Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Iowans are trained to have a sixth sense for distinguishing between someone reading a script from a super political action committee and saying what they actually believe when speaking at the Ames Pizza Ranch Monday.

“You have a disproportionate impact on the future direction of our country [and] it’s on Jan. 15,” Ramaswamy said. “We’re not doing the top-down nonsense game. I can’t do it in 30-second ads on TV. We try to record them [and] it’s just fake; we’re all reading from the same script and endorsed by the same consultants.”

Of the seven candidates who qualified for both of the Republican presidential debates, Ramaswamy is the only one without prior political experience. Additionally, he has qualified for the third debate in Miami on Nov. 8 alongside former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

“My parents came to this country 40 years ago with no money; in a single generation I’ve gone on to found multiple successful companies. I did well, I married my wife [and] we’re raising our two sons,” Ramaswamy said. “Following our faith in God, that’s the American dream. I’m worried that the American dream isn’t going to exist for our two sons of their generation unless we do something about it.”

One of Ramaswamy’s frequent campaign phrases is “there are three branches of government, not four,” in which he describes the fourth as the administrative state. Following that line during his speech Monday, Ramaswamy said in January 2033, after his two terms as president, he will have removed the fourth branch so that the U.S. will “once again have three branches of government.”

He said by that time, he will also have accomplished shutting down the “deep state” and firing 75% of the “federal bureaucrats who are a cancer on that system.”

“I have been a CEO,” Ramaswamy said. “I know that if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them, that means they don’t work for you. It means you work for them because you’re responsible for what they do without any authority to change it, the Fauci’s of the world are the examples of this cancer.”

Ramaswamy spoke on the ongoing conflict in Palestine and Israel, calling the attacks by Hamas “barbaric.” However, he urged caution on U.S. involvement so that “we don’t repeat the same mistakes that we made after 9/11,” and furthermore so the U.S. is not “marching” toward World War III.

“Save the money that we would have spent on war, instead [of] protecting our own homeland in this country because the number one lesson is that [if] this can happen in Israel, it can happen right here at home in the United States of America,” Ramaswamy said.

Jacob Reicks, a junior in agronomy, said it was “ballsy” for Ramaswamy to begin the event with that subject but that it did not cross a line because “it’s what people need to hear.”

“It kind of woke me, it had me a little worried. It wasn’t just, you know, Monday afternoon at Pizza Ranch,” Reicks said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, shit, he’s right. We could blindly walk into a World War.’”

Reicks said the candidates who plan to fight corruption the most are independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Ramaswamy. When Reicks asked Ramaswamy during the event if he would join a ticket with Kennedy, he said he would not because he is “using the Republican party as a vehicle to win this election.”

“No other candidates are saying they are working to unify America as well as Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] is,” Reicks said. “So I was hoping today that Vivek would talk about some of his plans to cut the tension between the left and the right or between Americans.”

Reicks, who does not identify with a party, said he was not committed to voting for any particular candidate of any party in the general election and was not committed to caucusing for Ramaswamy.