In this episode, I sit down with presidential candidate and entrepreneur, Rick Perry, to talk about his campaign and why he s running for President in 2020. We talk about how he s using his own money to fund his campaign, what he s doing to get his campaign off the ground, and how you can get involved as a small-dollar donor to help him win the 2020 election. We also talk about why it s important to be a contrarian in the political system and why you should be buying into the idea that politics should be run by a "crony class" and why it should be democratized. And we talk a little bit about why you shouldn t care if you re not part of the political donor class, because if you are, you might as well be playing the game too. Tweet me if you have any questions, suggestions or suggestions on how to improve the show. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What s the best way to get involved in politics? 2:30 - How can you get involved? 3:15 - How much money should you be making? 4:20 - What should you make? 5:00 What s your role? 6:40 - How do you make money? 7:30 What are you selling? 8:00 -- How should you sell a vision? 9:30 -- How can I sell a point of view? 10:00 | How do I sell something? 11:30 | Why I m a cause? 12:00 How should I be contrarian? 13:15 | What s my vision 15: What s I m going to do? 16:10 | How I m selling a vision 17:40 | Why do you have a problem? 14:20 | Why are you going to sell it? 15, what s the key to selling a point? 18:10 - Why I think I m contrarianism? 19: What do you want to sell a business? 21:00 // What s a problem you re going to build? 22:00 +16: How I think you can sell a good idea? 23:00 / 15: Can I sell it better than a business 15 - How to sell something better than I want to build it better? 26:00 & 16:40 Can I build it faster?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:23.000of the things we're doing differently in this campaign is we're breaking the system of even how somebody goes about fundraising for a political campaign.
00:00:35.000I've lived the full arc of the American dream.
00:00:37.000We've kickstarted this campaign with a personal investment, significant one that I've made.
00:00:41.000But this is going to be lifted up Not by the donor class, many of whom I even alienated, I would say, in Silicon Valley with the positions I've taken over the last week.
00:00:51.000They've been very clear about that and that's fine.
00:00:53.000The way we're actually going to get it off the ground is through a bottom-up grassroots uprising.
00:00:58.000And I want to do it in a way that breaks the cartel of professional political fundraisers.
00:01:04.000So one of the things that I've learned in this process is A lot of people are gonna make a lot of money off this presidential election.
00:01:13.000Actually, more people on the outside are going to make money off of this presidential election than probably any election in human history.
00:01:22.000Not exaggerating that because there's going to be billions of dollars spent on this election.
00:01:27.000It's going to be the most money that's ever been spent by candidates on an election.
00:01:31.000But the way the model works is the consultants who raise money, they get a rake of how much is raised.
00:01:38.000But there's only a small handful of them in the country because they know and have personal relationships with the people who have been historically donors to a, say, Republican presidential primary.
00:01:51.000Well, I think we have an opportunity to break that system.
00:01:53.000One of the things we're already seeing in this campaign is of the small-dollar contributions we're getting, we're getting like an off-the-charts percentage.
00:02:00.000In our case, it's upwards of 15, maybe more percent.
00:02:04.000That have never donated to the GOP or to a GOP candidate before.
00:02:08.000That's like way higher than the normal, which is like low single digit percentages.
00:02:13.000That's just one example of why there's an opportunity here.
00:02:16.000So one of the things that I want to do is, you know what, I don't want politics to be an industry.
00:02:20.000I don't like it as an industry, frankly, and I'm running for president to change the system in this country in a lot of ways.
00:02:27.000But so long as the system exists, I don't want it to be run by a cartel.
00:02:30.000I actually want to democratize that process.
00:02:33.000That if somebody else is going to make money off this process, frankly, if you're part of this movement, it might as well be you as well.
00:02:40.000There's no rule that says it only has to be some sort of self-appointed elite that gets to make a ton of money.
00:02:46.000If they raise a million dollars, they pocket $100,000 in a given week.
00:02:51.000And so one of the things we're doing here...
00:02:54.000Is basically anybody who wants to be a fundraiser for this campaign can be a fundraiser, but we're not just going to ask you to volunteer to do it.
00:03:01.000If you sign up, you can actually just do it as somebody who makes your 10% as well.
00:03:06.000So if you're not just going to the very wealthy people and getting $6,600 a pop, but maybe people who are getting $500 a pop or whatever, if you raise $100,000, that's $10,000 for you.
00:03:16.000If you raise a million dollars, that's $100,000 for you.
00:03:20.000If that's the way the game is played, you might as well play the game.
00:03:23.000And I'll tell you this too, from a matter of training, and I'm going to get to my guests today in a moment, who are I think going to have a lot of insight on this, but one of the keys to success is the ability to sell a vision.
00:03:34.000And if you can get somebody who isn't part of the political donor class to donate to somebody who's running for office, even if it's the U.S. president, you're building a skill set that you can use to do anything you want in your life and sell a different vision, be it a business you want to build, be it Welcome to my
00:04:08.000Chris and Cody, who have traveled from Austin to be with me, actually.
00:04:13.000Cody, in particular, has an entrepreneurship background, entrepreneurial background, as an investor, where I think we have some common cause as self-described contrarians.
00:04:23.000And I'd love to get a little bit more into your investment thesis and how you think about being a contrarian.
00:04:28.000I think that there's a lot there for not only how you succeed as a capitalist, But even the approach that we're taking to the political system and the cultural revival in this country being contrarian too.
00:04:39.000And Chris, your partner in life, partner in crime maybe, who I think has some perspectives.
00:04:45.000I'm really excited to learn from you, Chris, about your perspectives from your time in the military when you look at some of the objectives that I'm looking at advancing here.
00:04:53.000How can we actually translate that into action?
00:04:57.000And the theme, I was just thinking about The theme of this podcast, the theme of this campaign, even a theme of our conversation here is about how can reviving self-confidence at the level of the individual, maybe it's people who are in the military, maybe it's entrepreneurs, how does reviving self-confidence Lay the groundwork for our American revival, the revival of our country.
00:05:20.000So that said, Cody, I think people who don't already know you, who might be many people who already do know you, but for the people who don't know you, it'd be pretty cool to lay out your background a little bit from Wall Street to what you're doing now.
00:05:32.000And then maybe let's get right into that theme of self-confidence, actually.
00:05:36.000I think you have something useful to say about it.
00:05:38.000Well, I like your framing there, first of all, about what happened this weekend with SVB. I think that's interesting.
00:05:45.000One of our taglines is Main Street over Wall Street.
00:05:47.000And it's not that I think that there's anything wrong with Wall Street.
00:05:50.000I was on it for a long time with the humans who are doing the work.
00:05:52.000It's just, I believe, like you, that centralizing power in the hands of the few is really dangerous.
00:05:58.000So you do that with the donor class and saying, hey, we should probably decentralize this.
00:06:02.000There should be more options and access for all.
00:06:04.000And we feel that same way at Contrarian Thinking.
00:06:07.000I run a media company that does, I don't know, 60, 70 million views a month.
00:06:11.000And that all came on the back of me being in finance for a long time, building a bunch of businesses in finance and realizing that, man, if you go across any of the main sectors in the US, what you'll find is over any sort of 10-year period and then increasing over time, about 20 to 25% of the sector what you'll find is over any sort of 10-year period and then increasing over time, about 20 And so we're increasingly having this centralization of power in even business sectors, not just donors or politicians.
00:06:39.000And I don't think that's a great idea.
00:06:41.000Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I don't think humans are meant for it.
00:06:45.000And so we have this movement where we're trying to create 1 million financially free humans and 100,000 small business owners.
00:07:16.000If we just taught them how to do microacquisitions, then you could be the owner of your plumbing company, having worked in it for 10 years, and you can learn the leadership components of it, and you could learn how to structure a deal to own it.
00:07:28.000And so that's sort of our mission, is getting more people into ownership.
00:07:33.000If people raise for you, they've got skin behind the presidency, and they've got some ownership of this country, as opposed to right now, I think a lot of people feel like they don't have ownership over their life or the country.
00:07:43.000It's interesting you say that – use that expression of skin in the game.
00:07:46.000I mean the founding of the country – there's a controversial component to this, but the founding of the country was based on this vision of citizenship, participatory citizenship that said that actually to vote for a while in this country – you probably know this.
00:08:05.000Now, I don't favor that policy, but let's just double-click on that for a second.
00:08:10.000You – You can't care about a game that you have no skin in the game.
00:08:16.000I do think that we live in a national culture where people just passively take for granted what they inherit as a citizen, as opposed to this idea of actually having skin in the game.
00:08:29.000I'm not talking about voting restrictions for land ownership anymore, but there's something to the idea of actually having skin in the game in the country that you're a part of.
00:08:40.000Is that synchronous with you a little bit?
00:09:08.000I only can do that through business ownership because that's what I know.
00:09:11.000You can do that through actual regulation and law as somebody who's in charge of our governing system.
00:09:17.000But if all of us just figured out in our little lane, how could we get more skin in the game and then help others have more skin in the game as opposed to, sure, I could go out and raise another billion dollar private equity fund and I could buy all these businesses and I did that for a while.
00:09:30.000But at some point, one of my CEOs, he actually said, I was starting to talk publicly about this.
00:09:35.000And in finance, they don't really like when you do that.
00:09:37.000They don't like when you talk publicly about how we make money.
00:09:40.000And he was like, Cody, around here we get rich quietly.
00:10:30.000Here's how that creates value and here's the cut that I take.
00:10:33.000That's a very different approach and I think that maybe part of the reason that it's done quietly is that people aren't necessarily proud of exactly the substance of how it happens.
00:10:43.000Well, and you said it like you're like, "I've lived the American arc," which I think was a really good line because that's true.
00:10:49.000People love seeing you live the American arc if they feel like it's fair enough that they could get there too.
00:10:54.000And I think these days there's so many paths where people don't feel like that's fair.
00:10:58.000They're like, I got all this college debt, you know, like whatever all the narratives are, the victim mentality that's pretty pervasive.
00:11:04.000So I can't ever get there, so I don't want you to get there because if you get there, it's a zero-sum game.
00:11:08.000And I don't think that's true, but I do think we need different leadership and different education in order to realize that.
00:11:14.000I certainly needed that as an immigrant.
00:11:16.000I thought it was called- You were an immigrant from?
00:11:35.000Speaking to the point about there being significant problems, you know, within society that are, you know, considered societal problems instead of personal ones.
00:11:58.000There's certain aspects that you can, you know, take on board in order to decide like what is exactly the way that, you know, you decide for your future and your contribution.
00:12:10.000And some people think that incurring a lot of debt at a very young age, which again, you know, is obviously the only type of debt that is inexcusable or non-forgivable, right, in bankruptcy.
00:12:20.000And so we have people who think they're forced to make these decisions and thus they kind of become lost in a way of trying to find themselves and incurring so much debt while kind of searching for a purpose.
00:12:32.000To just go to the military like you, huh?
00:12:58.000You come from a survivalist perspective in that when you're a 19-year-old thrust into the world of the military hierarchy, you think about your own problems a lot less and you think about the problems of those around you and those below you and those adjacent to you, right?
00:13:15.000And you start to feel that burden of leadership at a very young age, whether you're on the enlisted side or an officer, right?
00:13:22.000The responsibility is just mounting and mounting in a very positive way.
00:13:27.000And in order, I think, to contribute to society, to an organization, to a group, you have to have your own stuff figured out to a pretty significant level.
00:13:35.000So it was a forcing function to figure out, like, what is my...
00:13:39.000You know, hierarchy of needs, personally.
00:13:40.000Like, where do ideologically do I fit within this certain paradigm?
00:13:46.000And having those responsibilities thrust upon you, where you a lot of time have life or death decisions, maybe not directly, but second and third order effects, right?
00:13:56.000Like, if I'm a logistician, and I don't have the ability to get food to this A group that's out in the Korengal Valley in the middle of Afghanistan who have no other means of resupply and were shut down for 72 hours because of storms or because of significant actions in the region.
00:14:15.000Those are burdens that weigh on you really heavily.
00:14:18.000Your ability to figure those out translate innumerably into the existing world outside of uniform.
00:14:27.000What did it do for your sense of self-confidence?
00:14:31.000Like how old were you when you were in the military?
00:14:33.000So, I went to the Naval Academy at 19 years old is when I made the decision.
00:14:40.000So, you know, I didn't want a conventional experience in college.
00:14:45.000I think I came from a family with a little bit of, you know, I didn't have a certain direction or forcing function and I kind of knew I needed the discipline at that age.
00:15:35.000And then you realize it and you're like, I can do a lot harder things for a year than go without music and video games and, you know, entertainment.
00:15:45.000And you just create this bond with the others near you that, you know, during a time of war, especially, that you know… Was it when it was?
00:15:53.000Yeah, I was there 2006 to 2010. Got it.
00:15:59.000That was when you were – That's when I was there.
00:16:01.000And so, you know, you kind of know and it's unsaid, the people that you're with that, you know, you're all – you joined to go fight a war.
00:16:10.000And that is a pretty significant responsibility to take upon oneself.
00:16:16.000I mean, you brought up skin in the game.
00:16:18.000I mean, there's different ways you could manifest that.
00:16:21.000I've gone back and forth on this, you know, since writing Woke Inc.
00:16:25.000and, you know, brought it up in my second book, Nation of Victims.
00:16:28.000Again, I actually have not, and I don't expect to make it part of my presidential campaign because I think there's a lot of practical difficulties associated with it.
00:17:31.000Yeah, they're in the US because they feel that they want to have the option in order for their son and daughter to serve in the South Korean mandatory subscription army.
00:17:43.000Well, in there, I think it's mostly boys.
00:17:46.000I think in South Korea, it's only for boys.
00:18:14.000They're like, no, I really would like to know, you know, your thought process.
00:18:17.000And the simplest analogy I can think of is if we all decide we need a building built, right?
00:18:22.000We all need to agree on the foundation of it, right?
00:18:25.000And there are certain necessary functions that every building has to have.
00:18:31.000I think in the United States, I think we go further and further away from that foundation, whether it's, you know, responsibility, personal or societal.
00:18:42.000I also think it has to do with how we view necessity, right?
00:18:48.000A lot of the times, we're so obsessed with the decisions we want to make, not the decisions that we must make in terms of sacrifice.
00:18:54.000And I think that's just taken us into an era of entitlement.
00:19:47.000And I think that's the whole point, right?
00:19:49.000You have these societies in which, you know, these third world countries and those who've, you know, descended into chaos because of conflict.
00:19:56.000And none of them are worried about their social media followers.
00:20:01.000None of them are – they're worried about where they're going to be.
00:20:11.000It's another when you're preying on a vacuum of – When those social media algorithms or whatever train you on the vacuum of identity, I mean we probably each have frailties as adults too, but it's another when you're 18. So you would say civic service.
00:20:24.000In my first book, I think the way I thought about it was Changing life structure is always a challenge and we've always – we have this idea you're 18, then you go to college.
00:20:36.000The irony is it's like the dress code in middle school where everyone says they don't want a dress code and then everyone like wears the exact same thing and so like that – I feel like that's what's going on with the gap year phenomenon a little bit is it's like, no, we don't want to – but anyway.
00:20:51.000To avoid that objection, what I said was, why don't we maybe weave it into, just to be very practical about it, like weave it into summer break while you're in high school and or in college, right?
00:21:02.000So you carry it over, you get the equivalent of one to two years of service, but by weaving it into, you know, what really, especially for many families, is a dead time summer break.
00:21:11.000Actually, it's one of the areas where poor kids, and I didn't know this, actually.
00:21:15.000My wife happened to have studied this and pointed me to it, so we did some more research on it.
00:21:21.000Actually, poor families, kids fall behind more over summer break.
00:21:26.000It's like more regression than people come from wealthy families because they can afford summer break activities or whatever.
00:21:31.000But put aside the equality-driven arguments, that's just a side point and a side benefit potentially.
00:21:38.000But fostering civic commitment, skin in the game, in the sense skin in the game as a citizen, not as a landowner but as somebody who did service, weaving that in.
00:21:50.000You could talk about whether it's one year off or whether it's that, but one of the practical questions that comes up is this question of what counts.
00:21:58.000Because you cut into it to say that it's not the military.
00:22:01.000As I thought about this more, I've moved closer to it having to be something that clearly relates to the national interest.
00:22:11.000And the military's task is to protect the country.
00:22:15.000Law enforcement's task is to enforce the laws of this country.
00:22:20.000I'm open-minded to something else fitting into that description and being broader, but to the extent this were an idea that I were in favor of implementing, I would say that military law enforcement may be working in the court system There's a multitude of different- What about the parks?
00:25:08.000I mean, a lot of kids who I went to school with, even at places like Harvard, etc., I would not wish that upon myself.
00:25:17.000I worry about it a little bit for our kids, and we think about how to address that, but...
00:25:24.000Outside the political context or whatever, one of the things that I've said if I could snap it into existence is if you had a tax regime that was like literally as low as it possibly could be in flat while you earn – But it was like you just take it back at the end and then just sort of let every generation start kind of more or less close to a blank slate.
00:25:50.000I would say that like whether you want high or low, you'd rather prefer it not while you were earning to allow anybody who wants to break through to break through to whatever level they want to and enjoy what they earn, but at the end of their life to say that actually – The next generation, you know, most people think about it as like, yes, we have equal opportunity.
00:26:07.000But some people miss the fact that even the kids who – and sometimes especially the kids who actually grow up with inheritance hanging over their head.
00:26:21.000Like I guess I would certainly choose that over somebody who grew up in poverty.
00:26:25.000But like I would absolutely choose – The upbringing, maybe I'm partial to it because it's the one I had, of having a non-wealthy but stable family upbringing enough to be able to put food on the dinner table and put me through school with education, but like still some sense of room to achieve.
00:26:45.000I think that that's something that – if you think about these couple of ideas here, inheritance over income as a framework for taxation – And the revival of civic duty and citizenship.
00:27:01.000These aren't actually like strictly or even at all partisan concepts.
00:27:07.000I actually have like – I actually have almost no idea how these ideas would land on – I'm running into Republican primary now, as you guys know.
00:27:20.000Are you guys – how do you identify politically or – and not these labels to matter, conservative, liberal or like – I don't know.
00:27:26.000Probably more Republican free markets.
00:29:00.000What I like about this conversation is typically when you're talking to political candidates, they're not open to not having incredibly strong views on something that are very on-brand.
00:29:11.000And so the cool part, I think, is having a situation where you'd say, let's innovate on this.
00:30:19.000Anyway, his point was that in this segment of the South Bronx, 90% of children born in this segment are born outside of wedlock.
00:30:28.000And so he wrote this whole book about an MTV segment called Who's Your Daddy, in which these trucks came around and they were DNA collection trucks to try to figure out who was related to who.
00:30:40.000And his whole mission was we need to get some sort of familial unit around these kids because that's how you develop ethics and principles and you have some safety nets from a family unit.
00:30:53.000But if we've lost a lot of that family unit in the US, then I think as a nation, it's interesting to try to figure out how could we not just deal with the symptoms, but deal with the problems up front.
00:31:04.000So yeah, you could do welfare and all of that for sure, but maybe you get the kids early on and then you solve some of the criminal justice problems long term by having some self-selective service up front.
00:31:17.000I think a lot of those problems get bred out of culture the longer and any earlier that they hit a child in their point in life.
00:31:26.000I think it'd be incredibly interesting to see how people would gravitate if they had a choice to their specific area of civic service.
00:31:34.000Yeah, I mean, I think it actually relates to the individualist piece of this too.
00:31:40.000Cody, you might have a view on this, where you've been following the rise of stakeholder capitalism and ESG and what non-capital markets.
00:31:48.000So, I mean, that's been kind of my core, one of my core areas of focus in the last few years.
00:31:53.000But without rehashing everything that I've said and criticizing the rise of this trend, one of the things that I think psychologically accounts for it, that's not the main, I'm not saying it's the dominant story, but it's a strand that I think is interesting is that When you, let's say at the age of 18, right?
00:32:12.000You've always been taught that service is intermingled with your self-interest, right?
00:32:20.000So like volunteer to put on your college application, then do it to get into business school or like law school or med school.
00:32:26.000It's like the standard operating procedure for getting to med school, do some sort of clinical service.
00:32:30.000That you never built the muscle memory of either pursuing self-interest unabashedly, nor did you ever build the muscle memory of doing service for the sake of service.
00:32:45.000They were always commingled in a way that you kind of never really learned how to either pursue your self-interest or to actually do service.
00:32:54.000but it was just sort of this perverted hybrid of both.
00:32:57.000And I feel like we wouldn't have these apologist instincts to say that, yeah, I'm going to enter the system of free market capitalism.
00:33:08.000Do it without feeling guilty about it.
00:33:10.000I do it generally by creating value because you only generally make money in this country if you have something of value that someone else is willing to pay for more than it cost you to make.
00:33:19.000And I have nothing to apologize for, but that doesn't deny that we're all Equal as citizens, and that we still have duties attached to our citizenship.
00:33:32.000And that actually gives me like more self confidence, weirdly, as an individualist, then this weird pseudo individualist culture where yeah, we're individualist, but we have to kind of, you know, sort of apologize for our success.
00:33:50.000Well, we kind of joke that I think a lot of the reason...
00:33:53.000I think if you go back to the root of a lot of the people who are apologizing for their success, it's what you said originally, which is like, they're not that thrilled by the way that they got there.
00:34:02.000And secondarily, I think a lot of people haven't really had a lot of extreme...
00:34:07.000There's difficulty and self-imposed difficulty thrust upon them who are apologizing for their success.
00:34:14.000Case in point, you have children of wealthy families that are on campuses like Harvard and Stanford, et cetera, picketing about XYZ issue that has to do with capitalism, but they were given everything and they come from a background where they feel a little guilty about that.
00:34:30.000They're like, I haven't given so much, now I feel guilty about it.
00:34:33.000Well, that's because They haven't ever had self-imposed difficulty.
00:34:37.000I think one of the reasons Chris and I don't feel that way is because, Chris, being a Navy SEAL ain't easy.
00:34:43.000And you also had a lot of stuff growing up with your family and familial issues you had to get through that definitely wasn't easy.
00:34:50.000And then I was a journalist covering human trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border and saw people hung from the rafters and women mutilated and Juarez.
00:35:00.000And so seeing that Just gives you context to say, oh no, we're incredibly lucky.
00:35:05.000Let's make as much money as humanly possible because it's a tool.
00:35:09.000And I can use that tool to change whatever I think needs fixed in our society.
00:35:14.000And whoever has the most money has the most power, I think, typically.
00:35:44.000I think even if you go to Juarez and you see what I saw there and you're a part of it, if you're not a sociopath, you will be changed by it.
00:36:57.000Truthfully, they've seen what humanity is capable of in some certain lights and they know what can be lost and how lucky we are to have whatever it is, however small it is, it's still ours, right?
00:37:52.000Those who do have some sense of vested skin in the game and those who don't.
00:37:57.000In a certain sense, that's part of what we see in the country right now is actually those who are in some ways invested in their status as American citizens and those for whom it's just a passive fact that they don't really Particularly have a second care for.
00:38:18.000And, you know, I just I just struggle with this.
00:38:43.000I was not expecting to talk about this with you guys, but seeing literally the two of you sitting side by side, right?
00:38:48.000Not to be reductionists, but you and I... Understand the power of pursuing our own version of the American dream through the system of free market capitalism, unapologetically, pursuing excellence.
00:39:17.000Began by knowing at the age of 19 that this is what I, Chris, needed to become the fullest version of myself, and that was through service to the country.
00:39:27.000And I just think those things are not...
00:39:31.000Not only are they not incompatible, they might just be deeply intertwined, actually, as one gives you the foundation of psychological security and confidence that you are a citizen, that you don't have to apologize when you do the things that you teach people how to do, which is make as much money as humanly possible, to borrow your phrase.
00:39:51.000And I feel like we've got this division between, you know, conservative movement that thinks of, you know, elevates as I'm part of this, right?
00:39:59.000The individualist dream, and then like the collectivist vision of the modern left.
00:40:06.000When, you know, put that to, you know, that's its own complicated picture.
00:40:11.000But like, at least in the conservative movement, we don't have to I think you're right.
00:40:34.000We talk about this sometimes and recently, right?
00:40:36.000And we kind of put into two buckets sometimes about serve or be served.
00:40:42.000And I think that's something in which people are inculcated at a young age, I think, into that type of – and I think it's pretty binary.
00:40:50.000You know, with some of the people that, you know, you might surround yourself with or that you just kind of view every day in society.
00:40:55.000But you look at it also, you know, from, I guess, a liberal or conservative perspective.
00:41:00.000And, you know, I think there's a tenement with, you know, with a liberal perspective in that you want a lot of stuff done for you.
00:41:08.000And on the conservative, like, you just want upward mobility.
00:41:11.000You want opportunity to do it yourself.
00:41:13.000And I think that's just like such a cultural rift, like, to talk about your classes system, you know.
00:41:19.000Those who know they have an opportunity to achieve any of it, it's like, sure, great, class be damned.
00:41:41.000We had religion as our, you serve because there's a moral obligation and it's A gateway to heaven, but it's also just what it means to be a good person.
00:41:50.000And you pursue capitalistic gains because within sort of religious context, you can do that and then you can tithe with the church.
00:41:56.000And those things I think were deeply held by conservatives.
00:41:59.000And now we know that religion is on the decline.
00:42:04.000So it's an interesting take that if we're not going to have sort of these religious views as a cohesive type of religious view as a reason why we should serve, is there another thing to fill in for it?
00:42:17.000And that's- - Like a national. - Right, exactly. - You know, and I think that, you know, a big part of the premise of our, you know, movement here is that there is this void in the heart of the American soul, right?
00:42:31.000That used to be filled by things like God or country or family.
00:42:40.000Even hard work really is a source of identity.
00:42:43.000If you create something in the world, that's a source of pride.
00:42:46.000Pride of the good kind can be a source of identity grounded in truth.
00:42:50.000When these things have disappeared, you have a black hole of a vacuum that's left.
00:42:57.000And that's what allows, you know, wokeism or gender ideology or climate ideology, whatever it is, to fill the void.
00:43:07.000And I've got to be careful about saying that you're just going to substitute God with country because it's not like the same thing.
00:43:17.000So even if country, national identity isn't going to get you 100% of the way there, it might get you – 35% of the way there.
00:43:26.000And it's better that way than a total vacuum.
00:43:29.000You know, somebody else's job, you know, it's a higher pay grade than me to fill that national vacuum with a religious, you know, revival in churches across the country, let that come through churches.
00:43:40.000But I think that it's less that the citizen identity can substitute for the God-based identity, but I do think America is the closest thing to a civic religion because it was a nation founded mostly on ideals.
00:44:00.000And our ability to believe in ideals is really what separates us from animals.
00:44:05.000I mean, we are made up of mostly the similar genetic content, more similar than not to, you know, a monkey or whatever.
00:44:17.000But one of the things that separates us, we think, to the best we know, is we can believe in something higher, something greater than ourselves.
00:44:38.000Have you ever been a society that has achieved like massive levels of wealth and success and abundance?
00:44:45.000And then, because I think what usually happens is you achieve, at least through history, it seems like you achieve this level of wealth and abundance.
00:44:53.000And then because of that, you have a lot of space for free time and, you know, things proliferate.
00:45:01.000Has there been a society that's had that happen and then sort of come back to sacrifice and difficulty again?
00:45:48.000And then there was, you know, lived on for, you know, whether the Roman Empire lasted hundreds of years or thousands depends on how you count.
00:45:54.000Because there was the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire.
00:49:21.000And I remember it was in finance and economics.
00:49:24.000And I just had only then learned about the Chicago boys.
00:49:27.000I didn't know that part of history, how we basically brought economists down from the US from University of Chicago To reinvigorate and reimagine the Chilean economy post Pinochet who was a dictator, right?
00:49:40.000Lots of stuff surrounding Pinochet and maybe were involved, but the moral of the story, it went from communism to Pinochet to us bringing in the Chicago boys to ushering in then a peaceful democracy and Chile then becoming with the least people In the US, in Latin America, and very far away from things.
00:50:00.000So completely disconnected from the Andes, the most economically viable, the highest salary range for people.
00:50:07.000And the untold story is that most of it was done through something really boring, which is just free market economics and freedom of economics.
00:51:11.000That's rough for inflation, but I mean, that's maybe what you need to do to fight inflation, but then you get more Silicon Valley banks and signature banks that were used to easy times skiing on artificial snow.
00:51:22.000Well, when the snow machine turns off, I'm talking about the Federal Reserve printing money, you know, there's no free lunch.
00:51:31.000But I think that on the other side of that, we can actually We can actually recognize that, all right, we learned that actual productivity is what drives sustained national growth, not artificial mark-to-market accounting driven by a lot of money flooding the system.
00:51:57.000I also think that there's a longer history of nations that end that way.
00:52:02.000And, you know, I think the Roman Empire did split up at some point.
00:52:07.000And, you know, I think this conversation about the national divorce, I don't know if you've been paying attention to that lexicon a little bit, but I'm running for president because I don't want to go to a national divorce.
00:52:19.000But I think times of economic hardship might actually get us closer to there as opposed to An actual national revival.
00:52:27.000It's funny how much you don't hear either party talking about GDP growth anymore.
00:52:35.000Is it spending cuts in a conservative solution?
00:52:39.000Is it, you know, tax increases because we've got to pay our bills versus how about this radical idea of just raw unleashing of productivity and growth itself?
00:52:53.000It's almost like we've forgotten that's an option.
00:52:56.000If GDP growth was over 4% in this country all the way through 1971, if that had continued at that rate through today, we'd have $20 trillion in excess value that would make all of our other problems, spending cuts, et cetera, tiny by comparison.
00:53:16.000And I think that it sounds like obviously who isn't in favor of growth, but actually I think there is this strain in America that is sort of an anti-growth strain, an apologist strain that says, no, no, we should learn to live with less.
00:53:28.000Well, actually – That's actually what creates a lot of travails for people when – I think the anti-nuclear agenda is about.
00:53:34.000I think it's a lot of what the anti-fossil fuel agenda is about.
00:53:37.000And I think that that – unlike the civil civic service stuff, which I was more just me still just thinking as a citizen, no, no, this is very much going to be – is part of the presidential campaign, is GDP growth.
00:53:54.000Like, that's American excellence and let's structure an economic agenda around actually delivering that rather than small ball of, you know, by spectacle accountants for how much cost we're going to cut from the system or how much we're going to increase taxes.
00:54:08.000We actually lost the self-confidence to play big ball.
00:54:10.000It's actually – that's one of the things that motivates me to do this thing.
00:54:13.000I have a question for you, which is, I think part of the reason why tax cuts or tax increases play so well is, one, the government can press a button theoretically and increase that one way or the other, and then they can say, yes, we've done it, yes, we've done it on the other side, and so it's like an easy win.
00:54:29.000But the other reason is also because for most of the population, if I was to say on Instagram, my platform is positive GDP growth, people would be like, what?
00:55:26.000You have – I think – I mean I don't know where you guys are on this, but I think it is a suffocating climate cult in the United States that shackles our ability to produce energy in this country.
00:55:52.000Incredibly oppressive regulatory regime when it comes to nuclear energy.
00:55:57.000So you just sort of go down the list from broad business regulation to unshackling energy to actually a worker shortage in this country.
00:56:06.000To just a revival of self-confidence, too.
00:56:08.000A belief that you can produce things actually makes you more effective at producing things, which goes to the themes of reviving national identity that I launched the campaign with.
00:56:16.000But to me, what I think about is like untaming the American beast, unleashing the inner animal, unleashing the American economy.
00:57:23.000Actually, reform of the Federal Reserve is actually a big part of this too.
00:57:25.000I don't want to put everybody to sleep here.
00:57:27.000But like, yeah, I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually hostile to wage growth in this country because they take wage growth as a leading indicator of inflation.
00:57:36.000And so every time you've seen wage growth in the last 20 years, they'll tamp down with monetary policy because they think that's a leading indicator of inflation.
00:57:42.000They've actually been terrible at even predicting inflation.
00:57:45.000I think the Federal Reserve needs to go back to just stabilizing the dollar as a unit of measurement.
00:57:48.000But it goes back to this point where if that's part of unleashing the American animal, what does it mean?
00:58:47.000Join the labor force, as you would put it, with productivity.
00:58:50.000I mean, you know, I guess if you prefer to get a PPP loan and a payment and a stimulus package and stay at home and play video games in your mom's basement, like, is that a real source of happiness?
00:59:00.000It's what we've incentivized people to do in their early 20s over the last year.
00:59:06.000But I do think that if we, you know, the worker shortage is a big part of an impediment to GDP growth.
00:59:12.000But if we actually embrace the idea as a nation, Maybe GDP growth is too abstract.
00:59:20.000The way I think about it though is deliver five plus percent GDP growth.
00:59:24.000Like all of our problems, like 90% of our problems are like out the window if we can do that.
00:59:27.000Why wouldn't we just make that the core of our economic agenda, the core of just like our national agenda and then derive pride and self-confidence and meaning?
00:59:44.000These are the things that are actually a core part of the campaign.
00:59:47.000And then maybe I'll just shoot myself in the foot at some point when we talk about national service and then everyone's like, no, we can't deal with that.
01:00:08.000Well, even, I mean, I always have a little beef with Dave Ramsey because he always talks about like, don't get the Starbucks, you know, don't buy this, don't buy that.
01:00:17.000And my point is you can only save your way to zero.
01:00:19.000There is a bottom limit of zero and all of us have to exist on something.
01:00:23.000So zero is actually not possible, but there is an unlimited upside to earnings.
01:00:27.000And so you can skip the Starbucks and go to zero and we can have our elderly people die with no medical healthcare whatsoever.
01:00:46.000If we just go back to historical pre-1971 level of like 4 – I mean it's like out of the ballpark.
01:00:52.000I mean even if we're in the – with a 3 plus percent GDP growth, all of our – Nearly all of our problems, both domestically and from a foreign policy perspective, go away.
01:01:56.000I just think that, you know, I mean- I think there's a certain strain of when many of us may have rallied behind the cry to make America great again.
01:02:05.000I think the thing we hungered for more than any one man or whatever was...
01:02:10.000The unapologetic pursuit of excellence in America.
01:03:14.000But I remember they were explaining to us the scorecards that the governors had in China, and I thought it was such an interesting thing.
01:03:21.000They were explaining how every single governor – I'm not sure if that's what they called them there, but let's call it a mayor or a governor – Of a particular area got a scorecard that was like GDP growth, employment, something else and something else.
01:03:33.000And they were tracked by their growth.
01:03:35.000And then they realized, oh, gosh, when we only do GDP growth, and when we only do unemployment numbers, then we have some societal or some environmental issues.
01:03:43.000But I can't believe – I mean, I remember I was driving in a car with our chaperone that basically meant that we wouldn't go places we weren't supposed to go.
01:03:52.000And I was like, gosh, you know – This doesn't feel very communist.
01:04:13.000Now, then you get an autocrat who then – whose head gets too big and then he kind of ruins the party, which is what Xi Jinping is doing now.
01:04:19.000And that's to our advantage, by the way.
01:04:20.000I think it creates an opportunity for us to seize on, which the US needs to wake up to and get on top of.