Looking Back on the Campaign, and Forward for the Country | Vivek Ramaswamy | EP 440

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticketing information.

I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on for my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

This rise of this managerial class, you see it in the Deep State in the federal government. The people who are the political consultants populating the industrialization of our political politics, who are neither ordinary citizens in their own right nor are they actual purposeful creators, but are the intermediating managers, right? That's what's sucking the lifeblood out of our culture and our country. I would go so far as to say the modern West as we know it. So is it possible to reform that beast? No, I think you have to slay that beast.

Hello everybody, I'm talking again to V.C. Ramaswamy. I started talking to Vic before he ran for president on the Republican side, with regard to his endeavors on the ESG alternative front in the financial domain, him fighting back against the climate apocalypse mongers in the economic realm. I've been talking to Vic pretty regularly as he's progressed through the Republican primaries.

He's dropped his striving for the presidency, but has established himself quite credibly as a candidate, and is still active as a political voice. We do a postmortem of his adventure on the political stage, talking about the Deep State, his relationship with Donald Trump, his plans for the future, talking about the viability of Trump as a candidate, Trump's divisiveness, Vic's reasons for trusting Trump, and putting some faith in a future that might include a four-year Trump presidency.

We'll be walking through the realities of a modern-day presidential campaign, so join us for that.

Hey Vic, thanks for coming on again. Some of the people watching and listening will know that we spoke well before you made your bid for the Republican leadership in the presidential race. We got to know each other before then, and you've been kind enough to take us along on your journey.

Essentially, we haven't done that for a while now. I know that part of your political adventure has come to a conclusion, but I think it would be very useful for everybody who's watching and listening to start from the beginning of your entry into the political domain, and then just to tell everybody, as clearly as you can, what happened to you, what you learned, and where you are now.

So, yeah, I'm still processing that, and that's why I was looking forward to this conversation. Even though it's been a couple of months, there’s a whole ton of, you know, transitional to normal life phase of this that I haven't had my own chance to process. Hopefully this conversation is part of that for me.

You and I actually spoke before, and you were one of a small handful of people I actually spoke to as I was contemplating this offline. But we had spoken on it before. I was a businessman, and I consider myself a businessman now. I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in the future, trying to drive change through the private sector. I founded a biotech company that challenged a lot of the way big Pharma did business. I found it, strive to challenge the way BlackRock and the ESG-promoting asset managers were functioning, and those were successes in their own right in different ways.

But I realized the mother of the beast in each of those cases and in so many other cases of problems I hadn't tackled was the administrative state, was that fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, the technocracy. The people who are never elected to run the government that were actually exercising political power.

You could take the FDA as an example in the shadow of the pharmaceutical industry, which I had seen firsthand, and the not only the illogical policies—if illogic were the only part of it, it would have been a technically solvable problem. It was fundamentally a political problem where people were exercising political power that they were never given.

The same thing with respect to the EPA and the SEC in the case of the asset management industry. I came to the conclusion, look, life is short. One of the best pieces of advice I got as a younger man was it takes about as much effort and difficulty to do something small as it does to do something big. I've found over the course of my career that that's been about true.

I've done some smaller things, I've done some bigger things, both of which are important, but they take about the same effort if you're doing something well, whether it's something really small or something really large. The amount of individual effort you put in is about the same.

So look, I said, what is the biggest possible impact I can have if I'm willing to put all my effort into it? It might as well be the biggest possible impact of all. Let me lead the United States of America! Let me lead the United States of America to a rediscovery of our national ideal. Take on that administrative state, that fourth branch of government; dismantle it to revive, in many ways, the ideals of the American Revolution.

I mean, that's what the American Revolution was about. In 1776 we said no to elite technocracy in the form of monarchy. It's a 1776 moment now. Young people did it back then. I was 37 years old when I declared, and most people said that's too young to run for president.

The truth is I found that as encouragement because our founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, were younger than me in many cases at the time they created the entire country. So that's where I was. I jumped off a cliff and didn't know what exactly was going to be my landing pad on the other side. Let's just say I learned a lot over the course of that last year, and, you know, God's plan was revealed. It was not meant to be the next president of the United States, it seems, but it did take me on a journey that at least I learned a lot from.

I took a lot away from it, and hopefully it sets me up to continue to have a big impact in other ways in the future. It just was originally my motivation. Now, a couple of things I learned: I assumed that it was going to be a message that people were hungry for. I knew people were hungry for this message.

I had written three books, I had traveled the country, I had been to most states in this Union as a consequence of my business activities across the books I had written. I knew how people were responding to this message. I thought of running for president in part because many people on those book tours, you know, tens, hundreds of people even, who I didn't know, came and encouraged me to run for U.S. president.

I didn't have much of a doubt in my mind that that message was going to resonate with a lot of people, but what I naively assumed was that somehow that message was going to land on the ears of the millions of people who needed to hear it, and A, that they were going to hear it at all; and B, that when they did hear it, that was the only thing they were going to hear versus a lot of other messages about me that would permeate the system.

It turned out to be a much more challenging initial incline than I had envisioned. The first thing I noticed was we planned a, you know, a big launch of the presidential campaign, a video. I had a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Probably, I'm not saying this to boast, but one of the things that I did was probably one of the most thorough policy vision rollouts of a presidential candidate on day one when they roll out their campaign.

I thought I had done it the right way. We went pretty quickly. I only decided in January of 2023 to run. I declared by the end of February 2024. It was February 21st when I declared, and we had a big lead-up to it. I think I had done everything exactly as I had planned to do, laid out the message about as well as I wanted to, and then I noticed that the world continued to proceed as though I had never launched my run for U.S. president, including even the political media that was covering the race.

Another presidential candidate had declared—well, Donald Trump had declared and Nikki Haley had declared—and then by the time I had declared, it was as though it was a non-event. I think the first thing that I realized was I was prepared to go into this as a battle of ideas, a battle of vision for the country, a battle of who would be the best person to execute against that vision, and I was sleeves rolled up ready for battle.

Then I realized that people didn't even view me as being in that battle, which was, ended up being the first battle of the campaign itself. The first five months was making the case not for my vision, not for my candidacy or my ability to execute, but for my ability to even be relevant in the first place.

That would be rather naive of me, but that was I think the first hard learning in declaring as an outsider for the race. Okay, so let me draw an analogy there and you tell me what you think about this. It's frequently the case that new entrepreneurs who've created a product believe that the fundamental issue at hand is the product.

When I started selling things into the marketplace, I suffered from the delusion that it was 85% product and, you know, 10% administration and 5% marketing and sales, and that was like exactly backwards. It sounds to me like a similar issue here, that you presumed that, except in the political realm, you presumed that if you had your policy prepared, you were already a credible person, that that would be the bulk of the initial battle.

What turned, if I've got you right, what turned out to be the case was a very sudden realization that while you had to get in the conversation at all—and that sounds like a sales and marketing problem to some degree—and this is I think why so many candidates who are credible turn to political consultants so rapidly, right? And that often sins them.

Okay, so is that a reasonable analogy? And you've put products in the marketplace before, so in principle, you knew that on the commercial side.

Well, I would say something about this—I agree with you on your analysis on the commercial side. What I would say is that is on steroids in the political side, right? So even if you transpose the commercial instinct onto politics, you'd be missing it by a mile.

The other thing is I came from industries that were a little bit different. I haven't really been in a consumer products industry or in the media industry. I mean, the industry that I spent the most time in was developing drugs for diseases that Pharma had ignored systematically.

That was an area where, look, it’s a regulated process. I saw from a front-row seat how broken institutions like the FDA really are, but it's not an area where if you're pre-commercial, and everything that I did was in the research and development phase, not in the commercial phase. So, actually, as entrepreneurs go, I actually did not necessarily have that same experience as many consumer interfacing entrepreneurs.

So that may be idiosyncratic to me. Then I would say even for consumer interfacing entrepreneurs, and Strive was a little bit closer to that because that's a fund management company that competes at BlackRock, I had some of that experience. It was nothing close to what the importance is of that is in politics.

To call it sales and marketing in some ways undersells the problem because sales and marketing is once you're there, how much do you amplify, how many people hear your message? Whereas for me at the early stages of the campaign, and as I think about the last year, even some of the things that later came back to become headwinds for me when I was, you know, front-running or whatever, top four, top five candidate were actually the path to getting there sort of set me up for the difficulties that I had later on.

But the first challenge was not even selling or marketing your message more effectively. It was literally like nobody would know that I was running for U.S. president, even though I was running for U.S. president.

I just talked to Dean Phillips and his campaign obviously came to an end. For those of you watching and listening, Dean Phillips was until recently running against Biden on the Democrat side and he faced this problem in spades.

I think he probably faced all the problems you faced plus the additional problem was that he was absolutely 100% shut out of the entire Democrat apparatus. People were literally told that if they worked for him, they would never do anything politically again in their life.

Then also, he had to face the same reaction from the legacy media. He didn't get it, and I don't think that he was attuned well enough to the alternative media, let’s say, you know, the podcast crowd and all that, to capitalize on that quickly. Plus, they tend to tilt more in the classic liberal-conservative direction, anyways.

Okay, so you had to face this problem of getting on the map at all. So how did that unfold?

So one of the things I did—and this is where, you know, I took good advice. You were one of the early people who offered a reflection on this, and you know, I said, “What's the downside in trying?” It makes a lot of sense to me if the traditional media is ignoring you, go to the non-traditional media as a way to reach the people.

So I adopted a strategy, let's call it a maxim early in the campaign, which was the "Talk to Everyone and Anyone" strategy. Okay? Left, right, center, cable news, non-cable news, print media, small-time media, local media, individuals walking on the street recording it and putting it on social media.

I wore a little camera or a little microphone right now. I wore a microphone pretty much everywhere I went. We just clipped the conversations and put it out. Now, my social media following was a lot smaller than it ended up being at the end of the campaign, but still that was just a way of putting out my message into the world.

What we started to notice was, you know, most of those things would get relatively small reach, but in a few instances there were a lot of interactions where people actually began to take interest, to say, “Wait a minute! That’s an interaction of a kind that I haven't seen before. That's interesting to me.”

Some of them were not necessarily casting me in the most flattering light. I might not have looked good, right? Just even visually, you know the things that I would have said were sometimes a little bit unscripted, may not have been said as eloquently as I might have prepared for in a speech or a TV interview, but that was actually part of what made it appealing.

And so that started to take off, I think, allowed the campaign. There were a couple moments, and then I got called. I happened to be in New York City, and they said, "Do you want to come on Don Lemon's show?" Right? Because many Republican candidates aren't going to go on there. So they thought, "We have a Republican candidate who's running. Why don't you go ahead and go on Don Lemon's show?"

We had a kind of interaction where this man lost, went haywire. I had just given a speech at the NRA meeting, and he picked on one particular thing that I said, which is a fact of history that black Americans in the United States did not get to enjoy their civil rights until they acutally had their Second Amendment rights.

The first anti-gun laws that were passed in the United States were designed to keep guns out of the hands of black Americans. That was part of a broader historical trend where even countries like China or Iran or other countries around the world that claim to offer the same Bill of Rights that the U.S. offers don’t have a Second Amendment.

So Don Lemon—and the funny thing happened actually, I thought this would be a bit of an aside—but Al… offro? They said there was a list of topics, see these are some of the tricks that the mainstream media plays. It was really interesting. There was a whole litany of topics they said this is what they would like to talk to you about.

I forget what it was. It was something related to China policy, which, you know, I believe the U.S. needs to do independence from China, they gave a couple others, but I specifically remember that being one of them.

Then you go on the set, and what do you know? They've pulled, airlifted quotes from my speech at the NRA meeting with their own commentary as the wraparound as the lead into the interview when they have purposely given me—it's not like they didn't think about it—they said, we're not going to tell you what we're going to talk about.

So this is exactly what we're going to talk about, a litany for a, you know, relatively new presidential candidate, first time on their show, here's a litany of what we're going to talk about, and it was not that. They decided to change topics in a spontaneous way. It was designed as a trap.

So in that case, anyway, I gave Don Lemon on air a history lesson, which caused him to, it ended up being a big favor for me on the campaign, lose his mind. You know, the earpiece that he had in, he was screaming at the people who were the producers in his ears saying it was distracting him as he was engaged in this debate with me.

It was such an uncomfortable moment for everybody involved, including anybody watching, that it ended up being the New York Times reported the next couple of days later as the catalyst for Don Lemon actually getting fired by CNN.

And so I had a few interactions like that that started to kind of increase the steam behind people at least paying attention to my candidacy, and things went on from there.

Did you know a baby's heart begins to beat at just 3 weeks? At 5 weeks that heartbeat can be heard on ultrasound, and this can sometimes be their only defense in the womb. That's where Preborn steps in. Preborn rescues 200 babies every day from abortion simply by providing mothers with an ultrasound. After hearing her child's heartbeat and seeing its perfectly formed body in the womb, she's twice as likely to choose life.

By 6 weeks, the baby's eyes are forming; by 10 weeks, a baby’s able to suck his or her thumb. Preborn needs our help to save these precious lives. For just $28, you could be the difference between the life or death of a child. And if you become a monthly sponsor, you'll receive stories and ultrasound pictures of the lives you helped save.

All gifts are tax-deductible and 100% of your donation goes towards saving babies. To donate, dial pound 250 and say the keyword "baby." That's pound 250, baby! Or go to preborn.com/jordan. That's preborn.com/jordan.

So let me ask you about—well, let me ask you about that. So I want to know what other moments went viral, right? So that's a really interesting one because there's two things about that that I find particularly interesting.

The first is the way that these mainstream Legacy Media journalists set up the people that they're interviewing. So the game seems to be—and this has happened to me many, many times—the game is very straightforward. The game is, we will poke and prod at you with ill-informed but provocative opinions, hoping that by being as annoying as possible, you will say something fatally stupid, demolish your reputation online, and elevate my reputation, the journalist as an investigator who can then walk away with like your scalp, so to speak on his belt.

Now, that's a—and so that's the kind of interview you face where every single word the interviewer utters is a verbal trap. Okay, but my experience has been that if you keep your head during that interchange and you don't play the game—so you don't say anything stupid, you don't apologize, you don't get upset—that that can turn viciously in your favor.

And you said okay and so that's interesting, so I'd like to get your thoughts on that. And then I'd also like to know what other things you did in the alternative media and direct-to-consumer, direct-to-voter model that also went viral.

You know, some of that's chance, right? If you put out 50 clips, you're going to get a Pito distribution of effect, but did you start to see a pattern for the clips that you got?

Okay, so let's unwrap that. Let's start with the gacha journalism first of all.

So, the gacha journalism strategy ended up being—it wasn't really a strategy. I think it's sort of how I'm wired. First was to do exactly what you said: just rationally process exactly what they're telling you and respond rationally as the person on the other side increasingly loses their mind because you're not doing what they expected or planned or set you up to do, which in turn I think makes them look, I think, far more illogical as a consequence.

When they were actually taking the rafan populist Republican to try to make fry of them, even for their own audience, they end up looking like the less reasonable ones. I went in The Breakfast Club, had a major viral exchange there, where a woman, she was pressing me hard on the fact that I had only ever really had major accomplishments in the business world that had never been in public service, with utter unawareness that the last and I believe successful president of the United States, Donald Trump, came with a very similar background.

I think she was frustrated that I wasn’t falling into her traps, and then she ended up giving a soliloquy about her experience in sixth grade where she put together a coalition for lunch money or something like this, which to her own audience, which is a largely left-of-center audience broadly, panned, saying that we don't want to really hear about your sixth-grade experience.

We understand that somebody who has accomplished things in the business world can at least have a legitimate case for having his ideas heard. This is coming from the left. Don Lemon's firing: I had an exchange with Chuck Todd where he said, “How can you have the level of certainty that there are two genders?”

I explained in manner of somebody who happens to have a biology degree, which I don't usually like using. You don't need a biology degree to know something about biology. You don't need to have a Harvard degree to be able to have standing to speak on a subject of science, but I have those things, and for an audience that particularly wrongfully elevates their attachment of value to those degrees, I decided to use that in my favor and broke down for him, “Here's what XX chromosomes mean. Here's what an X and a Y chromosome mean,” and that exchange went viral as well.

I think this one was more by chance, but he quickly was no longer on the air at Meet the Press, which was his main show shortly after. I had done the same thing with Don Lemon shortly after.

We had exchanges like that at The Breakfast Club. And then you think about the exchanges that I had on social media that ended up being the ones that really caught the public imagination were again interactions that I had in the field, let's call it, at the Iowa State Fair, at other places where we had protesters or people who were purposefully trying to either disrupt my events or others.

I got to give them credit who were respectful but sharply disagreed with what I had to say, and approached me in one-off conversations that weren't performative, but they were real conversations, authentic conversations between people who deeply disagreed on subject matter.

And so if I'm to put those together, both between the corporate media realm as well as in the, let's just say, real world, translated social media digital realm, that’s the through line that I would draw is the thing that really ended up creating not just one-off, but this ended up being a series of probably three or four months in there of repeated virality of interactions that were nothing more than the kind of interactions that I’ve been having for all of my adult life, which I enjoy, which I thrive on.

You know, think about the people I went to school with at places like Harvard or Yale. Predominantly had political views that were different from mine. I lean libertarian; most of them lean liberal. Some of them are even friends of mine and remain friends of mine to this day.

Authentic heated but earnest exchange—in some cases, the person on the other side wasn't necessarily authentic in their motives, take the Don Lemon, but you treat them as though they are, and then they self-illuminate in front of you. That ended up really lifting up the campaign in this case.

Now far earlier than we expected, okay? Because when we saw me not lifting up off the ground, I think I calibrated myself to saying, “Okay, this is going to be a long haul. It's going to be only after the debates begin.” And let me at least try to qualify for those debates.

Let me at least make that table stakes that I would qualify for the debate, and then after that it would be a steady build up. Instead, something started happening where, when I took the "Talk to Everyone" strategy—leaning media, right-wing media, corporate media, podcasts, and interactions—we actually saw a pickup that was then far earlier than I expected after I had recalibrated my own expectations.

That created new problems of its own, actually, so what started happening was this—in the advance of the first Republican debate—I started really surging in the polls, and that nobody expected.

We were talking about just four months before, the media would not give me the light of day, and many people had no idea I was running for president when I was running for president in the month of March; now we're talking about July, early August.

I mean, I was probably the Republican candidate who was most talked about—even by the corporate press—even when I’m not on there because who is this character that nobody's heard of that's now beginning to surge in a lot of these polls, passing up, you know, former vice presidents of the United States, former governors, people who were running that were far more prominent, viewed as real contenders in the race.

Then that’s where I started to really get a taste of a new kind of issue, where first is—I'll tell this: the corporate press I think took some umbrage at the fact that they had been one-upped in two ways. They had been one-upped in two ways: one way they had been one-upped is right on their own home turf, right? The Don Lemon and the Chuck Todd style interactions.

So I think that bothered them. But the second thing that bothered them, and I think this was the more interesting learning, I think they were bothered by the fact that I had sidestepped them. That many of the interactions that caused me that were most attributable to Americans having a favorable view of me had nothing to do with going through the normal gatekeepers, which are those in corporate media.

And this really pissed them off, okay? And so what they started to do was to realize that this was an opportunity to trap me, and I think that this is less about me and more about a defense of their own relevance as the sole gatekeeper in the realm of politics.

So this is where I think that if I was to give you feedback from the feedback you gave me. The feedback you gave me is sidestep the corporate media. You said that in one of our earlier podcasts—probably our first podcast that we had. You were one of the few people who was paying attention to me.

Here's what I learned as a consequence of that: is we're not yet at a future where the corporate media is entirely irrelevant. We're in this Lial State, this intermediate state where the new media is relevant, it's useful, it's necessary, certainly for newcomer break on the scene like me, but it coexists in a landscape where the traditional gatekeepers are still very much present, relevant, and important.

So they realize here’s the game they’re going to play is take this conversation you and I are having right now—this is going to be a 90-minute conversation. Think about a conversation: it has context. What we say 40 minutes from now may call back something that you and I just spoke about 10 minutes ago, alright? That’s the nature of this format.

The corporate media operates—television, let’s take cable television as an example—based on two, three, four-minute segments. So there started to be a really interesting thing that started to happen in July and August. By then, there’s a whole body of probably tens of hundreds of podcasts like this that I had done where what they were able to do was to then helicopter airlift something that came out of a conversation that had context attached to it, right? An hour, sometimes two hours’ worth of context around a statement, but to airlift that and to put that on air in a way that was cast in a completely different context than what it was intended in the context of a two-hour conversation.

And it wasn’t that they were just punishing me. What they were doing in the process was creating a disincentive for anybody else to actually participate in those longer-form conversations, because the message is, if you do that, do it at your own peril, because you will be punished unless you do it the standard way, where you script it. You don’t go through exactly what the traditional assembly line is for political communication, and you're going to do it through the format that we have control over, or else we will punish the defector.

And that’s what they began to do. So in August, in the lead-up to the first debate—and this was somewhat damaging to me—and it created a bit of a theme that the other candidates pounced on and exploited as a theme. Well, I’ll tell you the surprising thing that happened at the first debate was, remember my whole thing was in March, make the debate stage.

What happened is, in the summer, I surged so much so that not only did I make the debate stage, I was at the center of the very first debate stage. Ron DeSantis and I were the two people at the center of that debate stage, one of whom was the guy who was the pre-ordained challenger and replacer of Donald Trump according to, you know, many pundits in the world of conservative media, and then another guy who nobody had heard of at the center of a debate state with the former vice president, multiple U.S. senators, two governors, and other people who were irritated as hell that I was there.

I did not expect this, Dr. Peterson, but the thing that shocked me. I enjoyed it. At that first debate, I ended up being the target of every person—you were actually, I think, in that room physically even—and that was interesting to me. But in the lead-up to that is what really gave them the ammo.

And this is where I wasn't strategizing at all. At that point, I was just still continuing my "Talk to Everyone" strategy. I’ll talk to everybody. I’ll talk unfiltered, etc. There was a reporter from the Atlantic. This is a funny story. I haven’t really gone into depth on this, but I should.

There was a reporter from the Atlantic who has been really asking— the Atlantic has been asking to do a detailed, embedded profile of us—you, my team. I think maybe they were a little bit shrewder than me on this, said, “Well, we want to be careful about this.” I said, “What the hell! Let him in! We’re, we talk to everybody strategy. We’ve committed to something, stick to it. Practice what we preach.”

So he came to Columbus, Ohio, and then he was going to come on a private flight to whatever campaign stops we were making, culminating in the lead-up to the first debate. There was something funny about this guy. I forget his name, okay, but the first thing he says, it’s a weird, it’s like bizarre. He has a very mild-mannered affect and he goes out of his way to say multiple times, “I have a stutter.”

I was like, “Okay, I don't care if you have a stutter. I mean, it doesn't matter to me.” But he went out of his way for me to understand that he had a stutter, and he told my wife and everybody else he met, apologizing profusely, “I have a stutter, so don't mind me on this.”

My wife has a wisdom that I don't, but she said, “Just be careful about this guy because of that fact.” Right? It's not that he had a stutter; it's that he went out of his way to point that fact out to us. That she says, “I think he's looking to potentially exploit you. Just be careful with him.” I didn't take it one way or another.

She, you know, ended up being a Kaiser, so kind of character is. What, for those of you who know the movie reference there. Anyway, he followed me around, builds a lot of sympathetic rapport with me, and you know, ends up really somewhat of an intellectual smart guy.

Ended up able to be leveling with the arguments that I was making, demonstrating his sympathy for the essence—not just the superficiality, but the essence of the arguments. So I feel like I'm really leveling with somebody. By this point in the campaign, we had learned a lesson.

So my press secretary, she smartly had the habit of anytime a recorder is recording the conversation, she also goes on the record and records the conversation. Yeah, that’s a good idea. On the record. Let’s make it mutually on the record. Now she has worked, had, you know, 247 for a lot of the campaign. One of the weekends she had to go to a wedding, okay?

And this was a week—this was during the flight that this gentleman and I were taking to a campaign stop where we were headed. So now he has me without the, sort of press person near me and I think without being in recording, he's got his recorder on the plane.

Okay? So we're talking, and I'm foolishly just, you know, talking away like I'm talking to a friend here, to a guy who has already ingratiated himself a little bit. Softened his image with me.

I almost felt even a little bit sad for the guy that he had this loss of self-confidence based on some attribute that wasn't his own and seemed like a smart guy. So we're talking, and he pulls out, so about two weeks before, something had happened where I was on one of these podcasts, and a guy by the name of Alex Stein asks me—he's coining kind of a quasi-comedic podcast—and he asks me, “Do you believe what the government told you about 9/11?”

I said, “Do I believe everything the government told me about 9/11? Well, the reality is we know the government lied to us based on declassified documents that came out 20 years after 9/11 that Omar Al-Bayoumi, who was an individual who was previously deemed to be a 42-year-old graduate student that randomly met two of the hijackers—this was the story that the 9/11 Commission and the FBI published 20 years ago—turned out in the declassified documents 20 years later, was a Saudi intelligence operative. So we know the government lied about that.

So based on that hard fact, of course, we don’t believe everything the government has told us about this.” Now that statement was the fodder. It’s the classic move: take something in the context of a podcast-style conversation, airlift that to the conversation about, “Okay, so here's the conversation we had on the airplane.”

He says, “Alright, I believe the government should tell the truth about what we know about what happened on January 6th.” That's something I have been very vocal about during the campaign. I think government should tell us everything. Everything's fair game.

Were there FBI agents in the field? Tell us. Were there FBI agents in the field? Were there FBI informants in the field? Just answer the question transparently. Most of the mainstream media throughout the campaign has said that the FBI director has said there were none.

Actually, that's false. Christopher Wray, when he's responding to Congress, refused to answer the question, which the media has then later reported as saying that he said there were none. So I said, “Whatever is, just tell us the truth, and so we have a detailed, must be a 20-minute conversation easily about my view on the government's obligation to just be transparent. Whatever it is, just let the public tell the truth, publish all the video footage. Don't disclose some video footage and hide others; just tell the public the truth. We the people deserve the truth.”

So then he asked me, “Okay, well, were there federal agents in the field on January 6? You know, do you think it's a fair question to say were there federal agents on the plane on 9/11?” Now this is, I mean, this is a loony idea, right? Nobody—this is not out of shred of evidence for this.

But in the context of my principled answer, saying that for January 6 or for anything else, the government should just tell the people the truth, I said, “Look, the government should tell the people the truth, whatever it is. I have no reason to believe that there were federal agents on the plane. It's a ridiculous idea to think there were, but whatever it is, the government should tell the truth to the people.”

Okay, on that segment—and it was one snippet of maybe a 30-minute conversation on this topic, which is a broader two-hour conversation during a flight, the story comes out. This is right on the eve of the debate, okay? The story comes out from the Atlantic. It's in a detailed story, goes into a lot of other things.

The one thing that the editor-in-chief or whoever the main editor guy is at the Atlantic puts out and highlights is "Ramaswamy fuels conspiracy theories, asking whether there are federal agents on the planes on 9/11." So this is weeks later after he’s come—so I truthfully like, I remember the January 6 conversation. This was a one-off snippet.

I didn't remember saying that, and I just told my team, I was like, “I don't remember saying that!” I mean, clearly these people have reporting standards. He was recording a conversation. He’s reporting on something. Can you just ask the Atlantic to just share with us the recording where I said it? Just for my own knowledge of what I even said—it was a free-flowing conversation.

I'm not denying the way I was quoted, but just tell me what I said! They refused to. Now, CNN—this comes full circle from the Don Lemon—has their own vengeance to square, has booked me that night, okay? Boy, are they coming ready. I'm sure there’s coordination; it was done at a level at which it would be hard to believe there’s not some level of coordination here.

So CNN's booked me that night and they ask me the question, “So, so I know I'm going to get asked about this, so I’d like to know, so we just respectfully asked the Atlantic, what did I actually say?” Just tell me what you have, what’s the thing that you're quoting here in the article because then the article goes on; there’s a bunch. I’m being panned across the spectrum, left and right at this point, and they refused to provide it.

So I go on CNN and she says, “You know, why are you saying that there could have been federal officers on the plane on 9/11?” So I've never thought such a thing! It sounds to me like a ridiculous proposition. So I say, “Look, I don't think I said that. I think I was misquoted or taken out of context; that’s the truth of it.”

And I think that what I did not realize is that's when they knew they had won because she went out of her way to say, “Oh, I take your word there.”

What they had then within hours of that interview airing, the Atlantic slices just that portion where he’s questioned me after the detailed discussion about January 6—would it be fair for the government to ask the question of whether there were agents on the plane on 9/11? Just release that snippet and then CNN and the entire media has a field day because the entire slogan of my campaign is “Speak the truth.”

Right? Speak the truth when it's easy, when it's hard. Truth is the one-word slogan of my campaign. They used this to damage the hell out of me. And so I asked the Atlantic—we said publicly, “You release the snippet? Why don't you release the entire conversation? Why would you?” To this day they haven't done it.

To this day, I will challenge them. If you want to be honest arbiters of it, CNN, the whole next day running an entire field day saying that he said, “I’ve…., and if you listen to the exact footage, it’s even different than the describe it. The exact footage is sure. I think the government should tell the truth; I have no reason to believe there were. It seems like a ridiculous idea that there should be, but whatever it is, the government should tell the truth.” That’s what I said, which they summarize as saying that I'm raising conspiracy theories that there were federal agents on the plane on 9/11—ridiculous!

Now you attribute that to—so let's go into the attribution. So obviously this was somewhat shocking for you.

Shocking? Yeah.

Okay, so now, but you've already set up some diagnosis of the motivation. You said that as far as you were concerned, the legacy media wasn't very happy with you sidestepping them, let’s say, even though at that point you didn't really have an alternative. They also weren't very happy with the fact that their attempts to pigeonhole you, let’s say, had backfired quite spectacularly.

And then you had this character from the Atlantic who played, “I'm your friend” while you invited him in only to try to find one of these situations where something you said could be taken out of context to savage your reput.

But there’s the rub: why exactly is it? Is it just the additive combination of the reporter wants to make a name for himself, the Atlantic wants to have a story, CNN wants to capitalize on it, along with the fact that, well, it would be lovely to throw some dirt on a Republican because what the hell, why not, and to paint him with this right-wing conspiracy theory?

Like, is that sufficient? Is that the causal explanation for the manner in which that laid itself out? And then we'll get back to what effect that had at the debate.

Yeah, so I don't think it was sufficient. All those things were definitely factors, but I think this was in the context of something is going as it's not supposed to here, okay? There's a guy here who is advancing a Trumpian worldview of positive—I think of it as a positive nationalism—but nationalism nonetheless in the United States, and he is defying our expectations for what that's supposed to look like because he speaks in a manner that is at least as—I'm not saying this about myself; I'm saying this what I think they see in me—as audite and educated from the halls of the same Ivy League colleges that they deemed to be their esteemed institutions and speaking in a manner that goes toe-to-toe on the facts with debating, so-called the science on issues related to COVID policy or otherwise that we're unable to contend with.

This is a real threat. We need to go after this in a deeper way because he's not given us the video clips from speeches that we can caricature. We need to actually set the traps, and this needs to be quashed. It needs to be quashed now.

And by the way, this social media thing that’s sidestepping us— to hell with that—that's creating the disinformation. That's creating the alternative—the misinformation—that allows candidates like this to rise. It is our job and our social responsibility as a media institution to extinguish that possibility.

Let's punish his ability to do that by lifting some of the comments he's made in those LWD settings offline from the traditional media that individual citizens are beginning to access to their own peril and set the record straight for how this is done. We're the people who vet, who actually become serious presidential candidates. When he’s a non-serious contender, who cares?

But this guy's rising in the polls to become a serious presidential candidate, could really have an impact in shaping public opinion. We have an ability and a responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. Cut his legs off! I think was exactly what happened.

And then you have the industrialized politics in a Republican primary where that provides the fod for other candidates who were frustrated by the same thing happening to be able to use that to their advantage.

Not even the candidates, but in many cases even the super PACs supporting them, which is part of this industrialized cesspool of the modern industry of American politics. That's really what happened.

Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business—from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the “Did we just hit a million orders?” stage. Shopify is there to help you grow.

Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout—up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/jbp. Go to shopify.com/jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in—that's shopify.com/jbp.

Okay, so now, I was there, as you said, for that debate. And so let me offer you some observations, and then respond to them, and you can tell me, you flesh that out.

So first of all, I spent a lot of time working with Democrats in the U.S., and I've pulled back on that attempt in over the last two years, I would say, because I got tired of having to walk on eggshells with absolutely 100% of everything I said all the time.

The idea was to attempt to pull the Democrats on the moderate side away from the radical progressives who they're so foolishly aligned with and against whom they refuse to erect any barriers whatsoever. I've spoken to a lot more Republicans more recently, and I found that a lot more straightforward.

Even when we don't see eye to eye, I don't have to watch what I say, and there's almost always a genuine exchange of information. Now, when I went down to where was the—and where was the debate? Where was it held? The first one was in—I’m losing track here—I know the stage; it was in, of course, in Wisconsin.

That was where—yes, okay. So I was actually impressed with the field of candidates that the Republicans had offered. I thought that the debate was more rigorous and intellectually engaging than I expected it to be.

It was a real spectacle in the American sense, and you Americans are unbelievably good at that. And so it also had that, but then it was interesting watching you because what I saw was that first of all, you were a focus of attention for the rest of the candidates—not the only one, but certainly our focus of attention.

I think it does reflect what you just described, and you also elicited more positive and more negative responses from the audience than any of the other candidates, right? And so now—and so I’m interested in the personal element of that—this was, I'm not exactly sure what it was like for you to be on the stage with these political heavyweights, comparative political heavyweights let’s say, and holding your own.

It wasn't much before that that it was not as—not written in stone that you were even going to be part of the debate. So this is very new for you. So what do you think of the other people who you shared the stage with? What do you think you did well, and what do you think you did well?

And what would you have liked to have improved with regard to your performance for that particular event?

Yes, so I'm still reflecting on a lot of this, and I haven't landed on firm conclusions yet. But I can tell you, you know some maybe half-baked, you know, or some some incoherent reflections here, okay?

I went into that feeling a great sense of liberation and fun—that was my strategy, okay? We even put a fine point on that—you know, I was playing hours of tennis and working out, and we put out some videos on social media, you know, almost mocking the process, to be honest with you.

It was a little smug of me to do it, I have to admit that, but I had it; it was a smugness that I kind of acquired as a little bit of a defense mechanism against what was already a poisonous system by that point, right?

You have a media that systematically ignored me, and then finding my way to prominence nonetheless with the actual voters. Sidestepping the media, which is no easy thing to do, systematically punish the super PACs of the other candidates in the lead-up to that presidential debate.

I mean, you had, you know, I'm not picking on anybody here, but you take Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, all of their political consultants, you know, Ron DeSantis's machine—basically every other one—this is all public record—were in the lead-up to the debate, online and otherwise, issuing directed criticisms toward me foregrounding what was coming on the debate stage.

So I kind of entered the moment with—and I don't hold that against the other candidates, just how this game is played—but I entered that stage with the feeling of somewhat of a sense of disdain for the process, the industrialization of this, and what I saw were the products of it, which were in many cases other professional politicians.

I had a sense of disdain. I also had a sense—you said you pointed to the fact that some of that might have been defensive; you know, because I think so.

I think so, right? Because I think, okay, well, it's very interesting because that's a common defensive reaction, but it definitely has dangers, especially when you're engaged in the process, right?

I mean, it's a weird thing because you're part of it, clearly part of it, and then you can see where it goes sideways, and you have to criticize where it goes sideways, but you're still in the game. And so you can't be contemptuous of it because what the hell are you doing in the game if you're contemptuous of it?

So that’s real. It was—it had layers of paradox to it. So even in the lead-up to the debate as others were attacking me, my mode was, let me not just attack them in the lead-up to the debate, but let me—As you know, I would say it was pretty condescending manner.

I’m putting out here's my debate prep, and I put out a shirtless video of me playing tennis; we’re working out, we’re doing all kinds of fun things, and kind of saying one of these is not like the others, and it had a certain contempt to it.

I'll admit that it had a—it had a contemptuous tenor to that heading into the debate, which of course only threw fuel on the fire and the irritation of the existing system and to some extent the other candidates as well.

So that might have also accounted for the, of course, expanded emotional response, because when you said positive things, the crowd was very enthusiastic.

But I suspect now, now that you've told me this, I suspect that the more exaggerated negative response was probably a crowd reaction to that leaking in of disdain, yes?

Absolutely! And I'm, you know, we're being pretty unfiltered here, but I think that it's a good thing for people to be able to see behind the curtain a little bit of what is otherwise a shrouded process.

So anyway, we start the debate and I'm going in that night. I'm not one to be naturally prepped in this setting, and so there was some minimal amount of prep that I did, which felt very unnatural to me.

So the day of, I just made a decision: I'm going to have fun! I'm going to have fun one way or another. It’s a hell of an experience. This is a life experience, and I'm going to just speak in a pretty unfiltered way and I’m going to be a fighter.

Like, we feel like you're going into an arena. You're going to have a fight; roll up your sleeves in a little bit of a Gladiator spirit. Having fun when you're going in there, don’t play with kid gloves; bring your brass knuckles and let’s go have a fight!

I think that that's the tenor I was in going in there, and so I think from that point in the campaign forward, right, that effectively became my modus operandi. First was nobody was relevant; nobody viewed me as relevant—not even hearing my ideas.

Second phrase is they're hearing my ideas, but in actual—I would say, I hope, I tried to be respectful manner with the left-right, the people who are actually ideologically on the other side.

That created this ground swell of virality, which then caught the entire political system—the establishment in the Republican political industry—which is different from actual earnest candidates and the mainstream media by storm.

The arrows then start coming in. Somewhat as a defense mechanism and somewhat because I didn't see a better alternative, I just said, okay, well, I'm just going to fight. I’m going to take the gloves off, and I'm going to be a fighter for the rest of this, and I'm going to have fun while I'm at it.

Ended up being my attitude going into that first debate, and what we saw—and I think that was basically the tenor from there for the second half of the race—was me being somebody who didn't proactively hit anybody who hadn't hit me. But my rule from on was, if you're going to hit me, because it had just begun to—you know, I wasn't relevant; now it's relevant, but the relevance came in the form of being hit.

Whoever it is, Republican, Democrat, media, I don't care. If you hit me, I’m going to hit you back ten times harder and I’m going to be unsparing about it. That’s what effectively that first debate ended up being; it’s what most of the remaining debates ended up being.

It won me a lot of fans, I will say. The fans who loved me for doing it still ended up voting for who they saw the ultimate fighter of all, which is Donald Trump; but they loved me as their second choice.

I think in many of the polls what we saw by the end was the second choice ranking to Donald Trump. I’d be number one in the rest of the field, but that still left me with only 8% of the vote in Iowa, 7.8% of the vote in Iowa.

But it did actually probably lose me a lot of other supporters from the remainder who actually, once they were finally hearing my ideas—which keep in mind for the first half of the race they hadn't—but by definition, once they really heard my ideas, they were actually prepared to latch on to that, but were put off by the pugnacious way that I handled the way that I was getting hit.

So that's the real story of the reflection: as I said, I'm still in the process of reflecting on much of what happened last year. It was the first kind of conversation like this that I've had reflecting on it, but I think that's effectively what happened: I was unconstrained; I was a fighter, and I'm proud of being a fighter.

I think we need a fighter who leads for the country, but I think we need more than that too and I believe I bring more than that. But the formats that I was given in that latter half of the race allowed for people to see that I am a fighter, and that I am proud of it, and I won’t apologize for it.

But there was no other forum for people to see the other dimensions of my ability to be a leader, and dare I say, a uniter for the country, other than in-person settings of 50 to 200 people at a time, which is what I ended up gravitating to in that latter half of the race.

In those final months of the race, I ended up doing, you know, hundreds of events in Iowa, which was the life experience of a lifetime, by the way. I mean, this was really probably some of the most emotionally challenging and testing period I've been through, where I'm not approaching these with canned lines, right?

I'm treating each interaction with somebody at a Pizza Ranch in Iowa as though it's the first time I'm answering that question. That was the standard I held myself to. So every day you’re waking up at 7:00 a.m. In some cases, 11 events over the course of a day you'd be going to bed at midnight the next day.

Do it again, did more events in Iowa than the rest of the field combined. I ended up resorting to that because that was a setting in which, for the people who saw me there—which ended up being a tiny portion of the electorate— I think the feedback I would get, right? Because we would do photo lines; whenever there was an opportunity I would stay till the very last person had left.

The number one piece of feedback I heard—and I didn't know how to take this well—was, “You’re really different than what I thought of you coming out of the debates!”

Not everyone meant it in a bad way or a good way, but it was just genuinely fascinating to people that, “Okay, this is a different side of you that I did not see when I saw you at the debates.”

I think most people meant it in the sense that the people who were in those rooms say, “I wasn't necessarily thinking about voting for you. I was intrigued based on what I saw in the debates. I wanted to meet you; I didn’t think I was going to vote for you, but I'm going to vote for you now.”

The issue is you're talking about a few thousand people max that you touch that way, right, if you're just talking about individual events of 50 to 100 people at a time.

And that just wasn't enough to win an election that's mostly decided by people who are accessing their information in ways other than showing up in the middle of a blizzard or winter at a Pizza Ranch in Iowa.

So that was, you know, in a nutshell, I think a summary of the trajectory of the year and some of the things I learned in the process, and you know, there’s a million small things I probably would do differently if given the opportunity again.

Just the first time, of course, I would have expected that, and it is the case that there are a million small things I would have done differently. But in a big-picture sense, am I grateful that I ran and took the risk and bore the cost—financial and non-financial—associated with doing it? Yes, I am.

It brought our family closer together. It’s probably one of the most important things that I did. So you were one of the few people I talked to before I ran. One of the people I talked to also before I ran for genuine advice when I was thinking through—I was inclined to do it but I wasn't certain yet—was actually talking to Tucker Carlson beforehand.

And he gave me probably the two simple best pieces of advice. He didn’t have much by way of advice, but he had two pieces of advice that were gold. I think the first he said was, “Whatever your personal bubble is—so your family, environment, your closest friends—travel with that and keep them around you, and that will keep you grounded.”

It was very practical, but that actually was really good advice. We ended up doing it as a family. He said, “Hold yourself to a standard!” Right? And for each person this will be different. What he told me, but here’s what he said: “Do whatever would make your wife proud of you.”

Okay? And he said it with a smile on his face, but not as a joke, as a serious matter. So it’s a certain sense that assumes that you’re with a life partner. And you and I have talked about this before.

For I, one of the things I’m blessed with in my life is to actually have found my soulmate and to be married to my soulmate is something that is not something everybody gets to say. But I think Tucker told me, “Do something that makes sure everything you do makes your wife proud. Travel with your friends and family around you.”

So that you don’t get sucked into the circumstance of waking up in some sort of muddied haze wondering where I am on a given day and then becoming some alternative version of yourself. A lot of people get sucked into doing that.

Don’t. I followed both those pieces of advice and I think that that made the process one that I'm grateful for regardless of the fact that it didn’t achieve the result that I intended, which was to be the next president of the United States.

It brought our family closer together, it brought me in closer touch with my own convictions. I think you're tested on a daily basis. I probably came out of that year with an even greater certainty of my own convictions than I went into it with.

I thought I had high conviction going in, but you don't really understand your own convictions until you’ve been tested. And in a few instances, dare I say it even had convictions that were slightly different than where I began the campaign with.

For anybody else who didn’t go through that experience without having their views modified in some way means you’re probably not a person who’s open to reflection. I mean, you can't be challenged on a daily basis for a year without having your own views sharpened along the way.

And so I think our family is stronger for it; my views and my convictions are stronger for it. It didn't achieve the intended result, but it does give me a greater and renewed sense of purpose and mission to still do whatever I can to save this country.

Even if it's not going to be as the next president, and I'm grateful for that at the end of it.

There's lots of places we can go from there, but I want to go Let’s try two to begin with. The first, I'm curious about—I've been going through the biblical stories in my tour and in this new book I'm writing, and Moses in that book is the archetype of a leader. That’s what that story is about.

Moses is seriously punished by God for reverting to power when invitation and explanation would suffice—that’s his temptation, right? And you could imagine that that's the temptation of a political leader, especially as your reputation grows, the club that you can wield gets larger and larger as you’re more and more influential.

And so I'm wondering if that proclivity that you described for that tilt, that temptation towards disdain and fighting back, you know, I’d like to unpack that a little bit more because you lay out a very clear case for why that all emerged, but then you also said that to some degree that interfered with people’s ability to see who you were really on the leader front rather than on the fighter front, let's say.

And I'm not saying I know how to negotiate that, because I don't—it's obviously an extremely complicated space. But so let’s assess that in reflection. Do you think there are ways that you would conduct yourself going forward if you replicated your adventure?

And then I'd also like to delve more into your relationship with Trump, drawing on something you did say earlier. You said that perhaps part of the reason the legacy media went after you was because they saw you providing the same attractive message to, say, disaffected working-class Americans that Trump managed except you could do it in a manner that was actually credible.

Now, you were careful during your campaign, in my estimation, to not poke the bear—that's Trump or his followers for that matter. And so I’d like to explore your relationship a bit more with Trump, and I’d also like you to comment a bit more on that contradiction between fighting and pushing and laying out an attractive/invitational vision.

Yeah, so I’ll start with that latter piece. It’s a hard thing to do, and I don’t see a particular for myself, at least, a point to relitigate what I would have done differently. You know, I think circumstances in some ways—it’s hard to imagine it going any differently because the path that led there was the entire path that I walked through in our conversation.

It was almost unavoidable because at that point, if I—it was a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Because I put myself in a situation which was the only way to get on the map that had invited the level of arrows that I was taking from the other candidates, from the media, and you know, from the traps that were laid and from the political industrial complex.

That if I didn't hit back, I'd be too weak to be the president of the United States and wouldn't deserve that job. And there was no other way other than to hit back and hit back hard. But the window of formats that reach people is sufficiently narrow that it doesn’t allow for multiple aspects of a personality to come through, right?

So you’re going to get one label. You’re able to get through to the people in the mediums that are available to you in the media. I don’t really mean in just the corporate media but the collective mediums that are available to you. Fighter was the one that came through.

And so could I have done it differently? I don’t know. I certainly was unable because the truth is I am a fighter, but I’m not just a fighter, but that’s what came across when people were finally paying attention to the candidacy.

And the reality is—and understandably so for many voters—if you want a fighter in the White House, take the one who’s proven, who has taken more arrows, far more than I have, and overcome them—that was Donald Trump.

Which was many of the people who loved me the most, I mean like really love me as supporters, like the people who were guys who were maybe coming to 15-20 events that I held in Iowa, people who were enthusiastic supporters—speaking still to caucus for Donald Trump.

Right? And I don't blame them for it, because if what you see is the value proposition is here’s a young fighter who’s going to fight for me and fight for this country just as hard as he fights to defend himself against the treacherous media and political industrial complex, I love that!

And I’m going to vote for Donald Trump because he has proven at a scale that nobody has that—that's the guy who’s going to be able to do it. So that’s what ended up happening there.

But on a go-forward basis, I guess the difference is—and I don’t know what’s next for me, the truth is, I’m keeping a very open mind. The only criteria is to have an impact on the country that’s positive and not small.

As I said, it takes as much effort to do something small as it does to do something big. Large-scale positive impact in saving this country and reviving who we are, whatever I do next is going to fit that description.

But let’s say, let’s say that there was a, you know, a replay of it, but you’re starting from where we left off, right? This last time—I’m not starting from the place I did last, right?

And so you’re not—it's one thing to fight for relevance and then fight to be perceived in the right way. If you’re starting to already from the place of relevance, but then the question is just making sure people understand who you really are.

You know in some ways you can’t—it’s like an algebra problem, right? You can only solve for one variable with one equation at a time. And so in some ways, I was with one equation—the one linear race—trying to solve for both two variables: one of relevance and the other one of actually being seen the correct way.

You had to kind of pick one.

Sleep is a foundation for mental and physical health. In other words, you've got to have a consistent nighttime routine to function at your best. But if you're struggling with sleep, then you've got to check out Beam.

Beam isn't your run-of-the-mill sleep aid; it's a concoction carefully crafted to help you rest without the grogginess that often accompanies other sleep remedies. A bunch of us here at The Daily Wire count on Beam's Dream Powder to knock us out and sleep better through the night so we can show up ready for work the next day.

Just mix Beam Dream into hot water or milk, stir or froth, and then enjoy before bedtime. Then wake up feeling refreshed without the next day grogginess caused by other sleep products. Dream contains a powerful all-natural blend of RI magnesium, L-theanine, and melatonin to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed.

And with it now being available in delicious flavors like cinnamon cocoa, chocolate peanut butter, and mint chip, better sleep has never tasted better. And today, listeners of this show can get a special discount on Beam's Dream Powder. Get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to ShopBeam.com/Peterson and use code "Peterson" at checkout.

That's ShopBeam.com/Peterson and use code “Peterson” for up to 40% off.

Well, look, you did put yourself on the map. That was a success. And you're not very old, and there's no reason from a bird's eye view to assume this is your kick at the can.

I don't feel, having watched what you did, that you're exhausted as a political candidate, especially given how young you are. Right?

Okay, so maybe you laid the groundwork for something that could emerge in the future. Now there’s a variety of ways that could go. Everyone can see that you’ve had a fair bit of interaction with Trump after the—after your run for president, you know, came to its end.

Everyone, of course, is wondering what that might hold in the future. So what’s your sense of what you could bring and might bring to the table, assuming that a Trump presidency is realized in November?

Well, the first thing I would say is I think it would be a mistake to just rest on one’s laurels as a candidate and assume that is the outcome. So the first thing I'm focused on is making sure that we do have a Trump presidency in November, doing everything I can, traveling to different parts of this country, campaigning for Trump—not just through the primary, which is now, you know, effectively—and has been for a while over—but in the general election against Biden.

Reaching young voters, reaching non-traditional voters, I mean, even you think about Asian Americans or Indian Americans. I think 70% went the direction of Biden last time around, despite the fact that their values are almost undoubtedly more aligned with the pro-excellence agenda that Trump stands for.

Now young people in this country who are starving for purpose and meaning—we've talked about this in our last episode that we did together. Well, the left isn't providing that or they're satisfying it with the equivalent of fast food with race and gender and sexuality and climate.

A positive nationalistic vision that says that, you know what, this is a country that is the greatest country known to mankind, and you have an opportunity not only to live here but to contribute to this country and pass that on to the next generation—that civic sense of duty fills what many young people are starving for.

And I think that that's far more aligned with the message Trump is delivering than the nonsense they're hearing from Biden or the other side. So my focus in the near term is, don't take some outcome for granted; make sure that Trump is elected as the next president.

Do everything I can in my power to make that happen, and in the meantime, you know, if there are opportunities to continue to drive positive change through the private sector— as I was doing before I ran for president—let me have added the perfect opportunity to do it.

I mean, Strive is a company I co-founded, as you know, to push back against the ESG movement. I'm incredibly proud of progress, which is going very well. I’m very proud of Strive's accomplishments.

And I’m mentoring some of the other businesses that I've co-founded to have a positive impact— for-profit, nonprofit, through the private sector—a lot of ways to drive change, and then make sure that that electoral outcome is what it is in November.

I think that’s actually the top objective. And one of the things I found in my life at least is when you make these elaborate personal plans, right—“If this happens, then I'm going to do that thing, and if the other thing happens, then I'm going to do the other thing, and if that doesn't happen, then here's my plan B”—at least in my life I've learned that your plans are stupid.

Okay? At least maybe not yours, but mine—my plans are stupid. And so I’m guided by my purpose. That’s great! The plan will reveal itself, but the purpose is the same one that I entered the race with, which was to revive who we are, revive our missing national identity and self-confidence, pass that on to my kids and their generation.

I volunteered to do it as the next president. The people of this country made clear—certainly in the Republican party and I think far beyond that—that they want Donald Trump to do that job.

Thankfully, his ideology is, you know, very similar to mine in terms of what it means to advance an America First agenda, and so I've put all my energy into making sure that Donald Trump is elected the next president.

The reason I support Trump is because I support America First values because I support this country. It's not the other way around. But that’s, I think, the reason most people who support Trump feel that way and I view it the same way—is we’re going to do whatever we can to revive our country.

The number one most impactful thing we can do is have a U.S. president that shuts down and eviscerates much of that managerial bureaucracy in the federal government that revives our sense of national pride, does some basic things that Americans across the political spectrum agree on—from shutting the border to growing the economy.

I clearly believe that Donald Trump is the man to get that job done, and I'm going to make sure that he succeeds at it.

Okay, so your next your next party, your next plan is okay, is to continue the campaign. And now you made reference back to the way we started our conversation, and so let’s pursue that a little bit.

I'd like to know more about what you now know or believe you know about the political industrial complex, right? I mean, you said that you got into the race to begin with because you were concerned about the proliferation of something like a mid-level tyranny, right? Which I think is something that we're seeing all around the world.

It's a collusion between mid-level state actors. They're usually not elected; they don't have to face the electorate; they’re not on the hook for their own economic survival because they're paid bureaucrats. They've extended their domains radically at every level of political organization.

I think part of the reason that the MAGA types who are firmly behind Trump are behind Trump is because they feel in their bones that Trump is enough of a bull in the china shop to actually pose a challenge to that system.

So I would like—and the, you know, the example of the current Argentinian president keeps popping into the back of my mind because he's doing the kind of radical cuts in Argentina that Musk did, for example, at Twitter.

And so I would like to know—first of all, do you actually think, now that you’ve seen the system per se operate at close hand, do you think that it’s actually possible for a candidate, even Trump, who's only got a four-year mandate—which is not very long—to have the power, to have the ability to make a difference in this in relationship to this unbelievably entrenched, widespread system?

So I’d like to know how you feel about the political industrial complex that you've now come up against and are also now a part of, right? Peculiarly enough, isn’t that interesting