Best of the Program | Guest: Vivek Ramaswamy | 11/14/22

49m
Pat Gray joins the guys to discuss the loss of the Senate with Nevada’s sudden Democrat victory. Co-founder of Strive Asset Management Vivek Ramaswamy joins to break down what happened with crypto with the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and his strange connection with Ukraine. Stu lays out which House races Republicans are favored to win.
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Transcript

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

You weren't exactly a ray of sunshine.

Still, I just want you to.

Really?

Yeah, I want you to reevaluate what you brought to the show today

and maybe come in with something a little happier.

I'm a balance for you.

When you're too happy, I have to be sad.

I have to make people angry, sad.

It was not good.

Not good.

Today,

we just, you know, we took the red pill.

which turning out to be the blue pill, but just politically speaking,

And told you what was going on.

Also, we went into the

crypto exchange that looks like it's probably never going to get prosecuted because...

I don't know.

I think he might be.

He has every connection known to man and donated $40 million to Democrats.

I don't think so.

So I think there's a chance he might escape from this because of those connections, but man, there's a...

If this is not criminal activity, I will be stunned.

It absolutely is criminal activity.

However,

you really think he's going to pay the price that

even Elon Musk is paying now?

I mean, look at what they're doing to Elon Musk.

And look at how many people are.

What is it?

Chipotle?

Or General Mills?

One of the two.

Lending Tree, General Motors, United Airlines Holdings.

They all said, we're joining the boycott of Twitter.

This is ESG in action right here.

It is.

Against a guy who started the world's largest electric car company.

It's really, it is really fascinating to watch.

All right.

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And here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

Welcome to the Glenbeck program.

We say hello to Mr.

Pat Gray from hello.

Pat Gray Unleashed.

Welcome.

How are you feeling today?

Miserable would be a good word.

Despondent would be another word.

Huh.

Defeated would be a third that we could use.

So not spirited.

No, not spirited

in any way.

Except about the national divorce movement.

I'm kind of.

You're into that.

I'm kind of into that.

Yeah.

Do we mind?

I think that if we got a national divorce in the new, let's say, constitutional republic that we would like to live in, do you think the GOP would win the elections?

Somehow they'd still be able to do that.

They'd still find a way to lose.

There'd be a communist, one communist, and he'd be like, Green party takes over.

I think I should fill all of the Senate seats.

And they'd win.

Yeah.

That's probably true.

Yeah, probably true.

So how do you go for isn't it bizarre, though, that every time you go to sleep with a lead, you wake up with not the lead?

It's kind of strange to me.

I wasn't expecting this over the weekend.

That Adam Laxalt would drop the, what, almost three-point lead he had going into the weekend, two and a half points, something like that.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, oh, he lost.

Adam Laxalt preparing him for a loss.

I'm like, wait, what?

How did that happen?

Well, all the precincts that came in were heavy Democrat.

We just thought they might be slightly Democrat.

Okay.

Wow, that happens a lot.

Didn't happen in the gubernatorial race, though.

That's good.

They didn't.

That is true.

The Republican rules.

And if you're going to do it, you know, if you're going to cheat, you'd think you would do

it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's why.

Or

that's what they want you to think.

You know what?

We'll give them the governorship.

We'll give them that.

They won't be able to say that.

As long as we have the Senate, then they won't be able to say anything.

It hurts, though.

It hurts.

It does.

And to see the victory lap that Biden is taking.

I mean, after that Xi message,

he meets with Xi for three hours, comes out talking about

how great it is that Democrats won.

How did he put it?

That, oh, election denialism was strongly rejected.

Because, you know, there's such wide and open and honest elections in China.

I'm glad he was able to shine light on that.

Because they've been doing such a good job.

President Xi, very, very popular.

Very, very, very popular.

In fact, I think he might win 98, 99% of the vote if they let the population.

That's because they call him Mr.

Freedom.

Mr.

Freedom.

Mr.

Freedom.

Mr.

Freedom.

Wow, I didn't see that one coming.

No.

But then again, I didn't see Laxalt losing.

No, I didn't either.

No.

Did not either.

At least it takes the edge off the Georgia race now, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's like, eh, whatever.

It might be good for

Walker's chances.

I think there's an argument to be made that, like, now that control isn't 100%

just teetering on that, maybe,

maybe.

Maybe they win.

Maybe Republicans will be more active than some sideline voters that don't typically go out to the polls.

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe.

I still.

My reaction was a little like like Pat's.

Huh.

Well,

I mean,

I am.

It's a six-year term.

I'm getting out of the car before they drive it over the cliff, but they are driving it over the cliff.

Assuming we still have a nation in the next couple of elections, it will be nice to have a one-seat cushion as we see how close these things are.

The next couple of elections?

Yes, towards

46.

Next couple of months.

It is important, though.

And next time the map tilts towards Republicans, as we've discussed many times, this week.

Yeah, we have a better shot.

Yeah.

2024 should be a good year.

Now,

you said it's McConnell's going to see to that.

Well, I thought you were just talking about maybe replacing him with somebody.

Somebody I'm talking more exciting.

Now, there are some people that are talking about it as well.

You know, there's

Josh Hawley.

Okay.

Eric Schmidt.

Yes.

Rick Scott.

Good.

Ron Johnson.

All right.

Lindsey Graham.

Lindsey Graham.

Yeah, that's a surprise.

Yeah.

Mike Lee.

Huh.

JD Vance.

Okay.

Ted Cruz.

Like that.

Rubio.

Rubio is in that.

There's a few.

Murkowski, strangely not.

What a strangely not.

Stunning surprise.

Did they call that race yet?

I hate the Murkowski one.

I haven't checked that one in a while.

For the love of Pete, just call it Alaska.

I know.

I don't know if they have yet.

I do.

No, they haven't because they have to do the ranked choice thing and they have to wait for all the votes to come in.

But she's going to.

I think Murkowski's the favorite there by what I'm going to do.

Of course she is.

Of course she is.

You're going to go for

the more of the two evils.

Not the lesser.

It's never.

Yeah.

So Chewbacca is currently up by two points.

This is.

It went asked for a comment.

Asked for a comment.

That's what she said.

We've been talking about that race for like two weeks.

We're like, why have we not talked about this race with Pat in here?

We need Pat in here when we're talking about the Chewbacca race.

Right, because it's important to have somebody that can do

Vurkowski's at 42.8.

But the way this breaks out, of course, when you do the ranked choice voting, you're going to lose the last candidate first and her vote, which I think the last one is a Republican, but it's only a couple percent.

And that, let's just say that even goes to Chewbacca, which it could go either way.

The next one's a Democrat, and that's, I think, 9% of the vote, and that percentage will be distributed between, it will almost exclusively go to Murkowski, which should pillar over the 50-point barrier.

That's the way I'm looking at that race.

Now, of course, there's still a bunch of votes to come in.

Alaska is one of these ways.

Are you from labor unions?

Possibly.

I think you have 14 days after the election to have your, they wait 14 days, something like that,

to get all the votes in.

What?

Yeah.

Do they have to be at least marked the day?

I think they have to be post-marked.

Post-marked by.

And you might say, like, it's three towns away, and it still takes 14 days in Alaska.

That could be the truth.

I don't know.

You know, Alaska is a little bit of a different place, but I mean, if there's one, you can't, there's no reason to do this in like California.

Like, Alaska, maybe you have a, there's some island out that no one's ever visited.

And I don't know.

It takes a while for the mail to get there.

Maybe, but, like, you know, it's like New York City.

We need six months.

Sorry.

I think Nevada did that.

Either Nevada or Arizona.

Arizona, I was reading about one of the two, I can't remember, over the weekend, and they said that Saturday was the deadline for mail-in votes to arrive and be counted.

And it didn't even specify whether or not they had to be postmarked.

Yeah, they do have to count.

November 8th.

So that's good.

Well, the other ones they do is they're like, what?

You don't care about our military members serving overseas that want to get their votes.

What happens about a person who is in a cave in Afghanistan and decides on election day he's going, he needs to, he gives it to a Sherpa who postmarks it on November 8th, who then has to walk it.

And he hasn't heard yet that we withdrew from Afghanistan a year ago?

He's in a cave.

How would he know?

Okay, you're right.

He just knows he wanted Catherine Cortez-Masto to be the next senator.

I think that's a very good point.

A very good point.

And, you know, while you're at it, I mean, sure, he's over in a cave, but you might be in in the kitchen of some union kitchen where there's knives and

you've got to get around all the knives as you're passing out the ballots and then collecting all the ballots and making sure that it gets there.

You might need a couple of months.

That's very likely

that happens.

It takes some time.

How many times have we seen that be the case for some of these voters?

Many, many times.

Many times.

Or you might be dead, and it takes you a little longer to get it out of your casket, above ground, into into the hand of a mailman, and all the way to the voting place.

Right.

You know, it takes some time for the dead to get their vote counted.

They move slowly.

If you've ever seen

slowly or a zombie.

I don't know if you've seen this.

I've seen this happen.

You have to convince the worms to take that letter up above the soil.

And a lot of them don't want to.

No.

And

they have to grab that ballot with their teeth.

With their worm teeth.

With their worm teeth.

With their worm teeth and get that up there.

Yeah.

And worm teeth, you know, they might bite through the, they might start eating the ballot.

You have to get it up there before they finish dissolving it.

That was the problem with the with the Chads.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

The worm teeth.

The worm teeth.

It was worm teeth.

Man.

So many of our problems come back from worm teeth.

So many.

You know?

Yeah.

Good chunk of them.

Hey, so can I

just give you a story about Walgreens?

Walgreens has decided to close three locations in Boston.

Oh, what racists.

Amen.

Thank you for saying welcome.

It's so clear and obvious that that's all about racism.

It is.

Now they might have been, you know, robbed every day.

Yeah, but who isn't?

That's just sheer, unadulterated racism.

Thank you, Pat.

I was glad somebody said it.

I was hoping you would see that like the city of Boston does.

Everything is racism now.

Everything is racist.

It's true.

It's true.

I was

my wife and I went away.

I was in Nashville.

I love Nashville.

It's a great town with great people around.

Went into a Walgreens there.

And that was an interesting experience.

Really?

Yeah, it was different than most of the Walgreens that I go to in a normal city.

Well,

she was inside the store accosted by multiple homeless people while she was in her aisle and I was in my other aisle.

And she had to kind of come over and

let me know.

Now, this is like you have.

She has a problem with homeless people.

In this circumstance, yes.

First of all,

on the walk over there, obviously there was 1,400 homeless people that came up and asked us for money or looked at us in

a threatening manner of some sort.

But that's just Nashville.

That's just what's going on down there, downtown.

After you can crawl over the giant bags of trash that are on every single corner.

But once you get past that whole circumstance, you think once you're inside the Walgreens, you're going to have a moment, a respite of some sort.

Listen to this.

There's an elitism, Glenn.

Can you

the elitism of this guy?

Oh my gosh.

Oh, wow.

I mean, like, it's sad.

It's a real problem.

What happens when they shop at Walgreens all the time?

You know what I mean?

They're just like

the upscale Walgreens.

You do kind of expect, though, inside a store to not be harassed by people.

And apparently not.

Apparently, not.

You expect to be harassed by salespeople trying to sell you stuff.

That's what I expect going into the store.

Is that the way it happens at Tiffany's?

I don't know, Glenn.

Do you want to get into an elitism battle on the air?

Oh, we're doing.

All right.

I just want to make sure.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Vivek Ramashwami is with us now.

Vivek.

Glenn, how are you?

I'm good.

Kind of a disappointing week last week, but recovering from it and

moving on.

Yeah, well, you know, that's the only way forward, right?

I know, it is.

So, Vivek, I wanted to get you on to explain the FTX thing to somebody like me that's not really up on FTX, and I haven't been following this 30-year-old guy.

Tell me what's happening and what it means.

It's a really interesting story, Glenn, and not all of the details are crystal clear yet.

I can give you the super detailed version if you're interested, but the slightly less summary version is that there's a guy who operated an exchange called FTX, right?

That was the exchange where people trade cryptocurrencies.

It's like Coinbase.

Yeah, exactly, except this is offshore, Coinbase is onshore.

So think about that as an exchange.

But it's a centralized exchange.

It just happens to trade cryptocurrency.

So it's like an old school, think about it as an equivalent of like a stock exchange, except people can trade cryptocurrencies on it.

You know, that's owned and founded by and lead owner is Sam Bankman-Freed, who goes by SBF.

But he also had a separate hedge fund called Alameda.

So that's a trading firm.

So that's not an exchange.

That's just trading to try to make money like people always have.

On Wall Street, this has existed for a very long time, hedge funds that just trade their own capital to make more money.

So he's operating both the exchange and his own hedge fund.

And it appears what happened was when that hedge fund encountered a bunch of losses and they have leverage, right?

That means they're borrowing.

That means they have to post collateral to cover for those losses.

So it appears what he did was he took customer funds from the exchange, but used that to borrow it and post it as collateral.

And when that came to light, the other participants in that exchange, particularly one big market participant, this guy Chang Peng Zhao, said that he was going to dump a bunch of the, and this is where it gets a little bit complicated, but a bunch of the token issued by the exchange that basically caused the value of that token, the instrument that people hold on the exchange, to collapse.

And that sent a free fall spiral that caused the whole house of cards to come crashing down.

So, you know, putting complexities and the details to one side, which we can get into if you want, the bottom line is there's a guy who was self-dealing, using customer money on an exchange to cover his own personal trading losses, tried to cover it up.

When that came to light, there was a house of cards that came crashing.

And unfortunately, many of those customers are likely going to lose a lot of their money.

And even the portion they get back, they're not going to see for a very long time.

So that's just descriptively what happened.

But boy, is there a lot more that's interesting to this story when you look at this guy who was a major donor to the Democratic Party, one of the major faces faces of advocating for regulation of the cryptocurrency industry in Washington, D.C., that created the smokescreen that prevented people from being able to see through this fundamental fraud.

Okay, so let's, I want to go there, but first let's start.

He's like 30 years old.

And

the woman running the hedge fund,

his girlfriend looks like she's 14.

Yeah,

I'm not going to,

I don't have the facts, but I will tell you, it did not look

surprised me a little bit.

Right.

How is it that these two people pulled the wool over so many people's eyes?

So it's a great question.

I think it has to do with cultivating this do-good image, this futurist image on the promise of cryptocurrency and the importance of what that would mean for humanity.

I mean, at the end of the day, these are nothing, this guy is nothing more than a high-frequency trader.

And there's nothing wrong with being a high frequency trader but it's just you're in the business ordinarily to just make an extra buck to make an extra buck by beating somebody else at the sport of trading effectively but what he managed to do was to disguise that in the veneer of this moral superiority this morality and the funniest part about this glenn is that a lot of people miss this this is going to have a backlash that i think is going to be over inclusive where this guy was operating a centralized exchange that's no different than an old school exchange.

It just happened to offer trading in cryptocurrencies.

So there's really nothing that fancy or even futuristic, let alone morally humanistic about it.

It's just an old school exchange where people trade stuff and the stuff they trade is a cryptocurrency.

But the actual promise of the future of cryptocurrency, of decentralization, is actually decentralized exchanges where there's no single centralized owner of the exchange.

And the irony here, Glenn, is I think this is going to provoke a backlash from regulators to to the entire cryptocurrency,

including to decentralized exchanges.

And the irony, here's the ultimate irony that a lot of people miss.

He couldn't have done what he did if it were actually a truly decentralized exchange.

The only way he was able to borrow those customer funds as one actor and lend it over to his hedge fund to post his collateral is the fact that the exchange was centralized in the first place.

And so the irony here is you have this guy who was the face of pro-regulation.

He was a pro-regulatory advocate in Washington, D.C., which is why everyone viewed him as

the good guy, the golden boy.

And yet, the irony is he happened to be the fraudster.

And then the reaction to that is likely going to include over-regulating decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, which would have been probably the best way of actually preventing this fraud.

So that's the irony in the whole story that I think people haven't yet caught up to see.

Isn't he also

big in

ESG

and the World Economic Forum?

Part of the smoke screen, exactly.

It's all just part of the smoke screen, Glenn.

That is part of it.

Now, there was a story that was floating around on social media yesterday that actually found that a subsidiary of FactSet, which is one of these ratings companies,

assigned an ESG score on a leadership and governance metric, including as it related to sustainability standards, that was higher for this company than ExxonMobil, which is a company that most Americans will know and has been around for a long time.

Okay, so that's the bit of the farce in this, but that's just one example of the farce.

He's pro-regulation, so the Democrats in Washington, D.C.

see him as a good guy.

He is the second largest donor to Democrats this cycle, donating over $30 million.

Another point on the strike in the tally of being the good guy.

Hang on,

didn't he also say that for 2024 he will donate up to a billion dollars to the Democrats?

Yes.

So the funny thing is what he said is he was going to donate a billion dollars over the 2022 and 2024 cycle.

Now, the sad part for a lot of Democrats is they were kind of upset at him because you might think that meant like a few hundred million now and more 100 million then.

Actually, he only ended up donating 30 plus million.

So the side note to the story, kind of the comic part of this, is a lot of Democrats are actually upset at him for only ponying up a little over 30 million because he had committed to a billion.

But you see, this guy hits a common pattern, overpromising and under-delivering.

Turns out that applies to political donations as well.

But the broader point, though, Glenn, is it's just checking all the boxes, speaking with Clinton on stage and Tony Blair, boldly wearing shorts, being the cool guy of the future, World Economic Forum, all that entire crowd, ESG ratings, donations to the Democratic Party, being vocally pro-regulation in an industry where the other entrepreneurs have, in my opinion, for good reason, resisted regulation.

That created the cultivated aura of this being one of the good guys, one of the guys you could trust.

And it reminds me a lot of actually that CEO of Volkswagen.

You remember this guy Wintercorn?

He was the CEO of Volkswagen, which was the number one ESG award-winning company.

Yes.

Until they found, and by the way, he would wax eloquent about climate change and the energy transition until they found that he had actually rigged the emissions measurements in their own cars, right?

This reminded me a lot of that story, where the person who protests the case for the futurism of the ESG-Layden world, one of the good guys about the pro-regulation crowd, ended up being the most fraudulent of them all.

And it's not an accident that that pattern just repeats itself time and again, because it's all about creating a smokescreen to allow you to get away with a kind of fraud you would have never gotten away with if people hadn't been thrown off the scent with the smoke screen that you put up.

So that's the story.

It happens again and again.

And I wish people would learn the lesson, Glenn, but there's something about us as a people that make us suckers for the smoke screen of wanting to be the pro-ESG, pro-Democrat, pro-regulation, good guys that every time that ends up being actually a pretty good way to throw the regulators and to throw customers off the scent and to be able to get away with something like this.

And Vivek, there's a real big

media angle here to this, too, because this is yet another example, Elizabeth Holmes style, where they made this guy into a hero.

He doesn't brush his hair.

There were stories about how he wears shorts to every meeting.

One story talked about how he would fall asleep on beanbag chairs outside of offices, and they'd bring in all these multi-billion dollar donors past him while he was sleeping.

And then he would wake up and waddle into

the meeting like 10 minutes later.

And this was like, he's just a genius.

He doesn't even care.

He's asleep on a beanbag outside the meeting.

One story talked about, these are all praising him where he was playing video games during an entire presentation while he was in there and they gave him a billion dollars after this meeting where he was playing league of legends throughout an entire meeting

and and like there's no maya culpa from the media after all this who built this guy into this celebrity to get all of these dollars and

there will never be a time all they'll get is a bunch of podcasts later on hosted by the same reporters who initially interviewed him and made him into this superstar.

I mean, it's a ridiculous cycle.

You make such a good point, and this is less a story about this random guy, SBF, whatever.

He came two years ago, he'll be gone, you know, two months from now.

But it's an indictment of our culture.

I mean, what is it about our state of our psyche, our cultural psyche in the U.S., even internationally, that causes us to bear this self-inflicting pain every time, to line up behind a guy who not only poses to be the boy genius.

I mean, that was Elizabeth Holmes' version of this, but to take that to the next level, to think that he is actually better than the rest of us just because he checked the boxes that we had created in our artificial edifice of ESG and of humanitarianism and of political philanthropy.

It's almost as though we did this to ourselves and he was just the guy who happened to ride the wave that the rest of our culture had created.

That's the more interesting part of this story because it's the Volkswagen thing all over again.

You know, it's Unilever in Kenya.

I mean, it's all the stuff I've been writing and talking about for two years.

We just see the same story repeat itself in different clothing.

It just happened to be in the clothing of cryptocurrency this time around.

So I heard on the

podcast all in, I heard Brian Armstrong, who's the CEO of Coinbase, saying

he didn't see this one coming at all.

He said, I just thought he was a really good, really good guy.

He said, now, in retrospect, I guess I did see things, but I ignored them.

Was there anybody who saw this?

Not that I know of.

I mean, I think that's what makes it such a big story, right?

And I'm not even, you know, I follow the cryptocurrency space, but that's not an area where I spend an immense inordinate amount of my time.

I'm focused more on equity markets, et cetera.

But there is something about seeing a guy who is calling for greater regulation in his own industry while also making greater donations to the very people who are responsible for crafting those regulations.

Gosh, that sounds bad taste in my mouth.

That alone just struck me as potentially false and inauthentic.

Now, was that going to underlie a $30 billion, $40 billion fraud?

I did not necessarily go the extent of predicting that.

There was something that was a myth about this in terms of calling for self-hating regulation while donating to the very people who are going to write those regulations.

And that's strange.

That sounds a a little like Zuckerberg.

It actually does, doesn't it?

It does.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

Its pattern repeats itself, Glenn.

You know it well.

So it's not going to be, we could probably count.

If we took 10 minutes, we could probably find 10 to 20 other examples that smell just like it.

So I'm sketchy on all of this stuff, a vaccine, but

there's a missing $1.7

billion.

Is that accurate?

I can't tell you if it's accurate, but

that is what the latest reporting is.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

How do you misplace $1.7 billion?

Well, the funny thing is now they're talking about

the potential hack into the system, too, after the fraud story came to light.

So I'm.

So I have no basis for this other than intuition, but to say that that hack seems mysteriously well-timed.

So guys being

investigated now for fraud, being scrutinized for fraud, for himself misappropriating those funds to his affiliated hedge fund from an exchange that he was operating for customers, and then suddenly there's a hack.

And I think that it strikes me as a little convenient to sort of say that, okay, the hack is something that we can blame because that's something that's outside of all of our control.

When, in fact, at the very moment, for two years, there wasn't any report of a hack, but now there's a report of a hack right when you are being investigated.

So that did smell a little bit amiss to me.

But the facts on this are changing by the day, changing by the hour.

But the lesson I think is actually less complicated than each of those detailed facts might, you know, might

invite.

And I think that it's pretty simple.

Whether it was cryptocurrency or anything else, there's just a guy who's operating in exchange for customers.

And you cannot use customer money

without their express permission to advance your own financial trading goals, period.

That is a hard line.

And whether you're regulated or not, that is an illegal act of misappropriation, of theft, and then fraud and lying to the people who are you're stealing from.

So it actually, in a certain sense, has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, has nothing to do with crypto regulation.

The only double irony of this is that if it had actually been operated as a truly decentralized exchange, this guy couldn't have even done the thing that he did.

And so, in a certain sense, the cryptoness of this, let alone the morality of this, is all just a deflection and a smokescreen from the essence of what was really nothing different than just an old school Madoff-esque fraud.

And is there anything more than just trading into fiat currency,

becoming

in bed with Ukraine and the main bank of Ukraine to trade cryptocurrency and get it into fiat currency so people could use it.

Do you think there's a money-making scam in there as well?

Well, I think there's no doubt that there is

in all of crypto exchanges, sort of a money laundering element to it.

Yeah.

In the sense that you're using

the supposed anonymity of these exchanges to be able to

launder money that you otherwise would have not been able to launder.

But that's not unique to cryptocurrency, Glenn.

You have to do them the current fiat, too.

So that's a bit of a deflection.

I know.

Thank you so much, Vivek.

I appreciate it.

Vivek Ramaswamy, he is the author of Nation of Victims and co-founder and executive chairman of Strive Asset Management.

The best of the Glenn Bank program.

So, Glenn.

So,

Stu.

Nothing ever good starts with.

So, Glenn.

Yeah.

Can I walk you through

the house?

You mean my house?

The unfinished house?

It'll be finished in six weeks, you know.

Six weeks now.

Oh, gosh, that's terrible.

I thought it was only two.

Two weeks.

Okay,

I know.

Your house is never going to be finished.

Never going to be finished.

Anyway, go ahead.

I'll get that house.

Now, Glad.

Yes.

We have a situation where, let me give you the good news.

Okay.

For example, prediction markets.

Prediction.

Say the house should go Republican, 95% chance.

95% chance.

So that's pretty good.

That's really good.

Really?

Well, I do remember those prediction markets being very, very confident in things like Kerry Lake.

They were pretty confident.

Now they are not confident in Kerry Lake.

Now they're not.

No.

It's changed.

In fact, now there's a 94% chance that Kerry Lake will lose, according to the prediction markets.

Ha.

Wonder what happened there.

That's different than it was.

She probably had a 60 or 70 percent chance mid to late last week.

I trust the prediction markets.

Right.

They could change, right?

This could they, but, but, but that's what they think.

They're confident.

Yeah.

Almost everybody will tell you, and you've heard this non-stop, even in the mainstream media, the Republicans will likely win the House.

Yeah.

But can I be a little pessimistic here and walk you through what we have?

Is it pessimism or is it reality?

I think it's real.

I think it's reality.

But it's not all bad news.

But just how confident do you feel in this scenario that I'm about to walk you through?

Okay, I'm guessing zero.

Okay.

But let me hear it.

I went through all the outstanding races.

Okay.

Looked at them.

And I have,

I don't know, what I tend to find is a somewhat disturbing situation.

Okay.

So I ranked all of the races in the best chance for Republicans to win.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So

212 are pretty much in the bag.

212.

212.

Got to get to 218, though.

Wow.

218.

That's a long way.

That's easy.

Oh, there's a lot of races.

There's a couple dozen races still out there.

I mean, you know, gosh.

You really have to be over 220 to even, because you know there's a lot of weasels in there.

Yes,

for sure.

But 218 is control.

And at this point,

I will take 218 controls.

I will too.

All right.

So I've ranked them in the old school grading grading system from,

you know, your old high school days, A, B, C, D, F.

Ooh.

Okay.

Wow, that's harsh.

Now, none of these, I would say, are completely decided, but I came up with three A's.

Three A's.

Three.

Three.

So, and they're, and that, that means really high according to the grading scale.

These are the best of the best.

Yes.

Not sure things.

Let me give you an example of a race that I put as an A.

Okay.

Lauren Bobert's race in Colorado.

Oh, that's an A.

That's an A.

Now, as of right now, she leads by 0.4%

with 99% of the vote in.

How many votes is she away, actually?

Not percentage.

Not percentage.

That's a good question.

If you give me one moment, Glenn, of course, I can pull that up for you, and I'm completely prepared to give you any detail that's additional.

Why are you stalling?

I'm seeing you at any time.

And that's what's important about this particular coverage.

I can always tell you in a moment's notice.

And people need to understand this.

Wow.

I think we understand.

We're just looking for the number of votes that...

The number of votes in that race?

Yeah, in that race.

Yeah, I've got it at

1,122.

Thank you.

Okay, 1,000 votes away.

Now, but they're 99% in.

99% in.

And you'd think...

So basically what we're talking about there would the outstanding vote couldn't overturn it only if there was like a recount or something else.

That's all right.

I feel good.

I feel good about that.

I feel good about that.

That's the type of A race I'm talking about.

We have three of those.

That gets Republicans to 215.

Wait, we have three of those.

Three A races.

That are that good.

I think so.

There's another race in New York,

a 0.4 in New York.

Yeah.

Okay.

0.4.

That's not Colorado.

That's New York.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean,

when you say it that way,

you know, it doesn't sound as good, you know.

Right.

Where's the third one?

Third one.

Uh-oh.

That one's in California.

California.

That one is not even New York.

That's California.

All you have to do is depend on the fine people in New York and California.

Again, these are close races.

Okay.

But

I'm going to go ahead and just give us those three just for the optimistic take here on the house.

And that gives us gets gets us to 215.

215.

Now, seeming even more cavernous in between 215 and 218.

It seemed really easy.

It seemed pretty easy.

With a couple dozen races out there,

why can't we get all we need is six?

Right.

Right.

But now, of the A's, I only have three.

Three.

So now we're at 215.

Okay.

Now you'd say, what number?

B is still passing.

It's still a good grade.

It's still a good grade.

How many races would you like to see in the B column to make yourself comfortable?

that the Republicans are going to be.

27.

27.

That's a good number.

27.

Yeah, that's how I would feel too because I always feel these are are going to go against us.

How many do we have?

Two.

Two.

Two races that are B's.

Just two.

That would take us to

217.

Yes.

And you're going to be excited that here in our B's, we have another California.

Oh, good.

And you're going to be super confident because it's Arizona, is the other one.

Oh, I hope it's Maricopa County.

Because that one's done, so that's done so well.

Yes.

Yeah.

Now,

if we assume

we have both of the A's and the B's, that gets us to not 218,

which is what you need.

Yeah.

But 217.

217.

Which is one less than what you need.

So we don't have control.

We don't have control at 217.

Now, may I ask,

how much worse is a B from an A?

Is it like 1,100 votes?

Okay.

Or it should be 900 votes.

One race in Arizona.

It's a 0.2% lead with 94% of the vote in.

That's a B.

A B, boys and girls.

I'm not being unfair with these rankings.

That's a B.

And the only reason I say it's a B is because it was expected to be a pretty easy, not an easy win, but it's a purplish district, but it was projected to be a Republican-leaning district this time.

Now, of course, we've seen that before.

In what state?

In Arizona.

In Arizona.

Good, good.

Okay.

And then we have

a race in California where there is a six-point lead currently for the Republican.

However, only 52% of the vote in that's going to shrink as we get closer.

That's a B.

That's B.

But that one was leaning Republican anyway.

They've got the lead.

I'm going to give that a B.

All right.

That gets you to 217.

Now you go into the Cs.

now you just need one of these just need one of them and you'd like how many to be there to just get one at them

i'd like

this is a c is a c

so again you're in like toss-up area i would like

maybe

i'm gonna shoot low

five five that's a that's a nice guess unfortunately you lose

because i only have three you only have three c's now you if you're optimistic and you take those a's and b's and you're like okay well you can pick these off that's 217 you gotta win one of these three still own c's

this kid's is going well going well i think mitch mcconnell and kevin mccarthy i think they've done their job i think they've done their job they should be rewarded with more leadership they

should be rewarded with new positions now here we have two california races and an arizona in the c's

okay we have what two california races.

And

please tell me it's like in the farming area of California.

Some of them are.

Again, you know, I know California, we make fun of it.

There are races that a lot of Republicans do win in California.

Yeah.

Some of them they're even favored in.

But like,

for example, this one, which is

a toss-up

toss-up race, I would say, right now, if you look at the projections,

was a Biden plus six district.

Okay.

Okay.

So one that Biden won.

All right.

But now in this environment, which is not necessarily, I mean, it's only slightly better for Republicans, maybe.

Right.

We need the Republican to win.

And of course, we still have 30% of the vote to count.

So we don't know at this point.

Oh, 30.

Then you get into the Ds.

And there.

That was it.

There's three Cs.

You've got some.

I mean, you've got.

I think there's one that's in Arizona where the Republican leads by 0.6%

with 89% of the vote in, which my A's I put, if you're over 95% in and you're winning, you know, I put that as an A.

This one's at 89% in winning, so a chance, certainly a chance.

And it was a likely Republican district going in.

So you'd think maybe there's a chance that some of the votes will be.

Again, you see me, I'm reaching for some of these, but that's, again, it's close.

0.6% lead.

But if we won all of the C's.

C's, right?

That would give you to 220,

which again isn't great.

In fact, a lot of these

mainstream people looking at this are like, oh, well,

we project 221 for Republicans, plus or minus 4.

Well, that's a big.

That's a big plus or minus.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because 225 at this point would be like, wow, that's fantastic.

Right.

217, bad.

Bad, bad, bad, bad.

Yeah, okay.

Then you got three Ds,

and then I have all the rest of them are Fs.

They're not going to win, though.

They're not going to win.

No.

Well, again, they're all in California, mostly at least all in California.

And they're all districts that lean Democrat.

And, you know, the Democrat even have the lead in a bunch of them.

May I just ask a quick question?

Yes.

Why is it

that it just seems to be in the sketchy states where they can't really count everything.

That might be why we picture them as sketchy.

Right.

It might be why.

It might be.

Yeah, it might be.

It might be something that, in theory,

as a lawmaker in one of these states, you'd be incentivized to correct your terrible practices because no one believes you're voting anymore.

Or you might not be incentivized

if you're actually doing it.

Exactly.

So, again, you can see why, right,

you would say, hey, Republicans are favored in this race.

And I would say you

probably,

maybe right.

But, like, 95% confidence.

Do you have 95% confidence in that scenario I just mapped out for you?

I mean, I think.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Are Republicans involved?

They are.

No, I don't have any confidence in it then.

You know, you may remember, Glenn, us saying over and over again, Republicans should win this election unless they screw it up.

Which

they always do, I believe.

Was the rest of that prediction?

They're very good at that.

You know, you got a couple ranked choice voting.

Now, who would you say?

I'm going to give you time.

I'm going to give you time.

Okay.

Who would you say

is most responsible for that loss?

Now, don't answer right away.

I want you to think: is there anyone that might be responsible that maybe we should reassign.

And I don't mean reassign their sex.

I mean reassign them to, I don't know, basement duty instead of running the show.

Who do you think

is responsible for this?

Based on your lead-in.

Yes.

I believe.

No, no, don't base it on your lead.

I'm trying to analyze this a little bit.

I believe.

I'm talking it through like I'm on a game show.

Okay, okay.

Based on your question.

Based on my question, yes.

Do we have the game show music?

Based on your question,

I think what you want me to say.

No,

no, this is not high school.

This is not high school.

I'm not a progressive teacher.

No, but I think you have an opinion on this.

Yes, I do.

And you would say,

I guess I'll generalize as Republican leadership.

Mitch McConnell.

But Mitch McConnell doesn't have anything to do with the House.

That's why I'm.

No,

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

Both of them.

Both of them should go.

Both of them should go.

These guys are the same guys that were in those positions under Donald Trump.

You know, when they got rid of Obamacare.

Go on, that didn't get rid of Obama.

Oh, they didn't get rid of that, did they?

Wow.

Well, these guys, they've done an awful lot.

And Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have got to go, even if they're a minority, maybe especially since they're the minority leaders.

I mean, after a poor showing, usually what you see are repercussions for the people who led the charge to the poor showing.

That's usually how things work in the world.

Yes, right.

But not here.

You're

a football coach.

Your team is three and nine, and you're not going to make the playoffs, and you have a

big payroll.

Usually

you get fired.

Right.

That's usually what happens.

Right.

But that doesn't seem to be the way that these things go in Washington.

Okay, here are the people that can make

Mitch McConnell a thing of the past.

Mitt Romney, call his office.

Mitt Romney?

Is Mitt Romney really going to do a thing about he loves?

No, but he should be responsible for the

wave.

I know, but this is what he should know.

He should know that

I'm going to remember what you said about

Mitch McConnell being responsible.

And since you were wrong about that,

I'm sure you're going to

evict him.

And if not, don't worry about it because we have a very long memory.

And next election, you are out.

Remember, it's only two years.

Deb Fisher from

Nebraska.

Roger Wicker from Mississippi.

Rick Scott, Florida.

Ted Cruz, Texas.

Mike Braun from Indianapolis, from Indiana.

Josh Hawley from Missouri.

John Barrasso from Wyoming, Marsha Blackburn.

All of these people need to be

reminded that when you lose

and you have put your money into an Alaska race that was going to go to the Republican no matter what, and you double down there.

It's really egregious.

It's really egregious.

He cut money from Arizona.

Could have won.

New Hampshire.

Could have won.

Took the money from there, put it into a race where two Republicans were going against each other because he didn't,

because he wanted to rescue Lisa Murkowski.

And why did he want to do that?

Because the candidate running against

Lisa Murkowski said she will not vote for Mitch McConnell's leadership.

All of these senators.

All of these senators know what their constituents are saying about Mitch McConnell, but Mitch McConnell has a very heavy hammer, and he is trying to rush this thing through.

You've got to call them today.

The government switchboard at the Capitol is 202-224-3121.

Get on the phone, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

Let's start first with the Senate because they're going to be meeting tomorrow and then, I guess, voting on Wednesday.

We have a very short time period.

Mitch McConnell must not be the majority leader.