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April 14, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:06:31
A New Approach to Political Campaigns with Chris Petkas and Codie Sanchez | The TRUTH Podcast #12
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Time Text
One
of the things we're doing differently in this campaign is we're breaking the system of even how somebody goes about fundraising for a political campaign.
I was in a privileged position.
I've lived the full arc of the American dream.
We've kickstarted this campaign with a personal investment, significant one that I've made.
But this is going to be lifted up Not by the donor class, many of whom I even alienated, I would say, in Silicon Valley with the positions I've taken over the last week.
They've been very clear about that and that's fine.
The way we're actually going to get it off the ground is through a bottom-up grassroots uprising.
And I want to do it in a way that breaks the cartel of professional political fundraisers.
So one of the things that I've learned in this process is A lot of people are gonna make a lot of money off this presidential election.
Actually, more people on the outside are going to make money off of this presidential election than probably any election in human history.
Not exaggerating that because there's going to be billions of dollars spent on this election.
It's going to be the most money that's ever been spent by candidates on an election.
But the way the model works is the consultants who raise money, they get a rake of how much is raised.
Generally, the number is about 10%.
But there's only a small handful of them in the country because they know and have personal relationships with the people who have been historically donors to a, say, Republican presidential primary.
Well, I think we have an opportunity to break that system.
One of the things we're already seeing in this campaign is of the small-dollar contributions we're getting, we're getting like an off-the-charts percentage.
In our case, it's upwards of 15, maybe more percent.
That have never donated to the GOP or to a GOP candidate before.
That's like way higher than the normal, which is like low single digit percentages.
That's just one example of why there's an opportunity here.
So one of the things that I want to do is, you know what, I don't want politics to be an industry.
I don't like it as an industry, frankly, and I'm running for president to change the system in this country in a lot of ways.
But so long as the system exists, I don't want it to be run by a cartel.
I actually want to democratize that process.
That if somebody else is going to make money off this process, frankly, if you're part of this movement, it might as well be you as well.
There's no rule that says it only has to be some sort of self-appointed elite that gets to make a ton of money.
If they raise a million dollars, they pocket $100,000 in a given week.
That can be you too.
And so one of the things we're doing here...
Is basically anybody who wants to be a fundraiser for this campaign can be a fundraiser, but we're not just going to ask you to volunteer to do it.
If you sign up, you can actually just do it as somebody who makes your 10% as well.
So if you're not just going to the very wealthy people and getting $6,600 a pop, but maybe people who are getting $500 a pop or whatever, if you raise $100,000, that's $10,000 for you.
If you raise a million dollars, that's $100,000 for you.
That's the way the system works.
If that's the way the game is played, you might as well play the game.
And I'll tell you this too, from a matter of training, and I'm going to get to my guests today in a moment, who are I think going to have a lot of insight on this, but one of the keys to success is the ability to sell a vision.
And if you can get somebody who isn't part of the political donor class to donate to somebody who's running for office, even if it's the U.S. president, you're building a skill set that you can use to do anything you want in your life and sell a different vision, be it a business you want to build, be it Welcome to my
show!
Chris and Cody, who have traveled from Austin to be with me, actually.
Cody, in particular, has an entrepreneurship background, entrepreneurial background, as an investor, where I think we have some common cause as self-described contrarians.
And I'd love to get a little bit more into your investment thesis and how you think about being a contrarian.
I think that there's a lot there for not only how you succeed as a capitalist, But even the approach that we're taking to the political system and the cultural revival in this country being contrarian too.
And Chris, your partner in life, partner in crime maybe, who I think has some perspectives.
I'm really excited to learn from you, Chris, about your perspectives from your time in the military when you look at some of the objectives that I'm looking at advancing here.
How can we actually translate that into action?
I love your perspective on it.
And the theme, I was just thinking about The theme of this podcast, the theme of this campaign, even a theme of our conversation here is about how can reviving self-confidence at the level of the individual, maybe it's people who are in the military, maybe it's entrepreneurs, how does reviving self-confidence Lay the groundwork for our American revival, the revival of our country.
So that said, Cody, I think people who don't already know you, who might be many people who already do know you, but for the people who don't know you, it'd be pretty cool to lay out your background a little bit from Wall Street to what you're doing now.
And then maybe let's get right into that theme of self-confidence, actually.
I think you have something useful to say about it.
Yeah, totally.
Well, I like your framing there, first of all, about what happened this weekend with SVB. I think that's interesting.
One of our taglines is Main Street over Wall Street.
And it's not that I think that there's anything wrong with Wall Street.
I was on it for a long time with the humans who are doing the work.
It's just, I believe, like you, that centralizing power in the hands of the few is really dangerous.
So you do that with the donor class and saying, hey, we should probably decentralize this.
There should be more options and access for all.
And we feel that same way at Contrarian Thinking.
I run a media company that does, I don't know, 60, 70 million views a month.
And that all came on the back of me being in finance for a long time, building a bunch of businesses in finance and realizing that, man, if you go across any of the main sectors in the US, what you'll find is over any sort of 10-year period and then increasing over time, about 20 to 25% of the sector what you'll find is over any sort of 10-year period and then increasing over time, about 20 And so we're increasingly having this centralization of power in even business sectors, not just donors or politicians.
And I don't think that's a great idea.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I don't think humans are meant for it.
And so we have this movement where we're trying to create 1 million financially free humans and 100,000 small business owners.
In America.
In America.
If we just taught them how to do microacquisitions, then you could be the owner of your plumbing company, having worked in it for 10 years, and you can learn the leadership components of it, and you could learn how to structure a deal to own it.
And so that's sort of our mission, is getting more people into ownership.
Because what does ownership mean?
Skin of the game.
If people raise for you, they've got skin behind the presidency, and they've got some ownership of this country, as opposed to right now, I think a lot of people feel like they don't have ownership over their life or the country.
It's interesting you say that – use that expression of skin in the game.
I mean the founding of the country – there's a controversial component to this, but the founding of the country was based on this vision of citizenship, participatory citizenship that said that actually to vote for a while in this country – you probably know this.
You had to be a landowner.
Now, I don't favor that policy, but let's just double-click on that for a second.
You – You can't care about a game that you have no skin in the game.
I do think that we live in a national culture where people just passively take for granted what they inherit as a citizen, as opposed to this idea of actually having skin in the game.
I'm not talking about voting restrictions for land ownership anymore, but there's something to the idea of actually having skin in the game in the country that you're a part of.
Is that synchronous with you a little bit?
Is that what you're thinking?
Totally.
I mean, across the board, I think if you own a house, you don't burn it down.
You build it up.
You redo it.
And it's the law of the commons, I think, across the country in a lot of ways, is because everybody is responsible for it.
Nobody's responsible for it.
And what happens to things that we have in common?
Well, nobody takes responsibility.
And so the idea is...
that we try to combat that.
I only can do that through business ownership because that's what I know.
You can do that through actual regulation and law as somebody who's in charge of our governing system.
But if all of us just figured out in our little lane, how could we get more skin in the game and then help others have more skin in the game as opposed to, sure, I could go out and raise another billion dollar private equity fund and I could buy all these businesses and I did that for a while.
But at some point, one of my CEOs, he actually said, I was starting to talk publicly about this.
And in finance, they don't really like when you do that.
They don't like when you talk publicly about how we make money.
And he was like, Cody, around here we get rich quietly.
Someone said that expressly.
Expressly.
It's very familiar.
I mean, I came from that world a while as well.
That sounds about right.
Yeah.
And I was like, no, no, no.
That doesn't sound like that fun.
Plus, that's how we get massive inequality, which leads to overreach in a non-positive way.
So I'm like, even from your own self-interest, you should want more people to have skin in the game.
Yeah, because also you don't trust something that you don't understand, right?
And so I think that, you know, populism is a bad word on Wall Street.
And You know, I think there isn't enough introspection about what role you play in creating it.
And, you know, we make money quietly sums it up actually pretty well as opposed to unapologetically embracing.
Say, hey, here's what we do.
Here's why we're proud of it.
Here's how that creates value and here's the cut that I take.
That's a very different approach and I think that maybe part of the reason that it's done quietly is that people aren't necessarily proud of exactly the substance of how it happens.
Well, and you said it like you're like, "I've lived the American arc," which I think was a really good line because that's true.
People love seeing you live the American arc if they feel like it's fair enough that they could get there too.
And I think these days there's so many paths where people don't feel like that's fair.
They're like, I got all this college debt, you know, like whatever all the narratives are, the victim mentality that's pretty pervasive.
So I can't ever get there, so I don't want you to get there because if you get there, it's a zero-sum game.
And I don't think that's true, but I do think we need different leadership and different education in order to realize that.
I certainly needed that as an immigrant.
I thought it was called- You were an immigrant from?
My father was an immigrant.
He's from Spain.
Okay.
But I remember when I started in finance, I thought it was called a mutual fund.
Like we all had fun together instead of a mutual fund.
So I get it, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know, your perspective is, you know, you're coming from a different angle, right, Chris?
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaking to the point about there being significant problems, you know, within society that are, you know, considered societal problems instead of personal ones.
Like what?
Like the tragedy of the commons.
You know, like Cody had alluded to, you know, just a little bit ago about student debt, right?
I mean, there's choices to be made about the mechanisms in which you decide to fund yourself going through an education.
There's decisions, right?
There's certain aspects that you can, you know, take on board in order to decide like what is exactly the way that, you know, you decide for your future and your contribution.
And some people think that incurring a lot of debt at a very young age, which again, you know, is obviously the only type of debt that is inexcusable or non-forgivable, right, in bankruptcy.
And so we have people who think they're forced to make these decisions and thus they kind of become lost in a way of trying to find themselves and incurring so much debt while kind of searching for a purpose.
To just go to the military like you, huh?
I don't know if it's for everybody.
Well, that gives you sense.
I mean, just for your experience, I have not served in the military.
I, you know, have friends and colleagues of many who have.
Talk to me about what that does and maybe it's not generalizable.
I mean, it's different for different people but this idea of self-confidence that I was talking about earlier.
Yeah, absolutely.
Tell me about that.
You come from a survivalist perspective in that when you're a 19-year-old thrust into the world of the military hierarchy, you think about your own problems a lot less and you think about the problems of those around you and those below you and those adjacent to you, right?
It becomes an onus of leadership.
And you start to feel that burden of leadership at a very young age, whether you're on the enlisted side or an officer, right?
The responsibility is just mounting and mounting in a very positive way.
And in order, I think, to contribute to society, to an organization, to a group, you have to have your own stuff figured out to a pretty significant level.
So it was a forcing function to figure out, like, what is my...
You know, hierarchy of needs, personally.
Like, where do ideologically do I fit within this certain paradigm?
And having those responsibilities thrust upon you, where you a lot of time have life or death decisions, maybe not directly, but second and third order effects, right?
Like, if I'm a logistician, and I don't have the ability to get food to this A group that's out in the Korengal Valley in the middle of Afghanistan who have no other means of resupply and were shut down for 72 hours because of storms or because of significant actions in the region.
Those are burdens that weigh on you really heavily.
Your ability to figure those out translate innumerably into the existing world outside of uniform.
What did it do for your sense of self-confidence?
Like how old were you when you were in the military?
So, I went to the Naval Academy at 19 years old is when I made the decision.
Out of high school?
Out of high school, yeah.
Okay.
So, you know, I didn't want a conventional experience in college.
I think I came from a family with a little bit of, you know, I didn't have a certain direction or forcing function and I kind of knew I needed the discipline at that age.
You knew you needed it.
I did.
Actually, it was funny.
I had these- Your parents didn't say you needed it.
You knew you needed it.
No.
Yeah, I did.
And at the end of it, I was looking at West Point and the Naval Academy.
I decided to go to the little college down south in Annapolis and Yeah, it was a very difficult experience for me for four years.
You know, you don't have music, you don't have television, you're not allowed to have games like for your entire first year.
Like it's incredibly strict.
No music.
I mean, a multitude of different things, right?
But then, you know, you look at it then, it's like, oh my gosh, this is the end of days.
This is what, you know, is a creative joy for me.
This is an outlet.
And then you realize it and you're like, I can do a lot harder things for a year than go without music and video games and, you know, entertainment.
And you just create this bond with the others near you that, you know, during a time of war, especially, that you know… Was it when it was?
Yeah, I was there 2006 to 2010. Got it.
That was when you were – That's when I was there.
Yeah.
And so, you know, you kind of know and it's unsaid, the people that you're with that, you know, you're all – you joined to go fight a war.
And that is a pretty significant responsibility to take upon oneself.
Let's talk about this.
I mean, you brought up skin in the game.
I mean, there's different ways you could manifest that.
I've gone back and forth on this, you know, since writing Woke Inc.
and, you know, brought it up in my second book, Nation of Victims.
Again, I actually have not, and I don't expect to make it part of my presidential campaign because I think there's a lot of practical difficulties associated with it.
But just in concept, right?
What do you think about Whether or not – you know, you said you knew you needed it.
Well, I think a lot of people who are 18 and 19 don't know they need it and they still do.
Right.
What do you think about some idea of Israel-style universal service?
Yeah.
In the United States and what that would do for our national identity and self-confidence?
I'm drawn to this.
I really am.
I don't think it's practically implementable in our country exactly, but I'm kind of drawn to it.
What would be your take on that?
It's funny you ask me this because I had a very similar question with some family friends last weekend where they have a very young child.
They're of Korean descent, Korean immigrants, and they've decided to keep dual citizenship.
In America.
In Texas.
Yeah, they're in the US because they feel that they want to have the option in order for their son and daughter to serve in the South Korean mandatory subscription army.
Well, in there, I think it's mostly boys.
I think in South Korea, it's only for boys.
But in 19 years, who knows?
So how old are their kids?
Their kids are, I mean, one and two and a half.
The parents are preserving their own dual citizenship.
They are.
So that their kids, because the kids get the option at 18. Yeah.
To serve in the Korean military, presumably as the father did.
Yes.
Wow.
And so, you know, they asked me this.
I'm like, I can't give you an insight on this.
Like, I would not feel right.
They're like, no, I really would like to know, you know, your thought process.
And the simplest analogy I can think of is if we all decide we need a building built, right?
We all need to agree on the foundation of it, right?
And there are certain necessary functions that every building has to have.
I think in the United States, I think we go further and further away from that foundation, whether it's, you know, responsibility, personal or societal.
I also think it has to do with how we view necessity, right?
A lot of the times, we're so obsessed with the decisions we want to make, not the decisions that we must make in terms of sacrifice.
And I think that's just taken us into an era of entitlement.
It really does, actually.
So you're favorably disposed is what I'm sensing.
No, I'm for it.
You're for it.
I'm for it.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But you're not for all military subscriptions.
You're for that it could be like Teach for America.
Yeah, exactly.
Or it could be some kind of civic service.
Yeah, sorry.
I didn't even answer your question.
Everybody gets a gun.
Yes, not yet.
Not quite that.
Not quite that.
But you know, everybody has to serve in society, right?
Everybody has to serve one of those societal functions.
At the age of 18 or something like this.
Absolutely.
You know, they constantly, they change their major, right?
They don't know what they do.
They go out, they need to take gap years.
They don't finish.
They take time away.
They see the rise of the gap year, yeah.
Yeah.
The hunt for meaning.
The hunt for purpose.
Yeah.
And I think that's the whole point, right?
You have these societies in which, you know, these third world countries and those who've, you know, descended into chaos because of conflict.
And none of them are worried about their social media followers.
None of them are – they're worried about where they're going to be.
So I think you're an adult.
It's another thing when you're a kid.
Right.
I mean – I mean you have a form – you're a fully formed foundation.
Great.
You make the choices that you do.
It's another when you're preying on a vacuum of – When those social media algorithms or whatever train you on the vacuum of identity, I mean we probably each have frailties as adults too, but it's another when you're 18. So you would say civic service.
In my first book, I think the way I thought about it was Changing life structure is always a challenge and we've always – we have this idea you're 18, then you go to college.
The irony is it's like the dress code in middle school where everyone says they don't want a dress code and then everyone like wears the exact same thing and so like that – I feel like that's what's going on with the gap year phenomenon a little bit is it's like, no, we don't want to – but anyway.
To avoid that objection, what I said was, why don't we maybe weave it into, just to be very practical about it, like weave it into summer break while you're in high school and or in college, right?
So you carry it over, you get the equivalent of one to two years of service, but by weaving it into, you know, what really, especially for many families, is a dead time summer break.
Actually, it's one of the areas where poor kids, and I didn't know this, actually.
My wife happened to have studied this and pointed me to it, so we did some more research on it.
It's in the book.
Actually, poor families, kids fall behind more over summer break.
It's like more regression than people come from wealthy families because they can afford summer break activities or whatever.
But put aside the equality-driven arguments, that's just a side point and a side benefit potentially.
But fostering civic commitment, skin in the game, in the sense skin in the game as a citizen, not as a landowner but as somebody who did service, weaving that in.
You could talk about whether it's one year off or whether it's that, but one of the practical questions that comes up is this question of what counts.
Absolutely.
Because you cut into it to say that it's not the military.
As I thought about this more, I've moved closer to it having to be something that clearly relates to the national interest.
And the military's task is to protect the country.
Law enforcement's task is to enforce the laws of this country.
I'm open-minded to something else fitting into that description and being broader, but to the extent this were an idea that I were in favor of implementing, I would say that military law enforcement may be working in the court system There's a multitude of different- What about the parks?
But what else?
Yeah, what about the- You have national parks.
I mean, there's not that many people.
I think national parks are actually a great example.
What about TSA? So TSA, this is where I- TSA meaning like the Transportation Safety Administration?
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, something interesting that you see is you find a function in society for people.
If you've ever flown to Mexico City, if you've ever been in that airport- That's cool.
I have actually been to that airport.
Do you ever recognize something about the people who work there, all their TSA agents?
All the check-in people?
Oh, I did not know.
No, so tell me.
I did not know this.
They all have a handicap.
Yeah.
Really?
I never know.
I didn't register that.
Most of them are in a wheelchair.
So they don't have the ability- Yeah, you said that that actually is- True.
It didn't register to me that most of them fit that description.
Wow.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think there's a lot of different civic functions that we largely overlook that could absolutely be undertaken freely.
Give people the opportunity to serve in whatever functions they might.
Well, you have the most annoying saying that you say to me all the time when I don't want to do something hard.
With a saying that I always want to say like, hey, are we a good white shark?
And then I have to go, no, we're a great white shark.
And that's this ridiculous thing that he does.
But I think the point that I like about that and that you do a lot for me is just reminding myself of our capabilities.
And a lot of people, to your point, don't have maybe the parental units that could say, you can do a little bit more.
You can go harder.
You're more capable.
And like in your book, I think a lot of people instead say, Oh, it's not your fault.
We'll take care of you because you need it.
You poor, helpless, weak little thing.
In reality, it's so much more empowering.
I hate when people say to me, Cody, could you come speak at an event?
Because we need a woman business leader to speak.
Oh my god, yeah.
I'm like, how about just like, I'm a business leader and I happen to be a woman.
You should, yeah, exactly.
In other unrelated news, yes, my genitalia is different.
And so I never liked that.
And I think it's not very helpful.
And so with our kids, one of the things we think about is, you know, once you start- How old are they?
Well, we don't have any.
Okay.
So very young.
Future kids, yeah.
Very, very tiny.
But I think- You know, once you have some money, the game actually becomes, how do you put some hardship upon them on purpose?
Because otherwise, and we've all seen kids like this, where they were just given too much, and when you're given too much...
It's actually a burden.
It's a curse.
I mean, a lot of kids who I went to school with, even at places like Harvard, etc., I would not wish that upon myself.
I worry about it a little bit for our kids, and we think about how to address that, but...
Outside the political context or whatever, one of the things that I've said if I could snap it into existence is if you had a tax regime that was like literally as low as it possibly could be in flat while you earn – But it was like you just take it back at the end and then just sort of let every generation start kind of more or less close to a blank slate.
It's not about a high tax or low tax.
Some people want high taxes.
Some people want low taxes.
I would say that like whether you want high or low, you'd rather prefer it not while you were earning to allow anybody who wants to break through to break through to whatever level they want to and enjoy what they earn, but at the end of their life to say that actually – The next generation, you know, most people think about it as like, yes, we have equal opportunity.
But some people miss the fact that even the kids who – and sometimes especially the kids who actually grow up with inheritance hanging over their head.
It's a different kind of burden.
Oh, hugely.
Right?
Like I guess I would certainly choose that over somebody who grew up in poverty.
But like I would absolutely choose – The upbringing, maybe I'm partial to it because it's the one I had, of having a non-wealthy but stable family upbringing enough to be able to put food on the dinner table and put me through school with education, but like still some sense of room to achieve.
I think that that's something that – if you think about these couple of ideas here, inheritance over income as a framework for taxation – And the revival of civic duty and citizenship.
These aren't actually like strictly or even at all partisan concepts.
I actually have like – I actually have almost no idea how these ideas would land on – I'm running into Republican primary now, as you guys know.
Are you guys – how do you identify politically or – and not these labels to matter, conservative, liberal or like – I don't know.
Probably more Republican free markets.
Okay.
Absolutely.
I mean that's where we – Yeah, we like to say Republican.
How do these ideas land on your ears?
I guess like these are – Outside the orthodoxy, they're not part of my campaign platform, at least not now.
We've been very clear about what is on the agenda.
But just like outside of the formal politics of it, they're interesting ideas for reviving that national self-confidence actually.
Like maybe you derive self-confidence through service.
that pro-market people have with required service.
That doesn't sound right.
It sounds collectivist.
But what's your gut instinct?
Not for what the general population would be, just for yourselves, wearing your free-market, pro-market, individualist hat.
Let's take the service idea.
How does that land on you, on your ear, would you say, Cody?
Well, I think I'd want to see the data.
And I imagine that the national cohesion, which would be hard to determine if it's due to that one specific thing.
And Israel, it might be because they're surrounded by people who are...
Not a line.
It's survivalist.
But I think we're missing a lot of this group identity.
American group identity.
American group identity.
And so how could we bring more of that about?
Now, do I ever typically like the government to – I really don't like the government to be in charge of much.
I'm like a little bit more of a libertarian.
That's my gut instinct.
But there are some instances where you want to make sure the police force is centralized.
You want to make sure the military isn't privatized.
So I think there's some...
What I like about this conversation is typically when you're talking to political candidates, they're not open to not having incredibly strong views on something that are very on-brand.
And so the cool part, I think, is having a situation where you'd say, let's innovate on this.
What would these ideas be?
And that's almost like half the battle.
But I think...
I think it's interesting.
Yeah.
You know, devil's in the details, but I think that's an interesting idea.
Yeah.
I think the common thread, I mean, I think you might see it in other countries, right?
Japan, Poland, other areas of Eastern Europe as well, who have kind of stuck to a strong national ideology.
Some, yeah, bringing on nationalism, right?
Mm-hmm.
I don't think nationalism has to be a bad word.
No, that's true, right?
That's a really good point.
It can be marshaled, like many things, towards achieving bad things in the world, but I don't think it has to be so.
A belief in your nation, a conviction in your nation.
We would want our kids to do some sort of Service.
Selective service.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that would probably be mandated in some way by us, at least.
By you.
By parents, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think we do get into a world lately where there's so many...
I mean, gosh, we were listening to...
What was that guy's name who has an incredible school in the Bronx?
It's like Project Veritex or something like that?
No, no, no.
Project Veritas is something.
Not Veritas, like Vertex.
It doesn't matter.
Anyway, his point was that in this segment of the South Bronx, 90% of children born in this segment are born outside of wedlock.
And so he wrote this whole book about an MTV segment called Who's Your Daddy, in which these trucks came around and they were DNA collection trucks to try to figure out who was related to who.
And his whole mission was we need to get some sort of familial unit around these kids because that's how you develop ethics and principles and you have some safety nets from a family unit.
But if we've lost a lot of that family unit in the US, then I think as a nation, it's interesting to try to figure out how could we not just deal with the symptoms, but deal with the problems up front.
So yeah, you could do welfare and all of that for sure, but maybe you get the kids early on and then you solve some of the criminal justice problems long term by having some self-selective service up front.
I think it's interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think a lot of those problems get bred out of culture the longer and any earlier that they hit a child in their point in life.
I think it'd be incredibly interesting to see how people would gravitate if they had a choice to their specific area of civic service.
Yeah, I mean, I think it actually relates to the individualist piece of this too.
Cody, you might have a view on this, where you've been following the rise of stakeholder capitalism and ESG and what non-capital markets.
So, I mean, that's been kind of my core, one of my core areas of focus in the last few years.
But without rehashing everything that I've said and criticizing the rise of this trend, one of the things that I think psychologically accounts for it, that's not the main, I'm not saying it's the dominant story, but it's a strand that I think is interesting is that When you, let's say at the age of 18, right?
You've always been taught that service is intermingled with your self-interest, right?
So like volunteer to put on your college application, then do it to get into business school or like law school or med school.
It's like the standard operating procedure for getting to med school, do some sort of clinical service.
That you never built the muscle memory of either pursuing self-interest unabashedly, nor did you ever build the muscle memory of doing service for the sake of service.
They were always commingled in a way that you kind of never really learned how to either pursue your self-interest or to actually do service.
but it was just sort of this perverted hybrid of both.
And I feel like we wouldn't have these apologist instincts to say that, yeah, I'm going to enter the system of free market capitalism.
I'm going to make a ton of money.
Do it without apologizing for it.
Do it without feeling guilty about it.
I do it generally by creating value because you only generally make money in this country if you have something of value that someone else is willing to pay for more than it cost you to make.
And I have nothing to apologize for, but that doesn't deny that we're all Equal as citizens, and that we still have duties attached to our citizenship.
And that actually gives me like more self confidence, weirdly, as an individualist, then this weird pseudo individualist culture where yeah, we're individualist, but we have to kind of, you know, sort of apologize for our success.
I don't know.
Do you follow what I'm saying a little bit?
Yeah, totally.
Well, we kind of joke that I think a lot of the reason...
I think if you go back to the root of a lot of the people who are apologizing for their success, it's what you said originally, which is like, they're not that thrilled by the way that they got there.
And secondarily, I think a lot of people haven't really had a lot of extreme...
There's difficulty and self-imposed difficulty thrust upon them who are apologizing for their success.
Case in point, you have children of wealthy families that are on campuses like Harvard and Stanford, et cetera, picketing about XYZ issue that has to do with capitalism, but they were given everything and they come from a background where they feel a little guilty about that.
They're like, I haven't given so much, now I feel guilty about it.
Well, that's because They haven't ever had self-imposed difficulty.
I think one of the reasons Chris and I don't feel that way is because, Chris, being a Navy SEAL ain't easy.
And you also had a lot of stuff growing up with your family and familial issues you had to get through that definitely wasn't easy.
And then I was a journalist covering human trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border and saw people hung from the rafters and women mutilated and Juarez.
And so seeing that Just gives you context to say, oh no, we're incredibly lucky.
Let's make as much money as humanly possible because it's a tool.
And I can use that tool to change whatever I think needs fixed in our society.
And whoever has the most money has the most power, I think, typically.
And so that was sort of our mission.
And I think there's been sort of this attack of excellence in this country that is gross and pervasive.
And by attacking excellence, we're actually attacking that each of us have it within us.
So I think you're right.
You know, if we can get more people to choose service because...
Actually, do I think that?
At a young age.
Yeah.
I think even if you go to Juarez and you see what I saw there and you're a part of it, if you're not a sociopath, you will be changed by it.
I think the same thing's true.
We have friends that went into the military and they were like, oh God, we hate this.
I thought I was going to be Rambo.
Turns out it's something else.
But they were changed by it.
Absolutely.
And so I think, honestly, who cares about intent?
Because I can't judge anybody's intent.
But I can judge whether you've done the hard thing or not.
It's hard to not learn from hard things.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think you hit it so well in that it doesn't really matter the motive behind it, but the resulting factor of it, right?
In which you have that ability for civil service.
I think what you talked to is a term that's been adopted more freely, especially with General Mattis, former Mad
Dog.
Truthfully, they've seen what humanity is capable of in some certain lights and they know what can be lost and how lucky we are to have whatever it is, however small it is, it's still ours, right?
And I say ours as a collective.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just thinking about imagining your future children.
We have two kids ourselves at home.
But let's say you did mandate that.
As parents, call it somewhere between service and experience.
Okay.
But most of their fellow citizens as they grow up didn't.
I have a hard time seeing social cohesion coming.
I have a good time seeing their own self-confidence being developed out of it.
But the social cohesion you're actually creating...
Two classes of citizens, really.
Those who do have some sense of vested skin in the game and those who don't.
In a certain sense, that's part of what we see in the country right now is actually those who are in some ways invested in their status as American citizens and those for whom it's just a passive fact that they don't really Particularly have a second care for.
And, you know, I just I just struggle with this.
I don't know.
I mean, like, it's possible.
I mean, it's an idea I've been drawn to for a long time.
It has all kinds of pragmatic challenges.
It may very well be a political death knell.
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
We haven't done any polling on this.
It's good to be part of the conversation, though.
I mean, it's a bipartisan issue.
I do think you're sort of right, though.
There's something about it.
I was not expecting to talk about this with you guys, but seeing literally the two of you sitting side by side, right?
Not to be reductionists, but you and I... Understand the power of pursuing our own version of the American dream through the system of free market capitalism, unapologetically, pursuing excellence.
And you know what?
We generally do create value by creating things for other people.
Let's own that.
And that's a version of ownership.
That's how you begin skinning the game.
But like, Chris...
Began by knowing at the age of 19 that this is what I, Chris, needed to become the fullest version of myself, and that was through service to the country.
And I just think those things are not...
They're incompatible.
Not only are they not incompatible, they might just be deeply intertwined, actually, as one gives you the foundation of psychological security and confidence that you are a citizen, that you don't have to apologize when you do the things that you teach people how to do, which is make as much money as humanly possible, to borrow your phrase.
Yeah.
And I feel like we've got this division between, you know, conservative movement that thinks of, you know, elevates as I'm part of this, right?
The individualist dream, and then like the collectivist vision of the modern left.
When, you know, put that to, you know, that's its own complicated picture.
But like, at least in the conservative movement, we don't have to I think you're right.
We talk about this sometimes and recently, right?
And we kind of put into two buckets sometimes about serve or be served.
And I think that's something in which people are inculcated at a young age, I think, into that type of – and I think it's pretty binary.
You know, with some of the people that, you know, you might surround yourself with or that you just kind of view every day in society.
But you look at it also, you know, from, I guess, a liberal or conservative perspective.
And, you know, I think there's a tenement with, you know, with a liberal perspective in that you want a lot of stuff done for you.
And on the conservative, like, you just want upward mobility.
You want opportunity to do it yourself.
And I think that's just like such a cultural rift, like, to talk about your classes system, you know.
Those who know they have an opportunity to achieve any of it, it's like, sure, great, class be damned.
Well, no, I think you're right.
But I think to your point too, the conservative segment of this country, I think historically had religion as that component of service.
And so we did have two tenets, right?
We had religion as our, you serve because there's a moral obligation and it's A gateway to heaven, but it's also just what it means to be a good person.
And you pursue capitalistic gains because within sort of religious context, you can do that and then you can tithe with the church.
And those things I think were deeply held by conservatives.
And now we know that religion is on the decline.
sort of across the country.
So it's an interesting take that if we're not going to have sort of these religious views as a cohesive type of religious view as a reason why we should serve, is there another thing to fill in for it?
And that's- - Like a national. - Right, exactly. - You know, and I think that, you know, a big part of the premise of our, you know, movement here is that there is this void in the heart of the American soul, right?
That used to be filled by things like God or country or family.
Even hard work really is a source of identity.
If you create something in the world, that's a source of pride.
Pride of the good kind can be a source of identity grounded in truth.
When these things have disappeared, you have a black hole of a vacuum that's left.
And that's what allows, you know, wokeism or gender ideology or climate ideology, whatever it is, to fill the void.
And I've got to be careful about saying that you're just going to substitute God with country because it's not like the same thing.
Right.
But it's cumulative though.
Yeah.
So even if country, national identity isn't going to get you 100% of the way there, it might get you – 35% of the way there.
And it's better that way than a total vacuum.
You know, somebody else's job, you know, it's a higher pay grade than me to fill that national vacuum with a religious, you know, revival in churches across the country, let that come through churches.
But I think that it's less that the citizen identity can substitute for the God-based identity, but I do think America is the closest thing to a civic religion because it was a nation founded mostly on ideals.
And our ability to believe in ideals is really what separates us from animals.
I mean, we are made up of mostly the similar genetic content, more similar than not to, you know, a monkey or whatever.
We're more in common than we don't.
It's true.
But one of the things that separates us, we think, to the best we know, is we can believe in something higher, something greater than ourselves.
We can have conviction in an idea.
Which allows for sacrifice.
Exactly.
Which creates the space for sacrifice.
But conversely, maybe sacrifice opens up the space in your heart to actually have the ability to believe itself.
It might be a two-way relationship.
Absolutely.
Have you ever been a society that has achieved like massive levels of wealth and success and abundance?
And then, because I think what usually happens is you achieve, at least through history, it seems like you achieve this level of wealth and abundance.
And then because of that, you have a lot of space for free time and, you know, things proliferate.
Has there been a society that's had that happen and then sort of come back to sacrifice and difficulty again?
Like, does that exist in history?
Because I'd be curious.
You know, I think that – so I don't have all the answers right about it.
You know, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of global history, for sure.
I think of a couple friends, we probably need to have a couple friends who probably fit that category.
I'm not one of them.
But I do think the Roman Empire is pretty interesting.
I mean, there was no one rise and fall of Rome.
There were actually many rises and many falls.
And like the Punic Wars were pretty interesting because it had this disciplining function to sort of snap them out of this decline.
And so there was no rise and fall.
And then it split.
And then there was, you know, lived on for, you know, whether the Roman Empire lasted hundreds of years or thousands depends on how you count.
Because there was the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire.
And so...
I do think that there's room for a country where – I mean, it hits close to home in America, right?
Are we in some inevitable national decline as a product of our own success?
Where does it go?
Success breeds entitlement.
Entitlement breeds laziness.
Laziness breeds victimhood.
Victimhood justifies laziness.
And so is that an inevitable national decline?
It's like that quote that's often attributed to the founder of Abu Dhabi, but it was actually an American author, the founder of Dubai.
Where does it go?
Hard times create strong men.
Yeah, strong men create easy times.
Easy times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times.
So is it like a line or is it like a cycle?
And I think that's a choice.
I don't think it's an automatic.
I think it depends on leaders, actually.
I mean, nations are shaped in the shadows of people who lead them, not just politically, but in every sphere of life.
So I think it will be a choice, actually, is kind of where I land on it.
What are you going to say, Chris?
I think it's interesting because you also think about like how inheritance and entitlement, right, equals weakness.
And you kind of think about it, I think, in private industry as well.
Like what company do you know that inherits success without innovating?
And I think on the ideological front, like where is that happy medium?
Oh, I like that corporate analogy too.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Staying with what has worked, right?
What's your nucleus of ideologies versus what do we become more freeform about?
What do we innovate around to ensure prosperity, you know, socially, economically, and, you know, military-wise as well?
I think it's just like a really interesting problem to look at.
It's like, all right, like where does the innovation end?
As a company, for example.
Yeah, like what do we keep sacred, right?
To our core values.
Because I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a company who has, you know, not innovated but has stuck around for hundreds of years.
Yeah.
And to your point, but you see new leadership come in.
I mean, you see like some of the activist leadership at GE come in and completely restructure the company.
Now you have a ton of innovation there.
Yeah.
Or you see, you know, return of some of the previous strong leaders at like Starbucks.
They go away, they come back, the company kind of like rejuvenates again.
So that's interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, it's definitely much more beneficial, I think, and a positive outlook to look at it like it's in our hands.
Yeah, it really is.
It really is, actually.
But yeah, you're served by one aspect, though, and that's like economic prosperity, right?
I mean, that's the end of the day.
That's a goal of a corporation, right?
Just to add value.
For a nation, it has a different...
There's a different resulting factors, right?
Yeah, but there are lessons in there, but it's not quite the same thing.
I mean, GE is an interesting example where...
I think it's a combination of innovation and being reborn, but the soul is still the same.
Yeah.
And I think that, you know, we could debate about corporations, but I think nations can be reborn so long as the soul remains the same.
And it feels like we have an opportunity to go through our cycle of rebirth right now as a country as well, right?
So the easy times created weak men.
Weak men created hard times.
That's where we are right now.
That's true.
Well, I ran a business in Chile years ago.
In Chile?
Yeah, in Santiago.
And I remember it was in finance and economics.
And I just had only then learned about the Chicago boys.
I didn't know that part of history, how we basically brought economists down from the US from University of Chicago To reinvigorate and reimagine the Chilean economy post Pinochet who was a dictator, right?
Lots of stuff surrounding Pinochet and maybe were involved, but the moral of the story, it went from communism to Pinochet to us bringing in the Chicago boys to ushering in then a peaceful democracy and Chile then becoming with the least people In the US, in Latin America, and very far away from things.
So completely disconnected from the Andes, the most economically viable, the highest salary range for people.
And the untold story is that most of it was done through something really boring, which is just free market economics and freedom of economics.
Yeah.
I think about it that way and I think, huh, Chile might actually be an example where they became a really wealthy nation.
Yep.
And then they sort of went to communism and then they went to nationalism.
Autocracy.
Autocracy.
Yeah.
And then they were sort of reborn into democracy through that.
Not that I hope we would have to mimic that at all, but it is a cycle, interesting enough.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that- Kind of at the national level, you were alluding to this at the individual level.
It's the expression I sometimes share with young people, like hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.
It doesn't have to be.
Right.
Hardship can be what teaches us who we really are.
Totally.
And the question is whether we use that opportunity from a national perspective.
We're in for a tough economic time, right?
Inflation, you know, you've got actually on one hand, but struggling economy on the other.
There's no free lunch.
I mean, you got to raise rates.
That's rough for inflation, but I mean, that's maybe what you need to do to fight inflation, but then you get more Silicon Valley banks and signature banks that were used to easy times skiing on artificial snow.
Well, when the snow machine turns off, I'm talking about the Federal Reserve printing money, you know, there's no free lunch.
There's no easy way out.
But I think that on the other side of that, we can actually We can actually recognize that, all right, we learned that actual productivity is what drives sustained national growth, not artificial mark-to-market accounting driven by a lot of money flooding the system.
I also think that there's a longer history of nations that end that way.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I think the Roman Empire did split up at some point.
And, you know, I think this conversation about the national divorce, I don't know if you've been paying attention to that lexicon a little bit, but I'm running for president because I don't want to go to a national divorce.
But I think times of economic hardship might actually get us closer to there as opposed to An actual national revival.
It's funny how much you don't hear either party talking about GDP growth anymore.
It's like not like a thing.
I mean, you know, national debt.
Okay.
Is it spending cuts in a conservative solution?
Is it, you know, tax increases because we've got to pay our bills versus how about this radical idea of just raw unleashing of productivity and growth itself?
It's almost like we've forgotten that's an option.
If GDP growth was over 4% in this country all the way through 1971, if that had continued at that rate through today, we'd have $20 trillion in excess value that would make all of our other problems, spending cuts, et cetera, tiny by comparison.
And I think that it sounds like obviously who isn't in favor of growth, but actually I think there is this strain in America that is sort of an anti-growth strain, an apologist strain that says, no, no, we should learn to live with less.
Well, actually – That's actually what creates a lot of travails for people when – I think the anti-nuclear agenda is about.
I think it's a lot of what the anti-fossil fuel agenda is about.
And I think that that – unlike the civil civic service stuff, which I was more just me still just thinking as a citizen, no, no, this is very much going to be – is part of the presidential campaign, is GDP growth.
Without apologizing for it.
Like, that's American excellence and let's structure an economic agenda around actually delivering that rather than small ball of, you know, by spectacle accountants for how much cost we're going to cut from the system or how much we're going to increase taxes.
That's small ball.
We actually lost the self-confidence to play big ball.
It's actually – that's one of the things that motivates me to do this thing.
I have a question for you, which is, I think part of the reason why tax cuts or tax increases play so well is, one, the government can press a button theoretically and increase that one way or the other, and then they can say, yes, we've done it, yes, we've done it on the other side, and so it's like an easy win.
But the other reason is also because for most of the population, if I was to say on Instagram, my platform is positive GDP growth, people would be like, what?
Yeah.
You know, it's like not...
Right.
What does that mean?
It doesn't just like roll off the tip, like tax the rich, you know?
That's like, get it.
Got it.
Yep.
So like, how do you make...
How do you proselytize?
How do you make that great for the average American who reads at a sixth grade reading level?
What's the commentary?
We're thinking...
This is real-time stuff right now, as we're talking about.
Yeah.
But I mean, the way I think about it is unleashing the American economy.
Yeah.
Because we've got this inner animal spirit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like we have it in a cage.
It's domesticated.
What's in the cage?
Everything that incentivizes workers to stay home.
We have a worker shortage crisis in this country.
Anybody who's been to a restaurant in the last three years or tried to have a plumber come to their house knows what this means.
You have created economic incentives.
That's one cage.
You have – I think – I mean I don't know where you guys are on this, but I think it is a suffocating climate cult in the United States that shackles our ability to produce energy in this country.
That's a wage on GDP growth.
Same thing with respect to – same hostility to fossil fuels.
Also to nuclear energy, great.
Best known source of large-scale replenishable carbon-free energy production known to mankind.
No, don't want that either.
Incredibly oppressive regulatory regime when it comes to nuclear energy.
So you just sort of go down the list from broad business regulation to unshackling energy to actually a worker shortage in this country.
To just a revival of self-confidence, too.
A belief that you can produce things actually makes you more effective at producing things, which goes to the themes of reviving national identity that I launched the campaign with.
But to me, what I think about is like untaming the American beast, unleashing the inner animal, unleashing the American economy.
We've got it.
We've had it for most of our history.
Here are the numbers.
If we do that again, you don't have to give up Social Security, Medicare, and you don't have to pay more in taxes either.
We just deliver more productivity as a country.
How about that?
Yeah.
I don't know if that works, but that's the way I think we're going to roll that out.
I do, but I think you have to push it to the individual then.
Because if you say, we're going to unleash the American economy, then people go, okay.
What about for me?
And I think the answer there is when the business that you work for makes more money, you make more money.
You make more money.
If the animal gets unleashed, then you get freedom.
I kind of like that as a slogan for this, is make more money.
Yeah, you, yourself.
Like you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not like society as a whole, but like you make more money.
Like what does this mean?
It means you will make more money.
So it's not like we're going to lower – I think lowering taxes is part of this.
Right.
But it's not just the net effect of like the lower taxes that you take home in your paycheck.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, should and will be higher.
Absolutely.
Actually, reform of the Federal Reserve is actually a big part of this too.
I don't want to put everybody to sleep here.
But like, yeah, I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually hostile to wage growth in this country because they take wage growth as a leading indicator of inflation.
Right.
And so every time you've seen wage growth in the last 20 years, they'll tamp down with monetary policy because they think that's a leading indicator of inflation.
They've actually been terrible at even predicting inflation.
I think the Federal Reserve needs to go back to just stabilizing the dollar as a unit of measurement.
But it goes back to this point where if that's part of unleashing the American animal, what does it mean?
It means your wages go up.
It means you make more money.
I kind of like that.
Do you think that lands?
Yeah.
Especially because you can say the other guys just want other people to make less money.
Their platform is these guys make less.
And tax less, yep.
My platform is you make more.
But even some of the Republican platform as well, and I'm not blaming these guys.
They're looking at, you know, like accountants.
Okay, well, we've got this national debt problem.
Yeah.
So you get less benefits at later age in Social Security form or Medicare or whatever.
And like, I guess if we don't make any changes at all, I suppose that becomes inevitable.
But what if we make a change that we literally just increase our productivity as a nation?
You make more money without actually giving something up for it.
Smart.
Yeah.
It's kind of actually...
I think something that a lot of people would want to get behind.
It does require people to work hard.
I mean, I think...
Or be willing to sort of...
Join the labor force, as you would put it, with productivity.
I mean, you know, I guess if you prefer to get a PPP loan and a payment and a stimulus package and stay at home and play video games in your mom's basement, like, is that a real source of happiness?
I don't know.
It's what we've incentivized people to do in their early 20s over the last year.
But I do think that if we, you know, the worker shortage is a big part of an impediment to GDP growth.
But if we actually embrace the idea as a nation, Maybe GDP growth is too abstract.
The way I think about it though is deliver five plus percent GDP growth.
Like all of our problems, like 90% of our problems are like out the window if we can do that.
Why wouldn't we just make that the core of our economic agenda, the core of just like our national agenda and then derive pride and self-confidence and meaning?
Out of that.
So then you've got national identity, but you also have hard work is now back.
And then you start to fill that identity void too.
I don't know.
These are the things that are actually a core part of the campaign.
And then maybe I'll just shoot myself in the foot at some point when we talk about national service and then everyone's like, no, we can't deal with that.
Absolutely.
I think, you know, hardship with a growth-minded end state.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Like understanding the trickle down effects towards them.
I mean, I just don't think it's explained well.
And I think that's what doesn't land sometimes.
It's just the understandability of what's required of me to work a little bit harder.
Yeah.
Well, even, I mean, I always have a little beef with Dave Ramsey because he always talks about like, don't get the Starbucks, you know, don't buy this, don't buy that.
And my point is you can only save your way to zero.
There is a bottom limit of zero and all of us have to exist on something.
So zero is actually not possible, but there is an unlimited upside to earnings.
And so you can skip the Starbucks and go to zero and we can have our elderly people die with no medical healthcare whatsoever.
Sure, we could do that.
Or we could unleash the American tiger.
Exactly.
Uncapped upside.
Blue sky possibility.
Yeah.
And we're starting from like – I mean GDP growth is like pretty low right now.
We're talking about like 1-2%.
If we just go back to historical pre-1971 level of like 4 – I mean it's like out of the ballpark.
I mean even if we're in the – with a 3 plus percent GDP growth, all of our – Nearly all of our problems, both domestically and from a foreign policy perspective, go away.
Why not just do that?
And I think, you know, say what you'll buy Kennedy, plant a flag, so we're going to the moon.
Yeah.
Good point.
We're going back to 3% GDP growth and we'll just figure out how we get there.
There's a lot of obstacles.
Some of them are obvious.
If that's a freight train and you're on the train tracks, we're running through you, but we're still getting there.
That's a national mentality, I think.
I'm biased, but I would get behind.
Mentality is cultural, right?
How do you change the cultural message around what it is to contribute to society again?
Yeah, and this could be one way to do it, actually, too.
Well, that's how China got to where it was today.
Totally.
Yeah.
I mean, they've been at 8 plus percent for decades.
It's GDP growth or nothing.
And they're still at 5% now.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and China also thinks they're the only ones that are not going to become the next superpower, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of the common health notion.
And I sort of do joke around that inner animal in that cage.
It has leapt oceans to lift up places like China.
Well, their culture of Maoist victimhood actually came here to hold us down.
It's true.
Yeah.
I just think that, you know, I mean- I think there's a certain strain of when many of us may have rallied behind the cry to make America great again.
I think the thing we hungered for more than any one man or whatever was...
The unapologetic pursuit of excellence in America.
That's what it means to be American.
I don't actually remember the metrics, but I was in China for a while working with a company called State Street back in the day.
State Street, the asset manager?
Yeah, the asset manager.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is my old world.
Oh, that's right.
I mean, Strive is competing against – one of the firms I found is competes against BlackRock and State Street.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah.
I mean, I was like a little nobody, but I – I'm really bad at dates, but I was there.
It would have been like 2010, 11, 12, somewhere in there.
Is that when they did the she, the little like the statue?
Yeah.
Wait, that was right after I left.
Okay, got it, got it, got it.
So that would have been right after I left.
Yes, on Wall Street.
That was a hilarious story, but okay.
Yeah.
They put this girl who's like the statue that was like- It was like standing in front of the bull.
Standing in front of the bull, but then they were just marketing their ETF, SAG was the ticket.
It was like really funny.
I've It's like a classic example of virtue signaling capitalism.
It's such a finance thing to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
They went even further and made like a statue of Xi, like Xi Jinping.
Oh, no.
Might have been sponsored by him from the note, but you know, exactly.
Basically, same thing.
Yeah.
But I remember they were explaining to us the scorecards that the governors had in China, and I thought it was such an interesting thing.
They were explaining how every single governor – I'm not sure if that's what they called them there, but let's call it a mayor or a governor – Of a particular area got a scorecard that was like GDP growth, employment, something else and something else.
And they were tracked by their growth.
And then they realized, oh, gosh, when we only do GDP growth, and when we only do unemployment numbers, then we have some societal or some environmental issues.
But I can't believe – I mean, I remember I was driving in a car with our chaperone that basically meant that we wouldn't go places we weren't supposed to go.
And I was like, gosh, you know – This doesn't feel very communist.
It feels very capitalist.
Oh, it was.
They used it as a tool.
Yeah.
And he said, you know, we have a saying in China, which is, if it works, we call it communism and we move on.
And I was like, that's clever.
That's actually very funny.
Is it?
Let's call it on the joke.
That's really funny.
Now, then you get an autocrat who then – whose head gets too big and then he kind of ruins the party, which is what Xi Jinping is doing now.
And that's to our advantage, by the way.
I think it creates an opportunity for us to seize on, which the US needs to wake up to and get on top of.
That's a discussion for another day.
This is cool.
I agree.
Yeah.
So super unexpected.
It's not what I was expecting to talk about, but we'll keep the conversation going, guys.
Sounds great.
I love it.
I'm really glad you guys came out to hopefully enjoy your time in Columbus.
Our first trip just to see you.
Thank you.
We're excited that we were here.
I appreciate it.
We're excited about following what your ideas are on a go-forward basis.
I think it's really cool.
I appreciate it.
I want you guys to be a part of it.
100%.
I think we care.
I mean, forget the politics of which candidate and the who.
It's the what and the why.
Yeah.
100%.
Advancing this message.
It's really synchronous, Cody, with a lot of what you put out on a day-to-day basis.
I think it's a big part of why we were drawn to you guys.
I love it.
Obviously, you know, we were intersected, but I think- The American hero of it.
I love that.
It's such a great combination that you guys bring together.
We'll harass you on your TikToks and Instagrams so that we can up the level.
We're new to this game, so teach us how to play it.
We'll do some fun stuff with this fundraising mechanism, etc.
Democratize it.
If other people are making money off the process, it might as well be you.
Honestly, I think there's actually going to be a lot of money to be made if people actually are able to sell this.
You know, it doesn't have to be people who have been historically donating to the Republican Party.
If this is a vision you want to advance, great.
Donate to that.
But if you donate to it and then you just, you know, if you donated $10 and you raised $100, you already got your money back.
The rest is upside.
That's kind of what we're thinking about doing here.
I didn't even know that's how it worked.
Oh, it's crazy.
It's crazy.
That's wild.
Yeah, but it stops being a racket if everybody can participate.
A hundred percent.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Then the people are just striped.
Everybody's taking a processing fee.
Exactly.
Yeah, everybody gets to have their own little stripe machine.
They have their own little square.
I like it.
Yeah, it's kind of easy.
So I think that's what we're going to do.
So we're working through that next couple weeks.
Hopefully we roll that out.
I love it.
It's amazing.
We'll follow along.
Yeah, thanks guys.
Spread the word too.
Might as well.
Make some people join the movement and you don't have to apologize for making a little money in the process.
There we go.
Cool.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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