Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #445

1. 0:00 – 2:02

   Introduction

   1. VRVivek Ramaswamy0:00

      The way I would do it, 75% head count reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing. Shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can't have both. It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state, that's the welfare state. It presents itself in the form of the regulatory state, that's what we're talking about. And then there's the foreign nanny state where, effectively, we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:11

      The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths: The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vivek Ramaswamy.

2. 2:02 – 5:18

   Conservatism

   1. LFLex Fridman2:02

      You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas so you're the perfect person to ask, uh, what is conservatism?

   2. VRVivek Ramaswamy2:10

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman2:10

      What's your, let's say, conservative vision for America?

   4. VRVivek Ramaswamy2:14

      Well, actually, this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and direction of the conservative movement is that we've gotten so good at describing what we're against. Right, there's a list of things that we could rail against, wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVIDism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on. But actually, what's missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the purpose of my campaign because I do feel that that's why we didn't have the red wave in 2022. So, uh, they tried to blame Donald Trump, they tried to blame abortion, they blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn't have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for. So what do we stand for as conservatives? I think we stand for the ideals that we fought the American Revolution for in 1776. Ideals like merit, right? That the best person gets the job without regard to their genetics. That you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character. Free speech and open debate, not just as some sort of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the United States of America. Self-governance, and this is a big one right now, is that the people we elect to run the government, they're no longer the ones who actually run the government. We in the conservative movement, I believe, should believe in restoring self-governance where it's not bureaucrats running the show, but actually elected representatives. And then the other, the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive and I think is a North Star of the conservative movement is restoring the rule of law in this country. You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border. It's particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. You and I actually share a couple of aspects in, in common in that regard. That also though means your first act of entering this country can't break the law. So there's some policy commitments and principles, merit, free speech, self-governance, rule of law, and then I think culturally what does it mean to be a conservative is it means we believe in the anchors of our identity in truth, the value of the individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision. And that's a big part of what's been missing and it's a big part of not just through the campaign but through, you know, a lot of my future advocacy. That's the vacuum I'm aiming to fill.

   5. LFLex Fridman5:06

      Yeah, we'll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you've spoken about a lot. Uh,

3. 5:18 – 10:52

   Progressivism

   1. LFLex Fridman5:18

      but you've also had a lot of really tense debates so, uh, you're a perfect person to ask to steel man the other side.

   2. VRVivek Ramaswamy5:24

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman5:25

      So let me ask you about progressivism.

   4. VRVivek Ramaswamy5:27

      Sure.

   5. LFLex Fridman5:27

      Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left-wing ideas?

   6. VRVivek Ramaswamy5:31

      Yeah, so look, I think the strongest case particularly for left-wing ideas in the United States, so in the American context, is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its ideals. So even though our founding fathers preached the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom, they didn't practice those values in terms of many of our founding fathers being slave owners, inequalities with respect to women and other disempowered groups such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to last to this day. The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history isn't that long ago-... and that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those imbalances in power in the United States. That's the core view of the modern left. I'm not criticizing it right now. I'm steel manning it. I'm trying to give you, I think, a good articulation of why the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping into correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my counter-rebuttal of that, but the best statement of the left, I think that it's the fact that we've been imperfect in living up to those ideals. In order to fix that, we're gonna have to take steps that are se- severe steps, if needed, to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of opportunity in this country. That's the case for the left-wing view in modern America.

   7. LFLex Fridman6:51

      So what's your criticism of that?

   8. VRVivek Ramaswamy6:52

      So my concern with it is even if that's well-motivated, I think that it recreates many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I'll give you a really tangible example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would say something like this right now, but I think it's true so I'm gonna say it. I'm actually, even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing actually a rise in anti-Black and anti-minority racism in this country, which is a little curious, right when over the last 10 years we got as close to Martin Luther King's Promised Land as you could envision, a place where you have every American regardless of their skin color able to vote without obstruction, a place where you have people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way. Why are we seeing that resurgence? In part it's because of, I believe, that left-wing obsession with racial equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. And so when you take something away from someone based on their skin color, and that's what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do, the left-wing views are to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you're a white, straight, cis man, you have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When you take something away from somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates... It has, there are several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can agree we wanna avoid is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly wanted to heal. I see that in our context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even what's going on in... I'm from Ohio. I was born and raised in Ohio and I live there today. The controversy in Springfield, Ohio. I personally don't blame really any of the people who are in Springfield, either the native people who have born and raised in Springfield or even the Haitians who have been moved to Springfield. But it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome where if you put 20,000 people in a community where, or 50,000 people where the 20,000 are coming in, don't know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, are unable to assimilate, you know there's going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began per- perhaps with some type of, some type of charitable instinct, right, some type of sympathy for people who went through the hearth- the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States, what began with sympathy, what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that's my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview. Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other. You can't have both. And the reason why is no two people... and I think this is a beautiful thing. It's true between you and I, between you, I, and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues. No two people have the same skill sets. We're each endowed by different gifts. We're each endowed with different talents. And that's the beauty of human diversity. And a true meritocracy is a system in which you're able to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without anybody standing in your way, but that means necessarily there's gonna be differences in outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money, not just fame or currency or whatever it is. There's just gonna be different outcomes for different people in different spheres of lives. And that's what meritocracy demands. It's what it requires. And so the left's vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of meritocracy. And so those would be my two reasons for opposing the view is, one is it's not meritocratic, but number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have wanted to help. And I think that's part of what we're seeing in modern America.

4. 10:52 – 15:45

   DEI

   1. VRVivek Ramaswamy10:52

   2. LFLex Fridman10:52

      Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban. Great conversation. I think it's on your podcast actually.

   3. VRVivek Ramaswamy10:58

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman10:58

      Yes. Yeah. It was great.

   5. VRVivek Ramaswamy10:59

      His good guy day talking.

   6. LFLex Fridman10:59

      It was great. Okay. Well, speaking of good guys, he, he messages me all the time with, with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. Uh, what was, uh, what was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You're mostly focused on kind of DEI.

   7. VRVivek Ramaswamy11:15

      So, so let's just take a step back and understand, 'cause people use these acronyms and then they start saying it out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. Like DEI refers to capital D diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a philosophy adopted by institutions principally in the private sector, companies, non-profits and universities, to say that they need to strive for specific forms of racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity. And it's not just the D, it's the equity in ensuring that you have equal outcomes as measured by certain group quota targets or group representation targets that they would meet in their ranks. Uh, the problem with the DEI agenda is in the name of diversity it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So the way the argument goes is this, is that we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and minority views, but if certain opinions are themselves deemed to be hostile to those minorities, then you have to exclude those opinions in the name of the capital D diversity-But that means that you're necessarily sacrificing actual diversity of thought. I can give you a very specific example. That might sound like, okay well, is it such a bad thing if an organization doesn't want to exclude people who are saying racist things on a given day? We could debate that. But let's get to the tangible world of how that actually plays out. I- I, for my part, have not really heard in ordinary America people uttering racial epithets if you're going to a restaurant or in the grocery store. It's not something I've encountered, certainly not in the workplace. But that's a theoretical case. Let's talk about the real world case of how this plays out. So there, there was an instance, it was a case that presented itself before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, one of the government enforcers of the DEI agenda. And there was a case of a woman who wore a red sweater on Fridays in celebration of veterans and those who had served the military, and invited others in the workplace to do the same thing. And they had a kind of affinity group, you could call it that, a veteran-type affinity group, appreciating those who had served. Her son had served as well. There was a minority employee at that business who said that he found that to be a microaggression. So the employer asked her to stop wearing said clothes to the office. Well, she still felt like she wanted to celebrate, I think it was Friday was the day of the week where they did it. She still wore the red sweater and she- she didn't wear it, but she would hang it on the back of her seat, right? Put it on the back of her seat at the office. They said, "No, no, you can't do that either." So the irony is in the name of this capital D Diversity, which is creating a supposedly welcoming workplace for all kinds of Americans, by focusing only on certain kinds of so-called diversity, that translates into actually not even a diversity of your genetics, which is what they claim to be solving for, but also a hostility to diversity of thought. And I think that's dangerous. And you're seeing that happen in the last four years across this country. It's been pretty rampant. I think it leaves America worse off. The beauty of America is we're a country where we should be able to have institutions that are stronger from different points of view being expressed. But my number one criticism of the DEI agenda is not even that it's anti-meritocratic. It is anti-meritocratic. But my number one criticism is it- it's actually hostile to the free and open exchange of ideas by creating often legal liabilities for organizations that even permit certain viewpoints to be expressed. And I think that's the biggest concern.

   8. LFLex Fridman14:35

      I think what Mark would say is that diversity, uh, allows you to look for talent in places where you haven't looked before and therefore find really special, uh, talent, special people. I think that's the case he made.

   9. VRVivek Ramaswamy14:51

      He did make that case, and it was a great conversation. And- and my response to that is, "Great, that's a good thing." We don't need a three-letter acronym to do that, right? You don't need special programmatic DEI incentives to do it because companies are always gonna seek in a truly free market, which I think we're missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons. But in a truly free market, companies will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest or else they're gonna be less competitive versus other companies. But you don't need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government to do it. Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial and gender representation targets in your workforce. That's not the free market working. So I think you can't have it both ways. Either it's gonna be good for companies and companies are gonna do what's in their self-interest, that's what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I believe, but if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing it to adopt these top-down standards. That's my issue with it.

5. 15:45 – 22:36

   Bureaucracy

   1. VRVivek Ramaswamy15:45

   2. LFLex Fridman15:45

      I don't know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind which there's a good idea, to b- bully people and to do bad things. I don't know what it is.

   3. VRVivek Ramaswamy16:07

      This has less to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So, so part of what you've seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you've seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about it in the military, right? You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the stated objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts, it was- it was a policy move we regret. Our- our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9/11. Nonetheless, if you're part of the US military or you're General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military's actual substantive failures. It's what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability. You could say the same thing with respect to the educational system. It's a lot easier to claim that... And I'm not the one making this claim, but others have made this claim, that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes. You can claim using that- that math is racist. It's a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach Black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix our public school systems and the- and the ZIP code-coded mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities, in bad schools. So I think that in many cases what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause, but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism. So it's- so in many ways, bureaucracy, I think carves the channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years. And that's why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness 'cause that's just a symptom, I think, versus combating actual bureaucracy itself, the rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state. We talk about that in the government, but the deep state doesn't just exist in the government.It exists, I think, in every sphere of our lives from companies to nonprofits to universities. It's the rise of what we call the managerial class, the committee class. The people who professionally sit on committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs, original ideators, and- and ordinary citizens alike.

   4. LFLex Fridman18:54

      Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. (laughs) Uh, it seems like when you have a giant managerial class, they, the actual doers don't get to- to do. Uh, but like you said, bureaucracy is, uh, a phenomena of both the left and the right. This is not-

   5. VRVivek Ramaswamy19:13

      It's not even a left or right. It's- it's- it's just transcends that. I- but it's anti-American at its core. So our founding fathers, they were anti-bureaucratic (laughs) at their core, actually. They were the pioneers, the explorers, the unafraid, right? They were the inventors, the creators. People forget this about Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence, one of the great inventors that we have in the United States as well. He invented the lightning rod. He invented the Franklin stove, which was actually one of the great innovations of the- in the field of thermodynamics. He even invented a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use. That's just Benjamin Franklin. So you think, "Oh, he's a one-off." Everybody say, "Okay, he was the one zany founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the country." Wrong. It wasn't unique to him. You have Thomas Jefferson. What- what are you sitting in right now? You're sitting in a, on a swivel chair.

   6. LFLex Fridman20:05

      Mm-hmm.

   7. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:06

      Okay. Who invented the swivel chair?

   8. LFLex Fridman20:08

      Thomas Jefferson? (laughs)

   9. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:09

      Yes, Thomas Jefferson.

   10. LFLex Fridman20:10

       Yeah.

   11. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:10

       Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair-

   12. LFLex Fridman20:11

       Yeah.

   13. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:11

       ... while he was writing the Declaration of Independence.

   14. LFLex Fridman20:14

       Y- you- you're the one that-

   15. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:15

       Which is insane.

   16. LFLex Fridman20:15

       ... reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.

   17. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:21

       And he was 33 when he did it, while inventing the swivel chair. And-

   18. LFLex Fridman20:25

       I like (laughs) how you're focused on the swivel chair. Can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence?

   19. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:29

       But- but- but- but-

   20. LFLex Fridman20:30

       It makes me feel horrible.

   21. VRVivek Ramaswamy20:32

       ... but the Declaration of Inde- (laughs) the Declaration of Independence part, everybody knows. What people don't know, he was an architect. So he worked in Virginia, but the Virginia State Capitol dome, so the building that's in Virginia today where the state capitol is, that dome was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well. So these people weren't people who sat on professional committees. They weren't bureaucrats. They hated bureaucracy. Part of Old World England is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy and monarchy go hand in hand. A monarch can't actually administer or govern directly. It requires a bureaucracy, a- a machine to actually technocratically govern for him. So the United States of America was founded on the idea that we reject that old world view, right? The old world vision was that we, the people cannot be trusted to self-govern or make decisions for ourselves. We would burn ourselves off the planet is the modern version of this. With existential risks like global climate change, if we just leave it to the people and their democratic will, that's why you need professional technocrats, educated elites, enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set limits that actually protect people from their own worst impulses. That's the old world view. And most nations in human history have operated this way. But what made the United States of America itself, to know what made America great, we have to know what made America itself. What made America itself is we said hell no to that vision. That we, the people, for better or worse, are gonna self-govern without the committee class restraining what we do. And the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston. You could go straight down the list of founding fathers who were inventors, creators, pioneers, explorers, who also were the very people who came together to sign the Declaration of Independence. And so, yeah, this rise of bureaucracy in America, in every sphere of life, I view it as anti-American, actually. And- and I hope that, you know, conservatives and liberals alike can- can get behind my crusade, certainly, to get in there and- and shut most of it down.

6. 22:36 – 37:46

   Government efficiency

   1. VRVivek Ramaswamy22:36

   2. LFLex Fridman22:37

      Yeah, speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How do we make it smaller? What are the diff- what are the different ideas of how to do that?

   3. VRVivek Ramaswamy22:48

      Well, the first thing I will say is you're always taking a risk, okay? There's- there's no free lunch here, mostly at least. You're always taking a risk. One risk is that you say, "I wanna reform it gradually. I wanna have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right end state is, and then carefully cut with a chisel, like a work of art to get there." I don't believe that approach works. I think that's an approach that conservatives have taken for many years. I think it hasn't gotten us very far. And the reason is, if you have like an eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back. The other risk you could take, so that's the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much. To say that I'm gonna cut so much that I'm gonna take the risk of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way, that I'm gonna take that risk. I can't give you option C, which is to say that I'm gonna cut exactly the right amount, I'm gonna do it perfectly. Okay, you don't know ex-ante, you don't know beforehand that it's exactly how it's gonna go. So that's a meaningless claim. It's only a question of which risk you're gonna take. I believe in the moment we live in right now, the second risk is the risk we have to be willing to take. And we haven't had, we haven't had a class of politician, and Donald Trump in 2016 was, I think the closest we've gotten, and I think the second term will be even- even closer to what we need. But short of that, I don't think we've really had a class of politician who has gotten very serious about cutting so much that you're also gonna cut some fat, but not only some fat, but also some muscle. That's the risk we have to take. So I, what would I, the way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing. Shut down agencies that shouldn't exist. Rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an unelected bureaucrats. And that is the single greatest form of economic stimulus.... we could have in this country, but it is also the single most effective way to restore self-governance in our country as well. And it is the blueprint for, I think, how we save this country.

   4. LFLex Fridman24:57

      That's pretty gangster, 75%. Uh, there's this kinda almost meme-like video of, uh, Argentinean President, uh, Javier Milei (laughs) where, where on a whiteboard he has all the, I think, 18 ministries lined up and he's like, he's ripping like-

   5. VRVivek Ramaswamy25:15

      Hafuera!

   6. LFLex Fridman25:16

      ... Department of Education gone, right? (laughs) And he's just going like this. Uh, now the situation in Argentina is pretty dire.

   7. VRVivek Ramaswamy25:24

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman25:25

      And, and th- the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying, "Oh, th- the empire is falling." This is still, uh, in my opinion, the greatest nation on Earth. Still the economy is doing very well. Still there's, this is the hub of culture, the hub of, uh, innovation, the hub of so many amazing things. Um, do you think it's possible to do something like firing 75% of people in government when things are going relatively well?

   9. VRVivek Ramaswamy25:59

      Yes. In fact, I think it's necessary and essential. I think things are, depends on, depends on what your level of well really is, what you're benchmarking against. America's not built on complacency, right? (laughs) We're built on the pursuit of excellence. And are we still the greatest nation on planet Earth? I believe we are. I agree with you on that. But are we great as we could possibly be or even as we have been in the past measured against our own standards of excellence? No, we're not. I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline. That doesn't mean it's the end of the empire yet. But we are a nation in decline right now. I don't think we have to be. But part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial class, the bureaucracy sucking the lifeblood out of the country, s- sucking the lifeblood out of our innovative culture, our culture of self-governance. So is it possible? Yeah, it's, it's really possible. I mean, I'll tell you one easy way to do it. This is a little bit, I'm being a little bit glib here, but I think it's not crazy, at least as a thought experiment. Get in there on day one, say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy who was not elected, elected representatives obviously were elected by the people, but of the people who were not elected, if your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you're out. If it ends in an even number, you're in. There's a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you're in, and if it starts with an odd number, you're out. Boom. That's a 75% reduction. Then literally stochastically, okay, one of the virtues of that, it's a thought experiment, not a policy prescription, but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that you don't have a bunch of lawsuits you're dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political viewpoint discrimination. Actually, the reality is you've at mass, you didn't, didn't bring the chisel, you brought a chainsaw. I guarantee you, do that on day one and do number, step two on day two, on day three not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people who run a company, especially larger companies know this, it's 25% of the people who do 80 to 90% of the useful work. These government agencies are no different. So now imagine you could do that same thought experiment but not just doing it at random, but do it still at large scale while having some metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution. That, I think, would immediately raise not only the civic character of the United States. Now we feel, okay, the people we elect to run the government, they've got the power back, they're running the government again as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today. It would also stimulate the economy. I mean, the regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy. Most of it's unconstitutional. All we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about, but have not really effectuated, ever in modern history.

   10. LFLex Fridman29:00

       And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra competent that actually wanna work in government.

   11. VRVivek Ramaswamy29:05

       Exactly, which you're missing today 'cause the, right now, the government would swallow them up. Most competent people feel like that bureau- bureaucratic machine will swallow them whole. You clear the decks of 75% of them, real innovators can then show up.

   12. LFLex Fridman29:18

       Yeah, you know, th- there's kind of this cynical view of capitalism where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But I think a lot of people would wanna work in government to build something that's helpful to a h- huge number of people.

   13. VRVivek Ramaswamy29:32

       Yeah, well, look, I think, um, there's, there's opportunities for the very best to have large scale impact in all kinds of different institutions, in our universities-

   14. LFLex Fridman29:43

       Sure.

   15. VRVivek Ramaswamy29:43

       ... to K through 12 education, through entrepreneurship. I'm obviously very biased in that regard. I think there's a lot you're able to create that you couldn't create through government. But I do think in the moment that we live in where our government is as broken as it is and is as responsible for the declining nature of our country, yeah, I think bringing in people who are unafraid, talented, and able to have an impact could make all of the difference. And, and I agree with you. I don't think actually most people, even most people who say they're motivated by money, I don't think are actually motivated by money. I think most people are driven by a belief that they can do more than they're being permitted to do right now with their skill sets. See, I've never... Eh, I'll tell you this. So I've run, I've run a number of companies and one of the things that I used to ask when I was, you know, I'm not day-to-day involved in them anymore, but as a CEO, I would ask when I did interviews, and the first company I started at Roivent, like for four years in, I mean, we're, you know, company was pretty big by that point.I would still intent on interviewing every candidate before they joined, screening for the culture of that person. I can talk a lot more about things we did to build that culture. But one of the questions I would always ask them naturally just to start a conversation, it's a pretty basic question is, "Why did you leave your last job?" Or, "Why are you leaving your last job?" I'll tell you what I didn't hear very often is that I wasn't paid enough, right? And maybe they'd be shy to tell you that during an interview, but there's indirect ways to signal that. That really wasn't at all like even a top 10 reason why people were leaving their job. I'll give you what the number one reason was, is that they felt like they were unable to do the true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role. That's the number one reason people leave their job. And, you know, I think f- by the way, that's, I would say that as I'm saying that in a self-boastful way that we would attract these people. I think that's also true for most of the people who left the company as well, Royven, right? And- and- and it's- and that was true at Royven, it's true at other companies I've- I've started. I think the number one reason people join companies and the number one reason people leave companies, whether they've been to join mine or to leave mine in the past, have been that they feel like they're able to do more than they're able to with their skillset than that environment permits them to actually achieve. And so I think that's what people hung for. When you think about capitalism and true free market capitalism, and we used words earlier like meritocracy, it's about building a system, whether it's in a nation or whether it's even within an organization, that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential. And sometimes it just doesn't match for an organization where let's say the mission is here and somebody's skillsets could be really well aligned to a different mission, then the right answer is, it's not a negative thing, it's just that that person needs to leave and find their mission somewhere else. But to bring that back to government, I think part of what's happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy in so many of these government agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies. I- I- I think if you went to most federal bureaucracies and just asked them, like, "What's the mission..." I'm just making one up off the top of my head right now, the Department of Health and Human Services. "What is the mission of HHS in the United States of America?" I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who leads it, could give you a coherent answer to that question. I- I just, I just heavily doubt it. And you could fill in the blank for, you know, or any range of other, Department of Commerce. I mean, we could just go straight down the list of each of these other ones. What is the mission of this organization? You could even say for the US military, "What's the purpose of the US military, the Department of Defense?" I can give you one. I think it is to win wars, and more importantly, through its strength, to avoid wars. That's it. Well, okay, if that's the mission, then you know, okay, it's not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where we kind of feel like it sometimes and other ones where we don't. And who decides that? I don't really know, but whoever the people are that decide that, we follow those orders. No, our mission is to protect the United States of America, to win wars and to avoid wars. Boom, those three things. What does protecting the United States of America mean? Number one, the homeland of the United States of America and the people who reside there. Okay, that's a clear mission. I mean, the Department of Health and Human Services maybe could be a reasonable mission to say that I want to make America the healthiest country on planet Earth, and we will develop the metrics and meet those metrics. And that's the goal of the Department of HHS, to set policies or at least to implement policies that best achieve that goal. But you can't... A- a- and maybe that's the right statement of the mission, maybe it's not, but one- one of the things that happens is when you're governed by the committee class, it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization, whether it's a company or government agency or bureaucracy. And once you've done that, then you lose the ability to attract the best and the brightest, because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential, they have to know what it's towards. There has to be a mission in the first place. Then you're not getting the best and brightest, you get more from the committee class, and that becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral. And that is what the blob of the federal bureaucracy really looks like today.

   16. LFLex Fridman34:45

       Yeah, you said something really profound. At the individual scale, the individual contributor, doer, creator, what happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit. And then there's barriers that come up where you have to wait a little bit. This happens, there's friction always. And when humans together are working on something, there's friction. And so the- the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens is the managerial class, the incentive is- is for- to create barriers.

   17. VRVivek Ramaswamy35:15

       It's what it does. I mean, that's just by the nature of a bureaucracy, it creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever the other process was. Is there some room for that somewhere in certain contexts? Sure. It's like a defensive mechanism that's designed to reduce dynamism. But I think wh- when you- when that becomes cancerous in its scope, it then actually kills the host itself, whether that's a school, whether that's a company, whether that's a government. And s- so the way I think about it, Lex, is there's a- there's sort of a balance of distributed power. Um, and I don't mean power in the- in the Foucault sense of social power, but I mean just sort of power in the sense of the ability to effect relevant change in any organization between what you could call the founder class, the creator class, the everyday citizen, the stakeholder class, and then the managerial class. A- and there's a role for all three of them, right? You could have the constituents of an organization, say in a constitutional republic, that's the citizen. You could have the- the equivalent of the creator class, the people who create things in that- that polity. And then you have the bureaucratic class that's designed to administer and serve as a liaison between the two. I'm not denying that there's some role somewhere for people who are in that managerial class, but right now, in this moment in American history, and I think it's been more or less true for the last century but it's grown, starting with Woodrow Wilson's advent of the modern administrative state, metastasizing through FDR's New Deal and what was required to administer it, blown over and- and metastasizing further through LBJ's Great Society and- and everything that's happened since, even aided and abetted by Republican presidents along the way, like Richard Nixon.... has created a United States of America where that committee class, both in and outside the government in our culture, wields far too much influence and power relative to the everyday citizen stakeholder and to the creators who are, in many ways, constrained, hamstrung, shackled in a straitjacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions. And, um, you know, I- I certainly feel that myself. I, you know, I probably identify as being a member of that creator class most closely. It's just what I've done. I create things. And I think we live in an environment in the United States of America where we're still probably the best country on Earth where that creator has that shot, so that's the positive side of it, but one where we are far more constrictive to the creator class than we have been when we've been at our best. And that's what I wanna see change.

7. 37:46 – 52:11

   Education

   1. VRVivek Ramaswamy37:46

   2. LFLex Fridman37:46

      Can you sort of steel man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education as, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much?

   3. VRVivek Ramaswamy38:02

      Yeah, so I go back to this question of mission, right? A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren't aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place actually. So that might be a useful place to start, is that this thing was created. It had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose? Might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decide what are we doing with it or not. What was the purpose of this thing that we created? It's not a... It- it, uh, to me seems like a highly relevant question, yet in this discussion about government reform, it's interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, "Okay, but we got the status quo and it's just gonna be disruptive," versus asking the question of, "Okay, this institution was created. It had an original purpose. Is that purpose still relevant? Is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today?" To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So let's talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time, which was to make sure that localities and particularly states were not siphoning dollars, taxpayer dollars away from predominantly Black school districts to predominantly white ones. And that was not a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening, or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the South. And so you may say you don't like the federal solution. You may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original purpose of the US Department of Education to make sure that from a federal perspective, states were not systematically disadvantaging Black school districts over predominantly white ones. However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago, it's not a relevant purpose today. There's no evidence today of states intentionally mapping out which are the Black versus white school districts and siphoning money in one direction versus another. To the contrary, one of the things we've learned is that the school districts in the inner city, many of which are predominantly Black, actually spend more money per student than other school districts for a worse result as measured by test scores and other performance on a per student basis, suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per school determining student success and actually suggesting that even the over-funding of some of those already poorly run schools rewards them for their actual bureaucratic failures. So against that backdrop, the Department of Education has instead extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose to instead implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach. So Department of Education funding, so federal funding accounts for about, you know, giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country. But that comes with strings attached. So in today's Department of Education, this didn't happen back in 1970, but it's happening today. Ironically, it's funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail, they blow smoke to cover up for their own failures. What happens with today's Department of Education, they effectively say you don't get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals. And in fact, they also intervene in the curriculum where there's evidence of schools in the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding, so long as they have certain subjects like archery. There was one instance of a school that had archery in its curriculum. I- I find that to be pretty interesting, actually. I think that, I think you have different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude. But hey, maybe I'm biased, doesn't matter. Whether you like archery or not, I don't think it's the federal government's job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education. So what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose that's long passed. You don't have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve of siphoning money from Black school districts to white school districts and laundering that effectively in public funds. That doesn't exist anymore. So they find new purposes instead, creating a lot more damage along the way. So you asked me to steel man it and could I say something constructive rather than just, you know, pounding down on the other side. One way to think about this is, for a lot of these agencies, were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes. Where that positive intention existed, I'm still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies, but if you're gonna create one, at least make it, what should we call it? (laughs) Uh, a task force. Make it a task force. A task force versus an agency means after it's done, you celebrate, you've done your work, pat yourself on the back, and then move on rather than creating a standing bureaucracy which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place. And I think we don't have enough of that in our culture, right? I mean, even if you have a company that's generated tons of cash flow and it solved a problem, let's say it's a, let's say it's a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease and the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease and they generated a boatload of cash from doing it.... at a certain point, you could just give it to your shareholders and close up shop, and that's actually a beautiful thing to do. You don't see that happen enough in the American consciousness and the American culture of when an institution has achieved its purpose, celebrate it and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government would result in a vastly restrained scope of government rather than today, it's a one-way ratchet. Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well. And that's where you get this metastasis over the last century.

   4. LFLex Fridman43:50

      So what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector, the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don't want to have in government?

   5. VRVivek Ramaswamy44:02

      So if the question is, what should government do that the private sector cannot? I'll give you one. Protect our border. I mean, uh, capitalism, it's, it's never gonna be the job of capitalists or never gonna be the capability or inclination of capitalists to preserve a national border. And I think a nation is literally, uh, I think one of the chapters of this book, okay, A Nation Without Borders is Not a Nation. It's almost a tautology. An open border is not a border. Capitalism is not gonna solve that. What's gonna solve that is a nation. Part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its nation. In this case, the United States of America. That's an example of a proper function of the federal government, to provide physical security to its citizens. Another proper role of that federal government is to look after... O- o- or in this case could be state government, to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else without their consent. It's a fancy way economists would use to describe it. What does that mean? It means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else's river, then you're liable for that. It's not that, "Okay, I'm a capitalist and so I wanna create things and I'm gonna do hell or high water whether or not that harms people around me." The job of a proper government is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing their own rights through a system of capitalism in seeking prosperity, you're free to do it. But if you're hurting somebody else without their consent in the process, the government is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property right. So I would say that those are two central functions of government is to preserve national boundaries and the national security of a homeland, and number two is to protect and preserve private property rights and the enforcement of those private property rights. And I think at that point, you've described about 80 to 90% of the proper role of a government.

   6. LFLex Fridman45:50

      What about in- infrastructure?

   7. VRVivek Ramaswamy45:52

      Look, I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector. I mean, you can get into specifics. You could have infrastructure that's specific to national security. No, I do think that, uh, military industrial base is essential to provide national security, that's a form of infrastructure. I don't think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation. But, you know, interstate highways, you know, I think you could think about whether or not that's a common good that everybody benefits from but nobody has the incentive to create. I think you could make an argument for the existence of, of interstate highways. I think you could also make powerful arguments for the fact that actually you could have enough private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well. But, you know, I'm not gonna be... I'm not, I'm not, um, dogmatic about this. But broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the goal of the federal government, I'm not even gonna say 100, 80 to 90% of the goal of the existence of a federal government should be to... o- of government period, should be to protect national boundaries and provide security for the people who live there and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside there. If we restore that, I think we're well on our way to a revival of what our founding fathers envisioned. And I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did.

   8. LFLex Fridman47:03

      So if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government in the states for educa- for something like education?

   9. VRVivek Ramaswamy47:13

      I think here if it goes closer to municipalities and to states, I'm fine with that being a locus for people determining as, for example, let's just say school districts are taxed at the local level. For that to be a matter for municipalities and townships to actually decide democratically how they actually want that governed, whether it's balance between a public school district versus making that e- same money available to families in the form of vouchers or other forms of, of ability to educational savings accounts or whichever mechanism it is to opt out of that. If that's done locally, I'll have views on that that tend to go further in the direction of true educational choice and diversity of choice, the implementation of charter schools, the granting of state charters or even lowering the barriers to granting one. I favor those kinds of policies. But if we've gotten the federal government out of it, that's achieved 75% of what I think we need to achieve that I'm focused on solving other problems and leave that to the states and municipalities to, to cover from there.

   10. LFLex Fridman48:10

       So given this conversation, uh, what do you think of Elon's proposal of the Department of Government Efficiency i- in the, uh, Trump administration or really any administration?

   11. VRVivek Ramaswamy48:21

       Well, I'm, I'm, uh, of course biased because Elon and I have discussed that for the better part of the last year and a half. And so I think it's a great idea. (laughs) Uh, it's something that's very consistent with the core premise of my presidential candidacy. I got to know him as I was running for US president in a couple of events that he came to, and then we built a friendship after that. So obviously I think it's a great idea.

   12. LFLex Fridman48:41

       Who do you think is more hardcore on the cutting, you or Elon?

   13. VRVivek Ramaswamy48:46

       Well, I think, uh, Elon is, Elon's pretty hardcore. Um, I- I said 75% of the federal bureaucrats and while I was running for president he said, "You need to put at least 75%." So, so I agree with him. I think I would, um... I think it'd be a fun competition to see who ends up, who ends up more hardcore. I think he and I... I don't think there's someone out there who's gonna be more hardcore than here I would be. And the reason is I think we're both, we share in common a willingness to take the risk and see what happens. I mean, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. That much I guarantee you. Is there gonna be some broken glass and some damage? Yes, there is.There's no way around that. But once you're willing to take that risk, then it doesn't become so scary anymore. And, and here's the thing, Lex. It's- so it's easy to say this. Let's talk about where the rubber hits the road here. E- even in, even in a second Trump term, this would be, you know, the discussion, uh, President Trump and I have had this conversation, but I think we would continue to have this conversation is, where does it rank on our prioritization list? Because there's always going to be a trade-off. If you have a different policy objective that you wanna achieve, a good policy objective, whatever that is, right? You could talk about immigration policy, you could talk about economic policy, there are other policy objectives, you're gonna trade off a little bit in the short run the effectiveness of your ability to carry out that policy goal if you're also committed to actually thinning out the federal government by 75% because there's just gonna be some clunkiness, right? I mean, there's just gonna be frictional costs for that level of cut. So the question is, where does that rank on your prioritization list? To pull that off, to pull off a 75% reduction in the size and scale of the federal government, the regulatory state and the headcount, I think that only happens if that's your top priority. You can do it at a smaller scale. But at that scale, it only happens if that's your top priority because then as president, you're in a position to say, "I know in the super short run that might even make it a little bit harder for me to do this other thing that I want to do and use the regulatory state to do it. But I'm gonna pass on that. I'm gonna pass that up, I'm gonna bear that hardship and inconvenience because I know this other goal is more important on the scale of decades and centuries for the country." So it's a question of prioritization and, and certainly my own view is that now is a moment where that needs to be a top priority for saving this country and, you know, if there's one thing about my campaign, I was, if I was to do it again, I would be even clearer about... Uh, 'cause I talked about a lot of things in the campaign and we can cover a lot of that too but if there's one thing that I care about more than anything else, it is dismantling that bureaucracy and m- more o- moreover it is a... It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state, that's the welfare state, it presents itself in the form of the regulatory state, that's what we're talking about, and then there's the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms. The entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived a republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

   14. LFLex Fridman52:10

       (inhales deeply)

8. 52:11 – 1:14:29

   Military Industrial Complex

   1. LFLex Fridman52:11

      So you mentioned Department of Education but there's also the Department of Defense.

   2. VRVivek Ramaswamy52:15

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman52:16

      And there's a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to, uh, and a budget that's increasing-

   4. VRVivek Ramaswamy52:26

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman52:26

      ... and the number of wars and military conflicts that's increasing. So if we could just talk about that.

   6. VRVivek Ramaswamy52:32

      Sure.

   7. LFLex Fridman52:32

      So this is the number one priority (laughs) . It's like, uh, there's difficulty levels here. The DOD, uh, th- it would be probably the hardest, so let's take that on. What's, what's your view on, um, the military-industrial complex, Department of Defense and wars in general?

   8. VRVivek Ramaswamy52:50

      So I think the, uh, as I said, the nanny state, I'm against it overall. I'm against the foreign policy nanny state as well. Let's, let me start from that as the starting off point and then I'll tell you about my views on the DOD and our defense. First of all, I, I think that, and, and I think that it was easy for many people from the neocon school of thought to caricature my views with the media at their side, but actually my own view is if it's in the interest of the United States of America to provide certain levels of protection to US allies, we can do that as long as those allies actually pay for it. And I think that's important for two reasons. The less important reason, still important reason, the less important reason is it's still money for us, right? Well, it's not like we're swimming in a cash surplus right now. We're at $34 trillion national debt and growing and, you know, I think pretty soon the interest payments are gonna be the largest line item in our own federal budget, so it's not like we have money willy-nilly to just hand over for free. That's the less important reason though. The more important reason is that it makes sure that our allies have actual skin in the game to not have skewed incentives to actually enter conflicts where they're not actually bearing the full cost of those conflicts. So take NATO for example. Most NATO countries, literally a majority of NATO countries today do not pay or contribute 2% of their GDP to their own national defense which is supposedly a requirement to be in NATO. So a majority of NATO countries are failing to meet their basic commitment to be in NATO in the first place. Germany particularly is, I think, arbitraging the hell out of the United States of America and I don't think that the... I'm, I'm not gonna be some sort of, you know, shrill voice here saying, "So therefore we should not be supporting any allies or providing security blankets." No, I'm not, I'm, I'm not going in that direction. What I would say is, you gotta pay for it, right? Pay for your fair share, A, because we're not swimming in excess money ourselves, but B is it tells us that you actually have skin in the game for your own defense which actually then makes nations far more prudent in the risks that they take, whether or not they enter war, versus if somebody else is paying for it and somebody else is providing our security guarantee, "Hey, I got- might as well, you know, take the gamble and see where I end up at the end of a war," versus the restraint that that imposes on the decision-making of those allies. So now let's bring this, bring this home to the Department of Defense. I think the top goal of the US defense policy establishment should be to provide for the national defense of the United States of America. And the irony is that's what we're actually doing most poorly. We're not really using, other than the Coast Guard, we're not really using the US military to prevent crossings at our own southern border and crossings at our other borders.In fact, the United States of America, our homeland, I believe is less secure today than it has been in a very long time. Vulnerable to threats from hypersonic missiles where China and Russia, Russia certainly has capabilities in excess of that of the United States. Missiles, hypersonic means faster than the speed of sound, that could hit the United States, including those carrying nuclear warheads. We are more vulnerable to super EMP attacks, electromagnetic pulse attacks that could, you know, without exaggeration, some of this could be from other nations, some of this could even be from solar flares, cause significant mass casualty in the United States of America. The electric grid's gone. It's not an exaggeration to say if that happened, planes would be falling out of the sky 'cause our chips really depend on those electromag- well, would be affected by those electromagnetic pulses. More vulnerable to cyberattacks. I know this, oh, people, okay, start yawning and say, "Okay, boring stuff, super EMP, cyber whatever." No, actually, it is pretty relevant to whether or not you actually are facing the risk of not getting your insulin because your refrigerator doesn't work anymore, or your food can't be stored, or your car, or your, or your ability to fly in an airplane is impaired, okay? So I think that these are serious risks where our own national defense spending has been wholly inadequate. So I'm not one of these people that says, "Oh, we d- decrease versus increase national defense spending." We're not spending it in the right places. The number one place we need to be spending it is actually in protecting our national defense, and I think, uh, protecting our own physical homeland. And I think we actually need an increase in spending on protecting our own homeland, but that is different from the agenda of foreign interventionism and foreign nanny-state-ism for its own stake, where we should expect more and demand more of our allies to provide for their own national defense, and then provide the relevant security guarantees to allies where that actually advances the interests of the United States of America. So that's what I believe. And, you know, I think this process has been corrupted by what Dwight Eisenhower famously in his farewell address called the military-industrial complex in the United States. But I think it's, it's bigger than just the, you know, I think it's easy to tell the tales of the financial corruption. It's a kind of cultural corruption and conceit that just because a certain number of people in that expert class have a belief that their belief happens to be the right one because they can scare you with what the consequence would be if you don't follow their advice. And one of the beauties of the United States is, at least in principle, we have civilian control of the military. The person who we elect to be the US president is the one that actually is the true commander-in-chief. I, I have my doubts of whether it operates that way. I think it is quite obvious that Joe Biden is not a functioning commander-in-chief of the United States of America. Yet on paper, supposedly, we still are supposed to call him that. But at least in theory, we're supposed to have civilian control of the US military. And I think that one of the things that that leader needs to do is to ask the question of, again, the mission. What's the purpose of this US military in the first place? At the top of the list should be to protect the homeland and the people who actually live here, which we're failing to do. So that's where I land on that question.

   9. LFLex Fridman58:38

      Wait, okay, there's a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, you mean he's functionally not in control of the US military because of th- the age factor or because of the nature of the presidency?

   10. VRVivek Ramaswamy58:48

       It's a good question. Uh, I would say in his case, it's particularly accentuated 'cause it's both. In his case, I don't think anybody in America anymore believes that Joe Biden is the functioning president of the United States of America. How could he be? He wasn't even sufficiently functioning to be the candidate after a debate that was held in June. There's no way he's gonna be in a position to make the most important decisions on a daily and demanding basis to protect the leading nation in the world. Now, more generally, though, I think we have a deeper problem that even when it's not Joe Biden, in general, the people we elect to run the government haven't really been the ones running the government. It's been the unelected bureau- bureaucrats and the bureaucratic deep state underneath that's really been making the decisions. I, um, so I've done business in a number of places. I've traveled to Japan. And there's an interesting corporate analogy. Sometimes when you get out- if you get outside of politics, people can, I find, um, listen and pay attention a little bit more because of politics is so fraught right now that if you start talking to somebody who disagrees with you about the politics of it, you're just butting heads, but not really making progress. So let's just make the same point but go outside of politics for a second. So I was traveling Japan, I was having a late-night dinner with a CEO of a Japanese pharmaceutical company. And, you know, it takes a while to really get them to open up culturally speaking in Japan, you know, a couple nights of karaoke and, and, uh, you know, whatnot, maybe late, late night, uh, late-night restaurant, whatever it is. But we, we built a good enough relationship where he was, he was very candid with me. He said, uh, "I'm the CEO of the company. I could go and find the head of a research unit and tell him, 'Okay, this is a project we're no longer working on as a company. We don't want to spend money on it. We're gonna spend money somewhere else.'" And he'll look me in the eye, and he'll say, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir." I'll come back six months later and find that they're spending exactly the same amount of money on those exact same projects. I'll, and I'll tell him, "No, we agreed. I told you that you're not gonna spend money on this project, and we have to stop now, should have stopped six months ago." Get a slap on the wrist for it. He says, "Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Yes, no, no, of course, that's correct." Come back six months later, same person is spending the same money on the same project. And here's why. Historically, in Japan, and I should say in Japan, this is changing now. It's changing now, but historically, until very recently, and even to an extent now, it's near impossible to fire people. So if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't actually work for you. It means, in some deeper, perverse sense, you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to actually change it. So I think most people who have traveled in Japan and Japanese corporate culture through the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s and maybe even some vestiges in the 2020s wouldn't really dispute what I just told you.Now we're bringing it back to the more contentious terrain, I think that's basically how things have worked in the executive branch of the federal government of the United States of America. You have these so-called civil service protections on the books. Now, if you really read them carefully, I think that there are areas to provide daylight for a truly constitutionally well-trained president to act. But apart from those, that's a contrarian view that I have that bucks conventional wisdom. But apart from that caveat, in general, the conventional view has been the US president can't fire these people. There's four million federal bureaucrats, 99.9% of them can't be touched by the person who the... People who elected to run the executive branch can't even fire those people. It's like the equivalent of that Japanese CEO. And so that culture exists every bit as much in the federal bureaucracy of the United States of America as it did in Japanese corporate culture through the nine- 1990s. And that's a lot of what's wrong with not just the way that our Department of Defense is run and our foreign policy establishment is run, but I think it applies to a lot of the domestic policy establishment as well. And to come back to the core point, how are we gonna save this republic? This is the debate in the conservative movement right now. So this is a little bit, maybe a little bit spicy for some Republicans to- to sort of swallow right now. And, you know, my top focus is making sure that we win the election. But let's just move the ball forward a little bit and skate to where the puck is going here, okay? Yes, let's say we win the election, all is well and dandy, okay, what's the philosophy that determines how we govern? There's a little bit of a fork in the road amongst conservatives where there are, there are those who believe that the right answer now is to use that regulatory state and use those levers of power to advance our own pro-conservative, pro-American, pro-worker goals. And I'm sympathetic to all of those goals, but I don't think that the right way to do it is to create a conservative regulatory state that replaces a liberal regulatory state. I think the right answer is actually to get in there and shut it down. I don't wanna replace the left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. I wanna get in there and actually dismantle the nanny state. And I think it has been a long time in the United States, ma- maybe ever in modern history, that we've had a conservative leader at the national level who makes it their principal objective to dismantle the nanny state in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. That was a core focus of my candidacy. One of the things that I, uh, wish, and this is on me, not anybody else, that I should have done better, was to make that more crystal clear as a focus without getting distracted by a lot of the, a lot of the shenanigans, let's just say, that happen as sh- sideshows during a presidential campaign, but call that a lesson learned because I do think it's what the country needs now more than ever.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:04:39

       Yeah, it's a, it's a really, really powerful idea. I, it's actually something that Donald Trump ran on in, uh, 2016.

   12. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:04:48

       It's drain the swamp.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:04:49

       Drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual, but-

   14. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:04:59

       Can I say a word about the conditions he was operating in? 'Cause I think this is why I'm far more excited for this time around, is that a lot has changed in the legal landscape. So Donald Trump did not have the Supreme Court backdrop in 2016 that he does today. So there are some really important cases that have come down from the Supreme Court. One is West Virginia versus EPA. I think it's probably the most important case of our generation. In 2022, that came down and said that if Congress has not passed a rule into law itself through the halls of Congress and it relates to what they call a major question, a major policy or economic question, it can't be done by the stroke of a pen by a regulator, an unelected bureaucrat either. That quite literally means most federal regulations today are unconstitutional. Then this year comes down a different, a big one, another big one from the Supreme Court in the Loper Bright case, which held that historically for the last 50 years in this country, the doctrine has been, it's called Chevron deference, it's a doctrine that says that federal courts have to defer to an agency's interpretation of the law. They now toss that out the window and say, "No, no, no, the federal courts no longer have to defer to an agency's interpretation of what the law actually is." The combination of those two cases is seismic in its impact for the regulatory state. There's also another great case that came down was SEC versus Jarkesy, and, and the SEC is one of these agencies that embodies everything we're talking about here. The SEC, among other agencies, has tribunals inside that not only do they write the rules, not only do they enforce those rules, they also have these judges inside the agency that also interpret the rules and determine and dole out punishments. That doesn't make sense with- if you believe in separation of powers in the United States. So the Supreme Court put an end to that and said that that practice at the SEC is unconstitutional. Actually, as a side note, the Supreme Court has said countless practices and rules written by the SEC, the EPA, the FTC in recent years were outright unconstitutional. Think about what that means for a- a constitutional republic, that supposedly these law enforcement agencies, the courts have now said, especially this year, the courts have now said that their own behaviors actually break the law. So the very agencies entrusted with supposedly enforcing the law are actually behaving with utter, blatant disregard for the law itself. That's un-American. It's not tenable in the United States of America. But thankfully, we now have a Supreme Court that recognizes that. So, you know, whether or not we have a second Trump term, well, that's up to the voters. But even whether or not that now takes advantage of that backdrop th- the Supreme Court has given us to actually gut the regulatory state-We'll find out. I, I'm optimistic. I certainly think it's the best chance that we've had in a generation in this country, and that's a big part of why I'm supporting Donald Trump and why I'm gonna do everything in my power to help him. But I do think it is going to take a spine of steel to see that through. And then after we've taken on the regulatory state, I think that's the next step. But I do think there's this broader project of dismantling the nanny state in all of its forms: the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Three-word answer (laughs) if I was to summarize my worldview and, uh, my presidential campaign in three words: shut it down.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:08:25

       Shut it down. Okay, so the, the Supreme Court cases you mentioned, there's a lot of nuance there.

   16. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:32

       Yeah.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:08:32

       I guess, it's weakening the immune system of the different departments. The-

   18. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:36

       Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:08:37

       Okay.

   20. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:37

       Yep.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:08:38

       On the human psychology level, so y- you basically kind of implied that for Donald Trump or for any president, the l- the legal situation was difficult. Is that the only thing really operating? Like, isn't it-

   22. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:52

       Probably not.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:08:53

       ... also just on a psychological-

   24. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:54

       Probably. Yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:08:54

       ... level just, um, hard-

   26. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:08:57

       Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:08:58

       ... to fire a very large number of people? Is that what it is? Like, why... Is there a basic civility and momentum going on?

   28. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:09:04

       Well, I think there's one other factor. So, so it's your, so you're right to point. I mean, the legal backdrop is, is a valid, un-, understandable excuse and reason. Um, I think there are other factors at play too. So I think there's something to be said for never having been in government, showing up there the first time, and you're having to understand the rules of the road as you're operating within them and also having to depend on people who actually aren't aligned with your policy vision but tell you to your face that they are. And so I think that's one of the things that I've admired about President Trump is he's actually been very open about that, very humble about that, to say that there's a million learnings from that first term that make him ambitious and more ambitious in that second term. But everything I'm talking to you about, this is what needs to happen to the country, it's not specific to Donald Trump. It's, it's lays out what needs to be done in the country. There's the next four years. Donald Trump is our last, best hope and chance for moving that ball forward. But I think that the, the vision I'm laying out here is one that hopefully goes even beyond just the next two or four years of really fixing a century's worth of mistakes. I think we're gonna fix a lot of them in the next four years of Donald Trump's president. But if you have a century's worth of mistakes that have accumulated with the overgrowth of the entitlement state in the US, I think it's gonna take, you know, probably the better part of a decade, at least, to actually fix them.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:10:25

       I disagree with you on both the last and the best hope. Uh, I, Donald Trump is more likely to fire a lot of people, but is he the best person to do so?

   30. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:10:37

       We got two candidates, right? People face a choice. This is a relevant election. One of my goals is to speak to people who may not agree with 100% of what Donald... Who do not agree with 100% of what Donald Trump says. And I can tell them, "You know what? I don't agree with 100% of what he says." And I can tell you, as somebody who ran against him for US president, that right now, he is... When I say the last, best hope, I mean, in this cycle, the last, best hope that we have for dismantling that bureaucratic class. And, you know, I think that I'm also open about the fact that it's gonna take... This is a long-run project. But we have the next step to actually, the next step to actually take over the next few years. That's kind of where I land on it. I mean, you, you talked to him, I guess, a few weeks ago. I, I, I saw you had a podcast-
9. 1:14:29 – 1:36:03

   Illegal immigration

   1. LFLex Fridman1:14:29

      There's an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. You've spoken about mass deportation.

   2. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:14:38

      Yes.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:14:39

      That requires a lot of effort.

   4. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:14:43

      Right.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:14:43

      Money ... I mean, like, how do you do it and how does that conflict with the shutting it down?

   6. VRVivek Ramaswamy1:14:48

      Sure. And so it goes back to that original discussion we had is what is the, what are the few proper roles of the federal government? I gave you two. One is o- of the government, period. One is to protect the national borders and sovereignty of the United States, and two is to protect private property rights. There's a lot els- most of what the government's doing today, both at the federal and state level, is something other than those two things. But in my book, those are the two things that are the proper function of government. So for everything else the federal government should not be doing, the one thing they should be doing is to protect the homeland of the United States of America and the sovereignty and sanctity of our national borders. So in that domain, that's mission-aligned with a proper purpose for the federal government. I think we're a nation founded on the rule of law. I say this as the kid of legal immigrants. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. And in some ways if I was to summarize a, a formula for saving the country over the next four years, it would be a tale of two mass deportations: the mass deportations of millions of illegals who are in this country and should not be, and then the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, DC. Now, all else equal, you could say that those are in tension, but I think that the reality is anything outside of the scope of what the core function of the government is, which is protecting borders and protecting private property rights, that's really where I think the predominant cuts need to be in. And if you look at the number of people who are looking after the border, it's not even .1% of the federal employee base today. So 75% isn't 99.99%, it's 75%, which still leaves the ... It would still be a tiny fraction of the remaining 25%, which I actually think needs to be more rather than less. So it's a good question, but that's sort of where I land on ... When it's a proper role of the federal government, great. Act and actually do your job. The irony is 99.9999% of those resources are going to functions other than the protection of private property rights and the protection of our national physical protection.

Episode duration: 2:40:25