#71 Vivek Ramaswamy - EXPOSES Deep State, BlackRock, Big Pharma, Central Bank Digital Currency

Shawn Ryan Show is an open platform. Our goal is to bring truth and share untold stories that the media wouldn't otherwise cover. Part of that goal is to give the American people an opportunity to hear from their leaders and prospective leaders in a long format. We're done with the 15 second sound bytes. That's why 2024 Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is on this week. Vivek is the son of immigrants turned American success story and entrepreneur. After graduating from Harvard, he founded Roivant Sciences, an incredibly successful biotech company. He would later co-found Strive Asset Management, an investment firm that positions itself in opposition to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). In February of 2023, he announced his candidacy for the Republican Party's nomination for President in the 2024 election. Vivek has been a stark critic of the woke agenda and vows to dismantle the ever elusive deep state. This episode explores his upbringing and his ultimate goal of reestablishing a government for the people, by the people and of the people. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://preparewithshawn.com https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://blackbuffalo.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://1stphorm.com/srs https://ziprecruiter.com/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.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Today, we have a presidential candidate on the Sean Ryan Show. I would pay close attention to this one because there are actually real solutions to a lot of the problems that we face here in America today, and it is also very informative on a variety of topics such as, who is the deep state? BlackRock? How do we fix the southern border? And more. I'm going to say this again, to any presidential candidate who needs a voice. The Americans are tired of listening to five-minute soundbites that are scripted from your campaign managers.

• 1:42Shawn Ryan?

  We want somebody who can get out amongst the people, hold a long-form conversation without fear, and be able to think on your feet without a teleprompter. If that's you, and you need a voice, whether you're Republican, whether you're Democrat, whether you're somebody in the middle, this is your spot. I'm giving it to you. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome Vivek Ramaswamy to the Sean Ryan Show.

• 2:22Shawn Ryan?

  Vivek Ramaswamy, welcome to the show.

• 2:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's good to be on with you, man.

• 2:26Shawn Ryan?

  I'm honored to have you here, presidential candidate. We've got a lot to talk about.

• 2:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, I've been looking forward to this.

• 2:34Shawn Ryan?

  Good, good. So, a quick intro, you're an author, entrepreneur, a GOP presidential candidate, speaking hard truths, courage is contagious, the godfather of the anti-woke movement, author of Woke, Inc., Capital Punishment, and Nation of Victims. So, we've got a variety of topics I want to cover, but everybody always gets a gift when they come on here.

• 2:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Oh, really? Yeah. Thank you, man. What is it?

• 3:02Shawn Ryan?

  Those are my gummy bears.

• 3:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Are you kidding?

• 3:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, you know...

• 3:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm almost tempted to eat one right now.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  Have at it.

• 3:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm gonna try one right now, actually.

• 3:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I probably should have put some pudding in there for you to take to DC, to that nursing home they're running up there on tax-free dollars.

• 3:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, we'll talk about that. It is a gerontocracy in the country right now. So, do you make these, or you brand them?

• 3:26Shawn Ryan?

  We brand them.

• 3:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Good, where do you get them from?

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  We get them from Michigan.

• 3:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Michigan, alright, it's pretty close to where I am. Try and pop a couple of these.

• 3:34Shawn Ryan?

  Made in the USA.

• 3:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mm-hmm. Good gummies.

• 3:38Shawn Ryan?

  So, the effects of those won't kick in for another 30 minutes.

• 3:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Okay.

• 3:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You got me looking now.

• 3:44Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just kidding, those are legal in all 50 states. These are just gummy bears.

• 3:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thank you, man.

• 3:49Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 3:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm always a fan of, if you get a gift, you know, take it on the spot, because time flies and you later forget, so, these are good gummies, yeah.

• 3:58Shawn Ryan?

  Good. But, you know, the pudding to DC, I'm joking about it, but, you know, I am extremely concerned about the state of this country in so many aspects. And, you know, we talk about national security with China, with the southern border, with big tech, with all, with big pharma, all these different avenues, but nobody's talking about who's running our country. And what I mean by that, I'm not even talking right or left right now. I'm talking about, we have a bunch of geriatrics, and nobody is driving this car.

• 4:41Shawn Ryan?

  The motor's on, and nobody's behind the wheel. You know, we just saw Mitch McConnell...

• 4:49Shawn Ryan?

  Totally space out, or have a stroke, or whatever happened. I mean, then we took, what, a day or two later, we saw Feinstein. Didn't even read the notes. We've got Biden, who can't figure out how to put a sentence together. And I know there's more of these people. This is the biggest threat, in my opinion, to our national security. We have a bunch of people up there who, I mean, there's nobody upstairs. Nobody's driving that car.

• 5:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So, Sean, this actually gets to a deeper issue. I think the tempting thing to say on the surface, and there's a lot of truth to it, is that we have a gerontocracy in the United States, what you call the nursing home. And I do think that there is a need, a requirement in this country, for a new generation of leadership that can actually inspire, reach, and bring along young Americans, the next generation for whom we're creating a country. But that's just the surface. You want to dig deeper, this is not an accident. This is by design, because what really is happening in Washington DC is that the people who we elect to run the government

• 5:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  are not the ones who actually run the government. That's the dirty little secret in all of this, is that in some ways, it was designed to be a bunch of hollowed-out husks, serving as puppets for a managerial class that's really in charge in this country. That's actually why it's not just the old guys. Why they want John Fetterman in the seat that he's in. You need puppets who are pliable, who are moldable, who are adaptable to the demands of a permanent state, an administrative bureaucracy, a deep state that is absolutely the chief policymaker in this country. And the elected officials are really just people who enjoy being on cable television at night. They say, okay, give them that.

• 6:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We don't, the people in the deep state, they don't thrive on attention and ego. So we'll give the Nancy Pelosi's and the Joe Bidens and the Republican equivalents the ego hit, the dopamine hit, from being able to be a famous person who stands in front of a camera, when in fact, the real laws of this country are not passed in Congress, that is designed to look like a beautiful building. I took my three-year-old son there, three, four weeks ago, maybe three, four months ago, when I was there for a Sunday show. It feels like you're going to a museum because that is not where the laws of this country are passed. They're passed in the drab administrative buildings that you would never dare go. It's designed to look and be boring for a reason.

• 7:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think, once you see that, you understand why it is we are where we are. Because the question is, why on earth would we put these people in charge? Who couldn't pass a basic cognitive test if they were asked to perform a function or an activity of daily living? And the reason is, that actually is just a symptom of the deeper problem, which is that the people we elect to run the government aren't even the ones who are actually running it. And that was by design. And that's what I'm going in to fix, but we have to be able to see that with clear eyes. It's not just I'm a young guy versus these older guys. It's that I'm an outsider running against a system that is designed to keep the democratically accountable people, let alone an outsider, out of their business. And that's what's going on.

• 8:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I see that, and I've been calling this out for a long time. I mean, a lot of people have been calling this out for a long time, especially when it comes to the deep state and the puppets and all this stuff. But, you know, maybe you have a little more insight. I can't figure out who the deep state is.

• 8:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It is not, so this is, this is the whole point. It is not one person. The model of there being one puppet master individually, saying that I'm pulling the strings, it's the wrong mental model, right? In fact, in many cases, it's comprised, this is the harder part to see. Because then it gets really confusing when you, when you first think of it this way. There are many good people as individuals, in their individual capacities, as lives, as fathers, as neighbors, as coaches, who are part of that machine. It's the nature of the beast itself is not comprised of one human being with an intention. It is the machine, the leviathan itself, that goes beyond a human individual. It is a creation that's a beast.

• 9:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Think about the FBI, right? Because I've said I would shut down the FBI, and I can go into the details of how to do it. One of my motivations for being in this race certainly is, I am the single presidential candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the deep state, the administrative state. And we can talk about that. But the FBI is one of the institutions that I've said that I would just shut down. Most people who work at the FBI, I genuinely believe it, are individually good people. But they're part of a machine that is bigger than the sum of its parts, that has a culture unto itself. It is still the J. Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI that people walk into every day

• 9:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  and report to for work. It is an agency built in the shadow of a legacy that was fundamentally corrupt even at its inception, or at least through most of the 1930s and 40s, when it got off the ground. And so that is really what we have to see, is this isn't a human that we're up against, any individual human. It's individual human beings, democratically elected representatives of the actual democratic will of the people, up against a machine, a monster that we've created, that actually has to be shut down in order for us to actually have any chance of winning. And I can go into great detail on that.

• 10:30Shawn Ryan?

  So it's not an individual? Is it an entity of individuals that are all inspiring together? Or is it totally decompartmentalized?

• 10:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's totally decompartmentalized. I think that that's actually what makes it so hard to capture. Sort of like, there's an analogy, and we'll come back to the deep state piece of this, but it's deeply related to, say, censorship in this country. The way censorship is increasingly being carried out is initially, the first version, the version that our founding fathers would have cared about, would have been the government carrying out censorship directly, saying that "You, Sean, can't speak to criticize me as a member of the government." What they started to do is they started to be a waterfall. It wasn't the president directly saying it, but it was administrative agencies. So it's the bureaucrats saying that "You're creating misinformation that endangers the public. So I, as the president, am not going to be an autocratic king, but it's just going

• 11:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to be the technocrats saying that, hey, here's some things you can't say." Then it goes one step further down the waterfall, because that's still the government, to say, "Okay, well, we, the technocrats, can't do it, but we'll have a meeting with you, if you're a social media company." And we'll tell you that, hey, you know, the guy who used to work for me now worked in the private sector, that's the place I'm going to work later on as well. So we already have a friendly peer-like relationship. Not that we think we're doing something corrupt, but it's just the same kind of people who we understand each other. We have the common good in mind. And come on, you know, the truth, that people need to take vaccines, that people can't be trusted with the Hunter Biden laptop story. It's probably Russian disinformation on the eve of an election. Come on, you know what I'm talking about here. People need to take the vaccines. We're going to build public trust.

• 12:12Shawn Ryan?

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• 12:57Shawn Ryan?

  come from. And it got to this point where I was just going to start my own brand. And so we started going to trade shows and looking for the finest ingredients. And in doing that, I ran into this guy, maybe you've heard of him. His name's Laird Hamilton and his wife Gabby Reese. And they have an entire line of supplements with all the finest ingredients. And we got to talking. Turns out, they have the perfect functional mushroom supplement. It's actually called Performance Mushrooms. And this has everything. It's USDA organic.

• 13:40Shawn Ryan?

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• 14:24Shawn Ryan?

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• 15:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I need you to make sure that you're looking after which users are criticizing our government policy. So say I'm Andy Slavitt in the White House and say you're a counterpart at Twitter and we're having a conversation saying, and I'm not making this stuff up, this is just literally what happened. Why is, what was this guy's name? You know, an individual, an individual critic of the government, Alex Berenson, right? They literally name him by name. Hey, Alex Berenson, that guy, he's criticizing government policies on vaccination. That's eroding public trust. He's part of the disinformation dozen. Why haven't you shut it down yet? And you come back and say, well, you know, we think we have a free speech platform. No, no, no, you don't get it.

• 15:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Come on, you understand this, we're in this for the country. Why haven't you shut down his account yet? So then that horizontal managerial class goes and shuts down its account of that person because they know that the government side of it is, is still their regulator. So now we've gone from the president to then delegated to say, okay, the president's not doing censorship, it's just the administrative state. Now it's not just the administrative state, but it's the private sector. It's becoming more and more decentralized. And then what does Twitter do? Or what does Google do? They don't even have human beings doing it. They train AI to do it. Right? And so they kick it out to AI algorithms, which are themselves automatically, without human judgments, squashing certain kinds of information that they've been trained to view as dangerous, false, or misinformation.

• 16:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  A dirty little secret is that many of those algorithms have been so trained that the AI itself now spots American flags that are on someone's profile. So if you're somebody who has an American flag in your social media profile, the algorithms are already trained to pay greater scrutiny to what you say. Are you serious? I'm not joking about this. And it's not a human being that made that judgment. It's the AI that itself has been trained to say that these are the kinds of people who need to actually be silenced and suppressed. It's a dirty little secret in Silicon Valley. And actually, it's many of the same third-party firms. So it's just the cascade. You go from the president to the administrative state, administrative state to executives at Twitter, or YouTube, or whatever.

• 17:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Executives to then third parties, but the same third-party firms that are working for the big tech guys. And the third-party firms themselves writing algorithms and AI to be able to decentralize it. So why do I bring that example up as it relates back to our example of talking about the FBI? It's a machine that we're up against. If we think it's individual, person-to-person combat, we found the bad guys, we walked into the globalist cabal, and here we got them, with smoking cigars in the back room, deciding this is exactly how the rest of society lives at large. That's the wrong mental model. That's how it worked in the old world. That's true. Because what we have today going on in the United States of America is a modern 1775 moment.

• 17:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's where I think we are in the country. And in the old world, the way it worked is there were a group of people who got together in the back of palace halls and determined what was right for the rest of society at large. Because the old world vision, and it's absolutely a vision that's rearing its head again in this country today, is that we, the people, cannot be trusted to sort out our differences through free speech and open debate in a constitutional republic on how we fight climate change or racial injustice. Shaun, Vivek, we, the people, as individuals, cannot be trusted. It has to be decided in the back of palace halls by the enlightened elite.

• 18:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And we fought a revolution to say hell no to that vision. That yes, we the people in this constitutional republic decide how we self govern, thank you very much. Well, now that old monster is rearing its head again, except this time they say, well, it's maybe in the back of palace halls, like a three letter government building in Washington DC. But you show up there and it isn't quite there. There's no, there's no smoking, there's a smoking gun. There's no smoking cigars. So then you say, maybe it's the corner office of BlackRock and their avenue of their C suite on Park Avenue. Well, it's not quite there either. It's woven into a machine of a horizontal managerial class comprised of people in three letter agencies in government, comprised of the people who professionally sit on corporate boards, the associate deans of god knows what at universities,

• 19:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  the ambassadors to some second tier nation in Europe that was a donor to a political party. It's the same managerial class that makes it very hard to identify because it pervades multiple institutions, both within and outside of government. That's what we're up against, and I think that's the moment we live in today. The real divide in the country is not, in my estimation at least, between Republicans and Democrats. And that's why I very rarely talk about Republicans and Democrats. It rather bores me, actually. I think the real divide is between the managerial class and the citizen. Do we trust we the people to sort out our differences through free speech and open debate?

• 20:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think that elevates what this election, including this GOP primary, is all about. Do you stand on the side of incremental reform within those existing institutions? In which case you should probably go with somebody else. Or do you stand for revolution? And I stand on the side of revolution, the American revolution, the ideals of 1776 that we need to revive. That's the moment we live in, in this country. And I think it's going to take deeper than just scratching the surface of even Republicans or Democrats, or even pointing to individuals, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, they're too old. All that's true. But there's something deeper going on, and I think that's what we have to open our eyes to. That's what pulled me into this, because I don't think anybody else really sees it this way.

• 20:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's the best description of the deep state I've ever heard. So how are we going to break that up? I mean, that sounds extremely complicated.

• 20:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It is. Well, here's what I'll say.

• 21:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It is hard in that it won't be easy. But it is simple in that it's not complicated. Okay? And I think we've got to keep that distinction clear in our minds. We have three branches of government. It's actually pretty simple. It's enshrined in a readable document, cover to cover. I do it from time to time. The US Constitution. Something that we've forgotten, maybe needs to be taught in high school. I personally think every high school student should have to pass the same civics test that an immigrant has to pass in order to become a citizen of this country. Young people don't know anything about what that flag represents. Many of them. That's when you don't know what it represents. It's why you bend the knee to a trans flag instead of the flag of the United States of America. Teachers, there's actually a sad story of a teacher recently who removed the flag of

• 21:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  the Pledge of Allegiance and put the trans flag up instead as we pledged, as the kids in the classroom pledged allegiance to it. But that's because when the symbols themselves lose their meaning, we've got to restore the meaning for the symbols to actually mean something back. And so, anyway, I go back to what do we have? It's not abstract theories. It's enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, which is the best mission statement for a nation known to mankind. It is enshrined in the US Constitution, which is the best operating manual for a nation known to mankind, certainly a free nation. And so I don't think that this is complicated. I think it is hard. The distinction that I would draw. It's hard in that it's not easy, so I'm not blithe about the challenge, but I have a pretty clear conception of how this works.

• 22:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  There's one executive branch of government. Article 2 of the Constitution does not create two executive branches, a president and then a separate administrative state. There's one executive branch of government. It's called the unitary theory of the executive. I come at this as an outsider. I think that's definitely what it's going to take. An insider who grew up in professional politics and even learned to say the things that I'm saying now or in Woking as a second tongue. That's good if you're governor or a lawmaker or a state legislator or senator. When you're talking about the next president, you need an outsider who has a first personal native understanding of how to get this done. But it's got to be an outsider who also deeply understands the Constitution. Somebody who understands that...

• 23:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If someone works for you and you cannot fire them, that means they don't work for you. It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without having any authority to actually change it. I refuse to be a hollowed-out husk as a CEO of a company. I refuse to be a hollowed-out husk as the chief executive of the executive branch of the government. Read Article 2 of the Constitution. That's not how it works. Now, you also need a president who has an understanding of the laws passed under that Constitution. So, we have some time. I'll get deep with you here. Tackling the deep state, let's get deep on how we dismantle it.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Let's do it. 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-like 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.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 24:49Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Very poorly understood laws by former presidents. Even Trump, I think this is where he fell short, is that the advisors who came from that same managerial class, I mean, being the national security establishment. I love Trump's instincts, too bad he got John Bolton in charge of, as your chief and most important foreign policy person, as your national security advisor. He's an old-school neocon, so Trump has his hands hamstrung a little bit if the guy you're working through actually has a completely different vision. Same thing for the administrative state. He wanted to dismantle the deep state, but they told him things like, "Oh, you can't do it because there are civil service protections." Well, here's my suggestion. Read the law, okay? And I have.

• 25:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The civil service protections only apply to individual firings. Because the thing they're supposed to protect against, and we could debate whether we like this or not, but this is the law, that we don't want a president who's elected by the public to politicize the firing of any particular expert. Because say, let's say you're, you know, some underling in the State Department, and you said something I don't like about abortion, but you're a competent person, and I'm the president, and I say, well, fire him. That's what the laws are designed to protect against.

• 26:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 26:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We could debate whether that's a good thing or not, but that's just how the civil service rules work. On their own terms, those laws do not apply to mass layoffs. Say, I instead come in and want to say that I want to lay off 75% of the people or shut down this agency. The civil service protections don't apply to that. On the terms of their own law. So you have Trump, I mean, the people around him basically did not want him to do the things he wanted to do. So they tell him, under the civil service protections, stop you from those firings. How about actually go into the root, original purpose, and then read the law, and actually say, all right, well, how about just a mass firing? And mass layoffs are absolutely what I am bringing to the Washington DC federal bureaucracy. Take some other laws, you know, the 1977 Presidential Reorganization Act.

• 26:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  This is a law that basically says that there's limited circumstances. What do they tell Trump? If you want to shut down an agency, you have to ask Congress. Generally, that's true, but there are laws on the books that say, under certain limited circumstances, if it's going to stimulate the economy, or if it eliminates redundant agencies, then you absolutely, as the president, already have the authority, as the chief executive, just like a board of directors gives it to a CEO. Congress has already given the CEO the authority, in this case, the US president, to shut down those divisions.

• 27:17Shawn Ryan?

  What agencies in particular would you shut down other than the FBI?

• 27:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Department of Education, CDC, IRS, ATF, Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

• 27:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I've talked about the FBI extensively, and that's just the start. I think that we're going to continue to go down that list.

• 27:34Shawn Ryan?

  Would you replace them with other agencies?

• 27:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  In certain cases, yes, in certain cases, no. If you want to talk about the FBI, maybe we can since

• 27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the FBI.

• 27:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We have a shared interest there, and it's topical right now when we're having this conversation. So in the FBI's case, I would shut it down. I wouldn't build something else to take its place, but I would make good judgments on how we still carry out the functions that we need to have carried out without a corrupt bureaucracy in the middle. So at the local level, let's just start there. You have local police and local prosecutors. You don't have a separate investigative bureaucracy sitting in between. Well, at the federal level, you've got US prosecutors and you've got the US Marshals. We have this separate bureaucracy built in the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover sitting in between. That's part of the problem. Excuse me. So I want to go deep on this. There's 35,000 some odd employees at the FBI.

• 28:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  15,000 of them are doing good, honest work. Generally, the investigators on the front line, the agents on the front line. We need them, but actually, one of the things that's happened in the FBI is they've lost all specialization. Right? This is part of a cultural shift. It's what happens in a bureaucracy, even in a company. Same thing happens in the federal government, is they all just end up being a bunch of generalists. But they're worse than at busting up child sex trafficking rings, or worse at investigating drug crimes. See the influx of fentanyl by mules and coyotes coming through the tunnels, cartel finance tunnels underneath our southern border. Even financial crimes don't have the sophistication to go after true white collar theft today. And see, a bunch of generalists who are ineffective at their jobs because the FBI is this generalist institution.

• 29:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, what I would say is those 15,000, after we shut down the FBI, still have a job in the federal government. We're just going to move them to either the US Marshals, or the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, where they will, by the way, have greater specialization at agencies. Those three agencies have not been politically corrupted in the same way the FBI has, and carry out their work. That's 15,000 of the 35,000. The other 20,000, they're really the true bureaucrats. And that's the source of the politicization. That's the source of the rot. It's almost not even their fault, because if you have, it's just a law of human nature. This happens at the US Federal Reserve too, which I can talk about in a second. When you have a bunch of people who are showing up to work, who should have never had that

• 29:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  job in the first place. The biggest problem isn't just their headcount costs, that's a problem too. But it's the fact that when they're supposed to show up to, when they show up to work when they're not supposed to, they find things to do. Right? That's actually more damaging. So those 20,000 people are going to be sent home and they have to find honest work in the private sector. Truth is, we have more private sector jobs today than we do have people in this country. So this could be good for our economy, good for lifeblood, it might even be good for them to get back into the real world, understand what honest work looks like.

• 30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But when I say shut down the FBI, and since I've been saying this, I'm grateful that other candidates have now taken this on, and that's great, but we live in a moment where it takes a president who isn't a parrot for somebody else's slogans, be it another candidate, or be it a political consultant class, or a mega donor. We live in complicated times, and I think it requires an outsider, but a president who has a first personal understanding of how to get the job done. And that's what called me into this. I didn't think I was going to be running for president right now. A year ago, if you told me this is what I'd be doing right now, I'd say you were nuts, and that sounds like a sharp poke in the eye.

• 31:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But the reality is, I don't think we have 20 years to work with as a country. I don't think we're done yet. I think we still have an opportunity to say we are on our way up. Okay, maybe we have some bumps along the way, but that we're still just a little young, going through our own version of adolescence, our teenage years, figuring out who we're going to be. That's the optimistic way I'd like to see it, and I think it can be so.

• 31:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But if we wait another 20 years, I think that's the ballgame. And I think right now, we live in a moment where it's going to take a unique combination of traits to see this through and get that job done. And a standard professional politician is just not going to be able to do it. They're wired in the way they are for a reason. It's going to take someone coming in from the outside.

• 31:57Shawn Ryan?

  How are you going to find the right people to surround yourself with when you get in there? I mean, we know Trump had a hell of a time with that.

• 32:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, so look, I mean, first of all, I want to say, I think Trump was an excellent president. I think that the fact that there's a bunch of people that would rather see me bashing the guy who I think was probably the best president of the 21st century, definitely the best president of the 21st century, and whose election over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was probably the single most important political event of my lifetime. No, I'm not going to sit here and bash him. I respect him and his legacy, and I think we got to carry that forward. But I will also learn from the areas where he fell short. That's what I'll say, is maybe if I was in his position back in 2016, I would have done the same thing. But this isn't about me or him, it's about the country, right? And so, building on that foundation, one of the things we have to learn is that it's not a one-man job in the end.

• 32:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You're going to need people who you trust around you. And some of this is just a question of time, right? I mean, we're worried about winning an election, you're just not going to have the time to get started on the job, and the first year is where most of the work actually gets done. And I think this is one of the big disappointments and the momentum stoppers of Trump. I mean, the top one was the fact that his presidency was beset by a false basis impeachment witch hunt that they went on on a made-up Russia collusion hoax. But the second thing that was a little bit of an own goal was the air we took out of the balloon when President Trump failed to secure the number-one legislative victory he promised on the campaign trail, which was to repeal and replace Obamacare because

• 33:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Congress refused to do it. A Republican controlled Congress and Senate. And so that took a little bit of the wind out of the sails. And I think he just didn't have the right people around him driving that through. I think it was a failure of execution of the people who reported into him. So that's a long way of saying we're already starting.

• 33:49Shawn Ryan?

  You're already identifying people.

• 33:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Absolutely. So I spent the first three months, there's a big team that worked on this for us, identifying, first of all, the federal judges, because those, when we get into office, we can't waste time on that. We got to get those judicial appointments right all the way through, especially coming off the heels of a Biden administration that rolled back some of the good that happened, much of the good that happened on the appeals courts and the district courts under Trump. So we're already ready to go with that. I've published my list of appellate court nominees, of prospective Supreme Court nominees, and so we're already rolling. That train has already left the station. That's out there. Now we're moving to other positions in the federal government. And one of the temptations, Sean, is to focus on the cabinet level positions, because that's what will get headlines during a campaign. And let's

• 34:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  be honest, we have a campaign yet to win, right? But if we're really also focusing on the actual substance, the more important positions are positions like the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, the HR department of the executive branch, the Office of Management and Budget, OMB. It's like the CFO of the executive branch, the CFO of the government. These are positions that don't grab headlines. But if you're talking about ultimately dismantling the administrative state, and that's what I'm going in to do, the plumbing is what matters. And the people in those positions, Sean, and those positions too, for me, are

• 35:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  going to have to be bulldogs that are unidirectionally implementing my vision for reducing the federal employee headcount by over 75%, rescinding most federal regulations, which I believe are unconstitutional because they didn't go through Congress. And I think this is also one of the areas where I can learn from the Trump experience, where he put people in those roles who ended up being ambassadors for the deep state back to the president and explaining all the reasons why you couldn't do things. In the OPM and OMB roles, no. I want bulldogs, people who are my ambassador to the administrative state and will see this through and stop at nothing and break walls and break glass until they get the thing done.

• 35:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so, a lot of those people, I think, will be, in those kind of positions, will be fiercely anti-government, even libertarian oriented in their, in their orientation, not really coming from the traditional Republican Party ranks. And then, when it comes to the cabinet positions, sure, we're gonna need people in, you know, the Secretary of State, who is a realist when it comes to foreign policy rather than a neocon, and people whose policy objectives align with mine. But where I'm focused first is on the plumbing positions. The other thing we're doing right now, actually, this is the first time I'm sharing this in public, but might as well, I mean, I think the public deserves to know, is we have a

• 36:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  sort of a closet exercise in our own campaign, where we are setting up a plan to cut 75% of those federal employees. I want 50% of them cut by the end of year one. That is a monumental undertaking to get this right. And so, we're not gonna be able to interview each of those people, let alone make the good judgments about who's on which side. So I'm working with a team of people from the business world, from the world of, from the investment world, from the venture capital world, from the world of psychology, from the world of organizational behavior, and also with experience in government, to put together large-scale screening tests, so, on multiple attributes, not just competence,

• 37:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  but even more importantly, psychological attributes, work ethic attributes, perspectives on the Constitution, restraint of someone who believes whether or not they should be more restrained, or whether or not they should be more expansive in the roles that they carry out in the federal government. By about February of next year, I think we will be in a position to put out our screening filter, and then by March 1 next year, we're already gonna have that team in motion, ready to hit the ground running when I take over by the following January, January 20th, 2025. That's not the start line. We have a running start to that start line. And I think that that's what it's going to take to be able to see this through and get that job done.

• 38:03Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that was actually, my next question is, if you have an estimation on how long it would take to complete this? Sounds like the majority of it would be done in year one?

• 38:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes. And I think, I think the reality is, I mean, history teaches this to us, by year two... You're bogged down in your legislative priorities. And so this is one of the things that I'm doing a little bit differently than pretty much every president in modern history. Maybe Reagan, you could actually point to as the last president who got this right. Presidents make this mistake all the time, and it's an understandable one. And the way they campaign, you know if they're going to make that mistake based on you seeing how they campaign. Do they campaign on legislative promises? Democrat, Republican, this isn't a partisan thing. Say, here are the laws I will pass. But here's the only little kerfuffle in that.

• 38:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You're working with a 500-plus person body on Capitol Hill to see that through. That is designed to be cumbersome. That is designed to be slow. And I'm not complaining about that. Our founding fathers wanted it to work that way. But that is designed to be a laborious process. I'm looking at it a little bit differently. I do have a legislative agenda, and that's what I want to get to by the end of year one. But year one, for me, the focus is actually getting the things done that I don't need either the permission or forgiveness of Congress for. Running the executive branch of the government. That is where the deep state resides.

• 39:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That is where we can actually, the commander in chief's powers, rest. Why are our US military troops stationed in God knows where, 1.3 million serving today, 700,000 more, plus more than that, in reserve? Stationed in places where many of them shouldn't be, all of whom would be proud to actually solve the problem of American deaths on American soil resulting from fentanyl crossing the southern border, for example. So I've said that as commander in chief in month one, I will station the US military along our southern border. Building the wall was not enough. There are cartel-financed tunnels, as we talked about, underneath that wall. And so one of the things that I've said is we'd station the US military there. I've said that I would end the Department of Education, for example, or these other

• 40:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  departments, that the US president can do on existing legal authority that we talked about earlier. I would end a lot of the executive orders that we have inherited as a burden, as an albatross from prior presidents. I actually pushed Trump's people on this. Why didn't you rescind Executive Order 11246? That was the one that Lyndon Johnson signed that requires any government contractor. It's over 20% of the US workforce, working for a government contractor, anybody who does business with the federal government, to adopt race-based quota systems in their hiring. All it takes is a president with a pen, draw a line through that old executive order. That isn't ruling by fiat.

• 41:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That is fixing the rule by fiat that came in the past. Many of these from Biden, from Obama. Some from Bill Clinton as well. Take a line, cross it straight through. Jimmy Carter had some awful ones. Lyndon Johnson had the worst ones of all. That's something that I'm focused on early on in the presidency. Replacement for Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. I get that appointment power in January 2026. Have that lined up with plans of reform of the US Federal Reserve. So that's what'll give us the momentum boost. See, the way I'm thinking about this is the pinprick in the balloon, in Trump's case, was he went all in for repeal and replace Obamacare. Congress did not want to come along. I didn't think he had the right bulldogs in there to drive that process through.

• 41:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But then that deflated the momentum behind what else he could get done. The way I'm looking at it is in reverse. We're going to win this election in a landslide. It has to be a landslide. This cannot be, for so many reasons, this cannot be a 50.1 electoral margin. This has to be a Ronald Reagan 1980s-style moral mandate. And then use that momentum to fix the executive branch of the government. Fix your own house, right? And starting with the White House. And then by year two, we use that momentum to be in a strong position to say, okay, here's the legislative agenda, and we'll work with Congress over that cycle. And that works in our favor because the congressional elections will be coming up the next year. And most of what I'm going to do are going to be policies that will work in favor of those congressmen and senators getting reelected

• 42:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  because I think we're doing the right thing for this country. So that's kind of how I learned from my predecessors to be able to say, you know, I'm not some know-it-all that says I was born with this knowledge and I would have done a better job than them. No. I just believe in studying the experiences of others, learning what we can from it so that we can aspire to be better. And that's the way I look at leading as president.

• 42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it sounds like you got a great plan. One, one more thing I want to talk about with breaking this stuff up. And that we hear a lot of talk about term limits. You know, you get the career politicians, you get the geriatrics in there. They don't know what's going on. Everybody says term limits. Here's my fear, and I'm not as spun up on all of this as you are, obviously. So forgive my ignorance.

• 43:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We have different jobs.

• 43:14Shawn Ryan?

  I know you're also a, an avid two A guy, correct? And so if we amend this and we make it term limits, doesn't that open it up to amend everything? Including two A and all kinds of others?

• 43:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's a great question. So it depends on the method of amendment. So there's two ways to amend the constitution. One is what's called the legislative method, where Congress or the president can propose it through Congress. That it comes from the federal government, that you get, you know, a super majority in Congress. Then it goes to the states for ratification. That'd be my preferred method. It was Reagan's preferred method. The other method is still, it's constitutional. It exists and I recognize the authority to do it. And, and I celebrate the people across the country who have enough civic spirit to try to create one of these as an Article Five convention. A convention of the states where it comes bottom up from the states where they propose that. And in that convention, you're right, you know, you, you, you, you know, you gotta be, be prepared of what comes out.

• 44:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  My view is constitutional amendments are slow and cumbersome. So if there's three categories for where I'm driving my change, I just care about effectiveness. Okay, I'm going in there for eight years. I think about what do I want to do and what do I want to say? When I leave office in January 2033. My older son won't even be in high school by then. We're doing this for their generation. I want them to live in the country that is not the same country, a better one. Than even the one I grew up in, which is the greatest country still known to mankind in human history, if you ask me. Few things I want to say is we have three branches of government again, not four, the administrative states gone. We're not dependent on our enemy for our modern way of life. That's Communist China.

• 45:03Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Our economy is again growing, once again, at the fastest pace in the developed world, as it has for most of our history. It can be again. And that we are once again proud, most of us certainly proud, to be citizens of this nation. That much I know I can deliver. And in order for me to think about the most effective path to get there, between now and January 2033, that's my real destination, not November 2024. I have to go in order of effectiveness. First, what can the president do without lawmaking, using existing legal authority? Next, how do you go through Congress to pass the laws under the Constitution as it exists?

• 45:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And then third, look at what amendments we might want to make to the Constitution itself. And the legislative method of doing it doesn't open up the can of worms that you talked about. But you're right, term limits would require, which I do favor, term limits would require an amendment to the Constitution. I favor hard citizenship requirements, like passing that same civics test that an immigrant has to pass, or else, at the very least, serving this country in some capacity for six months. That would require a constitutional amendment. So we're not going first with that. You got to go in the right order. That comes later in the presidency. Now, I do want to say one thing about term limits, because it does get talked about a lot. I'm in favor of it. I think other candidates are too, and it's important.

• 46:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But it goes back to the first point I made to you. The real fact is that the people we might even be term limiting are today, aren't even the ones who are relevant. Right? They're just puppets. And they enjoy being puppets, right? Showing up on cable television at night and then going home and get a, you know, attaboy on your back from your wife and your kids, or your people in your community, whatever. That's a fine job for the people who select that. But they're just frontmen, right, for the real agenda. And so what I actually favor and can implement, without amending the Constitution, without even requiring a law from Congress.

• 47:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Is term limits for the bureaucrats. The people who are running the show. That's where we need fresh lifeblood. So what I've said is, I, as the leader of the executive branch, if I'm elected, if I, as the leader of the executive branch, cannot work for the taxpayer and collect a paycheck for more than eight years, which I think is a good thing, then neither should any of those federal bureaucrats reporting into me either. Forget the civil service protections. It's an eight-year norm for most positions. Are there going to be some exceptions? Fine. But the norm, our HR policy, the norm, is that it's eight years. No more than eight consecutive years working in that position.

• 47:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That is how you suck the lifeblood out of the deep state. Send people back to find honest work in the private sector. How you create a culture of service for people actually serve in that role too. Now, I think we only need 25% of the employees that we actually have there, so that's a lot smaller number of roles to fill. Anyway, people say, "How will you fill all those roles?" Well, here's the answer. We're only going to have a quarter of those roles left in the first place. But that is how you drive generational change. So what's the legal authority? Well, there's a little used US statute, 5 U.S.C. 3302. It gives the US president sole authority to set the regulations governing the Office of Personnel Management, the HR department.

• 48:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So again, in corporate America today, and it's funny how these parallels exist in the private sector, you might think, if you're an employee working at a giant corporation, that the CEO has no say, and it's the head of HR that actually determines what your hiring policies are. But the way it's really supposed to work, and the way it works on the books, is that the head of HR still reports into the CEO. Well, our executive branch actually works the same way, if you read the law, right? OPM still reports into the US president. Yes, OPM has its own regulations, the Office of Personnel Management, but 5 U.S.C. 3302 gives the US president sole authority to set those regulations.

• 49:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so Sean, I think that's why it takes

• 49:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  a unique combination, takes an outsider, somebody who has been a CEO, who has not grown up within the government, but also someone who has a constitutional scholar level understanding of the US Constitution and the laws of this country. And those two things don't usually go together, right? One, one type tends to be academic, they don't get things done. The other time type, you know, and I put in a complimentary fashion, a guy like Trump in this category versus professional politicians, break glass, get things done, but may not have a native understanding of the laws and the Constitution first. Personally, I have to rely on advisors. We have a moment where you cannot depend on relying on the advisor class because the advisor class will tell me no for the same reasons they told Trump no.

• 50:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Here's one difference though, and I give Trump a lot of credit for this. Is that the current Supreme Court, which he constituted and gave us, agrees six to three with my understanding of everything I've just told you. So will we get sued? You're darn right, we will. But that actually takes it to the Supreme Court, which then codifies everything that we're talking about here into judicial precedent.

• 50:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 50:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Which means the next president who comes after me won't have his hands tied in the same ways that my hands were tied and even more so, the ways that Trump's hands were tied. That is how we drive change on the time scale of history.

• 50:44Shawn Ryan?

  So you have a, you have a real plan here. That was the, that's the best plan I've heard. Actually, I don't, everybody else just says they're gonna do it.

• 50:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Shawn Ryan?

  But I've, I've not heard a real plan by anybody. So.

• 50:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, I'm grateful for forums like this rather than a three minute hit on cable television because in that or 30 second ad on television that you pay for and plant across the country because in that forum, you know,

• 51:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's a two dimensional TV screen and, and that's all we have. And the truth is,

• 51:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  There's only two things that allow an outsider like me to make this possible right now. If this was a traditional media landscape where everybody in the country voted in the primary on the same day, forget about it, I wouldn't even bother. There's no chance an outsider like me can come in. It's about who has the most super PAC money that can put up ads in 30-second and 60-second formats on television to raise name ID and then, by the way, networks reward the people who buy ads from them, and that's exactly how the ballgame would be played. But the two things that are different is Iowa, New Hampshire, these states go. First, I've been there more than any other candidate. People in those states are able to meet you, get a three-dimensional feel of who's real and who's not by being in the room.

• 52:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But the other big change is frankly, people like you doing what you are, right? This is direct-to-voter, direct-to-viewer conversations of a form that you don't have in traditional linear cable media. And those two things are what make it possible, and I believe likely, that we'll succeed in not only winning the nomination and the presidency, but hopefully, hopefully succeed in leading the national revival of those 1776 principles that we have long forgotten.

• 52:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'd like to commend you for doing it. I was gonna wait till the end to do that, but you know, I've had another candidate on. He was supposed to fly up here, turned into a 15-minute Zoom call, which was just a bunch of soundbites. And, you know, and it's gonna take somebody like you that's gonna get out amongst the people and not do the traditional five-minute news hit, you know, scripted, scripted answers. And it shows you're not too good to be amongst the people. And I really appreciate that, and I think a lot of people really appreciate that.

• 53:06Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thank you, man. One thing I'm trying to do in this process is I'll just lift the curtain, how the sausage is made. You don't know funny reason Kamala Harris was in similar situation too is... A lot of times when candidates don't want to come in person and do a sit down, and it's the same political consultants, right? They're like, they're like the equivalent of the permanent deep state, but in the campaign world.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 53:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Right? I mean, it's, the candidates come and go, but those guys are here for good. The little trick they play is, I'm not making this up, is when someone's doing an interview virtually, they're doing it usually facing a camera where there's a teleprompter in front of them. And they have people who are putting up the themes to hit as their talkers, as they call them, talkers, talking points, to be able to actually flash them such that it looks like they're looking at you on the screen. They're literally looking at words that remind them. And so it's just, it's just a tactic, again, in modern politics where everything you can to hide from the truth, that's the way the game is designed to be played.

• 54:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And my view is that if you're not willing to sit across the table from a podcaster, NBC News, a 22-year-old on a college campus, you're probably unfit to sit across the table from Xi Jinping. And so I'm trying to practice what we preach, but I'm grateful for folks like you as well.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Because the traditional media landscape has not been this country any great service in the last 10 years.

• 54:38Speaker 00

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• 55:07Speaker 01

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• 55:37Shawn Ryan?

  If you can't trust yourself to think on your feet in a long-form conversation, you got no business being in the White House.

• 55:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 55:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's just the way it is. But, let's, um, you know, I haven't heard much about your background. Sure. And so I'd like to cover that on this channel. And, um, so let's just start with your childhood. Where'd you grow up?

• 55:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio.

• 55:56Shawn Ryan?

  First-generation American.

• 55:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes. My parents are both immigrants. They came to this country with almost no money a little over 40 years ago. And they came with a work ethic and they came with a desire to get an education. And, uh, my mom was a geriatric psychiatrist. She took care of patients with Alzheimer's disease in nursing homes in southwest Ohio. My dad worked at the GE plant in Evendale, Ohio, under Jack Welch's tenure at GE, which was interesting as a time to go through cycles of job security when we were growing up. But, uh, but anyway, they, they, they lived their version of the American dream and they, most importantly, gave my brother and I the foundation for us to live ours. And so each of us went on to found successful companies that helped a lot of people in this

• 56:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  country. And now I've got two sons of my own and, uh, you know, I hope we can create that same American dream for them.

• 56:49Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. What, what did you like to do when you were growing up? What were your hobbies?

• 56:53Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I actually ended up, I, I liked sports a lot, uh, but I ended up focusing on being a tennis player because, so anyway, those layoffs at GE, uh, they came hard when I was in middle school. So when I was about fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, my dad ended up keeping his job by being able to go to night school in law school because GE needed patent attorneys, people who were lawyers, but also had some training as engineers. And so he went to night school for those four years and we were doing all the sports, my brother and I, soccer, basketball, you know, tennis, et cetera. But my mom needed one place where we could both be in the same place at the same time when she had both kids on her hands. And so that got us both into tennis because that was the place where you wouldn't have

• 57:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  two different soccer games in two different locations. And that actually worked out really well where, you know, I ended up focusing on something that I became pretty passionate about. Worked out even better for my brother because he's younger than me. And so he got better than I did by practicing against his older brother and playing with older kids along the way because my mom needed us in one spot. And so he ended up being one of the top players in the country. I was never quite that good, but I got competitive enough and, uh, still keep it up to this day. I was a pianist as well. We had a piano teacher who came home. She's probably one of the bigger influences on even some of my thinking. Really? As it, it was early, but she planted some seeds as it related to the, probably what became my political perspectives today, actually.

• 58:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  What, what was one of those seeds? Well, she gave me actually, um, so, so it was actually a funny story that led up to it. So she was, she was pretty strict, right? Like we would fear her coming if we had not practiced that week, which was many weeks, it turned out. And so the one thing that would somehow that we discovered would throw her off her tilt is, yeah, it shows this is, you know, Bill Clinton's impeachment and all of that, you know, back in the 1990s. And so this was like all the talk everywhere. So if we brought something up relating to Bill Clinton, or let alone Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, we know that like of the 30 minutes, we would buy ourselves some time where her anger at us for not practicing could be channeled a little bit towards an even bigger bad guy. And so, and so we would,

• 59:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  we would, I mean, like on a bad week, we would know that, oh, did you watch, you know, see what Ken Starr did the other day? Or, you know, and, and so that would, that would send her at least on track. I would listen to her. She had interesting thoughts on this stuff, but most importantly, it was to avoid the wrath of our not having actually practiced, which we feared deeply. And, you know, it turned out though, we thought we were tricking her, but she's like, I know what you're, later she came back one day with a book and she says, I know what you're doing. I know exactly what you're doing. You did practice this week and I brought something for you. And so she brought a book. It was Ronald Reagan's biography. And she was like, here's what you get. Read it. And now we're going to talk about the piano, but you want to talk about politics, read this. And that actually had

• 59:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  an impact on me. It, you know, I mean, you're reading it as a young person in, in middle school, maybe early high school.

• 59:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And you know, the seeds get planted somewhere in there. And you know, later, you know, in my college days, I certainly was libertarian before I became conservative. I still have pretty deeply rooted libertarian instincts. But I'm definitely a conservative today, but yeah, I think a lot about her, actually.

• 1:00:15Shawn Ryan?

  What, what, um, I mean, your parents, from what I've read, they lean left.

• 1:00:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  My, my mom doesn't, she's, uh, she leans in a pretty similar direction to me. My dad has, he wouldn't call himself left, but he has definitely, uh, the other side of me on many issues, which is great because we have open debates about it at the dinner table. Even when he was going to law school, actually, so some of those nights, so my mom would take us for the tennis, but sometimes we'd have to divide, they'd have to divide and conquer a little bit. And so my mom would have my brother, I actually would often go with my dad to those law classes at night. And I would sit in the back of the class. And then when we'd be coming back, you know, he'd be railing against Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, which actually part of what probably informed my views too. So I would, you know, take the other side of my dad and we would, you know, have debates.

• 1:01:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And it was probably good for me in sixth or seventh grade. Most of the other kids probably didn't know who Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia was. And I was sitting in the back of law class with my dad. So we would have 45 minutes on a drive back to, to talk about it. And so, uh, anyway, he, yes, the, the fact of he and I having different views goes back, I think, a long time. And in some ways I might've even gotten my different views from actually wanting to be contrarian against my dad growing up.

• 1:01:32Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 1:01:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  What was it that turned you from libertarian into conservative?

• 1:01:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I realized that I cared more about issue, I, I, what should I say? I cared about more issues than the narrow set of issues that libertarians care about. Right? So there's more to me than the first thing, first step for me was there's more to me than the libertarian in me. I was, I was a libertarian rapper in college. Like this is, I was, I enjoyed exercising ideas through, we'd go to like freestyles and open mic.

• 1:02:07Shawn Ryan?

  You were a rapper.

• 1:02:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I was a, I was a mediocre rapper.

• 1:02:10Shawn Ryan?

  Oh my.

• 1:02:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  A libertarian with a libertarian orientation. But I realized that, okay, libertarianism is all about the relationship between the state and the individual. Okay. And that's really important. Get the state the heck out of my hair. That's the way I feel about it. I continue to feel about it to this day.

• 1:02:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But there are still the deeper questions of what do we do in that now free world, that world that's free of state intervention, what then? And I think those are really important questions that relate to discovering who am I? Who is my family? What does that mean to me? What is true? What is God? Am I part of something bigger than myself? How does that relate to the culture that I create, both as a father, as an individual, and yes, even as a citizen? And I think those are important questions for a well-flourishing society that go beyond just the relationship between the government and the individual. And I care deeply about those questions.

• 1:03:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so that's what led me to say, okay, I'm more than just a libertarian. And then I started to shed the label a little bit even more when, frankly, I became disappointed, disillusioned a little bit, when I see other self-professed libertarians not really even standing up for the hard positions that they're committed to with their views. Uh huh. I could give you one example that's relevant to some of the books I've written. So in Woke, Inc., the first book that I wrote, one of the ideas that I threw out there was to say that if we're gonna have protected classes on the basis of race, and gender, and sexual orientation, and religion, and national origin, to say you can't fire people

• 1:03:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  for these criteria, well, then I think we should, if we're gonna have them at all, we should add political expression to that list. To say that if you can't fire somebody for being black, or gay, or Muslim, or white, or Jewish, or Christian, or Hindu, or whatever, that you should not be able to fire them for being an outspoken conservative, or an outspoken liberal, for that matter either. We should apply that standard even handedly. And the critiques I got were from libertarians, who say that, self-professed libertarians at least, saying, no, no, that's intervention in the free market. The market should sort this out, that if these businesses are firing these great conservatives over here, then that's a business opportunity for these other businesses over there to hire them instead.

• 1:04:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And that we should not want to burden businesses with regulations deciding who they can and cannot fire, or associate themselves with. At my core, I'm actually sympathetic to that, but the thing that's disappointing to me is that you can't have it both ways, actually. And in fact... It was the intervention in the market by creating the protected classes, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on. Those protected classes are actually what created the viewpoint discrimination we see in the private sector. People say, "What do you mean?" Well, here's how it worked. Those civil rights laws were passed. And then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,

• 1:05:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  which is none other than the alphabet soup of the deep state, interprets those statutes to then say, and they tell companies, and I've been a CEO, right? Any CEO who goes through HR training understands this, that you cannot create, now, you can not only not only not discriminate based on those attributes, which is what the civil rights laws say, but now, per the deep state's interpretation of it, and application of those regulations now to companies, it also means that you cannot create what they call a hostile work environment for those protected classes. Well, how does one create a hostile work environment? Let's talk about it. Real case of a grandmother who wore a red sweater every Friday to work to celebrate veterans and to celebrate our troops.

• 1:06:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And she had a little group that got together on Fridays for lunch at the office to do it. A member of a protected class complained to HR, claiming that that was a microaggression, that that created a hostile work environment. So they talked to the lady and they say, "Hey, you know, we don't want you doing this in the workplace anymore." She didn't like it, but she's, "Okay, fine." She still wears a red sweater to work on Fridays, and then she hangs it on the back of her chair at work. Well, that's still apparently a vestige of the microaggression, at which point they had her remove that. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stands on the side of this being an actual hostile work environment case, okay? So now you're a company that could be liable

• 1:06:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  under the civil rights laws for creating a hostile work environment, which creates the very conditions for viewpoint discrimination in the private sector. So now, where are my libertarian friends on this? They should be saying, "We want to repeal the protected classes. Get rid of the protected classes. Let the free market work." If people want to fire these silly, these silly businesses want to fire good conservatives, or good black people, or good white people, or good Hindu people, or good women.

• 1:07:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's an opportunity for a different business to hire them. And I think that's true, actually. And I don't think we would see that type of systematic discrimination in the workforce, because the market would, I think, mostly correct for it. But none of the libertarians I know had the spine to stand up and say that. They only had the jelly spine to stand up to me to say if I think, say, then, okay, then protect political expression. They said that's a violation of libertarian principles. That's a long answer to your question, but it's actually a pretty important question.

• 1:07:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

• 1:07:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I actually have true libertarian instincts, but I care as well about culture and family. And I believe that the revival of faith, not by the government, but maybe by the government getting out of the way, the revival of faith and family in our country, these are good things. Libertarians don't have views one way or another on that. I do. That's why I'm a conservative. But I'm also disappointed in the libertarians who will say that adding political expression as a protected class is some libertarian violation when they don't say a peep. And they become the lapdogs of the reigning establishment when they don't touch the civil rights statutes, which I absolutely do think did have some bad unintended consequences for this country. And the fact that I'm willing to say that, but the libertarians aren't, says that I'm done with that label.

• 1:08:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I'm going to stand for, I don't even use the word conservative even that much, the pro-American label.

• 1:08:40Shawn Ryan?

  I like that.

• 1:08:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's what I'm leading is a pro-American movement.

• 1:08:43Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about your school. So you got through, you got through high school. You went to Harvard, correct?

• 1:08:49Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, so I went to public schools through eighth grade, went to St. X High School in Cincinnati, St. Xavier. I'm still on the board of St. X. And then I went to Harvard for college, studied biology. I graduated in 2007 with a degree in biology. I thought I was going to be a scientist. That was the track that I was on. I ended up actually getting into the world of biotech investing instead. There was a hedge fund that recruited on Harvard's campus. And these guys were smart. A lot of them were physicists. I tried a summer internship in the world of hedge funds at a different hedge fund. I actually was applying more of my scientific acumen, even the molecular biology and everything else, in evaluating potential investments than I was, you know, pipetting things in the lab.

• 1:09:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so I was more passionate about that and actually had a knack that I discovered, an interest certainly in investing and finding undervalued opportunities. If the crowd's running in that direction, maybe I gotta go in that direction and find opportunity. And to be honest, at the age of 22, I was also hungry to make money, actually. My parents weren't rich. There was some guy named Jack Welch that had all this dominion and power over my dad and his company. Well, my parents wanted me to pursue some steady career track as a doctor, that we had financial security, that we didn't have to face layoffs. My question was, what about, who's that other guy? Right? I think that that's interesting to me. I went to school with kids at Harvard whose parents came from corridors that were totally unknown and unfamiliar to me,

• 1:10:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  that I say, okay, well, if they're able to do it, maybe I should focus on that instead. To tell you the truth, if I was to go back and do it again, I would advise the younger version of myself and also begin to think about maybe civic service a little earlier in my life. But I, just to be totally honest about it, I was ready to win in the system of free market capitalism and use and put to use my knowledge based while doing it and being a scientist. I mean, that's a 20-year career track to make, you know, at best, one drug or one medicine. Now, that's too long of a time horizon. I'm gonna be in my middle ages by then. I'm ready to get started now. It was intellectually stimulating and yeah, I was ready to make some

• 1:10:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  money. And so I joined a hedge fund in New York and did so as a biotech investor. And it turned out I was actually by, you know, some good fortune in my way, but I think I had some skill set for it too, tended to be pretty good at it. So I did start making a good amount of money at a young age, but for me, more than the money was the learning curve. I was learning a lot. And then when my learning curve, I felt like it started to flatten a little bit, even though I was making good money, I said, okay, I am interested in some of these other questions relating to law and justice and political philosophy that I hadn't really fully scratched while I was in college. I was reading stuff in my spare time in the evenings that, you know, are the kinds of things that

• 1:11:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I might have benefited from being a setting that was actually focused on these, on this passion I discovered. And so I told my bosses at the hedge fund that I was gonna leave and take a few years off and go to law school. I had a seat in law school at Yale at that point in time. And so I said, you know, hey, guys, it's been good. I appreciate it. You know, probably want to come back and work here too when I'm done, but I'll see you in a few years. At which point they said, no, no, no, don't leave, don't leave. I said, no, I think I really want to do this. I'm not going to do this any later than now. And they said, you can actually keep your job if you want to manage a portfolio from us on your own time from New Haven. If you want to do that, go for it. Would you be up

• 1:12:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  for that? I said, absolutely. That sounded like a good gig. And so I kept my job, ended up going to law school at the same time for those three years. Glad I did it. They were three fun years, but perhaps most importantly, I, that's where I met my wife. She was my next door neighbor, actually, literally, she was diagonally across from me. And that was probably the most tangible thing that came out of those three years. And it also taught me a lesson.

• 1:12:45Shawn Ryan?

  How long have you guys been married?

• 1:12:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We've been married since 2015. So coming up on eight years, but we've been together since 2011.

• 1:12:51Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:12:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, thank you, man. Two kids in as well.

• 1:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 1:12:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You have kids?

• 1:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  I do. I have a two year old.

• 1:12:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You have a two year old?

• 1:12:57Shawn Ryan?

  And one on the way.

• 1:12:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, one on the way?

• 1:12:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  When are you expecting, if you don't mind me asking?

• 1:13:02Shawn Ryan?

  November.

• 1:13:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  November?

• 1:13:03Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Exciting, man. We, we had our second son last year. And so mine are three and a half and one.

• 1:13:09Shawn Ryan?

  Are they alike?

• 1:13:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They're not alike.

• 1:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:13:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They're not alike.

• 1:13:13Shawn Ryan?

  I'm in trouble.

• 1:13:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I don't think we did anything different. You got a good one so far?

• 1:13:17Shawn Ryan?

  I got a good one.

• 1:13:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Sleeps.

• 1:13:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They're both good. There's different ways of good.

• 1:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about the company that you started then. R O I V A N T. How do you say that?

• 1:13:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Royvent.

• 1:13:30Shawn Ryan?

  Royvent.

• 1:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about that. What prompted that?

• 1:13:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, so it was actually, so I got out of law school. I had the dual job and full-time law school experience. When I'm done with law school, I had a lot of time on my hands because I had gotten used to getting my job done and, you know, a very efficient use of time with the team surrounding me and otherwise. And so I ended up messing around a little bit with my extra time. I, you know, took a stand-up comedy course in New York City, ended up starting to do some shows on the side. I was, I was really wasting my time, actually. I was having fun.

• 1:14:03Shawn Ryan?

  You were, hold on, you were a rapper and then you became a stand-up comic?

• 1:14:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, I did about 10 shows in New York City after I got out of law school while I was a manager, but and there were, and the best part of it was meeting some of the other people who were there because they were serious, right? People who were, who came to New York City to pursue that as their calling, many of whom were more naturally talented than me, though it's amazing what that class did, actually. There's some basic tricks you could use to get to be half decent, even if you're not natively gifted, which I'm not in this department. But that was, one of the things I learned, actually, is you carry around a notebook everywhere you go. And if something irritates the heck out of you, you write it down in that notebook. And usually there's something good there. It irritates you for a reason. Irritation, annoyance is a valuable, a useful emotion.

• 1:14:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so, you know, I think that's one formula for developing good content for stand-up comedy. But it actually, for me, ended up being a good formula for developing an idea to start a company. So all of those biotech companies that I'm meeting with as an investor, there are a lot of things that annoyed the heck out of me about the way those companies ran their businesses. I mean, big pharma and biotech, it's like a bureaucracy, actually. It's a regulated industry by a corrupt agency, the FDA, that makes for a 10-year, multi-billion-dollar process of developing a new medicine, far more inefficient and bureaucratic than it needs to be. It's also a government-created monopoly system through the patent system that it just creates an industry that behaves like a government, and that's pretty irritating when it happens. But I also spotted an opportunity as a consequence of that.

• 1:15:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so it turns out that these people in big pharma, these scientists, they don't make really any serious money if they're the ones who develop a successful drug. It's the executive ranks and the shareholders who benefit from it. But if they take a risk and they fail, Then they're punished for it. Unless it's the same risk that every other pharma company takes and everybody else fails, then you're with the pack. But if you take a risk that other people aren't willing to take and you fail, then you're a pariah and you might lose your job as a consequence. And you don't bear the financial upside of it anyway. So you have a bunch of people who have an incentive to go slowly. They don't care about getting to the answers quickly. And by the way, even if they did get there quickly, they're not benefiting if they succeed, but they do face the downside if they fail.

• 1:16:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So that creates a couple of opportunities. One opportunity is there's a range of drugs and they move like herds. It's like a pack mentality in Big Pharma. Okay. And so they decide, okay, this is the hot area. But then they all decide, okay, something else in the hot area, they all move as a pack. It's almost softly coordinated. And the FDA aids in this too, because the FDA decides what areas they're going to make easier versus harder from a regulatory perspective. It's corrupt. But that leaves, or at least it did when I started the company, I think it still does today, opportunities to develop medicines that they then leave behind as they, as the battleships really change course. There's really a lot of opportunities still hanging in the wake of that battleship.

• 1:16:59Speaker 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 like 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.

• 1:17:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So what I said is, okay, we can develop some of those drugs that they just dropped in the early or mid stages of the process. Pick up the ones that are valuable. You don't know which ones are going to work for sure, but you can use a data-driven lens to figure out which ones have a good shot. Build a portfolio of those. Some of them are going to work, some of them are going to fail. But if enough of them work, that's the basis for building a billion-dollar company. So when I presented that plan to people, people laughed at that. They say, well, why would these pharma companies leave these things behind if they have real promise? Well, a few years in, it was a multi-billion dollar company. And it was a company that now has developed drugs, five of which that I personally worked on are FDA-approved products today. One is a life-saving therapy in kids.

• 1:18:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Twenty of them are born a year, die of a genetic disease, where 100% of them die by the age of three.

• 1:18:17Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:18:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We worked on a therapy, it's now FDA-approved. A majority of those kids live lives of normal duration. Another one's for prostate cancer, another for women's health conditions that pharma abandoned. They talk a lot about diversity in their hiring ranks. Well, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, a lot of women's health conditions that were ignored. We developed medicines that are FDA-approved today. So that was my, that was my career. Oh, and by the way, the unique feature of doing this was a business model where we said, if those scientists then come, or drug developers from those pharma companies come to us, and they're working on the project, if that project succeeds, they get uncapped upside in it. So many of the people who came and worked in units of my company, they're now doing way better. They did extraordinarily life-changing wealth creation for them that they would have never

• 1:19:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  had in Big Pharma. And that was the business model for Roivant, which I led as CEO for seven years.

• 1:19:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 1:19:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Pharma hated me for it.

• 1:19:11Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet they did.

• 1:19:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They still do to this day, actually.

• 1:19:14Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about Big Pharma.

• 1:19:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I've heard that Big Pharma is the, the world's biggest lobbying organization.

• 1:19:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think that's accurate.

• 1:19:24Shawn Ryan?

  How much of the government do they control?

• 1:19:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They only control a portion of the government they need to control, which is the FDA, which is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, and they're pretty effective at controlling it, actually. So, a lot of the regulatory hurdle for developing a new medicine, that actually helps Big Pharma, because it makes it harder for a competitor to scale that same cost of capital. Simple story. So, just think about the hypocrisy underlying this. You see what happened with the COVID vaccines, right? The same FDA that says you have to take 10 years to develop a new medicine or a vaccine, spend billions of dollars.

• 1:20:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So much so, that not only are we gonna not say it's safe, we won't even give an individual the opportunity to, in their own free spirit, with full information, try it. You don't even have the right to try it if it hasn't been through 10 years of testing. We, the government, will not give you that choice. Is the same government that then says, "Oh, but here's a vaccine that makes it through in less than one year, and you don't have the choice not to take it, your only choice is to take it." You can't believe those things at the same time. That here's a medicine that's been through five years of testing, and you don't have the choice to take it even if you want to. Is the same government that says that here's something that sailed through in less than

• 1:20:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  one year, and you have no choice but not to take it? You can't believe those two things at the same time. That's the product of hypocritical lobbying. That's the answer. There you have it right there. Is Big Pharma wins on both sides of that trade? On one hand, they win from it having to take that much longer, because at least keeps the competition out for the normal process, but under circumstances where they're gonna stand to benefit from it, will get a fast-track process to say not only do you get to develop it at the public taxpayer's expense, by the way, funding the entire process, but mandates to have to take what they developed. That's corrupt. That's broken. That's why I favor a dramatic, drastic gutting of the FDA.

• 1:21:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's something that even, you know, my time in industry, here's what they would say. I was, I had views that were critical of the FDA, but I had to keep them to myself because of the thing they told me, and I was running a company, right? My job was not being a public figure or spokesman. It was to be the CEO of a successful company that I was leading, thousands of people, jobs created behind, actually, the medicines we're developing. I can't just leave them hanging out to dry because I say something bad about the FDA. There's an old industry adage in pharma, quiet. Everybody in pharma knows this adage to be true. They say FDA never forgets. So if you say something about the FDA, they will make it hell for you. You will have hell to pay for it. And it was funny, actually, even when I went to law school,

• 1:22:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, this is after years of being a biotech investor. It was like an eye-opening experience for me to say that, wait, the FDA is actually bound by law. That was a revelation to me. If somebody's working in the industry, people in the pharma industry aren't taught to think that way. They're, whoa, the FDA is thought to be God. But the fact that they're bound by law, that's like a novel notion for most people who work in the interstices of this industry. And so that's the way it works. What you think of as some mid-level government bureaucrat, whose name you'll never know and never care to know, this guy's like a king when it comes to the pharma industry. And what does he want? He gets the job on the way out, a lucrative job on the other side. So that's the way this works. It is a corrupt game. And you know what?

• 1:23:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Now, I'm not CEO of that company. I'm a free citizen, speaking freely. I'm not holding back. But I understand this deeply. And in some ways, it's personal to me. It is a personal sense of mission to make sure that that administrative state that I've stared eye to eye, now it's time to expose to the rest of the public how that game is actually played. And it isn't pretty, is the answer.

• 1:23:26Shawn Ryan?

  Since we're on the topic of privatized companies controlling the government, I'd like to get into BlackRock. You have some great insight on that. We're seeing this woke LGBTQ+. I mean, it's just being crammed down everyone's throat.

• 1:23:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Every company in America.

• 1:23:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, even the gay community. A lot of the gay communities, they're angry. They don't like this. They don't want this push. Why? So it sounds like it's all coming from BlackRock because they own, what, 80% of the companies? Or the majority shares of 80% of the companies on the S and P?

• 1:24:04Shawn Ryan?

  Why are they pushing this?

• 1:24:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So it's BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, Invesco, you go down the list. But it's like an ESG cartel in this country. Okay, so here's the way this works. And so I've gone deep on this issue. So if I'm going into too much depth or detail that's boring, just cut me off and we can move on. But this is a, this is my mission for the last three years before running for president. This is what I did, okay, is fight this stuff. Two of my books are about this. And the most recent company I founded, Strive, was about fighting against this by offering an alternative. So what happens is the largest asset managers in the world, just take the three biggest

• 1:24:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  ones, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, they're using 20-plus trillion dollars of our money. And when I say our money, it literally means our money, most people's money, without them knowing it. It's happened to me. It's happened to probably most retirees. Their own money is invested in funds managed by these passive fund managers, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, that are using that capital to vote for policies and advocate for policies in corporate America's boardrooms that most Americans, including the owners of capital, do not agree with and which do not advance their best financial interests. I'll give you examples.

• 1:25:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Voting for racial equity audits at companies like Apple and Home Depot. Scope three emissions caps and climate plans at companies like Chevron and Exxon. These are not policies that advance the success of those companies. These are policies that advance a one-sided progressive agenda. And the dirty little secret is they're not using somebody else's or their money to do it. They're using our money to do it. It is happening every day in this country. It is the largest aggregation of capital in private hands in human history, and they're using it to advance one-sided political agendas that Congress could not pass through the front door. This is a large-scale violation of fiduciary duty, in my opinion.

• 1:26:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It is a large-scale antitrust, anti-competitive violation because these three firms are the largest, really relevant shareholders that vote shares at Microsoft and Apple, at Disney and Paramount Pictures, at Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

• 1:26:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You go down the list, you're taught that you have a free market economy. Well, when both sides of the competition are effectively controlled by the same set of actors, that's not competition, that's an oligopoly. Especially when it comes to, it's not oligopoly on products, they're still competing on products. But it's a monopoly on ideas, environmental and social agendas. So now back to your question, why are they doing it? Answer. Their business model is to charge fees on how many assets they manage. Okay? And the biggest people directing assets, dollars to BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard are institutions like CalPERS, pension funds.

• 1:27:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The California State Pension Fund or the New York State Pension Fund. And what those government actors have said, these are government actors now, is to say that we won't let you manage the money of this pension fund. Now, the individual pensioners in California's pension system, I bet, don't know this. But that you don't get to manage our money as BlackRock unless you adopt these racial and gender ideologies, and that you vote shares accordingly. Oh, and that's not just with California's money, unless you do it with all of the money that you manage. That's the dirty little secrets. And my most recent book, Capitalist Punishment, is all about this, Woke Ink. My first book touches on it more lightly. And this is a scam.

• 1:27:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, this is the largest scale breach of trust. I would call it, go so far as to call it a form of financial fraud in the 21st century.

• 1:28:03Shawn Ryan?

  Let me dumb it down for me. So this is the, this is our elected officials.

• 1:28:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm just gonna say something really quickly. It is hard to dumb it down.

• 1:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And the reason it's hard to dumb it down is it is designed to be complicated for a reason. It is designed to be complicated to hide it from you. It is designed to sound boring to hide it from you. So the complexity is on purpose, but, but I will try to be simpler on it.

• 1:28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Let me, let me, the way I understand it is you have elected officials in California. Who are telling BlackRock that they will not allow them to manage the pension funds from the state of California unless they adopt this woke agenda.

• 1:28:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  As they vote their shares.

• 1:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  Through all of the states.

• 1:28:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes.

• 1:28:43Shawn Ryan?

  So they have to manage all of the pension funds in the same manner.

• 1:28:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They have to vote the shares. They have to vote the shares and speak as a shareholder in the boardrooms in the same manner. That's right. Because when BlackRock is buying shares in Pepsi, or in Disney, or in Target, or in Nike, they speak with one voice, right? They don't speak with California's voice, and then Ohio's voice, and then Iowa's voice. No, they're speaking with one voice. So they're speaking on behalf of the voice that the biggest dog in their client base, CalPERS, is pushing them around to do. And it's not just CalPERS, it's the state of New York, it's European pension funds, it's Canadian pension funds, right? That's exactly what's driving the invisible hand of the market? No. It is the invisible hand of left-wing government. So that's the dirty little secret.

• 1:29:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So many Republicans who talk about this issue, again, they say sloppy things, right? They're investing in woke companies. That's not the problem. The problem is they're investing in all companies, but causing all companies to have to adopt these policies, right? That's the real problem. And so I told you about how I challenged and stood up to Big Pharma. I stood up to this ESG industrial complex, again, as an entrepreneur. I founded a company called Strive. People say, "Oh, are you then going to just invest in the good companies and not in the woke ones?" No, guys, that's not the way it works. These are index funds, and so that BlackRock and states and Vanguard launched. So Strive launched index funds, whose purpose was to offer the same kinds of index funds

• 1:30:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  that the BlackRocks and Vanguard's of the world do, but with a key difference: to vote shares and to speak as a shareholder with a different voice in those boardrooms, to give those CEOs air cover, to say that not all shareholders are demanding this, to say that, "Here's the message to you guys, corporate America: as a shareholder..." Focus exclusively on your products and services for profit to maximize value for your shareholders. Period. That's it. And that's a different voice. So, once Strive came onto the scene, then BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard started to have to get on their back foot. Right? That's what, that's how you drive change in this country is not just through government, it is through competition. And so, that was my career, right?

• 1:30:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Driving change, you know, calling Big Pharma's bluff, driving behavioral change there, capturing opportunities. Same thing with Strive, bring an alternative to BlackRock. I believe in the same thing in tech. I was one of the first private investors in Rumble, which is challenging YouTube. I believe in driving change through the market as an entrepreneur, but we're not going to be able to really do this until we fix the head of the snake, which is the deep state in the federal government itself, which is what sends me on this mission I'm on now. And the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be doing this as an entrepreneur, but I can't get that job done, that job done, through the private sector, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing today.

• 1:31:39Shawn Ryan?

  When, when did you start Strive?

• 1:31:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I started Strive, uh, it feels like an eternity ago, but it was last year, actually.

• 1:31:44Shawn Ryan?

  Last year? How much money under management?

• 1:31:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Last January. The first fund only launched in August. It's approaching a billion dollars. It's north of 800, maybe, I've tracked recently, maybe 800 plus million dollars, approaching, rapidly approaching a billion. It, it isn't even a year since launching the first fund. The first fund launched late August or so last year. JP Morgan, when it got into the ETF business, took two years to cross a billion dollars. And so, I don't believe in failing at the things I do.

• 1:32:11Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:32:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I believe in success.

• 1:32:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:32:15Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about some of your-

• 1:32:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And by the way, I, I have, it's actually very important. I think it relates to, I think it's very hard, for example, to run for president as a governor, to wear two hats, or as a senator, right? Because then you have multiple objectives. I don't believe in that. So, I stepped down from the boards in my positions at Royvent, at Strive, at Chapter, another company that's doing great, and that I was successful in co-founding and sat on the board on. I don't want to be thinking about that and wearing two hats as I'm running for president. And so that wasn't required of me, but I made the choice to step down from my board positions to focus exclusively on the mission of serving the people of this country as the duly elected president of the United States.

• 1:32:57Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you.

• 1:32:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think it's hard to do that, and I empathize with it. It's a hard position for somebody to be in if they're still, you know, in whatever other position they're in, even in a governor position, right? Are the things you're doing the things that help you win the presidency? Or are they the things that's best for the people you serve in that state? And most of the time, those are going to overlap, but I believe it's, we're all at our best when we have a sole purpose, and that's why this is not my sole purpose.

• 1:33:24Shawn Ryan?

  Let's say Strive continues on this trajectory. How long do you think, how long do you anticipate it would take to start to combat BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street?

• 1:33:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, so the good news is, I think Strive has already had a dramatic, and combined with some of my public commentary and otherwise, a dramatic impact on the behaviors of BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, who have now, ESG is now even a bad word at BlackRock. Now, the reality is they're just making up new words to take its place. Sustainability, conscious capitalism. But Strive's success, I think, was probably the single greatest factor in the United States of America that turned ESG from the dogma. When I started Strive, the reason people told me it wasn't going to succeed is they said, "This stuff's already, the cake is baked, guys. You're a couple of years late to this. There's no way you're going to change that because that's just the due diligence factors

• 1:34:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  and the questionnaires you're going to have to fill out even to get off the ground, to have a client." Well, less than a year in, ESG has then become actually a toxic word, and many of, even BlackRock, is now on their back foot. And so it's already driving change, but in terms of to compete at that scale, that'll take a long time. You know, I believe going faster than most. As I said, JP Morgan, when they got into the ETF business, took two years to cross a billion. Strive's on a faster trajectory, you know, almost reaching that mark. I'm not up to speed in following day to day anymore, but you know, it's call it rapidly approaching a billion dollars within its first year. But there's a capable CEO now running the company. He actually is a guy who I was honored to recruit.

• 1:35:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  He was one of the top portfolio managers at Calpers, actually.

• 1:35:05Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:35:06Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, whose family was a family of public servants and cops who got sick and tired of what he saw over there. He moved his family to Ohio to take the job. And he's now the CEO of Strive and, you know, I have confidence in his ability to take it to the next level. But he's doing that without, you know, my journey here is a different journey that I'm now on. But there are going to be, changing this country is going to require people in the public sector and the private sector as parents, as coaches. It's not going to be someone coming from on high in the White House to do it. And I think that companies from Strive to Rumble to otherwise are going to have to be part of that revival in the economy as well.

• 1:35:43Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any other companies combating this along with Strive?

• 1:35:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Not in the ESG domain that I'm familiar with, not at the scale that Strive is. There's actually, I should, I should say that there's, there's a guy called Andy Puzder, who's actually a good friend of mine, who had started a different type of firm called Second Vote that was, you know, taking a different approach. I think what they were doing was, yeah, I think they were divesting from some of the companies that were behaving more woke from funds that they're offering. It's a different method, is my understanding. And I haven't been tracking this in a while, but Andy's a great guy, really love Andy. And so, you know, I think they haven't reached the scale that Strive has. But I applaud what he's doing, actually, and it's important. And so I predict there will be others that pop up. That's what happens usually when you have early successes.

• 1:36:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But, you know, Second Vote was one of those other efforts which I applaud as well. Actually, they're based, some of their folks are based here in Tennessee. And I think it's going to take more successful actors doing this in the private sector. And I, you know, respect Andy Puzder as a friend, as a friend for doing what he's doing. David Black, one of the people who was behind that. It's going to take other good patriots driving change, not just through government, but through the private sector as well. And, you know, I applaud the people who have the courage to actually step up and make that sacrifice as entrepreneurs.

• 1:37:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I know Andy as well. I'm hoping to get him on here to talk about, but he's got a place here.

• 1:37:06Vivek Ramaswamy?

  He's very knowledgeable about it. He and I are good friends and even though, you know. I started Strive and he was involved in Second Vote. We respect what each other are doing and I wish nothing but success on folks like Andy who want to do this at scale. That's what it's going to take in order to really drive real change for the better in our economy. And I don't think I'm exaggerating when I'm saying this, right? People ask about, well, do you care about woke capitalism or do you care about economic revival? These things are deeply linked, actually. You look at the last 50 years, Europe adopted, right, for the latter half of the 20th century, the multi-stakeholder model, the idea that businesses should focus on social agendas

• 1:37:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  other than products and profit, whereas the US in the latter half of the 20th century adopted the alternative vision. That is a fundamental reason why total stock market returns in the US are way better than that of Europe. We won, they lost. That's the answer. And yet, the bizarre thing is the winning side is now adopting the losing side's philosophy to now give us the next 50 years where we will have stagnation. And so, I think there is a deep relationship between the economic stagnation we've seen in this country and the abandonment of the philosophy of unbridled, unapologetic excellence in our system of free market capitalism that got us this far. That's part of what I think is going to put us on a lower growth trajectory unless we change it.

• 1:38:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so, these issues, I think, are deeply linked, actually.

• 1:38:37Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move on to southern border stuff.

• 1:38:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Sure.

• 1:38:42Shawn Ryan?

  How... I've heard that you're going to consider a military assault on Mexican drug cartels. Is that true?

• 1:38:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't think we're going to have to get there.

• 1:38:52Shawn Ryan?

  You don't?

• 1:38:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  What I've said is that we will use the military to secure our own southern border.

• 1:38:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I believe the top job of the US military, I'll give it to you, part of what's happened in our military, I mean, I know with your experience, you may have unique perspectives on this yourself, and so, I don't mean to be talking at you on this, but I'm sharing with you my perspectives on why I think the military's lost its way, is that it's lost its sense of purpose, actually. Especially at the top, especially starting with the commander in chief, but also the managerial class in the Pentagon. When an institution loses its way, that leaves a void. That's when poison fills the void. Wokeness in the military, that's a symptom of a deeper loss of purpose. Fighting wars that I think have not advanced the national interest of the United States. And so the top job of the US military under my watch is to protect Americans here on

• 1:39:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  American soil, protect the homeland. Number two, deter war. Number three, win wars when necessary. So I go in that order. So I don't want to start some war that's not going to be necessary, but I'm not also going to be on the one-sided receiving end of a war that we refuse to wake up and see. And we are on the receiving end of a one-sided opium war in this country that China's quietly waging on us. China is actually, I'm not making this up, from all places, Wuhan, China, come the synthetic precursors to make synthetic fentanyl in the hands of Mexican drug cartels south of our own southern border. And if you have any doubt about the intentionality of that, ask yourself why there's hundreds of Chinese chemists south of our own southern border, working with those drug cartels, pumping

• 1:40:24Vivek Ramaswamy?

  up fentanyl across our southern border, not marketed even as fentanyl, but lacing it in Percocet and other drugs that people don't know fentanyl's in. That's what's happening in this country. By the way, this is just an aside, but if China can do that, to use fentanyl as an intentional tool as an opium war in the United States now, I don't think it's a far-fetched, at least ask the question, same place that a man-made pandemic originated, of whether the pharmaceutical supply chain could eventually be laced with the same fentanyl as well. I think it's a legitimate question to actually ask, if they're lacing Percocet that's coming in illegally through the southern border, why wouldn't they lace legal Percocet through that, which is the supply chain relies on from China as well?

• 1:41:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I say this as somebody who knows a little something about this industry. As we know, what begins as a conspiracy theory originally becomes a prediction of reality tomorrow, I think we have to be asking these questions. What I've said is that, no, I do not want to be on the side of a one-sided war that's being fought where we refuse to acknowledge it. But I want to be smart about this. Here's how we're going to do it. We will use the military to seize, just to close the holes in the Swiss cheese of a southern border that we now have down there. That's how we actually solve the problem. The wall has not been enough. We have to use the military to seal the border. That, I think, solves the influx of the migrants, the influx of 14,000 people entering this

• 1:41:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  country daily illegally. Fifty thousand deaths, fifty thousand plus deaths, probably more per year resulting from fentanyl illegally crossing that southern border. And then also eliminate the incentives. No federal funding for sanctuary cities. That's disastrous. Not a dime of foreign aid to Mexico or Guatemala or Belize or Nicaragua. I have no patience for it. We're done with it until we have worked with them effectively to close Mexico's own southern border, actually, which is actually where many of those migrants come from.

• 1:42:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think that's even a possibility? Because the cartels are so, I mean, they're intertwined with government now.

• 1:42:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, here's what I will say. You're right, Mexico needs to regain its own sovereignty. So here's the steps I would take. First, seal our own southern border with our military. That I think is solvable. Next is Mexico and these other countries, they're not going to get aid until they actually regain their own sovereignty. Now, it's not, it's not as much of a lost cause as it might seem, right? I mean, Obrador has been a disaster. AMLO, he's the president of Mexico now. His hugs-not-bullets policy, you know, it's been a disaster, as you would predict. You actually had a president who came before him who was actually willing to be tougher on this issue, but we have a presidential election coming up in Mexico, actually in 2024. I'm paying close attention to this.

• 1:43:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Claudia Scheinbaum is the lead candidate. She is from AMLO's party, but she's a different person. And so here's what I plan to do. We'll seal that southern border, we'll close the tap on any aid, and I'm going to have a conversation with Claudia, if she's indeed the duly-elected president, early on in my term, and say, "Listen up. We will help you regain your sovereignty by providing aid for a tiny fraction of what we gave to Ukraine," which, by the way, I'm done with that. We'll talk about ending the Ukraine war, but that's what we need to do. This is a war that does not advance American interests. I will end it. I have a clear vision and plan of how to do it. Okay, we should not be protecting the invasion against somebody else's border somewhere halfway around the world when we have an invasion on our own southern border that we're doing nothing about.

• 1:43:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So for a tiny fraction of that cost, I will tell Claudia, "We will help you. We will do it for a tiny fraction of what we spent in Ukraine. We will help you regain your sovereignty." We're using our military to seal our own border in the meantime. You're not getting a dime of aid from us in the meantime. It is not in your interests to continue this hugs-not-bullets policy. Solve your own problem. But if you don't, and if it's still spilling into our yard, then we will come in and solve it for you. That's the answer. If you have a neighbor, just think about it in your neighborhood, okay? You don't want to go into your neighbor's lawn and shoot the dog that comes in and keeps biting your family members. That's your neighbor's job to take care of.

• 1:44:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But if you have a dog that daily comes over, a rabid dog that's biting your own family members, then you show up when that dog is about to come over, and you shoot it, and you bring it to its end. That's how you solve it. First, you build the fence. Make sure the dog doesn't come over. I will take that step even sooner than shooting the dog. But if that dog is still coming through that fence and biting my family members, yes, I will take over and go over in there with whatever gun of a size needed to get the job done, and put that dog to its end.

• 1:45:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So I refuse to be on the receiving end of a one-sided war, but I don't think we're gonna have to use our military over it, because we will make sure that Mexico solves its own problem. I have full confidence they will. I think Claudia Scheinbaum will have an incentive to regain her sovereignty in a way that AMLO did not have a spine to do. But it's gonna take a president with a spine to see that through, and that's what I'm bringing to the table.

• 1:45:36Shawn Ryan?

  You really think that Mexico can take care of their own problem?

• 1:45:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They can still, with aid. I mean, with a tiny fraction of what we've given. I mean, think about what we've given, you know, this clown in Eastern Europe, really. Can't even account for what we've given him. I mean, Abrams tanks. We're talking about how many javelins we've given this. I mean, this is, for a fraction of what we've armed Zelensky with, yes, I do think it is still possible for Mexico to get this job done.

• 1:46:04Shawn Ryan?

  If they can't, and we do have to send in military to go down there, how do you, have you thought about how you would do that?

• 1:46:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes, it needs to be lit up with intelligence first. So the problem is the NSA has completely abandoned any intelligence operation south of our own border, wasting intelligence resources in the Middle East that I think are a far poorer use of our resources. So if Trump was able to do it to ISIS, that was a far harder challenge. I think my challenge in doing it to the Mexican drug cartels would be much easier than what Trump had to do with ISIS. But the intelligence foundation is key, and I think we don't have that yet. And so while I'm working with Claudia Schonbaum to reach the right conclusion, we'll have intelligence sharing and otherwise, but we're going to get a head start on what we are going to need to do in order to solve that problem.

• 1:46:48Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move on to Ukraine. How do we, I mean, what is even going on here? Is this, is this just a-

• 1:46:56Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They refuse to tell us. The fact that we're voting against even an audit of how much money we've given them tells you how designed this corrupt process is to be corrupt. A lot of American taxpayers don't know this, they should. Our taxpayer money is literally paying the salaries of the Ukrainian government officials right now. So it's not only paying for our own deep state in this country, it's paying for the deep state in Ukraine. This is madness. And so what I've said is I would end the war. I will end the war by doing a deal on terms that will advance our interests. A deal requires everybody to get something out of the trade, that includes Putin. So here's the deal I would do. Freeze the current lines of control. A Korean War-style armistice agreement.

• 1:47:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I will further make a hard commitment that NATO will not and will never admit Ukraine to NATO. But in return, we get something greater. What is that? China and Russia have to end their military alliance. Russia has to pull out of its military partnership with China. That is the single greatest threat we face in this country from a military perspective. Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, has hypersonic missile capabilities ahead of that of the US and China. China has naval capacity, especially in the South China Sea, ahead of the US, and an economy that we depend on for the shoes on our feet or the phones in our pockets, our modern way of life. That is the single greatest threat we face. So in return for that deal, Putin has to exit his military alliance with China.

• 1:48:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'll make him remove the nuclear weapons from Kaliningrad, the little strip bordering Poland, and remove any Russian military presence from the Western Hemisphere. Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, yes, there are Russian troops on the ground. Get them out of the Western Hemisphere. In return, we'll also open up economic relations with Russia. I do believe we're the ones that foolishly bombed the Nord Stream 1 and 2. We will rebuild that. I think we want economic integration of Russia back into Western Europe and even with the West. Then Putin has no reason to be in bed with China. That's how we drive generational change and peace, not just in Ukraine, not just to save the money. But now Russia's not in China's camp, Xi Jinping will have to think twice before going after Taiwan.

• 1:49:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Because Xi Jinping's bet right now is that the US won't want to mess with two different allied nuclear superpowers at the same time. That's what gives him the confidence to go after Taiwan. But if Russia's no longer in his camp, and then we'll talk about, if you want, about how we get India on side as well, but mostly Russia, if we get Russia no longer in his camp, Xi Jinping definitely has to think twice before going after that island nation that's actually increasingly armed. That is how we at once end the war in Ukraine, but also deter China from going after Taiwan without going to war over it. That's the kind of leadership we need, as opposed to a neocon establishment now in both parties.

• 1:49:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And basically, every other candidate in this race on the Republican side other than Trump is a neocon. And basically, every Democrat who's running other than Bernie Sanders, or who's run in recent history other than Bernie Sanders, is also a neocon. It's a neocon consensus that is marching us closer to World War III, which I think is a great risk we face. The risk of World War III and nuclear war involving Russia, it's going up every day and nobody's talking about it. I am deeply worried about this. But I think as US President, I will be in a position to end the madness, to be transparent, to speak the truth, to stop pretending that Ukraine is some bastion of democracy. It's not. And to actually stand it, even if it were. It's not our job to protect it. It's their job to protect themselves. That's the answer.

• 1:50:36Shawn Ryan?

  I love what you're saying. I really do. I don't see, I mean...

• 1:50:42Shawn Ryan?

  You did a live with Elon Musk on Twitter the other day.

• 1:50:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes.

• 1:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  I found that fascinating. Elon said, I can't remember if it was during that live or at some other point, but he was talking about how the US has weaponized its currency. Now we see BRICS coming about, it's gaining a lot of momentum. You know, they want to start their own currency backed by gold, apparently. So with that gaining so much momentum, you know, Brazil, Russia, India.

• 1:51:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  China.

• 1:51:09Shawn Ryan?

  China, South Africa, Argentina's getting involved, Iran, Saudi Arabia. There's a lot of countries that are moving towards this because we put sanctions on countries. We've weaponized our dollar and it's hurt a lot of countries. You know, whether they deserve it or not, I see their point and they're making headway.

• 1:51:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And you know this well, Sean, those sanctions don't even work anymore then, right? Sanctions only work if the nation doesn't have an alternative. Now we're just driving everybody into China's hands.

• 1:51:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yes. So with all the momentum that they're making with BRICS and the new currency, why would they, I mean, why would they stop? I don't understand what would be the incentive to stop.

• 1:51:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's still relatively early, is the good news. And this is why domestic policy and foreign policy go together. I've said that actually the sole job of the US Federal Reserve should be to stabilize the US dollar. I would peg the US dollar to a basket of commodities, gold, silver, nickel, and agricultural and farm commodities. That will ground stability in the US dollar again, which then for many nations will make the appeal of the dollar higher relative to switching over to BRICS. I think that also reopening economic relations with Russia will be a giant leap forward. And Russia still would love economic relations with the West if they could actually trust us. We've given Putin no reason to trust us. We don't trust Putin. But we can trust each other to follow our self-interest.

• 1:52:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think that that's something that makes this far more salvageable than it might seem. But it's going to take a dramatic change in leadership and direction. And just putting another neocon in charge from the Republican Party instead of Biden, claiming the Republicans won, that's not going to do the job. It's going to have to take, like I said, the question in the beginning. Do you want reform or do you want revolution? I think this is a moment for revolution. And we need nothing short of one in order to actually salvage what this country was founded on.

• 1:53:01Shawn Ryan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about the digital dollar. There's a lot of talk about moving into this digital currency, this central bank currency. How is that going to affect us? And do you think that, do you think this is going to happen?

• 1:53:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I do not think it's going to happen if I'm president, and I expect to be president, so it's not going to happen. They're moving, taking steps in that direction, the Fed Now program, taking steps towards the central bank digital currency. That will take years, you know, five plus years to really roll out and implement. I'll put the kibosh on it in January of 2025. And the good news is this is something the next president can and absolutely is able to do. The real threat with the central bank digital currency is that China's doing it for a different reason. Right? The argument here is that China's doing it so we have to keep up with the Joneses or keep up with the Xinping's, as the case may be, and keep a strong dollar. No, it's the opposite. China's doing it because they want to penalize citizens.

• 1:53:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They want to weaponize the currency to say that if you're out of step with what the CCP wants you to do, well, you're going to have the money in your bank account wiped out. And we've seen a move taken from that page, from a play from that playbook, taken from Trudeau in how he dealt with the Canadian truckers. So that's actually something we should be frightened of here at home. And I don't think it makes the dollar more valuable to be digital. I think it makes the dollar more valuable to say that we're the one currency where you can't do that, even as the UK and Canada and other countries turn to a central bank digital currency. And so that's where I'm at on it, is I'm a hardliner against it. I was talking about this issue long before. It was a popular issue. People told me it was boring and you're putting people to sleep. No, I said-

• 1:54:44Shawn Ryan?

  It's not boring anymore.

• 1:54:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's fundamental, right? And so now I'm glad that it's become a little bit part, more part of the conversation, at least in this Republican primary. But you're going to need a president who- Again, who understands this deeply, rather than as a native and taught tongue? Because here's what happens. It's like a, it's like a water balloon. It's like a hydraulic pump system. You squeeze it in one place, it's gonna pop up somewhere else, right? And so this is what frustrates me about many Republican professional politicians, is that they, they know the slogans, or at least they can learn them, like a parrot. But the other side is actually two steps ahead. By the time they've learned the slogan, it's already a new thing. It's not ESG anymore, it's sustainability. It's not CBDC, it's gonna be the next thing.

• 1:55:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so we gotta understand the why, in order to be alert to how that threat's gonna re-present itself.

• 1:55:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. We got about 10 minutes left. I wanna talk about, I wanna end this with the World Economic Forum.

• 1:55:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes.

• 1:55:39Shawn Ryan?

  So, you sued 'em.

• 1:55:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I did.

• 1:55:42Shawn Ryan?

  There is a, there is a growing concern about globalization and the World Economic Forum, they put, they, they, just, the floor's yours. What's going on here with the World Economic Forum?

• 1:55:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, this is the old world, rearing its ugly head again. That vision that said that the people, the citizens of nations cannot be trusted to sort out their differences in a democratic process, or in a constitutional republic. That a small group of elites have to make that decision for the rest of society at large, from the mountaintops of Davos. This is the old worldview. It's what we fought in American Revolution to avoid. And so I've been probably the single greatest advocate against that agenda here in the United States, starting with Woke, Inc., starting with a lot of my scholarship, exposing exactly what they're doing, starting with, then my next book, Capitalist Punishment, and that's why I started Strive, to stand up to the economic agenda. I think I am probably Klaus Schwab's and Larry Fink's worst nightmare, certainly have

• 1:56:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  been over the last several years. One of the things they thought they could do, was perhaps defang me. So a few years ago, they have, they name a bunch of young people, from Elon Musk, to Mark Zuckerberg, to others over the years, who they've named on their list of young global leaders. And it's interesting, because they'll name people in these awards who are somewhat what they perceive as threats. Glenn Beck has been named. Glenn Beck is one of the greatest patriots in this country, who has stood up against this agenda. Elon Musk is on that list, Tulsi Gabbard. So they'll have this bad habit, and so they did it to me. I don't take that lightly. So I believe in civility. I said, "Take my name down." They didn't take it down. I had rejected the award when it was first offered, I was still named on their list.

• 1:57:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And so I said, you know what? I'm actually going to take the step of delivering accountability. I sued them. And most importantly, what we got out of that was the number one thing I asked for going in, not just a public acknowledgement of exactly what happened. And an apology to go with it. It's not about me. It's about the future. A hard commitment not to ever do this to anybody again without their permission. They did it to Elon. They've done it to others. It's not going to happen again, thanks to the lawsuit that I brought. But that's just one small step. Okay? This is a broader battle between the Great Reset. This vision that we have to dissolve the boundaries between the public and the private sector, between nations, to work together towards the global common good.

• 1:58:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  That's the vision of the Great Reset versus what we need on the other side. That is what I am trying to lead here. The Great Uprising. That says absolutely no to that vision. That we, the people, we, the citizens of nations, of this nation, we decide through our self-governance exactly how we live our lives. You will not tell us from abroad. And I think that that's one of the questions that's on the table today in the United States of America. Self-governance and sovereignty itself. As US president, I've said that I will not use a dime of taxpayer resources to fund institutions that are, yes, hostile to our sovereignty.

• 1:58:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The WHO, absolutely on the list. We're not going to fund it anymore. We're done with it. I think there are deep questions about even the continued purpose of our involvement in the UN. I think that we ought to be able to ask that question and ask, how are we advancing American interests? When I can do a deal bilaterally between a nation and ally, I will do that sooner than entering any multilateral arrangements. We have to regain our sovereignty as a nation. And as citizens, we have to regain our power of self-governance over aristocracy. That is why I say this is a 1775 moment in this country. And I think 2024 can be a 1776-style election of reviving those ideals of the American

• 1:59:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Revolution. Do I mean some kind of, in some physical sense? No. I mean it in the sense of reviving those ideals that our country was founded on. And that's frankly, what I'm in this race to deliver. And my whole point in this is I'm not going to try to say something to everybody to please them, say one thing to the donor class, another to, you know, patriots who show up at a rally. No, I don't play that game. I'll say the same thing to everybody. This is who I am. This is what I stand for. And if everybody in this country, at the end of this process, knows exactly who I am and what I stand for, and that's not what they want, I'm at peace with that. Deeply at peace with that. That is fine by me. But we have a machine that's designed to distort that reality.

• 2:00:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And it's gonna be my job to cut through it. If we do, I've done my job. I believe that is what the people of this country will demand that we have in the White House. I don't relish the job of being president. I'm gonna be very honest with you. I really don't. But I'm doing it because it is what I believe God put me here to do, and in this moment in our history. It's not the most important job, but God put us, each of us, here for a purpose. And we have to follow that purpose. And what God's plan is will be revealed, and if the voters of this country don't want that, that's great. I'm at peace with that. But I think it's gonna take somebody coming from the outside, who has a deep understanding

• 2:01:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  of the law and constitutions of this country, and even more importantly, a deep understanding of how to reach the next generation. I'm the youngest person ever running for president as a serious candidate. I'd be the youngest president ever elected if elected. It is gonna take bringing that next generation along with us. This can't be that 50.1 election. It has to be a landslide in order to deliver on the kinds of things I'm talking about here. We need a moral mandate to do it. This is our moment. And frankly, that's what motivates me every day to go from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. as we are seven days a week. And I've put 15-plus million dollars into this campaign to avoid having to ask some

• 2:01:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  mega donor for permission to run, taking a hat in hand, wringing a tin can. It's a broken system. It's corrupt. It's ugly. It's a super PAC primary already.

• 2:01:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But I'm gonna do my part. We're gonna make those sacrifices financially and otherwise. We'll stop at nothing. But, you know, I say if the people of this country do their part and they call me to serve, I will do mine.

• 2:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I like a lot of what I'm hearing. And, um, once again, I just wanna commend you for getting out amongst the people and doing non-traditional media, long-form interviews. You're great on your feet. Got great ideas. I'm, I'm, I'm really proud that, um, that I got you here and, uh, for the long-form interview, and I wish you the best of luck.

• 2:02:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thank you, man. I appreciate it being here, and you should keep doing what you're doing, too. I think it's important, not just with me, but for everyone in this country to know every one of those candidates. They're good people. We have different visions, but they're good people, earnest, in it for the right reasons, too. And as long as the people of this country know the truth without it being filtered through an artificial media echo chamber, I think good things are gonna happen in this country. And I'm, I'm really glad we came down here to do this.

• 2:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  Me, too. I wish you the best of luck.

• 2:03:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Thank you, man.