[@jackneel] “This War Is For AIPAC” James Fishback Reveals True Reason for Trump's Iran War

Link: https://youtu.be/Wf9EKbqopNQ

Duration: 127 min

Short Summary

James Fishbach is a 31-year-old former hedge fund analyst and fourth-generation Floridian running for Florida governor in 2026, who previously traded macro instruments including gold, oil, and interest rate derivatives worth $2 billion at his own fund. He argues that the Iran war benefits Israel rather than America, opposes Florida lending $385 million from its state pension fund to Israel, and promises to appoint a special prosecutor to reopen the Epstein investigation with full independence. Fishbach also discusses his positions on protecting American workers from illegal labor displacement, AI technology applications, and capitalism rooted in Christian ethics.

Key Quotes

1. "Pat Buchanan said it best that the US Congress really was Israeli occupied territory." (00:01:38)
2. "I would not just support the death penalty, but the death warrant that I would sign would be for public execution." (00:45:41)
3. "America is not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of pioneers and settlers." (00:53:25)
4. "We didn't buy it to stave off Chinese propaganda. We bought it so we could install propaganda of our own." (00:58:57)
5. "it shouldn't be controversial to say that no American should die for Israel." (01:01:00)

Detailed Summary

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Episode Overview

This podcast features James Fishbach, a 31-year-old former hedge fund analyst and fourth-generation Floridian running for governor in 2026, sharing his policy positions on foreign intervention, domestic priorities, constitutional rights, immigration, and AI technology. Fishbach presents himself as a political outsider willing to prioritize truth over career preservation, citing a regret minimization framework.

Guest Background

James Fishbach spent 10 years working at hedge funds, starting one called Macrovoyant focused on macro trading after college. He traded macro instruments including gold, oil, interest rates, and inflation, putting on $2 billion worth of interest rate derivatives trades at his own fund. Fishbach describes himself as a lifelong Republican who supported Trump from the "golden escalator" but now disagrees with the Iran war policy. His father served a year and a day in federal prison in the 1980s for a non-violent theft offense and has been denied employment, loans, and firearm rights since release. His mother was born in Baranca, Colombia, a small town known as "the oven of Colombia" due to extreme heat.

• Fishbach pledges to be the 47th governor of Florida, the youngest governor in America, and the sixth governor in his family
• The candidate lost his uncle in 2003 to drugs that came across the southern border while living on the streets
• He grew up witnessing major technological milestones including the first iPhone in 2007

Iran War and Foreign Policy

Fishbach argues the Iran war benefits Israel, not America, and characterizes this as a "lie" sold by AIPAC. He claims AIPAC's website states "We lobby for pro-Israel policies" and characterizes US Congress as "Israeli occupied territory." The bombing campaign began February 28th, with gas prices rising to their highest levels since 2022.

• Fishbach identifies two proximate causes for the war: Israeli interests and distraction from Epstein files revelations
• He estimates the Pentagon is requesting $200 billion for military operations
• The candidate proposes "would you rather" comparisons: $200 billion for bombing versus $62,000 bonuses for every qualified teacher, 1,300 rural hospitals, or down payment assistance for 20 million families
• As governor, Fishbach would never allow a single Florida National Guard member (14,000 members) to be deployed to a foreign war unless explicitly authorized by the United States Congress

Florida-Israel Financial Ties

The Florida state government is lending $385 million directly to the Israeli government from the state pension fund, which consists of money from teachers, firefighters, and first responders. Israel is the only foreign country receiving Florida state government lending money, done by purchasing Israeli war bonds after October 7th.

• Byron Donalds has taken $45 million between AIPAC corporate political action committees and hedge fund billionaires, including one named 39 times in the Epstein files
• The candidate characterizes this arrangement as using Florida public employee pensions to fund foreign military operations
• Fishbach promises to end this practice immediately if elected governor

Epstein Investigation Promises

Fishbach would appoint a special prosecutor to reopen the Epstein investigation with complete independence from the executive office. He states capital sexual battery in Florida carries the death sentence and would sign death warrants for public execution of convicted Epstein co-conspirators if evidence supports conviction.

• The special prosecutor will have complete discretion to subpoena Republicans and Democrats equally if implicated
• Epstein lived most of his time and committed most of his crimes in Palm Beach County, Florida rather than on his Caribbean island
• Thomas Matthews and Ro Khana pressured the DOJ to release the Epstein files, which contained approximately 6 million files
• The candidate frames this as the most important unfinished business in Florida's legal history

Campaign Progress and Events

Campaign polling improved from 2% to 23%, placing the candidate in second place in a crowded Republican primary field, beating both the lieutenant governor and former speaker of the house. On January 11, 2026, the candidate went viral after writing "No American should die for Israel" on a Marine's helmet. Four weeks after the viral helmet message, on February 8, 2026, someone attempted to set the candidate's house on fire with staff members inside, which he believes was connected to his political views.

• A Fox News debate is scheduled for July 21st where the candidate will share a stage with Ron DeSantis for the first time
• The campaign has raised significant grassroots support driven by the viral moment
• The candidate believes the fire attack represents the risks of speaking honestly about foreign policy and financial ties

Second Amendment and Red Flag Laws

Fishbach identifies as a "Second Amendment absolutist" who takes the text "shall not be infringed" very seriously. Under Florida's current red flag laws, individuals do not receive court-appointed attorneys and must fund their own defense while being disarmed during the legal process.

• A WWII veteran in Polk County, Florida had his firearms seized under a red flag law after telling an insurance adjuster he would come over with a "bazooka" over a claim dispute
• The veteran spent 12 months in court and paid $10,000 in attorney's fees for a non-violent statement made during a civil dispute
• Fishbach pledges to be a consistent defender of Second Amendment rights and opposes red flag laws as unconstitutional violations of due process

First Amendment and Free Speech

The UF College Republicans were banned for "so-called antisemitism," with lawyer Anthony Sabatini filing a federal lawsuit on their behalf. Raquel Pacheos, a 15-year Miami Beach resident and 9-year National Guard veteran, was confronted by Miami Beach Police after criticizing the mayor on Facebook for being too pro-Israel.

• Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) established that speech inciting imminent lawless action is not protected by the First Amendment; all other speech, including racist views, is protected
• TikTok removed the candidate's video from a rally where he stated he would defend his staff with an AR-15 against anyone attempting arson
• The candidate argues free speech protections are under coordinated attack from both corporate platforms and government entities

Immigration and Labor Policy

Pew Research estimates approximately 14 million people are living in the US illegally, while a recent Yale study estimates this could be as high as 23 million. Illegal immigration exploits both American workers (by dispossessing them of jobs, benefits, income) and third world migrants being trafficked and paid under the table.

• Job applicants in Florida Heartland counties like Okeechobee and Highlands are being displaced when busloads of migrants accept $3-4/hour versus $20/hour for the same work
• Billionaires who run the largest agricultural companies in Florida made their money over 30 years by exploiting illegal labor from the third world
• The New York Times profiled a 15-year-old boy in a 2022 article "The Kids on the Midnight Shift" who lost his arm illegally working at a meat processing facility in the Midwest, trafficked into the country
• A Lita hotel near Miami International Airport uses Indian workers via iPad to check in guests, replacing jobs that would go to local workers from Miami Gardens, Belle Glade, or Liberty City
• The speaker quotes Teddy Roosevelt stating America has one flag, one language (English), and no room for hyphenated Americans—only people who make the country their sole loyalty

Capitalism and Economic Ethics

The speaker argues capitalism is a good system, perhaps the best, but not perfect and needs to be rooted in a Christian ethic. If capitalism is only about maximizing profits and labor margins, that logic would justify slavery since it was cheap labor; certain things supersede the capitalistic impulse.

• The speaker believes capital holders (who own assets, borrow/lend money) versus renters (who don't own stocks) is the biggest wealth disparity driver on raw balance sheets
• The stock market has gone up 12% annualized for 20-30 years straight, creating massive wealth disparity between owners and renters
• Milton Friedman's free market principles do not support importing cheap foreign labor that underprices American workers
• As governor, the speaker plans to create a blueprint to combat illegal labor that other states can copy

AI Technology Views and Applications

The speaker claims AI has become less advanced in the last 6-12 months due to technical constraints with inference and training, and is probably capped out technologically in the near term based on scaling and inference research. He uses AI daily for research and video editing.

• AI could enable average Americans to file lawsuits themselves for approximately $10,000 in legal costs over 18 months
• 80% of companies settle rather than proceed to trial when threatened with a lawsuit, making legal threats a powerful tool with AI assistance
• AI will create a new renaissance for homeschool parents by generating individual education plans and custom interactive activities/games tailored to each student
• AI enables self-diagnosis of pain and helps hold doctors accountable by allowing patients to compare symptoms across multiple opinions in minutes
• The candidate views AI as a democratizing force for legal and medical access for ordinary citizens

Domestic Policy Proposals

Fishbach plans to mobilize the Florida National Guard for homeless outreach, viewing them as suited for compassionate, patient community engagement. The plan involves removing encampments from streets and using the National Guard to ensure people suffering from addiction get treatment.

• He proposes a 50% OnlyFans sin tax on income earned in Florida, estimating Sophie Rain would owe approximately $42 million in taxes to the state
• He would institute paid maternity leave for every working mom in Florida
• He pledges to restore voting rights and Second Amendment rights to every non-violent individual in Florida who has completed their sentence
• The candidate plans to work with Florida's largest hotels to persuade them to prioritize hiring local workers over remote foreign workers

Political Philosophy and Gen Z Landscape

Gen Z is politically conscious not because of school textbooks but because of YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Rumble, and podcasters on both left and right. Some people watch both Nick Fuentes and listen to Pod Save America, suggesting cross-ideological media consumption across the political spectrum.

• Age verification laws for social media are attempting to throttle Gen Z's ability to access information as Gen Z turns decisively to the right
• 2026 marks both the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Florida gubernatorial election
• The candidate frames this moment as a potential inflection point where honest voices can break through entrenched political structures
• He emphasizes his outsider status and willingness to speak uncomfortable truths about foreign policy and domestic priorities

Full Transcript

Show transcript

Today's guest is one of the most
polarizing voices in politics. Whether
you're a Republican or a Democrat, it
shouldn't be controversial to say that
no American should die for Israel.
>> A former hedge fund analyst who left
Wall Street, he's launched an anti-woke
investment fund, sued the Federal
Reserve, and is now running for governor
of Florida at 31 years old. Quit Only
Fans or pay your taxes. is going to be a
50% only fan sin tax. Sophie Rain is
nearing $42 million in taxes that she
will owe the state of Florida. One would
assume that she would just leave the
state. Fine by me. A fourth generation
Floridaian who dropped out of college at
21 to launch his own hedge fund. He's
built a career defying powerful
institutions. those men or women
implicated in Epstein's crimes. I would
not just support the death penalty, but
the death warrant that I would sign
would be for public execution. In this
episode, we'll explore the ideas that
have made him a target of Blackstone
Apac and the Republican party, explore
the tactics being used to bury his
career, and question if he is a
dangerous extremist or the only person
exposing the truth about how politics
really works. The Florida State
government is lending the Israeli
government $385 million. It's not
anti-Semitic to oppose every single one
of our tax dollars being sent to
Benjamin Netanyahu to fuel his war.
>> James Fishbach, welcome to the Jack Neil
podcast.
>> Hey, Jack. Good place to start here.
Trump started a war with Iran. And with
thousands of American Marines already
heading to the Middle East and within
the fear of ground troops and a national
draft, the price of gas is skyrocketing
across the country and in your home
state of Florida. James,
is the war in Iran actually for America?
It isn't. This war is a direct
repudiation of what voters, Republican
and Democrat, came out and supported
when they voted for President Trump in
November of 2024. We voted against new
foreign wars and we just found ourselves
entangled in one, not to our benefit,
but to the benefit of apparently US's
closest ally, which it isn't, but they
say Israel. And so this war very simply
is a war that Israel and Netanyahu have
wanted to get into now for 20 or 30
years. You know, two things can be true
at the same time, Jack. One, Iran is a
dictatorial homicidal regime that
persecutes Christians, that oppresses
women, that chance death to America.
That can be true, and it is true. It can
also be true that Iran, like North
Korea, like Sudan, like Somalia, like
many other countries around the world
that all fall under that same criteria,
Iran did not pose an imminent threat to
the United States of America. And so why
is it that all of a sudden we are
getting into a war that isn't just about
us and Israel dropping bombs on Iran and
killing upwards of 2,000 civilians.
We've already lost 13 US service
members. I was at the interament of
Major Cody Cork from Florida, Winter
Haven, Florida. uh this week on on
Monday and to see his family
so distraught, his life taken so
suddenly. Major Cork was a war hero. The
12 other service members we have lost
were war heroes as well. And at the end
of the day, it shouldn't be
controversial to say this. Whether
you're a Republican or a Democrat,
whether you're a Christian, Muslim, Jew,
rich, poor, whether you're from Florida,
or you live in California, it shouldn't
be controversial to say that no American
should die for Israel.
So, who actually benefits from this war?
The Israeli government in its current
form, there's this
expansionist angle that Israel has
always sought after. They've always
wanted to expand their borders beyond
what they currently are. And clearly in
a world where you have competing spheres
of influence, competing regional
superpowers, Israel is one of them,
Saudi Arabia is another, Iran, Egypt was
one in an earlier time, so is Libya. But
Israel is in a unique position now that
if Iran is defeated, they become the
regional superpower. They call this the
hegeimon in the world of foreign policy.
And so they can become the regional
hegeimon in the Middle East if Iran is
defeated. And what does that mean? It
means you have the seat at the table.
You set the terms for trade, for supply
chains, for negotiation, for diplomacy,
for all of that. And so Iran
objectively, yeah, Iran is a bad regime
full of really bad people. But Iran is
also, again, purely objectively, is a
counterweight to Israel's sphere of
influence in the Middle East. And so if
you get rid of Iran, you get rid of that
deterrent to Israeli supremacy in the
Middle East. And so it's natural if
there were a competing power, if Mexico
were the next China, right, and they
were competing for our resources, our
influence, it would make sense
rationally for Washington to want to
counter that. And so Israel's position
is one both crazy, but also rational if
you view it through an objective lens.
It's no way justified from a
humanitarian perspective. But that's how
I would objectively and rationally look
at where the different pieces are in the
chessboard.
So you're saying it does benefit
America?
>> No, it benefits Israel.
It benefits America if you think that
anything that benefits Israel benefits
America. And that is the lie that Apac
has sold for years now. A Apac in their
own words, take them at their own word,
their website says on the homepage, "We
lobby for pro-Israel policies." Okay,
fine. What if a pro-Israel policy is not
a pro-America policy? In fact, what if a
pro-Israel policy is an anti-American
policy? What if a pro-Israel policy
leads to the death of 13 US service
members in just a matter of 4 weeks and
leads to gas prices rising at the
fastest rate in 30 years? People in my
home state of Florida are already seeing
that pain at the pump. We're paying $67
more to fill up every single time we go
to the gas station in just the last
month. And so what is definitely a
pro-Israel policy objectively getting
rid of Iran, that regime that has
chanted death to Israel, that is clearly
a pro-Israel policy, giving them more uh
influence in the region, but that is not
a pro-America policy. And so again, I I
zoom out and say at a time where
everybody wants to point fingers and say
you're wrong, you're wrong. I think
actually both sides are kind of right on
the Iran war. one side, the neocon,
Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Steve
Whitoff, Jared Kushner side, as much as
I don't want to disagree with them on
the Israeli position, they are right
that Iran is a dictatorial homicidal
regime, but where they're wrong is that
Iran posed an imminent threat that
necessitated the kind of kinetic force,
the kind of bombs being dropped, the
civilians being lost. That's what is
also true. And so that's the way I've
approached this to our shared love for
speech and debate is acknowledge not
truth in a superficial kumbaya way but
acknowledge where there is actually an
intersection of truth between both
sides. Because I think far too often if
we come into this and say well Iran
really wasn't a bad regime. Of course
they were. Where I draw the distinction
is that Iran was bad but they were not
posing an imminent existential threat to
the United States of America. In fact,
if your standard was bad people posing
an imminent threat, we would be bombing
the cartels right now who are sending
over poisonous addictive fentanyl across
the southern border that is killing
upwards of 100,000 Americans every
single year. That poses a far bigger
threat from the Mexican cartels than
anything the Iranian regime has done in
the last 10 years.
So, why do you think this war is
happening right now?
>> Well, there is the ultimate cause and
the proximate cause. The ultimate cause
is all the reasons we've talked about.
Netanyahu, Israel, the Israel lobby. Pat
Buchanan said it best that the US
Congress really was Israeli occupied
territory. The influence of the Israeli
government in US politics runs deep. It
goes back many, many years. That is the
ultimate cause. This is a war that
serves Israel's interests.
Does it serve US interest? I would be
lying to say if it didn't. I don't think
the world is better off for a nuclear
Iran. I think what Iran did to the US
embassy in Beirut in 1983, they should
have paid the price for that. But you
don't pay the price for something like
that this many years later. The time to
retaliate was in 83,84,85,
not in 2026, 2027. And so the
approximate cause is really what I think
you're getting at is why now? Why now?
Because if you're actually worried about
a threat of a country that has openly
threatened the United States, that has
nuclear weapons, that has the ability to
launch intercontinental ballistic
missiles, you'd be bombing North Korea
right now, not Iran. I'm not advocating
either, of course. The proximate cause I
believe to be two things.
It is a very convenient distraction from
the revelations in the Epstein files,
which we were told, by the way, six
months ago, they were on her desk. Pam
Bondi, that is Pam Blondie. Then they
were a Democrat hoax. They didn't exist.
And it wasn't until Thomas Matthews
really been an American patriot and and
Ro Kana from here in California who
actually stepped up and called Cap and
said, "No, we want to see the files.
We're going to force the DOJ to release
the files." And we've seen, although
there have been redactions, although we
haven't gotten the full 6 million files,
we've just seen how troubling these
files are. I mean, George Orwell said it
best in 1989, the party's final and most
essential command was to deny the
evidence of your eyes and ears. And
that's what people in the Republican
party have told us for the last couple
of months is this is a Democrat hoax.
It's far overblown. Let's just move on.
And Jack, as someone who's voted
Republican my entire life, I can't look
at those files and look at the crimes so
openly bragged about and move on. I
think those men and women who were
implicated in those files must be
brought to justice. And there's very few
things that could overshadow the
criminality scandal
of the Epstein files, but bombing Iran
is one of those rare exceptions. And so
I don't think that it is a coincidence
that just as the pressure was turning
up, just as everyone was talking about
this
that all of a sudden we're bombing Iran.
Second,
I think that the disaection,
the frustration over the lack of the
golden age,
the fact that when we say we still
haven't reversed the Biden inflation,
young college grads are getting turned
away from jobs that they're qualified
for, and those jobs are being handed
over to unqualified foreign laborers
from India and China. Good people, smart
people, I'm sure. But the American
economy must work for Americans first
and foremost. When you've got private
equity firms like Blackstone, which I
know all too well working in the hedge
fund world, buying, hoarding single
family homes, not to fix them up, Jack,
not to lay down some new tile and
restore them and then put them back on
the market for a family of four to buy
in and become a family of six or seven.
No, but to hoard those homes, take them
off the market forever and to rent them
back to us. We said no to slavery a long
time ago. And a modern form of slavery
is this idea that you can be denied home
ownership. So, I think this lingering
yet long-standing frustration that the
economy isn't working. Yet again,
another convenient way to distract from
that by saying, "Well, we've got a rally
behind the cause. Patriotism. We saw
what happened after 911. We even saw
what happened, how popular the Iraq war
was, believe it or not, in the early
days, certainly not 24, 36 months
afterward, but very, very convenient
distractions to really the two biggest
scandals in modern history, which is the
K-shaped recovery, Wall Street doing
well, uh, and Main Street doing poorly,
often at the expense of Wall Street, and
then second, of course, the the
controversy over the Epstein Files.
When I think about
the Epstein Viles being a distraction
for the war, I could see where that
perspective makes sense. But do you
think it would also be fair to say
that it's kind of a chicken and the egg
thing that the Epstein files are a
distraction from the war itself? I think
honestly the way to settle this question
is which one did you ask about first?
The Epstein files of the war. Which one
was top of mind for you, Jack? Which one
is at the front of every single
newspaper for the last three weeks since
we started this bombing campaign on
February 28th? Which one has contributed
to the highest gas prices that we've
seen since 2022? And so I think that the
cover up around the Epstein files
totally backfired
to the point where
even Republicans that I'm meeting on the
campaign trail, people that voted
proudly for President Trump all three
times are saying, "I've seen enough from
Pam Bondi, from Cash Patel, from the DOJ
that they would continue to cover." I
mean, the Republican party has always
been particularly proud of standing up
against
the men and even women who would traffic
children. I mean, think about the movie
Sound of Freedom, right? Came from a
conservative point of view, a
conservative studio in Angel Studios.
And so, the Republican party,
conservatives, especially in my home
state of Florida, kind of ground zero
for Republican politics, have always
proud prided ourselves on we're going to
stand up to powerful men who are
trafficking children. And that line that
we heard all too often in the sound of
freedom, children are not for sale.
God's children are not for sale. And yet
our party is the one that is covering up
the greatest sex trafficking scandal in
human history.
>> Do you think the war bodess well for the
GOP in the next election or do you think
it bodess negatively?
>> It's
it bodess negatively without a doubt.
You might have seen the CNN poll last
week where they said 100% of MAGA still
supports our MAGA president. So 100% of
self-identified Trump supporters still
support Trump. And so what I think is
going to happen is there's going to be
two waves of frustration as a result
from the war. The first of which are
people like me who voted for President
Trump in 2024 in large part because he
rejected the neocon DC consensus that we
had to be the world's police force that
we had to subscribe to this very vapid
idea that Israel is our greatest ally
that we had to do the bidding of every
single country in the Middle East to
appease Israel.
He rejected that. And so it's really
a blatant hypocritical stance to say no
foreign wars and oh wait a year in
here's another foreign war with no end
in sight. By the way, you know it's
going to be quick. We we've we've
totally decapitated them. Why did you
ask for $200 billion then last week if
this is going to be a quick war that's
going to be over in a matter of weeks.
So there's two waves of frustration. The
first and I'm already pissed. The first
is just the lack just the total betrayal
of no new foreign wars. Here's a foreign
war and if you're complaining about it,
you're a radical left Democrat. That's
the first wave and you're going to lose
maybe 25 to 30% of voters on that. The
second wave
is coming. It's yet to fully materialize
and that is the economic pain that will
come from the war. higher oil to higher
gas to more of the tank to less
disposable income to cutting down other
parts of the economy. Think about it
this way. If you go to fill up on gas
twice a week, eight times a month,
$6 to fill up, you're paying more than
you were a month ago. So, you've got $48
out of your pocket that you could have
had for a haircut or fast food. Here in
California, In-N-Out Burger back in
Florida. or we might do a little bit of
steak and shake, little burger fries,
something else.
You're going to feel that downstream.
That's income that would have been spent
in hospitality, in leisure, getting a
haircut, going out with your kids,
bowling, movies, whatever the case is.
And so, you're going to see the second
and third order effects of that. And so,
unequivocally, this war is bad for
Republicans because they're the ones
pushing it. It's bad for the incumbent
party, which is the Republican party for
the two reasons that it feels like a
total betrayal and you're going to lose
folks and you've already lost folks on
that. The second is the economic pain
that's going to come from the war. We're
seeing the early signs of that with gas
prices up a dollar. The longer that the
straight of hormuse stays closed, the
greater the oil price will go up and
that's a direct correlation to gas
prices here at home, whether you're in
California or in Florida.
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But anyway, guys, back to the podcast.
Do you think the US will lose the Iran
war? We already have in many respects.
because it's not a war that is easily
winnable in traditional terms. When you
say victory, what does victory look
like? I was supportive, by the way, of
what President Trump did to Maduro in
December. Maduro is
a maniac who didn't just kill innocent
Venezuelans, he killed innocent
Americans. when he opened up the prisons
and sent trend raw gang members here to
flood our border when Kamala Harris was
the border zar when those same gang
members took over condominium complexes
all over the country when they pushed
fentanyl on young children who overdosed
that's a direct consequence of Maduro
being in power and so I supported the
fact that a grand jury in New York City
indicted Maduro he was a fugitive from
justice and President Trump brought him
to justice and now he will stand trial
for those crimes
He posed actually an imminent threat to
the United States. Not in a nuclear way,
not in an intercontinental ballistic
missile. Not that he was going to knock
out Bickl in downtown Miami, but he was
certainly responsible for the death of
thousands of Americans and posed an
ongoing threat, especially in my state
of Florida, which is the largest
diaspora of Venezuelan migrants, where a
lot of the drugs were coming directly
from Venezuela and flooding our streets.
that military
involvement was very different. There
was a clear win. Maduro out of power.
Done. We've kind of won that. Now, it'll
take time to install a new regime.
Clearly, there's a kind of a holdover
government now with the vice president.
There seems to be more of a US ally. I
think that Venezuela is one of those
countries where you don't have to
believe anything hypothetical about the
fact that the Venezuelans can do nation
building because they were the most
prosperous, the wealthiest nation in
South America up until the late 1990s.
And so they've done it before, they can
do it again. But the Iran conflict
doesn't have a clear binary. What does
victory look like? And that's my
frustration with the war as well is one,
why are we at war? But even if you put
that to the side, okay, we're at war.
How do we know we've won? We get seven
different criteria, seven different
competing explanations that we've heard
from President Trump, from Vice
President Vance, from Secretary Rubio,
from the press secretary Carolyn Levit
about why we're at war. Let's just go
through them really quick. Iran posed an
imminent threat. There's no intel to
back that up. We saw the resignation of
Joe Kent, who I dinner with last week in
DC. We saw Tulsi Gabbard be unable to
answer that question under oath in front
of Congress last week. There's been no
intelligence offered up. I mean, at
least the Bush administration had the
common courtesy to give us a false
pretext with weapons of mass destruction
lie as opposed to there's not even a
pretext here at all as to why we're
going to this war. So, that's the first.
The second is regime change. Just the
general typical neocon, George Bush,
Dick Cheney, democracy is back in. Let's
install democracy. The third is the
protesters who were being gunned down.
And they're two things can be true at
the same time. Once again, there were in
fact protesters who were being
innocently slaughtered on the streets of
Tyrron who should never be attacked by
the government. The second thing is that
the number of protesting deaths was
grossly exaggerated and was used as
propaganda by Israel to fuel our
involvement to get us more interested in
this war. The fourth is retribution for
1983, for the hostage crisis in 79, for
all of the Iranian proxies, whether it's
Hezbollah or the Houthis, for the
planting of Iranian IEDs during the Iraq
war that did in fact kill and maim
hundreds of US service members. All of
these things can be true, but again, it
all boils down to that question, what
was the imminent threat? And so, what
you've seen just there is five, six
different competing explanations.
Neither of them have any shred of
evidence to back up why we would go to
war. Now, Jack, we just met 20 minutes
ago, but if we had known each other at a
high school debate tournament, we bonded
over the fact beforehand that one of our
favorite high school debate tournaments
was the Patriot Games at George Mason
University. And let's just say we were
there uh when I was there in 2012. you
were in middle school at the time, but
when I was there in 2012 and you gave me
a funny look and you slapped me and then
today, the first time we had seen each
other since then, I pulled out a Glock
and pistolhipped you. Two things can be
true. You shouldn't have slapped me and
I shouldn't have pistol whipped you with
a 38 special. And so, this is the
dynamic. This is the dilemma. I don't
ever want to minimize. I don't ever want
to explain away the horrific crimes that
this Iranian regime has committed
against innocent Americans, service
members in Iraq, the Marines at the
barracks in 1983 in Beirut, all of the
victims of the regional proxies that
have been backed like the Houthis and
Hezbollah. But it always comes down to
what was that imminent threat. And so to
come full circle,
can we win the war? No. because we don't
even know what victory looks like. We
don't know what winning looks like. It
would kind of be like
we pull out three board games, Monopoly,
Risk, and Twister, and we lay them all
out and we I tell you, Jack, do you
think you can beat it? Do you think And
we literally take the risk pieces and
put them on the Monopoly board. And then
there's the Twister thing, and I say,
"Jack, do you think you can win this
game that I just made up that has no
clear-cut conclusion? No clear-cut
falsifiable victory. Can you win?
>> No, but I'll play if you give me some
money. You have a impressive finance
background uh
working in Wall Street traditionally,
but what do you think most people
misunderstand about the way money is
flowing
to kind of comprehend what the different
interests are at play and who's backing
those interests? I spent the last 10
years working at hedge funds. The one I
started out of college called
macrovoyant which is a play on the word
clairvoyant and the idea of a macro
trader which is what I've been
is instead of investing and saying I
like Tesla because the new model Y will
drive itself or I like Apple because the
MacBook Neo will see good revenue. What
a macro trader does is ignores those
questions. A macro trader says, "How is
the Federal Reserve going to screw it up
next? Is inflation going to go out of
control because the Fed after 2020
printed $5 trillion along with Congress,
kept rates pinned at zero for a year
longer than they should have, and then
engendered the worst inflation since a
guy named Paul Vulker had to break the
back of inflation in the early 1980s.
And so when I looked at that working at
a hedge fund, I put on quite literally
$2 billion worth of interest rate
derivatives trades to profit from that
breakdown in the system. That's the kind
of investing that I did. gold, oil,
interest rates, inflation, all of that
to get a better understanding of what is
really at stake when the government, the
Federal Reserve, global geopolitical
players are moving pieces around the
chessboard. And so what I would say is
what do people typically get wrong about
Wall Street in that sense?
The same people who oppose Trump or
support him will have no issue making
money if they oppose him on his success
or
losing money if they support him. And
and so it's fascinating that people are
able to separate and I had to struggle
with that very early on. Right? I I'm a
conservative. I support President Trump.
I supported him from the moment he came
down the golden escalator. I certainly
feel a little bit differently now given
the war with Iran and all of that, but I
had to separate my political view of him
from what the financial impact would be
of his policies. And so I I would quite
literally go to a Trump rally and wear
the MAGA hat and be cheering. But then I
had to look at the sober reality of well
the infrastructure week is never coming
or healthcare reform is not going to
happen and therefore these healthc care
stocks that have been mispriced are
going to remain mispriced or the Fed's
going to continue to be verbally
assaulted by Donald Trump in the summer
of 2013 2019 and and therefore we're not
going to get the rate cuts that the
interest rate futures market had been
predicting. And so all of that is to
say, I'm amazed at how the most
successful people on Wall Street are
able to separate their views of politics
from the way they actually make money.
And that's something that I struggled
with at first. And I was proud to say I
I kind of fully separated them near the
end of that. People see all the money
flowing from Apac to US politicians.
>> Yeah.
>> Why do you think Apac is buying out US
politicians and what exactly are they
buying?
They're buying allegiance.
They're buying an allegiance to an idea
which is in two words, Israel first. You
know, there there's this idea that, you
know, if you people like Randy Fine,
who's a Republican congressman from
Florida,
he is very pro-Israel to the point where
after he met Netanyahu two years ago, he
posted on Twitter, "I'm not going to
wash my hand so I can shake my kids when
I see them at home and let them know
that daddy touched Netanyahu."
His words.
People accuse someone like him of having
a dual allegiance, an allegiance to the
United States and to Israel. I think
that's false. I think people like Randy
Fine and a lot of these Apacbot
politicians have one singular allegiance
and that is to the best interests of
Israel. If those interests somehow
randomly like a broken clock twice a day
end up aligning with the US, they're
fine for it. But most of the time, their
primary concern is how can we fight for
the Israeli government? I mean, Ted Cruz
himself said it when he ran for the US
Senate. He said, 'I am running to be the
staunchest advocate for Israel in the
United States Congress. Can you imagine
saying that for Albania or Brazil or
Colombia or Mexico or even Sweden as
much as I am a fan of the IKEA
meatballs? The idea of saying that I'm
running to represent a foreign country's
interest in the United States Congress.
And so this is the real dilemma of what
Apac represents is they're buying
allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the
flag of the United States of America and
to the republic which it stands, one
nation under God. One nation. You pledge
your allegiance to one nation. And that
nation is this one, not Israel. And so
for me, it's not even so much Apac
alone. It is any foreign interest money,
anything that tries to push for
pro-Israel, pro-Qatar, pro- Sweden,
whatever the case is. Any money that is
coming in to push pro- foreign policies
is not something that I ever want to be
on the receiving end of. And I got to be
honest, I'm not voting for anybody whose
Apac tracker is not neon green.
>> Which is to say, they've taken no AP
pack money.
>> Have you taken any money? No, I never
have and I never will. And the reason
why is I don't want conflicts of
interest. For the same reason, you can't
be a lawyer and prosecute a case and
also be the same lawyer representing the
defendant on the case. You have a
conflict of interest. The same evidence
that you would use to prosecute the guy
for selling drugs to people in
Tallahassee in 1997 like Byron Donald's.
I digress. But the same reason you can't
be that guy prosecuting the case. and
also the defense attorney is because
where do you choose? You have
information here that definitely nails
the guy, but you're also representing
the defendant. You you definitely have
information that exonerates the
defendant, but you're trying to secure a
conviction. So, what do you do, Jack?
That is the dilemma. And I don't ever
want to be put in a position where one,
my integrity would be compromised, where
I'd ever have to feel like I chose
between one of those two things. But I
also would never want the public to
think even for a moment that my judgment
has been tainted by Apac money. And that
even if I had made the right decision, I
didn't do it because of someone else's
checkbook. And so for me, my Apac
tracker is going to stay neon green. My
opponent Byron Donald's will stay blood
red because there's nothing that he
won't do for Apac. has taken at this
point $45 million between Apac corporate
political action committees and a number
of hedge fund billionaires. One of whom
was actually in the Epstein files named
39 times. The most recent email was
between this hedge fund billionaire and
Jeffrey Epstein himself where Mr.
Epstein asked the man if he needed any
supplies sent to the island on his next
trip down there. What what supplies was
Jeffrey Epstein sending down bandages?
was he sending down his espresso pods or
what kind of supplies would one Jeffrey
Epstein be sending to a hedge fund
billionaire on Epstein's island?
>> So, I guess
as it pertains to the war, and I'll
touch on some of your more generalized
policies a bit later in this interview.
If you were elected governor tomorrow,
what would your first day look like as
governor of Florida?
be a very long day. We would need a lot
of caffeine to get through that one. I
believe that day one is about setting
tone for what the first hundred and then
the first four years would look like.
There's a couple things I would do on my
first day. As we sit here today, the
Florida state government, not the
federal government, they're doing a lot
of other things, but the Florida state
government is lending the Israeli
government $385 million to directly to
the Israeli government from our
government using the state pension fund.
That's money from teachers and
firefighters and first responders.
>> That's yearly.
>> Yeah.
$385 million every year. If you own a
small landscaping business and you want
to buy a new
chainsaw or lawn mower and you went to
that same building and said, "Hey, I you
you lent Netanyahu $385 million. I I'm
not asking for that. I'm not even asking
for a tenth of that. I I just need
$3,850
to buy this new lawn mower and this new
hitch for my truck so I can go a little
bit further and help cut the lawns of
vets in my community that I'm fighting
to serve." No, we don't do that for
people like you. We do that for
governments like them. In fact, Israel
is the only foreign country that is a
recipient of the Florida state
government lending money. And they do
that by buying Israeli war bonds. These
are government bonds much like US
Treasury securities that trade on the
open market. They were purchased after
October 7th to quote stand in solidarity
with the Israeli government. And stand
in solidarity we have. You can do that,
by the way, by praying and showing your
affection for obviously the lives that
were lost. And I can tell you as as a
Christian, I was horrified by what
happened on October 7th. I prayed for
weeks and months. We held dedications at
our masses. We dedicated individual
masses at our parish to the hostages and
to the innocent uh who were being killed
on both sides.
It's something totally separate to lend
a third of a billion dollars to a
foreign government to perpetuate a war.
And that's exactly what we've done. And
so the first thing I would literally do
is I would walk down to the state
pension fund as governor and we would
sell those bonds on the open market.
This is not a a contract. It's not an
agreement. In the same way you could
sell Apple or Tesla stock, you could
also sell these Treasury bonds from
Israel.
>> Do you think it's anti-Semitic to divest
from Israeli bonds?
>> No. It'd be just as it wouldn't be
anti-Slavic
to divest from Eastern European bonds.
This idea of anti-semitism has been
really overblown. Let me be very clear.
I I condemn hatred of Jews. I condemn
hatred of Muslims. I condemn hatred of
Christians. But saying you don't want
more of our money to be lent to a
foreign government doesn't make you an
anti-semite. It makes you a patriot. And
in the same way that the fringes of the
left jack would call us racist for years
for simply saying, you know, we're done
with the white guilt. We don't want you
telling the white kids to apologize to
the black kids. And we don't want you
telling the black kids that the system
is rigged and they are victims and they
are oppressed and there's no way they
can make it. No, those are slanderous
lies straight from the devil's mouth.
It's not racist to oppose DEI,
affirmative action, white guilt, just as
it's not anti-semitic to oppose every
single one of our tax dollars being sent
to Benjamin Netanyahu to fuel his war.
>> Are there any other major policy changes
you would make on day one?
>> Yes, there's a lot to do. I'm a
constitutional guy.
Congress has to authorize war.
The president can use armed forces for
self-defense obviously to prevent an
imminent threat from attacking the
homeland. But when it comes to issues of
war and peace, that is left to Congress
in the US Constitution. My view is
really simple. There are 14,000 members
of the Florida National Guard. My
commitment to them is I will defend the
guard as Florida governor. I will never
allow a single one of them to be
deployed to a foreign war unless it is
explicitly authorized by the United
States Congress. It's really common
sense. If this war is so necessary, so
justified, so overwhelmingly clear, then
you'll have no issue debating it and
getting Thomas Massiey's support on the
right and Rocon's support on the left
and everyone in between to be able to
authorize this war. So, I'm going to
stand up and defend the guard and make
sure that our incredible National
Guardsmen in Florida are never deployed
to a foreign war that is not authorized
by Congress. I'm also going to use the
Florida National Guard for something
that I wish the governor here in
California would do, which is to tackle
the homeless epidemic that has really
hurt your state, but if I'm being
honest, as well as hurt my state. 3 days
before Christmas this past year, a 74
year old woman by the name of Rita
Landrech was stabbed to death inside of
a Barnes & Noble in one of the
wealthiest towns in the entire state of
Florida by a 40-year-old homeless man
named Antonio Brown. If you're not safe
inside of a bookstore 3 days before
Christmas in one of the wealthiest towns
in Florida, you're not safe anywhere.
and the homeless crisis whether it's
where I grew up in Fort Lauderdale,
downtown Miami, Jacksonville, St. Pete,
Tampa, even smaller towns like Dand, we
have to get to the bottom of it. And the
way to do that is to remove the homeless
encampments from our street to make sure
that the people who are living on the
streets who are suffering with
addiction, who are suffering with
alcoholism,
that they get the treatment that they
desperately need so we can get the
safety that we desperately deserve. I
don't think of politics as big
highulutin policy platforms. Here's how
I think of it. Jack, heaven forbid two
years from now I I come back to LA
because I have a real craving for an
In-N-Out Burger as governor. Again,
heaven forbid I see you on the street
outside of In-N-Out Burger. And there's
a heroin needle, there's a suitcase,
you're sitting in your own urine. And I
say, "Jack, it's time to go. let me take
care of you. Let's get you the
treatment. Let's get you care. There's
nothing you can say in that moment
that's going to explain yourself out of
it. It's going to explain why you
shouldn't come with me. That's how I
think we need to view one the homeless
crisis in particular, but politics
generally is let's make it about our
brothers and sisters, our friends, our
neighbors. If we saw someone in our own
life who was living on the street
addicted to poison
on the path to overdosing or having
already overdosed multiple times and
given Narcan at the taxpayers's expense,
you don't have a choice anymore. It's
time for you to go not to prison.
It's time for you to go to a treatment
center to get back on your feet to once
again become that productive member of
society that I know that they can be.
And I say this as someone who lost my
uncle in 2003 to the poison that came
across the southern border. My uncle who
was living on the streets that we as a
state and as a country need to look out
for our neighbors. And genuine
compassion is not letting our brothers
and sisters die on the street. It's not
letting our brothers and sisters shoot
up heroin or fentanyl in the street.
It's not letting our brothers and
sisters quite literally live and sleep
in their own urine. It is to extend a
helping hand, but a very firm helping
hand that says it's time to go. I'm not
going to let go until you get help.
>> And how does the National Guard play
into that exactly?
>> Well, they're under my direct control as
governor. And what I would do is I'd
mobilize them for a couple reasons. one,
I have the constitutional authority to
do so. Two, they're actually very good
at this. They are on the front lines of
disaster relief after hurricanes.
They're also a big part of recognizing
the needs in our communities prior to
the storm. So, ramping up that hurricane
preparation as well as posttorm disaster
relief. So, they know our communities
very well. They are very good at working
with people, at extending that hand at
being patient. We don't need them to go
out with
rifles with 5.56 rounds. We don't need
night vision goggles. We need someone
who one is going to be a shock and awe
presence, but is also going to be a
compassionate, patient individual. And
the great thing about the Florida
National Guard is they are from the
communities that we are going to help.
And so they'll know their communities
best. What what's going to work in
Jacksonville may not be what's going to
work in South Florida. What's going to
work in Pensacola, which is effectively
the deep south. The old joke in Florida
was the further north you go, the
further south you go in the country.
What's going to work in the Florida
panhandle, may not work in Tampa or St.
Pete. And so, I trust the Florida
National Guard, as prepared and
professional as they are, as
substantiated many of times before and
after hurricanes, I trust them to carry
out that mission. And I would personally
lead that mission as Florida governor to
make sure that those people are they get
off the street not just for their own
good.
But I
I hurt for
the 6 or
8-year-old girl who has to turn to her
mom outside of the Immaculate Conception
Basilica in downtown Jacksonville and
say, "Mommy,
is that man asleep or is he dead?"
on the walk to get coffee or ice cream
after a movie. Why are all of these
people on the street? Aren't we the
richest country in the world? How is it
that the Pentagon just asked for $200
billion? That the Pentagon is willing to
take the National Guard, the White House
has not even taken the fact that a draft
is still on the table. And yet we don't
have the resources, the money, the
attention, or even the care to take care
of our own, including thousands of
homeless vets in Florida. And so for me,
it's not just about those people who are
living on the streets who need help.
It's about the rest of us being able to
live in a dignified modern society that
does not allow our streets to be
overtaken by people who are not evil,
who are not encouraable, but are merely
lost, are merely weward sheep. And I
welcome the day they can be found and
they can be part of our community once
again.
It seems like this is the most
overlooked problem uh at least in my
life. Cuz I mean, if you live in Los
Angeles or South Florida, that is
something you deal with and actively
have to think about every day. I mean,
we're in the main part of Los Angeles
right now. And it's also the worst part
of Los Angeles, downtown,
and it's a complex issue, but I can see
where the National Guard would be
particularly useful in helping tackle
it. I do want to touch on the Epstein
files. Would you have any policy
affecting
the release, anything surrounding it? I
would.
There's a lot of talk about the island.
The island, Epstein's Island, Little St.
James, the US Virgin Islands in the
Caribbean.
There's an island that doesn't get
talked about enough, even though it was
actually where Epstein did in fact live
most of the time, did in fact commit
most of his crimes with
his co-conspirators. And that island is
in Florida. That island is in Palm Beach
County. That island is the town of Palm
Beach, the richest town in my state.
What's interesting about Florida is we
don't have to change a single law to
bring these people to justice. Capital
sexual battery against a minor does not
have a statute of limitation. That means
just like murder, whether it happened
10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, is irrelevant.
You can bring a case any time. And so
one of those promises
is to appoint a special prosecutor to
reopen the Epstein investigation. We
know a lot more today than we did 10-15
years ago with the release of the files.
That is where I would start, but
certainly not where I would end. And
just bring people in for questioning.
Throw the book at them. Bring people to
justice.
I get flack, not from voters, but I get
flack from CNN and even Fox News for
saying this, but capital sexual battery,
Jack, in Florida carries the death
sentence.
>> I believe it isn't just
a thing that you throw around. It's
absolutely necessary in this case, not
just to
bring these depraved people to justice,
but to send a very loud and clear
message to anyone
that we will not tolerate these types of
heinous crimes against young women in
our society. As governor,
my name, my signature is the last thing
between someone on death row and someone
being executed. I would have to sign the
death warrant. I take
a lot of
responsibility. It is it's a lot,
especially as a Christian.
But I believe in the case of those men
or women implicated in Epstein's crimes,
if the evidence is there, if they are
charged, if they are convicted by a jury
of their peers, I would not just support
the death penalty.
But the death warrant that I would sign
would be for public execution.
>> Do you suspect that any active
politicians
were compromised by Epstein?
>> Yes.
And no one is off limits. This
investigation that will be done by my
special prosecutor will be completely
independent of the executive office of
the governor. Whoever this prosecutor is
will have complete discretion to
subpoena Republicans, Democrats, it
doesn't matter. I don't care if there's
an R or a D next to your name. If you
are implicated in those files, Jack, you
will be brought to justice when I am
governor.
>> Do you think Trump will pardon Galain
Maxwell? I came across an article
claiming that she was actively seeking
his pardon.
>> It's tough to know. I sure hope not.
You know, the Trump pardon process has
been very fascinating because that the
people that he's pardoned,
crypto scammers,
arm salesmen, these are not the people
that are worthy
of the pardon power. The pardon power is
for people who have long paid for their
crime.
And and one thing that I think about
when
staring down the prospect of being
elected as the 47th governor of Florida,
as the youngest governor in America, and
perhaps one day to make my ancestors
proud as being the sixth governor in my
family,
is how would I would use pardon power as
governor?
I I make no secret of this. My father
served a year and a day in prison in the
80s for a dumb mistake that he made.
Didn't hurt anybody. Stole some stuff.
Served a year and a day. My father,
since the day he's been released, has
carried the weight and the stigma of a
felony conviction on his record to the
point where I asked my dad, "Could we
could we go shooting this weekend with
grandpa?"
And the answer was no. But I never knew
really why until I got older because he
would be charged under federal law as a
felon in possession of a firearm.
when we got turned away from a mortgage
application or a rental application or
why my dad had been the most qualified
person for the job and been told and
offered the job only to be denied after
the job offer because he didn't pass the
background check because of something
that he had done 30 years prior and long
served out his sentence, long paid for
his crime. One thing that I will do as
governor is I will make sure that we
restore the rights of every single
person in Florida who has already paid
for their mistake. Because in America,
you don't hold someone's worst mistake
against them for the rest of your life.
And as Christians, we believe in the
redeeming power of making a mistake,
owning up to it, and then moving on and
writing the next chapter of your life. I
am ashamed to say that in my state,
if you made a mistake 30 years ago and
served a year and a day as a felon, it's
nearly impossible to vote. You cannot
own a firearm. You can still be turned
away from job applications that you are
perfectly qualified for. You can still
be denied a loan for your small
business. And so for me, pardon power is
in a in an individual sense making sure
that the right people are actually given
that second chance. but in a in a bigger
overarching sense to make sure that no
one is permanently punished for a
one-time mistake. And that includes
something that's quite controversial
even on my side, which is the idea of
the Second Amendment right being taken
from those with a prior felony
conviction. So,
you do welfare fraud in the 1980s. You
serve three years in prison. It's 2026.
You got three kids. You're now moving
into a new area for a new job.
And the community you're moving into is
an underped,
unsafe,
for lack of better word, ghetto.
What do you do? Well, what does any
American do? They exercise their
god-given constitutionally protected
second amendment right. They walk into
Bass Pro. They go to a gun show and they
buy a 9mm Glock. If you're a felon, it's
a crime to do that. It's a crime to buy
a firearm to protect yourself because of
a mistake that you made 20, 30, 40 years
ago. And so when I say restorative,
I mean restoring the rights of every
single non-violent individual in my
state with a prior conviction, the right
to vote
and the right to defend themselves and
their family. I mean, imagine not being
able to defend yourself 30 years after
you walked out of prison and your own
daughters, your own sons were living in
fear because you could not defend your
family. That is not what our founding
fathers had in mind in the summer of
1787 when they put pen to paper and
drafted the most important document in
American history known as the
Constitution.
>> Yeah, I don't really given much thought
to that one, but I mean
by typical arguments of why we should
have guns in the first place, it would
make complete sense that felons would
have guns because the purpose of a gun
isn't anything except the ability to
protect yourself, you know.
And I'm a Second Amendment absolutist.
You I think I take those four words very
seriously in the text of the Second
Amendment. Shall not be infringed. Well,
what about
what about making them wait 3 days? That
that sounds common sense. They say
universal
common sense gun law. Make them wait 3
days, Jack. It's cooling off period.
Okay, let's play this out.
Girlfriend, abusive ex. She's got two
young boys at home. They just broke up.
Boyfriend's now said he's coming over.
He's driving nine hours. She wants to go
to the store to be able to defend
herself if he comes over and starts a
ruckus. She goes to the store. Hey,
Second Amendment, not a felon. Nothing
wrong. Here's my money. Let Let me take
that one. No, ma'am. Come back in 3 days
and you can pick it up. There's no
no reason to tell a young woman who's in
fear for her life that she has to wait
72 hours to be able to defend herself
and her family. There's no reason for a
red flag law to exist. A red flag law is
this idea that remember Tom Cruz
Minority Report, you would prevent the
crime before it happened. The idea was
you could prevent all of these mass
shootings or all of these violent
incidents if you would call it in
beforehand. I'm all for, by the way, if
you act a fool and you commit a crime,
yeah, let's go arrest you and take your
guns because you're being arrested. You
don't get to have guns if you're in jail
or prison. But the idea was you could
call in an anonymous report on your
neighbor. The police would go to their
door and say, "Hey, we got this
anonymous red flag law petition
and we're going to take your guns. We'll
see you in court in 14 days and then
you'll have a hearing." In that hearing,
by the way, you do not get a
courtappointed attorney. You have to
come up with your own money. In the
meantime, you are disarmed. And if you
don't show up, you lose your Second
Amendment rights. Now, what could this
infraction be? Well, I'll tell you one
actual example that happened in my state
of Florida in PK County, which is the
center of the state. There was a World
War II vet who was on the phone with an
insurance adjuster. They're having a
dispute about a claim.
And he said, "If you don't fix this for
me, I'm coming down there right now with
a bazooka."
And this 21-year-old girl on the other
line feared that this was Call of Duty
Modern Warfare 2.
thinking that bazookas are readily
available as if this is Afghanistan
after Biden led the disastrous result
withdrawal. Of course, there were
bazookas everywhere back then. And she
called it in. And so later that day, the
police banged on a World War II vets's
door and said, "Red flag law time. We're
taking your firearms. We'll see you in
court." And he went back and forth in
court for 12 months. Had to pay $10,000
in attorney's fees. ever got a
court-appointed lawyer because it
doesn't allow for that through this
particular civil process.
That is not okay. It is not okay to say,
you know, my neighbor has an AR-15 and
has been posing with his gun on
Instagram and and last night my neighbor
at 2 a.m. was listening very very loudly
to Nick Fuentes, and I think he is a
danger to others. Please come and take
his guns. That is not the America that
our founding fathers fought and died
for. And doesn't matter where you are
politically. As governor, I will always
defend your constitutional rights in my
state.
>> Hey, really fast. Did you guys know that
we started this podcast a little over a
year ago? And in that time, we've had
the chance to sit down with some of the
best entrepreneurs in the world. But
honestly, these conversations have kind
of made me question everything I thought
I knew about investing, saving money, or
retirement. Growing up, I was taught,
put your money in a 401k, get a Roth
IRA, and invest in the S&P 500. But what
I've realized recently is things are
changing fast. Crypto's becoming really
mainstream. The S&P barely outpaces
inflation, and I'm the guy that was
investing in it for the past few years
inside of his retirement account. That's
why I was so excited when I met the guys
at iTrust Capital. They let you invest
in gold and cryptocurrency directly in
your IRA, which I didn't even know was
legal. And if you have an existing Roth
or 401k, you can transfer it over for no
extra cost. You get all the tax
advantages while getting to invest in
assets that have way bigger upside and
aren't tied directly to the dollar. With
just a small 1% transaction fee, you can
buy Bitcoin, gold, even Fartcoin with a
tax advantage retirement account. I'm
currently in the process of transferring
my accounts over to their platform, but
if you guys want to do the same, go to
joneil.com/iritrust.
Anyway, back to the podcast to tie it
back a bit to Epstein and we'll close
the loop here on the files in general.
Do you think that only the people with
the darkest secrets are allowed to run
for office or do you think
this is just something that happens to
happen to those who get in positions of
power?
>> It's probably a little bit of both.
I think if you're in a position of
power, the people that you're around,
the trips that you'll go on, the
attempts to infiltrate you. Matt Gates
famously talked about going to Israel
and his hotel room being bugged, going
to an Apac cocktail party and them quite
literally putting QR codes on each
member of Congress as if they were
slaves in an auction. You could talk to
Matt Gates and size him up on how pro-
Netanyahu he was. And right there you
could scan his barcode and bid on him
and give him money
and pay him off.
And so that world where you draw people
in is a world where I think you can
corrupt, compromise and therefore
control people. But I also think there
is truth to the people who are already
compromised.
People who already owe
the system favors.
Well, let's run them. Let's run them for
office because we've already we got them
right where we want them. If they don't
do exactly what we say, we'll release
everything we have on them. And so it's
it's a mix of those two. I don't ever
want to set false expectations, Jack. I
don't ever want to catfish. And I say
this as a politician who doesn't have
any political experience. I say this as
someone who joined Tinder quite
literally last month in an attempt to
meet young female voters where they are.
We got 4,000 matches in 48 hours, Jack.
And then they banned us. And my message
to young women on Tinder wasn't that I
was single and I wanted to go to Blue
Bottle and get coffee. My message to
them was this. I want to be a governor
for you as well. Because the Republican
party for far too long has
told women
how to live their lives, has litigated
every single part, wanted women to
explain every single decision. I'm
pro-life. I I believe that life begins
at conception. And if I lose the
election for being pro-life, for
reciting the words of Jeremiah 1:5, that
before I formed you, I knew you, that
before you were born, I set you apart.
If I lose the election for being
pro-life, I am happy to lose the
election. I'm never going to compromise
on that issue. But I'm also not going to
compromise on this radical belief that's
not radical at all. that if you give
birth to a beautiful baby boy on Friday
night as a working mom, you should not
be expected to show up to work on Monday
morning. My hottest take on Tinder as I
guess the pickup line was as governor, I
would institute paid maternity leave for
every single working mom in Florida. I
believe if you're pro-life, you have to
take away the active disincentives that
tell young women now's not a good time
to be pregnant. Now's not a good time to
be starting a family. And those
discussions, those words are uttered
every single day from corporate
boardrooms to the water cooler to the
back alley of a manufacturing facility.
And so my radical belief is put your
cards on the table. I think people don't
want someone who's going to try to be
authentic. You're either authentic or
you aren't. You don't try to be. If
you're trying to be authentic, you've
already lost.
And so for me,
I think that
just being honest with people upfront
and saying, "Look, I have zero political
experience.
I've never met with Apac. I've never
taken a dollar from them. I will never
take a dollar from them. I will never
meet with the kind of lobbyists that
have corrupted my state and are selling
it off in bits and pieces, trying to
pave over parts of the Everglades for
the next mass urban construction
project, trying to build AI data centers
in small towns like Fort Me and
Lockahhatchee,
there's never a question they'll turn
away from voters. I believe that the
voters of my state deserve an open book.
And when I go out and do five, six,
seven different campaign events every
single week, I say at the very end, I
say, "I'm not here to ask you for your
vote. I'm here to ask you to hire me."
Don't think of politics as pushing a
button on a voting machine. Think of it
instead as a choice between two men,
Congressman Byron Donald's and myself.
And as you're walking into that voting
booth on election day, ask yourself, who
would I trust more between these two men
to wake up every single day and to do
whatever it takes to fight for me and my
family? That is, I think, the choice
that voters are left with. And that's
what I'm telling them when I see them on
the campaign trail is the polls.
Certainly, we've done well. We've gone
from 2% to 23%. We're in second place in
a crowded field that includes the
lieutenant governor. We're beating him.
Includes a former speaker of the house.
We're beating him. selection probably
won't be over until that big Fox News
debate on July 21st where I'll be on
stage with Byron Donald's for the first
time and have an opportunity to use the
same speech and debate skills that you
and I honed for years and deliver not
just a rebuke of his vision which is
very dark for my state but also deliver
an affirmative vision that fights for
the dignity and the wages and the future
and the retirement of every single
Flidian at the beginning of this
interview, one of the first things you
said was, "No American should die for
Israel." On January 11th, 2026, you went
viral writing on a Marine's helmet, "No
American should die for Israel." 4 weeks
later, on February 8th, 2026,
someone tried to set your house on fire.
Do you think the second event was at all
connected to your political views?
>> Yes.
And I've always welcomed disagreement,
but
trying to
burn down my home
with my staff in it,
to be there as this attempted arson was
happening, to have to run out and see
the fire department
spraying down
all of it.
It made it real. I mean, you get death
threats, you get DMs, you get, you know,
we're going to hang you, whatever.
But literally to see the charring
on a place where I had just walked a
couple hours earlier,
it I didn't feel the full effect of it
maybe till the week later that
we're doing something that is bigger
than even just Florida.
I think there's a a theory, a vision for
the future of the Republican party that
is on offer with what this movement is
about. It's not about one person. It is
about one idea that whatever we do, we
put America first. When we say America,
we don't mean American GDP. We don't
mean American companies. We don't mean
American foreign policy, strategic
interest, visav the Middle East, and the
US's so-called greatest ally, Israel.
When we say put America first, we mean
put Americans first. We mean waking up
and every single policy we look at,
regardless of how small or big, we ask
ourselves one singular question. Does
this benefit American citizens? Yes or
no?
If that question were applied
just as the Pentagon were
dispatching the fighter jets to bomb
Tyrron, does this benefit American
citizens? If that simple yes or no
binary were asked,
those bombs would not have been dropped.
This war would not have been started.
Because what you'll never hear them say
is it benefits Americans. What you'll
always hear them say is, "Well,
it was a major blow to Iran's strategic
influence." What on earth does that
mean? It it toppled Iran's clout. What
on earth does that mean? It it reset the
chessboard. It dealt them a blow. How
does that help us? Not not only has this
war not helped us, it has hurt the 13
families who've had to bury loved ones.
The economic consequences
of the war, not just the dollar increase
in gas that we're paying, which is $6
every single time we fill up more. But
now the Pentagon, Jack, they want $200
billion. Let's play a game, shall we?
Remember that game, would you rather in
middle school? Would you rather, Jack
Neil,
spend $200 billion bombing Iran for
Israel,
or would you rather pay every single
qualified teacher in America a $62,000
bonus? Would you rather spend $200
billion to bomb Iran for Israel,
or would you rather build, 1300 rural
hospitals across America? Would you
rather spend $200 billion
to bomb Iran for Israel or give down
payment assistance for 20 million
families in America so they can buy a
home, get married, have children, and
live out the full arc of the American
dream. Let's make this a contest of
competing ideas of the would you
rathers. And when you frame it that way,
I think you make the war indefensible.
And what you make truly indefensible is
how preoccupied, how obsessed,
how addicted they are to war. And how
utterly apathetic they are to the war in
our own communities. The war to fight
another day, to pay the rent, to afford
groceries, to have kids, to retire with
dignity, to get highquality health care
at the VA that you've longed earned as a
veteran fighting in Korea or in Iraq.
the war to have a great paying job, to
own a home, and to live out
the promise of America. If we frame it
that way, we will win every single time.
And that money, that's directly from the
tax payments that Florida residents
make. Correct. Got it. So, it's not new
money. It's not being printed. It's not
that kind of thing. I do want to ask
though,
I don't consider myself to be the type
of individual that says something along
the lines of the ends justify the means,
but just
what is
like the ends and the means in the
situation to the people making these
kinds of decisions? Like do they expect
to get an ROI on this 200 billion and
those other things are just nicities to
the everyday person?
Well, a lot of them there's a revolving
door rather infamously between the
Pentagon and defense contractors. So the
200 billion is being used to buy weapons
from the largest defense contractors in
America. And so it certainly helps your
bargaining power when you leave the
Pentagon as the under secretary of
whatever to then be able to say, "Hey, I
did my part. You do yours. I want to be
on the board. I want to be in a vice
president of governmental affairs. I
want my 500gs. I want my private jet.
And I want my MX black card. And so
there is a quidd proquo to all of it.
That's why we have to enact term limits
for members of Congress. We have to ban
the revolving door that says you're in
government one day and then you're
working for the very people that you
enriched the next. That they are paying
back the favor that you gave them.
You know, my favorite economist, Thomas
Soul, says, "Show me the incentive and
I'll show you the outcome." I just
showed you the incentive for someone in
the Pentagon to push for $200 billion
to bomb Iran for Israel. Where is the
incentive for anyone, Pentagon,
Department of Education, Department of
Anywhere? Where is their incentive
to build rural hospitals?
Where is their incentive to pay our
teachers, firefighters, police officers,
paramedics more? Pay them what they're
worth. Where is their incentive to tell
20 million young families who are living
in a rental that you can now own a home?
You can have the picket fence, the front
yard, the back door, the golden
retriever. You can go from having one
kid to three or four. You can have your
in-law over maybe for just a weekend or
two.
There's no incentive to do that except
because you love your country. But I'm
afraid that the people at times who run
our government, they just don't not like
our country, they in many respects hold
utter contempt for the United States
that you and I love and cherish. A
US-based company, Oracle, recently
acquired Tik Tok from the Chinese.
It was owned under Bite Dance
originally. Do you think America bought
Tik Tok to protect ourselves from
Chinese propaganda?
Well, that's what they certainly told
us.
Why did we buy Tik Tok and why did we
have Larry Ellison run it? We didn't buy
it to stave off Chinese propaganda.
We bought it so we could install
propaganda of our own. Let me give you
just one example.
One of the lead executives at Tik Tok at
a conference earlier this year was
touting their new censorship policy for
hate speech. He said that if a account
calls themselves a Zionist,
which is to say, generally speaking,
someone who is supportive of the Israeli
government, the Israeli state, if
someone self-identifies as a Zionist,
that is approved. But if someone calls
you a Zionist, calls me a Zionist,
that is banned. That is hate speech.
The video that I made at a rally outside
of my home the day after was attempted
arson.
I came outside with an AR-156
and I said, "Anybody who tries anything
like that against our staff, our team,
we are not waiting for the police. We
will shoot you dead with an AR-15 with a
5.56 round.
Tik Tok took that video down.
Tik Tok will take down videos of young
Muslims criticizing the Israeli
government, of Christians calling out
what happened to the Holy Family
Catholic Church in Gaza City last
summer. will take down videos pointing
out the inconsistencies of both
Republicans and Democrats who disagree
on literally everything getting millions
of dollars from the same organization
known as Apac. And so, yeah, I think
there are probably some genuine concerns
about China, Tik Tok, and that general
propaganda arm. But I am way more
concerned about Tik Tok today with Larry
Ellison, Oracle, and this pro-Israel
bent and this push for censorship. Way
more concerned about that than I ever
was about Tik Tok in Chinese hands.
>> Is it illegal for foreign governments to
run propaganda in the US?
>> It's a good question. It certainly
should be. The way that the propaganda
is run is through something called FAR,
which requires anyone who is enlisted,
paid by a foreign government to register
with the Department of Justice to let
everybody know, hey, I am a registered
agent of Ukraine, of Saudi Arabia, or of
Israel. And there's clear limitations
about what you can do. And there's again
public disclosure there. The issue
though is that if you're taking 500,000
a million dollars from Apac, you are not
required to put that on your website.
You're not required to disclose that to
the voters who voted you in, Republican
or Democrat, to put their interest
first. And so what I think we have to do
more than anything is we have to ban
this kind of foreign money. In
principle, yes, it is illegal because it
violates the social contract between the
government and her people.
We can't possibly think that China would
let us go pay off their politicians in
the pullet burrow or the standing
committee of the CCP. Nor should we. But
why is it allowed the other way around?
And so my radical idea is we have to get
Apac out of US politics. The way you do
that is not just by changing the laws at
the top level, but we as voters, you in
California, me in Florida, saying, "I
don't care what they say, what they try
to dangle in front of us, under no
circumstance can you vote for someone
who has taken a penny from Apac." If we
go through one or two cycles of just not
voting for the Apacbacked candidates,
the system will flush itself out. and
then in eight years we'll have a really
good thing that we can be proud of.
>> Are you alone in that ideology?
>> I'm not.
>> Who else shares it?
>> Quite a few people on the right, of
course, but also on the left. In fact, I
think a lot of the skepticism about this
recent wave of what Israel has done in
Gaza has actually come from a lot of the
Democrats that I would find myself
disagreeing with on a lot of things in
recent years. You know, I was never some
pro-Israel advocate.
I kind of was a card carrying member of
the, you know, Israel is an ally and,
you know, they're the only democracy in
the Middle East and they're fighting the
bad guys so we don't have to. Similar
line was used against Russia with
Ukraine. The Ukraine is fighting the bad
guys so we don't have to. as if if
Ukraine didn't exist as a buffer, Russia
would be attacking us in New York City
or in Miami, which of course is not
true.
But I've got to give credit because
I truly wasn't aware of how bad things
had gotten. I was largely indifferent to
what was happening in Gaza and in the
Middle East until, you know, rather
selfishly, the Catholic Church, the Holy
Family Catholic Church in Gaza City was
bombed last summer and there was no real
investigation, no real accountability.
Netanyahu brushed it off when there were
people during a mass, the same mass that
I go to every single Sunday with my team
was bombed by the IDF.
And that's when I really, you know, it
was like an old Hemingway quote. How did
you go bankrupt? Gradually then
suddenly. How did you wake up to what
was Israel was really doing in the
Middle East? Gradually then suddenly.
And for me, that was the suddenly.
It also hit home when I saw free speech
being attacked in Florida. the new
anti-semitism law that came about in
2023
that said that even criticism of the
Israeli government could now become a
punishable offense. Florida State
Statute 105 adopts the IH, the
International Holocaust Remembrance AY's
definition of anti-semitism.
Now again, hatred of Jews is wrong, but
criticism of Israel is not
anti-semitism. And so if you are the
students for justice in Palestine at UF
and you are criticizing the Israeli
government and protesting against human
rights violations in Gaza or in the West
Bank, you have a First Amendment right
to do so. Just as if you're a
conservative going to a schoolboard
meeting protesting a vaccine mandate or
left-wing indoctrination in the schools,
you have a First Amendment right to do
so. This hit home
because this, you know, they say, "Oh,
well, what is the police going to come
knock on your door about this?" And
quite literally, this happened in in
January. A woman by the name of Raquel
Pacheos,
15-year resident of Miami Beach, 9-year
veteran of the National Guard,
committed the capital offense of
criticizing the mayor of being too
pro-Israel,
criticizing him on Facebook. And the
mayor of Miami Beach sent the Miami
Beach Police Department to go confront
her. And the entire encounter is on
camera. They just filed a First
Amendment lawsuit in federal court this
past week. And he admitted to it, never
denied it, and said we had to do it
because of the rise in quote
anti-semitism. So you can literally go
to jail for anti-semitism, criticism of
Israel, or criticism of APEC? Yes.
Did she go to jail? She didn't. She's
lucky because there was a huge firestorm
that broke out and now she has to go to
court. She has to sue them to finally
make this clear. This kind of oppressive
censorship can never be allowed anywhere
in America, but least of all in the
so-called free state of Florida. You
know, as a conservative, I don't want
the college Republicans of UF to be
banned for so-called anti-semitism,
which they were two weeks ago. And I'm
glad that my friend Anthony Sabatini, a
lawyer from Central Florida, has taken
up the case, is now suing them in
federal court. I am filing an amikas
brief defending not just their first
amendment right, but the first amendment
right of any student group to bring on
any speaker to say anything that is
protected by the US Constitution. There
are two forms of speech that are not
protected by the US Constitution. The
first is a truth threat. That's me
texting you later, Jack. Fun interview,
but I'm coming over to kill you. That's
not protected by the First Amendment. Or
it is, I see you across the street in
downtown Miami. And I say, hey guys,
that's Jack Neil. Let's go get him.
Let's let's lynch him.
That would fail the Bradenberg test from
Bradenber v. Ohio 1969 US Supreme Court
that said that speech that incites
imminent lawless action
violence is not protected by the US
Constitution. Everything else is fair
game,
including being racist, by the way.
Things that I find abhorrent, offensive,
they're still protected by the First
Amendment. And so again, let's go back
to that two truths.
Two things can be true. Calling for the
death of any race of any religion,
the destruction of that is wrong,
but it is not criminal. Criticizing your
own government, I may disagree with
those criticisms, but it is not
criminal. And so what I think we have to
do, and I don't like saying this because
I think the Democrats really weaponized
it in 2024. They told us that democracy
itself was on the ballot in the 24
election between Trump and Kla Harris.
That was a copout. Now, if you want to
criticize Trump and criticize the
involvement and the war and economic
policy, fine. But to make it this
existential fight about democracy and
that if Trump wins that democracy as we
know it is over, that is a very cheap
argument that wouldn't pass muster at
one of our local speech and debate
tournaments, let alone on a national
political stage. What I think you're
better off doing is just attacking
the substantive issues, the real issues.
With that being said, I do think that
the First Amendment is on the ballot in
my race. My opponent, Congressman Byron
Donald's, has said nothing about what
happened to Raquel Pacheos has said
nothing about what happened to the UF
College Republicans. said nothing what
happened about what happened to the
students for justice in Palestine who
were kicked off the University of
Florida which is a public university
which is taxpayer funded which is bound
by the first amendment. This is not a
private business. It's a public
university that is censoring students
simply because it disagrees with their
speech. Disagree with me all you want.
I'm never going to throw you off campus.
I'm never going to threaten you with
criminal prosecution. I'm never going to
send the police to bang on your door
because I believe that disagreement,
that debate makes us better Americans at
the end of the day. What do you make of
the Florida nightclub incident? I
believe uh this was two months ago.
Essentially, Andrew Tape, Tristan Tape,
Justin Waller, Myin Gaines, uh Myron
Gaines co-host, Clvicular, and Sneo were
at a nightclub in Miami. Allegedly,
someone had played a song. It was a song
called HH by uh Kanye and I think they
had gotten banned from all the clubs
within South Florida or that area and
there was a whole media press release
about this and many people saw it as
anti-Semitic. But I want to know your
thoughts on the incident.
>> Well, I'll tell you it is not my
favorite Kanye West song. That that is
reserved for
Flashing Lights I like a lot. I like
Love Lockdown from 808. I think that was
the best album. I've been listening a
lot to Life of Pablo. So, it would not
it would be not anywhere near my
favorite Kanye song. In in fact, I quite
seriously I think the song is pretty
offensive and I don't think it should be
played publicly. At the same time, the
two truths, that song is deeply
offensive.
It also should not have started
literally World War II to where
government officials were telling people
like Sneo Clvicular and Nick Fuentes
that they were no longer allowed in
Miami Beach. And clearly private
businesses had gotten the memo. Look, a
private business can turn anyone away.
The real test is if you owned a
restaurant and you were critical of
Israel, you would want to retain the
right to deny Benjamin Netanyahu
service.
if you were critical of China, you would
want to deny the right of chairman Xi
Jinping from having noodles at your
restaurant. So, we we agree. I think
that private businesses should be able
to deny patrons. Certainly not because
of their race or their religion. You
can't deny someone because they're white
or because they're Christian. But if it
is not a protected class, then yes, of
course. But it what it awfully looks
like here is actually the government
precipitating this action and saying,
"We didn't like this song.
Therefore, all businesses in Miami Beach
were telling you, "These guys are not
allowed. You should pass the word,
whether you're a restaurant, a club, a
coffee, whatever. These guys are not
allowed." Now, if those businesses had
come to that conclusion on their own, it
would be legally protected. I'm still
not the biggest fan of it because I
think playing a stupid song doesn't mean
you get banned for life from everywhere,
but that's still their right. But what
it really looks like is this was
government instituted. The government
made the call, the businesses picked up,
and therefore it was government action
disguised as businesses making their own
organic decision. And so again, I come
back to it. Two truths. It's a really
messed up song. I'm not a fan of it. At
the same time, I'm not a fan of
government action telling private
businesses that, and you don't have to
like Nick Fuentes. You don't have to
agree with him on nearly anything, but I
will always protect his free speech
rights and every American's free speech
rights, especially those who want to
criticize Nick Fuentes. If you want to
criticize him, be my guest. The beauty
of America is that we compete in the
open marketplace. That we don't settle
our differences with violence, but
through free speech and open debate. I
have a fun segment for you. You can just
describe the following people with one
word.
Ronda Santis,
brave.
Donald Trump,
funny.
Byron Donald's slave.
Sam Olman,
cunning.
Nick Fuentes,
smart.
Clvicular
Mog.
Epstein,
depraved.
BB Netanyahu,
criminal.
Charlie Kirk, patriot.
Erica Kirk,
deceitful.
JD Vance,
duplicitus,
Gavin Newsome,
disastrous. Do you think Gavin Newsome
has done a good job here in California?
>> I've been to California
six times my entire life. My
grandparents had a place out here in San
Francisco. They would spend the summers
to get away from the crazy heat of South
Florida. And so I would often visit them
and spend time. And I can tell you from
what they saw,
Gavin Newsome has been an utter
disaster. What I can objectively look at
is that people will always vote with
their feet and you had the number one
state for U-Haul rentals leaving the
state in recorded history. That tells
you something about the living
conditions here. I think this is a
beautiful state, by the way. Absolutely
beautiful. Second only to Florida, of
course.
But there's something about squandering
that beauty, letting that all go to
waste for political social experiments.
Remember, it was the same Gavin Newsome
that had told you you couldn't see your
loved one because of COVID, but was also
eating at the most expensive restaurant
on the West Coast at French Laundry.
This is the same Gavin Newsome who said
you must wear a mask everywhere you go,
even though he was maskless, chanting
with BLM supporters who were rioting in
the streets of LA, Sacramento, and
Oakland. This is the same Gavin Newsome
who said it is okay to talk to young
children about sensitive sexual topics
in the classroom. And so I don't view
the Gavin Newsome problem as Republican
or Democrat, even as left versus right.
I view it as right versus wrong. It is
wrong to do one thing and to tell your
people to do another. It is wrong to
tell people
that they should not do the very thing
that you are going out of your way to
do. And so I think history will look at
Gavin Newsome and will try to diagnose
exactly what his
tenure was most responsible for. But I
think the way to measure the failure of
Gavin Newsome's administration is how
many people have just left the state and
have gone for greener pastures. And one
of those pastures has been Florida.
>> Quick question. And how many different
apps, software, subscriptions are you
using to run your business? Because if
you're anything like me, you're probably
doing email marketing on one platform.
You built your website on another
platform and calendar appointments, CRM
somewhere else. You're paying hundreds,
thousands of dollars a month on all
these tools, and you can barely keep
track of anything. And that's why my
team started using Highle. It's
basically an operating system for our
entire business all in one place. You
can keep track of leads, send automated
emails and text, build landing pages,
and process payments all in one
platform, $97 a month. So, if you want
to stop paying for eight different
subscriptions, just go to
jagnille.com/hyle
or scan the QR code on screen. You can
also hit the first link in the
description, but again, that is
jagnil.com/hyle
if you want to run your entire business
all in one place. But anyway, guys, back
to the podcast. I want to touch on why
Florida is such an important state
like domestically as far as the entire
US goes and why you being elected
governor and your policies would have
impacts around the US and potentially
around the globe. But first, one of the
things that people often reference with
you is your opinions on Only Fans. The
CEO of Only Fans died of cancer a few
days ago at 43 years old. Do you want
Elon Musk to buy Only Fans and shut it
down?
That's one way to handle it.
I think Only Fans is a cancer on
society, but in particular on young
women. When I was growing up,
young women, including my sister, they
aspired to be nurses. lawyers, teachers,
which my sister is now a proud public
school teacher. They aspire to be
stay-at-home moms, to run small
businesses, to be veterinarians.
Now, young women, their top career
choice, if you ask them in national
surveys, is to be an influencer, and
among that, an Only Fans content
creator.
Now, are there women on Only Fans who
will do it no matter what? Of course.
But what is most
frustrating about all of this is there
are good women in my state and all over
this country who are turning to Only
Fans because they feel like they have no
other choice. They're struggling with
the rent, affording groceries. They
might want to put down the down payment
on a mortgage. They're college students
and they're struggling to pay for
tuition or textbooks this semester. And
so instead of being able to do something
worthwhile and dignified, they've been
sold the lie that it's just easy. Go on
only fans, take your cut, take some
photos of yourself nude, then some
videos, then bring in another person,
and then another person. Create an
entire library of explicit content that
commodifies you, that reduces you
to simply an object
of men, that financializes you into a
product and strips you of your humanity
and your dignity. I was attacked by
Sophie Rain because she said I wasn't
pro-women. With all due respect to
Sophie, the pro-women thing to do is to
help women be the best versions of
themselves. Because I believe that young
women, including Sophie Rain, are
capable of anything they put their minds
to. But no woman should feel trapped in
the world of online sex work. No woman
should feel as if they can't do anything
more worthwhile. And so if you're a mom
in Florida and you're struggling and you
feel like Only Fans is the answer, I
want you to know I'm not going to mock
you. I'm not going to ask you to explain
the last 15 years of your life. I'm
going to meet you where you are and make
sure you have the support that you need
to write the next chapter of your life.
If you're a college student and you're
struggling to pay tuition for the next
semester, know that I will be a governor
for you to get you off of Only Fans
to make sure you can write the next
chapter of your life. But if you, as
Sophie Rain has adamantly said, if you
insist on
selling your body on the internet, when
we have removed the barriers elsewhere
for you to make an honest, dignified
living, if you insist putting out online
degenerate content, that doesn't just
harm you, it also harms young men. It
draws them into lust. It fuels this
pornographic addiction that young men
are grappling with, which is also at the
heart of the crisis that young men are
facing these days. If you are part of
that systemic rot, you have two choices.
Quit Only Fans or pay your taxes. It's
going to be a 50% Only Fans sin tax. Any
income that is derived from Only Fans is
going to have a 50% tax. That means,
Jack, that Sophie Rain is nearing $42
million in taxes that she will owe the
state of Florida. I don't want to raise
a dollar in tax revenue if we can help
it. I would much rather create the Only
Fans syntax and scare everybody out of
Only Fans so we don't raise that money.
But if we do raise that money, we're
going to use it to raise teacher pay and
to increase empowerment programs for
young men and women so they don't have
to turn to online degeneracy. They don't
get addicted to online pornography, but
they can be the best versions of
themselves.
>> So you think women should pay a sin tax
for doing Only Fans?
>> Yes. And syntaxes traditionally are for
goods like alcohol, cigarettes,
nicotine, right?
>> Yes.
>> And is it typically the people selling
those things that are paying the
syntaxes to the government or is it the
consumer of the products? It's usually
the consumer of the product. The syntax
though can be applied to the supplier of
the product. And I wouldn't take it off
the table that the syntax could also be
applied to the young man, for example,
who's buying the content from Sophie
Rain on a monthly subscription. So
everything is on the table to tackle
this problem of online degeneracy. Even
people who disagree with me on this. You
ask them point blank about Only Fans.
Don't ask them if they support Only Fans
or whatever and they'll give you some
free speech argument.
Ask them this. If the number of women
doing Only Fans doubled tomorrow, would
that be a sign of a healthy society? Yes
or no?
Even Sophie Rain herself, I think, would
be hardpressed to argue that if the
number of women on Only Fans doubled
tomorrow, the number of 19, 20,
21year-old girls who aspired to be
veterinarians, florists, small business
owners, doctors, lawyers, teachers. If
that number doubled, it meant that women
gave up on their dreams. It meant that
women were being sold a lie. Were being
objectified, commodified in many
respects, and I don't say this lightly,
were being enslaved to an online world
of degeneracy. The pro-women thing to do
is to stand up to the owners of Only
Fans. Tell them to get the hell out of
our state. Tell them go bankrupt so we
can stand up for the dignity of every
single young lady in our state. So, if
you become governor of Florida, how much
would Sophie Rain be taxed for doing
Only Fans? At this rate, about $42
million she would owe and one would
assume that she would just leave the
state. Fine by me.
That's the case, then we're going to
start taxing the consumer. We will do
whatever it takes, Jack, to end the
online degeneracy, the filth that is
Only Fans. We will do whatever it takes.
then trust me, it will work.
Research from Pew estimates there are
about 14 million people living in the US
illegally with a recent Yale study
estimating this could be as high as 23
million. As the child of a parent that
had immigrated to the US, do you think
America should deport 20 million illegal
immigrants?
So, you're right. My mother was born in
South America, small town called Baranca
in Colombia. Very hot. It is called the
oven of Colombia. It is brutal there. I
spent the summers there for much of my
childhood and got a chance to see my
family, my grandmother, my elite that I
talked to almost every single day.
America is not a nation of immigrants.
We are a nation of pioneers and
settlers. It doesn't change the fact
though that immigrants have been a part
of our national story. that innovation,
cultural enrichment, food, entertainment
has been indelibly impacted by the work
of immigrants.
But the immigrants of the 1850s, the
immigrants of the 1950s are not the
immigrants of the 2020s. The immigrants
who stormed the border when Kla Harris
was the borders are were not the same
immigrants who came to Ellis Island in
search for a new place who were
committed to the words of our 26th
president Teddy Roosevelt when he said
we have but one flag the American flag.
We have but one language the English
language. We don't have any room for
hyphenated Americans. We only have room
for people who will make this country
their sole loyalty.
And the immigrants who came to Ellis
Island, they did not get food stamps,
Obama phone. They did not get $7,000 a
month. They did not get a $500 a night
hotel room. They did not get a Gavin
Newsome gift card to go to Arowan. They
pulled themselves up by their
bootstraps. They assimilated. They spoke
the language. They committed themselves
fully, unwaveringly, and undyingly to
the United States of our founding
fathers. That is very different than the
immigrants who came here 5 years ago
under Joe Biden. And so my view has
always been if your first act of
entering our country was to break our
law, whether that was storming the
border
or even overstaying your visa,
you have to go back because we are a
nation of laws and any job that is taken
by someone who is not here lawfully is a
job that could go to an American
citizen. There's this lie that's often
told that Americans don't want to do
these jobs.
It's a lie, but it's also a halftruth
because Americans don't want to do these
jobs. But finish the sentence. Americans
don't want to do these jobs at the slave
wages that American billionaires are
willing to pay American workers. The
people of my state,
you pay them an honest wage for an
honest day's work, they will show up
every single day, but they will take off
on Sunday to praise our awesome God. And
so, we need to get back to a system that
restores the Christian ethic of
capitalism. That doesn't say that
capitalism is about maximizing profits.
Because if capitalism, Jack, is about
maximizing profits and getting the
highest labor margins we can and it's
all about the bottom line, that's what
capitalism is about. We should bring
back slavery cuz that was really cheap
labor. And yet we don't because we
realize that some things are so morally
offensive, repugnant, abhorrent that
they supersede the capitalistic impulse
to maximize profits. And so my view has
always been we can't go around
in 10 years from now and say, "Well, I'm
really proud of our country because we
have the freest, most capitalist system.
We know the fruits of our system because
of high profit margins, stock market,
GDP, all of those things can be true,
but if people are living in poverty, if
you're a young man and you're not
married by the age of 30 and you can't
buy a home by the age of 30, if you
can't get a job even though you're fully
qualified for it, whatever the field is,
if your home is being auctioned off to
Blackstone, hoarded, and turned into a
rental community, and you can't and
engage in the promise of home ownership.
Doesn't matter what gross domestic
product is. Doesn't matter what the
stock market says. The American dream is
no longer a reality for you. And so I
want to get back to a country where we
don't worship any particular economic
ideology. We recognize that capitalism
is a good system. It is perhaps the best
system, but it is not a perfect system.
And I believe that capitalism rooted in
that Christian ethic is the way forward.
Assuming that
some major worldly event causes America
to suffer devastating economic
downfall. Uh
do you think it'd be reasonable to
assume we would see a large number of
immigrants come into the country
illegally uh for cheap labor purposes?
And with that,
what is the actual statute or
legislation that needs to change to stop
the current issue of illegal immigrants?
>> It's already illegal. What we have to do
is better enforce it. Yeah, it's illegal
to shoplift in California. The problem
is no one enforces the law. Even if the
police here in LA arrest someone, the
prosecutor will decline to press charges
or the Soros funded judge will declined
to hear the case. We'll let the person
go. We'll dismiss it. It's illegal to
burn down police stations in the name of
George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but
no one was arrested. It's illegal to
shoot people on the streets of Chicago,
young black men and women, but no one
seems to be arrested for it. So, the
question isn't whether the letter of the
law says it's illegal. It's whether the
enforcer and chief is actually
prosecuting these offenses. And as
governor, I would prosecute them to the
fullest extent of the law. What that
means is not just
going and
taking someone who has a felony warrant
out for their arrest who's an illegal
immigrant and sending them back to their
home country. That also means going to
the billionaires who run the largest
agricultural companies in our state and
saying, "It's over. It's done. You made
your money. 30 years ago, you managed to
do all of this without exploiting
illegal labor from the third world. You
can do it again. But your profit margin
days of maximizing at the expense of not
just our workers, Jack, but of these
migrants as well. I am not of the
opinion that every single migrant in our
country is some encourageable criminal.
Doesn't change the fact that I believe
they need to be resettled back home and
they need to be remigrated back to their
home country.
But the 15-year-old boy that the New
York Times profiled in 2022 in an
article titled The Kids on the Midnight
Shift, he lost his arm
illegally working at a meat processing
facility in the Midwest. His employer
and the billionaires who own that
company knew exactly what they were
doing when they were taking young men
like him, trafficking them into the
country, paying them under the table as
children to work the midnight shift. And
so we can dispel with the notion
that this only exploits American
workers. It does because it dispossesses
them of a job, of benefits, of an
income, of the life that comes with that
income and that financial
self-sufficiency. But it also exploits
third world migrant labor. And there was
a time and place where the Democratic
Party once recognized that a period
where you bring people over from another
country
and you exploit them for illegal labor.
We fought a war over that. That is wrong
then. It is wrong now. And I wish that
we can get back to a party where the
Democrats in leadership will get on the
same page with Republicans and say we
don't want illegal labor to benefit
anyone, not least because it hurts
American workers and it hurts the
migrants. Now look, the the guy who
killed Lake and Riley, the sicko that
killed Rachel Marin, the depraved
criminal who took the life of Jocelyn
Gary, these people are incorraible and
they need to be put to death. But most
immigrants in America left their home
because they wanted to escape poverty.
That doesn't make it okay, but it just
makes it a sober, rational recognition
of what actually went wrong. I have the
belief that you should stay where God
put you. That God didn't make a mistake
when you were born in Sagal or Nigeria
or Guatemala or Colombia or Venezuela.
That you were there for a reason. You
should fight for your wife, your kids,
your mom. As much as it might hurt your
mother-in-law, fight for your community,
make your country great. Because right
now, we can't make our country great
when young men cannot get a job because
the largest companies in America are
relying on cheap third world illegal
labor. And that is preventing them from
hiring good men. White or black, it
doesn't matter. Those jobs should go to
us. That income allows us to buy a home.
That home allows us to get married. that
marriage allows us to have children,
that children allows us
to live a life of purpose.
If you had to tie one core cause to the
wealth disparity happening between
classes in the US, uh would it be the
illegal labor issue?
>> Yes and no. Statistically, it is the
most pervasive
form of disparity. But if you just look
at raw balance sheet, raw net worth, the
biggest is going to be who owns the
assets, who borrows money, who lends
money, and who is on the other end,
which say they rent, they don't own,
they don't own stocks, stock market goes
up annualize 12% a year, 20, 30 years
straight. That's going to create a
pretty massive disparity. Right.
>> I believe that the Republican party is
wrong for not acknowledging what you and
I and almost everybody at home knows to
be true that income inequality is real.
It is a problem. the working families
where I grew up in Davyy, where I went
to church in Pahokei, one of the poorest
towns in Florida, where my dad often
bought watermelons by the hundreds to
sell on the side of the road in Fort
Lauderdale, a small migrant community,
farming community in Amacholi. Those
poor people, they don't wake up
and say, Mark Zuckerberg, you're the
reason I'm poor. They don't look at Bill
Gates or Elon Musk and say,
"Man,
I'm screwed because of how much money
they have." In fact, they're willing to
celebrate that success because where
they came from, rich men who had done
productive things would often be
dispossessed of their wealth in the name
of democratic socialism.
But I think there is truth to the fact
that
if you can barely afford your basic
necessities,
if you can not get a job, not be able to
buy a home
because the system isn't working for
you, that's the problem. I the people
that I meet in my state and rural
communities and working-class
communities, they don't aspire to be
Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Elon
Musk. They just want to live a life that
they can afford and a life that they can
be proud of. They want to keep their
head above water. And no, Elon Musk's
worth does not need to be nationalized
by the government to make that happen.
We have to remove barriers that make it
hard to start small businesses. We need
to create a labor market that actually
prioritizes American citizens, not
unqualified foreign labor, whether
that's illegally sourced or even legally
sourced via programs like the H-1B scam.
And we have to make sure that there are
real benefits and that wages keep up
with inflation. You know, if the prices
doubled over the next 5 years, you and I
would be pissed. Everyone would be
pissed if the prices doubled in the
economy. But if the prices doubled and
our salaries, our wages, our take-home
pay tripled, we'd have nothing to be
upset about. It's not just, Jack, that
prices have gone up. It's that prices
have gone up and our take-home pay has
not kept up the pace. And so an economic
system that fights inflation is one that
works to keep prices from going up
quickly, but also make sure that we can
work
so that that take-home pay is at the
very minimum keeping up with inflation,
but in many respects outpacing it. You
can't do that when you import 10 million
foreign workers who are willing to work
for $2 a day, who will never join a
union, who will never demand working
conditions, who will allow themselves,
sadly because of the system, to be
exploited. That holds down wages for
everyone else. You come out of high
school, you say, "I'm ready. I'm ready
to get into the world of agriculture.
I'm ready to move to Okchobee County or
Highlands County in the Florida
Heartland. I'm ready to do this work.
And just use a physical example. You
show up at a farm and just as you're
about to sign your employment contract,
a busload of foreign workers of migrants
from Central America is dropped off and
what you were going to get $20 an hour
for. that same hour of work they're
willing to do for $3, for $4 because of
the disparity between what they earned
at home, their living conditions here,
the ability to send money back home. And
what does that business owner do? Hold
up, Jack. We're not hiring your kind
anymore. We'll take a couple of those
guys. We'll take 10 of those guys at $2
an hour versus one of you for $20 an
hour. And that is the system we've set
up. Now, as much as I'd love business
owners to come to the patriotic
realization that you have to owe your
allegiance to your country and her
people as opposed to foreigners who got
here on a bus 5 minutes ago, that
realization, that epiphany is not going
to be
organic. I believe that it's
government's responsibility to correct
this wrong. And in many respects, a free
market is one that also plays by the
rules. The free market that Milton
Freriedman rightly defended is not one
that would import cheap foreign labor
and allow it to underpric good American
workers. And so I think that's
government's responsibility. That's one
thing that I'll do as governor is not
just stand up to illegal labor, but also
stand up to the billionaires that are
exploiting illegal labor at the expense
of hardworking people throughout
Florida. And my hope is that we create a
blueprint that any state, even
California, can command C, command V,
can copy and paste, take that blueprint,
and successfully apply it in the other
49 states. Would you regulate remote
labor?
>> I would in foreign countries. I'll give
you one example. There's a a Lita hotel
not too far from the Miami International
Airport
and you go in there to check in.
Put your credit card down and there's an
Indian from India, not from the Cherokee
tribe. There's an Indian there.
Uh, but he's not really there. It's an
iPad. He's on Zoom. This is actually the
case. I posted a video of this earlier
this year. There's an Indian there
checking you in.
at the Lintita Hotel.
That used to be a job that would go to a
young black girl from Miami Gardens or
from Belglade or from Liberty City. That
was going to be her first job. She
wasn't going to make a lot of money. She
knew that she had no illusions about
making $30, $40 an hour, but she wanted
someplace to start to build a little bit
of experience, to build up her resume,
to then have the knowledge to get the
next job. It wasn't about what she was
necessarily going to earn. It was also
about what she was going to learn.
That job, that income, those skills,
that learning and earning has now been
stolen from her and given to a fine
Indian fellow in Mumbai or in Kolkata.
That is not okay. And once again, we're
letting billionaires and large companies
prioritize their profit margins, their
bottom line. It is much cheaper to hire
an Indian on an iPad than a young black
girl from Miami Gardens to work at that
hotel. But now that young girl doesn't
have a job, doesn't have income, will
live at home 5 years longer, won't be
able to have a real relationship, won't
be able to have children until later
life or even at all, her ability to buy
a home taken, her skills squandered, her
destiny dispossessed. What are we doing
here? Thomas Soul quote again my
favorite economist.
Politics is not about solutions.
It's about trade-offs. Here's the
trade-off. I'm not going to make
everyone happy with this. Certainly not
the owners of Lita and their
shareholders. But here's the trade-off.
20-year-olds who are smart and qualified
can't get jobs or Lita cannot maximize
its third quarter profits.
What trade-off are you willing to sleep
with at night more? I'm asking companies
to do the right thing to look at the big
picture. By the way, forget the moral,
ethical, patriotic, be loyal to your
country and her people argument for a
moment, which would obviously favor
hiring local kids who are qualified to
do these jobs. Jack, are you inclined to
check into a hotel where you're going to
meet an Indian man with a strong accent
over a FaceTime call? Is that the kind
of customer service that you're going to
come to expect and enjoy? better than
AI, I suppose,
>> but not as good as having a breathing
human who speaks your language from your
community, who you can go down to in the
middle of the night and say, "Hey, I'm
locked out." Or, "Hey, I need a good
coffee to go to in the morning." "Hey,
hey, what can you recommend as a cool
family friendly attraction for this
evening?"
So, it's the morally right thing to do,
the ethically right thing to do, the
patriotic thing to do. also happens to
be the right business thing to do
because in the long run there's nothing
attractive about having a hotel, having
waiters, having people remotely zoom in
and check you in, take your order or
whine and dine you. That's not okay. And
so what I would tell those businesses
is, "Hey guys, I'm a business guy, too.
I'm an investor. My investment firm has
already deployed $40 million of capital
last year alone investing in companies
all over this country. I get it. I'm not
asking you to do something that's going
to hurt your bottom line. I'm asking you
to do the thing that's going to help the
country, help your community, and it's
all also going to help you maximize your
bottom line in the long term. In the
long term, you are not going to have
repeat customers if you force them to
check in and get customer service and
concierge over an iPad with an Indian
fellow who I'm sure is a good guy who
just wants to feed his family, but so do
we. We want to be able to feed our
families. The right thing to do is to
put American workers first. And so when
you're a governor, you got to pass laws.
You got to work with the legislator. You
got to compromise. But one thing that's
often underrated that I'm having an
appreciation for is you've also got to
be a good negotiator, a good
communicator. You have to be the person
who can pick up the phone and tell the
10 largest hotels in Florida,
here's why we all need to be on the same
page and get this done. I need to be
able to sell them, to persuade them.
I don't want them kicking and screaming.
If they have to, so be it. But that's
the last resort. My grandmother always
reminded me, you're always going to
attract more bees with honey than with
vinegar. And so I am going to speak
softly and carry a big stick, but I'd
rather that stick be one of carrots that
I can offer them to work with them to do
the right thing for our country, our
workers, and ultimately if we look past
next quarter or next fiscal year, the
right thing for their company and their
shareholders. This leads into a
really important question that a lot of
people are fearful of. If you were
elected governor of Florida,
how would you prevent AI from taking
everyone's jobs?
It's a really good question.
I haven't I use AI almost every single
day to do research, to edit videos, do
all our team uses it all the time.
I don't think and I grew up in the age
of dialup. I grew up in the age of the
Nintendo 64 and then seeing the GameCube
and the PS2 become the PS3 and then
broadband internet. I remember waiting
in line with my family as they got the
first iPhone in 2007. And so I grew up
at a really interesting time. You're a
couple years younger than me, but we
grew up at really interesting inflection
points in technological progress. more
has happened in technology in the last
30 years than perhaps the last 300 for
consumerf facing tech.
One, I think the fears over AI are
overblown for a couple reasons. But the
first is I think AI has actually become
less advanced in the last 6 months, last
year for whatever reason. And there's
some very interesting technical
constraints behind the scenes with
inference and training. AI it looks like
it's actually gotten dumber. And so one
of the preconditions for AI taking
everyone's job is that AI is smarter
than everyone. I would have actually
subscribed to that thesis 12 months ago.
But my own research, some of the
academic papers that I'm reading about
scaling and inference suggests that AI
is probably capped out in the near term
here. The kind of jobs that AI, if it is
in fact more advanced than humans, will
take are the kind of jobs that are in
many respects a weight on society. So
a parallegal
now the parallegals will not like that
the parallegals are being replaced but
that is a cost that is being born
in a society where you have to pay up
for legal expenses. So when AI comes in
what does that allow you as a average
American to do? It allows you to take
the fight to courts where you didn't
weren't able to do before. You know, if
you wanted to sue somebody,
$10,000 for a lawyer,
take them to court, 18 months, you may
you may not lose, whatever. With AI, you
can draft a lawsuit, you can file it
yourself, prosay, can take you step by
step. So, on one hand, that is a loss
for the one out of a thousand people who
are parallegals who are going to be able
to move on to a new career, a more
fulfilling career. They're smart people.
But it's also a gain for the other 999
people who are now able to use this
technology to hold companies that abuse
them or break their contract, hold them
accountable in a way they never were
before. I'm really excited about law in
particular because I think this is a new
era where even at this stage, even if
you assume no further technological
progress, AI and the field of law has
gotten very advanced where
everyday people can file lawsuits and
hold people accountable in the court
system. And one of the things about, you
know, the law is that, yeah, Walmart
could probably beat the average
Floridaian or the average American in a
lawsuit if it went all the way to trial,
but even the act of threatening to sue
them and then following it up with a
lawsuit,
80% of the time they're just going to
settle at that point. And and there's
some
something really cool about
giving that power, as cliche as it
sounds, giving that power back to the
people. Kind of calling cap, calling
their bluff and saying, you know what,
all right, you're not going to make this
right. You screwed up my hotel for 4
days. You broke my contract on the chain
link fence. You didn't fill my potholes.
Okay, well, we're going to sue you. 20
years ago, that was usually a I mean,
growing up as a kid, if you said someone
was going to sue somebody, they laugh.
And my my dad cut trees for 20 years. I
if if he got a dollar for every single
time he said someone was going to sue
someone, sue him for something, we
wouldn't have been eating lunchables as
often as we were as kids. And so
now you actually can hold not my dad,
but you can hold people accountable for
breaking their contracts or whatever the
case is. That's that's a net benefit,
right? If you look at it not as just the
losers but as the winners, I think
you'll find that generally speaking,
technological advancement has been
largely beneficial. Now, is that to say
that doom scrolling is good for society?
No. But what I think AI can liberate for
a lot of people is creating individual
education plans for students. It's going
to be a new renaissance for homeschool
parents, creating interactive
activities, games that are custom to
each individual students. Growing up, my
sister liked to play Sim City. I like to
play Call of Duty. Imagine creating a
game that could teach exponents or
logarithmics or whatever through the
lens of Sim City or even dare I say Call
of Duty 4 on my PC. That's pretty
freaking cool. And you could not fathom
creating custom internet games without
AI or without anything five or 10 years
ago. And so something really cool about
that, about individual education, about
bringing AI into the world of medicine.
I can't tell you how many times my dad
went to a doctor and complained about
the same pain five different doctors
over five different months and was told,
"Go home, sleep on it. Go home, sleep on
it, take some Tylenol, and now is able
in a matter of minutes to self diagnose
some pain with AI and actually hold
doctors accountable." We need that. We
need that check and balance. And so I'm
always going to be in favor of spreading
that knowledge and giving more agency
and power to everyday people. There have
to be restraints on that. You obviously
can't have chat bots telling kids to
harm themselves or even take their own
lives. We need an AI bill of rights that
says if you're under the age of 18, any
parent has a right to access those chat
logs. There have to be real guardrails
there. But I'm never going to be in
favor of having to present your ID to go
on the internet. There's these new age
verification laws for social media. It's
rather interesting that at a time when
Gen Z seems to be turning decisively to
the right that all of a sudden global
governments want to throttle Gen Z's
ability and the next generation's
ability to go online because heaven
forbid they'll see something from Nick
Fuentes that they agree with or
whomever. And I think that's what very
much age verification laws are trying to
do is they're trying to throttle Jenz.
I'll tell you Jenz doesn't get enough
credit. They are very politically
conscious about what's going on. I meet
Gen Z voters every single day on the
campaign trail and they have a real
pulse for what's happening in the
country, a real appreciation for the
historical moment that we're in. And
that's not because of the textbooks in
school. That's not because of AP World
History. That is because of YouTube, of
Tik Tok, of Kick, of Rumble, of a lot of
the podcasters on the left and the right
who are really waking people up. And the
people who there are people out there
who I know who who watch Assan [ __ ] who
also watch Nick Fuentes. People who
listen to Pod Save America and will also
listen to Tucker Carlson. I'm one of
those people. I listen to all of those
things. I don't find much joy in
watching Fox News. I actually want to
watch the other side so I can know what
my blinders are. I want to hear what the
other side is saying. In large part
because I don't believe that one side
has a monopoly on truth. It was the
Republicans pushing the lie of the Iraq
war. It was the Democrats pushing the
lie of COVID co and now it's the
Republicans pushing the lie of Iran is
going to drop a nuke on us in the next
week unless we bomb them and bomb a
school full of children and unless we
lose 13 service members. And so I'm not
buying any of that. That truth is only
possible not in an echo chamber but in a
radically open internet that allows
every voice to come in. And if you're
pushing age verification, you are by
definition making it harder to access
that internet. And that is good for no
one.
>> James, you're 31.
You've been called a fraud, an
extremist, a national threat.
Someone even try to set your house on
fire.
When you consider what all this is
costing you, why does it feel worth it
to run for governor of Florida?
For me, it's worth it because
I couldn't live with the regret of not
doing this.
I couldn't live with the regret of
wondering
what things would have looked like had I
not taken this risk.
We've upset a lot of people. to the Wall
Street Journal this week who labeled me
an extremist. If putting America first
makes me an extremist, I am guilty as
charged. If saying that we should have
paid maternity leave for working moms in
America makes me a radical, I am guilty
as charged. If saying that no American
should die for Israel makes me a
nationalist, I am guilty as charged. And
so I apply that regret minimization
framework that if I was staring down
this decision in November and I said
what would I regret more
like losing my career,
some friends,
professional networking opportunities,
cocktail party invitations?
Would I regret losing that more?
or I regret
losing the ability to tell the truth.
And I will not tell a lie on this
campaign, even if it means me winning
the election. I think that truths,
especially those that are controversial,
even ones that are unpalatable, have to
be told for the sake of our country. And
2026 is the year of this election. It's
also the 250th anniversary of our
Declaration of Independence when our
brave founding fathers decided that the
status quo was not okay. That they
wanted to chart their own course. They
wanted to
believe in something bigger than simply
being slaves to a colonial power. And if
I'm running for governor, if I'm running
to do one thing as the 47th governor of
Florida, it is to reassert
the founding words of that sacred
document that all men are created equal.
Beautiful.
Well, everyone, this has been your
guest, James Fishbach. This is the Jack
Noil podcast.
Appreciate you coming on, man. Thank
you, Jack.
>> Thank you, brother. An honor for sure.