#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths, the Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary, and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor, with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right, with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Saily for international roaming data, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, Ground News for cutting through the media bias, and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, there's a million reasons, and they're all nicely categorized, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.

**Vivek Ramaswamy** (1:19)
Maybe you will too.

**Lex Fridman** (1:22)
This episode is brought to you by Saily, a brand new eSIM service app offering several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I recently had a conversation with Peter Levels, levels.io, who's traveled across the world and been exceptionally productive while traveling across the world. So, this may come off as being a total travel noob, but two things that came to me as troublesome or difficult as a travel noob, when I'm traveling to all kinds of locations and I'm trying to be productive. One is power. So, power cables. All the adapters. You have to keep in mind in making sure your equipment is able to plug into the outlet without frying anything. In fact, I had a funny experience with that. Or not so funny about frying my equipment when I'm doing a podcast abroad. Anyway, so power and figuring that out is actually not trivial and related to that is figuring out which electronics stores to go to to get equipment and how to find those stores. And to find those stores, you need to have good Internet. And that takes me to the second issue that you run into when traveling is just getting good Internet in any country in any location. So that's what Saily helps you out with. They have a great data plan, easy to use, minimizes roaming fees while constantly being connected. And so when you're traveling, you're not desperately holding on to that sweet, sweet airport Wi-Fi before you take a leap out into the unknown when there's no Wi-Fi. Here, thanks to Saily, you can stay connected. Go to saily.com/lex and choose the one gigabyte Saily data plan to get it for free. That's saily.com/lex to get one free gig of Saily. All right, this episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P help. Have you seen the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's a good movie. I really should read the book. I haven't read the book. I really want to read the book. But I think there's something also magical about the performances in the movie, just pure genius. Anyway, the performances in the movie reveal the various manifestations of insanity, including the insanity of the people running the institutions. There's all kinds of insanities that humans are capable of. Why do I say this? I believe talking is one of the ways to reverse engineer how the insanity came to be in the first place. I would have loved to be inside One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and talk to those characters and talk to those human beings. In fact, I gravitate towards people with that kind of complexity in their mind. When I traveled across the country and in general when I travel, I gravitate towards people like the homeless people outside of 7-Eleven and have a genuine non-judgmental, just open-hearted conversation with them. I like talking to regular people. I like talking to people who, I don't know, do something real for a living. I don't mean to judge white-collar and tech jobs, but I just mean manual labor jobs. Just people with their eyes, their hands, their feet, their whole way of being shows aware and tear, shows the journey well-lived and hard-lived. I like those people and I really want to talk to those people on a podcast. But more than anything, forget the mics. I just like talking to them. Just as one human to another. Anyway, I say all that is conversation is a really powerful thing. And if you want to take conversation seriously as a way to heal your particular mental malady, consider using BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. I just recently did an episode on the history of Marxism. And what really struck me is that the 19th century was a battleground of radical ideas. And I think it's popular in modern political discourse to label, frankly, moderate ideas as radical. In our rhetoric, radicalize the rhetoric and push towards the moderate, our actual policies and ideas. And it's interesting to look back at the 19th century, the industrialized world that doesn't have enough data on what large-scale implementation of ideas would actually look like. It's interesting to see those ideas battle each other out in their most radical form. And so, that really opened up my eyes to sort of honestly embody and consider and walk a mile in the shoes of a particular idea, whether that's communism or capitalism. because capitalism does have flaws, but it is the thing that has given us much of the improved quality of life that we see around us today. I think it's a fascinating, complex question of why there's a large collection of humans, when free to compete, do a pretty good job. It's fascinating. And that's every time I talk about NetSuite, that's what I'm thinking about. How does a large collection of humans, different departments, different tasks, how do they all collaborate efficiently, effectively under the deadlines, under the stress, under the shadow of the reality that if the business does not sell a lot of stuff and make a lot of money, it's going to fail. And all those people will lose their jobs. It's stressful and it's beautiful. Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. The point is to see every side of every story and you, you the listener, come to your own conclusion. This is one of the problems I have with people that are against platforming certain voices. I believe in the intelligence of the listener to decipher the truth. And sometimes that doesn't come immediately, sometimes it comes over time. But I do think that it is the responsibility of a host of an interviewer to challenge the audience, to push the audience to not just listen to this particular person, but to listen to other people that disagree with this person. To listen to different voices and different perspectives and consider both the possibility that this person is completely right or completely wrong. And walk about with those two possibilities together. So don't get captured by a particular ideology. Give yourself time to accept the ideology and to accept the steel man against the ideology. And existing in that superposition of truths, try to figure out where in that gray area is your own understanding of the path forward. because unlike what politicians claim, I don't think there's a right or an easy or a clear answer for the problems that we face as a human civilization. In fact, the division I think that we're seeing online on the internet between the politicians is our best attempt at trying to, through the tension of discourse, figuring out what the hell are we doing here? How do we solve this? How do we make a better world? So anyway, Ground News does a great job of delivering the metrics that give you the context of like, okay, how biased is this particular story? So they can kind of help you in consuming that new story to understand where it's coming from. It's trying to clearly, in an organized way, deliver to you the perspective on the truth grounded in the context of the bias from which that perspective comes from. Okay, and there's a lot of other features that are super interesting. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're doing the work they're doing. It's extremely important. Go to groundnews.com/lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com/lex.