AZ Senate Candidate Blake Masters on Fighting Corruption

BUCK: We’ve got a special guest with us now, Blake Masters is the president of the Thiel Foundation and COO of Thiel Capital. He’s a Tucson native running for U.S. Senate seat in the great state of Arizona. And he joins now to talk about a whole range of issues. Blake, thanks so much for calling in.

MASTERS: Absolutely, Buck, thanks for having me.

BUCK: And to all our KFYI listeners there in the Phoenix area, thanks for tuning in, of course. Blake, I want to start with this because you are somebody who thinks it is absurd, based on what you’ve tweeted and I’ve heard you say, that members of Congress effectively can get away with insider trading. I’ve had a lot of people calling in today that are asking, hey, how many members of Congress right now own stock in companies that produce these vaccines?

I just wanted to lay it out, you’re a guy who really understands these things. Why the heck can members of Congress essentially use inside information to enrich themselves? We know a lot of them do. And also, what do you think about members of Congress owning stock in companies? Because there’s been some research into this. They do own, some of them, stock in companies that produce vaccines.

MASTERS: And, Buck, if you look at the returns that these lawmakers make they’re outperforming the market, man, these people ought to be professional hedge fund executives because they know how to trade stocks. I think it’s disgusting. It’s corrupt. It’s disgusting. Certainly it appears corrupt. And so that’s corrosive to our politics. But just look at how much Nancy Pelosi and her husband have made creating public equities about which they have material nonpublic information. I mean, it’s just completely corrupt. I think this should be banned. Individual lawmakers should not be able to own and trade individual stocks.

BUCK: Nancy Pelosi responded, I think, in part, maybe, to some of the noise and criticism you’ve rightly been making on this issue, Blake. She said something along the lines of — I think we played it on the show last week — you know, members of Congress should be able to participate in the free market.

I mean, you know, there’s a free market in illegal drugs, too, right? There’s a lot of rules out there that people have to obey when it comes to “the market,” and it seems to me that material nonpublic information, especially when Congress is spending trillions of dollars and having all kinds of carve-outs for different industries, protection from lawsuits from, I don’t know, vaccine makers, things like that, there should be some accountability here.

MASTERS: That’s right. It’s ridiculous for her to talk about the free market. It’s just outrageous. She’s a politician who’s getting rich off of her position, right? There’s obviously terrible incentives around allowing the same people who make tax and regulatory policy, allowing them to benefit from it. So I think, you know, it’s time to recognize this has just gone on way too long. This is why Congress has, like, what is it, a 6% approval rating?

Everybody knows and everybody feels like these people are just corrupt. Increasingly, it feels to me like the only difference between our country and a Third World dictatorship is we have to pretend our leaders aren’t corrupt. Well, Nancy Pelosi is, and she shouldn’t be allowed to trade individual stocks.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Blake Masters, COO of Thiel Capital. He’s running for Senate in Arizona, to our Arizona team of Clay and Buck listeners out there. And also want to know what you think just about year one Biden economy, inflation, the Biden agenda stalled out. What’s going on, from a guy who actually understands how markets function and what works in the economy and what doesn’t?

MASTERS: Well, look. I knew it was gonna be bad. If I’m honest, though, it’s been a lot worse and a lot faster than even I would have guessed, right, on day one, what did Biden do? The first thing he did was halt construction, finishing of the border wall.

The second thing he did was he canceled the Keystone pipeline. You know, that’s bad for the tens of thousands of Americans who lose their jobs. But think about what that does to people who are trying to build long-term projects. If the government can just come and cancel your pipeline that you invested, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and 20 years in, think about what that does to the business environment. So, of course, we’re now seeing supply shocks, we’re seeing inflation, we’re seeing shortages. I mean, this is the 1970s all over again. And unfortunately, Biden is so incompetent or maybe he wants this to happen — I don’t know — I think it’s gonna get a lot worse. I really do.

BUCK: Speaking to Blake Masters running for Senate U.S. Senate in Arizona. Blake, what would you want to do? I mean, let’s say that we’re heading in here and you are elected and we have a Republican — now, I know obviously we still have Biden is a president, but you can still push ideas in the Senate when you have a majority, those ideas can get a little bit further. What has to happen now to get the economy to, oh, I don’t know, the feeling and the numbers that we had in 2019 under Trump before the pandemic and Biden and all the rest of it? What would you want to see happen?

MASTERS: Well, the first thing we need to do is to stop printing trillions of dollars, right? It’s common sense that if you do that, you’re going to get inflation, you know, officially inflation is 6 or 7% right now. Unofficially I think it’s a lot higher than that, and that is a deadly, silent tax on so many tens of millions of hardworking Americans.

So first thing we do is stop the bleeding, stop printing money. Government has enough money, right? The problem is it’s so inefficient and so broken that they just don’t do anything well with it. So stop the bleeding and then reimplement President Trump’s economic policies. You know, under President Trump we had a roaring economy right before covid. Median wages in this country had started to rise for the first time in like 50 years. It was getting easier, not harder, for normal people to make ends meet and to raise a family. And this isn’t rocket science. We know what to do. We just have to get the Democrats out of power and reimplement these great policies.

BUCK: Blake, as we hear some of the more open socialist members of the United States Congress right now saying things like Elon Musk is a freeloader, who doesn’t pay taxes, and then it comes out that Elon is supposed to pay about — I think it’s 11 or $12 billion in taxes for this year alone.

MASTERS: Yes.

BUCK: You think folks are starting to realize that the collectivist, redistributionist, left-wing Democrats are either lying or just don’t know what the heck they’re talking about when it comes to this?

MASTERS: I do. I think people are realizing it. It’s why I think we’re gonna crush the Democrats in 2022. And look. Elizabeth Warren was saying this. She was calling Elon Musk a parasite. No. Elon paid more taxes this year, or will, than any American in history. And he’s built great companies. Right? He’s done a thousand times more in a day for this country what Elizabeth has done her whole life. And this is champagne socialism, right? This is limousine liberalism.

Elizabeth Warren flies on private jets. She I think has like $12 million in individual equities, right, public stocks that she should not be allowed to own. She’s a hypocrite. And she’s a wealth destroyer, not a wealth creator. And I think people are on to it.

BUCK: Blake Masters, everybody. Blake, where should folks go to learn more about your campaign for Senate in Arizona?

MASTERS: Thanks, Buck. You can go to BlakeMasters.com, sign up to volunteer. You’ve got five or 10 bucks you can throw my way, Christmas gift for the campaign, I will put it to good use, we will crush the Dems in 2022. Buck, thank you.

BUCK: Thanks so much. Good luck to you, also thanks to our great affiliate out there in Phoenix, KFYI, and all the folks listening in Arizona right now.