440. Looking Back on the Campaign, and Forward for the Country | Vivek Ramaswamy
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I'm talking again to Vivek Ramaswamy. I started talking to Vivek before he ran for president on the Republican side with regard to his endeavors on the ESG alternative front in the financial domain, him fighting back against the

climate apocalypse mongers in the economic realm. I've been talking to Vivek pretty regularly as he's progressed through the Republican primaries. He's dropped his striving for the presidency, but established himself quite credibly as a candidate and is still active as a political voice.

We do a post-mortem of his adventure on the political stage, talking about the deep state, talking about his relationship with Donald Trump, talking about his plans for the future, talking about the viability of Trump as a candidate, Trump's divisiveness.

Vivek's reasons for trusting Trump and putting some faith in a future that might include a four-year Trump presidency, and walking through the realities of a modern-day presidential campaign. And so join us for that. Hey, Vivek, thanks for coming on again. Some of the people watching and listening will know that we spoke, well, before you made your bid for the Republican leadership,

in the presidential race. We got to know each other before then, and then you've been kind enough to take us along on your journey, essentially, and we haven't done that for a while. Now, I know that part of your political adventure has come to a conclusion, but I think it would be very useful for everybody who's watching and listening

to start from the beginning of your entry into the political domain, and then just to tell everybody as clearly as you can, what happened to you, what you learned, and where you are now. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm still processing that. And that's why I was looking forward to this conversation, because even though it's been a couple months, there's a whole ton of, you know, transitional to normal life phase of this that I haven't had my own chance to process that. And hopefully this conversation is part of that for me.

So you and I actually spoke before, and you were one of a small handful of people I actually spoke to as I was contemplating this offline. But we had spoken on air before. I was a businessman, and I consider myself a businessman now, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in the future, trying to drive change through the private sector. I founded a biotech company that challenged a lot of the way big pharma did business. I founded Strive to challenge the way BlackRock and the ESG-promoting asset managers were functioning.

And those were successes in their own right in different ways. But I realized the mother of the beast in each of those cases, and in so many other cases of problems I hadn't tackled, was the administrative state, was that fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, the technocracy, the people who were never elected to run the government that were actually exercising political power. You could take the FDA as an example in the shadow of the pharmaceutical industry, which I had seen firsthand. And not only that

illogical policies. If illogic were the only part of it, it would have been a technically solvable problem. It was a fundamentally political problem where people were exercising political power that they were never given. Same thing with respect to the EPA and the SEC in the case of the asset management industry. And so I came to the conclusion, look, life is short. One of the

Best pieces of advice I got as a younger man was it takes about as much effort and difficulty to do something small as it does to do something big. And I've found over the course of my career that that's been about true. I've done some smaller things. I've done some bigger things, both of which are important. But they take about the same effort if you're doing something well, whether it's something really small or something really large. The amount of individual effort you put in is about the same.

And so, look, I said, what is the biggest possible impact I can have? If I'm willing to put all my effort into it, it might as well be the biggest possible impact of all. Let me lead the United States of America. Let me lead the United States of America to a rediscovery of our national ideals. Take on that administrative state, that fourth branch of government. Dismantle it to revive, in many ways, the ideals of the American Revolution.

That's what the American Revolution was about. In 1776, we said no to elite technocracy in the form of monarchy. It's a 1776 moment now. Young people did it back then. I was 37 years old when I declared, and most people said that's too young to run for president. The truth is, I found that as encouragement because our founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, were younger than me in many cases at the time they created the entire country.

So that's where I was. I jumped off a cliff and didn't know what exactly was going to be my landing pad on the other side. Let's just say I learned a lot over the course of that last year. And, you know, God's plan was revealed. I was not meant to be the next president of the United States, it seems. But it did take me on a journey that at least I learned a lot from, I took a lot away from, and hopefully sets me up to continue to have a big impact in other ways in the future. It just was originally my motivation.

Now, a couple of things I learned. I assumed that it was going to be a message that people were hungry for. I knew people were hungry for this message. I had written three books. I had traveled the country. I had been to most states in this union as a consequence of my business activities across the books I had written. And so I knew how people were responding to this message. I thought of running for president in part because many people on those book tours, tens, hundreds of people even who I didn't know, come and encourage me to run for US president. I didn't

have much of a doubt in my mind that that message was going to resonate with a lot of people. But what I naively assumed was that somehow that message was going to land on the ears of the millions of people who needed to hear it, and A, that they were going to hear it at all, and B, that when they did hear it, that was the only thing they were going to hear versus a lot of other messages about me that would permeate the system. And it turned out to be a much more challenging initial incline than I had envisioned. The first thing

I noticed was we planned a big launch of the presidential campaign, a video. I had a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Probably, I'm not saying this to boast, but one of the things that I did was probably one of the most thorough policy vision rollouts of a presidential candidate on day one when they roll out their campaign.

Thought I had done it the right way. We went pretty quickly. I only decided in January of 2023 to run. I declared by the end of February 2024. It was February 21st when I declared. And we had a big lead up to it. I think I had done everything exactly as I had planned to do, laid out the message about as well as I wanted to.

And then I noticed that the world continued to proceed as though I had never launched my run for U.S. president, including even the political media that was covering the race. Another presidential candidate had declared, well, Donald Trump had declared, and then Nikki Haley had declared. And then by the time I had declared, it was as though it was a non-event. And so that was, I think, the first thing that I realized was...

I was prepared to go into this as a battle of ideas, a battle of vision for the country, a battle of who would be the best person to execute against that vision. And I was sleeves rolled up, ready for battle. And then I realized that people didn't even view me as being in that battle, which ended up being the first battle of the campaign itself, the first five months, who was making the case not for my vision, not for my candidacy or my ability to execute,

but for my ability to even be relevant in the first place. And that would be rather naive of me, but that was, I think, the first hard learning in declaring as an outsider for the race. Okay, so let me draw an analogy there, and you tell me what you think about this. It's frequently the case that neophyte entrepreneurs who've created a product believe that the fundamental issue at hand is the product itself.

Right. When I started selling things into the marketplace, I suffered from the delusion that it was 85% product and

you know, 10% administration and 5% marketing and sales. And that was like exactly backwards. And so it sounds to me like a similar issue here that you presume that, except in the political realm, you presume that if you had your policy prepared, you were already a credible person, that that would be the bulk of the initial battle. But if I've got you right, what turned out to be the case was a very sudden realization that

while you had to get in the conversation at all. And that sounds like a sales and marketing problem to some degree. And this is, I think, why so many candidates who are credible turn to political consultants so rapidly, right? And that often sinks them. So, okay, so is that a reasonable analogy? But you've put products in the marketplace before. And so in principle, you knew that on the commercial side. So-

Well, I would say something about this is I agree with you on your analysis on the commercial side.

What I would say is that is on steroids in the political side, right? So even if you transpose the commercial instinct onto politics, you'd be missing it by a mile. The other thing is I came from industries that were a little bit different. I haven't really been in a consumer products industry or in the media industry. I mean, the industry that I spent the most time in was developing drugs for diseases that pharma had ignored systematically.

And that was an area where, look, it's a regulated process. I saw from a front row seat how broken institutions like the FDA really are. But it's not an area where if you're pre-commercial and everything that I did was in the research and development phase, not in the commercial phase. It actually, as entrepreneurs go, I actually did not necessarily have that same experience as many consumer interfacing entrepreneurs. So that may be idiosyncratic to me.

And then I would say even for consumer interfacing entrepreneurs, and Strive was a little bit closer to that because that's a, you know, fund management company that competes at BlackRock. I had some of that experience. It was nothing close to what the importance is of that is in politics. It was all about, to call it sales and marketing, in some ways undersells the problem.

Because sales and marketing is once you're there, how much do you amplify how many people hear your message? Whereas for me, at the early stages of the campaign, and as I think about the last year and even some of the things that later came back to become headwinds for me when I was a front-running or whatever top four, top five candidate,

were actually the path to getting there sort of set me up for the difficulties that I had later on. But the first challenge was not even selling or marketing your message more effectively. It was literally like nobody would know that I was running for U.S. president, even though I was running for U.S. president. So it was just getting on the map or being heard in the first place. I just talked to Dean Phillips and his campaign obviously came to an end. For those of you watching and listening, Dean Phillips is

was until recently running against Biden on the Democrat side. And he faced this problem in spades. I think he probably faced all the problems you faced, plus the additional problem that he was absolutely 100% shut out of the entire campaign.

Democrat apparatus. People were literally told that if they worked for him, they would never do anything politically again in their life. And then also he had to face the same reaction from the legacy media. And so he didn't get it. And I don't think that he was

attuned well enough to the alternative media, let's say, you know, the podcast crowd and all that, to capitalize on that quickly. Plus they tend to tilt more in the classic liberal conservative direction anyways. Okay, so you had to face this problem of getting on the map at all. So how did that unfold?

So, so one of the things I did, and this is where, you know, I took good advice. You were one of the early people who offered a reflection on this. And, you know, I said, what's the downside in trying it makes a lot of sense to me is if the traditional media is ignoring you go to the non-traditional media as a way to reach the people.

And so I adopted a strategy, let's call it a maxim, early in the campaign, which was the talk to everyone and anyone strategy. Okay? Left, right, center, cable news, non-cable news, print media, small-time media, local media, individuals walking on the street recording it and putting it on social media. I wore a, you know, I'm wearing a little camera or I'm wearing a little, what do you call it, a little microphone right now.

I wore a microphone pretty much everywhere I went. We just clipped the conversations and put it out. Now, my social media following was a lot smaller than it ended up being at the end of the campaign. But still, that was just a way of putting out my message into the world. And what we started to notice was, you know, most of those things would get relatively small reach. But in a few instances, there were a lot of interactions where people actually began to take interest to say, wait a minute, that's an interaction of a kind that I haven't seen before.

That's interesting to me. Some of them were not necessarily casting me in the most flattering light. I might not have looked good, right? Just even visually, you know, the things that I would have said were sometimes a little bit unscripted, may not have been said as eloquently as I might have prepared for in a speech or a TV interview. But that was actually part of what made it appealing.

And so that started to take off, I think, allowed the campaign. There were a couple moments. And then I got called. I happened to be in New York City. And they said, do you want to come on Don Lemon's show? Right. Because many Republican candidates aren't going to go on there. So they thought they have a Republican candidate who's running. Why don't you go ahead and go on Don Lemon's show?

We had a kind of interaction where this man lost, went haywire. I had just given a speech at the NRA meeting and he picked on one particular thing that I said, which is a fact of history, that black Americans in the United States did not get to enjoy their civil rights until they actually had their Second Amendment rights. And the first anti-gun laws that were passed in the United States were

were designed to keep guns out of the hands of black Americans. And that was part of a broader historical trend where even countries like China or Iran or other countries around the world that claim to offer the same bill of rights that the U.S. offers don't have a Second Amendment. And so Don Lemon, and the funny thing happened, actually, I thought this would be a bit of an aside, but I'll offer it. They

said there was a list of topics. See, these are some of the tricks that the mainstream media plays. It was really interesting. There was a whole litany of topics. They said, this is what they would like to talk to you about. I forget what it was. It was something related to China policy, which I believe that the US needs to declare independence from China. They gave a couple of others, but I specifically remember that being one of them. And then you go on the set and

And what do you know is they've pulled a airlifted quotes from my speech at the NRA meeting with their own commentary as the wraparound as the lead into the interview when they have purposefully given me, it's not like they didn't think about it or they said, we're not going to tell you what we're going to talk about. So this is exactly what we're going to talk about, a litany for a relatively new presidential candidate, first time on their show. Here's a litany of what we're going to talk about. And it was not that it was that they decided to change topics.

in a spontaneous way. It was designed as a trap. And so in that case, anyway, I gave Don Lemon on air a history lesson, which caused him to, it ended up being a big favor for me on the campaign, lose his mind. The earpiece that he had in, he was screaming at the people who were the producers in his ears saying it was distracting him as he was engaged in this debate with me. It was such an uncomfortable moment for everybody involved, including anybody watching it,

That it ended up being, the New York Times reported the next couple of days later, the catalyst for Don Lemon actually getting fired by CNN. And so I had a few interactions like that that started to kind of increase the steam behind people at least paying attention to my candidacy. And things went on from there.

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There's two things about that that I find particularly interesting. The first is the way that these mainstream legacy media journalists set up the people that they're interviewing. So the game seems to be, and this has happened to me many, many times, the game is very straightforward. The game is,

We will poke and prod at you with ill-informed but provocative opinions, hoping that by being as annoying as possible, you'll say something fatally stupid, demolish your reputation online, and elevate my reputation, the journalist, as an investigator who can then walk away with like your scalp, so to speak, on his belt. Now,

And so that's the kind of interview you face where every single word the interviewer utters is a verbal trap. But my experience has been that if you keep your head during that interchange and you...

don't play the game, so you don't say anything stupid, you don't apologize, you don't get upset, that that can turn viciously, viciously in your favor. And you said, okay, and so that's interesting. So I'd like to see your thoughts on that. And then I'd also like to know what other things you did in the alternative media and direct-to-consumer, direct-to-voter model that also went viral. You know, some of that's chance, right? If you put out 50 clips online,

you're going to get a Pareto distribution of effect. But did you start to see a pattern for the clips that you got? Okay, so let's unwrap that. Let's start with the gotcha journalism, first of all. Well, the gotcha journalism. So my strategy ended up being, it wasn't really a strategy. I think it's sort of how I'm wired. First was to do exactly what you said, just rationally process exactly what they're telling you.

and respond rationally, as the person on the other side increasingly loses their mind because you're not doing what they expected or planned or set you up to do, which in turn, I think, makes them look, I think, far more illogical as a consequence when they were actually taking the Ruffian approach

populist Republican to try to make fry of them, even for their own audience, they end up looking like the less reasonable ones. I went to the breakfast club, had a major viral exchange there where a woman, she was pressing me hard on the fact that I had only ever really had major accomplishments in the business world that had never been in public service with utter unawareness that the last, and I believe successful president of the United States, Donald Trump came with a very similar background. And

Yeah, I think she was frustrated that I wasn't falling into her traps. And then she ended up giving a soliloquy about her experience in sixth grade where she put together a coalition for lunch money or something like this, which to her own audience, which is a largely left of center audience, broadly panned, saying that we don't want to really hear about your sixth grade experience. We understand that somebody who has accomplished things in the business world can at least have a legitimate case for having his ideas heard. This is coming from the left.

Don Lemon's firing. I had an exchange with Chuck Todd where he said, how can you have the level of certainty that there are two genders? And I explained in the manner of somebody who happens to have a biology degree, which I don't usually like using terminology.

you don't need a biology degree to know something about biology. You don't need to have a Harvard degree to be able to have standing to speak on a subject of science. But I have those things. And for an audience that particularly wrongfully elevates their attachment of value to those degrees, I decided to use that in my favor and broke down for him. Here's what two X chromosomes mean. Here's what an X and a Y chromosome mean. And that exchange went viral as well. And

I think this one was more by chance, but he quickly was no longer on the air at Meet the Press, which is his main show shortly after I had done the same thing with Don Lemon, shortly after we had exchanges like that at the Breakfast Club.

And then you think about the exchanges that I had on social media that ended up being the ones that really caught the public imagination were, again, interactions that I had in the field, let's call it, at the Iowa State Fair and other places where we had protesters or people who were purposefully trying to either disrupt my events or others, I got to give them credit, who were respectful but sharply disagreed with what I had to say and approached me in one-off conversations that weren't

But they were real conversations, authentic conversations between people who deeply disagreed on subject matter. And so if I'm to put those together, both between the corporate media realm as well as in the, let's just say, real world translated social media digital realm, that's the through line that I would draw is,

is the thing that really ended up creating not just one-off, but this ended up being a series of probably three, four months in there of repeated virality of interactions that were nothing more than the kind of interactions that I've been having for all of my adult life, which I enjoy, which I thrive on. You know, think about the people I went to school with at places like Harvard or Yale, predominantly had political views that were different from mine. I leaned libertarian. Most of them leaned liberal. Some of them are even friends of mine and remain friends of mine to this day. And I think that's

authentic, heated, but earnest exchanges. In some cases, the person on the other side wasn't necessarily authentic in their motives, take the Don Lemon, but you treat them as though they are, and then they self-immolate in front of you. That ended up really lifting up the campaign, in this case now, far earlier than we expected, okay? Because...

When we saw me not lifting up off the ground, I think I calibrated myself to saying, okay, this is going to be a long haul. It's going to be only after the debates begin. And let me at least try to qualify for those debates. Let me at least make that table stakes that I would qualify for the debates. And then after that, it would be a steady buildup. Instead, something started happening where when I took the talk to everyone strategy, left-wing media, right-wing media, corporate media, podcasts and interactions, I was

We actually saw a pickup that was then far earlier than I expected after I had recalibrated my own expectations, and that created new problems of its own, actually.

So what started happening was this in advance of the first Republican debate, I started really surging in the polls in a way that nobody expected. You're talking about just four months before the media would not give me the light of day. And many people had no idea I was running for president when I was running for president in the month of March. Now we're talking about July, early August.

I mean, I was probably the Republican candidate who was most talked about even by the corporate press, even when I'm not on there, because who is this character that nobody's heard of that's now beginning to surge in a lot of these polls, passing up, you know, former vice presidents of the United States, former governors, people who are running that were far more prominent, viewed as real contenders in the race. And then that's where I started to really get a taste of a new, a new kind of issue where first is I'll tell you, this is the corporate press.

I think took some umbrage at the fact that they had been one-upped in two ways. They'd been one-upped in two ways. One way they had been one-upped is right on their own home turf, right? The Don Lemon and the Chuck Todd style interactions. So I think that bothered them. But the second thing that bothered them, and I think this was, I think, the more interesting learning

I think they were bothered by the fact that I had sidestepped them, that many of the interactions that caused me that were most attributable to Americans having a favorable view of me had nothing to do with going through the normal gatekeepers, which are those in corporate media. And this really pissed them off. OK. And so what they started to do was to realize that this was an opportunity to trap me. And I think that this is less about me.

and more about a defense of their own relevance as the sole gatekeeper in the realm of politics. So this is where I think that if I was to give you feedback from the feedback you gave me, the feedback you gave me is sidestep the corporate media. You said that in one of our earlier, probably our first podcast that we had. You were one of the few people who was paying attention to me. Here's what I learned as a consequence of that is we're not yet at a future where the corporate media is entirely irrelevant.

We're in this liminal state, this intermediate state where the new media is relevant. It's useful. It's necessary, certainly for newcomer break on the scene like me. But it coexists in a landscape where the traditional gatekeepers are still very much present, relevant and important. And so they realize here's the game they're going to play is take this conversation you and I are having. Right. This is going to be a 90 minute conversation.

The thing about a conversation is it has context. What we say 40 minutes from now may call back something that you and I just spoke about 10 minutes ago, all right? That's the nature of this format. The corporate media operates, television, let's just take cable television as an example, based on two, three, four-minute segments. And so there started to be a really interesting thing that started to happen in July and August is by then there's a whole body of probably tens, hundreds of podcasts like this that I had done.

Well, what they were able to do was to then helicopter, airlift something that came out of a conversation that had context attached to it, right? An hour, sometimes two hours worth of context around a statement. But to airlift that and to put that on air in a way that was cast in a completely different context than what it was intended in the context of a two-hour conversation. And it wasn't that they were just punishing me. What they were doing in the process was

was creating a disincentive for anybody else to actually participate in those longer form conversations. Because the message is, if you do that, do it at your own peril because you will be punished. Unless you do it the standard way where you script it, you don't go through exactly what the traditional assembly line is for political communication, and you're going to do it through the format that we have control over or else we will punish the defector. And that's what they began to do.

So in August, in the lead up to the first debate, and this was somewhat damaging to me, and it created a bit of a theme that the other candidates pounced on and exploited as a theme. Well, I'll tell you, the surprising thing that happened at the first debate was, remember, my whole thing was,

in March, make the debate stage. What happened is in the summer, I surged so much so that not only did I make the debate stage, I was at the center of the very first debate stage. Ron DeSantis and I were the two people at the center of that debate stage, one of whom was the guy who was the preordained challenger and replacer of Donald Trump, according to many pundits in the world of conservative media, and then another guy who nobody had heard of. At the center of a debate stage was the former vice president, multiple U.S. senators to governors to other people who were

irritated as hell that I was there. And I did not expect this, Dr. Peterson, but the thing that shocked me, I enjoyed it, was at that first debate, I ended up being the target of every person. You were actually, I think, in that room physically even. And that was interesting to me. But in the lead up to that is what really gave them the ammo. And this is where

I wasn't strategizing at all. At that point, I was just still continuing my talk to everyone strategy. I'll talk to everybody. I'll talk unfiltered, et cetera. There was a reporter from The Atlantic. This is a funny story. I haven't really gone into depth on this, but I should. There's a reporter from The Atlantic who has been really asking, The Atlantic has been asking to do a detailed embedded profile of us.

You know, my team, and I think maybe they were a little bit shrewder than me on this, said, well, we want to be careful about this. I said, what the hell? Let him in. You know, we talk to everybody's strategy. We've committed to something. Stick to it. Practice what we preach. So he came to Columbus, Ohio, and then he was going to come on a private flight to whatever campaign stops we were making, culminating the lead up to the first debate.

And there was something funny about this guy. Forget his name, okay? But the first thing he says, it's weird. It's like bizarre. He has a very mild-mannered affect. And he goes out of his way to say multiple times, I have a stutter. I was like, okay, I don't care if you have a stutter. I mean, it doesn't matter to me. But he went out of his way for me to understand that he had a stutter. And he told my wife and everybody else he met, apologizing profusely, I have a stutter, so don't mind me on this.

My wife has a wisdom that I don't, but she said, just be careful about this guy because of that fact, right? It's not that he had a stutter. It's that he went out of his way to point that fact out to us. And she says, I think he's looking to potentially exploit you. Just be careful with him. I didn't take it one way or another. She, you know, ended up being a Caesar Sosay kind of character, for those of you who know the movie reference there. Anyway,

He, you know, followed me around, builds a lot of sympathetic rapport with me, and, you know, ends up really somewhat of an intellectual. Smart guy, ended up able to be leveling with the arguments that I was making, demonstrating his sympathy for the essence, not just the superficiality, but the essence of the arguments. So I feel like I'm really leveling with somebody. By this point in the campaign, we had learned a lesson. So my press secretary, she...

She smartly had the habit of anytime a recorder is recording the conversation, she also goes on the record and records the conversation. Yeah, that's a good idea. On the record, let's make it mutually on the record. Now, she has worked 24-7 for a lot of the campaign. One of the weekends she had, she had to go to a wedding. And this was during the flight that this gentleman and I were taking to a campaign stop where we were headed.

So now he has me without my sort of best person near me. And I think without being in recording, he's got his recorder on the plane. Okay. So we're talking. And I'm foolishly just, you know, talking away like I'm talking to a friend here, to a guy who's already ingratiated himself a little bit, softened his image with me. I almost felt even a little bit, a little bit

saddened for the guy that he had this loss of self-confidence based on some attribute that wasn't his own and seemed like a smart guy. And so we're talking. And he pulls out. So about two weeks before something had happened where I was on one of these podcasts and a guy by the name of Alex Stein asks me, he's hosting kind of a quasi-comedic podcast. And he asked me, do you believe what the government's told you about 9-11? And I said, do

Do I believe everything government's told me about 9-11? Well, the reality is we know the government's lied to us based on declassified documents that came out 20 years after 9-11 that Omar al-Bayoumi, who was a individual who was previously deemed to be a 42-year-old graduate student that randomly met two of the hijackers—that was the story that the 9-11 Commission and the FBI published 20 years ago—

turned out in the declassified documents 20 years later was a Saudi intelligence operative. So we know the government lied about that. So based on that hard fact, of course, we don't believe everything the government has told us about this. Now, that statement was the fodder. It's the classic move. Take something in the context of a podcast style conversation, airlift that to the conversation about, okay, so here's the conversation we had on the airplane. He says, all right,

I believe the government should tell the truth about what we know about what happened on January 6th. And that's something I have been very vocal about during the campaign. I think government should tell us everything. Everything's fair game.

Were there FBI agents in the field? Tell us, were there FBI agents in the field? Were there FBI informants in the field? Just answer the question transparently. Most of the mainstream media throughout the campaign has said that the FBI director has said there were none. Actually, that's false. Christopher Wray, when he's responding to Congress, refused to answer the question, which the media has then later reported as saying that he said there were none. So I said, whatever it is, just tell us the truth.

And so we have a detailed, must be a 20-minute conversation, easily, about my view on the government's obligation to just be transparent, whatever it is. Just let the public tell the truth. Publish all the video footage. Don't disclose some video footage and hide others. Just tell the public the truth. We, the people, deserve the truth. So then he asked me, okay, well, were there federal agents in the field on January 6th? You know, do you think it's a fair question to say, were there federal agents on the plane on 9-11? Now, this is

I mean, this is a loony idea, right? Nobody, this is not out of shred of evidence for this. But in the context of my principled answer, saying that for January 6th or for anything else, the government should just tell the people the truth. I said, look, the government should tell the people the truth, whatever it is. I have no reason to believe that there were federal agents on the plane. It's a ridiculous idea to think there were, but whatever it is, the government should tell the truth to the people. Okay, on that segment. And it was one snippet of a maybe a 30-minute conversation on this topic, which is a broader two-hour conversation during a flight.

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The story comes out. This is right on the eve of the debate. Okay. And the story comes out from the Atlantic. It's in a detailed story, goes into a lot of other things. The one thing that the editor in chief or whoever the main editor guy is at the Atlantic puts out and highlights is Ramaswamy fuels conspiracy theories, asking whether there are federal agents on the planes on 9-11.

So this is weeks later after he's come. So I truthfully, like, I remember the January 6th conversation. This was a one-off snippet. I didn't remember saying that. And I just told my team, I was like, I don't remember saying that. I mean, clearly these people have reporting standards. He was recording a conversation. He's reporting on something. Can you just ask the Atlantic...

Just share with us the recording where I said it, just for my own knowledge of what I even said. It was a free-flowing conversation. I'm not denying the way I was quoted, but just tell me what I said. They refused to. Now, CNN, this comes full circle from the Don Lemon, has their own vengeance to square, has booked me that night, okay? And boy, are they coming ready. And I'm sure there's coordination. It was done in a level at which it would be hard to believe there's not some level of coordination here.

So CNN's booked me that night and they asked me the question. So I know I'm going to get asked about this. So I'd like to know. So we just respectfully asked the Atlantic, what did I actually say? Just tell me, what do you have? What's the thing that you're quoting here in the article? Because then the article goes on. There's a bunch of being panned across the spectrum left and right at this point, and they refuse to provide it.

So I go on CNN and she says, you know, why did you say, why are you saying that there could have been federal officers on the plane on 9-11? So I've never thought such a thing. It's a ridiculous, sounds to me like a ridiculous proposition. So I say, look, I don't think I said that. I think I was, I was misquoted or taken out of context. That's the truth of it.

And I think that what I did not realize is that's when they knew they had won because she went out of her way to say, oh, I take you at your word there. Okay. What they had then within hours of that interview airing

The Atlantic slices just that portion where he's questioned me after the detailed discussion about January 6th. Would it be fair for the government to ask the question of were there agents on the plane on 9-11? Just release that snippet. And then CNN and the entire media has a field day. Because the entire slogan of my campaign is speak the truth, right? Speak the truth when it's easy, when it's hard. Truth is the one word slogan of my campaign.

They use this to damage the hell out of me. And so I asked the Atlantic, we said publicly, you released the snippet, why don't you release the entire conversation? Why don't you? To this day, they haven't done it. And to this day, I will challenge them. If you want to be honest arbiters of it, CNN the whole next day running an entire field day saying that, but he said, I haven't...

And if you listen to the exact footage, it's even different than they describe it. The exact footage is, sure, I think the government should tell the truth. I have no reason to believe there were. It seems like a ridiculous idea that there should be. But whatever it is, the government should tell the truth. That's what I said, which they summarize as saying that I'm raising conspiracy theories that there were federal agents on the plane on 9-11. Ridiculous. Now, you attribute that to...

So let's go into the attribution. So obviously this was somewhat shocking for you. Shocking, yeah. Yeah, okay. So now, but you've already set up some diagnosis of the motivation. You said that,

As far as you were concerned, the legacy media wasn't very happy with you sidestepping them, let's say, even though at that point you didn't really have an alternative. They also weren't very happy with the fact that their attempts to pigeonhole you, let's say, had backfired quite spectacularly. And then you had this character from The Atlantic who played I'm Your Friend while you invited him in.

only to try to find one of these situations where something you said could be taken out of context to savage your reputation. Yes. But there's the rub. Like, why exactly? Is it just the additive combination of the reporter wants to make a name for himself, the Atlantic wants to have a story, CNN wants to capitalize on it?

along with the fact that, well, it would be lovely to throw some dirt on a Republican because what the hell, why not? And to paint him with this right-wing conspiracy theory. Like, is that sufficient? Is that the causal explanation for the manner in which that laid itself out? And then we'll get back to what effect that had at the debate. Yeah. So I don't think it was sufficient. All those things were definitely factors. But I think this was in the context of

Something is going as it's not supposed to here, okay? There's a guy here who is advancing a Trumpian worldview of positive, I think of it as a positive nationalism, but nationalism nonetheless in the United States. And he is defying our expectations for what that's supposed to look like because he speaks in a manner that is at least as

I'm not saying this about myself. I'm saying this what I think they see in me as erudite and educated from the halls of the same Ivy League colleges that they that they deem to be their esteemed institutions and speaking in a manner that goes toe to toe on the facts with debating so-called the science on issues relating to covid policy or otherwise that we're unable to contend with.

This is a real threat. We need to go after this in a deeper way because he's not given us the video clips from speeches that we can caricature. We need to actually set the traps and

And this needs to be quashed. It needs to be quashed now. And by the way, this social media thing that's sidestepping us, to hell with that. That's creating the disinformation. That's creating the alternative, the misinformation that allows candidates like this to rise. It is our job and our social responsibility as a media institution to

extinguish that possibility. Let's punish his ability to do that by lifting some of the comments he's made in those lewd settings offline from the traditional media that

individual citizens are beginning to access to their own peril and set the record straight for how this is done were the people who vet, who actually become serious presidential candidates. When he's a non-serious contender, who cares? But this guy's rising in the polls to become a serious presidential candidate could really have an impact in shaping public opinion. We have an ability and a responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. Cut his legs off, I think was exactly what happened.

And then you have the industrialized politics in a Republican primary where that provides the fodder for other candidates who are frustrated by the same thing happening to be able to use that to their advantage. Not even the candidates, but in many cases, even the super PACs supporting them, which is part of this industrialized cesspool of the modern industry of American politics. That's really what happened.

Okay, so now I was there, as you said, for that debate. And so let me offer you some observations and then respond to them. And you can tell me, flesh that out. So first of all, I spent a lot of time working with Democrats in the US. And I've pulled back on that attempt over the last two years, I would say, because I got tired of having to walk on eggshells with absolutely 100% of everything I said all the time.

The idea was to attempt to pull the Democrats on the moderate side away from the radical progressives who they're so foolishly aligned with and

against whom they refuse to erect any barriers whatsoever. And so I've spoken to a lot more Republicans more recently, and I've found that a lot more straightforward. Even when we don't see eye to eye, I don't have to watch what I say. And there's almost always a genuine exchange of information. Now, when I went down to, where was the debate? Where was it held?

The first one was in, I'm losing track here. I know the stage. It was in, of course, in Wisconsin. That was where the RNC convention began, Milwaukee. Yes, okay. So I was actually, I was impressed with the field of candidates that the Republicans had offered. I thought that the debate was interesting.

the debate was more rigorous and intellectually engaging than I expected it to be. It was a real spectacle in the American sense, and you Americans are unbelievably good at that, and so it also had that. But then it was interesting watching you, because what I saw was that

First of all, you were a focus of attention for the rest of the candidates, not the only one, but certainly a focus of attention. I think it does reflect what you just described. And you also elicited more positive and more negative response from the audience than any of the other candidates, right? And so now, and so I'm interested in the personal element of that. This was, I'm not exactly sure what it was like for you to be on the stage with these

political heavyweights, comparative political heavyweights, let's say, and holding your own. It wasn't much before that where it was not written in stone that you were even going to be part of the debate. So this is very new for you. So what did you think of the other people who you shared the stage with? What do you think you did well and what

What do you think you did well and what would have you liked to have improved with regard to your performance for that particular event? Yeah, so I'm still reflecting on a lot of this and I haven't landed on firm conclusions yet. But I can tell you some maybe half-baked or some inchoate reflections here, okay?

I went into that feeling a great sense of liberation and fun. That was my strategy, okay? And we even put a fine point on that. You know, I was playing hours of tennis and working out, and we put out some videos on social media, you know, almost mocking the process, to be honest with you. It was a little smug of me to do it, I have to admit that. But I had...

It was a smugness that I kind of acquired as a little bit of a defense mechanism against what was already a poisonous system by that point, right? You have a media that systematically ignored me, and then finding my way to prominence nonetheless with the actual voters, sidestepping the media, which is no easy thing to do, systematically punished the super PACs of the other candidates in the lead up to that presidential debate. I mean, you had, you know, I mean, I'm not picking on anybody here, but you take Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, all of their political consultants,

you know, a lot of Ron DeSantis' machine, basically every other one, this is all public record, were in the lead up to the debate, online and otherwise, issuing directed criticisms towards me, foregrounding what was coming on the debate stage. And so I kind of entered the moment with, and I don't hold that against the other candidates, just how this game is played. But I entered that stage with the feeling of somewhat of a sense of disdain for the process, the

industrialization of this and what I saw were the products of it, which were in many cases other professional politicians, I had a sense of disdain. I also had a sense of... And you said, you pointed to the fact that some of that might have been defensive. Yeah, I think so. I think so, right? Because I think... Well, it's very interesting because...

That's a common defensive reaction, but it definitely has dangers, especially when you're engaged in the process, right? Totally. I mean, it's a weird thing because you're part of it, clearly part of it, and then you can see where it goes sideways, and you have to criticize where it goes sideways, but...

You're still in, you're in the game. And so you can't be contemptuous of it because what the hell are you doing in the game if you're contemptuous of it? So that's a real... It had layers of paradox to it. So even in the lead up to the debate, as others were attacking me, my mode was, let me not just attack them in the lead up to the debate, but let me in as...

I would say it was pretty condescending manner putting out, here's my debate prep, and I put out a shirtless video of me playing tennis. We're working out, we're doing all kinds of fun things and kind of saying one of these is not like the others. And it had a certain contempt to it. I'll admit that. It had a contemptuous...

tenor to that heading into the debate, which of course only threw fuel on the fire and the irritation of the existing system and to some extent the other candidates. Our friends over at Legacy Box offer a simple and safe solution for digitizing all your memories. Do you know where that old box of home movies is? Have you checked to make sure it isn't in an environment that's too hot or too damp?

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as well. So that might have also accounted for the expanded emotional response, because when you said positive things, the crowd was very enthusiastic. But I suspect now that you've told me this, I suspect that the more exaggerated negative response was probably a crowd reaction to that leaking in of disdain. Yes, absolutely. And I'm

You know, we're being pretty unfiltered here, but I think that it's a good thing for people to be able to see behind the curtain a little bit of what is otherwise a shrouded process. So anyway, we start this, we start the debate and I'm going in that night. I'm not one to be naturally prepped in this setting. And so there was some minimal amount of prep that I did, which felt very unnatural to me. And so the day of, I just made a decision. I'm going to have fun.

I'm going to have fun one way or another. It's a hell of an experience. This is a life experience. And I'm going to just speak in a pretty unfiltered way. And I'm going to be a fighter. Like, it feels like you're going into an arena. You're going to have a fight. Roll up your sleeves in a little bit of a gladiator spirit, having fun when you're going in there. Don't play with kid gloves. Bring your brass knuckles and let's go have a fight. And I think that that's the tenor I was in going in there. And so...

I think from that point in the campaign forward, right, that effectively became my modus operandi. First was nobody was relevant. Nobody viewed me as relevant, not even hearing my ideas. Second phase is they're hearing my ideas, but in a actual...

I would say, I hope, I tried to be respectful manner with the left, right? The people who are actually ideologically on the other side that created this groundswell of virality, which then caught the entire political system, the establishment in the Republican political industry, which is different from actual earnest candidates, and the mainstream media by storm. The arrows then start coming in. Somewhat as a defense mechanism and somewhat because I didn't see a better alternative. I just said, okay, well, I'm just going to fight. I'm

I'm going to take the gloves off and I'm going to be a fighter for the rest of this and I'm going to have fun while I'm at it, ended up being my attitude going into that first debate. And what we saw, and I think that was basically the tenor from there for the second half of the race, was me being somebody who was –

I didn't proactively hit anybody who hadn't hit me, but my rule from then on was, if you're going to hit me, because it had just begun to, you know, it wasn't relevant, now it's relevant, but the relevance came in the form of being hit. Whoever it is, Republican, Democrat, media, I don't care. If you hit me, I'm going to hit you back 10 times harder, and I'm going to be unsparing about

it. And that's what effectively that first debate ended up being. It's what most of the remaining debates ended up being. It won me a lot of fans.

I will say the fans who loved me for doing it still ended up voting for who they saw the ultimate fighter of all, which is Donald Trump. But they loved me as their second choice. And I think in many of the polls, what we saw by the end was the second choice ranking to Donald Trump. I'd be number one in the rest of the field. But that still left me with only 8% of the vote in Iowa, 7.8% of the vote in Iowa. But it did actually probably lose me. A lot of other supporters from the remainder voted

who actually, once they were finally hearing my ideas, which keep in mind for the first half of the race, they hadn't by definition. Once they really heard my ideas, they were actually prepared to latch onto that, but were put off by the pugnacious way that I handled the way that I was getting hit. And so that's the real story of the reflection. As I said, it's still not

I'm still in the process of reflecting on much of what happened last year. There's the first kind of conversation like this that I've had reflecting on it. But I think that's effectively what happened is I was unconstrained. I was a fighter and I'm proud of being a fighter. I think we need a fighter who leads for the country, but I think we need more than that too. And I believe I bring more than that. But the formats that I was given in that latter half of the race allowed for people to see that I am a fighter and that I am and I'm proud of it and I won't apologize for it.

But there was no other forum for people to see the other dimensions of my ability to be a leader and, dare I say, a uniter for the country other than in-person settings of 50 to 200 people at a time, which is what I ended up gravitating to in that latter half of the race. In those final months of the race, I ended up doing hundreds of events in Iowa, which was the experience of a lifetime, by the way. I mean, this was...

Really, probably some of the most emotionally challenging and testing period I've been through where I'm not approaching these with canned lines, right? I'm treating each interaction with somebody at a pizza ranch in Iowa as though it's the first time I'm answering that question. That was the standard I held myself to. So every day you're waking up at 7 a.m., in some cases, 11 events over the course of a day. You'd be going to bed at midnight the next day, do it again.

did more events in Iowa than the rest of the field combined. I ended up resorting to that because that was a setting in which for the people who saw me there, which ended up being a tiny portion of the electorate, I think the feedback I would get, right, because we would do photo lines whenever there was an opportunity, I would stay until the very last person had left. The number one piece of feedback I heard, and I didn't know how to take this, was,

You're really different than what I thought of you coming out of the debates and not not ever meant it in a bad way or a good way, but it was just genuinely fascinating to people that, OK, like this is a different side of you that I did not see when I saw you at the debates.

And I think most people meant it in the sense that the people who were in those rooms say, I wasn't necessarily thinking about voting for you. I was intrigued based on what I saw in the debates. I wanted to meet you. I didn't think I was going to vote for you, but I'm going to vote for you now. The issue is you're talking about a few thousand people max that you touch that way, right? If you're just talking about individual events of 50 to 100 people at a time. And that just

wasn't enough to win an election that's mostly decided by people who are accessing their information in ways other than showing up in the middle of a blizzard or a winter at a pizza ranch in Iowa. And so that was, you know, in a nutshell, I think a summary of the trajectory of the year and some of the things I learned in the process. And

There's a million small things I probably would do differently if given the opportunity again. It's the first time, of course, I would have expected that. And it is the case that there are a million small things I would have done differently. But in a big picture sense, am I grateful that I ran and took the risk and bore the cost?

you know, financial and non-financial associated with doing it. Yes, I am. It brought our family closer together. It's probably one of the most important things that I did is, so you were one of the few people I talked to before I ran. One of the people I talked to also before I ran for genuine advice, when I was thinking through, I was inclined to do it, but I wasn't certain yet, but I actually talked to Tucker Carlson beforehand and he gave me probably the two simple best pieces of advice. He didn't have much by way of advice, but he had two pieces of advice that were gold.

I think the first he said was whatever your personal bubble is, so your family environment, your closest friends, travel with that and keep them around you. And that will keep you grounded. It was very practical. But that actually was really good advice. We ended up doing it as a family. He said, hold yourself to a standard, right? And for each person, this will be different, what he told me. But here's what he said is, do whatever would make your wife proud of you. And he said it with a smile on his face.

But not as a joke, as a serious matter. So it's a certain sense that assumes that you're with a life partner. And you and I have talked about this before. One of the things I'm blessed with in my life is to actually have found my soulmate and to be married in marriage.

in married to my soulmate is something that is not something that everybody gets to say. But I think Tucker told me, do something that makes, make sure everything you do makes your wife proud, travel with your friends and family around you so that you don't get sucked into the circumstance of waking up in some sort of muddied haze, wondering where I am on a given day, and then becoming some alternative version of yourself. A lot of people get sucked into doing that. Don't do it. I followed both those pieces of advice. And I think that that made the process a

One that I'm grateful for, regardless of the fact that it didn't achieve the result that I intended, which is to be the next president of the United States. It brought our family closer together. It brought me in closer touch with my own convictions. I think you're tested on a daily basis. I probably came out of that year with an even greater certainty of my own convictions than I went into it with. I thought I had high conviction going in.

But you don't really understand your own convictions until you've been tested. And in a few instances, dare I say it, even had convictions that were slightly different than where I began the campaign with. And for anybody else who didn't go through that experience without having their views modified in some way means you're probably not a person who's open to reflection. I mean, you can't be challenged on a daily basis for a year without having your own

views sharpened along the way. And so I think our family's stronger for it. My views and my convictions are stronger for it. Didn't achieve the intended result, but it does give me a greater and renewed sense of purpose and mission to still do whatever I can to save this country, even if it's not going to be as the next president. And I'm grateful for that at the end of it.

There's lots of places we can go from there, but I want to go, let's try two to begin with. The first I'm curious about, I've been going through the biblical stories on my tour and in this new book I'm writing. And Moses in that book is the archetype of a leader. That's what that story is about. And Moses is seriously punished by God for reverting to power when he

invitation and explanation would suffice. That's his temptation, right? And you can imagine that that's the temptation of a political leader, especially as your reputation grows. The club that you can wield gets larger and larger as you're more and more influential. And so I'm wondering if that proclivity that you described for that tilt, that temptation towards

disdain and fighting back. You know, I'd like to unpack that a little bit more because you lay out a very clear case for why that all emerged. But then you also said that to some degree that interfered with

people's ability to see who you are on the, really on the leader front rather than on the fighter front, let's say. And I'm not saying I know how to negotiate that because I don't. It's obviously an extremely complicated space. But so let's assess that in reflection. Do you think there are ways that you would conduct yourself going forward if you replicated your adventure? And then I'd also like to delve more into

your relationship with Trump. Drawing on something that you did say earlier, you said that perhaps part of the reason the legacy media went after you was because they saw you providing the same

attractive message to say disaffected working class Americans that Trump managed except you could do it in a manner that was intellectually credible. Now you were careful during your campaign in my estimation to not poke the bear that's Trump or his followers for that matter and so I'd like to explore your relationship a bit more with Trump and I'd also like you to comment a bit more on

that contradiction between fighting and pushing and

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I'll start with that latter piece. It's a hard thing to do, and I don't see a particular, for myself at least, a point to relitigate, you know, what I would have done differently. You know, I think the circumstances, in some ways, in some ways it's hard to imagine it going any differently because the path that led there was the entire path that I walked through in our conversation. It was almost unavoidable because at that point, if I, if I

It was a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation because I put myself in a situation, which is the only way to get on the map, that had invited the level of arrows that I was taking from the other candidates in the media and from the traps that were laid and from the political industrial complex. That if I didn't hit back, I'd be too weak to be the president of the United States and wouldn't deserve that job. And there was no other way other than to hit back and hit back hard.

But the window of formats that reaches people is sufficiently narrow that it doesn't allow for multiple aspects of a personality to come through, right? So you're going to get one label you're able to get through to the people in the mediums that are available to you. In the media, I don't really mean in just the corporate media, but in the collective mediums that are available to you, fighter was the one that came through.

And so could I have done it differently? I don't know. I certainly was unable to because the truth is I am a fighter, but I'm not just a fighter.

But that's what came across when people were finally paying attention to the candidacy. And the reality is, and understandably so for many voters, if you want a fighter in the White House, take the one who's proven, who has taken more arrows far more than I have and overcome them. That was Donald Trump, which is many of the people who loved me the most. I mean, like really love me as supporters.

Like the people who are guys who were maybe coming to 15, 20 events that I held in Iowa, people who are enthusiastic supporters speaking still caucus for Donald Trump. Right. And I don't blame them for it, because if what you see is the value proposition is here's a young fighter who's going to fight for me and fight for this country just as hard as he fights to defend himself against the treacherous media and political industrial complex.

I love that, and I'm going to vote for Donald Trump because he has proven at a scale that nobody has that that's a guy who's going to be able to do it. So that's what ended up happening there. But on a go-forward basis, I guess the differences—

And I don't know what's next for me. The truth is I'm keeping a very open mind. The only criteria is have an impact on the country that's positive and not small. As I said, it takes as much effort to do something small as it does to do something big. Large scale positive impact in saving this country and reviving who we are. Whatever I do next, it's going to fit that description.

But let's say that there was a replay of it, but you're starting from where we left off, right, this last time. I'm not starting from the place I did last time. Yeah, right. Right? And so it's one thing to fight for relevance and then fight to be perceived in the right way. If you're starting already from the place of relevance, but then the question is just making sure people understand who you really are.

In some ways, it's like an algebra problem, right? You can only solve for one variable with one equation at a time. And so in some ways, with one equation, one linear race, trying to solve for both two variables, one of relevance and the other one of actually being seen the correct way, you had to kind of pick one. Well, look, you did put yourself on the map.

That was a success. And you're not very old. And there's no reason from a bird's eye view to assume that this is your kick at the can. I don't feel, having watched what you did, that you're exhausted as a political candidate, especially given how young you are. I'm energized. Right, okay, okay. So, you know, maybe you laid the groundwork for something that could emerge in the future. Now, there's a variety of ways that could go.

Everyone can see that you've had a fair bit of interaction with Trump after your run for presidency came to its end. Everyone, of course, is wondering what that might hold in the future. What's your sense of what you could bring and might bring to the table, assuming that a Trump presidency is realized in November?

Well, the first thing I would say is I think it would be a mistake to just rest on one's laurels as a candidate and assume that is the outcome. So the first thing I'm focused on is making sure that we do have a Trump presidency in November, doing everything I can, traveling different parts of this country, campaigning for Trump, not just through the primary, which is now effectively and has been for a while over, but in the general election against Biden, reaching young voters, reaching non-traditional voters, reaching

And even you think about Asian-Americans or Indian-Americans, I think 70% went the direction of Biden last time around, despite the fact that their values are almost undoubtedly more aligned with the pro-excellence agenda that Trump stands for now. Young people in this country who are starving for purpose and meaning. We've talked about this in our last episode that we did together. Well, the left isn't providing that or they're satisfying it with the equivalent of fast food with race and gender and sexuality and climate.

a positive nationalistic vision that says that, you know what, this is a country that is the greatest country known to mankind. And you have an opportunity to not only live here, but to contribute to this country and pass that on to the next generation. That civic sense of duty fills what many young people are starving for. And I think that it's far more aligned with the message Trump is delivering than the nonsense they're hearing from Biden or the other side. And so

My focus in the near term is don't take some outcome for granted. Make sure that Trump is elected as the next president. Do everything I can in my power to make that happen. And in the meantime, you know, if there are opportunities to continue to drive positive change through the private sector, as I was doing before I ran for president,

let me have that. It's the perfect opportunity to do it. I mean, Strive is a company I co-founded, as you know, to push back against the ESG movement. I'm incredibly proud of progress. Which is going very well. Yes, I'm very proud of the accomplishments. I'm very proud of Strive's accomplishments and mentoring some of the other businesses that I've co-founded to have positive impact for profit, non-profit through the private sector, a lot of ways to drive change and then make sure that that electoral outcome is what it is in November and

I think that's actually the top objective. And one of the things I've found in my life, at least, is when you make these elaborate personal plans, right? You know, if this happens, then I'm going to do that thing. And if the other thing happens, then I'm going to do the other thing. And if that doesn't happen, then here's my plan B. At least in my life, I've learned that your plans are stupid. Okay. At least maybe not yours, but mine, my plans are stupid. And so

I'm guided by my purpose. That's great. The plan will reveal itself. But the purpose is the same one that I entered the race with, which was to revive who we are, revive our missing national identity and self-confidence, pass that on to my kids and their generation. I volunteered to do it as the next president. The people of this country made clear, certainly in the Republican Party, and I think far beyond that, that they want Donald Trump to do that job. Thankfully, his ideology is...

you know, very similar to mine in terms of what it means to advance an America first agenda. And so I've put all my energy into

making sure that Donald Trump is elected the next president. The reason I support Trump is because I support America first values, because I support this country. It's not the other way around, but that's, I think the reason most people who support Trump feel that way. And I view it the same way is we're going to do whatever we can to revive our country. The number one, most impactful thing we can do is have a U S president that shuts down and eviscerates much of that managerial bureaucracy in the federal government that revives our sense of national pride does some basic things.

things that Americans across the political spectrum agree on, from shutting the border to growing the economy. I clearly believe that Donald Trump is the man to get that job done, and I'm going to make sure that he succeeds at it. Okay, so your next party, your next plan is to continue the campaign. And now you made reference back to the way we started our conversation, and so let's pursue that a little bit. I'd like to know more about what you now know or believe you know about the

political-industrial complex, right? I mean, you said that you got into the race to begin with because you were concerned about the proliferation of something like a mid-level tyranny, right? Which I think is something that we're seeing all around the world. It's a collusion between

mid-level state actors, they're usually not elected, they don't have to face the electorate, they're not on the hook for their own economic survival because they're paid bureaucrats. They've extended their domains radically at every level of political organization. And I think part of the reason that the megatypes who are

firmly behind Trump are behind Trump is because they feel in their bones that Trump is enough of a bull in the China shop to actually pose a challenge to that system. So I would like, and the example of the Argentinian, current Argentinian president keeps popping into the back of my mind because he's doing the kind of radical cuts in Argentina that Musk did, for example, at Twitter. And so I would like to know,

First of all, do you actually think, now that you've seen the system per se operate at close hand, do you think that it's actually possible for a candidate, even Trump, who's only got a four-year mandate, which is not very long, to have the...

power? No. Have the ability to make a difference in this, in relationship to this unbelievably entrenched and widespread system. So I'd like to know how you feel about the political industrial complex that you've now come up against and are also now a part of, right? Peculiarly enough. Peculiarly enough. Isn't that interesting how that works? I would say it's not possible to reform it

It is possible to decimate it. Okay. I think, and that's what it's going to require.

This rise of this managerial class, you see it in the deep state in the federal government, or the fourth branch of government, the unelected bureaucrats who are exercising. You see it in the universities. Exactly. It's not just in the deep state. It's in the managerial class, the associate dean of God knows what, the ambassador or undersecretary to something or other, the people who are sitting professionally on a board of directors, the people who are the political consultants populating the industrialization of our political politics. It's a horizontal managerial class that

who are neither ordinary citizens in their own right, nor are they actual purposeful creators who are able to create something of inherent value, but are the intermediating managers, right? That's what's sucking the lifeblood out of our culture and our country. And I would go so far as to say the modern West as we know it. And so is it possible to reform that beast? No, I think you have to slay that beast. And I think it is possible for a chief executive

You could take it of a university. You could take it of the country, of the executive branch of the United States of America, of a company. You could go one by one. But for a strong chief executive who is at least on paper vested with the authority to run an organization,

to take what's on that piece of paper and actualize it to actually run that organization. And the system isn't set up for it. It isn't set up for a political candidate to really run their campaign. It's done by the industrialized machine around them. It isn't set up for the chief executive of the executive branch, the president of the United States, to run that executive branch or that bureaucracy. It's not naturally set up that way. And it's not set up for the president of the university to run the

the, you know, endless committees of associate deans. It's the committee class that permeates each of these institutions, even for large Fortune 500 companies. You might have HR heads who are exercising greater hiring policy decisions than the CEO. So that's not the default, but it takes the kind of executive who will overcome that activation energy to say, I'm going to break that system anyway. I'm not going to fall for the siren song of saying that I can reform it. Reform isn't possible.

But will I take the risk? And it is a risk. And there will be costs to it of saying, I'm not bringing some sort of chisel. I'm bringing a chainsaw, a jackhammer to the whole thing, raising it to the ground, burning it, and then burning the ashes.

And then start with a blank slate and build anew if I have to. And so the answer to your question is yes, but that's what it'll take. Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capella University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track. We care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals.

Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at capella.edu. I watched what Musk did with Twitter with great interest. And I've watched a number of leaders at a variety of corporations do something similar and revitalize their work.

their respective companies. You know, it's often a lengthy process and you have to be a very particular sort of person to do it. And I think people hope that Trump can do it. But here's a danger that I see even in what you just said. I understand your concern and I'm very sympathetic to it. I know that since time immemorial, the evil

brother of the rightful king has posed a archetypal threat to the integrity of the state, abetted by the blindness of the king, right? And that the archetypal story is that that descends into stasis and then chaos. And I feel that everyone feels that that's what's happening. But

There's another phenomenon that emerges when all that occurs, and that phenomenon has been symbolized as the dragon that eats its own tail. That's the symbol of chaos that's Uroboros. And the fervor with which you just described that potentially destructive process, the reason I'm pointing out that symbol is because

there's an element of it that's similar to what the radicals on the left say, you know, that everything has to be burned to the ground, that it has to be decimated, that we have to start anew. And I can see the critical conservatives and libertarians such as yourself inadvertently, accidentally in some ways, and even inevitably adopting the same dire prognosis, right? So

What's the difference between your view of creative destruction, let's say? This is a very hard question. What's the difference between your view of creative destruction and the leftist view that our institutions are terminally corrupt, that we have to raise them to the ground and start anew? Sure. So I think that there is a different vision of what you create to fill the vacuum. And what you've seen from the modern left is that

Actually, the very bureaucracies that they've created, right, this vestige of bureaucracy, the committee class, is indeed the product of what has cannibalized the institutions that once existed. So we're not starting from a neutral starting point. That's what I would say. If we were starting from a neutral starting point, we would start with a blank slate and ask what we need to build anew. We need to get to that blank slate. We're not even at that start line right now.

And so in some ways, I think the overgrowth of that managerial class and that bureaucracy has itself been weaponized by the left. Their tactics are no longer ones that say tear it down. Their tactics are weaponize what's already there to advance your ends, right? They're not tearing down the financial system.

The question is, how do you weaponize the financial system to advance your own substantive ends? They're not tearing down the prosecutorial or justice system. The question is, how do you weaponize that justice system to go after your own political opponents and keep them from running against you in elections? They're not tearing down corporate America. They're leveraging corporate America. Okay, so what you're pointing to there is the falseness of that revolutionary claim, that that's window dressing for acquisition of power.

power and the use of the current systems, the systems that they purport to despise. Yes, it's either a falseness, Dr. Peterson, or it is a

modern incarnation of the left that's different from the kind that existed when Karl Marx existed. Or even when Bernie Sanders existed, for that matter. Right. Even then when Bernie Sanders existed, for that matter. Exactly. It's a particularly new strain of the left that's a little bit different from the Occupy Wall Street, let's tear it down version. This isn't that anymore. They sort of, I think, in their view, if you can't beat them, join them, became the mentality.

And if you can't really tear it down through, if you can't invade the castle through the front door, you couldn't tear it down through the front door. Just invade it and infest it from the back door. And that's actually what's happened. Okay, so you had a clarion call to leadership, as you pointed out at the beginning of this interview, because you believe that the fundamental institutions upon which this country, your country, are predicated are...

They're on the money. They're on the money. Right. And so the path forward that I've seen for the conservative types is to see what the leftists want to do. Let's talk about the ones who do want to tear it down. They want to tear down the existing system and they want to rebuild it in accordance with the dictates of something approximating the radical left.

vision of Marx, let's say, radical egalitarianism that could extend even to the notion that something like property is theft. So they're going to tear things down and they're going to rebuild it on those principles. Oh, you guys in the United States, you already have a set of principles and one of them is the principle of distributed responsibility, right? And so, and that's the age-old medication that's offered when tyranny looms and chaos beckons. It's that

It's you don't fall prey to either of those and you don't fall prey to the dynamic. You reinvigorate the institutions of distributed responsibility. Now you've been pointing in that direction, right? Because you've taken a,

pro-family, pro-patriotic, pro-America, pro-West, right? And I don't know where it goes beyond that, whether you're an Enlightenment guy and how you view the interaction between all of that and the underlying Judeo-Christian foundation, let's say. But your call, and I'm hoping this is the case for Trump too, is your call isn't merely to decimate. It's to clear the path so that what's

true and right can make itself manifest again, which is what, for example, what Musk was trying to do and I think did successfully at Twitter. He got rid of 75% of the employees, right? But he wasn't trying to decimate the company. He was trying to establish it on Twitter

He was just trying to establish a fertile ground. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the decimate it is the overgrowth. I want to be really clear about this. Right. That's good to be very clear about that. Yeah, is to tear down the cancerous overgrowth itself. So I'm saying we're not trying to treat this tumor with symptomatic therapy, right? We want to decimate the tumor, right?

But the underlying organ is still what we want to save. Okay? And I think that that's actually really important. Okay. So let me ask you about this. Tell me what you think about this. Like, look, you were attacked a lot. And you said that one of the consequences of that was that, well, it got your back up, let's say. And some of that was contaminated with a certain amount of disdain. And we already walked through that. But you also pointed out something that's relevant in this context, which is that

The slings and arrows that were directed towards you are relatively trivial in comparison to the continual utter assault on Trump at every level of his life virtually. And so my fear, let's say, is that he's so embattled and so pushed into a corner and so poked and prodded and provoked that he...

Is he wise enough to separate his desire to clear away the overgrowth and let what's healthy survive? Or is he pushed into a corner enough so that there are enemies everywhere and his wrath will know no bounds, let's say? So what do you think about him? And you've got to know him a bit. Yeah. So here's what I will say is...

The man I've seen is, I'll reveal maybe two insights that are a little bit different from the media portrayals, but true to my understanding of what I see. One is, I see a leader who is even more ambitious for the country.

as a consequence of some of his learnings from the first term. I think the first term was incredibly successful. Look, you got four years of Trump, four years of Biden. Compare the results and make your vote accordingly. And if that's the way this election goes, I think Trump will be elected as the next president. But I don't think he views that as sufficient. I think that he believes that there are a lot of lessons learned from that first administration that he is ambitious for our country to want to translate in that second term. I think that's a real positive because that, to me, suffices.

signals growth and it signals actual positivity towards the future to say that there's a lot of things that I will still have learned from that first term. And that's an advantage he has relative to anybody else who ran for president is he actually has those learnings from having been in that office, even relative to me with a very similar vision. He's faced down that administrative state in a way that I've studied and have deep intuitions and knowledge about, but haven't faced in the same way that he has. And the second thing that I've noted about him is

This is in the last couple of months, but he is very receptive to the best arguments for how to do that as long as I think they're delivered in the right digestible way that's efficient and effective and thoughtful around him. I don't think he has patience for long driveling of anyone's oral diarrhea on a given day. But if delivered in a

pointed way, I think that he is actually very open-minded to adopting ideas that weren't necessarily part of his agenda previously. But if they're aligned with the actual vision and their ways of specific policies or specific actions to take that help advance the right America First vision for the country, he's actually very receptive to that. And the media portrays him as some sort of dogmatic, single-minded man. That's not what I see, actually.

I see a leader who actually cares about the country, who wants the best and brightest to give him and arm him with the tools he needs to turn that vision into reality. I mean, this is one publicly reported example. So, you know, I'll feel free to talk about it. I want to be respectful of the conversations I've had with him separately. But since this was publicly reported, I can speak to it. I was backstage with him in New Hampshire. This is after I dropped out and endorsed him.

And we spoke about the perils of a central bank digital currency.

And you and I may have talked about this on other occasions. I trust that you're familiar with some of those perils coming from the Canadian side of this. Yeah, yeah. I'm plenty familiar with them. So what I admired about Donald Trump is he had, on one hand, an intellectual humility about him. He didn't try to pretend to do what I know many politicians would do, would try to recite some talking points they briefly memorized without understanding what the actual thing was. He has the self-confidence to say, well, tell me about what that is and tell me about why it's bad.

Well, great. That's actually an honest conversation to get to. Here's what it is. Here's why it's bad. And then he also asked the further question of, well, then why are the advocates in favor of it? Right. Understand the best argument for the other side. It's not just, OK, this is what I'm supposed to say. So let me digest it. What is the argument for the other side? So we went through that and he didn't immediately adopt it. Right. He asked a couple of other people for their views, went on stage that night, didn't talk about it that night. But a few nights later, we're in New Hampshire. And lo and behold, and he didn't talk to me about this beforehand.

He comes out in a speech. He references my conversation with me backstage in his speech to the audience from a few nights before and says, I will tell you tonight that I am against a central bank digital currency and here's why. And the audience cheered. And he had his own conviction in why he was offering it for something that even a matter of days before, and it wasn't flippant. He took a couple of days. He understood the best arguments for the other side. He consulted other people as well in the process and then came to a decisive answer.

That, to me, is a mark of a leader that isn't just behaving in a reactionary response, which is what your concern was as expressed, but somebody who is able to think through the right arguments to make sure the right policies are actually advancing the agenda rather than just reflecting whatever direction the winds of temper are blowing on a given day. And I think that that

That's really encouraging. It encourages me and I think it should encourage every American and certainly every person who's voting for Donald Trump or every person who's open to voting for Donald Trump to know that that's actually what I think they're going to get. And I do think it's going to take a responsibility of people around him to provide that to him in a way that allows him to lead. But, you know, I think I'm going to do my part and I think the other people around him are going to do theirs to hopefully make that second term far more successful than what was already, I think, a very good first term.

Okay, so let me close with one final question. So when I was watching the Republican primary, I was hoping initially that public opinion would fall behind DeSantis because I thought DeSantis...

has a credible pro-American, truly conservative vision, and he has administrative experience. And the reason that I personally, I'm only speaking personally, and as a Canadian, you know, preferred DeSantis to Trump is because the divisiveness that surrounds Trump makes me very apprehensive. And this is independent of his merits as a person and as a businessman, perhaps even as a president. Trump

the phenomenon of Trump polarizes people to a degree that I think is unparalleled. It's unparalleled in my memory and having watched the political scene for like five decades, you know. So I would like you to tell me why you think that polarization is so intense and what you think, see, because the real critical part of me thinks, and I'm not saying I'm right about this, but

The Trump presidency, the Trump phenomenon is so divisive that I think the divisiveness itself poses a threat to the integrity of the country. Now, and I thought that's, okay, so- Let's separate two things there. One is, does divisiveness itself, irrespective of Trump, does divisiveness itself represent a threat to this country? Of course it does.

I think this country is skating on thin ice. We're at risk of dividing to a breaking point. I put a lot of that in the media. I put a lot of that in the industrialization of politics. I put a lot of that in the super PAC puppet mastery that characterizes modern politics. I think that you shouldn't have congressmen who are, I think you need term limits. I think congressmen should not be able to trade individual stocks. I think that the administrative state needs term limits. I think the people who we elect to run the government should actually run the government. Those are things that left or right people agree on in this country.

policies that you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return. Inherently, most people in their value set are not actually divided, but it is the projection, the artifice of division created much by the projection of the media that...

creates the appearance of division that then becomes the new reality. So that's where I think it's actually coming from. And then Trump is, the treatment of Trump is really just a symptom of that. The media puts him in such a box to create a caricature of a man that is part of the broader project of division they're creating, irrespective of Trump. They've just used Trump as another vehicle in achieving the divide and conquer strategy of a small group of people who benefit from that division.

Okay, so you think, for example, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but your sense would have been, for example, that had DeSantis emerged as the Republican leader instead of Trump, that the same forces would have turned him into another Trump, let's say, in the public imagination, that this is actually a consequence of- I don't think that any other person, you know, DeSantis or anyone else would have been a cure to the problem that you're concerned about. Now, do I see an opportunity-

to level up as a movement and say, we're not just against what the other side puts up, which is a temptation, but to say, this is what we're actually running to. These are our affirmative values of what we stand for. What is the opposite of the great reset? Sovereignty. Sovereignty at the level of the individual and the family and the nation and God.

That's what it means to be a conservative. That's what grounds our shared American values. That's our identity. Well, that's the identity that can be offered confused young people, right? That's subsidiary identity. And as a leader, I'm leading you there. Yes, I see that opportunity. And, you know, even in the last couple of months, and I want to respect all the conversations we've had, but in the last couple of months, one of the things that Donald Trump has said that I think

inspires me and I hope inspires people across this country is, you know what our vengeance will be? Success will be our vengeance. Success is unifying. And so I see the earliest

direction of us beginning to go in a direction that I think- And he said that, did he? Yes. That's a good line. That's a good line. I agree with you on that. I very much agree with you on that. And I think that that is a unifying message. Success is unifying. And as he said it, success is our vengeance. Well, that's the vengeance that you Americans took against the Soviet Union. Yes. And in many ways, even against the British Empire at the American Revolution.

in some ways, but very much against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Success was our vengeance against that enemy. And success can be our vengeance even against the enemy that we face of our own division. And so I think that I am cautiously optimistic that we may be stronger on the other side of this division as a bone heals stronger after it is broken. Yes, the bone of our

identity has been broken, but it can emerge stronger on the other side. And for the next four years, this may not just be a four-year project. For the next four years, I believe Donald Trump is the best positioned person to lead us there. I think it is his responsibility and the responsibility of people around him to make sure he's as successful as he can be in getting us there. But it's not just a four-year project. It took us

30 years to get to where we are right now with the assault on our institutions and our national identity and our national division. It could very well take more than four years to find our way out of it, to be stronger on the other side. But for the next four years, I'm optimistic that this can be the beginning of a step in that direction. Well, that's a very good place to stop.

Thank you very much for speaking with me again and making your experiences available to everyone who's watching and listening. I wish you the best of luck negotiating these very complex high waters over the next few months. It's going to be fascinating to watch this unfold.

I think we decided the last time we last couple of times we spoke to check in every four months or something like that. I think we should keep doing that as this progresses so that everybody can stay abreast of what's. Yeah. Yeah. And use these are fun for me. Actually. Good, good, good, good. Well, and good luck helping promote that positive and unifying vision like that's.

It would be lovely if Trump's campaign could turn more and more to that as he's simultaneously defending himself from the multidimensional assaults that assail him. But that vision of distributed responsibility, that is the time-tested antidote to tyranny and slavery, right? And it is the

fundamental realization of governance that your country is founded on, that principle of subsidiarity. And it's such a great call to adventure for young people. It's like, take your place in a marriage, take your place in a family, take your place in a community, bear a load. You know, all the responsibility you abdicate personally will be taken up and used against you by tyrants. That's the iron law of humanity.

Right. And so that's a great thing for everyone to understand. And I'm hoping the conservatives can run with that, you know, because there isn't another pathway forward that isn't chaos and tyranny. I'm hopeful and I promise you I'll do everything in my power to make it so.

All right, sir. To everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention to the film crew here in Toronto today. Thank you guys for setting this up. To everybody who's watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated. I hope you found the conversation useful and revealing. Vivek, it's always a pleasure talking to you and keep the flag flying, man. Thank you. I appreciate it. Take care.

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