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April 24, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:10:33
The Power of Debate and Tackling the Fentanyl Epidemic with James Fishback | The TRUTH Podcast #17
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So I began my career as an investor.
I've started a number of companies along the way.
And the company I most recently started was an asset management firm called Strive to compete against the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard and others who were promoting ESG values in capital markets.
But that gave me a front row seat to seeing what one kind of voting looks like.
The way voting works in the market is that the person who has the most dollars gets the most votes whether that's a consumer that decides which product rises to the top Whether it's a shareholder that gets to decide who gets to be elected on the board of Apple or in the board of Chevron or Exxon or any other company, it's not that everyone who's a shareholder of Exxon gets an equal say.
No, it's the fact that somebody who holds the most shares that's invested the most capital in Exxon has that say.
That's just the way capitalism works is it's a $1 one vote system and that's okay when you're talking about which products rise to the top.
When which ideas at a shareholder ballot rise to the top.
But in our body politic in a constitutional republic like the United States underpinned by a democratic process, we use a different system.
It's a one person, one vote system.
That shouldn't be adjusted upward or downward by the number of dollars you control in the marketplace.
That's actually one of my main issues with the rise of so-called ESG and stakeholder capitalism trends in corporate America.
Is that we're now using the dollar system, not just to say which products get sold, whether to invest in an R&D facility or a manufacturing plant.
No, we're now using the $1 one vote system to determine which ideas make it to the top, whether to correct racial injustices through quota systems or some other means, whether to fight climate change on the basis of a method that creates for higher consumer products for everyone or some other means or whether to fight it at all.
These are ideas that are settled in a constitutional republic through free speech and open debate in the public square where everyone's voice and vote counts equally.
And I think here's the difference.
I'm not saying that if you're a capitalist, say Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, that you can't engage in that.
You can in your capacity as a citizen.
Which is different from using your corporate platform to do it as a capitalist.
And I think that's deeply personal to me because I've been a capitalist.
I've succeeded in the system of free market capitalism in America as an entrepreneur, as an investor.
I've also pursued my journey as I am now in pursuing the US presidency as a citizen.
And I think both of those are part of our identity as Americans, not just somebody who's pursuing self-interest through the system of free market capitalism without apologizing for it.
But we're also citizens that each have our own civic duties.
And one of those identities as a citizen is grounded in this idea of free speech and open debate as the way we settle our political questions.
That's one of the things we share in common regardless of what our beliefs are from controversial topics ranging from abortion to affirmative action.
It doesn't matter.
What we share in common in this country is a commitment to the idea that we settle those differences through a civic process where we're all equal as citizens, each having the right to express our own opinion so long as our neighbor gets that same courtesy in return.
That is part of what it means to be American.
It's also why I'm excited about today's guest on the podcast, James Fishback, who, like me, I think has had a career as a capitalist.
He's an investor at a prominent hedge fund, as you'll hear from him soon.
But he's also somebody who's dedicated a significant portion of his time to starting a nonprofit that actually fosters, who would have ever thought, open debate and discourse and dialogue amongst the next generation of Americans.
He's not doing that in his capacity as an investor.
He's doing that in his capacity as a citizen.
And that speaks to me because American identity isn't just one of those things.
It's both of those things.
We're capitalists and citizens.
We believe in individualism and in unity.
We believe in the pursuit of self-interest and our civic duties.
Both of those are part of what it means to be American.
And that's what we're going to kick off the conversation with today with my new friend, James Fishback.
James, welcome to the podcast.
It was a real pleasure.
Yeah.
So thanks for being here.
I thought it'd be interesting to just get right into it in terms of You're an investor.
You're working at Greenlight Capital, David Einhorn.
I actually read David Einhorn's book.
What was it?
The Some of the People Fool, Some of the People All the Time?
Something like that was the book about, you know, 12, 15 years ago when I read it.
It stuck with me.
There's some interesting lessons in there.
He was actually quoting Abraham Lincoln, as you may well know.
It was a famous Abraham Lincoln quote that he, you know, riffed on as the title for his own book as an investor in, you know, capital markets.
But you're working for his firm.
But then you decide to also pursue this parallel journey to foster open debate amongst young Americans.
Presumably you had some concern about our country that led you to do that.
I found that that's actually one of the things that motivates people to take action is when they have a concern about a problem.
What was your concern and why did you pursue this journey to foster and build the nonprofit organization you have?
Tell us a little bit about it and then we'll get right into it from there.
Absolutely.
It's a real pleasure to be here, Vivek.
I started Incubate Debate back in 2019 in Florida, a state that I call home.
I did high school debate for four years, had a lot of fun with it.
Then after I came back from college, I did two years as a volunteer debate coach in Miami-Dade County at an urban school in Miami Gardens.
I saw how the sausage was made, both as a competitor and as a coach.
What I saw was incredibly troubling.
I saw an attack on free speech in what should be the epitome of open dialogue and debate.
After all, it is debate.
That's the whole point.
In high schools.
In high school debate.
I'm just trying to go through your thoughts.
You're working as an investor in New York City.
But you decide you also want to coach high school debate just as a hobby on the side.
You must have done it in high school.
You felt some attachment to it.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'd moved back to Florida and I wanted to just be involved in it.
I saw it did so much for me.
I had a really bad stutter as a high school student, as a kid.
And high school debate took time, but it got me out of that.
It gave me confidence.
I was reading Foreign Affairs Magazine and The Economist, all of these great sources as a freshman and sophomore in high school.
So I was kind of way ahead when we were talking about, you know, AP European history or talking about AP comparative government.
I was reading those things weeks or months beforehand.
So it was an incredible blessing to be a part of it.
And what initially motivated me to be the coach was socioeconomic hurdles.
So to be in debate, it's 20 bucks a tournament, 30 bucks a tournament.
And on top of that, parents, mom and dad have to come and judge that tournament all day Saturday.
That was a really big hurdle for me.
My mom came from Columbia in South America in the early 1990s, married my dad, who for the past 10 years has been a county bus operator in Broward County.
In South Florida.
And so it was really hard to go to debate tournaments to get the money, but then to have parents take off six, seven, eight hours to judge these debates.
That was a massive hurdle.
So you aren't super – you aren't particularly well off.
How would you characterize lower middle class?
Lower middle class, working class family.
Privileged in the same sense that you were to have two loving parents that gave me – that instilled those values, not just of grace and respect, but of civic disposition to care so deeply about the country that's given them so much.
Mm-hmm.
And so that was, you know, your high school experience.
How old were you now when you decided to go back to debate coaching?
I was 21. You're 21?
Yeah.
So you were still in college.
I just left.
You just finished college.
Yeah.
Did you graduate college?
No, I left actually.
Okay.
You left college.
I left my junior year because I started a hedge fund that I did for four years.
Oh, got it.
Where were you in college?
I was at Georgetown.
You were at Georgetown.
So you let – that's a big decision.
You decided to drop out of college.
Yeah.
Start this hedge fund of your own.
And then what?
And then you moved to Florida.
I moved to Florida.
So I was in DC, moved back to Florida, did that for four years.
And then, you know, the Bloomberg terminal is kind of an interesting country club, if you will.
You can always message people on there.
So I messaged David Einhorn on there.
I, you know, I read his book.
I've always read his quarterly letters.
Oh, the same book that I was talking about.
Okay, got it.
and the same quarterly letters that so many investors across the world look forward to reading every quarter.
And I messaged him and I said, this was in the spring of 2019.
And I said, I think the Federal Reserve is about to cut interest rates because of what was going on with the trade tensions and some of the deindustrialization that we were seeing.
And And kind of the Fed strategy had changed, right, where they were hyper-concerned about financial markets.
So I sent him this message and to his credit, we went back and forth.
We didn't agree on the first trade, but we came back a couple weeks later.
He put the trade on and – I was blessed to be in a relationship, a partnership with him for two years, advising him on these big macro events that I had done as a macro investor.
While you were still your own macro investor at your fund?
Yes.
And then eventually you just got in-hired by him?
Yes.
At the end of 2020, which was a fascinating year.
While you were also debate coach, presumably though, we're talking 2020, that's via Zoom?
That's via Zoom.
What was that during COVID? What was that like?
It was incredible.
I'll never forget, I was at the last debate tournament to ever be held in the country before we shut down.
And when was that?
That was March 2nd.
And it was in Orlando, Florida.
It was the Florida Forensics League Varsity State Tournament.
I was there with two students and they were competing and I was their coach and mom was there as well, one of the students.
And I'll never forget, you know, it was like the world.
No one really knew what was going to happen a week or two later.
But the kids in that moment were having so much fun, were debating and having a great time.
And then three months later, these tournaments were online and I judged a local tournament that was online in May.
But what was amazing, Vivek, was even though the expenses of running a debate tournament collapsed overnight, there's no catering, there's no need to hire buses to rent out rooms, you needed a Zoom Pro account, which is 50, 60 bucks a month.
The big institutions, the big Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Yale, you're familiar with both – They run these big debate tournaments.
They were still charging students, the same students that I was coaching in Miami Gardens and low-income communities, hundreds of dollars to participate in a virtual tournament from their couch.
Oh, come on.
That was about the expenses of putting it on in a room and providing food and lodging.
So, had they gotten one kid, they broke even.
That's right.
That's really funny.
They've got a thousand kids.
I mean, it's funny in a sad kind of way, but – It embodies higher education in this country.
Correct.
They've gotten so used to running a scam that even if it's a debate tournament via Zoom, we'll keep the scam mentality going.
So anyway, so I guess – I actually am separately curious about this.
I wasn't planning to ask you about this because I didn't realize the timeline here.
But how did that affect the quality of debate you were able to have taking the in-person to Zooms?
Is that something you were able to carry on pretty effectively or not?
We were.
We were.
So, this was about the time that Incubate Debate went from being a debate camp, which it was in the summer of 2019 at the University of Miami, the only free debate camp in Florida.
And you founded this?
I founded this.
And so, it's a nonprofit debate camp.
Correct.
Got it.
And then over 2020, over that summer, we had to do the camp online and – We then realize, wait, if Harvard and Yale and all these big places are hosting tournaments and still charging kids hundreds of bucks— We should just get a Zoom account and host tournaments.
Exactly.
We did that in September.
And how much did you charge them?
Nothing.
Okay.
Nothing.
And it's not just the cost of the tournament that's the charge.
It's mom and dad having to judge for six, seven, eight hours.
So on top of not charging them, we then invited people, think tankers, professors.
Oh, great.
So you could actually even make sort of professional judges at debate.
Exactly.
Rather than asking mom and dad to do a second job over the weekend.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I didn't realize that's how it worked, by the way, that it was parents of the people who participated that were the judges.
And that's what's so problematic about it.
It actually probably is biased.
Incredibly biased.
And I've got some funny stories to tell you on that front.
But, you know, we started this tournament.
We had 200 kids.
I thought we were going to get 40 or 50. 200 students from all over the country came to our first.
We called it the Incubate Debate Congressional Classic.
And we debated some pretty interesting topics, whether the US should sell the UAE F-35s, right?
Some really important topics that were in the news.
We always kind of pull topical stuff.
And the person that connected us, Bill Lackman, was actually one of our judges there.
Oh, was he?
Yeah.
That's great.
Good for him.
I'm glad that he was taking time to do that.
That makes me – It makes me proud of him.
That's good.
Yeah.
On a separate note, what he's done over the last couple of years, I mean, his whole life, but he's really, I think, embraced the engaged citizen idea, right?
Speaking up on issues, I think of one in particular, right?
The sexualization of young people on Pornhub, right?
Where he stepped up and he pressured companies like Visa and said, you can't be processing payments where you've got young women who are being exploited on these pornography sites.
Yeah.
So, it was, you know, it was an honor to have him come out and judge and so many, so many others.
This is still virtual stage.
Still virtual.
Yeah.
Whether it was from the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute.
So, you used the virtual thing to your advantage to say that we're actually just going to get super high-end, you know, professional debate judges that could be a draw for students and others, but didn't charge the students.
Yes.
It kind of breaks the culture of this professional debate society thing you got going on in college.
Yes.
Amongst college kids and high school students alike or mostly high school students?
Mostly high school students.
Got it.
Now, the judging breakdown, usually at a legacy, what I call legacy debate outside of what we do, is it's probably 60% parents and 40% ex-debaters who are now college students.
And that's problematic because they bring an enormous bias.
And I got to tell you, they don't even hide it.
They wear it proudly.
You mean in terms of the judging of this?
The judging of it.
The parents in particular do?
The parents and the college students both.
Got it.
So you think this actually helped with that?
Yes.
Okay.
So what's an example of a topic that someone would debate?
And the way it works is the high school students basically doesn't necessarily get to choose which side they're going to be on.
They're assigned.
Is that right?
They're assigned – the other debate tournaments will typically do a coin flip.
What we actually do is because we have so much geographic diversity.
Florida is the third largest state.
There are counties like Broward County, which are never going to vote for a Republican, and then counties like Holmes County, which voted 80% for Donald Trump in the last election.
And you're from Broward.
I'm from Broward.
I now live in the Panhandle in Madison County.
So when we pulled from all over the state, which is what the virtual format allowed us to do, we didn't necessarily have to assign sides because we got folks from the deep red America first counties and folks from the kind of Broward and Miami-Dade or Hillsborough County who just were naturally on different sides of important issues.
And that's what we really wanted.
We didn't want to compel people, right?
On issues like you talked about affirmative action, it would be awful to compel someone to say something they don't believe.
Now, we always encourage them, by the way, to entertain what the other side is going to say, to deeply research what they may bring up to have counter arguments.
But I fundamentally don't believe in compelled speech.
It's interesting.
I mean – This is random, but it just reminded me of something I haven't thought of in years.
It was actually kind of a fun experience in high school.
They have this, you know, model UN program that we did where I represented – I was sort of forced to represent Iran.
And I think it's kind of – it was just fun.
It was kind of interesting.
But it's high school.
You take on a position that you don't take on.
I think that – You could argue it's an exercise in building your skill set regardless of whether or not you're embracing it, but you're leaning in the direction of allow people to speak for what they're passionate about, and you're likely to get enough people on both sides to make the debate tournament work.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Got it.
So anyway, so what would you say that – like what was the impact that you saw that this has had on kids who then graduate and go to college?
Do you have a good sense for – Whether this is cultivating some type of civic culture amongst those kids.
Talk to me a little bit about that.
I'm actually really curious because that's one of the core, you probably know one of the core premises of my campaign is reviving civic identity in this country.
I think a commitment to free speech and open debate is a really important part of that.
It's not all going to be done through government.
In fact, I think very little of it is going to be and ought to be done through government.
What was your experience with this?
It was great when I was in high school.
And this was 2010, 2011, 2012. When did you graduate from high school?
2013. 2013. So you're a young man.
I'm 28. Okay, got it.
And it was great because we didn't get the kind of tribalism.
We didn't have that back then.
You'll remember – Democrats, Republicans – I mean, we can obviously go back to the 70s, but even go back 10, 15 years, we didn't have – there wasn't this clash that they are your enemy.
And when Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, it seemed like that was the spark for so much tribalism.
It deranged a lot of people.
It just deranged them.
And you're getting to this day, I think, to separate the Legacy Debate League, which is sort of the National Speech and Debate Association and what Incubate Debate is doing in Florida.
The guys over here, it's deeply problematic.
What they've done is they've replaced the commitment to free speech and open dialogue with an obsession and infatuation with Marxism, anti-racist ideas, which are, of course, racist.
And they're really trying to push out and force out ideas.
And the best way to do that, by the way, to force out an idea is to tell someone that they lose simply on the premise that they brought up an idea that you oppose.
And so one example of this is – and by the way, this is all public information.
This is not hearsay.
This is not a judge wrote something.
The judging – the debate community has something called a paradigm.
And the idea is – and originally the way it was supposed to work was if you and I were to go to a debate tournament together and compete against each other to debate maybe affirmative action, we would log on to this judge paradigm.
It's a website where we would see who our judge is 30 minutes out before the round, and we would see what preferences do they have.
On the issue.
On the issue.
Not originally.
Do they want us to speak slowly?
Oh, like that.
How do they think about the handling of evidence?
Got it.
And now what paradigms have become is just straight up issues.
That's actually pretty sad.
It's really sad because you take these young impressionable people who are here because of their commitment to free speech and open debate and you close that door.
I mean, high school debate is supposed to be the epitome of free speech and it's really shut it down.
Give me an example.
I'm actually really curious.
I'll read an example to you verbatim because you can't make this stuff up.
So this is from the Stanford debate tournament.
A lot of stuff happened in Stanford these days.
And this is a quote from a person's paradigm.
She says, I would hope I wouldn't have to say this, but given our political climate, I have no choice.
If you are discussing immigrants in the round and you describe the person as illegal, I will immediately stop the round, give you a loss, give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach.
Are you kidding me?
I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.
So, suppose there's a debate about illegal immigration.
Which there is.
Which there ought to be.
Yes.
And you come out on one side of that debate and you actually even use the word illegal – They would shut down the debate.
Literally.
Unbelievable.
She's going to stand up and wave her hands.
So this is not at your organization's debate.
No.
This is at some – Stanford's – Stanford's debate.
Hosted debate.
And Stanford is actually a country – is a university that also says, even when you're describing our country, they discourage you to use the word American.
Correct.
As of recently.
So in a certain sense, there's a consistency to that.
There is.
If you don't want to say American and part of what it means to be American is to believe in the rule of law, then you would be free to at least engage in the idea who would have ever thought that it is illegal to cross the border when the law says you can't cross the border without the government's ability to let you in.
In a certain sense, that is anti-American.
And then they say, don't say American.
So those things go together.
It's funny that you and I are having this conversation.
We're both the kids of immigrants who came to this country through the front door, but without getting into the rabbit hole of the illegal immigration issue on the substance of it, wherever you are in the substance of it, it's a sad thing to say that we can't debate that anymore in this country.
Correct.
And remember, illegal immigration, you know, just a word for a second.
This is a term the New York Times uses in their reporting every single day.
Yeah, but that even shouldn't be the standard.
Suppose the New York Times did it because the next thing they're going to say, the New York Times shouldn't say illegal immigration.
The New York Times will buckle under pressure to that mob.
That's right.
That shouldn't be the standard anyway, but you're saying it's doubly ridiculous.
It's doubly ridiculous because even the New York Times, which does not have a great track record on free speech, is saying that illegal immigration is fine.
Yeah, but not yet is the point because this is the bleeding edge that tomorrow will change what the New York Times itself says.
This is just at the vanguard of that movement, right?
So this is a leading indicator, not a trailing indicator.
Right.
Interesting.
You know, I think that – I'm trying to think about – let's say somebody who has a different point of view than you and I who were here, what would they say?
A lot of what I get is, well – This isn't about free speech or the Constitution because the government isn't telling you you can't say that.
It's just a privately hosted debate forum at Stanford.
So if you don't like that debate forum, have a different forum, but the First Amendment is still respected.
Right.
Because this debate forum doesn't offer that, whereas go start a different one.
In fact, you did.
And so I think that's the common kind of refrain that I hear in this type of setting is I think the thing that that misses is that free speech and even the First Amendment in this country, it's not just about protecting your rights.
It's definitely about that.
But it's not just about that.
I mean, the way the Founding Fathers saw it was that this is part of a culture, a founding culture of a nation, a culture in which we settle our questions through free speech and open debate because that's what we as a nation and as citizens of this nation are committed to.
And that's something that you undermine, even if it isn't the government that does it, you know, so-called big tech censorship, though I don't call it that because that largely is government tech censorship now.
Anyway, but the cultural infringements on free speech...
That's what we lose, is even if it's not a technical First Amendment violation, it runs afoul of the principle, the culture that's codified in that First Amendment.
And I think that that's part of how even if you're Stanford University and you're not technically the government, you accept government funds, but you're technically not the government.
Even if you put the federal funding piece of it to one side, you're still destroying the essence of what the country is and what's codified in that First Amendment.
I think that's what people miss sometimes.
That's exactly right.
So what did you – I mean, what did you do in response to that?
I guess you offer an alternative.
It's the best you can, right?
Build your own, they say, right?
And so we did that.
And, you know, we started out with that first virtual tournament.
And we had to do virtual, you know – Obviously, because of COVID, it was still very difficult in the fall of 2020 to convince students to come together, to convince parents.
But at the beginning of 2022, we had our first in-person tournament.
And this was in a rural county called Glades County.
It was our Dr. King Symposium.
And it was really about standing up for the principles that the good reverend represented, right?
Equality before the law, justice.
And so students came together for the first time, a hundred students to debate these issues from all over the state.
And we had a blast.
And since then, we've been hosting tournaments.
We have a thousand active students.
We're reaching out to schools right now.
So we're going to quadruple that number in the new school year.
And the idea is because you have to have fair debate, you have to have fair topics.
So it's not just the judging that's unfair from the other legacy establishment debate side.
It's also the topic.
So you're very passionate about the idea of merit.
Affirmative action runs counter to that.
So let me give you one of the debate topics that the National Speech and Debate Association wants students to debate.
It's still on their website right now.
It's not whether or not affirmative action is good for black Americans.
The question students had had to debate.
How has affirmative action helped black Americans?
Are you kidding me?
Dead serious.
So the two sides of the debate are it's helped them this way or it's helped them that way.
Right.
Oh, that's amazing.
And you know, we have our views- Wait, wait, wait.
Who hosted this debate?
This is the National Speech and Debate Association.
This is the largest debate- Can you send this to me?
I will.
Actually, this would just be- When was this?
This was posted online about a year ago.
Wow.
Send that to me today.
I will.
I'm actually- Pretty interested in that.
You and I have our views about affirmative action.
This is not about that.
Going back to the illegal immigration point, we ought to have a debate on whether affirmative action is good or not.
Oh, that's the heart of the debate.
Right.
It's the heart of it.
As opposed to the question of how it's good.
It actually has a big impact on the culture, even in the culture amongst conservatives, because that's a big part of why, I believe.
Affirmative action is one of these sacred cows you're not supposed to touch.
There isn't a Republican presidential candidate in US history, even in recent history, who has pledged, as I have, to end affirmative action in America.
I pushed the Trump team on this, including the policy team as to why they didn't take this on.
They said it's not a political hill they wanted to die on.
I disagree with that, but you can understand why.
If the scope of debate, I mean, in some ways, the way a debate question is posed defines the Overton window, right?
Correct.
Okay, here's one end, and here's the other end, and you can have at it.
But right now, the Overton window is the idea that you can debate how affirmative action has helped Black Americans, but no further than that.
Right.
It's interesting, and it also actually highlights to me how you can use This is sort of a deeper analogy here I'm about to make, but interrupt me if it doesn't make sense to you.
I think the Trojan horse model that the illiberal left has used for the last half decade, which is to take some of the values that People who are either adherence to classical liberalism or conservatism embrace.
Let's take free speech here as an example.
But to co-opt that, to advance an agenda that's antithetical to the thing that it appears, they actually embrace.
So we see this with free speech, we see this with capitalism.
But on the free speech side, so we're having debate.
Guys, we're embracing open debate.
And so it looks like it checks the box of believing in free speech.
But the way the question is itself framed involves a presupposition, an answer to the question, asserting a conclusion that almost uses the appearance of debate to legitimize that fact.
When in fact, there was no space for debate in the first place.
And that's a big part of what we see going on with so-called capitalism as well.
I mean, this is...
My most recent career as a warrior against ESG through the market is to say that, okay, you guys said you want a shareholder primacy and free markets determining how people actually make corporate decisions.
Well, great.
We'll just say that we're using the free market when in fact it wasn't the free market at all.
It was government tilting the scales of whether or not particular asset managers won mandates from large pension funds that then required implementing agendas through the back door that couldn't be implemented through the front door on emissions caps or whatever.
But again, conservatives have their tongue twisted and not because, wait, that's the free market now saying that we are adopting these environmental social agendas.
Same thing here is, okay, we're having debate.
Guys, we're having an open debate, but the way the question is framed itself belies the actual value you're supposed to protect.
And I think that's – it's an interesting move.
I mean before we sort of complain about it and enter despair, it's just interesting to observe.
Absolutely.
That's sort of a tactic of I think the modern progressive left.
I think a lot of the Chinese agenda in the United States I think makes a similar move is, okay, if you can't beat them – Act like you're joining them.
Embrace the things that they fetishize, but turn it into a golden calf, which allows them to worship at what ends up being a hollowed out husk of itself, a false idol.
And whether that's free speech or whether that's capitalism, we're able to trick the other side into actually bowing at the temple that they think they're bowing at, but they're actually bowing at our temple instead.
Does that sort of make sense to you?
Absolutely does.
And so, how do you cut through that?
Right?
Because you say we're at a debate, so you could say you're not going to participate in that debate.
Right.
But then you're the illiberal one now.
Yes.
You're the one who's rejecting and engaging in free speech.
So this is the puzzle.
Right.
What's the way through that?
It's tough.
I've spoken to so many students who just left debate as a result of this, as freshmen and sophomores in high school, because they couldn't stand being in an environment where free speech was constantly under attack, whether it was the topic that was being posed, the way it was framed, or whether it was the judges, right?
We're talking about if you use the term illegal immigration or one judge said to a student in a paradigm, I'm open to hearing conservative views, but please be careful.
Wow.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
And they tell, you know, so that's a really, really big problem.
I don't even know much about your politics.
Are you politically conservative or no?
I would say so, yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Got it.
And your parents?
I would say so, yeah.
Yeah.
And they came as immigrants, a Colombian?
My father's American.
Oh, your father's American.
Grew up in South Florida.
My mother came from a small town in Colombia.
It's kind of the oil capital, Barranca Bermeja.
And, you know, they love this country.
And they've seen what's happened.
But For me, what drove me to do this originally was the socioeconomic hurdles for so many students.
And it's not just one race.
Any student whose parents work, who cares, right?
What kept me in this fight was free speech and merit.
One last example.
There's a judge in a paradigm.
Again, this is all public information with their names on it.
So you can see where they represent who they are.
But said, if the debate is a tie, I will resort to affirmative action.
Oh, really?
As in racial equity for who wins.
Racial equity.
Yeah, as a tiebreaker.
And what does it mean for a debate to be a tie?
And what does it mean to say that prospectively about whether the debate was actually going to be a tie if it really was a tie?
Just put yourself in the perspective of somebody who's a judge says this, okay?
Is that if it's a tie, I'm going to use race to settle it, but you're also the person now prospectively judging it.
Are you really judging it?
No.
Through those merits?
I mean, that's a farce, actually.
It's kind of the way our culture works today, though.
It's interesting.
It really is.
And, you know, it hurts the students that they're trying to help the most.
Because now you have a team of young black students, the ones that I coached in Miami Gardens… And they get the win, Vivek.
They win that round.
But now they're constantly worried, did I win because of a racial equity?
Of course, yeah.
Or did I win on the merit?
And this is the tyranny of merit, kind of an interesting phrase, you know?
But this is what it is.
It's a form of psychological slavery.
Yeah.
I think that that's – it's an injustice to everyone who was involved in that but for different reasons.
Right.
What do you think it does?
I mean, let's just take the argument for the other side.
I vehemently reject it, but let's just get it on the table where they'll say something like these black kids grew up in tough circumstances in a systemically racist system and that we need to build up their self-confidence so that they then have the self-confidence to actually compete in a system but let's just get it on the table where they'll say something like these black kids grew up in tough circumstances in
And, you know, the counter-argument would be, well, you're not going to permanently make it fair because the world works as the way the world works is rewarding producers – Now, one counterargument rebuttal to that is they'll say, no, no, no, we're actually going to make the whole world fair and that's why that system of affirmative action pervades the entire economy.
But suppose that doesn't work and that results in national decline.
Some other people who would say that, no, no, no, this shouldn't last forever, but we need to do it.
So like the more so-called reasonable people here on the other side would say that – Yes, it's true that we can't have an economy that persistently works this way.
That's true.
But at a younger age, you need to give those black kids at least the self-confidence of what it feels like to win.
So even if they wouldn't have won according to blind criteria, you nonetheless need to give them the experience of winning to give them that self-confidence.
I know what my response to that is, but I want to hear yours.
What would you say in response to that?
What I would say is do what Incubate Debate is doing.
Go into these schools, work with the teachers, work with the students, host workshops to give them the confidence so every student can win on their own merit.
Don't lie to them.
It's lying.
Make no mistake.
It is lying to them, and they're deluded, and they're going to end up creating this tension between them and other students where they're going to end up On the outs.
Diversity, equity, inclusion webinar every quarter and that kind of tells our judges, right?
Wink, wink, racial equity, affirmative action in your judging decisions than it is to actually invest resources and boots on the ground to visit these underserved Title I high schools all across this country and work with the students to get them to that level where they can truly win on their own merit.
And they don't have to worry, did I win because the judge had some agenda?
There's deeper questions here where I think that's very noble.
And I think that that is something I would get behind.
I am behind.
Thank you for what you do and I'm pretty excited about it.
I think the reality is that's still, to me, a bit of a rosy picture because these kids did not grow up, many of them, in the family circumstance that you and I do.
70-plus percent of black kids are born into single-parent households.
Correct.
Unlike you and I, who enjoyed the ultimate privilege of having a family foundation with two parents who valued education, that's the real privilege.
We didn't grow up in Monty Aydin either, just like you.
But that is a privilege that many black kids are missing.
And even as late as high school, I guess...
It's better than nothing, for sure.
But what's your experience?
Like, honestly speaking, do you think it's salvageable if you have kids that grew up in a different family culture that didn't at home place the same value in education, that at home didn't have the same two parents?
Like, you're moving the needle definitely a little bit.
And if it's going to be moving, it's definitely in the positive direction.
But how much is possible against the backdrop of the family situation and the breakdown of the family in Black America being what it is?
Yeah.
My faith tells me that everything is salvageable and we should never throw in the towel when it comes to the importance of family, the privilege that you and I benefited from.
What I would say is this Open dialogue, this civic engagement has the opportunity to bring families together.
So I'll give you the one example.
There's a young girl who participates in our debate league.
Her parents were separated.
When she started competing with Incubate Debate and they came to the tournaments together to watch their daughter up there talking about the Second Amendment, talking about the Tenth Amendment, talking about federalism, doing that time and again over the course of the year, they got back together.
The mom and dad did.
The mom and the dad.
Right.
That's an unbelievable story, man.
And it's, you know, it's not just debate, right?
We need to have these.
So they were separated.
They were separated.
Unbelievable.
And so, but it's not just debate.
What an analogy, right?
Debate.
You can bring the country together, but it put up, and just out of curiosity, you're saying this is not a well-to-do family.
No.
Okay.
This is very much circumstances that you and I grew up in.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, it's not just debate, but we talk about the academic achievement gap.
Let's also talk about the extracurricular gap.
This is where families spend time on a Saturday at a football game, at a chess tournament, at a debate tournament.
If we can bring families and invite them together, one thing that we're starting to do at our upcoming tournaments is childcare.
And that's been a really big thing.
So we are going to have a childcare room.
So for that mother who has three young kids who wants to be there with the grandmother and the uncle, we are going to provide childcare so she can actually be there, watch her daughter, watch her son, and really have the sense of family unity and pride.
I like that.
Do you get the sense that – I guess one of the goals of debate is persuasion.
Do you get the sense that somebody who shows up at one of these things or a high school kid changes their mind from time to time on a subject?
Or do you think that that's not something that happens even in the best of scenarios?
Happens all the time.
Really?
Good.
Maybe the best example of it was the parental rights bill in Florida.
We had a debate.
This was in May of last year at our state championship.
And the question was around the question of whether the parental rights bill, which was, you know, restricting the discussions about those issues in K through three, whether that was a good or bad thing, whether that should continue.
I have never had more students and more parents blow up my phone about why this topic should be taken down.
That it was fascist.
Oh, wow.
Even the debate.
Even the debate about it.
Right?
And I thought, you know, and I was kind of priding myself like, you know, these kids have grown so much.
Having these discussions, getting this perspective, hearing from law professors and members of our armed forces, getting feedback on their debates.
But that derangement, much like we saw in 2015, that derangement over parental rights was a step too far for us.
So we got calls by coaches, by parents, by students that they were not going to come unless we scrapped this topic.
Of course, we did not scrap it.
Several of the students ended up coming after we provided a detailed research packet like we do with all of our tournaments about the ins and outs.
I thought best case scenario, the debate would be 80-20 split.
We don't force kids to say something they don't believe in.
So I thought 80% were going to say that the parental rights bill was a fascist bill, right, and should not pass, and 20% were to stand by it.
That debate, Vivek, was 50-50.
A month later, after the threats, the boycotts, and all of that, after they actually sat down and put down Twitter and put down the headlines and the histrionics and actually read through what was a seven-page bill in Florida.
There's many like it across the country.
This is a pro-family piece of legislation that is not controversial at all.
But it took a setting like that to actually smoke that out, right?
Absolutely.
And a lot of that was filtered through the media.
I mean, the bill that you correctly described through its actual title was dubbed by the media, Don't Say Gay.
Right.
Sometimes you got to make something rhyme to make a trend on social media or even get on actual cable news these days.
But actually, if you engage in – let's just take off the gloves and engage in actual debate about what the truth of it is.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we're not here – I'm conservative, unapologetically so, but I'm not here to change anyone's mind to believe what I believe.
I am here to facilitate open dialogue and debate.
And if that means an issue goes from 80-20 to 50-50 on its own merit, you know, we're not forcing kids.
We're not telling them you have to switch sides.
We're not saying you have to represent something you don't believe in.
But I suspect the same forces that Adam Smith so prominently talked about in 1776, right – This idea of the invisible hand, the idea of the free market, the open economy, competition, that also plays into this, right?
So if a student goes up there, has nothing to stand on, on this parental rights bill, they can't win the tournament.
They realize that through their research that there's no substance behind this don't say gay opposition.
That the only thing for them to do was to switch the side that actually represented the facts and the realities on the ground.
Vice President Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, come out, the second gentleman, and talk to our students, along with Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice, talk with our students.
So we bring in both sides, and we really want the open dialogue and competition.
And we see your students, they're in Florida.
They're in Florida.
They're in Florida.
And what we're doing – And it goes on spring semester.
When does the spring semester version of this end?
This will end in May.
Okay.
And how much time does it take for you in between now and then?
In terms of – It's time commitment for you.
Oh, time commitment is probably about 15, 20 hours a week.
Okay.
Not nothing.
It's not nothing.
And we do a summer program as well.
So we'll do our fifth annual free summer debate camp this summer at five different locations.
And the idea is to bring people together to have these discussions.
But, you know, we've got some upcoming debates.
One on AI, which is – Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
What impact will AI have on education in America?
And the interesting part is that one will be out of the Overton window, right?
Yes.
Or squarely within it to say, which is – There you're going to have to be able to have actually a rich, open debate because it's not the topic where the sides have already ossified.
Right.
That's cool that there are still spaces, and it's interesting to cultivate almost the skill set amongst kids these days.
It's probably better to find – I mean, I think we need to change the culture, but put that to one side.
If we take the current culture as granted, but we still want to build the skill sets you want to build amongst these kids, it's kind of sad that you have to find those kinds of topics.
That there's still enough controversy or opportunity for difference in opinion, but outside of the pale of the kinds of controversies you're not allowed to actually debate anymore.
I predict that'll actually be one of the better ones.
Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun.
Yeah.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
That's exciting, man.
So, probably reforming the Federal Reserve would still be another one of those topics, at least for the time being.
I know that's a topic near and dear to each of our hearts.
Right.
Related to how you may have gotten your first major job opportunity.
That's true.
About a Fed rate decrease way back in the day.
Should we talk about that a little bit before we wrap up?
Because I know you have many different sides to your background and we've talked a lot about your nonprofit work.
But maybe a little bit about your day job as an investor and an observer of markets.
Maybe we'll switch gears to that for a second before we wrap.
My own view is that If we are to learn anything from the current moment we're in, as we're having this conversation, some market instability, seeded by public concern about the stability of banks in the United States and in Western Europe, one of the major lessons we need to learn is that the Federal Reserve Has badly screwed up the project of trying to hit two targets with one arrow.
Right.
Inflation and unemployment.
They've done a very poor job of it, but part of my view is that it's not just that they've executed their job poorly.
It's that that was itself the wrong mandate.
To begin with, largely because it's based on flawed data.
It's like old New Zealand data compiled by British people a century ago that says that there's a trade-off.
To think that that's extrapolable to a modern economy is itself an error.
And then even if it were true, that it's possible for an omniscient central planner or a dozen of them in a Federal Open Markets Committee or whatever, Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee to play God.
And the results speak to the fact that that's been a disastrous experiment, probably contributing in some ways to the 2008 financial crisis, again, to the instability now where the Fed takes these Really, what are trailing indicators like wage growth late in a business cycle?
treat them like a leading indicator such that when you see wage growth, you tighten interest rates precisely when the business cycle was about to be self-correcting in its own right, but you turn what would have been a perfectly smooth cycle into a boom-bust bailout cycle that gets us exactly what happens to repeat itself over and over again.
You have 20,000 people that show up or 22,000 people that show up to work with at the Federal Reserve System doing a job they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
It It just exacerbates the problem through this managerial bureaucracy.
That's my diagnosis of the current state of play and I have my views on what I'm going to do as president about it.
You're a sophisticated observer of financial markets.
You've been watching the Fed for the better part of a decade, a decade and a half.
Share with me your perspective.
We're in the middle of this, in the thick of this capital market instability on the back of concerns about bank stability.
I place a lot of that blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve.
What's your take on it, man?
My take is the Federal Reserve is just trying to do too much.
It's trying to do too much and they're micromanaging.
So I think the best way to think about this is to go back to 2019 and you had what the Fed called a mid-cycle adjustment, which is a fancy way for saying we're going to cut rates not because we anticipate recession, but simply because we think we're going to take out some insurance because the Trump trade war might not be going as planned and so on and so forth.
But one of the main things they cited in those mid-cycle adjustments, which are three rate cuts, it was July, September, and October of 2019, was that inflation was too low.
Their 2% target, inflation was 1.7%.
So here's the issue.
Is that not only is it maybe the wrong target, but at the same time, they're trying to micromanage it down to the decimal point.
We're going to cut rates, we're going to raise rates, whatever it is, because inflation is off by two-tenths or three-tenths is fundamentally the wrong way to think about it.
And I think about the crisis too, right?
I put a lot of blame you do at the Federal Reserve, but I do as well at Congress and for the Federal Reserve enabling the congressional largesse that we saw with the COVID bailouts.
Now, the CARES Act was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate, and I think it made a lot of sense in the moment, right?
We had no idea what was going on.
It was the middle of March.
We had to shut the economy down.
Unemployment next month went to nearly 15%.
Maybe it made sense to, again, risk doing a little bit too much versus too little.
But then a year later, after unemployment had gone from 15 down to 6, over 100 million Americans had gotten vaccinated.
Kids were back at school.
Businesses were open in large parts of the country.
What does President Biden come do?
He passes the American Rescue Plan.
What was there to rescue?
The markets, the economy, the capitalism, right?
All of that was working its way to fix this problem.
What ended up happening was he prolonged the labor shortage by paying Americans not to work up through September of 2021.
You'll remember that in the summer of 2020, the expanded unemployment benefits were – estimated that two out of three workers were making more on unemployment benefits than they were going to work.
They were in no rush to go back to work.
And that exacerbated the labor shortage that in many ways has contributed to the inflationary situation today.
So I look at the Federal Reserve for coming out, Chair Powell saying, Congress needs to do more.
The risk of doing too much is less than the risk of doing too little.
And not just his words, Vivek, but his actions.
Well, one was cutting rates to zero.
That's fine.
I agreed with that move.
Again, in the middle of a crisis where we could look like an actual sudden stop, a real Great Depression-esque crisis, it made sense to throw the kitchen sink at it.
But when it became clear in the fall of 2020 that things were on their own getting back to normal, we then had a normalized monetary policy.
I had a lot of faith in Chair Powell that he, being a guy from private equity, being a guy from the investor background that you and I were, would not have fallen victim to the kind of academic Theories that has for too long afflicted the Federal Reserve.
Those 20,000 people at the Federal Reserve have developed research on all these types of fancy-sounding economic theories, and one of them is the idea of forward guidance.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
It irritates the heck out of me.
Yeah.
All it is is a promise.
Oh, it is – and people cling on to every word.
I mean, you just take a step back if somebody came to this – somebody were, you know, Rip Van Winkle and then woke up from the early – from the 70s or 80s now, watching us cling to the words of these soothsayers who are supposedly the omniscient and that it feeds their ego, Makes them think they're omniscient because as many people pay attention to them.
People pay attention to them.
You know this as well as I do.
Market participants, not because they have some insight about the truth.
It's just a question of how much they're going to screw it up.
And market participants want to know that.
And yet that has the impact on their psychology of actually feeding their false ego when the results that stare them in the face would tell them that they've done a horrendous job of it over the last 25 years.
People pay attention to them.
We need to fix it.
I mean, my view is I'll cut 90% of the staff of the Federal Reserve.
Sure.
The remaining still couple thousand people that would work there, put them back on the task of stabilizing the US dollar.
That includes serving under rare circumstances as the lender of last resort.
That's part of what stabilizing the dollar would involve.
But that's it.
It's a unit of measurement.
The same way that we wouldn't have started this podcast on time if time were a floating currency, right?
The number of minutes and an hour, if that were to float, we wouldn't show up at meetings on time.
Well, the dollar instability, this is my perspective at least, contributes to misallocations of capital that in turn become impediments to GDP growth.
That is the sole role of a proper Federal Reserve rather than this pattern that you see whenever you create an agency.
Never does it reduce its scope.
It only ever expands over the course of time decided with this academic managerial class that took over in the late 1990s.
That somehow balancing inflation and unemployment were something that they could omnisciently achieve.
Correct.
And the disastrous results should at least – I mean, it's one thing to make a mistake.
It's another thing to make a mistake over and over again for 25 years.
It's another to not learn from it.
Correct.
And actually do something about it.
In a sitting from where I said, I think part of the problem is that most people who even assume the presidency don't actually have an understanding of the issue and then lack the conviction then to follow through and see it through when their policy advisors or whatever who are creatures of the same swamp tell them you can't do that.
I think it's part of why we need people who have conviction to actually see that through, which brings us back to skill sets that we failed to build long ago in our civic culture, our civic culture going all the way back to basic primary education where people forgot to evaluate ideas on their own merit, which brings me back to, you know, what is the – what it is in the importance of what you do in your civic capacity and hopefully training the next generation not to be as stifled as many in ours have what is the – what it is in the importance of what you do in your
Absolutely.
And, you know, you think about kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?
Civic disposition is nearly near the top, right?
But what we're trying to do with incubate debate now is take the same two Sort of assets that have really helped us.
One of them is an ability to connect with young people and leverage the existing relationships we have with schools, with administrators, and school districts.
So what we're launching on Monday actually is our Not Even Once in School Assembly Series.
And this is talking about the dangers of fentanyl for young people.
This actually started by accident.
We had a debate a couple of months ago about the opioid epidemic, about whether harm reduction or abstinence was the more effective way for tackling addiction.
And what we found was it was an incredibly fascinating and informative debate, but there was a very wide knowledge gap where students walked in with the knowledge and then walked out with so much more.
So many students had no idea what fentanyl was.
And this is anecdotal.
We wanted to put a number to it.
So we conducted a statewide survey in February that asked 320 students in Florida about this issue.
Seven in ten, Vivek, said that their school had not spoken to them about fentanyl.
Half did not even know that counterfeit pills like Xanax, Percocet, the things that are being peddled to them on Snapchat, were being made with lethal fentanyl.
Unbelievable.
And it's incredible.
So what we've been spending the last couple of months on is building out a statewide series of assemblies where we're going into schools and we're walking into the wind.
The reason why is that – do you remember the D.A.R.E. program?
Of course.
The D.A.R.E. program.
What was the – how were they trying to convince you not to do drugs?
What was their talking points?
Just say no.
Just say no.
Why?
Why?
Well, drugs are bad for you.
Right.
They're addictive.
They'll ruin your life.
And you hear all the stories of people who had done drugs and bad things that happened to them.
Correct.
That was my experience of it.
Mine as well.
And, you know, if you smoke weed, you're not going to get into college.
If you, you know, smoke or drink, you're not going to be able to have that dream job as a surgeon.
But we knew that that was all exaggerated, right?
It was histrionic.
And that has created a culture where so many young people that we're trying to talk to, not just us, but so many other great organizations are walking into the head, walking into the wind because they're deeply skeptical, right?
Ten years ago, don't smoke weed because you're going to get very, very sick or you're going to get addicted or whatever.
You're going to lose your job.
Now, you've got college professors smoking weed on the job, right?
So that's the issue.
But then they conflate that with anything you're going to be told on, fentanyl and Percocet, etc., on the list.
And this is so – we can have a debate someday about the substance of the drug war and all of that, but this is different.
Fentanyl is a totally different animal.
It is.
And I think there's a reason why – and so when you do have this discussion, I mean my humble suggestion is make sure you include in that conversation at least an open debate about how much of this is really supply-side driven.
Correct.
Because it's no accident that we have seen a spike in the fentanyl epidemic precisely when China decided it was in its policy interest to wage a modern opium war in the United States by making the inputs – there's about four key inputs.
But by providing them inexpensively to Mexican drug cartels and even coming over, sending Chinese people to Mexico to synthetically create fentanyl.
to understand there's actually going to be far more harmful to the US than where its prior focus was in the so-called drug war.
But actually to use that to undermine the United States from within, now resulting in 100 plus thousand deaths, largely with Chinese fingerprints all over them, with Mexican drug cartels crossing over the border.
One of the kind of arguments I hear is, well, we have demand for it.
Let's address that.
I don't argue against that, but – It rejects the truth of the matter, just empirically of what's happened is when the profit margins for the drug cartels went up, they decided to actually, because they got the inputs more cheaply from China, they're actually able to have an incentive.
Correct.
To push more of it across the border.
And there's no doubt that there's a component of this, at least no doubt in my mind, that this was supply-side driven.
But make sure that that – I would suggest making that a part of the debate in terms of how you take this on.
That belongs on the menu of something that people are, I think, not particularly paying close attention to today, but, you know, ought to be in the conversation and it's where I'm focused from a presidential perspective as well.
Absolutely.
And I would just note on the demand point because you're absolutely right about these precursors.
And you know what the number one cities in China that produces these precursors of fentanyl is?
Where?
Wuhan.
Oh, is it?
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
It's a form of bioterrorism if you think about it.
Exactly.
So they gave us the pandemic.
I didn't know that.
So the city in China that produces – I think there's a couple of critical precursor ingredients.
Correct.
For synthetic fentanyl is Wuhan.
Is Wuhan.
Do you know what those are?
Those ingredients?
The two that are produced in Wuhan?
It's an acronym.
It's a long-sounding… But these precursors, they get sent to Mexico.
And the reason why fentanyl is so dangerous is because from a law enforcement perspective, whether it's on the interdiction side, they're looking out.
out.
It's all set up to look out for the size of what you're trying to bring in.
The potency of fentanyl is 50 times that of heroin.
Therefore, it's 50 times smaller.
Therefore, it's 50 times more profitable.
This is the most profitable investment somebody could make in the world.
You could turn $3,000 of precursors into over a million dollars of product that is on our streets.
I'd love to share a couple of stories with you.
I have some photos of some victims.
Yeah.
And a lot of these young people don't know actually what they're taking.
So the first young man that you see there, I had the pleasure of meeting his mother in DC a couple of weeks ago.
She was at the state of the union.
His name is Zach Didier, 17 years old.
He's from California and he had never tried drugs before.
So there goes kind of the whole demand addiction argument.
He bought a fake Percocet, what he thought was a Percocet on Snapchat.
On Snapchat.
On Snapchat.
Now remember, this is unbelievable.
These are the same social media companies that have the entire AI power to shut down a mask debate or a vaccine debate.
No issue with that.
But when it comes to shutting down these dealers who are peddling this poison, killing our young people, there's no, no bravery on that front.
Right.
No effort.
He was an Eagle Scout, star of his track and field team, soccer team, led his high school musical.
He always wanted to help other people.
His mom told me that he had almost a moral obligation to share the knowledge that he accumulated.
He got into UCLA a couple weeks after he passed.
And the Percocet, like so many drugs out there, he didn't know he was buying fentanyl.
These drugs are indistinguishable to career DEA agents, let alone to 17-year-olds like Zach.
You have Daniel Puerta Johnson, 16, from California, April 2020. He bought what he thought was an OxyContin on Snapchat again.
He had a ton of friends, was incredibly charismatic.
Which is itself a problem, by the way.
Correct.
But it actually was – was it fake again?
It was fake again.
Unbelievable.
Right?
He did not struggle with drug use.
First responders tried CPR, but he was on life support and passed a few days later.
Brianna Scott was 18.
She's from Georgia.
She ordered one Percocet on Snapchat, which she thought was a Percocet, indistinguishable from the real Percocet.
She split it in half with a friend.
Her friend lived.
She died.
Think about that.
The same pill.
These pills are cut in coffee grinders, right?
In living rooms.
You think it was just chance?
Yeah.
Well, it was a fentanyl pill.
Okay.
Right?
But I'm just talking about the quality control here, right?
So, what ends up happening is the precursor is kind of – I'm just trying to understand even descriptively because I've come from the pharmaceutical world in my prior life.
You're saying that literally it was like fentanyl was concentrated in the half of the pill that she took.
That's right.
Wow.
You see that encapsulation all the time.
It's just like – it's just – it's relatively just like – That shoddy, even in terms of the way they're just stuffing it.
Now, who's doing it?
Who's actually selling that?
Right.
So, what'll end up happening is we start in Wuhan.
We start with the precursors.
They come to Mexico.
Then we have Sinaloa and Jalisco, new generation.
They're cutting the fentanyl.
They have literally people in warehouses, whatever.
In warehouses, in Including people from China, I'm told.
Absolutely.
Okay, there's a guy writing a book on this that's coming out next year, and he's doing the research on this.
But in my conversations with him, he says that there's, you know, hundreds of Chinese people from China.
Right.
Who are purposefully there with the cartels to assist them in doing this.
The cartels are not skilled chemists.
Right.
And Wuhan actually prides itself on chemistry, on agro-science, right?
So all of that comes into this.
So they actually have to go there oftentimes.
And when did this relationship begin between – I don't know.
The biggest thing to take into account was fentanyl that was in the US five, six years ago, a lot of it came directly from China.
And that's where you had high purity.
The DEA tested the fentanyl on average from China, had a 90% purity.
The fentanyl coming from Mexico has a 7%.
Why?
Because it's being cut with antihistamines.
It's being cut with Benadryl, right?
And then it's being sent across.
So a lot of the fake Benadryl might have fentanyl in it.
No, no, no.
No, it's simply being used.
But by the same – They're breaking down the Benadryl and cutting the fentanyl with it.
So then they move that product into the US to then press the pills.
The pill isn't pure fentanyl.
Oh, got it, got it, got it, got it.
It's just their vector.
It's just their Trojan horse to get it across.
But then they know how to cut it so they can get the fentanyl back out.
No, sorry, sorry.
So...
You can't have a pure fentanyl pill.
Only two milligrams of fentanyl will kill someone.
And a pill, of course, as you know from your background, is a lot more than that.
So what they'll do is they'll mix the fentanyl with a cutting agent, right?
Oftentimes, that's Benadryl because of the antihistamine properties to it.
And then in the U.S. or either in Mexico, they'll press those into pills that resemble OxyContin, that resemble Percocet.
I see, I see, I see.
That are then sold to dealers who are then sold on Snapchat and delivered even quicker than an Uber Eats delivery to a young person here.
Now, what's the point of doing that?
Like, what is their purpose?
It just seems – I mean, it seems like they're – It's almost as though the purpose is to wreak death.
I mean, the profit motive alone doesn't explain that means of doing it.
Well, I think they figured that statistically, it works itself out, right?
Statistically, it works itself out.
A lot of them, by the way, don't even know.
What do you mean those?
So what I mean by that is if you go out and spend and make $10,000 in a weekend selling fake Percocets to people and one or two of them or three of them die, right?
You lose three customers, but you've netted hundreds of others, right?
So they don't care.
They just don't care.
And part of it, too, is these are not skilled people.
Just to give you another point, why – Sully it.
Why purposefully sully it with a little bit of fentanyl when it's not that it could have made the same amount of money even if they hadn't done that, right?
So that's a great question.
It's because of potency.
It's because of potency.
Without fentanyl, it doesn't give you what the reaction that people want.
So it's a cheap way to bring in something potent.
So it's just for the user experience.
For the user experience, right?
And it's so much cheaper.
Again, one kilogram of fentanyl is equal to 50 kilograms of heroin.
It's just COGS goes down.
Cost of goods goes down.
Absolutely.
And the utility of the addiction and the customer goes up.
So it may – from the cartel perspective, may actually just be a self-interested economic point.
That's what it seems like.
From the Chinese perspective – You know, you can speculate more, but I have my views on the intentionality of this.
The intentionality is a big part of it.
The most important thing.
The Wuhan part I didn't know about.
Yeah, that's a fascinating thing.
Can you send me some info on that, actually?
I absolutely will.
And to just talk about how indistinguishable the pills are, I want to talk a little bit about our last individual here.
He was 13 years old, Vivek.
13, unbelievable.
13. Luca was raised to care for others, started his first toy drive at five years old, fed the homeless with his mother.
He went on Snapchat to buy some weed, to buy some weed to cope.
Maybe it was, you know, again, he says the parents, it was a coping mechanism because of bullying.
So he went on Snapchat and what did the dealer say?
I've got something better that will help you even more.
I didn't realize Snapchat was such a distribution pipe.
It is.
Unbelievable.
It makes it very hard to prosecute too because the messages disappear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They go into the ether.
We'll meanwhile worry about someone misgendering someone.
Correct.
And again, misgendering or having a COVID debate on the platform.
He actually was concerned that the Percocet might have been fake.
So what did he do?
He took a picture of it, compared it to a screenshot of a real one.
Smart kid.
Smart kid.
Smart kid Luca was.
He took a picture and then still it looked similar enough that it tricked him.
It looked good enough.
He was convinced.
And we know this because his parents went through his phone afterward.
That was the last image in his camera roll on his iPhone.
This one for his Snapchat.
Exactly.
Oh my gosh.
Was comparing the real to what he thought was also real.
And...
On video, he actually recorded himself.
He crushed up what he thought was the real Percocet to look cool, recorded himself doing it.
The first line before he could start the second, his eyes rolled back and he passed away.
He was unconscious.
So these are four of the nearly 200 American citizens who are dying every single day from this poison.
It's a supply issue.
40% of it comes across the southern border.
You've taken an interest in this yourself.
Yes.
Since seeing it through the debate lens.
Yes.
I applaud you, man.
Thank you very much.
I applaud you.
This is your work.
It's our work.
We've got a great team as well at Incubate that are helping do this.
Our first event is on Monday at Hollywood Hills High School in Broward County.
We're going to have the DEA there, the FBI. But we're running the assembly.
It's a 20-minute assembly where we just talk about fentanyl.
The students who actually responded that survey reached out to a couple of them and asked, well, if they didn't talk about fentanyl Did you have a drug assembly?
And they said, yeah, we talked about weed and vaping for most of it.
90, rather 80% of fatal teen overdoses last year were fentanyl.
Really?
I didn't know that.
80% of fatal teen overdoses were fentanyl.
Were fentanyl.
Why is that not 80% of the assembly?
And that's what we've committed ourselves to do is this assembly is just about the thing that is killing nearly 200 Americans every single day.
It's interactive.
It is accessible.
We're not trying to preach to anyone.
We are trying to tell them and inform them that this is a real risk.
We're not telling them it's dangerous Vivek.
We are showing them these stories of these people and just how difficult.
One of the exercises we start off with is we have two translucent blue glasses.
I stand in front of them and I pour bleach in one and water in the other.
And then I come up, I mix them around, and I say, who wants a drink?
$1,000 cash right now, who wants a drink of this?
And we're dead serious.
Who wants to drink it?
The room is silent.
And then we go into the discussion.
And what the DEA has provided, Incubate Debate, is an image of 10 pills, 10 Oxycontin pills, four of which are fake.
We'll then offer the students $1,000 cash if they can figure out which ones are fake.
And the idea here is not to tell kids this is dangerous and this is going to get you killed.
Show them.
Show them.
Let them convince themselves the same ideas, the same persuasion.
Let them persuade themselves.
You're 28 years old?
I am.
You're an American hero, man.
I appreciate that.
I mean, we're well over time, but this is an amazing conversation.
And I just have a feeling we're going to be doing a lot more together.
I want to figure out how we can get more Gen Z Americans to love and care for this country as much as you have.
And I'm not even saying this to flatter you.
That's the least of it, actually.
It's just a genuine concern and curiosity, but also a sense of hope.
I mean, the fact that The fact that you are here, I think, speaks to a lot of people who wonder about what young Americans will become.
I think that you give us reason for hope.
And I hope that you're unafraid at every step of the way.
You're going to have your critics.
It's okay.
You know, you have thick skin if you're going to accomplish something in this world.
If you can't handle the heat, you stay out of the kitchen, but you're – you've entered the kitchen and I think that you're going to be hopefully the kind of guy that leads a lot of people in your generation to hopefully give us a country built on the principles that we care about, you and I both, and free speech and open debates at the top of that list.
You're leading the way.
You keep doing what you're doing.
And I think it'll be more powerful than quite possibly what anyone in this presidential race will do.
So I'm excited for you.
And hopefully we talk again.
Absolutely.
Thank you for the opportunity.
And it means a great deal.
Yeah.
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