This Is What’s REALLY Dividing America | Vivek Ramaswamy

What’s really dividing America isn’t race—it’s the lie of victimhood.

In this explosive episode, Skylar Lewis sits down with entrepreneur, political leader, and potential Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to expose the truth behind reverse racism, the collapse of masculinity, and the cultural incentives that reward weakness over responsibility.

From calling out DEI and woke ideology to breaking down the real crisis facing modern men and families, this conversation pulls no punches.

If you're tired of the noise and ready for truth, don’t miss this.

Connect with Vivek Ramaswamy and get his book "Nation of Victims":

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Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:15
Unknown
It's like a victimhood Olympics in America. Everybody's competing to be a victim. There's no winner in the victimhood Olympics. Maybe China's the winner. I could talk about that. The only loser in that is us as Americans at the end of reverse racism, racism. To correct some historical injustice is still common. Racism. The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

00:00:22:15 - 00:00:47:24
Unknown
You often create a financial disincentive for women to even stay married. Good times create weak men that comfort, that sense of complacency creates the hardship that instead leads to decline. Eventually in life, we're all going to encounter hardship. Yeah, hardship is not a choice. Victimhood is a choice. Those are the greatest gift we can be given to go through the tough times that caused us to really reflect on who we are and why we're doing what we're doing, and how we deal with those tough situations.

00:00:47:27 - 00:01:12:12
Unknown
In this episode, we have Vivek Ramaswamy. He ran for president of the United States. However, he's now running for governor and is highly involved politically in shifting our country at a core level. We have a conversation around masculinity, around what it means to be a man and how to raise children, how to raise boys. We talk about politic and what is wrong with our country and what the solutions are.

00:01:12:14 - 00:01:28:26
Unknown
Well, I'm excited, excited to be here. Thanks for letting us, crash the party at your house. Oh, and you're bringing the party door? Yes. We got we got something special for you we usually give us at the end. How nice. But check this bad boy out. You know what this is? This looks good. This is,

00:01:28:28 - 00:01:45:00
Unknown
What is this here we got open here. Let's see. Oh, wow. What, have you ever done? Nail boards? No, I have, oh, man. It's incredible. I know you're a guy that isn't willing to step in the paint, so pull it apart, okay? Yeah. And so what's going to happen is it'll it'll pop out. Pop out the back side of it a little bit too.

00:01:45:00 - 00:02:01:15
Unknown
Yeah okay I don't. Oh. Oh wow. Yeah. Wow. So we have a saying paint is the path. Comfort's the enemy. Yeah I think that that's that sounds about right here I rock serious, man. Totally. So leaning into the leaning into pain and being willing to get comfortable with it. And so something fun you can do even with the boys.

00:02:01:23 - 00:02:19:24
Unknown
Yeah. So I say even that, right. Yeah. You do stand on it for a minute, two minutes. And it's just, it's a test of mental toughness and kind of something fun to do as a family. Were you comfortable outside your comfort zone? That's that's actually it's, I love that. It's one of the values we try to impart to our kids actually too.

00:02:19:24 - 00:02:51:04
Unknown
And it's you know, I mean in a certain sense we, we, we thank you for this by the way. Yeah. We'll, hold on to that. Yeah. I, it was consistent with the values we were raised in. It was easier for my easier in some sense, easier for my parents, because we did go through the kind of maybe hardships and things that our kids may not go through because this early stance we live in and, you know, w my wife and I give a lot of thought to to make sure that you don't take the comforts for life as, as, you know for granted, especially when you build success.

00:02:51:04 - 00:03:07:13
Unknown
Right? We had success. One of the things on my mind is how do I make sure my kids aren't, addicted to comfort and pleasure, right? That they lean into difficult things and they have some difficult experiences? Yeah. I mean, that's that's what ultimately teaches you who you are. Eventually in life we're all going to encounter hardship.

00:03:07:17 - 00:03:29:06
Unknown
Yeah. Hardship is not a choice. Victimhood is a choice. And so how you respond to hardship I think is what defines who we really are. And those are each it doesn't feel like it often at the time. But those are the greatest gifts we can be given is to go through the tough times that caused us to really reflect on who we are and why we're doing what we're doing, and how we deal with those tough situations.

00:03:29:06 - 00:03:47:06
Unknown
Yeah, on that note, I was going to save that question for later. But what would you say is one of the most difficult things that you've gone through? Certainly as an adult? I think there's, there's, there's, a number of things I could pick made in the professional path. Right when we're talking about this. Yeah. We haven't personally, we could talk about that too.

00:03:47:06 - 00:04:07:09
Unknown
I mean, the first thing comes to mind on on professionally is. So I had always academically, through through Saint High School, I graduated a valedictorian, went to the top colleges I wanted to go to, got into Harvard, I went to Yale Law School, was successful in my first job out of college at this financial firm in New York City.

00:04:07:12 - 00:04:32:15
Unknown
I left that to start my biotech company, which I was excited to do, were able to, you know, build a business plan and build investor backing behind me to pursue drugs that the pharmaceutical industry had abandoned. And the whole strategy was you of a little bit of backdrop to understand the the story of the hardship we went through my whole thesis, I had seen this for years as an investor, is that the pharmaceutical industry behaved often like lemmings.

00:04:32:15 - 00:04:47:28
Unknown
Okay, they would all just follow each other and chase the pack in one direction. And the reason why is, if you're right and you're the only one who's right and everyone else is wrong, you don't really get paid more for that. But if you're wrong and you're the only one who is wrong, you get fired and lose your job.

00:04:47:29 - 00:05:07:02
Unknown
So everybody follows, followed impacts, and if they're wrong and they take the wrong bet, at least everybody looks equally bad. Well, my view is there's an opportunity to build a business there that if you're willing to have a little bit more risk tolerance, that you're willing to take risks that others don't, you can actually, you know, can have some failures, but you're going to have some successes that are outsized in proportion.

00:05:07:05 - 00:05:33:25
Unknown
And the company went on to be successful. But the first drug we developed was a drug for Alzheimer's disease. And Alzheimer's disease was the white whale of drug development. It was the toughest area. It was a graveyard. 99.7% of drugs in that area had always failed. But there was a drug that another big pharma company, GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, had developed through the second phase of drug development through phase two, and they just threw in the towel on all of their Alzheimer's products.

00:05:33:25 - 00:05:47:08
Unknown
They just said, this is too risky of an area. We're out of it. Not just that drug, a bunch of others. They just said, we're putting them on the shelf there. Had a neuroscience still believed in it. And so what my company's business model was, was we'll pick up those drugs, will develop them all the way through the finish line.

00:05:47:08 - 00:06:03:19
Unknown
We'll share in the upside with the prior company. And that drug looked like it had some promise. There's obviously risk in Alzheimer's, but it looked like it had great promise. The guy who had developed it in their division believed in its potential. Some of the top Alzheimer's drug developers in the world also actually took a look and said, wait a minute, this actually has real potential.

00:06:03:19 - 00:06:21:18
Unknown
So we ended up developing that medicine, and once we took it on, it ended up gaining such a high profile behind it. My my face ended up on the cover of Forbes magazine. I was the youngest high profile CEO and biotech. Suddenly, you know, they said it ended up being financed in a subsidiary with the largest biotech IPO of the time.

00:06:21:20 - 00:06:45:08
Unknown
There was a lot of attention to say, wait, this actually has a reasonable shot at success. And we developed it all the way, did everything the right way, turned over the cards, and just like every other Alzheimer's drug that had been developed, it was a failure. Drug didn't do any better than placebo. That was for me. The thing that made that tough is that was the first time we had somebody who'd achieved academically achieved in business.

00:06:45:10 - 00:07:17:26
Unknown
It was such a crushing failure. And I remember the morning I had to go in and talk to my employees. Right. We're talking about, you know, maybe several hundred employees, 4 or 500 employees across the organization at that time. I kept practicing my speech. I rarely practice my speeches. I knew I wanted to get this one right, as my apartment in New York City broke down in tears that morning, and ultimately, my my illusion was I had to appear strong, tell everyone everything's going to be okay, when in fact I felt pretty broken inside.

00:07:17:29 - 00:07:37:10
Unknown
And at the same time, what I learned from that experience is a everyone at the company in some way, in a sense, was their as a leader. They knew that I was feeling more pain than anybody else. I was supposed to show them my strength. In the end, it was actually all of my employees who helped lift me in the leadership of the company up, and that was that was a unique and uplifting moment.

00:07:37:13 - 00:07:59:03
Unknown
You fast forward 4 or 5 years later. It was that same group of people. Many of them that worked on developing for other eventually became five other medicines that ended up getting approved to treat patients that otherwise would have never seen the light of day. And we were stronger for it, having gone through that failure. Yep. So so one of the other drugs that came out of it was a therapy for kids.

00:07:59:03 - 00:08:28:07
Unknown
There's 20 kids a year born with this genetic disease, where 100% of them die by the age of three, if untreated. And we ended up developing a therapy that's now FDA approved, where 70% of those kids are able to live lives of normal duration, others for women's health conditions. And those are the successes. But in some ways, those successes would have never, may not have, never actually ever actually been realized the way we did if we hadn't gone through the experience of failure in the first place.

00:08:28:07 - 00:08:48:08
Unknown
And so for me, that was one of many experiences in life, you know, that was more on the professional side where it was tough. I you have the feeling you don't know how you're going to get through this. Yeah. And yet it actually makes you stronger at what you set out to do. And for me, that was one of the learnings that I share with young people all the time now is you shouldn't be afraid of failing you shouldn't be afraid of hardship.

00:08:48:10 - 00:09:07:26
Unknown
Deal with it. It actually, in the long run, can strengthen you as long as you have the right personal, often faith grounding, family grounding to help you get through it. Yeah, you can actually be stronger on the other side. In your book, talking about strength in your book, truths. Yeah, right. You have a conversation around the nuclear family.

00:09:07:26 - 00:09:28:05
Unknown
So the masculinity in the nuclear family has been under attack severely, and it's part of our mission, our rise up kings is we want to develop. And for strong, godly men that lead their families and their communities well, and that's I believe that's the best thing we can do for America is a group create a strength and there needs to be leadership.

00:09:28:05 - 00:09:58:00
Unknown
So I'm curious, what is your thought or what's your opinion on the decline of the nuclear family? My opinion is it's not good for America. My opinion is that it is a product of our culture, and in some ways, the incentive structures that we've created, often inadvertently because of the Great Society. I'm referring to the Lyndon Johnson engineered social project in America that created a nanny state and embraced victimhood culture in America, you often created financial disincentives for women to even stay married.

00:09:58:02 - 00:10:15:04
Unknown
Do you believe that was a Stem? I idea where victimhood in America start? Or from a policy perspective? Yes. Yeah. From a policy perspective, yes. And then you got to the question of what gave rise to those policies coming up. And some of this is really culture. Okay. So I think that there's there's a cycle that every civilization goes through.

00:10:15:05 - 00:10:37:15
Unknown
Right. You know, how does the old saying go. Right. You know, strong times, great weak men. Right. In a certain sense, you are good times create weak men in the sense that we are a product of our own success. Right? Thinking about after World War Two, thinking about the boom after that, it created a culture of complacency. Perhaps that then created a generation of victimhood and reliance on that same government that came afterwards.

00:10:37:15 - 00:11:00:06
Unknown
So it's more complicated than that. Yeah, but it's the cycles of history of any great nation. That's what we go through. It was that, quote often attributed to the founder of Dubai. I think it was actually American who wrote it. It says, my grandfather wrote a camel. My father wrote a camel. I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, my grandson will ride a Land Rover, but my great grandson will ride a camel again.

00:11:00:06 - 00:11:19:15
Unknown
Okay, so it's a certain sense of when you achieve success, that comfort, that sense of complacency creates the hardship that instead leads to decline. Yeah. So I think that's part of what we've seen in American history. Now, the job of great leaders is to turn that tide and make sure we're not just price takers of what happens in historical trends.

00:11:19:22 - 00:11:37:22
Unknown
The job of great leaders is to say this is the moment for us to actually lead. And that's what Lyndon Johnson failed as a leader. He was the president of United States and instead succumbed to that culture of victimhood and created and centered emotion. This culture of dependance on the government that in many ways was worse for family formation in America.

00:11:37:24 - 00:12:01:29
Unknown
Now, I'm going to talk about the comment on some of the rates in, in, you know, black families only because that was the target that Lyndon Johnson supposedly wanted to help in the 1950s. You think about the percentage of black kids born into into two family households. It was actually higher than it is today because of the incentives that Lyndon Johnson created through the Great Society to, quote unquote, help the very community.

00:12:01:29 - 00:12:27:09
Unknown
I actually believe he ended up hurting through some of those policies in the process. So the policy was part of it. I think some of this is a culture. Also, if you look at the culture of Hollywood, you look at what's valorized. For too long, it's actually been valorized values other than traditional family values. So it's going to have to be some policy changes, but some cultural changes that together, I think, coalesce to revive the value of the nuclear family.

00:12:27:09 - 00:12:47:21
Unknown
I mean, I didn't grow up in privilege, okay. The issues that were privilege a lot today. I didn't grow up in financial privilege, but I actually had the ultimate privilege of two parents in the house instilling in us a focus on education, hard work, a belief in God that I believe is the ultimate gift that we could actually give our children.

00:12:47:21 - 00:13:10:06
Unknown
And in some ways, I want to make sure that every kid who grows up in our state of Ohio, and I hope every kid who grows up in America is able to have that same stable foundation, right? If you jump in from a stable foundation, you jump a lot higher than if the foundation's shaky. It's I think our obligation as adults, as leaders, as parents to give our kids that stable foundation whenever possible.

00:13:10:08 - 00:13:28:14
Unknown
And I do believe that, I do believe that the country is not just going to be saved by politicians, it's going to be saved by leaders at every level. And the strongest of those leaders, I think, begin at the household, the mother and the father who play their respective roles in giving our kids that foundation from which to leap.

00:13:29:29 - 00:14:04:19
Unknown
How? Yeah. The statistic is right. In the 1960s, 5% of children were born, outside of marriage. Right. And then in 20 I believe is 2021. You mentioned that, I believe it's over 41% of children are now born outside of marriage. So I don't think people realize how severe this issue is. Right? Right. And how far backwards we've gone to where the norm now is that people are having sex on a regular basis outside of marriage, but they're also having kids outside of marriage, which is not.

00:14:04:19 - 00:14:21:15
Unknown
The nuclear family is about the traditional family. And I believe we're going to have to have a huge court or shift. I think it could be coming. I think it could be coming. I think people are ready for something new right? You get that dopamine hit, you get that. It's like it's like a shower, cocaine and a cocaine addict.

00:14:21:15 - 00:14:40:16
Unknown
Just because they're asking for it doesn't mean it's good for them. Yeah, but eventually that person can still come to the realization that what felt right or cooler in the moment isn't really what's what's true and what's right and what's good for them in the long run. Right. So so I think what's gone on in the country, in our generation, I mean, maybe similar generation, right.

00:14:40:16 - 00:15:02:08
Unknown
You've in my how old are you? 39. Same same age right. I guess maybe similar vintage. Yep. I think what happened with, with our millennial generation is that we, you know, you can make you can make all the reasons, explanations for it. We graduated college probably around the same time that the 2008 financial crisis set in. You're told the yep, you know, you go to college and get gender studies major in California.

00:15:02:08 - 00:15:28:21
Unknown
Somehow that would get you a head start on the American dream. It hasn't worked out that way. Get the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the bailouts afterwards. There's a lot of reasons where many of our peers ended up jaded and cynical. And if you look at the last 20, 30, 40 years in the country, I think we have lost our sense of purpose and meaning and identity where faith in God, patriotism, hard work, family values have disappeared in much of the country.

00:15:28:21 - 00:15:49:02
Unknown
And when you have that vacuum, that black hole, that's when the different forms of poison begin to fill the void. Right? And sometimes we can we can pick at any one of these poisons. I talk about, you know, in some of my books, wokeism and transgenderism. Yeah. Climate ism, Covid ism. You now see, you know, versions of anti-Semitism.

00:15:49:05 - 00:16:05:16
Unknown
Let's talk about Wokeism for a moment. How has Wokeism do you believe? And specifically because we what our organization's about as we were building up strong. So we know that when there's a strong man leading at home, he's going to take a stand for what is right. He's going to stand by his values like, that's right. He's going to represent well.

00:16:05:16 - 00:16:24:00
Unknown
But when there's a weak man, weak men are the cause that men create hard times, weak men create hard times, and weak men have destroyed the family unit, but are destroying family values and are not taking a stand for family values. And so part of our mission, right? How do we go? Strengthen man. And it's not through, learning about a topic on stage, right?

00:16:24:00 - 00:16:49:26
Unknown
It's through like, we have a really intense experiences that, create physical intensity, that challenge guys emotionally, spiritually, mentally. So it's a really challenging experience. And then we line them up with a value system. So our four pillars, we call them that, we call them a four pillars, which are faith, family, fitness and finances. And we believe that that is the proper ordering that a man or a human being should operate from.

00:16:49:26 - 00:17:04:27
Unknown
Right? We have faith as a primary family's always secondary, fitness in our health and then finances our business, our careers. There's always going to be after that. So we need I should love that. And I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to take that and run with it. Because I think that those are the foundations and pillars.

00:17:04:29 - 00:17:22:14
Unknown
And, you know, I was talking about when you have that vacuum, that whole that's when the poison fills the void. The job of a strong father, the strong, the job of a strong man in the household figure, a leader of the family, leader of the unit that ultimately comprise our society is to fill that void with the real thing.

00:17:22:16 - 00:17:41:21
Unknown
Right? So it's not just about playing whac-a-mole with the poison when it comes up. Those are symptoms of a deeper deficit. You fill it with the real thing. You're talking about faith. You talking about, you know, I talk about faith, family, hard work, patriotism, similar values. When you think about, you know, faith, belief in a higher power, belief in something bigger than yourself, belief in God.

00:17:41:23 - 00:18:03:06
Unknown
You ground that in the family, as we say, that's the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance. But even you talk about fitness and finance, it's about also reviving your own self-confidence and sense of self-worth through hard work. Yeah, work ethic. And those are also individual values that crisis of self-care, confidence that we've lost. And it's when you have that vacuum that you have the poisons that fill the void will fill the vacuum with the real thing.

00:18:03:06 - 00:18:19:20
Unknown
Right? We don't need the black hole in the first place. And I do think it's the job of thinking about, you know, men in our generation. The real way to step up is find a woman you love, marry her, have children, raise those kids, stand for them and embody for them through your actions. Not just your words, but your actions.

00:18:19:20 - 00:18:38:23
Unknown
The belief in hard work and self-reliance, the belief in you and even our earlier conversation. Yes, you're going to go through hardship from time to time. I grew up in a household, or my dad did. He faced down the layoffs at the GE plant at Evandale, Ohio, under Jack Welch in the 1990s. He didn't cry about victimhood or racism or whatever it was.

00:18:39:00 - 00:18:56:07
Unknown
He went to night school. He went to law school for four years at Northern Kentucky University Law School across the river. My parents couldn't afford childcare. You know what that meant? In sixth grade, I was driving with him 45 minutes at night after his full day at work and my full day at school to sit in middle school in the back of his law school class.

00:18:56:10 - 00:19:14:03
Unknown
That was great for me. I was learning things that my peers weren't learning, talking about in in Scalia and Justice Thomas on the drive back in every hardship, there's an opportunity. But to me, that's that was actually my path to you call being a conservative is watching a father figure in the House who went through hardship. We knew what that meant for our family.

00:19:14:11 - 00:19:35:13
Unknown
I saw how he dealt with it. It was through hard work that you overcame that hardship, and in some ways that was imparted to me. Now embodying hopefully that in the way I live, my own life with my own kids, hopefully absorbing that same value set, even if they're living under very different circumstances today. So that's, I think, the path and the path forward.

00:19:35:13 - 00:19:51:18
Unknown
You can't be the best version of yourself, I believe, unless you are, at least, you know, for those who were able physically fit to be able to take a timed mental health, physical health go together, you know, you have a culture as well that for a long time prize just spending money you don't have. You see that at the level of the nation.

00:19:51:20 - 00:20:14:27
Unknown
You say the the level of individuals with credit card debts outpacing, you know, what their earnings or what their bank account is. Financial stability is an important part of that. But yeah, I got to say I like that framework. The four F's is pretty good. Yep, yep. We talk a lot at our events on victimhood versus responsibility. I do an entire experience around that, really, breaking down where people have chosen victim.

00:20:14:27 - 00:20:32:04
Unknown
And so victimhood and great victimhood is a choice. I like the way you frame that victim. It is a choice. It is a choice. And it's, it can be pervasive, but it can show up. I mean, we have classes full of right, tons of entrepreneurs. And what's interesting is many entrepreneurs when we raise our hand. Hey, when was the last time you went victim?

00:20:32:04 - 00:20:48:24
Unknown
Most of them do not raise their hand. They don't think they go victim. But in many instances, we are victim. When something happens to us, that's us going victim to a circumstance, right? Hey, this happened to me. The economy's happening to me, right? Right. My wife not having sex with me is happening to me. Like these things are happening to me.

00:20:48:24 - 00:21:16:10
Unknown
That's a victim language to being an agent in the world, which is responsibility. So that's the the antidote to victimhood is is responsibility. It's a realization that we have we have ultimate responsibility, over our lives. And. Right. We've been given agency. And so, so our culture. Right. And and you talk about this in your books, our culture shifted from this place of responsibility to really like being a victim to life and to circumstances and even to Covid.

00:21:16:16 - 00:21:39:08
Unknown
Right? We're now victim to all the all these things. So where is victimhood most pervasive and how do we get out? I think victimhood is pervasive, the culture of it nearly everywhere you look in American life today. And that wasn't always us. I mean, that is a temporary thing. It's fleeting and we're going to get over it. But, I mean, I reject every form of victimhood, left wing victimhood, right wing victimhood.

00:21:39:08 - 00:22:04:08
Unknown
You forget about it. Yeah, you are an agent, okay? You are empowered with your own free will to author your own destiny. And the thing I remind the people who surround me, young people, sometimes myself, is that the number one factor, the number one factor that determines whether you achieve your goals in life is actually you. Yeah, I'm not saying it's the only factor.

00:22:04:11 - 00:22:21:27
Unknown
Yeah. I said the number one factor. But of all the other factors that determine whether or not you achieve something in life, hundreds of factors could be somebody else's attitudes towards you could be, you know, what happened to you last week. Could be the weather, could be whether or not your flight took off to get to where you wanted to go.

00:22:21:27 - 00:22:38:18
Unknown
Could be whether or not your company went through hardship and you lost your job. All of it. There's a lot of other factors, but the number one factor in the end that determines your own destiny in life, whether you achieve your own goals is actually you. That's a hard fact. So you remember that. You remember that victimhood is the choice.

00:22:38:18 - 00:22:59:16
Unknown
Am I choosing victimhood or am I choose an empowerment? That's the choice that every one of us has to face in the face of hardship. And part of what we've done as a society? Why do we have, you know, pervasive culture of victimhood? I think we created the incentives to be a victim right now. You get into college, the way you do it is you write some sort of sob story rather than actually being the highest achiever.

00:22:59:19 - 00:23:17:19
Unknown
The way you get a handout from the government, or even if you think about under the Biden years, even using racial victimhood narratives in Oakland or other parts of the country where you could only get a piece of government aid if you were a particular race predicated on a narrative of systemic racism, we've created the incentive structure for victimhood, right?

00:23:17:22 - 00:23:36:21
Unknown
Victimhood has become like kind of to use a financial markets analogy, a kind of currency. And when the currency is trading at a bubble, what do people do? They try to cash it in before the bubble bursts. That's what you see. It's like a victimhood Olympics in America. Well, the problem is there's the victim. It really is. Everybody's competing to be a victim.

00:23:36:21 - 00:23:53:02
Unknown
Well, you know what? I was a woman of color who also had discovered that I was actually a man, but I was a woman, and I'm also of color. Well, that puts me on the victimhood hierarchy. Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm a victim. Because, you know, I was I was a, you know, son of somebody who crossed the border illegally.

00:23:53:02 - 00:24:10:15
Unknown
And that means that I'm in the global victimhood hierarchy, somebody who came from the third world. And your victimhood narrative is not really nearly as big as mine, all in a competition to compete for the spoils of a shrinking pie. No, that's the victimhood Olympics. And the only loser. There's no winner in the Olympic team but Olympics. Maybe China's the winner.

00:24:10:15 - 00:24:29:15
Unknown
I can talk about that. The only loser in that is us as Americans. At the end of them, there's no winner in the victimhood Olympics. Yeah. What we really realize the real winner comes from the competition of empowerment, right? How do we empower each of us to achieve our own destiny and so on, to reject the politics of victimhood and embrace the politics of empowerment.

00:24:29:18 - 00:24:47:22
Unknown
Create an incentive structure that doesn't reward the person who who wins the most about their plight, but instead the person who's willing to work hard and to embrace positively a destiny that's greater than the one that someone might have expected of them. That's what the true American dream is about. The American Dream is about the rejection of victimhood.

00:24:47:24 - 00:25:06:18
Unknown
That's what I believe. That's our identity as Americans were not victims were victors. Right? We don't win. We win. Yeah, that's who we are as Ohioans, as Americans. Yeah. That's the values I want to pass on to my children. I hope you can see right here we're a book called Nation of Victims. Yeah. This is something that bothers me.

00:25:06:20 - 00:25:25:10
Unknown
And there's it's definitely the embodiment of left wing victimhood culture. Right. The identity that your race, your gender, your sexuality puts you in a relationship or your wealth puts you in a relationship with those who are oppressors and the oppressed. The Marxist way of thinking about the world from the past. I want to be careful that we don't fall into that same trap on our own side.

00:25:25:12 - 00:25:45:09
Unknown
Even the conservative movement to say that my plight is, you know, somebody else's, somebody else's exercising power over me and I'm a victim. I don't want to see that left wing victimhood culture. In fact, our movement. No. Yeah. No, we're not victims. The question is, how are we going to be victorious through actual empowerment? That doesn't mean there aren't fixes that we need to make.

00:25:45:11 - 00:26:03:00
Unknown
Of course, there are fixes we need to make structurally in our government in the way that, you know, our institutions are structured. You got to see a problem with clear eyes to solve it. But your purpose in seeing the problem with clear eyes isn't to isn't to whine about it. It's to overcome that problem. And that's where that's what I want to see out of our conservative movement.

00:26:03:00 - 00:26:27:13
Unknown
And that's the way, you know, whether it's as governor of Ohio and, you know, in my next chapter, yeah, that's the way I want to lead, is to set by way of example, I'm going to spot the problem, describe it Unsparingly. But it's not to not to earn tiers of sympathy from anybody. It's to actually solve the problem and allow people to thrive and to flourish at the best version of each of themselves and the gifts that we're given.

00:26:27:13 - 00:26:43:05
Unknown
That's what I want to create. Yeah, I believe that you have the governorship locked in. And so what would you say is going to be like, what? What are you taking hard stances on? Yeah, I'm taking hard stances on first is what does it mean to revive the American dream by taking a hard stance on American identity? Right.

00:26:43:05 - 00:26:59:01
Unknown
What does it mean to be a citizen of this nation? Can you believe that? Yeah. You explain the shared, shared American identity. What does that look like? So I think the way because it's, it's it's dismantled I mean it's a it's it's really feels that way. Yeah. It certainly feels that way. I mean, do those shared ideals still exist in the country?

00:26:59:01 - 00:27:21:19
Unknown
I believe they do. Yeah. I just believe we require leaders to help us rediscover them. But we've gone through a national identity crisis in the last four years. Certainly. What does it mean to be an American? To me, it means we believe in the ideals that set this country into motion 250 years ago. And that's what makes this country exceptional, is that we're a nation founded on a set of ideals that go to the heart of who we are as human beings.

00:27:21:19 - 00:27:54:14
Unknown
What makes us different from animals or four legged mammals? Right? Sometimes we we're trained to believe we're just a bunch of two legged higher mammals walking some geographic space, doing what our iPhones told us to do on a given day. Right. That's not America. That's not. That's not us at our best. What makes us different than those two legged or four legged other higher mammals is that we can believe in a purpose bigger than ourselves, that we have ideals that bind us together, ideals like meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence and hard work, which you're talking about, that you get ahead in the country, not in the color of your skin, or your race, or

00:27:54:14 - 00:28:15:16
Unknown
your sexuality or your gender, but on the content of your character and your contributions. That's why I will be rejecting the woke Dei agenda and affirmative action and quota systems. We want merit autocracy, where the best in every domain is able to succeed to the maximum of their potential. It means we believe in the rule of law as part of our national identity.

00:28:15:18 - 00:28:34:01
Unknown
I'm the kid of legal immigrants, and I say this as the proud son of legal immigrants. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law, right? We believe in accountability. We believe in self-governance. That means the people we elect to make the laws ought to be the ones who actually make the laws, not unelected bureaucrats.

00:28:34:07 - 00:28:51:27
Unknown
In some three letter agency or some bureaucracy that we've created. It means that we believe in free speech and free exercise of religion, that you get to speak your mind openly and practice your faith as long as I get to in return, without the government standing in our way. Right. That's the ideals that this country was founded on.

00:28:51:27 - 00:29:10:06
Unknown
We got to remember that those are the ideals enshrined in the US Constitution, in the Declaration of Independence. That's what we need to revive. And that's where I'll be uncompromising in the way that I lead our state of Ohio. We're going to embody those ideals. We want to make sure our kids understand, learn, appreciate, and grow up and embrace those ideals.

00:29:10:07 - 00:29:32:01
Unknown
So shifting the education. Absolutely. I mean, I want to Montana. It's yeah, I want every high school senior who graduates from an Ohio high school to have to pass the same civics test that every legal immigrant has to pass before they become a naturalized citizen. Yeah, I grew up in California. And what's interesting is there's no there's no California identity or pride around California.

00:29:32:01 - 00:29:49:23
Unknown
So when I moved to Texas, yeah, I had three and a half years ago. The amount of pride that Texans have over their state is quite incredible. I love it. So my my sons, I have a nine year old, 12 year old, two boys in history. And so my my older ones in history and he's learning about history, I'm like, hey, what did you learn about his history?

00:29:49:23 - 00:30:05:09
Unknown
Your day? And he's like, oh, just just Texas. Everything about Texas. And I walked into the school room for a parent teacher conference. And there's not a picture of the United States. There's a picture of Texas. That's it's Texas. It's the state of Texas everywhere. I'm like, where's the United States? Yeah. So they learn that's a little, you got to come on, get it, get it.

00:30:05:11 - 00:30:19:19
Unknown
It was it was just like having a man. It was a it was the opposite of a that was really interesting from California, which I there's no pride there. I moved into our house and our, our second sink at one of our, and our guest house is the is the cut out of the Texas state was the actual sink.

00:30:19:19 - 00:30:35:19
Unknown
I'm like, wow, this pride is just so unique. It's it's a powerful thing when you can have the shared identity which Texans have. Now, how do we how do we bring that into the US? Right. How do we how do we shift the identity? I love that example for Texans. In some sense, it's something we're we could use more of.

00:30:35:21 - 00:30:55:00
Unknown
You're in Ohio. I want to bring that sense of conviction back to Ohio. Yeah we're great state. Everybody that in the great state of Ohio is the state that led the way in the first industrial revolution. At the turn of the last century. We're the wealthiest state in the Union. We had six of the 15 most productive, wealthiest cities in the country, or even in the 1950s, or manufacturing engine.

00:30:55:00 - 00:31:14:18
Unknown
Toledo and glass. Akron and rubber. Yeah, Cleveland and Youngstown and steel. We have great aerospace heritage. John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, the Wright brothers, all Ohioans born, raised, achieved great achievements. Even Neil Armstrong went to the moon right here in our own state. And so I do think that there's a bit of a crisis of self-confidence in our own state.

00:31:14:22 - 00:31:28:23
Unknown
And part of what I want to bring back as the leader of this state is a conviction in Ohio. The sense of pride in Ohio is good. But as an embodiment and part of the United States of America as a whole, and as much as I love Texas, I love Texas, and I love what a lot of the policies that Florida's adopted.

00:31:28:25 - 00:31:42:26
Unknown
Yeah, people are moving to Florida. Texas. Yep, yep, I know Ohio right now. Did the people move out of more than they move into? That'll change on my watch. Is that it helps? Yeah. Yeah. So so if you look at the rankings of people moving in versus out. Yeah. Florida's number one Texas number two. Very close. Number one.

00:31:42:26 - 00:31:59:23
Unknown
And number two. Yeah. We're number 38 in Ohio. And we're a red state. Yeah it is interesting. We're going to change that. Don't worry. Yeah I want to I want Ohio actually to be number one in the list at least in terms of growth rate. Yeah. Have any plans on the income tax. Yes. Zero. Yeah. Beautiful I mean Texas is zero Florida here.

00:31:59:23 - 00:32:21:15
Unknown
We got neighbors even close to where we're having this podcast right now. Yeah. Who literally go sit six months in a day in Florida. It ain't because of the weather, despite what they'll tell you in public. Okay. It's the taxes. Yeah. And I think that we are creating financial we talked earlier about the financial incentives for family formation, the financial incentives for victimhood culture, or creating a financial incentive for people to leave Ohio.

00:32:21:20 - 00:32:43:13
Unknown
And I don't want that when we have population growth as our main challenge. And that's in two layers in Ohio. So one is are fertility rates gone down, children born in the household in 2020, we hit the all time low. Back then 2024 was even lower than 2020. So we're in an all time low in our fertility rate, our death rates going up because of an aging population.

00:32:43:15 - 00:32:58:16
Unknown
We've got more people leaving our state than moving in. And then if you look at who's leaving, they tend to be younger, college educated people who are leaving. The people moving in tend to be on government aid and tend to be a little older. So demographically, that's a real challenge for our state. Yeah, 11 million people and shrinking.

00:32:58:18 - 00:33:12:20
Unknown
By the time I'm done, we're going to be 15 million people and growing in the state of Ohio. And part of that is bringing back that sense of pride in our heritage and our history. And I was gonna say as much, I love Texas and Florida. You drop a pin anywhere in Florida and you draw a circle around it.

00:33:12:22 - 00:33:29:18
Unknown
You got a cross-section of Florida, you drop a pin anywhere in Texas, you draw a 100 mile radius around it. You got a good cross-section of Texas. You go to anywhere where we are right now in our state of Ohio, you drop a pin of where we're sitting right now, drop a 100 mile radius around us. You got a cross-section of America.

00:33:29:21 - 00:33:48:03
Unknown
So when I think about leading America back into our golden age, I don't even really just it's not just a golden age. It is a renaissance in our country. We're on the doorstep of a renaissance or reawakening in America. I think there's a responsibility for a state like Ohio to be the one that leads the way, because we're representation of the rest of the country.

00:33:48:03 - 00:34:03:15
Unknown
We have four full seasons. All right, like it or not, right now, I love it. Right. Yes. Texture. Yeah. It's that's not a knock on any other state I love Texas I love it I mean, there's a lot that you guys have done that we ought to learn from it and bring a leader with a spine of steel to actually lead our state.

00:34:03:15 - 00:34:28:09
Unknown
We're a conservative state. Do we need to be governed like one? But I think that there's also something about the character of Ohio as you describe the character of Texas, right? Risk taking bold pioneers, cowboys in the best of ways. The way I describe the character of Ohio is that we're a state that embodies a unique combination of two attributes that don't usually go together, but those attributes are ambition and humility.

00:34:28:11 - 00:34:45:23
Unknown
And usually you would think that those are in tension with one another, and maybe they are a little bit, but we're at once ambitious, right? The state that sent Neil Armstrong to be the first man to walk on the moon, or John Glenn to be the first American into orbit, a state that was we were the pioneers and the frontier state before there was a frontier.

00:34:45:26 - 00:35:10:03
Unknown
That's our heritage. We're ambitious, but we're also humble. Were grounded people who don't necessarily take ourselves too seriously, even as we take what we do seriously. That's our heritage. And so to me, that's the character of Ohio. It's different from the character of Florida, Texas, all beautiful in their own way. But you need leaders in the household at the level of the state and at the level of the nation who revive your confidence in who you really are.

00:35:10:05 - 00:35:27:18
Unknown
So I'm doing that for Ohio in the next step, and I hope that's our contribution to also doing it for America. Right. Reviving Donald Trump's doing his part is the leader of the country. We got to revive our sense of conviction in America and Texas, in Ohio, in all of it. And I hope California, for that matter, gets a great governor who not to turn that state around.

00:35:27:18 - 00:35:42:00
Unknown
I'm rooting for it. Needs it. Yeah. What is your what is your thought on so Trump right now making some quick moves as he's been in office. What is your take on the tariffs. Look I think the number one thing that Donald Trump has done to give first of all is just take stock of the first few things.

00:35:42:00 - 00:36:00:04
Unknown
Yeah. Is reviving a culture of meritocracy in all domains. We talked about that. That's a core American ideal. How will you revive that. Well take the D agenda out of the fact that he put he pulled. It is an amazing job. We've had this fixation on quotas from our military to our leadership. He said, no, we're not doing that.

00:36:00:05 - 00:36:21:11
Unknown
We're hiring based on merit. So the D regime, peak D is now behind us. Thanks a dollar. So good. Federal contractors had to comply with a lot of these racial and gender quota systems. No longer. Meritocracy is the way of American culture. I think what is what is aiming to do to the regulatory state is a beautiful thing to watch, because most of the laws write the laws.

00:36:21:11 - 00:36:41:20
Unknown
I use that in air quotes that bind people and tell people, this is what you can and cannot do in your daily life. Those aren't really laws in America. The rules. The rules written by fiat, by three letter agency bureaucrats who are never elected to their position and cannot be removed by the electorate and can't even be removed by the congressmen or the senators who we elect.

00:36:41:20 - 00:36:58:02
Unknown
That's really a perversion of what the Founding Fathers fought a revolution for, which is the idea that we, the people, select our elected representatives, and when they don't do a good job, we get to vote them out. Well, if somebody binds you through the stroke of a pen and you didn't elect him and you can't vote him out, that's not a law.

00:36:58:02 - 00:37:19:09
Unknown
That's an edict. Okay? That was the stuff of the American Revolution. So now Trump is bringing back in, in, in a lot of good ways that 1776 spirit of self-governance, of accountability, of meritocracy. Those are, I think, some of the best wins that he's delivered in a very short amount of time. Yup. Moving quickly in in some ways, that's a model for the way I'm going to come to Ohio.

00:37:19:09 - 00:37:40:07
Unknown
The speed that he's moved with, I think, sets the standard for hopefully even even a hurdle rate for the speed we're going to bring to the state of Ohio to just move quickly and zero out the income tax, cut excess spending in our own state, put a ceiling on property taxes, get rid of red tape, government overregulation. You want one more regulation in Ohio?

00:37:40:07 - 00:37:58:28
Unknown
I'm going to require you rescind at least ten others. Stand for law enforcement light of fire in a good way under the feet of our educational system. Drive achievement. Pay teachers in many ways tied to performance. Get the cell phones out of the schools. Bring back physical education at a young age. Civic education with the civics test as a condition for graduation.

00:37:59:01 - 00:38:14:11
Unknown
We got to move so fast in the state. You know, in some ways the opposition, they're not going to want to hit them, but it's going to be a good way because it's going to lift up even their kids. And that's what I like about Donald Trump is he's a businessman. He's a guy who isn't constrained by the historical stuffed suit norms of yesterday's politicians.

00:38:14:12 - 00:38:36:25
Unknown
Yeah, I think we can use a dose of that here in Ohio. And that's that's the spirit. Policies are state specific policies, different policies. But the spirit of moving fast and with energy, that's what I want to bring here for being relatively young. Right. You've built an incredible business. I would call it, track record Empire. I mean, you're up in the billion dollar net worth range.

00:38:37:04 - 00:38:59:09
Unknown
So you've done something so well, and you've scaled so quick at a relatively young age. We have a lot of entrepreneurs that are on this podcast that are thinking, hey, how do I scale? Like, what is the path to be able to create so much success so fast? So what would you say is attributed to the level of success that you've been able to, it's a good question.

00:38:59:09 - 00:39:17:01
Unknown
I mean, I've got I've started four successful companies. The fifth one that's much younger. It's hopefully going to be successful too. But for companies that are fast growing across different sectors, I think that, you know, look, I mean, I'm not sure you have successful CEOs and entrepreneurs listening to this. So I'm going to give you my advice. Yeah.

00:39:17:01 - 00:39:32:20
Unknown
It's great. You know, so we're looking for what can I set. What you've done is fairly unique. So you're not a I'm a I'm I'm my particular favorite stage of starting the company is the first few years of getting it off the ground. Yeah. We're setting the vision. Here's my advice. If the pack is running one way, make sure you run it in a different way, okay?

00:39:32:20 - 00:39:47:06
Unknown
You got to be contrarian and you have to be right. And those two things are intention is usually if it's right, everybody else is already doing it. If it's contrarian means you're probably heading in the wrong direction. On the flip side, there's no prize in being right if you're going the same direction as the pack because you're going to be out competed.

00:39:47:09 - 00:40:02:19
Unknown
So you're swinging big, then is what I'm here. You're not you're not okay. You got to go. You got to go where others aren't running. And you got to have conviction in why. You're right. Yeah. And then five years in it'll look like oh is obvious. Everybody else sort of obviously been doing this. So that's been my experience in every one of the businesses I started.

00:40:02:25 - 00:40:19:25
Unknown
Take that first business about in-licensing drugs from pharma companies that had decided they were getting out of it five years in after we had it's a multibillion dollar company. Five of the medicines we'd worked on are FDA approved, helping patients in a wide range of domains. Now, there's other copycat companies that came up and started doing the same thing.

00:40:19:25 - 00:40:39:02
Unknown
And so yeah, obviously there's there's a marketplace for these assets. Well, that wasn't the way they looked at it when I started that business, when it was really contrarian. Took a lot of arrows for it. But you're stronger on the other side. Business I found it called strive. Strive is an asset management in a financial services firm that pushed back on what was called the ESG movement.

00:40:39:02 - 00:41:02:22
Unknown
You're familiar with environmental, social and governance factors. We have corporate boardrooms making decisions, Dei quotas, climate change, emissions caps, using shareholder money to do it because large asset managers like Blackrock and Vanguard and State Street were amassing the money of everyday citizens and voting for those policies in corporate boardrooms of public companies. It looked like the cake was baked.

00:41:02:24 - 00:41:21:23
Unknown
When I started strive, which is a financial firm that said, whatever novel idea here, we're not going to promote left wing or any social values using your capital. We're going to promote value maximization. What maximizes value? That's how we're going to vote your shares at that time. I kid you not. People said there's no way you're running against the current.

00:41:21:26 - 00:41:41:12
Unknown
This cake is already baked. You're not going to be able to get any traction. ESG is the future. You can shape how we do ESG, but ESG is the future. That's the most. If you want to shape it differently, fine. Explain ESG real quick for people that aren't. Yeah, yeah, I briefly I mean, I wrote a couple books about this guys takes a longer explanation, but ESG cause environmental social governance factors.

00:41:41:12 - 00:42:03:06
Unknown
It was the idea that you use capital to drive social change. Use capital. It was in this case left wing progressive social change that you want to stave off climate change. We have to have capital owners that force business leaders to adopt climate change emissions caps in their business. You want to fix social justice, you got to adopt racial and gender quota systems.

00:42:03:09 - 00:42:42:28
Unknown
Those are values that most Americans don't actually believe when. But you're using their money to do it because they're invested in the stock market through index funds, through mutual funds. And those fund managers, those index fund managers, like I'll use Blackrock as an example, which did this for years and still continues to in some way. They vote those shares your money using it to buy shares in the largest corporate boardrooms, corporate, you know, publicly traded companies to vote the shares to tell those boards to adopt racial equity quotas, racial equity audits, climate change emissions caps that most of those capital owners, probably the people watching this program, don't actually support, but their money is being

00:42:42:28 - 00:43:04:09
Unknown
used often without their knowledge, to vote for those progressive social values that have no place in corporate America's boardrooms. And so what we created with stripe was a competitor. It was contrarian. It ran against the current. And strive became, in its first two years, one of the fastest growing new index fund managers, ETF managers that had been launched in that sector.

00:43:04:12 - 00:43:25:19
Unknown
There's another business that I started called chapter, that helped elders make better choices with respect to what Medicare plans are actually best for them, rather than the ones that were automatically served up using data to do it. There's another business I started recently for a therapy that was approved in in Europe, in other countries that wasn't approved in the US due to some barriers that, frankly, we had to overcome.

00:43:25:22 - 00:43:43:05
Unknown
So those are examples of where when the pack runs in one direction, you go in another, okay, you do that. That's what that's what gives you a long term success. What does that mean? Sometimes you're going to fail. Yes. The nature of being contrarian is sometimes, and even in the short run, you got to be. In the short run, things could be difficult.

00:43:43:08 - 00:43:59:15
Unknown
You may not find investors willing to back. If you're really that contrarian, fine. You don't have enough conviction to be able to build a great team, to really explain that vision to people, to bring together a group of like minded people who are capable. That's what led you to success over the long run. The second formula for success.

00:43:59:15 - 00:44:21:12
Unknown
And I strive myself to be better at this every day, because every one of us has room for improvement, is to surround yourself with people who aren't just great people, right? You say that, okay, we want to start with great people. As an entrepreneur, you can fall into the trap. If you're vague about that standard, about the standards you use, it allows you to slip a little bit.

00:44:21:15 - 00:44:38:06
Unknown
You got to hire people who are not just, you know, what you tell yourself are great people. You got to hire people around you who are better than you at what you've hired them to do. It's your job as a leader, the thing you're better than everybody else that is leading the full organization, set in a vision and picking people.

00:44:38:08 - 00:45:00:18
Unknown
But if you're not picking somebody who's better than you at the domain you've hired for, which is, say, as an engineer or somebody who's responsible for a computer program or somebody who's responsible for product design, or somebody who's responsible for sales or marketing or distribution. If they're not better than you at their domain, then that means that you're not really set up to scale, which is what your question was.

00:45:00:26 - 00:45:14:27
Unknown
So that's the question to scale. First step is as an entrepreneur, you're on the right path. Be contrarian, be right to scale. You're not going to scale unless the person you've put in that seat is better than you to do it. And here's something I got to get even better. I've learned over time. I got to get better at.

00:45:15:04 - 00:45:34:01
Unknown
I've gotten better over the years, is when somebody is in that position who doesn't meet that standard, you got to make a change. And I think that there's all kinds of internal barriers where it will seem like that's not the smart thing to do. Yeah, be smart about it. Can be respectful about it. It's actually the respectful thing to do, even for the person in that position.

00:45:34:01 - 00:45:53:12
Unknown
They're not set up for success. Yeah, yeah. My my perspective on that is if we have somebody that's in the wrong seat and it's not the right person, we're doing them a disservice by keeping them in that seat because that person could have left and started their career a new career. Yeah. In their desk. Yeah. And now you're holding them in the spot where you need them.

00:45:53:12 - 00:46:10:27
Unknown
Yeah. And so now we're delaying. So it's actually I'd say it's ineffective and unfair. Not unfair. But no it's not compassion. It's cruelty. Yeah. Certain for. Yeah. Yeah. So not letting the person go that's not the right fit is a form of cruelty. Yeah. Right. Beautiful. Makes you feel better. But it's not even better for you. It's. It's better for no one.

00:46:10:27 - 00:46:26:21
Unknown
So. Yeah, those are be some of my pieces of advice. If you're going to ask me for them, what would you, And. Yeah, what I definitely want to ask you for. You've built something incredible. I mean, right, you're out. You're out running for governor, yet you have these companies that are successful and killing it. So you've done something significantly.

00:46:26:21 - 00:46:44:22
Unknown
Thank you. You've done it right. That's one of the things that I think has allowed me to create the success that I've created was, just having great mentors and people around me that I can gain some insight from, people that are doing it. Right. Good. What's the biggest. Threat to America's freedom and our future as a nation?

00:46:44:22 - 00:47:03:29
Unknown
Would you say there's a lot of threats you could look at outside? You could think about many did. You could be temptation to talk about China. And I do think that our reliance on China is a long run threat to the future of the country. You know, I think that we shouldn't have dependance on adversary for our own military industrial base for semiconductors.

00:47:03:29 - 00:47:24:18
Unknown
The power of defense departments would go in that direction. But, but I actually think it's not the greatest threat. I think the greatest threat is the loss of our own identity here at home. That's I think the greatest threat is our loss of conviction in America, within America. That's actually the potential greatest threat. Unless we rectify it.

00:47:24:26 - 00:47:53:21
Unknown
We got to make sure that the people who are the young people who are raising in our country know, understand and embody the values represented in that flag, the values that our founding Fathers fought for 250 years ago. We got to revive that sense of American spirit. Once we lose that, that, you know, we're just like any other ordinary nation that I think is the greatest threat is the loss of appreciation and embrace of the ideals that made this country great.

00:47:53:24 - 00:48:16:18
Unknown
We fix that. The rest of our problems are easy. If we revive our shared American identity, rest of our problems, economy, the border, or even military that's solvable. Those are each individual symptoms of a deeper loss of purpose and identity in America. Solve that problem. The rest is easy. What is, reverse racism? Reverse racism is racism. Reverse racism is racism.

00:48:16:20 - 00:48:35:25
Unknown
Reverse racism. What would you decline? I mean, usually historically, racism is described as the people of a certain race, maybe the white race just going against people of a different race, nonwhite race. Racism in reverse is to be racist against white people or Asian or whatever it any, any direction in the future, 300 years from now, it might look different.

00:48:35:28 - 00:49:01:25
Unknown
Reverse whatever you think of as reverse racism racism to correct some historical injustice is still form of racism the best antidote to racism? Right? The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. To quote in that case with Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who said in a famous case a couple decades ago, I stand by that, stop discriminating on the basis of race.

00:49:01:27 - 00:49:17:21
Unknown
And it's different. I mean, some people watch this would say, okay, well, that's obvious. What? Why is he saying such obvious things? And that's a good that's a good point. I, I hope these are obvious things in America. But if you read Abraham Kendi, I'm going to, I'm going to quote it approximately, if not exactly, you know, his book.

00:49:17:21 - 00:49:36:27
Unknown
He has a different view, I believe when I read, I read the best articulated viewpoints from the other side, not because I agree with him, but I prefer to read things I disagree with, too, because you don't really understand what you believe unless you can offer the articulation of the other side. What he says in his book is, you know, I think I quoted exactly.

00:49:36:27 - 00:49:56:21
Unknown
I think it says the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. It's almost an exact quote, if not an exact quote from his book, A Different View. Right? So if you say what I'm saying is obvious, I'm just telling you there's an alternative view that says the way you rectify a past injustice.

00:49:56:21 - 00:50:20:03
Unknown
In my view, what I would call is a present injustice. Two wrongs don't make a right. Now let's let's just draw to dig a layer deeper than the surface level, you know, discussion for maybe folks like us who might agree with each other, what would the counterargument be? Well, there is racism left in America. Right? There are there are people who are completely immune from invidious racism in America.

00:50:20:05 - 00:50:38:07
Unknown
How are you going to correct for that? Here's my answer to that question is, yeah. I mean, is there some vestiges of invidious racism in America? Sure. Is it what it was in 1860? No, it's not okay. And at a certain point in a national history, was there a time and place for reparation in America? There was back in 1870.

00:50:38:10 - 00:51:04:18
Unknown
There was back in the reconstruction era. Did we get everything right back then? I'm not saying we got it perfectly. I don't think we did. But at a certain point in time, when the last burning embers of racism are slowly burning away, the last thing you want to do is throw kerosene on it. And that's what I think this new culture of reverse racism actually does, versus at a certain point, you just let it atrophy to irrelevance, right?

00:51:04:18 - 00:51:21:25
Unknown
That's actually the right way. At a certain point in time, it's like you use a biological analogy when you've mostly cleared the virus, right? You don't your immune system, if it goes on hyperdrive forever, even after the virus is long gone, it starts to eat its own organs, right? It starts to destroy the host, destroy the body itself.

00:51:21:27 - 00:51:51:24
Unknown
When it's almost cleared, you got to just let it play out on its own. At a certain point in time, when you get below the level of detection. Here's a scientific analogy. You got to let it atrophy to irrelevance. And that's, I think, the stage in our national history we're at right now. The risk I see is that as those final, final burning embers of racism are burning away, and then you tell people, no, no, no, I'm going to take away something for you based on your race, whether it's a seat in college or whether it's a job opportunity that will actually create, then a more reactionary wave of backlash, racism of not just the

00:51:51:24 - 00:52:08:10
Unknown
anti-white or anti-Asian racism, affirmative action, but you might see a wave then of anti-Black racism in response, because there's no better way to create racial animus than to take something of value away from someone based on the color of their skin. So that's what I'm worried about. That would be my response to Ibram Kendi or someone on the other side.

00:52:08:29 - 00:52:24:06
Unknown
And that's one of the things I'm going to try to do in the way I lead our state, and we set a standard for our country, is that I don't want to win by, you know, just owning the libs. Right. I mean that's easy to do. We can do the slapstick you know, social media you know Twitter trending thing.

00:52:24:06 - 00:52:47:01
Unknown
Right. Yeah. That's the easy part. Okay. What I'd like to do is to lead not just by, you know, tickling the other side. That's easy. We have too much of that. Today's politics. I want to do it by. We're never going to bring all of them along. But I think we can bring some of them along. Actually, if you show up, most human beings, by our nature, we're reasonable.

00:52:47:01 - 00:53:04:26
Unknown
If you explain it to people why you believe what you do. On that note, that's what I want to see happen. Articulate man is a dangerous man. Can be something that I. Yeah, a dangerous man in a part like it could steer positive or negative. Could be both. It could be. Your ability to articulate an idea is incredibly powerful.

00:53:04:26 - 00:53:24:19
Unknown
Right. And so you're a pretty articulate man. And so yeah I agree. We can bring people to the other side. Yeah. If there's thoughtfulness care and effective articulation. Right. So here's I'm going to lay out for you here's what success and failure look like for the next step of the conservative movement. Okay. Along what what success looks like is what we just talked about.

00:53:24:21 - 00:53:51:08
Unknown
We're laying out why we're doing what we're doing. We're uncompromising in our principles. We don't reach consensus through compromise on principle. We reach consensus through generous, empathetic explanation of why we are doing what we do. That's what true success looks like. Uncompromising on your principles, but being amicable in the way that we're actually able to discuss, even with those who disagree with us, why we're doing what we're doing, we'll bring some some fraction of them along.

00:53:51:15 - 00:54:11:25
Unknown
That's success. Here's a look. Here's what one version of failure looks like. There's some concern about it, but I'm going to we're here as leaders to make sure this doesn't happen. But left unaided in the social media influenced modern world that we live in. You know, part of what's happened is social media was created imitate real life. What really was started to happen is real life is now starting to imitate social media.

00:54:11:25 - 00:54:35:06
Unknown
Okay, here's what failure could look like. And we got to make sure this doesn't happen. But I don't want to see happen is that we become so addicted to a pattern recognition in last ten years. Let's say we did something that really pisses off the left 95% of the time. That means you're doing the right thing, right? So that's this wouldn't last last ten years, last 20 years in the country of look like.

00:54:35:09 - 00:54:56:11
Unknown
But that creates a muscle memory. And what I don't want to have happen is that then our goal is whatever we do, the goal is actually to piss off the left as opposed to get the actual thing done. And that's a trap I think we may risk falling into. So I want to make sure that our focus on actually getting the actual thing done, and if it's going to alienate some people, that's we're not going to let that stop us.

00:54:56:11 - 00:55:13:08
Unknown
But at our best, we're going to bring some of them along. And if that doesn't happen, doesn't happen. We're still going to do the actual thing. But whether it is, you know, we want to steal the southern border, we want to deport illegal immigrants who entered this country illegally. We want to bring prices down for consumers. We want to drive economic growth in the country.

00:55:13:15 - 00:55:31:21
Unknown
We want to restore meritocracy in the country by making sure the best person is getting hired. That's a mandate for common sense. And that's what made Donald Trump such a great leader in our moment, winning with such a decisive mandate last year. That's why I endorsed him. It's why I'm proud to have his support. That's what I want to see happen at the national level and at the state level.

00:55:31:24 - 00:55:48:16
Unknown
But when I think about Ohio and the way I want to lead, the way I'm going to do it is by making sure the goal isn't to just piss off the other side. Far from it. The goal is to actually get the thing done, and we got to make sure we don't fall into the social media trap, is what I call it along the way, and I think it's going to take real effort to do.

00:55:48:16 - 00:56:06:09
Unknown
Yeah. As a, as a Christian, my, right, as a follower of Jesus, I look at Jesus and the way he influenced people. And so he wasn't antagonizing people, right? He was showing up empathetically, but he showed up with truth, and he showed up with a spine. And he was strong. He was strong. He was very strong.

00:56:06:09 - 00:56:23:06
Unknown
He wasn't going to compromise on his values. So like what you shared right there, right? He was unwilling to compromise on his values, but he wasn't antagonizing and right and making them wrong and trying to prove something wrong. He was he was taking a stand for what was right and trying to get people to come run with him and come alongside of him.

00:56:23:07 - 00:56:44:22
Unknown
So even I think that's where the conservatives can get it wrong sometimes. All right. That's where the faith in remembering, you know, even stick once a week of his church and Sunday that reminds you, you know, in grounding yourself of what the standard is that we allow to hold ourselves to. Yeah. It's like if you make an axis, it could be stronger, you can weak be weak, or you can be cold and you can be warm, right?

00:56:44:22 - 00:57:01:00
Unknown
You know, Biden at his peak might have been yeah, he's a affable guy that might have been weak and warm. Yeah. You know, Kamala might have been weak and cold. And I think for us in our movement, we have a choice. We're strong as leaders. That's what we want at the top. Okay. And this is I'm not talking about anybody else but myself.

00:57:01:00 - 00:57:20:10
Unknown
And the standard I want to hold myself to is we're going to be strong in leading Ohio. But I don't want to be strong and cold. Yeah, we want to be strong and warm as we do this, because I think that actually allows us to be more successful. It actually allows us to get more done. It actually allows us to stand even more strongly for our principles.

00:57:20:12 - 00:57:41:10
Unknown
You're right. I mean, Jesus Christ is a great inspiration, his teachings in that way. And I think that every part is resonating. I mean, the great greatest leaders in history, there are few and far between in generations. That's a rare quadrant to fill of both being strong. You can be weak and warm. A lot of people are weak, and warm and warm is easy because you could just be a spine made a jelly and and you don't really have conviction in your principle.

00:57:41:10 - 00:58:02:13
Unknown
You can be warm while you're at it. That part's easy. Yeah, but being strong while remaining warm, I think is a much tougher thing to do. And I, and I do think that we live in a moment in our history that demands the strong, warm leaders who will lead our country and, in our case, lead our state to the next heights that we hope to reach as we start to, close out.

00:58:02:13 - 00:58:10:13
Unknown
What's one shift that you think politically, conservatives need to make?

00:58:11:03 - 00:58:27:23
Unknown
Well, I mean, it's, you know, I mean, I believe we're on the right side of this, but I would say, how do we heighten? How do we level up our game a little bit is the way I would talk about this is I think we have to more openly be the party that rejects victimhood. I don't forward open look like yeah, yeah.

00:58:27:23 - 00:58:54:00
Unknown
I mean, I think that I think that we, we can't imitate the methods of the left to defeat the left. Okay. And so while they cry based on race, gender, sexual orientation and their hierarchy, we can't fall into the trap of the nebulous they, whoever that is, did you know, did this to us and were victims? No. There are some policy errors in the past and we're going to correct them.

00:58:54:00 - 00:59:14:20
Unknown
But to see ourselves and our fate submitted to what somebody else did to us. No, reject that frame. We're going to we're going to be the authors of our destiny. That's where I want to see us level up as a conservative movement. That's a whole separate, multi-hour discussion for another day. If we want to go into, you know, where we think about that as it affects policy.

00:59:14:22 - 00:59:37:14
Unknown
But, you know, I want to generally use the three letter regulatory agencies to achieve our conservative goals, the conservative goals, dismantle that regulatory state, which has been overreaching in the first place. We have a major problem of illegal immigration in the country. Absolutely seal that border. Do it with pride. But to be able to look at some of the other policies that we look at for the next ten, 20 years, implement the policies, embrace empowerment.

00:59:37:14 - 00:59:55:01
Unknown
Right. How do you actually allow every American to live the true American dream? That's what we should stand for. Rather than ever falling into the trap of our own version of left wing style whining. I don't want to see that in our movement. What is, what's what's one thing that most people don't know about you?

00:59:55:04 - 01:00:13:15
Unknown
Well, I've been pretty open book for the last few years. I've read that, if you were to open up a lot of these so that people still don't know about me. Yeah. I'm really into fitness, actually. You know, that's what I saw. The gym. The gym. Right. We built that. We we we use a significant portion of our house.

01:00:13:15 - 01:00:26:18
Unknown
The square footage is spent on on a gym. Yeah. And I think it's because of what you said earlier. I think that you have to be physically healthy. Why is that important to you? Why is that important to you? I think it, gives me I have some of my best thoughts right when I'm down in the gym.

01:00:26:18 - 01:00:39:27
Unknown
So sometimes I'll be in the gym for, you know, 2 or 3 hours at a time. But it's not because I'm like, you know, fully working out. I'll take some time because you get your blood flow and you get your mental juices flowing. So I have my some of my best ideas as well. That in the shower. Yeah, that's for sure.

01:00:39:27 - 01:00:59:18
Unknown
Exactly, exactly. Or you know, you gotta find your spaces that allow you to, to, you know, be to become the best version of yourself. And so, yeah, we run a pretty busy schedule, but I was, you know, practicing with the coaches of the Ohio State men's tennis team before I came here. You know, I got a trainer who's going to be coming here at 12:00, and he and I'll be working out just twice a day during that otherwise busy day.

01:00:59:18 - 01:01:15:08
Unknown
And we'll be at a Lincoln Day dinner where I'm speaking in a different part of the state tonight with a bunch of meetings in between. So I think that, you know, we keep that as busy as schedules one can keep. But to carve out the time for for physical and mental fitness is is pretty important to me, actually.

01:01:15:19 - 01:01:30:18
Unknown
And to the extent that we're able to set that example for our kids, my wife is wired the same way, by the way, it's really important to her as well. And yeah, I think that that's kind of one of the things in our family routine that people may not be aware of, but it's pretty important to the way we run our lives.

01:01:30:18 - 01:01:57:18
Unknown
Final question. We talked about our mission with strengthening, strengthening man, right, bringing strong, godly man and having them lead, lead well, from your perspective, is one thing that the men that are listening and women that are listening, but men specifically that are listening, this podcast, what is one way that you feel that they could step into the next level of their strength, of their power, right to with the aim to lead?

01:01:57:18 - 01:02:22:12
Unknown
Well, because I believe that the true the masculine ity what what real masculinity is, it is a focus on responsibility and the burden of leading themselves, their families and the communities. Well, it's protecting, providing and protecting. So that's a that's masculinity at its core. And a lot of people say, oh, there's toxic masculinity. So my belief is there's no such thing as toxic masculinity because God created masculinity.

01:02:22:12 - 01:02:54:04
Unknown
So we're we're designed. So if it's toxic, it's not masculinity. Sure. So masculinity in and of itself is the desire of a man to go provide and protect those around. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So you know, and I say this not just obviously as a proud man and father myself, but a father of two sons. Yeah. Okay. So young boys growing up, you think about a culture that certainly for the last 20, 30 years is to our boys to, you know, shut up, sit down, do as they're told effectively and to, to, you know, make it seem like there's something wrong or to make it seem like, almost like it's a disorder.

01:02:54:04 - 01:03:15:03
Unknown
If a boy being a boy growing up with the energy or whatever they bring to the classroom, I don't think it's been good that being said, how do we move forward? You know, my own view is. True masculinity at its core isn't reactionary masculinity, right? It's not even viewing the responsibility as a burden to you and the responsibility is honor and liberating.

01:03:15:08 - 01:03:33:19
Unknown
Right. And so, yes, you have the responsibility, leadership of your family. If you're leading a business, of your business, of the people in your community that rests on your shoulders as a man, that's so true. Masculinity is about, I would say, don't view it as a burden. I view that as a source of liberation, view that as an honor, view that as dignity.

01:03:33:21 - 01:03:48:00
Unknown
And I think that to me, that's actually empowering. Rather than viewing that as a burden on my shoulders. Yeah. It's almost like, you know, it's like to draw the fitness analogy, you know, you pop out the shoulder press, right? It's not like it made you feel good afterwards, right? Yeah. You feel the burn, but it's a good burn.

01:03:48:00 - 01:04:04:04
Unknown
It's liberating. It actually makes you makes you feel fuller of life and energy. That's the way I view that responsibility. And so when you're picking up your kids or you're taking care of something in, you know, in the house, now, I would also say that that's that's the greatest joy I have is the time that I have with my two boys.

01:04:04:04 - 01:04:27:15
Unknown
We set aside time for that. And very practical piece of advice for busy business leaders or CEOs when possible. It's not always possible. When possible, even if it's 12:00, even if it's 1:00 Am, as many nights you put that head on the home pillow as possible, wake up the next morning even see it was ten minutes. See the kids off to school.

01:04:27:18 - 01:04:46:08
Unknown
That difference is everything versus say okay, it's maybe midday. I'll take the night at the hotel and you got to know we got a balance. Sometimes you need that night to sleep. But there was that extra flight, that extra drive to come home. It's so worth it because that energy you get that that's true. I think that's a true form of masculinity being present as well.

01:04:46:08 - 01:05:04:26
Unknown
Yeah. For your kids, because they're counting on you, especially your sons are counting on you. And, you know, that's the best advice I could give. Well, I appreciate your time. And I know you have a crazy schedule, so this is a fantastic conversation. A lot of good nuggets inside of it. And I think we should, bust out with a quick game of ping pong.

01:05:04:26 - 01:05:17:13
Unknown
Let's do it, man. Yeah. That's awesome. Russ, let's do it. Reset. I'm looking forward to it. All right, you got it. You got a paddle? Yeah, sure. It's fine. It's a number two. It's here. It is here. This year. I'm going to give it all I got. Here it is. All right. Yeah, yeah. There's no warm up.

01:05:17:13 - 01:05:39:09
Unknown
And then we played a seven. How's that? Okay, let's do it. Let's find it. Where's the balls? You see, I don't do as much pickleball. I'm a, Oh. This guy. Yeah, yeah. Tennis people don't look at them. They don't. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I play growing up, but, we kind of have a little bit, a little bit of, regret, you know, tennis courts converted to pickleball, the pickleball ization of America, as I call it.

01:05:39:09 - 01:05:56:19
Unknown
Yeah. It's, it's good. It's a real thing. Yeah. We just finished building ours at our property. Oh, really? Yeah. We're in Texas. Yeah. Pickleball courts. Yeah. Good for you, man. Yeah. 16 acres out there. Oh, good for you. It's good to have some space. Sure. Okay. He's got some skill. I can see this guy a little bit.

01:05:56:19 - 01:06:23:24
Unknown
Take a couple of warmups to. Gonna start, okay? And do 11. Think 11. Sure. We can talk about at the 2 or 2 stars each. Go to 11. Okay. And it only publishes if I win. That's the idea. That's our deal. Okay, here we go. Let's go, let's go, let's do this. Oh. I'm. Okay. Are we count off points?

01:06:23:24 - 01:06:28:28
Unknown
Yeah. Okay.

01:06:29:01 - 01:06:46:12
Unknown
What a beautiful set of, All right. Two. Oh, yeah. So we'll go faster than I thought. No, I don't know about that. Actually. Have a ping pong table at my house, but it's not utilized. Oh, yeah, you got to shake that off. I do, that's what I'm working on. Three. Oh. Oh, man. Okay, so what is it?

01:06:46:15 - 01:07:11:22
Unknown
313131. You're sure? Yeah. No no no no, we're going to eat. Chair, sir. Two 8 to 11. He's got the, oh one. Oh, so I got it. I got to hit two. Yeah, I got it. All right. I understand, all right, baby, come on. Okay. Five one. Hey, I was on your side.

01:07:11:22 - 01:07:34:10
Unknown
Bounce on your side. You win that pointer today. I don't know that was here. Okay, so five one. Yep. Five two. Your boy play at all? They're a little young girl. Yeah, yeah. How old are they again? Five and two. Okay. Yeah. Not tall enough. Yeah. That's a little. Yeah, yeah. My boys are actually much better than I am.

01:07:34:13 - 01:07:45:12
Unknown
Dude, I'm getting worked. Oh that's right. So everything I actually thought I was gonna do, you guys, you got a good 37.

01:07:45:14 - 01:08:06:06
Unknown
It's the paddle. Yeah. Hey, muscle. It is it. I had the home court advantage to. I got the home court advantage. Come on. I, I shot. Here we go. Here, sir. You're you're you're you're I got, you're short for some.

01:08:06:09 - 01:08:20:07
Unknown
Fake for, There we go. There we go. All right. Little action there. All right. Hey, five.

01:08:20:10 - 01:08:47:09
Unknown
Five, nine. Okay, let's get close. I'm getting. Oh, nice shot to come back. Here it is. It's nine. All right, there we go. Okay. Nine. Seven. I'm. I'm, ten seven. All right. I'm.

01:08:47:11 - 01:08:55:11
Unknown
Okay. Hey. Ten.

01:08:56:21 - 01:09:01:20
Unknown
Good game. Good. Good game. That was fun. One. Yeah. What do you got to come back and do more?