#169 Vivek Ramaswamy - Making Ohio Tax Free, DeepSeek, DOGE and the Education Crisis

Vivek Ramaswamy is a biotech entrepreneur, author, and political figure from Cincinnati, Ohio. He founded Roivant Sciences in 2014, focusing on innovative pharmaceutical development, and later co-founded Strive Asset Management. He is a prominent political figure, campaigning for the 2024 US Presidency before endorsing Donald Trump. In 2025, Ramaswamy stepped down from his co-leadership role in President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Ramaswamy’s expected run for Ohio governor has reshaped the state’s political landscape, with endorsements from prominent Republicans and a platform centered on tax reforms and reducing government inefficiency. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lumen.me/srs https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner https://ROKA.com | Use Code SRS https://www.armra.com/srs http://helixsleep.com/srs https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at http://betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. Vivek Ramaswamy Links: TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@vivekramaswamy Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vivekgramaswamy/ X - https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivekgramaswamy/ 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.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks. Made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks. Now made with no artificial dyes.

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  Vivek, welcome back for the third time.

• 1:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's good to see you, man.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Good to see you. A lot's happened since.

• 1:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I like this studio because I do a lot of these meetings, or podcasts, or whatever, and it's super hot and you're sweaty. Not with Sean Ryan. You have a similar belief and conviction in air conditioning as I do.

• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So thank you for that.

• 1:31Shawn Ryan?

  I like a nice chill. I like a nice chill, but.

• 1:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Same thing, yeah.

• 1:34Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, yeah, I saw you at the inauguration.

• 1:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:38Shawn Ryan?

  We saw you there. Army-Navy game.

• 1:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We've seen each other a couple times, yep, yep.

• 1:43Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks for getting me in there.

• 1:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, that was fun.

• 1:45Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, but, yeah, so a lot's happened, you know, since, since I saw you last, especially since we interviewed and so, you know.

• 1:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  A lot of good.

• 1:55Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of good stuff to cover today, but. I gotta ask.

• 1:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  Come on, are you running for a governor in Ohio or what's going on here?

• 2:03Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, I gotta wait to formally announce it, but that is the direction I'm headed. So, late February, man, we'll have a big announcement coming.

• 2:10Shawn Ryan?

  I love it. I love it. Um, what, what moved you from, you know, the, I mean, you ran for president.

• 2:16Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  You're gonna run for governor, likely, and so what, what was the shift? Why did you decide to concentrate more on state?

• 2:24Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, look, it's a couple of reasons. I mean, one is if we get the job done, I say we as a movement, but Donald Trump gets the job done over the next couple of years at the federal level, the action shifts to the states. In two to three years, take the Department of Education, dismantle the Department of Education, dismantle a lot of these regulatory agencies. When in doubt, my advice has always been kick it to the states, sort of founding fathers envisioned. We live in a system of federalism, so I'm just looking at where I can have the biggest possible impact. And a lot of the issues that I've been most focused on in substance, not just tearing down the administrative state, but education, for example, that can't be led by the federal government. It has to be led by the states.

• 3:06Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I had a good time, you know, over the last year, helping President Trump in whatever way I could, bringing young people along in the coalition, help him get elected. Started off with Doge, helped get that off the ground. But where I look to where the puck is going, if we get that job done at the federal level, tear down the bureaucracy, downsize the federal government, it's gonna require real leaders at the state level to catch the pieces. And I realized when I'm looking at that, that's a couple of years down the road. I wanted to skate to where I thought the puck was going.

• 3:36Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you say, why do you say it's all moving to the state? I mean, I had, I had a very interesting conversation with Eric Prince quite a while ago on here and...

• 3:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  This is a very smart guy. Yeah.

• 3:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yes. Um, loved talking to Eric. But, but he, he kinda changed my mindset, you know, a lot of people were worried how this election was gonna go.

• 3:57Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:57Shawn Ryan?

  And Eric kinda put it in my head, you know, the day... The states might be even more important than the federal government. And we should be focusing maybe more on on local municipalities and and and and state government rather than federal government because that's what affects your immediate area that you live in. And, you know, it just it really resonated with me. And so Howard, it's, I mean, you're saying it starts with the federal government by basically got.

• 4:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, and what what happened right now is the federal government is doing all the things that it shouldn't be doing while failing to do the few things that it should be doing. What are the few things the federal government should be doing? One key responsibility is protecting the homeland of its nation. The United States of America, the sovereignty of the US, starts even with the physical sovereignty of the US. Basic borders. We have not done basic border control control in this country. We've had more illegal entry at the southern border than we've ever had in our national history. That is a failure of the federal government. We could go on the other failures, too. We are lacking defense systems. We're lacking in cyber defense systems, super E and P defense systems. So the national defense function of actually defending our own homeland, forget meddling

• 5:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  around in other countries, our own homeland, we've already failed to do that. But that's because the federal government is in part focused on doing a bunch of things that it shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Regulating industries, you got a Department of Education that's meddling in the way that we educate our kids, thinking about impediments to nuclear energy in the United States, it starts with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the federal level. It's doing a bunch of things that fall outside of what our founding fathers envisioned in the Constitution. Constitution says Article One, here's what's actually the powers of Congress to legislate. And if it's not in Article One, Congress doesn't have the power to do it. The Tenth Amendment says that which is not reserved to the federal government is reserved respectively to the states and to the people.

• 5:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So if you can't find the reservation of authority in the Constitution, there's very specific categories of what Congress is able to do. If it's not one of those categories, that means by definition, the rest is left to the states. A big frontier that's on a lot of people's minds, for example, is education. The federal government should basically have no role in shaping K through 12, or frankly, even higher education. That is left to the states. And part of our model was, we want states competing with one another. Right? The same principle in capitalism that causes us to create value, where businesses compete with one another. Competition breeds innovation. That's what our founding fathers envisioned. If you read the Federalist Papers, with respect to our model of federalism anyway. And so, when I looked at, and obviously I ran for president,

• 6:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think that's the highest impact position you could possibly have. And I think Donald Trump is the man for our hour and the man for this moment. But when you look at the other way, the next most impactful way, at least for me, where I could say, here are things I could do through public service as a leader, where you see tangibly the impact of actually the decisions you make. It wasn't even close where you would have that large impact. It was as governor and among elected office. That's, that was the, that was the place I was drawn to look next. And that's, that's the way our country is supposed to actually work, where you got people leaving. California and New York in droves. Where are they headed? Right now, they're going to Florida and Texas. You know, Tennessee, since it's gone to effectively zero tax, has been more successful.

• 7:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You got states, other states that are largely blue states that they're leaving. But Ohio's kind of interesting in this regard. It's a red state. It's a conservative state. But at least as of last year, it was still number 38 in terms of people leaving versus netting coming to the country.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 7:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Coming to the state, yeah. And I think that leaves a lot of room for improvement. It's a state that in a lot of ways have been headed in the right direction. But I think right now, we need a governor, not only in that state, but across the country. Governors who are willing to step on the gas and actually govern conservative populations with conservative principles, to do it unapologetically, and to take on the problems that the federal government can't actually solve in its own right.

• 8:04Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I want to dig more into that. But when it comes to... These droves of people that are leaving the blue states and coming to red states.

• 8:12Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, I think a lot of people are really upset with policies in the, in, in the blue states, especially California.

• 8:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Sure.

• 8:19Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I'm sure there's getting ready to be another big influx as soon as these insurance companies start paying out for all these fires.

• 8:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Shawn Ryan?

  The mishaps that went on there, but, you know, it's something that I hear Tennessee is getting overrun with, with, with people fleeing their states. And, you know, while it's great to have all these new people coming in, it's, it's, it's, it's pricing all of the locals that, that made this state what it is today. It's driving them out with, with, with the, with the home prices, with, with, you know, with inflation. It's, it's just driving everything up, especially, especially in this county. And so is there, I mean, is there any way to, I mean, what, what are your thoughts on that? Do you want Ohio to become that?

• 9:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So I don't want Ohio to become Silicon Valley, and frankly, I don't even want Ohio to become Texas or Florida, even though those are well-run states. I want Ohio to be the best version of itself, actually. I mean, what Silicon Valley was to the American economy for the last 20 years, I think Ohio, the Ohio River Valley can be for the next 20. It's not going to be through bits of Silicon Valley's model, but what I call through atoms, through production of stuff, of actual tangible things that we require in the defense industry. And you look at building up our defense industrial base, aerospace innovation. Ohio is actually a great state for that. Wide open planes, you have no space ports in the state right now, a great history with John Glenn, first American to orbit the earth.

• 9:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You got Neil Armstrong, first person in the world to walk the moon. Those are Ohioans, right? So you have a great tradition there of production, even in bio, in biotech and medical production. Whole opportunities. I think it'd be a crypto state that leads the way in crypto and Bitcoin innovation. You, you go the distance. I want Ohio to be at the leading edge of also using AI, not just to take jobs, which is what people worry about, but actually to make jobs, if you train workforces to use AI, you increase productivity. So Silicon Valley is focused on training algorithms. I think if you're focused on training people to use AI, you can actually increase their productivity probably tenfold in a way that doesn't take those jobs. So I don't want Ohio to imitate Silicon Valley or try to be something that it's not.

• 10:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We're trying to be Texas or Florida. We got four seasons up there. It's a real state. There's a reality to it. If you go 100 mile radius of Columbus, draw a little circle around that, that's a cross section of the country. I grew up in Cincinnati, built my first business in New York. Before we had kids, I wanted to go back to Ohio because we don't want to raise our kids in Manhattan. And so I don't want to pretend to be something else. I want it to be the best version of ourselves, but yeah, I want to open arms to people from patriots from across the country to say that if you want to live in a state where you're able to pursue economic excellence, you know, turn a state into a a kind of special regulatory economic zone for many of these industries, to say that you don't want

• 11:08Vivek Ramaswamy?

  regulatory overreach to get in your way, great, come to Ohio. If you want to come to a state where your kids are able to actually get a good education on reading and writing and math, which is a major problem in our country. I want those people coming in, but without creating some of the issues you've seen in housing markets and other in places like, you know, Tennessee, even look at what's happened in markets like Austin. How do you do that? Well, first, go back to the philosophy of what causes a lot of those inflationary spikes are supply constraints. So part of the reason housing costs have gone up so much is that we don't actually permit new house construction or new home construction at the rate that we should. Because there are barriers, especially even in

• 11:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  single-family home type communities to say that if there's a family home of a certain size and the lot size is less than a certain amount, a half acre or whatever, you can't build a new home. That actually prices especially young families out of the market because you have a constraint on supply. So my general philosophy is we want to increase the supply of everything. That includes the supply of housing, it includes the supply of energy. It also includes the supply of people, because that is actually something that allows a business to grow. Is if you have talented people in your state, American patriots to hire, that's great. But if you increase the supply of both energy and housing and everything else required for those people to live affordable lives, that's how you match the demand going up. You got to also match the supply going up of those things too.

• 12:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I don't think those things have been done as well in some of these states that you know, were attractive places to live. But you had the influx, you got to be prepared to really increase, for example, the supply of housing, really increase the supply of energy in a way that keeps those costs down.

• 12:51Shawn Ryan?

  What about, what about stuff like?

• 12:56Shawn Ryan?

  The more traditional generational occupations like farming.

• 13:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:02Shawn Ryan?

  Like, I mean, I don't know how, I mean, like, farmer here, you know, here in this county, I mean, they, you sell a thousand acres here, I mean, you're looking at

• 13:13Shawn Ryan?

  probably a couple of hundred million.

• 13:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:15Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so you have these farms, these cattle farms and all these people that are, I mean, I know, it's, it's probably for the greater good, I don't, I mean, I don't know, you know, I know it definitely boosts the economy, but, I mean, farmers are just getting run out of here. I mean, it's

• 13:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Totally.

• 13:33Shawn Ryan?

  They can't, they can't sustain, you know, a thousand acre cattle ranch when they can sell it for a couple hundred million. And then the other thing, well, I'll let you go, I'll let you riff off that.

• 13:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  No, no, go ahead. Yeah.

• 13:46Shawn Ryan?

  But then the other thing is, you know, and this isn't just my opinion, I mean, you can look at any Facebook group, you can

• 13:51Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Shawn Ryan?

  hear the local gossip around town and, you know, the big worry is, is this influx of people from California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, um, Minnesota, uh, Wisconsin, I mean, is, is, are they gonna flip the state? You know, everybody's worried, you know, are, are we gonna start seeing the things in the schools here that you saw where you came from? And

• 14:19Shawn Ryan?

  it's, I mean, it's, it's a huge worry. And so, I don't know, it's, it seems like here, it might, I don't, I would like to see the growth slow a little bit. And, and so is, is there a way to do that?

• 14:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, I mean, I think all else, it depends on where you are in the state's journey as well, right? If you look at where Nashville was 15 years ago, it's not exactly where Nashville is today. So if you're not prepared for that influx, it could have a detrimental impact. All else equal, do you want to be a state that people want to move into versus one that people want to move out of? You probably want to be in the state that people want to move into because they want to move into there for good reasons. Same thing as the country. Do we want to be in a country where? You know, you opened the border under Biden. What did you see? People wanted to go one way and not the other. Well, you'd rather live in the country that people want to come to, but you've got to protect yourself. At the level of a nation, that means the hard border. At the level of a state, what it means is actually anchoring who you are and staying true to that North Star in a way that says, great, we're happy if more people want to flock here,

• 15:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  but it's part of the mission of who we actually are, rather than changing who we are because eventually you're then going to be a state that people eventually want to get out of anyway. So in the long run, I think it's a pretty good metric if people want to move in rather than out. The way I want to, I would love to lead Ohio is as a state of excellence, economic excellence and educational excellence. All right, if people, you have nine states that are zero tax states. If you want to be a state that people are actually flocking to, it's table stakes at this point. I think that people should be able to keep what they make. Property taxes, I mean, this is actually true in probably multiple of our states are getting increasingly insane where if you have a high enough property tax, what it does is it effectively says you don't own your property.

• 16:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Your property becomes a permanent lease from the government and you have a bunch of shackles that stop people from actually starting new businesses. What most of them are moving to Texas is because probably the most favorable environment for an entrepreneur right now to build a new business is in the state of Texas. I want that to be in the state of Ohio.

• 16:25Speaker 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.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks. Now made with no artificial dyes.

• 17:28Speaker 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.

• 18:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So you think about education, you think about economic excellence, that's great. I think where we haven't really had a model in the country yet, what I would like to create as a model is, what does educational excellence actually look like? And I think this is the one where, as a parent, you have kids? I do. You do, yeah. How old are yours? One and three. All right, pretty similar zip code to us. It's a fun age. I've got a soon to be five-year-old and a two-year-old who's gonna turn three in July.

• 18:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  This is the problem that, at the level of our nation, nobody is actually seriously talking about. Both on the left or on the right. I think Republicans have been better than Democrats. We have a massive achievement crisis in the United States of America. You got 75% of eighth graders, they are not proficient in math compared to international standards. 70% of them aren't proficient in reading. And the worst part is now you're starting to see there's other countries where English isn't even their first language. Where kids in those countries are more proficient in English, better performing in English, than our own kids right here at home where English is our only language. That's insane. It's unacceptable.

• 19:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And the thing about this, I mean, it goes to the first conversation we had about where the action is, in terms of government and our impact, is at the federal level or the state level? Right now, this year, definitely federal level because Biden in the past had done so much damage that Trump has to undo a lot of that at a fast and furious pace. But if he's successful, as I expect he's gonna be, you roll the tape a few years forward, fixing education is not something that's done by the federal government. So who's gonna fix that educational crisis?

• 19:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes, we have a lot of woke DEI issues. I mean, I was the chief DEI crusader, anti-DEI crusader, what, four, five years ago when I wrote Woke Inc. and criticized the spread of woke-ism through corporate America and other parts of our culture. But now that we're about to enter, we're not quite there, but we're about to enter the post-DEI era, the post-woke era, we gotta still admit to ourselves that that was part of the problem, but it wasn't the entire problem, accounting for this achievement crisis as well. And so how do we prepare ourselves to say, okay, well, there's more people moving in and we have tough times? Let's talk about the next 20 years. I think what we want is a generation of Americans who's actually equipped to compete. Because at the end of the day, China isn't

• 20:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  looking the other way and giving us some sort of participation trophy at the end of it for complaining. We can't be victims. We gotta be victorious. And I do think that lighting a fire under the feet of our educational system to prioritize achievement in math, reading, writing, critical thinking, physical fitness, by the way, I think that we've gone soft on this. Bring back early physical education. Bring back the presidential fitness test. We used to do that. You know, I don't know. I mean, most kids are not probably able to do the level of pull-ups that kids were able to do, what, 30, 40 years ago. I think it goes to implications for mental health. I think it goes to implications for military

• 21:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  preparedness. I think we have to have an education system that demands more of ourselves, and that has to be driven by the states. Actually, even think about knowing about the United States. I love how many American flags you have in this room, you know, imbue a good sense of patriotism that we sometimes, you know, leave behind for our kids. Most kids today who graduate from high school can't even pass the same civics exam that we require of a legal immigrant before they become a citizen. I think every high school senior who graduates from high school, as a requirement, should have to pass that test. I mean, it's a basic condition of citizenship and nation is that you know something about

• 21:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  your nation in order to be a fully informed citizen of that nation. So I think we gotta, you know, get tough a little bit when it comes to some of these issues relating to the revitalization of our young generation. Well, I think a lot of, I think a lot of people are ready for that. I mean, homeschool is... On a massive rise right now. Do you homeschool? So we started that way. Yeah, I mean, I think that this year we were on that track and then we, you know, for our son, felt our older guy, we felt that he might have been benefit with the socialization. But we're big fans of homeschooling. I think that school choice in most states, so Tennessee is in this category, has school choice. Ohio has school choice. It doesn't cover homeschooling. That needs to change.

• 22:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, educational choice means full models of choice. And you got a lot of people coming through homeschooling backgrounds where those kids are doing better, even than kids who are educated, even in expensive private schools or public charter schools. But I'm not like a one size fits all guy, saying homeschooling's for everybody. And we get into this debate as well in higher education. Sometimes both sides will fall into this trap that it's all about four-year college degrees only, and that's the only path to the American dream. Or you got the reactionary backlash that'll say, oh, no, colleges, colleges, not for, you know, college is a scam. Nobody should go there. It's only for two-year vocational degrees and apprenticeships. That's the way to go. Whether it's higher education or K through 12 education,

• 23:15Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't want a one-size-fits-all approach. I want everybody to be able to choose what the actual best path is for them. That's not a system we have right now. And I do think that universal school choice should actually, if you're gonna call it that, should be universal in including homeschooling as the right option. I think some parents will tell you this too. I mean, you know, we've got kids, young kids each ourselves. Yours are a little younger, but you'll probably notice this even more over time. They're different even in the same household. You're raising them in the same household, under the same circumstances. You know, one of them's a younger sibling and one of them's older, so it's different for each of them that way. But private school or public school might be the right option for one of them, and homeschooling might be the right option for the other one.

• 24:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It might change over different parts of their upbringing. And the people to know what's best for their kid, all else equal, is the parent. And I think that right now, people in wealthy families at least have the opportunity to hire home help or nannies or tutors or private school tuition or whatever it is. That's not where I'm worried. It's the civil rights issue of our time that actually the very people that so-called bleeding-heart liberals have been bleeding their hearts over. People in inner cities, people struggling with making ends meet, single parent households, they're the ones who actually left holding the bag where their kids don't have that level of choice. And so I do think this is, I think, I don't think it's an exaggeration to call this the civil rights issue of our time. I would call it that.

• 24:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I hope that that's going to bring along not just, you know, traditional Republican support. But you can think about anybody who's a parent wants to be able to choose their, choose to be able to send their kid to the best school they can. And even in the public schools, one of the things we don't have in this country right now is merit-based pay for teachers. I mean, you run a business of sorts, right? I run businesses. Generally, the way it works is the people who do the best job in creating value for the business are compensated more than those who don't do as good of a job in creating value for that business, or that fund, or that investment firm, or whatever. Why should it work any differently in public schools?

• 25:20Shawn Ryan?

  It shouldn't.

• 25:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We got metrics. You've got clear metrics. And so there isn't a state in the country right now that does this. There is no merit-based pay for teachers and principals and administrators. So Ohio to be the first state that implements not just universal school choice, universal including homeschooling, but also for the public schools to compete, implements merit-based pay for teachers, administrators, principals, where your pay, you should be paid a lot more than you are now. I think the best teachers are vastly underpaid. Should be paid far more when tied to the actual outcomes they deliver. And conversely, those who aren't delivering outcomes shouldn't be paid at that same level, and in some cases, should actually not be on that job at all.

• 26:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I do think that that's got to be done with leaders who have a spine to, that's, I mean, that's a big fight to pick. I'm not looking to pick fights for the sake of picking fights, but that's one, there's a reason why that doesn't exist in any of the 50 states. I think that is our path out of this educational achievement crisis.

• 26:20Shawn Ryan?

  How in the weeds have you gotten into that subject? I mean, how would it be done?

• 26:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not overly complicated, right? It could be done with, one model is to collaborate with the unions. I'm not gonna, and I don't, I don't believe in just picking fights for the sake of picking fights, being conservative without being combative is a, is a fine approach if that works. So you could talk to the people who are members of a public teachers' union and say that, you know what, here's how we're gonna do this, but if there are union objections, it is my view that if a public sector union, particularly, I'm gonna put fire and police in different category, where, where this doesn't apply to them, but if public teachers unions are unionizing, you gotta ask yourself, who are they actually unionizing against? In many cases, it ends up being the best interests of the kids they're actually serving.

• 27:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I say this as somebody who believes that the best teachers in the country right now are vastly underpaid and under-respected for the work they do. I want to see the best ones actually paid more. So either you do it in collaboration with the teachers' unions, or you have to be willing to say that that's not a sacred cow anymore that somehow we can't touch. To the contrary, if teachers' unions and the existence of public teachers' unions are in the way of getting that job done, then we need to fix that system.

• 27:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I guess, I guess what comes to my mind is, where I think you might run into problems, and maybe you've thought through this, is, you know, just looking back, what were easy A's? Physical education.

• 27:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Sure.

• 27:55Shawn Ryan?

  Art, home economics, you know, stuff like that, that was pretty much a wash. And so, how do you, how do you put them on the pay, on the same pay scale as somebody that's teaching calculus at a, at a, at a junior and high school level? You know, more challenging course that people are gonna struggle with more, or do you see what I'm saying?

• 28:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  No, absolutely. I think, I think you gotta, it's a great point. I think you gotta have market-based approaches for pricing each one. So I don't think they're gonna be paid at the same level. But my point is more, not who's paid more between somebody who's got, you got very few of those calculus teachers available, where you might have a greater supply of other teachers in earlier education, that's one question. The question I'm stating is... All of the people who are teaching calculus and all of the people who are teaching PE and all of the people who are teaching social studies are in public schools paid flat at the same level. And I'm saying, within each of those categories, whatever the market rate is for each of those, that's a separate question, and that should be, you know, a little bit of, a little bit of supply and demand, right? If you've got very few people in an essential category, we need to educate our kids, those

• 29:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  people are gonna have to be paid more than somebody who's in a category where you could find, you know, ten other people to do the job. But within each category, the way the public teachers work right now, public school teachers work, is that no matter whether they're really good, no matter whether they're really bad, they are paid flat the same way, with exceptions only for seniority, which is how long you've been there, or whether or not you have a degree, an advanced degree. The evidence actually shows that there is no correlation between having the advanced degree and being a better teacher in most subject areas, and there's definitely no argument that seniority makes that difference either. So my point is, within each of those categories, tie it to actual outcomes and merit.

• 29:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And the biggest objection you get is, well, who picks the outcome, right? And if you have just a testing-based outcome, are they just gonna teach to the test? My first response to that is, you can't let the, you know, whatever the old expression is, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I agree with that. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. The status quo of the bad is the enemy of the good, which is the fact that you've got a massive underachievement crisis in the United States. The facts I mentioned earlier, where, I'll tell you what bad is, is 75% of eighth graders not knowing how to be proficient in math. But the other thing is, it doesn't have to just be the test. I think it should be a composite of a number of different factors. On the table could be parents' assessments of the teachers, which I don't think is a bad starting point, either.

• 30:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Ultimately, not to say that parents are, catering to the parent is the only model or the right answer for the teacher, but that's probably a good first best place to start. You could have independent, peer-reviewed analysis. You could also then tie that to tests and objective metrics being an important part of that outcome. Is that gonna be a perfect system? Maybe there's no such thing as a perfect system. But I'll tell you what's far worse is having a system where compensation and promotions are totally agnostic to the actual performance of kids coming out of that system. And the reason why is, in some ways, the people who make the decisions aren't the ones who are actually have skin in the game. It's not, it's not their kids, or it's not really their outcome that matters. Their pay isn't tied to it.

• 31:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Half of public school pay, half of public school dollars right now, I think it's over half, it's like 52% of public school dollars right now, aren't even spent on instruction. It's on a bunch of other stuff, administration, bureaucracy, you have, you know, building construction or building amenities. You need some level of infrastructure, for sure, but I think it is insane that a majority of dollars flowing into public schools nationally don't even go towards instruction or towards those teachers. And so my view is, those teachers do need to be, the best of the teachers absolutely need to be paid a lot more than they are right now. And the union, the equalizing effect, that's actually the obstacle that gets in the way. And do it by category, right? Another example would be the inner cities.

• 31:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Well, how are you going to penalize people in like a poor neighborhood versus a better neighborhood? To the contrary, it might actually be the opposite, because you're looking at the rate of improvement, right? So if you're starting from a low baseline and you have a force of nature of a teacher who comes in and is able to demonstrate a scale of improvement that school hasn't seen, that's what you're indexing the actual merit-based pay to, is the actual rate of improvement. There's all kinds of questions on implementation, and it could get pretty technical pretty quickly. But the base principle is, do we actually believe in a meritocracy in education in America? Do we actually believe in meritocracy in amongst educators in America? And I think if we do, that will be the most important thing we can take up, the most

• 32:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  important tool in our toolkit, to solve the problem in our educational achievement crisis that frankly, too few people are talking about right now.

• 32:46Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. And what I meant, what I meant by the homeschool thing is, I think that, that people...

• 32:53Shawn Ryan?

  People realize that the education system is failing in a multitude of ways and they're they're they're just taking matters into their own hands because what else can you do? And so, yeah, I think that makes a hell of a lot of sense. Back to Ohio and you had mentioned AI and training people how to use AI. There is a lot of fear that AI is going to take over editors, they're going to take over attorneys, they're going to take over doctors, they're going to...all these occupations have a lot of fear, you know, that AI is going to take over and so how is AI actually going to create jobs?

• 33:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, the first thing to say is that you had to believe, you had to believe that you're going to stop something from happening before you turn that into a decision. And at a certain point in time, you got other countries that are going to leverage AI to beat out the United States regardless, that I think the better question to ask is how are we going to best use AI not only to make the United States competitive and at the leading edge of all other countries, but also in a way that actually makes people's lives better, including those of workers. I think part of what you're seeing is that can actually enhance the productivity of a lot of workers. What I see right now, though, is a massive imbalance, Sean, between the quantity of investment, and we're talking trillions of dollars of investment, going into training

• 34:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  new AI models, algorithms, code, versus the amount actually going into training human beings on how to use AI in each of those fields. I think fast forward 10 years from now, you're not going to eliminate the existence of lawyers or doctors or nurses, nor should we want that. I mean, there are certain areas where we're going to need human-to-human contact, it's irreplaceable. But it's not just even the human-to-human contact at an emotional touchy-feely level, it's at the level of people who are operating and using and asking the right questions of an AI that's actually giving you the right answers. And we're not right now, nobody has really given thought to what that training modality looks like, right?

• 34:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I hate using the term "the trades" versus other professions because it sort of looks down on the trades. I think it was probably, I think it was Mike Rowe, might have been somebody who came up with the artisanal professions. I love that term, that's great. I think we need more people trained in artisanal professions and that's a separate conversation for carpenters and welders and mechanics and plumbers and builders. But I think we need to think about a separate category, which is not just the... So-called, you know, genius model of the person who's creating a new AI model. We need that too. But what we're missing out on right now is training a generation to leverage that, to change the way they already practice their profession from engineering to medicine

• 35:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  to law to even day-to-day management of, you know, I think, I think it's probably a massive business opportunity for somebody to take up a serious enterprise, business-to-business training enterprise, that actually makes sure those workforces aren't replaced by AI, but are actually enhanced in their productivity by AI. And I think that that's an opportunity that we would miss if we just sort of stayed in the clouds and worried about it and tried to all play ourselves the victim card. Other countries aren't going to be doing that anyway. We might as well all pull up our pants and actually figure out how we're going to train ourselves to make the most of it. And I think we'll actually be better off. And, you know, we talked earlier about inflation, bringing down cost. Well, if the cost of providing a good or service is pretty expensive to get medical

• 36:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  care, it's pretty expensive to get a lawyer to defend yourself or to, or to pursue some sort of legal claim you need to pursue. It's out of reach for many people to be able to even make ends meet on getting a basic physical exam or a medical test that follows from it without adequate insurance. If the cost of providing those things come down, to say that you don't necessarily need somebody who has been through four years of college, then four years of medical school, and then seven years of a surgical training or residency before they can have the license to then still have to be a human being, to have to search the encyclopedia of their brain to give you an answer, but instead have somebody who was trained as a physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner, who with the aid and experience of day-to-day human

• 37:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  contact can have AI whose encyclopedia and ability to access it is far in excess of that trained physician, who you still need to do a lot of things, but in the meantime, you're serving a lot more people at a lower cost. That opens up more jobs for those nurses. That opens more jobs for those physician's assistants, even though it might mean fewer physicians who have gone through the full rigor of what it currently meant to be a physician 10 years ago. And that doesn't mean we don't need those people either. We need those people too. It's just going to change the composition of a workforce that I think the worst of all worlds.

• 37:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Is one where AI is here, whether we like it or not. We sit here with an armchair concern about, oh, no, what are we going to do about it when it takes our jobs? That's actually going to be a situation where it's more likely to erode and take jobs and disrupt communities than one in which we say, here's what we actually value. What are our actual values as a state or as a country? We want good people who work hard to be able to live the American dream that includes the ability to not only amass great wealth for themselves, but to live affordable lives as you're pursuing your passion, whatever that may be. Then you ask the question of, OK, got this new toolkit coming along. How do we best leverage that to achieve that American dream? And I do think one of the areas where we're under invested today is in workforce training to use AI, which I think is an opportunity.

• 38:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Interesting, interesting. Many aspirations to take Ohio tax-free? Yes. Really? I think it's, I mean, I do think it's table stakes, right? You've got seven, eight, nine states that are doing it. Not saying that can happen with the flip of the switch, but is an aspirational goal, right? Is it a goal, a destination to be table stakes, that you're competing to be? If you want to be the, if you want to be a state that people are flocking into rather than out of, I do think that eventually it's going to be table stakes to be zero income tax states, to have states with a low property tax burden, and states that, like Texas today, are closer to being regulatory sandboxes for many industries, by which I mean, you

• 39:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  know, it's kind of low burden regulation to be able to draw industry into that state. I think that's, that's almost table stakes stuff for economic excellence. I think the harder stuff to deliver, in the long run, equally important, is the educational excellence. But when you think about, you know, Tennessee, why is it doing well? Why are people moving into North Carolina? It's not quite down to zero, but it's on its way, on its way, stair stepping down to it. I just think people have a basic hunger, justified demand, to keep what they actually earn, and if they could pack their bags and move somewhere else. Unfortunately, that's what you see him doing. And many people in Ohio will go sit in Florida for six months and a day and pretend like it's about the weather, when it wasn't about the weather, it was about six months and a

• 39:49Vivek Ramaswamy?

  day for a reason. Many of them, I mean, I've got people, friends I know in the Ohio and greater Columbus community who do this all the time, they would rather be in Columbus the whole time. And so I don't think that it's a great service to a state, but the beauty is, that's why people are leaving California and New York, despite one of the most naturally beautiful regions and states on the planet. It's California, people still packing their bags and moving. I think if you have a confiscatory environment, as I think they do in California, eventually people are going to pack their bags and go, especially if they're not even getting the value out of the taxes they're paying.

• 40:28Speaker 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.

• 41:02Speaker 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.

• 41:35Shawn Ryan?

  Totally agree with you. The caveat to that is, you know, through COVID, we saw this big, you know, uprising in remote work.

• 41:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Shawn Ryan?

  And so, how do you, how would a state, so basically what I'm getting at is, how do you keep people from these states coming in and remote working from, let's say, Ohio? Ohio's attack, it turns into a tax-free state. How do you keep these influx of people from astronomical taxes, you know, like California? You know, how do you keep them, they move to Ohio, they're still working in California technically because they're remote workers?

• 42:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I want their companies moving to Ohio. I mean, I think that's a big part of, that's a big part of even what you're seeing with other companies reincorporating from places like California to Texas. I want Ohio to be the place where they're actually reincorporated and moving. So if you have enough of the workers moving, I want the company itself come in wholesale or the divisions of the company to the place where the next economic boom's actually happening. And a lot of the ways in which I think we're going to lead is, in Silicon Valley, on one hand, you have bits, right? Leadership in bits, computer programming, maybe that's remote work stuff. A lot of the areas of the future, I think, are going to have to be in the form of production once again, in the second industrial revolution of our country. Ohio was at the leading edge for the first industrial revolution. Even

• 43:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  all the way through the 50s, a lot of people don't know this, in the 1950s, Toledo was the glass capital of the world. Many people may not even know Toledo. It's this, you know, city with a rich history in Northwest Ohio, glass capital of the world. Akron, the rubber capital. You have Youngstown and Cleveland that were steel capitals of the United States. Dayton was a computing power capital for the industrial revolution. It's where the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is today, but it was a computing power capital back then. Cincinnati's, my hometown, was the Queen City. It was known as the Queen City. It was a consumer products capital. They called it Porkopolis. It was a meat, leading meat producer.

• 43:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  These are some of the wealthiest states in the Union dialed back about a century. I think even in the 50s, by 1950, it was six of the top 15 wealthiest cities in America, by the equivalent of San Francisco and Miami and Los Angeles and New York. That was actually, that was actually Ohio, six of the top 15. So I think if you skate to where the puck is going, not try to imitate what Silicon Valley was, and also, by the way, they've got great competitive talent there that I don't think it's realistic to say that we're going to recreate Silicon Valley in Ohio. Neither is it realistic nor is it desirable. But looking at areas where you're going to have to actually produce in order to lead. Think about aerospace production and innovation.

• 44:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Think about defense industrial-based production. You know, Anduril actually just recently built out a major facility in Ohio, announced the building of a major one, you know, very recently.

• 44:30Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 44:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah. Semiconductor production. So we're beginning to see the demand for natural attributes of people to leave to parts of the country where they're able to find different kinds of workforces than just in the, you know, in the, in the insular nature of Silicon Valley or wherever they may live. That's a real opportunity. But there need to be policy changes to make that possible. And I do think that being zero tax, being effectively a regulatory economic safe zone to be able to say that if you want to grow a business here without really worrying about the red tape associated with doing so, this is the state to do it. That's the part that policy, it's up to policymakers to deliver. But if we do, yeah, I do think that Ohio was a frontier state before there was a frontier,

• 45:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  and I think it can be a frontier state again. It just requires actually acting like one.

• 45:19Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. Love it. I love talking to you. You always know your stuff. It's great. Especially, you know, the history of Ohio and all those cities.

• 45:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's actually really, I mean, the history, I mean, some of this is, you know, it's got the, you know, and the next time it won't be the glass and the rubber capital. That's not what I'm promising. It's not going to be glass and rubber next time around. It'll be chips, AI, crypto, aerospace, biotech innovation, drug discovery. You go straight down the sectors, AI training for workforces. You can't look and drive with your eye in the rearview mirror, but take the spirit of that to go to the future itself. I told you about aerospace, the legacy of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Half of this is reviving self-confidence, man. I think that...

• 46:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You may be aware of this as like an internet meme. And it obviously grates on me when I see it. But when somebody says on TikTok, "Oh, that's so Ohio." What they mean is it's like denigrating. It's old, it's out of fashion, it's boring. I'd love to lead Ohio to a place where, what, 20 years from now? 10 years from now? 5 years from now? When we're sending new rockets to outer space? When we're actually having exploration in parts of the moon, or even Mars, that we haven't previously touched? When we're curing a form of a disease, a rare disease that was previously incurable? I want people to say, "That's so Ohio." At that point in time. That, I think, is the self-confidence, right? When Neil Armstrong and John Glenn grew up in Ohio, it was at a time when 6 of the 15 wealthiest cities were in Ohio.

• 46:50Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It was at a time when Toledo was the glass capital and Akron was the rubber capital. To say that I'm proud, as a citizen of the United States of America, and I'm proud of the place where I live, without having to apologize for it or feeling like I'm a second-tier kind of citizen or second-tier kind of economic region in my own nation? That's what builds the self-confidence to say I'm gonna go to outer space. And it's not an accident that a bunch of those happen in the same state at the same time. I mean, Amelia Earhart had Ohio roots. The Wright brothers were right there in Dayton. It's about creating a virtuous cycle of self-confidence. And you see this in sports sometimes. It's sort of a weird analogy, but I think there's something there where... I'm a tennis fanatic, right?

• 47:34Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You see Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, all at the exact same time. It's mathematically, arithmetically, you wouldn't predict this. But the 3 guys who won the most Grand Slams in history... So in a sport that's been around for a really long time, the ultimate metric is there's 4 Grand Slams a year. Who won the most Grand Slams? Number 1, 2, and 3...

• 48:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We're playing at the same time as each other. And that doesn't make any sense because there's only four a year. So if one of the three wins, that means the other two aren't. And yet, the three greatest of all time were playing at the exact same time. It's because it creates a culture that has a feedback loop on itself. And so every one of these successes isn't just an isolated success. It's about part of creating a culture of success. And I do think that right now, you know, it happens at the level of America as a nation. And I think in a microcosm, I think it's happened at the level of Ohio as a state, where people have lost their conviction in their citizenship, in their country,

• 48:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  and in this case, in their state too. So Donald Trump is reviving our conviction in America. I think he's got that covered. We're only a few weeks into the presidency, and I just think the number one thing he is going to have delivered a year in, isn't even the important stuff of sealing the border. He's going to do all these things. Seal the border, grow the economy, stop the foreign wars, negotiate settlements where needed to keep us out of funding foreign interests that don't advance our own objectives at home, ending government waste, ending backdoor censorship, all of it. He's on top of it. He's on the case. He's going to do it. But I think the number one thing he's actually going to have tangibly delivered come a year from now, is a revival of conviction in America. And I think that's great.

• 49:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  He's got that covered. I'm interested in reviving our conviction in Ohio. And I do think that there is, there's a deficit there. I do think the revival of that self-confidence is half the job of a good leader, and economic excellence and educational excellence automatically follow from there. Excellent. Excellent. I can't wait till, I can't wait till you're in the thick of it. Excellence is... You're going to have, what, a 31%? It's, we're doing, I think I was 57% in the most recent poll, and that came out at the start of this week. And then the guy who was number three in that poll, great guy, yesterday dropped out and endorsed me. So we're...

• 50:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Winning is not the ultimate goal. Winning is a means to the end of actually turning this state into the leading edge of innovation around the world. And what Javier Malay has done in Argentina in a short amount of time, in the United States compared to Argentina, we have more of a system of federalism than they do in Argentina. Argentina is a small country in the United States as well. But what he has done in Argentina, I think we have an opportunity at the state level to demonstrate was possible in the United States of America. So I think, you know, bringing a Malay-style outlook of economic stimulus to a state like Ohio, to the Ohio River Valley, to what people will call, I don't like this term, but what

• 50:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  people have historically called the Rust Belt, will instead be, I think, the new Platinum Belt, the new Excellence Belt of America. And I do think that that works, if you're willing to actually do the things required to get there. That works in the short run. I mean, get to zero tax, slash and burn the regulatory state. President Trump talked about Freedom Cities. Remember this?

• 51:17Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think it's a great idea, the idea of creating cities that are fountainheads of innovation, where you just have special economic zones in those cities to spawn innovation in the areas of the future, right? Future cities, that's great. I would love to not only revive that concept for federal cities, federal Freedom Cities, but to have Ohio be the state where many of them are actually housed and show what's possible. That's great. And that revives the self-confidence. You fix an education system that serves our kids with merit-based pay, school choice, civic education, physical education at that young age. I do think physical fitness is a virtue that we've lost, at least amongst cultivating in our kids.

• 51:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think you've got a whole lab for what's, again, possible in the United States of America. And so if Donald Trump's doing it at the federal level, he's got that covered. The only thing we need left is leaders with that kind of spine at the state level to do the same thing. And I do think that that's where the puck is going over the next couple of years.

• 52:21Shawn Ryan?

  Speaking of Trump, it's only been a couple of weeks. Things really seem to be turning around. I think way faster than anybody ever imagined.

• 52:30Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think it's going?

• 52:32Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think it's going well. I do think that he is far more seasoned for this second term than the first, right? I do think the first term was the most successful that we've had of any 21st century president. In some sense, that's too low of a bar, right? Who do you have? You have Bush, Biden, Obama, Trump, wasn't even close. But I do think this second term is in a different category. He's coming in with a level of preparedness. He is no deer in the headlights with the deep state. I think that the deer in the headlights is the other way around, right? When he's come in, they are completely paralyzed by a US

• 53:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  president who, radical as this idea might be, is actually running the executive branch of the United States of America. By the way, it's historically worked is that the president and other elected leaders are these cute little puppets that come and go. You know, I mean, obviously, nobody thinks Biden was running the country, right? But he was a cog in a system, but the system would still do fine once the next cog came along. Trump's not a cog. He's bringing a jackhammer to that system. I think that the administrative state is stunned, and I think that is what's going to be required to save the country. He's also just moving fast on the things he said he was gonna do. I think that one of the things that people are really used to is, wait, he said he was gonna do all

• 53:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  these things, sealing the border, using all resources, including from the Defense Department, required to be able to do it, ending the ability for men to compete in women's sports. Like, that was pretty early. That came out in recent days. He's actually doing the things that he said he was gonna do, but he's doing them too fast. Is that like the only objection, best objection that people have?

• 54:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  He definitely is moving at a faster pace than probably any president has in modern history or in our lifetimes. But I think generally if somebody was elected with a mandate and told you they were going to do certain things, and then he goes in there and does them, and he does them quickly, I don't think that the fact of doing them quickly is a bad thing, I think it's a good thing. And, you know, the fact that I think the best allegation they're coming up with is that the pace is just too crazy. Well, when you had open borders and the largest influx of illegals in American history, and a flailing economy, and inflation we haven't seen in 50 years, and foreign conflicts that didn't exist when Donald Trump left office, that do now exist that need to be extinguished. Yeah, I do think that Fast and Furious is exactly what we need, and I am, so far,

• 55:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  as impressed as I possibly could be. And I'm also somebody who, as you know, in my experience of running for president, or course of our own conversations even predating that, I'm not gonna just read from the chapter and verse of Republican talking points. But I think if we're just speaking a hard truth right now, he's come out with a bang, and I want to see that continue for the next four years. Do you have any fear that it's just gonna get unraveled? Of course. I mean, that's- Is he doing it in a way that it can't be unraveled? Well, I mean, I think, again, let's just say that that's step one, right? Step one is, you gotta do it. I mean, that, the idea of the fear of it being unraveled, being a basis for saying, therefore, we're gonna take some other slower approach, is a wrong alternative.

• 56:27Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But the idea of just saying, we did it, and therefore, we're gonna be complacent, that's not, that's not an answer either. So the way I look at it is, you do everything you possibly can legally through executive action, go far, reset the cultural baseline in government, and the cultural baseline to some sense in the country, to expect more of our government and the consequence. After that, you shut the door, and really shut the door through legislation. That legislation takes a long time. Some of it'll happen, some of it won't happen, just the nature of how Congress works. But I don't think that that concern should stop you from doing something through executive action that you otherwise could have done. Just an example from the week, right?

• 57:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If you have the opportunity to pass a new law that says that men can't compete in women's sports and receive federal funding at the same time-

• 57:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You could say that that is arguably more solid without a legal challenge in courts than an executive action, but that would take forever to do, and you don't need to actually wait for that law to be passed because the existing laws already say that federal funds should not allow for local institutions who are receiving those federal funds to discriminate in that way. Now, let's go to the next level. Many of these local institutions should not be receiving those federal funds because that money is just making a wrong, a round trip from those localities to the federal government. There's a bureaucratic rake, and then less of it comes back to the people. That doesn't make any sense. So, the right answer, the next step, will be shut down the Department of Education and return that money to the states. And so, the way I see President Trump moving is fiercely rational, just go quickly using

• 58:00Vivek Ramaswamy?

  the leggers, levers of executive power to do what needs to be done quickly and within the bounds of law. Next is then dismantle the bureaucracy that sort of messed up those actions, those actions in the first place. Actually, just, you can't reform that bureaucracy, but tear down the parts of the bureaucracy that just need to be torn down and never rebuilt. Then, the next step is, when in doubt about the rest, kick it to the states, except for the essentials of what we actually need to preserve in the federal government. And I think that that's going to be, that, you know, three-step sequence is going to look like the first 18 months, which brings us back to our earlier discussion, which is then, it goes to the center of gravity for what's left, you know, shifts and kicks to the states. And if we get each of those, each of the steps of that cascade done, that's what the

• 58:45Vivek Ramaswamy?

  stuff of saving a country in a lasting way actually looks like. And so, do we have to be vigilant to make sure this doesn't just all get sort of reversed, either through the myriad legal challenges that are coming, or, you know, by a future president that through a stroke of a pen can reverse everything to the prior status quo? Yeah, we've got to be vigilant for that. But I don't think that should stop us, should not stop President Trump, from moving swiftly in a fast and furious kind of way. And I say that in the best of ways.

• 59:15Shawn Ryan?

  Did you see, was it yesterday, but I believe it was the day before, first foreign dignitary to be in the White House, Netanyahu?

• 59:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes, I think there's more coming as well.

• 59:24Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure there are, I'm sure there's a lot more coming. But, I mean, what did you, what did you make of when he said, I mean, he really threw them there. He said, "We would basically control Gaza."

• 59:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  They caught some folks by surprise there. I would say that, first of all, just on the paws of foreign dignitaries coming in the way that they are, I think that he's commanding respect again. I mean, I do not think the rest of these world leaders had an iota of respect for Biden as the president. They had a respect for the office of the president. But I don't think they fundamentally respected the man who occupied it, largely because people have been in rooms with him, even business leaders who have gone to the White House in late Biden's tenure have told me the same thing. He's just not there, right? You and I are having a conversation as two thinking human beings examining one another's thoughts. That wasn't something that happened for people who met with Biden in the White House. And I don't mean to rag on the guy.

• 1:00:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I in some ways feel bad for any person of older age who's past their peak of mental acuity and is suffering from it. But that was the state of affairs. Now you got a guy who is with it, who brings the energy, who has the spine and the resolve and the force of muscle to be able to actually engage with independent ideas and negotiate in the backdrop of those ideas. So, you know, Donald Trump is a master conversation starter. He is a master negotiator. And he's a master at using a start of a conversation to enter a negotiation. Look at what happened even in the discussions in recent days with Mexico, Canada and China. Well, he brought Mexico and Canada to the table and now

• 1:01:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  the real focus shifts to what the heck we're going to do in our relationship with China, which is in a different category from Mexico and Canada. China's in a different category because we can't depend on China for our modern way of life. You got most of the semiconductors in the US Department of Defense being supplied by China. Our defense industrial base depends on China. Our pharmaceutical supply chain depends on China. So it's not just a trade question. It's a question of actual... National security, actually, in a true sense, you can't depend on an adversary for things that are essential to your existence. But look at the masterful way he backed into that, right? He started with, "Want to talk about Canada, talk about Mexico, get them to the table." Conversation starters that were, you could call them aggressive openers of conversation.

• 1:01:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But he's a guy who is able to start a conversation that otherwise would not be had. I love that he met in person with Gavin Newsom, great. You can trade barbs with the guy, but push comes to shove, on issues that relate to America, Gavin's gonna be talking him in good faith about it. Donald Trump will have that conversation. And then Bibi comes here. He has a conversation, and he, akin to a lot of his other conversation openers, had a, started a conversation by lighting a fire that otherwise sparks a conversation. Okay, what does the future actually look like? Like, let's talk amongst serious ideas of how we're gonna make sure the United States' interests are protected in ways that don't drag us into protracted conflicts in the Middle East. I mean, Donald Trump was the OG in the Republican Party for that.

• 1:02:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  He was an opponent to the Iraq War before that was a cool thing to say for a Republican politician. I think he's a guy who knows what he's doing. I think he's a pragmatist who understands America's interests deeply. And I think that you gotta let him work it in his method in order to get there, even if every one of the, you know, initial conversation starters isn't necessarily the literal way that he's actually gonna ultimately do it. Do you think we should control Gaza? Well, look, I think that, let's just take a broader question about US-Middle East policy. I don't think our track record, and the thing I'm gonna say is, is, super controversial here, I think it's kind of obvious.

• 1:03:14Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't think our track record of being a nation-building operator in the Middle East has been very good, or we wouldn't be where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. I mean, for God's sake, the Taliban is still in charge, $80 billion, and two decades later. It wasn't a nation-building project that worked. I don't think that Iraq was, compared to the amount of money, and even more importantly than money, the lives that were sacrificed, I don't think achieved our objectives there. And by the way, I fully, being in the room with, with one of them, fully respect. The patriots who served our country when our country called for their service. And I think there were valuable objectives to have been achieved in a narrow way, certainly

• 1:03:59Vivek Ramaswamy?

  in Afghanistan. And you could talk about other missions elsewhere, but I think by and large, our track record of engaging in, you know, straight up nation building has historically in the Middle East not been all that successful. What I'm going to say here is, I'm going to give President Trump the space to know that he's a man who has a strategy when he says something. In the long run, he has an idea of where he's going. And he is somebody who has proven time and again that he's able to use the contours of conversation and negotiation to achieve what others would have previously deemed impossible. I mean, I think what he did even in the Middle East last time around with the Abraham Accords was unthinkable. It was unthinkable at the time he took office.

• 1:04:43Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And you're not just going to get there by some linear path with, you know, Bushy Tail showing up and saying, okay, well, here's what I want to do. And I'm going to tell you exactly what that is and somehow everyone's going to magically agree with me. No, it doesn't work that way. You gotta have some level of cojones to say the things that others aren't willing to say, to bring people to the table in complex ways. And so, I'm going to let him do his job as the commander in chief to lead us effectively. He's demonstrated time and again that he knows what he's doing. Obviously, he knows as well as anybody what our historical track record in, you know, occupation and nation building in the Middle East has been in the past, because he was the guy who called that to the forefront of the Republican Party.

• 1:05:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And I think he knows what he's doing when it comes to mapping out how we're going to secure America in the future, which is his top objective.

• 1:05:34Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about DOGE.

• 1:05:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Sure.

• 1:05:37Shawn Ryan?

  Department of Government Efficiency.

• 1:05:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yes, love it.

• 1:05:40Shawn Ryan?

  You're a big part of that.

• 1:05:42Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah. What happened? Yeah, I mean, look, I've been talking about this for years. I mean, tackling the administrative state has been my longtime passion. And Elon and I actually met first when I ran for president at a dinner where this is exactly the topic we spent hours into 1 a.m. talking about was the basis of our friendship ever since. First objective is get Donald Trump elected. After he got elected, the question is, how are we going to have, for me personally, how am I going to have my impact on the country? That was the issue that I had been so focused on, wrote a book even recently, laying out the roadmap of one way I thought a lot of this could get done. Taking a legal and constitutional law-first approach and legislation to be able to cut budgets in a lasting way, to be able to do it in a way that used the law and the lawmaking

• 1:06:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  process and recent Supreme Court precedents. And so that was a vision I've been articulating for a long time. And, you know, even spoke about that shortly after Doge was announced in the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Elon and I co-published there, you know, lay that out. Now, something like Doge has never happened before, and it's like a new startup. It takes different directions, and I think that as the plan evolved to take more of a technology-centric approach, right? Doge was supposed to be an outside body to the government that was taking a look at a lot of these other constitutional and legal dimensions. I think it became clear that to drive rapid change in some of the ways that we could score quick wins, Doge came to reside in the government, taking a technology-first

• 1:07:10Vivek Ramaswamy?

  approach, taking over what was formerly known as the U.S. Digital Services. At that point, Elon and President Trump and I, we all, you know, came to the same conclusion that for me to drive the vision I had in mind, the best way to do that, the best perch from which to do it, is elected office. And so we all landed at the same place, and I think it was, what, this past Monday that Elon and I did our first DogeCast.

• 1:07:35Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Twitter Spaces, X Spaces, I think we started at midnight, it went to 1:30 a.m. laying out a lot of what this vision was. And if you look at how much he's been able to do in just the first two weeks, it's massive. And when you think about a technology-driven approach, nobody better to do it than Elon. And I think he is doing it not in a small way, but in a big way. And I'm going to be as helpful on my front of leading at the state level as is going to be required to pick up the pieces from, you know, tearing up the federal bureaucracy.

• 1:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  How many people are involved with that?

• 1:08:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think that it's not, success ought not be measured in terms of numbers of people. In some ways, you want to, fewer people doing, doing a lot. So I'm going to stick to what's, you know, I mean, I'm not, on the inside, I want to be respectful of, of it, so, you know, but you're not talking about five people, but you're not talking about an army of thousands of people that are randomly just looking for work to do either. That's the rest of the federal bureaucracy. But a lean, mean team, I think, has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time.

• 1:08:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, any surprises for you yet? I mean, a lot of-

• 1:08:38Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Not really.

• 1:08:39Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot of chatter about USAID right now and all the funding of different things. Looks like they're involved in the Romania stuff that we kind of-

• 1:08:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It's insane. I mean, even domestic political press.

• 1:08:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's insane. You know, and, and so that caught a lot of people's eye. We're doing an interview here in a couple of days about it. But, but I was surprised at the USAID stuff. I mean, that really-

• 1:09:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think it's great that, that Elon and the team are focused there. I give really good credit here on, to President Trump for USAID. I mean, he understands that, even in some of the conversations I had with President Trump, even at the, at the Army Navy game where you and I were, I mean, he mentioned that to me then. He mentioned it several times over, that this was one of the areas where he knows there's massive amount of waste of US taxpayer dollars. And also kind of a cultural issue. People who've been, worked in the State Department, or good people even who have worked in or around the USAID will tell you, it almost developed a culture of just believing that it wasn't accountable to anybody, not even the department within which it sat, let alone the American people. And at a certain point, you cannot incrementally reform that type of beast.

• 1:09:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  If you want to tame that beast, you got to look at it wholesale. And so, look, I love the, the expansive vision with which, you know, Elon is, is moving quickly, but it starts with a president who is really-

• 1:09:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Has the spine to do what usually you might have a president that talks on the campaign trail and then when it comes to, you know, making the leap when they're in office gets a little gun shy when they look off the cliff. Now you got a guy who's been in there before. He's had four years to think about it. It's a rare situation in American history. He looks at this as how do I actually, from a legacy of the United States of America, make the changes that need to be made? And you take a look at an organization like USAID, which is supposedly historically a sacred cow that couldn't be touched, lift the hood and see just the level of, I guess I could call it lowercase c corruption in the way a lot of those dollars are spent. Yeah, I think the American people are on the side of saying, give me back that money

• 1:10:40Vivek Ramaswamy?

  instead of using it to achieve influence operations domestically or abroad.

• 1:10:45Shawn Ryan?

  So how does it work? How does it work? I mean, we've seen all these, just in the two weeks, we've seen all these things identified where, you know, it's just cash just going out the door for nefarious reasons. And so is it, when they unveil it and they unveil, hey, USAID, you know, funded whatever, insert any of the last 10 things that they unveiled, does that when the funding stops? Is it, is it an exposure game? Doge exposes it to the US government?

• 1:11:20Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So fair with my opinion, right? I'm sure with my opinion. And I think that, again, we're going to give President Trump the latitude he needs to lead in the way that he knows the country needs to go without, you know, from the peanut gallery, it's a micromanage, micro guessing what each of these, what these decisions are. He knows what he's doing. But at a high level, give you the general principle, the US president runs the executive branch of government. Just because something has budgeted does not mean that he has an obligation to spend it on a wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive application of that budget. So this gets into, I mean, I don't know if this, if this is too technical or whatnot,

• 1:12:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  but the Empoundment Control Act, okay? That's a act passed in the 70s that said the US president has to spend certain money if it's been. Appropriated by Congress. Otherwise, it's called impoundment, where he's not spending the money. And so the Impoundment Control Act stops him from doing that. If you read the statute carefully, like read the actual existing law carefully, it's pretty clear that waste, fraud, or abuse is not in that category. Like, the idea that just because you've allocated the budget doesn't mean that that agency has to spend that money if it's going to a wasteful or fraudulent or an abusive expenditure. No, that's already a carve-out. So that already is a great place to start. Waste, fraud, abuse, the president has the authority to do it,

• 1:12:47Vivek Ramaswamy?

  and the president has the authority to delegate the exercise of that authority, which is what he's done here through the creation of Doge. And I think it's a brilliant move within the bounds of law. And that's not even touching the separate view that I think a lot of thoughtful legal minds have, that the Impoundment Control Act itself might be unconstitutional. Without even going there, right? Which I think there are strong arguments for that. Waste, fraud, abuse is something that no president has already authorized to spend. Now, let's go to a separate point. A lot of people don't know this, is that a good portion of the money that's spent every year, I think it's to the tune of about $500 billion, was never actually authorized by Congress in the first place, which is actually insane. So if Congress never authorized it, the idea that you have to continue to spend it is also insane.

• 1:13:31Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So I think those two things, waste, fraud, abuse, far more massive, far more pervasive than most Americans envision. But I'm glad the flashlight's brought to where the sun don't shine, in the bureaucracy, and that's how you actually get accountability and change. But combine that with executive action to say that we don't have to spend that money if there's an argument for waste, fraud, and abuse. By the way, the statute saying all this stuff might itself be unconstitutional anyway. But more importantly, that you have a US president that's actually running the show and calling those shots, the elected leader by the people of this country, rather than some unelected bureaucrat managing his fiefdom without accountability, that's not a democracy.

• 1:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Right? I mean, the basic premise of a democracy, and you know, there's always other people who are technical about this, we're constitutional republic. Yes, okay. I love that. But I'm just talking in a colloquial sense, lowercase d, democracy. The basic premise of a democracy.

• 1:14:29Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Is that when somebody in a government makes a decision that binds you, that stops you from doing something, or when somebody in a government makes a decision that spends your money, that they effectively with the force of government extracted from you, that if they don't do a good job or you disagree with that, you get to vote them out of that position. That's just table stakes for democracy. When somebody makes laws that bind you or spends your money by taxing you, you get to vote them out. If that doesn't exist, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in something else altogether. So the United States was founded on this idea that the people we elect to run the government

• 1:15:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  should be the ones actually running the government. That's not the case today. That's bluntly not the case today. The people who make most of the laws, they call them rules, but they function with the effect of law. People could have their lives ruined over them. The people who make those rules were never elected to their position in the first place. They're unelected bureaucrats. And so the idea that those decisions made by those bureaucrats are somehow untouchable, I think is something that says we don't actually live in a democracy. We live in some sort of technocratic bureaucratic monarchy. And I think we fought an American revolution to reject that. And I do think we live in a 1776 kind of moment right now, where we're rejecting that monarchy all over again.

• 1:15:55Shawn Ryan?

  I guess what I'm asking is, thank you for explaining all that, but is the, what I'm asking is how does it work? Does Doge shine the light on the wasteful spending, get that information?

• 1:16:11Vivek Ramaswamy?

  To the president.

• 1:16:12Shawn Ryan?

  To the president, and then the president makes the decision whether to stop it or not to stop it?

• 1:16:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Eminently sensible. That's exactly the, I mean, you see the way things have worked even in the last two weeks.

• 1:16:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Spotlight, President Trump makes the decisions, President Trump makes the decisions with executive authority going as far as he can, waste, fraud, abuse, that's the categories. And then any spending cuts beyond that have to come from Congress.

• 1:16:34Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. And then what is the, what is the strategy? Are they, are they, I mean, you can't go, I don't think you can.

• 1:16:45Shawn Ryan?

  You can't oversee all of the wasteful spending all at once. So they're starting in categories or they're going to go through, you know, USAID, FBI, CIA, is that how it's going to work?

• 1:16:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'll let President Trump, you know, lead the way. I think some of this is being done through a positive kind of shock and all, right? I mean, I think that that's, I think it's a positive term. I mean that in the best of ways, but you're coming in some ways, you have to let the actions speak louder than the words. And so what I can say is in the several months that I spent, you know, helping lay the groundwork for this, thinking about, there's a lot of different dimensions. There's the technology elements, there's the spending elements, there's the legal, constitutional, regulatory elements, each had their areas of focus. For my areas of focus, as we said, I think elected office is the right, best, next way to realize it.

• 1:17:39Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But for a lot of these other, you know, turning off agencies, deleting their actions, I think a lot of that is well thought out, but I think it's best done through actions rather than words. And so I predict that there will be continued additional successes, bold moves, moves that will not always be applauded by the legacy press that covers Washington DC, but I think will be applauded by the majority of people in this country.

• 1:18:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think that too. How long do you anticipate the initial sweep? How long do you anticipate the initial sweep to go for?

• 1:18:18Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I mean, let's just take the category of what do you think of the initial phase of the presidency is undoing damage of the last administration. Because there's a category of just what did Biden do that needs to be undone? And I always say Biden, it's not really Biden, but the machine that manages Biden. What did the Biden administration do that needs to be undone? I mean, that's the first three to six months of work of this presidency, right? I mean, this is the electorate gave President Trump a mandate, and it was a mandate, to reverse the damage of the last four years. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but that in some ways is the easiest part, right? So I think there's two phases to this national revival.

• 1:19:01Vivek Ramaswamy?

  The first phase is undo the damage of the last four years. That is the phase of running from something as fast as we can. I think it'll be the second phase of this that then becomes harder, which is we're not just running from something, but we're running to something, right? What does the alternative vision of what the country actually looks like, you know, what comes after? A lot of the successful executive orders in, you know, I think the first couple of weeks, there was a lot, but one of the, one of the areas that was particularly notable was effectively the ending of DEI and affirmative action and race-based quota systems in the government, which is having a trickle-down effect to the private sector because it ended up applies to government contractors who are no longer bound by the same thing. That's not some small segment of the economy.

• 1:19:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  20% of the US workforce works for a company that's covered by those government contracting regulations, now free of these, you know, DEI regime stuff. So, a lot of this is like, for example, undoing what happened under Biden and just fast and furious, undo that as quickly as possible. A lot of what Biden did was regulation by fiat, spending through the executive branch. You know, even you're asking about Doge, one of the areas to look at is even all the money that Biden pushed out at the 11th hour after the election. Jeez. It's an insane amount of money that was pushed out because they knew Donald Trump's coming in on January 20th. They pushed that money out to Rivian, I mean, you got a bunch of other people who just received billions of dollars that they shouldn't have otherwise received.

• 1:20:26Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So, phase one of this, we're talking at, I would have said six months if the pace President Trump's moving, maybe it'll be three months, okay? Wow. But you're looking at just fast and furious of reversing the damage. Damage control from Biden is done. We have set the nation back to resetting it to year three of the Trump presidency, 2019. I think of that as actually a really worthy goal, just baselining the country back to 2019 on so many metrics, right? As the final year of the Trump presidency pre-pandemic. Think about the number of border crossings hit an all-time low in 2019. Think about even our federal budget, by the way. People don't stop to ask this sometimes, and even if you go to Washington DC, they

• 1:21:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  use a lot of willy-nilly, wonky language of nondiscretionary budget, this or that. Just a basic question, like just forget the verbiage. How much money, like how much taxpayer cash did the government spend last year? Answer: about $7 trillion, just a hair less. Next question. How much money, just like cash, forget non-discretionary and discretionary this and mandatory spending this, no, just forget, just like overall dollars. How much money did the federal government spend in the year 2019? The answer was less than four and a half trillion. So to those who say, right, to the project of cutting $2 trillion in federal expenditures, oh, it's just not possible.

• 1:21:52Vivek Ramaswamy?

  2019 was not some ancient period of history. Like, it wasn't that long ago. We all remember it. It was the third year of Trump's term, the final year of his first presidency before the pandemic. If we just view the first three months, or first six months of this, but I think President Trump's going even faster, of baselining the country back to 2019 for border crossings, for how we felt, for what people felt like affordability was, what inflation was in the country. Think about even, at least as a mental model, of what federal spending looked like without all of the level of waste that Biden introduced. That wasn't that long ago. So I think that phase one of this is just undo the damage of the last four years. I'm not saying it's easy. Of course, it's not. Trump's the man for the job, and he's gonna do it.

• 1:22:36Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But then the question is, okay, what does the second phase look like? When we actually are post DEI? Let's just start, I mean, just use as an example. What is the post DEI America look like? And that's just one of, like, 50 changes that President Trump is making, but just as an example. I think that causes us to have to level up to answer that question. Right? We gotta, we gotta man up to say that for the last four years, we've had, it's almost an easy talking point, right? We're against DEI. Yeah, I mean, I was the crusader against this before it was cool, but now we're post DEI, now we got nothing left to blame. Right? So if 70% of our kids aren't doing well in math, but we've actually eliminated the subsidization

• 1:23:21Vivek Ramaswamy?

  of DEI in our schools, okay, now what are we gonna do to actually solve the remaining problem that's actually left? What does equal opportunity actually look like? We're against the equal results BS, but what does actual restoration of equal opportunity for all actually look like? Okay, we've cut a lot of the executive order-based spending of waste, fraud, abuse, and all that, but if we're serious about really permanently ending the precipice that we're otherwise on our way of, on our way to with the national debt. What does that mean for work requirements attached to welfare or other forms of federal payments, right? Those are different conversations. So I think that there's two phases to this.

• 1:24:02Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think there's phase one, shock and awe, moving so quickly that they won't even know what hit them. You can see it from the other side's response, like they have no idea what hit them, is just restoring the company, country back to 2019 greatness, okay? And in a manner of, I use the word company, Donald Trump is the CEO of the executive branch, he's running it, running the executive branch with the principles that a great CEO of a company would, and I don't think that's a bad thing. But we're so much more than a company, as a country, we're a nation. And so having done that, what does rebuilding this nation look like? For that, we have to say, not what are we running from, but what are we actually running to as a nation?

• 1:24:44Vivek Ramaswamy?

  What were those civic ideals that we want to revive in the country? And I think that's a longer-term project. I think it's a longer-term project, not just at the presidential or federal level, but to our earlier conversation, I think it will be governors and even local leaders that have to lead the way on that project. And I think that that's where the next chapter of work actually begins.

• 1:25:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that, so do you think the Doge will actually expand into states?

• 1:25:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  It has to. It has to. I think it's a necessity.

• 1:25:18Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think it has to and must expand to each of the 50 states. And that doesn't mean the methods in each of the 50 states are the same as the methods of the federal government, because it's a different problem to solve. But I do think that each of the 50 states, taking a long, hard look at waste, fraud, abuse, of how those state dollars are spent. In some ways, the capture of state governments is even worse than the capture of the federal government. I do think about cronyism in the state government administration.

• 1:25:46Vivek Ramaswamy?

  In some cases, even worse than you'd imagine at the federal level. And so I do think that bringing the essence of restoring three branches of government rather than four, the mission of reducing waste, fraud, abuse, the mission of cutting red tape and overregulation, that project is not done when it's done at the federal level. That's just the beginning. That's the end of the beginning. And I think you want to get to the beginning of the end, that's when you actually start doing it at the state level. If you just poll most people in this country, you could just ask most people you know, do you think there is too much red tape in America or too little red tape in America? I think you will find a lot of people who will tell you there's too much red tape. Small business owner or a hairdresser who has to get a license to be able to practice

• 1:26:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  her profession, the ability to be able to start a new business in nuclear energy production in the United States hasn't happened in 30 years. Is there too much red tape or too little red tape? I think you'll have a lot of people will tell you that there's too much red tape in America. Try bringing a new medicine to market, the 10 years and billion-plus dollars that that takes. It was the industry that I was in and I've overseen the development of five medicines that went on to become FDA-approved. I can tell you from experience, every one of those could and should have been developed at a fraction of the cost if the regulatory regime worked the way it actually should. I don't think you'll find anybody who would tell you that there's, huh, I think there's too little red tape in America. I think we need more red tape in America. I think we actually need a little bit more regulatory obstacles before we're able to do certain things.

• 1:27:13Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I don't think you're going to find many people in that category.

• 1:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about this deep-seek stuff? I mean, China basically, they did that for what, six, was it $6 million?

• 1:27:22Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We'll see what the actual facts are, so I'm not sure if I believe the exact numbers, but broadly speaking, did they create what appears to be a competitive, in some ways potentially even superior level of AI to that which it took tens of billions of dollars, maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars of investment from US companies with computing power that was a fraction of what the US companies had access to? It appears to be that way, yes. Now, some of the details, maybe they had access to a little more computing power, maybe there's a little bit more money spent. But don't let that deflect from the main point. This goes to the earlier question about US education and preparedness for the next generation. It's an example of it.

• 1:28:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I'm not saying the deep sea alone is the wake up call. We should have the wake up call. We could have the wake up call every day, just from the fact that 70% of our eighth graders aren't proficient in math. But they're deeply related. So just on the facts of what happened, right? Because people hear this and we're like in a modern social media culture where people read something for two seconds on their social media feed and then that's what they remember of it. Like, let's just sort of ground ourselves in what happened. There were export controls of chips from the US to China. And you have, apparently, if the facts are to be believed, they had access to something like 10,000 to 50,000 or so, and maybe it was a little more than that, based on new reporting.

• 1:28:48Vivek Ramaswamy?

  But call it 50,000 plus A100 GPU computing power chips from Nvidia. Where US companies, like Meta, I think it's like something like had 350,000 plus H100 GPU computing power chips from Nvidia. So it's like 60 plus, 63X plus computing power for US companies might have access to versus this relatively modestly funded startup in China. And what they did was with that capital constraint and with that computing power constraint, even if you're skeptical of the exact numbers, they were able to use that to, in a scrappy way, get to a similar place by doing some clever things, right? Examples of what it seems like they did.

• 1:29:33Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Instead of using 32 decimal places afterwards for a number, for numerically training AI, they used eight decimal places instead. Well, they're not, maybe not quite as precise as using 32, but for any near-term human use, maybe they felt like eight decimal places after was good enough. Or they use different areas of specialization where they didn't require everyone to be an expert in everything at the same time, but use these so-called, you know, centers of excellence, or there's different ways you could phrase what that is, where you'd have the relevant experts train on their relevant area of subject matter expertise. But if you had something in, you know, in the field of building a bridge, you don't need the advent of the best medical expert necessarily stepping up to answer that question

• 1:30:17Vivek Ramaswamy?

  because that's otherwise a waste in computing power. So you had different crappy things that they did along the way, training it on phrases at a time rather than just individual letters or words, to be able to use capital constraint and resource constraint to still get to the same place. I mean, that's a, I think about that kind of scrappiness as an American quality, actually. We're the pioneers and the explorers and the scrappy and the unafraid, and yet what we see is that this is a wake-up call for us. And, you know, I saw the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, was, had an interesting comment about this, which I think was, I don't agree with everything he wrote in there, but he

• 1:30:58Vivek Ramaswamy?

  had an interesting comment tying this success, this apparent success for this Chinese startup to even deeper differences in the Chinese educational system versus the current US educational system. And I think that if we don't use that as a wake-up call for us to at least light a fire under the feet of our STEM education in this country, then we would be making a grave mistake.

• 1:31:23Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Vivek, I know you got a dinner you got to get to. Is there anything else you want to discuss?

• 1:31:28Vivek Ramaswamy?

  No, it's gone right by, man. You know, I think, I think overcoming this victimhood culture in the United States is something that...

• 1:31:41Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I think I'm pretty keen on right now. I think that that's for everything we've talked about, from education to AI to economic leadership to success, right? Even in overcoming the federal bureaucracy and downsizing the federal government. It's easy to point the finger at the government and I do it because I think we should expect more of our bureaucrats and our politicians and expect a lesser size of our bureaucracy. But part of the reason that exists is that you have a culture that demands it. Right? You have an electorate that demands greater dependence on the government now rather than independence from it and then a victimhood narrative to justify that dependence. And it's mostly come from the left, right? But I'm going to talk about it in terms that aren't partisan at this point. We won, right?

• 1:32:25Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So what's the point of just repeatedly pointing to the other party? This is mostly a left-wing problem. I'm also worried that it's 10% likely to be a problem on the right as well, but I don't care whether it's left-wing victimhood or victimhood culture that goes beyond the left. We are not victims. We're not a nation of victims. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Nation of Victims. We should not at our best be a nation of victims. We are a nation of victors. And I do think that one of the things President Trump's doing, an outstanding job of his restoring respect for us on the global stage. I love the conversations he's opened up from Greenland to the Panama Canal. Great conversations for us to have, but to puff our chests abroad, we gotta all pull

• 1:33:09Vivek Ramaswamy?

  up our pants at home. I believe that. You know, that's an expression that has historically been used to preach to certain wings of the American left or whatever. I think I'm talking to all of us here. We all gotta pull up our pants at home. Enough whining, start winning. The pursuit of excellence is what I want to see in America, especially since we've now defeated the left at the ballot box. I'm keen to make sure that we restore that pursuit of excellence in America. And wherever it comes from, victimhood culture, I think we gotta get over it and see ourselves as actually victorious. We're the unafraid, we're the people who nobody could be, could stop, we're a country built on the idea of merit and meritocracy. That's America. That's what Donald Trump is standing for right now.

• 1:33:55Vivek Ramaswamy?

  And we can't forget that. And I hope that, um, I hope that somebody doesn't have to pick up this, you know, exchange three or four years from now and say, oh gee, you know, I wish we had heeded that earlier. I hope that's not where we're headed. And the left-wing victimhood narratives have ruined this country. I don't want to see those reemerge.

• 1:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  Where did it stem from? Where did the victimhood stem from?

• 1:34:23Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Shawn Ryan?

  From government handouts?

• 1:34:24Vivek Ramaswamy?

  You know, I think it stemmed in part from the Great Society in the 1960s, which was built on the idea of a victimhood narrative. And the thing about victimhood narratives that make them alluring is that there's always some truth at the kernel of it to justify it, right? And in the case of the Great Society, it's patently true that black Americans did not have not only the same opportunities that white Americans did, black Americans were a century before then slaves in the United States of America, right? So there's, there's a justification for it. But at a certain point in time, it actually becomes counterproductive to drive with your eyes in the rearview mirror, as I said earlier, and to wallow in that victimhood versus saying, how are we going to actually lift everybody up?

• 1:35:07Vivek Ramaswamy?

  So what the Great Society did, the so-called Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, biggest misnomer of policy agenda in American history, was it created a new culture of dependence on the government that was justified by this victimhood narrative. But it didn't just start with, it started black America, but it eventually pervaded basically all swaths of America to expand the permanent existence of the state that created a new culture of an expectation of what the citizen's relationship with the state really was. And you go back to, this is Lyndon B. Johnson who pushed this. His predecessor, of course, was JFK, who famously said, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Beautiful sentiment. I think what the Great Society created was the need for a new kind of Declaration of Independence in the country.

• 1:35:54Vivek Ramaswamy?

  For us to be able to say, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for yourself and for your family. That in many cases would be the best way an American could serve their country, is by not having to be dependent on that government. Especially relevant today, when you've got a $36 trillion national debt and growing, where the interest payments on that national debt are about to be the largest line item in our federal budget. I do think that the independence from the government is an important part of that victimhood culture. Part of it has just become popular. I mean, I do think that victimhood became a currency, right? Became more popular for a young person, or whatever, to claim to be a victim in the totem pole of victimhood. You get more stuff, right?

• 1:36:37Vivek Ramaswamy?

  I had a friend who was an interviewer for Harvard's application essays, and she just comes back and says, "Oh, my God. All I hear is the first thing they introduce themselves is what type of adversity or struggle they have faced in some sort of discrimination, or some type of family sob story." Not to say that some of them aren't real, but that's what became rewarded, more so than the actual achievement itself. Apparently, in Harvard admissions interviews, so if you reward victimhood, you get more of it. And the more you describe yourself as a victim, the more likely you are to see yourself as one. So it became a self-reinforcing culture, where that was what was rewarded, instead of excellence. And I think the way we turn this around is just as a country, yes, from the government, but also just as a culture.

• 1:37:19Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We revive a culture that once again rewards excellence over victimhood in all domains: academics, math reading, science, sports, physical excellence, excellence in music, the arts, all of it. That's America. That's who we are at our best. And I do think our participation trophy culture over our championship trophy culture that has emerged in the last, you know, 20 years or so, I think we need to shift back to that culture of excellence. And wherever it comes from, left or right, that's what I want to... That's what I want to... Competition. Competition to meritocracy. Let's revive that. Excellent. Excellent.

• 1:37:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Vivek, I appreciate you coming, and we'll see you again.

• 1:38:04Vivek Ramaswamy?

  Good seeing you, my man.

• 1:38:05Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 1:38:05Vivek Ramaswamy?

  We'll be back.

• 1:38:06Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.