Vivek Ramaswamy on his Presidential Run, Intellectually Oppressive Culture, Otherism

The people who live within a 100-mile radius of where I'm talking to you from, near my home in Columbus, Ohio, most of them understand the Constitution in their bones more deeply than many of the people that I went to Harvard or Yale Law School with or who I've built businesses with. You know, I'm not some, like, hands-off CEO who happened to have stumbled into biotech. The perceived rube you see, think is showing up at that MAGA rally because they're too dumb to understand climate change. Actually, most of them might be more educated on the topic of climate change than you believe you are, because you're getting your information through a distilled knowledge system that itself selectively cherry-picks from where the actual capital S science is itself derived from. Not to mention, if you want to play the intelligence game, actually ask who goes into climate science as opposed to into, say, somebody who actually majors in old school physics. Well, there's actually a talent pool bias that actually creates social activists who are drawn to the realm of majoring in climate science, that when they produce the capital S science, it's not even higher quality science relative to somebody who studied molecular biology or organic chemistry or actual physics. We can go— we can sort of debate that on its own terms of the intelligence hierarchy.

Republican presidential candidate Former biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is hitting a nerve with the American people, or at least some of the American people. The 38-year-old Vivek is now polling 3rd behind Trump and Ron DeSantis. I sat down with Vivek at the end of March for this interview before his rapid rise in the polls. I decided to rerun it this week given his rise in the polls and public consciousness, including at the first GOP debate this week. We go deeper on many of the soundbites that have been popping up this summer, including his ideas on the culture war, affirmative action, climate science, and more. These past few weeks have been the debut of many of Vivek's controversial ideas into the mind of the American voter. But Vivek has been evolving his intellectual ideas for a long time, especially among tech circles. In this interview, we covered his ambitious transformation from founder to candidate and discussed his views and radical policy proposals for immigration, the drug crisis, free speech, science research, and more. Here's Vivek.

Vivek, welcome to the podcast. We've been talking for a while now, and I'm excited to have a long-form conversation.

Twitter has been our main medium of getting to know each other a little bit, but, uh, it's good to do it the real way.

Totally. And, and, uh, I interviewed you on Clubhouse a couple years ago with Marc Andreessen and Catherine Boyle, and we, we talked about your book, which is a perfect segue. And at the time, you— we talked about how you spent a number of years focused on, um, fighting a physical cancer with your biotech company that you took public, and now you, you set out to then solve a cultural cancer. You released Woke Inc. You also released Nation of Victims. You started a company, Strive Asset Management, that tried to fight some of the excesses of woke capital. Then you run for president, or now you're running for president. Take us through that journey of when you realized that, hey, this isn't just enough to write books and run Strive. I have to go fight this at the highest level.

Yeah. career was as an entrepreneur, right? So I founded Roivant and, you know, I'm incredibly proud of what we built there. And there's 5 drugs that I personally worked on that are FDA-approved medicines today, and it's a multi-billion-dollar business and all that stuff. That was what my world was. And I began my career studying science, so I thought I was going to be a scientist. That's what that world looked like. I think that since I stepped down from my job at Roivant, traveled the country, I actually wrote Yeah, so a pair of books. There's actually a third one. I thought that exposing this, what I saw as a cultural cancer, was itself an important service and contribution that I could make, talking openly as a member of the whatever. Let's just call it what it is. Most elite educated. I wasn't born into wealth, but self-generated wealth in elite America, talking with, I think, some level of authority, having understood how if you will, the game is played, to be able to lift the curtain a little bit on why my fellow CEOs and investors and whatnot would privately agree with a lot of what I had to say, but weren't saying it in public. And I understood what that gap was about because I faced some of those same pressures as a CEO. At the same time, I grew weary of just compl— after a couple years, I would say, of just complaining about the problem. I do think there's a role for shining a light on a problem, but I felt like I had reached About a couple hundred cable news hits in and 2 books in and the 3rd one on the way, I was hitting a plateau on how much additional contribution I was going to make by just exposing that problem, especially because, you know, I think I played a role and others did too in creating a little bit of a culture of courage in our country where others were able to step out of their own, you know, closets and start talking about some of the same issues. I felt like the contribution I was able to make as a con— as a commentator, as an author, started to, you know, hit diminishing returns. And so I thought what I was going to do most for the next 5 to 10 years was to exclusively put myself all back in, in my career as an entrepreneur to drive positive change through the private sector. And so that's what led me to start Strive. And Strive is doing, you know, great as a business for its first year off the ground. I'm really proud of what we got off the ground. That's what I was all in on as sort of the next step, combined with maybe continuing to write books. You know, Strive was taking on BlackRock, and the ESG movement still is, but through the market, offering market alternatives to everyday Americans to invest capital in the market, but without sending a politicized message to corporate America in the form of environmental or social mandates. Instead, to mandate those companies to make money by providing products and services to people who needed them. And so I was on that journey. I will say that I would say that I came to the realization, and this was in the context of writing my third book on the ESG movement. It's called Capitalist Punishment. It's coming out pretty soon that it did dawn on me in a deeper way than it did even when I was writing Woke Inc., that this top-down marriage of government and corporate power and the cynical forces that perpetuated I would say a lot of cultural orthodoxies and secular cults in America, from wokeism to climatism to whatever else. It only works if we have a culture and a populace that's willing to buy up the narrative that they're selling. It does take two to tango. And the reality is I wasn't going to change that underlying demand side of the equation, no matter how much alternative supply I brought to bear. And I don't believe in silver bullets. I do believe in, you know, whatever, a plethora of partial solutions. So I was in my lane through the market. But late last year, I mean, this was really like December of last year, mostly even seriously over Christmas break, you know, the question of the why, like, why are we doing what we do? I mean, that settled in pretty deep for me. My wife and I looked each other in the eye and we started to have a serious conversation about the idea of running for president. It was, it was an idea introduced to me through— it wasn't an unfamiliar idea. There'd be people come up to me and say this at points over the last couple of years during the book tours. But it wasn't something that we took seriously. But in the midst then of an election season, Donald Trump had already declared we were entering an election season. There's a national identity crisis. It felt like I had a contribution to make to filling that national vacuum of identity that I wasn't going to be able to fully go the distance and do. be able to do just through the market. And thankfully, I have achieved financial success and independence to be able to now dedicate those resources to having a positive impact. And while I think Strive is going to be, I hope, an important part of a cultural revival in this country, I don't think there's a silver bullet. And I think that there was an opportunity for me to step up and say, you know what, there's a missing national identity in this country. If I can do for America in 2024 what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, leading America out of its last national identity crisis, And, and I, for, for reasons we can talk about, I do think that that's what I want to contribute to this race and to this country, then that's what I felt compelled and called to do. And so we entered the race not that far after. It was only 2 months later, by late February. I think I'm one of these people, once you, once I've decided I'm going to do something, I'm just, I don't like to dilly-dally around. I like to do it. And so by late February, I declared that I was entering the race.

I want to introduce some of your ideas to our, our, our Silicon Valley audience. So you're running to win first and foremost.

Yes.

But you're also running to advance your ideas. And you would love other candidates or the GOP in general to advance some of your ideas, even in the case in which you don't win. Why don't you talk about some of the ideas that you'd most like to be, to be advanced or to be copied by other candidates?

Yeah, I mean, look, we're already seeing it. And frankly, I think my team and the campaign team gets a lot more annoyed about it than I do. I think it's a good thing for the country if we're elevating the issues that matter. The GOP is in many ways a party that skips the step of defining what it stands for. My question is, what do we stand for and why do we stand for it? And so then they go to bickering about the who, right? Ronna McDaniel or somebody else, or Kevin McCarthy or somebody else, or Donald Trump or somebody else, just obsessing over the question of the who without ever stopping to have first defined the what and the why. And I think if we define the what do we stand for and why do we stand for it, The question of who actually becomes a lot easier, who's best suited to advance that agenda. So our whole campaign strategy is to lead the way in defining the agenda, the what and the why. And then the bet is the voters will next year reward the person who led the way in defining that agenda. But it's a win-win either way is the way I look at it. So the whole campaign for me is about reviving American national identity, answering the question of what it means to be American at a moment in our national history where we lack a good answer. To that question. So to me, important ideas of what it means to be American, it means reviving ideas like merit and meritocracy and the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, reviving ideas like free speech and open debate as a central part of our culture and how we settle political differences, reviving the idea of self-governance, a society in which every citizen's voice and vote counts equally without, frankly, elite intervention or without a quasi-monarchical structure. that imposes the right answers to the questions on the rest of society at large. Rule of law. Those will be examples of principles that then guide my policy positions. So let's talk about merit and meritocracy. I'm the first presidential candidate in history. This may be shocking, but it's— as best we can tell, it is true as can be. I'm the first US presidential candidate in history who has pledged to end race-based affirmative action. in America. And that's a mystery because it's something that a president can actually do. Why can a president do it? Because affirmative action was created by executive order under Lyndon Johnson. If it can be created by executive order, it can be ended by executive order. I've pledged to do it. Not a single Republican candidate even has touched this issue, not even Donald Trump. And I pushed his people on it. The reason they gave is they said this was not a political hill they wanted to die on. Well, I think that for a lot of reasons, we can talk about what those are. This is an issue that I'm Not only prepared to take on, I believe we will end a cancer on our national soul by ending this form of de facto racism embedded into hiring practices and college admissions practices. And really, I would say a culture across our country. That's an easy one. I think the only person in so many words that is expressly committed to abandon the demands of the climate cult in America. I think that I'm not one of these people that just talks about time horizons or it's an all-of-the-above strategy who say those words because they think that's what they're allowed to say, even though in their hearts they think something different. I'm going to say that part out loud. I think that the anti-impact framework, the carbon emission minimizing framework, is itself the wrong framework. I think the right framework is one that asks the question of how we maximize human prosperity through metrics like GDP growth. And we can get into you know, big part of my agenda is unleashing economic growth in the country. Speaking of which, I think that we have to take aim at other impediments to economic growth, not just the climate cult and its demands and unleashing US energy, but also the behavior of the US Federal Reserve. I think the Federal Reserve has been a bad actor for the last 25 years trying to hit 2 targets with one arrow, inflation and unemployment, which has proven to be a disastrous 25-year experiment since the Fed got academically infected in the late 1990s. I think what the Federal Reserve needs to do is go back to focusing on what it did focus on, even after it went off the gold standard in the early 1970s, for the 1980s and much of the '90s, focused on stabilizing the US dollar as a unit of measurement. That too is a big impediment to GDP growth. I'm a big opponent, while we're on the topic of currencies, an opponent to central bank digital currencies, which I think are, you know, I think a grave threat to liberty in this country for the same reasons that China is adopting central bank digital currencies. In the US, that's become an argument to say we need to do that to keep up. I view it the other way, is precisely for the reasons that the CCP wants to adopt it is exactly the reasons why we in the United States shouldn't. I can go on. I mean, I think that I'm also a proponent of unapologetically solving the actual problems that we face in our country within our own borders, like, say, the fentanyl crisis. It's a supply-side-driven crisis. It's not an academic debate. in a freshman year of an expository writing class where you in principle could say this is demand-side driven. Well, in principle it might be. In practice, it's not. It's a supply-side driven problem in this country driven by countless amounts. I mean, thousands upon hundreds of thousands of pills and otherwise through which fentanyl is trafficked into this country, responsible for over 100,000 American deaths per year, including places like my home state here in Ohio, where I'm talking to you from. I believe that it is both a legally and morally justified use of military force to use the US military to annihilate the drug cartels south of the border in Mexico. If we can do it to ISIS across the world, we can certainly do it to the narco state south of our own border, with the cartels as non-state actors that are responsible for literally 50 times as many people as died on 9/11 dying each year here in the United States. So These are unconventional ideas. I mean, I have policy positions on most of what enters the mainstream debate too, but these are examples of unique contributions to the debate that I've already made that frankly are already starting to be adopted by other candidates, which I think is a good thing. The case I make to the voters is, okay, at the end of this, do we want a follower in the White House or do we want a leader? I do think the Republican Party should become the party of the outsider, where we make it a habit of nominating the actual outsider rather than somebody who's a product of the political system that we supposedly want to dismantle. But, you know, I could, I could probably go on for the rest of the day. But those give you a taste of some of the things. And abolishing the Department of Education is something that, you know, unleashing that $80 billion for better uses in educating our children. These are just a sample of the kinds of ideas that even in the first 4 weeks of this have already been, you know, outspoken about and hopefully driving the debate already.

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I'm curious where you feel that you overlap with Silicon Valley and where you differentiate with Silicon Valley. There's not one, you know, Silicon Valley company I know of that's anti-DEI. Uh, and so, you know, you're from the vice position, perhaps alienates the 90% that is left-wing and the remaining, you know, 5 venture capitalists who are right-wing. got on the other side of you on the SVB issue. And although that's kind of a temporary or momentary issue that will probably be in the past, I suspect you have some substantive, more durable disagreements with that side of Silicon Valley as well. So how do you reflect on where Silicon Valley should overlap with you and recognize the things that you share in common and where there are substantive differences that should also be acknowledged as well?

I'm a little bit of an idealist here, but I would love to even abandon that Silicon Valley label because I think it's just another, you know, labels can be confining both whether you're in the in-group defined by that label or on the outside of it. And I would just like to think of that the people who operate and work in Silicon Valley is still just being part of a broader tapestry of American citizens who diverge in their opinions at our best, even in a healthy way. So on a wide range of questions now, Where do I differ from corporate Silicon Valley? At least let's talk about that. I think a few areas that are not going to be new to this conversation, because I've been vocal about this in the past, and there are other voices who have joined the chorus. I do reject the identitarianism of the modern capital D, capital E, capital I agenda that calls on us to see one another on the basis of our genetically inherited attributes, to see ourselves as oppressors or oppressed. based on the genetic attributes we inherit on the day we're born. I think that the hiring quota systems, the race consciousness that we foster, actually fuels greater racism in our country, both anti-white and anti-Asian racism. And yes, anti-white and anti-Asian racism is a coherent concept that can exist, but it is also fueling a new wave of anti-Black racism across the country through a culture of tokenism, through a culture of I would say quiet condescension and also a culture of psychological slavery. I'm going to use that word intentionally, that teaches young black kids that they can't achieve something on their own merits without somebody else giving them a helping hand up. And I think that in some cases it starts with good intentions. I don't think that most people in Silicon Valley corporate ranks, whatever, are believing that they make the world a worse place while gleefully pasting a smile on their face and marching with the bushy-tailed, make the world a better place Silicon Valley culture. It does annoy me a little bit. I'm going to have to admit that. But I think it mostly starts from good intentions, actually. And I think that good intentions can still be taken awry in a lot of bad ways. And I think the racialized, identitarian dogma entrenched into the hiring ranks of Silicon Valley, I think, embody that. And then I'm also against the culture. I mean, Silicon Valley 1.0's culture, I'm all in for with respect to the free exchange of ideas through a free and open internet. That was part of the promise of delivering on the culture of the First Amendment introduced in 1789 and even first envisioned really even in 1776. You could see the precursors of it in the Declaration of Independence. That was part of the promise of turning that into reality in a decentralized way outside of the purview of government itself, the free flow of information, the exchange of ideas. That was the American promise realized even on a global scale through the birth of the internet itself. And so that's Silicon Valley 1.0. I'm all in for the 2.0 version, and we'll see what 3.0 holds in store. But the 2.0 version, I think, gave up on that initial vision and instead said that actually we're going to use the same toolkit as the government through centralization of, of conversation and, and ideational exchange, but also to even work with the old school version of that in government to be able to do through the back door what government never could do through the front door. And that's something that I cannot abide. I think Elon Musk, at least in name— I was actually on Twitter earlier pointing out, I think, maybe some of the implementation failures so far, but all else equal, his intentions are in the right place and it was a positive step forward. But with him as one exception in what he's done with Twitter, stand against a culture of censorship that Silicon Valley has actually come to embody. And I think that some of the people who grew up in 1.0, Mark Zuckerberg and others who are now Effectively operating under the rules of 2.0 would cringe hearing this. But I think part of what makes them cringe isn't the truth of what I'm saying, but the reality of it. And I think that that's something that hopefully can be a soul-searching moment for some of those who came of age in the transition from 1.0 to 2.0, who still are able to help, maybe even with greater credibility, because the path to conviction sometimes runs through doubt, maybe to say that we erred. But we're going to come back and, and, you know, reorient ourselves towards the true North Star. The Jack Dorseys, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, I believe they have it in them. I don't— the question is whether they have the fortitude to actually, to actually unleash that inner animal. And if not, then it's going to have to be others that do it. It's part of why I'm in this presidential race. But, um, you know, I think those are some of the areas of disagreement with Silicon Valley 2.0 that actually channeled the spirit of Silicon Valley 1.0. that I'd like to actually see revived. The Silicon Valley Bank stuff, I'm happy to talk about. I was just disappointed, frankly, to see a lot of people who I think agree with me or would have agreed with me on first principle on what should have happened there, blinded by their own self-interest. And we're all human beings. We're all fallen human beings. Maybe I'm blinded by my self-interest at times. Maybe I'm blinded by my self-interest as a political candidate. What is that self-interest? I don't— I mean, we're making a sacrifice to do this whole thing, right? I've put 8-figure sums of my own money written into the campaign just to start this thing. This isn't self-interested in any capitalistic sense of the word. But I do think that with those caveats to one side, I think that it is interesting to me that amongst, you know, financial intelligentsia, of which I'm a member of one, but I know a lot of others who are, who are as well, there isn't one person who supported the government intervention in the Silicon Valley Bank case who I've met. who did not have direct financial interests in actually seeing the government intervene to save the uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, but plenty from Cliff Asness to Ken Griffin to others who did not have those same direct interests, who were equally members of the financial intelligentsia. I don't think anybody could look at me or certainly Cliff Asness or Ken Griffin to say we're unsophisticated on this issue, who didn't have those financial interests, who came out on the other side of it. So I do think this is a case where self-interest guides the likes of the David Sacks of the world to reinvent a moral justification for a position that he otherwise would've never adopted and certainly would've been on the other side of in absence of that self-interest. But put that to one side. That's a short-term thing. I think first principles are best discussed amongst participants in a debate where self-interest isn't clouding somebody's judgment on that. But I think that Silicon Valley is not one thing, just like America is not one thing. But if you're asking me to generalize, those would be some of my responses.

Yeah. And you had a great debate with David Sacks on it. So I won't get too much into the SVBO. I'll just point people in the show notes to that debate. I'm curious how far you take the merit idea, because if we got rid of affirmative action, we got rid of DEI, undoubtedly the groups that have been propped up by affirmative action, DEI would go down. And then similarly, if you extrapolate even further, pure merit-based immigration, I suspect that the, the groups that are crushing it will, uh, will have even more of them and, uh, even less of, uh, other, other groups of people who are not. So how far do you take that, that merit-based idea?

Yeah, so the second topic is slightly different because I don't think merit is just measured in terms of the way we conceptualize merit today in this country. So I don't think we need a bunch more IT guys in, in sort of what merit-based immigration necessarily means. I think we have other needs in this country that are underaddressed and There are many ways to be meritorious as contributors to the country. That should be what guides merit-based immigration in the country. But let's take on the hiring question. I think in the short run, you're right, we'd probably see less Black and Hispanic representation in corporate C-suite ranks if we abandoned affirmative action policies. I think that that's a reality and a symptom of our failure to address deeper problems upstream that almost stop us from addressing those deeper problems upstream because we apply these filters that tell us that we've artificially solved a problem through a symptomatic therapy, when in fact it relieves us of the responsibility of addressing the real problem upstream, which starts in early childhood. Education, family formation, the ability to give people a strong economic foundation to be able to achieve their maximal potential. That's what we need to be doing for people who are disempowered regardless of the color of their skin. Though many of them do tend to be disproportionately Black and Hispanic. And so my view is I think America loses in the end when we don't put the best person in their job. And if we're being really honest, most people listening to this, they can ask the question for themselves. Is that person who got a promotion, is the person who got the job, is the person who got that seat, whose kid got into that college, is that really the best person for that position? Or was it in part influenced by demographic attributes, particularly race? I think if most people are honestly answering that question, I think that we live in a world today where we— in a country today where we just accept that it's no longer just the best person who got that job or that spot in college or that promotion. It's just not the way it works right now. Maybe some people disagree with me. I don't think most people will. I think that's just an acknowledgment of a reality. Now, people may say that there are other social values to trade that off against, and that's a legitimate debate. But here's what I say is America itself loses in the end. First of all, China is not applying these same standards over there, our competitiveness. But we're also degrading the respect that we accord to every one of those Black Americans by effectively supposing that they needed that extra leg up and that hand up. I actually went to a— this is a first personal point about me. I mean, I went to a racially diverse, not all that well-off public school from 1st through 8th grade. I did not grow up in money. My parents weren't poor. We were middle class, but we happened to be living districted in a school district where if it wasn't majority Black, it was close to it. Okay. And kids who were held back, some of whom were 1 or 2 or even 3 years older than me in the same class and junior high school and otherwise. There isn't a single one of those Black kids who couldn't achieve everything that I have in my life that you or your peers have in your life, Erik. If they hadn't been given the same privilege that I had. And I don't mean money. I said I wasn't born into money, but the actual true privilege of being born into a stable family with, yes, 2 parents in the house that placed an emphasis on education and did it with full commitment, making the sacrifices needed as parents to do that for your kids. That's the reality. I don't believe that there are innate or certainly meaningful innate differences across different racial groups. I don't. Some people may disagree with me. I think that that's a whole separate discussion. But I think that that's just not the case, in my opinion. I think it is a case of early acculturation that starts even before schools, though I think that there's some need for reform in schools to provide parents with equal educational access. I think a lot of school choice movements in this country are taking positive steps in that direction. I think that's a huge step forward. But the further upstream we go, the closer we are to hovering right over the flame of truth. It starts with the family. And you know what? 70% plus of Black kids in this country were born into parents with households with 2 parents in the house in the 1960s. Today, it's well under 30%, inverted in the other direction. Why? It's because of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society policies. That in the name of helping Black Americans actually created incentives for Black families to have the dad out of the house because single mothers got paid more money on welfare than the dad was bringing home. And so she's like, oh, I'm married to you. Well, guess what? I'll be married to him, Uncle Sam, because he's going to send me more money. You create— people respond to financial incentives. We created that structure. And then Lyndon Johnson also was, as I alluded to earlier, the president who created affirmative action by executive order, then teaches Black kids through this form of psychological slavery that you can't hack it on your own. that actually you do need a special form of help because you don't have what it takes. That's effectively the message that it sends. And so, you know what? I think it is equally a form of anti-Black racism that I cannot abide. And I think that in the short run, that may mean less representation. In the long run, I think it forces us to do the hard work. And I'm one of these people that doesn't just want to, you know, talk the talk on ending affirmative action. I think we've got to walk the walk on creating the true conditions for equality of opportunity in this country. And then let the chips fall where they may. And I think it will be a lot less racially non-diverse than people might be worried about in their heart, because they probably harbor a racist supposition that Black people can't hack it on their own. And I don't share that. I think any person, regardless of the color of their skin, can, if we start under conditions of reasonable equality of opportunity.

And I just want to comment that the 2-parent household family formation has dropped, I believe, for poor families across races, which shows that, you know, the government influence is significant. It's not just one group. It's—

you just brought up affirmative action as the leading, which is why I talked about Black family formation. But it's actually true across the board. You're right. We have a fatherlessness epidemic across the country. We're in the middle of a national identity crisis across all races in this country for a reason. I do think the erosion of the traditional family structure is a big part of that.

I'm curious, as you've continued to think about how to balance out or get rid of sort of woke hegemony in corporations the most effective way? Because you could say, hey, companies just need to optimize for their bottom line. But maybe for some companies, it does make sense to be woke for their bottom line. Or you could say, hey, there needs to be no kind of political discrimination. Maybe that's hard to legalize. Or you could say, hey, there needs to be— there's woke capital companies, there needs to be right-wing companies, but maybe there's not the same IQ or same sort of talent base there. How have you evolved in your thinking of what is the most— what are the most effective ways to fight woke hegemony in corporations?

I don't view fighting woke hegemony as an end in itself.

Right.

It is a means to an end of reviving a shared national identity that binds us together and creating apolitical spaces like the workplace, by the way, that used to be the places that bind us together across the divisions of partisan and identity politics. So That's what I care about. I mean, the people who kind of fall into the trap of fighting wokeness as an end in itself, you're missing the point, right? Like, why? That's a Republican answering the question of the what, okay, but without answering the question of the why. You're like a billiard ball that rolls in whatever direction it's hit rather than actually understanding why you're aiming in that direction in the first place. And, you know, people say I wrote Woke Inc., so they may mistake me for one of these people. I mean, read the book or whatever that you think. I think I care much more about the why. Rather than, you know, just going through the motions of being anti-woke, which is what I see in a lot of the Republican political establishment today. You're asking the question of, of why that actually matters, right? Or how we actually get there, the why and the how, a little bit of both. First of all, I do think that the role of a corporation is to pursue its self-stated mission. Actually, different companies have different missions. So Ask yourself what your mission is. Maybe it's to produce notebooks. I say that because I have a notebook on my desk next to me. I just, you know, made that up. Maybe it's to make clothing. Maybe it's to provide financial products that allow people to achieve their retirement on a certain timeline. Follow your mission. And, and, and generally the path to value creation, you know, I do believe in the system of fiduciary duties, et cetera, but How do you actually create value? You create value by pursuing a worthy mission, and as a corporation, to have everything that you do be guided by that worthy mission. That's the path to value creation, lasting value creation of an enterprise. So every corporation owes it to itself to ask itself, what kinds of diversity do help you advance that mission and what kinds don't? Right. Let's take a steakhouse. Okay? The purpose of a steakhouse could be to provide culinary delight to their customers through serving a particular kind of meat. Okay, fine. I think it's incumbent on that steakhouse to ask itself what kinds of diversity it wants in its workforce ranks versus what kinds of diversity it does not want. Even the ever-prized diversity of thought is still, to me, if you're a corporation, just a means to an end of achieving your mission. So I would not, for example, make for a good example, good employee, of that steakhouse because I don't eat meat. I'm a vegetarian on moral grounds, whatever. I was raised that way. I believe in that. I, I, I would do it for health reasons, but if I have a choice just for culinary pleasure, I, I prefer not to kill animals. It relates to some of the same reasons I'm, you know, a grounded worldview and philosophy. I'm pro-life. That's a whole separate discussion we could, we could have another day. I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse. I would add diversity in many forms, even viewpoint diversity. But that would not help a steakhouse advance its mission. And so that's where I land on this. I called it critical diversity theory was, I think, the chapter in Woke Inc. that sort of described my worldview here is that we should— institutions should be diverse in their approach to diversity. But what I reject is the off-the-shelf approach. And if you have a 3-letter acronym, the chances are that's a good indicator that's off the shelf to say that there's one set of agendas, be it DEI or ESG or whatever else, CSR. That rejects the pluralism, institutional pluralism, the pluralism amongst the missions of different companies. And so I guess that's kind of the easy answer to the whole thing. Now, I think that if there's a company that's not pursuing its mission effectively and it still is a worthy mission, that under certain conditions, if you take incumbency bias, et cetera, off the table, can be an opportunity for a new market entrant to make a difference. That was the whole premise of Strive offering index funds that are narrowly different from those offered by BlackRock or others in its approach to proxy voting and shareholder engagement. There could be other markets where the same thing is true as well, but I think it's all about mission orientation, having a worthy mission, staying true to that mission, and then everything else, you know, really follows from that. I do think that that deals with the corporate side of this. That's not an end-all be-all solution to the cultural problem, right? I'm running for president. separately from building businesses for a reason. Because I do think that there's a demand side to this too. We might live in a culture where companies— a company in a given circumstance will make more money or better realize its own mission of serving its customers by spinning up these victimhood narratives that cause more of that populace, the Gen Z consumer base or whatever, to see themselves as race-based or sexually based victims. I do think that's a regrettable state of affairs for the country. But I don't think that that's the job of a company to solve that in the first instance. I think companies can play a role in providing leadership for a culture that's craving for leadership. I think many of those workers or employees, when they're saying they want you to take on a social cause, is like the equivalent of a child who many at the age of 9 might say he's trapped in the wrong body and of the wrong gender. It's not what they're saying that they're actually saying. They're waving a smoke signal saying, I need help. I need leadership, I need guidance. And so I think CEOs can play a role there, but I think the CEO's job is to do that in the context of corporate mission. But I think the job of a national leader, which is what I'm embarking on, I'm going to run to lead the country. I think that's a different hat where you actually want to provide leadership to the country in creating the conditions for true diversity of viewpoint expression. And so that's why I'm a big proponent of treating or adding political expression as a protected class. Ironically, it actually is the case in California. It's what allowed James Damore to settle with Google, is that he was likely fired on the basis of viewpoint discrimination. And ironically, that was actually passed during an era where there was great left-wing concern about, under the Bush administration or otherwise, having viewpoints censored in the workforce about post-9/11 surveillance state. Right. So things come full circle here. But whether it's a left-wing idea or right-wing idea, I don't much care. I think that we will be better off as a country if we make political expression a civil right in this country and codified as such, because I think that's something that unifies us regardless we're on the left or the right and fosters our culture of free speech beyond just government intrusions on free speech. Free speech culture is good for America. So I could go on there about how I think it ought to be addressed in my capacity as a public leader, as a president of the United States, but to not conflate that with how we deal with the problems raised by woke capitalism. I won't even call it the problem of woke capitalism. The problems revealed by woke capitalism. I think, uh, mission orientation is, I think, a great way, and, and unapologetic commitment to corporate mission is, I think, a way that CEOs can, can do the right thing both for their own organizations and, and for our broader national culture.

Richard Hanania reviewed your, your book, and, uh, it was, it was a positive review, but one thing he said that the— when challenged with changing the laws is that, hey, you could change the laws in a school, or you could change the laws in a certain business, but if all the teachers are left-wing, all the professors are left-wing, all the lawyers are left-wing, they're not going to follow the— it's going to be hard to enforce those rules. And so he says the big problems are it's a lack of ideas and a lack of talent. You're trying to solve for the ideas portion. I'm curious how you think about the talent portion, because he's also talked about the differences between between liberals and conservatives today. He says liberals just care more. They staff up the PTA meetings. They're willing to be activists. The right wing is not willing to do that. But also he says the left is just higher IQ. Most people who go to college are left wing, and not that people in college are always higher IQ, but on average, they tend to be probably higher IQ than people who don't go to college. Right now, many people in tech are politically homeless. They don't want to be super left because they see what it does to their companies. But they also don't want to be super right because they don't want to be associated with a certain kind of person that they feel that they're smarter than or more impressive than or more ambitious than. And they also don't believe in— they're not pro-life. They're pro-gay marriage. So they don't share all the same opinions, but they share a lot of them. They're free market. They don't want to be libertarian. And so I'm curious how you think about both the talent front of just how do you uplevel The, the, the, the right.

I do think there's a little bit of a fetishization of IQ as like a parameter that matters. I do think a lot of— if I'm to do the Silicon Valley overgeneralization again, would sort of, you know, would sort of point to that. Yeah, I can respond to the Richard Hanania point. And Richard's since become, you know, I think a good friend. He actually was here in Columbus not that long ago. And by the way, I wrote Woke Inc. a few years ago. I believe as a thinking human being to be able to evolve your thoughts and change your mind. I've moved a little bit.

Yeah.

even in terms of where I was on my policy prescriptions since Woke Inc., both on some of them being not really implementable ideas and others of them, while being good ideas, not being end-all be-all solutions. So I think that I agree with what Richard said. I think Richard sometimes falls into the same trap that maybe I fell into when I was writing Woke Inc., which is everyone thinks their little pet solution is like the right solution. And then you try to see the problem you're solving through the prism of the solution that you got smitten with. And actually, the reality is the problems are complicated and they require a plethora of partial solutions. And so Anyway, that's a separate and probably less important debate that we can get into it. But suffice to say, actually, bottom line in that review, I have grown to agree with a lot of what Richard wrote and have actually accommodated that into much of my thinking. Even if you look at some of the Wall Street Journal op-eds I've written in the last year, some of that actually, I think, reflects the evolution in my thoughts since Woke Inc. that Richard and others helped spawn for me through constructive criticism. Let's talk about this, the deeper cultural issue, because I think the way you phrase some things there, I think, are honest. And I think that they reveal, I think, a cultural divide that doesn't have to exist, but that does between Silicon Valley and the other. Let's talk about particularly the reluctance between many in Silicon Valley today seeing themselves kind of in their heart drawn to what— yeah, I'm not being presumptuous. I just think it's true. Drawn to what some people like me are saying on some issues relating to national identity, but who sort of shun the idea of the you know, Republican or right-wing label.

It's because Trump, Trump, Trump was so beyond the pale for so many people, right? Yeah.

Just forget Trump. Forget the who. Forget— just, just forget the labels. Just, just think about it in terms of first principles. You can decide where you are on the policies. I think you'll probably, at least for a Republican like me, probably find a lot of— a lot of people would find a lot of common cause without identifying themselves as Republican. We're seeing this in part of partly our data, by the way, Erik, too, is Like, I think 30% of our donors are like close to 30%, 29% of our donors in the first month. And we had like lots of unique individual donors. Uh, A, they were small donors, but B, 29% of them were first-time donors to a Republican candidate. So I hope we keep that number high. Normally I'm told it would be like 2%. So it's like an order of magnitude higher percentage, more than that, you know, a little bit more than 10x higher what the norms would be. for first-time candidates. And that's great. That's great. I'm for dissolving a lot of these artificial boundaries that we create. But I think part of what's at work isn't really a policy difference. It's sort of a cultural otherness. Like, I'm not one of them. And I think that there is this mentality of like the rube mentality or whatever that feels a little bit undignified to find common cause with a guy who's like wearing a camo hat, showing up at like a MAGA rally. I think we need to find a way of culturally piercing through that otherism. I think it's a form of otherism. And I think you see it in reverse, too, the otherism of, like, you know, Silicon Valley. But, but, but, you know, I mean, let's, let's be honest about who holds the tickets to power in the country. It's not like an equal asymmetric, you know, distribution there. So I think that that's not to say that one form of otherism is more justified than the other. But maybe the people who are, I think, in a position of economic power, at least in the country, ought to be willing to go first in abandoning otherism. And I think that it's part of my role here in this debate, national landscape or whatever. I mean, maybe some people will hear some of the things I say on a given day and disagree with them and think that guy's dumb, but— and they're entitled to that. But I don't believe in false humility. All right. I think I've probably achieved what most people who move to Silicon Valley to become an entrepreneur aspire to. Maybe not at the absolute highest level. It's not a trillion-dollar company I've created, but I've built 3 companies from scratch in the last, you know, 10 years, written, you know, 3 books, 2 of which are bestselling books already, graduated the tops of my classes at places like Harvard, Yale, et cetera. I'm not saying this to boast. I'm saying this to sort of build a connection with a base of people who I can then use that standing to tell you with firm authority. Okay. The people who live within a 100-mile radius of where I'm talking to you from, near my home in Columbus, Ohio, most of them understand the Constitution in their bones more deeply than many of the people that I went to Harvard or Yale Law School with or who I've built businesses with. You know, I'm not some like hands-off CEO who happened to have stumbled into biotech and then, and then just, you know, found the smartest people. I did find the smartest people I could, many of whom were smarter than me, who we did bring in. But, you know, the 5 drugs that are approved on the market today, they would not be on the market today for a rare genetic disease in 20 kids who now live lives of a normal— or are able to live lives of a more normal duration, would have died by the age of 3, to men with prostate cancer. to a drug for endometriosis and for uterine fibroids, to psoriasis, to a drug for elderly people with overactive bladder. I'm first personally involved in overseeing the strategy with FDA of the trials we need to run. This is coming from me here. I'm trying to find sort of some sense of common cause and purpose with people who think of themselves as product guys with skinny jeans and thinking that coding makes— the ability to code puts them in a different moral or intellectual stratum. Maybe it does put you in a different intellectual stratum. But the first thing I would say is not as much as you think. I think, actually. But the second thing I would say is that there's a fetishization of IQ as a parameter that matters after a certain point of intelligence. It doesn't matter if you're that much more intelligent or not, even in terms of your ability to make useful contributions. But then when it comes to human dignity that you're going to accord somebody, it doesn't matter at all, even whether you were at that stratum or not. And I think the sense of losing your self-importance just because you're like, smart or intelligent, have some authority to deliver this message because whatever, for whoever's playing that sport, like 99.99% of the time, I'm going to have outwon that relative to you. But I'm just going to tell you from that position of like self-realization, that does not accord you more moral worth than the rube who you perceive to show— the perceived rube you see, think is showing up at that MAGA rally because they're too dumb to understand climate change. Actually, most of them might be more educated on the topic of climate change than you believe you are, because you're getting your information through a distilled knowledge system that itself selectively cherry-picks from where the actual capital S science is itself derived from. Not to mention, if you want to play the intelligence game, actually ask who goes into climate science as opposed to into, say, somebody who actually majors in old school physics. Well, there's actually a talent pool bias that actually creates social activists who are drawn to the realm of majoring in climate science, that when they produce the capital S science, it's not even higher quality science. Relative to somebody who studied molecular biology or organic chemistry or actual physics. We can go— we can sort of debate that on its own terms of the intelligence hierarchy. But suffice to say, the people who are the consumers of actual primary knowledge at a MAGA rally here in Ohio probably know more about the actual impact on human flourishing of the use of fossil fuels than somebody who's receiving their information on the same topic from a distilled, approved pipe channel of how they get their knowledge on the same subject. And so whatever I'm going to say that's most persuasive, some of that probably sounded, you know, unhumble. And I did that on purpose for a reason, because I'm trying to, you know, bridge a divide here that I don't think has to exist. I think if people lose their sense of self-importance about their own IQ or the number of green pieces in their bank account as giving them any sort of form of moral authority in the country, I think that, no, that the people in the rest of the country have a good, pretty good sixth sense and antenna that you feel that way too. And that's a big part of the division in our country. And I think we would do well to abandon these false idols that we, you know, I think especially in Silicon Valley culture, Wall Street culture, where I kind of first began my career, you know, have grown accustomed to wearing. And then on a given day where we're, you know, feeling like a good citizen again and wondering where to send our political dollars and who to host a fundraiser for. feel like we ask the question, why are we so divided? Try looking in the mirror. I think each of us ought to— owes it to ourselves to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what role we played. Easy to point at January 6th and point at the TV and play some footage and say, I'm not that. A lot harder to look in the mirror and ask yourself what role you played in actually creating that. I think any American who's going to point out what happened on January 6th as a national travesty and blaming somebody else for it, my homework assignment for you is look in the mirror and ask yourself what role you played in creating the conditions for that. And I think every American has some self-reflection to do on that count. And I think the more of it we're willing to do honestly and engage in ourselves, I think the more likely it is we're going to have a thriving nation left at the end of it.

It's not just Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It's really just education polarization in general, where you sort of have a class that, that, you know, goes to university and all believes a certain way and, and, you know, 2/3 of the country that, that, that doesn't. Basically what, what sort of 2016 and Trump and others did is they They— or what happened as a result of it is, uh, you can no longer be right-wing, still be in good graces of, of people, of, of your coworkers, of your friends, of your relations. You know, they don't date anymore across the aisle. And with the hope for the new right, people like you, people like J.D. Vance, is saying, hey, we'll have the, the, the fight of someone like, uh, Trump, maybe, you know, the instincts, the, the ability to, uh, the charisma, let's just say. Whereas, but you also have the competence and perceived competence, perceived intellectual sophistication of like a Mitt Romney or Barack Obama so that people can see, hey, we're peers here. You went to the best universities, you built big companies. These are people I can associate with and justify it.

And Erik, here's— I'm not exactly in the same place as JD. I think there are some— and he's a friend, but also from Ohio here, et cetera. We were law school classmates and we grew up actually 15 minutes from each other. Even where he was closer to Middletown. It's not that far from where I grew up in West Chester, Ohio. And I don't want to speak for him, but my sense is I don't even harbor, like, an anti-elite bias as its own. I don't want to be anti-anything. I just don't like it when so-called elite are anti-rube or anti-so-called rube. And I think we should just get rid of these labels, actually, because they're artificial. They're made up. And I genuinely believe— I will say this. I said this before, but I'll say it again because I think it's important for people to hear me on this. I genuinely believe that most people, including sitting in woke Silicon Valley, begin with good intentions, including even as Americans, in doing something that they believe makes for the world being in the country— in their case, maybe the world without regard to the country, but being a better place. But still, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for good intentions for the rank-and-file person. Different for a lot of the people at the top who cynically exploit some of this hunger for purpose. But the average person in the ranks who kind of shows up and puts a little black square on their Instagram account or whatever, they're not bad people, right? Many of them are lost. They're hungry for purpose. They're discovering themselves. But it comes from a good place. I would really ask you to consider Making the same charitable assumption about the average person who shows up at a MAGA rally or a Trump rally or whatever, or pretty soon to be my rallies or whatever, soon in this country. Because it's true, actually. Like, I've seen it. I've lived in your world, right? It's not an unfamiliar one to me. It's, you know, in and out part of it. And I think that if we can make the assumption that the most other of the other still probably shares the same good intentions that we do, I think that we will realize a lot of the divisions that we create are the products of categories, terms we use. Language, I think, can be dangerous in this respect, right? Labels can be confining. Once you think of yourself as a person of color or as a member of Silicon Valley or as a member of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party or whatever, that label then becomes confining. It's like a prison that shackles you. And I think that it stops you. Once you're shackled, then you're shackled to a tribe that requires you to see a member of the other tribe as a member of the other. And, you know, I'm not anti-elite either. I think that's also just sort of a label. What does it mean to be elite? I mean, I, in Woke Inc., actually, I sort of parsed this a little bit where A university, you've got the professors, you've got the managerial class, the administrators, and then you've got the students. The professors and the administrative bureaucracy, the associate dean of God knows what, they're both elites. But I think one is responsible for the cancerous death of the university in a way that the other is not. Right. You have crazy left-leaning professors, fine. But as long as people are just freely pursuing their own ideas at a place like Harvard to pursue truth, so be it. It's a free flow of ideas with with protected environments to actually pursue ideas freely. But the managerial bureaucracy, the associate dean of some 3-letter acronym, that's actually what's created the anti-intellectual hostile culture at today's universities, the intellectually oppressive culture at most universities today. But both are elite. So the word elite is not useful. So I'm a fan of abandoning these labels, but I think that we have to do it with charitable instincts that are grounded not just for the sake of being nice, but because they're likely to be grounded in truth. That whenever you think whatever you're doing is to advance some good intention, chances are that person who you view as the other, who showed up even peacefully on January 6th in Washington, D.C., showed up there because they believed in good intentions for this country, too. And, you know, I think I reserve my criticisms where I don't start with those same charitable assumptions with the likes of those whose financial self-interest guides actually much of what they end up saying. And that's my issue with the Larry Finks of the world, or even a lot of the folks who disappointed me with their puzzling and vehement advocacy around the Silicon Valley Bank situation, which I know alienated a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, and that's unfortunate and probably lost a lot of donors as a consequence. But maybe we'll bring some of them back over the course of the next year and a half. But either way, my goal is to speak truth at every step of this. And I begin, for all but those who I think are in the category of having financial self-interest as a way of perpetuating philosophies that are guised in the garb of doing good, that's a really small subset of the total. But for everybody else, I'm really prepared to start with the charitable assumption that even if we disagree, we're still doing it with the best of intentions.

Yeah, it's well put. And to that end, you know, I want to define a term before we get you out of here. Sam Altman, in a recent Lex Fridman interview, Lex said, is ChatGPT too woke? And Sam said, I don't even know what woke means. People use the term. And the best way I define the term is choosing equity over liberty, choosing the reduction of disparities as your main goal over freedom of association or freedom of speech via legal methods or cultural methods. And that kind of prioritization just makes it a bit concrete. Because at the end of the day, there is a— you got to make a choice.

Yeah. The way I'll define it in neutral terms is it's a worldview that says that there are those who are oppressors and those who are oppressed in the world, generally based on genetically inherited attributes. And then you mix in a belief about the existential calamity posed by climate change. That's basically in short form what it means to be woke. Now, I think that agree or not, that's, that's a, that's a facially neutral definition. I have my criticisms. I think it's divisive. I think it calls on us to take steps that actually undermine cohesion and solidarity in the country. But put that to one side. I think defining a term is a fair ask. That's how I define it. And, um, you know, hopefully that's useful to the debate.

In closing, let's end with something that Silicon Valley can resonate with you on, which is building a startup, which is building your campaign. Uh, you know, famous Silicon Valley famously does not enter politics. People think it's, it's beneath them, or, you know, They, they don't— for other reasons, they don't get involved unless it's donating to the Democrat Party, but they don't run. Talk about— you built a big company, you're building a campaign. Give us an insight into, into what it's like.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's like starting a new company from scratch and entering as like an outsider. Climbing Mount Everest, taking on the biggest possible incumbents there are in this business— Donald Trump in the Republican Party and, and existing incumbents— as a total outsider. It's a lot of fun. It's— and I'm finding the same principles work— a mix of insiders and outsiders. Talent, people making a big difference, having a mission that's worthy, staying true to that mission. I'm planning to apply the same principles. Whether that creates for a successful electoral strategy or not, we'll find out in due course.

Well, we'll continue the conversation. It'll be fascinating to follow along and watch. My guest today has been Vivek Ramaswamy. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Erik. Appreciate it, man.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.