Vivek Ramaswamy: Walz vs Vance Debate, Clinton Predicts Kamala Surprise, Hassan Nasrallah Dead | 481
Patrick Bet-David, Vivek Ramaswamy, Adam Sosnick, Tom Ellsworth, and Vincent Oshana cover Hillary Clinton's 'October Surprise' prediction, the Walz vs Vance VP debate, the death of Hamas leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the US East Coast dockworkers strike!
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TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Podcast intro
01:05 - PBD previews the topics coming up on the podcast
04:56 - 💸 BUY 1 VT WALLET, GET 1 KEYCHAIN & CARD HOLDER FREE: https://bit.ly/3N6VHkr
05:50 - Poll shows Vivek Ramaswamy leading Ohio Gubernatorial candidates for 2026 race.
16:01 - Elon Musk declares ‘If Trump is Not Elected, This Will Be the Last Election.'
40:11 - A Dockworkers Walkout Could Batter the American Economy and Tie Up U.S. Trade
52:40 - Tim Walz is ‘nervous’ about upcoming VP debate
1:01:16 - Hillary Clinton: “Something Will Happen In October” To “Distort And Pervert” Kamala Harris
1:11:46 - Vivek discusses his WSJ article - "The American First Divide: Protectionism vs Libertarianism"
1:22:34 - Trump tariffs would mean up to 70,000 fewer jobs get created each month, Morgan Stanley says
1:26:18 - Israeli Airstrike Killed Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah
1:44:48 - WSJ Reports - Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now
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ABOUT US:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you pet on Goliath when we got pet dated?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value.
They hate it.
I didn't run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
No, but listen, I mean, for me, you already know how I feel with you in 2028.
We're live, and we have the one and only Vivek, Rabbaswami, in the house.
And by the way, a very interesting poll I'm going to show you that you and I know about the poll because, you know, when I show you the poll, I just want to see your reaction in a minute.
And folks, I want to get your reaction when I show you this poll.
It's interesting.
There's a lot of things to talk about.
Vivek has a new book out.
We're going to put the link below as well.
The entire time, Truths by Vivek Ramaswani, the future of America First.
The link will be below.
Go order it.
Support him.
If you're somebody that likes what he talks about, the first thing you ought to do is go order his book.
The link will be below.
However, story.
Another strike today happened.
And by the way, this is not just any strike.
This is a strike that could affect you that's watching this.
36 ports.
We'll get into the details.
45,000 employees.
We haven't had one of these since 1977.
It's catastrophic.
The number of raised they're asking for, 77%.
They want certain things to match fears.
We'll explain what products you could be affected by that could affect the cost of it.
We'll talk about that.
Then there's a big debate going on tonight.
Maybe it's not a big debate.
Maybe it's a big debate.
Who knows?
There's a VP debate going on tonight between JD Vance, who his highlight reel with debates.
He's very good at what he does, as well as going against this other guy that there's not a highlight reel, but his name is Walt.
There will be a debate tonight to the VP debate for some of you guys.
I do believe usual suspects, Vinny, you guys are.
Unusual suspects, you guys are watching it tonight and reacting to it, which is going to be exciting.
Adams pleads not guilty after Fed accused him of accepting $123,000 in luxury gift, fraudulently obtaining $10 million in public funds.
Again, this is allegedly.
Is he somebody that they cannot use and he was being too much too loud against the Biden and the establishment that they have to get rid of?
Or maybe he did something.
Who knows?
We'll kind of process that as well.
Israel is downgraded by Moody's again as war takes economic toll.
Few other stories there.
We'll talk about the walkout.
We'll talk about Disney layoffs indicate more Hollywood cuts are coming.
Sorry, the story from Wall Street Journal, Harvard.
Everyone wants to go to colleges in the South now.
They don't want to go to Harvard.
Interesting.
Why wouldn't somebody want to go to Harvard?
This is WSJ.
And then Americans are more reliant than ever on government aid.
And last but not least, America's young men are falling even further behind.
Now, a couple things before we get into this podcast and I show you the first poll.
Number one, if you've done business with our consulting firm, if you've been to the Vault, if you've been to BPW, if you bought a merch, if you've done a Minect, if you are a subscriber to VTNews.ai, if you're doing any of those, you're going to get an email today at 12 o'clock about a big event that we're hosting at an interesting location.
But those people will get the email first.
Then I will announce the event publicly to everybody on Thursday.
So to those of you that are insiders, you're going to get the email first.
You'll have 48-hour advance notice before everybody else does because that's only being sent to actual customers that have done business with us.
And then on Thursday, Rob, do we have a guest on Thursday?
Oh, we may, we may not.
We'll announce it to you.
And then on Thursday, we'll announce it to everybody what this event is going to be.
And trust me, you're going to want to be a part of it.
Some of you guys asked us about the only wallet that I wear.
This is the wallet that I wear.
This is the Valutainment wallet that I wear.
ID, cards, cash, easy to use.
It's not heavy.
It's not thick.
It's not, and it's 100% leather.
It is the only wallet you will see in my pocket.
It's not a Fendi.
It's not a Ferrogamo.
It's not a Louis Vuitton.
It's none of that stuff.
It's a Valutainment wallet with the logo on the side.
They're back.
And here's what we're doing today, which I'm excited about.
If you order one of the wallets, which Rob, let's put the link for the wallet.
If you order one of the wallets that we have here, we have them on brown.
We have them on black.
We're going to give you the card holder and the keychain of Valutain sent your way.
Price, 99 bucks.
The link will be below for you guys to get.
And you can add other Future Look Sprite gear anyways because the event we're hosting here soon that we'll announce to attend it.
You will have to wear Future Likes Bright gear.
Now, starting with that, Rob, I got a poll I want to show you.
Okay.
I got a poll I want to send to you that I think the audience needs to see, which is a very weird poll.
Nobody expected this poll.
This wasn't like a poll that we woke up this morning with Vivek saying, yeah, you know, this poll is going to come out and here's going to be on this list.
Rob, if you don't mind pulling this poll for people to see in them, Vivek, I'm going to come straight to you because we really want to know what your plan is next.
Are you planning on running BuzzFeed full-time?
Are you planning on running a media company?
Are you planning on putting maybe the Avengers together to do something?
Are you planning on somehow someway between now and the next election cycle, 2028, to maybe do something politically?
I don't know.
But this is the poll that just came out that shows us this.
The next election for governor of Ohio is 2026.
Look who's leading in the polling for the race, even though he's not running for it.
Look at this.
Jim Renachi, John Hosted, Lieutenant Governor, Robertsburg, all these guys are 15.9 as the highest one, completely undecided, 26%.
Vivek Ramaswani.
Governor 49%.
So is there a possibility that you would even entertain this?
You know, if you asked me six months ago, I would have said no.
I mean, it wasn't even in my headspace.
But I will tell you, so I live in Ohio.
I was born and raised there.
This is the number one thing that people across the state will come literally plead with me, beg me to do.
And so when people are in your own state begging you to do something that you're not, it's not something that I view as a pleasurable job.
It's not something that I have always aspired to in my whole life, but public service is about serving the public, right?
And so would I consider it?
Yes, I would consider it.
But am I definitively on that path?
I'm not definitively on any specific path right now.
We're going to let the election play out.
It's in less than 40 days.
I prefer to have clarity.
And when I'm clear and called into doing something with clarity, then I'm good to go.
But I will tell you that it does have an impact on me.
I would love to tell you that I'm not affected by what other people say.
It does have an impact on me.
I mean, I went to Springfield a few weeks ago, right?
Springfield, Ohio.
That's where I spent a lot of time growing up.
Obviously, the center of national conversation.
The number one thing coming out of there that everybody, even that town, there's hundreds of people that were in the room.
There were 2,000 people that wanted to come.
All I put on a social media post saying that we're showing up.
And the overwhelming mandate, I wouldn't call it an ask.
It was a mandate.
It was a demand of me is you need to come actually take our state to the next level.
And the reason is, and take me to one side.
There's no reason that a state like Ohio, which is actually a deeply conservative state, historically very successful, there's no reason it can't be competitive with, if not even then some, versus a Florida or a Texas.
And that's what many people in Ohio want to see is a state that's, you know, it's not a zero tax state.
It's not a state that has constitutional carry.
It's not a state that has universal school choice.
But you look at the reason why people are drawn to places like Florida and Texas.
Ohio could be a magnet like that.
And so whether it's me or somebody else, I think that's a, that's an untapped opportunity that I hope somebody steps into that void and definitely leads the state to even new heights.
But I love the place.
I had not aspired to it.
Am I thinking about it?
Well, if you see stuff like this and people demanding you to, you got to give it some thought.
But we'll wait till after the election.
Here's a clip, Rob.
If you want to play this clip, go for it.
Are you going to run for governor of Ohio?
And that was in Springfield.
Standing O from a question.
The guy had a two-part question.
They didn't let him get to the second part.
I'm a little more inclined than I was about 10 seconds ago.
So it's interesting in your mind, because, you know, are you at a place in your mind where the phase of being a capitalist, one, is behind you, where now it's more the role of an investor and more serving and giving back to your country on the political side?
Is that kind of the transition that's been made?
It's where I feel like I am in that stage of my own life.
Makes sense.
And I think having kids and also entering that sphere already once as a presidential candidate, it's very hard to just go back to pure capitalist mindset.
However, I will also say this.
There are many ways to have an impact on a country.
And I do think that action through the private sector can fill some voids that government cannot fill.
And even this year, this is more out of selfish desire, not monetary desire, but even just interest desire.
I miss scratching the business side of my brain a little bit, right?
Working that side of the scratching that hitch.
And so it's been fun to get involved with some projects in the private sector.
I've gotten a few companies off the ground, one in particular that I think is going to have some real impact this year.
So that's fun for me.
It's natural.
I know how to do that.
I know how to do that well.
But I'm at a stage in my life where when you're thinking about having an impact, I've lived the American dream already.
My kids grow up under conditions that my parents would have never imagined when they came to this country or that I grew up in just 30 years ago.
And it is all about how do we pass that on to the next generation.
That's my obsession.
And whether that's through public service, which is a likely path for me, or whether it's some other way, what I'm focused on is how do we pass the inheritance of a greater country to our kids.
And whatever that is, whatever the biggest way possible it is to have that impact, I don't want to do something small.
That's my rule.
I don't want it to be, there's room for people to do small things, but it takes about as much effort to do something small and to do it really well as it does to do something really big and do it really well.
It takes equal amount of effort both ways.
So I'm at a stage in my life where I want the next thing that I do to not be small, but to be big.
And we will, you know, in short order, probably, let's see how things play out in November.
I'll be having to make some decisions in the months ahead.
Well, listen, either way you go, you have a massive fan base and people that believe in you.
I will tell you guys one thing.
Remember when the story leaked about the bus feed meeting that was had.
You remember them when they wrote the story about it.
It's like, hey, this person, that person, this person was part of it.
I've watched people on how they are because I learned 20-some years ago, people have a few different talents.
There are those that are good one-on-one.
You know, in business, you have good one-on-one guys.
You sit in a room, you're doing a deal, handshake, getting the guy to agree.
Hey, guys, can you guys just give us an hour?
Just he and I need to talk.
And you figured out.
Then there's guys that are one to five or one to ten, smaller setting.
So, what do you think?
What do you think?
How about this?
What if we can make this work?
And it's kind of like a smaller group setting.
And then it's one to hundreds, if not thousands, right?
We know the one to thousands you're very good at.
You shine in a major way.
And we know you shine on the big stage with the controversy and the heat and criticism.
You shine.
We went to every single one of the debates.
We watched what you did.
And then it becomes the smaller one to five.
I had never seen you before on how you are.
And when we had that meeting and I saw how you handle the whole situation of questioning, it was a very awkward, uncomfortable meeting.
The first interaction.
The first interaction ever.
To put the kind of setting there, the BuzzFeed, he's coming in to buy shares in a company.
And this is public information.
It's not people that don't know.
So they're having an interaction with people that he's choosing possibly to be part of names that he's recommending.
But the way you handled all of it in that one-hour call that we have, that said a lot because that's how you're going to be negotiating when you're coming out with policies.
And as a guy that's in business who's seen people handle those types of meetings before, it was a 10.
I mean, I was so impressed by the way you ran the meeting.
It was incredibly impressive seeing that take place.
You know what I'm talking about.
It was fascinating.
But I'm sure if you commit to wanting to become the governor of Ohio, it's a lock if you do that.
And I think the reason why that's very important state to be the governor in is because that state matters.
And that state's going to matter in 28.
That state's going to matter in 32.
That state's going to matter in 36.
That state's going to matter in many different ways.
So that could be a way of getting to the next step to kind of get a state that is very important.
And then whatever you choose to do next, to me, I think you're 2028.
I've said this before.
I have Jamie Diamond running in 2028 as a Democrat.
I have the Rockwell consider 28.
He may run 32.
I have Mark Cuban for sure is going to want to run in 28, unless if some of the stories come out.
And I have you running in 28.
If Kamala wins, you'll run in 28.
If not, if they win, you may still run in 28.
Well, yeah, you would still run in 28 because it's going to, by the way, it's very technical when you kind of look right.
It's very technical because Trump wins.
It's one term.
So somebody's going to come out.
So it could be Vance, you.
That matchup is going to be like, it'll be a classmates.
It's going to be fiery.
That way.
We got one step at a time.
I told you.
I'm talking about it from the entertainer standpoint, right?
That I see.
That's going to be one that we'll be looking forward to and watching that take place.
Anyways, Rob, if you can pull up Elon Musk's tweet and then Mark Cuban's response to Elon Musk, and I want to go right to him because you had Mark Cuban on your podcast about a month ago, and it was a very, very good conversation the two of you guys had back and forth.
I thought it was one of those shows that everybody needs to watch.
But this is Elon Musk.
Rob, if you go to his account, good luck finding it.
This guy tweets 50 times a minute.
So you're going to need to keep it.
It's almost like he owns the thing.
Yeah, it's almost like he owns it.
So what date is that, Rob?
It's hours.
Seven hours ago.
Okay, do me a favor.
Why don't you do it this way, Rob?
Go to my Twitter account, Rob, if you could.
Go to my Twitter account.
Okay.
If you go there, you will see that.
Go one more.
Rest in peace.
Go one more.
Go one more.
Right there.
Okay.
Click on his first, then click on Elon's.
There you go.
Okay.
So I saw this one.
Yep.
Very few Americans realize that if Trump is not elected, this will be the last election.
Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it.
Let me explain it.
If even one in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be 2 million new legal voters in four years.
The voting margin in the swing states is often less than 20,000 votes.
That means if the Democratic Party succeeds, there will be no more swing states.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has been flying asylum seekers who are fast-tracked on citizenship directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
It is a sure way to win every election.
America then becomes a one-party state and democracy is over.
The only elections will be Democratic Party primaries.
This already happened in California many years ago following the 1986 amnesty.
The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America.
Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape.
Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.
Then Cuban responds, if you want to go back one, there you go, Rob.
He responds back and says, Elon, there will come a time when you need something from Trump.
You will think you will have earned the right to ask and receive.
You have been a loyal, faithful soldier to him.
You have supported him politically with tens of millions of dollars.
Then at the point you need him the most, you will find out what so many before you have learned.
His loyalty is only to himself.
So when you see that, I give my response.
I said, in other words, Kamala owes you many favors.
Two, you trust that Kamala Harris will 100% deliver on her favors she owes you.
Three, you were expecting a job from Trump in 2016 and didn't get it.
Or four, you're assuming Elon is wired like you.
What is your thoughts, Vivek, when you see this interaction?
So look, I actually love authentic, no holds bar, take off the filter interactions.
And I think the beauty of X, right, which Elon bought, is that you can have these exchanges out in the open.
So I give Mark Cuban, you know, he's going to take some criticism for it, but he's got the guts to say what he wants.
Elon is like so many other business people who are too afraid in corporate America of being canceled for their views.
You know what he told the advertisers to go screw themselves off, basically, is what he told him.
And so I think it's just great when we have more of these gloves off, straight up pummeling conversations.
Now, I'll tell you this is about Elon is both of those things that those two guys said can be true, right?
Where Mark Cuban says, oh, you're not going to get something from Donald Trump for it, which may reveal that that's not actually Elon's motivation.
Elon's motivation is that he cares about the future of the country.
And so there's two different visions of American politics.
One is where you're dealing with politicians as puppets, pieces on a chessboard, and you got the people who are wielding those interests moving them on that chessboard.
That's one vision.
And that exists.
I mean, that is a real sad, dark reality of how a lot of American politics works.
And then there's the separate version, which is the idealistic vision, which is to say that I have certain shared ideals.
And Elon and Donald Trump don't agree on everything.
Donald Trump and I don't agree on everything.
You know, I think the part of the coalition that President Trump has built this time around, especially, is it's a group of people who don't agree on 100% of every last issue, but still agree on the basic principles of how the country is supposed to work.
Free speech and open debate, meritocracy, the best person ought to get the job, not based on their race or their skin color.
You actually have to have self-governance.
It shouldn't be bureaucrats running the country, but elected representatives.
The rule of law, that's a big one.
I mean, that relates to this whole issue relating to the immigration crisis.
Elections we can trust and believe in.
Those are basic rules of the road.
And we're united around that.
Great.
I'm not expecting anything in return.
I just want to see that happen for the country.
I think that's where Elon's coming from here.
And so is there an element of truth to what Mark Cuban says about generally how American politics works?
Absolutely.
The idea that there are people who do it expecting special favors in return.
Is that the relationship that Elon says he has or even appears to have with Donald Trump?
Absolutely not.
It's a group of shared allies.
And I consider myself in this boat as well, who I don't want anything for myself in response.
I don't care about what that means for me individually.
It's not what I get, but it's about what do we all give to advance the ball forward for our country.
And that's my sense of where Elon's coming from as well.
Tom, your thoughts?
I think there's some very obvious things that Mark Cuban was projecting.
I mean, Mark Cuban has entered the pharmaceutical industry with fanfare.
I believe there's some nobility to what the company's trying to do, but also he needs a lot of assistance.
He's made a comment about wanting to be head of the SEC, and he also went head to head with the SEC, and they went after him.
And he had a famous quote that was, you have to be very careful if a government investigator wants your skin on the wall because they're probably going to get it.
And so there's kind of something that's come full circle there.
But I think I appreciate what you said because I don't believe that both men, Elon and Cuban, are on the same wavelengths.
I do believe Elon is very, very concerned and very serious and accurate without spin about the country and about the future of elections.
I think that's true.
And I also think that Cuban is a little self-interested right now and seems to have kind of put on the jersey all the way.
And I think there's stuff that he wants, and I think he's serious about the SEC.
And I also think he's serious about the assistance he wants for his pharmaceutical company.
Do I think that there's nothing in Cuban that cares about the country?
No, I don't think he's completely over the waterfall.
Adam.
Well, I just think it's most ironic to see who's in Trump's corner these days.
We're being very political right now.
So this is like very safe talk so far.
Oh, well, maybe I'll be a little controversial then.
I like to call this out, Patrick.
Can we pull up that quote again?
Elon's spot on with what's going on with the border.
I mean, I think that whatever's happened with the border sort of disqualifies the never was the borders are, Kamala Harris, from actually protecting the border.
But the part of this, let me explain forever, the EDM20 legals become citizens because you're something that Democratic expediting seems possible.
That would be 2 million new legal voters in four years.
There's been talk of this for a while.
You know, the one thing that Cuban gets true is Trump does demand loyalty.
I mean, I don't know if he, you know, asked for your hand in loyalty or anything like that, but he, that is sort of something that you hear about Trump, is that there's a one-way street to loyalty.
We've heard it.
We've heard people talk about this.
How many people have come through the Trump administration that said, I cannot support this guy, generals?
The list goes on and on and on.
But if it's a binary choice, which it is at this point, I mean, Kamala has disqualified herself, in my opinion, but it doesn't mean that Trump is perfect.
Yeah, let me say this word because this comes up a lot with Donald Trump and people use it mostly as like a negative to say that he wants loyalty.
Let me frame this in a different way, which I think is closer to the mark.
I think if you're an executive, right?
And Patrick, we'll just bring this back to the business setting.
You have a mission at a company.
You want people who work at the company who are aligned with that mission.
That doesn't mean that you're a bad person if you're not.
Let's say your mission is, I don't know, making water bottles.
Maybe you could think about a different example.
Maybe your mission is you have a steakhouse, okay, and you want to serve excellent steak.
You want people who are aligned with that mission, not somebody who's opposed to the existence of a steakhouse.
That doesn't mean that person doesn't have the right to have that opinion.
It just means they shouldn't be working at your company.
Well, the same thing I would say of running the U.S. government.
You have a vision for the country.
You have a way you want to run the show.
You want to thin out, let's say, bureaucracy.
You want to limit the number of federal regulations that are being passed by bureaucrats.
You don't want people who are working for you who believe in a different vision for the country.
That doesn't mean they're bad people.
That doesn't mean that they don't enjoy the same rights as every other American.
But who on earth would say that I'm running as an executive an entire set of departments, but I have people who are unaligned with the mission that I'm on?
So there's a difference between loyalty in the sense of like, okay, you have to sign.
No, I did not when I endorsed Donald Trump.
I was not asked to sort of do a blood oath.
No blood oath.
Okay, there's no blood oath.
All right.
We did not cut our arms and bleed together.
No, that was not that kind of loyalty.
But the question is, are you aligned with the same mission?
Now, it doesn't mean you can have some disagreements.
Of course, I said earlier, we don't agree on 100% of issues.
Elon and Donald and you have a bunch of other people and Trump who are supporting Trump don't agree with him on every other issue, on every individual issue.
But are you aligned on the basic mission?
I do think you got to be loyal to the overall mission of making America great again, of reviving our constitutional principles.
And I think that that's, again, like so many things with the media have been perverted to mean something very different as though it's some type of personal thing.
Yeah, I mean, you earned that, right?
And what's the earning?
Moral authority.
How do you get moral authority?
By delivering on your promises.
If you're doing your part and you're setting the example, then the expectation for loyalty goes higher.
This is in sports, Tom Brady.
The other day, a clip came out, which I freaking loved.
I don't know if you saw this exchange with Baker Mayfield and Tom Brady.
I did not.
Okay, so check this out.
So Tom, Baker Mayfield, if you have that, type in Baker Mayfield and Brady.
That clip is everywhere.
I would like to see Baker and Brady if there's a video that shows both of them.
It's not in there.
Well, I'll just tell you what he said.
So Baker says, look, I mean, when, you know, Brady was here at Tampa, it was very stressful, you know, because, you know, guys were all on the edge.
You know, they wanted me to, this is the one.
Go ahead and play this, Rob.
This is the entire clip.
So watch this.
Our guy here said, quote, they wanted me to come in, be myself, bring the joy back to football for guys who weren't having as much fun.
It's funny because you've made this environment for me very stressful up here in the booth.
So I understand where he's coming from.
Do you feel it?
No.
I was going to say, I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings.
So there was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day.
He says, if I want daycare, if I wanted to have fun, I was going to go to Disneyland with my kids.
You could pause around too.
Now, listen, Baker's having a good start, but there's a difference between somebody who is on, you know, he's on the road working his ass off, away from his family, doing their part.
You can expect loyalty.
So I don't have a challenge with that part.
And I know sometimes the argument is you got to be loyal to the country for sure over, but that person gave you the job.
Let's fulfill the mission and be aligned towards whatever the mission is.
Okay.
Do you think Cuban, this is just a feel.
I'm curious to know what you'll say.
Do you think he has interests of running in 28?
I think it would not shock me if he did.
I think if you asked him right now, in his own heart, he would tell himself that, no, of course I'm not interested in that.
I'm crushing it in the private sector.
I can't handle, you know, that type of public life.
But I think in his heart, he's clearly got something in him that is drawing him back.
He's really interested in American politics, really interested in expressing his own opinions.
And to his credit, engaging with people who disagree with him.
He and I had a great hour-long conversation.
I didn't want to dunk on him too much there.
My goal was to bring him on.
You weren't trying to do that.
Yeah, that was not the goal.
But I think that would I be shocked if he did in 28?
No, I would not.
Yeah, I think, by the way.
And I think he'd have a reasonable following behind him.
I think too.
Because people like a businessman.
I think he would be a phenomenal candidate for the left.
I think he'd be a phenomenal candidate for the left, and I think he'd be formidable.
Look, I just look at it this way.
If instead of Kamala Harris being the nominee, say it was fill in the blank of who it was, but somebody of Mark Cuban's pedigree, right?
Maybe use him as an example.
Would that be better for the country?
Undoubtedly, it would be better for the country, right?
Because then we could have a contest based on ideas about people who on both sides, say what you will, know at least how to win through American capitalism, which is part of what made this country great the first time around.
I think that would be better for the country.
Do I disagree with his policy views?
I do, especially on issues relating to ESG, DEI, equity in the country.
But let's have that debate in the open amongst people who at least are competent and have achieved success rather than what we have right now, which is somebody who's never signed the front of a paycheck, only ever signed the back of one from public funds to their bank account.
And I think that that is something we need more of on both sides is people who have succeeded in the private sector, businessmen or businesswomen, whatever, in American politics.
I think that's a good thing.
But has the Democratic Party shifted so far left that the thought of a white male billionaire running their party at this point is just absolute absurdity at this point.
You know, it's interesting.
So I was at the hotel.
My family's here and we were hanging out in the beach in Miami.
A guy comes up to me by the pool and he's just, he's kind of, you know, people are always, you notice when people notice you, but I've had a lot of conversations about taking pictures all day.
So I'm trying not to, not to really make eye contact right there because I was looking for some alone time.
But he says, hey, you're Vivek, right?
I said, yeah.
He said, well, listen up.
I'm a Democrat.
I'm pretty involved in politics.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I'm a big fundraiser for Democrats.
But I got to tell you, I don't agree with you on everything and I'm not for your guy, but I agree with your criticisms of the far left.
And I'm about as fed up with the far left as you are.
And I just want you to know that.
I said, oh, okay, well, that's interesting to me.
I see that current.
I think the same is probably true for Mark Cuban, too.
But he's still going to vote for Kamala, that same guy.
Of course.
He's still going to vote for their policies.
That's the biggest problem.
Well, so hey, I don't agree with those people on the left, but I'm still going to vote for them.
But here's what's going on in this election, actually.
So I think our side sometimes misses the plot when we say Kamala is a communist or a socialist.
That's giving her too much credit, right?
Because she doesn't actually have policies.
The fluidity of her policies is actually a feature, not a bug for the people who are controlling her.
So Biden had these cognitive deficits.
Biden's cognitive deficits were a feature because it allowed the people who controlled him to have total wield control over his thoughts or his behaviors.
With Kamala, it's the equivalent with her policy deficits.
So it's not that they're voting for Kamala despite the fact that she is some sort of far-left ideologue.
It's the fact that she's not ideological really at all.
She's another cog in the system, just a different kind of cog.
So I think their bet is that a lot of these people, even billionaire types on the left, center left that I've talked to, I'll say, okay, how is it defensible to stand for attacks on unrealized capital gains?
And I think that, and you all know what that is.
100 million.
25%.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, but the basic point is they could bring it down to other people as well, which is to say that even if you don't have the cash to pay the tax, you have to sell an asset in order to pay it.
You're going to be affected by it.
And everyone's going to be affected by it, and it would be the source of a second great depression, in my opinion.
Their response is, don't worry, it's not going to happen.
I said, well, she's put it along with Biden in their budget for the last several years.
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders have all been advocating for this.
And it's like, no, no, no.
It's almost like an attitude like, we got this one.
We got it.
Which suggests to me that they don't view her as an ideologue.
They view her as somebody who, it doesn't matter what she says.
She said this before.
She's saying, we got it already, say this other stuff now.
It's going to be okay, which suggests to me the real criticism of Kamala is the same criticism I've had of this system all along.
This is a charade.
The whole thing is about cogs in a wheel.
We don't want to just go in and defeat one candidate.
We want to go in and defeat that system.
And I think that's the better criticism here than the idea that she's some kind of Marxist or socialist.
I mean, Bernie Sanders is a true socialist.
He calls himself one.
He calls himself part of the socialist party and Democratic socialist.
And at least he's an ideologue.
I give him actually more credit than I give the person who's just a puppet and a cog in the wheel.
But that, I think, is closer to the flame with Kamala.
But you say he's a true believer.
Bernie is.
That's what Pat always says about Bernie.
Bernie is a true believer.
Kamala's not, I don't think Kamala is really a true believer.
I think that she is just another cog who doesn't have particularly independent thoughts, and that's an advantage to the people who control her.
The one thing, Vivek, and Pat, that I saw from that thing that Elon posted is actually scary as hell.
I don't think we actually realize what he said, if one out of 20 actually become citizens, then we're screwed.
We know it's way more than that.
They're saying the numbers are 20, 20 million by the end of this four years.
How is our side going to even combat that?
Has the damage already been done to it?
Because they're here.
They're not going anywhere.
The border, it's still wide open.
I love how when people talk as if it's still right now, I saw a video yesterday of a line of 25 to 50 Middle Easterns.
None of them are speaking English.
None of them are from here.
And Vivek, I know you guys saw these stats.
Out of the 7 million that ICE released into the country, 663,000 have criminal histories.
13,000 were convicted of homicide.
16,000 sexual assault.
1,845 face homicide charges.
And that's not counting the terrorists that they let in and the 325 missing children.
When it comes to the voting, Vivek, when it comes to that, are they already good for like election and election and election for the flight?
So I think it's getting in that direction.
So I got a whole chapter dedicated to the hard facts on this in the book.
The chapter title is called An Open Border is Not a Border.
Which, by the way, the fact that you have to have a chapter entitled that in a book called Truth is remarkable.
So there's two things I'll say about that.
One is, go back to 2012.
You see articles in Politico magazine where Democrats actually made the case for this as a political strategy.
So today, if you say the thing Elon says, they dismiss you as a conspiracy theorist.
Actually, go back to 2012.
This was part of the Democratic strategy.
Mass migration into the country, including legal and illegal included, was a way of securing lasting electoral majorities.
Now, they stopped saying that about a decade later because they realized it didn't look great, but that was part of a long-standing strategy and it's working.
Here's the other thing, though, that and I point this out in the book in a way that I think Republicans have not yet put their finger on yet.
All right.
Let's talk about the legal immigration system, even.
Even if you're talking about the Haitians in Springfield, that wasn't border crossers.
That's a different type of, under the government, at least, legal mechanism of temporary protective status.
Let's talk about legal immigration.
Let me ask you this.
What is the number one human attribute that the current immigration system selects for?
I'll give you some possibilities.
You can imagine an immigration system that selects for intelligence.
You could have one that selects for hard work or ability to make economic contributions.
You could have one that selects for ability to speak English or knowing about the civic values of the country.
All of those could be reasonable bases for an immigration system that values those attributes.
Those are examples of human attributes.
The case I make in this book is, and it's supported by the evidence, the number one human attribute that our current immigration system selects for is your willingness to lie, actually.
Right?
Because if somebody wants to come into the country and they say, okay, I cannot in good conscience select that I'm seeking asylum at imminent risk of bodily harm for my race or my religion, I can't say that in good conscience because it's not true, even though I'm undergoing conditions of difficulty.
That person's not going to get in.
But the person who does get into the country is the person who checks that box, knowing full well that it's not true.
So now you look at that stat from Elon, not only is that those, those are the people who are coming to the country, a small fraction of which become Democratic voters, they're a small fraction of which, even in the path to becoming Democratic voters, are demonstrated to be demonstrably already the people most willing to be dishonest and to lie.
And by the way, if you're selecting systematically for people who are more willing to lie to the U.S. government than not, you're selecting for people who are more likely to break the law when they continue to be here as well.
So that's the hard truth is you get what you pay for.
Okay, the incentives you set up, that's what you collect.
And what we reward right now, it's not like Harvard's college admissions, okay?
Or maybe they reward that too.
Who knows?
But your willingness to lie is the number one attribute that gets you into the United States or not.
That is a hard truth in today's immigration system.
So that makes that stat all the more scary.
And that's, I think, one of the strongest cases for mass deportation.
Thank you.
Illegally got to be returned to your country.
Thank you very much.
You know, I have personally worked at companies that were venture-funded, and there were hardworking people that wanted to get here in the H-1B program, had a degree from IIT, coming over here or from Taiwan, all these places.
They just all wanted to come here is work.
And they wanted, they believed in the exceptionalism that was coming out of Silicon Valley.
These really marvelous companies they wanted to work for.
And yet the H-1B would have quotas.
And so honest people with a great education who wanted to come here, who weren't checking the box and claiming asylum persecution or anything like that.
Suddenly, every year, you know, this at this date, it was around April, April Fools.
So around April 1st, the H-1Bs run out for the year because now there's a backlog of apps and you're stuck.
And so you have one of the mechanisms of immigration, which is a way to legally get here, you know, constantly has a lid on it in terms of numbers.
But then if you're willing to lie or you just open the border, you know, here comes the flood.
And so we all came from somewhere else, right?
At the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, it says, Give us your tired, you're poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
We all come from somewhere else, and there's, but it's supposed to be, you know, legally, and we've got all these mechanisms to incentivize.
It's not just the willingness to be dishonest, as you correctly point out.
I believe you correctly point out based on the data.
It is the fact that we encourage it.
Yeah, we encourage it.
And we encourage it.
We say, well, just do this.
Just do this.
And hardworking people that want to come here have to wait in Germany at a refugee camp so your family can be checked out.
Or you have to wait two years for the H-1B, your number finally, to come up because they have an artificial quota cap on it.
And you're just a hardworking person with a degree who wants to come over here and be an engineer.
So let me let me lay.
I love the way you say that because sadly, if you're honest, your odds of coming to the country plummet.
If you're dishonest, they spike.
Let's just take to first principles here, though.
I don't care if you're on the left or the right.
I'm going to give you a framing of what I think our immigration policies should look like based on first principles.
And if you disagree, let's disagree about it.
Let's think about your nation like a body, like a human body.
So we often use the term, right, for your human body, consent.
My body, my consent.
Left, right, most people agree with that, whether it's a vaccine, whether you're talking about, you know, sexual assault, abortion, whatever it is.
My body, my consent.
So think about the nation like a body.
No migration without consent.
That's number one.
Number two is consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America.
It's number two.
And number three is those who enter without consent must be removed.
It's that simple.
Three basic principles: no migration without consent.
Consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America.
And those who enter without consent must be removed.
That's the case.
It was where I land on this book.
Try to do this in every issue.
Just offer some simple, clear principles that I believe most Americans, Democrat, Republican, black, or white, will agree on.
I think most Americans agree on those principles.
I think those are hard truths that most Americans are behind.
All right, so we may disagree on how to apply them.
But once you've stated the principles, now you're just talking about disagreeing over application.
Rather than what we fall into the trap of thinking that, oh, well, we actually disagree on the first principles.
I don't know many Democrats who, on the face of it, would say they even disagree with those three principles.
But if you agree with those three principles, that means, based on number three, you got to have deportations of those who are in this country illegally.
Those who enter without consent must be removed.
You can't, you got to have secure border policies because no migration without consent.
So I think that that's something we don't do enough in politics is just identify our first principles on each of these seemingly difficult issues.
The surprise, and I think it is a beautiful surprise, is that most of us actually tend to agree on those principles.
And then it's just a question of application.
And that's what I try to do in this book as well.
Again, folks, if you haven't ordered a book yet, Rob, let's put the link below for people to be able to order the book, Truths, that came out just a few days ago, a week ago.
But let's get to the next story.
This is a story that could affect everyone's pockets with what's going on.
A dock workers walkout could batter the American economy and tie up U.S. trade.
Wall Street Journal story, represented by the International Longshoremen's Association, ILA, are preparing to strike across ports from Maine to Texas, threatening to disrupt U.S. trade and the economy.
J.P. Morgan analysts estimate the strike could cost the economy $3.8 billion to $4.5 billion a day.
The White House has urged negotiations but believes the supply chain could withstand a short strike.
The ILA, led by Harold Daggett, demands a 77% wage increase over six years, rejecting an offer of nearly 40%.
Daggett argues workers deserve a share of shipping companies, pandemic, and recent profits.
A strike would halt most container movements, but not affect military cargoes, cruise services, and oil and gas export.
Retailers and manufacturers from Walmart to GM warned the strike could drive inflation, especially during the holiday season.
Vivek, thoughts on this story.
My first thought is this is not good for Kamala Harris.
I mean, this is just not good for her on the eve of the election.
I'm not trying to say that from because I'm obviously voting for Trump.
I'm not voting for her.
And I'm actually somebody who urges against complacency for our own side.
So if something's bad for our side, I'm going to call it out.
This is not good news for Kamala Harris on the eve of an election.
I think what we're going to start to see is we're going to see some weird things happen in the next month.
I can't tell you what, and with an exact prediction what those are going to be, but one possibility, the least weird of the weird things I think we're going to see, is her rapidly distancing herself from and even possibly criticizing Joe Biden.
So I think you're going to see a lot of this in the next month, is the Democratic Party further making Biden the fallman for all of these policies and even leaks or other stories coming out.
They might be made up, right?
They probably will be made up, but made up nonetheless, that Kamala was the person who was trying to push Joe in this direction, but he didn't go on economic policy or border policy.
I think we're going to have to see, it's almost inevitable that we're going to see some of that in the next month because otherwise she is so saddled correctly with the Biden-Harris policies that are giving us everything from the largest strikes we've seen to the largest influx of mass immigration we've seen to the largest crime wave we've seen.
She is going to have to take the next level of steps to separate herself from these policies.
I don't think it's going to necessarily be successful.
I don't think most people are going to fall for it, but I think we're going to see more of that when I see stories like this.
Tom.
I think she's cornered here.
This is a massive union work organization, if you think of it that way.
And she just went toe-to-toe in the back room with the Teamsters and couldn't get them to do it.
They pulled their own people.
It was like 58, 35 in favor of Trump.
And so the union, Teamsters, comes out and says, you know what?
No formal endorsement this go around.
And by the way, we encourage all of our people to vote, vote your conscience, vote the way you would.
Boom, step back.
Now you've got this.
This is the, these are the major strikes where the White House usually has to step in with leadership and to enforce like a federal negotiator or somebody to come in to mediate.
And she is cornered on this.
This is going to, this is going to create, well, pandemic type interruptions in supply chain is what's going to happen here, number one.
And if we don't think that in very short order, a shortage of certain things is going to lead to inflation of those things, then you weren't paying attention to what was happening to certain food products at Walmart and Sam's Club and all of the Target, even in the earliest days of the pandemic.
As soon as you interrupt the supply chain, the price goes up.
And she's cornered because how does she stay in this middle?
Like last week, she suddenly became Trump on the border, spending 20 minutes at the border, 26 minutes.
I got to give her full credit.
26 minutes at the border and then making statements that were almost completing her run to the middle to be as much like Trump as possible.
She's stuck here.
She's absolutely stuck.
If she comes out and supports the union side, that's not the moderate position.
And we've got an economic impact.
Well, I just have a question for Rebecca because we've seen, you know, you said that Comrade Kamala.
Stay on this topic.
On the port topic.
I am.
Adam, I'm going to tell you on the port topic.
I'm with you, Pat.
Okay, let's see you because I know you're going to digress here in a second.
But we're starting to see like UAW.
Sean O'Brien came out.
He spoke at the Republican convention, I believe, right over the time that you were there.
He gave probably long speeches.
He had a fashion speech there, thick Boston accent.
We're not going for it.
And then we've seen Sean Fane, sort of a counterpart with the UAW, these strikes that are taking place.
We saw Hollywood taking place.
What's going on with this specific strike right here?
And why, Tom, touched on it.
Why are these unions that are typically so entrenched in the Democratic Party all of a sudden being like, yeah, I don't know about this time over here?
What's going on?
So there's a psychological component to this that runs deeper.
I don't think that there's a lot of people who are truly upset about saying, I'm not getting paid enough and prices are going to, people are bothered by it.
They suffer.
But what really gets people to move is to say that it's not just that I'm not making enough money, but prices have gone up.
It's that I'm not making enough money, but prices have gone up and nobody else seems to give a damn.
It's a second part that actually matters a lot, right?
And so I think that that's something, I saw that when I went to Springfield, by the way, when you showed up, even the community, the thing that they're frustrated by is not that they're struggling, they are, but it's just struggling and nobody else seems to care.
And I think that this is something that Donald Trump and the Republican Party under Donald Trump has done really well is to communicate, yeah, we've got the policies, but Kamal Harris can claim to, can claim to stand for the same policies.
That's the thing about policy shifts is you can say anything.
But who actually really seems to care and have that as a core motivation?
They can feel that.
You can smell that.
You can kind of feel it in your bones.
And I think that's what we're seeing is more of a psychological shift.
It's not that the union members are saying, okay, these policies are going to be better than Trump's policies because a lot of Kamala's policies are now looking like Trump's policies anyway, at least at the last minute.
She's trying to make them seem that way.
But I think it's that deeper psychology of who do I actually think gives a damn about me?
That's what gets people riled up is not that I'm struggling, but I'm struggling that nobody else actually seems to care.
That's the real problem.
So the emotional issues are.
If you're asking like this event or all of them, period.
Yeah.
This one is specific to this or this is a symptom.
Yeah, this is a symptom.
Because stay on this problem.
This is not a regular thing, by the way, just so you know this.
Like the stuff that this is.
This is a big deal.
This is 45,000 employees.
This is 36 ports.
This is a quarter of all bananas.
Like if you want to talk about product, this is a Hokul, Governor Hokul came out and said, if you're buying a car, make sure the car is going to be delivered type of thing.
This is people asking if gifts are going to get in by Christmas, toys, if you ordered in advance.
That's the concerns that people are coming up with.
This is these guys asking for a raise of 77% while the average salary on West Coast for the same work is $116,000.
They're making $81,000 a year.
That's a what, $19,000, $16,000, $35,000 raise that would give them 43%, but they're asking for 77% over six years.
This is a legit thing.
And by the way, the question you asked, which was actually a very good question, I thought you were going to digress and go and talk about something else when we're on this topic, is unions.
How are unions historically, you think about, you know, Jimmy Hoffa, you think about all these people.
Do you know even Pete Buttigic was trying to get them to agree to do the, what's that one thing called the Taft-Hartley Act or the Taft, which if you can pull up the Taft Harbor, are you familiar with Taft?
No, no, the Taft-Hartley Act is where the government can force unions to not bully employers and threaten them to say if you don't come back to work, you may lose this, you may lose that, you may lose this.
And they came up with this many, many years ago because unions would Ford, there was so much of that happened in the 20s and 30s that they came up with this and Kamala Harris and Biden are like, we want to have nothing to do with this because if they come out and do this the next 40 days, the impact of this could be in a big way.
But why don't we do this?
Tom or Vivek, Vivek, I'll go to you first.
The average person, okay?
Not even how this affects Kamala.
How could this affect the average person?
You're married, you got two kids, you're trying to do your thing, pay your bills, you're doing your thing.
How can this affect them?
Price spikes and supply shortages.
That's how that could affect them.
I mean, if things aren't able to, goods and services that show up at your grocery store or show up at Walmart or Target don't end up showing up on that grocery store.
If we ever get to the point of that type of supply shortage actually affecting an everyday family, I think that this thing, I think the election is basically done, no matter what tricks they pull.
That's what I believe.
Now, whether that happens in the next four to six weeks, we'll see.
These negotiations can go in any given direction.
I'll tell you this, though, is this is not a super, you know, interesting topic to a lot of people, but I also think the United States needs to take a long, hard look at the Jones Act, take a long, hard look at a lot of these regulatory statutes that were passed with good intentions, but that are also contributing to these types of difficulties, right?
So that's an act that was designed to protect American shippers, ship companies, and shipbuilders, but actually gets in the way of efficient, low-cost shipping into the United States of America.
So I think that there's two competing views.
And this is where, by the way, I think this is even a divide on the right.
This is not just between Republicans and Democrats.
This is a divide on the American right, where when we get, hopefully when we're successful in taking over the levers of power, the question is, do we want to use that regulatory state and expand it to advance pro-conservative or so-called pro-American goals?
Or do we actually want to dismantle a lot of that regulatory state in the first place?
That, I think, is the future divide, even in the direction of America First.
And I'll tell you this is it's not a divide even between neoliberals, neocons, and America first.
That's a divide within the America First right.
I come down in the camp of get in there and shut it down.
And a lot of those statutes, I think, are actually impeding the interests of American workers and manufacturers in the name of helping them.
So anyway, that's a longer discussion we could have, but that's where I land on it.
Tom, you look like you want to.
I think the first thing that first of all, I agree with that.
When you go into government, the first thing, I mean, Reagan said it best.
He said, you know, when he was asked about a situation and he said, people are looking for government to the solution.
But in this particular case, government is the problem.
It was you have well-intended regulations on one day that have, you know, evolved and now literally need to be dismantled because the conditions no longer exist.
The markets are different.
The mechanisms, the advancement of the economy itself is different.
Now, what are people going to see in this right now?
You mentioned bananas.
Bananas don't wait.
Bananas get ripe.
And if those bananas can't be unloaded, because bananas are picked bright green, and they have these special kind of these big water-filled tubs and stuff, they ship these bananas, those bananas don't wait.
And so what you're going to see is immediate price spikes on perishables and agriculture products.
You're going to see it like within weeks, the same way that when there's a hurricane in Houston, Texas sees an immediate increase in the price of gas because you've interrupted the supply.
So people are going to see this, you know, immediately, and they're going to be hearing something that maybe they don't understand.
CNN, day 31 of the longshoreman strike.
And by the way, Taft Hartley, that's where the president's supposed to say, hey, I'll send a mediator in to get you guys talking because you don't want us to go to Taft Hartley.
And that's the whole mechanism.
If they go to Taft Hartley, this election is over with, Tom.
Correct.
If they go to the force site right now, you can do this year two.
You can do this year three.
You cannot do this 40 days out in a reelection time while Kamala is getting the kind of rating that she's getting.
You cannot be doing something like that.
Let me get to the next story.
I want to see what you're going to be saying about this.
Tim Waltz is nervous about upcoming VP debate.
Okay, this is a story that came out.
Waltz is reportedly nervous about the upcoming debate against JD Vance, telling friends he's worried he will let Kamala Harris down.
Waltz has admitted to Harris that he's a bad debater and has brought in Pete Buticic to play Vance in mock debate sessions.
Budicic and a frequent Fox News guest helps Waltz prepare but won't be growing a beer to fully embody the Republican senator from Ohio.
Vance, a Yale graduate with sharp debating skills, is being prepped by Representative Tom Emmer, who would describe Waltz as like Gavin Newsom in a flannel shirt and aims to expose Waltz.
Minnesota is a nice persona as a fraud.
Emmer has spent the last month studying Waltz's debates and said, if I do my job, JD is going to expose him.
The goal is to make Waltz look like an out-of-touch liberal vouching for another liberal.
What do you think is going to happen tonight with the debate?
I think it is going to be probably a demolition destruction.
That's what I would call it.
But I think that that may matter very little because one of the things we learned even from watching the Republican primary debates last year, certainly I learned, is that it's not what happens on the debate stage that matters so much as the media's distillation of them.
At a presidential level debate between the two major candidates, it's a little different because you have just a significant number of people who are actually watching the debate, who are able to form their own judgments.
But for any other debate, other than the two lead presidential candidates facing off, whether it's a primary debate, whether I think it's probably going to be similarly true for the vice presidential debate, most people aren't going to watch the whole thing or even half of it.
What they're going to do is they're going to read the media's distillation of it afterwards.
And that was one of my biggest learnings from last year is, you probably, I don't know if you remember this last year, but you could pick up the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, and then you could have actually watched the debate.
And it was like there was two different events going on.
If you actually the person who watched both, you would wonder what debate they were watching.
So I think that what you're going to see is probably just, I mean, just based on obvious factors, I know JD, but just from watching, even if I didn't, just watching both candidates here for vice president face off, I think that there is a massive disparity.
It'd be like the equivalent in UFC before they had the weight classes.
You know, you got to have the weight classes so you have people of like natural capability going against each other.
Otherwise, it's not very fun to watch.
I think that's what it'll look like tonight, but it doesn't matter as much because the media's distillation of it will be what the media wants to make the distillation of it.
And that's what more people are going to see than the debate itself.
I would tend to agree.
Oh, sorry.
I think you hit on something there.
Look at the presidential debate.
We had all these polls, and these are opinion polls of who won the debate.
But what the real important thing was, what was happening to the undecided voters that were self-identified with the major parties and the ones that were identified as independents.
And what did Reuters find out and others find out when they conduct focus groups?
Guess what?
People broke for Trump on the economic issues.
So while all this banter was going on about the opinion polls, oh, you know, 58% said Kamala won the debate.
In fact, there were independent voters that actually were moved by the debate.
And so the point of it, now, when you get to a VP debate, you're absolutely correct.
What is it?
This is going to be in the far left mainstream media another kind of little mini RNC.
They're going to be talking about it endlessly for 72 hours, and there's going to be like certain enthusiasm that's going to come in the form of hyper-criticism advance.
That's what you're going to see of what it's going to feel like.
But at the end of the day, the important people are what in the distillation that people will see.
What are they going to be really caring about?
And what do they really want to know about?
Because it's those undecided and independent voters that's what are the keys to what comes out of this.
Just a question for Beg.
I would typically say I agree with you that the VP debate is almost irrelevant.
I mean, who was the MVP of the last VP debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence?
It was the freaking fly on Mike Pence's head.
So like, you don't remember anything that they argued about other than her.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
I'm talking about it.
I'm speaking.
I'm talking, which reminds me of my third grade teacher and just gives me PTSD.
But however, this potentially might be the last debate of the election season.
Trump has basically said he's not going to come out and debate Kamala.
I think it's scheduled, agreed upon October 23rd, which is in three weeks.
But I think Trump is not doing this debate.
Do you think Trump is making a mistake not doing another debate with Kamala?
I think it depends.
I mean, with the dynamics of this race, you know, they change week to week.
I personally think one of the formats that's been used in every other prior presidential cycle other than 2020 with COVID was actually the town hall format.
Okay, so the first debate is a straight-on debate like the one that Trump and Kamala and Trump and Biden already had.
But the second debate traditionally has been Trump did this with Hillary Clinton.
There's actual real human beings, real citizens, real Americans who themselves ask the questions of the candidate.
And that format's excellent because it reduces media bias.
There's some media bias.
Of course, they can hand-select the questions.
The moderators can cut in.
But in general, it becomes harder to stack the debate when you're hearing from real Americans directly of the candidate.
I think Donald Trump shines in that setting.
I think Kamala Harris does not.
So my view is, and Trump is a smart guy.
He knows how to play the cards.
And so my view is if there is another debate, it should be a town hall-style debate.
We're not making this up.
It's always been done this way.
This is the tradition for every presidential election other than the one that occurred during COVID in 2020, where they didn't do the town hall format.
Bring that back.
And I think that that will be a great format both for the country, but also for Donald Trump.
And so we still got another four or five weeks before this thing plays out, right?
So let's just see how things unfold.
I fully agree that they would need something like that, but it's trending the wrong way.
Now, the last two debates, there's no audience.
You can't even speak over each other.
So he's crushing at the debate, speaking over people with Nikki, with Ron, DeSantis.
Like, there's a dynamic there.
You need that with no one.
We got to see that this time around.
We got to see an audience.
We got to see live questions from usually the way they do it.
Look at these old presidential debates.
You actually have people sitting on the stage.
You're going to pull that up with Trump and Hillary.
You could see that second one.
There's people sitting on the stage.
I think that that is a pretty good format because it gives people a sense for how they interact with human beings, not just with these fake moderators.
But I think with Trump and Trump is just a master at that with using, you know, with the crowd we talked about earlier, Pat, about small groups.
Big group.
He's a showman, but he's a New Yorker and he kicks ass.
It's because of him that they stopped doing all of that.
And there's good luck trying to have NBC or CNN try to have another one of these ever again.
That's what they're favorite.
And our side has to agree, has to agree, Vivek, that no, no, no audience.
She can't have this.
There's no, like all the rules are set up to help.
the left.
And I mean, when 98% of the media is mainstream is left, we're at a disadvantage.
I think there's a really good point here because whether you like it or not, there is a key moment in Bill Clinton's candidacy where he approached the woman talking about the economy.
It was huge.
It was huge.
That was a huge moment where he walked right out to her and just really, you could feel the vibe that was there, like I feel you, and his charisma that he was projecting at that with a person.
And we all saw it from at home.
And debates can be spicy, too.
We were at a debate earlier this year.
One of the candidates, man, went after the leader of the party, correctly so.
And went after, and then went after the broadcaster that had been so manipulative in the past.
So there's also, I think, opportunities to get a little bit spicy and call people out who need to be called out.
Sure.
Sure.
I think there is.
So I think that that's a great format both for the country and, in my opinion, for Republicans and for Donald Trump.
But, you know, let's stay tuned.
Let's stay tuned.
You got a couple of these, a couple of examples from that in the past.
And I think that that's great.
I think that's great.
Let's see what happens tonight.
The dynamics of this race are going to change.
You mark my words, at least three or four more times between now and election day.
I mean, this October is going to feel like the equivalent of a year between now and the election.
And so I think there's a lot yet still to unfold.
Kevin McCarthy said, it's going to feel like it's Hillary said something too.
Hillary's like, oh, something's coming in October, like warning us about something on October 1st.
Let's read that.
Let's read that.
So let's go through that.
So Hillary Clinton, something will happen in October to distort and pervert Kamala Harris.
She's not even talking about anybody else.
She says, I anticipate there will be a full court press in October.
The digital airways will be filled.
And why does it matter?
Because the press, this is pro-Trump anyway.
Interesting.
Really?
Oftentimes, stories are put on digitally, then are picked up by, let's say, Fox and others.
And then those stories are stories.
So the mainstream press reports on them.
And so that the story then takes on a life of its own.
Is this the one, Rob?
Yes.
Of what she says?
If you want to play this clip, I mean, her voice is amazing.
Go ahead and play this if you can.
And I anticipate that, you know, something will happen in October, as it always does.
You know, the Russians, as I said earlier, are very active in this election.
We know the Iranians are active as well.
Chinese uses TikTok, or they certainly did against Biden and for Trump.
I think they're a little less pro Trump right now.
So you look at where people get their information, and they get their information largely from social media.
And so the campaign is doing the best job it can to combat that, combat both domestic and foreign false disinformation.
But I anticipate there will be a full court press in October.
The digital airwaves will be filled.
And why does that matter?
Because the press that is pro-Trump anyway, oftentimes stories are put on digitally that then are picked up by, let's say, at Fox and others.
And then those stories are stories.
So the mainstream press reports on them.
Actually believes that story ends up on a life of its own.
Well, it's the class.
There will be concerted efforts to distort and pervert.
Vivek, who is she talking to?
I think mostly to herself.
No, what I'm asking is that.
They might have had a no-audience rule there, too.
Who believes that?
And who was she actually talking to about this?
So look, I think there is an echo chamber on the left that is increasingly in need of believing the things that they, many more of them used to believe back in 2016.
But increasingly, a number of other Democrats have been disabused of this mythology, right?
You see a lot of the people moving from the center or the center left now even to come around to vote for Trump in this cycle.
So I think there's a group of people who are kind of miss the solidarity they used to have in 2016.
The idea of that Russia disinformation hoax, right?
The Trump-Russia collusion hoax, that was something that people had a big attachment to.
I even know professors, right, from MIT, other places who I knew back then, who for them, they weren't even terribly political, but this idea that somebody else is really colluding, we know something's wrong in the country, the idea of having a boogeyman to pin that on, that was really valuable.
It filled kind of a vacuum in their heart and in their soul.
And so when they were disabused of that notion, or most people were, there's a small group of them that still need somebody to be giving them that sense of the feeling they had back in 2016.
That's the increasingly shrinking group that she's talking to right there.
The interesting thing was even Hillary Clinton might need some of that for herself.
She still hasn't given, I mean, how many times would she go in an interview where she can't talk about Russia and disinformation from Russia when it was her own campaign?
So let's actually just take a pause on this.
Every time we've heard the message about Russian disinformation, let's do the pattern recognition.
I'll do 2016 and then I'll do 2020 and then let's come to 2024.
2016, the alleged Russian disinformation and interference that supposedly was supposed to propel Donald Trump to the White House was actually domestic interference from the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton's opposition research, that was laundered through the narrative of Russian intervention.
So the real Russian disinformation was created by domestic disinformation laundered through Russia.
That's 2016.
Maybe that's a one-time incident.
Well, then you get to 2020.
Now you have the Hunter Biden laptop story, which contains probably the most damning information about a major presidential candidate ahead of an election that we've seen in modern American history.
And that was systematically suppressed because, again, they laundered it through the narrative of Russian disinformation.
So when she's talking about the idea of somehow Russian disinformation coming up in 2024, it makes me wonder what might be domestically cooking because that's exactly what they've done each of the last two election cycles.
And I think that in some ways, is she lying about it?
Is she some sort of evil genius?
I think it's actually none of the above.
She, in some ways, is the same part of that psychologically needy group to believe in this grand delusion to fulfill some vacuum in their heart that they didn't quite have fulfilled back in 2016.
I think it's a psychological deficit rather than it is some sort of masterminding plan, even on her own part.
That's what I would say.
You go back to LBJ, and LBJ said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country.
It was very famous.
And he was talking about Vietnam and things were happening.
And they used to have the mainstream media as their lapdog.
And absolutely.
And so now what I hear John Kerry saying, what I hear Hillary Clinton saying here is they are frustrated in their inability to control narratives and free speech that are coming from other corners.
But then as you correctly say, they've had these convenient methodologies to rinse or launder, you know, these scandalous things and actually use social media to help do so when the mainstream media didn't go far enough for them.
And I think that I agree with you on the psychologically needy thing.
I think there is a lot of denial on, we can't believe we lost to this guy in 2016.
You saw Deepodesta when he came down to the ballroom and talked to the sobbing mob of her supporters.
Remember that?
And I believe that they suffered the equivalent of a political nervous breakdown that night that they've never really emotionally recovered from.
Exactly.
Because we lost to this guy.
We lost to this guy.
Yeah, but the part when she says we know mainstream media is mainly on the right.
Come on.
That is her.
She says that.
Is that the gaslighting to just try to at the highest level?
Exactly.
That's her just.
Who believes it, though?
It's either denial or left believes it.
All of them.
I had a Manek yesterday with a guy that was self-proclaimed TDS.
He's like, I don't know what the, and he couldn't get out of it.
And he's like, listen, even though what you're telling, I'm not even joking back.
This guy paid for 30 minutes to tell me.
He's like, since then, and he's like, it's just embedded.
They believe everything that she's saying, Pat.
That's their golden goose.
They still adore this woman.
They would have her as president in a heartbeat, but she's so unlikable every time she speaks.
And that's why I was being funny, Pat, and you nailed it.
The Clinton Global Initiative.
What is that?
That's not the Clinton Foundation.
What is their global initiative?
What is it?
I don't even know what the hell they're talking about.
The Clinton Global Initiative?
Yeah, what is she doing?
That is their.
That's a very serious initiative global.
That is their question.
About what?
People disappearing?
I'm so disappointed by your criticism of this initiative.
But if you had to.
It's basically like a roach motel for money.
Money goes in, but it doesn't go.
Got you.
Okay, perfect.
If you had to go to private jets.
If you had to.
That's my guess.
If I had to guess.
Don't say I wouldn't choose either.
This is a binary option.
Just hypothetical.
Complete game here.
Had to vote for Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris to be the president of the United States now.
Who would you actually vote for?
Now.
If you're asking the question, who's more qualified?
It's not even close.
If you're asking who's more qualified for the left.
You're saying Hillary's more qualified.
It's not even close.
Kamala is not qualified like Hillary was qualified to run, but she is that hated.
To have that likability resident.
To have that kind of a resume.
Your husband was a former liked Democratic president for two terms.
And how do you screw that up?
How do you go from having a president that a lot of people on the left say Bill Clinton's my favorite president?
You'll hear people saying a regular.
What's interesting is people should go back and listen to, for example, Bill Clinton's like 1992 campaign speeches and acceptance speeches, even for the nomination and his inauguration.
A lot of what he would say back then is exactly what a lot of Republicans would and do support today.
Welfare.
Bill Clinton was, I mean, I disagree with him on a lot of things.
Don't like the guy.
Obviously, you know, the deep dishonesty and a lot of it I rejected.
But as a matter of the policies that he advanced, even in the mid-90s, a lot of them actually are more pro-conservative by today's standards than they were even viewed as being back then.
Welfare reform is a good one.
And I would love to see, this gets back to that point about where I want to see the future direction of the Republican Party go is we've got to go the direction of dismantling this nanny state.
And I think that in many ways, what's happened over the last several years is the Republicans have imported many ideas from Democrats into the Republican Party itself.
That was the ultimate coup, actually, in the last 30 years was not just the Democratic Party wielding more power over the mainstream media.
It's that many of those ideas have become blasphemy with the Democrats used to be against.
They're now blasphemy even amongst Republicans, like adding work requirements to welfare, adding, you know, let's just say dismantling the nanny state of the welfare state, Medicaid.
You could think about the regulatory state.
And so what I want to see is a revival of a Republican Party that goes back and takes aim at that regulatory state.
And the funny thing is, if you go all the way back to Bill Clinton's speeches in the 90s, you put them in today's language, you would think it was a hardline conservative making those same statements, which I just think is pretty interesting, Patrick.
I don't disagree.
This is why a lot of people forget about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Set that aside.
He was actually not a bad president.
He was a guy that in many, him and Newt were able to sit across from the table and negotiate and get some things done, right?
And this is what year was Newt's man of the year, Time magazine?
This is when they were men before they became persons.
This is 94.
I think he was the man of the year.
It was in the Clinton midterm.
They were able to make things work.
95.
Vivek, on this topic of sort of what the Republican Party stands at this point, you wrote, I read it all the time, thanks to Pat, Wall Street Journal.
You wrote an article maybe a week ago, two weeks ago.
Yeah, that was an excerpt from the book, actually.
It was awesome.
Thank you.
And the premise was the America First divide.
Should the Republicans be more protectionist or libertarian in nature?
Walk me through that and the different distinguishments between those two options.
Sure.
So let me first say America First rejects the neoconservative neoliberal vision of yesterday.
Foreign interventionism rejects the idea that somehow we're going to make China a democracy by trading with them.
No, that has failed.
But for the America First future, what's the goal?
The protectionist camp, and I think most of the prominent voices in America First right now, most of them fit this description, would say that we need to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition.
We need to protect American workers and their wages from the effects of immigration.
That that's protecting the economic conditions of the worker.
And we should also make sure that we use the regulatory state.
We use regulations in the Department of Transportation or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the antitrust laws of the FTC.
That we should use the regulatory state to advance conservative goals rather than liberal goals.
The alternative view is the national libertarian perspective.
That's where I fall, which is to say that, no, we don't want to use the regulatory state to advance our goals.
We want to get in there and shut down the regulatory state.
You want to talk about trade?
Well, if we're serious about declaring economic independence from China, and I am in critical sectors like the U.S. military, which depends on China, our pharmaceutical supply chain, critical sectors, if we're really serious about reducing our economic dependence on China, that requires, yes, onshoring to the United States.
But if we're really serious about it, it also requires near shoring to allies, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Philippines, and so on.
But if you're truly in the protectionist camp, you'd say, no, no, no, let's trade with everybody, because that means American workers or American manufacturers aren't going to get quite the same high price.
When it comes to immigration, my view is we need an immigration system that selects for your readiness to assimilate, your ability to speak English, your ability to know something about the country through civics exams, your love of the country, your ability to make contributions.
That's one view of immigration.
We'd probably have less immigration in the near term as a result of that, but it's because it's based on the principle of what stands for pro-American values.
But the protectionist view is I don't care about any of that.
I just think if a company can hire somebody to do a job for $20 an hour versus being able to hire two immigrants to do the same job for $10 an hour, we should stop those immigrants from coming in.
So the American company has to hire the American worker.
The problem is that results in fewer workers being hired.
So the reason I stand for the national libertarian perspective, which is to say that I don't want to replace the left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.
I want to dismantle the nanny state.
That I believe should be the future of America First.
The reason I say that is not because that's a more important goal than helping American workers or manufacturers.
That is the way to help American workers and manufacturers for the long run.
And I do see a little bit of a deficit, a little bit of a gap in willingness of leaders to step up and adopt those positions, which is why I've made that a big part of my book, which is why I'm actually going to be, I expect to fill that void in a bigger way, because I think that that's the debate we need to be having.
Now, here's one thing I'll say about Donald Trump is Donald Trump does a good job of melding both of these positions.
And for a leader at the right time, he's the right leader for the right moment.
You need to build a coalition.
You need to be able to draw from the best ideas from all camps.
And so he's done a good job.
And I think we'll continue to for the next four years do a good job of bridging this divide.
But I think after Donald Trump, hopefully a successful second term that we're all rooting for, after that, I think that this rift is going to become pretty unavoidable.
And I think the rift between the protectionist version of the America First Right and the libertarian-leaning version of the America First Right is going to have to be the choice.
And I think that's where the future direction of the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the America First Movement goes from there.
Vivek, let me ask you this.
What is the difference between putting a tariff on a country versus a company?
Yeah, so that's a good question.
Well, first thing is, let's talk about it on the level of the country.
These are two different situations where one is you just say, hey, I want to protect American manufacturers, so I'm just going to slap a tariff on your company's products coming into ours versus saying that your country is already applying a higher tariff to our companies than we are to yours, and we're going to play on an even playing field.
Those are two different objectives.
So on the first, where we're just willy-nilly just saying, yeah, I want to protect American manufacturers and they shouldn't have to compete.
You know, I'm just going to slap a tariff.
That doesn't work because the other country is just going to raise the tariff to the same place.
But, and I think this is where you got to listen to Donald Trump very carefully.
What he's saying is we've got to play on an even playing field, which I agree with, which is to say if another country is already applying those tariffs at a higher rate to us directly or indirectly, right?
There's many ways to apply a tariff, the regulation or otherwise.
Those are forms of tariffs too.
If you apply regulation selectively to foreign companies, that's effectively a tariff.
So if you have other countries that are already treating us unevenly, then say, no, no, no, we got to compete on a level playing field.
That to me is fair game.
And that's a distinction where you have others who would be in the protectionist right that would say it's not just about the even playing field.
We want to create an uneven playing field in our direction.
That doesn't work because everyone loses.
But right now, are we competing on an even playing field with other countries?
We're not.
And that's where you got to use either the threat of tariffs at least to get them to be able to abide by the same rules and response.
So let's go with this.
Let's go a little bit deeper with this.
So let's just say I am Ford and I'm trying to get my workers working here, but I'm dealing with the union.
It's always a fight.
And for me to build the same car to sell it for $24,000, I can make that same car in Mexico for $7,800 instead of making it in Detroit for $13,900, right?
And if I build it in Detroit for $13,900, that means that $21,000 car, I would have to sell for whatever, additional $5.50, $27,000, right?
If you and I were part of the board, okay?
And the CEO comes, you're not the chairman.
We're board members.
There's nine of us and the chairman comes up and says, guys, our CFO just gave us the numbers.
We produce these cars in New York.
We're paying this much.
We produce these cars in Mexico.
We're saving $6,000.
We need to consider building something elsewhere so we can somehow, someway, avoid the constant battles we're having with the union.
What is the right move there?
So the job of a company's board of directors is always to maximize shareholder value, period, right?
You operate within the laws as you're given.
You may not like the laws, but within the constraints of those laws, how do you maximize the equity value of the company?
That's the job of the board, period.
I don't compromise on that.
It was a core premise of even the company I founded, Strive, to compete with other asset managers that have taken these other ESG philosophies.
However, let's talk about policy.
Why is it more expensive to actually produce here in the United States?
We don't often enough ask that question.
Here's a big part of the reason why the regulatory state in the United States is far more cumbersome for American companies than it is in other countries where those companies are then choosing to set up instead.
Climate change, emissions caps.
Now, interestingly, they don't apply those in China.
Well, that's why a lot of U.S. businesses have gone to places like China to say they don't have to track their emissions there or limit them in the way that they do here in the United States.
So that brings me back to the solution.
The right answer for American manufacturers and American workers is to dismantle that excess regulatory state.
But the irony, Patrick, is a lot of people on the right, I see them making this mistake, and it hurts me when I watch this.
It's like a slow-motion train wreck you kind of see happening in plain sight.
You got to stop it.
is to say that, oh, no, no, no, we need to actually make sure that they're not allowed to move.
But at the same time, we're also going to favor greater regulations right here at home.
Take the disaster in East Palestine.
There's two ways to go, right?
One is to say that, oh, we need to apply greater restrictions on what companies can and cannot do.
We have to regulate them even more to make sure those disasters don't happen.
Well, that further drives up the cost in the United States, which further increases the demand to go to other countries, versus the right answer is to say is a lot of those regulations were flawed in the first place.
We need to actually let the market compete, embrace the fact that capitalism is not a bad word.
And I don't want to see capitalism become a bad word in the Republican Party or in the future direction of the America First Right.
I think America First and capitalism are deeply, not only deeply compatible, I think that they're part and parcel of the same great American story of what made America great the first time around.
And if we're being really frank, I do think that that is a subject of debate on the America First Right.
Some people will want limits on credit card interest rates.
Some people will want limits on what companies are or aren't able to do or to break up big companies just because they're too big.
Versus the right answer is actually let the market solve the problems as long as we're competing on an even playing field.
As long as we're not dependent on China for our own military or our own pharmaceutical supply chain, which is crazy for our national security, we have an immigration system that's not just about an economic zone, but people who share our civic values.
That's what I call the national libertarian future.
And I think that's something that I feel a sense of obligation to really fill a void in what I see in the future direction here.
That's where I think the country needs to go.
Listen, we will, none of us will always 100% agree on everything.
You said this right off the bat at the beginning of the podcast.
When he announced the tariffs, possibly the 200% on John Deere, are you someone that would say, I'm fully for that?
Or are you kind of like, ah, it's a little bit of a trendy- Well, here's the thing about President Trump is he is a master negotiator, right?
So he knows how to pull the different levers in order to be able to get people to the table and have a conversation.
So each person's got to lead in a manner that's most authentic to their own style.
I'd put this more in a stylistic category, okay?
The stylistic category I put in is to say that we're not talking about an important issue we need to be talking about.
Let's get people to the table and have a conversation.
Donald Trump's been the master of that.
Even in the first term, a lot of the tariffs that were threatened were never implemented, right?
They were a way of getting people to the table.
You know, talk about Mexico.
They're not keeping their obligations or have not for a long time about actually doing their part of the border crisis.
So you say, oh, if you don't take care of that, I'm going to slap a border tariff on you.
I think that's a fair discussion to be able to have as a lever of countries operating according to even playing field.
So here's where I land.
Even playing field, I'm in favor of it.
At that stage, capitalism works and we should embrace it.
But it's not capitalism when other countries are using state-directed mercantilism and we're pretending it's capitalism where they're taking advantage of us.
No, we've got to get our other trading partners to operate on the same target.
Those are two different things.
Those are two different things.
I totally get the tariffs being put on.
I want to say today, Morgan Stanley came up.
Rob, type in Morgan Stanley says Trump's tariffs could cost American people 70,000 jobs a day.
I think I saw that 70,000 jobs a day.
Yes, two hours ago.
Okay, there you go.
Morgan Stanley warns that 70,000 U.S. jobs.
Okay, so this is different when they're talking about the fear of, I haven't read this article.
I just saw the title.
Can you go lower a little bit to see what it says?
So 70, Morgan Stanley Economics and Prominent Road Tariffs Hike proposal would drive up inflation and pose a hit to economic growth.
Okay, if the proposed tariffs are fully implemented, we estimate that the near-term acceleration, the inflation or drag in GDP.
Morgan Stanley said the bank's economists and strategists model the scenario in which Donald Trump wins the White House and quickly moves to implement a 10% blanket tariff in global imports and a 60% tariff on inbound shipments from China.
That would mean tariffs as high as 25 to 35%, about half of the U.S. industry.
The inflationary effect happens more quickly.
Judging from history, Morgan Stanley Economist said the model indicates 0.9% bump in PC Bryce.
Okay.
So your thoughts on this on the streets.
Yeah, so first of all, let's take the headline.
I find it interesting they call them the Trump tariffs when Biden chose to leave them in place.
Bingo.
So it's really interesting how they're going to, that shows you the tilt right out the gate.
Okay.
You don't know the bias.
You could talk about hit from tariffs.
You could at least have a reasonable debate about that, and that's a separate policy debate.
But I knew the slant right away.
When Biden has left those same tariffs in place and you're still calling them Trump tariffs, that tells me what that entire story and the so-called economic modeling is really about.
Yeah, see, I don't have a problem with that.
I think you need to do that with countries because I do think a lot of these countries have been, you know, negotiating in a way of like the way you would draw it up is the following.
Okay, we're buying this much from you.
It's generating you this much revenue.
What are you buying from us?
Right.
How are you buying from us?
Is it just me buying from you?
If that's the case and I'm not getting anything, like that was a negotiation with China, which the arbitrage was influenced.
It's got to be an even playing field.
They're also subsidizing their own companies from their own side.
That's not capitalism either.
And they're especially doing it to increase U.S. dependence on them in critical areas to our national security.
So here's my rule.
The end state is if everybody's playing on an even playing field, we get rid of our regulatory state to be able to actually make our companies most competitive here, then great.
Trade is a great answer.
But if we're not playing on an even playing field, which is the status quo, and then our regulatory state makes it even worse because we're applying constraints to our own companies that don't apply in other countries, that's a one-two double whammy.
So Republicans, I think some people may actually go the wrong direction to say, okay, then we need more protectionism and we need more regulations to make up for it.
No, no, no, no, that's the wrong direction.
It's actually the exact opposite direction.
We need to force the other countries to play by the same set of rules.
That's where a good negotiator like Donald Trump makes a difference.
And then if we're playing by the same set of rules and our environment's less competitive, let's look ourselves in the mirror and say, why are we less competitive?
A lot of that's the regulatory state.
Slash and burn that.
That's my three-word slogan for the future of the conservative movement.
To summarize it in one nutshell, shut it down.
When it comes to the nanny state, the regulatory state, shut it down.
That's what makes the United States competitive.
And when everybody's, you know, when you're talking about everybody's smokescreen is gone and clothes are laid bare, at the end of the day, I believe the United States of America is and should be the most competitive place to make a lot of things in the world.
But if we're not, that's the fault of our own government, and we need to fix that by dismantling that regulation.
I agree.
There's a lot of that that's got to be done.
Hopefully it will be in this next election if he ends up winning.
Israel Irsa killed their leader in Beirut, a pivotal figure who led the group for over 30 years.
The strike also killed senior Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki and Iranian Brigadier General Abbas Nilforshan of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
This marks the culmination of Israel's intense two-week campaign targeting Hezbollah and has even seen a major blow to both the group and its backer, Iran.
Israel's ministry warned civilians to evacuate before launching the airstrike, which flattened part of Beirut's southern suburbs.
Nasrallah's death today is a strategic setback for Hezbollah, Iran, and their allied militias, with President Biden calling it a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese.
Nasrullah was overseeing Hezbollah's growth into a powerful militia and its integration into Lebanon's political system.
What is your thoughts on this story here, Rebecca?
This is a big deal for sure.
And, you know, I think that for all of the criticisms of killing civilians in Gaza or whatever, I think that this is an example of doing what you want to do if you want to actually defeat your enemies, go after in a targeted way after the leadership.
So I think this is a big deal.
I think that a lot of people were skeptical that BB was going to be able to, and the IDF was able to pull this off.
They did.
And, you know, I think that it also is a good example of the fact that Israel is able to get this job done, right?
People say, Israel is able to get the job done, or do people actually need other countries to get involved in this conflict?
I think that this is a good example of Israel looking at the leadership of their opposition, able to get that job done.
And so I think this was definitely a big milestone in the war.
Tom?
I think it's huge.
And I think what it shows is that everybody who doubted Israel's ability to take care of herself needs to kind of take a step back.
This is Israeli military, Israeli intelligence, and them tracking where they were from the pagers and the radios that they disrupted their communication because they weren't using smartphones because smartphones are hyper-targeted.
So they went back to old school stuff.
They infiltrated a supply line, got stuff into their hands, caused those to detonate it, and then had incredible intelligence on here to make a precision strike.
And I've seen, you know, I want to see everything calm down and I want to see, you know, the people that are over there, the citizens that are, you know, so horribly affected, be able to, you know, live at peace.
But I'll tell you, over the last two weeks, I've seen nothing but what I think is strategic wins for Israel, the way they're handling this and the way they're going after this.
I mean, what is more targeted than the pager in the pocket of your target?
Vinny.
Yeah, I mean, I just think, you know, the tactics of this, from what you just said, Tom, think about, so they killed Nasrallah and Beirut.
They managed to plant the mini bombs in the pages in Walkie talkies of hundreds of Hezbollah members.
They managed to kill Hanieh while he was in Iran.
They killed Hussain Soleimani in Iraq.
And I just, with all this intelligence and all this tactical stuff, it brings me back to the October 7th and how, if you have all that intelligence, how did you not see that coming?
You know what I mean?
It kind of begs that question where you're like, that's like, by the way, this isn't a rinky-dig mission, what they're doing.
They're going everywhere and they're knocking out people with precision with the pages and everything.
So it's just, I don't know.
Vinny, I mean, Adam.
So, look, one thing is just becoming clear and clear and clear in the Israel situation.
Because sometimes you have to take a sort of pan out from what happened October 7th and what they've been doing in Gaza.
It's becoming clear and clear to me that Israel is basically doing one thing and one thing only, fighting Iran's web of terror that is basically set up all across the Middle East.
Whether it's the Houthis that are going on, you see what's going on in the seas out there, whether it's Hezbollah in Lebanon, whether it's Hamas, whether it's militias all across Syria, Iraq, all over Afghanistan.
I mean, Iran has their, you know, people say the head of the snake.
They like to use the term an octopus because it has tentacles everywhere.
And Israel, here's what I know about them.
If they go too hard in Gaza, you guys went too hard.
Oh my God, if they go too surgical in Lebanon, well, that's not fair.
I mean, you went, you're very specific strikes.
You just took them.
They're going to be criticized regardless.
So if you look at Bibi, and you know what Bibi's approval rating is in Israel right now?
You know what it is?
It's hovering in the mid to low 30s.
It's not like they're a big fan of what's going on with him because they want basically their people back who are basically being held ransom is that he's saying, listen, I'm going to get criticized no matter what I do.
So let me just eliminate the terror groups that are basically an existential threat to our country.
And we'll apologize later, or maybe never, because these people have a clear motive of destroying Israel.
And if you just look at who is aligned with Iran, where's Iran getting her funding?
China, Russia.
They're doing weapons supplies over there.
The U.S. has just moved what?
More military assets to the Mediterranean and to the Red Sea.
Hopefully this does not escalate even further.
But I'll circle back to one final point.
Where the hell is Joe Biden during all this?
You know, they said in the Bible, no man can serve two masters.
Joe Biden should have come out and said, we stand with our ally.
We're eliminating these threats.
Enough with Israel.
Just like I got a question for you.
I got a question.
You're typically, Rob, I found a speech.
I just send it to you if you want to find that.
I text it to you.
Vivek, there's an element of division on the conservative side with the way things are being handled with Israel.
How are you processing that?
You know what I'm saying, right?
With some people like, well, you know, look at these guys.
How many bodies, how many children and women is enough?
And these are influencers that are going to vote for Trump, right?
What do you say to them when there's a split on their opinions and this issue?
Well, look, I think especially when it comes to foreign policy, I think it shows the modern Republican Party is definitely a big tent coalition for sure.
And I think that that's one of the things, even I talked about protectionism versus libertarianism.
I would say the same thing with respect to foreign intervention versus conservatism on foreign on staying focused on domestic affairs.
Donald Trump does a good job of bridging that divide.
I'll say this is that I'll tell you where I land.
My view is that it is the job of every country to look after its own best national interest.
And I think it would be hypocritical to say, on one hand, that we believe that America First should pursue America First policies, but that somehow Israel cannot pursue Israel First policies, right?
I think that Israel has, as a sovereign nation, the right and responsibility to defend itself to the fullest, just like we would if we had an attack on our own homeland of the same kind.
So I think that it's there's you could you could argue hypocrisy is in a lot of different directions, but I think it's a, it would be hypocritical for us to say that we don't want the U.S. to intervene in foreign conflicts that don't directly affect the U.S., but we're going to be some sort of global arbiter of saying that here's what Israel can or cannot do.
I think Israel should have the latitude to determine for itself what is the right way to defend itself.
Now, there's a lot of debate in Israel about this.
Keep in mind, you pointed out Bibi's approval rating.
There is a healthy level of debate.
You've had members of his cabinet, including his war cabinet, resign over disagreements, right?
Gantz was the most prominent, certainly.
And so I think that that is a debate that Israel gets to have for itself without the U.S. or any other country in the West tying its hands or tilting its scales.
And I think that that's when a nation makes the best decisions for itself, where back to your point, no man can serve two masters.
Well, I think that applies to the leader of a nation.
The master is the citizens of your nation, not some sort of international council determining what you can or cannot do.
And so that's where I land on it, Patrick, is you could have, you could say that, okay, I don't want the U.S. troops to be used in this conflict.
I think that that is a principled position to say that we'll diplomatically support Israel.
We don't think our troops should be involved here.
But you can't at the same time say that, okay, we don't want our troops involved here, but then we're also going to pass moral judgment about what they're doing isn't or isn't or isn't the right way from a U.S. perspective.
Because the principal perspective from an America first standpoint is Israel has the right to defend itself just like the United States would and will, God forbid, something like that happening here on our own.
So here's a follow-up.
Here's a follow-up to that, which you'll hear on the, even in Twitter, people asking it.
They'll say, hey, you know, how many people died because of Helena?
What's the number?
Rob, what's the most recent number that we have?
Almost 600?
It's up there.
Is it up there?
I saw 600.
I saw 2,000.
I saw 1,000.
It's a big number.
It's a travesty what happened that went up there with the hurricane that took place.
No, it's a lot more than that.
I think it's all just Carolina, right?
And people are posting stuff and they're saying, hey, if you're in Carolina, if you're in Florida, if you're in Atlanta, if you need help, you know, unfortunately, you're not Ukraine, you're not Israel.
You're not going to get the money.
Because Ukraine and Israel will get the money before we do it.
What do you say to folks who, you know, their challenge is sometimes the money is sent to people overseas more than Americans who need it today.
Well, look, I think the first and sole moral duty of a nation's leaders is to its own citizens.
So I think that that's, if I made, deeply consistent with what I just said before, which is it's not our job to be the person passing judgment that Israel is doing too much or too little.
I think Israel gets to make that decision for itself.
On the flip side, our own nation, you think about even the amount of money we've sent to Ukraine, for example, I mean, there you're talking about like mass numbers, like $200 billion in the last couple of years.
I think that that is unconscionable for Americans who are struggling right here at home.
There are some questions that have been raised, and I'm not going to speculate on this until we get exact answers, but even in terms of divisions of the U.S. military or whatnot that have historically been used or divisions of U.S. resources that have been used to rescue people here in the United States, we talked about the 82nd Airborne.
There's other examples.
Why aren't they able to actually come to the rescue here in North Carolina?
We got two issues.
One is an American government that is failing to serve its own Americans here at home.
And part of that reason is, are we overstretched, too thin, engaging in parts of the world?
I think Ukraine is the foremost example of this where we otherwise shouldn't be.
Yes, I think that that's a reality.
So I think that those are legitimate concerns.
But I come back like I did before to first principles.
The first and sole moral duty of U.S. elected leaders is to U.S. citizens.
Again, the chapter in the book is called Nationalism Isn't a Bad Word.
Well, I think that that's a principle that shouldn't be controversial.
And the fact that that is controversial today, Patrick, tells you, I think, a lot of what's wrong in our country.
Yeah.
I was going to say, because you were talking about deploying troops.
We're sending a couple more thousand recently.
This came out yesterday on AP.
And this additional forces would raise the total number of troops in the region as many as 43,000.
I mean, Israel doesn't seem like it's slowing down.
This thing is escalating.
It's going to get uglier and uglier.
I mean, they're doing these attacks, but, and I guess I said this to Pat, to Rob, Pat, the PM of Jordan expressed the Arab world is ready for peace, but they're saying that Israel is refusing it.
He's saying, like, listen, we're asking for it.
We want it, but they're not even coming to the table for it.
But my thing is this, Vivek, and being a military member just like Pat, when you're deploying all these people, it's not just as a deterrent.
This is getting to escalate to the point where it's only a matter of time because I just read it right here as well, Vivek, that we have, you know, F-15s, F-16s, the Jets and everything like that.
I mean, with people in these jets.
So if something happens, you guys just look at these stats.
I mean, it's striking to me.
There's over 100,000 U.S. troops in Western Europe right now.
I mean, why the heck are they over there?
I'm actually having a debate with John Bolton later this week.
I forget which day, at the Virginia Military Institute, we're exactly talking about these questions.
They invited me.
They said, you want to debate you?
Would you be open to having a debate with Bolton?
I said, absolutely.
My own view is, again, the job of a nation's leaders foremost is to protect its own homeland and its own citizens.
And we're clearly failing to do that.
But I also believe in open dialogue.
So let's get the best views for the other side on the table and have at it.
But there's 100,000 troops in Western Europe.
You want to go back when Dwight D. Eisenhower was talking about whether there was going to be U.S. troops 10 years later?
This is like in 1951.
He said, if there's U.S. troops still in Europe 10 years later, that is an example.
That is the best evidence we'll have that NATO has failed in its mission.
Well, guess what?
Now we're in the year 2024 and we've got 100,000 U.S. troops in Western Europe.
So I do think that this is a philosophical divide in the country.
It's not right versus left.
It exists within both the right and within the left of what is the job of the U.S. military to engage in conflicts in other parts of the world.
And I come back to one principle: it is whether or not it advances clearly identifiable American interests or not.
Is that an isolationist position?
No, it's not.
Because I think there are clear examples of where it is in the U.S. interest for making sure that Americans aren't adversely impacted by, for example, loss of access to the semiconductor supply chain coming out of Taiwan.
You could go straight down the list.
But that should be the guiding principle, not to be some sort of global policeman, which I think that I'll call it out, whether it comes from the right, the left, from the nationalist right, from the liberalist right.
That's the first principle across the board: what advances U.S. interests?
The question becomes, the question becomes if that's ever going to happen.
And here's why I say that, because is it possible to win elections with what Eisenhower talked about, the military-industrial complex, knowing both sides need the money from the big guys that are lobbying God knows how much money that they make money, the more wars there is.
Like even with COVID, you know, the business model of a hospital is to make sure every bet is taken.
The business model of a hotel is to make sure every bet is taken.
The business model of a company that sells weapons is to have more wars.
You need customers.
You need people that are having issues for you to be able to sell more stuff.
If you don't, there's a problem there, right?
So is it even possible that that could be addressed?
And if yes, how?
Yeah.
So it's telling that even Eisenhower, he saved that for his farewell speech.
At that point, the farewell speeches are interesting.
You want to deliver them.
Because then you've got nothing to lose, right?
You've got nothing to lose.
And so, look, I think it's a major problem in this country.
Is it possible?
Yes, because I believe in America, right?
We're a country that fought a revolution, defeated the greatest empire in the world in 1776, but it's going to take that type of energy from we the people to say we're the ones who self-govern.
So I think it's possible, yes.
No, no, it's not.
It's the key question is how?
The question is, how do we do it?
Because this is the one part where, so there is you're running for office, okay?
So, hey, I got to find a way to get my poor people that are going to vote for me.
And we have to find an enemy.
Who's going to be our enemy?
Rich billionaires.
We're going to tax them on unrealized capital gains.
The average person is like, wow.
So what is on realized capital that was gained?
What is unreal?
But that's great.
That's more money for us.
Right.
Let's do that.
So there's stuff that you're going to say during a campaign that you're like, there's no way we're going to be able to do anything about that anyways.
But I got to say, because my party wants me to say it.
Then there's the stuff that you can actually truly change.
Do you really think this can change?
And if yes, how do you do it?
Which president is willing to put their life on the line to say we have to figure this out where we can't have these military-industrial complex continue with all the money you guys are making?
Look, I think it's going to take somebody who's independently wealthy, somebody who did not grow up within that system, right?
If you're a product of the system, then you're there to protect the system, right?
The system didn't advance you.
Somebody who grew up outside of the system, who has the willingness to take actual risk, and who has access to independent wealth to say that you're not dependent on that same system to be constrained in what you say.
And somebody who's in it, not necessarily to just win as the goal for itself, because winning an election isn't the ultimate goal.
Winning is winning for the country.
You could win on paper, but you've lost for the country.
So, I mean, it's one of the things that certainly compelled me to run for president as an outsider.
It's one of the reasons I'm supporting Donald Trump is I think that he's somebody that is independently wealthy, doesn't have to be doing what he's doing.
I think we need more people like that in American politics that aren't a product of that system.
Are there obstacles?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think there's many ways to sort of take the air out of the other side.
One is just through capture.
So I think one of the things you got to be alert to is making sure that you're not being captured at every step of the way.
What does it look like?
I think it starts with the ability to spend independently, the ability to be financially independent, and it starts with somebody who is obviously willing to lose.
And if you have somebody who's not taking real risk in the things they say, that means they're going to be captured.
But if you have somebody who's willing to stick to their convictions even when it's inconvenient, that's, I think, the best shot you're going to have, especially if they're financially independent.
This is going to be a tough enemy to go up against.
You got big pharma, you got military industrial complex, you got some of these guys that are going to be tough ones where one could sit there and say, well, you know, this may be that to do it, you have to risk more than just your job and re-election.
Because I understand not wanting to be re-elected.
And it's funny what you say is how he saved the speech.
You know, it's kind of like you worked for UPS for 40 years and on the last day say, listen, not going to lie, the benefits sucked.
My back hurts.
Okay, I don't appreciate this, but I'm out of here.
You guys do whatever you want to do with it now.
But let me read something to you that kind of has to do with you as somebody that you went to Yale and you went to Harvard.
And I think you went to Yale with JD Vance.
I think you guys have one with classmates, right?
So here's a story from Wall Street Journal.
Sorry, Vivek.
It says specifically Vivek there in the title.
No, it's sorry, Harvard.
Everyone wants to go to college in the South now.
Okay, let's see if there's any credibility here.
Or for the parents that still want to send their kids to Harvard, let's see if you have something else to say.
Northern student migration to southern schools has surged by 84% in two decades, a 30% jump from 2018 to 2022.
Schools like University of Alabama saw Northeastern student enrollment rise from less than 1% in 2002 to 11% in 2022 at the University of Mississippi.
Norton Easter freshman increased from 11 in 2002 to 200 over 2022.
Pandemic experience in social media influenced their shift as Northern students saw their schools under lockdown while Southern campus has stayed active.
Georgia Tech's Rick Clark noted they are seeing sororities at Alabama and football games in Georgia and Florida.
Life is happening.
Applications to Alabama surged by 600% in 2002 compared to 200% increase at Harvard.
Economic benefits and post-graduation prospects drive the move with Southern schools offering lower tuition.
The median out-of-state tuition at southern public schools is $29,000, much lower than northeastern counterparts.
What do you say to this story?
It's competition, man.
It's beauty.
Competition breeds innovation.
And I think that the response to the pandemic, I think, was horrific by a lot of these schools, effectively still charging the same tuition while doing remote learning.
That's a joke.
But I also think that a lot of the bureaucracy at places like Harvard have added cost.
You have the managerial class, the associate deans of diversity or whatever, adding cost without adding actual value.
Harvard used to be predicated on, I mean, the slogan of the school is Veritas.
It means truth, right?
And that is that meant something when I was there, actually.
It was a liberal leaning place, but forget about the liberal versus conservative.
I don't care about that.
It still was a place where you could exchange ideas, where you could express your ideas, even if they ran against the norm and the best ideas would win.
I loved it.
I had a great experience there.
That is not the same school that exists today.
The same thing I would say of Yale.
And so when a school itself or university starts becoming something other than its true self, then people are going to flee.
It's like a company.
It's like a state.
It's like a government.
Same thing as a university is when it falls and falls short of its own true North Star, right?
Harvard's never a party school.
So it's not that people are going to the South.
I don't think it's just because, oh, they're able to have more fun football games.
That's been the case, I'm sorry, for the last 50 years.
Okay.
Harvard's football games have not been as fun to go to as Clemson's or Georgia's, okay, or Ohio State, where I'm at.
That's not the axis where Harvard's ever going to compete.
That was never its value proposition.
But when it fails on its own value proposition to say that, okay, you're going to pursue truth, that all ideas are fair game.
No, you can't even do that.
You have to fear for free speech.
Well, then it's a question of like, what the heck am I getting out of this?
Because I'm not getting fun football.
I'm not getting a good party environment.
I'm not having a lot of, you know, let's just say traditional college-age fun.
But at the same time, I'm also not getting the rigors of intellectual exploration and freedom and exchange of thought and open debate.
Well, at that point, now prices are that much higher because they've hired an associate dean of God knows what.
I'm not getting the value relative to what this institution has to offer.
Do I think that a lot of those schools in that article where people are flocking to are offering that old value proposition that Harvard used to?
Probably not, if I'm being honest about it.
But are they offering at least some value proposition that's different and more authentic and true to what their university is?
Yes.
And I think that people want that.
There's institution, you want it to offer the best version of itself.
Harvard is not offering the best version of itself.
And perhaps the likes of Georgia Tech and Clemson and Ole Miss are.
So competition, that's how it works.
Tom, your thoughts on this?
I think you're exactly right on competition.
You know, USD News and World Reports puts out the rankings, and they're generally regarded as being probably the most acceptable ranking.
And University of Florida is up number 25, and they have tremendous engineering school that's up there, as does Georgia Tech.
Rice and Vanderbilt are known as the IVs of the South specifically.
And I think also we all saw kind of the dark underbelly in front of Congress, as you had the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, I believe that was the three, Sit there and not give acceptable answers on how they would provide protections for all students if protests on campus were getting a little out of hand, leading to some of those presidents taking different jobs or being removed.
I got to say a word about that one, though, because this is so important.
Just to inject a little bit of diversity of opinion here.
I think that there's two directions those schools could go.
Okay.
And I'm in the camp of I actually want Harvard and Yale to become great schools and great universities true to their mission again.
I think that's good for them.
I think it's good for the country.
I don't want to see them go the direction of saying, okay, well, we've been censoring all this other speech.
So now we're going to censor this other kind of speech too.
And we weren't doing enough censorship.
I think the right answer is the opposite of that is, okay, actually, let's be really honest, we're standing in front of Congress saying we stand for free speech when in fact we have not.
Let's go back to first principles where any opinion, any opinion, not violence, not obstruction of classrooms, but expression of any opinion is fair game.
And I think that is the fork in the road ahead for these universities.
And what I'm worried about is we're seeing them learn the wrong lesson from all of this to say is, oh, yes, yes, you're right.
We've censored all different forms of speech in the name of woke dogma, but we didn't censor what we would call anti-Semitic speech either.
And that we need to expand the net of what we censor.
I think it's the other direction that they need to go to say, actually, we weren't really staying true to principles of free speech in the first place.
Let's re-embrace that.
That's who we are.
And so, anyway, that's a fork in the road ahead for these universities.
I'm not one of these Republicans that likes to just, it's a very fashionable thing to do right now, where you go to like an Ivy League school and then you rail against the elites and rail against the Ivy Leagues.
I'm not that person.
I actually had great experiences at Harvard and Yale.
I'm proud that I was able to get a great education.
I'm grateful to a country that was able to provide it.
I want those schools to become the best version of themselves again.
I don't want to see us retreat to mediocrity, which is to say that, oh, well, there's a lot of other schools where you can get a decent education and it'll be one of the top 300 schools in the world.
No, I want the best universities on planet Earth to be in the United States of America, as they always have been.
As a guy who went to Harvard and Yale, how many kids do you have?
Two.
Okay.
Would you want them to go to Harvard or Yale?
Very interesting question.
So if you'd asked me, maybe before we had kids, this would have been maybe six, seven, 10 years ago.
I would have said yes.
If you ask both me, I mean, I think my wife probably would have said the same thing.
She went to Yale for undergrad and for med school.
If you ask both of us now, we totally are agnostic on this because, I mean, there's nothing really that special about these places right now.
In fact, you get a lot of the self-importance without the actual substance.
But I hope those places, or maybe it's going to be somebody else that takes their place, but there is an unambiguous class of university that's the best place on planet Earth to get a higher education.
I hope that exists in the United States.
And whether it's Harvard or Yale or somewhere else, I hope that place exists because that's where we would dream and aspire to send our own kids just as a poor van and I were able to enjoy ourselves.
And that's different from the current that's like sort of just anti-elite.
I mean, it's sort of like a fashionable thing.
I don't really know what that exactly means, but it's sort of saying, oh, well, you know, all that higher education stuff is mumbo-jumbo bogus anyway.
It's not the right answer for everybody, but I want that to exist as an option for the people who it is right for.
And right now, the sad part is the places that were the standard bearers of that type of education, the top form of education.
I think it's great for that to exist in America.
The problem is Harvard and Yale aren't fulfilling that standard right now.
But that's a different point from saying that, oh, I think the whole category is a mistake.
No, I don't.
I think the category should exist and I want America to have the best version of it.
And, you know, I think that that's different than just lazily sitting in an armchair and saying, oh, we're against the elites.
Fully agree with you because this comes down to value.
I mean, the bigger, larger conversation is, is college a scam?
You've done content on this.
We've seen people on the left like Andrew Gain come out and basically say the math just doesn't add up.
You know, his whole math thing that he's doing.
You even see what Charlie Kirk is doing going on campus.
Meeting the kids, you've gone a book.
Yeah, the whole college is a scam thing.
So the bigger question is everything's changing in this country.
Social media has changed the game.
COVID has changed the game.
You know, we talk about all the time, you know, 13 to 1 liberal professors in universities in the elite centers of higher education versus for every one conservative.
You know, is it indoctrination?
Is it education?
Harvard's endowment fund, $50 billion.
You know, Pat has a discussion who's the number one client of the university.
A lot of times it's the endowment, $50 billion, the Bill Ackmans of the world, the Leon Blacks of the world basically pulling their money away from these universities.
Things are changing.
You know, 50% of people in the United States never even graduated college, I believe is what it is.
Technical schools, trade schools, entrepreneurship was a taboo word 20 years ago.
Now it is forefront in the world.
I think just things are changing so fast that the old answer of you got to go to college and get your degree, and that's the answer, that's no longer what it comes down to.
Obviously.
Obviously.
Yeah.
And I just think that we, I just don't want to see us make the same mistake that we made by saying that, okay, we're going to be closed-minded and say four-year college degree is the only answer.
That was silly.
And in retrospect, it was wrong for a lot of people who were forced into that system versus two-year trade schools, vocational programs, maybe even going into entrepreneurship or small business right out of high school.
That's an answer for a lot of people.
I don't want to see us shift in the other direction because a four-year college degree is the right answer for a number of other people who may view that as the right calling or the right way to fulfill themselves.
And so I think that, again, it comes back to competition.
We should have multiple options.
The government shouldn't be subsidizing some of these things.
The Department of Education, it is actually a good example, even in the America First Right.
It's a kind of a divide that I talk about in the book.
One answer could say, well, the Department of Education has subsidized four-year college degrees to be a gender studies major in California, which didn't work out.
Well, now we should instead be subsidizing two-year college programs or vocational degrees.
I view it differently.
We shouldn't be subsidizing any of it.
Shut it down and just give the money back to the people.
That's the true answer.
So here's a question I got.
Watch this before we wrap up.
We got 10 more minutes before we wrap up.
So think about the product, okay, of Yale.
There's a guy that's born August 2nd, 1984, who is 40 years old, who went to Yale.
There's another guy that's born August 9th, 1985, who is 39 years old, who also went to Yale.
Okay.
One guy's name is JD Vance.
The other guy's name is Vivek.
Okay.
Heard of him too.
So I like that guy.
Both of them are Leos.
Okay.
Two Leos.
Now, here's the question I got for you, Vivek, because, you know, we're at a phase right now with kids and classmates that I go to school.
And as a parent, I'm sizing up other kids.
And I know when Dylan will tell me that kid is real, or this kid is real, or Tico will tell me, you're like, that person takes their school seriously, sports seriously, all this stuff.
When you guys were there, did you say that guy's a stud?
He's going to do something.
This guy's a stud.
Or was it just kind of like, nah, we're just going to college.
No one's thinking long-term what's going to happen.
I think, I don't think we were sizing each other up, but I think it was certainly that I thought he was a cool guy.
He was good, fun to hang out with.
And we used to watch Bengals games together.
Bengals games?
Yeah, because we're both from Cincinnati.
We're both from Greater Cincinnati.
Really?
Yeah.
So actually, even funny thing is we didn't know each other that well.
We didn't know each other till law school.
But apparently where I grew up till I was six is probably about a 15-minute drive, 10-minute drive from where he grew up, for where a lot of his upbringing was set in Middletown.
So it's funny.
So pre-Yale, were you guys friends or no?
No, we didn't know each other.
So only at Yale.
Yeah, but we discovered we were in Cincinnati fans.
Yes.
And let me ask you this question.
Was there a kid more impressive than the two of you guys in the class that everybody knew?
What is it?
I'm not asking for his name.
You know, I don't view things in terms of these hierarchies.
You know, I think, especially in law school, what happened was you had so many people who were so focused on what I call the treadmill, right?
Okay, well, now I've gotten out of undergrad.
Then I've gotten taken my asset.
Then I got into law school.
Now I'm going to, which corporate law firm am I going to work for?
Which clerkship am I going to get?
And there's simply I don't think you guys are part of that treadmill because both of you guys went different routes.
So that's one of the things we shared in common is we could both sit back and laugh at the treadmill a little bit.
Like these guys, and every one of them wants to be a U.S. president or candidate or whatever.
That's probably like the dream of every Yale law student.
And what's the path to get there?
And I think probably the thing that JD and I both shared in common was we could both kind of sit back and kind of laugh at that for different reasons.
I mean, it was just sort of a game.
And, you know, some of that's maturity.
And maybe a lot of those people now more advanced in their lives would go back and laugh at that version of themselves too.
But it's, it was a very largely a hyper-stressed environment where people are very worried about what their next career step was.
I knew I was just doing it for fun.
I was interested in the subject matter and I knew I was going to go back into business.
In fact, I had a job at a hedge fund full-time while I was at Yale Law School.
You know, funny, most of my classmates didn't even know that, right?
So I was just hanging out in law school, but I had a Bloomberg terminal in my New Haven apartment.
I did pretty well.
Those were some of my most productive years working at a hedge fund.
I probably made about 15 million bucks while I was in law school just as a side job.
But nice little side job right there back then.
You at Yale law school made $15 million part-time.
Over those three years, yeah.
Did other kids know you were making that kind of money?
I had no idea.
Yeah, they had no idea.
It was almost like I had, and I like that.
When have you ever shared this?
I like having different spheres of my life.
I don't know if I might have mentioned it amongst friends in the past.
A lot of them probably don't know it now, even, right?
And I think that that's, I think that that was great because I found the world of Wall Street to be often very stuffy, right?
You're getting just the finance crowds sitting on a trading floor.
I liked having my own separate space, but I also find Yale Law School to be really stuffy in a different way.
Hey, I made $10,000 a month part-time while I went to college.
Yeah, it's good.
There's this guy named Vivek made $15 million in three years while he's going to college part-time.
And it was, it was, you know, it was fun.
It was exercising a different style of my brain.
And I met my wife.
She was in med school.
We would hang out, watch NBA games.
We'd go hiking every weekend.
We'd fly, take out, take, you know, we'd do a lot more traveling than the other students because I had, you know, were they wondering, like, how are you able to do all this stuff right now?
You know, it wasn't, everything wasn't visible to everybody, right?
I think the people who are closest to me probably had some sense of, but I'm not, I didn't, you know, we lived in social media.
We lived in the same apartment.
We had a lot of many social media.
Yeah, and also, and also, I wasn't even on social media until probably 2020.
But even still, I'm not big on being super flashy about this stuff.
We lived in the same apartment building as the other students, and it was great.
And for me, that was good, right?
It was a so I'm somebody who thrives on having different environments.
Yale was cool because it was an academic environment that was different than the Wall Street environment that I'd come from, which was itself different from playing sports.
I used to, I, you know, still picked up my tennis game, would play a lot of sports with different groups there.
So I like having different groups in my life at the same time, or else you become sucked into an environment.
And so, anyway, back to the Yale Law School question, the environment there was just it did have the character of most people, not all people, but most people were very sucked into the treadmill of what that next rung on the ladder was going to be.
And my bet was you're probably going to get further anyway by not climbing the ladder that's set in front of you, but just following your own purposes.
Even though you made $15 million, who's counting while in law school?
You know, please tell me at the very least if you're hanging out with JD Vance, you were having some good tailgate parties, rooting for the Bengals.
We were rooting for the Bengals.
We were in the summer days.
A.J. Green, what's going on there?
You're eating the Fritos with the.
This is not A.J. Greenface.
This is 02.
This is Carson Palmer.
This is 2012, 2013.
This is Carson.
I would say probably Carson Palmer is probably what we're talking about.
You're not doing the icky shuffle at this point.
You know, funny thing is, Icky Woods lived not that far away from where I grew up too.
His daughter would go to the same elementary school that I went to as well.
And so the icky shuffle was legendary back in the day.
People probably don't know what that is, but it's the dance that you do.
By the way, Icky Woods got a shout out.
You know what's the most annoying thing?
Yeah.
Is the fact that Bengals are one the last four years to start the season?
And he finally got 2011 because he just got his first victory.
By the way, the last four five seasons, the first two games, Burrow is one and nine.
Drives me insane because it takes some time to warm up.
It takes some time to get the blood.
Joe is my son's favorite player, Joe Sandylon, a game-worn, I don't know what it was, a jersey signed with a note-specific letter to Joe at a UFC match, and he came up.
We had a great conversation together, and then we exchanged messages, and he sent that over to him.
Listen, I'm rooting for the guy.
They just got their first one.
You guys got your first one.
I know, but it's starting to be last season.
And the Chiefs, man.
It's like one point lost to the Chiefs.
Devastating.
Yeah, that was too.
Anyways, last thing, Vivek, about the book before we wrap up.
Yeah.
So if there's two, three things I'm going to pick up from the book, if I read it, what would that be?
From the bookstore?
So this book is designed to be a toolkit to arm Americans to have debates at the dinner table that they're not confident enough to have already.
So it was a reflection from the presidential campaign.
My best moments, the moments that I relished the most, were not even the ones where I dunked on the left.
Happened occasionally with the media, et cetera.
But the better moments were ones where we actually got young people or people who were dissenting views at an event, maybe even a protester, but would have an interaction, a conversation that changes somebody's mind.
And so the question that I got from people afterwards is, how do I do that in my everyday life?
How do I change the mind of somebody who disagrees with me, but do it in a civil manner?
And so I thought, okay, I'm one person I'm able to do this.
But what if we have millions of people who are armed with that same toolkit?
That's what this book is designed to give you the toolkit to do.
And so there's 10 truths that I lay out in the chapter.
And in each of them, my goal is to give the best possible arguments for the other side.
Not some straw man argument, but like really the best arguments for the other side.
Let's get them on the table.
And then sort of debunk them one by one, pick them apart.
I do something in this book that I've never done in my other books.
I would have cringed if you told me I had to do this in my prior book, but now I think it's a good idea.
Even at the end of every chapter, we lay out five truths where there are five core facts or arguments you take away from that chapter.
So this book is designed as a toolkit to arm Americans.
Generally, probably right-of-center Americans will agree with more of the views in here, but to arm them, not just to talk to ourselves, but to talk to our friends, and I still say the word friends on the other side, to be able to not defeat them, not just defeat them, but even more importantly, to persuade them to bring them along.
And I think that's how we save our country on the most controversial subjects.
The climate change debate, really unpacking.
Our surface temperatures going up?
Yes, I'll grant you that.
But is that a bad thing for humanity?
No, I give arguments in this book for why there may be some positive effects for humanity, which have been gone previously underreported or underdiscovered, backed by hard data.
The transgender debate, the debate about nationalism, the debate about the border and what that actually means.
What is our immigration system actually selecting for?
Let's get to the bottom of it.
So the book launched last week.
It was number one on Amazon for a good portion of last week.
And, you know, I think I just appreciate people want advice on making money.
Writing books is not the way to do it.
But if you want to get a message out, it definitely is a good way to do it.
And so I just thought about a major $15 million.
$150 million copies of it.
The books had nothing to do with it.
For better or worse.
Vivek, as usual.
I appreciate it, man.
It's great to have you on to talk to you about this book as well as other things.
Every time it's both entertaining, interesting to get your thoughts and perspective on issues that's going on today.
And my position is not going to change.
I still have you as the number one draft pick in 2028.
I'm keeping it as that.
But if in the interim you, I mean, listen, if you can make part-time, you know, $15 million while you're in school at law, you can part-time become a governor and then become a president.
I mean, anybody can do that part-time and take the next step.
