Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Wed, 25 Sep 2024
Vivek Ramaswamy is a conservative politician, entrepreneur, and author of many books on politics, including his latest titled Truths: The Future of America First. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep445-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/vivek-ramaswamy-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Truths (new book): https://amzn.to/3XPgZJF Vivek's X: https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy Vivek's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@VivekGRamaswamy Vivek's Instagram: https://instagram.com/vivekgramaswamy Vivek's Facebook: https://facebook.com/VivekGRamaswamy Vivek's Rumble: https://rumble.com/VivekRamaswamy Vivek's LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4e5g0uv Vivek's other books: Woke, Inc.: https://amzn.to/4eqiDqs Nation of Victims: https://amzn.to/3Tu4259 Capitalist Punishment: https://amzn.to/3XOwi5c SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Saily: An eSIM for international travel. Go to https://saily.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex Ground News: Unbiased news source. Go to https://groundnews.com/lex Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (12:50) - Conservatism (16:06) - Progressivism (21:41) - DEI (26:33) - Bureaucracy (33:25) - Government efficiency (48:34) - Education (1:02:59) - Military Industrial Complex (1:25:18) - Illegal immigration (1:46:53) - Donald Trump (2:08:18) - War in Ukraine (2:19:31) - China (2:30:42) - Will Vivek run in 2028? (2:42:21) - Approach to debates PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths, The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican party.
Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
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All right, this episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P, help. Have you seen the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's a good movie. I really should read the book. I haven't read the book. I really want to read the book. But I think there's something also magical about the performances in the movie, just pure genius.
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tech jobs but i just mean uh manual labor jobs just people with their eyes their hands their feet their whole way of being shows aware and tear shows the journey sort of well-lived and hard-lived i like those people and i really want to talk to those people on a podcast but more than anything forget the mics i just like talking to them just as a one human to another
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I just recently did an episode on the history of Marxism. And what really struck me is that the 19th century was a battleground of radical ideas. And I think it's popular in modern political discourse to label, frankly, moderate ideas as radical. Sort of, in our rhetoric, radicalize the rhetoric and push towards the moderate, our actual policies and ideas.
And it's interesting to look back at the 19th century, the industrialized world that doesn't have enough data on what large-scale implementation of ideas would actually look like. It's interesting to see those ideas battle each other out in their most radical form.
So that really opened up my eyes to sort of honestly embody and consider and walk a mile in the shoes of a particular idea, whether that's communism or capitalism. Because capitalism does have flaws. But it is the thing that has given us much of the improved quality of life that we see around us today.
I think it's a fascinating, complex question of why does a large collection of humans, when free to compete, do a pretty good job? It's fascinating. And that's every time I talk about NetSuite, that's what I'm thinking about.
How does a large collection of humans, different departments, different tasks, how do they all collaborate efficiently, effectively, under the deadlines, under the stress, under the shadow of the reality that if the business does not sell a lot of stuff and make a lot of money, it's going to fail, and all those people will lose their jobs. It's stressful and it's beautiful.
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The point is to see every side of every story and you, you the listener, come to your own conclusion. This is one of the problems I have with people that are against platforming certain voices. I believe in the intelligence of the listener to decipher the truth. And sometimes that doesn't come immediately. Sometimes that comes over time.
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And existing in that superposition of truths, try to figure out where in that gray area is your own understanding of the path forward. Because unlike what politicians claim, I don't think there's a right understanding. or an easy or a clear answer for the problems that we face as a human civilization.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vivek Ramaswamy. you are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas so you're the perfect person to ask what is conservatism what's your let's say conservative vision for america well actually this is
One of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and direction of the conservative movement is that we've gotten so good at describing what we're against. There's a list of things that we could rail against woke ism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVID ism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on.
But actually, what's missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the purpose of my campaign, because I do feel that that's why we didn't have the red wave in 2022. So they tried to blame Donald Trump.
They tried to blame abortion. They blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn't have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for. So what do we stand for as conservatives? Right. Right.
free speech and open debate, not just as some sort of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the United States of America. Self-governance, and this is a big one right now, is that the people we elect to run the government, they're no longer the ones who actually run the government.
We in the conservative movement, I believe, should believe in restoring self-governance where it's not bureaucrats running the show, but actually elected representatives. And then the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive and I think is a north star of the conservative movement is restoring the rule of law in this country.
You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border. It's particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. You and I actually share a couple of aspects in common in that regard. That also, though, means your first act of entering this country can't break the law.
So there's some policy commitments and principles, merit, free speech, self-governance, rule of law. And then I think culturally, what does it mean to be a conservative? Is it means we believe in the anchors of our identity, right? In truth, the value of the individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision.
And that's a big part of what's been missing. And it's a big part of not just through the campaign, but through a lot of my future advocacy. That's the vacuum I'm aiming to fill.
Yeah, we'll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you've spoken about a lot. But you've also had a lot of really tense debates. So you're a perfect person to ask to steel man the other side. Yeah. So let me ask you about progressivism. Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left wing ideas?
Yeah. So look, I think the strongest case, particularly for left wing ideas in the United States or in the American context. is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its ideals. such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to last to this day.
The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history isn't that long ago, and that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those imbalances in power in the United States. That's the core view of the modern left. I'm not criticizing it right now. I'm steelmanning it. I'm trying to
give you, I think, a good articulation of why the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping in to correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my counter rebuttal of that. But the best statement of the left, I think that it's the fact that we've been imperfect and living up to those ideals.
In order to fix that, we're going to have to take steps that are severe steps if needed to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of opportunity in this country. That's the case for the left wing view in modern America. So what's your criticism of that?
So my concern with it is even if that's well motivated, I think that it recreates many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I'll give you a really tangible example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would say something like this right now, but I think it's true. So I'm going to say it.
I'm actually, even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing actually a rise in anti-black and anti-minority racism in this country, which is a little curious.
Right when, over the last 10 years, we got as close to Martin Luther King's promised land as you could envision, a place where you have every American, regardless of their skin color, able to vote without obstruction, a place where you have people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way. Why are we seeing that resurgence
In part, it's because of, I believe, that left-wing obsession with racial equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. And so when you take something away from someone based on their skin color – and that's what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do. The left-wing views are to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you're a white, straight, cis man –
You have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When you take something away from somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates – there are several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can agree we want to avoid –
is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly wanted to heal. I see that in our context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even what's going on in, I'm from Ohio, I was born and raised in Ohio and I live there today, the controversy in Springfield, Ohio.
I personally don't blame really any of the people who are in Springfield, either the native people who are born and raised in Springfield or even the Haitians who have been moved to Springfield.
But it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome where if you put 20,000 people in a community where 50,000 people where the 20,000 are coming in, don't know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, are unable to assimilate. you know there's going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began perhaps with some type of
some type of charitable instinct, right? Some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States. What began with sympathy, what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid.
So that's my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview. Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can't have both.
And the reason why is no two people, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it's true between you and I, between you, I, and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues, no two people have the same skillsets. We're each endowed by different gifts. We're each endowed with different talents. And that's the beauty of human diversity.
And a true meritocracy is a system in which you're able to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without anybody standing in your way. But that means necessarily there's going to be differences in outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money, not just fame or currency or whatever it is.
There's going to be different outcomes for different people in different spheres of lives. And that's what meritocracy demands. It's what it requires. And so the left's vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of meritocracy. And so those are my two reasons for opposing the view is one is it's not meritocratic.
But number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have wanted to help. And I think that's part of what we're seeing in modern America.
Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban. Great conversation. I think it's on your podcast, actually. Yes.
Yeah, it was great.
It was great. Okay, well, speaking of good guys, he messes me all the time with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You're mostly focused on kind of DEI.
So let's just take a step back and understand because people use these acronyms and then they start saying it out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. DEI refers to capital D, diversity, equity and inclusion, which is a philosophy adopted by institutions, principally in the private sector, companies, nonprofits and universities.
to say that they need to strive for specific forms of racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity. And it's not just the D, it's the equity in ensuring that you have equal outcomes as measured by certain group quota targets or group representation targets that they would meet in their ranks.
The problem with the DEI agenda is in the name of diversity, it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So the way the argument goes is this, is that we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and minority views.
But if certain opinions are themselves deemed to be hostile to those minorities, then you have to exclude those opinions in the name of the capital D diversity. But that means that you're necessarily sacrificing actual diversity of thought. I can give you a very specific example.
That might sound like, okay, well, is it such a bad thing if an organization doesn't want to exclude people who are saying racist things on a given day? We could debate that. But let's get to the tangible world of how that actually plays out. I, for my part, have not really heard in ordinary America people uttering racial epithets if you're going to a restaurant or in the grocery store.
It's not something I've encountered, certainly not in the workplace. But that's a theoretical case. Let's talk about the real world case of how this plays out. There was an instance, it was a case that presented itself before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, one of the government enforcers of the DEI agenda.
And there was a case of a woman who wore a red sweater on Fridays in celebration of veterans and those who had served the military and invited others in the workplace to do the same thing. And they had a kind of affinity group. You could call it that a veteran type affinity group appreciating those who had served. Her son had served as well.
There was a minority employee at that business who said that he found that to be a microaggression. So the employer asked her to stop wearing said clothes to the office. Well, she still felt like she wanted to celebrate. I think it was Friday was the day of the week where they did it. She still wore the red sweater. She didn't wear it, but she would hang it on the back of her seat, right?
Put it on the back of her seat at the office. They said, no, no, you can't do that either.
So the irony is in the name of this capital D diversity, which is creating a supposedly welcoming workplace for all kinds of Americans by focusing only on certain kinds of so-called diversity that translates into actually not even a diversity of your genetics, which is what they claim to be solving for, but also a hostility to diversity of thought. And I think that's dangerous.
And you're seeing that happen in the last four years across this country. It's been pretty rampant. I think it leaves America worse off. The beauty of America is we're a country where we should be able to have institutions that are stronger from different points of view being expressed. But my number one criticism of the DEI agenda is not even that it's anti-meritocratic. It is anti-meritocratic.
But my number one criticism is it's actually hostile to the free and open exchange of ideas by creating often legal liabilities for organizations that even permit certain viewpoints to be expressed. And I think that's the biggest concern.
I think what Mark would say is that diversity is— allows you to look for talent in places where you haven't looked before and therefore find really special talent, special people. I think that's the case he made.
He did make that case, and it was a great conversation. And my response to that is, Great. That's a good thing. We don't need a three letter acronym to do that. Right. You don't need special programmatic DEI incentives to do it because companies are always going to seek in a truly free market, which I think we're missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons.
But in a truly free market, companies will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest. or else they're going to be less competitive versus other companies. But you don't need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government to do it. Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial and gender representation targets in your workforce.
That's not the free market working. So I think you can't have it both ways. Either it's going to be good for companies and companies are going to do what's in their self-interest. That's what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I believe. But if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing it to adopt these top-down standards. That's my issue with it.
I don't know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind which there's a good thing. to bully people and to do bad things. I don't know what it is.
This has less to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you've seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure.
So you've seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about in the military, right? You think about our entry into Iraq after 9-11 had nothing to do with the stated objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts, it was a policy move we regret. Our
Policy ranks in our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really, by all accounts, was not at all responsible for 9-11. Nonetheless, if you're part of the U.S. military or you're General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military's actual substantive failures.
It's what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability. You say the same thing with respect to the educational system. It's a lot easier to claim that, and I'm not the one making this claim, but others have made this claim that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes.
You can claim using that that math is racist. It's a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach math. black kids in the inner city, how to actually do math and fix our public school systems and the zip code coded mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities in bad schools.
So I think that in many cases, what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause, but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism. So in many ways, bureaucracy, I think,
It carves the channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years. And that's why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness, because that's just a symptom, I think, versus combating actual bureaucracy itself, the rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state.
We talk about that in the government, but the deep state doesn't just exist in the government. It exists, I think, in every sphere of our lives, from companies to nonprofits to universities.
It's the rise of what we call the managerial class, the committee class, the people who professionally sit on committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs, original ideators, and ordinary citizens alike.
Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don't get to do. But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomenon of both the left and the right.
It's not even a left or right. It just transcends that. But it's anti-American at its core. So our founding fathers, they were anti-bureaucratic at their core, actually. They were the pioneers, the explorers, the unafraid, right? They were the inventors, the creators.
People forget this about Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence, one of the great inventors that we have in the United States as well. He invented the lightning rod. He invented the Franklin stove, which was actually one of the great innovations of the field of thermodynamics. He even invented a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use.
That's just Benjamin Franklin. So you think, oh, he's a one-off. Everybody said, okay, he was the one zany founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the country. Wrong. It wasn't unique to him. You have Thomas Jefferson. What are you sitting in right now? You're sitting in a, on a swivel chair.
Okay.
Who invented the swivel chair? Thomas Jefferson? Yes, Thomas Jefferson. Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration of Independence.
You're the one that reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.
And he was 33 when he did it, while inventing the swivel chair. I like how you're focused on the swivel chair. Can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence? It makes me feel horrible. But the Declaration of Independence... The Declaration of Independence part, everybody knows.
What people don't know, he was an architect. So he worked in Virginia, but the Virginia State Capitol Dome, so the building that's in Virginia today, where the state capital is, that dome was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well. So these people weren't people who sat on professional committees. They weren't bureaucrats. They hated bureaucracy.
Part of Old World England is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy and monarchy go hand in hand. A monarch can't actually administer or govern directly. It requires a bureaucracy, a machine to actually technocratically govern for him. So the United States of America was founded on the idea that we reject that old world view.
The old world vision was that we, the people, cannot be trusted to self-govern or make decisions for ourselves. We would burn ourselves off the planet is the modern version of this.
With existential risks like global climate change, if we just leave it to the people and their democratic will, that's why you need professional technocrats, educated elites, enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set the limits that actually protect people from their own worst impulses. That's the old world view. And most nations in human history have operated this way.
But what made the United States of America itself, to know what made America great, we have to know what made America itself. What made America itself is we said hell no to that vision. That we, the people, for better or worse, are going to self-govern without the committee class restraining what we do.
And the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston. You go straight down the list of founding fathers who were inventors, creators, pioneers, explorers, who also were the very people who came together to sign the Declaration of Independence.
And so, yeah, this rise of bureaucracy in America in every sphere of life, I view it as anti-American, actually. And I hope that, you know, conservatives and liberals alike can get behind my crusade, certainly, to get in there and shut most of it down.
Yeah. Speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How to make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to do that?
Well, the first thing I will say is you're always taking a risk. Okay, there's no free lunch here, mostly at least. You're always taking a risk. One risk is that you say, I want to reform it gradually. I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right end state is and then carefully cut with a chisel like a work of art to get there. I don't believe that approach works.
I think that's an approach that conservatives have taken for many years. I think it hasn't gotten us very far. And the reason is, If you have like an eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back. The other risk you could take, so that's the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much.
To say that I'm going to cut so much that I'm going to take the risk of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way, that I'm going to take that risk. I can't give you option C, which is to say that I'm going to cut exactly the right amount. I'm going to do it perfectly. Okay. You don't know ex ante. You don't know beforehand that it's exactly how it's going to go.
So that's a meaningless claim. It's only a question of which risk you're going to take. I believe in the moment we live in right now, the second risk is the risk we have to be willing to take. And we haven't had, we haven't had a class of politician. I mean, Donald Trump in 2016 was, I think the closest we've gotten. And I think the second term will be even, even closer to what we need.
But short of that, I don't think we've really had a class of politician who has gotten very serious about cutting so much that you're also going to cut some fat, but not only some fat, but also some muscle. That's the risk we have to take. So what would the way I would do it? Seventy five percent headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy.
Send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed in a true self-governing democracy. It should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an unelected bureaucrats. And that is the single greatest form of economic stimulus we could have in this country.
But it is also the single most effective way to restore self-governance in our country as well. And it is the blueprint for, I think, how we save this country.
75%.
There's this kind of almost meme-like video of Argentinian President Javier Millet wearing a whiteboard. He has all the, I think, 18 ministries lined up. And he's like, he's ripping like, Department of Education, gone. And he's just going like this. Now, the situation in Argentina is pretty dire. And the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying, the empire is falling.
This is still, in my opinion, the greatest nation on earth. Still, the economy is doing very well. Still, this is the hub of culture, the hub of innovation, the hub of so many amazing things. Do you think it's possible to do something like firing 75 percent of people in government when things are going relatively well?
Yes. In fact, I think it's necessary and essential. I think things are depends on depends on what your level of well really is, what you're benchmarking against. America is not built on complacency. We're built on the pursuit of excellence. And are we still the greatest nation on planet Earth? I believe we are. I agree with you on that.
But are we great as we could possibly be or even as we have been in the past measured against our own standards of excellence? No, we're not. I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline. That doesn't mean it's the end of the empire yet. But we are a nation in decline right now. I don't think we have to be.
But part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial class, the bureaucracy, sucking the lifeblood out of the country, sucking the lifeblood out of our innovative culture, our culture of self-governance. So is it possible? Yeah, it's really possible. I mean, I'll tell you one easy way to do it.
I'm being a little bit glib here, but I think it's not crazy, at least as a thought experiment. get in there on day one, say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy who was not elected, elected representatives obviously were elected by the people, but if the people who were not elected, if your social security number ends in an odd number, you're out. If it ends in an even number, you're in.
There's a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number, you're in. And if it starts with an odd number, you're out. Boom. That's a 75% reduction. Then literally, stochastically, okay, one of the virtues of that, it's a thought experiment, not a policy prescription, but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that
You don't have a bunch of lawsuits you're dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political viewpoint discrimination. Actually, the reality is you've at mass, you didn't bring the chisel, you brought a chainsaw. I guarantee you do that on day one and do number two, step two on day two on day three.
Nothing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people who run a company, especially larger companies, know this. It's 25% of the people who do 80 to 90% of the useful work. These government agencies are no different.
So now imagine you could do that same thought experiment, but not just doing it at random, but do it still at large scale while having some metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution. That, I think, would immediately raise not only the civic character of the United States.
Now we feel, OK, the people we elect to run the government, they've got the power back. They're running the government again, as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today. It would also stimulate the economy. I mean, the regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy. Most of it's unconstitutional.
All we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about, but have not really effectuated ever in modern history.
And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra-competent to actually want to work in government.
Exactly, which you're missing today. Because right now the government would swallow them up. Most competent people feel like that bureaucratic machine will swallow them whole. You clear the decks of 75% of them, real innovators can then show up.
Yeah, you know, there's kind of the cynical view of capitalism where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But I think a lot of people would want to work in government to build something that's helpful to a huge number of people.
Yeah, well, look, I think there's opportunities for the very best to have large scale impact. in all kinds of different institutions, in our universities, to K through 12 education, through entrepreneurship. I'm obviously very biased in that regard. I think there's a lot you're able to create that you couldn't create through government.
But I do think in the moment that we live in, where our government is as broken as it is and is as responsible for the declining nature of our country, yeah, I think bringing in people who are unafraid, talented, and able to have an impact could make all of the difference. And I agree with you.
I don't think actually most people, even most people who say they're motivated by money, I don't think are actually motivated by money. I think most people are driven by a belief that they can do more than they're being permitted to do right now with their skill sets. See, I've never, I'll tell you that. So I've run, I've run a number of companies.
And one of the things that I used to ask when I was, you know, I'm not day-to-day involved in them anymore, but as a CEO, I would ask when I did interviews. And the first company I started at Roivant, like for four years in, I mean, we're, you know, company was pretty big by that point.
I would still intent on interviewing every candidate before they joined, screening for the culture of that person. And I can talk a lot more about things we did to build that culture, but- One of the questions I would always ask them naturally just to start a conversation, it's a pretty basic question is, why did you leave your last job or why are you leaving your last job?
I'll tell you what I didn't hear very often is that I wasn't paid enough, right? And maybe they'd be shy to tell you that during an interview, but there's indirect ways to signal that. That really wasn't at all, like even a top 10 reason why people were leaving their job. I'll give you what the number one reason was, is that they felt like they were unable to do
the true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role. That's the number one reason people leave their job. And, you know, I think... By the way, I would say that I'm saying that in a self-boastful way that we would attract these people. I think that's also true for most of the people who left the company as well, Roivant, right?
And that was true at Roivant, it's true at other companies I've started. I think the number one reason people join companies and number one people leave companies, whether they've been to join mine or to leave mine in the past, have been that they feel like they're able to do more than they're able to with their skillset than that environment permits them to actually achieve.
And so I think that's what people hung for. We think about capitalism and true free market capitalism. And we used words earlier like meritocracy. It's about building a system, whether it's in a nation or whether it's even within an organization that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential.
And sometimes it just doesn't match for an organization where let's say the mission is here and somebody's skill sets could be really well aligned to a different mission. Then the right answer is it's not a negative thing. It's just that that person needs to leave and find their mission somewhere else.
But to bring that back to government, I think part of what's happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy in so many of these government agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies. I think if you went to most federal bureaucracies and just asked them, like, what's the mission? I'm just making one up off the top of my head right now.
The Department of Health and Human Services. What is the mission of HHS in the United States of America? I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who leads it, could give you a coherent answer to that question. I just I just heavily doubt it. And you could fill in the blank for, you know, any range of the Department of Commerce.
I mean, it could go straight down the list of each of these other ones. What is the mission of this organization? You could say for the U.S. military, what's the purpose of the U.S. military, the Department of Defense? I can give you one. I think it is to win wars and more importantly, through its strength to avoid wars. That's it.
Well, OK, if that's the mission, then, you know, OK, it's not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where we kind of feel like it sometimes and other ones where we don't. And who decides that? I don't really know. But whoever the people are that decide that we follow those orders. No, our mission is to protect the United States of America, to win wars and to avoid wars.
Boom. Those three things. What does protecting the United States of America mean? Number one, the homeland of the United States of America and the people who reside there. OK, that's a clear mission.
I mean, the Department of Health and Human Services maybe could be a reasonable mission to say that I want to make America the healthiest country on planet Earth, and we will develop the metrics and meet those metrics. And that's the goal of the Department of HHS, to set policies or at least to implement policies that best achieve that goal.
But you can't – and maybe that's the right statement of the mission. Maybe it's not. But one of the things that happens is when you're governed by the committee class, it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization, whether it's a company or a government agency or a bureaucracy.
And once you've done that, then you lose the ability to track the best and the brightest because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential, they have to know what it's towards. There has to be a mission in the first place. Then you're not getting the best and brightest. You get more from the committee class, and that becomes – a self-perpetuating downward spiral.
And that is what the blob of the federal bureaucracy really looks like today.
Yeah, you said something really profound. At the individual scale of the individual contributor, doer, creator, what happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit. And then there's barriers that come up where you have to wait a little bit. This happens, there's friction always. When humans together are working on something, there's friction.
And so the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens is the managerial class, the incentive is to create barriers.
It's what it does. I mean, that's just by the nature of a bureaucracy. It creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever the other process was. Is there some room for that somewhere in certain contexts? Sure. It's like a defensive mechanism that's designed to reduce dynamism. But I think when you...
when that becomes cancerous in its scope, it then actually kills the host itself, whether that's a school, whether that's a company, whether that's a government. And so the way I think about it, Lex, is there's sort of a balance of distributed power.
And I don't mean power in the Foucault sense of social power, but I mean just sort of power in the sense of the ability to affect relevant change in any organization between what you could call the founder class, the creator class, the everyday citizen, the stakeholder class, and then the managerial class. And there's a role for all three of them, right?
You could have the constituents of an organization, say in a constitutional republic, that's the citizen. You could have the equivalent of the creator class, the people who create things in that polity. And then you have the bureaucratic class that's designed to administer and serve as a liaison between the two.
I'm not denying that there's some role somewhere for people who are in that managerial class.
But right now, in this moment in American history, and I think it's been more or less true for the last century, but it's grown, starting with Woodrow Wilson's advent of the modern administrative state, metastasizing through FDR's New Deal and what was required to administer it, blown over and metastasizing further through LBJ's
Great society and everything that's happened since, even aided and abetted by Republican presidents along the way, like Richard Nixon, has created a United States of America where that committee class, both in and outside the government and our culture, wields far too much influence and power relative to the everyday citizen stakeholder and to the creators who are in many ways independent.
constrained, hamstrung, shackled in a straitjacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions. And, you know, I certainly feel that myself. I, you know, I probably identify as being a member of that creator class most closely. It's just what I've done. I create things.
And I think we live in an environment in the United States of America where we're still probably the best country on earth, where that creator has that shot. So that's the positive side of it. But one where we are far more constrictive to the creator class than we have been when we've been at our best. And that's where I want to see change.
Can you sort of steel man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much?
Yeah, so I go back to this question of mission, right? A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education are aren't aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place, actually. So that might be a useful place to start, is that this thing was created. It had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose?
Might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decide what are we doing with it or not. What was the purpose of this thing that we created? It's not a
It, to me, seems like a highly relevant question, yet in this discussion about government reform, it's interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, okay, but we got the status quo and it's just going to be disruptive versus asking the question of, okay, this institution was created. It had an original purpose. Is that purpose still relevant?
Is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today? To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So let's talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time. Which was to make sure that localities and particularly states were not siphoning dollars, taxpayer dollars away from predominantly black school districts to predominantly white ones.
And that was not a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the south. And so you may say you don't like the federal solution. You may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original purpose of the U.S.
Department of Education to make sure that from a federal perspective, states were not systematically disadvantaging black school districts over predominantly white ones. However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago, it's not a relevant purpose today.
There's no evidence today of states intentionally mapping out which are the black versus white school districts and siphoning money in one direction versus another. To the contrary, one of the things we've learned is that the school districts in the inner city, many of which are predominantly black, actually spend more money per student than other school districts. Thank you very much.
So against that backdrop, the Department of Education has instead extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose to instead implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach.
So Department of Education funding, so federal funding accounts for about, you know, I'm giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country. But that comes with strings attached. So in today's Department of Education, this didn't happen back in 1970, but it's happening today.
Ironically, it's funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail. They blow smoke to cover up for their own failures. What happens with today's Department of Education? They effectively say you don't get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals.
And in fact, they also intervene in the curriculum where there's evidence of schools in the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding so long as they have certain subjects like archery. There was one instance of a school. that had archery in its curriculum. I find that to be pretty interesting, actually.
I think you have different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude. But hey, maybe I'm biased. Doesn't matter whether you like archery or not.
I don't think it's the federal government's job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate, where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education. So what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose that's long past.
You don't have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve of siphoning money from black school districts to white school districts and laundering that effectively in public funds. That doesn't exist anymore. So they find new purposes instead, creating a lot more damage along the way.
So you asked me to steel man it, and could I say something constructive rather than just, you know, pounding down on the other side? One way to think about this is for a lot of these agencies, Were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes.
Where that positive intention existed, I'm still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies, but if you're going to create one, at least make it, what should we call it, a task force. Make it a task force. A task force versus an agency means after it's done, you celebrate, you've done your work, pat yourself on the back and then move on.
Rather than creating a standing bureaucracy, which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place. And I think we don't have enough of that in our culture. I mean, even if you have a company that's generated tons of cash flow. And it solved a problem.
Let's say it's a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease. And the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease. And they generated a boatload of cash from doing it. At a certain point, you could just give it to your shareholders and close up shop. And that's actually a beautiful thing to do.
You don't see that happen enough in the American consciousness, in the American culture of when an institution has achieved its purpose, celebrate it and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government would result in a vastly restrained scope of government rather than today. It's a one-way ratchet. Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence.
But the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well. And that's where you get this metastasis over the last century.
So what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector, the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don't want to have in government?
So if the question is what should government do that the private sector cannot, I'll give you one. Protect our border. I mean, capitalism, it's never going to be the job of capitalists or never going to be the capability or inclination of capitalists to preserve a national border.
And I think a nation, it's literally, I think one of the chapters of this book, okay, a nation without borders is not a nation. It's almost a tautology. An open border is not a border. Capitalism is not going to solve that. What's going to solve that is a nation. Part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its nation, in this case, the United States of America.
That's an example of a proper function of the federal government to provide physical security to its citizens. Another proper role of that federal government is to look after, or in this case, could be state government. To make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else without their consent. It's a fancy way economists would use to describe it.
What does that mean? It means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else's river, then you're liable for that. It's not that, okay, I'm a capitalist and so I want to create things and I'm going to do hell or high water whether or not that harms people around me.
The job of a proper government is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing their own rights through a system of capitalism. In seeking prosperity, you're free to do it.
But if you're hurting somebody else without their consent in the process, the government is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property right. So I would say that those are two central functions of government is to preserve national boundaries and the national security of a homeland.
And number two is to protect and preserve private property rights and the enforcement of those private property rights. And I think at that point, you've described about 80 to 90% of the proper role of a government. What about infrastructure? Look, I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector. I mean, you can get into specifics.
You could have infrastructure that's specific to national security. No, I do think that military industrial base is essential to provide national security. That's a form of infrastructure. I don't think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation.
But interstate highways, I think you could think about whether or not that's a common good that everybody benefits from, but nobody has the incentive to create. I think you could make an argument for the existence of interstate highways.
I think you could also make powerful arguments for the fact that actually you could have enough private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well. But I'm not dogmatic about this, but broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the goal of the federal government
I'm not going to say 100, 80, 90% of the goal of the existence of a federal government should be to a government period should be to protect national boundaries and provide security for the people who live there and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside there. If we restore that, I think we're well on our way to a revival of what our founding fathers envisioned.
And I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did.
So if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government in the States? for something like education?
I think here, if it goes closer to municipalities and to states, I'm fine with that being a locus for people determining as, for example, let's just say school districts are taxed at the local level, for that to be a matter for municipalities and townships to actually decide democratically how they actually want that governed, whether it's balance between a public school district versus making that same money available to families in the form of vouchers or other forms of
ability to educational savings accounts or whichever mechanism it is to opt out of that. If that's done locally, I'll have views on that that tend to go further in the direction of true educational choice and diversity of choice, the implementation of charter schools, the granting of state charters, or even lowering the barriers to granting one. I favor those kinds of policies.
But if we've gotten the federal government out of it, that's achieved 75% of what I think we need to achieve that I'm focused on solving other problems and leave that to the states and municipalities to cover from there.
So given this conversation, what do you think of Elon's proposal of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration or really any administration?
Well, I'm, of course, biased because Elon and I had discussed that for the better part of the last year and a half. So I think it's a great idea. It's something that's very consistent with the core premise of my presidential candidacy. I got to know him as I was running for U.S. president in a couple of events that he came to, and then we built a friendship after that.
So obviously, I think it's a great idea. Who do you think is more hardcore on the cutting, you or Elon? Well, I think Elon is pretty hardcore. I said 75%. of the federal bureaucrats. And while I was running for president, he said, you need to put at least 75%. So I agree with him. I think it'd be a fun competition to see who ends up more hardcore.
I don't think there's someone out there who's going to be more hardcore than here I would be. And the reason is, I think we share in common A willingness to take the risk and see what happens. I mean, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. That much I guarantee you. Is there going to be some broken glass and some damage? Yes, there is. There's no way around that.
But once you're willing to take that risk, then it doesn't become so scary anymore. And here's the thing, Lex. It's easy to say this. Let's talk about where the rubber hits the road here. Even in second Trump term, this would be the discussion. President Trump and I have had this conversation, but I think we would continue to have this conversation is,
where does it rank on our prioritization list? Because there's always going to be a trade-off. If you have a different policy objective that you want to achieve, a good policy objective, whatever that is, right? You could talk about immigration policy. You could talk about economic policy. There are other policy objectives. You're going to trade off a little bit in the short run
effectiveness of your ability to carry out that policy goal, if you're also committed to actually thinning out the federal government by 75%, because there's just going to be some clunkiness, right? And there's just going to be frictional costs for that level of cut. So the question is, where does that rank on your prioritization list?
To pull that off, to pull off a 75% reduction in the size and scale of the federal government, the regulatory state, and the headcount, I think that only happens if that's your top priority.
You can do it at a smaller scale, but at that scale, it only happens if that's your top priority, because then as president, you're in a position to say, I know in the super short run that might even make it a little bit harder for me to do this other thing that I want to do and use the regulatory state to do it. But I'm going to pass on that. I'm going to pass that up.
I'm going to bear that hardship and inconvenience because I know this other goal is more important on the scale of decades and centuries for the country. So it's a question of prioritization. And certainly my own view is that now is a moment where that needs to be a top priority for saving this country. And if there's one thing about my campaign, I was if I was to do it again.
I would be even clearer about because I talked about a lot of things in the campaign and we can cover a lot of that, too. But if there's one thing that I care about more than anything else is dismantling that bureaucracy and more of moreover, it is a. It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state.
That's the welfare state presents itself in the form of the regulatory state. That's what we're talking about. And then there's the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them.
If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.
So you mentioned Department of Education, but there's also the Department of Defense. And there's a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to a budget that's increasing and the number of wars and military conflicts that's increasing. So if we could just talk about that. So this is the number one priority. It's like there's difficulty levels here. The DOD...
It would be probably the hardest. So let's take that on. What's your view on the military-industrial complex, Department of Defense, and wars in general?
So I think the nanny state, I'm against it overall. I'm against the foreign policy nanny state as well. Let me start from that as the starting off point, and then I'll tell you about my views on the DOD and our defense. First of all, I think that and I think that it was easy for many people from the neocon school of thought to caricature my views with the media at their side.
But actually, my own view is. If it's in the interest of the United States of America to provide certain levels of protection to U.S. allies, we can do that as long as those allies actually pay for it. And I think it's important for two reasons. The less important reason. still important reason. The less important reason is it's still money for us, right?
It's not like we're swimming in a cash surplus right now. We're at $34 trillion national debt and growing. And I think pretty soon the interest payments are going to be the largest line item in our own federal budget. So it's not like we have money willy-nilly to just hand over for free. That's the less important reason though. The more important reason is that it makes sure that our allies are
have actual skin in the game to not have skewed incentives to actually enter conflicts where they're not actually bearing the full cost of those conflicts. So take NATO, for example, most NATO countries, literally a majority of NATO countries today do not pay or contribute 2% of their GDP to to their own national defense, which is supposedly a requirement to be in NATO.
So majority of NATO countries are failing to meet their basic commitment to be in NATO in the first place. Germany particularly is, I think, arbitraging the hell out of the United States of America. And I don't think that I'm not going to be some sort of you know, shrill voice here saying, so therefore we should not be supporting any allies or providing security blankets. No, I'm not.
I'm not going in that direction. What I would say is you got to pay for it, right? Pay for your fisher, A, because we're not swimming in excess money ourselves. But B is it tells us that you actually have skin in the game for your own defense, which actually then makes nations far more prudent in the risks that they take, whether or not they enter war versus if somebody else is paying for it.
And somebody else is providing our security guarantee. Hey, I might as well, you know, take the gamble and see where I end up at the end of a war versus the restraint that that imposes on the decision making of those allies. So now let's bring this home to the Department of Defense. I think the top goal of the U.S.
defense policy establishment should be to provide for the national defense of the United States of America. And the irony is that's what we're actually doing most poorly. We're not really using other than the Coast Guard. We're not really using the U.S. military to prevent crossings at our own southern border and crossings at our other borders.
In fact, the United States of America, our homeland, I believe is less secure today than it has been in a very long time. Vulnerable to threats from hypersonic missiles where China and Russia, Russia certainly has capabilities in excess of that of the United States.
Missiles, hypersonic means faster than the speed of sound that could hit the United States, including those carrying nuclear warheads. We are more vulnerable to super EMP attacks, electromagnetic pulse attacks that could, you know, without exaggeration, some of this could be from other nations.
Some of this could even be from solar flares, cause significant mass casualty in the United States of America. The electric grid's gone. It's not an exaggeration to say if that happened, planes would be falling out of the sky because our chips really depend on those electromagnetic, well, will be affected by those electromagnetic pulses.
I know this, oh, people start yawning and say, okay, boring stuff, super EMP, cyber, whatever. No, actually, it is pretty relevant to whether or not you actually are facing the risk of not getting your insulin because your refrigerator doesn't work anymore or your food can't be stored or your car or your ability to fly in an airplane. is impaired. Okay.
So I think that these are serious risks where our own national defense spending has been wholly inadequate. So I'm not one of these people that says, oh, we decreased versus increased national defense spending. We're not spending it in the right places. The number one place we need to be spending it is actually in protecting our national defense. And I think protecting our own physical homeland.
And I think we actually need an increase in spending on protecting our own homeland.
But that is different from the agenda of foreign interventionism and foreign nanny state ism for its own stake, where we should expect more and demand more of our allies to provide for their own national defense, and then provide the relevant security guarantees to allies where that actually advances the interests of the United States of America. So that's what I believe.
And I think this process has been corrupted by what Dwight Eisenhower famously in his farewell address called the military-industrial complex in the United States. But I think it's it's bigger than just the you know, I think it's easy to tell the tales of the financial corruption.
It's a kind of cultural corruption and conceit that just because certain number of people in that expert class have a belief that their belief happens to be the right one because they can scare you with what the consequence would be if you don't follow their advice. One of the beauties of the United States is, at least in principle, we have civilian control of the military.
The person who we elect to be the U.S. president is the one that actually is the true commander in chief. I have my doubts of whether it operates that way. I think it is quite obvious that Joe Biden is not a functioning commander in chief of the United States of America. Yet on paper, supposedly, we still are supposed to call him that.
But at least in theory, we're supposed to have civilian control of the U.S. military and And I think that one of the things that that leader needs to do is to ask the question of, again, the mission. What's the purpose of this U.S. military in the first place? At the top of the list should be to protect the homeland and the people who actually live here, which we're failing to do.
So that's where I land on that question.
Wait, okay. There's a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, you mean he's functionally not in control of the U.S. military because of the age factor or because of the nature of the presidency?
It's a good question. I would say in his case, it's particularly accentuated because it's both. In his case, I don't think anybody in America anymore believes that Joe Biden is the functioning president of the United States of America. How could he be? He wasn't even sufficiently functioning to be the candidate after a debate that was held in June.
There's no way he's going to be in a position to make the most important decisions on a daily and demanding basis to protect the leading nation in the world. Now, More generally, though, I think we have a deeper problem that even when it's not Joe Biden, in general, the people we elect to run the government haven't really been the ones running the government.
It's been the unelected bureaucrats and the bureaucratic deep state underneath that's really been making the decisions. I've done business in a number of places. I've traveled to Japan. There's an interesting corporate analogy. Sometimes if you get outside of politics, people can—I find— listen and pay attention a little bit more because of politics.
It's so fraught right now that if you start talking to somebody who disagrees with you about the politics of it, you're just butting heads but not really making progress. So let's just make the same point but go outside of politics for a second. So I was traveling Japan. I was having a late night dinner with a CEO of a Japanese pharmaceutical company.
And, you know, it takes a while to really get him to open up, culturally speaking, Japan, you know, a couple nights of karaoke and, you know, whatnot, maybe late night restaurant, whatever it is. We built a good enough relationship where he was very candid with me. He said, I'm the CEO of the company.
I could go and find the head of a research unit and tell him, okay, this is a project we're no longer working on as a company. We don't want to spend money on it. We're going to spend money somewhere else. And he'll look me in the eye and he'll say, yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'll come back six months later and find that they're spending exactly the same amount of money on those exact same projects.
And I'll tell them, no, we agreed. I told you that you're not going to spend money on this project. And we have to stop now. Should have stopped six months ago. Get a slap on the wrist for it. He says, yes, sir. I'm sorry. Yes. No, no, of course. That's correct. Come back six months later, same person is spending the same money on the same project. And here's why.
Historically in Japan, and I should say in Japan, this is changing now. It's changing now. But historically, until very recently, and even to an extent now, it's near impossible to fire people. So if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't actually work for you.