E138: Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in conversation with the Besties

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Sacksy, can you come outside your window, and I'm going to start waving, and you'll see me. You want to see me?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:05)
Sack, have two of your butlers hold you up on their shoulders.

**Vivek Ramaswamy** (0:09)
I hope this is being taped and part of the show, because this is great.

**David Friedberg** (0:13)
David, you're wearing blue shorts, right?

**David Sacks** (0:15)
Yeah.

**David Friedberg** (0:16)
Yeah, I saw you. Did you see me?

**David Sacks** (0:17)
No, I didn't see you. Where are you?

**David Friedberg** (0:19)
When you look out on the first house, the pink house, look at this house, do you see it?

**David Sacks** (0:23)
I heard you. I couldn't see you though.

**David Friedberg** (0:25)
Yeah. Yelling like a lunatic.

**David Sacks** (0:29)
You're the pink house. Look, I'm right below me or above me?

**David Friedberg** (0:33)
No, I'm like to your right. If you're looking out, I'm at your right. Your first house on the right. Oh, there.
Oh, I see you with me.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:40)
Yeah. I see you.

**David Friedberg** (0:43)
I see you. I see you.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:45)
Guys, we're like 12-year-olds.

**David Friedberg** (0:46)
Come over afterwards. We'll have a glass of beer.

**David Sacks** (0:48)
I'm going to come over afterwards.

**David Friedberg** (0:50)
Vivek has a hard stop. We should go.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:09)
Vivek Ramaswamy is finally on the program. He's an entrepreneur. He graduated Harvard. Yale, all that kind of stuff. He was an entrepreneur, then a capital allocator. I think broad strokes. Everybody knows he's a conservative, running as a Republican. He's anti-woke. He's pro-life, anti-affirmative action, pro-free speech.
And he wants federal government term limits.
And his fans are lunatics. They've been asking for him to be on the All-In Podcast every day. I've gotten about 300 emails from your fans. Welcome to the program.

**Vivek Ramaswamy** (1:41)
They sound like your fans, actually, because I hear it all the time. It's like blaming me for why I have not been on this program. And so you guys, this has been like some sort of idealized experience for me. I'm looking forward to it.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:51)
Okay, great. So what we try to do here is have a real conversation, try to get these candidates off their talking points. So this isn't meet the press, obviously. We want to talk to you like a human being.
So the extent that, you know, as a politician, now you can talk like a human being, the audience and we would appreciate it. Meet David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. All right, Vivek, why don't you explain maybe your background as a capital allocator and as an entrepreneur and then why you chose to run for president at this time?

**Vivek Ramaswamy** (2:19)
Yeah, sure. I mean, my parents, like many people, you probably also know who have had similar success stories. They came to this country with almost no money.
I went on to actually found successful companies. And so I started my career as a biotech investor. I worked at a hedge fund in New York when I graduated in 2007 I thought I was going to be a scientist. I studied molecular biology. Ended up enjoying my time as an internship. It hit a hedge fund a lot more than that. So I did that for seven years. Three of those years, I spent law school at the same time. But then when I finished law school, I had, I think, felt like my learning curve had flattened from being a pure capital allocator. So I stepped down and founded a new kind of biotech company that I could, actually, you guys might be more interested in it than most of my political audiences. But the basic premise was give scientists skin in the game in the projects they actually work on. So if you're a GSK or advisor or whatever, Merck, you discover a drug or you develop it, you don't have personal upside in the individual drug that you develop. You do have various forms of asymmetric downside. And so people don't take risks unless they're the same risks that the other pharma companies are taking, because if you take the same risk and fail, but everybody else is failing in a therapeutic category at the same time, you're safe.
But if you take a risk that other people aren't willing to take and you fail, then you experience budget cuts, maybe job security risks, social embarrassment, which is a big factor in big pharma as well, which in turn created an opportunity that I took advantage of, which was that there were systematically categories of drugs that went undeveloped. Even after big pharma had, for a long time, spent a lot of money developing those drugs up to a certain point.