#112 Vivek Ramaswamy - The Truth Behind the Campaign Trail & Government Lies

Vivek Ramaswamy is a former Presidential Candidate and American entrepreneur. As a Harvard graduate, he founded Roivant Sciences, a wildly successful biotech company. He also co-founded Strive Asset Management, an investment firm that positions itself in opposition to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). Vivek fought a fierce battle on the campaign trail in 2024 and has returned to the Shawn Ryan Show to share his experience and what he believes is next for America. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://zippixtoothpicks.com - USE CODE "SRS" Vivek Ramaswamy Links: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vivekgramaswamy Twitter - https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy Campaign - https://www.vivek2024.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:35Shawn Ryan?

  Vivek Ramaswamy, welcome back, man.

• 0:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's good to be back.

• 0:39Shawn Ryan?

  How you been?

• 0:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Cool room here. I like, I like the cool temperatures.

• 0:42Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, thank you. It's a lot of history in here.

• 0:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, it is. I remember we talked about that last time I was here. It's good to be back and you know, this time it's on the back of a campaign that, you know, it's been about a few months since the campaign and so I've restored to sane, normal life and a chance to reflect on the last year, but I'm doing well.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. Good for you, man. I'm, I'm curious, how did the campaign go? I mean, is it as dirty getting into politics as everybody says it is?

• 1:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think it's worse.

• 1:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's worse?

• 1:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah. You know, it's going to be bad going in. I don't think, I don't like to think of myself as naive, but it's far worse than anybody might imagine looking in from the outside. I think the, one of the most surprising parts of the process to me is the role of the gatekeepers is massive and the gatekeepers include both apparatuses within each of the political parties. I can't speak to the Democrat party. I assume it's the same as it is with the Republican party. Gatekeepers in the party apparatus itself, gatekeepers in the media, and I'm not talking about just hosts. I'm talking about the people who the public never sees, but network executives who decide not even how something gets covered. That's not where they tilt the scale.

• 1:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's whether it gets covered, which is really interesting. And then third, of course, is the people who write the big checks, not the people who write the $6,000, $6,600 maximum checks to a campaign or a candidate.

• 2:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's a lot of money, but it's a lot of people across this country can write that check. Now, I'm talking about the people who don't write the checks to the campaigns, but write the biggest and most important checks of all, which are to the super PACs that fund political campaigns. They don't directly fund the campaigns, but that's just a fiction.

• 2:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The reality is the system runs on super PAC dollars. And so that was a little less true for my candidacy than the people I was competing with. But the fact that my competitors were funded that way had a big effect on the way that I had to compete against that. And those are collectively what I learned were the gatekeepers of American politics. And let's just say I emerged from the process a lot more educated on the realities of how the game is played, but also with a sense of restored purpose to change the game, to be able to, you know, I think, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, an outsider should run for US president. I believe that professional politicians pollute our politics.

• 3:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But on the other side of having done it now, I think it gives me a deeper conviction that it's going to require not just me, more people like Donald Trump or like myself, who literally have, yes, a lot to lose by doing this, but are doing it temporarily for a defined period of time as a matter of service. We need more of that, or else the game is going to keep being played the way it is.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think your campaign would have gone had Trump not been in the race?

• 3:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Oh, I think we would have been successful in achieving the goal. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the people of this country and in the Republican primary base made a very understandable choice. And it's why I myself endorsed Donald Trump the day that I dropped out of the race as well, is they said, look, we want an America first leader, but in Donald Trump, we have something that's particularly unique, is somebody who has actually done it before. So if you have an incumbent president like Biden, and you have a challenger who's challenging that incumbent, usually here's the trade off. The challenger is offering you some hope and dream. Okay, here's what I'm going to do that's different than the incumbent. This is a once in a century opportunity, actually. I think the last time it happened was with Grover Cleveland, but it's literally a once in a century opportunity that voters

• 4:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  get to say, here's a four-year record of a president who I've had. I see exactly not what he said, but what he did on the border, on the economy, the stability on the global stage, the fact that we aren't on the brink of World War III or weren't for those four years. And today, we have a border crisis of historic proportion. We have an administrative state, a weaponization of government that's out of control, an economy that's failing most Americans, and closer to World War III than we've ever been in my life. Make your choice. And so I think that's what the Republican primary base voted for, is anyone outside of the America First vision cannot represent the modern Republican Party. That much is clear. That basically, in this race, left two candidates. That was Donald Trump and

• 4:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  myself. And they made a clear and decisive choice to say that this time around, the person we want is the person who's actually done it, because that's what we get to compare to a Biden administration that's given us the opposite. And so if Donald Trump weren't in the race, I mean, there's hard polling data on this. Look at the end of the race. Certainly, in some of those early states like Iowa and also nationally, if you look at who the second choice to those Trump voters were, you know, would have me in first place in many of those. But, you know, that's, that's not for me to, you know, relitigate and analyze and, and think about what could have been. I'm thrilled that hopefully Trump is on track to a successful second term ahead. I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure

• 5:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  he's successfully elected, not just by a little bit, but by a lot. I think a landslide minus some shenanigans is still a decisive victory, and that's what this country needs. And I think that that second term, I'm hopeful, can go far further than Donald Trump's first term did. I think his first term was successful, but I think he has an opportunity to make the second one pale in comparison. And anything I can do to make that successful, that's gonna be the next highest way of me having an impact on this country, second to being the president.

• 6:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that we'll see you up there again, maybe in 2028?

• 6:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's a long time from now. You know, right now, one of the things I've learned in my life is every time I make these detailed, long-run plans, it never goes according to that plan anyway. So when you're guided by your own personal plans of here's what I'm going to do, it never goes that way anyway. Your plans are stupid. That's what I've found. But if you're guided by your actual sense of purpose, right? What's my purpose? Is my purpose going to change? No, it's not. My purpose is reviving the 1776 ideals this country was founded on. I think we've forgotten those ideals. I think our founding fathers were incredible human beings whose legacy, both in terms of their culture, in terms of their values, in terms of their constitutional vision,

• 6:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  we've all but abandoned. You've got the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. These guys were, you know, one guy invented the remedy to the common cold, a lightning rod, a Franklin stove. Benjamin Franklin, that was Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson invents the swivel chair. We're sitting in a swivel chair right now. Did he really? He literally was the inventor of the swivel chair. How the hell do you know that? Oh, it's just me studying American history. These guys are titans. Jefferson actually also invented, you'd actually be interested in this, the original version of the polygraph test, which is a lie detector test. Yeah. And so these are the guys who are our founding fathers, right? These are the guys who were the pioneers and the explorers that refused to be stopped. They wrote a Declaration of Independence. They meant what they said.

• 7:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Jefferson, you know, I mean, doesn't land well on the modern ear, but I think he said, what is it? "The tree of liberty is fed every generation by the blood of tyrants." And they fought a revolution, taking the risk pledging their sacred honor, their lives, and their treasure. The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, a good number of them died bankrupt because they had their assets seized by the British. I'm pretty sure 12 of them had their homes ransacked or burned. Five of them were captured and tortured by the British before their death. And they knew what they were signing up for. We've lost that sense of risk-taking. We've lost that sense of sacrificing for a country that allows us to otherwise enjoy the liberties that we do. And I don't say that as some sort

• 8:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  of, you know, self-important, "Okay, well, I'm gonna revive that legacy myself," but all of us need to step up and ask ourselves, "How are we gonna actually pass that on to our kids in the same way that our founding fathers did to us?" That's my sense of purpose. So whatever I can do to make that happen, I'm gonna do it again.

• 8:46Shawn Ryan?

  I love where you're going with this, and, you know, we hear about it all the time, right? It seems like there's more and more Americans willing to step up to the plate, but I think it lacks organization.

• 8:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  How are we gonna organize?

• 9:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, look, I think the first step is, I think the organization part will be easier once we actually have the underlying will to do it. And I think we're in a place right now, Sean, where that's changing gradually. I think a lot of people before said, "Okay, I'm gonna look after what my own interest is, let somebody else fight the battles that need to be fought," but especially for the wealthy class in this country, of which, you know, folks like myself are a member of that. And I've had my peers who would look at, "Okay, politics is for somebody else," or fighting these cultural fights to speak truth even when it's hard. That's for somebody else to do. For me, it's to just enjoy the fruits of that. People now are starting to wake up and recognize that we're not gonna have a country left in three, four, five, six years. I do think that that's what we're looking at. I mean,

• 9:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think about it on a personal note. If my kids are in high school before we get this right, I don't think we have a country left. I think a lot of people are starting to recognize that, too, and say, "You know what? The inheritance I want to give my kids isn't just a bunch of green pieces of paper. It is a country where they can actually enjoy the same gifts and liberties that allowed us to achieve what we have, too." And so I think, once you have that will, the organization naturally follows. And it's not just through politics. I think about organization as within every institution, right? So within politics, we can talk about what organization looks like. The Republican Party has been, you know, in its organization, deeply broken for a long time, and I think we've had some changes in leadership that hopefully will turn the page on that.

• 10:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But you could think about organization within every other institution, too. Think about organization in corporate America and in capital markets where you historically, for the last 10 years, had three incumbent institutions, BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, that have defined using the power of capital and the power of organization to dictate how the rest of corporate America behaves. Well, the other side needs to get organized and say, you know what, we're going to counter that through competitive forces that say companies should not be vectors of advancing left-wing political ideologies, but they should be focused on maximizing profit for shareholders and creating value for society by making products and services for their customers. That's getting organized in capital markets and in corporate America.

• 11:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's getting organized at the level of K through 12 education, who are governing our school boards, people who are effectively social activists, you have a lot of other people, myself included, I haven't run for school board before, but assume that that's going to be somebody else's problem. No, we got to get organized and say that, you know what, parents determine where their kids go to school, use actual choice measures to hold public schools accountable, and for the public schools, we do have representation out there that stands for educating the next generation of kids rather than indoctrinating the next generation of activists. So it's the same thing at universities, at philanthropies, at nonprofits. But getting organized doesn't mean just one top-down maneuver.

• 11:49Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If we're going to save this country, it's going to be in each of those domains one at a time. And so I was in it, in the presidential race, to start with reforming and getting organized and tearing down the deep state and the federal bureaucracy, which is one of those tools that has been weaponized that needs to be, I think, shuttered. I think personally, if we take care of that, a lot of the others become that much easier. But we're going to need people to get organized in the domain of higher education, K through 12 education, corporate American capital markets, and the nonprofit and philanthropy sector to be able to actually save this country bottom up.

• 12:24Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I'm talking about, I'm just, I mean, I'm talking about Congress, I'm talking about this, I don't even think they're organized.

• 12:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Shawn Ryan?

  It's a fucking disaster up there.

• 12:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, first thing, we use term limits.

• 12:39Shawn Ryan?

  And so, yeah, that's a great point. But if we do term limits, that's that's an amendment to the Constitution, correct?

• 12:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You know, I think that is an amendment to the Constitution, which was a high hurdle. Definitely amendment to the Constitution was a high hurdle to pass. But here's my way of at least getting the wheels greased, using the corruption against the corrupt system itself. So then I'm not going to be the next president. But if I were the next president, here's what I would do. The deal I would put up to Congress is, all right, here's term limits. Three terms for Congress, two terms for the US Senate. Most of them don't want to do it, not because it's a bad idea for the country, but because it's a bad idea for them individually. And so I don't love this deal, but here's how we would get it through at overwhelming majority levels, because there's bipartisan support for this. People across the country, Democrat and Republican, want term limits in Congress. Why isn't it happening? The people who have to vote on it, because it requires a constitutional amendment, requires

• 13:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  passage in both houses and ratification by the states. The people who are going to vote for it, it's against their self-interest. So the deal I would make is this, we're going to have term limits, but if you pass it, it doesn't apply to you. The people who vote for it, that Congress is grandfathered in. And anytime one of those seats is replaced by somebody else who's voted in to take it, then it applies to them going forward. So they're binding the future without binding themselves. Now, this is a wildly popular bipartisan policy. I think it would pass in an instant, even as a constitutional amendment. There's certain types of term limits that don't require a constitutional amendment. So you have the term limits that I favor for bureaucrats, right? If the US president can't work for the people of this country for more than eight years,

• 14:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  neither should any of those federal bureaucrats either, in my opinion. Those eight-year term limits don't require an amendment. They don't even require congressional action. That's something the US president can say as a hiring policy. For most roles, we have an eight-year term limit. You can't just sit and squat and collect the paycheck from the taxpayer without any political accountability for more than eight years if I, as the president, can't do that either. That's a term limit we could get past even without Congress. And so I think there are things we can do anyway to grease the wheels of saying that you take the self-interest of the congressman off the table, it's amazing what they would do. The bans on, I don't know where you are on this, but the bans on insider trading, or the bans on trading of stocks, we won't even call it insider trading, the bans of trading of individual stocks by congressmen and senators, or by bureaucrats.

• 15:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't see the public policy argument for how that advances the interests of the American people, but the reason, and I've gone to even Republican caucuses of the congressman, they're dead set against this, most of them are, do the same thing, say, okay, make the rule, think about what's in the best interest of the country by taking your self-interest off the table, it doesn't apply to you. Now they don't have to think about themselves, right? It only applies to the next guy. It's amazing what that does in clearing one's mind.

• 15:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's brilliant.

• 15:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so those are the kinds of things I would do.

• 15:29Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's brilliant, but where I'm going, if it is an amendment to the Constitution doesn't, and, look, I'm not near as knowledgeable as you.

• 15:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't know about that.

• 15:39Shawn Ryan?

  But how many times has the Constitution been amended? Because what I worry about is...

• 15:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Twenty-seven, or, well, actually seventeen, right? Because you have the Bill of Rights, this is the first ten.

• 15:47Shawn Ryan?

  So, does that open it up to Second Amendment, First Amendment, and start amending these things? Because there's definitely a push on freedom of speech, there's a push on gun control, there's a push on all kinds of stuff.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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• 17:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So there's two ways, I mean, this is a little technical, but there's two ways to amend the Constitution. Okay, one is through congressional action, and then you take it to the states to ratify what Congress amends. I think that that would not open up Pandora's Box, because that requires the presentation of a very specific amendment. Term limits for congressmen, that that is codified. And what do we say through term limits? What are we saying to the people? That we believe in a culture of service. Public service is about serving the public, not yourself. That we believe in a culture where different people at different stages of their life say, "I'm gonna go into public service, I'm gonna do my part, and then get the heck out of there, and go back to productively living my life and contributing to this country in other ways."

• 17:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's the kind of thing that qualifies as a constitutional amendment that could really unite and galvanize a civic spirit in this country, and restore trust, to say that we're not sending a class of professional politicians acting like leeches, as they do today, on the taxpayers who fund them. That'd be the way to do it. There's a second way to amend the Constitution that some people favor, which I don't, I'm actually sympathetic to it, to their motivations, but I don't think that we need to go there, and I don't think we're in a moment where we should go there right now, which is called an Article V Convention of States. So that's where a certain number of states can, under Article V of the Constitution, call a whole convention. If you think about the original Constitutional Convention, was amending the, what the older

• 18:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  system was, and that was what the Constitution came out of, you could do that again, under Article V of the Constitution. There, and a lot of the opponents to the Article V Convention worry about this, "You're opening Pandora's Box, you could just throw out the other amendments too, and just come out with something totally new." I don't think we need to go there, I don't think that that's, we've gotten to that point as a country yet. I think let's start with just electing the right person to lead the executive branch of the government, to actually use that authority to shut down the unconstitutional fourth branch of government. The biggest constitutional breach in America today, you know, all the threats to the Second Amendment, to the First Amendment, all of that, the Fourth Amendment, you take a look at the FISA reauthorization, and everything else going on right now.

• 19:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  A lot of that originates with the deep state. And people use this term, "the deep state." What is it? It's the people who were never elected to run the government, the four-plus-million federal bureaucrats, who are actually writing the regulations that act like laws, that bind the behaviors of businesses and people across this country, who were never elected to do it in the first place, and who the Constitution doesn't even recognize as existing. See, if our founding fathers went and walked around the bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., they would find it unrecognizable. They would say, "Well, what's this? We set into motion a system where you have checks and balances between three branches of government. There's a legislative branch that makes the laws. There's an executive branch that enforces the laws.

• 19:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  There's a judicial branch, the highest organ of which is the Supreme Court, that interprets the laws. What's going on with all of these bureaucracies with four-million-plus people making most of the rules that bind people's lives that have zero accountability attached to them? What's going on there? That's unconstitutional. That's why it's unrecognizable. We don't need an Article V Convention to change the Constitution to address that real threat to liberty. What we really need to do is just apply the Constitution we already have. And the sad part is, leaders from both parties have utterly failed to do it. I mean, the administrative state, that's what we call the deep state, administrative state, the managerial class, the shadow government, whatever you want to call it. The people who we elected to run the government,

• 20:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  they're not the ones running the government. It's this other class of people, the four-million managerial bureaucrats. It's grown in influence under both political parties, right? And I think that they're getting their wheels greased by Republicans and Democrats alike. That's what we need to do. Now, I'm sympathetic to the people who say we need an Article V Convention and we need to start the revolution again. Well, like you said, there's a risk you could just toss out the other amendments and go in the other direction. We don't need a new Constitution. We could add one, we could add a 28th amendment to add term limits, and that's something I'm in favor of. But the real thing we need in this country is not a new constitution. We need to apply the constitution that we already have. And that requires, and it starts with this president with the spine to do it.

• 21:24Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's why I ran. That was the, I wouldn't say the sole premise, but that was the number one goal of my candidacy, was to get in there, use the current Supreme Court, which agrees with everything I've just told you, as the backstop to say, we're shutting down the fourth branch of government, that we're going to fire millions, without exaggeration or hyperbole, millions of federal bureaucrats. The people who we elect to Congress, they may not all agree with me on everything, but at least it will be the people we elect to run the government that are actually running the government. That was the core premise of my candidacy for US president. And as I said, the people of this country, the Republican primary base, went for a guy who's, they said, is saying similar things, but has actually done a lot that we appreciate.

• 22:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So now I'm behind him, but I do think that that is the thing that we need to accomplish. And if there's something that I would push the next administration to do, above all else, shut down the deep state and the rest of our problems become that much easier to solve. And I do think that that's doable without tossing the constitution aside.

• 22:25Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I got a quick quote. Going back to term limits. So how long do you think that would take to flush these people out?

• 22:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If we did it the way that I said?

• 22:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That would happen organically, I think, in about a 10-year period, in that case.

• 22:38Shawn Ryan?

  Because I get, you know, I get, I get worried. I get really worried. I look at the population now, instead of just the politicians. I mean, the, if you look at Congress, these numbers aren't correct, but they're damn near this extreme. You know, Congress has, what, like a 10% ish approval rating?

• 22:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Shawn Ryan?

  And like a 90% ish reelection rate.

• 23:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you?

• 23:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  How do you explain that?

• 23:05Shawn Ryan?

  How do you explain? I mean, it's the people. It seems like we're our own problem here.

• 23:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, so it's interesting you say that. I mostly agree with that. Back to our boy, Thomas Jefferson, who we're talking about earlier. He had some wise words. I'm gonna try to say it as elegantly as he did. I think the way he said it is, "The government we elect is the government we deserve." And what he's saying is, you know what, if you get, if you get the cesspool that you want, but you're the people who elected them, well, you deserve it. And you earn your damnation, and that's what we've earned right now. That's what Thomas Jefferson would say.

• 23:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think that that's mostly true. There's an intervening variable, which is the influence of money on politics, which is what I talked about earlier, one of those three eye openers, the gatekeepers of American politics. You see, they have a vested interest. So why do those people keep getting elected? It's because they're propped up by people who get something in return for propping them up. Right? You wonder why certain people might change their mind from one position on the Ukraine war to another, or from one position on reauthorizing Pfizer to another. It's when they get the phone call, right? Get the phone call from the people who provide their mother's milk. Money is the mother's milk of politics. When mommy calls, you're not gonna get your milk unless you do what's required. And so in some ways, yes, it's up to us as the people to still see through that.

• 24:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We're the ones who fall for the ads that were served up on cable television, or now on digital ads, or whatever. Yes, there's a sheep-like element to each of us as human beings. But I think there's a lion that lives within each of us, too. And right now, the inner sheep has taken over. So you're right. I am all in favor of every one of us taking a long, hard look in the mirror and say, if I'm complaining about the media, you can talk about politics, you can talk about the media, too. That only exists as so long as we, the people, are bending the knee and serving as customers to what they say. Same thing as constituents to the politicians who we elect. We can complain about them all we want. Part of the problem is staring us in the mirror. What is it that makes me want to behave like a sheep rather than a lion?

• 25:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  What is it that makes us want to bend the knee to some authority? And I think there's a deeper discussion to be had there when faith and patriotism and family and hard work and all the things that fill our sense of purpose disappear. We, as a people, are lost and are just prone to bend the knee to even self-harming behaviors that put up politicians that act against our interests. So yes, that's a deep discussion and definitely half the story. But the other half of the story is, the people don't really get a choice when money's the mother's milk of politics and the people who we even hear about, right? It's one thing to say that I heard about two different candidates and I chose this one, and that's my fault. That's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, "The government we elect is the government we deserve." It's another to say, you may not even hear about the people who are trying to actually

• 25:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  challenge the status quo, because literally, the system is bought by the very people who are hostile to your interests. And I do think that's a big part of what's happening. In both political parties, for that matter, today. It's not a Republican versus Democrat point. It's this managerial class that has a chokehold of the government and every one of these other institutions. Our universities, much of capital markets, corporate America, the financial sector, the media. That managerial class versus the everyday citizen, that's the real dividing line in this country. I saw it firsthand in many ways, running for US president. I think that that managerial class is what we're gonna have to really dismantle, really nuke that structure if we have a chance of getting this country back.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  How are you gonna do that?

• 26:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Shawn Ryan?

  How are you gonna dismantle the managerial class?

• 26:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, I can tell you how I would have done it, if I were, if I were successful in what I set out to do. And, you know, I'm hopeful that Donald Trump, as the next president, is gonna be empowered to do the same thing, is you have to, you can't reform it. I think the first thing is, you have to reject the myth of reform. That's a hard thing to do. Reform is a myth.

• 27:03Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 27:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Think about well-intentioned people to say, okay, here's how things are running. I wanna go in and reform it. Fill in the blank of "it." FBI, ATF, CDC, fill in the three-letter alphabet soup, EPA, FDA, SEC, TSA, God knows what. The idea that you can reform that beast is a myth. Right? The way that beast, what Thomas Hobbes called the Leviathan, the monster. The way they view elected leaders is like cute little puppets that come along every four years. And in many senses, that's what elected leaders are. They behave that way. They're puppets of the people who provide the mother's milk. And so these bureaucrats view them the same way. These are cute little puppets that come along every four years.

• 27:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I was here long before you arrived, and I'm gonna be here long after you're gone. And so they view that as a little bit of an inconvenient constraint, like a passing cloud in the skies. Maybe a little bit of a rainstorm here, but don't worry, the rainstorm will pass. That's the way they view elected leaders. They say, we, we're the ones who actually exercise the real power. So if that structure's intact, you can't reform it by saying, I don't know, fire Christopher Wray. What are you gonna get? You're gonna get James Comey 2.0. It's the machine underneath him that you can't take a chisel to, you gotta take a chainsaw. And does that have some costs? It does. Does it have some risks? It does, actually. Absolutely, it does. Are there risks of inconveniences? Are there risks of some disruptions to the status quo?

• 28:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes, you can take that risk and make that sacrifice if you know what you're sacrificing for. It's the long run existence of this country. But that's what it's going to take, is a willingness to not engage in incremental reform, because that's a myth. But to engage in a wholesale raising of the managerial apparatus, but not a raising of the Constitution. I'm not saying throw that out. To the contrary, that actually revives our Constitution. Three branches of government with checks and balances. Executive, legislative, judicial. We don't have to make it up. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to rediscover the one that already worked for the first 250 years. And so that's the way you would do it. Mass firings.

• 29:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Fire not a few thousand federal bureaucrats. I think of the 4 million federal bureaucrats, you know how many the President of the United States or the new administration appoints? We're talking like tens of thousands out of, like maybe 10, 20, 30,000? Out of 4+ million. The rest, the conventional dogma has held, are immune from being fired by the US President. Think about that. That even the US President can't fire the people who work for him. Well, let me tell you something. Somebody who's run businesses, and anybody else who's honest, who's run a business, will tell you the same thing. If somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you. In some sense, it means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to actually change it.

• 30:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, it turns out if you read the law carefully and understand exactly how this works, no, the President of the United States absolutely can fire these employees. The reason they say they can't is because of these rules called civil service protections, which say that, I don't know, if you work at the FDA or the FTC or whatever, I can't fire you because I disagree with your view on abortion. Say what you will about the rule, that's what the rules say. You can't politically retaliate. Those rules do not apply to mass firings. But if you went in and said, every person whose social security number ends in an odd number is out, and every person who's social security ends in an even number, at least in the first round, is in, that's totally fine, because nobody can sue you then for

• 30:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  civil rights violations, or for racial discrimination, or gender disparate impact, or for political retaliation. No, all that's off the table, because it's a large wholesale firing. That's how you'd start. Large mass firing across the board. Take certain agencies that weren't really properly authorized in the first place and needn't exist. I'd put the ATF in this category. I have a lot that I'd put in this category.

• 31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Who else would you put in there?

• 31:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, there's a lot in this category. Some boring ones. Food and Nutrition Services, FNS, inside the Department of Agriculture, totally captured. A lot of lobbying interests. I mean, think about what the kids are eating in schools. It's a context of just, you know, large food companies capturing that system. Why do we need that bureaucracy in the first place? We don't. Shut down FNS while we're on one that starts with an F. I think there's a good case for shutting down the FBI. You know, does that mean we don't need federal law enforcement? No. Of course we need federal law enforcement. But let's reorganize it in a way that you could take, you know, what is it? It's 80,000 some odd employees. I've got to get the exact numbers. But we put together a full plan. You could take a certain number of them, move them to the US Marshals, which haven't been tainted in the same way.

• 31:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Actually, they've been far more effective at going after child sex trafficking cases.

• 31:57Shawn Ryan?

  What, you would move?

• 31:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Move some subset of agents. Agents on the front lines. Because most of the people who work at the FBI are back office bureaucrats. Fire them. Send them home. But talking about the investigative agents on the front lines, move them to the US Marshals, which is just purely focused on execution, which has been far more effective on execution on areas like child sex trafficking. Move them to other departments for complex financial frauds. There's a part of the US Treasury that looks at this stuff. It's called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, that at least the people there have expertise to smoke out the future SBFs of the world. And so for the small minority of people who are good people on the front lines, just executing the job of enforcing the laws rather than making them up, move them to parts that haven't been corrupted yet. And they can still enforce the federal

• 32:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  laws that need to exist. But most of the structure you can shut down. Shut down the Department of Education. You don't need... Thousands, tens of thousands of bureaucrats in Washington DC writing up the racial equity guidelines that public schools have to follow as a condition for getting federal money? The federal government shouldn't be in the business of dictating what those public schools across the country do in the first place. Shut it down. Return that money to the people of this country. Think about the $80 billion budget. Put that across the states to back to the people of this country. So, those are just examples of, of agencies in those cases ATF, CDC, FBI, Department of Education, clear plans for shutting them down wholesale and doing it in a smart way that doesn't hurt people where if there's a sliver of what they're doing that's necessary,

• 33:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  have it subsumed in, in existing part of at least the government as the first step. And to make it very practical, so it's not some sort of, this isn't some theoretical fantasy land, this is something we can actually achieve. And then there's other agencies where you could say, okay, well, Congress has authorized the existence of it. Fine, you could have a 75% headcount reduction. Fire three quarters of the people who work there. There's actually the most important Supreme Court case of our lifetime. Came out in the last couple of years. It's called West Virginia versus EPA. All right? And, and people have missed this in entirety, but it's by far the most important case if we use it in the right way. It basically held that certain regulations at the EPA, the Environmental Protection

• 34:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Agency, relating to the coal industry are unconstitutional because Congress never authorized the EPA to write those regulations. And it said if it relates to a major question, so it's known in the law now of what's called the major questions doctrine. If it relates to a major question, a question relating to a legal or constitutional right, or a question that has a major economic impact on people's lives, if it's a major question, those three letter agencies don't have the power to write those rules anymore.

• 34:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If that regulation of the EPA on the coal industry fails that test, and the Supreme Court held that it did, that means literally most federal regulations are unconstitutional today. Literally, the majority of federal regulations that are written, governing how small businesses to large businesses to individuals operate. Most of them are literally illegal under current law. So how would you go about changing that? Some of this is shutting down agencies. Some of this is firing three quarters. I think you could fire about three quarters of the 4 million people. You could fire at least 3 million of them. That's part of how you do it. The other half is, you know, I would take, and we had a clear plan for doing this, you know, where I'd have been president, to put an embed in each of those agencies. You could have someone reporting into a central hub.

• 35:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So you've got the spokes in the agencies that are left, the hub sitting in the White House, to say, "Just enforce West Virginia versus EPA. Identify every regulation ever written by this agency, and on day one, just say those are null and void." Literally, they're just nullified. By executive action, they'll say, "Is that..." New York Times wrote an article on me when I proposed a plan like this, saying, "The outsider businessman long shot who would rule by fiat." That's not ruling by fiat. What we've actually been doing is a country is ruling by fiat of the executive branch of regulatory agencies. What I would do is roll that back, using the authority endowed by the Supreme Court in the last couple of years in this seminal case.

• 36:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I know that got a little technical and a little bit in the weeds, but you asked, "How would we do it?" That's how we do it. It's very doable. I think President of the United States has the power to execute it. And on the back of that, what do you have? You've got three branches of government that is at least reminiscent of, recognizable as the constitutional republic that our founding fathers set into motion. And I think that they're right now rolling over in their graves. I mean, what you see in America right now is a bastardization of what our founding fathers fought a revolution, risking their blood and their treasure, risking their lives, losing their lives in many cases, to declare independence from a British monarchy that we've actually just recreated. That's really what this is, is a new monarchy

• 36:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  in the form of this administrative state. And it's not... It's even more devious than, "Oh, they want to oppress us and they're a tyranny that's hostile to the interests of everyday citizens." We miss the point if we think it's some sort of hostility to the people. The most devious part of this game, Sean, is, and it's gonna sound weird when I say it maybe, but the most devious part of this game is the people in that bureaucratic apparatus, they're doing what they do, not because they believe they're hostile to you, but because they believe they're being benevolent to you, to us, to we the people, right?

• 37:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Because their view is, we the people could never be trusted to self-govern, to sort out the questions on climate change, or racial equity, or the idea that you get to speak your mind, you get to say whatever the heck you want, an opinion, whatever your opinion is, you get to express that opinion, no matter how crazy that is, that's crazy talk. A civilization can't flourish if mere peons are able to express their own opinions and have an equal voice at the ballot box. And if you look at most of human history, to be clear, most of human history agrees with them, actually. Most civilizations, Old World Europe included, had that same view of ordinary human beings,

• 38:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  that they couldn't be trusted to self-govern. But that's what made America great the first time around, and so if we're going to make America great again, we gotta revive what made America great the first time around, and that's by embracing, not running away from, but embracing, some rather radical 1776 principles. And it's that radicalism of 1776, it's not moderation, it's the radicalism of the American Revolution, that actually unites this country, and it's gonna reunite this country if we have the courage to stand up for it.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you. How how close are you with Trump?

• 38:53Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We've built a pretty good relationship.

• 38:55Shawn Ryan?

  Good.

• 38:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We've gotten close, especially since the time I dropped out of the race. We've had a chance to spend a lot more time together in the last few months.

• 39:02Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see, look, a lot of people are calling you saying you would be a great VP. A lot of people want you in his cabinet. What do you think about that?

• 39:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's a decision for Donald Trump to make. I mean, I think the beauty of being the US president is, I think if done well, you're exercising the executive authority vested in you, as I said, to shut down agencies, fire millions of federal bureaucrats, but also choose who you want to hire. And he and I have had some great conversations. I want to be respectful of the detailed conversations we've had. But, you know, I want to serve this country and to have maximal impact in whatever way I can. And, you know, we've got a great relationship and I think he's got some, you know, great ideas in mind for how we might be able to work together. But I think what he wants in a vice president versus what he wants in a different cabinet position, those are decisions for him to make and I'll make whatever decision allows me to have the maximal positive impact I can on this country.

• 39:54Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think you would have the maximum positive impact?

• 39:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, um, look, I'll start with the basic principle that people are most successful in achieving what they're passionate about, right? It's hard to succeed at something that you have to acquire a passion for. Start with where you have passion, knowledge and capability and then use that. And different people, every one of us has our own unique God-given gifts. And yours aren't the same as mine, that aren't the same as anybody else, right? Everyone has their own unique gifts and, you know, I think we each got to look ourselves in the mirror, as we're talking about earlier, and ask ourselves what those gifts are. And so, you know, for me, if I think about what am I passionate about and what needs to get done in this country? And what?

• 40:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Needs to get done, not in some theoretical concept, but like, needs to get done now. I think there's two things the next executive branch of government can accomplish under Donald Trump's leadership. Take me out of it, but things that need to get done that can get done and that I happen to be really passionate about and knowing something about. One is, how do you actually shut down the border of this country? Secure it, once and for all, and destroy the incentive structure that we create. That's what it is, an incentive structure that we create to be here illegally and deal with this issue of immigration once and for all. And I have a, you know, I think a personal dimension here to this is I'm the kid of legal immigrants who came to this country through the front door.

• 41:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I say this as the kid of legal immigrants, your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. And I think it is a vestige of the deep state that accounts for that. I mean, right now, the reason people are coming into this country isn't because you have a shortage of people who are chasing them down or trying to go after them. I've been to the southern border, it's our own government actors that are rolling out the red carpet, paving the way for what I will call a mass invasion of this country. So we talk about basic steps we can take, like ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals, like moving our own military to the southern border, like ending all funding for Central America until they've blockaded their own borders, each country, from Venezuela

• 42:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to the southern border of Texas, like ending federal funding for sanctuary cities, like mass deportations of anybody who's in this country illegally. That's a, that's a touchy subject, but you know what? There's a million people, over a million, who have had a final order of removal. That means they've gone through the court system, there's no appeal left, it's a final order from the judicial system that still are in this country right now. Mass deporting those people, people who have committed a crime, start with that. If you have had the largest massive influx of illegal immigrants to this country in American history, logic says you have to have the largest mass deportation in American history, using existing laws. The things I said don't require new laws. Yeah. They require existing legal authorities. So we're talking about two kinds of mass deportations, if you will.

• 42:49Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mass deportation of people who are in this country illegally and wreck the incentive structure that they have to be here in the first place. And then a different kind of deportation, let's deport millions of federal bureaucrats out of the federal government and deport many of those agencies by shutting them down and deport many of the federal regulations by actually eviscerating that. Those are, I think, the two categories that certainly motivated my candidacy for US president is restoring the actual existence of our national identity that includes the rule of law through restoring basic border policies and, yes, deportation policies to go along with it. And then combine that with a deportation of the bureaucratic class out of Washington, DC through shutting down the administrative state. Those are the two things that I believe need to be done that was that were the, for me, I'm passionate enough about that were

• 43:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  the motivations for my candidacy for president. And putting me to one side, whatever role, you know, I may play, I believe that Donald Trump has the capability and the willpower to be able to still achieve. I think those are high on the list.

• 43:52Shawn Ryan?

  How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for bikini season because spring's right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm going to take everything I can to improve the health of my brain. And I'm going to tell you about my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods that help with brain health. All right. The first thing I do every morning is I have Laird Superfood Creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health. I put this in

• 44:32Shawn Ryan?

  my tea. Tastes amazing. Who likes vegetables? Cool. Me neither. That's why I take Laird's Daily Greens. Just pour it in a cup, shoot it real quick. You got your daily vegetable intake. Plus, guess what? Yep, that's right. Functional mushroom extract. There's six different kinds in here. Once again, great for brain health.

• 44:55Shawn Ryan?

  After greens, we got daily reds. This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it, but I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit. And so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beets anymore. All right, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night. Laird Sleep and Recovery. Helps me sleep, helps me recover from my daily workout. And guess what? Yep, you're right. It has mushroom extract. Guess what? It's good for your brain. And I saved the best for last. Most of you know this. My favorite supplement at Laird's is Performance Mushrooms. Has a ton of mushroom extract. Super, super good for your brain. Take it every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.

• 45:39Shawn Ryan?

  These are my five favorite supplements from Laird's Superfoods. You can go over to lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, save 20%. Ladies and gents, I would not have partnered with this company if I didn't believe in them. They take the cleanest ingredients. They try to source everything in America, unless they find a better ingredient that's more quality somewhere else. I think we can all appreciate that. Once again, lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS. That'll save you 20%.

• 46:14Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters, and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise,

• 46:59Shawn Ryan?

  all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have... An end of the month live chat that I'm on at the end of every month where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways,

• 47:43Shawn Ryan?

  go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine, too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 48:09Shawn Ryan?

  How would you, how would you even begin to do this? And how would you, are you interested in appeasing both sides of the aisle here by doing this?

• 48:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm not interested in appeasing anybody.

• 48:20Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 48:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  In fact, it will require, appeasement isn't the right word. I'm interested in uniting this country. That's what I'm interested in.

• 48:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I meant.

• 48:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, I'm interested in uniting the country, not appeasing somebody sitting on one side of an aisle in Washington DC, because that's a broken apparatus. We think about uniting the country. That's what we're missing.

• 48:40Shawn Ryan?

  How do you bring the right and the left together?

• 48:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't think that the people of this country, I'll take the two things that I just named, right? Let's just go, go in sequence of those. Let's start with the border issues and the immigration issues. So one of the things I did in the campaign is I went to parts of the country where traditional Republican candidates don't go. I think it was after you and I spoke, I went to the south side of Chicago, when you and I spoke last. I mean, and you know, I came here.

• 49:05Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  A little over a year ago. I went to the south side of Chicago, went to Kensington in the inner city of Philadelphia. These are places where the political consultant class would tell you, you're wasting your time, brother, in a Republican primary. And maybe there's some wisdom, because I didn't end up winning the race, right? But, you know, I started at 0.0 and I ended up at about 8% in Iowa, and you would have had 8% in New Hampshire. I dropped out before New Hampshire because I wanted most of that, I wanted all of that to go to Trump, and most of it did, to end the primary process. But. Anyway, advice notwithstanding, and maybe you could debate whether I should have followed the political advice, I went to some politically unconventional places because I was running to lead a nation, not some segment of a nation or one political party.

• 49:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I'll tell you some interesting things I saw there. I went to the south side of Chicago, what do we see? Yeah, a lot of people disagreed with me, challenged me to my face on, they want racial reparations, I'm against it. Wasn't easy to be in a room full of, you know, 150% Democrat, 95% Black room that's, you know, clamoring with people in the audience standing up, "What's your policy on racial reparations?" One woman, midway through my answer, she just turns around from the microphone, puts her back to me and walks straight out of the room. That's the level of contentiousness we had. And yet, when we get to the issue of illegal immigration in this country, it turns out that they're turning South Shore High School, at the time I visited, into an encampment

• 50:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  for migrants at a cost of $7,000 per migrant per month. Baby formula sneakers, no problem, if you're an illegal migrant. You've got a lot of people in that community, Democrat, sure, on the left, sure, of one racial group that isn't historically considered to be a Republican voting bloc, sure, who were probably more in favor of my hard border policies than many of the Republican rooms that I've visited over the course of the last two years. Because they're rightly asking, you know, "You say you're America first, what about me?" I say, "You know what? You have a point. America first includes all Americans, Black, White, Democrat, Republican, Gay, Straight, all included.

• 51:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The first and sole moral duty of US elected leaders is to US citizens, and that includes the people who were in that room, who were rightly up in arms about the way in which illegal immigrants are being treated, when they're talking about the rule of law and the breakage of the rule of law in Chicago, and criminals who need to be arrested, and I believe in all of that. But they say, "Isn't that a little hypocritical, when your own government is the one turning our own..." High school into an encampment for those migrants. And by the way, many of them had the same view that I did on Ukraine as well. We're forking over, what, 100, 200 billion dollars to some country halfway around the world, arguably one of the most corrupt nations on planet Earth, if not at least among so-called democratic nations. And we're sending our taxpayer money over there when we could be using those same resources,

• 51:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  including military resources, to secure our own border, the absence of which is creating an invasion that's landed on our own doorstep in places like the South Side of Chicago, to Philadelphia, to New York City. So yes, are we going to unite the country? Absolutely. Are we going to unite the political class, many of whom have vested interests in the policies we're talking about here? I mean, you're not supposed to say it this way, but let's be honest. When you talk about the Democratic Party apparatus, no, I'm not going to bring that party apparatus along, but am I going to bring along their constituents? Absolutely we will with these policies, because most Americans agree that we are still bound by the rule of law, that a nation without borders is not a nation. Now, the Democratic Party apparatus wants these policies because it's the hard truth.

• 52:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They're importing long-run voters, right? So it's no accident that the very people who are in favor of open border policies are also the same people who happen, by some massive coincidence, not coincidence, but some massive coincidence, to be against voter ID laws. It's a totally separate issue. If you go back to what Democrats were saying back in 2013, they were saying this publicly back then, this is part of securing lasting electoral majorities. Now, they've started, they've stopped talking about that as openly. But there's a difference between being bipartisan, reaching across the aisle in Washington DC to the bureaucratic managerial class, which is not our goal and ought not be our goal,

• 53:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  versus uniting the country of Americans who have diverse views on a lot of things, but still share the same basic values, 80% of us do in this country, I strongly believe that, that's important to me. That's a goal. And same thing with flushing the administrative state, the same thing. I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican, the people who we elect to run the government ought to at least be the ones who run the darn government. That much we can agree on, and by the way, that you're free to speak your mind on, you may disagree with me on abortion, or climate change, or policy, whatever it is, and we can disagree like hell, but you have the right to say it without some government actor in the deep state threatening a social media company to silence or suppress what you have to say. And we agree on that, even as we disagree like hell on any range of

• 54:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  other policy questions, tax rates to energy policies in this country. I think that that's how we actually unite the country. I don't think we're going to unite the country through moderation, through the idea of, you know, let's say there's a football field showing up at the 50-yard line, reach, stretch, hold hands, and sing kumbaya. At most, you're going to get the people who are at the 30-yard line over to the middle. I want to unite the whole country, the entire football field, but the way we're going to do that is reviving the common thread that unites that whole country. And one of the things I have appreciated, and I've, you know, I respect for the conversations I've had with President Trump, but in the last couple of months, certainly, and we've been, you know, had an opportunity to spend

• 54:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  a lot of time in the last few months, one of the elements of his message that I have loved hearing from him publicly is, he's been saying this consistently on the campaign trail, and I think it lands, it lands with me for sure, but I think it lands with people across this country who are like me, who have our views but want to see a united country. Success will be our vengeance, right? Success is unifying. And I think that Joe Biden is a guy who pledged to unite the country but failed to do it. That actually opens up a new opportunity for President Trump, not only to accomplish the kinds of things that he did in 2016, but to unite the country while doing it. And I think it's one of the things that once people in this country know that we care about national unity, that

• 55:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  it's an objective we care about, not that we're going to use that as some sort of excuse to sacrifice on our principles, but to the contrary, we're going to embrace our principles because we believe that's what's going to unite us as a country. That, I think, actually alone has the power of achieving a unity that we're missing is just...

• 55:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Authentically gesturing towards unity, I think, will be a huge leap that Donald Trump can take as the next president to unite this country. Donald Trump talks about the importance of national unity, talks about the importance of success as unifying, of channeling our vengeance into success and unifying this country through success, which he has been doing, which I think is a good thing. If he continues to do that through not only winning the election but governing, that alone, I think, will go miles towards healing this country and turning the page on, you know, a chapter where, here's where I'd love to be in a year or two as a country, to be able to look back at the last five

• 56:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  years, maybe longer, and just all of us take a big step back and say, boy, did we screw some things up. Boy, did we actually censor speech that could have actually stopped us from locking down schools and messing up a generation of young people and their social interactions, or even killing people who didn't get medical care because we were supposedly stopping another epidemic and stopped you from arguing about it. Or to say, man, we really spent a lot of money on some foreign wars that increased the risk of greater global conflict when we got actual security issues to address here at home. And, you know, even though we might disagree, we started hating each other for our disagreements as opposed to acknowledging our right to be able to air those disagreements. And, you know, we used to be a country where the best person got the job. And, you know what?

• 57:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We screwed up in the 1800s, where the best person couldn't get the job because they had black skin. And now we're screwing it up because they can't get the job because they have white skin. Boy, we screwed some things up over our 250 years as a country. Our 250th anniversary as a country is in 2026. Right? So maybe heading into that anniversary, that's what we might be saying is, over the last 250 years, but even over the last five years, we screwed a lot up. But here's what we're going to do is we're going to acknowledge that. And we're going to have our leaders that acknowledge it and say that there are still some basic principles that unite us as Americans. And we're not going to dilute them. We're going to embrace them. And that's how we're going to turn the page on this ugly chapter in our history and move forward as one nation, still married to each other

• 58:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  as citizens in a relationship as citizens rather than a national divorce, which I think is otherwise where this road ends.

• 58:16Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to the border.

• 58:20Shawn Ryan?

  Would you make it easier for the, would you make the immigration process lighter, easier?

• 58:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Depends on for who. I think we got to operate as a championship team. And the mentality of a championship team is, we want the very best to play on our team. So if you're a sports team, you want to go out and recruit the very best. So do I want to do that as a country? Absolutely. I mean Elon Musk, guy who's responsible for a lot of value creation in the United States of America, to say the least, and many others like him. We wouldn't have those people if they did not immigrate to this country and want to be here because we're the place where the champions come. So for people who have actual value to add to this country, and it's not just a bunch of tech guys in Silicon Valley I'm talking about. Talking about across our economy to add value, not just to our economy, but to our culture. Civic commitments, you know, the citizenship test on the back end

• 59:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to become a citizen, to be able to be a voting citizen, I'd bring that up to the front end to say, even if you're entering this country on any kind of visa program, you got to know the basics about this country. You got to really pledge allegiance to this country, but if you're selecting for skills, loyalty, and a commitment to the civic nationalist vision for what it means to be an American, then the very best and brightest of those, I think we do make it too difficult for them to be here. I met a guy. I'm a tennis fanatic of sorts, but I played tennis when I was in South Florida last time with a guy who was, he's a great guy, played in the pro tour, he was on, he was number one on Princeton's tennis team, I think for four years, even from his freshman year onward. He's like a concert level pianist, he can do a Rubik's Cube in a matter of, what, 30 seconds?

• 59:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Kind of like a genius type, as, you know, our institutions have educated him, went to Princeton, went to Harvard Business School. He's working in real estate investing, smart guy, the firm that employs him loves him. He's been over a decade waiting to get a green card in this country. So that guy. If he asked me, whereas he did, you know, any advice on how to speed this up, I couldn't give him the best advice. But the best cynical advice I could give would have been, you know what, sadly, our country's laws are such that you have a better chance of having a path to citizenship if you just catch a flight to Mexico and cross the southern border. And that's a broken system.

• 1:00:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So I think in certain cases, yes, but I do think that, should we make it easier to immigrate here on grounds of asylum? No. Should mass chain migration be easier just to say that, okay, if you're some distant relative and somebody who was part of the championship team came over, that your, you know, great uncle's sister also gets to come here because you're part of the same family? No, that's chain migration. I don't think that that should be easier than it is now. And so the question is, what types of immigration advance this country's national interest? And so the way I look at immigration policy is the way I look at every policy. What policies, including immigration policy? You could fill in the blank. I could say foreign policy, you could say economic policy, but you're talking about immigration. So let's talk about immigration policy.

• 1:01:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  What immigration policy best advances the interests of the citizens who are already here? That should be the question. And is there some level of immigration and some kind of immigration that better advances the interests of our own citizens? Yes, there is. Pursue that. Are there types of immigration that don't advance the interests of our own citizens here? Yes, there are. We should limit that to zero. Starting with the most abrasive form of all, which is illegal immigration across our southern and northern border in this country.

• 1:01:48Shawn Ryan?

  I'm going to switch, switch subjects here. I want to talk about the barge or the container ship that hit that bridge in Baltimore. What do you think that was?

• 1:01:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So I'm never one to speculate, Sean. I'm always tied to facts. I will say that it was.

• 1:02:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Let's just start with an obvious thing we could say.

• 1:02:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's bizarre that we just watch something like that happen, shrug our shoulders and say, hey, that's life in the United States of America. And by the way, that there was, you know, you watched that video, it was sort of, I'm sure you watched, if you're asking me about it, you must have watched the video. It was, it was disconcerting, it was truly bizarre. And to be able to just turn the page on that and say, oh yeah, you know, nothing to see here Baltimore, we got your back and we're gonna help you rebuild, whatever that means, and then we're all just supposed to move on and feel secure as a country.

• 1:02:41Shawn Ryan?

  Man, thank you for, thank you. I woke up, I saw that first thing, maybe 5am, tweeted about it, got called a conspiracy theorist right away. I said this was probably on purpose. And, and then I deleted it, because I was like, man, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm jumping the gun here. But, black box goes out right before it hits, they lose electricity, it turns, and, you know, every, every time we see a mass shooter in the US, right? We gotta wait, we got, sometimes a week before it's, this is who it was. But, within a matter of hours, we get, oh no, this is.

• 1:03:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We know for sure.

• 1:03:24Shawn Ryan?

  Loss electricity.

• 1:03:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So, I'm not, I'm not gonna speculate, right? Because I don't have the information, I'm always tied to, I've said, I say some things that often challenge conventional norms and wisdom, but whenever I do, I'm grounded to facts. I don't have those facts here. But what I will say is, it is beyond bizarre that we just accept as a country right now, even just at the level of mediocrity, accepting that, oh, this is just something normal that happens in the United States of America, and we're supposed to just turn the page as though it didn't happen, without asking deep and hard questions of how the heck is it? That we're now living according to third world results from, I mean, let's just take a look at the third world-um of the United States right now. You got a party in power that's using prosecutorial power to arrest a political opponent in the

• 1:04:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  middle of an election, that's also trying to have him removed from a ballot in certain states in the middle of a presidential election. That's a country where you got barges crashing into bridges, bridges come tumbling down, trains that go off the tracks, chemical spills in places like my home state in Ohio, all of which we're just supposed to throw our hands up in the air and accept that this is the new America. Crime wave that we've never seen in this country, an open border with 10 million illegal people are coming in a mass migration across this country, yet military resources being directed somewhere halfway around the world. Yeah, is that, is that the America that our founding fathers envisioned or set into motion? No, it's not. It's the stuff of third world banana republics. And so, at least at that base level, to say that when you see something like that happen in Baltimore, that your reaction's just supposed

• 1:04:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to be, "Okay, nothing to see here, move on and let's continue pretending like that didn't happen," as opposed to just reflecting on where we are as a country, at minimum, forget any other specific speculation about what did or didn't happen there, at minimum, asking ourselves what the heck happened here and what the heck is going on in our country is the right reaction, rather than just apathy.

• 1:05:11Shawn Ryan?

  How the, so with that being said, I mean, there's been a, nobody trusts the government. Nobody trusts the government.

• 1:05:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  For good reason, unfortunately.

• 1:05:19Shawn Ryan?

  How do you start to, how do you start to gain people's confidence back in the US, in the, in the government?

• 1:05:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, I think people should always be skeptical of the government, so I would say, never trust the government, but we've been given a reason to systematically distrust everything we're told by the government.

• 1:05:36Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  First answer is just start telling the truth. Start, best way to tell the truth is admit the mistakes you've made. I think we would go a long way in this country, if you have, say, President of the United States, and then a counterpart in the media who does the same thing, let's take the media example, I'd say the same thing for the president, to look the people of this country in the eye, and to tell them, "We," in the case of the media, or in the case of the president representing the country, you think about being a president, it's not about you, it's about, you're representing the country, you inherit the past, you're leading the entire nation. So to look the people in the country in the eye and say, "We, the government, we've lied to you for a long time. We've lied

• 1:06:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to you about a lot of things. Here's what we've lied about. Here's the truth of what we know. Here's the truth about what we don't know." Think about the origins of COVID-19. How much we're systematically lied to. Think about what we do or don't know about topic X that you're not supposed to talk about. Fill in the blank for what it is.

• 1:06:36Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, a hot topic in the last year for congressional hearings has been UAPs, whatever it is. Here's what we know, here's what we don't know. And here's where we told you something false, even though we knew it was false. And I'm sorry we did it.

• 1:06:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think?

• 1:06:53Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And here's why, here's why it's never gonna happen again. And by the way, you shouldn't trust me right now. But we have to earn back your trust. And the way we're gonna do it is to just tell the truth again to the people of this country. Believing that you can handle the truth. If you have a president who looks the people in this country in the eye and delivers that message. And just one member of the traditional media that systematically goes back through the last 10 years and say, hey, we lied to you. In the case of the media, that's a business opportunity right there. They would cash, capture massive market share right out the gate. If you have a media organization that had the guts and the gall to step up and say, we screwed up. Here's why we screwed up. And here's what we're gonna do to fix it. And don't trust us yet, but we're gonna have to earn your trust back.

• 1:07:35Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That would go leaps and bounds to reuniting this country and at least beginning to rebuild trust in this country as well.

• 1:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  What about holding some of these bad players accountable publicly?

• 1:07:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Oh, I think that that's gonna be required as an alternative. I mean, I was.

• 1:07:51Shawn Ryan?

  Who would you start with?

• 1:07:53Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, I would start with government actors who have violated the law. I mean, take any government actor who has systematically lied, intentionally lied about what they knew or didn't know about the origin of COVID-19. Or about the risks of rushing vaccines to market or whatever it is. Knowing something and then intentionally lying or trying to cover it up as a government actor. That's a violation of the law. And so if we're talking about restoring the rule of law at the southern border, which I favor, and I will not budge on. We shouldn't make an exception for somebody who happens to, you know, be addressed as a doctor before they're addressed. Just because they came out of the NIH or wherever else in federal bureaucracy. If they violated the law in the same way, they deserve to be held accountable in the same way that any other citizen who violates the law is also held accountable.

• 1:08:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so I'd start there with government actors who have violated the law. I think in the private sector, there's room for some level of leadership here where.

• 1:08:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  People owning this through honesty, I think, would go a long way. So I actually, I was at the UFC 300 fight this last weekend. Great day, by the way. A lot of good fights that day. But I was sitting right up there cage side and Mark Zuckerberg was there too. So we, we had a, we had a chat in between some of the fights. He's into fighting and yeah, whatever. I'll just spill the beans and share what we talked about. But he was telling me something to the effect of, uh, he was said, uh, he's really into, he's really into MMA. And so he said, you know, we've become so neutered as a country, right? Why, why shouldn't we just embrace that we have these human instincts? I love, I love, I've grown to like MMA quite a bit. So I was like, yeah, I agree with you. Okay. We're all sitting here watching UFC and talking about how great it is to watch UFC and we've

• 1:09:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  become neutered as a country. I said, well, what, what about that with respect to speech? How do you feel about that? And then he kind of paused for a second. He said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, I think you'd actually make the same argument for just saying that you get to say what you want in this country. We've become too neutered by trying to have central moderators of who decides what you can and can't say. You know, his response was, well, look, I'm actually a lot more pro free speech than people might know. And I've actually known a lot of his own tendencies. I believe that's actually probably true. It's about bending the knee and buckling to pressure. And so what I told him, and he said he would think about it, is, hey, listen, man, I think you could actually do a service to this country if you just came out, if it was in your heart, if you actually meant it, if you say you're pro free speech and you actually mean it,

• 1:10:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to just say, hey, I screwed up. You know what? Locking Donald Trump out of an account, a major president of the United States and now presidential candidate, to say that the decision to silence somebody and suppress them, even if I agree or disagree with what they had to say, is making the decision under pressure, under force of pressure, where a lot of people were buckling to outside pressure. We've become neutered as a country and all of us are subject to that kind of pressure and some of us screwed up and I screwed up. And if I were to make that same decision again, I wouldn't make the same decision. If you said that, I think that would have a therapeutic effect on the country. That's a form of accountability. The best kind of accountability is where you actually own it for yourself. And I think people in this country, I think it's part of our human nature, we have, there's

• 1:10:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  a part of us that wants vengeance, but there's also part of us that is hungry to forgive, actually. I think that that's one of the Christian values that the nation was founded on. It's a founding value of Judeo-Christian value. It's a founding value of this country. It's a value of many faiths across the world. It's something in our nature that opens our heart to forgiveness, but it requires somebody who deserves to be held accountable to be the first person to hold themselves accountable if they're that person. I think that goes a long distance, too. And so if a guy like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, that was the extent of our conversation. I think he left it off saying he'd think about it. That's where it ended, huh? That's where it ended, yeah. That's definitely where it ended. Weird.

• 1:11:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But, but, you know, whether, whether it's a member of the press at CNN, whether it's, you know, a guy who leads a large platform like Meta, whether it's a US president, even if it's not Donald Trump saying, "I screwed up, but we screwed up as a country. We're talking together, leading this entire nation, that we as a federal government have screwed up for the last 20 years." And I'm saying this not to blame somebody else, but I'm saying this on behalf of the government of the United States to apologize to the people of the systematic lies that we have told you. Not me as an individual, but we as leaders of this country have told you for the last 20 years. But I'm saying it with the goal of saying, "We want to turn the page and move on as one nation under God." That's a separate discussion for another day. I think the four-letterization of God in our culture,

• 1:12:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think, is something that has left people hungry for purpose, too. But if we come back to just admitting those failures, that's, I think, the best form of accountability, rather than one side having to extract that vengeance from the other. But that does require a level of self-awareness. I think that does require a level of authenticity and temperance. And I think of most leaders of technology companies, I think Elon Musk has done a great service by bringing a competitive dynamic to the table that paves the way for this. But if the likes of, you know, the leaders of Google and YouTube and Facebook, countless other platforms stepped up to the plate and say, "Hey, we got it wrong, and here's where we got it wrong."

• 1:13:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And not in some fake, sort of faux-humble kind of way to check the box and move on, but in a real way and have behaviors that then reflect that they mean it. I think that's far better than... Trials of prosecution for, you know, breakages of the rule of law in ways that challenge legal theories to push those prosecutions. It may be required at a certain point in time that you require legal accountability. Certainly for government actors who violated the law, I think that that's warranted. But to take it then the next step, how great would it be if we actually had a culture of leaders of those institutions just admitting their mistakes, doing it honestly, changing their behavior in a way that's credible, not some fake admission, but a real admission of accountability?

• 1:13:53Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think that would be a long way that people even outside of politics, you know, leaders like Zuckerberg could actually do a great service to this country if they actually owned the mistakes they'd made and changed their behaviors accordingly on their own. And I think we have an opportunity where I don't, I don't rule that out. I'm not, I've not lost hope on that happening. I think it's actually a cascading effect, right? If you imagine Donald Trump winning in a decisive landslide, as I believe is possible, assuming the mantle, saying that, you know what? I'm not going to compromise on the principles I ran on. We're going to enforce the rule of law. We're going to seal that southern border. If you're in this country illegally, I'm not going to just become moderate because I go into Washington DC. I'm going to deport people who are in this country illegally. So I'm going to do what we told you we're going to do.

• 1:14:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But our goal on the other side of that is actually to unite the citizens who are here behind the common values and purpose of what it means to be American. I think that that leaves space for a lot of the bad actors to then take a page from that playbook and at least a certain number of them to reveal themselves, not to have been bad actors, but maybe even good people who took bad actions. And if we give ourselves the space to at least not put people in such a corner. Sometimes if you put somebody in a corner, they're stuck having to only behave.

• 1:15:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  In the corner you've put them in, right? But if you give people the space to come out of the corner they feel trapped in, and I feel like a lot of the media does this to Republican candidates all the time, but I think it can happen across the board is if you put somebody in a corner and give them the only choice, they become the demon that you force them to be. And I think that if we give people the latitude to maybe admit error and correct course, I think that would be a preferred way of reviving and rebuilding this country. And I think we can do it.

• 1:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  I got another question. We only have 10 minutes left.

• 1:15:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm in. All right.

• 1:15:48Shawn Ryan?

  It's a tough one. You're probably not going to like it. But do you have any apprehensions about Trump taking the presidency if he does? Let's take Biden out of the equation. I think, I think the majority of the country knows he's incompetent or completely controlled, whatever. He's a disaster. He's a buffoon. Let's replace him with somebody that is strong.

• 1:16:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think there's a good chance, by the way, it's not going to be Biden for the reasons you mentioned. So as a side note, I think one mistake that we're all making, and I've shared my opinions with leaders in the Republican Party, I've shared my opinions with President Trump, is we got to be careful not to fall into this trap of complacency. And when you're a military guy, it's like the equivalent of a feint, right? A feint is you lead your opposition to a target that's not the real target for, there's a real operation that isn't the one that you're being led to follow. Well, it's exactly, it looks a lot like what's happening to me is make the entire Republican Party's focus and platform and fundraising and everything focused on beating Biden. What a great way to get to July or August and then find out that actually all of that

• 1:16:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  political, financial and messaging capital was wasted. And you have three months before somebody who then actually doesn't go through a difficult vetting process to be the person they try to trot in. So put that to one side. I think Michelle Obama is, is not crazy and the-

• 1:17:11Shawn Ryan?

  How would they do that without bringing Kamala and his president?

• 1:17:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, I think that Michelle Obama actually is a great way around that problem, right? It'd be, it'd be Joe Biden stepping aside. For making Michelle Obama the nominee, which is how they solve their Kamala problem. They have a Kamala problem right now is you got a black woman who is occupying the seat of number two seat in a party that has defined itself based on race and gender identity politics.

• 1:17:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So if they were to sideline her as the obvious number two for someone like Gavin Newsom that they bring in, I think they've bought themselves an identity politics problem. A white man for a white man, cis straight white man for a cis straight white male. Michelle Obama is a very elegant solution to that problem. And you could say so could be a Gretchen Whitmer, as long as you're checking one of the boxes. I think that they have enough air cover to do it, right? But I think that that's the, that would be the play. If it was Gavin Newsom, they could keep Michelle, they could keep Kamala Harris in the VP seat. I, you know, she may or may not go for that, but that assumes that she and Joe Biden have any say in the matter. I mean, part of what you're seeing with the Hunter investigations, with a lot of the other investigations swirling around Joe Biden is that's, part of that's leverage,

• 1:18:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  right, that they have on him behind closed doors. And maybe less relevant is not just Joe, but also Jill, who is probably the figure who's even more emphatically committed to making sure that Biden doesn't move. And there's also managerial class around them. It's not one managerial class, there are factions, many of whom have a vested financial interest to say they're proximal to the president. Some of those people might lose their proximity to the presidency if a different figurehead that comes in, so there'll be competing factions. But all I'll say for right now is play this forward. I think there is still a decent likelihood that it's not Biden that we're actually running against. But you, you asked a different question.

• 1:19:00Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give you my concerns.

• 1:19:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Shawn Ryan?

  That I saw. I saw a flip on Bud Light. I read an article in The Federalist that says he flipped on Bud Light and that they're not that woke and gave some bullshit on, oh, well, they hire veterans. Well, every major company in the US hires fucking veterans, so that's not an excuse.

• 1:19:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Cause we got a lot of veterans.

• 1:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  The next thing I saw, which was about two weeks later, was the TikTok thing, which I know you don't think we should ban TikToks.

• 1:19:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's at different grounds I can talk to you about.

• 1:19:26Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 1:19:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Okay.

• 1:19:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think we should ban it.

• 1:19:30Shawn Ryan?

  And the last one I saw was him saying that he's buddies with Xi Jinping and that he wants to bring Chinese auto manufacturing into the country to supply Americans with jobs, but China has more industrial robots than anybody in the world, so that wouldn't be a major manufacturing job for Americans.

• 1:19:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, so and I just want to say one word about, you look at most of the apps, many of the major apps in the app stores, not just TikTok, are Chinese apps, and many of the user data transfers to China are actually coming from US companies. So, where you and I may not be that different, which is, I say ban the behavior.

• 1:20:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Any forced data transfer to the CCP, ban it. Any turnover of CCP interference in what a company does in the United States of America, ban that. Make that a crime in the United States of America. The irony of that is, that's going to ensnare not just one Chinese company, that's going to end up ensnaring a lot of US companies too. And that's why there's reluctance to take that broad of an approach, because a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, supposedly American companies, would actually be guilty of the same behavior. So in some sense, I would go far further to actually solve the problem, as opposed to using this thing where people haven't given a damn about the threat that China proposes, somehow signing up for this. It's, I view it's a skeptical charade and a sideshow. But put that to one side. Back to your question. Look, I ran for president for a reason, right?

• 1:20:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I believe that we should be uncompromising about the ideals that made this country great the first time around. And that's actually how we're going to unite the country, not through some sort of median compromise approach. That being said, I do think that, you know, is any of us perfect as a human being, or as a leader? No. We're fallen human beings. So that's what makes us human and not gods. But I do think that, unambiguously, Donald Trump is going to be the best person in the race, certainly, by far, to lead this country forward. And I think he's going to be not a good president, but I think he has the potential to be.

• 1:21:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The president in the second term, even greater than the one that he was in the first. And I think he had a great first term. I said on the debate stage, I think he's the best president we've had in the 21st century. People really turned their heads at that one. So, wait a minute, let's just go down the list. George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It's not even close. Who was the best president of the 21st century? It was Donald Trump. And that was in his first term. And I think in that second term, I truly believe he has an opportunity to go further because he has, like any human being would, learned a lot from that first term. He came in, as I would have as an outsider, without that experience in the government, but has learned, and I've seen this in my conversations with him, learned a lot from that experience. I think some of that, even in my conversations, I've learned a lot from him that are a little

• 1:22:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  bit different from what my understanding might have been looking from the outside in, in terms of how he made some of those decisions. And I think he's learned from a lot of those experiences and is ready to go now to the next level of even more effectively administering that agenda. I mean, if you think about the way that they're thinking really ahead to transitioning with a running start, rather than last time around where it was a lot more difficult. He was hamstrung in the first two years of that presidency by a Russiagate investigation that was effectively a made up nonsense out of a Hillary Clinton provided Steele dossier that impaired his ability to govern for those first two years. I think those lessons learned create the potential for a second term that will be more successful than the first. But I can't speak for anyone but myself.

• 1:23:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure that second term, and that he's, first of all, most successful in getting there, in actually winning it by a decisive margin. And second of all, when he gets there, to be one of the most successful presidents in American history. I think that's truly what he has the potential to do with a guy who has the right America First vision, who has four years of experience with a great first term under his belt, now a decisive national reckoning, I think, against a failed president in Biden that could give Trump the mandate, not just in the executive branch, but even in Congress and the Senate, to implement an agenda in those first 12 months. Do I believe that he has the potential to be one of the most successful presidents in American history in that second term? I do, actually.

• 1:23:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And, you know, I'm not going to be, I'm never a guy who just sort of likes to, we're sitting in an armchair now, but, you know, pontificate in an armchair about what could or couldn't be concerns. I want to figure out what are each of us, myself included, able to do to make sure that we actually achieve that success. And, you know, I think I've been really, really encouraged by the conversations I've had with President Trump. This one's public, or he made it, you know, public in one of his speeches, so I, you know, feel free to talk about it, is, you take New Hampshire. I had just dropped out of the race. I was talking to him backstage before one of the speeches he gave in New Hampshire. I think this gives me a lens that really sees a different dimension of Donald Trump than you would

• 1:24:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  just get from the media. We're talking about the perils of a central bank digital currency in the United States of America. You're familiar with this issue? Uh huh. Yeah. And I think that Donald Trump's response, when I brought that up to him backstage, I said, "Listen, I think this could be something woven into your platform. It was an important part of my platform, is the opposition to a central bank digital currency." What many professional politicians would do, would try to memorize the acronym, and you even see some other Republicans who ran for president, you know, take this approach, and, you know, we'll leave that where it is. CBDC, I'm against it. I don't know what it is, but I'm against it. Versus Donald Trump, who was very honest, says, "What the hell is that? Tell me what that is." And we discuss it. And he says, "Okay, well, why do they want to do it then?"

• 1:25:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, that's a guy who then wants the best arguments for the other side. He processes it. Doesn't come to a decision on the spot, asks a couple of other people around him what their perspectives were, thinks about it, goes onstage, doesn't talk about it that night. Now, a few nights later, he goes back out on stage, and he's clearly talked to more people in the intervening period, and said, "Tonight, I am pleased to announce that I am opposed to the creation of a central bank digital currency in the United States." And in New Hampshire, you have a very educated primary voter base that went nuts. They were cheering for him because they knew that was the right position for him to adopt. And, you know, he's also a guy who, I don't, I don't need the credit for this, but onstage just says, "Hey, this came out of my conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy a couple nights ago."

• 1:25:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so that just defies everything the mainstream media says about this guy, that he's some sort of dogmatic leader who doesn't listen to the people around him. What I see is actually the exact opposite of that. Somebody who wants the best ideas to win. Somebody who is... Interested in getting the thing done rather than just to take credit for it. That's actually the Donald Trump I've seen behind closed doors. And I think the more of the country is able to see that, the more successful he's going to be, not just in winning this election, but to have the kind of mandate from the people of this country to do the right thing. Now, is any leader, is any leader myself, or any other CEO, or across this country, influenced by the people around them? Of course they are. So I think it's really important that the President of the United States have both the right head on his shoulders, but also the right people around him.

• 1:26:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think that that was also one of the learnings from that first term, is they had a lot of different kinds of people around them in that first term. And what I see for Trump and the team around him now is they're laser-focused on making sure the people who they staff the next administration with are really aligned with his vision and his agenda. And I think that's critical. And I think if they get that right, and I think they will, that second term is going to be one of the great terms of any president in US history.

• 1:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  Fair enough. Well, I appreciate it. Vivek, I hope to see you in there, man. He's gonna need a guy like you in that cabinet if he wins, so best of luck to you.

• 1:27:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Whatever's required for the country, man, we're gonna do it. And it's good to be back with you.

• 1:27:18Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Thanks for coming.

• 1:27:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thanks, man.