Vivek Ramaswamy clarifies his departure from DOGE due to its shift toward technology over his vision of restoring self-governance, while criticizing the U.S. education system where only 25% of eighth graders are math proficient and H-1B visas compress wages. He proposes auctioning visas to fund Social Security, investing $10,000 per newborn in stock accounts until age 18, and ending birthright citizenship for recent illegal entrants. Ramaswamy argues that individual accountability and meritocracy must replace victimhood culture to revive American excellence, positioning Ohio as a future innovation hub driven by grassroots funding and free-market reforms. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Break It Down Dumb00:01:26
What's up, everybody, and welcome to the podcast.
And today we are joined once again.
Listen, this is not the case at all.
He's definitely not running for governor of Ohio.
I know that for sure.
I mean, he'll tell you in a moment that he's definitely not going to do that.
Give it up for Vivek Ramaswamy.
You're definitely not going to be the governor of Ohio, right?
People loved you in Ohio, man.
This guy's coming.
He'll bring the comedians.
First, the comedians, and then the industry.
He's going to save the cats and dogs, man.
The dashboards.
Already?
Everybody.
All forms of blood.
All forms of blood.
Hold on.
Okay, okay.
So there's a lot of things going on here.
Yeah, there's a lot going on.
A lot of things.
There's a lot of things going on.
I need to know about Doge.
What happened?
You're on this podcast.
You give us this beautiful soliloquy about managerial class.
And like, it was so important that I was like, I need you to break it down dumb.
Obviously, you're a very smart guy.
So I was like, you guys say that, break it down dumb, but I know you're into the center of it.
I remember that conversation.
Sixth grade.
I'm a moron.
We're sixth grade.
You know, I'll tell you, if you can't explain it to a sixth grader, it means you don't understand it yourself.
That's what Epstein said.
That was quick, yeah.
Okay, okay.
Getting ready.
Okay, so this, I see you just deliver this amazing thing.
It's crazy on Twitter.
Elite Benevolence Explained00:13:45
Everybody's like, you got it.
Then after we met, where one of the core chapters was about dismantling the administrative state.
And so this is my passion.
Okay.
Yeah.
All of a sudden, Trump announces that you and Elon are running Doge.
Yes.
I'm so excited.
I'm like, finally, this is going to happen.
It's amazing.
And then you say you hate American workers or something.
Come on.
No, He said they were too dumb.
No, they're not too dumb.
There's none of the above.
But we need to light a fire under.
We can talk a lot about that.
No, no, no.
We're going to talk about that fire under our feet.
No, no.
We're going to talk about that in a second.
So what happened?
And now you're leaving Doge on the precipice of actually cleaning up the government, getting the managerial class out of there, fixing everything.
We got a good head start, by the way, in the two months leading up to inauguration.
Yeah.
But I'll give you the high level.
There's a short story, long story.
I can give you the short story for sure.
And the short story, both are accurate, but the short story, I can give you.
The short story is it evolved from a focus on where I was focused, legal, constitutional issues, legislative issues of if you want to save a lot of money, you got to do it through legislation.
If you want to look at the Supreme Court landscape for the last few years, it says a lot of these regulations are unconstitutional.
That's where I had been focused.
And, you know, the way it's gotten started, and you could see this publicly as well, is much more of a technology and digital technology focus.
Okay, so just slow down for a second.
So you were going to use the Constitution to remove legislation.
To remove regulations.
Sorry, regulations.
So you're going to use legislation to remove regulations.
I've written about this for the last year, right?
Can you give an example of that?
Yeah, I can give a good example of that.
So, you know, not to get too academic too quickly, but basically, Congress is supposed to pass the laws and the executive branch is supposed to enforce the laws.
But it turns out that most of the laws that decide what you can and can't do in your life were actually never passed by Congress.
They were passed by people who were never elected to their position.
The managerial class.
The managerial class, the bureaucrats in D.C. What's a law?
Give me an example.
Yeah, so they don't call laws, they call them rules, but they have the effect of laws.
Let's say the amount of fees that fishermen have to pay to the government to have a license to be able to fish in a particular area.
Let's say it is the registration requirement before a bank or an asset manager is allowed to do business.
Let's say it is the procedural hoop that a biotech company has to jump through before advancing from phase one to phase two of the development process.
Let's say it's the permission that a coal miner or a nuclear energy plant has to get as permission from the government before they build a new nuclear energy plant, which by the way has not happened in 20 years in this country because the red tape associated with doing so is so impossible.
Now, I imagine.
None of those were passed by Congress.
Yes.
None of those were passed by people that we, the people, elected.
They were written into law.
They call them rules, but effectively into law by unelected bureaucrats.
And the thing is, that's not a democracy, right?
It might be something else, but it's not a democracy.
Because in a democracy, if somebody makes a law that affects you, you get to get the crowd.
That's what it makes a law.
These are more like edicts.
Edicts come from a king because you can't vote him out.
This doesn't come from a king, but it's a new kind of edict of a bureaucracy.
So just so I can't.
So that was the problem.
You're not against regulation as long as it's decided by democratically elected officials.
That's my most foundational principle.
It so happens in my own politics.
I'm generally pretty libertarian.
I tend to be against, I think most of these regulations tend not to need regulation.
But the most important principle is if you're going to have it, at least let the people who it affects to say, if it's not working out for me, I want to be able to vote you out.
I need to be able to vote you.
That's the most important principle.
Just so we can understand, like a lot of this probably comes from good intentions.
Absolutely.
Right.
So these aren't like evil people necessarily.
There's certainly malicious people in all kinds of domains of life.
Yes.
Yes.
And the government is no exception to that.
And you can see some egregious examples of it.
But by and large, I think we're talking about the regulatory state.
The overwhelming majority of federal bureaucrats who I've met are good people because most people are good people.
And they believe what they're doing is not for the detriment of the American people.
It's for the betterment of the American people.
But it's for the betterment of the American people.
It's a kind of elite benevolence.
Yes.
And it's sort of skeptical of democracy because the idea that you can just leave it to ordinary people to decide this complicated stuff.
We can't leave it to ordinary people because they're going to harm themselves.
They're too dumb.
We have to make that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that was the whole premise of the British monarchy.
It's kind of the whole premise of the modern federal bureaucracy.
But I get that.
I think it's nice to not paint all these people who are creating this, what do you call it?
Creating reduced tape.
Bureaucracy, red tape, regulation.
Exactly.
As nefarious.
By and large, most human beings are not nefarious.
And a lot of times it's reactionary.
Like I think.
Most human beings are good people.
Yeah, they're good intentions.
There was like a fire in New York, I'm pretty sure.
And I think one of the rooms was created in like an apartment building.
And I think a fireman died because they built the room, but didn't ask the city for permission.
So the plot or the plan that they had.
So then I think what the knee-jerk reaction was to say, you cannot do anything to your apartment without permission for the whole city.
I'm probably butchering this.
Yeah, but it's the kind of example you see all the time.
Exactly.
And I get that knee-jerk reaction because you want to protect firemen.
These guys are brave.
They're running into a fire.
And it's actually a great example because you see that same type of incentive structure show up all the time where someone at the FDA, they rarely will get hauled in front of some hearing if they fail to approve a drug that saves lives.
But if they do approve a drug that has some unintended side effects, then they're going to be in the public eye.
So their incentive is to go in one direction, not the other.
Does that make them an evil person?
No.
Most human beings just respond to the incentives that they have while still in their heart of hearts believing that they're doing good.
That's the way it felt.
So this is your idea for government.
It's too big, yeah.
Right.
Well, we laid it out.
So there was a Wall Street Journal op-ed that we co-authored soon after it was written, focused on, A, this constitutional approach where the Supreme Court in the last couple of years came out and said, actually, most of those rules are actually unconstitutional because they didn't go through Congress.
That's a big freaking deal.
Happened a couple of years ago.
So we got that toolkit.
And then, if you want to really tackle government spending, which is a separate prong, the budget's set in Congress.
There's no way around that, right?
The budget is set by Congress.
We want to cut trillions of dollars.
You got to go to the core of that budgeting process.
So, that was where my focus and our focus was.
I think if you look at now what's taken off, and I think it could be great, it's very much a digital technology-first approach.
What does that mean?
Well, I mean, I'll let you read the executive orders that came out last week.
And like I said, I'll be-I know, I know that's it, you know.
So, I'll be, I'll stay, I'll leave it at what I'm able to say, which is, you know, sort of what you can see publicly.
Very technology-focused approach, and that there's nobody better to take a technology-focused-centric approach than Elon.
And by the way, we ended up having a pretty open discussion amongst all of us that if my focus is on the legal constitutional policymaking functions, that's where my passion has been.
The right way for me to realize my own vision is through elected office.
And by the way, not the governor of a higher end.
All of those except that one position.
Announcement will be coming of some kind in the next couple of weeks.
Got it.
But I will say that even some of the regulations you brought up, right?
The fireman example, most of those regs aren't just federal regulations.
In fact, most of them that affect people at everyday lives are also at the level of the state.
And, you know, I think short of being a president, when you think about driving executive action to improve people's lives, I think a governor's seat is probably the single best way to actually win.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
So that's where I land.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Wouldn't you and Elon coming in as doge, isn't that the same as unelected bureaucrats coming in to make a bunch of rules?
So I think it's a super fair question of deals and over the couple of months.
The question is, it's one thing if you are undoing the actions of people who have actually affirmatively made rules versus making new rules of your own.
So you're not going to make any rules.
You're just taking away rules?
I think.
If you're rolling back rules and actually cutting bureaucratic overgrowth, it's one thing to come in and say you're going to hire a million federal bureaucrats without any authorization from Congress to do it.
It's another to say there are 4 million, many of whom were hired without that authorization.
We need to scale that headcount back.
It's another thing to say all these regulations showed up with Congress never authorizing them.
It's another to say they're illicit unless they go through Congress, right?
So that was the premise.
It's a one-way ratchet.
If there's been a federal government overgrowth and a lot of that was never authorized by the Democratic process, then it's one thing to say, okay, then all of that in order to comply with the Constitution has to be rolled back.
You can't make it without authorization.
But how would you apply some new tech, you said Elon's trying to do like tech-driven rules?
Yeah, so I'm going to let you.
Wouldn't that be new rules?
So I share with you my outlook was in what brought me to the project.
And I'm super rooting for success and hopeful for success for what's going to come from a technology-driven approach.
But that's different philosophy and approach and emphasis.
Yeah, yeah, talk that shit.
Talk that shit.
The truth of the matter is, I think there's nobody better in the world to run a technology-focused approach to fixing the federal government than Elon.
And if that's where the focus is, I'm rooting for their success.
And similarly, when I'm thinking about my legal, constitutional, legislative focus in downsizing government, it's hard to argue the best way to do that isn't through actually being elected in my own right.
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding what the technology-driven approach would be.
What does that mean?
I mean, all I'll say is at that point, I'm not running ample friendly or whatever.
I would say I hear you.
I hear you.
I think we're probably reaching the outer bounds of what I'm able to talk about, but stay tuned.
I'm rooting for success.
I mean, I gave you what my outlook is because I could speak for my outlook.
So, but before I think there's an opportunity.
Is there an opportunity to make things more efficient using digital technology?
I believe there is.
But that's a different, that's a different.
But before you guys started it, did you have this conversation about what your outlooks were for this program?
We co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that's out there that laid out a vision that's pretty consistent.
And then did someone upload it?
Well, I think it's a first of all.
Did you see him salute?
It's an awful lot.
I tell you, people lost their minds over there.
No, it looks nothing like a salute.
It wasn't a single gesture.
People are so crazy, aren't they?
People are so dumb for seeing that and thinking of something else.
What fucking retards we got, right?
Your words, man.
I think that there was an evolution in any new project, right?
Something like this has never been done.
I'll give you one example.
Initially, this was supposed to reside outside of government.
Now it, you know, late in the lead up to starting, ended up in the government.
And by the way, here's another thing that's Alex's point.
When it's in the government, this is animal farm break.
When it's in the government, also, I can't run for office at the same time.
There's a rule called the Hatch Act that stops you from independently engaging in your own political activity or running for office while you're in the government.
If you're outside the government, it's a different constraint.
So there were a lot of things that obviously was supposed to be on the outside, for a lot of reasons, ended up moving inside, ended up having a technology-first approach.
And so when something like this has never been done and you set it up, obviously there's going to be some evolution.
And it made a lot of sense, given the way things evolved, for me to say, you know what, this is the right way for me to achieve my vision and goals for the country and to wish success in taking a technology-driven approach within the federal government.
And that's where we landed.
I think that that seems like you guys had a, what is that called?
Amicable breakup.
We're super friendly on a personal level.
Yeah.
It's just sometimes a mutual decision.
Very much so.
Exactly.
That's what I say when I get dumped.
What do you say to that?
I think both parties say that.
No, no, but what do you say that when you see that, you know, I'm sure you saw like tweets or articles or something like that where it's like, oh, the administration is pushing Vivek out.
Yeah.
And what is the reaction to that?
Do you call up Donnie and you're like, yo, that's good.
I mean, the conversation is telling you, I ran for president.
I mean, the number, the amount of Trump shit that you will read about yourself if you put yourself in the public eye.
At some point, you just sort of get used to it and deal with it.
It's a price and cost of doing business if you want to change the country.
But, you know, look, I think it is, do I feel like where I'm headed right now is the right direction for me?
100%.
Is there any division in the administration between you, let's say, and Trump?
Trump and I are great terms.
Yeah.
We have, on a personal level, super close.
You got TikTok Jack here.
That's how you went up to SPY.
Yeah.
He actually worked for me first.
Really?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We partnered with a lot of these people.
And a lot of people who worked on my campaign worked out.
Actually, ended up banning Trump's campaign.
A lot of people joined, you know, and myself too.
I endorsed Trump and worked my tail off over the last year to make sure he got elected for him.
And he's incredibly loyal to the people who support him.
And I understand that because if you support him in any way, you're going to be ready to go.
We support him all out.
And you went all out.
So I cannot fathom, like when I say that.
We're good, we're good.
Yeah, we're good.
But you and Elon, there might be some.
No, I don't.
No, not on a personal level.
Endorsing Trump Fully00:02:39
Send him back to the bottom.
But there's a different.
He's a fucking migrant.
You know what I mean?
I'm probably paying for him to stay in some hotel.
You're paying for a lot of people to stay in hotels.
I am.
That's changing very soon.
So what's going on?
What digital efficiency is going to fix that?
So my view is everybody has.
Look, let's talk about merit in the country, right?
Everybody's got their own gifts.
It seems like you got more merit to be in Doge than some fucking guy with four other companies.
You should have pointed him through the door.
You shouldn't be like.
Finish, finishing.
Because you got the mustache.
I do.
I got the mustache.
We got one in here.
Just give me, give them your heart.
I know.
You can't do it with a mustache.
That's good.
Especially, you got good length on there, but then it comes in.
And you can't be like, I'm Michael Dean.
That's out of the window.
That doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
All right, guys.
We also got dates.
First of all, Sacramento, thank you guys so much.
Nine sold-out shows.
I literally just didn't have time to add more.
So thank you, man.
It was such a fun weekend.
This weekend, I'm going to be in West Des Moines, Iowa on Friday and Saturday, January 31st and February 1st, and taking a couple weeks off.
And then February 21st and 22nd, I'm in Brea, California.
One of those shows is already sold out, so buy your tickets.
Then February 27th and 28th, and March 1st, I'm going to be in Zaney's in Nashville.
March 21st and 22nd, Omaha, Nebraska.
March 28th and 29th, Columbus, Ohio.
And these dates have changed, guys.
I was going to be in Toledo, Ohio in April, but we're going to move that show.
I got to make up for everybody who had to cancel on last minute in Tampa.
So Tampa, if you missed your shot last time because I didn't make it, well, you didn't miss your shot.
I fucked up.
I apologize.
Flu got me.
April 10th through 13th, I will be in Tampa.
Guys, get your tickets at akashing.com.
Now let's get back to the show.
What's up, guys?
Mark Agnon's arena tour continues.
All right.
February 27th, Baltimore.
I will be in McGooby's.
That's right.
McGooby's joke house.
McGoobi's is great.
It's like a house, but it's really like a small arena of a couple hundred people.
Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.
I'll see you guys there.
Baltimore, February 27th.
Don't, please don't do that.
Because people have tried to do this.
And after the show, they've come up to me.
They said, Akash said, I had to sew your dick.
I said, please don't do it.
Only men, men only.
Yeah, no, that's only who's coming.
Good fellas, suck his dick.
No, please don't.
Don't even really ask.
He's not even cheating.
No, because there would be other people there that don't know about this.
And then they go, oh, yeah, Akash said to suck your dick.
And then the other people will be like, what?
Why are they trying to suck your dick?
Because Akash said, they just said that.
February 27th Baltimore Show00:03:59
It's a whole thing.
Thank you.
Anyway, please don't do it.
You can just come to the show, have fun, get a drink, and laugh with people that like jokes.
I'll see you guys there.
Baltimore, February 27th.
Okay, so you and him aren't beefing, but you just had different personal levels for the program.
You got a bunch of people with different visions of how to achieve similar goals.
You find different ways to achieve those goals.
Did you have a combo where you're like, yo, I think we should actually go this direction?
Well, look, I think that it was an evolution of where we were headed for sure.
I mean, things, you know, in a new project, it's never been done before.
So initially, the thought it'd be outside government, use the legal constitutional basis legislation, ended up, you know, really having an internal to government and technology-centric focus.
I think that's great.
And I think it could be super successful.
And I think there's nobody with that focus.
I really mean this.
I think there's nobody with that focus that is going to be better positioned to do good things than Elon.
Of course.
But initially, the flip side is also at a certain point, I think this is what's going to be good for me as well, is if I'm really looking at a unique constitutional vision for the future of the country, grounded in my view of what our lawmaking process ought to be, how do you restore self-governance in America?
How do you actually rid ourselves of that managerial bureaucracy that exists at the federal, but also at the state level?
I think I need to stand on my own feet and be elected to office to do it.
And I think that that's a good thing.
That is interesting.
But let me ask you, if you got to run Doge your way or be governor of a state in the Midwest, what would you do?
Well, I will tell you, it's been my plan for even before Doge came into existence and after I left the campaign to pursue the path of likely running for governor of Ohio, right?
So this is something that I began to really wait.
You're going to run for government.
Is that going to happen for real?
Imminently.
We'll have an announcement to make.
What are we waiting on?
Yeah, just announce it right here.
They got to jump through some hooks.
Hey, you know what this sounds like to me?
Inefficient.
It sounds very inefficient.
Everything about government paperwork is inefficient to me.
But I will say that that was something that I was committed to even before the election was decided.
And so when it became clear that you're not able to do certain things while being part of the federal government, I made my choice about Pathama.
Who's the guy you're going to go?
He's actually term limited.
So it's a guy like DeWine.
So who are you going to go up against?
Who's the other?
Whoever chooses to run.
And it's just body bags all day.
Are you exactly?
Look, let me say this.
Yeah, say that.
I'll never talk that shit.
Talk a competitor as well.
You guys are competitors.
I can't believe you let this South African kick you out of dope.
So when you're talking about competing in an election, I don't think that's a good question.
Don't cancel my Twitter account.
You're actually not that bad anymore.
I like the play.
He's on the Rockets.
You're a good guy.
I like him better.
He's going to do great things.
He's going to do great things.
But I'm a competitor.
But what I will say is, I don't want to just win an election by some narrow margin and be another caretaker.
There are 50 caretakers across the country.
They come and go.
If there's an opportunity to actually transform Ohio, but also to show what is possible to the rest of the country by standing for excellence, you need a mandate to do that.
So you can't win by a little bit.
You got to win by a lot.
And so I'm in this to be not just in by some sort of marginal victory and be another nanny for a state government for a while, but to really go in and change the place for the better.
And if you think about it, Silicon Valley, right, has been at the bleeding edge of the American economy for the last 20 years, just by market capitalization, by innovation.
I think the Ohio River Valley can be the Silicon Valley.
Even one step more than that, to go to the next level where Silicon Valley isn't in terms of production.
Because I do think that's going to be the next wave of actual true innovation in America is actually producing semiconductors.
But how do you do that?
You see, we've got a lot more H-1B visas in Ohio.
It starts with rolling back to the city.
How do you do with these retard Americans, bro?
Ohio As Silicon Valley00:05:46
We just got retarded Americans.
There's no way we can figure out anything.
We've got a few centers right here trying to figure out what the managerial class is.
We're too dumb.
You know what the sad part is?
Yes.
We're actually, some people say that.
What do you think?
Some people say that he's sitting right here, the guy who says it.
No, actually, so to the contrary.
Okay, yeah.
Because I said this in my now infamous.
He got hot.
That was all me.
The next story should have said, the problem with me, the problem with me with my tweets is nobody else reads them before I put him out.
That is all me.
If I look into the championship game, you're like, all right, when you have a busy year and you're on vacation with your family, maybe put down the Twitter account for a little while.
Where are you going?
Two person, take your phone.
We're in Brazil.
And I was just like, you know.
You saw them work and you were like, nah, these motherfuckers.
Well, so the thing is, actually, the thing that pissed me off is actually a lot of people started saying the thing that you were saying, which is that actually there's some IQ differential in other countries versus the U.S.
I don't think so.
We've got to be the smartest.
I think that if anything, we are because we have a good selection bias of who comes here.
We're native IQ, but there's a big problem.
So if we have at least no less smart and probably smarter on average than most countries, if not all countries, because of the selection bias of who comes here, yet in eighth grade, you're still saying it's the immigrants that come in.
Well, the man is smart.
No, I mean, then you're still saying it.
I've been for generations.
Just say if you want it to be fun.
Just say white Christians are the smartest and everything will be okay.
Okay?
Take a man.
Just say Chris is king and we're the smartest.
Here's the problem, man.
Eighth grade.
I'll ask you a question.
Yeah.
What percentage of eighth graders are, for their age, proficient in math compared to international standards?
Anybody have a guess?
Four.
Four percent.
Four percent.
You're pretty pessimistic.
You're not bad, though.
It's 25%.
Yeah.
So 75% of our eighth graders compared to just other developed countries.
25% of our class is Asian.
25%.
They didn't do the demographic breakdown of it.
All right, so 25%.
That's a problem.
So I think it is a fixed problem.
For us to just say it's a problem for us.
25% are actually 100% that could do math and they're still poor.
The other countries, like, how are you still in the third world and all of you know math?
Apparently, math is unimportant.
This is in the developed world.
You should be focusing on shooting the schools up or something that can make your country the leader of the first world.
This is what I'm getting from the data.
I'm getting that math is not important at all to have the most powerful country in the world.
I think that the question is whether we're going to have the most powerful country in the world.
And that's what I'm worried about.
So, you know, we can, we can flex all you want, man.
Don't make me go kangaroo on you, right?
And I think that we are the greatest country known to the history of mankind.
I do.
Of course.
But we have to have the humility to understand where we got to be better.
And I don't think complacency is an option.
And I don't think, I mean, look at the news of the day or the news of this week, right?
You got new AI technology coming out of China that somehow takes everybody by surprise here because with a lot less in computing power, they were smart in the way that they were able to use less computing power to still achieve a similar result.
That's deep seek.
We can have that discussion later.
We are going to get our asses handed to us by China unless we get our act together and light a fire under the feet of our culture.
I think that's a hard truth.
No, I agree with that.
It's a funny thing.
I think we might need to fuck them up right now.
I mean, this is really the only chance we got.
We got to fuck them up right now.
What do we do?
Forget fucking anybody else.
We get it to their neighbors.
It's actually just, you know.
Get it to their neighbors.
This guy's crazy.
We can't.
He's saying nuke China.
No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying it.
How about just being better on our own terms?
Right?
That's a crazy idea.
That's crazy.
I think that's great.
I think it's too big.
We got it.
So at least you're talking about it, but I do think we can't hide and have our heads in the sand.
What do they do better than us?
What do they do?
We just told you.
I just didn't really do that.
This is the whole discussion.
This is the whole discussion.
I don't know what I was doing, man.
Was he saying that the AI computing?
So I think last 6%.
So maybe we don't want the best engineers, right?
What did they do?
Yeah, so there was this thing called DeepSeek that just came out.
You hear about it?
No.
Okay.
No worries.
I've seen more than the last couple of days.
DeepSeek?
Yeah.
Is that the Bonnie Blue video?
He's good.
I don't even know.
How do you know?
I know.
He's not a comedy engineer.
Somebody just loaded away.
I don't get this.
Many kinds of engineers.
Engineers of comedy.
I like that.
Where's your wedding ring?
Cross-examination.
Go, So, anyway, there's this thing that really surprised everybody, which with a lot less computing power, because we've had these export bans on chips going to China, the thought was they don't have access to the same type of computing power that other companies have.
And that's the issue with AI right now, is the computing power, right?
Or so it was thought.
And they've solved that issue.
Well, it's complicated.
So under conditions of scarcity, where they had these export controls, they still came out of nowhere and said, you know what, with a lot fewer chips and a lot less powerful chips, they nonetheless created a generation of AI that at least looks as competitive as the bleeding edge of what we're producing in the United States.
And, you know, there's a lot yet to be known, but they trained this using phrases rather than individual words.
Instead of going out 32 decimal places on a number, they only used eight decimal places.
The way they trained the AI, they ended up being a lot scrappier in doing it.
And we can have the whole discussion about deep seek and it get boring pretty quickly.
But my point is, we will see examples daily, weekly, of other countries, including China, having our asses handed to us unless we wake up and, as a Sputnik-like moment, say, we are the greatest nation and we're going to act like it.
Hiring American Born Workers00:15:25
We believe that hard work and education and excellence rather than victimhood is the way to do it.
And so, the funny thing for me is I've been saying this for years.
It's not a different message for me.
I've been preaching it to the woke left.
I wrote the book Woke Inc., I wrote Nation of Victims a couple of years ago, and it was perceived as an attack on victimhood culture because that's what it was in the U.S.
But what I intended it as a wake-up call, and I think many of the same people who supported me in delivering that message to the woke left may have initially had a different interpretation of it when I talked about it just more holistically.
I'm talking everybody.
I'm talking about bootstraps, meant Timberlands.
I think they loved it.
I think, you know, to puff our chests abroad, we all got to pull up our pants.
Yeah, all of us.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, there's a whole pull-up your pants thing.
We all got to pull up our pants.
Okay.
And we got to be serious about it.
We got to balance our budget.
We got to actually spend in accordance with what we actually bring in.
We got to seal our border.
We got to teach our kids how to do math and how to read and how to write.
And I want excellence in every domain, by the way.
I don't think we should be a country of only engineers, but if we want to be the country where we say companies hire American-born workers, that's what we all want.
We got to ask ourselves at least a hard question.
This is what people got upset about.
And they may get upset about me saying it right now, but it's a question that you have to confront, which is why are these companies choosing on their own to not hire as many American-born workers as we want?
It's a tough question, but we can't hide from asking that question if you care about this country.
I care about this country too much to just ignore that question because that might be politically convenient.
And by the way, the H-1B system, I hate doing this because it's so lame and sort of just repeating yourself.
I've said it like 150 times in the last year.
It is a broken system.
It is flawed, yeah.
In their house, I'm flawed.
It is badly broken.
I mean, why?
Why?
Because there's all kinds of things that are messed up.
Quickly describe what it is.
So it's a worker visa program that allows, it's about 85,000 grand a year where companies can get a foreign worker in a specific role of a specific skill set, often used by technology companies.
And when you say foreign, you mean Indian.
India is the number one country that uses it.
We got an H-1B here, don't we?
I think you got China.
You got other countries as well.
Okay.
I mean, you might.
There's about 85,000 a year.
But here's the deal with it.
First of all, it's distributed by lottery.
So my view is that colleges, they pick the very best, at least they think for their university.
We're not individually picking.
It's a lottery.
That's number one.
Number two is if you work for a particular company with an H-1B, here's the big problem.
You are like an indentured servant to that company because another company can't hire you.
So the market's not really working.
So I have for a long time.
And you get underpinned.
You're constantly afraid of getting sent back.
So they just take advantage of that.
And then also, you could argue that that compresses American wages because that person can't be hired away.
So the company has them under a barrel to pay them less.
There are rules to prevent that, but then companies may be abusing it and sidestepping those rules.
And you're afraid to report it if you're a person.
So it is not only a broken system, it is a deeply flawed system in its application.
And I've said this 100 times, maybe 150 times in the last year.
But assume we fix all of that.
And by the way, I've got some out-of-the-box ideas for how to fix this.
I'd say auction them off, actually.
Make the companies pay for it.
Get back to that.
And by the way, use that money?
Change the word.
If you auction them off, then you actually raise that money.
Now close Social Security.
The right is on your side.
So we've got $44 billion.
Social Security.
We're going to auction them.
We don't have enough money for Social Security.
And make the companies pay more.
So the company is a lot of people.
I'm going to talk to you frame of it.
You're being very high Q.
The EQ is when you say auction them off, the black people are like, what are you talking about?
We don't do that anymore.
This guy can joke around.
I'm going to be as loose as I can be, too.
But the point is they can pay for it.
Make them make and sell their victims.
They sell the flesh and sell their flesh.
To the highest visa.
Sell their visa.
Sell their visa to the highest bidder.
And sell your flesh.
Take their flesh and sell it.
Pay it to America, right?
So you want to make America great.
We got a social security gap.
Yeah.
Close the social security gap by saying that if a company wants to hire somebody with the equivalent of a new H-1B system, make them actually pay.
So there's a higher barrier to hire that foreign-born worker.
But the company will pay whatever it's worth to them to do it.
And by the way, when they do it, they shouldn't be endangered servants of that company.
They could work at a different company.
That's a pretty efficient approach.
And it could actually use to close the Social Security Trust Fund gap or anything else.
It sounds to me right now.
But those are wonky policy solutions.
But the deeper question, though, because everyone likes to go there.
I agree.
No, this is.
And get to the hard question.
Let's see, even after you have that system, I believe it is likely that companies will still, in some measure, hire workers that include workers from other countries.
And by the way, a lot of CEOs, what they'll say behind closed doors, and what they do behind closed doors is if you tell them they can't do it here, they start opening up sites in other countries.
That's what's happening.
Some of the most successful startups in the country right now, founded by names of people who, I'm not going to betray confidence as you all would recognize, have told me in recent weeks, right, in response to all of this, what people need to know is that I'm actually building teams in places like Brazil, in places like Europe, in places like European.
It's not because it's not just because it's cheaper.
There's a yeah, it's not getting hired engineers.
It's not good for America, right?
It's not good for America when you create those jobs in other countries.
So what are the question here?
How do we address the deeper question of make great airplanes?
Yeah.
Well, remote kind of future care.
What is like a great Brazilian piece of engineering?
What have they?
It's not my choice to make.
It's not my choice to make.
I'll give you decisions that other CEOs are making.
That's not good for America.
We want this to be the country where the greatest things come out of our own homeland.
I agree.
So the question to ask, the hard question is, why, when given the choice, are companies not making the choice to hire more American-born workers than we want?
We got to reflect on that.
And then there's a separate question.
So they got that observation, right?
Now you got a separate observation.
Before you go to the second question, it's related.
That 25% of eighth graders and only 25% are actually proficient in math.
That's a separate fact.
Are those two facts total coincidences?
Like, is that just a random coincidence that we now live in a period where American companies are choosing, I don't love this, but are choosing not to hire as many American-born workers at the exact same time that our educational system is producing lackluster results in math, science, and engineering?
Are those just random coincidences?
Or might those have something to do with each other?
I mean, we could explore if they do.
I'm not saying, I'm not saying I'm convinced either, but I'm saying that this has to be the conversation we're able to have rather than getting upset that the question was asked.
And I care too much about this country to do it.
And I think that messengers matter.
And one of the things I learned from this is, you know, people see the message through the messenger a little bit.
And for where I sit to be super clear about it, this is the only country I will ever pledge allegiance to.
I have nowhere else to go.
This is the country I will die fighting for if I have to.
And so, you know what?
When you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.
And if you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
And I was consistent with that with the left.
It was hard for me to preach a message to the left when we took a lot of arrows before criticizing world culture.
Now that's a cool thing to do.
That was not a cool thing to do when I started doing it because I don't think that victimhood culture is good for black people.
I don't think it's good for white people.
I don't think it's good for any American people.
I don't think victimhood culture lifts us up.
We're victors, not victims.
That's who we are.
I apply that principle across the board in America that all of us, not pointing the finger at anybody else, includes looking in the mirror myself as a guy who's raising kids in this country that I worry about, and I see how hard that is.
I want all of us to create a country where those kids still grow up in a country where excellence is the priority.
In math and engineering, sure, sports, arts, music, everything.
But we are a country where we pursue excellence.
We don't penalize somebody for being a striver, right?
That has a negative connotation to it today.
Our country was built on hard workers and strivers, whatever domain.
We also shouldn't be intimidated.
Yeah, we shouldn't be intimidated.
Like, we should have confidence.
We're Americans.
Like, you're coming here, and I'm going to be.
Darn right.
I'm going to beat you.
Like, I want you to come over.
I want to give you all the visas, and I'm going to still outperform.
And I think once we're in the world, we're the best.
And American exceptionalism was based on this idea of manifest destiny.
It was the manifest destiny of a nation.
And the reason we could do that is because other countries have national identities that are different than ours.
Yeah.
Right?
Italy or Japan or you could go straight.
Great countries love both countries, but their national identity is based on a lineage, right?
Whether you speak the language, whether your bloodstock, your stock of blood goes back five generations.
That's how it talents.
It's a hundred years old.
Yes.
Yeah.
Whereas America, I believe is a nation founded on a set of principles.
Yes.
Right.
Yes, there's a beautiful geographic space and a homeland we love and hold dear, but that homelessness.
That's how it makes you American.
Right.
It used to be 13 colonies.
Then you got the Louisiana Purchase.
Then you have out West.
Then you had Alaska, Hawaii.
Maybe there will be more to it to be coming soon.
Gangs.
But it doesn't matter.
The land is not the core element of America.
The blood and soil is important, but it's not the essence.
The essence is what are the ideals that bind us together across those otherwise geographically diverse and expansive differences.
And to me, it's those ideals that we pursue excellence.
We believe in merit, that the best person gets the job, that you can achieve the maximum of your own potential without anybody standing in your way and speak your mind at every step of the way.
That's what makes America great.
That's why we win.
So we have to revive that.
But right now, I feel like, especially the last four years, we've gone through a little bit of a lethargic period.
And I think most people who may have had issues with the way I framed it a few weeks ago would agree with me that we wouldn't have to make America great again if America was already perfect.
We should have the humility and the love of our country to not only admit that, but to embrace the challenge on the other side of it to say that we're still going to strive to be better than we've ever been.
That's who we are.
And that's the spirit I want to bring back in the country.
And if I'm being honest, I think we lost some of that.
But it doesn't have to stay that way.
You do know the whole thing is just it's good white Christian Americans don't like a brown guy holding the mirror up to their face.
That's what this is all about.
Don't you dare talk about it.
Don't you dare talk about it.
So it's funny.
It's funny to know.
So that's what it is.
I reject, and in my arguments, friendly, but healthy, heated arguments with the left over the last four years have been steadfast on this.
And I don't intend to change my position now.
My position in talking to the left, including black audiences or places where, you know, there was this idea that if you're not black, you can't say certain things.
I never believed that.
I think that your ideas stand on your own merits, regardless of your own skin color, and you got to express them.
That's what America's founded on.
So if that was my, and I got a lot of applause from many corridors of the conservative movement for maintaining a hard line on that.
But that's always been my belief.
And I'm not about to change that belief now either.
So I believe in being consistent across the board.
My fear for you, someone who roots for you, you said it yourself, the messenger matters.
You're going to run in a state conservative, I guess is a good way of putting it.
Having grown up in a conservative state, knowing a lot of conservatives, love them, but there's a good percentage of them.
I would say 20% comfortably that are simply not going to vote for you because of your race and/or religion.
Yeah, remember, and culture said that.
And culture said this exact thing.
Now, I'm not saying you can't run or whatever.
My question is: she literally said this.
She literally said, I would not vote for him because he's in position.
No, really?
Have you spoken to her recently?
No, we don't have, I don't have too much to say.
No, that's just our own health.
Anyway, how do you overcome that?
And I would listen, this is a beautiful moment to speak to your ideals and what you believe in.
And I love those ideals.
However, this is a practical problem that you will have to overcome.
Can you just do that with ideals?
So I think here's what I believe.
It happens to be true, right?
If I'm wrong about this, that I won't be a successful American politician.
I'm okay with that.
My goal in life is not to be a successful American politician.
My goal in this phase of my life is to change this country for the better by doing what I believe is truthful and required for saving our nation.
That's why I worked hard, worked my tail off to get Donald Trump back in office because I think at the federal level, he is the guy to lead us back to our sense of self-confidence and greatness.
So now, when I look at what I'm doing, my goal is not to map some sort of focus group path to what you're supposed to say to win an election.
What I care about is actually reviving excellence in America.
It so happens, though, that I think most people, including in the Republican Party, agree with the core principles of meritocracy, the pursuit of excellence.
I do think the majority think it's and I'm not going to get 100%.
I'm not going to get 100% of people supporting me.
That's great.
It's the beauty of a democracy.
So I think that the majority of people in this country, and certainly, I think even the majority of conservatives, especially the majority of conservatives, believe in hard work, self-reliance, self-determination, meritocracy, excellence.
That's what I stand for.
So I believe I'll be successful.
And you know what?
I would rather speak my message and achieve whatever, whether that's success or failure.
I don't care about that as much as speaking the truth of what I actually believe.
And I think that happens to be the best electoral strategy.
But are you shocked?
Were you shocked at the, I guess, racial blowback that you received when you tweeted that?
Or was that surprising to you?
Because I did notice this sense.
And I do think I'm a moderate person, but I noticed this sense amongst my brown Republican friends who were like shocked that this exists.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was funny to me.
Is it because of the racial pushback?
There's a couple things that no, no, no, but what were they saying?
I mean, that's all kinds of shit on.
Funny memes at all or no?
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't think they were super funny.
You're probably funnier, you know, in the scale of humor at times, you know.
But sometimes they got some banger.
It might have been one or two.
Did they put you on top of a train or anything like that?
I didn't get that.
I don't get that.
The surprise.
So I think there's a couple things going on.
The online world is not the real world.
I think the other thing is you look at actually real people in 3D.
I mean, you got a bunch of people with burner accounts that can't identify.
The energy changes completely.
I could care less, to be honest with you, about what some sort of, you know, somebody calls you a name and you put yourself in the public domain and you're putting yourself in a position to be a leader in the country.
If that stuff's going to bother you, you weren't cut out for it in the first place.
And part of my message, you know, it's the whole message in reverse.
It applies 360 degrees is that we're not victims, right?
We're victors.
Real People In Three Dimensions00:15:15
And that's the example we said.
So I'm not going to be some victim of, was there a lot of ugly racist stuff said on the internet?
Big news flash, big surprise.
You know, what do you expect in the depths of anonymous internet?
So commentary.
I could care less.
It's not going to deter me.
And to the contrary, what I do care about, though, is my goal is not just to provoke for the sake of provoking.
I want to be able to have an earnest and open conversation in our country about how we excel at a level that we have in the past.
We're the country.
I mean, think about my home state of Ohio sent Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, to outer space and the outer frontiers.
There's no reason Ohio can't be the heart of that again.
There's no reason the United States of America can't view this as our Sputnik moment right now.
But there are many rises and many falls of this American experiment.
And when you are down a little bit, you got to be able to light a fire under your feet to come back.
That's what we've always been.
But we can't just expect that to happen automatically.
And so I do care about an honest self-reflection as a citizen of the greatest nation known to the history of mankind.
How do we still pursue greatness at a higher level than we ever have?
I really care about that.
And I think that sometimes that involves tough conversations.
I'm game for it.
It's going to involve a lot of criticism along the way.
I'm fine with that.
If you can't handle the game, get out of the game.
If people accept the root reflection, how do we ameliorate the actual root cause?
Sure.
So that's what we should be talking about.
So I think a lot of this starts with early education in the country.
First of all, a lot of this even goes to concerns about inequality.
I think that every kid who's born in this country, starting at the age of four, if not younger, should have access to the best possible school they can, regardless of what their financial background.
Love that.
I mean, it's the truth, right?
Universal school choice.
That happens, by the way, not at the federal level.
It's part of what I'm thinking about my own next step.
That happens at the state level.
That's really where these changes happen.
I think that restoring at least a norm in the country of a solid family foundation.
Does that mean that somebody who grows up in a broken family environment or a single parent household can't achieve great success?
No, of course not.
But all else equal, it tends to be from a stable family, generally two-parent upbringing, you're going to be able to jump higher if you're jumping from a ground that isn't shaking, but a ground that's stable.
So I think it starts early.
And I think a disproportionate focus on high-quality education starting young, on measuring that achievement, starting young, and then some cultural shift.
And you tend to get more of what you valorize as a culture, right?
So I think it's fantastic that we valorize a lot of different things in American culture that are great because we produce great comedians, we produce great athletes, we produce, have historically produced great scientists and engineers.
It's great.
You get more of what you valorize.
But what I've seen a little bit that concerns me in probably the last 20 years, you could say you could blame some of this in the woke left, but it's not exclusively at the feet of the woke left is penalizing excellence, right?
Penalizing the person who works hard and wins and instead rewarding the victim.
And I think that if you reward victimhood, you get more victimhood.
And if you penalize excellence and hard work, you're going to get less excellence and less hard work.
So I think it's going to be a combination of policies that allow people to have access to the best possible education at a young age and start measuring and rewarding for success earlier, merit-based pay for teachers, not just everybody just getting the same thing for treating kids like they're on an assembly line, but actually measuring and pinpointing the people who are putting kids on even a little bit of a trajectory that's different when they're four years old.
By the time they're at 12th grade, you could run a truck through that.
So those increments of difference starting even young, that's a big freaking difference.
And then to create a culture that, what are you creating?
You just need to revive it because it is our culture to celebrate whoever's the best, to reward them, to celebrate that in every domain, right?
Not just academics, academics to athletics, physical excellence.
I actually, to some other controversy two years ago, favored bringing back what's called the presidential fitness test.
They used to have middle school kids go through that.
They take that away now.
How many push-ups can these kids do?
We don't valorize that type of physical excellence.
We should.
I love sports.
I mean, I was a four-year varsity athlete myself.
that sometimes can make you a better thinker too.
But we should embrace excellence in all of its forms rather than this thing that we kind of teach our kids to do nowadays.
And I'm not criticizing anybody else.
Like my kids grow up in a really different environment than I grew up in.
And I'm somewhat concerned about that.
It makes me think a lot as a parent about how do you cultivate that same environment where we participation trophy culture.
We should have trophies for the winners, not participation trophies.
That was America, right?
That was the America that produced greatness.
I worry a little bit about taking the guy who's a striver and using that and make that a negative connotation rather than celebrating the person who's going to put their head down and work hard, be it at basketball, be it at the violin, be it at math or be it in the science competitions.
And I do think that that's a culture that is American at its core.
Maybe we've lost our way on that a little bit.
I think we have.
But bring back the culture that produced greatness at every time where we've been at our best, the country that put the man on the moon, the country that was the country of the pioneers, the explorers, Lewis and Clark expeditions, for God's sake.
Merit-based pay for teachers is interesting.
I've never heard of that.
How do you implement that?
Super required.
Teachers' unions are an obstacle.
I think that there's an obstacle.
But I think that the idea that you're going to have participation trophy culture.
And certain situations, participation trophy culture for kids, we can just have participation trophy culture for the people who are educating our kids either.
Question about that.
Should unions be able to negotiate against the state?
I think that in certain domains, it's uncontroversial that they shouldn't.
Public school teachers, if you're unionizing as a public school teacher, who are you unionizing against?
And also against the very people you're supposed to represent.
But also who is rewarding that union?
Someone who's going to be in office for two, four years, and then they move on.
So they don't have to deal with the repercussions of bad policy.
Which is totally different from different kinds of unions, right?
Private sector unions came up about fighting against monopoly power, against capitalist consolidation.
But public sector unions, I mean, even you had FDR, I think, actually, who was a big pro-union guy that expressed a lot of skepticism about public sector unions.
And then you could talk about, you know, I would put police and fire.
That's in a different category because there are a lot of concerns that relate to how they're insured or protected in the case of putting their own lives on the line.
But let's just start with the easiest example where I think most people agree.
I don't think public teachers' unions make sense.
And why?
I think public teachers' unions means you're unionizing against the very people you're supposed to serve.
For example, kids who you're teaching, right?
How are you unionizing against?
Yeah, what are they advocating for?
Well, what you're advocating for, you advocate for summer break.
Let's just start with that.
So you're advocating for...
And I just talk about summer break.
This is a super boring subject to a lot of people.
I think it's a super important subject.
I've included this in one of my earlier books is you actually see regress when a kid finishes the school year in the spring versus when they show up in the fall.
But kids from well-to-do families, that regress is really small because they're able to pay for and seek out high engagement activity over those three months.
From poorer or less well-to-do school districts, that's where the gap actually grows, just the regress when they show up in the fall.
That's just one example.
I think it is a nice perk of being a teacher that you have summer break, but we should take a look at what produces the best results.
And conversely, the very best aren't rewarded.
Let's say you're actually doing the best job amongst your pack of peers of teachers in teaching kids how to excel in math and science and reading ability and critical thinking in a way that's measurable.
That person still gets paid the same salary, which I think is way too low right now.
I was just going to say that.
Teachers are severely underpaid.
Severely underpaid.
So you think getting creative unions, they're going to start, the state's going to be a good idea.
The best ones would actually get paid more money, especially it's in the context of a true market-based system where the people at the level of the family have the ability, whether they can afford it or not, they're able to, with a voucher or with a school educational savings account, able to choose to go to better school.
Absolutely.
There's good evidence for that.
I think you have too much faith in state budgets.
I mean, I don't think it happens.
I don't think it happens magically.
So I guess I'm with you.
It doesn't happen magically, but I think that great leaders can make a difference.
I think good leaders with the right policies at the level of the state can fix this problem.
And this is a man, here's why.
This is not going to the moon.
Going to the moon is a problem of physics.
And not every natural problem has a man-made solution.
This is a man-made problem.
And every man-made problem has a man-made solution.
I believe that.
And if we value education as highly as you'd like, then that's the budget you cut last.
You see what I'm saying?
It's not just the budget.
You don't value it already.
It's about how you use it.
That's an issue.
It's about how you use it.
So take the money to administer the bureaucracy, put that money in people's pockets and allow them to actually get to the best possible education they can get to.
Either renegotiate the union contracts or maybe get rid of them altogether in a way that allows for merit to be able to do that.
Doesn't that create just smart schools and dumb schools?
Well, we're here in New York City, close to downtown.
You got the best traders on a Wall Street firm.
If they make most profit for the firm, which is their mission, they get paid more rather than the guy who didn't.
Why would we want to operate our schools in a way that's the opposite?
How would you decide what merit is for a teacher?
And there's upsides and downsides to just be slaves of the test, right?
Nobody just wants to solve for one metric.
But there's going to be no perfect system.
I'll be the first to acknowledge that.
But is a system that has a combination of objective metrics, even if the metrics aren't perfect, better than one that has none at all?
I think it is strictly better, right?
So I think we can't let the fact that you're going to have some flaw in whatever metric you use to say that therefore we're not going to be able to do it.
You're going to get paralyzed trying to be perfect.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good, right?
And I do think that we're not at the good right now when it comes to doing justice by our kids in preparing them to be competitive.
And I think that's part of where the victimhood culture comes from.
But aren't they?
I mean, even in a state, if you train your kids to be actually prepared to compete, then they don't think of themselves as victims.
But I think consider that sometimes teachers are at the mercy of the families that these kids are born into.
Absolutely.
And we can't punish teachers because they have a class of 30 kids who are all from a single parent household.
I agree with you.
It's not their fault.
They have them eight hours a day.
And that was the other point I made.
So those would be the two biggest changes for the country: restoring a solid, rock-solid family foundation as the norm.
How do you do that through policy?
Yeah, some of it is at least eliminate the disincentives to do it, right?
I think those are accidents.
I don't think that somebody nefariously did this to the point we were talking about earlier.
But there are weird distortions where actually people can make more money by not having a man in the house than to have a man in the house.
I think those are accidents of arithmetic and the way that the great society under Lyndon Johnson worked out.
So that's not going to solve all the problem, but at least start with eliminating the disincentives.
I think some of this doesn't just happen through policy.
Some of it happens through cultural norm shifts as well, making it cool to be part of a family.
I think making family cool again is a great thing for the country.
I do think that when our leaders are able to, you know, even my own journey over the last couple of years, we did it as a family, but we showed the world that we did it as a family too.
And to people my age and to the next generation, I think that's a great norm to set and to show the country that fathers and mothers equally are in our kids.
What's that?
How do you reinforce that?
Yeah.
How do you bake that into the identity of an American family?
You know, I think we're going to see it happen.
I think it already, I'm pretty optimistic because I see that dial turning a little bit, even in just the way that Hollywood might make a movie, right?
What kind of movie appeals to what really are the masses of Americans who agree with these concepts?
It's almost like a business opportunity that opens up once you give people the permission to think a little bit differently.
And so that's one of the things I love about this election is it has mostly turned the page on at least the woke cancel culture in a way that I think is productive.
Mostly has given people a sense of permission to speak openly and rethink, I think, a lot of the toxicity of the last few years.
I think we're going to see, as you see a lot of corporations maybe responding, and that's a different discussion about how they're thinking about DI programs or whatever.
But I think you're going to see similar evolution in the arts, right?
The kind of songs that people make, the kind of movies that people make.
Not some boring stuff that hits you over the head and preaches about the importance of having a family, but what you show as a norm of what's actually beautiful and worthy and desirable in America, I think that culture will reinforce policies that also take away the disincentives for family formation.
This is a long-term project.
What you're saying sounds really good, and maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but I don't think that's a real thing.
I don't think that's a real problem.
Like, I don't see anyone who anyone is like, oh, I can't wait to be a single parent household.
Like, no one's like striving to not have a loving family.
I go like, where is this problem?
Can you give me an example of that?
Well, I do think that they're...
They're going to fix women.
That's the real issue.
I do think that it's a fact of their policy.
We need some policy.
We need some policy about that.
Easier to go to.
It is a fact that many women make more money from being married to Uncle Sam than being married to a husband, right?
So I think that that's not a good incentive structure to set up in the first place.
And I don't blame the people who are receiving those.
You know, we're talking about the great society, the way welfare has been administered.
I think there are actually just financial disincentives for family formation.
That's not a problem.
That's more a problem where corporations not paying people enough.
Well, that's a separate debate that we could have.
But I think that, you know, that's how do you get corporations to pay people more is you actually have a, I believe, a competitive market economy that allows people to get jobs in a growing economy.
That's a separate discussion of economic policy.
But even if you're going to have programs of government aid, which most of them I'm skeptical of, but if you're going to have it, do it in a way that doesn't create a disincentive to pay somebody more in the exact same situation where single mother without a man in the house, single mother, married man in the house, this one gets more money than this one.
I don't think that that's a good incentive structure to create.
But I'm not going to promise you that the solution is all going to come through policy and the family side.
I think through education, policy can deliver the solution.
Education is that he'll get us 50% of the way there alone in terms of giving people access to the best possible education they can at a young age.
Then you get to the hard stuff.
I do think that restoring the nuclear family norm is a hard thing.
I grew up in a really poor neighborhood.
I'm sure there's always people that try to take advantage of the system, but the majority of people weren't like happy to be on welfare.
Like it was a necessity.
Sure.
So you say that like they'll get paid more not being in a relationship.
Like no one's striving for that.
And it's like I think the least you can do is market it that way.
That way, I feel it's a little bit more.
Let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you, I could actually be, I'm super interested in this.
Restoring The Nuclear Family00:07:53
I don't have all of the answers of what the government is supposed to do to recreate family formation.
I think some of this is not going to come from the government.
The government should do the best we can.
What would be your perspective on how we could actually enhance more stable family formation in the country, given your own background that you shared?
Like I said, I think money is the thing that fixes a lot.
And if corporations are paying people more, now people can have two family households and make more than if the government was helping them out.
I would love people to be able to earn more as well, which requires a vibrant economy rather than a shrinking economy over the course of the year.
Yeah, but if we're paying people $15 on 40 hours a week, that's no money.
No one can live off that.
I mean, it's not even 15 to his point.
So, when you first said corporations, I was thinking corporate jobs, but minimum wage 725 still has gone insane.
And I don't mean to pull it all back to my favorite topic.
And I don't mean to pull it back to my favorite topic, but I pull it back because I think it relates to it of the bureaucracy in the regulatory state.
The reason people can't afford a house is in part because we have a crisis of not enough housing construction in the country.
Why?
Because there's too much red tape to be able to build a single-family home.
So building large.
Because people are making enough money to afford housing.
Well, I mean, housing costs are also high.
I mean, housing costs have shot out.
You're going to see it happen in California right now.
You've seen it happen across the country.
No, but specifically when they start to rebuild, there's a lot of people out there who like they bought their homes already built and they've never went through the red tape and bureaucracy of like building a home out there.
And then these people are going to see what it's like and you're going to see a monumental change happen in California.
Even the builders, even builders, right?
There's a lot of zoning regulations, for example, at a local level and at a state level that say you can't build a new house in this area if it's too small, if it's a single-family home.
That restricts the supply of new housing.
When you have less supply, prices go up.
And that's a big part of why people aren't able to afford housing, which I think is a major problem amongst Republicans and let's take it beyond housing.
To his point, I hate to not side with the Indian, but a box of cereal in New York legitimately is $10.
If minimum wage is $15 an hour and food is that expensive, even if I'm renting and I don't want to buy a house and I don't care about that, I'm still fucking struggling.
And if it's $15 an hour in New York, even if things are more expensive, $7.25 in Texas, a box of cereal is $5.
I got a family of four to feed.
I'm working 40 hours a week on minimum wage.
What am I going to do?
It's like the, and I support a lot of what you're saying, but there is a problem that might require more regulation, which is we inflation continues to go crazy.
CEO salaries continue to go crazy.
They outpace inflation.
Minimum wage has been stagnant for 20, I mean, largely stagnant since I was a kid.
So here is my view.
I think that the best way, the reason I want to dismantle the regulatory state is not because that is a more important objective than helping the American worker.
It is because I believe it is the way to best aid the American worker.
And right now, a shrinking economy or an economy that isn't growing at the pace that we historically have, that brings everybody down.
It shrinks the size of the pie.
I think companies, we want companies to independently make the choice to hire the best and brightest in the United States and pay them at a rate that allows people to flourish and live a great life.
We can all agree that hasn't been the case in the last 20 years, at least in the post-2000 period.
That has not been the case in this country.
I think most of that is a function of actually bad government policy by the actual regulatory state and bureaucracy.
You think about the Federal Reserve.
I mean, the Federal Reserve has tightened monetary policy.
This is a little technical, but it tightens monetary policy every time wages go up.
This is actually one of the best kept secrets of how Federal Reserve policy has hurt workers in this country.
They say that was a leading indicator of inflation.
It's a leading indicator of wages are going up.
So wages going up already was programmed into the mind of this bureaucracy that that's all else equal a bad thing.
Well, here's what we've learned: is it actually when people start making more money, they're like, yeah, we got too much money.
Right.
Let's restrict the flow of money.
It's even worse than that.
It's even worse than that because as you will probably appreciate, the last thing to go up in the business cycle when the economy is hot, the very last thing to go up is wages.
So what we actually discovered in retrospect is they thought that was a leading indicator of inflation.
Oh, gosh, we got to raise interest rates and tighten monetary policy.
They actually got it wrong.
It was the tail end of the business cycle when wages were going up, which means they tightened monetary policy right into a natural downturn of the business cycle, which is how you got the 08 crisis, which, by the way, people are age.
A big source of inequality was still the aftermath of that great recession after the 08 financial crisis.
Imagine we had how you got the 08 crisis.
I don't think that is.
No, no, no, no, but it worsened it.
It exacerbated it.
It exacerbated it and it caused it to last longer.
Poor people wanted more.
No.
No, no, no.
It was actually the Federal Reserve tightening monetary.
Anyway, it lasted a lot longer, even in the aftermath of it.
But my point is: imagine you didn't have any of that regulatory state all in.
Fast forward 20 years later, would we have been better off if none of the bureaucracy had even tried to do it?
And by the way, just take the money that was spent by that bureaucracy and put it in the pockets of people.
Yeah.
Yes, we would, actually.
So how come how come that bureaucracy is not affecting CEOs' pays?
Because there's that's been going.
So I think there is a well, I think that I think the reality is the bureaucracy is what determines that pay, right?
I think a lot of now, I believe in the market actually working, but this gets into a separate market structure.
So normally shareholders, you ask the question, I'll give the answer because this is actually a topic that was near and dear to my heart.
I started a company that was on this very issue.
Shareholders are the supposed bosses of a corporation and public companies.
It turns out that most public companies have their stock held by a really concentrated small number of firms, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard among them.
They're the ones who are actually voting for CEO pay, not the actual shareholders themselves.
So historically, the way the market economy is supposed to work is the shareholders hold the firm accountable.
Instead, you have a lot of these concentrated financial actors that are voting their shares on behalf of the everyday American or the pension fund holder in a way that has resulted, I do think, in some level of inefficiency.
So wherever you look in our country, the rise of this managerial class, right?
Wherever you see the rise of bureaucracy, the American citizen tends to lose in the end.
The everyday citizen tends to lose in the end.
And so my general form of solution is as a first step, take a jackhammer to the bureaucracy, take the savings and put them in the pockets of everyday citizens.
Real quick.
And good things are going to happen.
On that, you said BlackRock, what did you say?
State Street, Vanguard, and that's where a lot of this ESG stuff, by the way, came from, too.
ESG is like these environmental and social constraints on these firms came from the same firms that in many ways were using that as male screen.
Remember when they were getting to the point where they were to be able to actually fail companies vote in the way they should be, for example.
Okay, so just real quick so we understand.
It's not their capital, right?
It's not their assets.
Other people are putting their money into these companies.
They invest it.
But what's happening is they're using the leverage of all that capital to push policy onto these companies.
And then the shareholders are actually not seeing the capital.
They call them the capitalists.
Because right now they call BlackRock and Vanguard the shareholders.
That's the shareholders.
The actual capital owners are not what they want to reflect.
Exactly.
And matter of fact, sometimes those policies negatively impact their returns.
I believe that's the case.
God, I believe that's the case.
Okay, I strongly believe that's the case.
Because I think wrote a couple books about it.
I also started a competitor to BlackRock called Strive.
This is a few years ago.
So I care about trying to solve these problems as best I can through the market.
But one of the reasons I entered politics is there's only so much you can do through the market when the root cause of why these firms are structured this way is actually traces back to the regulatory environment that creates the incentives for that type of consolidation in the first place.
Betting Against Mahomes00:05:31
Guys, listen, you know, an exciting weekend.
I think that we need to have a little bit of a discussion about Akash and his picks.
Before we get to the picks, can I just say how right I was about not being a Cowboy fan?
Okay, tell me.
Oh, first of all, everybody, you're welcome.
Because I last year said, I'm done with the Cowboys.
It's never going to change.
You guys pretended you were sports fans.
You insulted me.
People online insulted me.
I feel a lot of hatred.
They hired this guy to be their head coach.
This guy, maybe he'll be a good coach.
He has no qualifications.
His name is Brian Schottenheimer.
He's been a coordinator for about 15, 20 years.
He's gotten one head coach interview his whole life.
But because the Cowboys are cheap and they don't want to pay money for a head coach, even though there's no salary cap, they had this guy who's a shitty offensive coordinator for them.
And they're like, let's just promote him.
He's the head coach now.
We can boss him around.
We'll save a lot of money.
Everything is going to be good.
And I saw so many Cowboy fans saying, you know what?
I'm done with this team.
I've given up hope.
It's never going to happen.
And suddenly, their reception, hey, man, I get it.
You're right.
You have the right to go support another team.
I want you to know I took those arrows for you.
I took those arrows for you.
Did those other cowboy fans say they want to kill Jerry Jones?
You're welcome.
Not yet.
Give it a season.
Give it a season.
And he doesn't have to die, but just, you know, there's a couple of Me Too cases out there.
Oh, my God.
Do you guys care about women?
Do you guys care about women?
I pretend I do for the sake of football.
So there's that.
I care about two women, really, to be honest.
I care about Luman.
I respect a lot.
Say what?
You have a mom, bro.
Hey, she made her bed, bro.
She also did.
She made her bed.
You like Deslaz does.
I forgive you, though.
I forgive you, though.
You know what I mean?
She ain't getting me too.
Me too.
I just felt so vindicated this year.
Okay, fair enough.
What about your playoff game?
What about your other picks?
Like, I never remember.
I don't know.
I got one right.
I don't know any of the words you're saying.
I said the Eagles would win.
I said, I'm going to go with the Bills over the Chiefs.
I didn't feel good about it.
I was wrong.
Betting against Patrick Mahomes, I guess, is just insane.
You're almost right, though.
It was close.
It was a good game.
You're almost right.
Man, it was a good game.
I mean, they should have.
What's it should have grabbed that package?
Dalton Kincaid.
He's a good tight end to his Akeez.
He got great hands.
Yeah.
Ball.
I mean, Josh Allen did great to avoid that sack, by the way.
That blitz was what a ballsy call, too, at that point in the game.
Yeah, see, well, I was thinking, and I'm pretty aggressive, but it was fourth and five.
They're at like their own 40 or whatever.
I was like, why wouldn't you punt this?
And then somebody brought up a good point.
He said, because you're giving it to Patrick Mahomes.
Yeah.
You give it to Patrick, you don't get the ball back.
So you have to go for the win.
You can't give it to him.
So I said, okay, you got to go for it.
Great play by Josh Allen just to throw it up in the air and not get sacked.
That's a great, great throw.
Yeah.
And I truly, I mean, Philadelphia is really good, but I thought Buffalo was the best team.
But I think Patrick Mahomes is just fucking different.
And I know people say the Chiefs get calls and blah, blah, blah.
And maybe they do.
I don't know.
That's also kind of how every great athlete does, though, right?
Kobe got calls.
LeBron got calls.
Jordan got calls.
Tom Brady got calls in football.
Like, this is just what it is.
It's also easier to make calls for the most dominant team.
Yeah, I think you just give them the benefit of the doubt.
They're just more glaring.
When you constantly are winning, you see all the calls that benefit the team.
Absolutely.
Like when the bum ass underdog team gets a call, you're not going, oh, this is so fun.
That's a very almost feel like better.
That's a great point.
And the more you're winning, the more games you play, the more calls that could go your way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it is an Eagles Chiefs Super Bowl.
I think the Eagles are really fucking good.
I hate them.
My wife and I got in a fight because I just refused to be happy for her because she's from Philly.
And she was just like, why can't you be happy for me?
And I was like, they're just terrible people.
And you're one of them.
And that's just what it is.
These are good fights.
I apologize later.
I didn't mean the apology, but I did apologize.
I lied.
But they're really fucking good.
I would hate to see them win the Super Bowl.
I think it's very possible.
I think I'm going to pick the Chiefs, but I'm wrong a lot.
So let's hope I'm actually right.
Is that your team?
Isn't the Chiefs your team?
Isn't that your bandwagon?
You're a diehard Chiefs fan.
I found myself rooting for the Bills because I would like to see Buffalo get a Super Bowl.
Nah, you just like torture.
You like this.
No, honestly.
The Chiefs, if they win, I'm going to be fucking thrilled.
And I will probably buy a Patrick Mahomes jersey because he's beaten.
There's only two teams left that I truly fucking hate.
I love that.
You're like, I'm sick of my team not winning anymore.
You know who I'm going to root for?
The Buffalo Bills.
No, all I have left is, what do they call it?
Schotten fraud or whatever.
Other people's misery that I don't like.
That's two teams that I fucking hate left, the Niners and the Eagles.
If Patrick Mahomes beats both of them in the Super Bowl twice, I'm buying a jersey.
I'll pay for his fucking Disney World trip.
I don't care.
Whatever you need, I will worship this man.
I will love this man.
Okay, so you're going Chiefs.
Yeah, well, yeah.
I think I'm going Chiefs and I'm really rooting for them.
And I might have to watch the game in Philly because my wife is going to be there.
And if I got to be around this fucking whole city, just of fucking idiots, I mean, it's just going to be unbelievable.
You are crazy.
It's just going to be unbelievable.
I mean, if they lose, though, what a sight that would be.
You know what I mean?
Just a bunch of fucking shows in Philly.
You perform in Philly.
You know, you.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Is that crazy for a comic to antagonize Philly?
Who would do such a thing?
America Is A Radical Idea00:13:09
Who would do such a thing?
It's probably how he got into arenas because everybody's like, oh, this guy hates Philly.
So do we.
Let's buy tickets to a show.
Wait, are you going to watch it in Philly?
I'm sure she's going to want to watch it in Philly.
And if I wanted to watch the Super Bowl in Dallas, I'd make her go.
That's never going to happen, but you know what I mean?
So, you know, that's going to be a nightmare.
So please, just beat the shit out of them.
Don't make it close like you always do.
Beat the dog shit out of them.
I would love that.
Patrick Mahomes, please.
You're going to riot either way.
I already know.
Riot.
Yeah.
I'm not capable of breaking anything.
I mean, no, you started.
My miasma is going to start flaring up.
Yeah, it's too much.
It's too much.
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General, a summary of my worldview is bureaucracy is bad, all else equal.
Do you think you're harms the very people it's supposed to help?
Do you think you're radical in the sense that America's radical?
Sure.
I mean, America is a radical idea.
Sure, of course.
Of course.
What I'm saying is, like, do you think that your viewpoint on what needs to be changed is significantly greater, more radical, more extreme?
I know these words have are like loaded, and I don't mean them to be loaded.
What I'm trying to say is, like, I think that what you're suggesting is a massive change.
Yeah.
And do you feel it is?
Yeah, I do.
I think a massive change is required to set our country back on the right track to remain.
I think we already are, but to remain the greatest country known to the history of man.
I do believe that.
And I think that the American Revolution was pretty radical, by the way, too.
I like America's birth.
America's birth was radical, right?
The idea that we, the people, get to self-government was a crazy idea, right?
The idea that your genetics and your lineage don't matter, but the best person ought to get the job.
That is a radical idea.
Or that any opinion, no matter how heinous to you or me it might seem, that any opinion gets to be expressed publicly, freely.
That is a radical idea.
I believe all of those things.
So, you know, that might make me radical.
I think I'm fine with that because America is a radical nation.
I'm not saying it is criticism.
I just oftentimes see your philosophy, and I think it's very digestible in the things that you're saying, and that you're using language that we're familiar with, right?
And tapping into our identities and what we are as Americans.
But the change that you're suggesting, I think, significantly shifts the course of the country.
And that is, you said this last time, you were probably like, we, we, what is it?
We should have the country we deserve or something like that.
This was Thomas Jefferson's idea.
It's like, for better we elect is the government we deserve.
Exactly.
For better or for worse, right?
And I think that's a very brave position to be in.
I think a lot of times when elected officials win, they're forced to make certain decisions and they reflect and they go, you know what?
It really ain't that bad.
Like maybe we'll try to move it 2% this direction, 5% this direction, 7%.
And so this is why, man, this is actually really important to me as I think about my next step.
I don't just, we were talking about this a little bit before.
I don't just want to win by a little bit and check the box and being a governor or whatever.
I want to win by such a decisive mandate to be able to actually do the hard things, right?
If you want to be an incremental changer in politics, you can do that by temporarily sitting in a seat with a narrow margin and then it's ping pong when somebody else is in charge of the different view.
It kind of goes incrementally in the other direction.
But if you want to revitalize an actual state or a country, you need a decisive mandate to do it.
And how do you get that?
Well, you have to tap into cultural necessity.
These people have to feel that you can deliver the change that they desperately need.
Like what's happened, I think, not throughout entire American history, but when America is doing well, when poor people can feed themselves and pay their rent, there's enough magic and distraction in this country where they don't need to rebel.
Right.
And that's kind of like the perfect spot for the really wealthy, where they're like, okay, we can get really rich and the poor people aren't going to work.
Exactly.
Right.
There's no, that's like, that's perfect, right?
And then every once in a while, you can see the desperation of the poor because the Luigi Mangione walks behind the healthcare CEO, blows his head off, and then the internet is like, hey, it'd be like that sometimes.
And to me, the reaction was indicative of people being desperate.
A lot of deep-seated frustration.
Yes.
So how do you tap into that desperation?
And I'm going to use this word sell loosely and then sell them a solution to that desperation that I think this is kind of what happened.
And we can get into like what happened with Trump, but I think a lot of people couch their support in Trump with these, like their, how do I, how do I phrase it?
Like they, they try to be noble in their support, right?
Especially on the coasts.
They go, yeah, I want to, I want to stop foreign wars.
You know, I really care about the migration issue.
They don't, right?
Their kid comes home from school and they're like, why am I, I'm a girl, but I think I'm a boy.
And they're like, who the fuck told you that shit, right?
Tired of that.
Yeah.
And I think that it's the cultural issue, but they feel uncomfortable saying that because of public scrutiny.
So they go, we got to stop these wars.
And you're like, well, where are the wars?
They're over there, but we got to stop that.
How can you tab into what Americans are feeling, even if it's not what they're saying?
Like when I saw the reaction of Luigi Mangioni, I was like, oh, Americans are feeling resentment and extreme hostility to the healthcare sector.
I think to government.
Sure.
I think to what else would you say?
I think, I think the almost every major institution would say towards their manner of work, the way that they're actually taught to the idea that you could get ahead through your own hard work.
They're not feeling that.
Through higher education.
Yeah.
Through the debt you take on through higher education.
We've all been part of the world.
How can you get the people?
We're taught that you go to college for four years, you load up yourself with debt and somehow you get a head start in the American dream when it hasn't worked out that way.
I think the first way to admit the failure.
So this is good.
Admit the failure.
This is really good.
This is be honest.
Yeah, but this is really good.
Admitting the failure is very important.
And I think, and to Trump's credit, I think there's a version of this.
And I don't know how much of this is marketing or actual truth, but like admitting the failures of your country.
Like if there is something that we, like the Gulf of Tonkin situation, like we should acknowledge that.
And we'd be like, hey, we did some foul shit, got us into a war.
A lot of people died.
That's bad.
You have every right to have a lack of like a faith and trust in our government.
We want to reinstill that.
And the way we're instilling it is accountability.
We don't gaslight you and be like, yeah, you don't know what you're talking about.
We go, hey, I did some goofy shit.
That's Elon.
Say you did some goofy shit.
Don't go, oh, you guys are making a big deal and nothing, because that's what Democrats did for four years.
Don't be the exact version of the people that you fought back against.
I think that the ability to honestly have the humility to say, here's where we screwed up.
And it's easy to point to the other side's screw-ups.
It's a lot harder on your own.
It's a lot harder, but we can't get our own screw-ups.
But then it's not just not just admitting that failure or the failures where we've gone wrong.
But I believe the right path is not to just stop there because I think there's a risk there.
The risk that I see there is that we fall into the trap then of saying, have we all been screwed over?
You know, our judgment's screwed over.
Yes, we have been screwed over.
Yes.
But if you stop there, then it's like you fall back into the trap of thinking that my fate is somebody else's fault.
100%.
That my plight is somebody else's responsibility.
We took accountability.
Or that's what I think maybe the left did a little bit.
They took all this accountability, which is honorable.
Hey, America was imperfect.
And we're not perfect.
We did some horrible shit.
And then we stopped at that.
Stopped there.
And that's not it.
It's how we fucked up.
How are we going to make it better?
And I don't want the American right to stop there either, which is to say that there's...
Well, the American right is the opposite.
It's we never did anything wrong.
And that's a problem.
It has to be.
That was kind of the old.
There's an older version.
Then there's a newer spin, which is, no, there's other stuff that we're being screwed over by.
We are government screwed us over.
All of which is, much of which is true, right?
But a lot of these systems, the H-1B system is badly broken.
It sucks.
It needs to be gutted.
But don't stop there.
We can't, your fate.
And I'll say this in ways that speak to everybody 360 degrees.
The number one factor that determines whether you achieve your goals is not your race, your religion, your gender, your sexuality, the climate, the weather, or somebody else from another country.
What is it?
Christ.
Is you.
Well, I'm trying to win you, Ohio, bro.
I'm trying my hardest.
I'm really trying my hardest.
Well, I believe that God lives in you.
Right.
And so those two, those two merge.
So do the priests.
And in a certain, and in a certain...
It's like in basketball.
He gives his own alley.
It's like the dunk contest.
It's like bouncing off the back door and taking around.
But go on, go on.
You don't need the guy for you.
It does live in you.
It does live in you.
And so, you know, I mean, this is probably even a really deeper discussion is I do think a revival of that type of conviction in ourselves.
Some of that involves revival of faith.
And I don't think the government should be in charge of doing this at all, but I do think a revival of our self-confidence.
So this is a revival of conviction in ourselves as individuals and as a country.
And even in states like Ohio, where people have fallen into the trap of believing, you know, we're number 38 where people move in and out.
Restoring that pride as an American, as an Ohioan, as a citizen, as a member of a family, revival of conviction in self.
That's what Donald Trump, I think, is doing at the level of the nation.
I mean, people could debate about Greenland or anything else, but the idea of manifest destiny, the idea that we're the pioneers and the explorers, that gives us back some of that self-confidence, that juice of conviction.
That's the second step we got to take is once, acknowledge that there are a lot of factors that have contributed, that were not your own individual level mistakes.
But if we just pause there, you're taught to see yourself as a victim, but to say that, no, we're committed to actually overcoming those barriers at a young age.
So every four-year-old, when he chooses a preschool or his parents choose a preschool for him, is choosing the best possible one.
And if you can't afford it, you have the money from shutting down the bureaucracy that you save the money to put it in the pockets of those parents to choose.
But after that, your fate is in your hands.
And we believe in you because you believe in you.
Real quick.
That's what we need to get to.
So real quick, I think this is really good because a lot of times we get into this like black and white economy.
Like these guys are the bad guys.
These guys are the good guys.
We never listen to each other.
But there is a version where if you're more, I don't even want to use the term centrist, but there's a version where you go, hey, I think it's honorable.
I think it's noble to recognize our failures.
I also think that what we're doing over here, which is shining a light on our successes and what we can do to improve the country.
And it doesn't matter which side.
It's the combination of both of those.
It's acknowledging the failures of the people because the people feel failed, right?
They feel like the government has failed them.
They feel like these institutions have failed them.
Because they have.
Because they have.
Let's acknowledge that.
And then going, we're not going to stop there and let you just complain and whine about all these institutions.
It's good.
We are going to show what's wrong with the institutions and we're going to give suggestions that we think will make it better.
And we believe in our heart they'll make it better and we are going to try to make them better.
I like that because should we expect more of our politicians and our government?
Of course we should, but we should also expect more of ourselves and each other.
And give them all directions.
But give them something to hope for.
Exactly.
And the way we expect more of our government is the government, I believe, has actually been in the way of your success.
It has been a chief obstacle, whether it's a small business with respect to the regulatory state, whether it is overspending on some parts of education without actually allowing you to choose where you go, housing burdens for new construction that raise new costs.
The government has been a burden.
You deserve as a citizen of this country to have that government out of your way so you can achieve the maximum of your own potential.
But after that, the rest falls on us.
And that is a beautiful thing because this is the country that does not constrain you based on your lineage or your genetics to achieve that.
Both of those have to be true.
Because if you just do the first without the second, you're back to victimhood culture.
If you just do the second without the first, you're guessing.
That's true.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're making people feel like their failures are completely.
It's got to be both.
It's got to be both.
And I think that strategy, as you described it right now, it's not a strategy.
It's true.
It's true.
I think it's really relatable.
And to me, like, obviously I'm in maybe a different situation, right?
But I think to somebody who is suffering, who feels like these institutions are not backing them in the way that they need, will then feel, one, validated in their feeling, their frustration, but also feel like they have some hope.
Because I don't want you to be like, hey, you're poor because it's their fault, but good luck being poor.
No.
I want people to be like, hey, listen, upward mobility is difficult for you.
And there are these institutions that have restricted that, the government being one of them.
But we want to fix these things so you can have upward mobility.
And if I'm somebody who needs that, I'm going to go, well, yeah, let's try something because this shit ain't.
That's a good idea I'm a fan of in this spirit.
Because I was going to bring this up earlier.
Gay marriage.
Fixing Upward Mobility00:15:55
Perfect time.
Has nothing to do with this.
Good, okay.
Let's make it short.
Damn it, August.
Fuck, man.
We're almost there.
One day.
One day.
We're going to be a week.
Weekend.
We're going to show our lives when a successful marriage can be.
We've been together for 11 years.
Okay.
Go on.
Go, go.
We've signed the contract.
It's good.
You know how I know on the wife?
Because it's like 16 years.
You know, no, no.
And he's wearing the ring.
So that's actually a fun experiment.
Like, this is two guys that are married to women divorcing their wives, making their wives marry each other, and then we marry each other.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We can be a little bit more.
And see who lasts longer.
It would be great.
It would be great.
They'd be divorced in two years.
We'd be gay in Palm Springs at 90 years old.
I think it would do well on Netflix.
This is all we need.
I love it.
Go, go, go.
We figured that out.
I mean, I get the creature.
Nobody could take that idea, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You can't do that without him.
Feedback will make you gay.
Go, go.
Now you're really killing me now.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry, Ryan.
Christ is gay.
Chris is gay.
Chris is gay in California.
Knock out news.
You know, that's too easy.
We'll leave that for somebody else.
He's knocked himself out.
Okay.
So we're going to go.
I'm going to start with this.
Go, go, go, go.
But an idea earlier, a serious note to this message of economic empowerment.
I haven't talked about this before, but it's an idea that I'm a big fan of.
If you think about in a given, in a given kid's account when they're born, I'm not going to say universal basic income stuff because it deters work, but take the spirit of that in a different direction.
The savings of shutting down a lot of the bureaucracy, you could take a tiny fraction of that and every kid who's born have $10,000 invested fully in the stock market.
They can't touch it until they're 18.
You want to know what the biggest source of income inequalities we can gripe about CEOs or whatever.
It's actually compound interest.
It's compound interest and not compound interest in bonds or in the bank account.
Yeah, compound interest in the stock market.
Yes, you're talking about kids graduating with enough money to not only pay for all of college, but have enough to start their small business.
But I got to stop you for one second just so people can understand.
This is very talking about when you say invest in the stock market, you're talking about it's not welfare to me.
It is no, no, no, no.
In fact, and let me just make the case to people who would disagree with you.
I just want people to understand the concept before you move on.
So when you say invest in the stock market, I think a lot of people immediately go, and I was talking to the guy who started Acorns.
I don't know if you know that accountant.
This is not like a plug for him, but essentially, this is his idea.
It's like we've kind of tricked people into thinking that investing is.
No, no, no.
Investing is putting money in and having compound interest work for you over a long period of time.
A long period of time.
In a diversify basket.
Yes.
So when you invest in the stock market, you're not investing in one company.
And I think that's what a lot of people think.
They go, I should have put money in NVIDIA.
No, that's guessing.
That's gaming.
Yes.
When you invest in the full market, for example, the Vanguard account that you were just talking about.
I'm just using it as a placeholder, right?
You're investing across the market, you put that 10 grand in, and then that 10 grand is compound interest over 20 years.
You have X amount of million dollars.
Yes.
I don't think people really realize what that concept is of compound interest.
And it takes a lot of discipline, right?
Because when that 10 grand turns into 50 and then something happens to your home, you're like, let me take that 50 out and then we put it into the home.
So I don't want to restrict people, but I do want them to understand the power of it.
My parents were financially illiterate.
They didn't know what the fuck that was.
So the difference in inequality at the highest levels is explained by people who are invested broadly in the stock market versus people who are not.
Long periods of time.
It's the long period of time that is the constant.
And the way the math works on the compound interest is like if what is 10 grand over 10 years or 20 years?
You know, I mean, it depends on, you know, if you're talking about a 20% rate of return, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Well, that's by the time you're going to be able to do that.
Let's go 10%.
Pull the spreadsheet.
We'll do that.
We'll do the math.
SP is more than that.
You're talking about compound stock market returns over long periods of time.
You're talking about double-digit returns.
And that multiplies itself.
So a dollar first becomes a dollar and 10 cents, but it's then a dollar and 10 cents times a dollar and 10 cents.
And so you're actually multiplying that whole effect.
Say it doubles every your money doubles every five to seven years.
Something like that.
So 10K when you're five is 20K.
When you're 10, it's 40K.
When you're 15, it's 80K.
When you're 20, it's 160K.
All right, I have a question for you.
This one is near and dear to my heart.
But so my pops has dementia.
Okay.
I know I've seen a bunch of articles about you, obviously, when I was looking you up even last time.
And it seems like there's some criticism.
And I don't know if this is people trying to make you more radioactive.
I don't know what exactly it is about how you made maybe your big first chunk of money.
I don't even know how much money you made.
I know what you're talking about.
Okay.
And this pisses me the hell off because I know how cynical the intentions are of just deceiving and straight up lying to people about it.
And at some point, but about what?
Yeah.
So I'll answer this.
So, so like there's this false allegation that somehow there was an Alzheimer's trial that I made a bunch of money off of that failed.
It's bullshit.
But here's actually the realities.
I think it's usually more important than that.
It's there's a lot in my own business background that informs my worldview and what we're trying to do for the country.
So I started a biotech company.
It was my first company, a major company that I started back in 2014.
Okay.
I'd been an investor.
I worked at a hedge fund in New York.
And it turned out pharma companies are among the more inefficient companies when it comes to allocating their money to developing drugs.
A bunch of pharma companies tend to get out of a therapeutic area at the exact same time.
So, when they throw in their towel, they all kind of follow the fad and go in a new direction.
And there's a lot of reasons why, but they all kind of throw the towel in the same areas at the same time that go from being in favor to out of favor.
So, my premise was to start a biotech company that took a lot of the projects that they had discarded after spending a lot of money on them.
Find the ones that they discarded, not necessarily because they were bad drugs.
No, because it wasn't a trend.
Yeah, because it was a trend.
And they had capital allocation issues that they had to allocate in a new direction.
And see if you could make one of those drugs work.
Exactly.
And so, some of these areas were women's health and urology.
Alzheimer's was one of these areas for sure, where 99.7% of drugs ever tested for Alzheimer's disease had failed.
A bunch of these companies are just like throw in the towel.
So, I set up a company called Royvent, and the whole model was: A, you give skin in the game to the scientists who actually developed these drugs.
They don't get that at big pharma.
And B, focus on the areas where pharma had abandoned them.
A subset of these are going to work.
Not all of them are going to work.
Biotech is a game of, it's a numbers game.
But enough are going to work to be able to create a successful company.
And I was convinced of that based on what I had seen.
So I started the company.
We developed a number of drugs in these subsidiaries.
So each of those units, one was focused on Alzheimer's.
One was focused on women's health.
One was focused on dermatology and so forth.
And the way I made my money was that five of those drugs that we developed through phase three and successful phase three studies went on to become FDA approved.
And the one I'm probably most proud of is a drug actually for the smallest of those markets, but there is a disease where 20 kids a year are born with this genetic condition, where 100% of those kids die by the age of three if they're untreated.
And because of the therapy that we led all the way to get through approval in phase three, about 70% of those kids live lives of normal duration.
Another for endometriosis, for uterine fibroids, women's health conditions that were generally ignored by pharma.
So those were the areas that we had success.
Five out of how many, you think?
There's many more that are still in development, but there were probably 20 drugs that we've put into development, 20 plus, many of which are still in the development process.
But five of them ended up going through phase three, successful, sold those rights to other pharma companies, generated billions of dollars in value for shareholders.
And the company I founded, Roivant, is like a $8, $9, $10 billion publicly traded company on the NASDAQ today that's returned billions of dollars to shareholders.
And I'm proud of that.
And it was a very cool company that bucked the trend of pharma.
And a lot of people in big pharma didn't like it because it in some ways made traditional big pharma look bad because it called the bluff on a lot of these areas they were ignoring.
And that's how the company succeeded.
Oh, so you think there's like a smear campaign?
You know, I think, well, I think initially a lot of pharmas did not like Roivant's existence.
That's definitely true.
But when I entered the realm of politics, which is the realm of smear campaigns, there was definitely a concerted effort to exploit one of the drugs that failed.
That's the Alzheimer's drug.
That's the Alzheimer's drug.
So we had a subsidiary called Aximan.
It was developing a drug for Alzheimer's disease.
So Roivant is.
Roivant's the parent company.
Subsidiary, it is.
And it's got a bunch of subsidiaries.
MyEvent is one, took it public, ended up being sold for a big premium.
Immune event took it public, trades at a big premium to where it went public.
Eurovant, a bunch of them.
It was acquired for big premium.
Aximant was one of those companies, which is a subsidiary of Roivant that developed this drug for Alzheimer's disease.
And the shares traded on the stock exchange, whole nine yards.
That drug eventually failed.
And so the stock price was high, and then it went down.
It was low.
And the false smear campaign against me is somehow I made money off of selling shares of Aximan.
It's false.
So you didn't make any money?
100% false.
Neither Roivant, the parent company, nor I sold a single share.
Though we could have.
It would have been perfectly legitimate.
Many biotech CEOs or many biotech companies do that to diversify.
It turns out that I just didn't do that because I felt like we wanted to actually see it through and take the same risk that the investors actually took in Accident.
No good deed goes unpunished in the public in the realm of political smearing.
Not a single share did we sell and rode that big loss all the way down in a way that actually was tough.
Like it was actually a tough early failure to go through.
And the way the company eventually succeeded was through these other successes.
And the thing I learned is that once you enter the realm of politics, people do not give a crap about what the actual truth is.
They have their agenda and they're going to use it to smear you.
And I think one of the things I've learned from watching Donald Trump, frankly, is that when people are that false and that malicious against you, at some point you got to actually take action.
I mean, what he did with ABC, settled the defamation suit.
At a certain point, you can't just roll over with this BS.
My initial approach was like, this is so garbage.
I'm just going to ignore this stuff.
But at a certain point, when it's that malicious, yeah.
Because I held you in perspective.
Just roll over and take it.
Or at least the articles I've written on it is, and I guess that there are people that are speculating on these drugs, right?
So you can develop a drug and when it's in between phase two or phase three or phase four, whatever it is, you can speculate, meaning you can invest in the company.
That's exactly right.
And then a lot of times these companies will spike in between phase two and three.
Right.
But it has to go through phase four in order to actually go through phase three to be approved or whatever.
Whatever it is.
So in order to make money, they're inspired by greed.
They don't really want to help Alzheimer's.
They're like, oh, I think this is a profitable endeavor.
Not everybody, but I imagine.
The stock traders.
It doesn't matter.
They're just looking at letters and, oh, this looks like it's got a chance.
They try to get in early because if it does pass phase three, if they're getting in phase one or phase two and then it passes phase three, they're going to get a 20x, 100x.
They'll take that risk and so in one big success pays for it.
That's exactly.
But the identification model I think was, is that you made money and then sold shares after it looked promising.
That was, that's the false allegation.
Right.
And they even said you put your mom in to like get it approved or something.
Oh my God.
The level of garbage about this.
Yeah.
So my mom was a geriatric psychiatrist who was in retirement, treated patients with Alzambras disease her whole entire career and had experience in the drug development space as well.
And she was one of, I'm starting the business from scratch.
I'm going to find the smartest people I can.
She kindly came out of retirement.
She didn't sell a single share or make money off that failure either.
But the thing that people make, she wasn't a key employee at the company, but she was one of the.
The narrative is beautiful.
It fails over here.
You bring your mom in, go, hey, make sure it passes.
It passes.
You guys make it.
And it actually, it actually, the trial failed.
Well, it failed at three.
It failed at three.
It passed it too.
We un-licensed it after phase two from GSK.
Oh, so it never even did anything.
It's just like the level of garbage on this is kind of eye-opening, actually.
People have, you know, if they have an objective, they could care less about what the actual truth is.
But what's the narrative they could sell?
And you know what?
Like I said earlier, I'm not going to be a victim about it.
You can stand up and actually explain it to people.
People actually understand the truth.
The truth is like a lion.
You can't hold it back.
It's going to be held back for so long.
Well, I'm glad you explained it to me because I had a perspective.
But this is not just politics.
This is everything.
I think when there's successful people that potentially could be in powerful positions, maybe they're not even powerful, you're going to create these narratives.
And if the narrative feels good and justifies those people's pain or their bitterness, they're going to run with it.
I mean, you see this all the time.
No, it's one of the things I kind of am keen to do more, frankly.
I was always uncomfortable sort of talking about my own successes in detail.
But one of the things I've realized is, A, it can actually give a lot of people inspiration.
And B, for people to actually get to know you, I think actually one of the things I would have done differently again in my presidential campaign is to actually talk more about my business background and the tough decisions we had to make at every step.
Like that Alzheimer's failure, that was tough.
It's probably the toughest career experience I've been through because it was still relatively early in the life of the company.
The other projects were still well on their way.
It actually strengthened in some ways the resolve of the people who work for the company to say, you know what, we did the right thing.
We did it right at every step of the way.
Royvent, the parent company, could have sold those shares when it was flying high.
Didn't sell a single share because we were with their with our conviction.
Even though that would have been the normal thing to do, we didn't do it.
But to say that that's how we're actually going to carry out each of these projects and then the rest succeeded, those successes were actually far more meaningful in light of actually having gone through.
Because the narrative is that's how you made all your money.
And in reality, that's how you lost all your money.
Exactly.
And I lost a ton on paper a lot of times.
And then you come all the way back.
Like, if you're going to get blamed for it anyway, you know what?
In retrospect, that was like what a lot of my friends were close to me said, you might as well have just done it.
That would have been perfectly legal and acceptable.
It might not have been what I felt like was the right thing to do.
This happened all the time.
What I'm insane is that having not done it, this will be the case.
And that's what most normal biotech CEOs could do, diversify a little bit or whatever.
And so the thing they pick on is Roivant, which is the parent company, just for completeness, Roivant, the parent company, was developing a bunch of these drugs.
We did a financing at Roivant, the parent, where there was so much demand in one of our financings.
It was $500 million financing, but more investors wanted to put in money.
The only way we were able to accommodate that capital was the investors in Roivant selling a certain number of shares in Roivan.
I was to the order of about 30 million bucks at that point in time.
Those shares that I sold then are worth way more today than they were back then.
So I actually lost, you know, I actually lost financial value by doing it, but that's the hook of a totally different company that you sold shares in that people will say he made money off of an Alzheimer's failure, which is, I mean, it's just, it's an eye-opening lesson to how dirty American politics works.
Selling Roivant Shares00:03:33
Yeah.
But it's also a lesson for me to say, you know what, I think you got to actually, people don't just want to know about your policies.
I think they want to understand the struggles you've been through.
And I've sometimes been personally natural in talking about it.
We don't vote for the policy.
We vote for the person.
Yeah.
And the exact policy secondarily.
And a lot of those, a lot of those experiences help shape me to who I am, to believe that, yeah, you're going to go through hardship from time to time.
You get through that by actually, you know, mostly coming out stronger on the other side of it.
If you can, I think addressing like, I think addressing like blatant lies is important.
It's something that we go through all the time because, you know, people make these things up that are just like so absurd.
You're like, there's nobody stupid enough to actually believe this.
But then you see narratives take on.
Totally.
And then you're like, that was my wish.
It's just like, okay, this is so, this is so garbage.
Yeah.
And then they start making up other stuff.
They say, well, the only drug he got approved was a trans drug.
Oh, no, I'm seeing it.
And it's just like, okay, I don't know what the hell that's about.
What's the transfer?
There's no trans drug.
I just like, I'd say.
We should have meant that though.
But it's like, it's at a level of insanity.
I think there's one drug that was approved for prostate cancer and dimitriosis and uterine fibroids and works on certain hormones in the body.
Somebody should be sued for malpractice if they're giving a drug that's only approved for that for some other thing.
And I have no, it would be ridiculous to think that it was.
But people say stuff and then I know from the emails that I get to say, oh, we're going to ask you these inquiries.
It's like, where are these people getting this stuff?
But at a certain point, you know what?
You got to actually just, I want to actually just stand for what's true.
I was putting out my special.
This is the last special I was going to do a special with the streamer and then they didn't want me to say certain things.
And I was like, all right, well, can I buy it back?
And then put it out myself.
And I put it out myself and I sold it myself.
And then as I'm selling it, I at one point tell people, there's like video this.
I'm like, guys, if you can't afford it, just feel it.
It'll be on the internet somewhere.
You can just do that.
That's totally fine.
And then if you can't figure out how to illegally stream it, I'll have it up on YouTube in the future.
This is me telling people, like, if you can't afford it, just go take it.
And if that doesn't work, it's going to be up on YouTube.
And then the special did really well.
And I guess people spun this narrative that like, oh, you made us buy it.
And then a few weeks later, you put it on the internet.
And in my mind, I'm like, every movie that comes out eventually is on TV.
Totally.
Like every UFC fight I watch is eventually on YouTube.
I'm like, I don't think I'm doing anything different than I, and I told the, but the narrative is he took our money and then he went with it.
And I don't, and I don't address it because I'm like, well, there's nobody that could believe this because I literally said verbatim on the podcast, like, just go take it and then eventually be there.
But it doesn't matter.
I feel the same way, man.
If people want to see you totally come down.
And I'm sure there are people who didn't hear me say that and then they felt tricky.
And for those people, I feel genuinely bad.
I'm like, now that fucking sucks because you supported me.
And then maybe you feel like I tried to do something.
But it's one of those things where there are people that they want to see you fail and they will, maybe they're not creating narratives, but they will believe a narrative that makes you look bad because it validates the way they feel.
I said about human beings.
And that is a huge.
And that is unfortunately something that you have to deal with with success.
Totally.
That's the cost of success.
And it's worth paying the price because.
I agree.
And the flip side is you can't, you know, just sit here and the other thing is to line up.
How much do you address and then how much do you...
Validating Smears And Narratives00:03:38
Yeah.
And there's, exactly.
I mean, at some point, you're validating.
I mean, to me, at a certain point, like to be able to deign to this level and say that, okay, I'm going to like legitimize this type of smear by engaging with it.
But on the other hand, it sticks.
And so you got to, you know, I think the best solution is, and I think I'm going to be better about this in the next phase of my political life is also just sharing more about my own personal journey just as a human being.
I mean, that's validating for me in my career.
Because that was something where I thought about you and I was like, and it's deeply personal to me because of my father.
And I'm like, ah, did he do some kind of tricky thing?
He was saying super deeply personal to me too.
Cause I think the whole thing was pharma had decided this is an area that's supposed to be not touched anymore.
It's too risky.
And actually, it is deeply personal to me.
My grandmother's sister died of Alzheimer's disease.
My mom spent years cutting her teeth in the nursing homes in Southwest Ohio where I would actually go to many of those nursing homes, play the piano for people who are in nursing homes suffering from Alzheimer's.
It's like an important area for me, which is part of why we took it on.
And it was a super bruising experience to then take all of that risk, put yourself out there and fail.
But the idea then that there's like an allegation that there was some kind of financial gain from it is just doubly double frustrating.
It's a salt on a wound.
Yeah.
Chips away and trust it.
And then people, you don't know, you know, maybe people have won't ask you about it, but then they're thinking about it.
They're thinking about it when in fact, yeah, exactly.
Is it a doubt in the back of somebody's mind?
Because both sides, we have a freak.
We got the modern economy.
Now you can talk to people.
Maybe that's the answer you do it.
But you said, so you've been around Trump and you learned from him and you saw how he fought with AAC.
Who are you fighting against?
Yeah, on the laws.
I think it's actually, you know, I would have never, I would have never contemplated doing it just because I want to do productive things.
And like, why are we going to, why are we going to, you know, fight some sort of side battle?
Such blatantness.
It turns out that if somebody says something that is false, something that is damaging, and they should have known was true or had good reason to know was true and is doing it maliciously anyway, that there's actually hard law that says they can't do that.
And so, not even for the money of it, but for the justice of it, I kind of have leaned in the direction that's just the right way to go.
Name names.
Oh, I'm not for the money.
I came to it quite recently.
And the reason is, the reason is people don't bring the why did they bring this stuff up during a Republican primary only.
And then again, they were mad about the comments I made on X about American excellence.
And suddenly, suddenly that issue comes back up.
Absolutely.
You know, suddenly randomly comes back.
Oh, it had nothing to do with the fact that you didn't like what I had to say.
And there was a coordinated response to that.
And so it comes from a malicious place.
And so at a certain point, at a certain point, you just can't roll over and take it.
This will plague you.
Like, you'll be in a debate and it'll get brought up again.
Oh, it's not going to happen.
Oh, that ain't going to.
And we're going to make sure that's not going to happen.
And for you to be like, this was settled in a court of law.
Yeah.
It's done.
And it's absolutely, here's the hard truth.
Here's the facts disputed.
And if not, bear the consequences.
That's the way I look at it.
Who?
Yeah, we need names, bro.
Oh, you know what?
A lot of these people, I don't even know who these people are.
I've never heard of these people, but the stuff that sticks, yeah, I think we're going to pick an example.
We'll pick a good example.
We'll pick a good example.
I like that.
Yeah.
Soros.
Is it Soros?
I think a lot of this comes, not even necessarily from the left.
Really?
Yeah.
Some of it does.
But some of it comes from other unexpected corners as well.
Really?
Courage To Stop Rolling Over00:10:16
Paul.
Sounds like you got a lot of people.
JD is a self-interested.
Explain how you're going to be able to get internet trolls.
Internet trolls, man.
Regardless, I don't believe in whining.
I believe in winning.
There we go.
Let's go.
Winning is the way to go.
Absolutely, man.
All right.
We're going to take a break for a second.
Problem is, the people who are able to participate in that right now are the ones who have excess capital that, in the short run, can stomach the risk of the market volatility.
That is, if you wanted to pick, there's many sources of American inequality, but if you wanted to get to the root of it, you pick one thing, it's compound interest.
That's the ballgame.
So actually, you have a generation of people who don't participate in that who end up being skeptical of capitalism.
So in a certain sense, what you're doing here is you are cultivating a generation of Americans who win through capitalism.
So when they graduate at the age of 18, compound interest through the success of the stock market and capitalism is no longer a source of bruised salt on a wound of envy of somebody else's success, but the success that allowed you to have a quarter million dollar nest egg to be able to get a head start in the American people.
And they believe in America.
It does not take a lot of money.
I mean, in terms of, we're talking about percentage of the federal budget, percentage of savings of waste from the federal budget invested in this tiny.
It's like it's like infinitesimally small fraction.
But then you'll have a bunch of loan shark businesses like, oh, access your money now with this huge interest rate.
And when you turn 18, you sign up.
I think you shouldn't be able to do that.
So I think, and here, I'm a libertarian generally with libertarian-oriented instincts when it comes to adults.
Kids are not the same as adults.
So if you put that in the bank account of a kid at four months old or at one month old or on the day of his birth, it has to be fully invested in the diversified stock market over a period of 18 years.
When he's 18 years old, he gets it out.
I would make it tax-free.
That is a down payment on preserving American capitalism.
So I have a lot of ideas like this.
But it's kind of responsive to your question.
But real quick, real quick, it's not just an investment in capital.
And by the way, it's not even my idea.
This is, I think other people have had these ideas.
But what we really need is people in office who are willing to think outside the box to be able to advance a vision for the good of all Americans, embracing capitalism rather than, because what happens then when the kid graduates at 18, but the other guy had his parents contributing to his Roth IRA, 15 grand a year, that graduates with that versus not, he's going to have hostility towards capitalism.
Of course, he's going to be jaded.
He's naturally envious.
And then, you know, I'm not saying that there isn't CE overpay because we talked about the structural reasons why there is, but then you look at that as the root cause of the problem rather than the fact that I actually, if I was given the same economic opportunity, could have started my own business at 22, but I can't.
And now I'm pissed at capitalism.
If you passed away, I thought it would be an actual Patriot Act.
You would be creating people who believe in that.
Let's repeal the old one.
Trust me, the other Patriot Act.
Oh, America gave me $80,000, $150,000 by the time I was 18.
Capitalism is great.
I trust the stock market.
It's not out to get me.
America is great.
I believe in this system.
There's one group called Invest America.
I think I've been advocating for this.
There have been others that have been advocating for it.
It's not, one of the things I've learned as well is that intelligence is not our problem in the country.
Actually, most people in America have common sense.
What we lack is courage, actually.
I think we just lack.
What we lack is courage.
I didn't even think that was coming.
I think it's a pussy.
No, no, no, no.
Firstly, I'm not a bunch of pussies, rather than a lot of people.
No, no, no, no.
It's just education.
We don't understand what these systems are.
So how can they work for us?
I don't think politics.
I don't say for politics.
I don't say politicians.
I think the...
Oh, that's good to clarify because I interpreted.
I thought you were talking about it.
No, no, no, no.
I'm talking about politics.
I'm talking about what we lack in the class that I'm in right now of people with policies.
It's not that they don't know the stuff that I'm telling you.
But did you see how he interpreted it and how I interpret it?
I interpret it immediately as we didn't have the courage to put our money in there.
No, What I'm talking about is we as politicians lack people in the political class lack the courage to be able to do what's outside the box as a career.
Because you want to get elected every four years, not you, but they want to get re-elected.
I actually think this happens to be a pretty good electoral strategy, probably.
It will over 20 years.
Yeah, over 20.
That's the same compounding period.
But to what you were saying is it's not only investment in the stock market, it's not only an investment in capitalism.
It is an investment in America.
You want to see America flourish because when America is flourishing and American businesses are flourishing, your money is flourishing.
You get to watch your money work for you.
Totally.
And again, I didn't understand this.
When I had my daughter, my wife and I were sitting with our business manager and they started telling us about these different things that we could do.
We could like put our money in for my daughter's college fund now.
And you get tax deductible.
Exactly.
So that's what I was referring to.
People in the Roth IRA account.
That kid is actually graduating with some of the six-figure payday.
And there's so many people that don't know that.
And it's tax-free growth.
Exactly.
I'm unaware of that.
It's available for the everyday American.
And in fact, if you did that for every kid in the country, there's no loss to the country.
I don't think that the taxpayer burden, you don't have to increase taxes an iota in order to pull this off.
You would find more than a multiple of this in just government waste, excess cutting bureaucracy at the level I want.
And then you get to 18 years old and you got people saying that, you know what, this capitalism thing isn't so bad, actually.
And, you know, somebody else might have more money than me because then they use that money to start some company or whatever.
And I'm happy for that because that still served me as a customer, but I'm bought in.
I've got skin in the game.
I think that that's far better than, I'm not being critical of other people's, you know, universal basic income.
I get the instinct.
But that creates that creates disincentives to work.
This is where it's at.
Because there, you're still in the income category where you're talking about being an owner.
This is true.
You're capitalist, an asset.
Make it tax-free on the growth.
And then by that point, when you show up, you are a capitalist in the sense that, not just a theoretical sense of it, I'm a capitalist when I'm 18 years old because the country that I grew up into through its economic success was not a source of my envy, but my participation.
It's also education by participation and inertia.
Right.
When you see your money working, you go, I'd like to continue this.
And you start dying.
I better understand that.
And I can do the math that tells me that because I started getting to a good preschool that taught me how to do math at a younger age rather than get an eighth grade.
Or even taught you how finances work.
I went to good schools.
Pretty good.
Like, I was never taught this at all.
Totally.
So I think that this is achievable.
This is not, none of what we're talking about here is rocket science.
What this requires from a political class is it's not that they lack the intelligence or the ideas.
They lack the courage, which is what brings me back to why am I in this game.
I do think that people who are willing to lose, if necessary, you're willing to lose means that's not your career.
It's not your livelihood.
But people who are willing to lose on the power of their ideas can then still stand for their ideas.
That's what I think is going to actually be.
A career politician.
Yeah, career politicians won't.
And this one's when he's like Donald Trump, by the way.
He's not a career politician.
Say what you will about his first week, which I think was a great first week.
He didn't use the usual assembly line model.
He came in and did a lot of stuff in that first week in a way that you wouldn't see from a career politician.
When you think about a president or a governor, whatever it is, executives who lead, you want them at this moment in our country's history in particular to be people who are willing to break things when necessary, as long as the mission is the betterment of the whole country.
Included all of us in the success of America.
And I think right now, the average person, the middle-class person, and the people who are impoverished do not feel included in the success of the economy or the country.
They feel left out.
And that might be educationally.
It might be strictly just their inability to invest in understanding what it is.
But that education of those systems, how they work.
And I also think there's a little part of it where it's like, if these funds are incentivizing people to gamble, it's not really investing.
They might be doing it because they're making fees per transaction.
Oh, yeah.
Get ready.
Fees per transaction.
You're tricking us into putting in the SP 500 or whatever index it is at the lowest possible fee.
Don't transact and then just let it sit.
But they're not incentivized.
These hedge funds are making money per transaction.
They want us to make these brokerages or whatever.
It doesn't.
But can you explain how that works?
Because I think that's very important.
I do think that, and I've done this in other scenarios, but the other conversation we were having, because that's just kind of the mood I'm in right now, not just today, but like in this period right now, is I've written extensive books and articles about how the system is rigged and all that stuff.
And I could do more of that.
But I feel like right now, what we need is to make sure we don't just, as we were talking about earlier, stop there, because then we're just victims.
I want to just talk about actually what we're going to do to no, we have the solution.
What I'm saying is why we're in the place.
Now, here's what happens.
A lot of money managers, they'll manage your money, but they take the fee.
If you take the fee out, that reduces the compound interest.
The fee is almost a negative compounding effect over time, too.
And then you get the monkey to the dart boards analogy where they've done this experiment where you have monkeys throwing darts at a board of stocks and often outperform half of these wealth managers that are out there because the wealth manager started the fee while the monkey doesn't.
So in many ways, I do think that people are set up to be screwed by the facts they were never given.
And I think that sunshine and education is a great, is a great toolkit.
But I do think that there is a role here at a young age where I'm not a government redistributionist guy, welfare state guy, but here for every kid born in the country, this is behind this.
If every kid born in the country is bought into the stock market and compounds at the diversified rate over the course of 18 years, we're good.
And by the way, if you get up at 10%, it becomes $55,000 at 10%, which is kind of conservative.
Also, like in 18 years.
So imagine you got 55,000 when you're 18.
I think you could make a case for whatever you want.
I think you could make a case for that number being even $15,000 or $30,000.
Could well.
It could well.
Starting off.
I'm being conservative.
you're talking about you're talking about people who are like straight up wealthy when they graduate well off enough still hungry enough to be able to use that and start their own business or invest further on their own account when they're 18.
Or pay for college and not be tired of debt.
And then some.
Investing In Every Kid00:03:46
We're talking about this model.
You're going to pay for college and then some.
And for some people, and college is not the right solution for everybody, especially by that point, you have a skill set.
You might be able to start your own small business, be in a trade or whatever it is.
Every person is able to do the thing that we want in America, which is to realize your own God-given gifts.
They're not the same God-given gifts, by the way.
We all have different God-given gifts.
That's true diversity.
But the country that we know and love is the country that recognizes that difference, stops trying to pretend that we all have the same skills and everything because we don't.
That's a beautiful thing, actually.
It's not a bad thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
But to say that we are the country where no matter what those unique God-given gifts are, you get to achieve the maximum of that potential without really any man-made obstacle standing in your way.
These are the kinds of solutions starting with early education, early economic empowerment.
The family one, I will grant you, I didn't give you a fully satisfactory solution because there's no government-ordained solution there.
But basic issues that I believe we can actually tackle, right?
And I don't think that our political class has taken a great interest in addressing over the course of the last year.
Because they're not incentivized to do it either.
No.
And a lot of it's not the federal level.
And I don't mean to be, you know, pitching my own book here about what I'm doing next, but I do think the action is a lot of the action there is at the level of the states.
I would love to see what's possible.
I would love to see this in Ohio.
Yeah.
And I would love to see it.
This is why I think the Ohio thing is actually a really good example for you because taking the reins of the United States of America before this is proven on any sort of like statewide level, we're in citywide level, I think is very terrifying for people, especially it exists in this bureaucratic system.
But proving it in a place, right?
This is why I was care about it.
But prove it there, and then all of a sudden everybody else.
I just want to pick up on that for a second because right now, you guys are, we're all, you know, millennial or whatever, but Gen Z, the phrase, that's so Ohio, is like a butt of a joke.
Yeah, it's a meme.
It's a meme.
And I think that's sad, actually.
I want the next time that we send a mission to the moon or to Mars that is successful.
What is it?
Like, that's so Ohio.
That's what I want to say.
So what is an example they use now?
Like, I want to say that.
Oh, like something super lame, like something super lame and boring.
They'll be like, oh, that's so Ohio.
Like that's like an online, online Gen Z meme type expression.
Are you going to be able to do that?
I want to actually, when we do excellent boundary breaking things as a country, I want to go back to saying that's so Ohio for that.
Because by the way, in the 1950s, people don't realize this.
Five of the top 15 cities that were the wealthiest cities in the country, five of the top 15 were in Ohio.
Toledo was the glass capital.
Akron was the rubber capital.
Youngstown and Cleveland were the steel capital.
From Ohio?
If you have some roots in Ohio North in Cleveland, in the Cleveland area, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong.
I mean, this was, Cincinnati was the consumer products capital.
Dayton was the compute power capital for much of the Industrial Revolution.
That wasn't that long ago.
That was in the 1950s.
And I think that there's a risk to saying that, okay, we want to go back to that.
Well, the reality is we're probably not going to be the rubber capital or the glass capital again.
But it could be the AI data capital, could be the capital of biotech, could be the capital of aerospace and space exploration, could be the capital of semiconductor production, defense industrial base in the country of producing the bleeding edge of technology that Silicon Valley might have in bits, what we can create in atoms, nuclear energy, fusion, where the United States has an opportunity to lead.
There's no reason that the heartland of the country that was a pioneer state, that was a frontier state, that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution, that that has to somehow be relegated to yesterday.
I think there is an opportunity to say from the center of the country, you show what was possible in Silicon Valley for the last 20 years.
Independence From Billionaire Pawns00:15:31
Just be careful.
We're doing it for the next 20.
Be careful running on that because you're talking about all these institutions that aren't existing in Ohio.
So to people who are living there, it's like, oh, he's going to bring a bunch of stuff that I'm not involved in.
So he must be bringing workers and people who don't live.
We want to do it from, we want to leverage.
And why do I favor Ohio doing it?
It's not random.
It's the country.
It's the state in the country that still has access to some of the best waterways.
60% of the population of North America is literally within a one-day drive of Ohio, access to the same talent base that I think we've always had, which is a great talent base.
I think there's a big concern about AI taking jobs.
I think we could actually use AI to make jobs instead of take jobs.
Everyone's focused on the algorithms and the computing power, which by the way the DeepSeek thing was itself a calling a bluff on.
But what we haven't focused enough on is training people on how to use AI actually in different domains.
Training human beings on how to use AI, we're not doing enough.
We're training the AI, but we're not training humans on how to use AI.
I think Ohio could be the leading state in the country if you have the kind of governor, the kind of leadership who makes that a priority.
And then you show the rest of the country what's actually possible.
Are you going to take donations from major corporations when you run?
You know, I did not, well, first of all, corporations, there's a whole complicated, I got to, I got to familiarize myself with the whole campaign finance landscape.
So, you know, how we do this, but I'm definitely not going to be bought and paid for.
I mean, since I've lived the American dream.
Don't they all say that?
Well, I think a lot of people, I don't blame a lot of people who can't do it differently, right?
So I'm not going to blame somebody who's in a different position.
Our family has been blessed to live the American dream.
And I'm happy to talk about my business background and story a little bit too.
What's that?
Net worth.
Just tell him.
Just put him in some.
Put him in this poor place.
But I'm like a paltry billionaire, right?
There's many people have billions.
Put him in his poor place.
I know what this motherfucker's worth.
There's many people have billions.
I just have billion.
I'm like a poor billionaire.
I'm like a poor billionaire.
I'm 39 years old.
My wife has lived the American dream.
Her focus was never financial, but she saves lives every day at the Ohio State Cancer Hospital.
This country has allowed us to have independence from a system of being somebody else's pawn.
And so it just wouldn't make sense, right?
Even when I ran for U.S. president, we took the money, we took over 30 million bucks out of our bank account and put it in the campaign, which gave me the ability to speak my mind freely.
And for better or worse, sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad, electorally speaking, but I think it's always good as a leader.
And so one of the things I learned through that process, though, is you don't want to be, you don't want to just be like taking, you want to have impact.
Whatever allows you to maximally have impact.
And so if I was to have won the presidential race, even that $30 million that I put in was a paltry sum to the super PACs that supported the other candidates.
I beat out a lot of governors and former senators, but I ended up fourth.
If you're talking about the difference between the people who are number two or number three, a lot more super PAC spending made the difference.
And so my view is people get elected.
Yeah.
I'm not going to be beholden to you.
Those people are going to be like, no, we don't want you doing this.
I'm not going to be beholden to anybody.
And actually in Ohio, in Ohio, there's a bit of a culture of a little bit of a lot of states have this pay-to-play culture.
I think you got to end that if you got to actually serve the actual people.
So how can you raise money and end it?
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, you don't, you don't make promises to people.
Well, why would I do that?
Exactly.
If you believe in my vision, come aboard.
And if not, don't.
So then what if you don't get that money?
What do you do?
First of all, at least we're backstopped and blessed.
As I told you, what we did with my presidential campaign.
And the second is the way I look at it is it's my job to deliver the message.
And if that's going to be a winning message, that's going to be the job of people who want to support us.
Grassroots donations, by the way, were a great way, a great experience we had in the presidential campaign.
I think we probably had more $1 donors than anybody who would been in a similar position.
$1 donors, but it actually sends a message of a bottom-up grassroots version of it.
So you don't want people who are beholden.
You can't afford to have that.
I think it's one of the things that Donald Trump did this time around, which is pretty smart, is he's not beholden.
He's a billionaire.
But if people want to support him, he wasn't saying no either.
So I think that you want to change the country.
Be at once not just living in your own echo chamber and satisfying yourself and patting yourself on the back for doing what made you feel like you were sending the right virtue signal, but at the same time, stay true to your principles at the same time, too.
So I think that's the way I think about it.
You got to focus on impact.
Trump got a lot of money from Elon.
Do you feel like that's maybe a conflict of interest of the amount of influence Elon has?
So I think one of the things that makes...
So I think the thing, what do you mean?
What's a good question?
Yeah, yeah, because it is.
He is in a shy way.
So my view is I think the best you're going to get in this country is you've got somebody who is independent of that system.
Donald Trump is independent of that system.
He won in 2016 with effectively an FU to the system that tried to stop him.
And that's what the people viewed as the attractive quality put him there.
He's a multi-billionaire, right?
So he doesn't need that money.
He really is.
I mean, there's no doubt about it in terms of where he is today.
And so I think that's all else equal a good thing.
Now, do I prefer a system?
I'll tell you what my ideal state is.
I would love a system in which the influence of mega money on American politics was virtually non-existent.
Mega money, right?
Small dollar donations I like, but I would love that system.
That's not the system we live in today.
It's not.
And you have George Soros, you have a bunch of other people on the left that, by the way, they used to say the same thing in 2010.
Corporations are not people.
Citizens United.
We don't want that until we got the Soros checks and then we're not going to worry about that any longer.
And, you know, I think that would I rather have a check and balance in that system than not?
Yeah.
If both sides play the same game, it kind of negates itself out, which is kind of interesting as a way to look at it.
And in many ways, one of the things we've seen, and this should be encouraging, is the people, we, the people at our best, are able to still see through it.
So if you look at Michael Bloomberg, right?
Yeah.
He tried to run for U.S. president spending like boatloads of money.
It just, it like just didn't work, actually.
You have candidates even this last time around that have had boatloads of money try to buy them.
You're never going to, you're never going to, a turd is always going to weigh more than the money that could lift it.
Okay.
But money.
So I think both sides doesn't really cancel tuts out.
It's just the corporations don't have all the power and the people don't.
Would I rather, would I rather have a check and balance?
I would rather have at least competitive forces that are 360 degrees.
But the ideal state, would our ideal state one be one in which the influence of money on electoral politics was non-existent?
Yeah.
I think that'd be an ideal state.
But wouldn't that put billionaires in a more advantageous position because then they could fund their own campaigns.
We could talk, I mean, if you want, I do think that it would, but at least they're not bought and paid for by somebody else.
Somebody can see that.
Right.
Right.
Bought and paid for it by yourself.
Yeah.
So anyway, I think that, I think that where I am, though, is also pragmatically looking at this.
Free speech is important in the country.
You want people to be able to express themselves.
And then you could say that, oh, if they don't fund the candidate directly, they can fund other causes.
I don't think that's the biggest problem in the country right now.
If you've got checks and balances in a lot of different directions, yeah, most billionaires in this country are not on the same side of most issues, right?
You've got billionaires who are on different sides of a lot of different issues.
I think that that's okay.
I think that that's okay.
It's not the fight.
It's not the next fight I'm going to pick.
It's not the next crusade on a problem to solve.
The next crusade I'm on a problem to solve is restore the American dream.
Actually, ensure that the best person is able to get the job through an actual meritocracy, restoring the idea that through your own hard work and dedication, you're able to get a good education and get ahead in this country, restore the center of the country being a place where we have the bleeding edge of innovation in America.
That's where my next fight is.
And yeah, you're right.
You don't want people who are going to be instruments for special corporate interests.
Being independently successful allows you to have that independence.
At some point in the distant future, is that system itself going to be changed?
One might hope so.
But in the meantime, I think you got pretty good checks and balances across the board where you got different moneyed interests with different competing influences.
I think that's the biggest problem involved.
Yeah.
I think that's why everything moves so slow because they want to pass something and then they have to speak to their donors.
Like, is it okay for me to pass this?
Yeah.
So look, I think that's when nothing happens.
You're not wrong.
But I do think that you got to pick what you're going to pick as your next battle to change.
And as a governor of one state, you're not going to change that.
I'll tell you that, right?
So at the level of a political culture overall, at the level of a nation, could that be the stuff of an actual political reawakening in our country at some point in time?
It could be.
But I think right now, there's a much more achievable mission that I'm actually pretty optimistic about.
Is there a state?
I always tell you what I believe I can do.
Everything we've talked about so far, I think I can do.
I think we can help do it at the state of Ohio set an example for the rest of the country.
And what we might aspire to, I'm not going to make a false promise on, but you bring up a good point.
Gotcha.
Is there a state that you've seen implement certain changes?
And they don't have to be holistically in the way that you're talking about, but certain changes that have had positive effects.
And you've gone, wow, it is possible.
Is there a state, even on like a small level?
Because we can point at all the poor decisions and how they've negatively impacted states, but I don't think we ever shine a light on the states that have made these changes.
I think Texas is doing a pretty good job with its universal school choice measures that are soon hopefully to become law.
It's on its way in.
That looks like a really solid program.
I think the ability to go to zero income tax, nine states that have done that, it makes that table stakes, I think, for the rest of the country to say that the burden on a business owner or the burden on an entrepreneur.
So I think you got nine states in that category.
I think the states that have done a good job of attracting industry, I mean, historically, it was thought that even in areas like aerospace exploration, places like, you know, Florida or Texas would lead the way.
You got states like Montana to Colorado doing a good job.
And I'm not just picking Republican examples here, for example.
So I do think that there are areas where states have brought down the barrier for new innovation, brought down the tax barrier so that that compounding interest can work in everybody who lives in that state's favor and have actually enacted true educational freedom.
I think there's some good examples to learn from.
If I felt like some model had already been perfect, then I wouldn't need to come in with a new vision.
But I hope what we're able to do with Ohio is to provide that beacon of example for the rest of the country.
Hypothetically, if you ran for governor of Ohio, would these be policies you would run on as abolishing state income tax or the $10,000 for every kid as soon as they're born?
Yeah, so then the latter would have to be more likely federally administered.
But compound interest working in the favor of lifting people up and getting rid of state income taxes, I think is like the easiest, lowest hanging fruit way to do that.
Educational choice for everyday citizens to be able to go to the best possible school.
And then just bringing down, like not by a little bit, but by a lot, the red tape and regulatory barriers that stop actual businesses from locating in what I think is one of the best places in the country to do it and seeing an economic boom as a consequence.
Yeah, it's basic table stakes.
And I would go even, you know, I'd go further in some other respects we haven't talked about either, which is reviving civic education in our country.
Part of that sense of that loss of pride and self-confidence comes from a lot of kids feeling like they're taught to hate our country instead of to be proud of it.
I think that revival of civic education is pretty important.
I personally believe that every high school senior who graduates from high school should be able to pass the same civics tests that every legal immigrant has to pass in order to become a citizen.
Somebody comes from another country, if they want to become a citizen, they got to actually pass a basic civics exam, which I think makes sense.
You got to be proficient in English and know the first thing about a country.
I think it'd be great if we taught every high school senior before they graduate the basic things we expect of a newcomer to the country so they can be proud of our country.
I think we'd probably see military, voluntary, military recruitment go up as a consequence.
I think we'd see a culture of civic-minded service go up in our country if people knew more about our country.
That falls on our educational system as well.
You know, look, I think that there's a lot else that, you know, would be, would be part of what I want to accomplish, but the kinds of things we're talking about here, absolutely.
And I do think that's something a governor can accomplish.
You brought up citizenship.
Ending birthrights is citizenship.
For the kids of illegals, that's what I would favor.
That's what I do favor and have long favored.
That's a whole separate, we could get into legal rabbit holes.
No, I just wanted to clarify.
If you came into the country, I'm a pretty hardliner that if you're going to come to the country, come legally, period.
Don't enter the country.
What if they're here legally awaiting their, what's the cases that are going on?
Illegally, though.
No, no, no.
But there are some that came, they're applied for legal.
You're talking about legal asylum seekers.
Yes.
They went through the border.
So now they're waiting for their trial and then they have a kid.
So I would say let's just start with the lowest hanging fruit, obvious stuff.
A, seal the border.
B, stop paying for any sanctuary cities.
End any kind of government benefit to anybody who enters the country illegally.
End government welfare benefits to anybody who's even here on asylum.
So end the incentives to be here illegally.
Ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals, that is one of those incentives.
And then at least starting with anybody who has committed a crime.
And even I would go a little further than that.
Anybody who entered the country illegally recently, let's start with that.
What does recently mean?
Last 18 months, last 24 months.
You came in the last 18 or 24 months illegally crossing that border.
You haven't established roots in this country.
I think it's a ridiculous claim to think that in one year or two years you have.
If that group of people alone is returned to their country, of fortune, if it's just that, that alone would represent the largest mass deportation in American history by far.
So very practically, to say the largest mass deportation in American history, I don't know that many people who actually find it objectionable to say, if you entered illegally in the last couple years of Biden, you haven't established roots in the country or you committed a crime.
We're talking about millions of people.
But to say combine that with sealing the border and ending incentives to enter this country illegally, I think most Americans are actually, if they have the permission to say it, most Americans are in favor of that.
Combine that with a rational approach to fixing our legal immigration system in a way that works for the benefit of America, including for the benefit of American workers, but in a way that benefits the people who are already here.
Do we have a legal immigration system that does that optimally now?
No, we do not.
Can we design a legal immigration system that uses market mechanism, right?
Companies should pay for the ability, pay the country for the ability to actually hire somebody born abroad, but in a way that benefits that company.
Yes, I think there are basic fixes that we can make as a total pact, because I think most people in this country are in favor of.
And I think there's a role for the states to play here too, is the pragmatic part of those mass deportations.
How are you going to do it?
You only have this many ICE agents.
Using Local Law Enforcement00:03:14
Well, I mean, there's provisions in law.
It's like 287G is what it's called, that allows the federal government to partner with state and local law enforcement to help them carry that out that doesn't require the federal military to be showing up in other parts of the country.
That should be utilized.
And it's not.
And I think you need willing governors, willing state leaders to be able to be good partners in carrying out that focused mission.
But if you explain it to the people, and I think it's one of the things I've found in the country is most Americans love our country and want what's best for our country.
And if you explain it to them, the people are with us.
I think that sometimes where we fall short of just sloganeering instead of actually explaining what makes sense for most people, I think that's half the battle.
And so I think if you have both at the presidential level, I think Donald Trump's going to do a good job of it.
I think he's already off to a good start in the first week.
But if you have partners who are leading the state at the level of the 50 states across the country doing the same thing to reinforce that, I'm confident we can have a pretty rational solution here.
I could be mistaken, but what was like the provision or executive order that Trump did where now they can go into places like churches to get illegals?
I mean, look, I think there's a lot of, I'd want to look at that in front of us before we get into specifics because I'm not off the bat familiar with it.
You haven't heard that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, with this.
I tend to have a rule of thumb, which is, you know, in Washington, D.C., it's a good rule of thumb.
A lot of people talk about statutes and then you actually read the statutes.
It says something different than what they talked about.
And same thing with the executive orders.
But broadly speaking, as a principle, do I believe in using local law enforcement to be able to enforce the law that if you're in this country illegally, to be able to return you to your country of origin?
Certainly if you've committed another crime or even if you came within the last 18 to 24 months, great and easy place to start.
Use local law enforcement to do it.
I think that actually creates a much more peaceable way to carry this out in a way that is still respectful of the dignity of every human being as a human being.
I think we've got to remember that if many of us, right, any of us were in the same position as many migrants who wanted a better life for their kids, maybe each of us would have done the same thing they would have done if the United States government is perceived as giving you a wink and a nod to come on in.
But that doesn't change the fact that we're a nation founded on the rule of law.
So I think doing it in a manner that is respectful of every person's humanity and dignity while at the same time not compromising on the rule of law, I think that's achievable, actually.
But I think that's the way we ought to carry this out.
Did you see anything?
I mean, this is from PBS.
It seems like the Department of Homeland Security says that.
ICE able to.
PBS, we should not have state-funded media.
I'll just sort of start with that.
I can pull up another source.
What were you going to ask?
Albert, I was saying that.
There was a question that was like, I mean, to conclude on this, it was just saying that it was able to enforce immigration laws to catch criminal aliens, including murderers and rapists who have illegally entered the country.
They're no longer able to hide in churches and schools to avoid arrest.
Yeah, I think that seems fair to me.
But I feel like you were going to say something.
I don't think we, as a country, generally like murders and racers hiding and it's a different question than this, but when it comes to free markets, everything you're saying makes sense, right?
Like deregulating, kind of letting the market operate as it is typically works out in the best case.
Competitive Health Insurance Markets00:06:45
And I think the thing that I have the most concern with is healthcare in this regard, because the inelasticity of people's access to declined health care doesn't really exist.
So I'm curious, is there anything you can implement in Ohio to ensure quality health care to the citizens of the state?
I think, I mean, at state level, so most healthcare is certainly Medicare.
It's a federal program.
Medicaid administration, and also even thinking about basic things like school health, right?
Implementation of physical education.
The best way to save on healthcare cost, to say the blunt truth, is actually make sure people are more healthy.
So if you're able to, if people have better health outcomes, this is one of the areas where usually it's a trade-off with how much money do you put in to get an outcome?
And then do you trade off a bad outcome for more cost?
That's how most things in life work.
When it comes to designing a health system, it doesn't work that way.
The healthier people are, the more money you actually end up saving.
So when you look at the quality of food served in public schools, that's a state government.
That's a state government item.
When you look at the quality of early physical education, which I talked about earlier in a different context, but it applies here too, I think it's really freaking important.
We used to measure early physical education outcomes.
I brought up the example of the presidential fitness test and people that may be a little bit hardcore for middle school or whatever, but I'm not wedded to one particular example.
But from an early age, making physical excellence in the pursuit of physical excellence a worthy goal that we not only implement, but measure.
You only excel in what you measure in our public school system starting at a young age, I think is strictly a good thing.
And so those are areas where it's not a panacea, but you're thinking over the long run, you're not going to see it show up in the next year.
But 10 years later, in terms of both bringing down cost and reducing the need for higher costs to be able to pursue good health, those are great things to start doing at a young age is taking a look at the quality of food going into school cafeterias and to take a hard look at measuring and implementing physical education as something that we prize and actually celebrate and prioritize and measure and think about even merit-based outcomes for teachers and school systems.
Every bit as much as academic excellence as I'm passionate about, I think physical excellence matters too.
And that's that, those are things that states can make a difference.
And as far as like non-prophylactic measures, like if someone breaks their leg or if they get diagnosed with cancer, like access to that, is that something you're able to address on a state level?
I think that you can, in a limited way, make improvements there.
Absolutely.
I think that when you think about disincentives for new healthcare or hospital construction in a particular area, for access, the amount of time that somebody has to drive to be able to get reasonable care.
You think about even states, it's true in many states across the Midwest, people in the VA, the amount of distance they have to drive to be able to access reasonable health care, bringing down the barriers to be able to create new sources of providing healthcare actually does two things.
One is it's more accessible to people who want to access it.
But the other thing it does is it actually brings down competition.
It brings down costs through competition and holds different people's feet to the fire.
There's also a lot of quirks in the bureaucracy that the amount that you're reimbursed for the exact same thing, if it comes through a hospital versus what's deemed to be a private practice clinic, like that should cost the same thing.
If the government reimbursement, even through Medicaid or otherwise, is different because it shows up through a hospital rather than because it shows up through private practice.
That's insane.
Why are they different?
Because it's just stupid.
You can just charge whatever you want.
Medicare and CMS, this is at the federal level now, but some of it's administered through the states when it comes to Medicaid.
There's just different levels of hospital will get more, private practice will get less.
And I think it just is.
It doesn't make any sense.
Now you have then barriers and even thinking about different licensing requirements and other barriers to create then new medical health care provision, new private practices, new hospital construction.
That confluence of that with the federal nonsensical differences in reimbursement rates actually give us a lot of the nonsensical health outcomes that we have.
So I do think that there is a role, an important role for the states to play here.
But in this case, when you think about CMS, that's really the mother of all of these problems at the federal level.
And a lot of that's just a product of bad regulation, lobbying, years of stasis, and lack of market competition.
Honestly, general principle is if you're able to destroy bureaucracy and take that excess saving and put it in the bank account of people to be able to buy their own private health insurance in a competitive market, that alone is all else equal to going to be a better starting point for a solution than the alternative.
So I'm a guy who believes in free markets.
I'm a guy who believes in capitalism, not crony capitalism and not tilted fake free markets, which is what we often end up with, but actually the real thing, that's the ultimate end state.
But in the meantime, kids aren't the same as adults.
One starts with physical education early, quality, food that kids are served at a young age.
That alone over a longer term period of time is going to yield dividends in health outcomes and cost savings.
So you don't think any of the problems with private insurance?
What's that?
You don't think any of the problems?
I think private insurance has major problems.
Part of it, among them, is that they have a special exemption from rules that apply to other industries that are anti-competitive rules that apply to other industries, don't apply to health insurance companies.
What are some of these?
Well, for example, antitrust rules.
Antitrust rules don't apply to health insurance companies in the same way they do to other companies.
It's super hard to start a new health insurance company.
You think about like innovative startups.
You see in a lot of different areas.
Why haven't you heard of a new innovation?
You heard a new innovative startup for like basically anything you could imagine.
You don't hear a new innovative startup being funded for a new health insurance company.
Why?
Because the barriers to entry by regulatory fiat are so darn high.
And I'm sure there are lobbyings that maintain that because it maintains their monopoly.
Of course.
Of course.
So I don't think, I don't consider the private health insurance market to actually be a market in any sense of the word.
We're taking true capitalism from crony capitalism.
That's where I look at it.
So, you know, how do you get rid of it?
Yeah, well, I think you roll back a lot of those restrictions legislatively.
Let's start with that.
And then, and then, yeah, I think that alone would see a capital boom and then funding.
You could do that on a federal level.
Yeah, that'd be a federal level.
That'd be a federal level.
Yeah.
So, so it's not, it's, and that's the thing about our beauty of our system is there's certain things that are for a president doing with Congress and the Senate, but there are limits on what a president can do because our founders envisioned a system of federalism where most laws ought to be made and implemented at the level of the states in areas from education to ordinary regulatory policy.
That's the beauty of our system.
There's a lot you could do as a governor, but there's some things that had to be done nationally.
And there's a lot you're able to do as a president, but a lot of what's our country's fate is really in the hands of the states.
And in some ways, since that's actually kind of market competition of its own.
Ohio As A Democracy Lab00:00:54
You look at the number one in two states that people move into right now, it's Texas and Florida.
When people leave California and New York, I would love for them to be moving to Ohio.
I think there's no reason it actually can't be.
It might sound aspirational, but it used to be.
It used to be such a state.
It's just you go through different cycles of leadership.
And I do think generally, Florida and Texas have had pretty good governors, all else equal for their state.
But it would be cool to bring that to what people call, I hate the term the rust belt, but what people call the rust belt, I think it could be the revival belt of the country.
The state of excellence is what I want to help us create.
And I think it could be pretty cool, not just for the state of Ohio, but then in the laboratory of a democracy to show the rest of the country what's actually possible.