Oct. 10, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I really just worry about Google being able to swing an election. | ||
| At least when Facebook rips the Hunter Biden story off the internet two or three weeks before the election, which is complete crap and they shouldn't be allowed to do it. | ||
| But when they did that, people noticed. | ||
| And you know, you have the Streisand effect sort of thing where it's this discussion. | ||
| You can talk about it and at least the censorship was transparent. | ||
| But with Google, they can change their search algorithms to, you know, if they're subtle enough, I think you could change it a meaningful amount, suppress this information about Trump, boost this information about Biden. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you know, do you really live in a free country anymore? | ||
| All right, we are in studio, and joining me today is the COO of Teal Capital, the co-author of Zero to One, which I keep on the set normally right over there, and the next senator from the great state of Arizona, Blake Masters! | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| I'm glad to have you, man. | ||
| I've wanted to do this for a while. | ||
| We wanted to do it in person. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As I said, you are the co-author of that book, which I think was really one of the sort of formative things for me to get involved in the tech world and all of that. | ||
| And I know that's obviously something that interests you a lot. | ||
| So why don't we start there? | ||
| How did you start working with Teal and getting some of these ideas across about making new things? | ||
| Yeah, well, I was a student at Stanford Law School, and I remember my friend said, hey, Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is going to teach a class. | ||
| And so we should take that class. | ||
| And I didn't know that much about Peter then. | ||
| I knew he was a libertarian, businessman, billionaire, founded PayPal. | ||
| That seemed cool. | ||
| So he was into seasteading, you know, this idea that you should maybe think about how to start new countries. | ||
| We should get back on that idea, actually. | ||
| So he seemed like a cool guy, and what an opportunity to take a class from someone who wasn't just a professor. | ||
| I'd actually done something in the world. | ||
| So I took that class and sort of befriended Peter. | ||
| This was my second year in law school. | ||
| I went to go intern for him at his venture capital fund. | ||
| That summer, and then he came back, taught another class my last year in law school. | ||
| I took really good notes on that class. | ||
| I just basically typed down everything he said. | ||
| Because I liked the first class, but I can't tell you too much about it, because it's all lost to memory, right? | ||
| I wasn't like a big note taker in college, because who cares? | ||
| But the second time I was prepared, so I wrote down everything Peter said, cleaned it up, posted it online. | ||
| And these notes became kind of like a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. | ||
| This was like 2012. | ||
| Because I think it was the first time you could actually kind of collect all of Peter's thoughts on building a startup. | ||
| That's what the class was about. | ||
| Startups and technology companies and how to do new things in a stagnant society. | ||
| And so I think people who were interested in Peter at the time, and his stock was sort | ||
| of rising, like Facebook was just about to IPO, you could piece together things from | ||
| like interviews, print interviews, YouTube, but there was no one set of like, "Here's | ||
| Peter Thiel's thoughts on how to start a startup." | ||
| And all of a sudden, me, as this random Stanford student, was publishing this online. | ||
| And so Silicon Valley, a couple thousand people just started following week over week these | ||
| notes and became this really successful-- Oh, so you were doing it in real time? | ||
| You were in the class putting the notes up and people were following. | ||
| So basically they were getting the education for free. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Which is really interesting because it was this awesome class and I think ultimately we turned it into a very successful book, but I think it would have just died. | ||
| All the material and Peter worked hard to organize all the thinking for the class, but if it's not recorded, if it doesn't actually get outside the classroom, it just dies there. | ||
| And that would have been a big shame. | ||
| Yeah, so the basic premise of the book is that the next Facebook is not going to be Facebook. | ||
| To go from zero to one, you have to do something fully new. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Does that feel more sort of relevant now than it did even, you know, eight, ten years ago because of the sort of upheaval and weird spot that we're in right now? | ||
| It does. | ||
| I think we desperately do need new technology to sort of take things to the next level. | ||
| We have a remarkably stagnant society. | ||
| I think people get distracted, like the iPhone 13 Pro just came out. | ||
| It's like, congratulations, the camera's much better. | ||
| And that's cool. | ||
| Wait, it's a half inch bigger? | ||
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Half is bigger, it's cool, it's good enough. | |
| We literally just shot a campaign ad in cinema mode on iPhone 13 Pro, and it's like, holy shit, this is actually a really good camera. | ||
| So there's some innovation, but it's also marginal, and this is all confined to your smartphone, or IT broadly, or software startups. | ||
| Actually, society looks so much like it did in the 1970s. | ||
| We're not moving faster, in some ways we're moving slower. | ||
| We don't build houses any better or more efficiently now. | ||
| actually housing prices are just going through the roof. | ||
| So much in our society is stagnant and "Zero to One" is, yeah, narrowly a business book, | ||
| but broadly it's this sort of exploration of why is so much of our society just stagnant? | ||
| Like, why can't we do new things? | ||
| Is that kind of the core of why you wanna go into politics? | ||
| Or is it fair to say you even wanna go into politics in a way where you're being sort of dragged to politics? | ||
| I sense that with a lot of people that are getting involved. | ||
| It was like, I didn't really want to be a politician at first, but somebody's got to fix this. | ||
| Somebody's got to fix it. | ||
| And I'm somebody. | ||
| I definitely have that view of it. | ||
| I'm getting into it. | ||
| I really want to get into it. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| You know, I'm loving campaigning. | ||
| I'm going to win the race, so I'm motivated. | ||
| I just told everybody. | ||
| You just told everyone, so that's going to happen. | ||
| Yeah, you're golden. | ||
| But it'd be nice in some sense, like if I didn't have to. | ||
| Like if things were working, if we didn't have this establishment that was presiding over, I think, this cultural and economic decay. | ||
| Then I wouldn't have to. | ||
| But that's not where we are, and I have to, and I think we need some new thinking in government. | ||
| So it's also the most important thing I could be doing. | ||
| I didn't think this was the case in, like, 2012 when I was taking those notes. | ||
| I thought, you know, I saw Mitt Romney lose to Barack Obama, and it's like, how could this possibly happen? | ||
| I thought the first Obama term was so bad that, of course, like a successful businessman governor, Mitt Romney, you know, he even looks the part. | ||
| Of course he's going to win, right? | ||
| He definitely looks the part, yeah. | ||
| And then it was just, I think it was too nice, and just sort of failed to understand this was a fight for the future of the country and he lost and to me uh... has always been political but | ||
| It's sort of like, well, if the right, if conservatives, if Republicans just aren't going to be serious about winning, maybe it's just a controlled opposition, and we're just going to have a managed decline politically, and that's why I wanted to go into business. | ||
| It's like, I could actually do something. | ||
| You know, you could start and invest in startups. | ||
| And if we can get technology to work sort of faster than government can retard progress, then maybe we can have a good future. | ||
| I basically thought it was all over, honestly, until 2016. | ||
| And Trump comes on the scene and sort of busts up the establishment. | ||
| And whatever your view of that is, like he did it, I think that's great. | ||
| I thought the administration was very successful. | ||
| But he showed me that new things are possible in politics. | ||
| And I think we need much more of a startup mentality because we have too much stagnation, too much bureaucracy. | ||
| We're really drowning in it. | ||
| So it's just time for- I've never thought about it this way, but would you consider Trump in 2016 as sort of a zero to one moment in politics? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| He came. | ||
| I thought it was sort of refreshing. | ||
| It was really honest. | ||
| I mean, I think this is why he was elected. | ||
| He was like the one person telling the truth, which is this left establishment and the right establishment. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It was the emperor has no clothes moment, where he's just like, you, you, you, you're getting screwed. | ||
| You're getting ripped off. | ||
| China's eating our lunch. | ||
| And he'd been remarkably consistent about that decade over decade. | ||
| And I think people That resonated with them. | ||
| Like, the election that we deserved in 2016 was Trump versus Bernie Sanders, which, of course, the DNC wouldn't let happen, and they rigged it so that Bernie couldn't win. | ||
| And I disagree with Bernie Sanders on everything. | ||
| I think he's just wrong. | ||
| Like, that left-wing sort of communist politics, like, that doesn't work. | ||
| But Bernie was at least more honest than Hillary, because he came on the scene and said, like, this is rigged. | ||
| This establishment is failing people. | ||
| And that's what Trump's message was, too. | ||
| They just had very different policy prescriptions, and I think Trump's are much better. | ||
| Do you kind of admire the sort of evilness of the DNC in a way, like that they rigged it against Bernie? | ||
| Admire is too strong. | ||
| Well, admire the way I always say... You gotta respect it in a sort of... Well, admire, like the way the doctor admired the alien in the first Alien movie, you know, it was so merciless that it was killing everything and it had no remorse. | ||
| Look, the left is serious about power, and they know how to play the game, and again, there's something horrible about that, but... | ||
| They play to win. | ||
| And so often Republicans don't play to win. | ||
| We play to be Mr. Nice Guy and then try to get some sinecure at some think tank, you know, when we lose. | ||
| And I think people are just sick of that. | ||
| Because our back's against the wall. | ||
| There's no more room to play defense. | ||
| What do you do about the nice guy part? | ||
| Because I heard you speak a couple weeks ago here in L.A. | ||
| and my general takeaway, I know you a little bit through Twitter mostly, but my takeaway was, oh, he's a nice guy. | ||
| Like, do you think that can actually work in this, like that we need these sort of corrupt, mean people willing to do horrible shit to become politicians? | ||
| Well, I think you've got to play to win. | ||
| And I'm definitely playing to win. | ||
| So I think I present like a reasonable person. | ||
| I think I am, you know, a nice person or whatever. | ||
| But I care more about doing the right thing than being nice. | ||
| And so I'm sure at some point in the campaign, like I want to run a positive campaign. | ||
| I think that's how I break through, by showing people in Arizona how I'm different. | ||
| But I'm sure the fangs come out. | ||
| You know, I can be sharp elbowed. | ||
| And I think you have to be. | ||
| I have super thick skin. | ||
| I don't think it's about being mean for the sake of it, but I do think we have to understand, like, right now we're playing for the future of the country. | ||
| And I think if the left wins, we won't have a good country. | ||
| We won't even have a country in 30 years, necessarily. | ||
| So I think the stakes are really high, and I'm willing to do what it takes to win and shore it up so that we can have a successful future. | ||
| I don't think that means be brash and be rude, but I do think it means Republicans have to get serious about, like, acquiring and using power to sort of build the society that works. | ||
| Brash and rude comes when you run for president. | ||
| It's one thing at a time. | ||
| It's just Senate now. | ||
| If you had to really just sort of sum up your political positions, it strikes me as some sort of blend between like a traditional conservative with libertarian leanings, something like that. | ||
| Is that kind of fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I've been there to libertarianism. | ||
| It's like I grew up with Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman on the bookshelf. | ||
| In college, I got super into the Austrian school, you know, von Mises and total free market economics. | ||
| I think it's very important to understand. | ||
| I think it's good to be coming from that place. | ||
| I also think we need to update. | ||
| So it's like I'm a very pro-market guy, very pro-business guy. | ||
| But there is no free trade with China. | ||
| And so if you have these free trade people negotiating trade agreements with China, There's a sense in which you just lose, because China doesn't have free trade. | ||
| They're always the way that society works, right? | ||
| CCP is just subsidizing domestic industries. | ||
| They can dump steel. | ||
| It's just not a level playing field. | ||
| And so for decades, it's just we have free traders at the negotiating table. | ||
| And the worse they are at negotiating, the better they think they've done. | ||
| It's free trade. | ||
| We can't possibly put a tariff on China. | ||
| And it's like, no, we took all this productive industrial capacity and we shipped it to Southeast Asia to save a buck. | ||
| And in theory, that's economically efficient. | ||
| In practice, it hollows out your sort of middle American economy. | ||
| To the great detriment of most Americans. | ||
| And so I think generally like a pro-market guy, laissez-faire as much as possible internally. | ||
| But like, you've got to pay attention to your trade relationship with China. | ||
| And I think for the longest time, Republicans and Democrats botched it. | ||
| And President Trump came on, you know, and again, emperor has no clothes moment. | ||
| He's just like, what are you guys doing? | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| They're eating your lunch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was true. | ||
| And yet, he's not president anymore. | ||
| And yet he's not president anymore. | ||
| Which is a big shame, but like, his policies were working. | ||
| You know, wages in this country stagnated from 1970, or at least the early 70s, all the way until 2016. | ||
| And they finally started going up, median wages, finally started going up under President Trump. | ||
| And he basically gets no credit for that. | ||
| And now all those gains are reversed because Biden and Harris are just reversing the policies. | ||
| So I think there's room to be like a super pro-market Republican but also understand that markets are supposed to be tools for human flourishing. | ||
| Like the goal is a successful productive society, right? | ||
| The goal is not some abstract economic ideal. | ||
| Is that what conservatives have sort of forgotten how to argue for? | ||
| I get the libertarian stuff for sure, but they've sort of traded in that, oh, there's a greater good here that we should all be trying to attain, and that's sort of disappeared. | ||
| That's right, and that's why I think, you know, on the right you have big business interests that are super pro-open borders, right? | ||
| Because they just care about cheap labor. | ||
| And there's a way you can rationalize that with GDP or sort of economic efficiency arguments, but they don't look at the consequences to society. | ||
| Or in my announcement video, I had a controversial line. | ||
| It was amazing that it was even controversial. | ||
| I would have thought it was common sense. | ||
| But I said, you ought to be able to raise a family in America on one single income. | ||
| Doesn't that mean you hate women or something? | ||
| That's what the Democrats said. | ||
| They attacked me for being sexist. | ||
| And it's like, I didn't say anything sexist at all. | ||
| It's like, you used to be able to raise a family on one income in this country. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| Globalization happened. | ||
| Maybe it's a complicated story to tell. | ||
| But you can't do it anymore. | ||
| And I think that's a problem. | ||
| And maybe, you know, a husband and wife, maybe the wife wants to go to work and the husband wants to stay at home and raise the kids. | ||
| I generally think it's good if someone stays at home and raises the kids. | ||
| Or maybe you want to have two people, you know, Work and that's fine. | ||
| That should be a choice. | ||
| You should be able to afford to raise a family You know, so I didn't say you couldn't choose I just said wouldn't it be nice if we were more prosperous, but that's not the way so many Even people on the right have come to think it's more like well think about all the GDP if we send the husband to work and you send the wife to work or Husband husband, whatever you send two workers and then you've got to get the nanny and now you've got three incomes and look at all this GDP that we're creating, you know, well, it's like What if what if that's not as good for the kids? | ||
| Wouldn't it be nice to have the choice? | ||
| But apparently not. | ||
| Apparently not. | ||
| I think it's really crazy. | ||
| So what do we call this new thing? | ||
| Like, is this what populism, like the new populism of the night is? | ||
| Like, what is it sort of? | ||
| Because I think when you say gender, not you specifically, but when people say, even if now I say, I don't mind if people call me a conservative now, I would say I'm sort of like a future conservative or something like that. | ||
| But when you say conservative to like a 20 year old, they freak out. | ||
| Like, it doesn't sound right. | ||
| There's a branding problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you do about that? | ||
| I don't think populist is necessarily the right label. | ||
| I don't mind if people call me that. | ||
| I don't call myself that. | ||
| I do think what I'm espousing are conservative messages. | ||
| I consider myself conservative, but obviously you can't keep everything the same. | ||
| Society moves on. | ||
| You've got to be a little bit wise about it. | ||
| What's worked in the past? | ||
| What's good about what we've inherited from our ancestors? | ||
| I think there's a whole lot. | ||
| The left wants to throw everything out about the past because it's not perfect right now. | ||
| Everything in the past must be Irredeemable and evil, right? | ||
| That's a mistake. | ||
| We've got to take so much of what we've inherited and just think about how to conserve it in the future while also adapting to new things. | ||
| So I think it's conservative, but it's not like ostrich bury your head in the sand and just repeat whatever Ronald Reagan was saying, right? | ||
| And I think conservatives need to update. | ||
| So whether you want to... I think it's just a new Republican Party that we're building. | ||
| You know, Paul Ryanism doesn't work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think Reagan did what he had to do in the 80s and People have basically just been trying to copy him ever since. | ||
| And this is just the point zero to one. | ||
| If you just look at Facebook, you look at Ronald Reagan, you look at what worked in the past, and if you just mindlessly copy it decade over decade, you'll get to a point where that thing doesn't even work anymore. | ||
| Except you haven't invested the time or the energy in thinking about what you should be saying now. | ||
| We're going to talk a little more about big tech in a bit, but like, are you worried that even if all the ideas are right and decent and, you know, pretty much most people can get on board, that between the media and big tech and everything else, that they just won't let those ideas be heard in a way that the average person could get across? | ||
| I mean, you know, I was out there on the campaign trail with Larry Elder and it was like, this guy was saying a lot of what you just said there, and he's a very decent man and the pedigree that he has and everything else. | ||
| And the media treated him horribly. | ||
| I mean, the black face of white supremacy. | ||
| I do worry about that, although I think California's just gone, to a first approximation. | ||
| Thanks for coming, by the way. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| It's good to visit California. | ||
| Also good to get back home. | ||
| Arizona's not there yet, and I think, you know, the country's not there yet. | ||
| I think if Arizona goes the way of California, if the country goes the way of California, it's all over. | ||
| It's just a one-party state. | ||
| It's dysfunctional. | ||
| Yeah, you can't get a fair hearing. | ||
| But these ideas are popular. | ||
| It's basically like you should be pro-business and pro-market, but make sure that that's actually working for the working class and middle class. | ||
| Like most people in America agree with me that in this country you should be able to raise a family on one single income. | ||
| The criticism of that statement is that it's banal because I haven't said how I'm going to do that. | ||
| It's more just like, Blake, you're just saying it's good to be prosperous or something, but people shouldn't be picking fights with it because it's sexist or because it's impossible. | ||
| That's just giving up. | ||
| Another thing I'm talking about on the campaign trail is just education. | ||
| And there's a partisan way to talk about this, where I think the left-wing ideology, 1619 project and critical race theory, all that stuff is horrible. | ||
| But even if you wipe that stuff away, if we got rid of it tomorrow, that'd be great. | ||
| And it would also not fix our schools, right? | ||
| Because our schools have been failing for decades. | ||
| It's like you graduate kids that can't even read or write because we just lower the standards and we fail to teach the basics. | ||
| And so I think when you point this stuff out, it's not even that ideological. | ||
| It's just so many things about our society don't work. | ||
| And we just need new leadership that is going to privilege competence and execution over anything else. | ||
| How do you think you also show people that politics isn't everything? | ||
| That politics isn't God and the meaning of life and everything else? | ||
| Because that's what it's become to so many people. | ||
| So to say, hey, I'm not going to solve all of your problems. | ||
| We're going to try to make things better. | ||
| We're going to try to, as you said, take the good stuff, bring in some new stuff. | ||
| But, like, we can't solve every single thing. | ||
| Part of it is getting out there with that exact message and reminding people that. | ||
| Because, you know, thinking about, like, my cohort, I'm a millennial, and thinking about Generation Z below me. | ||
| These kids are so attracted to the left-wing totalitarian message, the AOC stuff, right? | ||
| The progressive ideology. | ||
| And that's a totalizing ideology. | ||
| It does purport to solve all your problems. | ||
| It's just like, just believe in the party line and give the state unlimited power and we'll take care of everybody. | ||
| Cradle to grave in a literal sense, right? | ||
| But then also, the woke-ism, the progressivism, it is a substitute religion. | ||
| You know, I've come to believe it's basically a militant form of Christianity, sort of devoid of all the redemption and, you know, the benefit. | ||
| And so it is a whole totalizing philosophy. | ||
| But I think that's really scary. | ||
| And I think if you remind people, like, hey, this is where that goes when you follow that path. | ||
| You know, we have so many historical examples. | ||
| And you just, you remind people, like, that's not the job of government. | ||
| Like, government's job is to create conditions so that people can flourish and protect people's rights so that people can figure out the meaning of life on their own. | ||
| You know, I do think we need a sort of re-Christianization. | ||
| I do think a religious revival in America would be very good. | ||
| It's not my job to make that happen. | ||
| But what you're seeing with the woke takeover of everything is something very much like that. | ||
| I just think it's so crazy. | ||
| 60 or 70% of people in this country won't go for it if we have messengers who can say, like, this is horrible. | ||
| Do you see this thing, everything that you described there, do you see that as sort of the, what I would say is at this point, the obvious end of sort of purely secular liberalism, that at the end of just, I believe only in what's here and now, you're going to get all of this crazy hysteria around government, because people need to believe, one way or another. | ||
| They can say they don't believe, but they believe. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| No, we have a religious impulse, and when the left doesn't think they believe in God or Christianity, this is what we get. | ||
| And I think that's really warped. | ||
| I think it's bad. | ||
| I think it is hurting a lot of people, and I think it'll hurt a lot more. | ||
| It's a militant sort of secular religion. | ||
| They think they're atheists, but actually it's just... | ||
| It's really devastating. | ||
| It's just shifted. | ||
| It's just shifted. | ||
| You mentioned potentially a husband and husband. | ||
| It seems to me that the Republicans have pretty much all moved on gay marriage. | ||
| Do you see any issue there when you're talking about some of the religious stuff or even maybe some of the base that still isn't quite there? | ||
| I don't see it, but... I'm in super Republican activist rooms every day in Arizona. | ||
| And I just don't hear that at all. | ||
| You know, my hometown congressman in Tucson, when I was growing up, Jim Colby, I think was the first openly gay member of Congress. | ||
| If not, he was an early one. | ||
| But when he spoke at the 2000 convention in favor of George W. Bush, his nomination, I remember the Texas delegation actually turned their back on Jim Colby when he was speaking, right? | ||
| That's sort of where the country was, or that's where Texas was in 2000. | ||
| And then in 2016, right, fast forward 16 years later, I'm there in Cleveland at the RNC convention with Peter, and Peter gave this speech, and he had this line where he said, I'm proud to be gay, I'm proud to be Republican, but most of all, right, applause line, I'm proud to be an American. | ||
| And the crowd went nuts, you know, and the Trump kids were sitting in a sort of private VIP box there, and they all stood up and applauded, right? | ||
| It was just, to me, that was a bookend. | ||
| I was watching that on TV, and it was before I had ever met Peter, and I was still a lefty at the time, and I remember thinking, whoa, something just happened just now. | ||
| Like, when they all exploded, but of course the next day the media doesn't, they don't give you anything on that, right? | ||
| If anything, he's somehow a sellout for doing it, or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think people have moved beyond this. | ||
| I think there's a sort of personal libertarian streak in the, at least in Arizona, right? | ||
| Republicans don't care. | ||
| They don't care what you do. | ||
| They don't care what your family, but you know, but they don't want to feel They don't want to feel like they're a bigot or something, you know, because they're not on board with... Greg Queen's story, yeah. | ||
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Exactly. | |
| How about that? | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
| And so some people say, like, gosh, where does it stop, right? | ||
| Every Fortune 500 company seems to have these political messages, you know, pro-LGBT messages. | ||
| And if you believe what most Americans believed three years ago, you're, you know, racist and you're a bigot and you're retrograde. | ||
| People don't want that. | ||
| They don't want to be bludgeoned over the head with some agenda. | ||
| But I think most people are, like, pretty live and let live. | ||
| And I think that's positive development for the country. | ||
| So I hear basically none of this. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| I just felt it was worth asking because I do see some little tension on some of the stuff going on with the right. | ||
| There's this sort of like Catholic revival in the midst of this, where they're sort of against it. | ||
| And it's like, how do you blend that with the libertarian part? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But that's a protect that has to deal with stuff. | ||
| I think it's like the real problem with marriage, gay or straight, is that people just get divorced. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People don't get married. | ||
| You wait longer and longer, and people aren't forming families, and then when they do, they fall apart. | ||
| You know, because I think every force in society basically conspires against young people coupling, and that's really bad. | ||
| But I don't think that's a gay-straight issue. | ||
| I think everybody's divorce rates are too high for everyone. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned you're a millennial. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
35. | |
| 35, so I'm 45. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Gen X. Gen X, I'm sorry about that. | |
| Well, then you already answered the question. | ||
| Do you feel like, because I feel this way, that Gen X basically got completely passed over somehow? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| The boomers are still hanging on. | ||
| They will never let go of their power, yeah. | ||
| They just won't let go and they, I mean, Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and even Trump, I mean, we've got all of these people in their late 70s into 80s still running the show. | ||
| It should be the 45 year olds right now in the prime of things. | ||
| And yet maybe we're just gonna be skipped over and it'll be you young bucks at 35. | ||
| You definitely get screwed. | ||
| I agree Pelosi and Schumer should relinquish their power immediately. | ||
| I like Trump, I hope he runs again. | ||
| But he's the one I would wanna see who's in that generation run. | ||
| Well, I don't think you're bad because of your age, obviously, but the ones that are just- We need a changing of the guard. | ||
| I mean, we really just do. | ||
| I think the median age of the U.S. | ||
| Senate is 63, which is pretty crazy because it's the median, right? | ||
| So there's a lot of senators that are 70, 80. | ||
| Dianne Feinstein is like 127 or something. | ||
| And it's actually, I just kind of feel bad for her. | ||
| Like it's not clear she knows where she is in the Biden thing. | ||
| I mean, people make fun of it and okay, fine, fair enough. | ||
| It's rough and tumble in politics, but it's actually really sad. | ||
| I think it's really sad. | ||
| I think it's crazy that we have a president that clearly doesn't have a grip on things. | ||
| Like, he's just not there. | ||
| That's not even ideological criticism. | ||
| He's just not fully able to do the job. | ||
| Do you think if it was Trump, they maybe would be talking about that? | ||
| Would that be such a bold, crazy statement? | ||
| I wonder if the media would have something to say about that. | ||
| He once drank with a cup. | ||
| Remember the glass with two hands? | ||
| That was a neurological disorder. | ||
| It's just gaslighting. | ||
| It's just gaslighting. | ||
| They think people are stupid. | ||
| They think we can't actually see that President Biden cannot string a sentence together. | ||
| And this is really crazy. | ||
| One thing that's interesting though, I have not heard on the campaign trail, oh Blake, you're too young to be a U.S. | ||
| Senator. | ||
| And I was sort of bracing myself for that line of criticism. | ||
| Because I do have 20 years or 30 years even on some of my competitors. | ||
| But people do not feel this way. | ||
| Actually, two-thirds of the Republican primary electorate in Arizona is over 55. | ||
| So it's not a particularly young electorate. | ||
| But those people love me. | ||
| It's, you know, because like how radical is it to actually see a young conservative who's been paying attention, who knows history, who knows about the good things in the past, who knows how important it is to carry this forward, but also is young and has the energy and you can imagine, you know, I got a lot of skin in the game. | ||
| Hopefully I have a long runway left and I have young kids and I really care about the country they're growing up in. | ||
| And I think so many of the baby boomer politicians, you know, my competition in the primary, They're fine, you know, whatever, but there's a business guy and a military guy and a politician, and it's just, you have the career, and then you finish the career, and it's like, well, retirement sucks, it's boring, and you don't want to think about mortality, and so you're just looking for that capstone. | ||
| And so you have all the cliché stuff, like, I'm just ready to go back and serve my community, you know, and it's like, no man, I'm fighting for the future of this country. | ||
| So how much of everything sort of that feels wrong with the country right now is that? | ||
| It's that tension between things that are collapsing, that aren't working anymore. | ||
| Even media, you know, like watching CNN, that now we can expose their lies every two seconds online, which we couldn't do 10 years ago, and then their lies seem to get more brazen. | ||
| That it's a tension between, like, The mainstream media and the internet culture, a tension between young and old, like we're just at this weird turning point right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think it's just stagnation. | ||
| And ultimately it doesn't work. | ||
| And the people who have been in charge of it and presided over it won't admit that, you know? | ||
| Does that give you hope that, as right now it feels like it's getting out of control, that it maybe is at its death end in some way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| It does. | ||
| It's weird because it's simultaneously a very pessimistic message. | ||
| Like, I'm up on the campaign trail every night telling people, like, it's really bad. | ||
| Like, my competition is like, our best days are right around the corner. | ||
| And it's like, I think that sounds fake to people. | ||
| I hope our best days are in the future. | ||
| And I am excited and optimistic and that's why I'm running. | ||
| Because I think we can arrest the decline and reverse it and have a good country. | ||
| Going forward, but but it's really bleak. | ||
| I think it's really bleak. | ||
| I think things have not been working for so long You know, I think fiscal crises loom, you know, we're just printing tons of money seeing inflation It's just not gonna work this whole monetary policy that we have the system itself I don't know whether it has two years or 20 years, but I don't think it has 50 years Are you trying to tell me that 3.5 trillion doesn't equal zero? | ||
| Because I have a calculator back there. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's like, in the past, Democrats who wanted to spend a lot of money would have been honest enough to say, like, this is expensive. | ||
| It's an investment in ourselves, right? | ||
| I mean, this goes back to the founding father, Alexander Hamilton, was like, you know, public debt, we owe it to ourselves. | ||
| Like, sometimes you've got to invest in improvements. | ||
| There's a fair debate to have if If you acknowledge the stakes of the debate. | ||
| If you have to spend $3.5 trillion, make the argument. | ||
| But again, they think people are stupid. | ||
| And they think they can come and say 2 plus 2 is 4, $3.5 trillion equals zero. | ||
| It's free. | ||
| My Build Back Better agenda is free. | ||
| It costs nothing. | ||
| It's paid for. | ||
| And it's like, what the hell is that? | ||
| If you buy a $2 million house because you have $2 million, your house isn't free. | ||
| Cost $2 million, you know? | ||
| This was the burrito example I used with this guy the other day. | ||
| If you're at Chipotle and you order a burrito and they're like, it's 10 bucks, and then you just punch the guy behind you and take his 10 bucks, it still costs 10 bucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's free. | ||
| It's free. | ||
| So it's crazy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And I guess this stuff works over time. | ||
| I mean, they know what they're doing. | ||
| This is a calculated sort of linguistic manipulation. | ||
| But do you think it's because they think they can get away with it? | ||
| Like they think the media... Well, because they do. | ||
| The media then just repeats it as if it's true. | ||
| They do. | ||
| But I think the media stranglehold is just weaker than it's ever been. | ||
| And I give President Trump huge credit for this. | ||
| I think the mainstream media was, you know, garbage, frankly, before 2016. | ||
| Peddling the same sort of fake, you know, bipartisan... | ||
| center-left narrative. But I think Trump came along and totally just picked a fight with him. | ||
| It was crazy and chaotic and all that, but he delegitimated the mainstream media. | ||
| And so we live in this sort of information environment that's kind of wild. | ||
| It's hard to know who's telling the truth. | ||
| It's hard to know who to trust. | ||
| And then even if someone is trustworthy, they might be wrong about some deeds. | ||
| So people have to do the work and read a lot of things. | ||
| Like COVID, it's like, how do you actually know what's happening, right? | ||
| Is it the hugest problem in the world? | ||
| I suspect not anymore. | ||
| Is it Sort of serious, and we should pay attention to these things. | ||
| Or is it completely fake? | ||
| And, you know, it's hard to actually know. | ||
| Like literally, how many people are dying of COVID? | ||
| And at this point, the problem is experts. | ||
| The expert class has totally delegitimated itself. | ||
| And so if you can't listen to experts, who can you listen to, right? | ||
| And so I think people don't know what to believe. | ||
| There's a version of this about election integrity in Arizona. | ||
| We just had this audit come out. | ||
| And it's fascinating for me because I'm campaigning, I'm in these Republican activist rooms, and before the audit came out at least, I'd be talking to people who were just sure that Dominion voting systems switch, you know, whatever it is, 300,000 votes for Trump. | ||
| Switched them to Biden and it was simply rigged or something. | ||
| And I'm, you know, that's not my view. | ||
| I do think the election was unfair and stolen in some sense. | ||
| I think you can point to, like, tremendous amounts of irregularities. | ||
| And I think on the margins, certainly, Democrats cheat and steal. | ||
| And in Arizona, there's a ballot harvesting problem. | ||
| It's technically illegal, but goes unpoliced. | ||
| But I never really thought, and I think the audit shows this, that it wasn't as simple as, you know, a cartoonish rigging of 300,000 votes. | ||
| But I'm just so sympathetic to people who do think that. | ||
| Because they know, you know, the media would be happy to lie to them. | ||
| Almost every journalist would lie to hurt President Trump in some sense. | ||
| Election experts say, you know, studies show that people know that this narrative is so massaged and so fake. | ||
| And so I think when people can't trust the institutions anymore, when they can't trust the experts, they will latch on to whatever sort of You had a great Twitter thread on this because you were talking about this and then you referenced, I think it was that Atlantic, it was Atlantic, the article, where they said it was, they were fortifying the election. | ||
| So that, you know, they basically say a cabal of people figured out how to fortify the election. | ||
| And it's like then the average person reads that and even if you don't have the numbers right in front of you to go | ||
| Oh, they cheated this way specifically It's kind of like if you thought that Hitler was you know, | ||
| gonna be reelected you might cheat right like you might They spent years saying that President Trump was evil | ||
| incarnate, right? | ||
| in 2019. | ||
| In 2019, as late as 2019, Nancy Pelosi said he was an illegitimate president, you know, only elected because Russia put him, you know, this crazy shit. | ||
| It was really crazy. | ||
| Yeah, Hillary still got the tweet up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's an illegitimate president. | ||
| Really crazy stuff. | ||
| And then we actually have tons of irregularities. | ||
| You actually do have this sort of, I think, center left, left wing, media, NGO, corporate, Fusion of power that gets together and says, like, how do we get Trump out? | ||
| Like, we know this happened. | ||
| We know they had motive and opportunity. | ||
| Like, we know they were trying everything. | ||
| And then they brag about it in Time magazine. | ||
| We just had to make sure that democracy achieved the right result. | ||
| I mean, it's really sinister. | ||
| It's really Orwellian. | ||
| And so when you see all this, that's why I'm just so sympathetic to people who believe, you know, even the wildest things about the election. | ||
| No, me too. | ||
| It wasn't fair. | ||
| I think Trump wins in a fair fight. | ||
| It's like Pfizer knew that they had received or were about to receive emergency approval for the vaccine before the election. | ||
| But then we didn't find out about it until after the election. | ||
| And their official narrative on this is, well, we didn't want to influence the election. | ||
| And it's like Trump's warp speed was a huge development in 2020. | ||
| Like we created the vaccine so quickly. | ||
| And Maybe a lot of people might want to have known about that before casting their vote. | ||
| And Pfizer just decided not to release that info. | ||
| So in what sense is that fair? | ||
| How do you decide how much you can talk about this stuff? | ||
| Like whether your base really wants you to talk about it, because obviously Arizona just went through the audit, versus mainstream. | ||
| Like when the audit came out, I actually didn't even send a tweet about it, because I was like, it's hard to understand what happened here. | ||
| I was just like, it's a headache because I'm going to get an endless amount of hate and maybe be demonetized or my video will be deleted or whatever. | ||
| So how do you balance between sort of maybe what some of the base wants, Yeah, but the best way to do it, I think, is to not over-calculate. | ||
| Some people criticize me. | ||
| I had a big Twitter thread before the audit, before the Friday where the audit results came out. | ||
| I said, regardless of what happens, we're going to learn something tomorrow. | ||
| But regardless, Let's remember the election was sort of unfair and deeply troubled, deeply problematic in all these different ways and I catalogued them because I wanted that out in the record. | ||
| Then the audit comes out Friday and I didn't tweet about it until Saturday because I actually wanted to read the report. | ||
| and see what happens, right? Instead of just immediately loud shout, because there's a | ||
| lot there. And people criticize me for that, but it's like I wasn't going to have the consultant | ||
| approved, you know, pre-planned tweet just ready to go and beat up on political enemies. | ||
| I wanted to see what it said. And so I read it. So the best way I know how to campaign, | ||
| right, and it's my first time, but I think people are ready for like authenticity. | ||
| Like, I never say anything that I don't think is true. | ||
| I will go into these Republican activist rooms, and they may not like what I'm saying, but they will see that, like, I'm telling them the truth as I see it. | ||
| And that's the best I can do. | ||
| And it's tough, because sometimes these, you know, people want you to parrot back exactly what they say. | ||
| And if you don't, then you're a rhino or something like that. | ||
| But then I just say, like, hey, man, I'm obviously, like, with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm a very conservative person. | ||
| Sort of libertarian, individualist, techno, you know. | ||
| I'm different than conservatives you've seen before, but I'm obviously with you. | ||
| I'm just, I see it from a different perspective. | ||
| I know the feeling, man. | ||
| I know the feeling. | ||
| And that's, but I think people like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you can't, I don't think you can survive as a politician if you're just in this room saying what they want to hear, and then you go to a different room, you say what they want to hear. | ||
| Obviously you talk to different groups somewhat differently based on their interests, but all I can do is tell the truth as I see it, and just go and share that message with people. | ||
| And that goes to the tension of the internet now exposing a lot of stuff. | ||
| In the old days, you could do that. | ||
| You could go to one room, say one thing, another room. | ||
| It'd be completely fake. | ||
| And I think we trained a whole generation of fake politicians on that. | ||
| And the internet, I think, is kind of a crazy place. | ||
| But it's healthy in this respect. | ||
| I think it exposes who's for real and who's not. | ||
| And I think, you know, it's like, remember the Elizabeth Warren, drink a beer in the kitchen. | ||
| I'm gonna get me a beer. | ||
| And then, you know, her husband is like, come over here. | ||
| And then Trump was savage on that. | ||
| He was so good, right? | ||
| He's like, what are you... The husband's supposed to be there. | ||
| What's happening, right? | ||
| He's just like... And you know there were like 50 people in that room. | ||
| Consultants and media people. | ||
| I'mma get me a beer. | ||
| Gosh, you know, and it's like... | ||
| I kept saying it throughout the campaign, how can this billionaire, hair-plugged orange man be more authentic than all of these people? | ||
| He's so authentic. | ||
| And he is, he absolutely is. | ||
| So, all right, we're shifting a little bit to the internet stuff. | ||
| So I wanna talk about the big tech thing. | ||
| You've been very big on the big tech thing and what do we do? | ||
| This is the perfect blend of like, okay, libertarian principles, free market, all of that, but society seems to be crumbling under algorithms. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| We've got to rein in big tech. | ||
| We just have to. | ||
| I think five years ago, people weren't ready for this. | ||
| The big tech companies actually were less abusive. | ||
| They've grown a lot. | ||
| Things have changed. | ||
| This is what I mean. | ||
| You need people in leadership, people in office who are tracking these changes and who can intervene. | ||
| I think I'm a pro-market guy. | ||
| Peter invested in Facebook. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| We want companies that we invest in to become huge and successful. | ||
| But at a certain point, when companies become more powerful than most governments, when a handful of corporations come to dominate and control the flow of information in society, I think we can afford to treat them differently than you might treat a bakery or a hair salon. | ||
| And so I really just worry about Google being able to swing an election. | ||
| At least when Facebook rips the Hunter Biden story off the internet two or three weeks before the election, which is complete crap and they shouldn't be allowed to do it. | ||
| But when they did that, people noticed and, you know, you have the Streisand effect sort of thing where it's this discussion. | ||
| We can talk about it and at least the censorship was transparent. | ||
| But with Google, they can change their search algorithms to, you know, if they're subtle enough, I think you could change it a meaningful amount, suppress this information about Trump, boost this information about Biden. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you know, do you really live in a free country anymore? | ||
| And so I think we, I think we have to pay attention to this. | ||
| Conservatives focus a lot on censorship and I think we should because conservatives really are, they ripped President Trump off Facebook and Twitter while he was president. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And meanwhile Taliban commanders, you know, have blue check marks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so this is crazy. | ||
| And censorship is a huge problem. | ||
| and I think you can repeal section 230 and you can treat the platforms as common carriers, | ||
| which I think we should do. | ||
| But I think the problems with big tech are a lot deeper too. | ||
| I worry a lot about targeted advertising. | ||
| You just saw the study that came out last week that showed how bad Instagram is for teenagers, | ||
| especially teenage women, their mental health. | ||
| Everyone's pretending they're shocked. | ||
| Oh my god, I can't believe it. | ||
| We knew this, right? | ||
| You knew this. | ||
| And it's just the endless feed, and then you hoover up all this data about people and use it in pretty predatory ways, sort of subterranean. | ||
| You're hacking their psychology. | ||
| These companies employ psychologists on staff, as well as software designers, to get people hooked on the products, to get ever more data, to serve them ever more targeted ads. | ||
| I think we shouldn't be doing that. | ||
| At least for teenagers, we shouldn't be allowing Facebook to advertise to kids. | ||
| In some ways it's too late though. | ||
| I know we can do things, and let's say you get into the Senate, | ||
| and we have the hearings, and everyone's seen the hearings, | ||
| and even guys that I like at the hearings, like Ted Cruz, | ||
| but they're brutal no matter what, because even when there's a nice moment, | ||
| when Rand Paul really gets Jack at Twitter, or Ted Cruz really gets somebody caught in a lie, | ||
| nothing ever changes. | ||
| So is it possible that we've now been manipulated? | ||
| This is sort of my Matrix version of this. | ||
| We've been manipulated in so many ways now for enough years that no matter what you could do as part of the government, it would be like, eh, drop in a barrel. | ||
| I agree that's a risk, but I think to just conclude that is to give up. | ||
| I think there's at least still a really good chance. | ||
| You can do a lot. | ||
| Maybe not to start. | ||
| One senator can't really unilaterally pass a bill, right? | ||
| I'm going to get in there and make so much noise and actually run effective hearings. | ||
| And I think I really do know what to do with these companies. | ||
| Josh Hawley, Senator Hawley, has shown a lot of leadership on this. | ||
| And if you get a core group of five or six people like that, you get the ball rolling. | ||
| It may take some time, but I think we actually can make meaningful progress here. | ||
| Because I think also big tech is just going to get bigger and bigger, right? | ||
| These structural monopolies, they just become ever more profitable. | ||
| Unless we rein them in, they're just going to take over more and more ground. | ||
| Especially now that they're not even private companies, right? | ||
| Facebook is working with the Biden administration to decide what is COVID misinformation. | ||
| Jen Psaki says, Facebook pulled us off, and Facebook, like a good boy, pulls it off. | ||
| And that's really crazy. | ||
| We flag things for Facebook. | ||
| That's what she said. | ||
| Flag things for Facebook. | ||
| Of course, they're a private company. | ||
| They can make their own decisions. | ||
| Of course, we have a giant FTC under LenaCon that we're going to use as a giant threat to make you comply. | ||
| I think this stuff is really dangerous. | ||
| I don't think we can afford to give up. | ||
| You know, possibly these companies are too big and powerful, possibly they'll just do everything they can to make sure that people like me don't get elected. | ||
| But it's a risk we have to take, because otherwise we're thrown in the towel. | ||
| When I heard you speak a couple weeks ago, somebody asked you something about this, and basically that was your answer, and then you said at the end, you were like, well, what are they going to do, kill me? | ||
| And everyone kind of got quiet for a second, but it's like, I hope not. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like, who knows what these people could, what they could do. | ||
| I'm not saying they're coming to kill you, but like, just the way they can manipulate and make everybody hate everybody. | ||
| And again, after what I saw, what they did to Larry Elder, and when I would Google his name, after I'd be at rallies where there was so much love, so much support, and every single article in Google, it was like, I think 12 out of the 15 on the first page, hit piece, hit piece, hit piece, hit piece. | ||
| And it's like, it's a form of, it's like a digital assassination. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, I think it'll get really ugly. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But I think, and you know, I think social media is really flawed. | ||
| Like, maybe the world isn't instantly, shouldn't be instantly connected, you know, so you can outrage mobs in London because, you know, something happened in the U.S. | ||
| Like, that's actually a really weird phenomenon, this hyper-connectivity. | ||
| I don't think that's going away. | ||
| I don't think we can or necessarily even should make that go away. | ||
| But I do think, like, nope, super powerful multinational corporations shouldn't have the power and the ability to swing an election. | ||
| And I don't think, you know, past a certain point, past a certain market cap, or once you have 100 million users on your platform or whatever, I think you're a common carrier. | ||
| And the phone company can't, you know, discriminate against us because we have political views and so Facebook shouldn't be able to do it either. | ||
| To me, that's like the bare minimum that we need to do. | ||
| You mean Alex Jones should be entitled to a phone? | ||
| My gosh. | ||
| Yeah, imagine. | ||
| And it's just getting worse, right? | ||
| Banking. | ||
| I know, like, Republican political operatives in Arizona. | ||
| Wells Fargo has just shut out. | ||
| They at least had the grace to allow these people to withdraw their money before just closing the accounts. | ||
| But, like, pretty soon, like, we are moving this way. | ||
| Social credit systems, right? | ||
| We thought that helping China industrialize would make them more like us. | ||
| We thought it would turn them into a liberal democracy. | ||
| No, actually, our society is becoming remarkably a lot more like China. | ||
| A sort of oligarchy controlled by a few people. | ||
| Obviously, our version looks different, but I think they're using big tech, I think they're using the universities, they're using corporations, NGOs, Ford Foundation. | ||
| All this stuff, it's really part of this web that just kind of swims left. | ||
| Do you wanna seize their money? | ||
| I think J.D. | ||
| Vance said that a year or two ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
J.D. | |
| Vance, seize the Fordettes, yeah, great. | ||
| Yeah, like basically they're funding all these things that are destroying America. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And let's take the money. | ||
| At least let's tax them, because they're not a real non-profit. | ||
| There's huge non-profit, left-wing non-profit abuse in this country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So if it's not too late to do something about big tech, does it feel at least like there was like this slow push and then suddenly it became very rapid where right now it feels like every day we wake up and it's like there's some other crazy thing happening, whether it's someone being banned or the credit card stuff that you're talking about or something related to speech or something where it seems like, and everything we haven't, we've barely talked about COVID, where it's just like every day there's some other crazy thing happens. | ||
| And it feels like the algorithm's feeding it to us. | ||
| Like, it doesn't feel organic to me anymore when I wake up every morning and there's just some other, you know, and on Twitter, experts say, you already mentioned that, that something else is fueling, like, the craziness here. | ||
| Hard to know. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you. | ||
| It's just getting crazier and crazier. | ||
| It feels like a one-way ratchet. | ||
| How much is intentional and manipulated and, you know, designed for some effect versus just this is the crazy consequence of the world we live in. | ||
| It's very stagnant. | ||
| We have all, you know, Eric Weinstein talks about embedded growth obligations, right? | ||
| Like, we have all these expectations that things just get better and better in our society. | ||
| But they actually don't. | ||
| Like, these institutions broke a long time ago, but people, I think, are a little bit behind the curve in realizing it. | ||
| And so I think we're careening off the cliff here. | ||
| Like, we're really close. | ||
| And I think people feel that something is really wrong. | ||
| But still, the news cycle moves in these momentary outrages, and everybody just pays attention. | ||
| We go from acute crisis to acute crisis. | ||
| Who even knows what was in the news two weeks ago? | ||
| It's all just forgotten. | ||
| And I think the short attention span juxtaposed with the slow boil of sort of losing the country, losing these institutions, I think we're in a really bad spot. | ||
| Is there a country that you can kind of point to that is sort of doing it, in the broad sense, better? | ||
| Like, it seems like every Western nation is kind of crumbling at the moment. | ||
| Australia, they're attacking- Well, Australia's crazy. | ||
| Australia's crazy. | ||
| And, like, we don't see that on our news here, so if you say that to some- I mean, I've brought this up with family members. | ||
| You see what's going on in Australia? | ||
| What's going on in Australia? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I'm like, oh, well, actually, they've got the army out there hunting down people for walking their dogs. | ||
| No, it can't be. | ||
| Then you send them a video. | ||
| Oh, well, that can't possibly be quite true. | ||
| That's just cherry-picked, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But that, you know, Australia, Canada, we're seeing Western nations, just nobody's really doing it that well right now. | ||
| Nobody's doing it that well. | ||
| And this is what I realize, it's like, there's no place else to go. | ||
| Like, the United States is the leader, and if we lose it here, it's gone. | ||
| Like, I think Western Europe's been gone for a long time. | ||
| It's just this pessimistic, managed decline. | ||
| Is it Eastern Europe? | ||
| I mean, is it countries like Poland that seem to be sort of... Sure, maybe. | ||
| But I mean, you know, when Tucker Carlson goes to Hungary or whatever, and the Internet, the left uses their mind for a day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| I think maybe we have, you know, some things to learn or remember from countries like that. | ||
| But they're also very different countries, right? | ||
| They're small, more homogenous, more sort of poor and manageable. | ||
| It's like the U.S. | ||
| is very different. | ||
| Animal. | ||
| And so, you know, the U.S. | ||
| is not going to become hungry. | ||
| And there are certain things, ways in which we shouldn't. | ||
| So it's like, we should be the U.S. | ||
| We should be the best version of America. | ||
| And a lot of that is in the future, and a lot of that is in the past. | ||
| And again, it's this wisdom of knowing what's good about our past. | ||
| Like, what do we as a people believe in? | ||
| What's important? | ||
| What do we need to carry forward? | ||
| And how should we navigate the challenges of modern society? | ||
| And these are questions that Congress literally does not debate. | ||
| Like, nobody talks about this stuff. | ||
| The Senate's supposed to be the greatest debate hall in the world, and it's not. | ||
| It's just so big. | ||
| It's not on the list, even. | ||
| It's not on the list, but to your point, it's like, what is on the list? | ||
| Who is doing it well? | ||
| And I think if the U.S. | ||
| falls, there's really no global leader. | ||
| You could say China, but obviously I think that's a horrible dystopian society. | ||
| And yet there's this weird love of China now, well, from the left, because I think they're enjoying the destruction of America, in essence. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But that's bad. | ||
| Not on that side. | ||
| I think there's no good hope for freedom as we sort of know it and have cherished it over the decades in the American experiment. | ||
| Two centuries of the American experiment. | ||
| There's nothing that says that has to last forever. | ||
| I think people just take it for granted. | ||
| Like, oh, we live in America. | ||
| This is the best country. | ||
| We're so exceptional. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, I agree with all that. | ||
| But at the same time, if you take it for granted and you let your institutions decay and you let your government decay, That's what I always say. | ||
| It's not that they don't like the elites. | ||
| works and we live in this globalized world where we're just homogenizing and | ||
| you know it doesn't work and I think the left actually kind of likes this in some | ||
| weird way they get the stratified society where you have the thin elite at | ||
| the top and you hollow out the middle class and guess what the left gets to be | ||
| the elite right. That's what I always say, it's not that they don't like the elites, they just want their people in | ||
| the elite. | ||
| They just, they are, yeah, they are the elite, right. | ||
| You go to the same schools, you think the same way, you run society, you hollow out the middle class, and then you have an underclass. | ||
| People who are perpetually on the dole, whether it's UBI or just unlimited stimulus checks or welfare as we know it. | ||
| That's a really bad model for society. | ||
| It looks a lot more like Brazil than the U.S. | ||
| or how the U.S. | ||
| is supposed to look. | ||
| And so I don't think it's over. | ||
| I think we can still actually sort of arrest that decline. | ||
| But it starts by talking about it. | ||
| It starts by waking people up. | ||
| You know, I tell people in these Republican grassroots rooms that I go to, like, we've been playing defense on the right for so long that we're just out of space to play defense. | ||
| Our backs are against the wall. | ||
| And so if we don't win in 2022 and 2024, it's over. | ||
| And you'd think that's pessimistic and demotivating, but no, actually it's optimistic, because it means, like, recognize the strategy you've been employing has failed, recognize the stakes, recognize the importance of what we're fighting for, and go on offense. | ||
| Like, let's go fight and win. | ||
| Because otherwise, they're going to pack the Supreme Court, they're going to add new states to the Union, you know, they're going to federalize elections, everything will be woke, there'll be Chinese-style social credit systems, thought control, like, in ten years, this country will look like Australia. | ||
| You'll have the left-wing military, like, you know, hunting down people for non-compliance. | ||
| Like, that can happen here. | ||
| And that's my message for people. | ||
| It can happen here. | ||
| I was gonna ask you a little bit more about Arizona, but you are a politician now, and you had a hard out for 50 minutes, because you got to go fundraise. | ||
| So, you gave me a nice closer there. | ||
| Unless you want a bonus closer. | ||
| Bonus closer. | ||
| You want a bonus closer? | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Bonus closer. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Bring it. | ||
| Look, I think... | ||
| I'm just really excited to be running for office. | ||
| It's not something I, again, as discussed, I didn't think 10 years ago I'd be doing this. | ||
| I didn't think we'd have the opportunity. | ||
| But President Trump came and gave us a new lease on life. | ||
| I remind people who are like really sad that he's not in office that Okay, that sucks. | ||
| Now we have an incompetent president. | ||
| We have a wide open border. | ||
| Inflation's going through the roof. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| But remember that without President Trump, we'd be in year five of a Hillary Clinton presidency. | ||
| And I think that would be game over. | ||
| And so consider the gift that even if you thought it was chaotic, even if you didn't vote for him the second time, you know, I disagree with you and that's fine. | ||
| But he gave us this new lease on life, and I think the Dems and the left, they won't get it together. | ||
| Like, they don't understand what's going on. | ||
| But the right, if we can actually just shed the Paul Ryanism, if we can update, if we can rebuild a party that's pro-working class, pro-American, pro-family, we can actually still have a good future. | ||
| Like, I know it's possible, and so that's why I get up every day, and I'm excited to run. | ||
| I don't think it's naive. | ||
| I think we can actually build a better future, and so that's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| You gave me two closers, not bad. | ||
| Two closers. | ||
| Not bad, not bad. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks, Blake. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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