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Feb. 27, 2023 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

01:41:53

What Really Happened in the Midterms: Blake Masters Gives You an Inside Look | TRIGGERED Ep. 11

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	you you
	you what's going on guys welcome to another episode of
	triggered I just want to thank all of you guys for making this show like a huge success right out of the gate.
	I was talking to a bunch of people over the weekend who actually understand this world.
	I'm totally new to it and they can't believe the numbers that we're doing right now.
	And that's really because of you guys.
	But I think a lot of that's because of the environment that we're in.
	We're seeing yet another news story coming out about, they lied to you, the conspiracy theorists were right again,
	and that's like, what are we, a thousand and O against the experts, the people who are really smart
	and know everything.
	So since our mainstream media has failed us and will continue to fail us,
	so long as they're basically being the marketing arm of the Democrat party,
	it's awesome that you guys are coming to a place like this where we can talk about it,
	we can say what needs to be said.
	We can do that in a real way.
	And man, until they get their act together, hopefully you can get your news here
	because it'll actually be more accurate than all of the bullshit that they're feeding you
	and have been feeding you probably, probably for a long time,
	but certainly the last few years.
	It's interesting. You know, as someone who was a fly on the wall for the last few years in so much of these things, how different the truth is from what is portrayed in media is truly scary.
	And I think, you know, while perhaps I've noticed it for the last few years, it's probably been that way for far longer than any of us would like to believe.
	So, you know, we got to think about that.
	and we got to probably listen to people who've actually seen that,
	who understand what's actually going on, who can put sort of the cynical filter
	on what's probably really happening and actually get to the truth.
	And again, your conspiracy theorist buddy gets a lot of apologies probably from the FBI,
	the Department of Energy now, obviously all of the mainstream media,
	the CDC, the World Health Organization, who were wrong about everything.
	But while they were wrong about everything, guys, I think a really important thing that we have to understand
	and we have to make clear is they got what they wanted out of it, okay?
	Remember that. It's not like, oh, they're wrong and they have no more credibility.
	That part is true. They have no more credibility.
	But them being wrong, they were able to weaponize it enough to get what they wanted out of it.
	In this case, they were able to put a Joe Biden puppet...
	Globalist type. Looks like we could get into a nuclear war because of this brilliant, brilliant man who will be wonderful on foreign policy and he'll be great on inflation and trade and all these things that we're failing at miserably, but he'll be great.
	Trust us. Trust us.
	So, you know, as much as this should be a moment of reckoning for the media, It won't be.
	As much as it should be a moment of reckoning for the FBI, for the CDC, for the World Health Organization, it won't be.
	They're getting what they want every time.
	Then, when they get caught, You won't even talk about it.
	Notice how few people in the mainstream media are even mentioning these things?
	You know, they lied to you about Russia, Russia, Russia.
	They lied to you about the vaccine.
	They lied to you about two weeks.
	They lied to us about everything.
	And yet, here's another example, because what we're going to talk about is Wuhan.
	Remember, folks, there's no way the Wuhan virus could have come from the lab In Wuhan, China, that studies the exact freaking virus in question.
	That is not possible, according to so many people, especially geniuses like Anthony Fauci.
	Watch here a little clip, because we always talk about what was Trump right about?
	The answer is everything, folks.
	He was right about everything.
	Check out this clip. We'll talk a little bit about what they did when he said this.
	And my question is, have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?
	Yes, I have. Yes, I have.
	And I think that the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they're like the public relations agency for China.
	And this country pays them almost $500 million a year.
	And China pays them $38 million a year.
	And whether it's a lot or more, it doesn't matter.
	It's still — they shouldn't be making excuses when people make horrible mistakes, especially mistakes that are causing hundreds of thousands of people around the world to die.
	Well, guys, I for one am glad that it only took three years for the government to figure out where it came from, where everyone knew it came from, where everyone with an IQ above single digits understood that it came from, where it was always the most plausible answer, where Anthony Fauci was enriching himself while supporting probably gain-of-function research.
	Right? No, no, no.
	It didn't come from the most obvious place that studies the exact virus in question.
	And if you believe that, you're a heretic.
	You're going to be canceled.
	If you're a doctor, you'll lose your tenure.
	We'll throw you off social.
	We're going to make you pay for it.
	Everyone knew. We were conducting gain-of-function government-funded gain-of-function research in China because we probably weren't allowed to do it here.
	Those guys knew that. Anthony Fauci knew it.
	And the media spent all their time dunking on Trump.
	It's a conspiracy.
	Check it out for yourself. Because we don't know where the novel coronavirus came from yet, the conspiracy theories fill the void.
	I'm telling you the Chai Khans are trying to weaponize this thing.
	Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh with zero proof suggesting a Chinese bioweapon lab is to blame.
	This question about the Wuhan lab, we know that it's been debunked.
	Those same agencies now have been tapped with investigating one of Trump world's most favorite conspiracy theories.
	Donald Trump is still pushing the debunked bunkum, despite his own intelligence community's findings that that is simply not true.
	And there is simply no reason to believe that that is the case.
	There is no empirical evidence to verify that.
	Coming up with a conspiracy theory to try and foment xenophobia.
	With respect to the Chinese has just as much factual support as taking Clorox.
	He can't just sit back and let the doctors and the scientists do their jobs.
	He's got to chime in.
	He may pick up the conspiracy theory that this was some weapon.
	Guys, Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump's theory on the origins of the coronavirus.
	That's from CNN. That's from CNN. Are you still confident that it developed naturally?
	Ask Anthony Fauci.
	No, actually, Fauci said, it happened naturally.
	Of course it did. It didn't come from the lab.
	Think of how insane that is. Imagine thinking that it's crazy to blame the bioweapon lab.
	For what seems like a pretty effective bioweapon.
	But that's where we've been, guys.
	Okay? Now the Department of Energy is finally saying it.
	That's where it probably came from.
	Three years later, again. They won.
	The bureaucrats got what they wanted.
	The FBI says the same thing.
	Well, they won. They got what they wanted, right?
	The same people who think that your grandmother, who may have been around D.C. on January 6th, is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy ever, who are not worried about actual terrorists, who couldn't care less.
	Now we're seeing all the video of the cops letting them in or thinking they were getting set up by all of what's going on.
	Folks, there's a reason the Democrats didn't want this video out there.
	But they lied to you about this.
	They lied to you about natural immunity being affected.
	We saw that last week, right?
	They lied to you about Russia, Russia, Russia.
	They lied to you about the lockdowns.
	They lied to you. This is the one that's going to come out next, although they won't come out with it.
	And honestly, mainstream media, including mainstream conservative media, won't say anything.
	Remember, it was the safest and most secure election ever.
	Who here wants to bet that that, too, was bullshit?
	Now, they say it, and I go, what's the evidence?
	Well, the evidence is that we said it.
	Oh, really? Like, is there actual evidence?
	You're mailing out ballots to half the world, like, you know, for the first time ever?
	Like, well, we just said it.
	We're going to run with it. Can't go against that.
	It's got to be true, right?
	Where's the reckoning? Where's the accountability?
	They're just going to keep on doing this.
	And if you keep watching them and you keep supporting them and you keep listening to them like sheep and like puppets, they're going to keep winning because, again, they don't care that they got caught, right?
	It means nothing to them, okay?
	Watch this NPR headline in April of 2020.
	Scientists, they debunked the lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.
	How is it debunked?
	How is it debunked?
	Of course, the media went right along with the debunking of the obvious, right?
	Because the thing that is so flagrantly obvious you'd have to be an imbecile, to not believe it, has to be a lie.
	They went on with it because they don't care and it served their purposes.
	You want to see another example of this?
	Check out this.
	It was so ridiculous.
	Everything that we've been told for the last three and a half years was so insane that even those in Hollywood Even some of those that are pretty woke, finally, finally were willing to acknowledge just how insane it is.
	Check out Woody Harrelson here talking at one of the award shows.
	I don't even know which one, candidly, because you couldn't pay me to watch that shit if my life depended on it, okay?
	But check it out for yourself.
	And start reading.
	Okay, so the movie goes like this.
	The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes and people can only come out if they take the cartels' drugs and keep taking them over and over.
	I threw the script away.
	I mean, who is going to believe that crazy idea?
	Being forced to do drugs?
	I do that voluntarily all day long.
	Anyway, it's about that time.
	Hey guys, you notice how quiet the audience was?
	You got a little bit of laughter, but like, that's a pretty big audience.
	I've been there. And strangely enough...
	I guess that was actually SNL. Strangely enough, the audience and a room full of cameras, they couldn't be caught laughing at the joke.
	Can't do that at advisory expense.
	They're probably sponsoring the show.
	You can't laugh.
	Remember, guys, we were right about the lab leak.
	We were right about natural immunity.
	We were right about masks.
	We were right about lockdowns.
	We were right about the vaccines, about boosters, about the faking of the COVID numbers.
	We were right about the deadly hospital protocols.
	We were right about Invermectin.
	We were right that Dr.
	Fauci's an imbecile, right?
	I mean, he was wrong about everything since the early 80s in the AIDS pandemic.
	But you know what? You don't have to be a good doctor in government.
	You don't have to be right.
	You just have to be willing and able to snake anyone around you who's competent, who may take a little bit of the limelight away from you, because that's all he ever wanted.
	He wanted to be in front of the cameras.
	He's like a midget version of Adam Schiff.
	Always wrong, always lying, but never met a camera he didn't love.
	We were right about the World Health Organization.
	We were right about the World Power Grab.
	We were right about everything.
	But it doesn't matter.
	But, meanwhile...
	The Dems still want to blame Trump for everything.
	They went so far as to try to blame Donald Trump, my father, for reducing regulations to allow for business to flourish, which it did.
	Like regular regulations, like when they're buddies who are lobbyists to make sure that you need 40 layers of bullshit in between you to conduct your small business and everything that you do.
	All that money wasted, like we cut that stuff out.
	They tried blaming the Ohio train derailment where we went to East Palestine last week.
	They tried blaming it on Trump.
	And what's really amazing is that the Washington Post, in their desperate nature, you know, the Amazon Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos, in their desperation trying to blame Trump, not Pete Buttigieg, who took 20 days to get there and has been in charge of the transportation department for two years.
	Did jack shit about anything going on in our railway system.
	Not those guys. Not Joe Biden, who's had years to do something.
	No, no, no. Let's figure out a way to blame Trump two years after he was president.
	And the Washington Post did a review of, quote, every possible regulatory change made under Trump and found that none Not one contributed to the Ohio train derailment.
	A review by Glenn Kessler, not exactly a fan of Donald Trump, at the Washington Post.
	Again, the Amazon Washington Post.
	Literally one of the most partisan newspapers in the world, funded with unlimited money from Jeff Bezos.
	Found that none of them could have shown to be a contributing factor to the February 3rd accident.
	Right? So when Donald Trump gets rid of the bureaucracy and tries to cut down, not get rid of natural safety features, they attack him.
	They don't attract the hedge funds that own the rails, that cut every cost.
	What was really interesting is...
	When I was in Ohio, one of the guys in the motorcade was actually an engineer on the railroad.
	And he starts talking to me because people talk to me and have these conversations.
	And he's telling me about all the shortcuts that hedge funds have been taking when they do it because they've got to jack up profits, push down costs.
	That gives them an operating margin that looks higher, and then they sell to someone else.
	Right? Couldn't be them, folks.
	We're going to blame Trump.
	Wouldn't be Buttigieg for doing nothing about it.
	We're going to blame Trump. And even the Washington Post couldn't help it because Trump derangement syndrome continues to be real.
	It exists. You don't think it does?
	You don't think that the PC culture is trying to take everything?
	Roald Dahl, famed children's author, children's book author.
	Apparently people are taking offense to some of the things that were written in his books.
	For example, cloud men became cloud people.
	Mothers and fathers became parents.
	Ladies and gentlemen became folks.
	They even did the same to James Bond, folks.
	James Bond. So if you're thinking there...
	You know what, Don? It's silly for me to talk about rewrites of old books.
	This is the sort of mentality...
	And the left, the consequences of this are real.
	In Los Angeles, this woke mindset led Soros-funded district attorney George Gaston.
	Now, because I said it was Soros-funded, someone's going to say he's being anti-Semitic rather than taking the obvious approach of George Soros has been funding these lunatics who are making decisions, who are refusing to prosecute crime, and putting them in office.
	In Los Angeles, the District Attorney George Gascon just suspended the lead prosecutor handling the case of a child molester, James Tubbs.
	Tubbs has pleaded guilty for molesting a 10-year-old girl.
	Tubbs claims he is a woman named Hannah.
	The prosecutor reportedly suspended...
	The lead juror, because he called Tubbs he, and didn't go along with his pronouns and the delusion.
	Think about that.
	George Gaston, by the way, who effectively legalized drug use and prostitution in Los Angeles, only cares about the crime of misgendering someone.
	Think about how ridiculous that is, folks.
	Think of just how insane that is.
	So... You want to talk about insane.
	You want to talk about not being able to read the room.
	Let's talk a little bit about Paul Ryan.
	You know, one of the biggest rhinos in the Republican Party.
	Unfortunately, he's on the Fox News board, which probably explains a lot, certainly of their latest coverage.
	But to understand just how out of touch he is with the people...
	Paul Ryan threatened to boycott the RNC, you know, the Republican National Convention, which happens to be in his home state of Wisconsin, I guess this next one, if Donald Trump wins the nomination.
	What's really funny is no one cares!
	No one cares.
	Fox News did a post on Instagram about just this.
	And You should read the comments.
	In fact, I think I have a little bit of a screenshot of these clips, but maybe listen
	to the Ryan clip yourself for a few seconds before we talk about the realities of the
	situation.
	Come 2024, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where will you be?
	It depends on who the nominee is.
	I'll be here if it's somebody not named Trump.
	You won't show up if it's not?
	Yeah, I'm not interested in participating in that.
	Even Wisconsin?
	Even Wisconsin.
	Hey guys, remember the guy that wouldn't give you the wall because he didn't want to offend
	The guy that held up the first two years of Trump when we had the House and the Senate and the White House because he's too weak to actually do the things that his constituency and the Republican Party would want?
	That's the guy who's going to boycott it.
	But do yourself a favor.
	Look at the comments. I took a little screen grab.
	I commented on, hey, guess what?
	No one gives a shit, Paul Ryan.
	But since you're on the Fox News board, they've got to pretend that people do.
	And it also explains a lot about the content that they've been putting out lately with all the anti-Trump nonsense and boosting basically everyone else.
	I get it, guys. They want power.
	I understand that.
	They want a president that needs them desperately.
	A president that jumps when they say to jump.
	And asks, how high, sir?
	What can I do for you, sir?
	I get it. They're powerful people, but don't pretend for one second that they're fighting for you, the little guy.
	They couldn't care less.
	But look at the comments.
	I posted that in my comments.
	I talked about it a little bit.
	My comment on a sub-comment of the post got 3,000 likes and countless comments on that, let alone the comments that were already there.
	Paul Ryan is a dinosaur in the Republican Party.
	Literally zero people could give a shit.
	He has less clout than Liz Cheney, and yet we're going to hold him on a high pillar, and he's going to be making the decisions at Fox News for you, the Republican.
	Who actually cares about America First, the MAGA movement, you know, wants to support it.
	You know, he won't talk about, you know, the gender nonsense going on in our schools.
	He can't offend his liberal wife.
	That would be problematic at home, but who really cares, right?
	I'm sure he's making a lot of money at the board of Fox News.
	Think about this for a second, folks.
	This whole thing is absolutely insane.
	It's remarkable, actually, how delusional he is that he even bothers to go on TV because no one cares.
	As the comments will show you.
	So I hope you read them all because you'll see just how irrelevant Paul Ryan is to conservatism.
	But because he's on the board of Fox News, he'll have a lot of power and he'll flex it to make sure that we put in people and that we elect people who are beholden to Fox News.
	Not you. Not our country.
	Not like hard-working blue-collar Americans, but the big guys at the top who control it all.
	That's the difference between Trump and everyone else.
	So, guys, thank you for checking this out.
	We're now going to go to Blake Masters, but I do want to talk a little bit about our sponsors
	and everything that's going on there.
	Guys, this show has been an awesome success.
	Just people can't believe we're doing the numbers that we're doing right out of the box.
	Because again, it takes a lot of people years to get even that basic following.
	I'm totally new to sort of long form.
	I'm new to the podcast world.
	But you know, our sponsors are important.
	And you see what's going on, man.
	The cancellation exists day in and day out.
	I hear more and more. I may do an entire show coming up on just the cancellation.
	So if you're a sponsor and you're someone that's willing to talk about and sponsor a show like this and actually get real news out there and take the heat that comes along with it, support them.
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	Now, more than ever, you gotta support those kind of companies.
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	Don't give it to someone who's going to weaponize those dollars against you.
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	So with that, folks, I want to bring in a good friend, someone who's an amazing guy, and someone who's really been behind...
	Enemy lines for a long time.
	Someone who graduated from Stanford, grew up in woke tech, worked in San Francisco in the craziest, wokest places in the world where he could be maybe the only guy of hundreds.
	That was a conservative.
	But crushed it, came through, understands what's going on.
	We're here with the wonderful and great Blake Masters.
	You're going to love it. Let's go.
	Guys, great to be here.
	I'm actually really excited about this one.
	This is going to be Triggered with Blake Masters.
	Someone who is triggered.
	It's triggered a lot of people.
	I mean, it's sort of hard to believe.
	I mean, you feel and seem like such a nice guy.
	In the time that I've gotten to know you, an accomplished business guy, and they turned you into an evil, terrible person.
	What was that like?
	You know, It's so interesting.
	I knew they were going to do that, but you never know quite what it feels like to be on the other side of it.
	And I'd go home. My wife was always a little bit more moderate than me.
	I've always been pretty conservative.
	I'm sure we'll talk about that. But then for my wife to see the attack ads, right?
	To see what the Democrat machine is turning her husband.
	She's like, yeah, that's not the guy that I married.
	Did it make her more conservative?
	Oh, yeah. Because, you know, listen, I'm pretty conservative about a lot of things, but I also grew up in...
	New York City. So I understood the other world view because a lot of my friends felt that way.
	I was obviously huge 2A and so many of the basic things, but I was like, wow, they're making me more radical because they've become so insane.
	Yeah, and they're threatened, right?
	They're threatened by anyone successful on the right who can articulate ideas that most people agree with.
	And so they have to zoom in and take little things out of context and put $20 million behind this lie or that lie, so much so that the caricature that they put on television or that the media mindlessly parrots is just not the actual human being, as you've seen in politics time and time again.
	Oh, 100%. Well, I mean, I experienced that, right?
	I was the son of a billionaire from New York City, business guy, went to Penn, Ivy League, like, I'm supposed to be the liberal.
	When they found out I wasn't, it changed things.
	You, you know, let's call it maybe not the son of a billionaire thing, but you have a similar, you know, background CV, right?
	You went to Stanford, Not exactly what we'd call a conservative institution, a bastion of conservative thought and hope.
	That's for sure, yeah. But you then went into tech.
	You were a Peter Thiel Fellow before people probably knew what that was and working with him.
	How did that go?
	Because I imagine in the space that you existed, You were a minority, I would have to say.
	Yeah, I always like to say I was forged in the fire.
	And I grew up in Tucson, which is the biggest blue city.
	I guess Phoenix, technically, is the biggest blue city in Arizona.
	But Tucson as a town is very, you know, democratic.
	And it was pretty blue even when I was a kid.
	And so, yeah, that environment.
	And then Stanford, not exactly a hotbed of conservatism.
	And then, you know, San Francisco, technology, right?
	Yeah. But I was always on the right.
	I always knew what I believed.
	It's gone through stages. I used to be more libertarian as a lot of conservatives were.
	I still have a very libertarian streak in me in some of the stuff where I just want people to leave me the hell alone.
	That's right. So, that's interesting.
	So, how did that happen?
	What formed that? Well, I think my parents, I mean, my dad went to the Air Force Academy, and they were staunch-raiding Republicans, and I probably made my parents a little bit more libertarian as I was getting into that stuff in high school.
	But wherever I was on the right, I used to be very religious, and then I stopped in my teens and 20s.
	I was an idiot and thought I had no time for that, and it turns out now I'm quite religious again.
	Wherever I was on the right, where I never was, was on the left.
	Because I looked over, and that always seemed like bad news to me.
	Progressivism is this dead end.
	You study the history of the 20th century, and it's just no socialism.
	Authoritarianism of any kind leads to tyranny and ultimately to the worst atrocities.
	So I knew that conservatism was right.
	It just kind of felt in my bones.
	And then to be surrounded by this madness at Stanford, the crazy sort of idiotic, mindless leftism in San Francisco.
	Well, but the idiotic from people who would be considered by...
	Oh, they were the experts. Anyone in the know, they know everything.
	These are the best and the brightest, and yet they're pushing philosophies that have failed.
	Time and time again. Killed millions of people, whether it's the socialism, communism thing.
	I mean, a unique one for me.
	I grew up, my mother escaped communist Czechoslovakia, so my grandfather took me there as a young kid.
	Every summer for six, eight weeks.
	Like, I lived in it. I waited in the bread lines.
	They're not as glamorous as the academics who've never experienced this and choose to stay in America rather than going to those countries that espouse those values would lead you to believe how great they are.
	Right. And so I always just felt, yeah, maybe I stood out, but it was important to stand out and stand up for what you believe in.
	You know, and I learned this working with Peter Thiel for the last decade, basically.
	You've got to be comfortable standing alone.
	Yes. Because, you know, I think the silent majority actually agrees with us, right?
	But the media doesn't. The experts don't.
	The college professors don't.
	It's an important point. I say that when I speak on the college campuses, and, you know, we don't just speak to the echo chamber.
	We try to get out there, and it's...
	For life, I think you can...
	Greatly improve your position by actually putting yourself in those uncomfortable positions.
	You can argue those points, but you're just sort of going along with the mindlessness of the left where, first question, hey, would you be penalized if you were on this college campus and your teacher knew you were here listening to Donald Trump Jr.?
	Like, there's a consequence for actually being a conservative, but learning how to articulate that, and I feel it's going to do people so much more good than, again, just mindlessly following, you know, what they tell you, even, again, if there's a consequence that there didn't used to be.
	Right. And it's even more important today, because what they tell us, what the expert, you know, look at the COVID situation, right?
	Look at everything.
	I guess the experts are having a bad time.
	Your conspiracy theory moron has been batting a thousand,
	whereas the wonderful people in academia and Stanford and media,
	they haven't actually gotten much right, though they continue to win because
	they utilize that misinformation and or insanity or things that just aren't even plausible.
	Right.
	When was Wuhan lab leak theory?
	When was that? It came from two feet outside, not in the lab working on the virus.
	Fish market. Yes, they were eating bats.
	And they're able to maintain that narrative all the way up until it cracks.
	But the problem is they get the win.
	They do. And then there's no consequence.
	They do. For the lie. And so they just keep racking up the winds while we sit back there and, how do we stop that?
	I don't have a great answer for that, right?
	I mean, I try to do it with my campaign.
	I'll try to do that if there's a next campaign or whatever public voice I have.
	It really is important, though.
	I think the left, maybe some of them mean well, some of them probably don't.
	But the tactic of the gaslighting, right?
	It's so Clintonian. The Clintons would always, there was some scandal or some horrible thing, and it's like, oh, no, that doesn't exist.
	That's not happening. You're a conspiracy theorist.
	Look at this shiny object over here.
	And then when finally they don't deny it, finally it's just, you know, the dam breaks and they're like, oh, that thing?
	That's old news. What are you talking about?
	It's supposed to be that way. There's nothing to see here.
	It's like, no, you just lied.
	And there's no consequences for people who lie in politics.
	It's the Saul Alinsky, right?
	Rules for radicals. Accuse them of doing everything.
	And we see it, like, literally every day.
	You know, Donald Trump Jr.
	is dealing with Russia. But it's actually Hunter Biden.
	Russia and China and Ukraine.
	Such projections. Donald Trump Jr., he's high energy.
	He must be on drugs. I'm like, the other dude's like, he's literally on video smoking fucking crack.
	Like, imagine the field day they'd have if it was me.
	Yeah. But I'm the terrible person, and they're good, and again, they get what they want, and then, oh yeah, well, the laptop's real now.
	I think AOC yesterday said it was half fake.
	Well, I mean, AOC has half a brain, so I believe that.
	But, hey, it's video.
	It's not like we're a legend.
	Imagine the things, I ask this to everyone, imagine the stuff that Hunter was like, This is too much for video.
	I'm not gonna record this shit, because if he was able to...
	He's there with a prostitute smoking crack saying, hey, I think the Russian mob has my laptop.
	That would seem relevant.
	Worth looking into. After five years of Russia, Russia, Russia.
	But now it's like, that's the old news.
	It doesn't matter.
	I just don't think it works long term.
	I know it's frustrating when the left is racking up these wins, but I know this is, certainly Arizona is a commonsensical center-right state.
	And so is the country. And the people are with us, and we just have to persevere.
	I agree with that.
	I do think the people are with us.
	But I think perhaps what's missing is, Their engagement.
	They're with us. I think they believe it, but they, and I get it, they're busy trying to feed their families.
	They're working in a hard environment.
	That's getting harder every day when you look at the economy, when you look at inflation, when you look at fuel prices, when you look at egg prices and groceries.
	If you can find the eggs. Yeah, if they're not burning down the plants.
	Yet another conspiracy theory. They just magically happen to keep happening this way, right?
	I'd like to maybe, we'll talk about the campaign because maybe you saw some of this yourself,
	which is they're busy trying to live their American dream, you know, what hasn't already been exported to China
	by the Democrats, et cetera, but they're listening to stuff in the background.
	And I was guilty of this myself.
	I mean, if I watch CNN during the 16 campaign, I'm like, man, I'm a terrible human being.
	You can't help but be sort of persuaded.
	And I think that's what some of the idea is.
	If they say it loudly, there's got to be some truth to it, right?
	I didn't defend Michael Flynn as vehemently as I wanted to in 16.
	So I was like, well, the FBI and the CIA, there's got to be something to it.
	No, there doesn't have to be anything to any of it.
	There doesn't have to be anything.
	And so I'm worried that sort of people's apathy, and perhaps understandable, because again, they're just trying to live their lives, but they're still influenced by a little bit of that noise in the background, right?
	They're watching five minutes of news a day.
	You know, well, Blake Masters is a terrible human being.
	He must be a terrible human being.
	Not the guy that I've gotten to know.
	Right. But they don't have that.
	So you have a trillion-dollar industry from big tech, which you could talk a lot about.
	Yeah. You're pushing one narrative, smothering it.
	I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether it's social media side as well as Google as driven by Wikipedia, as driven by the lunatics that are running it, which are doing the fact checking, which allows for prioritization and search engine optimization.
	That's what's troubling, right?
	People are still buying into some of this stuff when there doesn't have to be any, even pretense, of sort of objectivity anymore.
	I think that's right. Obviously, the DAC is stacked against us.
	And I knew it would be hard.
	You know, I ran because I thought I could win, and the next time I run, I'll run because I think I can win.
	And I do think we're going to win, right?
	In Arizona, we're going to...
	We have to. We can't...
	Failure's not an option. They want us to pick up our ball and go home.
	We've got to keep fighting as daunting as it is.
	The deck is stacked against us.
	And it's like, I wish money didn't matter as much in politics.
	Turns out it matters a whole lot.
	Talk about that. In your race, what was the spend?
	Because everyone makes it seem like, well, the Republican billion donor class.
	Yeah, that's real.
	And sure, they want to control some things, but...
	What was spent on your race, and what was sort of the breakdown between you and your Democratic rival?
	Yeah, I raised $14 million hard dollars.
	Those are the dollars you raised in your campaign subject to limits.
	Mark Kelly raised, I think, about $85 million.
	How much of that from Arizona? Not that much.
	Probably 20%, 80% outside, right?
	The farm executives are just sending him the max checks.
	7 or 8 to 1? 7 or 8 to 1.
	Outside money came in for both of us.
	That was probably roughly equal.
	But 7 or 8 to 1.
	In hard money. So you guys understand.
	Hard money is like, that's the money you want to raise, right?
	I mean, other stuff you have to use for policy or this.
	That's what you can do the most with.
	You sort of basically have free reign.
	The candidate can actually make a TV ad and ship it, right?
	Correct. And so that's the most important money.
	And, I mean, I want to be self-critical.
	I didn't raise enough. Like, I worked my tail off every day making 100 phone calls a day to raise $14 million.
	But as a first-time candidate, like, that's what I was able to do.
	Well, but there's also that component, right?
	They're like, well, you have Sheldon Adelson or had Sheldon Adelson on the Republican side.
	But there's 30 of those guys on the Democrat side.
	And you don't hear about it. You know, you hear maybe a little bit about Soros because you see the lunacy that they're funding.
	But, like, there's a bunch of those guys.
	Yeah, and they have the act blue machine.
	Like, Mark Kelly didn't have to work hard at all to raise the $85.
	It just flows in. Well, it seems like he doesn't.
	To Warnock, to Mark Kelly, right?
	I mean, we really did take on the whole national Democrat machine.
	And so I'm proud that we put up a good fight.
	But when you are busy and you're living in Scottsdale and you're not like, you know, one of the activists showing up to the rooms that me and Carrie Lake are campaigning hard in because, you know, your interest is elsewhere, your focus is on your family, you're trying to make it in the Joe Biden economy.
	Well, maybe you do have a TV on, you know, while you're cooking chicken in the kitchen or whatever.
	And when you see these attack ads, that's just like...
	Relentless. All over the place.
	And no one knew who I was, right? And Carrie, she was a little bit more famous, but she didn't have a political voting record or something.
	And so they could just tell outright lies about us.
	And with Mark, it was interesting, Kelly, because he's the astronaut.
	I'm like, he's the China-funded...
	He had the Chinese flag that he took into space with him.
	So you want to think, like, oh, he's an astronaut.
	That's the American... As sponsored by the CCP, in my opinion.
	His voting record, 100% China.
	But they pretend like he's a moderate, and then because no one knew who I was, the first introduction to so many voters was, well, Blake is going to do this horrible thing.
	He's going to take away your Social Security.
	It's like every time I would talk about this, I'd say the opposite.
	We'd never pull the rug out from our seniors.
	We're never going to cut Social Security.
	Should we teach young people how to save and invest so maybe they don't have to rely on Social Security?
	Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I saw that in the State of the Union last week, right?
	Like, my first actual guest on the podcast was Kevin McCarthy, and like, three weeks ago, he basically was like, yeah, we're not touching social security, because I asked the question, because they say, Republican, no, no, no.
	It's like the one entitlement that you actually paid in for.
	That's right. Like, people spent their whole lives paying into a system that we're gonna, But the media will say the Republicans are going to pull it out from under us.
	He, three weeks before the State of the Union, was on the record on this podcast saying that's never going to happen.
	And yet Joe Biden can go on the State of the Union and say, this is what they want to do.
	The media tells every elderly person who's, again, maybe not fully engaged and maybe not fully paying attention.
	Oh my God, they're going to... The Democrats want to do this.
	I want to take the entitlements that are going to people who haven't paid in, who haven't earned anything.
	Maybe Ukraine. We can spend billions there, but we can't take care of people who actually...
	It's not an entitlement when you've actually been paying into the system.
	It's a public trust. That's yours. That's right.
	It's no different than a 401k or otherwise.
	And we want to protect that system and make sure it's available for people in 50 years, right?
	But the way to do that is to maybe not send $80 billion to Ukraine every month.
	And so, look, it's frustrating, but I knew that the left was going to lie.
	I knew they were going to contort things, right?
	We were just unable to sort of overcome it this time.
	Yeah, the Mark Kelly one was interesting, because it's like, they turned him into this guy, and then you watched him on a debate stage with you.
	Yeah. And you realized, like...
	And again, every red-blooded American, at least at one point in time, probably thinks about wanting to be an astronaut or something.
	So I understand there's a marketing appeal to that, but then you watch the guy and you're like, Like, a thoroughly unimpressive individual.
	You know, maybe he was good at that, but, like, not much else.
	I think I even said it on the debate.
	I hope he was good at that.
	He was good at being an astronaut, not good at being a senator.
	These days, who the heck knows?
	Right? These days, like, yeah, you check a box, you trans, congratulations, you're an astronaut, because, like, we gotta check off those boxes and make sure we do it.
	So I'm not sure that, hopefully, when he was doing that, maybe there was still a standard, but...
	I was actually surprised that someone that we'd sort of look at in sort of that hero capacity by any traditional sense of sort of the American dream, I was like, that guy's a badass?
	Like, no way!
	Like, just an empty suit.
	Didn't understand the policy.
	Didn't do a good job articulating it.
	And yet again, if you watch the things, it's like you're the clear winner.
	Like, you ran circles around them, and yet, other than maybe a couple influencer-type accounts, like mine being like, just watch.
	They show the one zinger that maybe he got that you know he didn't write because it was delivered so poorly, but that's the soundbite in the Arizona media market to every voter that's out there.
	Yeah, the media pretended that the debate was a tie.
	You know, it was like Masters and Kelly fight to the draw.
	It was a bloodbath. I was like, I wanted to mercy rule him.
	I'm like, I feel bad for this clown at this point.
	No, but it... But again, it's like so much of the game is raising that money and then just, you know, getting that message out.
	And I hate it. But it's like we have to figure out a way to win against that.
	So, okay. How do we do it?
	I have my opinions, but now that you've seen it, now that you've sort of been a part of it, what did you learn?
	What would you do differently as an individual, meaning the candidate?
	What would you do differently if you're, say, Arizona GOP or one of the other state GOPs and national GOP to actually start winning these things?
	There's a lot there. So I was a first-time candidate, unknown, right?
	I was going from zero to taking on an incumbent U.S. Senator.
	So that was a tough lift. Next time it would just necessarily be a lot easier.
	I mean, this stuff is always hard, so I dare say it wouldn't be easy.
	But people would know who I am.
	You know, there's a little bit more trust built up.
	I wouldn't be introducing myself to the electorate.
	So I think this is why most people who go for a Senate seat, or they're in the House or something like that,
	and that makes sense.
	In Arizona, we have these really late primaries.
	I think that's bad.
	We need to move those back.
	I think my primary is August 2nd.
	Well, that means for like 15 months, Republicans are just bashing each other.
	And you have two months to try to fix it.
	And I have a tough primary.
	The guy who ran against me and got second in the primary spent 20 million bucks trying to win that.
	And so I beat him by 12 points.
	But man, we were already taking damage before the general election.
	So I think Republicans should not be attacking Republicans.
	I understand we are the party of intellectual diversity, right?
	Hey, I get it. Hey, I'm a Trump.
	But not always easy.
	I see it going on right now, right?
	You know, they paid for influencer class that seemed like they're really unbiased and they were really pro-Trump.
	There's honest ways to attack and there's dishonest ways, but I want to see...
	There's a lot of attacks that go on that are subversive.
	It looks like it's a genuine concerned citizen who's been fighting for this cause.
	It's like, no, they're on the payroll or they're on a PAC payroll or they're on someone...
	But you see those switches.
	Right. And like, you know, listen, hey, Trump probably created that class...
	You know, the influencer class within conservative politics, where you wouldn't have even thought about it, right?
	Like, prior to that.
	And yet, you can see now how that, and I get it, people are looking to make a paycheck, but, you know, not everyone's the ideological, you know, champion.
	Like, someone like you walking away from Big tech jobs to do this.
	I have a little bit more respect for them.
	Someone who's making 90% of their thing off of social media, and they'll flip to whoever's writing a check.
	Or if anyone's writing a check, that's who they're going to be supporting.
	But we are right on the issues.
	Again, I understand there's more of an America first wing of the party.
	There's more of an establishment wing. You know where I am on that, of course.
	But we all believe in low taxes and a secure border and stuff like this.
	And so we've got to stick to the issues and then raise money.
	And get that out. But if our candidates are funded 20% of what the Democrats are funded, we're not going to win these races.
	Well, 20% plus, I don't know how to put a value on it.
	You'd probably do this better than I would, but the value of big tech being a booster for your opponent while being a detractor of yours.
	You know, making sure, you know, search engine.
	That zinger from Mark Kelly that's pre-written and that's gonna be the first 12 pages of Google search.
	The media bias because of the headlines. The media bias because of the headlines.
	So it's not just an eight to one difference in fundraising.
	Felt like 20 to one, right?
	It felt like real game. And maybe more in terms of sort of real, you know, if we had elections commissions that weren't so biased, they'd be looking at this as in-kind contributions as far as I'm concerned.
	They are because there's, again, there's no pretense Of objectivity.
	They don't even try to be fair anymore. No, there's no reason.
	It's just the other side is evil, and we're going to vilify them, right?
	But again, the people are with us, and so I know we can still win as long as...
	We do have to raise money. We also have to play by the left's rules.
	Like, I think that, you know, we were talking about this earlier.
	100%. I wish that, you know, you didn't have 30 days of voting.
	There should be some early voting window, but it should be tightened up, right?
	And I think we need to tighten up signature verification requirements in Arizona.
	Why should they be able to match, Blake?
	I mean, then every...
	But you're right.
	We have to... Can't fix that until we get in.
	To get same-day paper ballot with ID voting, you actually have to win.
	That's right. You can't win to implement that change unless you play by the rules.
	That's right. You know, they've laid the playing field for this.
	They weaponized COVID to implement this stuff.
	You know, the Constitution or, you know, your state constitutions or whatever be damned.
	Right. We're going to do this, and we're going to put pressure on even conservative judges or panels to say, ah, I'm not willing to stand up against this because I'll be vilified, but we've got to play that game.
	So we're going to complain about it or we're going to play the game?
	No, we play the game, and that means probably in every swing state, somebody needs to invest $10 million into a, call it a ballot harvesting operation.
	Ballot harvesting is technically illegal in Arizona, but what's not illegal, what's perfectly legal, and the Dems do it, so we have to, is to go and chase early ballots, right?
	You can't just tell our people to vote on Election Day.
	We tried that. It doesn't work.
	We need to be ruthless and, again, playing within the confines of the law.
	Get out there and understand who has a mail-in ballot and who hasn't returned it and just build that system with technology to make sure that they vote.
	Because if people vote, they will vote Republican.
	But if the Dems are just harvesting voters who on the margin wouldn't have voted and we're not doing that, like, yeah, they're going to build up an advantage that we can't overtake.
	You've hit that a couple times, and I actually agree with you.
	I think for the first time, probably in our lifetimes, and I'm a little bit older than you, I actually feel like we're winning on the issues.
	I mean, the Republican part, Joe Biden, the one thing he got right, he's like, who would have thought that blue-collar people would be voting Republican?
	Because they're not idiots.
	They see it.
	And yet, you're up against those deficits.
	When you talk about even things where, hey, I can see both sides of the story.
	When the left was pushing Republicans, You know, abortions.
	Well, the baby's only halfway born.
	It's 10 months and, you know, just the head is out.
	Like, we should be able to end it there.
	I mean, there was a Princeton professor that wrote an article like, you should be able to kill a baby up to six years old because they're still kind of dependent on the mothers and they're not self-sufficient.
	They've lost their minds, but then they weaponize something like Dobbs to turn out the young voter, and then, you know, oh my God, they're going to make you have your rapist.
	And the insanity is like, wait a minute, these guys would kill a child.
	Someone that could be totally viable for two months, and they voted that way.
	They're proudly wearing it.
	I understand both sides of the issue, especially where I come from.
	I understand how passionate people are on it, but we were actually winning that battle for the first time in maybe ever when they went full lunatic.
	And they're still full lunatic, but they manipulate that thing.
	I think when you talk about basic freedom of speech, the attacks on that from the other side.
	When you look at the trans issues.
	A three-year-old should be able to permanently, literally mutilate their genitalia to satisfy the woke urges of their teachers without parental consent.
	It's like, I can't imagine even the most Meaning, beyond the insane people, mothers out there being like, this is a wonderful idea, what the fuck could go wrong, right?
	Like, the kid can't buy a pack of cigarettes for another 15 years, couldn't get a tattoo, couldn't go to a movie, but sure, let a three-year-old make these decisions.
	I mean, I actually think we're winning on these issues, and the other side has shown their true colors, but...
	It's still hard to overcome the deficit.
	You're still against the media. You're still against the sort of entrenched opinion-making classes.
	The people who own newspapers, television studios, they all think a certain way.
	They're all kind of part of this hive mind.
	But you are right, and you can see glimpses of this.
	If you look at Biden's State of the Union, The one actually last year.
	The first half of each.
	I mean, it was MAGA. It was America First.
	Buy American. It's like he's claiming credit for all the policies that your dad put in place.
	He literally usurped America First.
	Because he knows it's popular. And then he took the insulin thing.
	Which he cancelled. My father did it.
	He did it. He cancels it.
	And he's like, now we're doing this for insulin.
	I'm like... It is dishonest. But if we had an honest press...
	They would call it out, but they're like, look at what he's doing for these type 1 diabetics or whatever it is.
	It's crazy. I just think with all the crazy lies that people were told during COVID and all the experts who still want you to wear a mask outside and all this, even though it's been debunked like six times, I think that...
	Normal people are starting to see that these people in positions of power and authority are abusing it and lying to them.
	And, you know, maybe we didn't get the, obviously we didn't get the result in November of 22 nationwide that we really wanted or I think we needed.
	But I'm still just incredibly optimistic.
	The stuff is always a pendulum and it is swinging so far to the left in ways that just don't work.
	I don't think the American people will stand for it.
	So, how do you capture the young people, right?
	Product of Stanford and Stanford Law and all that, you know, you've been there, you've been in those trenches.
	How do you reason with that individual before it's too late?
	I mean, you know, we sort of have indoctrination through our school programs.
	I've seen it with infants, you know, I've dealt with it in New York when I had my kids still there.
	You get them back, they're 18 years old, and now you're in a college.
	How do you win that kid over?
	Did you have any influence on your friends in college?
	Were you able to sway them in a place that would be a bastion of liberal thought?
	Maybe some, maybe some, but mostly no.
	And I think people who do go to elite universities, they might be too far gone.
	Thankfully, it's not most of the country.
	Most people in this country don't go to college.
	And I think increasingly young people should probably be learning very practical skills.
	If you want to be a college professor or a doctor or a lawyer, hey, great, go to college.
	But maybe you want to be a welder or an electrician.
	Yeah, and not have half a million dollars in debt for underwater basket weaving degree.
	But once you get through, and we used to think it was just colleges, but I think in the last Three or four years, people have realized, no, it's K through 12 as well.
	Once you go through that— Oh, they're starting so much earlier.
	If you really get indoctrinated, it's very hard to shake someone's ill-formed opinions out of them, and it's why moral formation and people should learn about the true history of our country and not some toxic version where you're supposed to hate America or something like that.
	It's why education is so important, but I think with young people, even if they do graduate from some of these universities, maybe they're going to be quasi-communist when they come out, but there's that saying, if you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart.
	If you're not conservative when you're 35 or 40, you have no brain.
	People are starting to pay taxes.
	People are trying to make it in the Joe Biden economy.
	Mortgage rates have doubled.
	The reset on that, it actually happened.
	You can't get into a house now. The place I have, like, literally, my mortgage payment literally almost doubled in terms of the interest because it just reset from an all-time low.
	I'm blessed to be able to cover that, but it's thousands of dollars a month.
	A lot of people can't. What's going to happen to the average guy who took advantage of all-time low interest rates, you know, maybe pushed themselves into a house they couldn't really afford, but they're living their American dream, and now...
	That mortgage resets.
	I mean, it's going to be...
	American dreams vanishing is literally twice as expensive to get into a house now for a young couple in their 30s that are thinking about having a family than it was three or four years ago.
	It's just unattainable. And so my message to young people who tend to be center-left or sometimes hard-left is, how is this working?
	American culture and our politics have undeniably drifted left over the past two or three decades.
	I think your father's presidency was the...
	Counter to that, right?
	But now we have Joe Biden and things are going in a further left direction.
	So according to their own political prerogatives, things should be getting better, right?
	Well, things are not getting better. The American dream is disappearing.
	Young people, my own peers, so I went to Stanford, Stanford Law School, my own peer, I'm 36 years old, so my peers, you know, at this point should be getting married, having kids.
	I mean, they should have been doing that probably 10 years ago.
	But so many of them are not married.
	They're not having kids. If they are, they're getting married later.
	Maybe the marriages don't last.
	They're not having as many children as their parents.
	And most are not on track to own a home, which is really crazy.
	And this is supposed to be the cream of the crop. Yeah, and this is the cream of the crop, right?
	And so that's really bad.
	It's like, for our baby boomer parents, everything sort of felt like it was on track and it worked more or less automatically.
	And, you know, at 27 years old, you could get married and have that 2.5 kids, white picket fence.
	And that is vanishing in America, and that's a big problem that I think politicians left and right should be talking about.
	No one's talking about that, and I think the America First policies obviously get us back to a future that looks more like that.
	The median wages were going up under the Trump administration.
	Now all those gains are gone, and with inflation, people's real purchasing power is just- Oh, it's actually way low, right?
	Way low. And that's what's interesting.
	I mean, as a business guy, you see some of the statistics that are out there.
	We created jobs!
	I'm like, wait, wait, wait. Telling someone they can no longer go to work and then being like, congratulations, we will allow you to go back to work.
	Isn't that nice? We created more jobs than any human...
	It's dishonest.
	It's really dishonest.
	But I think people are waking up to it.
	I would have thought we were going to have a red wave and people were going to wake up to it en masse last November.
	Didn't get that. But it's like, what are we going to do?
	Cry about it? No. You're going to put our shoulder to the wheel and go and make that change happen.
	Well, I think that's the point. We have to be playing the battle that they're playing.
	And, you know, for me, number one is, you know, let's call it loosely ballot harvesting.
	Obviously, each state has its own rules.
	Some places you can just do it.
	I mean, I bet you there's people in, you know, in places in Pennsylvania that they were giving ballots to someone.
	They couldn't tell you who was on the, you know, as evidenced by, you know, you have a borderline vegetable as a United States senator.
	So think positively. At least you didn't lose to John Fetterman.
	I mean, I know they called me an ableist, meaning I discriminate against those with disabilities.
	Well, I actually saw he's back in the hospital.
	Yes. When I saw it this morning, I literally...
	We wish him well. I literally said a prayer for him, but he should not be there.
	He needs to focus on his health.
	He's obviously unfit to be a United States senator.
	And what an indictment of the system.
	Correct. If he was able to win.
	And he'll just be a rubber stamp for whatever Chuck Schumer says, so it's okay.
	But when they called me an ableist, I was like...
	I don't think so. If he was going to be a checkout guy at a local grocery store, I'd say, that's great.
	I'm glad that he's gainfully employed.
	But this is a guy that wasn't able to formulate a thought And he's going to be a United States Senator making decisions that you, me, our children and grandchildren could be beholden to for generations.
	I don't think it's ableist.
	I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect a United States Senator to be able to have cognitive function.
	To be able to do the job. Just basic stuff.
	And yet I was vilified and terrible and I stand by my opinion because I don't care.
	But that's how they manipulate it.
	Guys like me, a little bit harder to cancel, right, when they go after me, but for the average person, That becomes hard, man.
	There's a social consequence to being a conservative.
	How do we win that over?
	And I do think we're starting to win on the issues, but we need other people to sort of line up.
	I think if they're unafraid and we're together, we're uncancellable.
	I think that's right. And I mean, I think you're blazing the trail and you get out and you say what you think.
	And you don't care. It's literally the definition of a privileged position, right?
	Of course it is. Comes responsibility, and you understand that.
	It's what I tried to do in my campaign as well, right?
	I had this, maybe in retrospect, it was a little bit naive, and I learned a lot about politics, but my honest-to-God thought was like, if I go out and just speak from the heart and speak honestly about tough issues, yeah, I'll take some arrows, but I'll be rewarded for that truth and righteousness.
	Turns out, no, if you get buried and blanketed in attack ads, right, people won't vote.
	I'm so proud of it.
	I get messages every day from young people, especially young men, who are like, Yeah, we're devastated that you didn't win your election, Blake, but man, you got me thinking about, could I be in Congress someday?
	You got me volunteering for this campaign.
	The kind of things that you were able to say on the campaign, unapologetically on Tucker Carlson or something, really inspired me, right?
	So, don't get me wrong, you've got to win.
	I'm going to win the next one that I run.
	But I'm proud that I got out there and I said true things, even if they were twisted and contorted and all this.
	You get out, you say the truth, you take the arrows, and if enough people do that, we win.
	Yeah, if we can blaze that trail, you know, with my father, I would say, you know, they could cancel the most powerful guy in the world, at least on paper, right?
	And they did. But, you know, 175 million Americans sort of get in line, it's not so easy.
	I see it, you know, maybe as a business guy, I love your opinion, you know, you see a Disney stock getting crushed because, like, people don't want to see the woke shit jammed down their throat all day long.
	Netflix, you know, same thing.
	People are saying, hey man, we have to be in a parallel economy because I'd love to
	not have cancel culture.
	I'd love for that not to exist.
	But as long as it does and as long as those people would kind of outwardly throw me in
	jail for having this opinion, why would I be giving them my money?
	Right.
	Yeah, I'm incredibly optimistic.
	It's like there's the market correction.
	Nobody wants to watch, you know, the new Star Wars offshoot where Luke Skywalker is exploring his LGBTQ identity, right?
	It's like, my kids love Star Wars because Star Wars is a great story.
	But when you politicize it, right?
	And it's not anti-LGBTQ. It went off the...
	It went insane when it was all about merchandising.
	And you could see they were just trying to make money with the Zhaja Binks one.
	After that, you're like, Star Wars, they lost me.
	And it was just like, they're just trying to sell another stupid lunchbox or toy in a Happy Meal.
	But now it's gone worse.
	Did you see that, like, the Disney, the new cartoon that they're putting out where it's basically like, you know, if you're white, you're the oppressor of all things.
	But I saw it the other night on TV and I was like, I can't even believe, like...
	They're encouraging racism, not doing anything to dissuade it at this point.
	It's like I remember in public school, Tucson, Arizona in 1992, I would have been in first grade.
	It's like we learned about MLK. And that's the content of your character, not the color of your skin.
	That's what matters, right? And it's like that was the conceptual thing.
	That was correct. 30 years later, we're teaching kids the opposite.
	Where it's like there's a racial hierarchy and you're the victim, you're the oppressor based on the color of your skin.
	I think it's poisonous.
	And so while it's dangerous and that is taking root in our schools, I also think, no, most people are pretty tolerant in America.
	And we don't obsess about race all the time.
	I imagine we're the most tolerant country in the world as it relates to race.
	And if you travel, you know this.
	If you've left the United States, then you know this.
	I've been all over the African continent.
	I've been all over Asia. I've been all over the world.
	People are pretty racist in other countries.
	Not so much here. Yeah, there's a lot more of it elsewhere.
	We just don't want to obsess about it, right?
	We want to teach our kids about the history and greatness of our country and not, you know, foment racial resentment.
	And that's like a 75%, 25% opinion.
	Most people are with us on this.
	Most people, I don't care if you're white, black, Asian, whatever.
	Most people are not obsessed with race.
	Most of my gay friends, when they look at the Star Wars offshoot, you know, making Luke Skywalker gay, they're like, yeah, that's stupid.
	Yeah. They're just gay.
	They're just people. They're not obsessed with their own acronyms or identity.
	And this identity politics is just so delicious.
	Yeah, and no one cares about that either.
	That's one they try to throw at conservatives.
	Like, you're against gays. And I was there when, you know, your mentor, Peter Thiel, you know, he's a gay guy, entrepreneur, super successful.
	I was there when he spoke at the Republican National Convention in 16.
	It was like... And I was like, the reception that he had there, just saying it, was better than when they were talking about the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment.
	And I'm like, so these are the most hardcore conservatives.
	They're going to the RNC. That's like the nerd prom for political conservatives.
	And they're there. I was like, let's see where this goes.
	Because even then, I had sort of the media narrative about how Republicans actually feel about it.
	You know, they'll find the one loser that still believes this stuff matters, and that's the guy they highlight and put out there.
	But, like, this was an arena of, like, 20,000 people.
	And they were like, yeah! I was like, oh.
	Like, this is, like, a non-issue...
	At all across like the hard, even the hardcore base.
	And, you know, that was sort of amazing to see.
	And yet it'll still be, you know, the narrative is not such and it'll be weaponized against us even six years later.
	That's exactly right. The left, they weaponize our own tolerance against us, right?
	They're obsessed with identity politics so that they don't have to account.
	For their failures in the economy, for their failures in foreign policy.
	Joe Biden, you know, what didn't he talk about in the State of the Union?
	The Chinese weather balloon that he just allowed across the country.
	He talks about how police officers are racist, and it's just like...
	Well, when your crackhead son gets a billion dollars from China, you know, as an investment...
	Listen, China's making a great return on that investment, because they've neutered America because of it.
	Does anyone genuinely believe, if we had real press, would they genuinely believe that China gives money to crackheads?
	No. They give money to people they can manipulate.
	They give money to people that they could control, and it's probably been a wonderful investment for them.
	I don't love it, but... I think China's very happy with the way things have gone the last three or three years.
	I mean, if you're an enemy of America right now, you can't not be thrilled Watching what's going on.
	You know, my thing is I say, like, if you were America's enemy and you had sort of the proverbial Manchurian candidate in charge, like, what would you do differently to destroy America than today's Democrat Party policy?
	And like, I can't think of anything.
	I'm like, it's perfect. You'd throw open the border, right?
	You'd print tons of money to debase the currency.
	Yes, of course. You'd let China basically do whatever it wants.
	Literally not interfere as they invade your country's airspace.
	Yeah, and I think you would go hard on these.
	You'd create racial strife amongst a populace that has to live together.
	That's right. And, you know, it's like this is their playbook.
	And I don't know where it ends.
	That's even remotely good for America or our children.
	I sincerely hope things don't have to get too much worse before they get better.
	I know there's a pendulum and I want to sort of catch it right where it is and send it gently back in the other direction.
	It's just common sense. And I think most people are with us on this.
	We just have to break through. I do.
	We've got to get there. We've got to make people okay to actually have these opinions, to talk about them publicly.
	I saw the branding of concerned mothers as domestic terrorists because they didn't want their children indoctrinated with liberal bullshit in school.
	And I'm like, I don't know.
	That seems pretty reasonable. Who's branding them these terrorists?
	Is it like some left-wing...
	No, it's the FBI and the DOJ of our country.
	No, they're not concerned about actual terrorists.
	That would be terrible.
	Was there a person that committed a heinous crime in this country in the last couple of years that wasn't on their radar, and yet they managed to let it slip through?
	It's like... I don't know.
	The weaponization of the DOJ, I do think, is probably...
	I mean, there's a lot of things going wrong right now, but it's chief among them, right?
	And I don't want a right-wing DOJ or some...
	You just want a neutral...
	I'll take balls and strikes. We don't have that now.
	I'll take just down the middle, like, enforce the law.
	Enforce the law. Enforce the Constitution. No matter who you are, enforce the law.
	Again, most people agree with that, and somehow...
	That's not what we have in our representative democracy.
	It's not doing a good job at actually representing the will of the people.
	And so you have something that increasingly looks like a banana republic, right?
	Conservatives get punished and prosecuted.
	And remember the case that this guy was just exonerated, found innocent, but the abortion protester, right?
	They said he shoved some person and that was a violation of the statute.
	It's like a Catholic dad of eight.
	Yeah, and they arrest him.
	They break down the door.
	You know, there's no accountability.
	Trying to call him jail for 20 years.
	Yeah, legal fees.
	They know that even if they don't necessarily win, I think they kind of tried doing this with us a little bit, which is if we just keep, like, the problem with bullshit is you still have to deal with bullshit, right?
	It could be bullshit, but, like, not everyone can spend millions like we did on legal fees to, you know, and then nothing happened.
	Oh, yeah, Russia, Russia hoax. Just kidding.
	Just kidding. Oh, really? Like, you spend 50 million of the U.S. taxpayers, but we also have to defend this stuff for years, and it was nothing.
	They knew it. No harm, no fault.
	It's just politics. No, it's not.
	Yeah. The process is the punishment.
	And the message, you know, they sent, I sort of attacked maybe a little bit less than your family, right?
	But I was attacked on the campaign.
	And then what does it tell someone from the business world?
	Like, hey, you better think twice before you get into this.
	Someone like you who would know...
	Like, I want someone like you actually making financial decisions for this country.
	Because you understand how they work.
	When I look at... Congress, and I see some of the people on the finance committee, I'm like, they wouldn't know.
	Never worked a job in the private sector.
	They wouldn't know anything. And you see the soundbites that they're saying, it's like they clearly have no understanding, and yet they are making trillion-dollar decisions.
	No business being there, but they're there longer, they've had some seniority, and it just...
	Continued. But if you put your hat in the ring, you're going to get tarred feathers.
	Why would you bother? I understand why a lot of good people don't want to run for office.
	I think some of the most talented people on the left, that's just a natural thing.
	They want power and they go into professors or politicians.
	The Obamas of the left go into politics.
	On the right, a lot of our best people go into business.
	It's like, hey, why would I get involved?
	Maybe I'll fund some campaigns. It's like, why did your dad run for president in 2016?
	He didn't need to. He did not need to.
	It wasn't a good business decision, but he built up all these bills.
	He did it the right way. You go in and you come out less wealthy.
	Unlike everyone else who magically gets really rich.
	The leftists, they go in and then they make money in government.
	And that's wrong. But he did it because he's a patriot and he cared about the country.
	In some sense...
	That was a really self-sacrificing thing to do.
	And I think a lot of business people, in a rational sense, aren't willing to do it.
	But I thought, you know, it's important.
	I need to be able to take these arrows and show other people that it's possible.
	Here I am, smiling on my face, like I'm ready to do it again and win.
	Yeah, I love that.
	But talk about that a little bit.
	You took arrows, obviously.
	But you even took arrows from...
	Our own side. Even after the primary, meaning, you know, the powers that be, whether it be, you know, Mitch McConnell or I saw, you know, Karl Rove, well, we're going to support the Democrats because we don't like this guy.
	The will of the people be damned in a primary.
	You know, we put millions behind the guy that was a rhino stiff that would do nothing.
	Well, we didn't get it, so we're just not going to support you.
	We're going to walk away from you and just sort of leave you hanging out there.
	What was that like?
	I mean, I'm watching these guys.
	I'm like, wait a minute, like, are they even, like, with...
	With Republicans like that, who needs Democrats?
	It's a big structural disadvantage, right?
	Again, I like being the party with a little bit more intellectual diversity.
	The left, man, they're like stormtroopers.
	They just move in lockstep.
	What they say today might be completely different from what they said yesterday, but when they announce a turn from on high, everybody just turns on a dime.
	And there's something that's very ruthless and effective about that discipline.
	I like that we're a little bit more individualistic and ragtag, right?
	But the downside is, especially when you have an establishment versus a sort of America-first split, is we have our own infighting, and then, like, how could you possibly defeat, then, the organized left-wing machine?
	I don't like that guy, so I'm not going to help win one of the Senate seats that was legitimately in play.
	Doesn't help. Obviously, I did not find a solution to fix that.
	But I am interested in party unity.
	I do. And it's why I said I don't think we should be attacking the Republicans.
	But party unity can't be at the price of selling out principles.
	And so I'm proudly America first.
	And I know that this works.
	Paul Ryanism doesn't work.
	Mitt Romneyism doesn't work.
	I think we just have to bring people in.
	And so I'm interested in persuading Republicans not to do that again.
	And maybe I had to charge the machine gun nest and lose a lot of blood.
	And I think the good news is a lot of people saw that.
	And a lot of people aren't happy with the way that establishment dollars were allocated.
	They shouldn't be. And they shouldn't be.
	I'm chief among people who say that was messed up.
	We just have to find a way to make sure that doesn't happen again.
	And it can't mean selling out our principles.
	Take us behind the scenes on the campaign.
	What was that like? What were some of the stories that people maybe don't see?
	You could learn something from the disagreements on strategy.
	From the inside baseball things, what were some of the things that you learned in that process or that you'd like to do differently?
	I think, I mean, it's my favorite part of campaigning is just meeting voters, right?
	And whether it's, you know, a lot of conversations are just, you know...
	We'll trade it and banter about how bad Joe Biden is, right?
	And there's a pleasure to that. That's really fun.
	Some of the conversations, they'll start like that, and then three or four minutes in, you develop a connection with somebody, right?
	And I love the retail politics and hearing where someone's...
	But then, you know, probably a dozen times, you know, I'd be talking to a parent who lost a child.
	Maybe they lost a child to murder from an illegal alien or maybe a fentanyl or whatever.
	Fentanyl or never-ending wars.
	Never-ending war. I met a few...
	Moms whose sons were in Iraq or Afghanistan and died by suicide.
	Those were always heartbreaking.
	But, like, so moving.
	So meaningful. And just, like, people in this country are suffering.
	And you never would have known this. You could pass this woman in the grocery store.
	You would never know.
	Everybody's got something going on.
	I think that's, you know, for me, those are the ones that keep you going.
	You know, it's so painful at the time.
	But, like, you know, there's nothing more painful for me in politics than, like, The billionaire class donor selfie, take another selfie with me at an event.
	When those people come up, it actually means something to them.
	It's changing their life. You take that couple seconds with them, and that's so important.
	It seems like there's so many people that are just like...
	That person doesn't matter. We're going to go kiss ass to the donor class.
	No, that person's why we do it.
	That person's why we do it.
	And when they look you in the eye and they say, thank you for what you're doing.
	Correct. And then I look at what they've gone through and I'm like, what I'm doing is nothing compared to what you lost a kid in a war that we didn't need to be in.
	So many people, every day on the campaign trail, people would come up to me and we'd try to bring my family, my wife, and my kids to all the campaign events we could.
	But of course, I'm a two-year-old.
	Sometimes it wasn't possible. So very often it was me solo.
	And people would say, thank your wife.
	Thank your children for me. You're making such a sacrifice to run for office.
	And there's a tension because I want to graciously accept that thank you and that compliment or whatever.
	But I also want to put it in perspective because I literally met a woman on the campaign trail who was talking about her beautiful baby, right?
	And I loved holding the baby, kissing the baby.
	And baby was like three months old.
	And she said something about her husband where in context it was clear that he wasn't right there.
	So what happened?
	Well, her husband hadn't met the child yet because he was deployed.
	Yeah. And it's like, that's real sacrifice, right?
	Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, everything that we did...
	Half the time, and like, yeah, I get, oh, Mark Kelly's making fun of me on TV, whatever.
	Yeah, it's fine. Obama comes to town to talk shit about, like, that's not sacrifice.
	I mean, it's some, because I want to...
	Yeah. No one wants to have to go through that, but it's nothing.
	But it's people who are in the cloth of a nation, and they're deployed, and they're missing the birth of their...
	Of their child. That is real sacrifice.
	People have laid down their lives for this country.
	That's real sacrifice. So you just try to put it in perspective.
	And meeting people like that gave me fuel and hope and energy to keep fighting.
	You know, you sort of got a start through Peter Thiel.
	You know, interesting guy. Sort of another guy that's been vilified by the, you know, by the left.
	Tell us how that happened.
	I mean, you end up writing sort of a top-selling kind of business book by attending his classes.
	But, you know, preaching all the things that we want.
	Like, this is how to start your own business.
	How to be self-sufficient. Maybe that put you on their radar.
	As an enemy of the people, because God forbid people in America be able to take care of themselves these days.
	Tell us a little bit about how you got that start, how a guy like that picks out a young kid out of Stanford and is like, you, come here.
	You're going to do great things. Yeah, it was my second year at Stanford Law School, and Peter came and taught a class.
	It was cross-listed with the business school.
	Small seminar, 30 or 40 kids.
	We just became, although it's interesting, because he was a billionaire at the time, and everybody wanted to take the class, and he'd get mobbed after the class.
	We called them gunners in law school, the people who were very annoying.
	I had them at Wharton.
	I'm sure how smart they were. Everyone's smarter than everyone.
	Disaster. And so they'd all mob him with probably uninteresting questions afterwards.
	And I didn't do that. So I didn't know Peter for like half the class.
	But what I did is made notes because it was like a really intellectually engaging class and pretty clearly like he wasn't just a guy who's just going to like assign you a textbook.
	I mean he had like original theories about like the world, right?
	So I made a list of like five questions and then halfway through the semester I emailed them to him.
	And then he said like, hey, this is really interesting.
	Like let's, you know, let's discuss, let's get a meal.
	And so we did, and that was great.
	But I think that restraint and the unwillingness to sort of play that mob game.
	You weren't just there for the selfie.
	Totally. Yeah, I knew these questions were interesting to me.
	I took care to make sure that I thought they genuinely interest him.
	And then we had that dinner, and I still remember it quite well.
	And it was clearly like, hey, we got along.
	And he became sort of a friend and mentor.
	Then he came back the next year to teach a class.
	This time I was sort of ready to go because I knew that he was going to deliver some good content.
	And I just didn't really have a plan, but I kind of copied everything down he said and then cleaned it up, posted it on my blog.
	Didn't really think anything would come of it, but that became like this Viral sensation in Silicon Valley.
	It was the first time where any entrepreneur could go and learn about Peter's systematic view of how to start a company.
	I put that on my blog, got a couple million views.
	I didn't know it at the time, but that was the rough draft of the book.
	When I saw people PDFing those notes and then selling them on Amazon, Wait a minute!
	My first instinct was to be pissed off.
	It's like, that's why...
	But then it's like... The capitalist kicked in and said, wait a minute, I'm losing a...
	There's a product here, right? So I pitched him on writing a book and we sold the book for quite a bit of money to the New York publisher.
	There was like an auction frenzy because his stock was hot at the time.
	Facebook had just IPO'd.
	Everyone wanted to see a book from him.
	And so we wrote that and a runaway bestseller.
	So that was pretty cool. That's pretty amazing.
	So what's the biggest misconception about Peter?
	Such a hard question because I know him so well.
	He's vilified in the press as some sort of evil genius billionaire.
	If he was a leftist...
	He's a genius billionaire, right?
	I know him really well.
	I know him as a warm-hearted guy that really cares about his family, first and foremost, his friends, his employees.
	He really is generous. I knew what to expect in politics because I knew the real Peter and then I saw how the media vilifies him.
	So I'm like... Man, they're gonna do that to me.
	That's why I walked into it eyes wide open.
	But I think there's only five intellects like Peter walking around at any given time in the world.
	I mean, he really is next level, and if you spend any time with him, you know this.
	Yeah, and some of the other people that perhaps more people know about, he really helped give them a start.
	Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, like, you know, I mean, they merged their companies together in 1999, and look at what Elon's gone on to do in his land, and Peter in his land.
	I mean, these guys are truly next level.
	Yeah, so if he's taking you under his wing, there's got to be something there, right?
	Peter's, yeah. Look, I've worked hard for my success, but I've also been lucky and humble and all that, right?
	But Peter's a very good judge of talent, and so I don't know exactly what it is that he saw in me, you know, way back in law school, but he...
	And he couldn't have predicted that things would work out as they have or that we'd be such good friends today.
	I ran his family office for the last five years before running for office.
	Listen, that in and of itself is a huge position for someone of your age.
	My friends are still like, Blake, why would you give that up?
	People would kill for the job you had and you gave it up to go get attacked on TV? You were in that job when we first met through a friend of mine who's a really successful sort of investor and wild man.
	And I'm like, wait a minute. Wait, you're...
	Early 30s running Peter Thiel's family office and you're going to do this shit.
	I guess I just believe in...
	And I turned down a job in a big law firm coming out of law school to go do a startup instead.
	So I've always believed in taking risks.
	I wish that...
	That we built a culture that encouraged more healthy risk taking.
	You don't want to take irrational risks, but you want to put people, especially young people, in a position where they're able to take some healthy risks.
	And as a society, we're really tracking in the opposite direction.
	And I think that's bad. So if you're in literally a privileged position to be able to take risks or to be able to speak your mind, I think you almost have a responsibility to do it.
	And that's how new things get generated.
	And we've just got to stop people from getting on this conveyor belt where you go to college, you get indoctrinated, you're not allowed to speak your mind, you have to fall in line.
	You're penalized for actually learning how to think.
	That's right. You just have to regurgitate.
	That's right. And every college has the glossy brochures that say, we will teach you, you'll learn how to learn.
	And it's all bullshit.
	It's just the opposite.
	When I was at Stanford, I think it was left-wing.
	This was 2004, 2008.
	But then when I went back to help Peter teach some classes at Stanford, every time I go back, you can just feel the climate is getting worse.
	It's getting more intellectually limited, stifled, more left-wing.
	It's just really bad. We're losing individual agency.
	This idea that one person could think a little bit differently or one person could do something.
	We're losing this culture of agency that I think Correct.
	And it was strange. I graduated from Penn in 2000.
	You know, that's now the home of Leah Thomas and, you know, the Penn-Biden Center, you know, funded by the CCP. He still says he's like a full-time professor at Penn.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know that he... You know, it's...
	It's fake. It's mind-boggling, right?
	And, you know, get a lot of money to do nothing.
	And, you know, the fact that...
	I mean, I think we could do, like, an hour on the fact that Joe Biden has a think tank.
	Like... I'm not sure he's capable of basic thought, but that's just me, and that's anyone who's actually watched him try to have one.
	But... I guess that's what's interesting.
	I mean, for so long, I went to Penn and I went to Wharton.
	That actually was like, oh, that's a great credential to have on your wall, but I actually don't think it means anything anymore.
	Because the way to get ahead is just to give them what they want to hear, not to actually think about it.
	I know someone who got into a program at a top 10 sort of school, and I know the kid.
	I'm like, dude, you're a conservative kid.
	What are you doing now? They have a very specific program that's...
	How the hell do you get into that school?
	Just with you, he goes, oh, like I wrote a paper that, you know, I'm a trans.
	He literally took like, It was sort of epic.
	I mean, don't hate the player, hate the game, right?
	He literally took the insanity, made it his own reality for three days, wrote down the most insane shit in the world, and he got in with it.
	They were like, we love that this guy is coming here.
	Now, he's like a hardcore young Republican, but they didn't know that, but he knew that if he did that, he'd never have a chance of getting into this very specific program, and so he gamed the system.
	Doesn't that tell us everything we need to know about how worthwhile these schools are anymore?
	It's really irrational for him to do that, but bad to have a culture where that's what you're doing, right?
	Correct. If that's the way you win, it's like, are you really winning?
	It's scary. So I just don't look at the value of that as having any real meaning, whereas when I was there, you know, a little longer than perhaps I'd like to believe, but ago, but like, You don't wear your politics on your sleeve.
	You could be there. I went to Wharton undergrad.
	It was pretty capitalist.
	That was fine. You didn't have to even think about these things.
	And yet, in 20 years, it's like...
	180. It's just, you know, like a bastion of some of the insanity.
	Right. And I'd like to think it's self-correcting, and you see it in some of the data.
	Like fewer kids are going to law school now because the legal jobs are sort of fewer and farther in between.
	As tuition continues to go up and up, I think many parents are finding it, you know, a little bit...
	It's just less automatic that you're going to go to college and that you have to do it.
	There should be many paths to success.
	That said, the government's got a thumb on the scale.
	They are subsidizing student loans, right?
	If you're like a 22-year-old construction worker, you've been swinging a hammer, developing some- You're going to pay for someone else's underwater basket weaving degree.
	That's right. And no bank would give you a loan for a home.
	And beyond that, that job will be replaced by AI in the next two or three weeks, whereas AI ain't swinging the hammer yet.
	Right. Talk a little bit about that, I imagine, because with your tech background, what I see in the last two months, let alone two years of AI, it's just like, oh my god, I know guys, they'll create the Don Jr.
	bot, and they'll try to just be me on Twitter, and they'll be like, what do you think?
	Jesus, that literally could have been me.
	Yeah. Are we going to displace people?
	I don't think we're going to displace people, but things are going to get scary.
	Things are going to get weird. Things are going to get uncanny.
	Just the progress with GPT-3, and I think they have version 4 that they're terrified to release because it's going to be way better, right?
	Correct. Instantly, this thing can write high school term papers at the 98th percentile in two seconds.
	Yeah, we've seen a movie about this.
	It's called The Terminator, right? It doesn't really end that well for people.
	I'm trying to figure out, like, what purpose do we serve at this point?
	I mean, these are big questions this century.
	I still think this stuff is always a little bit further away than the sort of Silicon Valley crowd wants to say.
	But like you said, the AI is not swinging a hammer.
	It's very hard to train an AI. You know, it's something a five-year-old can do, which is, like, take a car key and, like, if you tell them what to do, put it in the ignition, right?
	3D intelligence. A robot, if you don't tell exactly where its starting position is, it has no idea.
	It's still pretty far away from doing things in the world.
	But the intellectual stuff, or the linguistic stuff, the language model, chat, GPT, it's like...
	I mean, I knew this stuff was coming and I was blown away when it happened.
	The deep fake technology.
	You've seen these videos. Morgan Freeman.
	You can make Morgan Freeman and his physical likeness say anything ever.
	And pretty soon that's going to be undetectable, whether it's doctored or not.
	Correct. And it has societal implications beyond sort of just academia.
	I could see it being a huge disaster in sort of...
	Politics. Politics and criminal justice and all these things where you can...
	You'll get to a point where you may not be able to tell what's real and what isn't anymore, and therefore how do you act and respond?
	This is one reason why I was excited to try to get in the U.S. Congress, or I still am.
	I think we need young tech people to wrestle with these questions and regulate it.
	Should deepfake technology be banned in politics?
	Isn't it pretty weird if you can make Joe Biden say anything?
	Are you saying you don't think Maxine Waters has the intellectual capacity to deal with the advent of AI? Somehow I think she's going to need some help.
	Somehow, I mean, you saw AOC yesterday in the tech here, basically coming out in favor of repression, censorship.
	Well, yeah, and to a guy that was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, who seemed to turn a blind eye, and in his own words, oftentimes encouraged, like, pedophilia.
	I mean, you know, things that... I would have thought, you know, prior to sort of getting into this political journey myself, that I would have been like, dude, that's a 99.999, like the unheard, that's the holy grail of political issues.
	Like, no one likes pedophiles.
	You know what? I would have thought that, but you'd be wrong.
	Like, well, it's okay. They're misunderstood.
	They're, you know, they're maps.
	They're minor attracted persons.
	Like, I was like, I don't know. I sort of think they should be shot, but that's just me.
	You know, it's an extreme opinion, but like, I think I'd make an exception for pedophiles.
	Um... I can't believe it's even remotely closing yet.
	This seems to be like a hill to die on for the Democrat Party today.
	Like I said, we're right on the issues, and I actually think it's always the opposite.
	They're the extremists pushing this stuff, and the map thing in particular, I mean, it comes from ivory tower academics, and whatever students are learning at Harvard 20 years from now, that's what the left-wing presidential candidates will be parroting.
	You see where it's going, and it's really, really dangerous.
	That's why I think it's just super important to stand up for common sense.
	So you've done that, and you were sort of an early Trump guy, even working on the transition team.
	How did that happen? What did you see?
	Any good stories out of that insanity?
	Because, you know, when people are like, Russia collusion, I'm like, listen, guys, in all fairness, we got into this.
	We didn't know shit. We couldn't collude to order a fucking cheeseburger.
	We didn't collude with Russia.
	I have one story on that.
	Well, I got into it because Peter, who I was working for at the time, became an early surrogate for...
	You go fix this. Congratulations.
	So yeah, between Election Day and Inauguration Day, I was holed up in Trump Tower and next to Steve Bannon and stuff, we were trying to recommend some good scientific and technical people to get into government at various positions.
	But I remember one meeting I was in, Jared was there, and then Avi, you know Avi.
	And someone interrupts and says, like, excuse me, Jared, the Russian ambassador's on the phone.
	And I forget what our meeting was, but that was way more important.
	So he's like, I don't have time. He didn't care to talk to the Russian about it.
	He's like, Avi, go take it.
	And Avi at the time... Avi's like 23 years old.
	Avi at the time, it was his first job.
	Jared's like, go handle that, right?
	And so I always thought about that when they were doing the crazy Russiagate Mueller investigation.
	It's just like... No, I saw how little interest there was in colluding when Avi is like talking to the Russian ambassador, right?
	And so it's just, it was completely fake.
	I don't know, it was fun. It was like a, it reminded me of a startup, right?
	Yeah, no, I think it was. Man, had Hillary won, she had the Binders from Goldman Sachs.
	It was ready to go. You had the machine, but this was a bunch of smart people in the room trying to figure it out.
	Maybe it was very chaotic or something, but it also had energy to it.
	In your father's 2016 campaign, it had energy to it.
	There was nothing before it in American politics that was quite like that.
	I think we needed to upend the apple cart, because again, Mitt Romneyism doesn't work.
	Paul Ryanism doesn't work.
	It was always better than Hillary Clintonism, but...
	There was no difference, really.
	And so this America First, I don't know, it was a privilege to sort of get in at the ground floor and see...
	No, and that must have been, again, not easy.
	Even... As someone who worked for Teal, just because of where you came from, right?
	Tech Stanford, now you're working on the Trump transition.
	How was that living in San Francisco, I think, at the time, right?
	Or were you already in Arizona?
	I was in Arizona, and then I was mostly just based in New York for those couple months.
	But it was the first time in my life where I met many congressmen and senators.
	Some of them were interviewing for jobs in the administration.
	Talk about that. You had dealt with some of the smartest people in the world.
	Yeah. On a scale of 1 to 10, how impressed were you, generally speaking, with their abilities, their knowledge on issues?
	I'd give it a blended 6.
	That high? That high, but that's an average, right?
	It's interesting because some of these people are genuinely very impressive, but some are not, and that was the...
	That was the shocker to me.
	I'm 30 years old, now I'm meeting this congressman or whatever, and you're just like, oh, that's who's making these laws.
	We're talking to them about technology, and it's like, man, God help you, you don't even understand this.
	But the weird thing was, even the ones who really, I think, are quite smart, quite impressive individually, many of them who didn't support Trump in a 2016 run, they were asking me, like, What just happened?
	And I'm just like some 30-year-old tech guy, right?
	But I felt like I had my finger a little bit more on the pulse of why the electorate rejected, I'd say, the status quo and Hillary Clinton and put Donald Trump in the White House.
	And so that was my moment where I realized, hey, whether these representatives are impressive individually or not, most of them did not actually understand the conditions.
	That caused the America First movement.
	And a lot of them still don't know. I think more are getting on board and more understand it.
	Or they're faking it. That's the problem.
	They sort of say the sound bites.
	I saw that with the Democrats.
	I forget who it was. I think it was a congresswoman from Illinois.
	And she was like, well, I'm going to host wine and cheese parties for the other people running in the Midwest to teach them how to talk to their neighbors.
	I'm like, why the fuck would you...
	Something about that is very internally... You're your neighbor.
	If you want to represent that...
	I'm the son of a billionaire from Manhattan.
	I'm doing pretty good. You know, you put me in the Midwest.
	I'm not from there. I understand what they're looking for.
	I understand how to talk to them.
	I'm not supposed to.
	These people are their neighbors and they had no idea.
	And that was weird to me.
	And it was so indicative of the left.
	I think they can get away with it because they got the machine and everything else to carry them through that.
	But I guess the problem still exists even in the conservative side.
	I think so. I think it's very easy for people to get into office and lose touch.
	It becomes about the cocktail parties in D.C. It becomes about saying the right thing.
	Probably too many Republican legislators and governors are worried about their own press and therefore captured and controlled a little bit by the media.
	It's an easy existence to be a weak Republican in D.C. Meaning you can say whatever you want to your people in your backyard, but then when you get to D.C. when they need you and they know you fold, They leave you alone.
	I guess maybe, speaking of sort of the opposite of what would be the typical U.S. Senator, a mutual friend of ours, I wish you were both in the United States Senate representing the MAGA movement and blowing stuff up, but talk to us about J.D. Vance, because I think he's one of the few guys in the Senate that can do this.
	And when you think about it, I've had this conversation with friends that are conservative and in the political now, and I'm like, hey man, if you had to share a foxhole with someone in the U.S. Senate, who would it be?
	And they're like... You know, there's two or three names.
	Two or three out of 50.
	You know what I mean? When you're like...
	I think we have ten good ones, but I would...
	Listen, I think you're being generous, but I... But JD's the man.
	He's... I'm so glad he got in.
	Like, truly, he is the bright spot for me in the November 22 midterms.
	Correct. That was like... It's a little awkward for me to like...
	That was one of my pet friends.
	Yeah, he's like a really good friend, right?
	Yeah. But I'm proud of him already, and I think he's just going to be, if not the best, probably the best, but certainly a generational senator.
	Yeah, we can only hope so.
	We need more like that.
	We do. Well, listen, I'm glad that you're in this fight.
	I'm glad that you're continuing to stay engaged.
	I'm really glad that you're not dissuaded by what happened, that you learned something from it, because I think it's the thought process that you've put into every other aspect of your life that...
	It can teach us how we need to win and how we need to change and how the old systems and just we do this this way because it's the way we've always done it and there's no real consequence to losing.
	Works until it doesn't.
	And it doesn't work anymore.
	Well, I look forward to seeing a lot of what you have to do and in the meantime I hope You take the business acumen and the connections and the knowledge that you have to help grow some of that parallel economy as well.
	Because that's a big focus of mine right now, seeing what's out there.
	But as long as sort of woke corporate America is against the basic tenets of the American economy, That's right.
	Dream, the Constitution, freedom of speech.
	I don't feel right supporting it, so we'll do whatever we can to help try to support that.
	We didn't create that. We didn't choose it.
	It's sad to see, but there it is.
	But hey, this is the battlefield.
	Now we've got to fight. That's right. So, Blake, thank you very much for doing this, man, and look forward to having you back on as you continue to take over the world.
	Absolutely. Thanks, sir. Okay, guys, that was an awesome interview.
	I want to thank you for watching.
	I'm going to talk to you about our next guest because I think you guys are all going to really like this.
	So this is going to be Thursday.
	It's going to go live at 6 p.m.
	Eastern from Washington, D.C. with...
	Jim Jordan. Okay, so that's going to be a big one.
	You guys message me here if you have questions, things you want me to follow up on.
	Obviously heading the Judiciary Committee.
	Obviously someone that people actually want to just fully in charge, as in Speaker of the House.
	But he's the guy going after a lot of the stuff we want to go after so that's gonna be Thursday
	Live from Washington DC. That's gonna be awesome. I also want to remember to thank our sponsors, okay?
	Remember support the Patriot economy you can do that if you have a telephone
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	We've had guys, I've heard the stories, guys who have had gold and precious metals held in other places also agree in supporting the Patriot economy, transferring portions of their portfolio over to GoldCo.
	So go to DonJrGold.com.
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	So if you're going to have a phone, go to Patriot Mobile.
	Use Don Jr. as your activation code.
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	If you're going to have precious metals or if you're looking to diversify your portfolio, go to DonJrGold.com and my friends over at GoldCo are going to take care of you.
	I actually got a story the other day.
	Someone moving over, like...
	Pretty sizable six-figure amount of their portfolio that they had in gold and metals.
	Over to Goldco because they're like, I just want to support companies that believe in the stuff that we all believe in.
	That is fundamental and critical.
	I'm also going to go over now, over to Locals.
	So if you guys have subscribed there, I'm going to go one-on-one.
	I'm going to read your questions off the screen right here.
	Try to answer as many as I can.
	Do 20-30 minutes with you guys over there.
	Or if it's going really good...
	I'll do a lot more. And also, guys, don't forget to check out Kimberly.
	My boss, Kimberly Gilfoyle, is going to be going live on Rumble also on Thursday.
	I think her show's going to be great.
	Check her out on Rumble. I think you'll have a lot of fun with that one as well.
	It literally came about when she jumped on with me on my first episode when we didn't really have a guest.
	We were totally disorganized.
	She jumped on and did some time with me on the show.
	People were like, wow, she's really good at this.
	I was like, yeah. No shit.
	She was pretty successful for a long time at it before I took her on this ridiculous journey campaigning all over the country.
	But that ridiculous journey is worth it.
	It's what we're doing all of this for.
	It's so we can leave our children, our friends, our families, our future ancestors, a country that we recognize.
	And if you look at what's going on every day, you realize it's slipping away.
	That's not hyperbole.
	Every day, the insanity continues.
	They're shutting down free speech.
	They're shutting down rational thought.
	They want to shut down common sense.
	They're jamming crap down your throats.
	And if you don't believe everything they're saying, even after they've been caught lying for years on end...
	You're a heretic. You're going to get canceled.
	You're going to face the consequences.
	So again, support those who support you.
	Go check out Patriot Mobile.
	Go check out GoldCo at DonJrGold.com.
	Again, Patriot Mobile with activation code DonJr.
	Get it in there.
	Stop it. If you don't do that, you're going to wake up one day and understand that you've been giving your money to those who are willing to weaponize your hard-earned dollars against you.
	Then it's our fault. We do these things so that we don't have...
	We can't complain. I can't say that I didn't leave it all on the field.
	I'm out there bitching every day, getting canceled left and right.
	They call me every name in the book.
	Maybe I'm effective.
	Maybe not. But I hope we are.
	Because it's worth it.
	It's worth being in that fight.
	So guys, thank you so much.
	Go check out Kimberly as well.
	If you're a subscriber, go over to Rumble's local platform.
	I'm going to go there. I'm going to take a bunch of Q&A. And basically, if we've got a lot of good questions, I'll keep answering them.
	So I'll see you over there in a few seconds, folks.
	Thanks again for tuning in.
	You guys have been awesome.
	Everyone's telling me this show started off sort of gangbusters for a brand new podcast.
	And that's 100% because of you guys.
	So thank you for that support.
	Thank you for liking my, you know, I guess not so crazy take, but perhaps the way I say it would be considered crazy by corporate mainstream standards.
	But I think it's important. We have to have that conversation that way.
	And if that's what it takes to, you know, get it out there, let's go.

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