The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 341. Jordan Peterson Interviews Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy

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00:00:57.420 Hi everybody. I'm very happy today to talk with Vivek Ramaswamy, who has just announced his candidacy for the American presidency.

00:01:18.100 And is going to, well, hopefully change the political landscape in doing so.

00:01:23.780 Vivek is an American business leader and New York Times bestselling author of Woke Inc.

00:01:30.140 Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam.

00:01:33.720 Along with his second book, Nation of Victims.

00:01:38.000 Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

00:01:42.320 Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he often recounts the sage advice from his father.

00:01:49.940 If you're going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding.

00:01:53.940 This set the course for his life.

00:01:55.740 A nationally ranked tennis player, valedictorian of his high school, St. Xavier.

00:02:01.080 He went on to graduate summer comrade in biology from Harvard,

00:02:04.860 and then received his JD from Yale Law School while working at a hedge fund.

00:02:09.000 He then started a biotech company, Roy Vant Sciences,

00:02:13.460 where he oversaw the development of five drugs that became FDA approved.

00:02:20.280 In 2022, this is an important side note, he founded Strive,

00:02:25.100 an Ohio-based asset management firm that directly competes with asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard,

00:02:31.940 who used the money of everyday citizens, that includes you, by the way,

00:02:36.900 to advance environmental and social agendas that many citizens and capital owners disagree with.

00:02:42.860 That's a far more important issue than you might think,

00:02:45.440 and we're going to discuss that a lot as we proceed through our conversation today.

00:02:48.920 Well, hello, Vivek and everyone watching.

00:02:52.120 It's here on the YouTube platform.

00:02:55.380 It's always good to have everybody's time and attention.

00:02:57.660 Vivek Ramaswamy, who I'm talking to today, is running for president,

00:03:01.060 which seems to be quite the preposterous thing to do for anyone, I would say.

00:03:07.000 This next 2024 election is going to be some interesting contest, as far as I can tell.

00:03:14.200 We're not going to have seen anything like it.

00:03:16.340 And the fact that you threw your hat in the ring, I think, is part and parcel of the whole show.

00:03:21.940 So let's start by just exploring why it is that you decided to do this, and we should do that.

00:03:31.360 Why did you decide to do this?

00:03:33.480 And what is it that you hope to accomplish by making this run?

00:03:38.620 So let's start with why you're doing it.

00:03:40.880 So you know some of the journey I've been on over the last few years,

00:03:44.900 but I think that's what led me to the doorstep.

00:03:47.340 I've been addressing for the last few years this merger of state power and corporate power

00:03:53.000 that together do what neither can do on its own.

00:03:56.660 And part of me has long believed that the Republican Party in the United States is behind by 40 years, right?

00:04:02.320 Reciting slogans they memorized in 1980 when the real threat to liberty today is different.

00:04:07.560 So I've taken on the woke industrial complex in America through the books I've written,

00:04:11.700 through traveling the country, most recently taking on the ESG movement by starting Strive last year.

00:04:17.800 And that's where my headspace was.

00:04:19.260 I did not think I was going into politics.

00:04:21.500 I thought that I wanted to actually avoid the limiting shackles of partisan politics.

00:04:26.320 It just felt so constraining.

00:04:28.220 I thought of running for the U.S. Senate.

00:04:29.640 I decided not to do that.

00:04:30.620 I said, no, no, no.

00:04:31.200 I want to do this independently as an independent voice, thought leader, author.

00:04:36.020 And then, you know, look, I had successfully built a biotech company before.

00:04:39.800 Let me put those skills to work by starting Strive.

00:04:42.460 That was where my exclusive focus was going to be.

00:04:44.940 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.

00:04:54.260 But I got to be really honest about this.

00:04:56.020 And this was the realization that dawned on me after, you know, years into that journey is that it does take two to tango.

00:05:03.780 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.

00:05:17.000 Because that only works if there's a culture that's really willing to buy it up.

00:05:21.860 It only works if there's a populace that's buying up what they're selling.

00:05:25.400 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?

00:05:42.600 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.

00:05:52.500 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.

00:06:04.060 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.

00:06:14.680 I do not believe we have a good answer to that question in this country.

00:06:18.740 I'm on a mission to deliver an answer to that question.

00:06:22.560 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.

00:06:30.640 That is what allows wokeism and gender ideology and climatism and COVIDism to fill the void. 0.93

00:06:37.160 These are secular religions that prey on that vacuum. 1.00

00:06:39.540 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.

00:06:50.280 And I believe that there isn't a candidate in this field, I believe, who's quite up to that challenge.

00:06:55.420 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.

00:06:59.880 Okay, well, you brought up a lot of very complex issues in that description of your motives.

00:07:07.040 And so I'm going to walk through them one by one to unpack them for everybody.

00:07:10.240 Because, you know, you said the Republicans are 40 years behind.

00:07:13.440 And I think that's probably true of organizations like the UN as well.

00:07:18.820 And 40 years is a long time, given how much has changed in the last 10 years.

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00:09:01.460 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.

00:09:15.940 I just interviewed the CEO of the national, what's the organization?

00:09:24.660 State Treasurer's Organization.

00:09:27.340 It's a financial officer's organization.

00:09:30.120 Now, there's 28 states.

00:09:31.060 Yeah, I know them.

00:09:32.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:33.500 Well, they're pushing hard back against the ESG movement.

00:09:37.040 But, you know, we talked about in that podcast the fact that people don't even know what the hell that means.

00:09:41.940 Now, you opened your description.

00:09:43.520 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.

00:09:56.980 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.

00:10:10.380 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.

00:10:28.340 And one of the fronts upon which that battle is being fought is the ESG movement.

00:10:34.020 And so do you want to walk through that for everyone just to bring them up to date?

00:10:38.900 Absolutely.

00:10:39.520 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.

00:10:48.520 So the issue with the ESG movement, it stands for environmental, social, and governance factors.

00:10:55.600 It's designed to sound boring for a reason.

00:10:58.200 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.

00:11:06.620 So 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.

00:11:19.480 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.

00:11:24.020 What 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.

00:11:33.120 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,

00:11:45.940 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,

00:11:53.680 and which don't advance the financial best interests of most people whose money is actually used.

00:11:58.500 So what does that mean?

00:11:59.240 Think about yourself saving in a retirement account or a 401k account or a brokerage account.

00:12:04.580 You think that the person who's managing that money is exclusively looking after your best financial interests.

00:12:10.220 It turns out they're not.

00:12:11.720 They're also looking after advancing these other environmental and social goals.

00:12:15.940 Who are these institutions?

00:12:17.880 They're asset management firms like BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard or Invesco or countless others

00:12:24.780 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,

00:12:33.920 with net zero standards by 2050, with modern diversity, equity, and inclusion standards.

00:12:39.300 And those three or four firms alone manage about $20 trillion, maybe even a little bit more.

00:12:45.260 That's more than the U.S. GDP right now in the hands of three to four financial institutions.

00:12:50.580 But they're not using their money to do it.

00:12:53.300 They're using the money of probably most listeners to this exchange right now, people watching this.

00:12:59.380 Good chances that their money, their retirement accounts, their brokerage accounts are being used to tell companies like Apple to adopt racial equity audits 0.80

00:13:08.220 that Apple's board initially did not want to adopt, to tell companies like Chevron to adopt scope three emissions caps,

00:13:15.420 which I can talk about what that means, but that Chevron did not want to adopt.

00:13:18.980 And that most people watching this probably didn't want to force on Chevron either, but their money was used to do it anyway.

00:13:25.160 That's what this ESG movement is all about.

00:13:27.660 So how did we get here is actually a really important question.

00:13:32.220 And a lot of this began, there were two big milestones seeing the supercharging of this ESG movement in our economy and in capital markets.

00:13:39.720 The 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.

00:13:49.080 What happened in the 2008 financial crisis, and by the way, I had a front row seat to this.

00:13:53.380 I got my first job in New York at an elite hedge fund in the fall of 2007.

00:13:59.120 You know, the fund I worked at got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.

00:14:03.080 This is my first job out of college.

00:14:04.620 This is fun stuff for me, right?

00:14:06.340 A lot of people lost a lot of money on Wall Street.

00:14:10.120 I didn't have any money, so it didn't matter to me.

00:14:11.940 It was more of a learning experience, which was a pretty rich one.

00:14:15.020 But I had a front row seat.

00:14:15.940 What 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.

00:14:27.640 I view that as a major mistake.

00:14:29.100 It's a cardinal sin.

00:14:30.140 And 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.

00:14:40.000 This was crony capitalism all the way down.

00:14:42.660 And the left actually had a point in this country.

00:14:45.920 Occupy Wall Street was born.

00:14:47.100 And what they said is, look, if you're going to play that crony capitalist game, then you know what?

00:14:51.880 We're going to play our game.

00:14:52.820 We're just going to take money from your wealthy corporate fat cat pockets and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people. 0.74

00:14:59.240 Because that's what we on the far left want to do on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

00:15:03.140 But 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.

00:15:11.300 Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president of the United States.

00:15:14.120 There was a lot of cultural currents in the U.S. that said, well, wait a minute there.

00:15:18.520 The real problem isn't quite economic injustice or poverty.

00:15:22.500 It's really racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry.

00:15:26.580 And by the way, climate change.

00:15:27.940 This is post-Al Gore's inconvenient truth.

00:15:31.000 This actually presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street to say that, no, no, no.

00:15:36.360 Okay, guys, we'll make a deal with you.

00:15:38.560 We 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.

00:15:54.700 We'll do all of these things, but we don't do it for free.

00:15:59.700 We expect the new left to look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact.

00:16:06.080 And so they defanged Occupy Wall Street.

00:16:08.520 Most people don't even remember what Occupy Wall Street is.

00:16:10.980 It went by the wayside.

00:16:12.040 And 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.

00:16:23.060 And that's exactly what happened.

00:16:25.020 So that was the first big event.

00:16:26.220 Do you think it was that conscious?

00:16:30.080 Or do you think that that was the consequence of a thousand micro decisions?

00:16:34.240 You know, I mean, were there—

00:16:36.520 The latter.

00:16:37.140 It's easy to see us—

00:16:38.540 Okay, the latter.

00:16:39.400 It was the latter, yeah.

00:16:40.080 I 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.

00:16:48.680 No.

00:16:49.360 This isn't—and that's like the classical conspiracy theory.

00:16:52.120 This isn't a conspiracy theory.

00:16:53.200 It's just emergent reality, right?

00:16:55.280 You watch it in slow motion.

00:16:56.920 People need to understand when they think about what a conspiracy theory is that turns into reality.

00:17:01.340 It's that if you just watch the camera reel in slow motion, it plays out in dangerously boring form.

00:17:08.300 This is how the sausage gets made.

00:17:11.260 So anyway, that was the first catalyst.

00:17:13.220 And 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.

00:17:20.860 It's at least interesting to watch.

00:17:22.240 Something that began as a challenge to the system, stakeholder capitalism and ESG.

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00:18:37.080 Slowly became ossified as the system, and there's a lot of forces behind that.

00:18:42.500 The rise of passive index funds played a big role, and that's a discussion I can get into another time or maybe later in this discussion.

00:18:49.920 But a big then catalyst came out in—there was two big catalysts that came out.

00:18:53.020 One was in 2016, and one was in 2018.

00:18:56.020 The thing that happened in 2016, of course, is that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

00:19:00.620 This created a seismic shockwave across the establishment class, both in capital markets as well as the linkage between business and politics.

00:19:11.500 And what they said is, okay, wait a minute.

00:19:13.460 This game may not be played the way it's supposed to be going forward.

00:19:16.960 If 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.

00:19:29.360 And then they were vindicated, or so they thought, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords in 2018.

00:19:35.700 Not a lot of people realize this.

00:19:37.160 That was a big event.

00:19:39.660 That is the event that threw kerosene on this ESG storm.

00:19:43.680 And, 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.

00:19:49.380 This was a big deal.

00:19:50.720 So 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.

00:20:00.420 They 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.

00:20:13.900 Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, started saying similar things, that we have to earn our social license to operate.

00:20:19.620 And that's really what caused this ESG thing to spread like wildfire, was that event of pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords.

00:20:27.300 Okay, 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.

00:20:41.220 And so let's talk about the climate catastrophe for a moment or two, and also define stakeholder capitalism.

00:20:48.000 Because 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.

00:21:11.500 Now, 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.

00:21:28.900 But here's a rule of thumb, everyone who's listening can see, try this out for themselves and see what they think.

00:21:35.800 But 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,

00:21:51.320 then you have defined yourself as insufficient for the job.

00:21:56.740 You should be able to maintain a calm head regardless of the impending emergency, because there's going to be emergencies.

00:22:02.980 And if you become a tyrant during an emergency, then you're a tyrant.

00:22:07.280 And so that's the psychological issue.

00:22:10.080 Even if there is an emergency, we shouldn't be aggregating power into an elite.

00:22:14.860 And then there's a second element, too, which is, yeah, what bloody emergency precisely?

00:22:20.020 You know, I've talked a lot to Bjorn Lomberg, for example, and many other people, I would say, as informed as Lomberg.

00:22:26.040 And there's no evidence even in the IPCC reports themselves that climate change is, first of all, entirely man-made, because it's not.

00:22:35.320 And 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

00:22:44.140 that justifies untold trillions of panicked dollars being spent while we simultaneously destabilize our power grids

00:22:52.640 and 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.

00:23:01.480 And also throw poor people into poverty and risk the fossil fuel infrastructure that feeds half the planet.

00:23:10.120 Because people also don't understand that ammonia is made out of fossil fuel and ammonia fertilizer feeds four billion people.

00:23:18.780 And so, so, so anyways, you said 2008 Wall Street is guilty because of the bailouts.

00:23:24.980 The lefties pushed them hard on the ethical front, and rightly so, they decide to turn to ESG.

00:23:31.000 But then that's also amplified by this sense of apocalyptic climate doom.

00:23:35.560 And so, what's your formulation of the environmental challenge that confronts challenges that confront us now?

00:23:45.340 How do you construe that?

00:23:47.040 So, I have more to say about the ESG story, but I got to pause on what you just said.

00:23:52.440 I just got to pause on what you just said.

00:23:53.800 It was really, some really good stuff in there.

00:23:56.200 Okay, 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?

00:24:05.500 So, the first thing you said was a humble and powerful point, which is even if there is some sort of existential apocalyptic issue,

00:24:12.820 you should not want to entrust the people who are going to then wield tyrannical force to address it,

00:24:18.060 not to mention the fact that the technical issue is itself a completely artificial one, right?

00:24:23.380 It is grounded on false premises that deserve to be called out.

00:24:27.120 And I can call those out.

00:24:28.300 Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, others can call them out.

00:24:30.580 We can go into all the details of that.

00:24:33.580 But the point I want to make is that those two critiques that you just offered, spot on as they are, are deeply linked.

00:24:39.880 And 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.

00:24:53.180 It's not like this was a tyrannical response to a threat.

00:24:56.680 It was the creation of an artificial threat to exercise tyrannical power itself.

00:25:01.880 Okay, it's a religious cult.

00:25:04.440 And 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.

00:25:17.420 It was really just about power and dominion and punishment all the way down.

00:25:22.440 And I can basically prove that to you in a short amount of time, right?

00:25:25.640 If 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.

00:25:34.360 But 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?

00:25:42.580 First of all, you'd be delineating which kind of carbon emissions matter.

00:25:45.980 I don't subscribe to the tenets of this religion, but I understand this religion.

00:25:49.060 I think it's worth understanding a religion even if you're not a practitioner.

00:25:51.180 Even if you subscribe to this religion, there's a difference between methane leakage and carbon dioxide.

00:25:57.060 Well, methane leakage is far worse in places like Russia and China.

00:26:00.480 So 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.

00:26:13.260 And by the way, this is exactly what the ESG movement, it's like the apostles of this church, right?

00:26:17.640 So BlackRock is like an apostle of this Spanish Inquisition-style church.

00:26:22.160 BlackRock forces companies like Exxon and Chevron to drop oil production to meet net zero standards by 2050.

00:26:28.700 Yet 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.

00:26:41.380 This is nuts if you think that you care about reducing carbon emissions.

00:26:45.080 And it's not even, as I was alluding to methane emissions before, it's not even net neutral.

00:26:49.800 Methane, even if you subscribe to this crazy religion, is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.

00:26:57.000 So it's not even net neutral, it's worse.

00:26:58.700 So that's the first breadcrumb that there's something else going on here.

00:27:01.560 The 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?

00:27:20.020 So that's the second little breadcrumb that suggests there's something else going on here.

00:27:23.760 And 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.

00:27:42.520 That's really what this climate movement is on.

00:27:44.760 And delivering that power that we've been talking about in the hands of the proper elite.

00:27:50.880 The grand inquisitors of our time, right?

00:27:52.540 So that's really what's going on.

00:27:55.680 Those are two stunning points, and I want to lay them out philosophically for a moment just so people get what this means completely.

00:28:05.000 So let's say that we do buy the propositions of what Vivek has been calling the climate religion.

00:28:11.540 We'll get back to that term later.

00:28:12.960 So 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.

00:28:26.580 Now, I don't accept any of that, and I know you don't as well, but we'll give the devil his due.

00:28:31.700 If that's actually the driving factor, then all fundamental actions and perceptions should be directed towards minimizing, let's say, carbon dioxide output.

00:28:43.060 But 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.

00:28:54.380 And since we all share the same atmosphere and China and other terribly governed countries have way worse environmental regulations.

00:29:01.720 They're not even in the same universe.

00:29:03.520 All we're doing is substituting relatively clean fossil fuel for relatively filthy fossil fuel.

00:29:09.660 And 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?

00:29:20.980 And 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.

00:29:36.860 And then, and that's like, that's a subtle mystery on the fossil fuel front.

00:29:40.740 But 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.

00:29:52.560 And 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.

00:30:00.340 And so why do you oppose them?

00:30:02.620 And, 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,

00:30:21.400 in 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.

00:30:37.100 That's exactly right.

00:30:38.040 So, 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.

00:30:49.500 So 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.

00:30:58.240 Yeah, so I mean that in two senses.

00:31:00.700 Worse is the sense in which it is a religious institution gone awry.

00:31:06.540 And then the second is in which it fills a psychological need for religion and God in the everyday person.

00:31:11.760 On 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,

00:31:20.720 which came from, not the Bible, but from Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, Brothers K, in his chapter entitled The Grand Inquisitor, actually.

00:31:30.300 And it tells the story of how Christ comes back to earth during the 15th or 16th century or whatever in Seville, Spain.

00:31:36.980 He'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.

00:31:44.740 And the whole climax of the chapter is the dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.

00:31:48.940 And what the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ is, look, we the church don't need you here anymore.

00:31:56.040 You are supposed to be a symbol that helps us do our work, but your presence here actually stops us from getting our work done.

00:32:03.520 And he sentences Christ to execution the next morning.

00:32:08.300 Swapping 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.

00:32:15.600 But that's also what's going on here is the climate is just an excuse.

00:32:18.420 And in fact, once you get into a discussion about actually addressing carbon emissions, say, with nuclear energy, they get very worried.

00:32:25.100 So they're sentencing nuclear energy to death because that's their Messiah and their Savior, right?

00:32:29.300 You said you wanted to actually get rid of carbon emissions.

00:32:31.660 Well, you would welcome the second coming of Christ, the second coming of the climate solution of nuclear energy.

00:32:37.220 No, no, no.

00:32:37.720 They sentence it to death because, as the Grand Inquisitor told Christ in that story, your presence here actually impedes our work.

00:32:44.240 You're just supposed to be a symbol for us.

00:32:45.760 So 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.

00:32:58.080 Now, the second question, though, is why are the parishioners worshiping at all?

00:33:01.220 And 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.

00:33:08.480 I just think we're in the middle of this identity crisis where we are so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity as Americans.

00:33:19.740 And 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.

00:33:32.300 Faith in God is a big one.

00:33:34.160 But patriotism is also a big one.

00:33:35.640 National identity is big.

00:33:37.120 Family is also pretty big in this category.

00:33:39.840 Even hard work, actually.

00:33:42.580 We can get into that later.

00:33:43.700 But these are sources of identity, sources of pride, sources of grounding.

00:33:47.680 They're grounded in truth.

00:33:49.440 And the way I look at us as human beings, I mean, this is a first personal reflection, right?

00:33:53.220 We're just, we're like blind bats.

00:33:55.680 We're lost in some cave in an abyss.

00:33:57.940 And we send out these sonar signals for our echolocation of identity, right?

00:34:02.560 We 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.

00:34:10.120 Okay, I send a signal out, family is one source of identity I get back.

00:34:13.840 God is another source of identity I get back.

00:34:16.680 My nation is another source of identity I get back.

00:34:18.980 My 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.

00:34:27.120 But when those things disappear, we send out that signal and then nothing comes back and then we're lost.

00:34:36.020 And so then we start grasping at artificial sources of that identity, racial identity, gender identity.

00:34:42.700 Where do you think this bizarre gender ideology happens to have arisen from? 0.92

00:34:47.740 Climate, disaster, catastrophism.

00:34:50.240 That's a source of identity too, climate instead of Christ.

00:34:53.720 And so it's no accident that we see all of these secular religions arise at the same time.

00:35:00.060 Why do we see wokeism at the same time as we see radical gender ideology?

00:35:03.480 Racial wokeism as gender ideology, as climatism, as COVID-ism. 0.90

00:35:07.400 It's a symptom of that deeper abyss that we're lost in.

00:35:12.360 And so that's what I care about.

00:35:15.180 Okay, now you broke this out in two ways.

00:35:17.300 You said, I'm going to walk through your argument.

00:35:19.440 You said there's an offer on hand from above, so to speak, from the ESG and climate ideologues.

00:35:26.240 But there's an also corresponding need in the population that's associated with a kind of emptiness.

00:35:32.680 Yes.

00:35:32.940 And so, okay.

00:35:34.380 And then you also talked about the Brothers Karamazov and the notion of the Grand Inquisitor.

00:35:39.340 So, I want to address all three of those points.

00:35:43.460 So, 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.

00:35:56.260 And 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.

00:36:09.000 They have to catalyze them.

00:36:10.480 And the way that human beings catalyze their adult identity is by identifying with something beyond themselves.

00:36:15.500 And 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.

00:36:27.840 And they'll be initiated into that.

00:36:29.940 Now, 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.

00:36:40.460 Okay, so that's a true psychological hunger.

00:36:42.480 Now, 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.

00:36:53.800 It's like, well, to be Christ, to be the Messiah, you have to face down the apocalypse, right?

00:37:00.000 That's the last judgment.

00:37:01.820 The apocalypse that currently confronts us is environmental.

00:37:05.000 You know, and environmental apocalypses have confronted us throughout the entire history of mankind.

00:37:09.400 So, we have an ecological, what would you say, a psychological predisposition to be alerted to environmental catastrophe.

00:37:17.000 Okay, so, there's an apocalypse.

00:37:19.340 It's environmental.

00:37:20.160 The environmental apocalypse is a consequence of carbon.

00:37:23.300 Carbon is a consequence of excess industrial output.

00:37:26.280 If you adopt the radical left ideology, which is anti-industrial, then you fulfill your messianic mission.

00:37:34.020 Now, that's on the positive side.

00:37:36.840 The 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.

00:37:45.740 And 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.

00:38:06.900 And 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.

00:38:15.800 And so, that's an expanded vision of that messianism, right?

00:38:19.320 It's this overwhelmingly simple solution to a very complex moral problem.

00:38:25.540 All right, now, on the identity front, you laid out a bunch of issues that I think are extremely relevant.

00:38:31.380 So, 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. 0.96

00:38:44.540 It's your sexual proclivity, which is a pretty pathetic identity. 0.92

00:38:47.980 It's your ethnicity. 1.00

00:38:48.920 It's your race.

00:38:49.600 It's some group identity, which also takes the responsibility off of you, by the way.

00:38:54.820 Now, you might say, well, what constitutes a valid identity in contrast to that?

00:39:01.280 And you've already pointed to a number of those things.

00:39:03.840 So, this is also where I think the psychological community has failed to a large degree on this front.

00:39:09.780 Now, we're the heirs of a liberal Protestant tradition, socially and psychologically,

00:39:18.460 and we believe that our identities are fundamentally individual and subjective.

00:39:24.820 Okay, but that's actually not true, because your identity is nested.

00:39:29.580 Now, you pointed, so let's think of nestings, okay, because we could build a hierarchy that's a proper hierarchy conceptually.

00:39:35.780 And this is a good way of formulating what actually constitutes a robust identity.

00:39:40.900 This is where you'd get signal for those, you know, those forays that you're putting out.

00:39:47.080 Sonar signals.

00:39:47.740 The sonar, exactly.

00:39:48.900 Okay, so, look, a person has to be bound into an intimate relationship, and everybody needs and wants that.

00:39:55.120 So, that's the first level of social integration.

00:39:57.980 And then the couple has to be integrated within a family.

00:40:02.520 And then the family within a neighborhood, and the neighborhood within a community,

00:40:06.000 and the community within a town, a town within the state, the state within a nation,

00:40:10.680 and then the nation, let's say, into something approximating whatever web of international agreements is necessary to minimally keep the peace.

00:40:18.620 That's a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.

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00:41:38.640 You know, in Exodus, in the Old Testament book, Exodus,

00:41:45.620 part of what that book addresses is what forms of governance are necessary as an alternative to tyranny,

00:41:52.560 so single top-down tyranny, the pharaoh,

00:41:55.500 or the desert, which is, you know, completely scattered individuality.

00:41:59.280 And the answer is, the technical answer is,

00:42:01.500 the subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.

00:42:04.340 And so that means, you know, as an individual, you have a responsibility.

00:42:07.540 As a couple, as a family member, as a community member, and all of those.

00:42:13.060 And then you can think of identity as the belonging in all of those hierarchical positions.

00:42:19.420 And you can think of psychological health, not as something that occurs in an interior space,

00:42:25.500 but as the harmony between all of those subsidiary levels.

00:42:29.280 So it's an emergent property of harmony and not something that's carried internally.

00:42:33.200 I love, I mean, this is beautiful stuff, actually.

00:42:38.400 And when you just described the desert versus pharaoh dynamic here, the separation,

00:42:45.400 something clicked for me, okay?

00:42:47.400 Yeah, what's a killer set of ideas.

00:42:49.300 Well, I mean, in a much more practical sense for me in a, you know,

00:42:53.100 something as mundane as a political race here, okay?

00:42:55.220 It clicks for me why I'm doing this, is that, yeah, you're right.

00:42:59.460 You and I and others like us have complained about how the left has actually preyed on that vacuum

00:43:04.840 by at least offering a substantive, even if false, fundamentally artificial set of identities to fill that void.

00:43:13.860 But actually, I'm sick of complaining about that without critiquing the conservative movement.

00:43:18.300 Where's the conservative movement in filling that identity with an alternative, right?

00:43:22.280 We can ring, we can do all the hand-wringing we want.

00:43:25.260 Where are we over the last 10 years?

00:43:27.600 Where's our leadership?

00:43:28.940 Where's the leadership of, for example, conservative movement, pro-American movement,

00:43:32.760 pro-national movement, pro-family movement, whatever you want to call it.

00:43:36.320 These guys have been asleep at the switch while they've been watching the other side take advantage of this.

00:43:41.480 And that kind of...

00:43:42.160 Or, well, not just that.

00:43:44.200 It's worse than that.

00:43:45.520 Like if you look at...

00:43:45.940 They're participating in it in some ways.

00:43:48.420 They're participating in it.

00:43:49.540 Well, it's the conservatives, it's the conservatives in the UK who've been putting forward the net zero agenda.

00:43:54.380 Exactly.

00:43:55.940 Especially in Western Europe, but even some wings of the Republican Party in the US,

00:43:59.920 their meek response is effectively participating in this.

00:44:04.000 And this is where the analogy that hit me when you're talking about the desert and Pharaoh,

00:44:08.000 is that we as a people are lost in the desert.

00:44:13.080 And yet, we're criticizing that phenomenon by still critiquing Pharaoh.

00:44:17.800 Well, the Israelites are ready to go. 0.76

00:44:20.260 Many of them are already gone.

00:44:21.700 Okay, that's where a lot of the grassroots movement that I'm leading already and hoping to lead is...

00:44:26.960 We're already in the desert.

00:44:27.900 We're still lost, though.

00:44:29.660 We're not going to find the promised land by still criticizing Pharaoh.

00:44:33.960 To the contrary, the longer you're lost, the longer, the more likely it is the people are going to say

00:44:38.220 that I need to go back and bend the knee to Pharaoh. 0.86

00:44:40.380 Actually, I want to be ruled by Pharaoh.

00:44:42.160 That's exactly what's happening.

00:44:43.740 So where is the promised land?

00:44:45.560 And, you know, I'm not going to, you know, this analogy is really a weird place.

00:44:50.220 I'm not going to claim to be a Moses figure or anything like that.

00:44:53.300 That's beyond any of our pay grade.

00:44:55.460 But I will say, you know, when I laid out in this room, the video where we launched

00:44:58.720 this presidential campaign from right here in the front foyer of my house,

00:45:03.500 we said that my goal is to create a new American dream for the 21st century.

00:45:09.120 Okay, FDR had his new deal.

00:45:12.080 I don't agree with a lot of it, but FDR had his new deal.

00:45:14.420 Well, JFK had his new frontier.

00:45:17.360 Where's the conservative vision of where we're going?

00:45:20.060 That's what I call the new dream, the new American dream.

00:45:22.340 It's not just about money.

00:45:23.640 It's about reviving our conviction in our purpose as citizens.

00:45:27.540 What does that mean?

00:45:28.220 Unapologetic pursuit of excellence.

00:45:29.600 I can talk about what that means, but that's my vision.

00:45:32.300 Maybe a different candidate can offer theirs.

00:45:33.980 And if this Republican primary ended up being a competition of those ideas and visions,

00:45:38.160 man, our country's heading to a good place, but that's what's missing.

00:45:40.300 Yes, definitely.

00:45:41.240 Well, okay, so let's talk about the conservative issue here for a minute.

00:45:45.460 So if you look at what temperamental factors predict political allegiance,

00:45:53.200 the literature on that's quite clear.

00:45:55.200 If you're higher in openness, if you're higher in creativity,

00:45:58.720 and you're low in conscientiousness, you tend to move to the radical left, let's say.

00:46:05.200 And if you're high in conscientiousness and low in openness,

00:46:07.560 you tend to move towards the conservative front.

00:46:10.400 And there's a constant dialogue between those extremes,

00:46:15.300 because the creative people are necessary to make changes when changes are necessary,

00:46:21.080 but dangerous otherwise.

00:46:22.800 And the conservative types are very good at maintaining functional tradition,

00:46:27.780 but are intransigent in the face of necessary change.

00:46:30.900 And so free speech is actually the mechanism by which that conundrum is mediated.

00:46:36.400 Because people who can engage in free speech can keep arguing about which traditions need to be carefully modified.

00:46:43.280 Okay, so, but here's the problem that it presents on the conservative front.

00:46:47.460 So conservatives are not visionaries.

00:46:49.760 By definition, the visionaries tend to tilt in the more radical direction,

00:46:54.800 because they have radical visions, you know.

00:46:56.800 And so the conservatives are always pushed back into a reactionary standpoint, almost always.

00:47:03.640 They object vociferously to the excesses of the left.

00:47:07.900 But because they're not visionary, they can't extract from their tradition

00:47:11.680 an image of the promised land for the future.

00:47:14.080 You know, and I've been working with an organization in the UK

00:47:17.760 that's trying to do something that's analogous to what you're doing,

00:47:21.660 to lay out something approximating a compelling vision on the conservative side.

00:47:26.600 You know, I'll talk about one part of it.

00:47:29.100 Because I think it strikes right to the core, even of what we're discussing.

00:47:33.380 So we spend a lot of time talking about families.

00:47:37.580 Because, so you have the individual, then you have the individual in a couple.

00:47:41.900 But the next order of subsidiary organization is family.

00:47:47.040 And then you might ask yourself, well, what is a family?

00:47:50.460 Now, the answer on the inclusive left is a family is any old organization of any sort.

00:47:57.340 But that's so blurry that it leaves people with no guidelines.

00:48:03.240 They don't know what to do.

00:48:04.280 Because if you can do anything, you have no direction.

00:48:07.580 And so, well, we could say, well, a family fundamentally is a unit that produces children.

00:48:15.520 And if you're not willing to buy that definition,

00:48:19.140 well, then you could go develop your own definition of family.

00:48:22.420 But it seems to me that there's something core about laying the groundwork

00:48:26.640 for the emergence and proper rearing of children that's key to what constitutes a family.

00:48:31.460 And then one of the corollaries of that is,

00:48:33.500 well, if you're going to have children, you're probably going to need to have a man and a woman involved. 1.00

00:48:39.240 It's kind of worse that way.

00:48:40.400 Because otherwise, it's extremely, well, it's very difficult otherwise.

00:48:43.080 And that actually turns out to be relevant when you're thinking about an ideal.

00:48:46.660 So I talked to Dave Rubin about this, for example.

00:48:48.960 So Rubin, who's conservative and gay, is married to his partner, his husband, Dave.

00:48:54.240 And they went through the entire surrogacy route to have a couple of infants. 0.79

00:48:57.880 And it was very, very, very, very, very complicated, both ethically, practically, and financially.

00:49:04.440 And so, and they managed it so far.

00:49:06.700 You know, they have these two kids.

00:49:07.900 And I suspect they'll do a perfectly good job of giving these kids a wonderful home.

00:49:11.760 But they're also incredibly financially, what would you say, privileged.

00:49:17.560 You know, Dave's earned it.

00:49:18.540 But they have the capital to make this non-standard solution a possibility.

00:49:23.660 But it's by no means duplicatable for the typical person.

00:49:26.940 I mean, the simplest way to have a child, for the average person, is to have a man and a woman involved. 0.63

00:49:32.200 And you can use technological intermediaries, but it can't propagate easily, that solution.

00:49:37.980 And so, one of the things that's emerged, this is extremely interesting.

00:49:41.320 One of the things that's emerged on the cognitive neuroscience front recently,

00:49:45.560 and the same things happened in the field of AI,

00:49:48.040 is the realization that at the center of all of our concepts is an ideal.

00:49:54.180 That's actually how we categorize.

00:49:55.640 We categorize, just like Plato initially hypothesized,

00:49:59.660 we literally categorize in relationship to an implicit ideal.

00:50:04.680 I think you're right.

00:50:05.340 And so, to even use the term family, and for that to be meaningful, there has to be an ideal.

00:50:12.280 And the organization that I've started working with and helping put together

00:50:16.880 has made it part of our formal propositional landscape,

00:50:21.860 that the ideal has to be something like stable, long-term, monogamous, heterosexual, child-centered couples.

00:50:29.940 And now, the problem with the ideal,

00:50:32.580 this is what the postmodernists have shaken their fists about forever,

00:50:36.360 especially the French, like Derrida and Foucault.

00:50:38.580 The problem with the ideal is that it marginalizes, right?

00:50:42.480 Because the more distant you are from the ideal, the less you can fit in.

00:50:47.040 And so, the question then arises, what do you do with the margin?

00:50:50.280 And that's also a question that's so old that that was even dealt with in biblical times,

00:50:54.600 by the way, the problem of the fringe of the margin.

00:50:56.780 And the answer has to be something like,

00:50:58.960 look, everybody falls short of the ideal.

00:51:01.940 Like, even a married, stable, married, heterosexual couple,

00:51:05.800 lots of the times during their, say, 30-year marriage,

00:51:08.480 they're going to fight, they're going to wish they were divorced,

00:51:10.440 they're going to wish they were with other partners,

00:51:12.420 there might be affairs, lots of people end up divorced. 1.00

00:51:16.480 There's, the vast majority of us will never realize the ideal.

00:51:22.300 Well, none of us will in totality.

00:51:24.900 But that doesn't mean we should sacrifice the ideal.

00:51:27.320 What it means is that we should put forth the ideal forthrightly,

00:51:31.940 but allow the necessary space for deviation from the ideal

00:51:37.460 so that everybody can move forward despite the fact that the ideal has to rule.

00:51:42.160 It's a great, great framing.

00:51:43.400 I just want to jump in there for one second to draw even one further distinction, if I may.

00:51:48.700 First is there's the sense in which each of us falls short of our ideals, okay,

00:51:53.460 both as individuals and even as a nation.

00:51:56.380 I mean, you could extrapolate this to the American level

00:51:58.900 and take the critique of America as a nation is that, 0.98

00:52:01.560 well, America is hypocritical, right? 0.92

00:52:03.540 It had nations, it set an emotion, but there were slaves on day one. 0.98

00:52:07.260 Ergo, the ideals themselves are false.

00:52:09.080 No, in fact, hypocrisy is probably pretty good evidence that you have ideals, right? 0.82

00:52:13.720 There's no sense in which, for example, the Chinese Communist Party could be called hypocritical. 0.84

00:52:19.300 You can't be called hypocritical if you actually are measured against fundamentally nihilism at your core.

00:52:23.900 So idealism and the existence of ideals makes hypocrisy possible.

00:52:27.960 We should be grateful when we see hypocrisy because then we know we have two things.

00:52:31.600 We have both ideals and we have something that is real.

00:52:34.540 And something that is real never matches or rarely ever matches the ideal.

00:52:38.180 So there, in a certain sense, we should be vindicated.

00:52:41.720 We should feel reassured that we're doing something right because we have both ideals and reality.

00:52:46.880 And that's just true at the individual level.

00:52:48.780 Anybody who's in a married relationship knows this.

00:52:51.220 If they don't admit it, they're lying to you or they're lying to themselves.

00:52:53.900 It's just truth, okay?

00:52:57.440 I 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.

00:53:14.820 Is who's at the outer end of the margin.

00:53:17.220 And 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.

00:53:31.660 Because genetics are real, right?

00:53:34.000 What brings us into this world is real.

00:53:35.680 Be 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.

00:53:52.160 And so I think it's important to take that seriously.

00:53:55.020 But 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?

00:54:09.180 What began as a challenge to the system on behalf of the marginalized becomes the new system.

00:54:15.960 That is the essence of the woke cancer, actually.

00:54:18.720 I 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.

00:54:28.180 That'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?

00:54:39.480 Conscientious conservatives.

00:54:40.700 That's great, but as long as we have free speech.

00:54:42.000 But 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.

00:54:53.000 Okay, well, so we can lay that out a little bit, too.

00:54:56.520 What happened to Nicola Sturgeon is a perfect example of that, the prime minister of Scotland who just resigned.

00:55:03.240 Because here's the problem with the fringe, okay?

00:55:05.760 So the ideal in the center is a unity.

00:55:08.900 It's a single thing.

00:55:09.840 The fringe is a multiplicity.

00:55:12.620 Now, the problem with the fringe is that because it's a multiplicity, it can't occupy the center without destroying the ideal.

00:55:20.180 And that just brings the whole category to collapse.

00:55:23.680 The fringe of the fringe will destroy the fringe.

00:55:26.440 That's right.

00:55:27.080 So we can't do without the ideal.

00:55:31.240 Even on the fringe, we can't do without the ideal.

00:55:31.780 I love what you, I mean, the fringe defines itself in relation to the ideal, right?

00:55:38.140 In a certain sense.

00:55:39.320 Well, it has freedom.

00:55:40.340 It also has freedom because of that.

00:55:42.320 That's the freedom of being at the margin.

00:55:44.100 Because there's many versions of being at the fringe.

00:55:46.140 It's kind of like that lost bat analogy.

00:55:48.060 You send your sonar signal, it bounces back, it says, this is where you are.

00:55:51.680 It's like planets orbiting the sun, all right?

00:55:53.560 Once the sun's gone, you're just, you're, you're, there's going to be a whole new, there's going to be a whole new structure around you.

00:55:59.500 That's exactly what happens.

00:56:00.440 And sometimes I think conservatives, they'll use this phrase, right?

00:56:03.960 They'll come to eat their own, right?

00:56:06.420 And, and, and I, and I think that that there's a point to that, but it's low resolution.

00:56:10.960 I 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.

00:56:22.740 And 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.

00:56:28.280 Well, guess what?

00:56:29.040 You know, or, or even could do the feminist version. 1.00

00:56:30.740 You ain't seen nothing yet.

00:56:31.920 You ain't seen nothing.

00:56:32.720 You could see the feminist version of this too. 1.00

00:56:34.040 Title IX, women's sports, you know, women are on the fringe. 1.00

00:56:37.460 Well, 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.

00:56:48.400 It'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. 0.95

00:56:56.320 Same 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? 0.54

00:57:09.140 That 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.

00:57:18.400 So it isn't quite what some people will say is they will eventually eat their own.

00:57:24.320 It'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?

00:57:31.140 And 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.

00:57:39.180 That's what comes up in a political context.

00:57:40.560 There'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.

00:57:48.760 And I want to be really clear, I don't dismiss that conversation.

00:57:53.320 In fact, I think that should be the product of dialectic.

00:57:55.340 I think free speech can actually be a mechanism for sorting out those kinds of questions.

00:57:59.340 And 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.

00:58:17.080 And that's exactly where we are.

00:58:18.660 And that's a, due to a failure of the conservative movement.

00:58:20.660 It's a failure of the conservative movement.

00:58:22.140 See, we can blame the people on the fringe for, you know, getting us there.

00:58:25.700 They 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.

00:58:32.560 And I think the absence of.

00:58:34.220 To make a case for it.

00:58:35.340 And to make a case for it.

00:58:36.280 And so, and so, so then, then what happens in the evolution of time now, right?

00:58:39.940 So now we're in a moment where the discussion that you and I have already are talking about, that ship has sailed.

00:58:45.420 The structure itself is gone.

00:58:47.080 What does that require?

00:58:48.520 That's what makes this so difficult.

00:58:50.020 And 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.

00:59:15.500 And, and that's inherently an unlikelihood, but you said, by the psychological nature of creativity and conscientiousness, those are not supposed to coincide.

00:59:25.020 That's what sets a really high bar.

00:59:26.680 It's also what calls me into this race because it is what our moment demands because we're not starting from neutral territory.

00:59:33.360 We'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.

00:59:43.520 And 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.

00:59:53.900 Whether 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.

00:59:59.960 And thank you for laying that out.

01:00:01.400 Well, 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.

01:00:13.820 And so we're trying to play an invitational game.

01:00:16.320 And 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.

01:00:29.420 Yes. 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.

01:00:39.120 So 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.

01:00:50.440 The idea of sacrifice was woven into my upbringing, right?

01:00:53.500 Grandparents 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.

01:01:02.620 Sacrifices needed to be made to raise my brother and I, to have the academic achievements that we did in the education.

01:01:08.060 That didn't happen in a vacuum.

01:01:09.360 It happened on the back of parents who actually said there's more to life than just following your latest self-indulgence.

01:01:14.660 But these, these things can be done if you know what you're sacrificing for.

01:01:19.360 I draw that as an analogy to some of my policy agenda.

01:01:21.920 This is a harder sell, but I think it's true too.

01:01:24.120 The United States today needs to, I've made the case, declare independence from China. 0.98

01:01:29.720 That's a whole separate geopolitical discussion we can have.

01:01:32.380 Why I think that's important, why I think there's an opportunity.

01:01:34.920 But I've also been, even in week one, very clear, this will involve some measure of sacrifice.

01:01:40.120 In fact, if there's some resistance, I'm getting to the Declaration of Independence proposition of China.

01:01:45.780 It's actually coming from some Republicans who are unwilling to make that sacrifice, who have become so addicted to buying cheap stuff.

01:01:52.040 But again, I say that we can make those sacrifices if we know what we are sacrificing for.

01:01:57.520 And so this idea of sacrifice, I think, is fundamental to this question of identity.

01:02:01.800 Once 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.

01:02:08.640 If you have nothing that you're willing to make a sacrifice for, it means you have no identity, right?

01:02:13.200 And so that's a great framing of it.

01:02:16.840 Let's go down that road for a moment.

01:02:18.740 So, because you might ask yourself, well, why use the sacrificial language?

01:02:24.120 And also, why do you need to make sacrifices at all?

01:02:27.180 And the answer is, you're always going to be making sacrifices.

01:02:31.200 Because if you do one thing instead of another, then you sacrifice all the other things you could have done.

01:02:36.380 So, there's no action whatsoever without sacrifice.

01:02:39.900 Now, then you might ask, well, is there actually something in reality that's worth sacrificing for?

01:02:46.740 And the answer is, well, first of all, you don't have a choice.

01:02:49.740 Now, generally, because no matter what you do, if you do something, you're sacrificing.

01:02:54.800 Now, people might say, well, I want to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want.

01:03:00.240 And so that's sort of the ultimate in subjectivity.

01:03:02.700 And there's an impulsiveness and a pandering to whim that's associated with that.

01:03:08.160 But that's not really freedom.

01:03:09.900 What that is, is subjection to the rule by impulsive whims.

01:03:14.560 And that's what you see as characterizing children, right?

01:03:17.560 It's like, I get to do what I want right now.

01:03:19.960 Right?

01:03:20.220 So, then you might say, well, why sacrifice that?

01:03:23.600 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,

01:03:43.240 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.

01:03:54.600 And there's nothing about that that's arbitrary.

01:03:56.940 And so the question isn't, who is going to rule you?

01:04:01.560 No, I want no one to rule me.

01:04:03.380 How can I set my life up so no one can rule me?

01:04:05.760 The question is, what is it that I'm going to work towards allowing to rule me?

01:04:11.980 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.

01:04:20.400 And then that ties into this whole hierarchical identity.

01:04:24.480 You know, you sacrifice your whims to your partner.

01:04:28.400 You and your partner sacrifice your whims to your children.

01:04:32.560 Your family sacrifices its whims to the community.

01:04:35.460 And all of that, now you want that to be done harmoniously, and you want it to be done voluntarily.

01:04:40.400 Autonomously, voluntarily, exactly.

01:04:42.240 Yes, exactly.

01:04:43.320 So we have to create that sense of identity and purpose that makes us voluntarily opt into that nested identity state, right?

01:04:51.740 There is a sacrifice for a marriage.

01:04:53.460 That's exactly right.

01:04:54.060 There is a sacrifice to entering a marriage.

01:04:55.740 It's a sacrifice worth making.

01:04:57.040 There's a sacrifice to having children.

01:04:58.420 That's a sacrifice worth making.

01:04:59.820 There is a sacrifice to being a citizen of a nation.

01:05:02.780 I'm not a global citizen, just a global citizen.

01:05:04.420 I'm a citizen of a nation.

01:05:05.940 There's a sacrifice worth making.

01:05:07.620 We can make these sacrifices if we know what's worth sacrificing for.

01:05:11.560 That's the missing, what I call in the conservative movement, to borrow from David Hume.

01:05:15.100 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.

01:05:24.400 He could say what the shade of blue was without ever having seen it.

01:05:27.080 That was a challenge to his theory of empiricism.

01:05:28.560 Anyway, I borrow that.

01:05:29.900 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.

01:05:38.240 But it's duty that we actually autonomously opt into by way of our free choice and our free will.

01:05:43.940 These things are not incompatible.

01:05:45.480 They're not contradictory.

01:05:46.480 They sound contradictory.

01:05:46.960 Not at all.

01:05:48.000 They're not.

01:05:48.680 No, no, no.

01:05:49.100 They're not.

01:05:49.320 They're sort of mutually required.

01:05:51.540 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.

01:05:58.940 I've gotten this actually a lot on the road.

01:06:00.600 I was in Iowa and New Hampshire last week.

01:06:02.600 I do draw a distinction between this idea of freedom and autonomy amongst adults versus in children.

01:06:08.880 So, 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.

01:06:19.320 But, you know, is this idea that children are different than adults, okay?

01:06:23.680 And so that period you talked about between 16 and 21, I mean, I'll just even take the easier end of the spectrum.

01:06:29.960 Forget 21.

01:06:30.680 Just say 16.

01:06:32.100 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?

01:06:46.660 I mean, that at the very least is an inconsistency in the way we treat this.

01:06:49.980 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.

01:07:06.060 It is, you phrased it very politely, it would be suboptimal, I believe is the word you used.

01:07:10.780 I think that that is the most gracious way of putting that.

01:07:14.300 I think it should be avoided is the way I would say it as a prospective policymaker and leader of the country.

01:07:19.460 But 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.

01:07:33.580 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.

01:07:49.880 I'm with you all the way.

01:07:50.600 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 them repeat it 10 times in case you didn't notice, right?

01:08:08.720 It's repeated 10 times in the story, nine or 10 times.

01:08:11.780 He tells Moses to let my people go, which is of course a very famous phrase, but that's not the phrase.

01:08:18.660 The phrase is, let my people go so that they may worship or celebrate me in the wilderness, in the desert.

01:08:26.480 And so what it does is it sets up not freedom, but ordered freedom.

01:08:32.380 And so then you might ask yourself, well, what constitutes ordered freedom?

01:08:36.340 Well, a game is ordered freedom.

01:08:38.100 A voluntary game is ordered freedom because you have a large landscape of choice, but it's dependent on principles, right?

01:08:45.260 Those are the rules of the game.

01:08:46.340 And a game is a good analogy because people play games voluntarily and they want to play them and they enjoy them.

01:08:53.140 And so if you set something like, if you set a social structure up with a game-like substructure, then people voluntarily hop aboard.

01:09:03.160 Now, the free market response to the problem of the margins is to produce a plethora of games.

01:09:11.020 And 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.

01:09:22.640 And I think you can see that in the gay community, for example, especially among male homosexuals, because the entertainment industry,

01:09:29.620 especially on the more explicitly cultural end, is dominated by gay men.

01:09:37.080 And there's a reason for that as far as I'm concerned, because male homosexuality is associated with heightened levels of creativity. 0.62

01:09:44.280 And so there's a margin there.

01:09:46.760 And the margin is, well, if you're creative, you're not going to be traditional.

01:09:49.920 It's going to be hard for you to abide by the ideal.

01:09:52.040 But there's a niche for you on the cultural transformation front.

01:09:56.580 And so a free market solution to the problem of marginalization is something like the offering of a true diversity.

01:10:06.500 It's like, yeah, you're only five foot two, so you can't play basketball.

01:10:10.800 You know, but you might be a damn good jockey. 0.88

01:10:13.540 Exactly. 0.65

01:10:13.900 And if you have enough games, exactly, exactly that.

01:10:16.420 And then people can trade on their idiosyncrasies.

01:10:18.940 And you see, this is an argument that free market types haven't made to the diversity types.

01:10:23.440 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.

01:10:29.720 Diversity in our approach to diversity itself, by the way.

01:10:33.060 And I think you see the same thing.

01:10:34.340 I mean, so I've been trying.

01:10:36.500 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,

01:10:41.600 where even if you think about institutional purpose, right?

01:10:44.420 You were talking about the level of individuals in the marginalized, and so I agree with that.

01:10:48.680 That's one form of diverse approaches to diversity.

01:10:50.720 Here's a different approach of diverse approaches to diversity.

01:10:53.280 Is diversity of institutional purpose that even different companies, let's just take it in the realm of companies.

01:10:59.680 That's the world I've lived in, right?

01:11:01.240 Corporate America and capital markets.

01:11:02.700 Fine.

01:11:03.740 Each company ought to have a unique purpose.

01:11:05.740 And what is the problem with using a common three-letter acronym?

01:11:09.000 It's funny how these things always come in three-letter acronyms, but from ESG to DEI to CSR to, you know, CCP, I joke around.

01:11:16.800 WEF.

01:11:17.280 Yeah, exactly.

01:11:18.180 CCP and WEF are some of the ones lurking behind the scenes.

01:11:21.140 But the problem with these, you know, ESG or DEI three-letter acronyms is what are they effectively saying?

01:11:26.300 They're saying that, no, no, no, you can't have your own distinctive purpose.

01:11:28.920 Everyone's purpose must be common to advance environmental, social, and governance goals, diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

01:11:35.740 That's a denial of diversity, right?

01:11:37.820 It rejects our institutional purpose.

01:11:40.480 Exactly.

01:11:41.040 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?

01:11:49.120 What is your institutional purpose?

01:11:50.820 If you run an institution, you have one question, why do we exist?

01:11:56.140 Period.

01:11:56.840 Have a good answer to that question.

01:11:58.860 And then say what type of diversity you espouse.

01:12:02.260 That's really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose.

01:12:06.340 Different types of institutions should want different kinds of diversity, and they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don't want.

01:12:14.740 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?

01:12:21.460 I don't eat meat because I believe it is, in my tradition, morally wrong to kill animals solely for culinary pleasure.

01:12:29.040 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.

01:12:34.020 I respect other people's right and freedom to go in a different direction.

01:12:37.960 But take the example of me working at a steakhouse, okay?

01:12:42.200 I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse, even if I would deliver the ever-prized form of diversity of thought.

01:12:49.120 See, people sometimes are loose in terms of diversity of thought instead of diversity of appearance.

01:12:53.100 Yeah, yeah, I'm in favor of diversity of thought over diversity of appearance, too.

01:12:55.820 But even diversity of thought is too low resolution.

01:12:58.840 That's a diverse thought.

01:13:00.820 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.

01:13:10.240 Because the kind of diversity you want there should be in service of your purpose.

01:13:15.200 And so I think this revival of the idea of purpose itself gives meaning to diversity itself.

01:13:21.780 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.

01:13:29.640 There's a couple of places we can go with that.

01:13:32.800 So 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,

01:13:41.120 is that there's going to be a variety of institutions at each level of the hierarchy.

01:13:47.120 So you could imagine there's a variety of forms of couples.

01:13:51.280 You know, there's going to be some couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner, for example.

01:13:56.300 There's going to be some couples where the man is. 0.90

01:13:58.660 And that's fine.

01:14:00.480 You want the commonality of the coupling, but you want the diversity of possibilities within that framework.

01:14:07.640 And then the same at the level of family.

01:14:09.540 There's going to be some families with 10 kids.

01:14:11.260 There's going to be some families with one.

01:14:13.160 There's going to be blended families.

01:14:15.060 But that still circles around the core of family.

01:14:18.920 So you have order, but you have diversity at each of the levels of order.

01:14:21.980 And that you also have the recognition that each of those levels has its own domain of sacred responsibility.

01:14:31.300 Now, one of the things I've noticed, you could try this out for yourself if you're curious about it.

01:14:35.500 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.

01:14:42.840 And there's one point I make that always brings the audience, no matter where it is, to a dead silence.

01:14:50.640 Like absolutely pin drop dead silence.

01:14:53.620 And here's the argument.

01:14:55.120 So you need a sustaining meaning in your life.

01:15:00.460 Now, what does sustaining mean?

01:15:02.860 It means it will sustain you through catastrophe.

01:15:06.200 So it'll sustain you through pain and terror.

01:15:08.540 Now, that can't be happiness.

01:15:11.920 Because happiness is absent in conditions of pain and terror.

01:15:15.560 So it can't be that.

01:15:17.280 So what is it?

01:15:18.200 Well, I drew on my clinical experience to answer that question.

01:15:21.720 Well, what do people have when things, when they're truly in the desert?

01:15:25.620 When they're abandoned and lost and in pain?

01:15:28.440 Well, they have the structure around them that they've made sacrifices to produce.

01:15:33.780 They have their partner.

01:15:35.880 They have their, you know, their wife or their husband.

01:15:38.540 They have their children and their parents and their siblings.

01:15:43.080 They have their friends.

01:15:44.740 They have their community.

01:15:46.360 They have this hierarchy of social structure around them that can sustain them if they made the proper sacrifices.

01:15:53.560 And then the question is, well, what is the nature of the sacrifice that's necessary to make those bonds?

01:16:01.180 And the answer is, well, that's the adoption of voluntary responsibility.

01:16:04.660 And so once you know, and this is something conservatives haven't ever made explicit.

01:16:10.320 The meaning that sustains you in tragedy is to be found through the voluntary adoption of responsibility.

01:16:19.600 And so you can tell young people that.

01:16:21.660 You can tell young people that.

01:16:23.020 You say, they say, well, why should I grow up?

01:16:25.340 I can just do whatever I want whenever I want.

01:16:27.620 And that's especially true if they happen to be wealthy and privileged.

01:16:30.740 And the answer is, well, if you expend all that capital on hedonism, as soon as the storms come, you're shipwrecked.

01:16:39.220 Absolutely.

01:16:39.880 There'll be nothing left of you because there's no hedonism in hell.

01:16:43.500 And what you have there is whatever you've built responsibly.

01:16:46.580 And there's meaning in that.

01:16:47.780 And people understand that immediately.

01:16:49.700 And it's part of this alternative vision to this fractured hedonism that everyone is celebrating now.

01:16:56.120 Let me ask you a question about that because I think this is really interesting.

01:17:00.260 I mean, I care about delivering this solution, right?

01:17:03.720 So I want to get to the heart of it.

01:17:07.200 There's two possibilities there.

01:17:08.540 And the answer might be both.

01:17:09.600 But I want to get a sense for which one you meant.

01:17:13.060 One is that sustained meaning.

01:17:18.280 Is that what you said?

01:17:18.840 Sustained purpose.

01:17:20.540 Yeah.

01:17:21.380 Sustaining meaning.

01:17:22.340 Yeah.

01:17:22.540 Sustaining meaning.

01:17:22.900 Meaning that will sustain you across time.

01:17:24.540 Right.

01:17:24.720 Sustaining meaning.

01:17:25.700 That can preexist and be resilient across catastrophe in a way that this superficial idea of happiness can.

01:17:34.500 Tradition does that.

01:17:35.680 Tradition can be grounded.

01:17:36.920 If you're embedded in a tradition.

01:17:38.160 Right.

01:17:38.440 You bet.

01:17:38.800 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.

01:17:52.840 And 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.

01:18:07.020 Whatever it might be.

01:18:08.800 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.

01:18:19.580 Be that economic catastrophe.

01:18:20.740 I 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.

01:18:29.140 I think China may do this favor, favor, I use in air quotes, for the United States.

01:18:33.480 But which of those was the sense in which you meant it, right?

01:18:36.620 In first principles, developing that to be resilient across time?

01:18:40.640 Or 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?

01:18:52.760 I would say that you don't have to think except when you're failing.

01:18:59.260 Because the purpose of thinking is to calculate a new trajectory.

01:19:03.720 And if the trajectory you're pursuing is producing the desired results, then your theory is intact.

01:19:09.240 Well, then the question emerges, which is, well, how much failure is necessary to make you think?

01:19:16.780 And that's actually a moral question.

01:19:19.340 And that's the question of willful blindness.

01:19:21.320 You know, if you're awake and alert, and if you're humble in the classic virtuous sense,

01:19:26.400 you're always trying to figure out where you're insufficient and to rectify that.

01:19:31.640 In many Christian prayers, the Jesus prayer, for example, is a reminder that the Orthodox cite that continually, chant that continually, 0.85

01:19:40.180 is a reminder that you're insufficient in your current form and you should be looking for what would rectify you.

01:19:45.740 That's the practice of humility.

01:19:47.560 And the advantage to that practice is that you can make micro-repairs

01:19:51.100 instead of staying stubborn until the apocalypse happens and then collapsing.

01:19:55.260 Now, in the story of Moses, what happens to the pharaoh, who's a tyrant, is that the crises emerge and then magnify, right?

01:20:05.820 They just get worse and worse and worse and worse.

01:20:08.060 And he utterly fails to respond.

01:20:11.500 And the consequence of that is that his entire society is devastated.

01:20:16.100 The firstborn are all killed and the Red Sea floods and destroys the military might of the Egyptian empire.

01:20:23.840 And so, the answer to your question is, what's the relationship between failure and a return to abiding and sustaining values?

01:20:36.720 And the answer is, well, it depends on how stiff-necked you are.

01:20:39.460 Exactly.

01:20:40.280 And if you're stiff-necked enough, well, if you're stiff-necked enough, and this is no joke, and I mean this,

01:20:44.920 if you're stiff-necked enough, then you face the apocalypse.

01:20:48.680 And we're toying with that at the moment.

01:20:51.140 That's exactly where we are.

01:20:52.380 That's exactly where we are.

01:20:53.680 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.

01:21:04.220 Okay?

01:21:04.560 Well, wouldn't that be nice?

01:21:06.080 Because if it's not going to be somebody who delivers a vision, but from an actually conservatively grounded perspective,

01:21:12.940 with the consciousness of a conservative that still brings a creativity, a vision to this,

01:21:16.640 well, then it may have to be done by force, by way of apocalypse anyway.

01:21:22.060 And, 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.

01:21:29.340 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,

01:21:43.480 that compels me to want to do this better than I have at any point in the last week.

01:21:49.780 So, I've watched a lot of people in the last five years embark on political careers.

01:21:56.460 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.

01:22:03.220 And this is what I see happening consistently.

01:22:06.860 So, neophytes enter the political arena.

01:22:09.900 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.

01:22:18.480 And, you know, two thumbs up for that.

01:22:20.120 I think that's a necessary precondition.

01:22:22.500 But they get intimidated in the new arena, because the stakes are super high, and they don't have a lot of experience.

01:22:29.020 And so, what they end up doing is they end up hiring communication teams, and there are experts at political communication,

01:22:37.000 and they usually involve pollsters, for example, and speechwriters, people who will help you craft your message.

01:22:43.460 And then what I see happening, and this is inevitable, this is the inevitable consequence, is that the person running loses their voice.

01:22:50.760 And they often lose the election, too, by the way.

01:22:53.340 They lose their voice and the election.

01:22:55.020 Now, not always.

01:22:55.900 Sometimes they win, but they still lose their voice.

01:22:59.020 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,

01:23:06.160 which is really different.

01:23:07.320 You know, for 40 years, politicians, in some sense, had to craft their message,

01:23:11.400 because they had to pass it through the narrow bandwidth of legacy media.

01:23:15.520 Right.

01:23:15.980 And so, they'd had to compress things into a 30-second sound.

01:23:19.460 They were forced to.

01:23:20.440 Right, yeah.

01:23:21.280 Right, right.

01:23:22.040 But now, now you have the opportunity to just say what you think.

01:23:29.420 And if you just say what you think, well, first of all, if you're wrong, you'll learn.

01:23:34.260 And that's useful.

01:23:35.660 And the other thing is, is that people are going to respond positively to that because they're desperate for truth.

01:23:41.200 Now, you can tell that because Trump was successful.

01:23:43.940 Now, I'm not trying to put Trump out, you know, on some pedestal, up on some pedestal as the world's greatest truth teller.

01:23:50.580 But 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.

01:24:00.040 Without inhibition.

01:24:00.840 Without inhibition is what I mean.

01:24:02.400 Yes, 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.

01:24:13.000 And what was cool about that was that he won.

01:24:15.980 And so, I'm really interested in your candidacy, you know, because you're coming in from left field, you know.

01:24:21.720 You're going to definitely be a dark horse candidate.

01:24:24.260 And it's very interesting.

01:24:25.580 Like, and God only knows how that'll play out.

01:24:27.220 But 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.

01:24:41.100 You know how to use the new media.

01:24:42.980 And that's a deadly advantage.

01:24:45.040 And also, you know, your candidacy is sufficiently unlikely so that there's no reason for you to do things in a conventional manner.

01:24:53.540 Because conventionally, you should just lose.

01:24:56.060 You're not well enough known.

01:24:57.220 Right?

01:24:57.640 And you don't have enough of a political apparatus.

01:24:59.580 I don't have a machine, you know.

01:25:01.500 Right, exactly.

01:25:02.520 But that could be a huge advantage.

01:25:04.360 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.

01:25:09.100 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.

01:25:17.180 But 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.

01:25:24.080 Is no one's going to write another speech for me.

01:25:27.040 In fact, even when I give speeches, I don't write my own speeches.

01:25:30.640 I just say what's on my mind.

01:25:32.120 I don't use a teleprompter.

01:25:33.080 In fact, a fun—I haven't said this yet.

01:25:35.340 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.

01:25:43.240 And don't use a teleprompter.

01:25:45.320 I'll make that commitment.

01:25:46.360 Why doesn't the whole field make that commitment?

01:25:48.180 No teleprompter.

01:25:49.040 Speak from the heart.

01:25:50.380 Get it out there.

01:25:51.120 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.

01:25:59.300 And then people train you and prep you with your talking points.

01:26:01.360 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.

01:26:10.620 Why that?

01:26:11.560 Instead, actually, what I've said is—and I think we're actually going to do this.

01:26:15.380 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.

01:26:28.780 That's a big part of the next year and a half.

01:26:30.340 And I am running to run—I'm not running to make a point.

01:26:33.280 I'm running because I believe seeing this all the way through is the ticket to drive maximal positive change.

01:26:39.040 That's going to require a lot of learning.

01:26:40.720 We're just going to tape it in forums like this, and we'll put it out to the internet.

01:26:43.700 And you know what?

01:26:44.320 If that allows people to discover that I was not omniscient, great.

01:26:49.180 I am not God.

01:26:50.420 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.

01:26:56.120 Well, I didn't know it.

01:26:56.920 I told him that.

01:26:57.480 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.

01:27:02.420 So I just think that—I think that more honesty will go a long way.

01:27:07.620 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.

01:27:18.680 That's what I'm committed to doing.

01:27:20.400 I hope that keeps me honest.

01:27:22.240 I have a lot to learn, and not only am I going to learn it, we'll open source it.

01:27:26.760 Everybody can learn along with me.

01:27:28.500 That's one of the ways we're going to do this thing starting about next month.

01:27:30.620 Well, if you use prepared speech, you don't have faith in your heart.

01:27:38.460 Yeah.

01:27:38.780 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.

01:27:46.680 And if you can't do that, A, you shouldn't lead, and B, you should learn.

01:27:51.140 Because you can do that.

01:27:52.640 You can learn to do that.

01:27:53.860 And people do respond to that much better.

01:27:56.840 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.

01:28:03.780 Because you can make a more coherent argument in writing and a denser argument.

01:28:08.920 But then I've tried to read it on YouTube, you know, and it doesn't work.

01:28:13.700 It doesn't work.

01:28:14.540 Like, it works okay.

01:28:15.600 You know what I mean?

01:28:16.180 It's not a failure, but it's not a success.

01:28:18.580 The last thing I did, this was, so this is a hybrid that's worth experimenting with.

01:28:22.560 So, I wrote this statement of vision for this enterprise I described, the ARC enterprise.

01:28:29.000 And I wanted to share it with people, so I was going to read it.

01:28:32.120 But I knew that reading wasn't very compelling, because it didn't have that spontaneity that reveals the heart, let's say.

01:28:38.000 So, what I did was, I read, like, two sentences, and then commented on it.

01:28:42.920 And then read another two sentences and commented on it.

01:28:45.780 Yeah, that really worked.

01:28:46.960 Because, you see, it enables you to have your talking points at hand, you know.

01:28:52.760 I'm going to try that.

01:28:53.460 How much can you remember?

01:28:54.340 But it was very effective for me, and it kept the spontaneity, you know.

01:28:58.920 And so, and.

01:29:00.480 You can't plan for that.

01:29:02.260 You 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.

01:29:10.720 And you know what?

01:29:11.240 You're right.

01:29:11.660 I think there is something about legacy media that sort of forces that.

01:29:15.060 But I don't like just blaming legacy media, too.

01:29:17.360 Because I go on a lot of TV hits as well.

01:29:19.880 I don't think you have to do it that way, either.

01:29:22.100 And 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.

01:29:35.200 This could actually be the source of saving legacy media itself.

01:29:37.980 Just because you're given three to five minutes doesn't mean that you actually have to stick to those talking points.

01:29:42.120 Try doing it this way, too.

01:29:43.780 That's what I try to do when I go on television as well.

01:29:45.840 But anyway, this is good.

01:29:47.920 It's much more effective.

01:29:49.080 I mean, I've done that.

01:29:49.640 Maybe it's effective and maybe it's not.

01:29:51.720 Right?

01:29:51.900 Maybe it's effective.

01:29:52.380 We'll find out.

01:29:53.100 This is an experiment for me.

01:29:54.240 But here's what I'll say.

01:29:54.960 Because even if you were more likely to win the other way, you have your soul sucked out of you, right? 1.00

01:30:02.020 You're just a hollowed-out husk of yourself. 0.87

01:30:03.880 So if the point of winning was to go sit in the White House, then, okay, that's one thing. 0.98

01:30:08.180 If 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.

01:30:12.780 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.

01:30:23.540 I think I looked at the empirical evidence.

01:30:25.740 I can't see a shred of evidence.

01:30:27.660 There is hardly any evidence that election spending is positively associated with victory.

01:30:33.840 Good.

01:30:34.440 It's not.

01:30:34.920 Glad to hear that.

01:30:35.560 There's no evidence in relationship to incumbents.

01:30:38.220 Incumbent spending is completely irrelevant to electoral outcome.

01:30:41.520 There's some minor evidence on the challenger front that more spending makes the difference.

01:30:45.920 But you can't tell if that's because of the spending or because the more popular candidates are more likely to raise money.

01:30:51.700 And, 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.

01:31:00.600 He still has nothing.

01:31:01.820 He has his producer.

01:31:03.660 Awesome.

01:31:03.980 Love it.

01:31:04.000 He selects all his own guests. 1.00

01:31:05.960 Well, and all Rogan does is expose his ignorance because all he does is ask stupid questions. 1.00

01:31:13.080 I don't know the guy, but I'd love to meet him at some point. 1.00

01:31:15.980 He seems like he's on to something.

01:31:17.180 But I think imagine taking that spirit to actually running a presidential and political campaign.

01:31:23.260 That's what this is going to be.

01:31:24.560 And so maybe it's, I mean, I'm certainly betting it's a formula for success.

01:31:28.420 I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think so.

01:31:30.560 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.

01:31:43.500 Which is exactly what the political consultant class wants to do, right? 0.76

01:31:45.960 They want to say, hey, you're positioned to lead.

01:31:48.020 They want to craft everything.

01:31:49.040 They want to project the image of a leader.

01:31:52.240 But who cares if that leader doesn't actually exist?

01:31:56.280 And so that's how we're going to do this.

01:31:58.280 And, you know, a year and a half from now, we'll find out whether it was the electorally successful strategy or not.

01:32:03.120 But it is the personally, for me, it's the only way that I'm going to be able to do this.

01:32:07.000 And so it'll be a fun test case to see this all the way through.

01:32:10.960 Well, I would say psychologically, there is no other pathway to success than something approximating, abiding in the truth.

01:32:21.840 Because the truth puts reality within you and behind you.

01:32:26.680 And so that doesn't mean that that will result in proximal success at the moment.

01:32:33.800 Right?

01:32:34.220 And that's another sacrifice that has to be made.

01:32:36.160 Like, you know, you don't know in some cosmic sense whether it's time for you to be president.

01:32:41.940 Apparently, it's time for you to run.

01:32:44.500 But I would say, psychologically speaking, that if you stay true to your own voice, and you're very diligent in that,

01:32:52.580 and you make the sacrifices necessary to make that possible, that your candidacy will be a success regardless of the outcome.

01:33:00.220 And you might think, well, that's kind of paradoxical.

01:33:02.960 It's like, look, no, it's not.

01:33:05.600 Because, for example, you might tilt the discussion of the election in a direction that's extremely good for the country.

01:33:13.660 And that could be completely independent of whether or not you win the presidency.

01:33:16.980 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.

01:33:25.980 And I've seen this with other political leaders, you know, like, I talked to Netanyahu a while back,

01:33:31.000 and he really risked his political skin and his party's political skin to bring in necessary economic reform in Israel.

01:33:38.760 And that crashed his party and him for like a decade.

01:33:42.760 But he's back.

01:33:44.720 And Israel is thriving on the economic front.

01:33:46.860 So you don't know.

01:33:47.840 I'm not crafting it at all.

01:33:49.000 I think not crafting is exactly the way to go.

01:33:51.820 And maybe that's my bet is that's going to be what successfully puts me in the White House in 2024.

01:33:57.200 But I don't fetishize that.

01:33:59.120 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.

01:34:07.160 But just because you said the other way doesn't necessarily mean you lose, this other way doesn't necessarily mean you even win.

01:34:12.980 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

01:34:22.720 without actually having something of substance left on the inside of who occupies that stuffed suit.

01:34:28.340 So it goes in both ways, actually.

01:34:30.660 I think that's absolutely, I think that's an almost inevitable consequence.

01:34:34.280 Like I saw this with faculty members continually.

01:34:37.220 So here's part of the reason the universities are so ruined.

01:34:40.240 Okay, so a graduate student says to himself, I can't really say or write what I think.

01:34:46.700 No, an undergraduate says, I can't really say or write what I think.

01:34:51.060 I have to get my grade.

01:34:52.620 So he compromises what he says and thinks.

01:34:54.860 And then he's a graduate student.

01:34:56.100 He thinks, well, now I'm a little higher up in the hierarchy, but I'm still not a professor.

01:35:00.000 So I can't really say or write what I think.

01:35:02.840 And then he's an assistant professor.

01:35:04.740 And he says, well, I haven't got tenure.

01:35:06.560 So I better keep my mouth shut.

01:35:07.940 And then he's an associate with tenure.

01:35:10.440 And he says, well, I'm not a full professor.

01:35:12.860 Finally, when I become a full professor, I'll be able to say what I and write what I think.

01:35:17.460 And then he's 35 or 40.

01:35:19.480 And for 25 years, he's practiced deception.

01:35:23.180 And he doesn't have a word of truth left to utter.

01:35:25.680 And that happens to political figures all the time.

01:35:27.800 And that's a real defeat.

01:35:29.620 Totally true.

01:35:30.400 And you know what?

01:35:30.980 I think that that's what winning and losing really ought to be defined as.

01:35:35.040 And then we're making this empirical bet.

01:35:36.860 You pointed out to Donald Trump in 2015.

01:35:39.320 I think empirically, you know, my bet is where yours is, where that, in this moment, probably is the more electorally successful strategy anyway.

01:35:49.460 But I'm less sure of that than I am sure that this is how I'm going to do it.

01:35:53.660 Because that's what's in my control.

01:35:55.780 And that's how we're going to keep it.

01:35:56.600 Well, I would love to keep talking to you.

01:35:58.960 I mean, I've been really fortunate over the last six years.

01:36:01.560 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.

01:36:19.600 You know, and there's been some pretty intense discussions about that at multiple times.

01:36:24.000 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.

01:36:31.960 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.

01:36:41.400 And, 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.

01:36:53.220 And I think the idea of not letting people, I just can't believe political figures have other people write their speeches.

01:36:59.780 It's like, I mean, they do, though.

01:37:01.320 It's nuts.

01:37:02.040 People craft your thoughts.

01:37:03.140 I know.

01:37:03.680 It's utterly insane.

01:37:04.980 It's nuts.

01:37:05.480 And they'll say, I'll channel your thoughts.

01:37:07.040 But, you know, as, you know, whoever said it, language guards the channel through which thought flows, right?

01:37:11.180 My English, my 11th grade English teacher basically said that, right?

01:37:13.560 If you can't write it down yourself, you probably don't know what you wanted to actually say.

01:37:18.180 But anyway, here's an ask that I'll have for you.

01:37:20.580 I 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.

01:37:29.320 Keep me honest, right?

01:37:30.420 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.

01:37:40.020 Okay, well, let's do this.

01:37:41.340 This will be an interesting thing to do in terms of what I can bring to my audiences anyways.

01:37:45.900 I mean, you're going to enter this fray full flat out for the next year and a half.

01:37:50.160 Why don't we check in about every three months or so and we can play that by ear.

01:37:54.380 I love that.

01:37:54.640 You 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.

01:38:01.800 And you call me out whether you think I'm actually staying true to what I'm setting out to.

01:38:06.940 See, this conversation is ground zero.

01:38:08.620 Let's do this every few months.

01:38:09.920 And I'll give you my honest take of how I think things are going.

01:38:12.980 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.

01:38:24.220 There's no point to the whole thing.

01:38:25.680 Even 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.

01:38:34.420 I'd love it.

01:38:34.880 I'll take you up on that.

01:38:36.060 Okay.

01:38:36.400 Okay, good.

01:38:37.040 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?

01:38:45.540 And so that's always the grounds for a good discussion.

01:38:48.060 We managed that today.

01:38:49.340 It looks like we can do this because we did this with Michaela on Michaela's show a while back and it worked well.

01:38:53.720 And today I thought it went extremely well.

01:38:55.340 It zipped by and we covered all the time.

01:38:56.940 Are we already done?

01:38:57.620 Are you kidding me?

01:38:58.340 I thought we were just getting warmed up.

01:38:59.420 We are.

01:39:00.200 No, we're already done.

01:39:01.760 We've gone for an hour and 36 minutes.

01:39:03.560 I thought we were getting warmed up.

01:39:06.160 Okay, okay, okay.

01:39:06.820 That was the preamble.

01:39:07.660 We probably are.

01:39:08.760 Well, it looks like it is the preamble.

01:39:10.640 Okay.

01:39:11.060 Yeah.

01:39:11.600 All right.

01:39:12.160 Well, thank you, sir.

01:39:12.760 I appreciate it.

01:39:13.340 This is a good place to wrap up.

01:39:14.800 Good.

01:39:15.060 Well, for everybody who's watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.

01:39:18.820 And I'm going to move with Vivek over to the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:39:22.980 We're going to go through some autobiographical background.

01:39:25.160 And I'm very interested always in investigating to find out how people's interests made themselves manifest in their life,

01:39:31.600 in the problems that gripped them and in the opportunities that offered themselves to them.

01:39:36.020 So we'll continue that conversation for half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus front.

01:39:40.060 And so you can turn to that if you want to follow up on the discussion.

01:39:44.920 Vivek, thank you very much today for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:39:48.120 And congratulations on your candidacy.

01:39:50.540 It's a hell of a thing to undertake.

01:39:52.640 And you're going to be in for quite the roller coaster ride for the next 18 months.

01:39:56.800 I mean, I know you're familiar with that sort of thing already.

01:39:59.000 And so I look forward to talking to you again.

01:40:01.500 And to those of you who are watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention to the film crew here in Calgary.

01:40:07.600 I'm still in Calgary.

01:40:08.660 Thank you for your time today and your technological prowess.

01:40:13.840 And we'll turn it over to the Daily Wire Plus and ciao, everybody.

01:40:18.900 Hello, everyone.

01:40:19.960 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 20, 2023

341. Jordan Peterson Interviews Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy

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