John Stossel Interviews Vivek Ramaswamy on America's National Identity Crisis and His Anti-Woke Presidential Campaign

I am announcing my run for president of the United States. Vivek Ramaswamy is making what he wrote about in this best seller the focus of his presidential campaign. He’s running really as the first properly anti-woke president of the United States. Ramaswamy is obviously a long shot, but his arguments, that America has become a nation of victims, and that some on Wall St. now collude with government to cripple capitalism, made me want to learn more about him. You're doing surprisingly well. If I look at people who bet, which is not perfect, but the most reliable guide, you're in fifth place among the Republicans, you're ahead of Kristi Noem, ahead of Mike Pence. We're looking to be number one. That's the goal. But it's a steady climb to get there. I mean, it's like it's like we're Donald Trump was in 2015. That's about where we are in the polling nationally, Look, I'm not a political scientist. My projections of who's going to do what over the course of a year and a half, those predictions aren't worth much. But what I am in this race to do is to speak truth at every step. And my entire electoral strategy is I'm going to actually say what I believe and we'll find out whether that's a winning strategy or not. My bet is that it is. I just came here from New Hampshire, spent five days on a ten county bus tour there. If we're doing what we're doing in rooms of 100 or 200 people at a time, and we can take that nationally, I have full confidence we win this election. But more importantly, it's not about who wins this election that matters. It's the fact of how we actually revive our missing national identity. That's why I'm in this race and I'd rather speak truth and lose the election rather than to play some political snakes and ladders and figure out how. That’s the number one issue, revive our national identity? I actually think it is. And explain what that means. So, look, if you ask people my age, I'm 37, I'm a millennial. What does it mean to be American? You get a blank stare in response. I think that is it moral vacuum. It is a vacuum at the heart of our national soul. What would you wish the response to be? I wish the response to be something that was grounded in the principles that set America into motion. It said we're a nation built on basic ideas like the rule of law, like free speech and open debate, that we embrace meritocracy over grievance, that we embrace the unapologetic pursuit of excellence that we live in a country where the people who we elect to run the government are the ones who actually run the government. Even if I disagree with them, let it be the people we elect rather than a permanent managerial, bureaucratic, permanent state class that actually runs the show today. That's what it means to be American. We fought a revolution to bring this bring ourselves together That we're, yes, may come from many different skin colors, that there's two different genders, that there are two different political parties. But what unites us is a commitment to those common set of ideals. That's what it means to be American. Yet now you get a, you know, dull, lobotomized stare. That's effectively what you get when you ask somebody what it means to be American, if not an actual shameful response. Almost apologizing for the existence of a nation founded on those ideals. And yes, I think that's the most important issue. And why? Because our economic revival depends on a revival of self-confidence, because the revival of our leadership on the global stage, the revival of American self-confidence on the global stage, starts with restoring self-confidence at home and in each of ourselves. And so that's why this presidential campaign for me is more of a cultural campaign than a political campaign, though it's taken the form of a political campaign. Fighting the woke message that we, people who don't succeed are helpless victims, that America is a bad place because we kill people to get here, etc.. Exactly. I mean, that's part of it. Wokeness is a symptom, though, of that deeper national identity crisis. The symptoms keep showing up. Racial wokeism, transgenderism, climateism. This new and latest, most fabulous cult that's spreading across America, Covid-ism, for a couple of years. It keeps showing up. Covid-ism is the excessive fear of Covid? It's the religiosity around COVID policies, just like I described the religiosity around anti climate change policies or anti carbon policies, just like I described the religiosity about viewing one another through the color of our skin, the religiosity increasingly of the transgender movement that has little tolerance for dissent. The reason we see the rise of these secular cults is that we're hungry for purpose and meaning. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Yet we still can't even answer the basic question of what it means to be American, what it means to be a citizen of this nation. I have a vision on what the answer to that question can be. I think we can revive it in this country. And if we do, that's actually the key to solving our other problems economically, to foreign policy, to domestic policy, on which I have detailed thoughts on all of the above. But the revival of the national identity, that's actually what made me decide to enter this race. That's what gives me the motivation to actually go the distance. And that's the biggest issue? More than-- I can think of a couple other big ones. I could think of a couple of the big ones do. Crisis at the border. And our unsustainable debt. Both of those are failures of realizing our national identity. So let's talk about the border. Part of who we are is we're a nation built on the rule of law. When you abandon the values that define who you are as a country, when everything becomes just relativistic, morally relativistic, including legally relativistic, then what's wrong with an open border? Right? So that's a symptom of, again, that deeper loss of national identity. And then they'll say you're racist or xenophobic. Whereas I say no. The reason that we say no to illegal immigration is not because the people who are crossing are somehow bad people. That's not the case. It's the case that while the people, drug cartels, you know, that have more cynical intentions, many if not most people are not bad human beings. It's that we are a nation built on the rule of law. We cannot tolerate somebody breaking the law as their first act of entering this country. How'd your parents get in? Legally. Through the front door. My dad came here to get an education. He got an educational visa. My mother married my father. She also came here. She's a physician who built a career as a successful geriatric psychiatrist. So that's how my parents came here. And I think we should have. That was in the eighties. My understanding is now an Indian computer engineer with skills who applied legally would take 20, 50, a hundred years to get in because we're so tough on letting people in. Legally. What I'm a big fan of merit based immigration in this country. I think we should want more immigrants like my parents. Not all Republicans will agree with me on that. That's fair. We can have a debate about this, but I believe in merit based immigration. To me, merit means A the contributions you're going to make to this country and B your civic commitment to the country. But I believe in merit based immigration. I don't believe in turning a blind eye to border security in the name of advancing immigration policy. Border security and immigration are two separate questions. We should deal with them differently. Merit based means, are you are you educated? Do you have money? How do you decide merit? It's a great question. So I think that the likelihood of making a contribution to the country, specifically an economic contribution to the country, combined with civic allegiance to the country, passing a civic exam that you would have to at the time, you got to be citizenship, maybe even at the time you get a visa. We should bring that up to make sure that we're bringing in and adding to the civic lifeblood of the country rather than, frankly, many 18 year olds who earned the right to vote at the age of 18 but don't know the first thing about the Constitution or our country's history. I think we need to fix that through our educational system. But I also think that one of the ways to preserve that lifeblood of American civic identity is through making sure that the filters we apply to immigration to get into this country, bring in people who are actually in love with this country, who actually badly thirst for the ideals that represent America. How do you get the filter? You can't measure their love. Well, I think you measure their competence. And I think that it takes some level of commitment to be able to pass a civics exam. So do you have a job? Do you have money to invest? Yes. Do you have do you have a stable family? Do you have basic knowledge of the Constitution? Do you have a basic knowledge of the history of the United States? And that addresses a lot of the concerns of even people who have a knee jerk reaction, even against legal immigration. Because I think you have a valid point that we don't have assimilation in this country, that we don't that we celebrate our diversity while forgetting the ideals that bind us together. I think we can tighten up immigration policy, even legal immigration policy, to make sure that the people who enter this country are indeed American or ready to be American in the truest sense of that word, meaning that they actually share a commitment, starting with at least having an awareness of the commitments that we make as Americans. The unsustainable debt. Social security will go broke. Medicare will stop paying my medical bills. What would you do? Well, I would put pressure on that premise. Okay. They will. If we extrapolate the current GDP growth rate in this country right now, I see a lot of small ball between Republicans and Democrats on national debt questions. Democrats say we need to increase taxes. The only problem with that is that reduces the size of the pie and the size of your tax base. So that's a self-defeating proposition. It also wouldn't really solve— It also really wouldn't solve Medicare. Yeah, exactly. The second issue is that the Republicans will say that, well, some of them that you have to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare or else we're doomed. And it's financial Armageddon. I think there's a third way. The third way is restoring GDP growth in this country, restoring economic growth. We've grown at more than 4% for most of our national history. We're at one point something percent now. That is a shame. How do you restore that? Drilling more, fracking more, burning coal unapologetically. I know coal is a four letter word. Coal is really polluting. Oh, there's other ways we should figure out how to deal with that. But I don't think that it's nearly as pollutive as the public narrative makes it out to be, especially with modern methods of burning coal as well, embracing nuclear energy. So the very people who are opposed to fossil fuels are mysteriously hostile to the best known form of carbon free energy production known to mankind, which tells you what's going on. The climate cult has nothing to do with the climate. It has to do with global equity because they don't want America or even the West to get ahead. Nuclear energy might be too good at doing that. They want to give China and other parts of the world a chance to catch up. That's what this is about. Wait a second. These fools don't oppose nuclear energy because we might get ahead of China. They're just scared. They think of nuclear bombs. I don't think that that's right. I think that I think that they're exploiting some set of fears that some people have. I think the real problem with nuclear energy, they won't say it out loud, but I think the essence of what's going on is that it might be too good at addressing their made up climate crisis. And so if that's the case, well, guess what? If you have nuclear energy, the US continues to get on its growth trajectory that it's always been on where part of this was about. They like the expression in a different context, bending the curve so that other parts of the world can actually catch up. That's why they don't apply the same constraints, even when it comes to carbon emissions, to places like China as they do to the United States. So back to GDP growth, unshackling US energy is fundamental. Putting people back to work is fundamental. Stop people, stop paying people to stay at home. We give people an incentive in this country to be lazy. That is an obstacle to GDP growth. It's a big part of why businesses today cannot find adequate workers to get a job done. That's an obstacle to GDP growth. And then a third one is reform of the Federal Reserve, an agency that has gotten so rogue in believing that it can hit two targets with one arrow inflation and unemployment, that we can somehow balance that by playing financial god. It's a flawed premise. I would put the Fed back in its place to go back to stabilizing the dollar as a unit of measurement that actually helps capital allocation in this country. You know, it's funny, you and I are sitting now this interview, let's say the number of minutes in an hour varied from time to time. We wouldn't have showed up. You'd be sitting in one chair and then I'd show up later. You'd be gone. I'd be sitting a different chair. Same goes for capital allocation in an economy. When the dollar is as volatile as it is, that doesn't help efficiency of allocating capital to the highest returning projects and capital allocation and efficient allocation of capital is a precondition for GDP growth. And GDP growth is a fancy way of saying we all make more money. So again, I think that any economist would tell you self confidence in psychology is an important part of an economy too. Revitalizing our national sense of self confidence, especially among workers, is also something that spurs confidence in the economy itself. So with those four things, I think we can get back to five plus percent GDP growth, let alone the one point something that we're in. But back to your original premise, even for growing it over three plus percent, the idea that we're going to run out of Social Security or Medicare actually goes away. We will grow our way out of our problems. That's how we do it. You've said you would fire over half of the government's workers. That's correct. You would close the Education Department, other departments? Yeah, I would shut down the US Department of Education, not because I'm anti education, but because I am pro education. And the federal government has no business in education that should be administered locally. And there's a lot of things wrong -- Agreed. What other agencies? I'd shut down-- If you’re gonna fire more than half the government workers, Yeah. That’s big cuts. So in the Federal Reserve, I wouldn't shut down the Federal Reserve. I'd just lay off over 90% of the people working there. There's over 22,000 people in the US Federal Reserve System now. We need less than 2000 if its scope goes back to stabilizing the US dollars. Scope of focus. The FBI. A politicized government agency. In that case, we do need federal law enforcement, but the culture of that agency has become so corrupt that you're not going to fix it top down. You have to do it bottom up, and you can't do it bottom up without actually closing down the current FBI and creating something new to take its place built from scratch. A new, smaller agency? Exactly. A leaner, fit for purpose agency that respects the Constitution and the law rather than making it up as it goes along, which is what today's FBI does. What about the housing department? Agriculture Department? Labor department? Yeah, we're evaluating. I mean, a lot of those are on the potential chop block. We're seven, seven weeks into this campaign, but the agencies have identified that we would shut down and stay shut down, include the US Department of Education and then a long list of other agencies that will need to be shut down and possibly have something rebuilt to take their place. FBI, IRS, ATF, that's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I've also said similar things about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is fundamentally hostile to nuclear energy in this country. The culture of that agency is broken. We're going to have to rebuild something to take its place. You've said you would pardon Donald Trump if you were elected. I said I would pardon Donald Trump and anybody else who's been the victim of a politicized prosecution in this country. We've had a lot of those. Douglas Mackey, maybe a less well-known name. He's somebody facing up to ten years in prison right now, facing sentencing that could go up to ten years for making jokes on the Internet about Hillary Clinton's voters. By the way, the same joke was made in return about Trump supporters. The person who made that joke continues to roam the American terrain perfectly free. And I think it's a good thing she shouldn't have been prosecuted, but Douglas Mackey shouldn't have been prosecuted I think I’m pretty well informed, I don’t know about this person. Really? Facing a prison term? He’s facing up to ten years in prison. He was just convicted. And I think this is sad. This is something that we see every day in this country. Even many of the January six defendants who were denied due process to be able to see potentially exculpatory evidence. That's a due process failure. And you know, John, I'll tell you this, I'm principled on this. I was one of the weird guys back in the 2000s who was arguing for the importance of due process. Even in 911 related investigations and Gitmo and Guantanamo Bay. I think that these principles have to apply equally. And the thing that disappoints me is the people who are with me back then are nowhere to be found today when it comes to those basic principles relating to misuses and abuses of the police state, abuses of due process. So on a backward looking basis, I would fix that through the presidential pardon power, but a forward looking basis we're actually going to shut down those toxic agencies and rebuild a truly lawful culture in law enforcement 

itself. Who would have ever thought. Would you pardon Edward Snowden? I would pardon Julian Assange. I know. I know that for sure. I'm weighing Edward Snowden. It's a tough question. The reason I would pardon Assange and the reason that one's a lot easier for me to say is that he was just the guy who published it. Think about this. Somebody in the government leaked you information. That happens all the time. It's normal practice of the press. There's even formal procedures for how these leaks occur, but the government just picked on him. Now, there was somebody who worked with him, forget the name of this individual. It was a transgender individual who Obama pardoned, I think wouldn't pardon this individual if they weren't transgender working with Julian Assange. It was Chelsea Manning. That was the name of the person. And so in Julian Assange's case, the person who published the information got arrested. But then in Edward Snowden's case, it was the person who leaked it. So I think that that we have a backwards system here where the really federal law enforcement apparatus is just going crazy willy nilly against the people they don't like. And I think, you know, I think I'm the first person to say this. I absolutely would pardon Assange. And I think it stands for something that goes beyond political partisanship in this country. It stands for who we really are. But Snowden? Snowden, I’m actually collecting the facts on this. I'm going to be very honest with you. Right. Assange, I think, is the easier case. Edward Snowden I need to understand what the specifics were of the obligations that he made, that he violated and was he punished in a way that someone else, under similar circumstances would not have been? To me, that's the definition of a politicized prosecution. But if I find that he was, I'm keeping a very open mind to a potential pardon there, too. But studying this in depth, I believe in coming to these things with with nuance, I think pardoning Assange is I think the easier case. You must be really smart. High school valedictorian, Harvard, Yale Law School. Then you create this billion dollar biotech firm. Are you really smart? I don't know if I'm really smart, but I have been fortunate to been given a good education by my parents that came to this country as immigrants. And we tried to make the most of it at every step. So I'm more grateful for what I've been given than to proclaim that I'm some some genius from somewhere. But, you know, we've tried to do our best. You could have kept doing that instead of running for president. You've made half a billion dollars. You create good stuff in your biotech firm. Kids who once died at age three no longer do? Yeah, Look, we worked on therapies for this rare genetic disease affecting 20 kids a year to a drug for prostate cancer that I personally had an opportunity to help oversee developing. Endometriosis, uterine fibroids, overactive bladder in elderly people. Psoriasis. These are real problems that you’re solving for people. So as a businessperson, you're saving lives. You do more than politicians do. Why? Why politics? I'm proud of what I did in the private sector. If I'm being really honest about it, though, it only works if there's a culture willing to buy up what they're selling. And I don't think that I was going to be able to change that culture through the market, through even just complaining about the problem. I think there is an opportunity to drive a national revival in our country, but I couldn't think of a better way to do it than to successfully actually get elected US president and do for this country what Ronald Reagan did in 1980 when he led America out of the last national identity crisis. Let us begin an era of national renewal. I think we're in the middle of a national identity crisis today. And I think that we can create that missing national identity again for the next generation. A story I’ve told a couple of times over the last few years, which is there was a new cultural cancer really that threatened to kill the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I had in my life. That’s what you wrote this book about. That's exactly what that book was about. Yes. And you say the woke left imposes psychological slavery. Meaning? Meaning they tell you that your identity is based on your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, that if you're in certain of those classes you're in, in an oppressed category, certain of those classes, you're in an oppressor, a category. And yes, I think that's a form of psychological slavery. But while there were other talented people developing technology, developing medicines for patients who needed them. There were very few of them at the time I stepped aside, dare I say any of them that were willing to speak openly about this cultural cancer. And I worried that was going to prevent honestly kids like me born 20 years later from being able to live the American dream that I did. They don't want to criticize it because they take a hit. Of course they do. And I saw that firsthand. There were advisers to my own company that resigned after I said something about the importance of protecting free speech and the importance of actually governments not deputizing private companies to censor speech through the back door. Now, this was after January 6, 2021, when the country was in a particularly charged environment. So why’d they resign? Well, they resigned because they felt like that was going to be a threat to the proverbial our democracy if people weren't actually able to control the spread of hate speech and misinformation and incitements to violence, as they called it. And then they took issue with my broader view that companies in their capacity as companies should not engage in these social and political questions. So I think that that was I think, a two stepper for a lot of the people who were prominent advisers to the company. And they said that they don't want to associate themselves with a CEO that had the beliefs that I did. So, look, I had a choice to make. Black Lives Matter came to you and said issue a statement. Well, actually, it was my own employees in the company that was just what every firm in the country was doing, was issuing a statement that ended with “and capital B, Black Lives Matter.” Black lives matter! I support Black Lives Matter. But there are different ways of leading up to it. But it was a carbon copy statement. It's almost as though the same consultants sold it up, you know, written. They wrote it up and… So what’s wrong with that? …sold it to every company. Well, I think that the thing that's wrong with it is that the capital BLM movement stood for values that A were antithetical to my own beliefs, but B, I believe, demonstrably harmful even to the very black Americans who they proclaimed to stand for, such as dismantling the nuclear family structure. I reject the idea that we advance black empowerment by rejecting the nuclear family structure. Black Lives Matter rejected nuclear families? That was on their website as of the mid 2020. At the time that I was evaluating whether or not this was an organization that I could in good conscience say something positive about to endorse. I couldn't do it and I didn't want to be in the position-- to be in leadership, even if you're leading a company means being honest with the people you lead. So the convenient thing to do would have been to say what literally every other CEO in corporate America was saying. I couldn't in good conscience do that. I tried other ways. I talk to our employees about how our mission of developing medicines, including potentially life changing medicines for patients who needed them. That was something that united us, whether we were black or white, whether we were Democrat or Republican, that was uniting us in common cause. I advised them to be safe. The company was based in New York City. There were indeed riots breaking out across the country in cities at that time, but said that look, I care about you guys and I care about our mission. Let's be united. And that's something we can be proud of. Sent a full team out of the company about it. The feedback I got is that that missed the moment, right? There was a specific demand in America at that point in time for CEOs and other cultural leaders to stand in favor of very specifically Black Lives Matter. I couldn't do it. That led to a controversy, and I would say a series of not only escalation in my experience as a CEO, but self-reflection for me that if after having lived the full arc of the American dream, if after having founded a multibillion dollar biotech company that I was leading as CEO, that I had built from scratch, that even if I wasn't free to speak my mind, what hope was there for other Americans that had to, many of them make a decision about whether they want to even be able to put food on the dinner table if they lost their job for saying the wrong thing at work. And I just started to see it. To me, it felt like there was this culture of fear, an epidemic, a pandemic in some ways of fear that had spread across the country that prevented people from expressing themselves in public. One of the experiences actually I had as CEO was that one of the employees who, after the town hall where these issues were raised, privately emailed me to say that, hey, I actually agree with everything you're saying. I just don't feel comfortable saying it. Some of them came through H.R. Anonymous. They didn't even want me to know who it was, lest I say who it was. And to me, that opened my eyes to the fact that there was a gap in this country, a big gap between what people were willing to say in public and what people were willing to say in private. And to me, that's a litmus test of our civic health, right? You want to measure how good America is doing. It's not the number of ballots that are cast every November. It's the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public. Why is that so important? Well, I think that's important because that's actually how we respect one another as citizens, because we don't I don't respect you if I don't actually share with you what my beliefs are, as long as I give you the courtesy to state the same in return, I just think it's a precondition for truth in this country. I think that we get to the wrong answers when we censor speech. We get to the right answers faster when we allow all ideas to be expressed. The scientific method itself depends on the free exchange of ideas. I say that as somebody who was trained as a scientist, what do we see now in the name of capital S science? It's not science, it's scientism. It's a new religion in this country. We actually censor misinformation. I don't believe in that model. And I think that that's also part of what makes America itself is that it is the quintessential place on the planet where you get to express any opinion, no matter how heinous it is. And I think that that's part of what preserves peace in a diverse democracy. No matter how heinous? How does that preserve peace? Yeah, it's counterintuitive, but we're the nation that said that we're the ones who let the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, march in Skokie. That's what makes us different from the actual Nazis under Adolf Hitler. Is that we believe that no matter how heinous your opinions are, you still get to express them, because that's one of the things that binds us together. And we also believe that many we also know history teaches us that many of our beliefs will be proven false or will be modified in some way. Just ask Galileo. He didn't live to see the end of it himself. He wasn't so fortunate. But history teaches us that we have to have humility. People use fancy words to describe that, right? Epistemic humility is the philosophical word for it. It's a long way of saying that more often than not, we're going to find out that we were wrong in some way. We only figure out what the right answer is if we get there through free speech and open debate. I don't think that we would have closed those schools during the COVID 19 pandemic, not for nearly as long as we did if we had been allowed to debate the merits of doing it. Now, years later, it was just a report this, you know, hearings going on. As we're speaking about the origin of COVID 19, it's increasingly obvious that this began in the lab. We would have gotten to that answer sooner if we had been even allowed to say it, rather than being scrubbed from the Internet, which is exactly what it was a few years ago. And allowing people to say hateful things also must be allowed? Yes. Because? Because what is hateful to one person is still a different person's opinion. And we're a nation founded on the expression of diverse opinions. It is who we are. It's in our nature. And look, I also think that it's important for peace in a diverse democratic society, in any diverse republic or democracy, you need to let people speak. Because if you tell people they can't speak, they scream. If you tell people they can't scream, they tear things down. Or this is controversial to say, but I don't think January 6, 2021 happened because we had too much free speech in this country. I think in part it happened because we didn't have enough. And so I think that if we want to prepare for a world in which people settle their conflicts through physical force rather than through free speech and open debate, history has a lot to teach us about that. That is how you have a declining nation where people are left to just sort it out with sticks and stones. I'd rather sort it out through free speech and open debate, which is actually the vision that our founding fathers had when they said the First Amendment came first for a reason. It was the one that made all the other ones even matter. Now you've come out with a new book, Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Uses Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For. What's that mean? In one way, it's a really narrow niche issue, but another in another way, a really fundamental issue, which is the rise of ESG and stakeholder capitalism in capital markets. ESG is environmental, social and governance. Yes, it's a non grammatical amalgamation. Sounds good. I mean, it sounds fine. Three letters amalgamated together. It's designed to sound boring for a reason. So what's going on is there are a range of agendas espoused by one end of the political spectrum saying that we need to cut carbon emissions to fight climate change, that we need to use racial quotas in the boardrooms to make up for our past sins of slavery and systemic racism in the United States. But the public doesn't want to vote for a lot of those policies. Have to admit I'm part of the public that would not vote for those policies. So what the government realized is if we can't get it done through the front door, we'll just use the private sector through the back door to advance those same objectives. So what's happened in this country is that the largest financial institutions let's just take the three largest asset managers, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, they've aggregated the money of everyday citizens. Pension money… Pension money. 401K accounts, brokerage accounts, the money of everyday citizens to advance these one sided progressive political agendas, environmental agenda, social agendas. So they call them environmental, social and governance that most of those everyday Americans do not agree with and which crucially do not advance their best financial interests. That's a breach of fiduciary duty. It's probably the-- Most Americans agree that we should have a clean environment and we should be socially kind. Well, I think that they agree with that in our body politic, but we've got to sort that out where every person's voice and vote counts equally in deciding how we get there. What they don't want is their retirement dollars to be used to tell a company to adopt an agenda that makes that company less successful at delivering profit, which is why they were invested in the stock market or in those companies in the first place. So we have different mechanisms to do different things in our country. We have a beautiful system set up to say capitalism is a space where we make things. We provide products and services for people who need them. It's the best known system to mankind to lift people up from poverty. That's great. And then we've got this constitutional republic where we have a system for sorting out our political differences to decide how we the people, are governed. We set up as we the people, a system to do it. But what this stakeholder capitalism trend says is that actually the work of the constitutional republic is now done through the back door, through corporate boardrooms instead. And the dirty little dirty little trick at the heart of it is that they're using your money, our money to actually do it in many cases without people even knowing it. And so a big part of why I wrote that book was knowledge is the first step to empowerment. People ought to at least know how their money is being used. Then they can actually be free to make the choice of whether they actually want it used that way. And you started your own investment fund. That won't do that. Yeah. An investment firm, Strive Asset Management. Strive Asset Management launching a new index fund today that you might call the anti-ESG. Founded it last year, centered in Ohio. So I didn't think I was going to start another business, by the way. But after I stepped down from my biotech career, wrote these books, etc., But I decided I'm not I'm not a pundit. Right. I enjoy going on television from time to time. Some companies are doing it because it allows them to make another buck. They blow woke smoke. I enjoy writing books and columns in the Wall Street Journal, which I've done plenty of, but I'm a man of action. I believe in driving solutions. And so I said, look, if I've observed this problem, let's actually do something to fix it. So I started this business Strive whose whole premise was to offer similar products to what the likes of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard offer. But to do it with a different voice and vote when you're voting on behalf of policies as a shareholder in those companies, to tell companies to go back to focusing on excellence over politics, on products and services for your customers to maximize profit rather than any non-economic agenda social, cultural, political, environmental or otherwise. These companies will invest in things that will help preserve people's retirement fund, not make them feel good. Yeah, well, I generally think the people feel good when their retirement fund is doing well and when the economy is doing well. The key difference is almost every major asset manager for the last several years not only buys shares in those companies, they use their clients’ money. Probably even many people listening to this program to then tell those companies that, hey, we're the shareholder, we BlackRock are the shareholder of you Apple, who we're going to vote in favor of a racial equity audit at Apple. There's a true story in 2022 that Apple's board did not want to adopt but effectively was forced into adopting when a majority of Apple's own shareholders voted for that racial equity audit, or Chevron, a company that did not want to adopt a scope three emissions cap was effectively forced to change its policies after BlackRock State Street and Vanguard all voted in favor of a scope three emissions cap. So what's wrong with fewer omissions? What's wrong with having more minorities in the boardroom? Well, we could debate that. Those are deep issues. I don't think there's inherently anything wrong with either of those things, but it's a misuse of somebody else's money to foist that agenda onto a company whose board didn't even want to adopt it, because the job of an asset manager and the job of a corporate board is to advance the financial interests of their clients and of their shareholders. Period. Full stop. Anything short of that is a fiduciary breach. That's what's wrong with it. Now we can get into the merits of the climate debate. I think that most of the anti carbon agenda in the United States is based on a set of flawed premises. I think it is a it's a long discussion we could have, but that's my opinion in my capacity as a citizen. It’s a climate cult. There is a climate cult in this country that tells you that you have to reduce your carbon emissions when in fact that's based on a flawed set of premises that that has anything to do with advancing human prosperity. To the contrary, it's actually reigning in human prosperity. But that's my view as a citizen. However, whatever my view is or somebody else's view, let's sort that out through the democratic process. That's what we have. That's what America gives you. Our citizens. We the people, are empowered to answer those questions. That's what we said in 1776. That was what the American Revolution was fought to settle, that it's not somebody in the back of some palace hall settling that question. And yet today we have palace halls down the street on Park Avenue that settle that question, using your money to do it instead. That's a betrayal. It's a kind of financial fraud, actually. It's a betrayal of trust. And the thing that's wrong with it is even though I have a different opinion than many people who may advance these environmental agendas when it comes to climate change policy, we ought to have that debate as citizens rather than through the Trojan horse of corporate boardrooms. That's what's happening today. I agree with you about these cowards on Park Avenue where BlackRock just squandering people's retirement money. But a criticism your fund has higher expense fees, according to Forbes, four times as much as other index-- Oh, these are the these are the drivel that you see published. So we can go to the specifics of the fund details, but largely speaking, okay. At the time we launched a lot of those funds, they were comparable to the BlackRock fees. Now, BlackRock actually has fees that are higher than State Street's funds. And then in certain cases, our fees were, in one instance, lower than State Street fees. But you know what the system did not like? They did not like that there was a new voice at the table. Okay. So it's like an anaphylactic reaction they had when I showed up at this. So they started throwing all the spaghetti at the wall. If you actually go more than just a surface level look, it doesn't stick. But they can't take somebody showing up at the table with a different philosophy. That's really what this is about. It's an ideological cartel, okay? It's not a monopoly on product. It's a monopoly on ideas. And if you defect from that orthodoxy, they will punish the defector. That's really what's going on here. And, you know, I refuse to stand by silently. Right. Like I said, if a guy like me can't speak up openly and in an unfiltered way, I think it's going to be a lot harder to expect other people to do the same thing as well. I think the way we close that gap between what people say in public and private is to start talking openly again. So for better or worse, I'm pretty unfiltered in calling out a lot of these hypocrisies and know I think that the system is, you know, mounted it's immune reaction against a lot of what I have to say. But the good news is I'm here ready to take it. Let's go back to the culture war stuff because it's easier. You sell these beer koozies, Bud Light truth over relativism. What's that about? We're having some fun in the campaign. That's what this is about, too. What’s the message? The message is really simple. Budweiser and Bud Light made a disastrous decision to embrace Dylan Mulvaney I got some Bud Lights for us. Who I think belittles what it means to be a woman in the state of this modern cult of transgenderism that alienates a lot of its customer base. Well, that company deserves to be held accountable through the market. So we said It has been. They lost billions. Yeah. Well, appropriately so. They should be held to account for making bad decisions. But we had some fun within the campaign so the day after instead of Bud Light. We said Bud Right. And if you took the, you know, the cost of a 24 pack, whatever that is, and helped us in our bottom up grassroots movement, that we would stand for truth over relativism. One of the things I often say, if you flip to the back side of that, I think it's I think I see it on there for you. We say that courage is contagious in this country. Fear has been infectious in America. It spreads from one corridor to another, spreads faster than COVID 19, Fear does in America. But I think courage can be contagious, too. And that's the premise of this whole campaign. And, yes, you know, we're going to be unafraid to have some fun along the way as well. People can get those koozies and hopefully advance this movement in the process. And you're saying people should have the courage to stand up to the transgender movement? Yes, I think that's right. To be able to speak truth in the open. So here's the truth of the matter. When more often than not, especially when a kid says they're born in the wrong body, that their gender does not match their biological sex, that means they suffer from a mental health disorder. And the compassionate thing to do is not to affirm their confusion. It is to actually reach out and help them. Anything short of that is cruel. Actually, a couple of days ago. When was this? It was yesterday, actually. Time is, you know, losing my sense of time on the campaign trail here was just yesterday I had a chance to meet with a young woman who wrongly had begun her gender transition when she was just going through some psychologically difficult times at the age of 13. She's 18 now. She regrets her decision. She got a double mastectomy. I mean, she cut off both her breasts surgically. She went through chemical intervention, puberty blockers. She's never going to be the same. That's a permanent mistake we let her make. Instead of addressing what was a mental health challenge that she was going through at the time. And I think that the fact that the trans movement says it is offensive to call it a mental health disorder is itself offensive to the idea of something that might have a mental health disorder because we're all owed respect as human beings. But what I say is, you know what? You're an adult. You want to dress how you want. If you want, when you want, marry who you want. That's the country we live in. It's true. You can do that as an adult. But what the trans movement's done is in the name of standing up for trans rights has actually become downright oppressive on the rest of our culture. Changing our language, changed the way that we even the labels and the words we use, the rest of everyone else use the changed, the language that is the fabric that holds society together, that now tells kids this is what we must teach you to create more confusion amongst kids who are already confused. That is wrong. So I would say that, you know, kids aren't the same as adults. I would ban genital mutilation and chemical castration in kids under the age of 18. You're an adult, freely consenting, fully informed, do what you want. But if you're a kid, we have to draw the line and we already share this intuition by the way, there isn't a state in this union, agree or not, I'm just saying a fact that allows you to get a tattoo before the age of 18 because the premise is you don't want to allow kids to make permanent life altering changes to their body that they might later regret. All states have that law? Cause all these kids are getting tattoos. Well, I think that, yeah, all 50 states, you can't without going through a lot of consent and going through a lot of additional procedures. Yeah. You can't get a tattoo under the age of 18. That's right. I don't think we should do the same thing with respect to genital mutilation or chemical castration either. And that's really what this trans movement's about. Calling it mutilation and a mental illness. Aren't there people who just feel they're born in the wrong body and they have the treatments and they do better, they're happier in life? I think that's actually false on the data. Many of the people who are unhappy before remain unhappy after. And so the irony is we're actually doing physical harm to their bodies while mentally they're actually no better off. But I know people who have had work, had that work and they are happier. Good. Let them be so, let them be so that's what I say. If you're a fully consenting adult. You don't want to ban it? Yeah. No, if you're an adult, do what you want. I think it's different in kids, right? Kids go through difficult times. So I draw that distinction. I think it's a really important distinction and I started focusing on this issue more only after it started infiltrating children. I think protecting children is the line that I draw. And here's the other thing. I mean, even if you want to think about some of the contradictions here, like the gay rights movement said for the longest time, that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born. It had to be to be a civil right. Yet now we say your own biological sex is completely fluid over your life. Think about how this fits in with the women's rights movement. What we said during the women's rights movement, gender equality, which of course I support in this country, is that there's many ways to be a woman. You can be a you can be a woman with short hair, with long hair. You can wear pants, you can wear a skirt, you can do whatever you want. The core supposition of the trans movement is it fetishizes femininity a little bit, right? It says that, oh, you have to have lips of a certain shape or else you can't actually have identified as a woman. You have to dress and sound a certain way. Your body type has to be a certain thing. It's its reductionist to femininity itself. And then I think that in a certain sense, it even degrades our respect for one another. I actually did a recent podcast on my daily podcast that we've started as part of the presidential campaign. We're lifting the curtain and every day we're releasing a podcast with Riley Gaines, who's the best female swimmer in the country, or was at the collegiate level until a biological man showed up at the women's competition and actually took the top medal. For years in this country, we said that we needed Title Nine to create a space for women's sports to allow women who are biologically fundamentally different from men to still be able to compete at the highest level and respect that. That was a liberal argument. And yet now know back in the 1990s that was a big debate. And now we're saying that actually that vision of women's sports doesn't matter. So I'm fine with you be you as long as you leave the rest of everybody else alone. That's a principle that everybody should, should want to embrace, I think. But that’s a libertarian principle. You at one point in your life, considered yourself a libertarian. Mm hmm. But no more. I still have strong libertarian instincts, there's two reasons I don't call myself a libertarian anymore. Okay? One relates to, I think, a fiction that many libertarians adopt that's politically convenient for them to avoid taking criticism, which is to say that they turn a blind eye to all of the government interventions as they exist, but then stand against any policies that actually remove the effects of that government intervention. You want me to give an example? Yeah, because you kind of lost me. And I’m a libertarian so you can attack me here. Well I'm not attacking anybody. I'm probably the person in this presidential race who has by the way the strongest libertarian instincts. I used to be a self-described libertarian. I was a libertarian rapper in college actually. My stage name was Da Vek. Okay. So I you know, we're cut from similar cloths here. You have pictures? Tapes? Thankfully not. But maybe they are maybe the oppo research in this campaign. That is, they're going to dig up. So we'll give them some homework to do for the other campaigns. But here's really what I mean. So I've been an advocate for making political expression a civil right in country to say that you can't fire somebody for their political beliefs, for what they say on their own time, etc. Let me just pick on that. Libertarians do pick on that, right? Right. I mean, if I start a company, I don't have a right to fire white supremacists? Right. So here's the thing. What I would say is, in an ideal world, you should and this is why this gets to the heart of why I stop calling myself a libertarian, because in an ideal world, we wouldn't have these protected classes at all: race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin. We have all of those protected classes. But here's the thing. I'll explain to that not a lot of people understand. The existence of those protected classes was an intervention in the market and was an intervention in the market that created the conditions for viewpoint based discrimination. Here's how. Courts started interpreting that very broadly. They started to say that the prohibition on discriminating based on race includes not just nondiscrimination on race. It means, and I'm quoting the law here, you can't create a hostile work environment for a member of a protected class. Well, let's look at the case law. What are some of the ways that you create a hostile work environment? It turns out it's by wearing the hat of the wrong political candidate to work. Turns out it's by wearing a red sweater on a Friday, which a grandmother used to do to stand with veterans. A member of a protected class found that to be a microaggression. She was stopped from wearing it because that could create a hostile work environment. Saying something on your own time in social media. So what happened? The law itself, the intervention in the market, the civil rights laws, as they were interpreted, created the very conditions for viewpoint based discrimination while leaving political viewpoints unprotected. So I'm fine if you want to repeal all of those protected classes and actually let the market work. But here's my frustration with libertarians is nobody seems to have the spine to actually stand up and say that part. Yet, if you try to correct for the actual excesses of that by at least saying, all right, well, if all these are protected classes that let political beliefs not be unprotected, when we've created the conditions for viewpoint based discrimination, we'll say, oh, it's about the free market. So that's reason number one. I don't call myself a libertarian is I actually would be the purest of them. I would say fine, let's get rid of the protected classes altogether. But recognizing that that may not be politically feasible, even though I'm not afraid to say it, I'll say I still want to do the next best thing to be able to apply our standards even handedly. But the second reason I don't call myself a libertarian anymore is that while I am a big fan, big fan of getting the government out of my hair and yours and everybody else's in our country too, there are still other things that matter to me after that right? What do we do then? Well me too! What do we do? Exactly. Exactly. So what do we do in this world? So that's not anti libertarian at all. It's just why I don't call myself a libertarian. It's like the first thing I said wasn't So it's not I have I have nothing in me that's anti libertarian. All of that's in me. But there's more that I care about too. I care about the cultivation of virtue in a society. I cult. I care about Government can- the cultivation of how we live our lives. Government? Not government, not government through culture. So when it comes to government, I'm actually pretty much you and I think you're going to find very little daylight between us. But I think that the scope of my interest and leading as a cultural leader is setting a tone where I don't think it's the government's job to force people to get married and form a nuclear family. But I still do believe that the nuclear family structure is important. I don't think it's the government's job to foist religion onto anybody. But I do think the revival of faith in America is important. And so the reason I don't call myself a libertarian is libertarianism is a subset of a broader worldview that you might call American conservatism or my brand of it. And so that's the reason I don't use that label anymore, even though I would say firmly convicted in libertarian instincts, I almost grew out of that label, even while many of the principles stayed with me. You don't want government promoting 

religion or telling people to get married. No government should be doing that Thank you for your time. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. And it's a lot of fun to get beyond the usual talking points. Scratch deeper, and this is a lot of fun. I hope we could do it again. [Swoosh] I hope you liked this longer video. What other presidential candidates should I interview? Please let me know in the comments.