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Oct. 26, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

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The Great Uprising Is HERE! | Vivek Ramaswamy On Fighting The GREAT RESET! - Stay Free #232

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	So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.
	In this video, you're going to see...
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there you Awakening Wonders!
	Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand for an extremely special show.
	Today we have an extended interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican presidential candidate and outsider, who could become increasingly significant as the travails of Trump increase.
	If Donald Trump is taken out by the state, where does that leave Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Does that mean he's next in line to be taken out as an outsider?
	Or does that mean that he will elevate to candidacy?
	Let me know what you think in the chat right now.
	In this first part of the conversation, we're going to be talking about Dave Chappelle and Dave Chappelle's role as a free speech advocate in shifting times.
	We talk about Israel-Palestine and how you handle that as the President of the United States.
	Of course we talk about free speech as always.
	Now, this interview was pre-recorded and you can join us live when we make that kind of content.
	If you are an awakened wonder, press the red button.
	You can join interviews live.
	We do meditations.
	We're planning a movement so that we can form new communities as the apocalypse apparently unfolds before our very eyes.
	How does independent media become independent politics?
	You tell me, because without you, we are nothing.
	Thank you for elevating your consciousness above the level of fear.
	Thank you for being willing to open up the belly of the beast, chop the head of the serpent and move forward in a glorious new movement together.
	We are going to have to change politics pretty radically if we're going to change the world and perhaps Vivek Ramaswamy is part of the solution.
	Let me know what you think in the chat now.
	Of course, the first 15 minutes will be available on YouTube, but after that, we'll be flying on wings of freedom to Free Speech's sweet home, Rumble.
	Here's Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Vivek, thanks for joining us.
	It's good to see you, man.
	Vivek, this cannot be an easy time to have off-the-cuff, spontaneous conversations about politics, when the world's best comedians, like Dave Chappelle, find themselves unable to appease an audience with regard to a subject that you've spoken very boldly and bravely on, the escalating crisis in the Middle East, and it's almost its unique position now.
	as part of a cluster of wars that you might call a kind of omni-war, an emergent global war.
	And I wonder if you can comment on that, and I wonder if you can let me know really what you feel,
	Vivek, about the entry into an already fractured, sensorial and conflagratory cultural space,
	the mother of all controversial issues, an issue where it seems that it's not enough to say,
	well, we just want violence to end, we want war to end, where people on across the spectrum on
	that conflict want our...
	Outspoken advocacy and condemnation of their opponents.
	How are you coping with that as you make such great progress in your own campaign to be the Republican nominee?
	Well, Russell, I think it's become increasingly clear that I am a lone voice in the Republican Party standing out against World War III and against war more broadly.
	So I know you're on the other side of the pond, but as you know, I'm running for U.S.
	President, so I'm looking at this from a U.S.
	perspective, and I don't think we should apologize for that.
	My job as U.S.
	president if I'm elected, my moral obligation is to the American people.
	Now, even in America now, that is a controversial thing to say, which is interesting to understand
	what's lurking beneath the surface of that.
	And so I look at all of the conflicts emerging now as somewhat related in escalating the
	risk of World War III.
	Think about the funding package that's making its way through U.S.
	Congress now.
	Biden has called for a $106 billion foreign aid package.
	The majority of that is still directed at Ukraine.
	$61 billion on top of the billions and hundreds of billions we've spent escalating that war in a way that I don't think advances anybody's interests except for a select few who stand to benefit from this conflict.
	And I think that itself is a disaster that is Already, and I'm going to get to the Middle East and the Israel point in a second, but the context is really important here, Russell, is already against the backdrop of major conflict brewing by way of proxies between the U.S.
	and Russia, between the West and Russia.
	We're driving Russia further into China's hands with the Russia-China alliance.
	We have a no-win war that, if you look back now, it's been confirmed in recent days, Ukraine could have Agreed to terms of peace they were willing to a long time ago, except for the US and also your guy, Boris Johnson, goading them further into war.
	That's where we are today.
	And then this general logic that just because Putin is bad, that means Ukraine is good.
	That's a false premise for continuing this war.
	I mean, this is a country in Ukraine that has banned 11 opposition parties, that has outright consolidated all media into one state media arm.
	Yes, there are familiar feelings that that happens in the West more broadly, but that's happening here in Ukraine.
	You have a country that has effectively threatened not to hold its elections but for U.S.
	forking over more money.
	And by the way, occupied regions of the Donbas, like Luhansk and Donetsk, that are Russian-speaking, many of which don't view themselves even as really part of Ukraine, have not been represented in the Ukrainian parliament.
	Against this backdrop, we're escalating our way into major conflict between nuclear powers and driving Russia further into China's arms.
	It's nonsense.
	So that's why I've called for a clear, fair, rational path to peace in Ukraine.
	And I've laid out, and we can go into it, the terms of what that deal would look like.
	But then right around that same time, now you see the escalation towards a possible broader regional conflict in the Middle East.
	And I say this against the backdrop of what Hamas did to Israel.
	It was wrong.
	It was barbaric.
	I said it at the time.
	I say it now.
	It was wrong.
	And Israel absolutely has the right to defend itself and its own national self-existence.
	But now we're seeing a cascade where I hope I'm wrong about this, Russell.
	I really do, but I can see it with clarity.
	Here's what I fear is about to happen.
	Israel goes south into this ground invasion with Gaza without any clear objectives.
	That then causes Hezbollah, they've said that this is their red line, to attack Israel from the north.
	Right when Israel is mired in the South, that's a two-front conflict.
	No way the U.S.
	doesn't then get involved.
	The U.S.
	is involved.
	That then triggers Iranian-backed militias through the Middle East who have said that U.S.
	involvement is their red line to hit targets.
	The Houthis in Yemen have said it.
	The Bata Brigade in Iraq has said it.
	The U.S.
	has its largest embassy in Baghdad.
	Now we're mired in a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.
	We've done that before.
	We don't want to do it again yet.
	Yes, yet again we are on the path to potentially doing it.
	Civilian casualties will mount in Gaza.
	International allies will then turn their back on Israel.
	And even if Israel does succeed in toppling Hamas, what then?
	After Al Qaeda, you've got ISIS.
	After Hamas 1.0, you're probably slated for Hamas 2.0.
	And then this rolls out the red carpet, of course, for then China to be the ultimate winner of this and go after Taiwan while the U.S.
	is mired in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East, some of which have actually driven our already adversaries further into China's hands.
	And that's a path to World War III.
	And I don't think that that's an exaggeration, so I know that took a little while for me to explain because I think these things have to be looked at in the context of one another for the risk of major conflict, dare I call it World War III.
	And so my job as the U.S.
	President, I have clear pads, a clear vision of how to keep us out of World War III.
	And yet the shocking part is I am the only person in the Republican Party offering a clear stance on opposing World War III, a clear stance against this $106 billion aid package that Biden has proposed for wars that I think are not on track to advance American interests.
	And it's precisely in times like these, I mean, you brought up, what does this have to do with the Jon Stewart piece?
	Well, it's during times of crisis that we need free speech and open debate the most.
	You know, it's easy and fashionable now to go back and say, oh, the Iraq war was bad and Afghanistan was bad.
	Yes, it was.
	But that's easy for people to say now.
	That's lazy almost.
	Because many of those people back then were the ones calling for that war.
	They won't admit it.
	They hope you weren't listening to them 20 years ago.
	Well, the harder part is, remember why we got into those wars.
	They said after 9-11, shut up, sit down, do as you're told, follow the plan.
	Well, it's moments like these that effectively you're being asked to do the same thing as an American or otherwise.
	And that's the real danger of how we got into those wars.
	So easy to sit in an armchair and say, oh, we shouldn't have been in Iraq.
	Yeah, I said it at the time, and I say it today, too.
	The harder part is standing up with conviction when everybody else surrounding you is saying, skip the debate and march straight into that war again.
	And I'm not refusing.
	I'm refusing to comply.
	To the contrary, I'm looking to lead this country in a manner that actually speaks with a spine, in a manner that other Republicans seem, frankly, too afraid of their own shadow to be able to do.
	Yes, Vivek, I think that's important and it is extraordinary how people are willing to mobilise condemnation of, if not entirely latent, conflicts due to the ongoing consequences of many of those actions, in particular across that region.
	Certainly willing to speak out with a kind of advocacy and confidence that was As you point out, absent at the time.
	One aspect or a few aspects of your answer I'd love to follow up on.
	You're quite right, it was Boris Johnson of the UK that interrupted the potential peace deal between Zelensky and Putin at a time when a different pathway was clearly open.
	And that is curious.
	Another thing I want to touch upon is the bundling together, financially but perhaps even ideologically, these conflicts.
	When you start to create aid packages of a hundred billion dollars, as you point out, the majority of which goes to Ukraine, a small amount goes to the conflict in the Middle East, some even preparatory aid for Taiwan.
	You start to create I think a mental image that these wars are somehow conflated with one another, instead of discrete, distinct conflicts, each of which has to be understood in its own unique context.
	And at some point, I would have to agree with you.
	I mean, and how can this be a controversial thing to say?
	A pathway towards peace has to be considered, particularly for you as a potential US president.
	And just to let you know that 50% of our audience, at very least, ...are in the United States of America, that's generally speaking where people consume our content.
	What I'd also like to comment on is the way that you mapped out that trajectory, how the escalation of a Middle Eastern conflict in particular, even without taking a side ideologically, all of us have a responsibility to look at, hold on a minute, and then Hezbollah, hang on a minute, and now US, now Iran, whoa, where are we going with this?
	It seems that we are heading towards World War.
	It seems that if you're able to make that analysis, perhaps people that are heavily advocating for further expenditure and more aggression for this conflict and others have also got an idea that that's a potential outcome.
	Is it conceivable, Vivek, that they know that this can lead to at least an escalating conflict, because there's no doubt that that will happen, but potentially even something that is global, and that they can accommodate that vision and maybe even want it?
	Or do you think they just haven't thought it through?
	Well, it depends on who you're talking about.
	Different people fall into different parts of that category.
	And I'm sitting in a room here in Iowa in the middle of the campaign trail.
	I can just make sure you can hear me well, right Russell?
	Perfect.
	Good.
	Listen, I think you raise an important point.
	Even if you look at this morning, I wake up to Mitch McConnell, and this is not a Republican versus Democrat point in the U.S.
	I want you all to really understand this.
	This is not the traditional partisan conflict that they try to shoehorn into red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat.
	No.
	It's a bipartisan establishment in the US, in both the majority of the electeds in the Republican and the Democrat party that are marching us towards this war.
	These parties that otherwise disagree on everything, you know, they'll bash heads or pretend to bash heads.
	On everything here at home, on some domestic cultural war and, you know, every Republican likes to be more outraged than the next about men swimming in women's swimming competitions, which I'm against too, but it's a pissing contest to show outrage.
	But when it comes to the stuff that matters on foreign policy, they pretend like they're on the other, they pretend like they're opposed to the other side.
	They're really on the same team.
	Mitch McConnell called these conflicts interconnected.
	So, I want to say something about a path to world war, Russell, is the way you describe these conflicts may actually affect the way the conflicts themselves work.
	I mean, that's the relationship between diplomacy and war.
	And so, seeing these conflicts inherently as having to be funded together or not, I think actually escalates the risk of correlation in how we potentially, God forbid, end up in World War III.
	Now, your question is, are there vested interests or is this just stupidity?
	I think there are elements of both.
	Some people absolutely have their head in the sand.
	It's amazing that even many of the politicians that will criticize me for lack of foreign policy experience I don't think they could tell you which provinces in eastern Ukraine are even occupied.
	I don't think they could tell you what happened in 2014 that led us to the history of now.
	They're just puppets, listless vessels, to borrow a term of Ron DeSantis, you know, in terms of reciting the slogans of their super-packed puppet masters.
	They don't even know what they're saying for some of them.
	For others of them, they absolutely are not dumb people, but they stand to benefit from it.
	The Pentagon's budget this year, that's the, you know, here in the U.S., for those of you who don't know the Pentagon, that's the military branch of, the military of, the umbrella for all of the military branches and organizations where the decisions are made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the people who run the military.
	That's the way to think about it.
	The Defense Department, the Pentagon's budget, half of it, 50% of it, it's like an $850 billion budget, is going to defense contractors this year.
	I don't want to go off on this side tangent too far, but it's worth just understanding the context.
	Back in 1993 in the United States, under President Bill Clinton, so now there's a Democrat, the Defense Secretary convened a meeting of all of the defense contractors.
	Back then it was like 50 some odd defense contractors.
	And the government Well, I mean, this sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theory.
	It's not.
	It's just plain old mundane reality coordinated for these defense contractors to start merging with one another.
	So, they consolidated some 50-odd defense contractors over the years into five defense contractors.
	Now, just take a look at the cost of one of the stingers.
	That's a shoulder-bearing weapon, effectively, that's born today, and we're sending them to Ukraine.
	It is up from like $25,000 back then to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	Even if you adjust for inflation and the cost of technology equipment improvement,
	that's an over 7x increase for the cost of the exact same thing after you saw the government
	coordinated consolidation of the contractors to the military, many of whom are then in bed with
	that same government. So yes, what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military industrial complex,
	It is alive. It is real.
	You look at the other candidates in the Republican presidential field.
	I mean, one of my competitors in this race is a woman by the name of Nikki Haley.
	She is somebody who, after her short stint at the UN, which she uses to brandish as her foreign policy experience, her real foreign policy experience came when her family afterwards exploits those UN connections and government connections and otherwise to start, you guessed it, a military contracting business.
	You guessed it, to join the board of Boeing, which she did special favors for back when she was a governor of South Carolina.
	So my litmus test is if you are making money off your time of government connections, and worst category of all, making money off of war or the path to war, you are disqualified From being the commander-in-chief, and yet we live in a world right now where the establishment, from the media, to both political parties, to the super PAC puppet masters, label that foreign policy experience, and then push us further in that direction into war.
	These are the mistakes that took us into places like Iraq.
	We're making those same mistakes all over again.
	So, are there cynical forces at work, people who stand to make money off of this?
	Absolutely.
	And are they exploiting others in their own party to then say some of whom are too uneducated or undereducated on these issues to then come along and compliantly follow the plan?
	Yes.
	So it's both, Russell, is the answer.
	And I think that is why they are allergic.
	I mean, they're having an anaphylactic reaction to an outsider like me.
	I'll just give you a couple examples.
	I'm not A person who spins up victimhood narratives and cries about it.
	To the contrary.
	I'm going to show up and I think we're going to win this thing.
	But just to give you a sense for what type of allergic reaction.
	At first they said, oh yeah, young guy, a little bit different.
	It's a cute little addition to the race and we can brandish that as a, you know, a nice little trinket for the Republican Party.
	But now it turns out, I've been to the race, here I am.
	They're doing everything in their power to shut me up.
	I mean, you turn on mainstream media on a given day, you see the treatment that I'm able to get right now for my contrarian foreign policy views here to keep us in peace rather than in war.
	That's a cardinal sin right now, and you can see the establishment in both parties coming for me.
	Super PACs, those are the cancer on American politics, the farce where they say there's limits on how much you can contribute to a campaign.
	It's a lie.
	There are no limits on how much the multi-billionaire class, frankly, that donates to both parties, is donating in this particular case to Republican potential candidates, propping them up.
	There's closed-door summits where they're deciding which candidate they're going to put up against Trump.
	I'm not invited to those, but the Ron DeSantis' and Nikki Haley's of the world are sparring and begging these people licking their boots for money.
	That's part of the corrupt system.
	And then you see the kinds of things that are happening even at events that I'm going to.
	This is one I haven't talked about publicly, but I'm here in Iowa on this trip just a few days ago.
	I'm going on stage and everybody else is speaking at this event, right?
	Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, I'm speaking.
	You know, we get up on the back of a, on a stage in a room full of people in Iowa.
	Literally, I can see it on my timer.
	It's still like 30 seconds left before we go off.
	Just for me, not for any other candidate.
	And I mentioned some of these foreign policy views in that speech.
	The music starts playing, like it's literally, they've got like blaring outgoing music, like I was supposed to walk out.
	I just stayed on stage for the full song.
	It was very, it was, it was, uh, enjoyably awkward, but you know, I, I wait till that finish and then I'm going to finish my speech and make sure people hear what I have to say.
	But this is not going according to the plan of the establishment.
	If a guy is defecting from the Republican party right now in the United States, Their goal is to suffocate this.
	They don't want debate on the merits, because we win on the debate on the merits.
	What should we be spending our money on?
	National defense.
	Protect your own borders.
	I think it'd be good for Israel.
	Protect its own borders.
	But my job is to run for U.S.
	President.
	Protect our own borders.
	I think it'd be good if the U.S.
	didn't economically depend on China as much anymore.
	Onshore production to this country.
	But in the meantime, avoid catastrophic World War III, which is otherwise what we're barreling forward into.
	And that's a foreign policy agenda that apparently the Republican Party, the Democrat Party alike, don't want an insurgent Canada to actually state in public.
	And that's exactly what I'm doing.
	And I think that's the first step to keeping us out of wars that don't advance our interest is actually embracing more speech, not less speech, more free speech and open debate.
	And it's when they tell you to shut up that you have to actually Grow the spine to actually be more vocal than ever.
	That's our best chance to keeping our way out of this major conflict.
	I can see why there would be an appetite to censor you with music or with not including you in super PAC conventions because you are an innovative and discursive Thinker and, in my reckoning, precisely what's required within a Republican party that elsewise risks being captured by the same kind of militarist interests that have conventionally held sway, as you've explained beautifully, Vivek, over both parties.
	When it...
	When it comes to the historic conflict between Israel and Palestine now, of course I have sympathies to all the parties directly involved and suffering as a result of that horrific war.
	There's no question that throughout the history of that region, or at least certainly the relatively modern history, That United Kingdom interests, corporate interests, US interests have made conflicts in that region a lot worse precisely because of the military-industrial complex relationships and the ability that energy companies and the military-industrial complex have had to assert and exert influence over American and, you know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, UK foreign policy.
	What's striking at this time and perhaps the way that you say super PACs are set up and elections are sewn up and favoured political candidates are shut out or people that are willing to speak out against the establishment speak out against censorship speak out against wars that have not been Correctly contemplated our shutdown is perhaps because of the size and scale of the influence of this awful monopoly that you just described that collapsed from 50 organizations to just five.
	And you're right, the relationships of potential opponents with military industrial complex companies should mean that they forego inclusion in any race for office of the nature that you are currently pursuing.
	What I feel Vivek very strongly is that they're potentially now the
	centrist political class, the kind of neocon candidates that
	are visible on both sides of the aisle, as opposed to the more
	radical, sometimes demagogic, innovative, charismatic figures
	that are emerging that previously, presumably would have been in the independent space, and in the case of RFK
	are perhaps the only chance that US politics and therefore global politics have of pursuing a trajectory that seems to,
	by my reckoning, include the potential of world war as a
	favourable outcome, as it's the kind of crisis that would permit
	the type of controls many believe we saw piloted during the pandemic era.
	It facilitates censorship, it facilitates lockdown, it facilitates the closing down of dissent.
	Do you feel that if we have an election between party stooge candidates, Biden and whoever you would nominate as a stooge within your own party, that the advance towards war is inevitable because we'll be denied the possibility for proper conversations?
	Is America, and indeed the world's only hope, to start considering Outsider candidates that are willing to speak out against their parties and to speak out against the kind of narratives that at the moment, it seems astonishing to me, aren't being questioned.
	The possibility of alliance between China and Russia, terrifying.
	The possibility of limitless escalation in the Middle East, terrifying.
	The fact that we're bundling together funding without thinking about it, not to mention the fact that the military-industrial complex And America, as essentially their agent, sells arms to 57% of the autocracies in the world.
	And even, it's potentially true, I'm sure you're aware of the CIA whistleblower that said maybe even Hamas's weapons were American made, in office What would you do to match the invective of your campaigning to ensure that the military-industrial complex doesn't have that role in the world, given the importance of it and the power of the MIC in American political life?
	It could be argued, many would argue, they're more powerful than either the Democrat Party or the Republican Party.
	They dictate foreign policy.
	Are you willing to oppose that and prevent arms being sent to autocratic nations and to stand up against those kind of organizations and their current Influence.
	Now if you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble, Vivek Ramaswamy is about to comment on the, what he calls, this is his phrase and I don't know if it's a fair phrase to use, let me know if you agree, what he calls the Biden family and their criminal enterprises.
	If you want to hear Vivek Ramaswamy talk about that and how it relates to the current Ukraine-Russia conflict, click the link in the description and join us there.
	I mean, so you hit on a really important point, actually, which is the way in which we're often funding both sides of these conflicts, and somebody else is making money off it.
	It reminds me of Times Square, New York.
	There was this guy that was selling, the guy who was selling an Israel flag and a Palestine flag to whoever wanted to buy it.
	It's interesting that that guy in Times Square was making money from selling the flags.
	People are buying from both sides of him.
	But it's not that different than the military-industrial complex.
	Even if you think about a conflict that nobody else, for whatever reason, seems to have any other interest in.
	It's interesting how the good versus evil shows up in Russia versus Ukraine, but not in a different part of the Russian periphery in what's going on in Azerbaijan and Armenia.
	And I'm not advocating U.S.
	military involvement there at all, but it is interesting how nobody talks about how 120,000 Christians are being displaced in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, where Armenians live, back to Armenia as Azerbaijan's literally just rolled in and invaded.
	But part of the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S.
	has made for special exemptions that has sold and transferred arms, people making money off it, U.S.
	allies, too, have armed Azerbaijan.
	It's pervasive, this problem that you described.
	And I know it's self-serving for a guy like me to say, no, this is why it takes an outsider, insurgent, anti-establishment candidate to win.
	Like this is an electoral pitch.
	But I just think factually, me or somebody, it's got to be the case to be able to break this system.
	Now, the reason I'm able to do it is that, and it's sad that it works this way.
	It really is.
	I wish it weren't this way.
	But it's just a law of nature, Russell.
	It's like a principle of physics.
	This may be more immutable than some principles of physics, okay?
	We went from Newtonian physics to, you know, an Einsteinian view to, you know, let's say a post-Einsteinian view today, string theory, so even those things change.
	This one doesn't change.
	Every politician dances to the tune of their biggest donor.
	Certainly in the US, it's like a law of nature.
	And in my case, that biggest donor is me.
	I'm 38.
	I've lived the full American dream.
	I founded multi-billion dollar companies.
	And so I don't want to be somebody else's circus monkey.
	But unfortunately, that is what it takes.
	It's not a system where anybody can step up and do this.
	I wish it were, but it doesn't work that way.
	Politics is mother's milk.
	It is money.
	And so, one of the ways I'm able to do this, even getting shut out by the establishment media and otherwise now, it's one thing if I'm anti-woke and against the cult of racialism and transgenderism and even against some of the climate statements.
	Okay, well that started to cross into really third rail territory.
	But now, opposing these wars, that was the ultimate trigger that shuts me out of the mainstream.
	So I'm spending time reaching people in roomfuls of 50, 60 people, 100, 200 people at a time in places like Iowa, where I've been in the last few days.
	And my bet is that there's still some last vestige of the system where we, the people, can actually decide who governs, rather than having it decided in the back of palace halls, which is how it was done in Old World England.
	But it's a myth to say that somehow that's not how it's done in modern America.
	That's mostly how it's done in modern America, but there are slivers where we can exploit the crack.
	And what I see is ordinary people across this country, they do not want to go to war.
	Especially people in my generation.
	I'm 38.
	We grew up into the government lying to us about Iraq and Afghanistan.
	$6.5 trillion.
	See, the U.S.
	has a $33 trillion national debt problem.
	By the way, people forget that when they're signing up and sneezing $100 billion here, $100 billion there.
	How about the backdrop of the fact that we're basically bankrupt to the tune of $33 trillion?
	$33 trillion. But of that $33 trillion, $6.5 trillion was attributable just to Iraq and
	Afghanistan and more than the money even.
	Thousands upon thousands of our sons and daughters in this country.
	People my age and my generation.
	Lives sacrificed that we will never get back.
	We're on track to repeat those same mistakes all over again.
	When I'm in roomfuls of people here, of actual citizens of this country, nobody wants to see that happen.
	And yet the people who they've elected to office I just think that now is the time to debate these questions, right?
	steps decisively to march us and make sure that same thing happens all over again.
	And I just think that now is the time to debate these questions, right?
	So let's just go into, for example, the Israel case, which you raised.
	There's a couple of different separate questions that I think we ought not conflate, right?
	One question is that certain people will raise humanitarian questions or questions of proportionality or whatever.
	I'm not even focused on that.
	Put that to one side.
	I think Israel does have the right to defend itself.
	Absolutely.
	You know, others may disagree with me on that.
	Fine.
	I'm on this side of the question.
	Israel as a nation absolutely has the right to defend itself.
	But I'm asking a different question which is the one that they're actually even more keen to suppress within the Republican Party.
	Who says that This ground invasion is even going to be a good idea for Israel on its terms of national self-defense.
	Who said this is somehow ordained to succeed?
	I think there are a lot of reasons to say it would not succeed, and that even if it does succeed nominally, what comes after Hamas?
	That should not be beyond the pale to ask that question.
	Should not be beyond the pale to ask how the heck did that security breach?
	How the heck did that intelligence failure happen in the first place as well?
	Those should be basic questions that are addressed now to say the money saved on a ground invasion, might that be better spent securing Israel's own border?
	Just as we in the United States should be asking that question.
	I went to the southern border of the U.S.
	just a week and a week and a half ago.
	I went to the northern border two weeks ago.
	If that can happen in Israel, that can happen here in the United States.
	And yet the irony is the same establishment that has led us into foreign wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to otherwise, has done nothing to protect this homeland.
	You know, this woman by the name of Nikki Haley, she's actually calling for the Department of Defense in the U.S.
	I'm not making this up.
	I was here in Iowa at the same time.
	She's calling for a Department of Offense.
	I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
	Now, I want you to use this.
	I could care less for this particular individual, but she's a symptom of a deeper cancer in American politics.
	And the donor class is now propping her up.
	The mainstream media has decided that she should be the one opposing Donald Trump.
	Just think about this for a second.
	This is somebody who's saying the Department of Defense, which has badly failed to defend the American homeland, which is as vulnerable as it's ever been, is calling for, she's saying the quiet part out loud, make it a Department of Offense.
	And by the way, this is the person who, after her short stint at the UN, started Her family certainly did.
	A military contracting business.
	Made millions.
	Went from being personally in debt to being a rich person.
	Eight million some odd bucks made in the short time after the UN.
	Joining the board of companies like Lockheed Martin.
	And then now literally calling for a Department of Offense instead of a Department of Defense.
	These people are bloodthirsty.
	They're rooting for war.
	What do these people screech?
	She's screeching, finish them!
	Finish them!
	That's a slogan from Mortal Kombat, in case people forgot that's a video game, finishing as though that's a model for American foreign policy.
	Finish who?
	They hide behind the smokescreen of saying they might mean Hamas without a clear strategy of what comes after Hamas, but actually it's not what they mean.
	Finish them is purposefully vague.
	Finish who?
	It is the vague nebulous enemy.
	Do they mean Iran?
	Do they mean Russia?
	And part of the point, I think, is to escalate for World War III.
	And some of these people that, you know, the Biden family's in this category, I'd put the Haley family in this category.
	When they pull the trigger, they ring the cash register for their own family.
	I mean, Joe Biden, I think his son, their family sold off American foreign policy to make their family rich.
	It is not an accident that we're sending Trillion?
	Billions?
	Hundreds of billions of dollars to the very country that, huh, figure this one out, made a multi-million dollar bribe to the son of the president who had no business on Burisma's board.
	I mean, this guy's barely qualified to do an ordinary job in this country, let alone to serve on the board of a Ukrainian energy company where he has no expertise, paid five million dollars.
	Is it an accident that when that same president or former vice president, now president, is
	sending hundreds of billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to that same country?
	It is not.
	And I don't care if it's a Joe Biden version of this in the Democratic Party, a Nikki Haley
	version of this in the Republican Party, and it's symptomatic of other people in the Republican
	Party that have the same problem.
	That's not good for the United States of America.
	And believe me, a lot of people in the establishment media, in the Super PAC class, in the donor
	class, I can't tell you the number of potential backers I've lost over just saying the things
	I just told you there in that last 60 seconds.
	But again, I'm not going to be somebody's circus monkey.
	On a personal level, I would rather lose the election than to win by playing some careful political snakes and ladders.
	But for the country, it's bad that the system works that way because otherwise we're going to have somebody who's going to march us back into World War III, and I don't want to see that happen.
	When you describe how immersed and institutionally corrupt both the Republican Party and Democratic Party are in terms of the kind of familial ties, their willingness to do the bidding of the military-industrial complex, and When you observe that in all likelihood the ability of the
	military-industrial complex to dictate foreign policy, even though it's harmful to
	American interests and potentially even the interests of their declared partners, that there's
	potentially an exploitative agenda that is both curiously familial in the case of Hunter Biden's
	opportunities with Burisma and potentially global when you think of BlackRock's post-Ukraine
	war in the event that there is a post-Ukraine war, opportunities in rebuilding that nation
	as a kind of digital pilot scheme for a surveillance state, certainly one of the stories we've
	seen mooted, does it make you feel that these interests are so entrenched that you
	would have to enter the White House with a mandate to, for example, ban politicians in either
	the Republican and Democrat party from owning stocks and shares in companies that they
	regulate.
	Certainly if they sit on special committees, you know, the kind of Nancy Pelosi type ability to be ahead of the market, that would have to be curtailed.
	And perhaps even more terrifyingly, I mean, for me, you talk about super PACs and stuff, but almost that, once in office, what do you do about donations?
	What do you do about lobbying?
	What do you do to prevent the United States operating as a kind of agent for the weapons industry when it comes to arms sales around the world?
	Biden's famous lie about making Saudi Arabia a pariah before making their military capacity a little higher.
	With deals that went beyond any of the deals that Trump did, which were condemned by the Democrats while Trump was in office.
	These kind of policies, Vivek, are obviously much more incendiary than the rhetoric that you're currently using.
	So are you willing to Commit to policies like that, and indeed have you already.
	And also, since you've been doing this, what has it done to you?
	Since you've been running and having these conversations, what has it done to you spiritually?
	What has it done to your feelings as a man?
	You must have encountered things that are kind of damaging to encounter.
	I'm not suggesting that you've been damaged by them.
	I can see you're a very robust and strong person.
	But what has it done to your kind of spirit to see, you know, even small things like they fade the music up to larger things like you're not invited to participate in that type of funding?
	You know, that type of thing is almost... I almost laugh at that because that's exactly the system coming at me.
	But the stuff that deals less with me, Russell, but an observation of now having the curtain lifted and seeing how the game actually works, that part has left me...
	I would say it's a work in progress.
	We're going to see this race through, and so you're catching me probably halfway through this thing, right?
	But it has left me cynical and jaded in a way that's not natural for me.
	I'm a naturally optimistic person, and in my heart of heart, I still am optimistic for the future of this country.
	But it doesn't leave you with the same optimistic Bullions, okay, that I began this campaign with.
	And I think we're going to finish there.
	We're going to get to that destination.
	But I think having seen the game played the way that it is, having understood the expectations of how you're supposed to treat the Super PAC puppet masters versus ordinary voters, just as a matter of the system, I'm not playing the game that way.
	I hope I win this election.
	My heart says we have a very good path to do it, but irrespective of me knowing that this is how the game works and kind of having seen it firsthand, it is discouraging.
	No doubt about it.
	It is deeply, it makes one deeply cynical.
	It makes one jaded.
	I mean, it makes a guy like me impulses, you know, that you have to sort of think about, okay, a guy like me has lived the full American dream, right?
	I've founded successful companies.
	We've made, This country has given us the opportunity to achieve immense success and that includes wealth and we have two young sons.
	One's three and a half years old, one's a year old.
	My wife is doing outstanding work.
	She's one of the best in the world at what she does as a throat surgeon.
	We're living a great life with our family.
	I mean, there are moments where you just wonder, Why bother?
	We could just... We're going to be fine either way, really.
	I mean, that's the reality for a lot of people who have been in the position that I'm in.
	It's a reality for us.
	We're going to be fine either way.
	The country's not going to be fine, and so that's what pulls me back into this.
	But there are moments that just make you think about, if this is the way the game is played, screw it.
	You know, why don't we just, why the heck don't you just opt out and just go live a better life for yourself?
	And a lot of people who have achieved the kind of success that I have are making exactly that decision.
	And it's sort of a jaded and cynical thing to watch.
	But it's also part of what gives me my renewed sense of purpose.
	Then you double back down and say, you know what?
	If you're not going to do it, who else is?
	You have a lot of good-hearted patriots in this country.
	I meet them every day.
	But money is the mother's milk of politics.
	And if you've been given and blessed with the resources to be able to see this through, That if you don't do this now, I don't think we're going to have a country left.
	And in some ways that cynicism comes back with a vengeance to come back and give me my redoubled sense of purpose to see this through.
	So on a personal level, that's kind of where you're catching me.
	A little unstructured reflection, at least on that.
	And you know, I think it's something that will catch me three months from now and I'll let you know how I feel about it.
	As it relates to policies that I'm committing to, yeah, I think that this isn't that complicated, right?
	So, I don't think members of Congress or regulators or people who work in the federal bureaucracy should be able to trade personally individual stocks.
	It should be all left to a blind trust.
	They shouldn't know what they own or what they're trading at a given time.
	It can come out with retrospect later.
	That's the way that this should be done.
	It's not complicated.
	Now, I say this as somebody who began my career in the investment world.
	I'm going to just state something obvious.
	These congressmen and these bureaucrats, they would be better off financially if they weren't trading their own stocks, unless it was based on corrupt intentions, in which case they're going to do better.
	That's the only way these people, these clowns, are going to do better than professional investors in a competitive market.
	These are mostly clowns that would ordinarily, if they're behaving honestly, they would do better to leave their money invested In a blind trust by somebody who's not picking individual stocks or picking individual stocks without their knowledge.
	That would be the financially sensible decision.
	Unless they were actually doing it and using their special access to information to be able to enrich themselves, which is exactly what's happening.
	So I put an end to that.
	No lobbying of the government.
	For 10 years, at least, if you've been part of that government.
	If you have been part of a bureaucracy or a regulator that has regulated an industry, you should not be able to serve on boards in that industry for at least 10.
	Fine, let's at least make it five years after leaving office.
	I think it's pathetic that you have a former head of the FDA immediately going and plopping on the board of Pfizer.
	You see the same thing with the defense industrial complex.
	You have a person like Nikki Haley, made special favors for Boeing in South Carolina while she was the governor of South Carolina.
	After her time in government, she's now sitting, until this race, sitting on the board of Boeing.
	In her particular case, for another company, collecting stock options while she is literally running for president.
	As far as I know, that's unprecedented in U.S.
	history, yet here we are.
	These are basic rules of the road that should not be controversial, and these aren't Republican ideas or Democrat ideas.
	On the Super PACs, Democrats used to rail against them.
	Now, they look the other way when they're the beneficiaries of the same game that the Republicans are playing.
	My view is pretty simple.
	If you're going to spend money on a campaign as an entity, or if you're going to run ads for a specific candidate, which is what a campaign does, then you're just bound by the same rules that the campaigns are.
	$3,300 maximum.
	Now, in the U.S., I'm a free speech absolutist.
	I believe in free expression to the fullest.
	but free expression means there's already rules that for certain other entities other than super PACs there are limitations to say you can't give to a candidate but you can advocate for whatever cause you want and you could put as much money into an entity that advocates for a specific cause a policy or a cultural vision there should be no restrictions on that but if you're advocating for a candidate And now the super PACs are literally running.
	I mean, if you take a guy like Ron DeSantis, his entire campaign is literally being run down to operations to people who are knocking on doors or handing out leaflets or putting stuff in mail or advertising on television.
	It's being run by the super PAC.
	So if that's the case, that's corruption because obviously this is not disputed.
	These people show up at events hosted by the Super PACs to raise the money.
	That's just running the campaign.
	That's corruption.
	The whole point of the $3,300 maximum in donating to a primary of a presidential election is to prevent a corrupting influence.
	I would reinstitute that.
	So those are what I would call my anti-corruption measures.
	I've laid them out.
	I'm absolutely committed to them.
	And the irony is that the ideas that should be least controversial amongst Republicans and Democrats Thank you for that.
	that are most controversial for a guy like me running within the primary, but I'm not
	going to stop until we're done.
	Thank you for that.
	It's almost as if these institutions are organized to prevent individuals who might be ideologically
	oriented, who might be in a position to make a meaningful difference, who might have the
	personal confidence and principles to oppose the degree of corruption, be dissuaded from
	ever entering the system.
	In a sense, in a smaller, less relevant, but comparable way, you see the same even in the entertainment industry.
	The kind of products and commodities and individuals that succeed are the ones that are supportive of The ideology of the time, even if that's a tacit ideology like materialism or progress or atheism or corporatism or consumerism.
	I'm not even talking about like the hot button topics that define our time and that have become so divisive.
	It's almost like the cultural machinery, the political machinery, are in alignment to sort of self-sustain, which I suppose
	perhaps is a system's primary goal, is to prevent itself from being destroyed, particularly
	from within. It seems though that we are at a tipping point that began, observably at
	least, it seems in our country with the Brexit movement, across Europe with anti-EU
	parties that were opposed to measures taken after the 2008 financial crash.
	Trump evidently in your country and then that has progressed I think into figures like yourself and Bobby Kennedy.
	Do you feel like what that tells us perhaps?
	Is that the institutions themselves, even though when I talk to people that I respect and like, like Marianne Williamson, she would say, no, I have to do what I can for the Democrat Party within the Democrat Party.
	Do you think that given the tide of corruption, the deep institutionalism, But really what is required is that, you know, let me ask you a host of things.
	You know, Bobby Kennedy's gone from trying to oppose Biden within the Democrats to running as an independent.
	And several times you and I have both over this conversation, Vivek, observed That is a kind of neocon-centrist alliance that always comes together on matters of war, even if they're willing to have highly invective spats when it comes to cultural issues.
	When it comes to the major matters, they fall in line.
	Do you think that even the apparent distinctions between Republican and Democrat are as not as radical as the distinction between anti-institutional thinkers from both parties and therefore is there an emerging sense that it's the machine itself that needs to be challenged which can only really happen from outside of it as it amounts to a kind of, well as you've said before and I agree with this, a revolutionary uprising?
	Yeah, so look, I think the real divide in this country, it's interesting you used the word culturally incendiary, invective.
	The real cynical side of me, Russell, the more I'm seeing about this, is thinking that all of it is in part just a production and a smokescreen to create the artifice of real disagreement or division That sidesteps the real third rail that they care to protect, which is the pro-war agenda from a foreign policy perspective.
	Call it liberal hegemony, call it neoconservatism.
	Two different ways of describing the same worldview.
	And I think that's a big part of what's going on in moments like this one.
	So, I think the real divide in the country, in the U.S.
	today, it's not between black and white, as the media would at times have you believe.
	It is not even between Republican and Democrat, not really.
	It is between, in one version of this certainly, the managerial class.
	And the everyday citizen.
	Okay, what is the managerial class?
	It is sort of the swamp that exists within government.
	It's a horizontal class of people, the same people who become the undersecretary of God knows what in some deputy position of the bureaucracy of the federal government, who then become an associate dean of God knows what at a university, an ambassador to some second tier country abroad that then becomes the professional person who sits sits on a corporate board of directors, the Lockheed
	directors or the Raytheon directors on a given day. It's a horizontal class. It's the same
	class of people that are crushing the will of everyday citizens by wielding control over the
	institutions that they were supposed to safeguard, but are actually exploiting to
	horizontally permeate institutions and advance their own ends.
	That's what you might call the Great Reset on one side.
	It is the dissolution of barriers between the public sector and the private sector.
	The dissolution of the barriers between nations, actually.
	This is a trans-partisan, but transnational phenomenon as well.
	The dissolution of boundaries, and we can talk about this in a little more philosophical, between the online world and the offline world.
	That's what the metaverse is all about.
	But it's the dissolution of boundaries between different spheres of our lives.
	Let's stick to dissolution of boundaries between nations.
	Dissolution of boundaries between public and private sector.
	The dissolution of boundaries between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
	That is what the Great Reset is really all about.
	And then on the other side of this, you have what I call the Great Uprising, right?
	I think that it's a transnational movement.
	I am very focused on the U.S.
	version of this.
	That's the position I'm running for as President of the United States, who believe in the value of the nation, that I am a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous global citizen fighting climate change vaguely somewhere.
	No, I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America.
	It is an uprising that says hell no to the dissolution of boundaries between the public sector and private sector to create a modern form of fascism, a hybrid of corporate and state power.
	It's what the military-industrial complex is all about, but it's really what big tech, big government is all about.
	It's not big tech censorship, it is government tech censorship that does the bidding for that same force.
	No, it says hell no to that vision that we, the people, decide who governs, how we settle our differences through free speech and open debate in the public square, not in the back of palace halls, not in Old World England, not in the back of a SuperPAC, not in the back of BlackRock's corner office on the Park Avenue of Manhattan today, not in the back of three-letter government agency buildings in Washington, D.C.
	We say hell no to that vision.
	That is what the American Revolution was fought to reject.
	1776 vision said, for better or worse, and this is a crucial part of this, Russell.
	For better or for worse, in the short run, we the people decide who leads and who governs.
	Okay, that's a radical vision.
	And so there's a lot of people in the U.S.
	today, hey, say, hey, can't we all just get along, hold hands, sing Kumbaya, compromise?
	No, these are Radical ideals that led to the birth of the United States of America.
	The idea that you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return.
	That is a radical idea.
	The idea that we the people sort out our differences on existential climate change, which I'm using their words not mine.
	The idea that we the people could settle that difference through a constitutional republic.
	That is a wild idea because for most of human history it was done the other way.
	So what you see really is a skepticism of the ideals of the American Revolution itself.
	That's what's on the table right now.
	I think we live in a 1776 moment.
	I do.
	And if that makes you uncomfortable a little bit, Good.
	That's what the American Revolution was not fought to make people feel comfortable.
	Right?
	These are radical ideals that we have to, at times, take quantum leap steps, not just moderate steps, to fight and preserve.
	Fight for and preserve.
	And that's one of those moments we live in right now.
	And I think it's going to take a leader that recognizes that.
	You can't win a war unless you first recognize that you're in one.
	And so I think it's going to take a leader who, A, recognizes that.
	B, is not captured by the forces that gave us the status quo.
	But I think that this is the other further step in this, Russell.
	And, you know, I think that, you know, Trump brought elements of this.
	And I respect him, actually.
	I think he's a great leader in many respects.
	There are other areas where I would build on that foundation and go further.
	I think it's going to take a leader who hasn't been wounded in that war.
	And so that's what calls me into this.
	I think it's going to take somebody with fresh legs, likely from a different generation, to reach the next generation.
	And we'll see where this goes.
	I think that's what it's going to take, and there's a positive version of where this goes.
	I think that, in some ways, what a special time it would have been to be alive in America in the spring of 1776.
	I mean, that would be a... It was a special time to be alive.
	You have Thomas Jefferson.
	I'm sitting here on a swivel chair.
	You can see me swiveling, right?
	Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair, the prototype of it, while he was writing the Declaration of Independence at the age of 33.
	Think about that.
	There was something in the water back then.
	I am optimistic that we live in a moment where we can revive the ideals of that American Revolution.
	I favor doing it through peace, through activation of the energy of citizens that say hell no to that great reset in the peaceful version of a great uprising that does it through our electoral system and restores the integrity of our constitutional republic.
	But if it doesn't happen that way, you know, I think That's the way I want to see it happen.
	Let me just leave it at that.
	I think that that's the moment we live in and that's what I'm looking to lead through a peaceful version of a great uprising that restores the integrity of our constitutional republic.
	Vivek, when a figure like Jefferson enters into mythology, we do have a tendency to forget that they were real men.
	Real people that had a real vision that they were willing to sacrifice for in order to bring about.
	And it seems to me that part of the pervasive culture of our time is, except for matters that relate very directly to individualism and your ability to passively consume or passively protest without sacrifice, there's a kind of sense that the world is finished.
	The famous edict that history is over.
	And a kind of worldwide sense now that we're in a world where most terrain has been captured, most peaks have been scaled, many depths have been explored, that the world is over, that we've reached full saturation, that our role and our final apparition As consumers has been reached.
	When we've spoken before, I've noticed in your rhetoric a kind of appetite to reawaken and revivify the principles of the founding fathers.
	That kind of boldness, a willingness to embark on a brave adventure, an acknowledgement that that's going to be fraught with danger.
	And when I listen to certain, in particular, independent news commentators talking about
	the scale of corruption that we experienced during the pandemic, when even in our conversation
	today, the scope and potential for disaster that the march towards World War Three plainly
	includes that what's required is a kind of, firstly, a revolution in consciousness when
	it comes to us all as individuals, a willingness to look at our own lives and what motivates
	us and where do we see ourselves in five, ten years, both personally and on a global
	Obviously, I've had experiences lately working independent media where I see that the consequence and price of dissent, that dissenting voices will face serious opposition and sometimes that can be quite malign.
	It's hard without scaring people.
	It's hard without evoking the connotations of violence, which I noticed that you carefully stepped around, to awaken in people that this is a plain need.
	This time we live in plainly has the kind of need for revolution The time that you alluded to and the people that you alluded to saw and were willing to carry out.
	I suppose, though, that what we have to accept is those revolutions, whilst it was obviously a different time with different institutions and different challenges and different technology and ability to communicate, obviously revolution as part of its nature means an Overthrow of many institutions.
	And when, you know, many of the things we've touched on, a military-industrial complex that's willing to risk the lives of the people of the world, the safety of the people of the world, Big Pharma, which I know you have connections to, but when we spoke previously you, you know, you said that you're an outlier and a radical in that world rather than a sort of a compliant member of a corrupt system.
	You know, when you have Big Pharma that benefits from health crises, a military-industrial complex that benefits from military crises or wars, when you have energy companies that benefit from energy crises, it's plain that something rather radical is what's required.
	When was the last time anything like that happened in your country?
	Was it the revolution?
	Was it the New Deal?
	Is it possible that these institutions with a compliant and amplifying legacy media will provide a voice to a man like you who's willing to put these ideas in front of people?
	And indeed, if you pursue these ideas to their natural conclusion, you're going to come up against interests that go beyond financial and go into some areas of deep state power that are pretty frightening to contemplate.
	And I'm sure you've come into contact with some of the information I'm referring to there.
	How far are you willing to go when it comes to revolutionary politics?
	So, you know, I want to also just say, I think that there's something to, just for people to know about my own background.
	I was an entrepreneur, right?
	I mean, I'm not, I'm a business builder.
	I've written some books.
	This political world, or even the world of political revolution, that's not where I grew up, right?
	I came to my views because of my experiences.
	And one of the things I would say is, You know, people will say, some of the things you say, do they sound conspiratorial?
	Actually, I'm very different than even visionary conspiracy theorists.
	What I'm describing is not conspiracy theory.
	It is mundane conspiracy reality, right?
	The real conspiracy theories are just the reality is hiding in plain sight.
	And so, I think pragmatically, Russell, to win this, I think it is going to take, I know this sounds self-serving to say, weirdly self-serving, and I don't mean it that way.
	It's why I'm doing what I'm doing.
	I think it takes somebody like me, who understands the other side of how this game is played, understands the mundane realities of actually the merger between state and corporate power and the corruption that that creates on both sides, to be able to really be precise in how we level that system.
	And that's what it's going to take.
	So here's what I'm willing to do, right?
	I think that I'm in this, I'm all in this for the phase of this.
	And I hope that this is the only phase that's ever required to do this.
	Peacefully, through the electoral process, get in there, have enough of a mandate to shut down, and I do think that yes, this is the revolutionary aspect of what I will bring to the table as U.S.
	President, to shut down the government bureaucracies from the FBI, to the IRS, to the ATF, to the CDC, to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to the U.S.
	Department of Education, government agencies that should not exist.
	I've offered, these aren't slogans to me, In speeches I've given in Washington D.C.
	and elsewhere, laid out unprecedented detailed plans for exactly how we will do this.
	Phasing out the FBI, 35,000 employees, 20,000 will be fired, 15,000 will be reassigned.
	What's the legal basis for doing it?
	I've studied the current Supreme Court.
	We're in a short window where we have a Supreme Court in the U.S.
	that actually agrees with me.
	On the unconstitutionality of much of what's being done and the constitutionality of a U.S.
	president's ability to correct for it.
	I win that 6-3 even if we're sued.
	So that's the kind of battle I'm looking to go into is win this electoral battle, take battle against the deep state as the person who actually leads the executive branch of the government.
	I've been a CEO.
	I know that if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, That means they don't work for you, and I will exercise my power to gut that bureaucracy.
	75% headcount reduction by the end of my first term.
	Will they sue me for it?
	Yes, it is.
	We'll go to the legal battle.
	I've studied the Supreme Court.
	I understand the backstop of how we win.
	That's what I'm signing up to lead, okay?
	I am worried that if we don't seize this window to do it, I don't think we're working with a lot of time here, where either on one hand what we're going to have is a hegemonic combination of a corporate industrial complex, a modern version of the corporate state power, what we would call the Mussolini definition of fascism that governs, or something more that will be required to prevent that from happening.
	And we're not... I'm an optimist, as you said, Russell.
	I'm here to make sure we don't get there.
	I've said this actually time and time again.
	You tell people they cannot speak, that is when they scream.
	If you tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.
	And if pervasive government-private coordinated censorship suppression of the exercise of voice continues, I do worry that January 6th in this country will be a preview of 2021, will be a friendly parlay compared to what's to come.
	But I am here to make sure we don't get there.
	And so I'm all in for leading this now.
	I think now is our moment to do it.
	To Peacefully revive the ideals of the American Revolution.
	I think we can do this.
	I think that's the moment that we are in.
	That's what I'm volunteering to lead.
	I don't even relish being in the White House, by the way, right?
	I mean, or riding Air Force One.
	I don't think we should want somebody who relishes it.
	You know, it's not that much of an upgrade from what I've been doing for the last several years anyway.
	And I think that's, frankly, you don't want somebody who covets that position.
	I don't.
	But we're going to do it for eight years.
	I'll be 48 years old when I leave in January 2033.
	My older son won't be in high school.
	And I think we will look back at this moment we were in now and laugh at ourselves.
	That's what I'm hopeful we're going to get to.
	It's just fast forward to January 2033.
	Ten years from now, we will look back and say, man, we were going through our version of adolescence.
	That's what I want us to be saying.
	You go through your adolescent years as a country.
	You do some stupid things.
	You lose your self-confidence.
	You lose your way a little bit.
	But we're stronger when we get to our adulthood on the other side.
	That's the journey I believe we can be on.
	That's what I want to say when I'm leaving the White House in January of 2033.
	And so I want to stick to that path.
	I think we have a clear shot at doing it.
	I think we have clear objectives for success in this election.
	And I mean, this election that's pedestrian.
	I'm talking about that because I'm a candidate.
	Fine.
	But November 2024, that's not the destination.
	That is the start line.
	I think we have then an eight-year run after that to get this right, starting with the mother of all bureaucracies in the U.S.
	federal government itself, anti-corruption measures for decoupling the private sector from the public.
	Democracy and capitalism should not share the same bed.
	They need a clean divorce, some social distancing, to use the parlance of the day.
	That's what we need.
	But if we get this right, yes, I'm confident that we will look at ourselves and this will go down as a phase in history where we were going through some deranged adolescence, but we found our way to revive who we really are.
	I think that opportunity exists and I'm keen to make sure we capture it, but I don't think we're working with a lot of time, Russell, because I think the other path leads to some places where I don't want to see this country go.
	Yeah, I agree with you and I thank you for elevating the calibre of the conversation with your personal integrity and your passion and vision Vivek.
	Thank you for that.
	Thank you for joining us in the stream of freedom that is Stay Free.
	We're going to show you the rest of this conversation tomorrow in addition to talking about Jon Stewart's Apple cancellation.
	Does this mean that the system is closing down?
	That the pathway that you have to walk is becoming Ever narrower.
	Tomorrow we'll be talking about Trump's guilty plea, or the guilty plea of Trump's lawyers more specifically, and myocarditis, the Wuhan lab leak theory, and the necessity for radicalism in politics.
	Click the red button to join our locals community where you will get to see these conversations live on the occasions where we pre-record them, like our fantastic conversation with Jordan Peterson next week.
	We also talk explicitly and exclusively about how we're going to change the world together, create communities outside of the beast, the The serpent energy has to be abated.
	We have to transcend together.
	Those of you that have joined us already, I would like to welcome, like Livid Lemon, Sir T Baggins, saucy, Gil Lees, Deacon Magnetic, Freedom Advocator.
	Welcome.
	Thank you for joining us.
	Why don't you join us as well for access to incredible content.
	Next week, The revolution will grow a little stronger.
	You're not going to want to miss our fantastic conversation with Jordan Peterson.
	If you're an awakened wonder, you can watch it right now.
	Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, although it is also Vivek Ramaswamy talking, but for more of the different, because it's different stuff that he's saying.
	Until then, stay free.

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