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June 22, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
36:05
Megyn Kelly and Vivek Ramaswamy on The Power of Personal Responsibility | The TRUTH Podcast #34
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So I'm usually pretty ready with a response to a question I'll get on the campaign trail.
Sponsored by the WS.
Policy issues, I'm good.
Cultural issues, I usually have my views already formed.
But there's one recurring question, Iowa, New Hampshire.
You know, last night we did an event in Ohio.
Actually, it was our first fundraiser that we did for the campaign on our three-month anniversary of launching it.
We got the same question.
And I have to admit, I don't have a great answer.
I'm not sure the next US president can do anything about it either.
I'm not talking about woke culture.
I'm not talking about the merger of state power and corporate power.
I'm talking about the US energy sector, inflation, foreign policy, China, none of that stuff.
The question I get is, what are you going to do about I have to admit, it's a question that Stumps me a little bit.
The best I'm able to say is, look, I believe in the internet.
I think the internet decentralizes the provision of information.
But then again, there's now the means of accessing the internet that are themselves centralized, which then get captured by external forces, including the government itself.
I didn't have a great answer.
And that's why I was looking forward to a conversation with somebody who has done something that I haven't, which is to have lived in, grown up, professionally succeeded within the world of media itself, who's unafraid to speak truth On anything, including about media as well.
And as a friend, but I haven't had this conversation with her yet, and I'm looking forward to it.
So, Megyn Kelly, welcome to my podcast this time around.
I've been on yours many, many a time over.
Hi, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Looking forward to the chat.
Yeah, me too.
Where I can learn a thing or two from you.
I've got your answer.
Yeah, good.
All right.
Well, I'm eager for it.
Let's get right into it then.
Stay out of it.
That's really all you can do.
We don't need more government interference and the government can't help.
Can't help media.
Can only hurt.
You know, they're definitely not the solution to this massive problem.
I think the solution to this massive problem of, you know, dishonest media is media Darwinism.
That'll take care of it.
And it's already taken care of it.
CNN is collapsing.
Fox News is being punished for its disastrous Tucker decision.
MSNBC still has some viewers because that's where the leftists go.
But they will, the viewers figured out eventually, and they will punish the channels appropriately, and then they will find other outlets.
You know, media trust is at an all-time low.
The search for outside sources, we just saw this in this Harvard Harris poll, is greater than ever.
More independents are seeking their news outside of their old channels, like no more ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, no more for them.
More independents are seeking outside channels like the digital lane than ever before.
More Republicans are doing that than we've ever seen before.
Democrats are still watching TV, so they're still like dividing their eyeballs between all those channels I just mentioned.
And I think we really started to add to our problems when we started to have other performance of media like Facebook try to do little fact corrections on the ads, the political ads that were being run on it.
Like, no, just stay out of it.
You know, I agree with you on the government staying out of it.
I'm intrigued by your optimism on the market working this out.
I guess you're seeing it real time.
I mean, your own success through your channels of reaching people is probably a good testament to that.
But I guess it's fair to say then it sounds like you're pretty optimistic that the problems introduced by so-called media capture of narrative and the flow of information, that's not too high on your list of concerns just because you think competition is more or less working itself out.
Yeah, I think we're already correct.
We're well on our way to correcting it.
I think it was a bigger problem like five years ago than it is now.
Now, look, it's never been a problem for the left.
They're the ones who have all the institutions, so they can jam their narratives down our throats, and we've been sort of their prisoner.
Then Fox News was born and provided somewhat of an antidote.
Now, you know, it's a little wobbly.
But since, you know, even six years ago, the explosion of digital media, podcasting, radio as well, it's always been a sort of a hotbed for conservatism in a good way.
But look, right now, if you want to listen to anybody, like Glenn Greenwald is a liberal, but he's not woke and he fights these government institutions that have been, you know, corrupted, you can listen to him.
If you want to listen to Matt Taibbi, same thing.
If you want to listen to Ben Shapiro, you want to listen to me, you want to listen to you.
There's so many places that you can get us now where you don't have to surrender to...
These institutional rules that queer the debate, right?
And that's a good thing.
And I think that's as a result of consumer demand and a couple of intrepid, I don't know, just searchers like Glenn Beck.
You could name a few who have gone out into the space first and given it a try and created a lane for the rest of us.
I mean, I'm here because Ben Shapiro pulled me aside when I was post-NBC and said, MK, when you're making a decision about what to do next, this is a real lane for you.
And I was like, it is?
You know, podcasting?
What do you mean?
And he walked me through the numbers.
He showed me how to do it.
I'm like, you know what?
This is what I want to do.
I was so excited after meeting with him.
I'm like, I can be my own boss.
I can do the news the way I want it.
I don't have anybody pressuring me to do it this way or do it that way or say this or the other thing.
And there are many more just like me.
And I feel like this is the place for honest conversation.
And more and more people are getting it.
So yeah, I do feel hopeful.
I think the other things are dying.
And I'm glad about that.
And I feel like our lane is rising, and I think the future of media is with individual personalities and not these behemoth corporations.
Yeah, it does certainly seem to be moving that way.
It's kind of still fascinating to hear about your alluding to it.
Do you actually – I mean, this is interesting for me, right?
Now I'm interfacing with this as a political candidate and whatnot.
Do you get the sense that major networks broadly – it's not even a left-wing or right-wing thing – do have a – Sort of a top-down, invisible hand kind of thing going on internally?
Or do you think that, you know, what most of the people will say is that, no, they're totally independent and feel unconstrained to say what they do.
And you've been in that seat before, so it's like a pretty unique, and you're liberated now.
Look, when I was at Fox, there was more of an implicit understanding as to how you would cover the news.
And I honestly, I was okay with that bargain because Fox was an antidote to the left wing media bias that was everywhere else.
And my political sensibilities were more in line for the most part.
I mean, I started off more left leaning when I first joined Fox than I wound up.
But just, you know, that's what age and wisdom will do to you, in my view.
And plus, the country lost its ever-loving mind and moved far left.
So if you were a centrist, suddenly you were a conservative Republican by the end of that 10, 15-year period.
But I will say that it was more implicit at Fox than explicit.
At NBC, it was explicit.
I mean, they wanted the news covered this way.
And like take out your thoughts and your, you know, your take on the news and not replace it with like objective fact.
They would replace it with their take on the news.
And I remember thinking like, I can't do the news like this.
This is not going to work for me.
And my entire experience there was spent feeling like they were looking at me like it's not like the others.
It says things that the others don't say.
It does things that the others don't say.
And that was interesting.
So you think that's more the norm than not?
I mean, that's the sense I get, though it's not part of the prevailing narrative.
One point to push back on your...
I mostly share it, by the way, but to push back a little bit on your optimism of market solutions here, I suspect what your response is going to be.
If you just take Newsmax, for example, and some of the obstacles to Newsmax reaching consumers through its chosen medium, which is still cable, One America and Newsmax both were in the camp of AT&T and DirecTV taking governmental pressure to – at least it appears taking governmental pressure.
There's a hearing.
Congress calls them in, citing specifically this network and these two networks as to why you're carrying them.
And then lo and behold, the market later, the market makes the decision to remove them in due course thereafter, after the carriers had been threatened.
Does that – Does that kind of example worry you?
It's not that different than Twitter choosing to silence.
You could pick your favorite one.
Alex Berenson after the White House specifically called out Alex Berenson.
What's your take on sort of the governmental pressure angle here?
OAN has no right to be on DirecTV or with AT&T. They have no right to that.
They can easily just go the Daily Wire model tomorrow.
They don't need this outlet.
You can reach millions of viewers just by doing it, you know, by plugging in your computer and launching an internet company.
That's exactly what Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro did with Daily Wire.
They're not on a cable channel.
You know, the thing with Newsmax...
My understanding is they had a dispute with DirecTV because they wanted to get paid instead of paying DirecTV or at least just doing it for free.
And DirecTV didn't think they were worth it.
Well, that is market Darwinism.
That's okay.
You know, DirecTV is allowed to say, no, that doesn't work for us.
And I realize other people had suspicions about what the real reason was, but I have some good sourcing on it.
And I think that landed fine.
I think, look, the bigger you build your brand, like DirecTV could never get away with that if it were Fox News.
Because the audience, even though they're mad at Fox at the moment, they're still too big and too loyal to, So that works.
You know, net-net, it's going to work.
There are going to be a few players that don't have as much power who could get hurt.
And look, there's a reason they targeted OAN. You know, I don't watch OAN, but I understand it's a little bit more extreme in its politics, and that's fine.
There's a place for that.
But of course, if you're dealing with a company like AT&T, you realize you're more vulnerable.
So you better have a backup plan.
They should.
And, you know, the way things are going in this country, anybody who's on the right better have a backup plan.
That's why the people who are mostly on YouTube are now hedging their bets with Rumble, right?
We all see it coming.
They can't get rid of us all.
And so that – you put in a different category than maybe a higher level of concern you have with the government leaning on, say, Twitter for deciding what does and doesn't get posted.
That's sort of a different category.
I'm totally against that.
Yeah, I'm totally against what the government did there.
I don't think that this was the government leaning.
This wasn't the government at all.
This was a private company, DirecTV, saying, no, I don't like your deal.
I'm going to – I'm going to go book a new deal with The First, which is a conservative leading channel, which has got a lot of very popular personalities on it, from Bill O'Reilly to Dana Lash.
It's not like they replaced them with an MSNBC alternative.
So I genuinely believe the dispute with Newsmax was not about Newsmax politics.
It was about the number that they wanted.
Otherwise, why would they have replaced them with people like Bill O'Reilly?
It doesn't make sense.
Jesse Kelly is on The First.
I think the government needs to stay out of it.
Every time they interject themselves in these disputes, things get worse, not better.
Let the consumers decide.
Media has been very, very divided for a very, very long time.
We had sort of a honeymoon period in the 70s, 80s, and that's fine.
I think it was leftist even then, though not as bad as it is now.
And I think it's good to have fractured media.
People will figure out who they trust.
And yes, maybe we don't all agree on a basic set of facts, but those who want real facts, as opposed to just their worldview confirmed, We'll find them.
It's not that hard.
You listen to the Daily Wire in the morning and you listen to NPR. You know, you listen to both podcasts.
You get the times and you get the journal.
You spend a little time with Brett Baer in the evening and maybe you subject yourself to a little wolf blitzer.
You do what you have to if you really want facts.
So I want to switch gears for a second.
One of the big questions all over our mind is, of course, You know, the content and the future direction of our, what I'll call our movement, the conservative movement, pro-American movement.
We can apply what label we want to apply to it.
I think one of the fissures that I see, it's a little different than the traditional debates we're having within the Republican Party or whatever.
But I think the debate between whether we're really a party built and a movement built on Certain first principles around proceduralism, free market, free speech, classical liberal values, let's call it that.
Because I think that that's a strain that exists.
I think you and I share a commitment to those values in common.
But a moment that we're living in, I see this in the campaign trail a lot, Megan, where, you know, when I get questions like, oh, what do you think is going on with the media?
I think people are hungry for direction and leadership.
And For people who actually need some more substance to sink their teeth into.
This is something that I see a lot in traveling this country right now.
And it's interesting where there will be certain audiences, maybe like New Hampshire or other places, where you talk about the virtues of free speech, that the path to truth runs through free speech and open debate.
That's how we settle our questions.
That really gets certain people going.
I'm in that category.
But for certain people, that doesn't really do the trick anymore.
That's not quite enough, where we need more content, more substance of what it actually means to be a conservative.
I have my ideas on what should fill that void, the revival of family, the revival of faith, the revival of belief in a nation and patriotism, but sort of the content of something that stands in contrast to the left's I think that's something interesting I've noticed in the first three months of traveling the country,
talking to audiences, of seeing, I think, a You know, fissure means it seems like a conflict, but maybe two different camps in large conservative audiences, those who are actually just hungry for the revival of those classical liberal values that even a liberal in 1990 would have embraced versus this broader separate kind of hunger for purpose and meaning and actual identity to be filled by more than just the procedural values of classical liberalism.
So if we should shift gears a little bit, I just wanted to hear your reaction to that.
I know you're very thoughtful about questions like these.
I was curious for your take there because that's on my mind as we're heading back on the travel circuit campaign trail for the next few days.
And it was on my mind.
I'm curious for your thoughts on that.
Well, I mean, the way I view liberalism and what's annoying about it is it's like an enormous thumb that keeps trying to pin us down wherever we go in our lives.
They want to pin down our kids and tell our kids how to live.
They want to pin us down and tell us how to live.
They want to get us in our employment situation and tell us exactly how much taxes we need to pay, and it's a lot, and the kind of words that we can use when we're at the workplace.
Just everywhere you go, there's just like another thumb trying to pin you down.
And the way I view conservatism is there's no thumb.
It's hands-off.
You know, there might be a safety net under you, but there's no thumb coming down over you.
And to me, that's what's appealing about conservatism is I can be free.
In general, conservatives don't want to bother you.
They don't want to run your life.
They would like to make some suggestions to you, like maybe you should consider the introduction of faith into yours and your children's lives.
It might lead to something wonderful that would lead you without this vacuous hole that you feel the need to fill with Empty identity politics, et cetera.
Something to consider.
You might favor a smaller government approach where you are responsible for your life, not somebody else.
You will change the life as you want it, not some government bureaucrat.
But that's in direct contrast to liberalism.
And I just think it's so much more empowering.
That's what's attractive to me about the way conservatives govern, is it's more empowering.
And the other one is more belittling.
And one makes me feel good about myself and my children's prospects.
And one makes me feel terrible about myself, my children's prospects and my country.
You know, one is a massive downer and one is a massive upper.
There was a poll recently talking about how depressed liberals are and how they're way more depressed and likely to need psychiatric services and therapy.
Now, there's anything wrong with therapy, but way more so than conservatives are.
And it gets right to the heart of what you're saying and what I'm saying.
If you feel like you are in charge of your life and no one's coming to save you and you can change what's ailing you, it's a wonderful moment.
It's a great realization.
You want to start tomorrow and do it.
If you feel like it's somebody else's fault and I have to wait for them to fix their errors for my life to get better, it's depressing.
You feel disempowered.
You want to blame somebody else.
You feel resentful, which is a critical piece of what the left's messaging is today.
So that's the way I see it.
I don't know if that's too self-helpy for you, but that's how I see the two sides.
At the same time, I do think that when you think about the...
I guess when it comes to kids, this way you sort of put pressure on this a little bit, even from the conservative angle, right?
Like, what's your perspective on whether or not a social media product that Is known, let's say TikTok or whatever, to result in dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, etc.
amongst teens who are using it, maybe 15, 16 years old.
You know, put after 16 in a different category.
The free view of the world, some would say, and I don't subscribe to this, but the free view of the world is, hey, listen, that's up to parents.
Parents are supposed to decide what their kids do and don't use, but if the reality is that mechanism isn't actually delivering on...
The right outcome for kids, or let's just say, with respect to whether or not kids are going to go through gender conversion therapy, whether they're going to get through puberty blockers, chemical castration, surgical intervention, when a kid feels like they're born in the wrong body.
What's your perspective there when the outer limits of freedom only apply as we think about it to fully formed adults?
I think this is kind of where the rubber hits the road a little bit.
Is that in the realm of freedom for parents to be able to say that, no, my kid's actually going to go and get this gender conversion therapy and surgical intervention without the state telling me that I can't stop them from doing that?
You're on a sliding scale there.
So there's a big difference between, let's say, you must stick your kid with a COVID vaccine because I, the president, will tell you that's what he or she needs.
And you're free to chop off your son's penis when he's nine years old.
There's a big, big scale there between those two things.
And I think at one point, it's appropriate for government to pass a law saying, no, you may not actually harm your child in that way.
You may not cut off body parts of young children, any children, until they reach the age of majority, they can make their own decisions.
That, to me, seems like an appropriate government role to prevent the harm, that level, against children versus You know, most of the stuff to the other side of that, I'd probably be against government involving itself.
Like, I don't think, I don't like the TikTok ban.
I don't like TikTok.
My kids don't have any social media.
So it's not like I am in favor of it.
I'm not.
And I have a 13, a 12, and a 9-year-old.
But I do think it's up to the parents to regulate how their kids use a device that is ubiquitous in American society.
The solution is not going to work very well to do a whack-a-mole banning of the various apps.
TikTok, okay, fine.
It's not good.
But you know what?
Instagram's the one that's leading girls to want to kill themselves.
Snapchat, probably the most pernicious.
I've done so many stories on parents who have lost kids because of the bullying that goes on on Snapchat, but we're not going to ban each of these social media companies.
That's not going to work.
We're not going to do it.
It's America.
We're too pro-free speech and pro-freedom in general.
So on those, no, I think it comes down to good parenting.
People need to parent again.
Sorry.
I know you're tired.
Too bad.
You had them.
You raise them.
It's tiring.
It's hard.
Do it.
You know, everybody else needs to.
So do you.
I don't give those parents a pass.
You know, figure it out.
Try to find a way.
Yes, okay, he's got to have a phone because you got to pick him up and you got to know where.
Get him the phone.
Doesn't have to have social media.
You have to have social media for something.
You feel like he has to do it.
You have to submit to it.
Monitor it.
Make sure it's no more than 10 minutes a day.
They can live without TikTok.
They can live without Snapchat.
Anyway, so I just think we can't sort of shrug our shoulders and be like, well, the government, you know, he doesn't ban it.
No, do your job.
Yeah, that's totally the lazy answer, but the government get in there and ban it.
The shorter...
Version of the question though is, okay, that'd be great if that's what parents were doing across this country.
So many parents are not rising up to the role they're supposed to play, let alone, you know, the loss of the nuclear family structure altogether.
25% of households now living without dads in the house.
I mean, we can go all the way upstream, even two-parent households.
But that's not an invitation for government to come in.
I mean, you know how many kids are eating McDonald's every day?
You know how many kids are having the Big Gulp in their baby bottle in Appalachia?
They are.
Like, that's not an invitation for government.
I agree with you.
The harder question is, what is it an invitation for?
Fill in the blank.
And I think that that's actually the open question that remains unanswered where, okay, I got you.
We're on the same page.
Keep the state out of my hair.
But the fact of the matter is we open our eyes and that's the society we're living in.
What then actually drives that change?
What revival?
If not the government, and I agree with you, that's not the right answer.
That's the gaping hole where what I see amongst a lot of conservatives across the country, Megan, is that's what I was getting at in the beginning is a hunger for more than just the answer that we've often served, which is the government should not be involved in this.
I agree.
And that's what elected officials' jobs are, is to decide what the government does and doesn't do, and they should stay out of this.
But I think the hunger that I think a lot of people correctly have is a hunger for an answer for what then?
Got it.
But we see what we see.
What do we actually, as a culture, forget the government, what do we as a culture, as leaders in capacities outside of government, like what do we actually do against a state of affairs where we're seeing the breakdown, for example, is to stay on the issue of the family, the breakdown of the family, both in terms of parents exercising what their correct responsibilities ought to be in the way they bring their kids up, or even worse, the absence of family formation or the breakdown of the nuclear family altogether.
That's a hard question, it seems to me.
It is.
And if I had the answer, you know, I'd be something even more important than president.
I don't think it's going to come from government.
I do think it's going to have to come from the hearts of Americans struggling with these problems.
I do think we have a history of seeing when we hit rock bottom, then we change, you know, when there's enough suicides.
Thanks to Instagram, then the parents will pull the social media and say, we're not doing that.
Like, we've seen that in case after case, and clearly we're not there yet, but we're getting more and more information.
You know, that movie The Social Network was important.
The attention that's being called to some of these issues, that Facebook whistleblower, she was important.
Some of these stories I reference on Snapchat and so on that get out there, those are important as parents learn.
But it's not just what's happening to the children.
The parents are depressed, too.
You know, I mean, like, we need to make people pull themselves out of their depression in order to give them the skills to tackle these problems.
Otherwise, nothing will change.
And we're doing all the opposite things.
I mean, one of the reasons why identity politics is so pernicious, and one of the reasons I love how hard you fight against it, is because it leads to despair.
For all involved.
It's disempowering to the people of color, and it's offensive and depressing to white people who get blamed, or Asians, depending on the setting, who get blamed for the world's problems.
And it leaves you feeling like you can't change anything because you're born with original sin or you're born with original deficiencies that are impossible to overcome.
You know, people are depressed.
All these guys running around right now, They're depressed.
They've been told they're toxically male.
They're too white by coke, you know, whatever it is.
And they feel like, I guess I'm terrible and there's no behaving my way out of it.
So what do they do?
They start Googling and maybe they land on a Jordan Peterson video.
Good.
Good start.
Stay there.
Keep clicking.
He'll help you.
Oh wait, then you'll get called an insult by Olivia Wilde, one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and she'll make a whole movie about how pathetic you are.
That's effed up.
That's one of the problems of the left running Hollywood and controlling that national messaging.
I don't have a solution to that other than, again, back to the Darwinism.
Now we have the Daily Wire.
They're making different kinds of movies.
Right?
There are more and more, like my friend Mark Joseph is a conservative-leaning filmmaker who's making this movie, Reagan.
It'll have a different kind of messaging.
He also did the movie No Safe Spaces, which talks about the need for free debate on college campuses.
Like, the more we can get alternative viewpoints out there to reach out to these people who are suffering and tell them, don't listen to those people.
They're wrong.
The more empowered they'll feel, and hopefully the better their lives will be, But it's hard to inject self-help into someone's life from the outside.
You know, it has to come from within.
Yeah.
You know, you're someone who strikes me, Megan.
I think you have something that I think maybe more Americans...
We would do well with and it's not just a kid's thing.
It's even the parents that lack it is the parents are depressed.
But I think a lot of that comes from seems like we just live in this moment where there is a certain loss of self-confidence.
I think that that is upstream of a lot of the mental health epidemic.
You could say depression, anxiety, etc.
And then the hunt for woke ism or climatism or transgenderism.
I think these are all actually symptoms of a deeper loss of self-confidence and hunger for for meaning.
Where do you get your self-confidence from?
I'm just curious.
You seem like you've taken risks in your career.
I'm not here to talk about my story, but I find a lot of admiration for the way you've taken risks in your career, the self-confidence you bring in the show you put on every day.
What's your inner source of that?
You brought up the word self-help.
It doesn't have to come from the government, but it just comes from, you know what?
Let's say you're talking to a bunch of parents or a bunch of teenagers.
What's your perspective on where you derive your sense of self-confidence in hopes that somebody else might take something useful away from it?
Well, I would say the best gift I had was parents who never gave me any false praise or really any praise.
Yeah, we share that in common.
I like that.
You know, they just weren't that.
It was the 70s.
It was a different way of parenting back then, but never false praise.
And so if they ever did compliment me, I knew it was real.
And that helped me figure out what I actually am good at and what I'm not good at.
And also a sense of humor, you know, like You can't take this whole thing too seriously.
You can't take yourself too seriously.
Say you tried and you fell and you embarrassed yourself.
Okay, make it be your rocket fuel for your next adventure.
And that's true for people insulting you and attacking you and being jealous of you and trying to tear you down.
All of it's fuel.
It shouldn't be seen as a negative.
It should be seen as, oh yeah, okay, this is my secret juice that's going to make me even more powerful on my next encounter because how do you build up the muscles without tearing them down first?
We're framing everything wrong right now.
Everything wrong.
You know, we're telling people, as you know, you've heard the whole speech, but like leaning into victimhood and feeling sorry for yourself and feeling like everybody's out to get you.
I mean, I was just reading up about, it was one of these actresses who was at the Cannes Film Festival wearing nothing.
Nothing.
Literally, the breasts were out.
It was like, oh.
So I just did some Googling on this person.
It's like, who would do that?
Who would use their big moment in the sun to literally show their nipples?
Like, hello?
Where's your class?
And it was like, she's openly acknowledged she has ADHD and OCD and anxiety and autism and postpartum depression.
I mean, it was like, Okay.
I stopped listening when we got on, like, number four.
Okay?
So she doesn't have all that stuff.
She's just decided that there's cultural cachet and leaning into all this stuff.
And that same person, if I could spend a year with her, would say, I have none of that.
I have none of that.
I'm good.
Watch me act.
And she might actually wear a bra to her next big public appearance.
Why?
because I would try to show her that it's so much easier, more delightful, happier, funnier way of living.
If you can accept, we all have these little picadillos about ourselves and they're what make us interesting.
Who wants to be this perfect person who never fell down, who never had a bad moment, who never, whatever you take OCD.
Yes.
A lot of people have that weird thing where you've got to wash your hand five times.
It's not a disorder.
You know, it could just be something quirky about you.
People, they need to start embracing their weirdnesses and their failings and their disastrous moments as part of the mosaic that makes them an interesting person that's sticky, that people want to stick to, as opposed to somebody who's annoyingly perfect and you know they're actually not, and they're just hiding their stuff.
They're better at hiding it than you are.
Anyway, we've gone exactly the opposite way as a culture.
And I think it's depressing.
And I do think it leads to a lack of self-confidence because you're faking most of your life as opposed to being like, we'll see.
I'll put it out there.
They'll like it.
They won't.
I'm good.
Well, I think that that's a formula that probably the government's going to have very little to do with spreading.
I agree with you on that.
I do think we are like, wait, we mean it just like us as Americans are going to have to find a way of rediscovering that on our own.
I do think that there's a role for leaders to play in, you know, coaches, teachers.
I think US President, I mean, Ronald Reagan, I think in a certain way, there was something about, you know, leading in the 80s that led the country back from an identity crisis akin to the kind we might be going through now in the late 70s that revived our national self-confidence, but our national self-confidence starts from confidence in each of us in the way we live our daily lives.
And I don't think it's going to happen automatically, but I do think More people like you, Megan, honestly, who are willing to share what works for you.
I don't think that self-help books – yeah, I used to laugh at the category, but I don't anymore.
I think that there's actually something to be said for people who have discovered what works for them.
In a deeply first personal way to open up and share that with those who can take something and use something that comes of it, that's more likely to result in an epidemic of self-confidence that we're hungry for than any form of top-down political leadership or institutional reform.
I don't think that's where the ballgame is right now.
And so I like the way you said it.
Thank you.
I mean, I will say one thing you talk about, which I also support and agree with, is the importance of civics and reminding people what's important about being an American citizen, what's great about being an American citizen, what's great about our country.
I think that, you know, there was a time in this country...
Look, when I grew up, we had...
My husband was just asking me this.
This is before you were born, Vivek.
You were not even as twinkling in your daddy's eye.
But we had television.
What we have?
Happy Days.
We had Laverne and Shirley.
We had The Love Boat.
These like silly shows.
But they were about friendships and they were about family.
Little House on the Prairie was something I grew up with.
We had like songs that told a nice story that would be somewhat uplifting, you know?
Now we have...
The N-word in every two words in these rap songs and others.
We have WAP from Cardi B. We have the most disgusting messaging wherever we turn.
You turn on TV, it's like another nude scene or sex scene or some other just deviant scene that you're being subjected to at a young age.
Most 12-year-olds have seen porn, including really raunchy XXX porn on their phones.
Is that true?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, the vast majority of 12-year-olds have.
So, it would be nice if we, in this quest, could get some help from those running our cultural outlets.
And I do think it's starting to happen.
You know, the pushback on Disney.
You know, wherever I can, I sneak in my secret gay agenda.
Well, that's not for you to do, right?
Like...
But thanks for admitting it, and thanks to the whistleblower who leaked the tape, because now we know, right?
And now the Daily Wire is into children.
Not that this is a big promo for the Daily Wire, but I just like what they're doing.
They're building an alternative and we need more and more of those alternatives because there has to be a vision, you know, of an America that we love, of the family unit that's intact and working and loves one another.
You know, we do little things in our family.
Like when we go on vacation together, we don't bring a friend.
You know, the kids, they're still young, but they can't bring friends.
Like we spend the vacations together, the five of us.
That's our time to reconnect, the five of us, not for you to reconnect with your friends.
And the teenagers will hate it and too bad.
Then they'll get used to us and we'll reconnect and it'll be good.
Nurture this thing that you're building.
Nurture it with church or synagogue or wherever you pray.
Nurture it with human connection.
Time around the dinner table could not be more important.
And the value of each dinner goes up exponentially.
The takeaway that your kid gets from five versus two per week is enormous.
So you have to make an investment in tomorrow, in your children, in them feeling loved, in them not just doing this all day.
You have to, like American parents need to take that thing by the helm and try to steer it in the right direction.
I love it.
Megan, you're a good soldier and a good messenger.
And I think that I'm actually with you.
I think most of that change is going to come from outside of the instruments that we spend most of our time arguing about, the government or otherwise.
It's going to come from everyday people taking inspiration to do what they're already – and most people are empowered to drive the kind of change you described without having to go to some ballot box every November.
It's just the choices you make every day, and I appreciate you being a voice for – And a voice for restraint in just lazily resorting to centralized state-based solutions to things that actually absolve us of the responsibility that each of us bear as human beings, as parents, as citizens.
And keep at it.
Well, right back at you, Vivek, on all fronts.
It's been super fun to watch you.
And I'm so, so glad that more and more people are getting exposed to your ideas and your message.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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