whenever you have a sort of administration a committee that gets together to do a good thing the committee starts to use the good thing the ideology behind which there's a good ideal to bully people and to do bad things I don't know what it is this has less to do with leftwing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal so so part of what you've seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure so you've seen that in several different spheres of American life you could even talk about in the military right you think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the stated objectives that we had and I think by all account it was it was a policy move we regret our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 911 nonetheless if you're part of the US military or your general Mark Millie you would rather talk about white Rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military's actual substantive failures it's what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability can say the same thing with respect to the educational system it's a lot easier to claim that and I'm not the one making this claim but others have made this claim that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes you can claim using that that math is racist it's a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix our Public School Systems and the and the zip code code mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities in bad schools so I think that in many cases what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism so so in many ways bureaucracy I think carves the channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years and that's why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness because that's just a symptom I think versus combating actual bureaucracy itself the rise of this managerial class the rise of the deep State we talk about that in the government but the Deep State doesn't just exist in the government it exists I think in every sphere of Our Lives from companies to nonprofits to universities it's the rise of you call the managerial class the committee class the people who professionally sit on committees I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators entrepreneurs original ideators and and ordinary citizens alike yeah you need managers but as few as possible uh it seems like when you have a giant managerial class they the actual doers don't get to to do uh but like you said bureaucracy is uh a phenomena of both the left and the right this is not it's not even a left or right it's it's just transcends that but it's anti-American at its core so our founding fathers they were anti-bureaucratic at their core actually they were the Pioneers the Explorers the unafraid right they were the inventors the creators people forget this about Benjamin Franklin who signed the Declaration of Independence one of the great inventors that we have in the United States as well he invented the lightning rod he invented the Franklin stove which was actually one of the great Innovations of the in the field of thermodynamics he even invented a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use that's just Benjamin Franklin so you think oh he's a one-off everybody think okay he was the one zany founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the country wrong it wasn't unique to him you have Thomas Jefferson what what are you sitting in right now you're sitting in a on a swivel chair okay who invented the swivel chair Jefferson yes Thomas Jefferson funny enough he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration of Independence you're the one reminded me that he drafted he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33 and he was 33 when he did it while inventing the swivel chair I like how you're focus on the swivel chair can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence it makes me feel the Declaration of inde the Declaration of Independence part everybody knows what people don't know he was an architect so he worked in Virginia but the Virginia state capital Dome so the building that's in Virginia today where the state capital is that Dome was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well so these people weren't people who sat on professional committees they weren't bureaucrats they hated bureaucracy part of Old World England is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy bureaucracy and monarchy go hand inand a monarch can't actually administer or govern directly requires a bureaucracy a machine to actually technocratic govern for him so the United States of America was founded on the idea that we reject that old world view right the Old World Vision was that we the people cannot be trusted to self-govern or make decisions for ourselves we would burn ourselves off the planet is the modern version of this with existential risks like global climate change if we just leave it to the people and their Democratic will that's why you need professional technocrats educated Elites enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set the limits that actually protect people from their own worst impulses that's the old world view and most nations in human history have operated this this way but what made the United States of America itself to know what made America great we have to know what made America itself what made America itself is we said hell no to that Vision That We the People For Better or Worse are going to self-govern without the committee class restraining what we do and the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston you go straight down the list of founding fathers who are inventors creators pioneers explorers who also were the very people who came together to sign the Declaration of Independence and so yeah this rise of bureaucracy in America in every sphere of life I view it as anti-American actually and and I hope that you know conservatives and liberals alike can can get behind my crusade certainly to get in there and and shut most of it down yeah speaking of shutting most of it down how do you propose we do that how do we make government more efficient how do make it smaller what the different what are the different ideas of how to do that well the first thing I will say is you're always taking a risk okay there's there's no free lunch here mostly at least you're always taking a risk one risk is that you say I want to reform it gradually I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the Right End state is and then carefully cut with a chisel like a work of art to get there I don't believe that approach works I think that's an approach that conservatives have taken for many years I think it hasn't gotten very far and the reason is if you have like an eight-headed Hydra and you cut off one of the heads it grows right back the other risk you could take so that's the risk of not cutting enough the other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much to say that I'm going to cut so much that I'm going to take the risk of not just cutting the fat but also cutting some muscle along the way that I'm going to take that risk I can't give you option C which is to say that I'm going to cut exactly the right amount I'm going to do it perfectly okay you don't know X anti you don't know beforehand that that's exactly how it's going to go so that's a meaningless claim it's only a question of which risk you're going to take I believe in the moment we live in right now the second risk is the risk we have to be willing to take and we haven't had we haven't had a class of politician I Donald Trump in 2016 was I think the closest we've gotten and I think the second term will be even even closer to what we need but short of that I don't think we've really had a class of politician who has gotten very serious about cutting so much that you're also going to cut some fat but not only some fat but also some muscle that's the risk we have to take so what would I the way I would do it 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy send them home packing shut down agencies that shouldn't exist resend every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed in a true self-governing democracy it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules not unelected bureaucrats and that is the single greatest form of economic stimulus we could have in this country but it is also the single most effective way to restore self-governance in our country as well and it is the blueprint for I think how we save this country that's pretty gangster 75% uh there's this kind of almost mem like video of uh Argentinian president har emlay we on a white board he has all the I think 18 Ministries lined up and he's like he's ripping like Department of Education gone and he's just going like this uh now the situation in Argentina is pretty dire MH and and the situation in the United States is not despite everybody saying oh the Empire is falling this is still in my opinion the greatest nation on Earth still the economy is doing very well still there's this is the Hub of culture The Hub of uh inov The Hub of so many amazing things um do you think it's possible to do something like firing 75% of people in government when things are going relatively well yes in fact I think it's necessary and essential I think things are depends on depends on what your level of well really is what you're benchmarking against America's not built on complacency right we're built on the pursuit of excellence and are we still the greatest nation on planet Earth I believe we are I agree with you on that but are we great as we could possibly be or even as we have been in the past measured against our own standards of excellence no we're not I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline that doesn't mean it's the end of the Empire yet but we are a nation in Decline right now I don't think we have to be but part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial class the bureaucracy sucking the lifeblood out of the country sucking the lifeblood out of our innovative culture a culture of self-governance so is it possible yeah it's really possible I mean I'll tell you one easy way to do it this is a little bit I'm being a little bit glib here but I think it's not crazy at least as a thought experiment get in there on day one say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy Who Was Not Elected elected representatives obviously are elected by the people but if the people who are not elected if your social security number ends in an odd number you're out if it ends in an even number you're in there's a 50% cut right there of those Who Remain if your social security number starts in an even number you're in and if it starts with an odd number you're out boom that's 75% reduction then literally stastically okay one of the virtues of that it's a thought experiment not a policy prescription but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that you don't have a bunch of lawsuits you're dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political Viewpoint discrimination actually the reality is you've at Mass you didn't bring the Chisel you brought a chainsaw I guarantee you do that on day one and do number step two on day two on day three not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained spending a lot less money to operate it and most people who run a company especially larger companies know this it's 25% of the people who do 80 90% of the useful work these government agencies are no different so now imagine you could do that same thought EXP experiment but not just doing it at random but do it still at large scale while having some Metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution that I think would immediately raise not only the Civic character of the United States now we feel okay the people we elect to run the government they've got the power back they're running the government again as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today it would also stimulate the economy I mean the regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy most of it's unconstitutional all we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about but have not really effectuated ever in modern history and by the way that kind of thing would attract the ultra competent to actually want to work in government exactly which you're missing today because right now the government would swallow them up most competent people feel like that Bure bureaucratic machine will swallow them whole you clear the decks of 75% of them real innovators can then show up yeah you know there's kind of this cynical view of capitalism where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money but I think a lot of people would want to work in government to build something that's helpful to a huge number of people yeah well look I think um there's there's opportunities for the very best to have large scale impact in all kinds of different institutions in our universities sure to K through 12 tion through entrepreneurship I'm obviously very biased in that regard I think there's a lot you're able to create that you couldn't create through government but I do think in the moment that we live in where our government is as broken as it is and is as responsible for the declining nature of our country yeah I think bringing in people who are unafraid talented and able to have an impact could make all of the difference and and I agree with you I don't think actually most people even most people who say they're motivated by money I don't think they're actually motivated by money I think most people are driven by a belief that they can do more than they're being permitted to do right now with their skill sets see I've never I'll tell you the so I've run I've run a number of companies and one of the things that I used to ask when I was you know I'm not day-to-day involved in them anymore but as a CEO I would ask when I did interviews and the first company I started at royan like for four years in I we're you know company was pretty big by that point I would still intent on interviewing every candidate before they joined screening for the culture of that person I can talk a lot more about things we did to build that culture but one of the questions I would always ask them naturally just to start a conversation it's a pretty basic question is why did you leave your last job or why are you leaving your last job I'll tell you what I didn't hear very often is that I wasn't paid enough right and maybe they'd be shy to tell you that during an interview but there's indirect ways to signal that that really wasn't at all like even a top 10 reason why people were leaving their job I'll give you what the number one reason was is that they felt like they were unable to do the true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role that's the number one reason people leave their job and you know I think by the way that's I would say that I'm saying that in a self- boastful way that we would attract these people I think it's also true for most of the people who left the company as well vent right and and and it's and that was through at Ro vent through at other companies I've I've started I think the number one reason people join companies number one people leave companies whether they've been to join mine or to leave mine in the past have been that they feel like they're able to do more than they're able to with their skill set than that environment permits them to actually achieve and so I think that's what people hung for when we think about capitalism and true free market capitalism and we used words earlier like meritocracy it's about building a system whether it's in Nation or whether it's even within an organization that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential and sometimes it just doesn't match for an organization where let's say the mission is here and somebody's skill sets could be really well aligned to a different Mission then the right answer is it's not a negative thing it's just that that person needs to leave and find their mission somewhere else but to bring that back to government I think part of what's happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy in so many of these government agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies I I I think if you went to most federal bureaucracies and just asked him like what's the mission I'm just making one up off the top of my head right now the Department of Health and Human Services what is the mission of HHS in the United States of America I doubt somebody who works there even the person who leads it could give you a coherent answer to that question I I just I just heavily doubt it and you could fill in the blank for you know any range of the Department of Commerce I mean it could go straight down the list of each these other ones what is the mission of this organization you can even say for the US military what's the purpose of the US military the Department of Defense I can give you one I think it is to win Wars and more importantly through its strength to avoid Wars that's it well okay if that's the mission then you know okay it's not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where we kind of feel like it sometimes and other ones where we don't and who decides that I don't really know but whoever the people are that decide that we follow those orders no our mission is to protect the United States States of America to win Wars and to avoid Wars boom those three things what does protecting the United States of America mean number one the homeland of the United States of America and the people who reside there okay that's a clear Mission I mean the Department of Health and Human Services maybe could be a reasonable mission to say that I want to make America the healthiest country on planet Earth and we will develop the metrics and meet those metrics and that's the goal of the Department of HHS to set policies or at least to implement policies that best achieve that goal but you can't and maybe that's the right statement of the mission maybe it's not but what one of the things that happens is when you're governed by the committee class it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization whether it's a company or government agency or bureaucracy and once you've done that then you lose the ability to attract the best and the brightest because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential they have to know what it's towards there has to be a mission in the first place then you're not getting the best and brightest you get more from the committee class and that becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral and that is what the blob of the federal bureaucracy really looks like like today yeah you said something really profound at the individual scale of the individual contributor doer Creator what happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome and then there's barriers that come up where you have to wait a little bit this happens there's friction always and when humans together are working on something there's friction and so the the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction minimize the number of barriers and what happens is the managerial class the incentive is is for to grve barriers it's what it does I mean that's just by the nature of a bureaucracy it creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever the other process was is there some room for that somewhere in certain context sure it's like a defensive mechanism that's designed to reduce dynamism but I think when you when that becomes cancerous in its scope it then actually kills the host itself whether that's a school whether that's a company whether that's a government and so the way I think about it Lexis there's a there's sort of a balance of distributed power um I don't mean power in the in the Fuko sense of social power but I mean just sort of power in sense of the ability to affect relevant change in any organization between what you could call the founder class the Creator class the everyday citizen the stakeholder class and then the managerial class and there's a role for all three of them right you could have the constituents of an organization saying a constitutional republic that's the citizen you could have the the equivalent of the Creator class the people who create things in that that poity and then you have the bureaucratic class that's designed to administer and serve as a liaison between the two I'm not denying that there's some role somewhere for people who are in that managerial class but right now in this moment in American history and I think it's been more or less true for the last century but it's grown starting with woodro Wilson's Advent of the modern administrative State metastasizing through FDR's New Deal and what was required to administer it blown over and and metastasizing further through lbj's Great Society and and everything that's happened since even aided and embedded by Republican presidents along the way like Richard Nixon has created a United States of America where that committee class both in and outside the government in our culture wields far too much influence and power relative to the everyday citizen stakeholder and to the creators who are in many ways constrained hamstrung Shackled In a straight jacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions and um you know I I I certainly feel that myself I you know I probably identify as being a member of that Creator class most closely it's just what I've done I create things and I think we live in an environment in the United States of America where we're still probably the best country on Earth where that creator has that shot so that's the positive side of it but one where we are far more constrictive to the Creator class than we have been when we've been at our B and that's what I want to see change can you sort of Steal man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular Department Department of Education and are saying that the amount of pain that would be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much yeah so I go back to this question of mission right A lot of people who make Arguments for the Department of Education aren't aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place actually so that might be a useful place to start is that this thing was created it had a purpose presumably what was that purpose might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decide what are we doing with it or not what was the purpose of this thing that we created it's not a it to me seems to like a highly relevant question yet in this discussion about government reform it's interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about okay but we got the status quo and it's just going to be disruptive versus asking the question of okay this institution was created it had an original purpose is that purpose still relevant is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today to me those are some relevant questions to ask so let's talk about that for the Department of Education its purpose was relevant at that time which was to make sure that localities in particularly states were not siphoning dollars taxpayer dollars away from predominantly black school districts to predominantly white ones and that was not a theoretical concern at the time it was happening or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the South and so you may say you don't like the federal solution you may say you like the federal solution but like it or not that was the original purpose of the US Department of Education to make sure that from a federal perspective states were not systematically disadvantaging black school districts over predominantly white ones however Noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago it's not a relevant purpose today there's no evidence today of States intentionally mapping out which are the black versus white school districts and siphoning money in One Direction versus another to the contrary one of the things we've learned is that the school districts in the inner city many of which are predominantly black actually spend more money per student than other school districts for a worse result as measured by test scores and other performance on a per student basis suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per School determining students success and actually suggesting that even the overfunding of some of those already poorly run schools rewards them for their actual bureaucratic failures so against that backdrop the Department of Education has instead extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose to instead Implement a different vision of racial Equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach so Department of Education funding so Federal funding accounts for about you know I'm giving you round numbers here but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country but that comes with strings attached so in today's Department of Education this didn't happen Back in 1970 but it's happening today ironically it's funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail they blow Oak smoke to cover up for their own failures what happens with today's Department of Education they effectively say you don't get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender Equity goals and in fact they also intervene in the curriculum where there's evidence of schools in the midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding so long as they have certain subjects like archery there was one instance of a school that had archery in its curriculum I I find that to be pretty interesting actually I think that I think you have different kinds of physical education this is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude but hey maybe I'm biased doesn't matter whether you like archery or not I don't think it's the federal government's job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education so what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose that's long passed you don't have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve of siphoning money from black school districts to white school districts and laundering that effectively in public funds that doesn't exist anymore so they find new purposes instead creating a lot more damage along the way so you asked me to steal man it and can I say something constructive rather than just you know pounding down on the other side one way to think about this is for a lot of these agencies were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset yes where that positive intention existed I'm still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies but if you're going to create one at least make it what should we call it uh a task force make it a task force a task force versus an agency means after it's done you celebrate you've done your work pat yourself on the back and then move on rather than creating a standing bureaucracy which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place and I think we don't have enough of that in our culture right I mean even if you have a company that's generated tons of cash flow and it solved a problem let's say it's a let's say it's a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease and the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cur of that disease and they generated a boatload of cash from doing it at a certain point you could just give it to your shareholders and closeup shop and that's actually a beautiful thing to do you don't see that happen enough in the American Consciousness and the American culture of when an institution has achieved its purpose celebrate it and then move on and I think that that culture in our government would result in a vastly restrained scope of government rather than today it's a one-way ratchet once you cause it to come into existence you cause new things to come into existence but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well and that's where you get this metastasis over the last century so what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don't want to have in government so if the question is what should government do that the private sector cannot I'll give you one protect our border I mean capitalism it's never going to be the job of capitalists or never going to be the capability or inclination of capitalist to preserve a national border and I think a nation it's literally uh I think one of the chapters of this book okay a nation Without Borders is not a nation it's almost a topology an open border is not a border capitalism is not going to solve that what's going to solve that is a nation part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its nation in this case the United States of America that's an example of a proper function of the federal government to provide physical security to its citizens another proper role of that federal government is to look after or or in this case it could be state government to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else without their consent it's a fancy way economists would use to describe it what does that mean means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else's River then you're liable for that it's not that okay I'm a capitalist and so I want to create things and I'm going to do hell or high water whether or not that harms people around me the job of a proper government is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing their own rights through a system of capitalism and seeking Prosperity you're free to do it but if you're hurting somebody else without their consent in the process the government is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property right so I would say that those are two Central functions of government is to preserve National boundaries and the National Security of a Homeland and number two is to protect and preserve private property rights and the enforcement of those private private property rights and I think at that point you've described about 80 to 90% of the proper role of a government what about infrastructure look I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector I mean you can get into specifics you could talk infrastructure that's specific to National Security no I do think that military-industrial base is essential to provide National Security that's a form of infrastructure I don't think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation but you know interstate highways you know I think you could think about whether or not that's a common good that everybody benefits from but nobody has the incentive to create I think you could make an argument for the existence of of interstate highways I think you could also make powerful Arguments for the fact that actually you could have enough private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well but you know I'm not going to be I'm not I'm not uh dogmatic about this but broadly speaking 80 90% of the goal of the federal government I'm not going to say 100 8 90% of the goal of the existence of federal government should be to of government period should be to protect National boundaries and provide security for the people who live there and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside there if we restore that I think we're well on our way to a Revival of what our founding fathers envisioned and I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did so if we get government out of Education would you be also for reducing the size of government in the states for educate for something like here if it goes closer to municipalities and States I'm fine with that being a Locus for people determining as for example let's just say school districts are taxed at the local level for that to be a matter for municipalities and townships to actually decide democratically how they actually want that govern whether it's balance between a public school district versus making that same money available to families in the form of vouchers or other forms of of ability to educational savings accounts or whichever mechanism it is to opt out of that if that's done locally I'll have views on that that tend to go further in the direction of true educational choice and diversity of choice the implementation of charter schools the granting of State Charters or even lowering the barriers to granting one I favor those kinds of policies but if we've gotten the federal government out of it that's achieved 75% of what I think we need to achieve that I'm focused on solving other problems and leave that to the states and municipalities to to cover from there e