Bret Speaks with Vivek Ramaswamy on the Darkhorse Podcast
*****View on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2w3dsa-bret-speaks-with-vivek-ramaswamy-on-the-darkhorse-podcast.html***** Bret Speaks with 2024 Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. They discuss the characteristics that define a proper person for the role of US president, the values necessary to lead the country, and the unique position this election occupies. ***** Our sponsors: iHerb: carefully-curated selection of wellness products at terrific value on an easy to use site. ...
And so that's the funny thing going on in the Republican Party right now is there's this game of manufacturing the anti-establishment aura.
Yep.
But the thing on the inside of it is like about as establishment as it gets.
And I think that there is there are a couple of candidates, one in particular, who are the manifestation of that in the Republican Party right now.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the pleasure and honor of sitting this morning with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Did I pronounce your name correctly, Vivek?
You nailed it, actually.
I nailed it, excellent.
I was hoping that I would, and I feel a bit of relief at having done so.
So, let me say, I will give you more of a chance to say who you are and what we might want to talk about, but up front, let's just say, you correct me if I'm wrong, you're a serial entrepreneur, you have background in biotech, and you are currently a candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency.
That's correct.
And you're also an author, I will say.
You've written an excellent book on how your perspective came to be.
Anything else my audience should know?
Yeah, I wrote... was that Woke Inc.
that you read?
Yes.
Yeah, good.
I've written three books actually in the last couple of years.
Woke Inc.
was the first of the three.
I don't fashion myself as an author or writer, but I happen to be a guy who's done some things that wrote some books along the way.
But the books definitely reflect my evolution of thinking in the last few years and got me to the doorstep of where I am as a presidential candidate now.
Wonderful.
So let me give you a little bit of perspective on what I think this conversation should entail.
I've done a lot of thinking about American politics and the presidency in particular.
I think Americans misunderstand their own electoral process and it has created a kind of reflex in them during election season that I think is very unproductive.
So what I see is that Americans spend a lot of time asking potential presidential candidates to promise them things about policy.
What will you do when you're in office?
And I think this is a mistake two different ways.
One, I think this is really an act of desperation, where people realize they have very little control over the process of governance, and that the only way that they could possibly exert any force that would work in their direction is to get people to tell them that they will do things if they ascend to the office, and then hope that they will be too embarrassed not to do it when they get there.
And that's a total failure.
I also think it misunderstands what the office of president really is, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's not legislative.
So I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to ask you about policy.
Can I just say one quick thing on that?
On the second thing?
Yeah.
Which is that, actually there's a funny thing about most of my so-called presidential platform, are actually not what my wishlist legislative agenda would be.
For the very reason you described, like every presidential candidate, every successful president, Makes this mistake, and Trump was going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
What came of that?
Nothing, because you require this thing called Congress.
So most of what I'm focused on anyway is what a president can do in running the executive branch of the government.
So anyway, number two I'm in vehement agreement with, and I agree with you that most, not only people, but most presidential candidates misunderstand the process of what it actually means to run for U.S.
president.
Yeah, great.
So where I'm going to focus, and this is probably too much inside baseball, but back in 2020, I started an initiative called the Unity 2020 Initiative, and it was about trying to draft candidates who would actually serve us in the office of the presidency.
And we had three criteria that we wanted people to have before they were worthy of our consideration.
We wanted courageous, capable patriots, right?
Nothing ideological, but my feeling is, look, if you're courageous enough to confront power, if you're capable, you know how to do things, And you're patriotic, you love this country, then what I really want to do is set you free to do what you're good at, to consult the right people, to figure out what the right policy is.
And even if it's something I didn't think to ask for, if you've got the skills and after consulting people, it seems like the right policy, then I'm all ears.
So what I want to talk to you about primarily, you're obviously highly capable.
You appear to be courageous.
You're entering a realm of power, and you do so very forthrightly.
I don't hear you hedging a lot in the answers you deliver to questions, so I'm really interested in your perspective, your values, and how you think they dovetail with that office, potentially.
What vision would you have for the country, and how might you try to bring us in that direction?
I love it.
I'm looking forward to the discussion.
I've been looking forward to this for some time, actually.
So, open for a deep conversation around that.
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All right, so let me just ask you about something that I heard you say this week, which struck me.
It's a place where actually I don't need to convince you, but I'm hoping to convince you for an upgrade of your terminology.
And in discussing it, I think your values will emerge.
You were discussing the question of nationalism.
Do you want to say what you said earlier this week about that concept?
Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't exactly remember what I said earlier this week versus, you know, in the past versus today.
But the thesis will be the same regardless, because my beliefs haven't really changed that much.
So.
I don't think nationalism has to be a bad word.
And I think especially in the American context, it need not be a bad word, because America is a country founded on a set of ideals.
Unlike other nations whose identities have often been built around a common ethnicity or a language or a, you know, religion or a monarch, we can go down the list.
America's ideals, America's identity was founded around a set of ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence codified in the Constitution.
And I think that what's unique about that The thing that distinguishes us as human beings from animals is the fact that we, and I'm saying this, I know I'm talking to an evolutionary biologist here, so I'm trying to speak your language, but I might get myself into trouble.
I was a molecular biologist by background, so you have a higher pay grade than me on this one.
But I believe the thing that, one of the things that distinguishes us from animals, humans as a distinctive form of animals, is that we can believe in things.
That we can have conviction, that we can be persuaded of things through reason, through appeals to our emotion, through our belief in a narrative, through our ability to espouse ideals.
And so if you think about America as a country founded on a set of ideals that brought together a divided, in many ways, diverse group of people 250 years ago, It's a nation founded on the essence of what actually makes us distinctively human.
And so, the negative connotations around nationalism is typically an exclusion of the other, where the other is defined as a fellow human being.
Here, to me, American nationalism is grounded in an unapologetic embrace of the ideals That thread us, that unite us across our disparate attributes, that tug on the very thing that makes us human beings in the first place, and makes us want to and ought to respect one another as human beings too.
And so to me, that's what American nationalism is all about, is a belief in those ideals, a belief in a nation founded on those ideals, which is a nation founded on the essence of what actually defines our humanity itself, That should cause us not to hide from it, but to embrace it.
Because that might be our actual best path to what you described earlier.
What did you call it?
The thing you worked on, Courage?
Unity 2020.
Unity 2020.
That is how we get to national unity.
I think it's actually not by obsessing, as I believe we have in many ways.
Many ways we've erred in doing so.
In obsessing over our differences, often even skin-deep differences.
We call that capital D diversity.
But instead to smoke out what unites us across that diversity.
And to me, that's what I mean when I call myself an American nationalist.
Interesting.
Well, you have persuaded me slightly, actually.
And I'll come back to why.
But I want to lay out what I think is a better use of language.
And my feeling As somebody who takes language very seriously, is that at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what terms we use for what thing, but there needs to be a term for everything that we need to refer to.
We need to be in agreement about what the term means, and the term has to be precise enough to be useful.
I agree with you on that.
I've been in this discussion many times with many of my conservative friends.
A liberal, I would actually describe myself as a radical.
I'm a reluctant radical because I think radical change is very dangerous and the only reason that I would contemplate radical change is that we don't have a choice, but I do think that's where we are.
But nonetheless, I have many conservative friends and the term nationalism has been a bit of a sticking point because to me, There are really two concepts that, because they are similar seeming, are often conflated by people.
Patriotism and nationalism.
Many conservatives that I speak to view them as almost the same thing, and I view them as almost opposites of each other.
That patriotism is a willingness to sacrifice for something, and that something is very often a nation, but it could also be a principle or an idea.
Then nationalism, I would argue, is the use of that thing in a kind of weaponized form.
In other words, I find the two things juxtaposed in President Kennedy's famous speech.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
That what your country can do for you is the nationalist thread, and what you can do for your country is the patriotic thread.
And so in general, when I hear people invoke nationalism and they are not in an aggressive mindset, I really think that they should be using the term patriotism.
So what do you hear there?
Yeah.
So I hear a few things.
First I hear is, I think I'm really going to enjoy the next couple hours of my life, so this is good.
That's good, for sure.
So, I agree with the first thing you said, that often most problems... Who was it?
Maybe Wittgenstein or someone who says the most moral problems are problems of language.
And I...
I think I mostly, I think I agree in a weak form of that hypothesis, that's definitely true, that many problems of, perceived problems of morality at least are partially problems of language.
So, you know, let's, you and I could maybe at the outset of this conversation just align on the definition so we're not talking past each other for the next couple of hours.
I think that there's a further than distinction to be drawn between American nationalism, And nationalism in the context of a country that was not actually founded on ideals.
Because my version of nationalism, or American nationalism, incorporated your definition of patriotism, which is willingness to sacrifice for something where that something is an ideal.
That is exactly why I said that you had persuaded me, was because I heard in your definition of nationalism, the inclusion of the values that make this potentially a much more noble weapon.
Not that it's always been used that way.
So it's not even a weapon.
You're kind to say I persuaded you.
I just, you know, maybe it made it evident that we're talking about the same thing, actually.
But then there's a choice that I make, if I'm being really honest about it, right?
Because I'm saying, I could have said what I wanted to say in this interview, if this is the one you're referring to, what I did with a bunch of editors at Politico when I was in Washington, D.C.
That was when this came up earlier this week.
I could have said patriotism, or patriot.
I said I could have said I'm a patriot, but I said I'm a nationalist.
Why did I say that?
Well, it is part of my honest definition of what it means to be an American nationalist, is it incorporates at its core, it's not just that it includes, its very essence is a conviction around the ideals that define this country.
But I use that word for two reasons.
One is I want to put a fine point on this concept of American exceptionalism, which is a belief in the exceptional nature of the ideals that this country was founded on.
And the fact that this country is exceptional for being a country that's founded on ideals.
So I wanted to put a fine point on that.
But the second point, and this is the part where I'm being a little bit honest with you on the game I'm playing here, is I feel like we're in this lull right now, right?
We're in this hypnotized, aimless passage of time in our country, thinking, living our lives as though we're all a bunch of different two-legged higher mammals walking some common geographic space that we call a country, doing what our iPhones told us to do on a given day, programmed by the algorithms that we thought we were using to program, that were programming us back in reverse, that we need to be waking up out of it a little bit.
We need a little bit of shock therapy.
And I think that the path to unity, I'm going to use your word here, unity runs through a little bit of discomfort.
And so I think that not in a trolling kind of way, but in an honest kind of way, I want to make sure I'm actually getting there.
And I think we only get there by waking us up out of this hypnotic lull that takes the status quo for granted so much so that the status quo will no longer be the status quo, but will be some perverted form of it by the time we're done.
To say that, yeah, Patriot lands either not even inside the eardrum, or if it does, it goes out the other.
But nationalists, now I had their attention for the rest of that meeting, and we had a real conversation about what it actually means to be an American with a group of people that otherwise were ready to check the box and write some hit pieces on their latest Republican presidential candidate.
All right.
Well, uh, I'm also going to enjoy the next couple hours.
Um, yeah, this is, this is fascinating.
And I do appreciate what you've said about the necessity to, um, provoke people out of their stupor so that they actually engage.
And I have a whole different, uh, toolkit surrounding this, but to my- Can I ask you about one tool?
So just as maybe use it to the extent is useful.
So to your point about language, just so we can put a little button on that part of the conversation, if we put this little bow on it.
So then, what we can do is take some words off the shelf, like dust them off like a book in an old bookcase, make sure we do what you and I did, level set on what they actually mean, but still use some residual valence associated or attached to that word to perform the function of waking people up.
And then we can still not sacrifice the precision that you care about, because you and I by definition just did that at the start of this conversation.
But we also awakened the otherwise people we wouldn't be reaching if we were just talking about patriotism.
Yeah, this is exactly concordant with my approach.
Basically, I would argue that the human mind naturally functions mostly in an unconscious way, and that consciousness is the tool that we use for novelty.
When we encounter something that we cannot deal with, with automatic processing, our conscious mind gets involved.
And we modern folks are unfortunately faced with a world in which we've got a whole bunch of totally trivial novelty that occupies our conscious minds all the time.
I mean, even just the ingredient list on some food you might Think to consume has a lot of puzzles in it, right?
You can't process whether or not this is something you want to put on your mouth based on what the ingredient list says, because you don't know what most of those words are.
So our conscious mind is sort of being spent on all of these unresolvable questions.
But the correct use of the conscious mind is to Point it towards puzzles that actually do require this distinctly human capability.
And so, what you're arguing is, you could have said patriotism.
Maybe that would even have been the more accurate term.
But the point is, because we're so familiar with people invoking that term in a non-consequential way, we don't even hear it.
And then by saying nationalism, saying something that people have a kind of queasy feeling about, you got their attention and maybe that was to the better.
I do want to go back to your point about the US and American exceptionalism, because I'm a believer in this, but I also have a different framework for it that I think maybe you'll resonate with.
So my feeling is that the United States was a radical experiment in something and the most important piece of that experiment is often missed.
The most important piece of that experiment is that all of the brilliance that is encoded into the Declaration of Independence and then as you say codified in the Constitution is really about building a nation that is not ethnically based, that is indifferent to your particular ancestry, and that combines us together so that we collaborate for the other reason that evolution makes people collaborate.
One reason is genes.
That's not a very interesting reason.
The really interesting reason is that by collaborating with people and being indifferent to their genetic heritage, We all come out ahead.
It's fantastically productive to participate in collaboration because there is something, there's profit to be made.
And so the founders invented this melting pot and they put together a crude set of rules for what a melting pot would look like.
And that idea was so powerful that it became contagious.
And so I sort of see myself now as A patriot of the West, right?
I'm also a patriot of the United States, but my feeling is the West is composed of the countries that saw the brilliance of this way of organizing a society and adopted it.
And I see it as very much now under threat.
But in any case, you know, we are in sort of this modern scenario where,
The US is this incredibly powerful nation that also informally sort of speaks for and steers the West, and we have a responsibility to the globe in so doing, that the brilliance of that experiment catches on to all of the places it hasn't yet reached, and that we complete the job, that we finish the, you know, we finish the pursuit of the values that are laid out in our founding documents and the
Historical amendments that have been made to those documents by, for example, the civil rights movement, right?
That Western vision is precious and it is our job effectively to make the case for it globally.
Interesting.
I want to process that.
You're making me think already.
It's not something that Happens every day when you're doing most of the talking, like I am these days.
So I think it's an interesting framing, and I agree with it.
The first part, but is the obvious part, is that we're not ethnically based, right?
So that's not, it's not the commonality of genetics, which makes our country cohere.
That, I think, alone already poses a basic challenge, right?
I think, you know, I just met with the ambassador of Hungary recently.
You know, let's take Italy, might even be a better example.
This is Giorgia Maloney.
Her challenge there is, I think, less daunting than ours when it talks about Italian identity.
What's it based on?
It is based on a common genetic heritage.
It's based on a common language.
There are the things that Unite mammals or higher order animals, let's just say higher mammals, the ability to have a common communication system and a common genetic lineage that creates an urge to protect those who are closest to your kin.
That's at the heart of Italian identity.
They're swimming in the direction of biology, right?
Evolutionary biology, at least it spans the animal kingdom.
I think the thing that makes America interesting and hard and worth pursuing is that it's a contrarian bet against that grain.
Now, the way you had of re-accommodating that in the language of evolutionary biology, and maybe even the truth of it, was by bringing this argument about collaboration so we all come out ahead.
I want to think about that.
It sounds a little bit revisionist to me, in a positive way, a very optimistically revisionist account.
The way I see it is maybe a little less optimistically than that because wouldn't it be neat if it actually did align with evolutionarily hardwired instincts of a different kind for collaboration even if it wasn't the genetics?
That'd be convenient and it would certainly make my job easier as president and the next guy's job and thereafter that much more achievable to deliver national unity if that's all there was.
But I see the project as a little harder than that.
I think it involves
Tapping into instincts that are not, and tell me if this lands poorly on your ears as an evolutionary biologist, but are maybe not the aspects of our nature that necessarily came from what you and I would think of as evolution, but are aspects of us that were not necessarily evolved because we were somehow
Competitively, like it was a competitive attribute in Darwinian selection, but it's just a separate attribute of humanity, which sometimes runs against our interest, right?
The ability to make a sacrifice.
It's part of your definition of patriotism.
I think you're going to have to, you know, this gets into whole Darwinian debates, you know, assert your own conclusion many times over in order to say that that was evolutionarily hardwired.
And, you know, I'm sure you could come up for the account for it.
And part of that account is going to be this group theory of being in the interest of the whole group.
And that's why we collaborate because we all come out ahead if we actually, you know, equally make the sacrifice.
It's like this thought experiment that Kant had about the fishermen of why everyone doesn't overfish.
is because they're making a short-term sacrifice for themselves that ultimately work to the benefit of the whole.
But that's not the way I just see that part of our human nature.
That's the part of our human nature that I see as endowed by our creator.
And it is in us to call out what Lincoln might have referred to as the better angels of our nature, which I'm not sure came to us from evolution.
Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.
It did come through evolution.
Evolution was the tool that somebody else, maybe we'll call him God, put in us.
But anyway, I think that makes the job a little bit harder because we're actually, on my account of it, running against the grain of otherwise evolutionary odds that are stacked against us.
Alright, well we now are squarely in my home turf and I believe I have some very good news for you that just comes with a bitter pill, right?
So the bitter pill is kind of, you're intuiting it as a bigger part of the story than I think it is.
Let me just put it to you this way.
There are two evolutionary reasons to collaborate.
One of them is genes, and the other is the profit produced by reciprocity.
My argument, the one I laid out before, is that the reciprocity version of collaboration is way more dynamic and powerful, but it is also fragile.
Right, so when we humans collaborate because it makes sense to, and we are indifferent to our genetic relatedness or lack of it.
We produce wonderful things.
And in fact, it is not an accident, in my opinion, that the strange experiment that the founders built in the United States also is responsible for a huge fraction of the most important inventions that have ever been produced on Earth.
Right?
We're talking about Computers, we're talking about airplanes, right?
The list of things that Americans did because they were more indifferent to race than any previous civilization is staggering.
And so that is what happens when you collaborate Because reciprocity is productive rather than because you're genetically related.
But the problem is that it is much easier for evolution to stabilize that collaboration when times are good.
When you have growth, right?
And when growth fails, we break back down into those tribal alliances that are founded on something more durable.
And so my fear is that the brilliant experiment that did take place in the West is now faltering because we have run up against hard limits or at least a long dry spell in our ability to produce growth.
And so that this is actually a biological flip-flop between two different biological modes of collaborating.
And I will just insert one more thing there in light of what you said.
You detected something exactly right, which is that the competition is the driver.
And that led you to believe That possibly collaborating the reciprocity issue was maybe less biological and that we need to resist biological urges.
That's not right.
The fact is we evolved to collaborate in order to compete.
We collaborate to compete.
So it's not an invalidation of competition.
It's a type of competition.
Interesting.
So, the bitter pill is that we face the breakdown of our very dynamic system, our very unique and proven system in the West, the fairest civilization, I would argue, that has ever existed.
We face the breakdown of it into something more familiar from history, far less fair, far less dynamic, and far less capable.
For the purpose of this discussion, are you okay if we just stick to America versus the West?
Sure.
Okay.
I know it doesn't change your thesis.
I get annoyed, I'll be annoyingly distracted if we say, keep saying Western civilization because there's some exceptions there and just let's just talk about it.
Sure, sure.
No, I'm happy with that.
I just, I am always troubled in the other direction, right?
When we talk as if America is bigger than it is, when in fact it is sort of bigger than it is because it caught on.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I know you, based on everything you said, you wouldn't disagree with that, but it would help.
Yeah, we can easily get distracted on a side tangent if we just talked about America.
But back to the more interesting part of what you were saying.
So, you know, the funny thing about America, and this is just like, you know, not a particularly deep point other than a coincidence of history, but it's kind of interesting, is that 1776 was actually the year of both The Declaration of Independence and the Wealth of Nations.
Sort of interesting, right?
And so there's something about American identity and the last part of what you said really struck a chord with me, right?
Evolved to collaborate to compete, right?
There's both elements woven into it.
It's like the mother and the father of America.
The collaboration and the competition.
Democracy and capitalism.
Individualism and unity.
The Declaration of Independence and the Wealth of Nations.
It's a funny thing in America that both of them are our parents.
And then a big part of my work over the last several years before the presidency was actually sometimes when the parents run roughshod over each other, you have to keep them apart.
That's what stakeholder capitalism, ESG-ism is all about, actually.
Is the merger of the two impulses, or the two, I guess we could call them impulses.
The disastrous merger.
Yeah, it's the disastrous merger where you are left with neither collaboration nor competition, but some perverse form of both.
And then this is the dissolution of power between the state and the private sector that then creates, this is in a different context, a greater threat to American identity and liberty and prosperity than if they were kept apart.
But that's getting into my land.
We can go there if you want, but I'm more interested in your land.
But that's interesting.
So I actually buy your account, and I think that that makes me more optimistic about what's possible for the continuation in the future of our experiment, because it points us in the direction of some things that I think we can deliver that will help get us there.
I mean, I actually am the pro-growth candidate in this race.
I think it does get to a bit of a mystery where if you believe what I do, About growth, which is that most of our obstacles to growth, at least in America right now, were self-inflicted.
But that's not a dour diagnosis.
It actually should be uplifting, because it means that we can self-liberate from those restraints.
Constraints on American energy.
Drill, frack, burn coal, embrace nuclear.
Number one, input to growth.
Number two, put people back to work.
How do you want to do that?
Well, stop paying them to stay at home to start.
It's the number one obstacle to the growth of any business is they can't hire people right now.
I could go on.
Reforming the Federal Reserve.
I've written extensively about that, which we can get into if you really want to.
Get ready for bed.
Or some people like this stuff, and I can go into it.
Administrative state.
But then we know what we can do to restore those conditions of growth against the backdrop of which it's much easier for, as you said, evolution to stabilize.
Just to provide stability to that form of collaboration, which is otherwise tenuous, and against the backdrop conditions of plenty, it becomes that much easier to do.
I'm not one of these pro-growth people that believes that's the entirety of the story.
I do think that there's an identity vacuum that is upstream of our stagnation and growth that has to be independently addressed in our country.
That's a big part of what I'm stepping up to do in this race.
But I agree with you that a high growth environment certainly greases the wheels and opens the heart to a vision of identity that's healthy if you're actually delivering growth.
And so, tangibly, I think that's something I'm going to do as the next president.
But But I don't think it's the entirety of the story where there's a deeper void of purpose and meaning in the American soul that we still need to fill if we want to go the distance of bequeathing the experiment to the next generation.
Agreed.
There's a whole rabbit hole to go down there with respect to growth, what it is, where it comes from, and what is actually realistic with respect to stabilizing it.
One of my big concerns would be that if you build a system that requires growth in order for people to get along, then you're setting it up for failure.
And so there's a there's a hazard there.
But before we get there, I want to point out you had a list of What I call dynamic tensions, right?
Between what was it?
Democracy and capitalism.
Anyway, you had a list of these things, and there's one of them that I think is missing from the list, which I find vitally important and highly relevant to the conversation that you and I are having here, which is the tension between right and left.
And my argument for this would be that These things are both fundamentally necessary.
The dynamic tension between right and left is the magic ingredient that makes our system work.
And I fear anybody on either side who views their side as correct and would like to dispense with the other, right?
Because folks on the left who do not have honorable partners on the right, Their minds run away with them and they try to solve all kinds of problems that are maybe much harder to solve than they realize and they create a landscape of unintended consequences that's a disaster, right?
And folks on the right who think they can dispense with the progressive impulse actually will stagnate because they're so busy conserving things that work.
They miss opportunity after opportunity.
To actually get somewhere new.
Basically, you need honorable conservatives and honorable liberals to partner in the navigation, each holding the other back from its worst impulses.
Anyway, this theme has become an important one in my life because my own trajectory, although as I said, I'm very much of the left.
I don't really get along with people on the left at the moment.
Most of my friends are on the right, in part because it is the preservation and augmentation of the American experiment that animates us both, right?
We have different roles to play in it, but it is really a question of whether or not you want to see that thing continue and flourish or not.
So anyway, not surprising to me that you and I would have a very rich conversation.
Yeah, I think.
I look at that dynamic tension between the right and left in a similar way, but.
You know, one of competition sort of pushing each version, each side to be the best version of itself.
I think that there are certain personality types that are naturally drawn.
Through the way that they're wired to be of the left and certain personality types, just the innate attributes.
I mean, I've got two sons, you were talking before, and you've got two kids too.
I promise you, I would like to think we haven't treated our two sons any differently.
They're just different people, right?
They just come differently.
They show up.
You know, part of it feels just like they are who they are.
And, you know, they don't have political views yet.
They're super young.
There's certain backdrop conditions that open your heart and mind to be inclined in a certain way, at least adjusted for certain periods of your life, that part of it's persuasion, but part of it's the natural psychological inclinations, personality attributes that you have.
I think that there's a certain form of free form creativity, unstructured creativity that probably all else equal disposes someone to be on the left.
I think that there's probably some form of discipline or, you know, obsessive quality to discipline that some of that's hardwired personality attributes that natively disposes someone to be on the right.
A lot of attributes affect this.
But anyway, I think that each one of those People who have such personality attributes, let's just take right and left out of it now, right?
In a functioning society, in a society that's evolved to collaborate, to compete, to use your earlier language, there's a role for each side.
Part of the collaboration is the competition of pushing each one to be the best version of him or herself.
And then I think we get complicated where let's just look inside.
I mean, there are elements of each of that within me as a person, right?
There's a part of me that is disciplined.
You know, with obsessive, often even compulsive tendencies to channel that discipline.
And there's a part of me that is totally free-spirited and unconstrained.
And so it's not even that it resides within those individual people, but I think there's like an element of, if we're then to use that label for right and left, of the right and left that resides within each of us too.
And so that's collaboration and competition within different parts of our own spirit, within ourselves as a person.
And then certainly there's the version of that amongst ourselves as people, too.
So I think about it more that way than in terms of just right and left, partly because, to your earlier point, what do those words even mean right now, right?
I think we define nationalism and patriotism much more easily than you and I would be able to distinguish right and left right now in the current landscape.
I think that's what makes it so interesting to be a politician.
I sometimes cringe at that term right now because I've been one for all of three and a half months, but That's what makes it so interesting and exciting to be a politician in a time when those definitions are themselves up for grabs.
But anyway, I agree with you that whatever they are, there's a role for both attributes, which I think of as more than even political views, both sets of personality attributes that push us to be the best version of ourselves individually and as a whole.
Yeah, I quite resonate with that.
And I also think that this particular moment in history is one where the traditional distinction between right and left or blue and red couldn't possibly matter less.
I agree with you.
I say this to hardcore conservative audiences all the time.
Forget the Republican versus Democrat labeling.
It's actually kind of a projection.
It's a farce.
I think we live in more of a 1776 moment where we need to revive what it actually means to be an American.
Let's ask that question.
Let's get it on the table.
It's part of why you're under Article 5 Convention of States.
Fine, I won't get in the way of that.
Let's have a conversation about what it means to be an American.
People use the word America First and they say it's associated with Trump or whatever.
No, to me it's associated with George Washington.
I'm a George Washington, America First conservative.
Let's have the George Washington conversation.
Totally.
You know, this is in some ways the story of my life for the last six years, where I'm sure you don't know the story, but my wife and I were spectacularly ejected from the left.
Um, by virtue of us running up against a very, uh, colorful and dramatic version of the diversity, equity and inclusion movement in our roles as professors.
And so anyway, you know, we had lived in the most liberal of environments in the, in the blue sense of it.
And then suddenly we were demonized as members of the right, which was based on nothing at all.
But nonetheless, the, The number of people I have now seen ejected from the left, who are then demonized as on the right, who function as a kind of another left in exile, widely misunderstood.
I mean, Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is one of these people, right?
He's absolutely triggered an allergic reaction on the blue team, but when you talk to him, His values are, you know, what the Democratic Party used to stand for, so it's not surprising.
for me to see him sit down and have a productive conversation with Tucker Carlson, as I've also done, right?
The point is, any of us who are patriots first are meeting in the middle because that's where you meet, even if it's not where we come from, right?
We're, as you say, it's a 1776 moment, and the question is, is this idea important enough for us to actually die on that hill?
Not to put too fine a point on it.
No, I mean, well, it's a 1776 phraseology, so you're embracing the thought experiment here.
You know, the only thing I would say is, I just wonder whether it might be more productive if we even just, for a little while, like as in maybe the next couple of years, let's just let go of The label right and left for a little bit, right?
Yeah.
It's sort of, actually, I think oftentimes it's useful to have a sense of ordering.
You have a scatterplot, it's still useful to draw the line that runs through the scatterplot.
But sometimes, like once in a while, it's just useful to just look at the scatterplot as a scatterplot without bothering to draw the fit line.
And I do feel like part of what I mean when I say it's a 1776 moment is it's one of those moments where Don't draw the fit line.
Just look at the scatter plot and let's talk about where each of the dots fall without worrying whether or not they align with the line.
And that's the way I kind of view this presidential race.
I mean, many of the things I'm saying are certainly aligned with Reagan values.
Some of them are aligned with post-Reagan Trump values and some of them are aligned with libertarian values.
Some of them are aligned with You know, not heretofore pre-existing nationalistic values.
Some of them are George Washington America First non-interventionist values.
My position on Ukraine has earned me, I think, a lot of, you know, the person who has the most similar position to me on Ukraine is actually RFK.
You know, and I think I'm interested in diving in on some of the details because I've gone into a level of detail on this that I'd love to see whether he agrees with or not.
But anyway, the point is, We might be better served not even using that lexicon for a little while.
Let the dust settle.
And what we might find is let's say we have to put people in two camps again because we have a two-party system.
It might just look very different in terms of what's left and reordered about it.
And I think that'll be a good thing for us actually, not a bad thing.
1776 moment, we didn't have two parties in 1776.
Yep.
Took about eight years.
It didn't take long, but it took about eight years in to let that dust sort of settle.
The election of 1800, you know, started that, kicked that process off for us.
But I think that if we're really going 1776 on this or 1789 or 1792, really setting the whole thing in motion for two terms, let's try that for a little bit.
And I think that that's actually probably the moment that we live in right now.
Well, I agree with you, which brings us to a topic.
I feel it's going to be awkward, but I also detect your openness and your flexibility to discuss anything, which I really appreciate.
You know, the one thing about you, and it isn't you, but the one thing about you as you arrive in my field of awareness that troubles me, is that you're vying for the nomination of the Republican Party.
And mind you, this has nothing to do with the Republican Party.
I would say at the moment, the Republican Party has more patriotism to it than the Democratic Party does.
And I'm, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat.
I'm still a Democrat.
But I think my party is unrescuable.
But in some sense, I wonder, A, what do you think the Republican Party structure would think Of your candidacy.
I'm not asking about the rank and file Republicans, right?
That's up to them.
But the structure that actually subtly adjusts who can ascend to high office, what does it think of you?
And mind you, let me just say, you can tell me if I misunderstand your party, but I don't think it wanted Trump.
I think Trump- No, it did not.
Trump beat it at its own game.
But what do you think it thinks of you?
I think it'll have similar reactions to me that it had to Trump in 2015, actually.
Sort of anaphylactic reaction, but it looks different.
I look different than Trump and the party looks different because it's Trump-influenced now.
So what I see going on, this is the first conversation I've had about this.
It's only something I've really started to kind of perceive more recently.
It's interesting, it's kind of fun to watch, is that the Republican Party now, what's going on is, Trump has itself become part of the new DNA of the Republican Party.
I mean, even in the rank and file, but also the party structure itself, in part.
Though part of that has a latent anaphylactic reaction to him still, which is the part that then Releases its pent-up energy into this thing they call DeSantis right now.
But I think that that's really this thing known as DeSantis is really just a manifestation of that pent-up energy that's found itself, you know, for the moment, buoying one man.
I think that's a symbol of a deeper undercurrent and a tension there.
But the thing that I think that is going on in the party is they've recognized that, okay, the establishment needs to wrap itself in the mantle of being anti-establishment.
And so that kind of works because it tricks some of the people in the rank-and-file or on the ground level or in the grassroots who are in their bones anti-establishment and sort of get Some of them, not most, I think most of them have a good radar for this, but some temporarily will be drawn in to say, yes, that anti-establishment is us, only to be joining really the traditional establishment.
And so that's the funny thing going on in the Republican Party right now, is there's this game of manufacturing the anti-establishment aura.
Yep.
But the thing on the inside of it is like about as establishment as it gets.
And I think that there is there are a couple candidates, one in particular, who are the manifestation of that in the Republican Party right now.
I think there's an element of it that's true for Trump, but Trump's not the one that I mean.
I think it's mostly You know, but it's the two frontrunners, really, right now.
And I think that that dynamic is interesting.
It's fascinating.
I think that the base, you know, if you will, are, I consider myself part of it, will I think has a pretty good sixth sense and will soon, if not already, see through that.
But it is a little bit of a decoy that's been thrown into the system.
The amounts of gobs of money used to sort of buy up social media influencers or whatever to make the AstroTurf seem grassroots in the sticking it to the man, where the man is like, you know, create the boogeyman of
The Biden radical left or whatever is really just a form of an establishment wearing an anti-establishment veneer when in fact I think the party, I predict, it's part of the reason I'm in this is I think that people will be able to tell the difference and people will vote for the antigen over the antibody and I think that Trump was the antigen in 2015 and
I think in 2023, I'm already proving to be the antigen to that establishment.
In the Republican Party, by the way, itself.
And there's a very specific, they're closing ranks in a certain way around, you know, a certain puppet of that establishment.
On the Democratic side, that's Biden.
I think there's an emerging version of that in the Republican Party, too.
But I think that that is already beginning to have an anaphylactic reaction to me.
Well, I'll give you some advice you didn't ask for.
I'll take it.
I do think the electorate is growing wise to this game in both of our major political parties.
I think so too.
And that the openness to something that did not come in a familiar package Uh, has never been higher and I believe it is in fact higher at this moment enough to carry the day.
So I don't know if your trajectory requires you to go through the motions of attempting to get the Republican nomination and then
If you fail to get it, which through no fault of yours I expect is the likely outcome because of the structure, that then you will be placed in the awkward position of if you decide to continue running anyway that you will be accused of all kinds of spoilerism and that sort of thing.
But anyway, I would encourage You to look at what's happening on both sides of the aisle and recognize that the American public does not seem to be falling for it this time.
Right?
There is a game that is played in the U.S.
that involves using the primaries to limit the options to only those things that are palatable to what you're calling the establishment.
And that trick has been played on us so many times that People are ready to think outside the box.
The chessboard has changed radically.
CNN doesn't hold the kind of sway it once did, you know, and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and various other folks outside of that structure now have a tremendous amount of influence and a tremendous amount of openness to To breaking through the traditional boundaries.
So anyway, I would just encourage you to think about whether or not the way that this used to be done has to be the way that it's done this time.
I mean, even your own party was forged by, you know, forged in such an insurgency.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I think I'm less of like a, I'm no fan of the two party system, but I'm not one of these like rabid opponents to it and go to, you know, rank choice voting system.
That's the solution.
It's process.
I actually think a lot of the people who find their way into saying those things are actually, not as you yourself, but I see this in like Silicon Valley or otherwise, it's sort of cop out.
Where it's the safe way for them to vent their frustration at the substance, but to then pin it to proceduralism that makes it less controversial a way for them to vent the thing on the substance.
And so, the way I look at it is a little bit different, where like take a place like India, which has not a two-party system, but a multi-party system.
But it's like a totally, frustratingly broken electoral process as well.
Like, local politicians are literally, in the multi-party system, you only need to get 26% of the vote often to win.
You just need to bribe enough people to win.
I mean, literally, they give out, like, these old televisions to, like, houses, many of which still don't have televisions.
And they'll be like, here's a TV!
Exchange that for your vote.
Multi-party system.
So the multi-party system can exist without Anchoring to principle.
But I think the mirror image of that is I think it is entirely possible for a two-party system to exist where the people who are participating in it are still guided by principle rather than by tropes that are vestiges of partisanship.
And so I think both are possible, right?
And so what I'm looking at is the Republican Party is a vehicle for advancing what I kind of call this American nationalist In the sense that you would call patriot pro patriotic movement, and I'm using that as vehicle to advance that agenda.
But I think whether or not I was doing it through the Republican Party or in the context of a outside of two party system in some other alternative state of the world.
Like the procedure matters less and what matters more is are the leaders who are moving and galvanizing the minds and hearts of voters doing what they're doing grounded on principles or are they hollowed out husks going through a motion like a billiard ball that rolls in whatever direction it's hit as opposed to asking why we're aiming to hit the billiard ball in a given direction in the first place and so anyway that's a long way of saying I have my frustrations with the
Primary system as it exists, and then the general election, but I don't want to pin all of the blame on that.
I think the blame goes deeper for us as a citizenry to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, are we engaged as citizens based on conviction of principle, or is it some other hollowed out husk process that has been corrupted in many ways?
Both parties are badly corrupt by the influence of money in politics.
I mean, the Republican Party, I probably couldn't tell you which one is worse.
They're competing.
Both are pretty bad.
I think right now, maybe the Democratic, like literally this second, the Democratic Party might be worse.
But let's see, by the end of this race, the Republican Party hasn't outmatched them.
Maybe it will.
I think that we should focus on the substance rather than just the proceduralism of the two-party system.
Maybe the two-party system would be just fine if there wasn't such a corrupting influence of money on both existing parties, which then created a duopoly that was often controlled by the same class that was pulling both parties as the string of... It really wasn't a duopoly.
It was a monopoly disguised as a duopoly, which is a big part of what I think is going on in the country as it pertains to the donor class in America as well.
Yeah, I agree with this quite a bit.
I mean, I don't care how the right people ascend to the office.
I care whether the office retains the power for them to be useful, and whether the values that they carry there are ones that are liable to advance the ball in a direction that I think makes sense.
My concern, though, is exactly the one you raise, which is that because Both parties are now thinly disguised influence peddling operations that they effectively
Extract a kind of control over candidates that they allow to ascend so that by the time you get to the office, you either have lost the instinct to do the right thing or you have become so constrained, so encumbered by the donors who have put you in a position to do it that you don't do the right thing.
Anyway, my, you know, you're interesting to me in part because you have been a politician for only, what is it, three months, did you say?
Yeah, three and a half months.
So the point is, you didn't come from this system, so you're not yet of this system.
And my point is, actually, this is the moment, I mean, look, if the Republican Party responded to the current moment with the proper seriousness, Right?
If it responded and said, hey, actually, this is an emergency.
And this is not a moment for the donor class to be controlling anything because we have to save the nation.
Right?
I would listen.
But I don't hear that from it.
Right?
I hear politics as usual from both parties.
I do think at the moment, the Democratic Party has become Somewhat more deeply infected by this thing, you know, I see the Republican Party as more or less having innovated the influence peddling game, not that the Democratic Party was free of this, there was plenty of machine politics, but the Democratic Party used to at least
In some regard, retain political power by serving the interests of working Americans, right?
And yes, the labor unions had plenty of corruption and all, but nonetheless, it was at some level, the party of the working class and the Republicans were the party of management.
And then the Clinton administration decided to muscle in on the Republicans' action, and suddenly we had no party that represented working people, right?
And I see that as a A disastrous moment in American history.
But at this point, it's not that two parties is itself the problem.
I can live with two parties.
That's what I'm saying.
Yep.
But I don't know about these parties.
I would want one.
Exactly.
Right?
And so to me, honestly, it's going to be an interesting experiment, where here's my commitment.
I'm going to speak truth.
At every step of the way.
And maybe that'll lead to electoral success.
And maybe it won't.
And I'm fine with the outcome where it doesn't lead to electoral success.
My mission here, if I'm doing my job and running this campaign well, is that by the end of it, there's no way it could happen in the beginning of it, but by the end of it, everyone will know, every voter will know who I am and what I believe.
And if I don't get elected based on that, that's fine.
I'm at peace with that.
My deeper insecurity is that the process is so broken that even if I approach it that way, there's no way actually voters will know who I am or what I believe.
Because it will have been distorted largely by the influence, and I can't believe these words are coming out of my mouth because like 15 years ago, You know, I was not skeptical of these things in the same way that I am now, having seen it, but we'll be distorted by money, actually.
The image that I've seen it, I mean, you see it every day on the internet, right?
You know, I think that the paid distortion of the scales of discourse is, you know, will create a projection that I'm not at all confident that Maybe I'll get elected and people don't know exactly what I believe.
And maybe I won't get elected because people don't know who I am or what I believe.
But in my ideal state of the world, the process is working well if they know who I am and what I believe.
And in possession of that, they decide to make their own decision.
And so here's the part that's in my control.
There's two things that can create that distortion, that they don't know who I am or what I believe.
One is me trying to say what I think people want to hear, even though it's not actually what I believe.
That's one way, and I think it's a way that most candidates actually fall into the trap of Ending up with the result where people don't know who they are or what they believe.
I won't do that.
Because I'm fully prepared to lose this election.
You know, my sense, I'll probably experience some part of me that will experience a sense of relief if that day comes to pass.
But actually, the other way that it could happen is just that that's the way the broken system already works is that it creates this Artificial projection, even though I'm saying all the things that I believe to be true at every step of the way, and I'm kind of seeing this play out in the early phases of this campaign already, that the distortions introduced by money into the process will prevent voters from knowing that anyway.
And that's the regrettable part, and the part that's not going to be in my control.
But I'm going to stick to a belief in doing what is in my control.
I'll speak truth, at least show what my true convictions are, and And trust that I'll leave the rest to a higher power.
The higher power means here, in the literal sense, the higher power of the voters to be able to sort that out for themselves and make the bet that you suggest that we think we can make, which is that people have wisened up to a little bit.
An electorate that is prepared to cut through the projections that they're served and still be able to sort out for themselves, making the choice they want to make.
That sounds great.
I do think we can look a couple steps down the road and maybe you're right and this is doable through your party.
If it's not, if your party looks at your independence and views it as hostile to its business plan, mind you it shouldn't have one, but if it does and it views you as hostile to it, then at the point that it tells you that you are
Obligated to step aside and endorse whoever it is that ascends, I would suggest that you think very carefully about whether that is in fact consistent with your values and basically tell them to go screw themselves in no uncertain terms.
Because we Americans do deserve candidates.
Take our interests seriously.
And if those candidates cannot rise through our parties, then they must rise outside of them.
And that's the natural order of things.
And again, I would think the Republican Party, which began with, you know, Lincoln's insurgency would have to understand and accept that.
So anyway, that's a long way down the road before we even find out what's going to happen.
And I hope your optimistic view of your party is closer to accurate than my admittedly cynical view.
I do too.
And we'll find out in the next year.
But I have this Weird confidence.
And it is weird, right?
You look at the numbers.
But my gut instinct, though, is that, like, in my bones, I just believe that this is going to be the winning strategy of speaking truth without attachment to the result might actually be the best path to actually get to the result.
And we'll find out.
Yeah.
We'll find out.
It's the one I'm trying.
Great.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Can I ask you about another, even potentially more delicate topic?
Sure.
All right.
I was doing a little research and I was Let's say completely heartbroken to discover your name in close proximity to the World Economic Forum, and then I was heartened to discover that that connection might not actually be what it appeared to be.
Would you help me understand what the hell is going on there?
Yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, so it's fascinating.
So the punchline is there's no connection.
But the complicating part is they projected a connection, and the extent to which this was intentional versus as they're framing it accidental or inadvertent is interesting to me.
It sounds about as accidental as when LinkedIn Two weeks ago, censored me.
They locked my account.
I thought it was some technical glitch on our team's part.
I get a bunch of text messages one day, and believe me, I would come back to the World Economic Forum, but the analogy is striking here.
Microsoft owned LinkedIn.
I get a bunch of text messages, people who say they follow my content on LinkedIn.
Oh, I can't see it anymore.
Did you leave LinkedIn?
I was like, I don't think so.
I asked my social media team.
I approve the videos and the text, but I don't know who puts what where.
So anyway, they said that, oh, actually, LinkedIn seems to have locked your account.
I said, well, that must be some kind of glitch.
Figured out why.
We get an email back, and it lays out, here are the reasons why.
Here are some videos you posted.
One was about the links between Biden and China, and then the other two were about my views on climate policy.
One of which said that if the climate cult, as I called it, had to do with the climate, then we'd be worrying about carbon emissions from places like Russia and China.
And the second was that fossil fuels are a precondition for human prosperity.
Might have said requirement for human prosperity.
So they said that these three statements violated their policies.
So we went back and said, what's inaccurate about these statements?
I actually provided evidence to support them.
They're either opinions or opinions grounded in facts.
What's false?
They said, they doubled down, said this violates our policies on hate speech, misinformation, and violence.
So that's the email exchange.
At which point, I just took the emails and posted them on Twitter, which then prompted media inquiries to LinkedIn and Microsoft, which then caused them to come back and say, no, no, no, this was an, their word, not mine, error.
Right?
When a tech company says it makes an error, makes it sound like it was like that technical glitch.
This is not an error or a human error in the sense, if you think of an error, it was a bad judgment that they made to censor based on viewpoint.
So that was, that was LinkedIn.
That's what I'm reminded of when I see the World Economic Forum now suggesting that it was just an error that they didn't remove my name from their list of young global leaders.
So what happened?
Was that I get a call from some guy that says, hey, you know, you're going to be invited to join the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders.
I said, I respectfully decline.
I don't know if you noticed the title of my first book, Woke Inc., or the nature of the op-eds that I've written in The Wall Street Journal over the last year, arguing against stakeholder capitalism, the very Philosophy, merging state power and corporate power pervade from the mountain hops of Davos by people like Klaus Schwab, but I respectfully decline.
To the contrary, if you actually want to have an open public debate on our different perspectives, I'd engage you, but thank you very much.
A number of months later, I get, I wake up again to a slew of, it always happens this way, congratulatory text messages this time, saying congrats on being named to the World Economic Forum, and the guy told me, I called him up, I said, This is incorrect.
I don't know what was unclear about this.
E-mails, et cetera, to that effect too.
I don't believe I was unclear with you, but I respectfully declined and continue to decline this.
To which he says, no, no, no, you don't understand.
You are in a group where you're going to be able to meet the billionaires around the world that might be able to help you.
Mark Zuckerberg, others, gave me a full list of the names of people that have been included.
I said, I decline.
So I mailed them.
I said, I want my name removed.
They said, okay.
Months pass, turns out my name isn't removed.
Other people keep flagging it for me.
Now I'm writing more about the topics I've been writing about, crusading against DSG in the U.S., and people are saying, wait a minute, why is your name showing up on this?
I'll see that pop up on Twitter.
And then I said, I asked to be removed.
So some guy says, well, then why haven't they removed you?
So on Twitter, they tagged the World Economic Forum.
I said, it's false.
They said, no, no, no, we apologize, we'll remove you.
Still don't remove you.
At this point, I can't really tell whether it's incompetence or something intentional about this.
And so it proceeds so far that people like you experience profound disappointment at this.
And now I'm a presidential candidate.
Yep.
So I said, you know what?
Let's just make sure they don't do this again to anybody else.
There's good evidence they did it to Elon Musk and to, you know, Peter Thiel apparently was shown up on one of their lists.
Glenn Beck apparently had been named.
Mark Andreessen, I believe.
Some of these people may have voluntarily, you know, been fine with it and weren't thinking about it.
But in any case, in my case, I was thinking about it and I said I didn't want to be included.
So I sued them.
And so I currently am in litigation against the World Economic Forum.
Holding them accountable for exactly what they did.
Lied.
It was a lie.
Yep.
And so my demand, I'm not in this for money.
I don't want to make money off of this.
I'm open to if it's a, but that's not my objective.
My objective is, I'm going to demand a few things from them.
A firm apology.
A firm acknowledgement of the facts.
And most importantly, a firm commitment that they will not do that to somebody again in the future.
And I've been, I've grown to, it's a habit I've, so far, it's working out okay, is I like going to the other side's turf, holding my line, and winning.
I don't appreciate just showing up and making a point, we have to actually deliver the win.
My exchange, that's why I show up on the set with Don Lemon at CNN, or Chuck Todd on NBC.
A lot of my fellow contenders in this Republican race, it's a little disappointing, actually.
Some of them, you know, Ron DeSantis says he won't talk to NBC News, because they're not nice to him.
Well, last time I checked, we're volunteering to see who serves the country sitting across the table from Xi Jinping.
So if you can't sit across the table from Chuck Todd, that should raise some questions about your fitness to sit across the table from Xi Jinping.
Or some of them will say they won't go to college campuses unless the questions are pre-screened.
Well, it's easy to preach about cancel culture and free speech to your own tribe when you're not willing to practice what you preach.
And then many of those same people, by the way, are the ones who are wrapping themselves in that anti-establishment veneer.
Which is very funny because it's just an establishment core with an anti-establishment AstroTurf rapper around it.
But my view is we just have to practice what we preach.
So I'll go to the other side's turf.
Left, right, doesn't matter.
Show up and win.
And that's what I'm doing with the World Economic Forum now.
We're in litigation as we speak.
Great.
Well, you say you're not in it for the money.
I would encourage you, to the extent that you can win a victory and bleed that organization dry, please do it on behalf of the citizens of planet Earth.
And, you know, if you have to give the money to charity, so be it.
But anyway, yes, they are a blight on humanity to be certain.
Not surprising to me at all that they I mean, what an interesting tactic to defame you by associating you with them without your consent.
I mean, that is an amazing strategy.
It's a great way to take the legs out from one of your greatest threats and competitors, right?
Absolutely.
So what was the word you used?
I'm going to the beginning.
I was taking notes as you were talking here.
What were the three things that you said?
Courage.
Courageous, capable, patriot.
Patriot.
Okay, so patriot.
So let's go back to 1776, right?
This is actually what the American Revolution was fought over.
is the vision of the World Economic Forum today.
It's a vision that some monarch on the other side of the Atlantic gets to govern the most important questions of how citizens live their lives.
The American Revolution, if it was fought to do one thing, it was to say that we, the people, decide how we sort out our differences on climate change, on racial justice, on whatever.
We the people decide what the right answers are to those questions through a system where every individual's voice and vote counts equally.
As a citizen, that I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America, not some nebulous global citizen pledging allegiance to some sort of corporateocratic autocracy disguised in the mantle of benevolence.
And yet, we thought we settled that in 1776.
And now that ugly monster rears its head again.
And we have to be alert to it.
Call it our version of wokeness.
Being awake to the threats posed by an invisible autocratic class.
That old world European view that no, no, no, the people, the citizenry cannot be trusted to sort these questions out for themselves.
It has to be sorted out in the back of palace halls, right?
In the back of the corner office of Blackrock on Park Avenue or the mountaintop of Davos at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
That is what's at issue.
And I reject that vision.
Absolutely.
And I think that Republicans and Democrats alike should stand up to say that we'll disagree like hell, but it's going to be us that settle this question through our process, not through some form of monarchic intervention.
Absolutely.
The founders settled this question on our behalf, and they did so correctly, and they left these authoritarians with one legitimate tool, and that is to persuade us.
If they can't persuade us, they don't get to do it.
And they do not accept that.
And it is shocking to me that their refusal to accept it matters.
It is, in fact, evidence of the corruption, not only of the American system, but of the global system, that we actually have to worry that they will impose their obnoxious vision on us, even though it is written in our founding documents that we have a right to simply say no.
Right?
That is an amazing fact that that is the piece of history that we live in, and yet here we clearly are.
Here we clearly are.
That's right.
So, well, I think I'm optimistic.
Not blithely optimistic, but optimistic that through A modern declaration of independence, a modern revival of that 1776 moment, a modern suspension of the drudgery of bipartisan corruption or Or division or whatever you want to call it.
I think the corruption and the division are two sides of the same coin.
I'm optimistic that we can cut through that new threat to liberty in the way that we did back in 1776.
And that's honestly what I'm running to lead.
I absolutely believe that we can.
I don't know.
Have you run into something called the Hidden Tribes Report?
I have not.
The Hidden Tribes Report is a fascinating document that reveals that the American populace overwhelmingly agrees on most issues, even the issues that we are famously not supposed to agree on.
basically two fringes which push us around and prevent us from having the discussion we should have, but that there is something that the Hidden Tribes Report called the exhausted middle, which is all those of us who agree on the basic principles and would, if not for this artificial division, which is all those of us who agree on the basic principles and would, if not And what I hear you saying appeals very strongly to that exhausted middle.
What I hear Bobby Kennedy saying appeals very strongly to that exhausted middle.
And so I think, you know, I resonate with your optimism about our ability to get through this.
In fact, I think the path to get through it is more straightforward than we realize.
But the mechanism to get us on that path is going to involve behaving in ways that are counterintuitive.
I think counterintuitive is right.
I suspect we don't disagree, but I phrase it really differently, is I don't talk about the middle because that presupposes a single-axis, two-pole system, and I just don't think that's where we are right now.
I think it's the scatterplot where let's not even draw that line through it, to use an analogy I was using earlier, where I'm not a centrist by any sense of the term.
That implies some measure of moderation.
I'm like you, a radical of a certain kind.
We could put the, an American radical, right?
Right wing, left wing, let's put that to one side.
A lot of what I say, I think appeals or should appeal, if I may say so myself, to people that you would put on the radical far left.
Not the woke left, that's a different thing, but a version of the left that probably ought to be, owes it to itself to be as adamant as I am on our position with respect to Ukraine.
Which is, we need to get the hell out.
And our position on NATO, which is that the institution has outlived its purpose and yet ironically grew more after the fall of the USSR than it ever did before.
Or to call out the corruption just of the last week that we saw that apparently Biden, and it may as well have been Dick Cheney if you flip the rolls, but today it's Biden, was informed three months before the explosion at the Nord Stream Pipeline That Ukraine was preparing to do it, the CIA was informed, Biden was informed, and yet after it happened, described it as a deliberate act of sabotage, pinning it on the Russians, right?
This is wrong, right?
This is wrong and it has nothing to do with right or left, but that's a far left view.
It's increasingly now, I'm labeled as being on the far right fringe for saying it.
So it's not that like I call I'm not in the middle, the exhausted middle there.
The middle there, in some ways, is the problem, right?
The neocons in the Republican Party and much of the Biden establishment in the Democratic Party.
So whatever it is, it's not middle, but it's something else altogether.
Well, as you correctly intuit, you and I are on the same page here.
I'm just borrowing their term.
They called it the exhausted middle.
Yeah, sounds good.
In my taxonomy, I would say That the center is where we meet to discuss the fate of the nation, right?
It doesn't mean that you are of the center, but the center is the right place to meet to discuss these things, right?
It is the hotspot in your scatterplot.
And so I agree with that.
And I also, you know, I'm watching the...
I'm watching the blue team embrace all kinds of things that I would have called reactionary, right?
It's pro-war footing, I find absolutely stunning.
Its interest in censorship is beyond bizarre.
So, in any case, you know, I don't take any of these labels for granted, but I would say that I do think what the Hidden Tribes Report called the exhausted middle is actually It is the essence of the thing to which all of us patriots from across the entire map resonate.
It is that central agreement that we are not going to prioritize anybody's particular view or their right to access the market, that the best we can do is a system that liberates you as much as possible.
Individually liberates you as much as possible, creates as much opportunity as it can, creates as level a playing field as is possible, does not seek to redistribute the gains of those who have invested in some extra way or produced some extra measure of insight or some innovation, right?
We all agree on this, or at least we did until I don't know, 10 years ago and then we differed over some other things and now all of the things that we once agreed on are under threat, not because most of us have changed our minds.
That's the interesting part.
Most of us, if you ask the questions well, still agree on those principles.
I think you're right about that.
I think you're dead right about that.
And I think I even go one step further than that.
Most of us agree on those basic principles.
Most of us think that our neighbors or our classmates or our colleagues or our teammates or our parents of our kids' classmates also share those principles in common.
But we don't feel sure about it anymore because we don't feel free to talk about it in the open.
And so that's why I think Free speech is, I think, the ultimate tool of the anti-establishment movement, or to the contrary, censorship is the ultimate tool of the existing establishment, which makes the divisions that we perceive feel more real than they really are, actually.
And I think that's where we are in the country.
And which is actually, that sounds dark, that's actually an optimistic thing to say.
It's a deeply optimistic thing to say.
I think we just have to call that bluff by starting to talk openly again.
And I think what do we see?
There's this, you know, the expression of the Overton window.
My campaign is all about driving a truck through that window.
Maybe that gets me censored on LinkedIn for a while.
But that's I think something that It's actually heartening.
If it's possible, we call that bluff and it turns out 80% of this country agrees on those basic rules of the road.
That's something.
And the only reason I resist that framing of the middle is sometimes I think it leads to sort of, I would say, undesirable actions that we take that are substantive.
I mean, I think a lot of the, there's a lot of where I have a different point of view than what Elon has said about Twitter and what he wants to do there.
Where, like at the time he took it over, shortly after he took it over, I think he said something like, I mean, he's wearing the mantle of anti-establishment pro-free speech position here.
But I do find concerning some of the things that he said and some of the things that are happening are actually not again errors but are consistent with actually the stated design of the product which was that like I think I'm quoting him exactly from what he said in New York last fall which is You know, maybe the far left and the far right, maybe we don't want them, but for the 80% of the people who are in the middle, we need a place to converse, to have open discourse and debate.
To be clear, that's decidedly better than, I suppose, a machine that only includes 60% of the people starting at one end of the political spectrum, or 30% of the people at one end of the political spectrum that's the progressive one.
But I don't think it's the...
Definition of a free speech platform to say that there's still some determination of what counts as being in the proverbial middle and saying that we're a platform for that.
It's a pro-censorship centrist platform than a pro-censorship, you know, left-wing one or pro-censorship right-wing one for that matter.
And so I think that that's where I view some of the dangers of the new establishment wearing the anti-establishment mantle.
Because I think that it does trick some people to go along with it and still think that they're challenging an establishment when in fact it's just a new establishment or a reboot of an existing one.
I think we have to be very careful in making sure that we don't fall into the labels of who's far left or far right.
I think it's much more important that we suspend those designations for now and start to just ask what's true.
And then let's see where the chips fall and maybe a couple of years from now we can go back to debating what being on the left or the right or the far left or the far right actually mean.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
I strongly agree with you about the uncertainty that now characterizes Americans with respect to what their neighbors believe and the role that censorship plays in adjusting their certainty in the downward direction.
And I will say, I until very recently lived in Portland, Oregon, and my wife and I took up the experiment of speaking openly about what we thought was true.
And in Portland, you would think that everybody was on board with diversity, equity and inclusion, with so called gender affirming care, you would think that these things were agreed on by everybody that they were enthusiastic about You know, vaccines, mandates, masks, etc.
But our experience was, as soon as we indicated to people that we actually disagreed with much of the conventional wisdom, people almost reflexively confessed their own doubts.
It was rare that this didn't happen, where you would say to somebody, you know, actually, I'm not on board with that.
And they didn't come back with, yeah, I'm not either.
And then they would have their own story to tell about where their doubts came from.
So it's like the entire population was keeping up appearances so as not to be out of phase with some consensus that actually, I think, literally doesn't exist.
That there was effectively nobody on board with it.
You know, I'm sure there are some people in the extremes and I wasn't running into them, but the people you run into in the normal course of interaction, people who have jobs and are trying to feed families and keep a roof over their heads, they're not nearly as confused as we are being led to believe.
And I find your interact—the idea that you, as a candidate for president, are not allowed to voice a perspective on climate or energy policy that is out of phase.
Like, how insane is that?
For one thing, if your perspective was wrong, wouldn't you want a presidential candidate to say those things so that we could say, oh, this person believes a bunch of wrong stuff?
Yeah, it's insane.
I think that in some ways that was the easier example, actually.
So the one that happened on LinkedIn with Microsoft on LinkedIn censoring me, that's the easy example.
The reason that, so let's get real here, okay?
Good.
Like in the moment we're in right now, I'll tell you what my first instinct was when they sent back some of those crazy emails.
It was like, ooh, This is actually probably going to be pretty good for me because this is so nuts that all I literally had to do was to post these emails and I've got the entire right wing ecosystem coming to my rescue and some of the left too.
And like, you know, It's sort of a silly game, but it's like this game of primary presidential politics is like you're day trading for attention.
And it's a silly game and I hate playing it.
I'm trying not to, but there's a version of it where it's inevitable.
So I was like, oh, this is gonna be a good thing.
And by and large, most of the media got out of it.
It was quite favorable because Microsoft buckled trying to claim it was an error covering their tracks.
So that's the easy version.
Let me give you the hard version.
You know, to just get a little real here, where this is the new establishment and anti-establishment clothing, right?
So, I'm a free speech absolutist.
I don't know how you would characterize yourself.
Pretty, pretty close.
Let's put it this way, that where I differ would be around Issues of terrorizing, you know, doxing people.
Is it anybody's right to put Tucker Carlson's address?
Oh, that's not free.
That's not free.
That's not even free.
So let me give you my definition of free speech.
Absolutism.
Okay.
Because that's not free speech, right?
Or posting, you know, child pornography.
No, like that's not the expression of an opinion.
So that's where I go.
The expression of an opinion.
So what it means to have a free speech?
Any opinion should be expressed and the state should not be making, foremost the state of all, should not be making judgments about which opinions can and cannot be expressed in certain forums if it is discriminating on the basis of opinion.
Within reason, right?
I don't want to create a loophole for, let's say, pedophiles to disguise things as opinions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
No disguising of opinions.
But if it's an opinion, like a true opinion.
An actual opinion, no matter how vile.
Right, right, right.
So that's what I mean when I call myself a free speech absolutist.
It sounds like you are too.
No matter how vile the opinion, right?
That's what matters.
Okay.
There's a funny thing that happened.
You know, Florida this year, while the Senate is running or in the run up to running for president, signs a law.
It's a law that was in response to a trend of people distributing leaflets that contain, I think, some Bad stuff with respect to, you know, anti-semitic content or religious minorities they're saying bad things about.
And, you know, people distribute leaflets to people's homes of various kinds.
Some of them are commercial leaflets.
Some of them are political candidates.
That's very common.
But these other people are distributing these other leaflets that are deemed to contain content that harass religious minorities.
So they pass a law.
It's actually while he was traveling abroad, but he passes a law that says you That there's going to be criminal penalties, potentially jail time, associated with violating this law that involves distributing litter, as they call it, literature included, that would specifically, it flags, harass or intimidate a member of a religious minority group.
Something like this is almost exactly what the law says.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
I do not condone Bigoted, hateful, harassing speech.
But as a free speech absolutist, I believe the right answer to bad speech is not less speech, it is more speech.
So I said so on Twitter.
I said, and I think I said, you know, the recently passed hate speech law in Florida, with due respect, I disagree with it.
There's something interesting that happened.
There was a swarm of An online army that flags to Twitter's support function, the community notes function, that says, hey, this is false.
This speech is false.
So Twitter community notes, at behest of some of DeSantis' largest fans, adds a note that says, this is saying that there's an inaccuracy in this tweet, that this is not a hate speech law.
I said I disagreed with the hate speech law.
This is not a hate speech law per se.
Every time you add a per se to a centralized determination of truth, it tells you a lot about whether it should have been added in the first place.
So, I, nonetheless, said that this is actually a centralized determination of truth.
That's part of my problem with the Elon Musk issue, is that I don't think we should have majoritarian determinations of truth or not.
The tweets to which community notes are added, it is widely believed, are algorithmically boosted downward, or suppressed rather than boosted.
So what I see there is sort of a new anti-establishment front that is actually just implementing an establishment agenda, which is a law that's passed that effectively is Speech suppressive at the margin, right?
They said it's about private property rights.
I love private property rights, but that doesn't mean that if you're gonna, as the state, say there's certain opinions you can distribute via leaflet on private property, but other opinions which you can't, If they contain harassing content to a religious minority group, that is the definition of a hate speech law.
But not only are they passing the hate speech law, we're now going to use paid influencers on the internet to flag to an internet platform that launched my presidential campaign to say that it is false to call that a hate speech law.
That is actually, like, I think far more dangerous than the Microsoft LinkedIn episode in the moment we live in today.
Five years ago, the Microsoft LinkedIn episode was the more dangerous one, because then there was no necessary ability to call out that farce for what it is.
And so what the establishment is, it moves, but I'm kind of making a, I was making some notes as you were talking.
Here's to me how I, in the year, what are we talking about?
June of 2023.
I think hallmarks of the new establishment that I see that spans both political parties.
It is pro-war in Ukraine.
It is anti-free speech.
It is comprised of people on both sides of this so-called partisan divide who refuse to engage in open debate with their political opponents on unconstrained settings.
They talk a lot about Republicans and Democrats, like a lot, using capital R and capital D. They talk a lot about the radical right and the radical left, and they're Universally, their principal source of funding is super PACs.
Oh, and by the way, at least on the right, you see it more now, wearing an anti-establishment mantle.
To me, those are at least like, in 2025, it'll be something different than it is today.
And in 2020, it was something different than it is now.
But right now, I think that the new establishment, pro-war in Ukraine, anti-speech, refused to debate the other side, talks a lot about Republicans and Democrats, Donor-funded principally via super PACs.
Those are the hallmarks of what it means to be in the establishment today.
I think the version that I'm seeing cropping up in the Republican Party is far more concerning to me in this primary process than the version that I was railing against when I wrote Woke Inc.
a couple of years ago.
I don't know if any of that made sense to you, but that's what I see right now in the current landscape as I'm experiencing it.
No, it makes perfect sense to me.
I will add one thing to it, which you may well disagree with, but that the central role that influence peddling has played in the shaping of the modern versions of both of our major parties has actually produced
Almost through a back door, in my opinion, a kind of de facto fascism, which is the sort of central element of the new establishment perspective that you're describing.
In other words, this is the fusion of...
Corporate power with governance.
That is the sine qua non of fascism.
Yes.
And these are the things that that fusion now desires.
It desires to be able to control people's speech so it cannot be dislodged from power or exposed.
It seeks to limit the access to remedies that are actually inalienable by designation Right?
It finds democracy and constitutional rights to be the ultimate inconvenience, and it is doing everything to cryptically unhook those processes, thereby stranding a citizenry with kind of a, you know, a shell of its former republic.
So, I do see it clearly, and I will say, with respect to your point about Community notes the difficult version of censorship and what to think about it.
We are in a kind of arms race, and I think I'm probably more sympathetic to Musk's position than you are, it sounds like.
I'm concerned by some of the moves I've seen him make that I don't understand.
I don't understand the new CEO, the choice of Yakarino in part because of the WEF connection, the wokeness, the whole package looks very concerning.
But I will say in Musk's defense, Not on the Iaccarino choice, which I think is just simply a mistake.
But with respect to managing a platform like this, it is not easy to figure out how to draw the line of a free speech absolutist without carving out an exception for things that absolutely do not belong on the platform.
And so anyway, I would just say he may be screwing it up, but it's not like I could tell him how not to, right?
Yeah, I've written actually, I've actually written an extensive You know, I wrote a piece on this in the Wall Street Journal shortly after he announced his intention to potentially buy Twitter.
That actually does lay out how this can be done.
It's not my passion to run a social media company, although I don't think he picked the right person to do it either.
But I do think that no viewpoint discrimination has to be part of the list.
That means hate speech goes away as a category.
Yeah.
Now, illegal content totally goes away.
Spam, porn, all of that, forget about, like, that's not the expression of an opinion.
Yeah.
But no viewpoint discrimination.
And then when in doubt, give the user The choice to decide what they do and don't want to see, to set their own filters accordingly, rather than to make central determinations of truth of any kind.
I think that's part of what's the problem.
You've been through the version of this with the COVID determinations of truth, right?
I don't think community notes is that much more helpful under conditions of fear an epidemic of the real epidemic was fear in our country anymore or maybe it's a slightly better but not that much better than a centralized determination made by a small body of corporate executives either especially when those corporate executives control the supposedly community notes function it might just be it might just be wrapped up in an anti-establishment veneer like i said so i think that
There is a way to do this, but I think that it is a question of principles.
It's not an implementation difficulty.
There's all kinds of implementation difficulty, but that's not the hardest part.
The question is, what's the normative view?
And I think if you're going in saying that you want to serve the 80% of the people in the middle, but not the so-called far left or far right, that means you believe that there are certain opinions that should not be expressed.
And it's a much wider aperture than the old guard, right?
But it still means that you're not committed to the idea that there's no such thing as a wrong opinion.
And I am.
And I myself believe that we should be able to debate that.
And so I respectfully debate that and have different points of view from folks like, you know, Musk or DeSantis, et cetera, on this question.
And that doesn't mean they're bad people.
That just means that we have different opinions on this.
I actually respect a lot of the strides that Elon has made at Twitter.
It's heroic in the progress that we've made in the right direction.
But I think it's important that we make progress towards the right north star.
And that's, I think, what I'm going to be unapologetic about.
Yeah, I'm on board with that.
You do raise the question, and I think... I said at the beginning of COVID that I believed... Well, I have a general principle, which is that some stories, by their very nature, diagnose the system.
That watching the system process a given story reveals the nature of the system, as much as it reveals anything about the story in question.
I said at the beginning of COVID that it was a story that was going to diagnose our system.
It was going to let us understand the deep corruption of that system, how far it reached.
In fact, I believe I was right about this.
It lets us see the corruption of our academic institutions, of our journalistic institutions, of our government.
It let us see how far into our personal discussions the government was capable of reaching, how thoroughly it could breach our rights.
And, you know, I would say the report card, you know, we got an F. And the only reason we got an F is because there's no lower grade, right?
COVID revealed all of these defects.
And I know that in part because I was on the wrong end of that censorious instinct for almost the entire time.
Heather and I began discussing COVID as biologists on Dark Horse, and it resulted in us quickly becoming demonetized by YouTube, which they've never reversed, even though they were wrong on the substance of what they complained about.
And we feel their thumb, or the thumb of whatever it is that guides YouTube, their thumb is still on the scale.
Not only at YouTube, but we feel it at Twitter.
And I don't think that's Musk's doing.
I think there's something deeply embedded in his machine that still would like to keep us from reaching an audience, even though we've been vindicated across the board with respect to what we understood.
Deep corporate.
Deep corporate is the counterpart to the deep state, I think.
It exists.
It's part of this managerial bureaucracy that spans the public sector, the private sector, the associate deans of God knows what at universities.
It's a separate kind of DNA and a different kind of gene pool.
It is the wholesale capture of every structure on which we depend.
There seems to be not a single institution that has been able to resist this.
The only thing that resists it are small numbers of individuals who are not beholden to anyone.
And so that does raise a question I do want to ask you.
I don't know your position either during the so-called pandemic or your position now on what happened during the pandemic.
But as somebody who had his life turned completely upside down over these issues, I am very interested in what you thought and what you think now and how it would affect your power in governance I am very interested in what you thought and what you think now and how it would affect Yeah.
So I think that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
It It was engineered and it was engineered by a form of research Gain-of-function research that was banned here in the United States but was nonetheless funded in part using U.S.
taxpayer dollars because of the rogue behavior of U.S.
government actors in the deep state who disagreed with that policy.
And taxpayer dollars and the law be damned funded it anyway under the excuse of preventing a global pandemic that gave us a global pandemic instead.
Then they funded and used taxpayer dollars again to fund the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of that pandemic in the name of helping the health of a general population.
That ended up covering up many of the health risks associated with that vaccine.
It happened by no coincidence to be some of the very same actors That literally funded the creation of the pandemic, that then went on to fund the creation of the vaccines, again dressed up in the garb of helping humanity, did not help humanity in the way that they professed to.
And then we see the rise of a policy response that
In the name of helping humanity, made all kinds of mistakes that leave us worse off even along the very health axes, depression, anxiety, education of our children, obesity, diabetes, cancer treatment, and so on, that are net worse on health axes alone, let alone economic axes, just health axes alone, than they otherwise would have been had we not adopted those policies.
Yet, the very companies that were able to censor any debate about those policies were the principal beneficiaries, financially, of those policies.
That includes most of the Silicon Valley establishment.
So, I could probably go on for hours, but in summary, that is roughly what I think is some of the most useful parts that we could actually learn lessons from to stop us from making the same mistakes again, as I otherwise predict we're well on track to with respect to the culture of the climate, the cult of the climate.
That I think is in the early stages of on track of repeating the mistakes of the COVID biosecurity state.
I think we're now approaching the beginnings of a climate security state that's going to repeat every one of those same mistakes lock, stock and barrel in their new form.
Excellent.
Well, you did spectacularly well from my perspective, having watched and participated in the battle over COVID, there are a couple points I would add to your list going forward.
The hardest nut to crack in all of the COVID landscape has been the question of early treatment with repurposed drugs, where a large number of people who have figured out that the vaccines were not safe nor effective, still believe the propaganda that they were fed over early treatment with repurposed drugs.
That's a very deep rabbit hole, because there is a reason that the propaganda was so aggressive with respect to this issue.
The release of the vaccines required there not to be an alternative for the EUA to be granted.
So that is, in my opinion, the reason that this has been the hardest of these to clear up.
But anyway, it's worth looking into what actually took place with respect to repurposed drugs and also if you, you know, Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are their own can of worms, but even just the failure to recommend vitamin D for a population that is well understood to be vitamin D deficient
And the massive increase in health that could have been achieved relative to COVID if we had been honest about exposure to sun and if you can't get enough exposure to sun supplementation with vitamin D. That was a tremendous missed opportunity and A very frightening absence from the recommendations because it literally, you know, to the extent that there are side effects to vitamin D, they would have been positive, right?
It's an amazing thing for us to have missed.
The other thing that I didn't hear in your description was the role that our vaccination campaign likely played in the evolution of viral variants.
In other words, did we Yeah.
Produce an ongoing pandemic.
Of course we did, though.
Yeah.
By definition, right?
You know, and I think that that's actually deeply related to being a man-made virus in the first place.
Of course, this gets into the attributes of the way in which attributes of a man-made virus that did not naturally evolve in nature themselves create risk of variants that were of a different way of, let's just say, You know, let's just say evolutionary, micro-evolutionary change that's different of a kind than you had from one that originated in nature.
Right, and you know, you have a... Antigen shift versus drift and so on, yeah.
Yeah, you have an engineered virus that one should not expect to abide by the same rules that a natural spillover event would have produced.
And then you have an absurdly narrow so-called vaccine that creates an evolutionary signal that is so targeted that, you know, of course natural selection would overcome any benefit from these vaccines because the vaccines are just simply not broad enough to create a difficult puzzle to solve, right?
Selection is very good at solving a puzzle and with a single antigen that was guaranteed.
But The last thing I would say is a couple weeks ago, Heather and I were prone to look at the COVID response in light of the Nuremberg Code, which I'm embarrassed to say I had not gone back and reread since COVID began.
I knew that our vaccine campaign in particular was a violation because informed consent was breached twice, right?
Couldn't possibly be informed if they were censoring viewpoints, right?
You were misinformed.
And it wasn't a matter of consent because we were coerced.
But when we went back and looked at the provisions of the Nuremberg Code, I was surprised to discover that we appear to have violated every single one of them.
Interesting.
These are provisions about which in 1947, even though they had not yet been codified, seven doctors were hanged on the basis that we had violated or that they had violated this obvious principle derived from the Hippocratic Oath.
So, in any case, I do believe That this is another one of these examples of something that if you stand in the right place and you look back at our COVID response, it's so clear that what happened wasn't just wrong, but it was an egregious violation of a central principle of medicine, and not even modern medicine.
Totally.
Stretching way back.
It's worth looking at it through that lens.
I agree with you.
I think the fact that there's people like you who also now are not going to let this just go gently into the night, but make sure we learn these lessons is vitally important for actually our best way of preventing making that same mistake in the future would be to global pandemic or even a what I think is increasingly made up change of existential threat of global climate change.
And I'm with you on that.
I think that we're just at the beginnings of uncovering all of the sins that were committed under COVID, some of which were intentional.
I think some of this is being attributed incompetence, I think is too charitable.
And I think that without actual accountability for some of the individuals who actually committed the most offensive of the sins, who are now being, by the way, invited as commencement speakers this spring at prominent medical schools.
Yeah, I think that without accountability, including potential criminal penalties, we're going to put ourselves at risk of making those same mistakes again.
Yeah, I would also say even if COVID and medical, you know, I agree with you, this can't possibly have been incompetence, because incompetence can get you to a effectively random response, it can't get you to the inverse of a correct response.
And in this case, we did almost the inverse of everything we should have done.
To a T. Right.
To a T.
So, but I also think even just going, the exercise of going back and figuring out how our response to COVID happened is probably the best chance we're ever going to get to understand the corruption of our system, because it really does reveal the connections between the broken governmental because it really does reveal the connections between the broken governmental response, the universities and university science, journalism, the tech sector, all of these things as their connections are revealed by this
And so no, I'm not going to let it go, because I think it's very important that we use it to diagnose the illness that our system has and to cure it.
And it sounds like you are on a similar page, which I greatly appreciate.
Amen, my man.
I am.
I am.
It's probably the most enjoyable conversation I've had in a little while.
Awesome.
I'm pleased to hear that.
I know I need to let you go.
I'm grateful for it.
You've been very generous with your time, and even more importantly than that, it is so refreshing to have a conversation With as much at stake as any presidential candidate would see, that you've been absolutely willing to explore openly, to share viewpoints, to reposition.
Anyway, it's refreshing and let's just say if you make it to the presidency, I will be thrilled to see a courageous, capable patriot in that office and hopeful for the future.
I appreciate it, man.
I'd like to say I won't let you down, but That's a long time from now.
I think the part where I'll say I won't let you down is in this process.
I'll speak truth, be totally transparent, rather lose the election than to play some political snakes and ladders.
And I just think that that happens to be right now.
If I had to bet the winning strategy, because I think the people are wisened up, like you said, but Either way, that's how we're going to do this.
And hopefully this won't be the last time we chat.
Beautiful.
Well, good luck to you, sir.
And I look forward to seeing you down the road a piece.
