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Oct. 16, 2023 - Louder with Crowder

01:25:41

How Vivek Plans to Save the World - Ukraine, Israel, Deep State & Donald Trump

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	🎵 🎵You're a strange animal🎵
	🎵That's what I know🎵 🎵I know🎵
	🎵I know🎵 🎵You're a strange animal🎵
	🎵I've got to follow🎵 🎵I'm in the speed🎵
	🎵Speed🎵 🎵Speed🎵
	🎵Speed🎵 🎵
	Alright, welcome to Ash Wednesday, but there are no ashes today.
	ashes today.
	No one is smoking cigars because we have a guest here who's not a big cigar guy.
	We won't fault him for it.
	You can support him, follow him.
	You've seen us cover him on these debates, of course, and his, I guess, dunks, as people call it, with the media.
	Vivek2024.com.
	You can follow him, not on Twitter, but on X. We have the link up there below.
	Mr. Vivek, thank you for being here, sir.
	It's good to be here, man.
	I'm glad to have you.
	I'm not saying your last name because I feel like I'll screw it up.
	Yeah, you can say it.
	It's alright.
	Ramaswami.
	I don't want to.
	I trust you.
	I think you can do it.
	Ramaswami.
	Yeah, I believe in you.
	Was that right?
	That's dead on.
	But it's Vivek.
	That's the thing.
	It's like Vivek-like cake.
	But I've lived this for my whole life.
	Best efforts.
	I'm good with best efforts.
	Right, yeah.
	Do you ever use it to screw with people to act like you're offended if they get it wrong?
	You know, that's a good one I'll add to my arsenal.
	Oh, you absolutely should.
	It would be very disarming to the left.
	Yeah, I think actually.
	I can't believe that you pronounce, like, oh my gosh, I'm just kidding.
	Which actually, you know what, Way to Break the Ice, you may not be familiar with this, we've been following you for a while, and we actually have a segment called The Flying V, and we have a stinger, which this is the very first time that Flying V is going to see it.
	I'm pumped to see it.
	Let's let him see it. It's good.
	We spread not we spread.
	No expense at all.
	That's amazing, yeah.
	But it's good because every time you would do something great in media, we loved it, we'd play it with that.
	Fake thing, I like that.
	And then everyone just went off and it became a knuckle puck time.
	I'm sure that people will send in the memes, we can take your chats, but alright.
	I'm pretty pumped.
	Let me ask you first, because there's, I think now it's, is it 1,800 people running for the Republican primary?
	Yeah, and growing.
	Yes.
	Why do you want, and everyone else asked this and we'll get specific.
	You had a moment, when was that moment you said, I need to run for president?
	Last December.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So I had come off of my second book that I had written.
	I go through these phases.
	So I had started a series of businesses.
	Okay.
	Was that Nation of Victims?
	Nation of Victims was my second book.
	Yeah.
	And so I was on the book tour for Nation of Victims.
	And it is kind of a, you know, first you take it as a compliment, but then you take it seriously, where you're giving speeches to audiences about your book.
	I'm running a new business that I had launched and gotten off the ground called Strive.
	And yet people are coming up to you afterwards and saying, hey, you should really run for president next year.
	Okay, the first time that happens, you know, whatever.
	Yeah, you're like, thanks, mom.
	Exactly.
	And then on from there, actually, the funny thing is my parents are the biggest opponents of my doing this.
	They're probably just still disappointed that you're not a doctor.
	They still are.
	They're still going through psychological therapy for the fact that the one son that didn't go to med school, that's me, is doing this craziness, and the other son who did go to med school didn't end up practicing.
	Vivek, it's never too late!
	It is.
	Well, you know, they can hold out hope, but there's always the grandkids now.
	They've turned to the grandkids.
	I'm running for president.
	No.
	It's a big deal.
	I think it's very clear they would, certainly they made it clear at the very beginning that if they had a veto on it they would exercise the veto.
	Well I don't blame them just in the sense of like no one wants to... I'm not trying to want my kids to go through it either, but you look at it differently for your kids versus for yourself.
	Right.
	So the idea is playing in my head, but I think I saw the red wave that never came.
	That was probably the catalyst, asking myself, what's the gap in the Republican Party?
	There's a bunch of people who have become practiced at criticizing the radical Biden agenda, and I've done my fair share of that.
	But I think that's That's the main reason why the Republican Party didn't do so well last time around is that they didn't have an agenda of their own.
	They didn't have an actual affirmative vision, but could critique from a binder all of the things that the radical Biden left had done, which frankly became boring and unuseful.
	And so my wife and I, we had brought our second son into the world last year.
	I had just launched a new business.
	It was a whirlwind of a year, but we took a big step back and just sometimes you ask yourself the question of, Why?
	Right.
	I mean, why even bother doing the things we're doing right now?
	Yeah.
	Writing these books.
	Starting Strive to compete against BlackRock.
	All this stuff.
	Why?
	Yeah.
	And to tell you the truth, if you take a step back, we're only going to be here for a short time.
	I felt compelled.
	I saw a gap in the Republican Party.
	There's an absence of national identity in this country.
	We've lived the American dream.
	Can't ask for more from this country than the country's already given us.
	How am I going to make the maximal impact?
	And as ridiculous as that might ordinarily sound, oh, I'm going to have my impact by running for president.
	That's actually the conclusion that I came to because I do think it's going to take somebody coming from a different generation to lead the next generation and revive a national identity that I think young people, but frankly, all people in this country are badly missing.
	And my wife asked me, she being the same person in a relationship, asked me a reasonable question, which is, okay, even if you want to do this, if we want to do this, Are you sure you don't want to wait 20 years from now when our kids are out of the house when you have some more experience?
	And that was fair, too.
	And so that had me pause pretty seriously, you know, in the early part of the year.
	But I think the conclusion we came to is that I think we have 20 years left as a country.
	Really?
	I really don't.
	Yeah, not the same country that you and I grew up in.
	Now, careful, people will say that's pessimistic.
	They'll say, oh, you have no chance unless you do the Reagan Shining City on a hill.
	Well, it's not morning in America.
	That's the point.
	It can be morning in America again.
	I do believe that.
	I'm inherently an optimist, actually.
	I'm natively an optimist to a fault, but I also believe in not filtering your optimism through a fake prism.
	Yeah.
	And so yeah, some people will on the Republican debate stage, the American dream is alive and well.
	No, it's it's actually not right now.
	It may be on life support, that might be closer to where it is.
	It's not morning in America, but it can be.
	But I think it takes somebody who was both motivated by something other than just pummeling
	the other side into the ground versus actually asking what are we running to, but not doing
	it in this fake optimistic Pollyanna way that pretends like we're not in the middle of this
	war that we're actually in as a country.
	Well, and it also requires someone with some skin in the game, something to lose, you know,
	politicians, let's be honest, these people, they never want to leave office.
	I mean, of course, last time Joe Biden saw private office, I think like five, I think.
	I don't even know if we were on the new... I don't even know if we were AD at that point.
	The only time they want to leave office is if they can exploit their government connections to actually make more money than they otherwise would have made.
	Exactly.
	Which happens in both parties, by the way.
	Which goes back to, like you said, we're not here for a very long time.
	He's certainly not here for a very long time.
	He's six foot five.
	They don't live very long.
	It doesn't matter what you do.
	My wife's a nurse and she texted me during the show.
	How tall are you, man?
	I'd say 6'2".
	This guy's big.
	Yeah, he's 6'4", 6'5".
	E65.
	He had a while to go.
	They don't live very healthy.
	I don't care how much cycling you do with your Lycra pants.
	So I think that's important because you do have to identify a problem in order to actually have genuine optimism.
	Yeah.
	I think sometimes people get it wrong when they say the American dream is dead and they'll talk about like that, you know, price of a house or something like that.
	They'll talk about, you know, a pension that their parents had, the boomer generation.
	I go, well, when was the last time you worked in a foundry?
	There are still trades that are available.
	You have more options to live in houses further out of the city.
	We have different priorities.
	But as far as the idea that the world is your oyster and that you can go out and you can do better for yourself, I do see that generationally.
	Well, perception is reality for a lot of young people.
	It is.
	And we call it the American dream.
	It means something.
	The way you describe America Affects the way America actually works.
	That's the unique fact of a country built on ideals.
	You know, other countries are built on, let's just say, a religion or a monarch.
	America is not built on these things.
	They were built on a national set of ideals.
	And so if you have a group of people that decide those ideals no longer exist, that has an underlying effect on the way the country actually works.
	And so I do think it's going to take somebody who's able to reach the next generation of young Americans to revive that conviction in our purpose.
	And I don't think the American Dream is just about green pieces of paper.
	I mean, you know, you've achieved that perhaps through your company business here.
	I've achieved, you know, I've achieved my version of the American Dream.
	I don't know, I'm living the dream.
	People look at us like, yeah, you know, he's surviving.
	You're doing pretty well, man.
	I got a tour of the place.
	You're surviving and thriving.
	But I don't think that that's the whole story.
	I don't think it's about accumulating green pieces of paper.
	I think it is about reviving conviction in our purpose.
	As citizens of this nation.
	Yeah.
	Right now, it just feels like we're going through this aimless passage of time.
	And there's more to life than the aimless passage of time.
	But what happened, I think, somewhere along the way, is the things that used to fill our sense of purpose... Yeah.
	You can fill in the blank.
	For different people, it's different.
	Faith, for many people.
	Patriotism, belief in country, for many people.
	Hard work, the idea that I work hard and create something in the world and I'm proud of that, I derive my meaning from that.
	Maybe it's my family.
	When each of those things, and they have, have disappeared in their importance in our American life, that leaves this deep vacuum of purpose and meaning in the heart of a generation, and that's where we are right now.
	And you can't fill a vacuum with a void.
	You know, that's what we see, for example, a lot of the Middle East, where it's like, well, hold on a second, even if these people, even if we try and stabilize it, right, and this is something that's never really worked.
	Exactly.
	people who are under what would be considered radical regimes, but at least
	there was an ingrained ideology. These were fascists, they were anti-freedom, but you
	can't fill that void with nothing. And that's what the challenge came into.
	And so the left is good at this. They have their understanding of this is far
	deeper than actually many conservatives.
	They will say we'll fill that void with something.
	Yeah.
	Not jihadism somewhere else.
	Race, gender, sexuality, climate, which is sort of ideological jihadism and intellectual jihadism in this country.
	But at least they're doing that.
	Yeah.
	And I think the trap that we have often fallen into, myself included in this, if you read some of the books I've written at times, I've been doing this, is criticize all that's wrong and hypocritical with that vision without talking about an alternative vision, say, grounded in the individual, family, nation, God.
	I personally think that beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate, if we have the courage to actually stand for it.
	But I think that that was the muscle memory of the modern conservative movement, was to define ourselves in opposition to their vision, without offering an actual substantive vision of our own, where we dilute their poison to irrelevance, rather than just hammering it out of existence.
	Well, I want to get to some specifics, like, on the three-letter agencies and Section 230, but it's interesting that you bring that up, because on a personal level, you know, I've talked about this, is the only way you develop self-esteem is by getting really, really good at something.
	Getting excellent at something.
	I think that's correct.
	At something.
	It starts with passion.
	It doesn't matter what it is, you just have to get really good at something.
	That's the only way that you see, oh, wow, reps work.
	Oh, wow, time works.
	It's just a certain amount of doing it, and it goes back to, okay, What is America great at doing right now?
	You know, other generations kind of had that, whether it was World War II, they had an incredible sense of purpose, you know, whether it was manufacturing, spewing technology.
	Winning that war, whatever it was.
	Right, whatever it was.
	And that void has been filled with, your self-esteem is found, actually, in your identity, because it's criticism-proof.
	Yes.
	Which I think is why it probably draws people like you, who are trying to look for that intellectual consistency.
	Like, no, no, no, hold on a second, the emperor has no clothes, But you can't also fix that self-esteem issue that has now been replaced with identity without letting people know how you actually gain self-respect and purpose.
	I totally agree with you.
	On an optimistic day, what I will say is the loss of self-esteem is right over the target in terms of what's going on in our country right now.
	The analogy I would love to draw, and I think it's true, I hope this is true, is that maybe as a nation we're not actually in decline.
	Maybe we're just going through our version of adolescence.
	And when you go through your adolescence, you lose your self-confidence.
	You lose your way a little bit.
	You do some things you regret out of that self-confidence loss.
	Well, maybe our nation is going through our version of adolescence, but like all of us do, hopefully, or many of us do, we get to our adulthood on the other side.
	And then for me, I think the current picture of what I see in the country, this would be my version of the optimistic lens that I bring to the table, not just some sort of slogan written, recite Reaganism and say it's morning in America.
	But maybe it's possible that we're just in the thick of that adolescence.
	But we will get to our adulthood on the other side, and we don't have to be that nation in decline.
	Maybe we're still early.
	in our ascent. So let me ask you before we get because we covered these debates right we did the
	the two debates with these live streams um and you know it seemed like there was a stark contrast
	between the first one where you did come out aggressive yeah afterward you said hey everyone
	on the stage you know they're good people it seemed much more amicable. I would say that for
	most people on the stage yeah. Even Chris Christie? Well uh you know he's he's got his he's got his
	thing he's got his got his shtick.
	His thing is not being one of the good people.
	For me, it might be.
	The real thing I have a problem with is Republican or Democrat people who make money off their public service and will further advance policies to line their own pockets.
	And, you know, we have so many more important things to discuss than to assail individuals on that stage.
	That exists in the Republican Party, including in this race.
	But I think most of them are good people tainted by a broken system.
	Right.
	OK, so I'm not running against any of those individuals.
	I'm running against a broken system.
	And I have come to this conclusion with firm conviction in a way that if you asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have said it was a problem in the same way.
	The super PACs are a cancer on politics, on American politics and the Republican Party and Democrat Party alike.
	And I should have come to this conclusion earlier because my crusade against... Do you guys talk about the ESG movement?
	I mean, one of my so my last business before I ran for president was this company called Strive, which offers index funds, basic low fee ways to invest in the stock market or index funds, index funds that are similar to those offered by BlackRock and StateStream and Vanguard, but without pushing these environmental and social agendas onto the underlying companies when they vote their shares.
	Now, why do I care about this?
	One of the reasons I care about this is, I think that the way things work in the United States of America, they're supposed to work, is that we the people Settle our differences on questions from climate change, to racial injustice, to whatever, through a constitutional republic where every citizen's voice and vote counts equally.
	And the ESG movement rejects that because it says that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, gets to decide that from the Park Avenue corner office in Manhattan.
	Right.
	And then Elizabeth Warren, socialist-in-chief, gets to say, oh, they're too big to fail.
	I'm the socialist, but when was the last time I got a check from these companies?
	Right, and it's a merger of state and corporate power and that whole game.
	And so the left, when I wrote Woke Inc., which was my first book, and even when I started
	Strive, some thoughtful critics on the left would come up to me and say, okay, well, where
	are you on Citizens United?
	And my response at the time was, at the time, and I've evolved a little bit on this, from having seen this.
	Can I really quickly jump in here, because a lot of people don't realize, this was the left, and I used to combat them, where they'd say, Citizens United, businesses are not people.
	I was going, well, hold on a second, though.
	The ruling of Citizens United was basically the Hillary Clinton That's right.
	The Clinton machine wanted to stop a negative documentary against Hillary Clinton.
	That's right.
	So initially, I'm going, well, hold on a second.
	These filmmakers, even though they're a business, have the right to free speech.
	That's right.
	And that's probably where you started off with the defense point and then saw it metastasize.
	And I'm a free speech advocate, and so we can put the legal holding in the First Amendment holding of
	Citizens United and just respect that we have a First Amendment in this country,
	and we have to have a world in which people can criticize politicians or those who rise to power.
	But my response to the left, they would say that you're inconsistent because you're not calling out the actual influence of super PACs on electoral politics where everybody's citizens' voice and vote doesn't count equally, but you're only focusing on this ESG thing because it's politically popular for you because you're on the right.
	I don't think of myself as a traditional partisan anyway.
	But I said, you know, that felt to me like the bigger problem was the use of capital, retirement funds, trillions, tens of trillions of dollars of our own money, probably the money of people watching this program that don't know it, that are being used to vote for toxic left-wing policies in corporate America's boardrooms.
	That's the real cancer, and it is a cancer.
	However, I think that now that I have a close proximity to politics, which I didn't have then, I came from the business world where I realized what a big problem that was there.
	I have moved a little bit to now believe that, you know what, the super PAC influence on our electoral politics absolutely is a big problem, and if that was a left-wing concern, Thirteen years ago, so be it.
	It ought to be an America First conservative concern today.
	And so my view is that it's going to take somebody who's independent of that to break that system.
	One of the things I've learned is every politician, and I've met a lot of politicians, not just presidential candidates at every level, every politician is gross and dances to the tune of their biggest donor.
	It's like a circus monkey.
	So that's just like as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west kind of thing.
	It's like a law of physics.
	In my case, and in a rare few other cases, that biggest donor is me.
	Right.
	And so that brings with it a special sense of responsibility.
	And so I'm thinking about, as this race evolves, part of me has a deep-seated irritation with respect to the other professional politicians in this Republican primary, in the Democrat race as well, and Joe Biden and everything else.
	But the part of me now that realizes these people are just vessels, right?
	They're really just vehicles for advancing the interests of what the guy or gal who wrote their biggest check wanted them to say.
	I can't even hold it against them.
	They don't have, in many cases, independent thoughts.
	Oh, I can.
	But they're not even... I mean, I think of them as...
	Literally, it's just vessels, vehicles.
	It's the system that I'm running against.
	At the same time, sometimes it's a two-way relationship.
	Some of them will also make personal money off of it, and it becomes a two-way incestuous relationship.
	That's what I'm up against.
	I think it's a fair point to say that they're vessels, and I have to be very honest.
	During the first debate, I was cheering you on because I was like, you're making great points.
	These guys are trying to talk over you.
	You're doing a great job.
	In the second debate, I was yelling at the camera.
	Because I'm like, you're trying to make friends with these people, is what it seemed like.
	It did feel like that a little bit.
	I appreciate that you're trying to pull out the partisans.
	You've just got to be yourself, Yvette.
	You're a Republican, so I get it.
	There was a sense of being in the Reagan Library.
	It was framed as we're going to have a policy debate.
	There's six people talking at the same time in what was effectively an unmoderated debate.
	And the knives were out, though.
	And the bad jokes.
	Donald Duck.
	Yeah, it wasn't great.
	It was a terrible joke.
	So I think that the truth is, I'm finding clarity in terms of what I'm actually running against.
	I'm running against the puppet masters who are putting up these puppets on that stage.
	At the same time, There's no point in trying to meld over some sort of, you know, we don't really disagree on that much policy.
	We disagree on a few policies, but these are people who are effectively being wielded and manipulated by a super-packed puppetry system that I think I need to more or less take my gloves off and go after directly because the idea of trying to play nice or play mean doesn't make any sense.
	So how do you fix that?
	Yeah, so one of the ways to fix it is, I mean, you could just do it in the context of this race.
	I said, look, I'm in this to win this, but I would give up and publicly call on, technically, you know, these are a separate parallel system, but I would publicly call on any super PAC supporting me and say, give that money back to those mega donors, and I won't show up at your events or anything else, as long as every other Republican candidate in the race pledges to do the same thing, or at least the ones who matter.
	You know, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, at least.
	Maybe Tim Scott.
	Who is, all of whom, are basically funded by super PACs.
	It's a joke that your campaign is actually being run by your campaign.
	It's not.
	This is the super PAC primary where the people who can write unlimited checks are wielding these people as pawns.
	Okay, well that won't happen though.
	So do you have a plan B?
	Yeah, look, so I think from a policy perspective, now I've got to win to be able to do this.
	My view is, there is already a regime that says there are limits on how much you can directly contribute to a campaign.
	So my view is, do you have free speech rights?
	Absolutely you do.
	But if it's to promote a particular candidate, to effectively either run campaign operations, door-knocking operations to hand out signs for Ron DeSantis or whatever, just everybody's subject to the same rules.
	What are most viewers of this program?
	Are they told $3,300 is the maximum you can give to an individual candidate?
	Well, then why should somebody else be able to give $30 million but get special political favors out of it?
	Right.
	Now, we have a free speech issue.
	Fine.
	Policy?
	Whatever policy or cultural view you want to address?
	Great.
	We already have a regime that limits the amount you can give to a candidate, so we've already accepted that's not a constraint on free speech.
	The only one arrested for it was Dinesh D'Souza, who gave it to a friend running for a Senate race that they lost.
	I don't know the specifics of that case, but I'm sure it was the law.
	Of course, the law was applied even-handedly to people regardless of their political beliefs under President Obama.
	I'm sure he was politically suffering at the cost of his views, but that's the way I think the system should work.
	$3,300 max per primary, per general.
	So $6,600, that's the current regime.
	That's a lot of money for a lot of people, for sure, but it's not going to be enough to buy off a politician at the federal level.
	That's why we have that regime.
	So you have the separate regime.
	Should somebody be able to create a film that offers a criticism of Hillary Clinton's policies or somebody else's policies or stands for a particular agenda, whether or not I agree with it?
	Absolutely.
	Should there be limits on how much money they can invest in that?
	Absolutely not.
	Right.
	But if they're going to use it as a campaign contribution or a constructive campaign contribution in propping up a specific candidate by name in the exact same format as a political ad, specifically advocating for an individual candidate, apply the same rules Well, you just brought up a very interesting problem to when you're talking about the Hillary Clinton documentary.
	Well, no one's saying that Michael Moore can't raise as much money as he wants, right?
	We're talking about private investment.
	This is a problem that also happens in conservative media.
	Every major conservative media outlet, and this is why we started Mug Club in our network, they all have a 501c3 and they all have a 501c4.
	And ironically, the left Yeah, it's interesting.
	I was aware of that.
	enterprise, right?
	Totally.
	As far left as it, but Hollywood, right, at the end of the day, dollars make sense.
	And the right is far more reliant on non-profit donors for even media content.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	I was aware of that.
	So you guys have a C3 arm as well?
	No, we do not.
	We do not.
	No, we do not.
	And there's a big reason that this is a big thing that we've had a lot of conflict with.
	But there are a lot of, unfortunately, conservatives out there who have to play ball by YouTube's guidelines and by Facebook's guidelines, because donors want to make sure they're still... Yeah, exactly.
	It's, you know, hopefully you'll kill me last, and they never do.
	And that's why we're entirely funded by Mug Club, by independent viewers.
	You guys know where to sign up.
	It's capitalism, man.
	It's not PBS where we say that and then take money from the federal government.
	But that is one thing that you will be up against, just so you know, because these same people who give to the giant PACs also give to the 501c4s of these giant media entities.
	Totally.
	It's a choked system.
	And so part of the reason I'm able to say some of the things that I'm able to say Pardon peaceful Jansic protesters, that I'm against the war in Ukraine continuing and against further US funding.
	I mean, go down my views on the climate agenda.
	A lot of people on the conservative side of the aisle making good money off of those subsidies coming from on high from the Biden administration.
	The reason I'm able to take these views is precisely because it doesn't align with the donor establishment, but still, I'm able to be independent of that.
	For those people who can't tell, Joe Louis, if he's distracted, Joe Louis, which is incredibly rare.
	He never barks at anything, so someone's probably being murdered out there.
	No, that's not true.
	He's the most mellow.
	No, no, I'm saying he never barks.
	When was the last time you heard him bark?
	So let's go back to BlackRock.
	You're kind of talking about this.
	This does seem to be this sort of amalgamate, right?
	You have these giant companies that are, quote-unquote, sort of taking away the American dream.
	Even if you look into housing, you look into wanting to create an entire generation of renters, right?
	Own nothing and like it.
	And then, of course, big tech, which determines what you can and can't say, and also determines what people can and cannot learn.
	And the government determining the winners and losers in those spaces.
	Do you take that on?
	How do you do it?
	Now, unfortunately, it involves government intervention, but not to the same degree.
	Elizabeth Warren just wants to say, too big to fail, so that they have control.
	Well, the way I look at it is, let's actually roll back the government intervention that created a lot of those behemoths in the first place.
	So you want to go big tech direction or BlackRock?
	Let's go big tech first.
	Big tech first, okay.
	Because BlackRock is kind of easy.
	Everyone can say BlackRock, opioid epidemic, you know what I mean?
	Everyone goes, yeah, we don't like that.
	But let's talk about Big Tech.
	Well, I think there's a lot to say there, too.
	And Vanguard, and McKinsey & Company, right?
	Absolutely.
	But that's been the last several years of my life, so we can go there.
	We'll go Big Tech first.
	Take the three largest financial institutions, BlackRock, StateStreet, Vanguard, or you want to take Facebook, Google, or MetaGoogle, whatever.
	These are the most powerful companies in human history, more than the Dutch East India Company back in the day, which couldn't decide what you do or don't say to express yourself.
	Now, why are they so powerful?
	Part of the reason why, in both cases, we'll get to the BlackRock case too, Is government intervention to create special privileges that these companies effectively enjoy?
	Now, this dates back a long time.
	I know that you all have paid attention to the Section 230 debate.
	That's one example of a crony capitalist privilege conferred on a special class of companies that the rest of The country or the rest of the industries don't enjoy, right?
	So my view is you can't have it both ways.
	Either you get special governmental protections, in which case you are bound by the same constraints applied to the government, namely the US Constitution.
	Or you don't get those constraints and you're free to decide whatever it is you want to do.
	Exactly.
	But you can't have both.
	And so what happens today is these tech companies are effectively making political decisions—I mean, you all experience this—about what kind of content can and cannot appear on the Internet that violate the First Amendment.
	But the thing that people used to say four years ago is, oh, you know, if you said that, oh, you're a rube.
	The First Amendment only applies to— Right.
	The government doesn't apply to state actors, doesn't apply to private companies.
	Well, not so fast there.
	If it is state action in disguise, right?
	If the government is giving a special blanket of protection to a class of companies to do exactly what they're doing, then if it's state action in disguise, the Constitution still applies.
	And so one easy example, sometimes you get out of the present and you go to the past a little bit, go to history, you can come back to the present and see it more clearly.
	There was this heavy debate about the railroad companies during the War on Drugs, version 1.0 of it at least, where they wanted to search and seize individual passengers for whether or not they had drugs on them.
	The inconvenient part of this for the government is that there's this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment that says you can't quite do that.
	So what the government did is they got clever.
	They said, OK, we're going to pass a statute that says that We're not gonna search and seize anything.
	The government, police, forget about it.
	We're just gonna say the railroad can't be sued if they do that for one of their employees or passengers.
	So what do the railroads do?
	They start searching and seizing, and they can do that with impunity.
	At the behest of the government, though.
	At the behest of the government.
	Not with just the incentive.
	You're saying they went behind the scenes, probably, and said, hey, guys, it'd be really nice if you did this.
	Well, the funny thing is, in this particular case, in the Big Tech case, you get the incentive, too.
	But in this, you get the backdoor goading, too.
	In this case, it literally was just the incentive.
	And so this went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the incentive alone Right?
	The loss of immunity alone was enough to say that the railroad companies couldn't do that.
	That was state action in disguise.
	Right.
	So now in the tech case, not only do you have Section 230, which does the same thing, which says that if you take down Section 230, C2 in particular, people pay attention to C1, C2 is the part that says if you take down content that is otherwise constitutionally permissible, That you can do that with impunity, even though there are some laws at the states that say you can't engage in political discrimination.
	Right.
	About half the states in this country have such a law.
	This says no, no, no.
	For a tech company that operates an internet website, you don't have that same liability.
	It overrides any liability you might have under that state law.
	Right.
	So it's the same thing as with the railroads.
	But with the tech companies, it's one step worse.
	Not only do they do that, they're also holding a gun to your head and saying that if you don't take down that speech, We're going to break you up, we're going to penalize you,
	we're going to regulate you, and so on.
	It's even more corrosive because...
	Both in this case. It's even a stronger case than it was against the railroads.
	Well, and there were only a handful of railroad companies back in the day because it was very expensive.
	Right.
	The issue with big tech, right? A lot of people, having been there since 2006, for example, on YouTube,
	my brother was one of the first original partners, it was, hey, this is going to break apart the stranglehold
	that really only five companies on earth as far as media hold, ABC, CBC, CBS, Viacom, Turner.
	And so independent creators flocked to these platforms because they could make a living.
	And now those same people are saying, hey, great, we brought in all the independents,
	only now we've eliminated competition, we can tell you what you can and can't say.
	And then even further down the line, you have a company like Rumble who is being banned by foreign governments.
	Yeah.
	Being banned for simply allowing speech on the platform.
	And they're the only company that's really had the balls to say, okay, they flipped the bird to all of France.
	Yep. And the UK recently.
	And the UK. And you have a lot of conservatives who are afraid to touch it.
	So I do, by the way, little known, you know, the railroad.
	Who are afraid to touch it, meaning?
	They're afraid, they're still afraid to touch it and really go after big tech and YouTube and Facebook.
	There's a lot of talk, and there's been nothing done since I've been around.
	I think this goes back to the other effect of lobbying through capture, right?
	It's the oldest trick in the book.
	Use government as a tool, as a moat.
	To stop somebody from being able to compete against you.
	And so my view is one of the solutions to all of this doesn't come from government at all.
	It comes through competition in the market.
	I actually, you guys may not know this, I invested in Rumble back when it was a private company.
	Precisely because I believed in competition to Google and YouTube.
	That's also why I started Strive, to compete against BlackRock.
	Look, we can complain about the powers that be, but let's create market alternatives that people are actually able to avail themselves of.
	The challenge there, though, is they have such an advantage and such a leg up at this point.
	Scale.
	That's right.
	So there's no panacea.
	There's no silver bullets.
	It's an all-of-the-above approach.
	But if we're just relying on government where you don't have People with actual capabilities to compete, well that doesn't really solve the market choice problem.
	On the other hand, the market choice problem alone, against the backdrop of government-created protections that these companies enjoy, that's also not going to, on its own, solve the problem until you actually overcome the scale advantage that the existing incumbents have.
	You know, take the BlackRock example.
	The reason BlackRock, StateStreet, and Vanguard manage 20 trillion plus amongst the three firms alone, that's about as much worth as the US GDP in the hands of three firms, is that pension funds, particularly blue state pension funds in New York and California, those are arms of the government.
	Invest trillions of dollars with these asset managers, and they further tell them that we won't invest that money with you unless you embrace the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, unless you adopt diversity, equity, inclusion standards, not just at your firm, but vote your shares accordingly in any of the underlying firms that you're investing in.
	So that's directly using government-controlled money of the taxpayer or the pensioner to do through the back door what government couldn't get done through the front door.
	So it's the same movie as we're seeing with censoring speech as we now see with the weaponization of capital through capital markets.
	And so that's the real threat.
	to liberty that we face today. It's not just big government, right? It's not Reagan 1980 anymore.
	It's this hybrid of big government and big business that together are able to do
	what neither one could alone, and we require leaders who recognize that new threat rather
	than just reciting slogans that we memorized back in 1980.
	That's the death, where I would say, of the quote-unquote American dream.
	I still think there are a lot of possibilities, and I do think that a lot of people are entitled generationally, but this leviathan that is both big government and these big businesses, who by the way could not have scaled to that degree without the assistance of government, they actually are beholden to acting outside of the best interests of the American people.
	Of course they are.
	Blackrock and Vanguard.
	You cannot be both I think that lays out the answer to a question that a lot of people, I think, are probably, when I travel this country, certainly wonder about.
	by the way, which by the way, the US pulled out of right.
	So it was when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord that
	these people then said, Okay, we're gonna get it done through the
	backdoor using your capital without you knowing it as a vehicle to actually do it. So I think that lays out the
	answer to a question that a lot of people I think are probably
	when I travel this country certainly wonder about. I do think we're
	in the middle of a kind of war in this country. It is a war between the majority of us who love this country and what
	we're founded on, and love the founding ideals of this country
	and believe that all men are created equal, and that you get
	ahead not in the color of your skin, but in the content of your
	The basic American creeds we know to be true.
	Most of us who share those values in common And then this fringe minority, and I do think it's a fringe minority in the country, that believe that your identity is based on your race, your gender, your sexuality, that you have to abandon carbon emissions here in the United States, even if you shift into places like China.
	But the mystery is, why is this other side Winning that war when it's a fringe minority that don't represent most Americans in this country.
	Well, because we say fringe minority, but you can't name one member of the national platform, of the DNC, that doesn't actively support it.
	They have the Democratic Party in a chokehold, but they have every major institution in a chokehold, right?
	Every technology company, every asset management firm, every educational institution, K-12, or universities.
	I mean, even our own military.
	And part of what's going on here is That take each of these institutions, what do they have in common?
	It's something that you got to go beneath the surface to see it.
	Wall Street.
	Okay.
	Occupy Wall Street occupied Wall Street after the 08 crisis.
	The criticism came from the left.
	The original version of Breakup Big Tech back in the early 2000s and even to the early 2010s came from the left.
	The criticism of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War came from the left.
	So you go through institution one by one.
	These used to be institutions that took their main criticism from the old left.
	And so what ended up happening, one institution after another, all the way up to and including our own military, let alone Wall Street to Silicon Valley, which we were talking about before, is they realized that they could defang the old left if they adopted and used their own corporate power or used their own managerial power, in the case of the military or otherwise, To foist the new left's chosen ideology onto everybody.
	So that's what BlackRock is doing, because the old version, they said, Occupy Wall Street.
	Well, I don't want to do that.
	My only criticism there would be that the Tea Party came well before Occupy Wall Street, after the Santelli rant, where he was the one who said, this is what you get.
	Too big to fail with that famous 2008 crash.
	Now it's Pre-Occupy Wall Street.
	I will say that the Tea Party, this, well, let's go through the actual timing of this.
	So the bailouts were made under the Bush administration.
	Yeah, for talking about the initial TARP.
	Absolutely.
	This is the original sin of the bailouts, right?
	Yeah.
	And so the original version of what became Occupy Wall Street later, the left-wing reaction, the left-wing position, right, even in that election, in the 2008 election, John McCain, I think he would have won that election if he had criticized the bailouts, but he came out like a stooge.
	But the Tea Party was the right populist movement that did criticize it, and there was a big schism there between the Bushes and the McCains.
	For the 2010 run.
	No, no, no.
	This was pre-Occupy Wall Street.
	It didn't have any impact.
	The 2008 election was lost across the board.
	Right, but I'm saying that the Tea Party came out in protest of the idea of the big banks and too big to fail before.
	And I say that because I was there and I thought, man, if there could be common ground, you would think the initial Tea Party and Occupy Wall It actually was in New York, I went to some of those Tea Party meetings back then too, so I know what you're referring to, but I would say broadly speaking, what you saw was, forget left or right even, if you're BlackRock, or if you're Facebook, or if you're Google, or if you're the U.S.
	military, who are the people criticizing me for the war in Iraq, or for the bailouts, or for the Agglomeration of monopoly power in big tech.
	Yeah.
	What do I say to appease most of them?
	You know, the Tea Party?
	Okay, we're not gonna get them, but mostly the rest of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
	What are we gonna say?
	We'll put token minorities on your boards.
	We'll muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change, as long as we still get to fly in a private jet to Davos to say it.
	Yes.
	And that was the trade that effectively allowed this fringe minority, by numbers in the United States, you know, as most people in this country, they don't share these views.
	But to be able to capture the managerial class that still wields power over every major institution in American life, that is how the other side is winning this war.
	And so if we're to recapture control of this country and institutions in and outside of government, we have to understand that arranged marriage, that mutual prostitution of these two strange bedfellows that, one, agreed to advance the ideology as a sort of vessel, as long as they got what they needed to out of that trade.
	And I think that's a big part of what happened roughly. I mean, there's a different version of
	the story in different domains.
	No, I think you're right. I think that it happened in every sphere of American life.
	The Tea Party had that midterm sort of red wave politically, and Occupy Wall Street had the
	cultural and economic impact, like you're talking about with ESG and DEI, right? These are sort of
	these, I guess you would say, cancerous growths that come from the...
	Because I was down there too.
	It was the dowry.
	Yeah, I was down there at the Zanotti Park.
	Yes, I was sitting there.
	And I'm going, okay, Occupy Wall Street.
	And then I see Hammers and Sickles.
	And Che Guevara and Karl Marx.
	I'm going, oh, okay.
	So I guess you're saying that too big to fail is a problem.
	You want to nationalize everything.
	Okay, this is where I get off on this stop.
	The logic train isn't stopping here.
	But we should have been able to find some common ground.
	Also, quick note, there was a great book on the railroad.
	And maybe we can now.
	I mean, even on the Super PAC question, right?
	Now, the old left, it's interesting, now that I've taken up this message, I'm not hearing many on the left rise up and join me, because Biden's reelection campaign is absolutely going to be run by the same apparatus that's running most of the other Republicans, which is the Super PAC apparatus.
	But it should, in principle, be an issue that transcends traditional partisan policies.
	Well, there was a lot of overlap between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
	I say this as someone who, I mean, mercilessly mocked Bernie Sanders, but we had a lot of people, once Bernie dropped out, once he was screwed, let's say, out of the primaries, a lot of them came over and they became Trump supporters.
	And that surprised me.
	I was, back then, we have a large sample size, right?
	Because we have so much, as far as what comes in through back then Google and my own website, we're going, oh wow, a lot of these people were really mad at me for criticizing Bernie and his praising of Karl Marx and socialist policies, but now they've come back because they see a rebel, an outsider in Donald Trump.
	You want to know something funny?
	This is even just a rift on the left.
	I mean, we're here, we're, you know, we consider ourselves on the right, but it's interesting to observe even a fissure there on the left.
	So you bring up the Occupy Wall Street in the 2012 version of this.
	There was this video, I talked about this in my first book, Woking, I can't remember where it was.
	I want to say it was in one of the Occupy Wall Street movements in Philadelphia, because it's spread out in New York.
	Where there was this event, everybody's showing up, pissed off at the system, against the big banks that are taking our money, redistribution from rich to poor, that's what we're standing for.
	And so this guy takes the microphone, but he's a white man, and they say, hey, you have to step up and stand back.
	What does that mean?
	Well, there's an intersectional hierarchy where they decided that actually, if you were black and a woman, you got to the front of the line in terms of when you got called on.
	And this guy was coming ready to rail against the system, because he was the one oppressed against it.
	And you could just see it in his face.
	But wait a minute, I was going to be the one who was going to be the one who's complaining about the big banks screwing us out of all of our money.
	But now she gets to be the one who complains about... And she didn't even know she was supposed to complain.
	She's like, I guess I'm a microphone now.
	Right?
	So that was kind of a fissure between You know, Bernie has kind of moved and kind of bent the knee a little bit to the woke mob, too.
	But the version of just the economic redistributionist left that gave way to this new intersectional hierarchy, the woke oppression, identity, identitarian version of it, that was sort of a weird fissure even on the left, that, you know, the Wall Streets of the world, they don't want the economic redistributionists to necessarily be the ones they were debating.
	But the identitarians that want to talk about climate change, we'll do that all day because we can just check a box and it's easy for us to do.
	And so that was sort of the way that played out.
	And that also brings us to kind of the enforcement of this.
	You talk about sort of these strange bedfellows.
	I mean, they're so strange at that point, it'd be like, you know, the Hellraiser boudoir at that point.
	It is awful.
	But the enforcement, of course, doesn't take place without the three-letter agencies.
	That's right.
	This is the ultimate version of the managerial class in the swamp.
	And so when I'm thinking about what do I want to do as US president?
	Shut down that administrative state and its entire apparatus.
	Now, this has been talked about for a long time by Trump and otherwise and people all the way back to Reagan.
	I think it's going to take a unique combination of traits to do it.
	It's going to take a CEO, an outsider coming in saying that, you know, if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you.
	Right.
	It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to change it.
	So that's on the one hand.
	But on the other hand, it's going to take an outsider who also understands the law and the Constitution in a deep way.
	And let's just make a basic observation here.
	Those two characteristics don't go well together, right?
	Because on one hand, you have an academic that might be pontificating about the law and the Constitution, but doesn't have the sharp elbows to get something done.
	On the other hand, you might have a sharp-elbowed guy who's going to say, I'm going to break the system, but doesn't understand why he's going through the motions he does.
	And this is how they duped Trump in many ways.
	They told him that you can't fire those people because there are civil service protections.
	Right.
	Well, if you read the law, you realize those civil service protections only apply to individual firings.
	Right.
	The logic is if you work at the, I don't know, FTC and I disagree with you on abortion, I shouldn't be able to fire you if I'm the president.
	Agree or not, that's what the rules are made to do.
	Right.
	But they do not apply to mass layoffs.
	So that's the key.
	Mass layoffs are absolutely what I am bringing to the DC bureaucracy.
	75% headcount reduction by the end of the first term.
	Over a million in the first year.
	50% of that taking place in year one.
	People can find honest work in the private sector.
	I'm told that there's more open jobs and there are people looking for work.
	This is a two-for-one if we want it.
	Right.
	Let's test that theory.
	Absolutely.
	Let's put some people to some actual honest work and grow the economy.
	Agencies that should not exist.
	Department of Education, FBI, IRS, ATF, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CDC.
	which I know you like to quote. I quoted it and got us banned. Yeah, got us banned. Well,
	well, uh, even though I know you, you may like to quote it, we're still going to shut it down.
	Okay. I'm actually okay with that. You're okay with that. I'm not from CDC. So that's another.
	So you're sharp elbow enough to do it. Yeah, absolutely. I think you need to have somebody
	who has a complete and total disregard for Washington, DC and its norms. Yes. Well,
	but it's also for your own popularity because look, we're talking about the most popular agencies,
	not popular, I guess powerful is the right term, in the United States and maybe in the world.
	Not popular, yeah.
	Sorry, wrong P word.
	Powerful agencies.
	That's risky, right?
	I mean, obviously you've had to have these kind of, okay, I'm doing some pretty big things.
	There are going to be some people that don't want me to succeed at doing this, and nobody's been able to successfully do this.
	Maybe it's because they haven't tried, but there's somebody in the Republican Party.
	Chris Christie has called this the dumbest idea that he's ever heard was to shut down the FBI.
	I disagree.
	I respectfully disagree with that.
	You know, I think the dumbest idea I've ever heard is when they found how many terabytes of pedophile pornography on CIA computers that there were no mass layoffs.
	Unbelievable!
	And yet these are the same apparatus that's supposed to be going after it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	On the other side.
	It's so disturbing.
	Like, how about, at what point do you say, oh, okay, you cease to exist because you're committing the grossest evil.
	This is where other people, and it annoys the heck out of me when I see other Republicans, we're going to, I mean, We're going to get in there and fire Christopher Wray and, like, try to act like a tough guy.
	What is that going to do?
	I mean, come on, you're checking a box.
	That's what it is.
	That's all.
	And you're trying to use some emotional... and I see these people behind the backstage before the debates, man.
	I mean, it's really sad.
	But then it comes on, there's, I will fire Christopher Wray and...
	To what end?
	Because you're gonna get James Comey 2.0?
	The machine is what the rot is all about.
	That is the Leviathan.
	Now, this is also very practical for me.
	You can't just offer slogans, say, shut down the FBI.
	I'm serious about this.
	35,000 employees work at the FBI, the failed Bureau of Investigation.
	It is still, by the way, the J. Edgar Hoover building that people walk into in Washington, D.C.
	Can you believe this?
	It is still honoring his legacy.
	The same guy who collected tapes and threatened Martin Luther King with suicide.
	The same guy that's now going after concerned parents, calling them domestic terrorists.
	That's still the same legacy they're celebrating.
	35,000 employees.
	20,000 of them are bureaucrats in back office functions, which is where the rot and the corruption comes from.
	15,000 of them are agents on the front lines.
	I say put those agents where they will be more effective.
	The U.S.
	Marshals have actually been far more effective in going after child trafficking in related cases than the FBI has.
	Fine, move some of the 15,000 there.
	We've laid out a clear plan to do this.
	You know, financial crimes, complex white-collar crimes.
	People at the FBI have no clue what they're doing because the guy who was doing child trafficking today is doing counterterrorism the next day and is doing financial crimes the day after that.
	There's no specialization anyway.
	Move them.
	There's a separate part of the Treasury called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
	So move people to the exact places where they can precisely do their jobs And it's not a coincidence that when you have the loss of that specialization and the over-bureaucratization, that's when you see the corruption.
	So it's not like we're happening to get lucky solving two problems at once.
	The two problems go hand-in-glove together.
	The ineffectiveness and the bureaucratic bloat is itself a formula for the corruption, because you have a bunch of people showing up to work that shouldn't have been at work.
	They find things to do that they shouldn't have been doing.
	And so, yes, it's going to take somebody who is willing to get in there and gut it.
	Incremental reform Will not work.
	No, it won't work.
	Fire Christopher Wray is a false premise.
	It is a false lie.
	You're being lied to, and their job is to dupe you.
	They're trying to distract you to make you feel like they did something, and they didn't.
	He's a symptom, just as I would even say that bureaucratic bloat.
	All those things are symptoms of one thing, a complete lack of accountability.
	In other words, you only get that bloat with a complete lack of accountability.
	We have 87,000, and we want to be sure that we're not fact-checked on YouTube.
	87,000 new employees to the IRS.
	Not all our agents, right?
	That's the wordplay.
	Then what do they do?
	You guys are very good.
	Well, they'll catch you.
	They'll suspend us for that.
	If you say agents and not 87,000 employees.
	It'd be interesting if they applied that same standard to the CNN clips that end up online.
	Oh, they don't.
	It's really funny.
	I've had my experiences with those guys.
	Well, that was one of the first places that I saw you when you were talking to CNN, and I think it was about, there was some ethnic conversation that you were having with somebody who... Oh, was it Don Lemon?
	Yeah.
	Not now, guys!
	Get out of my ear!
	Get out of my ear!
	I can't think straight!
	But it was one of those moments where, like, all right, somebody's taking on the earpiece.
	Well, and that's one of the things that resonated with the American people about Donald Trump is that he was ready to say things that a lot of people thought, and he just didn't care about the niceties of politics.
	He didn't care about saying something that sounded good.
	Now, you can have your problems with President Trump.
	That's fine.
	I understand that.
	But that's the thing that I think a lot of people saw in you as well and said, Okay, somebody's coming in from the outside that might be able to get something done.
	That's what it's gonna take.
	The biggest question, though, is, okay, people have tried it before.
	Why are you different than a President Trump was?
	Because he even had some problems getting everything.
	He did a lot of great things.
	I think he did a lot of great things.
	And you've said that, so I appreciate that.
	I think he's an excellent president.
	I mean, everybody else is trying to Monday morning quarterback some small thing that he did.
	They feel like they have to.
	Which is senseless.
	When, in fact, he was a great president, now how do we move this agenda forward?
	That's my question.
	So, a few things.
	I think it will take, I said we're in a war.
	All else equal, who's going to be the general that moves us forward in that war?
	All else equal, it's better to have a general who hasn't yet been wounded in that war.
	I have fresh legs.
	I'm 38.
	I think it's less than half of Trump's age.
	Now my question is, what are you going to do with the last half of your 40s?
	Goodness, what's next after that?
	I'm not a plan B or a plan after kind of guy.
	We've got the next mission lined up and we'll figure out what comes after after.
	But I do think it will take somebody from the next generation to reach that next generation.
	And I think we can do that in a way that Trump, you know, is of a different generation.
	It's going to be a lot harder for him to do that job.
	I also think we can pick up where he left off.
	I mean, I'm not saying that I would have been Able to do everything I'm telling you we're going to do if Trump hadn't laid the groundwork.
	Part of the reason that we, I can confidently tell you, we will be able to, without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness, lay off 75% of those federal employees, shut down these government agencies, is the legal basis for doing it.
	It's contested, but six to three, the current Supreme Court agrees with me.
	Look at West Virginia versus EPA.
	I don't know if you paid attention to this case.
	Very important case.
	If you believe in the holding of West Virginia versus EPA, which said that there are certain regulations on coal miners coming from the EPA that Congress never gave them the power to pass, and so they're unconstitutional.
	If you believe that, that means literally the overwhelming majority of federal regulations are also unconstitutional. So this
	is how you drive change on the timescales of history. Trump gave us a great Supreme Court. He did
	pretty much all a reasonable person could do, could reasonably have done in those four years. Great. I
	want to build on that and move this forward. But I've got fresh legs this time around. And I
	won't be the same person eight years from now that I am today after going through it.
	I just won't.
	You drain the swamp, the swamp tries to drain you back.
	He's not the same person today that he was eight years ago, because we're all human beings.
	But I do think it will take thinking about our movement in terms of the content of what we want to achieve, rather than just which person is it going to be.
	America first.
	It does not belong to Donald Trump.
	It doesn't belong to me.
	It belongs to the people of this country.
	And so the question is, who's best positioned to take that agenda forward?
	I think it's going to take somebody from a different generation, coming in from the outside, with fresh legs, to be able to see this through.
	And I think I'm going to be best positioned to do it.
	Yeah.
	So you've got a lot of these agencies, right?
	You're targeting these guys.
	And look, I think it resonates a lot with what we talk about on the show.
	These are the same kinds of things that we talk about.
	You talked about BlackRock as well.
	So one of the companies, I don't know your exact connection to it, but Rovient.
	Right.
	I founded it.
	So you founded that company.
	Is that something that you're still currently involved with heavily?
	I stepped off all my boards.
	I have other candidates in this race.
	It's remarkable.
	I think Nikki Haley, while running for president, is collecting stock options off some corporate board.
	That seems unconscionable to me.
	It seems a little bit weird.
	So you mentioned BlackRock.
	So as far as my concern, you go after these agencies, they come after you.
	You go after Google, they come after you.
	You go after BlackRock.
	BlackRock just doubled their size of ownership in there.
	I think they went from 6 million shares to 12 million shares as of August.
	Are you worried these companies, these big investment firms out there, are going to try to get their hooks in financially and try to put pressure on you that way?
	Of course.
	That's the whole ballgame.
	But how do you plan for that?
	Well, so here's the way the game works, and so my most recent book, it's probably the most technical of the books, is Capitalist Punishment.
	It lays out exactly how this game is played.
	If you're a public company, like let's say you take your company here public, which I would advise you not to do.
	No, absolutely not.
	But many, many firms do need to go public for a wide range of reasons.
	You don't have a choice in terms of who owns your shares, and so it's automatic, it's programmatic that BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and similar firms, through their index funds, because they're not even making investment decisions, it's just that they have to have broad exposure to the market, they will end up owning 5, 6, 7% each, 25%, 30% collectively, and they're voting their shares in your boardrooms.
	So even many of these CEOs who don't want to be adopting DEI policies, or carbon emission policies, or the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, or condemnations of, you know, George Floyd's death, or whatever, that shouldn't be the business of companies.
	They're forced to do it.
	LGBTQIA+, hashtag, dollar sign, dollar sign, whatever it is.
	Yeah, well, the last dollar sign is silent.
	Silent, yeah.
	I see, I see, I see.
	So that's, but pretty soon that may, BlackRock may decide that that's not silent anymore, in which case they don't know.
	Well, what they decide goes, yeah.
	So, and I actually could give you some specific details on this.
	When you said that, you're saying it as a funny aside, it's actually true.
	If you want to take Apple, The world's largest company by market capitalization, right?
	We all know Apple.
	They were demanded by a fringe left-wing group that held a few shares to adopt what they called the racial equity audit at Apple.
	And Apple says, no, we don't want to do that.
	Now, I mean, this is not some sort of conservative company, okay?
	Apple has- Right, no.
	That accusation was never leveled against them.
	But the one thing, if you're Apple, you don't want to mess with is the talent in your engineering ranks, right?
	You want the best and brightest, because that's how you're competing against the equivalents in other parts of the world.
	So they said, no, thank you very much.
	Nonetheless, that fringe group puts up this, I think it was called Color Us United, was one of the non-profits that support it.
	No, not Color Us United.
	Color Us United is a good one.
	I'm trying to remember who it was.
	I know that we covered it on the show.
	It's, it's, it's some, some, Colors United is a good one, yeah.
	It could be like Colors Are Us, whatever it is.
	Yeah, something like that, something like that.
	It was stupid.
	It was stupid.
	But then BlackRock and State Street come in and say, we're going to vote and support that proposal anyway.
	It gets majority shareholder support at Apple's shareholder meeting, such that Apple's management team and board then go back and adopt the racial equity audit.
	Right.
	This is nuts, actually.
	How about the equity for the kids in factories building those phones?
	We used to have sweatshops, now we have tech shops.
	But here's the other side of this.
	It's not just passive hypocrisy.
	The reason is Apple, or BlackRock, can't do business in China If they dare criticize the practices of the CCP, but if you're also criticizing the United States or adopting a racial equity audit or a carbon emissions cap, then the CCP rolls out the red carpet.
	So that's how this game is played, and it is an ugly game.
	So the answer to your question is, how does BlackRock have all this money?
	It's because If you have a pension fund, or a retirement fund, or a 401k account, they're the ones managing your money that are investing it across the board.
	So absolutely, I'm deeply concerned about this.
	And it's going to take a president, it's going to take leadership in this country that undoes a lot of the rules in the administrative state.
	There used to be a rule that said you have to invest exclusively for profit if you're managing retirement fund money.
	That has changed under the Biden administration.
	They rescinded what was known as the sole interest rule at the federal level under ERISA, to now say that you can invest according to other standards that take into account factors like climate change and racial injustice.
	The government needs to change a lot of that.
	The pension funds need to stop using political strings attached when they invest their money.
	But it also takes market alternatives to deliver those solutions, which is why I started Strive, the most recent business that I did.
	Yeah.
	And so am I worried?
	Absolutely I am.
	But am I sitting around about it and whining?
	No.
	Don't get mad at me here, but this is one thing that is, you mentioned another criticism, because we have to give you the ability to answer these.
	You mentioned Strive like eight times.
	Yeah.
	Some people would say you're running for president to promote a company.
	They'll say the right things because, and by the way, if that were the case, I'm not saying this, that is not dissimilar from a lot of people who are in the swamp who run for president to sell more books.
	Totally.
	But there are people who are going to pick that up and say, are you just promoting strife?
	I have to ask you that.
	No, actually, I mean, if you look at the, probably, we came up in this conversation because we're talking about BlackRock, and we're talking about big tech.
	If you look at probably the hundreds of hours of my discussion in the run for the presidential campaign, my talking about this issue is less than 1% of the total.
	Right, and I actually think it's a strong suit of yours, so it'd be good to talk about it more.
	No, absolutely!
	Actually, that's one of the things that I've picked up is people know a lot about my policies, but people ask me, oh, well, you've come from nowhere.
	You know, are you just offering that?
	India?
	We would never say that.
	Ohio's not nowhere.
	Parts of it are.
	I lived there for a little while, so I can say that.
	So I think it's important that people understand that I have a track record of taking on bureaucracies and succeeding and winning.
	But there's a lot better ways to Promote your businesses?
	Maybe be part of your businesses?
	Yeah.
	Than to spend 15, 16 million dollars of your hard-earned money.
	Right.
	And people should ask every question.
	If you're running for President of the United States, every question is fair game.
	But I think it's important to have somebody who has actually understood the challenges as they pop up in the outside world and in the private sector.
	versus somebody who has only ever lived within the insular four corners of an existing political
	apparatus, which is what most people are running on.
	Well, let's flip it.
	And you know what?
	Just, hey, Mug Club, I hope you guys – I think this is – sorry, I was looking at
	the wrong camera because that's usually my camera.
	Mug Club, today I think we're going to put all of this out there for the public because
	it's too important of an interview.
	I'm going to put it out there for the public.
	I hope you understand you can hit the like button and share it and we'll do some extra content this week.
	We'll flip that from where you do have experience that all of these people at BC don't, right, in the private sector.
	They suckle at the government teat.
	But they would say, and I don't think that this is actually as virtuous as they believe it is, okay, no foreign policy experience, right?
	That's sort of the flip side of the coin.
	I think it's fair.
	And it's a question for people of what they want.
	I don't have foreign policy experience.
	I think Nikki Haley in the first debate, she said, you have no foreign policy experience and it shows.
	My view for most of the other people on the stage is you do have foreign policy experience and it shows.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	What if your experience is bad?
	Well, first of all, it shows in your bank account.
	Yes.
	I mean, some of these people have, I mean, just in her case, made 8 million bucks.
	In the period after she left the UN.
	Interesting how a politician leaves government in debt and goes to being worth $8 million by starting a military contracting firm with your family and joining the board of Boeing and all kinds of other things.
	So this is the rot at its worst.
	People who... Well, she's an aerospace engineer.
	That's why she's on the board.
	She was a Pratt & Whitney before.
	It's a whole thing.
	But she's a symptom of a deeper cancer of corruption that causes people to adopt policies, including pro-war policies.
	That have made a lot of people rich in this country.
	We said boring.
	I was thinking Boeing.
	I'm sorry, continue.
	But Boeing can be a boring, you know, boring.
	That's the Elon Musk drilling.
	Yeah.
	So here's what I would say is, if you want the same thing as the last 25 years of foreign policy, $3 trillion spent in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American lives lost that need not have been lost.
	Wars in the Middle East that have no point, no end, now seeing the same thing likely happen again in places like Ukraine and otherwise.
	Fine, go with one of the people that have foreign policy experience.
	But if you want somebody who understood and grew up in an era as a young person, right?
	My peers.
	I wasn't one of them.
	I'm grateful to my peers who did go serve in those places.
	But 20 years later, now rightly ask the question of the Taliban still in charge in Afghanistan.
	We have a hostile anti-American regime still in charge in Iraq.
	To what end?
	It was to literally no end.
	That's the same wheels that are now turning again in new conflicts on the other side of the world.
	Most notably in Ukraine heading into major conflict with Russia that doesn't advance American interests, but we're going to see that proliferate in other places too.
	If you want an existing foreign policy establishment that favors war for the sake of war, and a lot of bad actors in there who even make money off of advocating for it, fine, go with one of those people with foreign policy experience.
	But what I do have is a deep understanding coming in from the outside to say that I've made a career making successful deals for myself.
	What do you know about a deal?
	Everybody has to win in that deal.
	I've offered the clearest plan of anybody in this race of exactly how we will end that Ukraine war and deliver peace.
	Make a hard commitment that NATO won't admit Ukraine to NATO.
	Yes, freeze the current lines of control.
	I know that drives a lot of people nuts, but these are Russian-speaking regions that have not been represented in Ukraine's parliament for a long time in Luhansk and Donetsk.
	Fine, we can do that deal.
	Does Putin get something out of that deal?
	Yes, he does, but we get more.
	We require him to pull out of the alliance with China.
	That's something you haven't heard from anybody in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
	No, I think it's very important.
	As a matter of fact, I think... And I think it takes an outsider with clear understanding, but without the baggage of historical experience capture.
	Yeah.
	That's what it's going to take to, I think, keep us out of World War III.
	I mean, I think there will be some learning on the job.
	Of course.
	But I think that what you just said is important.
	You know, we've talked about this where people will get furious.
	We'll answer, people say.
	And by the way, not a fan of Russia, Putin at all, an oligarch.
	Russia bad.
	Also not a fan of Ukraine.
	Also, by the way, Hitler bad, just to be clear.
	Hitler bad, Mussolini bad, Pol Pot bad.
	Okay, let's go through all of it.
	Just to make sure, covered.
	But when people say, like, and there is no part of Ukraine that identifies as Russian or has ever been Russian, you're like...
	It's not true.
	It's just not true.
	So you can't just ignore those people.
	Why is there no cattle insurgency?
	Everybody ask that question?
	Yeah.
	In the eastern parts where they actually have captured land?
	Right.
	Part of the reason why is that those are Russian-speaking regions.
	That have not been represented in Ukraine's own parliament.
	It doesn't justify, obviously, the military action.
	Of course it doesn't!
	We've got to see facts.
	Exactly.
	If we're not looking at it for what it really is.
	We have to take that into account.
	As we have to take into account the fact that Ukraine is not some paragon democracy.
	I mean, this is a country that's banned 11 opposition parties.
	That's consolidated all TV media into one state media arm.
	Does that mean Putin is anything other than a craven dictator?
	No, Putin is a craven dictator.
	But just because Russia's bad does not mean Ukraine is good.
	And we have this false narrative that we've built up.
	That's what the existing foreign policy establishment is good at doing.
	I mean, you get to George Bush, good and evil in Iraq.
	How much better off are we for seeing that?
	But the media hated him, and the left hated him, and when Obama became president, Barack Obama, I'm going, where's Code Pink?
	Same thing now with Biden.
	I'm like, where are they?
	Remember they used to protest outside of the White House?
	Where's Michael Moore, right?
	He's out there waving a Ukrainian flag.
	I'm going, oh, hold on a second.
	This is a very clear case where these are bad actors against bad actors, and I'm not saying that... Yeah, I think the MAGA movement has actually been far more effective in securing peace than any other left-wing peace, pro-peace movement in American history.
	Is there any question at this point, like, everyone acknowledges the economy, right?
	As far as Donald Trump, okay, you have, because you have eight years of Obama, He kept us out of war and he grew the economy.
	That's why he was an excellent president.
	He didn't have any foreign policy experience as well.
	The funniest part, man, for that first debate is Mike Pence saying that we don't need a rookie on the job.
	The only reason that guy ever got anywhere near the vice presidency was because some guy who didn't have any political experience was a rookie.
	That's not the real reason.
	He was put there because Donald Trump wanted someone who made him look even taller.
	That was his greatest call.
	Like Mike Pence.
	We're not big fans of Mike Pence.
	You talk about talking points on that stage.
	Every single line is rehearsed and then you can see sometimes where he looks out like a kid who just told a joke but it's inappropriate because he's in front of adults.
	Like, this joke didn't land, man.
	I just wish that people would be more authentic.
	Now, can we delineate, though, and we've talked about this obviously in the last couple of weeks, the last week or so, with Israel Hamas.
	Yeah.
	There's a big difference between Ukraine and Russia.
	Big difference.
	In that Hamas is a terrorist organization where the extermination of all Jews is in their charter, and I don't necessarily think... And Israel matters to our national interest more than Ukraine does.
	Yeah, sure, they do.
	As a matter of fact, they certainly do matter to our national interest.
	Now that doesn't mean that there isn't an argument to be made, and we ran the numbers.
	If we cut the funding to all of the nations with, you know, who we provide foreign aid to, And by the way, those numbers are always a very low estimate when you actually understand also the incentives, and Israel as well, that they would come out ahead, because we fund a bunch of people who want to wipe them off the face of the map.
	Or, help Israel a little bit, and cut money anyways to places like Iran.
	The analogy you're drawing is interesting.
	Elon has drawn this analogy with respect to electric vehicle subsidies, where if you got rid of all electric vehicle subsidies, Tesla comes out ahead, because the unit economics actually work.
	Well, that's because they've sold too many Teslas.
	That's why they don't get the subsidy anymore.
	I think it's after 250,000 sold, the subsidy goes away.
	So it's like, oh, so I sold good cars.
	And the unit economics are just more solid in terms of how they're running the operation.
	So here's what I would say.
	I think that this is a moment right now, when we're having this conversation now, where
	we need rational, cool-headed responses to ask, yes, how do we support Israel's own right
	to its own national self-defense as Israel is fully entitled to?
	What happened, what Hamas did was barbaric, it was wrong, it was inhumane, it was medieval
	in its nature.
	Israel absolutely has the right to national self-existence and to fully defend itself.
	That's a decision for Israel as to how they go about doing it, and our job is diplomatically,
	in terms of intelligence sharing, in terms of limited circumstances of munitions support,
	that is our job as a partner and ally at the UN.
	Tell the UN you're not going to draw some false equivalence between Israel's defense.
	Ceasefire?
	Yeah, exactly.
	All that nonsense.
	Oh, it's the most ridiculous thing.
	It's the most ridiculous thing.
	Hey, ceasefire.
	But I was just raped, though.
	Yeah, but now it's a ceasefire.
	Ceasefire, exactly.
	Selective timing of this.
	I'm still sore.
	Our job is diplomatically to stand against all that nonsense.
	But I don't want to be one of these people shrieking, I mean Nikki Haley was screeching on air, finish them!
	You know, with a vague reference to, almost Iran was what she invoked right before she said that.
	And then you talk about Mike Pence, just do it!
	It's like, it's like a Nike, finish them is from like Mortal Kombat.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Just do it is like a Nike slogan.
	So they're like misappropriating corporate slogans as though that's our form.
	But Lindsey Graham, he said something equivalent to this.
	No, I'd say kill every last one of Hamas.
	Absolutely.
	Every last member of Hamas.
	And that's Israel's decision to make.
	And so Israel's making those decisions.
	I trust them to do the right thing.
	But we have to be very careful not to sleepwalk or emotionally outburst ourself into another broad regional conflict in the Middle East that the U.S.
	isn't meshed in with ground troops or otherwise.
	This is when we've made our worst foreign policy disastrous mistakes in the past.
	If I'm talking to Bibi, I would say, listen up, we got your back.
	You're on the right side of this.
	Don't let anybody stand in your way from defending yourself.
	And we've got your back on that.
	But my advice to you would be that we've made some of our poorest decisions in the wake of real disaster.
	That was your 9-11.
	We had our 9-11 here.
	And we entered disastrous multi-decade commitments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and 20 years later, it did not do us an iota of good.
	There's a little bit of a difference, though, I will say.
	And so just be careful.
	Yeah, be careful.
	But if you're comparing it as a percentage of the population, I think it would roughly work out.
	36 times, you know, what it was.
	Yeah, 20 to 30,000 Americans, and they live right there.
	And it's never, you know, they... But here's all I would say is, though, let's say, you know, As awful as this would have been.
	As 30 times as many people died on 9-11 as they did.
	And Canada did it.
	But going to Iraq still has nothing to do with that, right?
	Right.
	So I'm just making the point that we've made some of our worst decisions in response to emotional reactions to really, truly disastrous things that needed to be dealt with.
	Targeted response, get rid of Bin Laden, get rid of the Taliban, absolutely.
	Get rid of Al-Qaeda, hiding in the caves, the people who are responsible for this, which by the way, Was a far more complicated story than the U.S.
	government let out until the declassified files came out 20 years later.
	Go actually get the real job done, rather than using an emotional response to do something that literally might be an orthogonal objective, but in the mental haze and in the mental fog of war.
	We've made some of our worst decisions, so have other countries in their history.
	That's Israel's decision to make, but my job as the next U.S.
	president is to look after American interests, and I do not think we want to be Entrenched in another long, drawn-out, US-involved, regional, broad conflict in the Middle East that would not advance American interests, but there are easy ways we ought to support Israel diplomatically with intelligence sharing.
	I mean, heck, we don't even have an ambassador to Israel right now.
	Confirm an ambassador to Israel and Egypt and other countries where we don't have confirmed ambassadors right now.
	Can we start with like, no money to Iran at all?
	Absolutely!
	And no money to Hamas!
	But even indirect aid to Hamas that's actually been going through in the name of humanitarian aid or otherwise.
	Deport anybody in this country who has had any ties to Hamas or otherwise, extradite them to Israel.
	So there are things we ought to absolutely be doing.
	But there's also things that nobody else is talking about that we ought to be talking about.
	We have to make sure that we oversee full phase-out through the monitoring and agreements of Iran's nuclear program.
	But what the heck are we thinking with the Biden administration, with some Republicans cheering it along, talking about nuclear technology transfer to Saudi Arabia?
	We should not want nuclear proliferation of any kind in the Middle East, and definitely not in Iran, but not in Saudi Arabia either.
	And yet nobody's talking about that right now.
	So I think this is a moment for level-headed rationality, rather than emotional knee-jerk responses.
	And now it's a cool thing, right?
	It's what the cool kids do, criticize the Iraq War 20 years ago.
	In either party, it's the cool, easy thing to do, because it's long past, and there's no consequence to you to do it.
	I'm not patting myself on the back.
	I was in college at the time, but I was against the Iraq War then.
	I had a bunch of other harebrained ideas that I was dead wrong on, but that wasn't one of them.
	And that was a left-wing position then, even though I wasn't on the left.
	I considered myself a libertarian back then.
	But now, it's easy to do that now, but the hard part is in the thick and the heat of the moment to make sure you don't make that same mistake, but it's not going to relate to Iraq.
	It might relate to Iran or a broader regional conflict in the Middle East, and that's the moment to think rationally.
	How do you do the right thing in supporting Israel to do what it needs to do to defend its national self-existence, but at the same time as the U.S.
	look after our interests to make sure that we don't accidentally tripwire ourselves into some large protracted conflict in the Middle East.
	Now is the moment To think with that level of clarity and reason rather than what I see as really lazy responses from all over the political spectrum.
	The far left trying to create this false moral equivalence between Israel and their enemies, that's wrong.
	But you've got people in the old neocon right that have no muscle memory other than just effectively pounding the drums for war without asking the question of the why we're doing exactly what we're doing.
	And so back to the question of foreign policy experience.
	I don't think somebody with the foreign policy experience record of the last 25 years should be in charge of making those decisions.
	I think it should be somebody of my generation coming from the outside, and in this race, that's me.
	When the track record is bad, it's not much of a track record.
	I still do believe kill every single last one of them as far as it relates to Hamas.
	By the way, they don't need our money to do it, but they certainly need our moral support.
	I think you had a follow-up.
	The only thing I would say there is just be careful to think that's not the end of the road there.
	Because, you know, Hamas is just a client of broader forces that are wielding them, like Hezbollah.
	So, it's the Taliban story.
	The Taliban, 20 years later, is still now in charge.
	Yeah, but you know what?
	When they kidnap your women and children and cut off their heads, it's a good start.
	And I don't mean that irrationally.
	I mean, Hamas, look, this is in their... It's different.
	It's in their charter, right?
	And they're right there.
	And if you look into the history of what's happened... But the Hamas 2.0 or whatever, you know, you get rid of... It could be worse, but they don't seem... You get al-Qaeda, you get ISIS.
	We just have to be careful.
	And tell ourselves these false illusions because it made us puff our chest and feel good about ourselves to actually ask the question of what job are we getting done?
	What is the mission we're getting done?
	What matters?
	And then go and have confidence about what we're actually doing and understand what we're not doing or else you're gonna tell yourself false myths as we have for the last 25 years that have led us astray.
	So that's just I think we have to be really clear about this.
	I think in the Hamas case it's a little bit different.
	Just a little bit, because it can't really get much worse unless you're talking about more money, as far as the ideology, as far as what they have done to the Jews, or as far as what they've said they will continue to do.
	This is like an ISIS-like organization.
	It's as bad as it gets, and there is no end.
	There is no possible end.
	If it was someone who you thought could sit at the table, they could be reasoned with.
	It's no.
	Exterminate all Jews.
	That includes women and children.
	We're going to put our weapons caches in our schools so that we can actually have our own.
	They're committing war crimes on both sides.
	It's dead wrong.
	It's dead wrong.
	And I agree with you on Ukraine, Russia, same even looking back.
	And Israel's a very different situation.
	Very different situation.
	We're correct to stand with Israel in terms of our funding of their national self-defense.
	But be aware if there's a vacuum for sure.
	In a way that we shouldn't for Ukraine.
	So this is related to foreign policy, but you, I said you had kind of like your moonshot
	moment.
	You made a claim on China and Taiwan that I wanted to dive into where you kind of laid
	out your solution for the problem.
	And part of that was to kind of reduce our dependence on Taiwan for chip manufacturing.
	Yes.
	Right.
	And you said by the end of your first term, that was, that was a lot of people may not have understood how lofty that was, but that is an incredibly lofty goal that a lot of people would say is not even practical.
	Is what, what made you think of that and why was that something that you thought could get done?
	I guess, would it be about five years roughly at the end of your first term?
	So I think it's achievable if you look at just the trajectory of what you're looking at in terms of the TSMC plant in Arizona, the Intel plant in central Ohio, where I'm from today.
	But that's been a disaster in Arizona, though, the TSMC.
	Oh, so far.
	But part of the reason, part of the disaster nature of this is it's not money, which is what we pretend the problem is, and then we shower a bunch of crony money in the name of a CHIPS Act that's really just a Green New Deal and CHIPS clothing.
	Which works well with American cars, but yes.
	Yeah, I mean, it's funny how this pattern repeats itself.
	But it's actually a skills shortage.
	Right.
	Right.
	So I think one of the things we should focus on is bringing some of those skilled workers from Taiwan over here, but then also training more Americans for the know-how of how you create sub-10 nanometer semiconductor chips, right?
	Those are the leading edge ones at really the front lines of this.
	But it can't just be an on-shoring strategy.
	I love on-shoring, and I would love for that to be the long-run steady state.
	Quicker ways to do this as well.
	Broader agreements with South Korea and Japan.
	I mean, Samsung is still further along than any company is in the US, even though TSMC is still further along than Samsung.
	So if we're serious about decoupling our dependence on China or Taiwan, we have to take an all-of-the-above approach.
	And I think that's what's different than a lot of people who might share my views but just stick to onshoring alone.
	Yeah, I love onshoring.
	But ally shoring has to be something that we complement that with.
	And so if you look at the totality of what's possible there, right, and you provide market access to the, you know, Samsung's, etc, of the world here, to build here, etc, Japanese companies as well, that I think is a reasonable, achievable path to five years from now, having basically achieved near total, leading edge advanced semiconductor independence, which means that China's not going to have an economic gun to our head if they choose to annex Taiwan. Doesn't that gun just go
	straight to Taiwan's head? Do we worry that they go like, oh wow, we're kind of up shit creek here.
	Well, Taiwan should be focusing on defending itself right now. And I would say in the meantime,
	the US should run one destroyer through the Taiwan Strait every week. We should absolutely
	work with India to have an ability to block the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait.
	That's where China actually gets 60% of its Middle Eastern oil supplies.
	Or 60% of all of its oil supplies, which come from the Middle East, come through that strait.
	So there's a range of things we need to be doing.
	I love the Second Amendment here.
	How about the Second Amendment in Taiwan?
	China's deathly afraid of anything that resembles the Second Amendment.
	Put a gun in every Taiwanese household.
	Taiwan's government could.
	Train them how to use it.
	So there are elements of what we call a porcupine- I mean, absolutely.
	That's another thing that we talked about last week.
	They at least have a civilian-trained military, and so it's not the whole solution, but it's at least a step better than Taiwan is right now.
	Well, imagine if those people were carrying, like, a lot of people here in Texas at that music festival.
	When people say, what a good gun!
	Hey, yeah, it absolutely will.
	It'll certainly even the odds when they're Fortnite hang-gliding in, knowing that these people are defendants.
	Keep in mind, I was raised in Canada, which is a very silly place, I'm ashamed, and no one there owns or carries guns.
	So the Second Amendment was created for a very specific purpose and it works.
	Right.
	Okay, when you're talking about foreign invasion, autocrats invading, even your own government invading.
	That's what it was designed to do.
	That's not, you know, and then I say something like this, and then CNN will try to press me a million times, isn't, isn't, didn't you claim your Taiwan deterrence strategy was just putting the Second Amendment in Taiwan?
	No, I didn't say that.
	But it's part of a broader view of taking what you think of a porcupine strategy to keep Taiwan on its own feet.
	Taiwan's spending less than 2% of its GDP on military right now.
	I mean, that's less than the NATO commitment.
	Taiwan should be spending 5 plus percent of GDP on military, which is why I love Israel as a partner.
	They actually spend for their own national defense.
	That's a good friend and a good ally.
	So when the U.S.
	is clear about what our objectives are, then Absolutely.
	Right now, and people forget this, the Republican Party, these people are such jokers, the current U.S.
	posture towards Taiwan is strategic ambiguity.
	The one China policy is the policy of both parties right now as we speak.
	I don't know if you guys remember this, when Donald Trump won the election, he picked up the phone when his phone rang from the Taiwanese president.
	He was laughed at by both parties, violating diplomatic protocol.
	Yeah, that's the same GOP that somehow says that we somehow stand with Taiwan.
	We don't recognize its existence as a nation.
	So I say out with the crap.
	Let's focus on reality.
	We will defend Taiwan, at least until we get semiconductor independence, at which point we can then return to the status quo, like exactly what it is right now.
	Return to that five years from now after we're semiconductor independent, we're strictly better off.
	So let me clarify, because I think a lot of people miss this.
	You are saying that you would switch a stance to, we are officially defending Taiwan, as opposed to this moral ambiguity.
	Yes.
	And then, when we achieve semiconductor independence, we'll go back to what Biden did.
	The status quo is.
	Yeah, which is kind of like, eh, will we, won't we?
	The entire Republican establishment, too.
	Oh, yes, everybody.
	But we're strictly better off then.
	And by the way, in the meantime, we should fortify our homeland defenses, cyber defenses, super EMP defenses, border defenses, nuclear missile defenses.
	Taiwan can spend more of its own military spending on GDP.
	We've been running destroyers through the Taiwan Strait.
	Xi Jinping would have to be an idiot to invade Taiwan.
	In the meantime, have that economic gun to our head, forget about it, we're independent.
	And afterwards, We're in a better position, and Taiwan's in a better position than they've ever been.
	So be more aggressive in the interim.
	Yes.
	And then go back.
	That's, I think, the key point that people missed.
	That's the key point.
	They made it sound like you were going, all right, see you Taiwan.
	No, that's, I mean, if you look into what somebody else's super PAC is saying in a mail flyer about me, and that's what this whole process of politics is so badly broken.
	But this is what I've said at every step of the way.
	Upgrade from the status quo, and then return to the status quo, but upgrade during the window.
	Which gives Taiwan some lead time to start getting their act together.
	And allows us to get our act together.
	And we can pull in Afghanistan, and maybe leave one of those destroyers in the strait.
	We just forget, has a few pallets of cash, and Uncle Sam's not the wiser.
	What do you say to somebody's critique, though?
	And I don't dislike this strategy.
	My strategy is to go on the defensive for Taiwan, period.
	We are going to defend Taiwan.
	That's what I'm saying, too.
	No, no, no, I understand that.
	But somebody would say, like, look, China right now, they can save face because the United States isn't necessarily kind of bowing up and saying, we'll defend Taiwan.
	Strategic ambiguity is just a term for all of us.
	We all know that if China invades Taiwan, we're coming to the aid, and so is South Korea and Japan, right?
	I think we all kind of understand that's likely.
	I mean, at a time where we're running low on munitions.
	Got Ukraine, got Israel.
	We're running low on our naval capacity.
	I don't think that China sees a scenario right now, automatically, that the U.S.
	is going to be in a position to defend.
	Would you say that they normally do?
	Normally, outside of the Ukraine conflict right now and outside of that policy…
	I would say four years ago, they did.
	Okay.
	So you're saying the situation's changed.
	Our naval capacity, we have this silly thing called the Divest to Invest Program, where we're
	decommissioning ships in the South China Sea. So there's a lot of reason… our economic
	dependence on China has only gone up over the last eight to 10 years. And if we depend on
	China for our other modern way of life, the F-35s that we make in this country depend on
	China for their parts. So things have changed. And so I do think that the diplomatic clarity,
	not strategic ambiguity, strategic clarity… That we will defend Taiwan.
	That's actually really important.
	Especially because the situation changed.
	No, that's a good answer for it, because I've heard critique, and I wanted to kind of understand your position.
	I actually, yeah, and I actually really like that answer.
	And by the way, Navy was fantastic, till the village people screwed it up for the rest.
	I'm convinced that regardless of partisanship, I think most people in this country will agree, definitely most Republicans and a lot of independents and some Democrats too, will agree with the position that I just laid out to you.
	What I don't know is are they going to be able to hear it.
	You know who else will agree?
	Japan.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	A lot of people understand it's just a hop and a skip away.
	So a lot of those economic drivers, right, where they would say, oh, okay, this makes sense.
	So now we have some lead time, because look, it would be completely unrealistic to think that the United States never has an interest, especially after COVID, to achieve some type of semiconductor independence, or at least capabilities, right, as far as scale.
	They know that, and they're saying, okay, this gives us some lead time where we're not just worried About being wiped off the face of the map.
	Okay, we can now understand what our agreement is.
	Hey, you know what?
	Reaching your NATO spending is a good start.
	That's right.
	And yeah, that's very, very different from the way it's been portrayed, which is, hey, Taiwan, we're going to stay ambiguous until we have our semiconductors and then buy.
	That's how the media portrayed it.
	And I think it's a very important differentiation to make, because a lot of people are not aware of how that also ties into Japan.
	Look, this is something we have to talk about, too.
	And this is the thing that's frustrating in this process.
	It's a game.
	It's a distortion about what gets – I love these formats right here in this discussion.
	And I was thinking about this in the flight over because it happened in a different context earlier today.
	The future is going to be media that looks like this.
	Long form, we're able to explain ourselves, go directly to the actual listener.
	But right now we're in this intermediate era.
	Where very few people are doing this kind of format.
	I'm doing this, the whole campaign was based on this.
	But we're doing this in an era where the legacy media is still relevant.
	So what do they do?
	They're going to come in, and I don't know what it's going to be in this conversation, but they're going to come in, pick something we've said here, completely take it out of context.
	But that's the projection that still much of the generally older Republican primary base still gets served to them.
	So we're in this intermediate transition phase, where 10 years from now, that legacy media is going to be far less relevant, if not gone.
	But this is going to be the way of the future.
	But now we have this intermediate version of this where we're having a long what hour, hour plus hour and a half discussion now, that Needs to be in the listener who's gone through this is going to be listening to the whole thing in full, but the average person sitting in Iowa that's only getting their news from cable news and the newspaper they read is getting some purposefully distorted clip because some guy in the opposition research camp of Nikki Haley's campaign and Ron DeSantis' campaign, actually it's not gonna be their campaign, it's gonna be their super PAC,
	That the Super PAC is watching this, and is watching what they're going to distort from what came out of this conversation.
	And they have some paid historical repeat player relationship with some third-rate publication that calls itself a newspaper, and that's exactly the way this game is going.
	On CNN or Fox News, there'll be a clip of you saying, I, Vivek, Jews, hate, kill Taiwan!
	And they'll say, there you go!
	Made by AI, exactly!
	American or not, you decide!
	Alright, well I think, and I know that we've gone over time, it's vivek2024.com and people can follow you on X. Can you, okay, tell people how to, we have it in the lower third, Vivek, but what, G Ramaswamy.
	So what's the G?
	Is that your middle name?
	That's my middle initial, because Vivek Ramaswamy's already taken on the Twitter handle.
	Really?
	How many are there?
	Is it like Scott Smith?
	I mean, it's like, you know, if you go to India, there's not quite like a Scott Smith, but it might be like a Scott...
	You know, Crowder.
	Crowder.
	There are a few of them.
	That's like Thiago Silva is like John Smith in Brazil.
	I've known so many Brazilians.
	I've known five Thiagos and I've known 12 Silvas.
	All right.
	Thank you so much for taking the time.
	And folks, leave your comments, leave your feedback, because you're a big sample size.
	And hey, I really do appreciate that you have the fortitude to do this.
	A lot of candidates are afraid.
	You know this is going to be unedited.
	Yeah, that's how I like it.
	Yeah.
	Thank you, brother.
	Thanks, man.

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