 you mentioned getting rid of the Department of Education and a bunch of other alphabet agencies. One of them is the FBI. What is your argument, you know, and this is a libertarian audience, so you've already, you know, you had us at F, but what is your case against dismantling the FBI and what would you replace it with, if any? Yeah, FBI, IRS, ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've identified, and I'm not doing this glibly, right? Because, you know, there's agencies, we could just list the whole thing. We studied and understood what we're going to do with each one. The Department of Education should have never existed in the first place. We're shutting that down. The FBI, look, as long as you're going to have federal laws, you need a federal law enforcement apparatus. But that's in a different category, as is the IRS. As long as you have taxes, which I'm not a big fan of, but as long as you have taxes, you need somebody to collect them, so be it. The problem, they're slightly different. You have a cultural corruption of those institutions that runs so deep that I believe it will be impossible to reform top down or any other way. It's part of the rot of the beast. The Leviathan itself is ossified. And so I think they're the only right answer is you shut it down and then you built something skeletal from scratch to take its place that actually respects the Constitution rather than viewing it as an inconvenience. And it's the same FBI that corruptly denied Martin Luther King Jr. in this country a concealed carry permit that now politicizes in other directions. So if you look at the area under the curve over the last 60 years, this would actually be a bipartisan consensus. It's just that Republicans and Democrats would have supported it at different times. So I'm getting a job done that we should have gotten done 60 years ago. It's literally still the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. that those employees walk into. It's J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, even though the guy's long gone. And I'll shut it down. Could I just return to the alphabet agencies for a second there? Because for Libertarians, another group that we tend to worry about are the national security agencies, the NSA, the CIA, the DHS, and talk about lawlessness and the unwinding we've seen of our foreign policy in general in terms of both covert and overt operations overseas. What is your general take on that national security apparatus and just national defense? It is corrupt. It's fundamentally corrupt. And even recently, you don't have to look to ancient history for this. I think it is appalling that we have a media that will focus on the mechanics of a leak and how to prosecute some basically kid who leaked some material. And I'm not condoning that. But what about focusing on the substance of the leak that we actually have troops on the ground in Ukraine, which is in a war with Russia without telling the American people, not only without telling what lying about it, right? And this has just been a habitual pattern in our national security establishment. It is corrupt. So you get rid of the Pentagon, too? You build that from scratch? Well, I'm not going to be glib. I mean, I've studied the agencies that we've already identified to shut down. And I mean it when I say we will shut them down and the ones we'll rebuild and the ones we won't. I'll certainly drain the managerial class at the Pentagon. That much I'll go without saying. But I'm not going to just give you a glib answer. I'm not Ron DeSantis. I'm not just going to say something because I think it's going to impress you and then you just screw it up later. But here's what I will say. Massive reform is needed. The managerial class runs the show at the Pentagon. That much is clear. How we go about draining it, that's a beast. We're going to have to look at how we take on. I think I'm also going to send a signal and send some tone here. I'm looking actually, you know, the campaign trail is so busy, but I want to make a trip out to the UK. I want to visit Julian Assange. I expect to pardon Julian Assange. I think the fact that Chelsea Manning got a sentence commuted by President Obama, but without Julian Assange, the person who actually just published the information that was leaked, I just think this is just reeks of the rot. That is the administrative police state disguised in the garb of National Security. What about people like Everett Snowden or Daniel Hale? Also, are they patriots? Are they truth tellers or are they treason? So I would say, I mean I have a long and growing pardon list. I mean the likes of Douglas Mackey, right? Who's facing 10 years in prison now for making a meme about Hillary Clinton's supporters on the internet. This is not the country we live in, right? So here's what I am on the starting. I actually think he did do an important national service. I'm thinking through that pardon. Julian Assange, I'm on firm footing on because he's a journalist. He's somebody who literally posted the stuff he was given. That's just how the free press works. This is a selective prosecution. You know, the thing with Snowden is part of what might make it honorable is he took the risk and the knowing risk of actually, you know, he violated the law, right? And so I believe in the rule of law. That's a tougher case for me. And so I'm thinking through that, but that's not something I'm going to make a commitment on right now. But Julian Assange, I have thought through and made a commitment on that. And so I'll say it if I mean it. Well, with Assange, you know, what he is, what they're going to have gone after him for posting or working with Chelsea Manning to post were these videos from, you know, military operations in Afghanistan, basically, one involved the kind of gunning down of a photojournalist. I am curious, you know, as a you say you're continuing the America First agenda and part of that what Trump shook up within the Republican Party was foreign policy and rethinking the role of American military might where we should and shouldn't be in the world. What are your thoughts on American foreign policy interventionism? I think it has been disastrously expansive. And I think that we should actually have leaders who are able to lead with authority diplomatically using our economic might and the backstop of military strength. Yes. But economic might is part of it. It's part of what we've also lost to lead diplomatically. And also some of this is first personal. I mean, who the leader is. It's not just some system. First personal leadership actually matters. We're not doing enough of that. Certainly under Biden, but we're substituting for it by sending US military capabilities to places like Ukraine. And, you know, I've been pretty clear about this. I would not send another dollar to Ukraine. In fact, I think it's in a front that we now discover that we have American troops on the ground in Ukraine. So I think intervention in parts of the world where we have no direct national interest has been a disaster. I applaud Trump for actually defecting from a bipartisan consensus around that for much of the last 20 years. He deserves credit for that. Now I'm looking in other respects to take the agenda much further than Trump did to do it based on principles, but I want to recognize that was a positive development in our foreign policy as I see it. That was the reason live stream with Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for the Republican nomination for president and has just published capitalist punishment, a book-length diatribe against ESG and other aspects of what he considers woke capitalism. If you want to watch the full conversation, go here. If you want to watch another excerpt, go here and come back next Thursday, every Thursday at 1 p.m. when Zach Weisgriller and I are talking to somebody even more interesting than the last week. Thanks for watching.