Grand Canyon Times

U.S. Congressional candidate Blake Masters (R-AZ-8) joined the Grand Canyon Times podcast to discuss his race. Masters is one of four candidates currently running in the Republican primary to represent the 8th Congressional District. 

The district is currently represented by U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R), who announced last year that she will be retiring at the end of the current term.

This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Following is a summary of this episode:

• Trump Endorsement: Masters discussed his endorsement by former President Donald Trump in his 2022 Senate race. He said President Trump endorsed him because Masters was "strong on the border." 

• Border Security: Masters advocated for stringent border security, criticizing what he said are the Biden Adminstration’s “open border” policies. He said he supports finishing the border wall, empowering border patrol, and deporting millions of illegal immigrants, saying that border security is the most crucial issue in his campaign and for the country.

• Economic Policies and Big Tech Regulation: Masters said we had economic growth and low inflation under President Trump, attributing it to the former president’s pro-business policies. Masters also said there is a need to regulate Big Tech companies to prevent them from manipulating elections and infringing on free speech, drawing from his experience in the tech industry.

• Chinese Ownership of U.S. Farmland:  Masters said that Chinese ownership of Arizona farmland should not be allowed.

Masters ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, losing to incumbent U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D) by a vote of 51.4% to 46.5%. Kelly reportedly outspent Masters by $66 million in that race. 

After growing up and attending high school in Tucson, Masters graduated from Stanford University and received his J.D. from Stanford Law School. He then co-founded legal research startup Judicata.

He is co-author of the bestselling business book, “Zero to One: Notes on a Startup” with Peter Thiel, and served as president of the Thiel Foundation. Masters married his wife, Catherine, in 2012 and they have three sons. 

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Full, unedited transcript of this podcast episode:

[00:00:00] Leyla Gulen: Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I'm your host, Layla Coulin. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Blake Masters. Blake is a ventured capitalist running in the Republican primary to represent Arizona's eighth congressional district, hoping to take the spot currently represented by the soon to retire Republican Congresswoman, Debbie Lesko.

[00:00:24] Leyla Gulen: He co authored the best selling business book, Zero to One, Notes on a Startup with his mentor, billionaire entrepreneur, Peter Thiel. Blake Masters, welcome.

[00:00:35] Blake Masters: Layla, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. So,

[00:00:38] Leyla Gulen: first of all, why are you running to represent the 8th Congressional District?

[00:00:43] Blake Masters: Well, I just look around at what's happening to our country and I guess it's equal parts.

[00:00:47] Blake Masters: Terrifying and just maddening, right? I'm mad. I look at what Biden is doing, throwing our Southern border wide open. I look at the democratic mismanagement of the economy. And then you just rewind a few [00:01:00] years ago under president Trump's America first policies, people were succeeding, people were thriving, right?

[00:01:04] Blake Masters: It felt like the American dream was alive and well again. So I've been successful in business. A family man, I have a couple of young children of my own, and I look at the future that they're on track to have. And it's not so good here. I'm terrified for our country, and I ran for Senate, uh, two years ago.

[00:01:21] Blake Masters: I'm sure we'll talk about that, but I know I have a lot to contribute, uh, in the Congress. I want to go there and help, uh, President Trump implement his agenda once he's elected later this year.

[00:01:31] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, and I want to dive into that as well, and like you had mentioned, uh, former President Trump did endorse you in your race for U.

[00:01:37] Leyla Gulen: S. Senate. You had lost that race to Democrat incumbent Senator Mark Kelly, but by pretty slim margin, even though Kelly reportedly outspent you by 66 million, why do you think President Trump endorsed you and your

[00:01:51] Blake Masters: campaign? Mainly, I think, because he knew I was strong on the border, that in 2022, the border was the issue, already, the Biden open [00:02:00] borders policies were just causing havoc, not just in Arizona, of course, but throughout the country, and President Trump is a strong border president, he knew this, and he knew in my primary, I was there, Uh, by far the, the strongest candidate on the border.

[00:02:12] Blake Masters: So, that's what I'm campaigning on now. It's, I, I, unfortunately, we've had two more years since then of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's open borders policies. And, uh, when I get to Congress, I'm just gonna be a relentless warrior for border security. We need to finish the wall. We need to actually empower our border patrol.

[00:02:32] Blake Masters: I think we need to deport millions of illegal aliens, people who snuck in here, broke in. Illegally and have no right to be here. And that's by far the most important issue in this campaign and I think in the country right now Yeah,

[00:02:45] Leyla Gulen: and should you win this year's congressional election and President Trump win the presidential election?

[00:02:50] Leyla Gulen: What other key issues will you to be most aligned? Certainly the border is one of them. What else?

[00:02:56] Blake Masters: Yeah, I think the economy. We had wage growth under [00:03:00] President Trump. Inflation was low. Gas was cheap. Energy was cheap. It was good, right? It wasn't perfect. Things are never gonna be perfect. But man, after that eight years of Obama, Trump was a breath of fresh air.

[00:03:12] Blake Masters: The policies were good. They were working. And of course, as soon as Biden took the reins, they surrendered our energy independence, gas all of a sudden went from 2 to five in Maricopa County. We have some of the most expensive gasoline in the country. Inflation turned into double digits. This stuff isn't rocket science.

[00:03:29] Blake Masters: You want to set the conditions for businesses to thrive and then kind of get out of the way. And president Trump is a business guy. Understood that right with my business background. I understand that we don't want to centrally plan everything like the Democrats do We want to just be good stewards and shepherd a healthy economy and with the right policies we could have one again It's not rocket science Biden and Kamala Harris.

[00:03:51] Blake Masters: They caused this inflation. They cause gas prices to be expensive They cause food to be too expensive. We just need to get the [00:04:00] Democrats out and re implement the policies that we know work for the average American worker.

[00:04:05] Leyla Gulen: Yeah. And with all of your business experience, so what other tactics would you implement in a political role based off of that experience that you've

[00:04:14] Blake Masters: had?

[00:04:15] Blake Masters: Well, one issue that is very important to me, and I think I know Um, more about it, frankly, than any candidate nationwide or even any congressman or sitting senator is big tech and the threat that big tech poses. I'm not anti technology, I'm pro technology, just helps human beings do more with less, right?

[00:04:33] Blake Masters: Properly directed technology can help everybody live longer, healthier, happier lives. But properly directed, right? That's a big caveat there, because I've seen the rise of these tech monopolies. You have Google, you have Facebook, right? These big multinational corporations at this point, and they're almost invariably left wing.

[00:04:52] Blake Masters: They don't care about freedom. They're just trying to intentionally addict people to their products. There's so many harms that come with this stuff. We could [00:05:00] spend all day talking about it, but probably the biggest thing that I fear that they're doing is interfering in our elections. President Trump in 2020, he had the media against him, of course, he had the whole democratic machine against him.

[00:05:12] Blake Masters: But he also had Google and Facebook against him, but I, I just know from working in the technology business, Google has the capacity to Subtly tweak their search engine algorithms in the weeks before an election and I can't prove that they did this in 2020 But we can't prove they didn't and I'm sure they wanted to and frankly, I'm sure they did They would just subtly boost Biden content, suppress Trump content.

[00:05:34] Blake Masters: They can kind of manipulate what you see When you type something into the search engine and if you know anything about how mass media and and the internet works You know, that can sway tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of votes. And so if we let these left wing multinational corporations be in charge, if there's no oversight, they're just gonna work hand in hand with the Democrat machine, and they're gonna swing our elections.

[00:05:57] Blake Masters: You can say, oh, that's legal, that's fair. I I [00:06:00] don't think it is fair, and I don't think it should be legal. And so I think that's how they installed Biden in the White House in 2020, and look how much damage, look how much suffering that has caused. So, I wanna get in, and I wanna meaningfully restrain big tech.

[00:06:12] Blake Masters: It's gonna be hard. Because these are novel technological issues, right, what to do about the rise of artificial intelligence, what to do about Chinese deepfakes that can fool the CIA, I mean, these are thorny questions, but as a young, uh, tech minded business guy, I'm the kind of guy we want to send into Congress.

[00:06:28] Blake Masters: To help figure out how to restrain these companies. Yeah.

[00:06:32] Leyla Gulen: Regarding voter manipulation, do you fear or suspect that the same thing is happening in your campaign?

[00:06:38] Blake Masters: I do, or I think they would try it if they could. The great thing about running for Congress in a wonderful district like the eighth is it's very conservative, right?

[00:06:48] Blake Masters: This is a primary only election. When it worked really hard to win it, I know I'd be the best representative that our district could send to Congress. Once a Republican wins the primary, that's it. There's no general election. [00:07:00] It's just such a Republican district. So I don't fear that they're going to steal the general election from me, but what they're going to try to do is run the 2020 playbook again, run the 2022 playbook again on President Trump.

[00:07:16] Blake Masters: We all saw in Maricopa County how on election day in 2022. A surprise. The voting machines didn't work, but you could debate whether this is just gross negligence, like bordering on criminal negligence or whether they actually intended to do it to disenfranchise Republicans. That's a debate you could have, but either way, the machines didn't work, people were disenfranchised.

[00:07:35] Blake Masters: I think that's a huge problem and maybe not an accident. Yeah,

[00:07:39] Leyla Gulen: and I wanna get to what you hear from your constituents and voters in your particular district, but going back to the fact that Arizona as a whole. is a border state, and I don't think that there's a state in the country that isn't feeling the effects of what's happening right now with the border crisis.

[00:07:56] Leyla Gulen: Can you further expand on the problems that this [00:08:00] country is facing? Should we continue to go down this rabbit hole of allowing so many people to pour over the borders and to be able to stay here without any repercussion? Yeah,

[00:08:15] Blake Masters: I think open borders is civilizational suicide. There's a reason why everybody wants to come to America.

[00:08:22] Blake Masters: It's obviously the best country. in the world, I think in the history of the world. So I understand why people want to come here. The problem is if you just let millions and millions of people from the third world come here, that causes a lot of havoc. It over time changes the electorate. I think that's what the Democrats really want to do, right?

[00:08:39] Blake Masters: They want to make millions of third worlders citizens because they feel they'll be able to control them and control their votes. And on net, they expect that most of these folks will vote Democrats. So for the Democrats, it's about Changing the electorate to get one party democratic, uh, rule. But there's cultural effects.

[00:08:56] Blake Masters: I mean, just travel to Minneapolis. I used to [00:09:00] go to Minneapolis every summer as a kid. My cousins lived there. And so we'd go there for ten days or two weeks and hang out. And it's great. Go to the Mall of America, Minnesota's the land of 10, 000 lakes. You visit now, and, well, it looks a little bit more like Mogadishu, Somalia than it did when I would go in the mid 90s, and it's because of the unrestricted immigration, right?

[00:09:20] Blake Masters: You've got Ilhan Omar up there representing, and she's pretty clearly Somalia first. She won't say America first, but she acts like she's Somalia first. I just think that's a huge problem. So there's this cultural change that mass immigration affects. There's economic effects. I mean, Bernie Sanders used to be Able to talk about this before he got sort of absorbed by the Democrat machine.

[00:09:42] Blake Masters: Unrestricted immigration depresses wages. It lowers wages for working class Americans. If you're an American citizen, one of the best assets you have is monopolistic access to the best labor market in the world. Right? Our plumbing jobs, our construction jobs, they ought to be for our people. Just to say [00:10:00] Americans, but when you just open the floodgates and let anybody and everybody in the world who are in here That's millions of jobs taken away from Americans.

[00:10:08] Blake Masters: It depresses people's wages makes Americans more reliant on government instead of less And it crowds the roads, it takes away from housing stock. You just can't open the floodgates because then America becomes more like the third world. And I'm sick of it and the question is whether it's too late. I guess I'm optimistic.

[00:10:28] Blake Masters: I think if we get Republicans back in office and shut the border and start deporting people, I guess I don't think it's too late, but man, we're close. We're really close.

[00:10:37] Leyla Gulen: Well, the House just impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, uh, recently said on Meet the Press that the Biden administration doesn't bear any responsibility for the border crisis.

[00:10:48] Leyla Gulen: So what do you say to that? What would you say to security Mayorkas, excuse me, Secretary Mayorkas

[00:10:57] Blake Masters: about that? I'd say, well, the American people disagree [00:11:00] and their representatives disagree, which is why you just got yourself impeached, right? I, look, I think Mayorkas conduct has been criminal, really. I mean, uh, treason even.

[00:11:11] Blake Masters: He held up his right hand, January 2021 or whatever, and he swore an oath to defend the Constitution, right? To faithfully execute the laws of the United States. And they haven't even tried. It'd be bad enough if they were trying to secure the border and failed. That would just be incompetent, but they haven't even tried.

[00:11:32] Blake Masters: In fact, they've opened the border with their policies. They've hamstrung our brave men and women of border patrol, and they've practically laid out the red carpet to welcome that under Biden. I think something like nine or 10 million illegal aliens that we know about have already come in. And Mayorkas is just the foot soldier that's implementing those policies.

[00:11:52] Blake Masters: So I think it's criminal. I think he should be impeached. I think he should be worse than impeached. I hope the Senate. Convicts and removes him. I don't think they will [00:12:00] too many rhinos in the Senate, but and it's criminal and it's just it's having consequences. The fentanyl coming in. It's killing people.

[00:12:07] Blake Masters: I mean, my workers has blood on his hands. And so I'm not surprised that he says, Oh, it's not a responsibility. Clearly, he doesn't think it is. If, if he did, you would have at least been trying, but he's not been trying and he sold out our country. And there are really words to describe the magnitude of that level of crime.

[00:12:23] Leyla Gulen: Yeah. And when you mentioned the rhinos in the Senate, I mean, the Senate is already a Democratic majority. And then the House is such a slim. Republican majority. So should you be elected to Congress in Arizona? How would you prioritize securing the border? And how would you get others on board and actually get projects pushed and agendas pushed when you're receiving a lot of pushback from those who are not aligned with your belief

[00:12:52] Blake Masters: system?

[00:12:53] Blake Masters: Well, step one is to be okay with the pushback. And I got beat up pretty hard in my 2022 election. You already mentioned it. Mark Kelly [00:13:00] spent 66 million more than I had access to, and to just slander me on television and in people's mailboxes. And I fought the whole Democrat machine, and they really were afraid of me taking that seat.

[00:13:12] Blake Masters: So they hit me with everything they got, and then I had to fight the Republican machine as well. Mitch McConnell famously pulled 20 or 30 million of funding out of Arizona, funding that would have helped me and Carrie Lake win our races. So, I've already fought the establishment, I've took the shells, I've had the news media call me everything, right?

[00:13:29] Blake Masters: If you stand up and say, you know what, I prioritize Americans and I believe in border security, they will call you a racist, they'll call you a sexist, they'll call you a bigot, they'll call you a homophobe, they'll call you all these things. And, I guess I just don't care what they call me, I'm gonna do the right thing, and it means having a backbone.

[00:13:46] Blake Masters: It is tough. You're, you're right with our narrow majority in the house. And I mean, you saw the first vote to impeach Mayorkas last week didn't work, right? I mean, this one just barely passed, which is crazy. And of course, we don't have the votes [00:14:00] in the Senate, but I want to follow the lead of people like Senator Mike Lee, my friends, Senator JD Vance.

[00:14:06] Blake Masters: These guys did everything they could to block the crazy unlimited funding to Ukraine that Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and the establishment are all behind. And And so with those guys in the Senate, with me and Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, who endorsed me, Eli Crane, we're going to have, I think Arizona is going to have the strongest, most conservative congressional delegation.

[00:14:28] Blake Masters: It just takes a few people to lead and get new majorities. I'm optimistic we can increase our majorities when President Trump gets elected, and we need to because this country is running out of time and we got to secure the border yesterday. That is priority number one.

[00:14:41] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, you had mentioned Senate candidate Carrie Lake.

[00:14:44] Leyla Gulen: So what are your thoughts on her? Uh, campaign, her candidacy, and should she be elected, how she would do in the Senate?

[00:14:51] Blake Masters: Well, I hope she, I, I do think she's going to be the nominee. I know her. I like her. I'm friendly with her. I also know her opponent in the primary, Mark Lamb, Sheriff of Pinal [00:15:00] County. He's a good, he's a good man as well.

[00:15:02] Blake Masters: I expect Kerry will probably win the primary. And man, I hope she wins the general when she does. Ruben Gallego, which is going to be the main Democrat opponent, he's basically a communist. And he's crazy. And the hope is that this is sort of obvious to the electorate. My opponent in 2022, Mark Kelly, He votes the same way.

[00:15:23] Blake Masters: He's just as left wing functionally, but he's an astronaut and he presents like some moderate. He was able to fool a lot of people. Ruben Gallegos, just a young, hotheaded communist who I'm pretty sure hates this country or, or at least has a very different vision for it. And he's dangerous. And so we need to make sure Carrie, if she's the nominee, we need to make sure a Republican nominee wins and Once I win my primary, man, I'm going to do everything possible to help make that happen.

[00:15:49] Blake Masters: And then obviously I ran for Senate. I think we need some new blood in the Senate. The Senate is an older chamber at some time. My friends in the house who go over there say the Senate reminds them of a nursing home or [00:16:00] a retirement community and golf club community. Nobody's talking. A lot of people

[00:16:03] Leyla Gulen: would agree with that

[00:16:04] Blake Masters: statement, actually.

[00:16:05] Blake Masters: Yeah. So look, I would have been, I think instantly I would have been a breath of fresh air and a jolt of young energy into the Senate. But that didn't work out. I'm very excited to be running in for the eighth congressional district. I think if Kerry gets in the Senate, the job is to just stay focused and do what she said she's going to do.

[00:16:23] Blake Masters: And clearly she's not afraid to take on the establishment. And I don't expect that would change once she gets in. So very excited. It's going to be a tough race, but I think it's, I think it's winnable and I look forward to helping. Yeah.

[00:16:34] Leyla Gulen: If she were elected, that would really shake things up. I mean, as the Senate recently failed to pass that border security bill, you told the Phoenix reporter that the Senate bill put Ukraine first and America last.

[00:16:45] Leyla Gulen: So can you explain that to our listeners and how things can and should be different?

[00:16:51] Blake Masters: Well, just mathematically, right? I mean, they called this a border bill. So, okay, I'm excited. Let's go see how the Senate intends to secure the southern border. But then 80 [00:17:00] billion to Ukraine and 20 billion to our southern border?

[00:17:04] Blake Masters: That's a four to one ratio. Does that mean that the United States Senate cares more about the Ukraine, Russia border four times more than our own border with Mexico? I mean, that's just, it's a crazy miss alley. Even if you thought that we should be giving money to Ukraine, which is, I personally don't think we should anymore.

[00:17:23] Blake Masters: But even if you thought that four or five times as much to Ukraine to fight their proxy war as our Southern border gets, I mean, it's just crazy. And so, yeah, that bill put America or put America last. And it put Ukraine first and they're basically just trying to hold us hostage and say We opened the borders.

[00:17:43] Blake Masters: You want them closed? Okay, we can do the bare minimum, but it's going to cost you. And I'm proud of the Senators who stood up for that. Unfortunately, most Republican Senators aren't so great. And most caved. I think that thing passed with around 75 votes. I don't expect the House will take it up, [00:18:00] and it's time to play hardball in the House.

[00:18:01] Blake Masters: I hope that Speaker Johnson says, you know what? No. All deals are off until we pass H. R. 2, right, which is the very strong, tough border security bill that's already passed the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, we just don't have the votes in the Senate. So there's a little bit of deadlock right now, but I don't think we can blink first, not with the future of the country on the line.

[00:18:20] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, it sounds like you echo the sentiments of President Trump when he says they can get aid in the form of a loan. So as long as it gets paid back.

[00:18:29] Blake Masters: Yeah, but yes, that would be better, right? Now, are they actually going to pay it back? No default acceptable. Ukraine's a very, very strange and when you look at the government, I have a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainian people, of course, but, and the people are not the government, but the Ukrainian government's very corrupt, right?

[00:18:46] Blake Masters: Obviously, the Russian government's very corrupt, but the Ukrainian government is very corrupt. It's very hard to do. Remember, I think a couple funding cycles ago, Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul, who's great, he blocked like 40 billion to Ukraine or at least [00:19:00] delayed it because I don't think he had the power to stop it entirely, but he could delay it for a while and all he wanted was an accounting.

[00:19:07] Blake Masters: He's like, just give me a spreadsheet of where this money's going and He was overruled like most people in the United States Senate just want to send almost unlimited sums to Ukraine Who knows exactly where it's going who knows what Ukrainian oligarchs are getting rich like Zelensky's getting rich off of it We can't even track the money at that.

[00:19:26] Blake Masters: So how could you be sure that it's not just making all out war with Russia more likely? How could you make sure it's not just being money laundered right? It's a very corrupt country It's a very complicated situation. All Rand Paul wanted was a spreadsheet saying where the money went And he was denied that.

[00:19:41] Blake Masters: So I'm very skeptical. And we're certainly not going to let our border security get held hostage by the situation in Ukraine. Right,

[00:19:48] Leyla Gulen: right. Now, I mean, if you could have some input on that border security bill, what kind of points, caveats would you put in there to pass it to make it acceptable?

[00:19:59] Blake Masters: [00:20:00] Well, one high level point here is You know, we don't even need new laws.

[00:20:06] Blake Masters: We don't need a border security bill. First step would just be to actually implement policies that allow our border patrol and our customs officials to just enforce the law. Now, Biden's not enforcing the law. That's the problem. The border laws already say like illegal immigration is illegal, right? It's not allowed.

[00:20:25] Blake Masters: That's why it's called illegal immigration. So step one and President Trump could do this with one stroke of a pen, right? January 20th. Uh, of next year when he's sworn in again, just re implement the policies that we had four years ago. That solves a lot of the problem. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

[00:20:40] Blake Masters: Right? So it's important to understand that. Can we do better? Can we have better border security laws? Yes, absolutely. What would we want to see? Well, a law that mandates finishing the border wall. Laws that, uh, would prevent the executive from blocking border patrol, right? We just need to let border patrol do their jobs.

[00:20:57] Blake Masters: These are hardworking law enforcement [00:21:00] officials and they want to keep this country safe. And so when they apprehend somebody, right, maybe they turn them over to ICE and maybe that person gets deported that day. We need deportations. We need maximum empowerment of our on the ground law enforcement officials.

[00:21:13] Blake Masters: We need to finish the wall and we need to reform our asylum system so that people who come here can't just. Abuse it, right? Um, you can't just come into the United States and shout asylum and expect to be taken care of for the rest of your life. That's not the way it's supposed to work. So you can imagine a lot of changes, but again, passing legislation is hard and it's, it's a misdirection.

[00:21:35] Blake Masters: It implies that, oh, we need to do this hard thing to, nope. The easy thing would be for Biden to just reverse all of his dumb policies and that would go a long way towards securing the border.

[00:21:45] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, yeah. Well, the Tucson Standard reported that more than 12, 000 illegals came from more than 48 countries. So, that was just in the Tucson sector of the Arizona Mexico border.

[00:21:56] Leyla Gulen: 48 countries. Now, I'm sure as a [00:22:00] businessman, you have something to say about the influx of all these people who the left would say, Well, we need the workforce. We don't have enough people to fill jobs. But, What is your reality? What do you say to that? And who are these people? What do you think they're

[00:22:18] Blake Masters: wanting?

[00:22:19] Blake Masters: Well, first of all, yeah, it's 30 years ago. There was still an illegal immigration problem, but it was mostly hardworking people from Mexico. Maybe they wanted to work in agricultural fields or reframed houses or whatever. And it's not that anymore. The millions of people coming into our country, they're not mostly hardworking people from mostly Mexico.

[00:22:38] Blake Masters: You mentioned 48 countries. These are countries such as Bangladesh and Chad in Africa and Yemen, and I've actually read there's an influx of Chinese nationals. Most of these people are not coming with families. It's young military age, fighting age men in their 20s who are coming alone. And [00:23:00] the Chinese national in fighting age is coming into America, sneaking in.

[00:23:06] Blake Masters: You can only assume that they've been trained by the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, that they're a communist agent. And these are terror cells, these are sleeper cells we're letting in. So this is not people coming in to frame houses more cheaply than Americans are willing to work for. This is just a wholesale importation of a giant class of people, many of whom don't intend to work.

[00:23:26] Blake Masters: They intend to draw on government benefits and then commit havoc. So, it's just a security threat that far transcends any theoretical economic benefit. But of course, if you're just talking about the economy, no, I think American jobs are for American workers. Sometimes you can make exceptions for that. If there's a foreigner who's a talented entrepreneur, has a successful track record of making great businesses, hey, maybe we want to invite them into this country and they can start a company here and put Americans to work.

[00:23:53] Blake Masters: I think that benefits everybody, but we're talking about a couple thousand people there, right? You're not talking about the wholesale [00:24:00] importation of populations bigger than many state populations. And so this idea that, oh, we need American or we need people to fill jobs. Yeah, we do. And we have an incumbent advantage to this awesome workforce.

[00:24:14] Blake Masters: Like Americans are really talented. Really entrepreneurial, but we're failing them with our education system. We're failing to train young people to take the jobs of the future. We need to be investing in our own domestic workforce and just frankly prioritize and privilege American workers for American jobs.

[00:24:33] Blake Masters: Well, let's

[00:24:33] Leyla Gulen: talk about inflation and the rising cost of living. That is on the minds of a lot of Arizona voters. The Grand Canyon Times recently published a list of staple food items that their increase in prices from 2020 until now, for example, the cost of cereal has risen more than 300 percent since 2020.

[00:24:55] Leyla Gulen: And you were quoted as saying, everything costs more under President Joe Biden. [00:25:00] So what do you think is the root of our inflation crisis? And what do you, what would you do in Congress to bring inflation down?

[00:25:07] Blake Masters: Well, so much of it is just Biden's poor spending decisions. And sometimes I don't know if he, does he understand this and just doesn't care because they got to print all this money.

[00:25:19] Blake Masters: He got to dole it out how he wanted and, and just dumps the inflation that it causes on the American people. Maybe he doesn't care about that. Maybe he just doesn't understand the basic economic principle that when you print tons of money, right? You're adding more dollars, chasing the same number of goods and services in the economy.

[00:25:38] Blake Masters: Well, obviously that makes every dollar in your wallet worth less and less, right? And so prices are gonna rise and we call that inflation. So I don't know whether these Democrats just don't understand the basic economics or whether they just don't care about the pain that their policies cause. Not sure which is worse, frankly, but they're both pretty bad.

[00:25:56] Blake Masters: But Biden has printed and spent trillions and trillions of dollars. [00:26:00] I think wastefully. A lot of it was a couple years ago, right? After the initial COVID stimulus, which, hey, I don't think the government should have shut down businesses. That was a big problem, given that they did, right? Given that the government thought, hey, we have to shut down because this crazy virus, uh, it would make sense to have a one time temporary pandemic.

[00:26:19] Blake Masters: Program relief program, where if you're gonna force a business to close, you gotta maybe the government needs to step in and send that business over some money to make payroll once that emergency situation stops, though, I don't think it should have ever started. But once it stopped, and it pretty clearly you should not have been continued.

[00:26:36] Blake Masters: But then when Biden got elected or installed, I like to say now it's 2021 COVID is, it's not a picnic, it's bad, and we can never forgive the Chinese government for creating it, basically. But it was more like the flu than not, and you don't shut down whole economies for the flu, you don't print five trillion dollars and dole it out to people.

[00:26:56] Blake Masters: You don't pay people not to work because the flu is circulating, and that's [00:27:00] more or less what COVID was. And so Biden continuing those policies, and into 2021 and 2022, you had multi trillion dollar stimulus packages, right? These things sound good at the time, and Congress always likes to spend other people's money.

[00:27:14] Blake Masters: But when you just print it, we don't have the money. We printed that money, right? The government issues debt, and we just indebt ourselves, and they dole the money out. That's going to cause inflation. And so Biden caused this. It's not rocket science. He caused it. And how do you stop it? Well, the first thing to do is you stop the bleeding.

[00:27:33] Blake Masters: You stop spending trillions of dollars that we don't have. I think Mike Lee and Senator Rand Paul, they show a lot of leadership on these issues. We're indebting our children and our grandchildren by continuing, I think the national, that's 33 trillion right now. But at some point the music stops and we can't continue to keep spending like, like Joe Biden and his, his crop of drunken sailors.

[00:27:54] Blake Masters: We just have to put a stop to it.

[00:27:56] Leyla Gulen: I'm curious about your thoughts on this. When you talk about the printing [00:28:00] of the money and shutting down businesses and all that, I mean. In many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, there's often an insidious motivation. Do you think that there was any kind of an insidious motive to essentially put the country in this state, which, as we've seen over the last couple of years, has been very hard to climb out of?

[00:28:21] Leyla Gulen: Um, it, it almost feels a little bit like the great, anybody who lived through that and it just felt like this never ending story, like, where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Well, people who managed to survive through COVID, businesses and so forth, they're shutting down now because they just couldn't make up for those losses, even though it's already been a couple of years.

[00:28:46] Leyla Gulen: So, so do you feel that there was sort of an insidious? Reason for all of this to take place. I

[00:28:53] Blake Masters: do. I wish I could say I don't, but that's just not true. I do think it's insidious. Now you can debate [00:29:00] whether it's as as coordinated as a couple of powerful Democrats in smoke filled rooms hatching plans, right?

[00:29:06] Blake Masters: I do think it's possible to ascribe too much competence to these people. They're not that competent. But I also think that they're malevolent. I think that they love power. Biden and everybody involved in his regime loves power. They trust government more than they trust you to run your own life, to run your own business, to worship according to your conscience, to run your own family.

[00:29:28] Blake Masters: And so any policy that has the effect of hurting people's individual agency or a business's ability to operate in favor of consolidating power for themselves and for the government, centralizing government control, I think they're in favor of it. It's a tale as old as time. The government creates a crisis, or at least makes one a lot worse, and then says, wow, look at this crisis.

[00:29:51] Blake Masters: Look at this crisis that freedom in the market and people created. We, the government, have to step in and take more power to deal with it. And it's a one way ratchet. [00:30:00] And so the government never gets smaller. It just gets bigger. And it creates more and more gunk and power. And pretty soon, you turn into a totalitarian society and the wheels stop moving and the levers stop operating.

[00:30:12] Blake Masters: So that's what we're heading to. Again, maybe they're smart enough to see this and they just don't care. Maybe many of them are too dumb to see that's what their policies are doing. But I do think it's malevolent. I think it's evil. I think it's insidious. And I think it goes against our founding design.

[00:30:28] Blake Masters: This country is at a great experiment in liberty. And it's up to us to, to make sure that we hold our own government accountable. Things don't get out of whack. Well, things are really out of whack right now. And it's why I'm hoping here in November. We get a strong red wave that we didn't get in 2022 because our country is running out of time.

[00:30:46] Blake Masters: It's just that simple. Yeah. The words

[00:30:48] Leyla Gulen: of Winston Churchill, never let a good crisis go to waste. Uh, certainly played out over the last several years. Uh, you had mentioned China. The Grand Canyon times also recently reported that almost 10, 000 [00:31:00] acres of Arizona land in Maricopa and Pinal counties. Am I saying that correctly is owned by Chinese interests.

[00:31:09] Leyla Gulen: So how do you feel about that? And if elected. What would you do about foreign ownership of U. S. land? I mean, this has been a story playing out all over the

[00:31:17] Blake Masters: country. Well, I hate it. I hate that China and Chinese nationals, Chinese businesses own so much of our farmland. I think it should not be allowed. You know, the Chinese Communist Party is a communist dictatorship.

[00:31:34] Blake Masters: Like that's what China is right now. And again, we can have sympathy for individual Chinese people who didn't choose to be born into this totalitarian regime. But like. That's the reality. And so when we hear that Chinese nationals own all this land, it's really the Chinese government who can demand anything from those citizens at any time.

[00:31:53] Blake Masters: You and I, obviously, if we have some capital, we're not allowed to go and buy farmland around Beijing, especially around critical [00:32:00] military installations. Like China doesn't let us do this. It's crazy that we let the Chinese do it. I don't think we need to ban For all foreign ownership, if someone from England or Vietnam wants to buy a single family house in Arizona, hey, that's fine if they're following all the laws, but we can't allow China to do that because it's just different.

[00:32:21] Blake Masters: I'm, in general, grow trade with other countries. Again, England, Vietnam, trade with Italy. Italy makes some nice stuff. Maybe we want to import some of that here. Maybe we want to export to Italy. And there's no free trade with China. China is just a different entity entirely. They're, depending on how you see it, they're either an enemy or at least a, a very troublesome geopolitical rival.

[00:32:45] Blake Masters: And I think the future is going to be just a, hopefully a cold and not hot conflict with China. But we have to start taking the Chinese communist threat seriously. At a minimum, I think that means ban China, ban Chinese nationals from owning land, certainly in Arizona, and ideally [00:33:00] in the whole country.

[00:33:00] Blake Masters: That's a bare minimum. And what about TikTok? I think that's really bad too.

[00:33:05] Leyla Gulen: Because that's something that they don't allow in China either. That's right. And

[00:33:08] Blake Masters: I, I, look, I think TikTok would be sort of bad if it was domestic American company. It would just be And we're on the lines of Facebook and Snapchat and the big tech threat and what are they doing to our children's minds and all that.

[00:33:20] Blake Masters: But when you consider that TikTok is actually a Chinese company and it's so much of their internet traffic routes through China, like we're just allowing the Chinese government, because there's again, there's no distinction between the Chinese government and Chinese business. It's all kind of one in the same if you understand the structure of their industrial setup over there.

[00:33:37] Blake Masters: And so we're basically allowing. A giant Chinese Communist Party data mining operation to take place here. Some people say, oh, you can't curb people's freedom by not letting them use the app. Well, I don't think it's freedom to just let millions of American teenagers give the Chinese Communist Party unlimited information about [00:34:00] their lives.

[00:34:00] Blake Masters: I mean, this is just. It's just crazy.

[00:34:02] Leyla Gulen: Not just teenagers either though. I mean, these are our peers. These are political figures in this country who are leveraging TikTok as a way to access people and eyeballs and all of that. So I mean, it's really dangerous. The goose is good for the gander. I mean, right.

[00:34:21] Leyla Gulen: So if adults are doing it. Yeah.

[00:34:24] Blake Masters: At a minimum, if TikTok was going to operate in the United States, it should be forced not to send that data back to China. I have only domestic servers or non Chinese servers and all this stuff, but I'm not even sure you could police that. And so maybe nothing short of a full ban on TikTok would curb the Chinese Communist Party's access to our data.

[00:34:42] Blake Masters: And people need to remember we're already in a cold war with China. If anything that I'm talking about, like banning TikTok or banning Chinese ownership of land, agricultural land, especially, If that sounds like an escalation, it's not. China's already doing this stuff to us. They already banned us from owning [00:35:00] that kind of land.

[00:35:01] Blake Masters: American companies don't have free access to the Chinese market. Facebook can't just go in and Operate willy nilly in China. Meanwhile, China's launching all sorts of cyber attacks, digital espionage, not to mention weather balloons. Remember when that happened?

[00:35:16] Leyla Gulen: I saw it floating over the Atlantic Ocean.

[00:35:19] Leyla Gulen: Oh, that must have been wild. It was. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe my eyes. There

[00:35:23] Blake Masters: it was. And just let it happen, right? Oh, it's safe, it's safe. No, China is already doing this stuff to us. We're already in a Cold War with China, and we need to win that Cold War to make sure it doesn't become Again, a hot actual military conflict.

[00:35:36] Blake Masters: You can't do that if you don't have people in Congress who were wide awake to the Chinese threat and for too long, both Republicans and Democrats have just let China eat our

[00:35:44] Leyla Gulen: lunch. And I don't want to get too tangential because I want to make this about you and your campaign and everything else. But I've also seen posts on, I don't, I'm not on Tik Tok, um, but on Instagram with the Bite Dance, or TikTok CEO, [00:36:00] who is Singaporean, answering questions to Congress.

[00:36:04] Leyla Gulen: And I can't understand is why we as a nation can't wrap around our minds to the fact that, okay, so he's getting hammered with questions about his dealings with China and China's access to our information, all that. But I'm Singaporean, he says, but I'm Singaporean. Well, it's called an operative, right? I mean, they can hire somebody from any walk of life to represent them in their interests.

[00:36:30] Leyla Gulen: It doesn't mean anything that he's Chinese or not Chinese.

[00:36:33] Blake Masters: A hundred percent, but I guarantee you two thirds of the Congress was, was fooled by that, right? Or thrown off by that. Oh, he's Singaporean. It's fine. You're wide awake. You see it clearly. And I just wish more of our elected officials did.

[00:36:48] Leyla Gulen: Yeah.

[00:36:48] Leyla Gulen: Well, and that's obviously what you hope to change. And, uh, Blake Masters for Congress for Maricopa County, Arizona's 8th congressional district. How do people find out more [00:37:00] information about you? And how do they contact you, help make donations, or just, uh, help you in this whole process?

[00:37:07] Blake Masters: Thank you. Very easy.

[00:37:09] Blake Masters: Just go to BlakeMasters. com. You can sign up for more info about our campaign. I know it's tough in the Biden economy, but if you got five or 10 bucks, you can throw her away. It all adds up. It helps us get the message out. And the really encouraging thing right now is my polling data is crystal clear. Um, most of the voters in this district know me and know that I'm the strongest conservative in the race.

[00:37:31] Blake Masters: And if we have the resources to get the message out, I'll win and pretty soon, I think, become one of the most outspoken congressmen for the America First agenda. So, if you can go to blakemasters. com and help us out, help me get there, I know I won't let you down.

[00:37:46] Leyla Gulen: Blake Masters, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:37:49] Blake Masters: Thank you.