Vision Restored | Vivek Ramaswamy | EP 380

These values are cool; they are meaningful; they are different; they are today heterodox. You want to stick it to the man. You want to be heterodox. You want to be counter-cultural. Say you want to get married in a heterosexual relationship and bring kids into this world and teach them to believe in God and be patriotic and pledge allegiance to the flag. Yeah, that actually is pretty heterodox today. And so it's my job to reawaken that spirit.

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Thank you! Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking to author, entrepreneur, and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. We discuss his ongoing campaign, the long-growing hunger in the general population for depth in political discussion, the dire need, the necessity for a renewed American vision, and how Vivek plans to strip the Washington administrative agencies of their unconstitutional powers.

All right, Mr. Ramaswamy, we said about four months ago, which was the last time we talked, that we would talk in about four months, and here it is. I was very interested, after contemplating our last conversation, in staying in touch with you, at least in part, to get more insight into what it's actually like to be on the campaign trail. And so now you've been hard at it. How long have you actually been campaigning now?

Well, it was the last week of February that we began, so it's been just a little bit over four months, about close to five months.

Right, right. So what have you learned?

Well, one of the things I've learned is actually one of the more surprising expectations is that the political consultant class at the start of this campaign had a concern about my style that I think they still continue to have today, which is the advice they give me is to dumb it down. This is no longer the era of writing books. As you know, I mean, you've written more prolifically than I have, but the last few years I've been in a stage of life where I've been writing books, examining issues with depth. I think the threats to liberty are complex, and I've been exploring them. And so what they said is, "You need to get used to the political mindset. People don't have that kind of attention span; they need to be distilled into bullet points. Dumb it down when you need to, or nobody's going to listen to you." What I have found is that I have been at my worst when I'm doing that, and I've been at my best when I'm more or less ignoring that advice.

And that's less about me, Dr. Peterson; that's actually deeply encouraging about the voter base in this country. I'm talking to voters that go beyond the traditional Republican primary base, but everything that I'm saying here applies to the traditional Republican primary base as well. I think that our voters today are hungry for depth, actually in a way that they may have never been. And why do I say they may have never been? Well, I mean, these political consultants are getting their conventional wisdom from somewhere. I assume it's from past experience and not just raw stupidity. I think that they must be judging from prior eras.

And at least today, you put your finger on two things that I think are of crucial importance. You know, one of the things we talked about the last time, you said that you weren't going to have someone else write your speeches. You said you weren't going to use a teleprompter. You were going to say what you thought.

Now, this is what I've watched happen to a number of people that I know quite well. They lack confidence in their own ability, in their own capacity to judge the political context, and they hire political consultants. The political consultants claim to be political consultants, but my sense with political consultants is that they're like money managers; if they could manage money, they'd be rich. And if political consultants knew anything about politics, they'd be running themselves. And they always do say the same thing; they say just what you said, which is, "Well, people aren't very bright; they don't have a very long attention span; you have to dumb it down," which shows you exactly what they think of people. And it makes it does too, just exactly who they want to dumb down for; like it might be for the people, but it might be for them, and it's canned advice.

And then you said, you know, that you found when you did that, that that's when you went astray and you fell off course. And that's what I've seen happen to the other people I've watched do this. You know, I don't dumb what I say down ever, and people watch it online, and lots of people say, "Well, you know, I had to listen to this two or three times, and I had to look up some of the words," but I'm pretty thrilled that I'm not being talked down to and I learned something. And so I think all of that's a lie. I think it's mendacious, and I also think this is more situational, that it's a hangover from the television era.

Because, yes, television—yeah, right, right—because you had television produce fragmented attention. You could only get a 30-second sound bite, and you couldn't assume that your audience was following you. But that's not true online, and it's not true in the podcasts.

So that's very interesting. That's actually a great point, is that in a certain sense, it's easy to just blame the political consultants, but they may be playing to the medium of communication.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So they produce 30-second TV ads; that is what they do literally. You have to sit in 30 seconds, and the final one of those 30 seconds has to be paid for by XYZ. So that is already where they begin.

And even TV hits that are unpaid ads—and we haven't been doing very much TV paid ads at all. One of the things I'm learning is that actually is probably, certainly at this stage of the campaign, a horrendous waste of money.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't make any sense. But even the three, four-minute TV hits, it's a bastardized form of the truth. And you know, I do think especially in this moment we live in, the threats to liberty are complex. They do not present themselves in one bad guy and one good guy.

In fact, I think one of the mistakes that the Republican Party makes, and I see this when I go to party events in particular, you know, there will be a lot of signs that say, "Fire Biden." You know, and then the pledge that the Republican Party has asked people to sign is called the "Beat Biden" pledge. And it’s so reductionist. Right? Like, you know, the entire party apparatus is focused on one man—not because I have any great feelings about this man; I don't. I think he's an awful president.

But the deeper point is he's barely the president; it's a managerial class that's actually pulling the strings. And we can get into the substance of that, but that gets back to the reductionist form on TV or the political consultants giving you the advice. And you see this; just listen to the other candidates in this race. It's almost as though they're told to stay on message, and that message is how we defeat Joe Biden and the radical Biden agenda, as though these were words uttered by the same carbon copy printer that was served up to all of the candidates. I think it in some literal sense was the same carbon copy that was served up to all the candidates.

But then, you know, the good news is you might think in a less optimistic version of the world that the politicians speaking like this have a dumbing down effect on the people. And what I see, and I think this is encouraging—certainly in the on-the-ground events that we're doing now—are these millions of people—no, but these are maybe a few hundred or a big event, a few thousand people at a time. And at a small event, maybe 50. In rooms fulls of that size, people aren't falling for it, right? Their eyes will glaze over, and then the questions I get from the grassroots audience base—I mean, they're like the questions I get from you, very different from what I would get on cable television on a given night of the week.

So this is deeply encouraging that I think years— I think the last decade of the public knowing that they have been lied to, systematically lied to by the legacy media, I think has inculcated a deep sense of curiosity, intellectual curiosity, and skepticism. You know, I think the mainstream media will now complain that that creates conspiracy theories. Many of these conspiracy theories end up being correct; some of them may not be correct, but they're still the right spirit of being skeptical of what you're fed such that individual people across this country, college degree or not, are asking some of the most intelligent questions I've heard—more intelligent questions about central bank digital currencies than I will get from my former colleagues on Wall Street; more detailed questions about the relationship between the US and the UN than I might get in a standard foreign policy briefing from somebody who's been giving those briefings for 30 years.

And so I think this is actually deeply encouraging to say that, you know, part of the reason, as I often say, right: if you have a people who are sheep, a government behaves like wolves. Well, when those people are not behaving like sheep anymore—when they're questioning not only their government but their media and their political class are feeding them—this is a unique moment. And this is where I've—I've maybe—I wouldn't say shifted the messaging; I've discovered the core messaging of this campaign in the last three to four months—kind of what was in my heart at the start, I'm now able to articulate.

We live in a 1776 moment; that's what I think it's like—a moment of the American Revolution. That's what I feel in the air. Well, the other thing that's worth thinking about on the television front is that you don't want to underestimate the degree to which network TV and legacy media as such is really entertainment.

And so, well, that's exactly it. So, you know, it's politics as spectacle, and part of what you're being called upon to act out as a legacy media politician is the politician as actor. Right? You should be playing the party politician. And television, because it's primarily an entertainment medium, demands that. But that doesn't mean that that's what the public wants on the political front.

And I think, you know, you talked about this being a 1776 moment, and I know Lincoln wasn't around in 1776, but you know, people used to listen to Abraham Lincoln deliver two-hour speeches, right? And they'd be standing there in the hot sun while he was orating.

And one of the things I've also really noticed, Vivek, and this is interesting, you know, very few people buy books; it's a luxury market or it's an elite market. But the audiobook industry has exploded, and lots and lots of people listen to long-form podcasts. And they're not necessarily people who read, but it also looks to me—and this could easily be the case—that maybe 10 or 20 times as many people can listen to complex ideas as can read them.

And so I think, well, it might be the case; we don't know, right? Because it's a technological revolution; these long-form podcasts—and we don't really know what the significance of it is. Although we do know that the most popular journalist in the world—and that's definitely Joe Rogan—is a long-form podcaster, and his podcast regularly runs three hours. So, obviously, people don't have a short attention span.

You know, I think that there are a couple of interesting hypotheses of what's going on here. One is there might just be a real scientific understanding that this is revealed, which is everyone might have—I think I have, you know, if this is true for everyone, it's definitely going to be true of me—maybe a low level of dyslexia, right? Dyslexia might not be just like a condition for just a scarcity of people that there’s something about the way that our eyes process information that’s just a little bit behind where most people are and where their ears process information.

But I think that there's something deeper going on in our moment, and I think it's not a coincidence that we see the rise of this podcasting form at a moment in our history when there's a demand for it. And why is there a demand for it? I think there is a deep hunger for human connectivity, direct disintermediated human-to-human connectivity.

And the reason I say I think that's closer to the flame is that I see an excitement, Dr. Peterson, when I'm going to these events. I mean, I was in—a few days ago in Iowa—in a barn in a small town of just a couple hundred people. There were a couple hundred people in the barn; literally, it was as though everybody in the town came to the meeting that we were having in that barn.

And I think it's because we live in a moment where people are starved— we talked about this last time—for purpose and meaning and identity. But people are also starved for a disintermediated relationship with their fellow citizens and human beings. And so there's something about hearing the voice, especially if it's the voice of the person who actually wrote it, right?

So I think that's why audiobooks are more successful than the actual author reads it; it's also the case with the podcasts that they're unscripted. And so, yes, I think there's a great difference in listening—even, and this might make—this might be one of the ways that a long-form podcast actually has an advantage over a book. You know, I think it’s easier; I think you can think more deeply in a book, but I also think it's easier to deceive people because you can craft your lies in a book.

But it's very difficult to craft your lies in a spontaneous conversation, right? You get falseness of tone; you get awkwardness of body posture; you can tell when people are delivering a soundbite. You know, and I think part of the reason that people like Rogan and Lex Friedman is a good example too—Friedman is that the reason that they're so popular is because they are genuine.

The same thing is true with Russell Brand; you know, I mean, he's got more of a trickster stick, and he's a comedian, but of course, Rogan was a comedian too. But it's—and that is a form of disintermediated interaction. And I do think it's the antithesis of the crafted Hillary Clinton political class message.

It's part of the reason that Donald Trump was also successful, and it is something that makes itself available to people like you. And Kennedy has been doing this very effectively too; he is using the new media.

Pure Polio of the conservative leader in Canada has also done a very good job of that direct-to-voter communication. And I think your comments that the time is calling for that, because people are tired of being manipulated by large, gigantic enterprises, corporate or government alike; they want to see the real thing, and they want to hear it. Because they can tell if it's real, then you know.

And Trump definitely capitalized on that; you know, he didn't use the podcast format, although he used Twitter quite effectively, but he captured—certainly in that 2016—yeah, in 2016 he did, yes.

And you know, I mean, I think even large-scale rallies of being there in person, there’s, you know, in some ways, I would say that if I go to go up the chain, I would say there’s no substitute for being in person live in a room with even no screens or algorithms in the air between us, in all with a large group of people who are your direct consumers of your message.

And that's what the part of this campaign I'm enjoying the most. Next best to that are actual unscripted long-form conversations where you're not reading speeches into a teleprompter. It's not a three-minute hit; you know, context select the conversation we're having now.

And I've invested more time in that just because I hope it’s certainly effective as a campaign; we'll find out that part later, but I am rejuvenated as the best version of myself when I'm actually able to speak truth without doing it in some sort of artificially constrained format.

Then you go to actually TV hits, which are a true bastardization of reality. And then you go to the ultimate bastardization, which is a 30-second straight-to-camera TV ad, which is where most—where the most money will actually get spent on this campaign.

So one of the things I've learned is I don't yet have a strong view on what the political snakes and ladders will be on mapping a path to victory, but actually that might just be the path to victory. And I'm going to stick to that, and that's one of the things I've learned in this campaign.

I've reviewed the empirical literature looking at campaign spending and its relationship to campaign success, and as far as I can tell, there's no relationship at all.

Well, I also think what happens is that's especially true for incumbents, by the way. There's a small effect of advertising spending for challengers, but it's not very big, and it certainly doesn't justify the magnitude of spending.

And I think part of what's also happened to the political consultant class is that Democrat or Republican alike, they've been in bed with the political advertisers and the big media corporations for like six decades. And so the political consultants tell you to craft your campaign in a manner that will maximize your spending in the legacy media format, but there's no evidence that that works, by the way.

But that's the pipeline; it's actually fascinating you say that because maybe you've studied that empirical literature more than I have. Here's what I will tell you: in the last election cycle of a Republican primary and then this one as well—so in 2015 around this time you can look back at the data—in the second half of 2015, how much was each candidate spending per percentage point they had in the polls?

So for Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and a bunch of these other guys last time around, it was millions of dollars per percentage point in the polls; for Donald Trump, it was in the tens of thousands—the thousands of dollars is what we’re talking about—in terms of paid advertising per percentage point.

Now we look at it this time around, and I find this encouraging. It suggests to me we're on the right track, where again you look at the candidates in this race. If you count their Super PAC dollars that are spending money on ads, millions of dollars per percentage point in the polls for me, it's again in the tens of thousands.

We're not spending boatloads of money, barely any money on paid ads on TV or otherwise. And I think at this stage of a race, it does say something about, you know, you're on the product market fit, regardless of whether or not you're using the money to prop it up.

I do think there will come a point, as a realistic matter, at some point in this race. And it did for Trump last time around as well. It’s just, you know, part of the pill you have to swallow is just the sheer scale of reaching still too many people in this country who don’t access YouTube or long-form podcasts that still are viewing the linear medium of television.

And it does skew to be an older voter base that, yes, there's going to be a time and place for that in this campaign. But that's almost by the time you get there, you've already won if you're going in the right order.

And so that's the way I'm viewing this too. At some point, we're going to need the mega money to probably pipe this all the way through, but I’m pushing that as far out down the line as we can. And I am more confident than ever that actually an outsider like me—in particular in this race—can absolutely defeat the odds and win an election just as Donald Trump did last time around.

And it says as much about the improved pipes that we have thanks to new media that disintermediates television. But it says something even deeper, Dr. Peterson, about the people. The people can tell when they're being lied to, and I think that we live in this moment where the government, where the media, where the establishment believes that the people can't handle the truth.

It's like Jack Nicholson at the end of A Few Good Men, right? You can't handle the truth! I think the people live in a moment today, and it's the voice that I'm representing on their behalf—to say that you know what, we the people can handle the truth about COVID, about the Nashville shooter manifesto, about the Hunter Biden laptop story, about what really happened on January 6th, about what really happened over the course of the last year of vaccine mandate policies.

We can handle the truth; sometimes it's ugly, but just give us the truth. And I think that that's something that, if a good thing has happened over the last 10 years through the Trump administration and otherwise, I think we have a populace—a population—that was trained on knowing that they have been lied to, which means that they are badly starved, hungry for somebody—a human being, a medium, etc.—where they know they can at least get the truth or be able to tell the difference if they're being lied to or not.

And I think that is a powerful moment that we live in! I mean, how special it is to be alive in a moment like this. It's like if you're alive in 1775 or the spring of 1776—you'd have a lot of reasons to be upset about a tyrannical government. But what did they do back then? It was a special time, a unique time to be alive.

I think we're in one of those moments where it is actually a pretty unique time to be alive, if we're open, if we're willing to open our eyes and see it that way. And then when you have a bunch of other politicians who preach about the virtues of incremental reform or "I'm going to reform X, Y, or Z," I almost don't use the word reform anymore.

I think the real choice in this election, in this moment, is do you want reform or do you want revolution? And I stand on the side of revolution, actually. I stand on the side of the American Revolution. I'm not talking about violence or anything like this, but I'm talking about a revolution of those 1776 ideals—a revival of the American Revolution itself.

And in some ways, I'm far more optimistic today; ironically, you would have thought it might have gone the other direction. I would have thought it would have gone the other direction. I'm actually more optimistic today than when I began in late February, than when you and I spoke this March, because I believe that actually we absolutely are in a revolutionary moment. There's electricity in the air. It is a special time to be alive, and if we're able to awaken the positive instincts that come out of that, boy, do I think good things are going to happen in the next 18 months, and this election is just going to be one of them.

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Well, obviously, the fact that Kennedy's candidacy is quite popular, as well as Trump's, is an indication that that revolutionary fervor is active. Because Kennedy strikes me as as much of a bull in the china shop on the Democrat front as Trump was on the Republican front.

And you—I’ve been following you regularly on Twitter and watching how you've been treated in the press. I want to get back to that at some point, but also, it made me curious too. You've talked a fair bit about your skepticism about, let's say, the deep state, you know, about the FBI in particular. And you've put forward some relatively radical propositions. And you just said that you feel that there's a kind of revolutionary fervor in the air, which in some ways is a strange thing for a conservative to say, for a Republican to say.

And I know you’re more on the libertarian end, if I'm hopefully not putting words in your mouth. But what do you think it is that you're bringing to the table that's in that revolutionary spirit? And how do you defend yourself, do you think, against the danger that, you know, radical change in and of itself, even if it's hypothetically in the proper direction, can cause its own brand of trouble? You know, doubt about fundamental institutions and that sort of thing.

So what do you think is revolutionary about your approach, and how do you think you can protect yourself against the potential excesses of the necessity for relatively radical change?

I think that there are a couple of unique attributes here for me. One is it just does take somebody who comes in as an outsider. You cannot be beholden to the existing system.

One of the things that actually constrains the revolutionary impulse—and you could argue whether this is good or bad or neutral, but it's just a fact—is the influence of large donors in the Republican Party. There is a version of the world in which they—I mean, there's an institutionalized function that large donors play, and it's to sort of tame candidates to get them back on a few set of accepted messages that then become eventually the agenda they use to govern.

You could argue that there is a conservative function there, conserving the status quo in a way that some people may argue is good. I think there are positives and negatives, but I think the negatives outweigh the positives greatly in the current moment. For whatever it's good, you could debate whether this is good or bad. I'm not constrained by that. I'm totally unconstrained by that because I'm not playing the mega Super PAC puppet game.

I am independent. I have put now, more than the last time that we spoke, I've put over 15 million dollars of my own hard-earned money into this campaign. And we have 70,000 plus small dollar donors. The online fundraising is now, you know, just digital small dollar fundraising has now hit a snowball effect where it's just continuing to accelerate day by day.

That's what's lifting this campaign up. And so that's one of the constraints that doesn't apply to me that much. I think was also true largely of Trump. I think it takes a unique combination, though, because where Trump got tripped up with draining the swamp—gutting the deep state—is what the same members of that managerial class told him when he got into office. They told him lies, but lies that he was forced to believe because he didn't have independent knowledge to know any better.

Which is that you can't fire civil servants without running afoul of the Civil Service protections, which are these extensive laws designed to protect individual bureaucrats from firing by the U.S. president. Trump's instincts were in the right place; I actually think he was an excellent president in this regard, but he was not able to implement his own agenda.

He was able to expose the problem because the people around him told him a bunch of lies. Why are they lies? Well, my suggestion is read the law. Just those Civil Service protections, to use one example among hundreds, those Civil Service protections protect against individual employee firings. They do not apply to mass layoffs on their own terms; the law just doesn't apply to mass layoffs.

Mass layoffs are absolutely what I am bringing to the D.C. bureaucracy. I have said that I will lay off over 75 percent of the federal employee bureaucrat headcount by the end of the first term—50 by the end of the first year. And we've also already offered unprecedented detail on exactly how we will do it, on which of the remaining minority employees in the FBI, minority number of employees will move to the U.S. Marshals or to the drug enforcement agency or to the financial crimes enforcement network.

Which small sliver of the U.S. Department of Education will move to the U.S. Department of Labor so that we neither need an FBI nor a Department of Education? And we can get into those details, but you're asking about a question of personal attribute.

And I think that the personal attribute that really matters here is that we need a U.S. president that is at once an outsider to that system, uncaptured, un-beholden by the donor class and the managerial class, but at the same time who has a deep, first-person, bone-deep understanding of how to actually get that job done and a deep understanding of the laws and the Constitution of this country.

Okay, that is actually a rare combination that I'm bringing to the table.

Okay, let me ask you about that because that's very, very complicated. So, you know, first of all, it is the case that in most large-scale institutions a small number of people do almost all the productive work, right? That's the square root law. Okay? So if you have ten thousand employees, a hundred of them are doing half the work.

Now we saw a stellar example of that in Musk's takeover of Twitter because he dispensed with about 80 percent of the employees, and all he did was improve the company. Now, Musk has had extensive experience doing that sort of thing with other companies, and he's obviously able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Now you just made the case that you would like to do the same thing, and you also said that you had a detailed plan to do so. And so what I'm very curious about is how is it that you believe you will be able to decide who should stay and who should go? And how is it that you’ve developed this detailed plan? Like what sort of analysis have you conducted that enables you to determine what should be shrunk and how, and to know that that's going to cause beneficial rather than damaging consequences?

So there's something we have going for us here is that I don't have to start in a vacuum. There is this thing we call the U.S. Constitution—already proven, time-tested to be the best operating manual for a nation and preserving liberty in human history; that's certainly my view.

Well, it turns out that much of the excess we have seen came from running afoul of that operating document. So many of the administrative agencies that were created were created in a manner that Congress actually never gave those agencies the power to wield the power that they do.

The Supreme Court has, in the last two years, already begun to recognize that in West Virginia versus EPA, a case where the Supreme Court held that the EPA's regulation—climate-focused regulations on the coal industry were unconstitutional—because we the people never gave the government that authority, and Congress, in turn, never gave that authority to this three-letter agency.

Which nonetheless ran afoul—well, if those EPA regulations are unconstitutional, then it turns out most of the federal regulations today are also unconstitutional. It turns out most of the employees implementing those regulations are actually unnecessary.

So in many ways, I don't think we have to start in some first principles whiteboard of a vacuum and say, "How are we going to design and draw this up?" That would be a fatal conceit; I think that would be hubris. I think it designed for failure to think that one man, Elon Musk, or myself, or anybody else, it's just not going to happen; it's destined for failure.

But if you're following a time-tested framework for the operating manual for this nation—built in the shadow of the Declaration of Independence, the greatest mission statement for a free society in human history—well, then I think we are actually doing nothing more than implementing that which is already time-tested and true.

And so, you know, I don't want to, you know, short-sell myself here on—I mean, I have—I’m 37 years old; I've built multiple multi-billion-dollar companies. I do understand that if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you.

I understand what meritocratic hiring looks like. You work for them; you're in some ways their slave because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to change it. So I understand these principles, but it's not that experience-based—it's not Donald Trump's, not Musk's, not mine—that could be sufficient to get this right at the level of the nation.

It is actually a firm understanding and commitment to the Constitution itself, and that brings me back to that rare combination. You can't rely on your advisors for that; that is not a substitute for saying, "Okay, I'm bringing executive experience, and then I'm going to ask my advisors how it's done within this legal framework and ask the lawyers."

And I think that's the difference between me and Trump, and I think that’d be the difference between me and someone like an Elon Musk or anybody else who would be great as a business builder and is a good alternative to the professional political class doing this in Washington, D.C.

But I think it requires a deep intellectual, historical, principled understanding, passion for, and commitment to that Constitution to see that through, but not doing it as somebody who's coming in as just a law professor or a lawyer. They're not going to have the skill set to actually—the fortitude to cut and see that through.

And that explains why we haven't had leaders to that effect, Kit, because that is a rare combination; those skill sets aren't supposed to go together, right? These are different skill sets.

Why do they go together in your case?

So I hope they do. I mean, yeah, but why do you think they do? What is it about your background and your interests that make it reasonable for you to make the claim that you exist at that intersection between, like, legal prowess, let's say, and wisdom in relation to the Constitution and that entrepreneurial bent? What do you have on that front that, say, Trump doesn't have?

Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is I'm not going to claim to be some messiah coming from on high with exactly the prescription. But what called me into this race—I mean, when you and I first started getting to know each other, you would—I would have said we were both nuts if we were thinking about me running for U.S. president. I was driving change in the private sector; I started Strive; I was writing books; that was my calling.

So the thing that pulled me in, Dr. Peterson, is that I think I am the best among the lot we have now to actually bring that combination to the White House at a moment where we require it to actually reform that administrative state—to gut and bring a revolution to that administrative state that we need a unique combination to actually achieve.

Because I watched where Trump fell short; I watched where Trump excelled above his lot, and so that pulled me in. So I will preface everything I’m saying by saying that I'm not going to tell you that I am some messiah and here I have arrived.

Okay, far from it. But I do think I’m a product of my experiences. Okay, so first of all, I had the privilege of not growing up in money. I had the privilege of actually having to work for what I’ve achieved. I’m grateful for that. I did not want to be burdened, as many of my peers at places like Harvard and Yale were burdened—and I do think it's a burden—by the burden of inheritance or by the burden of not having the space to actually achieve and ordain for myself what I would in my career.

So I started as a scientist; I was a molecular biologist in the lab in my senior thesis all the way through college. I ended up getting into the world of biotech investing, the commercial side of my brain—right?—finding opportunity where others would not. That led me to really enjoy—I'm grateful for this more than boastful of it, just strictly grateful that I was able to find this opportunity to earn extraordinary success for myself; by my mid to late 20s, I was in law school simultaneously as I was making tens of millions of dollars as a hedge fund investor by spotting opportunity.

And then I said, "I'm going to take this to the next level. I'm going to start an entire business on finding opportunities to develop medicines that others didn't," and built a multi-billion-dollar company from scratch. And I think that’s different than coming in and just managing and being appointed, rising the managerial ranks of a big corporation sitting on a bunch of boards and then plopping yourself into CEO when some guy retires at the age of 70.

I built that company from scratch, and so that's one skill set. But actually, it was midway through my career at the hedge fund where I first started that I also have this weird native itch to study law and political philosophy. I had been so science-centric that I actually told my bosses at the hedge fund, I said, "Listen, I'm going to take three years off. I'm going to go to law school. I'm actually going to—I’m finding reading things in my spare time that I would rather do in a more structured setting now."

I discovered something important there, which is if you're following your passion, good things tend to happen. They said, “Just keep your job.” They gave me far more autonomy on the job; they said, “Go manage this portfolio yourself and do it from New Haven if you want to.” I said, “Great, we have a deal,” and that’s what I did.

But for me, it’s less that I have a skill set more than I have had, for the last 15 years, a dual passion that has given me experiences both akin to that of many legal academics—which shows up in several of my books, which have been quoted in appellate court opinions in the last three years—but my principal day job has still been as an entrepreneur building enterprises, hiring and firing people accordingly.

Right, so that calls me an intersection of—you’re at the intersection of three relatively unique domains of achievement, so one on the entrepreneurial front, one on the scientific front, and one on the legal front. And so that is, you know, each of those levels of accomplishment are relatively rare, and the intersection is relatively staggeringly rare, let's say.

How was it, do you think, and why did your interest turn from the scientific to the legal? And what aspects of the legal in particular compel you, and then how did that transmute into a political interest?

Well, I mean, the political interest really is barely an interest at all. I feel like this is a sense of duty that pulled me into this political journey. But all the way through the legal doorstep of it, I guess I'm a person that reasons through principles, okay? I think that science is actually founded on principles that are iteratively—we hone, and we have an approximation of the actual truth of the world, but the scientific method driven by hypothesis-driven testing, as opposed to just purely deductive—oh, I observe something and then I decide that that's the state of the world. That's not the way the scientific method works.

It's a deeply principled understanding and approximation of the world, right? You form a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis; you don't just sit and deductively observe the whole time. That's actually not, that's just pure empiricism; that's not the scientific method.

And so there's something about that that spoke to me, and I think that was probably why when I started my first major business, Royven, which was a scientifically-founded company—I mean, I personally oversaw the development of five medicines which are FDA-approved today—but the business-building piece of it was the first thing I did was, with the day one employees, we sat in a room for about six hours and came up with our first draft of what ended up being 20 business principles.

Right, here are the principles on which the company would run, right? Value creation, the external world is the sole goal; everything that happens in these four walls is a means to the end of what happens in the external world, you know, whatever is necessary is always possible.

I mean, we went through several iterations of that, and so for me I think it's just the way that I think and process information, and then that is, I think, part of what drew me to my interest in the law and in the ordering. I think we're a nation deeply built foundationally on the rule of law, not the whims of man, and that's what speaks to me about much of the U.S. Constitution—about the United States of America—and so delving deep into what those principles were became just a passion of mine.

It was a side hobby; I mean, the things I was reading in my spare time in my mid-20s—well, you know, I’m a hedge fund investor, and then, you know, before my career as an entrepreneur—damn, it's kind of a weird thing for a guy to do in his mid-20s and spend my weekends that way. But that's what helped me discover that I have this separate passion that drew me then to go to Yale for a few years.

But it's part of what pulled me back even out of my business career. I ran my business in a way that was tethered to those business principles. I think it's part of what allowed me to have success as an entrepreneur. But even when I felt like, okay, I've developed a drug among other things for prostate cancer, now there's this cultural cancer that nobody else is working on.

There are other people working on biological cancers; nobody was working back in 2020 on the cultural cancer that I believed I had identified, which was the mixture of this wokism with the forces of capitalism back in 2020 when I think this was really still not as well understood as it is today—to say that I'm going to step aside from my job as a biotech CEO to focus on this cultural cancer.

But against the backdrop of a legal framework where it feels intuitively like something's gone wrong, it's not obvious that somebody's prosecuting this as a legal violation, but what are the principles enshrined in that law that are violated by what we're actually seeing? So that's what drew me in.

And then one thing, you know, that led me to the doorstep of this—you’re interested in scientific science as an investigative process. And then when you set up a business, you started to understand that you needed to develop a set of guidelines that were essentially enabling principles. Because that's a good way of thinking about principles, or rules, rather than as restrictions—as enabling principles—and that attracted your attention to the idea of enabling principles as such.

You got deeper into that, particularly on the constitutional front; that pulled you into the legal domain. And now your claim is that you think that you and your team think that you can use your knowledge of those enabling principles—especially buttressed by your corporate and entrepreneurial experience—as a scalpel and a tool of discriminating judgment to recreate, shrink back, and re-establish the managerial state as something more akin to what was envisioned in the Constitution? Is that the gist of the argument?

That's exactly right. And I think that puts me together in a position to say, "Okay, now let’s just intuitively—there’s a lot there, right? So let’s just sort of make this intuitive. What would George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison say if they were walking the modern American terrain?"

If they were walking around in Washington, D.C. on a given day, what would they say? Would they be pleased? Would they be proud? Would they be appalled? I think today, in many respects, they would be appalled by what they see.

And I think their intuitive understanding— that intuition is also part of what I'm reviving here— because they're the guys who enshrined that intuition in the form of principles that are in a document known as our U.S. Constitution today. And so for me, I think I share those intuitions; there’s the intuitive side of me too.

But my skill set is both as an entrepreneur and as somebody who understands principles—including legal principles—and those things don't usually go together.

Now we haven't talked about all the things that I'm awful at; artistic talents are sparse. I think that there are—there's—everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, but I do think that the unique coincidence of those talents is something that, so happens, this moment calls for when we think about who we actually need in the White House to take us to the next level.

And I think there's something encouraging about the moment we live in and the challenges we face. It's not Congress that's driving the administrative state, and that's where my focus is as well, because I think that's where the skill set will be most useful.

Well, you could see that Trump was attractive to people because of his entrepreneurial background and the fact that he was an outsider and his appeal to people's sense that things had developed at the managerial state level far too far and that that needed to be disrupted. But Trump was lacking part, arguably, in political experience and potentially an administrative skill—although he had, being at the head of multiple successful enterprises, and so obviously had some administrative skill.

I think people are attracted to DeSantis in part because he has that toughness of temperament that's characteristic of Trump but has a better track record in terms of administrative ability, and your claim is that you have an interesting intersection of all those abilities, right? There's an entrepreneurial ability; there's an administrative ability, but then there’s also that legal depth of, in relationship to your understanding of constitutional principles, that gives you an additional edge.

So let me—okay, so let me ask you something about temptation because that— you know I’ve watched a lot—I think there’s one more dimension to this. There’s just one more dimension to this that I think is important as I was hearing you summarize this, and I just wanted to pause because I think it might actually be the most important of all.

I do think there’s a fundamental difference between either running an enterprise or even running a state as a governor that is a requirement of certainly the U.S. president in the moment we live in today is I think an ability to articulate and deeply believe in a vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation.

So take everything you laid out—yes, I think you summarized it beautifully—but I think that is in some ways insufficient; it's a little bit still too small because I think that's still like a resume test, and we all are Trump, DeSantis, myself, and you know we’re in the top three now in the Republican national polling.

But the other is too—I would put in the same category, interviewing for a job with the American public. So, you know, I feel like I’m in a job interview with the American public; so are the others. We should treat it that way and not take the public for granted.

So that's why I’m treating this like an interview, but I think there's a third element that goes beyond just that descriptive—and interestingly detailed account that you and I just went through—is this more foundational ability to articulate and believe in a vision of where we are going.

And I think this is a big difference for me, and this is a generational difference, I think, Dr. Peterson. I think this is what is allowing us to reach young people in this campaign in an unprecedented way for the Republican Party.

Part of that we’re using podcasts, but part of that is just the message is that young people are—as you and I have talked about last time—hungry for a cause, hungry for direction and purpose. And what I see in the rest of the Republican Party—I’m not going to speak about any other field here, but the Republican field—what I see is a group of people who are habitually running from something.

I am in this race to start leading us to something, offering an actual affirmative vision of our own, and I think we badly require that in this moment in our national history.

So to take everything we talked about—the competence, the diverse skill set from being enterprising to having deep knowledge of the law, and actually the unprecedented detail we've laid out on how to reorganize and gut the administrative state—all of that. But I think the missing fuel that will allow me to see that through but also revive a missing national identity is having a clear answer to the question of what it means to be an American.

We talk about the American Revolution—what were those ideals of the American Revolution? How do we revive them in the present? And I think we're seeing that in some ways—where, look together in the Republican debate stage, one of the requirements was 40,000 unique donors, right? The former Vice President of the U.S. just met that requirement, I’m told, in the last, you know, 24 hours. We're at over 70,000 unique donors.

I've never had a political donor in my life; we didn't begin this campaign with any donor lists. But the beauty of this is 40 of those donors are first-time ever donors to the GOP in any form, and most of them are relatively young actually.

So that says something about one of the missing gaps when I think the most important thing I want to be saying that I did for this country when I leave office in January of 2033—that's eight years from now—my older son won't even be in high school yet. Probably the most important thing I want to say is that we revived national pride in my two sons and their generation.

And I think it does take someone probably of a different generation. I'm the youngest person ever to run for president in a major political party, but not just of a different generation but of a different generational view that we're actually standing for an affirmative vision of our own rather than just tearing down the vision of the other side.

And so I just wanted to pause to say that because I think of all the things we talked about, that's probably the most important actually.

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Okay, well I think that’s a good addition. And I’ll return to the issue of temptation via the root of youth, I think.

So let’s talk about that vision of the future. So this is going to be a bit of a convoluted question because I have to wander around a bit to answer it.

So I’ve been involved in this enterprise that's established in the UK but has roots in Australia and Europe and the US and Canada. We’re trying to formulate a positive vision of the future. And one of our principles, let’s say our suppositions, is that if your vision of the future is predicated on fear—so it’s an apocalyptic vision, let’s say—and you’re using that fear as a means to garner power to yourself, you’re not to be trusted.

And this is happening most particularly, I would say, on the climate apocalypse front. And I suspect that there are any number of existential crises awaiting us in the future, as there always are. But my sense is that if you use any given crisis as a means of instilling a demoralizing fear and the consequence of that is that you’re gathering power to yourself, you're not to be trusted as an advocate of the people.

And you should be putting forward a positive vision. And we're trying to differentiate that and delineate it. And you know, we would like to see cheap energy; we would like to see a multi-dimensional approach to environmental maintenance; we would like to see, what would you say, a re-established commitment to the fundaments of a minimal necessary family.

We're not very fond of corporate gigantism, but most importantly, I would say of all those things is that we believe that we can—all be offered a positive vision of the future so that we have something to strive for that’s motivating and hopeful instead of being enjoined to cower and destroy our own ambitions because we’re something approximating a planet-destroying force.

Now I know that, you know, the typical young man in grade 12 now is more likely to be conservative than liberal; it's not true of young women. The tide is turning on the generational front, and I think it is because young people have been force-fed so much apocalyptic doom that they've really had enough of it.

And so your—and I see this in your tweets and your communications too—that you're trying to outline a positive vision. And you've laid out some of the principles.

What—and you talk a little bit about the return to constitutional principles—but if you saw a renewed America and, by implication, a renewed West, what would that renewal look like? Where would we be in five years or ten years that's different from now, and how might you move us towards that?

I think it is an ordering of our society on things that have always grounded successful flourishing societies throughout our human history.

So the left preys on this vacuum of identity with race, gender, sexuality, and then now what you just mentioned, climate. It’s cereal; once the climate farce is—and I do think that much of the agenda around it is a farce—one that, once that's revealed and untenable, just as when the COVID-19 pandemic passed, the residual climatism filled the void.

Once this farce passes and people like yourself, myself, Alex Epstein, and Bjorn Lomborg and others are playing roles in exposing this, it'll be something else that fills the void. I don't know what it is, but it'll be something!

Now, I think that what I see right now is a lacking in a conservative movement that becomes too—what should I say?—lazy, too satisfied, complacent. Probably complacent is the right word—with just criticizing that vision, and the endless hypocrisies and the nature of how uninspiring it is.

And it is uninspiring, but just criticizing it is also uninspiring. And so I want us talking more and acting more on ordering a country, a nation, a society grounded in the value of each individual—a member who is a member of a family, who is a family that is embedded in a nation with commitments to that nation.

And yes, I think a revival of a belief that we are one nation under God. That doesn't mean a single religion or a single, you know, religious orthodoxy pushed from on high—in fact, I think it shouldn't be so—but broadly individual, family, nation, God as an affirmative alternative to race, gender, sexuality, and climate.

And I think that that vision is not only more innately inspiring to young people, to all people, it is grounded in truth. Right? We have distinct sources of our identity that we, as lost human beings—we, as lost human beings who wander in that wilderness, biblically wander in that desert—we need something to ground us.

And I think that reviving the value of the individual through hard work and the creation of what you create through hard work and the ability to be proud of that. I was talking yesterday to two entrepreneurs who are themselves already young, actually—not much older than me, multi-billionaires—who have, are now on their next creation. I asked, "What motivates you?"

I think he didn't have an answer other than to say, "I hard work actually; I believe in hard work as an ethic, and I believe in creation." That's great! I said I need to help you; I need your help in bottling that up, and I need to put that in the water across this country.

But the value of hard work, the value of the family—that there is truth to having a commitment to the unit of two parents in the house with a commitment to their children first. The idea that, you know what, I will take care of my family first before I worry about the starving child in the middle of the Congo—not to say that there’s something wrong with going and helping the starving child in the middle of the Congo but to say that there's an ordering.

I am a self; that means something! I work hard, and create something in the world, and I am proud of that. And I am an individual agent, not writing some tectonic plate of group identity.

But there’s only ever one you, Dr. Peterson; there’s only ever one me; there’s only ever one anyone. And that there's inherent value as the individual.

The same thing I’ll say is that my first commitments are to my family—the children who I brought into this world, the wife with whom I am raising those children, the parents who brought me into this world. Those are my commitments.

And then around that, I have commitments as a citizen to this nation that I will go and visit the south side of Chicago or Kensington in the middle of Philadelphia before I go take pictures with some child in Myanmar so I can post it on my social media account and feel better about myself.

I'll get to Myanmar later; I'll get to the Congo later. But I’m a citizen of this nation, and that means something to me too. So I take care of myself throughout my own hard work and dedication; I take care of my family; I take care of my nation that I’m proud of; these are things that I believe that we're a nation under God.

And then, yes, as human beings, we are all equal in the eyes of each other because— in a Christian tradition or Judeo-Christian tradition—you’ll say we’re made in the image of God. And I raised in a Hindu household, we say it's that God resides in each of us.

But whatever formulation it is, there is a higher power. And then once we've taken care of all of that, then we can get to, you know, Ethiopia or South Africa or Myanmar or wherever else one might go.

But I think what we see right now is a substitution of that, in fact, right? Intense worries about the climate apocalypse or intensely worried about some fringe problem that doesn't affect your own community or your family or your nation at home as a substitute for the actual things that, in a time-tested way, ground us as human beings.

And so I’m still scratching the surface, but at least it gives you a taste—
No, no.

Well, you know, I've been spending a lot of time assessing the book of Exodus, right? And part of what the book of Exodus does is lay out a psychological and social alternative to tyranny and chaos, and chaos is the desert in the Israelite sojourn.

And so you can imagine two extremes of misgovernment: one would be tyrannical order, and the other would be desert chaos. And the alternative that's put forward in that book is an alternative that the Catholics in particular have referred to as subsidiarity.

And it's the notion of a hierarchical identity that's both individual and social, and it very much parallels what you're describing as the essence of identity itself. Now, you see a craving for this on the left, because the leftists tend to prioritize hedonic impulse, right, as sort of the grounds of individual subjectivity.

And then in response to the lack that produces, they leap to global identity solutions, and that would be ethnicity, race or maybe... okay, but what—
Why would be appropriate, exactly?

The appropriate alternative to that is, I think historically speaking, the subsidiary structure that you're laying out. So you could say, "Well, first and foremost, you're responsible for yourself." You have to take care of yourself, and that's a duty and an obligation but also a source of meaning, right, of meaningful stress.

And if you can manage that, well, then you can embed yourself within a couple, and that's another place you can derive meaning and identity. And if the two of you can organize yourselves halfway intelligently as a mutually sacrificial couple, because you're sacrificing your short-term impulses to her well-being and vice versa and counseling each other to do the same for yourselves, well then maybe you can establish a family, and that's your next level of responsibility.

And then maybe a community or a business enterprise, and then maybe a town, and then maybe a city or a state, and then maybe a nation, and then you said, you know, that has to be nested under God.

And that is like— that’s one of the pillars of Catholic social doctrine—one of the three pillars—that notion of subsidiarity. And I think it is the time-tested alternative to, you know, top-down Tower of Babel, statist centralism, and the absolute inkwell chaos of the fragmented identity that we see unfolding in the world now.

And I think that's why this message of responsibility, by the way, is echoing so deeply with young people, particularly with young men because meaning is to be found in that subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.

Right? And it's also ethical, and you implied this—it's also ethical. Oddly enough, to focus your attention first on what's local to you—right? Take care of yourself first, then take care of your wife.

It doesn't mean other people aren't important, but it means that you have a hierarchy of responsibility, and that you should take care of what's local and immediate before you dare ordain to presume that you're capable of doing something that's more abstract.

And I know people are absolutely right.
That's absolutely right! It's intuitive; it's woven into our nature as man. And I think that we are, in some ways, running contrary to our nature as man, which leaves a vacuum in its wake that leaves us lost, like the Israelites were in The Book of Exodus.

And I think that that's where we are in our modern American landscape. And so I think that there's a—not very practical component of how we revive that worldview. I think there's an attitude where the things that I'm talking about—individual, family, nation, God—these are needless to say not novel concepts. They sound novel to some when I say them now, to many, to most, and that shows you how dislocated we are right now from even the proper ordering of a society.

You don’t have to take a Judeo-Christian worldview; take Aristotle—is that the same thing, basically? You go to the Hindu scriptures. You know, in ancient India, they say the same thing, right? So this is time-tested, transnational, transhistorical stuff, okay? Truths!

Now the reality is, I think there’s a sort of squeamishness, prudishness that makes us feel in the modern American moment like we’re hearkening back to something. Those are antiquated values; they’re not cool; they’re not the stuff of progress, I think it’s a uniquely postmodern attitude.

And I think one that many, especially Millennials and Gen Z, actually might come back to it because they’re so starved. But Millennials, my generation, feel like that was like not cool, and certainly if there’s a boomer preaching to us as such or a Gen X or preaching to us as such, I think that there’s a reluctance—almost a contrarian impulse, an equal and opposite reaction in the other direction—a sort of natural rebellion to it.

This goes back to also the special set of attributes that I think it takes in this unique moment to get this done. This is my responsibility to make faith, family, patriotism, hard work— to make these values cool, actually, for the next generation to the way we live by those values. The example that I want to set living in the White House, I’m not some old fogy from a giant Gen from a past generation preaching how it used to be.

I’m talking about this on the campaign trail certainly in the way that it can be. This is a progressive vision as I cast it because of how far we’ve come. This now becomes the stuff of progress, not regress, and I think that—I know that's framing, and you could just say that's just marketing, but there's some element of marketing to the job, you know, to get this done.

Human beings have to come along; there’s some element of marketing to every job. And I think that's okay. I don't chafe at that; I accept it; I embrace it. Let's accept that, right?

Part of the job of the next U.S. president is to be a successful marketer for the values—as long as you’re marketing something that’s good for you, that’s grounded in truth, that’s good for the nation. There’s no shame in that.

But I think that as a young person— as a guy who still actually, you know, this month I'm turning 38— but as a guy who's still 37, you know, I think that there's no shame in that. I am openly saying—and many young people hear me say this—and that’s okay, they can be in on the marketing campaign to say that, “Yes, I’m marketing to you guys, but I’m marketing something that’s true.”

These values are cool; they are meaningful; they are different; they are today heterodox. You want to stick it to the man; you want to be a hippie; you want to be heterodox; you want to be counter-cultural? Say you want to get married in a heterosexual relationship and bring kids into this world and teach them to believe in God and be patriotic and pledge allegiance to the flag.

Well, that’s pretty heterodox today! Put up the U.S. flag instead of the trans flag in front of your house! Yeah, that actually is pretty heterodox today.

And so it’s my job to reawaken that spirit. And again, you know, you can talk about Trump or Biden or whoever. I think there are intangibles. Yes, we can talk about the differences in having—well, who has the business skill set? Well, who has the legal skill set? And these are important discussions, but I think far more important is who is going to be able to bring along a generation that is starved for purpose and meaning but running and latching on to the superficial fast food that the other side is serving up as opposed to serving up the more substantial fare in an appetizing format that they actually want to consume.

And I think that’s something that I feel like I’m not going to frame this in the sense that I have the unique ability to do, because then it's just more boasting, and I feel like I’ve been already boasting too much in this conversation. That’s not the point; it is something that I have a responsibility to do; I have a duty to do as a member of my generation and somebody who can do this, and with that comes a duty to do it right now.

And that’s the sense of duty that I feel right now. I’m extremely pleased to announce that the Daily Wire Plus has decided to make the 16-part Exodus seminar fully and freely available to everyone over the next four months on YouTube.

We are therefore truly beyond pleased to invite you, almost hospitably, to partake in this great moral banquet.

[Music]

So let me ask you the other question that has emerged in my mind as we’ve been talking. So, you know, for most of my career, I was a popular professor, and I had a little bit of exposure on the broader public front. I worked with a small television station in Ontario, and so I had a taste of public recognition, let’s say, but I didn’t become well-known until I was in my mid-50s.

You know, and that’s protected me, I would say, to some degree against some of the excesses that might otherwise be associated with that. You know, I had a very established family and long-term friends who were accomplished in their own right, and like a phalanx of people around me who could counsel me carefully as my star rose, so to speak.

Now you’re a young man, and you’ve been very successful on multiple fronts for a very long time. And you’ve garnered great wealth; you’ve had a lot of entrepreneurial adventures. Now you’re running a very public candidacy for presidency and—but you’re 37.

And so one of the things we talked already about the temptations that you faced on the campaign front with regard to the advice that you were receiving from the political class and how you withstood that. And I guess I’m curious—and I think this is probably the therapist in me thinking about someone who’s in your situation— is like, and you’ve provided a partial answer in your understanding that you have a responsibility at all these levels of social embeddedness.

But how do you keep your ego from running away from you, given the particulars of your situation in combination with your youth? Like what do you have around you that keeps your feet on the ground, do you think, or around you or within you?

Honestly, it’s very practical and simple. The first thing is my family. I actually am pretty grateful to—I don't know that I hope you don't mind me mentioning this—but the best piece of advice I got at the start of this campaign was just like very practical advice from Tucker Carlson.

Okay, Tucker told me this: like very practical stuff. He said, “Travel with your family; take your bubble that you live in with you, right? Because you know at some point you’re going to show up on the road, and you’re just going to be floating in the ether and waking up in some hotel asking, ‘Okay, where am I?’ and you're just floating and going through the motions. You’re going to feel like that at some point in this campaign.

And here's how you protect yourself against that: whatever you have at home, just take it with you. Or when you don’t take it with you, just make it a rule that you want to come back and spend as many nights at home sleeping in your own bed as possible.”

I came home at 11:30 last night; a few nights ago, it was 2 A.M. when I got back from Iowa. Oh, actually, where was it coming from? That was New Hampshire, excuse me. Lose track of where I'm coming from, but it’s 2 A.M., but I still made a point to come back rather than to sleep the night over there because just as a very practical point, there’s nothing philosophical about this—it grounds me.

I wake up that next morning to the sound of my young son crying, and it annoys you at first, for the first split second. And then it’s just joy after that, which is like— that’s what you wake up to in the morning. And I think that we're traveling as much as we can as a family now.

Now, my wife has her own version of this, which I wouldn’t say is in conflict but has some logistical attributes that we have to balance, which is her version of also part of staying grounded in a journey that she did not sign up for. She does not covet attention; she doesn’t hide from it. She’s—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her; she’s very earnest and connects with people at a level sometimes that’s even deeper than I do with many audiences, and she’s not shy about it, but she doesn’t covet it in any sense.

She certainly doesn’t seek it; the thing that keeps her grounded is—in addition to our family unit, which is important to her—is she made a decision that I admire her for keeping she’s kept her full-time job through this. And it’s not a lightweight full-time job; she is a throat surgeon; she literally saves lives of people who have gone through cancer at the Ohio— you know, cancer center at the James Hospital at the Ohio State University. People have been through, had neck cancer, the consequences of that.

She’s a throat surgeon—the best one of the best in the world, certainly in the narrow domain she’s in. She has people who fly here to see her; she keeps her operating room schedule. And so let’s say I’m in Iowa on a Friday night; there have been cases where she would— days where she will do 12 cases in the day and still be at a dinner event where we’re both speaking in Iowa that night.

And so for each of us, I think the practical steps—actually, I think where—and this is where I'm so grateful to Tucker, actually. I launched the campaign actually on his show, and it was just in the chit-chat that we had after that that I got like probably the best practical tip that I have since used throughout this campaign, which is as simple as this:

Whenever you can, just make it a rule, we will travel with our family as a family unit whenever that is possible. That is just what we will do! When that is not possible—because Apurva has to stay in Columbus, Ohio—maybe I’ll get one-on-one time with Karthik, and she’ll stay with Arjun.

And when it's not possible for the kids to come, which would be too taxing for them, or they have their activities, I will make an effort—and even if it’s 2 A.M., I will be back home in this house where I’m talking to you from. And maybe I’ll get an hour less sleep, but I’ll be more grateful for it in the morning when I wake up the next day.

Well, you know, that harkens back to this issue and the idea of embedded responsibility that we already discussed. You know, one of the errors that the psychotherapeutic community has foisted on the general public—and I think this is true even of the greatest therapists—is the idea that your sanity is something that's somehow located in you.

And I don't think that's true! Like I think your sanity is the harmony that's established between your multiple levels of social embeddedness. And so when you abide by Carlson’s advice to take your wife and your children along with you, you're actually taking the structure of responsibility that reminds you to be sane along with you, right?

And because we all need to be tapped into harmony and unity, and you do that not so much—some of it's abiding by your own principles; it's internal; it's pure force of will, but as Carlson pointed out, you know, you can wake up after a month on the road; you're kind of lost and suspended in space.

And that's also the sort of time where a moral error of one form or another is much more likely to occur. But if you’re in constant communication with those embedded levels of responsibility, that also keeps you on track, right? In that conservative manner, that is part and parcel of secure sanity, and that's another advantage to adopting social responsibility, right?

Is you surround yourself with people who remind you to be sane.

Yeah, because I don’t know about other people, but I’m not a perfect person or endowed with some sort of divine infallibility in the decisions that we make, and so we just put ourselves in a position to make the moral decision at every step through the structures that have—it was—it’s not I didn't invent this, my parents demonstrated it by example to me, and I suppose they didn’t invent it.

And it’s societies throughout human history in our faith-based tradition—I mean, the Hindu way of life just as the Judeo-Christian way of life puts a great premium on this institution of the family. And so I think it actually comes down to just being that practical about it rather than to be overly abstract.

It’s like, you know, you and I talked about the bats in the cave, I think! You know, I certainly see myself—all of us, I think my generation, maybe all of us as Americans, as human beings today—like blind bats lost in a cave, right? And the bat, how does it figure out where it is in that cave? It sends out an echolocation signal that bounces back off the wall, and then it comes back, and it says, "This is where I am."

So if we human beings are doing the same thing, this is my family, that truth bounces back—it says, "This is where I am. I believe in God; I'm a citizen of this nation." Those things come back and say, "This is where I am."

When those things disappear or they’re distant, what happens? We send out these signals, and then nothing comes back, and we’re back in the desert. We’re back to being the Israelites in the Book of Exodus. We’re back to being Americans in 2023.

And so, yeah, well, that’s part of that problem of overemphasis on subjective self-identity, you know? Right? This is a big—this is a terrible thing that the radicals on the left have done to people psychologically, is to