Ep 177 | Why the 'Anti-Woke Crusader' Is Running for President | Vivek Ramaswamy | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Leading up to the 2024 election, I am devoting an entire series of episodes of the Glenbeck podcast to conversations with presidential candidates.

It hopefully will be more than one with each candidate.

But I want you to understand my job is not to help or hurt any candidate.

There is no agenda except for asking fair, vital questions.

I am who I am, so

I,

you know,

I'm not necessarily the best hider of how I feel, but I want you to know it is

my number one objective to make every single candidate feel comfortable so I can ask the questions you want asked.

We need candidates to be crystal clear about who they are and what they stand for.

These are essential conversations that I don't think you'll get on a debate stage.

The first episode, my guest today in this series, just recently announced his candidacy, and it confused mainstream media.

They can't figure out why the anti-ESG guy is running for president.

He's someone who understands the serious implications of tech and energy revolutions.

He wants to replace

the World Economic Forum's stakeholder capitalism with excellence capitalism.

He realizes what's at stake for America and has some very bold ideas about how to rescue it.

If you haven't been introduced to this candidate yet, buckle up.

Episode one,

Vivek Ramaswamy.

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Have aik, when did you first start thinking

maybe I should run for president?

I mean, in a serious way, December.

It's actually pretty recent.

It sort of hit me in early December, and there was something about the way I,

I can't say exactly why, but I think it was because the way I thought I saw the race shaping up, it worried me a little bit that it was going to become this battle of biographies, right?

I mean,

that's at least the media coverage of it, right?

You got Trump over here.

DeSantis says he's going to declare in June.

It's going to be this political brawl.

And to me, that was a lost opportunity where this is a chance to define a national identity.

It's what I've been trying to do through a lot of my other work, you know, taking on the the ESG movement and otherwise.

So it hit me in December, but I'm still running strive at full tilt.

We hit some important milestones in November and December.

And then we got to Christmas break, where that was the first time in a long time that my family and I have together gotten to totally unplug.

We actually took a trip to Mexico.

It was...

It was divine.

It hit family time together.

But then, you know, you start to take a step back and think about why you're doing what you're doing just every day.

I mean, I mean, professionally, just why are we going through the motions?

And this thing about our missing national identity, I mean, it just gnawed at me, right?

I mean, I think for me and for my wife, too, these are, it's deeply personal what this country allowed us to achieve.

We've lived the full arc of the American dream.

We just had kids.

That's, you know, three, one's three years old, one's seven months old.

That changes the way you view the world too.

And I thought, look, as much as I was, and in many ways, I'm continuing to, like you, address the top-down threats to liberty and prosperity, this merger of state power and corporate power that's far more powerful than big government alone, those are important forces to take on.

But

if we're being honest,

they can only sell it if somebody's buying it.

Correct.

Right.

And so what is it about our culture?

What is it about, frankly, my generation?

What is it about the next generation, my kids' generation, that makes us so hungry for this victimhood mentality, makes us so hungry for for purpose.

Well,

I think it's the black hole in the vacuum, actually.

I mean, the way I look at this, I don't mean to be,

get philosophical right out of the bat here, but I just think we human beings,

we're like bats.

We're lost in a cave, we're blind, and we figure out where we are in that cave by sending out sonar signals.

It's like echolocation.

You figure out where you are when you're blind by getting a signal back.

So there's these pillars of truth in life.

Okay.

Family is something true.

It's the unit that brought me into this world or raises me in it.

My belief in God is grounded in truth.

That's something real.

My status as a citizen of a nation, that's real.

My hard work, even the things I create through my hard work, that's real.

I mean, whatever these sources of identity are, we send out a signal and we get it back and say, okay, that's who I am in relation to my nation.

That's who I am in relation to my family.

That's who I am in relation to God, in relation to what I work hard to create.

Well, it turns out we live in a moment where those things have all disappeared.

Faith is on the decline.

Patriotism is nearly gone in this country.

Family as an idea, as an institution is under assault.

You have to be defensive if you talk about family today.

Hard work, we've created the conditions for, I think, an epidemic of laziness and lethargy in our country.

But the sources of identity that used to fill our vacuum of purpose and meaning and identity, they're gone.

So what do you have left?

You have a black hole.

You have a vacuum.

And then when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that is when poison begins to fill the void.

And that's what lends the entire population to be susceptible, to be vulnerable to cynical exploitation by the likes of those who, you know, be it the ESG movement, be it DI, be it the rise of wokeism, or transgenderism or gender ideology or COVIDism or climatism, which seems to be the biggest one that's here to stay.

They're preying on that insecurity.

They're preying on that black hole.

They're creating that black hole.

They're creating it and then preying on it, right?

First is the assault.

Yeah.

And then you have the black hole and you fill the vacuum with poison.

And so to me, I was,

to be really honest, I'm a little bit disappointed in our movement in that we're not rising to the occasion to do any more than just stamping the poison out, to complain about it.

We need to fill that void with something more rich and meaningful.

So I don't know if I'm going to do it, but I'm going to give it a try.

And that's what I'm called to do.

Here's the problem with that.

You know,

great presidents,

Ronald Reagan,

this is who we are.

Government is the problem.

We are the solution.

That's evil.

We're good.

Okay.

John F.

Kennedy, we're going to go there and bring somebody back, send them there and bring them back.

Could not be done.

We don't have anyone giving vision.

Everybody's vision is save it, just save it, just save it.

You're not going anywhere.

That's right.

If you're just playing defense all the time.

It's all defensive.

And I think it's inherent.

So there's, Reagan was an exception to this, but most of the great,

whether or not you agree with their vision, but most of the great visionaries as American presidents actually have not come from the conservative camp.

I mean, FDR had his New Deal.

JFK had his new frontier.

Reagan was a bit of an exception here.

It's what made him so special.

He had an actual vision, but conservatives are about either pointing out problems which need to be pointed out, and I give Donald Trump a lot of credit in 2015 and 2016 for what he did in this country, pointing out problems that no one else was willing to point out.

He blew walls up.

He did.

He revealed the corruption that we wouldn't have seen from China to the media to the linkage between government and the private sector to the administrative bureaucracy.

I mean, he's a hero for that.

But it's different than saying, okay, that's an actual vision.

That's our promised land.

That's where we're going to go as a people.

And for me, I mean, you probably saw it in the way we framed this campaign.

That's what I'm trying to do here.

The new American dream, what we call the new dream.

FDR had his new deal.

We have our new dream.

It's an affirmative vision of what America can be.

And the good news is it's not as hard as you think because

a lot of this just involves reviving.

The basic ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago.

We don't have to reinvent it.

Correct.

We just have to rediscover it.

We have to

reboot the system.

I've been saying a lot lately.

Unplug it and plug it back in.

I like that a lot.

Actually, back to factory settings.

I like that.

Sometimes you don't know what's wrong with the computer.

It's just that the thing isn't working.

Just like, turn it off,

turn it back on.

And we are so far away from factory settings.

Factory settings are 1776 settings.

That's what we need in this country.

It is 176.

1796.

I love that.

This is a period in between, right?

The whole period of it.

The Declaration of Independence.

All the way through the Bill of Rights.

Yes.

When you have the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, you have everything you need.

That's right.

Everything you need.

It's set it into motion.

And

I really like that.

Factory settings.

That's what we need to restore.

And I think that sometimes political partisanship, I mean, to tell you the truth, I was not drawn to partisan politics, right?

So it was when I stepped down from my, I mean, who is, but, you know, I stepped down from my biotech company.

I knew I wanted to, you know, participate in driving a change in this country.

I actually thought about running for U.S.

Senate for all of like two weeks and then decided there was an open seat in Ohio.

I decided, no, no, no, we're going to do it.

You know, write books, start a new company, focus on learning from your lessons in the private sector to apply it through new entrepreneurial adventure.

But part of what I don't think of myself as entering even politics in this presidential race, even though technically I guess I am.

It's a technical matter, and I'm learning on a ballot.

But the thing is this.

I think that a lot of Republicans and Democrats too, I think are making this mistake to sort of frame the current moment through the lens of partisan politics and then play a 50-50 tug of war.

There's 50% of the country on this side, 50% on this side, and who wins by 51, 49 or whatever.

I think it basically misses the real

political divide in this country.

It's kind of what you said.

It's a 1776 moment where there's the basic ideals that set this nation into motion.

I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican or black or white or whatever, right?

We can debate corporate tax rates sometime.

We can debate whether Ivermecton treats treats COVID.

We'll have our space for that, but those are details, okay?

On the basic rules of the road, free speech, open debate to settle political questions, the idea that the people we elect, whoever thought, ought to be the people who actually run the government, right?

Merit, excellence, basic ideas, self-governance over this modern aristocracy.

Are you on board with those basic ideals or not?

And I think that there's a lot of people whose answer to that question is that they're not, but it's only about 20% of the country.

But it is also, I bet you, about 5% of that 20 don't know them.

They don't know what they are.

They don't even know what they are.

That's right.

It doesn't even have to be 20%.

They know them smaller.

Yeah, it's been twisted and bent to mean something.

Especially, especially if they're under the age of 40.

I think that's especially true, right?

And so I just prefer us looking at, let's just say, the next 18 months, right?

Let's not make this about Republicans and Democrats because it would be missing the point.

It is about whether you're pro-American or dare I say it, anti-American.

I mean, that's a word that you're not supposed to, I think there's an anti-American strain

in our country right now.

Big time.

But the good news is if we frame this that way and make this race about the essence of what it means to be an American, what are the values and commitments that define your citizenship and your allegiance and your commitments, your basic values as an American.

I think the next election can be a landslide.

I think 2024 can be like Reagan in 1980 and be like Reagan in 84.

And I couldn't think of something more unifying for the country than an actual tangible result like that to hang our hat on so that we can go back to debating corporate tax rates, but do so under conditions of free speech.

What does, see, that, that, that used to be the difference.

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I'm going to take a quick break and talk to you about pain.

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When I was growing up, my father and everybody else that I knew at the time, they could talk to Democrats and Republicans and they'd have huge disagreements.

Yeah.

But those were policies.

That's right.

They agreed on the principles.

We don't agree on principles anymore, and nobody is talking about them.

So let me go to the principles.

What

does it mean to be an American?

So I think I'm going to go in no particular order here, but I think, among other things, it means that you believe in the pursuit of excellence and merit.

That you actually get ahead in this country.

As Martin Luther King said, and not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions, that your own hard work, commitment, and dedication get you ahead in this country.

It means you believe in the rule of law.

I mean, tangibly, what does that mean today?

It means that your first act of entering this country can't be a law-breaking one.

We can talk about the policies that follow from these principles, but back to the principles, it means you believe in the rule of law, that we're a nation of laws, not a nation.

And perhaps one of the biggest ones of all is that we, the people,

decide how we settle our political differences.

We the people decide how we're governed.

Not somebody sitting in the back of a palace wall in old world Europe, not somebody sitting in a back room of Park Avenue today.

For better or worse, and this is a crucial part of the American bargain, and I think we should be open about this.

Sometimes for the better, and even sometimes when we get it wrong, maybe for the worse.

We, the people, as citizens, decide how we move our political future forward, where everyone's voice and vote counts equally, regardless of the number of green pieces of paper you control in the market, regardless of what your genetically inherited attributes are, the citizens of this nation govern themselves.

I think that's a big part of what it means to be American.

And I think there's one more piece to this, Glenn, which I think we've missed in the last 10 years, which is just take those set of ideals.

And I could enumerate a few more, and they're all grounded in the founding of this country, but there's one more piece of it that started at the founding, but it actually is everything that happened since then, all the way through the Cold War, actually, is that set of ideals, our conviction that those ideals are exceptional, that those ideals make us exceptional, that those ideals are what American exceptionalism is actually all about.

It's not about the exceptionalism of the geographic space, beautiful as our country is.

It's about the exceptionalism of the ideas that

set this entire nation into motion.

And just a conviction that we have a responsibility to preserve them because the rest of the free world looks up to them as their example.

That, too, is actually part of what it really means to be American today, not just in 1776, because those guys didn't know that that was going to be the case.

They may have had some vision and hope for it, but they set it into motion.

But part of what it means to be American is to embrace that with unapologetic pride pride and even responsibility to say that this isn't just about making America itself.

The world, the free world, the world as we know it, depends on America being itself too.

And to me, that is this idea of American exceptionalism.

That's what it means to be Americanism.

Let's talk about American exceptionalism a little bit.

It has been denigrated by people who do not like America or who have only focused on the bad things.

On the flip side, you have people who are raw, raw America, and it's red, white, and blue, an eagle, and there's an F-16.

Okay.

And neither of those are true.

And

we have so distorted

on both sides who we truly are.

You know,

my favorite person in history is Churchill.

Love him.

Love him.

But you read about him from Indian historians.

He's a monster.

You totally can attest to a monster.

He's a monster.

So

which is he?

He's both.

And we're both.

And we have to accept that we're both.

You know, half the country is losing the faith.

I mean, I am so close.

So close.

I have days.

I've never had this before.

I have days now where I am so ashamed of my country.

Not for the past, but for right now.

So ashamed of my country.

I I would renounce my citizenship

if there was a better place to go.

But there's not.

But the process of elimination shouldn't be a basis for American pride.

Right.

But I'd go any place that said the Bill of Rights.

I'd go to any place that had, I don't think you can make a better mission statement.

And that's what our Declaration of Independence is.

That second paragraph is our mission statement.

That is it.

Mission statements are never fully accomplished because if they are, you need a new mission statement.

Right.

You know, know, this is what we're striving for.

And we have to have forgiveness for the mistakes, but we also have to learn from those mistakes.

And there's zero learning curve.

In fact,

we are just going back into the darkest places we've ever been.

I think there's something really deep about what you said, right?

I think that it's not just about idolatry.

American exceptional is F-16s and Eagles and red, white, and blue flags, right?

That's just idol worship.

You have to understand what does that symbolize?

And what it symbolizes has a fraught history beneath it.

Why is it fraught, though?

Even our worst hypocrisies are only made possible by the fact that we had a Bill of Rights at all, that we had a Declaration of Independence at all, that we had ideals.

I mean, go to communist China today, say what you will about them.

You're never going to be able to call them a hypocrite.

Because in order to be a hypocrite, you have to have ideals.

So, in a certain sense, the failures that I think the modern left or whatever obsesses over, it's proof of the fact that we have ideals that we measure ourselves against.

We are fallen human beings.

We're human beings.

We're not God.

We're not gods roaming a divine landscape.

This is Earth.

We're human beings in the real world who fall short of the ideals we set for ourselves.

But that's what America is.

It's not about perfection.

Is it the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of justice?

America is, in many ways, it used the the word striving, obviously a word near and dear to my heart too, but we choose that for a reason.

America itself is about, it's not static.

It's about the pursuit.

It's about the journey to where we will go.

And maybe the whole journey, to take that promised land analogy, maybe we never get there because the whole promised land was the pursuit of it itself.

That is the American identity.

And our commitment to that, that's part of what American exceptionalism is about, too, because no other nation in human history has its national identity grounded grounded in principles in the way that we do.

And I think that that's a great invention such that, you know what?

You know, so I grew up in a Hindu tradition, right?

So I was raised Hindu.

I'm Hindu today.

There's this idea of, you know, the reincarnation of the actual soul.

It's a metaphor, really.

People read these things very literally, but it's a metaphor for taking the essence of what is true.

You know, the flesh, the idol, whatever, that's artificial.

Nations don't have to die the way people do.

They can be constantly reborn as something else.

So if you took, if you told me we were taking the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the vision that set this nation to motion and it was reborn in something else that you called, you know, what you said on a bad day, a different country that you want to be a part of, great, that country is America.

That's the way I look at it.

This is just a hollowed-out husk of itself.

But you know what?

I don't think we're quite there.

I actually think there's on a much more practical level with that philosophical backdrop to one side.

I think this is an assertion.

I don't have polling data to back this up, only the fact that I've traveled a majority of states in this country in the last couple of years, and I know my neighbors in central Ohio, where if you take a cross-section of it, that's a pretty good cross-section of the country, actually.

I think that most Americans believe in these basic ideals, the ones you and I just talked about, from self-governance to free speech to merit and so on.

Most Americans, not all of them, most of them agree on these ideals.

And most of them, even further than that, I think, deeply believe and think that their neighbors and their colleagues and their classmates are good and believe these things to be true also.

But they can't be quite sure anymore because you're not allowed to talk about it in the open.

Correct.

Right.

So the first step for me is, and that's what creates this culture of fear.

Fear is infectious.

I'm going to use an analogy from chemistry here.

Okay.

But fear is infectious and it spreads automatically.

But courage can be contagious too.

It just requires a higher activation energy.

What does that mean?

It requires a greater critical mass of people to exhibit courage, but after you do that, it's a hair trigger away from an epidemic of courage too.

I think we can get there.

One of the entire premises for, I mean, less this presidential campaign, but that too, but what I've been doing over the last three years, a lot of what you do, I think is in service of getting us over that activation energy, that hump, where once we get there, we're a hair's trigger away from a national revival.

Because the the reality is, I think 80% of this country agrees on those basic principles.

There's been a perversion for all the reasons you and I are familiar with, where the 20% of the anti-American strain, through both institutional control, through the culture of theater they've created, through the perception of a culture that's projected onto places like social media that aren't at all actually reflecting the real culture that they're supposed to be and the media itself.

Those are artificial, right?

Those are just projections.

But the underlying reality, if we're able to actually rediscover the underlying reality, I think we discover that it's not as hard as we might think, actually.

That's why I'm optimistic.

That's why federalism is so right.

Because all of these problems are happening in power centers.

That's right.

But I go to my town.

I go, I live in a small town up in Idaho.

There are Democrats, Republicans, Independents.

And we could all sit down if it was our town and we could fix it.

We could fix it.

But this,

what they've created is this idea that it's so huge there's no way to get around it.

You will sit down and shut up and take it because we know what's best.

And people have, you know, the Tea Party, big movement,

but people believe, they didn't know the deep state.

We didn't know the deep state yet.

We didn't know really what we were up against.

We thought we were up against some bad Republicans, you know, and some bad Democrats.

Not a permanent state that actually governed the permanent

state.

It was the wrong debate to no one's fault because there was a deeper underlying cancer.

Correct.

But, you know, now we know, right?

Okay, so

how do you cut that out?

So

I'll tell you, I mean, this is part of what compels me to run for the presidency.

Okay.

I don't think even the best-intentioned, capable, unifying leader can take on that permanent state while still leaving it intact.

I think you need to be willing to take steps and the exercise of executive power, as laid out in Article 2 of the Constitution, to do what a president is constitutionally empowered to do.

You have to shut down the administrative state.

Not say that.

Well, it's under his direction.

He can do it.

Exactly.

So this is what a lot of people miss.

If you don't mind getting into the details,

because this is the how is also I said the what and the why.

Well, the how kind of matters too, right?

So, so the reason Trump wasn't able to do it, okay, is I know a lot of the policy people who have served in the administration, they've taken, you know, I would say delicate views around issues like civil service protections, right?

So, Congress has these civil service protections that say that you can't be fired for most positions in the federal government.

Now, towards the very end, the Trump administration came around to the Schedule F sort of, I don't know if you're familiar with some of this stuff, but they said, okay, well, we can be really clever and maybe find more employees we could fire than we otherwise could.

But as I'm going to get to it in a second, that's the wrong framework, okay?

You have these, under Nixon, we have these laws that I think actually created the managerial cancer,

what are called impoundment prevention provisions.

So there's a 1974 anti-impoundment act that was passed.

What does it say?

If Congress allocates money for a specific agency, even if the president who's running the executive branch knows that it ought not be spent there, that it's going to go to waste, fraud, abuse, not advancing the interests of the American people, that he still has to spend it there per this congressional law.

Then you have public employee union protection.

So there's a whole piece to this edifice where a lot of the time Republicans who

get like I am up on a high horse against the deep state will say that I'm going to do these things, but we need to do it by repealing all of these provisions.

I'm all in favor of repealing them.

Here's the dirty little secret.

Not only Democrats, but even a lot of Republicans

resist repealing those kinds of protections because secretly deep down inside, they too are believers in the permanent state.

Well, this is why running for president is actually the right way to have a best fighting chance of fixing this.

In my view, I'm going to be really explicit about this.

Under Article II of the Constitution, all of those laws are unconstitutional.

And I bring a perspective from the private sector as somebody who's actually built companies and run companies and fired people

to it.

Exactly.

To interpret an obvious fact of Article II of the Constitution, that if somebody works for you and you can't fire them,

that means they don't work for you.

It means you work for them.

I would go so far as to say it means you are their slave because you don't know why?

You're responsible for what they do without even having any ability to direct it.

And that's actually the unfortunate, and I feel bad for him, that's the unfortunate position that President Trump found himself in.

He thought the people were working for him and he was draining the swamp.

The swamp drained him because if you can't fire them or you you believe, or your advisors and your legal teams, et cetera, tell you you can't fire them, then that means you work for them.

And you know what?

That's exactly how they view you.

I see that in the federal government.

I see it firsthand from my last journey at Strive in the 50 states across this country, right?

Go to a pension fund investment committee or go to a pension fund board.

They view a governor or a state treasurer as nothing more than a nuisance, right?

It's sort of a laughing scoff.

We sort of say, oh, your attorney general, your governor, and your treasurer had this to say, and yet here you are investing in an ESG promoting BlackRock fund that made these votes.

How do you square that?

The answer I usually get is, oh, I don't report to them.

To which my response is, well, to whom exactly do you report then?

In which case, you get no answer.

Blank stare in responses that were an irrelevant question or almost a cute question.

Because obviously.

Oh, I remember when I was young and naive.

Yeah, and I thought that too.

No, no, you don't understand how it works.

These guys are figuring out.

Well, that problem starts with the federal government.

And so my answer is: I think, you know, over the next six months, we're going to literally delineate.

I've identified one already.

It's been tens of administrators.

I've got a digital scholar on this.

I have, yeah.

And I think I'm going to be really frank about this.

It is not

uncontested, right?

There are a lot of people who will say that I'm dead wrong on this.

I think there are a lot of people who will say that, you know what, actually, though that hasn't been the way that it's been read for the last 30 to 40 years, post-Nixon, post-anti-impoundment, that actually that is just a textual reading of the Constitution, and that makes sense.

And we've had textualists on the court.

So the other thing I've been doing is then studying up what the current Supreme Court would actually think, because this is not the Supreme Court of 20 years ago.

Yes.

And so it is my view that there's a real opportunity to not only do this.

I'm going to do it by executive.

I'm going to be a team player, right?

If my prediction that this is going to be a landslide election, let's say I'm the person who wins it, okay, is correct, great.

I'd rather work with Congress and the Senate to do it.

But even if it's majority Republicans, I'm not at all convinced that those Republicans are going going to come along for this ride, which is actually what matters, because like I said to you, I could care less about Republicans than Democrats.

I care about self-governance.

So I hope those Republicans will come along.

I hope it's not just Republicans in a landslide, but it's the right Republicans.

But if it's not, I intend to act by executive authority anyway, not because I'm a despot or I want to be despot, but because the Constitution not only empowers a president to run the executive branch of the government, The Constitution requires its responsibility for the president to run the executive branch of the government.

His cabinet.

It is.

And that means not just complaining to the media about it, as important as exposing the problem was under Trump.

It means actually doing something about it.

And that basic private sector perspective of just what an employment arrangement looks like reads right onto what the Constitution demands.

So then what's going to happen?

They're going to sue, right?

Somebody who gets fired is going to sue.

So I can't make any promises.

I don't control what the Supreme Court does, but

as you know, I'm a student of these things, and I like to at least have an educated view going in.

I think there's a real opportunity and a likelihood that the Supreme Court will take the same view of Article II of the Constitution that I do, which you know what that does?

It codifies this in judicial precedent.

Those laws are gone.

If you want to change it and you want a fourth branch of government, be my guest and amend the Constitution.

Try that with 75% of the states getting behind it.

Ain't going to happen because the people of this country believe in self-governance.

And in the meantime, the three-branch system that we actually set in motion in 1776 is the one that survives.

So when you think about like, why am I running for president?

Look, there's a part of this that's a cultural cultural component, a cultural leadership component of just reviving an American missing national identity to lead us by way of a national leader who can offer vision and even symbolism of what this country can be.

But part of it's the hard stuff, right?

Part of it's the actual knit and grit and technical of running the executive branch of the government, which I'm sorry to say we haven't had a president who's actually done since Ronald Reagan.

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No, it's in my name, or he would have to get some special document.

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You know, by that point, you start getting foreclosure notices and you realize you've got four mortgages on your house.

Not only that, you don't even own your home anymore.

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You know what happened to Reagan.

I mean,

Reagan talked about closing up the Fed, closing up the Department of Education, and they destroyed him.

I mean, the Fed can do a lot of damage to a report, to the president's approval rating.

Yeah.

Oh, it's in their control, right?

So here's my view on, I mean, we're talking about monetary policy here.

Are you okay to geek out a little bit here?

No, I'm okay.

So the entire premise behind the modern Federal Reserve just misses the mark.

Okay.

There's this,

you know, there's this thing called the Phillips curve.

Okay, the whole thing,

the whole modern monetary policy rests on this idea.

I don't know if we can see it, but I'll explain it to you here.

Okay.

Is that there's a trade-off between inflation and employment.

Okay.

And so the Federal Reserve's job is to optimize across those by playing God with the monetary system.

There are so many things wrong with this, but the number one thing that's wrong with it is that the premise is itself false.

Actually, it's based on old British data outdated from a small sample set, and somehow that found its way into the bloodstream, which means the Federal Reserve is actually hostile by definition to employment in this country.

Because by definition, full employment on the Phillips curve model, where there's a trade-off between inflation and full employment, full employment is a signal of a humming economy that's a predictor of inflation, which means they need to raise rates into that, and vice versa.

So, if that whole premise is false, what does it even reveal?

That's just the academic mistake.

The deeper mistake of hubris is to think that any central planner, and this is a form of central planning, could have played God as the puppet master of how the economy runs from inflation to, you know, to employment in the country's conditions anyway.

So, I think the Federal Reserve,

look, if I was starting from scratch and had a say in all central bank systems in the world, would we even have central banks?

No, we would not.

But

I'm not just running as some theorist or like some sort of

idealist here.

I'm running to run the federal government of the United States and get us as close to those ideals as we can, short of abolishing the Federal Reserve, which I couldn't, I told you I'm going to shut down the Department of Education.

I'm going to shut down the Department of Education.

I can tell you the constitutional authority, part of what we just discussed to make that happen, and learning from the travails of Reagan and even Trump to do it.

I will not tell you that for the Federal Reserve.

Here's what I will say: the scope of responsibility of the Federal Reserve should be reduced to doing exactly one thing, and that is making sure that

the dollar is a stable currency as measured versus a basket of commodities.

Period.

That is the only job of the years.

In two years, I predict we will be at war

and we will be introducing a digital currency.

The damage that we are doing to the dollar right now, I don't think, I think.

I think these people want to reset.

Oh, okay.

That's what they're calling.

There's a reason they invented the term.

Correct.

So they want to reset everything.

And they know, unless they know something about

the polling that I don't know, they know that there's a chance their rule ends in two years.

They are going to accelerate and do whatever they have to do to get that dollar to collapse so they can have their digital currency and complete control.

That's right.

And get it so it's so crazy with war that there's just no way of going back.

Just one citizen to another here.

Okay, can you, but you're in a position to actually do this.

I'll do what I can to.

Anybody who's worth their salt as a Republican candidate should be able to, without batting an eye, at least make a simple commitment that they will stand opposed to the adoption of central banking digital currencies in the United States.

But here's how it's going to happen.

Full stop.

But I agree with you.

I haven't heard enough Republicans even say it.

I just want, I mean, from Ronald Listen,

to Donald Trump,

I want you to be on record with me to to be at least clear that this is where we are drawing hard lines with respect to the final domino.

Either we need to go in the other direction of just constraining the scope of the Federal Reserve itself.

But to the extent you talk to these people, I mean, this has to be,

some of them may not even know what it is, but we need to actually, that means

a hard commitment.

I talk to

people on the intelligence committee.

I mean, I've talked to so many people.

Look, I'm 60, but I'm not dead.

These people have been in Washington for so long and they're 60, 70, 80, 90.

They have no idea what digital currency even means.

We've got to have younger generation running this country.

And you know what?

Some of the younger generation, I mean, somebody could be 50 and they're still dead inside because they've still been in Washington for 20 years anyway.

No, I'm not saying

it's

we need a vitality of actually, I mean, and speaking of the founding, right?

We talked about the principles.

We probably skipped skipped an important topic, actually, because it relates to this.

We didn't talk about the founding culture of the country.

There was a culture of curiosity.

Oh, yeah.

The people who were in the equivalent of Washington, D.C.

back then, I mean, Thomas Jefferson

sat there and wrote the, took a pen and wrote the Declaration of Independence.

He was sitting in this chair.

So he said, you know, it's uncomfortable.

I need a long time to write it.

I'm just going to invent the swivel chair.

Well, today, what we say is, oh, no, no, no, you're not an expert.

You're not part of the expert class.

You weren't trained as an engineer.

He said, screw that.

I will actually be an autodidact, teach myself because I'm curious.

I'm interested.

Benjamin Franklin, from the, from the, you know, from the bifocal lens to scientific experimentation to the fact that he's also a political philosopher.

The potbelly stove.

Of course, the potbelly stove, absolutely.

These guys were so unique.

That was a culture.

That was one of the principles.

It's just, is there something in the water back then?

But it was not, it was known the world over.

There's an article

in the

London Times from the period

Benjamin Franklin back in like 76,

75, somewhere in that.

Benjamin Franklin is coming over and he's on this ship and it's docking at this time.

Do not be anywhere near that.

He has some sort of a ray gun that he has been crafting and he's going to decimate the entire city city of London.

I mean,

they were so far ahead that people thought it was like magic.

He's doing something with the lightning bolts.

He's got

that.

I know.

Good for Benjamin Franklin.

I know.

And you know, where are the Benjamin Franklins of our time, right?

Where are the Thomas Jeffersons of our time?

We have them, but they don't believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yeah, they don't believe in the Bill of Rights.

But to me, when I ask where are the Benjamin Franklins or the Thomas Jeffersons of our time, that includes believing in the Bill of Rights.

Yes, okay.

So to me, it's the fusion of those two things, the hunger, the intellectual curiosity, the belief in boundless frontiers, that human innovation and ingenuity can power us to go there rather than to forever stay here, but to do so guided by the principles that got us here in the first place.

That was our founding culture.

That's what we're missing in Washington, D.C.

too.

So part of the problem is, I mean, you've got different categories of people back to this issue of digital currencies, right?

You'll have people at one camp that will say something like,

we ought to stay competitive with China.

Okay, but this is, and some Republicans will say this too.

I mean, this is such a boneheaded argument that I

am reluctant to dignify it with even a response, but suffice to say that ask yourself why China wants digital currencies.

Might you suppose that they actually want to turn their social credit system and create a permanent architecture for it?

So why on earth would we want to copy them unless actually we wanted to do the same thing?

China is the new model.

If I hear that from one more business person, I'm going to lose my mind.

Glenn, China's the new model.

I don't want to be that.

You don't want to be that because they're doing it for a reason.

Now, some people here cynically may be doing it for that reason too, but the rest of them, especially in the Republican Party, are just doing it to go along for them because they don't, because they don't think anything, they're not independent thinkers.

They're just going through the motions.

So there's that camp.

Then there's the camp that'll say something like, you know,

I mean, I get this response, right?

I've spoken to half of Congress.

I've spoken to the Republicans.

Every time I'm in D.C., we'll meet with a group of senators or Republican unions in Congress or whatever.

And it's sort of just like

I'm like an overenthusiastic kid or something, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the curse is.

But back to talking about Medicare or Social Security or whatever.

And not to say those aren't important questions, but these are the things that serious people in Washington, D.C.

are concerned about.

What the American people want.

And if I hear this phrase when we're talking kitchen table issue,

it's just like everything's a kitchen table issue if somebody controls your kitchen, right?

Yeah.

So, so

there's that camp.

And I think that's a big part of the camp too, which

to me is what's missing in that founding culture.

Is okay, I'm telling you about something here.

Do you not have the slightest bit of at least intellectual curiosity to even learn what we just said, as opposed to just giving a pat on the back and say, Yes, you know, you need to, thanks for doing great work.

You're a great patriot.

That means nothing to me because I know you didn't process what we just discussed.

And then there's the camp of people who, I think, actually are hungry to understand that the threats to liberty present themselves themselves in new forms.

And part of why, whether it's ESG or CBDC, that it presents itself in the form of acronyms is that it was designed to bore you into submission.

Yes.

And so that's why we need to wake up to that.

And so,

anyway, I just think that when we talk about the 1776 moment, yes, it's the principles, but we got to study these guys again.

The spirit of the people.

We used to call it the spirit of 76.

Did I say I didn't know?

Oh, you didn't know that?

No, no, I didn't know that.

It used to be called the spirit of 76.

Cool.

That's kind of what it ought to be.

Let's stay kind of in this technological area here.

I'm a wannabe futurist.

I read all of, you know, I love tech and I love the future.

Dumb as a box of rocks.

Can't tell you how any of it works.

Book works.

I love

what's just over the horizon.

Okay.

And it's either going to be fantastic or it is going to be the strongest prison man has ever seen.

Apocalyptic.

Man will be over.

And I've been saying it for 20 years.

We have got to have philosophical and ethical discussions about these things.

That's right.

And people are just starting to get it.

Unfortunately, this is exponential growth.

You get it today.

You're not going to understand.

If you don't keep going, you're not going to understand what's happening in 12 months from now.

Totally.

I mean, the emergence of the metaverse is a big topic worthy of discussion.

I mean, the rise of AI and, you know, chat GPT is the latest thing in town.

So

the moral framework for the rise,

in absence of filling that moral vacuum we talked about earlier, right?

We have that moral vacuum.

You would talk about the woke left or whatever that wants to prey on that vacuum.

Now imagine doing that with the supercharged turbo power of algorithmic force as well, with artificial intelligence.

Then we're really working with something that we can wrap our hands around.

So, and Mark Zuckerberg was actually a year ahead of me at Harvard.

I, you know, adopted Facebook during its first year.

I was a, I was a freshman or sophomore back then, too.

His insight wasn't a technological one.

He is a brilliant technologist and recruited even more brilliant ones to work for him to turn that into, say what you will about the company, at least a successful, you know, massively successful technological enterprise.

But his fundamental insight at the heart of the company

wasn't a technological insight.

It was an insight about human nature.

And the insight about human nature was that, you know what?

If I could get someone to let their insecurities click on one thing faster than another thing, then that gives me a window into their soul that's far deeper than they have into their own.

Actually, the first version of Facebook, you might remember this, was actually this, you know, he had this hot or not, right?

Whether or not this was a hot picture or that was a hot picture, some other classmate that he pulled from Harvard's own, you know, directory of database of students.

That was the founding premise of Facebook.

It was calling a bluff on human nature, okay, to say that you could bring out the base instincts in us, but use the speed of somebody's action, click of a finger, to gain a window into their soul because they don't have a window into their own soul because they're suffering from that vacuum as it exists.

That was the fundamental insight that formed the backbone of the social media industry as we know it, multi-trillion dollar industry to this day today.

Twitter and everything came later and preying on the same vacuum.

So that's a long way of saying I agree with you that we have to actually get our moral foundation straightened out as human beings in the offline world.

in order to fully harness the power for human flourishing and prosperity, which I share your belief and interest in.

But in order to get it right, rather than to be consumed by it, we we have to start with those basic rules of the road and human first principles, or else where AI and the algorithms will take us actually just exploit and prey on our absence of actually doing it.

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You know, and I know two years from now is an election.

Then another six months, the president gets in.

That in the AI world

is huge.

Huge.

Is huge.

Social media

has destroyed, I think, in many ways our family, our children, our ideals.

It's exploited and brought out the worst in people in many ways.

AI is being programmed by the same people.

Of course it is.

And I'm a capitalist, but

the capitalist system with something that reaches inside of you and just

exposes who you are and they keep it and you don't know.

is so dangerous.

It's so dangerous.

It's the difference between decentralized capitalism versus capitalism as a tool that's deputized by central authority.

It's a shame that we use the same word, capitalism, when they're two fundamentally different things.

One is the use of market mechanisms wielded by a central body.

Fascism.

Fascism.

The other is a decentralized system of commerce against the backdrop of a decentralized democratic self-governing nation, right?

So those are two different things, and it's a shame we use the same word, and that creates some confusion.

But, you know, let's talk about on the AI question here.

What I'm seeing playing out just in plain sight, even in the issue of censorship or ideas, censorship, et cetera, is this waterfall of political accountability.

So, first, the Constitution sets into motion a three-part, three-branch system of government, separation of powers, all that, stuff you and I love in the Constitution.

They then delegate, because of the inconveniences of actually passing laws.

Yep.

Who would have ever thought the system was designed to actually limit the passage of laws?

Anyway, delegates then its authority to the administrative state, the alphabet soup, right?

The FTC, SEC, FDA, you know, DOJ, just goes on, right?

The EPA, FAA, that alphabet soup.

That's where 1.0 post-Reagan conservatives were focused, and an appropriate place to remain focused.

But what's happening in plain sight is that ball is moving, okay?

It's moving several steps down the cascade.

That alphabet soup now delegates political authority to a new alphabet soup of human actors

at AMZN, MSFT, FB, G-O-O-G, B-L-K, BlackRock sticker, right?

That's the new alphabet soup getting done through the back door, what even the administrative state couldn't accomplish through the front door.

But then what are those guys doing?

Because we're always on the conservative camp playing catch-up.

It's always a game of catch-up.

We're anywhere between one and two steps behind.

They're now using the final

delegation of authority by decentralizing it and putting by decentralizing it and just pinning it to AI.

So that's a no, no, no, no, we're not making those decisions at all, whatever whatever those might be.

It's just AI.

So you'll see that in the realm of censorship, but you'll see it in the realm of even financial decision making through one of our favorite topics, ESG.

ESG meeting AI is just actually ceding authority to what appears to be objective.

And that goes back to human beings.

What causes us to bend the knee?

I'll tell you a little funny story here that has nothing to do with politics, but I'll bring it back to this conversation is...

So I'm a tennis fanatic, actually.

Do you watch, have you ever watched professional tennis?

Okay.

So one of the things that happened in professional tennis in the last five years is that they got rid of line judges.

Human line judges no longer make the calls.

It's just all done by machine.

But the funny thing was that actually in the first year when they rolled this out, you could literally see just on like instant replay with just like a video camera that like records it.

It was wrong.

Because the system that was making the line calls, the way the technology works is it doesn't actually take a photographic image of where the ball lands.

It's making a computational prediction of where the ball will land.

And it took a while.

So now it's super precise, but in the first year, it would get it wrong.

But

here's what you'd see is the players didn't argue.

They used to argue with the line judges, right?

You get John McEnroe, you get all the drama, but once you got rid of the line judges, you pinned it to the AI, even when it was clearly a wrong call.

You don't argue because, hey, it's just the AI telling us.

Correct.

I just use that as a fun analogy, but it's about a serious topic.

That when you do that for this waterfall of political political questions or moral questions or ethical questions and pin that to the AI to say that who gets

in the social credit scoring system, it's not Larry Fink deciding.

It's not Joe Biden deciding.

And it's just the AI deciding that this is the interest rate that you ought to pay for your home loan or for your small business loan or whether or not you get to say this on the internet without actually being either explicitly censored or just algorithmically suppressed.

That's just the AI doing it.

We as human beings have somehow this innate human instinct to say that, well, if it's it's the AI, it's like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.

That's just a question of objectivity.

When in fact, they're using the equivalent of converting Celsius to Fahrenheit to apply that same rubric to actually settling the questions that we ought to settle.

as human beings the old-fashioned way through free speech and open debate.

And we need to prepare ourselves to see the difference before we enter the brave new world of automatically ceding that authority to algorithms.

And that's what this whole metaverse is all about.

The metaverse is basically about dissolving the boundary between the online world and the offline world.

If you want to get, you know, draw an analogy here, that's actually part of the project of the Great Reset, which I know is a passion of both of ours to analyze.

It's actually about the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private sector,

the dissolution of boundaries between nations, right?

To say that these boundaries create inconveniences, that leaders can't solve global problems unless they dissolve those boundaries.

Well, this is the next frontier, dissolving the boundary between the online and the offline world.

Because once you dissolve that boundary, it's a one-way ratchet.

We don't go back in the other direction.

We need to at least prepare ourselves psychically, morally, ethically, as human beings to fill our deepest needs for meaning before that dissolution happens.

Because once that happens,

it's preying on that vacuum and it's game over.

So that's kind of how I see this

two bifurcation.

Either we're going to apocalyptic hell, or we're we're actually going to potentially a better place where we can still harness technology to advance our human needs so uh if i know you're on a tough uh schedule so i've got a couple of things i just really want to hit with you um that i'd love to hear your answers um

you are

one way or another one of the big topics in the general will be abortion how are you going to deal with that i'm pro-life i don't know where your position is i'm pro-life okay yeah so i'm unapologetically pro-life i think it i picked it up in my Catholic upbringing.

I'm a Catholic education.

I brought up Hindu, but St.

Xavier High School.

It's a moral issue for you.

It's a moral issue for me, but it's not grounded in just because the Pope said it, right?

Because I'm, you know, that's not the reason.

Logic gets me there.

Okay.

When does

when does when do you treat someone forget forget children of the unborn child?

When do you say that someone is dead, actually, on the back end of life?

It's when brain activity stops.

Somebody will go to prison for ending the life of playing a role in ending the life of somebody who still had brain activity.

And there's a reason for that moral commitment, how he got there, whether it's through a religious path or a secular path, that's what it is.

When does brain activity begin?

At least in about six weeks, right?

So it's completely inconsistent the way we treat, I mean, our own intuitions, right, in the way we live our life on any other question other than the question of pre-born life, says that that's a life worthy of dignity and respect, the full human respect that we accord to to human beings here anyway.

Clarence Thomas actually brought it up pretty well in the Dobbs case.

I don't know if you remember his Q ⁇ A and his exchange, but nearly everyone agrees that, let's say there's a pregnant woman, she's, you know, assaulted or battered, God forbid, things like this happen.

Should the perpetrator bear additional liability if it results in the death of the fetus?

Yes.

You'd be hard-pressed to find an American where if you weren't in the middle of an abortion debate, but you just asked them that question in a vacuum, 99% of people are going to tell you, absolutely.

And they'd be enraged at that person.

Well, what does that tell you?

We have this basic intuition that that's a life.

And so what's confounding it here is this idea of sort of woman's autonomy over their own body, which, you know, we conservatives have to grapple with.

I think that what conservatives need to do better is own the issue of adoption better, own the issue of childcare better.

I think that, you know, the religious path to get there for some would sort of say no to contraception.

I just think that if you, depending on what your paths are to being pro-life, I think being unapologetically pro-life involves actually affirming the importance of what we can do, you know, to provide greater avenues for painless adoption, painless even, or at least, at least with minimal sacrifice, childcare.

So I think we should talk more about that than we already do.

But

that won't be an issue where

I have something groundbreaking to say other than to say I'm happy with where Dobbs landed, and I'm glad that we finally resolved resolved this constitutional question.

Will you take the loyalty pledge for the GOP?

So I reluctantly already said that I would on the expectation that every other candidate does the same thing.

I'm not a party man.

I could care less for the GOP party apparatus.

But I think the debate stage is important and I think that that's where we actually flesh out this question of the what and the why.

And you know what?

If everyone on there in order to get into that debate, Ronald McDaniel sets the rules, great.

I think it's important we have that debate on the expectation that everybody else makes the same commitment.

Sure, I'll support the nominee.

Have you put any thought into

Teddy Roosevelt, the guy who started the Progressive Party, the Bull Moose Party?

Yeah.

He was a Republican.

People don't get that progressivism is a disease that eats the Constitution, and it's in both parties.

It's in both parties.

However, it's the system that we have.

And

some are looking at this and saying, please, let's not have a whole bunch of people up there because

it can really determine

who wins at a much lower

number.

You know, if you've got eight people.

I've heard this from DeSantis supporters, okay?

They're saying, if you have a bunch of people, if it's just Donald Trump and him.

I hate it.

I really dislike the armchair political analysis.

Let's talk about the what.

Who cares about the politics

and the numerical analysis of this?

And who the heck knows anyway, right?

But put that to one side.

And it also presumes that it should somehow be a national objective to not get Donald Trump elected.

I agree.

Right?

Like.

Who said that was somehow codified in stone?

If Donald Trump

is the person who the educated populace of this country were knowing all the facts without having the debates tilted or scales of debate tilted by big tech hiding information on the eve eve of an election.

And

that's not a theoretical.

That actually happened in the last election.

But with free and fair flow of information and free and fair elections, if Donald Trump is the person who wins the, who the people of this country want to run the country, he should run the country.

And it does irritate me a little bit.

There is this thing going on in the Republican donor class right now.

And I get a little bit of the back chant from this too is, hey, man, you're taking, you know,

you're saying the things that Ron should be saying.

This is the time.

This is the time to say it.

This is the time to clear

that.

Let's elevate that, right?

And so I care about the what rather than this weird obsession with sort of the puppet mastering that's quietly going on in the establishment or whatever class of the Republican Party.

The people, what did we say?

Self-governance over aristocracy.

I am bringing an agenda and a vision to the table that if I may say it, I don't like to boast, but I just think it is factually true, that is missing in the Republican Party.

Let's air that and let's make that the objective of this this year.

Next year, the voters get to decide.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's DeSantis, maybe it's Trump, maybe it's somebody else.

That's up to the voters to decide, not somebody else who's a puppet master trying to play the engineering game of limiting the candidates' number of candidates on the debate stage.

And that's actually how we revive a national identity is by actually living it in the way we even run and conduct this party or this primary process.

Trevor Burrus You have made me think of Thomas Jefferson several times.

He said,

in the end, trust the American people.

They may get it wrong, but eventually they'll get it right.

Trust the people.

And that's the problem with the parties, with on both sides, with the elites.

They don't trust the people.

That was the 1776 bet.

Yes.

So,

you know, you also just said,

I think you have to live it and live the principles.

When you look at

your

biotechnology background, people will say,

well, he's part of biotech.

I love this, that the people who hated pharmaceutical companies now love them.

And the people who said, no, I don't love pharmaceutical companies, but they do a lot of good now hate them.

And then

you also have the thing with China where you say, what is your China policy?

You're going to ban?

Yeah,

I have a detailed China policy, but broadly speaking, speaking of our Thomas Jefferson analogy,

Declaration of Independence from China.

That is

the Declaration of Independence in 2024.

So it means economic decoupling from China until the CCP either falls or radically reforms its behaviors.

I think the latter is unlikely.

I think the former is likelier than people think.

So I think China's in a vulnerable moment.

And this is one where we got to get into the geopolitics of this for this to be more than a talking point.

But China's in a vulnerable position right now.

I know they are.

Okay.

Xi Jinping does what autocrats do.

He shot himself and China in the foot as part of his quest to hold on to, what do autocrats do, hold on to power.

Last October, he took that unprecedented third term.

He broke the chain of succession.

You watched Hu Jintao get booted from that room.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

Get booted from that room in that party meeting when Xi Jinping took that third term.

Turns out

sitting right next to him, right?

And Jack Ma basically sends him to re-education camp now where Jack Ma is nowhere to be seen for even daring to question a Chinese financial regulator.

So what did he do, though?

In the process, he spooked a lot of people.

He tanked the Chinese economy, tanked the Chinese stock market.

The COVID policy,

the COVID policy had as much to do with COVID in China as our climate policy has to do with the climate, which is nothing at all.

It's just another gambit for control.

But that leaves China pretty vulnerable right now.

And so, I think we're working, it's part of what gives me the sense of urgency to make sure I get in that office two years from now to actually do something.

So, how do you think about it?

So, what do we declare independence mean?

Yeah, I didn't answer your question yet, which I can.

But I think there's a lot of things we can do.

But wait, wait, wait.

I want to ask because I think I know what it means.

So if I have it right, you have to answer the question, we get a lot of our, just our antibiotics, let alone all of our medicine.

Taking China out, which I agree with, causes unbelievable pain here.

So how do we...

How do we balance that?

How do we get there?

Yeah, so I'm making a calculated bet here.

And I think that whether or not you know it, you're taking an uncalculated risk is what we're doing right now.

I'd rather turn that into a calculated risk.

Got it.

Churchill, not Chamberlain.

Okay, let's think on the time scales of history rather than electoral cycles.

I'm just referring to Churchill because you brought him up earlier, right?

That's what I think the current American moment demands.

And I think it requires willingness to make some sacrifice.

Now,

I can't guarantee this, but I think the more willing we are to make a sacrifice, the less likely it is that we'll actually have to make one.

I agree.

So

I can't make any promises, but we put the best person in office.

We have Churchill, not Chamberlain.

That's what we get.

But we are willing.

What is willingness to make a sacrifice required?

It requires knowledge of what you're sacrificing for, which is what comes back to the 1776 moment, which is what comes back to this missing national identity that I'm reviving.

That's why I think this foreign policy and domestic policy are inextricably intertwined.

But specifically on China, there's some easy things we can do.

The first is abandoning climate religion, okay, which

I don't get it, Glenn, why more Republicans who privately agree with me will not say this out loud.

I don't think there's a candidate in this race who's yet said it out loud.

Good thing about having me on the debate stage is this is going to be the agenda by the end of the year, whether I'm the standard bearer or not.

I'm running because I want to be, but abandon climate religion that shackles the United States while leaving China untouched.

That's low-hanging fruit.

That's low-hanging fruit.

Get China out of the WTO.

Accountability for COVID-19.

Now we know.

It began in a Chinese lab.

Well, if you don't deliver accountability, you can expect even worse in the future, right?

Shame on me.

First, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice,

fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

That's the United States moment here.

But

I like to also be transparent about it, okay?

You're not making me go here, but I'm going to go here because I think I need to be explicit and honest about what this policy actually means.

It means we have to be willing

to ban most U.S.

businesses from doing business in China until the CCP reforms its behaviors as a mercantilist actor.

Have you already done that with your businesses, any of your companies?

Yes, so Strive.

When I started Strive,

not as a virtue signal, I'll tell you why I did it.

We had to do it for Strive's business model to work.

I committed that Strive would not do business in China, period.

That's something that no other asset manager or financial, major financial institution in the United States has ever done.

And why did I do it?

Is it because I dislike China or whatever?

I have my own personal feelings.

That's not why.

Strive's whole premise, and you know this, was to be a fiduciary for U.S.

clients.

That means looking after their best interests when you vote their shares and when you deliver shareholder mandates to corporate America.

You can't do that if you have two masters.

And BlackRock's problem or Invesco's problem is that they have the boot of the CCP on their neck.

Where if BlackRock tells a company like Intel and puts them in their China-Taiwan risk-focused universe, which they don't have, that's going to be a problem for their line of business in China because BlackRock sells mutual funds in China.

But you know what BlackRock's done instead?

They put Intel, America's one of America's leading semiconductor manufacturers,

in their climate-focused universe.

The list of companies that ought to focus on addressing climate-related issues.

This is a semiconductor company.

This is a company that's potentially whose semiconductors are vital to protecting us against the risk that China invades Taiwan.

And yet, we're talking about the climate-focused universe?

On what Earth?

It's not an accident.

It's because, you know what?

The CCP gives them an atta boy when they constrain the United States without laying a touch in Petro China, where BlackRock's also one of the largest shareholders, doesn't apply those emissions caps over there.

So anyway, back to starting Strive.

I could not in good conscience say that even though that's a big market opportunity for the shareholders of Strive, we can't pursue that opportunity and also claim to be a good vocal fiduciary for American clients in the boardrooms of U.S.

companies.

And that's really important.

And I've seen this firsthand.

This is not coming from reading in a book, right?

I was an exchange student in China.

I went to Harvard for college.

I did an exchange program.

I was a student at Peking University, which is the Harvard of China.

Meida, they call it over there.

I was an exchange student at Hong Kong University for another one of those springs.

I've done business in China in my dealings as a biotech CEO.

As Elon Musk, others have, people who have done business in China and who have been even educated at Chinese universities and also have studied at Yale.

You want to know there's a big center that's paid for by China.

You go there, you get your own re-education, the funding to American universities.

Look at what's happening at UPenn.

I understand this not as some sort of scholar.

I've tried to study this as much as I can, but first personally, based on my experiences, and I think it is with that backing that I say that you need a U.S.

president who's willing to do the hard thing.

Yeah.

To ban U.S.

businesses from doing business in China until the CCP reforms its behaviors.

That requires willingness to make sacrifice.

We can do that if we know what we're sacrificing for, but the best case scenario of all is if you're actually willing to, then you don't have to because they're more economically vulnerable than we are.

You pull that economic rug out.

This might be the fall of the CCP in the next six years, as we know.

You don't ever make a threat.

You make a promise.

Yes.

When you are promising something, you don't ever have to threaten.

Look, you guys have to change or we're not going to do business with you.

Exactly.

That's much different because then they look at you and go, I think he's serious.

They really mean that.

When that happens, then your negotiating power completely changes.

And that's how to run foreign policy.

Guys, I can give you one more example because it fit the bill so perfectly.

That's the phone call to President Obrador.

Actually, there'll probably be a new president by January 2025.

But the president of Mexico, which is the same thing, for a fraction, and by the way, when I say fraction, I mean tiny fraction of what we are spending protecting somebody else's border on the other side of the world,

we could actually not only protect our own border, but actually have a proper use case for the U.S.

military to decimate the cartels.

And I think that phone call is, again, a promise.

It is a promise to say that that for a fraction of what the last guy spent in God knows where, in Ukraine,

for a fraction of that, we can help you and arm you to decimate the cartels.

I know they're your sugar daddy.

There's a new daddy in town.

We're going to help you solve this problem.

And if you don't,

I'll make a promise.

We're going to solve it for you.

We're going to solve it for us.

Because that's what's resulting in 80 to 100,000 fentanyl-related deaths per year, not to mention the homelessness crisis, not to mention actually even the violence increasingly on our side of the border from your failed narco-state on the other side of the Rio Grande.

And if there's one job for the U.S.

military, we believe it is to actually protect our own soil.

We're going to do it.

That's not a threat.

That's a promise.

So I think that

we need leadership that takes that national identity.

You can only do that if you're standing on strong footing and believing in your nation, the ideals that your nation stands for, both to the rest of the world and even to human history and posterity.

But if we're doing that, that's what we're protecting.

We can declare independence from China.

We can actually protect who would have ever thought our own border with our own military.

And I do believe that is a top use case for the U.S.

military.

And I think this doesn't have to be that hard.

I fully expect it to be harder than

the implementation.

But if you're guided by a simple vision, I think everything that you and I have talked about, and you can add ending affirmative action to the list because that's also by executive order, but just take the set of things we've talked about.

That's first six months stuff,

actually.

And what if you're not addicted to saying that,

I'm not hell-bent on saying that it has to be two terms or whatever.

I just want to get these things done.

That's what I care about.

I care about the agenda.

Get these things done.

Pass on the baton.

That's fine.

I hope

I'm 37 years old.

I hope there's going to be things that I do after my presidency that are important for humanity, for the country, in ways that go far beyond politics.

But getting these things done, we're working within a window now where actually delivering those things gets us not to a national divorce, but to a national revival.

And I think we need to know where we're going in order to have that national revival.

And we're at this moment where national divorces comes up from time to time as a topic of conversation.

The more we talk about it, the more it might speak itself into existence.

But I think we have an alternative sitting, hiding in plain sight.

That is this national revival.

And crazy as it is for a 37-year-old guy who's never held political office to say, I want to lead it, I think somebody's got to.

It's not about me.

Nobody's coming from on high to save us.

If we're going to save,

if we are to be saved, it's going to be we're going to do it ourselves.

But this would be the role that I will volunteer to play.

And, you know, if called by the people to do it and by God to do it, then

that's what I got to do.

And that's kind of what led me to this crazy idea.

I'd love to have you back.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.