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May 19, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:20
Carly Fiorina | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 51
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Time Text
If we want to reconnect the social fabric, we have to rebuild relationships.
And the most effective way to build relationships is collaborate with somebody else and solve a problem.
Don't talk up here in abstract.
Get down on the ground and solve a problem.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
Our guest today is Carly Fiorina.
She's the head of the Unlocking Potential Foundation and, of course, 2016 presidential candidate.
We'll talk with Carly in just a second.
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Carly Fiorina, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
It's great to be with you, Ben.
Thank you for having me.
So for the vast majority of people who are familiar with you, I'm sure they're familiar with you from the 2016 presidential campaign.
Obviously, you had a huge name profile before that.
You were CEO of Hewlett-Packard and you'd run for Senate in California as well.
So what got you from business into politics in the first place?
Well, you know, I kind of realized that politicians and the policies they pursue impact all of our lives.
There were periods in my life where I didn't vote at all.
I thought politics wasn't for me.
And then I realized, actually, politics affects me.
It affects a lot of people.
And I also think there's so much that's broken about our politics.
I think, as George Washington observed in 1789, it's about winning more than it's about problem-solving.
And I think the vitriol in politics is really soul-crushing to a lot of people.
And so I thought, well, maybe I can make a positive contribution and perhaps speak about it in a different way and speak about a citizen government, which is what I think we were meant to have.
Well, looking at the state of politics now, are you optimistic still about that vision of getting into politics?
Because it seems like we're getting more polarized.
There's sort of a movement by Rod Rehr and others to sort of move away from the political, to just say, listen, nothing's getting solved there.
Let's move back into the areas that you occupied beforehand.
That's where the solutions are going to get done.
Well, I'm kind of there at the moment.
You know, I think that, first of all, We know this from our founders, but I've learned this in my life.
Power concentrated is power abused, always.
There's too much power concentrated in Washington, D.C.
And what happens when power gets concentrated, especially in big bureaucracies, and let's face it, government's a big bureaucracy, is power starts to serve itself, preserve itself.
And so problems don't get solved when you're focused on keeping things the way they are.
So, the work that I do now is really to lift up problem solvers, wherever they are, in communities, in companies, in organizations, so that they can be focused on solving the problems right in front of them, because they're frustrated by the fact that the people they thought were solving the problems aren't really getting them solved.
Okay, so let's talk about you jumping into politics.
So, I first became aware of you because I didn't really read the business section when I was, you know, 15 years ago.
But when you first started running for Senate in California, so what year was that?
2010.
2010.
Okay, so you're running for Senate in California.
What prompted you to take on a quixotic task like running for Senate in California?
Well, as I told you, I don't mind tough challenges.
I've been attracted to tough challenges all my life, so that was a tough job.
That was a tough challenge and a very long shot, but honestly, I felt as though there was nothing in the conversation, in the political conversation, about the people that I saw in California who didn't think the way Barbara Boxer did.
Who were being harmed by the policies that Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and the Democrats in Sacramento were pushing.
And I felt as though it was important to have somebody with some small shot to be able to stand up and articulate what I thought were Real life, realistic policies that actually work, that I know something about.
See, one of the reasons I think we were intended to be a citizen government is politicians don't know a lot about a lot of things, especially if they've been in politics all their life.
I'm not saying they're bad people.
There's some very good people in politics.
But if all you've done is run and win, run and win, run and win, You don't know a lot about what's going on, and yet you're making policies that impact people tremendously.
And so California's business environment was getting harmed, crushed by these policies.
I happened to know something about it, and Barbara Boxer knew nothing about it.
And that kind of ticked me off.
Well, it turns out Barbara Boxer knew very little about anything, but neither did the voters of California.
She wouldn't be the only politician that way.
But I think so much of politics just gets to be, it's like sports.
It's win-lose.
My team, my team.
And we've turned into tribal team players.
I'm on the D team, so I always go with the D. I'm on the R team, I always go with the R. That win-lose never solves problems, although it may win elections.
So after that taste of running in 2010, what prompted you to think, okay, 2016, I really want more of this?
Well, it's such a doubting question, Ben, I'm sure.
I mean, yes, it was a huge challenge.
I talk to tons of politicians and I always look at them and I say, like, this seems horrible.
Why would you want to do this?
Well, you know, there are things about it that are very hard, but the voters make it great.
I mean, I have no regrets.
I loved talking to citizens.
And one of the things that I said, the media once asked me, what's the biggest surprise about running for president?
And I said, the yawning chasm between what citizens talk about and how they talk about it and what the media asks and how the media talks about it.
There is a yawning chasm still, which is why it's so important that you do what you do, for example.
So, why did I do that?
I did it because, once again, I knew it was a long shot, I knew it was a tough challenge, but ours was intended to be a citizen government.
And I know something about big bureaucracies, and I know what makes them tick, and I know what has to happen to reform them.
And Washington is one gigantic bureaucracy.
And it is a system that seeks to preserve itself at all costs, Republicans and Democrats alike.
I know something about that.
I know how to reform those systems.
And so I thought, well, I think my voice can make a contribution here.
And you famously made a courageous stand in the middle of the debates when you started talking about Planned Parenthood openly and shot to the top of the polls.
What did it feel like to go from nowhere to the top of the polls in a matter of... Well, it wasn't exactly the top of the polls, but I think we did get to something like 9% in the national polls.
There were a couple where you were up to like 15, I think.
And so that was a big change because when I started, less than 3% of the electorate had ever heard of me.
I mean, I had no name ID.
You know, I focused less, honestly, on what the polls were saying, and more on what I was saying.
And the Planned Parenthood, that was the time, of course, when the whole scandal about selling body parts was coming out.
And literally, the media machine was saying it wasn't true.
And of course it was true.
And it's been demonstrably shown to be true.
And that was just outrageous to me.
Outrageous because it is a crime against humanity.
Outrageous because it says something terrible about the character of our nation.
But also outrageous because here is something that's actually going on.
That a whole bunch of people, for political reasons say, And it was.
So, you're in the middle of this campaign, you suddenly start to pick up enormous steam, and then Donald Trump, then candidate Trump, decides to airmail himself into the middle of the campaign, effectively, and insults you personally.
I have to admit, I was not a voter for President Trump in 2016, I didn't vote for any of the candidates at the top of the tickets, and one of the reasons was because President Trump routinely attacked people in ways that I thought were unpalatable, and it wasn't just you, obviously he accused Senator Cruz's father of killing JFK, He still does.
That behavior continues.
Right.
So how did you not get cynical about politics given both his statements and then the reaction to his statements specifically targeting what you look like?
Well, first let me say when Trump entered the campaign, everything changed.
Instantaneously.
And you could tell as a candidate.
The minute Trump came down the escalator, every question became about him.
From the media.
Every question became about him.
On every network.
Because he was interesting.
He was a celebrity.
He drew eyeballs.
And so the whole conversation shifted.
It's one of the reasons I said what voters wanted to talk about was so different than what the media wanted to talk about.
And Donald Trump knew that.
He was brilliant at it.
And so, okay, give me the media attention, he said, and it worked.
Regarding President Trump's comments about me, and I actually tell that story in this book, but Gee, President Trump isn't the first man who ever said something about my looks, either positive or negative.
Women's looks are discussed as a way of demeaning or dismissing them.
It's happened to me all my life.
So when it first happened, it was just kind of like, oh, here we go again.
My staff was stunned.
And I just said, we'll find a time to deal with it.
And so I finally dealt with it in that debate.
People were shocked that he said it in a presidential campaign.
But in fairness, he's not the only man or the first man to have said things like that.
Were you perturbed, though, by the reaction of primary voters, that they looked at that and they didn't find that offensive enough to?
I do.
be even close to disqualifying.
Obviously, he wins the nomination, then goes on to become president of the United States.
Well, I find it disturbing.
I do.
I find it disturbing that we have come to accept a level of discourse and behavior that should be unacceptable.
I don't think Trump is necessarily the cause of this.
He may be the result of it.
But the level of...
Vitriol, conflict, insult that we now think of as routine in civil discourse should not be acceptable in this nation.
And it worries me.
And that's what I meant when I said earlier, politics, somehow the way we conduct politics is it has infected everything.
Part of that is social media.
People will say things on social media that they would never say to your face.
And yet we've just sort of come to think that's okay.
It's not okay.
So moving forward, what do you make of President Trump?
So now obviously he's the president.
How do you grade his performance as president?
Well, let me say a couple things.
First, Republicans have rightly criticized Democrats for assassinating someone's character because they don't agree with them.
Remember, John McCain was a racist.
Mitt Romney was a misogynist.
Neither men were either one of those things.
It's wrong to assassinate someone's character because you disagree with them.
But it's equally wrong to defend someone's character just because you happen to agree with some of their policies.
I think Donald Trump is an entertainer, so he focuses on himself.
And a leader focuses on those they serve.
I think Donald Trump is a politician, so he focuses on winning.
A leader focuses on problem solving.
I think a leader understands that how you do things matters hugely.
It matters as much as what you do.
Because how you do things builds support or not, it builds character or not, it lifts people up or not.
And while I agree with some of the things Donald Trump does, I rarely agree with how he does any of them.
So moving forward to 2020, and this is the hard question obviously, do you plan on voting for him in 2020?
I don't know.
So what would he have to do in order to win your vote in 2020?
I don't traffic in hypotheticals.
Never have, won't now.
Okay, so looking at the future of the Republican Party then.
I, as I've said, did not vote for any of the top candidates in 2016.
Many of my chief worries about President Trump as president involved him alienating young voters particularly.
My generation is very anti-Trump.
That's true for many young Republicans as well as many young Democrats.
What do you see as the future of the Republican Party?
The theory of the media is that it's a demographically shrinking base, that that base will continue to shrink demographically, and that the future of the Republican Party is basically there is no future.
The Democratic Party is going to win from here till eternity.
Where do you see the Republican Party going?
Do you still consider yourself a member of the Republican Party?
Well, I think that depends on people who call themselves conservatives and Republicans.
I really do.
So, for example, when people who are Republicans say that it is the duty of Republicans to pledge loyalty to President Trump, That doesn't bode well for the future of the party.
This is America.
We don't pledge loyalty to a president.
Not in this country.
In this country, a citizen is sovereign.
And a president has to earn our respect.
So, I think it depends.
When there are constitutional principles at stake, and yet those get swept aside because, oh my gosh, we have to stand with President Trump because the Democrats are bad.
I don't think that bodes well for the future of the Republican Party.
I mean, let's just take the Mueller report.
I've read every single word of it.
There are real constitutional principles at stake there.
And so for people to say, oh, just never mind.
I don't think that bodes well for the future of the Republican Party.
So let me ask you in depth, since you've read the Mueller Report and since it's the hot topic of the moment and it looks like it's going to be unfolding, the consequences of it over the next couple of months, what do you think ought to happen?
So my brief take on the Mueller Report is that it has an enormous amount of both embarrassing and terrible behavior by the President of the United States.
As a lawyer, I didn't see anything that rises to the level of criminal obstruction of justice.
Obviously, William Barr felt the same.
Robert Mueller had the capacity to rule on that.
He didn't.
He sort of kicked it over.
Do you think, number one, that I didn't see more evidence of collusion than was already there?
I didn't see criminal collusion.
What was your overall assessment of the Mueller Report and what ought to happen from here?
Well, first let me say one of the things I learned at my brief time in law school is that lawyers can disagree.
And apparently a lot of lawyers disagree about this.
I'm not a lawyer.
But as a citizen reading this report, I found the report... First of all, you're right.
And Mueller's very clear in this report that he sets a very high bar.
It's called criminal conduct.
That's a very high bar to have to clear.
I would also say the report is carefully and precisely written.
I would say that Trump is not exonerated.
I would also say Trump did not fully cooperate.
But more to the point, the Russian Interference.
That volume of the report is stunning and shocking.
And the fact that we are not having a conversation in this country about how to prevent that from happening again is Really dereliction of duty, I think, honestly.
And the fact that both Republicans and Democrats, in fairness, have taken that as a political issue.
It's not a political issue.
The sweeping, systemic, I'm quoting, as you know, the sweeping, systemic interference in our elections by the Russians is now a political football, and it should not be.
Do you remember when Republicans were so upset because President Obama whispered to President Medvedev and said, I'll have more flexibility after the election, and Republicans went up in arms, oh my gosh.
Of course the FBI had to investigate the hints that they were given.
There was a lot there.
And we should be shocked by what has been uncovered.
And alarmed.
And I would also say that in Volume 2, I accept I'm not a lawyer.
It wasn't criminal conduct.
But this is not the way a president of the United States and his staff should be behaving.
And my question is, if it were a Democrat doing this, what would Republicans be saying?
See, here's the thing about principles.
They're sometimes inconvenient.
And if a principle is right when it's a Democrat in the White House, then that principle remains right when a Republican is in the White House.
And I think the Republican Party The Democrat Party too has to kind of get focused on what are our principles.
And I think our principles as a conservative are power concentrated is power abused.
Decision making has to be dispersed.
Huge bureaucracies have to be reformed.
People closest to the problem know best how to solve them.
And that definitely doesn't mean people in Washington, D.C.
It means people in cities and communities and families and businesses.
And we are a long way from those principles.
So, in a second, I want to ask you to turn to the Democratic Party and give your diagnosis there, since you've given your diagnosis to the Republican Party.
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All right, so let's talk about the Democratic Party on the other side of the aisle.
So, suffice it to say, I agree with a lot of your critiques of the Republican Party.
Obviously, I'm deeply worried about people who are willing to go along with bad behavior simply in the name of getting a win.
I do think that there are a lot of people who, obviously, I assume you agree with this, who back President Trump, not because of his worst aspects, but because they feel they are getting what they want in terms of policy.
And they are pragmatist when it comes to, okay, there's only one guy on the ticket in front of me.
He's the person I got to vote for because he's there.
Absolutely.
And then they look at the Democratic Party, and they say, all these people had to do was be sane, and that's not a thing that seems to be happening.
What's your diagnosis of the Democratic Party, and who do you think is best positioned inside the Democratic Party?
I know you're not into speculation, but who do you think are the top candidates in the Democratic Party position for 2020?
So I think the Democrats have taken the easiest possible route And rather than really be introspective about why they lost, who they're missing, who they're not appealing to anymore because of their rabid identity politics, they've taken the easy way out and they've said, it's all Trump.
It's all Trump.
It's all Trump.
And it's not all Trump.
Democrats have contributed to this climate.
As I said earlier, I think in a way Trump is the result of a long decline in our political discourse, not the cause of it.
And Democrats have been unbelievably insulting and assassinating people's character because they didn't agree with them.
And now they just say Trump is bad, Trump is bad, everything Trump does is bad.
And everything that has become a partisan football.
And, of course, they go further and further and further and further to the left.
And so, if Bernie Sanders is their nominee, Trump will win in a landslide.
If Elizabeth Warren is their nominee, Trump will win in a landslide.
I still think we should call out bad behavior when we see it.
I still think we should stand up for constitutional principles.
But, when faced with the choice between policies that will ruin this country And policies that generally speaking are working for this country, people are going to vote for Trump.
So, I think the question for the Democrats, the question for someone like Joe Biden, who I think many people would say maybe has the best shot of beating Trump because he appeals to some of the same constituents that took Trump over the top against Hillary Clinton.
Biden has to survive a Democrat primary.
And we'll see.
We'll see.
So far, you know, apologizing endlessly for getting into someone's personal space wasn't a strong start.
So looking at sort of the problems that face the United States, there seems to be a couple of broad consensus items that I think I personally believe are incorrect but seem to have become common wisdom.
Some of those broad consensus items seems to be that there is a large group of Americans who are being economically left behind thanks to income inequality and that the only way to rectify that imbalance is either through government redistributionism or through restrictions on trade.
What do you make of the argument that the rising populism of the left and the right are driven by the idea that major corporations have been outsourcing, that communities are being left empty?
And what do you think is the solution to that, if any?
See, to me, this question is a classic example of problems being placed in the wrong place.
So why do people say income inequality, redistribution, trade?
Because those are federal solutions.
Yes, there are people being left behind.
Unlocking Potential Foundation does a lot of work in communities.
There are structural impediments.
Washington DC is the most rapidly gentrifying city in the nation.
And as a result, People who have lived there all their lives can no longer afford to live there.
If you live in a neighborhood that, like Ward 8 in D.C., your life expectancy is 37 years less than 10 miles away because there's inadequate medical care, because there's not as healthy food your life expectancy is 37 years less than 10 miles away All of these things have been building up for a very, very, very long time.
So it's naive for us to say, actually, there is no problem.
Everyone is doing better.
Everyone isn't doing better.
On the other hand, the solution to that is not federal.
It's not, I mean, trade policy can help in certain ways.
Redistribution, who do you give the money to for what?
These are problems that require collaboration at the community level.
This is the work my foundation does, to bring people together in a community, lift leaders up, not based on their position or their title, but their ability to solve a problem.
And one of the things I see happening all across this country is people are so sick of politics, they're so sick of nothing happening, that they're saying, you know what?
We're going to have to kind of buckle down and do something with this problem because we actually know something about it.
It impacts us.
Not everything is going to get fixed in Washington, D.C.
There are some federal solutions that are required.
But most things actually, and this is the genius of our founders, most things actually get solved a little closer to home.
So when we talk about solving things closer to home, I've written extensively about the breakdown of the social fabric.
My new book is all about that.
Obviously people like Tim Carney have talked in their book, he has a book called Alienated America, talking about the disintegration of the social fabric.
How is a social fabric rebuilt?
Because it seems like without that social fabric, people are going to look more and more to government, including the federal government, for solutions that used to be solved on a community level.
And my solution has largely been, you need to re-engage not only with the ideas of the founding, but also with your religious roots.
I know Tim Carney sort of believes the same thing, that with the death of church, particularly in the middle of the country, a lot of the social fabric has disintegrated.
How do you think that social fabric can be rebuilt?
People have to connect with each other.
I know it sounds so basic, but church used to be a place where people connected with one another.
People have to connect with one another and solve problems.
It's amazing what happens when people decide, I'm going to collaborate with you and solve a problem.
It could be a simple problem.
It could be a complicated problem.
We have to stop looking up there.
We have to reconnect with one another.
The work that we do in my foundation, we work with all kinds of people.
We never ask.
What's your political party?
What are your political beliefs?
What's your religious affiliation?
We never ask.
Instead, what we do is, what problem do you want to focus on?
What problem do you want to solve?
And when people get focused on a problem that impacts more than them, then they start reaching out to others.
If we want to reconnect the social fabric, we have to rebuild relationships.
And the most effective way to build relationships, I've learned this over and over and over, is collaborate with somebody else and solve a problem.
Don't talk up here in abstract.
Get down on the ground and solve a problem.
And it turns out, people kind of like doing that.
And they figure out, okay, you and I look different, we may think different, we're a different generation, but we can actually get along and get something done.
So you mentioned a little bit earlier that you do think that there are certain areas where federal solutions are available.
So what are some of the federal solutions that you think ought to be applied and that are not currently being applied?
Well, you mentioned trade.
I mean, trade policy absolutely impacts people in all kinds of ways.
I don't happen to be a big fan of tariffs because I think demonstrably they harm our consumers and our businesses more than they harm the trading partners we're trying to punish.
But that's clearly an answer.
I think there's no question that the deregulatory movement that the Trump administration has led has had a wonderful effect on the economy.
The more confidence businesses of all sizes have in the economy, and that confidence in part comes from their knowing that, you know, if I see an opportunity, I can go after it.
If I see someone I want to hire, I can hire them without being burdened by a whole set of things coming down the pike that I can't afford.
All those things help.
My point, however, is that I think government so often gets in the way more than it solves a problem, and And I also think that politicians don't actually focus on solving problems.
They focus on winning.
And the truth is, here's the dirty truth about politics.
Unresolved problems win elections.
How long have we been talking about the same problems?
How long have we been talking about immigration?
Fifty years?
How long have we been talking about care of veterans?
How long have we been talking about debts and deficits?
How long have we been talking about government reform?
We've been talking about those things forever.
How long have we been talking about abortion?
Forever.
And the truth is, Having those things unresolved and getting people all riled up about them wins elections.
We've seen it over and over again.
If politicians aren't going to role model problem-solving, and I don't think they have for a very long time, I think citizens are going to have to.
And what I know, and what I say in this book, is we're actually all meant for problem-solving.
We have the potential to problem-solve, and it's very fulfilling when we do it.
Do you think the American people are ever going to get the hint about and vote this way?
In other words, the American people, we like to make a lot of overtures about problem solving and getting together and fixing all of these things.
And then we tend to vote for the most entertaining politicians, the people who tell us what we want to hear, the people who pander to us, the people who yell at each other the loudest.
And that's not unique to President Trump.
This existed long before President Trump.
Do you think that we ever get the hint or do you think that basically what we end up with is, you know, to come full circle, where we ended up at the beginning, that we end up with more and more people disengaging from politics.
I used to believe pretty strongly that the people who are going to be most involved in saving the country were the people who are politically aware.
I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.
I think that the people who may save the country are the people who are least politically aware because they're more focused on... Or have checked out.
Right, exactly.
The people who have decided, you know what, I can't focus on all this noise out here.
Instead, I'm going to focus on the stuff that I can do right in front of me.
Do you think the American people clue into this, or do you think that basically we have a widening, ever-yawning gap between the political class and everybody else?
Well, what I see happening in communities, yes, I do think people are cluing into it.
But I also think that we have to be, you know, one of the things that I think you have to do to solve a problem is be clear-eyed about what the current state is.
So, I mentioned George Washington in 1789, the trouble with political parties, they will come to care only about winning.
The system is designed to win.
On both sides.
Political parties have put together a system that narrows choices quickly, that supports people who are already in office, that provides benefits to the folks who are already in politics, and makes it very difficult for people who aren't in politics.
So if you doubt that, think about what the system produced, and has produced.
Honestly, in the United States of America, this political system, both parties produces Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
This is the best we can do?
I think not.
I think not.
So, eventually, I think we're going to have to figure out that political parties are not always operating in citizens' best interest.
They're operating in their own interest, and they're operating in the interest of people who are trying to win elections.
But in the meantime, I think we've got to solve the problems right in front of us and quit looking to Washington to do it for us.
And that means, as well, by the way, Role modeling the behavior that eventually we want out of our elected officials instead of parroting their behavior.
So in one second, I want to ask you about your role as a publicly facing woman in the business world.
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Okay, so let's talk about what it was like to be CEO of HP.
What sort of public requirements do you think were different maybe because you were a woman than there would have been for a male CEO in the same position?
Did you feel that there were certain burdens that you had to carry just publicly or challenges that you had to face in that role that if you'd been a man you wouldn't have had to face?
I wouldn't use the term requirements, but what I would say is the scrutiny is different.
The criticism is different.
So, for example, when I took the job, I was very focused on the fact that this was a great company that had lost its way.
We'd missed nine quarters in a row.
We were losing market share.
Profitability was deteriorating.
We had to fix some things.
And so I was ready, on the day of my announcement, to speak to the press about those things.
Why this was still a great company, but we needed to make some fundamental changes to restore our innovative spirit.
And what did the press want to talk about?
Oh my gosh, you're a woman.
The editor of the most widely read business publication at the time, the very first question I was asked was, what designer made your suit?
When I was a presidential candidate, my campaign was routinely asked what kind of shoes I was wearing.
So these are things that men simply don't have to deal with, and they are a distraction.
The other thing that I would say is, I think that there is an understanding between men of the necessity for respect and how it's important to give another man respect.
I'm not sure that understanding exists where women are concerned.
And so people will talk in terms about women that they would never use for men.
Now, the reason I say I don't think it was a different requirement.
I was a chief executive officer of a publicly traded company.
And my job was just the same as any other CEO's.
I needed to worry about our customers, our employees, the communities in which we lived and worked, our shareholders.
We had a massive transformation that we needed to take that company through.
And so it was my job not to let all this noise distract me.
But there's a lot of noise and it takes energy not to be distracted by it.
So what were your strategies for getting over that?
I mean, I know that, you know, just being in the public eye, even in what I do, the amount of flack that I take, which is nothing compared to the amount of flack that you've taken over your career, can be extraordinarily draining, just on a personal level.
How did you deal with that on a personal level, being attacked so much, being in the public eye so much, being under scrutiny so much?
I ignored it.
I ignore it all.
It's one of the things I say in this book.
If you can't get over being criticized, you will never fulfill your potential.
If you can't get over being criticized, you will never lead.
You will never change the order of things for the better.
You will never actually solve the problem.
Because criticism is the price.
Whether you're a man, whether you're a woman, whether you're different, whether you look like everyone else, criticism is always the price.
Yes, the criticism of me as a woman was maybe different.
Gee, I don't like her suit.
I don't like her hair.
On the other hand, the fact that there's criticism that accompanies every leader.
And by the way, leader is not about your position or your title.
It's about whether you're solving a problem and changing the order of things for the better.
Criticism is the price.
And so I learned very early on.
I got criticized a lot early in my career.
Who does she think she is?
Why is she doing that?
My gosh, people have been trying to solve that problem forever.
Why does she think she can do it?
I learned to tune it out.
That doesn't mean, by the way, that I didn't seek feedback.
Because feedback's very important.
And feedback comes from people who actually care about what you're trying to do.
And they maybe care about you.
But criticism is just noise from people standing on the sidelines who don't have the job that you have and don't have the responsibilities that you do.
Whatever your job is and whatever your responsibilities are.
So what's your social media strategy?
Social media is just criticism from people who don't know you.
That's right.
So what's your social media strategy?
So first of all, you have to put it in perspective.
And I know it's very difficult.
Again, social media is one of the reasons I wrote this book.
Because if you think about it, people are growing up in an environment.
They're trying to find their way in an environment where criticism is omnipresent, where criticism is unbelievably intense, cruel even, where we have national debates and dialogues at the highest levels of politics where we have national debates and dialogues at the highest levels of politics that kind of feel like vitriolic, That's an incredible environment to have to find your way in.
And yet, it means that when you get all that stuff, you've got to put it in perspective.
And you have to realize if you're doing something worthwhile.
If you're doing something worthwhile, if you're solving a problem, if you're providing another point of view.
85% of what you're going to get is criticism.
Okay.
That's the way it is.
So I want to ask you about, you know, you mentioned your education earlier, the loss and the fact that you dropped out of law school, that you ended up going for an MBA.
So what are your thoughts on people who are looking at a career path and thinking about college, law school, MBA?
What do you think our colleges are worth at this point?
Because obviously there's big controversy over whether everybody should go to college for free or whether we should pay $500,000 to get our kids into crew at USC.
Yeah.
Wow.
Talk about a terrible lesson for those kids, not to mention for society at large.
So first what I say to people, and I say in this book, is don't get hung up on the plan.
I see so many people, honestly, and I've seen it all throughout my career, who have so much potential, but they get on a plan.
Okay, I'm going to graduate from law school, and then I need to make this much money, and then I need to be a partner in this firm, and then I need to get married, and then I need to have so many... They have all these things that have to happen for their plan to come true, and they miss so many opportunities along the way.
Ambition is fine, but if you get so hung up on a particular destination, I have to be here by this point.
If I'm not here by this point, it's over.
That's a real dead end.
They get there, and it isn't what they thought.
Or they sell so much of their soul to get there.
They give up so much to get there, that by the time they're there, they're not at all who they should be.
Or they never get there at all, and they're devastated, and none of those outcomes are good.
So yes, be ambitious, but see the opportunities around you.
The opportunities around you might cause you to take a detour, and it won't be fatal.
It might be exactly where you're meant to go.
So what's the contrast between, you know, following the opportunity and the so-called kind of follow-your-bliss movement of the 1960s?
You talk about how you were looking for self-fulfillment when you dropped out of law school.
This wasn't something you felt was fulfilling.
For me, I had a similar experience.
When I finished law school, I worked for a major law firm for about 10 months.
I thought it was the worst thing ever.
I dropped out.
I went to work for one-third the pay at a different company, and that started me on a different career track.
And I very much encourage people to do that sort of thing.
But how do you know the difference between when you're dropping something that you're doing in search of another opportunity, and when you're dropping something that you're doing in favor of something stupid?
Because you do see this too.
People who have a plan, and then they decide to follow their dream, and it turns out that their dream is to finger paint.
How exactly do you distinguish?
Well, first of all, it would never have occurred to me to say I was dropping out of law school for self-fulfillment.
It's not how I thought about it.
And I realize it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the 60s and all that, but I think therein lies the truth.
If you hate something, you're going to be bad at it.
I mean, it's just human nature.
If you hate something, you're going to be bad at it.
I think the difference between dropping something you hate and following an opportunity versus finger painting is, are you actually wanting to be excellent?
Are you prepared to work hard?
Are you trying to make a positive difference?
Working hard and being excellent is really key.
It's not just key to success, it's actually key to fulfillment.
And so, wherever a path takes someone, the question I always ask them is, Do you like what you do?
Are you learning?
Are you making a contribution?
Are you working hard?
Are you doing the best job you can?
And if the answer to all those five questions is yes, yes, yes, yes, then you're probably on the right path.
So here's a question that is very often asked to females, not as often asked to males, probably should be asked to men more often.
How did you balance career with family life?
This is obviously something that my own wife struggles with.
As I've said, she's a doctor.
That means she's been basically in medical school since we met.
Which is now 11 years coming up in July.
We'll be married.
She's finally finishing residency Thank God in in two months, but she's taking time off when when we had kids She took six months off for our first kids took about three months off for our second kid She's planning on working part-time after she's done because she's looking for particular balance How do you think it's important to draw a balance between what you're doing in terms of family life and what you're seeking in terms of career because there is a Prevailing view out there that women can have it all and they're only 24 hours in a day And I wonder how much that's true Well, I think, first of all, there is no silver bullet.
There is no magic answer.
And there is no cookie-cutter answer either.
I sort of faced this when I realized that something very fundamental, how each of us spend our time, becomes our life.
And so therefore we have to own the choice of how am I going to spend my time.
Because how we spend it becomes our life.
And so I got very intentional, very deliberate about how do I spend my time.
And the revelation for me was when I realized whatever choice I make, someone will be unhappy.
Whatever choice I make, someone will be unhappy because someone always wants more.
If you're focused on work, your family wants more.
If you're focused on family, your work wants more.
And so that also is something I think we have to learn to live with.
But when I say I'm deliberate and intentional, I began a process of Looking at how am I spending my time in a week?
How am I spending my time in a month?
How am I spending my time in a year?
And then to look back at it and say, are these the choices that I think I should be making?
And each one of us has to make that choice.
There is no one size fits all and there is no silver bullet.
You have to own those choices because it becomes your life and you have to realize not everyone will be happy, but that's part of the price too.
Do you think that the media have sort of pervaded a mythical view of what the balance can be?
In other words, it seems like there's an Instagram view that you can work full time at a job, spend 12 hours a day with your children, vacation every month, and all of this somehow works out perfectly.
If you watch TV, There seems to be very little struggle to draw that balance.
It's basically, I'm a high-powered lawyer and I work full-time, but I also am there for every one of my kids' baseball games.
It's like, well, I'm not sure that that's just the case.
I feel like what that's leading to in many ways is women sometimes putting off I mean, statistically, women are putting off marriage, they're putting off childbearing, they're putting off childrearing until later in time because they've been told by a media that career ought to come first, when in reality, maybe it should for certain women, but it's not invariable.
There is a ticking clock on one end when it comes to family, and there's not a ticking clock necessarily when it comes to career.
What do you think the media's role is in drawing sort of a model for how women should pursue career?
Well, I do think that I give women maybe a little more credit for thinking for themselves.
But I do acknowledge your point that so much of what we see on television and in social media is just a fantasy.
It's a fantasy.
I mean, so much of social media is a complete fantasy.
How much time do people spend curating their Instagram photos?
That's a fantasy.
And it's not only a fantasy, it's a superficial fantasy.
And so, again, part of, I think, what people have to deal with in this environment, and part of the reason I wrote this book now, is to say, understand what all this is.
Entertainment, maybe.
It's a little bit of propaganda, frequently.
It's driven by a business incentive to make money on the part of the media, so therefore they want people to watch.
And who wants to watch about real life?
Isn't it easier to watch about some fantastic, you know, fantasy about how everything can be?
But I think that Life is always trade-offs.
It is for men too.
And there are a lot of men in my father's generation who got to the end of their careers and said, oh my gosh, what have I missed?
How much have I missed?
And they regretted that far more than they thought about the corner office they attained.
So, in your book, Find Your Way, I mean, it covers an enormous amount of ground.
You also talk about sort of being driven and focused with regard to relationships.
So, you talk about this specifically with regard to your first husband.
I was wondering if you could tell that story.
Well, my first husband was a mistake.
But, you know, without getting into all the sort of details, let's just say he betrayed my trust in very significant ways.
And so, I had to come to grips with that and say, This isn't gonna work.
I wasn't the first person to do that, but it felt incredibly difficult and dramatic to me.
And fortunately, I met the love of my life and my soulmate, and 37 years later, here we are.
So life worked out.
But I think often about what might have happened to me had I not had the courage to make that choice.
Courage features prominently.
in a fulfilling life or a successful life or an impactful life.
And what ends up happening to so many of us is it is our fears that hold us back.
And most of those fears are kind of silly.
I mean, my fear, honestly, with my husband, my first husband, my mother never really liked him, was, oh no, my parents are going to say, I told you so.
Well, how silly is that?
And yet, how often do people get held up by, I'm afraid I'm gonna make a mistake?
Of course, we all do.
I'm afraid I'm gonna get criticized.
I'm afraid I'm gonna look foolish.
I'm afraid my likes will go down.
All those are such stupid fears.
And so, getting over those fears, being courageous, is a huge part of an impactful, productive, fulfilling, successful life.
So I want to get back to your tips that you have in your book, Find Your Way, which is really a terrific book.
In a little while, I want to go back to the very beginning for people who don't know your whole story.
So your story is really fascinating because it had a lot of ups and downs.
You talk in your book, Find Your Way, about your story, about the fact that your parents expected you to go to law school and you decided not to go to law school.
And then somehow you end up going from secretary to CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
So can you tell that story about why didn't you decide to go to law school?
You started.
Yeah, I started because I was one of those kids who was a parent pleaser.
I was a middle child.
I was the one who was never going to disappoint.
My parents' expectations for me weighed very heavy on me.
And so I lived through their expectations.
By the way, there are a lot of people who live for other people's expectations.
And so I go off to law school and I just hate it.
And then I realize I have to make a choice.
I'm either going to pursue something that I truly hate, and please my parents or I'm going to please myself and find my own way.
And so I dropped out.
And that was an incredibly difficult decision.
I wasn't a quitter.
I wasn't the person who was going to drop out.
But now I have to go make a living.
And so I had put myself through school as an undergraduate, as a temporary secretary in local businesses.
And so I went back to work full-time, typing and filing and answering the phones.
I mean, we don't really even have those positions anymore.
We keyboard, we don't type, but that's what I did.
And I was grateful for that job.
I really was.
I typed and filed and answered the phones for a nine-person real estate firm.
It was a dead-end job, man.
But it paid the rent.
And maybe six months into that job, two men came up to my desk.
They worked there and they said, we've been watching you.
You do such a good job.
You're so focused.
Maybe you want to know about what we do.
And that was my first introduction to business.
I had never thought about business.
I ran away to Italy to teach English for a year.
You can imagine my parents are really concerned.
And finally, I buckle down and get an MBA.
And I land in an entry-level position in a vast company with literally one million employees.
And I'm at the bottom of the totem pole.
I didn't have a plan to get ahead.
I didn't think I would make it a year.
But what I saw were problems everywhere that just festered, that everybody talked about but nobody did anything about.
And I saw people impacted by those problems who actually knew a lot about them.
So I started working with people and solving problems.
And what I figured out is if you solve problems and change the order of things for the better and produce results, people pay attention.
And then other opportunities came along.
Literally, that is the story of my life.
So how do you get from working at the lowest level at a one million person company to being the head of a company that hires hundreds of thousands of people?
I ran to problems.
I know it sounds so basic, but that's the truth.
I ran to problems.
I always took the challenging jobs because I figured out I like challenge.
I like solving difficult problems that everybody else is saying, stay away from those problems.
And the reason I liked it so much is because everywhere I went, I found people who knew something about the problem.
People closest to the problem know best how to solve it.
It's just they're so often not asked.
And so I would ask people, and they'd always have good ideas, and then we'd work together.
And I found I loved that.
I loved the teamwork of it.
I loved the collaboration of it.
I liked the intellectual challenge of it.
And when problems get solved, when things get better, I guarantee you other opportunities come along, and they always did.
And I wasn't afraid to say, okay, I'll take on that challenge.
So your story is actually somewhat like my own mother's.
My mom started off as an education major.
She went to Northwestern, then Boston University.
And she started off as a secretary at a company.
She ended up becoming vice president of that company.
And I'd be curious to get your thoughts on what it was like to be a woman working at that time.
There's a lot of talk now about sexism in the business world and about the so-called glass ceiling in the business world.
What were your experiences with being a working woman?
Well, both are true.
It was then and it is now.
That's just a fact.
apparently there was allegations of a lot more of that kind of sexist abuse in the workplace.
Obviously now we still experience people who suggest that that's a prevalent problem.
Well, both are true.
It was then and it is now.
That's just a fact.
And let me quickly say, most people are not bad people.
There are some bad people who engage in bad behavior and that behavior has to be confrontable But most people are maybe thoughtless, or careless, or clueless, or maybe they're afraid.
So I'll give you three examples.
The first one I already mentioned, two men come to my desk and take a chance on me.
And say, you can do more.
And they encouraged me to go on.
My first client meeting ever at that vast company called AT&T was held in a strip club because that's where the men went to have business lunches.
And my male colleague didn't really want me to come.
So he said, we're going to the strip club and I assume you won't come.
I went because I couldn't be scared off of my job.
We turned into very good colleagues over time, because it turned out he was afraid of me.
He was afraid the NBA would take away his job.
I had a boss introduce me as, this is Carly, your new boss.
She's our token bimbo.
I've been called all kinds of names.
My appearance has been commented on.
Here's the truth.
It's different when you're different.
It is.
The criticism is different.
The challenges are different.
And yet, for every thoughtless, clueless, careless person in any organization, in my experience, there are ten times as many people who are well-meaning, who want to lift people up.
The problem is, Too often, the well-meaning people don't say anything.
And so the bad behavior continues, and we've seen a lot of that in the press as well.
I mean, pick your Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, the gymnastics coach.
People knew that was going on, and they didn't do anything about it.
So what's the best way for women to deal with that, or anybody who's being mistreated at work?
Because one of the things that we see is obviously, I totally agree, people who do this sort of stuff should be called out.
Not only is my mom a working woman, my mom actually worked, my dad stayed home.
My wife, as people know, is a doctor, so she's a working woman.
What's the best way for folks to deal with this?
Because on the one hand, you want to call things out when you see them.
On the other hand, there's There's a converse sort of tendency, for some people anyway, to hide behind the eight ball of victimhood, to feel like there's such an obstacle to overcome that I can never overcome it, and defeat themselves in the process.
What's the best way to deal with these situations?
Well, the truth is it depends on the situation.
So I'll tell you two stories.
The guy who said we're going to go to the strip club to have lunch, right?
Who was doing it obviously, purposefully to humiliate me and scare me.
It almost worked.
After that, he and I became great colleagues.
We never talked about that day again because the truth is I actually needed to work with him.
He knew the clients, he knew the company, and he figured out he needed to work with me because he was kind of a pie in the sky guy and I would Work hard and understand the details and get it done.
So we became good colleagues.
We worked our way through it.
The boss who introduced me as a token bimbo, I went into his office afterwards, shut the door and said, you will never speak to me that way again.
Sometimes behavior has to be confronted.
Sometimes you have to realize that someone was thoughtless and careless and clueless and get over it.
And what I tell young women, young people of all kinds, but young women especially, is my advice is don't get a chip on your shoulder.
There are bad people, and bad people need to be confronted, but most people aren't.
There may be thoughtless or clueless, so don't get a chip on your shoulder.
And look for the people who will lift you up, because there are plenty of people who will, men and women.
But also don't hide your light under a bushel.
Don't try and fit in.
Don't be less smart than you are.
Be as smart as you are.
Be as brave as you are.
Be as tough as you are.
And if somebody has a problem with that, it's their problem.
Don't ever let it be your problem.
I mean, what's really inspiring about this sort of stuff, I think, is that it's very individually based stuff.
It's not stuff where you're calling for, now we have to call for a giant piece of legislation, a big piece of social change.
It's just stand up for yourself in the moment.
Yes, and by the way, the other thing that I think is going on, you talked about victimhood, When people feel victimized, they feel helpless and powerless.
And one of the reasons I wrote this book is because actually all of us have enormous power.
We just don't realize it sometimes.
And we don't realize how to unlock it and to use it.
But the other thing that I worry about in this current climate of Me Too is everything is the same.
And everything isn't the same.
A coach of gymnasts who is abusing them routinely, or a Matt Lauer or Harvey Weinstein, it's not the same as Joe Biden putting his hands on someone's shoulders.
You can't create a situation where the real issues become trivialized by people saying, I felt slightly uncomfortable.
So what do you think?
Let's take the Joe Biden thing, for example.
What do you think the proper response, both on the part of Joe Biden and society, should be to the sort of Joe Biden sin?
I totally agree with you, by the way.
I think that the failure of society to recognize gradations in behavior, to suggest, OK, well, this is a bad thing, and therefore all bad things are equivalent bad things, is really silly.
And that's why I've said that the attempt to paint Joe Biden as some sort of great sexual victimizer, when there's not been a single allegation that he was sexually victimizing anyone, is bizarre.
But how should society deal with that sort of thing?
What should its attitude be toward the Joe Bidens of the world when they do this?
Well, I think a lot of people have come to the conclusion that this is silly.
This is silly.
And a lot of people have said this is silly.
A lot of women have said this is silly.
Both Democratic women and Republican women.
I think really what the Joe Biden Episode illustrates is it's politics.
And one of the things that I think is unfortunate about politics is that vitriol we talked about, that tribal, I win, you lose, it's infecting every conversation.
It's a shame when we can't have a serious conversation about real assault and real abuse because our headlines are filled with, what do we think about Joe Biden?
That's all about politics, and it's all about his primary opponents trying to take him down early.
That's what that's about.
Okay, so in a second I'm going to ask you one final question.
I want to ask you about whether you think that the American people are ready for a female president, which is one of the questions that has been in the air since Hillary Clinton, since you ran.
But, if you want to hear Carly Fiorina's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click the subscribe button, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Carly Fiorina, thanks so much for stopping by.
It really is a pleasure to see you.
Thank you.
It's great to be with you.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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