Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has thrown his hat in the ring for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination. His youth, energy, and tech-savviness has given him a surprise boost early in the race. Today's Liberty Report will sit down with Ramaswamy to see what makes him tick. What's his vision for an American renewal?
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Running for President?
00:08:31
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With us today is co-host Daniel McAdams. | |
| Daniel, good to see you today. | |
| Good morning, Dr. Paul. | |
| How are you this morning? | |
| Doing well, and it's a good day today because we have a special guest. | |
| We do indeed. | |
| Somebody running for the president. | |
| The nerve of somebody running for the presidency. | |
| I wouldn't ever think of such a thing. | |
| Yes. | |
| But we're very pleased to have a Republican candidate for the president has been announced, Vivek Roma Swami, who is getting pretty good TV coverage, so he must know something about politics. | |
| But he has interesting things to say. | |
| He's had a lot of interviews, and we have the chance to visit with him and find more things about his plans and conditions and his background. | |
| Vivaka, thank you for showing today, and glad to have you with us. | |
| I've been looking forward to this for a long time, guys. | |
| I'm looking forward to the discussion, and thanks for having me today. | |
| Wonderful. | |
| You know, I want to start off with getting a little bit of information about you because we've read a whole lot. | |
| But what has motivated you? | |
| I've read about your bio. | |
| It's pretty interesting. | |
| And I even noticed that at Harvard, you got your degree in biology. | |
| That's pretty good. | |
| Somebody knows biology getting in there. | |
| I was often wondering whether you've ever had a conversation or is Dr. Fauci one of your teachers? | |
| Oh, no. | |
| Although I actually in my early days did attend a lecture that he gave. | |
| And I have to say that I left with a disfavorable impression even back then. | |
| I promise you. | |
| It's not a new phenomenon for me. | |
| But we'll put that to one side. | |
| Yeah, that's for sure. | |
| Someday he'll be history. | |
| But I'll have to check that out with my son, Rand, and find out when he's going to be history. | |
| But no, we're glad to have you on here today. | |
| You know, you have a hint sheet has appeared on the internet, which I looked at, which I like. | |
| You started off, number one, one is some of your personal beliefs. | |
| God is real, and there are two genders. | |
| But on top of it, it is titled Truth. | |
| And I think a lot about that because I spent a lot of years in Washington trying to sort it out. | |
| And then I got to thinking, not only do we have to sort it out when we're learning and in college and reading and studying, but on other circumstances, because all of us, in a way, I've concluded that that's what we ought to always be engaged in because there's religious truth, philosophic truth, political truth. | |
| And how do you sort it out? | |
| Because we know there's not a monolith out there that we can pull a lever. | |
| This is it. | |
| I fear, though, that there's some people out there that would like to do that. | |
| But just say a few words about you having that on your list that truth is a good thing to seek. | |
| Yeah, truth is the North Star of not only this campaign, I think it's the North Star of the values that undergird this country. | |
| The First Amendment, I think, is founded on truth. | |
| The Establishment Clause, which actually prevents the establishment of a single religion in the United States, was all about actually protecting instead paving the way for free speech and open debate, also included in the First Amendment. | |
| So I think part of this is woven into our Constitution because it's a theory about the pursuit of truth itself. | |
| The path to truth runs through free speech and open debate. | |
| That's how we do it on earth. | |
| In a divine kingdom of heaven, it may reveal itself in a different way. | |
| But on earth, when we live in the world that you and I live in currently, Dr. Paul, we sort that out. | |
| The last best path that we have to get there is free speech and open debate. | |
| And I think that is enshrined in our Constitution. | |
| And so, in many ways, that's what motivates me in this campaign, just to bring it to a practical level. | |
| One of the things that I'm doing in this campaign is speaking the truth, at least my beliefs, unapologetically. | |
| And if that's the right political strategy, great. | |
| It'll be for the people of this country to decide, and I'll be the next president of the United States in January 2025. | |
| But I would rather lose that election and still speak what the truth is at every step of the way than to play some political snakes and ladders. | |
| And I think that's part of what's actually gotten the energy behind this campaign to get it off the ground in the early days. | |
| Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I go further back I go from the beginning of time because if you go back to the original ideas that humans talked about, it was a seeking of truth that motivated them. | |
| But I think even with that, what's going on today in this society and what we see in our political system and our judicial system, our economic system, it seems like there's a bigger challenge here. | |
| And I've sort of tried to divide that up. | |
| And I think there's one group that's growing in numbers and determination, and that is people like you who are seeking the truth and want to present it versus those who say, don't sweat it. | |
| You'll never reach there. | |
| And they don't even believe it exists. | |
| And they become nihilistic. | |
| But I think we live in special times like that. | |
| And I think that is what you just recognized. | |
| But when we apply this, though, to the various things in politics, you know, it can become very, very controversial. | |
| And of course, some of us, especially what we do in this program, we want to deal with the issues and we want to seek the truth, but we're not looking for the type of thing that sometimes happens on TV that I've been exposed to over the years. | |
| And that's the yelling and screaming and interruption. | |
| So those are the goals that we have here at the Ron Paul Institute. | |
| I love that. | |
| And I think that one of the things that we're going to share in common, I believe, you know, I'm not saying this to flatter you, but just so you have the factual backdrop. | |
| I was kind of one of your super fans back when you were in this game back in the mid to late 2000s. | |
| I graduated from college in 2007. | |
| And back then, I used to call myself a libertarian. | |
| I can tell you why I call myself more of a conservative today. | |
| But I think we're cut from similar cloths. | |
| That if there's one thing I want to do as the next U.S. president, I'm thinking about January 2033 when I'm leaving office. | |
| What do I want to be saying that we accomplished? | |
| Number one on the list is that we will in this country, once again, have three branches of government, not four. | |
| I think that fourth branch, the rise of that fourth branch, is I think the number one obstacle to the realization of the American dream itself, to the realization of the ideals enshrined in our Constitution, including the main filter that distorts our pursuit of the truth as well. | |
| So I don't believe, Dr. Paul, that all solutions are going to be delivered by government. | |
| In fact, I believe that most will hopefully not be delivered through government. | |
| My background is as an entrepreneur. | |
| I built a biotech company. | |
| That was my first career. | |
| In my most recent career, I've been pushing back against some of the orthodoxies that we see in the marketplace, like the rise of the ESG movement, through offering market alternatives, which is the first best choice. | |
| But there are certain things that I am not in a position to do through the private sector that I'm not in a position to do through writing books or starting businesses. | |
| And the top of the list is, I think, actually restoring a three-branch constitutional republic. | |
| And yes, I think that's also the biggest threat to federalism itself, is that fourth branch in the federal government. | |
| It's a threat to separation of powers, and it's a threat to federalism. | |
| And if there's one thing that motivates me in this race, one thing that I'm going to deliver, it's to revive the national identity of our constitutional republic by restoring those three branches. | |
| And that's something I think the next U.S. president can do. | |
| And that's something that I think we probably share in common as a passion. | |
| I'm not 100% sure on that. | |
| We haven't spoken before. | |
| But that's something that I'm in this to actually deliver, and I think we can get done. | |
| Very good. | |
| Daniel has a question for you. | |
| First, I want to welcome you, Vivek. | |
| Thanks a lot for joining us. | |
| It's really a delight to speak with you. | |
| Obviously, very successful and intelligent, and there are a lot of libertarians that are interested in what you have to say. | |
| Now, I'm not a wealthy man. | |
| You're a very successful entrepreneur. | |
| Occasionally, I do find a couple quarters under the couch. | |
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U.S. President's Vision for Change
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| But we heard from the Pentagon yesterday that they actually looked under the couch and found $6 billion, $6.2 billion, that they meant to send to Ukraine, and they didn't send it to Ukraine. | |
| You tweeted out, I think, earlier, if anyone else had done this, they'd be in prison. | |
| So they found this money. | |
| It sounds really great. | |
| A little bit of a windfall. | |
| They want to send it to Ukraine. | |
| You think that's a good idea? | |
| I think it's an awful idea. | |
| I think that we have gotten into a bad habit in this country of fighting politically correct wars. | |
| And this is the politically correct war of our time. | |
| I don't think there should be such a thing as a politically correct war. | |
| War itself is a thing that we should actually avoid, unless in the rare circumstance that it ever is required to protect Americans here on American soil. | |
| So what I've said as U.S. president is not only would I end the Ukraine war and stop the bleeding of the money, I think that much would be good, but I also want to use this as an opportunity. | |
| I'm an optimist. | |
| I believe in using every silver lining we're given, even in the mistakes that we've made, to our advantage. | |
| I want to end the Ukraine war on terms that also stop us from ever going to war with China over Taiwan. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| That sounds like maybe a crazy man talking. | |
| Let me explain that to you because neither political party is talking about this, and I think it's achievable. | |
| I think it's achievable because Vladimir Putin does not enjoy being Xi Jinping's little brother, yet he is in a military partnership with China. | |
| The 2001 Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Cooperation, they called it, and also the 2022 No Limits Partnership. | |
| They're in a military alliance with one another. | |
| That's why China, per those treaties, is coming to Russia's aid to now fight Ukraine. | |
| Here's the deal I would do with Putin: I would say we would stop this war. | |
| We're done with it. | |
| Okay, we don't want this to be another Vietnam or an Iraq. | |
| We've gotten into the bad habit of endless, pointless wars. | |
| This is another one of them brewing as we speak. | |
| Put an end to it. | |
| But I'm going to put an end to it on terms that actually get us even more out of this, which is that Putin, in return for us freezing the current lines of control, in return for us committing, as I believe we should, that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO. | |
| Putin has to, most importantly, I'll ask a few other things of him too: move the nuclear weapons out of Kalingrad, get the Russian military out of Cuba and Venezuela and out of the Western Hemisphere. | |
| But the most important thing I'll demand he gets done is he exits that military partnership with China. | |
| That restores now a trilateral international order where none of the three major nuclear superpowers are allied, rather than the bilateral one that exists today. | |
| That is how we deter China from going after Taiwan because Xi Jinping's bet right now is that Russia's in his camp and that the U.S. won't want to go to war with two different allied nuclear superpowers at once. | |
| And he's probably right about that. | |
| But now, without Russia in his camp, Xi Jinping will really have to think twice before going after Taiwan. | |
| And my top foreign policy goal as U.S. president is to make sure we deter aggression against Taiwan while not taking the U.S. to war over it. | |
| But that's my top objective. | |
| How's that America first to be defending Taiwan? | |
| Just not to push back, but I'm just curious. | |
| Oh, and please do push back. | |
| We don't do enough of, we don't have enough raw open debate. | |
| So here's my actual view on this. | |
| And I've gotten myself into trouble plenty of time, so I don't mind doing it here too. | |
| I only believe in protecting Taiwan with full force to the extent that we're dependent on that island nation for our modern way of life. | |
| If we have our semiconductor supply chain secured through South Korea, through onshoring here to the United States and otherwise, I think that changes my appetite to engage militarily with Taiwan. | |
| But the fact of the matter is today we are dependent on that island nation for the way we live our lives, from the chips in these phones to the refrigerators that we use that are food cold. | |
| They come from a tiny island nation in the South China Sea. | |
| But I'm the only person here, I believe, at least in the Republican side here, with a vision, for how we deter aggression with Taiwan without going to war, which should be the objective. | |
| And the number one way we do it is actually by ending the war in Ukraine. | |
| So the conventional wisdom is, oh, if Vladimir Putin takes over any territory, that's going to embolden Xi Jinping to go after Taiwan. | |
| That is wrong. | |
| The real thing that emboldens Xi Jinping to go for Taiwan is his military partnership with Russia, because Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world and hypersonic missile capabilities ahead of the United States. | |
| What we should be doing is pulling Russia out of China's camp, and we can do that if we end the Ukraine war by saying that we're not sending any more money, no NATO membership for Ukraine. | |
| Those are big wins in Putin's eyes, but we get a bigger win in return, which is we pull Russia out of China's camp. | |
| And I think it's going to take that kind of foreign policy vision to restore peace, pull America out of these pointless wars, but in a way that, yes, does advance American interests first, not just by having our head in the sand and preaching first principles. | |
| I am driven by first principles, but I'm also a believer in translating that into pragmatism. | |
| And we have an opportunity to do it. | |
| It disappoints me that we don't have a single presidential candidate in either major political party talking about that right now. | |
| And I believe I have the vision here and the commitment to actually be able to deliver on that pretty quickly in my first term as president. | |
| You know, the country and the political parties and the politicians and the pundits spend a lot of time talking about exactly what we're talking about right now, is how do we correct these mistakes? | |
| This occurs in economics as well. | |
| We get too many regulations, we get too much interference by the Federal Reserve and all these things. | |
| How do you get out? | |
| We spend our time trying to solve the problems. | |
| Mises said that every time the government does something, he creates two new problems. | |
| I don't think, and I want to get your opinion on this, I don't think we concentrate enough, and you've mentioned it, but how do you prevent it? | |
| It seems to me that there's a broad political principle that we've been following, and it's strongly bipartisan. | |
| It's ingrained with if you object to it, you're not a patriot, you're not an American, you don't care about the troops. | |
| And that's where the problem is. | |
| So, you know, I lived through the 60s, and I was drafted, and I know all about that. | |
| But all they talked about, when was it going to end? | |
| When was it going to end? | |
| And we elect a president, and he doesn't end. | |
| It just goes on and on. | |
| I want to know what you think about what major change in the philosophy of our foreign policy could keep us from getting involved so that we don't have these details because you have good ideas on how you do it. | |
| And I'm sure you could have done a better job than they did coming home from Afghanistan or Vietnam or all these places. | |
| But what we try to do at the Institute is find ways to get people to understand you're already in the war when you're leading up to war. | |
| And do you have any ideas on that, how to go back one step to not get engaged? | |
| And you have good ideas about how to disengage, but I'm thinking about how do I it hasn't worked. | |
| So I'm trying to get people to think, let's stay out of that mess. | |
| Why do we have to go so far looking for a war? | |
| Well, I'll give you one idealistic answer and then one practical answer. | |
| The idealistic answer is have more people go back and read George Washington's farewell address after his term in office. | |
| I mean, it's a beautiful statement of what I think of as the original America First Vision. | |
| I call myself a George Washington America First Conservative, not engaging abroad without actually having American interests at issue. | |
| That was the original vision. | |
| We would do well to remember it. | |
| In practical terms, though, Dr. Paul, I think the way it works today is that there's the rise of this managerial class in nearly every institution of American life. | |
| I see it in the private sector. | |
| It's a version of what I call deep corporate. | |
| It's the analog to the deep state, and I can tell you a lot about my experience with that in the private sector. | |
| But you see it in universities. | |
| You see it in nonprofit institutions. | |
| I hope you never see it at the Ron Paul Institute, but it's a pervasive cancer, middle management, let's call it, the HR departments, but really more deeply, the rise of a Burnham-style, the professional managerial class. | |
| But one of the areas where it originates and is most rampant is in the government itself. | |
| Let's talk about two examples that you just touched on there in your commentary. | |
| One is the managerial class, you want to talk about it domestically for economic issues, at the Federal Reserve. | |
| I'm a big proponent of restoring a single mandate. | |
| If we're going to have the U.S. Fed at all, and I think in the context of other central banks existing, there's a multi-step process to ever envisioning a world without central banks, which I'm all in for, but I'm also a pragmatist. | |
| In the meantime, how do we actually deal with the Fed we have, restore a single mandate of dollar stability? | |
| None of this managing inflation and unemployment and trying to hit two targets with one arrow. | |
| But your question is, where did that come from? | |
| And so my philosophy and my experience is that when you have people show up to work that should have never had that job, they find things to do. | |
| That's what happened with the Federal Reserve. | |
| So I don't need, as U.S. president, 23,000-plus employees, as is the case today, showing up to work in the Federal Reserve System. | |
| I have planned over 90% headcount reduction, and picking a U.S. Federal Reserve chairman in January 2026 was aligned with that vision, to actually reduce the headcount to put them back in the place of just saying restore dollar stability. | |
| That's a technical function. | |
| We don't need 23,000 of you walking around Washington, D.C. on a daily basis and other branches throughout the country. | |
| So that's domestically. | |
| I think we have the same problem at the Pentagon. | |
| The managerial class at the Pentagon is the real problem. | |
| The young men and women who are wanting to serve their country, the way we honor them and respect them, and I respect their civic commitments, is by making sure the self-interested managerial class at the Pentagon doesn't invent purposes of its own. | |
| So part of the reason, again, is I think a headcount reduction. | |
| And then part of this is restoring purpose. | |
| The number one purpose of the U.S. military should be to deter war. | |
| State that. | |
| Then you have a mission alignment of what it takes to actually achieve that purpose, and I think a lot else follows from there. | |
| On the money issue, doesn't that admit that we've lost the intellectual fight? | |
| Because, you know, it's been going on, especially in this country, since Jefferson and Hamilton. | |
| It was central banking, that amount of control. | |
| It sounds like you want to improve things, but for some reason I have become cynical over this, that central banking is a total failure and it's control so much, and it invites a lot of invasion of our civil liberties because they use it as a weapon to tell companies what they can do. | |
| They might even deny loans to people who don't capitulate to the political system. | |
| I agree with you. | |
| Look, philosophically, I agree with you, and that's the right North Star. | |
| I'm a believer. | |
| I told you what's the campaign slogan, what's the campaign mission? | |
| It is truth. | |
| That means that I'm not going to make any false promises. | |
| Everything that I tell you, I'm going to deliver. | |
| And I believe we're going to win this election. | |
| In my heart of heart, I believe I will be leaving office in January 2033, hopefully talking in a conversation like this with you about what we accomplished. | |
| And when I tell you what we're going to have accomplished, I really mean it, that that's what we're going to have accomplished. | |
| So, if I'm writing a book or serving as a professor and starting the clean slate from scratch, absolutely. | |
| I'm a central bank, more than a central bank skeptic. | |
| I'm a central bank eliminationist because I believe it should not have existed in the first place. | |
| However, realistically, if I'm looking at actually driving this through as the next president of the United States, a lot of this requires Congress to act. | |
| One of the things I'm focused on is what can I deliver as president that's not contingent on a promise of what 500 people on a given day want to do on Capitol Hill. | |
| That's where I'm focused. | |
| When I'm picking the next chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, I'm picking somebody who has a isn't going to look, he or she is going to look nothing like what a past chairman of the Federal Reserve has looked like, someone deeply aligned with me on this vision of, at the very least, restoring dollar stability with less than a tenth of the employees in the system. | |
| That's it, a technical function. | |
| Most Americans should never know the name of who that person is. | |
| And then that gets us much of the way there to eventually then, if it's me in a second term or if it's somebody else thereafter, put ourselves on a path to actually ending central banking as we know it, because that is a source of great corruption. | |
| But I'm not in this race to prove a point. | |
| If I was, then I would be saying in the Fed, because then I can at least drive the terms of debate in a way that whoever gets elected can at least have to at least be constrained by the scope of the ideas that I injected into the race. | |
| That's not what I'm here to do. | |
| I'm here to lead this country. | |
| And if I'm saying truth is our slogan, I'm telling you what we are actually going to deliver. | |
| And so starting in 2026, by January 2026, we'll have a 90% headcount reduction at the U.S. Federal Reserve. | |
| It will be operating according to a single mandate of restoring dollar stability. | |
| And that's the best foundation we've had in a century for taking then the next step in the decade ahead of actually eliminating central banking as we know it. | |
| That's how I see it. | |
| You probably would look to the Mises Institute for your next Fed chairman. | |
| That'd probably be a good start. | |
| I think it would be. | |
| I like what you said about depending on in the middle of management. | |
| That's great. | |
| Let's not forget, though, the State Department has 40,000 employees. | |
| Most of them are involved in pushing far-left social fads on countries that have zero interest in such fads. | |
| And that's why we make so many enemies overseas. | |
| The Africans can't wait to see the back of us because of this. | |
| But I had a question. | |
| Now, you got a lot of mileage, and deservedly so, out of just coming out and saying, you know what, I would pardon Trump immediately as president. | |
| I think that's a great statement. | |
| But I'm looking at our, we have a very lively chat, live chat, and we're grateful to them. | |
| But they're all interested, and that sounds great, they say. | |
| But what about Assange and Snowden? | |
| How do you feel about that? | |
| Pardon. | |
| And I've been very clear about that. | |
| And you want any good answer of even bringing people along on this who might disagree with me? | |
| Assange sits in Forensic Silence. | |
| By the way, I might ask for some of your listeners or yourselves on help. | |
| I've had a lot of trouble with this. | |
| I'm trying to visit Julian Assange. | |
| Actually, I have a planned trip to the UK that I committed to speak at something in September. | |
| I want to see him during that visit and face-to-face have that conversation. | |
| So if there's anybody in your network, you know, they're making it really hard to see him. | |
| But that's something that I'm keen to do. | |
| We can help you with that. | |
| Yeah, I would hope so, given, I would take it gladly. | |
| I intend to pardon him because even the people who disagree with me, they have nothing to say to me on this. | |
| Chelsea Manning, the government employee who leaked the information to Assange, who just merely published it, actually had her sentence commuted by President Obama because she's a member of a favorable political class. | |
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Reviving Revolutionary Ideals
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| Let's call the truth what it is. | |
| She's transgender. | |
| I think that we should not have the two tiers. | |
| And this is nothing against anti-trans common or anything like that. | |
| It's just a statement of how the federal police state works. | |
| There's two tiers of justice or multiple tiers of justice. | |
| An intersectionality-based theory of justice. | |
| Based on how high or low you are in the intersectional pyramid, there's now not only a different claim on economic goods, there's now a different claim on justice itself. | |
| Antifa is treated one way, peaceful protesters of a different persuasion treated a different way. | |
| Chelsea Manning treated one way. | |
| Julian Assange treated another. | |
| Trump one way, Biden another. | |
| Enough with it. | |
| We have to have one rule of law grounded in the Constitution, grounded in the Constitution that set this nation into motion almost 250 years ago. | |
| That's what we need to revive today. | |
| And I think that I'm in this race. | |
| I want to revive the ideals of the American Revolution. | |
| And the standard I use is that if our founding fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were walking around today, what would their reaction be to what they see? | |
| And if they would be appalled, we should be appalled too. | |
| And I am appalled as a citizen. | |
| And so I think we live in this 1776 moment. | |
| That's the spirit we need to revive. | |
| And this isn't some defense of Donald Trump's behaviors or judgments. | |
| I'm running against him, I remind you, okay? | |
| I would have made many different judgments than he did. | |
| But I do not want to win this election by some federal administrative police state eliminating my competition from contention. | |
| That's why I've said I would pardon him. | |
| I would pardon Assange. | |
| I would pardon Douglas Mackey. | |
| I would pardon many of the peaceful January 6th protesters. | |
| I will pardon anybody in this country who is the victim of a politically motivated persecution through prosecution. | |
| That's how we actually move forward. | |
| I think all these things are good. | |
| We all should move in this direction. | |
| I generally in Congress didn't vote for this idea that we solved the budget by getting rid of waste, abuse, and fraud. | |
| I want to, but the system is totally fraudulent and that won't answer. | |
| It's deeper than that, and it's ingrained in our system. | |
| It's been with us now that undermined our republic for more than 100 years. | |
| And I am known as the optimist, you know, because I believe things can get better, because I see movement in the intellectual world and the breaking down of this system. | |
| See, I'm not going to get rid of the Fed. | |
| I can't even get it to be audited. | |
| But the Fed will self-destruct. | |
| So will these wars self-destruct. | |
| The wars don't go on forever. | |
| The empires go down because they bankrupt themselves. | |
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Why I Remain Optimistic
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| And I understand that you're anxious to try to prevent that. | |
| But I'm sort of getting to the point where I'm convinced that's usually what happens. | |
| And one of the things it does is the almighty dollar. | |
| Now, you want to maintain a sound dollar. | |
| And I just wonder how that will be controlled. | |
| Because if you want to look at the Federal Reserve, think of all the professors that do their duty and respond by writing all that trash and putting it out there and getting paid large sums of money. | |
| How about the military-industrial complex? | |
| How they control the politicians and how they control the universities and the money flows. | |
| So it is huge. | |
| And that's why, you know, even with my optimism, I see a real challenge there. | |
| And because that almighty dollar is not going to be almighty. | |
| And it's sort of like what happened with the lockdown. | |
| It was horrendous. | |
| But finally, the people said that's enough enough. | |
| We're not going to put up with it. | |
| And the people are starting to resist. | |
| That's where I see the optimism. | |
| So that's what I like to encourage. | |
| And I know you have an optimistic streak in you because you think that we should do these things. | |
| And I support those issues, essentially, but I also am realistic in the sense it's ideological, the truth. | |
| And what we could go back to exactly, do you and I have exactly the same agreement on truth? | |
| Probably not, but probably I don't have it with Daniel either. | |
| But truth is a substance that we seek for. | |
| And I think the goal in life is seeking excellence and truth. | |
| You know, this is a job, but most people give up on it because all they see is failure. | |
| So I'd like you to finish up here with giving us a word of optimism because so far I think you came across as being optimistic. | |
| I am optimistic. | |
| I'm 37 years old. | |
| I was born in 1985. | |
| I hope, on a personal note, that I'd like to think that my family's in my own best days are still ahead of me. | |
| That's not for me to determine, but that's what I hope. | |
| And I hope the same for our country. | |
| And I think it might take someone of my generation to see our country that way. | |
| I don't think we have to be that nation in decline. | |
| I don't think we have to be Rome, to use the analogy of another great empire that lost its way. | |
| I don't think we have to be Carthage, who lost its way, ending its fate in a war. | |
| I think we are just a little young as a nation, going through our own version of adolescence, figuring out who we're going to be when we grow up. | |
| And when you see it that way, at least for me, when I see it that way, it starts to make sense. | |
| Because when you go through adolescence, you go through an identity crisis. | |
| We're 250 years into this. | |
| Rome lasted 2,000 years, if you include the second half of the Eastern Roman Empire as well. | |
| We're 250 years in. | |
| So even if we're destined to be Rome, we're in the early innings. | |
| We're going through our adolescence. | |
| I don't think we're in decline. | |
| I think we truly can be in our ascent. | |
| Maybe even the early stages of our ascent. | |
| We might not even be at base camp on our way to the mountaintop. | |
| That's the way I see it. | |
| It's not going to happen automatically. | |
| And I do have a vision that, yes, the U.S. president can actually make a difference. | |
| I believe there's one executive branch, not two. | |
| I will run the executive branch accordingly. | |
| It will take someone, an outsider like me, maybe even of a different generation, to make this happen. | |
| But I genuinely believe it deep in my bones that it is possible. | |
| I believe I have probably, among people who have run in the last 30 years, maybe say for yourself, but I feel it this way, probably one of the most deep understandings of how to actually shut down the administrative state on strong legal and constitutional authority. | |
| I think that breaks through the managerial class, starts to restore the will of most everyday citizens in this country. | |
| And I do think we're in this 1776 moment where the values of the American Revolution are alive and well. | |
| We just have to rediscover them. | |
| And that's why I'm optimistic. | |
| So I would summarize that: seek liberty, and we'll find our answers. | |
| And that's what the founders tried, and that's what we unfortunately have rejected. | |
| Daniel has a question or a comment to make as we move to close. | |
| Yeah, I just want to say I like your idea about restoring our GDP growth. | |
| I would just encourage you to understand that we cannot do that unless we break the bipartisan addiction to spending in the military-industrial complex, which is not defense spending, it's military spending. | |
| And I think you've covered that, so I really appreciate that, and I hope you will hold on to that. | |
| But before I go, I do want to thank our sponsor for this month, and that is 4patriots.com. | |
| Go to 4patriots.com, use the code RON to get a 10% discount on your first order. | |
| It's hurricane season down here. | |
| You need to get those solar generators, get them up and running. | |
| So thanks to 4patriots.com. | |
| I will include a link in the bottom. | |
| Thanks again, Vivek. | |
| Good luck to you. | |
| Yes, go ahead. | |
| Can I just say one thing in closing is that for the libertarians out there, you're not going to agree with 100% of what I say, but you're going to agree with 90% of it. | |
| And I think I actually have a shot at winning, a real shot at winning. | |
| I'm ahead of where Trump was in June of 2015. | |
| I need you all. | |
| I was a libertarian rapper in college, and we're 90% aligned now. | |
| But it's going to take all of us doing our part to carry this over to the finish line. | |
| So I hope this is the beginning of the kind of conversation we're going to have about even redefining the bipartisan system or the Republican Party. | |
| I need your help to actually do it, and I'm going to be looking for it, and I'm going to be grateful for it if you guys help lift me up to actually do the things that we talked about here. | |
| I intend to. | |
| Very good. | |
| And I want to just follow up with a closing brief statement on Daniel's point about the bipartisanship. | |
| And unfortunately, all the big issues are very bipartisan. | |
| That's why it also is a reflection that we're bankrupt and we can't work very well anymore because nobody's willing to give up the welfare war of their state. | |
| So that's it. | |
| And that's why, if it's a debt, if it's a budget for the military, if it's civil liberties, most of the time they get passed. | |
| When I first went to Congress, if you wanted to point out that we do not need to spend Upton billion dollars getting engaged in another war, you know, we could get five or six people to agree. | |
| Today, that number is growing. | |
| So that's why I'm optimistic about it. | |
| But it's also, people have to understand that both sides have to eventually accept the idea of liberty, which means free market, sound money, and volunteerism. | |
| Those principles are universal, and that is how we'll arrive at a truthful system and to follow the rules of our Constitution. | |
| I do want to thank our guests today for appearing very much. | |
| It's been an interesting program. | |
| And I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today. | |
| Please come back soon. | |