By Jo Nova
Vivek Ramaswamy has a plan. It’s quite something to listen to. He has an extraordinary combination of skills.
This is a man who is only 38, and has studied molecular biology*, made millions in biotech, understands Big Pharma, but he’s also done a law degree at Yale. He is that rarest of combinations — the CEO who understand biology and science, and the lawyer who reads the constitution, and the investor who has played and won on Wall Street. He is all of these things.
I’ve never heard a Presidential candidate speak like this — with an eight year plan grounded in the legal foundations of the nation. He knows employment laws make individuals unsackable, but whole departments can be razed. Nothing can stop the President from dismantling the FBI if he wants to. Ramaswamy is already assembling a team, picking the players. He can list what he will get done by 2033 when he leaves office and his youngest starts high school.
Last week I played a small extract of this interview with Shawn Ryan — where Ramaswamy described how the FDA is captured by Big Pharmaceutical firms. ( “Big Pharma is the worlds biggest lobbying organisation”) But the whole interview is compelling and I’ve listened to interviews before about his books, about Woke Inc, about Strive (the Capital Fund he set up that runs counter to BlackRock and ESG) but this is about Ramaswamy himself, and his plan for the US, the Deep State and this strange moment in history. As the child of Indian immigrants he can explain what makes America Great better than many Americans can.
His role in this campaign will surely change it — his competitors must be listening to interviews like this, taking notes.
“It’s a machine that we are up against”
Ramaswamy describes the Deep State as a machine which needs puppets to represent them — the people we elect to run the government are not the ones who run the government. It’s no accident we have a gerontocracy, he says. It’s designed to be that way. The real laws of this country are not made in Congress, they’re made in the halls of bureaucracy.
The machine in the Monster that we have created. There are many good individuals doing what they think is a good job inside the machine. The waterfall of power flows from the President to the administrative state, to executives in social media, to managers in third party firms to AI. The decisions are not even being made by humans. The AI has learnt to spot US Flags in social media as a risk factor.
We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country
In the old world, Ramaswamy says, people got together in smoky rooms in the back of Palace Halls to decide how to run countries. Now it’s the enlightened elite making these decisions. We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country and decide about issues like climate change or racial injustice. The real divide now is not Republican or Democrat, it is between the managerial class and the citizen.
We fought a revolution to say Hell No to that theory and that We The People in this constitutional republic must be the ones who decide.
Now that old monster is rearing its head again, he says, except this time the power is diffused. We might think the power is at the back of a three-letter-government building in Washington DC, but there’s no smoking hall there. Maybe the power lies at the corner office of BlackRock, but it’s not quite there either. Instead the power is woven into a machine of the managerial class. It’s very hard to identify. It’s very pervasive…
It’s a two hour interview. You can convert it to Mp3 and listen as you jog, drive or cook. It was compelling starting from 3 mins in.
*Molecular biology is my favourite science — it’s not possible to understand the human condition, life, viruses, medicine and biotechnology without it.