 Okay, yeah, let's run this clip about the new American identity, which is something I think that we all care deeply about. We hunger to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we cannot even answer the question of what it means to be an American. Today the woke left praise on that vacuum. They tell you that your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve, and what you're allowed to think. This is psychological slavery, and that has created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America. And that is why today I am announcing my run for president of the United States. There he is. He's about to join us. Yes. We're going to be talking about psychological slavery. We're going to be talking about what it means to be an American. Whether or not Vivek Ramaswamy eats pudding with his fingers like Ron DeSantis allegedly does. Or does he use a spoon or a fork? Four fingers is what apparently is. Four fingers. You know what? Two fingers. If you're confident, I think it's two fingers. Three fingers. You're on the edge. Four fingers. It's... Yeah. Move. Just move to Canada. Oh. All right. It's going to be a good conversation. Thanks everybody for joining us. We've got 90 people watching concurrently according to... All right. Good. There he is. There he is. Vivek Ramaswamy. Thanks so much for joining the Reason livestream. It's good to be on. I'm sorry to be finishing half of the lunch here as I grabbed a bite walking in. As long as it's the second half, you know? It was a couple bites. You are a busy man. We just... We introduced you a bit a couple minutes ago. And we ran part of your presidential announcement where you talked about how people in America want to be part of something bigger. But we don't have... And that the way the left and wokeness is kind of working, it's a form of psychological slavery. You mentioned in your announcement that we don't even know what it means to be an American anymore. I'm going to let you finish that sip of water and then launch into like what... For you, what does it mean to be an American right now? Well that is the conversation we need to be having in the country. That's the entire premise of this campaign is it is a cultural movement to revive our missing national identity. To me, being an American means you believe in the principles that set the nation into motion 250 years ago. Principles like the rule of law, that people like my parents, yes, do get to come here legally if they come through the front door. But that your first act of entering this country by definition cannot be a law-breaking one if you believe in the rule of law as the basis of your national identity. I think it means you believe in basic ideas like free speech and open debate as our mechanism for settling political questions, not the use of force. And yet today we live in a country, we can go into the details of how I don't think we live up to that national identity, but your question is what does it mean to be an American? The two of you get to speak your mind freely as long as I get to in return and the same goes for our neighbors. Would you be in favor of increasing legal immigration? Increasing decreasing is the wrong conversation with due respect. I think I am in favor of merit-based immigration and I can define what that means, but if that results in a higher number or a lower number, I'm fine with that, but that's the standard we have to apply. What's merit-based immigration? So merit-based immigration, I think there's two components to merit. I think as it relates to immigration, one is your actual ability to make contributions to this country economically, particularly in areas where we could use great contributions. Keep in mind one of the great obstacles to GDP growth in America today is a workforce shortage, actually, is a worker shortage problem. Let's just cabin that away or somewhere. Immigration can play a role in alleviating that, but it also means that you embrace civic commitments to the country, that you actually understand the history of this country. The constitution. I want to ratchet that up. And then I actually want to bring that back to high school students, and we can talk about reviving the notion of capital C citizenship, not just for people who come from abroad, but even people who age into citizenship. I think that's something we don't talk enough about. But anyway, that's a merit-based immigration. You are Ohio born and bred, right? Yes, that's correct. I lived in Oxford, Ohio, part-time and full-time for 20 years. I know Ohio is the heart of it all. Every fast food chain is headquartered in Columbus, it seems, with the exception of McDonald's and who needs them. I want to ask just a real question, though, about the merit or the immigration that made America what it is. My grandparents from Ireland, but especially from Italy immigrated here in the mid-1910s, they were illiterate. They were uneducated. They never learned to speak English. They worshiped a strange God using Latin. There's no way people like that would have made it in under any kind of merit-based system. Yet they came here and they contributed, I would say, mightily to America. So I guess my question is, is merit simply another word for getting H-1B visa workers in short supply who with degrees in? And where does that leave Mexicans who want to come here and will cook the food and clean the diapers of both old and young Americans, of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's children who are living in the White House now? Where does that leave the immigrants who came here en masse without really anything to offer other than they were coming here to be set free to work? So I'd say a couple of things. First of all, I think there are different phases that a country goes through. Right now, we're coming off of a period where we have had rampant illegal immigration in the country. We need to actually be stringent. We've also lost our national identity. I don't think that has been true for most of our national history. I don't think that it will be true for much of our national future. But I think that I'm running for president in the year 2024. And this is what I advanced for the year 2024. Another thing I'll say is that merit means more than just having a bunch of tech skills. I'm not sure that we have the dearth of engineers in this country. And by the way, you brought up the H-1B visa system. That is so broken. I mean, we actually were afraid to make decisions based on merit. And we have an H-1B visa lottery systems, actually. Why on earth would you leave it to chance when you could actually just meritocratically pick what we actually need? Now you're talking about people. There's many shortages in this country. We have a shortage of plumbers, of carpenters, of welders. We have a shortage of people. We have healthcare assistance. I mean, literally, people who left people in and out of beds. We have a rampant worker shortage in multiple sectors of the economy. Silicon Valley is the least of the problem. And so when I say merit, I meant what I said, make contributions to the country, especially in areas where we are short on people to make those contributions. We also used to have a system in this country where I think there's a reasonable conversation to have about it of people who actually want to come here as seasonal workers and then to go back to south of the border of Mexico as part of a legally ordained process. I think that there's reasonable room for that being part of the conversation about merit-based immigration, too. Why do you think Republicans in particular, liberals have not been particularly pro-immigrant, but Republicans right now, the Republican party is hostile to immigrants, legal and illegal in general. Donald Trump- I don't know if I agree with that assertion. I think it's a- Donald Trump was pro-immigrant in absolutely no way, shape, or form, right? Ron DeSantis is not talking about increasing legal immigration or make it easier for good people to move here. Ron DeSantis just says whatever he thinks the political base wants to hear in a given moment. He doesn't have independent of it. The thoughts of his own. He responds to Twitter and the effects of it. So I don't know what Ron DeSantis thinks. I just know what comes out of his mouth reflects what he thinks is going to achieve that dopamine hit in getting a Twitter trend. But I'm not sure I agree that that's where most Republicans are. Here's what I see on the ground. I mean, when I speak to grassroots audiences, I think they're hungry for leadership on this and they're very open-minded. I think part of the reason that the likes of Ron DeSantis get mistaken into thinking the Republican base is against immigration is that the way that higher ups in the party talk about this conflates border security with immigration. Those are two different issues. Border security is border security. Immigration is immigration. And so I think this is one of the areas where I'm not afraid to draw contrast with those who either haven't developed their positions or those who have adopted a position that's grounded in, I think a backlash to border security where I'm a hardliner there, believe me. I think I believe in using our military to secure our own border. I think it's a legitimate use of the military to actually combine that with building a wall. I think it's what it means to live in a nation built on the rule of law. But I am completely a fan of legal merit-based immigration. I think we should embrace it. Can breathe both the economic and civic lifeblood back into the country and that's not a bunch of tech bros in Silicon Valley that is really looking at need more broadly in a way that we can actually sensibly bring people into the country. And I think many in our base, including in the conservative base and the Republican party are with us. It's just that you have Stooges at the top, professional politicians. It's not just Ron DeSantis, he's just one of them who think they're responding to what the base wants, jumping like a circus monkey without actually having independent thoughts about what our actual principles really are. To follow up on the Ron DeSantis question, the Ron DeSantis topic, he is someone who like you has put the sort of fight against so-called corporate wokeness on the front burner. He is fighting this battle with Disney right now in Florida. If that is kind of at the center of both of your campaigns, why should people opt for you or take a closer look at you versus a popular two-term governor in Florida? So the popular two-term governor in Florida has been good as an executor in certain respects, not as good as he would make it out to be, but I think that's a separate discussion for another day. The question is who do you want in the White House? Do you want a visionary who has their own ideas or do you want a guy who executes other people's ideas? And I think there's a role for everyone in the system. But I think when we're in the middle of this national identity crisis in our country, I don't think we want a follower in the White House. I think we need an independent thinker and a leader. And the case I make for effectiveness too is that Ron DeSantis is like a billiard ball. You hit him in a given direction, he'll go in that direction. But he doesn't know why he's heading in that direction. He's not the one doing the aiming and that results in loss of effectiveness. So let's just take the Disney thing, for example. The real root cause of what causes many companies to behave in the way they do. It's a complex story. I literally have a book out this week that lays out part of that cause. And we're gonna talk in depth about capitalist punishment in a few minutes. Yeah, and I don't write these books to sell books. I care about spreading a message. So forget about that, but I'm getting a point about Ron DeSantis. That's what the upstream causes for a lot of corporate wokeism. He's instead using the bully pulpit of the state to score some points on social media and conservative media, but missing the point where what he says he is doing, it's laughable, is that he's rolling back the special protections that Disney shouldn't have been given in the first place. I agree with that. I don't like chronic capitalism. I don't like special forms of corporate protections that are the product of lobbying. What the media completely missed, and it shows you how asleep at the switch, even the media is, is that some of those corporate privileges and special protections were signed into law just a couple of years ago by, wait for it, Ron DeSantis, actually. And I can go into the details of what those were. Those included exemptions from the political anti-discrimination statute that he passed. There was a special exemption if you own a theme park more than 25 acres in the state of Florida. That was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. And then he strips that after the fact, saying that, oh, we should have never had these chronic capitalist protections in the first place. That's a joke, because he was actually the one of the ones who signed it in the first place anyhow. And so I think that that state action argument or that lurking state action piece, I think is a bit of a farce. And I think that, you know, I think that he ruins the credibility of his own crusade by not knowing why he was doing in the first place. And by the way, Disney then gets the better of him in the end by the day before his new governing board takes over, completely castrating that board of having any power. So execution's missing. Same thing, I mean, he's divesting from BlackRock. He'll have a nice little Twitter trend removing $700 million. Yet that's mostly cash and short-term securities when they have a $13 billion pension fund that's still invested with BlackRock. I think what happens is you repeatedly miss by half when you don't know why you're going through the motions, but you're just going through them or you're going through them because Twitter, you know, told you to and gave you dope, mean, hit and made you think that that's what you're supposed to do as opposed to having first principles. I think that's what's missing. It's fine for a governor who can do a decent job. But if you're looking for the next US president to lead us out of a national identity crisis, I think it's going to take more than Ron DeSantis. And I say this as somebody who, for a long time squinted and tried to see it and tried to get excited, decided that it was fake in me to do that as well. And by the way, if you don't have somebody who's willing to go to a college campus because the questions haven't been pre-vetted, he's afraid of 22-year-olds. If you're not going to sit across the table from Chuck Todd at NBC as I'm doing this Sunday, I'll meet the press and Ron DeSantis says he won't talk to NBC because they're not nice to him. You're not fit to sit across the table from Xi Jinping representing the United States. Would you arm wrestle Ron DeSantis if he agreed to sit down with you? I probably would, yeah, why not? Let's, you know, we took, we're taking a chance. Aquisbiller and I have reason for taking a chance because the last two big talk shows that you appeared on was Don Lemon on CNN and Tucker Carlson. And they both were fired, you know, hours after appearing on, having you as a guest to talk about this identity crisis and about kind of bringing people together. Can we run, let's run that clip, Zach, that you have of the Don Lemon discussion because I think this comes to bear on these questions of national identity, Vivek, and what you're putting at the foreground of your presidential run. So let's look at this clip real quick. And let me just note that this is, you know, edited down for time, but we have the links to everything in the description. We fought a civil war in this country to give black Americans the equal protection under the law that we failed to secure them in 1776. But then you wanna know what happened? Southern states passed anti-gun laws that stopped black people from owning guns. The Democrat Party then as of now wanted to put them back in chains. That war was not fought for black people to have guns. That war was fought for black people to have freedoms in this country. Actually, that's why the civil war was fought. And the sad part about it. That war wasn't fought for black people to have guns, I think. Actually, you know, the funny fact is black people did not get to enjoy the other freedoms until their Second Amendment rights were secured. And I think that that's one of the lessons that we learned. Black people still aren't allowed to enjoy the freedoms. I disagree with you on that, Don. I disagree with you on it. I think you're doing a disservice to our country by failing to recognize the fact that when you are already black skin, and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me. But we're not. Well, here's where you and I have a different point of view. I think we should be able to express our views regardless of the color of our skin. We should have this debate. I'm not saying you shouldn't express your views. Without me regarding you as a black man. I think it's insulting that you're sitting here. But me regarding you as a fellow citizen. That's what I'm thinking. That you're sitting here, whatever ethnicity you are, explaining to me. Whatever ethnicity I'm all telling you. About what it's like to be black in America. Whatever ethnicity I am, I'll tell you what I am. I'm an Indian-American. I'm proud of it. But I think we should have this debate. Black, white doesn't matter. I think we should have this debate. On the content of the ideas. If you're going to do it, you should do it in an honest way. And let's note that according to the New York Times, this might have been one of the last straws for Don Lemon. They, right here, that the incident left several CNN leaders exasperated. So just before we get into the substance of your disagreement with Don Lemon there, what's your reaction to his dismissal? I mean, look, I think that depends on the mission of your organization. If the mission of your organization is to foster a particular worldview, in this case, a woke worldview, and to advance that that's a perfectly legitimate or living a free country, you're allowed to start an enterprise where that's your purpose. Don Lemon would make a great host. But if your stated mission of your organization is what Chris Licht, the new CEO of CNN, says their mission is, is to foster diverse viewpoints and actually engage in the prevarience of news and opinions that are diverse in nature on your programs, then Don Lemon would not be a good host. Maybe he shouts down guests on the base of the color of their skin saying they can't make those arguments and you didn't have the segment where he was also shouting at his producers and preventing as a co-host from getting into the conversation. So it depends on what the mission of your organization is. CNN has stated its missions. I think it would be very consistent with that mission for them to find a better anchor than Don Lemon. So I'm happy to have played the final role in squeezing the lemonade out of the lemon and moving on with it. So I think more debates what we need. And by the way, can I ask you a question? This is a live stream that you guys do, right? Do you also put it out as a podcast or is it just a live stream? It will go up right as a podcast. I like this live stream model, right? Do you take questions from people too? We're, yes we do. We have an audience questions in a little bit as well. I love in that clip the way that Poppy Harlow, the co-host, starts reading her phone because she's like, I'm not gonna get involved in this. What is your question? The reason I asked that, the reason I asked that about your guys' thing is that's different about cable TV as a medium. That would have been kind of fun actually to get like audience reactions during the middle of that. And instead I just saw Poppy look very uncomfortable and that's all the reaction we had. Yeah, it might be a generational thing as well. I mean, what has happened broadly across the world is that power differentials have been leveled and equalized by things like the internet. And cable news, which at one time was new media is now old media and it's not used to kind of the back and forth. I think the world, younger people in general are newer forms of technology really enable or kind of demand. What is your, what's your pitch to black America though? Because most blacks are, blacks the share of black votes that went to the GOP went up a little bit under Trump in the second term. But basically since Eisenhower in his second term, it's rare when a Republican candidate can get 10% of the black vote. What's your pitch to black America? As you're testing about for a new national identity. Yeah, so the first thing I would say is I don't view there as being one black America, just like there's no one white America or one Indian American America. I reject that premise at the outset. But why do we take a look at this demographic that tends to vote Democrat? I think a big part of the problem is Republicans have not explained what our intentions are. And I say our, I mean, I'm an America first conservative. I am using the Republican Party as a vehicle to advance my set of ideals. I'm very open about that. I'm not a partisan politician or hack. I could care less for political partisanship. Most of it bores me, but we're playing the game of presidential politics. Let's talk about the Republican Party. I think let's look at the facts. I mean, Lyndon Johnson created a so-called great society, it's the biggest misnomer in modern political history, that wasn't a very great society for the very black people it was supposed to help. Paid mothers, government money to have an incentive to get the dad out of the house so they could make more money. Uncle Sam's better for me than you over here. Maybe I'll marry him instead. So how you get to over 70% of black kids being born into two parent households in the 1960s to less than 30% today, you get what you pay for is the answer to that. And I think it's at a front. I don't think that's been good for black Americans across the country. And it's also true, I mean, I'm thinking of somebody like Jackie Robinson who in 1960 campaign for Richard Nixon in 1964 campaign for Democrats because Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-60s when much of the country was still under legal segregation where it was illegal to serve blacks and whites equally. It was illegal for blacks to go to certain schools and things like that. It strikes me as kind of, if you start the clock in 1968 or 1972, it's one thing, but this, I mean, I think this is part of the Republican problem with an appeal to black Americans is that, yeah. I mean, that's ancient history at this point for the partisan. No, no, it is literally, if you're talking about, Lyndon Johnson, we're talking about the 60s and Barry votes 164. Fair enough. I was talking about Lyndon Johnson because many of those policies are still in effect today, right? Civil Rights Act did pass and there's broad consensus in favor of the Civil Rights Act today. I think that there should not be, in my opinion, broad consensus around the vestiges of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, so that's the distinction I draw. I mean, the Republican Party is the party that was the abolitionist party and the post-reconstruction era also wanted to put guns in the household of black Americans so they could actually secure those civil rights as I was talking about in that clip. So go back, and these parties, like I said, these labels mean very little if you go far enough back, parties have flip flop. But what I say is that the policies I care about want to go to the root causes, restore the nuclear family structure as a cultural norm in this country, including in black America. Restore focus on education. School choice is a big part of this. Empowering many black families that are trapped in ghetto-like communities for their kids to be trapped in those schools. And I use that word intentionally to provoke the point that we're really confining people to the public school systems where they live without school choice programs. Democrats are the ones who are opposed to school choice programs, right? Donald Trump was the most pro-school choice president in history, the federal government. I was obviously plays a limited role in education. Why would you be better than Donald Trump, who is your, you know, who is the leading Republican candidate, former president himself, former businessman? Why are you better than Donald Trump? I think he was gonna take the America First agenda about as far as he was gonna go. I'm now taking it further and taking on issues that Trump was, frankly, I think a little bit reluctant to touch. Take affirmative action. The U.S. president can end affirmative action. Also started under Lyndon Johnson by an executive order. Trump could have ended it by an executive order. I pushed his people on why they didn't do it. They said it was a political hill they did not want to die on. I have no such fears or inhibitions. I'll take that on. I'll do it on day one. Easy thing to do, one, one, two, four, six. Put into motion by Lyndon Johnson. We'll take a pen and cross it out. I reject the climate cult. I will issue an executive order saying that we're done measuring or mandating carbon emissions measurements through any vector of the federal government. That's a longer discussion, but I think it's based on fraudulent premises. And so I'll get that done. I think that shutting, you're gonna talk about the Department of Education. Yes, he put a good person on top of it, Betsy DeVos. Well, the way I view it is that government agency should have never existed in the first place. I'll shut it down. I've identified a list of government agencies that I would actually literally shut down. So I'm going further than Trump, but here's the thing. I think we'll also unify the country as we do it. And I know that sounds counterintuitive. I'm going further than Trump on America first, but also uniting the country. Yes, is the answer. Because if we're doing it based on first principles and moral authority, rather than vengeance and grievance, that is the path to national unity, a national revival, rather than a national divorce. I don't think we get to national unity by showing up in the proverbial middle and saying, let's all compromise and hold hands and saying kumbaya. I think we get to national unity by embracing the radicalism of the American ideals that bind us together across our diversity. And that's what I'm doing in a way that, I think the last president who actually tied the agenda to the why, to those principles was actually Ronald Reagan. And I think that's why Reagan was more successful than Trump. I think he was actually in driving a national revival every year. One of the other, your platform is called America first 2.0. We'll have a link in the show notes to so people can run through it. You mentioned getting rid of the Department of Education, a bunch of other alphabet agencies. One of them is the FBI. What is your argument? And this is a libertarian audience. So you've already, you had us at F, but what is your case against dismantling the FBI and what would you replace it with? Yeah, FBI, IRS, ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've identified, and I'm not doing this glibly, right? Because there's agencies, we can just list the whole thing. We studied and understood what we're gonna do with each one. The Department of Education should have never existed in the first place. We're shutting that down. The FBI, look, as long as you're gonna have federal laws, you need a federal law enforcement apparatus, but that's in a different category as is the IRS. As long as you have taxes, which I'm not a big fan of, but as long as you have taxes, you need somebody to collect them. So be it. The problem there is slightly different. You have a cultural corruption of those institutions that runs so deep that I believe it will be impossible to reform, top down or any other way. It's part of the rot of the beast. It is, the Leviathan itself is ossified. And so I think they're the only right answer is you shut it down and then you built something skeletal from scratch to take its place that actually respects the Constitution rather than viewing it as an inconvenience. And it's the same FBI that corruptly denied Martin Luther King Jr. in this country a concealed carry permit that now politicizes in other directions. So if you look at the area under the curve over the last 60 years, this would actually be a bipartisan consensus. It's just that Republicans and Democrats would have supported it at different times. So I'm getting a job done that we should have gotten done 60 years ago. It's literally still the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC that those employees walk into. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, even though the guy's long gone and I'll shut it down. And I think that that's something I'm taking on without apology. The other thing, before I forget it guys is just because we were having a meeting about the debate stage and everything else is the way I get on the debate stage and get to the center of the debate stage is actually one of the attributes is unique donor counts. So if people like and agree, you don't have to agree with everything I'm saying but if you believe and you don't even have to know you're gonna vote for me but if you believe this set of ideas we can drive that on the Republican debate stage just like I took it to the debate stage with Don Lemon if you want to see these ideas at the forefront of the GOP see Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump and others answer to it and us actually sharpening what the GOP actually stands for. Interesting question there. Help me do it. I think literally everybody, right now I'm gonna just be craving about it. We're not about raising money. You know, I'm not opposed to that, right? But we're talking about unique donor counts. That's one of the key metrics they've actually recently identified. Give one dollar. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do about the suggestion? Yeah, I mean, trust me, anybody who sees this will know where to find you and give you money and if- Nick, could I just return to the alphabet agencies for a second there? Because for libertarians another group that we tend to worry about are the national security agencies, the NSA, the CIA, the DHS and talk about lawlessness and the kind of unwinding we've seen of our foreign policy in general in terms of both covert and overt operations overseas. What is your general take on kind of that national security apparatus and just- It is corrupt. National defense, okay. It is corrupt. It's fundamentally corrupt. And you know what? I mean, even recently we started to look to ancient history for this. I think it is appalling that we have a media that will focus on the mechanics of a leak and how to prosecute some basically kid who leaked some material and I'm not condoning that, but what about focusing on the substance of the leak that we actually have troops on the ground in Ukraine which is in a war with Russia without telling the American people not only without telling what lying about it, right? And this has just been a habitual pattern in our national security establishment. It is corrupt. So I'm actually looking to- So you get rid of, do you get rid of the Pentagon too? You build that from scratch? Well, I'm not gonna be glib. I mean, I've studied the agencies that were, we've already identified to shut down and I mean it when I say we will shut them down and the ones we'll rebuild and the ones we won't. You know, I have a very, I'll certainly drain the managerial class at the Pentagon. That much I'll go without saying but I'm not gonna just give you a glib answer. I'm not Ron DeSantis. I'm not just gonna say something because I think it's gonna impress you and then you just screw it up later. But here's what I will say. Massive reform is needed. The managerial class runs the show at the Pentagon. That much is clear. How we go about draining it, that's a beast we're gonna have to look at how we take on. I think I'm also gonna send a signal and set some tone here. I'm looking actually, the campaign trail is so busy but I wanna make a trip out to the UK. I wanna visit Julian Assange. I expect to pardon Julian Assange. I think the fact that Chelsea Manning got a sentence commuted by President Obama but without Julian Assange, the person who actually just published the information that was leaked. I just think this is just reeks of the rot that is the administrative police state disguised in the garb of National Security. What about people like Everett Snowden or Daniel Hale? Also are they patriots or are they truth tellers or are they treason? I have a long and growing pardon list. I mean, the likes of Douglas Mackie, who's facing 10 years in prison now for making a meme about Hillary Clinton's supporters on the internet. This is not the country we live in. So here's what I am on the story thing. I actually think he did do an important national service. I'm thinking through that pardon. Julian Assange, I'm on firm footing on because he's a journalist. He's somebody who literally posted the stuff he was given. That's just how the free press works. This is a selective prosecution. The thing with Snowden is part of what might make it honorable is he took the risk and the knowing risk of actually, you know, he violated the law, right? And so I believe in the rule of law. That's a tougher case for me. And so I'm thinking through that, but that's not something I'm gonna make a commitment on right now, but Julian Assange, I have thought through and made a commitment on that. And I'll say it if I mean it. Well, with Assange, you know, what he is, what they're going to have gone after him for posting or working with Chelsea Manning to post were these videos from, you know, military operations in Afghanistan, basically. One involved the kind of gunning down of a photojournalist. I am curious, you know, as a, you say you're continuing the America First agenda and part of that what Trump shook up within the Republican Party was foreign policy and rethinking the role of American military might where we should and shouldn't be in the world. What are your thoughts on American foreign policy interventionism? I think it has been disastrously expansive. And I think that we should actually have leaders who are able to lead with authority diplomatically using our economic might and the backstop of military strength, yes, but economic might is part of it. It's part of what we've also lost to lead diplomatically and also some of this is first personal. I mean, who the leader is. It's not just some system. First personal leadership actually matters. We're not doing enough of that, certainly under Biden, but we're substituting for it by sending U.S. military capabilities to places like Ukraine. And, you know, I've been pretty clear about this. I would not send another dollar to Ukraine. In fact, I think it's in the front that we now discover that we have American troops on the ground in Ukraine. So I think intervention in parts of the world where we have no direct national interest has been a disaster. I applaud Trump for actually defecting from a bipartisan consensus around that for much of the last 20 years. He deserves credit for that. Now, I'm looking in other respects to take the agenda much further than Trump did to do it based on principles, but I want to recognize that was a positive development in our foreign policy as I see it. And I intend to continue that course. On Donald Trump, you know, Don Lemon got in trouble a couple of weeks ago when Nikki Haley announced saying she was past her prime because she was in her, I guess, early 50s as a woman. Donald Trump is gonna be like 78. You know, he's an old man. Is Donald Trump past his prime? Well, it's funny. Joe Biden and Donald Trump will literally be more than twice. They are literally more than twice my age and then some. But I'm not one of these people that says just because you're old, you know, you're disqualified or whatever. I think this is another form of cheap identity politics. I know a lot of people who are, not a lot, but some who are older than Joe Biden and sharper than many people my age, right? So that happens too. I think that the question is, how far was he gonna go? And I think he did most of what he was gonna do. He went about as far as he was gonna go. I think that you can go further if we're actually doing it on principled footing rather than just vengeance and grievance. That's gonna be the fuel that takes you so far. Principles could take you further. And I'll tell you this, I'll tell you this too, actually this is just true. This relates to your question a little more closely. I won't be the same person eight years from now if I'm in the White House for the next 10 years, for the next eight years, plus the year and a half of the campaign that's left. I won't be the same person then that I am today, just as Trump isn't the same person that he was in 2015. You get to be an outsider once. This time I've got fresh legs. I'm not jaded and cynical yet. I'm not tired and defeated yet. And so you take the torch, you patch it on the next guy who's able to take it further and I expect to do the same when I'm leaving office as well. I think that's the way it's like it works. What's your role for national debt? And debt is a problem and deficits spending are borrowing constantly. Depresses long-term economic growth. The flood of cheap money and fake money obviously is a major cause if not the major cause of inflation. We have a massive and ongoing debt problem. We have unsustainable old age entitlements. All of the budget we're approaching 70% of the federal budget is basically for Medicare and Social Security. These have funds that are going bust in the near future. What is your plan to alter old age entitlements and bring government spending and revenue into some kind of a court? Well, the top low-hanging fruit is what nobody in either party's talking about which amazes me, which is actually GDP growth itself. It's as though we've forgotten that's an option and in all of those projections that say we're gonna run out of money, assume fairly enough I guess the current GDP growth rate and if you extrapolate that out, yes, we're going bust. I cannot financially and fiscally speaking. It doesn't have to be that way. We've grown at more than 4% GDP growth for most of our national history. If we get back to a three-handle, three-point something, actually most of those fiscal problems are completely gone. Now that doesn't mean that I don't favor more discipline in our spending but I'm just talking about lower-hanging fruit here. No, no, but wait, lower-hanging fruit being economic growth, that's kind of crazy talking because- It's not, I tell you why. Okay, but I'm just saying in the 21st century we've had lower than average 2% annual GDP growth before that, for the 50 years before that it was more like 3%. Most advanced economies have also seen bad economic growth. So how are you gonna conjure that out of a hat? And I don't think anybody, the one thing we can control is government spending, right? Not whether or not the economy grows or not. Well actually, I think that that's a much, I mean we do have a constitutional system of self-governance that let me challenge you back. If it was gonna be so easy, why haven't we done it? I think we actually lack political consensus and social consensus around the commitments we've historically made. So if that was so easy, what happened? Now let me tell you, you could say the same in reverse to me about GDP growth but you haven't had a president like me, let me tell you actually identifying obstacles to GDP growth and then how we're gonna address them. The number one obstacle that's easily addressable is unshackling the US energy sector. It's actually a fundamental input to the rest of the economy. We have put ourselves in a straight jacket at behest of this climate cult that shackles the US while leaving China untouched. I think it's a big problem, it's easily solvable and I can go into detail on how I would address it. Drill, frack, burn coal. Yes, I know those are epithets, embrace nuclear energy, we can talk about that too. Productivity drives GDP growth. Productivity is in part driven by the productivity of the American energy sector. Second thing is that we've talked about the number one obstacle to many businesses growing right now is the worker shortage. You get what you pay for. We subsidize four year gender studies majors in California or whatever, without actually putting in a competitive disadvantage then by definition. Cultural and gender studies graduates are 0.04% of all college graduates on an annual basis. That's not the issue. No, no, no, but I'm the reason I wanna push back. I'm pushing back and you're pushing back because you're interrupting. Nick, I'm using an expression. I'm using an expression, four year college degrees. I think we have a fundamental disagreement on how achievable GDP growth can be. I do not share your defeatist perspective on this, but I'm in the middle of telling you how we're gonna do it, so if I may, and then let's debate it. I didn't bring up gender studies, you know, what's wrong with the college system? I'm stating a fact is we subsidize for your college education, which actually subsidizes people, take it on debt that they shouldn't take on, then the government gets in a quick sand where they have to say they relieve it as opposed to which necessarily puts it a competitive disadvantage. It's just definitionally a competitive disadvantage. Somebody who wants to pursue a one year program to be a builder, a mechanic, a carpenter, a plumber. Well, you can't find a builder, a mechanic, a carpenter, a plumber. Part of it's what you get what you pay for. Part of it is that Lyndon Johnson Great Society, which created a culture, an anti-work culture in this country. You know, put that on supercharge with the COVID aid over the last couple of years. We have created a culture of laziness in this country because human beings are not economic automatons. So even after you strip back some of that COVID aid, people start to form that habit. So unshackling the energy sector, putting people back to work and merit-based immigration plays a role in that and the third is reform of the Federal Reserve, which is fundamentally hostile. So let me ask you a question here because how interested are you in this third topic because this will require a minute to explain. I think our audience will be interested. Yes. Okay, because Nick, you're cool too. I just want to make sure before I go on this. We're not generally big fans of a loose and baggy Fed. So please go. Okay. So this is a fundamental obstacle to GDP growth in the country that something the president can do. So what happened with the Federal Reserve is I think it's not a coincidence that when we went off the gold standard, actually before 1972, we actually were growing at four plus percent GDP growth for most of our national history. We went off the gold standard, we had a Federal Reserve that still was nominally, including under Volcker, committed to stabilizing the dollar as a unit of measurement. We still had three plus percent GDP growth for the period through the eighties, nineties, et cetera. What happened is a bunch of academicians took over the Fed in the late 1990s under the mythology of this thing called the Phillips Curve. I don't know if this means something to you or not, but okay, I mean, is this myth that there's a trade opportunity and inflation on employment some central? Yes, somebody can control this. It was based on old New Zealand data by a British economist. Anyway, somehow America and Federal Reserve system fell in love with that and figured that we have a financial God that can balance inflation and unemployment. That's about the equivalent of hitting two targets with one arrow, you can't do it. And I think what's happened then is that Federal Reserve has taken on far more responsibility to supposedly smooth out a business cycle which they've actually exacerbated. So one of the things they do is they take what is a trailing indicator of the business cycle, wage growth in the country, and treat it like a leading indicator. What does that mean? They tighten because they treat wage growth as a leading indicator of inflation when in fact it's the last thing to go up in the business cycle which means they consistently tighten monetary policy into a business cycle downturn which gives us the 2008 financial crisis, a big part of the 2000 tech bubble burst was worsened by this. And then also what we're seeing even now happening in the current 2023 banking instability. So as president, what do you do to control Fed policy? Because that's your way. Fire over 90% of the staff and put them back to a mandate where they focus on stabilizing the dollar as a unit of measurement. Now here's what one of the ways that affects GDP growth is, let's say the number of minutes in an hour floated and it varied and it was volatile. None of us would show up on this live stream at the same time. When the dollar is that volatile, capital does not flow to the most efficient projects. That's an obstacle to GDP growth. So Nick, I come back and just say, don't be so jaded. GDP growth is lowering your fruit even politically and yet nobody's talking about it. I don't give up on that. And you know what I've, I've lived the life of building a successful career made up, I don't apologize for my success. A lot of money in the system of free market American capitalism. I have a good handle on how to, on how to actually accomplish. I think it's actually far more politically feasible to abandon the climate called put people back to work, reform the federal reserve. And then we'll get spending cuts. Well, yeah. What are the spending cuts concretely because this is something that nobody ever wants to talk about every, you know, even Democrats will talk about cutting wasteful spending, but entitlement, so security, Medicare, what, what has to happen if anything to fix that? So I'm telling you what I'm going to do, right? I'm not going to be there for more than eight years. In the eight years I'm there, I'm prioritizing GDP growth and then shaving down the administrative state. There will be fewer than 25% of the federal employees at the end of my presidency than there will be on day one. That much I'm confident of. That paves the way for the next guy to then actually take aim at much of what that federal bureaucracy perpetuates. Now, in the second term, maybe we'll return to that, but I'm being very clear about what I think there will be broad consensus to get done. And here's why I'm focused on where I am too. I don't like to make false promises. Why don't make false promises? Everything I've told you or almost everything I've told you can be done by the, who would have ever thought, the office that I'm running for, the US president without asking Congress for permission, reform of the administrative state, shutting down government agencies, reform of the federal reserve. All this was sending the executive order that created affirmative action in America. Draw a common thread through that. The things I'm telling you I'm gonna do, I know I can tell you I'll do them because I can do them without asking Congress for permission. That's the mistake that most US presidents make as they drive a legislative agenda. Throw a little pop quiz back at you guys, all right? How long have you been doing this podcast, by the way? Since fall of 2016. Oh, okay. All right, so this makes this question very fairer game then. What was Trump's top policy promise that he made? Legislative promise, you remember what it was? I'm saying it's either that it was gonna be anti-political correctness or that it was gonna build a wall. Yeah, those were slogans but he had a piece of legislation that he ran on, repeal and replace Obamacare. Okay, that worked out. It was a pledge, yeah, it didn't work out so well, right? Because Congress stifles you. So I'm keeping a clear head on my shoulders. I'm an executive, I know how to get things done. I have a vision for the country. I think I can lead us out of our national identity crisis with the things a president and a president alone can do without asking anybody for permission or for forgiveness. You know, another one of Trump's slogans was he was gonna drain the swamp and that kinda sounds like what you're saying here is you're gonna clear out the dead wood, get leaner and meaner. It kinda relates to one of our audience questions here from Brandon Quinn who says, how do you commit to dismantling government agencies once elected? I'll just put a little twist on that and say, what are you gonna do differently from Trump who said that he was gonna come in? You know, Bannon, his advisor at the time was talking about deconstructing the administrative state. So what strategic or political difference or attack are you going to take? So a couple of things. I mean, I think the two main obstacles are one, civil service protections where the classic advice is you can't fire people. The second is actually, relates to what's called impoundment prevention that you have to spend money that Congress has allocated. Let me start with the second because that's what's generally viewed by legal scholars as the bigger obstacle. So there's a problem with the budgeting process. And here's how it works. Before, the way the Constitution envisioned it, there was three branches of government, not four. The executive branch asked for permission to spend money. So the White House would ask Congress for permission to spend. Presidents started to get lazy. They delegated that after the birth of the administrative state to say, hey, you agencies, talk to Congress directly or go through the OMB and talk to Congress directly and make those budget requests and Congress is lazy. And so they just started suggesting draft language. What the deep state really learned is that, hey, this is an opportunity. What used to go as draft bills and legislation for budgets as you may spend X, somehow started to come back as you shall spend X because that's what the administrative state wanted. So then let's say if Trump comes along and says, hey, I want to, you know, this or that, the administrative state goes back and says, no, no, no, Mr. President, you can't do that because Congress has said you shall spend it. Simple solution. I believe there's one executive branch, not two. It's called the Unitary Theory of the Executive. You don't need a fancy word to do it. There's three branches of government, not four. All budget requests will go through the White House and we'll come back with permission to spend, which is what the framers envisioned, but that doesn't mean that I have to spend it. So I can go through the language and the civil service stuff. We might put people to sleep, but the point is you require two things to get this done. I think it's gonna take an outsider, not somebody who's a creature of the swamp, and Trump was certainly an outsider, but it's gonna be somebody who has their own first personal bone deep constitutional conviction to actually see that through. And I don't think that existed in the Trump administration. That's what I'm bringing to the table is a combination of, yeah, I've written three books in the last 18 months and a lot of it's about constitutionalism and all of that. I've also built multi-billion dollar businesses and I'm not a professional politician. That's a unique combination of attributes and speaking as a member of my generation, as I said, first millennial candidate ever to run as a Republican, I think that's gonna be a unique blend to see this through. The Leviathan will strike back. I'm not gonna make it as easy as Trump did to go after me. That doesn't mean they won't and that doesn't mean that I'm not fully ready for it, but you can't make it easy. And I think in many ways, Trump did make it easy for them to strike. I think for this final portion of our conversation, we should shift to a discussion of woke capitalism since that's a big, recurring topic of your campaign and your books, the most recent to at least, and there's been a lot of comments to that regard. One here says just FYI, I'm not voting for anyone whose platform includes waging a war with wokeism because your idea is essentially based off censoring other speech. Wrong, dead long, dead long. I mean, I can kind of speak to that concern a little bit and you can respond to this because I live in Ron DeSantis' Florida and I've watched him advance things like the Stop Woke Act. That's his attempt to stop wokeness from encroaching into the schools and into corporate America. And to my mind, the way it's been done here is a pretty clear violation of free speech rights. It's- So I think Ron DeSantis is sloppy. I think Ron DeSantis is sloppy because he doesn't have an understanding of why he's doing what he's doing. I think that, and it's a shame that he has screwed this up in many ways that have folks like yourselves, maybe in person ask that question, understandably irritated when somebody says they're fighting wokeness, first of all, that's how I'm labeled. I never actually say that I'm waging a war on wokeness. I say, I want a crusade to revive a missing national identity. Those are different things. That's what's me versus Ron DeSantis is different, is Ron DeSantis is a troll. Yes, and I named that book at a time where most people didn't know what the word woke does and it woke was and it actually offers the most rigorous definition of what we're actually talking about, that a bunch of Republican puppets then take and run with and bastardize what it actually means. And so, yes, I did. I wrote the book on it, try reading the book and whoever asked the question, I think we'll have a very different impression after reading that book. Give a quick summary then of how battling wokeness does not get the government into policing what is and is not permissible speech either in the public sphere or in corporate America. So that's the question to ask. It's called a woke ink for a reason. The ink part is actually what's doing the work. So a lot of this is top down government driven in the first place. That's what we need to see. That's what Ron DeSantis, by the way, fails to see. That's what I think a lot of the people who are just going through the motions of criticizing wokeness fail to see. Let's talk about woke capitalism, ESG movement. That's not the free market. That's an illusion. Don't fall for the trick. What's happening is that the three largest asset managers in the country, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are using $20 trillion of citizens' money to foist those agendas onto corporate boards. I mean, let's say Apple. I'll give you some examples just to be specific here because it's a specific question that deserves specificity. Apple and Home Depot did not want to adopt a racial equity audit until BlackRock and State Street voted for it and then they had to. Chevron did not want to adopt a scope three emissions cap until BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard used the money of everyday citizens without their permission to vote for that politicized policy. They will say it's about long run investment return. It's not, and I've written essay length and book length works about why. And I can tell you why too, but suffice to say that everyone here will be persuaded that the proponents and opponents of those proposals and those boards themselves agreed they had nothing to do with advancing shareholder value is about advancing a social agenda. So BlackRock and State Street or private companies, you might say, why are they doing it? Well, here's why. Blue states like California, CalPERS and the Pension Fund, New York City Comptroller and New York State Pension Funds say that they can't manage their money unless they adopt firm wide commitments to the Paris climate accords, which by the way the US did not sign up to and troubled out of it. Net zero standards by 2050, modern diversity, equity inclusion standards. That is not the invisible hand of the free market. That is the invisible fist of government which should make every libertarian's blood boil. So do not, they are trying to use your language back against you. And I say your, I mean, strong libertarian instincts used to call myself one not that long ago. They're weaponizing the language to dupe you into thinking that this is the evidence of the free market when in fact it's lurking state action the entire time. I also tell conservatives, I coach them, stop talking about big tech censorship. It's not. It's government tech censorship because then government is using a combination of threats and special immunities and coordination to do through the back door what government couldn't do through the front door. I mean, I think every libertarian should have the hair on their back stand up to know that the Biden White House specifically calls in executives from say Twitter to identify individual critics of the government by name like Alex Berenson and pressure them and ask them and threaten them as to why they haven't silenced that person which they then do and get an atta boy on the back when they do. That's not the free market. That is state action in disguise. And if you need a rhyme to help you, if it's state action in disguise the constitution still applies. The Supreme Court has held that on countless occasions from Bantam books where a prosecutor threatened a bookstore owner to remove a book. The bookstore owner removed the book. Supreme Court said that wasn't private action. That was state action to the railroads and the war on drugs. Actually, there's a case called Hansen where the federal government wanted a way to war on drugs. Problem is we have a fourth amendment in this country. It's a good thing. Well, what they said is we'll wrap a special form of immunity around those railroads saying that those private railroads can search whoever they want. That's just the action of a private company and passengers can't sue them. Supreme Court said not so fast because if they're using immunity as an inducement to get a private company to do what the government couldn't do then that's lurking state action. That's exactly how section 230 works, by the way, for internet companies. And so back to the original question. Wait a minute, what did you mean by that? Oh, oh yes. So section 230 is the analogous form of the immunity that you wrap around the railroad company by saying that they can't be sued by a passenger for violating their fourth amendment rights. The same thing is what section 230 C2 does. People mix up C1 and C2. Section 230 C2, what it says is even if there's a political non-discrimination statute like that Florida adopted, for example, that that would be preempted by section 230 C2. And even if a citizen would have otherwise been able to sue for the removal or wrongful removal of constitutionally protected speech or suing of the or removal of their account due to terms of service or whatever else, they can't because federal protection, section 230 C2 preempts it just like that law of the railroads preempted a passenger from being able to sue the railroad. Okay, seems like a stretch, but okay. I've argued this at book length works, man. So you can read it and check it out. So yeah. Certainly, capitalists, just to give you a plug for your book, capitalist punishment is an extensive look at the way that ESG is kind of being worked through the system. But can I, just very quickly before Zach tribes in, in that book, you seem to be saying more that it is the private actors. It is the Black Rocks, the state in the Vanguard to the world that are pushing this agenda through kind of overly passive investors who have kind of given up their rights for as shareholders. So I'm saying that it's actually lurking state action that guides Black Rock at State Street and Vanguard to behave that way. And other conflicts of interest that they enjoy even with state actors, both in the US and even in China that cause them to advocate on behalf of everyday citizens using their money to do it. It's a complicated topic. So we could have a multi-hour discussion or a book length work explaining it, but the reality is this idea that it's just private actors making decisions without government intervention is a farce. And I'll even point to the Biden rule. So Biden had a pro ESG department of labor rule that said its objective was to expressly permit retirement fund managers to take into account collateral benefits other than investment return. There was initially a disclosure requirement to retirees to let them know that's what they were doing. They removed the disclosure requirement because they purposefully wanted to make sure people didn't know about it. Their stated justification is they said that would have a chilling effect on the use of ESG factors. But if it takes them away from this conversation, it's from this part of our conversation, it's I think the details matter, right? And so do I think that this type of government foisted woke capitalism ESGism is a problem I do. But all I want is the government actually to get out of the way, which is different than somebody like Ron DeSantis who doesn't understand the mechanics of anything that I've just told you, that thinks the right action is somebody's behaving woke and it's up in the state of Florida to come after them. We've got five minutes with your left, Vivek. So Azak, do you want to ask a final question? You know, where I get frustrated with how conservatives talk about this generally is this idea of lurking state action, I think is a good way to think about it. I agree with you that this is a problem, especially we've seen it on revealed more and more with things like the Twitter files, the way that the lurking state action is affecting the actions of private players. Where I get frustrated is conservatives often then take the action not to restrain the state but to clamp down on the private companies. I agree with you. I agree with you. Either take section 230 and I've read your book, you know, Woke, Inc. and one of the places where I sort of saw this was when you were talking about trying to combat your wokeness in the workplace. By expanding employment protections to people based on their political beliefs so that a political belief would be treated like a great religion. A great topic for a libertarian audience, a great topic. It is a good debate to have. So here's what I say. I would be totally fine, and if you find another Republican to say this, find another libertarian politician to say this and I'll give you a prize. I would be totally fine repealing the protected classes. Okay, I don't think we need them. I think that moment has passed. I don't think we need them. However, so long as we have protected classes, let me make the case to you for lurking state action here too for viewpoint discrimination. So what happened is as long as you had race and gender and sexual orientation now included in gender post-boss doc and after the Equality Act, what happened was courts interpreted them so broadly to say that that doesn't just prevent a business from discriminating against an employee on account of the race or their sexual orientation. It also stops the employer from creating a hostile work environment for a member of that protected class. It's illegal for an employer to create a hostile work environment. How does one create a hostile work environment, you might ask? Well, just look at the cases that come before the alphabet soup of the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It includes somebody wearing a red sweater, a grandmother wearing a red sweater on Fridays to celebrate her support for US troops that a member of minority groups said he found to be a microaggression. People wearing the hat of the wrong presidential candidate. I could go on with examples. But what's the point I'm making? The existence of those protected classes construed broadly, created the conditions for viewpoint discrimination the government did while leaving political viewpoints unprotected. So you can't have it both ways. Either we get rid of the protected classes and actually let the market work or you correct for a negative externality of actually having intervened in the market, creating government created viewpoint discrimination. And then here's a funny thing that a lot of people know. It's actually blue states that have viewpoint based discrimination protections. It's on the books in California and even in limited sense in other blue states because that was actually during the Bush era something that they worried about in terms of viewpoint discrimination in the private sector in the other direction. So again, here's where I think details matter. And the funny part is I probably have the deepest libertarian instincts of anybody who's run for US president in modern history. But I'm willing to actually go beyond, I don't believe in just reciting those pions either. I think we have to look at the unique threats to liberty as they present themselves in the year 2023. And so long as we have an unspoken consensus that we're not allowed to go back and look at the Civil Rights Act in 1964, then let's get real about actually addressing liberty as it's experienced by. You're rank ordering, you're saying you would support the elimination of the protected class. Absolutely. But I'll be honest, that's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. That's the best solution. But in your mind, it's actually an improvement to expand the protected classes in the absence of that. That is where I think there's room for debate and questioning. I agree. But running out of time on the stream. So I'm gonna leave it to Nick to kind of wrap up with a final question. I guess, you know, I read Capitalist Punishment. I've read Woke, Inc., and I find them interesting. I have, this is a broader question. What is kind of, what's your theory of social change? Because it's clear that America in most ways has gotten better. Where, you know, we're a more tolerant country, we're a more open country, et cetera. But, you know, thinking about the Don Lemon exchange and other things, and you've been critical of things like Black Lives Matter movements, you're critical of the government force and corporations to do certain things. You're critical of corporations expressing political commitments or cultural commitments that may or may not be at odds with their bottom lines or whatever. But, you know, you very much emphatically followed Milton Friedman on the idea that, you know, the primary or the only function of a corporation is to increase shareholder value. We have a great early 2000s debate with Milton Friedman, John Mackey of Whole Foods, and T.J. Rogers, formerly the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. But I guess what I'm asking is, what's your theory of social change? Is it fundamentally political? Is it cultural? Is it economic? Is it technological? You know, and I, in thinking about this and going back to that immigration question, which I come back to a lot, in the early 20s, as immigration was being restricted pretty much everywhere in the world, there was a famous case where a man from India who had served in World War I and had become a citizen or tried to become a citizen, it went all the way to the Supreme Court and it was ruled that people from India could not be Americans. They could not be naturalized citizens. They couldn't move here legally. And that wasn't fixed until 1946. You know, how does that happen? How do we protest? How do we change? How do we make society more the way that we want it to be? And obviously what that is changes. What is your theory ultimately of social change? Because sometimes it seems like you're attacking political change or technological change or cultural change or commercial activity. How, you know, what's the best way for America to find what that national identity is? It's a great question. This is the conversation we need to be having across the country because I don't think it should just be top down. I think the role of a president in driving that change is to set a national example. I think Ronald Reagan is the last president who did that well. I think we can't just preach about family values. I mean, the person we elect in the White House is not a robot. It's not an automaton. It's a human being. And I think setting that national example I think is underappreciated as a lever for driving positive social change in a way that doesn't require violating anybody's principles or political convictions. And I think that that's a missed opportunity in this country in the last eight years, certainly a badly missed opportunity at a time where we could have used a fulfillment of our hunger for purpose and meaning and even the examples of leadership that set. I think it's also gonna require people stepping up then and responding to that example in ways that cause parents to step up in the way they take responsibility for raising their kids. Business leaders to step up and say, my goal, the way you create shareholder value is to have a worthy mission and to stick to that mission rather than to be browbeat and into orthogonal objectives in their own capacities. Not because the government browbeats them into doing it. That's where Ron DeSantis and I are different. But because they choose to do that through their own inspiration and self-discovery as part of a process of cultural change. And then if there's a government as is the case today that actually browbeats them in the other direction, the role of actually a good version of a government leader is to remove that, I would say, artificial state guidance, that invisible fist of the big government. So I think that my theory of social change of these things are best delivered bottom up. I think the role of the government is to get out of the way, but we can't assume that the status quo is starting at some sort of neutral white slate. And in very great discussion of how you guys have really enjoyed it, that's why I no longer, that's one of the reasons I no longer call myself a libertarian is that I find that many people who do like to wish a status quo that isn't a status quo. We're starting with all kinds of complicated lurking state action that we can't wish away. It is what it is and we're starting in the present. Correcting that is gonna take, I think more than just recitations to pions we memorized 40 years ago because that's not the world as it exists today. And that's what I think a leader in the White House needs to understand is staying true to those principles, but also one of the things that I've said, for example, I would do, and this relates to a point you raised earlier, one of my executive orders on day one will be any time there has been a government bureaucrat in the last five years, we could say 10 years, but practically we'll say five years who has pressured a private actor to take an action that the government couldn't have otherwise taken, we have to publish that. We have to at least see it. It's called the Twitter files, called the state action files. And I think that that's neither a violation of, is that an overreach of government authority? No, we're talking about making transparent the misdeeds of the government itself. And so you call that a war on bureaucracy, a war on wokeness, who cares what you label it? I think I stay true to the principle of understanding that the threats to liberty did originate, many of them, the ones I'm concerned with certainly, with government overreach, be it blue state pension funds in California or be it our federal government, but let go with the labels that we use, whether you call that conservative or libertarian, stay true to that principle. And that goes to the heart of national identity itself because we're a nation founded on those principles. And that's what I'm leading both through my policy agenda, if you go deep enough to understand what the principles that actually underlie it, versus the surface level comparisons to Trump or DeSantis. And then also hopefully the personal, first personal example with which, it's the standard that the people of this country you all included should hold me to in leading the country if I'm elected. And so, I think that there's a lot there, but I think that the combination of the example you set and getting the government out of the way is the full extent of what the government leadership job ought to be. And that should be enough to pave the way for other leaders and other spheres of our culture, having nothing to do with government to actually step up and drive what you call positive social change. So it's a great question to end on. And I appreciate it. Thank you. And I appreciate your support. Get me on the debate stage and give a dollar. So that's my cheap ask at the end, but I promise you I will elevate these issues starting in August on the Republican debate stage and I hope they'll be good for the country. All right. Vivek Ramisami, the latest book is Capitalist Punishment. You're running for president. Thanks so much for spending the time with us. Thanks guys. We'll see you. Bye.