Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #445
- 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 ever passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules not an elected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are
actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the
other, you can't have both. It's an assault and a crusade
on the nanny state itself. And 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 in nanny state. Once we've done that,
we've revived the republic that I think would make
George Washington proud. - 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 of 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. This is "Lex Fridman Podcast." To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Vivek Ramaswamy. You are one of the great elucidaters 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 and direction of the
conservative movement is that we've gotten so good at
describing what we're against. Right? 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 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, you know, 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 man the other side. - Yeah. - [Lex] So let me ask
you about progressivism. - Sure. - Can you steer 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, so 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 steel 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 into correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my
counter rebuttal 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
gonna 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 gonna 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. 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. And so 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, you have 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 wanna 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, some type of charitable instinct, right? Some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in 2010 and 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 it's the beautiful thing, it's true between you and I, between you, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 would be 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, a great conversation. I think it's on your podcast actually. - Yeah.
- [Lex] Yes. Yeah, it was great.
- He was a good guy there. - It was 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 'cause people use these acronyms and then they start saying
it outta muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means, like DEI refers to 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. Now, the problem with the DEI agendas 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 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. So 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 a 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, 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, no,
you can't do that either. So the irony is in the
name of this D, 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 that it's 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, right? You don't need special programmatic
DEI incentives to do it because companies are always gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna be good for companies and companies are gonna 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 which
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 could even talk about
in the military, right? 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, 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. 'Cause there is 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
than 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 it's strengthening the
power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that
bureaucracy from criticism. So, in many ways, bureaucracy,
I think carves 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 'cause 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 can
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, they, 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's 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, right? 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 of the, 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's like, okay, he
was the one zany 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 in a, on a swivel chair. Okay. Who invented the swivel chair? - Thomas Jefferson?
- Yes, Thomas Jefferson. - [Lex] Yeah. - Funny enough, he
invented the swivel chair while he was writing the
Declaration of Independence. - You're the one-
- [Vivek] Which is insane. - 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, the Declaration of Independence
part, everybody knows, what 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 it requires 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 worldview. Right, 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 worldview. 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 gonna 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 could go straight down
the list of founding fathers who were 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, you know,
conservatives and liberals alike can get behind my crusades
certainly to getting 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 to make it smaller? What are the different
ideas of how to do that? - Well, the first thing I'll 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
wanna reform it gradually. I wanna 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 gonna cut so much that I'm gonna take the risk
of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way that I'm gonna take that risk. I can't give you option C, which is to say that I'm gonna
cut exactly the right amount, I'm gonna do it perfectly. Okay, you don't know, x anti,
you don't know beforehand that it's exactly how it's gonna go, so that's a meaningless claim. It's only a question of
which risk you're gonna 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, 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 the second term be even, 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 gonna cut some fat, but not only some fat,
but also some muscle. That's the risk we have to take. So what would I, 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 ever 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 Milei. Where on a whiteboard, he has all the, I think 18 ministries
lined up and he's like, he's ripping like 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,
oh, 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, it depends on, depends on what your
level of well really is, what you're benchmarking against. America's not built on complacency, right? 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. Getting 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 sarcastically, 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 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 to 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 competent to actually
wanna work in government. - Exactly. Which you're missing today. 'Cause 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 this
cynical view of capitalism where people think that the
only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But, I think a lot of people
would wanna 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.
- [Lex] Sure. - 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 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 are 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 Roivant, like for four years in, I mean we're, 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. And 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 a 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, Roivant, right? And it's, and that was true at Roivant, true at other companies I've started. I think the number one
reason people join companies, and number 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 skillset then
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 in 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 heavily doubt it. And you could fill in the blank for, you know, any range of other,
Department of Commerce. I mean, just could go
straight down the list of each of these other ones. What is the mission of this organization? You could even say for the U.S. military, what's the purpose of the U.S. 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's 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 wanna 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 to 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 track the best and the brightest 'cause 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 for 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 context? Sure. It's like a defensive mechanism that's designed to reduce dynamism. But I think what, when you, 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 a, there's sort of a balance
of distributed power. And 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 could 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 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 of the modern administrative state metastasizing through FDRs 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 abed 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 in 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, you know, I certainly
feel that myself, I, you know, 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 her best. And that's what I wanna see change. - Can you sort of steel
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 gonna 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 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 woke 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
intervened 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 passed. 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 steel man 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. Were that positive intention existed? I'm still a skeptic of
creating bureaucracies, but if you're gonna 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. Right? I mean, even if you have a company that's generated tons of cash
flow and 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,
in 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, it's never gonna be the job of capitalists or never gonna be the
capability or inclination of capitalists to preserve a national border. And I think a nation, it's literally, I think one of the chapters
of this book, okay? A nation without borders is not a nation, it's almost a tautology. An open border is not a border. Capitalism's not gonna solve that. What's gonna 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 could be state government, to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their
costs onto somebody else without their consent. It'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 wanna create things and I'm gonna 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. So, 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. And 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 tell 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, you know, interstate highways, you know, 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, you know, I'm not gonna be, I'm not, I'm not dogmatic about
this, but broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the goal of
the federal government, I'm not gonna say 100, 80 to 90% of the goal of the existence of a federal
government should be to, of 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'll 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 educate, for something like education? - I think here, if it goes closer to
municipalities and the states, I'm fine with that being a
locus for people determining as, 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 govern. Whether it's 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, 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. - So 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? - Well, I'm, of course, biased 'cause Elon and I had discussed that for the better part of
the last year and a half and said, 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 U.S. president in a couple of events that he came to and then we built a friendship after that. So, obviously, I think it's a great idea. - Who do you think is more
hardcore on the cutting? You or Elon? - Well, I think Elon is
Elon's pretty hardcore. I said 75% of the federal bureaucrats, and while I was running
for president, he said, you need to put at least 75%. So I agree with him. I think I would, I think it'd be a fun
competition to see who ends up, who ends up more hardcore. I think he and I, I don't
think there's someone out there who's gonna be more hardcore
than he and I would be. And the reason is I think
we're both, we share in common a willingness to take the
risk and see what happens. I mean, the sun will
still rise in the east and set in the west, that
much I guarantee you. Is there gonna 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. And here's the thing, Lex, it's, so it's easy to say this. Let's talk about what the
rubber hits the road here even in second Trump term, this would be, you know, the discussion, President Trump and I have
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 wanna achieve,
a good policy objective, whatever that is, right? You could talk about immigration policy, you could talk about economic policy. There are other policy objectives. You're gonna 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% 'cause there's just gonna
be some clunkiness, right? I mean, there's just
gonna be frictional costs for that level of cut. So 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 gonna pass on that. I'm gonna pass that up. I'm gonna bear that
hardship and inconvenience because I know this other goal is more important on the
scale of decades and centuries for the country. So 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. And, you know, if there's
one thing about my campaign, if I was to do it again, I would be even clearer about 'cause 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 moreover, it is a, it's an assault and a crusade
on the nanny state itself. And 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 in nanny state. Once we've done that,
we've revived the republic that I think would make
George Washington proud. - So you mentioned
Department of Education, but there's also the
Department of Defense. - [Vivek] Yeah. - And there's a very large
number of very powerful people that have gotten used to, and
a budget that's increasing and the number of wars
and military conflicts that's increasing, so if we could just talk about that. - [Vivek] Sure. - So this is the number one priority. It's like, there's difficulty levels here. The DOD, it 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, as the nanny state,
I'm against it overall. I'm against the foreign
policy nanny state as well. Let me 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 U.S. 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? 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 gonna 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 outta
the United States of America. And I don't think that the,
I'm not gonna be some sort of, you know, shrill voice here saying, so therefore we should not
be supporting any allies or providing security blankets. I'm not going in that direction. What I would say is you
gotta 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 enter 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 this could even
be from solar flares cause significant mass casualty in the United States of America. The electric grid's gone, it's not exaggeration
to say if that happened, planes would be falling outta the sky 'cause our chips really depend
on those electromagnetic, well will be affected by
those electromagnetic pulses. More vulnerable to cyber attacks. I know this, people, okay,
start yawning and say, okay, boring stuff, super
EMP, cyber, 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 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 increased
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 our 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 interest of the United States of America. So that's what I believe. And, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 U.S. 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's 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. military because of the age factor or because of the nature
of the presidency? - That's a good question. I would say in his case,
it's particularly accentuated 'cause 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 gonna 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. So I've done business
in a number of places, I've traveled to Japan. There's an interesting corporate analogy. Sometimes you get out, if you get outside of
politics people can, I find, 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. So let's just make the same point, but go outside of politics for a second. So, I was traveling Japan, I
was having a late night dinner with a CEO of a Japanese
pharmaceutical company. And, you know, it takes a while to really get him to open up, culturally speaking in Japan, you know, a couple nights of
karaoke and, you know, whatnot. Maybe late night
restaurant, whatever it is. Well, 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 wanna spend money on it. We're gonna spend money somewhere else. And he'll look 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. And I'll tell him, 'No,
we agreed, I told you that you're not gonna
spend money on this project and we have to stop now, 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 in 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'll bring it 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 contrarian view that I have that buck's conventional wisdom, but apart from that caveat. In general, the
conventional view has been, the U.S. president
can't fire these people. There's 4 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 it 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 is run and our foreign policy
establishment is 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 gonna 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 is 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 wanna replace
the left wing nanny state with a 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 principle objective to dismantle the nanny
state in all of its forms, the entitlement state,
the regulatory state, and the foreign policy in 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, 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. - It's 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, but- - 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. So Donald Trump did not have the Supreme Court backdrop
in 2016 that he does today. So 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 said, 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 Jarkesy. And 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 and dole out 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 in 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, the Supreme Court has given us to actually gut the regulatory state? We'll find out. I'm 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 gonna 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 nanny 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. - [Vivek] Yeah. - I guess it's weakening the immune system of the different departments. - Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. - [Lex] Okay.
- Yep. - On 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- - [Vivek] Probably not. - Also just on a psychological
level, just hard- - Yeah. - 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's, it's 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 gonna fix a lot of them in the next four years of
Donald Trump's president. But, if you have a
century's worth of mistakes that have accumulated with the overgrowth of the
entitlement state in the US I think it's gonna take, you know, 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 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 a
hundred percent of what Donald, who do not agree with a 100%
of what Donald Trump says. And I can tell them, you know what? I don't agree with a 100% of what he says. And I can tell you as somebody who ran against
him for U.S. 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, you know, I think that
I'm also open about the fact that it's gonna 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, so 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 is more focused
on some of the other topics that you are also focused on- - Border? Laser focused on. - And there is a tension there, just as you've clearly highlighted. - We shared the same priority with respect to the southern border. And that's, those are near term fixes that we can hit outta the
park in the first year. But at the same time, I think we gotta 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 gonna be
competing schools of thought where some will say, okay,
well we want to create a right wing entitlement state, right? Do a shower federal subsidies
on favored industries while keeping them away
from disfavored industries, new bureaucracies to administer them. And, you know, I don't come
from that school of thought. I don't wanna see the bureaucracy expand in a pro-conservative direction, I wanna 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- - [Vivek] Shut it down. - 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 'cause you over fire, hiring
back based on meritocracy, and it is a full-time... And it's not only full-time
in terms of actual time, it's full-time psychologically because you are 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, you know, 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, and I believe he shares it deeply, is that all else equal 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. - [Vivek] Right. - Money, I mean like 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 is the, 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, or else 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% of the
federal employee base today. So, 75% isn't 99.99%, it's
75%, which still leaves the, it would still be a tiny
fraction of the remaining 25%, 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% of those resources are going to function as 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 criticism exists? - So, fair enough. Or, and I would call those even, not even criticisms, but just
thoughtful questions, right? Even if somebody who's really
aligned with doing this, those are thoughtful questions to ask. So, I do wanna say
something about this point on how we think about the
breakage of the rule of law in other contexts. There are 350,000 mothers who are 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 trade-offs
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 trade-offs to enforcing the law. And we've acknowledged
that in other context, 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
under the rule of law, we enforce laws that has
costs, that has trade offs, but it's who we are. So, that backdrop is, and
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? That is 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 face the consequences
of it, which is also, a competing and 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 'cause all that was theoretical. Very practically, there's ways to do this, starting with people who've
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 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 a safe third country means even if somebody's claiming to seek asylum from political persecution, we'll 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 here 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 gonna be a policy that includes a large
number of deportations. I think by definition it's gonna 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 gonna fix that, we're gonna have the
largest mass deportation in American history. And we 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 continue
to outweigh the benefits. And that's exactly the way our
policy should be guided here. I wanna do it with in as respectful and as humane of a manner as possible. I mean, the reality is, I think one of the
things we gotta remember, given the example I gave with the Haitian case in Springfield, town that I've 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. 'Cause 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 8, 10, 12, 14 years
after the earthquake in Haiti where many of them came when they're gonna 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 protected status. And 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 a 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 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've been morally wrong advice, so 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 gonna
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 say they're 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, and 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 back door saying that it's refugee and asylum 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 billed
fundamentally on lies. But there's the other side of it, you know, illegal immigrants
are used in political campaigns for fearmongering, for example. So, what I would like to understand is what is the actual harm that
illegal immigrants are causing? So the claim, one of the more
intense claims is of crime. And, you know, I don't, I
haven't studied this rigorously, but sort of the surface
level studies all show that legal and illegal
immigrants commit less crime than American- - I think, it is true
for legal immigrants, I think it's not true
for illegal immigrants. - That's not what I saw. - So I, and sort of in this, this part of why I wrote this book, okay? And I mean the book is
called "Truths," so, I better darn well have well
sourced facts in here, right? Can't be made up hypotheses, hard truths. And there's a chapter where even in my own research on it, Lex, I mean 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? Fearmongering, 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 objectives. 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 gonna
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 U.S. history even better than the average
U.S. 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, if 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 'cause the
law says you only get asylum if you're gonna 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, right? Imagine if you're a 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, it isn't your GPA, it isn't your athletic accomplishments. It's whether or not you're willing to lie on the application. You're gonna 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 it 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 wanna teach my kids
that I'm not gonna lie or break the law to do it." That person is infinitely less likely to get into the United States. That's, I know it sounds
provocative to frame it that way, but it is not a 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 impart,
protect American workers from the effects of
foreign wage competition. That if we have immigrants,
it's gonna 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 are 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. 'Cause the United States of America is founded on excellence, we
should be able to compete, but that's a policy debate we can have, but right now, we are 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 wanna see change. - There 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's 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, but she said, well, maybe
you, but not people like you. So, that whole kind of
approach to immigration I think is really
anti-meritocratic fundamental- - [Vivek] And even anti-American. - Anti-American, yeah. - So I wanna confront this directly because it is a popular
current on the American right? And 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 creedal 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 as its own. So obviously we are among other things that 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 contexts than
in the United States, so that's the first reason, the 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 view is no, no, 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, it 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 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, you know, 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, you know, what direction the
conservative movement goes in the future. - Quick pause, bathroom break?
- Yeah. - Lemme ask you to
again steal man the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism for
him is the fake elector scheme. The 2020 election, and
actually the 2020 election in the way you formulated
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 preached this to the left,
I preach it to my kids, we gotta accept it on our own side too. We're not gonna save this
country by being victims, we're gonna 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 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 gonna 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 is I try to do that in this book, is to give the best possible
argument for the other side. You don't wanna give
some rinky-dink argument for the other side and knock it down. You wanna 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 is the strongest case against Donald Trump? Well, I ran for U.S. president
against Donald Trump, so I'm gonna 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 I'm, 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 gonna 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're asking me to steal man it, 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 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 lemme see if I can address that. - The 2020 election
and not in, what is it? TDS kind of objection. It's just I don't think there's
clear definitive evidence that there was voter fraud. - Lemme ask you about 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 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. - [Lex] Sure. - Obviously I'm not the candidate, but I'm gonna give you my
perspective nonetheless. I think we have seen some
growth from Donald Trump over that first term and 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, you know, 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
like 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. It's 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 are 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've 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've
had on the independent voter. Now you look at, okay, let's talk about
constructive solutions 'cause 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 too make election day 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 the Hunter Biden laptop story whether that would've changed
the results in the election. - We can't, obviously.
- [Lex] Right. - I looked at some post-election polling about the views that that would've 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 is hard to characterize
bias as one of the problem. - Lemme ask you one question about, because there's, 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've had to advantage Republicans at
the ballot box, to censor it, I would be against that. And I will 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.v I'm not aware of one instance. If you are aware of one, I would, let me know
'cause I would condemn it. - Most people in tech
companies are privately, their political persuasion is 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. - But there's two different problems, I just wanna sort them out, right? Because I have a problem with both. You talked about two issues
and 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 Hunter Biden 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 was, 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 government 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. The Russian disinformation of
the Hunter Biden 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've 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 is a real, that should not exist. The government FBI or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information, yes. We could talk about Pavel
Durov and the censorship there. - Sure. - There should not be any
censorship and there's not, should not be media bias. And your 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 elector scheme and then do a lot of
shady, crappy behavior during January 6th and try
to like shortcut your way just 'cause 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 U.S. politician ever been perfect throughout the course
of American history? No. But do you wanna, if you
wanna 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,
and do as they're told unless their BLM or Antifa rioters, in which case it's perfectly fine for them to burn cities down. We were told that we're
gonna 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 in other points in the history of the United States. The reaction to systematic
coordinated censorship and restraints in the
freedom of a free people is never good. And if you wanna really
understand what happened, if one really wants to get to
the bottom of it rather than, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 like 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 U.S. 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 gonna be a victory. That I think is how we unite this country. And so I don't think,
you know, 50.001 margin where cable news is declaring the winner six days after the election, I don't think that's gonna
be good for the country. I think a decisive victory
that unites the country turns the page on a lot of the challenges
of 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 an
outcome I'm rooting for. - So, just to pile on, since we're steel manning
the criticism against Trump is 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. The 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 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's style
is different from mine. But I do think that if
we're able to use levity in a moment of national division, and 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 lighthearted and
manner that loves the country, do the same thing to Kamala Harris and with an equal standard, I think that's actually
good for the country. But, you know, 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's gonna achieve for the country rather than picking on really the personal attributes
of either one, right? I'm not criticizing Kamala Harris' manner
of laugh or whatever. You know, one might criticizes like a personal attribute of hers that you may hear elsewhere. And I just think our country's better off if we have a focus on both the policies but also who's gonna be more
likely to revive the country. That I think is a healthy
debate headed to an election. I think everybody has their
personality attributes, their flaws, what makes them funny and
lovable to some people, makes some 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 Zelenskyy
and sat down with Putin, what do you think is 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, 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. - Yeah. - 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 it's to be very transparent about it. From everyone's perspective, you know, 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 far more
than they expected to. And frankly, that Russia was told that NATO was gonna 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 has 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 are 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 gonna
see willy-nilly behavior of just randomly deciding
they're gonna violate the sovereignty of neighboring nations and have hard assurances
and consequences for that, that's the beginnings of a deal. But then I wanna be ambitious
for the United States. I wanna 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 withdrawing itself from its military alliance with China. And this could be good for
Russia too in the long run. 'Cause 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 outta the western hemisphere, certainly outta 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 gonna 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 of more or less Ukraine funding has really failed to confront. That, I think, is the way we deescalate 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. - [Lex] Yeah. - 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, these
are monitorable attributes. If there's cheating on that, we're gonna immediately have consequences as a consequence of their cheating. But we can't cheat on, you
know, 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 Kursk region, but Russia has captured giant chunks Donetsk, Luhansk,
Zaporizhzhya, Kherson regions. So it seems, given what you're laying out, it's very unlikely for Russia to give up any other 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, right? 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, you know, out of any good deal, not everyone's gonna like
100% of what comes out of it, but that's part of the
cost of securing peace is that not everyone's gonna
be happy about every attribute, but I could make a case
that an immediate peace deal is also now in the best
interest 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. Zelenskyy 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 Zelenskyy
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 'cause 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've 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 what'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
and 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, 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 is, one of the challenges in
Ukraine, a war torn country, is how do you guarantee the flourishing of this particular nation, right? 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 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 wanna be, right? If there's only one factor that matters to each of the two parties and those are there 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 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 and the United State is playing hardball, not just with one side of this, not just with Zelenskyy 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 gotta 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
wanna 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, who somebody I admire as well, even then you would not argue for a foreign independence 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 onshoring
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 'cause some on the right would say, okay, I wanna 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 on 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 risks
that China takes the risks that could escalate us
to World War III as well. So I think that geopolitically, you gotta look at these
things holistically that end of the Russia-Ukraine
War and that peace deal deescalates not only the
Russia-Ukraine conflict, but the risk of a broader conflict that includes China as well
by also weakening China because Russia also
has hypersonic missiles and missile capabilities that
are ahead of that of China's. If Russia's no longer in the
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,
you know, the Nixon era. I think that you need people who are gonna 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 in 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, but 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, you know, we can get into specifics, but it's gonna 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, so 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 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 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 interest of the United States of America. So, those are 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 do you do when
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 gonna 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 gonna
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, you know, because my name is Vivek Ramaswamy, right? I'm saying it because it's
strategically important to the United States to understand that, God
forbidden, 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 Thucydides trap, you
know, 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 gonna require real leadership, leadership with the 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 he have? Major conflicts in the Middle East. Major conflict in Russia-Ukraine,
judge by the results. And, you know, I mean 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 issue is you wanna stay outta 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, you know, someone I've gotten know
actually reasonably well, for example, recently is Georgia Maloney, who's the 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 U.S.
when we sat down was she talked about, she doesn't
even read the newspaper, she doesn't read and watch the media and it 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 here or for, 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's gonna 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 ethnonationalism 'cause 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 mythmaking and its national legacy and history. And to say that, you know,
every nation does have to have a kind of mythmaking 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, you know, 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 2028? - Well, I'm not gonna 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 out of World War
III and rampant crime. Yes, we need the right policies, but we also need leaders who in a 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 gonna
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 gotta 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 kickass 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 Walz. So Tim Walz, maybe I'm
lacking in knowledge is 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 that 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 an earnest, in civil but contested
context, right? Of a debate. Who do we wanna take on? You wanna take on somebody
who disagrees with you, but still has deep ideology of their own. I think John Fetterman's
pretty interesting, right? 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-floppity, flippity-floppity way, but in a thoughtful evolution, somebody who'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 he comes across, at least as somebody who has been through
that torturous process of really examining your
beliefs and convictions and, you know, 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, you know, a number of other leaders probably merging at lower levels on left, not everybody's gonna necessarily
come from Washington, D.C. in fact, the longer they're there, the more they, in some
ways, get polluted by it. Yeah, I think the governor of Colorado, he's an interesting guy. He's got a more libertarian tendency, you know, 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 oriented tendencies within the Democratic party. I think that there are a number of, you know, I mean, I don't, you know, foresee him
running for president, but, you know, I had a debate last year when I was running for
president with Ro Khanna who say what you owe about him, he's an 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. So I like people who are willing to
challenge the orthodoxies in their own party 'cause it says they
actually have convictions. And so whoever the Democrats put up, I hope it's someone like that. And for my part I will, 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 wanna create a right wing entitlement
state or a nanny state, I wanna shut it down. That challenges the presuppositions 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' price controls and it'll reduce access to credit. I don't think that we want a crony capitalist state
showering private benefits on selected industries that favor us, or that we want to expand
the CFPB or the FTCs remit and somehow we're gonna 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. You know, I believe in
certain issues that, you know, or 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 topic
issue in American politics, but just to give you a sense for, you know, how I think and view the world. I'm against factory farming
of a large scale of, you know, you could sort
of say putting, you know, 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 rank, you know, 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 outta politics. - Getting mega money, getting mega money. - The mega money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so long as it exists,
you gotta play the game. I mean, you gotta, if
you're gonna play to win, I think it's one of the things I realized is that you just can't compete without it, but you wanna 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 if I'm 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. 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? Does it? - 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 crossed 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 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've just taken
that as a pause, right? We're at 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, Lex is- - Edit it out? - Oh, it just didn't end up in the book. 'Cause it just went in
a different direction than like what's interesting
for a publisher to publish. - [Lex] Yeah. - 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, you know, I think
that's one of the things that I learned from this campaign was 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, you know, physically challenge
yourself, workout, et cetera, but to give yourself the space to reflect, to recenter yourself on the why. Had I done that, I think I
would've been even more centered on the mission the whole time. Rather than, you know, you get attacked on the way you're thrown off your tilt or thrown 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, which is 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. - Yeah. - On your own 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 do? - Well, I enjoy debate.
And for me, I think, just in ordinary life, forget about like 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, right? You know what 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, you know, 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, you know, other countries, you know, China, India,
you know, 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, you know, 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 gonna save our country. - Are they right? Is the thing I actually
literally see you do. So you are listening to the other person. - From 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. - [Vivek] Yeah. - Like to where they
get you like outraged. - [Vivek] Yeah. - It's always, probably
because you just love the heat. - I love the heat and
I'm a curious person. - [Lex] Yeah.
- 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're just trying 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're 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 what I mean? The climate change protestors 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
gonna 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. I 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 we 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 kinda had that
boundless curiosity too. And I think part of
what's happened culturally in the countries 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, that's,
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 practice at the Ohio state- - You're damn good at
tennis. I was watching it- - 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 'cause you're- - That 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 with in the
juniors who invited me out, so I hit with them in the
mornings alongside the team. My goal, I'm-
- Uh-oh don't say- - [Vivek] I should be, I should be, yeah, I should be careful here. - [Lex] Oh no. - My hips are telling me-
- [Lex] No, no, no. - So I've been playing
so many days a week- - [Lex] Please don't. - 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 if 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 companies, one company in particular that I think is gonna 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 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. 'Cause 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 swivel chair. And thank you so much
for talking today, Vivek. This was fun.
- Thank you, man. One final fact of Thomas Jefferson, whether you cut this out-
- Of course. - He wrote 16,000 essays. - [Lex] Yeah.
- 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, 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, you know, reading the book and appreciated your
feedback on it as well. And, you know, hopefully
we'll do this again sometime. - [Lex] 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.