#1169 Vivek Ramaswany | 2024 Presidential Candidate on Being Proud to be an American

Vivek Ramaswamy is the co-founder of Strive Asset Management, and he is a 2024 Presidential Candidate. This conversation was recorded at Lyceum Miami. Topics include exploring the meaning of “wokeness” and being adopted by corporations, the last ten years of politics, national identity & what it means to be an American, and why Vivek decided to run for President. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Vivek Ramaswamy is the co-founder of Strive Asset Management, and he is a 2024 presidential candidate. The following conversation was recorded at a live event, Lyceum Miami, which my team and I hosted on March 4 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Here's my conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

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• 0:50Speaker 02

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• 1:20Anthony Pompliano?

  You have written two different books.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And those books have become quite popular. I thought a great place to start would be what is wokeness?

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Oh, yes, it's good to define. It's good to define a term. So I'll define it in neutral terms that are not critical because I prefer to describe it. And then, you know, you can either criticize it, agree with it, or whatever. So wokeness refers to broadly seeing invisible injustices that no one else had previously seen before, becoming alert to them, and then taking all action required to correct those injustices, generally taking the form of race, gender, sexual orientation, or other genetically inherited injustices.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  But now, ever-expanding to include other forms of social injustice, including the most recent secular religion of climate. So that's wokeness in a nutshell. Now, you could agree with this and believe that there are systems of invisible social hierarchies that have been created for all of human history, and that it is the job in our moment in history to correct for all of that in the present. I think a lot of people do believe in that. I think it's worth engaging with their ideas seriously and taking their arguments seriously. Having tried that set of clothes on, you know, your ideas aren't like your kids, they're like clothes. You try them on. If you don't like them, you can move on to the next one. I prefer to move on to the next one. And that's the camp I am in with where the woke movement is.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  But I think it's become dominant enough in American life that maybe 20 years ago, this was a fringe philosophy that was about a challenge to the system. And agree or not, I respect anybody who wants to boldly challenge a prevailing orthodoxy. There's something about that you gotta respect. But I think what began as a challenge to the system has now, in many ways, become the system in many institutions, from education to even corporate America, in ways that demand a new challenge to that system. And that's what I tried to do with my first book, Woke, Inc.

• 3:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So, there's this intersection of wokeness with society for the way it impacts individuals. There is an interaction with government, and then there's an interaction with corporations. When you and I first met, you were very focused on that corporation and how it was interacting with these ideas of wokeness and its mandate to make profits for shareholders. Explain what's happened over the last couple of years. How have these corporations changed? And why is it that you deem it as such a threat to the corporation and kind of that mandate for profits to embrace some of these ideas?

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's not only a threat to corporations, I think it is a threat to the integrity of self-governance. But that sounds dramatic until you actually see what's going on. So, actually, it goes back not just a couple of years, but to the 2008 financial crisis. So I got my first job at a hedge fund in the fall of '07, right on the eve of the '08 crisis. And that was actually quite educational. I had a front-row seat to watch that play out. The fund I worked for got mentioned in Michael Lewis's book, The Whole Nine Yards. It was a pretty good experience for me. What happened in the aftermath of the '08 crisis was that... You know, the old left was frustrated. I think a lot of us were frustrated with the use of public funds to bail out banks when times went bad, even though the private owners of those banks made out well when times were good. That was crony capitalism. I disagree with the bailouts.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  And the Occupy Wall Street movement was the response to it. So what Occupy Wall Street said is, if you're gonna just run this crony capitalist show the whole time, all the way down, then we're gonna come in and say, we're gonna redistribute that money from those wealthy corporate fat cats to poor people, to help poor people, because if the game is broken, then we might as well play that game and make sure we're playing it even-handedly. Agree or not, that's what the old left had to say. But there was a little bit of a coincidence, right? So this beginnings of the woke narrative were also on the rise, right around that same time. Barack Obama was elected as first black president of the United States. There was different cultural currents converging in the United States, even on the left. And there was the birth of this new movement that said, you know what, the real problem, guys, an intra-progressive conversation here.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  The real problem wasn't economic injustice or poverty, quite. It was racial injustice, and misogyny, and bigotry, and the beginnings of climate change. And then Wall Street spotted this rift. And what they said is, okay, good, this is an opportunity, because Occupy Wall Street is a pretty tough pill to swallow if you're a big bank. But the new woke stuff is actually pretty easy. You applaud diversity and inclusion, you put some token minorities on your boards, you muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to Davos. This is pretty good work if you can get it. But they didn't do it for free. The implicit expectation was that the new left looked the other way when it came to leaving existing power structure intact.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  Silicon Valley did the same thing, by the way, when it came to censoring hate speech or misinformation. The old left used to be the one that said, break up big tech. They said, wait, wait a minute here. We will use our monopoly power to advance your ends through censoring speech and misinformation or hate speech, whatever you wanna call it, however you define it, we'll be on your side. But we don't do it for free. We expect the new left to look the other way when it comes to the attack on monopoly power. And so that was really the beginnings of this. It's a sort of arranged marriage, right? Not an arranged marriage of love. It's more like mutual prostitution. The bedfellows don't love each other, but each side gets something out of the trade. And then that was the birth of this otherwise bizarre occurrence of how capitalists get

• 6:50Speaker 04

  in bed with a bunch of woke millennials, and they birthed woke capitalism. They used that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. That was actually what set this into motion, the beginning of the ESG movement. Can't beat them, join them. Both sides kind of had that realization. And then it steadily became a crescendo from there. Trump was elected. That was a catalyst that drove a lot of people crazy, still does to this day, as best I could tell. 2018, he pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords. That then creates a new sense of panic that if private sector leaders are not going to tackle the existential challenges of global climate change, then if the public sector leaders aren't going to do it, then we in the private sector have to step up to that challenge ourselves. And then that really throw through kerosene on what was already a burning fire, turning

• 7:33Speaker 04

  the ESG movement into really, I think, the prevailing orthodoxy in American capitalism. And so that's why, you know, very few people were in the position that I was. I mean, I was founded, built a multibillion-dollar biotech company, other enterprises as well, successful career as hedge fund partner, whatever, before. You're supposed to shut up, sit down, do as you're told, keep making your money, and move along with it. That was the environment, certainly, when I stepped down from my job as CEO in January of 2021 it was, it was a little over a couple of years ago. But I think that the right answer to a culture of fear is to actually just start talking openly, unapologetically. And, you know, fear is infectious, but as I, you know, as I often quip, courage can be contagious too. It just has a higher activation energy, it takes more of us doing it.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  And so that was the beginning of my journey out of biotech into this new world that I've been in, even pre-presidential campaign, that's what the last couple of years have been all about.

• 8:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about Strive.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And you guys are getting investors to put capital into funds. Those funds, from a structural standpoint, exist among many asset managers. But once you have a high concentration of funds, as you do now, you all have essentially tried to weaponize that money in the boardrooms, not for destructive purposes, but as a discipline tool, I would use the terminology, to keep companies focused on their mandate of making profits. Talk a little bit as to like what you guys are doing there and what the responsibility of corporations has been.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. And so as a lead in to understand Strive, I just want to briefly describe the problem that Strive set out to solve. So this is a firm I founded, you know, about a little over a year ago. So I left my job as a biotech CEO, wrote these books, traveled the country, decided actually there's a problem to be solved through the market, not through government, through the market, where there's three large asset managers in the United States, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. Just those three control about $20 trillion, about as much capital as the US GDP. But they use it to not only invest and provide passive investment exposure to the US market, but also to vote for policies like racial equity audits at Apple and Home Depot, even when the boards of those companies didn't want to adopt them,

• 9:43Speaker 04

  scope three emissions caps at companies like Chevron, whose boards did not want to adopt them until majority of shareholders, and I use shareholders in air quotes because they're not the actual capital owners, but they're registered as the shareholders, tell these firms to do. So this is a big problem. I was complaining about it as an author, as a commentator on cable news and traveling the country. And I said, you know what? Actually, beginning my career as an entrepreneur, why not just use that talent and actually try to solve this problem? So I created Strive, co-founded it with actually a former high school classmate of mine, who is now got a full team building this asset management apparatus in Columbus, Ohio, that had a different vision. It said, you're going to offer those same kinds of index funds, but with a different shareholder message to the underlying companies, which is to say, get out of politics,

• 10:28Speaker 04

  focus exclusively on delivering excellence in your products and services, and yes, make money unapologetically by maximizing value for your shareholders in the process. Novel idea. Who would have ever thought? And so that's actually generated a lot of controversy, but also a lot of demand with it. I mean, Strive, I think, crossed over half a billion dollars in AUM just three months after the launch of its first fund. I think it took JPMorgan over two years to cross a billion when they first entered the same ETF business. And I think it's actually just reflects a bottom-up hunger for people who, once they know, speaking of waking up or becoming awakened to invisible injustices, they wake up to the invisible injustice that their own retirement fund is being used to cause American oil companies to produce

• 11:12Speaker 04

  less oil and gas, so that they, with the other hand, can pay for more gas at the pump. People are incensed, rightly so. I mean, I think it's, I would go so far as to call it, it is definitely the largest fiduciary breach of the 21st century. In dollar-denominated terms, I think there's a case to make that it's the largest-scale financial fraud of the 21st century. You're telling people one thing, in fact, you're doing another at a $20 trillion scale. So, so what we do at Strive is, you know, during my tenure, as I stepped down as executive chairman and I stepped off the board to pursue the presidential campaign, there's a whole team running it. But even during my time as executive chairman, sent letters to the boards of Chevron, Apple, Disney, engaged publicly with those companies. Even actually, though, the last week, it was funny, I had a, just yesterday, a little

• 11:54Speaker 04

  spat with Marc Benioff. Actually, Strive had sent a letter to Salesforce, Benioff, and their board, saying that Salesforce should knock it off with the political behaviors. The company hasn't done well. A lot of that's attributable to the culture that this guy at the top has created. They have, they literally host woke Wednesdays. They require employees to confess that the US is racist and all kinds of original sins. I mean, literally, this is part of company-sponsored events there, racial hiring quota systems, gender-based hiring quota systems, threatening to pull out of Republican states if lawmakers don't adopt policies that Marc Benioff agrees with. Our shareholder letters say, not to say to adopt Republican policies instead, no, just knock it off with the politics. And then he lashed back yesterday, saying that, well, now, it's clear I'm just a politician. And

• 12:39Speaker 04

  I said, yeah, if you want to actually run for, if you actually want to be a politician, try running for office and actually get your policies implemented through the front door. Instead, he's actually serving as a politician in the guise of a CEO, but using corporate power as a means of effectuating it. And so why is that a threat to democracy? It's because we made a bargain in 1776 in this country, which said that unlike old world Europe, which settled its political differences in the backs of palace walls with business elites and church elites getting together and deciding what was best for the masses, we in 1776 said we're going to do it the other way. We're going to leave it to the citizens of a country to decide for themselves, for better or worse, how they address their political differences and shared social challenges.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  That was the American bargain. And so the reason I view this as a threat to democratic self-governance is not just what Milton Friedman worried about. Which I worry about too, is that it distracts companies from pursuing their own mission and maximizing profit, which grows the size of the economy and all that stuff. That's known. But the invisible part, or at least it was invisible when I first started talking about this three years ago, is that it delegated the political decisions to a small group of market actors, which actually rejected the 1776 vision that every person's voice and vote ought to count equally, regardless of their position in the marketplace for dollars when it comes to political questions. So that's kind of what animated my journey more

• 14:08Speaker 04

  than even just the idea of maximizing value, though I do in my capitalist capacity care about that too. It's actually my indignation as a citizen, I would say, that actually was what pushed me to take all the steps I've taken in the last few years.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  You're now running for president in the 2024 election. Before we talk about what your specific views are and kind of what your campaign is, what is your analysis of the last, I don't know, eight, 10 years of politics? We've had a Republican president. We've had a Democratic president. We've had an environment where there was low interest rates. We now have an environment where there's high interest rates. And we've kind of seen a lot of different things happen over that, you know, call it decade or so. What's worked and what hasn't worked so far?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, look, I think that it's a direct pickup from where I left off in my own story, what drives me to do this. Is that it does take two to tango, right? So everything we're talking about so far was about a top-down cynical marriage of business and government. And there's truth to all of this, of course, but that only works if you have a culture and a populace that's really willing to buy up what they're selling. Okay? That's something that no market actor alone can address if the demand side of this is what it is. And I think there's a reality to that, too. And I just think so. I'll make a couple of observations. You asked about the last 10 to 15 years. We're in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, from baby

• 15:39Speaker 04

  boomers to millennials. We've lived in an era of chronic easy money, artificially created money raining from on high like manna from heaven, that has created a culture in its wake that leaves actually not just a cultural vacuum, but a moral vacuum of people forgetting what actual productivity, what actually drives productivity and long-run economic prosperity because of the artificial snow that we've been skiing on. As the artificial snow machine now turns off, we forget how to actually do the real thing. But all of that has contributed to what I see as a national identity crisis. Where, you know, our generation, let's call it, right? Millennial-ish, whatever, millennials and younger, but really any generation in America

• 16:20Speaker 04

  today, we're so hungry for a cause, we're so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity in this country, at a point in our history where the things that used to fill that void, whatever it was, maybe it was religion, family, hard work, national identity, those things have disappeared, they're uncool, they're not popular, but we still have that black hole and need for purpose, and so we fill it. We fill that hunger with fast food instead. Maybe it's woke-ism, maybe it's gender ideology, maybe it's covid-ism, maybe it's climatism. These are just secular religions that are filling the need to believe in something higher at a point when we've lost our ability to believe in something higher.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  So the whole premise of my candidacy, and I'm not, I'm running as a Republican, but I'm not a partisan politics guy, I could care less for the machinery of partisan politics. I think it's, at best, boring and at worst, even unproductive. But I'm running on a premise of reviving that missing national identity, to fill that void, that black hole.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  With the ideals that set this particular nation into motion 250 years ago, from unbridled meritocracy to free speech, open debate, democratic self-governance over aristocracy. These are ideas that I'm pretty convinced that most Americans actually agree on. I think most Americans are pretty sure their neighbors and their colleagues agree on them too, but they're not sure anymore because they don't feel free to talk about it. And my whole premise is if we're able to talk about this in the open, if we're able to take down the conversational barriers, we will discover that the real dividing line in America is not today between Democrats and Republicans, which would make it sort of a 50/50 thing.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  But it's between those who are members of this artificial managerial class and the everyday citizen who's crushed by the will of that managerial class. Or a different way of cutting the cake is pro-American, as defined by pro-American values, the values that I just laid out, or a subset of this country that's anti-American in the sense that they fundamentally oppose those ideals in which this country was founded. And those transcend the boundaries of partisan politics. But the beauty of that, I think, is that the split isn't 50/50 anymore. I think it's like 80/20, which is why I think 2024 can and should be a landslide election, Reagan-style, 1984-style election.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  And I'm running to deliver it. I think we can. But I think we're gonna have to look beyond the, you know, suffocating confines of identity politics or partisan politics to do it. And so that's the first six months of this is laying out that cultural vision.

• 19:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So when I hear national identity, I think it's this message of like, proud to be an American, right? And something about the city of Miami specifically is, it is this melting pot of people from all different walks of life, all different geographies. There are tons of people from South and Central America, from Europe, from other areas of North America, from Africa, India, Middle East. I mean, you just go across the entire globe. People end up here. And what's so fascinating about this to me is that as all those people come together, there is this feeling that what it means to be an American in a city like Miami may actually be different than what it means to be an American somewhere else.

• 19:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But that pride still cuts through all those different communities. And so when you think of that, what does that future look like? If more and more of the citizens not only feel the internal pride to be an American, but they're willing to speak about it to their neighbors. They're willing to post about it on social media. They're willing to say, hey, these are the ideals and values that I stand for, and I'm willing to defend them when somebody violates them. What does that future look like in America?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a beautiful thing that you described. I mean, I'm a kid of immigrants as well. My parents came from India, not a lot of money 40 years ago. But we have a certain love of the country that I wouldn't say that you could only have as a first-generation American or an immigrant, but that you definitely can have, especially as somebody who opted to be part of this or who's the kid of someone who opted to be part of this, made a sacrifice to be part of this. You don't just always value something you inherit. You often value something you had a stake in choosing, you had a stake in building. But I think our diversity is only beautiful if it is against the backdrop of something greater that unifies us across that diversity. Without that, I'm looking across the audience here.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  We've got a lot of shades of melanin, that's great. Who cares if we're just a bunch of different-looking, four-legged or two-legged higher mammals roaming a common geographic space, doing what our iPhones tell us to do on a given day? Sometimes I wake up, that's what America looks like to me. And we're celebrating diversity as our strength. I think the whole thesis of my candidacy is that diversity, I will say this out loud, it deserves to be said, diversity is not our strength. Our strength is what unifies us across our diversity. What unifies across our diversity in this country is the ideals that we share. It goes to our humanity, because what makes us different than four-legged beasts or even two-legged ones that roam a geographic space is that we can believe in an ideal. That's what makes us human beings. It's what gives us our humanity.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  And the thing that makes American identity so beautiful is it's tied to the essence of what makes us human beings themselves, worthy of respect. And so... What does that world look like? Looks like one in which you see that commonality first, before you see the difference in the shade of your melanin content. My last book, actually, The Nation of Victims, we talked, it's a side story, just reminded me of as we were talking now. Septimius Severus, actually, he wasn't a great Roman emperor, but he was Roman emperor nonetheless. He happened to have dark skin. Okay, and so some streaming network, I don't know if it was HBO or whoever it was, some, one of these streaming networks, a couple of years ago, or a decade ago, creates a show,

• 22:34Speaker 04

  calling him, celebrating him as "The Black Emperor." The first man who came to England, black man to come to England, came not as a slave, but a conqueror, and built him up as this hero figure. Turns out, if you lived in the Roman era, they didn't see him as a black emperor at all. I mean, they had eyes, they could see that he had darker skin, but it was the same way that we look at somebody who has dark, different shade of their eye color, right? It was just a biological fact about them. And I think that if we can go to, get to a place where, okay, I see it, and even, even one step further, there may be a lot of cultural diversity, it's part of that, but the thing I see is, what the Romans saw is that you were a citizen. Now, the irony about Septimius Severus is that they're building him up as the black emperor. He's actually one of the most brutal emperors,

• 23:17Speaker 04

  because he conquered other empires, including those of other black Africans, from whom he plundered. Why was he plundering? Because Roman Empire was in decline, and he actually was the one who diluted the denarius the most, right? Printing artificial money, a lesson we can learn too, inflated the currency. He did something that we don't do, which is plunder somebody else's silver to be able to actually fill the void, but that's a side story, just so people are educated about that emperor. I'm not building him up to be some hero figure. But it's interesting that that's the way Romans saw fellow Roman as a citizen. And for most of my life, that's how fellow Americans see each other, as a fellow citizen, but we have been acculturated to see each other now as the amalgam of our boring genetic attributes. And I think we can get back to that, but it's gonna take some leadership,

• 24:01Speaker 04

  and it's gonna take cutting through this culture of fear. I see that culture of fear in the Republican Party too, so one of my, one of my first things I'll do as president, I've committed to this, is... Something a president can do. End affirmative action in this country. You're not supposed to say that out loud. Thank you, I appreciate that. Race-based affirmative action is a national cancer. It's not just about anti-black, anti-white, or anti-Asian racism. It is that, but it's more than that. It's fueling a new wave of anti-black racism in this country. I truly believe that because there's no better way to foster racial animus against a group than to take something away from a different group on the basis of their skin color. We've done it in 1870. We've done it in 1840. We're doing it in 2023.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  And yet, I mean, even Donald Trump, you know, this is one that he could... I mean, so Lyndon Johnson set this executive order into motion. Not a lot of people know this, like many bad things that started with the federal government. It was an executive order, 11246, in the 60s, that required anyone who does business with the federal government... So that includes 20% of the US workforce, by the way. Not a lot of people know this. I mean, GM does business with the federal government. Google does business with the federal government. 20% of the US workforce to adopt race-based quota systems as a condition for being able to do business. Any US president since then could have taken a pen and crossed it out because that's an executive order. And even Republicans, they delicately dance around this one. Trump could have done it. I actually pushed some of his team on why they didn't do it long before I was running for president.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  He said, "Well, it's not a political hill that we want to die on." And, you know, I think sometimes the Republicans of today look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt's worst nightmare. You know, speak loudly and carry a small stick. And I think that when it comes to our culture, we got to speak loudly and carry a big stick. I think that's the moment we're in now. But I think taking on some of these sacred cows you're not supposed to touch from affirmative action to climate religion, which I'm unapologetically someone who resists the demands of this religion, to, you know, I think we should celebrate our ability to live a high-carbon lifestyle. In fact, the rest of the world should only be so lucky. The best-known way to lift people up from poverty is indeed the use of the resources and the innovation

• 26:12Speaker 04

  that has allowed us to use carbon in the way we have. You know, to the use of the military, to protect the border. Who would have ever thought a US military protects the US border rather than somebody else's border? Solve a cartel problem. If you're going to designate them domestic terrorists, if you're going to designate them terrorists, don't just freeze their assets. If you think Bin Laden's a terrorist, you took him out. You think Soleimani's a terrorist, you take him out. You think a drug cartel is behaving exactly the way al-Qaeda and ISIS did, why is that anathema?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  It is to the modern defense establishment, but I don't understand why it is. And the more I've studied, the more convinced I've become that these are things that we ought to be doing. These aren't even partisan ideas, though the republic, I just came from CPAC, and I will tell you, they were eating it up. You guys are like, very polite. They were rambunctious last night, but, but the conservatives like it, but I think these are not fundamentally partisan ideas. I think most independents, and I think many Democrats, increasingly quietly, but nonetheless agree, they'll agree more quietly behind closed doors. But I think if we are able to tear down the illusion of division, and I do think it's an illusion created by those who profit from it, either in actual dollar terms or in political terms,

• 27:24Speaker 04

  then I think we rediscover that that reality, that future world that we talked about, where we see one another as fellow citizens who share a commitment to a set of ideals. It's not some distant future, it's just right here, sitting in front of us. We just have to open our eyes and see it. And I'm hoping over the next year and a half, and then the next 48 years after that, that's going to be my small role in driving something of a cultural revival in this country.

• 27:48Anthony Pompliano?

  When I think of proud to be an American, it signifies to me, you can be proud of a lot of things. You can be proud of your family, where you work, the community you're in, various social groups you're in, etc. But being proud doesn't necessarily make you immune to critiquing those groups as well.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 28:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you can be proud of something, let's say you're on a sports team, but you also have to critique yourself, because that's the only way you can get better. And one of the things that you've already laid out is that there's a number of organizations in the federal government that you think that we can do without. And so the one that I think you've been kind of most vocal about so far is the Department of Education.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 28:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk a little bit, using that as an example, in terms of going into what many people would say is a kind of over-budget, bureaucratic, inefficient system and organization. How do you pick what goes, what stays?

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And then how do you fight against the inertia of the system as president?

• 28:47Speaker 04

  So I have views on the latter, but let me just talk about the vision of how I see the administrative state. Three categories in the way I look at what I expect to do as president, alright? So one is agencies that never should have existed, that still exist, but better late than never, shut it down and make it a dividend to the people if needed. It's about $80 billion is what runs through the Federal Department of Education. You divide $80 billion across a lot of the underfunded public schools across the country, that adds up to a lot of money. Okay, you do the math on a district-by-district basis, but it's not just the money. It's the fact that when you have a centralized body with tens of thousands of bureaucrats who come to work for literally no good reason, they find things to do.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  And that's actually the source of a lot of the emergence of gender ideology and critical race ideology in the schools, is it's a string attached to accepting that federal funding. So the first thing I've said I'll do is I will shut down the Department of Education, and that's in category A, well I'll shut it down and it's not gonna come back. Category B are functions that, much more limited set, but functions that do need to exist, but that have become just the bureaucracy, like that, literally that organization, has become so toxic in its ossified managerial bureaucratic insular perspective and operation, that the only way to reform it is not through actual putting a figurehead on top or hiring

• 30:11Speaker 04

  new people, it's just so much a part of the DNA of that bureaucracy that you have to shut it down and then replace it with something new built from scratch, a true startup to take place, the incumbent that you level. I put the FBI in that category. It is still the J. Edgar Hoover building that those people walk into every day, and whether it was 60 years ago when Democrats wanted to end it, or whether it's 60 years later when a broader group of Americans who lean in a different direction want to end it. I think that better late than never. Shut the FBI down. Create something new to actually take its place that has integrity to its actual purpose of enforcing the laws rather than to be the nation's determiners of who actually

• 30:54Speaker 04

  runs the country and viewing the president as an employee. And then I think there's a third category of agencies that do lend themselves to reform, some cases radical reform. I'd put the Fed in this category, right? The US Federal Reserve needs a different, fundamentally different mandate than it has today. So it's an organization where here, so category A shouldn't have existed in the first place. Category B needs to exist a law enforcement function, but is so corrupt and so ossified that you just gotta shut it down and then create something new. Category C is, okay, if I was drawing up the system in the first place, I wouldn't have included a Federal Reserve, but I would say that for every nation on earth. So if we're just accepting some realities that central banks exist, still need a radical reform of the mission of the Federal Reserve.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  And here, I mean, this, I mean, I guess we're talking to a money crowd here, so I think it's okay to go into detail. If I'm getting boring, then just let's keep moving on, but I just think-

• 31:48Anthony Pompliano?

  They want to hear about the Fed.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  You sure? Okay, all right. The offer remains open, so we can keep, we can move on. But I just think the myth of the Phillips curve is itself an artificial construct created by faulty academic premises based on old British data that actually were not at all extrapolable to a modern economy, let alone an American one, that say there's a fundamental trade-off between inflation and full employment. It's just, it's just an entire agency, an entire apparatus in the US and then the rest of the globe too, operating on one giant faulty premise that makes a central bank fundamentally hostile to full employment, because full employment to them is a signal of inflation, which means you have to do the opposite thing.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  So anyway, I think the job of the Federal Reserve, to the extent we have one, and I think I'm a pragmatist as well, I'm not just spouting off ideas, the things I say we're gonna do, we're gonna do, is not, I'm not gonna say it in my case, shut down the Fed or anything else, somebody who says that, don't believe them, but dramatically restrict the scope of the Federal Reserve to be exclusively about doing one thing. Make the dollar a unit of measurement. Peg it to a basket of currencies, and your job is to maintain a stable dollar. Period. That's it. And I think that that is a disciplining function, but it's also one that, you know, none of us should know that Jerome Powell is the Chair of the Fed. We, it, it, it should not be a thing that most Americans know. There's a lot of things Americans should know that they don't, but this shouldn't be one of them.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  And I think that it should, the foot is a unit of measurement to the meter, in the same way that the dollar is a unit of measurement to a basket of commodities. Okay? So anyway, back to your point, that'd be my vision, there's three categories for bureaucratic reform. The how of how you do it, I, I take a strong view of this thing called the Constitution, which says the executive branch is led by the elected President of the United States. Well, I'll bring a private sector perspective to an interpretation of the Constitution. And I'm not just winging it, I also went to law school, but, but I think this is a more useful lens to bring to this here. Is that if someone works for you and you can't fire them, that means that they don't work for you.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  It means you are their slave, actually. Because you're responsible for what they do without having any authority over what they do. And so what happens today is the President of the United States is basically a slave of the administrative state, but he gets to live in the White House to compensate for it. Like, that's effectively the way this works. And I don't intend to be the fool who runs to be the next puppet who occupies that office, but I think the key is even others who have said things like this and meant it, I think, as of Trump or whatever, is they believed that Congress had to act and became frustrated that Congress doesn't repeal civil service protections or impoundment

• 34:46Speaker 04

  prevention protections, which say that if Congress allocates money to a specific agency, the president actually has to spend it, or federal union protections. And my view is you don't have to go through Congress on this stuff because Article 2 of the Constitution says that the president runs the executive branch. And the common, plain text understanding of that, bringing this private sector novel idea that it says if somebody works for you, you can fire them, means that you can actually fire somebody who works for you. This will be litigated. But I've also studied the current composition of the Supreme Court, and, you know, while I can't say this with certainty, it is my belief that a majority of this Supreme Court, unlike 20 years ago, agrees with this interpretation of the Constitution, which means we codify this in judicial precedent, so that not only through my presidency, but every presidency

• 35:31Speaker 04

  here and after, the person who actually runs the country will be the people who the citizens elect to run the country. Who would have ever thought that was actually the way a self-governing democracy worked? And yes, I think it can be so again. So that's a top domestic priority agenda for me. Thank you.

• 35:49Anthony Pompliano?

  When you decide to run for president, how much of it is, I am looking at the state of the United States, I have a vision for improving it, iterating it to something that I want to see exist in the world, combined with who is in political office, who are other people who are running? When you kind of view this, I don't think anyone else here has ever run for president or gone through the analysis of doing it, how much is just like the job versus people that are either also going to run, currently in various offices? Talk a little bit as to how you kind of view that.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  I can't speak for others. I'll speak for myself. My sense is that the answer is different for others, especially those who are... ...professional politicians. I think their answer will be probably the inverse of what mine is. Mine is 90% the first, right? It's I have a clear vision for the country. It's not somebody else's vision handed to me in a binder. For better or worse, it is a vision that I've developed over the course of three books I've written in the last 18 months, traveled the country, been to a majority of states, listened to large audiences, respond to my message and learn more from them in response. And I think we have a national identity crisis that demands a vision. So that's what guided me into this, regardless of who else is running. And as recently as November, as recently as Thanksgiving, if you told me that I was

• 37:15Speaker 04

  going to do this, I would have said that that was a crazy idea. But there was something about it that just I felt called, you know, in the month of December over Christmas break, we just took a long, hard think about as much as I'm going to work on these top-down issues even through the market, it does take two to tango. There is this culture that is a separate, you know, in economic terms, demand-side problem here that needs to be addressed. Now, 10% of it, though, is I think part of what made it click for me was also watching the beginning of the Republican field shape up to what appeared to be a collision course

• 37:54Speaker 04

  towards a biographical brawl between Trump and DeSantis, which I think would have just been a shame for the country to make it a tug-of-war about personalities and some sort of, you know, ego-driven dispute. I'm not saying that that's exactly where it was or is even now, but that was where it was heading. Whereas to me, this ought to have been, and now will be, about substance, about competing visions for the country. It's not about me, it's not about Trump, it's not about DeSantis. I don't even think 2023, there aren't going to be any votes cast. It shouldn't even be about the who. It should be about the what and the why. What do we stand for? Why do we stand for it? Answer that question.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  And then the who becomes a lot easier. And the Republican Party of today gets obsessed over this question of the who. Is it Kevin McCarthy or somebody else? That's a week of news cycle. Ronna McDaniel or somebody else? And if those of you don't know who that is, good for you. But, you know, Donald Trump or somebody else? You know, this is the obsession of a Republican Party that's just it's just a symptom of the fact that...

• 39:03Speaker 04

  It's a party that doesn't even know what it actually stands for, right? And so I think that defining that agenda and that vision makes the selection of the who a lot easier. The premise of our campaign strategy is that, look, the person who leads the way in defining that agenda this year will be selected by the voters of this country to implement that agenda next year. I don't know if that premise is right or not, but I think it is. And that's certainly our entire campaign strategy is built around leading that vision, leading the definition of the agenda this year, what it means to be a Republican, what it means to be an American. And then our expectation is that next year that will lead to me being the nominee and

• 39:45Speaker 04

  hopefully if my analysis of the situation is right of the 80/20 divide rather than the 50/50 divide, we win 2024 in a landslide. But, you know, there's a lot of steps to get from here to there, but it's, you ask the personal question, what does it feel like? It feels like you're jumping off of a cliff into an abyss. You don't know exactly where you're going to land. It's a sacrifice, but you can always make a sacrifice if you know what you're actually sacrificing for. You know, this is going to be a bottom-up campaign because I've had financial success and I don't apologize for it. I'm making a significant personal investment behind this. But the good news is people don't, from Michael Bloomberg on to, you know, anybody else who's learned this lesson, Coke, you know, to anybody else over the years, you don't buy elections in this country.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  That's just to get this movement started. This is going to be bottom-up. And I actually think, I know this is not a, you know, crypto audience per se, but I know you have an interest in the space and actually developing crypto policy is an important part of what my team's working on right now. But this is bottom-up. And so I've learned not to be shameless about this in nine days on the campaign. Honestly, check out what I'm standing for. Vivek2024.com. V-I-V-E-K, 2024.com. And actually, the thing that determines, the Republican Party is weirdly non-transparent about this stuff, but the one thing we know is that placement on the debate stage and how much time you get, et cetera, is going to be driven by almost certainly unique donor counts.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  So not how much money alone, but the number of unique donors. Like, seriously, you don't have to vote for me?

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Put a dollar, put five dollars in, and that ensures that we at least define the agenda. And I think that that's what not only the Republican Party needs, but the country needs more of. And I hope that we will, on the other side of this, be actually unified around the vision of e pluribus unum. It's on all of our coins for a reason. And you're right, I loved what you said earlier. Patriotism and loving America isn't just about F-16 fighter jets and eagles and red, white, and blue and celebrating that. It's not, actually. It's about a recognition of who we are. And you know, even recognizing the best arguments for the woke movement or whatever is acknowledging our hypocrisy or whatever. I don't reject that premise, actually.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Far from it. I think our hypocrisies, our worst hypocrisies, are our best proof of the fact that we have ideals at all. Okay? Nobody will ever call the Chinese Communist Party hypocritical. You can call them a lot of things, but you can't call them hypocritical if they don't have ideals, and they don't, right? You can only be a hypocrite if you had ideals in the first place. And our worst hypocrisies are the proof that we have those ideals and also are the proof that we are human beings who by definition will forever fall short of our ideals. But America is about the pursuit of those ideals. And I just think if we can use even the last 10 years, not just to do it even a lot of people on my side of the political aisle like to do, which is,

• 42:49Speaker 04

  you know, I think be aggrieved by the existence of a culture that's gone in the wrong direction, but instead view it as an opportunity to be even strengthened by going through something of a, you know, national adolescence. I don't think we have to be post Septimius Severus Rome. I don't think we have to be in some inevitable national decline. I think that we might just be a little young, going through our version of adolescence, figuring out who we really are, and that's okay. As long as we actually live to grow up on the other side of it. And that's what I'm hoping 2024 actually represents is an entry into a sort of cultural adulthood in our country that we've long missed.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  And so, anyway, at the very least, the next milestone for us is elevating these ideas on the debate stage, defining that agenda. And if the entire world of crypto, I think, got behind this, I think there's also going to be a crypto policy agenda that I think will be far more sensible than what either of the sides of the aisle is going to put on offer. I'll actually take a lot of help from whoever you think are smart folks on that. We're working on that as we speak. The only thing I want is a mass movement of people who put in a dollar or $5 to actually make sure that we drive the agenda this year and then hopefully put ourselves in a position to win next year.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  How can people follow you on Twitter? You've been posting an amazing amount of content in terms of videos, conversations. Some of it is right after you have a meeting. Like, you're very kind of open and transparent about the process of doing this, your ideas, various speeches. Where can they follow you on Twitter?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's @, you know, handle thing, Vivek G. Ramaswamy, spelled the usual way. You know, but, but, but I'll say this, is actually one, one cool thing we're going to start doing on the campaign next week or the week after is, probably the week after, is, there's this charade, actually. I feel compelled to share this with everyone. There's a charade in being a presidential candidate. The charade is this, you get these briefings before you go speak to an audience or do an interview with a reporter, which like brief you on some topic in like the Middle East that you didn't know the first thing about until like 30 minutes before the interview. And then you get the bullet points and then you sort of, you know, puff your chest and, and project as though you knew this all your life.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  It is just false. It is hilarious, but it is, but it is also fundamentally false. And so, one of the things that we're doing is, we're taking all of my briefings, which are hopefully going to be daily. For me, that's also just a disciplining function because one of the things is just time expands and even just this first 10 days of campaigning, the one thing I miss is learning new things. We've just been stacked. I was in DC this morning, I'm here, we're popping to Palm Beach for like a, you know, big Republican event down there. I don't have, I'm gonna get back to this this week. There's a forcing function of just learning new things every day. And so we're just gonna open source that briefing process. Everyone else can learn in the same way, but also hopefully evaluate a candidate not just on what they already know, which is in reality what they pretend to know, but

• 45:51Speaker 04

  actually, I think probably one of the most important attributes of a president is to understand how they learn. So we'll put that out through social media. I will try to make good use of our website as well. So where I try to direct most people is the website, which is vivek2024.com. But Twitter is another place where we'll be posting a lot of this. I put vivek2024.com because that has a nice little donate tab at the top. So people do like $1 even. So that's kind of like why we push people there. But through all, you know, it'll be through whatever other social media channels, we're gonna be as wide and far-reaching as we can to literally open up the process so people can actually understand what this process entails. Because I'm just 10 days into this, everything I thought it was, was just, is just artificial.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  It's made up. It's a fake projection. But I hope that gives the other candidates comfort too, to be a little bit more real. I've given a challenge to the GOP field. You know, we all, a couple of us spoke at CPAC yesterday. They didn't follow my challenge, but I'm gonna keep pressing them on it. No third-party written speeches. Disintermediate the political consultants who try to channel the message. No, it's just actually a shielding process. No third-party written speeches, no teleprompters, no reading from speeches. Make that a rule. That'd be a first time in politics. I don't, I've committed, I'm not using teleprompters, not having any written speeches. But we wanna push the other candidates to do the same thing.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  But I think the more we hopefully lead by example, I hope, the more of that we actually get from the other candidates, so that that's a change that'll outlive this election if we actually just change the rules of the road of how the sausage gets made.

• 47:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Vivek Ramaswamy.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Fantastic. Thank you. Appreciate it.