This is really something….
Vivek Ramaswamy was on Lex Fridman’s podcast recently and it was a really fascinating discussion.
But what stood out to me more than anything else is that Vivek is SO strong on policy that Lex continually asked him to make a “Steel Man Argument” on each point.
In case you’re not familiar with that term, it basically means asking the person to take the other side of the debate from the side they support and make the best argument they can.
In other words, Lex couldn’t really keep up so he just kept asking Vivek to debate himself!
And he did!
Vivek talks for about 98% of this video, taking both sides of arguments, setting them up, knocking them down, and in general just doing a fantastic job of talking through every single policy issue that was raised.
Vivek is MAGA.
Vivek is (hopefully) a big player in the future of the Republican party.
I hope President Trump grants Vivek and Elon powerful positions in his new cabinet to go in an REMOVE 75% of the Federal Government just like both have talked about.
It’s a great interview, please enjoy:
Full transcript:
Vivek: 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 ever passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both. It’s an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself.
And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There’s the entitlement state—that’s the welfare state—it presents itself in the form of the regulatory state—that’s what we’re talking about. And then there’s the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren’t paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms: the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we’ve done that, we’ve revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.
Lex: The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths: The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all of that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Vivek Ramaswamy.
Lex: You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas, so you’re the perfect person to ask, what is conservatism? What’s your, let’s say, conservative vision for America?
Vivek: Well, actually, this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and the direction of the conservative movement is that we’ve gotten so good at describing what we’re against. Right? There’s a list of things that we could rail against—wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, covidism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on. But, actually what’s missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was, in many ways, the purpose of my campaign because I do feel that that’s why we didn’t have the red wave in 2022.
So they tried to blame Donald Trump, they tried to blame abortion, they blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn’t have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for.
So what do we stand for as conservatives? I think we stand for the ideals that we fought the American Revolution for in 1776. Ideals like merit, right? That the best person gets the job without regard to their genetics. That you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character. Free speech and open debate—not just as some sort of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the United States of America. Self-governance, and this is a big one right now, is that the people we elect to run the government, they’re no longer the ones who actually run the government. We, in the conservative movement, I believe, should believe in restoring self-governance where it’s not bureaucrats running the show but actually elected representatives.
And then the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive, and I think as a north star of the conservative movement, is restoring the rule of law in this country. You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border. It’s particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country, you and I actually share a couple of aspects in common in that regard. That also though means your first act of entering this country can’t break the law. So there’s some policy commitments and principles—merit, free speech, self-governance, rule of law. And then I think, culturally, what does it mean to be a conservative? It means we believe in the anchors of our identity, in truth, the value of the individual family, nation, and God. Beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision. And that’s a big part of what’s been missing.
And it’s a big part of not just through the campaign, but through a lot of my future advocacy, that’s the vacuum I’m aiming to fill.
Lex: Yeah, we’ll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you’ve spoken about a lot, but you’ve also had a lot of really tense debates, so you’re a perfect person to ask, to steel man the other side.
Vivek: Yeah.
Lex: So let me ask you about progressivism.
Vivek: Sure.
Lex: Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left-wing ideas?
Vivek: Yeah, so look, I think the strongest case, particularly for left-wing ideas in the United States, so in the American context, is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its ideals. So even though our founding fathers preached the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom, they didn’t practice those values in terms of many of our founding fathers being slave owners, inequalities with respect to women and other disempowered groups. Such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to last to this day. The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history isn’t that long ago. And that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those imbalances in power in the United States. That’s the core view of the modern left.
I’m not criticizing it right now, I’m steel manning it, I’m trying to give you, I think, a good articulation of why the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping in to correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my counter rebuttal of that, but the best statement of the left is that we’ve been imperfect in living up to those ideals. In order to fix that, we’re going to have to take steps that are—severe steps if needed—to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of opportunity in this country. That’s the case for the left-wing view in modern America.
Lex: So what’s your criticism of that?
Vivek: So my concern with it is, even if that’s well motivated, I think that it recreates many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I’ll give you a really tangible example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would say something like this right now, but I think it’s true, so I’m going to say it. I’m actually, even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing a rise in anti-black and anti-minority racism in this country, which is a little curious, right? When over the last 10 years we got as close to Martin Luther King’s promised land as you could envision. A place where you have every American, regardless of their skin color, able to vote without obstruction. A place where you have people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way.
Why are we seeing that resurgence? In part, it’s because of, I believe, that left-wing obsession with racial equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. And so when you take something away from someone based on their skin color, and that’s what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do according to the left-wing views, you have to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you’re a white, straight, cis man, you have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When you take something away 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… there are 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 the 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 live 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 were 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 there are 50,000 people, where the 20,000 are coming in, don’t know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, 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. And the reason why is no two people, and I think it’s the beautiful thing, it’s true between you and I, between you, me, 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. 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 in 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 life. 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 would be my two reasons for opposing the view: 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.
Lex: Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban.
Vivek: Yeah.
Lex: A great conversation. I think it’s on your podcast, actually.
Vivek: Yeah.
Lex: Yes. Yeah, it was great.
Vivek: He’s a good guy, though.
Lex: It was great. Okay, well, speaking of good guys, he messages me all the time with beautifully eloquent criticism, I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You’re mostly focused on kind of DEI.
Vivek: So let’s just take a step back and understand ’cause people use these acronyms and then they start saying them out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. Like, DEI refers to 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 agendas in the name of diversity is that it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So, the way the argument goes is this: we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and minority views, but if certain opinions are themselves deemed to be hostile to those minorities, then you have to exclude those opinions in the name of the 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. But let’s get to the tangible world of how that actually plays out. So 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 to the office. Well, she still felt like she wanted to celebrate. I think it was Friday, the day of the week when they did it. She still wore the red sweater and she… well, 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, no, you can’t do that either.
So the irony is, in the name of this 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-meritocratic—it is anti-meritocratic—but my number one criticism is that 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.
Lex: I think what Mark would say is that diversity allows you to look for talent in places where you haven’t looked before and therefore find really special talent, special people. I think that’s the case he made.
Vivek: 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.
Lex: I don’t know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind which there’s a good ideal, to bully people and to do bad things. I don’t know what it is.
Vivek: 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 accountability for its own failure.
So you’ve seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about the military, right? You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11—it 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 you’re 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.
Because there is 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 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-coded 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 advancing a social cause, but it’s strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism. So, in many ways, bureaucracy, I think, carves 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—you can call it 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.
Lex: Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don’t get to do. But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomenon of both the left and the right, this is not—
Vivek: It’s not even a left or right, it just transcends that, but it’s anti-American at its core. 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 in 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’s like, okay, he was the one zany 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… on a swivel chair. Okay. Who invented the swivel chair?
Lex: Thomas Jefferson?
Vivek: Yes, Thomas Jefferson.
Lex: Yeah.
Vivek: Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration of Independence.
Lex: You’re the one—
Vivek: Which is insane.
Lex: —reminded me that he drafted—he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.
Vivek: And he was 33 when he did it while inventing the swivel chair.
Lex: I like how you’re focused on the swivel chair. Can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence? It makes me feel horrible.
Vivek: But the Declaration of Independence part everybody knows, what people don’t know is he was an architect. So he worked in Virginia. 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. Part of 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—it 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 worldview. Right? 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 worldview. And most nations in human history have operated this way.
But what made the United States of America itself—to 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, you know, conservatives and liberals alike can get behind my crusade certainly to getting there and shutting most of it down.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.