Vivek Ramaswamy and James Smith dissect America's post-9/11 slide into a permanent emergency, critiquing the Patriot Act and secular religions like "wokeism" that fill a moral vacuum. They analyze the Republican primary's philosophical rift between neoconservative donors and an "America First" base, exposing how super PACs turn candidates like DeSantis into puppets prioritizing hegemony over peace. Ramaswamy defends his pharmaceutical record against Soros allegations while arguing the presidency must lead by moral example, ultimately asserting that true liberty requires repealing administrative overreach rather than relying on government power to combat cultural shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ending The Emergency Nation00:15:06
Fill her up!
You are listening to the gas digital move.
We need to roll back the state.
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If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hello, hello.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very quickly, before we get into the show today, my brand new comedy special is available on YouTube for free.
Go check that out if you haven't already.
Also, I'm coming all over the place.
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ComicdaveSmith.com.
Go there for all my dates.
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A lot of fun stuff.
Vivek Ramaswamy.
How you doing, man?
How are you, sir?
Welcome back.
Good to be back.
I'm glad we could do this one in person.
Yeah, it's much better than the other way around.
Yes, yes, it is.
So what brings you to New York City?
Besides coming here?
Hey, we're going to 9-11 Memorial tonight as a family.
We had a number of other events and engagements we took on during the day.
My kids and my family are also here because we traveled to campaign in New Hampshire on Sunday.
And so we're on our way back.
I went to the U.S. Open last night.
So a bunch of things we took care of in New York.
Nice, yeah.
And back tomorrow.
As we are recording this, it is September 11th.
Me and you are both like around the same age.
And I think...
Yeah, how old are you?
I'm 40.
Yeah, 48.
37.
Same age, bro.
I'm 38.
Yeah.
38.
Okay.
So we were kind of in that generation of kids who were teenagers when 9-11 happened.
It's been interesting.
I've been thinking about it a lot over the last few days.
As, you know, the anniversary of 9-11 is always kind of an opportunity to kind of think about this thing that happened to the country, where we've gone as a country since then.
I saw there was a Glenn Greenwald had this, I think it was on Patrick Batt-David's show, and he was talking about how when the Patriot Act first was passed, that it was, even at the time, even in post-9-11 kind of craziness, it was still controversial.
And that one of the things they put into it to get it over the line was that it would expire in six years and have to be reauthorized.
And they keep reauthorizing.
And it's just a bigger theme I've been thinking of that it's almost like since 9-11, we've been in like a state of emergency the entire time.
Ever since.
And in every sense, we live in an emergency country now.
It's a one-way ratchet.
And it's a bit the vestiges of that that created COVID lockdown policies that will create climate change emergency policies in the future.
And I do think it's good to take occasions to memorialize who we really are as a country.
I mean, today is a day about, as we're recording this on 9-11, about commemorating the people who died, their families, the heroic people.
I know several of them.
You know, one of them is on my team who were involved and family members were involved in not running from ground zero, but running to ground zero.
That's what this day is about.
But I do think it provides an occasion to take a step back and ask, what is it that we are protecting in the first place?
And just like in the wake of a tragedy, right?
I mean, you could think about in response to whatever the tragedy is, you sometimes make policy decisions that you later, in times of more careful reflection, admit were wrong.
It's during times of peace that it's our responsibility to go back and undo a lot of that damage.
And so I do think that that's one of the occasions for us to reflect on today is honoring those who have served this country, including as first responders that day.
Sure.
you know, memorializing the victims and their family members who have suffered at the fate of something that should have never happened in this country.
But also reflect on how we can be a country that continually improves, that we make mistakes.
I think sometimes it's easy to fall in the trap of just flogging the people who made the mistakes as opposed to just saying, okay, we understand we made those mistakes, but how do we build on that foundation to be better going forward to make sure something like that never happens again?
Well, I think that's right.
But I would add, I agree with all of that, but I would also add that like if we truly want to like honor, you know, like the victims and the heroes, you know, as you said, like firefighters who are running toward the buildings crashing rather than running away, and then the innocent people who died, then it's also important to kind of like talk about some of the uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.
I know you got in trouble or whatever for talking about how the official 9-11 story was not exactly complete and that there were details that were not told to the American people, things that would have been a huge deal at the time.
I mean, it's like as the years go by, there's a different type of emotion.
But I mean, if you had told the American people on September 12th of 2001 that high levels of people within the Saudi government were in on 9-11 and that the Bush administration's response was to fly a whole bunch of them, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, out immediately while there were no flights leaving, this would have been like the outrage of the century.
And yet when that comes out, you know, 15 years later, it's just kind of one of those things.
20.
20 years later.
They declassified it about two years ago.
And so, look, I'm a guy who doesn't like to wallow in retrospective grievance.
Actually, not once did I bring up 9-11 on the campaign trail, but when asked about it, I will answer honestly.
That being said, my question is, how do we move forward from here?
Not what are we running from, but what are we running to?
And that's what this whole campaign's about.
What does it mean to be an American?
I think we live in one of these 1776 moments.
And the positive version of that is what a time that would have been to be alive, right?
In 1775, the spring of 1776.
We're sitting in a, you and I are sitting in this studio live in swivel chairs, okay?
Thomas Jefferson at the age of 33 invented the swivel chair.
Yeah.
The prototype of what we're sitting in while writing the Declaration of Independence.
And, you know, the spirit of that country, where is that spirit?
How do we revive that?
What would we say today?
You're not an expert.
You're supposed to be writing declarations of independences, not inventing swivel chairs.
You don't have training in that to do it.
The country that says, no, no, no, we're the unafraid.
We're the explorers.
We're the pioneers.
We support freedom.
We embrace freedom.
The freedom that is innate in us as human beings who have been endowed with free will.
That's what this country is.
And I think that we can learn from countless mistakes we have made in our past.
I still think in the face of all of those mistakes, and I'm like you, I'm a critic of many of them, sometimes at great personal cost.
And I'm sure you've encountered your version of it too.
But even still, having been such a critic, I will say that I'm the person who will also admit, happily, that this is still the last best hope for the project of freedom on God's green earth and likely in human history, that we will use that as a starting point to be better.
And that's, I think, the spirit we're trying to marshal in this campaign rather than to just wallow in victimhood and grievance for past sins, though I'm never going to sweep them under the rug.
That's where I'm at.
Well, I agree with that.
I think also the fact is like we're both guys who have little kids.
Yeah, we do.
How old are your kids?
My oldest is four.
my youngest is one and a half.
Very similar.
Yeah.
So, and I think when you have little kids, you kind of don't have the option to just wallow.
It's like, well, you don't have the option to not fight for a better country for our kids to grow up in.
And to your point of where we're, what we're running toward or what we ought to be running toward is, and this is kind of what I was getting at with that, is that what we need to be is not an emergency nation anymore.
It's amazing to me watching this whole presidential campaign how nobody in the political or media class even talks about radical Islamist terrorism anymore.
It's just like this is God.
What do we talk about?
It's just not even like a major concern.
And yet all of the things, whether it's the TSA groping us or the Patriot Act or the Department of Europe, they're all still there.
It's an implicit admission that the emergency is gone.
So we don't have a terrorism emergency.
We don't have a COVID emergency.
We don't have a financial crisis emergency.
And what I find myself wanting is we're of the age when I still have a memory of what America was like before all of this.
And I think that's what we should be, at least to some degree.
Like that's what I'd like my kids to grow up in.
A country where we're not all pitted against each other on immutable characteristics.
We're not in this constant state of emergency where the government is seizing all of these emergency powers, where we could just be a relatively like, I know America's maybe normal country isn't the right way to put it because America is not a normal country and never really has.
Yeah, I reject the normalcy.
But I mean, we're supposed to be what America was supposed to be, which is that we're supposed to be a city on a hill.
We're supposed to be a beacon of freedom, an example for the rest of the world.
And I think like that's the kind of society we want to be.
You know, I think I'm in an optimistic mood or something today, Dave, but I think that the way I look at it is we're going through a version of adolescence.
Okay.
So when you go through your adolescence, I don't know about you, but most of us, we lose our way a little bit.
Right.
Lose your sense of who you are, lose your self-confidence.
There's that sense of the small things that happen to you feeling like emergencies and reacting to them, overreacting to them, learning, bruising yourself along the way, but learning from it and being stronger for it on the other side when we get to our adulthood.
So I'd like to think of it this way.
I think there's a lot of truth to it.
I hope there's a lot of truth to it.
That, yes, we're going through a national identity crisis that's just evidence of our national adolescence, but we will be stronger for it on the other side when we get to our adulthood.
And when you view it that way, you don't have to then accept this narrative that we're a nation in decline.
We could still yet be a nation in our ascend, but we're going through the identity crisis that you would expect in a sole form of national adolescence.
So on that framing of it, even thinking about our kids, sometimes, and I started this campaign saying, I want to create the same country that you and I grew up in for our kids.
I don't even say it that way anymore.
I hope we can create a country greater than the one that you and I grew up in.
And I think that memory does do some favors.
Whereas if we were going back and actually living as 40-year-olds at that time, there's probably a lot else we would have found that we would have complained about too.
And so, you know, I think we could think about a lot of the lying of the government to its people.
A lot of that is recent, from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to Saudi Arabia's role in 9-11 to the financial crisis and the basis for the bailouts, the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the COVID origin.
I mean, we could just go on Hunter Biden's laptop story, how our money's being spent in Ukraine.
But you go back far enough, even into the 80s, even for presidents we like.
You know, we could talk about Reagan.
You could talk about others.
Oh, we don't like Reagan on this shit.
Oh, really?
I mean, Iran-Contra, you could talk about it.
You feel fine to talk about any of the drugs.
The guy shipped cocaine into America while prosecuting the war on drugs.
Right, right.
So problems.
So exactly.
But my point is, in some ways, this should encourage us.
So there's two things going on.
One is, yes, I do think that we're going through a definite identity crisis relative to even where we were in the late 80s and 90s.
The second thing, though, is even on that account, the late 80s and 90s are not really as idyllic as we remember them to be in contrast to the present.
When we're going through adolescence, it really feels like an emergency if we create an false idyllic memory of what really never was, but still was the last best hope for freedom on God's Great Throne.
And so that's Courtney, where I'm coming from.
Well, I think there's kind of, there's multiple things happening at once, right?
As there always are, especially with something as complex as a society of 300 plus million people.
There's lots of things happening.
I mean, there's lots of things.
The improvements in like medical technology from, say, the 80s and 90s to now are astounding.
I mean, there are things they can do.
My son had open heart surgery when he was a newborn baby.
And they are so much better at it now than they were in the 80s.
Like a surgery that would have been like a step of a coin over whether he'd live or die is now like a 99% thing.
And he's doing great.
So overall, that cancels everything else.
You know what I mean, in my view.
But I do think that there's kind of this double-edged thing going on today where I think the Republic is in greater risk probably than it's ever been in my lifetime.
And at the same time, we have this unbelievable opportunity, kind of what you were talking about in the 1776 moment, where there's this massive realignment.
There does seem to be like a huge awakening from the American people.
I brought this up when I was on Rogan a few times, but even just that song by Oliver Anthony blowing up so much where you do feel like, oh, yeah, there is this real, like, there's this movement.
There's electricity in the air.
There's electricity.
Light the match, and that's when it takes off.
So that's where I think we are.
And now it's up to the leaders in their respective spheres of our lives to have the courage to light the match.
Right.
And good things happen.
I predict very good things are going to happen if we have the courage to actually stand for it.
People substituted, I think, for the last five to 10 years their, I mean, I think what's happened in this country is you have loss of faith and patriotism and hard work and family all at the same time.
You then have this moral vacuum and you start latching onto fast food, COVIDism, climatism, wokeism, transgenderism, whatever it is, to fill that void.
But what I see happening in the country, at least in certain parts of the country, even amongst friends here in New York City and I gave a speech up Midtown earlier and this is not exactly conservative havens here in Manhattan where we're sitting today.
But even here, I think we're sensing a tiring, a weariness of saying that I've just got to fill that hunger with fast food, whatever that fast food is.
And I think that there's an openness to the real thing, whatever the real thing is.
Give me more substantial fare than racial and gender ideology and climate ideology and COVID ideology.
I mean, all of these things are ideologies in their own right.
Secular Religions And Woke Agendas00:06:58
Give me the real thing.
And maybe America is an ideology, but that's okay.
That's an ideology grounded in truth that is compatible with our human nature, that we are human beings endowed by our creator with the ability to pursue life, liberty.
Yeah, I think.
And happiness.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
You know, I think about how, you know, if you remember like...
uh, maybe like the early 2000s, remember how popular the uh, the new Atheist movement was.
It was like yeah, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and a lot of these guys yeah, I was at the time.
I was like a pretty militant atheist um, which i'm not at all anymore um, but uh, and then you kind of saw how, like Jordan Peterson at like, became this huge phenomenon and it's almost like I think a lot of us were in a place and I certainly this was kind of my evolution where there were a lot of people like around that time who were like, well listen, this is a more sound logical argument.
And the truth is you can't really prove the existence of a God.
And therefore, we're not required to prove a negative.
And therefore, the...
Yeah, all that.
And then there was almost something like, it's almost like we lived with the results of an atheistic society for a while.
And then a lot of people were like, yeah, you know what?
I actually think I am craving meaning.
I'm craving some kind of bigger purpose.
And I've seen, kind of to your point, that almost the real flaw in atheism is that it doesn't exist.
Because as soon as you become an atheist, it's almost like something rushes.
fill that void.
You, you could be an atheist.
You don't believe in god.
You're gonna believe in something?
Yeah right, and so I mean that's, that's one of the oldest expressions.
You have a hole the size of god in your heart.
Yeah, and god, fill it.
Something else will instead.
And actually, if i'm not mistaken, I think it was actually Pascal, who's a scientist and mathematician right, who actually first said it and has, in his own life, had gone through his own phase of secular religion.
But I do think that that's what's happened and I I think there's a further danger in that where some of the most dangerous religions are the ones where you fail to acknowledge that it's actually a religion when you're practicing it.
That's what's going on with the climate religion in this country.
It pains me to watch.
Oh, it's absolutely.
It is absolutely a substitute for true religion.
But it is more dangerous because you convince yourself that you're actually engaging in logic and reason and capital s science, when it's really just scientism.
And this is more dangerous because, I mean, take someone like me, so i'm also religious.
You know, you could have somebody who's you know, traditional Evangelical, Christian or Catholic or whatever, who in the Jew Hindu, doesn't matter.
What are you i'm?
I'm Jewish uh I, I wouldn't.
I mean, it doesn't matter.
You know, I kind of like found god.
You believe in, right?
Yes, I believe in god since, since having kids, that really changed.
It's interesting.
It was a similar time frame, you know.
I came back to it.
I went through my own fate.
I grew up in a religious household, left that for most of my 20s, came back, probably shortly before we had kids.
Actually, in some ways, that may have been what led me to right, actually having kids, but anyway, the whole part of that journey, with what that means, is I was still.
Let's just Let's take my example.
I was a drug developer, right?
I oversaw the development of medicines.
Five of them are FDA approved.
One of them is a life-saving therapy in kids, which 100% of kids die by the age of three with this genetic disease they're born with.
Now, one of the therapies that we worked on is one that allows a majority of those kids to live lives of normal duration that's FDA approved.
So be it.
When we're engaging in different facets and spheres of our lives, we know we can wear different hats, right?
It's not that I hope and pray for a miracle cure.
You analyze data, you make probabilistic bets, some work, some fail.
You're rational about what that's going to be.
And you wear that hat because you're not practicing religion when you're doing that.
You're practicing science.
Right.
Right.
Or you're practicing investment calculus or business practice.
Okay.
And it's different when you go to the temple or you go to the church and you pray.
It's a different side of how you access truth.
It's not like you're reasoning your way into that.
If you're listening to at least many people who sit in the pews, listen to the pastor, it's not like your logical brain is computing, even though you have that side of yourself.
The problem with the secular religions is that they combine these things into one exercise where you convince yourself that you're actually doing the thing that we're talking about, about making a logical business decision or a scientific calculation, when in fact the thing you're doing is you're just sitting in the pews and engaging in a feeling that the pastor is giving you.
And that pastor might be named Al Gore or, you know, whoever it is, Greta Thunberg or whoever it is.
And I think that it's just important.
There's nothing wrong with either mode of accessing truth.
But you've got to know which one you're actually practicing or you lose track of what the heck you're doing.
And that's what's going on in the United States of America with respect to this climate cult.
And the problem with that is not just that you're confused.
You make decisions that actually harm human beings in ways you never otherwise would have accepted.
That was COVID policy.
It's now climate policy.
And I think that it's at risk of repeating itself unless we actually have the courage, not just through government, preferably not through government, as much as possible, to fill that void of purpose and meaning with something that's real and lasting and true and tied to our nature, our innate nature as human beings, so that we're, it's like a spiritual vaccine against the kinds of spiritual poison that otherwise fill that void.
So my perspective on it would be that it's not, it's like, it's not even like that we need through government in any way to fill, I think that government is the one who's in the way, basically.
Almost always.
Like at the heart of the destruction of kind of like the pro-family, pro-God culture is government at every turn, at every turn, from subsidizing the birth of family.
Using money.
Taxpayer money to do the opposite of what's best for people.
It's almost like, and even just like the most basic functions that government has taken for, say, most of the 20th century, I mean, even things like Social Security, it was like before Social Security, the old Social Security was you would rely on your children to take care of you when you were older.
Libertarian Courage Beyond Labels00:15:11
And then the government comes in and like is like a wedge between these familiar bonds.
And I mean, I know you've done a lot.
You've probably been all over this topic more than anybody else.
But the fact that so much of this kind of woke ideology, which is really anti-everything traditional values, is pumped in by, number one, by college universities, which are basically a government program.
Government creatures, absolutely.
Yes, I mean, the governments are the ones giving out the loans so kids can go to these schools, whether they're private or public.
And then also the fact that so many of these like, which I actually learned from you, but that so many of these like public sector pensions actually demand of these financial companies that they have these kind of woke agendas if they're going to get the money.
Which you pull the string up all the way.
It's actually a government actor, not even BlackRock, go upstream of BlackRock, it goes to CalPERS, which is a government creature.
So there's also some areas where on the woke thing while we're pausing on that is it comes from the government in terms of hard laws from the government to the Civil Rights Acts.
Okay.
So the Civil Rights Acts say you can't discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation now included religion, national origin, and otherwise.
But combined with the administrative state, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, what that came to mean was through the law, through Reg's regulations, right, which were never actually passed by elected representatives, but by unelected bureaucrats, came to mean that if you're an employer, you're a private company, you can't create a, what they call, hostile work environment for a member of a protected class.
So what began as a non-discrimination provision, that you can't discriminate against hiring somebody, now says you can't create a hostile work environment for that member of a protected class.
Well, how does one go about creating a hostile work environment?
Turns out that allowing the expression of certain viewpoints in the workplace, that itself is a civil rights violation because you have created a hostile work environment.
So there's a grandma who wears a red sweater on Fridays to commemorate those who are serving in the military.
A guy who's a member of a protected class says that he considers that a microaggression.
She no longer has wearing it on Fridays and no longer has the happy hour in the office.
She just brings the red sweater and puts it on the back of her chair.
He still asserts microaggression.
The company is now in a position to say if they don't tell her that she can't do that, that they might be liable under the Civil Rights Acts themselves.
And so this is the government creating the conditions for rampant viewpoint discrimination, call it woke capitalism, call it what you want, rampant viewpoint discrimination in the private sector while leaving political viewpoints unprotected.
So it's not the market or the culture that's getting us to us.
It's not the invisible hand of the market.
It is the invisible hand of government that's guiding us to what looks like a cultural phenomenon of, you know, woke epidemics or whatever.
So yes, I agree with you that many people, especially in the conservative movement who will offer and then turn to a government solution by playing tug of war, miss the point that it was actually first step.
What I say is at least try it.
Why don't we just try not paying people not to have more money to be a single mother than to be a dual parent mother than to say we need a government program to subsidize some sort of pro-family creation.
Just try removing the thing that actually created the skewed incentives in the first place and let's see how that goes.
We've never done that in this country.
And that's where you have a, you would say you have a fairly libertarian leaning audience here.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a hardcore libertarian.
I think the audience is.
Well, whatever the audience is, but to your libertarian friends, and I'm a former self-described libertarian and probably still have a lot, I definitely have a lot of those instincts still deep in my bones.
I call myself a conservative for reasons we can talk about.
I think there's more to life than just the relationship with the government.
But what I would say to our libertarian friends is, just as I'll sort of speak to, you know, speak truth to my camp of conservatives or liberals who disagree with me to the libertarian group is don't back off of your principles even when it's hard, right?
Standing up for the repeal of protected categories in the Civil Rights Acts, that's a difficult thing to do in the current climate.
But when you're frustrated with conservatives who are then offering other stupid solutions at times that are symptomatic therapies of how you should use government power to change wokeism, and I hear the libertarian frustration with that, my only advice back is great, but then have the courage to actually stand up for your own principles by repealing the protected categories and the Civil Rights Acts as opposed to hiding in a hole, which is what many of them go on to do.
You get what I'm saying, right?
100%.
Yeah.
So I'm completely with you on that.
I don't know if you ever saw, there was the reason guys, Nick Gillespie and Nick and Zach had Chris Ruffo, I think his name is, the guy is out there in Florida, and he basically pushed them on that.
If he's like, well, if you're really a libertarian, then your position is repeal the Civil Rights Act.
Yes.
And neither of them had that conversation with Rufus.
Neither of them would.
And then you're just left and you're just...
Because there's fear.
It's this culture of fear.
Because that's right.
So that is actually the libertarian position.
I would say, though, that what's to be the libertarian position.
It's the only coherent libertarian position there.
Here's the truth, okay?
It's that this is the libertarian position, and people want to run away from it because it, again, you're worried that people will call you names.
But the truth is that, and this is how I, look, I'm Jewish.
I think you should have a right to say no Jews allowed outside of your business.
I think you have the right to discriminate.
And in fact, I don't fail as a business.
Yeah.
But we have a lot of capital, so I don't know if you really want to discriminate against those Jews here.
But I'm just saying it's like, look, the idea that if somebody actually hated me for being Jewish so much that if legally allowed to, they would put up a no Jews allowed sign.
But instead of being able to do that, what are you doing by forcing it?
So now I'm going into this business and spending money on these people?
I would rather know who you are, and I'm quite confident that this would, the market would sort all of this out.
I'm actually within this, but this is my only, this is, there are two reasons why I don't call myself a libertarian anymore.
This is one of them.
Okay.
Is that the people who...
You don't think this is a winning topic?
No, no, no, no.
Because I actually, because I actually am open to saying it.
Right.
But what frustrates me is the lowercase, you know, or maybe properly put the uppercase or whatever, the political label version of it is mostly staffed by people who, at least in my experience, don't have the courage to actually go the full distance and stand for the principles.
And so you end up in this halfway house in the middle where you're going back to wallowing in grievance, but without actually having the courage and spine to see through something like a repeal of the Civil Rights Act, which I think would be the principled position from a libertarian.
The second reason is more philosophical we could talk about another time, but unless you want to talk about it now.
Yeah, no, I'm curious.
Well, what's the second reason?
Well, because I'm interested in more questions.
To your first reason, that seems to me, like, I get your point.
I have that same frustration I talk about a lot on the show, but that seems to me to be the reason why I'm saying these other people who identify as libertarian are not actually defending libertarian principles.
Exactly.
But that's more the reason to me why, like, someone should be defending these principles.
He sounds like you're down too.
I'm not pure libertarian.
So there were, you know, they were good, right?
But you're a libertarian who's a successful comedian and podcaster, not somebody who's driving that through the front door of public policy.
I have a, well, that's true, but no libertarianism.
That's fair enough.
Public policy.
Believe me, no one listens to us.
But I also, listen, I guess I'm fortunate in the sense that, number one, I'm a true believer.
And number two, I don't live in D.C. I'm not trying to get invited to cocktail parties.
I don't have to worry about any of that.
Like if there's, there's a lot of these think tanks that are libertarian that are kind of in that orbit.
And so you can never really go outside the lines of allowable opinion.
Whereas like, I'm like, I hope those people hate me.
I don't care.
So an example of how I'm waging this particular battle is I've said that I would be very open to then seeing political expression be made a protected class.
If you can't discriminate for race, gender, religion, national origin, or otherwise.
And the law created the very conditions for viewpoint discrimination to do it.
But that's a second best solution to what my still preferred first best solution is.
Which is actually repeal the protected classes altogether.
Yes, I think it's fair to say that if we're going to live, if we're going to live within a civil rights framework, then it should be applied differently.
I understand that also.
So you could characterize my position as one that's aligned with a deeply principled libertarian.
The other piece of it is just the scope of the set of issues I care about, which is I think that there is more to not only to life, but even civic life.
I won't call it political life, but I'll call it civic life than just the relationship between the individual and the government.
So the libertarian position is keep the government out of my hair.
And I pretty much generally agree deeply with that.
I have to think deeply if there was any exception to that.
So I'm pretty much there.
Keep the government out of my hair.
I'm a medical choice absolute right to try.
I mean, one of the things that frustrates me as a guy who has had to raise and expend hundreds of millions of dollars to get drugs through the FDA approval process is the fact that there should be people in this country who are allowed to take that, knowing the risks even after phase two, which they have a pretty darn good idea of what the thing is going to do or not going to do.
But anyway, put that to one side, there are other questions that are interesting, that are important.
Like, what do we do in that free country once the government is out of our hair?
Okay, what then?
And it's just that one way or another, it's not the fault of libertarian political philosophy, but it's just not something that libertarianism has anything to say about.
There are other things in life that have things to say about that.
Sure.
I think.
Virtue or faith.
And so I'm just interested in those questions as well.
And the only reason I bring that back politically, Dave, is this related to our opening conversation where, yeah, most of the time the problem is get the government out of the way.
But I think in the role of the U.S. presidency, and this is part of what moves me into this, is there's more to the job than making policy.
Part of the job, I believe, done well is just standing as an example of what our national character is.
Yeah.
Just the way you live your life, the way you speak, the way you interact with people, the way you treat people.
And I think that this is not a policymaking function at all.
It's neither pro-nor anti-libertarian.
It's just neither here nor there on that axis of government control versus individual, but just a different thing.
Where, your dad, I'm a dad.
I would love to have a president in office where I could, just in my capacity as a father, look my two sons in the eye and tell them, I want you to grow up and be like him.
Yeah.
Not having the government forcing you or not forcing you to anything, but just that element of it.
And I think it's been a long time since we've had a president who fits that description, at least for me.
I think it's true for a lot of people.
And I think that that's a big part of the impact that the next president of the United States can have on reviving the national character of this country in a way that has nothing to do with policymaking or restraints or relief of restraints on liberty, but that I still think is important.
And I guess that's why I guess I call myself conservative rather than libertarian, even though the policy differences are actually much, much, much smaller than being a libertarian.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, at the end of the day, I don't really care about the labels as much as the underlying views.
But I do agree with you.
I think libertarianism is a limited worldview.
The analogy I use is it's kind of like if you opposed slavery in 1840, you're like, so I'm an abolitionist.
And then someone's like, okay, but being an abolitionist, this doesn't tell you anything about how to raise your kids.
Totally, totally.
And you're like, yes, no, that is outside the scope of that.
And I also think you should be a good husband and father or whatever.
But I will say I agree with your point.
I remember, you know, because we're both like 90s kids.
And I remember at the time in the 90s, as a teenager, feeling very much like, oh, this thing about Bill Clinton is no big deal.
Who cares?
Who cares if the president got a blowjob in the Oval Office?
And it's now as like an adult and a husband and a father, I'm like, yo, you're getting a blowjob from a 21-year-old intern when you were the like, whatever, 50-year-old president of the United States of America.
Like that is so messed up, dude.
And there is something, I'm not saying it should be illegal or anything like that.
No, no, exactly.
But that's so bad for us as a nation that we can't have a president who's a decent enough person.
Like, I'm a better person than that.
Everyone I know is like a better person than that.
Like, what do we, well, maybe not everyone I know.
Yeah.
But I'm just saying like, that is a problem.
There's an element of failure there.
And I think that, you know, this is, this would be a disappointment for what a presidency should look like.
And this is not what I'm aspiring to.
But let's say we had a president who got in there and didn't fix a single thing or worsen, did not improve or worsen a single public policy relative to the status quo, which would be a deep disappointment.
Sure.
But still conducted himself or if it's a woman, herself, whoever it is, with a level of decency that was becoming of what we want the leader of the United States to do.
That itself would be a net positive relative to where we are.
Now, for me, I'm much more interested in driving a policy agenda, shutting down the administrative state, things that I don't even require Congress to do.
I mean, that's what I'm going in there to do.
Those are, I mean, deeply libertarian commitments.
I mean, they frighten many people in the Republican Party when I say we're not just going to incrementally reform these agencies because I think they can't be reformed.
We're going to get in there and shut them down.
On Wednesday this week, I'm giving a first ever legal basis for exactly how we will shut them down in ways that the advisor class to Reagan and Trump each duped them into believing they couldn't.
But that's not all I want to do for this country.
And much of what I want to do isn't start some sort of aggressive family policy top-down agenda, but maybe just be a president in the White House who values the importance of family and speaks to it in a first personal way that sets an example that might be a little bit different than the example that Bill Clinton set.
And I think that that too is just an important part of being a leader.
Not, I wouldn't say in all political roles.
If you're a senator or congressman walking the halls of Congress, that's a different point.
You have a very narrow job.
But for the presidency, I think that that's an important element of it that I think goes beyond whatever the traditional labels of, you can call it libertarian or conservative.
I could care less for it either, but is probably about half the job of the next U.S. president too.
Dissidents Against Super PACs00:11:14
And I think you and I probably care about reuniting this country.
I think that that's actually going to be our means of reuniting this country most, more so than convincing people who deeply disagree with you on like abortion or whatever else.
Yeah, no, I get your point.
No, I think there's a real point to that.
I wanted to ask you, by the way, before I wanted to get into, there's two more topics.
We've got a little bit of time left.
So what was it like?
There's a shift in topics, but since last time you were on the show, there was a presidential debate.
Yes.
And one of the things that I just thought was like really striking is you're at this presidential debate and you have the former vice president of the United States of America.
You've got like the most popular Republican governor in the country.
And you just became the entire focus of the debate.
It was unbelievable.
You're who everybody's going after.
Like it was unbelievable.
It was really quite a what?
What was that like for you?
It was kind of humorous, actually.
I was having, I mean, I was probably having a little too much fun up there, but it was interesting.
But then I think it was important to understand why, right?
You know, these things say I'm a threat to these people on rising in the polls, all that.
That's fine.
I think all that's true.
The real reason is we have a deep ideological divide on the real third rail when it comes to the establishment in either party, which is foreign policy.
These people cannot abide the fact that a serious contender for the presidency would actually cut off aid to Ukraine at this moment, that we would actually state a clear position on Taiwan that defects from strategic ambiguity, that's honest about where we will and won't draw our red lines.
So the idea of moving from ambiguity to clarity, let's just start.
That's like, I think the philosophical premise that's a break from a lot of that neoconservative.
And this isn't even the original neocon.
This is imitative, cheap imitation neocon versions is the idea that there's going to be a guy who comes in from the outside and actually offers clarity and speaks the truth about what he will and won't do in a way that threatens the model of liberal hegemony for the last 40 years of this country's foreign policy.
That was really the third rail.
And so if you see the stuff they come at me about, okay, everybody on that stage is anti-woke in some measure or other, or at least they'll act like it.
They'd rather have a virtue singling pissing contest about who's more against, you know, women having to compete with men in the swimming pool.
Okay.
We all agree on that stuff.
That's easy.
But when it comes to, are you willing to end the Ukraine war or not?
You saw commitments where people didn't even want that to be a hand raise or answer question.
Climate change agenda.
People do not want to be held to account to a viewpoint on that.
Cutting off aid to Ukraine, though, is I think the basic third rail that I think is going to separate the kids from the adults in this Republican primary race.
And I was the only person on that stage who I think has a clear vision of how to keep us out of World War III while still advancing American economic interests.
And it almost makes you wonder why some of the people on that stage, whether or not they know it, somewhere in their heart is deeply rooting for World War III.
And I think that that takes the guise of this debate about experience.
I say this guy's inexperienced.
There's a deeper philosophical point where what has experience led us to?
Experience has led us to 25 years of pointless wars that do not advance American interests, but it's taken the guise of this more personalized attack.
But what it really is about is something that's a philosophical divide in the GOP.
And this primary will be good because we will come out of it decisively with one answer or the other.
Are we doubling down on neocons or are we moving forward to a foreign policy that advances American interests while keeping us out of war?
But the divide isn't even, the divide is between the voters and the donors.
It really is.
There's not a big divide amongst the Republican base over this.
They're all true about that.
I think there's a lot of people who don't know what they think yet.
Perhaps.
I think there's a lot of my sense, actually.
Traveling, Iowa, New Hampshire, et cetera.
I was surprised.
And some of that's the donors, right?
Because they're ultimately control the means of production of what shows up on your advertisements on television and the candidates who they put up as their puppets.
But I do think that this is an interesting moment where this is something useful that will come out of this primary.
I am actively, and I see it in rooms of 200, 300 people in Iowa, not 200, 300 million, 200, 300 actual, just like 300 individuals.
But I will have people who will walk into that event thinking that they're in support of continuing aid to Ukraine that will walk out of that event saying, no, no, no, no, ending this war with a peace deal and getting Russia out of China's hands is absolutely the right way to go.
And so I think this is one of those rare moments where we get to do something that we don't do in our politics anymore.
We actually persuade people on the merits of an issue.
And the beauty of this issue is, at least as it relates to Ukraine, it's not so old yet that people have become entrenched in believing that it has to be either this way or the other way.
I think there's a lot of people in the Republican primary base, at least, that are curious, open, but still think that, yeah, isn't the right thing to support the guy who's like not the evil dictator man, but the other guy who was taught to be the good guys, because that's what we do in the United States, peace through strength, all that stuff.
Who I think are really open to being convinced.
And so that's a big part of why I'm doubling down my voice on this issue is I think it can actually make a change in what the GOP ends up becoming.
Yeah, well, it does.
It's great that you're doing that.
It does seem like you, out of the two major parties, I mean, you, Trump, and RFK are like kind of the only people who are good on Ukraine.
But I will say, watching the debate, watching the, say like where Mike Pence is or where Nikki Haley is on Ukraine, I listen to that and I am very convinced.
I go, there's no chance that you can win the nomination.
Yeah, I don't believe it.
In 2004, sure.
This was the key to winning in the Republican primary.
Not anymore, not after this.
And I'm curious what your thoughts are on this.
I think DeSantis, who is, I just think has been a complete flop as a presidential candidate, even though I think he did some very good things as governor in Florida.
I agree with you.
He is trying to walk this line where he goes, he kind of knows he can't say what Mike Pence is saying because he knows that's a loser.
But he also, I think, doesn't want to alienate his donors.
It leaves for people like me, I have no idea where he truly stands on the issue, where his heart is.
And I think this is kind of a cowardice on his part on his part.
So I'm going to be a little bit more charitable here because I think I'm closer to it and understand what's going on.
It's not even his fault.
It's the fault of a broken system, right?
I mean, you have a campaign effectively being run by a super PAC.
I mean, this whole thing's a charade, right?
The distinction between super PAC and campaigns.
It's a joke.
It's a farce.
And we're playing this game where they're literally serving up binders of stuff to say, this is what you should say.
Like there was, I don't know if you saw this before the first debate.
There was like a 400-page memo, 17 pages of which are dedicated to one-liners to be directed against me.
I saw, I saw.
Which is, which is remarkable.
And yet it's just the way the machine works.
And I feel badly, actually, for the people who are the puppets who then get propped up.
I mean, these are people who, some of whom might not even run for president.
They're doing a good job in the role they're in.
They don't, whoever they are.
I'm not talking about anybody specific here, but I think this happens a lot.
Don't enjoy people, are doing a good job being an executor.
When you're a president, you need to actually have vision.
But the donor class has decided, no, no, no, no.
It can't be Trump and there must be an anointed one.
And we're going to pour like literally hundreds of millions of dollars into, we can't do that to the campaign.
So we're going to create this farce saying there's an independent super PAC that then props that up, runs the whole thing, creates the one-liners you're supposed to say, but that comes with strings attached because many of those donors are addicted to sort of the American hegemony, self-esteem, self-self-esteem that they derive from what America is in the global stage to say that that can't be your position on Ukraine, that tie your hands on what you can say about Ukraine, what you can say about the falsehoods of the climate change agenda.
What you can say about even pardoning Donald Trump or Julian Assange or anyone else.
I mean, I've got a day one list of pardons.
That costs me donors.
My Ukraine position costs me major donors.
We're here in New York City.
I'm very, from my prior life, well connected in this city and these circles.
The number of people I lose because of my willingness to say that I would pardon Donald Trump for politicized persecutions through prosecution, it comes at a real sacrifice.
Like literally a, I could not monetize it.
But it's like I was saying before.
there is this, it seems right now in the GOP primary, there is just this enormous gulf between the donor class and voter.
But like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Donald Trump is a complete winner amongst voting base.
First off, it's the right thing to do.
This is an insane politicized hit job.
But even if you're one of these calculating British politicians, it's really funny that they can't bring themselves to do it because mother's milk is their donor money.
And so that's what's the problem with our politics.
And you've had puppets, super PAC puppets in prior cycles.
You've got them in this cycle.
So in some ways, I don't blame the puppet, right?
They're just being manipulated and deputized by the puppet master.
But it's a system that I think is badly broken and in need of dramatic overhaul.
Right now, the people who can overhaul it are outsiders like me and who have also been capable enough that I'm self-funding this with eight figures of my own money rather than having to deny and rely on eight figures of donor class money that come with strings attached.
All right.
So let me ask you, because I've seen, so I think, look, a lot, the stuff you say about taking down the administrative state, you know, ending these three-letter agencies when you say things like pardoning Ross Albrick, which I've heard you say before, and Julian Assange, and talked about putting Ron Paul as the head of the Federal Reserve.
These are things that get me very sexually aroused.
I love all of them, okay?
I'm completely on board with all of this.
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Skepticism In The Therapy Industry00:15:20
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All right.
Let's get back into the show.
There's one of the things that I think a lot of people, kind of dissident, not just libertarians, but just kind of dissidents in general.
One of the things we have a lot of trouble with is even when people say all of the right things, then there's always the question of like, can I trust this guy?
Fair enough.
And I've seen, you know, I saw the interview you did with Anomaly where there's been some of these kind of things online about, you know, look, you are a guy to a lot of us who it's kind of like came out of nowhere.
All of a sudden, this guy made hundreds of millions of dollars in some industry that is known as being a pretty corrupt industry.
All of a sudden he's here.
He's saying all of the right things.
And we're like, so what's going on here?
And there's our, I've seen a lot of things come out about like your company and they're, they're accusing, you know, you of like some type of pump and dump type scheme where your stock plummeted, but you made tons of money.
This is some of the worst downfalls.
There were failed drugs that people did.
So yeah, like what, you know, because listen, I think.
Can we just walk through some of that?
Sure, absolutely.
So the first thing I would say is people should be skeptical of anybody.
Yeah.
New, not new, anything.
Be skeptical.
I think that's healthy, but be skeptical 360 degrees, right?
Because everybody's, I mean, the manipulation is 360 degrees.
It may be happening through what's served up to you on your own social media algorithms by the people who you think you trust, but actually have their own agenda for pushing what they do.
So as long as the skepticism goes 360 degrees, I think it's a good thing.
So look, let's say how I succeeded.
First, people say, well, is he a pharma industry shill?
Look at how the people in the pharma industry, like big pharma execs, feel about me.
That answers your question.
Comparing my company or my rise as an entrepreneur to big pharma or being part of big pharma is like the equivalent of calling Rumble part of big tech.
Okay.
Okay.
Because just because you're doing the same things and offering a video sharing platform doesn't mean you're big tech.
You're there for a reason.
And I say this as somebody who invested in Rumble back when it was a private company, precisely because I wanted to back at the challenge of big tech.
And we did the same thing with respect to big pharma, which often coordinates softly to leave certain therapeutic areas undeveloped.
Now, there's the separate point is, oh, no, no, was this guy actually successful at being a biotech entrepreneur?
Answer is yes.
I mean, I don't like to brag, but let's just call the facts are what they are.
In seven years, I oversaw the development of medicines, five of which are FDA approved today.
Most people who ever start a biotech startup never get to one product that makes it past that line.
We got five.
Now, the whole strategy is develop drugs in areas that pharma abandons.
One of those was a failed drug for Alzheimer's disease.
Whoop-to-doo.
99.7% of drugs ever tested for Alzheimer's disease failed.
About thousands of drugs.
Mine was one of them.
What's unique about me is five of the medicines that I oversaw the development of.
One of them is life-saving in kids.
One of them is a drug for prostate cancer.
That's what created the value that allowed me to make money.
That's a $10 billion public company today.
That's the predominant source of my wealth.
Now, then there comes the falsehood.
They say that, oh, well, Vivek company had a subsidiary, Axivan, that had this drug for Alzheimer's disease and that he sold shares and made money.
No.
Like you could literally factually track this stuff, just not a dime.
I could have, actually, but I didn't.
In fact, many people would call that, may call that, I would say, honorable to not have done that because you actually are invested in the thing that you're actually doing.
And so the only thing I would say to people is be skeptical of what you're fed.
Be skeptical of what you hear from me.
Be skeptical of what you hear from Dave.
Be skeptical of what you hear from everybody, but get to truth in the end.
And, you know, politics is notorious for this.
But one of the things we've been doing is as the falsehoods come up, actually, there's a page on our website we made.
Somebody, Scott Adams, suggested we do this online.
And he was just like, I'm sick and tired of like, you know, these stories about you seem to be BS, but don't make your other people do the work.
I said, fine.
So we had our team.
We put it together in 72 hours.
And I wrote it myself.
I didn't want somebody else writing this.
That's stuff I wrote myself.
You could probably figure that out by reading it.
It's vivek2024.com is our website.
Go to vivek2024.com slash, what was it?
Truth over myth.
Fake news.
Vivek2024.com slash fake news.
And, you know, we just go through the hard facts and people should make the judgments for themselves.
The litmus test I'd give you, though, is think about what somebody has given up for the decisions they make.
Sure.
Right.
So I stepped down from my job as a biotech CEO precisely because I refused to bend the knee and make a corporate statement or contribution in favor of Black Lives Matter and then specifically made it, took a stand that companies should not be engaging in political and politicized, one-sided tilting of scales, which you're seeing in most of corporate America.
And I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that said big tech companies should not listen or should not be bound by government actors who pressure them to censor content.
I wrote that in the wake of January 6th, three advisors to my company resign.
I'm sitting in a very good position as CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.
Had to face a choice.
I could have done what everybody else did and chose instead to step down so I could speak my mind freely.
That comes at some sacrifice.
In this campaign, it is obvious that most of the things that I am saying are not the things that allow me to raise the maximal donor money that I could, especially with a base of connectivity and whatever in elite among wealthy people or whatever, many of whom are refusing to associate with or give to my campaign.
It comes at great cost.
We've put in immense amounts of our families' money instead to do that.
And so all I would ask is when people are getting to truth, get to truth, but think about it.
Be a thinking person.
Don't just consume what you're fed.
And I'm confident that, you know, that's what this process is about.
People will understand who I am and what I stand for.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's, you know, it's like one of the things people were trying to make a big deal out of was getting like the Soros grant for a conversation.
Yeah, just think about it.
I just think about things like this where you're a thinking person.
This isn't really evidence of anything.
Like, I'm not, it's just like the fact that someone took a grant.
I remember they used to, people used to say about Tulsi Gabbard, because I'm a fan of her.
I mean, I didn't vote for her, but I was a fan of her running in the Democratic Party and someone being anti-war there.
And they'd be like, yeah, but she's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
And you're like, yeah, I know.
And the Council on Foreign Relations is a messed up order, but that doesn't actually prove anything.
Because if you're a first-term congresswoman who's an active duty combat vet, they're going to come.
You're not even thinking about it.
You're just like, sure, I'll come speak at this point.
Yeah, it's like, it doesn't prove what people think it does.
All I was thinking is skeptical of everybody.
You should be skeptical.
It doesn't necessarily think about it independently, right?
Soros thing.
I mean, I've answered this a million times, but say your kid's 24 years old back in 2010.
Yeah.
Back in 2010.
And they get the opportunity to have a $50,000 scholarship.
That's a generic scholarship that you submit something on a website and they tell you whether they get a scholarship or not.
And that's it.
And some guy who's now long dead, who made his money independently, who has last same, last name is this other guy who seems to support liberal causes, though long before that guy went off the truly toxic deep end that he's gone in the last seven years and say, okay, that's a 24-year-old, like generically, I mean, I've applied to probably 50 scholarships over the course of the different components of education, that being one of them.
Forget about me being, you know, defending myself or whatever, because I think this is a relatively stupid line of attack, but put that to one side.
Think for yourself independently about your parent of a kid or you're a kid in that same position.
Does that make sense?
And if that's disqualifying to be U.S. president, then let's just go down the list.
Donald Trump took a $160 million loan from George Soros as a full-grown adult business loan from George Soros.
Ron DeSantis has had fundraisers in June with, I think, like one of George Soros' investment partners.
And for my part, I actually, those aren't things that I think are disqualifying for those people either because I understand how just the game is played.
Donald Trump's a businessman.
I was a smart student.
Donald Trump funded the Clintons.
I mean, he was given money.
I mean, no kidding, right?
And people thought for a long time he was a Hillary Clinton plant, which is a ridiculous idea.
Then it was a Russia.
He was a collusion hoax.
He was a really bad person.
Really bad Hillary player.
And then the other side says this is a Russia collusion hoax.
And so I'm a big fan of, I mean, some of the stuff that's gotten me in trouble, if you will, with the mainstream press comes from my own skepticism of prevailing government narratives.
So I will never fault somebody for being skeptical, only for being skeptical and lazy.
Right.
Because I think that be skeptical, but don't be lazy.
And combine the two and then get to actually real truth.
And I think good things are going to happen.
All right.
So final question.
And I'll let you get out of here.
You see the way they're coming after Donald Trump.
I think Tucker Carlson was on Adam Corolla's show, it was recently.
And he said, which I think is something that we've all kind of thought, at least at one point, whether we agree with it or not.
But he said, look at where this thing is going, like chart it out.
I mean, they tried just slandering him.
They tried impeaching him.
Like that didn't work.
They tried impeaching him again.
That didn't work.
They've now indicted him.
His poll numbers are going up.
That didn't work.
And he was like, we're moving dangerously close toward like assassination territory.
But you're seeing, even regardless of that, just how much they're coming after the guy and trying to ruin him.
You've got you kind of RFK and Donald Trump are the three candidates out there who are making waves, who are really running in opposition to three-letter agencies.
And three-letter agencies are not known for their kindness.
Do you worry about this at all?
Like, do you worry about like becoming an enemy of the state?
It does seem like they're working on taking Donald Trump out.
And then if he's out of the race, you're now kind of the America first Trumpist candidate in the Republican Party.
Do you like, as a person with a family and kids, do you get worried about like being in the crosshairs of this, you know, the most powerful government in human history?
It doesn't make me, I'm not at my best when I'm in fear mode.
Right.
And so am I a human being?
And does that come up from time to time in my mind?
Yes.
But that's not what's going to allow me to actually unleash the true potential of this country and unleash my own potential as a leader.
Our family, we made a serious decision.
I mean, it is a sacrifice to this.
We're living a great life, right?
We had two young kids, live the full American dream.
You know, Air Force One won't be that much of an upgrade for me from our life that we've lived for the last three years.
We're happy with that.
And so this comes at some sacrifice.
And I think that if you're living in constant fear, you're never going to get the thing done that you wanted to get done in the first place.
And so I would say we're guided by our purpose, understanding as thinking people that there are risks.
Right.
But you know what?
Every plan you make in life is somewhat stupid too.
At least it's been that way for me.
Sure.
Like all your plans are kind of dumb.
You think you, I mean, there have been stages in my life.
Maybe all of us have done this where, you know, even plotting up my career, we're going to do this.
And then it's going to be the next thing that come up.
But if that doesn't happen, then we're going to do this.
And it's just like, it never went according to plan anyway.
Right.
And so, and this is actually part of where my faith comes back as well.
I do believe that it is not really in some true sense of the universe.
It's not being done by us.
It is being done through us.
I believe God put us here for a purpose.
And we're here to do our part and realize that true purpose.
And so for me, that's actually liberating.
That's a source of my freedom when I fall into sometimes the mental trap and model of thinking it's being done by me.
I'm the agent.
I am, you know, I went through my 20s of, you know, thinking I'm the Howard Rourke.
It's, it's actually, for me at least, and each person might be different.
It's confining.
Whereas when you remind yourself, at least for me, I think of it as a reminder that, hey, I'm an agent.
I'm an instrument.
I'm put here to achieve a unique purpose.
Just because I'm running for the presidency, that's not higher or lower than any other important job that needs to be done for the purposes that we're each here put on earth to pursue.
But that's the one that I believe I've been given the skill set and the blessing to be able to make an impact this way.
Great.
That's what I'm going to do.
Then I'm cool.
And so I think that, you know, are there times where you get all wrapped up in your head?
Yeah, that's natural.
But that's not most of the time for me.
And I think I'm at my best when we're guided by our purpose, not overly attached to our plans.
I don't even relish, I really don't relish the idea of being the next president.
It doesn't seem appealing to me.
Right.
It really does.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, if you told me right now that you're God and you could tell me with certainty that somebody else was going to be the better person to lead this nation forward and reunite the country and lead a national revival and shut down the administrative state and keep us out of foreign wars and grow the economy and actually have young people be proud again to be citizens of this country.
And somebody else is going to do all those things better than I am and that they shall be the next president.
My first emotion in response to that is deep relief for sure.
Because there are other ways to live a life that would selfishly be, I think, a lot more fulfilling.
But when you're guided on the flip side, when you're guided by that purpose, yeah, are you taking some risks along the way?
Sure.
But were you going to plot out everything of whether you're going to walk out in this car that's going to drive us to where we're going next isn't going to get T-boned at the next light?
I can't promise to myself that that's not going to happen either.
And so you do what's right and you leave the rest to your part and leave the rest to fate.
I have been thinking that a lot lately, that a lot of us are just following our calling.
And it's maybe not as much our choice as we think.
Well, listen, you are in the thick of what has got to be the most fascinating presidential cycle that I've ever seen.
And we've seen some interesting ones, but man, is this one wild.
And I think you're also one of the things that's very interesting about your campaign is that I think you are proving, in a way, a thesis that a lot of us had that Donald Trump was not, Donald Trump was not the cause of kind of the populist America First movement.
He was more a result of it.
A product of it.
And I think seeing you kind of like at that debate where everyone's attacking you, it kind of demonstrated that it's like, look, this thing, this kind of like anti-establishment feeling, this populism, whatever you want to call it, you know, this is with us and it's here to stay.
And it's going to be very interesting to see where it all goes.
And America First, it does not belong to one man.
I'll also remind people that it doesn't belong to me.
It doesn't belong to Trump.
No, that's not true.
It is bigger than one man.
It belongs to the people of this country.
And that's the way I look at it.
Absolutely.
Vivek Ranadive's 2024 Campaign00:00:18
Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on the show.
And hopefully we do it again.
And I'm really looking forward to following how this whole thing shakes out.