The Iced Coffee Hour - Vivek Ramaswamy on Toxic Wokeism, Alien Existence, and Becoming President

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Go to https://ground.news/iced to see through media bias and know where your news is coming from. Sign up through my link to get 30% OFF unlimited access this month only. NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: / @theicedcoffeehourclips Timestamps: 0:00 - INTRO 1:55 - Getting to know Vivek 8:32 - Vivek's behavioral problems as a kid 24:51 - Why Vivek doesn't eat meat or drink alcohol 30:15 - Vivek's take on nature vs nurture 35:41 - Married 12 days after 'first date' 51:11 - How Government And Corporate America ARE THE SAME 57:00 - How much it costs to run for president 1:08:51 - Why politicians ALWAYS overpromise 1:14:50 - Has the government uncovered alien spacecraft? 1:21:20 - Reacting to his impersonation For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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release the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Say what we know about unidentified flying objects. Just give it to us straight. Every politician dances to the tune, like a circus monkey, to their biggest donor. How do you expect to unite the United States when you struggle to do so with Royven? I think the way we're going to unite this country is by... But before we get into it, guys, I've been getting interested into politics lately, if you couldn't tell from the guests we've had on the ice coffee hour.

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Once again, guys, it's ground.com. slash iced for 30% off with the link down below in the description. On top of it all, we just really appreciate Ground News for sponsoring this video and also just performing the service that they do for all of us, making sure we're aware of all of the bias that exists in media. So with that said, thank you so much, ground news, and on to the episode. Thank you so much for having us on. Thanks for coming over, guys.

It's good to be here. I will say one of the biggest criticisms that I've seen from people who watch you. is that they know your stances, they know your policies, but they feel like they don't actually know you as a person. They kind of feel like you're this human chat GPT. Yeah, I've been called that. They don't know you. Yeah. So I'm curious. Growing up, what did you want to be? You know, I went through like most young people, a lot of different phases. My parents, I think acclimatized us to think of being a doctor when he grew up. My mom was a doctor. A lot of our family members, uncles and aunts were to. I think that came, though,

from more of a place of financial security. My parents came to this country with not a lot of money. And part of that immigrant mentality is just a very defensive instinct, which is how are you going to have, you know, a stable, secure life. So that's kind of the defensive environment in which we were raised. I, you know, at points along the way, look at what other kids' parents are doing, thought maybe I would be a lawyer at times that seemed like not a career that called me in terms of being in a service profession.

I honestly kept an open mind when I went into college. But there wasn't something that I thought of to say that this is definitely what I want to be. I had different figures and mentors. Like you're like five years old. You didn't want to be an investment banker when you five. No, no, I think I wanted to play. I think I want to be a basketball player. Really?

Yeah, yeah. You're taller than I expected you. Oh, thank you. People do say that to me, actually. I don't know why everybody is six. I'm at six, yeah. Short for the NBA, though. Fair enough.

Not NBA standards. Yeah. In principle, you can achieve everything you ever want. within the limitations of what God has given you as your talents to make you so. When did you realize that like basketball is not going to be? Probably around, probably around fourth grade. Yeah, this is just realistically not going to be. I might have made the select team, but then there's the AAU league, which is, you guys have

no reason to know this, but that's kind of where it gets really serious. And I was getting nowhere near that. And so I ended up switching sports to tennis where I thought I had a better shot of actual success. And ended up, you know, doing well too. But that wasn't going to be in the cards to be a professional tennis player. either. But a lot of the people that I played with did end up going to the pro tour, and it's a very different life. How were you as a kid growing up? It's hard to know. Now that I'm a parent, you kind of think about what you were like. I was somebody who probably enjoyed, it was pretty

social, enjoyed meeting other kids. I was probably a kid who conversed with, you know, when my parents would have their own adults or whatever over before my younger brother was, you know, he's four years younger than me, but before he was of age, I was also able to probably be comfortable talking to people older than me or whatever. That was just the environment that my parents raised me in. I was always pretty curious, I think. I like to explore new things. I've always enjoyed almost debate and arguing and storytelling. Where do you think you got that from? And that inquisitive mind. It's a good question. Were your parents like that? Some people are just born like that. I don't think I turned out the way that my parents intended to mold me. And I mean, I mean that in a good way.

And I think that they wanted a guy who put his head down, followed the rules, learned how to do something useful, built a successful and stable career and a family that had more security than they had or felt like they had when they were in this country. That was their, you know, mindset for me. Like the kind of thing that you would hear in my household growing up, up would not be something like dream and be whatever you want to be when you grow up. No, it wasn't that. It was you need to focus and have stability and make sure that you have a clear path to a stable career. And that was instilled in us starting at a very young age. And so now that I'm talking through it with you guys, when you ask me, where did that come from? I guess there's

something innate probably in many kids that make them react. But it overpowered. But there's a reactionary instinct. And so, you know, I haven't had a conversation like this in a while, but it makes me think about maybe it was a reactionary impulse that led me to actually pursue a career as an entrepreneur and live a career life that was completely unstructured at every step of the way. It's interesting because you kind of fit the mold of what your parents wanted from you

for a very long time. I mean, especially with your job at Goldman Sachs, but then for some reason, Actually, what's really just interesting is for me, when I went to Harvard and then had an open-ended career plan, that alone was quite a bit of a leap. And then when I decided to potentially explore, you know, career paths outside of traditional science or medicine, that itself, I know that the way I look at it now or the way we would look at it now is that's like a pretty cut and dry assembly line path. For my family's upbringing, that was a weird thing to do. That was already off the beaten path. They didn't know anything about what that world entailed. So, yes, in some ways, it was itself a much more, in retrospect,

part of the assembly line path to go get an internship at Goldman Sachs. But if you ask my parents, that was like a foreign notion to them, which was interesting. But you still tried or I guess had that like subconscious pushing on you. That was like, okay, find like a hiring job that's stable where you work a lot, which was the Goldman Sachs thing, but it seems like you still had this, like, thing that you were born with that was like, okay, no, no, no,

we got to do something more creative, we got to do something. Yeah, but it was higher risk. It was definitely beaten into my head. So there's, you know, there's both parts of you, right? I mean, if we all look inside each of ourselves and ask ourselves, who are we? I mean, there's the part that's beaten into you.

I mean, I guess in Freudian terms, you call that, I guess, the super ego or whatever. And then there's the inner self and the combination of those two things create a blend of who we are as people. Yes, there was the part of me also that grew up with some sense of stability and trying the tried and true path. That's half of me. And then half of me just wants to break that and rebel against it and or just explore my own creative self about where my passions actually lead me.

Now, I would say that in that summer internship, what I chose, it's probably one of the choices if I was to go back again. I probably wouldn't have chose that particular summer internship. But I learned a lot from it in retrospect. And yet, even my senior year in college, that was part of what probably motivated me to start my first business, which I did in my senior year after that internship after my junior year, which is my first business that I founded. But I probably did it in some ways out of feeling constrained by that first summer internship. So it seems like you very much want to have free will to go with what you want. Did you ever get in trouble with your parents growing up? Yes, I mean, but like nothing extraordinary.

You're fairly obedient. I mean like I wasn't like I wasn't like a kid who I was not the kid who ended up in detention But you were also highly opinionated. Yeah. So back in the day when you were a kid, did your opinions ever get you into trouble with your peers? Did you ever get into a fight or did you ever like get bullied or something? So I went to a public school from first through eighth grade. It wasn't a particularly great public school, but it was a public school that was the one we were

districted and nonetheless. That was a place where actually being the straight-laced academic, you know, put your head down, go to science class kind of kid wasn't actually particularly rewarded. And so there was probably one instance. This is what caused my parents to switch me out of that public school to go to a Jesuit high school. There was a flight of stairs. I was carrying my science books from class to class got pushed down that flight of stairs resulted in me probably. I mean, we think that was the cause about a few months later having to get a hip surgery. Who pushed you? It was a random kid. There's no way. Did you have a history

with this kid? No. It's actually really interesting. Yeah. It's really random. A lot of these kids grew up in difficult background. So this is a school where a lot of kids in the classes, they weren't in my classrooms necessarily, but were like one or two years left behind. There was a wing of the school called the success wing, which is the wing that they would tell kids like me to stay away from because these are kids who maybe 14, 15 years old, but are still in, you know, seventh grade. But they called it the success.

That's the wing that they called. That sounds a big counter. Well, yeah, it is kind of. The success wing was, I probably went in there for one class ever, but the success wing was the wing that you stayed out of. But yeah, it's a place where, you know, you got a nerdy kid with, you know, glasses and carrying a science textbooks from class to class. Who's an academic guy? That's a target. But that was also a good experience for me because, you know, you're an outsider in that setting.

That's fine. But I went to a different school setting where I was an outsider, which was St.NX High School in Cincinnati. So that was a Catholic high school. Yeah. I was a lone Hindu kid, and that was also an interesting learning experience, too. And so I've probably always been in settings where I have been comfortable, grew to be comfortable, I would say, in being in settings where I was, you know, often the odd man out. And that kind of was my big part of my out. What happened to the bully afterwards?

I don't remember. I don't think it was like, I didn't go running to a teacher. We didn't like, I don't. I mean, it was, I think probably nothing. I couldn't even remember who the kid was. It wasn't a kid who was in my classes or in, you know, because we, you know, they had slightly advanced classes or slightly remedial classes. There were different classrooms, but in between classes, it's the same group of kids going together in one school. And, you know, probably nothing happens.

And you actually tumbled down a flight of stairs. Yeah, we'll push down a flight of stairs. Wow. Okay. It happens. It's kind of stuff that goes, you know, growing up. It's probably the biggest instance of what I would call the closest thing to bullying that I experienced. but it was definitely something that, you know, a teacher of mine then pulled my parents aside

when they picked me up from school and like, you need to get this kid that out of here. And he was a teacher in that school. So when I was in high school, I observed two different predominant archetypes of the student, which is like those who work extremely hard and have to study consistently to get good grades and they feel pressured usually by their parents or by some other factor to like put their nose to the book and grind versus those where school kind of just came easy. They would get good grades, but they wouldn't have to study. as much as the other person.

I'm running which one of those two would you say you were? Because I see you're like ultra successful. Thank you, man. Hundreds of millions of dollars. You're running for president, which is just insane. Like, which one, which archetype would lead to this future? I don't think that you could necessarily predict one as a path. I think one of, I mean, that's just my honest answer.

If I was to think back which one I fit, there was probably elements of both. I mean, we did have parents who were very focused on the traditional path, educational achievement, come home, do your homework, et cetera. But did it come easy to you? But yeah, I mean, I think that everybody has their native talents. And I think, you know, doing well in school was something that I was naturally prone to do. And, you know, write or read or learn or do math. Well, yes, I mean, joining the NBA wasn't in the cards for me.

But the equivalent of that for academic achievement was just to be blunt about it. And so I'm not sure that it's the compliant shut up, sit down, do your homework mentality that automatically yields a particular result. I think it's different for different people. I mean, my wife was maybe on the other side of that. She's also incredibly academically successful, you know, one of smartest people I've met. But, you know, I think that for her,

it was much more libertarian in her upbringing compared to my parents' focus, just because they moved around to different places. And so it was her love of learning that guided her. I also had a natural love of learning, but it was in an environment that was much more structured. But I think it would be probably reductionist and

you know overly trying to fit a square peg into a round hole kind of thing to sort of think that there's one trajectory of parental upbringing that leads to one thing and another that leads to another patterns like if you have disciplinary and parents that tell you this is the structure that you should be and then you have to learn and teach yourself to like to be disciplined to do all of your work and to you know read the cross your T's and dot your eyes and stuff like that I do think that that does has some long-term effect, contrary to the person that has, like, the natural innate inherited

intelligence that learns to be lazy. They learn they can cut corners and stuff like that, and it comes from a more like creative problem-solving type brain. I think so. I think that if we're going to draw that out, though, I think that there's definitely more than two tracks. Of course, but those are the, I would say like those are the two predominant archetypes that I observed in high school. How old are you if you don't mind me? 24. You're 24. Actually, oh, yeah, I'm still 24. What's that? 33. You're 33? Yeah. Oh, you look younger. Thank you. You're not an age where that's a compliment. It's just a fact.

Now that I've become a parent myself and also just reflecting on seeing a lot of people who've pursued a lot of different journeys, I think that when kids show up, like even at like a very, like a very young age, in many ways, they're wired. They are who they are. They're just like I've got two young sons. They're both. One of them's three and a half. of them is a year old. They're very different people. And we're raising them in the same circumstances. Like we're not doing anything that's that different for one than the other, but they're just

they're different predilections. One of them talked earlier than the other one. The other one got up on his feet is like far more physically dexterous and physically exploring versus the other guy's more verbal and emotional exploring. And I think that in some ways we're each, the cake isn't fully baked, but like it's like a half-baked cake. when it shows up. And so how much ever you will to tame that or mold that, I think, is a failed pursuit versus then there's a separate question of, are you an environment where that inner self is able to become the maximal version of whatever it's going to be versus an environment

that sometimes can choke that out of existence for a long time or an environment that you know, and this might have been my experience of this, that wasn't really like fitted to what my new true inner nature was, but that actually helped me hone it and discover it even more. I think that was my experience of it. It depends on what kind of underlying person almost was born into their bodies that found themselves in that circumstance. So I'm curious, if you could change anything with the way your parents raised you, what do you think that would be? I'm not sure I would. I wouldn't be who I am.

You know, we're each the product of our own experiences. So I'm not, there's a few cases where I might look back in life and say there's a few things that I would have done differently. And even still, there's not that many of those because, like, I'm not even a person to dwell on that. Maybe I should have taken Spanish instead of French in high school. Like, that'd be on the list for me. I would have been better at speaking the relevant language because I would have used it more. But I don't, I'm not wired to think about. that because the truth is who I am today is absolutely a product of the experiences that led me here.

And so to say that I would have wished for one of those experiences that was different, either in a decision that I made or that my parents made, is almost like rejecting some aspect of myself today. But I guess how are you parenting your children differently than how your parents raised you? Well, I think there's a couple realities. One is our children grow up in far more comfortable circumstances than I did. I think that that raises both opportunities and concerns. I worry a little bit about, I think part of who I am, the scrappy nature of who I am,

comes from a kind of insecurity that you pick up from your parents. It's hard to recreate something that isn't, you know, necessarily. It's manufactured a little bit more. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And on the flip side, I think that we are wide open to our kids deciding for themselves, what it is discovering for themselves, what it is they want to do. My older son right now wants to be a fighter jet pilot. That was not within the Overton window of acceptable career options.

Well, that sounds fun, though. Yeah. That does sound fun, actually. But as a father, I bet you that's a little concerned. You're like, oh, hold on. I think, no, I think actually, not all. You don't think so? At that age, I think it's great.

And that's totally different. I would be so nervous for the safety of my kid. Oh, they're three years old. Come on. Three years old. But even if he goes and become a fighter jet pilot, that's something he's passionate about doing. That's pretty awesome. And I think that that's just a different outlook.

Now, it's interesting to think about this. I can't say that one of those approaches is better or worse than the other. It's just the nature of where we are in our lives versus where our parents were in their lives. And I'm a product of that upbringing that would bring up my kids in a different way than my parents did. but that doesn't mean that I wish that my parents did any differently. So for your kids, would it bother you if they wanted to pursue a career that made no money whatsoever?

Like, let's just say, I want to... Totally fine with that. Okay. Absolutely. So it seems like your parenting style is like worlds different than the parenting style you were subjected to when you were a kid. Because you're like, do whatever you want kids. Yeah.

So it did change you. We try to teach them. We do our best. We do our best instincts and them. Yeah. And also understanding the consequences of their actions, but to empower them to be able to make those decisions for themselves.

Interesting. Absolutely. But would you want them, if their future career made no money, would you feel good supporting them financially through that? Like, let's just say they wanted to be an artist. Let's just say they made no money whatsoever, but they're like, I love art. I'm passionate about this. Then the money would have to come from somewhere.

Well, if you're a good artist, maybe the money comes from making part. Possibly. Yeah. So there's that. So I think that there's a sweet spot zone for the optimal. upbringing that you maybe be able to give your kids from a material perspective. I think that if you don't have enough money to send your kids to a good school and you're in a bad school district or whatever, and this relates to my policy issues, which we can talk about another day, then I think

that you're at a disadvantage. I mean, if you're not able to get the same kind or quality of education as peers your age, you're at a disadvantage. On the other hand, if you're raised in circumstances where you have nothing to actually aspire to because you're just showered and swimming in wealth that it crowds out your own ability to have hunger and scrappiness. And I've gone to college and law school and otherwise with people who fit that description. I think that's a kind of disservice that you can do for your kid as a parent too. And so our goal for our kids will be allow them to have the true luxury. This is a real luxury to be able to pick the career that allows you to follow your passions

without fear of putting food on the dinner table. But that doesn't mean that you have a right to fly around in a private jet because of the career that you chose. Do you think that might stifle motivation knowing that there's always a fallback? Yeah, I wonder about it. Am I? I mean, I think that that's a risk. You know, a lot of kids might end up. I know a lot of people who have ended up.

I think some of them are even in my own extended family, who ended up in careers that they're like fine or perfectly complacent with, but isn't exactly what they would have chosen if they were following their true passion. They did it out of the need for achieving a level of financial security. And then they pursue hobbies that may more align with their passions. And nothing to say anything wrong with that model. I suppose most people work. for the sake of putting food on the dinner table,

but make sure that work isn't the entirety of their life so that they're able to pursue their passions outside of work. I'm a little bit different. The path I've pursued is one where I don't really draw a distinction between work and hobby and passion and pleasure. The way I'm spending my time all the time, as best I can, is directed towards something that I'm incredibly passionate about.

And that's the ultimate win, I think, is to be able to live a life where you're able to do that. You can't do that if you literally, I mean, we're human beings. We're like have certain basic needs. You need to shelter over your head or food or drink for sustenance, right? So if you literally can't do those things, then, yes, you're not able to achieve self-actualization by following your passions through your work. I think that the boundary we'd like to draw for our kids is to give them the opportunity

to pursue their passion. without fear of putting food on the dinner table, fine. But that doesn't mean that you're going to live a life of opulence and luxury automatically because of that either. No, that could come through being an exceptional artist or musician or creator of whatever kind you want to be. But part of the tradeoff of making whatever choice it is is you're passionate enough to do that regardless of whether that's the actual reason you're doing it to accumulate green pieces of paper. That's not a reason to pursue a track as a singer or a artist or whatever. you should do it because of your passion. And if you were doing it because it was going to accumulate you green pieces of paper,

then that's not following your passion. That's just the equivalent of going to work as a, you know, a janitor or a cab driver or anything else that's doing it for the money. Do that make sense? What are your hobbies outside of work? What do you enjoy? To tell you the truth, I do. I know you love work on the same way. But like if you take that aside.

I play tennis. You say, okay. Yeah, I'm a tennis fanatic. Okay. The presidential campaign has not been great for my tennis game. But until this kicked off, probably since I was like, since I turned maybe 29 or 30 for the last seven, eight years. Yes, tennis has been a big passion, both watching and playing. I used to play growing up.

And so that's something that I try to keep up as much as I can. Is there anything besides that? In terms of like fun hobbies. Yeah. So when kids came into the picture, one of the things is that does eat into your hot. You got to pick hobbies. You get to pick one or two. I did enjoy for a while good film.

and good theater, like good movies and or good live production. Yeah. So that would be something. And then writing is a hobby of mine too, actually. Just free form, carry around a notebook, long form writing. And some of the argumentative stuff, sure, I'll publish and you can see it and, you know, wherever I've published this stuff. It's probably what resulted in me writing three books over the last couple of years. I was probably a suppressed author without knowing that.

And so writing is a hobby of mine as well. You've also mentioned before that you are vegetarian for religious and moral reasons, and that you also don't partake in any sort of like drinking or vices, like smoking anything as well. I'm just curious, like, why do you decide to, like, how is it a moral reason to be vegetarian from your perspective? Because for me, I like eating me. I think it tastes great and all. But morally, I'm conflicted on it. How do you draw that distinction between like, okay, for your own personal sake, you deem it as immoral?

and also for the other vices. Well, I think there's the choices that we make in our own lives that are totally different from the policy perspectives that we offer on others, right? So I've been a CEO of a company. Well, do we serve meat at company events? Yes, we do. Because I believe that each person is able to make the choices that they deserve to make that's best for them.

And certainly from a policymaking perspective, I'm a hard libertarian when it comes to people being able to make whatever decisions suit them and not legislating one form of morality. So put that to one side. I was raised in a vegetarian household, but the reason I remain vegetarian is that all else equal, I would rather not kill an animal for my culinary pleasure. If my life depends on it, absolutely. Not going to think twice. If my nutrition actually depends on it, like if I'm going to be less healthy in some way, absolutely, I would do it in a heartbeat, no problem, because I do think that that's a trait. straight off that's justified if it's going to allow us to live a more effective life, then absolutely.

So are there circumstances in which I would do it? Absolutely. But I'm able to get that in ways that don't require killing a sentient being. If I can do it that way, I'll do it that way. That's the way I look at it. And then what about the no drinking stance? I'm not a hardliner. I just prefer not to be intoxicated. I prefer to be in control. Like that's just part of the freakish nature of my control freak nature of myself. is I don't want to do things that, like everything I want to do, I want it to be a conscious decision. When did you make that decision? When did you realize that?

Probably like pretty young age. I mean, I like to be in control of the situations that I'm in. And I think that I've seen what it's done to friends. I don't care to subject myself to addictions that allow me to lose control over myself or who I am. Was there a specific moment? That's not a moral decision, right? I think there's nothing immoral about having alcohol, or nothing immoral about smoking a cigarette.

Those are health decisions that you want to make for yourself. Was there a specific moment, though, that changed your opinion on drinking or smoking? No, I don't think so. I think that I'm open-minded. I mean, it's not like I won't have a sip of alcohol, but it's like it's like poison. I have to, like, spit it out, right?

But I just don't like being intoxicated. And I think that I did grow up in a household or neither of my parents drank, so maybe that was sort of a natural conclusion for me to come to. I also have friends who have become alcoholics and have suffered through that that reinforced my belief set as I grew up. It's the same part of me that likes to get a good night of sleep.

I feel good and at my best the next day that I don't want to feel hungover the next day and I don't want to feel inebriated when I'm enjoying life plenty as it is. I don't even drink, I rarely drink caffeine, actually. I don't have coffee. I have enough energy as it is. Where does the energy come from?

We recently had a guest on our podcast that said, what was it? Like, of the Uber successful, there is a hypomania. Hypomania. It's a very, very rare trait or gene that some people have. It's like a super gene where it means that you can get crazy energy off a very little sleep. I get, for better or worse, I have a lot of energy.

So you probably have a lot of energy. So you probably have hypodicist. Yes. Yeah, I don't know about the term, but I definitely am somebody who has a lot of energy. As long as I'm doing something that I think is worthy and interesting, yeah, I can run on very low fumes and be pretty high-functioning. So I'm curious, who else in your family has that trait? My mom has that trait for sure. There we go.

She is also not a coffee drinker. Okay. And, like, to tell you the truth, I don't know what would happen if I drank coffee. Like I think I might explode. It might be just like I would love to see this. Yeah, it's probably not great. Even if I have like a tea and I just gets you going. It gets it's a little bit like I'm not even thinking.

Yeah. Especially if I'm like tired like after not like a great night of sleep, but then have a tea. It's like, oh no, I can't deal with that. I'd rather not have the caffeine and I'm good at finding the energy. So our prior guest said that a lot of that is genetic, that you would inherit that trait from a parent or close relative. Yeah, I bet that's genetic. Interesting. Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about... There's far more that's genetic than we understand, for sure. That's what I think we're wired the way we are. And that goes to my whole point about the upbringing piece of this is, I just think it is overly false precision to think that there's some kind of formula to all of this. We're complicated beings. Each of us is unique in our own ways. And to think that some model of molding you is going to result in some very precise outcome,

I just don't think it works that way. How much would you say is genetic versus upbringing in terms of maybe someone's success, life, motivation, future? I mean, both are important, but I think that we would like to, the fairy tale side of us wants to say that you can achieve anything you want with your own hard work and commitment and dedication.

The fact of the matter, that's not true. There was no chance I was ever going to make it to the NBA despite the fact that I would have wanted to when I was in second or third grade. And so I think what I think of as, this isn't exactly your question, but just to get my own thoughts on the table is, what do I think of as the spirit of what we mean

when we say that in America, meritocracy or merit or unbridled excellence. What do we mean is whatever your God-given talents are, and each of us, the three of us, I'm sure, have three different ones, whatever they are, any two different people have different God-given talents. Whatever your God-given talents are,

that you live in a society that allows you to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without anybody standing in your way. So that's what I think about. That's what I think is beautiful about this country. That was the opportunity that I was given in this country. I think that's the opportunity that this country gives everybody. That's what's special about the United States of America. How much of that is God-given talent versus God-given gifts of other kinds,

like parenting or circumstance or otherwise? It depends on the attribute you're talking about. I mean, if you're talking about athletic talent, well, let's talk about athletics. I think that if you want to be anywhere from the 0th to the 70th percentile, most of it is probably just effort and commitment and passion and dedication. If you want to go the difference between like the 98th percentile and the 99.9.9th percentile, it's absolutely genetics that make that difference of the increment of whether or not you're able to go that final distance controlling for somebody who has been passionate in that respect.

And so we could say that for athletics, but I think there's probably other domains of life for which that's generally true too. And so I hate to draw an overall rule of thumb, but we use the athletics as a model. It's probably not too far off the mark for other domains that we could think of too to say if you want to be in the zero to 70th

or even the zero to 90th percentile of a given domain, which is to say you're pretty darn good, better than nine out of ten people who do it, your effort and your dedication and your hard work and your passion and your upbringing and your commitment. commitment will get you pretty much as far as you want to go.

But if you want to go to that final increment of being that, what we call, we call it that for a reason, freak of nature, right? I mean, the people who are winning championships in athletics or comparable non-athletic domains, the true freaks of nature, we call them that for reason, is that it was a product of, you know, nature, actually.

It's both. It's both. Yeah, it's definitely both. Yeah, Kobe Bryant, you know, yeah, Kobe Bryant, no matter, You could have somebody else, I would venture to say you, any of the three of us, that worked as hard on the basketball court as Code Rinas, we're still not going to be doing what he was doing at the peak of his game.

And that's okay. It's a beautiful thing. We should celebrate that. You think about it, why are we opposed to athletes using performance enhancing drugs or anabolic steroids or whatever? Is that it ruins our ability to celebrate that native talent. I mean, let's say we talk about Kobe Bryant, maybe 30 years from now, we can have AI programmed humanoid robots that will do on a basketball court

what like the combination of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James could never do or on a tennis court Novak Djokovic could never dream of doing. I wouldn't want to watch that. Now, some people might say, I'm wrong about that. Maybe we will. And I would draw a distinction. The thing you'd be admiring there would be like computer programming coding. Right.

So there may be room. For, like, we talk about tennis and pickleball. There may be AI ball later, which is like the equivalent of like the AI version of humanoid, you know, AI program robots playing tennis and they're like hitting the ball, like way harder than like a normal human tennis player is. But you're admiring a different thing. Right. There. And in some ways, that's even part of what's baked into why we separately enjoy men's and women's sports differently.

I'm just thinking out loud. It kind of reminds me of F1. That's probably why. Both are, if you want just the people who are going to hit the hardest or pat or just like, see the ball fly the fastest, that's not what you're really admiring. You're admiring people competing to the outer edge of what natural capability in Dow's combined with effort. And I think there's something about us that admires that. So like, you know, men's women's sports. We can celebrate each one differently, partly because that's what's baked in.

What are you saying about F1? F1. A lot of people that celebrate F1 surprisingly are engineers, like mechanical. engineers because they love to appreciate all of the stuff that goes into creating the vehicles. It's not necessarily like watching a bunch of people go super fast around a track. My friend is mechanical engineer. It's like super into all of that stuff, not for like watching the races, but like the mechanics behind building such a machine.

It's a great point. And so I think we can admire different things in different experiences, but it's okay to acknowledge that some of that is nature that we're celebrating. expressed through us as human beings. And that's a beautiful thing too. I do want to bring up relationship advice. Because you said in your book, Woke Inc. That your parents got an arranged marriage.

Yeah. Which is, I mean, like, growing up in the United States, growing up in Southern California is nuts to hear. Like, we think that that stopped existing 100 years ago. It's nuts, but it's not as nuts as you think, actually, because it's kind of come full circle. Well, they've been married 40 years successfully. And you also said,

wasn't the marriage like 12 days after their first real date? Yeah. It was like getting to know each other. It was like less than two weeks. Can you walk us through? How does that happen? Yeah. So two families get together.

They each pick who they think. They knew each other before, right? What's the process like? The families didn't know each other before, but they knew of each other, like via via networks. So my mom was living up and grow up in my store, which is one part of India. My dad was in Kerala and via family networks. And there's a lot of pre-veting that went into it. We're like, all right, they're both educated.

They're both like even like there's not some major mismatch in height. Right. Like there's a lot of factors that go into this, right? Where they, you know, academically inclined. They know what each other's interests are. But what did they think about it? Like your dad and your mom, wouldn't they like? I want a culturally normal, right?

Nobody's forcing it on them. They're down. They're cool with it. They're the final consent for the decision. But to put them together and then say, hey, if you guys want to go with it, go with it. That sounds nuts compared to the environment. We grow up, which is like, which is different than I'm about to get to where we are now. But the environment that I grew up in was one where you would date people that you might meet at school or at a bar or in the neighborhood or whatever and have an organic interaction that guides you.

All the way now to Gen 3 where you have an algorithm that asks you for your preferences and asks you about your height. Right or left. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't seem effective, which is weird. That's exactly. So that seems a lot more similar to me than like to a, to a, to a. what my parents arranged marriage was. It arranged by AI today instead of arranged by human beings who love you.

So I like the way it went for me, which was my wife and I met at a party. And we were naturally drawn to each other. And we had an immediate human chemistry that we then followed and led us to the life that we've pursued. And that's cool. But that's, but what the irony now of,

yes, we can look back and say like arranged marriages are weird. But it's equally weird from my frame of mind to look at like algorithmically, set up anonymity for swiping left and right. There's senses in which, I mean, I just went to wedding with one of my best friends who met exactly in that same setting, but it felt like it wasn't so different than the setting in which my

parents met, which is kind of funny and interesting. How did they get married after 12 days? Why 12 days? Is it like after a week and after? If you ask me, so I'm not, I'm not endorsing that model. Was that like their parents saying, get married after 12 days or were they just like, well, let's not least some time?

I think it's sort of somewhere in between. where now you can also look at like people who I know, maybe you guys know as well, who are like, yeah, we've been together for six years and we're, we're deciding whether we want to get engaged. At a certain point, it's like, dude, have some conviction in your relationship. What do you feel like is too long? What do you feel like it's true, right? Like, no, it's a fair point.

What's too long to get engaged? What would you say as a point where, as a guy, it's like by this time? What's too short? What's too long? I mean, this is broad strokes. Yes, we understand. This is not, we're not making policy here. Right.

Maybe we should. I just think like if I was talking to a friend. Yeah. Right. And my friend has been like, if he's been engaged for three years but they're postponing the wedding, I was like, something's off. Interesting. Something's off. Right.

Why get engaged then, right? Or why have the level of partial commitment without just going all in? So that's, that's an instinct that's baked in there. Does that mean 12 days of the right answer? Probably not. in the modern society, but part of these are societal norms that are baked into the society you grow up in. And so I think if your engagement is measured in years, well, I'm saying from the time of meeting, from the time of meeting somebody to the time where you get engaged,

like how long does it take to get to know somebody? I think that depends by person. I think that a lot of people though would tell you who are in happily married relationships that are built to last. and I'm grateful and feel fortunate to the world, to God, that I'm in one of those relationships now. But I think I'm one of these people, but many people I know would tell you the same thing. Within a matter of weeks and at times within days. You'll know.

You know. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. So against that backdrop, like 12 days isn't nuts. But if, like, I think if you're talking about within a period of months, If you're serious, right? Like it's one thing to just be like, oh, I'm hanging out with this person and I'm dating like five, you know, whatever.

I don't, you know, what the culture is right now, but dating five people at the same time. And, you know, I'm not going to, it's not like a particularly serious, you know, relationship. Put that to one side. But if you're actually in a monogamous single person to single person committed relationship where you're invested in getting to know the other person and vice versa, Chances are that if you are going to fast forward that 40 or 50 years and say that that worked, more often than not, you knew that within the first several months of, first probably three months of being in that relationship. Okay, a couple of points on this, because we just had Ben Shapiro on recently, and he said the exact same thing. Did he, okay.

Yeah, because he proposed to his wife, like two months, right? It's early. After they first met. It was very quickly after they first met. That doesn't strike me as crazy. Right? Like, you know they have a great relationship, playing the kids together. So as someone in the dating pool currently, what I'm so scared about is getting into a relationship

and not feeling that immediate connection. You don't even scared of it. But here's the thing. It's like I view relationships as a certain threshold that you have to exceed and you're like, okay, a threshold of compatibility. Now I know I can be with this person for the rest of my life. But I do think that there is that like pinnacle relationship where you do meet someone and like right off the rip, you're like, okay, this is my person.

And it's like, am I going to subvert my expectations? to being, you know, exceeding that threshold of compatibility. Or for normalcy versus. But there comes a time where you can't continue to date for 20 years and hold out for that pinnacle relationship because then you'll be too old. No, I know. I think that some of this is just, you know, there's certain things that are in the cards for you in life and certain things that aren't.

And I think there are many people who could be happy in a long run lasting relationship with the person who probably still isn't their soulmate. And that's a tough position to be in. But you know what? There's worse things that happen in life, too, to a lot of other people that may never find that or may never find internal satisfaction either. So I can't speak for that. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I was in a position to say that very quickly, here's a person I met and this was made to be. and it's obvious within a matter of months,

and so we're just, you know, fate is sealed. I wish that for every person. You're asking for the scenario of what happens if I'm not that. I'm just expressing a personal concern of mine because I've always held out for like, I'm going to meet that person where it's going to be like 12 days, like, boom.

Right? Yeah, tomorrow I'm 25. 25. Happy birthday. Thank you, thank you. So give yourself a few years, and I would say that probably there's a life staging thing. I guess I haven't been asked for this advice.

before so you know take it with a grain of salt but I think it's probably a life staging thing where you give yourself the next 10 years to open yourself up to that possibility and my advice during those 10 years would be don't waste time in a like a multi-month relationship where you know yeah that that's not going to be right that's not going to be fitting like if three months in you're not sure move on that'd be my advice for the at least the next 10 years of your life. Now you might get to your like mid or late 30s later on and you feel like you want to live a life that brings children into this world that find somebody you're compatible with that maybe doesn't meet this ideal extended. You can turn to that later.

But give yourself the next 10 years to give yourself the maximum chance as opposed to I think what I've seen many of my friends go through as well is, you know, I'll be in a relationship where it's compatibility for like three, four years, but then you get to your late 20s and you're like 29 and you're like, what do I do with that? And that was something that probably many of them regret, right? You could have, like what was four years

could have been four months and give yourself, I think, the opportunity. So that'd be my, like, for you specifically in the life stage you're in. Thank you for the relationship. Would be the advice. You asked. To tie off, to tie the knot on this,

to tie the knot. Yeah, there we're on this whole relationship thing. The one thing that you said that was super fascinating was comparing modern dating, like on algorithm-based apps to arranged marriage. But the difference is in arranged marriage, it's the people that probably know you most intimately, know your character, know your values,

your personality, belief systems versus you selecting for yourself what you're interested in, which is the modern dating way. And I find that a lot less effective. And if I'm referencing, if I'm correct, it's Carl Jung who said,

when it comes to judging one's, own character, everyone is horrible. Something like that. You're better judging others than your own. Exactly. Let me say something about that. I think the people who are making the modern dating apps would say something different is it's not even you choosing it.

Oh, really? The AI will know better than you. But just because you put in your preferences of what you want to see. Right. It doesn't mean. It's actually good to feed you. But when they want to give you the people that like you continue to date and stay on the app rather than that they're not about matching people.

There is in the app. So there's some that some, I mean, I'm not a marketplace. It seems like most want to keep you on as long as possible. Tinder is something that I've heard. They show you the most attractive people first. You swipe on them and then it shows you an attractive. It's like a slot machine. They show you an attractive person.

I think it was like every like 12 to 15 times. They need to keep you on there. Yeah, exactly. So, so I mean, I'm not up on the latest over the competitive landscape of these dating apps look like. But I would imagine there's a market niche for, at least back in the day, there used to be the ones that would, you know, It was e-harmony or which one that would sort of promise you more that what you're in this for is not something in the short run, but something that's long run and lasting. But my only point is the real question and the real debate is, do you trust an algorithm to do that well?

Or do you trust the people who know you best to do that well and a network and a tradition that makes that happen? So I'm certainly not planning to, we have no vision that that's how things are going to plan for our kids. It's not how to sit down for me. but all I'm saying is what seems even to me growing up super weird as a model now that we've entered the postmodern world it actually makes that previous super weird model of my parents seem a little less weird than it once did because the postmodern world isn't all that different it does seem though that there would be more pressure on your parents to get married because of all the family pressure they put on the two versus them coming to their own decision they could say well if our parents you know say it's good, wouldn't that have such a big influence on them to believe it's good? It probably did that marriage is inherently good. No, stigma of divorce as well. What's that?

For the cohesiveness of arranged marriages, there is a huge stigma. In those communities, absolutely. Oh, yeah. They got divorced and their family made that decision for them. But the divorce rates are great amongst arranged marriages from what I've heard. The divorce rates are like, they're pretty low. But part of it might account for what you just said, which is that if it's tradition that brought you together being an arranged marriage, it might be tradition that keeps people

together in unhappy marriages too. I don't think that's most of what's going on, but to be fair, that's, that's, you know, a possibility in certain cases. I am somebody who believes that all else equal. I mean, each person's different. This doesn't mean for every individual, but all else equal, marriage is inherently good. Bringing children into the world in the context of a married household with two parents in the house is inherently good. I don't know that it's such a bad thing for us to adopt that cultural norm. I don't think the government should be enforcing it, but far from it. But I think it's okay for us to embrace a culture that says that all else equal, we're rooting for you to get married, ideally finding that soulmate.

And that that becomes part of a general cultural norm versus the postmodern slide of, well, maybe I will, maybe I won't. Well, maybe I'm a man and maybe I'm a woman. Right. I mean, it just goes to, it can go to a level of, once you sort of feel like you're removing a lot of constraints, what it turns out you're doing is you're actually just creating new ones that often can leave you far worse off as a result. And so I think it's this tricky thing where it's like the paradox of choice. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, yes, I think it's well said. I think that you can become a prisoner of what you feel like is the optical illusion. of choice when in fact it's just a new kind of prison. And so I think we need some level, I think we probably benefit with some level of default structural norms in a culture, in a society that we still have the freedom to opt out of. For sure. And I think that's probably the optimum that I would want to create for my kids and not just

using governmental power, but as a cultural norm, I think that's a good thing in our country to create a certain default ordering. But there's always going to be people for whom the right answer still isn't fitting in that order. There's still a path to opt out. And, you know, I guess that's probably what my parents had, right? I mean, if my mom or my dad, either of them said after those 12 days, they don't want to do it.

Nobody was going to force them to do it. But there was a heavily, you know, a heavily culturally informed expectation that there's a good chance that's going to work. And as long as you have that opt out, now there's not when we're just talking about marriage. We're talking about really anything, right?

That if you're a man, you dress a certain way, there are certain, you compete in certain sports in certain ways, but if you're a fully grown adult and you want to do it differently, we're not going to stop you. Right.

No one's going to come to your house with their handcuffs and say you can't do it. But that if you bastardize and pervert that fetishization of choice to say that there's no default norm at all, and there shouldn't be those defaults, I think you're just creating a new form of oppression and depression as a consequence. I think we're veering too far in that direction. I agree with that, but I also think that we do need to appreciate those that do go away

from the norm. Whether or not we like embellish it and like, you know what I mean, like recommend it is a different thing, but we do need to appreciate and respect the, you know, the abstraction from the norm. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Do you know, for those for those. For those. for whom that's the right choice. Okay, so now we're gonna go into more of like a policy thing. By the way, I read Woking, I loved it. I loved it.

And I wanna say, I've always intuitively thought that there is so much commingling between corporate America and like, the bureaucrats. Like, intuitively, it made so much sense to me, but I never really felt like I had like that confirmation, but this book just like, I feel like I, you know what I mean?

Like the Matrix got opened, which is insane. And I'm not just like a full-on- just like believer of everything. It was a very honest book. I mean, I was not really filtering very much in that book. It was what I felt at the time. I put it on a page and that was that book.

Yeah, but no one's open about this. Because especially the people that they control the dissemination of information. Right. You know what I mean? So obviously, why would they out themselves as the people that muddy the waters? Right. So it doesn't really make any sense. But I really liked that book.

Thank you, man. I'm going to recommend it to a lot of people, yeah. I hope a lot of young people really. I mean, it seems a little less bold today than it was, oh, come on a man. Yeah, some people. Than it was at the time. But at the time when I wrote that book, the stuff in there, you were not allowed to say it. Right, but it's so abstract still.

And I do think that you go a little too nuanced and like deep about it, where I think if you made it more of like a, the problem with nuanced opinions, which is exactly what are we filming? Yeah, we're rolling. The problem with nuanced opinions is the fact that you need to justify it with so much data, so much like supporting information that nobody is willing to pay attention to. And I found that to be one of the biggest issues today is that a lot of the times the correct opinions are the nuanced ones, but it's not exciting and it does require a lot more information. Too much thinking.

Exactly. And your book was exactly that. It's like in order to understand that framework, you do need all that supporting information, but nobody's going to go out of their way to figure it out. Well, I hope that we change that because I think the truth is sometimes, you know, For sure. And sometimes requires getting beyond just what is built to trend on algorithmically powered social media. And I do worry about the discursive impact of an internet that was built to mimic real life. And then we now have real life mimicking the internet. And I think that that's something I worry about.

I don't have an obvious answer of how to change it. Make it more exciting somehow. Yeah. I don't know how, but like the truth isn't exciting enough. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. At times. I think there's a difference between exciting and beautiful.

Sure. But I mean, enticing. Like, people want to try to reach the truth. Yeah. How do we make that more, I would say, you know, enticing? Mm-hmm. Appetizing. Why is that desirable?

To reach the truth? No. To make it more appetizing. Because then I think people, digest it. I think it's, people are more receptive to surface level basic ideas. They don't need to think too much about, but that interests them. And so how could you get people interested in something? If it takes too much work, if it's, it's a kind of an age old question of like, what, if you have a good product, but you don't market it well. Yeah, yeah. What's the point

of having a good product? But you got to operate within the constraint of making sure the marketing of the product doesn't change what the product actually is. And so, you know, the truth in this particular case, a deep debate about cultural and political, you know, circumstances in the United States in the year 2020 when I wrote that book, is there a more effective way to market that to reach a larger number of people

without changing the underlying truth of what you're communicating? I'm sure there is. And I'm sure that I probably have been less effective than I can be. But for me, my goal in writing that book was not to reach the maximum number of people. It really wasn't. It was to, I was practicing out a hobby. Get your thoughts out on paper.

Free long form writing, exactly. And if I write down there what I actually mean and, you know, nobody reads it but 10 people, yeah, that'd be disappointing. Certainly part of me would be disappointed by that. But I'd rather do that and have it be true to who I am. than to solve for what's going to reach the most people. That was easy in the case of writing the book. Where it actually becomes a lot harder is on a presidential campaign.

Yeah. Right. Because there's one giant popularity contest is what this feels like, actually. It's not what I expected. I think that policies have less to do with it than I expected coming into this. So what do you think is the most important factor? I'm not sure. I'm figuring it out right now, but policy, for me, policy is very important. I mean, I think that money's, money's the most important factor.

I mean, money is to be a, tactically, tactically the most, it's not what I think should be the most important factor. There's two different questions. What I think should be the most important factor versus what is the most important factor. And I think that there's a big gulf between the two. And the reality is, I'd rather kind of do it like I did with woke ink to make a bet on the university. and on the country and on our process to say, I'm going to speak my convictions, and maybe people will hear them, and maybe they won't.

And if everything works the way it's supposed to work, then that means that if that's what the people of this country want, I'll be the next president. I feel good approaching it that way and that I can put my head on my pillow at night, regardless of the outcome. There's a version of the world where that just doesn't work, and what you need to do is you need to check certain boxes,

particularly those that allow you to accumulate large-scale donors, really, to buy the ads, need to reach people, et cetera. So do you think this is really an advertising thing? It's like how many people can you get in front of? How much do you think it would cost? I think spending, I mean, the person who wins this election this year all the way through is probably going to spend about $2 billion. Two billion.

Yeah. So is that how much you think it would cost to be able to get elected president? Well, I think that you can't get elected if you don't have a message that the people of this country don't want. But the distorting. The distortions created by the amount of money that's spent via the super PACs completely distorts the system. So it's less that that amount of money will win you the election. But the fact that that much money is being spent, creating distortion and noise, makes it much more difficult for a guy who's coming in from the outside and actually just express the own views.

Where do they spend the money? Where does $2 billion go? Where? TV, radio, mail, direct mail, billboards. Are those the people who show up to vote? Yes. In primaries, absolutely. Okay. Yeah.

The fact of the matter is the Republican primary electorate, a lot of them, they're not the world that we're talking to right now. It's people who watch old school cable television. That's where they get their news and old school radio, like AMFM radio. That's the reality for the Republican primary electorate. When do you think that's going to change? Because eventually those people are going to age out. It's going to change, but I think it's, I think the obviousness of the fact that it is going to change creates an illusion for how quick that's going to happen.

I think it's like a 10 to 20 year time horizon. I have a very blunt question. As somebody who is a part of that like ultra wealthy upper echelon, like elite members of society and running for president, I am sure, as shown in your books, that you, have access to and can observe the level of corruptness that exists in the United States. Yeah. Now, especially as you're running for president, are you surprised by it? What, what, how have you experienced corruption?

I'm surprised by how broken and corrupt the political system is. And I, you're surprised by it. Yeah. And you probably went in. Who's a guy who's not naive to this, right? Who has a baseline expectation that it's a broken system. It's far more broken than you expect. How so?

because I'm a complete outsider of this. Like, how is it surprising? I have no idea. It's surprising because they create the illusion that it's not. So I'll just give you some, you know, boring facts, but it helps you piece this together. The max amount you can give to a campaign in a primary for a presidential election is $3,300.

Turns out you can donate another $3,300 for the general. So add that up, the most you can contribute to a campaign is $6,600. bucks. That's a lot of money for a lot of people, but it's not enough to buy off a presidential candidate. It's just not because it's going to cost $2 billion. There's a lot of people who can give $6,600. Why do we limit it at $6,600? We limit it because we don't want any one person to have undue or corrupting influence over our president. That's why we have that system. This is all a farce. That's not where the money, like, I don't have the exact numbers.

in front of me, but like 90 plus percent of the money that's been spent on this campaign season so far has not been spent by the campaigns of the individual candidates that are subject to these limits. It's spent by super PACs. These are these separate entities where there's no limit to how much money people can put in. They can put in a million. They can put in 10 million. They can put in 100 million. And you have people putting in tens, soon to be hundreds of millions as individuals. Why do they do that to get influence. So the very thing that we were supposed to stop with the campaign thing, now the candidates, what they do is they show up at events, hosted by the Super PAC, where there are mega donors in that room, 10, 20 people, given millions of dollars apiece. That's who the

candidate knows is actually funding their campaign. I mean, if you look at other candidates in this race, Ron Sands, Nikki Haley, whatever, these are people where the dollars are really being spent by their super PACs, the candidates know who the super PACs are. And I'm not saying these candidates are good people or bad people. It's a broken system. Many of them are good people tainted by this broken system. They're playing the game as it's currently played. And so what happens is they dance to the tune of those donors, the things they say on TV

or on that debate stage or whatever. That's not them speaking. That's some mega donor speaking using their vocal cords as a vehicle, as a vessel, to communicate. How much do you think it would cost to be able to do that? Like, what's the minimum? Like, is it $10 million, $50 million? I mean, you're saying, you're saying to have your own money. Correct.

Like, if I were to influence a policy. Oh, oh, if you're going to influence a policy. Let's just say, you know, whoever's running, you know, whoever's in the lead right now, 50 million bucks. Yeah. Is that the amount? Is it 10? Is it 100?

I think if you're talking about contributing mid to high seven figures, you're definitely going to have influence. on a politician. If you're in the eight-figure territory, you're in the really special club of people who are then the puppet masters. So the people who can write eight-figure checks, they're the puppet masters.

Are these companies or people? People. What is the message that they're trying to get across usually? Is it... Depends on what their self-interest is. I mean, different people have different self-interest. Deregulations in their industry. Yeah, or actually even just pet policies

that they consider to be their version of what makes for a better America. That's actually the thing, is it's not exactly as you'd expect in terms of it all being directly relating to like their business interest. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is for sure. But if only it were that simple. Have you been approached for any of these?

For Superpack stuff? Yes. Like huge donations say, hey, we'll give you $100 million, but we want you to. It doesn't work. It never works that way even for the other candidates. Okay. The way it works is they're technically, they will say can't be Super PAC coordination. right but but randis's entire campaign is literally being run by the super pack so that's not his fall that's not ronda

is his fault but it is a tortured interpretation of how the system was supposed to work in the first place why even bother with the campaign contribution limits i mean why if the candidate's entire the bulk of his campaign can be run by a super pack like most of the staff is hired by the super pack the ads are all being bought by the SuperPack. And you know who the Super PAC donors are, and you show up at their events to raise the money. Why bother with the farce? So the beauty of our system is supposed to be that every citizen's voice and vote counts equally,

regardless of the number of green pieces of paper they control, and that culminates in the ballot box. That's a farce. That's just not the system we have in the United States of America. And the worst part of it is we create this myth that that's how it works. when in fact that's not how it works. And so every politician dances to the tune of their biggest donor. It's like as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, it's like a law of nature.

Every politician dances to the tune like a circus monkey to their biggest donor. Now, in my case, that biggest donor is me. If you're investing in your own campaign, the way the rules work is that the $6,600 limit applies to everybody else. But if it's your own money, you can put an unlimited amount. So I've put in over, I think 15 plus million. I have to look up for the exact number. It's over 15 for sure million dollars into this campaign. Well, I'd rather do that than be somebody else a circus monkey.

But it is a broken system. And it is the dirty little secret in American politics. And those who don't... There's the donor puppet master's pulling the strings. Those who do not dance to the tune don't even end up becoming politicians because they don't win. Not the ones you hear of. They don't end up winning. One thing that really frustrates me,

are the bureaucrats that you talked about in your book that then become upper management or sit on boards, make millions of dollars, all the while when they're in the public office, they're just like a dancing puppet, like you said, for those industries that they will then join, make seven-figure salaries after their term.

Yeah, it's the real, one of the real divides in this country is not between black or white or Democrat or Republican even. It's between what I call this managerial class in Woke Inc, that's what I was talking about. The same kind of, middle to upper management that staffs corporate boards of directors, or is the associate dean of God knows what at some Godforsaken university, to being the undersecretary of something or other in the U.S. government, to the person sits in the ambassador to some second-tier nation abroad.

It's the same horizontal pool of people that are crushing the will of the everyday citizen. And I would put the Super Pack Puppet Masters in that category. Do you find that there's a balance, though, between going with some of these large donors and getting your own message across? Like, let's just say that's the only way to become president. That's what I'm doing. But let's just say that's the only way to be president is that you have to get these donations. Do you find there to be a balance between it? I think that that's otherwise, then it might never happen.

Yeah, that's that's what I was saying. It's one thing to write woke ink. Like, that was easy for me. The hard part is if your mission is actually to change this country, you've got to be oriented towards your ends. Now, I'm being an idealist about this. But my hope is in the modern era versus at least, even seven, eight years ago, we can reach people directly through other mediums.

That's why I'm talking to you guys. I'm talking to other people, reaching people directly on the hope that we can still break that system. So I'm running against that system. I'm not running against any other candidate. I'm running against that system. And because I've been blessed to live the American dream in this country, I have no real resources to be able to put into this in a way that somebody who wanted to challenge the system

without those resources couldn't. So I don't want to compromise on principle there. Are there people, if people want to support me in whatever way, I'm not going to change what I say for them. And they know that. I'm not dancing to anybody's tune. But if people want to support me, great, I'll take it. But I'm not going to play the game that the other candidates play in becoming circus monkeys.

But we will find out whether that's a successful strategy. What would you do if that doesn't work? I'd reflect on it and think about how else we reshape and fix a badly broken system, which is what we have today, a badly broken system. And so right now, my heart says we're going to be successful. But there's no point in speculating. I'm going to keep doing what we're doing exactly the way we've been doing it. And another, you know, seven, eight months, it's going to be very clear whether I'm the Republican nominee. And in another 13 months, it's going to be clear whether I'm the next president. So I'm not naturally a plan B kind of

person. So we're going to carry that track and see how far it takes us, which I think is going to be to success in reviving this country. But if it's not, and the broken system is as broken as it is that stops an outsider or anybody else coming in, play by the rules, but be able to get elected without playing the donor puppet master game, I think there's a lot of soul searching, not just for me, but for this country on how we break that system. It is corrupt and it needs to change. I'm curious, why do so many politicians have all of these campaign promises before they get elected into being in public office? And then all of the sudden, when they're in public office, nothing changes. For example, Trump in the Wall.

For example, Hillary Clinton saying that everything is wrong with public policy, everything's wrong with politics and the bureaucrats, but she's been a career politician, the same as Joe Biden. Like, why do they blame everything yet change nothing? Is this because of that distortion from their donors? and they promise all these things to be appetizing to the voters. And then all of a sudden, like, they just are beholden towards their donors. I think it's a big part of it. A lot of it's a deflection tool to be able to, you know, advance their own political goals

when, in fact, the things that they need to get done are the ones that their donor masters have told them to get done. I think some of this is also politicians sometimes just make mistakes. I mean, a U.S. president can't do certain things without Congress. And so you don't know what Congress is going to look like. So I try not to make promises that are legislative promises in this campaign, things that are contingent on Congress. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower.

Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like Habinier, yes. Save the Everyday with Amazon. The things I'm talking about doing are the things that I can get done without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness. Shut down a lot of those excess bureaucratic agencies. Lay off 75% of the useless federal employee headcount. 25% of the people can get the rest of the job done. These are things that I'm going to be able to get done in my capacity as U.S. President. And the fact that I don't have promises that I've made to donors about very specific things that I'm going to do. No, the promises I've made are the ones that are transparent on media and social media to the American public every day.

That's what I hope will be what allows me to succeed in a way that many of these politicians of yesterday have not. And I do think it's going to take an outsider to do that. I also think it's going to take somebody coming from the next generation to do it. I agree. I really do. I mean, it's our generation, your generation, that's going to bear the brunt of the $33 trillion national. deficit that we have and so on. And so I think it makes sense right now more than ever to have somebody from the different generation from the next generation to lead us. Where do you feel like

your weak spots are? Where are your blind spots? By definition of their blind spots, you know, you don't know about them. Yeah, but let me think about that. Because I've heard a lot of people say experience. Yeah, I think that's a big one. I mean, I think that, but that's the over said one. Yeah, I think it is the over said one. But I think it's a legitimate question. I mean, I think even for a lot of people in the Republican primary base who view me favorably, I think the way they view me right now. You know, we're sitting in October. We got time to evolve this.

Many of them didn't know who I was six months ago. But right now, I think many of their headspace is great young man, breath of fresh air. That's what I hear a lot. Such an important voice in this race. And I'm glad you're running and thank you for making the sacrifice to run. And you have a bright future ahead. and whether you're president or something else, I'm so glad you're playing a role in our country's future.

That's where the headspace is. There's the 8% of people out there, 10% of people out there who are already supporting me. That's good. It was 0% in March, so we've made some progress. But the big obstacle is getting people from seeing me as a nice young man with great ideas and energy and youthful spirit who has a bright future ahead and has a role.

to play to say, that's going to be the guy who's my next president. And I don't think that we have grown up in an era where people are used to seeing somebody who's 38 years old be the next president. But frankly, we live in an era. I mean, you're a creator. I respect that about you, man. But Thomas Jefferson was a creator. He was 33 years old, same age when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. And he invented the swivel chair while he was at it. Right. And Thomas Jefferson wasn't alone. I mean, Benjamin Franklin invented the Franklin stove, the bifocal spectacles, a remedy to the common cold. We don't have that spirit in this country anymore.

And I think that it doesn't have to stay that way. We can bring it back. But that's my job to get done. If we get done, I'll be the next president. And that's the work that I have cut out for me in the next few months ahead. Do you feel like you have any other weaknesses, though? Yeah, I'm sure. We all have, you know.

So do you mean substantive weaknesses or electoral weaknesses? Substantial, yeah. Yeah, like in terms of being an effective president. Correct. I mean, countless. I think we all do. But from a personal perspective, look, I'm a guy who, has in my career been fortunate to work with very bright people in building the businesses

that I've built. That was part of my philosophy. Hire people smarter than you or more talented than you in whatever domain I can find them and need them. And when I look back at the people who I've built my businesses or enterprises with, these are some of the most talented people. I'll meet my life, chose them intentionally with that basis because we started from scratch to build up. I think coming in and running the executive branch of the government with millions upon millions of preexisting employees who are there, not based on merit, but based on civil service protections and other factors, is a different game than being a creator from the ground up. And so I think that that will be a new experience for me, one where I can't alone rely on my entrepreneurial experience to do it. Now, I think that that entrepreneurial experience provides some real advantages that people

otherwise coming from within politics or bureaucracy don't have. But I think the best you can do about your limitations is at least to be aware of them, humble about them. One of the ways that I did build my businesses was to surround myself with people who would challenge me, not just people who were yes men who agreed with me. People shared the same principles and mission and who are skilled, but often will disagree with me and be afraid to challenge me to be the best version of myself as a leader I possibly can be. And I intend to lead the federal government the same way as well. Do you think the government has recovered

alien spacecraft? Was the question unidentified flying objects? Or alien spacecraft or evidence? Evidence of aliens. I would say evidence of aliens. I don't know. So the question I'm answering yes to is have identified flying objects. If you did discover aliens, do you think it would be in the public's best interest to know about it or not? I think it's the public's best interest to know what the government knows. There are almost no circumstances in which the government should be hiding something from the public. But let's say that would cause public panic. Do you believe that maybe it's worth withholding?

I think there's, so this is an ancient debate from the era of Socrates and Plato to even the COVID-19 and climate change alarmism era that we're in today. there's no such thing as a noble lie. It doesn't exist. People think they're telling a lie to be noble because the public can't handle the truth. We can handle the truth. We require the truth. And the reason people don't trust the government is that the government doesn't trust the people back. And so if there's one thing I will bring to the table, we'll be transparent, tell the truth about everything.

Release the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Say what we know about unidentified flying objects. Say what we know about how many federal federalists. agents were in the field on January 6. I mean, just give it to us straight. What do we know about the vaccines before they were rolled out for COVID-19? Just be straight with the public. Release the national transgender shooter manifesto. Transparency. Anytime a government official has pressured a private actor to do something through the back door that the government couldn't do directly, release it, make it known to the public. When the government controls like where they choose to be

honest and where they choose to lie, I think that's hard to draw that line. And I think that they've been a little generous on their side with it. Yeah. You decided to step down from Royvent because of your non-acknowledgement of BLM and, you know, post the George Floyd tragic death. And broader stakeholder capitalism and corporate social responsibility, garbage, all that. Exactly. But currently you're kind of campaigning based off of being a huge, like, uniter, right?

Similar to what Obama was trying to do, which is like be the great uniter. How do you expect to unite the United States when you're, you're going to. you struggled to do so with Royvind. Well, I actually think that's a good, challenging question to ask. The mission is different, right? The mission of Royvind was to develop medicines for patients who needed them that the rest of pharma had ignored. And so we actually did unite the company around that mission, even though there were people

on both sides of a political question related to Black Lives Matter. Now, my job as leader of the president of the United States is to use. unite this country around our national values. So it depends on the mission that you have. So it's more that I fulfilled that mission. In my seven years of CEO, I oversaw the development of a number of medicines, five of which are FDA approved today, one of which is life-saving therapy and kids, another for prostate cancer, another for women's health conditions, endometriosis, uterine, fibroids, and others, that was that mission. Now I'm on to a different mission. And I think that the Obama or Biden version of national unity, it's fake. I think their model of national unity is just

getting other people to believe what they believe and trying to get the other side who disagrees with them to compromise and then hold hand sing kumbaya that's not how we're going to get to national unity i think the way we're going to unite this country is by reviving the ideals that we share as americans all the way going back to our founding and those are extreme ideals it's not through moderation or being a moderate it is by embracing the extremism of those ideals free speech, the idea that you guys get to speak your mind as long as I get to in return. That is a radical idea. For most of human history, it was done the other way.

The unbridled pursuit of excellence and meritocracy. That is a radical extreme idea. But I think the way we're going to unite this country is by embracing that radicalism rather than somehow engaging in moderation and compromise. Now, I'm curious on the topic of Royvent, I'm really big into investing. And Yahoo Finance had an article about Roy Vint's negative EPS and huge losses lately. Who is sustaining those losses? So it's actually really important to understand the biotech business model.

I mean, Royvince's a $9, $10 billion, some odd public company today. And most biotech companies that are even companies, most biotech companies that are one or two or $3 billion biotech companies on an accounting basis, their R&D costs exceed their revenue. Many of them don't even have products yet that are approved. But the value of that IP, as those products proceed through different stages of the process, make it a lot more valuable. So in Royvance history, for example, there were years of developing these medicines and then sell them in one year to other distributors in like a $3 billion deal. That was what happened in my last full year as CEO or my last year and a half as CEO. So it's just a way in which if you look at normal standard, you know, industry outside of biotech, consumer products or whatever, you analyze it differently versus an IP industry, an intellectual property industry. So most biotech companies, full stop outside of big farm, most innovative biotech companies worth billions of dollars are not companies that in the year that they're actually developing a given medicine are recording EPS, even though it's the accretion of the IP value.

Does it worry you, though, that the CEO has sold off so many of his shares over the last year? I have not paid attention to it. Okay. Once I've separated from the company, I've left my investments to somebody separate. But my view is that, you know, my hope and expectation is that Royvon's going to be an incredibly successful company over the long run. I believe even in the businesses and enterprises that I've created, part of what you do is build great succession for yourself, build great teams that are able to carry on the mission. such that what you create outlives you. That's what gives me a lot of satisfaction.

And so, you know, I think it's been a bear of a year in the stock market for a lot of people. Royvind's been immensely successful. And I give a ton of credit to the team that's there. I don't take credit for that. I've been out of the business for a little while now, but I give credit to the team that's there. And I take pride in having for every, about almost every one of those senior people there having recruited that team.

And that's hopefully how I'll lead this government as well. as well as recruit some of the best advice. This is the last one. Okay. There's a video of you out there. I didn't realize you have an accent. And I want to show you this. I just want to give your opinion on that.

Let me see it. No, Mom, I'm going to be first, but Trump is so weird, man. But I tell them, I went to Harvard. I went to Yale. They look at me like, okay. That's really funny. Hey, Vivek? Hey, man, how are you?

You're Vive. I'm a small week. Good to meet you. Hi, hi, hi. Hey, yeah. What brings you to this part of town? Where are you from? I'm like down the street, actually. Oh, that's fantastic. So, so what do you do? I'm a student. I want to play basketball. It's fantastic. So when you have, you know, you can be a cornerback. You can be a wide receiver. It doesn't really matter. The great thing about a meritocracy is if you're really good, you're going to make millions of dollars. And if you're not, you're going to get cut from your team, probably not going to have any friends, probably not going to get any girls. But that's the great thing about capitalism, right? It's equality for all. And

And that's on day one, we got to get rid of affirmative action. We got to get rid of the affirmative action. That guy's pretty good. His actual vague voice is very good. It's really good. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So this guy might have a future career.

Is that not you? I mean, I wish I was in my 20s. That guy's pretty good. Yeah. So maybe when they're looking for people to mock me on SNL, he'd be a pretty good. I think he'd be pretty good. I'm going to tell you, if you did a video with him and you brought him here, here, you'll get like 30 million views.

We should bring it. Guaranteed. Let's get the guy here. Guaranteed. I've never met him. I came across this a few days ago and I wanted this show. It's pretty darn good. This has gone viral.

We'll get that guy here. That's really fun. He makes a living just off of impersonating. You know what? I'm happy to, I'm happy to have spawned, you know, creative careers. And, you know, I give that guy some credit. I have a feeling if we're successful in this as I expect to be.

I'm feeling that guy's going to be in employment for a long time to come. So I wish him well in his career. Thank you so, for your time. I really appreciate this. This has been such an honor. Thanks guys. Thank you for coming over. Thank you. I appreciate it. Beautiful. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. I really appreciate your time. I'm sorry we went a little later than expected.