https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bMoo3Ltf6bs
First of all, it is the case that in most large-scale institutions, a small number of people do almost all the productive work, right? That’s the square root law. Okay, so if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them are doing half the work. Now, we saw a stellar example of that in Musk’s takeover of Twitter, because he dispensed with about 80% of the employees, and all he did was improve the company. Now, Musk has had extensive experience doing that sort of thing with other companies, and he’s obviously able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Now, you just made the case that you would like to do the same thing, and you also said that you had a detailed plan to do so. And so what I’m very curious about is how is it that you are, how is it that you believe you will be able to decide who should stay and who should go, and how is it that you’ve developed this detailed plan? Like, what sort of analysis have you conducted that enables you to determine what should be shrunk and how, and to know that that’s going to cause beneficial rather than damaging consequences? So there’s something we have going for us here, is that I don’t have to start in a vacuum. There is this thing we call the U.S. Constitution, already proven, time-tested to be the best operating manual for a nation in preserving liberty and human history. That’s certainly my view. Well, it turns out that much of the excess we have seen came from running afoul of that operating document. So many of the administrative agencies that were created were created in a manner that Congress actually never gave those agencies the power to wield the power that they do. The Supreme Court has in the last two years already begun to recognize that. West Virginia versus EPA, a case where the Supreme Court held that the EPA’s regulation, climate-focused regulations on the coal industry, were unconstitutional because we the people never gave the government that authority, and Congress in turn never gave that authority to this three-letter agency, which nonetheless ran afoul. Well, if those EPA regulations are unconstitutional, then it turns out most of the federal regulations today are also unconstitutional. Turns out most of the employees implementing those regulations are actually unnecessary. So in many ways, I don’t think we have to start in some first principles whiteboard of a vacuum and say, how are we going to design and draw this up? That would be a fatal conceit, I think. That would be hubris, I think, designed for failure to think that one man, Elon Musk or myself or anybody else, is just not going to happen. It’s destined for failure. But if you’re following a time-tested framework for the operating manual for this nation built, an operating manual built in the shadow of the Declaration of Independence, the greatest mission statement for a free society in human history, well, then I think we actually are doing nothing more than implementing that which is already time-tested and true. And so, you know, I don’t want to short sell myself here. I mean, I’m 37 years old. I’ve built multiple, multi-billion dollar companies. I do understand that if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them, that means they don’t work for you. I understand what meritocratic hiring looks like. You work for them. You’re in some ways their slave because you’re responsible for what they do without any authority to change it. So I understand these principles, but it’s not that experience-based, not Donald Trump’s, not Musk’s, not mine that could be sufficient to get this right at the level of the nation. It is actually a firm understanding and commitment to the Constitution itself. And that brings me back to that rare combination. You can’t rely on your advisors for that. That is not a substitute for saying, okay, I’m bringing executive experience and then I’m going to ask my advisors how it’s done within this legal framework and ask the lawyers. And I think that’s the difference between me and Trump. And I think that’d be the difference between me or someone like Elon Musk or anybody else who would be great, who is great as a business builder and is a good alternative to the professional political class doing this in Washington, DC. But I think it requires a deep, intellectual, historical, principled understanding, passion for, and commitment to that Constitution to see that through, but not doing it as somebody who’s coming in as just a law professor or a lawyer. They’re not going to have the skill set to actually, the fortitude to cut and see that through. And that explains why we haven’t had leaders to that effect yet, because that is a rare combination. Those skill sets aren’t supposed to go together, right? These are different skill sets for a reason. Why do they go together in your case? I hope they do. But why do you think they do? What is it about your background and your interests that make it reasonable for you to make the claim that you exist at that intersection between legal prowess, let’s say, and wisdom in relationship to the Constitution and that entrepreneurial bent? What do you have on that front that say Trump doesn’t have? Yeah, so the first thing I’ll say is I’m not going to claim to be some Messiah coming from on high with exactly the prescription. But what called me into this race, I mean, when you and I first started getting to know each other, I would have said we were both nuts if we were thinking about me running for US president. I was driving change in the private sector. I started strive. I was writing books. That was my calling. So the thing that pulled me in, Dr. Peterson, is that I think I am the best among the lot we have now to actually bring that combination to the White House at a moment where we require it to actually reform that administrative state to gut and bring a revolution to that administrative state that we need a unique combination to actually achieve because I watched where Trump fell short. I watched where Trump excelled above his lot. And so that pulled me in. So I will preface everything I’m saying by saying that I’m not going to tell you that I am some Messiah and here I have arrived. Okay, far from it. But I do think I’m a product of my experiences. So first of all, I had the privilege of not growing up in money. I had the privilege of actually having to work for what I’ve achieved. I’m grateful for that. I did not want to be burdened as many of my peers at places like Harvard and Yale were burdened. And I do think it’s a burden by the burden of inheritance or by the burden of not having the space to actually achieve and ordain for myself what I would in my career. So I started as a scientist. I was molecular biologist in the lab in my senior thesis all the way through college. I ended up getting into the world of biotech investing the commercial side of my brain, right? Finding opportunity where others would not that led me to really enjoy I am grateful for this more than boastful of it just strictly grateful that I was able to find this opportunity to earn extraordinary success for myself by me by my mid to late 20s. I was in law school simultaneously as I was making tens of millions of dollars as a hedge fund investor by spotting opportunity and that’s that I’m going to take this to the next level. I’m going to start an entire business on finding opportunities to develop medicines that others didn’t and built a multi-billion dollar company from scratch. And I think that’s different than coming in and just managing and being appointed rising the managerial rank ranks of a big corporation sitting on a bunch of boards and then plopping yourself into CEO when some guy retires at the age of 70. I built that company from scratch and so that’s one skill set. But actually it was midway through my career at the hedge fund where I first started that I also have this weird native itch to study law and political philosophy. I’d been so science centric that actually told my bosses at the hedge fund. I said listen, I’m going to take three years off. I’m going to go to law school. I’m actually going to I’m finding reading things in my spare time that I would rather do in a more structured setting. Now I discovered something important there, which is if you’re following your passion good things tend to happen. They said just keep your job. They gave me far more autonomy on the job. They said go manage this portfolio yourself and do it from New Haven. If you want to I said great. We have a deal and that’s what I did. But I for me, it’s less that I have a skill set more than I have had for the last 15 years a dual passion that has given me experiences both akin to that of many legal academics which shows up in several of my books which have been quoted in appellate court opinions in the last three years. But my principal day job has still been as an entrepreneur building enterprises hiring and firing people accordingly. Right. So you’re at the intersection of three relatively unique domains of achievement. So you one on the entrepreneurial front one on the scientific front and one on the legal front and so that is no each of those levels of accomplishment are relatively rare and the intersection is relatively staggeringly rare. Let’s say how was it do you think and why did your interest turn from the scientific to the legal and what aspects of the legal in particular compelled you and then how did that transmute into a political interest? Well, I mean the political interest really is barely an interest at all. I feel like this is a sense of duty that pulled me into this political journey, but all the way through the legal doorstep of it. I guess I’m a person that reasons through principles. Okay. I think that science is actually founded on principles that are iteratively we hone and we have an approximation of the actual truth of the world. But the scientific method driven by hypothesis driven testing as opposed to just purely deductive. Oh, I observed something and then I decide that that’s the state of the world. That’s not the way the scientific method works. It’s a deeply principled understanding and approximation of the world, right? You form a hypothesis and then you test that hypothesis. You don’t just sit and deductively observe the whole time. That’s actually not that’s just pure empiricism. That’s not the scientific method. And so there’s something about that that spoke to me and I think that was probably why when I started my first major business Roivent, which was a scientifically founded company. I mean, I personally oversaw the development of five medicines, which are FDA approved today, but the business building piece of it was the first thing I did was with the day one employees. We sat in a room for about six hours and came up with our first draft of what ended up being 20 business principles, right? Here are the principles on which the company would run, right? Value creation in the external world is a sole goal. Everything that happens in these four walls is a means to the end of what happens in the external world. You know, whatever is necessary is always possible. I mean, we went through several iterations of that. And so for me, I think it’s just the way that I think and process information. And then that is, I think part of what drew me in my interest in the law and in the ordering. I think we’re a nation deeply built foundationally on the rule of law, not the whims of man. And that’s what speaks to me about much of the US Constitution, about the United States of America. And so delving deep into what those principles were became just a passion of mine. It was a side hobby. I mean, the things I was reading in my spare time in my mid-20s, well, you know, I’m a hedge fund, you know, investor. And then, you know, before my career as an entrepreneur, I mean, it’s kind of a weird thing for a guy to do in his mid-20s and spend my weekends that way. But that’s what helped me discover that I have this separate passion that drew me then to go to Yale for a few years. But it’s part of what pulled me back even out of my business career. I ran my business in a way that was tethered to those business principles. I think it’s part of what allowed me to have success as an entrepreneur. But even when I felt like, okay, I’ve developed a drug among other things for prostate cancer. Now there’s this cultural cancer that nobody else is working on. There are other people working on biological cancer. Nobody was working back in 2020 on the cultural cancer that I believed I had identified, which was the mixture of this woke-ism with the forces of capitalism back in 2020 when I think this was really still not as well understood as it is today to say that I’m going to step aside from my job as a biotech CEO to focus on this cultural cancer, but against the backdrop of a legal framework where it feels intuitively like something’s gone wrong. It’s not obvious that somebody’s prosecuting this as a legal violation, but what are the principles enshrined in that law that are violated by what we’re actually seeing? So that’s what drew me in. And then one thing, you know, that led me to the doorstep of this. You were interested in science as an investigative process. And then when you set up a business, you started to understand that you needed to develop a set of guidelines that were essentially enabling principles, because that’s a good way to go about it. That’s a good way of thinking about principles or rules rather than as restrictions as enabling principles. And that attracted your attention to the idea of enabling principles as such. You got deeper into that particularly on the constitutional front that pulled you into the legal domain. And now your claim is that you think that you can you and your team think that you can use your knowledge of those enabling principles, especially buttressed by your corporate and entrepreneurial experience as a scalpel and a tool of discriminating judgment to, what would you say, recreate, shrink back, and reestablish the managerial state as something more akin to what was envisioned in the Constitution. That’s the gist of the argument. That’s exactly right. And I think that puts me together in a position to say, okay, now let’s just intuitively, there’s a lot there, right? So let’s just sort of make this intuitive. What would George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison say if they were walking the modern American terrain, if they were walking around in Washington, DC on a given day, what would they say? Would they be pleased? Would they be proud? Would they be appalled? I think today in many respects, they would be appalled by what they see. And I think their intuitive understanding, that intuition is what I’m reviving here because they’re the guys who enshrined that intuition in the form of principles that are in a document known as our US Constitution today. And so for me, I think I share those intuitions. There’s the intuitive side of me too. But my skill set is both as an entrepreneur and as somebody who understands principles, including legal principles, and those things don’t usually go together. Now, we haven’t talked about all the things that I’m awful at, okay? My artistic talents are sparse. I think that everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. But I do think that the unique coincidence of those talents is something that it so happens this moment calls for when we think about who we actually need in the White House to take us to the next level.