Speaker 1: This is Gavin Newsom and this is new Kidkrich. I
Speaker 1: just wanted if I could just briefly up top. You
Speaker 1: sent out a couple of tweets over the last twenty
Speaker 1: four hours specific to Ukraine. Obviously topical issue, and I
Speaker 1: appreciated candidly your tweets which were a little more assertive
Speaker 1: pushing back on this notion that somehow time is our
Speaker 1: ally with Putin, that it's time to be a little
Speaker 1: more muscular, time to call him out. You also called
Speaker 1: out I thought an important fact that's not necessarily part
Speaker 1: of the discourse. He spent twenty one years in Sweden.
Speaker 1: I mean, these guys have a longer.
Speaker 2: View version that was actually the Napoleonic Wars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was Putin who said, look, we fought Sweden
Speaker 3: for twenty one years. You think I want to slow down.
Speaker 1: You think I'm going to slow down, So tell me,
Speaker 1: I mean, where are you in the over under? I mean,
Speaker 1: is you know, I appreciate your advocacy for trump et cetera.
Speaker 1: But I think, I mean it is the revelation that
Speaker 1: he's waking up to this new reality that this is
Speaker 1: not something you can snap your fingers. Putin's a different
Speaker 1: kind of character.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that first of all, he probably shares
Speaker 3: a lot of people's concern that if you push Putin
Speaker 3: too hard you end up with a tactical nuclear war.
Speaker 3: And then maybe more so, I think there's a there's
Speaker 3: a dance around Putin that's a little more complicated than
Speaker 3: just yes or no. On the other hand, I think
Speaker 3: he actually believed from his first term when they did
Speaker 3: a pretty good relationship. Although he had sent lethal weapons
Speaker 3: to Ukraine. He is much tougher than Obama had been,
Speaker 3: but he was pleasant. They had no major fights, and
Speaker 3: I think he had in the back of his head
Speaker 3: to look, we're reasonable, we can talk with each other.
Speaker 3: And it's taken him, I think, about five months to
Speaker 3: realize nothing Putin says matters. That what matters is what
Speaker 3: Putin does. And when he says to you, oh, I
Speaker 3: really like to get to a truce, but by the way,
Speaker 3: for the next three days, I'm going to bomb civilians.
Speaker 3: After a while begins to sink in. You know, it's
Speaker 3: the opposite of George W. Bush. I'll never forget the
Speaker 3: day Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and
Speaker 3: saw his soul, and I knew that was nuts, because
Speaker 3: you can't be a KGB lieutenant colonel have a soul.
Speaker 3: So with the whole concept of you know, somehow we
Speaker 3: try to make him a Western figure, he's not. He's
Speaker 3: a Russian figure, and Russia is a different culture than
Speaker 3: Western Europe.
Speaker 1: And so the idea of what secondary oil sanctions you're
Speaker 1: advocating for.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean I advocate four big things, more weapons,
Speaker 3: faster and something which the German minister Preme minister said
Speaker 3: today that they'd agreed to, which has used the weapons
Speaker 3: in Russia, so you start causing him pain in his territory.
Speaker 1: And this is the longer range weapons, allowing them more range.
Speaker 3: We've begun to give them weapons that can reach Russia,
Speaker 3: and of course they have lots of They're going to
Speaker 3: produce some astonishing number of drones this year. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean what I think, like a million five or something.
Speaker 3: I mean, people forgot Ukraine used to be a major
Speaker 3: industrial center for the Soviet Union. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: engineers in Ukraine, a lot of hardworking, smart people, and
Speaker 3: they now mobilize and fighting. I think, so second, you
Speaker 3: give them permission to fight inside Russia. Third, you apply
Speaker 3: very severe sanctions on particularly sale of oil, which is
Speaker 3: their only currency that they generated, any hard currency. And fourth,
Speaker 3: I would start picking up all of the ships that
Speaker 3: are carrying illegal oil and just literally let it be
Speaker 3: known worldwide. You know, if you if you own a
Speaker 3: ship and you use it to carry Russian oil, you're
Speaker 3: going to lose the ship and we're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 3: basically impound it forever. And at that point, his method
Speaker 3: of hiding from the sanctions collapses, his ability to sell
Speaker 3: within the sanctions collapses.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And then the other thing I would do, which has
Speaker 3: some legal implications, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer,
Speaker 3: so I don't worry about that, is I would take
Speaker 3: the three hundred billion that is impounded in the West
Speaker 3: of Russian money, I give it all to Ukraine.
Speaker 1: What has been the reticence of That's what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that Trump didn't move more aggressively to do that,
Speaker 1: or is it part of a tactical negotiation?
Speaker 3: State Departminent Treasury will tell you there are all sorts
Speaker 3: of complicated questions about doing that, to which my answer,
Speaker 3: in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition is fine, let them fight
Speaker 3: it out in court. Take the money.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Well, that's a perfect segue into your
Speaker 1: new book, Trump's Triumph, because I think a lot of
Speaker 1: that is sort of reflected, sort of this notion of
Speaker 1: action and moving beyond process and having a more entrepreneurial
Speaker 1: mindset in terms of governance, et cetera. But let's frame
Speaker 1: this book. This book comes out on June third, it's
Speaker 1: your how many, mister speakers, Seriously, how many books have
Speaker 1: you written?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm told forty four. So are you?
Speaker 1: And you're you're writing all these books. You actually write
Speaker 1: these books.
Speaker 3: You have help, but I write all these books.
Speaker 1: And this one unsurprising that you'd come out with a
Speaker 1: book about Trump's triumphs, but you But what surprised me
Speaker 1: a little bit is this notion that you place them
Speaker 1: as one of the five giants up there with Jackson
Speaker 1: and Jefferson and people like Lincoln and Fdr himself. I mean,
Speaker 1: is that your your current belief or is that one
Speaker 1: that reflects.
Speaker 3: I believe that since the summer of twenty fifteen, because
Speaker 3: I watched him do two things that were kind of amazing.
Speaker 3: One was tap into the deeply felt emotions of at
Speaker 3: least half the country and particularly and this is one
Speaker 3: of the great ironies that I know you're wrestling with
Speaker 3: and I've heard you talk about it. You know, we're
Speaker 3: having this switch of which party is the working class
Speaker 3: party and which party is the elite party. Well, Trump
Speaker 3: intuited this, and people forget he had thirteen years of
Speaker 3: doing The Apprentice at NBC. He was a natural salesman
Speaker 3: and a natural showman, so his instinct was to go
Speaker 3: right for the blue collar worker. And he did two things.
Speaker 3: In August of twenty fifteen. Vince Haley, who's now the
Speaker 3: Domestic Policy director at that time, was working with us,
Speaker 3: and he walked in one day in August and said,
Speaker 3: you have to see the c SPAN coverage of Trump
Speaker 3: in Arizona because Trump is talking about illegal immigration. And
Speaker 3: then he invites the father of a young man who's
Speaker 3: been killed to come up on stage. And then Trump
Speaker 3: steps way back and allows this guy to have like
Speaker 3: five or ten minutes on stage. Was a willingness to
Speaker 3: give up the spotlight that most people watch Trump will
Speaker 3: thinks not likely and that most politicians would find very
Speaker 3: scary to give control of the microphone to this person.
Speaker 3: And I watched the dynamics of that. And then you
Speaker 3: may remember the very first debate Chlis and I were
Speaker 3: watching in our living room and there was the one
Speaker 3: where he got this really nasty, embarrassingly personal.
Speaker 1: Fight and was this the Megan Kelly Kelly?
Speaker 2: I mean, it was just it was kind of like, ooh,
Speaker 2: I don't yeah, nothing about them.
Speaker 1: I thought that was it. I thought it was over.
Speaker 3: They were racing to the bottom, and I think he
Speaker 3: got there first. And which is a line actually that
Speaker 3: a year later somebody would use to describe the fight
Speaker 3: with Hillary in the last month that she was going
Speaker 3: towards the bottom, but we thought we could beat her
Speaker 3: to it. So so anyway, so we watched this debate
Speaker 3: and everybody, mean Frank once had a focus group. They
Speaker 3: all thought Trump had lost. Everybody, like you know, everybody
Speaker 3: at our level thought Trump had lost. Watching these various
Speaker 3: online things and he's at seventy and eighty percent out
Speaker 3: of sixteen, and I'm thinking, I wait a second, that
Speaker 3: there's a mismatch here between everyday Americans and the elites
Speaker 3: on a grant, on a giant scale. And at that
Speaker 3: point I decided that what you had was a phenomenon
Speaker 3: who had somehow tapped into a core desire of the
Speaker 3: American people that they wanted to have a leader who
Speaker 3: would profoundly change Washington. And in Trump you had somebody who,
Speaker 3: by personality and by background, was pretty enthusiastic. I mean,
Speaker 3: he's always wanted to be a person of consequence, and
Speaker 3: you know, if you're the guy who breaks up the
Speaker 3: Rooseveltian system after ninety years, you get to be a
Speaker 3: person of consequence. And so it fit what his particular
Speaker 3: half of the country wants, it fit what I think
Speaker 3: is a historic necessity as a conservative, a political leader,
Speaker 3: and it fit you know, his personal desire to have
Speaker 3: a prime he wondered. And it's very interesting to think
Speaker 3: back to this in terms of the politicians you've known.
Speaker 3: His slogan wasn't Trump. His slogan was make America great again.
Speaker 3: So he was picking a topic bigger than himself within
Speaker 3: what he could grow. And I think after surviving the
Speaker 3: two assassination attempts, he really personally believes that God spared
Speaker 3: his life for the purpose of actually achieving that. So
Speaker 3: I would My point is not whether you like him
Speaker 3: or just like him, but if you look at the
Speaker 3: great change agents, they really are. Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln and FDR.
Speaker 3: And I think there's a fifty to fifty chance. It's
Speaker 3: not a certainty yet. And I've told him, you know,
Speaker 3: all he did was he earned a ticket to the dance. Now,
Speaker 3: if he dances well enough and he wins the twenty
Speaker 3: sixth election, then I'll learn a ticket to winning the
Speaker 3: twenty eight election. And then which will probably be JD.
Speaker 3: Vans on our side. And if we get the Trump
Speaker 3: vice president's only forty years old. If we get the
Speaker 3: Trump vice president on top of the Trump president, see,
Speaker 3: then he will be in a league with those guys.
Speaker 1: We're going to get to that, and we'll get to
Speaker 1: twenty six in a second. But I want to go
Speaker 1: back a little bit.
Speaker 2: I'm not doing your show, Fish, and by the way,
Speaker 2: you only thinking about it.
Speaker 1: No, All I want to say is I'm grateful you're here.
Speaker 1: This is a hell of the thing that the two
Speaker 1: of us are having this conversation. So take me back.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, you know, and you're absolutely right, and I
Speaker 1: appreciate because we had Frank Lunz on and I want
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about what Frank talked about
Speaker 1: in a minute a little bit going back the contract
Speaker 1: with America, et cetera. But Frank made that point about
Speaker 1: those focus groups. But I want to I'm curious your
Speaker 1: point of view. Then with Trump. You must have known
Speaker 1: him tangentially. But you were the leader of the as
Speaker 1: you said yourself a second ago, conservative movement. Here's a
Speaker 1: former Democrat, kind of all over the place, no strong
Speaker 1: ideological mornings necessarily. I mean, you must have been pretty
Speaker 1: distrustful early on. Were you of Donald Trump? You weren't,
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: I've known Trump for a quarter century.
Speaker 1: Right, Uh, politics, though he wasn't always a line.
Speaker 3: I knew him back when he's a businessman. He was
Speaker 3: a very noisy businessman. And I'd read his two books,
Speaker 3: which I'd recommend everybody. If you want to understand Trump,
Speaker 3: you read The Art of the Deal and The Art
Speaker 3: of the Comeback. Comebacks the more important of the.
Speaker 1: Two, because it opens up with some very telling lines.
Speaker 3: It's amazing. He opens up with, Uh, my property in
Speaker 3: Atlantic City's losing money. The economy is going down because
Speaker 3: of Iraq. I'm nine hundred million dollars in debt personally
Speaker 3: to the banks, and my wife just called and said,
Speaker 3: you wanted a divorce. And he has this great line.
Speaker 3: He says, this is the moment you either get depressed
Speaker 3: or you plan a comeback. This book is about that,
Speaker 3: which also tells you a lot about how he survived
Speaker 3: the last four years.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: This is a guy who's resilient on a scale that
Speaker 3: is historic. We first talked with him Pliston and I
Speaker 3: had breakfast with him in Des Moines, in all places,
Speaker 3: in February of twenty fifteen, and we talked about running
Speaker 3: for president because we'd run in twelve and learned the
Speaker 3: hard way that if the other guy has many millions
Speaker 3: more than you bet on the money. But I learned
Speaker 3: a lot of out running for president.
Speaker 1: Even though you won easily by any objective measure, you
Speaker 1: want all those NAMN debates.
Speaker 2: At least enough TV, the ads cout on do the debates.
Speaker 3: For me. It was a wonderful learning experience, and I
Speaker 3: think in my willingness to take on the news media
Speaker 3: head on, I was probably a forerunner for Trump's invention
Speaker 3: of fake pop news. Well, we talked at length about
Speaker 3: running and it was very interesting, and you could tell
Speaker 3: that he had now moved from that would be an
Speaker 3: interesting thing to kind of a businessman thinking through what
Speaker 3: would it take, how much would it cost, how would
Speaker 3: you structure it? And so I watched his development all
Speaker 3: through fifteen, and I I wasn't particularly pro Trump at
Speaker 3: that point, right, Frankly, if you remember, Jeb Bush was
Speaker 3: the front runner, He had the most.
Speaker 1: Money, hundred million in a pack, he had his father and.
Speaker 3: His brother, he had nationwide name mighty, and watching Trump
Speaker 3: psychologically take him apart low energy the case study, well,
Speaker 3: he got so far inside Jeb's head. The Jeb is
Speaker 3: running around New Hampshire in shorts jogging. Now the average
Speaker 3: New Hampshire writing regards the idea of a presidential candidate
Speaker 3: who's jogging has disqualification on ground just automatically, which which
Speaker 3: was really unfortunate. Jeb's actually was a very good reform
Speaker 3: governor of Florida. But Trump just had this ability to
Speaker 3: somehow set the stage where you couldn't win.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And it's a it's a very unusual capability.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting. So I appreciate in twenty fifteen you started,
Speaker 1: I mean there was sort of the dance of sort
Speaker 1: of developing more of this formal relationship as it relates
Speaker 1: to the political and said, did you find him particularly
Speaker 1: policy driven then was he inquisitive in terms of tactics policy.
Speaker 3: Look, he's talking about tariffs forty years ago. Yeah, true,
Speaker 3: talking about immigration, I mean the whole He's talking about
Speaker 3: the corruption of washermen. There are some basic themes. But
Speaker 3: what I was going to say, though, is, and this
Speaker 3: may help you understand where I'm coming from. Trump is
Speaker 3: not a conservative, right. Trump is the best anti liberal
Speaker 3: politician in my lifetime, better than Reagan. Reagan was the
Speaker 3: great conservative articulator. I sort of stood on his shoulders
Speaker 3: with the Contract with America, and we came out of
Speaker 3: a formed philosophical background. Trump understands that the current doesn't
Speaker 3: work and that the woke phase of the American left
Speaker 3: is totally destructive of the American system. This is my view, obviously,
Speaker 3: and therefore he is prepared to fight everybody I want
Speaker 3: to fight. Now. The fact that he doesn't read Bill
Speaker 3: Buckley and he doesn't have a National Review subscription, I
Speaker 3: don't care because I know that instinctively he'll get up
Speaker 3: every morning and think, you know what part of the
Speaker 3: left can I take apart today? And one day it'll
Speaker 3: be Harvard, and another day will be The New York Times,
Speaker 3: and another day it'll be some bureaucracy, but every day
Speaker 3: he will cheerfully go out and engage and tear apart
Speaker 3: the people who I think need to be torn apart.
Speaker 3: So I'm very happy to have a non conservative, anti liberal,
Speaker 3: entrepreneurial activist with all the skills of a great businessman.
Speaker 1: Well so, at peril, I jump right into the book
Speaker 1: and get chapters and chapters ahead. He's also taking on
Speaker 1: things that you've champion. I mean, you've highlighted in the
Speaker 1: book the importance of of genomics and synthetic biology and
Speaker 1: discovery and invest you know in R and D, the
Speaker 1: issues obviously with DARPA, et cetera. I mean, how concerned,
Speaker 1: including by the way, you just did a documentary with
Speaker 1: your wife on of all things, four letter word for
Speaker 1: some of your friends PBS. Very proud PVS to me,
Speaker 1: but on journey to America on immigration, and so I'm
Speaker 1: curious just that tension. I get this sort of owning
Speaker 1: the lib and liberalism more broadly defined. But where do
Speaker 1: you are you? Where are you in this.
Speaker 3: Sort of I think I think when everything shakes out,
Speaker 3: let's start with immigration. Trump is as pro legal immigration
Speaker 3: as he is anti illegal immigration. I mean, two of
Speaker 3: his wives are foreign born. His mother came from Scotland. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know he he's not going to jump up and down.
Speaker 3: And he has said openly, I mean he's come up
Speaker 3: with this idea of this five million dollar you know,
Speaker 3: avenue to America.
Speaker 1: What happened to that?
Speaker 3: Well, I suspect it will be implemented. He wants the money.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure his calculations are right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, that's a little generous.
Speaker 3: Enough people show up to make it a big deal.
Speaker 3: But Canada and other countries have had very similar, smaller
Speaker 3: scale example proudgets. There's no question that the most aggressive
Speaker 3: pieces of the Trump coalition would do things that I
Speaker 3: would regard as destructive. There's also no question if you
Speaker 3: look at, for example, the caliber of the people he's
Speaker 3: appointed at the Center for Disease Control or for the
Speaker 3: National Institute of Health. These are very smart, very senior people.
Speaker 3: And and I just had a conversation with the new
Speaker 3: head of NIH, who clearly wants to clean out the underbrush.
Speaker 3: But and I say this as a guy who, while
Speaker 3: balancing the federal budget for four years in a row,
Speaker 3: the only time in one hundred years, we doubled the
Speaker 3: size of nih Well balancing the budget so deeply in science.
Speaker 3: But I'll also tell you it's now a big It
Speaker 3: kept growing. So what we doubled was the baseline from
Speaker 3: which it just kept growing. And it's a big bureaucratic
Speaker 3: system with a lot of ballogne. I mean, when you're
Speaker 3: paying sixty five percent more than the grant so that
Speaker 3: Harvard or Stanford or somebody can pay for overhead, there's
Speaker 3: a lot you can do that doesn't hurt genuine reform.
Speaker 3: You also have a big problem which I don't know
Speaker 3: how they're going to solve, and that is they've gotten
Speaker 3: into this ropidope system where people will file for a
Speaker 3: research project, not reach the conclusion because they've already filed
Speaker 3: for continuing and if they reached the conclusion, they have
Speaker 3: to go out and find a whole new topic. That's
Speaker 3: a fair amount of stating down research by your rocratizing it.
Speaker 3: So I mean, I'm passionate about this stuff. I'll give
Speaker 3: you one other example. I am totally committed to space.
Speaker 3: I have been since in nineteen eighty one, I introduced
Speaker 3: the Northwest Ordinance for the Moon, saying that if you
Speaker 3: got to a certain population, you could apply for statehood,
Speaker 3: which at that time people thought was nuts. Now they
Speaker 3: still think it's nuts, but not quite as nuts.
Speaker 1: I remember you in the debates talking about space and
Speaker 1: we were wondering what the you know, you were on
Speaker 1: the edge there, so you have been you consistent.
Speaker 3: I'm just glad that Elon came along and maybe doable.
Speaker 3: And I'll give you an example. When the starship actually
Speaker 3: gets settled down and works properly, it has thirty three engines,
Speaker 3: it produces two point three times as much thrust as
Speaker 3: the Saturn five the rocket went to the Moon two
Speaker 3: point three times as much. So your choice is to
Speaker 3: go with the traditional NASA spend an amazing amount of
Speaker 3: money and maybe get two people in the surface of
Speaker 3: the moon. Or this thing will lift one hundred people
Speaker 3: or one hundred and fifty tons, so you could put
Speaker 3: fifty to seventy people on the Moon in one bite.
Speaker 3: I mean, just boom.
Speaker 1: But to your point, that requires ns It requires all
Speaker 1: of the innovation and entrepreneurs I mean, it requires research institutions,
Speaker 1: It requires presumably institutions of higher learning as well. Are
Speaker 1: you concerned about what's happening in terms of those partnerships?
Speaker 1: I mean, just I think about Sandia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Labs,
Speaker 1: I think about all the R and D that's happening
Speaker 1: with military and obviously with academia. I mean, you're concerned
Speaker 1: that there's a recklessness. I appreciate solving for issues of
Speaker 1: some abuse or some inefficiencies, but there seems to be
Speaker 1: a blunt approach.
Speaker 3: Now, first of all, I think there is. As a historian,
Speaker 3: I would argue that when you try to make change
Speaker 3: on this scale, you're going to have very sloppy margins.
Speaker 3: You cannot move slow enough to be careful or the
Speaker 3: old order will surround you and drown you. Here here
Speaker 3: you have you have to be, which means you're going
Speaker 3: to make mistakes and you're going to screw things up.
Speaker 3: You got to go back and fix them. At the
Speaker 3: same time, I would say, uh, I really I worry
Speaker 3: about our greatest universities. Partially I suspect the opposite of
Speaker 3: your view, which is partially I think they're so left
Speaker 3: wing now that they're virtually to tolitarian, and that they
Speaker 3: create a group think that is really destructive. And yet
Speaker 3: at one point, just a generation ago, these were the
Speaker 3: greatest centers of learning, on the planet. Uh, And it
Speaker 3: does worry me. How how do you how do you
Speaker 3: keep the best of Harvard or the best of MI
Speaker 3: I T or the best of Stanford or Berkeley? Uh,
Speaker 3: without well at the same time taking head on the
Speaker 3: kind of ideological group think that has become literally almost
Speaker 3: to tolitarian in its unwillingness to have any competition of ideas.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a real challenge and we don't
Speaker 3: truth is, we don't have a good answer.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, how do you square that circle? Specifically
Speaker 1: on this notion of the journey to America? And I
Speaker 1: want to talk to about the timing of that. And
Speaker 1: by the way, congratulations ninety minute documentary on PBS that's
Speaker 1: really a love letter to absorbing the best and the
Speaker 1: brightest and who we are as America in the spirit
Speaker 1: of Reagan. You talked about the life force of new Americans,
Speaker 1: that language evocative of who we are. But now we're
Speaker 1: starting to talk about twenty seven percent of the student
Speaker 1: body as international at Harvard, and you're basically saying now
Speaker 1: you don't need to apply, and they're opening up their
Speaker 1: arms and their wallets in places like China. How do
Speaker 1: we square that?
Speaker 3: I think it's very hard. I think that there are
Speaker 3: two conflicting things going on, and we don't talk about
Speaker 3: them very honestly. I think what's happened in much of Europe,
Speaker 3: where the culture is literally being drowned, should be a
Speaker 3: much greater alarm, and it's something you can't even talk about.
Speaker 3: But if you look at places in Britain or France,
Speaker 3: or Sweden or neighborhoods and Brussels, you're seeing basically the
Speaker 3: end of Western civilization. So on the one hand, you
Speaker 3: have to say, are there legitimate concerns about who comes
Speaker 3: here and why they come here? The other side of
Speaker 3: that is with the Chinese. A very great deal of
Speaker 3: China's technological advance has come from American universities, where Chinese
Speaker 3: students come, learn a heck of a lot and go
Speaker 3: back home. And if China is our biggest competitor, which
Speaker 3: I think may turn out to be exaggerated a decade
Speaker 3: from now, nonetheless, for planning purposes, they are our biggest competitor.
Speaker 3: Do you really want cal Tech and MIT to be
Speaker 3: providing the best Chinese scientists in the world so they
Speaker 3: can go back home? I those are topics that deserve
Speaker 3: a lot deeper and more conversation. And I think I'm
Speaker 3: perfectly happy to say that there will be pieces of
Speaker 3: the Make America Great Again movement that are going to
Speaker 3: have to go back and be fixed because they're going
Speaker 3: to be destructive. Some of them are just playing going
Speaker 3: to be wrong. I mean, I'm a very big advocate
Speaker 3: for science. I wrote a piece recently on why we
Speaker 3: should not cut science funding at NASA. For example. On
Speaker 3: the one hand, I'm totally in favor of wiping out
Speaker 3: the Space Launch System, which is stunningly expensive and has
Speaker 3: accomplished nothing. And by the way, you could probably pay
Speaker 3: for a decade of NASA science with the cost of
Speaker 3: the Space Launch System, you know. So I think there
Speaker 3: are ways that there are good things we should protect,
Speaker 3: and that's going to lead to fights, because you're going
Speaker 3: to have some people who are clumsy or sloppy, or
Speaker 3: who ideologically are pretty cheerful about being ignorant.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, look, you you talk about Doge
Speaker 1: in the book, you write about it rather and you
Speaker 1: but you write about it very in laudatory terms, but
Speaker 1: you make the point you just made as it relates
Speaker 1: to if you're going to move fast, you're going to
Speaker 1: break some things. But this notion of iteration and time
Speaker 1: to move and speed. You you even highlight old Peter
Speaker 1: Drucker talking about excellence and efficiency, which I appreciated, But
Speaker 1: I mean, what is your over under just you know,
Speaker 1: doge in particular? Is it? You know, are you satisfied
Speaker 1: with the two trillion dollars in savings?
Speaker 3: It will turn out to have at least two patterns.
Speaker 3: One is more noise than achievement. Yeah, uh. And the
Speaker 3: other is that it will have exposed for us a
Speaker 3: number of things that were going on that are kind
Speaker 3: of astonishing. Uh. And that you you know, so on
Speaker 3: the one.
Speaker 1: Hand, condoms in Gaza, which you know turn out not
Speaker 1: to be the case.
Speaker 3: What do you mean? Well, for example, it's pretty clear
Speaker 3: that I think at least ten percent of the UN
Speaker 3: refugee workers in Gaza were pro Hamas.
Speaker 1: Oh that's separate, separate. I'm just I'm just I'm lamenting
Speaker 1: on the sort of Orwellian notion of fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: of condoms, which the President reminded me of in the
Speaker 1: Oval office, which I told him was not true.
Speaker 3: And there's a good California, and I'm sure you fondly
Speaker 3: remember Reagan.
Speaker 1: I do, by the way, speaker, I'm in his office
Speaker 1: every day as a point of pride.
Speaker 3: That's well, that's right, I mean right there, right there
Speaker 3: in the governorship. Yeah. Every once in a while, Reagan
Speaker 3: would see something in the newspaper and it was click
Speaker 3: in his head. I would repeat it endlessly. I see
Speaker 3: where you're going, And now look there there's a great
Speaker 3: rookie who is a German poet once said, if you
Speaker 3: drive away my demons, will my angels flee? Also, well,
Speaker 3: talent's with the charismatic leader of Trump's power is there's
Speaker 3: five or ten percent where you go, really, and then
Speaker 3: there's this other stuff that is amazing and historic, and
Speaker 3: you may not be able to separate the two.
Speaker 1: Yeah or yeah, I mean I may have a different
Speaker 1: I'm maybe ninety ten of your flipped.
Speaker 3: That's one of the reason I wanted to do the
Speaker 3: show with you. I remember when we talked about Citizenville.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and all the ideas you had decade ago before
Speaker 2: you ran.
Speaker 3: Into the Sacramento bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: God bless by the way, I still tell people that's
Speaker 2: a really worthwhile book.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you for saying that. By the way, I
Speaker 1: think so much. It's interesting. I reflected on that our
Speaker 1: conversations and a little bit on that book. As reading
Speaker 1: your book, I mean, you talk about, you know, governing,
Speaker 1: not just campaigning. You talk about issues around efficient and
Speaker 1: effective government and more novel and I think what's always
Speaker 1: interested me about you is your willingness to lean into
Speaker 1: the future and talk about healthcare differently than others, as
Speaker 1: you did again here even highlighted my friend Dean Ornige
Speaker 1: in terms of some of his work on wellness and prevention.
Speaker 1: These four p's. You talk about predictability and personalization in
Speaker 1: the healthcare space, but you also take on other spaces
Speaker 1: which I appreciate as well, like the old Eisenhower frame
Speaker 1: on the military industrial complex. And I'm curious, in relationship
Speaker 1: to the DOGE question, why do you think there's been
Speaker 1: so little willingness to enter into that space, even the
Speaker 1: space launch example you just gave.
Speaker 3: I think you know, I had one fight in the
Speaker 3: first bushes of Trump's first term over HUAWEIH and what
Speaker 3: we needed to do to dramatically strengthen American telecommunications, and
Speaker 3: it's the one fight that I clearly decisively lost, and
Speaker 3: I lost it because AT and T was on the
Speaker 3: other side, and AT and T is so big, big,
Speaker 3: contributes so much money as so many lobbyists by so
Speaker 3: many TV ads that you know, I just just ran
Speaker 3: over me. It was an exciting experience, but I felt
Speaker 3: like a lot. I felt like the guy in Tanneman Square,
Speaker 3: the tankage. So I started with that. I mean it is.
Speaker 3: I think the space launch system is one of the
Speaker 3: best examples of the sickness of the old order and
Speaker 3: what Eisenhower did warn about. I mean, people should go
Speaker 3: back and read his farewell address because he's very clear,
Speaker 3: and this guy had been a five star general commander
Speaker 3: of Allied forces in Europe as well as president, so
Speaker 3: he had pretty good knowledge and he's saying correctly. In
Speaker 3: order to build a system big enough to defeat or
Speaker 3: contain the Soviet Empire, you have to turn over so
Speaker 3: much money and power to a bureaucracy which will then
Speaker 3: hire a big corporations that you're going to have the
Speaker 3: permanent danger that they grow together into sort of a
Speaker 3: single organism which then operates for its own benefit. And
Speaker 3: that's an enormous problem across It's a problem in healthcare too.
Speaker 3: I mean, big health in many ways is as bad
Speaker 3: as Big Defense. And I'm working on a paper right
Speaker 3: now which will amuse you when he finally comes out
Speaker 3: talking about Trump time and Trump's savings and going back
Speaker 3: to the skating rink in New York. Yeah, city had
Speaker 3: the rink had quit making ice, which makes it very
Speaker 3: hard if your skating rink, and the city had for
Speaker 3: six years tried to fix it and spent thirteen million dollars.
Speaker 3: Trump talks about this in his first in the book,
Speaker 3: The Art of the Deal.
Speaker 1: This is one of his great successes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, objectively, and he says, you know, he's looking at
Speaker 3: his apartment, looks out over the rink, the woman rink,
Speaker 3: and so he finally gets so pissed off at six
Speaker 3: years they can't make ice, and he challenges the mayor
Speaker 3: publicly and says, you give it to me, and I
Speaker 3: will fix it in less than a year for under
Speaker 3: three million dollars. Well, he fixed it in four months,
Speaker 3: and we came in twenty five percent below budget, and
Speaker 3: they already spent six and a half million. He came
Speaker 3: in twenty five percent below the three million dollar budget,
Speaker 3: totally fixed in four months. And in the book, is
Speaker 3: this great line where he says, they had this firm
Speaker 3: in Florida that had won the contract and didn't know
Speaker 3: what they were doing. And so I said to myself,
Speaker 3: who builds skating rinks? I thought Canavan? I went, oh,
Speaker 3: excuse me. So he goes to the National Hockey League
Speaker 3: and says, who builds the skating rinks? And this is
Speaker 3: firm in Montreal And they fly down and they look
Speaker 3: at it and they go, this is really embarrassing. This
Speaker 3: is so easy to fix, you can't believe it. And
Speaker 3: when he finally got it done, somebody said what happened?
Speaker 3: He said, it wasn't magic, it was common sense and management. Well,
Speaker 3: to the degree that we could bring common sense and management,
Speaker 3: we would. I think you could get better defense for
Speaker 3: twenty five percent less than the current defense budget if
Speaker 3: you could clean out all the bureaucracy and all the
Speaker 3: cronyism and all the bad contracts. I tell every audience
Speaker 3: if you took the Pentagon and turned it into a triangle,
Speaker 3: and took the other two thirds and turned into a museum,
Speaker 3: you would get a better defense system overnight. And the
Speaker 3: reason simple. You'll understand. This is the governor of a
Speaker 3: state with a huge bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in
Speaker 3: nineteen forty three so that twenty six thousand people could
Speaker 3: manage World War two with carbon paper, manual typewriters and
Speaker 3: filing cabins, And in fact, Marshalls chief of staff, used
Speaker 3: to run drills to see how fast you could find
Speaker 3: paper if you needed a certain document, where is and
Speaker 3: how do you get there? Well, everybody depending on now
Speaker 3: has a smartphone, an iPad, a laptop, computer, and I
Speaker 3: have never gotten you. You might be able to get
Speaker 3: somebody caltech to figure this out. I've never been able
Speaker 3: to get an exchange rate. That is, if you have
Speaker 3: one person over here with a carbon paper distribution and
Speaker 3: one person over here with the smartphone or an iPad
Speaker 3: or computer, what's the relative exchange rate of information flow?
Speaker 3: My guess is it's above a million. Well, just one.
Speaker 3: You have the same twenty six thousand people. Now, since
Speaker 3: they're not filing paper and they're not writing on carbon,
Speaker 3: what they're doing is writing each other to prove that
Speaker 3: their job is important so they can stay employed. So
Speaker 3: you screw up the whole system with the person A
Speaker 3: writing person B who writes person see, who then writes
Speaker 3: person A and they beat these things to death, and
Speaker 3: exactly the way New York City was failing with the
Speaker 3: ice rate, because you have a bunch of bureaucrats who
Speaker 3: write papers that have no meaning. And I think I
Speaker 3: helped found the Military Reform Caucus in eighty one. I
Speaker 3: helped pass the Goldwater Nichols Reform in eighty six against
Speaker 3: every active duty senior officer, none of them wanted it. Nowadays,
Speaker 3: I'll tell you it's invaluable. We need a deep, thorough
Speaker 3: review of all of our national security, not just defense,
Speaker 3: all of it. If we're going to compete in the
Speaker 3: modern world.
Speaker 1: It just seems of all things. And you know, I
Speaker 1: appreciate the skating rate because is a reminder of under
Speaker 1: promise over deliver. And we can talk about some of
Speaker 1: those day one actions that Trump may or may not
Speaker 1: have succeeded with in a moment. But I'm curious as
Speaker 1: it relates to the issues of the Pentagon. I mean,
Speaker 1: Trump's been bold, and he's provided a lot of space
Speaker 1: for Doge and certainly Musk in the last one hundred days,
Speaker 1: but the Pentagon does seem to be off limits. I mean,
Speaker 1: is that is.
Speaker 3: That is that accurate? I don't think so. I think
Speaker 3: I think they will presently be as ruthless as the
Speaker 3: Pentagon as they will be anywhere else.
Speaker 1: Interesting. F thirty five comes to mind? Huh, what F
Speaker 1: thirty five comes to mind?
Speaker 3: Actually, I've gotten real pushback on that because I was
Speaker 3: one of the people who's really critical. Yeah, but three
Speaker 3: or four people who I'm writing this paper, and I
Speaker 3: was talking about examples of cost overruns, and I've had
Speaker 3: three or four people who do not work for Lockheed,
Speaker 3: aren't part of the system, but they're very smart right
Speaker 3: back and say to me, that is an inaccurate measurement
Speaker 3: that you actually look at the plane they have built.
Speaker 3: It has no relationship to the original contract. It is
Speaker 3: vastly superior, and the price has dropped now to about
Speaker 3: a reasonable price for a fifth generation fighter. I mean,
Speaker 3: I was shocked. I took it out of my paper
Speaker 3: because there are too many people writing me back and saying,
Speaker 3: so the other examples are terrific, this one's just dumb.
Speaker 3: It's not seconically right. It's interesting because I would have
Speaker 3: a week ago I would have said to you exactly that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's sort of it's we throw that one around. Now.
Speaker 3: I'm getting beaten up by people who know a lot
Speaker 3: more than I do, saying now, I have a lot
Speaker 3: of good examples in my paper, but that ain't want to.
Speaker 1: Them, that ain't want them interesting. So all right, so
Speaker 1: you'll you'll stipulate we should see some more. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously the Secretary of Defense has done some personnel moves,
Speaker 1: et cetera, but they seem relatively modest compared to the
Speaker 1: overall reforms that that you're advocating for. But you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things I've struck in the book, and
Speaker 1: again unsurprising, is it's been a consistent theme with you
Speaker 1: is sort of anticipating the next war, not necessarily relitigating
Speaker 1: and reflecting exclusively on on the last one. And the
Speaker 1: issues of electron electronic EMF issues are that you've been
Speaker 1: sort of focused on issues a space in relationship to defense,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about what
Speaker 1: you sort of positive you least promote in this book
Speaker 1: as it relates to future security on national effects, I.
Speaker 3: Think there are three big things. The first is we
Speaker 3: need to quit talking about war fighting and think about
Speaker 3: war winning. The fact that we have great taxical capabilities
Speaker 3: and wonderfully courageous people who go for twenty one or
Speaker 3: twenty two years in a place like Afghanistan and don't
Speaker 3: win should bother us because war fighting is not the goal.
Speaker 3: War winning is the goal. And as suns Sooo wrote,
Speaker 3: the group find five hundred BC, the greatest of all
Speaker 3: generals win bloodless victories. So you know, the the question
Speaker 3: is can America design a war winning series of strategies
Speaker 3: rather than a war fighting strategies. The second thing I
Speaker 3: would say is you have to look at all of
Speaker 3: national security. You mentioned, for example, the real threat of
Speaker 3: electromagnetic pulse attack, and a very close friend of mine,
Speaker 3: Go Fortune, wrote a remarkable novel called One Second After,
Speaker 3: in which he shows you a village in North Carolina
Speaker 3: after electricity has been cut off by an electromatic post.
Speaker 3: I mean, it is a breathtaking book. He was actually
Speaker 3: invited to Sandia. You'd mentioned Sandia Labs earlier. He was
Speaker 3: invited there by the physicists who were grateful that somebody
Speaker 3: could explain what they worried about, and thought his book
Speaker 3: really was a very accurate projection. So you need to
Speaker 3: think about not just the Defense Department, but the totality
Speaker 3: of national security and then in the defense department itself,
Speaker 3: I've beengun writing something which only occurred to me. By
Speaker 3: watching Ukraine. We are seeing an extraordinary change in the
Speaker 3: nature of warfare, and none of us understanding it. I'm
Speaker 3: actually going to write a paper on Podier, Crasie and Agincoreps,
Speaker 3: which are the three great battles in the Middle Ages
Speaker 3: where the British annihilate the French because the French cannot adjust.
Speaker 3: They have to be armored knights. Their culture requires it.
Speaker 3: And the British have developed a longbow which slaughters armored knight.
Speaker 3: And that takes place over a century, and in that
Speaker 3: entire period that a culture will not allow them to change. Well,
Speaker 3: we may have a similar problem. We like big, expensive,
Speaker 3: sophisticated long to develop long to field systems you're now
Speaker 3: up against. As I said a while ago, I think
Speaker 3: the numbers for next year are for this year for
Speaker 3: Ukraine are going to be a million, five hundred thousand drums. Now,
Speaker 3: most of them are small, most of them are simple.
Speaker 3: Most of our guys would look down their nose at them.
Speaker 3: But Lord Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar, set
Speaker 3: a one point numbers annihilate and if you take the
Speaker 3: combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, three D printing, new specialized
Speaker 3: kinds of chemistry. There's a firm in your state actually
Speaker 3: called Divergent, which is probably the most advanced factory on
Speaker 3: the planet, far ahead of anything in China, and they
Speaker 3: use those techniques to be able to shift what they
Speaker 3: make within a matter of hours. I mean, it's astonishing
Speaker 3: to visit them. And they're in La not far from
Speaker 3: an in and out burger, and they I measure my
Speaker 3: trips to calig But anyway, when you when you start
Speaker 3: thinking about, for example, you don't just measure the Chinese
Speaker 3: warship navy. All the Chinese merchant ships have been designed
Speaker 3: now for twenty years to be capable of launching drones. Well,
Speaker 3: if I have a ship and it happens to have
Speaker 3: forty drones on it, is that an aircraft carrier or
Speaker 3: is that a merchant ship? And if I have eighteen
Speaker 3: hundred of them, does that count as part of my
Speaker 3: navy or is that just an auxiliary group? And how
Speaker 3: many munitions does an American ship carry? And how many
Speaker 3: drones can it stop? If the other guy's able to
Speaker 3: send endless quantities, I'm just giving you a flavor. I
Speaker 3: don't think we realize yet. You know, I talked to
Speaker 3: occasionally to the Amazon people about their use of robotics,
Speaker 3: which is part of the reason they've been able to
Speaker 3: be so amazing. We have no notion yet of how
Speaker 3: fast the modern battlefield is going to become and how
Speaker 3: complicated it's going to become. And our current bureaucracies, in
Speaker 3: our current procurement system makes it very difficult to be
Speaker 3: agile enough. And frankly, excuse me, the dominance of these
Speaker 3: big corporations, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, what have you read
Speaker 3: you on makes it very hard to have the kind
Speaker 3: of entrepreneurial change that you've seen in Silicon Valley for
Speaker 3: your entire lifetime. You know, it's the small company today
Speaker 3: that's the giant company in twenty years. And if you
Speaker 3: can't grow the small companies because they can't get through
Speaker 3: the Defense Department's paperwork, then you're not ever going to
Speaker 3: have the rate and rhythm of innovation that you need.
Speaker 1: No, And that's something you highlight sort of that framework
Speaker 1: of iteration, the sandbox and procurement reform, which is so
Speaker 1: foundational and it's it's really it's about you know, it's
Speaker 1: the incumbency racket. You talk about incumbency capitalism versus innovation capitalism,
Speaker 1: and that sort of innovation capitalism is a big part
Speaker 1: of what we focus on and obviously I think is
Speaker 1: part of the secret sauce to your point of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: I'm curious just going back a little bit, and you know,
Speaker 1: and we're bouncing around a little bit here, but again
Speaker 1: back to timing, because Journey to America, you did it
Speaker 1: with your wife, and you guys have done how many documentaries? Now,
Speaker 1: you've done forty.
Speaker 3: Four books'n we've done ten movies, and I've done forty
Speaker 3: four books. She and I have done I think four
Speaker 3: or five of them together. She wrote six children's books. Yeah,
Speaker 3: about Elis the Elephant and American history. Yeah. Well, Peignaterton
Speaker 3: because you know, she's a music major. She was a
Speaker 3: piano major, plays the French horn, spent twenty years in
Speaker 3: a professional choir at the Basilica in Washington. Uh So
Speaker 3: that's her natural background. Then she was a clerk in
Speaker 3: the Agriculture Committee in the House. And she, you know,
Speaker 3: she works really hard. She works much harder than I do.
Speaker 1: And tune in for the rest of the conversation with
Speaker 1: New Gingrich