10 Disruptive Truths | Vivek Ramaswamy | EP 481

I don't think the right spot-on critique of Kamala is that she's a communist. Right? The policies she's advocated for in the past certainly would vindicate that characterization. She favors taxes on unrealized capital gains, a single-payer healthcare system. She has favored bans on fracking and bans on offshore drilling. But as you say, right now, sincerely or not, those are not the views that she's espousing at the moment. So it's less that she is a communist or a socialist; I think that that gives her the credit of being an ideologue when in fact it misses the point. She's just another cog in the system. We're not running against a candidate; we're running against a [Music] [Music] machine.

Hello everybody! So what I did today was the culmination, or at least the culmination for now, of a sequence of talks that I've had with Vivek Ramaswamy, who many of you know, perhaps the majority of you that he was a contender on the presidential circuit on the Republican side. A young man who came really as an unknown into the race, although he had quite a substantial history of accomplishment behind him. One of the things we've done with the podcast is track his progress, both as a candidate and also as a person, across the expanse of the presidential circuit. That's been extremely interesting and illuminating, and he was quite successful.

One of the consequences of that is appears to be the case that he's entered the close circle of the fundamental contender for the presidency now, Donald Trump. So what did we do in this discussion? Well, one of the consequences of Ramaswamy's journey has been the modification and specification of his political and philosophical views. He's written a new book called "Truths: The Future of America First," which launches on September 24th.

So we walked through that. We walked through the chapters, which detail out his attempt to put forward something like a conservative vision rather than the more standard conservative objections to the revolutionary vision of the progressives. And so we discussed his proposition that a state that's functional, and a psyche that’s functional for that matter, has to be predicated on allegiance to a higher power, a higher authority. God is real is one of the insistences of his chapters in the new book, "Truths."

There are two sexes, we discussed the climate change hoax and what exactly it means that it's a hoax. We talked about the value of subsidiarity, identity, and responsibility with regards to the nuclear family and the nation, the constitutional nation-state, and as a source of abiding identity. Then we walked through as well Ramaswamy's analysis of the current state of the Trump candidacy, the surprising entry of RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk onto the stage in the last few weeks, which is really a revolutionary development. We got his thoughts about what that might imply and how a Trump presidency might conduct itself as it unfolds across the months post-election.

So join us for all that!

Hello, Mr. Ramaswamy! It's good to see you again. I guess we have two streams of conversation to undertake today. The first pertains directly to a new book that you're releasing on September 24th, "Truths: The Future of America First." I think we'll use that as a springboard for a more general discussion. One of the agreements we made about a year ago was that you would check in with regular updates regarding the progression of your presidential candidacy, which has come to an end. But there's many things to discuss with regard to its conclusion and everything you've learned and to what the future pathway looks like, let's say in a Trump administration, what role you might play in that, and how you construe that in general.

But let's start with your book. Tell us about "Truths: The Future of America First."

Yeah, so it's one of the things and it's great to see you again, by the way, because we have most kept that pledge, and I think it's been a fun forcing function for me to also in conversations like this to take some space and reflect on what has been still a life-changing journey. I've enjoyed each of these times when I've been able to check in, and giving myself that space has been useful.

This book was one of the things that gave me that occasion for reflection as well. So I left the campaign at the start of this year, and one of the core tenets of my campaign—the slogan was "Truth" actually—but it caused me to reflect more deeply on, okay, what did that actually mean and what are the stakes for the future of this movement that I ran my presidential campaign as part of the America First movement. What is the future of that movement, and how does it relate to the pursuit of truth?

That's what this book is about. It goes through ten simple hard truths, and I can tell you what some of those are, but it's a little bit different than the books that I've written in the past. I wrote "Woke, Inc.," which actually was our first basis to get to know one another, that first book, and I've written—this is my fourth book—I’ve written in the last three years. But this one's different in that it's not actually an academic exposition of any kind; it doesn't pretend to be. It's designed to equip people with the kinds of points they can use in dinner table talking point conversation with friends on the left, who they otherwise may not be interacting with.

I think one of the premises of the book is not just the content of it, but the methodology of how we get our country back. I think it's going to be through more open dialogue that we're not having amongst even friends and even family members for whom certain cultural or political topics have gone beyond the pale. Each chapter ends with five hard points or facts that you took away from that chapter. I've never written a book that had that type of character to it, as opposed to maybe more intellectual or academic bent, but I think that this actually may be the most useful of the books that I will have written, I hope, because it would arm a lot of everyday citizens who agree with the points that I make in the book but may not have been able to distill them in ways that allow them to talk to their friends on the left or friends who are outside of political interest, to be able to start the conversations at the dinner table that we're otherwise not having.

So it's not quite a how-to book, but it does have an element of guiding people to have difficult conversations with friends, and I think that's a crucial part of this, with friends who they otherwise might have experienced distance with. That's part of what this book hopes to accomplish as well.

Can we walk through some of those truths? Do you want to detail some of them out so that people have a more clear understanding of what it is and also explain to us why you selected and focused on those?

Yeah, absolutely. So the first one is: God is real. And I'll go kind of straight down the list of some of these.

1. God is real.
2. There are two genders.
3. The climate change agenda is a hoax. That's an adaptation of what I used in my campaign.
4. That fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.
5. Another one is that reverse racism is racism.
6. Another is that an open border is not a border.
7. Another is that in a democracy, the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, or as I phrase it in the book, there are three branches of government in the United States, not four.
8. That’s actually probably one of the most important chapters of the book, albeit the one that gets the most technical.
9. Another one is that nationalism isn't a bad word. And that’s a chapter whose thesis is that the elected leaders of a nation, including the United States, owe their first moral duty to the citizens of their nation.
10. So that explores, I think, a lot of the themes relating to the future of America First.

There’s a chapter entitled "Facts are not Conspiracies," and you know, again, these truths are written in the chapter that follows that is the US Constitution is the strongest and greatest guarantor of freedom in human history. Another chapter explores the importance of the nuclear family; I make the claim in the book that the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

So it gives you a sense for the kinds of truths that I expose in this book. They're the kinds of things that had I said these things in the 1990s when I grew up in the American Midwest, I would have advised you to not buy this book because they would have been too obvious, right? The things that are so obvious they would have been banal to say. The irony is now, in the year 2024, many of those statements are controversial for the same reasons that they were banal 30 years ago.

I think when the obvious becomes controversial, that is really a reminder of how far we’ve fallen as a country. But I think that part of the approach, the book, isn't to be angry about it but to offer let's just take the climate change agenda as a hoax chapter, for example. That’s one that I think will—and already amongst the people who have had these conversations—does make a lot of people upset when they hear that framing.

Are you claiming that climate change, or the idea of it, is a hoax? No, I say the climate change agenda is a hoax because whether climate change is real or not is the wrong question. The chapter, I think, if I may say so, goes somewhat logically through—not independently conducted research, I'm not a climate scientist—but amassing the research of a lot of people who have made this their life's work to go through the different questions underlying climate change.

First of all, are global surface temperatures going up? That’s a reasonable question to ask. The answer appears to be yes. Is that related to man-made causes? There’s evidence suggesting that the answer to that question may be yes.

But now that we've gotten that out of the way, is there clear evidence or any evidence to suggest that that would pose an existential risk to mankind or the future of humanity? And that's where, I believe, the answer is no, against the backdrop of hard facts that the book exposes from other researchers that have highlighted. Folks you've talked to, even Bjorn Lomborg, for example, has highlighted eight times as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.

Well then, how do we synthesize that to a dinner table conversation that somebody’s able to have with their friends who believe that climate change is the single most important issue that needs to be addressed, while not being a denier of the fact that global surface temperatures are going up because they are, but getting to the heart of the matter of whether that actually has an adverse impact on the future of humanity?

So that's the kind of thing I try to do chapter by chapter in the book. Right? That's part of—the problem. I mean you know we've been enjoined repeatedly over the past years to defer to the experts, but that difference presupposes that any given set of facts immediately displays for your perusal a set of policies that should be intelligently implemented.

And part of the problem with that hypothesis is, well, there's many problems with it but one of the major ones is balance of risk, let's say. One of the things that we did that was so catastrophic in our COVID panic was to prioritize a small potential increment in health over every other possible concern, short and long term, and what would you say? Abdicate any political responsibility whatsoever with regard to balancing those risks. And that certainly applies on the climate side is, even if there is a risk, the question is, well, what is the risk precisely and what could we do to ameliorate it?

What would be the risks of that amelioration? Like the large-scale transformation of the entire industrial enterprise is no minor undertaking. It's not at all obvious, as you point out, even by the IPCC's own recognition, that that is the primary existential threat that confronts human beings.

I even, on the environmental side, and so, this is completely independent of the reality of climate change, which I think is also questionable, and the potential danger of carbon dioxide, which in my way of thinking has not been convincingly established, especially given the massive data showing that carbon dioxide produces global greening, especially in semi-arid areas.

That's like, that's a greening increase of 20%! When I look at this data as a scientist—and I am a scientist—I think that data point is so overwhelming. A 20% increase in greening, especially in semi-arid areas accompanied by a quite dramatic increase in crop productivity, it's like that single data point overshadows the significance of all the other data points, as far as I can tell.

And that's only one potential problem. Okay, so you on the climate point, just because this is of near and dear to my heart as well, and it is an example of what I strive to do in this book, where folks like yourself are able to go into the actual hard data points and form your own conclusions, but for the everyday citizen, that often, you know, people who have other callings may not have the same background that you do, that could be a difficult thing to do, when much of what you're served up comes through the filter of intermediary sources that actually are, in many ways, bastardizing their so-called synthesis of the underlying research.

So what I try to do here is at least demarcate several categories of questions. The first you raised is I think one many people are at least comfortable now with broaching the idea that, okay, even if climate change represents some kind of risk, is the cure worse than the disease? That's the COVID-19 analogy. And I contend with that. But that is well-trodden ground.

One of the things I try to do in this book, and for example in this chapter of the book as well, is to go beyond just that well-trodden and accepted trade-off debate to actually even a deeper question of forget the cost of intervention. Are we certain or do we even have a basis to believe that a net increase of a small amount of global surface temperatures is indeed a bad thing for humanity, period? This irrespective of the question of intervention, right?

Because you have many people say that, oh, we still need fossil fuels. We still need that. And the cost of that, even though climate change is going to be bad for humanity, the cost of that would exceed the benefits. That's one argument. That's a totally separate argument but an important one from the question of whether or not carbon dioxide aided or eded increases in global surface temperatures of under two degrees Celsius over the course of a century is bad or good.

It turns out there are some effects that are arguably bad for humanity; there are other effects which are more convincingly potentially net positive for humanity, such as the fact that more people die of cold temperatures than warm ones, such as the fact that the earth is actually covered by more green surface areas, you noted, than it was even a century ago, especially in semi-arid areas, as you're right to note. And then there's the deeper question of going even upstream of that.

So are we sure this is net bad for humanity? Then there’s the question of, are we even sure that carbon dioxide is even the cause of the said phenomenon in the first place when it's actually a much smaller percentage of the atmosphere, when we have relatively low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere relative to most of Earth's history? Those are also deeper questions on the underlying science to ask. I find in many of these questions, we could talk about the border debate, we could talk about a number of the other issues, even in the gender ideology debates, where I think conservatives often will conflate those different questions because we know in our gut what the right answer is, what the truth is.

Sometimes, if our goal is to bring—as my goal here is—friends at the dinner table along, we can actually do better by understanding which of those strands of particular audience on the other side would find most persuasive or is most receptive to—and actually use that rather than the amalgam of the general point that sometimes we make in our political discourse.

So we could start by talking about [Music] depression. Depressed people are sad and frustrated and disappointed. They tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that's paralyzing. Depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder. One of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering was suffering because they were ill in the strictly physiological sense or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of [Music] life.

The probability that tossing an antidepressant into the mix is all of a sudden going to fix your life that are absolutely catastrophically out of order is zero. The more unstable your life is, the less serotonin your brain produces, and that makes you hypersensitive to negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion. You take the problem I'm suffering and then you think, well, why are you suffering? It’s exposure therapy. And then you can practice encountering the obstacles that are stopping you. It’ll make you braver, and it’ll help you deal with your problems. Voluntary confrontation with the forces of darkness and chaos is the fundamental story of [Music] life.

Right? So it's partly a guide to civil political dialogue, and I guess I'm curious too, why you picked the topics you picked. So I'm going to walk through some of them in some detail because I think that's a useful exercise. I mean, the first one you picked is really quite, what would you say? Well, you couldn't have picked a more contentious or deeper opening salvo than your proclamation that God is real.

And so, let me ask you this question in a relatively complicated way. So I've written a new book called "We Who Wrestle with God," which will be out in mid-November. One of the things I've noted about the culture war, say, that's reigning between the atheists and the believers, which is an element of the culture war, is that the phenomenon that we're discussing is ill-defined. Right? I mean Dawkins, for example, who's probably the most famous living blatant atheist, who's making a moral case for atheism, you know, he parodies religious belief, especially of the Judeo-Christian type, as worship of the, you know, big daddy in the sky, which is virally a quote from him: "the sky daddy."

Part of the problem with that formulation is that it's simply not true. Like the characterization of the Divine in the Old and New Testaments—and this is also true of many literatures pertaining to the domain of religious phenomenology—is much more sophisticated than that. It's not easily pared, except in the manner that you can take an oversimplification of any complex belief and parody it.

And so, the book I wrote is a walkthrough of the multiple characterizations of the Divine in the standard Western canon. I’m formulating this this way for a very particular reason with regard to you. So because you start with your chapter about the reality of God, the essential claim in the Western canon is that there's a unity underlying all things. So you could think about that, for example, on the positive side as the unity of beauty and truth and love.

That there’s a unity that underlies all things, that it’s an active process, that unity, and not merely a static state, and that it’s the kind of unity that is related to you in a manner that's best characterized as a relationship. I think those are the—now, it’s also a sacrificial relationship, which has certain implications. But that’s the basic argument.

And you know, the counterargument is that there is no underlying unity, that the virtues and the goods do not sum into something that's commensurate, and that you have no relationship whatsoever between you and the infinite. And like I don’t find those contrary hypotheses particularly credible. You know, like for example, do we believe that there’s no unity underlying say the manifestations of truth and beauty and justice?

All the things that we consider positive virtues and good, are they not united under some rubric that approximates the good as such? And are we not in some sort of relationship with that good? I mean, it’s very dangerous to occupy—to put forward the contrary suppositions. It ends up tilting people in a nihilistic direction or a hedonistic direction, or it tempts them to worship power as an alternative uniting spirit, let's say.

So anyways, that's how I've been conceptualizing the same question. I'm curious about why you found it necessary and desirable to open your argument with this proposition that God is real. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, well, I found it necessary because I think it's the most important of all. I found it desirable in part because I was able to bring a dimension to this that is maybe complimentary to the one that it sounds like you're bringing in your upcoming book. I will use that as a chance to say the only thing that I would not take issue with but expand on what you just said is that I don't think that that's actually limited to the Western philosophical worldview or to even the Judeo-Christian tradition.

So the reason I thought it was desirable for me to bring to bear here is I’m actually a religious Hindu, and I believe exactly in exactly the worldview that you just described. That sense of unity rests actually at the heart of even the Hindu worldview. It's known as the non-dualistic worldview. It’s a philosophy that says the dualism, the separation between man and the Supreme Being, the separation between truth and beauty—non-dualism rejects the existence of that distinction.

And you know, I think how to describe Hinduism is it’s the reconciliation of man with the Supreme Being and his Creator. I think that is something that is a common thread through nearly all major world religions. I think that the common thread—I think that debate, this debate about between the atheist and the person of faith in each of those religious traditions and cultural backgrounds, and backdrops where that debate has taken place, I think falls into the trap of believing that because you can’t understand something, that that other thing no longer exists, which is actually a denial of the entire history of science as well.

Right? So the idea that your body is composed of cells that themselves contain nucleic acids that offer the blueprint for your genetic makeup, the fact that you couldn't see that does not deny its actual truth. I think that’s the form of argument that I see with the atheist not only in the American setting but really for all of Western philosophical religious history.

But it turns out even if you look to ancient arguments in places like India for people who had a non-dualistic worldview—you could call it a Hindu worldview of believing that there is a Supreme Being that resides and is unified with each man. The fact that you can't see that or access that is not a valid argument on its own to deny its actual truth.

Well, let's look at that a minute from the scientific perspective. You know, because there's actually, it seems to me that one of the prerequisites, the presuppositions, of formal science is at least the implicit recognition of something like a Transcendent Unity. So, and here's what I mean by that—it's like any good scientist knows that his or her theories are insufficient. Right?

That implies that there is a world that's a unity outside of our conceptualization. Right? So that’s a belief in a Transcendent reality. So what you're doing when you do science is that you're subjecting your hypothesis to revision by the facts of the Transcendent Unity. Right? You put your hypothesis up for testing against the manner in which the real but as of yet unknown world will manifest itself. So you have to presume that there is a reality beyond your presuppositions, and not only that, you have to presume that that reality is intelligible and that making the effort to make it intelligible is actually beneficial and good because— and it could be destructive.

I mean, you can discover things that are destructive, but the scientific mindset is predicated on the idea that the expansion of our knowledge in the direction of this Transcendent unity is actually a net moral good because otherwise science would be an evil enterprise.

And so, it seems to me, and I make this case in this book too, that the hypothesis of something like a Transcendent unity is a necessary precondition even for science itself to find its purchase and move forward. The fact that the university and the scientific enterprise essentially emerged out of the religious monastic tradition historically and technically is an indication of that fact rather than, you know, the kind of post-French Revolution notion that science and religion are somehow at odds.

I don’t think that's historically accurate. And so, there’s one other thing too, and I'm interested in your comments about this.

See, the other reason that the proposition that you begin with, "God is real,” is necessary in a political sense, as far as I can tell, is that there’s dawning realization over the thousands of years of human civilization that it’s necessary, even for those who rule, to be subject to some ethical framework or power that's beyond them.

So even among the ancient Mesopotamians, for example, they—and these are the oldest writings that we have, which is why I’m bringing them into the discussion—the Mesopotamians realized that their emperor had to be an avatar of a god they knew as Marduk. Marduk was the god of attentive watching and truthful speech. In so far as the Mesopotamian emperor was an avatar of the spirit of careful attention—the attention that updates and learns—and truthful speech, he had the right to remain as emperor.

But in so far as he deviated from that moral path—which wasn't a characteristic of him—but a characteristic of something transcendent, if he deviated from that, he violated the, what would you say, the principles upon which his sovereignty was predicated. And you have to ask yourself how could it be other than dangerous for anyone to inhabit a political system where the presumption was that the ruler was the fundamental final source of ethical evaluation.

I mean, there's no difference between that and a tyranny, obviously.

So much in what you said there—and again it's another great example in parallel to our climate discussion now, on this discussion about religion. One of the things I tried to do in this book is to make that accessible to, again, ordinary Americans who feel in their heart probably what you said but may not have been able to parse it exactly in the manner that you have.

So let’s just separate, as we did for the climate discussion, into a couple different categories of argument here. It's funny; I actually—this actually relates directly to the opening chapter of "Truths" as well. I’m sure your book is a full book on it; this is a shortened version.

The first point about science itself being predicated—the scientific method itself being predicated on that unity—that's exactly right. So what the observation I make to just make it simpler and more convincing to laypersons is that it is therefore not an accident. Every great scientist or many great scientists, you know, Albert Einstein, you go straight down the list—Blaise Pascal—some of the people who have made the greatest discoveries that have improved the frontiers of scientific understanding of the universe did indeed believe in a single true God.

I do believe that that is something that at least should surprise people who adopt the post-French Revolution worldview that say, how science and religion are at odds when some of the unambiguously greatest scientists, physicists, biologists, chemists have all arrived at the conclusion that there is some greater mover of this universe that we're unified with.

The scientific method almost presupposes that exactly—you're going to incrementally access knowledge that you don’t have and the fact that you're able to do that in the realm of science is actually validating, not contradictory of the fact that you may do the same through religious experience.

So that's one category of argument, which is different from a separate—entirely different point—which is scientific knowledge is only one form of knowledge. The idea that truth is limited to that which you can access through empiricism or through empirical testing is just a claim; that's an assertion, when in fact empirically—well, it's also one that's scientifically that's been scientifically invalidated exactly.

In recent years, because the advanced cognitive scientists in particular, the scientists of perception understand that we have to prioritize our perceptions because otherwise there's an infinite number of potentially relevant facts, and an infinite number is too many. So we use a value structure to prioritize our perception of facts, and so there’s no escaping from the value problem—not even at the level of perception—it’s logically inescapable.

And then again, in the interest of sort of making this accessible again, you go to Albert Einstein. He did not deduce his theory of relativity through empirical deduction or even through empirical observation; he deduced it through what you could call a form of meditation, right? Deep reflection on what must be true in the universe, accessing what we now accept as truth through a different mode than empirical deduction, which was later validated through empirical testing.

So you’ve got the fact that the scientific method itself relies upon the idea of some broader unity as you call it. B, the fact that empirical deduction of truth is not the only path—in fact, you have almost definitive proof that it can't be the only path to accessing truth—and good historical examples to support that.

And that's all separate from the other category that you brought up, which is the utility of religious belief, whether that's in providing a constraint or a structure around the sovereignty of any particular kingdom or republic or whether it’s even the fulfillment that most people are able to experience in their own lives.

Here, you may actually be making a case for even a Dawkins-like atheist. I don’t know what Dawkins' own views are, but an atheist believing that their kids would still be better off if their kids at least grew up being raised in a traditional religion and believing in God because, well, Dawkins has described himself recently as a cultural Christian, and I think it's exactly for those reasons.

Exactly. It's just the utilitarian, the utility-enhancing argument for it, for the same reason that you would believe that a republic like that of the United States, or an old kingdom in Mesopotamia, would be better governed if its leader were—their sovereignty were derived from but also located within a broader sovereignty under God.

And so I think that those are four different categories of arguments. Some are actually grounded in truth, others are grounded in utility, but all of which lead to, as you put it at the beginning, the desirability but also the importance and necessity of starting the book with that exploration of why God is real and why that's important.

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Let's turn, if you don't mind, to chapter 2, which is that there are two sexes. So I want to again ask you a relatively complicated question in that regard.

One of the striking facts of human perception and conception is the primacy of sexual differentiation. So the first thing I would say about that is that sex emerged about three-quarters of a billion years ago. So it’s a very, very old phenomenon and it’s very fundamental. I mean, sex emerged at least in part to ensure that creatures could stay ahead of their parasites.

I won't go into that in any great detail, but it turns out that sexual reproduction is more effective as a multigenerational strategy than parthenogenesis because creatures could in principle just produce identical copies of themselves, but that turns out not to be biologically effective. And so sex is very fundamental. Now one of the things that implies is that the ability to differentiate sexually is also of fundamental significance because creatures that fail to do that don’t find a mate.

That's that on the evolutionary side. And so even creatures that don’t have a nervous system can differentiate practically and functionally between the sexes. But there’s more to it. As far as I can tell is that the notion of sexual differentiation as a primal fact of being, I think you could make the case that that's the most fundamental of our perceptual categories.

Like I think it's more fundamental than up or down, or black and white, or night and day. Like, and those are very fundamental conceptualizations, right? And so what that implies is that if you can gerrymander the perception of sexual differentiation, if you can do that for ideological reasons, if you can convince people to accept that distortion of reality, there’s no distortion of reality that they would be immune to in the aftermath of that violation.

So, you know, I mean, I thought about this very deeply since the entire notion of the gender spectrum has emerged into public consciousness and we've seen the devastating effects of that, with regards to medical malpractice for example. I mean, the best data that I've been able to access now suggests that something approximating 10,000 minor women—minor girls— in the United States have had double mastectomies that have been paid for by insurance in the aftermath of this gender thing that has possessed the broader culture.

And I think one of the things that the Democrats are most culpable for and in an unforgivable manner is still maintaining their support for this view that gender is a spectrum and a continuum. And, you know, it's interesting because, of course, people do vary substantially in their personalities, and there are masculine and feminine personalities, and they're not 100% aligned with the underlying sexual biology. But that doesn't mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the sexual categories are cultural constructs or unreal in any deep sense.

So, okay well, so that's, I've kind of outlined the way that I've been perceiving that. I'm curious about why you picked that as number two in your list of topics that need to be addressed, and what brought this to your attention and what you think the problems and solutions are.

Well, after number one and number ten, there was no particular order to the rest other than making for a good book. So actually, the climate change chapter came second; this came a little bit down the line, but that's just a matter of organization in the book. It’s okay, it's a foundational one for exactly the reason you lay out.

First of all, you want to trace the evolutionary heritage of gender, or of sex really. It’s exactly as you laid out and you could make the case how foundational it is relative to other foundational attributes of living creatures, but it is in the category of foundational regardless. One of the things I explore in this chapter is sometimes it’s good to look at the exception that you would hear on the other side as the best argument against your, in my view, and explore that, because you know people are going to encounter that.

If they don't encounter it in our own discussion, they're going to encounter it elsewhere. So let's take the phenomenon of intersex as you’re familiar, right? So this would be a rare set of genetic anomalies, chromosomal abnormalities that result in somebody having rather than two normally ordinar—just for everyone’s benefit, I'm sure most people are aware—two X chromosomes, you're a woman, and an X and a Y chromosome, you're a man. That's the definitional distinction for sex on a chromosomal basis in human beings.

However, there are rare instances in which individuals are born with and able to survive and live lives approaching normal duration with XY, XXY, XYy. These run by names like Jacob syndrome or Klinefelter syndrome. Now the fact that we have historically and continue to still describe these as syndromes, and the way that we treat them if historically even related to classifying them as syndromes, I think in many ways reveals that okay, the fact that that exists, and those people deserve to be treated with dignity, and part of our societal approach for nearly all of history to treat them with dignity is to characterize that as a syndrome in a way that’s able to be addressed reveals exactly the point that you were making, which is that it is still foundational.

The idea that we have otherwise ordinarily evolved to have two X chromosomes in the human race; you're a woman and an X and a Y, you're a man.

I think one of the things I also explored, making this again part of the point of this book is to make it accessible to ordinary people in the context of otherwise contentious political debates they’re having. You don’t have, let’s not accept any of the premises that you and I have just talked about here. Let’s not say that you have to subscribe to that out of the gate or you haven't studied evolutionary biology to be convinced of it, or maybe that doesn't matter to you.

It should be at least a little bit of a mystery, a little curious at the very least that the very now umbrella political movement and cultural movement, the LGBTQIA—there’s many letters there, so they put a plus at the end—that LGBTQIA+ movement at once asks you to espouse contradictory claims on this question.

So, on one hand, at the very movement, this umbrella movement that told you that the sex of the person you’re attracted to is hardwired on the day you’re born—and by the way that was a central claim of the gay rights movement—and it was a central claim of the legal argument for why gay rights count as civil rights, that it’s an immutable characteristic. The very people who said that the sex of the person you're attracted to on the day you’re born also now require you to believe that your own gender, or even in some constructs your biological sex, is completely fluid over the course of your life.

Now you can’t believe both of those things at once. But it becomes even less credible now. Now let’s just go one layer deeper. That paradox is even more perplexing when you’re asked to believe this against the backdrop of there being no gay gene. There's no gay chromosome. But yet that's the attribute that you have to believe is hardwired on the day you’re born or else you’re a bigot.

And yet the attribute for which you do have two definitive measurable, imageable, biotyping, empirically discernible—you think about even the chapter of God is real and people who hold empiricism as even their false god, fine, apply that here—a discernible, empirically observable reality. And yet to say that that's the attribute, the one that is actually totally mutable over the course of your life while the one that had no genetic or chromosomal basis—the sex of the person you’re attracted to—is the one that somehow had to be immutable.

So it becomes, I think, serially more and more ridiculous or at least untenable to adopt those contradictory assumptions at once. To say that maybe you could believe one of those things or you could believe the other of those things, but the postmodern demand is that you believe both of those things at once, which is something that even for somebody who isn't, you know, maybe as drawn to the underlying biological or evolutionary historical truth could at least acknowledge the hypocrisy of that for the purpose of civil dinner table conversation— which again is part of the purpose of my book to make some of these concepts a little bit more accessible.

I think it points to the fact that the argument isn't the issue. Like the issue, as far as I can tell, is something like, let's walk through it a little bit and see if we can formulate. It's something like the presumption that I am going to gerrymander my perceptual and cognitive categories such that at any given moment I have maximal freedom to pursue whatever form of gratification, sexual and otherwise, that might come to mind.

And so if that's my goal—and I think that is the goal of the hedonistic left—is to justify that that attitude of pleasure, immediate pleasure-seeking at the expense of everything else, then the logical contradictions don't matter. If that means sometimes assuming that everything is radically socially constructed so that any constraint placed upon me is just an arbitrary manifestation of the tyrannical patriarchy, well then I’ll accept that when it suits my desire to explore my hedonistic proclivities.

If it means in other circumstances that I have to accept the idea of immutability with regards to sexual attraction, I’ll also do that happily because the real game here is, I think what's increasingly on display in the pride parades, which is not so much a celebration of the freedom to love—which is, you know, what the Democratic good thinkers insist upon—but the freedom to pursue any form of gratification whatsoever, free from any possible constraints of like future or future or social orientation.

I mean, that's what explains the willingness, I think, to swallow these contradictions because they aren't contradictory at that deeper level if your desire is that your desires are gratified immediately, regardless of any other consideration.

Then there is no contradiction at that level of analysis. And so if we're to then connect the common thread through all three of the topics we've discussed so far—and we're going through no particular order in the different chapters of my book, and so be it—but let’s just connect these three. Right?

We've talked about climate; we’ve talked about religion; the claim that God is real, and now this notion our conviction and the truth that there are two genders based on two sexes. I think a common thread exists there where your point is that logic was never really the point or argument was never really going to be the mode of persuasion in the first place.

What are these new—this new climate change agenda and the LGBTQIA agenda? What’s really at the heart of it is they really do have the characteristics of actually—to bring in full circle—modern religions. Right? And so when you stop believing in the real thing, you're going to believe in alternative religions instead. Or the idea of hedonism as an end in itself. Like, that is the ultimate false idol or the false god.

Whether you believe that if there isn't some sort of other controlling and constraining demand on how human beings are supposed to behave through a moral order and endow upon us by God, then you will believe in a different constraining principle and impose our human beings by the climate.

So I do think that that goes to this native human need for belief in higher purpose, belief and meaning—a belief probably something like the irresistible force of the quest for unifying hypotheses. Yes. Right? I mean we could make that, you know, your case you laid out, and I think it is genuine, is that there’s no escape from a belief structure.

That’s right, because—and that’s partly because you have to conceptualize your beliefs in relationship to one another, and you have to do that in something resembling a hierarchical manner because some things you believe have to be primary compared to other things that you believe. You know, like you value your wife more than some random woman on the street, for example, which indicates a priority of value.

Now you can debate whether or not you should do that, but you can't debate that you do do that. So let's say that people are driven by necessity to organize their beliefs coherently and hierarchically, and that implies that there's going to be competitions between different hierarchies of belief. But that there's no escape from the necessity of a hierarchy of belief, partly because in the absence of such a hierarchy, you're just confused and aimless, which is very uncomfortable and distressing psychologically and also very impractical.

And so then the question becomes, well, what are going to—what are the foundations going to be of that hierarchical belief? And you're pointing to something like allegiance to a transcendental unity in a classic sense that's associated with, say, with the mainstreams of religious thought that characterize mankind.

And what seems to happen is that, in the absence of that, alternatives emerge that are pathological. And one would be the worship of power, and you certainly see that with the postmodern worship of power because people like Foucault—he's the best example of this—and certainly it was characteristic of Marx make the presumption that power is the fundamental motivator, and it is a unifying force, although it's pathological in the extreme in my estimation.

But you also see, in classic accounts, the proclivity for people to degenerate in a hedonistic direction when they lose their moral guidance. And so, for example, in the story of Moses—the Exodus story—when Moses departs from the lost Israelites to go to receive the Ten Commandments, they're left under the control of Aaron.

Aaron is Moses' political wing. You could think of him as someone who's only beholden to the whims of the people, so he's like a populist—that's another way of thinking about it. The transcendental guide disappears, and all that's left is the populist representative of the people. And what happens in the Exodus story is that the Israelites immediately degenerate into worship of the golden calf, which is something like orgiastic materialism, because they end up dancing naked in an orgiastic manner, in a drunken, orgiastic manner, and worshiping something like the golden calf, which is a symbol of material wealth.

One of the implications there is that in the absence of a transcendent orientation, the populist proclivity is going to be the demand for the gratification of immediate desire. And of course, that makes a certain amount of sense, right? Because obviously we’re motivated to requite our immediate desires. You have to have a reason not to do that—that's a higher reason, right? Just like you have to have a reason to mature or you have to have a reason to forego gratification.

So, of course, that's how a society would degenerate. And I would say also the reason it tends to degenerate in the direction of power, which is somewhat different than hedonism, is that the purpose of power is the gratification of hedonistic desire, right? Because if I want to gratify myself and I have power, I can force you to comply, and you can become an agent of my whims.

And so that's where you get that dance between the hedonists and the tyrants. And so those are the cataclysmic forces that beckon and destabilize in the absence of something like an upward-oriented transcendental—what? Transcendental subjugation? That’s how it looks to me anyways.

So that seems to be akin to the argument that you're making, at least implicitly, in at least those chapters of your book. And if I may, if I may just to sort of bridge this to—actually it actually is a perfect bridge to much of the rest of the book, is that yes, you can't escape belief. That is a common thread through the book.

The book is called "Truths." This isn't a truth that is a chapter of its own, but it's a common thread through the entire rest of them, which is that you can't escape a belief or a belief structure. And so whether we're talking about LGBTQIA-ism or racial wokeism, that's a chapter that we cover in the book as well, or climatism, you can't escape belief.

I start with the big one, right? God is real. That's an alternative belief structure, which is grounded, I believe, in truth but also even from a self-fulfillment perspective provides you at least greater fulfillment than these other false idols. The other—these other golden calf substitutes. But that may be difficult for some people, especially those who may not be so inclined.

You know, you have to be under a certain condition or a certain state of mind and being to be able to open your mind to the possibility of believing in God if you previously didn't. And that’s not something you’re going to, I don’t think, through a book persuade someone into anyway.

So one of the things I offer in the book is alternatives, right? Maybe you're not going to fill the whole vacuum in your heart or the whole vacuum of belief that you require that's otherwise filled by climatism, wokeism, and transgenderism with the following. Maybe God is the most important one, but absent that, there are other proxies—proxies maybe the wrong word—but other substitutes.

And so this relates to some of the other chapters that I cited, to the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. That in some ways is at least a belief in a structure, a belief in the importance of family, a belief in a grounding conviction of your identity.

This chapter on nationalism isn’t a bad word. That’s at the heart of it, is that a civic identity or a national identity can also provide that sense of belief that is necessary.

Anyway, but you may as well ground it in something that is a true, but also is more time-tested in what is able to provide a human being with his sense of fulfillment and purpose. And so, in some sense, that is better than I probably conceptualized if I was to rewrite the introduction to my book after this conversation.

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Well, so let me outline something else from Exodus that’s extremely interesting in that regard. So there’s a time when the Israelites are lost and wandering when they set up Moses as a judge. And so they are fractious and squabbling because they don’t have the capacity for self-governance, being recently freed slaves who are now lost in this expansive, chaotic wasteland, this post-tyrannical domain of confusion, which is what the desert signifies.

So they really try to make Moses into a new Pharaoh. And so they set him up as judge, and so they bring all the disputes they can't reconcile themselves to his attention and ask him to rule. And Moses’ father-in-law comes along—a man named Jethro—re-enters the picture. He’s a good man, a good foreigner. And he says to Moses, “You have to stop doing this because you’re going to be reestablished as a new Pharaoh.”

And so you'll have all the problems of the previous tyrant, but also by depriving your people of the necessity of adjudicating their own disputes, you infantilize them and they’ll stay as slaves. And so that’s a very interesting and cogent critique.

And so, what Jethro tells Moses to do—this is a very key occurrence in the history of political thought—because the issue that’s being addressed in a very compact form is what's the alternative to the tyrant and the slave? Right?

You could think about those as extreme forms of social organization: tight organization under a single power and no organization whatsoever. What Jethro tells Moses to do is to divide his people into groups and make a hierarchy.

So put everybody in groups of ten, have those ten elect a leader from amongst themselves, then to make a group out of those leaders, and then to take the leader leaders and make another pinnacle above them, to do all the way up to groups of ten thousand, and then to adjudicate the disputes from the bottom up, letting only those that can’t be adjudicated at a lower level get to Moses.

So it’s the construction of a hierarchy that’s called the principle of subsidiarity. And so it’s the formulation of a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility and identity. That’s the alternative to the slave and the tyrant. You’re touching on that in your formulation.

This is something we’ve been dealing with for a while at this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship organization that’s an attempt to bring conservatives and classic liberals together all around the world. So, you know, you’re highlighting certain elements of those, that subsidiary identity, which is not only a belief, right?

It’s a mode of being in the world. Like to have a family isn't only to believe that a family is valuable; it's also to have a family, right? And to be nested in that. One of the points that you're making that you appear to be making is that, well, if you're looking for an identity, father, sibling, son, in a well-structured nuclear family actually provides that, right?

It’s who you are. It shapes the way you see the world and it offers you a set of meaningful responsibilities. But it's not only the nuclear family, right? It’s the town, it’s the city, it’s the state, it’s the nation. And so there’s a place for the nation as well.

You know, the problem with the globalist view, which is that it’s disenfranchised hyper-individualistic, autonomous individuals bereft of any social structuring, is that you end up with the slave-tyrant problem immediately.

Is that when you eradicate all the subsidiary structures from people’s identity, you turn them into slaves and you turn the ruler into a tyrant. And that’s the danger of organizations like the WF or the UN or the EU for that matter, right, that push this identity that’s too extreme.

There’s no intermediary social institutions; there’s only individuals and the king, the Pharaoh, the tyrant. And then you end up with this slave-tyrant dichotomy and everyone is lost and aimless and without identity. And so you are, I think your point that what you're doing with these intermediary structures—nuclear family, a constitutional republic, and a national identity—is flesh—it’s not so much a substitute for the orientation towards the divine; it’s the fleshing out of what that would mean.

Yes, practically in how you constitute yourself as an individual. This is what the conservatives have to offer in part, right? Because the atomized liberals tend to think of everybody as only individuals, but when you start to understand that your identity is also that of the nuclear family and also that of the nation, let’s say, in the state, then that gives you a place and a set of tasks to undertake that are nested underneath the transcendent but also meaningful manifestations of identity.

That's exactly right. And so this is the heart of really what the book is about when I talk about truths. This is the heart of a truth that permeates all of the other ones. So you used a couple—so many interesting things what you said there. You used the word subsidiarity; you could use the word constitute as it relates to individual.

So I’m going to—I’ll pick up on that verbal cue to cite something else different but relates to the same verbal cue, which is Jethro and Moses. That principle of subsidiarity, of organization, is what many scholars have at least tied and even attributed in some cases to Article 4, Section 4 of the US Constitution.

And where it actually finds its own roots is actually none other than that through that principle of subsidiarity that Jethro imparted to Moses, both in the system of federalism also in the system of how our own district courts to appellate courts to the Supreme Court is actually set up in the United States.

And so whether as a historical parallel or even for certain people who participate in the Constitutional Convention, whether they had in mind actually Jethro and Moses' structure there of subsidiarity, it’s actually deeply woven into the fabric and founding of the United States.

So people often will say we’re founded on Judeo-Christian values, and that’s what our Constitution was written in the backdrop of, and people say these things, but without actually necessarily understanding some of those deeper linkages, details. Exactly. And that’s one of the things I also explore in this book.

Now, on this principle of subsidiarity, look, I think that there is also an opportunity for—and our goals in our respective books here may be slightly different, and mine is different here from even some of my prior books.

My goal here is actually very pragmatic, right? In that even for those who may not get there on God or on nation, they could at least get there on family, right? The idea that you’re a brother, a father, a husband, and then that grounds you.

Great. The nuclear family is, I make here, the greatest form of governance, certainly greater than a government. And then maybe you get there on family, then you can go a little bit further that I'm a citizen of this nation, not any other nation, not some nebulous global citizen fighting climate change nebulously somewhere.

And so I export climate in the same book, but I’m a citizen of this nation—in my case, the United States of America. That means something. Here’s what that means; here’s what that civic ideal is really based on, and my pride in that national identity—if you call that a form of nationalism, that need not be a bad word.

So maybe we get there with that. And then look, you have a vacuum in your heart. Have you filled the whole thing with your family identity and your national identity? Maybe not, but if you’ve even partially filled the cup, you’re diluting a lot of the poison that otherwise filled it to irrelevance.

And that itself is partial progress, even if we don't make it all the way to people who I may not—we overwhelm with the single chapter dedicated to “God is real.” Okay, maybe we do win some people over with that, but even if we don’t, I want to leave room—it’s a very practical project for partial victories along the way.

And I think that in some ways, that’s one of two mistakes I’d like to identify. I think in the conservative movement is we haven’t given ourselves, or maybe not ourselves, but our fellow citizens the space for those partial victories.

And I think the more we provide the space for those partial wins, the more likely we are to eventually progress to what a fuller victory looks like. The other issue I see with the conservative movement is here we often are very good at identifying and lambasting the poison that fills the cup, right? The alternative belief structures that we adopt.

But I think without—certainly amongst conservative political leadership in recent years—I’d say this probably for the better part of the 21st century, we’re not good enough at identifying what the alternative beliefs are that we alter division is that we actually subscribe to.

So we know what we're against, but what exactly do we stand for? So we talk—we spend a lot of our airtime, if you just look at, I don’t know, conservative media, right? And you look at race, gender, sexuality, and climate. How much time do we spend talking about those topics versus talking about the value, inherent value of each individual, the inherent value of the family, the nation, and God?

I think that there's a vast disparity where we actually are doing far less to defeat the ideologies or dogmas of race, gender, sexuality, and climate by confronting them directly than we might by actually reviving individual family, nation, and God.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a time in place for directly confronting a threat and fighting it head-on. I think that there’s a time and place for that, and I think that that’s necessary at times. But it is not the way in which we’re going to restore the kind of order we miss in postmodern America or the postmodern West.

I think that that will require doing the harder work of saying it’s not just what we’re against but what do we actually affirmatively stand for. And I see that as missing when I think about the future of America First. One of the hard truths that permeates the book as well is that it is an abject failure of the modern Republican party.

I think it is a damning indictment of the modern conservative movement, and I hope what I do through this book is pave a path for what that future conservative movement can be resurrected to actually accomplish.

Yeah, well, that's very much akin, as I said, to what we're trying to do with this Ark organization and for exactly the same reasons is that, you know, the conservatives are frequently criticized for being reactionary to for their objections, let's say, to the visionary proclivity of the left but have been remiss repeatedly in defending and fleshing out an alternative vision.

And as you said, it’s become time for the obvious to be restated. I mean one of the constant criticisms of my work—writing and lecturing, for that matter—is that, you know, well, Peterson does nothing but state and explain the obvious. But it is the case that in times of crisis, it is precisely the role of conservatives to make a case for what is so deeply rooted in people's psyches that it's foundational and to defend that.

That's exactly what conservatives do—that is their role. And so, visionary conservatives shine a light on the true pathway forward that's grounded in the appropriate guiding traditions of the past, and it certainly looks like that’s what you’re doing in this book.

Let me turn our attention in the time we have left over to something that's more—well, more political and more personal at the same time. Now you spent a lot of time on your presidential campaign, which was quite successful, all things considered, given how relatively unknown you were as a political actor and the complexities of the current political situation.

And I’m very curious about the consequences of that. I mean, I did note that there was a fair amount of—I'm wondering what your relationship is with the powers that be on the Republican side at the moment.

I mean, we've seen Trump make some remarkably interesting moves in the past few weeks. I mean, the fact that he’s aligned himself with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and, by all appearances, Elon Musk, who agreed yesterday to head something like a commission on governmental efficiency, which would be—I mean, this is the radicalness of this can hardly be overstated, right?

I mean RFK wants to—what, he wants to rekindle the or reformulate the health and food distribution systems? Like, I mean that's a major undertaking! And I think he’s absolutely right about the health crisis that besets us.

I mean, obesity and diabetes are a plague of such catastrophic proportions that they make any risk from climate change appear like absolutely trivial, in an insane trivial. But it's radical. And while Elon Musk is a radical sort of character, and Tulsi Gabbard again, she fits the same—she’s subject to the same descriptive terminology.

And it's also interesting that all three of those people are ex-Democrats, right? You could also say about Trump, you know, it’s not like Trump is the world's most obvious conservative, quite the contrary.

So I'm curious about what you make of what's happening around Trump at the moment, and around Kamala Harris too for that matter, because there's also evidence that her stance has become substantially less radical and more conservative.

Now you can be skeptical and cynical, and maybe you should be about how much of that's just surfaced, but the Democrats did shut out the radical leftists at the convention to a large degree, and much of what Harris has been pushing is much more mainstream Democrat than what you might have expected, for example, if the people like AOC or Rashida Tlaib had got the upper hand, the real radicals in the Democratic Party.

So what do you make of what's happening around Trump? How do you feel about it? What potential role are you playing and might you play in the future in relationship to that, and what do you have to say about what's happening with Kamala Harris and the reconfiguration of the Democrats?

Well, look, everything you just laid out, I think accentuates an increasingly obvious truth, which is that the real divide in this country is not between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, as those words have become less meaningful. You have multiple former Democrats who you named, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, and by the way, somebody who formerly identified as a Democrat as well, as Donald Trump now looking at the world in a very different way.

On the other hand, you have Kamala Harris in her—it's not even a gradual run; it's a sprint toward the center of traditional political content. I think what we’re actually seeing is a different divide. It is a divide between the managerial class and the everyday citizen.

So I’ll start with Kamala for a second here. I don’t think the right spot-on critique of Kamala is that she’s a communist. Right? The policies she’s advocated for in the past certainly would vindicate that characterization.

She favors taxes on unrealized capital gains, single-payer healthcare system, she has favored bans on fracking, bans on offshore drilling. She was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal so much so that she wanted to end the filibuster in the Senate—we could go straight down the list of that history, and I’ve done that in other places.

But as you say, right now, sincerely or not, those are not the views that she’s espousing at the moment for the most part. So it’s less that she is a communist or a socialist; I think that’s almost giving her too much credit.

I think that gives her the credit of being an ideologue, which I don’t think she is—I don’t think she’s particularly ideological. I think she, like Biden, as Biden proved to be anyway, is really just another cog in a machine, right?

I think that this is part of—I think the more Republicans see ourselves running against a candidate and it say that that candidate, Joe Biden, you know when I ran for US president, right?

The pledge we had to sign to be on the debate stage was called the “Beat Biden” pledge, and I told the then chairwoman of the Republican Party I thought this was a silly idea, because we’re not running against Joe Biden. So why are we framing our entire Republican primary endeavor in the context of beating Joe Biden?

In the very practical sense, I didn’t think we’re going to run against Joe Biden. We’re not, but even in the deeper philosophical sense that why don't we focus on what other alternative vision we actually have to offer to the people?

So I think that's a trap that Republicans would fall into. Now again with Kamala, to say that, okay, here's everything that's wrong with Kamala Harris when, in fact, that misses the point that she's just another cog in the system. We're not running against a candidate; we're running against a machine.

I think we have to understand that. So that is where I think you see a lot of the common threads between folks like, you know, myself, to RFK, to Donald Trump, to Tulsi. We have divergences between us to other more historically traditional Republican conservatives.

There’ll be shades of difference on individual policy questions on the merits of one form of, you know, regulation or policymaking or other, but what we do represent in sheer common is a hostility to the managerial class, the managerial administration of America by, I would say, people who are never elected to their positions.

The people who we elect to run the government—from Kamala Harris to Joe Biden or anybody else—they're not the ones actually running the government. It is a managerial machine of which they’re just a part. That really is the divide, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in that changing landscape.

It’s also strange—it’s so strange that it’s the conservative Republicans that have found themselves in opposition to the managerial class, because logically it should be that the conservatives are the supporters of the managerial and administrative class. There have been points in history where that’s been true, no doubt about it.

But I think that—that's where, you know, these words change their valence and meaning over time.

Yeah, right. You know, the managerial class. I don't use the term “elites” really as much as some of my other friends on the right do because I think that I’m an elite. Elon Musk is an elite, you know, by certain definitions. Founders—I think there’s a different categorization I would offer between the everyday citizen, the creator, and then this managerial intermediary class, the bureaucrat class, the committee class.

And I think there's always a balance of power between all three, and maybe some element of all three is always required in a well-functioning society. But right now we live in a moment where that balance of power has shifted too heavily in favor of the managerial committee class.

And not just in government, but in universities and companies and nonprofits—in any institution. I think now is a moment we live in where creators are able to ally with everyday citizens to be able to drive real change. Change. And so that’s—I’m a creator by background; that’s what led me to run for US president. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, very similar backgrounds as creators who are allied with the everyday citizen to be able to overthrow in some sense the managerial class that has a lot of our modern culture and certainly our modern government in a chokehold.

And so that’s what motivated me to run in the first place. I think it's a common thread that you could connect for some of the other characters you just mentioned. For my part, look, I’ve enjoyed my presidential run immensely.

It was the experience of a lifetime. I grew in ways that I would not have but for doing that one thing. I do believe in—the you know, for all the things that I could blame for why I didn’t achieve the ultimate goal, I'm grateful that I, as somebody who was relatively unknown at the start of it, I beat multiple former and current senators and governors and a former vice president along the way, and so I'm satisfied with how we did. But at the same time, I didn’t achieve the goal of assuming the presidency, and I tell my kids the same thing.

So I’ll follow the advice myself: the number one factor that is most determinative of what you achieve in life is you. It’s not the only factor that matters, but it’s the number one factor. And there are some things that I think I could have done better.

I think a lot of my former colleagues, people I’ve worked with, employees of mine, close friends, family members, I think one of the things that they were most frustrated by—they tell me this, and I appreciate that—is that they're frustrated that they feel like the public did not get to see the full me that they know.

Right? I think that part of what happened in the process of running for president—and it was unavoidable this time around, and I don’t say I have any regrets considering the result that I achieved—but, you know, if I was to still take some reflections and learning from it, I took the approach that if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back 10 times harder. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat; that was just my approach.

And because I had been in a position where in the world of business it doesn’t happen to you in quite the same way. But when I started to become ascendant, it was a level of attack—a deeply personal attack on me from 10 different angles—that that was the way I dealt with it was to say, well, I will one by one hit you back 10 times harder, and that’s how I’m going to do this. And that is part of me—I’m a fighter; I’m a competitor.

But it’s not all of me. And I think that one of the challenges—but if you’re going to lead the free world, you better be up for that challenge at the highest level—is to show the people that you are a fighter while also finding ways to really allow 300 million people who don’t otherwise know you to really get to know what’s in your heart beyond just your ability to fight.

And that is, I think, where I left some room on the table over the campaign that I think is, you know, probably one of my great learnings.

Okay, well, you alluded to the fact that you learned a lot well undertaking this endeavor, and the overall effect of that still remains to be determined because you’re a young man and God only knows what’s open to you in the future.

But in terms of growth on the wisdom side, you just—you know you alluded to the fact that you feel that you might have been too combative. You know I’ve noticed this with the new leader of the Conservative Party in Canada, Pierre Poilievre. He’s in all likelihood going to be the next prime minister; he’s cataclysmically far ahead in the polls at the moment, and it looks like Trudeau and his minions and the Socialists along with them are going to be devastated in Canada when the next election emerges.

Now, Poilievre is a scrappy guy; he’s not particularly agreeable in the temperamental sense. He’s more of a competitor and a fighter, and that served him very well as a member of the opposition when his fundamental goal was the criticism, let’s say, of the Trudeau government or lack thereof.

But when he transformed into the leader of the Conservative Party and now the putative prime minister, his role has to shift, right? He has to become more of a statesman—he has to be less impulsive and reactive.

Now, I mean, it's a tricky thing to manage, right? Because you know you had to demonstrate that you could fight back and land your own blows. You know, I saw that you were quite effective at that, for example, at the convention speeches and publicly.

So what do you think you learned in terms of maturity, let's say? How did you learn to regulate your proclivity to be scrappy? And how do you see your book, let’s say—like your book seems to be a manifestation of that desire to, rather than react, to provide something more closely approximating a well-developed vision.

So walk us through how you think you've changed. I’m particularly interested in changes that would be indicative of an expanded maturity because, you know, you went through quite the mill and a series of very what? Deep challenges and complex situations that you had to negotiate.

And so I'm very curious about how you think this has changed you and maybe for the better and even possibly for the worst, because it’s also not that straightforward to withstand all those slings and arrows, for example, without, you know, that having some—potentially detrimental effect on your—yeah, what would you say? It’s easy to become resentful, for example.

It could be. Is it? Is it? I think I’ve gone through—I think I’ve gone through a few phases of that, but I think, with the benefit of some distance, I think I have greater clarity.

So I actually—the first thing I would say is I’m not sure that even if I was to go back in time to January 2023 and go through the whole thing again that I, in the situation I was in, would do it too much differently than I did. In a certain sense, it kind of had to be the way it was; it’s just the way that things were ordered.

Because, let’s say I had started with—I mean, I do have a different vision for what the future of the conservative movement ought to be, the future of the country ought to be. It’s an alternative vision, not a reactionary one. That’s what I started with last year.

But if I just remained in that territory as a guy who’s unknown coming from nowhere in a media landscape, reaching 330 million people, it would have gone nowhere. I would have never even been on that debate stage in the first place.

I think people do want someone in the commander-in-chief role and require, as part of why Donald Trump got there the first time and is back there again now, who can level with the