Bivet. Grandmaswami. Welcome back, man.

It's good to be back.

How you been?

Cool room here. I like cool temperatures.

Thank you. Thank you. There's a lot of history in here.

There is a lot of history. Remember we talked about that last time I was here? It's good to be back. And, you know, this time it's on the back of a campaign that, you know, it's been about a few months since the campaign. And so I've restored to sane, normal life and a chance to reflect on the last year, but I'm doing well.

Nice. Good for you, man. I'm curious, how did the campaign go? I mean, is it as dirty getting into politics as everybody says it is?

I think it's worse.

It's worse?

Yeah. You know, it's gonna be bad going in. I don't think. I don't like to think of myself as naive, but it's far worse than anybody might imagine looking in from the outside. I think one of the most surprising parts of the process to me is the role of the gatekeepers is massive. And the gatekeepers include both apparatuses within each of the political parties. I can't speak to the Democrat party. I assume it's the same as it is with the Republican Party. Gatekeepers in the party apparatus itself, gatekeepers in the media. And I'm not talking about just hosts. I'm talking about the people who the public never sees, but network executives who decide, not even how something gets covered. That's not where they tilt the scale. It's whether it gets covered, which is really interesting. And then third, of course, is the people who write the big checks, not the people who write the $6,000 or $6,600 maximum checks to a campaign or a candidate. That's a lot of money, but it's a lot of people across this country can write that check. Now, I'm talking about the people who don't write the checks to the campaigns, but write the biggest and most important checks of all, which are to the super PACs that fund political campaigns.

They don't directly fund the campaigns, but that's just a fiction. The reality is the system runs on super PAC dollars. And so that was a little less true for my candidacy than the people I was competing with. But the fact that my competitors were funded that way had a big effect on the way that I had to compete against that. And those are collectively what I learned were the gatekeepers of american politics. And let's just say I emerged from the process a lot more educated on the realities of how the game is played, but also with a sense of restored purpose to change the game, to be able to. I think it sounds like a good idea an outsider should run for us president. I believe that professional politicians pollute our politics. But on the other side of having done it now, I think it gives me a deeper conviction that it's going to require not just me, more people like Donald Trump or like myself, who literally have, yes, a lot to lose by doing this, but are doing it temporarily for a defined period of time as a matter of service. We need more of that, or else the game is gonna keep being played the way it is.

How do you think your campaign would have gone had Trump not been in the race?

Oh, I think we would have been successful in achieving the goal, yeah. I mean, look, I think that the people of this country in the republican primary base made a very understandable choice. And it's why I myself endorsed Donald Trump the day that I dropped out of the race as well, is they said, look, we want an America first leader. But in Donald Trump, we have something that's particularly unique, is somebody who has actually done it before. So if you have an incumbent president like Biden, and you have a challenger who's challenging that incumbent, usually, here's the trade off. The challenger is offering you some hope and dream. Okay, here's what I'm going to do that's different than the incumbent. This is a once in a century opportunity. Actually, I think the last time it happened was with Grover Cleveland. But it's literally a once in a century opportunity that voters get to say, here's a four year record of a president who I've had. I see exactly not what he said, but what he did on the border, on the economy, the stability on the global stage, the fact that we aren't on the brink of World War III or weren't for those four years.

And today we have a border crisis of historic proportion. We have an administrative state, a weaponization of government that's out of control, an economy that's failing most Americans, and closer to world War three than we've ever been in my life. Make your choice. And so I think that's what the republican primary base voted for, is anyone outside of the America first vision cannot represent the modern Republican Party. That much is clear. That basically in this race left two candidates. That was Donald Trump and myself. And they made a clear and decisive choice to say that this time around, the person we want is the person who's actually done it. Because that's what we get to compare to a Biden administration that's given us the opposite. And so if Donald Trump weren't in the race, I mean, there's hard polling data on this. Look at the end of the race, certainly in some of those early states like Iowa and also nationally, if you look at who the second choice to those Trump voters were, would have me in first place in many of those. But that's not for me to relitigate and analyze and think about what could have been thrilled that hopefully Trump is on track to a successful second term ahead.

I'm going to do everything I can to make sure he's successfully elected, not just by a little bit, but by a lot. I think a landslide, minus some shenanigans, is still a decisive victory, and that's what this country needs. And I think that that second term, I'm hopeful, can go far further than Donald Trump's first term did. I think his first term was successful, but I think he has an opportunity to make the second one pale in comparison. Anything I can do to make that successful, that's gonna be the next highest way of me having an impact on this country, second to being the president.

Do you think that we'll see you up there again maybe in 2028?

It's a long time from now. You know, right now, one of the things I've learned in my life is every time I make these detailed, long run plans, it never goes according to that plan anyway. So when you're guided by your own personal plans of, here's what I'm going to do, it never goes that way anyway. Your plans are stupid. That's what I've found. But if you're guided by your actual sense of purpose, right. What's my purpose? Is my purpose gonna change? No, it's not. My purpose is reviving the 1776 ideals this country was founded on. I think we've forgotten those ideals. I think our founding fathers were incredible human beings whose legacy, both in terms of their culture, in terms of their values, in terms of their constitutional vision, we've all but abandoned. You got the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. These guys were, you know, one guy invented the remedy to the common cold, a lightning rod, a Franklin stove. Benjamin Franklin. That was Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson invents the swivel chair. We're sitting in a swivel chair right now.

Did he really?

He literally was the inventor of the swivel chair.

How the hell do you know that?

Oh, it's just when you study american history, these guys are. Are titans. Jefferson actually also invented. You're actually interested in this, the original version of the polygraph test, which is a lie detector test. And so these are the guys who are our founding fathers, right? These are the guys who were the pioneers and the explorers that refused to be stopped. They wrote a declaration of independence. They meant what they said. Jefferson, you know, I mean, doesn't land well on the modern ear, but I think he said, what is it? The tree of liberty is fed every generation by the blood of tyrants. And they fought a revolution, taking the risk, pledging their sacred honor, their lives, and their treasure. The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, a good number of them died bankrupt because they had their assets seized by the British. I'm pretty sure twelve of them had their homes ransacked or burned. Five of them were captured and tortured by the British before their death, and they knew what they were signing up for. We've lost that sense of risk taking. We've lost that sense of sacrificing for a country that allows us to otherwise enjoy the liberties that we do.

And I don't say that as some sort of self important. Okay, well, I'm gonna revive that legacy myself, but all of us need to step up and ask ourselves, how are we gonna actually pass that on to our kids in the same way that our founding fathers did to us? That's my sense of purpose.

You know, it seems whatever I can.

Do to make that happen, I'm gonna do it again.

I love where you're going with this, and we hear about it all the time.

Right.

It seems like there's more and more americans willing to step up to the plate, but I think it lacks organization. Yeah, how are we gonna organize?

Well, look, I think that the first step is, I think the organization part will be easier once we actually have the underlying will to do it. And I think we're in a place right now, Sean, where that's changing gradually. I think you had a lot of people before it said, okay, I'm gonna look after what my own interest is. Let somebody else fight the battles that need to be fought, but especially for the wealthy class in this country, of which, you know, folks like myself are a member of that. And I've had my peers who would look at, okay, politics is for somebody else, or fighting these cultural fights to be speak truth, even when it's hard. That's for somebody else to do. For me, it's to just enjoy the fruits of that. People now starting to wake up and recognize that we're not gonna have a country left in 3456 years. I do think that that's what we're looking at. I mean, I think about it on a personal note, if my kids are in high school before we get this right, I don't think we have a country left. I think a lot of people are starting to recognize that too, and say, you know what?

The inheritance I want to give my kids isn't just a bunch of green pieces of paper. It is a country where they can actually enjoy the same gifts and liberties that allowed us to achieve what we have too. And so I think once you have that will, the organization naturally follows. And it's not just through politics. I think about organization as within every institution, right? So within politics, we can talk about what organization looks like. The Republican Party has been in its organization deeply broken for a long time. And I think we've had some changes in leadership that hopefully will turn the page on that. But you could think about organization within every other institution too. Think about organization in corporate America and in capital markets, where you historically, for the last ten years, had three incumbent institutions, Blackrock and State street and Vanguard, that have defined using the power of capital and the power of organization to dictate how the rest of corporate America behaves. Well, the other side needs to get organized and say, you know what? We're going to counter that through competitive forces that say companies should not be vectors of advancing left wing political ideologies, but they should be focused on maximizing profit for shareholders and creating value for society by making products and services for their customers.

That's getting organized in capital markets and in corporate America, getting organized at the level of k through twelve education. Who are governing our school boards? People who are effectively social activists. You have a lot of other people, myself included. I haven't run for school board before, but assume that that's gonna be somebody else's problem. No, we gotta get organized and say that, you know what, parents determine where their kids go to school. Use actual choice measures to hold public schools accountable. And for the public schools, we do have representation out there that stands for educating the next generation of kids rather than indoctrinating the next generation of activists. So you could do the same thing at universities, at philanthropies, at nonprofits. But getting organized doesn't mean just one top down maneuver. If we're gonna save this country, it's gonna be in each of those domains one at a time. And so I was in it in the presidential race to start with reforming and getting organized and tearing down the deep state and the federal bureaucracy, which is one of those tools that has been weaponized, that needs to be, I think, shuttered. I think personally, if we take care of that, a lot of the others become that much easier.

But we're going to need people to get organized in the domain of higher education, k twelve education, corporate american capital markets, and the nonprofit and philanthropy sector to be able to actually saved this country. Bottom up, man.

I'm talking about, I'm just, I mean, I'm talking about Congress. I'm talking about this. I don't even think they're organized. It's a disaster up there.

First thing we need is term limits.

And so, yeah, that's a great point. But if we do term limits, that's an amendment to the Constitution, correct?

You know, I think that is an amendment to the Constitution, which was a high hurdle. Definitely an amendment to the constitution was a high hurdle to pass. But here's my way of at least getting the wheels greased, using the corruption against the corrupt system itself. So then I'm not gonna be the next president. But if I were the next president, here's what I would do. The deal I would put up to Congress is, all right, here's term limits. Three terms for Congress, two terms for the US Senate. Most of them don't want to do it, not because it's a bad idea for the country, but because it's a bad idea for them individually. And so I don't love this deal, but here's how we would get it through at overwhelming majority levels, because there's bipartisan support for this. People across the country, Democrat and Republican, want term limits in Congress. Why isn't it happening? The people who have to vote on it because it requires a constitutional amendment, requires passage in both houses and ratification by the states. The people who are going to vote for it, it's against their self interest. So the deal I would make is this, were going to have term limits, but if you pass it, it doesnt apply to you, the people who vote for it, that Congress is grandfathered in.

And any time one of those seats is replaced by somebody else whos voted in to take it, then it applies to them going forward. So theyre binding the future without binding themselves. Now, this is a wildly popular bipartisan policy. I think it would pass in an instant even as a constitutional amendment. Theres certain types of term limits that dont require a constitutional amendment. So you have the term limits that I favor for bureaucrats, right. If the US president can't work for the people of this country for more than eight years. Neither should any of those federal bureaucrats either, in my opinion. Those eight year term limits don't require an amendment. They don't even require congressional action. That's something the US president can say as a hiring policy for most roles. We have an eight year term limit. You can't just sit and squat and collect a paycheck from the taxpayer without any political accountability for more than eight years. If I, as the president, can't do that either, that's a term limit we could get past even without Congress. And so I think there are things we can do anyway to grease the wheels of saying that you take the self interest of the congressman off the table.

It's amazing what they would do. The bans on. I don't know where you are on this, but the bans on insider trading or the bans on trading of stocks, we won't even call it insider trading. The bans of trading of individual stocks by congressmen and senators or by bureaucrats. I don't see the public policy argument for how that advances the interests of the american people. But the reason, and I've gone to even republican caucuses of the congressmen, they're dead set against this. Most of them are. Do the same thing. Say, okay, okay, make the rule. Think about what's in the best interest of the country by taking your self interest off the table. It doesn't apply to you now. They don't have to think about themselves. Right. It only applies to the next guy. It's amazing what that does in clearing one's mind. So those are the kinds of things I would do.

I think it's brilliant. But where I'm going, if it is an amendment to the constitution, and look, I'm not near as knowledgeable as you.

I don't know about that.

But how many times has the constitution been amended?

Because what I worry about is, well, actually 17, right? Because you have the Bill of Rights.

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So there's two ways. I mean, this gives a little technical, but there's two ways to amend the Constitution, okay? One is through congressional action, and then you take it to the states to ratify what Congress amends. I think that that would not open up Pandora's box. Cause that requires the presentation of a very specific amendment, term limits for congressmen that that is codified. And what do we say through term limits? What are we saying to the people? That we believe in a culture of service. Public service is about serving the public, not yourself. That we believe in a culture where different people at different stages of their life say, I'm gonna go into public service, I'm gonna do my part, and then get the heck out of there and go back to productively living my life and contributed this country in other ways. That's the kind of thing that qualifies as a constitutional amendment that could really unite and galvanize a civic spirit in this country and restore trust. To say that we're not sending a class of professional politicians acting like leeches, as they do today, on the taxpayers who fund them, that'd be the way to do it.

There's a second way to amend the Constitution that some people favor, which I don't. I'm actually sympathetic to it, to their motivations, but I don't think that we need to go there, and I don't think we're in a moment where we should go there right now, which is called an article five convention of states. So that's where a certain number of states can, under article five of the Constitution, call a whole convention. You think about the original constitutional convention was amending what the older system was, and that was what the constitution came out of. You could do that again under article five of the Constitution there. And a lot of the opponents to the article five convention worry about this. You're opening Pandora's box. You could just throw out the other amendments, too, and just come out with something totally new. I don't think we need to go there. I don't think that that's. We've gotten to that point as a country yet. I think let's start with just electing the right person to lead the executive branch of the government, to actually use that authority to shut down the unconstitutional fourth branch of government.

The biggest constitutional breach in America today. All the threats to the Second Amendment, to the First Amendment, all of that. The Fourth Amendment. You take a look at the FISA reauthorization and everything else going on right now. A lot of that originates with the deep state. And people use this term, the deep state. What is it? It's the people who were never elected to run the government, the four plus million federal bureaucrats who are actually writing the regulations that act like laws, that bind to the behaviors of businesses and people across this country who were never elected to do it in the first place, and who the constitution doesn't even recognize as existing. See, if our founding fathers went and walked around the bureaucracies of Washington DC, they would find it unrecognizable. They would say, well, what's this? We set into motion a system where you have checks and balances between three branches of government. Theres a legislative branch that makes the laws. Theres an executive branch that enforces the laws. Theres a judicial branch, the highest organ of which is the Supreme Court, that interprets the laws. Whats going on with all of these bureaucracies?

With 4 million plus people making most of the rules that bind peoples lives, that have zero accountability attached to them, whats going on there? Thats unconstitutional. Thats why its unrecognizable. We don't need an article v convention to change the constitution to address that real threat to liberty. What we really need to do is just apply the constitution we already have. And the sad part is leaders from both parties have utterly failed to do it. I mean, the administrative state, that's what we call the deep state administrative state. The managerial class, the shadow government, whatever you want to call it. The people who we elected to run the government, they're not the ones running the government. It's this other class of people, the 4 million managerial bureaucrats. It's grown in influence under both political parties. Right. And I think that they're getting their wheels greased by Republicans and Democrats alike. That's what we need to do. Now, I'm sympathetic to the people who say we need an article five convention and we need to start the revolution again. Well, like you said, there's a risk you could just toss out the other amendments and go in the other direction.

We don't need a new constitution. We could add one. We could add a 28th amendment to add term limits. And that's something I'm in favor of. The real thing we need in this country is not a new constitution. We need to apply the constitution that we already have, and that requires, and it starts with a president with the spine to do it. That's why I ran. That was the, I wouldn't say the sole premise, but that was the number one goal of my candidacy, was to get in there, use the current Supreme Court, which agrees with everything I've just told you as the backstop, to say we're shutting down the fourth branch of government, that we're going to fire millions, without exaggeration or hyperbole, millions of federal bureaucrats. The people who we elect to Congress, they may not all agree with me on everything, but at least it will be the people who we elect to run the government that are actually running the government. That was the core premise of my candidacy for us president. And as I said, the people of this country in the republican primary base went for a guy who they said is saying similar things, but has actually done a lot that we appreciate.

So now I'm behind him. But I do think that that is the thing that we need to accomplish. And if there's something that I would push the next administration to do, above all else, shut down the deep state and the rest of our problems become that much easier to solve. And I do think that that's doable without tossing the constitution aside.

I just, I got a quick quote going back to term limits. So how long do you think that would take to flush these people out.

If we did it the way that I said? Yeah, that would happen organically, I think, in about a ten year period in.

The case, because I get worried. I get really worried. I look at the population now instead of just the politicians. I mean, just, if you look at Congress, these numbers aren't correct, but they're damn near this extreme. Congress has, what, like a 10% ish approval rating and like a 90% ish reelection rate.

So how do you, how do you explain that?

How do you explain, I mean, it's the people, it seems like we're our own problem here.

Yeah. So it's interesting you say that. I mostly agree with that. Back to our boy Thomas Jefferson, who we're talking about earlier, he had some wise words, and I try to say it as elegantly as he did. I think the way he said is the government we elect is the government we deserve. And what he's saying is, you know what? If you get it, if you get the cesspool that you want, but you're the people who elected them, well, you deserve it, and you earn your damnation. And that's what we've earned right now. That's what Thomas Jefferson would say. I think that that's mostly true. There's an intervening variable, which is the influence of money on politics, which is what I talked about earlier, one of those three eye openers, the gatekeepers of american politics. You see, they have a vested interest. So why do those people keep getting elected? It's because they're propped up by people who get something in return for propping them up. Right. You wonder why certain people might change their mind from one position on the Ukraine war to another, or from one position on reauthorizing FISA to another, it's when they get the phone call, right?

Get the phone call from the people who provide their mother's milk. Money is the mother's milk of politics. When mommy calls, you're not gonna get your milk unless you do what's required. And so, in some ways, yes, it's up to us as the people to still see through that. We're the ones who fall for the ads that were served up on cable television or now on digital ads or whatever. Yes, there's a sheep like element to each of us as human beings, but I think there's a lion that lives within each of us, too. And right now, the inner sheep has taken over. So you're right. I am all in favor of every one of us taking a long, hard look in the mirror and say, if I'm complaining about the media, you can talk about politics. You talk about the media, too. That only exists so long as we the people are bending the knee and serving as customers to what they say. Same thing as constituents to the politicians who we elect. We can complain about them all we want. Part of the problem is staring us in the mirror. What is it that makes me want to behave like a sheep rather than a lion?

What is it that makes us want to bend the knee to some authority? And I think there's a deeper discussion to be had there. When faith and patriotism and family and hard work and all the things that our sense of purpose disappear, we as people are lost and are just prone to bend the knee to even self harming behaviors that put up politicians that act against our interests. So, yes, that's a deep discussion. Definitely half the story. But the other half of the story is the people don't really get a choice when money's the mother's milk of politics and the people who they even hear about. Right. It's one thing to say that I heard about two different candidates, and I chose this one, and that's my fault. That's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, the government we elect is the government we deserve. It's another, you may not even hear about the people who are trying to actually challenge the status quo because literally the system is bought by the very people who are hostile to your interests. And I do think that's a big part of what's happening in both political parties, for that matter today.

It's not a republican versus democrat point. It's this managerial class that has a chokehold of the government. And every one of these other institutions, our universities, much of capital markets, corporate America, the financial sector, the media, that managerial class versus the everyday citizen, that's the real dividing line in this country. I saw it firsthand in many ways, running for us president. I think that that managerial class is what we're gonna have to really dismantle, really nuke that structure if we have a chance of getting this country back.

How are you gonna do that? Yeah, how are you gonna dismantle them, the managerial class?

Well, I can tell you how I would have done it if I were successful in what I set out to do. And I'm hopeful that Donald Trump, as the next president, is going to be empowered to do the same. Thing, is you can't reform it. I think the first thing is you have to reject the myth of reform. That's a hard thing to do. Reform is a myth. Think about well intentioned people to say, okay, here's how things are running. I want to go in and reform it. Fill in the blank of it. FBI, ATF, CDC. Fill in three letter Alphabet soup. EPA, FDA, sec, TSA, God knows what. The idea that you can reform that beast is a myth. The way that beast, what Thomas Hobbes called the Leviathan, the monster, the way they view elected leaders is like cute little puppets that come along every four years. And in many sense, that's what elected leaders are. They behave that way. They're puppets of the people who provide the mother's milk. And so these bureaucrats view them the same way. These are cute little puppets that come along every four years. I was here long before you arrived, and I'm going to be here long after you're gone.

And so they view that as a little bit of an inconvenient constraint, like a passing cloud in the sky. Maybe a little bit of a rainstorm here, but don't worry, the rainstorm will pass. That's the way they view elected leaders. They say, we're the ones who actually exercise the real power. So if that structure is intact, you can't reform it by saying, I don't know, fire Christopher Ray. What are you gonna get? You get James Comey 2.0. It's the machine underneath him that you can't take a chisel to. You gotta take a chainsaw. And does that have some costs? It does. Does that have some risks? It does, actually. Absolutely, it does. Are there risks of inconveniences? Are there risks of some disruptions to the status quo? Yes. You can take that risk and make that sacrifice. If you know what you're sacrificing for, it's the long run existence of this country. But that's what it's going to take, is a willingness to not engage in incremental reform because that's a myth. But to engage in a wholesale raising of the managerial apparatus, but not a raising of the constitution. I'm not saying throw that out.

To the contrary. That actually revives our constitution. Three branches of government with checks and balances, executive, legislative, judicial. We don't have to make it up. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to rediscover the one that already worked for the first 250 years. And so that's the way you would do it. Mass firings fire not a few thousand federal bureaucrats. I think of the 4 million federal bureaucrats, you know how many the president of the United States or the new administration appoints? We're talking like tens of thousands out of like maybe 10, 20, 30,000 out of four plus million. The rest, the conventional dogma has held, are immune from being fired by the US president. Think about that. That even the US president can't fire the people who work for him. Well, let me tell you something. Somebody who's run businesses and anybody else who's honest, who's run a business will tell you the same thing. If somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you in some sense. It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to actually change it.

Well, it turns out if you read the law carefully and understand exactly how this works, no, the president of the United States absolutely can fire these employees. The reason they say they can't is because of these rules called civil service protections, which say that, I don't know if you work at the FDA or the FTC or whatever, I can't fire you because I disagree with your view on abortion. All right, say what you will about the rule, that's what the rules say. You can't politically retaliate. Those rules do not apply to mass firings. If you went in and said every person whose Social Security number ends in an odd number is out, and every person whose Social Security ends in an even number, at least in the first round, is in, that's totally fine because nobody can sue you then for civil rights violations or for racial discrimination or gender disparate impact or for political retaliation. No, all that's off the table because it's a large wholesale firing. That's how you'd start. Large mass firing across the board take certain agencies that weren't really properly authorized in the first place and needn't exist. I'd put the ATF in this category.

I put a lot. I have a lot that I'd put in this category.

Who else would you put in there?

I know there's a lot in this category. Some boring ones. Food and nutrition services fns inside the Department of Agriculture totally captured a lot of lobbying interests. I mean think about what the kids are eating in schools. Its a context of just large food companies capturing that system. Why do we need that bureaucracy in the first place? We dont shut down fns while were on one that starts with an f. I think its a good case for shutting down the FBI. Does that mean we dont need federal law enforcement? No, we of course need federal law enforcement. Let's reorganize it in a way that you could take, you know, what is it? It's 80,000 some odd employees. I gotta get the exact numbers. But we put together a full plan. You could take a certain number of them moving to the us marshals, which haven't been tainted in the same way, actually have been far more effective at going after child sex trafficking cases.

Hold on. You would move, move.

Subset of agents. Agents on the front lines. Cause most of the people who work at the FBI are back office bureaucrats. Fire them, send them home. But talking about the investigative agents on the front lines, move them to the us marshals which is just purely focused on execution, which has been far more effective on execution on areas like child sex trafficking. Move them to other departments for complex financial frauds. Theres a part of the US treasury that looks at this stuff, its called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, that at least people there have expertise to smoke out the future sbfs of the world. And so for the small minority of people who are good people on the front lines, just executing the job of enforcing the laws rather than making them up. Move them to parts that haven't been corrupted yet and they can still enforce the federal laws that need to exist. But most of the structure you can shut down, shut down the Department of Education. You don't need thousands, tens of thousands of bureaucrats in Washington DC writing up the racial equity guidelines that public schools have to follow as a condition for getting federal money.

The federal government shouldn't be in the business of dictating what those public schools across the country do in the first place. Shut it down. Return that money to the people of this country. Think about the $80 billion budget. Put that across the states back to the people of this country. So those are just examples of agencies in those cases, ATF, CDC, FBI, Department of Education, clear plans for shutting them down wholesale and doing it in a smart way that doesn't hurt people, where if there's a sliver of what they're doing that's necessary, have it subsumed in an existing part of at least the government as the first step to make it very practical. So it's not some sort of. This isn't some theoretical fantasy land. This is something we can actually achieve. And then there's other agencies where you could say, okay, well, Congress has authorized the existence of it, fine, you could have a 75% headcount reduction, fire three quarters of the people who work there. There's actually the most important Supreme Court case of our lifetime came out in the last couple of years. It's called West Virginia versus EPA. And people have missed this in entirety, but it's by far the most important case if we use it in the right way.

It basically held that certain regulations at the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the coal industry, are unconstitutional because Congress never authorized the EPA to write those regulations. And it said if it relates to a major question. So it's known in the law now of what's called the major questions doctrine. If it relates to a major question, a question relating to a legal or constitutional right, or a question that has a major economic impact on people's lives, if it's a major question, those three letter agencies don't have the power to write those rules anymore. If that regulation of the EPA on the coal industry fails that test, and the Supreme Court held that it did, that means, literally, most federal regulations are unconstitutional today. Literally, the majority of federal regulations that are written governing how small businesses to large businesses to individuals operate, most of them are literally illegal under current law. So how would you go about changing that? Some of this is shutting down agencies. Some of this is firing three quarters. I think you could fire about three quarters of the 4 million people. You could fire at least 3 million of them.

That's part of how you do it. The other half is, you know, I would take. And we had a clear plan for doing this. You know, where I'd have been president to put an embed in each of those agencies. You could have someone reporting into a central hub. So you got the spokes in the agencies that are left the hub sitting in the White House to say, just enforce West Virginia versus EPA, identify every regulation ever written by this agency. And on day one, just say those are null and void. Literally, they're just nullified by executive action. They'll say, is that New York Times wrote an article on me when I proposed a plan like this, saying, the outsider, businessman, Longshot, who would rule by fiat? That's not ruling by fiat. What we've actually been doing as a country is ruling by fiat of the executive branch of regulatory agencies. What I would do is roll that back using the authority endowed by the Supreme Court in the last couple of years in this seminal case. A little technical and a little bit in the weeds, but you asked, how would we do it? That's how we do it.

It's very doable. I think President of the United States has the power to execute it. And on the back of that, what do you have? You got three branches of government that is at least reminiscent of, recognizable as the constitutional republic that our founding fathers set into motion. And I think that they're right now rolling over in their graves. I mean, what you see, America right now is a bastardization of what our founding fathers fought, a revolution, risking their blood and their treasure, risking their lives, losing their lives, in many cases, to declare independence from a british monarchy that we've actually just recreated. That's really what this is. A new monarchy in the form of this administrative state. And it's not. It's even more devious than, oh, they want to oppress us, and they're a tyranny that's hostile to the interests of everyday citizens. We miss the point if we think it's some sort of hostility to the people. The most devious part of this game, Sean, is, and it's gonna sound weird when I say it, maybe, but the most devious part of this game is the people in that bureaucratic apparatus. They're doing what they do not because they believe they're hostile to you, but because they believe they're being benevolent to you, to us, to we the people.

Right? Because their view is we the people could never be trusted to self govern. To sort out the questions on climate change or racial equity or the idea that you get to speak your mind, you get to say whatever the heck you want an opinion, whatever your opinion is, you get to express that opinion, no matter how crazy that is. That's crazy talk. A civilization can't flourish if mere peons or able to express their own opinions and have an equal voice at the ballot box. And if you look at most of human history, to be clear, most of human history agrees with them. Actually, most civilizations, old world, Europe included, had that same view of ordinary human beings, that they couldn't be trusted to self govern. But that's what made America great the first time around. And so if we're going to make America great again, we got to revive what made America great the first time around. And that's by embracing, not running away from, but embracing some rather radical 1776 principles. And it's that radicalism of 1776. It's not moderation. It's the radicalism of the american revolution that actually unites this country, and it's going to reunite this country if we have the courage to stand up for it.

I'm with you. How close are you with Trump?

We've built a pretty good relationship.

Good.

We've gotten close, especially since the time I dropped out of the race. We've had a chance to spend a lot more time together in the last few months.

Do you see? Look, a lot of people are calling you, saying you would be a great vp. A lot of people want you in his cabinet. What do you think about that?

That's a decision for Donald Trump to make. I mean, I think the beauty of being the us president is, I think, if done well, you're exercising the executive authority vested in you, as I said, to shut down agencies, fire millions of federal bureaucrats, but also choose who you want to hire. And he and I have had some great conversations. I want to be respectful of the detailed conversations we've had, but I want to serve this country and have maximal impact in whatever way I can. And we've got a great relationship. And I think he's got some great ideas in mind for how we might be able to work together. But I think what he wants in a vice president versus what he wants in a different cabinet position, those are decisions for him to make. And I'll make whatever decision allows me to have the maximal positive impact I can on this country.

Where do you think you would have the maximum positive impact?

Well, look, I'll start with the basic principle that people are most successful in achieving what they're passionate about. Right. It's hard to succeed at something that you have to acquire a passion for. Start with where you have passion, knowledge, and capability, and then use that. And different people, every one of us has our own unique, God given gifts, and yours aren't the same as mine that aren't the same as anybody else. Right? Everyone has their own unique gifts. And I think we just got to look ourselves in the mirror, as we were talking about earlier and ask ourselves what those gifts are. And so for me, if I think about what am I passionate about and what needs to get done in this country and what needs to get done not in some theoretical concept, but like, needs to get done now. I think there's two things the next executive branch of government can accomplish under Donald Trump's leadership. Take me out of it. But things that need to get done, that can get done, and that I happen to be really passionate about. And knowing something about one is how do you actually shut down the border of this country, secure it once and for all, and destroy the incentive structure that we create?

That's what it is, an incentive structure that we create to be here illegally and deal with this issue of immigration once and for all. And I have a, you know, I think a personal dimension here to this is I'm the kid of legal immigrants who came to this country through the front door. And I say this as the kid of legal immigrants. Your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. And I think it is a vestige of the deep state that accounts for that. I mean, right now, the reason people are coming into this country isn't because you have a shortage of people who are chasing them down or trying to go after them. I've been to the southern border. It's our own government actors that are rolling out the red carpet, paving the way for what I will call a mass invasion of this country. So we talk about basic steps we can take, like ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals, like moving our own military to the southern border, like ending all funding for Central America until they've blockaded their own borders, each country, from Venezuela to the southern border of Texas, like ending federal funding for sanctuary cities, like mass deportations of anybody who's in this country illegally.

That's a touchy subject. But you know what? There's a million people, over a million, who have had a final order of removal. That means they've gone through the court system. There's no appeal left. It's a final order from the judicial system that still are in this country right now, mass deporting those people, people who have committed a crime. Start with that. If you've had the largest massive influx of illegal immigrants to this country in american history, logic says you have to have the largest mass deportation in american history using existing laws. The things I said don't require new laws. They require existing legal authority. So if you're talking about two kinds of mass deportations, if you will, mass deportation of people who are in this country illegally and wreck the incentive structure that they have to be here in the first place. And then a different kind of deportation. Let's deport millions of federal bureaucrats out of the federal government and deport many of those agencies by shutting them down. And deport many of the federal regulations by actually eviscerating that. Those are, I think the two categories that certainly motivated my candidacy for us president is restoring the actual existence of our national identity.

That includes the rule of law through restoring basic border policies and, yes, deportation policies to go along with it. And then combine that with a deportation of the bureaucratic class out of Washington, DC through shutting down the administrative state. Those are the two things that I believe need to be done that were the, for me, I'm passionate enough about, that were the motivations for my candidacy for president and putting me to one side. Whatever role I may play, I believe that Donald Trump has the capability and the willpower to be able to still achieve. I think those are high on the list.

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And so we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset. We talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on at the end of every month where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it, check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping all the firearm stuff. Pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com vigilance elite, or just go in the link in the description. It'll take you right there. And if you don't want to and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine, too. I appreciate it. Either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you. How would you, how would you even begin to do this? And how would you. Are you interested in appeasing both sides of the aisle here by doing this?

I'm not interested in appeasing anybody. Well, in fact, it will require. Appeasement isn't the right word. I'm interested in uniting this country. That's what I'm interested in.

That's what I'm interested in.

Yeah. I'm interested in uniting the country, not appeasing somebody sitting on one side of an aisle in Washington, DC. Cause that's a broken apparatus. We think about uniting the country. That's what we're missing.

How do you bring the right and the left together?

I don't think that the people of this country. On the tick, the two things that I just named, let's just go in sequence of those. Let's start with the border issues and the immigration issues. So one of the things I did in the campaign is I went to parts of the country where traditional republican candidates don't go. I think it was after you and I spoke. I went to the south side of Chicago. When you and I spoke last. I mean, you know, I came here.

Oh, yeah, really?

Over a year ago. I went to the south side of Chicago, went to Kensington in the inner city of Philadelphia. These are places where the political consultant class would tell you, you're wasting your time, brother, in a republican primary. And maybe there's some wisdom, because I didn't end up winning the race, right, but I started at 0.0, and I ended up at about 8% in Iowa and would have had 8% in New Hampshire. I dropped out before New Hampshire because I wanted all of that to go to Trump. And most of it did end the primary process. But anyway, advice notwithstanding, and maybe you could debate whether I should have followed the political advice. I went to some politically unconventional places because I was running to lead a nation, not some segment of a nation or one political party. And I'll tell you some interesting things I saw there. I went to the south side of Chicago. What do we see? Yeah, a lot of people disagreed with me, challenged me to my face on. They want racial reparations. I'm against. It wasn't easy to be in a room full of, you know, 150% Democrat, 95% black room that's clamoring with people in the audience standing up, what's your policy on racial reparations?

One woman, midway through my answer, she just turns around from the microphone, puts her back to me and walks straight out of the room. That's the level of contentiousness we had. And yet when we get to the issue of illegal immigration in this country, it turns out that they're turning South Shore high school, at the time I visited, into an encampment for migrants at a cost of $7,000 per migrant per month. Baby formula sneakers, no problem. If you're an illegal migrant. You got a lot of people in that community. Democrats, sure. On the left. Sure. Of one racial group that isn't historically considered to be a republican voting bloc. Sure. Who were probably more in favor of my hard border policies than many of the republican rooms that I've visited over the course of the last two years because they're rightly asking, you know, you say you're America first. What about me? I say, you know what? You have a point. America first includes all Americans, black, white, democrat, republican, gay, straight, all included. The first and sole moral duty of us elected leaders is to us citizens. And that includes the people who were in that room, who were rightly up in arms about the way in which illegal immigrants are being treated when they're talked about the rule of law and the breakage of the rule of law in Chicago and criminals who need to be arrested.

And I believe in all of that. But they say, isn't that a little hypocritical when your own government is the one turning our own high school into an encampment for those migrants? And by the way, many of them have the same view that I did on Ukraine as well. We're forking over, what, 100, $200 billion to some country halfway around the world, arguably one of the most corrupt nations on planet Earth, if not at least among so called democratic nations. And we're sending our taxpayer money over there when we could be using those same resources, including military resources, to secure our own border, the absence of which is creating an invasion that's landed on our own doorstep in places like the south side of Chicago to Philadelphia to New York City. So, yes, are we going to unite the country? Absolutely. Are we going to unite the political class, many of whom have vested interests in the policies we're talking about here? I mean, you're not supposed to say it this way, but let's be honest. When you talk about the democratic party apparatus, no, I'm not going to bring that party apparatus along, but am I going to bring along their constituents?

Absolutely we will, with these policies because most Americans agree that we are still bound by the rule of law, that a nation without Borders is not a nation. Now, the democratic party apparatus wants these policies because its the hard truth. Theyre importing long run voters. Right. So its no accident that the very people who are in favor of open border policies are also the same people who happen by some massive coincidence. Its not a coincidence, but some massive coincidence to be against voter id laws. Its a totally separate issue. And if you go back to what Democrats were saying back in 2013, they were saying this publicly back then. This is part of securing lasting electoral majorities. Now, they've stopped talking about that as openly. But there's a difference between being bipartisan, reaching across the aisle in Washington, DC, to the bureaucratic managerial class, which is not our goal and ought not be our goal, versus uniting the country of Americans who have diverse views on a lot of things but still share the same basic values 80% of us do in this country. I strongly believe that. That's important to me. That's a goal.

And same thing with flushing the administrative state. The same thing. I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican. The people who we elect to run the government ought to at least be the ones who run the darn government. That much we can agree on. And, by the way, that you're free to speak your mind on, you may disagree with me on abortion or climate change or policy, whatever it is, and we can disagree like hell, but you have the right to say it without some government actor in the deep state threatening a social media company to silence or suppress what you have to say. And we agree on that, even as we disagree like hell on any range of other policy questions, tax rates to energy policies in this country. I think that that's how we actually unite the country. I don't think we're going to unite the country through moderation, through the idea of, you know, let's say there's a football field showing up at the 50 yard line, reach, stretch, hold hands and sing Kumbaya. At most, you're going to get the people who are at the 30 yard line over to the middle.

I want to unite the whole country, the entire football field. But the way we're going to do that is reviving the common thread that unites that whole country. And one of the things I have appreciated, and I've been respectful of the conversations I've had with President Trump. But in the last couple of months, certainly, and we've had an opportunity to spend a lot of time in the last few months, one of the elements of his message that I have loved hearing from him publicly is he's been saying this consistently on the campaign trail, and I think it lands. It lands with me, for sure, but I think it lands with people across this country who are like me, who have our views, but want to see a united country. Success will be our vengeance. Right? Success is unifying. And I think that Joe Biden is a guy who pledged to unite the country, but failed to do it, that actually opens up a new opportunity for President Trump not only to accomplish the kinds of things that he did in 2016, but to unite the country while doing it. And I think it's one of the things that once people in this country know that we care about national unity, that it's an objective we care about.

Not that we're gonna use that as some sort of excuse to sacrifice on our principles, but to the contrary, we're gonna embrace our principles because we believe that's what's gonna unite us as a country. That I think, actually alone has the power of achieving a unity that we're missing is just authentically gesturing towards unity, I think, will be a huge leap that Donald Trump can take as the next president to unite this country. If Donald Trump talks about the importance of national unity, talks about the importance of success as unifying, of channeling our vengeance into success, and unifying this country through success, which he has been doing, which I think is a good thing, if he continues to do that through not only winning the election, but governing that alone, I think will go miles towards healing this country and turning the page on a chapter where heres where id love to be in a year or two as a country, to be able to look back at the last five years, maybe longer, and just all of us take a big step back and say, boy, do we screw some things up. Boy, did we actually censor speech that could have actually stopped us from locking down schools and messing up a generation of young people and their social interactions, or even killing people who didn't get medical care because we were supposedly stopping another epidemic and stopped you from arguing about it, or to say, hey, man, we really spent a lot of money on some foreign wars that increased the risk of greater global conflict when we got actual security issues to address here at home.

And, you know, even though we might disagree, we started hating each other for our disagreements, as opposed to acknowledging our right to be able to air those disagreements. And, you know, we used to be a country where the best person got the job. And, you know what? We screwed up in the 18 hundreds where the best person couldn't get the job. Because they had black skin, and now we're screwing up because they can't get the job because they have white skin. Boy, we screwed some things up over our 250 years as a country. Our 250th anniversary as a country is in 2026. Maybe heading into that anniversary, that's what we might be saying is over the last 250 years. But even over the last five years, we screwed a lot up. But here's what we're gonna do, is we're gonna acknowledge that, and we're gonna have our leaders that acknowledge it and say that there are still some basic principles that unite us as Americans, and we're not gonna dilute them. We're gonna embrace them. And that's how we're gonna turn the page on this ugly chapter in our history and move forward as one nation, still married to each other, as citizens, in a relationship as citizens, rather than a national divorce, which I think is otherwise, where this road ends, let's go.

Back to the border. Would you make it easier for the. Would you make the immigration process lighter? Easier?

Depends on for who. I think we gotta operate as a championship team. And the mentality of a championship team is we want the very best to play on our team. So if you're a sports team, you wanna go out and recruit the very best. So do I wanna do that as a country? Absolutely. I mean, Elon Musk, guy who's responsible for a lot of value creation in the United States of America, to say the least, and many others like him, we wouldn't have those people if they did not immigrate to this country and want to be here, because we're the place where the champions come. So for people who have actual value to add to this country, and it's not just a bunch of tech guys in Silicon Valley. I'm talking about, talking about across our economy, to add value, not just to our economy, but to our culture, civic commitments, the citizenship test on the back end, to become a citizen, to be able to be a voting citizen, I'd bring that up to the front end to say, if you're entering this country on any kind of visa program, you got to know the basics about this country.

You gotta really pledge allegiance to this country. But if you're selecting for skills, loyalty, and a commitment to the civic nationalist vision for what it means to be an american, then the very best and brightest of those, I think we do make it too difficult for them to be here. I met a guy. I'm a tennis fanatic of sorts, but I played tennis when I was in South Florida last time with a guy who was. He's a great guy. Played in the pro tour he was on. He was number one on Princeton's tennis team, I think, for four years. Even from his freshman year onward, he's like a concert level pianist. He can do a Rubik's cube in a matter of, what, 30 seconds. It's kind of like a genius type. Our institutions have educated him. Went to Princeton, went to Harvard business School. He's working in real estate investing. Smart guy. The firm that employs him loves him. He's been over a decade waiting to get a green card in this country. So that guy, if he asked me, as he. Did, you have any advice on how to speed this up? I couldn't give him the best advice, but the best cynical advice I could give would have been, you know what?

Sadly, our country's laws are such that you have a better chance of having a path to citizenship if you just catch a flight to Mexico and cross the southern border. And that's a broken system. So I think in certain cases, yes. But I do think that. Should we make it easier to immigrate here on grounds of asylum? No. Should mass chain migration be easier? Just to say that, okay, if you're some distant relative and somebody who was part of the championship team came over, that your great uncle's sister also gets to come here because you're part of the same family. No, that's chain migration. I don't think that should be easier than it is now. And the question is, what types of immigration advance this country's national interest? And so the way I look at immigration policy is the way I look at every policy. What policies? Including immigration policy, you could fill in the blank. I could say foreign policy, you could say economic policy, but you're talking about immigration. So let's talk about immigration policy. What immigration policy best advances the interests of the citizens who are already here? That should be the question.

And is there some level of immigration and some kind of immigration that better advances the interests of our own citizens? Yes, there is. Pursue that. Are there types of immigration that don't advance the interests of our own citizens here? Yes, there are. We should limit that to zero, starting with the most abrasive form of all, which is illegal immigration across our southern and northern border in this country.

I want to switch subjects here. I want to talk about the barge or the container ship that hit that bridge in Baltimore. What do you think that was?

So I'm never one to speculate, Sean. I'm always tied to facts, I will say that it was. Let's just start with an obvious thing. We could say it's bizarre that we just watched something like that happen, shrug our shoulders, and say, hey, that's life in the United States of America. And by the way, that there was, you know, you watched that video. It was sort of. I'm sure you watch, if you're asking me about it, you must have watched the video. It was. It was disconcerting. It was truly bizarre. And to be able to just turn the page on that and say, oh, yeah, you know, nothing to see here, Baltimore, we got your back, and we're gonna help you rebuild, whatever that means. And then we're all just supposed to move on, secure as a country, man.

Thank you for. Thank you. I woke up, I saw that first thing, maybe 05:00 a.m. tweeted about it, got called a conspiracy theorist. Right away I said, this was probably on purpose. And then I deleted it because I was like, man, maybe. I don't know. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here. But black box goes out right before it hits. They lose electricity, it turns. And, you know, every time we see a mass shooter in the US, right? We gotta wait sometimes a week before it's, this is who it was. But within a matter of hours, we get, oh, no, this is. We know for sure lost electricity.

I'm not gonna speculate. Right? Cause I don't have the information I'm always tied to. I say some things that often challenge conventional norms and wisdom, but whenever I do, I'm grounded to facts. I don't have those facts here. But what I will say is, it is beyond bizarre that we just accept as a country right now, even just at the level of mediocrity, accepting that, oh, this is just something normal that happens in the United States of America, and we're supposed to just turn the page as though it didn't happen without asking deep and hard questions of how the heck is it that we're now living according to third world results from? I mean, let's just take a look at the third world dom of the United States right now. You got a party in power that's using prosecutorial power to arrest a political opponent in the middle of an election that's also trying to have him removed from a ballot in certain states in the middle of a presidential election. That's a country where you got barges crashing into bridges, bridges come tumbling down, trains that go off the tracks, chemical spills in places like my home state in Ohio, all of which were just supposed to throw our hands up in the air and accept that this is the new America crime wave like we've never seen in this country.

An open border with 10 million illegal people are coming in. A mass migration across this country, yet military resources being directed somewhere halfway around the world. Yeah. Is that the America that our founding fathers envisioned are set into motion? No, it's not. It's the stuff of third world banana republics. And so at least at that base level, to say that when you see something like that happen in Baltimore, that your reaction is just supposed to be, okay, nothing to see here, move on, and let's continue pretending like that didn't happen as opposed to just reflecting on where we are as a country. At minimum, forget any other specific speculation about what did or didn't happen there. At minimum, asking ourselves what the heck happened here and what the heck is going on in our country is the right reaction rather than just apathy.

How the, so with that being said, I mean, there's been a, nobody trusts the government. Nobody trusts for good reason. How do you start to gain people's confidence back in the US, in the government?

Well, I think people should always be skeptical of the government. So I would say never trust the government. But we've been given a reason to systematically distrust everything we're told by the government. First answer is just start telling the truth. Start. Best way to tell the truth is admit the mistakes you've made. I think we would go a long way in this country if you have, say, president of the United States and then a counterpart in the media who does the same thing. Let's take the media example. I would say the same thing for the president to look the people of this country in the eye and to tell them, we, in the case of the media or in the case of the president representing the country, think about being a president is it's not about you. It's about you're representing the country. You inherit the past, you're leaving the entire nation. So to look the people in the country in the eye and say, we the government, we've lied to you for a long time. We've lied about a lot of things. Here's what we've lied about. Here's the truth of what we know.

Here's the truth about what we don't know. Think about the origins of Covid-19 how much we're systematically lied to. Think about what we do or don't know about topic x that you're not supposed to talk about. Could fill in the blank for what it is. I mean, a hot topic in the last year for congressional hearings has been uaps, whatever it is. Here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and here's where we told you something false, even though we knew it was false, and I'm sorry we did it, and here's why. It's never gonna happen again. And by the way, you shouldn't trust me right now, but we have to earn back your trust, and the way we're gonna do it is to just tell the truth again to the people of this country, believing that you can handle the truth. If you have a president who looks the people in this country in the eye and delivers that message, and just one member of the traditional media that systematically goes back through the last ten years and say, hey, we lied to you. In the case of the media, that's a business opportunity right there.

They would capture massive market share right out the gate. If you have a media organization that had the guts and the gall to step up and say, we screwed up, here's why we screwed up, and here's what we're gonna do to fix it and don't trust us yet, but we're gonna have to earn your trust back. That would go leaps and bounds to reuniting this country and at least beginning to rebuild trust in this country as well.

What about holding some of these bad players accountable publicly?

Oh, I think that that's gonna be required as an alternative. I mean, I was.

Who would you start with?

Well, I would start with government actors who have violated the law. I mean, take any government actor who has systematically lied, intentionally lied about what they knew or didn't know about the origin of Covid-19 or about the risks of rushing vaccines to market or whatever it is, knowing something and then intentionally lying or trying to cover it up. As a government actor, that's a violation of the law. And so if we're talking about restoring the rule of law at the southern border, which I favor and I will not budge on, we shouldn't make an exception for somebody who happens to, you know, be addressed as doctor before they're addressed just because they came out of the NIH or wherever else in the federal bureaucracy. If they violated the law in the same way, they deserve to be held accountable in the same way that any other citizen who violates the law is also held accountable. And so I'd start there with government actors who have violated the law. I think in the private sector, there's room for some level of leadership here where people owning this through honesty, I think, would go a long way.

So I actually, I was at the UFC 300 fight this last weekend. Great day, by the way. A lot of good fights that day. But I was sitting right up there, cage side, and Mark Zuckerberg was there, too. So we had a chat in between some of the fights. He's into fighting and whatever. I'll just spill the beans and share what we talked about. But he was telling me something to the effect of, he said, he's really into MMA. And so he said, we've become so neutered as a country, right? Why shouldn't we just embrace that? We have these human instincts. I've grown to like MMA quite a bit. So I was like, yeah, I agree with you. Okay. We're all sitting here watching UFC and talking about how great it is to watch UFC, and we've become neutered as a country. I said, well, what about that with respect to speech? How do you feel about that? And then he kind of paused for a second. He said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, I think you'd actually make the same argument for just saying that. You get to say what you want in this country.

We become too neutered by trying to have central moderators of who decides what you can and can't say. His response was, well, look, I'm actually a lot more pro free speech than people might know, and I've actually known a lot of his own tendencies. I believe that's actually probably true. It's about bending the knee and buckling the pressure. And so what I told him, and he said he would think about it, is, hey, listen, man, I think you could actually do a service to this country if you just came out, if it was in your heart, if you actually meant it, if you say you're pro free speech and you actually mean it, to just say, hey, I screwed up, you know what? Locking Donald Trump out of an account, a major president of the United States and now presidential candidate, to say that the decision to silence somebody and suppress them, even if I agree or disagree with what they had to say, was making the decision under pressure, under forces of pressure, where a lot of people were buckling to outside pressure, we become neutered as a country, and all of us are subject to that kind of pressure.

And some of us screwed up, and I screwed up. And if I were to make that same decision again, I wouldn't make the same decision if you said that. I think that would have a therapeutic effect on the country. That's a form of accountability. The best kind of accountability is where you actually own it for yourself. And I think people in this country, I think it's part of our human nature. We have, there's a part of us that wants vengeance, but there's also part of us that is hungry to forgive, actually. I think that that's one of the christian values that the nation was founded on. It's a founding value of judeo christian value. It's a founding value of this country. It's a value of many faiths across the world. It's something in our nature that opens our heart to forgiveness. But it requires somebody who deserves to be held accountable, to be the first person to hold themselves accountable if they're that person, I think that goes a long distance, too. And so if a guy like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, that was the extent of our conversation, I think he left it off saying he think about it.

That's where it ended. Yeah, that is definitely where it ended. Weird. But whether it's a member of the press at CNN, whether it's a guy who leads a large platform like meta, whether it's a US president, even if it's not Donald Trump saying, I screwed up, but we screwed up as a country, and we're talking together, leading this entire nation, that we as a federal government, have screwed up for the last 20 years. And I'm saying this not to blame somebody else, but I'm saying this on behalf of the government of the United States, to apologize to the people of the systematic lies that we have told you, not me as an individual, but we as leaders of this country, have told you for the last 20 years. But I'm saying it with the goal of saying we want to turn the page and move on as one nation under God, that's a separate discussion for another day. I think the four letterization of God in our culture, I think, is something that has left people hungry for purpose, too. But if we come back to just admitting those failures, that's, I think, the best form of accountability, rather than one side having to extract that vengeance from the other.

But that does require a level of self awareness, I think that does require a level of authenticity and temperance. And I think of most leaders of technology companies, I think Elon Musk has done a great service by bringing a competitive dynamic to the table that paves the way for this. But if the likes of the leaders of Google and YouTube and Facebook, countless other platforms, stepped up to the plate and say, hey, we got it wrong. And here's where we got it wrong. And not in some fake, faux humble kind of way to check the box and move on, but in a real way and have behaviors that then reflect that they mean it. I think that's far better than trials of prosecution for, you know, breakages of the rule of law in ways that challenge legal theories to push those prosecutions. It may be required at a certain point in time that you require legal accountability, certainly for government actors who have violated the law. I think that that's warranted. But to take it, then the next step, how great would it be if we actually had a culture of leaders, of those institutions just admitting their mistakes, doing it honestly, changing their behavior in a way that's credible, not some fake admissions, but a real admission of accountability?

I think that would be a long way that people, even outside of politics, leaders like Zuckerberg, could actually do a great service to this country if they actually owned the mistakes they'd made and changed their behaviors accordingly on their own. And I think we have an opportunity where I don't rule that out. I've not lost hope on that happening. I think it's actually a cascading effect. Right. If you imagine Donald Trump winning in a decisive landslide, as I believe is possible, assuming the mantle, saying that, you know what? I'm not going to compromise on the principles I ran on. We're going to enforce the rule of law. We're going to seal that southern border. If you're in this country illegally, I'm not going to just become moderate because I go into Washington, DC. I'm going to deport people who are in this country illegally. So I'm going to do what we told you we're going to do. But our goal on the other side of that is actually to unite the citizens who are here behind the common values and purpose of what it means to be american. I think that that leaves space for a lot of the bad actors to then take a page for that playbook and at least a certain number of them to reveal themselves not to have been bad actors, but maybe even good people who took bad actions.

And if we give ourselves the space to at least not put people in such a corner, sometimes if you put somebody in a corner, they're stuck having to only behave in the corner you've put them in. Right? But if you give people the space to come out of the corner, they feel trapped in. And I feel like a lot of the media does this to republican candidates all the time. But I think it can happen across the board, is if you put somebody in a corner and give them the only choice, they become the demon that you force them to be. And I think that if we give people the latitude to maybe admit error and correct course, I think that would be a preferred way of reviving and rebuilding this country, and I think we can do it.

I got another question. We only have ten minutes left.

Amen. All right.

It's a tough one. You're probably not going to like it, but do you have any apprehensions about Trump taking the presidency? If he does, let's take Biden out of the equation. I think the majority of the country knows he's incompetent or completely controlled, whatever. He's a disaster. He's a buffoon. Let's replace him with somebody that I.

Think there's a good chance, by the way, it's not gonna be biden for the reasons you mentioned. So, as a side note, I think one mistake that we're all making, and I've shared my opinions with leaders in the republican party, I've shared my opinions with President Trump, is we gotta be careful not to fall into this trap of complacency. I mean, you're a military guy. It's like the equivalent of a feint, right? Feint is you lead your opposition to a target that's not the real target for. There's a real operation that isn't the one that you're being led to follow. Well, that's exactly it. Looks a lot like what's happening to me is make the entire republican party's focus and platform in fundraising and everything focused on beating Biden. What a great way to get to July or August and then find out that actually all of that political, financial, and messaging capital was wasted, and you have three months before somebody who then actually doesn't go through a difficult vetting process to be the person they try to trot in. So who would that do on, who is that? Who would prop up? I think Michelle Obama is not crazy.

And how would they do that without bringing Kamala and his president?

Well, I think that Michelle Obama actually has a great way around that problem. Right. It'd be Joe Biden stepping aside for making Michelle Obama the nominee, which is how they solve their Kamala problem. And they have a Commonwealth problem right now, is you got a black woman who is occupying the seat of number two seat in a party that has defined itself based on race and gender identity politics. So if they were to sideline her as the obvious number two for someone like a Gavin Newsom that they bring in, I think they've bought themselves an identity politics problem. A white man for a white man, cis, straight white man for a cis, straight white male. Michelle Obama is a very elegant solution to that problem. And you could say so could be a Gretchen whitmer. As long as you're checking one of the boxes, I think that they have enough air cover to do it. Right. Okay. I think that would be the play. If it was Gavin Newsom. They could keep Michelle. They could keep Kamala Harris in the VP seat. She may or may not go for that, but that assumes that she and Joe Biden have any say in the matter.

Part of what you're seeing with the hunter investigations, with a lot of the other investigations swirling around Joe Biden, is that's part of, that's leverage, right, that they have on him behind closed doors and maybe less relevant, is not just Joe, but also Jill, who is probably the figure whos even more emphatically committed to making sure that Biden doesnt move. And theres also managerial class around them. Its not one managerial class. Theyre factions, many of whom have a vested financial interest to say if theyre proximal to the president, some of those people might lose their proximity to the presidency. Its a different figurehead that comes in. So there will be competing factions. But all ill say for right now is play this forward. I think there is still a decent likelihood that it's not Biden that we're actually running against. But you asked a different question.

I want to give you my concerns that I saw. I saw a flip on Bud light. I read an article on the Federalist that says he flipped on Bud light and that they're not that woke and gave some bullshit on, oh, well, they hire veterans while every major company in the US hires fucking veterans. So that's not an excuse.

Cause we got a lot of veterans.

The next thing I saw, which was about two weeks later, was the tick tock thing, which I know you don't think we should ban tickets on different grounds.

I can talk to you about.

I do.

Okay.

I think we should ban it. And the last one I saw was him saying that he's buddies with Xi Jinping and that he wants to bring chinese auto manufacturing into the country to supply Americans with jobs. But China has more industrial robots than anybody in the world, so that wouldn't be a major manufacturing job for Americans.

Yeah. So I just want to say one word about you. Look at most of the apps, and many of the major apps in the app store is not just TikTok, are chinese apps. And many of the user data transfers to China are actually coming from US companies. So where you and I are may not be that different, which is, I say, ban the behavior.

Okay?

Any forced data transfer to the CCP, ban it. Any turnover of CCP interference in what a company does in the United States of America, ban that. Make that a crime in the United States of America. The irony of that is that's gonna ensnare not just one chinese company. That's gonna end up ensnaring a lot of us companies, too. And that's why there's reluctance to take that broad of an approach, because a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, supposedly american companies, would actually be guilty of the same behavior. So in some sense, I would go far to actually solve the problem as opposed to using this thing of people who haven't given a damn about the threat that China proposes, somehow signing up for this. I view it's a skeptical charade in a sideshow. But put that to one side. Back to your question. Look, I ran for president for a reason, right? I believe that we should be uncompromising about the ideals that made this country great the first time around. And that's actually how we're going to unite the country, not through some sort of median compromise approach. That being said, I do think that, is any of us perfect as a human being or as a leader?

No. We're fallen human beings. That's what makes us human and not gods. But I do think that unambiguously, Donald Trump is going to be the best person in the race, certainly by far, to lead this country forward. And I think he's going to be not a good president. But I think he has the potential to be president of the second term even greater than the one that he was in the first. I think he had a great first term. I said it on the debate stage. I think he's the best president we've had in the 21st century. People really turned their heads at that one. So wait a minute. Let's just go down the list. George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. It's not even close. Who was the best president of the 21st century? It was Donald Trump, and that was in his first term. And I think in that second term, I truly believe he has an opportunity to go further, because he has, like any human being would, learned a lot from that first term. He came in, as I would have as an outsider without that experience in the government, but has learned and I've seen this in my conversation with him, learned a lot from that experience.

I think some of that, even in my conversations, I've learned a lot from him that are a little bit different from what my understanding might have been looking from the outside in, in terms of how he made some of those decisions. And I think hes learned from a lot of those experiences and is ready to go now to the next level of even more effectively administering that agenda. I mean, think about the way that theyre thinking really ahead to transitioning with a running start, rather than last time around, where it was a lot more difficult. He was hamstrung in the first two years of that presidency by a Russiagate investigation that was effectively made up nonsense out of a Hillary Clinton provided steel dossier that impaired his ability to govern for those first two years. I think those lessons learned create the potential for a second term that will be more successful than the first. But I cant speak for anyone but myself. Im going to do whatever I can to make sure that second term and that hes, first of all, most successful in getting there, in actually winning it by a decisive margin.

And second of all, when he gets there to be one of the most successful presidents in american history, I think thats truly what he has the potential to do with a guy who has the right America first vision, who has four years of experience with the great first term under his belt, now a decisive national reckoning, I think, against a failed president in Biden that could give Trump the mandate, not just in the executive branch, but even in Congress and the Senate, to implement an agenda in those first twelve months. Do I believe that he has the potential to be one of the most successful presidents in american history in that second term? I do, actually. And I'm not going to be. I'm never a guy who just sort of likes to, we're sitting in an armchair now, but pontificate in an armchair about what could or couldn't be concerns. I want to figure out what are each of us, myself included, able to do to make sure that we actually achieve that success? And, you know, I think I've been really, really encouraged by the conversations I've had with President Trump. This one's public, or he made it public in one of his speeches.

So I feel free to talk about it, is take New Hampshire. I had just dropped out of the race. I was talking to him backstage before one of the speeches he gave in New Hampshire. I think this gives me a lens that really sees a different dimension of Donald Trump. Than you would just get from the media. We're talking about the perils of a central bank digital currency in the United States of America. You're familiar with this issue. Yeah. And I think that Donald Trumps response. When I brought that up to him backstage, I said, listen, I think this could be something woven into your platform. It was an important part of my platform is the opposition to a central banked digital currency. What many professional politicians would do, would try to memorize the acronym. And you even see some other Republicans who ran for president take this approach and, well, leave that where it is. CBDC, Im against it. I dont know what it is, but Im against it. Versus Donald Trump, who was very honest, says, what the hell is that? Tell me what that is. And we discuss it. And he says, okay, well, why do they want to do it then?

Well, that's a guy who then wants the best arguments for the other side. He processes it, doesn't come to a decision on the spot, asks a couple of other people around him what their perspectives were, thinks about it, goes on stage, doesn't talk about it that night. Now, a few nights later, he goes back out on stage, and he's clearly talked to more people in the intervening period and said, tonight, I am pleased to announce that I am opposed to the creation of a central bank digital currency in the United States. And in New Hampshire, you have a very educated primary voter base that went nuts. They were cheering for him because they knew that was the right position for him to adopt. And, you know, he's also a guy who, I don't need the credit for this, but on stage just says, hey, this came out of my conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy a couple nights ago. And so that just defies everything that the mainstream media says about this guy, that he's some sort of dogmatic leader who doesn't listen to the people around him. What I see is actually the exact opposite of that.

Somebody who wants the best ideas to win, somebody who is interested in getting the thing done rather than just to take credit for it. That's actually the Donald Trump I've seen behind closed doors. And I think the more of the country is able to see that the more successful he's going to be, not just in winning this election, but to have the kind of mandate from the people of this country to do the right thing. Now is any leader, is any leader, myself or any other CEO or across this country, influenced by the people around them? Of course they are. So I think it's really important that the president of the United States have both the right head on his shoulders but also the right people around him. And I think that that was also one of the learnings from that first term is they had a lot of different kinds of people around them in that first term. And what I see for Trump and the team around him now is they're laser focused on making sure the people who they staff the next administration with are really aligned with his vision and his agenda.

And I think that's critical. And I think if they get that right, and I think they will, that second term is going to be one of the great terms of any president in us history.

Fair enough. Well, I appreciate it, Vic. I hope to see you in there, man. He's going to need a guy like you in that cabinet if he wins. Best of luck to you.

Whatever is required for the country, man, we're gonna do it. And it's good to be back with you.

Right on. Thanks for coming.

Thanks, man.

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