Vivek Ramaswamy On What Makes America Great

Vivek is an entrepreneur and a Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race. He founded a biotech company, Roivant Sciences, after working as an investment partner at a hedge fund. He’s also the author of Woke, Inc. and Nation of Victims. I’ll get ahead of you guys and confess that I liked him in our chat, and decided I wasn’t going to repeat the now-familiar trope of trying to get him to denounce Trump. See what you think, but I learned some stuff about his life.

For two clips of our convo — on whether evangelicals will vote for a Hindu, and whether we should let Russia keep the Donbas — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Vivek’s upbringing in Cincinnati as the son of Indian immigrants; his engineer dad worked for GE; his mom was a geriatric psychiatrist; he took regular trips to his dad’s village in “the boonies of India”; his forebears were British subjects but he doesn’t feel oppressed by it; he thinks Americans’ view of victimhood is narrow and selective; affirmative action is “structurally embedded” and creates a culture of grievance; Vivek was raised Hindu but went to a Jesuit high school — which in fact strengthened his Hinduism; his faith sees Jesus as a son of God; he defends pluralism and Jefferson; Trump lacks any core values of Christianity; why Vivek went into biotech; how Big Pharma saved my life; his problem with “lurking state action” in the market that disguises its role; his problem with woke capitalism; his goal of reducing the federal workforce by 75 percent; his defense of Taiwan as long as the US is dependent on its semiconductors; why he thinks the CHIPS Act was “poorly executed”; his defense of bilateral trade agreements over multilateral; why “person of color” is as flattening as “LGBTQ”; his thoughts about being a visible minority within the GOP; his reply to the common criticisms against him, including Josh Barro’s “that section guy”; and his optimism for the culture war.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Leor Sapir on the treatment of kids with gender dysphoria, Ian Buruma on his new book The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II, and Spencer Klavan, who wrote How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises. Later on: Martha Nussbaum, Matthew Crawford, David Brooks and Pamela Paul. Please send any guest recs, pod dissent and other commentary to dish@andrewsullivan.com.