The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 308: Vivek Ramaswamy—Can You Handle the Truth

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

The entrepreneurial businessman and presidential candidate lays out his plan to help America reclaim her national identity and shatter the Overton Window by taking on the army of angry acronyms; CSR, SDG, DEI, ESG, WEF, and CCP, which has earned him the nickname godfather of the anti-woke movement.

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Chuck, if I were to say, do you want the truth? What would you say? You can't handle the truth. Not bad. How that reference came up is, well, you'll hear it. It's just embedded in my conversation with Vivek, Ramoswamy, who, as you may have heard, is running for president. relax it's not a political conversation not really anyway and this is certainly not a political podcast but vivake has thrown his hat into the political ring there is no doubt about it i don't know

how much you know about the guy but he's impressive he's a young man by presidential candidate standards he ran a very successful biotech company he walked away in his role as CEO because he didn't what was happening in the world of all things woke. He didn't feel like he could speak his mind at the time and he didn't want to speak his mind as a CEO because that would have been unfair to shareholders and his partners and he made an ethical. Yeah, he made an ethical decision to step away from a plum job in Silicon Valley. And since then, I think Chuck, people talk about him in terms of the godfather of anti-wokeness. He's really put the flag in the ground, and he's running largely on that identity. No apologies, no going back. He's a guy who, on day one of

his presidency, says he's going to repeal affirmative action with the stroke of a pen in the same way that it was brought about by Lyndon Johnson. Here's the thing that gets me about, Mike, is that he doesn't have any notes. He speaks extemporaneously all the time, and he's determined not to write a speech. He might write a speech, but he's not going to read a speech or have one written for him. He's going to do it himself. Which will probably go out the window if he wins. But I got to tell you, man, part of the reason I wanted to have this guy on is because I just wanted to hear more from him. And never mind what I agree with and what I don't agree with. I think, most people who listen to this will probably be able to piece that together. What I really dig that

he's doing is what you just said. He's not going to use a teleprompter in the course of running for president. He's not going to refer to notes when he gives speeches. In fact, he's going to document the entire business of running. He's going to start his own podcast and he's going to have a blog and there's going to be videos. And he, he's going to actually do the transparent thing. At least that's what he's claiming. And personally, when I heard that, I just thought, well, that's what we need. People are starving for that. And I honestly didn't think we were going to talk much about it. But, but we kind of come right out of the gate with transparency. And it just gets better after that. The guy can talk. He has a lot of big ideas. And I feel terrible that we didn't get.

to go deeper into it. You really wanted to talk about fentanyl, right? Yeah, I really did want to hear about fentanyl because he really wants to end it. And of course, you know, living in Ohio, I think there's a big fentanyl problem in Ohio. So I think that's top of mind for him and his folks. Well, let's just get into it, all right? Because aside from repealing affirmative action on his first day in office, he also wants to make political expression of civil right. He wants to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. And he wants to wage an economic war against China. This is a big thing.

He wants to declare America's independence from China. And he's got a plan to do it. And he wants to declare an actual war against Mexican drug cartels. So that's a lot. That's a biggie. That's a lot. He's fun to talk to. He's fun to listen to.

who knows what the candidacy will ultimately amount to, but I'll tell you, he's having the kind of conversation that I wish we were having on a bigger level. So what can I do except invite him on the podcast? I did. He said yes, which begs the obvious and titular question. Can you handle the truth? Vivek, Ken, here we go. Right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss a rotary phone?

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And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at NetSuite. dot com slash mike that's net sweet dot com the vague it seems that you've embraced a whole new level of heretofore unprecedented transparency both in the audio visual approach to this podcast and perhaps to your entire presidential run am i overstating it you know i don't want to pat myself on the back about it or anything but i think that's about right we're running i guess the terminology is open source campaign, you know, we're going to lift the curtain and, you know, bring people in. I think people

can trust the process more if they can see, you know, what's right about it, what's wrong about it. I think that even if you're not going to fix all the things that are wrong, and I'm learning that there's a lot that's wrong with our broken campaign system, even if you could just see it, though, I think it'll actually build trust. And so if that's, you know, we hope to take this the distance and win the White House and change the country. But even if that little thing was one positive thing that came out of the campaign, that alone would be hopefully good for the country. So how exactly are you going to do it? You're going to sort of podcast and live blog every step of the process along the way. It's like Bullworth, sort of. Right? It sort of is. I mean, I've never

fashioned myself as a reality TV show star. I think to the contrary, you know, I started my career in pretty private corridors, right? My first job out of college was that, you know, hedge fund investment firm. It's like the classical quiet, doesn't want to be in the press, stay out of the limelight beginning of my career. Even in my career as an entrepreneur initially, you know, you're developing medicines. It's not something that lends itself to being done particularly in the public eye, even because the public's not particularly interested in the sausage making of that sport. I don't know that I'm going to be, I'm yet natural at this. But the thing that was clear to me was, look, it's a corrupt.

process, actually. I mean, the number of things, number of people that are going to make money. Let's just start with that, right? The number of people are going to make money off this presidential campaign is probably more money will be made off this campaign cycle than any other campaign cycle in human history. And I have a front row seat to what the dirty side of that looks like. All the candidates do, too. You know, I think there's just such an artifice behind it where even, you know, a conversation like this one or if there's like a press conference or whatever, the way it works is you get a briefing behind closed doors on some policy matter. And then you show up pretending like you knew all your life the things that you just learned 15 minutes beforehand.

And it's fake, really. And so a lot of those policy briefings, that's where it first started is the policy briefings, we just taped them. Then we said, let's just tape them and put him out as podcast. Then we said, let's just do a podcast. And then we've got an embedded videographer that's traveling with me on the campaign trail, recording the conversations we're having with Americans across the country and call them podcasts if you want, but we're going to put them out through different channels and give people a sense of what this is actually a lot. like? Well, I had a whole sort of mental list of things I'd arranged and I want to talk to you about, you know, everything from really ESG and corporate governance and the climate and the stuff that you've been hitting. But honestly, since we came out of the gate with this, let's stick with

this for a minute. Because what you're talking about, I think, is a, God, the word's just so overused anymore, but authenticity. People are absolutely starving for it. And I wonder if part of your decision to be this transparent about what is about to happen to you, my friend, because you surely understand what's coming, right? It's going to be a multi-front conflagration. But speaking only for myself, after seeing the current president, with great respect, win the office from his basement, from running a campaign that was so carefully controlled. And to this day, regardless of what you think of the guy, nobody can deny the fact that he's being handled

in a way that I've never seen the leader of the free world handled before. So did part of that go into your decision to do a warts and all campaign? Yeah, it did. I mean, I think that that's Biden is one input. Frankly, the good side of it is I think that there are elements of what Trump did in 2015 and 2016 that I take some inspiration from as well. Being willing to say things are open to. is just saying things that might not be the same things, he said six months later.

And that might be the stuff that the conventional media laughs at. But you know what? Human beings do change their minds, especially if they're speaking off the cuff rather than through practiced points. And so, you know, I think one of the things that also from a first personal perspective for me is I actually have been in environments where I haven't been free to speak my mind. I made a decision a couple of years ago, more than a couple years ago now, three, yeah, a little over two years ago.

I stepped down for my job as a biotech CEO, right? I founded a biotech company, built it as CEO. We got, you know, five of those medicines or FDA-approved medicines today that I worked on. And that was a phase of my career. But when the George Floyd- Sorry to make, but you can't gloss over that. That's a big deal. That's a big deal.

You want me to tell you about my background? People understand where you came from. I'll make sure that's spelled out in the preamble. But just take a minute, if you would. I've got a lot of friends in biotech, and I've got a lot of friends in venture. and what it takes to get a viable medicine out of R&D and onto the shelf, that is nothing short of Herculane and in its own way, a campaign, right? I mean, you have to launch a campaign to get that done.

So riff on that if you'd be so kind. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I began my career actually thinking I was going to be a scientist. I studied molecular biology and undergrad. I spent a lot of time in the lab, you know, spilling chemicals. and doing, you know, various forms of research, decided that, you know, when in the business world, they say hands-on, they mean like, you know, in a metaphorical sense, hands-on. You're in the lab, you're talking about hands-on.

It is hands-on the beaker. And so, you know, here's the honest truth is I wasn't that great at it, right? Like, I'm not actually that skilled. The time horizons required to do that in the lab were just too long relative to your human lifespan. You might spend your whole life working on one little thing. And I respect the people who do it. It's like meditative, it's useful, it's necessary, but it just wasn't for me.

When I got out of college, I joined that hedge fund. There were four physicists that were graduated from Harvard a little while before I did, and they had started this hedge fund and they were doing this quant kind of work, but they were dipping their toes into biotech investing. And I here I was graduating with the science degree. And so I was sort of interested in investing as well by that time. And so I said, okay, maybe I'll put this to work in a different way. Then ended up being pretty cool.

did that for seven years. So that was from 2007 to 2014. But that's when I learned about the biotech and farm industry, a little bit from an outsider in perspective, but as an investor. And it depends on how much you want to be bored by my story. But I spent three of those years at the same time in law school because I kind of had this itch to study law and political philosophy. And so I told my bosses I was going to quit and pursue that for three years. They said, keep your job at the same time and do it. That was great. Got me some autonomy on the job. It's actually the tip I give to anybody. If you feel like doing something, do it. because good things happen.

And I probably got like a quasi-promotion level of autonomy that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't told them that I was going to pursue something out of left field. But anyway, after I came back to my job, then I didn't have law school on my hand. I had a lot of spare time on my hands. And one of the things I did in that spare time is I had a very short-lived career

trying my hand at stand-up comedy in New York on the side. So I did about, the only useful thing that came out of it was ever since then I carry around this notebook everywhere I go. It's actually like a habit you pick up when you're in the comedy circuit. But then what I started to do is I started writing down all the things. I didn't write a lot of great jokes, it turns out. But I did write a lot of the things that bothered me about the pharma industry as I was an investor in it. It's like a regulated industry. A lot of people don't know this, but in Big Pharma, most of the titles you have in the corporate hierarchy, they're directly

mirrored off of a title at the FDA. So it's literally an entire industry whose corporate org chart is built in the shadow of the government bureaucracy that regulates it. And then top it off, it's got a patent-based system that's a built-in government-created monopoly. I'm not saying that's a bad thing or good thing right now. I'm just saying that's a descriptive truth. And so you have an industry that operates like a government, like a monopoly that's a regulated monopoly,

and that creates a lot of inefficiency. And so my notebook got full. I started writing down all the things that annoy me culturally about this industry. We could go on and on about those. I mean, people have no incentive to take risk if you're in a big pharma company, if you take a risk and you succeed, you don't personally benefit in that upside at all.

If you take a risk and you fail, you might have a budget cut to your annual budget. You might even get fired. And so people are almost in a rush to not get the answer. So part of the reason it takes so darn long to develop a drug, I mean, there's a lot of, you talked about it being a campaign and a Herculane lift of its own, and that's true for reasons dealt to us by nature.

But some of those are man-made. Where the organizations that are developing this, the individuals who work in those organizations, they don't have any rush or incentive to get to an answer of whether something works or not. It's almost preserving the status quo longer if they don't know the answer, because at least it's another cycle of an annual budget they get, and they don't get paid anymore if it did work. So anyway, this is one of many things that annoy me about the farm industry.

There's also a lot of group think there's certain categories that they would say, we love this category, and then it falls out of favor, and then they're out of that category. But out of inefficiency like that lands opportunity. And so I saw an opportunity to develop drugs in some areas, that pharma had just shifted out of. They had just fallen out of favor. So like women's health, medical dermatology, some rare diseases, actually genetic diseases

and children that were too small as markets for pharma to pursue. He said, okay, great. There's great research others have done. We can pick up where they left off. And also, by the way, give scientists skin in the game in their projects to say that if it works, you get uncapped upside in your own project. Uncap means like if it makes a ton of money, you get a portion of the money. money that it makes and use that to recruit great people who are trapped in this managerial bureaucracy.

And so that was the whole premise. It's actually the first time since the campaign started that I've actually told this story to somebody because it feels like a different phase of my life. I'm committed to not ask you the same questions you've been asked for the last month. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Repeating yourself does get pretty boring. We're already four weeks into this. And I'm committed to not repeating myself. Good luck. Even though that won't have me staying on message, I suppose. Too bad. Anyway, this is a throwback for me. So this is back in 2014.

I started Royvent. And like anything, it's a little bit harder than you think. You know, you lay out of play and the opportunity was there. But there are some reasons why pharma does things the way they do it. And, you know, you get a little bit of a humbling early experiences. We had an Alzheimer's drug early on was one of the drugs we developed. Alzheimer's was one of the areas that pharma had decided was one of the untouchable areas. One of the areas that we chose to enter, but a first drug that we developed there was,

a failure like so many other drugs, and you sort of get it. Okay, well, pharma's been failing for a long time. That's why they dropped it. You know, there's a lot more to the story than that. We had a drug that had reasonable odds that looked like of working, but it didn't. But, you know, I think after some of those humbling experiences along the way, we developed a bunch of medicines. And five of them are FDA-approved drugs today, for ones for prostate cancer, ones for

endometriosis and uterine fibroids, ones for psoriasis, another one for overactive bladder in elderly patients. And then another one is a therapy for kids who are born with this genetic disease where 100% of them die by the age of three. And if people get this intervention now, this biologic therapy, a majority of those kids have an opportunity to live alive of normal duration. So that was a phase of my life that I was incredibly proud of, but it was very different than the world I'm in now. And I weirdly, this is the long detour that brought us into this, is there's a lot of things I loved about that phase of my career. One of them that I didn't like was that I definitely was not free to speak my mind.

If I was to share what my perspectives were, even as a citizen, of course, I don't believe in using your corporate pedestal to foist your opinions on your employees or your customers or anything else, not that. But even as a citizen speaking freely about, you know, fill in the blank, and for me, where I sort of began to learn that the real way was in the wake of the Georgia Floyd death and the demands on corporate leaders across the country, I kind of had to make a choice, whether I was going to continue advancing my self-interest through capitalism and through work that I was proud of as a biotech CEO, or was I going to speak freely as a citizen if I couldn't

do both at the same time? And, you know, I made a choice, and that's what led me on this more recent journey that I've been in over the last few years. Okay. So I'm asking about this because I do think your former life is illustrative, if not even indicative of where you are right now, because I do think the business of getting a product on the shelf is analogous to getting a candidate in office. But I also think that your willingness to assume risk, anybody's willingness to assume risk. You know, that's the four-letter word that nobody talks about anymore, because it's that willingness to take the risk that we seem so completely focused on mitigating. And look,

and I'm all for getting rid of unnecessary risk, but quick sidebar, in my business, people ask me all the time why TV sucks, why so many shows look the same. And the answer, I think there's something there, right? Because you don't get punished as an executive if you greenlight an idea that fails horribly that has some sort of precedent that's already been on the air. But if you greenlight something brand new and fresh and exciting and that thing craps the bed, you're out, right? That's 100% true. It's exactly it. Okay. So that willingness to assume risk, that's in your DNA. You apparently understand the farm industry better than you know, actually.

Because you just tied together the two things that I said, which is that's even a more precise description of it than I gave, which is on one hand, you have individuals who have like an asymmetric down. side from taking a risk. Because in the upside, they don't get paid. Downside, they might lose their job. But then I also told you the other part, which is that there's a lot of group think in the farm industry. I didn't tell you why, but you said why. It's that if you take the risk that everyone else is taking, it's okay to fail. If you take the risk that no one's taking and you succeed, you don't get rewarded personally. And so everyone takes the same risks. And when they fail together and they're safe, hiding in the crowd. And when they succeed, they succeed. succeed, but it's a smaller success because you're sharing the pie with everybody else, but they're

okay with that because the individuals who make the decision, even though that's not in the interest of the company overall, the individuals who make the decision, it's in their self-interest. And so, you know, some of this is individual courage. Some of it's like the systems that are set up for people to just respond to the incentives they're given. And I think I want to give more thought to the TV and the Hollywood analogy. I mean, even if you think about language, like language tells us a lot about reality, actually. So you call them blockbusters, referring to movies in the movie industry, right? But in the drug industry, we use the word blockbuster to refer to a blockbuster drug. I don't know. I'll give a lot more thought to this, but I think there's probably a lot of analogies

between my former world and the world you know, too. Well, people are still raving, raving. I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial, and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If on the other hand you have better things to do with your time than watch my mom and me

be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk, text and data on a blazing fast network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the Microwworks Foundation and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. And I agree. I think you can always find those links just under the surface.

but when you distill it all down, I still feel like you come to the basic raw ingredients of the bully base. There's always going to be hard work. There's always going to be a willingness to assume risk. And there's always going to be a fascination with the reverse commute, which brings me back to where I interrupted you. Here you are the CEO of a going concern. You've got hits on the board, right?

You're less moon vests in this case, right? You are running the corollary of a successful network. And you just say, no, I'd rather step away than signal my virtue, which I think is what was happening in corporate America, certainly after George Floyd, but really going all the way back to 2008, when companies suddenly got it into their heads that, wait a second, we just got a heap and dose of bad PR. People hate us now, right? And so tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like that's when capitalism and corporatism and CEOs all started to fall in line in a super weird way around the same time that you got out of line. Yep. Exactly.

In a good way. I mean, I think you're right. Virtue signaling is probably an interesting way to, probably the right way to describe it. Signaling, your virtue is doing what everyone else is deems to be virtuous. Actually, being virtuous means tell them the truth. It means being honest. And so the thing that happened was, now my company is a multi-billion dollar company at this point. I built it from scratch as CEO.

I'm still leading it as CEO. And George Floyd dies. Okay, I don't know a ton about it at the time, but I hear about it. And suddenly there's a demand that I make a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. Now, I keep an open mind, learn a little bit about what this organization entails. and one of the early things that I see written about it was some of the hostile statements that it makes towards people of other races.

Well, I don't love the hostility aspect of anything. I don't want to endorse a hostile organization that I sort of see, you know, a call to decimate the nuclear family structure in America. That doesn't sound good to me. Because one thing I know about, actually, I mean, this is near and dear to my heart, right? I was born raised in Cincinnati.

I have, my parents were immigrants. The one, you want to know what the one, privilege we had. They didn't come here with a lot of money, but the privilege we had, it's a word that gets bandied around around a lot, was actually the privilege of growing up in a stable family. That values education. That's the most stable background you could have for achieving the heights that I've achieved. I couldn't have done it if I wasn't starting with that. So why on earth would I advocate or back an organization that stands for the opposite of that for black kids across the country where family stability is already a major problem? So I refuse to do it. And that

And that set into motion, I told some of the story in my first book. So I'm making a long story very short here. Woke ink. Yeah, Woke Inc. was the first one. And so anyway, I tell the story in Woke Inc. But to make a long story a little shorter here, the next six months led me to, you know, I think be a little bit more free and leaning into actually speaking out in my capacity as a citizen. But one of the things I did is I told you I went to law school along the way. It was a former law professor of mine who is like one of the top First Amendment scholars in the country, big advocate of free speech as a my. And so, you know, January 6th happens the following January, right? January 6, 2021, that is. And, you know, there was a lot of technology censorship.

You know, censorship carried out by tech companies, but as the facts revealed, were quietly responsive to governmental pressure to censor speech. And then I learned a lot more about the laws that actually even facilitate censorship of free speech at the government. government's behest. My former law professor and I co-wrote a piece. It was like a scholarly article, okay? And the article basically made the case that when private companies, so I was bringing a CEO's voice to this, he's bringing a law professor's voice to this, but when private companies respond to governmental threats and inducements to censor speech that the government cannot itself censor, that those companies are actually bound by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It was a

provocative legal academic argument, but we put it out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. It was new at the time. That argument has since become more popular, but back then it was a bit of a head turner. And this was gunpowder in the air in the country, so to speak, in the cultural ether after January 6th. Three advisors to my company in the next 48 to 72 hours resign with ceremonious notes as to I. And they cite statements going back to what I had been saying since the prior that companies shouldn't engage in these political issues, as I said in the wake of George Floyd's tragic death. And so to me, that was when I faced the choice to say, okay, nobody's forcing me to step down or anything, but I don't have a boss. That's great. I was a founder and CEO of a company

that I don't do well with a boss and that's fine. That's me. But functionally, there was a cultural oppression, if you will, that was different than a corporate hierarchical oppression that still created the experience of having my hands tied, even though I felt like until then I had been an independent free soul. And the choice is, am I going to speak through the filter of corporate self-interest? Or am I going to speak my mind freely,

but take the risk of actually harming the company? And the only rub is, I'm not the only person who gets harmed if I harm the company then. It's not really your company. Yeah, I mean, there's a thousand plus people who have followed me as employees over time to work for me.

There's investors in the company who, you know, it's not up to, me to just sort of decide that I want to make the company less valuable because I feel like speaking freely. So I did the only thing that I could, the highest integrity thing that I felt like I could do, which is to step aside from my job as CEO to put in charge somebody who by that point, many years into this journey has been groomed as somebody who can actually take on a big role like that. He was my CFO at the time, happened to have very different political beliefs, by the way. And it's interesting how that works. Like that never entered the workforce. Today it's now

just a norm as a litmus test. We were like diametrically different. political beliefs. But we worked together and he's a brilliant guy and I couldn't have built because you're trying to get life-saving medicines on the shelf and who gives a tinkers damn. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he was, you know, my philosophy is higher people smarter than you. If you can get him because it's such like I was a biologist. Here's the thing I've generally found. Physicists learn biology faster than biologists learn physics. He was a physicist. Sure. He was one of the smart guys year ahead of me in college. We brought him in. And so he's brilliant. We have very different political views, but anyway, put him in charge running the company.

I stepped aside and said that his voice is the voice of the company going forward. And when I speak and boy, will I speak, it is me speaking as a citizen. And so then I wrote woke ink and wrote these two other books. The second one's already out. The third one's coming out soon. Travel the country. I've been to a majority of states and then some, you know, over the last couple of years. And one of the things about writing is it forces you to, at least for me at least, it forces me to actually define what I think. I had this 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Smith in St.X High School in Cincinnati. She said that if you can't write it down, you probably don't know what you actually think.

And I could say now that she's smart. She was right. She was right. I sort of found it annoying at the time. But three books in now I can say she's definitely right about that. And so that was great for me. And even the book number two, I highlighted some of the things in book number one that I had changed my mind on. And that was, for me, it was as much a journey of introspection as it was about, you know, publicizing my views. But at a certain point along the way, I felt like, all right, geez, here I am complaining about a lot of problems. You know, that's the easy part. How about we

step up and solve? Writing about a lot of problems, right? Yeah, writing and speaking and all that stuff. I mean, you know, writing about the problem is easy. It also sells. People love to read books about the problem. You know, my publisher will tell me people don't want to, even in the editing process. Too much solutions here. Too much positivity. That part gets edited out. We need more on the problem. More on this. I kind of wrote it about evenhandedly, but the books end up being about like, you know, majority about the problem because apparently that's what sells.

But I'm an entrepreneur. And so I wanted to solve, I want to deliver some of the solutions through the market. And so I found another company is actually what I did. This is what I thought I was going to be doing right now. I found in a company called Strive. Have you heard of it? Are you familiar with it? Yes.

I have. Strive, as I understand it, is essentially an investment company that if you were to take ESG and kind of turn it inside out. sort of a retrenchment to the principles of investing as opposed to the signals of virtue. Exactly. You nailed it. So the whole point is when you actually, and just very specifically, the mechanics of how that works is if you have a share in a company, you don't just have a financial entitlement. You also have a right to vote that share. You also have a right to make your voice known to management and influence that management team. Well, it turns out

the largest asset managers in the world are using those rights of everyday citizens who, money they've aggregated. Take a firm like BlackRock, for example, manages, you know, five to ten trillion dollars on a given day. The top three, including Vanguard and State Street, two, those three manage about $20 trillion together. It's about as much capital as the US GDP. So they buy up shares in basically all publicly traded American companies. But they, on behalf of their clients, probably most people listen to this program, if I had to guess, nonetheless tell those companies to adopt emissions caps, racial equity audits in their hiring practices, a bunch of one-sided political policies.

We call those environmental, social, and governance agendas. That's what the ESG stands for that most Americans either disagree with or don't want advanced with their dollars and that don't advance their best financial interests. And so the premise of strive was to kind of replicate the same business model in terms of investment products, but with a different twist, which is to tell those companies to knock it off with the politics and to tell companies to focus exclusively on who would have ever thought making products and services for people who need them and make money doing it without apologizing for it. So that was the premise of my most recent company that I founded, which was Strive.

Well, I'm glad you did it because one of the things that's so pernicious about ESG is the the seeming banality of it, right? these acronyms, they just seem so innocuous. Quick sidebar, you'll laugh at this. A couple years ago, I got hired to address a company, big company, their annual gathering. And I was a fan of what they did. They made basically mobile offices for construction sites, right? Love them. They've been around forever. And I didn't ask a lot of questions because I was pretty sure I knew what the audience was all about, and I had a pretty good message for them. But halfway through this moderated Q&A,

I realized it was an ESG gathering. Now, this is two years ago, and I'm fairly informed, but I realized I'm not sure what this stands for. I'm not even sure what this is. And so as I learn what it is, I'm literally on stage in front of 5,000 people, for a fact, and I can feel my sphincter tightening because I don't like any of what I'm hearing.

And I'm like, how did this, become a thing. Like, I can't think of a single company today that doesn't have some kind of ESG thing going on. So, forgive me, but just back up a little bit and explain why that happened. And then I really want to learn more about how the average person who owns the average index fund, say, at Vanguard, is actually now, whether they know it or not, a part of this. And don't even get me started here in California, right? CalPERS, the unions, all that stuff must be. be baked into. Oh, it is. It is. Yeah. So I'll give you, I mean, I'll give you a short version. I actually end up writing a book mostly before I ran for decided to know it was going to run for

president. It's coming out later this year and it is going to be explaining the ESG movement. So it does take like sort of a book length work to do this correctly, but I'll give you the long story short. So you asked about the history. Let me address that. So I think a lot of this dates back to the 2008 financial crisis. Okay. I had a front row seat to that. I said I joined a hedge fund back in the fall of 2007. You know, this was a hedge fund that got a mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short. I was in the front row of seeing this, which was from a first personal perspective, awesome, great learning experience.

Crappy for the country. And if I didn't have a lot of money, but if I did, I would have been terrible. For me, like most other people on Wall Street who did, I just was a 22-year-old kid that had just joined, you know, the ranks. But I got to see what happened. And so what happened in the aftermath of the 08 crisis, we're not going to go through the whole 08 crisis here, but the punchline is one of the things that happened was the government bailed out the banks using public funds to do it.

So bankers made a lot of money when times were good. They got bailed out by the public when times went bad. And that was the basis for the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. And I lived in New York City at the time. I even went down there to check it out. It was kind of interesting stuff, right? The premise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, say what you will.

I mean, they say some crazy things, but I think it was founded on a reasonable grievance that capitalism is really just crony capitalism. And so we're going to take that money from those corporate fat cats and redistributed to poor people to help poor people. I found it not uncompelling, you know, at the time even. I wasn't like an Occupy Wall Street guy by any stretch, but I thought it was interesting and they had a point. Now, here's the thing. That created the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country because there was a strand of the Occupy Wall Street movement that started to splinter off and started to say things like, well, we need the hierarchy of intersectionality to be taken into account. What the heck is that,

right? What does that mean? Well, it means like literally, so there was an Occupy Wall Street rally. There's a famous video of this, and I actually cite this in Woke Inc, where the people who spoke at the Occupy Wall Street rally had to reshuffle themselves in line when they were waiting in line for the microphone based on where they were on the intersectional high. hierarchy of race, gender, and sexual orientation. And gender identity wasn't a thing back then, but it was mostly race, gender, and sexual orientation. So here they are Occupy Wall Street. So there's this guy who's a white dude who's, like, poor and pissed at the banks and the bailouts

who, like, wants to say something. What did you say? End of the line, buddy. He's like, yeah, you're a, but they did. They made him go back to the back of the line. It's this great footage where he's then doubly pissed because he thought he showed up because he's railing against the banks, but then he can't even say it because he's white. and a man and presumably straight,

because that then puts him straight at the back of the line. And so he's just like, what's wrong? Like I thought I was supposed to be able to speak. And so that kind of created a fissure where that's what created the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street. Because if you're Wall Street, you can get on board with that.

Right? So they said, okay, okay, okay, this is good. We'll put some token minorities on our boards and force them to put token minorities on your boards. Goldman Sachs won't take a company public unless its board is sufficiently diverse. This is a real fact. We'll muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after we fly in a private jet to Davos.

We'll do all these things, but we will not do them for free. We effectively expect the Occupy Wall Street folks, the other ones, to go home. Yeah, hands off. That's what happened. So that's when this ESG thing really basically began. It technically began in 2004, but that's really when it got some legs. Then the second thing that happened was Trump was elected. So people lost their mind when that happened.

And then when Trump in 2018 pulled out of the. Paris, oh, when I say people lost their mind, what were they saying? Let me be fair here. They were saying things like, well, if government is not going to rise to the challenges of addressing injustice, then the private sector must do it instead. Yeah, I'll save you. And then in 2018, then they say these things, then they're like waiting for legitimization. And then they look to 2018 when Trump pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords, then they go bananas. And they say, okay, if we're all going to burn on this planet that's overheating and, you know, our children shouldn't be having children because there isn't going to be a plan for them left to inhabit.

We, the leaders of the private sector must take this on because the U.S. government refuses to. And CalPERS, your boys, your homeboys in your backyard, what they do is they establish a network. It's called the, you know, one of many, but one of them is the climate action 100 plus network. And so what they basically say is CalPERS, which is, you know, half a trillion dollar plus allocator to large investment firms, says that we're not going to give you money unless you sign up to the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, to be part of the Climate Action 100 Plus network, to adopt net zero standards by 2050, to adopt modern diversity equity inclusion standards. So then the Black Rocks and State Streets and Vanguard's the world say, well, we're fond of money.

So if that's the requirement, then absolutely we'll take it, but there was a rub. The rub wasn't that Calper's saying that they want Calper's money to be used to advance those agendas, and that itself would be bad enough because the workers at Calpers who put money in probably don't want the pension fund managers of CalPers doing that. So that alone would be bad enough. But their commitment and demand

of these Black Rocks and vanguard was that no, no, no, no. You guys have to adopt a firm-wide commitment to the goals of the Paris Climate Accords and diversity, equity, inclusion, et cetera, which means everybody else's money got dragged along for the ride. People in their 401K accounts,

people in their brokerage accounts, people in their pension funds from other states, like Ohio or Indiana or whatever, wherever I'm talking to you, I'm talking from Ohio today. That's actually what caused this ESG thing to then hit critical velocity in the post-2018 period. And so all of these firms, they use the money of everyday citizens, trillions of dollars, to buy up shares in companies like Chevron to Apple, to Disney, to anyone else. And so the largest shareholders of corporate America are BlackRock State Street and Vanguard. But then they show up and they force those companies to adopt climate agendas, and social agendas that at first,

most of the companies didn't even want to adopt, and yet they were forced to, anyway, using our own money to do it. And so that's the long story short, at least, of what actually happened. It's like you just described Yelp on steroids, right? Do do do do do do do. I love stories like this.

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If you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. It's like somebody said, okay, we're going to come up with a rubric, a metric, and we're going to assign your company a score, right? This is why I think the company that I didn't mention but interacted with two years ago was having an ESG conference. They needed a score. They needed to be able to do some things.

so that they could go to their VCs, right? They're bankers and say, look, we're good now, right? You like us, right? And they say, yes, yes, yes. And so they can expand, raise more money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I get all that. What I think is stunning is if you can, and this will help you win. Or if not, it will certainly define you forever as a jagged little pill that helped open people's eyes.

because if you can get people like, well, like my mom and dad and just regular folks who do care about any number of things to understand that their investment choices, even in the most innocuous of funds, the Vanguard 500, right? The global. I mean, so all of that is being impacted by this thing. And it's not just the ESG. you glossed over pretty quick, but DEI is a thing too. And most rational people don't go, oh, diversity, I'm against that. Equity. Who wants that? You know, inclusion, not for me.

So, I mean, God forbid you try and peel back some layers of these things and find out what's underneath the acronyms. It's not necessarily what you think. Oh, it's not what you think. And so the DEI think about that as the S in ESG. So S stands for social. What does social mean? it basically means DEI. What does DEI mean?

Diversity equity inclusion. It basically means to make, again, another long story short, quota systems. That's really what it means. Quota systems based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. And I'm going to just be really honest. I mean, maybe people will disagree with me if they're hearing this, and that's fine. But look around at the place you work.

Look around in the classroom of your high school senior who gets into college. Is it really the person who is most meritorious for that job? for that seat in college? Is that really who's getting the position today? Or is it influenced by factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation? You can answer for yourself. I suspect that many people will quietly, if not openly, admit that it's not merit anymore that determines whether somebody gets that job, whether somebody gets that promotion, whether somebody gets that spot in college. And part of the reason why is they're using your own money to create a country you didn't vote for. And, you know, I think that you're right.

Once people see that, it's hard to unsee. And you know what? Here's the thing that people I think can agree on is even if they think that there needs to be something done to rectify historical racial injustice or whatever, let's do that through the political process, right? But let's not use our money through the back door to sacrifice investment return as a way of doing this through the back door. You go through the front door if you want to do it.

That's how it's supposed to work. constitutional republic. And that's what we can unite on. Back to where we started. Yeah. Transparency. Transparency. Transparency. Show me where the money's going. Show me where my money's going. Show me how the sausage is being made. You know, I mean, I say this is the dirty jobs guy, but people are interested in it. That's why the thing you're going to do with your campaign, I think, is really going to be useful. But I just come back to the acronyms again and again. There's so many. There's so many. And once you start looking for them, it's all you see. There was a file this thick on my boss's desk at Discovery, and it was called, I called it the AAA, which was the Army of

Angry acronyms. It's so true. Because after every episode, it was either OSHA or the EPA or the FBI or the HUSA. Honestly, if everything that was represented by a three-letter acronym just disappeared in an instant, man, we would be like a better country right now. So I'll give you the corporate world, right? So you've got DEI, diversity equity inclusion. You've got ESG, environmental social governance.

You've got CSR, corporate social responsibility. You've got SDG. That's the sustainable development goals of the UN. You got W.EF. It's the World Economic Forum. And then you've got actually the one that's lurking behind the scenes of many of them, which is CCP, which is my favorite one is the Chinese Communist Party. China.

Which actually is laughing their way to the top of the global food chain because all of those three-letter acronyms, here's something funny about it. There's no Chinese equivalence to those three-letter acronyms. So there is no DEI or ESG in China. Right. And even for global firms like BlackRock that offer investment funds and buy shares in Chinese companies, they don't apply ESG over there. They only apply it over here. So here's like a dirty little secret here.

It's not a secret because it's publicly known, but not a lot of people are aware of it. BlackRock will pressure along State Street and Vanguard also companies like Chevron to adopt what's called a scope three emissions cap. What does that mean? This is relevant to a small business owner. This isn't just a big public company thing. If you're a small business owner, you want to pay attention to this. The scope three emissions cap that Chevron was forced to adopt in 2021 was effectively one that says not only does Chevron have to reduce its own emissions.

I mean, this is debatable enough. But they have to do scope two, but then scope three. Scope three means they have to make sure everyone in their supply chain, either a supplier or a customer has to also reduce their own. emissions such that Chevron's reported scope three includes all of them and has to come down and apply cap. This is nuts for a lot of reasons. But one of the sadder parts of the story is that like in 2019 or 2020, Chevron's dropping oil production projects, including in like the Sichuan Basin of China and elsewhere. Guess who's buying up those projects? Petro China on the other side of the world. Of course. Now, this is where it really takes a little twist here. Guess who's one of the

larger shareholders of PetroChina. Could it be BlackRock? None other than BlackRock. None other than Black Rock. So what a circle there. They're using Chinese clients' capital to buy shares of a Chinese company without applying any emissions constraints

so that they get to buy the very project that Chevron is dropping because they're using American clients capital to get Chevron to drop business opportunities that Chevron should otherwise be pursuing for environmentalism. And the last time I checked is it was supposed to be global climate change that we were addressing itself. That's a separate, you know, a farce at the heart of that new cult in its own right. But just the hypocrisy of BlackRock's own

behavior in the ESG movement, that's why I said the three-letter acronym lurking behind all the other ones is CCP because it's not an accident, right? This is not just some critical accident. The CCP demands this because if you apply any emissions constraint to Petro-China, they'll say close the door and shut it on your way out. You're not going to do business here. but if you're also one of the guys who's shackling the United States, they will roll out the red carpet. So BlackRock actually became the first foreign owner of a firm of mutual funds that was able to offer mutual funds in China,

but only after they did a lot of things that the Chinese government wanted them to do, including even certain kinds of lobbying in the United States. So it's a dirty game. So how in the hell, how in the hell are we ever going to become independent from China if our entire investment structure is, funneling main street money and pension money through entities that are literally investing in their government. So you want the easy stuff or the hard stuff? It's going to take the hard stuff to get there. I could say a bunch of easy things. Where do you want me to start? Hard stuff. Hard stuff.

Okay. Yeah, the easy stuff doesn't matter. Hard stuff. We should do the easy stuff too. We're not doing some of it today. But let's do the hard stuff because this is the part that I think some politicians have trouble saying out loud, even though they'll privately agree with me in the Republican Party. I think we basically need to decouple from China, full stop. What does that mean? Means, I think we need to actually ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China until either the CCP falls or reforms. You're going to get in trouble. I'm already getting in trouble. You're going to get in trouble. Donors who, even donors who like a lot of what I say, that's a bridge too far. Let me explain what I mean. I don't want the U.S. to suffer. I don't want to suffer here at home.

But here's the deal. We got addicted to buying cheap stuff from China. Our supply chains are tethered to China. So let me make that a little more digestible here. Okay, I know that sounds like a big leap. I'll say three things here to make it a little more digestible. Okay, one is we shouldn't conflate getting out of China for our supply chains and access in the Chinese market with assuming that it all has to be done just within the U.S. There might be other, you know, domestic onshoreing efforts and industrial policy that say bring stuff to the U.S.

turn off that channel in your brain for a second because people mix these two things up. I'm saying something different for now, right? I'm talking about a different subject, which is decoupling from China. So if decoupling from China includes the totality of all other non-enemy partners, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Western Europe, parts of Africa, actually becomes, you know, I've been working through a lot of this with supply chain experts, etc. it's not as daunting as you might first think, actually. So if you think you have to bring all of that to the United States,

it's basically going to be a long time before we would be able to pick up that slack. But if you really, if literally everyone else who's an ally, or at least a non-enemy of the United States picking up the slack, it's actually way more pragmatically digestible than you think. Here's a second thing I'll say is that it's kind of a lesson from the business world a little bit, but it applies, I got to imagine it applies in geopolitics. I haven't been the president of the United States before. very few people have, but I got to imagine the first principles are the same, which is that

it's when you're most willing to make a sacrifice, like actually willing to, that you may not have to make one at all. And so China right now is in a pretty weak spot because Xi Jinping does what autocrats do, right? He shot the Chinese economy in the foot last year to hold on to power. He held onto power for an unprecedented third term. Well, that's an opportunity. for us. And so, you know what if we say? We're going to ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China until and unless the CCP radically reforms, I think we have the stronger hand. It's like a game of poker. I'm not saying we're bluffing. We're playing the hand we actually have, which is the stronger hand, but we're willing to bet behind it. Is that a sure bet that they're

going to automatically fold? I can't tell you that. But our best chance of doing it is that we're actually willing to make the sacrifice. So if you're willing to make the sacrifice, chances are you won't have to make one at all. But even in the event you have to, you're at least sacrificing for this thing that is represented by that flag behind you, Mike, which is this thing we call America, thinking on the timescales of history, rather than thinking on the timescales of what I'm going to do that's most convenient tomorrow morning. And I really don't see a different way out of this, because we got ourselves into this mess. We're going to have to get ourselves out of it. It's like a, I don't know I would draw a human relationships analogy here, but we're in a

codependent relationship with China. Okay, codependent relationships generally do not end well. I'd say abusive. It's an abusive. It's an abusive relationship. The only question is who ends it first. Okay, the sooner we end it, the better for us. The longer we wait, the better for them. This is a choice. Some choices demand courage in our personal lives, in our national lives. And this is one of them. Courage for sure. But the other thing you said, sacrifice. Sacrifice. That's, you know, that's one of those words that's been so cheapened over the years. it's going to mean literally we have to give up something. And of course, every time we do a thing, because time is fluid, you're right,

no man ever steps into the same river twice, right? Because no man is the same tomorrow and no river is the same. And so, you know, here we are trying to figure out how to do something as grand as get off the China teat. When, do you know Enis and his freedom? Have you ever seen him speak? He's like DM'd me on Twitter before, but I don't think we've ever, like spoken at substance. Yeah, we exchanged some Twitter messages, but yeah. Reach out. He can be useful not only in your campaign, but I think you'll just be inspired by him.

I mean, he knows about sacrifice. Dude, this guy. I mean, you walked away from a billion dollar company because by the way, I'll take exception to something you said. You said you didn't have a boss. You do have a boss. Yeah. And it's that annoying little voice in your head that tells you to do stuff that you really maybe don't want to do, whether it's jump in the plunge pool or run for the president of the United States or just speak your mind. You work for that dude, right?

And his freedom, you know, goes out there in defense of the Uyghurs, blocks out Nike on his tennis shoes, and writes in all sorts of things that create all sorts of trouble for the NBA. The NBA is so firmly and completely at the beck and call of China. It just is mind-boggling.

And with great respect to LeBron James, who's a devastating athlete. When I look at him and I look at Ennis freedom and just forget everything except the diversity of thought. And look at what one guy's doing and look at what the other guy's doing. And there's your metaphor for sacrifice.

And if we're going to do something beyond the NBA with China, I mean, you said earlier, do you want to start with the simple stuff or the hard stuff? All right, we went right for the hard stuff. Let's go to the simple stuff. Can the NBA do it? can the NBA do it? Because if they can't, how in the hell are we going to do it?

Exactly. It's like, think about it. I think people understand this better when they think about it. Maybe they'll understand it better when you just think about it from a personal perspective, too, right? I mean, like my parents, big part of our upbringing was delayed gratification. That's just, okay, part of, I don't know, call it like a cultural upbringing or whatever it is. And, you know, it's like entering a marriage. right, you give something up.

Okay. But you can make that sacrifice if you know what you're sacrificing for. Having kids. Now we've had kids and young kids at home. Okay, that's a sacrifice. Like, among other things, my career as a tennis player has like officially ended.

The presidential campaigns playing a role in that too, but kids play a role in that too. Okay, you give up some... And that whole comedy thing. Comedy day, I'll forget about that. That was never meant to be in. That was done. But the point is, even in your life,

the decisions you make, okay? You can make a sacrifice if you know what you're sacrificing for. It's not that different as a country either, right? And China in some ways understood. I mean, it's like the bluff they called. I'm going to give you, like, a really bad movie analogy, but did you watch the second, I don't know why it just occurred to me, but I think it was the second Batman in that most recent series,

like the Christopher Nolan one, the Dark Knight. Did you watch that? Honest to God, I can't keep him straight. I don't know. Like the Dark Night. Flash and a Batman. It was the really good one. is the punchline.

Like, so there was this, you know, okay, if you'd watch it, it would make more sense to you, but there was the scene where like the Joker sets up. So this is the one with Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, like they're playing the roles. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. It was a really good one of Christopher Nolan made.

It's like by far like one of the better movies probably at the time. But you remember that scene where, so it's sort of they have these two people on boats. And one of them is the prisoners and one of them is just like the people who were ordinary people and they're each given the detonator to the other, and it sort of is, you know, calling the bluff on human nature. And like, he was so certain that they were just both going to blow each other up. And actually, in the end, the unlikeliest thing happened, which is that neither one blew up,

even as the clock struck midnight, is that like the Joker was trying to call the bluff on human nature. And I think that that's kind of like the bluff that China is effectively called for the last 40 years on the United States is you guys are so addicted to us, to instant gratification, to fentanyl, to TikTok, to debt, to buying cheap stuff, even if your values tell you otherwise, that you can't declare independence from us. You need us. You need me, right? She's in Ping in the face of the Joker, okay, like in that moment is you need me and you can't do it. and I will watch you blow yourself up into oblivion laughing at every step of the way.

Can we call that bluff or not? Can we call that bluff back on him or not to say that, you know what? Yes, we can, actually. We are going to do just fine, even if it does mean buying less cheap stuff. Even if it does mean telling our kids that they're not going to use it. If we can tell them that they can't smoke a cigarette by the end of 18, then we're going to darn well tell them that they're not going to use TikTok by the age of 13. You know what? If we're going to use the military to fight a bunch of people halfway around the world, we'll use our military to fight your foot soldiers in the form of the Mexican drug cartels in your modern opium war south of our own border. Damn right, we're going to do it. And I think that the question is, can we muster that fortitude? Can we make the sacrifices need to back that up? Because right now, the joker's on the other side of the Pacific laughing his way into our own march towards our own demise. And if we do it, it's not going to be because he did it to us, right? I'm against

victimhood culture at the level of individual. I'm against victimhood culture in geopolitics. We can't be a victim of China. Okay. If we're marching to our own death, it's not because Xi Jinping did it to us. It's because we did it to ourselves. And so wake up and are you willing to make the sacrifice? And you know what? I'm sacrificing donors, right, for this message right now, as we speak, who have vested interests in China. I don't know whether speaking my beliefs as I have them is a successful electoral strategy. I really have no idea. whether that's a successful electoral strategy. We'll find out.

But somebody's going to have to do it, is the way I view this. Well, look, I mean, the world's full of people speaking hard truths to the opposition, but speaking hard truths to your own tribe, that's what gets you credibility, long term, you know, short-term pain, for sure. But you're so right, in my view, about the China relationship. And that's a great analogy from the dark night. I had seen it. I do remember it.

But hearing you talk about it, I'm reminded of Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, too. You need me on that wall. You want me on that wall, right? Now, it's all kind of shifted around, but it's the same dynamic. Do you want the truth? That's right. Can you handle the truth? Yep, yep, yep. Can you handle the truth?

That's exactly right. Can we handle the truth? I think we can. I wonder. I think we can. But we'll see. Well, then let's talk about the truth. This is a version of mutually assured destruction, right? the Joker and the thing and it's like, you do me, I do you.

It's what's the point? And we hope reasonable minds ultimately prevail. But that was a moment in the movie. It was a moment when suddenly it was just like 30 seconds to midnight. Well, we've been at 30 seconds to midnight now for as long as I've been alive. Like the doomsday clock has been anywhere from four minutes to midnight to 30 seconds to midnight. And it's like we're living in this constant state of emergency. whether it's a COVID emergency or a China emergency or a fentanyl emergency or a nuclear emergency,

people are just spun out and strung out and bored with being terrified. And so to bring it back to the E in the ESG, which of course it's all linked to the S and the G, and it's all together, but how much of it is fear? How much of it is happening? because this is the other four-letter word that I wanted to bring up with you. We got risk covered, but fear. If we really believe the earth is coming to an end in 12 years or 10 years now or six years or whatever it is, well, then that truly explains just about any hairbrained policy or behavior that I can think of.

But is there any basis in your opinion to actually live with that level of fear? No. absolutely not but I think that the reality is it's not that we're bored of fear it's that we're addicted to fear we really are that's the four-letter addiction of our time we're addicted to it and you know the climate cult it's really become our new religion right because when you lose your belief in the things that actually matter the things that used to give you that sense of purpose and grounding and being actually this term that people use on the internet based okay well based actually based and grounded in something right god faith in god faith in country

belief in country in your family in your absolutely hard work meritocracy hard work hard work hard work is a source of identity by the way you create something in the world it's like it's like i use an analogy I was talking to talking to kids recently is it's like we're like blind bats right flying in cave. We don't see where we are, but we figure out where we are by, it's like you send out a sonar signal and it bounces off, okay, my faith in God, it bounces back, my faith in my belief in country, I'm a citizen of a nation, it bounces back, my family, okay, that's part of my identity, things I've created that I'm proud of through my hard work, bounces back. That's how you locate yourself in that cave. But we live in this moment now where we send out the signal

and then nothing comes back. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before,

with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode.

Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle.

The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S. U.S.S.S.S.A. And so we're just lost in that abyss.

and we start making stuff up, right? What happens? You actually have people who are trapped in caves for a long time in darkness. You start hallucinating. You start imagining things. You want to fear something greater

than just the reality of your own abyss. So you create a new mental one instead. That's what this climate cult is all about. And a lot of people who are critics of ESG or whatever will, myself included at times, will complain about the cynical forces, right? The Black Rocks, the ESG movements, the profiteers who stand to benefit from this,

the Al Gore's that are, turned themselves into multi-millioners propagating nonsense that if you watch his movie in 2006 or whatever it was, the inconvenient truth, none of those predictions. Like literally, it's just like a batting average that you would have no basis. Zero point zero. Zero point zero. Not once. Not once is Armageddon worked out. That's how you get a Nobel Peace Prize. But at that level, what is it about them? It's not even about them. Forget them. What's wrong with us that we're still listening to these people? What is it that makes us want to bend the needs? to this authority, it's that we're lost.

Right? And what is it with you and bats? Well, we're like that. First Batman, now you got bats in a cave. That's what we are. We're a bunch of blind bats lost in the cave, trying to fly and I figure out where we are. We lost our sonar system.

We can't figure out where we are so we joined the climate cult instead. Let me add something to your metaphor so you can use it in your next time you're addressing the gang. There's a cave outside of Austin called Bracken? Been there. Bracken Cave.

Have you really? Yeah. crap, man, I can't get anything past you. Well, it's the... I like it, though. Chuck, if you don't remember, it's the home of the largest concentration of mammals on the planet. You thought you were going to die there, didn't you?

I damn near did. I sank in bat guano up to my neck and had to be pulled out by a series of people who were pretty sure it was the end. There was so much ammonia in the air, and you've got literally 40 million Mexican-freetail bats emerged from that cave at the height of the season. They fly to Mexico.

they eat their weight in mosquitoes and they come home. And then they just crap their brains out. And when you're standing in that cave underneath all those bats and, you know, the little placentas are hitting you and exploding like water balloons and all of the urine and all of the, yeah, it makes you think differently about bats. But that's a great metaphor. But in my mind, the way you said it, I see six or seven bats flying around looking to find. I'm sorry, man.

That's a traumatic experience. I did not mean to. This is four. Yeah, man. you really triggered me because this is, I'm talking about 40 million bats. Can I just have a second for that? So you were, you were literally like neck deep? Yeah. I was with a bat biologist guy named Jim Kennedy, one of the very first episodes of Dirty Jobs. And we weren't prepared. I just went in literally with a garbage bag wrapped around me.

It was a very hazardous environment and a gas mask because once you get deep into it, you know, there's just so much nitrogen in the air. It's a bad deal. But yeah, that's kind of where Dirty's Jobs was born as the host sunk. Oh, is that right? It's a dirty job. So did you get a rabies shot? No, I just went ahead and got the rabies. I just figured cut out the middle, man. A little natural immunity. Natural immunity is good. That's funny, man. I'm sorry you went through that. That's a hilarious story, though, in retrospect. It was great fun, but my point is bats are not only putting out their sonar to get a ping back. They're flocking, right, like sparrows do. When you see these, they call them murmurations. When you see thousands of sparrows flying together in this cloud,

millimeters apart from each other. Like, why aren't they colliding? It's the same thing with bats, except it's even more random looking because, you know, their wings are all leathery and they're just, just can't imagine they're not running into each other. Somewhere in there, there's a metaphor, Vivek, because we do the same thing, except now we're not only not getting our signal back. We're running into each other. We're not flocking the way we're supposed to, and we're crapping on our fellow man in quantities too voluminous to articulate. So I'm just saying, it's a hell of a metaphor. But you combine that with the earlier Batman movie.

Oh, yeah. I see, that's, I think this is like subconscious for me. I brought the Batman into this, too. That's a good point. Yeah, I'm in a very. What you need now is like, just add a little Joe DiMaggio to it. Something with a baseball bat. That's right.

And then what you've got here is another three book deal, my friend. And then we talked about Al. Gore's batting average, which is 0.0. On his kind of prediction, there we go. The theme of this episode is the bat. I like that. Why not? Look, I want to be respectful of your time.

So just tell me when you have to go give a campaign speech or something. Now, we've got out like an hour and a half for this thing. Yeah. So we're good. Oh, perfect. Perfect. Because I got to get back to meritocracy and work ethic. Because those are, you know, if I have a lane or at least if I think I do, I'm really

worried about the death of merit or at least the decline of it. And earlier you talked about it in terms of, well, what are we sacrificing in the classroom? Yep. In order to do these other things. Well, that seems like a relatively small thing until you start to spin it out. And now, you know, what are we sacrificing in the cockpit? What are we sacrificing in the operating room? And this is the only argument I've ever heard that actually gets people's attention who are arguing blindly for diversity on its face instead of a meritocracy. When it comes to getting your kids appendix removed or getting the plane landed safely that your mom's on, I mean, there still is some respect for meritocracy, isn't there? I think there's a native human instinct that embraces merit because it's almost the

self-interest of it, right? I think that you're tapping into, as you said, if your mom's on that plane, do you really want them to eliminate the test that pilots used to use before they sit? We're great on a curve. United Airlines literally did this, right? And American Airlines did something very similar. I know. Right? Do you really want them to eliminate the test, be it for engineering or for law or for medicine,

that puts somebody in charge of the bridge that you build, the operating room that you're operated on, the person who's defending you in court when you're wrongfully charged? Is that really the person you want in that sense? I think it's the self-interest that in part brings anyone along to this pro-merit argument. It's also just part of what it means to be American, though. I mean, this was at the heart of Martin Luther King's dream, right, that he wanted his four children. It wasn't even about him. It was about his, I said, I have a dream that my four children grow up in a country where they're judged

not on the color of their skin, but in the content of their character. And I would add their character, including their contributions, or their character as measured by their contributions. That's what it means to live in a meritocratic society. And it's very personal to me, by the way, right? My parents came here with not a lot of money to Southwest Ohio, grew up as a skinny kid with nerdy glasses, funny last name, dad who had a different accent than the other kids in Southwest Ohio.

But, you know, my parents always taught me, you know, hardship is not the same thing as victimhood. Hardship can be what teaches you a little bit about who you are. And achievement was my ticket really to get ahead in life. My dad had a saying, actually, he would say that if you're going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding. Outstanding. It made a lot of sense to me. It stuck with me.

It was kind of corny at the time, but it stuck with me. And achievement was my path to live the dream, the full arc of the American dream as I have. Founding multi-billion-dollar companies as a kid of immigrants who came here with not a lot of money. It's something that I owe to not just America. I owe it to this country, but what is America? I mean, merit is at the heart of America. And so I think that part of this is about, yes, self-interest, but part of this is also just about identity. Right. If we don't have meritocracy, who are we? Right. We're just a bunch of different looking.

I'm glad I bring a different shade of melanin to this conversation, but so what, right? Who cares if we have different shades of melanin or we have different sexual orientations or genders or whatever? It's meaningless. It doesn't matter. Well, a lot of people care. No, no, but it does. I mean, this is. Unless, Well, here's what I would say. I'll come back around. Unless there's something greater that binds us together across those attributes, then that becomes pretty interesting, right? Okay, because how interesting is that that we're so different looking? There's all of these differences that make us diverse.

That means something against the backdrop of some shared commonality. But if you lose that commonality, then you're just a bunch of different looking pounds of flesh with two legs walking on a geographic space doing what your iPhone told you to do on a given day. Like, that's what America looks like at times today. We wake up on a given day. That's sometimes what America looks like to me today. That's not the America I know.

And so I think that we're making our last and final appeal based on merit. But I'll tell you something, Mike. It's kind of funny. Like affirmative action, race-based affirmative action, is pretty unpopular in this country. Even if you survey, even among Democrats, Republicans, doesn't matter. The history of affirmative action is really long. But the main source of affirmative action was actually an executive order

that Lyndon Johnson issued that said, that if you're going to do business with the federal government, and that's like even small businesses fit that description. If you're buying stuff from the federal government, it's over 20% of the U.S. workforce fits this executive order. You have to adopt a race-based quota system. Well, that's where affirmative action was born. A U.S. president, and I'm running, I've said going to be very clear, I will eliminate it by executive order by just rescinding Linen Johnson's executive order. It's not that hard. There isn't a single presidential candidate, not even a Republican presidential candidate in American history for the last 60 years since the Johnson era

that even pledged to end affirmative action. It's one of these sacred cows you're not supposed to touch. And the climate cult is, by the way, in that same category too. There's certain topics that are untouchable today. You can dance around them. You can complain and you can complain about wokeness if you're on the right, but you can't quite say that you're going to end affirmative action. Well, actually you can because I'm doing it. But it's interesting to me, that there's this concept they call the Overton window, the acceptable range of what you can actually talk about. One of my goals in this candidacy is we're driving a truck right through that window

and shattering it because if we can't talk about it in the open, that's actually what creates more fear and division. And, you know, I have a good litmus test for what I use for how healthy we are as a country at a given time. The simplest litmus test, more than any other, okay, it's the easiest way to know how well America's doing. what's the gap between what people are willing to say in private and what people are willing to say in public? More than the ballots cast every November.

You know, I mean, more, more, other than the less, maybe some people like that. That doesn't matter. None of that matters by comparison. Small ball compared to, are people willing to say in public what they actually think, what they're willing to say in private?

Right now there's a big gap. We can close that gap. I think we're going to be in better shape as a country. And I think what we'll discover is most people do believe in ideas like merit. But we can't be sure anymore because you're not allowed to talk about it. And I think once we're allowed to talk about it again, I think that their native instincts of most people in this country is you still care about this idea that the best person gets the job, the best kid gets that spot in college, the best person makes it onto that sports team, the best person is the one

who gets that promotion or pay raise at work. And that's when America's work in the way that it's supposed to. I get in trouble every single year. We have a work ethic scholarship program that I administer through my foundation. And of course, I can't look into your heart or your soul. You know, I think this is the fundamental problem with merit. It requires patience because you can't sum up a person based on attributes they can't control their eye color, their blood type, their star sign, their ethnicity, their gender, and so forth. When I say those things out loud, when people are asking about the foundation and when I don't provide three boxes, male, female, other, all that stuff now, I'm not trying to make trouble.

I'm just saying, wait, wait. I woke up one day to learn that talking about a meritocracy was a dog whistle. I woke up one day to learn that the actual words of that work ethic are problematic. Lockheed Martin actually arbitraged them out of their company handbook. Corn Ferry has a whole list of words that have been deemed problematic, like drive, ambition. And there are alternatives now for these words. And so, you know, the language matters a lot. And I see it happening all around us.

And, you know, we talked about the acronyms earlier. But if you're going to run a campaign that essentially challenges the American people to handle the truth, what are you going to do vis-a-vis the language to make damn sure that message lands hard? I'm going to be very precise and unforgiving and not mince words with that language. My goal is not to provoke for the sake of provoking, but nor is it to compromise or shave around a message to say it the right way for making it more palatable either. And so I don't know if that's going to be electorally successful. but when I say merit, it's not a dog whistle for anything else other than unapologetic merit. So if you're in the way of merit, be it an equity-based agenda or otherwise, we're running straight through you.

And I think that we're going to be very clear about the fact that the best person is going to get the job again in this country. The best kids are going to get to college again in this country. And the best means different things in different settings. There's not one hierarchy of best, right? the people who are best at a four-year liberal arts college like Harvard that I went to or whatever might be very different than the people who are going to be going through two-year programs learning how to be a welder or a carpenter or mechanic. And in some ways, part of what we miss in this country, actually part of the mistake of meritocracy

or some of the pro-merit camp. There's not one pro-merit camp. Sometimes you get it wrong as you fetishize the one axis of meritocracy, forgetting that there are many axes of meritocracy. And speaking in like on a first personal sense, I told you achievement was my ticket to get at it, but you know what, my path cannot be and should not be the only path in this country. So I guess when I think about how do I get that to land in this country, one is without mincing words and without apologizing for it. That's the part that's going to be unsparing.

But I think the part that I'm hopeful will allow the message to land more broadly anyway is not attenuating the spirit of what I'm saying by one bit, but to highlight the fact that we might just be short-sighted in the way we think about merit. And there's many ways to be meritorious in this country, but we've fallen into the trap that thinking there's only a one-dimensional axis to actually earning dignity and honor and respect in our country, when in fact there are so many roads that this country at its best ought to or should offer, you wonder why we have a worker shortage. Part of the reason is it's a closed-minded conception of merit that says it runs through for your college degrees alone. And so I hope the combination of those two things

allows me to both avoid having to kind of compromise and do like a mealy-mouthed, you know, everybody be-happie-hap-hism to the message. I'm not going to do that, but also actually understand the truth of it is that merit is plural actually allows it to reach more people and bring more people along.

I guess that's what I'm hopeful for, but we'll find out. May I offer some completely unsolicited and totally worthless advice? Yes. I doubt it's worthless, but I'll take it. For me, I get that celebrities and politicians in particular and CEOs, they have to paint with a broad brush because a lot of people are listening and they have to say things that are impactful to the fat part of the bat, as it were, bringing the bat back. But these things, you know, they're bromides and their platitudes and they're tripe. and the idea that the best path for the most people, for instance, is a four-year degree,

is the best example that I have of it and the thing that I always come back to because it's true that a four-year degree is a great path for a lot of people, but it's a horrible path for millions of people, and it's expensive as hell. And I think, just from the cheap seats, one of the things Americans are going to look for in this next election cycle is a candidate, who doesn't trade in bromides and who simply says, look, I don't know who's listening to me right now, but the odds are pretty good if I say something sweeping,

that it's going to land in exactly the wrong lap. And sometimes it's just extraordinary to me how free and easy people are with advice that has absolutely no application to so many people who might be listening. I'd love to see a candidate come out of that space just once. Well, I'll do what I can. I mean, no pressure.

I'm just saying. It's not like you're asking me to. I think that's kind of the whole premise of our candidacy. I'd rather speak truth as at least what I believe to be true and lose badly than to speak platitudes because that allows me to have the greatest breadth and somehow, amalgamate enough votes. But our bet is that actually approaching it that way might just be the winning strategy in the end anyway. But it's definitely the only way I'm going to know to do how, because I've been in a position of having constraints on what I feel like I can say before,

and I don't do well with that. I left that career for a reason, and I don't intend to go back to being really enslaved by anybody with respect to what none of us should be enslaved. And it's back to that culture of say it openly. If you're going to say it in private or you believe it have the ability to say it and speak it unapologetically as long as your neighbor gets to do the same thing in return it turns out that might be one of those things we share across our diverse attributes if we bring that back i think we're going to be all right i'm just sitting here trying to make a mental list of all the people i know who have voluntarily stepped away from a multi-billion dollar company because they you know felt like saying a thing that they weren't

comfortable saying it's it's a short list we should probably land the plane soon. I know the language matters a lot to you and you're awfully facile with it, man. It's really fun talking to you. But the metaphors that you used, those stick with people, whether it's bats in a cave or anything else. But I forget where it was, but you were talking about, we touched on it here, but the fringe. Fringe is important, but it's not the center of the thing. And you were saying before, and this is what I want to leave people with, when we take meritocracy and work ethic and family and patriotism to a degree. When we remove all those things, the bats don't get a signal back so they start to make up these other things. And that to me means that there's a

core, right? We're tolerant people and we can tolerate a lot of fringe. Yep. But we're being asked to accept the fringe as the core, right? So somewhere in there, there's a metaphor. And the fringe can't even be the fringe. It's like, think about this at the visual of like, if the sun is the core, you've got like Neptune and Pluto out at the fringe. But once the sun is gone, the fringe is itself lost, right? And so in some ways, the fringe can only exist. And I have no objection to whatever that fringe is. Like each person be the version of yourself that you want to be in relation to the core. You don't have to conform to the core. But when you lose the foundations of purpose and meaning itself, right, from faith in God to family to hard work to national identity,

then the fringe itself loses even the center that located its own identity around, right? And so Pluto's gone. It's like, you know, the moment the sun disappears, it's just in a velocity in the middle of nowhere. It's not even part of a solar system or a galaxy or anything else anymore. And, you know, I think that that's actually kind of what we do when we move the core itself, you know, like the feminists who were on the fringe in the 1990s, arguing for Title IX or whatever, they're gone, right? Like, it's irrelevant because if now the fringe itself has moved such that the distinction between man and woman is different as it applies to sports, then what's title nine about, right? We just see this cycle play out over and over again. And so I think that,

I guess you call that a conservative idea. I mean, I don't like these labels, but in the sense of conserving, right, like that sense of conservative. Like in some ways, when you say liberal, I don't mean like just Democrat liberal, classically liberal values like free speech. That's a classically liberal value. Even unbridled colorblind meritocracy through capitalism, that's a classically liberal value that rejects an old world British style honor system.

We say absolutely not. So that's a classically liberal value. Here I'm talking about a conservative value as it relates to conserving something, conserving those foundations around which human beings derive their purpose and meaning. And the big ones I keep coming back to, faith, family, national identity, and hard work, we need those pillars. And then you can have a

happy fringe that exists around that, that sort of heterodox with respect to opting into different versions of variations of those things. But the things have to exist. They can't just disappear. That's the vacuum we're in right now. But it creates an opportunity. And I'm running for president because I think it'll be hopefully the most important contribution I'm able to make. You can't do everything as a U.S. president. But you pick the few things that you want to do, you do them right. The one I want to do at the moment we live in is restore at least one of those missing pillars, which is the missing national identity. And I think that faith and family and hard work can pretty well follow suit if the first one of those missing pillars goes

back to actually fill in the blank. Look, I'd be delighted if you would just remind the people in the solar system that the sun is sort of at the center of the system. And it's fine. It's fine. to argue over Pluto's status as a planet or a big asteroid. Right. Or, you know, it got downgraded, then I got upgraded. It got upgraded. Yep, exactly. Fine to argue about the moons of Saturn versus the moons of Jupiter and this or that. And, you know, science learns more and more.

But since you wrote the book on it and to torture the metaphor mercilessly, is the woke notion in this metaphor essentially an attempt to say that the sun is not really the sun. Yep. It's just something else. It's just like another one of these planets. It's just this thing. It's not the center of our thing. It's just another chunk of gas in our general area.

It's somebody else's version of truth is that there is no sun. And my truth is that Pluto isn't a planet. You know, I think that that's sort of the version of it. But you can debate whether Pluto is a planet as long as you still have the sun. But once the sun is gone, none of the planets are planets. We're just arbitrary bodies of mass floating around in an infinite space. That's what we become in this morally relativistic, nihilistic world. And I think that we need some level of grounding as human beings.

I'm glad about this work about hard work, because I think that is one of the sources of grounding that we've lost, one of the components of that sun. But I think, yes, I think a big part of the woke movement, and there are a lot of wokeness that people use the word broadly, but I'll even be more academic and technical about it. This sort of postmodern movement, wokeism as part of that, is about the rejection of an objective truth

and an objective grounding of our identity itself. And when that's gone, we're all just lost. We're back to be in those bats in the cave. That's where we are as a country right now, sadly. It sounds like a dower thing to say, but we're lost. It's a biblical concept. It's when the Israelites were lost in the desert. Same thing.

It's Exodus. It's Exodus. Absolutely. It's Exodus all over again. But you're not yet at the promise. land. So you're still in what? Exodus is what? Book three, book three? You know? Two or three, yeah. And two of five there in the Torah, you're still lost. You're nowhere near the promised land. You've been freed from the Pharaoh. And yet what do you say when you're lost in the desert,

you want to go back and bend the need of Pharaoh? Why is that? Is that Pharaoh's fault? Well, I think that, you know, we can have a conservative victimhood culture that might say that that's the case, big government or whatever. And it's not totally wrong. But it misses half the story. Look in the mirror. Look deep. Ask your what it is that wants you to bend down, it's because you're lost in the desert. And so that's where we are as a country right now. And I guess I've backed myself into putting myself into some sort of self-aggrandizing analogy here, not claiming to be a Moses or anything. But I think that we need leadership to the promised land, right, to a destination that makes us understand, at least

see where we're heading, to have it within shooting and striking and visual seeing distance, or else we're just going to keep going asked to be ruled by one culture of COVIDism to climateism to whatever the next ism may be, that's exactly where we are as a country. Safetyism. Safetyism, you nailed it. That's a lot of regulation in this country is based on that principle of you have to be 100% sure of something before you accept it. Well, you don't have innovation then.

You don't have new things that get built. You won't have highways in this country, right? And so that's exactly right. We've got to look ourselves in the mirror, ask ourselves what's going wrong. And, you know, I think if we look in the mirror and look deep, we're more likely to get to the answer than pointing our finger at somebody else. I really appreciate your time. This is not a political podcast.

We don't invite political figures on, but I heard you announce and you just said a lot of things that matter to me on a personal level. And I know are on the minds of a lot of voters who just, they're starved for it, man. They're just starved for the truth. And even though they don't want to hear it, they have to hear it. And if you are going to document your entire adventure here, the way we're doing this now, then win, lose, or drawl, you're going to change the conversation.

And I think everybody wins when that happens. So I appreciate it. So I appreciate it. It's good to meet you guys. Yeah. And people can learn more about you at Vivek-2024.com. That's V-I-V-E-K-2024.com. Yeah, thank you.

And finally, I think I can say with a straight face, this is the only venture guy. the only CEO, the only lawyer, and the only failed stand-up comedian on the ticket this year. And by God... Wait a minute. Wait a minute. There might be another stand-up on the ticket. See, now you're sounding very fringy. Like literally, Vivek, fringe is the stuff on a jacket, right? Like on the buckskin.

Literally, that's what it is, yeah. That's literally what it is. So what would fringe look like without the buckskin? it would just be a bunch of random strings lying around. It'd be nothing. My God. Sure to appreciate it. Good luck.

Something tells me our paths will cross again. I'm looking forward to it, man. And keep an eye out for the bats. Come visit Columbus, Ohio. Check it out. Not too many bats yet. I love Columbus. I'd never had a bad time in Columbus.

Had a weird time. Not too many bats. You'll be safe. Yeah, so it will be good. We'll be good. Thanks for you guys. Good luck, my friend. Thank you.

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