Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - The Power of Debate and Tackling the Fentanyl Epidemic with James Fishback | The TRUTH Podcast #17

00:00:00.000 So I began my career as an investor.

00:00:25.000 I've started a number of companies along the way.

00:00:27.000 And the company I most recently started was an asset management firm called Strive to compete against the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard and others who were promoting ESG values in capital markets.

00:00:39.000 But that gave me a front row seat to seeing what one kind of voting looks like. 0.89

00:00:45.000 The way voting works in the market is that the person who has the most dollars gets the most votes whether that's a consumer that decides which product rises to the top Whether it's a shareholder that gets to decide who gets to be elected on the board of Apple or in the board of Chevron or Exxon or any other company, it's not that everyone who's a shareholder of Exxon gets an equal say.

00:01:08.000 No, it's the fact that somebody who holds the most shares that's invested the most capital in Exxon has that say.

00:01:15.000 That's just the way capitalism works is it's a $1 one vote system and that's okay when you're talking about which products rise to the top.

00:01:24.000 When which ideas at a shareholder ballot rise to the top.

00:01:29.000 But in our body politic in a constitutional republic like the United States underpinned by a democratic process, we use a different system.

00:01:38.000 It's a one person, one vote system.

00:01:41.000 That shouldn't be adjusted upward or downward by the number of dollars you control in the marketplace.

00:01:47.000 That's actually one of my main issues with the rise of so-called ESG and stakeholder capitalism trends in corporate America.

00:01:55.000 Is that we're now using the dollar system, not just to say which products get sold, whether to invest in an R&D facility or a manufacturing plant.

00:02:03.000 No, we're now using the $1 one vote system to determine which ideas make it to the top, whether to correct racial injustices through quota systems or some other means, whether to fight climate change on the basis of a method that creates for higher consumer products for everyone or some other means or whether to fight it at all.

00:02:24.000 These are ideas that are settled in a constitutional republic through free speech and open debate in the public square where everyone's voice and vote counts equally.

00:02:36.000 And I think here's the difference.

00:02:38.000 I'm not saying that if you're a capitalist, say Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, that you can't engage in that.

00:02:44.000 You can in your capacity as a citizen.

00:02:50.000 Which is different from using your corporate platform to do it as a capitalist.

00:02:55.000 And I think that's deeply personal to me because I've been a capitalist.

00:02:58.000 I've succeeded in the system of free market capitalism in America as an entrepreneur, as an investor.

00:03:04.000 I've also pursued my journey as I am now in pursuing the US presidency as a citizen.

00:03:08.000 And I think both of those are part of our identity as Americans, not just somebody who's pursuing self-interest through the system of free market capitalism without apologizing for it.

00:03:17.000 But we're also citizens that each have our own civic duties.

00:03:21.000 And one of those identities as a citizen is grounded in this idea of free speech and open debate as the way we settle our political questions.

00:03:29.000 That's one of the things we share in common regardless of what our beliefs are from controversial topics ranging from abortion to affirmative action.

00:03:36.000 It doesn't matter.

00:03:37.000 What we share in common in this country is a commitment to the idea that we settle those differences through a civic process where we're all equal as citizens, each having the right to express our own opinion so long as our neighbor gets that same courtesy in return.

00:03:53.000 That is part of what it means to be American.

00:03:57.000 It's also why I'm excited about today's guest on the podcast, James Fishback, who, like me, I think has had a career as a capitalist.

00:04:06.000 He's an investor at a prominent hedge fund, as you'll hear from him soon.

00:04:10.000 But he's also somebody who's dedicated a significant portion of his time to starting a nonprofit that actually fosters, who would have ever thought, open debate and discourse and dialogue amongst the next generation of Americans.

00:04:23.000 He's not doing that in his capacity as an investor.

00:04:26.000 He's doing that in his capacity as a citizen.

00:04:28.000 And that speaks to me because American identity isn't just one of those things.

00:04:32.000 It's both of those things.

00:04:34.000 We're capitalists and citizens.

00:04:35.000 We believe in individualism and in unity.

00:04:38.000 We believe in the pursuit of self-interest and our civic duties.

00:04:42.000 Both of those are part of what it means to be American.

00:04:44.000 And that's what we're going to kick off the conversation with today with my new friend, James Fishback.

00:04:48.000 James, welcome to the podcast.

00:04:50.000 It was a real pleasure.

00:04:51.000 Yeah.

00:04:51.000 So thanks for being here.

00:04:52.000 I thought it'd be interesting to just get right into it in terms of You're an investor.

00:04:58.000 You're working at Greenlight Capital, David Einhorn.

00:05:00.000 I actually read David Einhorn's book.

00:05:02.000 What was it?

00:05:03.000 The Some of the People Fool, Some of the People All the Time?

00:05:05.000 Something like that was the book about, you know, 12, 15 years ago when I read it.

00:05:09.000 It stuck with me.

00:05:10.000 There's some interesting lessons in there.

00:05:12.000 He was actually quoting Abraham Lincoln, as you may well know.

00:05:15.000 It was a famous Abraham Lincoln quote that he, you know, riffed on as the title for his own book as an investor in, you know, capital markets.

00:05:23.000 But you're working for his firm.

00:05:25.000 But then you decide to also pursue this parallel journey to foster open debate amongst young Americans.

00:05:32.000 Presumably you had some concern about our country that led you to do that.

00:05:37.000 I found that that's actually one of the things that motivates people to take action is when they have a concern about a problem.

00:05:42.000 What was your concern and why did you pursue this journey to foster and build the nonprofit organization you have?

00:05:49.000 Tell us a little bit about it and then we'll get right into it from there.

00:05:51.000 Absolutely.

00:05:52.000 It's a real pleasure to be here, Vivek.

00:05:54.000 I started Incubate Debate back in 2019 in Florida, a state that I call home.

00:06:00.000 I did high school debate for four years, had a lot of fun with it.

00:06:04.000 Then after I came back from college, I did two years as a volunteer debate coach in Miami-Dade County at an urban school in Miami Gardens.

00:06:12.000 I saw how the sausage was made, both as a competitor and as a coach.

00:06:17.000 What I saw was incredibly troubling.

00:06:20.000 I saw an attack on free speech in what should be the epitome of open dialogue and debate.

00:06:28.000 After all, it is debate.

00:06:29.000 That's the whole point.

00:06:30.000 In high schools.

00:06:30.000 In high school debate.

00:06:32.000 I'm just trying to go through your thoughts.

00:06:34.000 You're working as an investor in New York City.

00:06:37.000 But you decide you also want to coach high school debate just as a hobby on the side.

00:06:41.000 You must have done it in high school.

00:06:42.000 You felt some attachment to it.

00:06:44.000 Okay.

00:06:44.000 Yeah.

00:06:44.000 I'd moved back to Florida and I wanted to just be involved in it.

00:06:49.000 I saw it did so much for me.

00:06:51.000 I had a really bad stutter as a high school student, as a kid.

00:06:55.000 And high school debate took time, but it got me out of that.

00:06:58.000 It gave me confidence.

00:07:00.000 I was reading Foreign Affairs Magazine and The Economist, all of these great sources as a freshman and sophomore in high school.

00:07:06.000 So I was kind of way ahead when we were talking about, you know, AP European history or talking about AP comparative government.

00:07:11.000 I was reading those things weeks or months beforehand.

00:07:13.000 So it was an incredible blessing to be a part of it.

00:07:16.000 And what initially motivated me to be the coach was socioeconomic hurdles.

00:07:21.000 So to be in debate, it's 20 bucks a tournament, 30 bucks a tournament.

00:07:25.000 And on top of that, parents, mom and dad have to come and judge that tournament all day Saturday.

00:07:31.000 That was a really big hurdle for me.

00:07:33.000 My mom came from Columbia in South America in the early 1990s, married my dad, who for the past 10 years has been a county bus operator in Broward County.

00:07:42.000 In South Florida.

00:07:43.000 And so it was really hard to go to debate tournaments to get the money, but then to have parents take off six, seven, eight hours to judge these debates.

00:07:50.000 That was a massive hurdle.

00:07:51.000 So you aren't super – you aren't particularly well off.

00:07:54.000 How would you characterize lower middle class?

00:07:55.000 Lower middle class, working class family.

00:07:57.000 Privileged in the same sense that you were to have two loving parents that gave me – that instilled those values, not just of grace and respect, but of civic disposition to care so deeply about the country that's given them so much.

00:08:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:08:10.000 And so that was, you know, your high school experience.

00:08:13.000 How old were you now when you decided to go back to debate coaching?

00:08:16.000 I was 21. You're 21?

00:08:18.000 Yeah.

00:08:18.000 So you were still in college.

00:08:20.000 I just left.

00:08:21.000 You just finished college.

00:08:22.000 Yeah.

00:08:22.000 Did you graduate college?

00:08:23.000 No, I left actually.

00:08:24.000 Okay.

00:08:24.000 You left college.

00:08:25.000 I left my junior year because I started a hedge fund that I did for four years.

00:08:29.000 Oh, got it.

00:08:29.000 Where were you in college?

00:08:30.000 I was at Georgetown.

00:08:31.000 You were at Georgetown.

00:08:31.000 So you let – that's a big decision.

00:08:33.000 You decided to drop out of college.

00:08:34.000 Yeah.

00:08:35.000 Start this hedge fund of your own.

00:08:37.000 And then what?

00:08:38.000 And then you moved to Florida.

00:08:39.000 I moved to Florida.

00:08:39.000 So I was in DC, moved back to Florida, did that for four years.

00:08:43.000 And then, you know, the Bloomberg terminal is kind of an interesting country club, if you will.

00:08:47.000 You can always message people on there.

00:08:48.000 So I messaged David Einhorn on there.

00:08:50.000 I, you know, I read his book.

00:08:51.000 I've always read his quarterly letters.

00:08:53.000 Oh, the same book that I was talking about.

00:08:54.000 Okay, got it.

00:08:54.000 and the same quarterly letters that so many investors across the world look forward to reading every quarter.

00:08:59.000 And I messaged him and I said, this was in the spring of 2019.

00:09:03.000 And I said, I think the Federal Reserve is about to cut interest rates because of what was going on with the trade tensions and some of the deindustrialization that we were seeing.

00:09:11.000 And And kind of the Fed strategy had changed, right, where they were hyper-concerned about financial markets.

00:09:16.000 So I sent him this message and to his credit, we went back and forth.

00:09:19.000 We didn't agree on the first trade, but we came back a couple weeks later.

00:09:22.000 He put the trade on and – I was blessed to be in a relationship, a partnership with him for two years, advising him on these big macro events that I had done as a macro investor.

00:09:33.000 While you were still your own macro investor at your fund?

00:09:36.000 Yes.

00:09:36.000 And then eventually you just got in-hired by him?

00:09:39.000 Yes.

00:09:40.000 At the end of 2020, which was a fascinating year.

00:09:42.000 While you were also debate coach, presumably though, we're talking 2020, that's via Zoom?

00:09:48.000 That's via Zoom.

00:09:49.000 What was that during COVID? What was that like?

00:09:51.000 It was incredible.

00:09:52.000 I'll never forget, I was at the last debate tournament to ever be held in the country before we shut down.

00:09:59.000 And when was that?

00:10:01.000 That was March 2nd.

00:10:04.000 And it was in Orlando, Florida.

00:10:06.000 It was the Florida Forensics League Varsity State Tournament.

00:10:08.000 I was there with two students and they were competing and I was their coach and mom was there as well, one of the students.

00:10:14.000 And I'll never forget, you know, it was like the world.

00:10:17.000 No one really knew what was going to happen a week or two later.

00:10:20.000 But the kids in that moment were having so much fun, were debating and having a great time.

00:10:24.000 And then three months later, these tournaments were online and I judged a local tournament that was online in May.

00:10:31.000 But what was amazing, Vivek, was even though the expenses of running a debate tournament collapsed overnight, there's no catering, there's no need to hire buses to rent out rooms, you needed a Zoom Pro account, which is 50, 60 bucks a month.

00:10:45.000 The big institutions, the big Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Yale, you're familiar with both – They run these big debate tournaments.

00:10:53.000 They were still charging students, the same students that I was coaching in Miami Gardens and low-income communities, hundreds of dollars to participate in a virtual tournament from their couch.

00:11:04.000 Oh, come on. 0.87

00:11:05.000 That was about the expenses of putting it on in a room and providing food and lodging.

00:11:10.000 So, had they gotten one kid, they broke even.

00:11:13.000 That's right.

00:11:13.000 That's really funny.

00:11:14.000 They've got a thousand kids. 0.68

00:11:15.000 I mean, it's funny in a sad kind of way, but – It embodies higher education in this country.

00:11:19.000 Correct.

00:11:20.000 They've gotten so used to running a scam that even if it's a debate tournament via Zoom, we'll keep the scam mentality going.

00:11:26.000 So anyway, so I guess – I actually am separately curious about this.

00:11:29.000 I wasn't planning to ask you about this because I didn't realize the timeline here.

00:11:33.000 But how did that affect the quality of debate you were able to have taking the in-person to Zooms?

00:11:39.000 Is that something you were able to carry on pretty effectively or not?

00:11:43.000 We were.

00:11:43.000 So, this was about the time that Incubate Debate went from being a debate camp, which it was in the summer of 2019 at the University of Miami, the only free debate camp in Florida.

00:11:52.000 And you founded this?

00:11:54.000 I founded this.

00:11:54.000 And so, it's a nonprofit debate camp.

00:11:56.000 Correct.

00:11:57.000 Got it.

00:11:57.000 And then over 2020, over that summer, we had to do the camp online and – We then realize, wait, if Harvard and Yale and all these big places are hosting tournaments and still charging kids hundreds of bucks— We should just get a Zoom account and host tournaments.

00:12:12.000 Exactly.

00:12:12.000 We did that in September.

00:12:14.000 And how much did you charge them?

00:12:15.000 Nothing.

00:12:16.000 Okay.

00:12:16.000 Nothing.

00:12:17.000 And it's not just the cost of the tournament that's the charge.

00:12:20.000 It's mom and dad having to judge for six, seven, eight hours.

00:12:23.000 So on top of not charging them, we then invited people, think tankers, professors.

00:12:29.000 Oh, great.

00:12:30.000 So you could actually even make sort of professional judges at debate.

00:12:34.000 Exactly.

00:12:34.000 Rather than asking mom and dad to do a second job over the weekend.

00:12:36.000 Exactly.

00:12:37.000 Exactly.

00:12:37.000 I didn't realize that's how it worked, by the way, that it was parents of the people who participated that were the judges.

00:12:43.000 And that's what's so problematic about it.

00:12:44.000 It actually probably is biased.

00:12:47.000 Incredibly biased.

00:12:48.000 And I've got some funny stories to tell you on that front.

00:12:51.000 But, you know, we started this tournament.

00:12:53.000 We had 200 kids.

00:12:54.000 I thought we were going to get 40 or 50. 200 students from all over the country came to our first.

00:12:59.000 We called it the Incubate Debate Congressional Classic.

00:13:02.000 And we debated some pretty interesting topics, whether the US should sell the UAE F-35s, right?

00:13:10.000 Some really important topics that were in the news.

00:13:12.000 We always kind of pull topical stuff.

00:13:13.000 And the person that connected us, Bill Lackman, was actually one of our judges there.

00:13:17.000 Oh, was he?

00:13:17.000 Yeah.

00:13:18.000 That's great.

00:13:18.000 Good for him.

00:13:19.000 I'm glad that he was taking time to do that.

00:13:21.000 That makes me – It makes me proud of him.

00:13:24.000 That's good.

00:13:24.000 Yeah.

00:13:25.000 On a separate note, what he's done over the last couple of years, I mean, his whole life, but he's really, I think, embraced the engaged citizen idea, right?

00:13:32.000 Speaking up on issues, I think of one in particular, right?

00:13:35.000 The sexualization of young people on Pornhub, right?

00:13:37.000 Where he stepped up and he pressured companies like Visa and said, you can't be processing payments where you've got young women who are being exploited on these pornography sites. 0.80

00:13:47.000 Yeah.

00:13:48.000 So, it was, you know, it was an honor to have him come out and judge and so many, so many others.

00:13:52.000 This is still virtual stage.

00:13:53.000 Still virtual.

00:13:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:54.000 Whether it was from the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute.

00:13:57.000 So, you used the virtual thing to your advantage to say that we're actually just going to get super high-end, you know, professional debate judges that could be a draw for students and others, but didn't charge the students.

00:14:08.000 Yes.

00:14:09.000 It kind of breaks the culture of this professional debate society thing you got going on in college.

00:14:15.000 Yes.

00:14:16.000 Amongst college kids and high school students alike or mostly high school students?

00:14:18.000 Mostly high school students.

00:14:19.000 Got it.

00:14:19.000 Now, the judging breakdown, usually at a legacy, what I call legacy debate outside of what we do, is it's probably 60% parents and 40% ex-debaters who are now college students.

00:14:29.000 And that's problematic because they bring an enormous bias.

00:14:32.000 And I got to tell you, they don't even hide it.

00:14:34.000 They wear it proudly.

00:14:36.000 You mean in terms of the judging of this?

00:14:38.000 The judging of it.

00:14:38.000 The parents in particular do?

00:14:40.000 The parents and the college students both.

00:14:42.000 Got it.

00:14:42.000 So you think this actually helped with that?

00:14:44.000 Yes.

00:14:45.000 Okay.

00:14:45.000 So what's an example of a topic that someone would debate?

00:14:49.000 And the way it works is the high school students basically doesn't necessarily get to choose which side they're going to be on.

00:14:54.000 They're assigned.

00:14:54.000 Is that right?

00:14:55.000 They're assigned – the other debate tournaments will typically do a coin flip.

00:14:59.000 What we actually do is because we have so much geographic diversity.

00:15:02.000 Florida is the third largest state.

00:15:03.000 There are counties like Broward County, which are never going to vote for a Republican, and then counties like Holmes County, which voted 80% for Donald Trump in the last election.

00:15:11.000 And you're from Broward.

00:15:12.000 I'm from Broward.

00:15:12.000 I now live in the Panhandle in Madison County.

00:15:14.000 So when we pulled from all over the state, which is what the virtual format allowed us to do, we didn't necessarily have to assign sides because we got folks from the deep red America first counties and folks from the kind of Broward and Miami-Dade or Hillsborough County who just were naturally on different sides of important issues.

00:15:32.000 And that's what we really wanted.

00:15:33.000 We didn't want to compel people, right?

00:15:35.000 On issues like you talked about affirmative action, it would be awful to compel someone to say something they don't believe.

00:15:40.000 Now, we always encourage them, by the way, to entertain what the other side is going to say, to deeply research what they may bring up to have counter arguments.

00:15:47.000 But I fundamentally don't believe in compelled speech.

00:15:51.000 It's interesting.

00:15:52.000 I mean – This is random, but it just reminded me of something I haven't thought of in years.

00:15:57.000 It was actually kind of a fun experience in high school.

00:15:59.000 They have this, you know, model UN program that we did where I represented – I was sort of forced to represent Iran.

00:16:08.000 And I think it's kind of – it was just fun.

00:16:10.000 It was kind of interesting.

00:16:10.000 But it's high school.

00:16:11.000 You take on a position that you don't take on.

00:16:13.000 I think that – You could argue it's an exercise in building your skill set regardless of whether or not you're embracing it, but you're leaning in the direction of allow people to speak for what they're passionate about, and you're likely to get enough people on both sides to make the debate tournament work.

00:16:28.000 Absolutely.

00:16:28.000 Yeah.

00:16:29.000 Absolutely.

00:16:30.000 Got it.

00:16:30.000 So anyway, so what would you say that – like what was the impact that you saw that this has had on kids who then graduate and go to college?

00:16:40.000 Do you have a good sense for – Whether this is cultivating some type of civic culture amongst those kids.

00:16:49.000 Talk to me a little bit about that.

00:16:50.000 I'm actually really curious because that's one of the core, you probably know one of the core premises of my campaign is reviving civic identity in this country.

00:16:58.000 I think a commitment to free speech and open debate is a really important part of that.

00:17:03.000 It's not all going to be done through government.

00:17:04.000 In fact, I think very little of it is going to be and ought to be done through government.

00:17:08.000 What was your experience with this?

00:17:10.000 It was great when I was in high school.

00:17:13.000 And this was 2010, 2011, 2012. When did you graduate from high school?

00:17:17.000 2013. 2013. So you're a young man.

00:17:20.000 I'm 28. Okay, got it.

00:17:22.000 And it was great because we didn't get the kind of tribalism.

00:17:28.000 We didn't have that back then.

00:17:29.000 You'll remember – Democrats, Republicans – I mean, we can obviously go back to the 70s, but even go back 10, 15 years, we didn't have – there wasn't this clash that they are your enemy.

00:17:39.000 And when Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, it seemed like that was the spark for so much tribalism.

00:17:47.000 It deranged a lot of people.

00:17:49.000 It just deranged them.

00:17:50.000 And you're getting to this day, I think, to separate the Legacy Debate League, which is sort of the National Speech and Debate Association and what Incubate Debate is doing in Florida.

00:17:59.000 The guys over here, it's deeply problematic.

00:18:03.000 What they've done is they've replaced the commitment to free speech and open dialogue with an obsession and infatuation with Marxism, anti-racist ideas, which are, of course, racist.

00:18:15.000 And they're really trying to push out and force out ideas.

00:18:19.000 And the best way to do that, by the way, to force out an idea is to tell someone that they lose simply on the premise that they brought up an idea that you oppose.

00:18:28.000 And so one example of this is – and by the way, this is all public information.

00:18:32.000 This is not hearsay.

00:18:33.000 This is not a judge wrote something.

00:18:35.000 The judging – the debate community has something called a paradigm.

00:18:38.000 And the idea is – and originally the way it was supposed to work was if you and I were to go to a debate tournament together and compete against each other to debate maybe affirmative action, we would log on to this judge paradigm.

00:18:49.000 It's a website where we would see who our judge is 30 minutes out before the round, and we would see what preferences do they have.

00:18:56.000 On the issue.

00:18:57.000 On the issue.

00:18:57.000 Not originally.

00:18:59.000 Do they want us to speak slowly?

00:19:01.000 Oh, like that.

00:19:02.000 How do they think about the handling of evidence?

00:19:04.000 Got it.

00:19:04.000 And now what paradigms have become is just straight up issues.

00:19:10.000 That's actually pretty sad.

00:19:12.000 It's really sad because you take these young impressionable people who are here because of their commitment to free speech and open debate and you close that door.

00:19:21.000 I mean, high school debate is supposed to be the epitome of free speech and it's really shut it down.

00:19:28.000 Give me an example.

00:19:28.000 I'm actually really curious.

00:19:29.000 I'll read an example to you verbatim because you can't make this stuff up.

00:19:32.000 So this is from the Stanford debate tournament.

00:19:36.000 A lot of stuff happened in Stanford these days.

00:19:37.000 And this is a quote from a person's paradigm.

00:19:41.000 She says, I would hope I wouldn't have to say this, but given our political climate, I have no choice.

00:19:46.000 If you are discussing immigrants in the round and you describe the person as illegal, I will immediately stop the round, give you a loss, give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach.

00:20:01.000 Are you kidding me?

00:20:02.000 I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.

00:20:06.000 So, suppose there's a debate about illegal immigration.

00:20:10.000 Which there is.

00:20:11.000 Which there ought to be.

00:20:12.000 Yes.

00:20:13.000 And you come out on one side of that debate and you actually even use the word illegal – They would shut down the debate.

00:20:21.000 Literally.

00:20:22.000 Unbelievable.

00:20:22.000 She's going to stand up and wave her hands.

00:20:25.000 So this is not at your organization's debate.

00:20:27.000 No.

00:20:27.000 This is at some – Stanford's – Stanford's debate.

00:20:29.000 Hosted debate.

00:20:30.000 And Stanford is actually a country – is a university that also says, even when you're describing our country, they discourage you to use the word American.

00:20:38.000 Correct.

00:20:38.000 As of recently.

00:20:39.000 So in a certain sense, there's a consistency to that.

00:20:41.000 There is.

00:20:41.000 If you don't want to say American and part of what it means to be American is to believe in the rule of law, then you would be free to at least engage in the idea who would have ever thought that it is illegal to cross the border when the law says you can't cross the border without the government's ability to let you in.

00:20:59.000 In a certain sense, that is anti-American.

00:21:02.000 And then they say, don't say American.

00:21:03.000 So those things go together.

00:21:04.000 It's funny that you and I are having this conversation.

00:21:06.000 We're both the kids of immigrants who came to this country through the front door, but without getting into the rabbit hole of the illegal immigration issue on the substance of it, wherever you are in the substance of it, it's a sad thing to say that we can't debate that anymore in this country.

00:21:18.000 Correct.

00:21:19.000 And remember, illegal immigration, you know, just a word for a second.

00:21:24.000 This is a term the New York Times uses in their reporting every single day.

00:21:28.000 Yeah, but that even shouldn't be the standard.

00:21:29.000 Suppose the New York Times did it because the next thing they're going to say, the New York Times shouldn't say illegal immigration.

00:21:32.000 The New York Times will buckle under pressure to that mob.

00:21:34.000 That's right. 0.96

00:21:35.000 That shouldn't be the standard anyway, but you're saying it's doubly ridiculous.

00:21:38.000 It's doubly ridiculous because even the New York Times, which does not have a great track record on free speech, is saying that illegal immigration is fine.

00:21:44.000 Yeah, but not yet is the point because this is the bleeding edge that tomorrow will change what the New York Times itself says.

00:21:49.000 This is just at the vanguard of that movement, right?

00:21:52.000 So this is a leading indicator, not a trailing indicator.

00:21:55.000 Right.

00:21:57.000 Interesting.

00:21:57.000 You know, I think that – I'm trying to think about – let's say somebody who has a different point of view than you and I who were here, what would they say?

00:22:04.000 A lot of what I get is, well – This isn't about free speech or the Constitution because the government isn't telling you you can't say that.

00:22:14.000 It's just a privately hosted debate forum at Stanford.

00:22:18.000 So if you don't like that debate forum, have a different forum, but the First Amendment is still respected.

00:22:23.000 Right.

00:22:24.000 Because this debate forum doesn't offer that, whereas go start a different one.

00:22:28.000 In fact, you did.

00:22:29.000 And so I think that's the common kind of refrain that I hear in this type of setting is I think the thing that that misses is that free speech and even the First Amendment in this country, it's not just about protecting your rights.

00:22:44.000 It's definitely about that.

00:22:46.000 But it's not just about that.

00:22:48.000 I mean, the way the Founding Fathers saw it was that this is part of a culture, a founding culture of a nation, a culture in which we settle our questions through free speech and open debate because that's what we as a nation and as citizens of this nation are committed to.

00:23:04.000 And that's something that you undermine, even if it isn't the government that does it, you know, so-called big tech censorship, though I don't call it that because that largely is government tech censorship now.

00:23:13.000 Anyway, but the cultural infringements on free speech... 0.76

00:23:20.000 That's what we lose, is even if it's not a technical First Amendment violation, it runs afoul of the principle, the culture that's codified in that First Amendment.

00:23:30.000 And I think that that's part of how even if you're Stanford University and you're not technically the government, you accept government funds, but you're technically not the government.

00:23:38.000 Even if you put the federal funding piece of it to one side, you're still destroying the essence of what the country is and what's codified in that First Amendment.

00:23:46.000 I think that's what people miss sometimes.

00:23:48.000 That's exactly right.

00:23:49.000 So what did you – I mean, what did you do in response to that?

00:23:52.000 I guess you offer an alternative.

00:23:53.000 It's the best you can, right?

00:23:55.000 Build your own, they say, right?

00:23:57.000 And so we did that.

00:23:58.000 And, you know, we started out with that first virtual tournament.

00:24:01.000 And we had to do virtual, you know – Obviously, because of COVID, it was still very difficult in the fall of 2020 to convince students to come together, to convince parents.

00:24:09.000 But at the beginning of 2022, we had our first in-person tournament.

00:24:15.000 And this was in a rural county called Glades County.

00:24:17.000 It was our Dr. King Symposium.

00:24:19.000 And it was really about standing up for the principles that the good reverend represented, right?

00:24:24.000 Equality before the law, justice.

00:24:27.000 And so students came together for the first time, a hundred students to debate these issues from all over the state.

00:24:31.000 And we had a blast.

00:24:32.000 And since then, we've been hosting tournaments.

00:24:33.000 We have a thousand active students.

00:24:35.000 We're reaching out to schools right now.

00:24:36.000 So we're going to quadruple that number in the new school year.

00:24:39.000 And the idea is because you have to have fair debate, you have to have fair topics.

00:24:45.000 So it's not just the judging that's unfair from the other legacy establishment debate side.

00:24:51.000 It's also the topic.

00:24:52.000 So you're very passionate about the idea of merit.

00:24:55.000 Affirmative action runs counter to that.

00:24:56.000 So let me give you one of the debate topics that the National Speech and Debate Association wants students to debate.

00:25:02.000 It's still on their website right now.

00:25:04.000 It's not whether or not affirmative action is good for black Americans.

00:25:07.000 The question students had had to debate.

00:25:10.000 How has affirmative action helped black Americans?

00:25:15.000 Are you kidding me? 0.60

00:25:16.000 Dead serious.

00:25:17.000 So the two sides of the debate are it's helped them this way or it's helped them that way.

00:25:22.000 Right.

00:25:22.000 Oh, that's amazing.

00:25:23.000 And you know, we have our views- Wait, wait, wait.

00:25:25.000 Who hosted this debate?

00:25:26.000 This is the National Speech and Debate Association.

00:25:28.000 This is the largest debate- Can you send this to me?

00:25:29.000 I will.

00:25:30.000 Actually, this would just be- When was this?

00:25:33.000 This was posted online about a year ago.

00:25:36.000 Wow.

00:25:37.000 Send that to me today.

00:25:38.000 I will.

00:25:39.000 I'm actually- Pretty interested in that.

00:25:42.000 You and I have our views about affirmative action.

00:25:44.000 This is not about that.

00:25:45.000 Going back to the illegal immigration point, we ought to have a debate on whether affirmative action is good or not.

00:25:51.000 Oh, that's the heart of the debate.

00:25:52.000 Right.

00:25:52.000 It's the heart of it.

00:25:53.000 As opposed to the question of how it's good.

00:25:55.000 It actually has a big impact on the culture, even in the culture amongst conservatives, because that's a big part of why, I believe.

00:26:03.000 Affirmative action is one of these sacred cows you're not supposed to touch.

00:26:06.000 There isn't a Republican presidential candidate in US history, even in recent history, who has pledged, as I have, to end affirmative action in America. 0.79

00:26:15.000 I pushed the Trump team on this, including the policy team as to why they didn't take this on.

00:26:18.000 They said it's not a political hill they wanted to die on.

00:26:21.000 I disagree with that, but you can understand why.

00:26:23.000 If the scope of debate, I mean, in some ways, the way a debate question is posed defines the Overton window, right?

00:26:30.000 Correct.

00:26:31.000 Okay, here's one end, and here's the other end, and you can have at it.

00:26:34.000 But right now, the Overton window is the idea that you can debate how affirmative action has helped Black Americans, but no further than that.

00:26:41.000 Right.

00:26:43.000 It's interesting, and it also actually highlights to me how you can use This is sort of a deeper analogy here I'm about to make, but interrupt me if it doesn't make sense to you.

00:26:59.000 I think the Trojan horse model that the illiberal left has used for the last half decade, which is to take some of the values that People who are either adherence to classical liberalism or conservatism embrace.

00:27:19.000 Let's take free speech here as an example.

00:27:21.000 But to co-opt that, to advance an agenda that's antithetical to the thing that it appears, they actually embrace.

00:27:30.000 So we see this with free speech, we see this with capitalism.

00:27:32.000 But on the free speech side, so we're having debate.

00:27:36.000 Guys, we're embracing open debate.

00:27:39.000 And so it looks like it checks the box of believing in free speech.

00:27:43.000 But the way the question is itself framed involves a presupposition, an answer to the question, asserting a conclusion that almost uses the appearance of debate to legitimize that fact.

00:27:57.000 When in fact, there was no space for debate in the first place.

00:28:00.000 And that's a big part of what we see going on with so-called capitalism as well.

00:28:05.000 I mean, this is...

00:28:06.000 My most recent career as a warrior against ESG through the market is to say that, okay, you guys said you want a shareholder primacy and free markets determining how people actually make corporate decisions.

00:28:21.000 Well, great.

00:28:22.000 We'll just say that we're using the free market when in fact it wasn't the free market at all.

00:28:27.000 It was government tilting the scales of whether or not particular asset managers won mandates from large pension funds that then required implementing agendas through the back door that couldn't be implemented through the front door on emissions caps or whatever.

00:28:38.000 But again, conservatives have their tongue twisted and not because, wait, that's the free market now saying that we are adopting these environmental social agendas.

00:28:46.000 Same thing here is, okay, we're having debate.

00:28:48.000 Guys, we're having an open debate, but the way the question is framed itself belies the actual value you're supposed to protect.

00:28:54.000 And I think that's – it's an interesting move.

00:28:57.000 I mean before we sort of complain about it and enter despair, it's just interesting to observe.

00:29:03.000 Absolutely.

00:29:04.000 That's sort of a tactic of I think the modern progressive left.

00:29:06.000 I think a lot of the Chinese agenda in the United States I think makes a similar move is, okay, if you can't beat them – Act like you're joining them. 0.98

00:29:16.000 Embrace the things that they fetishize, but turn it into a golden calf, which allows them to worship at what ends up being a hollowed out husk of itself, a false idol.

00:29:24.000 And whether that's free speech or whether that's capitalism, we're able to trick the other side into actually bowing at the temple that they think they're bowing at, but they're actually bowing at our temple instead.

00:29:33.000 Does that sort of make sense to you?

00:29:34.000 Absolutely does.

00:29:36.000 And so, how do you cut through that?

00:29:38.000 Right?

00:29:39.000 Because you say we're at a debate, so you could say you're not going to participate in that debate.

00:29:43.000 Right.

00:29:43.000 But then you're the illiberal one now.

00:29:44.000 Yes.

00:29:45.000 You're the one who's rejecting and engaging in free speech.

00:29:47.000 So this is the puzzle.

00:29:49.000 Right.

00:29:49.000 What's the way through that?

00:29:51.000 It's tough.

00:29:52.000 I've spoken to so many students who just left debate as a result of this, as freshmen and sophomores in high school, because they couldn't stand being in an environment where free speech was constantly under attack, whether it was the topic that was being posed, the way it was framed, or whether it was the judges, right?

00:30:10.000 We're talking about if you use the term illegal immigration or one judge said to a student in a paradigm, I'm open to hearing conservative views, but please be careful.

00:30:20.000 Wow.

00:30:20.000 What does that mean?

00:30:21.000 What does that mean?

00:30:22.000 And they tell, you know, so that's a really, really big problem.

00:30:26.000 I don't even know much about your politics.

00:30:27.000 Are you politically conservative or no?

00:30:28.000 I would say so, yes.

00:30:29.000 Okay.

00:30:30.000 Yeah.

00:30:30.000 Got it.

00:30:30.000 And your parents?

00:30:31.000 I would say so, yeah.

00:30:32.000 Yeah.

00:30:32.000 And they came as immigrants, a Colombian?

00:30:34.000 My father's American.

00:30:35.000 Oh, your father's American.

00:30:36.000 Grew up in South Florida.

00:30:36.000 My mother came from a small town in Colombia.

00:30:38.000 It's kind of the oil capital, Barranca Bermeja.

00:30:41.000 And, you know, they love this country.

00:30:43.000 And they've seen what's happened.

00:30:45.000 But For me, what drove me to do this originally was the socioeconomic hurdles for so many students.

00:30:52.000 And it's not just one race.

00:30:53.000 Any student whose parents work, who cares, right? 0.99

00:30:56.000 What kept me in this fight was free speech and merit.

00:31:00.000 One last example.

00:31:02.000 There's a judge in a paradigm.

00:31:03.000 Again, this is all public information with their names on it.

00:31:06.000 So you can see where they represent who they are.

00:31:08.000 But said, if the debate is a tie, I will resort to affirmative action.

00:31:15.000 Oh, really?

00:31:17.000 As in racial equity for who wins.

00:31:19.000 Racial equity. 0.85

00:31:19.000 Yeah, as a tiebreaker. 0.85

00:31:20.000 And what does it mean for a debate to be a tie?

00:31:22.000 And what does it mean to say that prospectively about whether the debate was actually going to be a tie if it really was a tie?

00:31:28.000 Just put yourself in the perspective of somebody who's a judge says this, okay?

00:31:32.000 Is that if it's a tie, I'm going to use race to settle it, but you're also the person now prospectively judging it.

00:31:38.000 Are you really judging it?

00:31:39.000 No.

00:31:39.000 Through those merits?

00:31:40.000 I mean, that's a farce, actually.

00:31:41.000 It's kind of the way our culture works today, though.

00:31:43.000 It's interesting.

00:31:44.000 It really is.

00:31:45.000 And, you know, it hurts the students that they're trying to help the most.

00:31:49.000 Because now you have a team of young black students, the ones that I coached in Miami Gardens… And they get the win, Vivek.

00:31:57.000 They win that round.

00:31:58.000 But now they're constantly worried, did I win because of a racial equity?

00:32:03.000 Of course, yeah.

00:32:04.000 Or did I win on the merit?

00:32:06.000 And this is the tyranny of merit, kind of an interesting phrase, you know?

00:32:08.000 But this is what it is.

00:32:10.000 It's a form of psychological slavery.

00:32:12.000 Yeah.

00:32:13.000 I think that that's – it's an injustice to everyone who was involved in that but for different reasons.

00:32:20.000 Right.

00:32:21.000 What do you think it does?

00:32:22.000 I mean, let's just take the argument for the other side.

00:32:24.000 I vehemently reject it, but let's just get it on the table where they'll say something like these black kids grew up in tough circumstances in a systemically racist system and that we need to build up their self-confidence so that they then have the self-confidence to actually compete in a system but let's just get it on the table where they'll say something like these black kids grew up in tough circumstances in

00:32:46.000 And, you know, the counter-argument would be, well, you're not going to permanently make it fair because the world works as the way the world works is rewarding producers – Now, one counterargument rebuttal to that is they'll say, no, no, no, we're actually going to make the whole world fair and that's why that system of affirmative action pervades the entire economy.

00:33:03.000 But suppose that doesn't work and that results in national decline.

00:33:06.000 Some other people who would say that, no, no, no, this shouldn't last forever, but we need to do it.

00:33:10.000 So like the more so-called reasonable people here on the other side would say that – Yes, it's true that we can't have an economy that persistently works this way.

00:33:19.000 That's true.

00:33:20.000 But at a younger age, you need to give those black kids at least the self-confidence of what it feels like to win.

00:33:26.000 So even if they wouldn't have won according to blind criteria, you nonetheless need to give them the experience of winning to give them that self-confidence.

00:33:38.000 I know what my response to that is, but I want to hear yours.

00:33:40.000 What would you say in response to that?

00:33:42.000 What I would say is do what Incubate Debate is doing.

00:33:47.000 Go into these schools, work with the teachers, work with the students, host workshops to give them the confidence so every student can win on their own merit.

00:33:57.000 Don't lie to them.

00:33:57.000 It's lying.

00:33:58.000 Make no mistake.

00:33:59.000 It is lying to them, and they're deluded, and they're going to end up creating this tension between them and other students where they're going to end up On the outs.

00:34:21.000 Diversity, equity, inclusion webinar every quarter and that kind of tells our judges, right?

00:34:28.000 Wink, wink, racial equity, affirmative action in your judging decisions than it is to actually invest resources and boots on the ground to visit these underserved Title I high schools all across this country and work with the students to get them to that level where they can truly win on their own merit.

00:34:42.000 And they don't have to worry, did I win because the judge had some agenda?

00:34:46.000 There's deeper questions here where I think that's very noble.

00:34:50.000 And I think that that is something I would get behind.

00:34:53.000 I am behind.

00:34:55.000 Thank you for what you do and I'm pretty excited about it.

00:35:00.000 I think the reality is that's still, to me, a bit of a rosy picture because these kids did not grow up, many of them, in the family circumstance that you and I do.

00:35:10.000 70-plus percent of black kids are born into single-parent households.

00:35:15.000 Correct.

00:35:16.000 Unlike you and I, who enjoyed the ultimate privilege of having a family foundation with two parents who valued education, that's the real privilege.

00:35:25.000 We didn't grow up in Monty Aydin either, just like you. 0.98

00:35:29.000 But that is a privilege that many black kids are missing.

00:35:32.000 And even as late as high school, I guess... 0.89

00:35:36.000 It's better than nothing, for sure.

00:35:38.000 But what's your experience?

00:35:40.000 Like, honestly speaking, do you think it's salvageable if you have kids that grew up in a different family culture that didn't at home place the same value in education, that at home didn't have the same two parents?

00:35:54.000 Like, you're moving the needle definitely a little bit.

00:35:56.000 And if it's going to be moving, it's definitely in the positive direction.

00:36:00.000 But how much is possible against the backdrop of the family situation and the breakdown of the family in Black America being what it is? 0.99

00:36:06.000 Yeah.

00:36:08.000 My faith tells me that everything is salvageable and we should never throw in the towel when it comes to the importance of family, the privilege that you and I benefited from.

00:36:18.000 What I would say is this Open dialogue, this civic engagement has the opportunity to bring families together.

00:36:27.000 So I'll give you the one example.

00:36:29.000 There's a young girl who participates in our debate league.

00:36:31.000 Her parents were separated.

00:36:35.000 When she started competing with Incubate Debate and they came to the tournaments together to watch their daughter up there talking about the Second Amendment, talking about the Tenth Amendment, talking about federalism, doing that time and again over the course of the year, they got back together.

00:36:54.000 The mom and dad did.

00:36:55.000 The mom and the dad.

00:36:56.000 Right.

00:36:56.000 That's an unbelievable story, man.

00:36:57.000 And it's, you know, it's not just debate, right?

00:36:59.000 We need to have these.

00:36:59.000 So they were separated.

00:37:00.000 They were separated.

00:37:01.000 Unbelievable.

00:37:01.000 And so, but it's not just debate.

00:37:03.000 What an analogy, right?

00:37:04.000 Debate.

00:37:05.000 You can bring the country together, but it put up, and just out of curiosity, you're saying this is not a well-to-do family.

00:37:10.000 No.

00:37:11.000 Okay.

00:37:11.000 This is very much circumstances that you and I grew up in.

00:37:14.000 Mm-hmm.

00:37:14.000 And, you know, it's not just debate, but we talk about the academic achievement gap.

00:37:18.000 Let's also talk about the extracurricular gap.

00:37:20.000 This is where families spend time on a Saturday at a football game, at a chess tournament, at a debate tournament.

00:37:25.000 If we can bring families and invite them together, one thing that we're starting to do at our upcoming tournaments is childcare.

00:37:31.000 And that's been a really big thing.

00:37:33.000 So we are going to have a childcare room.

00:37:35.000 So for that mother who has three young kids who wants to be there with the grandmother and the uncle, we are going to provide childcare so she can actually be there, watch her daughter, watch her son, and really have the sense of family unity and pride.

00:37:50.000 I like that.

00:37:52.000 Do you get the sense that – I guess one of the goals of debate is persuasion.

00:37:59.000 Do you get the sense that somebody who shows up at one of these things or a high school kid changes their mind from time to time on a subject?

00:38:07.000 Or do you think that that's not something that happens even in the best of scenarios?

00:38:11.000 Happens all the time.

00:38:13.000 Really?

00:38:13.000 Good.

00:38:14.000 Maybe the best example of it was the parental rights bill in Florida.

00:38:17.000 We had a debate.

00:38:19.000 This was in May of last year at our state championship.

00:38:23.000 And the question was around the question of whether the parental rights bill, which was, you know, restricting the discussions about those issues in K through three, whether that was a good or bad thing, whether that should continue.

00:38:39.000 I have never had more students and more parents blow up my phone about why this topic should be taken down.

00:38:46.000 That it was fascist.

00:38:48.000 Oh, wow.

00:38:48.000 Even the debate.

00:38:50.000 Even the debate about it.

00:38:51.000 Right?

00:38:51.000 And I thought, you know, and I was kind of priding myself like, you know, these kids have grown so much.

00:38:56.000 Having these discussions, getting this perspective, hearing from law professors and members of our armed forces, getting feedback on their debates.

00:39:03.000 But that derangement, much like we saw in 2015, that derangement over parental rights was a step too far for us.

00:39:09.000 So we got calls by coaches, by parents, by students that they were not going to come unless we scrapped this topic.

00:39:18.000 Of course, we did not scrap it.

00:39:19.000 Several of the students ended up coming after we provided a detailed research packet like we do with all of our tournaments about the ins and outs.

00:39:28.000 I thought best case scenario, the debate would be 80-20 split.

00:39:34.000 We don't force kids to say something they don't believe in.

00:39:36.000 So I thought 80% were going to say that the parental rights bill was a fascist bill, right, and should not pass, and 20% were to stand by it.

00:39:44.000 That debate, Vivek, was 50-50.

00:39:47.000 A month later, after the threats, the boycotts, and all of that, after they actually sat down and put down Twitter and put down the headlines and the histrionics and actually read through what was a seven-page bill in Florida.

00:40:01.000 There's many like it across the country.

00:40:03.000 This is a pro-family piece of legislation that is not controversial at all.

00:40:09.000 But it took a setting like that to actually smoke that out, right?

00:40:13.000 Absolutely.

00:40:13.000 And a lot of that was filtered through the media.

00:40:15.000 I mean, the bill that you correctly described through its actual title was dubbed by the media, Don't Say Gay.

00:40:20.000 Right.

00:40:20.000 Sometimes you got to make something rhyme to make a trend on social media or even get on actual cable news these days.

00:40:26.000 But actually, if you engage in – let's just take off the gloves and engage in actual debate about what the truth of it is.

00:40:34.000 Absolutely.

00:40:35.000 And, you know, we're not here – I'm conservative, unapologetically so, but I'm not here to change anyone's mind to believe what I believe.

00:40:43.000 I am here to facilitate open dialogue and debate.

00:40:46.000 And if that means an issue goes from 80-20 to 50-50 on its own merit, you know, we're not forcing kids.

00:40:51.000 We're not telling them you have to switch sides.

00:40:52.000 We're not saying you have to represent something you don't believe in.

00:40:55.000 But I suspect the same forces that Adam Smith so prominently talked about in 1776, right – This idea of the invisible hand, the idea of the free market, the open economy, competition, that also plays into this, right?

00:41:07.000 So if a student goes up there, has nothing to stand on, on this parental rights bill, they can't win the tournament.

00:41:15.000 They realize that through their research that there's no substance behind this don't say gay opposition.

00:41:20.000 That the only thing for them to do was to switch the side that actually represented the facts and the realities on the ground.

00:41:31.000 Vice President Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, come out, the second gentleman, and talk to our students, along with Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice, talk with our students.

00:41:38.000 So we bring in both sides, and we really want the open dialogue and competition.

00:41:42.000 And we see your students, they're in Florida.

00:41:44.000 They're in Florida.

00:41:45.000 They're in Florida.

00:41:46.000 And what we're doing – And it goes on spring semester.

00:41:48.000 When does the spring semester version of this end?

00:41:50.000 This will end in May.

00:41:51.000 Okay.

00:41:52.000 And how much time does it take for you in between now and then?

00:41:55.000 In terms of – It's time commitment for you.

00:41:58.000 Oh, time commitment is probably about 15, 20 hours a week.

00:42:00.000 Okay.

00:42:01.000 Not nothing.

00:42:02.000 It's not nothing.

00:42:03.000 And we do a summer program as well.

00:42:04.000 So we'll do our fifth annual free summer debate camp this summer at five different locations.

00:42:09.000 And the idea is to bring people together to have these discussions.

00:42:12.000 But, you know, we've got some upcoming debates.

00:42:14.000 One on AI, which is – Oh, interesting.

00:42:16.000 Yeah.

00:42:16.000 What impact will AI have on education in America?

00:42:20.000 And the interesting part is that one will be out of the Overton window, right?

00:42:22.000 Yes.

00:42:23.000 Or squarely within it to say, which is – There you're going to have to be able to have actually a rich, open debate because it's not the topic where the sides have already ossified.

00:42:34.000 Right.

00:42:35.000 That's cool that there are still spaces, and it's interesting to cultivate almost the skill set amongst kids these days.

00:42:42.000 It's probably better to find – I mean, I think we need to change the culture, but put that to one side.

00:42:49.000 If we take the current culture as granted, but we still want to build the skill sets you want to build amongst these kids, it's kind of sad that you have to find those kinds of topics.

00:42:58.000 That there's still enough controversy or opportunity for difference in opinion, but outside of the pale of the kinds of controversies you're not allowed to actually debate anymore.

00:43:07.000 I predict that'll actually be one of the better ones.

00:43:09.000 Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun.

00:43:09.000 Yeah.

00:43:10.000 It's going to be a lot of fun.

00:43:10.000 That's exciting, man.

00:43:12.000 So, probably reforming the Federal Reserve would still be another one of those topics, at least for the time being.

00:43:16.000 I know that's a topic near and dear to each of our hearts.

00:43:19.000 Right.

00:43:19.000 Related to how you may have gotten your first major job opportunity.

00:43:23.000 That's true.

00:43:27.000 About a Fed rate decrease way back in the day.

00:43:31.000 Should we talk about that a little bit before we wrap up?

00:43:33.000 Because I know you have many different sides to your background and we've talked a lot about your nonprofit work.

00:43:40.000 But maybe a little bit about your day job as an investor and an observer of markets.

00:43:45.000 Maybe we'll switch gears to that for a second before we wrap.

00:43:49.000 My own view is that If we are to learn anything from the current moment we're in, as we're having this conversation, some market instability, seeded by public concern about the stability of banks in the United States and in Western Europe, one of the major lessons we need to learn is that the Federal Reserve Has badly screwed up the project of trying to hit two targets with one arrow.

00:44:18.000 Right.

00:44:19.000 Inflation and unemployment.

00:44:21.000 They've done a very poor job of it, but part of my view is that it's not just that they've executed their job poorly.

00:44:28.000 It's that that was itself the wrong mandate.

00:44:31.000 To begin with, largely because it's based on flawed data.

00:44:34.000 It's like old New Zealand data compiled by British people a century ago that says that there's a trade-off.

00:44:40.000 To think that that's extrapolable to a modern economy is itself an error.

00:44:43.000 And then even if it were true, that it's possible for an omniscient central planner or a dozen of them in a Federal Open Markets Committee or whatever, Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee to play God.

00:44:54.000 And the results speak to the fact that that's been a disastrous experiment, probably contributing in some ways to the 2008 financial crisis, again, to the instability now where the Fed takes these Really, what are trailing indicators like wage growth late in a business cycle?

00:45:14.000 treat them like a leading indicator such that when you see wage growth, you tighten interest rates precisely when the business cycle was about to be self-correcting in its own right, but you turn what would have been a perfectly smooth cycle into a boom-bust bailout cycle that gets us exactly what happens to repeat itself over and over again.

00:45:31.000 You have 20,000 people that show up or 22,000 people that show up to work with at the Federal Reserve System doing a job they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

00:45:38.000 It It just exacerbates the problem through this managerial bureaucracy.

00:45:41.000 That's my diagnosis of the current state of play and I have my views on what I'm going to do as president about it.

00:45:47.000 You're a sophisticated observer of financial markets.

00:45:49.000 You've been watching the Fed for the better part of a decade, a decade and a half.

00:45:54.000 Share with me your perspective.

00:45:55.000 We're in the middle of this, in the thick of this capital market instability on the back of concerns about bank stability.

00:46:01.000 I place a lot of that blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve.

00:46:05.000 What's your take on it, man?

00:46:06.000 My take is the Federal Reserve is just trying to do too much.

00:46:11.000 It's trying to do too much and they're micromanaging.

00:46:14.000 So I think the best way to think about this is to go back to 2019 and you had what the Fed called a mid-cycle adjustment, which is a fancy way for saying we're going to cut rates not because we anticipate recession, but simply because we think we're going to take out some insurance because the Trump trade war might not be going as planned and so on and so forth.

00:46:35.000 But one of the main things they cited in those mid-cycle adjustments, which are three rate cuts, it was July, September, and October of 2019, was that inflation was too low.

00:46:45.000 Their 2% target, inflation was 1.7%.

00:46:49.000 So here's the issue.

00:46:51.000 Is that not only is it maybe the wrong target, but at the same time, they're trying to micromanage it down to the decimal point.

00:46:59.000 We're going to cut rates, we're going to raise rates, whatever it is, because inflation is off by two-tenths or three-tenths is fundamentally the wrong way to think about it.

00:47:09.000 And I think about the crisis too, right?

00:47:11.000 I put a lot of blame you do at the Federal Reserve, but I do as well at Congress and for the Federal Reserve enabling the congressional largesse that we saw with the COVID bailouts.

00:47:23.000 Now, the CARES Act was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate, and I think it made a lot of sense in the moment, right?

00:47:30.000 We had no idea what was going on.

00:47:31.000 It was the middle of March.

00:47:32.000 We had to shut the economy down.

00:47:34.000 Unemployment next month went to nearly 15%.

00:47:37.000 Maybe it made sense to, again, risk doing a little bit too much versus too little.

00:47:42.000 But then a year later, after unemployment had gone from 15 down to 6, over 100 million Americans had gotten vaccinated.

00:47:52.000 Kids were back at school.

00:47:54.000 Businesses were open in large parts of the country.

00:47:56.000 What does President Biden come do?

00:47:58.000 He passes the American Rescue Plan.

00:48:00.000 What was there to rescue?

00:48:03.000 The markets, the economy, the capitalism, right?

00:48:07.000 All of that was working its way to fix this problem.

00:48:10.000 What ended up happening was he prolonged the labor shortage by paying Americans not to work up through September of 2021.

00:48:18.000 You'll remember that in the summer of 2020, the expanded unemployment benefits were – estimated that two out of three workers were making more on unemployment benefits than they were going to work.

00:48:33.000 They were in no rush to go back to work.

00:48:35.000 And that exacerbated the labor shortage that in many ways has contributed to the inflationary situation today.

00:48:42.000 So I look at the Federal Reserve for coming out, Chair Powell saying, Congress needs to do more.

00:48:48.000 The risk of doing too much is less than the risk of doing too little.

00:48:51.000 And not just his words, Vivek, but his actions.

00:48:55.000 Well, one was cutting rates to zero.

00:48:57.000 That's fine.

00:48:58.000 I agreed with that move.

00:48:59.000 Again, in the middle of a crisis where we could look like an actual sudden stop, a real Great Depression-esque crisis, it made sense to throw the kitchen sink at it.

00:49:08.000 But when it became clear in the fall of 2020 that things were on their own getting back to normal, we then had a normalized monetary policy.

00:49:16.000 I had a lot of faith in Chair Powell that he, being a guy from private equity, being a guy from the investor background that you and I were, would not have fallen victim to the kind of academic Theories that has for too long afflicted the Federal Reserve.

00:49:31.000 Those 20,000 people at the Federal Reserve have developed research on all these types of fancy-sounding economic theories, and one of them is the idea of forward guidance.

00:49:42.000 Oh, my God.

00:49:44.000 Oh, my God.

00:49:44.000 It irritates the heck out of me.

00:49:45.000 Yeah.

00:49:46.000 All it is is a promise.

00:49:47.000 Oh, it is – and people cling on to every word.

00:49:50.000 I mean, you just take a step back if somebody came to this – somebody were, you know, Rip Van Winkle and then woke up from the early – from the 70s or 80s now, watching us cling to the words of these soothsayers who are supposedly the omniscient and that it feeds their ego, Makes them think they're omniscient because as many people pay attention to them.

00:50:08.000 People pay attention to them.

00:50:10.000 You know this as well as I do.

00:50:11.000 Market participants, not because they have some insight about the truth.

00:50:14.000 It's just a question of how much they're going to screw it up.

00:50:17.000 And market participants want to know that.

00:50:19.000 And yet that has the impact on their psychology of actually feeding their false ego when the results that stare them in the face would tell them that they've done a horrendous job of it over the last 25 years.

00:50:29.000 People pay attention to them.

00:50:29.000 We need to fix it.

00:50:30.000 I mean, my view is I'll cut 90% of the staff of the Federal Reserve.

00:50:33.000 Sure.

00:50:33.000 The remaining still couple thousand people that would work there, put them back on the task of stabilizing the US dollar.

00:50:39.000 That includes serving under rare circumstances as the lender of last resort.

00:50:43.000 That's part of what stabilizing the dollar would involve.

00:50:45.000 But that's it.

00:50:45.000 It's a unit of measurement.

00:50:46.000 The same way that we wouldn't have started this podcast on time if time were a floating currency, right?

00:50:52.000 The number of minutes and an hour, if that were to float, we wouldn't show up at meetings on time.

00:50:57.000 Well, the dollar instability, this is my perspective at least, contributes to misallocations of capital that in turn become impediments to GDP growth.

00:51:04.000 That is the sole role of a proper Federal Reserve rather than this pattern that you see whenever you create an agency.

00:51:11.000 Never does it reduce its scope.

00:51:12.000 It only ever expands over the course of time decided with this academic managerial class that took over in the late 1990s.

00:51:19.000 That somehow balancing inflation and unemployment were something that they could omnisciently achieve.

00:51:25.000 Correct.

00:51:25.000 And the disastrous results should at least – I mean, it's one thing to make a mistake.

00:51:30.000 It's another thing to make a mistake over and over again for 25 years.

00:51:32.000 It's another to not learn from it.

00:51:34.000 Correct.

00:51:34.000 And actually do something about it.

00:51:36.000 In a sitting from where I said, I think part of the problem is that most people who even assume the presidency don't actually have an understanding of the issue and then lack the conviction then to follow through and see it through when their policy advisors or whatever who are creatures of the same swamp tell them you can't do that.

00:51:52.000 I think it's part of why we need people who have conviction to actually see that through, which brings us back to skill sets that we failed to build long ago in our civic culture, our civic culture going all the way back to basic primary education where people forgot to evaluate ideas on their own merit, which brings me back to, you know, what is the – what it is in the importance of what you do in your civic capacity and hopefully training the next generation not to be as stifled as many in ours have what is the – what it is in the importance of what you do in your

00:52:22.000 Absolutely.

00:52:23.000 And, you know, you think about kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

00:52:27.000 Civic disposition is nearly near the top, right?

00:52:30.000 But what we're trying to do with incubate debate now is take the same two Sort of assets that have really helped us.

00:52:39.000 One of them is an ability to connect with young people and leverage the existing relationships we have with schools, with administrators, and school districts.

00:52:49.000 So what we're launching on Monday actually is our Not Even Once in School Assembly Series.

00:52:54.000 And this is talking about the dangers of fentanyl for young people.

00:52:58.000 This actually started by accident.

00:52:59.000 We had a debate a couple of months ago about the opioid epidemic, about whether harm reduction or abstinence was the more effective way for tackling addiction.

00:53:07.000 And what we found was it was an incredibly fascinating and informative debate, but there was a very wide knowledge gap where students walked in with the knowledge and then walked out with so much more.

00:53:18.000 So many students had no idea what fentanyl was.

00:53:21.000 And this is anecdotal.

00:53:22.000 We wanted to put a number to it.

00:53:23.000 So we conducted a statewide survey in February that asked 320 students in Florida about this issue.

00:53:31.000 Seven in ten, Vivek, said that their school had not spoken to them about fentanyl.

00:53:36.000 Half did not even know that counterfeit pills like Xanax, Percocet, the things that are being peddled to them on Snapchat, were being made with lethal fentanyl.

00:53:47.000 Unbelievable.

00:53:47.000 And it's incredible.

00:53:49.000 So what we've been spending the last couple of months on is building out a statewide series of assemblies where we're going into schools and we're walking into the wind.

00:53:59.000 The reason why is that – do you remember the D.A.R.E. program?

00:54:02.000 Of course.

00:54:04.000 The D.A.R.E. program.

00:54:05.000 What was the – how were they trying to convince you not to do drugs?

00:54:08.000 What was their talking points?

00:54:09.000 Just say no.

00:54:10.000 Just say no.

00:54:10.000 Why?

00:54:11.000 Why?

00:54:11.000 Well, drugs are bad for you.

00:54:13.000 Right.

00:54:13.000 They're addictive.

00:54:14.000 They'll ruin your life.

00:54:16.000 And you hear all the stories of people who had done drugs and bad things that happened to them.

00:54:21.000 Correct.

00:54:21.000 That was my experience of it.

00:54:22.000 Mine as well.

00:54:23.000 And, you know, if you smoke weed, you're not going to get into college.

00:54:26.000 If you, you know, smoke or drink, you're not going to be able to have that dream job as a surgeon.

00:54:33.000 But we knew that that was all exaggerated, right?

00:54:36.000 It was histrionic.

00:54:37.000 And that has created a culture where so many young people that we're trying to talk to, not just us, but so many other great organizations are walking into the head, walking into the wind because they're deeply skeptical, right?

00:54:50.000 Ten years ago, don't smoke weed because you're going to get very, very sick or you're going to get addicted or whatever.

00:54:55.000 You're going to lose your job.

00:54:56.000 Now, you've got college professors smoking weed on the job, right? 0.99

00:55:00.000 So that's the issue.

00:55:02.000 But then they conflate that with anything you're going to be told on, fentanyl and Percocet, etc., on the list.

00:55:07.000 And this is so – we can have a debate someday about the substance of the drug war and all of that, but this is different.

00:55:14.000 Fentanyl is a totally different animal.

00:55:16.000 It is.

00:55:16.000 And I think there's a reason why – and so when you do have this discussion, I mean my humble suggestion is make sure you include in that conversation at least an open debate about how much of this is really supply-side driven.

00:55:33.000 Correct.

00:55:33.000 Because it's no accident that we have seen a spike in the fentanyl epidemic precisely when China decided it was in its policy interest to wage a modern opium war in the United States by making the inputs – there's about four key inputs.

00:55:50.000 But by providing them inexpensively to Mexican drug cartels and even coming over, sending Chinese people to Mexico to synthetically create fentanyl. 1.00

00:55:57.000 to understand there's actually going to be far more harmful to the US than where its prior focus was in the so-called drug war.

00:56:04.000 But actually to use that to undermine the United States from within, now resulting in 100 plus thousand deaths, largely with Chinese fingerprints all over them, with Mexican drug cartels crossing over the border.

00:56:14.000 One of the kind of arguments I hear is, well, we have demand for it.

00:56:18.000 Let's address that.

00:56:18.000 I don't argue against that, but – It rejects the truth of the matter, just empirically of what's happened is when the profit margins for the drug cartels went up, they decided to actually, because they got the inputs more cheaply from China, they're actually able to have an incentive.

00:56:32.000 Correct.

00:56:33.000 To push more of it across the border.

00:56:34.000 And there's no doubt that there's a component of this, at least no doubt in my mind, that this was supply-side driven.

00:56:40.000 But make sure that that – I would suggest making that a part of the debate in terms of how you take this on.

00:56:47.000 That belongs on the menu of something that people are, I think, not particularly paying close attention to today, but, you know, ought to be in the conversation and it's where I'm focused from a presidential perspective as well.

00:56:58.000 Absolutely.

00:56:59.000 And I would just note on the demand point because you're absolutely right about these precursors.

00:57:03.000 And you know what the number one cities in China that produces these precursors of fentanyl is?

00:57:06.000 Where?

00:57:07.000 Wuhan.

00:57:07.000 Oh, is it?

00:57:08.000 Yeah.

00:57:09.000 Unbelievable.

00:57:09.000 It's a form of bioterrorism if you think about it.

00:57:11.000 Exactly.

00:57:12.000 So they gave us the pandemic.

00:57:13.000 I didn't know that.

00:57:14.000 So the city in China that produces – I think there's a couple of critical precursor ingredients.

00:57:20.000 Correct.

00:57:21.000 For synthetic fentanyl is Wuhan.

00:57:23.000 Is Wuhan.

00:57:24.000 Do you know what those are?

00:57:24.000 Those ingredients?

00:57:25.000 The two that are produced in Wuhan?

00:57:28.000 It's an acronym.

00:57:29.000 It's a long-sounding… But these precursors, they get sent to Mexico.

00:57:34.000 And the reason why fentanyl is so dangerous is because from a law enforcement perspective, whether it's on the interdiction side, they're looking out.

00:57:42.000 out.

00:57:43.000 It's all set up to look out for the size of what you're trying to bring in.

00:57:46.000 The potency of fentanyl is 50 times that of heroin.

00:57:49.000 Therefore, it's 50 times smaller.

00:57:51.000 Therefore, it's 50 times more profitable.

00:57:53.000 This is the most profitable investment somebody could make in the world.

00:57:56.000 You could turn $3,000 of precursors into over a million dollars of product that is on our streets.

00:58:02.000 I'd love to share a couple of stories with you.

00:58:04.000 I have some photos of some victims.

00:58:06.000 Yeah.

00:58:06.000 And a lot of these young people don't know actually what they're taking.

00:58:10.000 So the first young man that you see there, I had the pleasure of meeting his mother in DC a couple of weeks ago.

00:58:17.000 She was at the state of the union.

00:58:19.000 His name is Zach Didier, 17 years old.

00:58:22.000 He's from California and he had never tried drugs before.

00:58:26.000 So there goes kind of the whole demand addiction argument.

00:58:30.000 He bought a fake Percocet, what he thought was a Percocet on Snapchat.

00:58:35.000 On Snapchat.

00:58:36.000 On Snapchat.

00:58:37.000 Now remember, this is unbelievable.

00:58:39.000 These are the same social media companies that have the entire AI power to shut down a mask debate or a vaccine debate.

00:58:44.000 No issue with that.

00:58:46.000 But when it comes to shutting down these dealers who are peddling this poison, killing our young people, there's no, no bravery on that front.

00:58:54.000 Right.

00:58:54.000 No effort.

00:58:55.000 He was an Eagle Scout, star of his track and field team, soccer team, led his high school musical.

00:59:01.000 He always wanted to help other people.

00:59:04.000 His mom told me that he had almost a moral obligation to share the knowledge that he accumulated.

00:59:09.000 He got into UCLA a couple weeks after he passed.

00:59:13.000 And the Percocet, like so many drugs out there, he didn't know he was buying fentanyl.

00:59:18.000 These drugs are indistinguishable to career DEA agents, let alone to 17-year-olds like Zach.

00:59:27.000 You have Daniel Puerta Johnson, 16, from California, April 2020. He bought what he thought was an OxyContin on Snapchat again.

00:59:36.000 He had a ton of friends, was incredibly charismatic.

00:59:39.000 Which is itself a problem, by the way.

00:59:41.000 Correct.

00:59:41.000 But it actually was – was it fake again?

00:59:44.000 It was fake again.

00:59:45.000 Unbelievable.

00:59:45.000 Right?

00:59:45.000 He did not struggle with drug use.

00:59:47.000 First responders tried CPR, but he was on life support and passed a few days later.

00:59:52.000 Brianna Scott was 18.

00:59:54.000 She's from Georgia. 0.84

00:59:55.000 She ordered one Percocet on Snapchat, which she thought was a Percocet, indistinguishable from the real Percocet.

01:00:03.000 She split it in half with a friend.

01:00:06.000 Her friend lived.

01:00:08.000 She died.

01:00:10.000 Think about that.

01:00:12.000 The same pill.

01:00:13.000 These pills are cut in coffee grinders, right?

01:00:17.000 In living rooms.

01:00:19.000 You think it was just chance?

01:00:23.000 Yeah.

01:00:23.000 Well, it was a fentanyl pill.

01:00:25.000 Okay.

01:00:26.000 Right?

01:00:26.000 But I'm just talking about the quality control here, right?

01:00:29.000 So, what ends up happening is the precursor is kind of – I'm just trying to understand even descriptively because I've come from the pharmaceutical world in my prior life.

01:00:37.000 You're saying that literally it was like fentanyl was concentrated in the half of the pill that she took.

01:00:41.000 That's right.

01:00:41.000 Wow.

01:00:42.000 You see that encapsulation all the time.

01:00:44.000 It's just like – it's just – it's relatively just like – That shoddy, even in terms of the way they're just stuffing it.

01:00:51.000 Now, who's doing it?

01:00:53.000 Who's actually selling that?

01:00:55.000 Right.

01:00:55.000 So, what'll end up happening is we start in Wuhan.

01:00:58.000 We start with the precursors.

01:00:59.000 They come to Mexico. 0.95

01:01:01.000 Then we have Sinaloa and Jalisco, new generation.

01:01:04.000 They're cutting the fentanyl.

01:01:06.000 They have literally people in warehouses, whatever.

01:01:10.000 In warehouses, in Including people from China, I'm told.

01:01:14.000 Absolutely.

01:01:15.000 Okay, there's a guy writing a book on this that's coming out next year, and he's doing the research on this.

01:01:18.000 But in my conversations with him, he says that there's, you know, hundreds of Chinese people from China.

01:01:25.000 Right.

01:01:26.000 Who are purposefully there with the cartels to assist them in doing this.

01:01:30.000 The cartels are not skilled chemists.

01:01:31.000 Right.

01:01:31.000 And Wuhan actually prides itself on chemistry, on agro-science, right?

01:01:36.000 So all of that comes into this.

01:01:37.000 So they actually have to go there oftentimes.

01:01:38.000 And when did this relationship begin between – I don't know.

01:01:55.000 The biggest thing to take into account was fentanyl that was in the US five, six years ago, a lot of it came directly from China.

01:02:03.000 And that's where you had high purity.

01:02:04.000 The DEA tested the fentanyl on average from China, had a 90% purity.

01:02:09.000 The fentanyl coming from Mexico has a 7%.

01:02:11.000 Why?

01:02:12.000 Because it's being cut with antihistamines.

01:02:14.000 It's being cut with Benadryl, right?

01:02:16.000 And then it's being sent across.

01:02:17.000 So a lot of the fake Benadryl might have fentanyl in it.

01:02:20.000 No, no, no.

01:02:21.000 No, it's simply being used.

01:02:23.000 But by the same – They're breaking down the Benadryl and cutting the fentanyl with it.

01:02:28.000 So then they move that product into the US to then press the pills.

01:02:31.000 The pill isn't pure fentanyl.

01:02:32.000 Oh, got it, got it, got it, got it.

01:02:33.000 It's just their vector.

01:02:34.000 It's just their Trojan horse to get it across.

01:02:38.000 But then they know how to cut it so they can get the fentanyl back out.

01:02:40.000 No, sorry, sorry.

01:02:42.000 So...

01:02:43.000 You can't have a pure fentanyl pill.

01:02:45.000 Only two milligrams of fentanyl will kill someone.

01:02:47.000 And a pill, of course, as you know from your background, is a lot more than that.

01:02:50.000 So what they'll do is they'll mix the fentanyl with a cutting agent, right?

01:02:54.000 Oftentimes, that's Benadryl because of the antihistamine properties to it.

01:02:57.000 And then in the U.S. or either in Mexico, they'll press those into pills that resemble OxyContin, that resemble Percocet.

01:03:04.000 I see, I see, I see.

01:03:05.000 That are then sold to dealers who are then sold on Snapchat and delivered even quicker than an Uber Eats delivery to a young person here.

01:03:12.000 Now, what's the point of doing that?

01:03:14.000 Like, what is their purpose?

01:03:16.000 It just seems – I mean, it seems like they're – It's almost as though the purpose is to wreak death.

01:03:25.000 I mean, the profit motive alone doesn't explain that means of doing it.

01:03:29.000 Well, I think they figured that statistically, it works itself out, right?

01:03:34.000 Statistically, it works itself out.

01:03:36.000 A lot of them, by the way, don't even know.

01:03:39.000 What do you mean those?

01:03:40.000 So what I mean by that is if you go out and spend and make $10,000 in a weekend selling fake Percocets to people and one or two of them or three of them die, right?

01:03:51.000 You lose three customers, but you've netted hundreds of others, right?

01:03:55.000 So they don't care.

01:03:56.000 They just don't care.

01:03:57.000 And part of it, too, is these are not skilled people.

01:04:00.000 Just to give you another point, why – Sully it.

01:04:05.000 Why purposefully sully it with a little bit of fentanyl when it's not that it could have made the same amount of money even if they hadn't done that, right?

01:04:10.000 So that's a great question.

01:04:11.000 It's because of potency.

01:04:13.000 It's because of potency.

01:04:14.000 Without fentanyl, it doesn't give you what the reaction that people want.

01:04:19.000 So it's a cheap way to bring in something potent.

01:04:21.000 So it's just for the user experience.

01:04:23.000 For the user experience, right?

01:04:25.000 And it's so much cheaper.

01:04:25.000 Again, one kilogram of fentanyl is equal to 50 kilograms of heroin.

01:04:29.000 It's just COGS goes down.

01:04:31.000 Cost of goods goes down.

01:04:32.000 Absolutely.

01:04:33.000 And the utility of the addiction and the customer goes up.

01:04:35.000 So it may – from the cartel perspective, may actually just be a self-interested economic point.

01:04:39.000 That's what it seems like.

01:04:40.000 From the Chinese perspective – You know, you can speculate more, but I have my views on the intentionality of this.

01:04:47.000 The intentionality is a big part of it.

01:04:49.000 The most important thing.

01:04:50.000 The Wuhan part I didn't know about.

01:04:51.000 Yeah, that's a fascinating thing.

01:04:52.000 Can you send me some info on that, actually?

01:04:53.000 I absolutely will.

01:04:54.000 And to just talk about how indistinguishable the pills are, I want to talk a little bit about our last individual here.

01:05:01.000 He was 13 years old, Vivek.

01:05:03.000 13, unbelievable.

01:05:04.000 13. Luca was raised to care for others, started his first toy drive at five years old, fed the homeless with his mother.

01:05:14.000 He went on Snapchat to buy some weed, to buy some weed to cope.

01:05:20.000 Maybe it was, you know, again, he says the parents, it was a coping mechanism because of bullying.

01:05:26.000 So he went on Snapchat and what did the dealer say?

01:05:28.000 I've got something better that will help you even more.

01:05:32.000 I didn't realize Snapchat was such a distribution pipe.

01:05:38.000 It is.

01:05:38.000 Unbelievable.

01:05:39.000 It makes it very hard to prosecute too because the messages disappear.

01:05:41.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:41.000 They go into the ether.

01:05:43.000 We'll meanwhile worry about someone misgendering someone.

01:05:48.000 Correct.

01:05:48.000 And again, misgendering or having a COVID debate on the platform.

01:05:53.000 He actually was concerned that the Percocet might have been fake.

01:05:58.000 So what did he do?

01:06:00.000 He took a picture of it, compared it to a screenshot of a real one.

01:06:04.000 Smart kid.

01:06:05.000 Smart kid.

01:06:07.000 Smart kid Luca was.

01:06:09.000 He took a picture and then still it looked similar enough that it tricked him.

01:06:13.000 It looked good enough.

01:06:13.000 He was convinced.

01:06:14.000 And we know this because his parents went through his phone afterward.

01:06:17.000 That was the last image in his camera roll on his iPhone.

01:06:20.000 This one for his Snapchat.

01:06:22.000 Exactly.

01:06:22.000 Oh my gosh.

01:06:23.000 Was comparing the real to what he thought was also real.

01:06:27.000 And...

01:06:28.000 On video, he actually recorded himself.

01:06:31.000 He crushed up what he thought was the real Percocet to look cool, recorded himself doing it.

01:06:37.000 The first line before he could start the second, his eyes rolled back and he passed away.

01:06:42.000 He was unconscious.

01:06:45.000 So these are four of the nearly 200 American citizens who are dying every single day from this poison.

01:06:54.000 It's a supply issue.

01:06:55.000 40% of it comes across the southern border.

01:06:57.000 You've taken an interest in this yourself.

01:06:59.000 Yes.

01:06:59.000 Since seeing it through the debate lens.

01:07:01.000 Yes.

01:07:02.000 I applaud you, man.

01:07:03.000 Thank you very much.

01:07:04.000 I applaud you.

01:07:05.000 This is your work.

01:07:07.000 It's our work.

01:07:08.000 We've got a great team as well at Incubate that are helping do this.

01:07:11.000 Our first event is on Monday at Hollywood Hills High School in Broward County.

01:07:15.000 We're going to have the DEA there, the FBI. But we're running the assembly.

01:07:19.000 It's a 20-minute assembly where we just talk about fentanyl.

01:07:22.000 The students who actually responded that survey reached out to a couple of them and asked, well, if they didn't talk about fentanyl Did you have a drug assembly?

01:07:30.000 And they said, yeah, we talked about weed and vaping for most of it.

01:07:35.000 90, rather 80% of fatal teen overdoses last year were fentanyl.

01:07:42.000 Really?

01:07:43.000 I didn't know that.

01:07:44.000 80% of fatal teen overdoses were fentanyl.

01:07:46.000 Were fentanyl.

01:07:47.000 Why is that not 80% of the assembly?

01:07:50.000 And that's what we've committed ourselves to do is this assembly is just about the thing that is killing nearly 200 Americans every single day.

01:07:58.000 It's interactive.

01:07:59.000 It is accessible.

01:08:01.000 We're not trying to preach to anyone.

01:08:04.000 We are trying to tell them and inform them that this is a real risk.

01:08:08.000 We're not telling them it's dangerous Vivek.

01:08:10.000 We are showing them these stories of these people and just how difficult.

01:08:15.000 One of the exercises we start off with is we have two translucent blue glasses.

01:08:21.000 I stand in front of them and I pour bleach in one and water in the other.

01:08:27.000 And then I come up, I mix them around, and I say, who wants a drink?

01:08:33.000 $1,000 cash right now, who wants a drink of this?

01:08:36.000 And we're dead serious.

01:08:37.000 Who wants to drink it?

01:08:38.000 The room is silent.

01:08:40.000 And then we go into the discussion.

01:08:43.000 And what the DEA has provided, Incubate Debate, is an image of 10 pills, 10 Oxycontin pills, four of which are fake.

01:08:53.000 We'll then offer the students $1,000 cash if they can figure out which ones are fake.

01:08:58.000 And the idea here is not to tell kids this is dangerous and this is going to get you killed.

01:09:02.000 Show them.

01:09:03.000 Let them convince themselves the same ideas, the same persuasion.

01:09:07.000 Let them persuade themselves.

01:09:09.000 You're 28 years old?

01:09:09.000 I am.

01:09:10.000 You're an American hero, man.

01:09:12.000 I appreciate that.

01:09:14.000 I mean, we're well over time, but this is an amazing conversation.

01:09:17.000 And I just have a feeling we're going to be doing a lot more together.

01:09:20.000 I want to figure out how we can get more Gen Z Americans to love and care for this country as much as you have.

01:09:30.000 And I'm not even saying this to flatter you.

01:09:32.000 That's the least of it, actually.

01:09:34.000 It's just a genuine concern and curiosity, but also a sense of hope.

01:09:39.000 I mean, the fact that The fact that you are here, I think, speaks to a lot of people who wonder about what young Americans will become.

01:09:49.000 I think that you give us reason for hope.

01:09:51.000 And I hope that you're unafraid at every step of the way.

01:09:55.000 You're going to have your critics.

01:09:57.000 It's okay.

01:09:58.000 You know, you have thick skin if you're going to accomplish something in this world.

01:10:01.000 If you can't handle the heat, you stay out of the kitchen, but you're – you've entered the kitchen and I think that you're going to be hopefully the kind of guy that leads a lot of people in your generation to hopefully give us a country built on the principles that we care about, you and I both, and free speech and open debates at the top of that list.

01:10:19.000 You're leading the way.

01:10:20.000 You keep doing what you're doing.

01:10:22.000 And I think it'll be more powerful than quite possibly what anyone in this presidential race will do.

01:10:26.000 So I'm excited for you.

01:10:28.000 And hopefully we talk again.

01:10:30.000 Absolutely.

01:10:30.000 Thank you for the opportunity.

01:10:31.000 And it means a great deal.

01:10:33.000 Yeah.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - April 24, 2023

The Power of Debate and Tackling the Fentanyl Epidemic with James Fishback | The TRUTH Podcast #17

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