#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War

0:00:04 The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism
0:00:10 in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths the
0:00:16 Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is
0:00:21 considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all that,
0:00:27 he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard
0:00:34 and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people
0:00:42 on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. And now a quick few
0:00:47 second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It’s the best way to support
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0:01:04 bias, and aid sleep for naps. She’s wise, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for
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0:01:28 This episode is brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service app offering several
0:01:34 affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I recently had a conversation with Peter Levels,
0:01:39 Levels.io, who’s traveled across the world and been exceptionally productive while traveling
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0:01:55 as troublesome or difficult as a travel noob when I’m traveling to all kinds of locations and I’m
0:02:03 trying to be productive. One is power. So power cables, all the adapters you have to keep in
0:02:10 mind and making sure your equipment is able to plug into the outlet without frying anything.
0:02:15 In fact, I had a funny experience with that or not so funny about frying my equipment when I’m
0:02:21 doing a podcast abroad. Anyway, so power and figuring that out is actually not trivial. And
0:02:27 related to that is figuring out which electronics stores to go to to get equipment and how to find
0:02:32 those stores. And to find those stores, you need to have good internet. And that takes me to the
0:02:40 second issue that you run into when traveling is just getting good internet in any country in any
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0:03:21 one free gig of salee. All right, this episode is also brought to you by better help spelled H-E-L-P
0:03:27 help. Have you seen the movie? One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. It’s a good movie. I really should
0:03:32 read the book. I haven’t read the book. I really want to read the book. But I think there’s something
0:03:38 also magical about the performances in the movie, just pure genius. Anyway, the performances in the
0:03:44 movie reveal the various manifestations of insanity, including the insanity of the people
0:03:50 running the institutions. There’s all kinds of insanities that humans are capable of. Why do I
0:03:59 say this? I believe talking is one of the ways to reverse engineer how the insanity came to be
0:04:06 in the first place. I would have loved to be inside one flew over the cuckoo’s nest and talk to those
0:04:13 characters and talk to those human beings. In fact, I gravitate towards people with that kind of
0:04:19 complexity in their mind. You know, when I traveled across the country and in general when I travel,
0:04:23 I gravitate towards people like the homeless people outside of 7-Eleven and have a genuine
0:04:28 non-judgmental, just open-hearted conversation with them. I like talking to regular people.
0:04:36 I like talking to people who, I don’t know, do something real for a living. I don’t mean to
0:04:47 judge white collar and tech jobs, but I just mean manual labor jobs. Just people with their eyes,
0:04:55 their hands, their feet, their whole way of being shows aware and tear, shows the journey sort of
0:05:02 well-lived and hard-lived. I like those people. And I really want to talk to those people on a
0:05:09 podcast, but more than anything, forget the mics. I just like talking to them. Just as one human to
0:05:15 another. Anyway, I say all that is, conversation is a really powerful thing. And if you want to
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0:05:36 This episode is also brought to you by Netsuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
0:05:42 I just recently did an episode on the history of Marxism. And what really struck me is that the
0:05:51 19th century was a battleground of radical ideas. And I think it’s popular in a modern political
0:06:00 discourse to label, frankly, moderate ideas as radical, sort of in our rhetoric, radicalize
0:06:09 the rhetoric and push towards the moderate, our actual policies and ideas. And it’s interesting
0:06:16 to look back at the 19th century, the industrialized world that doesn’t have enough data on what
0:06:21 large-scale implementation of ideas would actually look like. It’s interesting to see
0:06:28 those ideas battle each other out in their most radical form. So that really opened up my eyes
0:06:36 to sort of honestly embody and consider and walk a mile in the shoes of a particular idea,
0:06:42 whether that’s communism or capitalism. Because capitalism does have flaws,
0:06:50 but it is the thing that has given us much of the improved quality of life that we see around
0:06:57 us today. I think it’s a fascinating complex question of why there’s a large collection of
0:07:07 humans when free to compete do a pretty good job. It’s fascinating. And that’s every time I talk about
0:07:12 NetSuite, that’s what I’m thinking about. How does a large collection of humans, different departments,
0:07:19 different tasks, how do they all collaborate efficiently, effectively, under the deadlines,
0:07:26 under the stress, under the shadow of the reality that if the business does not sell a lot of
0:07:31 stuff and make a lot of money, it’s going to fail. And all those people will lose their jobs.
0:07:39 It’s stressful and it’s beautiful. Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle
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0:07:53 This episode is brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare
0:08:00 media coverage from across the political spectrum. The point is to see every side of every story
0:08:06 and you, you, the listener, come to your own conclusion. This is one of the problems I have
0:08:11 with people that are against platforming certain voices. I believe in the intelligence of the
0:08:17 listener to decipher the truth. And sometimes that doesn’t come immediately. Sometimes it comes over
0:08:25 time. But I do think that it is the responsibility of a host, of an interviewer, to challenge the
0:08:30 audience, to push the audience, to not just listen to this particular person, but to listen to
0:08:36 other people that disagree with this person, to listen to different voices and different
0:08:43 perspectives and consider both the possibility that this person is completely right or completely
0:08:50 wrong and walk about with those two possibilities together. So don’t get captured by a particular
0:08:57 ideology. Give yourself time to accept the ideology and to accept the steelman against
0:09:05 the ideology. And existing in that superposition of truths, try to figure out where in that gray
0:09:13 area is your own understanding of the path forward. Because unlike what politicians claim,
0:09:19 I don’t think there’s a right or an easy or a clear answer for the problems that we face
0:09:25 as a human civilization. In fact, the division I think that we’re seeing online on the internet
0:09:31 between the politicians is our best attempt at trying to, through the tension of discourse,
0:09:36 figuring out what the hell are we doing here? How do we solve this? How do we make a better
0:09:42 world? So anyway, ground news does a great job of delivering the metrics that give you the context
0:09:49 of like, okay, how biased is this particular story? So they can kind of help you in consuming
0:09:55 that new story to understand where it’s coming from. It’s trying to clearly, in an organized way,
0:10:02 deliver to you the perspective on the truth grounded in the context of the bias
0:10:08 from which that perspective comes from. Okay. And there’s a lot of other features that are
0:10:12 super interesting. I’m glad they exist. I’m glad they’re doing the work they’re doing. It’s extremely
0:10:18 important. Go to groundnews.com/lex to get 40% off the ground news vantage plan,
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0:10:35 This episode is also brought to you by ASleep and it’s Pod4Ultra. Cools or heats up each side
0:10:40 of the bed separately. Speaking of the amazing things that capitalism brought to our world,
0:10:48 they increasingly make naps more and more magical. The ultra part of the Pod4Ultra
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0:11:01 positioning of the bed, which is another fascinating piece of technology. And so you can sort of read
0:11:05 in bed, you can watch TV, all that kind of stuff. But I think the killer feature, the most amazing
0:11:11 feature is the cooling the bed, a cold bed with a warm blanket, one of my favorite things in the
0:11:17 world. For a nap, for a full night’s sleep, all of that. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong.
0:11:24 I don’t care. I’m a scientist of N of 1 of myself when it comes to health, when it comes to nutrition,
0:11:30 when it comes to all of that. I integrate the advice from all of my friends, all of the scientific
0:11:35 literature and podcasts and all that kind of stuff from out there. But at the end of the day,
0:11:39 I take all of that with a grain of salt and just kind of listen to my body and see what works. And
0:11:49 for me, naps are magical. I think they’re essential for my productivity. I go hard in the first few
0:11:56 hours of the day, usually four, four hours of deep work. And after that, there’s a bit of a crash,
0:12:02 just because it’s so exhausting. And a nap solves that like trivially, 15, 20 minutes.
0:12:08 Sometimes I’ll pop a caffeine pill before the nap or drink the coffee before the nap and I wake up,
0:12:14 boom, ready to go again. I don’t know if I can do that without the nap. I honestly don’t. And so,
0:12:19 so thank you, 8 Sleep. And thank you for the magic of naps. Go to 8sleep.com/lex and use code
0:12:27 Lex to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This is Alex from the podcast. To support it,
0:12:34 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s the Vec from Oswami.
0:12:56 You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas. So you’re the perfect
0:13:02 person to ask, what is conservatism? What’s your, let’s say, conservative vision for America?
0:13:09 Well, actually, this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party in direction
0:13:15 of the conservative movement is that we’ve gotten so good at describing what we’re against.
0:13:21 There’s a list of things that we could rail against, wokeism, transgender ideology,
0:13:27 climate ideology, COVIDism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris
0:13:32 agenda, the list goes on. But actually, what’s missing in the conservative movement right now
0:13:37 is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country?
0:13:42 And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the
0:13:48 purpose of my campaign, because I do feel that that’s why we didn’t have the red wave in 2022.
0:13:53 So they tried to blame Donald Trump, they tried to blame abortion, they blamed a bunch of individual
0:14:00 specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn’t have that red wave was that
0:14:04 we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what
0:14:10 we stand for. So what do we stand for as conservatives? I think we stand for the ideals
0:14:18 that we fought the American Revolution for in 1776. Ideals like merit, right, that the best person
0:14:23 gets the job without regard to their genetics, that you get ahead in this country, not on the color
0:14:28 of your skin, but on the content of your character, free speech and open debate, not just as some sort
0:14:34 of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the
0:14:39 United States of America, self-governance. And this is a big one right now, is that the people we
0:14:43 elect to run the government, they’re no longer the ones who actually run the government. We,
0:14:48 in the conservative movement, I believe should believe in restoring self-governance, where it’s
0:14:52 not bureaucrats running the show, but actually elected representatives. And then the other,
0:14:56 the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive, and I think as a
0:15:02 north star of the conservative movement, is restoring the rule of law in this country.
0:15:05 You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border.
0:15:10 It’s particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. You and I actually
0:15:17 share a couple of aspects in common in that regard. That also though means your first act of entering
0:15:22 this country can’t break the law. So there’s some policy commitments and principles, merit, free
0:15:27 speech, self-governance, rule of law. And then I think culturally what does it mean to be a
0:15:35 conservative is it means we believe in the anchors of our identity, in truth, the value of the
0:15:43 individual, family, nation, and God, beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the
0:15:47 courage to actually stand for our own vision. And that’s a big part of what’s been missing.
0:15:52 And it’s a big part of not just through the campaign, but through a lot of my future advocacy.
0:15:57 That’s the vacuum I’m aiming to fill. Yeah, we’ll talk about each of those issues. Immigration,
0:16:03 the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic,
0:16:10 something you’ve spoken about a lot. But you’ve also had a lot of really tense debates. So
0:16:15 you’re a perfect person to ask to steal me on the other side. So let me ask you about progressivism.
0:16:19 Can you steal me on the case for progressivism and left-wing ideas?
0:16:24 Yeah, so look, I think the strongest case, particularly for left-wing ideas in the United
0:16:31 States or in the American context, is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its
0:16:35 ideals. So even though our founding fathers preached the importance of life, liberty and the pursuit
0:16:40 of happiness and freedom, they didn’t practice those values in terms of many of our founding
0:16:46 fathers being slave owners, inequalities with respect to women, and other disempowered groups,
0:16:50 such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to
0:16:56 last to this day. The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history
0:17:01 isn’t that long ago, and that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those
0:17:06 imbalances in power in the United States. That’s the core view of the modern left. I’m not criticizing
0:17:11 it right now. I’m still manning it. I’m trying to give you, I think, a good articulation of why
0:17:17 the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping in to correct for historical
0:17:23 or present inequalities. I can give you my counterbottle of that, but the best statement of the
0:17:27 left, I think that it’s the fact that we’ve been imperfect in living up to those ideals.
0:17:32 In order to fix that, we’re going to have to take steps that are severe steps, if needed,
0:17:36 to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of
0:17:39 opportunity in this country. That’s the case for the left-wing view in modern America.
0:17:41 So what’s your criticism of that?
0:17:46 So my concern with it is, even if that’s well-motivated, I think that it recreates
0:17:51 many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I’ll give you a really tangible
0:17:56 example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would
0:18:00 say something like this right now, but I think it’s true, so I’m going to say it. I’m actually,
0:18:08 even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing actually a rise in anti-black and anti-minority
0:18:13 racism in this country, which is a little curious, right when over the last 10 years we got as close
0:18:17 to Martin Luther King’s promised land as you could envision, a place where you have every
0:18:22 American, regardless of their skin color, able to vote without obstruction, a place where you have
0:18:27 people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way. Why are we
0:18:32 seeing that resurgence? In part, it’s because of, I believe, that left-wing obsession with racial
0:18:38 equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. When you take something away from
0:18:43 someone based on their skin color, and that’s what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do,
0:18:47 the left-wing views are to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you’re a white,
0:18:53 straight, cis man, you have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When
0:18:59 you take something away from somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus
0:19:05 towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates,
0:19:09 there are several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can
0:19:15 agree we want to avoid is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly
0:19:20 wanted to heal. I see that in our context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even
0:19:24 what’s going on in, I’m from Ohio, I was born and raised in Ohio and I live there today,
0:19:30 the controversy in Springfield, Ohio. I personally don’t blame really any of the people who are in
0:19:34 Springfield, either the native people who have born and raised in Springfield, or even the Haitians
0:19:39 who have been moved to Springfield, but it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome
0:19:46 where if you put 20,000 people in a community where 50,000 people, where the 20,000 are coming in,
0:19:51 don’t know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, are unable to assimilate,
0:19:57 you know there’s going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began perhaps with some
0:20:05 type of charitable instinct, some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in
0:20:11 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States, what began with sympathy,
0:20:17 what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response
0:20:22 that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that’s my number one criticism of that left-wing
0:20:29 worldview. Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible.
0:20:34 Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both.
0:20:40 And the reason why is no two people, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it’s true between you
0:20:46 and I, between you and I and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues,
0:20:51 no two people have the same skillsets. We’re each endowed by different gifts,
0:20:56 we’re each endowed with different talents. And that’s the beauty of human diversity.
0:21:03 And a true meritocracy is a system in which you’re able to achieve the maximum of your God-given
0:21:07 potential without anybody standing in your way. But that means necessarily there’s going to be
0:21:12 differences in outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money,
0:21:16 not just fame or currency or whatever it is. There’s just going to be different outcomes
0:21:20 for different people in different spheres of lives. And that’s what meritocracy demands,
0:21:27 it’s what it requires. And so the left’s vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of
0:21:32 meritocracy. And so those are my two reasons for opposing the view is, one is it’s not meritocratic,
0:21:38 but number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have
0:21:40 wanted to help. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing in modern America.
0:21:46 Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban, great conversation. I think it’s on your
0:21:51 podcast actually. Yes. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, well, speaking of good guys, he messes me all
0:21:58 the time with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more
0:22:03 convincing things he said to you? You’re mostly focused on kind of DEI.
0:22:07 So let’s just take a step back and understand, because people use these acronyms and then they
0:22:11 start saying it out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. Like,
0:22:17 DEI refers to capital D, diversity, equity and inclusion, which is a philosophy adopted by
0:22:22 institutions, principally in the private sector, companies, nonprofits and universities,
0:22:27 to say that they need to strive for specific forms of racial, gender and sexual orientation
0:22:33 diversity. And it’s not just the D, it’s the equity in ensuring that you have equal outcomes,
0:22:38 as measured by certain group quota targets or group representation targets that they would
0:22:44 meet in their ranks. The problem with the DEI agenda is in the name of diversity,
0:22:50 it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So the way the argument
0:22:56 goes is this, is that we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and
0:23:02 minority views. But if certain opinions are themselves deemed to be hostile to those minorities,
0:23:06 then you have to exclude those opinions in the name of the capital D diversity.
0:23:10 But that means that you’re necessarily sacrificing actual diversity of thought.
0:23:13 I can give you a very specific example that might sound like, okay, well,
0:23:18 is it such a bad thing if an organization doesn’t want to exclude people who are saying racist
0:23:23 things on a given day? We could debate that. But let’s get to the tangible world of how that
0:23:28 actually plays out. I, for my part, have not really heard in ordinary America people uttering
0:23:32 racial epithets if you’re going to a restaurant or in the grocery store. It’s not something
0:23:35 I’ve encountered, certainly not in the workplace. But that’s a theoretical case. Let’s talk about
0:23:40 the real world case of how this plays out. There was an instance, it was a case that presented
0:23:45 itself before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, one of the government
0:23:52 enforcers of the DEI agenda. And there was a case of a woman who wore red sweater on Fridays in
0:23:56 celebration of veterans and those who had served the military and invited others in the workplace
0:23:59 to do the same thing. And they had a kind of affinity group. You could call it that, a veteran
0:24:04 type affinity group appreciating those who had served. Her son had served as well. There was a
0:24:09 minority employee at that business who said that he found that to be a microaggression.
0:24:16 So the employer asked her to stop wearing said clothes to the office. Well, she still felt like
0:24:20 she wanted to celebrate. I think it was Friday was the day of the week where they did it. She
0:24:24 still wore the red sweater and she didn’t wear it, but she would hang it on the back of her seat,
0:24:27 right, put it on the back of her seat at the office. They said, no, no, you can’t do that either.
0:24:33 So the irony is in the name of this capital, the diversity, which is creating a supposedly
0:24:39 welcoming workplace for all kinds of Americans by focusing only on certain kinds of so-called
0:24:45 diversity that translates into actually not even a diversity of your genetics, which is what they
0:24:50 claim to be solving for, but also a hostility to diversity of thought. And I think that’s dangerous.
0:24:55 And you’re seeing that happen in the last four years across this country. It’s been pretty rampant.
0:25:00 I think it leaves America worse off. The beauty of America is we’re a country where we should be
0:25:04 able to have institutions that are stronger from different points of view being expressed.
0:25:09 But my number one criticism of the DEI agenda is not even that it’s anti-meritocratic. It is
0:25:15 anti-meritocratic. But my number one criticism is actually hostile to the free and open exchange of
0:25:21 ideas by creating often legal liabilities for organizations that even permit certain viewpoints
0:25:26 to be expressed. And I think that’s the biggest concern. I think what Mark would say is that
0:25:34 diversity allows you to look for talent in places where you haven’t looked before and therefore
0:25:39 find really special talent, special people. I think that’s the case he made. He did make
0:25:44 that case. And it was a great conversation. And my response to that is great. That’s a good thing.
0:25:50 We don’t need a three-letter acronym to do that. You don’t need special programmatic DEI incentives
0:25:54 to do it because companies are always going to seek in a truly free market, which I think we’re
0:25:59 missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons. But in a truly free market, companies
0:26:04 will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest or else they’re going to be less competitive
0:26:10 versus other companies. But you don’t need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government
0:26:15 to do it. Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial
0:26:19 and gender representation targets in your workforce. That’s not the free market working.
0:26:22 So I think you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s going to be good for companies and companies
0:26:26 are going to do what’s in their self-interest. That’s what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I
0:26:30 believe. But if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing
0:26:35 it to adopt these top-down standards. That’s my issue with it. I don’t know what it is about
0:26:41 human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together
0:26:49 to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind wish there’s
0:26:55 a good ideal to bully people and to do bad things. I don’t know what it is. This has
0:27:00 less to do with left wing versus right wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy
0:27:08 is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you’ve seen
0:27:14 with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used
0:27:20 the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you’ve
0:27:24 seen that in several different spheres of American life. You can even talk about in the
0:27:31 military. You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the stated
0:27:38 objectives that we had and I think by all accounts it was a policy move we regret. Our policy ranks
0:27:44 and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really
0:27:49 by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9/11. Nonetheless, if you’re part of the U.S.
0:27:55 military or your general Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism
0:28:00 than you would actually talk about the military’s actual substantive failures. It’s what I call the
0:28:04 practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability because it’s the same thing with
0:28:09 respect to the educational system. It’s a lot easier to claim that and I’m not the one making
0:28:14 this claim, but others have made this claim that math is racist because there are inequitable results
0:28:19 on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes. You can claim
0:28:24 using that that math is racist. It’s a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept
0:28:30 accountability for failing to teach black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix
0:28:36 our public school systems and the zip code coded mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities
0:28:42 in bad schools. So I think that in many cases what these bureaucracies do is they use the
0:28:47 appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause,
0:28:53 but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from
0:28:59 criticism. So in many ways, bureaucracy I think cars the channels through which much of this
0:29:05 woke ideology has flowed over the last several years and that’s why part of my focus has shifted
0:29:11 away from just combating wokeness because that’s just a symptom I think versus combating actual
0:29:17 bureaucracy itself, the rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state. We talk about
0:29:21 that in the government, but the deep state doesn’t just exist in the government. It exists I think
0:29:28 in every sphere of our lives from companies to nonprofits to universities. It’s the rise of
0:29:32 you could call the managerial class, the committee class, the people who professionally sit on
0:29:38 committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs,
0:29:45 original ideators, and ordinary citizens alike. Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible.
0:29:54 It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don’t get to do.
0:30:02 But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomena of both the left and the right. This is not.
0:30:07 It’s not even a left or right. It just transcends that, but it’s anti-American at its core.
0:30:11 So our founding fathers, they were anti-bureaucratic at their core, actually. They were the pioneers,
0:30:16 the explorers, the unafraid. They were the inventors, the creators. People forget this about
0:30:21 Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence. One of the great inventors that we
0:30:26 have in the United States as well. He invented the lightning rod. He invented the Franklin stove,
0:30:31 which was actually one of the great innovations in the field of thermodynamics. He even invented
0:30:36 a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use. That’s just Benjamin
0:30:41 Franklin. So you think, oh, he’s a one-off. Everybody think, okay, he was the one Zaney
0:30:45 founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the
0:30:50 country. Wrong. It wasn’t unique to him. You have Thomas Jefferson. What are you sitting in right
0:30:57 now? You’re sitting on a swivel chair. Okay. Who invented the swivel chair? Thomas Jefferson?
0:31:01 Yes, Thomas Jefferson. Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration
0:31:08 of Independence. You’re the one that reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of
0:31:13 Independence when he was 33. And he was 33 when he did it while inventing the swivel chair.
0:31:18 I like how you’re focused on the swivel chair. Can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence?
0:31:23 It makes me feel horrible. But the Declaration of Independence part everybody knows. Well,
0:31:28 people don’t know he was an architect. So he worked in Virginia, but the Virginia state
0:31:33 capital dome, so the building that’s in Virginia today, where the state capital is, that dome
0:31:37 was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well. So these people weren’t people who sat on
0:31:43 professional committees. They weren’t bureaucrats. They hated bureaucracy. Part of Old World England
0:31:47 is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy and monarchy go hand in
0:31:55 hand. A monarch can’t actually administer or govern directly requires a bureaucracy, a machine,
0:32:00 to actually technocratically govern for him. So the United States of America was founded on the
0:32:08 idea that we reject that Old World view. The Old World vision was that we the people cannot be
0:32:12 trusted to self govern or make decisions for ourselves. We would burn ourselves off the
0:32:18 planet is the modern version of this. With existential risks like global climate change,
0:32:22 if we just leave it to the people and their democratic will, that’s why you need professional
0:32:28 technocrats, educated elites, enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set the limits that
0:32:31 actually protect people from their own worst impulses. That’s the Old World view. And most
0:32:37 nations in human history have operated this way. But what made the United States of America itself,
0:32:42 to know what made America great, we have to know what made America itself.
0:32:47 What made America itself is we said hell no to that vision, that we the people for better or
0:32:52 worse are going to self govern without the committee class restraining what we do. And the likes of
0:32:58 Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston,
0:33:03 you go straight down the list of founding fathers who are inventors, creators, pioneers,
0:33:08 explorers, who also were the very people who came together to sign the Declaration of Independence.
0:33:13 And so yeah, this rise of bureaucracy in America in every sphere of life, I view it as
0:33:18 anti-American, actually. And I hope that conservatives and liberals alike can
0:33:24 get behind my crusade, certainly, to get in there and shut most of it down.
0:33:30 Yes, speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make
0:33:35 government more efficient? How do we make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to
0:33:40 do that? Well, the first thing I will say is you’re always taking a risk. Okay, there’s no
0:33:45 free lunch here, mostly at least. You’re always taking a risk. One risk is that you say I want
0:33:52 to reform it gradually. I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right
0:33:56 end state is and then carefully cut with a chisel like a work of art to get there.
0:34:01 I don’t believe that approach works. I think that’s an approach that conservatives have taken
0:34:06 for many years. I think it hasn’t gotten us very far. And the reason is if you have like an
0:34:11 eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back. The other risk you
0:34:15 could take, so that’s the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the
0:34:19 risk of cutting too much. To say that I’m going to cut so much that I’m going to take the risk of
0:34:23 not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way that I’m going to take that
0:34:28 risk. I can’t give you option C, which is to say that I’m going to cut exactly the right amount.
0:34:32 I’m going to do it perfectly. Okay, you don’t know ex ante. You don’t know beforehand that it’s
0:34:37 exactly how it’s going to go. So that’s a meaningless claim. It’s the only question of which risk you’re
0:34:42 going to take. I believe in the moment we live in right now, the second risk is the risk we have
0:34:49 to be willing to take. And we haven’t had a class of politician. I mean, Donald Trump in 2016 was,
0:34:53 I think, the closest we’ve gotten. And I think that the second term will be even closer to what
0:35:00 we need. But short of that, I don’t think we’ve really had a class of politician who has gotten
0:35:06 very serious about cutting so much that you’re also going to cut some fat, but not only some fat,
0:35:11 but also some muscle. That’s the risk we have to take. So what would the way I would do it,
0:35:17 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing,
0:35:22 shut down agencies that shouldn’t exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation
0:35:26 that Congress never passed. In a true self governing democracy, it should be our elected
0:35:31 representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an elected bureaucrats. And that is the single
0:35:36 greatest form of economic stimulus we could have in this country. But it is also the single most
0:35:43 effective way to restore self governance in our country as well. And it is the blueprint for,
0:35:51 I think, how we save this country. That’s pretty gangster, 75%. There’s this kind of almost meme
0:35:59 like video of Argentinian president, Javier MLA, we’re on a whiteboard. He has all the,
0:36:06 I think 18 ministries lined up. And he’s ripping like the Department of Education gone.
0:36:12 And he’s just going like this. Now, the situation in Argentina is pretty dire.
0:36:21 And the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying the empire is falling.
0:36:28 This is still, in my opinion, the greatest nation on earth. Still, the economy is doing very well.
0:36:35 Still, this is the hub of culture, the hub of innovation, the hub of so many amazing things.
0:36:44 Do you think it’s possible to do something like firing 75% of people in government
0:36:50 when things are going relatively well? Yes. In fact, I think it’s necessary and essential.
0:36:56 I think things are, depends on what your level of well really is, what you’re benchmarking against.
0:37:00 America’s not built on complacency. We’re built on the pursuit of excellence.
0:37:05 And are we still the greatest nation on planet earth? I believe we are. I agree with you on that.
0:37:10 But are we great as we could possibly be, or even as we have been in the past, measured against
0:37:16 our own standards of excellence? No, we’re not. I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline.
0:37:20 That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the empire yet. But we are a nation in decline right now.
0:37:27 I don’t think we have to be. But part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial
0:37:32 class, the bureaucracy sucking the lifeblood out of the country, sucking the lifeblood out of our
0:37:37 innovative culture, our culture of self-governance. So is it possible? Yeah, it’s really possible.
0:37:41 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,
0:37:46 but I think it’s not crazy, at least as a thought experiment. Get in there on day one,
0:37:51 say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy who is not elected, elected representatives obviously
0:37:56 are elected by the people. But if the people who are not elected, if your social security number
0:38:01 ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50% cut right
0:38:08 there. Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number, you’re in. And
0:38:13 if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75% reduction. Then literally,
0:38:19 stochastically, okay? One of the virtues of that, it’s a thought experiment, not a policy prescription,
0:38:25 but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that you don’t have a bunch of lawsuits you’re
0:38:29 dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political viewpoint
0:38:35 discrimination. Actually, the reality is you’ve, at mass, you didn’t bring the chisel, you brought
0:38:41 a chainsaw. I guarantee you, do that on day one and do number two, step two on day two, on day three,
0:38:47 not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government
0:38:52 being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people
0:38:57 have run a company, especially larger companies know this, it’s 25% of the people who do 80-90%
0:39:02 of the useful work. These government agencies are no different. So now imagine you could do that same
0:39:06 thought experiment, but not just doing it at random, but do it still at large scale while having some
0:39:12 metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence, as well as the greatest
0:39:18 commitment and knowledge of the Constitution. That, I think, would immediately raise not only
0:39:22 the civic character of the United States, now we feel, okay, the people we elect to run the
0:39:26 government, they’ve got the power back, they’re running the government again, as opposed to the
0:39:30 unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today, it would also stimulate the economy. I mean,
0:39:36 the regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy. Most of it’s unconstitutional,
0:39:42 all we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative
0:39:48 presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about, but have not really effectuated ever in
0:39:52 modern history. And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra-component
0:39:56 to actually want to work in government. Exactly, which you’re missing today, because
0:40:00 right now the government would swallow them up. Most competent people feel like that bureaucratic
0:40:05 machine will swallow them whole. You clear the decks of 75% of them, real innovators can then
0:40:11 show up. Yeah, you know, there’s kind of the cynical view of capitals and where people think
0:40:16 that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But I think a lot of people would
0:40:20 want to work in government to build something that’s helpful to a huge number of people.
0:40:27 Yeah, well look, I think there’s opportunities for the very best to have large-scale impact
0:40:33 in all kinds of different institutions. In our universities, to K through 12 education,
0:40:37 through entrepreneurship, I’m obviously very biased in that regard. I think there’s a lot
0:40:42 you’re able to create that you couldn’t create through government. But I do think in the moment
0:40:48 that we live in where our government is as broken as it is and is as responsible for the
0:40:54 declining nature of our country, yeah, I think bringing in people who are unafraid, talented,
0:40:59 and able to have an impact could make all of the difference. And I agree with you. I don’t think
0:41:03 actually most people, even most people who say they’re motivated by money, I don’t think they’re
0:41:12 actually motivated by money. I think most people are driven by a belief that they can do more than
0:41:18 they’re being permitted to do right now with their skill sets. See, I’ve never, I’ll tell you that,
0:41:24 so I’ve run a number of companies. And one of the things that I used to ask when I was, you know,
0:41:28 I’m not day to day involved in them anymore. But as a CEO, I would ask when I did interviews.
0:41:32 And the first company I started at Reuven, like for four years in them, where, you know,
0:41:38 company was pretty big by that point, I would still intend on interviewing every candidate
0:41:43 before they joined screening for the culture of that person. I can talk a lot more about things
0:41:48 we did to build that culture. But one of the questions I would always ask them naturally,
0:41:52 just to start a conversation, it’s pretty basic question is, why did you leave your last job?
0:41:58 Or why are you leaving your last job? I’ll tell you what I didn’t hear very often,
0:42:01 is that I wasn’t paid enough, right? And maybe they’d be shy to tell you that during an interview,
0:42:07 but there’s indirect ways to signal that. That really wasn’t at all like even a top 10 reason
0:42:12 why people were leaving their job. I’ll give you what the number one reason was, is that they felt
0:42:20 like they were unable to do the true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role.
0:42:24 That’s the number one reason people leave their job. And, you know, I think, by the way,
0:42:28 that’s, I would say that as I’m saying that in a self-boastful way that we would attract these
0:42:33 people. I think that’s also true for most of the people who left the company as well, Reuven,
0:42:38 right? And it’s, and that was true at Reuven, it’s true at other companies I’ve started,
0:42:41 I think the number one reason people joined companies and the one people leave companies,
0:42:45 whether they’ve been to join mine or to leave mine in the past, have been that they feel like
0:42:49 they’re able to do more than they’re able to, with their skill set, than that environment
0:42:55 permits them to actually achieve. And so I think that’s what people hung for. When we think about
0:43:00 capitalism and true free market capitalism, and we used words earlier like meritocracy,
0:43:04 it’s about building a system, whether it’s in a nation or whether it’s even within an organization
0:43:09 that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential. And
0:43:14 sometimes it just doesn’t match for an organization where, let’s say the mission is here and somebody’s
0:43:17 skill sets could be really well aligned to a different mission, then the right answer is
0:43:21 it’s not a negative thing, it’s just that that person needs to leave and
0:43:25 find their mission somewhere else. But to bring that back to government, I think part of what’s
0:43:30 happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy and so many of these government
0:43:36 agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies. I think if you went to most
0:43:40 federal bureaucracies and just asked them, like what’s the mission, I’m just making one up off
0:43:44 the top of my head right now, the Department of Health and Human Services, what is the mission
0:43:51 of HHS in the United States of America? I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who
0:43:56 leads it, could give you a coherent answer to that question. I just, I just heavily doubt it,
0:44:00 and you could fill in the blank for, you know, any range of other, Department of Commerce. I
0:44:04 mean, just go straight down the list of each of these other ones. What is the mission of this
0:44:08 organization? You could even say for the US military, what’s the purpose of the US military,
0:44:12 the Department of Defense? I can give you one. I think it is to win wars and more importantly,
0:44:17 through its strength to avoid wars. That’s it. Well, okay, if that’s the mission,
0:44:21 then you know, okay, it’s not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where
0:44:25 we kind of feel like it sometimes and other ones where we don’t, and who decides that. I don’t
0:44:30 really know, but whoever the people are that decide that, we follow those orders. No, our mission
0:44:35 is to protect the United States of America to win wars and to avoid wars. Boom, those three
0:44:39 things. What does protecting the United States of America mean? Number one, the homeland of the
0:44:43 United States of America and the people who reside there. Okay, that’s a clear mission. I mean,
0:44:48 the Department of Health and Human Services maybe could be a reasonable mission to say that I want
0:44:52 to make America the healthiest country on planet Earth, and we will develop the metrics and meet
0:44:58 those metrics. And that’s the goal of the Department of HHS to set policies or at least implement
0:45:02 policies that best achieve that goal. But you can’t, and maybe that’s the right statement of the
0:45:06 mission. Maybe it’s not, but one of the things that happens is when you’re governed by the committee
0:45:12 class, it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization, whether it’s a company or government
0:45:16 agency or bureaucracy. And once you’ve done that, then you lose the ability to attract the best and
0:45:19 the brightest, because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential,
0:45:22 they have to know what it’s towards. There has to be a mission in the first place,
0:45:25 then you’re not getting the best and brightest, you get more from the committee class, and that
0:45:32 becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral. And that is what the blob of the federal bureaucracy
0:45:36 really looks like today. Yeah, you said something really profound at the individual scale of the
0:45:42 individual contributor, doer, creator. What happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit,
0:45:48 and then there’s barriers that come up. We have to wait a little bit. This happens, there’s friction
0:45:52 always in when humans together are working on something, there’s friction. And so the goal of
0:45:58 a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens
0:46:04 is the managerial class, the incentive is to create barriers. It’s what it does. I mean,
0:46:10 that’s just by the nature of a bureaucracy. It creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever
0:46:14 the other process was. Is there some room for that somewhere in certain contexts? Sure. It’s a
0:46:23 defensive mechanism that’s designed to reduce dynamism. But I think when that becomes cancerous
0:46:29 in its scope, it then actually kills the host itself, whether that’s a school, whether that’s a
0:46:33 company, whether that’s a government. And so the way I think about it, Lex, is there’s sort of a
0:46:41 balance of distributed power. I don’t mean power in the in the Foucault sense of social power, but
0:46:47 I mean just sort of power and sense of the ability to affect relevant change in any organization
0:46:52 between what you could call the founder class, the creator class, the everyday citizen, the
0:46:58 stakeholder class, and then the managerial class. And there’s a role for all three of them, right?
0:47:02 You can have the constituents of an organization, say in a constitutional republic, that’s the
0:47:06 citizen. You could have the equivalent of the creator class, the people who create things in
0:47:11 that that polity. And then you have the bureaucratic class that’s designed to administer and serve as
0:47:17 a liaison between the two. I’m not denying that there’s some role somewhere for people who are
0:47:22 in that managerial class. But right now, in this moment in American history, and I think it’s
0:47:28 been more or less true for the last century, but it’s grown, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s advent
0:47:32 to the modern administrative state, metastasizing through FDR’s new deal and what was required
0:47:39 to administer it, blown over and metastasizing further through LBJ’s great society and everything
0:47:43 that’s happened since even aided and abetted by republican presidents along the way like Richard
0:47:51 Nixon, has created a United States of America where that committee class, both in and outside
0:47:56 the government and our culture, wields far too much influence and power relative to the everyday
0:48:04 citizen stakeholder and to the creators who are in many ways constrained, hamstrung, shackled
0:48:10 in a straight jacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions. And I
0:48:15 certainly feel that myself. I probably identify as being a member of that creator class most
0:48:20 closely. It’s just what I’ve done. I create things. And I think we live in an environment in the United
0:48:24 States of America where we’re still probably the best country on earth, where that creator has that
0:48:29 shot. So that’s the positive side of it. But one where we are far more constrictive to the creator
0:48:34 class than we have been when we’ve been at our best. And that’s what I want to see change.
0:48:38 Can you sort of steal man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department,
0:48:46 Department of Education and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it
0:48:54 and firing 75% of people will be too much? Yeah. So I go back to this question of mission, right?
0:49:00 A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren’t aware why the
0:49:04 Department of Education was created in the first place. Actually, so that might be a useful
0:49:11 place to start is that this thing was created. It had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose?
0:49:15 Might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decide what are we doing with it or not.
0:49:20 What was the purpose of this thing that we created? It’s not a, to me, seems like a highly
0:49:24 relevant question yet in this discussion about government reform, it’s interesting how eager
0:49:28 people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, okay, but we got the status quo and
0:49:32 it’s just going to be disruptive versus asking the question of, okay, this institution was created,
0:49:38 it had an original purpose. Is that purpose still relevant? Is this organization at all
0:49:41 fulfilling that purpose today? To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So let’s
0:49:47 talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time, which was
0:49:56 to make sure that localities and particularly states were not siphoning dollars, taxpayer dollars,
0:50:02 away from predominantly black school districts to predominantly white ones. And that was not
0:50:06 a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening or there was at least some evidence that was
0:50:10 happening in certain states in the south. And so you may say you don’t like the federal solution,
0:50:15 you may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original purpose
0:50:18 of the U.S. Department of Education to make sure that from a federal perspective,
0:50:23 states were not systematically disadvantaging black school districts over predominantly white ones.
0:50:28 However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago,
0:50:34 it’s not a relevant purpose today. There’s no evidence today of states intentionally mapping
0:50:38 out which are the black versus white school districts and siphoning money in one direction
0:50:44 versus another. To the contrary, one of the things we’ve learned is that the school districts in the
0:50:49 inner city, many of which are predominantly black, actually spend more money per student
0:50:56 than other school districts for a worse result, as measured by test scores and other performance
0:51:00 on a per student basis, suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per
0:51:06 school determining student success, and actually suggesting that even the overfunding of some of
0:51:10 those already poorly run schools rewards them for their actual bureaucratic failures.
0:51:16 So against that backdrop, the Department of Education has instead extrapolated that original
0:51:21 purpose of what was a racial equality purpose to instead implement a different vision of racial
0:51:26 equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public
0:51:31 schools actually teach. So Department of Education funding, so federal funding accounts for about,
0:51:37 you know, giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools
0:51:42 across the country. But that comes with strings attached. So in today’s Department of Education,
0:51:46 this didn’t happen back in 1970, but it’s happening today. Ironically, it’s funny how these things
0:51:50 change with the bureaucracies that fail, they blow oak smoke to cover up for their own failures.
0:51:57 What happens with today’s Department of Education? They effectively say you don’t get that funding
0:52:02 unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals.
0:52:06 And in fact, they also interviewed in the curriculum where there’s evidence of schools in
0:52:11 the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education
0:52:16 funding so long as they have certain subjects like archery. There was one instance of a school
0:52:21 that had archery in its curriculum. I find that to be pretty interesting. Actually, I think that,
0:52:24 I think you have different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental
0:52:29 focus with physical aptitude, but hey, maybe I’m biased, doesn’t matter whether you like archery
0:52:34 or not. I don’t think it’s the federal government’s job to withhold funding from a school because
0:52:37 they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate,
0:52:43 where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education. So what you see then is an
0:52:48 abandonment of the original purpose that’s long past. You don’t have this problem that the Department
0:52:52 of Education was originally formed to solve of siphoning money from black school districts to
0:52:56 white school districts and laundering that effectively in public funds. That doesn’t exist
0:53:01 anymore. So they find new purposes instead, creating a lot more damage along the way.
0:53:05 So you asked me to steelman it, and can I say something constructive rather than just,
0:53:10 you know, pounding down on the other side? One way to think about this is, for a lot of these
0:53:18 agencies, were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes.
0:53:23 Where that positive intention existed, I’m still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies,
0:53:31 but if you’re going to create one, at least make it, what should we call it, a task force.
0:53:37 Make it a task force. A task force versus an agency means after it’s done, you celebrate,
0:53:42 you’ve done your work, pat yourself on the back and then move on, rather than creating a standing
0:53:48 bureaucracy, which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first
0:53:52 reason it was born in the first place. And I think we don’t have enough of that in our culture.
0:53:58 I mean, even if you have a company that’s generated tons of cash flow and it solved a problem, let’s
0:54:03 say it’s a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease. And the only thing people
0:54:07 knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease. And they generated a boatload of
0:54:10 cash from doing it. At a certain point, you could just give it to your shareholders and close up
0:54:14 shop. And that’s actually a beautiful thing to do. You don’t see that happen enough in the American
0:54:18 consciousness and the American culture of when an institution has achieved its purpose,
0:54:23 celebrate it and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government
0:54:28 would result in a vastly restrained scope of government rather than today. It’s a one-way
0:54:31 ratchet. Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence,
0:54:35 but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well.
0:54:39 And that’s where you get this metastasis over the last century.
0:54:43 So what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector,
0:54:49 the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don’t
0:54:52 want to have in government? So if the question is what should government do that the private
0:54:58 sector cannot, I’ll give you one, protect our border. I mean, capitalism is never going to be
0:55:02 the job of capitalists or never going to be the capability or inclination of capitalists
0:55:06 to preserve a national border. And I think a nation is literally, I think one of the
0:55:11 chapters of this book, a nation without borders is not a nation. It’s almost a tautology.
0:55:15 An open border is not a border. Capitalism is not going to solve that. What’s going to solve that
0:55:20 is a nation. Part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its
0:55:24 nation, in this case, the United States of America. That’s an example of a proper function of the
0:55:30 federal government to provide physical security to its citizens. Another proper role of that
0:55:34 federal government is to look after, or in this case, it could be state government,
0:55:42 to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else
0:55:47 without their consent. That’s a fancy way economists would use to describe it. What does
0:55:51 that mean? It means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else’s river, then you’re liable for
0:55:55 that. It’s not that, okay, I’m a capitalist, and so I want to create things, and I’m going to do
0:56:00 hell or high water, whether or not that harms people around me. The job of a proper government
0:56:04 is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing
0:56:09 their own rights through a system of capitalism in seeking prosperity. You’re free to do it,
0:56:15 but if you’re hurting somebody else without their consent in the process, the government
0:56:18 is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property
0:56:24 right. I would say that those are two central functions of government is to preserve national
0:56:29 boundaries and the national security of a homeland, and number two is to protect and preserve private
0:56:33 property rights and the enforcement of those private property rights. I think at that point,
0:56:40 you’ve described about 80 to 90% of the proper role of a government. What about infrastructure?
0:56:44 Look, I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector. I mean,
0:56:47 you can get into specifics. You could have infrastructure that’s specific to national
0:56:52 security. No, I do think that military industrial base is essential to provide national security.
0:56:56 That’s a form of infrastructure. I don’t think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to
0:57:02 provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation. But interstate highways, I think you
0:57:07 could think about whether or not that’s a common good that everybody benefits from but nobody has
0:57:12 the incentive to create. I think you could make an argument for the existence of interstate highways.
0:57:16 I think you could also make powerful arguments for the fact that actually you could have enough
0:57:19 private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well.
0:57:26 But I’m not dogmatic about this, but broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the
0:57:31 goal of the federal government, I’m not going to say 100. 80 to 90% of the goal of the existence
0:57:38 of a federal government period should be to protect national boundaries and provide security
0:57:42 for the people who live there and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside
0:57:48 there. If we restore that, I think we’re well on our way to a revival of what our founding
0:57:52 fathers envisioned. And I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did.
0:57:58 So if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government
0:58:04 in the states for something like education? I think if it goes closer to municipalities
0:58:09 and the states, I’m fine with that being a locus for people determining. For example,
0:58:13 let’s just say school districts are taxed at the local level. For that to be a matter for
0:58:18 municipalities and townships to actually decide democratically how they actually want that
0:58:23 government, whether it’s the balance between a public school district versus making that same
0:58:27 money available to families in the form of vouchers or other forms of ability to educational
0:58:32 savings accounts or whichever mechanism it is to opt out of that. If that’s done locally,
0:58:38 I’ll have views on that that tend to go further in the direction of true educational choice and
0:58:44 diversity of choice, the implementation of charter schools, the granting of state charters or even
0:58:48 lowering the barriers to granting one. I favor those kinds of policies. But if we’ve gotten the
0:58:53 federal government out of it, that’s achieved 75% of what I think we need to achieve, that I’m
0:58:58 focused on solving other problems and leave that to the states and municipalities to cover from
0:59:04 there. Given this conversation, what do you think of Elon’s proposal of the Department of
0:59:12 Government Efficiency in the Trump administration or really any administration? I’m, of course,
0:59:16 biased because Elon and I had discussed that for the better part of the last year and a half.
0:59:20 I think it’s a great idea. It’s something that’s very consistent with the core premise of my
0:59:25 presidential candidacy. I got to know him as I was running for US president in a couple of events
0:59:30 that he came to, and then we built a friendship after that. Obviously, I think it’s a great idea.
0:59:34 Who do you think is more hardcore on the cutting, you or Elon?
0:59:42 Elon’s pretty hardcore. I said 75% of the federal bureaucrats. While I was running for
0:59:49 president, he said you need to put at least 75%. I agree with him. I think it could be a fun
0:59:55 competition to see who ends up more hardcore. I don’t think there’s someone out there who’s
1:00:01 going to be more hardcore than here I would be. The reason is, I think we’re both, we share in
1:00:07 common, a willingness to take the risk and see what happens. The sun will still rise in the
1:00:11 east and set in the west. That much, I guarantee you. Is there going to be some broken glass
1:00:15 and some damage? Yes, there is. There’s no way around that, but once you’re willing to take
1:00:21 that risk, then it doesn’t become so scary anymore. Here’s the thing, Lex. It’s easy to say this.
1:00:25 Let’s talk about where the rubber hits the road here. Even in the second Trump term, this would be
1:00:30 the discussion. President Trump and I had this conversation, but I think we would continue to
1:00:37 have this conversation is, where does it rank on our prioritization list? Because there’s always
1:00:43 going to be a trade-off. If you have a different policy objective that you want to achieve, a good
1:00:48 policy objective, whatever that is. You could talk about immigration policy. You could talk about
1:00:54 economic policy. There are other policy objectives. You’re going to trade off a little bit in the
1:01:00 short run the effectiveness of your ability to carry out that policy goal if you’re also committed
1:01:04 to actually thinning out the federal government by 75% because there’s just going to be some
1:01:09 clunkiness. There’s just going to be frictional costs for that level of cut. The question is,
1:01:15 where does that rank on your prioritization list? To pull that off, to pull off a 75% reduction in
1:01:19 the size and scale of the federal government, the regulatory state, and the headcount,
1:01:24 I think that only happens if that’s your top priority. You could do it at a smaller scale,
1:01:28 but at that scale, it only happens if that’s your top priority because then as president,
1:01:33 you’re in a position to say, “I know in the super short run that might even make it a little bit
1:01:38 harder for me to do this other thing that I want to do and use the regulatory state to do it.”
1:01:43 But I’m going to pass on that. I’m going to pass that up. I’m going to bear that hardship
1:01:47 and inconvenience because I know this other goal is more important on the scale of decades
1:01:54 and centuries for the country. It’s a question of prioritization and certainly my own view is that
1:02:01 now is a moment where that needs to be a top priority for saving this country. If there’s
1:02:08 one thing about my campaign, if I was to do it again, I would be even clearer about, because
1:02:12 I talked about a lot of things in the campaign and we can cover a lot of that too, but if there’s
1:02:16 one thing that I care about more than anything else is dismantling that bureaucracy and more
1:02:25 over it is an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. That nanny state presents itself
1:02:29 in several forms. There’s the entitlement state, that’s the welfare state, presents itself in the
1:02:33 form of the regulatory state, that’s what we’re talking about, and then there’s the foreign
1:02:38 nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren’t paying their fair
1:02:44 share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell,
1:02:49 it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms,
1:02:53 the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state.
1:02:58 Once we’ve done that, we’ve revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.
1:03:03 So you mentioned the Department of Education, but there’s also the Department of Defense.
1:03:11 And there’s a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to
1:03:18 an budget that’s increasing and the number of wars and military conflicts that’s increasing.
1:03:22 So if we could just talk about that. So this is the number one priority.
1:03:31 It’s like there’s difficulty levels here. The DoD would be probably the hardest. So let’s take
1:03:37 that on. What’s your view on the military industrial complex, Department of Defense,
1:03:43 and wars in general? So I think the nanny state, I’m against it overall. I’m against the foreign
1:03:46 policy nanny state as well. Let’s start from that as the starting off point, and then I’ll tell you
1:03:53 about my views on the DoD and our defense. First of all, I think that, and I think that it was easy
1:03:58 for many people from the neocon school of thought to caricature my views with the media at their
1:04:03 side. But actually, my own view is if it’s in the interest of the United States of America to provide
1:04:09 certain levels of protection to US allies, we can do that as long as those allies actually pay for
1:04:15 it. And I think it’s important for two reasons. The less important reason, still important reason,
1:04:19 the less important reason is it’s still money for us, right? Well, it’s not like we’re swimming
1:04:24 in a cash surplus right now. We’re at $34 trillion national debt and growing. And, you know, I think
1:04:27 pretty soon the interest payments are going to be the largest line item in our own federal budget.
1:04:32 So it’s not like we have money willy-nilly to just hand over for free. That’s the less important
1:04:38 reason, though. The more important reason is that it makes sure that our allies
1:04:45 have actual skin in the game to not have skewed incentives to actually enter conflicts where
1:04:50 they’re not actually bearing the full cost of those conflicts. So take NATO, for example.
1:04:58 Most NATO countries, literally a majority of NATO countries today, do not pay or contribute
1:05:07 2% of their GDP to their own national defense, which is supposedly a requirement to be in NATO.
1:05:12 So majority of NATO countries are failing to meet their basic commitment to be in NATO in the first
1:05:16 place. Germany particularly is, I think, arbitraging the hell out of the United States of America.
1:05:22 And I don’t think that I’m not going to be some sort of, you know, shrill voice here saying,
1:05:27 “So therefore we should not be supporting any allies or providing security blankets.”
1:05:31 No, I’m not going in that direction. What I would say is you got to pay for it, right?
1:05:35 Pay for your fissure. A, because we’re not swimming in excess money ourselves.
1:05:40 But B is it tells us that you actually have skin in the game for your own defense,
1:05:44 which actually then makes nations far more prudent in the risks that they take,
1:05:47 whether or not they’re in a war, versus if somebody else is paying for it
1:05:50 and somebody else is providing our security guarantee, hey, I might as well, you know,
1:05:54 take the gamble and see where I end up at the end of a war, versus the restraint that that imposes
1:05:59 on the decision making of those allies. So now let’s bring this, bring this home to the Department
1:06:08 of Defense. I think the top goal of the U.S. defense policy establishment should be to
1:06:12 provide for the national defense of the United States of America.
1:06:16 And the irony is that’s what we’re actually doing most poorly. We’re not really using,
1:06:21 other than the Coast Guard, we’re not really using the U.S. military to prevent crossings
1:06:26 at our own southern border and crossings at our other borders. In fact, the United States of America,
1:06:30 our homeland, I believe, is less secure today than it has been in a very long time.
1:06:35 Vulnerable to threats from hypersonic missiles where China and Russia, Russia certainly
1:06:39 has capabilities in excess of that of the United States. Missiles, hypersonic means faster than
1:06:43 the speed of sound that could hit the United States, including those carrying nuclear warheads.
1:06:50 We are more vulnerable to super EMP attacks, electromagnetic pulse attacks that could,
1:06:52 you know, without exaggeration, some of this could be from other nations, some of these could even
1:06:58 be from solar flares, cause significant mass casualty in the United States of America. The
1:07:02 electric grid’s gone. It’s not an exaggeration to say if that happened, planes would be falling
1:07:07 out of the sky because our chips really depend on those electromagnetic, well, will be affected by
1:07:12 those electromagnetic pulses. More vulnerable to cyber attacks. I know this, oh, people say,
1:07:17 okay, start yawning and say, okay, boring stuff, super EMP cyber or whatever. No, actually, it
1:07:22 is pretty relevant to whether or not you actually are facing the risk of not getting your insulin
1:07:27 because your refrigerator doesn’t work anymore or your food can’t be stored or your car or your,
1:07:34 or your ability to fly on an airplane is impaired. Okay. So I think that these are serious risks
1:07:38 where our own national defense spending has been wholly inadequate. So I’m not one of these people
1:07:42 that says, oh, we decrease versus increase national defense spending. We’re not spending
1:07:46 it in the right places. The number one place we need to be spending it is actually in protecting
1:07:50 our national defense. And I think out protecting our own physical homeland. And I think we actually
1:07:56 need an increase in spending on protecting our own homeland, but that is different from the agenda
1:08:02 of foreign interventionism and foreign nanny stateism for its own stake, where we should expect
1:08:06 more and demand more of our allies to provide for their own national defense and then provide the
1:08:10 relevant security guarantees to allies where that actually advances the interests of the United
1:08:16 States of America. So that’s what I believe. And I think this process has been corrupted by what
1:08:20 Dwight Eisenhower famously in his farewell address called the military industrial complex in the
1:08:26 United States. But I think it’s bigger than just the, I think it’s easy to tell the tales of
1:08:33 the financial corruption. It’s a kind of cultural corruption and conceit that just because a certain
1:08:37 number of people in that expert class have a belief that their belief happens to be the right one
1:08:41 because they can scare you with what the consequence would be if you don’t follow their advice.
1:08:46 And one of the beauties of the United States is at least in principle,
1:08:51 we have civilian control of the military, the person who we elect to be the US president
1:08:55 is the one that actually is the true commander in chief. I have my doubts of whether it operates
1:08:59 that way. I think it is quite obvious that Joe Biden is not a functioning commander in chief
1:09:03 of the United States of America yet on paper, supposedly we still are supposed to call him that.
1:09:09 But at least in theory, we’re supposed to have civilian control of the US military.
1:09:15 And I think that one of the things that that leader needs to do is to ask the question of,
1:09:18 again, the mission, what’s the purpose of this US military in the first place
1:09:24 at the top of the list should be to protect the homeland and the people who actually live here,
1:09:26 which we’re failing to do. So that’s where I land on that question.
1:09:30 Wait, okay, there’s a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, you mean he’s
1:09:35 functionally not in control of the US military because of the age factor or because of the
1:09:40 nature of the presidency? It’s a good question. I would say in his case, it’s particularly
1:09:47 accentuated because it’s both. In his case, I don’t think anybody in America anymore believes
1:09:51 that Joe Biden is the functioning president of the United States of America. How could he be?
1:09:55 He wasn’t even sufficiently functioning to be the candidate after a debate that was held in
1:09:59 June. There’s no way he’s going to be in a position to make the most important decisions
1:10:03 on a daily and demanding basis to protect the leading nation in the world.
1:10:08 Now, more generally, though, I think we have a deeper problem that even when it’s not Joe Biden,
1:10:13 in general, the people we elect to run the government haven’t really been the ones running
1:10:17 the government. It’s been the unelected bureaucrats in the bureaucratic deep state
1:10:23 underneath that’s really been making the decisions. As I’ve done business in a number of places,
1:10:28 I’ve traveled to Japan. There’s an interesting corporate analogy. Sometimes if you get outside
1:10:35 of politics, people can listen and pay attention a little bit more because of politics. It’s so
1:10:39 fraught right now that if you start talking to somebody who disagrees with you about the politics
1:10:43 of it, you’re just butting heads but not really making progress. Let’s just make the same point
1:10:48 but go outside of politics for a second. I was traveling in Japan. I was having a late-night
1:10:55 dinner with a CEO of a Japanese pharmaceutical company. It takes a while to really get him to
1:11:04 open up, culturally speaking in Japan, a couple nights of karaoke and late-night restaurant,
1:11:08 whatever it is. We built a good enough relationship where he was very candid with me.
1:11:16 He said, “I’m the CEO of the company. I could go and find the head of a research unit and tell him,
1:11:20 okay, this is a project we’re no longer working on as a company. We don’t want to spend money on it.
1:11:24 We’re going to spend money somewhere else.” He looked me in the eye and he’ll say, “Yes, sir.
1:11:29 Yes, sir.” I’ll come back six months later and find that they’re spending exactly the same amount
1:11:34 of money on those exact same projects. I’ll tell him, “No, we agreed. I told you that you’re not
1:11:38 going to spend money on this project and we have to stop now. It should have stopped six months ago.
1:11:42 Get a slap on the wrist for it.” He says, “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. Yes, no, no. Of course, that’s
1:11:48 correct.” Come back six months later, same person is spending the same money on the same project.
1:11:53 And here’s why. Historically in Japan, and I should say in Japan, this is changing now.
1:11:57 It’s changing now, but historically until very recently and even to an extent now,
1:12:04 it’s near impossible to fire people. So if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them,
1:12:11 that means they don’t actually work for you. It means in some deeper perverse sense you work for
1:12:17 them because you’re responsible for what they do without any authority to actually change it.
1:12:22 So I think most people have traveled in Japan and Japanese corporate culture through the 1990s
1:12:28 and 2000s and 2010s and maybe even some vestiges in the 2020s wouldn’t really dispute what I just
1:12:33 told you. Now, we’re bringing back to the more contentious terrain. I think that’s basically
1:12:37 how things have worked in the executive branch of the federal government of the United States of
1:12:42 America. You have these so-called civil service protections on the books. Now, if you really
1:12:48 read them carefully, I think that there are areas to provide daylight for a truly constitutionally
1:12:55 well-trained president to act. But apart from those, that’s a contrary view that I have that
1:13:00 bucks conventional wisdom, but apart from that caveat, in general, the conventional view has
1:13:05 been the US president can’t fire these people. There’s four million federal bureaucrats, 99.9%
1:13:10 of them can’t be touched by the person who the people who elected to run the executive branch
1:13:14 can’t even fire those people. It’s like the equivalent of that Japanese CEO. And so that
1:13:20 culture exists every bit as much in the federal bureaucracy of the United States of America
1:13:25 as they did in Japanese corporate culture through the 1990s. And that’s a lot of what’s wrong with
1:13:29 not just the way that our Department of Defense has run and our foreign policy establishment
1:13:33 has run, but I think it applies to a lot of the domestic policy establishment as well.
1:13:37 And to come back to the core point, how are we going to save this republic?
1:13:40 This is the debate in the conservative movement right now. So this is a little bit,
1:13:47 maybe a little bit spicy for some Republicans to sort of swallow right now. And, you know,
1:13:52 my top focus is making sure that we win the election. But let’s just move the ball forward
1:13:56 a little bit and skate to where the puck is going here. Okay. Yes, let’s say we win the election
1:13:59 all as well. And Dandy, okay, what’s the philosophy that determines how we govern?
1:14:03 There’s a little bit of a fork in the road amongst conservatives, where there are those
1:14:10 who believe that the right answer now is to use that regulatory state and use those levers of power
1:14:16 to advance our own pro-conservative, pro-American, pro-worker goals.
1:14:22 And I’m sympathetic to all of those goals. But I don’t think that the right way to do it is to
1:14:28 create a conservative regulatory state that replaces a liberal regulatory state. I think
1:14:32 the right answer is actually to get in there and shut it down. I don’t want to replace the left wing
1:14:36 nanny state with the right wing nanny state. I want to get in there and actually dismantle
1:14:43 the nanny state. And I think it has been a long time in the United States, maybe ever in modern
1:14:50 history, that we’ve had a conservative leader at the national level who makes it their principal
1:14:57 objective to dismantle the nanny state in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory
1:15:07 state, and the foreign policy nanny state. That was a core focus of my candidacy. One of the things
1:15:13 that I wish, and this is on me, not anybody else, that I should have done better, was to make that
1:15:19 more crystal clear as a focus without getting distracted by a lot of the shenanigans. Let’s
1:15:23 just say that happened at side shows during a presidential campaign, but call that a lesson
1:15:29 learned because I do think it’s what the country needs now more than ever. Yeah, it’s a really,
1:15:37 really powerful idea. It’s actually something that Donald Trump ran on in 2016. Drain the swamp.
1:15:43 Drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully
1:15:48 do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual. Can I say a word about the conditions
1:15:52 he was operating in? Because I think that’s why I’m far more excited for this time around,
1:15:59 is that a lot has changed in the legal landscape. Donald Trump did not have the Supreme Court backdrop
1:16:04 in 2016 that he does today. There’s some really important cases that have come down from the
1:16:10 Supreme Court. One is West Virginia versus EPA. I think it’s probably the most important case of
1:16:17 our generation. In 2022, that came down and said that if Congress has not passed a rule into law
1:16:22 itself through the halls of Congress, and it relates to what they call a major question,
1:16:27 a major policy or economic question, it can’t be done by the stroke of a pen by a regulator,
1:16:32 an unelected bureaucrat either. That quite literally means most federal regulations today
1:16:37 are unconstitutional. Then this year comes down a different and big one, another big one from the
1:16:42 Supreme Court in the Loper Bright case, which held that historically for the last 50 years in this
1:16:48 country, the doctrine has been, it’s called Chevron deference. It’s a doctrine that says
1:16:56 that federal courts have to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law. They now toss that
1:16:59 out the window and say, “No, no, no, the federal courts no longer have to defer to an agency’s
1:17:04 interpretation of what the law actually is.” The combination of those two cases is seismic and
1:17:09 its impact for the regulatory state. There’s also another great case that came down was SEC
1:17:15 versus Jarkasy. In the SEC is one of these agencies that embodies everything we’re talking about here.
1:17:22 The SEC, among other agencies, has tribunals inside that not only do they write the rules,
1:17:27 not only do they enforce those rules, they also have these judges inside the agency that also
1:17:31 interpret the rules and determine endolot punishments. That doesn’t make sense with,
1:17:35 if you believe, in separation of powers in the United States. So the Supreme Court put an end
1:17:38 to that and said that that practice at the SEC is unconstitutional. Actually, as a side note,
1:17:44 the Supreme Court has said, “Countless practices and rules written by the SEC, the EPA, the FTC,
1:17:49 and recent years were outright unconstitutional.” Think about what that means for a constitutional
1:17:56 republic, that supposedly these law enforcement agencies, the courts have now said, especially
1:18:02 this year, the courts have now said that their own behaviors actually break the law. So the very
1:18:09 agencies entrusted with supposedly enforcing the law are actually behaving with utter blatant
1:18:16 disregard for the law itself. That’s un-American. It’s not tenable in the United States of America,
1:18:21 but thankfully, we now have a Supreme Court that recognizes that. So, you know, whether or not
1:18:28 we have a second Trump term, well, that’s up to the voters, but even whether or not that
1:18:33 now takes advantage of that backdrop that the Supreme Court has given us to actually gut
1:18:39 the regulatory state, we’ll find out. I am optimistic. I certainly think it’s the best chance
1:18:43 that we’ve had in a generation in this country, and that’s a big part of why I’m supporting
1:18:48 Donald Trump and why I’m going to do everything in my power to help him. But I do think it is
1:18:54 going to take a spine of steel to see that through. And then after we’ve taken on the regulatory state,
1:18:59 I think that’s the next step. But I do think there’s this broader project of dismantling the
1:19:04 nanny state in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign
1:19:11 policy in any state. Three-word answer, if I was to summarize my worldview and my presidential
1:19:17 campaign in three words, shut it down. Shut it down. Okay. So the Supreme Court cases you mentioned,
1:19:23 there’s a lot of nuance there. I guess it’s weakening the immune system of the different
1:19:28 departments. Yeah, it’s a good way of putting it. Okay. And the human psychology level,
1:19:34 so you basically kind of implied that for Donald Trump or for any president,
1:19:41 the legal situation was difficult. Is that the only thing really operating? Like, isn’t it?
1:19:49 It’s just on a psychological level, just hard to fire a very large number of people. Is that
1:19:53 what it is? Like, why? Is there a basic civility and momentum going on? Well, I think there’s one
1:19:58 other factor. So you’re right to point. I mean, the legal backdrop is a valid,
1:20:04 understandable excuse and reason. I think there are other factors at play too. So I think there’s
1:20:10 something to be said for never having been in government, showing up there the first time,
1:20:15 and you’re having to understand the rules of the road as you’re operating within them.
1:20:23 And also having to depend on people who actually aren’t aligned with your policy vision, but tell
1:20:27 you to your face that they are. And so I think that’s one of the things that I’ve admired about
1:20:31 President Trump is he’s actually been very open about that, very humble about that to say that
1:20:35 there’s a million learnings from that first term that make him ambitious and more ambitious in that
1:20:39 second term. But everything I’m talking to you about, this is what needs to happen in the country,
1:20:44 it’s not specific to Donald Trump. It lays out what needs to be done in the country.
1:20:48 There’s the next four years, Donald Trump is our last best hope and chance for moving that ball
1:20:55 forward. But I think that the vision I’m laying out here is one that hopefully goes even beyond
1:21:00 just the next two or four years of really fixing a century’s worth of mistakes. I think we’re going
1:21:04 to fix a lot of them in the next four years of Donald Trump’s president. But if you have a centuries
1:21:08 worth of mistakes that have accumulated with the overgrowth of the entitlement state in the US,
1:21:13 I think it’s going to take probably the better part of a decade at least to actually fix them.
1:21:22 I disagree with you on both the last and the best hope. Donald Trump is more likely to fire a lot of
1:21:27 people. But is he the best person to do so? We’ve got two candidates, right? People face a choice.
1:21:35 This is a relevant election. One of my goals is to speak to people who may not agree with 100%
1:21:39 of what Donald, who do not agree with 100% of what Donald Trump says. And I can tell them,
1:21:43 you know what? I don’t agree with 100% of what he says. And I can tell you as somebody who ran
1:21:48 against him for US president that right now he is, when I say the last best hope, I mean in this
1:21:55 cycle, the last best hope that we have for dismantling that bureaucratic class. And I think
1:22:00 that I’m also open about the fact that it’s going to take, this is a long run project,
1:22:04 but we have the next step to actually, the next step to actually take over the next few years.
1:22:06 That’s kind of where I land on it. I mean, you talked to him, I guess a few weeks ago,
1:22:12 I saw you had a podcast with him, right? What was your impression about his preparedness to do it?
1:22:17 My impression is his priority allocation was different than yours. I think he’s more focused
1:22:22 on some of the other topics that you are also focused on. And there is attention there,
1:22:27 just as you’ve clearly highlighted. We share the same priority with respect to the southern border,
1:22:32 and those are near term fixes that we can hit out of the park in the first year.
1:22:36 But at the same time, I think we’ve got to think also on decade long time horizon. So
1:22:42 my own view is, I think that, I think that he, it is my conviction and belief that he does care
1:22:48 about dismantling that federal bureaucracy, certainly more so than any Republican nominee we
1:22:54 have had in, certainly in my lifetime. But I do think that there are going to be competing schools
1:22:59 of thought where some will say, okay, well, we want to create a right wing entitlement state,
1:23:04 right, to shower federal subsidies on favored industries while keeping them away from disfavored
1:23:08 industries and new bureaucracies to administer them. And, you know, I don’t come from that
1:23:13 school of thought. I don’t want to see the bureaucracy expand in a pro-conservative
1:23:17 direction. I want to see the bureaucracy shrink in every direction. And, you know,
1:23:22 I do think that from my conversations with Donald Trump, I believe that he is well aligned with
1:23:26 this vision of shrinking bureaucracy, but that’s a longer term project.
1:23:30 There’s so many priorities at play here, though. I mean, you really do have to do
1:23:36 the Elon thing of walking into Twitter headquarters with a sink, right? Let that sink in. That
1:23:43 basically firing a very large number of people. And it’s, but it’s not just about the firing. It’s
1:23:49 about setting clear missions for the different departments that remain hiring back because
1:23:57 you overfire, hiring back based on meritocracy. And it’s a full time. And it’s not, it’s not
1:24:01 only full time in terms of actual time. It’s full time psychologically because
1:24:08 you’re walking into a place unlike a company like Twitter, an already successful company.
1:24:14 In government, I mean, everybody around you, all the experts and the advisors
1:24:22 are going to tell you you’re wrong. And like, it’s a very difficult psychological place to
1:24:29 operate in because like you’re constantly the asshole. And I mean, the certainty you have
1:24:36 to have about what you’re doing is just like nearly infinite because everybody, all the really
1:24:40 smart people are telling you, no, this is a terrible idea. Sir, this is a terrible idea.
1:24:46 No, you have to have this spine of steel to cut through what that short term advice is you’re
1:24:52 getting. And I’ll tell you, certainly, I intend to do whatever I can for this country, both in
1:24:58 the next four years and beyond. But my voice on this will be crystal clear. And President Trump
1:25:04 knows that’s my view on it. And I believe he shares it deeply is that all all sequel, getting there
1:25:11 and shut down as much of the excess bureaucracy as we can do it as quickly as possible. And
1:25:14 that’s a big part of how we save our country. Okay, I’ll give you an example that’s really
1:25:20 difficult tension, given your priorities, immigration. There’s an estimated 14 million
1:25:26 illegal immigrants in the United States. You’ve spoken about mass deportation.
1:25:35 Yes. That requires a lot of effort, money. I mean, how do you do it? And how does that conflict
1:25:40 with the shutting it down? Sure. And so it goes back to that original discussion we had is what
1:25:46 are the few proper roles of the federal government? I gave you two. One is of the government period.
1:25:51 One is to protect the national borders and sovereignty of the United States,
1:25:55 and two is to protect private property rights. There’s a lot else. Most of what the government’s
1:25:58 doing today, both at the federal and state level is something other than those two things.
1:26:02 But in my book, those are the two things that are the proper function of government.
1:26:06 So for everything else, the federal government should not be doing. The one thing they should
1:26:10 be doing is to protect the homeland of the United States of America and the sovereignty and sanctity
1:26:15 of our national borders. So in that domain, that’s mission aligned with a proper purpose for the
1:26:19 federal government. I think we’re a nation founded on the rule of law. I say this is the
1:26:23 kid of legal immigrants. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law.
1:26:28 And in some ways, if I was to summarize a formula for saving the country over the next four years,
1:26:34 it would be a tale of two mass deportations, the mass deportations of millions of illegals
1:26:39 who are in this country and should not be, and then the mass deportation of millions of unelected
1:26:43 federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C. Now, all as you could say that those are intention,
1:26:49 but I think that the reality is anything outside of the scope of what the core function of the
1:26:54 government is, which is protecting borders and protecting private property rights, that’s really
1:26:59 where I think the predominant cuts need to be. And if you look at the number of people who are
1:27:04 looking after the border, it’s not even 0.1 percent of the federal employee base today.
1:27:10 So 75 percent isn’t 99.99 percent. It’s 75 percent, which still leaves that it would still be a tiny
1:27:14 fraction of the remaining 25 percent, which I actually think needs to be more rather than less.
1:27:18 So it’s a good question. But that’s sort of where I land on when it’s a proper role of the federal
1:27:24 government. Great. Act and actually do your job. The irony is 99.9999 percent of those resources
1:27:28 are going to functions other than the protection of private property rights and the protection
1:27:34 of our national physical protection. There is a lot of criticism of the idea of mass deportation,
1:27:41 though. So one, fair enough, it will cause a large amount of economic harm, at least in the short
1:27:48 term. The other is there would be potentially violations of our kind of higher ideals of how
1:27:54 we like to treat human beings, in particular separation of families, for example, tearing
1:28:00 families apart. And the other is just like the logistical complexity of doing something like
1:28:05 this. How do you answer some of those criticisms? Fair enough. And I would call those even not
1:28:08 even criticisms, but just thoughtful questions, right? Even to somebody who’s really aligned
1:28:13 with doing this. Those are thoughtful questions to ask. So I do want to say something about this
1:28:20 point on how we think about the breakage of the rule of law and other contexts. There were 350,000
1:28:25 mothers who were in prison in the United States today who committed crimes and were convicted of
1:28:30 them. They didn’t take their kids with them to those prisons either, right? So we face difficult
1:28:35 tradeoffs in all kinds of contexts as it relates to the enforcement of law. And I just want to make
1:28:39 that basic observation against the backdrop of if we’re a nation founded on the rule of law,
1:28:45 that we acknowledge that there are tradeoffs to enforcing the law. And we’ve acknowledged that
1:28:50 in other contexts. I don’t think that we should have a special exemption for saying that somehow
1:28:54 we weigh the other way when it comes to the issue of the border. We’re a nation founded on the rule
1:28:59 of law. We enforce laws that has costs, that has tradeoffs, but it’s who we are. So that backdrop
1:29:05 is the easiest fact I can cite is 350,000 or so mothers who are in prison and did not take
1:29:11 their kids to prison with them. Is that bad? Is it undesirable for the kids to grow up without
1:29:18 those 350,000 mothers? It is. But it’s a difficult situation created by people who violated the law
1:29:23 and faced the consequences of it, which is also competing an important priority in the country.
1:29:28 So that’s in the domestic context. As it relates to this question of mass deportations, let’s just
1:29:33 get very practical because all that was theoretical. Very practically, there’s ways to do this. Starting
1:29:37 with people who have already broken the law, people who have not just broken the law of entering,
1:29:41 but are committing other crimes while already here in the United States. That’s a clear case
1:29:45 for an instant mass deportation. You have a lot of people who haven’t integrated into their communities.
1:29:49 You don’t think about the economic impact of this. A lot of people are in detention already.
1:29:54 A lot of those people should be immediately returned to their country of origin or at least what is
1:29:59 called a safe third country. So safe third country means even if somebody is claiming to seek asylum
1:30:03 from political persecution, well, move them to another country that doesn’t have to be the United
1:30:07 States of America that they passed through, say Mexico, before actually coming here. Other
1:30:12 countries around the world are doing this. Australia is detaining people. They don’t let them out and
1:30:16 live a normal, joyful life because they came to the country. They detain them until their case is
1:30:21 adjudicated. Well, the rates of fraud in Australia of what people lie about, what their conditions
1:30:25 are is way lower now than in the United States because people respond to those incentives.
1:30:30 So I think that in some ways, people make this sound much bigger and scarier than it needs to be.
1:30:35 I’ve ever taken a deeply pragmatic approach and the North Star for me is I want the policy that
1:30:40 helps the United States citizens who are already here. What’s that policy? Clearly, that’s going
1:30:45 to be a policy that includes a large number of deportations. I think by definition, it’s going
1:30:49 to be the largest mass deportation in American history. Sounds like a punchline at a campaign
1:30:54 rally, but actually it’s just a factual statement that says if we’ve had the by far largest influx
1:30:58 of illegal immigrants in American history, it just stands to reason. It’s logic that, okay,
1:31:02 if we’re going to fix that, we’re going to have the largest mass deportation in American history.
1:31:05 And it can be rational. Start with people who are breaking the law in other ways here in the
1:31:11 United States. Start with people who are already in detention or entering detention now. That comes
1:31:16 at no cost and strict benefit. There isn’t even a little bit of an economic trade-off. Then you
1:31:19 get to areas where you would say, okay, the costs actually continued outweigh the benefits,
1:31:25 and that’s exactly the way our policy should be guided here. I want to do it in as respectful
1:31:32 and as humane of a manner as possible. I mean, the reality is, I think one of the things we
1:31:37 got to remember, I’ll give you the example I gave with the Haitian case in Springfield,
1:31:40 town that has spent a lot of time in growing up in Ohio. I live about an hour from there today.
1:31:45 I don’t blame the individual Haitians who came here. I’m not saying that they’re bad people,
1:31:49 because in that particular case, those weren’t even people who broke the law in coming here.
1:31:55 They came as part of a program called temporary protective status. Now, the operative word there
1:32:00 is the first one, temporary. They have been all kinds of lawsuits. There have been all kinds of
1:32:06 lawsuits for people who even ate 10, 12, 14 years after the earthquake in Haiti, where many of them
1:32:10 came when they’re going to be removed, their allegations of racial discrimination or otherwise.
1:32:15 No, temporary protective status means it’s temporary, and we’re not abandoning the rule of law
1:32:19 when we send them back. We’re abandoning the rule of law when we let them stay.
1:32:24 Now, if that has a true benefit to the United States of America economically or otherwise,
1:32:27 go through the paths that allow somebody to enter this country for economic reasons,
1:32:32 but don’t do it through asylum-based claims or temporary protective status. I think one of the
1:32:39 features of our immigration system right now is it is built on a lie and it incentivizes lying.
1:32:45 The reason is the arguments for keeping people in the country, if those are economic reasons,
1:32:50 but the people actually entered using claims of asylum or refugee status, those two things
1:32:55 don’t match up. So just be honest about what our immigration system actually is. I think we do need
1:33:01 dramatic reforms to the legal immigration system to select purposely for the people who are going
1:33:06 to actually improve the United States of America. I think there are many people, I know some of them,
1:33:12 right? I gave a story of one guy who I met who is educated at our best universities or among
1:33:15 our best universities. He went to Princeton. He went to Harvard Business School. He has a great
1:33:20 job in the investment community. He was a professional tennis player. He was a concert pianist.
1:33:24 He could do a Rubik’s Cuban in less than a minute. I’m not making this stuff up. These are hard facts.
1:33:28 He can’t get a green card in the United States. He’s been here for 10 years or something like this.
1:33:32 He asked me for the best advice I could give him. I unfortunately could not give him
1:33:36 the actual best advice, which would be to just take a flight to Mexico and cross the border.
1:33:39 And claim to be somebody who is seeking asylum in the United States.
1:33:44 That would have been morally wrong advice. I didn’t give it to him. But practically,
1:33:47 if you were giving him advice, that would be the best advice that you actually could give
1:33:51 somebody, which is a broken system on both sides. People who are going to make those
1:33:55 contributions to the United States and pledge allegiance to the United States and speak our
1:33:59 language and assimilate, we should have a path for them to be able to add value to the United
1:34:03 States. Yet they’re not the ones who are getting in. It’s actually the people, our immigration
1:34:07 system selects for people who are willing to lie. That’s what it does. Selects for people who are
1:34:11 willing to see their seeking refugee status or seeking asylum when in fact they’re not. And
1:34:16 then we have policymakers who lie after the fact using economic justifications to keep them here.
1:34:19 But if it was an economic justification, that should have been the criteria you used to bring
1:34:24 them in the first place, not this illusion of asylum or refugee status. There was a case,
1:34:29 actually, even the New York Times reported on this, believe it or not, of a woman who came from Russia
1:34:39 fleeing Vladimir Putin’s intolerant LGBT, anti-LGBTQ regime. She was fleeing persecution
1:34:45 by the evil man Putin. She came here and eventually when she was pressed on the series of lies,
1:34:49 it came out that she was crying finally when she broke down and admitted this. She was like,
1:34:54 “I’m not even gay. I don’t even like gay people.” That’s what she said. And yet she was pretending
1:35:00 to be some sort of LGBTQ advocate who was persecuted in Russia when in fact it was just
1:35:03 somebody who was seeking better economic conditions in the United States. I’m not saying you’re wrong
1:35:07 to seek better economic conditions in the United States, but you are wrong to lie about it. And
1:35:14 that’s what you’re seeing a lot of people even in this industry of sort of “tourism” to the United
1:35:17 States. They’re having their kids in the United States. They go back to their home country,
1:35:21 but their kids enjoy birthright citizenship. That’s built on a lie. You have people claiming
1:35:25 to suffer from persecution. In fact, they’re just working in the United States and then living in
1:35:30 these relative mansions in parts of Mexico or Central America after they’ve spent four or five
1:35:34 years making money here. Just abandon the lie. Let’s just have an immigration system built on
1:35:38 honesty. Just tell the truth. If the argument is that we need more people here for economically
1:35:42 filling jobs, I’m skeptical the extent to which a lot of those arguments actually end up being true,
1:35:46 but let’s have that debate in the open rather than having it through the backdoor saying that it’s
1:35:50 refugee in a silent status when we know it’s a lie. And then we justify it after the fact by
1:35:54 saying that that economically helps the United States cut the dishonesty. And I just think that
1:35:59 that is a policy we would do well to expand every sphere. We talk about from the military industrial
1:36:04 complex to the rise of the managerial class to a lot of what our government’s covered up about
1:36:09 our own history to even this question of immigration today. Just tell the people the truth. And I
1:36:14 think our government would be better serving our people if it did. Yeah. In the way you describe
1:36:20 eloquently, the immigration system is broken in that way that is built fundamentally on lies,
1:36:27 but there’s the other side of it. Illegal immigrants are used in political campaigns
1:36:33 for fear-mongering, for example. So what I would like to understand is what is the actual
1:36:41 harm that illegal immigrants are causing? So one of the more intense claims
1:36:50 is of crime. And I haven’t studied this rigorously, but sort of the surface level
1:36:56 studies all show that legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime than America.
1:37:00 I think that is true for legal immigrants. I think it’s not true for illegal immigrants.
1:37:05 That’s not what I saw. So I, in sort of in this, this part of why I wrote this book,
1:37:11 okay? And I mean, the book is called Truths. So better darn well have well-sourced facts
1:37:16 in here, right? Can’t be, can’t be made up hypotheses, hard truths. And there’s a chapter
1:37:20 where even in my own research on it, Lex, I know a lot about this issue from my time as
1:37:26 a presidential candidate, but even in writing the chapter on the border here, I learned a lot
1:37:32 from a lot of different dimensions and some of which even caused me to revise some of my premises
1:37:38 going into it, okay? My main thesis in that chapter is forget the demonization of illegal or legal
1:37:43 immigrants or whatever as you put it, right? Fear-mongering, just put all that to one side.
1:37:52 I want an immigration system that is built on honesty. Identify what the objective is.
1:37:55 We could debate the objective. We might have different opinions on the objectives.
1:37:59 Some people may say the objective is the economic growth of the United States. I make that, I air
1:38:06 that argument in this book. And I think that that’s insufficient personally. Personally, I think
1:38:11 you need, the United States is more than just an economic zone. It is a country. It is a nation
1:38:15 bound together by civic ideals. I think we need to screen not just for immigrants who are going
1:38:20 to make economic contributions, but those who speak our language, those who are able to assimilate,
1:38:24 and those who share those civic ideals and know the US history even better than the average US
1:38:28 citizen who’s here. That’s what I believe. But even if you disagree with me and say no, no, no,
1:38:34 the sole goal is economic production in the United States, then at least have an immigration system
1:38:40 that’s honest about that rather than one which claims to solve for that goal by bringing in people
1:38:45 who are rewarded for being a refugee. We should reward the people in that model, which is I don’t
1:38:48 even think should be the whole model. But even if that were your model, reward the people who are
1:38:54 demonstrated have demonstrably proven that they would make economic contributions to the United
1:38:59 States, not the people who have demonstrated that they’re willing to lie to achieve a goal.
1:39:04 And right now, our immigration system, if it rewards one quality over any other,
1:39:08 there’s one parameter that it rewards over any other. It isn’t civic allegiance to the United
1:39:12 States. It isn’t fluency in English. It isn’t the ability to make an economic contribution to
1:39:18 this country. The number one attribute, human attribute, that our immigration system rewards
1:39:24 is whether or not you are willing to lie. And the people who are telling those lies about whether
1:39:28 they’re seeking asylum or not are the ones who are most likely to get in. And the people who are
1:39:33 most unwilling to tell those lies are the ones who are actually not getting in. That is a hard,
1:39:39 uncomfortable truth about our immigration system. And the reason is because the law says you only
1:39:46 get asylum if you’re going to face bodily harm or near term risk of bodily injury based on your
1:39:51 religion, your ethnicity or certain other factors. And so when you come into the country, you’re asked,
1:39:55 do you fulfill that criteria or not? And the number one way to get into this country is to
1:40:00 check the box and say yes. So that means just systematically, imagine if you’re at university,
1:40:04 Harvard or Yale or whatever, you’re running your admissions process. The number one attribute
1:40:09 you’re selecting for isn’t your SAT score, isn’t your GPA, isn’t your athletic accomplishments,
1:40:14 it’s whether or not you’re willing to lie on the application. You’re going to have a class populated
1:40:19 by a bunch of charlatans and frauds. That’s exactly what our immigration system is doing
1:40:23 to the United States of America is is literally selecting for the people who are willing to lie.
1:40:26 Let’s say you have somebody who’s a person of integrity says, okay, I want a better life for
1:40:30 my family, but I want to teach my kids that I’m not going to lie or break the law to do it.
1:40:37 That person is infinitely less likely to get into the United States. I know it sounds
1:40:43 provocative to frame it that way, but it is not an opinion. It is a fact that that is the number
1:40:48 one human attribute that our current immigration system is selecting for. I want an immigration
1:40:53 system centered on honesty in order to implement that. We require acknowledging what the goals of
1:40:57 our immigration system are in the first place. And there we have competing visions on the right,
1:41:00 okay, amongst conservatives, there’s a rift. Some conservatives believe,
1:41:04 I respect them for their honesty, I disagree with them, believe that the goal of the immigration
1:41:11 system should be to in part protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage competition,
1:41:15 that if we have immigrants going to bring down prices, and we need to protect American workers
1:41:21 from the effects of that downward pressure on wages. It’s a goal. It’s a coherent goal. I don’t
1:41:24 think it’s the right goal, but many of my friends on the right believe that’s a goal. But at least
1:41:28 it’s honest, and then we can design an honest immigration system to achieve that goal if that’s
1:41:32 their goal. I have other friends on the right that say the sole goal is economic growth.
1:41:37 Nothing else matters. I disagree with that as well. My view is the goal should be whatever
1:41:44 enriches the civic quality of the United States of America. That includes those who know the language,
1:41:48 know our ideals, pledge allegiance to those ideals, and also willing to make economic
1:41:52 contributions to the country, which is one of our ideals as well. But whatever it is,
1:41:57 we can have that debate. I have a very different view. I don’t think it’s a proper role of immigration
1:42:01 policy to make it a form of labor policy, because the United States of America is found on excellence.
1:42:04 We should be able to compete. But that’s a policy debate we can have. But right now,
1:42:08 we’re not even able to have the policy debate because the whole immigration policy
1:42:13 is built on not only a lie, but on rewarding those who do lie. And that’s what I want to see change.
1:42:19 They’re just to linger a little bit on the demonization and to bring Ann Coulter into the
1:42:25 picture. Her, which I recommend, people should listen to your conversation with her.
1:42:33 I haven’t listened to her much. But she had this thing where she clearly admires and respects you
1:42:40 as a human being. And she’s basically saying you’re one of the good ones. And this idea that you had
1:42:46 this brilliant question of like, what does it mean to be an American? And she basically said,
1:42:56 not you, Vivek. She said, well, maybe maybe you, but not people like you. So that whole kind of
1:43:02 approach to immigration, I think is really anti-meritocratic. Fundamental. Maybe even
1:43:07 anti-American. Anti-American, yeah. So I want to confront this directly because it is a popular
1:43:11 current on the American right. The reason I’m not picking on Ann Coulter specifically is I think
1:43:15 actually it’s a much more widely shared view. And I just give her at least credit for willing to
1:43:22 articulate it, a view that the blood and soil is what makes for your American identity, your
1:43:27 genetic lineage. And I just reject that view. I think it’s anti-American. I think what makes for
1:43:33 an American identity is your allegiance, your unabiding allegiance to the founding ideals of
1:43:38 this country, and your willingness to pledge allegiance to those ideals. So those are two
1:43:43 different views. I think that there is a view on the American right right now that says that we’re
1:43:50 not a creedole nation, that our nation’s not about a creed. It’s about a physical place and a physical
1:43:58 homeland. I think that view fails on several accounts. Obviously, we’re a nation. Every nation
1:44:01 has to have a geographic space that it defines its own. So obviously, we are among other things
1:44:06 a geographic space. But the essence of the United States of America, I think, is the common creed,
1:44:12 the ideals that hold that common nation together. Without that, a few things happen.
1:44:17 First of all, American exceptionalism becomes impossible. And I’ll tell you why.
1:44:24 Every other nation is also built on the same idea. Most nations have been built on
1:44:28 common blood and soil arguments, genetic stock of, you know, Italy or Japan would have a stronger
1:44:32 national identity than the United States in that case, because they have a much longer standing
1:44:38 claim on what their genetic lineage really was. The ethnicity of the people is far more pure in
1:44:41 those in those contexts than in the United States. So that’s the first reason American
1:44:46 exceptionalism becomes impossible. The second is there’s all kinds of contradictions that then
1:44:52 start to emerge. If your claim on American identity is defined based on how long you’ve been here,
1:44:58 well, then the Native Americans would have a far greater claim of being American than somebody who
1:45:04 came here on the Mayflower or somebody who came here afterwards. Now, maybe that blood and soil
1:45:07 views are no, it’s not quite the Native Americans, you only have to start at this point and end at
1:45:11 this point. So on this view of blood and soil identity has to be okay, you couldn’t have come
1:45:15 before a certain year, then it doesn’t count. But if you came after a certain year, it doesn’t
1:45:20 count either. That just becomes highly uncompelling as a view of what American national identity
1:45:24 actually is versus my view that American national identity is grounded on whether or not you pledge
1:45:30 allegiance to the ideals codified in the Declaration of Independence and actualized in the U.S.
1:45:35 Constitution. And, you know, it’s been said, some of my friends on the right have said things like,
1:45:41 you know, people will not die for a set of ideals. People won’t fight for abstractions or
1:45:47 abstract ideals. I actually disagree with that. The American Revolution basically disproves that.
1:45:53 The American Revolution was fought for anything over abstract ideals that said that, you know what,
1:45:57 we believe in self-governance and free speech and free exercise of religion. That’s what we
1:46:01 believe in the United States, which was different from Old World England. So I do think that there
1:46:05 is this brewing debate on the right. And do I disagree like hell with Ann Coulter on this?
1:46:10 Absolutely. And did I take serious issue with some of the things she told me? Absolutely.
1:46:17 But I also believe that she had the stones to say, if I may say it that way, the things that
1:46:22 many on the right believe, but haven’t quite articulated in the way that she has. And I think
1:46:25 we need to have that debate in the open. Now, personally, I think most of the conservative
1:46:30 movement actually is with me on this. But I think it’s become a very popular counter narrative in
1:46:35 the other direction to say that your vision of American identity is tied, is far more physical
1:46:40 in nature. And to me, I think it is still ideals-based in nature. And I think that that’s a good
1:46:44 debate for the future for us to have in the conservative movement. And I think it’s going to
1:46:50 be a defining feature of what direction the conservative movement goes in the future.
1:46:52 Quick pause. Bathroom break? Yeah.
1:46:59 Let me ask you to, again, steal me on the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism
1:47:07 for him is the fake election scheme, the 2020 election, and actually the 2020 election
1:47:12 in the way you formulated it in the nation of victims. It’s just the entirety of that process
1:47:20 instead of focusing on winning, doing a lot of whining. I like people that win, not whine,
1:47:24 even when the refs are biased in whatever direction.
1:47:28 So look, I think the United States of America, I preach this to the left.
1:47:33 I preach it to my kids. We got to accept it on our own side too. We’re not going to save this
1:47:37 country by being victims. We’re going to save this country by being victorious. Okay. And I don’t
1:47:41 care whether it’s left wing victimhood, right wing victimhood, I’m against victimhood culture.
1:47:45 The number one factor that determines whether you achieve something in life
1:47:50 is you. I believe that’s not the only factor that matters. There’s a lot of other factors that
1:47:54 affect whether or not you succeed. Life is not fair. But I tell my kids the same thing,
1:47:58 the number one factor that determines whether or not you succeed in achieving your goal is you.
1:48:02 If I tell it to my kids and I preach it to the left, I’m going to preach that to our own side
1:48:07 as well. Now, that being said, that’s just a philosophy. Okay. That’s a personal philosophy.
1:48:11 You asked me to do something different and I’m always a fan. One of the things that,
1:48:15 the standard I hope that people hold me to when they read this book as well as I try to do that
1:48:18 in this book is to give the best possible argument for the other side. You don’t want to give some
1:48:23 rinky dink argument for the other side and knock it down. You want to give the best possible argument
1:48:28 for the other side and then offer your own view or else you don’t understand your own.
1:48:34 So you asked me, what’s the strongest case against Donald Trump? Well, I ran for US
1:48:38 president against Donald Trump. So I’m going to give you what my perspective is. I think it’s
1:48:43 nothing of what you hear on MSNBC or from the left attacking him to be a threat to democracy.
1:48:49 I think all of that’s actually nonsense. I actually think it is, if you were making that case,
1:48:54 you know, and here’s my full support as you know, but if you were making that case,
1:48:59 I think for many voters who are of the next generation, they’re asking a question about
1:49:04 how are you going to understand the position that I’m in as a member of a new generation,
1:49:08 the same criticism they had of Biden, they could say, oh, well, are you too old? Are you from a
1:49:13 different generation that’s too far removed from my generation’s concerns? And I think that that’s,
1:49:18 in many ways, a factor that weighs on, that was weighing on both Trump and Biden. But when they
1:49:24 played the trick of swapping out Joe Biden, it left that issue much more on the table for Donald
1:49:28 Trump. So you asked me to steal, man, that’s what I would say is that when I look at what’s the number
1:49:33 one issue that I would need to persuade independent voters of to say that, no, no, no, this is still
1:49:38 the right choices. Even though the other side claims to offer a new generation of leadership,
1:49:42 here’s somebody who is, you know, one of the older presidents we all have had who was elected,
1:49:46 how do we convince those people to vote from? That’s what I would give you in that category.
1:49:51 Right. But I get it. And you share a lot of ideas with Donald Trump. So I get,
1:49:54 when you’re running for president, that you would say that kind of thing.
1:50:00 But there’s, you know, there’s other criticism you could provide. And again, on the 2020 election,
1:50:06 let me ask you, I mean, you spoke to Donald Trump recently, what’s your top objection to
1:50:10 potentially voting for Donald Trump? And let me see if I can address that 2020 election and not in
1:50:21 the, what is it, TDS kind of objection. It’s just, I don’t think there’s clear definitive evidence
1:50:27 that there was a vote of fraud. Let me just give it a different area. Hold on a second, hold on a
1:50:33 second, hold on a second. I think there’s a lot of interesting topics about the influence of media,
1:50:40 of tech and so on. But I want a president that has a good, clear relationship with the truth
1:50:47 and knows what truth is, what is true and what is not true. And moreover, I want a person
1:50:55 who doesn’t play victim, like you said, who focuses on winning and winning big. And if they lose,
1:51:04 like walk away with honor and win bigger next time or like channel that into growth and winning,
1:51:09 winning in some other direction. So it’s just like the strength of being able to
1:51:13 give everything you got to win and walk away with honor if you lose. And
1:51:20 everything that happened around 2020 election is just goes against that to me.
1:51:23 So I’ll respond to that. Sure. Obviously, I’m not the candidate,
1:51:28 but I’m going to give you my perspective nonetheless. I think we have seen some growth
1:51:34 from Donald Trump over that first term in the experience of the 2020 election. And you hear
1:51:37 a lot of that on the campaign trial. I heard a lot of that even in the conversation that he had
1:51:43 with you. I think he is more ambitious for that second term than he was for that first term.
1:51:48 So I thought that was the most interesting part of what you just said is you’re looking for somebody
1:51:53 who has growth from their own experiences. Say what you will, I have seen personally,
1:51:59 I believe, some meaningful level of personal growth and ambition for what Donald Trump hopes
1:52:04 to achieve for the country in the second term that he wasn’t able to, for one reason or another.
1:52:08 COVID, you could put a lot of different things on it, but in that first term.
1:52:14 Now, I think the facts of the backdrop of the 2020 election actually really do matter. I don’t
1:52:20 think you can isolate one particular aspect of criticizing the 2020 election without looking at
1:52:29 it holistically. On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, we saw a systematic, bureaucratically
1:52:35 and government-aided suppression of probably the single most important piece of information released
1:52:41 in the eve of that election, the Hunter Biden laptop story, revealing potentially a compromised
1:52:44 U.S. presidential candidate. His family was compromised by foreign interests,
1:52:52 and it was suppressed as misinformation by every major tech company. The New York Post had its own
1:52:57 Twitter account locked at that time, and we now know that many of the censorship decisions made
1:53:03 in the year 2020 were actually made at behest of U.S. bureaucratic actors in the deep state,
1:53:07 threatening those tech companies to do it, or else those tech companies would face consequence.
1:53:11 I think it might be the most undemocratic thing that’s happened in the history of our country,
1:53:18 actually, is the way in which government actors who were never elected to the government used
1:53:24 private sector actors to suppress information on the eve of an election that, based on polling
1:53:30 afterwards, likely did influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. That was election
1:53:34 interference of the highest order. So I think that that’s just a hard fact that we have to contend
1:53:38 with. And I think a lot of what you’ve heard in terms of complaints about the 2020 election,
1:53:45 whatever those complaints have been, take place against the backdrop of large technology companies
1:53:49 interfering in that election in a way that I think did have an impact on the outcome.
1:53:53 I personally believe the Hunter Biden laptop story had not been suppressed and censored.
1:53:56 I think Donald Trump would have been unambiguous. I think the President of the United States right
1:54:00 now would be Donald Trump. No doubt about it, in my mind. If you look at polling before and
1:54:05 after and the impact that would have had on the independent voter. Now you look at, okay,
1:54:09 let’s talk about constructive solutions because I care about moving the country forward. What is a
1:54:17 constructive solution to this issue of concerns about election integrity? Here’s one. Single day
1:54:24 voting on election day as a national holiday with paper ballots and government issued voter ID
1:54:29 to match the voter file. I favor that. We do it even in Puerto Rico, which is a territory of the
1:54:34 United States. Why not do that everywhere in the United States? And I’ll make a pledge. I’ll do it
1:54:43 right here, right? My pledge is as a leader in our movement, I will do everything in my power to
1:54:50 make sure we are done complaining about stolen elections. If we get to that simple place of
1:54:55 basic election security measures, I think they’d be unifying to make election day a national holiday
1:54:59 that unites us around our civic purpose one day. Single day voting on election day as a national
1:55:05 holiday with paper ballots and government issued voter ID to match the voter file. Let’s get there
1:55:11 as a country, and you have my word, I will lead our movement in whatever way I can to make sure we
1:55:18 are done complaining about stolen elections and fake ballots. And I think the fact that you see
1:55:24 resistance to that proposal, which is otherwise very practical, very reasonable, nonpartisan
1:55:31 proposal, I think the fact of that resistance actually provokes a lot of understandable skepticism.
1:55:39 Understandable skepticism of, okay, what else is actually going on? If not, if not that, what
1:55:46 exactly is going on here? Well, I think I agree with a lot of things you said. Probably disagree,
1:55:52 but it’s hard to disagree with a Hunter Biden laptop story, whether that would have changed
1:55:55 the results of the election. We can’t know, obviously. I looked at some post-election polling
1:56:00 about the views that that would have had, and I can’t prove that to you, but that’s my instinct,
1:56:07 it’s my opinion. I think there’s probably, that’s just one example, maybe a sexy example of a bias
1:56:15 in the complex of the media. And there’s bias in the other direction too, but probably there’s
1:56:19 bias, it’s hard to characterize bias as one of the problems. Let me ask you one question about,
1:56:25 because bias is one thing, bias in reporting, censorship is another. So I would be open-minded
1:56:34 to hearing an instance of, and if I did hear it, I would condemn it, of the government systematically
1:56:41 ordering tech companies to suppress information that was favorable to Democrats, suppress that
1:56:47 information to lift up Republicans. If there was an instance that we know of government bureaucrats
1:56:54 that were ordering technology companies covertly to silence information that voters otherwise would
1:56:59 have had to advantage Republicans at the ballot box to censor it, I would be against that. And I
1:57:04 would condemn that with equal force as I do to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,
1:57:09 suppression and censorship of the origin of COVID-19. All happened in 2020, these are hard facts.
1:57:16 I’m not aware of one instance. If you are aware of one, let me know because I would condemn it.
1:57:21 Most people in tech companies are privately, they’re political persuasions on the left,
1:57:30 and most journalists, majority of journalists are on the left. But to characterize the actual
1:57:36 reporting and the impact of the reporting in the media and the impact of the censorship
1:57:41 is difficult to do. But that’s a real problem, just like we talked about a real problem in
1:57:45 immigration. There’s two different problems, I just want to sort them out, right? Because I have
1:57:48 a problem with both, you talked about two issues, I think both are important, but they’re different
1:57:57 issues. One is bias in reporting. One is censorship of information. So bias in reporting, I felt
1:58:02 certainly the recent presidential debate moderated by ABC was biased in the way that it was conducted.
1:58:10 But that’s a different issue from saying that voters don’t get access to information through
1:58:16 any source. So this hundred-bind laptop story, we now know that it contains evidence of foreign
1:58:21 interference in potentially the Biden administration and their family’s incentive structure.
1:58:27 That story was systematically suppressed. So in the United States of America, if you wanted
1:58:32 to find that on the internet, through any major social media platform or through even Google
1:58:40 search, that story was suppressed or downplayed algorithmically, that you couldn’t see it. Even
1:58:45 on Twitter, if you tried to send it via direct message, that’s the equivalent of email, right,
1:58:50 sending a peer-to-peer message, they blocked you from even being able to send that story using
1:58:56 private messages. That I think is a different level of concern. That’s not bias at that point.
1:59:01 That’s outright interference in whether or not, you know, that’s outright interference in the
1:59:06 election. Let’s do a thought experiment here. Let’s suppose that Russia orchestrated that.
1:59:13 What would the backlash be? Let’s say the Russian government orchestrated the U.S. election, they
1:59:18 interfered in it by saying that tech companies, they worked with them covertly to stop U.S. citizens
1:59:23 from being able to see information on the evenment election. There would be a mass uproar in this
1:59:27 country if the Russian government orchestrated that. Well, if actors in the U.S. government
1:59:32 bureaucracy or the U.S. technology industry bureaucracy orchestrated the same thing,
1:59:36 then we can’t apply a different standard to say that if Russia did it,
1:59:40 it’s really bad and interfered in our election. But if it happened right here in the United States
1:59:44 of America, and by the way, they blamed Russia for it falsely on the Russian disinformation
1:59:49 of the Hunterbein laptop story that was false claim, we have to apply the same standard in both
1:59:52 cases. And so the fact that if that were Russian interference, it would have been an outcry,
1:59:56 but now it happened domestically and we just call that, hey, it’s a little bit of bias ahead of an
2:00:00 election. I don’t think that that’s a fair characterization of how important that event
2:00:08 was. Okay. So the connection of government to platform should not exist. The government FBI
2:00:14 or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information. Yes, we could
2:00:19 talk about Poladurov and the censorship there. There should not be any censorship and there’s
2:00:25 not should not be media bias. And you’re right to complain if there is media bias,
2:00:31 and we can lay it out in the open and try to fix that system. That said, the voter fraud thing,
2:00:38 you can’t right a wrong by doing another wrong. You can’t just, if there’s some shitty,
2:00:43 shady stuff going on in the media and the censorship complex, you can’t just make shit up.
2:00:49 You can’t do the fake, fake electro scheme and then do a lot of shady, crappy behavior during
2:00:56 January 6th and try to like shortcut your way just because your friend is cheating a monopoly when
2:01:00 you’re playing monopoly. You can’t cheat. You shouldn’t cheat yourself. You should be honest
2:01:09 and like with honor and use your platform to help fix the system versus like cheat your way.
2:01:15 So here’s my view is, has any US politician ever been perfect throughout the course of American
2:01:21 history? No. But do you want to, if you want to understand the essence of what was going around
2:01:26 in 2020, the mindset of the country, we had a year where people in this country were systematically
2:01:32 locked down, told to shut up, sit down, do as they’re told, unless they’re BLM or Antifa rioters,
2:01:36 in which case it’s perfectly fine for them to burn cities down. We were told that we’re going to have
2:01:40 an election, a free and fair election, and then they were denied information systematically heading
2:01:45 into that election, which is really important and in this case, damning information about one of the
2:01:51 parties. And then you tell these people that they still have to continue to shut up and comply.
2:01:57 That creates, I think, a real culture of deep frustration in the United States of America.
2:02:03 And I think that the reaction to systematic censorship is never good. History teaches us that.
2:02:07 It’s not good in the United States. It’s not good at another point in the history of the United States.
2:02:12 The reaction to systematic coordinated censorship and restraints on the freedom of a free people
2:02:18 is never good. And if you want to really understand what happened, one really wants to get to the
2:02:23 bottom of it rather than figuring out who to point fingers at. That really was the essence of
2:02:31 the national malaise at the end of 2020 is it was a year of unjust policies, including COVID-19
2:02:37 lockdowns, systematic lies about it, lies about the election, that created a level of public
2:02:45 frustration that I think was understandable. Now, the job of leaders is to how do you channel that
2:02:50 in the most productive direction possible? And to your question, to the independent voter out
2:02:57 there evaluating, as you are, do I think that Donald Trump has exhibited a lot of growth based on
2:03:00 his experience in his first term and what he hopes to achieve in his second term? I think the answer
2:03:06 is absolutely yes. And so even if you don’t agree with everything that he’s said or done in the
2:03:11 choice ahead of us in this election, I still believe he’s unambiguously the best choice to
2:03:18 revive that sense of national pride and also prosperity in our country. So people aren’t
2:03:23 in the condition where they’re suffering at behest of government policies that leave them
2:03:28 angry and channel that anger in other unproductive ways. No, the best way to do it is actually
2:03:33 actions do speak louder than words, implement the policies that make people’s lives better.
2:03:35 And I do think that that’s the next step of how we best save the country.
2:03:44 Are you worried if in this election, it’s a close election, and Donald Trump loses by a
2:03:50 whisker that there’s chaos that’s unleashed? And how do we minimize the chance of that?
2:03:56 I mean, I don’t think that that’s a concern to frame narrowly in the context of Donald Trump
2:04:03 winning it or losing it by a whisker. I think this is a man who in the last couple of months,
2:04:09 in a span of two months, has faced two assassination attempts. And we’re not talking about
2:04:16 theoretical attempts. We’re talking about gunshots fired. That is history changing in the context of
2:04:20 American history. We haven’t seen that in a generation. And yet now that has become normalized
2:04:26 in the US. So do I worry we’re skating on thin ice as a country? I do. I do think it is a little bit
2:04:35 strange to obsess over our concerns or national or media concerns over Donald Trump when, in fact,
2:04:42 he’s the one on the receiving end of fire from assailants who reportedly are saying exactly the
2:04:49 kinds of things about him that you hear from the Democratic machine. And I do think that it is
2:04:55 irresponsible at least for the Democratic Party to make their core case against Donald Trump.
2:05:00 It was Joe Biden’s entire message for years that he’s a threat to democracy and to the existence
2:05:04 of America. Well, if you keep saying that about somebody against the backdrop conditions that
2:05:10 we live in as a country, I don’t think that’s good for a nation. And so do I have concerns
2:05:14 about the future of the country? Do I think we’re skating on thin ice? Absolutely. And I think the
2:05:21 best way around it is really through it. Through it in this election, win by a landslide. I think
2:05:25 a unifying landslide could be the best thing that happens for this country, like Reagan delivered
2:05:31 in 1980, and then again in 1984. And in a very practical note, a landslide minus some shenanigans
2:05:36 is still going to be a victory. That, I think, is how we unite this country. And so I don’t think
2:05:44 a 50.001 margin where cable news is declaring the winner six days after the election, I don’t
2:05:49 think that’s going to be good for the country. I think a decisive victory that unites the country
2:05:53 turns the page on a lot of the challenges in the last four years and says, okay, this is where
2:05:58 we’re going. This is who we are and what we stand for. This is a revival of our national identity
2:06:03 and revive national pride in the United States, regardless of whether you’re a Democrat or Republican.
2:06:07 That, I think, is achievable in this election too. And that’s what the outcome I’m rooting for.
2:06:14 So just to pile on, since we’re stealing the criticism against Trump as the rhetoric,
2:06:22 I wish there was less of, although at times it is so ridiculous, it is entertaining,
2:06:30 the I hate Taylor Swift type of tweets or truths or whatever. I don’t think that’s-
2:06:34 He’s a funny guy. I mean, the reality is different people have different attributes.
2:06:40 One of the attributes for Donald Trump is he’s one of the funnier presidents we’ve had in a
2:06:43 long time. That might not be everybody’s cup of tea. Maybe it’s different people don’t want.
2:06:46 That’s not a quality they value in their president. I think at a moment where you’re
2:06:51 also able to make, I will say this much, is everybody’s got different styles,
2:06:56 Donald Trump style is different from mine. But I do think that if we’re able to use
2:07:02 levity in a moment of national division, in some ways, I think right now is probably a role where
2:07:06 really good standup comedians could probably do a big service to the country if they’re able to
2:07:10 laugh at everybody 360 degrees. So they can go up there and make fun of Donald Trump all they want,
2:07:15 do it in a light-hearted and manner that loves the country, do the same thing to Kamala Harris
2:07:20 with an equal standard. I think that’s actually good for the country. But I think I’m more
2:07:24 interested, Lex, as you know, in discussing the future direction of the country, my own views.
2:07:28 I was a presidential candidate who ran against Donald Trump, by the way, and is supporting him now,
2:07:35 but I just prefer engaging on the substance of what I think each candidate is going to achieve
2:07:40 for the country, rather than picking on really the personal attributes of either one, right?
2:07:45 I’m not criticizing Kamala Harris’s manner of laugh or whatever, you know, one might criticize
2:07:49 as like a personal attribute of hers that you may hear elsewhere. And I just think our country is
2:07:56 better off if we have a focus on both the policies, but also who’s going to be more likely to revive
2:08:00 the country. That I think is a healthy debate headed in an election. I think everybody has their
2:08:05 personality attributes, their flaws, what makes them funny and lovable to some people, makes
2:08:09 them irritating to others. I think that that matters less, heading into an election.
2:08:16 I love that you do that. I love that you focus on policy and can speak for hours on policy.
2:08:21 Let’s look at foreign policy. Sure. What kind of peace deal do you think is possible,
2:08:29 feasible, optimal in Ukraine? If you sat down, you became president.
2:08:34 If you sat down with Zelensky and sat down with Putin, what do you think it’s possible
2:08:40 to talk to them about? One of the hilarious things you did, which were intense and entertaining,
2:08:47 your debates in the primary. But anyway, it’s how you grilled the other candidates that didn’t know
2:08:55 any regions. They wanted to send money and troops and lead to the deaths of hundreds of
2:09:00 thousands of people and they didn’t know any of the regions in Ukraine. You had a lot of zingers
2:09:05 in that one. But anyway, how do you think about negotiating with world leaders about what’s going
2:09:10 on there? Yeah, so look, I think that let’s just get the self-interest of each party on the table
2:09:16 and to be very transparent about it. From everyone’s perspective, they think the other side is the
2:09:25 aggressor or whatever. Just get it on the table. Russia is concerned about NATO shifting the
2:09:30 balance of power away from Russia to Western Europe when NATO has expanded far more than they
2:09:36 expected to. And frankly, that Russia was told that NATO was going to expand. It’s an uncomfortable
2:09:40 fact for some in America, but James Baker made a commitment to Mikhail Gorbachev
2:09:44 in the early ’90s where he said NATO would expand not one inch past East Germany.
2:09:48 Well, NATO’s expanded far more after the fall of the USSR than it did during the existence of the
2:09:54 USSR. And that is a reality we have to contend with. That’s the Russian perspective. From
2:09:58 the Western perspective, the hard fact is Russia was the aggressor in this conflict crossing the
2:10:04 boundaries of a sovereign nation. And that is a violation of international norms. And it’s a
2:10:08 violation of the recognition of international law of nations without borders or not a nation. And so
2:10:12 against that backdrop, what’s the actual interest of each country here?
2:10:19 I think if we’re able to do a reasonable deal that gives Russia the assurances it needs about
2:10:23 what they might allege as NATO expansionism violating prior commitments,
2:10:28 but get codified commitments for Russia that we’re not going to see willy-nilly behavior
2:10:33 of just randomly deciding they’re going to violate the sovereignty of neighboring nations and have
2:10:38 hard assurances and consequences for that, that’s the beginnings of a deal. But then I want to be
2:10:43 ambitious for the United States. I want to weaken the Russia-China alliance. And I think that we
2:10:52 can do a deal that requires, that gives some real gives to Russia conditioned on Russia with drawing
2:10:56 itself from its military alliance with China. And this could be good for Russia too in the long
2:11:01 run because right now, Vladimir Putin does not enjoy being Xi Jinping’s little brother in that
2:11:07 relationship. But Russia’s military combined with China’s naval capacity and Russia’s hypersonic
2:11:12 missiles and China’s economic might, together those countries in an alliance pose a real threat
2:11:17 to the United States. But if as a condition for a reasonable discussion about where different
2:11:23 territories land, given what’s occupied right now, hard requirements that Russia remove its
2:11:28 military presence from the Western Hemisphere, people forget this, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua,
2:11:32 we don’t want a Russian military presence in the Western Hemisphere, that too would be a win for
2:11:38 the United States. No more joint military exercises with China off the coast of the Aleutian Islands.
2:11:42 The kinds of wins that the United States wants to protect the West’s security, get Russia out
2:11:48 of the Western Hemisphere, certainly out of the North American periphery, and then also make sure
2:11:52 that Russia’s no longer in that military alliance with China. In return for that, able to provide
2:11:57 Russia some things that are important to Russia, we’d have to have a reasonable discussion about
2:12:02 what the territorial concessions would be at the end of this war to bring it to peace and resolution,
2:12:05 and what the guarantees are to make sure that NATO’s going to not expand beyond the scope of
2:12:10 what the United States has at least historically guaranteed. That I think together would be a
2:12:17 reasonable deal that gives every party what they’re looking for that results in immediate peace,
2:12:22 that results in greater stability, and most importantly, weakening the Russia-China alliance,
2:12:27 which I think is the actual threat that we have so far, no matter who in this
2:12:32 debate, more or less, Ukraine funding has really failed to confront. That I think is the way we
2:12:38 de-escalate the risk of World War III and weaken the threats to the West by actually dismantling
2:12:45 that alliance. So from the American perspective, the main interest is weakening the alliance between
2:12:50 Russia and China. Yes. I think the military alliance between Russia and China represents
2:12:56 the single greatest threat we face. So do a deal that’s very reasonable across the board, but one
2:13:02 of the main things we get out of it is weakening that alliance, so no joint military exercises,
2:13:06 no military collaborations. These are monitorable attributes. If there’s cheating on that,
2:13:11 we’re going to immediately have consequences as a consequence of their cheating,
2:13:16 but we can’t cheat on our own obligations that we would make in the context of that deal as well.
2:13:22 There might be some extremely painful things for Ukraine here. So Ukraine currently captured a
2:13:28 small region in Russia, the Kyrgyz region, but Russia has captured giant chunks. Then yes,
2:13:33 Kulhansk, Sepadezhnyi, Hurshan regions. So it seems given what you’re laying out,
2:13:37 it’s very unlikely for Russia to give up any of the regions that’s already captured.
2:13:41 I actually think that that would come down to the specifics of the negotiation,
2:13:46 but the core goals of the negotiation are peace in this war, weaken the Russia-China alliance,
2:13:50 and for Russia, what did they get out of it? Part of this is here’s something that’s not negative
2:13:54 for Ukraine, but that could be positive for Russia as part of that deal, because it’s
2:13:59 not a zero-sum game alone with Ukraine on the losing end of this. I think reopening economic
2:14:04 relations with the West would be a big win for Russia, but also a carrot that gets them out of
2:14:09 that military relationship with China. So I do think that the foreign policy establishment has
2:14:15 historically been, at the very least, unimaginative about the levers that we’re able to use.
2:14:19 Actually, I was a little bit critical of Nixon earlier in this discussion for his
2:14:23 contribution to the overgrowth of the U.S. entitlement state and regulatory state,
2:14:28 but I’ll give Nixon credit here on a different point, which is that he was imaginative of being
2:14:35 able to pull Red China out from the clasp of the USSR. He broke the China-Russia alliance back then,
2:14:39 which was an important step to bring us to the near end of the Cold War. So I think there’s an
2:14:45 opportunity for a similar unconventional maneuver now of using greater reopened economic relations
2:14:50 with Russia to pull Russia out from the hands of China today. There’s no skin off Ukraine’s back
2:14:54 for that, and I do think that’s a big carrot for Russia in this direction. I do think that will
2:15:00 involve some level of territorial negotiation as well, that out of any good deal, not everyone’s
2:15:04 going to like 100% of what comes out of it, but that’s part of the cost of securing peace is that
2:15:09 not everyone’s going to be happy about every attribute. But I could make a case that an
2:15:15 immediate peace deal is also now in the best interests of Ukraine. Let’s just rewind the clock.
2:15:20 We’re looking at now, let’s just say, we’re early 2022, maybe June of 2022. Zelensky was
2:15:26 ready to come to the table for a deal back then until Boris Johnson traveled when he had his
2:15:31 own domestic political travails to convince Zelensky to continue to fight. And that goes to the
2:15:35 point where when nations aren’t asked to pay for their own national security, they have what the
2:15:40 problem is of moral hazard of taking risks that really are suboptimal risks for them to take,
2:15:44 because they’re not bearing the consequences of taking those risks, not fully in the cost.
2:15:51 If Ukraine had done a deal back then, I think it is unambiguous that they would have done
2:15:57 a better deal for themselves than they’re doing now after having spent hundreds of billions of
2:16:04 dollars and expended tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. So the idea that Ukraine is
2:16:09 somehow better off because it failed to do that deal before is a lie. And if we’re not willing to
2:16:14 learn from those mistakes of the recent past, we’re doomed to repeat them again. So this idea
2:16:19 that it would be painful for Ukraine, you know, it’s been painful, tens and tens and tens of thousands
2:16:24 of people continuing to die without any increased leverage in actually getting the outcome that
2:16:29 they want. So I think there’s an opportunity for a win-win-win, a win for the United States in the
2:16:34 West more broadly, in weakening the Russia-China alliance, a win for Ukraine in having an agreement
2:16:39 that is backstopped by the United States of America’s interests that provides a greater degree
2:16:44 of long-run security to the future existence of Ukraine and its sovereignty, and also stopping
2:16:49 the bloodshed today, and I think a win for Russia, which is to reopen economic relations with the
2:16:55 West and have certain guarantees about what the mission creep or scope creep of NATO will be.
2:17:01 There’s no rule that says that when one party, before a full outright world war starts at least,
2:17:06 there’s an opportunity for there to actually be a win for everybody on the table rather than to
2:17:11 assume that a win for us is a loss to Russia or that anything positive that happens for Russia
2:17:16 is a loss for the United States or Ukraine. Just to add to the table some things that Putin won’t
2:17:23 like, but I think are possible to negotiate, which is Ukraine joining the European Union and not NATO.
2:17:30 So establishing some kind of economic relationships there and also splitting the bill,
2:17:37 sort of guaranteeing some amount of money from both the Russia and the United States for rebuilding
2:17:46 Ukraine. One of the challenges in Ukraine, a war-torn country, is how do you guarantee
2:17:52 the flourishing of this particular nation? So you want to not just stop the death of people
2:17:58 and the destruction, but also provide a foundation on which you can rebuild the country and build a
2:18:01 flourishing future country. I think out of this conversation alone,
2:18:08 there are a number of levers on the table for negotiation in a lot of different directions.
2:18:12 And that’s where you want to be, right? If there’s only one factor that matters to each of the two
2:18:18 parties and those are their red line factors, then there’s no room for negotiation. This is a
2:18:30 deeply complicated, historically intricate dynamic between Ukraine and Russia and between NATO and
2:18:36 the United States and the Russia-China alliance and economic interests that are at issue combined
2:18:40 with the geopolitical factors. There are a lot of levers for negotiation and the more levers there
2:18:45 are, the more likely there is to be a win-win-win deal that gets done for everybody. So I think it
2:18:50 should be encouraging the fact that there are as many different possible levers here almost
2:18:56 makes certain that a reasonable, practicable peace deal is possible. In contrast to a situation
2:18:59 where there’s only one thing that matters for each side, then I can’t tell you that there’s a deal
2:19:03 to be done. There’s definitely a deal to be done here. And I think that it requires real leadership
2:19:08 in the United States playing hardball not just with one side of this, not just with Zelensky or
2:19:12 with Putin, but across the board, hardball for our own interests, which are the interests of
2:19:17 stability here. And I think that that will happen to well serve both Ukraine and Russia in the
2:19:22 process. If you were president, would you call Putin? Absolutely. I mean, in any negotiation,
2:19:26 you’ve got to manage when you’re calling somebody and when you’re not. But I do believe that open
2:19:30 conversation and the willingness to have that as another lever in the negotiation is totally fair
2:19:39 game. Okay, let’s go to the China side of this. The big concern here is that the brewing cold or
2:19:47 God forbid, hot war between the United States and China in the 21st century. How do we avoid that?
2:19:54 So a few things. One is, I do think the best way we also avoid it is by reducing
2:20:00 the consequences to the United States in the event of that type of conflict. Because at that
2:20:05 point, what you’re setting up for, if the consequences are existential for the United States,
2:20:10 then what you’re buying yourself in the context of what could be a small conflict is an all-out
2:20:15 great war. So the first thing I want to make sure we avoid is a major conflict between the
2:20:20 United States and China, like a world war level conflict. And the way to do that is to bring
2:20:24 down the existential stakes for the U.S. And the way we bring down the existential stakes for the U.S.
2:20:29 is make sure that the United States does not depend on China for our modern way of life.
2:20:34 Right now we do. Okay, so right now we depend on China for everything from the pharmaceuticals
2:20:39 in our medicine cabinet. 95% of ibuprofen, one of the most basic medicines used in the United States,
2:20:46 depends on China for its supply chain. We depend on China ironically for our own military industrial
2:20:52 base. Think about how little sense that makes, actually. Our own military, which supposedly
2:20:57 exists to protect ourselves against adversaries, depends for its own supplies, semiconductors
2:21:02 and otherwise, on our top adversary. That doesn’t make sense. Even if you’re a libertarian in the
2:21:10 school of Friedrich von Hayek, somebody I admire as well, even then you would not argue for a foreign
2:21:14 dependence on adversary for your military. So I think that’s the next step we need to take,
2:21:21 is at least reduce U.S. dependence on China for the most essential inputs for the functioning
2:21:26 of the United States of America, including our own military. As a side note, I believe that means
2:21:31 not just on-shoring to the United States, it does. But if we’re really serious about that,
2:21:37 it also means expanding our relationships with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines.
2:21:40 And that’s an interesting debate to have, because some on the right would say, “Okay,
2:21:44 I want to decouple from China, but I also want less trade with all these other places.” You
2:21:47 can’t have both those things at the same time. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both.
2:21:51 And so we have to acknowledge and be honest with ourselves that there are trade-offs to
2:21:55 declaring independence from China. But the question is, what are the long-run benefits?
2:21:59 Now, you think about the other way to do this is strategic clarity.
2:22:06 I think the way that you see world wars often emerge is strategic ambiguity from two adversaries
2:22:11 who don’t really know what the other side’s red line is or isn’t and accidentally crosses
2:22:16 those red lines. And so I think we need to be much clearer with what are our hard red lines
2:22:20 and what aren’t they. And I think that’s the single most effective way to make sure this
2:22:25 doesn’t spiral into major world war. And then let’s talk about ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict
2:22:30 in the terms that I just discussed with you before. I think weakening the Russia-China alliance
2:22:34 not only reduces the risk that Russia becomes an aggressor, it also reduces the risk that China
2:22:40 takes the risks that could escalate us to World War III as well. So I think that geopolitically,
2:22:44 you got to look at these things holistically, that end of the Russia-Ukraine war and that peace deal
2:22:49 de-escalates not only the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but the risk of a broader conflict that includes
2:22:55 China as well. But also weakening China because Russia also has hypersonic missiles and missile
2:22:58 capabilities that are ahead of that of China’s. If Russia is no longer in a military alliance with
2:23:06 China, that changes China’s calculus as well. So that’s kind of, I think, more strategic vision
2:23:13 we need in our foreign policy than we’ve had since certainly the Nixon era. I think that you need
2:23:17 people who are going to be able to challenge the status quo, question the existing orthodoxies,
2:23:22 the willingness to use levers to get great deals done that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten done.
2:23:27 And that’s what I do think. Someone like Donald Trump and the presidency, and obviously,
2:23:31 I ran for president as an outsider and a businessman as well. I think this is an area,
2:23:36 our foreign policy is one where we actually benefit from having business leaders in those roles
2:23:42 rather than people who are shackled by the traditional political manner of thinking.
2:23:46 I think the thing you didn’t quite make clear what I think implied is that we have to accept
2:23:52 the red line that China provides of the One China policy. Both sides need to have their red lines.
2:23:57 Both sides need to have their red lines. So we can get into specifics, but it’s going to vary
2:24:01 depending on the circumstances. But the principle that I would give you is that we have to have a
2:24:06 hard red line that’s clear. I think that that hard red line, and I was clear during my campaign on
2:24:10 this, I’ll say it again, is I think that we have to have a clear red line that China will not and
2:24:16 should not for any time in the foreseeable future annex Taiwan. I do think that for the United States,
2:24:23 it probably is prudent right now not to suddenly upend the diplomatic policy we’ve adopted for
2:24:30 decades of what is recognizing the One China policy in our position of quiet deference to that.
2:24:35 And I understand that that may be the red line is the national recognition of Taiwan as an independent
2:24:40 nation would be a red line that China would have, but we would have a red line to say that we do
2:24:46 not in any circumstance tolerate the annexation by physical force in any time in the foreseeable
2:24:50 future when that’s against the interests of the United States of America. So there’s examples,
2:24:54 but the principle here is you asked, how do we avoid major conflict with China? I think it starts
2:24:59 with clear red lines on both sides. I think it starts with also lowering the stakes for the
2:25:04 United States by making sure we’re not dependent on China for our modern way of life. And I think
2:25:09 it also starts with ironically using a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war as a way of weakening
2:25:14 the Russia-China alliance, which in the other direction of weakening China has significant
2:25:21 benefits to us as well. But what are you doing? China says very politely, we’re going to annex
2:25:26 Taiwan whether you like it or not. Against the backdrop that I just laid out, that’s not going
2:25:30 to happen. That wouldn’t happen if we actually make sure that we are crystal clear about what our
2:25:35 red lines and priorities are. We’re also dependent on Taiwan right now for our own semiconductor
2:25:40 supply chain. So China knows that’s going to draw us into serious conflict in that circumstance.
2:25:45 So against the backdrop of clearly drawn red lines, against the backdrop of Russia no longer
2:25:49 automatically being in China’s camp, that’s a big lever, I think also strengthening our
2:25:53 relationship with other allies where we have room to strengthen those relationships like India.
2:25:58 And I’m not just saying that because my name is Vivek Ramaswamy, I’m saying it because it’s
2:26:03 strategically important to the United States to understand that God forbid in a conflict scenario,
2:26:08 China would perceive some risk to the Indian Ocean or the Andaman Sea no longer being reliable for
2:26:13 getting Middle Eastern oil supplies. There’s a lot of levers here, but I think that if we
2:26:17 are both strategically clear with our allies and with our adversaries about what our red lines are,
2:26:21 what our priorities are, reasonable deals that pull Russia out of the hands of China and vice
2:26:26 versa, reasonable allies and relationships that cause China to question whether it can continue
2:26:30 to have the same access to Middle Eastern oil supplies as it does today. And then clear red
2:26:35 lines with China itself about what we definitely aren’t okay with and understand that they may
2:26:41 have certain red lines too. That allows us, I think, to still avoid what many people will call
2:26:46 the unavoidable conflict, the lucidities trap against the circumstance of when there’s a rising
2:26:52 power against the backdrop of a declining power, conflict always becomes inevitable. That’s a
2:26:57 theory. It’s not a law of physics. And I don’t think that, A, we have to be a declining power.
2:27:02 And B, I don’t think that that has to necessarily result in major conflict with China here.
2:27:07 It’s going to require real leadership, leadership with a spine. And you don’t have to judge based
2:27:11 on international relations theory to form your view on this. Four years under Trump,
2:27:15 we didn’t have major conflicts in the Middle East in places like Russia, Ukraine.
2:27:20 We were on the cusp of war with North Korea when Obama left office and Trump took over.
2:27:24 Four years under Biden, less than four years under Biden and Harris, what do you have?
2:27:28 Major conflicts in the Middle East, major conflict in Russia, Ukraine,
2:27:33 judged by the results. And I would say that even if you’re somebody who disagrees with a lot of
2:27:37 Donald Trump and you don’t like his style, if you’re single issues, you want to stay out of
2:27:42 World War III, I think there’s a pretty clear case for why you go for Trump in this election.
2:27:48 So Prime Minister Modi, I think you’ve complimented him in a bunch of different directions,
2:27:51 one of which is when you’re discussing nationalism.
2:27:56 Yeah. I think I believe that someone I’ve gotten to know actually reasonably well,
2:27:59 for example, recently is Georgia Maloney, who is a leader of Italy, told her the same thing.
2:28:05 One of the things I love about her as a leader of Italy is that she does not apologize for
2:28:11 the national identity of the country and that she stands for certain values uncompromisingly
2:28:15 and she doesn’t give a second care about what the media has to say about it.
2:28:19 One of the things I love last time I spoke to her when she was in the US when we sat down was
2:28:22 she talked about, she doesn’t even read the newspaper. She doesn’t read and watch the media
2:28:26 and allows her to make decisions that are best for the people. And there are elements of that
2:28:31 in Modi’s approach as well, which I respect about him, is he doesn’t apologize for the fact that
2:28:36 India has a national identity and that the nation should be proud of it. But I’m not saying that
2:28:42 because I’m proud of Maloney or Modi for their own countries. I’m American. I think there are
2:28:46 lessons to learn from leaders who are proud of their own nation’s identity rather than apologizing
2:28:51 for it. And I think it’s a big part of, you know, it’s why I ran for president on a campaign
2:28:56 centered on national pride. It’s also why I’m not only voting for but actively supporting Donald
2:29:00 Trump because I do think he is going to be the one that restores that missing national pride in
2:29:06 the United States. And, you know, I touch on this as well in the book. There’s a chapter here. It says
2:29:13 nationalism isn’t a bad word. I think nationalism can be a very positive thing if it’s grounded in
2:29:19 the actual true attributes of a nation. And in the United States, that doesn’t mean ethno-nationalism
2:29:22 because that was not what the national identity of the United States was based on in the first
2:29:29 place. But a civic nationalism grounded in our actual national ideals, that is who we are. And
2:29:34 I think that that is something that we’ve gotten uncomfortable with in the countries to say that,
2:29:38 oh, I’m proud of being American. And I believe in American exceptionalism. Somehow that’s looking
2:29:42 down on others. No, not looking down on anybody, but I’m proud of my own country. And I think
2:29:46 Modi’s revived that spirit in India in a way that was missing for a long time, right? India had an
2:29:51 inferiority complex, a psychological inferiority complex. But now to be proud of its national
2:29:57 heritage and its national myth-making and its national legacy and history. And to say that,
2:30:02 you know, every nation does have to have a kind of myth-making about its past. And to be proud of
2:30:07 that, it’s like Malcolm X actually said this here in the United States. He said, “A nation
2:30:15 without an appreciation for its history is like a tree without roots. It’s dead.”
2:30:20 And I think that that’s true not just for the United States. I think it’s true for every other
2:30:25 nation. I think leaders like Maloney in Italy, leaders like Modi in India have done a great job
2:30:33 that I wish to bring that type of pride back in the United States. And whatever I do next,
2:30:37 like I’ll tell you this, is I think reviving that sense of identity and pride, especially in the
2:30:43 next generation, is one of the most important things we can do for this country. Speaking of
2:30:49 what you do next, any chance you run in 20 and 28? Well, I’m not going to rule it out. I mean,
2:30:55 that’s a long time from now. And I’m most focused on what I can do in the next chapter for the country.
2:30:59 I ran for president, million things that I learned from that experience that you can only
2:31:05 learn by doing it. It was very much a, you know, fire first, aim later when getting into the race.
2:31:09 There was no way I could have planned and plotted this out as somebody who was coming from the
2:31:15 outside. I was 37 years old, came from the business world. So there was a lot that only
2:31:21 could learn by actually doing it. And I did. But I care about the same things that led me into the
2:31:25 presidential race. And I don’t think the issues have been solved. I think that we have a generation
2:31:32 that is lost in the country. It’s not just young people. I think it’s all of us in some ways are
2:31:38 hungry for purpose and meaning at a time in our history, when the things that used to fill that
2:31:44 void in our heart, they’re missing. And I think we need a president who both has the right policies
2:31:49 for the country, you know, seal the border, grow the economy, stay at a World War three and rampant
2:31:56 crime. Yes, we need the right policies. But we also need leaders who, you know, sustained way,
2:32:01 revive our national character, revive our sense of pride in this country, revive our identity
2:32:08 as Americans. And, you know, I think that that need exists as much today as it did when I first
2:32:12 ran for president. I don’t think it’s going to be automatically solved in just a few years.
2:32:16 I think Donald Trump is the right person to carry that banner forward for the next four years.
2:32:22 But after that, we’ll see where the country is headed into 2028. And whatever I do, it’ll be
2:32:28 whatever has a maximal positive impact on the country. I’ll also tell you that my laser focus
2:32:34 maybe as distinct from other politicians on both sides, is to take America to the next level to
2:32:39 move beyond our victimhood culture, to restore our culture of excellence, we got to shut down
2:32:44 that nanny state. The entitlement state, the regulatory state, the foreign policy nanny state,
2:32:49 shut it down and revive who we really are as Americans. And I’m as passionate about that as
2:32:55 ever. But the next step is not running for president. The next step is what happens in the
2:33:01 next four years. And that’s why over the next four weeks, I’m focused on doing whatever I can
2:33:08 to make sure we succeed in this election. Well, I hope you run because this was made clear on the
2:33:15 stage in the primary debates. You have a unique clarity and honesty in expressing the ideas you
2:33:22 stand for. And it would be nice to see that. I would also like to see the same thing on the other
2:33:30 side, which would make for some badass, interesting debates. I would love nothing more than a kick
2:33:37 ass set of top tier Democrat candidates. After four years of Donald Trump, we have a primary
2:33:42 filled with actually people who have real visions for the country on both sides. And the people of
2:33:48 this country can choose between those competing visions without insult or injury being the way
2:33:53 we I would love nothing more than to see that in 2028. Who do you think? So for me, I would love to
2:34:01 see in some kind of future where it’s you versus somebody like Tim Walls. So to Tim Walls, maybe
2:34:07 I’m lacking in knowledge. It’s a first of all, like a good dude has similar to you,
2:34:17 strongly held if not radical ideas of how to make progress in this country. So to just be on stage
2:34:23 and debate honestly about the ideas, there are like very there’s a tension between those ideas.
2:34:34 Is there other people Shapiro’s interesting also? I would like to take on in earnest and civil, but
2:34:39 contested context, right, of a debate. Who do you want to take on? You want to take on somebody
2:34:43 who disagrees with you, but still has deep ideology of their own. I think John Federman’s
2:34:48 pretty interesting. He’s demonstrated himself to be somebody who is thoughtful, able to change
2:34:53 his mind on positions, but not in some sort of fake, flip-floppy, flippity-floppity way,
2:34:57 but in a thoughtful evolution. Somebody’s been through personal struggles. Somebody I deeply
2:35:03 disagree with on a lot of his views and most of his views, but who I can at least say comes across
2:35:09 at least as somebody who has been through that torturous process of really examining your beliefs
2:35:14 and convictions and has, when necessary, been able to preach to his own tribe where he thinks
2:35:20 they’re wrong. I think it’s interesting. I think that you have in a number of other leaders probably
2:35:25 emerging at lower levels. On the left, not everybody’s going to necessarily come from Washington, D.C. In
2:35:30 fact, the longer they’re there, the more they in some ways get polluted by it. I think the governor
2:35:37 of Colorado, he’s an interesting guy. He’s got a more libertarian tendency. I don’t know as much
2:35:41 about his views on it from a national perspective, but it’s intriguing to see somebody who has at
2:35:47 least libertarian freedom or in attendencies within the Democratic Party. I think that there are
2:35:53 a number of, I mean, I don’t foresee him running for president, but I had a debate last year when
2:35:57 I was running for president with Ro Khanna, who say what you all about him. He’s a highly intelligent
2:36:02 person and is somebody who is at least willing to buck the consensus of his party when necessary.
2:36:07 I think he recently, I would say lambasted, he phrased it very delicately, but criticized
2:36:13 Kamala Harris’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains. I like people who are willing to
2:36:17 challenge the orthodoxies in their own party because it says they actually have convictions.
2:36:21 Whoever the Democrats put up, I hope it’s someone like that. For my part,
2:36:31 I have and continue to have beliefs that will challenge Republicans, that on the face of it
2:36:36 may not be the policies that poll on paper as the policies you’re supposed to adopt as a Republican
2:36:42 candidate, but what a true leader does doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear. You tell
2:36:46 people what they need to hear and you tell people what your actual convictions are. And this idea
2:36:50 that I don’t want to create a right wing entitlement state or a nanny state. I want to shut it down.
2:36:54 That challenges the preset positions of where a lot of the conservative movement is right now.
2:36:58 I don’t think the bill to cap credit card interest rates is a good idea because that’s
2:37:03 a price control just like Kamala Harris’s price controls and it’ll reduce access to credit.
2:37:08 I don’t think that we want a crony capital estate showering private benefits on selected
2:37:14 industries that favor us or that we want to expand the CFPB or the FTC’s remit and somehow
2:37:18 we’re going to trust it because it’s under our watch. No, I believe in shutting it down. That
2:37:24 challenges a lot of the current direction of the conservative movement. I believe in certain issues
2:37:28 that maybe even outside the scope of what Republicans currently care about right now.
2:37:33 One of the things that I oppose, for example, is this is not a top issue in American politics,
2:37:38 but just to give you a sense for how I think and view the world. I’m against factory farming
2:37:45 of a large scale of… You could say putting the mistreatment of… It’s one thing to say
2:37:50 that you need it for your sustenance and that’s great, but it’s another to say that
2:37:55 you have to do it in a factory farming setting that gives special exemptions from historical
2:37:59 laws that have existed that are the product of crony capitalism. I’m against crony capitalism in
2:38:04 all its forms. I’m against the influence of mega money in politics. I don’t think that’s been good
2:38:08 either for Democrats or Republicans. Some of those views, I think, are not necessarily the
2:38:13 traditional Republican orthodoxy reading chapter and verse from what the Republican
2:38:19 party platform has been. It’s not against the Republican party platform, but it’s asking what
2:38:24 the future of our movement is. Some of these things are hard, like getting money out of politics.
2:38:28 Getting mega money, getting mega money. The mega money, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so long as it exists,
2:38:31 you got to play the game. I mean, you got it if you’re going to play to win. I think one of the
2:38:37 things I realized is that you just can’t compete without it, but you want to win the game in order
2:38:42 to change the game. And I think that that’s something that I keep in mind as well. So…
2:38:48 You have written a lot. You’re exceptionally productive, but even just looking book-wise,
2:38:54 you’ve written basically a book a year for the last four years. When you’re writing,
2:38:58 when you’re thinking about how to solve the problems of the world to develop your policy,
2:39:08 how do you think? I need quiet time, extended periods of it that are separated from the rush
2:39:13 of the day to day or the travel. I actually think a lot better when I’m working out and
2:39:19 physically active. So from running, playing tennis, lifting, somehow for me, that really opens up my
2:39:23 mind. And then I need a significant amount of time after that with a notebook. I usually carry
2:39:29 around a notebook everywhere I go and write it down in there. Is the notebook full of chaotic
2:39:33 thoughts or is it structured? Sometimes it’s chaotic. Sometimes it’s structured. It’s a little bit
2:39:37 of both. Sometimes I have a thought that I know I don’t want to forget later. I’ll immediately
2:39:41 jot it down. Other times, you know, on the flight over here, I had a much more structured
2:39:45 layout of, you know, I got a lot of different projects in the air, for example. And I cross
2:39:48 pollinate, you know, I was in the shower this morning, had a bunch of thoughts, collected
2:39:55 those on my plane ride over here. So I think that writing is something in all of its forms that helps
2:39:59 me. It’s one of the, one of the things that actually helped me this year was actually writing this book.
2:40:04 You’re going through a presidential campaign, you’re going at super speed.
2:40:08 And if I was to do the presidential campaign again, the thing I would do is actually to take
2:40:12 more structured breaks. I don’t mean breaks isn’t just like vacations,
2:40:15 but I mean breaks to reflect on what’s actually happening.
2:40:20 Probably the biggest mistake I made is last time around heading into the first debate,
2:40:26 I was like in nine different states over seven days, I would have just taken that as a pause,
2:40:32 right? We’re halfway through, you’ve established relevance. Now make sure the country sees who
2:40:37 you actually are in full rather than just the momentum competitive driven version of you.
2:40:42 And I just think that that’s sort of, those taking those moments to just take stock of
2:40:46 where you are, do some writing. I didn’t do much writing during the presidential campaign. I
2:40:52 enjoy writing. It’s part of how I center myself. It’s part of what this book allowed me to do is,
2:40:56 okay, I ran that whirlwind of a campaign. The first thing I started doing after I collected
2:41:02 myself for a couple of weeks was take the pen and start writing. And I was committed to writing
2:41:06 that book whether or not anybody read it. I was just writing it for myself. And actually it started
2:41:10 in a very different form. It was very personal reflection oriented. So most of that, funny
2:41:15 enough, I’ve learned about writing the books like this edited out. It just didn’t end up in the book
2:41:18 because it went in a different direction than like what’s interesting for a publisher to publish.
2:41:24 And so for each of my books, the things that I started writing ended up never in the book anyway,
2:41:28 just because the topic ended up morphing. But the journey that led me to write this book,
2:41:32 a lot of it in this book is still in there. This is my fourth book in four years, you’re right.
2:41:38 And I hope it’s the most important one, but it is certainly the product of an honest reflection
2:41:43 that whatever it might do for the reader, it helped me to write it. And I think that’s one of the
2:41:48 things that I learned from this campaign is not just all the policy lessons, but even just as a
2:41:57 matter of personal practice, the ability to take spaces of time to not only physically challenge
2:42:01 yourself, work out, et cetera, but to give yourself the space to reflect, to re-center
2:42:08 yourself on the why. Had I done that, I think I would have been even more centered on the mission
2:42:13 the whole time rather than you get attacked on the way you’re throwing off your tilt or
2:42:17 throwing off your balance. It becomes a lot harder for someone else to do that to you
2:42:21 if you’ve really centered yourself on your own purpose. It’s probably one of my biggest learnings.
2:42:27 So you’ve mentioned the first primary debate. So more than almost basically anybody I’ve ever
2:42:33 seen, you step into some really intense debates. And you’re on podcasts, but in general, kind of,
2:42:38 in all kinds of walks of life, whether it’s sort of debates with sort of protesters
2:42:44 or debates with people that really disagree with you, like the radical opposite of you,
2:42:51 what’s the philosophy behind that? And what’s the psychology of being able to be
2:42:57 calm through all of that, which you seem to be able to- Well, I enjoy debate. And for me, I think
2:43:03 you just in ordinary life forget about a formal debate setting. Whenever I’ve received criticism
2:43:11 or a contrary view, my first impulse is always, are they right? I mean, it’s always a possibility,
2:43:16 right? And most of the time, what happens is you understand the other side’s argument,
2:43:21 but you emerge with a stronger conviction in your own belief. You know your own beliefs
2:43:25 better if you can state the best argument for the other side. But sometimes you do change your
2:43:29 mind. And I think that that’s happened over the course of my life as well. I think no one’s a
2:43:34 thinking human being unless that happens once in a while too. And so anyway, just the idea of the
2:43:38 pursuit of truth through open debate and inquiry, that’s always just been part of my identity,
2:43:44 part of who I am. I’m wired that way. I thrive on it. I enjoy it. Even my relationships with
2:43:49 my closest friends are built around heated debates and deep seated agreement, disagreements.
2:43:53 And I just think that’s beautiful, not just about human relationships,
2:43:58 but it’s particularly beautiful about America, right? Because it’s part of the culture of this
2:44:04 country more so than other countries in China or India or Asian cultures, even a lot of European
2:44:11 cultures are very different where that’s considered not genteel behavior. It’s not the respectful
2:44:16 behavior. Whereas for us, part of what makes this country great is you could disagree like hell and
2:44:21 still get together at the dinner table at the end of it. I think we’ve lost some of that,
2:44:27 but I’m on a bit of a mission to bring that back. And so, whether it’s in politics or not, I’m
2:44:33 committed in that next step, whatever the path is over the next four years. One of the things I’m
2:44:39 committed to doing is making sure that I go out of my way to talk to people who actually
2:44:43 disagree with me. And I think it’s a big part of how we’re going to save our country.
2:44:48 Are they right is the thing I actually literally see you do. So, you are listening
2:44:52 to the other person. For my own benefit, to be honest, selfish.
2:44:56 You also don’t lose your shit. So, you don’t take it personally. You don’t get emotional,
2:45:00 but you get emotional sort of in a positive way. You get passionate, but you don’t get,
2:45:03 it doesn’t, I’ve never seen you broken. Yeah.
2:45:11 Like to where they get you like outraged. It’s always probably because you just love the heat.
2:45:16 I love the heat and I’m a curious person. So, I’m kind of, I’m always curious about what’s
2:45:20 actually getting the other, what’s motivating the person on the other side. That curiosity,
2:45:24 I think is actually the best antidote, right? Because if you just try to stay calm in the face
2:45:30 of somebody attacking you, that’s kind of fake. But if you’re kind of curious about them, right?
2:45:34 Genuinely, just wondering, I think most people are good people inherently,
2:45:38 we all maybe get misguided from time to time. But what’s actually,
2:45:41 what is it that’s moving that person to go in such a different direction than you?
2:45:46 I think as long as you’re curious about that, you know, I mean, the climate change protesters
2:45:52 that have interrupted my events, I’m as fascinated by the psychology of what’s moving them and what
2:45:57 they might be hungry for as I am concerned about rebutting the content of what they’re saying to
2:46:03 me. And I think that that’s certainly something I care to revive. We don’t talk about in politics
2:46:09 that much, but reviving that sense of curiosity, I think is in a certain way, one of the ways
2:46:15 we’re going to be able to disagree, but still remain friends and fellow citizens at the end of it.
2:46:19 I agree with you. I think fundamentally, most people are good. And one of the things
2:46:25 I love most about humans is the very thing you said, which is curiosity. I think we
2:46:29 should lean into that. You’re a curious person. You know, this podcast is
2:46:35 basically born of your curiosity, I’m sure. And so I just think we need more of that in America,
2:46:38 that kind of, you know, even when I talked about our founding fathers, we were joking about it,
2:46:43 but they were inventors. They were writers. They were political theorists. They were founders of a
2:46:49 nation. They kind of had that boundless curiosity too. And I think part of what’s happened culturally
2:46:55 in the country is we’ve gotten to this place where, you know, we’ve been told that stay in your lane.
2:46:59 You know, you don’t have an expert degree in that. Therefore, you can’t have an opinion about it.
2:47:04 I don’t know. I think that’s not, it’s a little bit un-American in terms of the culture of it.
2:47:08 And yeah, it’s one of the things I like about you and why I was looking forward to this conversation
2:47:15 too, is it’s cool to have intellectual interests that span sports to culture, to politics, to
2:47:20 philosophy. And it’s not like you just have to be an expert trained in one of those things to be
2:47:25 able to engage in it. But actually, maybe, just maybe, you might even be better at each of those
2:47:29 things because you’re curious about the other, the Renaissance man, if you will. I think we’ve
2:47:35 lost a little bit of that, that concept in America, but it’s certainly something that
2:47:40 is important to me. And this year, it’s been kind of cool after leaving the campaign. I’ve been doing,
2:47:45 I’ve been doing a wide range of things, right? I’ve been picking up my tennis game again.
2:47:48 I’ve practiced at the Ohio State. You’re damn good at tennis. I was watching your thing.
2:47:50 I used to be, used to be better, but I’m picking it up again.
2:47:57 Somebody online was trying to correctly, I think you shot a very particular angle of that video.
2:48:01 I think they were criticizing your backhand was weak, potentially, because you were…
2:48:06 That would be a fair criticism. But it’s gotten better again. It’s gotten better recently. I’ve
2:48:10 been playing with the, I’ve been practicing with the Ohio State team in the morning. They’re like,
2:48:14 number one in the country or close to it. Now, the guys on the team play, but there’s a couple
2:48:18 coaches who were recently on the team, one of whom used to be a guy used to play within the
2:48:22 juniors who invited me out. So I hit with them in the mornings alongside the team.
2:48:27 My goal, I’m, I should be, I should be careful here.
2:48:35 Oh no. My hips, my hips are telling me, I’ve been playing so many days a week that I set a
2:48:38 goal for myself by the end of the, to play in a particular tournament, but we’ll see if that
2:48:44 happens or not. No, no. But regardless, it’s been fun to get back into tennis. I was an executive
2:48:49 producer on a movie, something I’ve never done before. It’s called City of Dreams. It’s about a
2:48:54 story of a young man who was trafficked into the United States. It’s a thriller. It’s a very
2:48:59 cool movie to be a part of. I have actually started a couple of companies. One company in
2:49:04 particular that I think is going to be significant this year, guiding some of the other businesses
2:49:12 that I’ve gotten off the ground in the past. So for me, I’m re-energized now where I was in
2:49:18 the thick of politics for a full year there and getting a little bit of oxygen outside of politics,
2:49:21 doing some things in the private sector has actually given me a renewed sense of,
2:49:26 of energy to, you know, get back into driving change through public service.
2:49:32 Well, it’s been fun watching you do all these fascinating things, but I do hope
2:49:37 that you have a future in politics as well, because it’s nice to have somebody that
2:49:46 has rigorously developed their ideas and is honest about presenting them and is willing to debate
2:49:51 those ideas out in public space. So I would love for you and people like you to represent the
2:49:58 future of American politics. So Vivek, thank you so much for every time I’m swiveling this chair.
2:50:00 I’m thinking of Thomas Jefferson. It’s good. That was my goal.
2:50:06 So big shout out to Thomas Jefferson for the swiveling chair and thank you so much for talking
2:50:09 to Dave Vivek. This was fun. Thank you, man. One final fact to Thomas Jefferson,
2:50:17 whether you cut this out. Of course, he wrote 16,000 essays in his life, letters, right? So
2:50:22 you said I’ve written four books in four years. That is nothing compared to, you know, how prolific
2:50:27 this guy was. Anyway, good stuff, man. Thanks for having me. Neither of us will ever live up to
2:50:32 anything close to Thomas Jefferson. I love your curiosity, man. Thanks for reading the book and
2:50:36 appreciated your feedback on it as well. And, you know, hopefully we’ll do this again sometime.
2:50:41 Yep. Thank you, brother. Thanks, dude. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vivek
2:50:45 Ramaswamy. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
2:50:48 And now let me leave you with some words from George Orwell.
2:50:57 Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give
2:51:13 an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
2:51:21 [Music]