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April 3, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy

01:14:41

Trump's Indictment & the Future of Republican Leadership with Dave Rubin | The TRUTH Podcast #1

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	I care a lot more about the what and the why than I do about the who.
	Okay, one of the things that irritates me about partisan politics is, Especially in the Republican Party, if I'm being honest, is that we obsess over the who.
	Ronna McDaniel or somebody else.
	Kevin McCarthy or somebody else.
	Donald Trump or somebody else.
	Without actually stopping to ask the question of what do we stand for and why do we stand for it?
	In fact, if we go in that order, it turns out the question of the who becomes a lot easier.
	And so that's why in the first number of weeks of this campaign, we've actually been focusing on the substance rather than on the partisan politics of it.
	That being said, one of the approaches that I've taken to making my policy positions known, one of the I'm not running the stuff I want to say through polls or tests or political consultants.
	I'm going to tell you what I believe without apology and I would rather lose this election and have actually been honest about what I believed at every step of the way than to play some game of snakes and ladders of what I'm supposed to say in some hollowed out husk of a path to victory.
	You could forget about that.
	But it turns out that last week, or in the last couple of weeks, there was some element of the question of the who that was on my mind.
	When I saw some of the behaviors of Governor Ron DeSantis, Staying quiet about the Silicon Valley bailout in the back of the way the government stepped in following the Silicon Valley bank failure.
	When I saw him being conspicuously silent following news breaking that an indictment of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, appeared likely.
	I just saw this pattern.
	I started to get a little bit Frankly, irritated to see a fellow leader in the Republican Party operate with this level of, frankly, cowardice, lack of courage that we should want out of whoever our next leader is to sit across the table from Xi Jinping.
	We should want someone with a spine.
	So anyway, that was the issue that weighed on me.
	And so I started to make comments about that transparently without going through political consultants, without going through a donor class, without going through a filter, just like I would on my policy issues.
	I got a text message from a friend, and I'm grateful for it, who basically told me that, you know what, I was alienating a lot of people.
	That that was something that didn't particularly sound great in this race.
	And you know what, we didn't end up having a long conversation because you know what I said?
	Let's actually have this conversation together.
	Live in real time, in the open.
	Let's actually air the issue.
	It's somebody who has been very supportive, a big supporter of Ron DeSantis.
	He's a well-known figure, Dave Rubin, who's joining me as my guest today.
	And you know what I said to Dave is, I appreciate that constructive criticism.
	Let's just make it an open conversation between you and I. And that's actually when it occurred to me that we should just make that the first episode of our podcast.
	Because the premise of the entire campaign, the premise of this podcast is that We're going to lift the curtain, all right?
	It's not going to be a private conversation between a leading media personality and a presidential candidate.
	We'll just have the same conversation we were going to have.
	Unfiltered, unvarnished gloves off.
	Not just about Ron DeSantis, but on a wider range of issues relating to pursuing the presidency.
	But to bring you into it, and this is the first episode of a series daily from here on out where we're going to be doing just that.
	And I think we're going to kick off today with a bang with my good friend who sent me that text message a little bit ago calling me out on it.
	And you know what?
	Let's have a conversation about it.
	Dave Rubin, welcome to the first episode of the podcast.
	Vivek, it's great to be with you.
	And I said to my guys before we started, we need more podcasts.
	That's right.
	Someone has got to start a new podcast.
	And then my phone rang.
	Vivek, let's do a podcast.
	Here we are.
	It's incredible what's happening in America right now.
	Podcast nation in America.
	Here we are.
	This one's a little bit...
	The premise for this is less the podcast and more presidential campaign.
	Because the thing that I began to learn in the first few weeks of this is that...
	The presidential campaign is all about artifice, okay?
	You create one reality behind closed doors.
	You get prepped.
	You get a briefing.
	You get whatever.
	And then you go out and project to the public like you had known forever what you were going to say even though you just learned it 15 minutes before closed doors beforehand.
	And I think that that's in some ways part of the problem in America today.
	You and I have talked about this in other settings, this gap between what people are willing to say in public and what people are willing to say in private.
	That gap is about as big as I could remember in my lifetime over the last few years.
	If we close that gap, I think good things happen in this country.
	But we got to lead by example.
	And you know what?
	The reason I called you actually was, yes, we're doing this podcast.
	We're opening up a lot of my policy briefings.
	We're, you know, publishing those so everybody can see how the sausage actually gets made.
	But the reason I called you is you and I, we had a private exchange and, you know, you reached out.
	I appreciated you reaching out.
	And I thought, you know what?
	Why should we have this conversation just between you and I? Because I think it's a conversation that probably should be happening within the Republican Party across the country relating to leadership.
	I mean, what does it actually mean to be a leader?
	And we're talking today, like right now as we speak, waiting for what sounds like pending news of the Trump indictment.
	And I'll just kick this off.
	I want to hear your reaction to it.
	You and I haven't explicitly talked about the Trump indictment.
	We did talk about the potential responses of Republican candidates.
	But my just candid view is I don't know whether this is going to be politically good for Trump or me or Ron DeSantis.
	I don't care.
	It's wrong.
	We should not live in a country where the political party in power uses the police state to arrest its political opponents.
	That's the stuff of banana republics.
	We're skating on thin ice as a country right now, and I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican, whether you're Joe Biden running against Donald Trump, whether you're me running against Donald Trump, or whether you're Ron DeSantis running against Donald Trump.
	It's a moment that calls for principle rather than political calculations.
	That's why I spoke up about this.
	I guess I assume that you feel the same way, but I guess I can't be – I'm not sure about it.
	So I'd love to hear your opinion on the Trump situation, but that's what's on my mind today.
	But I think it makes me think more deeply about these questions of leadership in our country too right now.
	Sure.
	So let's start with the easy stuff, the agreement stuff.
	And for sure, the only thing we discussed before we started recording this is that we're going to get into everything sort of with no rules.
	And there are points of disagreement that we'll gladly get into.
	But I can very easily, just to jump off on the Trump stuff, completely agree with everything you said right there.
	We are potentially entering, and maybe we've entered it already, banana republic level stuff.
	You know, between two impeachments, between the Mar-a-Lago raid, between months of January 6th hearings, every other thing they tried to get him on over the years.
	Trump Jr. had lunch with a Russian for 15 minutes on the Upper East Side in 2017.
	Unbelievable.
	The litany, the litany of just insane things that all either turned out to be nothing or just, you know, a shell game of truth or whatever you want to call it.
	Yes, this this cannot go forward.
	I think at the moment.
	Look, today, as we're recording, this is Wednesday.
	Now, originally Trump said he was going to be arrested on Tuesday, and that obviously didn't happen.
	Maybe there's some pushback now in the DA's office.
	Who knows what Alvin Bragg is hearing from people?
	Maybe Soros is in his ear going, man, we overplayed this one.
	Who knows what's going on over there?
	But I will say in the short term, this is definitely good for Trump because his people are excited again and they needed something to be excited by.
	Right.
	They absolutely did.
	He announced two months ago there hasn't been that much movement for him.
	We saw he's a known quantity.
	You're an unknown quantity.
	He's a known quantity.
	And that changes how you behave in this, which is actually that would get us to the reason I had called you about a week and a half ago on something.
	But I'm completely with you on this.
	They cannot go ahead with this.
	They might go ahead with this because this is what sort of the authoritarian left, which, you know, if you want to pick a place that may be ground zero for it, it would be a New York City DA's office.
	This is what they want to do.
	They want to scare their people into silence.
	And just one other thing on this.
	When you talk about that chasm between what people believe and what they're willing to say, you're right.
	It has diverged and become so large that it is very, very hard these days if you were in a restaurant.
	Let's say you were in a restaurant with 50 people sitting in that restaurant.
	You could probably go around that restaurant and ask people very, very basic questions about reality and get more than 50 responses that are completely different.
	That's a huge, huge problem, and I think that's going to be an interesting challenge for you and all the other candidates.
	What actually binds us together?
	What are the basic things that we can agree on so that we can begin growing a strong tree out of what many have turned into scorched earth?
	That is the question.
	I think that is the question for our moment.
	We've celebrated our diversity and our differences so much that we forgot.
	We are in a moment where we have forgotten.
	All of the ways, we're just the same.
	Dave, it's great.
	We have two different people with two different shades of melanin here.
	Two different sexual orientations, if I'm remembering correctly.
	Who cares?
	I don't know.
	Is there something you want to tell me that I don't know about?
	There could be three these days.
	Maybe there's five.
	We'll see how it changes over the course of our conversation.
	Maybe our gender identities are fluid over the course of this conversation.
	We can celebrate our diversity to we're blue in the face.
	Celebrate the blue diversity, too.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's made up.
	It's artificial if there's nothing greater that binds us together across that diversity or else we're just a bunch of different looking higher mammals roaming the geographic plane doing what our iPhones told us to do on a given day.
	That's not America.
	That's why diversity is our strength, which is what they always say, is just complete nonsense.
	Diversity can't be our strength.
	It can be A strength, right?
	Like, it can be a strength if you have a group of people that are from wildly divergent places whose lifestyles and paths to get there have been very, very different, whose cultural traditions and foods and music and clothes are all very different.
	That could be good if you put them together and you might find something in the sort of ether of that.
	But it's not necessarily your strength that There are many good things that can come out of having 10 roughly, say, similar people all on a similar mission.
	If your mission is freedom, if your mission is to strengthen individual rights, strengthen the ability for people to live as they see fit, why would I care about diversity if we're going to just talk about diversity of skin color or your genitals or this other nonsense?
	Yes, yes.
	Diversity is not our strength.
	I think our strength is what unifies us across our diversity.
	But when we lose that, diversity is meaningless.
	With that, our diversity can be a beautiful thing.
	One of the things that I do think binds us together across our diverse attributes, or should be, I think it still does.
	I think we've forgotten it.
	Are some of the basic concepts like the rule of law, that we apply the law even-handedly, no matter who you are, high or low, black or white.
	We're a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
	We're a nation that believes in free speech and open debate and the rights of political citizens of a nation to disagree politically in the open.
	I think we now live in a moment, though, where those basic ideas are themselves under assault.
	I mean, if you think about – actually, I was one of the weird guys back in college and shortly after who was arguing vehemently for the rights, the constitutional due process rights of the people in Guantanamo Bay.
	Yes, these are likely terrorists.
	Yes, they committed heinous crimes.
	But the whole point is we have to know that they were the ones who were actually responsible for it before we subject them to punishment in the same way that you wouldn't want to be locked up mistakenly at a front door without going through that due process as well.
	We have these principles for a reason.
	Many of the people who were vehemently with me back then are pin drop silent today when it comes to, say, a January 6th peaceful protester or whatever who was locked up, potentially indicted, potentially convicted or in settlement.
	Without actually seeing exculpatory evidence, which is one of the fundamental principles enshrined effectively in the constitution that is codified in the case law, Brady rule and otherwise, this is wrong.
	And this ought to unify us, right?
	Because you could say whether or not you're supporting the rights of somebody who's in Guantanamo Bay, which is classically a left-wing issue, whether or not you're supporting the constitutional rights of somebody who's being prosecuted for alleged crimes on January 6th, which is conventionally a right-wing issue, we agree or should agree, I think most of which is conventionally a right-wing issue, we agree or should agree, I think most of us still do, on the
	I mean, the whole premise of my being in this race is to call that bluff, the idea that we're divided by actually start talking openly again.
	And once we start to talk openly again, we realize what most of us suspect, which is actually that our neighbors and our colleagues and our classmates still agree on those basic rules of the road, even if we disagree on corporate tax rates.
	That's the whole bet I'm making.
	I hope that's what we discover.
	Look, that's a pretty good bedrock place to start a campaign from.
	And I do agree with you that I think most people, if you could calmly explain that to them and they really thought about what the issues are, they would agree with that.
	I would have one slight qualifier statement there, which I don't want to get too lost in this right now because it's a whole other conversation.
	You know, on the Guantanamo Bay thing, if you're not a citizen of the United States, I don't know that you deserve all of the protections of United States law, but let's.
	Yeah, we can debate that.
	The point is, we should have equal protection under the law for American citizens.
	I think the reason that we got led to this crazy place that we are in right now, that would lead someone like you, who I'm guessing, I don't want to speak for you, but I'm guessing 10 years ago probably didn't have political aspirations, but now being right in the thick of this thing, is there are two things I think that really happened.
	I think that the first one's very unfortunate for me, which is that there was a failure of classical liberalism.
	The old school liberals, the JFK liberals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ed Koch liberals, old blue dog Democrats, they have completely failed the liberal experiment.
	And wokeism has completely infected now the Democrat Party, which should have been the party version of liberalism.
	That's one thing.
	And then I think, you know, Trump derangement syndrome for, although it sounds like a pejorative to some extent, I think it actually is a type of mental condition that a huge swath of people have, especially liberal elite who, who run our media basically.
	And the reason, so when you say, well, why don't these people apply their principles equally, regardless of whether it's Guantanamo Bay or January 6th is because suddenly many people saw Trump as the center of the universe instead of finding either God or some other belief system at the center.
	So if, if the center of your universe is something that you hate, absolutely hate that you believe is orange Hitler, You can take almost any position possible in an effort to destroy that thing.
	And I think that really is why so many people who I thought were really thoughtful, interesting, the type of people that were sense makers, Say, 10 years ago, have become so out of touch.
	And then I would add one other thing to that, which is that then you throw in COVID, which turned people, you know, completely upside down.
	There were three forces, at least, and I'm sure you can probably think of another couple, probably related to economics specifically, that just led us to this moment.
	Yeah, I think you're right about that.
	I look at it as the, you know, you kind of gave the hand, I'll give you the glove, right?
	You know, I think those forces are against the backdrop of what you alluded to briefly when you talked about the loss of belief in God, where you're right.
	I mean, I think Trump, the, you know, COVID you could put on the list.
	I think a lot of the economic excess in the back of the 2008 financial crisis created the conditions for this two people losing their mooring to how we create value in an economy.
	There's a lot of those factors.
	We're seeing the other side of that now.
	Absolutely.
	But I think that it's against the backdrop of losing our sense of grounding in the things that used to give us identity and purpose, right?
	Faith in God is one of those things.
	Patriotism, belief in your national identity, belief that you're a citizen of a nation, that's one of those things.
	Belief in family is one of those things.
	Even hard work.
	The idea of hard work.
	You derive your identity from working hard, from creating something.
	You've built something.
	I've built something.
	We all build things that we can derive our identity from.
	When those things disappear, faith, family, patriotism, hard work, when those things are gone, we then have this vacuum.
	And when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that is when poison fills the void.
	Maybe it's the things you hate.
	Maybe it's the – what did you say?
	The tyrant orange man, whatever.
	Trump derangement syndrome.
	Trump derangement syndrome, right?
	Where you see the other as your enemy.
	Then that becomes your own identity, is your opposition to that enemy.
	That's what wokeism preys on.
	That's what gender ideology preys on.
	That's what climatism preys on.
	This idea of covidism, climatism, two sides of the same coin.
	Some higher catastrophe that I have to believe in to give myself some sense of grounding and purpose and meaning.
	And my whole project, I think it's part of your project too.
	I listen to you often, Dave, too, is fill that void with something else, right?
	Something more meaningful.
	Maybe the time-tested stuff that we always have filled it with.
	Yeah, I toured with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half.
	We did about 120 shows in, I think, 20 countries.
	Jordan and his wife actually were over for dinner last night.
	My oldest son, his middle name is Jordan, in honor of Jordan.
	And Jordan, to me, has been the most...
	I actually think you can say this objectively.
	He has been the most influential public thinker over the last decade, let's say, in the entire world.
	And in essence, what you just laid out there is what his entire message is about.
	You know, people would it was sort of memeable and it was kind of you could make jokes about it.
	But the basic idea when Jordan came onto the stage was clean your room before you clean the world.
	That was the basic idea.
	Make your bed when you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, shower, stand up straight with your shoulders back.
	See what you can do for the world.
	But you have to do it for yourself first.
	No one's going to come in and make your bed.
	No one's going to brush your teeth and comb your hair.
	And if you can't do those things for yourself, well, then you're certainly not going to stop climate change.
	You're not going to stop any of the other tyrannical forces that you think are happening, the evils of capitalism or whatever it is that the social justice warriors think is coming.
	And I think by being around him, that really got ingrained to me And once I started doing those things more so for myself, well, then I was able to do a lot of other interesting things.
	I built a couple successful businesses.
	I never intended on being a businessman.
	I mean, I built a tech company in the middle of all of this.
	So that basic idea, if you do something for yourself, First, that then you can change the world is, I would say, the most important underpinning of all of this because everyone else right now, the whole system has it backwards.
	If you listen to the messaging out of corporate media and mostly out of the Democrats, Some Republicans too, but to a lesser extent, mostly Democrats.
	The idea is just give the government enough power, enough money, enough attention, and it will somehow solve all of the problems.
	It has never happened.
	It will never happen.
	And I always slightly butcher the number on this one, but I think as Ronald Reagan said, the nine scariest words in the English dictionary are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
	And I think that really is the problem right now.
	And that's also the challenge that you'll find, and Republicans always have to go uphill on.
	It's very easy for Democrats to always be like, yeah, we're going to take money from them and give it to you.
	We're going to give free this to that.
	It all just sounds great.
	And everyone's like, yay, we got all that stuff.
	The challenge for a responsible adult and for someone like you to get into a race and say to people, well, you're going to have to do a little something.
	You have a little autonomy in this.
	You're a playable character in this game.
	You're not a non-playable character in a video game, an NPC. That's much more of a challenge because then people go, if I pardon my French for a moment, they go, oh shit, I got to do something too?
	And I think that's always the uphill battle that, let's say, right-leaning or conservative people face.
	I mean, to your point that then you can go on and address climatism or the evils of capitalism, I know you're saying it jokingly, but what you realize is that...
	When you're grounded – I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody who – James Lindsay actually.
	He was joking around that the opposite – but it's kind of true.
	He's like the opposite of woke is based but not like in the internet meme sense of the word but actually that you're based in something.
	That you're grounded.
	That you're grounded, right?
	That you have a sense of grounding.
	I think when you have a sense of grounding, a lot of those alleged problems that you wanted to otherwise go out and solve – For your own sense of purpose that you were missing, when you actually have that sense of purpose fulfilled by something real, by something true, it's amazing how those problems themselves, many of them disappear because they were actually artificial.
	They were made up.
	They were figments of a need we created for ourselves in the first place.
	I think Jordan Peterson is spot on about this.
	I think one of the things that in my conversation with him recently came up was he was listening to my framing.
	We're getting into similar ideas.
	We say it in different ways.
	Ask the question of why the Israelites wanted to go back to Pharaoh when they're lost in the desert, right?
	I think that when they're lost in the desert, they can't see the promised land.
	There's something inside, right?
	You look yourself in the mirror and it's easy to complain about the Pharaoh.
	The harder part is looking inside and asking myself, what is it that causes me to want to bend the knee?
	And I think that that's something that we in our movement have – haven't yet quite put our finger on.
	We'll complain about big government.
	We'll complain about the merger of big government and big business.
	Myself included in this.
	I've written books about this stuff, right?
	That's in some ways the easy part.
	The harder part is that trick only works if you have a populace that's willing to say yes to the answer that Ronald Reagan posed, the nine scariest words, right?
	I'm here with the government.
	I'm here to help.
	Well, a lot of people will open that door.
	You know what?
	Someone wants to propagate ESG or stakeholder capitalism or woke capitalism or whatever.
	It only works really if there's a populace, a consumer base willing to buy up what they're selling.
	What is it within each of us that makes us want to bend the knee?
	That is that vacuum, that black hole that we need to fill.
	I think that related to a little bit of our exchange – our text exchange the other night that prompted me to want to have this conversation with you not just via text but in person or the next best thing.
	I think that that's part of what we're missing in our conservative movement and the Republican Party is a sense of leadership, a leader who can actually – I think a career politician is unlikely to do it,
	which brings us back to the issue of the Trump indictment and the Republican response to it, or in some cases, the absence thereof, that made me for a long time I really mean this.
	I said this to you the other day.
	I'll say it again.
	For the longest time, I was last year not imagining or even wanting to enter partisan politics here.
	It's not the path I was on, not particularly the path I want to be on.
	But I'm going to do it anyway for the purpose of this presidential campaign and hopefully a presidency that follows.
	We'll do it as service.
	But the reason that I was called into this is I... Wanted to believe that someone like Ron DeSantis was up to this challenge, right?
	Was going to be the guy who helped lead us the way into filling that vacuum of purpose and showing us a better way forward.
	That does require courage, and my definition of courage is somebody who not only has convictions, but is willing to make sacrifices to act on those convictions.
	And that's what left me disappointed these last few days, this last week, when we saw the news of a potential pending indictment of a former president of the United States.
	I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican.
	I don't care if you're black or white.
	I don't care if you're running against him in this primary, as I am, as Ron DeSantis presumably is, or not.
	This is a moment for those first principles, those principles that unite us as Americans.
	And the fact that we had a professional politician class in our Republican Party that had so much trouble just coming out and stating something that is true, that most Americans hunger for, that our Republican base hungers for, is something that disappointed me.
	And I think that it's something that gives me even a greater sense of It's sort of that moment for the Republican Party, too.
	Right.
	So, OK, so first off, I definitely want to address the specific reason I had texted you last week, which is a little bit of an offshoot on that.
	It's not on the Trump thing specifically.
	But let me address what you're talking about here, because I think we do have a difference of opinion.
	It's worth hashing out here.
	So, you know, Trump announced this thing on Truth Social Friday afternoon.
	Maybe one of your guys in the back end could find out what time it was.
	I think it was sometime in the afternoon, maybe early evening.
	He just announces, I'm going to be arrested on Tuesday.
	DeSantis made his comment first thing Monday morning.
	It was right before I went live on my show, so it was about 10 a.m.
	on Monday morning.
	Now, I want everybody that is in this presidential race to lead with conviction, just as you laid out there.
	I like DeSantis a lot, obviously.
	I moved to Florida.
	My chips are on the table.
	I mean, so do I, by the way.
	So do I. As a person and as a governor, I love him.
	Well, look, I always tell people, it's funny, like, I don't pretend to be a journalist.
	I tell people what I think, and you can agree or disagree or watch or not watch, but that's very different than, say, virtually everyone on CNN or MSNBC that's pretending they have no opinions as they sneak their opinions in the back door.
	So I don't pretend that I don't like the guy or he wasn't.
	One of the major reasons that I moved not only myself But two companies to Florida and a series of people that are in this room right now and that my life is unbelievably better because of his policies here.
	So I'm just putting that out there like I'm not hiding anything, obviously.
	Related to him.
	What I would say on this is, Trump makes this statement, and what Trump is very good at, obviously, is getting everyone to always react to everything in the craziest possible way.
	There was no corroboration at that point.
	There hadn't been a leak from the DA's office saying this is what's going to happen on Tuesday, etc., etc., I didn't have a problem with waiting out the weekend when the news cycle is a little bit slow.
	And then, again, quite literally, first press conference Monday morning, he addressed it.
	it.
	And you also have to remember, not only did he say that this is an absolute abuse of power and it's a Soros funded DA, DeSantis fired a Soros funded DA in Tampa.
	He's in a legal battle about it right now.
	So it's not as if he has just sat on this thing.
	Now, I saw all the Twitter people and yes, the Twitter people say he's backing off and where was he all weekend?
	The thing is, and I think you'll find this more, and maybe this will get us to the issue that I texted you about, the higher your profile gets, you are not going to want to respond to every single thing Trump does in Trump time.
	That is a tactic of Trump to get the machine to always be in Trump orbit.
	And I think actually what's happening right now is that the Trump energy, which now has been re-energized by this thing, it's gotten a boost from this thing.
	I actually think it's DeSantis energy, believe it or not, because if you see what's happened over the last three days is a DA supposedly announces this thing or it leaks.
	So Trump gets it on Friday and then Team Trump for three days is attacking DeSantis.
	That tells you that their real focus is DeSantis, not even this case.
	So I think we're 100 percent agreed on the abuse by the DA and that this should be called I think DeSantis did it.
	He did it on his own timeline.
	So I think maybe we're having like a little bit of a timeline disagreement.
	But I didn't think that the statement, I thought the statement was as clear as it could possibly be.
	And then, by the way, he made the funny joke about, you know, I don't know what it's like to pay off a porn star.
	And I saw the Trump people upset about that.
	And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
	Trump is the ultimate troll.
	He has made fun of everyone.
	Everybody calm down here.
	DeSantis is not known to be funny.
	He threw in one funny line.
	Give the guy a break.
	So I don't think we have a major divergence there, but I don't see it as a lack of leadership at all, actually.
	See, you know, I just see it a little bit differently, David.
	I'm not looking at this from like, I mean, believe me, I'm running to win the presidency against Donald Trump and presumably if Ron DeSantis enters this race against Ron DeSantis and others, too.
	I'm looking at this from a bigger picture of first principles here, right?
	I mean, the New York Times and others were also reporting about a likely indictment early next week.
	Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything.
	That doesn't mean anything.
	That doesn't mean anything.
	I'm not saying that an indictment's coming.
	As we're having this conversation, Trump has not been indicted and it's Wednesday today, right?
	Right.
	But I'm making a different point here.
	I care less about the Trump-DeSantis tug-of-war.
	This is boring stuff.
	I think the Republican Party obsesses about the question of the who without asking the question of the what and the why, which is actually if we go in the order of ask the what and the why first, then the question of the who becomes a lot easier.
	That's the order we need to go in.
	I've said that since day one of launching this candidacy.
	But here I'm making a point about leadership, making a point about What it means to actually be courageous to act with conviction.
	And here's the reason I felt compelled when I woke up on Saturday morning.
	That's when I saw it and for the first time read the news and wanted to react to it.
	And I did.
	And I was unapologetic about it.
	It's the same reason I actually reacted to the Silicon Valley bailout news before it actually broke out.
	I wrote on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
	I negotiated with them and said, look, they ran it online before the bailout announcement was announced because we have these rare windows when there's something really important to actually do whatever small part we can play to shape a really bad outcome away from happening.
	We have a responsibility to do that.
	So let's just take the Trump indictment case.
	Then I want to come back to the Silicon Valley case because that, too, is just a pattern that I see.
	I don't mean to pick on Ron DeSantis.
	He's an incredibly accomplished governor.
	He's a relevant – to say the least, a highly relevant figure in this presidential race, and we just live in an important moment that just as I'm going to be in this podcast and in this campaign, totally unfiltered about where I am on policy, where I am on questions of culture, including untouchable issues with the left.
	I'm not going to wear kid gloves and not touch certain issues on how I feel even about the people in this race.
	I'm just going to be very candid about it.
	So today we happen to be talking about that.
	Back to the Trump indictment.
	The time to actually speak out is when you can play a small role in preventing a bad thing from happening.
	Those of us who are in this race running against Donald Trump and, you know, let's just put the artifice of DeSantis running or not to one side.
	He's broadly perceived as running.
	He's behaving like he's running.
	So Joe Biden to Ron DeSantis to myself, you're in a unique position to have credibility to say, yes, it will be almost certainly more politically convenient for everyone if Donald Trump were not in this race.
	But that gives you added standing, moral standing, ethical standing, credibility, personal standing.
	to nonetheless make a statement on principle to say that we are not a nation that should indict its political opposition.
	And this was a guy.
	But isn't that exactly what he said?
	That's not what he said, though.
	That's really not what he said.
	And I want to say two things about this, Dave, though.
	And this is the thing about Ron DeSantis.
	And it's not about even Ron DeSantis.
	Think about the professional politician.
	This is just true about a professional politician is it's one thing where the shortest distance between two lines, between two points is in math class, you say a line in the real world.
	It's between a professional politician and a press conference.
	And Ron DeSantis fits that description pretty well on many national issues.
	OK, willing to take Florida money, your money to fly migrants from from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, which you could say has a nexus to Florida.
	Fine.
	But is that about getting in front of a press conference?
	Absolutely.
	Because the press conference followed.
	And I don't fault him for all that.
	He's a national Well, that was also wildly popular in Florida.
	It was wildly popular in Florida.
	I mean we don't want to leave the immigrant series.
	One of the governors doing something about it.
	But I think it would also be wildly popular to take potentially – or not, but at least to take a stand on a range of national issues, so be it.
	But this is a hard one, right?
	Woke-ism, railing against woke-ism.
	I got news for you.
	I wrote Woke Inc. long before most Republicans knew the word woke.
	That's easy when you're preaching to your base.
	The hard part – and it's harder when you're a CEO that has to step down and lose your privileged position to be able to write.
	That's a different thing.
	But if you're a Republican politician today, railing against woke is easy.
	It comes at very little to no political cost.
	What's harder is to say that your chief political opponent is somebody who should not be indicted.
	And I think that – yeah, you could say, OK, the weekend or whatever.
	I don't buy that, first of all.
	I don't buy this model of running it through a poll-tested, consultant-tested, donor-class-approved message where – But do you know that he did that?
	Well, of course he did, though, right?
	But you don't know that he did that, right?
	Well, here's what I'll tell you my experience.
	I'll tell you my experience, okay?
	My political consultants, including my PR advisors, told me to not touch this issue.
	That is the...
	I mean, there's a reason you still haven't heard from Nikki Haley, okay?
	There's a reason – I mean, you see a consistent pattern of response.
	This is an issue you're not supposed to touch.
	If you're going to touch it, you're supposed to touch it very delicately because it will alienate a lot of donors.
	Most members of the donor class do not like Donald Trump, okay?
	I see this, right?
	Behind closed doors, whatever.
	They want to pick a candidate who's actually going to defeat Donald Trump.
	And so this is the – what I'll tell you – I can tell you about my experiences.
	This is an issue you're not supposed to touch.
	Yet, I just have a deep sense of personal affront about it.
	And there's no doubt that Ron DeSantis on Friday night or on Saturday or whatever saw that there's a pending possibility.
	Who knows if it's true?
	It's, you know, as you said, it's a post on social media.
	But, you know, there's other media outlets that presumably have some standard to at least verify a possibility saying that this could be coming next week.
	We're waiting for it as we speak today.
	What should – what do we actually care about?
	Forget the political race.
	Forget the politics of it.
	What do I care about as an American?
	I don't want to see that happen.
	I don't want to see a former president of the United States who's a lead candidate in this race indicted because that leads us to a national divorce.
	That leads to a generation of a loss of public trust.
	And we have an opportunity to shape that outcome with credibility.
	Why wouldn't we be the ones, even if it's by a little bit, but with credibility to call, what did I do?
	I called on the Manhattan DA to abandon this politicized prosecution.
	I think the fact that not only that it took two days, but even when he says it, what do you say?
	Say the easy stuff.
	Say Soros as many times as you can.
	Great.
	We all know it's a popular thing amongst the Republican base to beat up on George Soros.
	But just to say explicitly that it would be wrong for Donald Trump to be arrested over a crime that actually would at most be a misdemeanor if it were ever charged at all.
	That's not justice.
	And I think that it relates to the same pattern that The prior weekend of, again, Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
	Since that bailout, haven't heard a peep from the likes of Ron DeSantis.
	Why?
	Well, David Sachs, who was one of the big proponents who I debated openly on this issue with gloves off, I think it was – I don't know what your perspective is on this, on the substance of it.
	Well, on a personal note, I like both of you guys.
	I've had you both on the show many times, but I've broken bread with both of you guys.
	It got, unfortunately, a little nasty at times, but everybody's...
	Yeah.
	We have strong disagreements on this, especially when money's on the line.
	One funny thing about the Silicon Valley bailout situation is there's not one person who...
	I've heard publicly for that bailout of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem that did not have some personal vested interest in seeing it bailed out, whereas other financiers from Ken Griffin to Cliff Asnes and others, who also know a thing or two as well about banking instability in our system, who didn't have that exposure were against it.
	So it's amazing what self-interest does to people's perspectives.
	But the point I was going to make is, Ron DeSantis was pin drop silent about it.
	This is a guy who will speak about a national issue in a heartbeat if he needs to.
	Didn't say a thing about it in a notable act of silence.
	And you look at who's funding him.
	David Sachs hosting big fundraisers for Ron DeSantis.
	And so I just think that it's not about Ron DeSantis.
	It's about the professional politician class, where if we live in a moment that calls for leadership, calls for courage, making sacrifices to advance your personal convictions.
	That's what we need in the presidency.
	Maybe not what you need in Congress.
	Maybe not what you need in the Senate.
	There you need people who work together within the system, are willing to participate in the sausage-making process.
	But in the White House, I think you need somebody who's actually willing to carry out their convictions even if it comes at some great political cost.
	And I will say that the silence of the professional political class – I won't even pick on Ron DeSantis here.
	He just happens to be the best of them and the leader among them.
	From Silicon Valley bailout to very carefully tiptoeing in 48-hour timelines around making sure that we're saying the poll-tested popular stuff by decrying – saying the magic words like Soros that you're supposed to say without just authentically coming out and saying that the 45th president of the United States obviously on these facts should not be indicted I think is an indictment of the absence of courage in the professional political class in the Republican Party,
	which is why – Right.
	So first, let me give you the – Positive part on what you're saying, which is this is exactly why when I heard that you were running for president, which I heard sort of a few days before it was official, I was thrilled.
	And why I think when you get on the stage, that's going to really be where you shine.
	And regardless of where this ends, you are going to have a moment that will help shape things going forward.
	And I think that will be spectacularly good.
	You know, one of the lines that Peter Thiel always uses is that we have an evil party and a stupid party.
	The evil party is the Democrats and the Republicans are the stupid party.
	And I think what we're going to see, and then I'll get to the specifics of what you're talking about.
	I think what we're going to see on the debate stage, look, if you take Trump, DeSantis, you, Nikki, let's say Pompeo, and I don't know, you want to give me one more who might jump in, let's say Tim Scott, I don't know, somebody like that is a pretty solid set of people who are qualified, who have different, somebody like that is a pretty solid set of people who are qualified, who have different, interesting, divergent points of view, who I think can explain why they believe what they believe
	Think how profoundly different that is than what we saw just a couple years ago in the Democrat primary.
	Where you had a bunch of, I would say, radically far-left people basically trying to out-left each other, and then you end up with the guy who is like the most machine, you know, career politician, I would also argue mentally compromised, everything else.
	So let me, I just want to put that out there because that's the purpose of having a conversation like this, is that you are making a distinction between, at least in your view, a distinction between yourself and, let's say, the professional class.
	On the DeSantis thing specifically, you know, it's one thing to say it's easy to fight the woke now because it's become a little trendier now.
	But the guy's been doing it to the backdrop of COVID for two years at a state level like nobody else.
	I mean, he has driven it.
	Out of our education system.
	He's driven it out of our institutions.
	One thing that's obviously very dear to your heart, ESG. I mean, he now has a 20-state coalition.
	This is like the separatists in Star Wars, which if you watch the prequels a certain way, the separatists aren't that bad.
	he is actually building an alliance of states to fight ESG.
	So I would say he's doing virtually all of the things that you would want or that any roughly conservative person would want.
	Maybe they look a little bit easier now because he's been doing them and been not only successful, I mean, won by a crazy landslide.
	You know, Florida has the most net migration into the state.
	Nobody's leaving.
	We have lowest all-time unemployment.
	We have lowest all-time crime, virtually no homeless.
	So all of that stuff's working.
	And then you start forgetting about why things are working.
	So I think he does deserve a little more credit maybe than you're giving him on that.
	But maybe we should get that to the reason that I texted you, because I think that that'll show people a little bit of what's really going on under the hood here.
	So about a week or so ago, maybe it was 10 days ago, you were at a press conference.
	Do you know where you were at that point?
	You might have been in the press conference.
	I'm even trying to – you tell me which one it was and then I'll tell you where I was.
	I've been traveling so much.
	Well, I know you had a bunch of cameras in front of you and they were asking a question about who you would talk to in media.
	And basically you said, you know, some candidates won't talk to certain media outlets, but I believe in more conversation and we should talk to everybody and everything else.
	And to me, that was obviously you were going after DeSantis because he no longer is talking to NBC because of how they've been treating him.
	Now, on the first principles, because I know you like the first principles thing, on the first principles part, I completely agree with you.
	The more talk, the better.
	The more we can get ideas out there and have an honest, a truly honest and even debate of ideas.
	Great.
	Now, the reason I texted you about that, and I purposely wasn't doing it on Twitter, it was just, it was, and I think I even said to you in the text, this is unsolicited advice.
	I appreciated it, yep, yep.
	The reason I texted you was because, you know, NBC over the last couple of months, they have, I mean, and we could do a version of this with the New York Times and Washington Post and everything else.
	They have lied so egregiously about virtually everything coming out of Florida, but DeSantis related, don't say gay, all of the ESG stuff, all of the gender stuff, the race stuff, African-American studies.
	That was the one that caused the question that you gave the response to that.
	Eventually, Andrea Mitchell was interviewing Kamala Harris and said, said to her, I can almost do it verbatim.
	What do you think Ron DeSantis wasn't, doesn't want American people to know about slavery and the aftermath of slavery?
	And it was such a profound lie.
	Oh, yeah.
	A profound lie.
	Of course it was.
	That DeSantis' campaign basically put out a statement and they said, look, until you guys apologize and retract, we're not talking to you anymore.
	And what I said to you, and then I'll stop.
	What I said to you was, I think what's going to happen here is it's somewhat easy for you to say, let's talk to everybody.
	But once you've been in the machine and when you get that spotlight, which is coming for you, it absolutely is for all the right reasons, Vivek, because you're going to get more momentum.
	It's obvious.
	Once you realize, man, they are lying about everything related to my family and my history and my opinions and my actions and my businesses, you might at some point pull a DeSantis and go, you know what?
	I will no longer talk to those people.
	It's not out of fear of talking.
	It's not out of fear of the battle of ideas.
	It's saying, you guys are no longer honest actors in this game, and there are many other ways to get the message out.
	I think that's their calculation.
	And what I was trying to say to you was, you may like what it's doing to him at the moment, sort of optically, but when it turns on you, You might have a slightly different feeling.
	So I was really sending that purely as a friend and as someone that wants you to succeed in this.
	And I really mean that.
	I do.
	You know, I'll say a couple things in response to that, right?
	I am a political outsider now.
	I think you only get to be a political outsider once.
	Let's say we succeed and actually, you know, get into the White House.
	Then you are part of the system.
	And I think at a certain point, you got to Pass the torch on, because there's no way that you want to drain the swamp.
	I'm sure it will drain part of you, too.
	That's on the administrative reform side of this.
	And so, you know what am I going to be?
	Probably, if I have a lot less hair, more of them are gray.
	I'm jaded, cynical, and given into the system eight years into a presidency.
	Time to get off, drop the mic, and pass it on to somebody else.
	And we have a system that's built on that principle for good reasons.
	So, Am I going to say exactly everything the same way 8 years from now or 10 years from now than I do today or even 4 years from now or even 2 years from now or even 18 months from now as I do today?
	Probably not.
	That doesn't mean that I'll be more right then than I am today.
	I think that there's something to be said where when I say you need an outsider, that doesn't mean that It is me because I'm different.
	It's because you – every person is different when they're an outsider relative to when they've become somewhere between cynical and captured, and it's probably a combination of the two.
	It seems to be what politics does to you.
	Good title for a book, Between Cynical and Captured.
	That's exactly – I mean I'm just off the cuff here, but that's exactly what I see is this partisan political game doing to people.
	The donor class is a big part of this.
	I've never had this type of open conversation about Desantis in particular.
	I think it's kind of important, though.
	I really do ordinarily just focus on the what and the why in terms of policy.
	But this is important because I just think it is important for understanding openly, putting on the table how I feel.
	If I had squinted through my eyes and really saw what I wanted to see there last year, I wouldn't be in this race.
	But I actually do respectfully disagree with you, Dave, on a couple of things there.
	I do think that fear has something to do with it.
	I think that even you use the ESG and the BlackRock examples, we can sort of We can get into the details on this because I think they matter.
	The distinction between doing what is truly the right thing versus what appears to be popular, it's everything when determining whether you actually are putting somebody in the White House who's going to sit across the table from Xi Jinping and have to make tradeoffs and sacrifices.
	I mean, one of the things I've said is I want to declare independence from China.
	Sounds good as a slogan, but I also say, you know what?
	That's not going to be easy.
	It's going to involve real trade-offs and sacrifices.
	Thinking on the timescales of history, even when you're trading off some short-run benefits, those are going to be tough decisions.
	This is one example among many.
	You're going to need somebody who is able to get to the truth rather than just doing the easy thing that allows them to trend on Twitter for a cycle.
	I'll tell you this.
	Since you brought it up, I actually give this answer.
	Close to full marks.
	Close to full marks.
	Better than anybody else that I would think of on the COVID response, okay?
	But since you brought it up on the ESG thing, Look, I mean, I don't want to bore people and get into specifics here, but it's the same pattern.
	The treasurer of the state ceremoniously pulls out $700 million some odd dollars out of BlackRock.
	That generates a great set of headlines and news cycles, but Florida wasn't the first to do this.
	They were like the fifth state, maybe the sixth or seventh or eighth state to do this.
	It's poll tested.
	It's popular.
	And I disagree with you on taking on the woke stuff.
	I mean, I... I know when it was unpopular to take on the woke stuff back in 2020, when I embarked on my journey writing Woke Inc and beginning to write in the Wall Street Journal, you know, Ron DeSantis came to that after it was – and I'm giving him full credit.
	I'm really happy he did.
	But when the tides are already changing, but on the ESG thing, it's kind of a pattern I just want to point out here.
	Being the fifth or sixth or seventh person to then pull funds out of the treasury, which are like cash and cash-like securities.
	Great, $700 million sounds like a big number.
	Drop in the bucket when it comes to Florida's system.
	But then when it comes to actually pulling out the big dollars from the equity portfolios, behind closed doors, backroom deal, what they called a truce, left $13 billion with BlackRock anyway because the headlines had already captured the easy thing to do, which is a treasurer left $13 billion with BlackRock anyway because the headlines had already captured the Now, I could go into details on that, and that's specific, and I'm not trying to –
	You know, play gotcha on that one thing, but I am pointing out a professional politician pattern.
	It's not Ron DeSantis specific.
	It's a professional politician pattern where the reason we have the stupid party, right?
	You have the evil party and the stupid party.
	I guess you said Peter said that.
	I don't disagree with that characterization, but a big part of the reason why is the stupid party, if you will, is beholden to just getting the serotonin surge and the political points out of a short-term hit created by the artifact of modern social media culture to say the things that you're supposed to say.
	Use the magic words.
	Say woke.
	Say sorrows.
	Say the things you're supposed to say, which is close to and sometimes correlates with doing exactly the right thing.
	But in the hard stuff, it's off by half, right?
	Why does Florida still have $13 billion invested with BlackRock?
	That's exactly why.
	Why was a BlackRock top lobbyist, the person who hosts the inauguration party for DeSantis?
	Why does David Sachs host fundraisers for DeSantis while DeSantis says nothing about Silicon Valley Bank?
	I think that after the bailout, and I think that the answer is it's fear.
	I think it's a different kind of fear.
	It's not fear of the woke mob.
	It's fear of a donor class.
	It's fear of constraints within a Republican Party itself that stop someone.
	And so now back to the NBC News thing.
	Look, I get it.
	I mean, maybe you're right.
	I don't get it at the full scale and I'm going to get the full brunt of this, I'm sure.
	And so talk to me in six months and maybe, you know, I take your point.
	I can't deny that.
	But, you know, I mean, I had the experience with The New Yorker.
	You know, they wrote, I mean, they got all the facts, wrote complete hit piece last December.
	It was disgraceful.
	And like the number of falsehoods in there, just even like biographical falsehoods, let alone falsehoods on my policies.
	I would like to think I could at least get it at having had it at a smaller scale.
	But I just come back to a general first principle.
	If you can't handle that with NBC News, and I know that you would say it's not about not handling it.
	It's about having other ways.
	But if you if that's something that's going to cause you to say that I'm not going to talk to NBC News, which is, you know, still reaching half the country that I want to govern.
	I'm not sure that you're the right person to sit across the table from Xi Jinping, who's going to be breaking a lot worse.
	That's good.
	Because, all right.
	So then we definitely have like a true fundamental difference on that because and, you know, look, you did write the woke book in 2020.
	I was, you know, in 2017 or 20 even 16 because I was a lefty.
	I mean, I was a progressive on the Young Turks Network.
	I was waking up to this stuff very early.
	You know, I did the Why I Left the Left video.
	I was really seeing all of that craziness a long time ago.
	See, to me on this, if they are genuinely and truly always going to be bad actors, and that is what they have consistently proven.
	I honestly believe this.
	At this point, if you were to read the New York Times about any article about a Republican, if you just put the word not in front of every statement or you reversed every statement, it would be closer to the truth than what the articles are saying.
	And you wouldn't even have to do that just for Republicans.
	You could do a reverse version of that for Democrats.
	The corporate press is so in bed with the Democrat machine or whatever that thing is, that at some point, you can either just go back as an abused wife and just say, hit me again, hit me again, hit me again, I'll try to be better.
	You can try your different tactics again.
	You can make sure you record it on your side and all of that stuff.
	But they will never stop.
	So I don't think NBC even reaches half the country anymore.
	I think one thing, I'll tell you this, you want to see DeSantis go as sort of open as he can possibly go, go on Rogan then.
	You know what I mean?
	If I'm too close, let's say, for that, I mean, obviously I'm going to sit down with all of you guys in person.
	We already did our in-person last week with Nikki.
	I want to do in-person, one hour, unedited with everyone.
	But if I'm thought of as too close, then do three hours with Rogan and get around the system.
	The thing is, that's like, you know, to say you have to go to NBC or you have to go to the New York Times or something like that, which I know that's not exactly what you're saying.
	I know what I'm saying exactly, but yeah.
	But you're saying you have to play a little bit in that.
	To me, that's like saying, oh, there's a dinosaur jumping.
	Well, it's sort of like saying there's a dinosaur sinking in the tar pits.
	We better jump on them.
	And guess what's going to happen?
	I mean, that's what happened, right?
	The saber-toothed tiger would die on the back of the brontosaurus because they'd both sink once he ate a little flesh on the top.
	And I think that's really the issue.
	And I think you'll probably see that more and more.
	But just one other thing on that.
	You know, I think a little bit of what you're talking about It's sort of timeline related to some of this.
	So, you know, he maybe was the fifth governor.
	I'm just going to take your word on this one.
	I don't know it for a fact, but I'll fully take your word.
	Let's say he was the fifth governor to do something on ESG. Now there's this 20 state union coming together to do more.
	That may be right.
	The thing is, the guy is also running a state.
	I think once you're in there doing all these things, you're just going to have priorities doing things.
	You know, when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago for the book, I said, you know, we did a lot of the reasons that Florida's great, but I said, Governor, I have to ask you something that's gonna be more challenging here.
	So I said, as a new Floridian, one of the things that I hear all the time is that house prices are just insane here.
	Now, on one hand, it's a product of success.
	If you get, we literally have 1,200 people moving here a day, almost a million people in three years.
	So eventually, you're gonna have a housing problem.
	He fully acknowledged it.
	He did not deny it or skirt around it.
	And I said, what are you gonna do about it?
	And he said, well, we've had, I think it was seven 20-year infrastructure projects that they've now moved up to seven years.
	So they skirted 13 years off these things.
	So they're doing these things.
	Now, you can't do it overnight.
	You can't build the houses just one step at a time.
	But I think this also gets to your point about the outsider-insider thing.
	There is a machine.
	Whether we like it or not, there is a machine.
	It operates in a certain way.
	To me, he is the best guy operating in that machine who has done virtually all of the things that we could have asked for.
	Has the sequencing not been exactly what you would have wanted?
	That is quite possible.
	But the question is, could you have done it any faster, having existed within the machine?
	And you know what?
	It's easier said than done, right?
	So I grant you that, Dave.
	And here's the other thing I'll say.
	I think we agree on this.
	He's been an outstanding governor.
	And the things you're saying are making me want to be more precise about exactly what I'm saying, okay?
	I think he's a great governor.
	I think that for a governor, for a congressman, For a U.S. Senator, for a state legislator, for an attorney general, for a state attorney general, for a state treasurer, for a lieutenant governor, he gets A marks, you know, maybe even A plus marks, okay?
	But going back to the topic you and I were talking about, which goes beyond a person here, we're in the middle of a national identity crisis.
	We have not just the problem of big government, but a hybrid of big government, big business, cultural forces, and education that together do what neither can on its own.
	But we have not only that hybrid, we have a deeper problem in our soul.
	We look inside and we see a black hole of a vacuum to half the populations, including the ones who do watch NBC News, who bow to religions that they don't even recognize are religions, and we can't even call them religions because they're really cults.
	At least religions have withstood the test of time.
	That's the moment we live in.
	And in that moment, the question is not who do we need running a state, or I shake it back.
	There are good questions of who do we need running a state.
	That's a really important question.
	But that's a different question from who we need leading a national revival.
	And to me, that is a different question than someone who's just an important foot soldier or even a general in this.
	We're not talking about the general, we're talking about the president.
	And I think that the person that we need, whoever it is, I'm running because I believe it's me, but I'm not making the case for me.
	I'm making a case for the country and part of the case for the outsider as the model of being the president is that you need somebody who takes all of those assumptions of the system, whatever they are, and they're really challenging.
	There's a lot of cogs in that wheel just to reject those assumptions full stop.
	I'll give you one example of those in the federal government.
	There's a reason why Republican presidents have not shut down government agencies.
	Because if you've grown up in the system, the thing they teach you, if you've been a congressman, you've been involved in passing some of these laws, is that there's a civil service protection.
	Congress renews civil service protections.
	So it's part of the standard laws in the budget that gets re-approved, appropriations that say that, okay, this is a constraint that Congress applies to the chief executive such that even if the American people elect someone to be the US president, the US president can appoint a new head of the FBI, can appoint a new head of the Department of Education the US president can appoint a new head of the FBI, can appoint a new head of the Department of Education who themselves will make whatever incremental changes they can, but
	And then we can get real boring on this stuff, but there's other laws which say that, you know … Yeah, I mean, exactly.
	But, you know, the nuts and bolts of it matter, right?
	There's these other laws called these impoundment prevention statutes that say that if Congress appropriates the money for a specific cause, the president has to actually spend it on that specific cause.
	Like, this stuff isn't – Viewed as controversial, it's just viewed as that's just how the system is played.
	If you want to bring a baseball, if you want to bring a sledgehammer to just wreck that system, you need one hand constitutional conviction, on the other hand, outsider conviction to actually do it.
	So I've had my stage in life as a constitutional scholar, law school, all that stuff.
	But as a guy who's built companies, I'll tell you, if somebody works for you, and you can't fire them, That means they don't work for you.
	It means you work for them.
	You know this as well as I do.
	You couldn't run a business if it were any other way.
	Well, how's that for an entrepreneur's lens of interpreting the Constitution?
	Not my Yale Law School background, though we've got the constitutional version of this argument I could give you, too.
	That's what it means to have an outsider.
	And if you're beholden – and so then what do we have to do?
	You have to use proxies.
	Are you the guy who is going to buckle to the Silicon Valley fear-mongering to say, well, I don't know.
	Maybe there's actually some kind of reason why this particular set of tech companies needed to be bailed out because my donors are telling me so.
	I know I need to win the presidency, but Donald Trump has done a lot of stuff wrong and I'm not going to get involved in that.
	You know, the Soros DAs, but, you know, I'm not getting involved in that, even though I'm aspiring to be a national leader.
	You know, NBC News, they lie.
	And all this is true stuff, right?
	They lie.
	You know, I'm not going to engage in debate with them.
	And I'll send you some.
	We'll probably air some.
	I'll tell you when I'm on CNBC what that looks like.
	But...
	I think that that's part of a pattern.
	Okay, I'm going to get a trend to get off BlackRock, take $700 million out, but okay, we'll do a deal for $13 billion.
	We got the news cycle out of pulling some small pittance out.
	Is that the person, it's not even wrong to say this, the class of person who understandably are operating within the constraints of a really difficult system?
	There's just almost like a law of physics here.
	That can't be the person that actually tears down the system because they are necessarily a product of it.
	It's not a person-specific thing.
	It's a first principle where I'm making the case that for the presidency, the GOP has to be the party that, at least as its default norm, nominates the outsider, or else you're just going to get the same darn thing over and over again, the same old thing.
	You got it, and you know whose fault it is.
	It's going to be our fault because that's the rules of the road and the hierarchy we set up.
	Right.
	Okay, so let me just say, again, I disagree with some of your characterizations of what he's done, but we don't have to just bludgeon that point.
	To your point about what the Republicans should have going forward is this tear-it-down thing.
	That, in some ways, has been what the Trump energy has been, right?
	Drain the swamp.
	I will do all of those things.
	I actually think an interesting—let's move it off DeSantis for just a couple of minutes.
	Yeah, enough of that.
	Because, again, I'm telling you that as a Floridian, I'm thrilled that he is my governor, and I think he's deeply confident.
	And for good reason, I'm with you on that.
	And all of those things.
	But I'm not sitting here as a surrogate or anything like that.
	So I think let's just move off that for a second.
	But I think you just probably explained, and maybe you didn't even realize you were fully explaining it, I think you maybe just explained the best argument for your own candidacy, which probably has more to do with going after Trump in a way, because...
	Your argument, in some ways, is the exact same thing as Trump.
	All of the FBI, the CIA, the deep state, this never-ending, always-growing monster that we're all frustrated with must be crushed at the knees.
	I'm the outsider.
	I'll tear it all down.
	Now, I don't know that all conservatives want that, by the way.
	I think a lot of people look at America and they go, boy, we're pretty damn screwy.
	There's a lot wrong here, but we're still the best country in the world.
	And if we burn it all down, you know, it's not like you get freaking Shangri-La the next day.
	We might have a massive 20-year pain point to deal with and chaos and all sorts of stuff.
	And God only knows what the system would do against the guy that really could do it.
	But I think you might have just explained your greatest sort of way to get Trump, which is, OK, I actually agree with Trump on these big issues.
	I fully agree with him.
	However, I don't think he's capable of doing it.
	He couldn't do it last time.
	He's more hampered this time.
	He's older this time.
	There's a generational shift this time.
	And I can come in as an executive and someone that's built these companies that's younger and more ready and direct.
	And now it is true.
	He may still think he's an outsider, but you're even more outside than him.
	So maybe that really is the lane that you should be going on.
	So that's a little bit different than everything we've spent an hour talking about.
	But that strikes me as a place where when you find what your base is, like we know what the Trump base is right now, right?
	I think we're starting to see what the DeSantis base will be.
	It's a little unclear to me what maybe a Nikki base will be, but I do think it's there.
	I think you just found your base in what you just said right there.
	I don't know that maybe you've thought about it more specifically than that, but I think that might be it.
	That, okay, the guy who, you know, the base loves, I'm here and I can do it better than him.
	That's interesting to me.
	It's interesting, man.
	I appreciate that.
	That outside-in perspective, because I'm just speaking off the cuff here, but...
	I do think, I think I said it in my little rant there.
	I think it is true that you only get to be an outsider once, right?
	I don't, I won't, if I am in the system, I'm not an outsider anymore.
	I'm already tainted by it.
	And I have seen enough of this game.
	You know, it's funny.
	I mean, just to bring people inside a little bit too, it's like one of the things that annoys the hell out of me right now is the, even the donor conversations that I need to have, right?
	So I've, I just cut an eight-figure cash check to seed the campaign with.
	Great.
	I'm in a position to do that.
	And then we cross 10,000 small donors in less than the first month.
	That's great, too.
	But that's what's going to drive this.
	But then there's this thing that happens in a political campaign.
	I didn't even know this, but you have structured call time that shows up on your calendar.
	And some of that call time is you're just pounding the phones, calling these donors.
	And then there's two classes of them, right?
	Like there's the people who can max out at like – I'm just giving you a little inside baseball here.
	Maybe you already know all this stuff.
	But there's like a $3,300 maximum, but then $6,600 if you include the general election.
	If it's a husband and wife, like that's the max level.
	And there's a lot of people who are in the top 1% or whatever in this country for whom that's not a big deal to make that donation.
	But then there's the real – those aren't the people I'm calling directly.
	Those people the campaign will call whatever.
	But the people you really call are the – We're good to
	go.
	I just think that I cringe at that.
	But if that's what it actually takes to get elected, and then I've done that and I'm in that system for four years, I'm not an outsider anymore.
	Tainted product.
	I do think this idea – I'll marinate on that, man, in finding my lane and my base, as you said.
	I think you get to be an outsider once.
	I don't want to just tear the system down for the sake of tearing it down.
	I think that certain things need to be torn down to be rebuilt because you can't reform them.
	Managerial reform of the FBI, for example, I believe, is today.
	Structurally, it's just impossible.
	It's not going to happen.
	You have to shut it down and build something new to take its place.
	But there's no way somebody who's been an insider, even four years in the presidency, even certainly a career as a career politician is going to do that because it's just the thing you're not supposed to do.
	Right.
	I would say that that might I don't know exactly how true that is, because if you have a good track record of running, you know, that's why also we should probably mostly if you're going to choose a politician to be president, they should more so be governors than senators, because you have a chief executive of quite literally a piece of land and an organization.
	So so there is more expertise done there.
	So if you look.
	So that's why I'm saying if you are on stage with Trump and DeSantis, let's say you're the last three left.
	Right.
	Your frustrations with DeSantis would be, okay, you've done a lot of good stuff, I can see that, but you exist within a system.
	And I don't know that everyone's going to get on board the okay Vivek will burn down the system and that makes DeSantis bad because he did all of the things we wanted to do.
	It doesn't make him bad.
	It doesn't make him bad, but yeah.
	Right.
	I just don't know that that can win.
	But what could possibly win, or not even win, just get a certain amount of energy in your direction, is it's a lot easier for you to be on stage with the three of them and turn to Trump and be like, listen, man, I agree with a lot of your stuff, which, by the way, DeSantis is going to have to do, It's not like they have massive policy differences, right?
	So you're going to be able to look at him and say, hey, I agree with all of this stuff.
	You want to drain the swamp?
	You want to get rid of all these agencies?
	You want to burn it down?
	Damn right.
	But guess what?
	You didn't do it, and I can do it better, and here's why.
	That shows me a lane.
	But I do think that you're going to find a little bit of risk as time goes on.
	You're a good advisor.
	Well, but I do think there is some sort of risk in the just, we must burn it down thing.
	Because even remember this, remember when the Democrats had their primary and Bernie was basically burn it all down.
	That was his main thing, burn it all down.
	And Pete, remember when Pete on stage said to him, you want to burn it all down?
	And he kind of just stood there like...
	The thing is, the Democrats are much more as a party willing to burn it all down.
	There now is a hatred of America within that.
	They don't view this experiment as positive.
	It's very different for the Republicans.
	We might all be frustrated, and I think virtually all of us are.
	And by the way, when I say we as Republicans, I've never been a Republican my entire life until I moved to Florida.
	So, you know, I guess I say that with some sense of irony.
	But as a general rule, conservative-leaning people or libertarian-leaning people or the independents who really I think will be attracted to you, they don't want to burn it down.
	They want some measured destruction appropriately.
	I think DeSantis, in effect, is doing that.
	I think your place in that, I think, remains to be seen, basically.
	But that seems like the avenue to me.
	I think about it as the Phoenix.
	The party of the Phoenix.
	And so this is a great conversation, man.
	We covered a lot of ground.
	I love talking to you for this reason, man.
	You embody closing that gap between what we say in private and public, intra-party, inter-party.
	I think we share the absence of those partisan labels or care about them in common.
	I'm glad we're doing this, man.
	We took our text message and made it live.
	This is fun.
	Vivek, let me say one other thing, and I really mean this, and I've said this on my show several times.
	You've obviously been on my show a couple of times, but we've covered some of the things you're doing lately and obviously will continue.
	I am thrilled that you will be on that stage and that you are getting in on this.
	I want more people out there.
	As I said, I sat down with Nikki last week.
	I like her a lot.
	I like Trump a lot.
	I've met him.
	I'm friends with his kids.
	Obviously, I like DeSantis a lot.
	I think That however dirty this is all going to get and nasty and really the horrible things that are going to be said about you and your family and they'll go after your parents and all of that stuff.
	I think there's a way for some set of us to be a little bit above that.
	It's going to be hard.
	It's going to be deeply hard for you as the candidate.
	It's going to be deeply hard for me as a guy that talks about this stuff.
	It's going to be hard for the average person who maybe was a Trump voter last time, but maybe is tired of it this time and is looking towards you or towards DeSantis.
	It's going to be hard for everybody.
	But I think the worst outcome of all of this is what the is what big tech will push on us It's what the corporate media will push on us, which is let's just, and I don't mean destroy the whole thing the way you described it before, but I mean just like let's scorch earth everybody to the point that we end up with Biden again, with the powers of ESG being furthered, with all of the woke stuff coming more, you know, just being pushed further towards us.
	That really is the risk.
	So it's my job, I think, to try to mitigate that as much as possible.
	But again, the fact that you're doing this is absolutely awesome.
	And I think that people need to understand that conservatives are not mean.
	They are not idiots.
	They are not warmongers.
	I think it's going to become very obvious, that part, certainly on the warmonger part, because the Democrats are all in on this thing.
	That's a whole other topic we can discuss another time.
	But that's why I think you have a valuable voice in this.
	And I'm happy to do whatever it is that we just did here.
	And I'll text you my true thoughts in a few minutes. .
	I'll look forward to our text exchanges and to doing this again.
	And I'll come out and we'll do the in-person thing.
	I'm looking forward to that too, man.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Hey, it's the free state of Florida.
	And you know, you got to come to Ohio sometime too, so we'll do both.
	How about that?
	We commit both directions.
	Someday I'm coming to do that with Florida.
	Someday you're coming here and we'll sit in Columbus together.
	But this is the next best thing.
	I liked it.
	I appreciate it, man.
	I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

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