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April 7, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:12:57
The Opioid Crisis: A Personal Tragedy Reveals America's Hidden Enemy | The TRUTH Podcast #8
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All right, so I'm here hanging out in Columbus with my good friend, actually, someone I've gotten to know over the last couple of years who, you know, we've shared stages with.
We've run into each other at conferences.
But those settings are always so rushed that I don't think we've ever gotten a chance like outside of like a large group where you're introducing me to speak or someone else is speaking and we're, you know, in a rush to say quick close to actually sit down and hang.
And so, you know, today's our day for that.
But you know what?
What better way to do that than on a podcast?
Than on a podcast in our hometown, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
But I'm ashamed to say, I guess, we were just chatting a little bit before for the last couple of minutes, but...
I know a ton about your views and how principled you are, but I don't know a ton about your background and the why of what you got into what you're doing.
So, no time better than now, man, and then we'll get into it.
I'm happy to tell you, and it's a pleasure to be here, Vivek.
We've met through all those channels that you outlined and, you know, being at the Heritage Foundation, where I'm the vice president for outreach, has given us that opportunity.
You know, Heritage is very particular about not endorsing candidates and making sure that we maintain neutrality.
And so, it's a pleasure for me to be here in a personal capacity with you.
The best way to tell my story is I'm Andy Olivastro.
I'm a quarterback, I'm a coach, I'm a communications pro, and I'm a coalition builder.
And as a quarterback, I've always been Did you actually play football?
Oh, yeah.
You look like football players.
You know, 20 pounds ago, I was a quarterback.
Now, I just retain the bumps and bruises and the pain in the tendons.
But as a quarterback, you call the play and you try to lead the team to victory.
As a coach, you review the plays, you refine the playbook.
It's all about continuous improvement.
And that's a sort of operational mentality that I've brought to my life.
And so, at the Heritage Foundation, where I'm in my third tour of duty, is the way I like to talk about it.
I worked as a political appointee, as a presidential appointee in the Bush administration.
I coached cabinet secretaries in the corporate world.
I worked at Edelman Public Relations for a number of years, and then I was in the corporate world at United Technologies, now Raytheon, for almost 10 years.
That was all C-suite executive support, writing speeches, developing executive communications plans and programs.
You know, that was my operational kind of outlook was I'm going to be the quarterback, the coach and the comms pro, but always try to build a community and drive this sort of coalition of willing participants in the direction that I thought we needed to go.
And that was, you know, free market economy and global trade and all these things.
But something happened really interesting in my career.
I was, you know, about a handful of years ago, I was sitting with some friends from India and China and they were colleagues and they were back here in the States for an event that we were holding.
And they started to tell me something that was really special to them, that I had gifted them.
And it was pocket copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Because when I travel around the world, I used to bring those with me.
And I'd leave one in the seat of the pocket on the airplane, I'd leave one in the hotel room, and I would give them to colleagues.
And that was my American playbook.
That's what I think is our American playbook.
And I always thought it was special to share that and have a conversation about that.
It wasn't so much about supply chains.
You could have those conversations.
It wasn't just about employee engagement when you have 200,000 employees around the globe.
It was, what are the ideas that actually animate people?
What should we be striving to do?
And that was something that just always motivated me.
And when the opportunity presented itself to sign back up with Heritage, You know, I just looked at where the movement was.
I looked at where the country was.
And I said, the bow ties are off and the brass knuckles are on.
Let's go have these conversations.
Love that, man.
Love that.
And what are the – I mean, I guess I didn't think of you as a generalist because we have always been in our tours of duty on ESG and that circuit.
And what are the other issues that I would say personally interest you kind of the most?
It's kind of cool because usually you get someone with that background, you don't think of themselves as a domain expert.
But I think of you as a domain expert in areas where we've crossed paths.
Sure.
Yeah, I've developed, I think, a deep interest in ESG, and that comes from, I mean, and we've talked a lot about this, and obviously the American people have heard a lot from you on this, and I think to their benefit, because you've changed the conversation and the tenor of that debate, and you've changed incentives in that debate, which I think is fundamentally important for the direction of the country.
But in terms of ESG in general, I've always looked at it as – The broader debate of business's role in society.
When corporate social responsibility becomes corporate socialism requirements, that's a big problem.
I've always looked at it as a lot of people that believe stakeholders have just as much say as everybody else, but then they insert themselves as far upstream as they can.
That's about controlling the means of production.
I think we all know, anybody who's read history, has read economics, knows that that's communism and that's Marxism, is controlling the means of production.
That's just always been something that's – that whole kind of continuum is something that's always been interesting to me.
But the other issues that are interesting to me are the ones that affect the American people in the most fundamental way.
I think education reform is absolutely the number one driver.
And I think the alchemy in the grassroots right now, we really haven't seen that.
Everybody was looking for this red wave that maybe didn't come except in Florida.
But that red wave is – that alchemy is still brewing across the country.
Our friends at Moms for Liberty – You know, Tiffany and Tina, they will tell you what they see and what they hear.
And they are growing just as fast today as they were a year and a half ago.
And so that's still brewing.
And I think the education conversation is fundamentally important.
The other one that's really important to me is fentanyl and the opioid scourge that's affecting the country.
I lost my younger sister in 2016 to an accidental overdose.
So I know it personally.
My family knows the pain of that.
And I think if we really want to look at The ways in which we need to address that and the idea of declaring federal health emergencies, the idea of making sure that a public health bureaucracy is actually leading to better outcomes, the idea that our streets shouldn't be awash in attics, and then the idea that we shouldn't have an open border.
These things should be non-starters, should be unacceptable, and bright, clear lines should be drawn in this.
And you've spoken to that, and other candidates, obviously, have spoken to that.
But those are things that are fundamentally important.
We're losing 100,000 of our fellow Americans.
I mean, these are individuals.
They have names.
They have parents.
They have siblings.
They have positive value to add to society and we're losing them to a drug addiction, a drug scourge that we're not even really fighting.
And I think that's something that we fundamentally have to talk about.
And if we can solve that, I would see a better future for America.
You know, we – we'll come back to ESG.
Right.
Actually, I think – you know, I'll take a little bit of time to – I don't think I've done it as part of this presidential campaign yet.
And I think it's important to lay that out.
Right.
You know, just for a minute, if you don't mind me asking about it.
And I – Sure.
You know, I don't mean to cause any more pain than you've already endured.
I'm sorry for your sister's loss, but do you mind me asking about that story a little bit?
No, please do.
My sister, her name is Amy.
She's great.
Tell me about her a little bit.
You can't talk about her without bringing a smile to your face because she was brilliant and she was beautiful.
But I- She's your younger sister?
She's my younger sister.
I have an older brother, RJ.
He's two years older than me.
And so she was- She was nine years younger than me.
Nine years younger.
So in many ways, the conversation, when I think about her, you know, she lived a different life than my brother and I did.
He was two years older.
We went through school together.
He was always the better quarterback than I was, the better baseball player than I was.
And I was just chasing after him.
And so she was our little sister, literally.
And she was an actress and she was a, you know, active in theater.
But she was really exceedingly bright and wanted to either do law school or theater school.
Ended up getting a degree in philosophy, magna cum laude from University of West Florida, and But that was because she had started on somewhat of a challenge.
She made some bad personal decisions and I don't blame other people for the individual decisions that other people make, that individuals make.
But she developed an addiction and had to wrestle with that for a long time.
And so, what you So it wasn't from like a hospital stay or something?
It wasn't from a hospital stay.
How old was she when this happened?
She was 33 when she died.
So she was 33. And when did she develop the addiction?
You know, a handful to almost – you know, it was probably more recreational use of drugs that led her in that direction.
I don't think she ever really wanted to start on heroin.
I think it was a boyfriend who convinced her that it was – Is it after college or during college?
This was right about the time before she graduated.
Right, before the end of college.
Before the end of college.
And you think that's when she got into the use of drugs?
Yeah.
She fought it, and she would have clean spells, and then she would have relapses.
And when those clean spells would come, those were beautiful moments.
You know, she would think and act with clarity.
She would be a great part of family conversations.
She would be present, literally and figuratively.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, and that's the pain that people feel.
I mean, there's, for my parents especially, sleepless nights.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Driving her to methadone clinics to get that and just hoping, beyond hope, that you never have to drive there again.
You know, trying to find work for her, which was always difficult because how reliable might she be, but also who wants to hire somebody who, you know, you might tell by appearance maybe hasn't been...
Hasn't been standing on her own two feet for too long.
But, you know, that's the upsetting part of it and the very sad and tragic part of it.
And it was fentanyl.
It was fentanyl.
It was an accidental overdose of fentanyl.
And she, you know, this is the thing that I think I would want everybody to understand.
It's the finality of it all that makes you realize that when there's 100,000 of our fellow Americans dying every year, that moment is terrible.
But those sleepless nights, those unanswered prayers, the idea that when somebody does overdose and they often do it in their home...
That now the family home has become a place where a death like that has taken place.
It's not natural causes.
And so you've got 15 police officers, a medical examiner, a coroner showing up and zipping up an industrial zipper that you can hear through two walls to take your sister out.
It's devastating.
I mean – and this is what's wreaking havoc across America.
And if we don't take it seriously and more seriously than we currently are, we're going to see more of that.
And so, you know, that's what's wreaking havoc in families across America and in every community here in Ohio where we are and in my home state of Connecticut.
Yeah.
It's – it's sad.
But I think it's sad in a way that feels – Like there's a cynical force behind it too, right?
Because you know it's coming from the cartels.
Right.
Who in turn are getting it from China.
Right.
And I think there's something about, you know, maybe COVID is a bad example.
We now obviously almost nearly definitively know it came from a Chinese lab too.
But there's something about something that's passive that is just a fact of nature.
Yes.
That makes like a hurricane or something like this, just a tragedy that you are able to mourn as just a tragedy because life is uncertain.
And there's something about living in the world that leaves us vulnerable to the uncertainty of higher power in nature and that we can't control.
But I think the thing that frustrates me about – The fentanyl crisis is that it feels like we can do something about it.
It feels preventable.
It feels like this shouldn't be happening.
And it is happening in part because there's an enemy of the United States that's, frankly, and I don't mean to touch the emotional nerve, but creating a problem that leaves good Americans like your sister I
agree with you, Vivek.
If anybody's listening and they think my sister Amy made bad choices and Pay the consequences.
In a way, that's true.
But then I would say, think about Bishop Evans, who was a 22-year-old Army National Guard in Texas, who was protecting the border, and two illegal aliens were trying to cross the river.
And his training was, don't go in there, it's too dangerous.
But his humanity took over, and he went into the river to try to save these two illegal aliens crossing the border.
And the tragedy of it is Bishop Evans died, those two illegal aliens survived, and they were smuggling drugs into the United States of America.
Something is fundamentally wrong if we're going to lose a good American like Bishop Evans because his humanity was, I'm going to try to help these two people, and these two people were coming into our country to peddle death and depression.
I think that's something fundamentally wrong.
Yeah, I mean, that encapsulates, there's so much emotion in that story, right?
So that another American like Bishop is going to likely die at behest of using those drugs or be harmed by it.
That's where we are in the country.
And, you know, I mean, I think one of the things I've said in this presidential campaign that for whatever reason, and I can't quite understand why people get so worked up about this proposal, is that if we're going to use The US military to protect us against anything.
It ought to be protecting us from the risks that present themselves on our own soil.
We now know that there are literally Chinese individuals at behest of the government Who are in Mexico, not just – not only are they shipping the raw materials, in Mexico producing fentanyl,
to literally send it across that southern border via mules who get across the border one way or another, in their vision of the opium war, and literally by the hundreds of thousands, just as measured by deaths,
let alone the countless more who are homeless or displaced from living normal lives in the United States – It is working, and yet we're sitting by as bystanders just watching it happen in plain sight.
It's infuriating to me, just as an American, forget the politics of it, just to watch that happen to us in plain sight.
And I think part of why – I mean, there's this whole debate about Ukraine now.
Right.
But I think part of what pisses people off about Ukraine isn't even the expenditure of the dollars, though sometimes they'll say it that way.
It isn't just the legacy of Iraq or the Iraq War or something like this.
It's the sense that we can't even protect our own border here at home, that we have real problems in America.
That we're purposefully sidestepping to create some other, you know, what some will say, I don't agree with this necessarily, made up problem.
I don't think it's a made up problem, but take on somebody else's problem.
I think that you wouldn't, here's my hypothesis, I guess, where I'm going with that is, I don't think you would see nearly as much American opposition to engagement in Ukraine if it weren't for the fact that we're failing to take care of actual problems that our military should be concerned with here at home.
If they were, then I don't think you would see nearly as much of a debate about what our role should be in Ukraine.
And I think that's what the people who criticize the The so-called isolationists miss is that it's actually not an isolationist sentiment at all.
It's a sentiment that mostly reflects a frustration of dealing with problems that we could have and should have dealt with first.
You know what I mean?
I do.
And I think that what you've just outlined is exactly the right – A set of questions to start to ask should have been asked many, many years ago.
What is the American national interest?
And when you ask that question, and you start to, you know, have that conversation and that debate, you know, there's a role for deliberative bodies like the House of Representatives and the United States Senate.
There's a role for I think we're good to go.
The way this should take place, and we see some glaring mistakes happening right here at home, glaring needs that need to be addressed at home, and the framework that you just outlined is exactly the kind of framework that should be driving that debate at a national level.
Yeah.
Are there folks, just as out of curiosity, at Heritage who are focused on either the cartel issue and or the use of military force there, and also the Ukraine issue, or is this out of scope?
It's not out of scope.
I mean, one of the great things, again, this is my third tour of duty at Heritage, and I believe that As goes Heritage, so goes the conservative movement.
As goes the conservative movement, so goes the United States of America.
It's a proud, deeply proud affiliation that I have.
On behalf of Heritage, I would say we have people like Laura Reese who are focused on border security.
We have people like Mike Howell focused on border security, the oversight that's needed to make sure that the Biden administration answers difficult questions that they have been sidestepping.
In terms of drug policy, we have a brilliant guy named Paul Larkin who has been writing quite a bit on the sort of discontent around illicit drugs and sort of unpacking that across all forms of illicit drugs.
Because, Vivek, if you think about it, we have this problem that we've been talking about.
And it runs concurrent to the idea that we decriminalize and legalize all form of narcotics.
And for us to just shrug our shoulders and assume there's no connection, I think it sort of belies logic in that way.
And there's just no way that you can walk through any major city these days, not see some people that are clearly under the influence to the point where they're not functioning very well at all on our streets.
And for us to sort of shrug our shoulders at that is a major problem and I think a dereliction of duty for anybody who wants to be a part of these conversations.
This might be more of a conversation with Paul, but I mean, to the extent that you have a good sense for this.
Sure.
Do we – because I actually should know this and don't off the top of my head.
Right.
Do we have a good sense for – How much of a role fentanyl versus these other drugs are playing?
I mean, I know it's 100,000 deaths a year for fentanyl.
Right.
Like, what's the order of magnitude on some of these other drug-related deaths as it compares to fentanyl?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's not something that I could probably answer with any – I wouldn't want to mislead anybody on the numbers, but obviously fentanyl is deadly, and you can overdose on that.
It's instantaneous, and you only need the amount of fentanyl that would cover the tip of the pen or pencil that we've got in front of us, and it will end somebody's life.
The other drugs, it's usually much different and not so potent and not so fatal in the Culturally, what are the habits that are drawn out of that?
When I was growing up in the Just Say No campaign that the Reagan White House was launching, that was what we were taught in school.
The idea that the war on drugs hasn't been a success or something like that is not a reason to Flip the card over and say, well, let's do it the other way and let's legalize and decriminalize all of this because all you're going to end up with is a bunch of people that perhaps need a little bit more help and are finding themselves in a situation where they're not going to get it.
In fact, they're going to find themselves on a much worse path.
I mean the argument goes, right?
That – well, you wouldn't have the cartels if everyone was actually able to sell.
So that – the only reason you have the cartels is because of the prohibition that gives them a shadow monopoly, which in turn gets to the same result of still people dying of addiction.
So I mean that's – it's not – I don't find that persuasive, but I think it's an argument that deserves – It deserves airing.
Yeah.
It deserves airing.
It deserves to be weighed.
Yeah.
Now, I mean I think the question is then – but if you're going to be in the worst of all worlds, you might actually create the conditions for the cartels without actually going the distance and dealing with them.
I think you said something earlier, which to me, I'm telling a personal story about my sister, and there's a positive, much as one could say, ending or point of the story that we're at, which is we've got a scholarship under her name now.
We give scholarships out to graduating seniors in our hometown under her name, and so we try to have her legacy live on in the best sense of the words.
But the leading cause of death to 18 to 45-year-old men in this country is fentanyl overdose.
And if you're a Mexican drug cartel or the Chinese Communist Party, you don't look at that metric and think that's a deep concern.
You look at that metric and you think that's a wonderful thing.
And so, we need to be having the conversation that we're having under the rubric of public health, under the rubric of saving families and saving communities, but also from a national security point of view.
And so, I think all those options should be on the table that you've outlined.
Yeah.
I mean I think that it's considered uncouth to say something like this.
The southern border, it's a failed – it's a failed narco state south of the border.
We should be willing to do what we ought to do when we deal with terrorists.
I think the way that ISIS behaves is not that different from the way those Mexican drug cartels are behaving and President Obrador is basically in the pockets of the cartels.
Well, I think that if they're actually terrorists, we don't just freeze their financial assets.
We ought to treat them in the way we treat Soleimani or Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri, drone strikes, airstrikes, tactical special force operations for a fraction, by the way, of what we've spent in Ukraine.
I think we could decimate the cartels and solve the supply side problem in the fentanyl crisis.
And yet in that context, we worry about concerns relating to nation building and destabilization.
Yet somehow if it's in the other hemisphere, we actually lack those same concerns.
It's just fascinating to me that that's where we are.
Do you – and I think that there's room for reasonable debate in this, but like does the work that Heritage is doing – Point in one direction or another on the emerging Ukraine debate we're having in the conservative movement, which I think is a good debate to have because it airs a lot of other issues that have nothing to do with Ukraine.
But I'm curious what the orientation is of heritage so far around that particular debate.
The opportunity to be here with you today is a pleasure for me.
But, you know, the Heritage Affiliation kind of put that to the side.
As an observer, if both of us are just sort of seeing where… Yeah, I mean, yes, absolutely.
I mean, we've been, I think, driving a big part of that conversation.
The idea that, you know, no checks and balances on the spending or no checks and balances on the result of that investment.
It's deeply problematic, but it's problematic from a pure spending standpoint.
But I don't think you can approach every national security concern in a war in Europe purely from a spending standpoint.
But we have deep concerns there.
We've written a lot about it.
But in favor of engagement, though?
You know, listen, I think Putin is a menace.
And, you know, I think that, you know, personal hat, you know, I think that the idea that America would stand by and allow him to advance on Ukraine is probably one that fails the test of what is our interest.
But we have to make that case a lot better.
I think, you know, we've sort of, you know, I think there was a calculation made by By certain world leaders, country leaders, I should say, that the United States was not in a position to thwart any of that activity.
I mean, there was probably four months of constant daily Russian troops mounting a presence at the Ukraine border, and it just became this sort of fait accompli that this was going to happen.
And, you know, if NATO is meant to be A protection against that sort of thing happening and it fails, then you have to start to question, you know, are these international institutions really doing their part?
And obviously, things will happen in that way.
But so, I think from a heritage standpoint, you know, we question it, but we question it.
The discussion needs to happen, but obviously, we understand the severity of it and the importance of having a free Europe in a It's weirdly linked to – in an Unexpected way to one of the issues that are near and dear to both of our hearts actually,
which is the ESG question.
I sometimes joke around that – cynically at least that ESG stands for Export Soviet Gas because that's the effect that it's had on – Global financial markets and commodity markets and even energy markets more broadly for people's access to energy because here's the sad part of the story, right?
We've got this Ukraine debate going, more or less US engagement, okay?
And legitimate debate to be had there.
I've been pretty clear as a presidential candidate that I believe the top two foreign policy priorities in the United States – and I do think foreign policy is about prioritization – is declaring independence from communist China and actually protecting our southern border, including solving the fentanyl crisis, including using the US military as a just including solving the fentanyl crisis, including using the US military as a just and justified use of the US military to But in some ways, the debate about Ukraine is a false –
Straw man, because actually the real issue is that while with one hand the Biden administration gives 40 plus billion plus another 60 plus billion for a total of 100 plus – 60 plus in weapons and 40 plus in just raw aid to Ukraine with one hand to fight against Vladimir Putin.
While with the other hand, not a lot of people know this.
Joe Biden's administration and White House was the number one major Western power that was lobbying against the EU's ban on Russian oil imports.
Think about that for a second.
So if the EU wants to ban Russian oil imports, well, that would be a big problem.
You know, sort of undercutting of Putin's ability to finance his war machine.
And then who's lobbying against that?
It's none other than the Biden White House, which with the other hand is giving a hundred plus billion dollars worth of taxpayer money.
To Ukraine to fight against Vladimir Putin, who's financing his war machine with the European purchase of Russian oil that the Biden White House is itself lobbying against.
It's actually nuts.
This is where I get to do one of my favorite things in our conversations.
I get to ask you a question.
Why do you think that is?
Because I think that's fascinating.
Why do we think that is?
Well, I mean mechanically why that is and then we can get the philosophy of actually why what's really – what the hell is really going on in our country.
But the mechanics of why that is, is because the US and the West, and Western Europe included, shot itself in the foot when it comes to its ability to produce fossil fuels.
And also nuclear energy.
Germany shut down nuclear plants.
Coal plants have been shut down.
Fossil fuel restrictions in Western Europe, even in the United States, created a dependent relationship on Russia.
To provide oil and gas.
So think about the farce here.
You have a climate religion in the United States, a climate cult in the modern West that obsesses over Western countries like the US and Canada and Norway and others not producing oil and gas.
Now, keep in mind, the three countries that are probably the cleanest at producing just in terms of raw pollution into the environment on oil and gas are countries like the United States, Canada and Norway.
And yet, just watching, it's a global market for these commodities that we're talking about, Russia pick up the slack.
So prices are a little bit higher when you have constrained production.
Russia's able to sell that into a market with higher prices and rake greater profitability for one of its main sources of revenue because we shot ourselves in the foot.
Now, is that because we care to stave off global climate change?
Well, no.
Last time I checked, it was called global climate change for a reason.
Actually, there's a double irony in this.
From what I've described so far, it might just look like a net neutral transaction.
Less oil and gas production here, more oil and gas production over there, and we call it a day with just a virtue signaling wrapper.
That would be bad enough.
No, no.
It's actually one step worse than that.
When you're producing oil and gas and oil in places like Russia is actually far worse than it is in the United States.
And even if you buy into the crazy commandments of this religion, methane is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.
And so wait a minute.
Now we're shifting oil production to places like Russia where methane leakage is worse in the name of fighting carbon emissions.
Actually, the absolute oil produced is the same.
The absolute carbon production is the same.
It's just a worse form of carbon with methane leakage to top it off.
It reveals that it actually has nothing to do with even climate change.
It has to do with the United States and the modern West engaging in this some sort of self-loathing behavior.
It's a form of self-hatred.
It's a form of self-flogging.
It's like wearing a hair shirt.
It's like a form of religious self-punishment.
That's actually what's going on in America.
And then we create the kinds of geopolitical problems in the other side of the world that create the need for these debates we have to help Ukraine or not to help Ukraine.
When, in fact, if we were just self-sufficient on our energy needs, Russia would have withered into irrelevance.
And actually, what we've seen is this bluff of the idea that Putin did indeed have some sort of military prowess that was going to pose a threat to the United States.
He can't even fight Ukraine, right?
And by the way, it brings up for me the nuttiness of the American intelligence complex that says that somehow Kabul was not going to fall for years to the Taliban.
It falls within days.
Then says Ukraine is going to fall within days and that war is still going on over a year later.
That's a whole separate point about what we call – should we call it intelligence or should we call it something other than intelligence because we seem to be systematically wrong about what we're supposedly intelligent about?
But it creates these false straw man debates that were actually just grounded in our own lack of self-sufficiency on something as basic as energy.
Why is that?
Is it because of the climate?
No, that doesn't make sense because then you'd be embracing nuclear and the US has – the progressive movement has hostility towards nuclear.
It would have worried about shifting oil production to places like Russia.
No, it doesn't care about that.
It's about self-hatred.
It's about self-punishment.
It's about self-loathing.
And so is it any surprise that you then see Biden with one hand financing Putin's war machine and with the other hand funding Ukraine to fight against Putin's war machine?
No, this is just a form of self-hatred and self-loathing in America.
That's what's going on.
That's why – I mean that's why I believe that though I can go deep on the geopolitics or the economics of it.
At the core of it is just this national identity crisis.
And if we fill that national identity crisis, if we solve that national identity crisis, these other questions actually become a lot easier to address.
Do you think – so this is one of the beauties of your message and your posture and your positioning is that you've identified this, which I think is 100% accurate.
And so when I hear you speak, I hear you speaking to the need for a renewed American purpose and renewed and restoration.
We use a lot of interesting language on this, but I think it was at CPAC you mentioned, you know, the ideas that will propel us forward are the ideas, those radical ideas that were in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution, right?
And if we believe in equality and self-governance and the consent of the governed to pursue life or for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if we can have that conversation again, Is that something the American people can agree on?
Yes.
You think so?
Yes.
I'm just – I mean like absolutely this is – not only can agree on, I think most of us do agree on, right?
I think that most Americans – Agree on these basic rules of the road.
Okay?
I said in my opening campaign video, you know, maybe we disagree as a joke, right?
Maybe we disagree on whether corporate tax rates should be high or low.
Maybe we disagree on whether ivermectin treats COVID, but those are details.
What really matters is the basic principles that bind us together.
Funny little notice, the Council for Foreign Relations literally did a write-up on me that someone published today that said that it was the first presidential campaign ever where a candidate was promoting ivermectin to treat COVID.
I'm just like – either you have to be so dense as to miss the tenor of the point I was making.
or intentional deception That describes the Council on Foreign Relations right there.
I was just shocked when I read this.
It was just not credible stuff.
But you know what?
I don't think we have to – We don't have to do much other than open our eyes to the fact that most of us actually share these values in common.
Meritocracy, free speech, open debate, self-governance over aristocracy.
These are basic American ideas.
This is what it means to be American.
But most of us already believe, know deep down that our neighbors and our colleagues and our classmates also believe these things to be true.
But there's this doubt.
We can't quite be sure about it anymore because we're not allowed to talk about it.
And I think that's what creates this new culture of fear that causes us to see artificial divisions that don't actually exist.
But, you know, you're right.
I do see this as a moment where there's this opportunity for a national revival.
But if we miss it, I think the stakes are really high because then we're on our way to this national divorce.
And I just think we're at one of those moments where we're at that precipice where hairs trigger away from a positive national revival if we want one, but it's not going to happen automatically.
So to hear you talk about that, Vivek.
One would say we're poised for both – maybe these are more complementary than contrasting, but a realignment election and maybe even a landslide election – But as a declared presidential candidate, how do you see yourself getting 65-75% of the vote of the American people?
I think that's the number we should be shooting for, by the way.
We think sometimes small ball in the conservative movement.
Let's not think about how we get from 50.1 to 50.2 or 49.9 to 50.1.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the way I divvy up the political landscape right now is not between – certainly not between black and white, but it's not even between red and blue.
Okay.
Okay.
It is between those who are fundamentally pro-American, who believe in the ideals that set this nation into motion, and those who are fundamentally anti-American, American, the camp in this country that wants to apologize for the ideals that set this nation into motion, for the existence of a nation founded on those ideals themselves.
And those people exist.
But then you draw it that way.
It's not 50-50 anymore.
It's 80-20 in our favor.
And I think that that creates the opportunity for a landslide election where even if 80% of them agree, even if you peel off, you know, 10 to 15% of them because they just can't muster the muscle memory to vote for somebody who's a declared Republican candidate, you're still at a 65-70% landslide election.
It's a 1980-1984 style, Reagan-style landslide election that could be the single most unifying thing we deliver for this country.
But I think it requires reawakening self-confidence a little bit.
It's actually what the theme of this entire podcast is, is reviving American self-confidence.
I think it takes a bit of self-confidence for someone who's An identified Democrat.
To be able to say that, yeah, you know, I'm not supposed to vote for what they teach me is the party of white supremacy, the party of tyranny, or whatever.
You know what?
I'm an independent soul.
I'm not anybody's slave.
I'm going to think independently.
I'm not going to do something just because someone taught me to, just because somebody drove a bus that brought me to the voting booth and I somehow owe them paying them back by voting for being the person who brought me here.
No.
I'm an independent – I'm a man.
I'm my own man or I'm a woman.
I'm my own woman.
I'm my own person who's going to do what I think is right because I can think independently.
I'm not a psychological slave.
That takes courage.
That takes self-confidence.
But I think that courage can be – I say this often.
I think courage can be contagious in this country.
And you know what?
I think that actually people who can lead the way there are not just Republicans.
I think there's going to be some Democrats in this election who will lead the way with courage to say that, yeah, I disagree with them on, I don't know, corporate tax rates.
Let's pin it to that.
But I agree deep in my bones about the importance of free speech, about the importance of open debate, about the importance of actually living in a self-governing nation rather than one that's governed from the aristocrats sitting on the mountaintops of Davos in Old World Europe.
No, I don't agree with that.
You know what?
I might disagree with you, but I'm going to have it out with you the way citizens do in the public square rather than by using some sort of cynical, subtle use of force, maybe even through financial markets or whatever.
That's what the ESG cancer is all about, to settle it.
I think a lot of Democrats quietly feel that way.
I think they're going to require courage to be able to You know, muster the fortitude to act with their conviction, but I think it's in their heart already.
I give somebody like a Bill Maher a lot of credit.
He's become a friend over the last couple of years for embracing that despite the fact that he's not where the Republican Party is on abortion or capital punishment or I don't know where he's on, you know, a variety of the traditional issues that divide Republicans and Democrats.
I think the real cultural issues right now relate to free speech, relate to actual culture of fear we've created in this country.
I think if we can make this election about those elements of American national identity and we nominate the person who's actually able to articulate these issues to the general public, yeah, I think it's a landslide election.
The best antidote to fear is courage, right?
And the way you've articulated that, to me, it's very much the principles of subsidiarity, right?
I mean, be governed by those institutions closest to you.
That's yourself, your family, then it's your community, then it maybe is your local government, then there may be some other sort of mediating institutions, obviously the state government and then the federal government and everything.
But the idea that the federal government has jurisdiction on half of the things that we're talking about is a role that the government doesn't need to play.
The idea that somehow we're having a debate, corporate tax rates, that might be their jurisdiction, and that might not be what's deciding the election right now, but what it means to be a man or a woman, or what it means to have some hierarchy of values that dictate the culture and the norms and mores of society.
I mean, that's very much a debate that we should be having with ourselves, with our families, with those local institutions, and that's the best way you get towards virtuous self-governance, which I think is the path that we can go on.
But you mentioned being able to articulate that and needing somebody who can articulate that.
You know, I've been wanting to ask you, Abraham Lincoln said, and I believe it was in the first debate with Stephen Douglas, that public sentiment is everything.
With public sentiment, everything can succeed.
Without it, nothing can.
And those who shape public sentiment...
Are, in a way, not quoting him, more important than judges and regulators and others, lawmakers even, right?
Because you're able to dictate and shape that.
And so, you know, we talk in the conservative movement a lot about the Overton window, and I've concocted the Olivastro sequence of winning, right?
But it's shaping public opinion.
It's creating the political will and sometimes somebody shows up who has that will and hasn't necessarily needed to be shaped.
And then there's legislation that's modeled, drafted, passed, and then you sort of reset that process.
But how important is it in your mind to get your message out and how do you get it out?
Because if you're going to shape public sentiment, To make it a successful election, but then also to then govern successfully.
I mean, that's a monumental task.
It's exciting that you're doing it, but you must have had some thoughts around how you're going to do it and the ways in which you're going to do it.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I think it's – I think unifying the country is a complicated project.
I think people are hungry for unity, but delivering it's complicated.
I said this on the CPAC stage, I think, when you're out there.
I mean, we're not going to do it by showing up in the middle.
Right.
Saying we can all compromise and hold hands.
I don't think people are in a mood for compromise.
I think people have convictions in this country and they're competing convictions.
And that's what creates, you know, even the language around the possibility of a national divorce.
And so that can seem very complicated.
How do you compromise against the backdrop of, you know, competing but deep-seated convictions?
And I think it's by rediscovering that many of those convictions...
Are really convictions in the same thing, even though, based on the angle of where you sit, the shadows that you cast, you're made to believe that they're actually different.
And so what does that mean?
I think we have to unapologetically embrace the extremism, the radicalism.
Of the actual American ideas that set this nation into motion.
And just wear on our sleeve that they are radical ideas.
The idea that you can speak your mind freely, say whatever you want, express whatever opinion you want, bar none, so long as I can do the same in return.
The idea that whether you or I win in the system of free market capitalism in America is just exclusively determined by our unique skills and the effort we put into cultivating those skills to make contributions.
Nothing else.
There's nothing else that matters other than that.
The idea that we as citizens, non-expert citizens, by the way, Those are radical ideas.
Right?
For most of human history, it was done the other way.
But those are crazy ideas.
But you know what unites us is that that craziness of that commitment, that's what brings us together as Americans.
And so I think, ironically, the way we deliver national unity and see that all the way through a governing agenda that actually implements policies that get this done, I think is actually by embracing that spirit of extremism.
Because if we don't lean into it, it's still there anyway.
And the idea of compromising across that That's a lost cause and a false project if it was ever going to work.
But I think that this way of doing it, I'm actually pretty optimistic.
I think if we get this right, we're about to deliver an American revival, but it's not going to be by being tame.
It's not going to be by being meek.
That's kind of my advice even to young people when I talk to them.
We're talking about this at a political level, but even at an individual level, I think we live in this moment that you're taught to be genteel.
You're taught to be, you know, wear your gloves when you're handling a tough issue.
Even the athletes who compete in America today, right?
It's not Michael Jordan anymore.
It's not Kobe Bryant anymore.
It's like the equivalent of LeBron James, where, you know, you care more about the The hug you give to the teammate on the other side at the end of the game rather than just unapologetically winning on the basketball court, right?
And it's a trivial example about basketball.
But that's what we're taught is that the way we have unity with one another is actually by, you know, by shaking hands, you know, and building a bridge and compromising when in fact, I don't know, I think that Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were – United more – I mean,
Matthew Johnson and Larry Bird's rivalry, for example, by actually their shared commitment to leave blood on the court before they get off and competing against one another.
That's almost more unifying, kind of the extremism, the unapologetic nature of that relationship between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg or whatever.
We miss that in our culture today.
And then we wonder why we're divided.
It's because – The extent of our commitment to one another was just paper thin.
Of like a compromise.
If you don't stand for anything, then you can't actually have a deep bond of solidarity.
And I think we just need to actually embrace the gloves-off nature of our disagreements.
And I think that actually weirdly brings us back together.
It also allows you to be more successful, by the way.
I think the reason we have a generation of people who live in their parents' basements is that they're too afraid to actually take the gloves off.
I think we need a little bit more of that in our culture.
My advice to young people is if you live in a culture of people who are meek puppets, if you're actually willing to keep your elbows nice and sharp, you'll actually clean up and succeed in the system whether it's financially or otherwise.
That's – I'm a 37-year-old self-funder running for president.
Didn't happen automatically.
I think that you could – if you're in your teens right now, you could be doing the same thing as long as you're unafraid, right?
To tear some things down along the way without apologizing for it.
The unapologetic, relentless pursuit of excellence should be how everybody wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror.
And they all have a different – everybody has an individual sort of, you know, path through life, distinct path through life.
But we're all on that same journey together.
There aren't, you know, separate truths and things like that.
There are separate circumstances, of course.
But I love the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird comparison.
I mean, those guys battled ever since, you know, college in 79 when they played against each other all the way through a professional career and they hated each other.
But that developed into a respect and an admiration as they got later in their career because they wanted to beat each other.
But that's what makes it wonderful.
You can have that pursuit of excellence.
There's a great book called The Captain Class and it talks about what it actually means to differentiate yourself and how in all these different circumstances, different athletes from a Brazilian volleyball team to an Australian rugby team to even Bill Russell with the Celtics and how very early in his career, or his rookie season, if I'm not mistaken, they were destined to lose.
There was a turnover late in game six, and they were destined to lose.
And he covered 90 feet of the court in less than two seconds to block a shot.
It's a – there's no video of this, but there's audio of it.
And when you read about it and then you listen to it, that's what made his teammates realize that this guy – not only is he a captain in terms of a presence, but we can follow him.
He has an unparalleled example of excellence because it's a superhuman feat in that sense, but the fact that he could do it, and then obviously his record bears it out that he could do it repeatedly over a course of many seasons and lead the Celtics in the way that he did.
Those are the amazing stories, and if you want to write that story for yourself – That's the unapologetic pursuit of excellence that's so very important.
And that's part of what can unify us, can galvanize us.
It's embrace that extremism a little bit.
You know, it reminds me – I mean we talk about Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and Matt Johnson.
It's like the rivalries between Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, right?
I mean these guys would go in at each other's throats.
Right.
Yet when push came to shove, you know, Hamilton – Came out and endorsed Jefferson over Aaron Burr.
That got him into a duel that got him killed.
But that was – I mean, those were the characters that we missed that set this nation to motion.
I mean, Adams and Jefferson, head-on rivals.
Right.
Until they finally, kind of like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, once they take the jerseys off and they're done, hang the jersey and retired, kind of say, you know what?
We always loved each other.
We were part of something special.
Yeah, exactly.
We made it together and it wouldn't have happened without either of them.
Both die on July 4th – what is it?
1826, 50th anniversary of the birth of the nation.
We don't have – I mean I think what we're missing today is as much as – we were talking just a little bit about those founding principles and rediscovering a shared American identity around those founding principles.
I think we could use a little bit of that founding culture.
I think the people who are unafraid to explore a little bit, be daring a little bit, Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, these guys are political philosophers, but they didn't invent something in the realm of science.
They didn't say, oh, that's for just the scientists.
I'm going to teach myself and do what I need to to learn what I need to about electricity because it's weird what's happening in the sky.
I wonder how I could use that if you're Benjamin Franklin.
Oh, I'm Thomas Jefferson.
I need to write the Declaration of Independence, but I need a swivel chair to do it.
Well, I'll just invent it.
You know that Jefferson invented the swivel chip?
Yes, absolutely.
We don't do that anymore in this country because we have this self-confidence problem that starts with kids being taught that you need to wait in line and wait your turn before you actually do something and gain expertise to try something out or else you might make a mistake.
So what?
You make a mistake, you fall flat on your face, you pick yourself up, you're better off for it, and then you compete with the person who's better than you and you compete until you actually get better than them.
I mean, that was – That was Jefferson Adams.
That was Jefferson Hamilton.
That was Larry Bird, Magic Johnson.
Where do those people exist today?
I don't know.
I mean, like I said, I mean, people – I was talking to a mainstream media reporter today who says, you know, why didn't you just wait your turn before running for president?
Because I don't feel like waiting my turn because it's not about me.
It's about accomplishing something for the country.
And if I think I can do it, then I'm not going to follow some playbook that tells me that I'm too young or haven't jumped through the right hoops to do it.
Forget about that.
I don't think that's what Thomas Jefferson would have said if he were alive today, and he was our third president.
If I want to be our 47th, then I'm not going to be doing the same thing either.
And we just miss that spirit.
It's not even about politics.
It's not even about...
It's not even about, you know, the presidential race or whatever.
It's just about a culture that we miss in this country.
I agree with you.
It's harnessing that broad umbrella or even this sort of rubric that we talk about of American exceptionalism, but how do you internalize that and make that a part of who you are?
It's easy to talk about in the abstract for a nation.
What about being exceptional yourself?
Right.
I think that's vitally important.
Yeah.
I mean, you're running the risk of making Americans fall in love with America again.
Yeah, who would have ever thought?
But it's a beautiful- Fall in love with yourself.
Fall in love with yourself.
You know, I mean, you're an American.
Get out of self-hatred.
Fall in love with yourself.
That's part of what it means to be American.
A big part of understanding self-governance Mm-hmm.
Can you have self-governance if you're ruled by your passions and not some reason, or if you're ruled only by reason and not some passion?
You know, I think as the story would go is that Ronald Reagan would often quote Thomas Paine and say that we have it within our ability to start America all over again.
And there's a breed of conservatives who would say, "That's not how this works." And there's another who would say, but we understand the messaging that he's trying to communicate here.
But we do have that ability, right?
And you could have the Obama administration release a YouTube video of Julia, cradle to grave government, taking care of you.
And if you see that and it soothes you, then I would say with all due respect to any of my fellow Americans that you need to examine yourself.
And you need to understand that somebody who's going to give you something is going to be able to take it away at some point.
Totally.
You know, there's a lot to say about that.
I mean, one thing is just as a leader, one of the better pieces of advice I got about being a CEO is that every so often you got to – Approach it when you walk in the door to say that I was just – especially if you're a few years in.
Assume I was just hired into this job and it's day one.
What would I do?
Which is like almost every CEO who goes through that experience would say it's clearly not what I'm doing right now.
Right.
Why?
That's a logical disconnect, right?
Because it shouldn't be any different if it was your first day versus if it was your 30th day or versus if it was in the middle of your sixth year.
Now, that's like true up to a point.
Obviously, if every day is your first day, you'd sort of be stopping and starting a new strategy.
So I don't mean literally treating every day.
But probably every six months, every year, you've got to come into work one day with that perspective.
And I think it's not that different with approaching the presidency right now.
I think that – I think that's true.
Come in and you don't have to take any of that existing status quo is given.
But it's approaching the presidency.
It's approaching also just the life trajectory you're on if you're trying to make it in the system of American capitalism, making your grind.
Yeah, if you wake – if every day was just an extension of the last, most days you got to build towards progressing your journey, your career, whatever it is.
But every once in a while, you got to wake out of bed and just say, okay – If I'm starting with a blank slate, would I be doing exactly what I'm doing now?
And the more I did that, I would say the more often I started finding that actually when I woke up on a given day, is this actually, if I had to snap my fingers, it could be doing anything I wanted to in the world right now.
Am I sure it would be this?
And as I started thinking this way more...
Actually, the answer started to become yes more often.
And that too is a source of self-confidence and conviction.
And you lose the doubt that it should have been something else you were doing.
And so I don't know.
I just think that even outside of the politics of it, if we just had a culture of people who were unafraid to sort of live their lives that way, I think in a certain sense, the nation and the national culture is almost automatically fixed as a consequence.
I think it creates...
untold opportunity for every individual because in free market system of voluntary exchange you can you can create the market that you might want to dominate you can create the set of conditions that will dictate whether you're successful or not or you can greatly influence them of course um but it requires you to be in service of other people it
It requires you to work and earn and demonstrate some sense of effectiveness.
That's the beauty of the marketplace.
I mean, it's why democracy and capitalism are not Separate things that happen to come together to fuel what is America.
I mean, these are deeply integrated in ways that make the other work and make the other possible, and it's something that we are sorely lacking trust and faith in, and that has deep implications.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's no accident that, you know, I've sometimes quipped, but it's not a joke.
It's true.
I mean, 1776 was the year of both the wealth of nations and the Declaration of Independence, right?
Capitalism and democracy are both of America's parents.
That's the contradiction at the heart of the American identity is that we're both of these things, right?
We each want to be our individual, the best expressed version of ourselves.
But we also, you know, hunger to be part of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
And, you know, we're both of those things, not just one of them.
That's okay, actually.
I think we sometimes in the conservative movement embrace one of those now, the individualist, while resisting the impulse of being a collectivist.
But just because you believe in a greater whole called the nation doesn't mean you're a collectivist.
It means that there's a certain apparent contradiction in American identity, but actually both of those two things go deeply together.
You know what I mean?
I do.
And I wonder how – I mean – You've talked about creating or recreating a sense of purpose about that national identity.
And I think this, in my mind, connects directly to that, which is that people need to see that, see that in themselves, see that in their families and in their communities, but also see it across the country.
And that doesn't mean that it has to be homogenized.
It's not that America is this one thing for everybody.
And I think that that's the scope...
That some on the other side of the political spectrum will look at and say, we sort of need to centralize and bureaucratize, which leads to the homogenization of the American experience.
And I think that's deeply troubling, which is why it's very exciting when you have individuals like yourself out there and other individuals who have raised their hand to say that I want to be counted in this contest and previous ones that are not just out there to perpetuate the status quo.
That's really very, very important.
Yeah, stultifying.
Now, we did talk about capitalism and democracy.
I just phrase it a slightly different way where I think both of them are America's parents, but I think that sometimes each can infect the other too.
And that's what gets us to this ESG cancer that I think you and I have shared passion for.
I thought it would – I mean I haven't done this since launching on the presidential campaign.
I thought it was worth explaining to people exactly what's going on here and then you can highlight some of the other people including yourself who have been doing great work on this.
But just to shift gears to that for a second, I mean I think what's going on in America is that this is a symptom of a deeper hierarchical – Order, governing order in our country where the people who control the dollars are now determining not just the rules of the market.
But really, the rules of governance itself.
So probably most people watching us have this conversation right now don't know that their own money is invested in a 401k account or a retirement account or a brokerage account that's literally handed over to someone else who's using that money to vote in favor of political or social agendas like racial equity audits, like emissions caps at companies like Chevron.
That most of those everyday citizens actually disagree with.
And by the way, which are completely unrelated to their best financial interests and in fact, in some cases, outright contrary to their best financial interests.
That's a form of financial fraud, right?
It's a form of – It's a form of bait and switch, telling people you're doing one thing when in fact you're doing another.
And I think that that Is an example of when someone finds out about that, they're not surprised.
They kind of knew something like this was happening all along, but they didn't know exactly the extent to which it was true with their own bank accounts.
I think that's the kind of thing that sows the kind of mistrust to say that, okay, because the people who manage my money in the system of free market capitalism are also looking out for the kind of thing that I should have done through the political system.
That's, I think, part of what creates this mistrust too that makes you – I think sows the seeds for this culture of apologism in America.
I agree 100%.
I don't think I can agree more than 100%, but I don't know that – it's an awkward position to be in to add to comments that Vivek makes about ESG. As you've scoped out so much leadership on this issue, I would say that, you know, I came at it slightly different.
And in 2007, I did a fellowship at the Claremont Institute, the Lincoln Fellowship, where you study Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship.
Wonderful program.
And when I did that, I was working at Edelman Public Relations and working on behalf of a lot of large companies.
But Edelman would publish the trust barometer, and we would look at, survey the American people or opinion elites, as we put it at the time, to look at the state of trust across different industries and whatnot.
And what we found was that business was much more trusted than media and government and others.
And my motivation for understanding Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship and my fondness for the American founding – I'm a conservative movement guy.
That was my background before I ever ended up at Edelman.
But my thought process was, well, if we're going to have a bunch of corporate executives out there who are carrying greater water for explaining the direction of the country or the way in which the world should work because they're trusted more than all these other institutional representatives, elected officials, media figures, and others, if we're going to have a bunch of corporate executives out there who are carrying greater And it was something that I was deeply interested in.
But I also saw it ran right directly up against Michael Porter at Harvard Business School who saw that you have this challenge of social problems that business can step in and help solve because business can scale faster.
They operate on a profit loss motivation.
They can sort of address these things and be more solutions oriented.
So government take a backseat.
Business can come in and solve these things.
And you just saw the confluence of all of this and then the confluence of sort of corporate reputation campaigns that would come in and say, well, if we talk about all these things, nobody's going to talk about this other thing where maybe we didn't perform as well or, you know, we had a health or safety issue or something that we're just going to kind of push over here, but we're going to be measured we had a health or safety issue or something that we're just going to kind of push over here, but we're going to be measured by something
But the confluence of all of this just represented that the conversation was shifting away from merit, away from excellence, excellence and to a whole other set of bean counters as to what actually would describe the pieces that would make up a successful company.
And so it became diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Those metrics matter more than your financial metrics.
Those were the messages that were pushed to employees more than anything else.
You know, you might think about environmental health and safety.
You might think about a multinational corporation that's going to create a new plant in an emerging market.
And you might say, like, okay, is there a local water source?
Is there reliable this and that, energy supplies, and all these things.
All of those concerns, which are legitimate ones for a successful business to be run, were all pushed up.
came the stakeholder capitalism conversation.
And I just thought from a pure fundamental sense of who owns the capital that we're talking about, obviously shareholders are the primary, but individual employees who bring their time, talent, and their expertise to the table are being short shrifted on this because they're not having a say in this.
Now they'll tell you that they're factoring that in, but we all know it's the noisy employees that actually drive some corporate behavior and all that.
So I think – What I looked at and I saw this happening was we've got a fundamental problem and a fundamental distrust of all these institutions.
Business is going to end up in a worse place because they're trying to solve for something that they cannot solve.
And then insofar as any CEO, he or she is now genuflecting in front of every single stakeholder that ever crosses their path, they're not leading a company.
And so you have this weird world where Business leaders sit on nonprofit or NGO boards, and those NGOs write letters to the business community to tell them to stop doing something that the business community is doing, which is their normal course of operations.
And it's just this weird nebulous influence sector, which you talked about earlier, but it's sort of the cream rises to the top.
And then you have this complete elite infrastructure of deciding how money is spent, where money is invested.
Oh, and by the way, In 2003, at the United Nations, they decided that they could weaponize everybody's capital and start to drive and push the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
I mean, they've written about it.
It's out there.
They want to take credit for it, so they're finding a way to do that.
But all of this is a simple thing.
It's incompatible Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, every day and twice on Sunday side with the great uprising.
And I think that that's the moment that we're in.
And it just, it paints a really interesting picture for how we got here.
The people that I've worked with in corporate America, I'm sure it's the same for you, some of them are wonderful people and brilliant.
Some of them, not so wonderful and not so brilliant.
And so, that managerial class that's infected across the board, the way in which a lot of these decisions are made, I think we're
going to do something.
I think we're going to do something incredible for the country.
But it's not going to be a silver bullet from the presidency or even through – I'm really proud of what we've set into motion at Strive.
I'm proud of what you guys do every day in your daily work.
But it's going to be an all of the above approach.
We live in complicated time.
There are no silver bullets.
It's a plethora of partial solutions.
And I think as long as we cultivate a generation – I mean even your parent of twins, I have two kids as well.
Even in our capacity as parents, teaching that next generation to actually have the fortitude and the self-confidence to weather the storms created by the forces that be.
I think that's actually going to be some of the most important tickets to the national revival, not just what I do as an ex-president or not even what we do through our market solutions.
Yeah, those play a role.
Some of this is just passing on some of that cultural strength, the Michael Jordan, the Alexander Hamilton mentality of not having to apologize for who you are.
I think the more we pass that on to the next generation, I think the more likely it is that this other stuff becomes a lot less complicated than it might seem when we're looking at it straight in the face.
I agree with you.
And I'd say three things in parting, and it's been a pleasure to be here with you.
So thank you for the opportunity to sit with you.
But the number one thing is raising our kids right is the most important thing.
And And I try to do everything I can to do that right.
And then I say, go check with your mother, make sure that I'm right, and we'll find out if that's true.
The second thing is, Vivek, you have, and I've said this to you before, you know, you've changed the tenor of the conversation, you've changed the debate, and you've created new incentives for Americans and for people around the globe to think about what it is that America is and should be.
And so just deeply grateful for that.
That's a commitment that you've made.
And it's something that we should all be grateful for.
And so I'm just very grateful for that.
But I speak on behalf of many people that are very proud to know you and proud to see the success that you're having and carrying that message forward.
And then the last thing is, you know, in our daily work at Heritage, and again, I don't have my Heritage hat on here today, but We do have this thing called Project 2025. Yes!
Oh yeah, I'm pumped about that.
This is agnostic of who the nominee is, but the next friendly administration is going to be prepared to do the right thing on day one.
This is about staffing the next friendly administration, getting patriotic Americans to come to Washington, D.C. The conservative movement has always said, stay out of D.C., we're going to drain the swamp.
Well, the only way to drain the swamp is to get good patriotic Americans to come to D.C., And help drain the swamp.
And that means changing the way the government operates, getting rid of agencies that don't need to exist and all of that.
But in order to do that well, you've got to have those good patriotic Americans sign up, Project 2025, get the training that they need, because in order to serve in the federal government, you have to have training.
So get that training before day one even comes.
And then later on this year, you know, again, Heritage is going to release a playbook and that policy playbook has- Oh, I'm pumped for that.
The policy playbook has- I hope to be successful in this election.
I'm going to be using that thing.
That's got 50 coalition partners are working on that.
Fill the roles in that manager of bureaucracy.
Absolutely, man.
That's great.
Well, thanks for coming over, dude.
Thank you.
To be continued.
And, you know, it's been really encouraging seeing the work that you do.
But even, you know, the way we've crisscrossed our paths, it's not just the substance of what you bring.
I like that attitude, that positivity that, you know what, you've been through a lot.
And I wasn't aware of even your sister's story and, you know, what your family's been through.
But I love the...
I love the positive energy you're able to bring, even as you're talking about some of the most dire subjects in our time.
And I think we need a little bit more of that in the country.
I'm going to try to bring that, too.
I like that.
I am my brother's keeper.
That's the way I look at it, right?
Yeah.
In a certain sense, there's a good sense in which that's true.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
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