341. Jordan Peterson Interviews Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy

[0] Hi everybody.

[1] I'm very happy today to talk with Vivek Raviswabi, who has just announced his candidacy for the American presidency and is going to, well, hopefully change the political landscape in doing so.

[2] Vivek is an American business leader and New York Times best -selling author of Woke, Inc. inside corporate America's social justice scam, along with his second book, nation of victims, identity, politics, the death of merit, and the path back to excellence.

[3] Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he often recounts the sage advice from his father.

[4] If you're going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding.

[5] This set the course for his life, a nationally ranked tennis player, valedictorian of his high school, St. Xavier.

[6] He went on to graduate Samacomlade in biology from Harvard, and then, received his JD from Yale Law School while working at a hedge fund.

[7] He then started a biotech company, Roy Vant Sciences, where he oversaw the development of five drugs that became FDA -approved.

[8] In 2022, this is an important side note, he founded Strive, an Ohio -based asset management firm that directly competes with asset managers like Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard, who used the money of everyday citizens, That includes you, by the way, to advance environmental and social agendas that many citizens and capital owners disagree with.

[9] That's a far more important issue than you might think, and we're going to discuss that a lot as we proceed through our conversation today.

[10] Well, hello, Vivek and everyone watching.

[11] It's here on the YouTube platform.

[12] It's always good to have everybody's time and attention.

[13] Vivek Ramoswamy, who I'm talking to today, is running for president, which seems to be quite the preposterous thing to do for any.

[14] I would say, this next 2024 election is going to be some interesting contest, as far as I can tell.

[15] We're not going to have seen anything like it.

[16] And the fact that you threw your hat in the ring, I think, is part and parcel of the whole show.

[17] So let's start by just exploring why it is that you decided to do this.

[18] And we should do that.

[19] Why did you decide to do this?

[20] and what is it that you hope to accomplish by making this run?

[21] So let's start with why you're doing it.

[22] So you know some of the journey I've been on over the last few years, but I think that's what led me to the doorstep.

[23] I've been addressing for the last few years this merger of state power and corporate power that together do what neither can do on its own.

[24] And part of me has long believed that the Republican Party in the United States is behind by 40 years, right?

[25] reciting slogans they memorized in 1980 when the real threat to liberty today is different.

[26] So I've taken on the woke industrial complex in America through the books I've written, through traveling the country, most recently taking on the ESG movement by starting strive last year.

[27] And that's where my headspace was.

[28] I did not think I was going into politics.

[29] I thought that I wanted to actually avoid the limiting shackles of partisan politics.

[30] It just felt so constraining.

[31] I thought of running for the U .S. Senate.

[32] I decided not to do that.

[33] I said, no, no, no. I want to do this independent.

[34] as an independent voice, thought leader, author, and then, you know, look, I had successfully built a biotech company before, let me put those skills to work by starting Strive.

[35] That was where my exclusive focus was going to be.

[36] And I'm proud to say, I think we are already having major impact on the market through my work at Strive, and even just through putting a spotlight on the problem.

[37] But I've got to be really honest about this.

[38] And this was the realization that dawned on me after, you know, years into that journey, is that it does take two to tango.

[39] Okay.

[40] And what I mean by that is the top down version of this problem, the cynical exploitation of corporate power and state power to shackle the human spirit, I think is only half the issue because that only works if there's a culture that's really willing to buy it up.

[41] It only works if there's a populace that's buying up what they're selling.

[42] And to me, I think that requires every one of us to look deeply in the mirror and ask ourselves, what is it about us as a people that wants us to bend the knee or that makes us want to bend the knee to the powers that be, that wants us to embrace these new secular religions.

[43] And that wasn't quite a problem that I was going to be able to address even through market action in taking on BlackRock or the ESG forces in capital markets.

[44] And that's really what when it dawned on me that there was no better way to drive a cultural revival in America than to successfully, And successfully is an important part of this, but then to successfully run for president.

[45] And the whole premise of my campaign is actually to define a national identity, answer the question of what it means to be an American in the year 2023.

[46] I do not believe we have a good answer to that question in this country.

[47] I'm on a mission to deliver an answer to that question.

[48] And my basic premise here is that our absence of that answer, that is the black hole at the center of our nation's soul.

[49] That is what allows wokeism and gender ideology and climateism and COVIDism to fill the void.

[50] These are secular religions that prey on that vacuum.

[51] If we can fill that vacuum with, say, a vision of national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes these other agendas to irrelevance, that is how we win.

[52] And I believe that there isn't a candidate in this field.

[53] I believe who's quite up to that challenge.

[54] I'm not sure I am either, but I do believe that I'm going to give it the best shot that we have, which is why I'm running.

[55] Okay, well, you brought up a lot of very complex issues in that description of your motives, and so I'm going to walk through them one by one to unpack them for everybody, because, you know, you said the Republicans are 40 years behind, and I think that's probably true of organizations like the UN as well, and 40 years is a long time, given how much has changed in the last 10 years.

[56] And what that means is that the average person, who's watching and listening to this is also behind and isn't even aware of what acronyms like ESG mean or why they should really give a damn.

[57] I just interviewed the CEO of the national, what's the organization, state treasurer's organization.

[58] It's a financial officer's organization.

[59] Now, there's 28 states.

[60] Yeah, I know them.

[61] I know them.

[62] Yeah, yeah.

[63] Well, they're pushing hard back against the ESG.

[64] movement and and and but you know we talked about in that podcast the fact that people don't even know what the hell that means now you opened your description essentially i don't want to put words in your mouth but from my perspective you opened your your description of your motives with a statement about what essentially boils down to a kind of fascist collusion and what we're seeing is an amalgam of power that's corporate which of course the left winger's complain about that's government which the right wingers complain about, and then of media, which everybody complains about, and rightly so.

[65] And there's this idea that seems to be reigning in the upper echelons of the power structures that we're facing an apocalyptic emergency of such magnitude, whatever the emergency happens to be, that they should be conveniently ceded all the power.

[66] And one of the fronts upon which that battle is being fought is the ESG movement, And so do you want to walk through that for everyone just to bring them up to date?

[67] Absolutely.

[68] I mean, this has been something of my obsession over the last several years and not just as a commentator, but as a doer and as an entrepreneur, too.

[69] So the issue with the ESG movement, it stands for environmental, social, and governance factors.

[70] It's designed to sound boring for a reason.

[71] My general rule of thumb is, if it sounds like a three -letter acronym that bores you, That's a good sign that you should be paying more attention because it was designed to bore you.

[72] What this whole game is about is using private power, using capital markets, to accomplish through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution.

[73] So I'll tell you what it is, and then I'll walk through the history of how we got there, because that's also pretty important to.

[74] The essence of the ESG movement is what it does is it uses the money of everyday citizens.

[75] Americans, but Canadians too, Australians and Western Europeans.

[76] It uses the money of everyday citizens to invest in companies and to vote their shares in ways that advance one -sided progressive agendas, environmental and social agendas, that most of those people do not agree with, that most of those people did not know were actually being advanced with their own money, and which don't advance the financial best interests of most people whose money is actually used.

[77] So what does that mean?

[78] Think about yourself saving in a retirement account or a 401k account or a brokerage account.

[79] You think that the person who's managing that money is exclusively looking after your best financial interests.

[80] It turns out they're not.

[81] They're also looking after advancing these other environmental and social goals.

[82] Who are these institutions?

[83] They're asset management firms like BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard or Invesco or countless others that have signed a pledge to say that they're going to align all of their underlying companies with the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, with net zero standards by 2050, with modern diversity equity and inclusion standards.

[84] And those three or four firms alone manage about $20 trillion, maybe even a little bit more.

[85] That's more than the US GDP right now in the hands of three to four financial institutions.

[86] But they're not using their money to do it.

[87] they're using most money, they're using the money of probably most listeners to this exchange right now.

[88] People watching this.

[89] Good chances that their money, their retirement accounts, their brokerage accounts are being used to tell companies like Apple to adopt racial equity audits that Apple's board initially did not want to adopt, to tell companies like Chevron to adopt scope three emissions caps, which I can talk about what that means, but that Chevron did not want to adopt and that most people watching this probably didn't want to force on Chevron either.

[90] but their money was used to do it anyway.

[91] That's what this ESG movement is all about.

[92] So how did we get here is actually a really important question.

[93] And a lot of this began, there were two big milestones seeing the supercharging of this ESG movement in our economy and in capital markets.

[94] The first one, which I think of as the Big Bang, that really set the whole thing, for all intents and purposes, into motion, was the 2008 financial crisis.

[95] What happened in the 2008 financial crisis, and by the way, I had a front row seat, to this.

[96] I got my first job in New York at an elite hedge fund in the fall of 2007.

[97] You know, the fund I worked at got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.

[98] This is my first job out of college.

[99] This is fun stuff for me, right?

[100] I didn't.

[101] A lot of people lost a lot of money on Wall Street.

[102] I didn't have any money, so it didn't matter to me. It was more of a learning experience, which was a pretty rich one.

[103] But I had a front of a seat.

[104] What happened was in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, Republicans, it's worth remembering this, Republicans in this country bailed out the big banks, which I don't know what your view is, Dr. Peterson, I view that as a major mistake.

[105] It's a cardinal sin.

[106] The Bush administration and Hank Paulson, a CEO, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs used public taxpayer funds to bail out Goldman Sachs while letting his competitors fail.

[107] This was crony capitalism all the way down.

[108] And the left actually had a point in this country.

[109] Occupy Wall Street was born.

[110] And what they said is, look, if you're going to play that crony capitalist game, then you know, We're going to play our game.

[111] We're just going to take money from your wealthy corporate fat cat pockets and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people, because that's what we on the far left want to do on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

[112] But right around that time, there was a fissure in the left -wing movement in this country, where there was the birth of this new, let's call it the woke left.

[113] Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president of the United States.

[114] There was a lot of cultural currents in the U .S. that said, well, wait a minute there.

[115] The real problem isn't quite economic injustice or poverty.

[116] it's really racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry.

[117] And by the way, climate change.

[118] This is post -Al Gore's inconvenient truth.

[119] This actually presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street to say that, no, no, no, okay, guys, we'll make a deal with you.

[120] We will use our corporate power, use our money, really your money, to applaud diversity and inclusion, to put token minorities on corporate boards, to muse about this racially disparate impact of climate change from the mountaintops of Davos after flying there in a private jet.

[121] We'll do all of these things.

[122] But we don't do it for free.

[123] We expect the new left to look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact.

[124] And so they defanged Occupy Wall Street.

[125] Most people don't even remember what Occupy Wall Street is.

[126] It went by the wayside.

[127] And that's how the birth of this new, what I've sometimes called woke industrial or ESG industrial complex was born, where Wall Street said that, you know what, if you can't, can't beat us, join us.

[128] And that's exactly what happened.

[129] So that was the first big of it.

[130] Do you think it was that conscious?

[131] Or do you think that it was the consequence of a thousand micro decisions?

[132] You know, I mean, were there, what?

[133] The ladder.

[134] It's easy to see us.

[135] Okay.

[136] It was the ladder.

[137] Yeah.

[138] I mean, this is not, this is not a smoke -filled room where there was some sort of meeting in the back of Goldman Sachs's boardroom on 85 Broad Street in lower Manhattan.

[139] No. This isn't, and that's like the classical conspiracy theory.

[140] This isn't a conspiracy theory.

[141] It's just emergent reality, right?

[142] You watch it in slow motion.

[143] People need to understand when they think about what a conspiracy theory is that turns into reality.

[144] It's that if you just watch the camera reel in slow motion, it plays out in dangerously boring form.

[145] This is how the sausage gets made.

[146] So that was the first catalyst.

[147] And so what began as a challenge to the system, which is, you know, as an intellectual, whatever, I always I was enjoy it, if I agree it or not.

[148] It's at least interesting to watch.

[149] Something that began as a challenge to the system.

[150] Stakeholder capitalism and ESG slowly became ossified as the system.

[151] And there's a lot of forces behind that.

[152] The rise of passive index funds played a big role, and that's a discussion I can get into another time or maybe later in this discussion.

[153] But a big then catalyst came out in, there was two big catalyst that came out.

[154] One was in 2016, and one was in 2018.

[155] The thing that happened in 2016, of course, is that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

[156] This created a seismic shockwave across the establishment class, both in capital markets, as well as the linkage between business and politics.

[157] And when they said, okay, wait a minute, this game may not be played the way it's supposed to be going forward.

[158] If business, if political leaders like Donald Trump are going to break the system, then we the business leaders need to exercise our authority to step into the vote.

[159] void instead.

[160] And then they were vindicated, or so they thought, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords in 2018.

[161] Not a lot of people realized this.

[162] That was a big event.

[163] That is the event that threw kerosene on this ESG storm.

[164] And even the people who are complaining about this ESG movement need to understand where it came from a little bit better than they do.

[165] This was a big deal.

[166] So this is what then caused CalPERS, the California teachers and pension retirement system and other big allocators, the people who give BlackRock and State Street your money, they started to say that, look, if political leaders are not going to step up to the occasion to address the existential challenges we face like global climate change, then business leaders need to do it instead.

[167] Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, started saying similar things, that we have to earn our social license to operate.

[168] And that's really what caused this ESG thing to spread like wildfire was that event of pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords.

[169] Okay, so now there, with that move, you tie the corporate response to, say, Occupy Wall Street at the end of the 2008 financial crisis with the climate catastrophe.

[170] And so let's talk about the climate catastrophe for a moment or two, because, and also define stakeholder capitalism, because the narrative that's insisted upon by the woke left, let's say, but also by these woke capitalists is that the emergency that confronts us on the environmental frontier is so cataclysmic that any and all emergency measures are thoroughly, not only thoroughly justified, but morally required.

[171] Now, I have a problem with that theory psychologically as well as technically, and so psychologically, I've been trying to figure out how you separate the wheat from the chaff on the leadership front, especially in the face of a real emergency because emergencies do occur from time to time.

[172] But here's a rule of thumb.

[173] Everyone who's listening can try this out for themselves and see what they think.

[174] But if the emergency you're confronting terrifies you so badly that you're paralyzed into immobility or tempted to aggregate all the power to yourself and become a tyrant, then you have defined yourself, as insufficient for the job.

[175] You should be able to maintain a calm head regardless of the impending emergency, because there's going to be emergencies.

[176] And if you become a tyrant during an emergency, then you're a tyrant.

[177] And so that's the psychological issue.

[178] Even if there is an emergency, we shouldn't be aggregating power into an elite.

[179] And then there's a second element, too, which is, yeah, what bloody emergency precisely?

[180] You know, I've talked a lot to Bjorn Longberg, for example, and many other people, I would say, as informed as Lomberg.

[181] And there's no evidence even in the IPCC reports themselves that climate change is, first of all, entirely man -made because it's not.

[182] And second, even if it is, there is no evidence whatsoever in the IPCC reports that there's going to be some apocalyptic turning point in the next 50 years that justifies untold trillions of panic dollars being spent while we simultaneously destabilize our power grids and increase the cost of electricity by up to five times and make ourselves, at least in Europe, much more reliable or much more reliant on Russia.

[183] And also throw poor people into poverty and risk the fossil fuel infrastructure that feeds half the planet because people also don't understand that ammonia is made out of fossil fuel and ammonia fertilizer feeds four billion people.

[184] And so anyways, you said, 2008 Wall Street is guilty because of the bailouts.

[185] The lefties push them hard on the ethical front, and rightly so.

[186] They decide to turn to ESG, but then that's also amplified by this sense of apocalyptic climate doom.

[187] And so what's your formulation of the environmental challenge that confronts challenges that confront us now?

[188] How do you construe that?

[189] So I have more to say about the ESG story, but I got to.

[190] I just got to pause on what you just said.

[191] I just got to pause on what you just said.

[192] It was really some really good stuff in there.

[193] Okay, so I'm going to go one step further than you and draw a linkage between the psychological critique and the technical critique because they're related, right?

[194] So the first thing you said was a humble and powerful point, which is even if there is some sort of existential apocalyptic issue, you should not want to entrust the people who are going to then wield tyrannical force to address it, not to mention the fact that the technical issue.

[195] is itself a completely artificial one, right?

[196] It is grounded on false premises that deserve to be called out.

[197] And I can call those out.

[198] Bjorn Lomberg, Alex Epstein, others can call them out.

[199] We can go into all the details of that.

[200] But the point I want to make is that those two critiques that you just offered, spot on as they are, are deeply linked.

[201] And the reason is you are almost too charitable in that psychological account.

[202] In that actually, the psychological account explains the fact that the entire climate agenda, actually has nothing to do with the climate.

[203] It's not like this was a tyrannical response to a threat.

[204] It was the creation of an artificial threat to exercise tyrannical power itself.

[205] Okay, it's a religious cult.

[206] And so, I've said this numerous times, I think the climate religion has about as much to do with the climate as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christ, which is to say nothing at all.

[207] It was really just about power and dominion and punishment all the way down.

[208] And I can basically prove that to you in a short amount of time, right?

[209] If the climate religion...

[210] Do it.

[211] I mean, just, I'm going to...

[212] To avoid going on for hours, I'll just pick a couple of tidbits, but we could go on for hours.

[213] But the couple tidbits we can just start with are...

[214] So one is, if you really care about carbon emissions as the end -all, be -all, okay, first of all, you'd be delineating which kind of carbon emissions matter.

[215] I don't subscribe to the tenets of this religion, but I understand this religion.

[216] I think it's worth understanding religion even if you're not a practitioner.

[217] Even if you subscribe to this religion, there's a difference between methane leakage and carbon dioxide.

[218] Well, methane leakage is far worse in places like Russia and China.

[219] So then it should be a mystery that you want to shift carbon production from the United States where you tell companies like Exxon and Chevron to stop producing to places like China, like PetroChina on the other side of the world.

[220] And by the way, this is exactly what the ESG movement.

[221] It's like the apostles of this church, right?

[222] So Black Rock is like an apostle of this Spanish Inquisition -style church.

[223] BlackRock forces companies like Exxon and Chevron to drop oil production to meet net zero standards by 2050.

[224] Yet literally some of the same companies buying up those same projects on the other side of the planet are PetroChina, who BlackRock is a large shareholder of without telling PetroChina to adopt any of those same emissions caps.

[225] This is nuts if you think that you care about reducing carbon emissions.

[226] And it's not even, as I was alluding to methane emissions before, it's not even net neutral, methane, even if you subscribe to this crazy religion, is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.

[227] So it's not even net neutral, it's worse.

[228] So that's the first breadcrumb that there's something else going on here.

[229] The second breadcrumb that there's something else going on here is that that same movement, certainly it's apostles in the ESG movement, that are so hostile to carbon emissions, is also hostile to the best known form of carbon -free energy production known to mankind, which is nuclear energy, right?

[230] So that's the second little breadcrumb that suggests there's something else going on here.

[231] And the problem with nuclear energy in a nutshell is that nuclear energy might be too good at solving the alleged clean energy problem such that it doesn't solve for the actual agenda, which is delivering equity between the West, America in particular, and the rest of the world to catch up.

[232] That's really what this climate is all.

[233] And delivering that power that we've been talking to the hands of the proper elite.

[234] The Grand Inquisitors of our time, right?

[235] So that's really what's going on.

[236] Those are two stunning points.

[237] And I want to lay them out philosophically for a moment just so people get what this means completely.

[238] So let's say that we do buy the propositions of what Vivek has been calling the climate religion.

[239] We'll get back to that term later.

[240] So if we do buy that, then we're going to make the assumption that the fundamental existential crisis facing us is one of pollution and that that can be reduced in complexity to carbon dioxide emission and maybe methane and a couple of other greenhouse gases.

[241] Now, I don't accept any of that, and I know you don't as well, but we'll give the devil as do.

[242] If that's actually the driving factor, then all fundamental actions and perceptions should be directed towards minimizing, let's say, carbon dioxide.

[243] But the first point you make is, well, we're making it very difficult for Western countries to use coal and to explore for fossil fuels.

[244] But we're making it very easy for China to do so.

[245] And since we all share the same atmosphere and China and other, you know, terribly governed countries have way worse environmental regulations.

[246] They're not even in the same universe.

[247] All we're doing is substituting relatively clean fossil fuel for relatively filthy fossil fuel.

[248] And then, you know, you added that additional decoration, which is, well, isn't it?

[249] also convenient that companies like BlackRock happen to own huge shares in exactly the Chinese companies whose interests they're promoting.

[250] And so, you know, that's kind of, so what that means is that by the measurement standards of the advocates of the climate religion themselves, their policies are not only a failure, they're actually positively counterproductive, just like they have been in Germany in the UK.

[251] And then, and that's like, that's a subtle mystery on the fossil fuel front.

[252] But then you have the blatant mystery, which is the second.

[253] thing you pointed to, which is, okay, boys and girls, we can pretty much solve the bloody carbon dioxide problem like overnight with nuclear.

[254] And we have small nuclear plants now, and we have nuclear plants that are way safer than they were 50 years ago, and that could be built at a modular level.

[255] And so, why do you oppose them?

[256] And, well, that brings us into the religious issue, I would say, because this is not so much a pro -planet agenda designed to to bring about harmony with the natural world, as it is an attempt to simultaneously destabilize the entire industrial infrastructure in accordance with the claim that all human activity is nothing but cancerous growth on the planet, combined with this underground desire to accrue all tyrannical power into centralized elite hands.

[257] That's exactly right.

[258] So, okay, so with that, let's talk about, you've insisted a number of times, that the climate narrative is a religious or quasi -religious structure.

[259] So why don't you, I've got some thoughts about that, which I'll share eventually, but I would like you to lay out why you use that terminology specifically.

[260] Yeah, so I mean that in two senses.

[261] Worse is the sense in which it is a religious institution gone awry.

[262] And then the second is in which it fills a psychological need for religion and God in the everyday person.

[263] On the first of those, just as you were laying out the philosophical framing of it, I was reminded of actually one of my favorite stories about Christ, actually, which came from, not the Bible, but from Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamezov, Brothers Kay, in his chapter entitled The Grand Inquisitor, actually.

[264] And it tells the story of how Christ comes back to earth during the 15th or 16th century or whatever in Seville, Spain.

[265] He's walking the streets, performing miracles.

[266] and then the Grand Inquisitor, a person leading to Spanish Inquisition, spots him on the street and has him arrested.

[267] And the whole climax of the chapter is the dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.

[268] And what the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ is, look, we the church don't need you here anymore.

[269] You are supposed to be a symbol that helps us do our work, but your presence here actually stops us from getting our work done.

[270] And he sentences Christ to execution the next morning.

[271] swap in climate for Christ, which really is what's happening in the psychological minds of people who are buying this religion up, which I'll get to in a second.

[272] But that's also what's going on here is the climate's just an excuse.

[273] And in fact, once you get into a discussion about actually addressing carbon emissions, say with nuclear energy, they get very worried.

[274] So they're sentencing nuclear energy to death because that's their Messiah and their savior, right?

[275] You said you wanted to actually get rid of carbon emissions.

[276] Well, you would welcome the second coming of Christ, the second coming of the climate solution of nuclear energy.

[277] No, no, no, no. They sentence it to death because, as the Grand Inquisitor told Christ in that story, your presence here actually impedes our work.

[278] You're just supposed to be a symbol for us.

[279] So in a certain sense, it has a religious quality in terms of the church that protects its own turf, even from the very God that it tells its, you know, parishioners to worship.

[280] Now, the second question, though, is why are the parishioners worshipping at all?

[281] And I think this gets to the heart of, in a weird way, my candidacy for president of the United States, even though we're in deep, philosophical terrain here, I just think we're in the middle of this identity crisis where we are so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity as Americans.

[282] It's probably true for much of the Western world, too, even beyond America, but we're so hungry for a cause at a moment in our history when the things that used to fill that void, faith is one of them.

[283] Faith in God is a big one.

[284] But patriotism is also a big one.

[285] National identity is big.

[286] Family is also pretty big in this category.

[287] Even hard work, actually.

[288] We can get into that later.

[289] But these are sources of identity, sources of pride, sources of grounding.

[290] They're grounded in truth.

[291] And the way I look at us as human beings, I mean, this is the first personal reflection, right?

[292] We're just, we're like blind bats.

[293] We're lost in some cave in an abyss.

[294] And we send out these sonar signals for our echolocation of identity, right?

[295] We can't see where we are, but we deduce where we are by bouncing off the signals we send and get them back as sources of truth.

[296] Okay, I send a signal out, family is one source of identity I get back.

[297] God is another source of identity I get back.

[298] My nation is another source of identity I get back.

[299] My hard work, the things I create in the world, these things we deduce our identity, and it tells us, even though we're blind where we are lost in that abyss.

[300] But when those things disappear, we send out that signal and then nothing comes back.

[301] And then we're lost.

[302] And so then we start grasping at artificial sources of that identity, racial identity, gender identity.

[303] What do you think this bizarre gender ideology happens to have arisen from?

[304] Climate, disaster, catastrophism.

[305] That's a source of identity, too.

[306] Climate instead of Christ.

[307] And so it's no accident that we see.

[308] all of these secular religions arise at the same time.

[309] Why do we see wokeism at the same time as we see radical gender ideology, racial wokeism as gender ideology, as climateism, as COVIDism.

[310] It's a symptom of that deeper abyss that were lost in.

[311] And so that's what I care about.

[312] Okay.

[313] So you broke this out.

[314] Okay, now you broke this out in two ways.

[315] You said, I'm going to walk through your argument.

[316] You said, there's an offer on hand from above, so to speak, from the ESG and climate ideologues.

[317] But there's on also corresponding need in the population that's associated with the kind of emptiness.

[318] Yes.

[319] And so, okay, and then you also talked about the brothers Karamazov and the notion of the Grand Inquisitors.

[320] So I want to address all three of those points.

[321] So the first point is that the developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, pointed out that the last stage of cognitive development, as far as he was concerned, was adolescent messianism.

[322] And what he meant by that was that people between the ages of 16 and 21, when they're undergoing their last great neural pruning, by the way, they sort of settle into their adult identities.

[323] They have to catalyze them.

[324] And the way that human beings catalyze their adult identity is by identifying with something beyond themselves.

[325] And so in the archaic situation, that would be with tribe, for example, but also with the traditions of the tribe, right, rather than just the people that are there presently now, with the ancient traditions of the tribe and they'll be initiated into that.

[326] Now there's a messianic urge that comes along with that which could be expressed, would be expressed in modern terms as something like the desire of young people to save the planet.

[327] Okay, so that's a true psychological hunger.

[328] Now, what's being offered by the radical left to address that messianic need is something like, it's very simple and this is part of the problem.

[329] It's like, well, Well, to be Christ, to be the Messiah, you have to face down the apocalypse, right?

[330] That's the last judgment.

[331] The apocalypse that currently confronts us is environmental.

[332] You know, and environmental apocalypses have confronted us throughout the entire history of mankind.

[333] So we have an ecological, what would you say, a psychological predisposition to be alerted to environmental catastrophe.

[334] Okay, so there's an apocalypse, it's environmental, the environmental apocalypse is a consequence of carbon.

[335] carbon is a consequence of excess industrial output.

[336] If you adopt the radical left ideology, which is anti -industrial, then you fulfill your messianic mission.

[337] Now, that's on the positive side.

[338] The negative side is, while you can also do it with absolutely no effort on your part because all you have to do is oppose the right things, and it also lifts the moral burden from your shoulders, because instead of having to undergo a psychological transformation that would involve confrontation of all of your own inadequacies, let's say, to put yourself on the right path spiritually, you can just demonize whoever happens to be convenient for demonization, and in the radical left case, it would be anything to do with the industrial or corporate world, and you can put all the sins on the scapegoat's shoulders, and you're done with them.

[339] And so that's an expanded vision of that messianism, right?

[340] It's this overwhelmingly simple solution to a very complex moral problem.

[341] All right, now on the identity front, you laid out a bunch of issues that I think are extremely relevant.

[342] So you know that people are struggling with their identities.

[343] And what's happened is they're also being offered a one idea fits all problem solution, which is, well, your identity is nothing other than your group identity.

[344] It's your sexual proclivity, which is a pretty pathetic identity.

[345] It's your ethnicity.

[346] It's your race.

[347] It's some group identity, which also takes the responsibility off of you, by the way.

[348] Now, you might say, well, what constitutes a valid identity in contrast to that?

[349] And you've already pointed to a number of those things.

[350] So this is also where I think the psychological community has failed to a large degree on this front.

[351] Now, we're the heirs of a liberal Protestant tradition socially and psychologically.

[352] And we believe that our identities are fundamentally individual and subjective.

[353] Okay, but that's actually not true because your identity is nested.

[354] Now you pointed, so let's think of nesting's, okay, because we could build a hierarchy that's a proper hierarchy conceptually.

[355] And this is a good way of formulating what actually constitutes a robust identity.

[356] This is where you'd get signal for those, you know, those forays that you're putting out, those tests.

[357] Sonar signals.

[358] Exactly.

[359] Okay.

[360] So, look, a person has to be bound into an intimate relationship, and everybody needs and wants that.

[361] So that's the first level of social integration.

[362] And then the couple has to be integrated within a family.

[363] And then the family within a neighborhood, and the neighborhood within a community, and the community within a town, a town within the state, the state within a nation, and then the nation, let's say, into something approximating whatever web of international agreements is necessary to minimally keep the peace.

[364] That's a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.

[365] In Exodus, in the Old Testament book Exodus, part of what that book addresses is what forms of governance are necessary as an alternative to tyranny, so single top -down tyranny, the pharaoh, or the desert, which is completely scattered individuality.

[366] And the answer is, the technical answer, is a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility.

[367] And so that means, you know, as an individual, you have a responsibility, as a couple, as a family member, as a community member, and all of those.

[368] And then you can think of identity as the belonging in all of those hierarchical positions.

[369] And you can think of psychological health, not as something that occurs in an interior space, but as the harmony between all of those subsidiary levels.

[370] So it's an emergent property of harmony and not something.

[371] it's carried internally.

[372] I love, I mean, this is, this is beautiful stuff, actually.

[373] And when you just describe the desert versus pharaoh dynamic here, the separation, something clicked for me, okay?

[374] Yeah, it's a killer set of ideas.

[375] Well, it, you mean, in a much more practical sense for me, you know, something as mundane as a political race here, okay?

[376] It clicks for me why I'm doing this, is that, yeah, you're right.

[377] You and I and others like us have complained about how the, left has actually preyed on that vacuum by at least offering a substantive, even if false, fundamentally artificial set of identities to fill that void.

[378] But actually, I'm sick of complaining about that without critiquing the conservative movement.

[379] Where's the conservative movement in filling that identity with an alternative?

[380] Right?

[381] We can do all the hand -wringing we want.

[382] Where are we?

[383] Over the last 10 years, where's our leadership?

[384] Where's the leadership of, for example, a conservative movement, pro -American movement, pro -national movement, pro -family movement, whatever you want to call it.

[385] These guys have been asleep at the switch while they've been watching the other side take advantage of this.

[386] And that, that kind of...

[387] Or, well, not just that.

[388] It's worse than that.

[389] Like, if you look at the...

[390] They're participating in it in some ways.

[391] They're participating in the conservatives.

[392] It's the conservatives in the UK who've been putting forward the net zero agenda.

[393] Exactly.

[394] So, especially in Western Europe, but even some wings of the Republican Party in the U .S. or they're meeked.

[395] response is effectively participating in this.

[396] And this is where the analogy that it hit me when you're talking about the desert and Pharaoh is that we as a people are lost in the desert.

[397] And yet we're criticizing that phenomenon by still critiquing Pharaoh.

[398] Well, the Israelites are ready to go.

[399] Many of them are already gone.

[400] Okay, that's where a lot of the grassroots movement that I'm leading already and hoping to lead is we're already in the desert.

[401] We're still lost, though.

[402] we're not going to find the promised land by still criticizing Pharaoh.

[403] To the contrary, the longer you're lost, the longer, the more likely it is the people are going to say that I need to go back and bend the knee to Pharaoh.

[404] Actually, I want to be ruled by Pharaoh.

[405] That's exactly what's happening.

[406] So where is the promised land?

[407] And, you know, I'm not going to, you know, this analogy is really to a weird place.

[408] I'm not going to claim to be a Moses figure or anything like that.

[409] That's beyond any of our pay grade.

[410] But I will say, you know, when I laid out in this room, the video where we launched this presidential campaign from right here in the front foyer of my house, we said that my goal is to create a new American dream for the 21st century.

[411] Okay, FDR had his new deal.

[412] I don't agree with a lot of it, but FDR had his new deal.

[413] JFK had his new frontier.

[414] Where's the conservative vision of where we're going?

[415] That's what I call the new dream, the new American dream.

[416] It's not just about money.

[417] It's about reviving our conviction in our purpose as citizens.

[418] What does that mean?

[419] Anapologetic pursuit of excellence.

[420] I can talk about what that means, but that's my vision.

[421] Maybe a different candidate can offer theirs.

[422] And if this Republican primary ended up being a competition of those ideas and visions, man, our country is heading to a good place, but that's what's missing.

[423] Yes, definitely.

[424] Well, okay, so let's talk about the conservative issue here for a minute.

[425] So if you look at what temperamental factors predict political allegiance, the literature on that's quite clear.

[426] If you're higher in openness, if you're higher in creativity and your low in conscientiousness, you tend to move to the radical left, let's say.

[427] And if you're high in conscientiousness and low in openness, you tend to move towards the conservative front.

[428] And there's a constant dialogue between those extremes because the creative people are necessary to make changes when changes are necessary, but dangerous otherwise.

[429] and the conservative types are very good at maintaining functional tradition but are intransigent in the face of necessary change.

[430] And so free speech is actually the mechanism by which that conundrum is mediated because people who can engage in free speech can keep arguing about which traditions need to be carefully modified.

[431] Okay, but here's the problem that it presents on the conservative front.

[432] So conservatives are not visionaries.

[433] by definition, the visionaries tend to tilt in the more radical direction because they have radical visions, you know, and so the conservatives are always pushed back into a reactionary standpoint, almost always.

[434] They object vociferously to the excesses of the left, but because they're not visionary, they can't extract from their tradition an image of the promised land for the future.

[435] And I've been working with an organization in the UK that's trying to do something, that's analogous to what you're doing, to lay out something approximating a compelling vision on the conservative side.

[436] You know, I'll talk about one part of it.

[437] Sure.

[438] Because I think it strikes right to the core, even of what we're discussing.

[439] So we spent a lot of time talking about families.

[440] Because, so you have the individual, and then you have the individual in a couple.

[441] But the next order of subsidiary organization is family.

[442] And then you might ask yourself, well, what is a family?

[443] Now, the answer on the inclusive left is a family is any old organization of any sort, but that's so blurry that it leaves people with no guidelines.

[444] They don't know what to do, because if you can do anything, you have no direction.

[445] And so, well, we could say, well, a family fundamentally is a unit that produces children.

[446] And if you're not willing to buy that definition, well, then you could go.

[447] develop your own definition of family.

[448] But it seems to me that there's something core about laying the groundwork for the emergence and proper rearing of children that's key to what constitutes a family.

[449] And then one of the corollaries of that is, well, if you're going to have children, you're probably going to need to have a man and a woman involved.

[450] It kind of works that way.

[451] Because otherwise, it's very difficult otherwise, and that actually turns out to be relevant when you're thinking about an ideal.

[452] So I talked to Dave Rubin about this, for example.

[453] So Ruben, who's conservative and gay, is married to his partner, his husband, Dave, and they went through the entire surrogacy route to have a couple of infants.

[454] And it was very, very, very, very, very complicated, both ethically, practically and financially.

[455] And so, and they managed it so far.

[456] You know, they have these two kids, and I suspect they'll do a perfectly good job of giving these kids a wonderful home.

[457] But they're also incredibly financially, what would you say, privileged.

[458] you know, Dave's earned it, but they have the capital to make this non -standard solution of possibility.

[459] But it's by no means duplicatable for the typical person.

[460] I mean, the simplest way to have a child for the average person is to have a man and a woman involved.

[461] And you can use technological intermediaries, but it can't propagate easily that solution.

[462] And so one of the things that's emerged, this is extremely interesting, one of the things that's emerged on the cognitive neuroscience front recently, and the same things happened in the field, of AI is the realization that at the center of all of our concepts is an ideal.

[463] That's actually how we categorize.

[464] We categorize just like Plato initially hypothesized.

[465] We literally categorize in relationship to an implicit ideal.

[466] And so to even use the term family for that to be meaningful, there has to be an ideal.

[467] and the organization that I've started working with and helping put together has made it part of our formal propositional landscape that the ideal has to be something like stable, long -term, monogamous, heterosexual, child -centered couples.

[468] And now, the problem with the ideal, this is what the postmodernists have shaken their fists about forever, especially the French like Deradu and Foucault.

[469] The problem with the ideal is that it marginalizes.

[470] Right?

[471] Because the more distant you are from the ideal, the less you can fit in.

[472] And so the question then arises, what do you do with the margin?

[473] And that's also a question that's so old that that was even dealt with in biblical times, by the way, the problem of the fringe of the margin.

[474] And the answer has to be something like, look, everybody falls short of the ideal.

[475] Like even a married, stable, married heterosexual couple, lots of the times during their, say, 30 -year marriage, they're going to fight, they're going to wish they were divorced, they're going to wish they were with other parties.

[476] partners, there might be affairs, lots of people end up divorced.

[477] The vast majority of us will never realize the ideal.

[478] Well, none of us will in totality.

[479] But that doesn't mean we should sacrifice the ideal.

[480] What it means is that we should put forth the ideal forthrightly, but allow the necessary space for deviation from the ideal so that everybody can move forward, despite the fact that the ideal has to rule.

[481] It's a great, great framing.

[482] I just want to jump in there for one second to draw even one further distinction, if I may, is first is there's the sense in which each of us falls short of our ideals, okay, both as individuals and even as a nation.

[483] I mean, you could extrapolate this to the American level and, you know, take the critique of America as a nation, is that, well, America's hypocritical, right?

[484] It had nations, it said in a motion, but there were slaves on day one, ergo the ideals themselves are false.

[485] No. In fact, hypocrisy is probably pretty good evidence that you have ideals, right?

[486] There's no sense in which, for example, the Chinese Communist Party could be called hypocritical.

[487] You can't be called hypocritical if you actually are measured against fundamentally nihilism at your core.

[488] So idealism in the existence of ideals makes hypocrisy possible.

[489] We should be grateful when we see hypocrisy because then we know we have two things.

[490] We have both ideals and we have something that is real.

[491] And something that is real never matches or rarely ever matches the ideals.

[492] So there, in a certain sense, we should be vindicated.

[493] We should feel reassured that we're doing something right because we have both ideals and reality.

[494] And that's just true at the individual level of anybody who's in a married relationship knows this.

[495] If they don't admit it, they're lying to you or they're lying to themselves.

[496] It's just truth, okay?

[497] I think that that is still distinct from a second question that you raised, which is also a good question, which is I think what the left, and I'm a big fan of taking the best arguments we possibly can to understand, you know, what we're, you know, taking seriously here is the marginal point, is who's at the outer end of the margin.

[498] And there, I think some of this relates to not just a failure of an individual temporally over the course of a lifetime to depart from the ideal, but some ways in which a certain person cannot themselves be part of the ideal ever, because their genetics are real, right?

[499] What brings us into this world is real, be it, be it gender, be it sexual orientation, be it other attributes that make one successful or not in a system that's set up in a certain way, there is literally a reality of permanent marginalization for some, even according to an ideally structured system.

[500] And so I think it's important to take that seriously.

[501] But the problem with the modern left, the modern radical left, is it turns that exercise of interrogating the question of what we do at the margin and makes a whole new system out of it.

[502] Right?

[503] What began as a challenge to the system on behalf of the marginalized becomes the new system.

[504] That is the essence of the woke cancer, actually.

[505] I didn't mind it when it was an idea in the halls of a liberal arts academy to think about at least debate, how it is we accommodate the people who are marginalized in a system that is still an ideal system.

[506] That's an open conversation that at least under parameters of free speech, which as you said, as an intermediating mechanism between kind of the creative liberals and the, you know, what was the juxtaposition to creative?

[507] conscientious conservatives, that's great, but as long as we have free speech, but the problem is, when that challenge to the system becomes the new system, we're then heading to a very different place than even the ideal that the pro -Marginal camp would have argued for.

[508] Okay, well, so we can lay that out a little bit too.

[509] What happened to Nicola Sturgeon is a perfect example of that, the Prime Minister of Scotland, who just resigned.

[510] Because here's the problem with the fringe, okay?

[511] So the ideal in the center is a unity.

[512] It's a single thing.

[513] The fringe is a multiplicity.

[514] Now, the problem with the fringe is that because it's a multiplicity, it can't occupy the center without destroying the ideal.

[515] And that just brings the whole category to collapse.

[516] The fringe of the fringe will destroy the fringe.

[517] That's right.

[518] So we can't do without the ideal.

[519] Even on the fringe, I love what you.

[520] I mean, the fringe defines itself in relation to the ideal, right?

[521] In a sense.

[522] Well, it has freedom.

[523] It also has freedom because of that.

[524] That's the freedom of being at the margin.

[525] Because there's many versions of being at the frame.

[526] It's kind of like that lost bat analogy.

[527] You send your sonar signal, it bounces back and says, this is where you are.

[528] It's like planets orbiting the sun, all right?

[529] Once the sun's gone, you're just, you're, you're, there's going to be a whole new, there's going to be a whole new structure around you.

[530] That's exactly what happens.

[531] And sometimes I think conservatives, they'll use this phrase, right, they'll come to eat their own, right?

[532] And I think that there's a point to that, but it's low resolution.

[533] I mean, the essence of what's going on is actually what you described, which is that once you've destroyed or invaded the ideal itself, by definition, being on the fringe is sort of nihistic at its core.

[534] And so at that point, it's a free -for -all, which is to say that, okay, well, you thought you were on the fringe as being gay, well, guess what, you know, or even could do the feminist version.

[535] You ain't seen nothing, yeah.

[536] You ain't seen nothing.

[537] You could see the feminist version of this, too.

[538] Title IX, women's sports, you know, women are on the fringe.

[539] Well, then when that itself becomes the center of the story, you just wait till you just say that the men become the women that actually, through the back door, decimate the existence of women's sports, not because they weren't funded pre -Title -9, but even after funding, the essence of it is gone if biological men are competing as women.

[540] Same thing with respect to being gay.

[541] All of this time to sort of accept somebody who is attracted to someone of a different sex at birth by saying that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired at birth, right?

[542] That was the premise of the gay rights movement and I think there's a lot of truth in it too, is completely undercut by a new movement that says your sex itself is completely fluid over the course of your lifetime.

[543] So it isn't quite what some people will say is they will eventually eat their own.

[544] It's the fact that they've itself lost the structure against which they at least had the liberty to be on the fringe of, right?

[545] And so that's not to that we shouldn't have, you know, conversations for, you know, disabled people or whatever in the, you know, American Disabilities Act context.

[546] That's what it comes up in a political context.

[547] There's a whole discussion to be had about how we deal with this problem of the fringe, how we deal with accommodation against the backdrop of ideals.

[548] And I want to be really clear, I don't dismiss that conversation.

[549] In fact, I think that should be the product of dialectic.

[550] I think free speech can actually be a mechanism for sorting out those kinds of questions.

[551] And I don't reject their importance.

[552] But I think that What's happened right now was the obsession with the fringe has eviscerated the ideal itself, which leaves both those who espoused the ideals and even those who identified themselves as one time being a member of a fringe all worse off in the end.

[553] And that's exactly where we are.

[554] And that's a due to a failure of the conservative movement.

[555] It's a failure of the conservative movement.

[556] We can blame the people on the fringe for getting us there.

[557] They were just the agents in the pawns who moved it.

[558] But it's the role of the conservative movement to keep that structure intact.

[559] act.

[560] And I think the absence of...

[561] To make a case for it.

[562] And to make a case for it.

[563] And so then what happens in the evolution of time now, right?

[564] So now we're in a moment where the discussion that you and I have already are talking about, that ship has sailed.

[565] The structure itself is gone.

[566] What does that require?

[567] That's what makes this so difficult.

[568] And I think that in some ways, you've made a more powerful philosophical case for my candidacy that in my first week I have yet to do yet, which is that it requires defying the odds of having somebody who is both conscientious, conscientious conservative, as you noted, but who has the capacity for being visionary in having the vision of recreating that structure, that solar system around which the rest of the fringes can orbit.

[569] And that's inherently an unlikelyhood.

[570] By you said, by the psychological nature of creativity and conscientious, those are not supposed to coincide.

[571] That's what sets a really high bar.

[572] It's also what calls me into this race because it is what our moment demands because we're not starting from neutral territory.

[573] We're starting from the state of entropic chaos that you highlight.

[574] Desert.

[575] The desert.

[576] We're starting from being lost in the desert.

[577] And so thank you because you have in a philosophical, in a deeply philosophically grounded way, made the case for my candidacy and why I am doing this.

[578] Whether I will deliver or not the next year and a half remains to be told, but that's at least the challenge I'm setting out to take on.

[579] and thank you for laying that out.

[580] Well, with this group that I've been working with in London, we've also set forward a couple of other propositions too, which is that if your policy requires compulsion or force, it's at least suboptimal.

[581] And so we're trying to play an invitational game, and so you could imagine that on the visionary horizon.

[582] Your goal as a visionary is to produce an image that's so compelling that people of their own free accord say, yeah, you know, I'd be willing to sacrifice to that end.

[583] Yes, yes.

[584] Willing to sacrifice.

[585] I love the way you frame that.

[586] Because you can make a sacrifice if you know what you are sacrificing for.

[587] Actually, so this was a big part of my upbringing, right?

[588] Immigrant parents from India, Hindu tradition came to this country.

[589] Part and parcel of parenting, part and parcel of growing up as a kid in that household.

[590] The idea of sacrifice was woven into my upbringing, right?

[591] Grandparents who lived in the house because it was their duty to take care of their parents because that was just familial sacrifice needed to be made.

[592] Sacrifices needed to be made to raise my brother and I, to have the academic achievements that we did in the education.

[593] That didn't happen in a vacuum.

[594] It happened on the back of parents who actually said there's more to life than just following your latest self -indulgence.

[595] But these things can be done if you know what you're sacrificing for.

[596] I draw that as analogy to some of my policy agenda.

[597] This is a harder sell, but I think it's true too.

[598] In the United States today needs to, I've made the case, declare independence from China.

[599] That's a whole separate geopolitical discussion we can have, why I think that's important, why I think there's an opportunity.

[600] But I've also been, even in week one, very clear, this will involve some measure of sacrifice.

[601] In fact, if there's some resistance I'm getting to the Declaration of Independence proposition of China, it's actually coming from some Republicans who are unwilling to make that sacrifice who have become so addicted to buying cheap stuff.

[602] But again, I say that we can make those sacrifices if we know what we are sacrificing for.

[603] And so this idea of sacrifice, I think, is fundamental to this question of identity.

[604] Once you're grounded in identity, once you're grounded in who you are and what you might be willing to make a sacrifice for, it's almost a litmus test for identity.

[605] If you have nothing that you're willing to make a sacrifice for, it means you have no identity, right?

[606] And so that's a great framing of it.

[607] Let's go down that road for a moment.

[608] So because you might, you might ask yourself, well, why use the sacrificial language and also why do you need to make sacrifices at all.

[609] And the answer is, you're always going to be making sacrifices.

[610] Because if you do one thing instead of another, then you sacrifice all the other things you could have done.

[611] So there's no action whatsoever without sacrifice.

[612] Now, then you might ask, well, is there actually something in reality that's worth sacrificing for?

[613] And the answer is, well, first of all, you don't have a choice.

[614] Now, generally what, because no matter what you do, if you do something, you're sacrificing.

[615] Now, people might say, well, I want to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want.

[616] And so that's sort of the ultimate in subjectivity.

[617] And there's an impulsiveness and a pandering to whim that's associated with that.

[618] But that's not really freedom.

[619] What that is is subjection to the rule by impulsive whims.

[620] And that's what you see as characterizing children.

[621] It's like, I get to do what I want right now.

[622] So then you might say, well, why sacrifice that?

[623] And the answer is, because it isn't a coherent or communal medium to long -term solution, the reason you sacrifice the whims of childhood, that polytheistic state of motivational possession that characterizes childhood, the reason you sacrifice that to an integrated maturity is because the integrated maturity, A, constitutes an identity that will protect you from anxiety and provide you with hope, but also unifies you across time and lays the preconditions for your social, integration and there's nothing about that that's arbitrary and so the question isn't who is going to rule you no i want no one to rule me how can i set my life up so no one can rule me the question is what is it that i'm going to work towards allowing to rule me and it's either going to be my whims which means i'm subject to them or it's going to be some higher order state of integration that requires sacrifice and then that ties into this whole hierarchical identity.

[624] You know, you sacrifice your whims to your partner.

[625] You and your partner sacrifice your whims to your children.

[626] Your family sacrifices its whims to the community.

[627] And all of that.

[628] Now, you want that to be done harmoniously and you want it to be done voluntarily.

[629] Autonomously, voluntarily, exactly.

[630] Yes, exactly.

[631] So we have to create that sense of identity and purpose that makes us voluntarily opt into that nested identity state, right?

[632] There is a sacrifice for a marriage.

[633] There is a sacrifice to entering a marriage.

[634] It's a sacrifice worth making.

[635] There's a sacrifice to having children.

[636] That's a sacrifice worth making.

[637] There is a sacrifice to being a citizen of a nation.

[638] I'm not a global citizen just a global citizen.

[639] I'm a citizen of a nation.

[640] There's a sacrifice worth making.

[641] We can make these sacrifices if we know what's worth sacrificing for.

[642] That's the missing, what I call in the conservative movement to borrow from David Hume.

[643] David Hume had this famous chapter in sort of his, he was an empiricist, but one of the paradoxes in his theory of empiricism was what he called the missing shade of blue.

[644] He could say what the shade of blue was without having ever having seen it.

[645] That was a challenge to his theory of empiricism.

[646] Anyway, I borrow that.

[647] I call it the missing shade of red in the conservative movement is this idea of the revival of duty and embracing duty as a precondition for freedom, but it's duty that we actually autonomously opt into by way of our free choice and our free will.

[648] These things are not incompatible.

[649] They're not contradictory.

[650] They sound contradictory.

[651] Not at all.

[652] They're not.

[653] No, no, no. They're sort of mutually required.

[654] The other thing I was just going to say about kids, because I think this is one where I wasn't sure if you were going to disagree with me on this, but actually having heard you, I suspect that you don't.

[655] I've gotten this actually a lot on the road.

[656] I was in Iowa and New Hampshire last week.

[657] I do draw a distinction between this idea of freedom and autonomy amongst adults versus in children.

[658] So, you know, one of the things that I've said that rankles, I think, a lot of the, you know, libertarian leading, you know, conservatives or whatever.

[659] And I used to call myself a libertarian for a bunch of reasons I'm not anymore.

[660] But, you know, is this idea that children are different than adults, okay?

[661] And so that period you talked about between 16 and 21.

[662] I mean, I'll just even take the easier end of the spectrum.

[663] Forget 21.

[664] Just say 16.

[665] If you can't use an addictive cigarette by the age of 18 or drink an addictive sip of alcohol by the age of 21, why is it that you're allowed to use an addictive social media product as a preteen either?

[666] I mean, that at the very least is an inconsistency.

[667] the way we treat this.

[668] Now, I fully agree with you that all else equal, the path to getting to this ideal, the structure of ideal that we discussed before ought to be a path that does not involve coercion or impinging on free will.

[669] It is, you phrased it very politely, it would be suboptimal, I believe is the word you used.

[670] I think that that is the most gracious way of putting that.

[671] I think it should be avoided is the way I would say it as a prospective policymaker and leader of the country.

[672] But I don't apply the same rules of the road as it applies to children, because none of us believe that children actually should be treated as the same autonomous agents that they ought to be on the other side of entering adulthood.

[673] Now, that gets into questions of parenting, et cetera, which we can get into.

[674] But be that as it may, I buy into this, I buy into this vision of structure as necessary in a precondition for experience of freedom, but the path to getting there can't involve coercion.

[675] I'm with you all the way.

[676] So in the Exodus story, when God charges Moses with standing up to the Pharaoh, he tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh something very specific, and he has him repeated 10 times, in case you didn't notice, right?

[677] It's repeated 10 times in the story, nine or 10 times.

[678] He tells Moses to let my people go, which of course a very famous phrase, but that's not the phrase.

[679] The phrase is, let my people go so that they may worship or celebrate me in the wilderness, in the desert.

[680] And so what it does is it sets up not freedom, but ordered freedom.

[681] And so then you might ask yourself, well, what constitutes ordered freedom?

[682] Well, a game is ordered freedom.

[683] A voluntary game is ordered freedom because you have a large landscape of choice, but it's dependent on principles, right?

[684] Those are the rules of the game.

[685] And a game's a good analogy because people play games voluntarily and they want to play them and they enjoy them.

[686] And so if you set something like, if you set a social structure up with a game -like substructure, then people voluntarily hop aboard.

[687] Now, the free market response to the problem of the margins is to produce a plethora of games.

[688] And so that you might be marginal in one game or almost all.

[689] games, but there may be some game that you'll be central because of your temperamental advantages.

[690] And I think you can see that in the gay community, for example, especially among male homosexuals, because the entertainment industry, especially on the more explicitly cultural end, is dominated by gay men.

[691] And there's a reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, because male homosexuality is associated with heightened levels of creativity.

[692] And so there's a margin there and the margin is, well, if you're creative, you're not going to be traditional.

[693] It's going to be hard for you to abide by the ideal.

[694] But there's a niche for you on the cultural transformation front.

[695] And so a free market solution to the problem of marginalization is something like the offering of a true diversity.

[696] It's like, yeah, you're only five foot two, so you can't play basketball.

[697] You know, but you might be a damn good jockey.

[698] Exactly.

[699] And if we have enough games, exactly, exactly.

[700] that.

[701] And then people can trade on their idiosyncrasies.

[702] And you see, this is an argument that free market types haven't made to the diversity types.

[703] It's like, well, the reason you want a free market is to provide a diverse number of games so the marginalized can find a center.

[704] Diversity in our approach to diversity itself, by the way.

[705] And I think you see the same thing.

[706] I mean, so I've been trying.

[707] I don't know that I've succeeded over the last several years, but I've been trying to exactly preach that to the diversity crowd, where even if you think about institutional purpose, right, you were talking about at the level of individuals, in the marginalized side, and so I agree with that, that's one form of diverse approaches to diversity.

[708] Here's a different approach of diverse approaches to diversity, is diversity of institutional purpose that even different companies, let's just take it in the realm of companies.

[709] That's the world I've lived in, right?

[710] Corporate America and capital markets, fine.

[711] Each company ought to have a unique purpose.

[712] And what is the problem with using a common three -letter acronym?

[713] It's funny how these things always come in three -letter acronyms, but from ESG to DEI to CSR to you know, CCP, I joke around.

[714] W .EF.

[715] Yeah, exactly.

[716] CCP and WEF are some of the ones lurking behind the scenes.

[717] But the problem with these, you know, ESG or DEI three -letter acronyms is what are they effectively saying?

[718] They're saying that, no, no, no, you can't have your own distinctive purpose.

[719] Everyone's purpose must be common to advance environmental, social, and governance goals, diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

[720] That's a denial of diversity, right?

[721] It rejects a lurking tyranny.

[722] Exactly.

[723] It's a lurking tyranny versus, if you're really pro -diversity, you should have that fall out of the structure that you and I discussed, right?

[724] What is your institutional purpose?

[725] If you run an institution, you have one question, why do we exist?

[726] Period.

[727] Have a good answer to that question.

[728] And then say, what type of diversity you espouse, that's really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose.

[729] Different types of institutions should want different kinds of diversity and they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don't want.

[730] I'll actually give you one example that I use that's sort of funny, you know, at times is I'm a vegetarian, okay?

[731] I don't eat meat because I believe it is in my tradition morally wrong to kill animals solely for culinary pleasure.

[732] There are conditions in which it would be fine to do it, but if it's just for my culinary pleasure, I'd rather not do it.

[733] I respect other people's right and freedom to go in a different direction.

[734] But Take the example of me working at a steakhouse, okay?

[735] I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse, even if I would deliver the ever -priced form of diversity of thought.

[736] See, people sometimes are loose in terms of diversity of thought instead of diversity of appearance.

[737] Yeah, yeah, I'm in favor of diversity of thought over diversity of appearance, too.

[738] But even diversity of thought is too low resolution.

[739] That's a diverse thought.

[740] But a steakhouse still shouldn't want to employ me because that's not the kind of diversity of thought you should want if your focus is on delivering excellent stake to a customer because the kind of diversity you want there should be in service of your purpose.

[741] And so I think this revival of the idea of purpose itself gives meaning to diversity itself.

[742] And whether that's true in a company context or a national context, that's kind of my approach to the diversity discussion that we've managed to obsess over.

[743] There's a couple of places we can go with that.

[744] So one of the things you're pointing out, and it's in keeping with this Berkian notion of subsidiarity that has its origins and this Exodus narrative, by the way, is that there's going to be a variety of institutions at each level of the hierarchy.

[745] So you can imagine there's a variety of forms of couples.

[746] You know, there's going to be some couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner, for example.

[747] There's going to be some couples where the man is.

[748] And that's fine.

[749] You want the commonality of the coupling, but you want the diversity of possibilities within that framework and then the same at the level of family.

[750] There's going to be some families with 10 kids.

[751] There's going to be some families with one.

[752] There's going to be blended families, but that's still circles around the core of family.

[753] So you have order, but you have diversity at each of the levels of order.

[754] And you also have the recognition that each of those levels has its own domain of sacred responsibility.

[755] Now, one of the things I've noticed, you could try this out for yourself if you're curious about it.

[756] But I've gone to 400 cities in the last four years lecturing about the sorts of things that we're talking about today.

[757] And there's one point I make that always brings the audience, no matter where it is, to a dead silence.

[758] Like absolutely pin drop dead silence.

[759] And here's the argument.

[760] So you need a sustaining meaning in your life.

[761] Now, what does sustaining mean?

[762] It means it will sustain you through catastrophe.

[763] So it'll sustain you through pain and terror.

[764] Now that can't be happiness because happiness is absent in conditions of pain and terror.

[765] So it can't be that.

[766] So what is it?

[767] Well, I drew on my clinical experience to answer that question.

[768] Well, what do people have when things, when they're truly in the desert, when they're abandoned and lost and in pain?

[769] Well, they have the structure around them that they'd made sacrifices to produce.

[770] They have their partner.

[771] They have their, you know, their wife or their husband.

[772] They have their children and their parents and their siblings.

[773] They have their friends.

[774] They have their community.

[775] They have this hierarchy of social structure around them that can sustain them if they made the proper sacrifices.

[776] And then the question is, well, what is the nature of the sacrifice that's necessary to make those bonds and the answer is, well, that's the adoption of voluntary responsibility.

[777] And so once you know, this is something conservatives haven't ever made explicit, the meaning that sustains you in tragedy is to be found through the voluntary adoption of responsibility.

[778] And so you can tell young people that.

[779] You can tell young people that.

[780] They say, well, why should I grow up?

[781] I can just do whatever I want whenever I want.

[782] And that's especially true if they happen to be wealthy and privileged.

[783] And the answer is, well, if you expend all that capital on hedonism, as soon as the storms come, you're shipwrecked.

[784] Absolutely.

[785] There'll be nothing left of you because there's no hedonism in hell.

[786] And what you have there is whatever you've built responsibly.

[787] And there's meaning in that.

[788] And people understand that immediately.

[789] And it's part of this alternative vision to this fractured hedonism that everyone is celebrating now.

[790] Let me ask you a question about that, because I think this is really interesting.

[791] I care about delivering this solution, right?

[792] So I want to get to the heart of it.

[793] There's two possibilities there, and the answer might be both, but I want to get a sense for which one you meant.

[794] One is that that sustained meaning, is that what you said, sustained purpose?

[795] Yeah, sustaining meaning, yeah.

[796] The meaning that will sustain you across time.

[797] Right, sustaining meaning.

[798] That can pre -exist and be resilient across catastrophe in a way that this superficial idea of happiness.

[799] Tradition does that.

[800] Tradition can be grounded.

[801] If you're embedded in a tradition, you bet.

[802] But there's a version of what you described, which also makes me think about a very different direction here, which is that you can also form that in response to catastrophe, too.

[803] And so I think much of the social structure that we have created in absence of that purpose and vacuum, I mean, this might be a cycles of history thing, less about psychology and more just about the nature of history here, is that we create the conditions for that catastrophe, whatever it might be.

[804] And it might be that catastrophe itself may have to be the catalyst for rediscovering what that sustained meaning was across those circumstances in the future.

[805] Be that economic catastrophe, I think that we're due for economic tough times, in part for a lot of the difficult decisions we've made over the last 10 years amidst this vacuum of purpose.

[806] I think China may do this favor, favor, I use in air quotes, for the United States.

[807] But which of those was the sense in which you meant it, right?

[808] In first principles developing that to be resilient across time, or are you also subconsciously making some kind of empirical prediction here that in absence of this, we're going to have to have this as a response, at least, that will cause us to adapt?

[809] I would say that you don't have to think except when you're failing.

[810] Because the purpose of thinking is to calculate a new trajectory.

[811] And if the trajectory you're pursuing is producing the desired results, then your theory is intact.

[812] Well, then the question emerges, which is, well, how much failure is necessary to make you think?

[813] And that's actually a moral question.

[814] That's a question of willful blindness.

[815] You know, if you're awake and alert, and if you're humble in the classic virtuous sense, you're always trying to figure out where you're insufficient and to rectify that.

[816] In many Christian prayers, the Jesus' prayer, for example, is a reminder that the Orthodox cite that continually, chant that continually, is a reminder that you're insufficient in your current form and you should be looking for what would rectify you.

[817] That's the practice of humility.

[818] And the advantage to that practice is that you can make micro -repairs instead of staying stubborn until the apocalypse happens and then collapsing.

[819] Now, in the story of Moses, what happens to the pharaoh, who's a tyrant, is that the crises emerge and then magnify, right?

[820] They just get worse and worse and worse and worse.

[821] And he utterly fails to respond.

[822] And the consequence of that is that his entire societies is devastated.

[823] The firstborn are all killed and the Red Sea floods and destroys the, what, the military might of the Egyptian Empire.

[824] and so the answer to your question is what's the relationship between failure and return to abiding and sustaining values and the answer is well it depends on how stiff -necked you are and if you're stiff -necked enough well if you're stiff -necked enough and this is no joke and I mean this if you're stiff -necked enough then you face the apocalypse and we're toying with that at the moment that's exactly where we are that's exactly where we are And I think that, I think that in certain sense, my goal in this journey is to make sure that that doesn't have to be the catalyst for deliverance, okay?

[825] Well, wouldn't that be nice?

[826] Because if it's not going to be somebody who delivers a vision but from a actually conservatively grounded perspective with the consciousness of a conservative that still brings a creativity of vision to this, well, then it may have to be done by force by way of apocalypse anyway.

[827] and in the modern sense of that word, we're going to have to be forced to learn the lesson that we couldn't learn ourselves in the first place.

[828] I don't think we're quite there yet, and I do think we have a window to get this right, which is the entire premise of, I mean, you have verbalized using words what I feel in my bones, in my heart, that compels me to want to do this better than I have at any point in the last week.

[829] So I've watched a lot of people, in the last five years, embark on political careers.

[830] You know, I've been privileged to watch that with many people on the Democrat side, many people on the Republican side, and in different countries as well.

[831] And this is what I see happening consistently.

[832] So neophytes enter the political arena.

[833] Now, they may have been people who, like you, have had a pretty stellar career and have racked up enough successes so that they can present themselves as credible candidates.

[834] And, you know, two thumbs up for that.

[835] I think that's a necessary precondition.

[836] But they get intimidated in the new arena because the stakes are super high and they don't have a lot of experience.

[837] And so what they end up doing is they end up hiring communication teams and there are experts at political communication and they usually involve pollsters, for example, and speechwriters, people who will help you craft your message.

[838] And then what I see happening, and this is inevitable, this is the inevitable consequence, is that the person running loses their voice, voice and they often lose the election too by the way they lose their voice and the election now not always sometimes they win but they still lose their voice so and one of the things that's emerged is the opportunity on the political landscape to do what you and i are doing right now which is really different you know for 40 years politicians in some sense had to craft their message because they had to pass it through the narrow bandwidth of legacy media right and so they'd had to compress things into a 30 second sound they were forced to right yeah right right but now now you have the opportunity to just say what you think and if you just say what you think well first of all if you're wrong you'll learn and that's useful and the other thing is is that people are going to respond positively to that because they're desperate for truth now you can tell that because trump was successful now i'm not trying to put trump out you know on some pedestal up on some pedestal is the world's greatest truth teller, but I would say that one of the things Trump did was speak without without, you could say without forethought, but that isn't exactly.

[839] Without inhibition?

[840] Without inhibition, is what I mean.

[841] Yes, he basically for all of his flaws, he did, he struck especially the working class as genuine because he was willing to say what he thought.

[842] And what was cool about that was that he won.

[843] And so I'm really interested in your candidacy, you know, because you're coming in from left field you're going to definitely be a dark horse candidate and it's very interesting like God only knows how that'll play out but one of the advantages that I think you have apart from your financial background and the fact that you're alert to the dangers of ESG tyranny and so forth which is a non -trivial example is that you can really afford to take the risk you know how to use the new media and that's a deadly advantage and also you know your candidacy is sufficiently unlikely so that there's no reason for you to do things in a conventional manner because conventionally you should just lose.

[844] You're not well enough known, right?

[845] You don't have enough of a political apparatus.

[846] I don't have a machine, you know.

[847] Right, exactly.

[848] But that could be a huge advantage.

[849] You know, one of the pieces of help I'll ask for you is keep me honest through this whole thing because that's where I'm starting off.

[850] I can imagine that there's a lot of people who embark with that vision and then just become stultified by the suffocating forces around them.

[851] But I'll tell you a couple rules of the road that I've, you know, tied my hands to the mast to make this easy for me in a good way is no one's going to write another speech for me. In fact, even when I give speeches, I don't write my own speeches.

[852] I just say what's on my mind.

[853] I don't use a teleprompter.

[854] In fact, a fun, I haven't said this yet.

[855] A fun little challenge, I was thinking about issuing to the entire Republican field, maybe I'll just do it right now, is don't have anyone write your speeches and don't use a teleprompter.

[856] I'll make that commitment.

[857] Why doesn't the whole field make that commitment.

[858] No teleprompter.

[859] Speak from the heart.

[860] Get it out there.

[861] And, you know, one of the things that we're going to do is I've learned pretty early on.

[862] What you're supposed to do if you're running for president is you get trained behind closed doors and then people train you and prep you with their talking points.

[863] And you come on, put on this nice suit and tie, and then you project to the world how much you know about words and terms that you just learned 10 minutes ago.

[864] Why that?

[865] Instead, actually, what I've said is, and I think we're actually going to do this.

[866] I mean, over the objections of good advice.

[867] is all of my policy briefings, all of my education.

[868] I mean, there's a lot that anybody, myself included, for sure, is going to have to learn to be an effective president of the United States.

[869] That's a big part of the next year and a half.

[870] And I am running to run, I'm not running for, to make a point.

[871] I'm running because I believe seeing this all the way through is the ticket to drive maximal positive change, that's going to require a lot of learning.

[872] We're just going to tape it in forums like this and we'll put it out to the internet.

[873] And you know what?

[874] If that allows people to discover that I was not omniscientious, great.

[875] I am not God.

[876] You know, I was on a radio interview yesterday where somebody asked me about some term in U .S. military history that I should know.

[877] Well, I didn't know it.

[878] I told him that, but I said, I'm also a fast study and committed to learning, which I think he took in a good way, and I meant it.

[879] So I just think that more honesty will go a long way.

[880] I think this race will be better off if none of us read speeches that other people wrote for us.

[881] If none of us even use a teleprompter, stick into some script, but speak from the heart.

[882] That's what I'm committed to doing.

[883] I hope that keeps me honest.

[884] I have a lot to learn, and not only am I going to learn it, we'll open source it.

[885] Everybody can learn along with me. That's one of the ways we're going to do this thing starting about next month.

[886] Yeah.

[887] Well, if you use prepared speech, you don't have faith in your heart.

[888] Yeah.

[889] You don't have faith that you can respond to the moment in accordance with your principles.

[890] in a dynamic manner that will involve the audience.

[891] And if you can't do that, A, you shouldn't lead, and B, you should learn.

[892] Because you can do that.

[893] You can learn to do that.

[894] And people do respond to that much better.

[895] Like, I've experimented with this on YouTube because now and then I'm trying to think, Sue, something really difficult, you know, and I'll write it out because you can make a more coherent argument in writing and a denser argument.

[896] But then I've tried to read it on YouTube, you know?

[897] And it doesn't work.

[898] It doesn't work.

[899] Like it works okay, you know what I mean?

[900] It's not a failure, but it's not a success.

[901] The last thing I did, this was, so this is an hybrid that's worth experimenting with.

[902] So I wrote this statement of vision for this enterprise.

[903] I described, the ARC enterprise, and I wanted to share it with people, so I was going to read it, but I knew that reading wasn't very compelling because it didn't have that spontaneity that reveals the heart, let's say.

[904] So what I did was I read like two sentences and then commented on it.

[905] and then read another two sentences and commented on.

[906] Yeah, that really worked because, you see, it enables you to.

[907] Well, it enables you to have your talking points at hand, you know, because I'm going to try that.

[908] Can you remember?

[909] But it was very effective for me, and it kept the spontaneity, you know?

[910] And so, and you can't plan for that.

[911] But I think you have to, in some ways, be disciplined about making sure that you don't just revert to the natural norm of just sticking to what you need to say.

[912] And you know what?

[913] You're right.

[914] I think there is something about legacy media that sort of forces that, but I don't like just blaming legacy media, too, because I go on a lot of TV hits as well.

[915] I don't think you have to do it that way either.

[916] And in a certain way, I think that the last best chance for reviving legacy media is if the people who go on it stop behaving, like the cartoons that legacy media created for the last 30 years, this could actually be the source of saving legacy media itself.

[917] Just because you're given three to five minutes, doesn't mean that you actually have to stick to those talking points.

[918] Try doing it this way, too.

[919] That's what I try to do when I go on television as well.

[920] But anyway, this is good.

[921] Much more effective.

[922] I mean, I've done that.

[923] Maybe it's effective and maybe it's not.

[924] Right?

[925] Maybe it's effective.

[926] We'll find out.

[927] This is an experiment for me. But here's what I'll say is even if you were, even if you were more likely to win the other way, you have your soul sucked out of you, right?

[928] You're just a hollowed out husk of yourself.

[929] So if the point of winning was to go sit in the White House, then, okay, that's one thing.

[930] If the point is actually to drive a revival, you're not going to do that even from the White House.

[931] just to hollowed Alaska yourself.

[932] I don't think there is any evidence that you're more likely to win doing it the conventional handled, poll driven media establishment craft a persona way.

[933] I think I looked at the empirical evidence.

[934] I can't see a shred of evidence.

[935] There's hardly any evidence that election spending is positively associated with victory.

[936] Good.

[937] It's not.

[938] There's no evidence in relationship to incumbents.

[939] Incumbent spending is completely irrelevant to electoral outcome.

[940] There's some minor evidence on the challenger front that more spending makes the difference.

[941] But you can't tell if that's because of the spending or because the more popular candidates are more likely to raise money.

[942] And, you know, if you look at someone like Joe Rogan, Rogan's very interesting figure, because he's basically created a whole media empire out of nothing.

[943] He still has nothing.

[944] He has his producer.

[945] Awesome.

[946] He selects all his own guests.

[947] Well, and all Rogan does is exposes ignorance.

[948] because all he does is ask stupid questions, you know, and I don't know the guy, but I'd love to meet him some point.

[949] You know, he seems like he's on to something.

[950] But I think imagine taking that spirit to actually running a presidential and political campaign.

[951] That's what this is going to be.

[952] And so maybe it's, I mean, I'm certainly betting it's a formula for success.

[953] I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think so.

[954] But I'd rather stay true to who I am and actually putting that on full display and being open about learning through the process and open sourcing that.

[955] than trying to do this in some way that projects some image of some omniscient guy, which is exactly what the political consultant class wants to do, right?

[956] They want to say, hey, you're positioned to leave.

[957] They want to craft everything.

[958] They want to project the image of a leader.

[959] But who cares if that leader doesn't actually exist?

[960] And so that's how we're going to do this.

[961] And, you know, a year and a half from now, we'll find out whether it was the electorally successful strategy or not.

[962] But it is the personally, for me, it's the only way that I'm going to be able to do this.

[963] and so it'll be a fun, it'll be a fun test case to see this all the way through.

[964] Well, I would say psychologically, there is no other pathway to success than something approximating, abiding in the truth because the truth puts reality within you and behind you.

[965] And so that doesn't mean that that will result in proximal success at the moment, right?

[966] And that's another sacrifice that has to be made.

[967] Like, you know, you don't know in some cosmic sense whether it's time for you to be president.

[968] Apparently, it's time for you to run.

[969] But I would say, psychologically speaking, that if you stay true to your own voice and you're very diligent in that and you make the sacrifices necessary to make that possible, that your candidacy will be a success regardless of the outcome.

[970] And you might think, well, that's kind of paradoxical.

[971] It's like, look, no, it's not.

[972] Because, for example, you might tilt the discussion of the election in a direction that's extremely good for the country.

[973] And that could be completely independent of whether or not you win the presidency.

[974] In fact, you might even do that more effectively by running a campaign that wouldn't be crafted this time to put you in the optimal political position.

[975] And I've seen this with other political leaders, you know, like I talked to Netanyahu a while back, and he really risked his political skin.

[976] and his party's political skin to bring in necessary economic reform in Israel.

[977] And that crashed his party and him for like a decade.

[978] But he's back.

[979] And Israel is thriving on the economic front.

[980] So you don't know.

[981] I'm not crafting it at all.

[982] I think not crafting is exactly the way to go.

[983] And maybe that's, my bet is that's going to be what successfully puts me in the White House in 2024.

[984] But I don't fetishize that.

[985] And then there's the inverse of this, too, Dr. Peterson, which is you could craft.

[986] it to win and check the box of winning the presidency.

[987] But just because you said the other way doesn't necessarily mean you lose, this other way doesn't necessarily mean you even win.

[988] Even if you actually numerically win the election and sit in the White House, who cares if the person sitting there is just a stuffed suit that certainly knew how to craft how to win without actually having something of substance left on the inside of who occupies that stuffed suit.

[989] So it goes in both ways, actually.

[990] I think that's absolutely.

[991] I think that's an almost inevitable consequence.

[992] Like I saw this with faculty members continually.

[993] So here's part of the reason the universities are so ruined.

[994] Okay, so graduate student says to himself, I can't really say or write what I think.

[995] No, an undergraduate says, I can't really say what I write or say or write what I think.

[996] I have to get my grade.

[997] So he compromises what he says and thinks.

[998] And then he's a graduate student.

[999] He thinks, well, now I'm a little higher up in the hierarchy, but I'm still not a professor, so I can't really say or write what I think.

[1000] And then he's an assistant professor, and he says, well, I haven't got tenure, so I better keep my mouth shut.

[1001] And then he's an associate with tenure, and he says, well, I'm not a full professor.

[1002] Finally, when I become a full professor, I'll be able to say what I, and write what I think.

[1003] And then he's 35 or 40, and for 25 years, he's practiced deception, and he doesn't have a word of truth left to utter.

[1004] And that happens to political figures all the time, and that's a real defeat.

[1005] Totally true.

[1006] And you know what?

[1007] I think that that's what winning and losing really ought to be defined as.

[1008] And then we're making this empirical bet.

[1009] You pointed out to Donald Trump in 2015.

[1010] I think empirically, you know, my bet is where yours is, where that in this moment probably is the more electorally successful strategy anyway.

[1011] But I'm less sure of that than I am sure that this is how I'm going to do it because that's what's in my control.

[1012] And that's how we're going to keep it.

[1013] Well, I would love to keep talking to you.

[1014] I mean, I've been really fortunate over the last six years, because I've had a group of family members and friends around me who have their own independent viewpoints and who want nothing from me who constantly are interacting with me and making sure that I'm not, you know, wandering off the path in some manner that's untoward, you know, and there's been some pretty intense discussions about that at multiple times, but it is very useful to have people around you who, you know, who you talk through your strategy, the one you just laid out and say, look, guys, I'd like you to keep an eye on me. And if you think I'm striking some false notes or I'm starting to be, you know, the great and wonderful awe is the projection of the leader that, you know, you can rein me in a bit.

[1015] And if you do put that goal to keep control of your tongue first and foremost in mind, and then you have people who can reflect that back to you.

[1016] You know, you can stay on the proper track.

[1017] And I think the idea of not letting people, I just can't believe political figures have other people write their speeches.

[1018] It's like...

[1019] I mean, they do, though.

[1020] It's nuts.

[1021] You have other people craft your thoughts.

[1022] I know.

[1023] It's utterly insane.

[1024] It's nuts.

[1025] And they'll say, I'll channel your thoughts, but, you know, as whoever said it, language guards the channel through which thought flows, right?

[1026] My 11th great English teacher basically said that, right?

[1027] If you can't write it down yourself, you probably don't know what you wanted to actually say.

[1028] But anyway, here's an ask that I'll have for you.

[1029] I mean, honestly, honest to God, and you're, you know, the program, et cetera, you do, call me back on here and call me out.

[1030] or don't call me back out here and call me. Keep me honest, right?

[1031] If you're seeing a deviation from this, anyone in my shoes deserves to be called out and roasted over it because that's what keeps us honest.

[1032] Okay, well, let's do this.

[1033] This will be an interesting thing to do in terms of what I can bring to my audiences anyways.

[1034] I mean, you're going to enter this fray full flat out for the next year and a half.

[1035] Why don't we check in about every three months or so, and we can play that by year and you can just provide us with an update you know and then you can walk everybody through the whole experience and we can talk over these issues continually and you call me out whether you think I'm actually staying true to what I what I'm setting out to see this conversation is ground zero let's do this every few months and then and I'll give you my honest take of how I think things are going and and if you see me becoming the thing that I'm telling you I'm entering this to shake up and change call it out because then we might as well call it quits on on the whole thing.

[1036] There's no point to the whole thing.

[1037] Even if I'm doing better in the polling, but I'm becoming some hollowed out husk of myself, let's just call it a day and move on because that's not really what this whole enterprise was about.

[1038] I'd love it.

[1039] I'll take you up on that.

[1040] Okay, okay, good.

[1041] Well, I'll keep an eye out and I'll try to ask you the most difficult questions I can ask that are real questions and that are fair, you know?

[1042] And so that's always the grounds for a good discussion.

[1043] We managed that today.

[1044] It looks like we can do this because we did this with Michaela, and Michaela's show a while back, and it worked well, and today I thought went extremely well, it zipped by, and we covered all the terms of, are you kidding me?

[1045] I thought we're just getting warmed up.

[1046] We are, no, we're already done.

[1047] Are you?

[1048] Are you?

[1049] Okay, okay.

[1050] Okay, okay.

[1051] I thought we're getting warmed up.

[1052] Okay, okay, okay, all right, that was the preamble.

[1053] Probably are.

[1054] Well, it looks like it is the preamble.

[1055] Okay, okay.

[1056] Okay, and this is a good, this is a good place to wrap up.

[1057] Good, well, for everybody who's watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention, and I'm going to move with Vivek over to the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[1058] We're going to go through some autobiographical background and I'm very interested always in investigating to find out how people's interests made themselves manifest in their life in the problems that gripped them and the opportunities that offered themselves to them.

[1059] So we'll continue that conversation for half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus front and so you can turn to that if you want to follow up in the discussion.

[1060] Vieck, thank you very much today for agreeing to talk to me today and congratulations on your candidacy.

[1061] It's a hell of a thing to undertake.

[1062] And you're going to be in for quite the roller coaster ride for the next 18 months.

[1063] I mean, I know you're familiar with that sort of thing already.

[1064] And so I look forward to talking to you again.

[1065] And to those of you were watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention to the film crew here in Calgary.

[1066] I'm still in Calgary.

[1067] Thank you for your time today and your technological prowess.

[1068] And we'll turn it over to the Daily Hour Plus and chow, everybody.

[1069] everyone.

[1070] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.