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