#169 Vivek Ramaswamy - Making Ohio Tax Free, DeepSeek, DOGE and the Education Crisis

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A lot's happened since the last time. I like the studio because I do a lot of these meetings or podcasts or whatever, and it's super hot and you're sweaty.
Not with Sean Ryan. You have a similar belief and conviction in air conditioning as I do.
Yeah, yeah. So thank you for that.
Like a nice chill. Like a nice chill, but...
Same thing, yeah. But yeah, saw you at the inaugurations.
Yep, yep. We saw you there.
Army-Navy game. We've seen you a couple times, yep.
Yep. Thanks for getting me in there.
Yeah, it was fun. But, yeah, so a lot's happened since I saw you last, especially since we interviewed.
Yeah. A lot of good.
A lot of good stuff to cover today, but I got to ask. Yeah.
Come on. Are you running for a governor in Ohio, or what's going on here? I mean, I got to wait to formally announce it, but that is the direction I'm headed.
So late February, man, we'll have a big announcement coming. I love it.
I love it. What moved you from, you know, I mean, you ran for president.
You're going to run for governor, likely. And so what was the shift? Why did you decide to concentrate more on state? Well, look, there's a couple reasons.
I mean, one is if we get the job done, I say we as a movement, but Donald Trump gets the job done over the next couple of years at the federal level, the action shifts to the states. In two to three years, take the Department of Education, dismantle the Department of Education, dismantle a lot of these regulatory agencies.
When in doubt, my advice has always been kick it to the states. It's what our founding fathers envisioned.
We live in a system of federalism. So I'm just looking at where I can have the biggest possible impact.
And a lot of the issues that I've been most focused on in substance, not just tearing down the administrative state, but education, for example, that can't be led by the federal government. It has to be led by the states.
And I had a good time over the last year helping President Trump in whatever way I could, bringing young people along in the coalition, help him get elected, started off with Doge, helped get that off the ground. But when I look to where the puck is going, if we get that job done at the federal level, tear down the bureaucracy,

downsize the federal government, it's going to require real leaders at the state level to catch the pieces.

And I realized when I'm looking at that, that's a couple years down the road.

I wanted to skate to where I thought the puck was going.

Why do you say it's all moving to the state?

I had a very interesting conversation with Eric Perence quite a while ago on here. Very smart guy.
Interesting dude. Love talking to Eric.
But he kind of changed my mindset. A lot of people were worried how this election was going to go.
And Eric kind of put it in my head that, hey, the states might be even more important than the federal government, and we should be focusing maybe more on local municipalities and state government rather than federal government, because that's what affects your immediate area that you live in. And it really resonated with me.
And so, I mean, you're saying it starts with the federal government by basically gutting. Yeah, I mean, what happens right now is the federal government is doing all the things that it shouldn't be doing while failing to do the few things that it should be doing.
What are the few things the federal government should be doing? One key responsibility is protecting the homeland of its nation. The United States of America, the sovereignty of the U.S.

starts even with the physical sovereignty of the U.S.

Basic borders.

We have not done basic border control in this country.

We've had more illegal entry at the southern border

than we've ever had in our national history.

That is a failure of the federal government.

We could go on the other failures too.

We are lacking defense systems.

We're lacking in cyber defense systems,

super EMP defense systems.

So the national defense function

of actually defending our own homeland

So, let's go. We are lacking defense systems.
We're lacking in cyber defense systems, super EMP defense systems. So the national defense function of actually defending our own homeland, forget meddling around in other countries, our own homeland, we've already failed to do that.
But that's because the federal government is in part focused on doing a bunch of things that it shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Regulating industries.
You've got a department of education that's meddling in the way that we educate our kids, thinking about impediments to nuclear energy in the United States. It starts with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the federal level.
It's doing a bunch of things that fall outside of what our founding fathers envisioned in the Constitution. The Constitution says Article I, here's what's actually the powers of Congress to legislate.
And if it's not in Article I, Congress doesn't have the power to do it. The Tenth Amendment says that which is not reserved to the federal government is reserved respectively to the states and to the people.
So if you can't find the reservation of authority in the Constitution, there's very specific categories of what Congress is able to do. If it's not one of those categories, that means by definition, the rest is left to the states.
A big frontier that's on a lot of people's minds, for example, is education. The federal government should basically have no role in shaping K through 12, or frankly, even higher education.
That is left to the states. And part of our model was we want states competing with one another.
The same principle in capitalism that causes us to create value where businesses compete with one another, competition breeds innovation. That's what our founding fathers envisioned, if you read the Federalist Papers, with respect to our model of federalism anyway.
And so when I looked at, and obviously I ran for president, I think that's the highest impact position you could possibly have, and I think Donald Trump is the man for our hour and the man for this moment. But when you look at the other way, the next most impactful way, at least for me, where I could say, here are things I could do through public service as a leader, where you see tangibly the impact of actually the decisions you make, it wasn't even close where you would have that large impact.
It was as governor and among elected office, that was the place I was drawn to look next. And that's the way our country is supposed to actually work, where you got people leaving.
California and New York in droves, where are they headed? Right now they're going to Florida and Texas. Tennessee, since it's gone to effectively zero tax, has been more successful.
You got states, other states that are largely blue states that they're leaving, but Ohio is kind of interesting in this regard. It's a red state.
It's a conservative state. But at least as of last year, it was still number 38 in terms of people leaving versus netting coming to the country.
Really? Coming to the state. Yeah, and I think that leaves a lot of room for improvement.
It's a state that in a lot of ways has been headed in the right direction, but I think right now we need a governor, not only in that state, but across the country, governors who are willing to step on the gas and actually govern conservative populations with conservative principles to do it unapologetically and to take on the problems that the federal government can't actually solve in its own right. You know, I want to dig more into that, but when it comes to these droves of people that are leaving the blue states and coming to red states, and I think a lot of people are really upset with policies in the blue states, especially California.
I'm sure there's getting ready to be another big influx as soon as these insurance companies start paying out for all these fires because of the mishaps that went on there. But it's something that I hear.
Tennessee is getting overrun with people fleeing their states. And while it's great to have all these new people coming in, it's pricing all of the locals that made this state what it is today.
It's driving them out with the home prices, with inflation. It's just driving everything up, especially in this county.
And so is there any way to – what are your thoughts on that? Do you want Ohio to become that? So I don't want Ohio to become Silicon Valley. And frankly, I don't even want Ohio to become Texas or Florida, even though those are well-run states.
I want Ohio to be the best version of itself, actually. I mean, what Silicon Valley was to the American economy for the last 20 years, I think Ohio, the Ohio River Valley, can be for the next 20.
It's not going to be through bits, that's Silicon Valley's model, but what I call through atoms, through production of stuff, of actual tangible things that we require in the defense industry. And you look at building up our defense industrial base, aerospace innovation.
Ohio's actually a great state for that. Wide open plains.
You have no spaceports in the state right now. A great history with John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth.
You got Neil Armstrong, first person in the world to walk the moon. Those are Ohioans, right? So you have a great tradition there of production, even in biotech and medical production, whole opportunities.
I think it'd be a crypto state that leads the way in crypto and Bitcoin innovation. You go the distance.
I want Ohio to be at the leading edge of also using AI, not just to take jobs, which is what people worry about, but actually to make jobs. If you train workforces to use AI, you increase productivity.
Silicon Valley is focused on training algorithms. I think if you're focused on training people to use AI, you can actually increase their productivity probably tenfold in a way that doesn't take those jobs.
I don't want Ohio Ohio to imitate Silicon Valley or try to be something that it's not or try to be Texas or Florida. We got four seasons up there.
It's a real state. There's a reality to it.
If you go a hundred mile radius of Columbus, draw a little circle around that, that's a cross section of the country. I grew up in Cincinnati.
I built my first business in New York. Before we had kids, I wanted to go back to Ohio because we don't want to raise our kids in Manhattan.

And so I don't want to pretend to be something else. I want it to be the best version of ourselves.
But, yeah, I want to open arms to people from patriots from across the country to say that if you want to live in a state where you're able to pursue economic excellence, turn a state into a kind of special regulatory economic zone for many of these industries

to say that you don't want regulatory overreach to get in your way, great, come to Ohio. If you want to come to a state where your kids are able to actually get a good education on reading and writing and math, which is a major problem in our country, I want those people coming in, but without creating some of the issues you've seen in housing markets and other in places like, you know, Tennessee, even look at what's happened in markets like Austin.
How do you do that? Well, first go back to the philosophy of what causes a lot of those inflationary spikes are supply constraints. So part of the reason housing costs have gone up so much is that we don't actually permit new house construction or new home construction at the rate that we should, because there are barriers, especially even in single family home type communities to say that if there's a family home of a certain size and the lot size is less than a certain amount, a half acre or whatever, you can't build a new home.
That actually prices, especially young families out of the market because you have a constraint on supply. So my general philosophy is we want to increase the

supply of everything. That includes the supply of housing.
It includes the supply of energy.

It also includes the supply of people because that is actually something that allows a business to

grow is if you have talented people in your state, American patriots to hire, that's great.

But if you increase the supply of both energy and housing and everything else required for those

Thank you. is if you have talented people in your state, American patriots to hire, that's great.
But if you increase the supply of both energy and housing and everything else required for those people to live affordable lives, that's how you match the demand going up. You got to also match the supply going up of those things too.
And I don't think those things have been done as well in some of these states that were attractive places to live, but you had the influx. You got to be prepared to really increase, for example, the supply of housing, really increase the supply of energy in a way that keeps those costs down.
What about stuff like the more traditional generational occupations like farming? I mean, I don't know how... I mean, like farmer here, you know, here in this county, I mean, they, you sell a thousand acres here.
I mean, you're looking at probably a couple hundred million, you know? And so you have these farms, these cattle farms and all these people that are, I mean, I know it's probably for the greater good. I don't, I mean, I don't know.
I know it definitely boosts the economy, but, I mean, farmers are just getting run out of here. I mean, they can't sustain a 1,000-acre cattle ranch when they can sell it for a couple hundred million.
And then the other thing, well, I'll let you go. I'll let you riff off that.
No, no, no, go ahead.

Yeah.

But then the other thing is, and this isn't just my opinion.

I mean, you can look at any Facebook group.

You can hear the local gossip around town.

And the big worry is, is this influx of people from California,

New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.

I mean, are they going to flip the state?

You know, everybody's worried.

You know, are we going to start seeing the things in the schools here that you saw, where you came from?

And, I mean, it's a huge worry.

And so, I don't know.

It seems like here it might, I don't, I would like to see the growth slow a little bit. And so, is there a way to do that? Yeah, I mean, I think all else, it depends on where you are in the state's journey as well, right? If you look at where Nashville was 15 years ago, it's not exactly where Nashville is today.
And so if you're not prepared for that influx,

it could have a detrimental impact.

All else equal, do you want to be a state

that people want to move into

versus one that people want to move out of?

You probably want to be in the state

that people want to move into

because they want to move into there for good reasons.

Same thing as the country.

Do we want to be in a country where,

you know, you open the border under Biden,

what did you see?

People wanted to go one way and not the other.

Well, you'd rather live in the country that people want to come to, but you've got to protect yourself. At the level of a nation, that means the hard border.
At the level of a state, what it means is actually anchoring who you are and staying true to that North Star in a way that says, great, we're happy if more people want to flock here, but it's part of the mission of who we actually are rather than changing who we are because eventually you're then going to be a state that people eventually want to get out of anyway. So in the long run, I think it's a pretty good metric if people want to move in rather than out.
The way I want to – I would love to lead Ohio is as a state of excellence, economic excellence and educational excellence. If you have nine states that are zero-tax states, if you want to be a state that people are actually flocking to,

it's a stakes at this point. I think that people should be able to keep what they make.
Property taxes, I mean, this is actually true in probably multiple of our states, are getting increasingly insane where if you have a high enough property tax, what it does is it effectively says you don't own your property.

Your property becomes a permanent lease from the government.

And you have a bunch of shackles that stop people from actually starting new businesses.

Most of them are moving to Texas,

is because probably the most favorable environment for an entrepreneur right now to build a new business is in the state of Texas.

I want that to be in the state of Ohio.

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So you think about education, you think about economic excellence, that's great. I think where we haven't really had a model in the country yet, what I would like to create as a model is what does educational excellence actually look like? And I think this is the one where, as a parent, you have kids? I do.
You do, yeah. How old are yours? One in three.
All right. Pretty similar zip code to us.
It's a fun age. I've got a soon-to-be five-year-old and a two-year-old who's going to turn three in July.
This is the problem that at the level of our nation, nobody is actually seriously talking about, both on the left or on the right. I think Republicans have been better than Democrats.
We have a massive achievement crisis in the United States of America. You got 75% of eighth graders.
They are not proficient in math compared to international standards. 70% of them aren't proficient in reading.
And the worst part is now you're starting to see there's other countries where English isn't even their first language, where kids in those countries are more proficient in English, better performing in English, than our own kids right here at home where English is our only language. That's insane.
It's unacceptable. And the thing about this, I mean, it goes to the first conversation we had about where the action is in terms of government and our impact is at the federal level or the state level.
Right now, this year, definitely federal level because Biden in the past had done so much damage that Trump has to undo a lot of that at a fast and furious pace. But if he's successful, as I expect he's going to be, you roll the tape a few years forward, fixing education is not something that's done by the federal government.
So who's going to fix that educational crisis? Yes, we have a lot of woke DEI issues. I mean, I was the chief DEI crusader, anti-DEI crusader, what, four or five years ago when I wrote Woke Inc.
and criticized the spread of wokeism through corporate America and other parts of our culture. But now that we're about to enter, we're not quite there, but we're about to enter the post-DEI era, the post-woke era, we got to still admit to ourselves that that was part of the problem, but it wasn't the entire problem accounting for this achievement crisis as well.
And so how do we prepare ourselves to say, okay, well, there's more people moving in and we have tough times. Let's talk about the next 20 years.
I think what we want is a generation of Americans who's

actually equipped to compete. Because at the end of the day, China isn't looking the other way and giving us some sort of participation trophy at the end of it for complaining.
We can't be victims. We got to be victorious.
And I do think that lighting a fire under the feet of our educational system to prioritize achievement in math, reading, writing, critical thinking, physical fitness, by the way. I think that we've gone soft on this, bring back early physical education, bring back the presidential fitness test.
We used to do that. I don't know.
I mean, most kids are not probably able to do the level of pull-ups that kids were able to do, what, 30, 40 years ago. I think it goes to implications for mental health.
I think it goes to implications for military preparedness. I think we have to have an education system that demands more of ourselves, and that has to be driven by the states.
Actually, even think about knowing about the United States. I love how many American flags you have in this room, you know, and use a good sense of patriotism that we sometimes, you know, leave behind for our kids.
Most kids today who graduate from high school can't even pass the same civics exam that we require of a legal immigrant before they become a citizen. I think every high school senior who graduates from high school as a requirement should have to pass that test.
I mean, it's a basic condition of citizenship in a nation is that you know something about your nation in order to be a fully informed citizen of that nation. So I think we've got to get tough a little bit when it comes to some of these issues relating to the revitalization of our young generation.
Well, I think a lot of people are ready for that. I mean, homeschool is on a massive rise right now.
Do you homeschool? So we started that way. Yeah, I mean, I think that this year we were on that track, and then we, you know, for our son, our older guy, we felt that he might have been a benefit with the socialization, but we're big fans of homeschooling.
I think that school choice in most states, so Tennessee is in this category, has school choice. Ohio has school choice.
It doesn't cover homeschooling. That needs to change.
I mean, educational choice means full models of choice. And you've got a lot of people coming through homeschooling backgrounds where those kids are doing better, even than kids who are educated, even in expensive private schools or public charter schools.
But I'm not like a one-size-fits-all guy saying homeschooling's for everybody. And we get into this debate as well in higher education.
Sometimes both sides will fall into this trap that it's all about four-year college degrees only, and that's the only path to the American dream. Or you got the reactionary backlash that'll say, oh no, college is a scam.
Nobody should go there. It's only for two-year and vocational degrees and apprenticeships.
That's the way to go. Whether it's higher education or K-12 education, I don't want a one-size-fits-all approach.
I want everybody to be able to choose what the actual best path is for them. That's not a system we have right now.
And I do think that universal school choice should actually, if you're going to call it that, should be universal in including homeschooling as the right option. I think some parents would tell you this too.
I mean, we've got young kids each ourselves. Yours are a little younger, but you'll probably notice this even more over time.
They're different even in the same household. You're raising them in the same household under the same circumstances.
One of them is a younger sibling and one of them is older, so it's different for each of them that way. But private school or public school might be the right option for one of them, and homeschooling might be the right option for the other one.
It might change over different parts of their upbringing, and the people know what's best for their kid, all else equal, is the parent. And I think that right now, people in wealthy families at least have the opportunity to hire home help or nannies or tutors or private school tuition or whatever it is.
That's not where I'm worried. It's the civil rights issue of our time that actually the very people that so-called bleeding heart liberals have been bleeding their hearts over, people in inner cities, people struggling with making ends meet, single-parent households, they're the ones who actually left hold in the bag where their kids don't have that level of choice.
And so I do think this is, I don't think it's an exaggeration to call this the civil rights issue of our time. I would call it that.
And I hope that that's going to bring along not just traditional Republican support, but you can think about anybody who's a parent wants to be able to choose to be able to send their kid to the best school they can. And even in the public schools, one of the things we don't have in this country right now is merit-based pay for teachers.
I mean, you run a business of sorts, right? I run businesses. Generally, the way it works is the people who do the best job in creating value for the business are compensated more than those who don't do as good of a job in creating value for that business or that fund or that investment firm or whatever.
Why should it work any differently in public schools? No, it shouldn't. We've got metrics.
You've got clear metrics. And so there isn't a state in the country right now that does this.
There is no merit-based pay for teachers and principals and administrators. So I want Ohio to be the first state that implements not just universal school choice, universal including homeschooling, but also for the public schools to compete, implements merit-based pay for teachers, administrators, principals, where your pay, you should be paid a lot more than you are now.
I think the best teachers are vastly underpaid. Should be paid far more when tied to the actual outcomes they deliver.
And conversely, those who aren't delivering outcomes shouldn't be paid at that same level and in some cases should actually not be on that job at all. And I do think that that's got to be done with leaders who have a spine to, I mean, that's a big fight to pick.
I'm not looking to pick fights for the sake of picking fights, but that's one, there's a reason why that doesn't exist in any of the 50 states. I think that is our path out of this educational achievement crisis.
How in the weeds have you gotten into that subject? I mean, how would it be done? Yeah, I mean, it's not overly complicated, right? It could be done with the, one model is to collaborate with the unions. I'm not going to, I don't believe in just picking fights for the sake of picking fights.
Being conservative without being combative is a fine approach if that works. So you could talk to the people who are members of a public teacher' union and say, you know what, here's how we're going to do this.
But if there are union objections, it is my view that if a public sector union, particularly, I'm going to put fire and police in a different category where this doesn't apply to them, but if public teachers' unions are unionizing, you've got to ask yourself, who are they actually unionizing against? In many cases, it ends up being the best interests of the kids they're actually serving. And I say this as somebody who believes that the best teachers in the country right now are vastly underpaid and underrespected for the work they do.
I want to see the best ones actually paid more. So either you do it in collaboration with the teachers' unions, or you have to be willing to say that that's not a sacred cow anymore that somehow we can't touch.
To the contrary, if teachers' unions and the existence of public teachers' unions are in the way of getting that job done, then we need to fix that system. Okay, I guess what comes to my mind is where I think you might run into problems, and maybe you've thought through this, is just looking back, what were EZAs? Physical education, art, home economics, stuff like that.
That was pretty much a wash. And so how do you put them on the same pay scale as somebody that's teaching calculus at a junior and high school level? A more challenging course that people are going to struggle with more? Do you see what I'm saying? No, absolutely.
It's a great point. I think you've got to have market-based approaches for pricing each one.
I don't think they're going to be paid at the same level. My point is not who's paid more between somebody who's got very few of those calculus teachers available where you might have a greater supply of other teachers in earlier education.
That's one question. The question I'm stating is all of the people who are teaching calculus and all of the people who are teaching PE and all of the people who are teaching social studies are in public schools paid flat at the same level.
And I'm saying within each of those categories, whatever the market rate is for each of those, that's a separate question. And that should be a little bit of supply and demand.
If you've got very few people in an essential category where we need to educate our kids, those people are going to have to be paid more than somebody who's in a category where you could find 10 other people to do the job. But within each category, the way the public teachers work right now, public school teachers work, is that no matter whether they're really good, no matter whether they're really bad, they are paid flat the same way, with exceptions only for seniority, which is how long you've been there, or whether or not you have a degree, an advanced degree.
The evidence actually shows that there's no correlation between having the advanced degree and being a better teacher in most subject areas. And there's definitely no argument that seniority makes that difference either.
So my point is, within each of those categories, tie it to actual outcomes and merit. And the biggest objection you get is, well, who picks the outcome, right? And if you have just a testing-based outcome, are they just going to teach to the test? My first response to that is you can't let the, you know, whatever the old expression is, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And I agree with that. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
The status quo of the bad is the enemy of the good, which is the fact that you've got a massive underachievement crisis in the United States. The facts I mentioned earlier where, I'll tell you what bad is, is 75% of eighth graders not knowing how to be proficient in math.
But the other thing is, it doesn't have to just be the test. I think it should be a composite of a number of different factors.
On the table could be parents' assessments of the teachers, which I don't think is a bad starting point either. Ultimately, not to say that parents are catering to the parent is the only model or the right answer for the teacher, but that's probably a good first best place to start.
You could have independent peer-reviewed analysis. You could also then tie that to tests and objective metrics being an important part of that outcome.
Is that going to be a perfect system? Maybe there's no such thing as a perfect system. But I'll tell you what's far worse is having a system where compensation and promotions are totally agnostic to the actual performance of kids coming out of that system.
And the reason why is in some ways the people who make the decisions aren't the ones ones who actually have skin in the game. It's not their kids or it's not really their outcome that matters.
Their pay isn't tied to it. Half of public school dollars right now, I think it's over half, it's like 52% of public school dollars right now, aren't even spent on instruction.
It's on a bunch of other stuff, administration, bureaucracy, you have building construction

or building amenities. You need some level of infrastructure for sure.
But I think it is insane that a majority of dollars flowing into public schools nationally don't even go towards instruction or towards those teachers. And so my view is those teachers do need to be, the best of the teachers absolutely need to be paid a lot more than they are right now.
And the union, the equalizing effect, that's actually the obstacle that gets in the way. And do it by category, right? Another example would be the inner cities.
Well, how are you going to penalize people in like a poor neighborhood versus a better neighborhood? To the contrary, it might actually be the opposite because you're looking at the rate of improvement, right?. If you're starting from a low baseline and you have a force of nature of a teacher who comes in and is able to demonstrate a scale of improvement that school hasn't seen, that's what you're indexing the actual merit-based pay to is the actual rate of improvement.
There's all kinds of questions on implementation and it could get pretty technical pretty quickly, but the base principle is, do we actually believe in a meritocracy in education in America? Do we actually believe in a meritocracy amongst educators in America? And I think if we do, that will be the most important thing we can take up, the most important tool in our toolkit to solve the problem in our educational achievement crisis that frankly too few people are talking about right now. Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
And what I meant by the homeschool thing is I think that people realize that the education system is failing in a multitude of ways, and they're just taking manners into their own hands because what else can you do? And so, yeah, I think that makes a hell of a lot of sense. Back to Ohio, and you had mentioned AI and training people how to use AI.
Yes. There's a lot of fear that AI is going to take over editors.
They're going to take over attorneys. They're going to take over doctors.
All these occupations have a lot of fear that AI is going to take over. And so how is AI actually going to create jobs? I mean, the first thing to say is that you've got to believe that you're going to stop something from happening before you turn that into a decision.
And at a certain point in time, you've got other countries that are going to leverage AI to beat out the United States, regardless that I think the better question to ask is how are we going to best use AI not only to make the United States competitive and at the leading edge of all other countries, but also in a way that actually makes people's lives better, including those of workers. I think part of what you're seeing is that can actually enhance the productivity of a lot of workers.
What I see right now, though, is a massive imbalance, Sean, between the quantity of investment, and we're talking trillions of dollars of investment going into training new AI models, algorithms, code, versus the amount actually going into training human beings on how to use AI in each of those fields. I think fast forward 10 years from now, you're not going to eliminate the existence of lawyers or doctors or nurses, nor should we want that.
I mean, there are certain areas we're going to need human-to-human contact. It's irreplaceable.
But it's not just even the human-to-human contact at an emotional touchy-feely level. It's at the level of people who are operating and using and asking the right questions of an AI that's actually giving you the right answers.
Right now, nobody has really given thought to what that training modality looks like. I hate using the term the trades versus other professions because it sort of looks down on the trades.
I think it was Mike Rowe, might have been somebody who came up with the artisanal professions. I love that term.
That's great. I think we need more people trained in artisanal professions, and that's a separate conversation for carpenters and welders and mechanics and plumbers and builders.
But I think we need to think about a separate category, which is not just the so-called genius model of the person who's creating a new AI model. We need that too.
But what we're missing out on right now is training a generation to leverage that, to change the way they already practice their profession from engineering to medicine to law to even day-to-day management. I think it's probably a massive business opportunity for somebody to take up a serious enterprise, business-to-business training enterprise that actually makes sure those workforces aren't replaced by AI, but are actually enhanced in their productivity by AI.
And I think that that's an opportunity that we would miss if we just sort of stayed in the clouds and worried about it and tried to all play ourselves the victim card. Other countries aren't going to be doing that anyway.
We might as well all pull up our pants and actually figure out how we're going to train ourselves to make the most of it. And I think we'll actually be better off.
And we talked earlier about inflation, bringing down cost. Well, if the cost of providing a good or service, it's pretty expensive to get medical care.
It's pretty expensive to get a lawyer to defend yourself or to pursue some sort of legal claim you need to pursue.

It's out of reach for many people to be able to even make ends meet on getting a basic physical exam or a medical test that follows from it without adequate insurance. if the cost of providing those things come down

to say that you don't necessarily need somebody

who has been through four years of college,

then four years of medical school,

and then seven years of a surgical training or residency before they can have the license to then still have to be a human being to have to search the encyclopedia of their brain to give you an answer, but instead have somebody who was trained as a physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner who, with the aid and experience of day-to-day human contact, can have AI whose encyclopedia and ability to access it is far in excess of that trained physician, who you still need to do a lot of things, but in the meantime, you're serving a lot more people at a lower cost. That opens up more jobs for those nurses.
That opens more jobs for those physician's assistants, even though it might mean fewer physicians who have gone through the full rigor of what it currently meant to be a physician 10 years ago. And that doesn't mean we don't need those people either.
We need those people too. It's just going to change the composition of a workforce that I think the worst of all worlds is one where AI is here, whether we like it or not.
We sit here with an armchair concern about, oh no, what are we going to do about it when it takes our jobs? That's actually going to be a situation where it's more likely to erode and take jobs and disrupt communities than one in which we say, here's what we actually value. What are our actual values as a state or as a country? We want good people who work hard to be able to live the American dream that includes the ability to not only amass great wealth for themselves, but to live affordable lives as you're pursuing your passion, whatever that may be.
Then you ask the question of, okay, got this new toolkit coming along. How do we best leverage that to achieve that American dream? And I do think one of the areas where we're underinvested today is in workforce training to use AI, which I think is an opportunity.
Interesting. Interesting.
Any aspirations to take Ohio tax-free? Yes. Really? I do think it's table stakes.
You've got seven, eight, nine states that are doing it. I'm not saying that can happen with the flip of the switch, but it's an aspirational goal.
Is it a goal, a destination to be table stakes that you're competing to be? If you want to be a state that people are flocking into rather than out of, I do think that eventually it's going to be table stakes to be zero income tax states, to have states with a low property tax burden, and states that, like Texas today, are closer to being regulatory sandboxes for many industries, by which I mean it's kind of low-burden regulation to be able to draw industry into that state. I think that's almost table-stake stuff for economic excellence.
I think the harder stuff to deliver in the long run, equally important, is the educational excellence. But when you think about Tennessee, why is it doing well? Why are people moving into North Carolina? And it not quite down to zero, but it's on its way stair-stepping down to it.
I just think people have a basic hunger, justified demand to keep what they actually earn. And if they could pack their bags and move somewhere else, unfortunately, that's what you see them doing.
And many people in Ohio will go sit in Florida for six months and a day and pretend like it's about the weather when it wasn't about the weather it was about six months and a day for a reason many of them I mean I've got people friends I know in the Ohio and greater Columbus community who do this all the time they would rather be in Columbus the whole time and so I don't think that it's a great service to a state but the beauty beauty is, that's why people are leaving California and New York, despite one of the most naturally beautiful regions and states on the planet, it's California, people still packing their bags and moving. I think if you have a confiscatory environment, as I think they do in California, eventually people are going to pack their bags and go, especially if they're not even getting the value out of the taxes they're paying.
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And so how do you, how would a state, so basically what I'm getting at is, how do you keep people from these states coming in and remote working from, let's say, Ohio. Ohio's attack turns into a tax-free state.
How do you keep these influx of people from astronomical taxes, you know, like California? How do you keep them? They move to Ohio. They're still working in California technically because they're remote workers.
I want their companies moving to Ohio. I mean, I think that's a big part of even what you're seeing with other companies reincorporating from places like California to Texas.

I want Ohio to be the place where they're actually reincorporated and moving. So if you have enough of the workers moving, I want the company itself coming wholesale or the divisions of the company to the place where the next economic boom is actually happening.
A lot of the ways in which I think we're going to lead is, in Silicon Valley, one hand, you have bits, right? Leadership in bits, computer programming, maybe that's remote work stuff. A lot of the areas of the future, I think, are going to have to be in the form of production once again in the second industrial revolution of our country.
Ohio was at the leading edge for the first industrial revolution. Even all the way through the 50s, a lot of people don't know this.

In the 1950s, Toledo was the glass capital for the first industrial revolution, even all the way through the 50s,

a lot of people don't know this.

In the 1950s, Toledo was the glass capital of the world.

Many people may not even know Toledo.

It's this city with a rich history in Northwest Ohio,

glass capital of the world.

Akron, the rubber capital.

You have Youngstown and Cleveland

that were steel capitals of the United States.

Dayton was a computing power capital

for the industrial revolution. It's where the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is today, but it was a computing power capital back then.
Cincinnati, as my hometown, was the Queen City. It was known as the Queen City.
It was a consumer products capital. They called it Porkopolis.
It was a meat-leading meat producer. These are some of the wealthiest states in the Union dialed back about a century.
I think even in the 50s, by 1950, it was six of the top 15 wealthiest cities in America, the equivalent of San Francisco and Miami and Los Angeles and New York. That was actually Ohio, six of the top 15.
So I think if you skate to where the puck is going, not try to imitate what Silicon Valley was, and also, by the way, they've got great competitive talent there that I don't think it's realistic to say that we're going to recreate Silicon Valley in Ohio. Neither is it realistic nor is it desirable, but looking at areas where you're going to have to actually produce in order to lead.
Think about aerospace production and innovation. Think about defense industrial-based production.
And Earl actually just recently built out a major facility in Ohio, announced the building of a major one very recently. Semiconductor production.
So we're beginning to see the demand for natural attributes of people to leave to parts of the country where they're able to find different kinds of workforces than just in the, you know, in the insular nature of Silicon Valley or wherever they may live. That's a real opportunity, but there need to be policy changes to make that possible.
And I do think that being zero tax, being effectively a regulatory economic safe zone to be able to say that if you want to grow a business here without really worrying about the red tape associated with doing so, this is the state to do it. That's the part that it's up to policymakers to deliver.
But if we do, yeah, I do think that Ohio was a frontier state before there was a frontier, and I think it can be a frontier state again. It just requires actually acting like one.
Interesting. Interesting.
Love it. I love to talk you.
You always know your stuff. It's great.
Especially, you know, the history of Ohio and all those cities. It's actually really, I mean, the history, I mean, some of this is, you know, it's got the, you know, and the next time it won't be the glass and the rubber capital.
That's not what I'm promising. It's not going to be glass and rubber next time around.
It'll be chips, AI, crypto, aerospace, biotech innovation, drug discovery. You go straight down the sectors, AI training for workforces.
You can't look and drive with your eye in the rearview mirror, but take the spirit of that to go to the future itself. I told you about aerospace, the legacy of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.
Half of this is reviving self-confidence, man. I think that, you may be aware of this as like an internet meme, and it obviously grates on me when I see it, but when somebody says on TikTok, oh, that's so Ohio, what they mean is it's like denigrating, that it's old, it's out of fashion, it's boring.
I'd love to lead Ohio to a place where, what, 20 years from now, 10 years from now, five years from now, when we're sending new rockets to outer space, when we're actually having exploration in parts of the moon or even Mars that we haven't previously touched, when we're curing a form of a disease, a rare disease that was previously incurable. I want people to say that's so Ohio at that point in time.
That, I think, is the self-confidence, right? When Neil Armstrong and John Glynn grew up in Ohio, it was at a time when six of the 15 wealthiest cities were in Ohio. It was at a time where Toledo was the glass capital and Akron was the rubber capital.
To say that I'm proud as a citizen of the United States of America, and I'm proud of the place where I live without having to apologize for it or feeling like I'm a second-tier kind of citizen or second-tier kind of economic region in my own nation. That's what builds the self-confidence to say, I'm going to go to outer space.
And it's not an accident that a bunch of those happen in the same state at the same time. I mean, Amelia Earhart had Ohio roots.
The Wright brothers were right there in Dayton. It's about creating a virtuous cycle of self-confidence.
I mean, you see this in sports sometimes. It's sort of a weird analogy, but I think there's something there where, I'm a tennis fanatic, right? You see Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, all at the exact same time.
It's mathematically, arithmetically, you wouldn't predict this, but the three guys who won the most grand slams in history. So in a sport that's been around for a really long time, the ultimate metric is there's four grand slams a year.
Who won the most grand slams? Number one, two, and three were playing at the same time as each other.

That doesn't make any sense because there's

only four a year, so if one of the three

wins, that means the other two aren't.

Yet, the three

greatest of all time were playing at the exact

same time. It's because it creates

a culture that has a feedback

loop on itself.

Every one of these successes isn't

just an isolated success. It's about part of creating a culture of success.
And I do think that right now, it happens at the level of America as a nation. And I think in a microcosm, I think it's happened at the level of Ohio as a state where people have lost their conviction in their citizenship in their country, and in this case, in their state too.
So Donald Trump is reviving our conviction in America. I think he's got that covered.
We're only a few weeks into the presidency, and I just think the number one thing he is going to have delivered a year in isn't even the important stuff of sealing the border. He's going to do all these things, seal the border, grow the economy, stop the foreign wars, negotiate settlements where needed to keep us out of funding foreign interests that don't advance our own objectives at home, ending government waste, ending backdoor censorship, all of it.
He's on top of it. He's on the case.
He's going to do it. But I think the number one thing he's actually going to have tangibly delivered come a year from now is a revival of conviction in America.
And I think that's great. He's got that covered.
I'm interested in reviving our conviction in Ohio. And I do think that there is, there's a deficit there.
I do think the revival of that self-confidence is half the job of a good leader, and economic excellence and educational excellence automatically follow from there. Excellent, excellent.
I can't wait till you're in the thick of it. Excellence is a good way, man.
What, a 31%? We're doing, I think I was 57% in the most recent poll, and that came out at the start of this week. And then the guy who was number three in that poll, great guy, yesterday dropped out and endorsed me.
Winning is not the ultimate goal. Winning is a means to the end of actually turning this state into the leading edge of innovation around the world.
And what Javier Malay has done in Argentina in a short amount of time, in the United States compared to Argentina, we have more of a system of federalism than they do in Argentina. Argentina is a small country in the United States as well.
But what he has done in Argentina, I think we have an opportunity at the state level to demonstrate what's possible in the United States of America. So I think bringing a Malay-style outlook of economic stimulus to a state like Ohio, to the Ohio River Valley, to what people will call, I don't like this term, but what people have historically called the rust belt will instead be, I think, the new platinum belt, the new excellence belt of America.
And I do think that that works if you're willing to actually do the things required to get there. That works in the short run.
I mean, get to zero tax, slash and burn the regulatory state. President Trump talked about freedom cities.
Remember this? I think it's a great idea, the idea of creating cities that are fountainheads of innovation where you just have special economic zones in those cities to spawn innovation in the areas of the future, right? Future cities, that's great. I would love to not only revive that concept for federal cities, federal freedom cities, but to have Ohio be the state where many of them are actually housed and show what's possible.
That's great. And that revives the self-confidence.
You fix an education system that serves our kids with merit-based pay, school choice, civic education, physical education at that young age. I do think physical fitness is a virtue that we've lost, at least amongst cultivating in our kids.
I think you've got a whole lab

for what's again possible in the United States of America.

And so Donald Trump's doing it at the federal level,

he's got that covered.

The only thing we need left

is leaders with that kind of spine at the state level

to do the same thing.

And I do think that that's where the puck is going

over the next couple of years.

Speaking of Trump, it's only been a couple of weeks. Things really seem to be turning around, I think, way faster than anybody ever imagined.
Yeah. How do you think it's going? I think it's going well.
I do think that he is far more seasoned for this second term than the first, right? I do think the first term was the most successful that we've had of any 21st century president. In some sense, that's too low of a bar, right? Who do you have? You have Bush, Biden, Obama, Trump, wasn't even close.
But I do think this second term is in a different category. He's coming in with a level of preparedness.
He is no deer in the headlights with the deep state. I think that the deer in the headlights is the other way around, right? When he's come in, they are completely paralyzed by a U.S.
president who, radical as this idea might be, is actually running the executive branch of the United States of America. The way it has historically worked is that the president and other elected leaders are these cute little puppets that come and go.
Obviously, nobody thinks Biden was running the country, right? But he was a cog in a system, but the system would still do fine once the next cog came along. Trump's not a cog.
He's bringing a jackhammer to that system. I think that the administrative state is stunned.
And I think that is what's going to be required to save the country. He's also just moving fast on the things he said he was going to do.
I think that one of the things that people are really used to is, wait, he said he was going to do all these things, sealing the border, using all resources, including from the Defense Department required to be able to do it, ending the ability for men to compete in women's sports. Like that was pretty early that came out in recent days.
He's actually doing the things that he said he was going to do, but he's doing them too fast. Is that like the only objection, best objection that people have? You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business what if there was a feature like speed dating but only for hiring in other words you could meet several interested qualified candidates all at once well good news there is it's zip intro from zip recruiter you can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow.

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But I think generally if somebody was elected with a mandate and told you they were going to do certain things and then he goes in there and does them and he does them quickly, I don't think that the fact of doing them quickly is a bad thing. I think it's a good thing.
and the fact that I think the best allegation they're coming up with is that the pace

is just too crazy

well when you had open borders and the

largest influx of illegals in American history

and a flailing economy and inflation

we haven't seen in 50 years and foreign conflicts that didn't exist when Donald Trump left office that do now exist that need to be extinguished. Yeah, I do think that Fast and Furious is exactly what we need.
And I am so so far, as impressed as I possibly could be.

And I'm also somebody who,

as you know,

in my experience of running for president

in the course of our own conversations,

even predating that,

I'm not going to just read

from the chapter and verse

of Republican talking points.

But I think if we're just speaking

a hard truth right now,

he's come out with a bang.

And I want to see that continue for the next four years.

Do you have any fear that it's just going to get unraveled? Of course. I mean, that's— Is he doing it in a way that it can't be unraveled? Well, I mean, I think, again, let's just say that that's step one, right? Step one is you got to do it.
The idea of the fear of it being unraveled being a basis for saying, therefore, we're going to take some other slower approach is a wrong alternative. But the idea of just saying we did it and therefore we're going to be complacent, that's not an answer either.
So the way I look at it is you do everything you possibly can legally through executive action. Go far, reset the cultural baseline in government and the cultural baseline to some sense in the country to expect more of our government and the consequence.
After that, you shut the door and really shut the door through legislation. That legislation takes a long time.
Some of it will happen. Some of it won't happen.
Just the nature of how Congress works. But I don't think that that concern should stop you from doing something through executive action that you otherwise could have done.
Just an example from the week, right? If you have the opportunity to pass a new law that says that men can't compete in women's sports and receive federal funding at the same time, you could say that that is arguably more solid without a legal challenge in courts than an executive action, but that would take forever to do. And you don't need to actually wait for that law to be passed because the existing laws already say that federal funds should not allow for local institutions who are receiving those federal funds to discriminate in that way.
Now let's go to the next level. Many of these local institutions should not be receiving those federal funds because that money is just making a round trip from those localities to the federal government there's a bureaucratic rake and then less of it comes back to the people that doesn't make any sense so the right answer to the next step will be shut down the Department of Education and return that money to the states and so the way I see President Trump moving is fiercely rational just go quickly using the levers of executive power to do what needs to be done quickly and within the bounds of law.
Next is then dismantle the bureaucracy that sort of messed up those actions in the first place. Actually, you can't reform that bureaucracy but tear down the parts of the bureaucracy that just need to be torn down and never rebuilt.
Then the next step is when in doubt about the rest, kick it to the states, except for the essentials of what we actually need to preserve in the federal government. And I think that that's going to be that, you know, three step sequence is going to look like the first 18 months, which brings us back to earlier discussion, which is then it goes to the center of gravity for what's left, you know, shifts and kicks to the states.
And if we get each of those, each of the steps of that cascade done, that's what the stuff of staving a country in a lasting way actually looks like. And so do we have to be vigilant to make sure this doesn't just all get sort of reversed either through the myriad legal challenges that are coming or, you know, by a future president that through a stroke of a pen can reverse everything to the prior status quo.
Yeah, we've got to be vigilant for that. But I don't think that should stop us, should not stop President Trump from moving swiftly in a fast and furious kind of way.
And I say that in the best of ways. Did you see, was it yesterday, maybe it was the day before, first foreign dignitary to be in the White House, Netanyahu.
Yes. I think there's more coming as well.
I'm sure there are. I'm sure there's a lot more coming.
But, I mean, what did you make of when he said, I mean, he really threw him there. He said we would basically control Gaza and occupy it.
It caught some folks by surprise there. I would say that, first of all, just on the paws of foreign dignitaries coming in the way that they are, I think that he's commanding respect again.
I mean, I do not think the rest of these world leaders had an iota of respect for Biden as the president. They had a respect for the office of the president, but I don't think they fundamentally respected the man who occupied it, largely because people have been in rooms with him, even business leaders who have gone to the White House in late Biden's tenure have told me the same thing.
He's just not there. You and I are having a conversation as to thinking human beings, examining one another's thoughts.
That wasn't something that happened for people who met with Biden in the White House. And I don't mean to rag on the guy.
I, in some ways, feel bad for any person of older age who's past their peak of mental acuity and is suffering from it, but that was the state of affairs. Now you got a guy who is with it, who brings the energy, who has the spine and the resolve and the force of muscle to be able to actually engage with independent ideas and negotiate in the backdrop of those ideas.
So Donald Trump is a master conversation starter. He is a master negotiator, and he's a master at using a start of a conversation to enter a negotiation.
Look at what happened even in the discussions in recent days with Mexico, Canada, and China. Well, he brought Mexico and Canada to the table, and now the real focus shifts to what the heck we're going to do

in our relationship with China,

which is in a different category from Mexico and Canada.

China's in a different category because we can't depend on China

for our modern way of life.

You've got most of the semiconductors in the U.S. Department of Defense

being supplied by China.

Our defense industrial base depends on China. Our pharmaceutical supply chain depends on China.
So it's not just a trade question. It's a question of actual national security, actually, in a true sense.
You can't depend on an adversary for things that are essential to your existence. But look at the masterful way he backed into that, right? He started with, we want to talk about Canada, talk about Mexico, get him to the table, conversation starters that were, you could call them aggressive openers of conversation.
But he's a guy who is able to start a conversation that otherwise would not be had. I love that he met in person with Gavin Newsom.
Great. He'd trade barbs with the guy, but push comes to shove on issues that relate to America.
Gavin's going to be talking to him in good faith about it, Donald Trump will have that conversation. And then Bibi comes here.
He has a conversation and he, akin to a lot of his other conversation openers, started a conversation by lighting a fire that otherwise sparks a conversation. Okay, what does the future actually look like? Let's talk amongst serious ideas of how we're going to make sure the United States' interests are protected in ways that don't drag us into protracted conflicts in the Middle East.
I mean Donald Trump was the OG in the Republican Party for that. He was an opponent to the Iraq War before that was a cool thing to say for a Republican politician.
I think he's a guy who knows what he's doing. I think he's a pragmatist who understands America's interests deeply.

And I think that you got to let him work it in his method in order to get there, even if every one of the initial conversation starters isn't necessarily the literal way that he's actually going to ultimately do it.

Do you think we should control Gaza?

Well, look, I think that let's just take a broader question about U.S. Middle East policy.
I don't think our track record, I don't think anything I'm going to say is super controversial here, I think it's kind of obvious. I don't think our track record of being a nation-building operator in the Middle East has been very good, or we wouldn't be where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.
I mean, for God's sake, the Taliban is still in charge, $80 billion, and two decades later, it wasn't a nation-building project that worked. I don't think that Iraq was, compared to the amount of money, and even more importantly than money, the lives that were sacrificed, I don't think achieved our objectives there.
And by the way, I fully, being in the room with one of them, fully respect the patriots who served our country when our country called for their service. And I think there were valuable objectives to have been achieved in a narrow way, certainly in Afghanistan.
and you could talk about other missions elsewhere. But I think by and large, our track record of engaging in straight-up nation building has historically in the Middle East not been all that successful.
What I'm going to say here is I'm going to give President Trump the space to know that he's a man who has a strategy when he says something. In the long run, he has an idea of where he's going.
And he is somebody who has proven time and again that he's able to use the contours of conversation and negotiation to achieve what others would have previously deemed impossible. I mean, I think what he did even in the Middle East last time around with the Abraham Accords was unthinkable.
It was unthinkable at the time he

took office. And you're not just going to get there by some linear path with, you know, bushy tail showing up and saying, okay, well, here's what I want to do.
And I'm going to tell you exactly what that is. And somehow everyone's going to magically agree with me.
No, it doesn't work that way. You got to have some level of cojones to say the things that others aren't willing to say, to bring people to the table in complex ways.
And so I'm going to let him do his job as the commander in chief to lead us effectively. He's demonstrated time and again that he knows what he's doing.
Obviously, he knows as well as anybody what our historical track record in occupation and nation building in the Middle East has in the past, because he was the guy who called that to the forefront of the Republican Party. And I think he knows what he's doing when it comes to mapping out how we're going to secure America in the future, which is his top objective.
Let's talk about Doge. Sure.
Department of Government Efficiency. Yes, I love it.
So you're a big part of that. And then what happened? Yeah, I mean, look, I've been talking about this for years.
I mean, tackling the administrative state has been my longtime passion. And Elon and I actually met first when I ran for president at a dinner where this is exactly the topic we spent hours into 1 a.m.
talking about was the basis of our friendship ever since. First objective is get Donald Trump elected.
After he got elected, the question is, for me personally, how am I going to have my impact on the country? That was the issue that I had been so focused on. Wrote a book even recently laying out the roadmap of one way I thought a lot of this could get done.
Taking a legal and constitutional law-first approach and legislation to be able to cut budgets in a lasting way, to be able to do it in a way that used the law and the lawmaking process and recent Supreme Court precedents. And so that was a vision I've been articulating for a long time.
And even spoke about that shortly after Doge was announced in the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Elon and I co-published there, lay that out. Now, something like Doge has never happened before, and it's like a new startup.
It takes different directions, and I think that as the plan evolved to take more of a technology-centric approach, right, Doge is supposed to be an outside body to the government that was taking a look at a lot of these other constitutional and legal dimensions. I think it became clear that to drive rapid change in some of the ways that we could score quick wins, Doge came to reside in the government, taking a technology-first approach, taking over what was formerly known as the U.S.
digital services. At that point, Elon and President Trump and I, we all came to the same conclusion that for me to drive the vision I had in mind, the best way to do that, the best perch from which to do it is elected office.
And so we all landed at the same place. And I think it was, what, this past Monday that Elon and I did our first DogeCast Twitter spaces, X spaces.
I think we started at midnight. It went to 1.30 a.m., laying out a lot of what this vision was.
And if you look at how much he's been able to do in just the first two weeks, it's massive. And when you think about a technology-driven approach, nobody better to do it than Elon.
And I think he is doing it not in a small way, but in a big way. And I'm going to be as helpful on my front of leading at the state level as is going to be required to pick up the pieces from tearing up the federal bureaucracy.
How many people are involved with that? I think that success ought not be measured in terms of numbers of people. In some ways, you want fewer people doing a lot.
So I'm going to stick to what's – I mean, I'm not on the inside. I want to be respectful of it.

So, you know, but you're not talking about five people,

but you're not talking about an army of thousands

of people that are randomly just looking

for work to do either. That's the rest of the federal

bureaucracy. But a lean, mean

team, I think, has accomplished a lot in a short

amount of time. I mean, any surprises

for you yet? I mean, a lot of

chatter about USAID

right now and all the funding

of different things. Looks like

they're involved in the Romania stuff that

Thank you. for you yet? I mean, a lot of...
Not really. There's a lot of chatter about USAID right now and all the funding of different things.
Looks like they're involved in the Romania stuff that we kind of... It's insane.
I mean, even domestic political press. It's insane.
Yeah. And so, that caught a lot of people's eye.
We're doing an interview here in a couple days about it. But, I was surprised at the USAID stuff.
I mean, that really... I think it's great that Elon and the team are focused there.
I give really good credit here on to President Trump for USAID. I mean, he understands that.
Even in some of the conversations I had with President Trump, even at the Army-Navy game where you and I were, I mean, he mentioned that to me then. He mentioned it several times over that this was one of the areas where he knows there's massive amount of waste of U.S.
taxpayer dollars and also kind of a cultural issue. People who've been working in the State Department or good people even who've worked in or around the USAID will tell you it almost developed a culture of just believing that it wasn't accountable to anybody, not even the department within which it sat, let alone the American people.
And at a certain point, you cannot incrementally reform that type of beast.

If you're going to tame that beast,

you got to look at it wholesale.

And so, look, I love the expansive vision with which Elon is moving quickly,

but it starts with a president

who really has the spine to do what usually

you might have a president that talks on the campaign trail and then when it comes to making the leap when they're in office, gets a little gun-shy when they look off the cliff. Now you got a guy who's been in there before.
He's had four years to think about it. It's a rare situation in American history.
He looks at this as how do I actually, from a legacy of the United States of America, make the changes

that need to be made, and you take a look at an organization like USAID, which is supposedly

historically a sacred cow that couldn't be touched, lift the hood, and see just the level

of, I guess I could call it lowercase c, corruption in the way a lot of those dollars are spent.

Yeah, I think the American people are on the side of saying, give me back that money,

instead of using it to achieve influence operations domestically or abroad.

So how does it work? How does it work? I mean, we've seen all these, just in the two weeks, we've seen all these things identified where it's just cash just going out the door for nefarious reasons. And so is it, when they unveil it, and they unveil,

hey, USAID,

you know,

funded whatever,

insert any of the last

10 things that they have unveiled,

does that,

when the funding stops,

is it an exposure game?

Doge exposes it

to the U.S. government?

The U.S. government stops?

So I'll share with you my opinion. Right, I'll share with you my opinion.
I think, again, we're going to give President Trump the latitude he needs to lead in the way that he knows the country needs to go without, from the peanut gallery, micro-guessing what each of these decisions are. He knows what he's doing.
But at a high level, I'll give you the general principle, the U.S. president runs the executive branch of government.
Just because something has budgeted does not mean that he has an obligation to spend it on a wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive application of that budget. So this gets into, I mean, I don't know if this is too technical or whatnot, but the Impoundment Control Act.
Okay, that's an act passed in the 70s that said the U.S. president has to spend certain money if it's been appropriated by Congress.
Otherwise, it's called impoundment where he's not spending the money. And so the Impoundment Control Act stops him from doing that.
If you read the statute carefully, read the actual existing law carefully, it's pretty clear that waste, fraud, or abuse is not in that category. The idea that just because you've allocated the budget doesn't mean that that agency has to spend that money if it's going to a wasteful or fraudulent or an abusive expenditure.
No, that's already a carve out. So that already is a great place to start.
Waste, fraud, abuse. The president has the authority to do it and the president has the authority to delegate the exercise of that authority, which is what he's done here through the creation of DOGE.
And I think it's a brilliant move within the bounds of law. And that's not even touching the separate view that I think a lot of thoughtful legal minds have that the Impoundment Control Act itself might be unconstitutional.
Without even going there, right, which I think there are strong arguments for that, waste, fraud, abuse is something that no president has already authorized to spend. Now let's go to a separate point.
A lot of people don't know this, is that a good portion of the money that's spent every year, I think it's to the tune of about $500 billion, was never actually authorized by Congress in the first place, which is actually insane. So if Congress never authorized it, the idea that you have to continue to spend it is also insane.
So I think those two things, waste, fraud, abuse, far more massive, far more pervasive than most Americans envision, but I'm glad the flashlight's brought to where the sun don't shine in the bureaucracy, and that's how you actually get accountability and change. But combine that with executive action to say that we don't have to spend that money if there's an argument for waste, fraud, and abuse.
By the way, the statute saying all this stuff might itself be unconstitutional anyway. But more importantly, that you have a U.S.
president that's actually running the show and calling those shots, the elected leader by the people of this country, rather than some unelected bureaucrat managing his fiefdom without accountability. That's not a democracy.
Right? I mean, the basic premise of a democracy, and, you know, you always have the people, you know, who are technical about this work. Constitutional Republic.
Yes. Okay.
I love that. But I'm just talking in a colloquial sense, lowercase d, democracy.
The basic premise of a democracy is that when somebody in a government makes a decision that binds you, that stops you from doing something, or when somebody in a government makes a decision that spends your money that they, effectively with the force of government, extracted from you, that if they don't do a good job or you disagree with that, you get to vote them out of that position. That's just table stakes for democracy.
When somebody makes laws that bind you or spends your money by taxing you, you get to vote them out. If that doesn't exist, then we don't live in a democracy.
We live in something else altogether. So the United States was founded on this idea that the people we elect to run the government should be the ones actually running the government.
That's not the case today. That's bluntly not the case today.
The people who make most of the laws, they call them rules, but they function with the effect of law. People can have their lives ruined over them.
The people who make those rules were never elected to their position in the first place. They're unelected bureaucrats.
And so the idea that those decisions made by those bureaucrats are somehow untouchable, I think, is something that says we don't actually live in a democracy. We live in some sort of technocratic, bureaucratic monarchy.
And I think we fought an American revolution to reject that. And I do think we live in a 1776 kind of moment right now where we're rejecting that monarchy all over again.
I guess what I'm asking is, and thank you for explaining all that, but is the, what I'm asking is how does it work? Does Doge shine the light on the wasteful spending, get that information to the president, and then the president makes the decision whether to stop it or not to stop it? Eminently sensible. You see the way things have worked even in the last two weeks.
Spotlight. President Trump makes the decisions.
President Trump makes the decisions with executive authority going as far as he can. Waste, fraud, abuse.
That's the categories. And then any spending cuts beyond that have to come from Congress.
Okay. And then what is the strategy? Are they I mean, you can't this, I don't think you can.
You can't oversee all of the wasteful spending all at once. Are they starting in categories? Are they going to go through USAID, FBI, CIA? Is that how it's going to work? I'll let President Trump lead the way.
I think some of this is being done through a positive kind of shock and awe. I think it's a positive term.
I mean that in the best of ways. But you come in, in some ways, you have to let the actions speak louder than the words.
And so what I can say is in the several months that I spent helping you know, helping lay the groundwork for this, thinking about, there's a lot of different dimensions. There's the technology elements, there's the spending elements, there's the legal constitutional regulatory elements, each had our areas of focus.
For my areas of focus, as we said, I think elected office is the right, best next way to realize it. But for a lot of these other, you know, turning off agencies, deleting their actions, I think a lot of that is well thought out, but I think it's best done through actions rather than words.
And so I predict that there will be continued additional successes, bold moves, moves that will not always be applauded by the legacy press that covers Washington, D.C., but I think will be applauded by the majority of people in this country. Yeah, I think that too.
How long do you anticipate the initial sweep to go for? I mean, let's just take the category of what we think of the initial phase of the presidency

is undoing damage of the

last administration. Because there's

a category of just, what

did Biden do that needs to be

undone? And I always say Biden, it's not

really Biden, but the machine that manages

Biden. What did the Biden administration

do that needs to be undone?

I mean, that's the first three to

six months of work of this presidency,

right? I mean, this is the

electorate

Thank you. do that needs to be undone, I mean, that's the first three to six months of work of this presidency, right? I mean, this is, the electorate gave President Trump a mandate, and it was a mandate, to reverse the damage of the last four years.
I'm not saying that's going to be easy, but that in some ways is the easiest part, right? So I think there's two phases to this national revival. The first phase is undo the damage of the last four years.
That is the phase of running from something as fast as we can. I think it'll be the second phase of this that then becomes harder, which is we're not just running from something, but we're running to something.
What does the alternative vision of what the country actually looks like, what comes after? A lot of the successful executive orders in, I think, the first couple of weeks, there was a lot. But one of the areas that was particularly notable was effectively the ending of DEI and affirmative action and race-based quota systems in the government, which is having a trickle-down effect to the private sector because then it applies to government contractors who are no longer bound by the same thing.
That's not some small segment of the economy. 20% of the U.S.
workforce works for a company that's covered by those government contracting regulations, now free of these DEI regime stuff. A lot of this is like, for example, undoing what happened under Biden, and just fast and furious, undo that as quickly as possible.
A lot of what Biden did was regulation by fiat,

spending through the executive branch.

You know, even you're asking about Doge.

One of the areas to look at is even all the money that Biden pushed out at the 11th hour after the election.

It's an insane amount of money that was pushed out

because they knew Donald Trump's coming in on January 20th.

They pushed that money out to Rivian.

I mean, you got a bunch of other people who just received billions of dollars that they shouldn't have otherwise received. So phase one of this, we're talking at, I would have said six months, at the pace President Trump's moving, maybe it'll be three months.
You're looking at just fast and furious of reversing the damage. Damage control from Biden is done.
We have set the nation back to resetting it to year three of the Trump presidency, 2019. I think of that as actually a really worthy goal, just baselining the country back to 2019 on so many metrics.
That's the final year of the Trump presidency pre-pandemic. Think about the number of border crossings hit an all-time low in 2019.
Think

about even our federal budget, by the way. People don't stop to ask this sometimes.
And even if you go to Washington, D.C., they use a lot of willy-nilly wonky language of non-discretionary budget, this or that. Just a basic question.
Like, just forget the verbiage. How much money, like how much taxpayer cash

did the government spend last year?

Answer. how much money, like how much taxpayer cash did the government spend last year? Answer, about $7 trillion, just a hair less.
Next question. How much money, just like cash, forget non-discretionary and discretionary this and mandatory spending this, no, just forget, just like overall dollars.
How much money did the federal government spend in the year 2019? The answer was less than $4.5 trillion. So to those who say, right, to the project of cutting $2 trillion in federal expenditures, oh, it's just not possible, 2019 was not some ancient period of history.
Like it wasn't that long ago. We all remember it.
It was the third year of Trump's term, the final year of his first presidency before the pandemic. If we just view the first three months, the first six months of this, but I think President Trump's going even faster, of baselining the country back to 2019 for border crossings, for how we felt, for what people felt like affordability was, what inflation was in the country.
Think about even at least as a mental model of what federal spending looked like without all of the level of waste that Biden introduced. That wasn't that long ago.
So I think that phase one of this is just undo the damage of the last four years. I'm not saying that's easy.
Of course it's not. Trump's the man for the job.
He's going to do it. But then the question is, okay, what does the second phase look like when we actually or post-DEI? Let's just start, I mean, let's use that as an example.

What does the post-DEI America look like? And that's just one of like 50 changes that President Trump is making, but just as an example. I think that causes us to have to level up to answer that question, right? We got to man up to say that for the last four years,

we've had, it's almost an easy talking point. We're against DEI.
I was the crusader against this before it was cool, but now we're post-DEI. Now we've got nothing left to blame.
70% of our kids aren't doing well in math, but we've actually eliminated the subsidization of DEI in our schools. Okay, now what are we going to do to actually solve the remaining problem that's actually left? What does equal opportunity actually look like? We're against the equal results BS, but what does actual restoration of equal opportunity for all actually look like? Okay, we've cut a lot of the executive order-based spending of waste, fraud, abuse, and all that.
But if we're serious about really permanently ending the precipice that we're otherwise on our way to with the national debt, what does that mean for work requirements attached to welfare or other forms of federal payments, right? Those are different conversations. So I think that there's two phases to this.
I think there's phase one, shock and awe, moving so quickly that they won't even know what hit them. You can see it from the other side's response.
They have no idea what hit them. It's just restoring the country back to 2019 greatness.
In a manner of, I use the word company, Donald Trump is the CEO of the executive branch. He's running it, running the executive branch with the principles that a great CEO of a company would.
And I don't think that's a bad thing. But we're so much more than a company as a country.
We're a nation. And so having done that, what does rebuilding this nation look like? For that, we have to say, not what are we running from, but what are we actually running to as a nation? What were those civic ideals that we want to revive in the country? And I think that's a longer-term project.
I think it's a longer-term project, not just at the presidential or federal level, but to our earlier conversation. I think it will be governors and even local leaders that have to lead the way on that project.

And I think that that's where the next chapter of work actually begins.

Do you think that Doge will actually expand into states?

It has to.

It has to.

I think it's a necessity.

Interesting.

I think it has to and must expand to each of the 50 states.

And that doesn't mean the methods in each of the 50 states are the same as the methods of the federal government because it's a different problem to solve.

But I do think that each of the 50 states taking a long, hard look at waste, fraud, abuse of how those state dollars are spent.

In some ways, the capture of state governments is even worse than the capture of the federal government.

I do think about cronyism in the state government administration. In some cases, even worse than you'd imagine at the federal level.
And so I do think that bringing the essence of restoring three branches of government rather than four, the mission of reducing waste fraud abuse, the mission of cutting red tape and overregulation, that project is not done when it's done at the federal level. That's just the beginning.
That's the end of the beginning. And I think you want to get to the beginning of the end, that's when you actually start doing it at the state level.
If you just poll most people in this country, you could just ask most people you know, do you think there is too much red tape in America or too little red tape in America? I think you will find a lot of people who will tell you there's too much red tape. Small business owner or a hairdresser who has to get a license to be able to practice her profession, the ability to be able to start a new business in nuclear energy production in the United States hasn't happened in 30 years.
Is there too much red tape or too little red tape? I think you'll have a lot of people will tell you that there's too much red tape in America. Try bringing a new medicine to market, the 10 years and billion plus dollars that that takes.
That was the industry that I was in, and I've overseen the development of five medicines that went on to become FDA approved. I can tell you from experience, every one of those could and should have been developed at a fraction of the cost if the regulatory regime worked the way it actually should.
I don't think you'll find anybody who would tell you that there's, I think there's too little red tape in America. I think we need more red tape in America.
I think we actually need a little bit more regulatory obstacles before we're able to do certain things. I don't think you're going to find many people in that category.
What do you think about this deep seek stuff? I mean, China basically, they did that for what, was it $6 million? We'll see what the actual facts are, so I'm not sure if I believe the exact numbers. But broadly speaking, did they create what appears to be a competitive, in some ways potentially even superior level of AI to that which it took tens of billions of dollars, maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars of investment from U.S.
companies with computing power that was a fraction of what the U.S. companies had access to.
It appears to be that way. Yes, some of the details, maybe they had access to a little more computing power, maybe there's a little bit more money spent, but don't let that deflect from the main point.
This goes to the earlier question about U.S. education and preparedness for the next generation.
It's an example of it. I'm not saying the deep seek alone is the wake-up call.
We should have the wake-up call. We could have the wake-up call every day just from the fact that 70% of our eighth graders aren't proficient in math, but they're deeply related.
So just on the facts of what happened, right, because people hear this and we're like in a modern social media culture where people read something for two seconds on their social media feed and then that's what they remember of it.

Like, let's just sort of ground ourselves on what happened.

There were export controls of chips from the U.S. to China.
And you have, apparently, if the facts are to be believed, they had access to something like 10,000 to 50,000 or so, and maybe it was a little more than that based on new reporting, but call it 50,000 plus A100 GPU computing power chips from NVIDIA. Where US companies, like Meta, I think it's like something like had 350,000 plus H100 GPU, computing power chips from NVIDIA.
So it's like 60 plus, 63X plus computing power for US companies might have access to versus this relatively modestly funded startup in China. And what they did was with that capital constraint and with that computing power constraint, even if you're skeptical of the exact numbers, they were able to use that to, in a scrappy way, get to a similar place by doing some clever things, right? Examples of what it seems like they did.
Instead of using 32 decimal places afterwards for a number, for numerically training AI, they used eight decimal places instead. Well, they're not, maybe not quite as precise as using 32, but for any near-term human use, maybe they felt like eight decimal places after was good enough.
Or they used different areas of specialization where they didn't require everyone to be an expert in everything at the same time, but used these so called, you know, centers of excellence, or there's different ways you could phrase what that is, where you'd have the relevant experts train on their relevant area of subject matter expertise. But if you had something in the field of building a bridge, you don't need the advent of the best medical expert necessarily stepping up to answer that question because that's otherwise a waste in computing power.
So you had different scrappy things that they did along the way, training it on phrases at a time rather than just individual letters or words to be able to use capital constraint and resource constraint to still get to the same place. I mean, that's a, I think about that kind of scrappiness as an American quality, actually.
We're the pioneers and the explorers and the scrappy and the unafraid. And yet what we see is that this is a wake-up call for us.
And I saw the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, had an interesting comment about this, which I think was, I don't agree with everything he wrote in there, but he had an interesting comment tying this success, this apparent success for this Chinese startup to even deeper differences in the Chinese educational system versus the current U.S. educational system.
And I think that if we don't use that as a wake-up call for us to at least light a fire under the feet of our STEM education in this country, then we would be making a grave mistake. Well, Vivek, now you've got a dinner you've got to get to.
Is there anything else you want to discuss? No, it's gone right by, man. I think overcoming this victimhood culture in the United States is something that I think I'm pretty keen on right now.

I think that that's – for everything we've talked about, from education to AI to economic leadership to success, right, even in overcoming the federal bureaucracy and downsizing the federal government, it's easy to point the finger at the government.

And I do it because I think we should expect more of our bureaucrats and our politicians and expect a lesser size of our bureaucracy. But part of the reason that exists is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the rather than independence from it, and then a victimhood narrative to justify that dependence.
And it's mostly come from the left. But I'm going to talk about it in terms that aren't partisan at this point.
We won, right? So what's the point of just repeatedly pointing to the other party? This is mostly a left-wing problem. I'm also worried that it's 10% likely to be a problem on the right as well.
But I don't care whether it's left-wing victimhood or victimhood culture that goes beyond the left.

We are not victims.

We're not a nation of victims.

I wrote a book a couple years ago called Nation of Victims.

We should not at our best be a nation of victims.

We are a nation of victors.

And I do think that one of the things President Trump's doing,

an outstanding job of his restoring respect for us on the global stage.

I love the conversations he's opened up from Greenland to the Panama Canal. Great conversations for us to have.
But to puff our chests abroad, we got to all pull up our pants at home. I believe that.
That's an expression that has historically been used to preach to certain wings of the American left or whatever. I think I'm talking to all of us here.
We all got to pull up our pants at home. Enough whining, start winning.
The pursuit of excellence is what I want to see in America, and especially since we've now defeated the left at the ballot box. I'm keen to make sure that we restore that pursuit of excellence in America.
And wherever it comes from, victimhood culture, I think we got to get over it and see ourselves as actually victorious. We're the unafraid.
We're the people who nobody could stop. We're a country built on the idea of merit and meritocracy.
That's America. That's what Donald Trump is standing for right now.
And we can't forget that. And I hope that somebody doesn't have to pick up this exchange three or four years from now and say, oh, gee, I wish we had heeded that earlier.
I hope that's not where we're headed. And the left-wing victimhood narratives have ruined this country.
I don't want to see those reemerge. Where did it stem from? Where did the victimhood stem from? From government handouts? You know, I think it stemmed in part from the Great Society in the 1960s, which was built on the idea of a victimhood narrative.
And the thing about victimhood narratives that make them alluring is that there's always some truth at the kernel of it to justify it, right? And in the case of the Great Society, it's patently true that black Americans did not have not only the same opportunities that white Americans did. Black Americans were, a century before then, slaves in the United States of America, right? So there's a justification for it, but at a certain point in time, it actually becomes counterproductive to drive with your eyes on the rear view mirror, as I said earlier, and to wallow in that victimhood versus saying, how are we going to actually lift everybody up? So what the Great Society did, the so-called Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, biggest misnomer of policy agenda in American history, was it created a new culture of dependence on the government that was justified by this victimhood narrative.

But it didn't just start with, it started black America, but eventually pervaded basically all swaths of America to expand the permanent existence of the state that created a new

culture of an expectation of what the citizen's relationship with the state really was.

And you go back to, this is Lyndon B. Johnson who pushed this.

His predecessor, of course, was JFK, who famously said, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Beautiful sentiment.
I think what the Great Society created was the need for a new kind of declaration of independence in the country for us to be able to say, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for yourself and for your family. That in many cases would be the best way an American could serve their country is by not having to be dependent on that government, especially relevant today when you've got a $36 trillion national debt and growing where the interest payments on that national debt are about to be the largest line item on our federal budget.
I do think that the independence from the government is an important part of that victimhood culture. Part of it has just became popular.
I mean, I do think that victimhood became a currency, right? It became more popular for a young person or whatever to claim to be a victim in the totem pole of victimhood. You get more stuff, right? I had a friend who was an interviewer for Harvard's application essays, and she just comes back and says, oh, my God, all I hear is the first thing they introduce themselves is what type of adversity or struggle they have faced in some sort of discrimination or some type of family sob story.
Not to say that some of them aren't real, but that's what became rewarded more so than the actual achievement itself, apparently even in Harvard admissions interviews. So if you reward victimhood, you get more of it.
And the more you describe yourself as a victim,

the more likely you are to see yourself as one. So it became a self-reinforcing culture where that was what was rewarded instead of excellence.
And I think the way we turn this around is just as a country, yes, from the government, but also just as a culture. We revive a culture that once again rewards excellence over victimhood in all domains.

Academics, math, reading, science, sports, physical excellence, excellence in music, the arts, all of it. That's America.
That's who we are at our best. and I do think our participation trophy culture

over our championship trophy culture

that has emerged in the last 20 years or so,

I think we need to shift back to that culture of excellence.

And wherever it comes from, left or right, that's what I want to – competition.

Competition and meritocracy.

Let's revive that.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Bovaveg, I appreciate you coming. And we'll see you again.
Good seeing you, my man. All right.
We'll be back. Thank you.
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