Vivek Ramaswamy 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, he often recounts the sage advice from his father: if you want to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding. In 2022, he founded Strive, an Ohio-based asset management firm that directly competes with asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, who used the money of everyday citizens 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 with the man who just threw his hat in the ring to become the next president of the United States. Today s episode features a conversation I had with Vivek about why he decided to run for President and what he s hoping to accomplish by making this run. I m very happy to have him on the show, and I hope you do too! Tweet me if you have any thoughts or opinions on this episode or anything else you d like to hear me talk about in a future episode. I d love to hear from you! Timestamps: 1:00 - Why I m running for President 3:30 - What does it mean to you? 4:10 - Why did you decide to do this? 5:40 - What is your biggest takeaway from this episode? 6:20 - What are you looking forward to from it? 7:00 8:30 What is it a dream? 9:40 11:30 | What s your vision for the future? 12:00 | How do you think it s going to be a better than that? 13:10 14:40 | What is the biggest thing I m going to do in 2020? 15:20 16:10 | What do you need to do? 17:30 Is it a good thing? 16) 17 + 13:30 + 16:00 + 17? 14) 15 + 15 #1 + 15) #3 6 7 5 13) 8) Is it possible
00:00:00.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:57.420Hi everybody. I'm very happy today to talk with Vivek Ramaswamy, who has just announced his candidacy for the American presidency.
00:01:18.100And is going to, well, hopefully change the political landscape in doing so.
00:01:23.780Vivek is an American business leader and New York Times bestselling author of Woke Inc.
00:01:30.140Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam.
00:01:33.720Along with his second book, Nation of Victims.
00:01:38.000Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
00:01:42.320Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he often recounts the sage advice from his father.
00:01:49.940If you're going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding.
00:04:31.200I want to do this independently as an independent voice, thought leader, author.
00:04:36.020And then, you know, look, I had successfully built a biotech company before.
00:04:39.800Let me put those skills to work by starting Strive.
00:04:42.460That was where my exclusive focus was going to be.
00:04:44.940And 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.
00:04:54.260But I got to be really honest about this.
00:04:56.020And this was the realization that dawned on me after, you know, years into that journey is that it does take two to tango.
00:05:03.780And 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.
00:05:17.000Because that only works if there's a culture that's really willing to buy it up.
00:05:21.860It only works if there's a populace that's buying up what they're selling.
00:05:25.400And 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?
00:05:42.600And 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.
00:05:52.500And 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.
00:06:04.060And 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.
00:06:14.680I do not believe we have a good answer to that question in this country.
00:06:18.740I'm on a mission to deliver an answer to that question.
00:06:22.560And my basic premise here is that our absence of that answer, that is the black hole at the center of our nation's soul.
00:06:30.640That is what allows wokeism and gender ideology and climatism and COVIDism to fill the void.
00:06:37.160These are secular religions that prey on that vacuum.
00:06:39.540If 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.
00:06:50.280And I believe that there isn't a candidate in this field, I believe, who's quite up to that challenge.
00:06:55.420I'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.
00:06:59.880Okay, well, you brought up a lot of very complex issues in that description of your motives.
00:07:07.040And so I'm going to walk through them one by one to unpack them for everybody.
00:07:10.240Because, you know, you said the Republicans are 40 years behind.
00:07:13.440And I think that's probably true of organizations like the UN as well.
00:07:18.820And 40 years is a long time, given how much has changed in the last 10 years.
00:07:23.300And what that means is that going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:07:31.860Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:07:33.820But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:07:39.640In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:07:44.640Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport,
00:07:48.660you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:07:53.960And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:07:57.160With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:08:04.540Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:09:01.460The 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.
00:09:15.940I just interviewed the CEO of the national, what's the organization?
00:09:43.520Essentially, 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.
00:09:56.980And 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.
00:10:10.380And 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.
00:10:28.340And one of the fronts upon which that battle is being fought is the ESG movement.
00:10:34.020And so do you want to walk through that for everyone just to bring them up to date?
00:10:39.520I 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.
00:10:48.520So the issue with the ESG movement, it stands for environmental, social, and governance factors.
00:10:55.600It's designed to sound boring for a reason.
00:10:58.200My 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.
00:11:06.620So what this whole game is about is using private power, using capital markets to accomplish through the backdoor what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution.
00:11:19.480So 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.
00:11:24.020What 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.
00:11:33.120It 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,
00:11:45.940that most of those people do not agree with, that most of those people did not know were actually being advanced with their own money,
00:11:53.680and which don't advance the financial best interests of most people whose money is actually used.
00:12:17.880They're asset management firms like BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard or Invesco or countless others
00:12:24.780that 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,
00:12:33.920with net zero standards by 2050, with modern diversity, equity, and inclusion standards.
00:12:39.300And those three or four firms alone manage about $20 trillion, maybe even a little bit more.
00:12:45.260That's more than the U.S. GDP right now in the hands of three to four financial institutions.
00:12:50.580But they're not using their money to do it.
00:12:53.300They're using the money of probably most listeners to this exchange right now, people watching this.
00:12:59.380Good chances that their money, their retirement accounts, their brokerage accounts are being used to tell companies like Apple to adopt racial equity audits
00:13:08.220that Apple's board initially did not want to adopt, to tell companies like Chevron to adopt scope three emissions caps,
00:13:15.420which I can talk about what that means, but that Chevron did not want to adopt.
00:13:18.980And that most people watching this probably didn't want to force on Chevron either, but their money was used to do it anyway.
00:13:25.160That's what this ESG movement is all about.
00:13:27.660So how did we get here is actually a really important question.
00:13:32.220And a lot of this began, there were two big milestones seeing the supercharging of this ESG movement in our economy and in capital markets.
00:13:39.720The first one, which I think of as the Big Bang, that really set the whole thing, for all intents and purposes, into motion, was the 2008 financial crisis.
00:13:49.080What happened in the 2008 financial crisis, and by the way, I had a front row seat to this.
00:13:53.380I got my first job in New York at an elite hedge fund in the fall of 2007.
00:13:59.120You know, the fund I worked at got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.
00:14:15.940What happened was, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, Republicans, it's worth remembering this, Republicans in this country bailed out the big banks, which I don't know what your view is, Dr. Peterson.
00:14:30.140And the Bush administration and Hank Paulson, a CEO and alumnus of Goldman Sachs, used public taxpayer funds to bail out Goldman Sachs while letting his competitors fail.
00:14:40.000This was crony capitalism all the way down.
00:14:42.660And the left actually had a point in this country.
00:14:52.820We're just going to take money from your wealthy corporate fat cat pockets and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people.
00:14:59.240Because that's what we on the far left want to do on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
00:15:03.140But right around that time, there was a fissure in the left-wing movement in this country where there was the birth of this new, let's call it the woke left.
00:15:11.300Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president of the United States.
00:15:14.120There was a lot of cultural currents in the U.S. that said, well, wait a minute there.
00:15:18.520The real problem isn't quite economic injustice or poverty.
00:15:22.500It's really racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry.
00:15:27.940This is post-Al Gore's inconvenient truth.
00:15:31.000This actually presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street to say that, no, no, no.
00:15:36.360Okay, guys, we'll make a deal with you.
00:15:38.560We will use our corporate power, use our money, really your money, to applaud diversity and inclusion, to put token minorities on corporate boards, to muse about this racially disparate impact of climate change from the mountaintops of Davos after flying there in a private jet.
00:15:54.700We'll do all of these things, but we don't do it for free.
00:15:59.700We expect the new left to look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact.
00:16:06.080And so they defanged Occupy Wall Street.
00:16:08.520Most people don't even remember what Occupy Wall Street is.
00:16:12.040And that's how the birth of this new, what I've sometimes called a woke industrial or ESG industrial complex was born, where Wall Street said that, you know what, if you can't beat us, join us.
00:16:40.080I mean, this is not a smoke-filled room where there was some sort of meeting in the back of Goldman Sachs' boardroom on 85 Broad Street in lower Manhattan.
00:17:11.260So anyway, that was the first catalyst.
00:17:13.220And so what began as a challenge to the system, which is, you know, as an intellectual or whatever, I always enjoy it if I agree it or not.
00:17:22.240Something that began as a challenge to the system, stakeholder capitalism and ESG.
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00:18:56.020The thing that happened in 2016, of course, is that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
00:19:00.620This created a seismic shockwave across the establishment class, both in capital markets as well as the linkage between business and politics.
00:19:11.500And what they said is, okay, wait a minute.
00:19:13.460This game may not be played the way it's supposed to be going forward.
00:19:16.960If political leaders like Donald Trump are going to break the system, then we, the business leaders, need to exercise our authority to step into the void instead.
00:19:29.360And then they were vindicated, or so they thought, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords in 2018.
00:19:39.660That is the event that threw kerosene on this ESG storm.
00:19:43.680And, you know, even the people who are complaining about this ESG movement need to understand where it came from a little bit better than they do.
00:19:50.720So this is what then caused CalPERS, the California Teachers and Pension Retirement System, and other big allocators, the people who give BlackRock and State Street your money.
00:20:00.420They started to say that, look, if political leaders are not going to step up to the occasion to address the existential challenges we face, like global climate change, then business leaders need to do it instead.
00:20:13.900Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, started saying similar things, that we have to earn our social license to operate.
00:20:19.620And that's really what caused this ESG thing to spread like wildfire, was that event of pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords.
00:20:27.300Okay, so now with that move, you tie the corporate response to, say, Occupy Wall Street at the end of the 2008 financial crisis with the climate catastrophe.
00:20:41.220And so let's talk about the climate catastrophe for a moment or two, and also define stakeholder capitalism.
00:20:48.000Because the narrative that's insisted upon by the woke left, let's say, but also by these woke capitalists, is that the emergency that confronts us on the environmental frontier is so cataclysmic that any and all emergency measures are thoroughly, not only thoroughly justified, but morally required.
00:21:11.500Now, I have a problem with that theory psychologically, and so psychologically, I've been trying to figure out how you separate the wheat from the chaff on the leadership front, especially in the face of a real emergency, because emergencies do occur from time to time.
00:21:28.900But here's a rule of thumb, everyone who's listening can see, try this out for themselves and see what they think.
00:21:35.800But if the emergency you're confronting terrifies you so badly that you're paralyzed into immobility or tempted to aggregate all the power to yourself and become a tyrant,
00:21:51.320then you have defined yourself as insufficient for the job.
00:21:56.740You should be able to maintain a calm head regardless of the impending emergency, because there's going to be emergencies.
00:22:02.980And if you become a tyrant during an emergency, then you're a tyrant.
00:22:07.280And so that's the psychological issue.
00:22:10.080Even if there is an emergency, we shouldn't be aggregating power into an elite.
00:22:14.860And then there's a second element, too, which is, yeah, what bloody emergency precisely?
00:22:20.020You know, I've talked a lot to Bjorn Lomberg, for example, and many other people, I would say, as informed as Lomberg.
00:22:26.040And there's no evidence even in the IPCC reports themselves that climate change is, first of all, entirely man-made, because it's not.
00:22:35.320And second, even if it is, there is no evidence whatsoever in the IPCC reports that there's going to be some apocalyptic turning point in the next 50 years
00:22:44.140that justifies untold trillions of panicked dollars being spent while we simultaneously destabilize our power grids
00:22:52.640and increase the cost of electricity by up to five times and make ourselves, at least in Europe, much more reliable or much more reliant on Russia.
00:23:01.480And also throw poor people into poverty and risk the fossil fuel infrastructure that feeds half the planet.
00:23:10.120Because people also don't understand that ammonia is made out of fossil fuel and ammonia fertilizer feeds four billion people.
00:23:18.780And so, so, so anyways, you said 2008 Wall Street is guilty because of the bailouts.
00:23:24.980The lefties pushed them hard on the ethical front, and rightly so, they decide to turn to ESG.
00:23:31.000But then that's also amplified by this sense of apocalyptic climate doom.
00:23:35.560And so, what's your formulation of the environmental challenge that confronts challenges that confront us now?
00:23:47.040So, I have more to say about the ESG story, but I got to pause on what you just said.
00:23:52.440I just got to pause on what you just said.
00:23:53.800It was really, some really good stuff in there.
00:23:56.200Okay, so, so, I just need to go, I'm going to go one step further than you and draw a linkage between the psychological critique and the technical critique, because they're related, right?
00:24:05.500So, the first thing you said was a humble and powerful point, which is even if there is some sort of existential apocalyptic issue,
00:24:12.820you should not want to entrust the people who are going to then wield tyrannical force to address it,
00:24:18.060not to mention the fact that the technical issue is itself a completely artificial one, right?
00:24:23.380It is grounded on false premises that deserve to be called out.
00:24:28.300Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, others can call them out.
00:24:30.580We can go into all the details of that.
00:24:33.580But the point I want to make is that those two critiques that you just offered, spot on as they are, are deeply linked.
00:24:39.880And the reason is you are almost too charitable in that psychological account, in that actually the psychological account explains the fact that the entire climate agenda actually has nothing to do with the climate.
00:24:53.180It's not like this was a tyrannical response to a threat.
00:24:56.680It was the creation of an artificial threat to exercise tyrannical power itself.
00:25:04.440And so, and I've said this numerous times, I think the climate religion has about as much to do with the climate as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christ, which is to say nothing at all.
00:25:17.420It was really just about power and dominion and punishment all the way down.
00:25:22.440And I can basically prove that to you in a short amount of time, right?
00:25:25.640If the climate religion really, I mean, just, just, just, I'm going to, to avoid going on for hours, I'll just pick a couple of tidbits, but we could go on for hours.
00:25:34.360But the couple of tidbits we can just start with are, so, so one is if you really care about carbon emissions as the end all be all, okay?
00:25:42.580First of all, you'd be delineating which kind of carbon emissions matter.
00:25:45.980I don't subscribe to the tenets of this religion, but I understand this religion.
00:25:49.060I think it's worth understanding a religion even if you're not a practitioner.
00:25:51.180Even if you subscribe to this religion, there's a difference between methane leakage and carbon dioxide.
00:25:57.060Well, methane leakage is far worse in places like Russia and China.
00:26:00.480So then it should be a mystery that you want to shift carbon production from the United States, where you tell companies like Exxon and Chevron to stop producing, to places like China, like PetroChina on the other side of the world.
00:26:13.260And by the way, this is exactly what the ESG movement, it's like the apostles of this church, right?
00:26:17.640So BlackRock is like an apostle of this Spanish Inquisition-style church.
00:26:22.160BlackRock forces companies like Exxon and Chevron to drop oil production to meet net zero standards by 2050.
00:26:28.700Yet literally some of the same companies buying up those same projects on the other side of the planet are PetroChina, who BlackRock is a large shareholder of, without telling PetroChina to adopt any of those same emissions caps.
00:26:41.380This is nuts if you think that you care about reducing carbon emissions.
00:26:45.080And it's not even, as I was alluding to methane emissions before, it's not even net neutral.
00:26:49.800Methane, even if you subscribe to this crazy religion, is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.
00:26:57.000So it's not even net neutral, it's worse.
00:26:58.700So that's the first breadcrumb that there's something else going on here.
00:27:01.560The second breadcrumb that there's something else going on here is that that same movement, certainly it's apostles in the ESG movement, that are so hostile to carbon emissions, is also hostile to the best known form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind, which is nuclear energy, right?
00:27:20.020So that's the second little breadcrumb that suggests there's something else going on here.
00:27:23.760And the problem with nuclear energy in a nutshell is that nuclear energy might be too good at solving the alleged clean energy problem, such that it doesn't solve for the actual agenda, which is delivering equity between the West, America in particular, and the rest of the world to catch up.
00:27:42.520That's really what this climate movement is on.
00:27:44.760And delivering that power that we've been talking about in the hands of the proper elite.
00:27:50.880The grand inquisitors of our time, right?
00:28:12.960So if we do buy that, then we're going to make the assumption that the fundamental existential crisis facing us is one of pollution and that that can be reduced in complexity to carbon dioxide emission and maybe methane and a couple of other greenhouse gases.
00:28:26.580Now, I don't accept any of that, and I know you don't as well, but we'll give the devil his due.
00:28:31.700If that's actually the driving factor, then all fundamental actions and perceptions should be directed towards minimizing, let's say, carbon dioxide output.
00:28:43.060But the first point you make is, well, we're making it very difficult for Western countries to use coal and to explore for fossil fuels, but we're making it very easy for China to do so.
00:28:54.380And since we all share the same atmosphere and China and other terribly governed countries have way worse environmental regulations.
00:29:01.720They're not even in the same universe.
00:29:03.520All we're doing is substituting relatively clean fossil fuel for relatively filthy fossil fuel.
00:29:09.660And then, you know, you added that additional decoration, which is, well, isn't it also convenient that companies like BlackRock happen to own huge shares in exactly the Chinese companies whose interests they're promoting?
00:29:20.980And so, you know, that's kind of, so what that means is that by the measurement standards of the advocates of the climate religion themselves, their policies are not only a failure, they're actually positively counterproductive, just like they have been in Germany and the UK.
00:29:36.860And then, and that's like, that's a subtle mystery on the fossil fuel front.
00:29:40.740But then you have the blatant mystery, which is the second thing you post, you pointed to, which is, okay, boys and girls, we can pretty much solve the bloody carbon dioxide problem, like overnight with nuclear.
00:29:52.560And yes, we have small nuclear plants now, and we have nuclear plants that are way safer than they were 50 years ago, and that can be built at a modular level.
00:30:02.620And, well, that brings us into the religious issue, I would say, because this is not so much a pro-planet agenda designed to bring about harmony with the natural world, as it is an attempt to simultaneously destabilize the entire industrial infrastructure,
00:30:21.400in accordance with the claim that all human activity is nothing but, you know, cancerous growth on the planet, combined with this underground desire to accrue all tyrannical power into centralized elite hands.
00:30:38.040So, okay, so with that, let's talk about, you've insisted a number of times that the climate narrative is a religious or quasi-religious structure.
00:30:49.500So why don't you, I've got some thoughts about that, which I'll share eventually, but I would like you to lay out why you use that terminology specifically.
00:31:00.700Worse is the sense in which it is a religious institution gone awry.
00:31:06.540And then the second is in which it fills a psychological need for religion and God in the everyday person.
00:31:11.760On the first of those, just as you were laying out the philosophical framing of it, I was reminded of actually one of my favorite stories about Christ, actually,
00:31:20.720which came from, not the Bible, but from Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, Brothers K, in his chapter entitled The Grand Inquisitor, actually.
00:31:30.300And it tells the story of how Christ comes back to earth during the 15th or 16th century or whatever in Seville, Spain.
00:31:36.980He's walking the streets, performing miracles, and then the Grand Inquisitor, a person leading the Spanish Inquisition, spots him on the street and has him arrested.
00:31:44.740And the whole climax of the chapter is the dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.
00:31:48.940And what the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ is, look, we the church don't need you here anymore.
00:31:56.040You are supposed to be a symbol that helps us do our work, but your presence here actually stops us from getting our work done.
00:32:03.520And he sentences Christ to execution the next morning.
00:32:08.300Swapping climate for Christ, which really is what's happening in the psychological minds of people who are buying this religion up, which I'll get to in a second.
00:32:15.600But that's also what's going on here is the climate is just an excuse.
00:32:18.420And in fact, once you get into a discussion about actually addressing carbon emissions, say, with nuclear energy, they get very worried.
00:32:25.100So they're sentencing nuclear energy to death because that's their Messiah and their Savior, right?
00:32:29.300You said you wanted to actually get rid of carbon emissions.
00:32:31.660Well, you would welcome the second coming of Christ, the second coming of the climate solution of nuclear energy.
00:32:37.720They sentence it to death because, as the Grand Inquisitor told Christ in that story, your presence here actually impedes our work.
00:32:44.240You're just supposed to be a symbol for us.
00:32:45.760So in a certain sense, it has a religious quality in terms of the church that protects its own turf, even from the very God that it tells its parishioners to worship.
00:32:58.080Now, the second question, though, is why are the parishioners worshiping at all?
00:33:01.220And I think this gets to the heart of, in a weird way, my candidacy for president of the United States, even though we're in deep philosophical terrain here.
00:33:08.480I just think we're in the middle of this identity crisis where we are so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity as Americans.
00:33:19.740And it's probably true for much of the Western world, too, even beyond America, but we're so hungry for a cause at a moment in our history when the things that used to fill that void, faith is one of them.
00:33:57.940And we send out these sonar signals for our echolocation of identity, right?
00:34:02.560We can't see where we are, but we deduce where we are by bouncing off the signals we send and get them back as sources of truth.
00:34:10.120Okay, I send a signal out, family is one source of identity I get back.
00:34:13.840God is another source of identity I get back.
00:34:16.680My nation is another source of identity I get back.
00:34:18.980My hard work, the things I create in the world, these things we deduce our identity and it tells us, even though we're blind, where we are, lost in that abyss.
00:34:27.120But when those things disappear, we send out that signal and then nothing comes back and then we're lost.
00:34:36.020And so then we start grasping at artificial sources of that identity, racial identity, gender identity.
00:34:42.700Where do you think this bizarre gender ideology happens to have arisen from?
00:35:34.380And then you also talked about the Brothers Karamazov and the notion of the Grand Inquisitor.
00:35:39.340So, I want to address all three of those points.
00:35:43.460So, the first point is that the developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, pointed out that the last stage of cognitive development, as far as he was concerned, was adolescent messianism.
00:35:56.260And what he meant by that was that people between the ages of 16 and 21, when they're undergoing their last great neural pruning, by the way, they sort of settle into their adult identities.
00:36:10.480And the way that human beings catalyze their adult identity is by identifying with something beyond themselves.
00:36:15.500And so, in the archaic situation, that would be with tribe, for example, but also with the traditions of the tribe, right, rather than just the people that are there presently now, with the ancient traditions of the tribe.
00:36:29.940Now, there's a messianic urge that comes along with that, which could be expressed, would be expressed in modern terms as something like the desire of young people to save the planet.
00:36:40.460Okay, so that's a true psychological hunger.
00:36:42.480Now, what's being offered by the radical left to address that messianic need is something like, it's very simple, and this is part of the problem.
00:36:53.800It's like, well, to be Christ, to be the Messiah, you have to face down the apocalypse, right?
00:37:36.840The negative side is, well, you can also do it with absolutely no effort on your part, because all you have to do is oppose the right things.
00:37:45.740And it also lifts the moral burden from your shoulders, because instead of having to undergo a psychological transformation that would involve confrontation of all of your own inadequacies, let's say, to put yourself on the right path spiritually, you can just demonize whoever happens to be convenient for demonization.
00:38:06.900And in the radical left case, it would be anything to do with the industrial or corporate world, and you can put all the sins on the scapegoat's shoulders, and you're done with them.
00:38:15.800And so, that's an expanded vision of that messianism, right?
00:38:19.320It's this overwhelmingly simple solution to a very complex moral problem.
00:38:25.540All right, now, on the identity front, you laid out a bunch of issues that I think are extremely relevant.
00:38:31.380So, you know that people are struggling with their identities, and what's happened is they're also being offered a one-idea-fits-all-problem solution, which is, well, your identity is nothing other than your group identity.
00:38:44.540It's your sexual proclivity, which is a pretty pathetic identity.
00:39:48.900Okay, so, look, a person has to be bound into an intimate relationship, and everybody needs and wants that.
00:39:55.120So, that's the first level of social integration.
00:39:57.980And then the couple has to be integrated within a family.
00:40:02.520And then the family within a neighborhood, and the neighborhood within a community,
00:40:06.000and the community within a town, a town within the state, the state within a nation,
00:40:10.680and then the nation, let's say, into something approximating whatever web of international agreements is necessary to minimally keep the peace.
00:40:18.620That's a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.
00:40:22.580In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.
00:52:57.440I think that that is still distinct from a second question that you raised, which is also a good question, which is, I think, what the left—and I'm a big fan of taking the best arguments we possibly can to understand, you know, what we're taking seriously here—is the marginal point.
00:53:14.820Is who's at the outer end of the margin.
00:53:17.220And there, I think some of this relates to not just a failure of an individual temporally over the course of a lifetime to depart from the ideal, but some ways in which a certain person cannot themselves be part of the ideal ever.
00:53:34.000What brings us into this world is real.
00:53:35.680Be it gender, be it sexual orientation, be it other attributes that make one successful or not in a system that's set up in a certain way, there is literally a reality of permanent marginalization for some, even according to an ideally structured system.
00:53:52.160And so I think it's important to take that seriously.
00:53:55.020But the problem with the modern left, the modern radical left, is it turns that exercise of interrogating the question of what we do at the margin and makes a whole new system out of it, right?
00:54:09.180What began as a challenge to the system on behalf of the marginalized becomes the new system.
00:54:15.960That is the essence of the woke cancer, actually.
00:54:18.720I didn't mind it when it was an idea in the halls of a liberal arts academy to think about at least debate how it is we accommodate the people who are marginalized in a system that is still an ideal system.
00:54:28.180That's an open conversation that at least under parameters of free speech, which, as you said, is an intermediating mechanism between kind of the creative liberals and the, you know, what was the juxtaposition to creative?
00:54:40.700That's great, but as long as we have free speech.
00:54:42.000But the problem is, when that challenge to the system becomes the new system, we're then heading to a very different place than even the ideal that the pro-marginal camp would have argued for.
00:54:53.000Okay, well, so we can lay that out a little bit, too.
00:54:56.520What happened to Nicola Sturgeon is a perfect example of that, the prime minister of Scotland who just resigned.
00:55:03.240Because here's the problem with the fringe, okay?
00:55:05.760So the ideal in the center is a unity.
00:56:06.420And, and, and I, and I think that that there's a point to that, but it's low resolution.
00:56:10.960I mean, the essence of what's going on is actually what you described, which is that once you've destroyed or invaded the ideal itself, by definition, the being on the fringes is sort of nihilistic at its core.
00:56:22.740And so at that point, it's a free for all, which is to say that, okay, well, you thought you were on the fringe as being gay.
00:56:32.720You could see the feminist version of this too.
00:56:34.040Title IX, women's sports, you know, women are on the fringe.
00:56:37.460Well, then when that itself becomes the center of the story, you just wait till you just say that the men become the women that actually, through the back door, decimate the existence of women's sports.
00:56:48.400It's not because they weren't funded pre-Title IX, but even after funding, the essence of it is gone if biological men are competing as women.
00:56:56.320Same thing with respect to the, with respect to being gay, all of this time to sort of accept somebody who is attracted to someone of a different sex at birth by saying that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired at birth, right?
00:57:09.140That was the premise of the gay rights movement, and I think there's a lot of truth in it too, is completely undercut by a new movement that says your sex itself is completely fluid over the course of your lifetime.
00:57:18.400So it isn't quite what some people will say is they will eventually eat their own.
00:57:24.320It's the fact that they've itself lost the structure against which they at least had the liberty to be on the fringe of, right?
00:57:31.140And so that's not to say that we shouldn't have, you know, conversations for, you know, disabled people or whatever in the, you know, American Disabilities Act context.
00:57:39.180That's what comes up in a political context.
00:57:40.560There's a, there's a whole discussion to be had about how we deal with this problem of the fringe, how we deal with accommodation against the backdrop of ideals.
00:57:48.760And I want to be really clear, I don't dismiss that conversation.
00:57:53.320In fact, I think that should be the product of dialectic.
00:57:55.340I think free speech can actually be a mechanism for sorting out those kinds of questions.
00:57:59.340And I don't reject their importance, but I think that what's happened right now is the obsession with the fringe has, has eviscerated the ideal itself, which leaves both those who espoused the ideals and even those who identified themselves as one time being a member of a fringe, all worse off in the end.
00:58:18.660And that's a, due to a failure of the conservative movement.
00:58:20.660It's a failure of the conservative movement.
00:58:22.140See, we can blame the people on the fringe for, you know, getting us there.
00:58:25.700They were just the agents and the pawns who moved it, but it's the, it's the role of the conservative movement to keep that structure intact.
00:58:50.020And I think that in some ways you've made a more powerful philosophical case for my candidacy that in my first week I have yet to do yet, which is that it requires defying the odds of having somebody who is both conscientious, conscientious conservative, as you, as you noted, but who has the capacity for being visionary and having the vision of recreating that structure, that solar system around which the rest of the fringes can orbit.
00:59:15.500And, and that's inherently an unlikelihood, but you said, by the psychological nature of creativity and conscientiousness, those are not supposed to coincide.
00:59:26.680It's also what calls me into this race because it is what our moment demands because we're not starting from neutral territory.
00:59:33.360We're starting from the state of, of, you know, entropic chaos that you highlight in the desert, not, we're not, we're starting from being lost in the desert.
00:59:43.520And so thank you because you have, in a philosophical, in a deeply philosophically grounded way, made the case for my candidacy and why I am doing this.
00:59:53.900Whether I will not, I will deliver or not the next year and a half remains to be told, but that's at least the challenge I'm setting out to take on.
01:00:01.400Well, with this group that I've been working with in London, we've also set forward a couple of other propositions too, which is that if your policy requires compulsion or force, it's at least suboptimal.
01:00:13.820And so we're trying to play an invitational game.
01:00:16.320And so you could imagine that on the visionary horizon, your goal as a visionary is to produce an image that's so compelling that people of their own free accord say, yeah, you know, I'd be willing to sacrifice to that end.
01:00:29.420Yes. Yes. Willing to sacrifice. I love the way you frame that because, because you can, you can make a sacrifice if you know what you are sacrificing for actually.
01:00:39.120So this was a big part of my upbringing, right? I mean, immigrant parents from India, Hindu tradition came to this country, part and parcel of parenting, part and parcel of growing up as a kid in that household.
01:00:50.440The idea of sacrifice was woven into my upbringing, right?
01:00:53.500Grandparents who lived in the house because it was their duty to take care of their parents, because that was just familial sacrifice needed to be made.
01:01:02.620Sacrifices needed to be made to raise my brother and I, to have the academic achievements that we did in the education.
01:01:09.360It happened on the back of parents who actually said there's more to life than just following your latest self-indulgence.
01:01:14.660But these, these things can be done if you know what you're sacrificing for.
01:01:19.360I draw that as an analogy to some of my policy agenda.
01:01:21.920This is a harder sell, but I think it's true too.
01:01:24.120The United States today needs to, I've made the case, declare independence from China.
01:01:29.720That's a whole separate geopolitical discussion we can have.
01:01:32.380Why I think that's important, why I think there's an opportunity.
01:01:34.920But I've also been, even in week one, very clear, this will involve some measure of sacrifice.
01:01:40.120In fact, if there's some resistance, I'm getting to the Declaration of Independence proposition of China.
01:01:45.780It's actually coming from some Republicans who are unwilling to make that sacrifice, who have become so addicted to buying cheap stuff.
01:01:52.040But again, I say that we can make those sacrifices if we know what we are sacrificing for.
01:01:57.520And so this idea of sacrifice, I think, is fundamental to this question of identity.
01:02:01.800Once you're grounded in identity, once you're grounded in who you are and what you might be willing to make a sacrifice for, it's almost a litmus test for identity.
01:02:08.640If you have nothing that you're willing to make a sacrifice for, it means you have no identity, right?
01:03:20.220So, then you might say, well, why sacrifice that?
01:03:23.600And 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,
01:03:43.240A, 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.
01:03:54.600And there's nothing about that that's arbitrary.
01:03:56.940And so the question isn't, who is going to rule you?
01:04:03.380How can I set my life up so no one can rule me?
01:04:05.760The question is, what is it that I'm going to work towards allowing to rule me?
01:04:11.980And 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.
01:04:20.400And then that ties into this whole hierarchical identity.
01:04:24.480You know, you sacrifice your whims to your partner.
01:04:28.400You and your partner sacrifice your whims to your children.
01:04:32.560Your family sacrifices its whims to the community.
01:04:35.460And all of that, now you want that to be done harmoniously, and you want it to be done voluntarily.
01:05:07.620We can make these sacrifices if we know what's worth sacrificing for.
01:05:11.560That's the missing, what I call in the conservative movement, to borrow from David Hume.
01:05:15.100David 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.
01:05:24.400He could say what the shade of blue was without ever having seen it.
01:05:27.080That was a challenge to his theory of empiricism.
01:05:29.900I 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.
01:05:38.240But it's duty that we actually autonomously opt into by way of our free choice and our free will.
01:05:51.540The 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.
01:05:58.940I've gotten this actually a lot on the road.
01:06:00.600I was in Iowa and New Hampshire last week.
01:06:02.600I do draw a distinction between this idea of freedom and autonomy amongst adults versus in children.
01:06:08.880So, you know, one of the things that I've said that rankles, I think, a lot of the libertarian-leaning conservatives or whatever, and I used to call myself a libertarian for a bunch of reasons I'm not anymore.
01:06:19.320But, you know, is this idea that children are different than adults, okay?
01:06:23.680And so that period you talked about between 16 and 21, I mean, I'll just even take the easier end of the spectrum.
01:06:32.100If 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?
01:06:46.660I mean, that at the very least is an inconsistency in the way we treat this.
01:06:49.980Now, 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.
01:07:06.060It is, you phrased it very politely, it would be suboptimal, I believe is the word you used.
01:07:10.780I think that that is the most gracious way of putting that.
01:07:14.300I think it should be avoided is the way I would say it as a prospective policymaker and leader of the country.
01:07:19.460But I don't apply the same rules of the road as it applies to children because none of us believe that children actually, you know, children actually should be treated as the same autonomous agents that they ought to be on the other side of entering adulthood.
01:07:33.580Now 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.
01:07:50.600So 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 them repeat it 10 times in case you didn't notice, right?
01:08:08.720It's repeated 10 times in the story, nine or 10 times.
01:08:11.780He tells Moses to let my people go, which is of course a very famous phrase, but that's not the phrase.
01:08:18.660The phrase is, let my people go so that they may worship or celebrate me in the wilderness, in the desert.
01:08:26.480And so what it does is it sets up not freedom, but ordered freedom.
01:08:32.380And so then you might ask yourself, well, what constitutes ordered freedom?
01:08:46.340And a game is a good analogy because people play games voluntarily and they want to play them and they enjoy them.
01:08:53.140And so if you set something like, if you set a social structure up with a game-like substructure, then people voluntarily hop aboard.
01:09:03.160Now, the free market response to the problem of the margins is to produce a plethora of games.
01:09:11.020And so that 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.
01:09:22.640And I think you can see that in the gay community, for example, especially among male homosexuals, because the entertainment industry,
01:09:29.620especially on the more explicitly cultural end, is dominated by gay men.
01:09:37.080And there's a reason for that as far as I'm concerned, because male homosexuality is associated with heightened levels of creativity.
01:11:41.040It'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?
01:11:58.860And then say what type of diversity you espouse.
01:12:02.260That's really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose.
01:12:06.340Different types of institutions should want different kinds of diversity, and they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don't want.
01:12:14.740I'll actually give you one example that I use that's sort of funny, you know, at times is I'm a vegetarian, okay?
01:12:21.460I don't eat meat because I believe it is, in my tradition, morally wrong to kill animals solely for culinary pleasure.
01:12:29.040There 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.
01:12:34.020I respect other people's right and freedom to go in a different direction.
01:12:37.960But take the example of me working at a steakhouse, okay?
01:12:42.200I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse, even if I would deliver the ever-prized form of diversity of thought.
01:12:49.120See, people sometimes are loose in terms of diversity of thought instead of diversity of appearance.
01:12:53.100Yeah, yeah, I'm in favor of diversity of thought over diversity of appearance, too.
01:12:55.820But even diversity of thought is too low resolution.
01:13:00.820But 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.
01:13:10.240Because the kind of diversity you want there should be in service of your purpose.
01:13:15.200And so I think this revival of the idea of purpose itself gives meaning to diversity itself.
01:13:21.780And 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.
01:13:29.640There's a couple of places we can go with that.
01:13:32.800So one of the things you're pointing out, and it's in keeping with this Burkean notion of subsidiarity that has its origins in this exodus narrative, by the way,
01:13:41.120is that there's going to be a variety of institutions at each level of the hierarchy.
01:13:47.120So you could imagine there's a variety of forms of couples.
01:13:51.280You know, there's going to be some couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner, for example.
01:13:56.300There's going to be some couples where the man is.
01:17:38.800But 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.
01:17:52.840And so I think much of the social structure that we have created in absence of that purpose and vacuum, I mean, 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.
01:18:08.800And 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.
01:18:20.740I think 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.
01:18:29.140I think China may do this favor, favor, I use in air quotes, for the United States.
01:18:33.480But which of those was the sense in which you meant it, right?
01:18:36.620In first principles, developing that to be resilient across time?
01:18:40.640Or are you also subconsciously making some kind of empirical prediction here that in absence of this, we're going to have this as a response, at least, that will cause us to adapt?
01:18:52.760I would say that you don't have to think except when you're failing.
01:18:59.260Because the purpose of thinking is to calculate a new trajectory.
01:19:03.720And if the trajectory you're pursuing is producing the desired results, then your theory is intact.
01:19:09.240Well, then the question emerges, which is, well, how much failure is necessary to make you think?
01:21:06.080Because if it's not going to be somebody who delivers a vision, but from an actually conservatively grounded perspective,
01:21:12.940with the consciousness of a conservative that still brings a creativity, a vision to this,
01:21:16.640well, then it may have to be done by force, by way of apocalypse anyway.
01:21:22.060And, you know, 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.
01:21:29.340I 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,
01:21:43.480that compels me to want to do this better than I have at any point in the last week.
01:21:49.780So, I've watched a lot of people in the last five years embark on political careers.
01:21:56.460You 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.
01:22:03.220And this is what I see happening consistently.
01:22:06.860So, neophytes enter the political arena.
01:22:09.900Now, 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.
01:22:18.480And, you know, two thumbs up for that.
01:22:20.120I think that's a necessary precondition.
01:22:22.500But they get intimidated in the new arena, because the stakes are super high, and they don't have a lot of experience.
01:22:29.020And so, what they end up doing is they end up hiring communication teams, and there are experts at political communication,
01:22:37.000and they usually involve pollsters, for example, and speechwriters, people who will help you craft your message.
01:22:43.460And then what I see happening, and this is inevitable, this is the inevitable consequence, is that the person running loses their voice.
01:22:50.760And they often lose the election, too, by the way.
01:22:53.340They lose their voice and the election.
01:23:35.660And the other thing is, is that people are going to respond positively to that because they're desperate for truth.
01:23:41.200Now, you can tell that because Trump was successful.
01:23:43.940Now, I'm not trying to put Trump out, you know, on some pedestal, up on some pedestal as the world's greatest truth teller.
01:23:50.580But I would say that one of the things Trump did was speak without, without, you could say without forethought, but that isn't exactly right.
01:24:02.400Yes, he basically, for all of his flaws, he did, he struck, especially the working class, as genuine because he was willing to say what he thought.
01:24:13.000And what was cool about that was that he won.
01:24:15.980And so, I'm really interested in your candidacy, you know, because you're coming in from left field, you know.
01:24:21.720You're going to definitely be a dark horse candidate.
01:24:25.580Like, and God only knows how that'll play out.
01:24:27.220But one of the advantages that I think you have, apart from your financial background and the fact that you're 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.
01:25:04.360You 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.
01:25:09.100I 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.
01:25:17.180But I'll tell you a couple rules of the road that I've, you know, tied my hands to the mast to make this easy for me in a good way.
01:25:24.080Is no one's going to write another speech for me.
01:25:27.040In fact, even when I give speeches, I don't write my own speeches.
01:25:33.080In fact, a fun—I haven't said this yet.
01:25:35.340A 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.
01:25:51.120And, 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.
01:25:59.300And then people train you and prep you with your talking points.
01:26:01.360And 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.
01:26:11.560Instead, actually, what I've said is—and I think we're actually going to do this.
01:26:15.380I 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.
01:26:28.780That's a big part of the next year and a half.
01:26:30.340And I am running to run—I'm not running to make a point.
01:26:33.280I'm running because I believe seeing this all the way through is the ticket to drive maximal positive change.
01:26:39.040That's going to require a lot of learning.
01:26:40.720We're just going to tape it in forums like this, and we'll put it out to the internet.
01:26:57.480But 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.
01:27:02.420So I just think that—I think that more honesty will go a long way.
01:27:07.620I 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.
01:27:38.780You 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.
01:27:46.680And if you can't do that, A, you shouldn't lead, and B, you should learn.
01:27:53.860And people do respond to that much better.
01:27:56.840Like, 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.
01:28:03.780Because you can make a more coherent argument in writing and a denser argument.
01:28:08.920But then I've tried to read it on YouTube, you know, and it doesn't work.
01:29:02.260You just got, 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.
01:29:11.660I think there is something about legacy media that sort of forces that.
01:29:15.060But I don't like just blaming legacy media, too.
01:29:17.360Because I go on a lot of TV hits as well.
01:29:19.880I don't think you have to do it that way, either.
01:29:22.100And in a certain way, I think that the last best chance for reviving legacy media is if the people who go on it stop behaving like the cartoons that legacy media created for the last 30 years.
01:29:35.200This could actually be the source of saving legacy media itself.
01:29:37.980Just because you're given three to five minutes doesn't mean that you actually have to stick to those talking points.
01:29:54.960Because even if you were more likely to win the other way, you have your soul sucked out of you, right?
01:30:02.020You're just a hollowed-out husk of yourself.
01:30:03.880So if the point of winning was to go sit in the White House, then, okay, that's one thing.
01:30:08.180If the point's 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.
01:30:12.780I 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.
01:30:23.540I think I looked at the empirical evidence.
01:30:35.560There's no evidence in relationship to incumbents.
01:30:38.220Incumbent spending is completely irrelevant to electoral outcome.
01:30:41.520There's some minor evidence on the challenger front that more spending makes the difference.
01:30:45.920But you can't tell if that's because of the spending or because the more popular candidates are more likely to raise money.
01:30:51.700And, you know, if you look at someone like Joe Rogan, Rogan's a very interesting figure because he's basically created a whole media empire out of nothing.
01:31:24.560And so maybe it's, I mean, I'm certainly betting it's a formula for success.
01:31:28.420I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think so.
01:31:30.560But 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.
01:31:43.500Which is exactly what the political consultant class wants to do, right?
01:31:45.960They want to say, hey, you're positioned to lead.
01:33:05.600Because, for example, you might tilt the discussion of the election in a direction that's extremely good for the country.
01:33:13.660And that could be completely independent of whether or not you win the presidency.
01:33:16.980In 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.
01:33:25.980And I've seen this with other political leaders, you know, like, I talked to Netanyahu a while back,
01:33:31.000and he really risked his political skin and his party's political skin to bring in necessary economic reform in Israel.
01:33:38.760And that crashed his party and him for like a decade.
01:33:59.120And 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.
01:34:07.160But just because you said the other way doesn't necessarily mean you lose, this other way doesn't necessarily mean you even win.
01:34:12.980Even 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
01:34:22.720without actually having something of substance left on the inside of who occupies that stuffed suit.
01:35:30.980I think that that's what winning and losing really ought to be defined as.
01:35:35.040And then we're making this empirical bet.
01:35:36.860You pointed out to Donald Trump in 2015.
01:35:39.320I think empirically, you know, my bet is where yours is, where that, in this moment, probably is the more electorally successful strategy anyway.
01:35:49.460But I'm less sure of that than I am sure that this is how I'm going to do it.
01:35:55.780And that's how we're going to keep it.
01:35:56.600Well, I would love to keep talking to you.
01:35:58.960I mean, I've been really fortunate over the last six years.
01:36:01.560Because 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.
01:36:19.600You know, and there's been some pretty intense discussions about that at multiple times.
01:36:24.000But 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.
01:36:31.960And 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.
01:36:41.400And, you know, if you do put that goal to keep control of your tongue first and foremost in mind, and then you have people who can reflect that back to you, you know, you can stay on the proper track.
01:36:53.220And I think the idea of not letting people, I just can't believe political figures have other people write their speeches.
01:37:05.480And they'll say, I'll channel your thoughts.
01:37:07.040But, you know, as, you know, whoever said it, language guards the channel through which thought flows, right?
01:37:11.180My English, my 11th grade English teacher basically said that, right?
01:37:13.560If you can't write it down yourself, you probably don't know what you wanted to actually say.
01:37:18.180But anyway, here's an ask that I'll have for you.
01:37:20.580I mean, honestly, honest to God, and you're, you know, the program, et cetera, you do call me back on here and call me out or don't call me back out here and call me.
01:37:30.420If 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.
01:37:54.640You can just provide us with an update, you know, and then you can walk everybody through the whole experience and we can talk over these issues continually.
01:38:01.800And you call me out whether you think I'm actually staying true to what I'm setting out to.
01:38:06.940See, this conversation is ground zero.
01:38:09.920And I'll give you my honest take of how I think things are going.
01:38:12.980And 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.
01:38:25.680Even if I'm doing better in the polling, but I'm becoming some hollowed out husk of myself, let's just call it a day and move on because that's not really what this whole enterprise is about.
01:38:37.040Well, 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?
01:38:45.540And so that's always the grounds for a good discussion.