YouSaid · the spoken record

Vivek Ramaswamy

lines on the record: 214
first: 2024-09-25
most recent: 2024-09-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Protect national boundaries and provide security for the people who live there and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside there. If we restore that, I think we're well on our way to a revival of what our founding fathers envisioned. And I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector. I mean, you can get into specifics. You could have infrastructure that's specific to national security. I do think that a military-industrial base is essential to provide national security. That's a form of infrastructure. I don't think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation. But, you know, Interstate Highways, I think you could think about whether or not that's a common good that everybody benefits from, but nobody has the incentive to create. I think you could make an argument for the existence of interstate highways. I think you could also make powerful arguments for the fact that actually you could have enough private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well. But I'm not going to be, I'm not dogmatic about this. But broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the goal of the federal government, I'm not going to say 100. 80 to 90 percent of the goal of the existence of a federal government should be to a government period, should be to”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That okay, I'm a capitalist, and so I want to create things and I'm going to do hell or high water whether or not that harms people around me, the job of a proper government is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing their own rights through a system of capitalism in seeking prosperity, you're free to do it. But if you're hurting somebody else without their consent in the process, the government is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property right. So I would say that those are two central functions of government is to preserve national boundaries in the national security of a homeland. And number two is to protect and preserve private property rights and the enforcement of those private property rights. And I think at that point, you've described about”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the question is, what should government do the private sector cannot? I'll give you one. Protect our border. Capitalism, it's never going to be the job of capitalists or never going to be the capability or inclination of capitalists to preserve a national border. And I think a nation, it's literally, I think one of the chapters of this book, a nation without borders is not a nation. It's almost a tautology. An open border is not a border. Capitalism is not going to solve that. What's going to solve that is a nation. Part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its nation, in this case the United States of America. That's an example of a proper function of the federal government to provide physical security to its citizens. Another proper role of that federal government is to look after, or in this case could be state government, to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else without their consent. It's a fancy way economists would use to describe it. What does that mean? It means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else's river, then you're liable for that.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would result in a vastly restrained scope of government, rather than today it's a one way ratchet. Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence, but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well. And that's where you get this metastasis over the last century”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we call it, a task force. Make it a task force. A task force versus an agency means after it's done, you celebrate, you've done your work, pat yourself on the back, and then move on. Rather than creating a standing bureaucracy, which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place. And I think we don't have enough of that in our culture. I mean, even if you have a company that's generated tons of cash flow and it solved a problem, let's say it's a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease. And the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease. And they generated a boatload of cash from doing it. At a certain point, you could just give it to your shareholders and close up shop. And that's actually a beautiful thing to do. You don't see that happen enough in the American consciousness and the American culture of when an institution has achieved its purpose. Celebrate it and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you asked me to steal Manet, and could I say something constructive rather than just, you know, pounding down on the other side. One way to think about this is for a lot of these agencies, were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes. Where that positive intention existed, I'm still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies, but if you're going to create one, at least make it.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“intervened in the curriculum where there's evidence of schools in the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding so long as they have certain subjects like archery. There was one instance of a school that had archery in its curriculum. I find that to be pretty interesting, actually. I think that different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude. But hey, maybe I'm biased. Doesn't matter whether you like archery or not. I don't think it's the federal government's job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate where that locality found that to be irrelevant locus of education. So what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose that's long past. You don't have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve of siphoning money from black school districts to white school districts and laundering that effectively in public funds. That doesn't exist anymore. So they find new purposes instead.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bureaucratic failures. So against that backdrop, the Department of Education has instead extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose to instead implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach. So department education funding, so federal funding accounts for about giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country. But that comes with strings attached. So in today's Department of Education, this didn't happen back in 1970, but it's happening today, ironically, it's funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail, they blow smoke to cover up for their own failures. What happens with today's Department of Education? They effectively say you don't get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals. And in fact, they also...”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“purpose of the U.S. Department of Education to make sure that from a federal perspective states were not systematically disadvantaging black school districts over predominantly white ones. However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago, it's not irrelevant purpose today. There's no evidence today of states intentionally mapping out which are the black versus white school districts and siphoning money in one direction versus another. To the contrary, one of the things we've learned is that the school districts in the inner city, many of which are predominantly black, actually spend more money per student than other school districts for a worse result as measured by test scores and other performance on a per student basis, suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per school determining student success and actually suggesting that even the overfunding of some of those already poorly run schools rewards them for their”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, it seems like a highly relevant question, yet, in this discussion about government reform, it's interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, okay, but we got the status quo and it's just going to be disruptive versus asking the question of, okay, this institution was created. It had an original purpose. Is that purpose still relevant? Is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today? To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So let's talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time, which was to make sure that localities and particularly states were not siphoning dollars taxpayer dollars away from predominantly black school districts to predominantly white ones. And that was not a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening, or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the South. And so you may say you don't like the federal solution. You may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I go back to this question of mission, right A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren't aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place, actually. So that might be a useful place to start is that this thing was created. It had a purpose, presumably. Was that purpose might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decide what are we doing with it or not? What was the purpose of this thing that we created? It's not a”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influence and power relative to the everyday citizen stakeholder and to the creators who are in many ways constrained, hamstrung, shackled in a straitjacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions. And I certainly feel that myself. I probably identify as being a member of that creator class most closely. It's just what I've done. I create things. And I think we live in an environment in the United States of America where we're still probably the best country on earth where that creator has that shot. So that's the positive side of it, but one where we are far more constrictive to the creator class than we have been when we've been at our best. And that's what I want to see change.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constituents of an organizational republic that's the citizen, you could have the equivalent of the creator class, the people who create things in that polity. And then you have the bureaucratic class that's designed to administer and serve as a liaison between the two. I'm not denying that there's some role somewhere for people who are in that managerial class, but right now, in this moment in American history, and I think it's been more or less true for the last century, but it's grown, starting with Woodrow Wilson's advent of the modern administrative state metastasizing through FDR's New Deal and what was required to administer it, blown over and metastasizing further through LBJ's great society and everything that's happened since, even aided and abetted by Republican presidents along the way, like Richard Nixon, has created United States of America where that committee class, both in and outside the government in our culture wields far too much.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. I mean, that's just by the nature of a bureaucracy. It creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever the other process was. Is there some room for that somewhere in certain contexts? Sure. It's like a defensive mechanism that's designed to reduce dynamism. But I think when you becomes cancerous in its scope, it then actually kills the host itself, whether that's a school, whether that's a company, whether that's a government. And so the way I think about it, Lexis, there's sort of a balance of distributed power, and I don't mean power in the Foucault sense of social power, but I mean just sort of power in the sense of the ability to effect relevant change in any organization between what you could call the founder class, the creator class, the everyday citizen, the stakeholder class, and then the managerial class. And there's a role for all three of them, right? You could have the”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Health and human services maybe could be a reasonable mission to say that I want to make America the healthiest country on planet Earth and we will develop the metrics and meet those metrics and that's the goal of the Department of HHS to set policies or at least to implement policies that best achieve that goal. But you can't and maybe that's the right statement of the mission. Maybe it's not. But one of the things that happens is when you're governed by the committee class it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization, whether it's a company or government agency or bureaucracy. And once you've done that, then you lose the ability to track the best and the brightest because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential, they have to know what it's towards. There has to be a mission in the first place. Then you're not getting the best and brightest. You get more from the committee class and that becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral. And that is what the”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who leads it, could give you a coherent answer to that question. I just heavily doubt it. And you could fill in the blank for any range of the Department of Commerce. I mean, I just could go straight down the list of each of these other ones. What is the mission of this organization? You can even say it for the U.S. military. What's the purpose of the U.S. military, the Department of Defense? I can give you one. I think it is to win wars, and more importantly, through its strength to avoid wars. That's it. Well, okay, if that's the mission, then you know, okay, it's not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where we kind of feel like it sometimes and other ones where we don't and who decides that. I don't really know, but whoever the people are that decide that we follow those orders, no, our mission is to protect the United States of America, to win wars, and to avoid wars. Boom. Those three things. What is protecting the United States of America mean? Number one, the homeland of the United States of America and the people who reside there. Okay, that's a clear mission. I mean, the department...”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where let's say the mission is here and somebody's skill sets could be really well aligned to a different mission, then the right answer is it's not a negative thing. It's just that that person needs to leave and find their mission somewhere else. But to bring that back to government, I think part of what's happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy in so many of these government agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies. I think if you went to most federal bureaucracies and just asked them, like, what's the mission? I'm just making one up off the top of my head right now, the Department of Health and Human Services. What is the mission of HHS in the United States of America?”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role. That's the number one reason people leave their job. And I think, by the way, I would say I'm saying that in a self-boastful way that we would attract these people. I think it's also true for most of the people who left the company as well, Royvant, right? And that was true at Royvent's true at other companies I've started. I think the number one reason people join companies, number one people leave companies, whether they've been to join mine or to leave mine in the past have been that they feel like they're able to do more than they're able to with their skill set than that environment permits them to actually achieve. And so I think that's what people hung for. Think about capitalism and true free market capitalism. And we used words earlier like meritocracy. It's about building a system, whether it's in a nation or whether it's even within an organism that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential. And sometimes it just doesn't match for an organization.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you what I didn't hear very often is that I wasn't paid enough, right? And maybe they'd be shy to tell you that during an interview, but there's indirect ways to signal that. That really wasn't. All like even a top 10 reason why people were leaving their job. I'll give you what the number one reason was, is that they felt like they were unable to do”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Belief that they can do more than they're being permitted to do right now with their skill sets. See, I've never, I'll tell you, so I've run a number of companies. And one of the things that I used to ask when I was, you know, I'm not day-to-day involved in them anymore, but as a CEO, I would ask when I did interviews. And the first company I started at Royvent, like for four years in. I mean, we're a company was pretty big by that point. I would still intend on interviewing every candidate before they joined screening for the culture of that person. I can talk a lot more about things we did to build that culture. But one of the questions I would always ask them naturally just to start a conversation, it's a pretty basic question, is why did you leave your last job or why are you leaving your last job?”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, look, I think. There's opportunities for the very best to have large scale impact. All kinds of different institutions in our universities to K through 12 education through entrepreneurship. I'm obviously very biased in that regard. I think there's a lot you're able to create that you couldn't create through government. But I do think in the moment that we live in where our government is as broken as it is and is as responsible for the declining nature of our country. Yeah, I think bringing in people who are unafraid, talented, and able to have an impact could make all of the difference. And I agree with you. I don't think actually most people, even most people who say they're motivated by money, I don't think are actually motivated by money. I think most people are driven by”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, what you're missing today because right now the government would swallow them up. Most competent people feel like that bureaucratic machine will swallow them whole. You clear the decks of 75% of them. Real innovators can then show up.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about, but have not really effectuated ever in modern history.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained. Spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people have run a company, especially larger companies, know this. It's 25% of the people who do 80 to 90 percent of the useful work. These government agencies are no different. So now imagine you could do that same thought experiment, but not just doing it at random, but do it still at large scale while having some metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence, as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution. That, I think, would immediately raise not only the civic character of the United States. Now we feel, okay, the people we elect to run the government, they've got the power back, they're running the government again, as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today. It would also stimulate the economy. I mean, the regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy. Most of it's unconstitutional. All we require is leadership.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have a bunch of lawsuits you're dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political viewpoint discrimination. Actually, the reality is you've at mass, you've didn't bring the chisel, you brought a chainsaw. I guarantee you, do that on day one and do step two on day two. On day three.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy, at least as a thought experiment. Get in there on day one, say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy who was not elected, elected representatives obviously are elected by the people, but if the people who are not elected Your social security number ends in an odd number, you're out, if it ends in an even number you're in Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number you're in, and if it starts with an odd number, you're out, boom, that's a 75% reduction. Literally stochastically, okay, one of the virtues of that, it's a thought experiment, not a policy prescription, but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. In fact, I think it's necessary and essential. I think things are, it depends on what your level of well really is, what you're benchmarking against. America is not built on complacency, right? We're built on the pursuit of excellence. And are we still the greatest nation on planet Earth? I believe we are. I agree with you on that. But are we great as we could possibly be or even as we have been in the past measured against our own standards of excellence? No, we're not. I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline. That doesn't mean it's the end of the empire yet. But we are a nation in decline right now. I don't think we have to be. But part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial class, the bureaucracy, sucking the lifeblood out of the country, sucking the lifeblood out of our innovative culture, our culture of self-governance. So is it possible? Yeah, it's really possible. I mean, I'll tell you one easy way to do it. This is a little bit, I'm being a little bit glib here, but I think it's not.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have in this country, but it is also the single most effective way to restore self governance in our country as well. And it is the blueprint for, I think, how we save this country.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe in the moment we live in right now. The second risk is the risk we have to be willing to take. And we haven't had a class of politicians. I mean, Donald Trump in 2016 was, I think, the closest we've gotten. I think the second term will be even closer to what we need. But short of that, I don't think we've really had a class of politician who has gotten very serious about cutting so much that you're also going to cut some fat, but not only some fat, but also some muscle. That's the risk we have to take. So the way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an unelected bureaucrats. And that is the single greatest form of economic stimulus.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other risk you could take. So that's the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much. To say that I'm going to cut so much that I'm going to take the risk of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way, that I'm going to take that risk. I can't give you option C, which is to say that I'm going to cut exactly the right amount. I'm going to do it perfectly. Okay, you don't know ex ante. You don't know beforehand that it's exactly how it's going to go. So that's a meaningless claim. It's only a question of which risk you're going to take.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing I will say is you're always taking a risk. Okay, there's no free lunch here, mostly at least. You're always taking a risk. One risk is that you say, I want to reform it gradually. I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right end state is and then carefully cut with a chisel like a work of art to get there. I don't believe that approach works. I think that's an approach that conservatives have taken for many years. I think it hasn't gotten us very far. And the reason is if you have like an eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what made the United States of America itself Know what made America great, we have to know what made America itself. What made America itself is we said hell no to that vision, that we the people, for better or worse, are going to self-govern without the committee class restraining what we do. And the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston, you could go straight down the list of founding fathers who were inventors, creators, pioneers, explorers, who also were the very people who came together to sign the declaration of independence. And so, yeah, this rise of bureaucracy in America in every sphere of life, I view it as anti-American, actually. And I hope that conservatives and liberals alike can get behind Micrusades certainly to get in there and shut most of it down.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of Old World England is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy and monarchy go hand in hand. A monarch can't actually administer or govern directly requires bureaucracy, a machine to actually technocratically govern for him. So the United States of America was founded on the idea that we reject that old world view. The old world vision was that we the people cannot be trusted to self-govern or make decisions for ourselves. We would burn ourselves off the planet is the modern version of this. With existential risks like global climate change, if we just leave it to the people and their democratic will, that's why you need professional technocrats, educated elites, enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set the limits that actually protect people from their own worst impulses. That's the old world view. And most nations in human history have operated this way.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Declaration of Independence part, everybody knows what people don't know is an architect. So you worked in Virginia, but the Virginia State Capitol Dome. So the building that's in Virginia today, where the state capital is, that dome was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well. So these people weren't people who sat on professional committees. They weren't bureaucrats. They hated bureaucracy.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration of Independence. You're the one that's insane.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not even a left or right. It's just transcends that, but it's anti American at its core. So our founding fathers, they were anti-bureaucratic at their core, actually. They were the pioneers, the explorers, the unafraid, right? They were the inventors, the creators. People forget this about Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence. One of the great inventors that we have in the United States as well. He invented the lightning rod. He invented the Franklin stove, which was actually one of the great innovations of the field of thermodynamics. He even invented a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use. That's just Benjamin Franklin. So you think, oh, he's a one-off. Everybody thinks, okay, he was the one Zaney founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the country. Wrong. It wasn't unique to him. You have Thomas Jefferson. What are you sitting in right now? You're sitting in a swivel chair.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advancing a social cause, but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism. So in many ways, bureaucracy, I think The channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years. And that's why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness, because that's just a symptom, I think, versus combating actual bureaucracy itself, the rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state. We talk about that in the government, but the deep state doesn't just exist in the government. It exists, I think, in every sphere of our lives, from companies to nonprofits to universities. It's the rise of call the managerial class the committee class, the people who professionally sit on committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs, original ideators, and ordinary citizens alike.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military's actual substantive failures. It's what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability. You say the same thing with respect to the educational system. It's a lot easier to claim that, and I'm not the one making this claim, but others have made this claim, that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes. You can claim using that that math is racist. It's a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix our public school systems and the zip code mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities in bad schools. So I think that in many cases what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This has less to do with left wing versus right wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you've seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you've seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about it in the military, right? You think about our entry into Iraq after 9-11 had nothing to do with the stated objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts it was a policy move we regret. Our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9-11. Nonetheless, if you're part of the U.S. military or”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did make that case, and it was a great conversation. And my response to that is great, that's a good thing. We don't need a three-letter acronym to do that, right? You don't need special programmatic DEI incentives to do it because companies are always going to seek in a truly free market, which I think we're missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons. But in a truly free market, companies will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest or else they're going to be less competitive versus other companies, but you don't need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government to do it. Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial and gender representation targets in your workforce. That's not the free market working. So I think you can't have it both ways. Either it's going to be good for companies and companies are going to do what's in their self-interest. That's what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I believe. But if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing it to adopt these top-down standards. That's my issue with it.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually hostile to the free and open exchange of ideas by creating often legal liabilities for organizations that even permit certain viewpoints to be expressed. And I think that's the biggest concern.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted to celebrate, I think it was Friday was the day of the week where they did it. She still wore the red sweater and she didn't wear it, but she would hang it on the back of her seat, right? Put it on the back of her seat at the office. They said, no, no, you can't do that either. So the irony is in the name of this capital D diversity, which is creating a supposedly welcoming workplace for all kinds of Americans by focusing only on certain kinds of so-called diversity that translates into actually not even a diversity of your genetics, which is what they claim to be solving for, but also a hostility to diversity of thought. And I think that's dangerous. And you're seeing that happen in the last four years across this country. It's been pretty rampant. I think it leaves America worse off. The beauty of America is we're a country where we should be able to have institutions that are stronger from different points of view being expressed. But my number one criticism of the DEI agenda is not even that it's anti-meritic. It is anti-meritic. But my number one criticism is”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's get to the tangible world of how that actually plays out. For my part, have not really heard in ordinary America people uttering racial epithets if you're going to a restaurant or in the grocery store. It's not something I've encountered, certainly not in the workplace. But that's a theoretical case. Let's talk about the real world case of how this plays out. There was an instance, it was a case that presented itself before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, one of the government enforcers of the DEI agenda. And there was a case of a woman who wore a red sweater on Fridays in celebration of veterans and those who had served the military and invited others in the workplace to do the same thing. And they had a kind of affinity group. You could call it that, a veteran type affinity group, appreciating those who had served. Her son had served as well. There was a minority employee at that business who said that he found that to be a microaggression. So the employer asked her to stop wearing said clothes too, the office. Well, she still felt like she was.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“themselves deemed to be hostile. The capital D diversity, but that means that you're necessarily sacrificing actual diversity of thought. I can give you a very specific example. That might sound like, okay, well, is it such a bad thing if an organization doesn't want to exclude people who are saying racist things on a given day? We could debate that”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's just take a step back and understand because people use these acronyms and then they start saying it out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. Like DEI refers to capital D, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a philosophy adopted by institutions principally in the private sector, companies, nonprofits, and universities, to say that they need to strive for specific forms of racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity. And it's not just the D, it's the equity in ensuring that you have equal outcomes as measured by certain group quota targets or group representation targets that they would meet in their ranks. Now, the problem with the DEI agenda is in the name of diversity, it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So the way the argument goes is this, is that we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and minority views. But if certain opinions are”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a true meritocracy is a system in which you're able to achieve the maximum of your God given potential without anybody standing in your way. But that means necessarily there's going to be differences and outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money, not just fame or currency or whatever it is. There's just going to be different outcomes for different people in different spheres of lives. And that's what meritocracy demands. It's what it requires. And so the left's vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of meritocracy. And so those are my two reasons for opposing the view is one is it's not meritocratic, but number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have wanted to help. And I think that's part of what we're seeing in modern America.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason why is no two people, and I think it's a beautiful thing, Trubetine, you and I, between UI and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues. No two people have the same skill sets. We're each endowed by different gifts. We're each endowed with different talents. And that's the beauty of human diversity.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are unable to assimilate, you know, there's going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began perhaps with some type of charitable instinct, right? Some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States, what began with sympathy, what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that's my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview. Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other. You can't have both.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can agree we want to avoid is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly wanted to heal. I see that in a context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even what's going on in, I'm from Ohio. I was born and raised in Ohio and I lived there today. The controversy in Springfield, Ohio. I personally don't blame really any of the people who are in Springfield, either the native people who have born and raised in Springfield or even the Haitians who have been moved to Springfield. But it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome where if you put 20,000 people in a community where 50,000 people where the 20,000 are coming in don't know the language are unable to follow the traffic laws.”
2024-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source