Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Freedom, Innovation, Superabundance with Marian Tupy | The TRUTH Podcast #3

00:00:02.000 We're

00:00:23.000 seeing an emerging debate in the Republican presidential field where some, like Nikki Haley are on the side of spending cuts as a way to address the growing national debt problem.

00:00:36.000 Others like Donald Trump are opposed to making any cuts to Social Security or Medicare.

00:00:41.000 And that's part of a bigger battle on how to address the deficit, how to address national debt between Republicans and Democrats, where, you know, the classical conservative view is focusing on spending cuts.

00:00:53.000 The classical liberal view amongst Democrats is to cover it via tax increases.

00:00:59.000 I think there's a third way.

00:01:00.000 I think there's a better way.

00:01:01.000 It's more obvious.

00:01:03.000 No one's talking about it.

00:01:04.000 It was once an obvious topic in both parties, but it somehow disappeared from the debate.

00:01:10.000 And that's GDP growth itself.

00:01:13.000 And as you know, one of my core objectives here is to be a pro-growth candidate.

00:01:19.000 To actually deliver not only American cultural self-confidence, It's a big part of what the heart of this campaign was all about, reviving a missing national identity as Americans.

00:01:29.000 But that's also the foundation for an economic vision, an economic revival, unleashing the American economy, restoring GDP growth to a level that, frankly, we've enjoyed in most of our nation's history until most of our national history, until the early 1970s.

00:01:45.000 We were growing at over four plus percent per year.

00:01:48.000 That has since tapered off dramatically.

00:01:51.000 There are deep-seated reasons why we're going to talk about some of those today.

00:01:55.000 But the question is why it is that no one is actually addressing GDP growth.

00:02:01.000 And it's not just because they're not thinking about it.

00:02:04.000 That would be too easy to address, actually.

00:02:07.000 It's because there's quietly a new philosophy in America that That says that actually we should not focus on growth.

00:02:16.000 Not on economic grounds, but on philosophical grounds.

00:02:20.000 That the anti-growth agenda is itself the morally sound one.

00:02:25.000 That somehow we should learn to live less.

00:02:27.000 Learn to live in a more harmonious lifestyle with the planet.

00:02:33.000 This is actually, it's a world view.

00:02:34.000 It's worth understanding.

00:02:36.000 I think that's actually what accounts for the disappearance of GDP growth from the economic policy debates that we otherwise were having even as recently as a couple decades ago where growth was an objective.

00:02:47.000 I personally think that, you know what, if Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon and we accomplished that, I think it's a much more achievable goal to say we're going to restore 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country.

00:02:57.000 I have a vision for how to do it, but today I'm actually joined by the author, one of the co-authors certainly, of a book that's caught my attention.

00:03:07.000 His voice really speaks to some of these issues in a way that's truly unafraid.

00:03:12.000 I hope I'm saying it correctly.

00:03:13.000 Marian Tupi?

00:03:14.000 Correct.

00:03:15.000 Thank you.

00:03:15.000 Marian Tupi.

00:03:16.000 And the book is Super Abundance.

00:03:17.000 Good book that I've had an opportunity to begin to sink my teeth into, but I'll be going deeper soon.

00:03:23.000 But Marian, welcome to the podcast.

00:03:24.000 And we're going to have a deep conversation about not only the themes in your book, but what's behind the anti-growth agenda in this country.

00:03:32.000 Welcome.

00:03:32.000 Thank you for having me.

00:03:33.000 Yeah.

00:03:33.000 Delighted to be here.

00:03:35.000 Glad to be here.

00:03:35.000 So tell us just a bit.

00:03:36.000 I know you just published the book.

00:03:37.000 It was only a matter of months ago, late last year.

00:03:41.000 Tell me what the thesis of the book is.

00:03:44.000 And I've had a chance to page through it, but I haven't had a chance to hear it in your own voice yet.

00:03:49.000 Give me your core motivation for what brought you to this project, what you hope to accomplish with it, what its core thesis is, and then we'll get right into how that relates to some of the areas I'm focused on, which is restoring a pro-growth agenda in this country.

00:04:02.000 Well, I think that people have been wondering about the relationship between population and resources and population and a livable planet for a very long time, right?

00:04:15.000 And for most of that time, people thought that if you have population increasing, you're going to run out of resources.

00:04:22.000 You know, Malthus famously publishes his paper in 1798 claiming that population is increasing at a much faster rate than resources.

00:04:30.000 Therefore, we are all going to starve to death.

00:04:32.000 Same with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford University biologist.

00:04:36.000 He's still alive, still publishing, still appearing on 60 Minutes.

00:04:40.000 This is sort of the climate scaremonger.

00:04:42.000 Correct.

00:04:42.000 The guy who said we were going to have global cooling in an ice age 40 years ago and then now says we're going to heat ourselves to death.

00:04:48.000 That guy.

00:04:49.000 Right.

00:04:49.000 And he published a book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. And obviously, none of those prognostications came true.

00:04:58.000 But more recently, people are still concerned about the planet running out of resources.

00:05:03.000 But people are also very concerned about the overall impact of humans on the planet.

00:05:10.000 So I think that the book is really intended for all those people out there, especially potential parents who are freaking out about having children because they are somehow going to damage the planet and everything is going to end up in tears.

00:05:24.000 And so when we were publishing this book, we suddenly started realizing over the last four or five years In mainstream media, or maybe you can say left-wing progressive media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, you have a constant stream of articles about how humans are bad for the planet, how bringing a child into the world is an act of selfishness, how humanity is a cancer upon the planet.

00:05:46.000 And so, I think that what we are doing is scaring ourselves, and especially scaring the children, the young people, to death.

00:05:53.000 They are depressed, they are anxious, they don't want to have babies, and basically the book shows That population growth is not only is it not bad for the planet, it is good for the planet.

00:06:07.000 What we show by looking at data over the course of last 170 years is that every 1% increase in population has reduced prices of commodities by about 1% relative to wages.

00:06:21.000 So we have this extraordinary situation.

00:06:23.000 That's interesting.

00:06:24.000 It's a little counterintuitive, right?

00:06:26.000 I guess it's production maybe outstrips the demand or something like this.

00:06:30.000 Well, it's even better than that.

00:06:33.000 You see, what happens is that biologists and the doommongers, they sort of think about the human being, a newborn, as coming to the world only with an empty stomach.

00:06:44.000 But a newborn comes into the world with an empty stomach but also a pair of hands and most importantly a brain capable of creating new ideas which then can be turned into inventions, innovations, productivity gains and higher standards of living.

00:07:01.000 A perfect example of that would be two German chemists in the early 20th century who discovered synthetic fertilizer.

00:07:09.000 Before then, humanity, in order to grow food, We would use animal dung or even human excrement in order to grow food.

00:07:18.000 And then later we discovered guano.

00:07:19.000 But that started running short in the middle of the 19th century.

00:07:23.000 And these two Germans basically discovered how to make synthetic fertilizer from natural gas. 0.86

00:07:29.000 And so now we are able to feed 8 billion people.

00:07:33.000 And many, many more on fewer acres of land because our agricultural productivity is simply increasing.

00:07:42.000 And behind agricultural productivity is simply new inventions which come from the human brain.

00:07:47.000 So that's really the principal driver, you would say, of making for what you would call a better planet.

00:07:52.000 Correct.

00:07:53.000 It's actually just ingenuity itself and that the more people you have, it's a probabilistic game that the more likely it is that you are to have a breakthrough innovation.

00:08:04.000 That's right.

00:08:04.000 Economists like to distinguish between Smithian growth and Schumpeterian growth.

00:08:09.000 Smithian growth, named after Adam Smith, is all about division of labor, more trade, division of labor, that sort of thing.

00:08:18.000 But Schumpeterian growth, named after Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, is all about innovation.

00:08:24.000 The reality is that over the last 200 years, the main driver of human prosperity, the fact that today the world is so much more prosperous than what it was even 200 years ago, is just new inventions and innovations, new ideas.

00:08:39.000 So a typical example would be, you know, in a Smithian growth economy, you just add more workers with shovels in order to build a canal.

00:08:50.000 In a Schumpeterian economy, you invent a giant digging machine, right? 0.93

00:08:56.000 So instead of having to use thousands of workers, you just use a machine, giant excavator that uses fossil fuels.

00:09:05.000 And so this is how you create prosperity, through technological innovation.

00:09:09.000 And nobody knows how to come up with new technologies and new inventions.

00:09:13.000 For that, you need more people.

00:09:15.000 You need new ideas.

00:09:16.000 I am, you've got my attention here.

00:09:19.000 This is actually, this gets to the heart of what I think of as what I call small ball economics and big ball economics even within the Republican Party.

00:09:29.000 It's just the thing I was talking about a moment ago where I think that there is this captivation with the Smithian view, as you put it.

00:09:38.000 It's not just that it would be—I mean, in fairness to that view, and I'm much more moved by the Schumpeter vision, but to get the best alternative on the table, I think it's not just a matter of more shovels.

00:09:50.000 It's a matter of, you know, they would argue, you know, different kinds of shovels in different places because you have different regions that may have different areas of expertise.

00:09:59.000 You then sort yourself to your best expertise, then you open up trade— Then there's gains from trade to allow an efficient trading equilibrium.

00:10:07.000 That's the fullest extension of the Adam Smith or the Smithian view.

00:10:11.000 I think that's been the neoliberal consensus for the last 40 years of growth in the global economy, 50 years.

00:10:20.000 That's how we actually achieve growth in the economic pie, but without enough of an emphasis on Human ingenuity and innovation as a game changer in its own right.

00:10:33.000 And so you would say the Schumpeter view is that's actually the real driver of longer-run prosperity, not assuming how you optimize an existing fixed pie through gains from trade and human productive capacity.

00:10:47.000 Is that a fair assessment?

00:10:48.000 Ideally, you would have both, right?

00:10:51.000 I mean, there are certain activities which it simply doesn't make any sense for the United States to participate.

00:10:56.000 Undertake, yep.

00:10:57.000 Maybe, I don't know, certain agricultural produce which doesn't have to be produced here because it can be imported from South America or whatever.

00:11:04.000 Or maybe we don't have the weather for it.

00:11:06.000 So you still want free trade.

00:11:07.000 Yeah, of course.

00:11:08.000 But that's not an end-all be-all, right?

00:11:11.000 But the ultimate driver of growth, really, the high rates of growth that we've been accustomed to and certainly the high increase in GDP was new technology.

00:11:23.000 And that is something that you are right that we have sort of stopped talking about, about how the administrative state, how the D.C. bureaucracy, how different mandates from the government, how taxation performs in order to undermine innovation in this country.

00:11:42.000 So talk to me about what you think is behind this, not only loss of growth from the conversation, but the fact that we enjoyed, as I noted, 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country through about 1971. And it's been, it's tapered off and declined considerably.

00:12:01.000 I think we're well under 2%.

00:12:03.000 Well, I wish there was a consensus on this.

00:12:07.000 I mean, there's a lot of debate.

00:12:08.000 I'm sure there's no consensus.

00:12:09.000 I want your view.

00:12:10.000 Well, my view is that it really starts with people.

00:12:15.000 The more people you have, the better you are at producing new ideas and new inventions.

00:12:22.000 And part of the problem that we...

00:12:24.000 Can I just put pressure on that for a second?

00:12:25.000 Why would that be the case?

00:12:26.000 I mean, is it like just like a probabilistic game?

00:12:29.000 It is a probabilistic game, but also only a small fraction of humans invent or innovate anything, right?

00:12:37.000 Exactly.

00:12:38.000 It's low digits, low single digits, so maybe 5%, right?

00:12:42.000 And so in a population of 300 million people, which is what the population of the world was at the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus, that 5% will amount to many fewer people than a population of 8 billion people.

00:12:56.000 The 5% will be obviously much larger. 0.67

00:12:59.000 So the bigger the population, the more likely it is that you are going to come up with somebody like Vivek or Elon Musk or somebody else.

00:13:06.000 So that's a probabilistic game is your point there.

00:13:08.000 And this is just a...

00:13:10.000 I'm nitpicking at like an early normative assumption here just because it has consequences for where we go.

00:13:19.000 That versus not a numbers game, but focusing on how we cultivate...

00:13:27.000 Higher likelihood of ingenuity itself, even amongst a fixed population.

00:13:32.000 Why one route rather than the other?

00:13:34.000 I don't know whether governments are very good at stimulating the number of inventors or innovators.

00:13:41.000 I know there was an OECD study done about 10 years ago looking at different governments around the world trying to stimulate invention and innovation, and that didn't prove to be successful.

00:13:55.000 So we don't actually know where inventors or innovators come from.

00:13:58.000 What we do know is that a lot of inventors or innovators are actually quite quirky individuals.

00:14:04.000 They tend to be a little bit on the spectrum.

00:14:07.000 They have very different personality traits than the mainstream of humanity.

00:14:13.000 But what I think you want to do is to create an environment Where if the innovator does exist, he or she can succeed.

00:14:25.000 One aspect of promoting innovation is, of course, having the maximum potential amount of freedom.

00:14:32.000 In large chunks of the world, people are not free.

00:14:37.000 They're not free to think, to publish, to communicate, to invest, to profit.

00:14:44.000 If Steve Jobs' father didn't emigrate from Syria to the United States but remained in Syria, if Steve Jobs was born in Syria, he could never have accomplished what he accomplished in the United States.

00:14:56.000 The guys behind Google, or for the matter, Elon Musk, had they remained in their home countries, they would probably not be able to build the kinds of enterprises which they have.

00:15:05.000 So freedom is also a huge component of it.

00:15:07.000 How do we know that?

00:15:08.000 We know that because If you look at China, for example, China has been the most populous country in the world for 2,000 years, but it was dirt poor until about 40 years ago because they only had that one component, which is a huge population, but they didn't have freedom.

00:15:27.000 It was only after they started liberalizing in the late 1970s that they started growing.

00:15:32.000 But freedom is not just about you not having to live in a crappy country where you cannot do anything.

00:15:38.000 Freedom is also about regulation.

00:15:42.000 Freedom is also about taxation.

00:15:45.000 Whether you're disincentivized because the paperwork can go on for months or years.

00:15:56.000 The precautionary principle which has been embraced by the European Union and which a lot of people would like to import into the United States.

00:16:05.000 The precautionary principle basically says That you cannot bring a good into the market unless you prove that it will not do any harm to anyone.

00:16:18.000 So no innovation can be marketed until you can be absolutely 100% sure that it's not going to harm anyone.

00:16:27.000 Well, you know, if those were the conditions for marketing innovation 100 years ago, we wouldn't have cars, we wouldn't have planes, we wouldn't have anything.

00:16:36.000 So all of these things, I think, work in combination to suppress the natural innovativeness of the people who might otherwise be innovators and inventors.

00:16:48.000 You know, that's a lot of the—it's very first personal to me.

00:16:51.000 I mean, I think I've seen that firsthand.

00:16:52.000 So the first major company I started was a biotech company, Roivant.

00:16:58.000 And we developed medicines.

00:17:00.000 But I will tell you from firsthand experience, I mean, the level of constraint applied by FDA to this industry— The biotech and pharmaceutical industry is absolutely the number one impediment to innovation in that industry.

00:17:19.000 And you would sort of, you'd run the math beforehand.

00:17:22.000 Okay, here's what the cost is to develop that drug.

00:17:26.000 Here's the benefit on the other side.

00:17:28.000 The number one variable isn't the benefit on the other side, which is always unknown anyway, but you model what you think it is.

00:17:34.000 But you do know what the cost is.

00:17:35.000 And the number of times you're required to do two or three phase three studies instead of just one or two.

00:17:42.000 Might increase your increment in confidence by 1%, 2%, adding that second 2,000-patient study on top of a 2,000-patient study you already did, big diminishing returns and what you learned from that.

00:17:55.000 And yet, that is the precautionary principle in action here in America.

00:17:59.000 I think a big part of that is what holds the nuclear energy revolution back, too.

00:18:04.000 So there's a lot to that story.

00:18:07.000 A couple of comments on that.

00:18:08.000 One having to do with FDA. Here's a thing that an American government could do tomorrow, and that is to conclude an agreement with the European Union of mutual recognition of drugs or food items.

00:18:23.000 Easy.

00:18:24.000 That can be done.

00:18:24.000 That can really be done.

00:18:26.000 Right now, if you are a European company, and Europe is not third world, if anything, their health and safety standards are higher than ours.

00:18:36.000 So the thing is, if something is approved for consumption in the European Union, it should by default be approved for consumption in the United States.

00:18:46.000 I think the European Union also...

00:18:48.000 I think the essence of what happens here, at least in the biotech and pharma world, is actually...

00:18:53.000 It's almost the other way around.

00:18:55.000 The FDA is applying such high and exacting standards.

00:19:00.000 Now, that's a kind way of putting it.

00:19:02.000 Some of these are nonsensical, burdensome goalposts that most companies actually end up marketing their drugs in the U.S. long before they go to Europe, just because Europe is not paying nearly as much for prescription medications as the U.S. is.

00:19:19.000 So companies then focus on the U.S., And then in Europe, okay, if they've already met the U.S., you're actually seeing a little bit of, good for the Europeans, I guess, but free-riding in the other direction where all the cost is borne in the U.S. There's definitely free-riding on the part of the Europeans.

00:19:35.000 But mutual recognition, if you go through the trouble of developing something in the EU, it doesn't have to be a drug.

00:19:40.000 It could be a food item.

00:19:41.000 You should be able to sell it.

00:19:43.000 I mean, my gut instinct.

00:19:44.000 When the child formula, infant formula...

00:19:50.000 When we ran out of it in the United States, we had to import it from the EU. I mean, infants are not dying in streets in Europe.

00:19:59.000 We can do this.

00:20:01.000 So it goes for food items.

00:20:04.000 And then the big chunk that you have mentioned, of course, is energy.

00:20:08.000 Again, the regulatory state.

00:20:13.000 On the one hand, the government is creating reams of regulations which make it almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant in the United States.

00:20:24.000 Oh, it is basically economically near impossible.

00:20:26.000 Right.

00:20:26.000 And on the other hand, so the left hand is doing that, the right hand of the government.

00:20:31.000 It's actually subsidizing and giving all sorts of subsidized loans to nuclear power stations in order to make up for the costs of overregulation.

00:20:42.000 So this is a typical D.C. craziness that you encounter.

00:20:47.000 But, of course, I'm a huge fan of nuclear fission and fusion, and I think that we should be building much more of that.

00:20:53.000 And I think that part of the reason why we stopped growing in the 1970s, to go back to the original point that you were making, is that our energy costs are much higher than they would have to be if we truly had a free market in energy, if we allowed for different forms of energy to be built and supplied to the American people.

00:21:12.000 In the short to medium run, I would say that the greatest thing that the American government could do in order to stimulate growth would be to get out of the energy situation and allow the market to take care of it, allow us to drill for natural gas, which produces much less CO2 into the atmosphere than burning of coal, more nuclear energy.

00:21:37.000 We can do this if the government just gets out of the way.

00:21:41.000 You know, I fully agree with you on that.

00:21:45.000 I'll just go one step further on this.

00:21:47.000 I agree with you that unshackling ourselves from the constraints on U.S. energy is probably the lowest hanging fruit, easiest way to unlock innovative power in America.

00:22:00.000 I'm curious for your perspective, just to know what our respective priors are on this.

00:22:06.000 I don't even think that reducing CO2 is a worthy public policy goal in and of itself.

00:22:15.000 We can go into the details of the climate debate.

00:22:18.000 Is climate change real?

00:22:20.000 Is it man-made?

00:22:20.000 Yes, yes, probably.

00:22:21.000 It seems to be so.

00:22:23.000 Whether or not that's an existential threat for the planet or whether or not—actually, this is a theme that probably resonates, I think, with your argument.

00:22:32.000 The best way to handle climate change is through human innovation that allows for not only adaptation, but as my friend Alex Epstein says, mastery of that change in climate.

00:22:44.000 And so that goes back to the innovation argument that, ironically, your best way to deal with the supposed threats that you're addressing with an anti-innovation agenda, like the climate cult, and I do think it has a religiosity to it, It's actually through doing more of the very thing that they don't want you to do, which is use of energy to innovate.

00:23:03.000 Do you follow what I'm saying?

00:23:04.000 Yeah, no, I do.

00:23:04.000 I read both of his books.

00:23:06.000 I'm a huge fan.

00:23:07.000 I think they're extremely well written, full of good ideas.

00:23:12.000 First of all, even assuming that CO2 is a problem, and I'm perfectly willing to To acknowledge that because, you know, I'm not a climate scientist.

00:23:25.000 I do not believe at the same time that we are facing some sort of a climate apocalypse.

00:23:30.000 If you are looking, I mean, if this is an existential crisis, then you have to be able to measure it.

00:23:37.000 How would you measure it?

00:23:38.000 Well, who is it existential crisis for?

00:23:40.000 It's existential crisis supposedly for the human beings.

00:23:44.000 That's what existential crisis means.

00:23:46.000 But if you look at the number of people who are dying due to extreme weather, and this has to do with hurricanes, floods, heatwaves.

00:23:55.000 Way down.

00:23:55.000 98% down.

00:23:56.000 98 or 99% down.

00:23:57.000 So in fact, through this climate mastery, We are managing to survive better than ever before.

00:24:06.000 And so that convinces me that we are not facing a climate apocalypse or rather existential crisis.

00:24:13.000 Now, of course, The problem that we are facing is that the same people who are saying we need to get away as quickly as possible from energy sources which emit CO2 into the atmosphere are the same people who are saying that we cannot use the energy sources which would enable us to do that.

00:24:32.000 Like nuclear or hydroelectric.

00:24:33.000 Like nuclear.

00:24:34.000 Well, hydroelectric is great, provided that you live in countries where it makes sense, right?

00:24:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:24:40.000 But I'm saying the opposition is still telling.

00:24:42.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:24:43.000 But nuclear is the biggest example.

00:24:45.000 Nuclear, maybe thermal energy.

00:24:48.000 I bet you that the moment that thermal energy becomes commercially...

00:24:54.000 It's plausible.

00:24:55.000 The same people will be out in the streets saying...

00:24:58.000 And I have my views on this.

00:24:59.000 Why do you think that is?

00:25:01.000 So I think it is because they are not actually looking for a solution.

00:25:08.000 Of course.

00:25:09.000 Yep, you're over the flame.

00:25:11.000 Keep going.

00:25:11.000 You're right over the flame on this.

00:25:12.000 To me...

00:25:14.000 G.K. Chesterton, I'm not a religious person myself, but I do believe what G.K. Chesterton said, is that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

00:25:26.000 Oh, I like that.

00:25:26.000 Who said that one?

00:25:27.000 Because Blaise Pascal is the one who I often cite having said something...

00:25:32.000 Blaise Pascal says if you have a hole in your heart the size of God and God doesn't fill it, something else will fill it instead.

00:25:39.000 Right.

00:25:39.000 That's the Pascal version.

00:25:40.000 Who's this guy?

00:25:41.000 Chesterton?

00:25:42.000 I should know him.

00:25:42.000 G.K. Chesterton.

00:25:43.000 Who is he?

00:25:44.000 I think he was an English writer, philosopher, back in the 19th century.

00:25:50.000 If you stop believing in God, you don't...

00:25:53.000 You don't believe in nothing.

00:25:54.000 You believe in anything.

00:25:55.000 I like that.

00:25:57.000 And sort of my view is that...

00:26:02.000 There is that God-shaped hole in human hearts, and it will be filled by something.

00:26:10.000 People simply need to believe in something transcendental.

00:26:14.000 It's very difficult for humans to cope with the idea of a directionless universe where things happen ad hoc, etc.

00:26:22.000 I happen to believe that, but regardless, the point is that most people are looking for some transcendental meaning in their lives.

00:26:29.000 And I think that the green religion, well, environmentalism has become a green religion.

00:26:36.000 And it's very interesting how it maps onto the main features of Christianity.

00:26:41.000 These people will be the first ones to say, I don't believe in Christianity.

00:26:46.000 But when you think about the structure of the two religions, there is the Garden of Eden, which is, of course, a planet before industrialization.

00:26:58.000 You have your devils, and that's the fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel CEOs.

00:27:03.000 Look at how people talk about fossil fuel CEOs.

00:27:07.000 They are the devils, right?

00:27:08.000 You have your priesthood, which is the IPCC. You know, you cannot converse with them. 0.86

00:27:14.000 You cannot criticize them.

00:27:15.000 If IPCC says something, you know, it's that written in stone.

00:27:20.000 You have your saints, Greta Thunberg.

00:27:22.000 I mean, talk about the secularists.

00:27:23.000 Totally.

00:27:23.000 She's a modern Joan of Arc.

00:27:24.000 Yep, yep.

00:27:25.000 And as I like to say, you even have indulgences.

00:27:28.000 So before the Reformation, the Catholic Church, if you committed a crime, you could give some money to the Church and your crimes would be forgotten and they would be forgiven.

00:27:41.000 And how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like John Kerry?

00:27:48.000 Was that true in the Catholic Church?

00:27:49.000 I wasn't familiar with that.

00:27:50.000 That's called an indulgence?

00:27:51.000 Indulgences, that's right.

00:27:52.000 And so how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like Al Gore or John Kerry or Leonardo DiCaprio and countless other Celebrities, Meghan and Harry, they fly around the world on private jets.

00:28:08.000 They burn a lot of fossil fuel.

00:28:11.000 They contribute a lot to CO2 emissions.

00:28:14.000 But they perform a few incantations.

00:28:21.000 They say the right things.

00:28:22.000 It's almost like magic.

00:28:23.000 They give a little bit of money or free speeches to green causes, and suddenly all of these sins are forgiven.

00:28:30.000 And so what I'm saying is that I'm absolutely convinced that modern environmentalism fills that God-shaped hole in people's hearts.

00:28:41.000 What was the one right before Saints?

00:28:42.000 You said IPCC? What was the church?

00:28:44.000 Priesthood.

00:28:45.000 I like that.

00:28:45.000 It's a priesthood.

00:28:47.000 Yeah, I like that.

00:28:50.000 So, you know, here's a debate that I've had.

00:28:53.000 I'm probably not supposed to say this out loud, but I'm just going to be very honest.

00:28:57.000 As I think about delivering...

00:29:00.000 You know, a solution to these problems.

00:29:03.000 I kind of find myself at a personal crossroads.

00:29:08.000 I'm at the early stage of this presidential campaign.

00:29:10.000 But there's one of two roads to go with this.

00:29:14.000 And I'm torn about it, frankly.

00:29:16.000 So I agree with everything you just said.

00:29:19.000 I'm really liking the way you're thinking.

00:29:23.000 Because you're articulating some of the things that I agree with better than I have even to date.

00:29:29.000 And so I'm appreciative of that.

00:29:33.000 So it leaves me at a crossroads, right?

00:29:35.000 If you have this God-sized hole in your heart, to borrow the Blaise Pascal framing of it, there's two ways to play the game.

00:29:42.000 The way I've been playing this so far is open people's eyes to that reality.

00:29:49.000 And allow reason and rationality to kick in.

00:29:53.000 Okay, I actually am very supportive of a faith-based revival in America for time-tested religions.

00:29:58.000 The difference between a religion and a cult is a religion at least, at least has been time-tested.

00:30:04.000 Okay, a cult has not.

00:30:05.000 These are cults, not religions.

00:30:07.000 Because the climate religion is young enough that we can call it exactly what it is.

00:30:13.000 It's a cult.

00:30:14.000 But that's one road.

00:30:17.000 I wonder whether the more successful approach will be to create a sort of religiosity, zealotry around a pro-growth agenda itself, right?

00:30:30.000 I mean, there's two ways to play this game.

00:30:33.000 One is make people aware of that vacuum.

00:30:36.000 And then hope that the awareness, the power of reason, etc., to see that fact gives them liberation from the fact to say that either they're going to adopt a true religion grounded in truth, a true God, or they're going to recognize that, hey, I thought I was being a secularist, but I'm not even being secular.

00:30:54.000 I'm just being a religious fanatic again without even recognizing it.

00:30:57.000 That's the road I've been taking.

00:30:59.000 I hope it's successful.

00:31:02.000 The different approach would be to spawn, you know, a religion around the pro-growth agenda itself.

00:31:12.000 And at least then we have tangible human prosperity rather than human demise, which is where I think the climate cult leads us.

00:31:20.000 It's the goal of the climate cult, actually, to lead us to human demise.

00:31:22.000 It's actually a form of self-flogging, a sort of wearing a hair shirt, apologizing for human existence.

00:31:28.000 And even if you listen to the Saints, Greta Thunberg or whatever, this is directly what they're saying, right?

00:31:36.000 It's actually about apologizing for the injustices of capitalism.

00:31:41.000 Climate justice is actually more the emphasis on the justice than the climate, which involves mostly the West.

00:31:47.000 Countries like the U.S. in particular apologizing for their success.

00:31:51.000 Why not compete with that with actually a new belief system in the importance of economic growth, productivity, innovation, prosperity in itself, I wonder whether that might actually just be more effective than the approach that, you know, folks like I, maybe folks like you and I, if I may say, have been taking so far on this did.

00:32:15.000 Do you follow, and what's your reaction to that?

00:32:16.000 I do.

00:32:17.000 Well, first of all, I think that you've zeroed in on something very important, and that is the excessive use of the word justice in anything like climate justice.

00:32:25.000 And I think the reason why they're doing it is because once you start using things like climate justice, whenever you put justice in it, You can stop thinking in terms of trade-offs.

00:32:35.000 Yes.

00:32:36.000 Right?

00:32:37.000 Justice is not about trade-offs.

00:32:39.000 Justice is uncompromising.

00:32:40.000 Justice is uncompromising.

00:32:42.000 So that snail or whatever it is that you need to save...

00:32:48.000 If that's justice, then the welfare of the human species and the future of humanity doesn't really matter because the goal is to preserve whatever it is that you are trying to do.

00:33:00.000 Whereas what I'm talking about is the constant need for trade-offs.

00:33:07.000 The more you regulate the energy industry, for example, the energy output, the more you micromanage it and you choose between winners and losers, The more of an impact you have on economic growth and therefore future prosperity of the American people.

00:33:21.000 Now, with regard to what you are asking, I mean, it is not for me to suggest campaign points, but I do think that there must be a market for this kind of pro-growth optimistic vision of America.

00:33:41.000 Certainly, whenever I leave D.C., And go, for example, to the West Coast and meet with people in the Silicon Valley or LA and San Francisco.

00:33:50.000 There's a lot of sort of future techno-optimistic attitude that we are going to fix this country by simply innovating our way out of scarcity and out of problems.

00:34:01.000 Because the difference between 2% economic growth rate And a 3% in economic growth.

00:34:07.000 It's huge!

00:34:08.000 It's 50%.

00:34:09.000 Trillions of dollars, right?

00:34:10.000 It's not one percentage point difference.

00:34:12.000 It's 50%.

00:34:12.000 Over what time horizon?

00:34:13.000 Well, any year, right?

00:34:15.000 Or literally.

00:34:16.000 Any year, any year.

00:34:18.000 Well, it's 50% in growth rate itself, but it's more than 50% in the destination.

00:34:21.000 And then, of course, incremental growth over time.

00:34:24.000 So there must be for it.

00:34:25.000 And we also know from American history That there were times when Americans were much more optimistic about the future.

00:34:34.000 I mean, the 1950s and 1960s were all about, you know, creating new technologies, famously what Peter Cheel talks about, about flying cars, etc.

00:34:46.000 People used to be much more optimistic.

00:34:48.000 And maybe it was after the 1970s energy crisis that people became much more pessimistic.

00:34:56.000 And then more recently, I think what happened was that both political parties started embracing victimhood.

00:35:03.000 I mean, you have your own book, The Nation of Victims, right?

00:35:06.000 Nation of Victims, yep.

00:35:07.000 Exactly.

00:35:07.000 And whereas Democrats have for a very long time been a party of victims, Republicans also started embracing victimhood.

00:35:16.000 I agree with you.

00:35:17.000 And so now for the first time in a very long time, we don't really have a political party or a candidate who is putting across the positive vision, is that if we just do certain things differently, we can actually be much more prosperous in the future.

00:35:37.000 And I would like to see that kind of candidate emerge and embrace that sort of Yeah, much of what you say describes my candidacy.

00:35:54.000 I don't like to use the word techno-optimism because the mistake that some of those folks in Silicon Valley make, in my opinion, is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues that don't have a technical is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues

00:36:15.000 And I think those deserve to be addressed by free speech, an open debate, and an exchange of ideas, kind of what you could, in a reduced sense, call the culture war issues or whatever.

00:36:29.000 And so I don't think we're going to resolve the question of how to address historical racial injustice in the United States whatsoever.

00:36:41.000 well, we can debate that, but maybe abortion or something like this, by a techno-optimistic view of the future.

00:36:52.000 And that's okay, because not every question needs to be settled through this.

00:36:55.000 And this is, I guess, gets to the heart of my criticism of that Silicon Valley crowd that you're talking about.

00:37:00.000 Some of them are, I think, afraid of wading into the waters of moral and normative debate and sort of sublimate that into technology will solve everything AI will help us.

00:37:15.000 And I'm kind of a candidate who...

00:37:18.000 Bluntly, we'll take on those, be a participant, staking out my position in a fundamental normative debate, moral debate.

00:37:26.000 But still believes that 90% of our problems can be addressed through actually just embracing growth again.

00:37:34.000 Fair point.

00:37:35.000 I mean, one problem with, of course, the cultural issues is that if we forego freedom of speech, if we forego certain areas of research that we cannot go into because God knows what monsters are hiding there.

00:37:53.000 Then we may also forego on a lot of different life-saving technologies.

00:37:59.000 A perfect example of that would be drugs.

00:38:04.000 Should we know about genetic differences between people on a molecular level or genetic level?

00:38:09.000 Well, yes, if it means that our drugs, for example, can be tailored to different people depending on the need.

00:38:19.000 But once you say that we cannot research in that particular area because it is politically incorrect, then there is a lot of human suffering down the line of people who are not going to be given life-saving medicines and things like that.

00:38:33.000 And there may be other areas.

00:38:35.000 Where we might be prevented from going from a purely research standpoint because they become politically radioactive.

00:38:44.000 So, research, freedom of speech, freedom of research, freedom of publishing, this is all incredibly important and I fear that we are using it because of these red guards on American campuses. 1.00

00:38:59.000 So in the interest of maybe not just violently agreeing with one another, I'm going to maybe just press on a couple places on your thesis.

00:39:05.000 I wouldn't say these are areas of disagreement, but areas of curiosity, just put pressure on it a little bit.

00:39:11.000 One relates to the US, one relates to China.

00:39:15.000 Let's start with the China example, and then we'll come to the US question I had for you.

00:39:20.000 So in China, I like your thesis about freedom.

00:39:23.000 Resonates with me, of course.

00:39:26.000 Now, China is not in any sense under the last 10 to 15 to 20 years free in the sense we would think of it here.

00:39:34.000 How would you characterize their pace of innovation?

00:39:38.000 Certainly their pace of GDP growth has on absolute percentage numbers been multiples higher than what it is in the United States.

00:39:45.000 Now they're growing off of a smaller base and there's all kinds of confounding factors there.

00:39:48.000 But how do you square what many would describe as an innovative set of results in China?

00:39:57.000 With the abject absence of true human freedom.

00:40:01.000 Sure.

00:40:01.000 Well, I would distinguish between copying and innovating.

00:40:05.000 Yeah.

00:40:05.000 Well, there's a lot of copying going on, that's for sure.

00:40:07.000 So China was a deeply totalitarian society before 1978. After that, there was a process of liberalization, meant in the best possible way, until about 2012. The country was still a dictatorship, authoritarian dictatorship, but it was becoming more free.

00:40:24.000 It used freedom as a tool to achieve economically.

00:40:26.000 They used freedom as a tool to catch up with America and the West.

00:40:31.000 And then after Xi takes over, we are now once again seeing a switch from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism.

00:40:39.000 The two are quite distinct, right?

00:40:41.000 So you would predict a decline in the innovativeness of Chinese culture if Xi continues to do?

00:40:46.000 I would predict a decline in GDP growth.

00:40:48.000 In GDP growth itself, yeah.

00:40:49.000 Because the Chinese were able to generate a lot of economic growth between 1978 and, say, 2012. By simply copying the things that we have done well in the West. 0.95

00:41:02.000 And even today, the West continues to provide a disproportionate amount of innovation around the world, precisely because innovation and freedom, freedom to think, freedom to speak, are deeply connected.

00:41:16.000 So China was approaching a point where You can achieve only that much with copying, right?

00:41:26.000 Be it borrowing or buying or even stealing intellectual property of others.

00:41:31.000 But then the question was, was China going to become a member of that small club of countries that actually does original innovation or not?

00:41:39.000 And my hypothesis is that China cannot become a member of that small group of countries which produce innovation because freedom has been on a downward trajectory over the last decade or so.

00:41:53.000 So it would be much more difficult for China to...

00:41:56.000 So China has been catching up...

00:41:57.000 I agree with you to share our premise.

00:41:59.000 I'm just saying if somebody's looking at this for the outside in who doesn't necessarily share our premise here, would they look at the results?

00:42:06.000 And say that the results are consistent with that?

00:42:08.000 Or would they say, no, no, no, there actually is enough original non-copycat innovation here that it puts pressure on the thesis that freedom actually matters for innovation?

00:42:18.000 I would say that China cannot overtake the United States, cannot continue to grow at its current pace if it doesn't become freer.

00:42:33.000 In other words, they've reached a limit.

00:42:36.000 And in fact, Xi made a deliberate decision, which has been known throughout history, including the history of China, was that he was presiding over a country where economic dynamism, which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative centers of

00:42:56.000 Wealth was beginning to disseminate into the pockets of billionaires, corporations, party chiefs in different provinces, etc.

00:43:06.000 That's very dangerous for an authoritarian slash totalitarian society.

00:43:11.000 And what tends to happen in instances like that is that either the totalitarian folds and innovation bursts out or the totalitarian, in order to maintain his position, his lock on power, destroys economic innovativeness.

00:43:27.000 Puts Jack Ma in jail.

00:43:28.000 Precisely.

00:43:29.000 This is what happened in China with the collapse of the Song Dynasty in the 12th century and its replacement by first the Mongols and then the Ming Dynasty.

00:43:38.000 They basically decided not to innovate anymore.

00:43:41.000 But this was a top-down decision.

00:43:43.000 The Ming Dynasty. 0.73

00:43:44.000 So the Song Dynasty saw a lot of innovation.

00:43:46.000 It was very innovative.

00:43:46.000 They produced Paper currency, whether you like it or not, they produce gunpowder, a compass, and many other innovations, I think printing press.

00:43:56.000 But then the Ming come in, and they basically say, we don't want to innovate anymore because it's internally destabilizing, right? 0.99

00:44:03.000 And so this is exactly what China did under Xi, or rather what Xi did with China.

00:44:08.000 He basically decided instead of innovating, instead of decentralization and instead of all this dynamism that we had, I'm going to reconstitute the Communist Party.

00:44:23.000 I'm going to put it back firmly in charge of the country.

00:44:28.000 But that will come at the cost of dynamism.

00:44:32.000 There is just one thing that I want to say about China and the United States.

00:44:35.000 I know that right now the relationship between China and the United States is very bad.

00:44:40.000 And, you know, there are many good reasons for that.

00:44:44.000 But what I would encourage Americans to think about is that whatever China is doing, we have a lot of power on our side to make it easier for America to grow.

00:44:55.000 We cannot help the fact that China is poaching a lot of intellectual property from the United States.

00:45:01.000 Don't engage in victimhood culture vis-a-vis China.

00:45:03.000 Precisely.

00:45:04.000 What worries me so much, especially in the last 10 years or so, is that we constantly say, well, we need to punish China for X, Y, and Z. And God knows China is doing a lot of bad things.

00:45:14.000 I'm not here to defend China.

00:45:16.000 It's a totalitarian communist regime.

00:45:17.000 I'm one of those people who believes we should punish China for any of those things. 0.98

00:45:20.000 But...

00:45:22.000 I think another question that we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that we are doing to ourselves in order to keep us from innovating, from growing?

00:45:31.000 Can we have a different regulatory environment where anybody can succeed?

00:45:38.000 And that way we don't have to worry about how much China is stealing because we are growing like crazy. 0.86

00:45:43.000 What about taxation regime?

00:45:48.000 Is our corporate tax rate really that great?

00:45:51.000 My understanding is that taxation in this country, the code, is as long as King James Bible times 11. Oh, longer, yeah.

00:46:02.000 Times 11, right?

00:46:03.000 Yeah.

00:46:03.000 What if we simplified it, right?

00:46:06.000 What if we had an immigration system that actually was smart enough to bring in the best people from around the world to create value here rather than elsewhere?

00:46:17.000 All of those things could be combined.

00:46:19.000 Didn't pay people not to work.

00:46:21.000 Didn't pay people not to work.

00:46:22.000 And all of these things that we could do in order to generate growth.

00:46:25.000 But fundamentally, somebody has to come in and stop saying to the American people, you are victims.

00:46:31.000 Rather, Victims of foreigners. 0.99

00:46:33.000 Rather, what you should be saying to the American people, you are victims of a horrible, vile, wicked force in the world, and it's called Washington, D.C. I'm just making a note here.

00:46:51.000 What are the obstacles and impediments to growth in the United States itself?

00:46:56.000 You've got regulation.

00:46:57.000 You've got taxation.

00:46:58.000 You've got non-meritocratic immigration.

00:47:01.000 You have unintentional immigration policies, effectively.

00:47:04.000 We have a workforce shortage.

00:47:06.000 We're paying people, effectively, not to work, have created that.

00:47:09.000 I think culture is a big part of it.

00:47:11.000 The rise of a victimhood mentality itself makes for a less productive population.

00:47:16.000 I think anti-meritocratic hiring practices are on the list.

00:47:20.000 I don't think affirmative action is particularly conducive to allowing the best people To actually innovate, if you tell people it has to be based on quotas of race, sex, or sexual orientation that they're hiring, engineers or scientists or innovators, you're probably going to get less ingenuity and scientific innovation on the back of it.

00:47:40.000 I don't think there is...

00:47:42.000 I think the climate cult is on that list.

00:47:43.000 I mean, what else is on that list for you?

00:47:45.000 Well, I don't think that there is...

00:47:47.000 There are two very dangerous philosophies that are emerging from academia and entering American public life.

00:47:54.000 And we cannot be blasé about it because we know that just because something has been secluded in that mad lab, which is American tertiary education for a few years, we cannot count that it won't spill out like from the Wuhan lab and then enter America as a whole. 0.92

00:48:14.000 The first one is degrowth theory.

00:48:16.000 This is pushed by a number of academics which claim that not only do we have to stop growing, we should do with less in the future.

00:48:25.000 In other words, that the American people should reduce their standards of living because Mother Gaia.

00:48:30.000 So that's number one.

00:48:32.000 Who are some of the leading proponents of this?

00:48:34.000 You know what?

00:48:35.000 I can get you the names.

00:48:36.000 We were involved with them in an online discussion, but these are mostly not economists, by the way.

00:48:44.000 These are mostly environmentalists, and very often biologists, because biologists See human beings as deer or yeast or rabbits.

00:48:56.000 You know, when we overpopulate, we consume everything and then we die.

00:48:59.000 But economists see human beings not as a very special animal.

00:49:04.000 As the main subject of concern.

00:49:05.000 Yeah, we are a very different type of animal.

00:49:08.000 We are intelligent beings who are capable of innovation.

00:49:11.000 Animals cannot innovate.

00:49:12.000 That's the difference between the biological viewpoint of degrowth and the economic point of growth.

00:49:18.000 So degrowth is one area of concern to me.

00:49:21.000 The other one is equity.

00:49:24.000 Equity means proportional representation of different groups, be they sexual orientation, be they gender, be they race, be they age, nationality, whatever, in the positions of socioeconomic influence.

00:49:48.000 And my argument is That the beauty of the Enlightenment, what the Enlightenment gives the world is the notion that your birth doesn't matter.

00:49:58.000 It's what's in your mind that matters.

00:50:01.000 The great advance of the Enlightenment was to say that the nobility in Europe in the 18th century, who were entitled to all sorts of perks and all sorts of jobs, Should be deprived of those perks and those jobs because they didn't earn it through their intellect or through their hard work.

00:50:22.000 They were there by the accident of their birth.

00:50:24.000 And so what enlightenment insists on is merit, is meritocracy.

00:50:29.000 And we had that for 200 years.

00:50:31.000 And over those 200 years, the world has changed beyond all comprehension.

00:50:34.000 We are much richer.

00:50:36.000 Fewer babies are dying in infancy.

00:50:38.000 We are more educated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:50:41.000 And I think that meritocracy played a huge part in it.

00:50:44.000 And when we get away from it, when we start appointing people into positions of power because of irrelevant characteristics, this must by necessity reduce our growth and destroy us.

00:50:56.000 Not to mention that it's of course a zero-sum game.

00:51:00.000 So this gets to a pretty interesting place.

00:51:03.000 So I agree with everything you just said.

00:51:06.000 I don't know how much you've been following what I've been saying in the last six to 24 months, but maps onto identifying exactly these two obstacles.

00:51:15.000 But let's focus on the second, right?

00:51:17.000 Equity.

00:51:18.000 The equity agenda.

00:51:23.000 I think that that presents some interesting challenges for your thesis, for your policy prescription on population growth, actually, versus the question I asked in the beginning, which was, let's just decide early on.

00:51:37.000 Is it about creating the conditions for an existing population to be more innovative, productive, successful, prosperous as a consequence of that innovation?

00:51:48.000 Or should it be playing the passive probabilistic game of just assuming more is better?

00:51:54.000 And against the backdrop of these cultural obstacles, degrowth and equity, it's like I feel like we get more juice out of the existing squeeze if we tackle those things head on, versus focusing on just more people holding versus focusing on just more people holding those conditions constant.

00:52:16.000 Of course, you would say don't hold those conditions constant, but...

00:52:19.000 What I worry about is to the extent we're not making much progress on addressing those conditions, actually populating into those conditions, you know, through immigration or whatever, we could decide what the mechanism is.

00:52:35.000 May risk making that problem worse because you're actually ossifying the very conditions of degrowth and equity in the first place, just perpetuating the very thing that you...

00:52:52.000 I'm with you.

00:52:53.000 I think that, you know, production, reproduction rates rising and, you know, catching up to, you know, exceeding death rates by a wider margin is a good thing, all else equal for the planet.

00:53:04.000 But I just wonder whether as a matter of prioritization, tackling these cultural obstacles To innovation and growth is just we live in a moment where that's more important than wishing population growth into existence for a probabilistic game,

00:53:24.000 believing that a small number, the 1% of that population bell curve that ends up innovating is shouldering a much greater burden against the backdrop of a rest of population who actually has embraced degrowth and equity as their agenda.

00:53:37.000 Do you follow what I'm saying?

00:53:38.000 Yes, I do.

00:53:40.000 I need to clarify my position on population growth.

00:53:43.000 The book was written in order to defend the idea that more people is better for the planet.

00:53:53.000 Which I agree with.

00:53:54.000 It is not there to create government programs in order to enhance procreation.

00:54:02.000 It has a purely negative defense.

00:54:06.000 It's a defense against people who are saying that humans are a cancer on the planet and the best thing that could happen for the planet is for all of humanity to die out.

00:54:17.000 Under no circumstances would I want to be misunderstood as saying that we should force people to have more children.

00:54:23.000 Rather, what I'm saying is...

00:54:24.000 I understand that, and that's fine.

00:54:26.000 There are huge chunks of young people around the world, including the United States, who are saying to us in public opinion polls, We cannot bring children into the world because it's going to end.

00:54:38.000 And this is nutty, and this is counterproductive.

00:54:40.000 So you and I agree on that, and I don't misunderstand you to be saying that at all.

00:54:44.000 I think you've been very clear about it.

00:54:45.000 But I'm asking a different question about prioritization.

00:54:47.000 I think that they are part of the same thing, which is zeitgeist.

00:54:50.000 It's an intellectual zeitgeist.

00:54:52.000 Within it, you have both the anti-population, humans are a cancer type of people, whilst at the same time you have...

00:55:01.000 The same kinds of people tend to also be people who favor equity, who are against meritocracy, who are against capitalism.

00:55:10.000 It's a part and parcel of the same mindset, right?

00:55:14.000 So, trust me, once you start attacking people or criticizing people on equity, you will hear from the environmentalists and whoever else because it's the same group of people, essentially.

00:55:26.000 I agree with you.

00:55:27.000 I just, it's a very first personal thing for me right now, right?

00:55:30.000 I'm running for U.S. president.

00:55:31.000 I've got to decide what I'm prioritizing.

00:55:35.000 And it's the difference between getting out there and having an agenda.

00:55:41.000 We talk about the pro-growth agenda and some of the stuff's easy, right?

00:55:44.000 Anti-regulation, you know, tax liberation.

00:55:48.000 That stuff almost goes without saying.

00:55:49.000 Stop paying people not to work.

00:55:51.000 But the difference between being a little bit of the techno-futurist and talks about, let's reproduce, let's repopulate the stuff that Elon Musk will say a lot of the stuff on a given day, because it conveniently elides the more controversial questions of whether we need to get rid of affirmative action in America, right?

00:56:18.000 Versus leading first with that degrowth and equity agenda and dismantle that.

00:56:26.000 I mean, the top two things I said on day one when I rolled out this campaign about four weeks ago, five weeks or whatever it was.

00:56:33.000 Pledges, right, as a candidate.

00:56:37.000 End affirmative action in America. 0.93

00:56:40.000 We can do that with the stroke of a pen, race-based affirmative action, which is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, and something that's anti-meritocratic is anti-innovative.

00:56:49.000 And abandon the demands of the climate cult in the United States, which is a great obstacle to the energy industry, which in turn is a great obstacle to growth itself in our country.

00:56:59.000 Those are culturally fraught things to say.

00:57:03.000 Those are things that even most other, forget Democratic candidates, Republican candidates are willing to say.

00:57:09.000 I don't think there's been a U.S. presidential candidate, even on the Republican side in modern history, that has said those things out loud.

00:57:16.000 Now, you know, I think as we expand, one of the things I've been doing is expanding the Overton window and running a truck through it.

00:57:23.000 And so maybe others will jump on that train later this year.

00:57:26.000 I kind of expect they will.

00:57:29.000 But it seems to me that hitting that head on is almost more important right now than in an abstract sense talking about Birth rates and death rates right now.

00:57:48.000 I think they're part of the same thing.

00:57:50.000 I think they're part of the same, but it's emphasis.

00:57:53.000 I'm open-minded.

00:57:54.000 I think that you have the same umbrella.

00:57:56.000 The pro-growth umbrella can cover all of these aspects together.

00:58:01.000 Okay.

00:58:03.000 If you want more growth, you have to have best people in charge of companies, in charge of government agencies, Because only the most talented people are going to get you there, right?

00:58:18.000 So it cannot be an accident of birth.

00:58:20.000 It doesn't matter what your color is, what your gender is, what your sexual orientation is.

00:58:24.000 You want the best person for the job because that creates most value, that creates most growth.

00:58:30.000 So that's the equity part of it.

00:58:34.000 Then by embracing growth, you're of course immediately, explicitly denying the degrowth agenda.

00:58:42.000 And you are saying that we are going to grow our way out of these environmental concerns that people have.

00:58:51.000 We are going to use a lot more gas, which is going to lower CO2, and we are going to go full on building more fission reactors and hopefully one day fusion reactors on the planet in the United States.

00:59:06.000 So that tackles, by unleashing the energy potential of the United States, you are taking care of the degrowth agenda. 0.60

00:59:17.000 And of course, once you embrace the pro-growth agenda and you're saying that the future is going to be bright, then you are also addressing the problem of low population rates.

00:59:27.000 Right now, native-born American women have 1.7 children per woman. 1.00

00:59:32.000 We need 2.1.

00:59:34.000 I mean, it's almost a pro-life agenda.

00:59:36.000 So it's a pro-life agenda.

00:59:37.000 I mean, there is a reason why...

00:59:39.000 It's kind of interesting, actually.

00:59:40.000 It's quite possible that one of the reasons why our growth begins to taper off in the 70s and why population rates...

00:59:53.000 I'm beginning to slow down after the Great Recession is because people see a dark, more scarce future ahead of them.

01:00:02.000 But by embracing growth, by embracing merit, you are essentially creating a positive vision of the future where children born into the world Can be better off, so parents can start having more children.

01:00:20.000 If they want to.

01:00:21.000 I gotta admit, this is quite persuasive, actually.

01:00:27.000 Because it is an affirmative vision into which the, you know, equity and degrowth are obstacles, but it's actually kind of a new dream, focused, is what we say is the premise of the campaign, new dream, new American dream, focused on Growth itself, prosperity itself as an objective, and the anti-merit agenda, the climate cult, these are all obstacles to that, but actually there's more to it than just taking down the obstacles.

01:00:56.000 I think repopulation is part of it.

01:00:58.000 I think that's actually a justification for the pro-life movement that is often forgotten in this country, actually.

01:01:06.000 Nick Eberstadt from American Enterprise Institute recently pointed out to me that optimism has a lot to do with population growth rates.

01:01:16.000 In most of the Western world, by which I include Japan, South Korea, most of the advanced economies, population rates are collapsing.

01:01:23.000 There is one exception.

01:01:25.000 And that's Israel.

01:01:26.000 In Israel, population, rather, the total fertility rate is well above 2, which is the replacement level.

01:01:34.000 And not just amongst Orthodox Jews, but also amongst secular Jews.

01:01:38.000 Oh, really?

01:01:40.000 What he suggests, and having spoken to Israelis, I think it's possible, is that they have a fundamentally optimistic vision of the future for their country because they've been growing like crazy for the last 20 years or so. 0.51

01:01:57.000 What's the GDP growth rates over there?

01:01:59.000 Oh, I don't...

01:02:00.000 Well, it was much...

01:02:01.000 I don't remember right now, but it's much higher than what it was in the 1970s and 1980s when Israel was fundamentally a socialist country.

01:02:08.000 But actually, it was Netanyahu who started liberalizing the country as a finance minister in the 1990s and then maintained that deliberization or rather deregulation type of governance.

01:02:20.000 So, you know, I think it's possible.

01:02:25.000 And...

01:02:27.000 If we can return that optimism to America, then it's perfectly possible that people are going to have more children, willingly, without any government need to spend more money or regulate or persuade anyone.

01:02:39.000 And one of the topics you'll hear, I did not want to end this without covering this topic as well as, it's a bit of an offshoot, but it's, I think, important in our discussion about your thesis is that The kind of innovation sort of matters, too.

01:02:59.000 So you could say that GDP growth has tapered off.

01:03:01.000 We face a lot of cultural travails now.

01:03:03.000 But some people will say, no, no, no, we've had the Silicon Valley boom.

01:03:06.000 We had the Internet age, for God's sake, in the post-1970 period.

01:03:13.000 Some of the greatest innovation known to mankind, especially in tech, is of a kind that we hadn't seen in the pre-digital, pre-internet era.

01:03:25.000 We're now in the third wave internet, right?

01:03:29.000 Web 1.0, Web 2.0, now we're moving to Web 3.0.

01:03:34.000 And yet, we're still having the conversation that we're having about the absence of innovation driving prosperity.

01:03:41.000 Maybe We're not talking enough, the argument would go, about the right kind of innovation and that creating a social media app.

01:03:51.000 Think about multi-trillion dollar companies like Facebook.

01:03:54.000 I mean, the entire social media industry is based on picking at certain insecurities.

01:04:03.000 What will you click on faster As a consequence of what I present you, and then what does that let me know about your inner soul and your preferences than you know about your own so that I can advertise to you to buy things more effectively?

01:04:21.000 I think persuasively, I think a lot of people would say, I think I'm even very open to saying that That's not the kind of innovation that necessarily has and drags us forward in terms of human prosperity, but that is what the market will deliver if it's against the backdrop of Human psychological insecurities that lend to that being the most profitable incremental business opportunity to pursue, which is what led to the birth of the modern social media industries.

01:04:50.000 Tell me if you're following what I'm saying, and what's your response to that?

01:04:54.000 I follow what you're saying.

01:04:55.000 I would say that Silicon Valley was born and succeeded within the regulatory and taxation environment which has been created by the federal government and by states' governments.

01:05:08.000 It was a regulatory environment which basically allowed them to do whatever they pleased and they flourished as a result.

01:05:15.000 I am fundamentally opposed to government choosing winners or losers in the market system.

01:05:22.000 I agree with you.

01:05:22.000 We're not talking about government action.

01:05:23.000 I'm talking about cultural points.

01:05:24.000 What I want is for us to have a fundamentally deregulatory and tax simplification agenda, which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all the other different industries of which which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all Remember when Barack Obama ran on creating 8 million jobs in the green industry?

01:05:50.000 Sure.

01:05:50.000 Well, I'd be surprised if he created 8 jobs, let alone 8 million jobs, right?

01:05:55.000 His presidency was saved by fracking and the massive decline in the prices of gas and prices of energy because of fracking and fossil fuels.

01:06:07.000 But the point is that he could not have known Where innovation was going to come from.

01:06:14.000 He thought it would come from green energy.

01:06:16.000 It came from fracking, right?

01:06:18.000 And the same goes for any presidential candidate or for that matter any politician.

01:06:23.000 You simply don't know where the innovation is going to come from, which industry is going to flourish.

01:06:31.000 And therefore, I think the goal of American decision makers should be to make the whole business environment in the country as easy to navigate as possible and then let a thousand different flowers bloom.

01:06:45.000 That would be my suggestion.

01:06:49.000 It's wishful.

01:06:50.000 But I think grounded in first principles, which I respect, I just wonder whether...

01:06:57.000 And we're not going to resolve this today, but I think it's something I struggle with, think about deeply, is even if we get that policy prescription right, low regulation, debt, taxation, get the state out of it.

01:07:13.000 I think that there is this reality of a third variable of culture.

01:07:20.000 Like if you have the people regulated by the state, the state, I think there's this creation.

01:07:24.000 People come together to create a government.

01:07:25.000 People also come together to create a culture.

01:07:28.000 And I think that so long as we have that apologist streak in our culture, call it woke, call it what you want, That apologist streak is, I think, independently an impediment to prosperity, flourishing, excellence, and growth.

01:07:48.000 It's partially mediated through government, yes.

01:07:50.000 But even in, we live, I think, in a moment today where government is not the only threat and impediment.

01:07:59.000 And I think part of what I worry about is not only is there an independent impediment in the culture, but that culture creates certain psychic insecurities that even allow a free market capitalist economy to To almost create the kinds of innovation that innovate against the backdrop of a culturally insecure populace that lends themselves to produce more Snapchats and Facebooks rather than

01:08:29.000 nuclear fusion.

01:08:31.000 And I know one obstacle to nuclear fusion is the regulatory apparatus.

01:08:34.000 I'm a dead set opponent to it.

01:08:36.000 But I think that we would be not completely honest if we said that was the only impediment, because it's just more profitable to create an app in the near term that exploits the insecurities of a teen girl who grew up in a culture that didn't instill in her the psychic fortitude that she needed.

01:08:55.000 And I think this goes back to Adam Smith.

01:08:57.000 I mean, Adam Smith, I think, said, I don't know if it's so many words, but, you know, the cultivation of virtue is a precondition for capitalism to achieve its optimal results, right?

01:09:06.000 Because if virtue is the delta between what we want and what we need, and those are the backdrop demand conditions, then...

01:09:15.000 The profitable opportunity will be to still give people what they want rather than what they need.

01:09:19.000 And I think we can't wish ourselves into a first principles reality when there's this third variable of culture that is an equally an impediment to.

01:09:28.000 Does any of that make sense to you?

01:09:29.000 No, it does make sense.

01:09:30.000 I mean, I think that capitalism is a moral system because in order to succeed in capitalism, you have to provide your fellow human beings with something they want.

01:09:40.000 That much we agree on.

01:09:41.000 But it's not a sufficiently, it's not a sufficient morality.

01:09:44.000 Because if somebody wants child pornography, for example, you should be able to say, well, I'm not going to provide it to you.

01:09:52.000 In other words, capitalism has a moral component in it, but it also needs to be buttressed by other ethics, such as there may be a market for child pornography.

01:10:03.000 It would make some people better off.

01:10:05.000 Because that's what they want, but I cannot provide it because it's abhorrent, immoral, etc.

01:10:11.000 And so there is scope for that.

01:10:14.000 I just think that the mental anguish, the anxiety, the cultural weltschmerz that we are going through right now, Is an outcome of ideas, of bad ideas that have been poisoning the public discourse for very many decades.

01:10:38.000 Identity politics that you have identified poisons that aspect, the meritocracy.

01:10:43.000 Then you have the degrowth theory, poisoning pro-growth agenda.

01:10:47.000 Then you have the apocalyptic vision of the world, which is poisoning America's willingness to have children to the future.

01:10:54.000 So all of them are connected to a set of bad ideas, which can only be combated with other bad ideas.

01:11:00.000 And that is what we are trying to do, both you and me.

01:11:04.000 Love it.

01:11:05.000 Love it.

01:11:05.000 And I think that, as I think about the framing of what I'm trying to accomplish here, presidential race, whatever, that's just a means to an end, to a national cultural revival.

01:11:19.000 I think I will be both the pro-growth candidate, but not at the expense of also taking on the cultivation of this word that we've sort of lost in our culture.

01:11:33.000 We've lost growth in our lexicon, but we've also lost this concept of virtue.

01:11:37.000 And I think the cultivation of virtue in a way that takes on the cancerous ideologies, what you call the bad, what charitably call the bad ideas, I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different than just the techno-futurist I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different

01:12:01.000 Taking on an important optimistic outlook that I share that we'll bring to the table in this pro-growth, pro-innovation agenda, but it has to be against the backdrop of cultivating virtue as an alternative to the cultural poison that fills the wake of the vacuum of virtue that we've since created.

01:12:19.000 I think I agree.

01:12:20.000 I think that fundamentally a liberal democracy that we cherish and want I use liberal in the classical European sense.

01:12:28.000 I understand.

01:12:28.000 And free market capitalism, they both require an ethical, well-informed, well-educated population, and we are losing that.

01:12:38.000 I think that's something that both, to wrap our conversation from where we began, that Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter would both agree on.

01:12:46.000 Yes.

01:12:47.000 After all, Smith's other great work was his take on ethics and morals.

01:12:53.000 Actually, yep, people forget that.

01:12:54.000 It may have been his greater contribution of the two, but they go together.

01:12:58.000 Wealth of Nations could not have existed without the backdrop of his ethical foundation against which that Wealth of Nations was built, and maybe we channel a bit of the two of them into the conversation we're having today.

01:13:10.000 Hopefully.

01:13:10.000 Yeah.

01:13:11.000 Thank you, man.

01:13:12.000 It was a great conversation.

01:13:13.000 Well, thank you for having me and very good luck to you.

01:13:15.000 Yeah, I'll take it.

01:13:16.000 I'll take it.

01:13:16.000 I appreciate it.

01:13:17.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - April 04, 2023

Freedom, Innovation, Superabundance with Marian Tupy | The TRUTH Podcast #3

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