WBD610 Audio Transcription

The Great Uprising with Vivek Ramaswamy

Release date: Wednesday 25th January

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Vivek Ramaswamy. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Vivek Ramaswamy is an entrepreneur and author. In this interview, we discuss his thesis that social and political struggles are rooted in the rise of a managerial class dominating society at the expense of everyday citizens. We also talk about the need to revive a binding national identity, and how the social justice movement may be causing more harm than good.

“When you tell people they cannot speak, that is when they scream. But when you tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.”

— Vivek Ramaswamy

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Welcome to the show, Vivek.  I'm not going to attempt to pronounce your surname.

Vivek Ramaswamy: You can pronounce it; it's not that hard.

Peter McCormack: Ramaswamy.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Ramaswamy.  It's Vivek, like cake.

Peter McCormack: Vivek, so I've got that wrong!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, it's Vivek, and then Ramaswamy.

Peter McCormack: All right, well welcome to the show.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, thanks, man.

Peter McCormack: So, Mr Epstein, Alex Epstein recommend you come on the Bitcoin tour.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Our good friend, yeah.  He told me the Bitcoin crowd might be into some of the stuff I'm spending my time on these days.

Peter McCormack: I don't know if he would call me a friend. 

Danny Knowles: A sparring partner.

Peter McCormack: Maybe a sparring partner, associate.  I gave him a hard time, I pushed him back a little bit.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Okay, well he can handle it, I would assume.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm centre-right in the UK, so I'm ultra-left-woke in the US.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Okay, got it!

Peter McCormack: So, I'm right on your target list!

Vivek Ramaswamy: I don't even know what these words mean any more, to be honest with you.  I think the spectrum itself, right/left, is itself in need of definition.  It is a skeleton that we try to hang things on, but I think it's quite possibly been the wrong skeleton in the first place.

Peter McCormack: Or obliterating so we stop dividing ourselves.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I'm not just one of these unity, can't we all get along, come in the middle, centrist type of people.  I actually reject the idea that there is a unidimensional spectrum of left and right; I think there are many axes, and I think we sometimes in our political discourse try to retrofit a multidimensional axis into a bidirectional axis, and then we come up with curiosities that wonder why the Republicans can't settle on the Speaker, the news of this week.  A lot of those curiosities are explained by the fact that we're using the wrong framework in the first place.

If I had to do my reductive version of it, I would at least pick a better reductive version than R versus D, Republican versus Democrat.  I talk about the difference between the managerial class and the everyday citizen.  If I had to pick one bidirectional axis that best described the two pulls of American political struggle, it would be the members of the managerial class in government, in the private sector, in every institution we know, the hired hands who are supposed to manage through some level of bureaucracy and institution; and then the everyday individuals who are supposed to be the people who that institution serves.  In a democracy, that's a government and a citizen.  But it could be the same in a corporation, where you have the owners of the corporation versus the hired class that runs those corporations today.  In a non-profit group, it could be the cause or the people that it's supposed to serve versus the people who sit, I love that passive verb, sit, on the board of that organisation.

Anyway, that's how I see the world, is you've got the managerial class, you've got the everyday citizen, and then you've got this weird third category of creators that can maybe mediate the other two groups.  But that's a long way of saying I don't know what left/right, British version versus American version exactly even mean these days.  I think it's up to us to actually define what these words mean before we start using them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's tricky, man.  For me as a British European coming over to the US, it's particularly tricky.  I think in Europe, we're not so divided based on our politics and specific issues don't always divide us into our camps.  We have Conservatives and we have Labour, where Labour tends to be more working class, tends to be; Conservative tends to be more middle to upper class, tends to be historically.  But when a particular issue comes up, COVID would be an example and we don't need to get into the politics of COVID itself, but people weren't split by whether they were Conservative or Labour, it just doesn't happen that way.

I think there's a number of issues we're not split because there's no religious context to our political parties the way there is say in the US, so I think those things get a bit tricky.  I kind of like your framing though, as it's almost like you're grouping people together based on their function in society.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, and even their orientation towards how they live their lives, even outside the realm of politics.  I mean, let's just take in the corporate class.  There's a fundamental difference between the person who runs a human resources department, than the person who's tasked with founding the enterprise that led to the birth of that human resources department; or, the modal engineer who gets his 401(k) plan administered by the human resources department.  One of those is the everyday citizen, one of those is the creator class, but then the human resources department person is the member of the managerial class. 

Or take a university, there's the professors, the creators; the students, the stakeholders for whom the university exists; and then there's the explosion of the million and a half associate Deans of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and associate Deans of everything else, that have actually created the fat that comprises that organisational institution.  And I just think if I had to pick, I mean I don't like reducing things to shoehorning everything into one unidimensional axis anyway; but if I had to, it would be the distinction between the people who are the members of this managerial class.  The same people who become the associate Deans are the same people who get some sort of third-tier ambassadorship, who are the same people who are the deputies, undersecretary of whatever in the US Government.  It's the same kind of gene pool, the same class of orientation of person that comprises this horizontal managerial class.

I think we live in a moment where many everyday citizens are frustrated that their own voice is suppressed through the perpetuation of managerial bureaucracy that is not particularly partisan in nature.  I think we live in a moment where a lot of that managerial bureaucracy has been used to promote progressive or left-wing agendas, and I think there are reasons for that, but I think it's the less interesting part of the dynamic, which is really one where the people who are the technocratic, bureaucratic managers wield a lot more societal clout and weight and relevance in influencing societal outcomes than everyday citizens, I'll call them individuals, whose voice and vote we're taught is supposed to count equally in a democratic body politic.

Peter McCormack: Well, we at the moment in the UK have a bit of a rise up of the more kind of working class that you're talking about.  We are experiencing a period of high levels of strikes, I don't know if you're following this in the UK.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Only what I see briefly in the papers as reported through the Western American press, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we've had the nurses striking and most of the strikes are on wages and conditions.  And when they talk about conditions with these companies, it's usually because some driver efficiency is making people have to work particularly harder than normal in stressful conditions, or introducing risk into the working environment.  We've had the train driver strike, we've had ambulance drivers strike, we've had the people who police the roads strike.  There are strikes all over the UK at the moment.

Vivek Ramaswamy: What are they striking against?  This is what interests me, because I have a view on this about what's going on in the West right now; but in your particular case, what do you see them striking against?

Peter McCormack: Well I guess, I mean you could argue they're striking for more money, but actually they're really striking against inflation because inflation has been so high in the UK, quoted at 10%, probably much higher, that these people cannot afford to live.  

I just made a film recently about inflation in the UK.  We visited a food bank, I don't know if you have food banks here, but a food bank in the UK.  People make donations and then people are hard up who can't feed themselves and their equivalent of welfare doesn't go far enough, can go get a bag of food to take home and feed their family.  The guy who runs that food bank, when I interviewed him he said there's a change in demographic.  It used to be people who were coming who were unemployed.  Now he said, "We've got people being referred to us from the NHS, nurses who work, work full time but still cannot afford to make ends meet, so they need to survive on donations", which to me is a scandal.

So they're striking against inflation, so they're striking for more money because the cost of living's gone up so much, but also conditions.  And then if I think through it, like if you're asking me a smart question here, like are you trying to pick into something, because a lot of the problems in say the NHS have been caused by bureaucracy.  My mother worked in the NHS.  Middle managers, waste, just all the people who were brought into these different levels within the NHS that separated decisionmakers, the bureaucracy, which became a very inefficient and wasteful system.

Vivek Ramaswamy: So tell me if this resonates with you from a UK perspective.  I'm increasingly talking about this theme here in the US where I think the top of the next presidential agenda, this may be popular more among Republican circles but I think it should be equally plausible and viable amongst Democrats, maybe it will be in a few years, is that we ought to at least live in a society where the people who we elect to run the government are the people who actually run the government.  And the bizarre thing in the United States is most of the governmental decisions that actually affect people's lives are not at all made by the people who run the government, it is made by the likes of whatever, you could think about some of the most influential public policymakers in the US in the last five years: Anthony Fauci, James Comey, both make the top list; nobody elected them to their posts.

Now you say that, okay, well they report to the President of the United States and we all of course elect the President of the United States.  It turns out that the President, for much of the managerial class, at least we've operated under what I view as a fiction but it's a fiction that's widely accepted, that the President cannot fire a member of that federal bureaucracy because they're subject to civil service protections.  So in the private sector, we don't have employee protections but in the government, if you're a member the managerial class, most members of the managerial class are statutorily protected.  I think a lot of these statutes are unconstitutional but that's my view, we'll come back to that later.  But on paper, they're protected by statutory protections that prevent them from getting fired.

My view is that we should replace those statutory protections with sunset clauses instead that say that if you're a US President and you can't suckle at the teat of the federal government for more than eight years, then neither should most employees in that federal governmental bureaucracy; that if you are the person who's elected to run the government, you ought to darn well be able to fire the people who report to you.  And by the way, if you really want managerial reform, you're going to have to take a lot of those agencies that can't be reformed from within, because they've existed so much longer than you have in a position of power, that you need to shut them down and maybe create new ones to take their place.  I mean, that's what the governmental version of this looks like.

I don't know how much that resonates with you from a UK perspective but it's it strikes me that the people who Boris Johnson led, or whatever, were actually much more relevant in implementing public policy than the person who was the figurehead at the top.  Of course, the people didn't vote for the Prime Minister there the same way that the citizens vote for President here, but curious for your thoughts.

Peter McCormack: Well, I just did write down there, "Prime Minister unelected", we actually have an unelected Prime Minister at the moment!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Exactly, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's crazy, but that's how our parliamentary system works.  I mean during COVID, we had our version of Anthony Fauci, a guy called Chris Whitty; that's correct, yeah?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Was he an ex-GSK guy?

Peter McCormack: Don't know, Danny can check.  And the way I considered him, he was an advisor to the government.  Boris Johnson would not know the decision to make, he would advise on the situation, and then government policy would come after that.

Vivek Ramaswamy: You would think!

Peter McCormack: You would think, yeah.  I mean, what does resonate with me in this is that, slight deviation from what you said, the civil service always continues to grow and they're the hardest people to get rid of.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, it's a cancer.

Peter McCormack: During the COVID lockdowns, lots of people lost their jobs, companies went bust.  Nobody who worked for the government lost their job essentially, I mean someone might prove me wrong.  That resonates with me and I think I know why Alex Epstein told you to talk to the Bitcoin crowd, and the reason this will resonate with them is, not every bitcoiner is an anarchist and not every bitcoiner is a libertarian, but they all recognise there's massive inefficiencies in the system; and those massive inefficiencies ultimately cost us as individuals.  We either pay higher tax to pay for the unproductive class, or we pay higher inflation due to mismanagement of the economy, or a wide range of issues, so this is why it's going to resonate.

We did a really interesting conversation with an economist yesterday, he made me rethink the entire way the government works.  We made a show in the UK with a guy called Dan Tubb, talking about how the UK Government essentially needs to cut its budget by a quarter to be able to pay off its debt.  And this Economist, Josh, said to me yesterday, the government used to run a deficit during times of war to pay for the war; but after the war, they would be able to run a surplus because the only significant spend was on the cost of the war, and therefore the tax would lead to that being paid off.  

But since 1945, most governments have become insurance companies.  They provide insurance for health, they paid insurance for pensions, they provide all different types of insurance and those insurances just grow and grow and grow unchecked.  So I think this is why Alex thinks you want to talk or you should be talking to the Bitcoin crowd because you're saying things that's going to resonate with them.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I think that the Federal Reserve and the perpetuation of it is also an extension of the managerial class.  I think it is a one-way ratchet as well.  I think that once you have added a managerial layer, then it's a lot more difficult to go in the direction of deconstructing it.  It's especially true in government; I do think it's increasingly true in the private sector as well.  

One of the interesting things to me, just because it's been in the news so much recently with the so-called Twitter files, is how much of those top-policy decisions, I mean these are foundational questions for the company, the existence of the company and its mission, were made not by the founder class or the CEO, but actually were made by a deep corporate equivalent to the deep state counterparts, if we're to use that terminology.  And indeed it was middle-managers and government coordinating with middle-managers at a social media company in Silicon Valley to decide what the public could and could not consume, when the people sitting atop those chains, the President of the United States on one hand, Jack Dorsey on the other, had no idea that this was actually happening beneath their own noses.

It's an interesting moment where, I just think the same way that you think about at a university, the professors really don't hold the keys to power at most elite universities and setting their policies, but it's some sort of hired managerial Dean or associate Dean that is actually making the decisions of how the place runs, when the creator class, be it the founder of a large company that still is in many cases running that company isn't actually running that company, the professors who were supposed to be the ideators who were supposed to be educating the students, aren't the ones who actually are making the kinds of decisions that affect the kind of education those kids get.

Similarly in government, the people who we elect to run that government, the people who we think, the President as the Commander-in-Chief, isn't actually making the calls; it is a member of the managerial class in the military, a member of the managerial class at the NIH, a member of the managerial class at the FBI that's actually making the decisions that affect the way people live their lives.  And I just think I am certainly a part of what I think of as the Great Uprising, that is the response to the vision at the other end of the spectrum, the Great Reset, the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private sector so that their managerial leaders can work together to accomplish what neither could on its own.  

I think part of what you're seeing with the strikes in the UK is not that different than what you saw from the truckers in Canada, or from last year, or what you saw from everyday populists go into the polls here in the United States, or what you see from folks taking to the streets of Australia.  It is a broader reckoning with democratic societies across the West and even beyond the West, I think versions of this in India and Japan we're seeing early signs of, of everyday constituents, citizens, individuals rejecting this managerial technocratic vision of horizontal layers of managerial leaders calling shots to say that, "No, we reject that vision, my voice actually matters".  I'm not as steeped in the UK context as you, so I've got to be careful here about --

Peter McCormack: That's fine.

Vivek Ramaswamy: -- preaching about more than I know.  But it seems to me that the wage discussion against the backdrop of inflation may be as much a catalyst as it was a foundational cause, that there's gunpowder in the air and that might have been the match that lit this fire.  But any match that was going to be lit was going to light that room up anyway, because there's a broader sense of frustration amongst everyday citizens in the West that they've lived in a society that tells them that their voice matters, that their vote matters, that they have a sense of agency, when in fact they do not.

To me, that's the line that I draw through not just the trans-partisan issue that I was talking about at the outset, but I view it as not just a trans-partisan issue but a transnational issue, and it might be the most interesting social political struggle of our time, is that struggle between the bureaucrat and the individual, public and private sector alike.

Peter McCormack: So, would you say the left versus right is a useful distraction from what you've identified?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I think it is a distraction, I do.  Now, I think that we live in a moment where the left has been more effective than the right.  I'm talking about just the last ten years; there's periods in history where the reverse was true.  But I think it so happens we live in a moment of history where the left has better co-opted the managerial structure to be able to advance the content of its agenda more effectively than the right has.  But to me, that's less interesting than whether or not we actually have a debate about what structure in society allows the left and right to adjudicate their differences.

Peter McCormack: Well, would you say the reason the left has been more successful is because they have a more collectivist approach?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I think that's a great question.  I think that if you had to pick on a white sheet of paper which side was going to be more effective, using managerial bureaucracy to advance in a sense, I guess, if you had a gun to my head, I would probably say the left would be better at it, all things equal, precisely because collectivism is part of the philosophy, and a bureaucracy exists in an organisational collective.  But I could equally make a case to you that the right should have been better at it, because the right believes in people who have money using money to advance their ends.

In the Bush era in the United States, I think you actually saw the right actually having the keys to the kingdom of the managerial bureaucracy, corporate political donations, the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private sectors, the security state that was created in the wake of 9/11; a lot of that was the creation of the right not the left but it was the same managerial class.  And to me, the much more interesting debate is whether we as a society are one that sorts out the differences between left and right.  

Do we sort them out through free speech and open debate in the public square, through honest dialogue, through a democratic process that we all agree to; is that is that how we do it?  Or do we do it like they did on your side of the pond 300 years ago, where we say, "No, we can't trust everyday citizens to sort out these questions, they just can't be trusted.  We have to do it through a small group of managerial elites deciding behind closed doors what the right answers are for society at large", be that right or be that left, okay, that's a that's a detail.

To me, that's a 1776 question, which is far more interesting than the superficial partisanry of how the media culture teaches us to retrofit these divisions.  They shoehorn them into this artificial red versus blue debate, when in fact the real deeper debate is what's the mechanism by which we sort out those differences at all; and that itself is actually an unsettled question right now, it's the most important unsettled question, and that's what I think is showing up amongst populists on the left and right being among those that took to the trucker campaign in Canada, or the people taking to the streets of Australia, or even a populist movement in the US that doesn't support the same kinds of free market, Reaganite, economic policies that the Republican Party once did.  That's not exactly what the nationalist populist movement in the United States is about right now, and it's what you see in the rift in the Republican Party between the 20 people who are holding up the election of Kevin McCarthy versus not.

If you're reviewing this through right versus left you would say, "Oh, that's just dysfunction and people can't get their act together", the kind of boring stuff you see on television on a given day, without understanding that that's a symptom of a deeper divide that does not track the red versus blue boundary but tracks a very different boundary instead.  And I think you even see it, I don't know how many people aware of this, but there's still this, whatever, speaking of politics here, an ongoing election for Chair of the Republican National Committee for the RNC, and that's a hotly contested race too.  And again, you have an incumbent that is a representative of the managerial class and you have a disrupter who says, "No, we just need to stop making this a consultant driven affair that pays off whoever needs to be paid off and creates an ossified managerial structure for how you even run that political party".

Why do I bring that example up?  It's otherwise a rather boring topic that ordinary people should not pay attention to or waste their time paying attention to, but for the fact that it's an example how even within that political party shows up this same debate between managerialism and individualism.  And I just think that's so much more close to the actual intuitions that move people who are taking to the streets to take to the streets, rather than the content of some sort of classical Republican versus Democrat debate, which people have their views on.  It might be to motivate them enough to get to the ballot box or to argue at the dinner table but not to take to the streets.

I think the things that gets people to the streets right now, and it's happening more and more, is not the debate about whether or not you believe in more regulation or less regulation, or slightly higher taxes or slightly lower taxes, or even abortion; that's not something that's galvanising people and getting them to the streets.  What galvanises people and gets them the streets is, "Do I live in a society that regardless of what I have to say, value what I actually have to say in deciding how that society is run; or do I live in a society where I am told the answer to that question, whether it's George Bush and Dick Cheney's security state in the mid-2000s, or whether it's the biosecurity state that was created in the aftermath of COVID…?  I think when you talk about people taking to the streets, that's the question that drives people to the streets.  The rest of them will have them arguing at the dinner table and voting at the ballot box, but that's about it.

Peter McCormack:  I mean I would disagree that the vote on abortion didn't bring people to the streets.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I corrected myself; it did temporarily, but it was fleeting.  It took people to the ballot box, I think it affected how people voted in the November elections.

Peter McCormack: Of course, it was very negative of the Republicans.

Vivek Ramaswamy: But you don't see the trucker protests, you don't see the Canadian trucker protests, you don't see the kind of yellow people wearing yellow jackets, or whatever, in France coming out; that's a different energy.  And it's a different energy because it tracks a more fundamental issue, which is the rules-of-the-road issue.  I think free speech falls in this category, by the way.  I don't view free speech as a substantive partisan political dispute, but again another one of these fundamental rules of the road.

As I frequently said in other forums, when you tell people they cannot speak, that is when they scream; but when you tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.  And again, free speech is not -- we live in a moment right now where that is more of a conservative value than a than a liberal one, but that's pretty new.  At its core, it is neither a conservative nor a liberal value, it is a foundational cornerstone value of one side of the 1776 question, which was different than the other side of the 1776 question.  

I just think we live in a 1776 moment right now where the kinds of issues that most move us are closer to 1776 questions than they are to contemporary partisan questions; but we haven't yet caught up to that because that feels too weird to say out loud, that we sort of pretend like they're just the same kinds of partisan questions that we were debating ten years ago, when in fact they're not.  I think they're the kinds of questions that result in foundational reform, Convention of States kind of stuff.  The same sort of oddity in the water in 1776 to 1789 is the oddity in the water today, and I think that's a good thing, by the way, it could be the subject of a national revival if we recognise that as opposed to letting MSNBC and other cable television tell us about Republicans and Democrats.

Peter McCormack:  I romanticise a lot of American History.  My knowledge is limited but I do romanticise it.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Better than mine of British history but we can each teach the other.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've spent time reading the Constitution, I've spent time studying what the forefathers were trying to do; limited.  But my limited understanding is that as a group of people, they tried to plan as best a country that would keep the power in the hands of the people, they tried their best and they tried to foresee as much as they can.  Obviously they couldn't foresee internet and social media, all this stuff, but they tried their best.

It now seems that you don't have a political class that has the same integrity, or they come in green and the system changes them, they can't make change, but they don't have that same integrity.  It feels more like they've become opportunist, spotting how they can bend the system for their benefit.  Now I might be being unfair there.

Vivek Ramaswamy: No, I don't think you are.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's what it feels like to me.  I've noted AOC because it came up in one of our interviews recently, that whether you like AOC or not, I'm not a huge fan, but I agreed with my other guests when they said, when she first came on the scene she was interesting, she would challenge people, she felt like she stood up for her constituents and it feels like she's been just kind of co-opted by the system.  I don't know if that is the incentives of what you can benefit to yourself, or it's the incentives of the system, the horse-trading that we see on House of Cards on TV, where we learn about the horse-trading; I don't know what it is.

But when you talk about that like another 1776 moment, I feel like the US is there.  You had a civil war before; I feel like you're having a cold civil war, I feel like you are.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I mean I don't disagree with you.  I'm often very careful about using that word, just because I think war is one of these things that speaks itself into existence.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's why I say cold civil war.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, and I appreciate that and respect it, and I'm not faulting you for it.  I'm just telling you that I agree with you, even though I'm very careful not to use that word because it's like the Heisenberg Principle a little bit here.  Sometimes the way you describe your society actually affects the way that society works, and so I feel some sense of responsibility to not contribute to that outcome.  But I think that I worry that that may be where we're heading if we don't wake up to some of the causes of our march towards that state of affairs.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, just to interrupt, I don't feel like America's heading in the trajectory of a kinetic internal civil war or guns being drawn, I don't feel like --

Vivek Ramaswamy: Okay, maybe I think we're in different places then.  I don't think we're well on the way, I don't want to see us get there.

Peter McCormack: I just think perhaps more a fracturing of the states, I think that could potentially happen, whether it's the blue states up in the Northwest, or it's Texas.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I worry that it's not even that, because even if you take a state like California, there's almost two states within California.  There's the far coast and then you just drive an hour-and-a-half or two inland, and then there's the inner strip that borders Nevada all the way down.  Those are two different states.  Most people that travel to California don't go to the latter, I recommend people do, it's beautiful.  It doesn't have a beach line but it's beautiful, there's a lot of cultural diversity there, but it's very different than the corridor of taking Route 1 from San Francisco all the way down to LA; it's two states within that state.

So whether or not it's the states, I think the bad version of this is going something in the direction of Ireland where there's not some clean geographic split like there was in 1868 between the North and the South, but there's a version of the North and the South that exists within every state, maybe even within every city or many cities or many counties.

Peter McCormack: Did you say Ireland?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Ireland, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I'm half Irish, my dad lives in Ireland.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Right, so I'm talking about I don't want to see us go in this direction at all, but where you have two nations that are not at all geographically separated, like not even North or South but not even separated by state boundaries, but two nations that exist within close geographic quarters spread over the coast to coast of the United States.  I'm an optimist actually at my core, I don't think that's where we're going but I think that that's where we will be going in absence of first, identifying the underlying problems with a level of clarity that goes beyond the low resolution filter of partisan politics; but second, without recreating or reviving that shared national identity that bound us together.

I mean if you ask an average person my age right now, one of my peers, probably people of any age, "What does it mean to be American in the year 2023?"

Peter McCormack: How old are you?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I don't think you get a good answer to that question.  I'm 37 years old.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I'm a millennial.  So, yes, most millennials, "What does it mean to be American in the year 2023?" I think you mostly get silence.  We don't have a good answer to that question, it's a vacuum, it's a black hole.

Peter McCormack: Well, what would the historic answer to that question be?

Vivek Ramaswamy: The ideals that set this nation in motion.  I believe that I am a free, autonomous individual who's free to achieve anything I ever want in this country with my own hard work and commitment and dedication, regardless of the colour of my skin, regardless of my gender, that I can do that and that I'm free to speak my mind at every step of the way; that's what it means to be American, for example, and I think you can give other versions of that answer. 

It means pursuing excellence unapologetically, it means that I am a participant in determining who leads our country, that they report to me rather than the other way around.  These are the ideas that set into motion this experiment 250 years ago that we call America; that's what it means to be American.  I don't think my peers, I don't think our fellow citizens, even people who are older and younger than me today, both, can say those things with conviction.  And I think if we're able to revive that, our path to avoiding this cold and possibly hot civil war over the next couple of decades depends on whether we can fill that void of national identity with something that binds us together across these otherwise seemingly irresolvable divides of partisan and identity politics.

Peter McCormack: But I think people in Texas would say their kind of identity is what you've just said, I think they still would believe that, but I'm not sure if they say it as an American or a Texan.  I think that's perhaps one of the issues, is this divide that's built up between the left and the right.  But the reason I find what you're saying so interesting is I go back to the example of the nurses, these nurses who are complaining that they need a pay rise and the hours they're working, etc, they're campaigning together for the thing that's going to be the most impactful on their life and they could be from any part of the political spectrum, but that is the thing that's most important to them and they're working together.

That's why I think what you're saying is super-interesting and that's why I brought up the point: is the left/right a distraction from this?  And then I think, well the biggest problem you have here is the beneficiaries of this managerial class are the people who get to maintain it.  You mentioned the truckers; that was your worker class.  The whole protest was ended by the managerial class by a couple of ways, controlling the financial system and controlling the media.  So they had the tools to close down the revolution.  

Vivek Ramaswamy: I just want to --

Peter McCormack: Correct me if anything --

Vivek Ramaswamy: No, not correct you, it makes me want to supplement what you're saying, because it would be easy for someone who's listening to this to just sort of, now forget the conservative side of me, to say that this is just a repetition of Marxist tropes, right, the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, and I don't believe that my definition of being a managerial class versus an everyday citizen particularly tracks onto wealth.  That was the Marxist Trope, the idea that dollars, green pieces of paper, are effectively what determine which class you in or are not in.

I think my definition of managerialism includes people who are, relatively speaking, wealthy and, relatively speaking, non-wealthy in both compartments.  I think it refers instead to maybe a different hierarchy of cultural class.  I think Donald Trump was supposedly a billionaire, probably is, but is not a member of the cultural elite, is very much a representative, at least aimed to be I think, of the everyday citizen.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I mean we can go there, but I'm going to make a slightly different point.  On the flip side, you could -- I'm trying to break the dichotomy that this has anything to do with wealth, is the point I'm trying to make.  On the flip side, you could have somebody who's a, I don't know, manager of a studio in like Brooklyn, and I don't know, I'm trying to pick which would be the most typical neighbourhood here in Bushwick, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: But could it even just be a manager of a McDonald's?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, it could be, exactly, that isn't particularly wealthy but is a member of the managerial class anyway.  I think many associate Deans at state universities probably fit this description too, not particularly wealthy or among the highest paid Americans but are still a member of that managerial class.  So for me, it would be easy to mistake as the struggle between the workers and the hard-working people and the billionaire class; that's not how I actually see it.  I see the three categories really: creators, the managerial class and the everyday citizen, in all of the economic strata, all skin colours.  It's not a black or white thing, it's not a gay or straight thing, it's not a rich or poor thing, and it's not a Republican or Democrat thing,

Peter McCormack: But it's because I said the workers, right, that's where you're supplementing --

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I was just clarifying, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And I don't want to misrepresent you.  So are you saying the tension though is between the managerial class and the everyday citizen; that's where the tension is?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, that's where the tension is.

Peter McCormack: What is the role of the creator class in this?

Vivek Ramaswamy: So the creator class is I think a rarer breed that is neither a member of the managerial class, nor in any sense of the word an everyday citizen.  I mean they're rarer people who are born to create things that did not exist in the world.  What is the role of the creator class I think can vary over the course of different periods in history.  Right now, I think the right call to action for the creator class is to deliver the tools to the everyday citizen, to unshackle themselves from the chokehold of the managerial bureaucracy and technocrats.

Peter McCormack: Like Bitcoin?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Potentially, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, Satoshi was part of the creator class?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Absolutely a member of the creator class.  I think Elon Musk buying Twitter and taking half the managerial ranks out and firing them on the first day, Elon Musk is not an everyday citizen but nor is he a member of the managerial class.  I have my own experiences.  I mean, it would be probably boring to talk about my own history, but I think that that's just a small footnote to the discussion because I think there's a role, a really important role, for the people who are fortunate enough to be endowed with the personal attributes and skillsets and just sort of gall to be creators.  

Right now, the right call to action is -- I think we have this struggle between the managerial class and the everyday citizen.  I think creators can liberate the everyday citizen from the managerial class, dismantle managerial bureaucracy and return us to more distributed forms of power, both in the private sector and public sector.

Peter McCormack: You're talking like a bitcoiner; distributed systems!  This is why Alex wanted you here.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, okay.

Peter McCormack: So, how do which one you're in; which one am I in?  Am I in the creator class?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I don't know you well enough to say, to be honest, but it seems like you've created this thing that didn't exist in the world, that but for you it would not exist.  I think that's a pretty good litmus test, so I have every reason to think that you may be a member of the creator class.  And the point here is not to create a hierarchy between the three.

Peter McCormack: No, I'm just trying to understand where I am in my role.  If I am part of the creator class and if I agreed with your thesis then I would have a duty to use what I have to dismantle --

Vivek Ramaswamy: A managerial bureaucracy, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, which by the way I do agree with.  I do think the managerial bureaucracy is different between those working in the civil service and those working within private companies, I think there is a difference.  I think within the civil service, you have a lot more job protection and you can be a lot more wasteful.  I mean, I owned my own company; previous to this, I was the CEO of an advertising agency before I did this, so arguably I'm part of the managerial class there, but I knew who didn't perform and I would get rid of them.  So I think there is a difference.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I don't think it comes with the label that comes after your job title and your email signature.  But could you have somebody who works in a human resources department who's not cut out from that managerial class?  Absolutely.  In fact, I think the woman who runs HR at Strive, I hired her precisely because you could just see it in the sort of cultural DNA, she wasn't cut from that cloth.  It turned out that she hadn't actually risen the ranks through human resources anyway, had actual experience in being innovative in other spheres of life, but now just happens to enjoy the issues that come up with human beings and people in an organisation, and that's great.  So, I'm not a big fan of reducing someone based on their title in an org chart, or the job they happen to have at that given moment.  I do think there are correlations though.

But I think that every person owes it to themselves to be introspective and ask themselves where they best fit in.  And by the way, there's a role for managers, right, there's a role for technocrats, but I think we live in this moment where the technocratic class has overreached.  They have been for a variety of historical factors, I think dating back to the 2008 Financial Crisis, which coincided with the election of Obama, which had an interesting interaction with each other, which is a whole separate story we can go into.  I've talked about it in Woke, Inc, my first book, etc.  But anyway, has led us to a place in our national history where it so happens that the managerial class is wielding far more power than they ought to in appropriate balance between the roles of what creators contribute versus what technocrats contribute versus what everyday citizens contribute, and I just think that that balance is out of whack.

We live in a moment where that balance needs to be restored and it mostly falls on the shoulders of creators to be able to do that right now.

Peter McCormack: Because it's fracturing democracy?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Because it's fracturing democracy, it's factoring social cohesion.  Look, I if I was to summarise this in terms that fewer people will get, because they're terms that I use; but to summarise this I think a little bit better, it is the Great Reset versus the Great Uprising.  Does the term the "Great Reset" mean anything to you?

Peter McCormack: I mean, yeah, World Economic Forum!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, fine, so the Schwab world view, okay, on one end of the spectrum, which calls for the dissolution of boundaries between public/private sectors so that leaders can work together to address shared global challenges; that's what Klaus Schwab would say; is that government alone is not stepping up to the plate, but neither is capitalism; that leaders must walk work together in the mountaintops of Davos to join forces to address these shared global challenges, because that's the vision of the Great Reset.

The Great Uprising basically says, "Hell, no!" to that vision, "I will not have that", and I worry that they're on a collision course that actually will leave us with the whole thing burned down.  And I think the role for creators is to say that, "We don't need to burn".  Sometimes an institution gets so rotten that completely dismantling it and replacing is the only option that's left, but it's not the option I would prefer if we actually address the problem sooner, that institutions and their technocrats who are put in their respective positions went back to confining themselves to the scope of what they were supposed to do, rather than taking on a far greater role within that organisation, or a far greater role for that organisation within a society than was ever envisioned.

So, I think it's a little bit of institutional overreach and technocratic overreach that we need to contain and if we don't contain it, well then the Great Uprising, burning the whole thing down is going to be the only solution that's left, and I don't think that's good.  I think that's why the role of the creator class is to hopefully achieve deliverance for the everyday citizens who are constrained by managerial overreach before it's too late.  And then once it is too late, then I'm going to be part of the Great Uprising too, to say the only solution left is to burn it down and create something new to take its place.  But in the meantime, I hope that the creator class can rise to the occasion to do what's needed.

Peter McCormack: What is actually at stake here?  So, you've observed this and I'm still not entirely clear on the delineation between the managerial class and the everyday citizen, but we can come back to that.  But what is at stake here?  When you look at this and you look at the trajectory of this integration of the World Economic Forum with the government, I think I read about it, this has happened with the Trudeau Government; I can't remember what show it was, was that with Mark Moss where we covered this?  But anyway, by the by.  What is the trajectory you're seeing, and what is at risk?

Vivek Ramaswamy: What is at risk is the -- I'm going to give it to you in an American context.  I would say, the continuation of the American experiment itself, but it's even bigger than that because the stakes matter for the rest of the world too.  The American experiment was more than just about the geographic bounds of this place we call America, it was about a vision for organising a society, where individuals could be trusted to determine and to have an equal stake in determining what the common good was, what the direction of that society was, for better or for worse.  The existence of a self-governing, democratic Republic itself, a self-governing, constitutional republic.  That is what's at stake.

What we see today is I think a hollowed-out husk of that constitutional republic, where we tell ourselves that we live in a tripartite system of checks and balances, when in fact members of that tripartite system of checks and balances are regularly co-opting private companies to do through the back door what they could not get done through the front door under constitutional constraints.  Two prominent examples: one is technology-based censorship; the government can't take down speech that it doesn't want to on the internet?  No problem, we're going to delegate it to a private company to do our dirty work instead, thus a Twitter, a Facebook, and we can go into the specific examples, but I think it's now unambiguous that that's exactly what the federal government has been doing.  I don't call it Big Tech censorship anymore, I call it what I believe it is, government tech censorship.

Peter McCormack: And, was that happening historically under Trump's Government, or is this purely a Biden Administration thing?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I think that this is like a hockey stick curve in the last three years.  I think a lot of this started during COVID at the level of the states, and took off dramatically with the Biden Administration taking office.

Peter McCormack: But was it happening under Trump's Government?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I think it wasn't happening, maybe not because he didn't want it to happen, but because the private sector leaders who happened to be in charge were not as amenable to doing it anyway.  He convened a group of CEOs at the White House, and what did they do?  They disbanded, because they were able to signal virtue at a time when that was culturally popular and the cool thing to do.  So, whether or not Trump did it because of lack of intention or lack of effectiveness is a separate debate to be had.  But I think the fact of the matter is the effectiveness of this actually working took off astronomically under President Biden.  It actually took off under President Obama, took a break under President Trump, then took off under President Biden again.

I mean, just to give you one example, right.  So, after the 2008 Financial Crisis, and I write about this extensively in Woke, Inc, but there's an interesting thing that happened in the Obama Administration which was, there was the Tea Party that took control of Congress in 2010, and Obama wanted to actually pass a budget that included federal government money being used to donate to non-profits.  Well, the Tea-Party-led Congress said, "No, we're not going to allocate budget money", call it obstruction, call it what you want, that's constitutional democracy.

However, what did the Obama Department of Justice do?  And this is I think where this trend really started to take off, which is why I'm bringing up this particular example.  The Obama Department of Justice had negotiated big-time settlements with Bank of America, JP Morgan, you know, a bunch of these financial institutions, that had committed bad acts in the lead up to the 2008 Financial Crisis, so $7 billion, $10 billion, $13 billion, Goldman Sachs' was $5 billion, something like that. 

It turns out that very little of that money ever got paid to the public fisc; why?  Because the Obama Department of Justice reached agreements behind closed doors with those banks to say that for every dollar those banks would give to the non-profit causes that the Obama Administration wanted to fund, but that Congress refused to fund, organisations like the National Urban League, or La Raza, or a bunch of others, that if the banks made a $1 donation to one of those organisations, that could offset $2 or $3 for money that they didn't have to pay in criminal penalties in the settlements that they had reached with the DoJ.  Now, if you're a bank, this is a good deal.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, great deal.

Vivek Ramaswamy: First of all, less money that you have to pay; second of all, a press release of making a donation to that non-profit looks a heck of a lot better than $1 of settlement to the DoJ; and third -- by the way, some of these are 501(c)(3) organisations, so that's tax deductible anyway, put that to one side, that's another side financial benefit; so, banks being fond of money were actually happy to take this trade.  But it was sort of this devious, perverted mechanism of the government effectuating a public policy that the tripartite separation of power, balance of power regime said, "No, we're not using public taxpayer money to fund these causes", but you found the government delegating that work to these private parties instead.

Peter McCormack: Do we not just call that a loophole?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I don't call it a loophole, I call it an exploitation of the system, a perversion of the system.  It's not a loophole, because I don't even think it was constitutional.  I think this stuff was illegal under the Constitution, but it happened.  And then it became a new norm that then became codified.

So then, when you get to the Biden Administration and the White House that then calls Twitter officials in and says, "Hey, why haven't you taken down this specific critic of the government?"  First and last name, let's name one, Alex Berenson, whatever, "You don't take down that individual, why haven't you taken them down?  By the way, we're your regulator and by the way, we're going to break you up and regulate you unless you do the things that we need you to do, take down hate speech and misinformation as we define it, take down that individual".  Look, this is the stuff that had our Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves.

The First Amendment exists for one thing, it is to give citizens the freedom to criticise their government.  Well, it turns out that if you tell that citizen that they can't criticise the government, the government isn't doing it directly, they're just using a private company to do it.  That's the Obama version of this, and then you see the same thing with COVID policy, and then you see the same thing with John Kerry, this will be the last example in the litany, but I just want to give you a sense of how ubiquitous this is.  The Green New Deal, can't pass it through Congress?  No problem.  John Kerry, the climate tsar, self-appointed climate envoy, or self-described climate envoy in the US, pressures every major financial institution to sign the climate pledge instead to enter the Net-Zero US Banking Alliance to effectuate the same goals that they couldn't pass through the front door of Congress.

So, I do think that this has become ubiquitous, I do think it has been more prevalent over the last decade under Democratic Administrations than Republican ones, but I think Democrats and Republicans are to be equally concerned, because this is not how we live in a constitutional republic.  This is a perversion of the rules of the road themselves, and at least let's agree what the road is.  My cars might go faster than yours sometimes and yours might beat mine in the race sometimes, but at least we agree on the road.  And I think that the deeper socio-political debates of our time are actually agreeing on the rules of the road themselves, rather than on the content of the cars that ride them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I can imagine the break under Trump, it's probably going back to your point you were trying to make with Trump earlier, in that there's part of him that's outside of the system.

Vivek Ramaswamy: A big part of him, yeah.  He was never part of the intelligencia elite, he was always an outsider to that.

Peter McCormack: And there's an argument that he's maybe part of the creator class.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Maybe.

Peter McCormack: Maybe, but you can see how therefore when he came in, he was a threat to this managerial class because he didn't give a fuck, right, I mean he didn't give a fuck.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I mean, that was what the drain the swamp philosophy was all about.  Now, as a sidenote, I do not believe that he was nearly as effective as he should have been or I would have wanted him to be in actually draining the swamp; Trump did not drain the swamp, the swamp drained Trump.  That's a separate point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think he had some personality weaknesses personally.

Vivek Ramaswamy: You think, really?  Interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's more of an ego thing.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, and in some ways, I think that's part of what you're seeing even in the rift between the MAGA movement in the United States and Trump himself, because Trump was a great vehicle for advancing that, but he is not the end-all, be-all of it; there's something that lives, a movement that lives beyond that of reviving the American Nation that outlives this particular individual.  And we're all flawed individuals, right, he was one of he was one of those flawed individuals.

But anyway, the system had an immune system response to him because he was financially empowered, and then became a politically empowered version of somebody whose sole purpose was to dismantle the managerial class, and I think his heart was in the right place in trying to do so, he just wasn't effective at doing it actually is my net assessment of it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair assessment.  Danny, I feel like you were looking for receipts on that Obama thing?

Danny Knowles: I mean, I was looking through a few things but it's all there.

Peter McCormack: It's all there?  Amazing.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I mean, I wrote a book on this stuff, so it better be there!  I'd be embarrassed!

Peter McCormack: Is that the Woke, Inc book or a separate one?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Woke, Inc was the first, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, what is the answer then?  You're very good at outlining what the issue is; I'm onboard, I'm completely onboard, I understand it and I do believe the left versus the right is a distraction, and I do believe that people who control the media control the left versus right fight.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I agree with you.

Peter McCormack: And they keep us distracted and fighting with each other.  I don't feel like it's a conspiracy theory saying that, but I think it's more of a US problem than a UK problem.  We don't really have this problem in the same way.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I think you don't, and as we were having this conversation it's really interesting to me --

Peter McCormack: Do you know why I don't think we have it?

Vivek Ramaswamy: You go first and I'll tell you my insight, I think, but you own it, make sure I'm hearing you correctly.

Peter McCormack: I mean, there's a couple of reasons, and I'll let Danny answer as well on this one, because he's from the UK as well.  We don't have left versus right media in the same way you have.  We don't really have Conservative TV channels or Labour TV channels.  And do you know what, with something like the BBC, everyone gets a fair go.  And I do believe our journalism is a little bit more investigative in the mainstream, not the independents.  And so, I don't believe we're being sent propaganda to separate us to sell advertising, I just don't believe that's happening like it is in the US.

I put the majority of this down to the media.  Where are the incentives; who's incentivised to divide us?  Well, it's Fox News and MSNBC so they can sell their advertising.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, that's one explanation.  It's interesting, I'll ponder that, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I mean, what do you think, Danny?

Danny Knowles: I definitely agree on the media thing.  I think our media's way less partisan.  I think this is a massive generalisation and could be totally wrong.  I think we're also slightly less opinionated and slightly less confrontational.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, just by nature.  I think that's a big factor too. 

Peter McCormack: Are you saying we're more civilised?!

Vivek Ramaswamy: More civil.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, more civil.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Civil and civilised can be very different things!  An American and a Brit would see which one was civilised differently maybe.  I think that that touches on a cultural difference too.  In the American context, maybe you'll be upset at me for saying this and I'm just spouting off here, trying to think about this.

Peter McCormack: I'm not that nationalist.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Okay, and I'm not committing myself to this view right now, I'm just thinking out loud.  But there's a special betrayal about it in the American context, which is that in some ways you guys, and I'll say this jokingly, you guys were always, at your historical roots and core, the OGs of the monarchical model anyway.  That was part of the western, European model of social governance until the American Revolution that then spread back to the French Revolution that then gave rise to this idea of constitutional, self-governing, democratic Republics.  It was you guys copying us, if I may say it that way, that here, when we then resort back to the monarchical model, the aristocratic model of managerialism, it feels like an even deeper betrayal of what the thing even is. 

Whereas there, it feels like you're just shedding the skin that you happen to have worn for 250 years.  You've also been along for a lot longer, so this could just be a temporary blip in history.  It's like a, "Okay, we did that constitutional self-governing democracy thing, but we did the other thing for a lot longer, and so maybe that little trend passed and so, okay, it's one thing versus the other and you'll have some people who are upset about it in the present time", but it's a historical backdrop that's much longer, much older.  It's a deeper, rich history that goes much further back than this nation's does, putting aside the Native American predecessors to the US, or whatever, but the America as we know it.  Whereas in America, that's all we've ever known.  In fact, the whole premise was that project.

So, when we start behaving the other way, it's a betrayal of the existence of the whole project.  So in a certain sense, it's existential for the idea for American culture in a way that's not existential for the idea of British culture, because British culture includes so much more history than this modern blip of democratic self-governance.  In fact, if anything, the latter is the anomaly to the longer arc of the history of British culture.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, sorry.  So, are you basically saying we have culture outside of politics, but the establishment of your state is the bedrock of your culture?  That makes sense to me.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, what you are thinking when you say that is exactly what I am saying.  I would phrase it slightly differently, but yes.

Peter McCormack: How would you phrase it slightly differently?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I would say that, and let me make this very simple; I would say that monarchy is part of British culture.  I mean, it culturally is, when you think of the passing of the Queen, how much that reawakened British national identity that was tapping into something dormant.  But just look at most of British history; it's been run under a monarchy, hasn't for the last seven decades or eight decades, seven decades, under where the political power was mostly wielded, but that was the anomaly.  And maybe that became the new norm.  But if that stops being the new norm and you go back to centralised technocracy, elite, enlightened managerial leaders going back to wielding power that drains the voice of the everyday citizen, it doesn't feel like there's as much at stake, because you may just be reverting back to what the essence was.

Whereas here, the whole essence, the whole darn ball game, was based on the idea of rejecting that.  That's the entire American identity, was born on the idea of unshackling ourselves from centralised, aristocratic, monarchical exercise of power over the everyday citizen to say that the person who's in charge reports to me, rather than the other way around.  So, when we start behaving the other way, the whole identity's gone.

Peter McCormack: There are bitcoiners, very well-known, prominent bitcoiners, who actually would argue for a return to a monarchy over democracy.  They would say democracy has failed, probably for similar reasons that you're pointing out, that managerial class.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I understand that argument, I do.

Peter McCormack: The reason they prefer a monarchy is that --

Vivek Ramaswamy: It's so that they can create a mob.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, whereas you've essentially got an individual that has to keep the country happy and if they don't, you have a revolution.

Vivek Ramaswamy: That's right.

Peter McCormack: I'm sold!

Vivek Ramaswamy: But all I would say is when I'm using the word "democracy", now let's get one more level specific, which is I'm using it -- there's two senses of democracy.  Actually, America was born not as a democracy, but as a constitutional republic, and I've been trying as hard as I can to use that term here but it's a little bit of a mouthful; but there's a big distinction.  So, I think that America was purposefully not born in the image of a direct democracy, because a direct democracy can lead to a tyranny of the same form that I'm using shorthand monarchy for, and you can actually have a version of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that actually looks very different.

Peter McCormack: No, I understand, I get corrected on this all the time.

Vivek Ramaswamy: But broadly speaking, I think we get each other and what we're saying.

Peter McCormack: When I say "democracy", I mean the ability to vote.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, the ability to have, exactly, stake in determining who the leaders of the country really are.

Peter McCormack: Maybe you should just try a king, see how you get on, see what happens!

Vivek Ramaswamy: But it wouldn't be America itself.  It might be something else, but it's not going to be America.  In Britain, it can still be Britain.  Here, it just wouldn't be America, it would be something else, something totally different.

Peter McCormack: I'm teasing you.

Vivek Ramaswamy: But that's why it strikes a different valence here than it does over there, is the whole damn thing.  So, what is the solution, you were asking earlier?  I think it is a revival of shared American identity at a moment where we lack one, and I think that could go a long way from a different angle too, speaking from my millennial seat again.

Our generation is very hungry for a cause, for purpose, for identity, we just hunger for these things.  We suffer from widespread depression and anxiety and insecurity and loneliness.  We flock to secular religions like wokism or transgenderism or climatism or COVIDism, or whatever it is, because we're hungry for a deeper purpose and we serially hunt from one to the next, now knowing what we're even searching for.  And I personally think part of what we hunger for is a nation, is that nation, and a revival of that nation, built around the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, that's how I frame it -- that's what my second book was all about -- but maybe somebody else could frame it differently. 

But reviving that national identity, filling that hole, that vacuum, should be our calling.  I think it should be the calling of the GOP, because the GOP is itself a party in search of an identity, so it might as well be this.  But I think if we can fill that generational hunger for purpose and meaning and identity and move beyond this mistaken decade of celebrating our diversity, I think we've become very smitten with that over the last decade.  I think our diversity is completely meaningless if there's nothing greater that binds us together across that diversity; or else, we're nothing more than this group of different-looking higher mammals roaming a common geographic domain, doing what our smartphone told us to do on a given day.  That's not the American idea. 

The American idea is that there's a set of ideals that bind us together across our different demographic and genetic attributes.  Reviving that, both through the market, and that's a big part of why I founded Strive, is I think Strive can serve as a unifying force in capital markets in the economy in corporate America, through the message that we deliver to focus on excellence over politics, and I can tell you all about that, but I think part of those solutions can come through the market; I think part of it can come through, and ought to come through, our politics as well, possibly through the revival of a new conservative movement, and it doesn't have to be a conservative movement, a new pro-American movement, whose goal is to fill that missing vacuum of American identity. 

I think there's an opportunity to do that and hopefully the next 24 months are all about that with the season that we have coming up in this country.

Peter McCormack: What if you're wrong, Vivek?  So, what if this push and pull at the moment is a part that's pulling back towards traditional historic American values that were built out of the Constitution, or 1776; and what if the other side is a pull towards more kind of, how would I put it, European kinds of ideals and values?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Great framing, actually.

Peter McCormack: The reason I ask this because I'm sure, Danny, we saw a poll once where America is pretty much kind of 50/50, let's say 50/50, Republican/Democratic.  I know it's not exactly, but just for the sake of this.  But if the world was to vote whether they're Republican or Democratic, it was largely swayed towards the Democratic side; I cannot remember where I saw this.  If you suddenly imported 70 million British people into America and they were voting, it wouldn't be a 50/50, it wouldn't even be close; the majority would be voting Democrat.  This is why I made that joke to you at the very start, I'm a centre-right in the UK and the people here think I'm a woke liberal, because we're less extreme but we're very different.

Perhaps there is this kind of old-world traditional American value which feels very Republican, and there are these new world, rest-of-the-world values which it's being pulled towards.  I don't know if I've articulated it well.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I think you're absolutely describing the struggle in the United States right now.  It's the pull towards 1776, pull towards traditional European model, that's exactly it.  That was the push and pull of the American Revolution, it was fought through a war.

Peter McCormack: You want us back!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I don't…

Peter McCormack: We've got a king, we can bring it back!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I don't want that, but other people seem to.  And it's not a Republican/Democrat thing quite but there's correlation, so I grant you that.  But that is the struggle.  I am in the camp of saying, "I don't want America to go in the direction of just becoming another nation in what otherwise is the normal arc of human history", which raises this question of a word that you hear banded about from time to time, "American exceptionalism".  What does that mean?  It refers to the way that America is an exception to that general rule of certainly western, and probably global, human societal structure.  American exceptionalism refers to the fact that we take exception to that; I believe in that.

So, this is just a local question where you have maybe even a higher perch than I do, because I'm mired in this parochially nationalistic framing of the discussion because I'm American and that happens to be the thing I care about, but you're right.  If you zoomed out and looked at this thing from Mars, and we were analysing this unique region across time and space, you're right, there's just this tug-of-war.  The soul of a nation: is it the 1776 version, or is it the 16th century version or the 17th century version that is more representative of what existed for a lot longer time in the cultural predecessor, even the linguistic predecessor of the United States?  It just so happens that I'm in one of those camps.

Peter McCormack: But the interesting is, where I've told you where I probably sit on the political spectrum, I want your version to maintain.  The reason I want your version to maintain is I romanticise about the history of America and American values.  I've come to not be a huge fan of globalisation, and I think I've got the first one of my shows you should listen to.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I'll take a look.

Peter McCormack: You know which one I'm going to say!  I made a show with a guy called Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation.  He did a study into the role of the IMF and the World Bank.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Can I write that down?

Peter McCormack: No, we'll send you a link and Danny will do it, Danny will find it for you, we'll send you that.  He's written a paper and we made a podcast about it.  Historically, the Europeans left an imperialist imprint on the world as they sailed the seas and conquered nations and essentially stole resources.  The American version of that has essentially been economic imperialism, whereby the use of things such as the World Bank and the IMF have essentially forced or changed countries.  The great example he gave, was it Bangladesh?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: He said, "Just as an example, go to Bangladesh, lend them lots of money, they get into debt", and the IMF and the World Bank historically, they've tended to go to nations where it's easy to give people money or take it.  This is your managerial class, by the way.  And somewhere like Bangladesh, what they would get them to do is to farm shrimp.  This is economically successful, "You can farm lots of shrimp, you can sell it round the world", but the problem is the shrimp isn't being sold back to the Bangladeshis.

So, what's tended to happen is these nations have become dependent on the dollar, they've become dependent on debt, and this has allowed America, and other European nations, to maintain their rich, successful -- the lifestyles we get to live are based on the resources being extracted from the developing world or poorer nations.  That is your managerial class that's created that, and there might be a connection there in the story you're trying to tell in why this has happened.  It might come internally from the --

Vivek Ramaswamy: Very interesting, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think you'll really enjoy that.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I think I would too, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And I think that might be the connection that's caused this.  So, I think for America to be able to return to its traditional values, I think it has to return to its history of building its own economic success within its own boundaries with its own manufacturing; something it's got away from.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I get to the same conclusion increasingly, but for a slightly different reason.  It changes the topic a little bit, but actually is an interesting bridge to go there, because there's much more to say about what you just brought up.  But anyway, I actually get there from a national security perspective.  I actually think that the necessity of defeating China, both economically and militarily, or I should more precisely say economically so that we don't have to militarily, which I think is the far more preferable for this to play out, leads to that same place, not out of some sort of economically protectionist, or even culturally protectionist motivation, but just out of a national security, existential vantage point.

I think an interesting thing about this defeating China question is, the major difference that the US faces right now, it's a challenge.  I think this is one of the complex challenges of public policymaking in the United States, the foreign policy right now in this unique moment we live in.  Unlike the cold war of the 20th century, where the US defeated a mighty rival in the USSR, we never relied on the USSR to provide the shoes on our feet and the phones in our pocket.  I think today, we do rely on our arch rival, dare I say enemy, for providing the shoes on our feet and the phones in our pockets.

Peter McCormack: But that is a bilateral relationship.  They rely on you.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, but one was far ahead of the other, and used that to be able to make itself appear from a vantage point where it began nowhere near that peer at the time --

Peter McCormack: I see what you're saying.

Vivek Ramaswamy: So, that was exactly -- that's already a win for China.  Now, it's to potentially even surpass and be in a position of greater global authority, but I think the first stop Xi Jinping wants to get to is to an unambiguously, non-unipolar but bipolar, global order, so that's destination number one.  Destination number two will be to create a unipolar world in which China is the centre of gravity of that unipolar world, rather than the United States. 

But I am, perhaps optimistically from a US standpoint, not yet conceding that we are yet at a stable equilibrium of a bipolar world order, but in China's seemingly inexorable march towards that new stable equilibrium, part of what got them there was kind of like Greece with Troy, delivering a Trojan Horse that they knew we could not resist, which was the Trojan Horse of capitalism itself, "global capitalism" in air quotes, because they were really pulling mercantilist strings from behind the scenes, but deluding us into thinking that was capitalism, much as Greece deluded Troy into thinking that it actually was just a beautiful Trojan Horse, when in fact there were a lot of other agendas at work that did their work once global capitalism had become the vector for delivering it.

Anyway, the complicated challenge for the United States right now is, how do we defeat an enemy that we depend on to power our modern way of life?  I think the short answer is, if we're going to do it, that's going to involve the pain of ripping off a Band-Aid, of incurring some short-term economic cost in order to protect ourselves against existential long-run risk.  I mean, I think semi-conductor self-reliance is a big part of that; that's going to take a long way to get there.  Those are the chips that power the phones, the laptops we use, they power the cameras that are recording this conversation.  Given that semi-conductors come from Taiwan, we're going to have to protect Taiwan from invasion until we build up our semi-conductor production capabilities here in the United States. 

It is shameful that we got this far, to rely on a random island in the middle of the South China Sea to power our entire modern way of life.  The refrigerator that kept this can of water cold before you kindly brought it out for me here is probably powered -- I'm looking at it right now, I can tell it's the kind of refrigerator, probably powered by an advanced semi-conductor.  Those aren't made here, those are made in Taiwan.  But anyway, my reason why I bring that up is, I think it's just as a national security matter, it's table stakes for us getting there to be able to make more of those things here.

Then, I'm a little less so than many of my friends on the populist right, the Josh Hawley, JD Vance kind of crowd, who would also just believe we need to do that for a sense of American pride and economic protection of workers.  I don't begrudge those benefits, but I think the main motivation for me to support those same policies is just a national security agenda vis-à-vis China.  But all to say that these things aren't necessarily separable from one another, they go hand-in-hand together. 

There I think you have two prongs of a policy agenda that can lead to that -- actually, we've talked about three of them.  We talked about restoring free speech; we talked about dismantling the managerial class; we talked about defeating China economically, so that we don't have to militarily, and I could go on for hours about that, including my views on what that means for energy policy in this country.

Then the fourth element that I would just add to that list, and then we've covered a lot of policy bases, is embracing merit in this country.  It's actually an important value of our national identity, an important competitive advantage, even vis-à-vis China and other countries that we've lost in this country, embracing merit over identity politics, eviscerating affirmative action in every sphere of American life, restoring the idea that you advance in this country based not only the colour of your skin, but on the content of your character and contributions.  To me, we're 80% of the way there and on an American revival, on a revival of that national identity that we're missing, actualising it through policy in ways that change people's lives.

If I was to give it to you in order: probably, defeat China, dismantle the managerial class, restore free speech, and embrace merit over identity politics.  I think we're in pretty good shape, so I'm an optimist that this can be done, that it needs to be done.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, merit itself is a little tricky.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Of course it is, of course!

Peter McCormack: I'm with you on the idea that some forms of affirmative action actually introduce a form of reverse discrimination.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Which then creates original discrimination in response.  I mean, it's anti-white racism, anti-Asian racism, but then it spawns anti-black racism in response, and I think it's an important discussion actually.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I will be out of my depth here.  This is why the co-opting of the term "woke" bothers me, because the original definition of woke was "awake to social injustice".  Social injustice does happen.

Vivek Ramaswamy: It's becoming alert to otherwise invisible injustices.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it bothers me that it's been co-opted to be a pejorative in divisive, polarised, left versus right issues, because I think social injustice is something important.  We do live in a society and if you want national identity, you think national identity is important, then there should be funding to create better opportunities in neighbourhoods that are less well-serviced, that help kids who are from damaged neighbourhoods.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Or fix the damaged neighbourhoods themselves.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Or a failed public school system that perpetuates a cycle of kids growing up in that damaged neighbourhood.

Peter McCormack: I believe in coordinating society, I'm not an anarchist, I think social injustice is important.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Can I ask a question, since we're using the words?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Vivek Ramaswamy: How is social justice different from justice to you, because I definitely care about justice?  Social justice, I don't know what it means.

Peter McCormack: Justice for me is the rule of law, which itself is completely fucked at times, but justice to me is the rule of law.  Here are the laws, justice should be served.  If I come into your house and I steal your car, I should be arrested.  You've had a breakdown of justice in San Francisco, where people are just walking into stores and robbing them and they're not being arrested.  They've been told, "You can steal, and it's okay", which is damaging and dangerous for businesses.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I'm so glad you brought up that example --

Peter McCormack: That is a breakdown.

Vivek Ramaswamy: -- because it is social justice though in conflict with justice and the entire social injustice agenda is predicated on the idea that actually that distribution of property was sufficiently unjust that it's not worth society prosecuting crimes for stealing something worth less than $900, especially if you're a certain race.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but to me that's a poor -- it's a good example.

Vivek Ramaswamy: But it's a perversion.

Peter McCormack: It's a perversion.  And, look, I can give you, in the justice system, I can give you poor examples of justice.  I'm in litigation at the moment in the UK for tweeting words; I'm in litigation for libel.  I think, and I've been through a process which I think is not delivering a good from of justice; I think it's poor justice.  So, justice or social injustice, you can have them both.  But for me, justice is the rule of law; looking at ideas of social injustice to me is more kind of avoiding any forms of discrimination, or if there has been any form of historical unfairness, you do something to try and balance things.  It's not black versus white, I mean gender's a great example.

I have a daughter.  The world is undoubtedly harder for her.  Anyone who says it isn't, it just is.  But I'm a man who's worked in the workplace, I've seen the differences, how men work together and do deals and drink in the bar afterwards; I've seen how it's harder for a woman in those environments; I've seen how women are spoken to.  Anyone who says that doesn't happen, it does, that does happen.

Vivek Ramaswamy: If she was 2, my prediction is by the time she's in the workforce, it's actually 180 in the other direction.

Peter McCormack: Maybe not.

Vivek Ramaswamy: But for much of the last 20 years, you're probably right.

Peter McCormack: But it's the fact that society has moved forward, society has recognised and made certain things socially unacceptable.  It was a man's world.  The forefathers, they were fathers, they weren't foremothers!  In 1776, how many women were making those decisions?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Here's where I am on the set of issues.  You're saying important things, but they're things we obviously recognise.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I'm saying is that those ideas now of trying to create a better and fairer world, from a place that wasn't fair and a place of social injustice, has now become a pejorative and I just find that disappointing.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, can I offer you a theory as to why?  I think the flagbearers of that movement need to pre-specify at what point they're done, because it's not 1776 any more, it's not 1960 pre-Civil Rights Act America any more.  I think that the question of when we are going to stop looking in the rear-view mirror has to be pre-specified ex-ante, or else two centuries from now, we're still going to be saying the same thing that you just said. 

Yes, the nation began imperfectly; yes, we have made I think meaningful, fundamental changes in the structure of a society that corrects for those injustices.  And at some point, it's never going to be perfect, we need to decide we're going to move on.  And I think that we are long past that place, before the social justice ends being self-defeating in their own right; here's what I mean. 

I'll give you a psychological analogy which is, let's say you're a psychiatrist and you have a patient who comes in and used to suffer from severe anxiety, but now just suffers from really mild, latent anxiety that barely ever shows up, but occasionally it shows up because he's feeling a little anxious.  The last thing you probably want to do is to shout at that person, "Don't be anxious, don't be anxious", and just scold them.

I make an analogy to where I see the role of racism in society too.  I'm not in the camp of the anti-woke crowd that rejects the idea that there is still widespread racism in the United States; I'm just in the camp of believing that that widespread is really, really small in magnitude, non-zero but small in magnitude.  And I think once you've gotten to a certain point, the right approach is to just let it atrophy slowly to irrelevance, rather than to scream at the person like the psychiatrist did at the anxious person, "Don't be racist, don't be racist".  We inflame the whole thing.

Peter McCormack: But you're missing the nuance here and this is what I think is important.  I'm with you, I think some of the attempts to create new social justice is fucking ridiculous.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Where are you on race-based affirmative action?  Let's get to the meat of the matter.

Peter McCormack: What I would say is, let's look at the statistics.  In America, are you more likely to end up in jail if you're black?  If it's yes, okay, why?  It's because of these certain neighbourhoods and opportunity.  Okay, why?  What are the reasons that's happening?  Historically, there are reasons.  Okay, invest in those areas and support those communities and try and change them.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Great, that's different than using race-based quota systems, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm totally with that.  But at the same time, when I ran my advertising agency, I brought a woman onto the board and when I did that, it wasn't merit-based, she hadn't earned that position, but we had a male-dominated board of four men in a company, I've told this story before by the way, that was probably 30%, 40% women.  So, I brought her onto the board.  We discovered things about things in the toilets that weren't being done, in the women's toilets, that they required.  We also discovered that actually, when we have a work night out, the girls feel unsafe getting home, so we implemented putting in taxis in place for the women to get home.

It's a fucking sad example of this but one of the ladies who worked there ended up getting murdered, not when she worked for us, a few years later, a young girl called Sarah Everard, you can look her up.  She worked for me and we put that in place.  She was murdered walking home during the COVID era.  So, we learnt those things by making that affirmative action, by putting that person in that seat, and that was a good thing.  I don't feel guilty about that in any way at all.

I think the important thing is that, do you know what, we need better leaders with more nuance, that's what it is for me.  We don't need Tucker fucking Carlson and whoever it is on the other side just always dividing people and arguing, we need the nuance.  Okay, is there an injustice here?  Yes.  How can we deal with it; how can we invest; how can we improve where this injustice is?  Then, let's have some nuance in there.  Yeah, it is a bit weird that we're allowing children not to be able to maybe have a -- no, I'll give you a better example.

Matt Walsh made a film about What is a Woman?, I'm sure you've seen it.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I actually haven't seen it but I'm familiar with it, yeah, I've seen clips.

Peter McCormack: It's half brilliant.  Do you know why it's half not brilliant?  All I wanted in that was him to sit down with somebody who's suffering from gender dysphoria and just say, "What is going on here?  Help me understand both sides of this".

Vivek Ramaswamy: This is a very interesting discussion to me, both sides of this and the nuance, because I'm a fan of that.  In some ways, I feel like at times, I catch myself losing my own ability or even interest in engaging in that nuance, because I'm interested in getting to a state of the world that sometimes I feel like will make me less competitively advantaged to do that if I'm encumbered by anyone along the way, so I welcome folks like you calling me out on that along the way, because that's not what I want for myself.  But I'll tell you this.  I think there's a false parity that we have created between both sides.  I'll give you the gender dysphoria example, then I'll give you the race example because they tie together.

Gender dysphoria is real, it exists.  For the few people who have it and have had it for much of human history, it is a source of suffering.  It is a medical condition, it deserves empathy.  That is a tiny fraction of all human beings ever born, but they exist.  There are people born without the ability to use their legs, there are people who are paraplegic, quadriplegic.  These are rare situations, each of which demand their own forms of sympathy, empathy, care and attention.  What we have instead created is a culture that believes that we have to change fundamental social order to accommodate what is really a far rarer event and in the process, create more of the problem itself.

So, if you teach a kid to doubt their gender identity at a young age, you are likely to create more gender dysphoria.  Do I believe that the rise in gender dysphoria in America is actually just nothing more than the uncovering of a phenomenon that was always there; or, do I believe that it is a phenomenon that we have created by teaching kids to doubt their actual gender identity?  I think it is much more the latter than it is the former. 

When you have a kid that comes out in a given classroom, there's good data on this, epidemiology on this, it spreads faster than COVID.  The R-Squared is faster than the R-Squared for COVID in schools.  For a kid who identifies or self-identifies as trans, for the number of other kids in that same perimeter, it's almost modellable like an R-Squared for COVID.  You'll see other kids pop up at a rate that completely defy the possibility of what gender dysphoria could actually have looked like.  And I think that we're creating it, in the same way that I brought up in the race context, where I'm not one of these people that rejects the idea…

I actually kind of agree with Robin DiAngelo's presupposition that all of us probably have native impulses that are just hard-wired into us, because we're human beings evolved from apes, come to where we have tribal instincts of our own, that have hard-wired judgements that may be, among others, race-based, that we might as well be aware of.  But at a certain level, at a certain point, there was a time in our history where that demanded a comprehensive societal response.

But once you've cleared the virus below the level of detection, when you try to still mount a comprehensive immune response, you kill the host, and I think that's what we're doing with the trans obsession, with the racial obsession, we are killing the host in the process of killing a virus that was already mostly gone.  I think that that's where the, "Yes, you have to look at both sides of this problem", is a bit of a siren song, when it's 99% the way there, but it's really just the 1% that you treat as though it was a 50% problem, that we actually recreate a 100% problem across the board, and that's where I'm at on it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I'm going to leave you with one thing, and we're going to need to follow up on this.  I think you need to spend some time looking at money, and I'm going to send you some things to hopefully read and look into why we as bitcoiners care about this.  We bitcoiners, once you've gone down this rabbit hole, we don't care about the ability to just be able to put our money into this funny money and it's suddenly worth more.  We care about why the money is broken and what the impact on society has been.  I actually don't fundamentally disagree with you on the trans thing, I actually don't.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I don't think you do, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But why?  My thing is, why has this happened?  We've gone from a world where one income would pay for a family home and two kids and a car, and a mum would stay at home with the family.  We're now at a place where two incomes may not even pay for one home.  The money has been perverse.  We have broken homes, kids who are on the internet seeing all kinds of weird shit.  I think it's more of a fracturing of society, the massive availability of drugs that kids don't need; we've fucked with our kids and they're looking for identity, and then perhaps that's where that's come from.

I think it's a very complicated picture.  I don't disagree with you though, that's the point.  I think we're actually agreeing more than we disagree.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I agree with that, yeah, I think that's true.

Peter McCormack: But I would say, we'll find two or three pieces for you.  You've listed your four things, like defeat China, etc.  I think the one thing you're missing in there is the money layer, what that has actually done to people.  This ability just to be able to create money out of thin air, this driving of the wealth gap by those who control the spigot.  I think that will be a new bow.  You don't have to be a bitcoiner, but I think it will be a new --

Vivek Ramaswamy: No, I'm actually quite sympathetic to -- I don't call myself a bitcoiner just because it sounds quasi-religious, but if it didn't sound quasi-religious I actually would call myself a lower-case B bitcoiner.  And the interesting thing is, I just put that into the dismantling-the-managerial-class part of the narrative that I gave you, because I do think it's the managerial class that's put in charge of printing the paper.

I'll say two things about this.  One is, I think you've got to be careful about not asking too much of Bitcoin.  You may be addressing a very real problem, but don't put too much on the shoulders of addressing problems that are fundamentally cultural in nature that may or may not have to do with money.  A lot of it will have to do with money but not all of it has to, and I think that that sets up for disappointment if you ask for all of the world's perils to be solved by a money-centric explanation.  It would be a shame that people should be disappointed because you could solve so much, but not 100%, that if you put 100% on the shoulders of Bitcoin, that might be a bit too much.

Peter McCormack: I'm not, by the way.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, okay, good.  It's something that I've found occasionally popping up in the bitcoiner crowd.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin Fixes This!

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, exactly, and it's almost self-undermining for the cause itself.  But the other question is, an interesting economic question that I ponder as, if I had to I guess self-identify, a conservative, is that trickle-down economics doesn't work in the model where that wealth creation takes place from actually money raining from on high, like manna from heaven, because the people who were closer to actually collecting it take their rake before it trickles all the way down anyway.  It might have worked in a Fed-free, non-central bank, industrial production society where you would believe in trickle-down economics and policies that created it; that might work. 

That doesn't work in a society, you're right, where people are able to exploit skiing on artificial snow.  And once you turn off the spigot, skiing might work just fine if it wasn't on artificial snow that was created from on high.  That's exactly the kind of slopes we've been skiing for the last 30, 40, 50 years in this country.

Peter McCormack: We could go back and forward, I've really enjoyed this.  We're going to have to follow up, I'll come to you next time.  Where are you?

Vivek Ramaswamy: I'm Columbus, Ohio, why don't you come?

Peter McCormack: We're overdue.  We've got to go and see Warren Davidson up there as well.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Oh, good, he's a friend.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've got to go and see Warren at some point.  We will get up to Ohio.  If not, are you travelling lots?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, all the time, man.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I think you should come to the conference in May, the big Bitcoin Conference. 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Where is it?

Peter McCormack: It will be in Miami.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Okay, what's it called?

Peter McCormack: It will be Bitcoin 2023.  Last year was like 25,000 people.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Let's do it.

Peter McCormack: But listen, let's stay in touch, we're going to send you some stuff, let's stay in touch.

Vivek Ramaswamy: We'll do that.

Peter McCormack: I haven't even looked at my notes yet!

Vivek Ramaswamy: That's fine, we could go on for hours.

Peter McCormack: Where do you want to send people to?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Strive.com, that's the company I founded, and we didn't even get into Strive, by the way, because it is not fixing the money problem, but fixing a big money problem, the BlackRock problem.  So, strive.com and then vivekramaswamy.com, my first name and last name.

Peter McCormack: All right, we'll put it in the show notes.  Thank you so much.  I look forward to when we can do this again.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Awesome, look forward to it, man.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.