Best of The Program | Guests: Vivek Ramaswamy, Dr. Bradley Garrett, & Gabe Kaminsky | 2/23/23

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With, I mean, Haley, uh, Nikki Haley was on this week.

Thought she made a lot of sense, more hawkish than I would be.

Yeah, yep.

I really like the fake.

He was on today's podcast.

I really like him.

Yeah, for sure.

I think we had an interesting week with the candidates.

It's interesting to see how people react to a conversation about this because we've been through a bunch of primaries now that you're going to show together.

And people get really pissed off when you say anything positive or negative about any of the candidates because

a lot of people take it personally and they say like, well, that means you don't like my guy.

Or that means you're attacking my guy.

It's like, I think our approach should be, look, let's hear from everybody.

I want to hear from you.

I like Vivek, vaccine, but Ben, have you heard me put anybody through the ringer like that?

I mean, I asked him every tough question,

you know, about the World Economic Forum and everything else.

Sure.

And that's the way it should be.

If you're asking questions, we'll ask them.

But I'm in for whoever is the guy.

Whoever is the guy.

I don't have a horse in this race.

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the best of the blended program.

Abe Kaminski is an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, and he has been on the program just recently.

He was on, I think, a couple of weeks ago, to talk about the British group that is fighting disinformation

and making a blacklist of conservative media.

Well, he has a new story that has just dropped today, and that is

a story on James Comer demanding records from the State Department and their funding of the of the group of blacklisting conservatives.

This is an amazing story to think that our State Department has funded an effort to

stop advertising on programs like and truly including mine.

My tax dollars are going to hurt my own business.

It is incredible.

Welcome to the program.

Gabe, how are you?

Hi, Glenn.

Thanks for having me.

So tell me the latest twist in this.

What's happening?

The latest twist is following the National Endowment for Democracy, a State Department-backed entity announcing it will no longer provide future resources to the Global Disinformation Index.

Today, Representative James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has sent a letter to the State Department and Secretary Anthony Blinken, and he's demanding documents in connection to funding of the Global Disinformation Index by March 9th.

He's also demanding a briefing by the State Department no later than March 2nd.

So, this is just the latest development in Republicans in Congress beginning to investigate this funding.

Explain to people why this matters so much.

You know, what we've uncovered through our series, Disinformation Inc.

and the Washington Examiner, is how the U.S.

Department of State has been funding an organization called the Global Disinformation Index, which has been secretly seeding and compiling blacklists of conservative news websites and seeding those to advertising companies with the intent of

shutting down those websites, places trying to dictate where you can read and get your information, places like The blaze the daily wire the washington examiner and certainly your radio show glenn uh and so what we found is that the state department is funding that group the global disinformation index uh which has raised pretty pretty big red flags among first amendment lawyers

have you seen the story um about the um google effort called jigsaw

I'm not familiar now.

Okay, you should look into this as part of your series because you're so good at your investigative reporting.

There is a story out now about jigsaw, and

what's bothered me was, you know, Bing and everybody else immediately jumping on the bandwagon, saying, oh my gosh, we had no idea.

That global initiative, that was, huh, we had no, we're not going to use that anymore.

There's a story out now about

pre-bunking instead of debunking, pre-bunking.

and Google is using a device that they have put together called Jigsaw and it is going to

push things out

to let me see if I can get the

The way they have said this is absolutely incredible.

It is not just going to expose false claims, it relies on, quote, conditioning individuals to view certain types of arguments as fake news even before they encounter them.

That sounds a little spooky.

Yeah, I will say that that does sound spooky.

And I'll tell you what, Glenn, that sounds very similar to what we've unpacked at the Global Disinformation Index because they've been identifying disinformation as not merely fraudulent or false information, but actually opinion articles that they disagree with.

And so, for example, they've been flagging Washington Examiner pieces that are based on research, that are commentary, is disinformation.

So certainly the movement has morphed into this disagreement with ideas you don't like, you know?

It's really, really unbelievable.

Gabe, thank you so much for all of your work.

And this story just broke just a few minutes ago.

You can find it at the Washington Examiner.

If you're not reading the Washington Examiner every day, you're missing out.

It is a must-read

website.

Thank you so much, Gabe.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Glenn.

Yeah, babe.

Bye-bye.

He's an investigative reporter, has been looking at all of this disinformation.

And I mean,

my tax dollars, my tax dollars are being put to use to silence me.

I mean, it's incredible.

And by the way, it's not the first time it's happened to you,

which

congrats yeah uh but this is a totally new type of effort it's it is the first time it's not the first time people have gone after me yeah but if you remember right the press had no interest in uh

when the white house had organized three or four separate uh attempts outside of the White House, but all from within the White House.

Right.

Like it was, you know, it was people who worked in the White House and they had side organizations that were coming after you.

I guess it's a little bit different.

Yeah, it's a little different.

But they had been doing that and nobody paid attention to that.

No one cared.

Nobody cared.

Now, but this is the first time.

And this is all of government approach.

This is what Joe Biden is doing.

It's all government approach to stopping whatever it is they want to stop.

Yeah.

And so they'll use and find all of the levers in all of these different agencies.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see if the USDA was, you know,

working against energy or working against disinformation or whatever it is.

Yeah, and

it ties into what we've been talking about the last couple of weeks, where the disinformation police, if you will, is something that actually could have value to society, especially right now.

where we're going into a world where AI and deepfakes and voice replication and all these things are coming.

And having institutions that could sift through this for us and let us know when something was real and something wasn't would be truly valuable if it wasn't being done like this.

If we could have trust in these institutions, media sources, government, all of these things that are supposed, scientists, health officials, all these people are supposed to be around to help us go through this stuff and figure out what's real and what isn't.

Instead, what's happened is they've pre-bunked the whole process.

Correct.

They've come up with, they've made everyone not believe the fact-checking process before these crucial moments occur.

And now no one knows where to turn.

Well, I think it's really, it's becoming easier.

You know, anything that the networks are telling you is most likely

at least slanted,

but very well possibly false.

Okay.

You can't, this is the thing on the same thing with Putin and

Ukraine.

More than one thing can be true.

Okay.

So

I don't like Putin.

However, what Putin said in his speech,

some of it was very true.

So it doesn't, and by saying that, that doesn't make me a supporter of Putin.

Okay.

There's another option.

Putin is right about these things, wrong about other things.

That doesn't make me have to choose between Putin or Biden.

I don't want Biden leading a war in Ukraine.

I like the people of Ukraine.

I don't like the government of Ukraine because it's absolutely corrupt.

I don't like the government of the United States because it appears to be absolutely corrupt.

I don't like the government of Russia.

It appears to be absolutely corrupt.

So I don't have to pick sides.

I can say I like and support the people, but I don't support any of those governments.

I don't support any of them in the war.

None.

I don't want my money going there.

I don't want it, you know, going against Putin.

And I don't want a nuclear war on Putin.

Last night I did a special on the effects of nuclear war, and it was really eye-opening because

we really don't take it seriously at all anymore.

Because we all learn that, nah, this is, that's not good.

You can't win in that war.

But there was something in last night's special right towards the beginning that I thought was so important.

And that is the idea

that this is the first time, and think of this, this is the first time that

two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States,

would be facing off face to face.

We've always fought through proxies like it's happening right now.

But Russia is now saying that

we have

perpetrated the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, which is a crime against humanity, war crimes, okay?

And we're saying war crimes against them.

And they are also saying that

by us being there and spending so much money and doing all this and giving them advice, we're directly engaging.

We are also saying that the only way that we're going to end this is if Putin and his regime is gone.

So it's regime change.

He is saying

that it's either us or them because I'm not going anywhere.

So if they defeat, they'll defeat our entire system.

So they cannot win.

The United States is trying to destroy us.

They're trying to destroy us.

We're trying to destroy them.

Okay.

That's never happened since we had nuclear missiles.

It's never happened.

We've never gone toe-to-toe, face-to-face.

And it's always been about another issue.

It hasn't been, I'm going to topple you.

That's what makes this nuclear flashpoint different than all of the other flashpoints

It's always been about something else but now both sides are on record crimes against humanity regime change

That's why if we got into a war and we know we knew Putin was winning and it meant the end of NATO and possibly the end of America,

would we consider using nukes?

It means the end of us and the end of Europe.

I think we would.

If they are losing and they feel like that's the end of Russia and they're going to be taken over by NATO,

will they use nukes?

Yeah, I think the answer is yes.

That's the biggest thing you need to understand about this I still don't think that it's a reality that it will happen

I do think that when you have the understanding that both sides are backing each other into a corner and they're both calling for the decapitation of those systems both sides

you're in a different world

that's and you're right I mean it's never happened it seems to me the the best way to avoid this is going to sound very basic, but the best way to avoid this escalating is for the current president to be voted out of office and someone else being in control of those decisions.

If we can make it that long.

Yeah, and that's still, you know,

still two years away.

Two years away.

Two years away.

A year and a half, I guess.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Brad Garrett is joining joining us.

Hi, Brad.

How are you, sir?

Good morning, Glenn.

I'm doing great.

How are you?

I'm good.

I'm shocked at the number that there's only 3.7 million Americans that would consider themselves preppers.

I would have thought that was at least 5%, 10%.

You know,

I think that number is a bit misleading because a lot of people don't want to identify themselves as preppers.

So I think that, you know, that's a problem with polling.

Right.

Because if you if you ask people, if you switch that question around, you say,

you know, can you survive for 30 days on your own?

Like imagine there's no government infrastructure, you know, water is down, power is down, there's no grocery stores.

If you ask people the question that way, then about

11.7 million people say that they can survive for 30 days.

So

I think it's a problem of labeling.

Just like in the past, people didn't want to be called survivalists.

people now don't want to be called preppers it has a kind of uh you know negative taken on a negative connotation for some reason you know it's it used to just be called self-reliance are you self-reliant yeah

um yeah of course yeah 150 years ago everyone was self-reliant right we've become we've become increasingly dependent on the state um and less dependent on our neighbors which i think is the bigger problem you know i i

because i consider myself uh

well actually i I go back and forth.

I consider myself a prepper because I'm more prepared than most of my friends.

However, I just know there's going to be something like, oh, crap, I forgot batteries.

There's going to be something that it all falls apart.

You know what I mean?

Absolutely.

There's always something.

But, you know, this is why I spent a lot of time in

Salt Lake City when I was writing my book, Bunker.

And the

Church of Latter-day Saints up there, and they are incredible preppers.

And they run through scenarios all the time.

So they will,

you know, they'll practice an emergency, they'll work through their food stores, they practice calling everyone on their phone chain, making sure their neighbors are available in the event of a disaster.

That's what we should all be doing.

You know, if you do a dry run, then you realize what you're lacking.

Were you allowed into the tunnels underneath Salt Lake?

No, I tried.

You should have called me.

I could have maybe gotten you in.

It's incredible.

yeah it's absolutely incredible um

the they have enough food uh storage and everything else for the entire city in case there's a a problem it's really incredible really incredible that's fantastic i have to say it was the easiest part of writing my book you know a lot of a lot of preppers particularly preppers that are building

high-level luxury private bunkers uh did not want people to necessarily know where they were or what was inside them.

But when I showed up in Salt Lake City,

they were open arms for the most part, you know, just let me into all of their facilities.

I saw the canning facilities where they filled those number 10 cans with pasta and oatmeal and everything else.

And

it was quite a thing.

But yeah, I didn't make it to the tunnels.

Tell me,

since we have had this nuclear warning,

It's my understanding that there are countries, Russia is one of them.

I think Switzerland is one, I think the United Kingdom is one, where they are going back and looking at their old Cold War bunkers.

And

in Switzerland, I believe that they're being mandated by government.

You've got to go update the food and water in them.

Is that true?

That is true, yeah.

And I mean, it's it's kind of ironic that the bunkers that were built by the Soviet Union in Ukraine have been sheltering people and saving probably tens of thousands of lives at this point.

But that has encouraged the rest of Europe to sort of reassess their position in terms of bunkers.

Switzerland is

the most protected country on earth, aside from maybe North Korea, but we have no idea what's going on

really.

So there is space for

102% of the population.

which is kind of astounding.

They've actually got 300,000 private bunkers inside Switzerland and then 5,000 public shelters.

And most of those are

not just fallout shelters, but blast shelters.

So those are nuclear, biological, and chemical filtered shelters that the population can take shelter in.

And there's actually enough space that if someone was visiting,

the tourists could end up in those bunkers as well.

That is crazy.

So where are we on the scale of these

Western nations and nations that would be affected by this nuclear threat?

Where are we in taking it seriously and as a government and preparing people for it?

Absolutely terrible.

I mean,

the U.S.

and U.K.

are probably at the bottom of the list in terms of preparations.

And that goes back...

in the United States to the Cold War.

So there was

a team of nuclear strategists that included Herman Kahn that thought about what it would take to

he wrote this amazing book on the governor of

the world.

I have a copy of it.

It's great.

It's absolutely incredible.

But he ran these scenarios about what it would take to

evacuate the U.S.

population into bunkers if there were to be an all-out nuclear exchange.

And the cost of construction of those bunkers essentially exceeded GDP of the country for a year.

Yeah, so that's why the

Kennedy administration, I think it was in 63, Kennedy made this speech where he basically said,

you know, it's the responsibility of each person, each family, each community to take preparation upon yourselves.

And that's the path that we've been going down since then.

And what I think what frustrates a lot of Americans is that we now know that as that speech was being made, the government was hard at work constructing bunkers for themselves, for their families, for their aides.

So, you know, we have a model in the United States and also in the UK

where if you're a politician, if you're a CEO, if you're

someone with influence and power, you're probably going to get space in a bunker, but everyone else is

left out to dry.

And

so that has triggered in the United States this incredible movement in the last 10 years or so of private citizens building their own bunkers.

And some of these even rival the government bunkers that were built during the Cold War.

So why did you write this book?

Are you I mean do you are you feeling we're going to need bunkers or

what was your motivation here?

Well,

the the bunker is really a metaphor

for thinking about our deteriorating geopolitical situation, thinking about our deteriorating, you know,

just

social situation within the country.

When I began writing the book, I was

interested in the topic from a sociological perspective.

I wanted to know who the private players were that were building these bunkers, what they were worried about.

and

whether there was any credence to it.

And

I have,

since I wrote the book, purchased a cabin in the woods and a five-acre ranch.

I've got two different locations that are connected by a

four-wheel drive dirt track, so I can move between them without going on major roads.

Most of the people that I spoke to who were serious about their preparations told me

that

The concerns that they had weren't just speculative, right?

They felt we were on the precipice of something happening.

And keep in mind, I started writing this book in 2017.

I finished it in 2021.

So

I had a lot of interviews with people telling me that a pandemic was inevitable, that we were overdue for one, that they happened with regularity every hundred years or so.

And then it happened.

And so that made me go back and reassess all the other things that people were telling me that seemed slightly conspiratorial

or like some kind of magical thinking.

And then when I went and reassessed those claims, they seemed to hold a lot more weight than I expected them to.

Yeah.

And so you became, you became one of us.

Anyway.

Sorry about that, Brad.

But I think to your point, you know, it's, you know, we're just going back to an earlier time or it's

taking on a different kind of mindset where you can't just get on Amazon and click a button and get the thing you need tomorrow.

You need to have it now because you might not be able to get it when things go wrong.

And so,

yeah, I think it's just a kind of changing up our mindset a little bit to think about

what our position might be in the future and it might be a little more precarious.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Vivek Ramaswamy is on with us.

You know, you could have told me, given me a better clue.

We just talked, I think it was on Friday, and said, are you thinking about running for president?

You're like, I'm thinking about it.

Come on, you knew.

You knew.

Glenn, I think I said I was very seriously considering it.

I talked about every possible hint I could have on this show.

No, I mean, we hung up, and I said on the air, he's running.

He's absolutely running.

Yeah, come on.

I get it for you.

I know.

Exactly.

So, Vivek, first of all,

you are not known as a politician or somebody who's ever done this.

You're known as a CEO.

We'll get into some of that.

What is it that your platform, I mean, like on

with Russia, what would you do as president with what we're going through now in Ukraine?

I think foreign policy is all about prioritization, Glenn.

I would not spend another dollar on Ukraine.

I would reprioritize that to take on the number one foreign policy challenge, which is declaration of independence from communist China.

I think we can declare economic independence and defeat them economically so we don't have to militarily.

That's number one.

And then number two, if there's a use case for the U.S.

military and weapons, it is actually to protect our border and to take on, and I would go so far as to say, decimate the cartels.

100,000 fentanyl deaths in the United States today, 80% of which comes from southern border crossings.

Deal with that.

Protect our soil here.

We could do that for a fraction, Glenn, of the cost that it takes to

fight a foreign war somewhere on the other side of the world that has far fewer American interests tied to it.

I was in New Hampshire yesterday, and actually, one of the things that surprises me, Glenn, is how broad the support for that idea for what those foreign policy prompts is.

Oh, yeah.

And it's amazing to me that the defense establishment doesn't, you know, it says you can't say that in polite company, but that gives you a sense for where where I am on foreign policy so let me ask you if a vaccine I mean the Donald Trump was an outsider he came in and he's told me several times personally he had no idea he knew it was bad but he had no idea that he wouldn't be able to trust a soul in Washington he had no idea how deep the deep state was and how powerful it was what makes you think you could go in and rock everyone's world

well he's told me the same thing and he's a friend and honestly i take inspiration from what he did in 2015.

i just think we got to take this to the next level part of this is going to have to be just involving shutting agencies down full stop now are there costs and benefits to that yes but i think we live in a moment where the benefits outweigh those costs so what when you say shut agencies down what agencies are you talking about

Department of Education.

Let's start there.

I was speaking to the Iowa legislature this morning, congratulating them for what they did with school choice in Iowa.

I say we need to eliminate the federal Department of Education.

But many other three-letter acronyms, even much of the national security apparatus, Glenn, has to be shut down and replaced in those cases with something new.

Because when a managerial rot runs so deep, you can't reform it by putting a different figurehead at the top.

You have to shut it down and build something new to take its place.

And here's the other thing.

I mean, I can say this.

Donald Trump knows this just as well as I do from being a CEO.

If you can't fire somebody who works for you, that means they don't work for you.

It means you work for them.

You are their slave.

We need to replace these civil service protections with sunset clauses saying that, you know what, if I can't be the next president of the United States and work for the federal government for more than eight years, then neither should anybody who works for me either.

Those federal bureaucrats got to be subject to eight-year sunset clauses.

How are you going to get that done?

I mean, you have to have, you have to have a Congress.

that has the balls to do these things.

And I'm not sure you have the Congress on either side of the aisle.

You got a few.

You're asking all the right questions, right?

So I take a strong view of the Constitution here.

Article 2 of the Constitution says that the President of the United States runs the federal government, period.

So if Congress isn't willing to act, as president, I am, and I have studied the Supreme Court and the composition of the Supreme Court right now.

You want to take this one and test it in the Supreme Court with me?

Great.

We can then use judicial precedent to make sure that we lock that in.

I believe that Clarence Thomas and others on the court today will be right there with me on my view of Article II and how that reads in the Constitution to say that a lot of these other

quasi-unconstitutional statutes from the Impoundment Prevention Act of 1974 that says that actually that the president has to spend money on specific agencies that Congress has actually authorized it to have to spend on.

That's authorization, not a mandate.

Firing and civil service protections, as I said, if you're running the federal government under Article II of the Constitution, the President runs the executive branch.

I take the Constitution seriously.

And you know what?

I think the friendly way to do it is to lead Congress.

I personally think that 2024 can actually be a landslide election, Glenn.

It's a separate topic for another day.

I'm optimistic about that.

But if we don't get it done that way, we will get it done through executive authority per what the Constitution empowers a president to do.

This is what, again, I talk about America First, I'm all in as an America First conservative.

We've just got to take this to the next level with what I repeatedly am now calling America First 2.0.

And that's a big part of the reason I'm doing this.

So why did you change?

You said you were a libertarian.

Why did you decide you were

a conservative over a libertarian?

I used to be a libertarian in college, actually.

And I had this discussion with folks in New Hampshire yesterday, too.

There was a couple libertarians that came to

one of my rallies last night.

But

here's the thing.

Libertarians, I got two issues.

One is they're too meek, actually.

So they'll talk about the free market, and they say they don't want to make political expression a civil right, as I believe we need to in this country.

Yet they don't actually touch the other protected classes like race or sex or religion or national origin.

And so my view is these libertarians today, with all due respect, have their heads in the sand because you can't have it both ways.

That's problem number one.

But problem number two is deeper, which is, you know, what do we do in that free world, even when the state's out of our hair?

There's still the deeper question of purpose as a citizen, how we live our lives, how we live virtuous lives.

And I care about virtue in civic life and in family life and in faith-based life too.

Not to say that the government necessarily should be involved or mandating those things, but those things matter for human flourishing, for American flourishing.

And libertarianism has nothing to say about that.

That is why I call myself a conservative today, in contrast to 15 years ago when I thought I was a cool kid in college calling myself a libertarian.

So we're talking to Vivek Ramaswamy.

He's running for President of the United States as a Republican.

We've gotten to know each other over the World Economic Forum and ESG, and you are not only

one of the biggest voices against it,

you're actually, you've put into action Strive management, where you are saying, invest with us.

We'll do better with your money than BlackRock.

And we're going to use the voting rights that we get to try to tell these companies, don't do these woke things.

But there's some charges out about you that I'd just like to hear you answer.

You were nominated and selected as a World Economic Forum young global leader in 21.

This is hilarious.

Thank you for this opportunity.

This is actually a lot of fun for me.

Look, partisan politics, I think there's a lot of people on the left and on the right who are threatened by my entry into this race, so I welcome the opportunity to have this debate in the open.

All right.

I think you know this.

I don't like to boast about myself, but I would go so far as to say no one, and I mean no one in this country, has been a bigger both doer and crusader against the World Economic Forum agenda than probably the two of us on this call.

I would challenge somebody to name, I really mean it, I would challenge anybody to name one for me.

If you really pressed me, I would name maybe Elon Musk.

And guess what?

He's named on that same website of the World Economic Forum.

Somebody else, financially, friend Peter Thiel, he's been named on that same website.

You want to know why?

Here's the dirty little secret.

And I've seen this firsthand.

I experienced it firsthand.

The World Economic Forum names you on their website without your permission.

So the funny part is I have a book coming out later this year where I actually detail this experience.

I have phone calls, emails, and I was respectful about it.

I believe in being civil, but I said, do not name me on your website because I do not accept your award.

I don't want to speak at your conference.

They tell me, oh, no, no, no, no, you misunderstand.

We have all the global billionaires here.

Mark Zuckerberg was a young global fellow.

They gave me the list of names.

And they said, no, no, no, Vivek, you don't understand.

This is an honor.

I was like, I respectfully disagree.

I don't want to be named.

And I don't accept your award.

And then they go on to put my name on their website anyway.

Now, they've asked me to speak there and that kind of thing.

I declined.

But the funny thing about me, and I've learning a little bit about how this partisan politics game works, you know, Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018 and 2019.

Do I hold that against him?

No.

You want to know why?

Because everyone who's as financially successful as me or Donald Trump or Elon Elon Musk or whoever else gets invited to speak.

In my case, I said no, because this has been my focus area.

It would not have made sense for me to do it.

In Trump's case, he said, yes, I don't hold that against him.

But I think it just reveals, you know, one of the things that's been eye-opening to me about the online version of the conservative movement is the rise of these click-bait conservatives that it's sort of sad, want to mislead their own followers to advance what agenda I don't know.

But at the end of the day, I also don't want to complain about it.

We're in the big leagues with presidential politics.

This is, you know, we all know it's a dirty game, but it's good to keep your eye on the facts.

Well,

I can verify.

I'm not a good person of this agenda than me.

I can verify one thing.

The World Economic Forum has me on a list, too, and they won't take me off that list either.

So it's just not the same kind of list.

I know.

So the next thing is that you have a longtime association with Soros, and I'm probably the number one anti-Soros guy in the world.

Can I give you a one-word answer to that question, Glenn?

I know you're the number one anti-Soros guy.

So I'm not saying false to you.

I'm saying false to the longtime association with George Soros.

Yeah.

Lie.

100% lie.

Now, let me actually give you guys the facts.

And again,

these clickbait conservatives online.

I don't know if, you know, they feel threatened or whatever and

they need to make up stuff.

I was 25 years old when I went to law school.

I got a scholarship funded by Paul Soros, not George Soros, but Paul Soros that allowed me at the age of 25 to pay for law school.

And I took it.

You want to know why?

Because I'm smart.

Now it's hilarious to me that the same people who bring that fact up from when I was 25 years old taking a scholarship funded partially by somebody who's related to George Soros don't say a word about the fact that, again, Donald Trump, who I love, who I respect, I'm not criticizing him, took a $160 million loan from not Paul Soros, but George Soros himself.

I have no problem with it you want to know why because it's business Donald Trump knows what he's doing I don't think he's corrupted by that I'm not criticizing him for it he's a friend but I think it's funny and I think it's revealing that these same people will talk about a 25 year old kid taking a scholarship to help him pay for law school from a relative of George Soros make a big deal out of that without saying a peep about Donald Trump taking a $160 million loan for George Soros.

And I say that as a friend and somebody who respects Donald Trump because I don't think that that disqualifies him or taints him in any way because he's a man of integrity and he's doing business the way he knows how.

But, you know, I think that when you're in positions like I've been or Donald Trump's been, you get that.

I think if you're sitting online all day on Twitter, it can be a very different story.

All right, I've got one more question on in this line here.

And that is,

you're a biotech guy and in bed with big pharmaceuticals and

a big proponent of mRNA shots.

And,

you know,

have uh

you you've never critiqued pfizer

so let me let me let me say a couple things

first of those things is true i'm a biotech guy i am proud of my success in biotech and five of the medicines i worked on personally oversaw in the company that i founded are fda approved products today that is now a multi-billion dollar company a 7 billion dollar company that i led as ceo one of those drugs is a drug for prostate cancer another for women's health conditions from endometriosis endometriosis to uterine fibroids to psoriasis, to one that's particularly touching for me.

It's an approved therapy for kids who were born with a genetic disease that caused them to die by the age of two at 100% fatality rate by the age of two or three.

Now a majority of them have an opportunity to live lives of potentially a normal duration.

I'm proud of those things, Glenn.

I will not apologize for it.

That is part of what makes America great.

And it is part of what makes innovation great is it empowers human beings to live better lives.

That is not an association with anything other than human innovation and a commitment to actually making people prosper by addressing diseases and treating them.

Now, the idea that I am a proponent of some sort of vaccination agenda, no, I'm on the record right now.

I oppose vaccine mandates.

I think that there has been a lot of rampant government lying and mistrust, appropriately so to the American public, because of how badly they handled this issue.

But I think we can't go to a place where we say that now we don't want people working on innovative medicines to treat diseases from prostate cancer to psoriasis to genetic conditions in children.

No, I think that we ought to stand up for the innovation that makes us who we are.

And I'm proud of what I accomplished.

Let me go back to your platform.

A good friend of ours, David Harsani,

has a pushback a bit on one of your platform policies.

I'd like to hear your response.

Yeah, some, I think, respectful questioning about

one of your policy proposals, Vivek, about making political ideas a protected right.

I think there's a lot of appeal to conservatives who continually get fired from their jobs over what they believe.

He says, though,

we could have some negative side effects.

He says, your idea would potentially make it illegal not only for Disney to fire a social conservative, but for a Jewish restaurant to sever its relationship with an Eo-Nazi, or a hedge fund would be compelled to keep a Trotskyite who believe profits are evil on the payroll, or Walmart having to wait for the worker who spends his days trying to put big box chains out of business to leave on his own volition.

How do you walk this line?

Because obviously there is a lot of really negative consequences coming from this, but

if we make this a civil right, does it go too far?

Great question.

These are the kinds of things we actually should be talking about.

This is a great question.

Thank you.

So here's what I would say.

I would give Congress a choice.

Either you repeal the protected classes as they exist, okay, race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and you actually leave it to the free market, or you have to apply those standards even-handedly.

But you cannot have it both ways.

And I'm going to, since this is, you know, since I know who I'm talking to here, it's a pretty sophisticated, you know, counterpart here.

Glenn in particular understands this, I know.

Let me explain exactly how those civil rights laws and protected classes created the conditions for viewpoint discrimination.

You have two minutes.

Go ahead.

Civil rights statutes, right?

Yeah, so Linda Johnson thought they were just prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race.

But they've now been interpreted to say that that includes hostile work environments against religious minorities.

What's one of the ways that now you can create a hostile work environment?

It's by wearing a Trump hat to work.

It's by saying the wrong thing on social media.

So ironically, the law created the conditions for viewpoint-based discrimination while leaving political viewpoints unprotected.

So you know, I say, can't have it both ways.

If you can't fire somebody for being black or gay or Muslim or white or Jewish or whatever, you should not be able to fire somebody for being an outspoken conservative either.

We have to apply these standards even-handedly.

And if you want to get rid of protected classes altogether, great, I'll have that conversation.

But no Republican or anybody else is willing to.

And so in the meantime, I think we need to bring civil rights into the 21st century to protect political expression as a civil right.

All right.

Vivek,

I love the fact that you're running.

I support anybody who is standing up for the Constitution, standing up for the right of people, standing up against

the endless wars and the lies.

And you just are just able to run for president, are you not?

Didn't you just have a birthday?

Are you

36, 37, two years ago?

37.

Yeah, you're 37.

That would be a shocking change from what we have had traditionally since really Clinton.

And I think he was in his 40s.

I only want people above 100 years old to run for president.

Yes, yes.

I think we should go the other direction.

Sorry, Vivek.

Okay.

Vivek Ramaswamy, we'll talk to you again.

Thank you so much.

You can find out more at Vivek,

V I V E K

2024.com.

Vivek2024.com.

V I V E K 2024.com.