Vivek Ramaswamy: The Path To The Presidency with Michael Knowles
Michael Knowles sits down with Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss his primary campaign to be the Republican nominee for 2024.
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Vivek Ramaswamy is an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, the founder of a major biopharmaceutical company, the co-founder of Strive Asset Management.
He's the author of a couple of books, notably Woke Inc.
He's a graduate of Harvard and Yale.
And now Vivek is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
Every presidential campaign has the usual suspects.
The governors and the senators and sometimes the congressmen.
And then, every so often, some totally unexpected figure pops up and shakes up the race.
And this year, that person would be my friend, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek, thank you for making the time.
I know you're very busy on the campaign trail.
It's good to be on.
This is my first stop after getting off the CPAC stage here, so that was fun.
And you know what?
We're having fun with this.
When you first told me that you were thinking about maybe running for president, you know, my only thought was, huh.
I would have expected he'd wait until 2028.
But I was not surprised that you would...
I don't even know if you knew that you might run someday.
But I did.
I sort of had this thought.
You have good instincts.
Yes.
But you've jumped right into the race.
A lot of people do not know who you are exactly.
The people who do know who you are have been saying...
Don't write this guy out just because you haven't heard his name.
This is a very impressive guy who brings in a wealth of knowledge from a lot of different segments of public life.
And I happen to agree with that take.
So I'm very excited to help introduce you to the rest of the public.
Thank you, Ben.
Now that I've been very nice to you, I'm gonna be cold.
I'm going to grill you.
I'm gonna give you very tough questions.
Like you've done in the past.
I know the real Michaels.
I'm ready for you.
Okay, first question.
Who's your favorite president?
Thomas Jefferson.
I think Thomas Jefferson embodies the founding culture in the United States.
I'm a big founding principles guy, for sure.
Actually, the whole premise of my candidacy, by the way, is reviving the principles that set the nation into motion.
This actually should be a really easy election.
There's hard elections where everyone agrees on the basic principles and you disagree on some really important policy issue.
This should be an easy election where free speech, open debate, all the stuff that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence and beyond, this is the stuff that actually most Americans agree on, and yet we live in this moment where they're artificially fraught.
But anyway, why is Thomas Jefferson my favorite president?
It's not just because he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
And as a startup guy, as a founder, as a company, you guys built companies, I'm big on mission statement.
That is the best mission statement for a nation ever written, the Declaration of Independence.
But there was also a founding culture to go along with it, right?
He was a polymath, as were many of these guys, Benjamin Franklin on down.
These guys, even John Adams, not a lot of people know this about him, but he studied Sanskrit later in life.
These guys, yeah, he actually, after he left the White House, and these guys, they were also kind of boastful about it.
He would put it in his letters to TJ because he knew that posterity would read about it.
He says, oh, if I was to do it again, I would have been a Sanskrit scholar rather than, you know, being the U.S. president.
Yeah, exactly.
But there was a little showmanship there, but there was showmanship grounded in reality.
And I kind of love the showmanship, too, because it's real in a certain sense.
They're proud of it.
And so Thomas Jefferson, he's writing the Declaration of Independence with his hand, but he realizes that, oh, well, you know what?
I don't really like the chair I'm sitting in, so I guess I would love this idea of a swivel chair.
It didn't exist before then, so he just made one.
He invented it.
He invented the swivel chair.
To write the Declaration of Independence so that he could actually write the great founding document providing the greatest mission statement for not only the United States or a nation but the free world as we know it.
That's missing today.
I think we miss the people who look at somebody else's domain and say, hey, that's for somebody else who has expertise over there, and I'm not supposed to do that because I'm not trained, versus saying, you know what?
I'm a human being.
We have free will.
No one is born with all the knowledge they need to have to do anything, and if I'm hungry enough, most things I could probably figure it out, and if I feel like doing it, I'm going to do it, whether somebody tells me to or not.
That's part of what we're missing too, is not just the founding principles, but a little bit of that founding culture.
And there are other reasons I like Thomas Jefferson from the standpoint of history.
Is that as is now all too trite and familiar, I mean, he was a flawed man.
He did not live up to his own ideals.
He was, in a very real sense of the term, hypocrite.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not for his slaves.
Now, of course, this deserves to be talked about.
Over the last few years, it's been over-talked about because that's all anybody can fixate on about an important man's legacy who had much more to him than the worst aspects of his hypocrisies.
But he's also a reminder that hypocrisy is only made possible by the existence of ideals.
There's a reason we can't call—a big part of my speech just now was about the CCP— Say what you will about the Chinese Communist Party.
You can never call them hypocrites.
Because in order to be a hypocrite, you had to have ideals in the first place.
You can call Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite because he had ideals.
And so he's a reminder of not only the existence of ideals, but the fact that we as human beings are flawed, deeply flawed.
There will be people 250 years from now that look back at us today and say, weren't they hypocrites?
We just don't know what basis they're going to have for saying it, but it's definitely going to happen.
La Roche-Foucault said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
That's exactly right.
You said it better than I did.
Well, at least La Roche-Foucault did.
I don't use speechwriters, but if I did, you know, a few years from now, if I'm successful in the White House, maybe we've got to talk.
They've been trying to can me from Daily Wire for years, so that would be a great opportunity.
Stay in play for another two years, and then January 2025 we'll talk.
Right.
So, speaking of these great men and these great writers and thinkers, Which book has most influenced your political views?
That's a good question.
Most.
That's a pretty high bar.
I would say Friedrich von Hayek's Constitution of Liberty.
I think it's an underappreciated work because people read the summaries of someone like Hayek and then they conflate it with like a Nozick or they conflate it with just the broader theory of libertarian thought, Austrian economist von Mises.
And I love all these guys, but they actually had very different and distinctive views from one another.
I think Hayek was a cut above.
Hayek was a cut above because his case for, you know, what is in bastardized form referred to as libertarianism, it's so reductionist, I kind of cringe as I even acknowledge that description.
But it was really grounded in fundamental human respect, human dignity.
And so his view was that, you know, I'm going to distill it to sort of a modern practical form here, but let's just take the arguments about redistribution or whatever.
His point would be, look, if the argument for redistribution is grounded in human worth, to say that your human worth is tied to the number of green pieces of paper that sit in your bank account, that's the basis for making sure everyone has the same equal number of green pieces of paper.
You've got it backwards because you're actually committing a moral error.
You're tying someone's moral worth to their financial worth.
to their financial worth.
Right.
And that's actually what creates the conditions for rampant mutual disrespect amongst what should be co-equal citizens.
And so people miss the fact that his case against unbridled merit and excellence in what we would call free market capitalism today was grounded not in some economic account, which, you know, is maybe better tied to Milton Friedman's tradition, but is actually tied to the basic dignity of man itself but is actually tied to the basic dignity of man itself and the basic dignity of citizens, of nations, who are co-equal citizens, regardless of the number of green pieces of
In some ways, the problem is actually the redistributionists are the ones who also commit the error of fetishizing the accumulation of paper.
Right.
When in fact, there's more to life, there's more to human worth, there's more to human value than that.
And so I think that was, I think what makes some of his work profound and I think should be more persuasive to more people than you would think.
Speaking of relating to all of our citizens, some of whom we don't always want to relate to, what is one issue on which you could see yourself reaching across the aisle?
And what is one issue on which you could probably never see yourself reaching across the aisle?
So I got to say one thing off the gate here, out of the bat.
I don't really care about partisan politics that much.
Like partisan politics boards me.
So like even this talk of the aisle makes me, you know, recoil a little bit because it's so reductionist.
I just don't even think Republican versus Democrat is the most relevant political distinction in America today.
I mean, I'm an unapologetic conservative and we can talk about my views, but the Republican Party, what does that mean?
I mean, the Democratic Party, what does that mean?
These are relatively incoherent concepts.
It's sort of designed to shoehorn the real political debates into these sort of artificial categories.
I think the real political divide in the modern West, certainly in America, but in the modern West more broadly, is – This divide between what I call the Great Reset and the Great Uprising.
The Great Uprising is the response to the Great Reset, a view that says you have to dissolve the boundaries between the private sector and the public sector, between nations, between the online world and the offline world, so everybody can work...
Between men and women.
Yeah, that's a different dissolution of boundaries, actually, between the genders.
It's all about dissolving boundaries so that the leaders of institutions may work together towards the common collective good.
That's the vision of the Great Reset.
And it's different from the side I'm on, if I had to pick between the two, the great uprising, which says hell no to that vision.
We, the citizens of nations, in America, the citizen of this nation, as a citizen of this nation, say, we decide in a self-governing democratic republic how we sort out our political differences.
That's really the divide, the managerial class versus the everyday citizen.
One way I might frame it as well is between those who are unapologetically pro-American and those who are, and I think these exist in America today, those who are fundamentally anti-American.
There's a distinction there.
The good news is that's an 80-20 divide.
It's not a 50-50 divide.
So here's what I'll say.
If that's the way I draw the aisle, I'm not reaching across the aisle.
I'm unapologetically in the pro-American camp, and I'm not making a concession to the anti-American camp other than through persuasion to get them to join our camp.
There's nothing about me that will cause me to reach across the aisle to the great reset.
I am on the side of believing that I'm not a citizen of the globe or a citizen of the world.
I'm a citizen of a nation and I'm proud of it.
So draw it that way, there's no reaching across the aisles.
But Democrat versus Republican, I mean, these things don't even, these words, these are words, they're meaningless.
Of course, there are many issues in which I'll bring a lot of Democrats along with me.
I mean, I think one of my proposals is to make political expression a civil right in America.
To say that if you can't fire somebody or deplatform somebody because they're black or gay or Muslim or white or Hindu or Jewish or whatever, that you shouldn't be able to fire them just because they're an outspoken conservative.
I guess theoretically means an outspoken liberal.
That's not relevant.
The conservative piece is what's relevant because that's what's happening in America.
Nobody gets fired for me.
It just doesn't.
So it would be silly for me to say, but in principle, I would say the same thing.
But why do I bring up that example?
Today, a lot of the people who stand up to me are sort of federal Democrats that don't know the first thing about American history, legal history, when they say, oh, no, that would be a bad idea.
When they don't know, it's kind of rather embarrassing to them when they find out that actually this protection exists in a good number of states.
Including and especially blue states that actually passed this protection during the Bush era in California, for example, because they were fearful of the expansive military state under Bush and Dick Cheney that they were going to suppress people who wanted to stand up to the post-9-11 expansive state.
Well, they said, no, no, no, we need to give space to those people to have those protections from getting fired.
So it sort of proves that that isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, but it's just an example of the kind of thing that I'm in favor of.
One of my, you know, I wouldn't call it a signature policy.
I just view it as a simple, it's on the list, right?
I'm sure it would have a lot of support.
Yeah, that one.
But I was about to say a different one, which is, you know, look, I think that if you can't smoke an addictive cigarette by the age of 18, if you can't have an addictive sip of alcohol by the age of 21, I don't think you should be using an addictive social media product like TikTok before the age of 15 either.
That's not a partisan point.
It's not a Republican point.
It's not a Democratic point.
I think it makes sense.
Even principled libertarians, God love them, but kids aren't the same as adults.
I think everyone acknowledges that.
So there's a lot to sort of my policy perspectives that transcend the traditional partisan boundaries or whatever.
Call that reaching across the aisle, call it reaching across the aisle, but I don't even...
I'm not a politician.
This stuff is silly to me.
I'm an unapologetic, America first conservative, will not apologize for it, but I think that just reciting those slogans means very little until you first rediscover what America is.
I love the idea of banning.
You've got at least one supporter for this proposal of banning social media for kids.
I think, you know, I love cigars.
I'm not a cigarette fan, but I love cigars.
And some people say it's a vice.
Well, at least that vice sharpens your mind a little.
Social media, especially if you're a kid, it melts your brain.
It comes out your ears.
It's designed to melt your brain because it's picking at insecurities.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's core insight—he was a year ahead of me when I was in college, and Facebook was invented, if we were to call it that, while I was in college— It's designed to prey on your insecurities, right?
I mean, you're going to click on this versus this faster, gives you a window into your soul deeper than you have into your own soul.
And so that's what it's about.
So we can have a debate about what that means for the loss of virtue amongst adults that lends us vulnerable to this kind of algorithmic exploitation and manipulation.
But adults are adults.
It's their job to fortify themselves in the offline world.
That's a whole separate and deep discussion.
But for kids...
By definition, you haven't formed that moral or psychic foundation.
And there's a reason why China doesn't allow the version of sexualized dance videos or whatever that exists on TikTok here, over there.
It's about math and engineering.
In the Chinese version, ByteDance-operated version of their product over there, it's like, you know, they send fentanyl across our southern border in Mexico, effectively, through cheap raw materials that they sell to the cartels.
This is digital fentanyl.
If I had to take the analogy further, it's financial fentanyl in the form of national debt, but that's a whole separate discussion of our broader addiction to China.
But bringing me back, even China, actually, I'll go there too.
I don't think that has to be a partisan point.
I think that recognizing that the CCP is the single greatest threat that America faces over the next 30 years, that ought to be a point of bipartisan consensus.
It isn't.
I think that we need conservatives who are able to, in greater detail, make the case for that to the American people, make the case because there's going to be some sacrifices in weaning off of China.
Cheap goods.
Yeah, we got addicted to cheap stuff.
It's a form of addiction.
We get addicted to everything, from the fentanyl to the digital fentanyl to the cheap stuff.
But, but we can make these sacrifices if we know what we're sacrificing for.
It's this thing we call America.
To make sure our children and grandchildren aren't a bunch of Chinese serfs that are somehow citizens of some sort of co-equal, bilateral, global governing equilibrium created between the United States and China, which is what China hopes for.
No, they should be the citizens of the greatest nation on earth.
But that requires some short-run sacrifice.
I think America could use bluntly a little less Chamberlain and a little more Churchill.
And, you know, I think that's a big part of the premise for my candidacy is to deliver that kind of vision.
Speaking of China, President Ramaswamy gets the call.
China has invaded Taiwan.
What do you do?
So, invaded is what we're talking about here, not blockade, right?
Yeah, so, because I think the scenarios are basically different.
I do think that we have to vigorously protect Taiwan.
I don't like enmeshing ourselves in foreign wars that don't matter.
I'm on that side of the Ukraine issue.
I think we have overspent, and it's a lesson we ought to learn for a long time to come.
I'd take a fraction of that money and protect our own southern border.
But the reason Taiwan matters is I mean, the semiconductor chips that power our phones, the semiconductor chips that power our refrigerators that kept this water cold before we're drinking it, all of that comes from this tiny little island nation off the southeast coast of China.
And this is a shame that we ever got here.
But we are where we are.
And so if China holds the keys to Taiwan, that's the final step in the long-run bargain they've always wanted to reach with the United States.
The final coup they wanted to achieve in the 50-year game that they played with Henry Kissinger and won without our knowing it, which is to say that there's a grand bargain.
We get your intellectual property and we'll make your stuff.
That's what China is saying to the U.S.
So if the US right now, I mean, we have no reason to accept that bargain.
It would be foolish, right?
Because we can source the stuff from somewhere else, right?
So we have that leverage going for us.
However, once China's squatting on Taiwan, they can really squeeze the leverage out of that negotiation, and then it's a permanent bipolar new status quo.
Now, here's where I'm at.
I don't think they're quite yet ready to invade Taiwan.
Mm-hmm.
And I think there's things we can do that can pull the economic rug out from under China to effectively defeat them.
I say defeat them in the sense that the fall of the CCP may not be as far away as people think.
Xi Jinping actually did a lot of damage to China over the last year as part of his quest to hold on to power.
I think there's actually an interesting window here that we might be working within that just like we found out Putin's military capacity was sort of an emperor has no clothes situation.
Not so much for Chinese military capacity, but even for Chinese economic capacity.
And remember, the grand bargain between the CCP and the people is at least you take care of our material way of life and we'll cede our freedoms to you.
But that doesn't work if they're no longer supporting the material way of life.
And so I would go so far as to ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China unless and until the CCP either falls or reforms its behaviors.
Now, that'll hurt us a little bit.
It'll hurt them more.
I think our willingness to make that sacrifice, it's not a small sacrifice, probably is the single greatest lever to make sure that we never have to make it.
You got to think about this stuff.
It's not static.
And so for me, I think that also semiconductor capacity here at home is rising too, so then that gap is going to close.
We do have this little divest-to-invest thing going on in the U.S. Navy.
You familiar with this or not?
No.
So, it's a long story, but we have a divest-to-invest program where we're decommissioning ships in the South Pacific.
And so our nadir of military capacity in the South Pacific, China's already got more You know, more ships in its navy than we do, but our nadir really is kind of going to be in the 2026-2027 timeframe.
Xi Jinping's not quite ready yet, so I think that's what he's playing for.
So I think the window between January 2025, when if I'm successful and I take office...
In mid-2026 or 2027, that's the window where we got to pull the economic rug out from under China, declare independence from China, decouple.
But actually, I think the way it's going to play out is that guts the economic fortitude of the CCP.
They lose their mandate in China itself.
And we actually are in a very different situation than we should have been and start to get back on the right track that we would have been on had the decisions not been made in 1970s to totally couple with China.
I know that's long and complicated, but hopefully some of that made sense.
That's a good answer.
And you've partially answered my next question, which is on trade.
The Republican Party founded on protectionism and tariffs.
Then for much of the 20th century, certainly the second part of the 20th century, the Republican Party is the party of free trade.
Now the Republican Party doesn't quite know what it is.
TBD, right?
TBD, so trade under...
I'm not a protectionist.
Okay.
But vis-a-vis China, the reason I adopt policies that align with those advanced by protectionists is for national security reasons, right?
Because I think that this is about China is operating according to mercantilist rules, deputizing capitalism.
I use capitalism in air quotes to advance their geopolitical end of achieving long run, even military parity with the United States.
In China, economic policy and military policy are two sides of the same coin.
We in the West, in the United States in particular, adopt a dualist view that military policy over here and economic policies over here.
But that was what China exploited.
That was the whole wedge they exploited because they view them as part and parcel of the same.
And you know what?
Got to give it to somebody when they win.
They won that game.
Henry Kissinger was wrong.
China was right.
But I think that that's with respect to China.
And I don't think that we should conflate that with coddling American workers who don't need coddling.
Now, I think we also look at a couple other dimensions here.
One is the dollar as the U.S. reserve currency of the world, the U.S. dollar being the reserve currency.
I think it's a good thing.
However, that does create some distributive consequences here at home, right?
So what does the dollar as a reserve currency mean?
It means there's an extra bid for the dollar above and beyond what would have existed under free market conditions where the dollar was not the reserve currency.
Why do we want the dollar as a reserve currency?
We then control the financial system.
We can freeze the terrorists' assets on demand, whatever.
It's a good thing for America.
But what does that mean?
It means, on average, that tilts the scales of U.S. exports costing more to other countries and U.S. imports costing less.
So that systematically does disfavor U.S. manufacturers.
So I think there's some areas where we have to not be willfully blind to distributive consequences we create at home from policies that are still good for the nation as a whole.
And therefore to implement other policies to balance them.
Exactly.
To make sure that anything that's protecting the nation as a whole, that we don't abandon the dollars, the reserve currency of the world, but say that we're in that together and that we're not just blind, purposefully blind to the consequences of who's left holding the bag as a consequence.
So I think we've got to be in that together.
But I think that that is at the margin, right?
And so I think that some of this case for industrial policy bleeds into, and even takes support from people like me, because I'm coming at it from a very different angle vis-a-vis China, to marshal support for what could easily devolve into a form of really economic laziness.
I do think that U.S. competitiveness is in part created by having our feet held to the fire and being the best on the planet means that we're actually doing it because we're the best on the planet.
And so vis-a-vis China, what is decoupling from China means It's not going to all be reshoring into the United States, although it will involve some of that, but it will also involve looking at Southeast Asia, India, South America, and I think that's got to be all of the above approach because the real objective is economic independence from an enemy, and I use the word enemy intentionally here vis-a-vis communist China.
But I think that that's something that we can do in a more focused way with respect to China.
So we're talking about the free flow of goods and services.
How about the flow of people?
On immigration, assuming that you are opposed to illegal immigration and would like to stop that, then there are some other questions.
The question is what to do with the people already here.
Does one provide a path to citizenship, say, for the illegal aliens who are currently in the country?
And then further...
Polls have suggested that many, many Americans want to reduce not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration as well.
So when it comes to legal immigration, would President Ramaswamy restrict it, expand it, or keep it about the same?
So on illegal immigration, I'm a hardliner.
I believe in the use of the U.S. military to protect our border.
It's a shame that that's a controversial idea, that using our military to protect our border is actually the most controversial use of our military when, in fact, using it to protect somebody else's border is somehow perfectly fine.
So I'm what you would call a hardliner on the issue of illegal immigration.
On legal immigration, I think that we've gotten it wrong.
We have a policy of accidental immigration when I think we should have a policy of intentional immigration.
We have lottery systems for H-1B visas.
I mean, this makes no sense.
Why on earth would you want to leave it to a lottery when you could actually just pick the best ones to actually come?
Best ones as measured by commitment to the country, likelihood of making contribution to the country based on their track record and even their educational economic position in a different country.
So I believe in meritocratic points-based immigration.
Now, I've heard that answer before.
Say someone is skilled at some job, and so the company says, we really need this person, and that's the case.
But you said something very interesting.
You said commitment to the country, which would not presumably just be quantifiable.
Civic commitment, yeah.
So I think there's this step later on of, first of all, I think we need to bolster...
The citizenship tests in this country.
Not just knowledge, but even enthusiasm, commitment.
I think at best, a lot of people grow up and are born as citizens just because they inherit their citizenship and they don't know the first thing about what it means to be an American.
Well, a lot of immigrants come to the country today and they're every bit as bad as they don't really know either.
No, I think it's got to be somebody who pledges allegiance to that flag and understands the history behind it, understands how we got to where we are, understands what makes America great and then wants to be a part of it.
So I'm big on this idea of revival of citizenship.
And what I'm about to say is I say jokingly, okay?
It's not a policy that I think we can actually implement.
So these are risky things to say as a political candidate, but I don't care because it's just the kind of thing we ought to talk about openly.
I don't hate the idea of pick a sum of money, $50,000, $100,000, whatever it takes for somebody to go make a pretty good life for themselves in some developing nation and God knows where.
Take the citizens of this country and say, if you don't want to be part of this country and you never want to come back, the only condition is you never come back.
Here's the money.
Go make a great life for yourself because if you don't believe in what this nation stands for, you don't have to be a part of it.
That's okay.
You know what?
The only thing...
Then we've got to really secure the border because what's going to happen is a lot of them are going to kind of come back and make sure we keep our end of the bargain.
But it's a thought experiment for the kind of nation that I think we need.
It's a nation of citizens who are actually committed...
to what that flag symbolizes.
And I think that immigrants, if we're selecting them in the right way, through meritocratic admission, not just through contributions, but through commitment to the nation, I think that can be part of the national civic revitalization as well.
I like that, the be my guest plan.
You sure you don't like the country?
Be my guest.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You certainly leave.
Well, this ties in with another question.
Many on the left don't like the country.
They mock the idea of patriotism.
They say that this country was evil and rotten from the very beginning.
We've heard that for years.
Increasingly, a number of people on the right seem to have trouble with patriotism and love of country because they view America as a woke empire that is dedicated, perhaps first and foremost, to spreading, I don't know, transgenderism overseas, and that America basically has lost its way, and so it's very difficult to be patriotic.
How would President Ramaswamy...
How do you recultivate this patriotic love of country in Americans on the left and the right?
So I think first is it does start at the top.
This is a cultural tone that we're able to set for the country.
I think Ronald Reagan did it.
He drove a national revival the last time America was in a national identity crisis, which was in the late 70s.
I'm committed to restoring the ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago, okay?
I don't think we achieve national unity by showing up in the proverbial middle of Say, hold hands, compromise, guys.
Can't you get along?
Kumbaya.
That ain't happening.
Okay, if that was ever going to happen, that's not happening today.
I think we achieve national unity by embracing, unapologetically embracing the extremism.
The radicalism of the ideas that set this nation into motion, free speech, open debate, unbridled meritocracy, self-governance over aristocracy, these are the things that it really means to be American.
A belief in the Declaration of Independence, even if we channel into that Declaration of Independence from China, get that policy in there too.
But truth be told, this is what it means to be American.
And I think done this way, we actually find the common thread that unites us across our diversity.
I think our diversity is not our strength.
Our diversity isn't even beautiful.
Who cares?
We have a bunch of different shades of melanin here, right?
I'm looking at the camera crew, a bunch of us here.
Sicilian, it's always been kind of a liminal, racially ambiguous.
We've got a spectrum of melanin content.
I think it is utterly meaningless.
It is neither beautiful nor our strength unless there's something greater that binds us together across our diversity.
Without that, we're really just going through the motions as a bunch of higher mammals, like a bunch of animals roaming across this American plain.
Yeah, sure, America's beautiful, but so are a lot of other countries, visually speaking.
What makes America actually beautiful, what makes America itself, is the existence of that common thread of ideals.
And that's what makes e pluribus unum, from many one, mean something.
And I think that a policy agenda that flows from those principles, I mean, what have I pledged to that no other U.S. presidential candidate We're good to go.
Maybe it's hard if you're a white guy in the White House to end affirmative action.
I don't know.
Maybe it's because I'm 37, maybe because I'm not.
Maybe it's because I don't care.
I want to end affirmative action.
Abandoned climate religion.
The heart of climate religion is really apologizing for the success of the modern West and modern America as we know it.
I refuse to apologize for that.
But I think that these can actually be unifying ideas.
In some ways, these are extreme ideas to some people.
But I think it's by embracing the extremism of the ideals that underlie them that will actually unify Americans across the lines of not just identity politics, but even partisan politics.
And again...
Maybe I'll eat my words, but I think 2024 will be a landslide election, and I'm bluntly running because I think I'm going to be the guy that delivers it.
I'm not kidding.
I think it's going to happen.
I've told people from the beginning, as I mentioned, I said, don't underestimate this guy.
He's thought through these things, and there is a coherence.
Maybe people totally reject your agenda, but there is a coherence to it.
Let's bring that coherence from the national malaise that you're describing right down to the fundamental political unit.
Right now, marriage rates are at or near all-time lows.
Birth rates at all-time lows.
You're seeing abortion is still pretty high.
So, the American family is in free fall.
What policies would President Ramaswamy undertake to reverse that decline of the family?
So I think there is a bit of an assault on the family.
Undertaken through the assault on religious liberty in our country, too.
So this is a longer discussion about religious liberty, but I think it's closely linked to family.
I think the Equality Act, which I don't think was appropriately termed, but nonetheless could be a Pandora's box if we let it be.
I think for me as president, it's important to hold the line there to say that now you're not going to create the conditions for using that law as a basis for labeling a religious organization to be a hate group or whatever that changes their lending standards Does it not already?
It already does.
The quality act worsened it.
But I think it was a symptom of a deeper trend in this country.
So one of the things that I'm able to do, because I'm not a Christian nationalist, I'm not even Christian.
I'm Hindu, right?
I went to Christian schools and whatever, and I'm a deeply faith-based person.
I can do what somebody who...
Where's their Christianity on their sleeve?
Can't do.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
I just mean that literally in modern American culture it's really difficult for them to do what I can do in offering a staunch defense of not another inch budging on the issue of religious liberty.
And I think that's intricately linked to family formation as well.
I'm very clear about what my priorities are and what they aren't.
And there's some things that I think are important that still aren't my priorities.
One of the things, it's my belief that you do five or six things, and I've laid out what those five or six things are.
You do those five or six things well.
As U.S. president, you're going to be one of the greatest presidents in modern history.
So for me, that's Shutting down the administrative state.
Actually, I've identified specific government agencies to shut down.
I've specifically flagged the Department of Education.
I've specifically flagged the FBI. In the Department of Education's case, it needs to be shut down and not come back.
In the FBI's case, we need to shut it down and create something new to take its place.
Now, how do you do it?
There are so many presidential, probably every Republican presidential candidate, I don't know about the FBI, but has said, I'm going to shut down the Department of Education.
And then none of them ever get it done.
Yeah, because they all have a flawed view of Article 2 of the Constitution.
They think they need Congress to do it.
Hmm.
I think it's a mistake.
I don't think they need Congress to do it.
I think the Constitution says that the President of the United States runs the executive branch of the government.
If you run the executive branch of the government, that means you run the executive branch of the government.
Maybe it's my private sector view here.
Maybe it's not being a politician.
I did go to law school, but here it's actually my private sector view that allows me to interpret the Constitution as it ought to be interpreted here, which is that if someone works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you.
It means you work for them.
Because you're responsible for what they do without having any authority over it.
And now I'm the full run for the White House where supposedly that's the position, right?
Well, that's what I'm going to change it.
I'm going to do it by executive order.
And it will be litigated.
But I think it's an interesting time to do it.
There's a lot of things that give me a sense of urgency to run for president in this cycle to deliver this change.
This is one of them.
I think we have a Supreme Court that likely shares my view of the Constitution here, and then we codify it in judicial precedent to make sure that I'm not just the first president, but the first of many who will actually be able to be the person who's not only elected to run the government, but who actually does run the government.
I give Donald Trump a lot of credit for identifying that as a problem, but if he had actually fixed it, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it.
The way you're talking about executive power is different than the way many Republicans and conservatives in my lifetime have talked about it.
Many conservatives have said, we want fewer executive orders.
We want less executive power.
You've suggested perhaps executive power is a way to protect the people.
In a one-way ratchet, as a downside, as a downsizing mechanism.
So I think the proper concern is that actually they needed to make sure Congress authorized funds Before the president actually spent it.
That's actually the historical concern.
But the problem is there was the inverse then built in by Congress, which is an overreach.
So this is like the 1974 Impoundment Protection Act passed under Nixon, or it was actually to predict against stuff Nixon was doing, which basically said that even if Congress allocates money to a specific agency and the president doesn't want to spend that money, the president still has to.
I think it's unconstitutional.
I think it's an unconstitutional overreach of Congress.
I think it's—the symmetric point is the president can't spend money that Congress never budgeted, but just because Congress budgeted doesn't mean the president actually has to spend it.
If they see as the leader of the executive branch that there's waste, fraud, abuse, and so on, just like a board of directors to a CEO says, here's your budget and research and development, but the CEO says that, actually, I know that that project is going to fail.
Do I still have to spend that money?
Absolutely not.
It makes no sense.
That ought to be the relationship.
I think it is the relationship intended between Congress and the president too.
So I'm all about being very high resolution on this stuff, but I think as it relates to the exercise of restraint, firing someone, not hiring someone in an agency that didn't exist, but firing someone in an agency that does exist, if you're running the executive branch of the government, you gotta be able to do that So in a one-way ratchet, in the downsizing realm, I think executive order is absolutely an appropriate mechanism.
And I think I'm on constitutionally solid grounds.
And I think the current Supreme Court is highly likely to agree with me, which means we codify that in precedent.
And I hope every future president, whether they're of the Democratic Party or Republican Party for that matter, thanks hopefully the next administration, if I'm successful, for actually delivering it.
I, in fact, share this more expansive view of executive power.
And as president, you will be the top law enforcement officer in the United States, the capo di tutti capi.
Now, we have a big crime problem in the country right now.
Some say we have an over-incarceration problem.
Some look around at the murder rate.
They say we have an under-incarceration problem.
Some people say we need to abolish prisons.
Some people say we need to build more prisons.
I guess one could say that we should keep it exactly the same.
Where does President Ramaswamy stand?
I do think that there are too many people incarcerated, but there's a problem of being over-inclusive and under-inclusive, right?
We're not actually arresting people who ought to be arrested, and we're channeling that to put a lot of people in prison and spend a lot of money on it, even in ways that don't really respect even a law and order culture, because the asymmetry between the two is itself, I think, a legal betrayal.
It's This isn't a policy answer, but it's just a first-person answer.
There's a guy who works for me, and I'm glad he works for me, but I'm not glad about the circumstances that brought him to me.
He was a cop in Oregon.
And he always wanted to be a cop.
That was all he ever wanted to do.
In fact, he didn't even go to college because he knew the fastest path to being a cop was to actually join the military for a couple of years because that would make him eligible to be a cop.
It was his life dream.
And then he goes to Oregon, streets of Portland, Oregon, and this is where he can actually do some good as a cop until they tell him, here are the people you can't arrest.
The people who are actually known to be burglars, people who are literally shooting meth on the street.
You can see it, but for whatever reason, they've decided that these are the people you can't arrest.
Full stop.
They've just made that executive decision.
It doesn't make any sense why.
And so he's left writing traffic tickets for guys who speed or run red lights.
He said, I refuse to pull over the people who speed.
I pull over the people who run red lights, but what I started to do is I just refused to write him a ticket.
I would just pull him over and roll down the window and just say, sir, do you mind not running the red light next time?
And he would say, yeah, sure, and I'd let him go.
If you can get away with murder, you should be able to get away with the red line.
Yeah, and I said, why did you even bother pulling him over?
He said, sometimes people would just complain that I didn't pull him over if they saw me, so I would just pull him over and then have a conversation because I couldn't in good conscience do that.
Eventually, he became so jaded that he left law enforcement altogether and works for me in a different capacity.
But...
I think the problem is the uneven enforcement of laws as they stand.
Now, you know, talk about the DOJ. You know, I'm a big fan of bringing the civil rights revolution into the 21st century by applying it even-handedly.
We talked about political expression as a civil right.
That's a legislative point.
But I do like one of the things I'm going to do with the DOJ is actualize a legal theory that I advanced in Woke Inc.
I think it's on solid ground, if I may say so myself, but we lay out all the historical legal precedents that would justify it.
So the civil rights protection against discrimination on the basis of religion doesn't just mean that you cannot discriminate against an employee for their religion.
It also means that you as the employer cannot force an employee to bow down to your religion.
So the question is whether the modern DEI agenda or wokeness or whatever fits the Supreme Court's test for what counts as a religion.
Turns out it meets that test in spades.
Certain clothes you can't wear, words you can't say, apologies you must recite.
It's a systematic worldview rather than a worldview on a narrow set of questions.
Secular humanism meets the Supreme Court's test for what counts as a religion.
Of course, sacramental.
Exactly.
So wokeness certainly meets that test to a T.
And so actually much of what you see in corporate America, even in the schools, et cetera, the enforcement of the DEI agenda is actually a civil rights violation, not under a change law.
Under existing law today, so I'll instruct the Department of Justice to prioritize ridding ourselves of this national cancer by applying who would have ever thought our civil rights laws evenly.
By interpreting wokeism as a religion.
By...
Acknowledging that wokeism is a religion under the Supreme Court's test, under the legal definition of a religion.
I've not won but two chapters of this in Woking.
One chapter is wokeness is like a religion.
Actually, the next chapter is actually wokeness is literally a religion.
So the first was colloquial, but the second we actually just legally meter it against, you know, yeah, law school professor approved.
You know, I've had a bunch of people kick the tires on this.
I think this is a, you know, I co-developed it actually with a former law professor of mine.
I think this is actionable today.
People ask, what can a president do about the woke epidemic?
Well, a lot of it's just fundamentally illegal under existing civil rights statutes.
And you know what?
People may say, oh, that's the free market.
Can't have it both ways.
Okay, if you want to get rid of the civil rights laws and the protected classes altogether, let's have that conversation.
But so long as we have it, we've got to apply those standards even-handedly.
And so when I think about the core issues of national identity and culture, I do think that the use of executive authority even in legal enforcement of civil rights violations or legal violations that are rampant in America today is a lever that I'll have to use.
Well, speaking of enforcement, Vivek, I would like to sit here all night, maybe have a couple drinks, talk about all of this, but the policies instituted by your campaign staff will be enforced on me and I will be defenestrated if I keep you here one moment longer.
