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Sept. 26, 2024 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

01:21:34

Kamala Fails Softball Interview, Adams Indicted, Live with Vivek Ramaswamy | TRIGGERED Ep.177

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	you you
	you we have the great the one and only Vivek Ramaswamy tonight
	He's back with us.
	He has a new book out, Truth, the Future of America First.
	And it's more than just a book, guys.
	It's a toolkit on how to win in November, and more importantly, how to win beyond November.
	And amid the left-wing madness that we see each and every day, we need a toolkit like that more than ever.
	Like I always say, guys, I wake up wondering each and every day if I'm just the star of The Truman Show.
	Kamala Harris can't even explain her own positions, but the media tells us she's incredibly brilliant.
	She's incredibly articulate.
	She can't even get through a softball interview, but we're supposed to believe that she's got all the answers, and her campaign is simply filled with joy.
	I don't see a lot of joy on people's faces in grocery stores, or when they're trying to buy a home, or maybe get a mortgage.
	I don't see any joy in Eastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of young men are getting slaughtered in pointless wars, or in the Middle East.
	Not a lot of joy going on in the world.
	So I have a feeling that campaign is falling flat.
	It's all nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and we're going to break it all down.
	So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these episodes.
	The rest of big tech, the mainstream media, they're stacked against us.
	We have to work harder each and every day to make sure that we break through all of the noise and actually grow this movement.
	Remember, folks, if you miss Triggered here on a given night, or if you're just traveling, whatever it may be, in your car, you can get Triggered on Spotify.
	You can get it on Apple Podcasts.
	So if you miss the show here on Rumble, check it out there.
	Send it to your friends if that's how they get their podcasts.
	You know the deal.
	We got to all be in this together.
	For all of the top headlines that we'll spot here on the show, check out my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, MXM, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias, okay?
	We're gonna get to those headlines in a second, but don't forget about our incredible and brave sponsors who have the guts to support programming like this, okay?
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	Now, with that, let's get to some of the top headlines.
	Before I do that, guys, laptop keeps timing out.
	Uh, that way I can see your comments.
	If you have questions for Vivek or otherwise, uh, we'll be able to get into some of those.
	Uh, that's a big deal.
	Like to hear from you guys.
	Always gives me a different line of thought.
	Uh, in case you weren't already aware, Kamala Harris is a liar.
	For example, at the debate, she insisted that she had no interest in taking anyone guns.
	Let's look.
	...my position on fracking, and then this business about taking everyone's guns away.
	Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.
	We're not taking anybody's guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this.
	Well, for starters, I'm still buying, not buying, even a little bit, that she actually owns a gun.
	Someone probably gave one to her and left it there so she could pretend she's a gun owner.
	If she does, she should tell us all about it.
	She should explain how these mechanisms work.
	But when her claim that she doesn't want to take anyone's guns, there seems like there's something wrong with that.
	That's a complete lie.
	Kamala Harris supported a San Francisco ballot measure that banned San Francisco residents from possessing handguns.
	Huh.
	Sounds kind of like a ban.
	Kamala Harris is such an anti-gun radical that she said she would walk into a locked home to examine how someone actually stores their guns.
	Check this one out.
	Responsible behaviors among everybody in the community and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.
	So now she's gonna walk into your home to check, to make sure.
	Because, in her mind, that's the government's right.
	What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?
	If they don't like anything else you're doing, they can just walk into your home.
	No cause, no effect.
	That is Democrat America.
	The good thing is that even the kids, because the children always know, folks, even the
	kids know the truth about Kamala Harris.
	Just watch what this recent CNN segment had to say about it.
	What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?
	Liar.
	I mean kid nails it!
	Kid nails it.
	Imagine that.
	A young, elementary school-aged child has a better understanding of what exactly Kamala Harris is than most Democrat voters.
	They get it.
	They see it with their own eyes.
	They're not buying into the narrative.
	And it doesn't stop there, folks.
	Here's another young girl saying exactly what she thinks about 2024.
	It'd be good for us to have a black woman as president for the first time in history, but my vote's kind of still on Trump.
	Smart kids!
	They get it!
	They probably hear their parents talking about the pain of feeding their families, of housing them.
	They hear the stories around the world about never-ending wars.
	Those kids are right.
	By the way, imagine what the left would say if Fox News started trying to interview kids and put them on TV.
	I think there's something probably a little disgusting about that.
	But in this case, I'll take the results since they already put it on national TV.
	Who am I not to talk about it?
	Everything about Kamala Harris is a lie.
	She tweeted this week that crime is down.
	Really?
	If crime is down, why is, like, deodorant locked up at my local CVS?
	Why is it every big city, basic products?
	Not luxury products.
	Even the basic products are locked down in big cities.
	Why are major stores like that shutting down across the country?
	I'm wondering why that is.
	It's almost like no one's reporting them.
	Just because someone's no longer reporting crimes, or the FBI is no longer reporting on the statistics, or collecting them, or local agencies are too preoccupied to actually report, or they realize that they're just going to be manipulating statistics anyway, it's almost like the crimes aren't happening, even if they're happening.
	And tomorrow, Kamala Harris is hitting the border and will claim to be really tough on illegal immigration.
	She's gonna crack down now!
	In fact...
	She's going to a part of Arizona where the Trump wall was built.
	That's the same wall she stopped construction of.
	She's finally going to the border.
	She was the Border Czar.
	And I think everyone in my family has been to the border more than Kamala Harris because anyone can go somewhere more than zero times.
	My father today addressed the damage caused by Kamala Harris' open border.
	She's destroying American towns.
	She's doing that every day.
	Check this out.
	In Aurora, Colorado, Springfield, Ohio, where it's been a mass invasion, these were two beautiful, successful towns, idyllic.
	And they're in trouble, big trouble.
	And very unfair that people want to leave, they want to get out.
	But everyone's afraid to say, I want to get out, because they want to be politically correct.
	And other towns just like them, hundreds of them all over America, Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens.
	It's an inundation.
	It's an invasion.
	This influx has overwhelmed our schools.
	They're taking the seats of students that can no longer go there, and they don't even speak English.
	They're trying to fire a lot of people and hire interpreters.
	Can you believe that?
	They want to get rid of some people they want to hire.
	Springfield is looking, the mayor said it the other day, looking for interpreters because Nobody in all of the 32,000 people that took into the town.
	Think of this.
	You have a town of 50,000 people, and almost instantly you have 32,000 people, in this case from Haiti.
	Most of them don't speak English, so they're looking for interpreters.
	You have to get them out.
	We have to save our country.
	You have to save these towns.
	They flooded the job market with low-wage migrants, but many cases, migrants that also have horrible criminal records.
	Murder, drug dealing, so many different things.
	A lot of human traffickers.
	And it's mostly human traffickers in women.
	Last month, American-born workers lost 1.3 million jobs.
	This is last month.
	You know, when they were in office, even the beginning of Kamala Harris's career is a lie.
	She got her start in politics from her then-boyfriend, Willie Brown.
	Willie Brown appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission.
	She made over $280,000 from that job and defended it by talking about how hard she worked.
	I'm sure.
	Sounds like she worked hard, but, you know, I'll let other people get into the details of that one.
	But it turns out, like everything else, that's yet another lie.
	Records show that Kamala Harris missed nearly a quarter of the commission's meeting.
	All she had to do was show up to the job.
	Show up to two meetings every month to make almost $300,000 a year.
	And she couldn't even manage to do that.
	Now she's claiming to care about crypto.
	Semaphore is reporting that Harris escalated her courtship of crypto.
	Thinking of McDonald's here for a second.
	I'd pay a lot of money.
	Like, I would honestly, I would pay a lot of money to hear Kamala Harris explain crypto blockchain technology without a teleprompter.
	Do you remember what it was like When she was trying to explain cloud technology in the cloud, check this one out to refresh your memory.
	Now, no longer are you necessarily keeping those private files in some file cabinet that's locked in the basement of the house.
	It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud that exists above us, right?
	It's no longer in a physical place.
	I'm going to ask the live chat.
	What do you guys think?
	$10,000 a minute?
	$25,000 a minute?
	No prompter to have Kamala Harris explain.
	The longer you go, the better it could be.
	I'd pay good money to watch her debate my 15-year-old son on the details of crypto and blockchain.
	There's zero chance.
	She knows anything about it whatsoever.
	She just understands, well, Trump went there, so I gotta try to go there too.
	All she has are word salads and platitudes.
	Yesterday, she said in a speech that we need inspiration to become inspired.
	Check this out.
	And let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired.
	It never ends!
	Like, what?
	We need to be inspired.
	To be inspired for the inspiration to inspire more inspiration, inspire all of us.
	I mean, this person is an imbecile, folks.
	Like, what are we doing here?
	How is it that she can be the Democrat nominee without a single vote?
	It's just supplanted there.
	I just wonder.
	This will be a good question for Vivek.
	And meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on what feds say is foreign corruption.
	Authorities say that Adams received over $10 million in public matching funds for campaign contributions by using so-called straw donors.
	Where else do we think we see a lot of that?
	Like, ActBlue?
	The entire DNC?
	To hide the fact that he was accepting foreign campaign contributions going all the way back to 2014.
	But Adam says he's not going anywhere, and that he's been targeted for clashing with the Harris-Biden border chaos.
	We'll see what happens next.
	But the pressure is certainly building on Adams to resign.
	It is interesting that you can be sort of Democrat royalty.
	You can do everything you want.
	It's never an issue, like sort of Hunter Biden, until you cross Democrat Party policy.
	Eric Adams' mistake?
	He talked about the tens of thousands of migrants stuck in high-end New York City hotels, costing city taxpayers billions on an annual basis, watching crime skyrocket as officers are beaten in the street, etc., etc., etc.
	You can do whatever you want as a Democrat.
	See Hunter Biden.
	You just can't go against the regime.
	When you do, indictment.
	Now on Tuesday, Tim Walz will debate J.D.
	Vance.
	I can't wait to see that.
	I'm going to be there myself.
	I'm going to do the spin room afterwards.
	There's a lot of things that Tim Walz needs to address.
	Like why he took more than 30 trips to China.
	Like why he's maybe a stooge of the communist regime there.
	Why he lied about his military service.
	And why he did nothing as Minneapolis burned.
	You know, don't forget guys, he did do something.
	I did.
	He managed to get tampon dispensers installed in boys bathrooms in schools.
	I just don't think that really does that much for anyone.
	And it doesn't stop there.
	I want you to remember the name Brian Lisinski.
	You might know who this is.
	And you might not, but you should.
	Tim Walz hired him as a top educational official to shape Minneapolis's school curriculum.
	Brian wants to destroy the United States.
	I'm serious.
	Listen for yourself.
	We're also sometimes lying on ourselves when people say like, oh, we can, we use critical race theory in school.
	We don't use critical race theory in school.
	The first tenant of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist.
	So if the nation state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with.
	It must be overthrown, right?
	And so we can't be like, oh, no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and diverse.
	It's not about that.
	It's about overthrow.
	It's insurgent.
	And we need to be, I think, more honest with that.
	And it's funny that they, you know, they don't understand critical race theory, but they actually tell some truth when they're like, yeah, it is anti-state.
	You can't be a critical race theorist and be pro-US.
	It is an anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
	So I think it's an interesting argument there, and that's why I'm a critical race theorist.
	But...
	Well, that guy's definitely not a theorist on much else.
	theorist on much else.
	But guys, that's what we're up against.
	That's who Tim Walz wants educating our children.
	You don't think that's going to become a predominant theory of that administration if they win?
	And remember, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are pretending to be centrists.
	They're pretending to be reasonable.
	The party of defunding the police and radical school indoctrination, the leaders of those camps, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, want you to think that they're moderate.
	They're not moderate.
	Speaking of which, have you seen the latest Trump ad about Kamala's radicalism?
	It's actually perfect.
	Kamala is, guys, for they them.
	President Trump is for you.
	Taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.
	Surgery.
	For prisoners.
	For prisoners.
	Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
	It's hard to believe, but it's true.
	Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.
	Every transgender inmate would have access.
	Kamala's for they-them.
	President Trump is for you.
	I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.
	I mean, every transgender inmate.
	You have the privilege of paying tens of thousands of dollars per person to make sure they can go through their gender voyage.
	On your dollar.
	We're not going to educate our kids.
	We're not going to take care of our veterans.
	We're not going to fix roads.
	No, no, no.
	If Kamala Harris is elected, they're going to make sure illegal immigrants and criminals can have all the sex change operations they want.
	That's insane.
	Media's never going to tell you that.
	But they've done it.
	They're pretending she's never made a decision in politics in her life, but she has for years.
	There's a long record of it, that they're totally discounting.
	Everything she's thought for decades has changed 100%.
	And by the way, Kamala also claims she wants to try to unite the country.
	So I'll ask you here all tonight, are you feeling the unity yet?
	I'm feeling about as much unity as I'm feeling joy coming from these policies.
	Guys, with that, Vivek Ramaswamy is coming up in a few minutes.
	He's got a great new book, Truce.
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	And guys, with that, joining me now, author of the new book, Truce, the Future of America First,
	Vivek Ramaswamy. What's happening, man? How are you doing?
	How you doing, man?
	Good to see ya.
	I'm keeping busy, bud.
	I'm like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest right now.
	But I see you out there, and we're both in that same boat.
	Yeah, we know a little bit about the feeling of that.
	I was in Wisconsin.
	I was in Waukesha yesterday.
	I was at the University of Pittsburgh last week.
	Obviously pretty critical.
	Swing states, I don't need to tell you that.
	Both in the blue wall.
	We probably need one of those states to take this.
	And then I visited Springfield last week.
	So I've been, you know, I've been on the move as you have been.
	And it's interesting to get a pulse of how things are going.
	No, it's important.
	Listen, I saw some of the videos you were doing.
	I saw you were with Charlie Kirk on some of these college campuses.
	You were talking there, and it was interesting.
	You know, you had, and he's done this for a long time, you're very good at it yourself.
	I used to do it with him all the time, even back in 15 and 16 before, you know, when it was still almost verboten for a Republican to go on a college campus.
	But it's sort of interesting.
	I saw a lot of people kind of come at you initially with hate, but the second they actually had a moment to be sort of retrospective, to think about some of the basic You know, premises that they took as though it was like the gospel, and they were like, wait, what?
	I didn't know that.
	I think you had a lot of converts.
	Explain it.
	What did you think?
	I think we had a lot of converts, too.
	I was actually pretty encouraged.
	So we went to the University of Pittsburgh, which is supposedly a more left-leaning campus.
	It's in a city that's historically been the vibe.
	First of all, I mean, of course, there's a selection bias of who comes out to an event.
	But we're talking about, like, massive numbers.
	I was blown away.
	It's not like, OK, there's a few hundred people.
	These are like hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
	For many of whom are just straight-up pro-Republican, pro-Trump, who are unafraid to say it on the campus.
	I thought that was an interesting sign.
	Much better, though, in the dynamic was, OK, yeah, we can get a bunch of, you know, fawning praise from people coming to the mic and say, we love you so much and can you sign my hat.
	OK, that's only going to get us so far.
	They're going to come vote for us anyway.
	What we said is, come to the front of the line.
	Like, clear the way.
	We got enough of those.
	Clear the way for somebody who actually wants to actually disagree with us.
	And I will tell you, I've had different types of disagreements over the course of, obviously, the presidential campaign over the last two years.
	We got mostly, I would say, 90% of those who came up were thoughtful, open-minded.
	Some of them openly anti-Trump, but they would end the question with, but make the case to me, which I think is actually pretty interesting.
	Which reflects a different kind of openness.
	That would have never happened eight years ago.
	I mean... Oh, it's totally different.
	I got pulled off a stage almost once.
	They were like, listen, I guess it was...
	Where were we?
	We were one of the, I think up in Michigan, like Michigan State Police.
	It was me, Charlie, Tommy Hicks at the time.
	It was like 50, we were like, hey, of course the university, you know, limits the size of the room, even though we had sort of overflow tickets, but then they have to make sure that equal side of the leg.
	And they're like, we can't protect you.
	There's, we have two cops here.
	Like, you're going to get killed.
	I was like, I'd rather get my ass kicked than walk away at this point.
	But there was no reasoning.
	They didn't want to hear anything.
	They were just there to disrupt.
	So I love that I'm hearing the people like, OK, fine.
	I guess they get it.
	They see it with their own eyes, too, what's going on.
	Yeah, I think they're pretty open-minded.
	Maybe it's not as good as they've been told.
	There was actually one guy who came to the front.
	So he was just like an obstructionist from the back.
	And you could hear him screaming.
	And he's got some signs.
	So I'm wondering what the sign is.
	It actually ended up being pretty interesting.
	So he is far left.
	He started a movement in his dorm.
	And he's like a big crusader.
	But the movement is right in Joe Biden.
	So it was really interesting.
	So we gave him the mic.
	At first, Charlie and I were like, all right, we're going to get him up on stage.
	Afterwards, I kind of leaned over to Charlie.
	I was like, let's let this guy talk a little bit, OK?
	Let's let this guy be heard.
	So he wants people to write in Joe Biden and Pennsylvania in the ballot.
	So there was interesting views across the spectrum.
	But one of the things I would say is, so look, I was in the campaign.
	I got an interaction with Don Lemon early on in my campaign.
	He ended up getting fired after he erupted in ways that weren't productive for him.
	But there are times where you're facing off with the left, especially with people in the media,
	especially people who have actually bad intentions, the puppet master of the Democratic Party,
	where you got to go hard. You got to go with gloves off, full on throttle, brass knuckles.
	I think when you go to a college campus, and I think one of the things that I realized is we don't want to do that to a bunch of 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds.
	It's different, right?
	I think these people are actually persuadable.
	Most of them are there in good faith.
	And so my goal there was to, you know, it's one of my learnings actually was there for a few hours.
	And we're going to do this again in a couple of the swing states is you got to give people
	the space to be able to make the final leap on their own.
	Because if you dump them all the way and you go all the way to just prove them, make a
	fool of them on the spot, what's the point of you or I doing that to a 22 year old college
	student?
	But if you just ask a couple of questions and rather than me speaking by the end of
	it, what I try to do is just ask them questions.
	I think you give them the space to say, if we put them in a box, then they have to defend
	themselves in that box.
	But if we allow them the space to come out a little bit, see the sunlight, I think we
	actually did wind up, end up winning some converts.
	And so that's been one of my learnings in the last year, is you have some cynical, bad actors on the left, you gotta fight, you gotta fight hard without apology.
	You've also got the next generation, many of whom are not really against us, even though they think they might be.
	We just gotta give them the space to discover Maybe a different point of view that's different than what's been stuffed down their throats.
	Yeah, because I mean, I look at all these young leftists.
	I'm like, they're like, they think they're the rebels.
	I'm like, listen, if you're siding with corporate media, if you're siding with like every mainstream left-wing politician, if you're siding with, uh, you know, woke corporate and Hollywood, like.
	You're not the rebel you think you are.
	If you're a conservative on a college campus, you actually have some guts.
	That's not easy.
	There's a consequence to that.
	On the other side, you're regurgitating what the entire machine wants you to say?
	I got news for you.
	Also, in terms of your money's worth, college is pretty expensive right now.
	You want to get more money out of your money's worth?
	You actually learn more in college when you're challenged.
	So if you're a conservative on a college campus or even a libertarian or even somebody who's an independent, but just maybe wants to question whether or not it's going to be existential threat to humanity if global surface temperatures go up by one degree Celsius, which by the way, there's no fact to suggest that that's going to be a threat to humanity.
	Try questioning that on a college campus.
	You're going to get some reactions, but they're going to force you to be on your toes and you're going to get a better education as a result too.
	So with college being as expensive as it is, it's also almost a pitch to just get your money's worth out of an experience that otherwise is pretty wasteful.
	100%.
	I mean, I published Charlie Kirk's, you know, book, The College Scam, talking about sort of the ever-decreasing value proposition of that college education.
	And so, you know, I know all about that.
	You're right.
	And as it relates to global warming, like, I'm actually currently much more worried about the global warming where the temperatures go from basically average temperatures as they've been for the last few hundred years to like 5,000 degrees Celsius because of nuclear war.
	which we seem to be approaching much closer each and every day
	as we torment Russia, as we now want to send long-range missiles
	into Russia that are American-made, probably operated by Americans in Ukraine,
	because I'm sure that Ukrainians couldn't figure out how to do it.
	So as I watch that escalation, that's the real global warming that I'm worried about.
	That's the one that there's no coming back from.
	I would say that there are, I could probably list for you, a number of potentially existential threats to humanity
	that rank way higher than climate change, probably hundreds.
	But two that I'd put high on the list is major risk of World War III and also depopulation in the West and in the United States of America.
	The decline in the fertility rate, the increase in global conflict rates from foreign interventionism, both of those are far greater threats to the future existence of humanity and to the United States than climate change is or ever will be.
	But why aren't we actually talking about it?
	It's actually, these agendas actually end up going together, actually.
	It's no accident that people who are pushing the global climate agenda are also calling for greater depopulation in the name of saving climate, because it actually has nothing to do with human prosperity in the end.
	That's too long of a discussion for us to have now.
	That's why I write the book, and there's a whole chapter dedicated to the climate change debates.
	But back to the broader point is you've got young people in particular, Don, and you know this, who are hungering for purpose, hungry to be part of something bigger.
	And my advice to them is, I don't, you know, if you go to campus and say, vote Trump, I don't think, you know, some people will be convinced by that, and I'll put it that way.
	But what I've said is, so I said this in Wisconsin last night, I said it in Pennsylvania last week, is just figure out who is going to make you more proud of being a citizen of this country.
	Who is going to leave you more proud of your American identity?
	Who's going to leave you feeling stronger as an American?
	Figure out who that person is for you and vote for that person.
	I have no doubt that if people are honestly going through that reflection, especially if they're undecided, who's actually going to make you feel stronger and more proud and more grounded as an American?
	That's going to be Donald Trump.
	But I'd rather actually let those final few undecides, they're not going to come to our side because we're, you know, screaming them to agree with us.
	But I think they will, if they think about who's going to make you more proud to be a citizen of this nation, there's one answer to that.
	And so that's been effective, I would say, on the ground.
	Yeah.
	And I say, you know, who do you think is actually going to do a better job for all of the things that matter to you?
	For the young kids on a college campus, like you're going to graduate, you want to be able to get a job, who's going to do a better job with the economy?
	That's not even close, because we've had actually four years under the Harris-Biden regime.
	Joe Biden the other day just said, no, no, no, Kamala Harris was a part of every decision we made, and she owns every decision we made.
	Almost confident he's throwing her under the bus because of the coup that she pulled off on him.
	But, you know, are you going to be safer?
	Are you going to get sent to the front lines of World War III?
	Who's going to make peace?
	The people who were so weak that they effectively brought on war and or so stupid that they gave Russia every excuse they needed to invade?
	I mean, don't forget, three days before Russia invaded, Kamala Harris was the one they sent over there to try to calm things down and talk it down.
	I don't know.
	I don't want to send my kids to the front lines of a war that no one's articulated to me what victory looks like.
	That doesn't make sense.
	That's not patriotic war.
	That's just stupidity to enrich the military-industrial complex.
	So, yeah, there's a lot there that should be obvious.
	But you're right.
	I think you ought to do it from a different perspective than perhaps the way we've been doing it for the last few years.
	Yeah, and one point on the war piece of this, people are really focusing on the Russia-Ukraine war correctly because it's bled about $200 billion of our taxpayer resources.
	The only worse use of U.S.
	military jets flying around Ukraine is U.S.
	military jets carrying around the Ukraine's president around the United States of America to campaign for the opposition.
	But actually, the Springfield event we did last week, which was awesome, by the way, and it was so cool to go to Springfield.
	I just posted on X. There was no plan.
	I don't have a campaign apparatus or anything.
	So I showed up in Springfield.
	We put up an Eventbrite.
	2,000 people RSVP.
	We can't even fit 75% of them into a room packed full of close to 400 people.
	A 19-year-old kid comes up, and this is actually to bring it full circle on the age or generational thing.
	He says, all right, I'm voting for Donald Trump, but I can't convince my mom.
	What can you tell me so I can convince my mom to actually come around?
	Because she voted for Obama twice, and then Hillary, and then Biden, and I would like to get her this time.
	He's 19.
	I said, all right, so is she helping you pay for your college education?
	Yes.
	Tell her I'm going to make more money when I graduate if Donald Trump is the president and now he's a sophomore in college than if Kamala Harris is.
	I think that'll actually convince her, which is actually one way to do it at the bottom line.
	Unless you want me living in your basement for the rest of eternity.
	Now, there's some moms that may want that, so you've got to figure out where they strategically lie, but 100%.
	We touched on war a little bit, Vivek.
	My father's apparently meeting with Zelensky at Trump Tower tomorrow.
	How do you think that conversation should go?
	I mean, after sort of campaigning against him and realizing maybe he spent enough time with Kamala Harris to see the writing on the wall, now he's coming to meet with my father.
	But what do you think should be said there?
	How does it relate to any of the themes perhaps in your book?
	Obviously, you're going to be very anti-war and, you know, we got to get involved in things that actually perhaps benefit America.
	I think, you know, America first, that should be a fundamental tenet of that.
	What do you think happens there tomorrow?
	Yeah, well, I mean, I could talk about the principles behind this in the book, but very pragmatic tomorrow.
	Well, I'll say the first thing is, it'll be very technical about this because you know what type of environment we live in with lawfare in the United States.
	I would give advice for what that meeting looks like on January 20th, okay, after inauguration day or January 21st.
	He's not going to be conducting diplomacy as a citizen.
	He's going to be engaging in a conversation.
	But when he's back in office, what does that first conversation look like?
	I would tell you it's actually got to be deeply pragmatic.
	One of the things I like about your dad is he's able to have a conversation with even people who have Disagreed with him, criticized him in the past.
	He's able to put that to one side and do what's pragmatic for the future.
	And I think that he's going to be able to find, and your father's good at this, I think good business leaders generally are, at finding everybody's incentives, all right?
	How is everybody at the table going to be taken care of?
	Right now, Ukraine actually is in a more vulnerable position than it would be if they did a deal that was backstopped by U.S.
	self-interest.
	So the deal I think we need is, all right, be really honest.
	Here's what we care about as the United States.
	We don't want Russia and China to be in an alliance anymore.
	We think that's hurting us.
	We think the Russia-China alliance poses a threat to us because that actually makes China stronger vis-a-vis the United States.
	So we need to do a deal for American interests, this matters to us, that pulls Russia out of its alliance with China.
	And I also don't like the fact that we got Russian military in our own backyard.
	People don't know this.
	Not many people do.
	Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua.
	Russia has a military presence in all those areas.
	So I would use, from an American perspective, and your father's very candid, and I think his candor works in his favor, to say, candidly, this is what we want for the United States of America.
	We don't want Russia in our backyard.
	And we also don't particularly want to have them in an alliance with China.
	And it's no skin off your back, Ukraine, if we even reopen some economic relations with Russia, okay?
	We can have that reasonable discussion.
	And if Russia's better off economically, because we're open to trading with them, That doesn't take any skin off your back.
	But Russia's deal as a consequence is going to be, we're going to have some reasonable territorial concessions.
	But if they infringe on those territorial concessions, again, the rest of the deal is off.
	And so now Russia is in a tough spot if they renege on the deal.
	Ukraine is better off because now hundreds of thousands of your own sons and daughters are not dying in that war.
	And by the way, Ukraine's military is so Depleted.
	They're now having to recruit people above the age of 40 to serve.
	Put an end to that senseless war that you should have done in 2022 before Boris Johnson showed up on your doorstep to deflect from his own domestic problems in politics at home.
	And you actually get a reasonable deal.
	Is it everything you want?
	No.
	But it's a reasonable deal that allows you to have a security agreement that's backstopped by U.S.
	self-interest.
	That's far more powerful than what you're going to get by fighting an uphill war that otherwise, frankly, could result in Even much of Ukraine no longer existing as a sovereign country if you actually see this play out several more years on the correct trajectory.
	I mean, I look at this as a genocide.
	And by the way, from Russia, too.
	I mean, listen, Russia haven't exactly had an overperformance in terms of military might of the Russian standing army, which, you know, any one of us who would have grown up in the 80s would have feared and, you know, And we're like, not a great performance.
	And Putin's lost a ton of men too, but he's finding people from Siberia
	that he doesn't care about.
	He'll send them, this is not like oligarch sons from Moscow dying on the front lines.
	And so, and by the way, Zelensky being no different.
	They're just sending a bunch of, who they look at like the peasants.
	We're gonna send a bunch of our peasant white folks over there and the men will die.
	And they're recruiting guys in their fifties.
	It's multiple generations of men just sent to their death for, no.
	And by the way, I sort of do this now and I don't know that I've spent time
	with anyone in Washington, DC.
	in politics who has articulated to me what victory actually looks like.
	It's lunacy.
	That's right.
	I think you're 100% right.
	I think the reason they don't say it is certain of those people in Washington, D.C.
	do know what victory looks like.
	They just understand that it's outside of the acceptable window of what they can say.
	It's regime change in Russia.
	I think that that's actually what... Yeah, that's great.
	But you and I have actually done business unlike most of the people in Washington, D.C.
	I don't know.
	Honestly, I don't know that I've ever had a deal where I got everything I wanted.
	Everything was... Oh, that's right.
	I mean, regime change in Russia, I don't even think it's a worthy goal.
	I don't even think it's a worthy goal, by the way.
	Think about who fills the vacuum left by Putin.
	And our track record of regime change hasn't exactly been great.
	How'd that work in Iraq, Vivek?
	Yeah, hasn't been a, you know, if we don't learn from our past mistakes, we're doomed to repeat them.
	But I do think that, look, Zelensky, you got to look at this from a business perspective, actually, too, right?
	I think the expected value outcome is even if he has, we've tilted his incentives, okay?
	There's a term that I would call chain ganging.
	He's chain ganging us into this war because that's kind of what his incentive is too.
	So like in a business setting, all right, let's just play this out.
	Forget the war context.
	In a business setting, if there's a 1% chance that you're going to make a billion dollar cash out on a deal, that's still an expected value of $10 million.
	But if you take a 99% chance you're going to end up with a zero, that's still like a high potential expected value, where in fact, you might actually just be better off getting a normal job that makes you two million bucks.
	Okay, that's actually a better case scenario for your family.
	But if you're thinking big, and you have a 1% chance at a billion dollars, that's a $10 million value, you might have a person who's willing to take that risk.
	That's effectively the situation we're putting Zelensky in, which is with our own health, He has some shot at maybe even going on an offensive in Russia and emerging with strength, but actually the downside for his own people is going to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, we've already seen, and casualties.
	And I think the actual security threat to the very people who are funding it, the West that's funding it, ends up on the losing end of that security catastrophe.
	So Brzezinski makes sense to go for broke because, or at least in some vision of the world, it could make sense to go for broke.
	He wears the cargo pants like he is.
	It's great.
	I have cargo pants too, but it doesn't mean I'm a frontline soldier, you know?
	It's part of the sales pitch.
	But I do think there's a reasonable, and even for the Ukrainian people, the better outcome is, I think, a negotiated peace there.
	And it shouldn't be outside the Overton window to say this, frankly, in both parties.
	It's not just a Democrat issue.
	And it's one of the things I try to do in this book.
	It's probably going to make some people upset.
	It came out this week, in that it's not just speaking hard truths to the left.
	It's also speaking hard truths to our side.
	You know, some people will say, OK, well, we're ahead of an election.
	We've got to focus.
	And I am focused on making sure we defeat Kamala Harris and win the down-ballot races.
	But what's the point of winning if our own party is actually going to adopt some of the very poison that we think we're up against?
	And so I think the more we're able to look at this outside of the partisan silos and just talk about this in first principles, the stronger we're actually going to be.
	So how would you describe the, you know, the Harris campaign strategy right now?
	I mean, I don't know if you saw sort of my intro, but I played some of the clips of her, you know, talking about, you know, the cloud and cloud technology and other word salads.
	You know, she's now adapting a pro crypto stance.
	Like, I'd love to hear her explain.
	Anything crypto, like, I'd love to hear her explain the blockchain, like, I'd pay a lot of money, uh, you know, to hear her do that.
	You know, there's no substance, uh, but yet much of the regime media, they don't seem to care.
	It's like, you could hear the dumbest thing and it's like, it's brilliant.
	It's brilliant.
	You must, it's like, you know, when you're looking at some, you know, modern art, like, uh, you see the guy that's a big art guy in the world.
	It's like, he's like, it's brilliant.
	You're looking at him.
	I don't know.
	My kid drew that.
	Like, what are you talking about?
	Uh, Is anyone buying it anymore?
	Do people see through it?
	Yeah, I think people do see through it, but it's hard.
	And I'll tell you why.
	So the short answer is, the things she says are obviously not brilliant.
	They can, in some ways, qualify neither as dumb nor brilliant, because she's not even saying anything, actually.
	Well, by the way, there's truth to that, yeah.
	But the strategy, we got to call this out, the strategy is kind of brilliant, actually, because it's a short enough time.
	So I think this all fits together.
	I mean, how would a candidate like her couldn't earn a single Democratic vote even in the primary?
	She couldn't even make it to the Iowa caucus.
	How is she even a plausible candidate to be the next president of the United States?
	It's kind of a brilliant strategy, and it dates back to long before she was the nominee.
	So I think this was in some sense part of the game plan the whole time.
	And I called this out from the Republican debate stage back when they called me a conspiracy theorist for saying it.
	But the reality is just play at the incentives, right?
	So if you're going to swap out Biden, you'd rather have the option value for as long as you can, right?
	In the world of capital markets, you call this a call option.
	They bought themselves a call option by making the earliest possible presidential debate in US history.
	It's the earliest ever debate they've had in June.
	Because if he did well, by some miracle, it would have reset the race.
	And if he didn't do well, they have a free option to switch her out.
	They wanted that switch to happen literally as late in the cycle as possible.
	Because the first thing that happens when you replace Biden is it doesn't matter who you put in.
	It's like the equivalent of the reaction that a tortured prisoner has to his His the person who releases him from captivity. You're
	going to fall in love with that person no matter who it is In this case
	They had the honeymoon phase with kamal harris And the bed as you rise that ride that honeymoon phase all
	the way through november by saying as little as possible Yeah to disrupt the don't let people hear about her
	Yeah, exactly.
	So in some sense, it's actually a brilliant strategy.
	And we've seen that proven by the fact that every time she has tried to veer into grocery price controls or some element of substantive policy, it hasn't gone well for her.
	And so she understands that for much of the voter base in the United States of America, especially in the state of civic decline that we're in, they vote based on a vibe rather than actually based on policy.
	So that's their strategy.
	The question for us is, what do we actually do about it?
	It's our job to actually call that out, to offer our own alternative vision, to show up in the places where we're not otherwise showing up.
	I think your father has done a masterful job of that, but I think that that's going to be required all the way through the finish line, because, frankly, it's a strategy that you're asking, are people seeing through it?
	Well, I think some people do.
	I think we've been lied to in every major election.
	There's been one major lie, at least, one major lie.
	Got the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the Russia hoax of 2016.
	You got the Hunter Biden laptop suppressed on the eve of the election by every major tech company on the eve of the 2020 election.
	This election, it was the idea that Biden could not possibly be swapped out as the nominee.
	That ended up being the fact that they actually made it work all the way through the very end.
	I think for us, the right criticism of Kamala, because I think the criticisms that are closest to the truth are the ones that land.
	People are intuitively intelligent about this stuff.
	It's not really that she's actually a Marxist or a communist.
	I think that I think that's off the mark by a little bit, and it doesn't help us quite as much as I want it to for two reasons.
	One is, it gives her too much credit, right?
	It gives her the credit of being an ideologue, right?
	It says that she actually has function and policy principles.
	She's a chameleon, not an ideologue.
	Right, yeah, so she's not an ideologue, and that almost gives her too much credit.
	The second thing it does is it puts them in a position to allow, right, the billionaire class who's on CNBC on a given day to talk about how, no, no, she's actually pro-capitalism.
	Well, she switched yesterday to being in favor of some sort of pro-growth policy on cryptocurrency or AI or whatever the next thing.
	It doesn't matter, but it allows her on paper to defy the idea that a true Marxist wouldn't say this.
	And second of all, she isn't really smart enough or I think even principled enough to have a deep-seated political philosopher ideology.
	I think the truth of the matter is she is a cog in a machine.
	And we're running against that machine.
	And I think our movement is at its best, I think your father's at his best, when he is running against the machine, to dismantle the machine, above the fray of partisan politics.
	There's a reason why we're not only seeing former Democrats come to our side, we're seeing former Republicans like Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney move to the other side.
	It's not about Republicans and Democrats, really.
	It's about the citizen versus this managerial class.
	And more than anybody who's run for president in our lifetime, who's been the major nominee of either party in our lifetime, Donald Trump is the person whose mission it is.
	When we say drain the swamp, it is to dismantle that machine.
	I think that's a powerful message that wins over a lot more of those independents rather than just Saying that she's a communist, which I think gives her too much credit.
	Because at least, you know, say what you will about Karl Marx.
	He was at least a smart guy.
	Say what you will about Bernie Sanders.
	At least he has the principles, right?
	I think that neither of which we could say about really about Kamala Harris.
	But I think what we can say is just like Biden's cognitive deficits were In some ways, a feature, not a bug.
	Her policy deficits are really a feature, not a bug for the people who are controlling her.
	But if we call this out as the machine we're up against, it doesn't matter if it's Kamala, Joe, Sherrod Brown, or whoever the next guy, they're all cogs in that machine and we're going in to break the machine.
	I think that's a powerful message, but I think it's a powerful message because it's closest to the truth.
	So, you know, speaking of sort of, you know, the failed policies, you know, Kamala Harris, she's going to the border tomorrow.
	I mean, it sort of feels to me like that's like a murderer visiting the crime scene.
	But can you explain how your book maybe helps demystify why the American left is all in on open borders?
	I mean, they literally hate the idea of a national sovereignty.
	Why is that?
	I mean, it seems like, I can't name a civilization in history that put themselves last And managed to survive.
	What is it about the American left that is all in on this concept?
	Right.
	So I'm going to read you the title of this chapter.
	It's called, An Open Border Is Not A Border.
	Where, if I told this to you, or like most of the other chapters in this book, if I told this to you in the 2000s, I would advise you to save your money and not buy this book because it's far too obvious for any person to even waste the paper that it's printed on.
	Today it's actually a controversial thing to say in many corridors of the modern left.
	So, there's two sides to this, and there's one side that our side gets a little shy about talking about, which is the legal immigration side of this, which I'll get to in a second.
	On the illegal side, and I say this as the kid of legal immigrants myself.
	My parents came here with no money.
	I founded multi-billion dollar companies.
	That's the American dream.
	You do it the right way and you're going to make contributions to this country.
	I'll get to that.
	And you believe in this country and you embrace the civic ideals this country was founded on.
	You could speak the English language.
	I mean, these are, I think, attributes that really matter for immigration.
	I say this as the kid of those legal immigrants.
	Your first act of entering this country can't break the law.
	This is solvable.
	I mean, we just go through just a litany of this.
	This is the easy part.
	This is sometimes the easy part, but we got to do it.
	Move the military to the southern border.
	We got 100,000 troops.
	A lot of people don't know this.
	100,000 troops in Western Europe.
	What the hell are they doing there?
	Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was the supreme commander of NATO, okay, when he was the head of,
	effectively like a commander in NATO, he said that if we have troops here 10 years from now,
	that's a proof that NATO has failed.
	Now in the year 2024, we got 100,000 troops in Western Europe, move some fraction of them,
	if not all of them to our southern border, complete the wall, put aquatic barriers in the Rio Grande,
	stop paying for sanctuary cities, end birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals,
	reinstate, remain in Mexico.
	And just tell somebody, if you're going to claim asylum, you got to at least have proof of asylum.
	That ends the illegal mass migration crisis.
	This is not complicated.
	And if you're in this country illegally, we'll return you to your country of origin.
	That's the illegal side.
	Now, on the legal side, I think we often make this out to be a much harder problem than it is, right?
	Because then we'll start talking about, and I've talked about this too, merit-based immigration.
	Well, what is merit?
	What does that mean?
	Okay.
	Let's not get theoretical.
	Let's just get really practical.
	I'll give you 75% of the solution here, and I talk about this in the book.
	If you basically have a system that says, if you are going to rely on welfare, if we can predictably say, based on your economic condition, we require transparency of what your economic condition is before you enter, if we know you're going to rely on government assistance within the first couple of years you're here, we're not going to admit you, and we make you ineligible to receive any form of government assistance for at least 7 to 10 years after you come.
	Okay, if you're going to rely on government assistance, welfare, Medicaid, etc., and we know that, we should not be admitting you to the country.
	If you do not speak English, we should not be admitting you to the country.
	If you don't know the first thing about the U.S.
	civic ideals, and we have a civics exam for naturalization, move that to the front end.
	If you don't know the basics about the civic understanding of the United States, you're going to run out of the country.
	Those three things alone.
	If we eliminate anybody who's going to rely on government welfare or recipient of government aid, anybody who can't speak English, and anybody who doesn't know the first thing about U.S.
	civic history, that alone solves, I kid you not, 75 plus percent of our legal immigration problem.
	That's not complicated.
	Yeah.
	Totally.
	How do you institute that when the Democrats seem...
	You know, I know great guys that are, you know, they're computer programmers from Eastern Europe.
	They're brilliant.
	They work, you know, they work.
	I mean, half the tech stuff I invested, you know, it's done over there.
	Those guys have zero chance of getting into America.
	Now, they could create jobs, they could add value.
	They would never be dependents, but the entire Democrat party seems intent.
	The only kind of immigration they want are people who will be permanent dependents because it's a reliable vote for them.
	They've ostracized so many people that would have otherwise been reliable Democrat voters, whether that's a lot of, let's call it even African American men, certainly a lot of Hispanics around the country.
	You know, they're just importing a reliable voter base since they're not willing to actually do the right things for the people that were traditionally Democrat voters.
	Yeah, and to those who would say that's a conspiracy theory, I would encourage you to just go back and look at what the Democrats themselves were saying in 2012, right?
	Democratic strategists.
	There's an article in Political Magazine from 2012.
	Just look at that.
	That was a stated strategy of mass migration, which has long-run electoral advantages into the country.
	I do think a lot of Democrats, especially those at the more local level and the state level, mayors, even some governors, I think are beginning to see the first-hand effects that's having on them.
	So I think they could actually be the front lines of shifting the tide on this.
	But forget partisan politics about it for a second.
	I want people to think about this.
	This is actually one of the things I expose in this chapter of the book is you could design an immigration system and it's like whatever the incentives are, whatever the incentives you set up in that system is exactly what you get.
	So in the legal immigration system, you could imagine one that rewards people who are the smartest, in which case you get the most intelligent.
	You could imagine you reward somebody who is the most hardworking, most likely to be industrious or make contributions.
	You could imagine you could have a system that rewards those who demonstrate a love of the United States or readiness to assimilate or speak English the best, whatever it is.
	You could imagine any one of those as being the type of person or at least the type of quality that the immigration system rewards.
	In fact, the immigration system, even on the legal side right now, the immigration system we have is none of those.
	The hard truth is that the number one human attribute that our current immigration system rewards is Your willingness to lie, actually.
	Your willingness to just outright, intentionally tell a lie under oath, under pain and penalty of breaking the law.
	If you're willing to do that, that dramatically increases your odds of getting into the country.
	Now, you have somebody on the other side of that saying, OK, I can't in good conscience tell you that I'm seeking asylum or refugee status because I face imminent risk of bodily harm due to my race or my religion.
	And therefore, that's what it takes to qualify.
	I can't lie.
	That person's not going to get in.
	The person who's willing to tell that lie is exactly who our current immigration system rewards.
	And against that backdrop, it is no surprise that you're seeing an increase in crime, because if you're willing to lie to break the law as your first act of entering, even through the so-called legal system, you're going to be more likely to continue to break the law while you're here.
	And we haven't talked about that enough on our side, but I mean, that's part of the reason I write this book.
	Well, it's complicated, because on behalf of the people that are doing the asylum checklist, well, they travel through eight countries to get here.
	They could have sought asylum in any one of the other countries, but, you know, America's the one that's gonna give them, you know, $3,000 a month, and a phone, and a this, and housing, and guaranteed healthcare.
	You know, you lose a little bit of that asylum right when it's like, oh no, I just got to a place where I'm safe.
	No, no, no, you traveled through seven other countries to get to America.
	Like, there's a difference.
	It's even funny how it relates to sort of the woke victimhood culture mentality a little bit in terms of what our immigration system rewards.
	So I tell one of the stories, it's a true story, but I tell one of the stories in the book of a woman who came here Fleeing from persecution, so under the asylum system, persecution by Vladimir Putin because of his assault on the LGBTQIA plus community.
	She's a lesbian and she comes here because she's going to be unsafe, imminent risk of some kind of bodily harm to her if she stays in Russia.
	She comes here on the slightest questioning of it based on the way she lives her life here.
	Wait a minute.
	How could you possibly have been fleeing if you're really an LGBTQ person?
	It doesn't seem like that.
	Immediately breaks down and says, OK, I admit it.
	I'm not even gay.
	In fact, I don't even like gay people.
	I never have.
	It's just a made up myth because that was what was required.
	But anyway, it's a story of who do we actually reward through our immigration system?
	It's the people who, sadly, Today's system rewards you most.
	Not if you're the smartest, not if you're the hardest working, not if you love this country.
	The number one human attribute that's rewarded is if you're willing to lie.
	And in some sense, you as a country get what you deserve.
	If that's the system that we're going to have, our nation's declining.
	But in some sense, our policymakers get for our country what they've created.
	I think we can reverse it.
	It doesn't have to stay this way.
	These are solvable problems.
	I mean, this is not... This is not about... Curing Alzheimer's is harder.
	Putting a man on Mars is harder.
	This is not a problem of nature.
	This is a man-made problem.
	And a man-made problem always has a man-made solution.
	But, you know, I think that's actually what this election is about, is November 5th is not the destination.
	It is the starting line.
	We just got to get there.
	So, you know, interesting one, because I want to shift gears a little bit.
	I mean, since we sort of started speaking about that woke victimhood culture that people are clearly taking advantage of, and many are just lying about to gamble.
	And I'm sure there's some people that really believe this stuff.
	And I'm sure there's plenty that say, hey, I'd love to go to Harvard, so I'm going to be trans.
	And that's a sure way to do it.
	Maybe if I want to become a general in the military, just check that box, and you're probably good these days.
	but you're now a significant shareholder in BuzzFeed, which I did not have on my bingo card, you know,
	anytime soon.
	Will you be able to make any changes to that website?
	And will you be able to, you know, talk about what you hope to achieve?
	I have sort of a long story.
	So when they were going down the tubes, I had a little show and fraud, you know,
	I don't often take glee in other people's misery, but they tried going after me one time on a total lie.
	I I managed to catch him I'll tell you because it's actually they tried linking me to Jeffrey Epstein Uh, you know because I was at some party I guess a friend of mine was doing this development I'm a real estate guy from New York.
	So a real estate guy from New York was a good friend invited me down And apparently Jeffrey Epstein was at this party.
	I don't know.
	There's no pictures.
	There's no this I didn't know who the guy was is it but this was like 2007-2008 You know, I get a call and like...
	2020.
	2020, you know, we have credible evidence from two sources that say you're on Epstein's
	plan. I was like, I wasn't on Epstein's plan, didn't go to him, didn't go to this. And they're
	like, we don't care. We're going to write the article because you can link the article.
	So of course I go, I don't know, like, why don't you write about all the times that Bill
	Gates was there or Clinton or Stephanopoulos or whoever the other people that I've read,
	you know, have been accused about being there. There are big time Democrats and who spent
	a lot of time on the island. You're saying I was on a plane with them. No, we're just
	running the article. You have six hours to respond.
	Otherwise we're going with, you know, two people who say you were there. And I'm like, I wasn't.
	I just, and I remembered, I actually flew down with a friend and we flew down private
	and I called the guy, but it was like 12 years prior. So I was like, listen, uh,
	could you go on the record and just tell these guys I flew down with you and I was there
	with my wife and we flew down with you and we flew back with you. And he was like, yeah,
	sure. But he goes, you know what? My pilot's like a real, you know, anal guy. Like, let
	me, let me call. He calls the guy and I was like, oh yeah, no, I kept the records.
	I was like, you kept records from 12 years ago?
	Like flight manifestos?
	Like, you know, mostly you throw that stuff two, three years and you throw it out and it's gone, right?
	He goes, oh yeah, no, here it is.
	So I sent the guy a text about five minutes before the deadline.
	I go, uh, if you write the article now, I'm going to sue your ass off and I'm going to own your magazine and I don't get it.
	And you know what?
	It was like, I ripped his heart out of his throat.
	Like, and it didn't matter.
	There was like, okay, well, you know what?
	We got bad information.
	We had bad sources.
	It was that he wanted to hurt me.
	Uh, you know, and so I remember, it was BuzzFeed at the time, and so it was one of those, when they went down, so what the hell?
	And also BuzzFeed News was actually the one, they're also one of the ones, the BuzzFeed News division, which actually doesn't exist anymore, they shuttered it, was also one of the ones that broke the stories on a lot of the, a lot of the supposed Russia's collusion, all that stuff back in 2016.
	Oh yeah, no, these guys were vicious, and it was all lies, and all nonsense, and no consequence.
	So when they went down, I was like, You know, I know they love to throw out the learn to code to a bunch of guys that are plumbers and construction workers, but it was like, yeah, maybe you guys are going to need to learn to code or be replaced by AI in about two weeks because that's where probably most of that's going anyway.
	But how do you figure this one out?
	How do you get involved?
	Are you going to be able to change it?
	Yeah, so first let's take a step back.
	So I left the campaign and I got in the world of politics, but the business world was my background.
	And so I left the campaign in January.
	Obviously I've been heavily involved in helping your father and other candidates.
	But I do have a lot more spare time on my hands after leaving the campaign, which is a full-time activity.
	Yeah, I miss scratching the business side of my brain a little bit as well.
	And so I've started a couple of companies, actually, a couple of which I think are going to go on to do some big things of guided enterprises that have already started.
	But I also have always had an itch for finding undervalued opportunities.
	This is a company that has just, for some of the reasons you may have mentioned, cratered since its IPO.
	It is Still generating an interesting amount of revenue.
	It has a bloated cost structure that hasn't served the company too well, and there's some debt-related pressures.
	But I said, you know, for a relatively modest sum, at least, you know, thankfully, I've lived the American dream.
	But from my own vantage point, from my portfolio, a relatively modest investment, I could come out owning a significant piece of a company that, if they did change direction, Could create, I think, a lot of value.
	And one of the things that I think is missing in the conglomerate model of media... I mean, you got the creator economy today, right?
	You got Rumble.
	It's a great example of that.
	By the way, I was an investor in Rumble back when it was a private company, even before its own public listing.
	And so I believe in driving positive change through capitalism.
	But, you know, one of the things you see in the creator economy, whether it's Rumble or X, is Yes, you have no ideological filter, and I think that's great, but you also have no quality filter, which is to say that that's not a publisher, it's a platform.
	And then you have publishers who apply ideological filters, they apply quality filters, but with that quality filter comes also an ideological filter.
	And I just happen to think there is an opportunity out there for somebody, right?
	You could say whether it's BuzzFeed or anybody else, but for somebody to create a content publisher, not a platform, but a content publisher, That actually represents a truly diverse range of viewpoints under the same platform, under the same publisher, and builds a powerful corporate brand around that.
	I think that opportunity exists.
	I think nobody has stepped up to seize it.
	Now, BuzzFeed is a company that effectively is a brand in search of an identity, right?
	Everybody's heard of BuzzFeed.
	They have a huge name ID.
	Which is a wish for any media startup to have.
	Distribution channels and pipes of reaching tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people via social media, YouTube, and their followings, yet they don't have the right fluid flowing through those pipes.
	And so those were, in my view, underappreciated assets if they were managed in the right way, but that's the big if.
	And so historically, you know, the way it works is, so I'm the second largest outside shareholder.
	I didn't, you know, it's pretty easy for publicly traded companies.
	You buy the shares of the stock and you file the right thing when you're supposed to file the right thing.
	And so I'm an activist investor in BuzzFeed and it's the, I'm the second largest outside shareholder.
	Great.
	Now, conventional wisdom is that in certain companies that have the dual class shareholding structure, What the founder, who in this case is also CEO of the company, has outsized voting power, you're not going to be able to drive too much change as an activist.
	There's some interesting dynamics here, and I'll keep it pretty high level, but they do have some debt that could effectively come due or be put to the company as soon as the end of this year, which changes the usual game theory around that situation.
	Obviously, there's a lot going on this year and a lot that I have my focus on even outside of the business world.
	But in the effort of trying to drive some positive change through the private sector and creating value in the process, I saw this as an opportunity to, as an outside investor, not as a CEO or anything like that, but as an activist investor, to bring some interesting ideas to the table at a time where they're going to have to do something.
	I think it's great.
	We need more people doing that.
	The other side is very good at being activists.
	We don't tend to do that.
	I'm not afraid to bring ideas to a table where they're initially not welcome, maybe.
	But actually, it's the same thing.
	If you actually have a coherent vision for how you're going to create value, forget the ideological left-wing or right-wingness of it.
	Is there an opportunity to use existing assets to build a coherent brand and create value?
	Even if it's not the one that I've suggested, but it's something different than the direction the company is going and bring some discipline to a cost structure and so on.
	Yeah, I do see an opportunity to create value in mismanaged companies.
	And this is one of several private sector pursuits I've picked up since leaving the campaign.
	It just happens to be the most visible because it's a publicly traded company.
	I think it's great.
	You know, Vivek, you wrote the book Truce.
	What would your priorities be for a second Trump administration, the second term?
	What are the truths that can guide us in a second term?
	What can your book teach us about that next chapter in political history?
	And, you know, where does it go sort of beyond Trump?
	What's that bench look like?
	How do we curate that so it doesn't just come back to, you know, the same old, same old swamp garbage that I think so many people are fed up of?
	Yeah, so actually, this book deals with both of those things.
	But the first of those is, in some sense, easier.
	The second of those is actually an interesting intellectual fissure, even within our own movement.
	I think it's interesting.
	But I think we begin to explore in this book, and I think our movement's going to be stronger if we see it with clear eyes.
	On the first one, I'll distill it down to a really simple punchline, OK?
	It can be a tale of two mass deportations.
	First is the mass deportation of millions of illegals who are in this country illegally.
	Send them back to their country of origin and stop them from coming in.
	But there's also the second mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C.
	I think we achieve both of those things in many of the illegal rules and unconstitutional rules that they've written along with it.
	So I say that somewhat blithely.
	Obviously, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of breadth of range of issues.
	But if you want to save a country and distill it to two punchlines that effectively come out and are developed in more obviously rigorous and detailed ways in this book, You have the first mass deportation of millions of illegals out of this country.
	Your father talks about it all the time.
	The only thing is, I would say, don't forget that second mass deportation of literally, there's four million unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
	that are writing rules that never passed Congress that are acting like a wet blanket on our economy, constraining our freedom and providing the basis for weaponization.
	We have saved a country in the process.
	So that's what I think a second Trump term that's North Star number one and two.
	You could debate which one's number one and number two.
	I put actually the unelected bureaucrats as number one.
	By the way, in terms of future damage, in terms of being able to, you know, take advantage of a guy that, like my father, who has the guts to actually do some of these things, that would be very controversial in Washington, D.C., even if it's right for the people.
	I think that's, you know, as important, if not more so, perhaps.
	And I like the dynamic, by the way, the setup that it's going to be a second term, so it's not like he's going to have to have some sort of, you know, re-election, you know, sort of back in the back of a shadow.
	I like the fact that he's been out of office for four years and had a chance to actually even reflect, as you and I both know he has, on exactly how we're going to, in that second term, achieve even more than he did in the first.
	I know he's, and you know this obviously better than anybody, how ambitious he is about that.
	So I think that's what that term looks like.
	I think the The thing I touch on in this book, and this is really intended to just open the conversation in this book, I'm opening the conversation on this, is one of the tough questions we're going to have to grapple with in the new America First movement, right?
	Rejecting the neoliberalism of yesterday, okay?
	The idea that we're going to spread democracy through capitalism to China didn't really work, okay?
	So we reject the neoliberal shibboleths of yesterday, but As we go forward, I think we confront a tough question where there's great people who mutually respect each other, good friends, allies, right?
	We're sitting on the same side of the table here.
	I think we're still gonna have to sort out where our priority is.
	On one hand, do we want to replace the left-wing nanny state with A version of a right-wing nanny state.
	Industrial policy that provides subsidies to select sectors over others.
	You know, we want to set caps on credit card interest rates.
	I mean, Kamala Harris once said, grocery price caps, we got interest rates.
	You know, these are thorny questions.
	Do we want to actually use the levers of government and the use the levers of the bureaucracy to advance our substantive goals for American workers or manufacturers in a well-intentioned way?
	It's hard.
	Or do we actually want to get in there and actually, three words for me, shut it down.
	And I fall in the latter cap.
	I believe the right answer for the long run, even for America, even and especially for American workers and manufacturers, is actually going to be getting there and actually just shut it down.
	You may cut so much fat that you also cut some muscle.
	But I don't want to turn to the CFPB, which is the same agency that Elizabeth Warren was the first head of, scold them for saying we're asking small businesses for their race and gender data, but on the other side of our mouth say that, hey, we want to empower that CFPB to cap the way that credit card interest rates are being calculated.
	I actually would rather just scrap the whole thing.
	I can see a lot of that stuff backfiring.
	We come up with something that seems to be well-intentioned, and then the left takes it when they get back in power someday and just weaponizes it against everything.
	And you see it.
	I had Bobby Kennedy on the podcast last week.
	We're talking about some of the stuff with food and man, we're giving our kids poison.
	But you know, I could say, well, you know, hey, cheese, it's a really bad.
	We're going to get rid of those on the shelf.
	And, you know, the left comes back and said, you know, cows are really bad for the environment.
	We have a scientist here that says it's causing all of the climate change.
	There's no more beef.
	You know, doesn't mean we shouldn't let people know what they're eating.
	They can make their own decision.
	They can force corporate policy with their purchasing power.
	You know, there are ways to do these things.
	But I want to be careful with some of these outright ban, whether it's speech or otherwise,
	because, you know, frankly, the left has proven themselves to be much better and much more
	vicious about implementing these things.
	And so, yeah, you're right.
	I think we have to be very careful about that.
	And one of the things I'm encouraged by in sort of the future leadership in our movement, I mean, we've had...
	You know, we've been at dinners, yourself, myself, JD, you know, being able to debate the different contours of this.
	I mean, broadly aligned on the overall principle, deeply aligned on putting our country first over any other one.
	But against that backdrop to say, OK, how are we actually going to make America stronger?
	Is it in the short run going to be through a little bit more of a muscular subsidy based and temporary even regulatory state to reorient it the right way?
	Or is the right next step to actually just say, you know what?
	It might cost us some in the short run, but just dismantle it.
	Shut it down.
	Shut it down again.
	Burn it.
	Burn the ashes.
	And when necessary, start from a blank slate.
	And I think that that's That's, I think, what I see in the character of the emerging... You asked about the binge.
	One of the things I love about some of the people who have been around those dinner tables with us is that they're people who share the same principles, but are still able to actually engage in reasoned debate.
	Here's what I want to see not happen in the America First movement, right?
	The reason the neoconservative and the Mitt Romney John McCain version of the GOP, it floundered.
	It wasn't just that they had the wrong ideas.
	Think about liberal internationalism, the democratic capitalism of somehow believing we're going to change China through trade.
	The reason it failed wasn't just that those were inherently bad ideas in retrospect.
	You never know, you know, no one's going to get it right in the first instance.
	None of us know what the future holds in store.
	We have the benefit of retrospect and we reject that today.
	The reason it failed is it became so codified where it was, these guys, Mitt Romney, John McCain, they didn't know why they were saying the things they were saying.
	They just knew they were supposed to say them.
	They said them out of habit, out of muscle memory.
	And so, you know, I'm speaking I was, you know, spitting some hard truth for us here, too, if I may, but I think it's going to make us stronger.
	And I say the book is truths, it's not just to the left, but 360 degrees.
	I don't, I sometimes, when I'm traveling the country for these down-ballot Canada's, I'll occasionally see people, they'll go on a stage and say things like, We need to put America first.
	We need to make more things here.
	We're the party of the working class.
	But the way they're saying it reminds me of the way that John McCain or Mitt Romney might have said it, just because it feels like what you're supposed to say, as opposed to actually knowing why we're saying it.
	I don't want to see the same thing happen in our movement.
	I think you're right.
	So I want to keep that culture of healthy debate in a constructive sense of how we put America first alive.
	Our bench, and especially the younger side of that bench, I think, has that character to it.
	But, you know, we got a job to achieve.
	His first is, let's put your father back in office, the two mass deportations, fix the country and revive that economy, seal the border, get us out of the brink of World War III, just like he did, by the way, last time he took office back in 2016 with North Korea.
	Do the same thing again.
	And then after that, I hope there's a longer renaissance yet to come where we're going to be iterating on what it means to be America first.
	And this book, I think, opens the door on that conversation.
	Well, no, I agree with you.
	It's actually interesting, you know, watching, you know, a guy like yourself and a J.D.
	sort of, you know, do well, you know, a couple others even, you know, sort of emerge in a Republican primary.
	You know, two years ago, I would have been like, oh, man, like, what's next?
	Like, it's just going to go back to the same old.
	But it's great to see people that have come out, you know, sort of as warriors, people who are willing to have those conversations about not just Again, the rote truth that they're told to say, but like, who actually understand the truths, are willing to go to bat for them, are willing to enable, more importantly, are able to articulate them beyond sort of the surface.
	And I think that's a huge thing.
	Did you get the bug, though?
	Is it fighting from the outside?
	Do you want to get back in the game?
	Where's your role in the future of the movement?
	What footprint do you want to have, Vivek?
	You know, we should probably talk about that in about 45 days after we've won this thing.
	It's really hard to kind of think about it, you know, contingency plan.
	I mean, people in Ohio, you know what their effort was.
	I mean, even in Springfield, people here want me to be the next governor here.
	I mean, I think obviously we got J.D.' 's seat for the Senate, so there's the Ohio-centric stuff.
	You know, obviously there's a lot that needs to be done in implementing the agenda.
	You know, we've talked in the past about cabinet positions, administration.
	I think, let's turn to that soon after November 5th, when we have some clarity.
	And clarity, I mean, not just in terms of the presidency, where frankly right now, I don't want people to be complacent, but I actually feel pretty good.
	But also in terms of what the Senate looks like.
	I mean, look, we couldn't pass the SAVE Act.
	That's a big deal.
	The hardest part of the J.D.
	decision was like, man, it's not like we have a lot of rock stars in the Senate.
	You know what I mean?
	There's two or three, but that's about it.
	That's not enough.
	We couldn't get the SAVE Act, not because Democrats didn't support it, but not even because enough Republicans supported it.
	And so I do think that, let's see what that picture looks like.
	And I don't think 51-49 is good enough.
	No, no, we need 54-55.
	Just to cancel out the guys that will just vote with the Democrats every time because it's like that, because they can, it's because it's easy for them.
	It's expedient in Washington, D.C.
	They'll get invited to the cool person holiday party.
	Totally.
	So if we're really in, if we're like in really like outstanding shape, like close to a 60-40 or 55, 56-44, right, in the Senate, yeah, that could be point one direction.
	On the other hand, if we're razor thin, that could point in a different direction.
	You know, I think there's a lot of ways to have change in the next four years, but whatever it is, we want to, we don't want to, we don't want to play small ball.
	We get the chance.
	We're going to be given the mandate by the people.
	We don't play small ball and play big ball in the short time we're given.
	And so that's how I'm looking at it.
	I think you're 100% right, man.
	That's what I say all the time.
	We've been playing t-ball while they've been playing hardball, and, you know, you can't play against each other in that game.
	We got to be playing the same game, and you've done a great job with that.
	Vivek, where can we, where can people get the book?
	Is it just The Usual Suspects available everywhere?
	Yeah, Usual Suspects.
	You know, funny story, actually, is it's been on number one on Amazon, like, the whole week, and then I just, the publisher agent just told me it was, oh, it just got bumped to number two.
	I looked at, like, who bumped me from number one?
	It was Melania.
	Which is really great.
	Which is also another great book, which I'm actually looking forward to.
	My wife is looking forward to getting and reading as well.
	But nonetheless, yeah, just get it.
	Go to Amazon, get it.
	It just came out this week.
	It'd be pretty cool if we, you know, topped the bestseller list or whatever, just because it forces people on the left to read it and engage with it.
	You know this as well as I do.
	If you want to make money, books are not the way to do it.
	But if you want to get a message out in a nuanced way, And I hope it arms people where... You know, you and I are both in this category.
	I think you and I should talk about this publicly more.
	We have friends on the left, right?
	We have friends who disagree with us.
	I grew up in New York City.
	Like, you know, I was always a conservative, but there was a time, like, you could actually have a conversation.
	Totally.
	And I miss that.
	I literally remember being like, hey guys, like, I get your point.
	I totally disagree.
	But like, if you're going to make that point, at least this seems to be the way to take it.
	They're like, that's a really good idea.
	I didn't think of that.
	I'm like, you know, I just think we should remind people though, like your father has friends, you have friends, I have friends on the left, but what we want to do is actually open their eyes.
	And so when people ask me in the campaign, how did you do that?
	How do you talk to people on the other side?
	That's actually what motivated me to write this book.
	This is how you do it.
	It's my suggestion of how you do it.
	And if it helps people at home actually bring voters along, especially before November, then I think it will have been a success.
	So I'll be grateful if people check it out.
	Well, Vivek, great to have you here.
	Guys, make sure you check out the book.
	Vivek, I'm sure I'll run into you on the campaign trail.
	I think I'm seeing you at a couple events over the next few weeks, so I look forward to catching up in person, and then in 40-something days, starting those other conversations up again, because we're going to have a busy road ahead.
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