SPEAKER_03: Saxie, can you can you come outside your window and I'm going to start waiting and you'll see me want to see me? Zack have two of your butlers hold you up on their shoulders.
SPEAKER_05: I hope this is being taped and part of the show because this is great. David, you're wearing blue shorts, right? Yeah. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03: I saw you. Did you see me? Not in see you. Where are you? When you look out on the first house, the pink house? Look at this house. You see that?
SPEAKER_00: I heard you. I couldn't see you though. Yeah. Yelling like a lunatic.
SPEAKER_01: You're the pink house. Look, I'm right.
SPEAKER_00: Are you below me or above me?
SPEAKER_03: No, I'm like to your right. If you're looking out, I'm at your right. Your first house on the right. Oh, there. Oh, I see you.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I see you. I see you guys are like 12 year olds. Come over
SPEAKER_03: afterwards. We'll have a glass. Okay. All right. I'm coming. I'm going to come over afterwards.
SPEAKER_00: We've got the hard stuff we should go. Rain Man David
SPEAKER_04: Saxon. All right, the vague Ramaswami is finally on the program. He's an entrepreneur. He graduated Harvard. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. He was an entrepreneur, then a capital allocator. I think broad strokes. Everybody knows he's he's a conservative, running as a republican. He's anti woke, he's pro life anti affirmative action, pro free speech. And he wants federal government term limits. And his fans are lunatics. They've been asking for him to be on the all in podcast every day. I've gotten about 300 emails from your fans. Welcome to the program.
SPEAKER_05: They sound like your fans actually, because I hear it all the time. It's like blaming me for why I have not been on this program. And so you guys this has been like some sort of ideal idealized experience for me. I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, great. So what we try to do here is have a real conversation, try to get these candidates off their talking points. So this isn't meet the press, obviously want to talk to you like a human being. So the extent that you know, as a politician, now you can talk like a human being the audience and we would appreciate it. Meet David Sachs, Chumath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. Why don't you explain maybe your background as a capital allocator and as an entrepreneur and then why you chose to run for president at this time?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, sure. I mean, my parents, like many people, you probably also know who have had similar success stories, they came to this country with almost no money. I went on to actually found successful companies. And so I started my career as a biotech investor. I worked at a hedge fund in New York when I graduated in 2007. I thought I was gonna be a scientist, I studied molecular biology, ended up enjoying my time as an internship, it had a hedge fund a lot more than that. So I did that for seven years. Three of those years I spent law school at the same time. But then when I finished law school, I had, you know, I think felt like my learning curve had flattened from being a pure capital allocator. So I stepped down and founded a new kind of biotech company that I could actually you guys might be more interested in it than most of my political audiences. But the basic premise was give scientists skin in the game in the projects they actually work on. So if you're a GSK or advisor or whatever, Merck, you discover a drug or you develop it, you don't have personal upside in the individual drug that you develop. You do have various forms of asymmetric downside. And so people don't take risks unless they're the same risks that the other pharma companies are taking. Because if you take the same risk and fail, but everybody else is failing in a therapeutic category at the same time, you're safe. But if you take a risk that other people aren't willing to take and you fail, then you experience budget cuts, maybe job security risks, social embarrassment, which is a big factor in big pharma as well, which in turn created an opportunity that I took advantage of, which was that there were systematically categories of drugs that went undeveloped, even after big pharma had for a long time spent a lot of money developing those drugs up to a certain point. So I built a business called InLicenced, basically in licensed some of those drugs in their early stages of development, phase one or phase two, often for pennies on the dollar relative to what had gone into them. Often we would have scientists or drug developers who are passionate about that very project inside the companies who would come with those drugs because they wanted to develop them. But the big pharma company said that they weren't in that area anymore. And we built a pipeline of such drugs. The whole plan was some of them would work, some of them wouldn't. The successes would make up for the failures. And it's now a 10 billion dollar public company, and it returned, unlike many private companies, returned a billion dollars plus to shareholders before going public. And it continues to do well to this day. I led the company as CEO for seven years. Five of the drugs I worked on are FDA approved today. And what I'm probably most proud of is a drug that is actually biologic that is a life-saving therapy in kids. Another one's an approved drug for prostate cancer. But that was my world is the point. Very different world. Maybe more similar to your guys's world now than the world I'm in now. Something funny happened in 2020, which was that in my own company, there were demands that I make a statement on behalf of Black Lives Matter after the George Floyd, it was tragic death in May of 2020. By June, there were demands that I started making statements on behalf of BLM. And it was a funny time because only starting that February, I had ventured into actually exercising my voice as a citizen while being a CEO at my own peril, criticizing what was then the still new shiny object of stakeholder capitalism. So I published this piece in the Wall Street Journal and generated some waves that February. A few months later in May, this George Floyd controversy comes up. And the long story short, I can go into it if you guys are interested, but over the next months, a series of escalating events led me to face a choice the following January of, you know, there's three advisors to my company that stepped down after I wrote a rather I didn't intend it to be, but a rather controversial piece in the Wall Street Journal at the time. What was the premise of 2021? Yeah, the premise of the piece was that it actually was controversial on numerous counts, but the basic premise was it was the first legal argument anybody had made that if the government is pressuring a private actor to do something that the government couldn't do directly, that that was still state action. Now the subtext is this was in the wake of January 6th, when there was widespread systematic censorship of you know, political speech in this country. At least I believe there was and so at the time I made that argument, it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory on the facts. No, that's not happening. It was also dismissed as a legal theory. You know this rube who happened to go to law school for God's first year where the First Amendment only applies to state actors. You know now fast
SPEAKER_05: forward 3 years, two and a half years. We now know those facts were far worse than even I envisioned at the time and actually the legal argument that I made is now popularized by Clarence Thomas and others that are finding its way into our jurisprudence. But anyway, three advisors to the company found it so offensive that I would make this argument in public that within 48 hours of that piece, they resigned and that was definitely a post gen six mood and reaction that I had to then make a choice, right? Because now this is having potentially an adverse impact on the company. I could either all right call it a year where I experimented with expressing myself and you know wearing my legal academic hat and call that a day and continue with biotech or legitimately if I didn't want to have an adverse impact on my company, I could step down and really speak freely. I chose to step down not in small part because the company was doing great. You know I had a successor lined up so there was a fortunate set of circumstances. It happened to be the right time. I just had my first son. My son Karthik was born in February of 2020. He was about to turn a year old. We were in a transitional phase of our life. COVID, you know, we were we had a year away from the office. My wife was filling her fellowship. There was just a lot going on in her life that it felt like this was a moment for a life transition to focus on. You know, there's a lot of people, talented people developing medicines, maybe some of them more talented than me. You know, Rovin's a successful company. Did you feel
SPEAKER_04: like you were being bullied into making a statement about Black Lives Matter by your own employees and what's your thought generally speaking on companies being politically active and companies having a political voice because it has come up in our industry over and over again. You might know Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said, hey, we're here to do crypto, nothing else. Please don't talk about anything political. So what are your thoughts generally on that? You
SPEAKER_02: wrote a whole book on this, right? I mean, I read your book and it's a lot about the distinction between what the
SPEAKER_02: intention is in optimizing for shareholders versus the personal interests of the executives and those in charge expressing their personal points of view through the corporation. You had some points of view on where that should all go. But was that in part motivating for you to run for public office and why president instead of running for a Senate seat or congressional seat or something else? Yeah. So I've
SPEAKER_05: turns out I've written I wrote three books in the last two years and two of them are about this topic. The first one is Woke Inc, which was for a general audience and then there was a second one called Capitalist Punishment, which was specifically about the ESG strand of this and capital markets. And just for people who are aware, my general view is that companies should focus on making products and services for people who need them without apologizing for it. And yes, that's how you maximize profit for shareholders by having a worthy mission and sticking to it without taking on social missions that are best carried out by institutions outside of corporate America. I so much believe this that even before I ran for president, this actually does answer your question, Dave, is I actually thought the way I was going to have impact based on this. I enjoy being an author, but I'm not by nature just an academic. I like to do things. I started a company called Strive. It's an asset management firm that directly competes against the likes of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard. That's what I thought my next leap was going to be. Strive's first fund launched last August and less than a year and it's close to a billion dollars in assets under management. I think it took JP Morgan two years to get to a billion when they got into the ETF business. That was what my journey was going to be is within corporate America, restore the unapologetic pursuit of excellence over distracting and dilutive political, environmental, and social agendas. But the thing that struck me, I think late last year and last December, last year we had our second son got a new company off the ground. You all know what that entails. It was very much an all-in experience doing that. December we had some time to take a step back and my wife and I, we take a moment to ask yourself, why are you doing what you're doing? It's not a conversation you often have or take time to do, but the question of the why. And it reminded me back of that experience I had at Royman. You asked me, did I feel bullied? I didn't actually feel bullied. I think I could imagine someone in my shoes feeling that way, but I didn't feel like it was somebody cornering me to do something I didn't want to do. Others have had that experience. That wasn't quite how it felt for me. It felt like there's a group of people who followed me on this mission, who look up to me, who were disappointed in me actually. And I think that was much harder than feeling like I was being bullied was to have a group of people who followed me on this worthy mission of developing medicines that pharma companies weren't that felt proud of that mission that now felt disappointed in me. And that was much harder to deal with than the bullying. But that also opened my eyes to the fact that I'm here stridently fighting against BlackRock and the ESG industrial complex, which is a little bit of a deflection from the essence of what I actually think is going on at the real root cause, especially amongst young people in the country. What is that? Which is that they and this is what I saw in my employees in the experience I went through. So that was formative for me. These are good people. These are earnest people, many of whom came. It's in many ways is my fault because the pitch that we made in recruiting, we recruited from Harvard and MIT and everywhere else, big pharma companies didn't recruit out of undergrad. We did. Part of my pitch was, hey, you want to go to a quant hedge fund and turn that pile of cash into bigger pile of cash? Or do you want to actually make medicines that impact people's lives and do well that way? So that was part of you and my pitch going in. So we select for a certain kind of person and then they come back and say, they're disappointed me for not adopting unrelated social agendas. What dawned on me is that young people in this country, I'm a millennial, you guys are young, we're hungry for a cause, right? We're so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity. And yet we're starving for that at a time in our history when the things that used to fill that void. There's a lot of things that could fill that blank. I talked about it today at this constitution camp here in New Hampshire, faith, patriotism, hard work, family. But I think there's some truth to what Brian Armstrong told his employees. A corporation with a worthy mission can help fill that void too. And I think that's one of the roles that CEOs who feel like they're being bullied might miss is you don't have people who are bullying you, you have people who are lost, who are looking to you for direction and purpose.
SPEAKER_03: You're saying it quickly, but I think that family and religion are very, very big drivers of that.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, huge. Yeah. I'm just saying it quickly because I talk about that all the time. But I think that family and faith is, I mean, these are foundational building blocks. They're foundational. I think that when you look statistically
SPEAKER_03: at like the decay in the number of young people who are religious or the decay in a number of young people who actually have, you know, two parent families, all of this speaks to the fact that the social norms that gave people purpose have actually gone, but they haven't been replaced with anything else. And I think that's the vacuum that you're seeing that many of these young people fall into. And so they're looking for something to your point. And the problem with that is not the causes themselves, but the fact that they're short lived. And then what's left over is the need for more and more and more. And that escalation, I think, is very dangerous if you think about where, you know, society goes to from here. Yeah, I agree with you on that. And that's why I have been
SPEAKER_05: characterized and Jason introduced me that way, too, as anti woke. I don't actually think of my I don't I don't like that label, because it's not inaccurate. I don't like it because it's false. I think it misses the point where I think the way we actually combat, fill in your favorite blanket woke ism, climate ism, COVID ism, fentanyl usage, anxiety, depression, loss of self confidence, these things are symptoms of a deeper void of purpose and meaning. And so I don't think you help the matter much by and I've done some of this. I will admit this right. Yeah, I'm not blaming other people. Well, I mean, but the book the book, I don't have you read the book, Jason or not? I haven't yet. But I will. Okay. The book is it was titled and written before the word weapon woke took on its current political valence. Yeah, I will say that actually, okay. Many people didn't know what the word woke was at the time I titled was fairly revelatory. When you
SPEAKER_02: came out and use that word in your in your title, it was like, let me reveal to you a little bit about what this thing that I'm calling woke is turning into, which is a more broader kind of social psychological issue that we're all grappling with. Right how it's now leached its way into politics. It's leached its way into nonprofits. It's leached its way into corporate America, into for profits into the military into government, etc. Obviously, since that was published, it has now become this hot term that has different meaning for different people. And it can be pretty exciting in terms of how people react. You say in that Dave, yeah, I appreciate you
SPEAKER_05: saying that Dave, because my net prescription is actually dilute not just woke ism. I mean, that's just part of the story. We dilute secular religions, the rise of secular religion, right. And I don't call them even religions, because religion is what stood the test of time, a cult has not, but the rise of modern secular cults, we dilute them to irrelevance by filling that void with an alternative vision. And so, if one political camp might offer race and gender and sexuality and climate as a prescription for the void, I think we're conservatives fall badly short, is by simply being anti those things without actually offering an alternative vision of our own. And I am aiming certainly to do that in this campaign, individual family race, and
SPEAKER_04: gender, and these kind of things, what would be your, you know, qualities or things to focus on? So let's do like a
SPEAKER_05: little face off right into talking about race, gender, sexuality, climate, I pair them up against individual family nation God, okay. And I think that there's a substantive vision here. I think America happened to have been founded on the latter vision, not the former. So if I'm running for US President, I think that that already tilts the scales in favor of this vision, because it so happens as a historical matter, America was grounded on some people will contest this, but I think on that vision, rather than the genetic and climate based one. But I think that that's something where the Republican Party and conservatives have fallen short. That's part of what your question, Jason pulled me into this, is I saw the emergence of what was likely to be a biographical brawl between two guys who are the, you know, front runners or whatever. You know, that's not productive. But I think more importantly than a biographical brawl, even the question about who we are, I think the Republican Party and the conservative movement was in many ways defining itself in opposition to that alternative vision of identity, where what I want to do, what I'm striving to do, and I hope we're doing, is actually offering an affirmative vision of our own that go to the heart of what it means to be an American. And, you know, I don't think that national identity alone is going to fill that vacuum fully. But I think it makes a pretty good darn stride forward. And I think those roles for pastors and others, that's beyond my pay grade. And so I'm not, I'm not purporting to do that in this campaign. I speak to it, but that's, that's going to be the role of people in a higher calling than being US President. But I think the next US President can play a meaningful role in filling that vacuum, at least when it comes to national identity. And so that's really what this campaign is about. It's not, it's not anti woke, it is unapologetically nationalist in a certain sense of that word, nationalist in the sense of embracing those ideals that sent this nation into motion that still unite us across those genetically inherited attributes that we've otherwise celebrated over the last 10 years in the state to say you believe in American exceptionalism. And
SPEAKER_04: that's, that's your platform for running my platform. That is absolutely my platform, the exceptionalism of the ideals
SPEAKER_05: that set this country into motion. Absolutely. So Vivek, let
SPEAKER_02: me ask a question around where we are in the cycle of the American experiment, where we have obviously allowed the throttle to be full forward. And as a result, we've seen extraordinary progress emerge from the entrepreneurial talents and the drive of the people of this country for the past 250 years. And it's really extraordinary and a transformed human civilization. We now find ourselves, particularly over the past 50 years as this problem has gotten worse, with increasing disparity between the haves and the have nots, or those who believe they they have not, which is nearly everyone. Everyone now has some point of view that they have not got something. And they see other people that do have something that they do not. And this inequality and this perception of inequality, both with respect to absolute amounts of capital, income, earnings, and these perception issues have now driven a populist movement in this country that we have seen historically, many times in the past, different countries that ultimately turn into either socialist nations, or fascist nations. In all cases, some sort of autocratic regime seems to have emerged because of this populist movement that we're now seeing not just in the US, but across the West. Do you feel like we're at that moment in the US? And one of the manifestations of that, I'll say, is government spending, because everyone demands more from their government and the government steps up and the elected officials that they elect step up and spend more and it layers and it layers and layers. And we now have a $33 trillion debt load. And we have a one and a half trillion dollar annual deficit. And by many projections, Social Security will be bankrupt in anywhere from 10 to 15 years, 10 to 20 years, whatever numbers you want to use, the CBO assumes we're going to have unsustainable spiraling debt. What is your point of view on where we are in the cycle, how it's manifesting today, and how we're going to deal with the fiscal issues that arise from these movements?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so I think where we are in that in the cycle, I don't take that as a passive law of physics. I think that who runs this country and leads this country can make an actual difference in the actual underlying course of that so called cycle, which is part of what pulls me into this. So I'm a little bit unconventional on my views on the debt load and the entitlement spending in this country and our first step in our way out of it. I don't think we're in a place of having remotely enough consensus or trust. And I think trust is probably the more important word than consensus. To begin just snip, snip, make cuts to what people feel like they were entitled to and promised, especially in a moment where we're beginning with deep distrust that will take what you call those populist flames and throw kerosene on it. I do I'm more optimistic about this. And I think this is quite realistic, actually, is that the next leap forward is we can grow our way out of, I'm not going to say all but most of our actual fiscal, pending fiscal calamity. This year, I mean, I think like right now, last six months, we're talking less than 1.5% annualized GDP growth, what we're averaging right now. For most of our national history, we actually grown at over 4% GDP growth. Certainly, if you go back to the pre-gold standard period, and even after going off the gold standard, we had a relatively stable US dollar. And I am one of these weird guys who believes that the Fed should have a single mandate of dollar stability without playing the Phillips curve game. But anyway, put that sidetrack to one side. We've grown at 3, 4% GDP growth for most of our national history, even relatively recent national history. And I don't think it's a complicated path to get back there. I think things we need to do. Unlock American energy. There's, you know, we talk about secular religions. I view the climate cult as one of those secular religions. What's your energy plan? What was your
SPEAKER_04: specific energy plan be? Completely, completely unlock
SPEAKER_05: the permitting process that they've used as a backdoor mechanism to shut down American energy production. Drilling, fracking, burning coal. Coal should not be a four letter word, embracing nuclear energy. Later tonight, like after we're having this conversation this evening, I'm going to be at St. Anselm College, laying out my detail. It's going to be like a giant poster, laying out the anatomy of how I will shut down the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has been a fundamentally hostile administrative agency to the existence of nuclear power in this country. Actually, even to the detriment of actually making sure that we are getting our nuclear energy from Gen 2 rather than Gen 3 or Gen 4 reactors. But that'll be for tonight. It's an all of the above approach of unshackling ourselves to produce energy here in the United States. To your point about, you know, David made a good point earlier about the addiction of paying people more from the federal government. That becomes the status quo if that's your voter base. That's not even good in many cases for the people we're giving that money to. I think we should stop paying people to stay at home when actually the top obstacle for many businesses to grow, you guys will know this well, is filling vacant job openings. And so that is an obstacle to GDP growth, is paying people more to stay at home than many of them earn to go back to work. Do you think
SPEAKER_03: that the IRA was good legislation? I don't have, it's
SPEAKER_05: not like it's not like my the horse that I'm going to, you know, ride, right in terms of like the main, I'm going to pin everything on it. But I mostly don't think it was great legislation. But like, where are you coming from on that? Because we might have different reasons for saying why. If you think about what the IRA does for energy, and frankly, if
SPEAKER_03: you just roll up the BIL chips in an IRA, I'm just curious to your thoughts on whether government incentives are moving in that direction that you actually support or you still think it's missing something. Well, so one of the things that I actually focus on, and I think
SPEAKER_05: it's really important, is what can the US president actually do? I mean, President Trump's, I don't know if people remember this, his main policy promise was actually repeal and replace Obamacare, which never happened because it required going through Congress. So I'm actually focused on elements that I can deliver on without asking Congress either for permission or forgiveness. And so that's what my answer to Jason was, I go straight to at least let's focus on actually the administrative state, which on my reading of the Constitution reports in to the single duly elected president. So when I talk about the permitting process at the Department of Interior or shutting down the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I believe in, you know, we could go, I'm going into details on it tonight, I have the legal authority to do that as the US president. I think the legislation is going to be much more complicated and I don't believe that I can be in a position to promise what we would do legislatively to any of that. You mentioned getting
SPEAKER_03: people to take all these jobs that are available. Do you want to talk about immigration for a second and what you think about that? Yeah, merit based immigration. immigration, would
SPEAKER_05: you are you saying you would cut entitlements like
SPEAKER_04: unemployment or shorten the unemployment period to force people to go back to work? Is that what I'm reading? And tie them and tie them to work requirements? Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Would you have a specific for that, like a certain number of
SPEAKER_04: months or, you know, a pretty good a pretty good I mean, I do,
SPEAKER_05: but I think that's again, I'm very clear about what I will do through executive authority, what needs to go through legislation. I mean, that's all in negotiation. But I think a good principle is 1996 or in the 1990s, workfare under Clinton was actually far more aggressive than the work environment work requirements that were put into this supposed republican led debt deal where, like, what did they say? It was if you were age 18 to 55, and you are able bodied and childless, then you have to work at least 20 hours a week in order to receive more than three months out of three years worth of welfare, right? Now, Joe Biden, as a US senator voted for actually much more stringent workfare requirements in the 90s. So, you know, yes, I have ideas on specifics, but I'm not going to make a promise on exactly what that specific will look like. But a guiding principle is it has to be at least as aggressive as what we adopt. I mean, to your point during Clinton, we had 69 almost 70% participation
SPEAKER_04: and we're at 60 now, I think so. It's obvious that we have to trim that. But to chamat's next point, you know, we have 10 million job openings. We're not letting anybody in. How would you look at immigration? Obviously, we have people coming in the southern border illegally. And then we have h1b visas. And now Canada is saying, hey, we'll steal all those h1b is we'll take them. So how do you look at immigration to chamat's question? merit based immigration? I mean, one of the
SPEAKER_05: things that Canada does have, and I'm not a fan of America imitating Canada or anything like this in most respects, but they do have a point based system, right? They have a point based system. And so I think the point based system should work differently in the US. But I do favor merit based immigration. I'm a little bit of a departure from what I think is the Republican consensus here. You know, people I respect Tom Cotton and others have proposed bills with a hard cap on the number of immigrants. I it's a mistake. I think that the cap should declare itself based on how many people meet the meritocratic criteria, or have a little different qualities than
SPEAKER_04: for what would be a top criteria in this point based system to criteria skills that match up to job openings in the United
SPEAKER_05: States. But secondarily, and this one's important to me, I would move the civics portion of becoming a citizen to the front end of even being granted a visa to enter this country. And I think that addresses and accommodates an important part of the concern that many people who are pro immigration cap actually favor is I think there are legitimate concerns about the dilution, the loss of a national identity. But a lot of that is conflated with first the cycle of illegal immigration. I'm a hardliner on this. I favor putting the US military on the southern border. I've said I would use it on the northern border. I believe that we are on strong constitutional and legal authority to do it. I do not think building the wall is enough. There are cartel finance tunnels underneath that wall that vehicles literally run through today. So in some ways I'm going further than Trump in this direction. But simultaneously, de bureaucratize speed up the process for merit based immigration. But part of merit includes not just skills, but also civic commitments to the country. And I'm, you know, I use the word nationalist before I know that scares some people. I mean it in a positive way. I think every high school student in this country should have to pass the same civics test that an immigrant has to pass in order to become a citizen of this country. I also would favor bringing that on the front end and it selects for the kind of people who know something about the country when they enter, which I think is a good thing. People should assimilate and they should love this country
SPEAKER_04: in order to come into the country. Yes, I do. I think I
SPEAKER_05: think you should want to come here to be an American. Yeah. I think I think you're gonna get agreement around the horn here.
SPEAKER_04: Sax, you've heard Vivek's position so far. You obviously are passionate about the GOP. What do you agree with? And what don't you agree with so far? Well, there's a lot of stuff to agree with there. We're talking about American exceptionalism.
SPEAKER_00: One thing I want to talk about there is that I agree that America is exceptional. And we're most exceptional when we're trying to set an example for other nations where we're trying to be the shining city on a hill, as Reagan put it. But lately, and really, I mean, over the last couple of decades, what you've seen is that what American exceptionalism means to a lot of people in Washington is that we run all over the world and impose our ideology and our values on all these different countries. We began this great crusade to try and spread democracy in the Middle East. We tried to turn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq into Madisonian democracies, where you now are very, very involved in Ukraine, basically trying to detach that country from the Russian sphere of influence and turning it into a member of our military and economic alliance. So it does seem like American exceptionalism has taken on this sort of harder, more militarized edge. Where would you draw the line? I mean, like, what makes sense to you? I think I
SPEAKER_05: basically agree with everything you just said. I think as a side note on the geopolitics of it, I do think Ukraine is on track to become potentially the next Vietnam or the next Iraq. I think you have said similar things. I also think there's something else going on with Ukraine that's fueling this, which relates to the deeper identity crisis in our country that I described earlier. I think Ukraine has become a new religion, right in the in the country. And it's something that it's substitute for purpose and meaning, just like climate ideology or wokeism is. And, you know, there's the flag. It's like a crusade. I mean, you have people like waving these.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. You go to Washington, D.C., at least I did in
SPEAKER_05: June. I was there for one of the Sunday shows where my wife and I are going for a walk. We saw more trans flags and Ukraine flags than we did American flags on a short walk that we took through Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. So I'm not I'm not whining about this or being histrionic about it. I just think getting to the essence of what's going on, I think that's a different element of Ukraine that's different from even what we saw with the Amr Iraq. I don't think American exceptionalism is foisting our values on anyone. I think American exceptionalism is about demonstrating through our example how America flourishes and is strong when we live by our own ideals. And I think the best way we give hope to the free world is by being that shining city on a hill, not going somewhere else and talking about it with tanks behind us while actually suffering here at home. If you roam the streets of Kensington, as I did a few weeks ago, you don't have to go to Baghdad to see the third world. And so that, I think, is I think a big loss of where we are today in the country. When you're president,
SPEAKER_04: Putin invades Ukraine. You would sit back, not give any armaments and let him roll in. Here's what I would do. I would
SPEAKER_05: actually be proactive in doing a deal. And I've been very clear about the deal I would do. Trump has said he would do a deal in 24 hours and said what it was. I believe there's a deal to be done, but I also believe it's important to be clear about what the contours of that deal would be. I would freeze the current line. Let's take the status quo right now. So I can answer your question or I could answer starting from the present. If you don't, I could do both. We could do both. I mean, the obvious is maybe put NATO, take
SPEAKER_04: NATO off the table and avoid the whole thing. But now we're playing a little history. Yeah, we're playing a little history. So maybe it's better to talk about what's happening in the present. Right? Because I don't think that we would have
SPEAKER_05: if I was president, I don't think we would have gotten to the point of those things rolling in. Angela Merkel made some disastrous comments. Putin made a hard demand. We would have said hard no to Ukraine joining NATO and that would have been that there would have been no tanks rolling in.
SPEAKER_04: Putin may have took NATO off the table. Putin may have still invaded. We don't know. I don't think so. But we can't, you
SPEAKER_05: know, those are counterfactuals that we can, you know, we're not going to have one side or the other being able to prove that, right? So let's talk about the present. Right now, let's say I'm US president. I would freeze the current lines of control. We have a precedent for doing this, the Korean War, Korean War style armistice that does give Putin most of the Donbass region. That's beyond the pale of what many are willing to accept in either party. But I think any deal, someone has to win. Everyone has to win something out of the deal. I would further then give that assurance that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO. But there's a requirement in return. The biggest requirement is that Russia has to exit its military partnership with China. There's a 2001 treaty. It's called the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Cooperation, military cooperation between the two countries that Xi Jinping and Putin ratcheted up to the so-called strategic no limits partnership in 2022. That is why China is now coming, by the way, to Russia's aid. I personally believe we are absolutely sending Putin into Xi Jinping's arms in a way that's a mistake. I would also require that Putin remove his nuclear weapons from Kaliningrad, that we take any Russian military presence in the US, in the Western Hemisphere off the table, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua. I think this is a deal that Putin would do if we paired it with reopening economic relations with Russia, which I would do. Because I think Putin does not, and I can give you some evidence for this, but I think Putin does not enjoy being Xi Jinping's little brother. And so I think that this is actually an opportunity, and I have to confess, I am a guy who sees our foreign policy prism through the prism of believing that China is the top long-run threat that we face. And so most of my foreign policy views and national security views, even on topics that are apparently unrelated to China, I still see it through that prism. But this one isn't a far leap because China is literally in a military treaty with Russia and coming to their aid. I would use the Ukraine war and an end to the Ukraine war as a way to bifurcate the Russia-China relationship and divide, basically dissolve that relationship. And then actually that's our best way and most effective step towards deterring Xi Jinping from going after Taiwan. Because right now Xi Jinping, I think that there's a mistaken consensus view that the way he thinks about it is, oh, reason by analogy rather than by actual analyzing of a situation. Say, oh, well, he got that piece of land, maybe I can go get this island. I don't think he reasons by analogy. I think he reasons by the cards he has in terms of hard power. So his bet is that the US won't want to go to war with two different allied nuclear superpowers at the same time. But if Russia is no longer in his camp, then Xi Jinping is going to have to think twice about going after Taiwan. So then I guess my broader Taiwan, the question
SPEAKER_04: there is, you wouldn't defend Ukraine, would you have America and the allies defend Taiwan if it was invaded?
SPEAKER_05: I would at least until the US has achieved semiconductor independence. So you would defend Taiwan? Because we depend on them for our modern way of life in a way that we don't on Ukraine. And then the latter part of this is sounds a little crass to some people, but I believe in being honest, I actually think that, yeah, I'll get to the get to this point in a second. But to answer your question, yes, until we've
SPEAKER_05: achieved semiconductor independence, God, I believe we can achieve semiconductor independence. Yeah. So it's not
SPEAKER_04: your belief is not, hey, these are two democracies. They both deserve equal defense from the United States, Ukraine and Taiwan. It's Ukraine doesn't have semiconductors. We don't have a strategic need to defend them in Taiwan. So it's a lot more of a pragmatic cutthroat approach to foreign policy. It
SPEAKER_05: is. I, of course, resist the characterization of cutthroat a little bit. I go back to the principle that David mentioned of what American exceptionalism is to me is that when America is strong and is flourishing and Americans are flourishing within America, we set the example for the free world of what is possible. And so my view is that, yes, at least until time, until we're semiconductor self-sufficient. And I think things work out here where I think we can get there. So in time frame where we've got our semiconductors up and running,
SPEAKER_04: you'll let China roll into Taiwan. No big deal for you. I
SPEAKER_05: will say that I definitely evaluate that very differently than I do. Okay. That's super candid. But I but I your
SPEAKER_04: thoughts on that is important. Freebird. Yeah, let me just ask.
SPEAKER_02: So Vivek, I mean, I think that your point is a really important one, which is that when we're happy at home, we tend not to look for conflict abroad. That's almost a universal truth that's emerged from history. Human civilization has shown that, you know, when the people in a democracy in particular are happy at home, and certainly autocracies are quite different. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, you go through history, but like when you have a true democracy, you don't vote to go and you don't support the idea of conflict abroad if you're happy at home. But the counter is true, which is when you're unhappy at home, you tend to look for conflict abroad. And by some assessments, Ray Dalio had this great book about this, The Changing World Order. I don't know if you if you read it. But you know, he makes this point about the internal strife leads to external conflict, which is why it felt like we were going to go that way with Ukraine, Russia coming out of 21. So I wonder, are we happy at home? We're not and I want to ask it, I want to ask another question tied to this. Why is Donald Trump leading in the polls? Because I think that the two go hand in hand, there is something that he represents. And there's something about his voice, that I think echoes the sentiment of this populist unhappiness inside of this country today, that manifests in a bunch of ways, one of which is the interest in and support for external conflict. But I don't know if you're up for kind of thinking about tackling the two questions together. But I'd love your your take on that. Yeah, great question.
SPEAKER_04: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you're extending a
SPEAKER_05: theme of where I talk about sort of domestic cultural annoyances, as a symptom of a deeper vacuum in our national soul. I think that actually our projection and focus abroad is a lot easier of a deflection away from the harder step of taking a long, hard look in the mirror and asking ourselves about the health of our own nation today. And so I think it's a deep question. I think we're not healthy as a nation today. I think we suffer from deep seated psychic insecurities, psychological insecurities. I think the economic stagnation, the fact that real wage growth isn't up for the bottom 99% of the country. A lot of that I put at the feet of the Federal Reserve. There are a lot of other complex factors behind it. But a lot of this feeds into what you call populism. I don't excuse me. I don't I don't like you, by the way, just to be
SPEAKER_02: clear, I think that it's just imprecise. It's a rapper that tries to catch too many things, and it doesn't catch any of them enough. So yeah, yeah, you think what you're calling populism is actually a failure
SPEAKER_00: of our elites? Isn't that what's going on? We saw during COVID, that all the health authorities did a horrible job, the CDC, and the NIH, it turns out they were funding in a function research, which may have caused COVID. In the first place, they were doing experiments on bat viruses, almost certainly did cause Yeah, exactly. So you know, we keep finding out that the elites are supposed to be running the country and running these institutions are doing absolutely horrible job. That's what the reaction is against. Then people come along and label up populism and say it's gonna lead to fascism. It's like, come on, that is a way of protecting the people in power from accountability for the horrible job they're doing. It's well said. Absolutely. In the use of the word populism is
SPEAKER_05: almost stacking that debate in favor of saying that those grievances aren't legitimate. And so I think why is Donald Trump polling at number one in the polls? Because people know the truth. I think those grievances are absolutely legitimate. Now, I think the mood of the country has changed a little bit, including the mood of the hard conservative base has changed since 2015. I think there is now I think there is now a sense that what are we actually going to do about it? Are we are we going to go the direction of a national divorce? I mean, divorce is one of these things that speaks itself into existence. Maybe applies at the same level of a nation, right? That's on the table. It's in the it's in the ether. I don't think most people, including in our hardcore America first base, I'm part of that base. I don't think want a national divorce. And so I think that the moment now calls for this. Why I'm in this race. This is actually why at this point, I couldn't have told you this in March, but at this point, I'm convinced we're actually gonna be successful in this. This is what the unique fusion we're going to require is not somebody showing up saying hope kumbaya, let's move forward, compromise, hold hands and declare its morning again in America. No, that ain't gonna work. But I think it requires recognizing the legitimacy of those grievances, not as lip service, I believe, for the same reason Sax just mentioned, many of those grievances are legitimate, they're grounded in truth. But to say, as I often say to the left, hardship is not the same thing as victimhood. And we're not going to choose victimhood. We're going to choose recognition of truth as our best path to heal over whatever's happened and then to move forward. That's why I've come out and been very vocal about the fact that I would pardon Trump of each of the two indictments that have already been brought in. If the J six indictment is brought against him, I would do the same thing. I think that we have to be able to recognize the truth of our past grievances of our fellow Americans, and actually, not just pay lip service to it, but feel into it and acknowledge the reality of them. I think that's then the table stakes events meeting a demand that many in our grassroots conservative base have, I'm one of them, a desire to also move forward as one nation. And I think both of those elements are going to be required. They don't go together. I think there are people in the republican primary who offer each of those on their own. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Whoever's successful gonna have to offer both this morning. There was a an opinion piece. I'm assuming you read it by
SPEAKER_02: Rich Lowry, chief of the National Review, published on Politico. Get ready for the Vivek Ramaswamy moment in which I would say he's fairly effusive about the campaign you're running. Right? I mean, would you agree like if you said Yeah, it was a there was a really Yeah, some really take it back. Did you read the piece? I mean, I thought there was some really nice abusive, really interesting. He loves you. Yeah. No, he said, Oh, he doesn't love me. Actually. He doesn't love you. But he said, I think he said some complimentary thing that's okay. About your campaign about your character. But said, there's no way you're going to win and win for president. Well, you went from under 1%. I think now the latest poll has you
SPEAKER_04: above 5%. And we're in the very early innings here. Right? I
SPEAKER_05: think there's one that just came. I mean, yeah, there's some that have, you know, bounced a little higher than that. But yeah, you're a little higher for the first debate. The thing that
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