https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JX9B5tnj-xI
You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. A free market solution to the problem of marginalization is something like the offering of a true diversity. It’s like, yeah, you’re only five foot two so you can’t play basketball. You know, but you might be a damn good jockey. Exactly. And if you have enough games, exactly, exactly that. And then people can trade on their idiosyncrasies. And you see, this is an argument that free market types haven’t made to the diversity types. It’s like, well, the reason you want a free market is to provide a diverse number of games so the marginalized can find a center. Even if you think about institutional purpose, right? You were talking about the level of individuals in the marginalized side. And so I agree with that. That’s one form of diverse approaches to diversity. Here’s a different approach to diverse approaches to diversity. Is diversity of institutional purpose. But the problem with these, you know, ESG or DEI three-letter acronyms is what are they effectively saying? They’re saying that, no, no, no, you can’t have your own distinctive purpose. Everyone’s purpose must be common to advance environmental, social and governance goals, diversity, equity and inclusion goals. That’s a denial of diversity. If you run an institution, you have one question. Why do we exist? Period. Have a good answer to that question. And then say what type of diversity you espouse. That’s really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose. Different types of institutions should want different kinds of diversity. And they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don’t want. Hi, everybody. I’m very happy today to talk with Vivek Ramaswamy, who has just announced his candidacy for the American presidency. And is going to, well, hopefully change the political landscape in doing so. Vivek is an American business leader and New York Times bestselling author of Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s social justice scam, along with his second book, Nation of Victims. Identity politics, the death of merit and the path back to excellence. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he often recounts the sage advice from the father. If you’re going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding. This set the course for his life. Nationally ranked tennis player, valedictorian of his high school, Saint Xavier. He went on to graduate summer comm laude in biology from Harvard, and then received his JD from Yale Law School while working at a hedge fund. He then started a biotech company, Royvant Sciences, where he oversaw the development of five drugs that became FDA approved. In 2022, as an important side note, he founded Strive, an Ohio-based asset management firm that directly competes with asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, who use the money of everyday citizens, that includes you by the way, to advance environmental and social agendas that many citizens and capital owners disagree with. That’s a far more important issue than you might think, and we’re going to discuss that a lot as we proceed through our conversation today. Well, hello Vivek and everyone watching. It’s here on the YouTube platform. It’s always good to have everybody’s time and attention. Vivek Ramaswamy, who I’m talking to today, is running for president, which seems to be quite the preposterous thing to do for anyone, I would say. This next 2024 election is going to be some interesting contest, as far as I can tell. We’re not going to have seen anything like it, and the fact that you threw your hat in the ring, I think, is part and parcel of the whole show. So let’s start by just exploring why it is that you decided to do this, and we should do that. Why did you decide to do this, and what is it that you hope to accomplish by making this run? So let’s start with why you’re doing it. So you know some of the journey I’ve been on over the last few years, but I think that’s what led me to the doorstep. I’ve been addressing for the last few years this merger of state power and corporate power that together do what neither can do on its own. And part of me has long believed that the Republican party in the United States is behind by 40 years, right? Reciting slogans they memorized in 1980 when the real threat to liberty today is different. So I’ve taken on the woke industrial complex in America through the books I’ve written, through traveling the country, most recently taking on the ESG movement by starting Strive last year, and that’s where my headspace was. I did not think I was going into politics. I thought that I wanted to actually avoid the limiting shackles of partisan politics. It just felt so constraining. I thought of running for the U.S. Senate. I decided not to do that. I said, no, no, no, I want to do this independently as an independent voice, thought leader, author, and then, you know, look, I had successfully built a biotech company before. Let me put those skills to work by starting Strive. That was where my exclusive focus was going to be. And I’m proud to say I think we are already having major impact on the market through my work at Strive and even just through putting a spotlight on the problem. But I got to be really honest about this, and this was the realization that dawned on me after, you know, years into that journey, is that it does take two to tango, okay? And what I mean by that is the top-down version of this problem, the cynical exploitation of corporate power and state power to shackle the human spirit, I think is only half the issue because that only works if there’s a culture that’s really willing to buy it up. It only works if there’s a populace that’s buying up what they’re selling. And to me, I think that requires every one of us to look deeply in the mirror and ask ourselves, what is it about us as a people that wants us to bend the knee or that makes us want to bend the knee to the powers that be, that wants us to embrace these new secular religions? And that wasn’t quite a problem that I was going to be able to address even through market action and taking on BlackRock or the ESG forces in capital markets. And that’s really what, when it dawned on me, that there was no better way to drive a cultural revival in America than to successfully, and successfully is an important part of this, but then to successfully run for president. And the whole premise of my campaign is actually to define a national identity, answer the question of what it means to be an American in the year 2023. I do not believe we have a good answer to that question in this country. I’m on a mission to deliver an answer to that question. And my basic premise here is that our absence of that answer, that is the black hole at the center of our nation’s soul. That is what allows wokeism and gender ideology and climatism and COVIDism to fill the void. These are secular religions that prey on that vacuum. If we can fill that vacuum with, say, a vision of national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes these other agendas to irrelevance, that is how we win. And I believe that there isn’t a candidate in this field, I believe, who’s quite up to that challenge. I’m not sure I am either, but I do believe that I’m going to give it the best shot that we have, which is why I’m running. Okay, well, you brought up a lot of very complex issues in that description of your motives. And so I’m going to walk through them one by one to unpack them for everybody, because, you know, you said the Republicans are 40 years behind, and I think that’s probably true of organizations like the UN as well. And 40 years is a long time, given how much has changed in the last 10 years. And what that means is that the average person who’s watching and listening to this is also behind and isn’t even aware of what acronyms like ESG mean or why they should really give a damn. I just interviewed the CEO of the national, what’s the organization? State Treasurer’s Organization. It’s a financial officer’s organization. Yeah, there’s 28 states. Yeah, well, they’re pushing hard back against the ESG movement. But, you know, we talked about in that podcast, the fact that people don’t even know what the hell that means. Now, you opened your description, essentially, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but from my perspective, you opened your description of your motives with a statement about what essentially boils down to a kind of fascist collusion. And what we’re seeing is an amalgam of power that’s corporate, which, of course, the left-wingers complain about, that’s government, which the right-wingers complain about, and then of media, which everybody complains about. And rightly so. And there’s this idea that seems to be reigning in the upper echelons of the power structures that we’re facing an apocalyptic emergency of such magnitude, whatever the emergency happens to be, that they should be conveniently ceded all the power. And one of the fronts upon which that battle is being fought is the ESG movement. And so do you want to walk through that for everyone just to bring them up to date? Absolutely. I mean, this has been something of my obsession over the last several years, and not just as a commentator, but as a doer and as an entrepreneur too. So the issue with the ESG movement, it stands for environmental, social, and governance factors. It’s designed to sound boring for a reason. My general rule of thumb is if it sounds like a three-letter acronym that bores you, that’s a good sign that you should be paying more attention because it was designed to bore you. What this whole game is about is using private power, using capital markets to accomplish through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution. So I’ll tell you what it is, and then I’ll walk through the history of how we got there because that’s also pretty important too. The essence of the ESG movement is what it does is it uses the money of everyday citizens, Americans, but Canadians too, Australians and Western Europeans. It uses the money of everyday citizens to invest in companies and to vote their shares in ways that advance one-sided progressive agendas, environmental and social agendas, that most of those people do not agree with, that most of those people did not know were actually being advanced with their own money, and which don’t advance the financial best interests of most people whose money is actually used. So what does that mean? Think about yourself saving in a retirement account or a 401k account or a brokerage account. You think that the person who’s managing that money is exclusively looking after your best financial interests. It turns out they’re not. They’re also looking after advancing these other environmental and social goals. Who are these institutions? They’re asset management firms like BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard or Invesco or countless others that have signed a pledge to say that they’re going to align all of their underlying companies with the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, with net zero standards by 2050, with modern diversity, equity and inclusion standards. And those three or four firms alone manage about 1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash jbp. Go to Shopify.com slash jbp to take your business to the next level today. That’s Shopify.com slash jbp. Let’s go down that road for a moment. So, because you might ask yourself, well, why use the sacrificial language? And also, why do you need to make sacrifices at all? And the answer is, you’re always going to be making sacrifices. Because if you do one thing instead of another, then you sacrifice all the other things you could have done. So there’s no action whatsoever without sacrifice. Now, then you might ask, well, is there actually something in reality that’s worth sacrificing for? And the answer is, well, first of all, you don’t have a choice. Now, generally what because no matter what you do, if you do something, you’re sacrificing. Now, people might say, well, I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want. And so that’s sort of the ultimate in subjectivity. And there’s an impulsiveness and pandering to whim that’s associated with that. But that’s not really freedom. What that is, is subjection to the rule by impulsive whims. And that’s what you see as characterizing children. Right. Like, I get to do what I want right now. Right. So then you might say, well, well, why sacrifice that? And the answer is, because it isn’t a coherent or communal medium to long term solution. The reason you sacrifice the whims of childhood, that polytheistic state of motivational possession that characterizes childhood, the reason you sacrifice that to an integrated maturity is because the integrated maturity, A, constitutes an identity that will protect you from anxiety and provide you with hope, but also unifies you across time and lays the preconditions for your social integration. And there’s nothing about that that’s arbitrary. And so the question isn’t who is going to rule you. No, I want no one to rule me. How can I set my life up so no one can rule me? The question is, what is it that I’m going to work towards allowing to rule me? And it’s either going to be my whims, which means I’m subject to them, or it’s going to be some higher order state of integration that requires sacrifice. And then that ties into this whole hierarchical identity. You sacrifice your whims to your partner. You and your partner sacrifice your whims to your children. Yes. Your family sacrifices its whims to the community. And all of that, now you want that to be done harmoniously and you want it to be done voluntarily. Autonomously, voluntarily, exactly. Yes, exactly. So we have to create that sense of identity and purpose that makes us voluntarily opt into that nested identity state. There is a sacrifice for marriage. That’s exactly right. There is a sacrifice to entering a marriage. It’s a sacrifice worth making. There’s a sacrifice to having children. That’s a sacrifice worth making. There is a sacrifice to being a citizen of a nation. I’m not a global citizen, just a global citizen. I’m a citizen of a nation. There’s a sacrifice worth making. We can make these sacrifices if we know what’s worth sacrificing for. That’s the missing, what I call in the conservative movement, to borrow from David Hume. David Hume had this famous chapter in sort of his, he was an empiricist, but one of the paradoxes in his theory of empiricism was what he called the missing shade of blue. He could say what the shade of blue was without ever having seen it. That was a challenge to his theory of empiricism. Anyway, I borrow that. I call it the missing shade of red in the conservative movement is this idea of the revival of duty and embracing duty as a precondition for freedom, but it’s duty that we actually autonomously opt into by way of our free choice and our free will. These things are not incompatible. They’re not contradictory. They sound contradictory. Not at all. They’re not. No, no, no. They’re not. They’re sort of mutually required. The other thing I was just going to say about kids, because I think this is one where I wasn’t sure if you were going to disagree with me on this, but actually having heard you, I suspect that you don’t. I’ve gotten this actually a lot on the road. I was in Iowa and New Hampshire last week. I do draw a distinction between this idea of freedom and autonomy amongst adults versus in children. One of the things that I’ve said that rankles, I think, a lot of the libertarian leading conservatives or whatever, and I used to call myself a libertarian for a bunch of reasons I’m not anymore, but is this idea that children are different than adults. That period you talked about between 16 and 21. I’ll just even take the easier end of the spectrum. Forget 21. Just say 16. If you can’t use an addictive cigarette by the age of 18 or drink an addictive sip of alcohol by the age of 21, why is it that you’re allowed to use an addictive social media product as a preteen either? At the very least, it’s an inconsistency in the way we treat this. Now, I fully agree with you that all else equal, the path to getting to this ideal, the structure of ideal that we discussed before ought to be a path that does not involve coercion or impinging on free will. You phrased it very politely. It would be suboptimal, I believe is the word you used. I think that that is the most gracious way of putting that. I think it should be avoided, is the way I would say it as a prospective policymaker and leader of the country. But I don’t apply the same rules of the road as it applies to children because none of us believe that children actually should be treated as the same autonomous agents that they ought to be on the other side of entering adulthood. Now, that gets into questions of parenting, et cetera, which we can get into. But be that as it may, I buy into this vision of structure as necessary in a precondition for experience of freedom, but the path to getting there can’t involve coercion. I’m with you all the way. So in the Exodus story, when God charges Moses with standing up to the Pharaoh, he tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh something very specific, and he has him repeat it 10 times in case you didn’t notice. It’s repeated 10 times in the story, 9 or 10 times. He tells Moses to let my people go, which of course is a very famous phrase, but that’s not the phrase. The phrase is, let my people go so that they may worship or celebrate me in the wilderness, in the desert. And so what it does is it sets up not freedom, but ordered freedom. And so then you might ask yourself, well, what constitutes ordered freedom? Well, a game is ordered freedom. A voluntary game is ordered freedom because you have a large landscape of choice, but it’s dependent on principles, right? Those are the rules of the game. And a game is a good analogy because people play games voluntarily, and they want to play them and they enjoy them. And so if you set something like, if you set a social structure up with a game-like substructure, then people voluntarily hop aboard. Now, the free market response to the problem of the margins is to produce a plethora of games. And so that you might be a margin, you might be marginal in one game or almost all games, but there may be some game that you’ll be central because of your temperamental advantages. And I think you can see that in the gay community, for example, especially among male homosexuals, because the entertainment industry, especially on the more explicitly cultural end, is dominated by gay men. And there’s a reason for that as far as I’m concerned, because male homosexuality is associated with heightened levels of creativity. And so there’s a margin there, and the margin is, well, if you’re creative, you’re not going to be traditional. It’s going to be hard for you to abide by the ideal. But there’s a niche for you on the cultural transformation front. And so a free market solution to the problem of marginalization is something like the offering of a true diversity. It’s like, yeah, you’re only five foot two, so you can’t play basketball. But you might be a damn good jockey. Exactly. And if you have enough games, exactly, exactly that. And then people can trade on their idiosyncrasies. And you see, this is an argument that free market types haven’t made to the diversity types. It’s like, well, the reason you want a free market is to provide a diverse number of games so the marginalized can find a center. Diversity in our approach to diversity itself, by the way. And I think you see the same thing. I mean, so I’ve been trying. I don’t know that I’ve succeeded over the last several years. But I’ve been trying to exactly preach that to the diversity crowd where even if you think about institutional purpose, right, you were talking about the level of individuals in the marginalized. And so I agree with that. That’s one form of diverse approaches to diversity. Here’s a different approach to diverse approaches to diversity is diversity of institutional purpose that even different companies, let’s just take it in the realm of companies. That’s the world I’ve lived in, right? Corporate America and capital markets. Fine. Each company ought to have a unique purpose. And what is the problem with using a common three-letter acronym? It’s funny how these things always come in three-letter acronyms, but from ESG to DEI to CSR to CCP, I joke around. W-E-F. Yeah, exactly. CCP and W-E-F are some of the ones lurking behind the scenes. But the problem with these, you know, ESG or DEI three-letter acronyms is what are they effectively saying? They’re saying that, no, no, no, you can’t have your own distinctive purpose. Everyone’s purpose must be common to advance environmental, social and governance goals, diversity, equity and inclusion goals. That’s a denial of diversity, right? It rejects the institutional purpose. Exactly. It’s a lurking tyranny versus if you’re really pro-diversity, you should have that fall out of the structure that you and I discussed, right? What is your institutional purpose? If you run an institution, you have one question. Why do we exist? Period. Have a good answer to that question and then say what type of diversity you espouse. That’s really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose. Different types of institutions should want different kinds of diversity and they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don’t want. I’ll actually give you one example that I use that’s sort of funny, you know, at times is I’m a vegetarian. Okay. I don’t eat meat because I believe it is in my tradition, morally wrong to kill animals solely for culinary pleasure. There are conditions in which it would be fine to do it, but if it’s just for my culinary pleasure, I’d rather not do it. I respect other people’s right to and freedom to go in a different direction, but take the example of me working at a steakhouse. Okay. I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse, even if I would deliver the ever-priced form of diversity of thought. See, people sometimes are loose in terms of diversity of thought instead of diversity of appearance. Yeah, yeah, I’m in favor of diversity of thought over diversity of appearance too, but even diversity of thought is too low resolution. That’s a diverse thought, but a steakhouse still shouldn’t want to employ me because that’s not the kind of diversity of thought you should want if your focus is on delivering excellent steak to a customer because the kind of diversity you want there should be in service of your purpose. And so I think this revival of the idea of purpose itself gives meaning to diversity itself. And whether that’s true in a company context or a national context, that’s kind of my approach to the diversity discussion that we’ve managed to obsess over. There’s a couple of places we can go with that. So one of the things you’re pointing out, and it’s in keeping with this Burkian notion of subsidiarity that has its origins in this Exodus narrative, by the way, is that there’s going to be a variety of institutions at each level of the hierarchy. So you can imagine there’s a variety of forms of couples. There’s going to be some couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner, for example. There’s going to be some couples where the man is, and that’s fine. You want the commonality of the coupling, but you want the diversity of possibilities within that framework. And then the same at the level of family. There’s going to be some families with 10 kids. There’s going to be some families with one. There’s going to be blended families, but that still circles around the core of family. So you have order, but you have diversity at each of the levels of order. And then you also have the recognition that each of those levels has its own domain of sacred responsibility. Now, one of the things I’ve noticed, you could try this out for yourself if you’re curious about it, but, you know, I’ve gone to 400 cities in the last four years lecturing about the sorts of things that we’re talking about today. And there’s one point I made that always brings the audience, no matter where it is, to a dead silence, like absolutely pin drop dead silence. And here’s the argument. So you need a sustaining meaning in your life. Now, what does sustaining mean? It means it will sustain you through catastrophe. So it’ll sustain you through pain and terror. Now, that can’t be happiness because happiness is absent in conditions of pain and terror. So it can’t be that. So what is it? Well, I drew on my clinical experience to answer that question. Well, what do people have when things, when they’re truly in the desert, when they’re abandoned and lost and in pain? Well, they have the structure around them that they’ve made sacrifices to produce. They have their partner. They have their, you know, their wife or their husband. They have their children and their parents and their siblings. They have their friends. They have their community. They have this hierarchy of social structure around them that can sustain them if they made the proper sacrifices. And then the question is, well, what is the nature of the sacrifice that’s necessary to make those bonds? And the answer is, well, that’s the adoption of voluntary responsibility. And so once you know, and this is something conservatives haven’t ever made explicit, the meaning that sustains you in tragedy is to be found through the voluntary adoption of responsibility. And so you can tell young people that. You can tell young people that. They say, well, why should I grow up? I can just do whatever I want whenever I want. And that’s especially true if they happen to be wealthy and privileged. And the answer is, well, if you expend all that capital on hedonism, as soon as the storms come, you’re shipwrecked. Absolutely. There’ll be nothing left of you because there’s no hedonism in hell. And what you have there is whatever you’ve built responsibly. And there’s meaning in that. And people understand that immediately. And it’s part of this alternative vision to this fractured hedonism that everyone is celebrating now. Let me ask you a question about that, because I think this is really interesting. And I care about delivering this solution. So I want to get to the heart of it. There’s two possibilities there. And the answer might be both. But I want to get a sense for which one you meant. One is that sustained meaning. Is that what you said? Sustained purpose. Yeah. Sustaining meaning. Yeah. Sustaining meaning. Meaning that will sustain you across time. Right. Sustaining meaning. That can pre-exist and be resilient across catastrophe in a way that this superficial idea of happiness can. Tradition does that. Tradition can be grounded. If you’re embedded in a tradition, you bet. Right. But there’s a version of what you described, which also makes me think about a very different direction here, which is that you can also form that in response to catastrophe, too. And so I think much of the social structure that we have created in absence of that purpose and vacuum, this might be a cycles of history thing, less about psychology and more just about the nature of history here, is that we create the conditions for that catastrophe, whatever it might be. And it might be that catastrophe itself may have to be the catalyst for rediscovering what that sustained meaning was across those circumstances in the future. Be that economic catastrophe, that we’re due for economic tough times in part for a lot of the difficult decisions we’ve made over the last 10 years amidst this vacuum of purpose. I think China may do this favor, favor, I use an air quotes, for the United States. But which of those was the sense in which you meant it? In first principles, developing that to be resilient across time, or are you also subconsciously making some kind of empirical prediction here that in absence of this, we’re going to have to have this as a response, at least, that will cause us to adapt. We’ll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary, Logos in Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. I would say that you don’t have to think except when you’re failing, because the purpose of thinking is to calculate a new trajectory. And if the trajectory you’re pursuing is producing the desired results, then your theory is intact. Well, then the question emerges, which is, well, how much failure is necessary to make you think? And that’s actually a moral question. That’s a question of willful blindness. If you’re awake and alert and if you’re humble in the classic virtuous sense, you’re always trying to figure out where you’re insufficient and to rectify that. In many Christian prayers, the Jesus prayer, for example, is a reminder that the Orthodox cite that continually, chant that continually, is a reminder that you’re insufficient in your current form. And that’s a reminder that you’re insufficient in your current form and you should be looking for what would rectify you. That’s the practice of humility. And the advantage to that practice is that you can make micro repairs instead of staying stubborn until the apocalypse happens and then collapsing. Now, in the story of Moses, what happens to the Pharaoh, who’s a tyrant, is that the crises emerge and then magnify, right? They just get worse and worse and worse and worse. And he utterly fails to respond. And the consequence of that is that his entire society is devastated. The first born are all killed and the Red Sea floods and destroys the military might of the Egyptian empire. So the answer to your question is, what’s the relationship between failure and a return to abiding and sustaining values? And the answer is, well, it depends on how stiff-necked you are. Exactly. And if you’re stiff-necked enough, well, if you’re stiff-necked enough, and this is no joke and I mean this, if you’re stiff-necked enough, then you face the apocalypse. And we’re toying with that at the moment on like five different fronts. That’s exactly where we are. That’s exactly where we are. And I think that in a certain sense, my goal in this journey is to make sure that that doesn’t have to be the catalyst for deliverance. Okay? Well, wouldn’t that be nice? Because if it’s not going to be somebody who delivers a vision but from an actually conservatively grounded perspective with the consciousness of a conservative that still brings a creativity of vision to this, well, then it may have to be done by force by way of apocalypse anyway. And in the modern sense of that word, we’re going to have to be forced to learn the lesson that we couldn’t learn ourselves in the first place. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. And I do think we have a window to get this right, which is the entire premise of, I mean, you have verbalized using words what I feel in my bones, in my heart, that compels me to want to do this better than I have at any point in the last week. So I’ve watched a lot of people in the last five years embark on political careers. You know, I’ve been privileged to watch that with many people on the Democrat side, many people on the Republican side and in different countries as well. And this is what I see happening consistently. So, neophytes enter the political arena. Now, they may have been people who, like you, have had a pretty stellar career and have racked up enough successes so that they can present themselves as credible candidates. And, you know, two thumbs up for that. I think that’s a necessary precondition. But they get intimidated in the new arena because the stakes are super high and they don’t have a lot of experience. And so what they end up doing is they end up hiring communication teams. And there are experts at political communication and they usually involve pollsters, for example, and speech writers, people who will help you craft your message. And then what I see happening, and this is inevitable, this is the inevitable consequence, is that the person running loses their voice. And they often lose the election too, by the way. They lose their voice and the election. Now, not always. Sometimes they win, but they still lose their voice. So, and one of the things that’s emerged is the opportunity on the political landscape to do what you and I are doing right now, which is really different. You know, for 40 years, politicians, in some sense, had to craft their message because they had to pass it through the narrow bandwidth of legacy media. And so they’d had to compress things into a 30-second soundbite. They were forced to. Right, yeah. Right, right. But now, now you have the opportunity to just say what you think. And if you just say what you think, well, first of all, if you’re wrong, you’ll learn. And that’s useful. And the other thing is, is that people are going to respond positively to that because they’re desperate for truth. Now, you can tell that because Trump was successful. Now, I’m not trying to put Trump out, on some pedestal, up on some pedestal, as the world’s greatest truth teller. But I would say that one of the things Trump did was speak without, you could say without forethought, but that isn’t exactly- Without inhibition. Without inhibition. Yes. He basically, for all of his flaws, he struck, especially the working classes, genuine because he was willing to say what he thought. And what was cool about that was that he won. And so I’m really interested in your candidacy, you know, because you’re coming in from left field, you know. You’re going to definitely be a dark horse candidate. And it’s very interesting. Like, and God only knows how that’ll play out. But one of the advantages that I think you have, apart from your financial background and the fact that you are alert to the dangers of ESG tyranny and so forth, which is a non-trivial example, is that you can really afford to take the risk. You know how to use the new media, and that’s a deadly advantage. And also, you know, your candidacy is sufficiently unlikely so that there’s no reason for you to do things in a conventional manner because conventionally you should just lose. You’re not well enough known, right? You don’t have enough of a political apparatus. I don’t have a machine, you know. And so- Right, so actually- But that could be a huge advantage. You know, one of the pieces of help I’ll ask for you is keep me honest through this whole thing, because that’s where I’m starting off. I can imagine that there’s a lot of people who embark with that vision and then just become stultified by the suffocating forces around them. But I’ll tell you a couple rules of the road that I’ve, you know- Great. Tied my hands to the mast to make this easy for me in a good way is no one’s going to write another speech for me. In fact, even when I give speeches, I don’t write my own speeches. I just say what’s on my mind. I don’t use a teleprompter. In fact, a fun- I haven’t said this yet. A fun little challenge I was thinking about issuing to the entire Republican field. Maybe I’ll just do it right now is don’t have anyone write your speeches and don’t use a teleprompter. I’ll make that commitment. Why doesn’t the whole field make that commitment? No teleprompter. Speak from the heart, get it out there. And you know, one of the things that we’re going to do is I’ve learned pretty early on what you’re supposed to do if you’re running for president is you get trained behind closed doors and then people train you and prep you with their talk points and you come on, put on this nice suit and tie and then you project to the world how much you know about words and terms that you just learned 10 minutes ago. Why that? Instead, actually, what I’ve said is, and I think we’re actually going to do this. I mean, over the objections of good advice is all of my policy briefings, all of my education. I mean, there’s a lot that anybody, myself included, for sure, is going to have to learn to be an effective president of the United States. That’s a big part of the next year and a half. And I am running to run. I’m not running for to make a point. I’m running because I believe seeing this all the way through is my max is the ticket to drive maximal positive change. That’s going to require a lot of learning. We’re just going to tape it in forums like this and we’ll put it out to the internet. And you know what? If that allows people to discover that I was not omniscient, great. I am not God. You know, I was on a radio interview yesterday where somebody asked me about some term in U.S. military history that I should know. Well, I didn’t know it. I told him that, but I said, I’m also a fast study and committed to learning, which I think he took in a good way. And I meant it. So I just think that more honesty will go a long way. I think this race will be better off if none of us read speeches that other people wrote for us. If none of us even use a teleprompter, stick into some script, but speak from the heart. That’s what I’m committed to doing. I hope that keeps me honest. I have a lot to learn and not only am I going to learn it, we’ll open source it. Everybody can learn along with me. That’s one of the ways we’re going to do this thing starting about next month. Yeah. Well, if you use prepared speech, you don’t have faith in your heart. Yeah. You know, you don’t have faith that you can respond to the moment in accordance with your principles in a dynamic manner that will involve the audience. And if you can’t do that, A, you shouldn’t lead and B, you should learn because you can do that. You can learn to do that. And people do respond to that much better. Like I’ve experimented with this on YouTube because now and then I’m trying to think through something really difficult, you know, and I’ll write it out because you can make a more coherent argument in writing and a denser argument. But then I’ve tried to read it on YouTube, you know, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work like it works. Okay. You know what I mean? It’s not a failure, but it’s not a success. The last thing I did, this was, so this is a hybrid that’s worth experimenting with. So I wrote this statement of vision for this enterprise I described, the ARC enterprise, and I wanted to share it with people so I was going to read it. But I knew that reading wasn’t very compelling because it didn’t have that spontaneity that reveals the heart, let’s say. So what I did was I read like two sentences and then commented on it and then read another two sentences and commented on it. Yeah, that really worked because you see it enables you to have your talking points at hand, you know, because I’m not sure if you can remember, but it was very effective for me and it kept the spontaneity, you know. And so. You can’t plan for that. But I think you have to in some ways be disciplined about making sure that you don’t just revert to the natural norm of just sticking to what you need to say. And you know what, you’re right, I think there is something about legacy media that sort of forces that, but I don’t like just blaming legacy media too because I go on a lot of TV hits as well. I don’t think you have to do it that way either. And in a certain way, I think that the last best chance for reviving legacy media is if the people who go on it start, stop behaving like the cartoons that legacy media created for the last 30 years. This could actually be the source of saving legacy media itself just because you’re given three to five minutes doesn’t mean that you actually have to stick to those talking points. Try doing it this way too. That’s what I try to do when I go on television as well. But anyway, this is good. It’s much more effective. I mean, I’ve done that. Maybe it’s effective and maybe it’s not. Right? Maybe it’s effective. We’ll find out. This is an experiment for me. But here’s what I’ll say is even if you were more likely to win the other way, you have your soul sucked out of you, right? You’re just a hollowed out husk of yourself. So if the point of winning was to go sit in the White House, then okay, that’s one thing. If the point is actually to drive a revival, you’re not going to do that even from the White House if you’re just a hollowed out husk of yourself. I don’t think there is any evidence that you’re more likely to win doing it the conventional handled poll-driven media establishment craft a persona way. I think I looked at the empirical evidence. I can’t see a shred of evidence. There’s hardly any evidence that election spending is positively associated with victory. Good. There’s no evidence in relationship to incumbents. Incumbent spending is completely irrelevant to electoral outcome. There’s some minor evidence on the challenger front that more spending makes the difference. But you can’t tell if that’s because of the spending or because the more popular candidates are more likely to raise money. So and you know, if you look at someone like Joe Rogan, Rogan’s very interesting figure because he’s basically created a whole media empire out of nothing. He still has nothing. He has his producer. Awesome. He selects all his own guests. Well, and all Rogan does is expose his ignorance because all he does is ask stupid questions. I don’t know the guy, but I’d love to meet him some point. He seems like he’s onto something. But I think imagine taking that spirit to actually running a presidential and political campaign. That’s what this is going to be. And so maybe it’s I mean, I’m certainly betting it’s a formula for success. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think so. But I’d rather stay true to who I am and actually putting that on full display and being open about learning through the process and open sourcing that than trying to do this in some way that projects some image of some omniscient guy, which is exactly what the political consultant class wants to do. Right. They want to say, hey, your position to lead. They want to project the image of a leader. But who cares if that leader doesn’t actually exist? And so that’s how we’re going to do this. And a year and a half from now, we’ll find out whether it was the electorally successful strategy or not. But it is the personally for me, it’s the only way that I’m going to be able to do this. And so it’ll be a fun test case to see this all the way through. Well, I would say psychologically, there is no other pathway to success than something approximating abiding in the truth, because the truth puts reality within you and behind you. And so that doesn’t mean that that will result in proximal success at the moment. Right. And that’s another sacrifice that has to be made. Like, you know, you don’t know in some cosmic sense whether it’s time for you to be president. Apparently it’s time for you to run. But I would say psychologically speaking, that if you stay true to your own voice, and you’re very diligent in that, and you make the sacrifices necessary to make that possible, that your candidacy will be a success, regardless of the outcome. And you might think, well, that’s kind of paradoxical. It’s like, look, no, it’s not. Yeah. Because, for example, you might tilt the discussion of the election in a direction that’s extremely good for the country. And that could be completely independent of whether or not you win the presidency. In fact, you might even do that more effectively by running a campaign that wouldn’t be, you know, crafted this time to put you in the optimal political position. And I’ve seen this with other political leaders, you know, like I talked to Netanyahu a while back, and he really risked his political skin and his party’s political skin to bring in necessary economic reform in Israel. And that crashed his party and him for like a decade. But he’s back, and Israel is thriving on the economic front. So you don’t know- I’m not crafting it at all. I think not crafting is exactly the way to go. And maybe that’s- my bet is that’s going to be what successfully puts me in the White House in 2024. But I don’t fetishize that. And then there’s the inverse of this too, Dr. Peterson, which is you could craft it to win and check the box of winning the presidency. But just because you said the other way doesn’t necessarily mean you lose. This other way doesn’t necessarily mean you even win. Even if you actually numerically win the election and sit in the White House, who cares if the person sitting there is just a stuffed suit that certainly knew how to craft how to win without actually having something of substance left on the inside of who occupies that stuffed suit. So it goes in both ways, actually. I think that’s- absolutely. I think that’s an almost inevitable consequence. Like I saw this with faculty members continually. So here’s part of the reason the universities are so ruined. Okay, so a graduate student says to himself, I can’t really say or write what I think. No, an undergraduate says, I can’t really say or write what I think. I have to get my grade. So he compromises what he says and thinks. And then he’s a graduate student. He thinks, well, now I’m a little higher up in the hierarchy, but I’m still not a professor, so I can’t really say or write what I think. And then he’s an assistant professor, and he says, well, I haven’t got tenure, so I better keep my mouth shut. And then he’s an associate with tenure, and he says, well, I’m not a full professor. Finally, when I become a full professor, I’ll be able to say what I- and write what I think. And then he’s 35 or 40, and for 25 years, he’s practiced deception, and he doesn’t have a word of truth left to utter. And that happens to political figures all the time, and that’s a real defeat. Totally true. And you know what? I think that that’s the- that’s what winning and losing really ought to be defined as. And then we’re making this empirical bet. You pointed out to Donald Trump in 2015. I think empirically, you know, my bet is where yours is, where that, in this moment, probably is the more electorally successful strategy anyway. But I’m less sure of that than I am sure that this is how I’m going to do it, because that’s what’s in my control, and that’s how we’re going to do it. Well, I would love to keep- I would love to keep talking to you. I mean, I’ve been really fortunate over the last six years, because I’ve had a group of family members and friends around me who have their own independent viewpoints and who want nothing from me, who constantly are interacting with me and making sure that I’m not, you know, wandering off the path in some manner that’s untoward, you know. And there’s been some pretty intense discussions about that at multiple times, but it is very useful to have people around you who, you know, who you talk through your strategy, the one you just laid out, say, look, guys, I’d like you to keep an eye on me. And if you think I’m striking some false notes or I’m starting to be, you know, the great, wonderful Oz, the projection of the leader, that, you know, you can rein me in a bit. And, you know, if you do put that goal to keep control of your tongue first and foremost in mind, then, and then you have people who can reflect that back to you, you know, you can stay on the proper track. And I think the idea of not letting people- I just can’t believe political figures have other people write their speeches. It’s like- I mean, they do, though. It’s nuts. You have other people craft your thoughts. I know. It’s utterly insane. It’s nuts. And they’ll say, I’ll channel your thoughts. But, you know, as, you know, whoever said it, language calls the channel through which thought flows, right? My English- my 11th grade English teacher basically said that, right? If you can’t write it down yourself, you probably don’t know what you wanted to actually say. But anyway, here’s an ask that I’ll have for you. I mean, honestly, honest to God, and you’re, you know, the program, etc. you do. Call me back on here and call me out or don’t call me back out here and call me. Keep me honest, right? If you’re seeing a deviation from this, anyone in my shoes deserves to be called out and roasted over it because that’s what keeps us honest. Okay, well, let’s do this. This will be an interesting thing to do in terms of what I can bring to my audiences anyways. I mean, you’re going to enter this fray full flat out for the next year and a half. Why don’t we check in about every three months or so and we can play that by ear and you can just provide us with an update, you know? And you can walk everybody through the whole experience and we can talk over these issues continually. And you call me out whether you think I’m actually staying true to what I’m setting out to. See, this conversation is ground zero. Let’s do this every few months and then, and I’ll give you my honest take of how I think things are going. And if you see me becoming the thing that I’m telling you, I’m entering this to shake up and change, call it out because then we might as well call it quits on the whole thing. There’s no point to the whole thing. Even if I’m doing better in the polling, but I’m becoming some hollowed out husker myself, let’s just call it a day and move on because that’s not really what this whole enterprise was about. I’d love it. I’ll take you up on that. Okay, okay, good. Well, I’ll keep an eye out and I’ll try to ask you the most difficult questions I can ask that are real questions and that are fair, you know? And so that’s always the grounds for a good discussion. We managed that today. It looks like we can do this because we did this with Michaela on Michaela’s show a while back and it worked well. And today I thought it went extremely well. It zipped by and we covered all… Are we already done? Are you kidding me? I thought we were just getting warmed up. We’re already done. We’ve gone for an hour and 36 minutes. Are you kidding me? Okay, okay, okay. I thought we were getting warmed up. Okay, okay, okay. That was the preamble. Well, we probably are. It looks like it is the preamble. Okay, okay. Well, thank you, sir. This is a good place to wrap up. Good. Well, for everybody who’s watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention. And I’m going to move with Vivek over to the Daily Wire Plus platform. We’re going to go through some autobiographical background and I’m very interested always in investigating to find out how people’s interests made themselves manifest in their life, in the problems that gripped them and the opportunities that offered themselves to them. So we’ll continue that conversation for half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus front. And so you can turn to that if you want to follow up on the discussion. Vivek, thank you very much today for agreeing to talk to me today and congratulations on your candidacy. It’s a hell of a thing to undertake and you’re going to be in for quite the roller coaster ride for the next 18 months. I mean, I know you’re familiar with that sort of thing already. And so I look forward to talking to you again. And to those of you who are watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention to the film crew here in Calgary. I’m still in Calgary. Thank you for your time today and your technological prowess. And we’ll turn it over to the Daily Wire Plus and ciao everybody. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.