Vivek Ramaswamy argues America's decline stems from an oversized government and cultural poisons like wokeism, proposing to dismantle the administrative state via 5 U.S.C. 3302 to slash the federal workforce by 75%. He suggests ending the Ukraine war through a Korean-style armistice to secure Russian withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere and China's exit from its military partnership with Moscow. Domestically, he advocates repealing the Impoundment Prevention Act and urging Taiwan to adopt Second Amendment-style rights for household arms. Globally, Ramaswamy plans to decouple from Chinese mercantilism by rejoining the CPTPP with Pacific Rim nations, aiming for a tripolar world order where U.S. leverage forces fair trade or total disengagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
America's New Identity Vision00:14:56
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Steer's your host.
James Duet.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am very excited for today's show.
I am joined by our second presidential candidate to appear on the show.
Of course, RFK came on.
And today we have Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
How are you, Sarah?
Good to talk to you, man.
I've been looking forward to this.
Yes, me too, very much.
You've said a lot of good things that have caught my eye while you've been campaigning.
How's it been going for you?
This has got to be different than anything you've done before, doing a ton of media.
Have you been enjoying the process?
I'm like 75% enjoying it.
Yes, I would say, is the honest answer.
We were going through, there's like administrivia to this process that, you know, would probably be worse than a sharp poke in the eye.
But 75% of it and the part, the main part of it is actually a joy.
I mean, we travel this country with our family four days a week.
At least the family comes with me.
We go on, you know, when you go on vacation, one of the things you struggle to do is to meet the locals of a place, right?
The local people to get to know the character of a place.
That's actually what the whole thing is about.
And we go to different small towns, communities across this country, really meet the people of that place, understand each other.
And I do think, I know it may sound cheesy, but it's just true.
It's been our experience that, yes, there are so many different people in different parts of this nation, from Iowa to New Hampshire to Michigan to South Carolina to Ohio, where I am now.
And yet, I truly believe it.
We still are one people across all of those different attributes.
And so, you know, we take this campaign bus right along with my three-year-old son as much as we can.
And it's been like a road trip across the country that'll be, it's already been memorable.
So we're enjoying it.
The question is, accomplishing the mission.
Sure, sure.
Well, that's cool.
That's real cool.
You get to take the little ones around with you.
I'm sure that's a lot of fun.
And he is like at that age where he actually might remember some of this later in life.
Like I got some memories from three.
So that's, that's pretty cool.
Yeah, I've got memories from three, too.
And, but it seems like unbelievable to me that he wouldn't.
You know, like, I know that, I know that that's probably going to be the case.
They won't remember all of it.
But like when you see them soaking it up, right?
Like in terms of like, even when, you know, I mean, I'm giving a speech at some barn in New Hampshire when it was a Sunday and I'm going back to New Hampshire this evening.
And there's like a bounce house in like the back of the barn where him and a bunch of other kids are playing.
But then like, you know, when me and a couple of the other people are speaking and talking about the country, like these are kids who are three years old.
They can, they tell the difference to like, okay, like people are listening to something going on here come back in and kids who rarely will pay attention when you're trying to get them to like read a nighttime storybook are dialed in.
And, you know, how much are they processing about our discussion about free speech?
I don't know.
Probably not, probably not most of it, but they're taking something away from it.
It's interesting.
So we'll see when he grows up how much of this he actually remembers.
But I would have trouble believing that some of this isn't going to stick with him.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so I got, I got little kids like around the same age.
I have a four-year-old and a one and a half year old.
And it's, I think if nothing else, what he's probably processing is that his dad cares about something that's important and wants to, you know, like talk about it with people.
And even just like kind of that, understanding that in itself, I think is valuable.
Okay, so you talked about accomplishing the mission.
Now you have a lot going against you.
You're not 85.
It seems like that's a requirement to be president these days.
I'm pretty sure that's what the Constitution says.
Now, of course, you're running against, you got a sitting president on the Democratic side and you have the former president on the Republican side.
So anybody running is going to have quite an uphill battle to doing this.
So what is it?
What made you decide you want to take this uphill battle and you think there needs to be a different alternative to Biden versus Trump part two?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that I did not imagine I was going to be running for president a year ago, right?
I had just founded Strive that was competing against BlackRock.
I'm a passionate opponent of the ESG movement.
I'm a big believer in government solutions last.
I believe in market solutions first.
And so I did what I know how to do.
I started businesses.
That's how I've built my whole career writing books.
I wrote my third book earlier.
Actually, wrote it last year.
It just came out earlier this year, raising two young kids at home.
That was my life.
I was called into this race because of a vacuum that I saw.
The vacuum I saw was this.
You look at people my age.
How old are you, Dave?
I'm 40.
You're 40.
So we're similar.
We're similar generation.
I mean, we're both millennials.
I'm 37.
I was born in 1985.
You ask people our age, what does it mean to be an American today?
You get a blank stare in response.
There's a vacuum of purpose and meaning and identity at the heart of our national soul.
And I think a big, even the battles that I was waging through the market, offering market alternatives to the ESG industrial complex, let's be really honest about it.
It only works if there's a demand side of this, a culture that's hungering to buy up what they're selling.
I think that sometimes that's overstated.
A lot of this is driven top down, but there's an element of truth to that.
And I wasn't going to fix that by starting another business.
I did see a vacuum for someone to be able to address that by offering a vision of American national identity that dilutes a lot of this cultural poison to irrelevance.
And we could debate, different people call different things the poison.
Wokeism, gender ideology, climate religion, COVIDism, globalism, depression, anxiety, drug usage, suicide, whatever it is.
Different people pick different poisons, but I think that each of these are just symptoms of a deeper vacuum of purpose and meaning and identity in our country.
And then I look at the Republican landscape, and I think it's, I mean, put the Democrat landscape to one side.
That's it.
It's a whole different beast.
But look at the Republican landscape.
And I see a group of people who are saying the things I've written in Woke Inc, my first book, and railing against the problem, as I'm guilty of doing for much of the last several years too, but missing the real opportunity, which is to fill that void with our own vision, a vision of affirmative American national identity grounded in our common values that dilutes the poison to irrelevance.
And so I've built my business career and everything I've done in my life, even the books I've written really fit this description is if the pack is running in one direction, I pick the other direction if I'm sure that I'm right about it, or at least I have a conviction that I'm right about it.
And I see a pack in the GOP running in one direction where they're running from something.
And I believe this was our opportunity, that this is our opportunity to start running to something, to an actual affirmative vision of what it means to be an American today.
A vision that I don't have to reinvent.
It was a vision that our founding fathers invented in 1776.
And in a certain sense, they didn't even invent it.
They were inheriting a tradition that came before them.
But in my eyes, a vision that our founding fathers set into motion in 1776.
I think we live in a 1776 moment, not a moment to play whack-a-mole for symptomatic therapy on cultural poisons that serial arise, but rather to offer an affirmative vision of our own.
And all I had to do was be the vehicle to advance it.
I don't have to invent this stuff.
It came in 1776, but what I do need to do is to channel that to meet our current moment.
And nobody else was doing it.
And so that last December, at least it started, called me into this race.
And I do think it takes a member of a different generation.
It's not that, oh, I'm young and, you know, healthy and therefore and lucid and therefore that's different than the reigning incumbents.
We can debate that.
But I think it might just take a member of a different generation, at least figuratively.
Maybe it could be an older person, but at least mentally part of a different generation to share a conviction that, yes, you know what?
We don't have to be this decrepit nation in decline, that we might just be a nation in our ascent.
And maybe folks like you and I, let's hope that our best days in our own lives are still ahead of us, maybe to see a country whose best days are still ahead of itself as well.
That's what I believe.
And I think I'm in this race to deliver that.
But whether I succeed or not, that's in the hands of the voters of this country.
My job is to make sure people know who I am and what I stand for and what I will fall for if necessary, what I will sacrifice for.
My job is in the next year to year and a half, let the country know that.
And then if that's the country, if that's the person that the people want to lead them to the next phase of our national life, then so be it.
I'm up for the job.
Gee, well, there's a lot there that's very interesting.
And I do think, and certainly I'm not saying that alone somebody's age like should discount them.
Like I think if Ron Paul was in the White House right now, we'd be in a much better country than we are.
And he's almost 90, I think, you know, but there is something kind of interesting about the kind of decrepit nature of our empire and the fact that so many of the political leaders are from this generation.
I mean, you know, you talked about us being the same generation.
I comment on this a lot, but like I remember when I was like a teenager, we had these political figures like Joe Biden in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate.
And so many of these people just like, it's like they grabbed the ring of power and just never gave it up.
They're so, I think, removed from what's actually going on in this country and how rough in so many ways the last 20 years has been on this country.
Like this is not.
And you see this a lot with the policies.
I mean, you see this kind of attitude with, say, like the war in Ukraine, where it's like, well, America said he can't do it and that's that.
You're not allowed to do it.
As if we're still living in this 1994 unipolar moment where whatever we say goes.
And then you see Biden have this policy.
You see China line up behind Ukraine.
You see Iran and Saudi Arabia backing China.
You see like all of these different moves and you're like, oh yeah, no, we're not living in that world anymore.
We're not living in the 90s boom.
We're a country that's $30 trillion in debt.
Other countries see our cultural weakness.
They see what we've been through over the last few years.
And it does seem like a lot of these leaders have not adjusted to the moment that we're in.
I think you're right about that, Dave.
And it's not just you named some Democrats and that's totally accurate.
I mean, you could say you could add Mitch McConnell to that list, really.
I mean, there's a range of Republicans, all of whom, by the way, end up on the same side of the Ukraine question by no coincidence, actually.
And the part that, you know, again, I'm not like, I'm against identity politics of all kinds.
And so I don't want to be a hypocrite and use age-based identity politics to sort of check a box either, because there's plenty of people our age that think in that way.
And there's people like Ron Paul who think more like us, right?
But I think the point goes beyond just the biographical age, but the perspective of being tethered to reciting memorized slogans from 30 years ago.
And the interesting thing is I would have hoped for a silver lining in some of this.
And I hope you don't, you know, I mean, we don't have to go down the Ukraine rabbit hole if you don't want to, but just since you brought it up as an example, there are people who were around back then.
I mean, you and I were kids, but it wasn't that long ago to say that, oh, on one hand, we're going to fetishize, and I do think that's what we're doing, fetishizing this Budapest memorandum from 1994, which, by the way, if you look at the hard facts and actually read the darn thing, we've more than fulfilled our commitments that were ironclad in paper.
But some of the same people who were actually alive and politicians back then, if anything, one of the advantages of having somebody who was actually maybe in a more lucid phase of their life back then should actually remember maybe the fact that, say, James Baker told Gorbachev that we were not going to expand NATO at all relative to where we were in the 1990s.
And yet NATO, which was formed to deter the USSR, has expanded exponentially in the period after the fall of the USSR more than it ever did before.
Or that George Kennan, a guy who was mostly around before you and I were alive, in his waning years when he died, I think it must have been in the late 90s, said that NATO expansionism was the biggest foreign policy disaster we've made in the post-Cold War era.
You would think that, okay, well, there may be some pros and cons to having people who were around back then and the Bidens and the McConnells and the Pelosi's and the Schumers of the world could stand up and remind us of the agreement that Baker made with Gorbachev, could remind us of what George Kennan, the chief architect of Cold War deterrence, had to say about NATO expansionism.
But somehow it's not just that they're old.
It's that their memory is so selective as to justify what they want to do in the present, which is just repeating only the mistakes that they've made in the past in Iraq or, you know, some of them dating back to Vietnam for that matter.
And so I would have less of a problem with it if there were pros and cons to this.
But there's something fascinating.
And I haven't gotten to the bottom of this, Dave, but it's just the observation is true that it's unidirectional in repeating a certain class of mistakes while staying blind to the learnings that somebody could have brought with them.
And yet somehow selectively, it's the learnings that get filtered out.
And that's what makes me cynical to think this is an old age.
It's an incentive failure because there's an incentive structure that creates these decisions over and over again.
No, you make, you make a great point.
One Word Changes Everything00:17:44
And just to add more names to the list, I mean, like in terms of opposing NATO expansion, Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamar, William Perry, who is Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, all took the same approach.
I think what really happened is that the neoconservative and neoconservative leaning members, they won.
They won out and they defeated the ones who were warning against this.
And I do think part of it is that the incentives of government just kind of line up so that if you're advocating expanding the power, everybody around you is making a lot more money.
Yes.
And if you're advocating reducing or limiting the power, everyone around you is making less money.
And so this is just, I mean, it's really what happened is that the neoconservatives had this vision that was, which they laid out in the project for a new American century.
They said, we're going to remake the Middle East and we're going to expand NATO all the way to Russia's borders.
And this way, you know, the Middle East will be loyal to us.
We can do business with them and Russia won't be a European power.
And this made a lot of private state connected actors filthy freaking rich.
And so there was just a lot more support for them.
But you're right.
At this point, it's almost like even when some of those guys are still around, I mean, Bill Burns, who's the head of the CIA, he wrote the Net Means Net memo that, which was warning that if we pursue NATO, Ukrainian entry into NATO, this is going to lead to what we have today.
But even he doesn't seem to have anything to say about it now.
It's like they all just kind of put the blinders on and went, nope, we were right about everything.
And history began when Vladimir Putin invaded.
And we can't look at any of that other stuff.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Nom Nom.
Nom Nom delivers fresh dog food with every portion personalized to your dog's needs so you can bring out their best.
Nom Nom is made with real whole food you can see and recognize without any additives or fillers that contribute to bloating and low energy.
That's because Nom Nom uses the latest science and insights to make real good food for dogs.
Their nutrient-packed recipes are crafted by board-certified veterinarian nutritionists and they're made fresh and shipped free to your door.
Nom Nom's already delivered over 40 million meals to good dogs like yours, inspiring millions of clean bowls and tail wags.
Go check them out.
If you got a dog, you know you don't want to be feeding them garbage.
A lot of that stuff you pick up in the supermarket is not nearly as good as this stuff.
Nomnom comes with a money-back guarantee.
If your dog's tail isn't wagging within 30 days, Nom Nom will refund your first order.
No fillers, no nonsense, just Nom Nom.
Right now, you can get 50% off your no risk two-week trial at trynom.com slash P-O-T-P.
That's T-R-Y-N-O-M dot com slash P-O-T-P for 50% off.
Try NOM.com slash P-O-T-P.
All right, let's get back into the show.
You know, I even go a little bit, I mean, the slogan of our campaign, you might have seen this is one word, truth.
Okay.
And so I want, I'm interested in truth even more than narrative, even though narratives are powerful and narratives can be part of the path that get us to truth.
I do think the money narrative is has truth to it.
And that's what I was alluding to before when I talked about cynical motivations for the filters that result in otherwise consistently unidirectional selective memory, right?
Consistently selective, filtered, unidirectional memory is something that justifies, I think, an appropriate cynicism to get to truth.
But as I've sort of gone deep into this, I have to admit that I think the money account is accurate, but incomplete because I do think that there are plenty of actors who themselves have not really benefited financially in any measure that I could tell based on the facts and yet still fall on the same side of this unidirectional pull.
And so I'm about getting to the truth.
And so it's just curious, like still, what else is going on there, right?
It's not, money's part of the story for sure, but it's not the whole story.
And I'm just interested in getting to the bottom of what's going on.
And I think that part of it is that there is this psychological masturbation of just the raw exercise of hard power itself that is its own draw apart entirely independent of the money itself.
And I think that gets closer to the flame, actually, where it's not that you will just selectively remember the past, right?
Remember the Budapest memorandum while forgetting the 1991 agreement with Russia, right?
That you will selectively remember Cold War deterrence against the USSR, which I have to repeatedly remind people doesn't exist today, while forgetting George Kennan's warnings, or for that matter, other even establishment figures like those you cited.
You got to give credit.
I don't just label someone as being in the establishment and evil.
If they're saying the right things, I'll listen to them.
But part of what's going on is I see this even when I get my briefings, right?
In terms of my preparation to be president, there's a certain class of people who almost get off a little bit in talking about B-16 bombers and B-2s and F-16s and the difference between a javelin and an AT-4.
And it's like, these are terms and that's fine.
I mean, I've gotten like, you know, quizzed on the nuclear triad many times.
Like the first time I, you know, I mean, like literally as soon as I started running this guy asked me, what's the nuclear triad?
I said, I don't know.
And then that was like the source of great derision.
And like now I know what the nuclear triad is, but I still get questions quizzing me on the nuclear triad when actually it's just a military theory, right?
It's not like some actual physically existent thing.
And if you're really thinking about deterrence today, you probably wouldn't just be talking about land, air, and sea, but maybe cyber would be on your list if you're a thinking person or economic dependence.
But the point I'm making is a slightly different one.
There's a certain human guttural response when it comes to just like the raw exercise of hard power, especially for those who don't feel strong within to substitute their absence of the strength within for projecting strength without.
It's like the classic bully syndrome, but written on a national scale.
And I think that if you want to get close to the flame of what's going on, I think that's even a more powerful human, guttural, instinctual, hardwired, evolutionarily, you know, and DNA and woven instinct than even the money, though I think the money plays a role in it.
But either way, come back to what you and I were talking about.
I do think it's going to take somebody who's from the outside, member of a different generation, to be able to not only call that out, not seeking to be a commentator here, but to be able to lead us to something, to an affirmative, alternative vision, because simply complaining about this, you know, the existing establishment, pro-war establishment, bears some analogies to the frustrations I was just expressing to you about many of my fellow contenders in the GOP who read a line from Woke Inc. put it in their teleprompter, call it a speech, and then are railing about wokeness.
That's going to only get us so far.
And there is something about human nature, too, that responds to a certain form of railing more than it instinctually in the short term responds to an actual affirmative vision because that requires us to do work.
And listeners as human beings don't like, it's not anyone's fault.
It's just how we're wired.
We want to preserve our caloric usage in our brain for something else.
And so we'd rather respond to the thing that requires us to mentally spend less energy.
But in the long run, that's what makes us different from animals is that we do override our evolutionary instincts with what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
And I believe that to be true.
But I think that's what we're going to have to appeal to to say, okay, we're not just railing against wokeness or the pro-war establishment or whatever.
Like there's a time and place for that.
But here's an affirmative vision of our own.
That's what we're running to.
And I think I'm not even reinventing that.
I'm reinventing the ideals enshrined in our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence.
Why don't we revive that as not reverting to the past?
All I'm doing is framing that as the future and call me a progressive if you want, that I'm progressing towards that 1776 vision, putting it into our future rather than relegating it to our past.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that's all very appealing.
I think that the, along with kind of the positive vision, which I think is important, it's important for any community of people to have.
And it's important to, you know, for to put any of this into motion under the democratic system we live in, you have to rally a lot of people to be, you know, inspired and want to get on board.
The other thing is like the plan of action.
Because I think in a lot of ways, Donald Trump, while it was fairly vague, this like make America great again thing, but he kind of like tried to do this.
Like we're going to bring jobs back.
Everyone's going to be winning.
It's going to be great.
I think the problem is that from my perspective with Trump was that when it actually came down to implementing a plan, I think that he didn't really have much of a strategy to stop all of the things that he was railing against.
And, you know, we he can brag about his white hot economy for the first three years.
Truthfully speaking, I think it was much more of a bubble than it was really a white hot economy.
If you have like insanely low interest rates and insanely high government spending, you can look at a lot of charts and numbers and say, hey, everything's going really good.
But that aside, the wokeness did not slow down.
It dramatically increased under Donald Trump.
The COVID regime, at least the first year and much of the worst of it, all happened while he was in the White House.
Not saying he's responsible for all of it.
He is responsible for some, but it certainly didn't stop it.
I think what, and I know you've talked a lot about this, that in order to implement a lot of these plans, a lot of the shadow government really has to be reined in.
The FBI, the CIA, the Federal Reserve, our government is kind of permeated by these incredibly powerful institutions that are unaccountable to voters, operate in secrecy, and as we've seen a lot very recently, even conspire to work against the sitting president of the United States if they don't like his mission.
So the question then is like, how do you actually put this into action?
Like, how do you is a lot of this about your appointments?
Because that was certainly one of Trump's weakest areas is that he would appoint, I think whoever was kissing his ass, basically he would put them into positions of power, even when it was so clear from their career that their goals were diametrically opposed to his.
Yeah.
So there's a couple hard commitments that I'll make.
I'm not prone to boasting or making false promises or anything else, but the few things I'll deliver, I'm also not going to feign false humility either.
Okay.
Here's what I know I can do.
We'll end the war in Ukraine.
We'll pull Russia apart from China.
That I think is the single greatest foreign policy accomplishment of this century.
If we're able to achieve it, I think I can.
Trilateral international order instead of the bilateral one that favors China.
That's what we were just talking about.
Now, domestically, here's the second thing.
By the time I'm done, when I'm leaving office in January of 2033, there will be, once again, in this country, three branches of government, not four.
Full stop.
And I'm probably the single candidate who has run for president in either party in the last 30 to 40 years who has a deep, first personal understanding of how to actually get it done.
And I think it is going to take not just personnel, which is what you brought up.
That's part of it.
It is going to take a president who has a first personal, bone-deep conviction to see it through, because some of what I'm about to tell you is controversial.
You will have the advisor managerial class tell you all the reasons why you can't see it through.
You're going to need the personal conviction and fortitude to see it through.
So I'll give you some examples of what I mean in terms of the statutory and constitutional understanding that will empower me to see it through.
I'm not just an academic.
I've built multi-billion dollar businesses, but I'm not just a business guy.
I understand the Constitution.
Let's start with a simple, simple law, underutilized.
5 U.S.C. 3302.
Okay.
It says something very simple.
The U.S. president has sole authority to set the regulations governing the Office of Personnel Management, the OPM.
That's the HR department, the Human Resources Department of the Executive Branch of the federal government.
The OPM is one of the great underappreciated forces behind the rise of the deep state itself.
It's like the HR bureaucracy of the federal government.
That's where the collective bargaining agreements come into place.
The implementation of civil service protections comes into place.
So from a staffing perspective, surely the people that I put more important than the cabinet level appointments are the OPM and the OMB, those kinds of positions that relate to the plumbing of both personnel policies and money in the federal government.
I'm not going to make some of the mistakes that Trump did, which is putting in place people who are effectively like mediators between the president and the administrative state, almost become ambassadors for the voices of the administrative state back to the president.
No, it goes the other way around.
I'm bringing a vision to restore three branches of government, at least a 75% total federal employee headcount reduction under my watch in the first term.
You're there to be a bulldog and see it through.
And if actually there's one place where I'm going to put libertarians, either hard libertarians or soft libertarians in those roles, that's actually where it matters, right?
Is in roles like OMB and OPM.
But it's not even their personal ideology that matters as much as their commitment to see that vision through.
But anyway, 5 USC 3302 gives the U.S. president sole authority to set the regulations governing OPM.
That's underutilized.
That's one way around the civil service protections of the collective bargaining agreements.
There's an expired statute, but it's actually not expired.
There's only certain provisions of it that are expired called the 1977 Presidential Reorganization Statute.
The provisions that expired were the provisions that required congressional consent because Congress was skeptical of Jimmy Carter back then.
But actually, the rest of the statute that still lives on includes provisions that say the president can reorganize agencies, including shutting down agencies, if they either promote the economy or reflect redundancies amongst the existence of multiple government agencies that don't exist.
That is what I will use to shut down the U.S. Department of Education, which should not exist, spends $80 plus billion dollars a year, that I will use to shut down the FBI, spends $11 billion a year when there's plenty of arguments for redundancy in the federal government there as well, the U.S. Marshals and so on carrying out most of the same functions.
To go down the list, the ATF, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, possibly the entire Department of Energy as we know it, the CDC, will go down the list.
I'm actually statutorily empowered to do it.
One of the things that stops you is, if it's not the civil service protections, oh, by the way, they'll say that, oh, there's civil service protections that you can't use to fire people.
Well, hold the phone.
It actually is pretty clear that what it was doing was preventing the political retribution of a U.S. president towards a civil servant.
But on its own terms, those statutes do not apply to mass firings, mass layoffs, which require only 60-day notice.
So it requires a president that has a level of understanding of the detail to have the conviction to see that through when an advisor otherwise says, oh, your hands are tied and you can't do it.
I don't buy that.
And I've built multi-billion dollar businesses, not listening to people from the managerial ranks telling me what I can and cannot do before getting to truth.
Get to the truth of the matter.
Be guided by that rather than what somebody whispered in your ear because then you're just a puppet.
Now, one of the other obstacles they'll bring up is the so-called impoundment prevention concerns, that if Congress budgets the money, you have to spend it and there's nothing you can do about it.
There's a lot I could say here, but the least inflammatory approach, and my general rule of thumb is be as minimally disruptive as you need to be to get the job done, but as maximally disruptive as you need to be to actually get the job done.
Those are my modus operandi.
Let's start with the minimally disruptive approach is the draft budgets, the appropriations language that we'll send to Congress, will not make the mistake that many Republican presidents and, of course, Democratic presidents have made in the last number of decades, where they got lazy and they delegated the draft appropriations language to the administrative state, to the deep state, to turn up the draft language.
The language used to say appropriations language may spend.
Makes sense.
President is asking for permission on behalf of the executive branch to spend money authorized by Congress.
When presidents got lazy, somehow the draft appropriations language that came from the deep state, the administrative state, the agencies that ran through OMB to the Congress, which itself has fellas fallen asleep at the Switch as well.
They changed the may to shall.
A simple one-word change, but that has deep-seated implications.
So then that becomes the draft language that then comes back, says you shall spend.
Say that the appropriation specifically for the U.S. Department of Education says shall spend.
Well, now let's say a U.S. president like Trump wants to make a change to a subset of the Department of Education, puts Betsy DeVos on top and says, okay, we're going to drive the change.
You know, the middle management comes back and says, well, you know, Mr. President, it says you shall spend.
So sorry, you're violating the demand of Congress.
The Magnesium Sleep Secret00:03:40
And that itself is arguably an unconstitutional interpretation of that appropriation.
The 1974 Impoundment Prevention Act passed under Nixon unfortunately codifies that understanding.
I'd repeal that statute, but it's not repealed.
But the easiest thing I can do is make sure that our draft appropriation language that runs through my OMB, which maybe will have someone cut from your cloth sitting in that seat, will actually say, you know what?
We may spend it.
We're asking for permission.
But that doesn't mean that we have to spend it if it's wasteful or fraudulent or an abusive form of spending or certainly something that doesn't advance the U.S. interest, let alone was something that even represented what was a constitutionally ordained function of the federal government in the first place.
So I could go on for a full day and we have less than an hour here, but the thing I come back to is there's not a lot that I'm going to promise, but I think I am the single presidential candidate in the last generation who has an understanding and a conviction and a passion for actually knowing how to shut down the administrative state, an academic level understanding of it, but not as an academic, as somebody who's actually built something, seen it through.
And I think that I'm the single best positioned person, not only in this race, but in at least the last few races even, to actually see it through such that when I'm leaving office in January 2033, there's not a lot that I can tell you that I will have gotten done.
But that much that we have three branches of government, not four by the time I'm done, that much I know I can see through.
And there's a few things.
I mean, I think execution is all about focus, right?
There's a few, if you try to do everything, you'll end up doing nothing.
But in a small handful of things, ending the war in Ukraine, doing that deal between Russia and China, pull them apart, restore the administrative state, restore the three-branch system of government over the administrative state, and in the process, have an economy that's actually growing again organically rather than through money raining from on high from a Federal Reserve that falsely prints it, and then a young generation that resultantly is actually proud to be an American today.
That much I believe I can deliver.
That's why I'm in this race to do.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Bio Optimizers.
Did you know that there is one phase of sleep that almost everyone fails to get enough of?
And this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation, repair, controlling hunger and weight loss hormones, boosting energy and so much more.
And if you don't get enough, you're probably always struggling with cravings, slow metabolism, premature aging, and even worse conditions.
You need that deep sleep.
Why don't most people get enough of this?
One important phase of sleep, a big reason is magnesium deficiencies.
Over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium.
And magnesium increases GABA, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for sleep.
Magnesium also plays a key role in regulating your body's stress response system.
Those with magnesium deficiencies usually have higher anxiety and stress levels, which negatively impacts sleep as well.
Now, before you go out and just buy a magnesium supplement, it's important to understand that most products out there only have one to two forms of magnesium when the reality is your body needs all seven forms of this essential sleep mineral.
That's why I recommend magnesium breakthrough.
Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help calm your mind and help you fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up refreshed.
The deep sleep benefits are really noticeable.
Go check them out at magbreakthrough.com slash P-O-T-P to order right now.
In addition to the discount you get when you use the promo code P-O-T-P, they're always giving amazing gifts away with purchases.
Negotiating With China Now00:15:49
So go check them out.
Magbreakthrough.com slash P-O-T-P to get your magnesium breakthrough and find out what this month's gift with purchase is.
Magbreakthrough.com slash P-O-T-P.
All right, let's get back into the show.
I got to say, I really appreciate your position that you want to actually have a technical strategy for doing this and not be unnecessarily inflammatory.
Not that obviously, if you're doing things like this, you're going to be attacking very powerful interests.
There's going to be people upset about it.
I do think that Donald Trump was inflammatory at every turn that he could be without having really a technical plan for actually draining the swamp.
And I think that's a bad combination.
You're much better off to actually focus on how this thing can be drained than then not needlessly piss everybody off and get this crazy backlash.
So I want to ask you a little bit about what you were saying about kind of pulling Russia and China apart.
Certainly the policies under Joe Biden has been pushing them together.
So just ending those policies will help in that in that department.
But I don't.
So what, you know, I've heard you talk about declaring economic independence from China.
What exactly does that mean?
And like, how exactly do you pull China and Russia apart?
Yeah.
So those are two different tracks.
Okay.
And I appreciate what you said, Dave, because it's actually a really important point is, and I see this in the Republican Party.
I'm more of a critic of the Republican Party than Democrats only because I think I think change starts at home.
And so if I'm running the Republican ticket, it's easy to point the finger at somebody else.
Let's look in the mirror first.
And I think a lot of the, you know, what you see is inflammatory behavior for the sake of being inflammatory.
I don't mind.
I mean, I'll be inflammatory when I need to be because that's what's required to get the job done, but it's not for its own sake.
And I think it's often a substitute, actually, for the lack of a substantive understanding of what actually needs to be done.
So that's really what's going on is it's a deflection or an insecurity that's a projection of the absence of actually having the ability to deliver on the goods itself.
So as I said, for the administrative state, let me now turn to the foreign policy dimension of this.
Two different tracks there.
So the economic independence piece, I'll come back to.
Let me just talk about how we'll pull Russia apart from China.
I'm a big believer in, you know, as the expression goes, right, if they give you lemons, make lemonade, find the silver lining, whatever trite expression you want to use.
It's trite because it's true.
I believe in it.
The Ukraine war is that lemon out of which we'll make lemonade.
Okay.
I think it's a disaster that the U.S. has been involved as much as we have, that we're marching even in the direction with a bipartisan consensus to turn this into the next Iraq.
I think that's the track we're on.
But I don't like to just sit around and complain about it.
Here's how I'll use that, at least as an opportunity to do something even more important.
Use that as a catalyst to do a deal with Putin that says, listen up, we'll freeze the current lines of control.
Korean war-style armistice.
We won't support Ukraine any further.
We will go further and give you what you asked for in late 2021 after Angela Merkel's disastrous comments that the Minsk agreement was just about biding time when Putin said, well, then I need to know that NATO's not going to admit Ukraine.
We stayed silent.
He invaded Ukraine.
I'll say, no, we'll go back.
We'll give you that too.
Ukraine will not admit NATO.
But we require in return that you exit your military partnership with China.
There's the 2001 Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Cooperation that the two countries signed, ratcheted it up in the so-called no limits partnership that Xi Jinping and Putin entered in 2022.
I think it was in February of 2022.
Well, that's the requirement.
And then a few more things on the list.
Pull the nukes out of Kaliningrad, bordering Poland.
Get the Russian military out of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua.
Russian military presence does exist in the Western hemisphere.
Pull that out.
We'll restore normal economic relations.
Let go of the sanctions.
This is a deal that Putin would absolutely do.
I believe at least he absolutely would do a deal of this form because he's the little brother in that relationship with Xi Jinping, kind of like Mao Zedong was with respect to Brezhnev with the USSR.
Putin's like the new Mao.
So I'm not saying that I love Putin any more than we loved Mao back then.
I don't trust Putin at all.
But I do trust him narrowly to follow his self-interest.
And I think that this is in his self-interest.
And so this pulls Putin out of that relationship, creates a trilateral international order instead of the bilateral one that favors China.
That's more stable, less likely to result in nuclear war, less likely to result in war, period, and actually advances American interests.
This is how we deter Xi Jinping from going after Taiwan without going to war over Taiwan.
Probably the most important tangible foreign policy accomplishment of the next president, and I'm confident I have the clearest vision of how to deliver it, is deter China from going after Taiwan without going to war over it.
That's critical.
We cannot go to war with China.
This is not going to be a good outcome for anybody, certainly not for the United States.
But this is how we do it, because Putin's calculus right now is that the U.S. will be on its back foot if the two allied nuclear superpowers with hypersonic missile capabilities and super EMP capabilities and the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, and I'm talking about Russia here, is combined with the economic engine of China that the U.S. is dependent on, that the U.S. will have to be meek if China goes after Taiwan, but Xi Jinping will have to think twice if Russia's no longer in his camp.
Can I just jump in there?
Because I actually find that very interesting.
And I think that has potential to work.
I mean, I think if you were to offer Putin a deal like that, he would, first off, he'd get a lot of what he wants.
He could save face.
He could spend that as like, look at everything I get, which is what we're going to need here.
Everyone's going to have to be able to feel like they can save face to their own people.
And so that would be good.
I'm just throwing this out there, not saying you got to agree with it right now.
But if you needed one more really powerful bargaining chip, which would guarantee Putin would agree.
I know what you're going to say, but let's.
Well, what is it?
What was I going to say?
Exit NATO.
Exit NATO.
That's the answer.
So listen, I'm a negotiator.
You would save taxpayer money.
We have no need to be in there supporting.
We joined.
It is not lost on me.
We'll just leave it at that.
It is not lost on me.
But if I'm leading the United States, my job is to represent our interests.
I've built my career in part, and I feel like I sound like Trump here, but like, I don't mean, I'm really good at doing deals.
Look at my track record on this.
Yes, no, I understand you can't throw that out as a starting point.
So just, I got you.
I understand the point, and it's not lost on me.
We're just scratching the surface here, I promise you.
Yeah.
So that's, so that's on, that's on the Russia-China partnership side.
Then, you know, I mean, I think other things to deter war with China, there's small stuff around the edges I've brought up.
I personally think that Taiwan should adopt the U.S. version of the Second Amendment, right?
The Second Amendment's the protection that secures all of the others, but it also secures foreign threats as well.
Put a gun in every Taiwanese household, train them how to use it.
Why not?
That Xi Jinping is darn scared of a Second Amendment.
That's why they don't have one in China.
Are you suggesting the U.S. government should be arming Taiwan?
No, the NRA could open its own branch.
Taiwan could just do it on its own.
I mean, the NRA is a private organization, right?
So I just think I'm throwing an idea into the ether that's like a football pass.
I throw up the pass.
It's up to Taiwan to catch it.
And that's American exceptionalism as part of that is exporting our ideas of freedom, right?
Agreed.
And so that's their choice whether or not they want to catch that ball.
But I think that there are things.
I come back to my North Star.
How do we deter China from going after Taiwan without going to war over Taiwan?
And why do I care about deterring China for Taiwan after all?
Taiwan's different than Ukraine because Taiwan is the fountainhead of global semiconductors that provide literally our modern way of life.
We wouldn't be having this conversation right now virtually.
I wouldn't be able to use this phone if it were not for advanced leading-edge semiconductors coming off the island nation of Taiwan.
It's just a fact, right?
And so now I come to the economic dependence piece of this.
I'm not blaming anybody over the last 30 years.
I'm just learning from the mistakes we've made.
We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were participating in a game of global free market capitalism when in fact the party on the other side wasn't actually engaging in the game of global free market capitalism.
They were playing the game of mercantilism, which they were using companies as pawns, literally as pawns, and I could tell you how they do it, to advance geopolitical agendas that have nothing to do with commerce.
So Airbnb having to hand over U.S. user data as a condition for doing business in China.
I'm not making this up.
I mean, these are hard facts.
I talk about it in my book.
It's Wall Street Journal reporting on this.
That's not capitalism.
That's mercantilism.
BlackRock being required to lobby the U.S. government for lowered listing standards specifically for Chinese companies shortly before.
I mean, it's almost, you know, you could almost connect the dots shortly before being granted a government-granted license to be allowed to sell mutual funds in China.
That's not capitalism.
That is mercantilism.
We just go straight down the list.
China has turned companies into vectors for advancing agendas that have nothing to do with commerce.
This is a problem.
This is a great threat.
I think that turns Larry Fink to Jamie Dimon to Elon Musk, for that matter, in some ways, into circus monkeys that jump as high as the CCP needs them to jump because they're dependent on the biggest economic opportunity or growth opportunity that they see, which is expanding into the Chinese market.
Notably, that's not a criticism of those business leaders.
I have other criticisms of certain of those business leaders, but this isn't one of them.
Businesses are doing what you'd expect businesses to do.
It's a criticism of U.S. policy that is reciting a mantra without recognizing that that mantra is not grounded in truth.
It's grounded in a narrative that doesn't track the actual truth, the essence of what's actually going on.
So what I would do as U.S. president is I'd sit across the table from Xi Jinping and say, listen up, we're cutting the cord.
We're declaring total economic independence unless you commit to playing by the same rules that govern our system of having a capitalistic relationship, no ip theft, data theft, no use of companies as lobbying pawns, as a cons, as a requirement for being able to engage in commerce in your country, just as we don't do it in reverse, or else we're cutting the cord.
But there's a crucial precondition for me to be able to do that credibly, I think we have to re-enter the trade relationships that Trump exited with many of those Pacific nations.
So Trump exited the TPP.
It's now the CPTPP that they call it.
Again, I'm a big believer in finding silver linings, right?
So the silver lining of this is that gives me greater leverage as U.S. president to go back and say, hey, well, Trump pulled out.
You know, we're willing to do it.
But here's the conditions for coming back in and get some more concessions out of it.
What are those concessions?
I mean, Japan and South Korea, they like state-owned enterprises and, you know, corporate welfare at a level that we don't appreciate.
And so, you know, we'll get some more concessions for them to back down on some of that.
But that's a detail.
Basically re-enter those relationships with Japan, South Korea, India, Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam included, Australia, go around the Pacific Rim, even Brazil, Mexico will go around the board.
Shore up our supply chains through trade relationships such that the damage we would inflict by the United States, even from cutting the cord from China, would be tiny compared to what it was if we were just depending on magically waving a magic wand and expecting that we'd onshore all that to the United States.
That's not going to happen.
That's a false promise.
It's not grounded in truth.
Then I'm able to sit across the table with Xi Jinping with a spine and mean it.
And he will know that I mean it when I say that unless you meet our demands of playing by the same rules, then we're cutting the cord.
I have a high degree of confidence that, again, people generally tend to act in their self-interest.
Xi Jinping will have to fold on that, right?
Because China's in a weaker spot than we are.
Their zero COVID policies last year were disastrous.
He shot himself in the foot.
You know what?
I think he'll have to meet those demands.
But if he doesn't, then yes, I'm prepared to see that through.
And this is, again, how we reduce our reliance on China in a way that actually here deters war.
I know that turns the conventional thinking on its head, which is you're less likely to go to war if you're economically dependent.
China sees it the other way, actually.
The fact that so many countries, so many companies are economically dependent on China is just one more lever and a plug that they'll pull, right?
We're deluding ourselves if we're the only ones who think we can cut the cord, right?
If they're saving it for a military moment, then I think we have that, you know, sort of Damocles hanging over our neck too.
But I think that by actually exercising greater economic leverage, what we do is we force China to play by the same set of rules, which will actually stabilize the economic relationship versus the unstable equilibrium that we're in now when they're not really playing by the rules of capitalism.
We see that with plain eyes and yet still have to recite the slogan because we feel like we're stuck.
Part of the problem is we need to re-enter those trade relationships.
And part of it's just shoring up our own fortitude here at home.
You know, I think stop paying people to stay at home.
That's a big part of what drives the worker shortage in our country.
And stop overregulating our own economy that it's impossible to produce here.
Which goes to the administrative state point we were talking about earlier.
Absolutely.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Mango.
Think man go.
This is the new pill that will help improve your performance in the bedroom.
They have a new innovative compound.
It will level up your bedroom game.
They combine three FDA approved ingredients, the active ingredients in Cialis and Viag, as well as oxytocin, which is the love hormone, and L-arganine to increase blood flow to achieve optimum performance.
They're rapidly dissolving tabots.
They hit the bloodstream quick for faster results.
They're a mango flavor.
They're individually packaged for on-the-go use.
And it's all 100% online with free doctor's visits, all done online.
No subscription required to try the mangoes.
Go to mangoRX.com, use the promo code GAS15, and you will get 15% off your first order.
That's mangoRX.com, promo code GAS15 for 15% off.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Did you happen to catch, there was a real interesting moment last year when the Trilateral Commission met in Japan and there was like this crazy, rowdy group of different representatives from Asian countries.
I'm talking allies, South Koreans, Japanese, who were furious about how provocative the U.S. is being toward China.
And I would just suggest that if we're talking about negotiating these things away, much like you were talking about negotiating with Vladimir Putin, there's also many things that where we could stop performing war games right off of their coast.
We could stop having our State Department, one of Trump's final moves from the State Department, labeling them as committing a Uyghur genocide, which was, by the way, listed one single source, Adrian Zenz, which was all like doctored bad numbers.
I'm not saying they're treating the Uyghurs great, but the data that they provided that Pompeo put out was like just not accurate.
Even I believe Zenz has admitted that himself.
But I also think there's probably, you know, stuff like Joe Biden saying we will militarily defend Taiwan, which is just, look, none of us want to see China invade Taiwan, but the idea that America is going to go over there and militarily defend Taiwan if they're invaded is goofy.
Defending Taiwan Fundamentally00:06:34
It just makes no sense.
It's like saying China would stop us from invading Mexico City.
It's not going to happen.
You can't do it.
We're two countries with a whole lot of H-bombs and we're not going to move.
Even in our own war games, we lose that war.
So I just think there's probably room to negotiate with China by also saying like you can take this kind of harder path economically, but also saying that like to back off of some of the provocations that I think both Obama, Trump, and the Biden administration have been guilty of.
Yeah, so I want to separate a couple things there.
I agree with a lot of the intuition there, but maybe just parse a couple things.
Sure.
I do think that, so I'm one of these people where I don't, I'm not going to be some apologist for China's behaviors with respect to the Uyghurs.
To the contrary, I've actually been very critical of, for example, companies that'll be self-flogging here in the United States for putting a neat little black square on their Instagram account talking about the death of black Americans at the hands of police while watching real enslavement in the present day in China.
But we can't conflate that with saying that somehow it's the U.S.'s responsibility to be the world's human rights police, right?
That's the mistake that we make.
And so I think sometimes we fall in the trap of, oh, well, we want to defend the existence of, we want to defend some other regime abroad.
My point is, no, we will not, but it's not our job to police that either.
So I just think we have to keep clear eyes about that is the first distinction I draw.
Second distinction I would draw, and this is going to, you know, this will get me in a lot of trouble in the Republican Party, but it's just my true belief.
I think our commitment to Taiwan, let's be really honest, is fundamentally and ought to be fundamentally different if we're semiconductor supply chain independent, period.
I mean, we got, you got Samsung, you got South Korean companies, you've got building and construction going on here in the United States.
We're a matter of years from getting there.
I personally think that China, it depends on Xi Jinping's motivation.
If it's to screw over the United States economically, then he has an incentive to go sooner.
But I think this is more of a nationalistic impulse dating back to 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek, you know, was fundamentally hostile to now what the recognized ruling regime in China is, which is the Communist Party.
If that's really what it is, he's going to possibly wait until we actually have semiconductor independence in this country because he will predict, hopefully correctly, and if I'm president, it will be correctly, that we don't have a reason to engage in a way that we would if our own economic security depended on it from the semiconductor supply chain.
So I think that that's an interesting insight that no one's talking about here.
And I'll come back to saying that here's how I want to do it.
I think that here's, and it's achievable, right?
So this is not la-la-land stuff.
Pull Russia apart from China.
If Taiwan wants to, we certainly can export our ideas and help turn itself into a porcupine with its own version of the Second Amendment.
Re-enter the trade relationships with Japan, South Korea, et cetera.
Part of what they were frustrated about as well there, that they're venting about was our absence of trading with them in Japan.
And then put ourselves in a position to say that, hey, listen, if you're not going to play by the same set of rules, we're not going to play your game economically.
I think this gets us there.
And I think I'm the only person in this race, and part of the reason I'm in it, who has a clear vision and a clear set of steps to deter, avoid war with over Taiwan and end the war in Ukraine, all the while actually advancing American interests.
And it amazes me, right?
People who have been around, as you said, for 30, 40 years aren't within miles of this vision, but instead are selectively remembering one set of agreements, but not another from the 1990s that make a justification on a path to war, whatever is going to be the path that leads to war.
That's going to be the justification that they cling on to.
And so I think that that's maybe take somebody of a different generation.
Maybe just take somebody who knows the facts.
Maybe just take somebody who's grounded by a vision of how we actually advance George Washington's farewell address.
I'm a George Washington America first conservative.
Read his farewell speech.
It's a good statement of what our foreign policy today should be.
And I stand by it.
Absolutely.
Well, look, I think, and I know you got to get a role.
I'll let you go.
But I think just pretending we live in a unipolar moment is living in a fantasy.
And I think your idea about a tripolar moment is living in reality.
So I just think that's fundamentally as an advantage.
And favors the United States, by the way.
That tripolar favors the United States too.
No, the unipolar moment didn't do so great for America.
We just spent ourselves into bankruptcy.
I think we're better off this way.
Listen, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Let people know if they want to support you, if they want to find out more of your stuff, where can they go?
Vivake2024.com, V-I-V-E-K2024.com.
I actually want to point out, I mean, I'm ahead of where Donald Trump was in June of 2015.
Latest poll just came out this morning.
I'm at 6%, twice most other U.S. senators and governors who are even doing well in this race.
Long way to go.
I'm not in this to prove a point because I think too often many of us are satisfied with saying we move the frame of discussion and want to make a point.
Folks who are in your listenership, basically you yourself, Dave, you won't agree with 100% of what I say, but you're going to agree with like 90% of what I say, maybe more, 95%, 95% of what I say.
I think, look, if you really agree with 80, 90% of what I say, I need your help, especially in places like New Hampshire, but I need your help because we're going to have to dissolve these standard party distinctions between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, but even between the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party to see this through.
And with that lift, I spoke to Ron Paul a matter of days ago.
I think a combination of, yes, putting American interests first, but with the vision that Dr. Paul brought to this race, that's a big part of what I'm bringing to this race, but not to shift the Overton window.
We're already doing that.
To actually see this through.
And the good news is I've lived the American Dream.
I'll put already $10 plus million dollars of my own money.
We're going to cut a multi-million dollar check imminently as well.
We're going to keep adding to this.
We're committed to see this through.
We're not making that sacrifice lightly, but I need you guys is what I'm saying.
And so let me earn your support.
And Dave, you can maybe help me better understand how to do it.
So I appreciate that.
Well, listen, I would love to have you back on anytime.