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Nov. 24, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

01:56:52

Blake Master

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	People, this was legit late because I forgot to create the link on Rumble.
	Because when I created this link earlier today, we were going live with the Ahmaud Arbery discussion before the verdict and Rumble only allows one live stream at a time.
	Now let me see if it's actually in Rumble and then we're going to see if I can stop having a mild panic attack.
	Let's see here.
	Good, that's my face.
	Booyah.
	Okay, so a couple minutes late.
	Sorry for the hiccup, people.
	It's bound to happen every now and again, but we had to discuss that Ahmaud Arbery situation before the verdict came down so that people could have reasonable expectations of what that jury was likely to be.
	And anyways, that verdict went along the way most people were predicting.
	Some people had predicted not what occurred.
	It's a verdict now for anyone who had been paying attention to the trial and who had been paying attention to the coverage because it was virtually unanimous within a certain variance among everyone who said something.
	There's going to be a conviction on something.
	I had said no malice murder for either of the McMichaels.
	That was not the case for Travis McMichaels.
	I said maybe the cameraman has the better chance of not getting pinned with...
	Some of these other felony murder charges.
	But alas, I mean, he got acquitted on some of the felony murder charges, but convicted on other felony murder charges.
	And that's, you know, under Georgia law, as far as I understand it now, felony murder conviction is effectively the same as murder.
	So even though the felony that Bryant had participated in was false imprisonment and I think one of the other assaults, but not assault with a firearm.
	Felony murder.
	And it's, you know, Max, same sentence as murder itself.
	So that's the day's news.
	Someone says no link on Rumble.
	Let me just go get the link on Rumble.
	It is live there now.
	It is live there now.
	My content go here.
	This looks like what it is.
	I'm going to close this up.
	Put the link in the chat and that should be it.
	Okay, people.
	So.
	With that minor hiccup out of the way, Robert's not yet in the house.
	Blake Masters is in the house.
	And I didn't know who Blake Masters was.
	His social media presence is not the same as others.
	It's not as extensive as other people.
	So it's tough to look for nitty-gritty details, to look for controversies.
	Seems to be pretty clean-cut.
	Straight and arrow?
	Or straight and narrow?
	Pretty clean cut.
	But Blake Masters, as far as a name goes, and I'm going to say this when Blake comes in, it's as awesome of a name as when Homer Simpson changed his name to Max Power in that episode where his name was Max Power.
	Blake Masters.
	It's a great name.
	It is a name that commands power.
	And when they say Nomen S. Omen, the name is a sign.
	Blake Masters has a great name.
	And for those of you who don't know him, Chief Operating Officer of the Teal Foundation.
	Currently running for Senate in, I'm going to say Arizona, but I think I may have forgotten.
	Running for office and is now going to discover a new world of politics if he hasn't already discovered it thoroughly already.
	He's done some interviews.
	He's got a Wikipedia page.
	And that's basically it.
	But we're just going to talk about this.
	I don't know where the conversation is going to go.
	I do suspect it's going to touch on...
	Some current decisions, current events, because at the end of the day, I think what a lot of us understand is that the reason why these two trials, Rittenhouse and McMichaels, Ahmaud Arbery, why they are so important above and beyond, they don't set precedent in a meaningful sense on a going-forward basis, but they are meaningful, impactful for what's going on, the society in which we're living, and the way society is trending towards vigilantism.
	And I'm putting that in quotes because in one case it was deemed to be lawful self-defense, in the other case it was deemed to be felonious vigilantism.
	But we're living in a world where politicians seem to be creating policy, imposing policy that is resulting in, if it's not the destruction of the very social fabric, it's at the very least fraying around the edges.
	And then what you end up getting are these incidents.
	Which the trials become sort of litmus tests for where society is going and where things are headed.
	Full disclosure.
	Not full disclosure.
	Disclaimers.
	Standard disclaimers.
	Testes soup.
	Don't know what that means, but I have not made soup out of testes, if that's what I was going for.
	Superchats.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	Rumble takes 20%.
	If anyone wants to go over and watch on Rumble, it is true you have to create an account to comment, so there's no anonymous commenting in Rumble.
	Rumble takes 20% of these Rumble rants, so you can feel good giving more to the creator and supporting a company that supports free speech.
	Rumble has merged with Locals, so if you go to Rumble, you'll see a direct link to our Locals page.
	Robert Barnes and I are on Locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	No legal advice, no medical advice, no election fortification advice.
	Yeah, Legal Eagle's analysis of the Rittenhouse had certain deficiencies, but it had certain strengths.
	So I'll give him credit for that.
	Okay, I may not get to all the Super Chats, but I might.
	If they interfere with the conversation too much, I won't bring them up.
	If there's legit questions, Super Chat or not, I'm going to try to get them and get to them.
	One more Super Chat.
	Hello from Austin, Texas with love.
	When will we see you guys down here on the Rohan?
	Oh, the Rogan.
	Hey, I will fly.
	I will drive for that if I have to.
	Okay, with that said, people, bringing in the man of the hour, Blake, how goes the battle?
	Hey, good.
	How are you?
	Good.
	So look, this is our first time meeting and it's very interesting because ordinarily, you know, I can dig up dirt on social media.
	I can know of controversies.
	I can, you know, catch interviews, lots of them.
	You're pretty clean, from what I understand, and you've given some interviews, but they're mostly very professional interviews.
	I haven't seen any controversies, Blake, but for those of us who don't know who you are, elevator pitch, who are you?
	I'm surprised you haven't seen any controversy, first of all.
	I have a pretty clean-cut background, no stupid stuff, but I'm out there taking arrows every day.
	Well, the taking arrows part, that much I've seen, but I say controversy like...
	There has been no attempts at cancellation for outrageous conduct.
	I mean, you've taken some flack for being what some people call Peter Thiel's puppet.
	I know people are using another word for that, but I don't consider that controversy.
	So who are you?
	Tell the world.
	And I'm bringing Robert in because I see him now.
	Robert.
	Yeah, Blake Masters.
	I grew up in Arizona where I'm running for U.S. Senate right now.
	I went to Stanford, Stanford Law School, started my career out in Silicon Valley.
	Peter Thiel and I wrote a best-selling business book in 2014, Zero to One.
	We wrote that together.
	And I've been working with him ever since.
	I run his investment firm, Thiel Capital.
	Mostly we just invest in startups and hopefully the world gets new technology and we make money.
	And that's all good, but we're also very political.
	And Peter became a big Trump surrogate in 2016.
	So I got to help out with that and then join President Trump's transition team.
	So I've been involved sort of behind the scenes with politics at a high level for a number of years.
	And then I moved back to Arizona in 2017, 2018, and had this front row seat to watching Arizona lose two Senate seats.
	They were always reliably Republican when I was a kid.
	And now they're both Democrat.
	And you look at what's happening.
	I think we're losing it.
	And I know I'm the one person in Arizona who can beat Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, who's horrible.
	So I'm running for office.
	And they haven't been able to cancel me yet.
	I don't think they'll be able to.
	Robert and I like to start from the beginning, but Robert, go ahead.
	You were about to say something.
	Oh yeah, no, I was going to ask.
	So yeah, what was your family upbringing?
	What did your parents do?
	And sort of the short script of the broader biography.
	Yep, my dad was in the Air Force.
	He went to the Air Force Academy, and my mom grew up in Poblo, Colorado.
	So they met, married in the early 70s.
	My dad, he was in the service for a number of years, worked at the Pentagon.
	Then he got out and started a private software company that did well in the 80s.
	My parents were Reagan Republicans, and then sort of became Ron Paul Republicans, and then Donald Trump Republicans.
	So I was raised in a conservative household, sort of went super deep on the...
	I ran stuff, Milton Friedman in middle school, high school, then Austrian school, sort of libertarian economics in college.
	And since I've gotten out of school, I survived Stanford and Stanford Law School without becoming a left-winger or anything like that.
	I've always been super anti-progressive in that sense.
	I've become a lot more conservative.
	You have kids, you get older, you realize the left is deadly serious about using political power.
	I think it's time for a new generation of Republicans to get in and take office and fight back, actually fight back and take ground back.
	Questions from childhood, siblings-wise, what did your parents do and what was your upbringing like?
	Yeah, Deb was in the service.
	I was in the Air Force and then started a software company that did well in the 80s and he's sort of been doing, you know...
	Futures trading and software, and he's now trading crypto for the last couple of years.
	My mom was a stay-at-home mom.
	She raised my sister and I. I have one sister, one sibling, Crystal.
	She's two years older than me.
	And my mom stayed at home and raised us until we were about 10. And then she wanted to start a business.
	So she became, I don't know if you know Kumon, math and reading, sort of extracurricular, sort of remedial, but also for gifted kids to get even further ahead.
	Supplemental math instruction.
	It was a program developed in the, I think, 1950s in Japan because modern schools just, of course, don't teach kids to be numerate.
	And so my mom had a successful business here in Tucson that she sold two or three years ago.
	So just kind of self-employed parents.
	I saw what that was like, the virtues of it, and also the struggles of trying to make it on your own and run a small business in America.
	Increasingly a hard thing to do.
	Can you describe how the book came about?
	My understanding is taking notes in lectures by Peter Thiel turned into a blog that turned into a best-selling book.
	How did that whole thing work?
	Peter came and taught a class my second year of law school at Stanford.
	I didn't know much about him.
	I knew he was the libertarian founder of PayPal.
	I just took his class.
	It turned out to be super, super interesting.
	It was called Sovereignty, Technology, and Globalization.
	Cross-listed with the business school.
	And I think there were 30 or 40 of us in class.
	It was a seminar.
	And it became very clear after just like two or three class sessions.
	I remember thinking like, holy shit, this is like new information, right?
	I studied political theory at Stanford.
	Most of my professors, yeah, they're smart, but conventional, you know, you read Locke and Montesquieu and Machiavelli and, you know, they're just talking about, you know.
	There were no new takes.
	And all of a sudden, I'm taking this class from Peter, who at that point, I think, was already a billionaire.
	He founded PayPal and had started Facebook.
	And if you know anything about Peter, I think he's sort of next level, genius type person.
	But more important than just...
	He slices up the world in different analytical ways.
	And so I'd never heard someone present fresh theories on how things work.
	So one class, we're talking about peak oil.
	And then the next class, we're talking about China.
	And the next class, we're doing textual exegesis on Abe Lincoln's Lyceum Address.
	And then Peter's talking about Leo Strauss.
	So it was this intellectually engaging environment.
	And Peter was a cool guy.
	And so I got to know him a little bit during that class.
	Unfortunately, I can't tell you too much more about the class because I've forgotten.
	I never took notes, again, because most classes were just sort of boring.
	And it's all in the book anyway, so why take notes?
	And that was a shame because I think that class is lost to history.
	But anyway, I interned for Peter at his venture capital firm Founders Fund that summer.
	And the next year, my last year in law school, Peter came and taught a class, this time in the undergraduate computer science department, called...
	CS183 startups.
	And it was just his take on how to create new startups, new technology companies.
	And this time I was prepared.
	So I just, I didn't even really have a plan, but I just knew that I didn't want to lose this material.
	And I basically just typed everything he said, like as fast as possible, just typed it down and went home, I think after the first class and realized, you know, this is good content, but it was also sort of...
	You know, it wasn't sentences.
	It was just almost chicken scratch.
	I just caught what I could.
	So I went in and, you know, it was hot in my memory and I just filled in the sentences and edited it and sort of published it as an essay.
	And after two or three class sessions were published as these notes essays, they became very popular in Silicon Valley.
	They sort of went, you know, mini viral.
	And it turned out to be that the whole Silicon Valley at the time, this was 2012, was paying attention.
	It was like everybody was following this class because for the first time, you could actually hear what Peter thought about how to create a startup.
	And so that became kind of a phenomenally successful rough draft.
	Maybe nine months after I graduated, I pitched him on writing a book and we sold the book in New York.
	There was a crazy auction.
	All the New York publishers wanted it.
	And then we wrote the book.
	So that's basically it.
	I kind of made my own luck on that one.
	That's, well, you don't say.
	I mean, that's phenomenally fascinating.
	But what is it like you're being taught a class by someone who maybe the class does not appreciate, is a billionaire, is not doing it for the money, is doing it for the passion?
	Do your brethren, like, do your fellow students appreciate that?
	Or do they just treat Peter Thiel like any other professors, nod off, pay more or less attention?
	It was sort of neither.
	Actually, and let me give you an example to illustrate.
	Like in the first class, sovereignty, technology, globalization.
	I remember, I think, yeah, 30 or 40 kids in the class.
	And there was kind of a wow factor because, again, like everybody knows he's been very successful.
	He was sort of already maybe the best tech investor in Silicon Valley.
	So people are paying attention, but maybe not even in the right way.
	Like after class, I remember Peter would always get mobbed, you know, like 15. Of the 30 or 45 kids or whatever would go up and surround him after.
	And I never did that.
	That never seemed like the right way to actually get to know him.
	It seemed to be more about them trying to go up and impress him with one of their questions or, you know, get FaceTime or something like that.
	And so, you know, I think they were overeager, but didn't quite understand, like, who they were dealing with or the opportunity that could come if they actually, like, knew how to stood out.
	He knew how to stand out.
	So I waited.
	I didn't mob him.
	I never wanted to go bother him after class, you know, like he's trying to leave and do other stuff.
	But I did save up some questions.
	I think I emailed him halfway through the quarter.
	And I just had four or five questions that I was sincerely interested in.
	I thought about them.
	So I didn't want to waste his time.
	And I also knew that, you know, based on what I knew about him at the time, that he would find these questions interesting.
	So I basically had a little bit of self-discipline.
	And, uh, emailed him and he replied and my friend Colin and I, who were sort of two peas in a pod in, in, in class, um, well, Peter replied and just said like, these are great questions and I think we should grab dinner.
	So like, do you and Colin want to get dinner?
	And then, you know, we sort of, we're fast friends after that.
	So I think, uh, yeah, I don't know.
	Maybe that there's a lesson in there for someone.
	Now, in terms of prior to Stanford, in terms of public or private schools, in terms of elementary school, high school, things of that nature?
	Yeah, I went to public school through fifth grade.
	Pretty good neighborhood here in the foothills in Tucson.
	My public schooling was fine, although looking back, I think people want to talk a lot about left-wing indoctrination in schools now.
	I remember my parents being really pissed in first grade.
	We wrote letters to the newspaper, and my letter was published, and it was some eco-hysteria rant about developers having purchased land very close to the schools, and they were going to plan to put all these houses on them, and what about the salamanders, and what about the geckos, and this was some horrible thing.
	I don't remember writing this, but you read it, and it's just like a first-grade left-wing environmental screed.
	You might not have written it.
	Someone else might have written it through you.
	Literally.
	I remember a lot about first grade, actually.
	I don't remember actually ever thinking that, right?
	But I remember my dad was pissed, and he's like, you live in a house that used to be desert.
	It was bulldozed to make a house.
	Obviously, you should have desert.
	You should have national parks.
	You should conserve land where appropriate, but this anti-human...
	An environmentalist view that we were already being taught in first grade.
	That was a warning sign.
	I remember in fourth grade, my parents were pissed that we were learning that Columbus, Christopher Columbus, was evil.
	He was racist.
	They murdered all the indigenous people and all this.
	It was a very one-sided view.
	But on the whole, I learned to read and write, and it was an enriching school.
	And then I did go to private school from sixth grade to twelfth grade, the same school.
	Greenfields Country Day School in Tucson.
	It's probably the best academic school in Tucson at the time.
	Unfortunately, it's sort of defunct now.
	It just couldn't compete economically with the rise of charter schools in the last decade or so.
	I remember maybe three out of my six or seven teachers in my junior and senior year were PhDs.
	So it was a really good secular college prep school.
	How much of a political shift was it going to Stanford?
	You know, I mean, Stanford was pretty liberal.
	I got there in 2004, but I don't think it was anything like it is now.
	I really do think it's gotten just a lot more Leninist.
	I was pretty libertarian in college.
	You know, most people were pretty left.
	But most undergrads were checked out.
	You know, it just didn't really seem to be top of mind to people.
	This is the early 2000s still, right?
	It's like, yeah, you had the Iraq War, but I remember becoming really concerned that it wasn't working.
	I'm sort of turning into a quagmire, and gosh, maybe we were lied to.
	2005, 2006, but again, it hadn't turned into this giant disaster yet.
	There was no consensus on that.
	I think people forget in the early 2000s, I think the racial tensions that we see now and the obsession that the left has with dividing people by race.
	That didn't really exist as much.
	You know, I think that was a product of the Obama administration.
	And so I think most people, you know, when I was at school at Stanford, were basically just there for the ride, not too ideologically engaged with anything.
	Actually, just to come back to one thing, you're taking the class with Peter Thiel, you take these bullet notes, chicken scratch, whatever, but you're taking thorough enough notes that you then, is it after you're...
	You're not out of Stanford yet, but you're still in Stanford.
	You approach Peter and you say, "I got these notes," and you discuss putting it into a book.
	I published the notes online, like the day of class, most times.
	And they started to become popular.
	I think they hit the top of Hacker News, which was a news aggregation site popular in Silicon Valley.
	And I remember after two or three class sessions, it was clear that important people were paying attention and that this wasn't just like...
	You know, random student on a blog that no one reads.
	And so I remember thinking, oh shit, I should check in with Peter about this.
	Because we knew each other, right?
	Because I'd interned, I'd taken that class before.
	So I emailed him and I said, hey, I'm not sure if you've heard, but like I've been posting notes that I've taken from the previous class sessions.
	I hope that's all right.
	And he replied and said something very close to, oh, we've heard.
	Yep, paying attention.
	And he's like, yeah, go ahead and keep it up, but don't fuck it up.
	That's amazing.
	It was cool, too, because the class really would have vanished.
	It wasn't being recorded.
	There was no podcasting to speak of back then.
	I mean, Peter's also...
	Perfectionist.
	And, you know, one of the reasons he has for teaching classes is it forces you to organize all this material and concretize, you know, your own thinking.
	So I think he does it as a great sort of benefit for the students in the room.
	And it can change many of their lives.
	But I think he also has a personal motivation, you know, just clarity of thinking.
	But he wouldn't have written zero to one.
	You know, like the material was obviously good enough to turn into a good book and it's done like phenomenally well.
	I think we've sold like three million copies, but it never would have happened.
	And obviously, like I couldn't write zero to one by myself.
	You know, it's like mostly his ideas and his business experience there.
	So it was this interesting thing where the notes were like this forced rough draft.
	And you go back and read the notes and there's typos still.
	And like, I'm not going to go fix them all.
	And there are errors that I made.
	But it was this good way of getting out his ideas in this sort of plausible deniability way, right?
	He could just be like, that's just a student.
	So I owned all the mistakes.
	And I think, you know, he got a lot of the credit.
	And that was a pretty good way of getting this out.
	But it was also a good rough draft because it, you know, publishers, they're in the hits business.
	And they want to know if there's a market for a book.
	And just because you're a successful venture capitalist does not mean your book will be successful at all.
	And yet I could show them like 2 million people had read these notes and the average time spent on site, I forget what it was, but it was like a long time.
	So we could prove in advance the content was engaging.
	So we got a good deal and just kind of snowballed.
	Now, when you were in law school, did you know you wanted to go into business or politics or were you thinking about a legal career?
	I was thinking about a legal career.
	It was still maybe a mistake to go to law school or I'll say like I didn't go for the right reasons.
	Looking back, the peers of mine that are really happy having gone to Stanford Law School are the ones that really just wanted to be a lawyer.
	Maybe even they knew specifically the kind of law they wanted to practice.
	And then you go and you execute on that plan and you become that kind of lawyer and it works.
	I think two-thirds or three-fourths of the people who go to law school don't know why they're going.
	It's just a thing to do.
	And I was guilty of that.
	I was selling software after college.
	I had a startup called Box, which turned out to be phenomenally successful, and that was great.
	But once I realized they would just hire more salespeople instead of let you make a lot more money as the company scaled up, I started to think like, okay, I should go back to school and do something.
	So I went to law school.
	I would have been happy being a lawyer, I think.
	I mean, I'm glad I didn't, and I've had an awesome career and all that.
	But I really, like I look at the, and I know we'll get to Kyle Rittenhouse in that trial, but I look at...
	I mean, you look at Binger and how incompetent he is on the prosecution side, but even look at the defense side, and I think they did some good things, but room for improvement.
	You know, I really actually think I would be very good at being a litigator.
	Yeah, it just involves selling.
	I think Binger did a good job being the most disingenuous, dishonest prosecutor ever.
	Yeah.
	That was the only way of succeeding in that case.
	Sure.
	Back to the McMichaels and the prosecutor, I don't know her name.
	Much more competent, but also seemingly much more authentic in what you would pursue.
	But we'll get there in a bit.
	Yep.
	Explain your business ventures now, because what's the startup you did?
	Box, what did that do?
	Well, Box, it was sort of an early competitor to Dropbox.
	I think Aaron Levy started it in like 2005.
	And Dropbox sort of won the consumer file storage and synced folders on your desktop.
	Battle.
	And so when I started to get involved with Box, I just graduated from Stanford.
	Now it's like spring of 2008.
	The world is ending with the financial crisis and all that.
	So it's actually hard to get a job.
	But I got a job as the third salesperson at Box, and they had just decided to become an enterprise sales company, enterprise software company.
	And so...
	You know, Box basically just does file management and collaboration software online.
	But it was a little startup within a small startup.
	We had to figure out how to start selling this product to businesses.
	So it was fun.
	And we figured it out.
	But like I said, over the 12 to 18 months that we figured it out, it became clear to me that I just didn't want to keep doing that forever.
	And so I went back to school.
	But yeah, Box went on to IPO, I think, in 2015.
	Yeah.
	Great success.
	Very interesting, too.
	I lived at the office.
	For the longest time, I wanted to save money.
	And so I just annexed a conference room, and I had an inflatable bed.
	And Aaron Levy, the CEO, was living on the second floor somewhere, or first floor, I think.
	And I was on the third floor.
	And I'd have my George Foreman grill and make bacon for the sales execs who got in early.
	And it was the classic startup vibe.
	Yeah, I use Box.
	A good number of lawyers do because of its ease of use and particularly for business purposes better than Dropbox.
	For visual and not some other files, Dropbox can be better depending on the circumstances.
	Was it going to Peter Thiel's class that led you to go think, okay, I want to work with Peter?
	Yeah, I think it was just path dependent.
	It was like I interned for his venture capital.
	And then we stayed in touch.
	And then I had the opportunity to write that book.
	And basically, when we published Zero to One, we published it September 2014.
	I came on to Teal Capital in 2014 to sort of run the PR and marketing for the book.
	And that became Peter's biggest project.
	And his stock had really risen.
	I think Facebook IPO, you know, 2012.
	And he was the hot new investor with the hot new book.
	And so the zero-to-one marketing tour, we did this crazy global book tour, you know, to Asia and Europe and tons of places in the United States, of course.
	And that PR and marketing basically became coincident with, like, Peter's own personal PR, you know, which I basically managed for a while.
	And I did that through 2015 and 2016, and I just kind of snowballed and got more and more responsibility within his organization.
	I think I took over running the nonprofit, the Teal Foundation, in 2015, 2016, and then by 2018, I became COO of his family office.
	Now, one of the topics that Peter, I mean, there's a lot of topics where Peter was heretical at the time for the ideas he was putting out there, though more and more recognition has come to those ideas and its validity as time has gone on.
	But one of them was second-guessing the...
	Almighty wisdom within the academy of the beauty of globalization.
	Was he the first person that really sort of opened that door to second-guessing that for you?
	I think so.
	And I forget, like, I mean, Tyler Cowen had been a commenter on this, you know, The Great Stagnation.
	I forget when that was published or when I read it.
	There have been some other critics of globalization sort of in the early 2010s.
	No, I mean, I think I learned, you know, I think I learned a lot and had my views very much shaped by Peter in that respect.
	You know, Peter had this, I think it's still true, unfortunately, this tech stagnation thesis.
	Everybody thinks we live in this technological age just because you have iPhones that get better and better every year.
	You know, look at the price of flat screen TVs.
	It plummets every year and the TVs just get higher and higher res.
	But actually, you know, we live in like a phenomenally stagnant society.
	Airplanes are moving slower.
	Plane travel sucks, you know, today relative to the 70s and 80s.
	We don't actually have that much advanced innovation.
	There haven't been crazy innovations in plastics or in, you know, dementia, therapeutics, and all the stuff that would actually make life sort of better and more productive.
	We haven't had, which is why you've had wage stagnation more or less for 50 years in this country since 1972.
	So we don't live in a technological age, and that's really weird.
	And I think the narrow cone of progress in IT distracts people from realizing that.
	And I continue to think that's a really compelling thesis.
	And Peter was, I think, certainly pioneering it in the early 2000s.
	For anybody who doesn't know what the Thiel Foundation does, in a nutshell, it's a not-for-profit work in innovation.
	But what are the three branches of the Thiel Foundation?
	And yeah, go into that just a bit.
	Well, we have three internal programs, and then we also just make grants to outside nonprofits and individuals who we think are doing cool stuff.
	I like to think of the foundation as an anti-nonprofit nonprofit.
	We hate nonprofits.
	Most nonprofits just want to signal that they're doing good.
	It's like the Gates Foundation and Mosquito Nets in Africa.
	Maybe that's fine.
	Maybe some of that is good.
	I suspect a lot of it's just wasted.
	But certainly it's conventional, and you get the sense that everybody's trying to do the same thing.
	We wanted the Teal Foundation to be a private foundation, 501c3, but we wanted to only do things that would not get done if we didn't do them.
	By definition, sort of unconventional, unpopular philanthropy.
	And so the three programs we have, one is just kind of a literary philosophical project called Imitatio, where we support People who are sort of developing and extending the theories of Rene Girard, mimetic theory, which is, you know, Peter got to study under Rene Girard at Stanford, and he's very into that stuff.
	And so we give grants to academics and help translate books and stuff like that.
	Two is Breakout Labs, which was a sort of biotech, not even an incubator, but the idea, and I think the market's changed, but in 2011, there weren't a lot of seed stage biotech firms.
	And if you had a company or maybe you were an investigator at a lab or just a young scientist who had an idea to turn your research into some product, nobody was going to invest seed stage capital with you if they had a fiduciary duty because you were just so early.
	And Breakout Labs specialized in finding people, scientists who might become great businessmen.
	And kind of pairing them up with the resources they needed, sometimes to even incorporate the company and actually start.
	And then we'd give the company a grant.
	And if they ever successfully raised money, that grant would turn into equity.
	So kind of pre-VC, VC for biotech.
	And that's actually done pretty well.
	We've sunsetted the program because now there's so much capital chasing early stage biotech.
	But I think for a long time in the market, we filled a gap.
	And then the flagship program is the Teal Fellowship.
	This is the famous one that most people know, which is we pay young people to drop out of college.
	You know, we think college is tremendously expensive, tremendously overrated.
	You look at the quality of education in the last couple of decades, it's just plummeted.
	You look at the number of administrators and diversity, equity, inclusion, you know, fake jobs that these colleges are hiring.
	It's just going through the roof.
	Tuition's going through the roof.
	Far outpacing inflation.
	And the truth is, like, we probably send way too many people to college every year.
	We should shame on us for building a society where, like, you know, we look down on people who don't go to college and we pretend that everybody has to have a four-year liberal arts degree.
	We think that's insane.
	And we started the fellowship to show that if you can take talented young people and just give them some resources, we give them a hundred grand and we say, go build a business.
	Not everybody builds businesses, but a lot do.
	And some have been fantastically successful.
	So it's our way of poking the college regime in the eye.
	Well, this is the 20 under 20 facet, right?
	Which is you pick people under 20. And I guess the idea is that...
	Even if they go and squander the 100,000, they're still 20 or under so they can go back to college if they need to in order to get that insurance package.
	Some go back to college.
	We changed it so it's no longer 20 or 20 because it was arbitrary.
	We're getting a lot of people who applied when they're 20 and now they're 21. So now it's just all college.
	If you're under the age of 22, then you're eligible.
	We only have like 10% go back to school.
	And the 10% that do go back to school are usually...
	You know, going back for an engineering degree or a math degree or something like that.
	They're going back after some, you know, maybe their venture failed, but they're going back with like actually renewed clarity or like some understanding of what they're doing, right?
	School, and we're not anti all school, but school is definitely a tool.
	Like it makes sense if you want to go and learn skills and get a degree that you're actually going to need.
	And so I think anybody who is going to college needs to think long and hard about, like, does that make sense?
	And maybe you know a lot more about that if you've done something for a year or two after high school.
	So some go back.
	I'm pleased with 10% going back.
	But most people don't, and a lot succeed.
	How could that translate into federal public policy?
	Because I remember, like, you know...
	Back in the day, I was for free college and Bernie's ideas in that respect.
	But as the role of college has changed, I've changed my views on that subject because it's been more about acculturation and about protecting a privileged class's economic and social standing, not about actual information and empowerment, in my view.
	How could that translate outside of federal loan policies and other policies?
	How could that translate on the federal policy level in terms of rebalancing our priorities?
	Trump talked about apprenticeship programs and other things.
	We've got translated into policy, but what are some illustrations or examples of that?
	Well, I think the first thing you need, basically, anti-college policy, stuff that actually attacks these institutions and forces them to either reform or go out of business.
	I think the college lending regime is just predatory, like this idea that the government is going to guarantee all these loans.
	If you're a 20-year-old carpenter, And you're swinging hammers every day, and you're actually framing houses or building furniture, and you can demonstrate reliable income.
	You're doing what you should be doing.
	You can't go and buy a $300,000 house.
	You can't go and get a $250,000 loan for that house, even if you've got the 50 grand down payment saved up.
	No lender is going to look at that and say, yeah, here's the loan.
	But we're going to let an 18-year-old with no skills take out $250,000 to go get a women's studies degree at Vassar College.
	Thanks to Joe Biden, the debt is non-dischargeable.
	You can't go bankrupt.
	It's like indentured servitude unless they come up with some...
	Left-wing program where if you, you know, volunteer for whatever left-wing pet cause, maybe they'll forgive some of the debt someday.
	But I think this is a really predatory system.
	And so I think there are a lot of things to do.
	It's like make these colleges liable for the debt that their students take on and are unable to pay back.
	I think right there, just like making the colleges feel some skin in the game.
	You know, just send Harvard the bill, right?
	Take it out of their endowment.
	It's usually not Harvard.
	It's the sort of middle tier and lower tier schools that are the most predatory.
	But I think you make the schools feel the pain for their lack of results.
	I think that's good.
	And then on the positive side of the ledger, you mentioned apprenticeship programs.
	I think we need to go beyond talk and we actually need to do this.
	You know, I don't think most people in society should go to college.
	You should go to college if you want to be like a doctor or a scholar.
	Even law school, I think, should probably be like one year.
	And then you should apprentice.
	It shouldn't be three years.
	Everybody knows the second and third years are kind of fake.
	But I think we've got to get serious.
	And, you know, we should be teaching young people to weld and to hang drywall and build houses and then give them the skills to market themselves, right, in the modern digital economy.
	It's not just a meme or a trope that, like, you can go make 100 grand as a 23-year-old plumber.
	But that's just way better than making 35K as some adjunct professor, you know, teaching Russian literature.
	We just have too many people with those soft skills and not enough people with hard skills.
	I was going to say, if you hadn't yet been in controversy, your choice of useless degrees might be the one that gets you in trouble.
	I would have gone with the safe choice, liberal arts or religious studies.
	Those are the ones that most people can find non-offensively useless degrees.
	Although I have an undergrad in philosophy with a minor in history.
	So equally useless, except for, I always said, it trains you to think before you get your professional degree.
	Yeah, maybe.
	In theory.
	There's a lot of useless degrees.
	I'm an equal opportunity offender.
	Fully half the degrees in a college course catalog are near useless.
	But the idea that, like, why is it an education?
	Why does tuition cost so much at Harvard, Yale, all of these Ivy League schools?
	They pay the staff with it.
	The staff come in saying, well, if I want to teach her, I want X amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
	Not looking at Elizabeth Warren specifically, but I'm thinking of her.
	And so you want to charge the students.
	To funnel that cash to these professors who might be overvalued, overrated, and not producing for what they're being paid.
	And then what ends up happening?
	The students have racked up debt that the government then wants to forgive that has been put in the pockets of the professors who might not have delivered value for their salary.
	That sounds like a broken system as far as I can tell, but how do you fix it?
	How do you fix it, actually?
	Well, you almost give too much credit to the system.
	I mean, I don't think the professors are actually taking home the lion's share of the tuition dollars.
	And you look, again, look at the ratio of administrators to actual faculty, and you'll just be shocked at the rise of this sort of administrative bureaucracy.
	The HRification of the world, right, has sort of started in the universities.
	And so I think it's actually even worse.
	I mean, I agree with you, but I think it's even worse than that.
	I mean, luckily, I think people know the game is basically up.
	I think people at this point, you know, parents send their kids to college almost not because they know that it's going to give them some great education.
	I think people at this point know that that isn't quite true.
	People treat college today as more of an insurance policy.
	Like it's sort of a pessimistic thing, but God, you don't want to not go to college because then you might fall through the cracks in our society, right?
	Which I think is at least a healthier psychological understanding of what's actually happening.
	But as I mean, it just can't continue as the costs continue to get so absurdly high and the benefits got like maybe it's actually worth it to go to Harvard or Stanford.
	Right.
	It costs a lot.
	You go into some debt, you know, if you're not from a wealthy family.
	But but the degree, I think, while while sort of functionally useless in this social, you know, economy that we have is actually still somewhat valuable.
	Right.
	It's a separator.
	And so maybe there's economic logic to that, but I think the third-tier schools and the second-tier schools, they just don't make sense for so many liberal arts people.
	And I think you're starting to see people actually understand, no, we don't have to participate in the system.
	And I view my job, you know, I'm running for Senate, and when I'm a U.S. Senator, I'm going to be super serious about education funding policy.
	And how do we actually tilt back more towards industrial policy and vocational training programs, stuff like that?
	But I also view a lot of my job, certainly as a candidate and also as a senator, is to use the cultural power of that Senate seat and to talk about this.
	And the right answer is not the Bernie Sanders AOC, hey, there's some problems here, so let's send everybody to college and give everybody a meaningless degree.
	That's the wrong way to go.
	We should build an economy where there are like...
	Thousands of different paths to success.
	You know, we shouldn't put everybody on the meat grinder of the four-year degree and just march in lockstep because that actually won't work.
	It just won't try in the next generation for a successful future.
	Well, it perverts and distorts incentives, and it starts to become this sort of cycle where basically they indebt people for useless degrees, and then the only place where it's useful is to get an adjunct job or an administrative job in the college that then is continually fed by the same indebted machine that's more about shifting cultural power to people on ideological grounds than it is any economic productivity.
	Almost no correlation between a college will be successful if it feeds that machine than if it actually creates an economically productive independent participant who might be independent of thought as well.
	Now, in terms of...
	Aspects of why there has been this...
	Until I heard Peter talk, I had not even fully appreciated the lack of development scientifically in a wide range of areas for really half a century.
	What do you ascribe as the reason why we've had this complete lack of productivity and inventiveness in those areas?
	I mean, some people reach for the easy answer, which is just maybe the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
	And there's sort of a...
	A frontier that gets ever harder to actually pick fruit from because we've just discovered most of what there is to discover.
	I can't prove that's false.
	I strongly suspect that's false.
	I think there are a lot of reasons.
	I think cultural reasons.
	It used to be in the 20s and 30s, maybe you were a little bit of a mad scientist and you were crazy, but you could actually have some meaningful independence and maybe you thought you were a genius and you were going to pursue this line of research.
	You know, maybe you discovered penicillin or maybe you, you know, discovered some new nuclear theory.
	But there was a sense in like an individual scientist could actually have the agency to meaningfully discover something new.
	And today, I think the charismatic lone wolf scientist is basically, you know, relegated to Hollywood movies.
	And not even then.
	Science has just become institutionalized.
	You know, everybody specializes in some micro thing.
	You know, Peter's quote on the stuff is like retail sanity, wholesale madness.
	You know, somebody knows the exact details of this peer reviewed, you know, paper on this new protozoa, but no one knows what's actually happening.
	One of my carve outs or areas of focus on the Trump transition team was...
	You know, my job was to try to find and vet really talented people to recommend to the president-elect that he appoint to various scientific and technical positions in the government.
	Because, you know, the new president has to appoint like 4,000 political appointees.
	A lot of those are in like the Department of Energy and have to do with like nuclear policy and stuff like that.
	But I took a hard look at science funding and the way that we actually fund basic research in this country.
	And the National Institutes for Health and all that stuff.
	And after a week or two of sort of really diving in, I became convinced, I think Peter did too, that we needed to fire Francis Collins, who is the head of the NIH and still is now.
	So obviously we were unsuccessful at sort of persuading people that we should get rid of Collins.
	But you look at Collins and you look at the sort of science, the elite science bureaucracy.
	Both in our universities and in the government.
	And these people tend to be sort of center-left politicians.
	It's more about politics than science.
	You look at who actually gets grant funding approved.
	You can't get a controversial grant approved.
	And researchers know this, and everybody's responding to their local set of incentives.
	And so most of the grant money goes to either neutral things or sort of things that can vaguely be mapped onto some left-wing agenda.
	And the grants go to old people, you know, young scientists who want to study bold, high risk, high reward, potentially controversial science don't get funded.
	And if you're a young scientist, you're probably pretty smart and you're not even going to pursue those lines of inquiry, right?
	So I think the regimentation and bureaucratization of science funding is like a huge, huge problem.
	And of course, Collins was, you know, probably talking with Fauci and who knows how much he knew about the funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance and all this stuff.
	So I'm not saying we would have not had COVID had we been successful.
	But but interestingly, like the Francis Collins stuff wasn't spiked by, you know, know, Obama holdovers or anything like that.
	I don't know who killed it in Trump Tower, but one of the various competing factions killed it and they just wanted status quo and continuity.
	And I think that doesn't work anymore.
	Yeah.
	Do you think, uh, Trump, uh, uh, Appreciate that.
	In other words, there were a lot of great ideas and good personnel reminding him that personnel is policy.
	Nixon kind of made the same mistake.
	Pat Buchanan talks about it in his book about Nixon.
	Or his most recent book about Nixon.
	But there was a constant frustration by a large group of us that at key personnel decisions, ultimately the status quo held sway.
	And I think it undermined...
	Trump's ability to translate his creativity and possible change agency to actually drain the swamp, so to speak.
	Yeah, I mean, obviously he's totally right on drain the swamp.
	I think his own instincts are second to none.
	I think we all found out the swamp is probably like five or six times deeper than expected.
	But I think you're right.
	And I saw this, right?
	I saw this in Trump Tower.
	It's like so many people who weren't, I think, fully...
	Allied with the 2016 campaign.
	Everybody jumps on to the ship as soon as, you know, as soon as Trump won.
	And that was frustrating to watch.
	I'm sure it was frustrating for him too.
	But I do think we saw this get better and better, almost on a monthly basis, but certainly on a quarterly basis throughout the administration.
	You know, I know Johnny McEntee, who they brought in towards the end last year or so.
	To run the presidential personnel office.
	And of course, you saw the Atlantic hit piece that they just did on McEntee in the last few weeks.
	And they hate him because he was effective.
	He was loyal to the president.
	He believed in America first.
	The president knew like, hey, we actually do need to be better here at making sure that we get the right, competent, aligned people.
	No more funny stuff.
	And it was very effective.
	And I just know the second administration would have been, hopefully still will be.
	Way more effective.
	Because I do think it takes some time.
	Here's the deal, Blake, and sorry to interrupt you, or if I did.
	The problem you're describing with education and the institutions of education very much seem to be the exact same problems with the institution of government itself.
	That you have layers of bureaucrats upon bureaucrats which increase the cost of the operations.
	And when Trump came in and said, drain the swamp, drain the swamp, and then you say, yeah, the swamp is...
	Multiple times deeper than you ever thought it was.
	But to drain the swamp, you need to have allies within the swamp.
	And so you need to then go in and start swaying the members of the swamp who are sucking at the proverbial teat of the swamp, and you can't drain them.
	So bringing up Mike Bruno, it's like, drain the swamp?
	Trump had to fire more than half of his cabinet.
	How do you go about remedying these problems when the solution is going to be exactly that which the problem itself wants to avoid at all costs?
	You can't trim the fat at universities, nor will you.
	So the idea is compete with them.
	But how do you trim the fat and drain the swamp, so to speak, within the government if you don't really have that alternative?
	That's a great question.
	I think that's the existential question.
	I'm not going to pretend it's easy.
	But I think that's what we're up against.
	You've got to drain the swamp, and the swamp does not want to be drained.
	And the swamp has a lot of power.
	And, you know, I mean, even if you're just talking sort of at the above board level, right, like civil service, you know, there's 2 million bureaucrats that you basically can't fire for any reason.
	And you think they're neutrally distributed ideologically, or do you think they happen to lean pretty far left, right?
	So it's a challenge, you know, I mean, in a second Trump administration, you know, one of the things I'd most want to see is just massive civil service reform.
	But of course, the entrenched...
	Bureaucracy won't like that, right?
	And we're not even talking about sort of deep state or shadowy sort of intelligence actors who may have their own view and may have their own power centers and whatnot.
	So I think it's really hard.
	But I also think the status quo is not working and we can have managed decline and things just get worse and worse until gradually and then suddenly things really just blow up.
	Or we can recognize how serious it is now and actually take power and this time...
	Learn from the past and really be ready on day one to wield it.
	You're going to call it the bureaucratic...
	As senator, you'll label that bill bureaucratic reform and then it's going to be framed as massive layoffs for federal employees.
	Maybe they get their whole pension.
	It's the rage, retire all government employees.
	You do less damage probably if you just didn't show up to work, but you can still fully be paid.
	That's the bargain.
	And maybe there's a win-win there.
	I don't know.
	Not a serious policy proposal, but maybe not so far off.
	But I do think...
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I was going to say, yeah, I think civil service reform is critical because I think, you know, the entire idea of making civil service apolitical, all it really did was empower the professional class to have disparate power without going through elected office, without being subject to democratic restraint.
	Because that's what, you know, you go all the way back to late 19th century, early 20th century, the shift from the spoiled system to civil service reform was really shifting it from democratically controlled bureaucrats to...
	Outside of democratically controlled bureaucrats.
	And of course, the nature of bureaucrats is to expand and extend their power and influence and wealth.
	And they have not done so in a way that's been...
	Either culturally positive or economically productive.
	And I think that absolutely you just sort of have to start taking the axe to a range of places.
	And part of it is getting over that illusion because we don't have apolitical civil service people.
	We have a professional class that has political prejudices partially of its class, partially of the college system, partially of who gets hired.
	Because, you know, if the people that are hiring there, they're not hiring other.
	But speaking of which, how much like one concern I have with the vaccine mandates being imposed aside from all the constitutional and discriminatory issues that it implicates and the right to bodily autonomy and so forth.
	Is the way it can be used politically.
	In other words, the kind of people who are independent enough of thought, because you're talking back about incentives and structures, and we have all these disincentives to actually being productive and positive, that the kind of person who is likely to object to a vaccine mandate...
	It's someone who thinks independently, tends to think for themselves, doesn't just defer to authority no matter what, and may probably disproportionately not be inclined towards the current administration.
	And it seems like the vaccine mandate becomes a way of a political purge, of purging people who have different dissident political thoughts in ways they couldn't do legally under the current civil service system.
	It becomes an effective pretext to wipe out political dissidents within positions of power.
	Any thoughts?
	Well said.
	Unfortunately, I think that's right.
	It's obviously not about COVID at this point.
	We know that people who are vaccinated can still spread the virus.
	It's not going to protect someone else.
	It only protects you.
	Maybe some people should take it if they're, you know, old and obese and comorbid or, you know, something.
	But it has to be an individual choice.
	And it doesn't actually make sense.
	There's no public health logic to the vaccine mandate.
	And I think you hit the nail on the head.
	The reason they're pushing so hard is because it is quite an effective tool of social control.
	You know, Biden wants the military thinned out from anybody who might dissent from all the cultural stuff that they're trying to...
	You know, promulgate through the military.
	They want the Customs and Border Patrol agents who are already besieged, who are already, you know, underfunded, undersupported.
	I mean, this administration believes in open borders.
	So if you can just get rid of two thirds of Border Patrol by mandating, you know, this vaccine from their perspective, that's great.
	And I think more people on the right need to realize what you just said.
	I mean, they're playing for all the marbles.
	Progressivism is a totalizing ideology.
	They want all the power.
	And when they find a really clever way to get it, they'll exploit it.
	And that's what they're doing.
	And if anyone was not already thoroughly enough blackpilled in the crowd, Robert, you just did it because, I mean, I've had a not such an eloquent expression of the same thought, which is...
	Get out the doctors who don't...
	Get out the nurses who don't want to be vaccinated.
	Get out the healthcare workers who don't want to get vaccinated.
	Get out the federal workers who don't want to be vaccinated.
	If you have to call in government reserves, you know who they are.
	You know where they're ideologically aligned.
	And it's a great way of cleaning house on a morally virtuous basis like all tyrannies do.
	And it's...
	Okay, that's another black pill moment.
	And so how do you...
	How do you combat that?
	Because everyone seems so thoroughly on board with this compelled vaccination, vaccine passports.
	You are now fighting against the current, and you've been demonized thoroughly in the media, which is on board, the government, which is on board, and the pharma companies, which are obviously on board.
	You have to start that ideological battle almost in the past, and we can't do that anymore.
	Again, I'm not saying it's going to be easy.
	I think you're articulating the challenges.
	Look, I guess by definition, I'm not fully black-pilled.
	I'm optimistic because I'm running for office.
	If I thought it was all over or if I thought it was impossible, I would just retreat and focus on doing well for my family and making sure that we're safe and taken care of and all that.
	But I think it's bleak.
	I think it's scary what's happening, but I don't think it's all gone.
	And I think, you know, it's a race against time.
	Can we even make it to the 2022 elections before America blows up?
	But I do think 2022 and 2024, and they go together, these are our last chance.
	And I think if we take power back and we wield it wisely and intelligently, then we have a chance.
	Then it's like we have an opportunity to do the hard work.
	Of turning the ship around.
	And it's a big ship, and there's a lot of, you know, built-up sclerotic bureaucracy, so the rudder is not even that responsive.
	But I think the alternative is to just give up, and that doesn't feel right.
	One of the things you mentioned was the critical role of cultural power that the position of the senator can have.
	Because it seems to be one thing, particularly...
	On the Republican side, frankly, that they've underutilized is the cultural power their position holds.
	An example of that has been the Rittenhouse case.
	The left has not been bashful about using their positions of power to talk about whatever.
	I sued Elizabeth Warren over her decision to talk about the Covington kids in a way that libeled them.
	But in that context, you were one of the people that has been, you and J.D. Vance, have been very publicly out.
	Did we lose them?
	Can you hear me?
	Here's my bad camera.
	I don't know what happened to the good one.
	Alright, different view.
	Don't worry, it's good enough.
	You chose also to speak out about the Rittenhouse case, and you spoke out before there were acquittals.
	I mean, there were some, God bless them, some conservatives that waited until their acquittals to suddenly speak out.
	But can you talk about how important, like that case is an example where Kyle needed defense in the court of public opinion, because that's going to translate to judges, it's going to translate to people who have decision-making power, it's going to translate to the future of him to have a future.
	given how much he's been smeared and libeled by the press and misrepresented by the prosecution in the case can you talk can you talk about why you're willing to speak out about that and why more people who hold public Yeah, that was really frustrating.
	And on the one hand, I'm campaigning, and I think I got a lot of credit for speaking out.
	And on the other hand, I think it's really disgusting how basically no incumbent or very few incumbent Republican politicians.
	And very few candidates, actually, wanted to stick their neck out at all.
	And this is a particularly striking example because Kyle was just so obviously innocent.
	If you only listen to Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon, you're not going to know the facts and you're going to just accept the narrative, hook, line, and sinker.
	But if you actually just even took like 20 minutes to watch the video.
	And I remember this was clear, like, right after it happened, by the way.
	It didn't only become clear during the trial, although that's when everybody started to talk about it.
	But, like, he was chased down.
	You know, he had a legal right to be there, and he was chased.
	And I think the Rosenbaum guy was saying that he was going to kill Kyle, and it was reached for the gun.
	And the other dude actually, like, had a gun.
	Like, it just was 100 to 0 clear cut.
	And if you don't have, if your political party doesn't have candidates who are willing to speak out, Especially when something is 100 to 0 and everybody's just afraid of saying the obvious truth, then you're just so screwed.
	So to me, it was just obviously the right thing to do.
	I also expected it to be good politics.
	I didn't even expect it to be controversial, but I'm baffled at why more people didn't speak up.
	But I think it matters, and I think, look, we were all proven right.
	And I went on Tucker and I said, like, the jury reached the right result, but like, shame on the prosecutor, right?
	Shame on the system.
	Shame on the media for basically putting this kid through this.
	Because he was just clearly innocent.
	I'll give one, our first shout out of the evening to Darth Crypto, who's doing the Lord's work in terms of holding Binger to account via social media and independent journalism.
	But it was so obvious that it's only now that...
	Robert, you'll tell me if I gave David a French too hard of a time in my last video where I said he comes out on CNN now and says it was obvious from the beginning he had a very strong self-defense case.
	It was obvious what Wisconsin law was.
	I went back and read your article from the time you mentioned one line.
	He might have a self-defense case.
	He might have also not.
	Then you go on a network that for the last 14 months...
	Tries, at every chance they got, to equate what he did to Proud Boys.
	Vigilantism, etc., etc.
	Robert, first things first.
	Was I unfair with David A. French?
	There's no such thing.
	It's very hard to be too mean to Mr. French.
	Okay, fine.
	I can sleep a little better tonight.
	But, Blake, the question's going to be, what do you do with a party as a whole that is to...
	Nervous, fearful to take the proper position once it's, you know, factually acceptable to take that position.
	First 48 hours, fine.
	Next week, maybe.
	But once it becomes sufficiently clear, what accounts for the silence in the face of vigorous mob mentality, 14 months of disinformation and trying to lock an innocent kid up for the rest of his life?
	How do you fix that party problem?
	I mean, I think I fix it by running for office and being the best candidate in Arizona and winning.
	You know, I think we've got a few people who are willing to be brave and stand up and say the obvious truth.
	But it's true that the Republican Party, you know, I think we have to finish what President Trump got started.
	Like, we're remaking the party and we're battling for its future right now.
	And the establishment, they want to take it back to Paul Ryan.
	You know, they want to take it back to Mitt Romney.
	Mitt Romney kneels with BLM.
	During the riots and protests of 2020, he's not going to come out in favor of Kyle Rittenhouse or at all risk any political capital.
	For decades, it feels like my whole political consciousness has just been witness to watching Republican politicians want to play defense.
	They want to be accepted by the left.
	They want to just go along to get along.
	And so they never, you know, they just argue for corporate tax cuts, which I think are often a good idea.
	I'm a fan of low taxes.
	But if that's all you have, if you're unwilling to actually comment on and try to help shape this culture and talk about other issues, you're just going to lose.
	Because the progressive left is deadly serious.
	They've taken over almost every institution.
	They own the entire media, basically.
	And they just want to lock on power.
	And if they have to lie and defame...
	You know, random 17-year-old kids to prop up the narrative.
	They'll do it.
	But I think I've been breaking through in my race because I'm just willing to say this stuff.
	You know, President Trump was willing to actually defend Kyle Rittenhouse.
	And I think he's one of the few elected officials who would ever do that.
	I was going to say, as a joke, were you talking about the 16?
	Were you talking about Sandman or Rittenhouse as the 17-year-old?
	There's a lot of these.
	Sandman was 16 at the time.
	There's a lot of these.
	They'll defame anyone if they have.
	If it doesn't fit the narrative, they will lie about it.
	And we see that day in and day out.
	Yeah, I mean, our current Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, also did it when she was in Congress.
	Speaking of which, one of the issues like, for example, right now, Kyle Rittenhouse, the Covington kids, cannot sue a sitting member of Congress under the court's current interpretation of the Westfall Act.
	And they've interpreted it to be broader than the speech and immunities clause to say, once you get elected to the House, once you get elected to the Senate, You can libel and lie about anybody, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, effectively.
	They suggest that maybe somewhere out there there's outer limits, but they've yet to find these outer limits.
	I mean, you've had people, congressmen, defame their neighbors and get off on those bases.
	I know Thomas Massey and J.D. Vance are looking at possible legislation so that if you are elected at Congress, you should have no more immunity than the Speech and Immunities Clause provides in the Constitution.
	What do you think about that idea?
	I don't know the details, you know, behind that act or anything like that, but it stands to reason like speech and immunities clause should apply to you.
	And then after that, you know, you're subject to the normal defamation laws that anyone else is.
	I do.
	I think it's a problem.
	You know, you saw the members of the squad say that Kyle was a white supremacist terrorist who murdered innocent people in cold blood who were just there to march peace.
	And like, I think that's a problem.
	I'm a free speech guy.
	I want people to be able to say.
	You know, what they think, free exchange of ideas.
	But I don't think the left cares about that.
	And when they own all these institutions and when they weaponize and defame people, I don't think we just have to bury our head in the sand and take it.
	Well, I'd come in with the white pill moment of sorts, is that I think people, this Rittenhouse trial, you know, when you had 115,000 people watching live on Nick Ricada, 140,000 watching live on Crowder.
	You had people watching this and then realizing in real time, holy shit, they have been lying to us, but how?
	From the very beginning.
	Because at the beginning I said, okay, fine.
	It might be self-defense.
	What's the kid there for with a gun in the first place?
	When the trial revealed that the kid, and he is a kid, was there because the police basically left Kenosha to burn.
	National Guard didn't come in.
	Politicians made a decision to allow Kenosha, which I had never heard of.
	To be terrorized utterly and burnt to the ground, much like a village in Europe during the Second World War, just razed to the ground.
	People saw that.
	We were told at the beginning he was a violent kid at a peaceful BLM protest, mostly peaceful but fiery protest.
	When I saw the footage of what was going on in Kenosha, I think for every 10...
	Arsonists and rioters and looters, there might have been one legit BLM protester out there for legit causes.
	So people are seeing it.
	But policy-wise, how you can get past the sovereign immunity or the immunity for politicians is a separate issue.
	But Blake, this might be the biggest black pill question.
	You are a successful business person.
	You're going to go into the Senate.
	If you get elected, you're going to have to, I suspect to some extent, relinquish your income.
	Fully disclosed, not be in a position of conflict of interest.
	If you're fortunate of not to get elected, you're going to have to go from the life you have to the life you are running for that you might not realize that you don't actually want to have once you get it, to get stuck in a machine where you are but, I won't say a cog in a wheel, I'm going to say you're a toad in a swamp, or you might be a frog in a swamp of toads.
	And you might not be able to get anything done, and you might get thoroughly blackpilled.
	So, I mean...
	Are you ready for what you might get?
	Every fear hides a wish, but are you ready for what you might get?
	And what do you tell people who say you're just going to get up there and you're going to do what some people say Trump did?
	You're going to get in there, not do enough, and you're going to get booted out and the evil powers are going to win.
	I'm more optimistic.
	You can call it naive, but I just think it's the most important thing I could be doing.
	I think I'm...
	I'm young, but I've been around, and I've seen some high-level stuff and done some high-level stuff in the last decade or so since I've been an adult.
	And I think certainly the Democrats haven't seen a candidate like me, so I know I'm going to win.
	I think the Senate hasn't seen a senator like me for a long time, not in this modern context.
	I'm just optimistic.
	Like, I don't know how much one person can do, but I sure as hell intend to find out.
	And if it's actually just less than we think, you know, and I get in and I'm just grinding my head against the gears, unable to do anything, then again, it's that cultural power of the Senate seat.
	It's coming back on this program and talking to you about, you know, the ways that leadership tried to blackmail me or that this is how it's going on, you know, and this is why no one's voting for my big tech, you know, restraint bill or my privacy legislation.
	So I, you know, I don't want to just be like a celebrity and just go on Fox and complain about the Democrats.
	I actually want to do stuff.
	And I think being young and smart and high energy with some experience here, I'll be able to be as effective as possible.
	But to the extent not, my job is to tell people where and why and how the government's broken, because it doesn't stay broken for long.
	You know, there's going to be a pendulum.
	We're not on a successful track right now.
	And the question is, when things break, do they break in a way that we can actually come in and put the pieces back together and build a healthy country?
	Or do we break in some radical left-wing Bolshevik direction?
	And I think that's bad.
	I think that's the end of America.
	And I want to do everything I can to put a stop to it.
	What do you think, in the same discussion of revisions to the Westfall Act to make senators and congressmen liable like anybody else outside of the Speech and Immunities Clause, and civil service reform, another issue is sovereign immunity and the scope of it.
	So there's been discussions by Andrew Branca, Law of Self-Defense, and there's now legislation apparently proposed in Missouri along these lines.
	And this may be primarily a state issue, but it's come up on the federal side as well, which is what should the scope of immunity be?
	For, say, federal prosecutors, the proposal of Kyle's Law is basically that you should be allowed to sue a prosecutor if they brought a bad faith prosecution for political purposes that results in acquittal.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	I support that.
	Devil's in the details, and maybe there are some hard cases, and it's like, was this politically motivated?
	Obviously it was, but it was still more inbound.
	No, I think the Kyle case is actually the perfect test case, because that prosecution was malicious.
	It was political.
	I mean, it was disgusting.
	I think the people responsible for it should be held accountable.
	And to the extent that's not legal or that, you know, that's not illegal, their behavior, I think it should be made illegal.
	And speaking of terms of cultural influence, you've also been one of the primary people on restraining the sort of the power of the big tech monopolies and where they've gone in terms of invasion of privacy, gatekeeping roles in speech.
	Could you describe why do we need to restrain big tech and what are some of your ideas in that respect?
	I think the first and most obvious reason is, you know, there's no First Amendment in two or three short years if we don't meaningfully restrain these companies.
	I mean, just functionally, right?
	We have these giant network monopolies that control the flow of information in our society.
	That's just the way it is.
	It's bad.
	It's not the way the Internet was supposed to work, right?
	It's supposed to be this decentralized sort of communications utopia.
	Turned out, because of the power of targeted advertising, you were able to build these hyper-networked handful of monopolies.
	And if we allow them to censor people, especially on the basis of political belief, I think it's all over for free speech.
	They ripped off President Trump, Twitter and Facebook did, while he was still president.
	I know we talk about this, and people haven't forgotten, but my God, that is so messed up.
	And meanwhile, Taliban commanders and Anti-Semites in Iran, they have blue check marks.
	And so this is just so crazy.
	And I think it's not even a complicated solution, right?
	You just treat the companies as common carriers, just like the phone company can't kick you off for having a political discussion.
	Why should Facebook and Twitter be held to a lesser standard?
	So it's just political will to get that done.
	But I also think that's table stakes.
	I think the problems with big tech go much deeper.
	I'd flag two that are sort of, you know, even beyond censorship.
	One is just election integrity.
	You know, so many people want to focus on issues with mail-in ballots, and I think we absolutely should, because I think that stuff is really messed up.
	But I look at what I think Facebook, especially, but also Twitter did with the Hunter Biden laptop story, you know, like published in the New York Post, real newspaper, true information about Hunter Biden makes Joe look really bad.
	And three weeks before the election, These tech platforms ripped that off.
	And, you know, in Arizona, our official margin was 10,500 votes.
	I think, you know, if you add up all the key swing states, it was like less than 100,000 votes.
	And that one brazen act of corporate censorship, just that one, I think, swings the election.
	I really do.
	And then I have to worry, like, at least that's obvious, right?
	Facebook did that.
	We're all talking about it.
	I'm talking about it now.
	A year later, maybe there's some Streisand effect there where it actually gets some coverage.
	What about Google?
	I think Google definitely had a point of view on who ought to win the 2020 election.
	And if they're not stupid, and they're not stupid, they can subtly change their search algorithms to boost Biden content, to suppress Trump content.
	And again, if they're subtle enough, we can't really tell.
	Well, I can tell you that they're able to do that.
	I can tell you from the Hillary email search function back in the day when I was starting to get mildly red-pilled, it was...
	It was obvious when you knew what you were looking for.
	And people don't appreciate that.
	It's an established fact.
	In as much as statistics can prove anything, had that Hunter Biden story been broadcast much in the same way the Trump PP story from the Steele dossier was published or broadcast promoted, it would have affected the election.
	Hands down, guaranteed.
	So the only people who are guilty with colluding with foreign interests to have affected the election...
	Through legitimate means, as in the media they control, was not Trump or the Russians.
	I just want to bring this one up because this is 100 pounds.
	And this is a lawyer, David Stern, which is interesting.
	I've never seen the name spelled like that.
	Glad I caught Rittenhouse discussion.
	Heard his defamation claim in the U.S. is questionable, but as a U.K. civil lawyer, I can say 100% his claim here is near guaranteed.
	The U.K. system is much more in favor of the litigant than the U.S. And, oh boy.
	Had he been defamed here?
	Same thing in Canada.
	You know, in Canada, it can be a truthful statement and still be defamatory.
	But the UK and Canada don't respect First Amendment rights as much as the US First Amendment.
	So it's a trade-off.
	You want people to be empowered to say what they want without limitations.
	And, you know, sanctioning for defamation is a limitation.
	But, okay, now someone had asked also, what's your view on Section 230 and how would you practically go about...
	Remedying the very problem that you've identified now.
	Not to put you on the spot, I suspect you've thought about it.
	What would be your sort of...
	Yeah.
	...imagining the way in for a solution?
	I mean, I think we should remove Section 230 protection from these companies.
	I do think people talk about Section 230 too much.
	From what I've sort of seen and studied, I think the common carrier approach is actually just stronger and cleaner.
	I think...
	Yeah, if these tech platforms want to behave like publishers, fine, we'll treat them like publishers.
	But just treating Facebook like the New York Times doesn't really solve your problem.
	I think it merely strips away some corporate welfare that we currently give to Facebook and shouldn't.
	So by all means, get rid of Section 230, but let's not make that the focus of the discussion.
	Let's not pretend that that solves more than a small part.
	I think common carrier status.
	I think looking into breaking up Facebook.
	You know, there's no reason to me why Facebook should be able to own Facebook Classic, plus WhatsApp, plus Instagram, very discreet business units.
	And then, you know, their business model is just, I mean, I find it sort of personally disgusting, but they just hoover up all this data from all these different properties about people, roll it up into one centralized place, right, manipulate it, and then serve people ads that are so targeted.
	That they're just predatory, especially when they do it to teenagers and children.
	And I think if they want to behave like that, and they also have left-wing politics and are interfering with our elections, then breaking them up is absolutely on the table.
	You mentioned that the big tech's role in election manipulation and censoring certain stories, censoring certain voices, manipulating algorithms.
	Robert Epstein has done a lot of work on this showing how effective it is just by changing where stories rank on the first page.
	The other aspect with his past elections, as has been particularly a hot topic in Arizona, has been the way in which our elections function.
	In other words, the not only did Zuckerberg have these huge donations where he appeared to kind of buy off local election offices in a problematic way.
	$420 million.
	Yes, exactly.
	Yeah, I mean, how is that not illegal?
	Yeah, I mean, how is that not illegal?
	And, like, why is he not investigating that?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Abranovich, I've been in front of his wife as a federal judge.
	Let's just say it wouldn't inspire my choice for him, but put it that way.
	You can't always judge everybody by their spouse, but sometimes you can.
	But in terms of...
	Other aspects of what happened in Arizona, I was glad to see the audit process, because I think we should always have that.
	No matter who wins, who loses, whatever, the audit process restores confidence, increases transparency, identifies deficiencies.
	What was your thought process?
	There was a lot of criticism by some within the old establishment wing of the Republican Party there in Arizona, the old sort of McCain attaches, that they shouldn't have done the audit.
	I thought the audit was a good thing, regardless of whether it led to, you know, A change of office or anything else, that it was just inherently good for Americans to have more confidence in the transparency and recognizing issues with their elections.
	Totally.
	I mean, I think auditing is good practice.
	It's certainly good practice in business, right?
	Like, we audit our nonprofit foundation every year, even though there's no reason to suspect anything is wrong.
	It's just literally good practice.
	It's common sense.
	So, like, why wouldn't you do that with elections?
	Why wouldn't that actually not even be a one-off?
	Why wouldn't there just be a, you know, separate wing?
	of your, you know, election department, you know, firewalled and designed to find problems with whatever just transpired.
	So I found the criticisms of the Arizona audit to be almost entirely in bad faith.
	You know, sometimes people had some procedural criticisms or like, you know, shouldn't the auditor be doing this or that?
	But those should be made in good faith to try to make an audit stronger.
	And you could tell the entire blue check journalist class.
	And again, yeah, a lot of Republicans, unfortunately, they just didn't want it.
	They just didn't want anybody looking into what happened.
	And so it was in bad faith.
	And I think you got to ask, like, why?
	So I'm glad we audited.
	You know, I wish I wish it was started sooner.
	I wish it was completed sooner.
	Now the results are on Brnovich's desk.
	We'll see what he does with it.
	It's interesting because a lot of the media wanted to say here in Arizona, wanted to say the audit, you know, it's bad.
	We shouldn't do it.
	That's horrible.
	You can't audit.
	And then when the results came out.
	They just wanted to focus on that top line finding that the machine count more or less matched the hand audit recount.
	And then all of a sudden they were pro-audit.
	They're like, see, nothing to see here.
	Nothing to see here at all.
	And that's one way to read the audit.
	The other way is there are actually a lot of things that were found that I think are highly questionable and highly concerning.
	You had all these ballots printed on paper that wasn't technically legal.
	You had the Maricopa County Recorder's Office counting ballots that weren't signed.
	Mail-in ballots.
	You're supposed to sign them.
	If you don't sign them, technically, per strict reading of the state law, it's not a legal vote.
	But they opened them up, and if they could ascertain who it actually came from and maybe call the person, they counted the votes.
	And so no audit is going to show what vote that applied to.
	There's a lot of stuff that went wrong.
	In Arizona, we have ballot harvesting.
	We have a ballot harvesting problem.
	Brnovich wants to make a huge deal of how he successfully defended the Arizona law banning ballot harvesting before the Supreme Court.
	But the Supreme Court was always going to say we have the right to have that law.
	And unfortunately, we don't enforce the law.
	And if you don't catch ballot harvesting, if you don't marshal extra law enforcement resources to catch ballot harvesting, catch the Democrat operatives at the nursing home when they're going and basically forcing people to vote for Joe Biden, once they put him in the mail, no audit in the world is going to flag that that's an illegal vote, even though it is.
	I think there's tremendous problems, and I think we've got to tighten the ship up.
	Hopefully we get the state legislature back in session.
	But I will defend the audit, just the fact that we did it with everything I got.
	Because as soon as you say, like, you can run this obviously kludgy process, and there are these problems, but no, actually it was the most perfect election of all time.
	Election experts say this was totally perfect, even though people can see that it wasn't.
	And you can't audit it.
	It's like, all of a sudden, you're living in a banana republic.
	And I really think we're slipping that direction.
	I'm going to bring up one chat unrelated, then I'm going to go back to another chat earlier on this question.
	This is Alex.
	David Duke says, Hey, Viva, Mr. Stern.
	If Kyle was defamed in the UK or defamed by UK media, could he be sued?
	In theory, yes, you have to establish damages within the jurisdiction to establish causality.
	Twitter was being sued for defamation in Canada and the case stuck.
	So case by case, but that's my assessment.
	But the one I want to go back to more on topic, Blake, Roberto Gonzalez says, I'm going to reference Scott Adams for the second time in a day after I read this.
	Why weren't you more critical of the GOP when they agreed to leave signature verification?
	Out of the audit.
	The ASGOP, Arizona GOP, is more to blame because the election here has been tampered with in 16, 18, and 20. I don't know exactly what that means.
	The problem with this question is why didn't you do something earlier is always something that can quite literally always be asked unless you did something at the first nanosecond it became available.
	But Blake, the question is, you know, why weren't you more critical earlier on about the...
	Failure to require signature verification.
	Why wasn't I?
	I'm a candidate, man.
	I wasn't paying attention to the minute-by-minute unfolding of the audit, right?
	I support the audit.
	It should be a good audit.
	I don't think we should have signature verification.
	I think it should all be mail ID.
	You want mail-in ballots, you have voter ID.
	No signature verification.
	Could you explain that?
	In other words, that's one reform that's an important reform.
	I mean, yeah, right now in Arizona, if you go to vote in person, you do have to show an ID.
	That's the law.
	I think it's mostly enforced.
	If it's not, it should be.
	And people who violate it should go to jail.
	Obviously, you should have to show an ID in order to vote.
	But in Arizona, for mail-in voting, you don't.
	You can just sign.
	And if they verify the signature with what they have on file...
	It's good.
	But of course, I heard so many stories from people who just talk about how election administrators can just tweak the sensitivity settings on signature verification, right?
	Ultimately, you're relying on software.
	And if you're not getting the pattern recognition that you want, you can tweak the settings and all of a sudden the signatures are matching.
	So I think that's total crap.
	And if you want to have mail-in voting, and I don't think, I think we should actually tighten that up, right?
	When I was a kid, it was absentee voting.
	And if you had like a doctor's note because you couldn't actually go to the polls, or if you were serving on a military base and you couldn't go to the polls, then, you know, you have an absentee ballot.
	But Arizona, unfortunately, was a pioneer in this vote-by-mail-for-convenience thing.
	So now that's the system we got.
	But I think if you do that, at a minimum, you need to have voter ID laws, right?
	I should have to enclose a copy of my driver's license or a scan of my passport in to verify that I'm the person who's casting this vote.
	And if you look at polling, like 70 or 80% of people agree with me on that.
	Like this is common sense.
	But as soon as you say it, the Democrats attack you because, oh, that's voter suppression or that's racist.
	And I can't tell you how many minorities, Latinos and black people come up to me on the campaign trail and they're like, can you believe that the Democrats think it's racist to require voter?
	Like I have an ID.
	My family knows how to get an ID.
	Like guys, Latinos and black people know how to get IDs.
	This is not like a special white thing.
	You know, like it's not.
	Americans know how to do it.
	An ID should be free for people who can't afford it, but it's bullshit to say that you shouldn't have to have an ID in order to vote.
	Everybody knows you should, and to the extent the Democrats want to fight us on that, I think we just double down, but we don't care.
	I've got to say, the knife cuts both ways on this, but for anybody saying it's racist for voter IDs and yet the same party implementing vaccine passports, I can say this now because I was in New York.
	I had to show...
	A vax pass to get coffee, and I, you know, to sit in the shop, and I chose to stay outside.
	But for the people saying it's racist to require ID to vote, but it's not racist to require ID to sit down in a restaurant, I don't know how you reconcile that, but the flip side is, they're going to say, look, you guys are against the vaccine passport ID for all that stuff, so therefore you have to also be against ID for voting, which I think it's a flawed argument.
	I'm not for mandatory ID for leaving your house.
	I mean, there's a lot of shit you shouldn't have to show ID for, but voting is not one of those things.
	The vaccine mandates are stupid because vaccine mandates are stupid, but the logic of requiring ID when you have a social function where someone has to prove who they are, no, that makes sense.
	And voting is one of those things.
	You need an ID to rent a car from Enterprise.
	You need an ID in order to vote.
	And this is the hill we die on because as soon as we say, no, you don't, we are just giving.
	In terms of foreign policy, your thoughts on the group of Peter Thiel associates or people that are connected to him, they're running for office, you, J.D. Vance, some others that are involved in the court of public opinion.
	I consider it sort of a group of smart populist intellectuals in a Trumpian tradition rather than an old school establishment with creative thinking and outside the box ideas for challenging institutional power.
	I think we badly need a new reset in our foreign policy.
	This is what Trump campaigned on in 2016.
	It's one of the things that really set him apart.
	From everybody else was just this reset.
	You know, can we please stop trying to democratize random countries in the Middle East?
	Because it just doesn't work.
	I think we should have known that it didn't work a long time before.
	Apparently, everybody realized it, but now it obviously doesn't work.
	And instead, we got to get serious about the one, to a first approximation, the geopolitical threat, which is China.
	And if you look at, like, Trump's appearances on Larry King live in the 80s, like, he was remarkably consistent on this, right?
	And I think in the 80s, like, maybe it made sense to be a little bit more pro-China, right?
	Vis-a-vis the Soviets.
	I think Chinese industrialization would only help us win the Cold War.
	And, okay, now it's the 1990s.
	Now you've got H.W. in there.
	And I think it was just naive, frankly, to, you know, as this bipartisan consensus, Joe Biden was in the Senate, of course, because he's been in there for...
	100 years.
	And this idea that let's help China industrialize and we'll have free trade with China, which of course doesn't exist, but it was this conceit.
	And then they'll liberalize.
	They'll become more like us.
	I think that was naive in the 90s.
	I think it started to become negligent and stupid.
	In the 2000s, but George W. Bush just picked up that torch and ran with it.
	And again, that was bipartisan.
	And then in the 2010s, when we're not course correcting under Obama, right, I think as late as 2014, Joe Biden was like, China, come on, man.
	Like, they'll never compete with us.
	And it's like, dude, that is just so dumb.
	And we gave the keys to them, right?
	We shipped all this productive industrial capacity to China and Southeast Asia.
	And we really just helped China rise.
	And now we're going to be paying for that for decades.
	And so I think Trump's reset was badly needed and we're just getting started with it.
	It's amazing.
	My father, for all his...
	He said RAP was going to be dead by 2000 and I think he lost that bet.
	But in the year 2000, he was saying China is going to rise as the ultimate competitor to the US.
	When COVID hit and we realized that, holy crap...
	We're reliant not necessarily only on China, on India.
	We're reliant on overseas, not necessarily friendly nations for our most fundamental stuff like medicines, raw materials.
	And now, holy crap, we are beholden to them in more ways than one which affects national policy.
	This is a problem decades in the making.
	And again, it's a big question not to put you on the spot.
	How do you resolve this problem without triggering Something of a World War III of economics, if not military, with China now that says, yeah, we're not prepared to let you off the noose quite that easily.
	Well, I think the first thing is to recognize we are already in a Cold War with China, right?
	And the trick is, how do we win that Cold War without it turning into a hot war?
	But if you don't recognize that's where we are, then you're just screwed.
	So that's where we are.
	I think there's some easy things to start with.
	And I don't pretend these are full solutions, but just table stakes, right?
	Like, did you know there are 911,000 foreign nationals studying in U.S. universities?
	And the number one country does come from hundreds of thousands of people is China.
	You have tons of Chinese nationals studying in U.S. universities, you know, and you've read a lot about these Confucius Institutes and whatnot.
	It's like, why on earth is that allowed?
	Like, that's just day one.
	Shut it off.
	Right?
	I'm not talking about Chinese-American, because then you're American.
	But Chinese national studying in the U.S., to a first approximation, like, that should just not exist right now.
	Because we know, like, espionage is not all just James Bond stuff.
	Not even mostly, right?
	You know, they're recording those classes, everything.
	You know, I can't tell you how many PIs I talk to in U.S. science labs who are like, yeah, 80% of my lab speaks Mandarin.
	It's just all that tech and scientific research just goes back to Beijing, to CCP.
	So that's table stakes.
	Why do we allow Chinese nationals to buy farmland in the U.S. and buy residential real estate?
	You know, it just compounds our own housing affordability issues and just a way to help CCP-connected people money wander.
	I think that's bad.
	So there's all sorts of little things that we could do that I think start a cultural shift towards giving policymakers to take China more seriously.
	I want to bring this particular call.
	It's not a super chat.
	Maybe the caps captured my attention.
	I like that.
	Hey, what if it's not?
	What if it's not?
	How about that?
	Let me just say one thing about in Canada, by the way, you want to talk about xenophobic from the most progressive government ever in Canada.
	Justin Trudeau's government is now recognizing.
	It's a problem.
	It doesn't have to be China.
	It could be Russia.
	You brought in the race with the xenophobic accusation.
	It's foreign interests in our nation.
	And it could be China.
	It could be Russia.
	It could be any foreign interest.
	So it's not xenophobia when the government here now is realizing we've got a big effing problem.
	Canadians can't afford property in Canada, but foreign interests can.
	So, sorry, Blake, if you may respond to this, because...
	I won't read it because I'm PG-13.
	It sounds like somebody who should not be in charge because if they were, we would just lose to China.
	I don't know what to say, except like the world is real, nations are real, and China, you know, they're their own nation.
	They think they have their own destiny and they're working, they're deadly serious about achieving it.
	I think China's the challenge of the next 20 to 50 years.
	And that's just...
	That's just how it is.
	They will, I think, work with the United States and be frenemies until such time as it hurts them less than it hurts us.
	And they'll flip that switch if they can and they will bury us.
	That's the long-term view.
	And I think if you're not eyes wide open about that reality, you have no business being anywhere near the levers of power in this country.
	I'm not, it's not xenophobic.
	It's not, it's just saying, I think China's on the rise.
	I think China has been enabled by our politicians left and right.
	I think now we're in a real pickle.
	And, you know, you look at the military technology that they're testing, that they're developing.
	You just oppose it with the craziness that we see in our own military, sort of promulgated from the top brass down.
	I really worry about, will we be able to win a war against China in 10 years?
	And I think if you just have critics that say any anti-China policy is xenophobic, it's almost like they're hoping to lose.
	Yeah, it's kind of an excuse and political pretext for not wanting to challenge or contest Chinese power.
	I always find it ironic, of course, because the Chinese government may be one of the most xenophobic.
	China is the most racist country on earth.
	And the United States is the least racist country on earth.
	Yeah, we have a lot of different kinds of people and we have some tensions.
	And I think the media, of course, loves to foment racial tension division.
	That's been its MO since the Obama years.
	But actually, if you really travel and you see how other people in other parts of the world identify...
	No, the U.S. is the least racist country in the world, and China is the most racist.
	I will stand by that.
	And another place where they've hidden behind racism for actually wanting to change voting patterns, change electoral power, change cultural and economic power, often to the detriment of working-class minorities disproportionately in the United States, is immigration policy.
	Can you discuss your...
	Thoughts on where we're at with immigration.
	And I mean, for example, Trump pursuing the most limited immigration policy, maybe in decades, led to the biggest support for a Republican candidate in the modern era, amongst particularly Mexican-American voters in places like Texas and Arizona.
	So what are your thoughts on that?
	I'm an immigration restrictionist.
	I think we have too much of it.
	I think definitely we have too much illegal immigration, almost by definition, right?
	Because the correct amount of illegal immigration is zero.
	It's illegal.
	You're not supposed to have it.
	You know, maybe a few people get across, but like you should basically have approximately zero illegal immigration.
	And I think people rightly focus on that issue, especially now because the borders have been thrown wide open.
	You know, Biden and Harris.
	I mean, Trump went on Sean Hannity and he said, Sean, all Biden had to do.
	With respect to the southern border was nothing.
	Nothing.
	Like, how hard is it to just not change anything?
	And it wasn't perfect in September of 2020, but it was, like, pretty damn good relative to what we have now.
	Biden reverses all those policies, practically invites people to come here, right?
	We'll pay you now.
	Certainly we'll put you up in a hotel and give you a lawyer and please come.
	You know, you're the only person in this country apparently not subject to the vaccine.
	So they roll out the red carpet.
	And of course, now you have 225,000 illegal immigrants coming here every month illegally.
	Most of the women and children are in traffic.
	The southwest border is the biggest crime scene in the country.
	And I actually think that's impeachable conduct, right?
	Not some phone call or these pretexts that they invent about Trump.
	But I actually think we don't talk enough about legal immigration.
	And we accept in this country more than 1 million legal immigrants every year.
	And I've seen firsthand in Silicon Valley, like the H-1B visa system, where we accept tens and tens of thousands of foreign workers, mostly from India, also China, to basically just do jobs for tech companies for less money than they would have to pay domestic workers.
	And then so you stop training your domestic workers, right?
	Facebook loves this program because it would love to pay coders from India.
	To come over and work, you know, very hard for less money.
	And I think that's bad.
	I think the test of any immigration policy, whether you're trying to combat illegal immigration or whether you're trying to reform our visa systems, should be, does this policy work for the benefit of the average American?
	And if it does, it's probably a good policy.
	Like, you do want some people to come here, right?
	The best and the brightest in the world, right?
	Rocket scientists from wherever.
	People who are going to create new companies and really be dynamic and innovative.
	But I suspect that's like 50,000 people a year, if that.
	It's not a million.
	Especially in a country where people are struggling right now.
	Like, the best asset, I think, that so many Americans have is monopolistic access to a tight domestic labor market.
	But if we just throw it open...
	No borders, literally, with Mexico.
	Come on in.
	Throw open the borders in a figurative way with just extremely liberal visa programs.
	All of a sudden, your kid is competing with 7 billion people globally.
	And I don't think that's fair.
	I don't think that's good.
	And I think we're seeing the consequences of it now.
	It's a de-industrialized, hollowed-out middle class.
	Oh, my God.
	This guy gets it.
	The H1B1 is wage suppression.
	It might be new for someone to hear, so it's good to hear it.
	And the left used to be able to talk about it.
	Bernie Sanders used to be able to talk about how, obviously, illegal immigration depresses wages for the American middle class or working class.
	Obviously, H-1B visa programs are just handouts to foreigners instead of directing jobs to Americans.
	But they don't talk that way anymore.
	As they've been taken over by the forces of wokeness, they can't even acknowledge basic economic reality.
	It's extraordinary.
	I mean, they were opposed to exporting jobs with NAFTA and other questionable trade deals and most favored nation status for China.
	But then now can't be honest about, well, what happens when they just import the labor to drive down the labor?
	I mean, it's extraordinary because that's precisely what's happening.
	And disproportionately, it's working class African-Americans and Latinos that are often the most negatively adversely impacted.
	But the left takes them for granted.
	They take them for granted.
	And then, you know, hey, it doesn't matter if you have policies that actually work for them, because they'll just vote for us anyway.
	And then let's import a whole host of other people.
	And then eventually, you know, the left is bullish on being up to grant amnesty.
	And, you know, this really is an electoral strategy.
	This is how they think.
	And then if you vote against, you're a race traitor, which is the way to frame anybody who diverges from the statistical...
	It's not statistical anomalies.
	There is something weird when...
	Any demographic disproportionately and excessively votes for one political party, and this is racial, religious, ethnic, when you can pinpoint a demographic and say 75-plus percent of the time they vote X, and then when they don't, they're demonized by that party as being race traitors, religion traitors, whatever.
	It's filthy politics at its core.
	But Blake, here's a question.
	So you're running now.
	You're in the thick of it.
	When is D-Day is November?
	4th?
	2022?
	I want to say November 3rd.
	Okay.
	My primary is late.
	My primary is August.
	Early August.
	August 2nd.
	So my question basically is what's the process?
	Because this is not going straight through.
	You've got to get through the primaries.
	Who's running in the primaries?
	First question.
	What does this process cost?
	What's it cost?
	It costs a lot.
	So everybody listening, if you like me, give me money because I need it.
	I'm running against...
	There's four other guys.
	I'm number two right now in the polls.
	So Mark Brnovich, who we've talked a little bit about, the Arizona Attorney General, he's at 26% in the polls.
	I'm at 14%.
	And then there's three guys under 5%.
	I don't think they're going anywhere.
	God bless them.
	It's going to be me and Brnovich.
	Brnovich is bleeding support.
	Everybody knows who he is because he's been around for seven years.
	And he's just that lame politician.
	He's not the worst.
	Attorney General.
	Obviously, you lock up some bad guys when you're Attorney General.
	But he's one of these politicians that focus groups everything, poll tests everything, and then only acts when it's too little, too late, and then pretends to be this huge champion.
	So I think that's up.
	People see through that.
	I'm climbing.
	12 weeks ago, nobody knew who I was.
	And now I'm at 14% in the polls.
	President Trump was kind enough to host a fundraiser for me at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago, which was awesome.
	It's not an endorsement.
	Not yet.
	I hope to attract his endorsement.
	But I'm up and to the right.
	I think Brnovich is failing.
	But he's running this campaign where he's coasting on name ID and just hoping people just vote out of habit because they know who he is.
	And I think you can't play not to lose.
	You cannot play not to lose.
	You have to play to win.
	And that's just so representative of his old-style politics.
	I'm sick of Republicans that just play defense.
	Okay, little case in point, little anecdote here.
	Have you guys heard about this Scottsdale school board president that compiled a dossier on parents?
	I just met with Amanda Ray, one of the parents in the dossier yesterday, and she was telling me the whole story.
	That's really sick stuff.
	This guy, because parents were complaining about mask mandates and vaccines and stuff, he had their social security numbers and their photos and photos of their kids and was actually surveilling them.
	Really sick stuff, I'm sure.
	That the Attorney General of Arizona could find an Arizona law that this creep violated.
	But he's not doing it.
	And instead, he finds it more profitable to...
	He literally sent Merrick Garland a letter, the Attorney General in D.C., saying, this is outrageous.
	I demand a federal investigation of this.
	And then he went on Fox News to talk about it.
	I'm holding the Biden administration accountable.
	I'm sending them a letter.
	And it's like...
	Dude, everybody sees through that.
	Nobody's interested in your angry letters.
	People are interested in you judiciously and forcefully using political power to do the right thing.
	And he's just part of a class of politicians that's unwilling to do that, which is why I'm climbing, because people know I'm different.
	That's why I'm going to pass him and beat him.
	And then I've got to beat the Democrat incumbent, Mark Kelly.
	But his approval rating is tanking like Joe Biden's.
	And so I think this is going to be a Republican pickup in 2022.
	I think I'm going to be the next senator from Arizona.
	Arizona used to have this sort of iconoclastic from Goldwater.
	McCain at times was iconoclastic.
	It depends on which McCain you got on which day and which year.
	Because it was also the Keating 5 McCain and some other McCains.
	But the Iraqi War McCain and bomb, bomb, bomb, everybody McCain.
	But it seemed like the last half decade or so, and maybe it was the vestigial impact of the McCain attaches.
	That, you know, McSally was a terrible candidate.
	These, you know, because you're describing Brnovich is basically operates out of the Mitch McConnell playbook.
	So when the Republicans are not in power, you know, loud talk, loud talk, loud talk, but don't actually use their power.
	And when they have the power, they don't use it.
	And that that has been a failed strategy for the Republican Party on a sustained basis over time or for those simply inclined towards conservative or just non-progressive objectives or agenda.
	these days.
	That's, you know, that's the group that opposes the Democratic Party is everybody that's not part of the sort of woke agenda that is shrinking in its public support as people see it rise to power.
	But in that same...
	So you talk about opposing that.
	Is that why the Republican Party has a trophy so far?
	Because Arizona's always had this big populist wing in terms of voters, but its leaders have had this sort of corporate establishment mindset.
	A lot of the senators were just not so good.
	What do you attribute that as someone who's grown up and lived and watched it all in Arizona?
	There's a few factors, but basically I do think Arizona's path from ruby red...
	To becoming a swing state has a lot to do with it.
	I think people fell asleep.
	And when you're a really red state, I think you can...
	Maybe permit yourself to think you don't have to actually invest in party infrastructure, right?
	You don't actually have to groom the next generation of young leaders.
	You don't have to mentor anybody.
	You don't have to worry about, do you have all your precinct committee men?
	And are people active, right?
	Because you're just going to win.
	And in Arizona, for the longest time, you could just run Jeff Flake, and Jeff Flake could win a Senate seat.
	And he was actually a pretty good congressman.
	He turned out to be, I think, a very lousy senator.
	He had this deranged relationship, I think, in his own mind with President Trump and became a resistor and all these problems.
	But you can't run guys like Jeff Flake and win in Arizona anymore.
	You just can't do it.
	And no one paid attention to the party infrastructure, to the organizing.
	Maybe the rise of super PACs had something to do with this.
	You know, like Governor Deuce, he just ran everything out of the super PAC.
	And you see this huge rift between the more populous MAGA actual party that now Kelly Ward is running and the sort of center-right Chamber of Commerce business establishment.
	I have to unite those factions.
	I need every Republican to vote for me.
	It's a swing state.
	I need independents and moderates.
	That one-third voter block, especially in Maricopa County, to come over.
	But then my task, I think, once I'm in, is also to make sure that this never happens, right?
	To make sure that we are united as Republicans in Arizona.
	But you're right.
	It's kind of the Wild West.
	We've seen it happen.
	And I think you can afford to be lazy and complacent until one day it bites you in the ass.
	And we started losing Senate elections in 2018.
	And we better win this one, because if we don't...
	Arizona can go the way of Colorado and just be a blue state forever.
	I'm going to bring it up.
	Complacency kills everything.
	I'm going to ask you, we'll end on one hard question, but the easy question right now.
	For the support, how can people support you?
	Where can they find you?
	I'll pin them in the pinned comment, but how can people support you right now for your race?
	Thank you.
	Yeah, just go to my website, blakemasters.com.
	The first thing you see is donate.
	The second thing you see is sign up for email updates.
	And you should go do both of those things.
	Campaigns are very expensive.
	And, of course, you've got to show...
	I need to show DC that I can out-raise everybody, which I'm doing.
	I out-raised Brnovich almost two to one last quarter, which is embarrassing for him.
	It's like he's been around for seven years.
	He can't raise any money because no one likes him.
	So it's kind of about the money, but it's also about crushing my opposition and making sure that I'm up and to the right.
	So anything you can do to help is much appreciated.
	And now, as someone who has run for federal office, and I can relate, what do you spend?
	I raised, I think it'll be public one day, about $20,000, give or take, for my campaign.
	Max was $100,000 in any event, but I didn't need it, and it wouldn't have made a difference in my writing.
	What do you spend the money on?
	What are the most useful avenues to spend the money you raise to get your message out there on?
	Well, right now, I'm just saving.
	I'm in accumulation mode.
	We're starting to spend a little bit.
	Digital ads.
	But here's the thing.
	Most people just think money matters so much more than it does in politics.
	You have to have enough.
	But I've got competitors that are trying to run digital ads, and it's like the money is just a multiplier of the substance.
	And their ads suck because they're not saying anything interesting.
	They're doing the standard thing like, Joe Biden is taking away your freedoms, and I'm going to fight for you.
	And it's like...
	Yeah, he is taking away our freedoms, but nobody connects with that, right?
	And so they'll put a lot of money behind that campaign and it'll mostly be useless.
	I've tried a different strategy where I'm coming out with these videos and we're putting no money behind them because I want to see what kind of works, what goes viral, right?
	I had a pro-gun video that got like a million and a half views in a very short amount of time because I think I took a different tack.
	I think I don't sound and feel like a conventional politician.
	You know, so we sort of learn how to get good at that.
	We learn how best I can deliver, you know, the message that I believe in.
	And then we get intelligent about, you know, putting money behind those next year.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	Yeah, it's important to, well, I always call it, money is having a ticket to the ball.
	But if you don't dress well, ain't nobody going to notice you when you're there.
	And I used to do a lot of political consulting back in the day.
	And I was just shocked at...
	I think the other problem that conservative causes had...
	It's not only been who the messenger is and what the message is, but also the way in which it's delivered.
	You have this professional political consulting class that one has a different political sense.
	They're part of the professional class, almost by definition, and share a lot of their prejudices and parochialisms, but also just the competency level.
	There's this strange disincentive.
	You'd think if you'd run 50 losing campaigns, you wouldn't get the next gig, but it turns out you do.
	There are RNCs happy to write another check.
	How much are you trying to make sure that the way the message is delivered matches the creativity outside the box, independent thought process that the substance of the message and the messenger is?
	I think people more than ever before are just allergic to fakeness.
	You know, if you ever do see me make those super conventional political ads where I just sound, the script sounds indistinguishable and I'm changing my voice to be the candidate, just tell me.
	Hold me accountable.
	Just tell me to stop doing what I'm doing because there's a lot of guys who can do that.
	I think, you know, I bring a unique perspective to the table.
	You know, I'm just me.
	And so I only want to make political messaging that's A, true.
	And B, what I actually think.
	And C, just like, actually, you know, like a lot of what you're getting when you vote for somebody is like their personality and their work ethic.
	And it's them.
	You know, I'm tired of cookie cutter candidates.
	I think I'm a pretty unique candidate.
	And I think the day that I stop doing that is the day that I fail.
	These are going to be the last two questions.
	This one, I think, is the obvious answer.
	Did you ask me about the single income households?
	I mean, that was an interview you gave on Arizona News.
	I'll answer it.
	The supposition that when you say single income household, someone would say that's misogynist.
	Sexist.
	That means that the person saying that thinks women can't be the sole income winner.
	The point was economics and not gender.
	So if you thought gender, you might be the sexist.
	My final question, I think, Robin, unless you have another one, is going to be the one you're going to deal with going into this.
	It was touched on in that very interview as well, and I think I know your answer in advance.
	You're going to be run off.
	You're going to be labeled, even written off, as the Peter Thiel mouthpiece.
	So I assume he's funding.
	I mean, I assume it's a big funding coming from Peter Thiel.
	How do you get past that as being the puppet, the mouthpiece of who might be your former employer, your biggest financier for your campaign?
	How are you going to be viewed as an individual?
	And not as a spokesperson for or being controlled by, you know, a bigger financier of your campaign.
	I think just by going out and saying what I think, you know, like my own, I'm candid about my own thinking, having been like very much shaped by Peter.
	You know, I mean, he's been at this point, he's sort of a, you know, best friend, top five friends, certainly, and a mentor, you know, and we've worked together.
	And I think he's brilliant.
	And frankly, I think we're lucky to have him on the right.
	And some of my opponents, it's so funny.
	They want to beat me up for raising money out of state.
	It's like, well, in a Senate race like this, 80% of the money comes out of state.
	And you guys would love to raise money out of state.
	You just can't because nobody cares about you.
	So I'm raising money out of state.
	They want to hit me for, yeah, being funded.
	And Peter set up a $10 million super PAC, which is totally a separately distinct organization.
	I can't decide how that money is spent.
	That's illegal.
	So firewall.
	But they want to hit me because a billionaire is funding my campaign.
	And it's like, you guys would love a billionaire to be funding your campaign.
	But none of them like you, you know?
	And I think we need more people like this.
	The left has Bloomberg and Steyer and Soros.
	And I think they pursue like a ghastly agenda.
	And they're really good at that game.
	And I think the right-wing billionaires, the conservative billionaires need to wake up and realize we're losing this country.
	And so I'm grateful and proud to have Peter's support.
	Like, I really am.
	I think it's just obvious.
	I speak my mind.
	Like, Peter doesn't want to break Facebook up.
	And I think I'm obviously not like a Trojan horse for big tech.
	Like, I think there's a lot of problems with these big tech companies and they're existential.
	And you'll see when I get into the Senate how deadly serious I am about holding these companies and keeping them accountable, holding them, you know, restraining them in meaningful ways.
	He doesn't...
	I think he disagrees with me on some of that stuff.
	And it's like, fair enough.
	We're not going to agree on everything.
	But the best I can do is just go and run on what I think is important.
	If that's the only thing people hit me on, I think I'm doing great.
	Yeah, well, if you and J.D. Vance are in the indicator, a lot of us on the populist intellectual side welcome Peter's involvement and support because it's necessary to take on a very corrosively corrupted institutional establishment that sometimes crosses into both parties.
	So I think it's great that you're running and hope it keeps going well.
	All right, everyone in the chat.
	First of all, first things first, hit the thumbs up and drop a comment just so those things trigger the algorithm.
	Blake, I'm going to put your links up in the front one last time.
	Where can we find you?
	What can we expect from you in the coming months?
	And then stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes and I'll sign off with our crowd.
	BlakeMasters.com.
	Donate if you can.
	It really does help.
	And sign up for email updates.
	What can you expect?
	You can expect me to gain traction in this race.
	You can expect me to have...
	Some more provocative videos that I think will make the left, you know, explode.
	And we'll have fun.
	I think you can tell which candidates are having fun and which candidates aren't.
	And I'm certainly having fun.
	So, thank you.
	And I'm going to say, explode metaphorically, people.
	All right, everyone in the chat.
	I did this.
	Tongue in cheek.
	That's tongue in cheek.
	But Blake, thank you very much.
	Robert, stick around.
	We'll see our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, you know where to find him.
	You know who he is now.
	There was a section where I said, clip this, people, and send it to Twitter.
	I forget when it was.
	I think it was at an hour and 36 minutes.
	Anything in here, clip it, share it, send it out.
	On Twitter, Blake, who are you?
	BG Masters.
	Facebook, not that anyone cares about Facebook.
	Facebook makes it hard, right?
	BG Masters.
	BG Masters.
	Blake, thank you very much.
	Phenomenal, fascinating, amazing.
	Godspeed.
	Thank you.
	Be careful what you wish for.
	You might end up in the Senate and you're going to see who you're working with next year.
	Okay, stick around, everyone in the chat.
	Thank you very much.
	And we will see you on Sunday, if not earlier.

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