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April 29, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:34
OH, CANADA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1072
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Coming up, bad news in the Canadian election.
The bad guy makes it across the finish line, and some people are blaming Trump for the result.
I'll talk about it.
I'll also reveal how Princeton has become the leader of the university resistance to Trump.
And FCC Commissioner Nathan Symington joins me.
We're going to talk about the...
A way in which the United States can have a kind of smart re-industrialization.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about a couple of things in this opening segment.
I don't know if you've seen, but there's an Indian-American congressman.
The guy's name is Tanidar, something like that, from Michigan.
Who has introduced articles of impeachment against Trump.
Now, this is kind of hardly a surprise.
He is in a tradition of a whole bunch of left-wingers who could have done this.
It didn't have to be him.
But it turns out it is him.
And to listen to this guy talk about it is really quite comical.
Because this is a guy who is raised in India and speaks with a thick, somewhat broken English accent.
And so, you know, this is the kind of guy in India who would be like a government clerk or a waiter or like a street vendor.
And it turns out that the Stanidar guy is qualified in the sense that he...
Got a degree in chemistry from some Indian university.
He started a business.
He apparently employed a bunch of people.
He's now a congressman.
But the one thing that comes through, if you listen to his statement, and if you can go to my ex-feed and listen to him, he doesn't sound American.
He doesn't sound like he's from here.
It sounds like they picked some Indian guy off the street.
And this is a guy who is, quote, off the boat, at least in the way that he looks and sounds.
I won't really go into his looks, but the guy, I mean, looks freakish.
I mean, looks a bit like a trans.
He's got peculiar long hair.
I think he plucks his eyebrows.
Anyway, enough said about his appearance.
But you've got a strange-looking man with an extremely off-the-boat Indian accent.
So this is a very bad look, I think, for the Democratic Party.
And the point I made, and I kind of upset some people, including apparently this guy's son, who's like, you know, sure enough, he's like, you're a felon, you're just a felon.
So I struck a nerve with this guy.
But the point I wanted to make was that these are guys who I think, you know, these are guys who have traveled on the passport of diversity.
In fact, the heavy Indian accent, The peculiar pronunciations, the un-American or non-American kind of style of discourse, all of this is like a plus in the Democratic Party.
In fact, if you seem assimilated, like a guy like me, it doesn't really fit in the Democratic Party because I'm too assimilated.
I'm apparently like on board with Western civilization.
I have a Christian background, so I don't really fit their profile.
They want somebody.
Who is, quote, multicultural, who is diverse, who has the broken accent, who sounds like they not only come from someplace really far away, but they have no intention of assimilating to the norms and mores and let alone cultural values of America.
So, I don't know where this is going to go.
Knowing Trump, he's going to probably belittle and deride and make fun of this guy, and it'll be kind of well-earned.
Because this is not a very good front man for the Democratic Party.
If they're trying to get some kind of impeachment traction going, this is really not the way to do it.
Now, I also want to offer some thoughts about the Canadian election.
In a way, it's a disappointment, isn't it?
Pierre Polev, a smart guy, well-spoken.
This is the guy, I've talked about him a few times.
This is the apple eater who has a wry, pungent style of communication.
He seems to be what Canada needs.
But he's not what Canada wants.
And when you look at the election results of last night, Canada goes for the fourth time, four terms.
With the liberals, with the Trudeau party, with Mark Carney.
Mark Carney was a lot like Kamala Harris.
They just plucked him out of nowhere.
He didn't run in any kind of primary.
He had sort of the credentials.
And this guy is the worst of the worst.
I mean, he's a suave character, to be sure.
He's got a resume, but that's not the point.
He's obsessed with climate change.
He wants to get to net zero.
He's going to be the ruin of Canada.
But hey, look, the Canadians already knew that.
They had a virtual clone of his, which is Trudeau.
Trudeau ran Canada into the ground.
Canada had a horrible experience during COVID.
Now, there are some people who are blaming this on Trump.
And look, I can see why they do that.
The way they're coming at Trump is, I'm talking now about Canadian right-of-center conservatives, is they say, look, this Paul Lev guy was ahead in the polls.
He would have won if it wasn't for tariffs, if it wasn't for Trump's rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state.
This caused the Canadians, the anti-Trump feeling among the Canadians, to coalesce around Carney.
And that's really what caused Pierre Poilev the election.
However, I think that this line of reasoning is missing one element, and that is the reaction of Pierre Poilev to what Trump was saying and doing.
Poilev basically went into a very anti-Trump posture.
And he's like, we reject Trump.
His behavior is irresponsible.
So think about it.
What happened really here is that the conservatives in Canada, and there are a lot of them who like Trump, became alienated from Pierre Poilev because he was bashing Trump.
And so ultimately, Poilev narrowed his own base to the anti-Trump conservatives in Canada.
Well, come on.
You expect to win an election.
So what I'm getting at is, as smart as he is, Poilev was running a playbook very similar to a Jeb Bush, very similar ultimately to a Paul Ryan.
This is a guy who was, in a sense, the conservatism of the past.
And we're in a different era.
In some ways, Trump's behavior is not totally surprising, because what Trump is saying is, look, I want to negotiate with the Canadians.
And Trump even slyly admitted that because the liberals are such wimps, he's like, I might get a better deal out of this guy Carney, because after all, by and large, a liberal is going to bend more easily than a conservative.
So Trump is looking at it from the American point of view.
And from the American point of view and from the negotiating point of view, it might even be better to have a guy like Carney, but it's not better from the Canadian point of view.
And so I feel bad for Canada, but look, I don't think that the Canadians, it looks like a lot of the boomers, the baby boomer type, these are the people who are reflexively anti-Trump.
These are the people who pivoted to Carney.
These are the people who have essentially sealed the fate of Canada over the next several years.
And I don't think it's going to be a good fate.
But the reason I'm not really, I don't think that Trump is the main factor here is that the Canadians have seen for themselves how badly their country has done under the party that's ruling it.
And so for them to vote for the party to continue, it would be very similar, by the way, to America voting for Kamala Harris.
It would be like saying, listen, you know what?
You pummeled us for four years straight.
You've taken away our free speech.
You locked us down.
You forced us to take the vaccine.
You had basically the government knee on our necks for four years.
We like it.
We want more of it.
So we're going to vote you in for another...
Canada basically did that.
That's where they went.
And that's what they're going to be paying the price for.
In some ways, I think...
We also need to remember that the idea of making Canada the 51st state, I'm more convinced than ever that this is not, I repeat, not a good idea.
It's not a good idea because the Canadians behave like Oregonians.
They behave like Californians.
They behave like people in Washington state.
In other words, the more you beat them down, the more they say more, more, more.
They like to be pummeled.
They like to live in a country that's going downhill.
Carney is going to be a kind of Pied Piper, I think, taking them off the precipice.
But if that's where they want to go in a democratic society, who can stop them?
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The battle between the Trump administration and the universities, particularly the selective universities-- Harvard, Columbia, Princeton-- continues.
And Harvard is trying to figure out where it wants to go here.
There apparently is a lot of pressure from the Harvard donors for Harvard to make a deal with the Trump administration.
On the other hand, a number of universities, unnamed, there was an article about this, but it didn't name which universities, have apparently formed a kind of coalition or consortium to resist the Trump administration.
They're working kind of silently or behind the scenes with each other to figure out how to push back against Trump.
Leading the anti-Trump resistance from the university side is Princeton University.
And the president of Princeton is a guy named Christopher Eisgruber.
And this guy sort of fancies himself, you know, there are people from Alvin Bragg to Judge Juan Merchant.
Of course, the anti-Trump judges in D.C. like Tanya Chutkin, they like to play the role of the heroic anti-Trump warrior.
Now, none of them really have amounted to much.
Probably the most successful would be Bragg, who got the conviction against Trump.
But even that didn't amount to much, because at the end of it, the judge won Merchant had to say, all right, well, we've got you convicted, but we can't do anything about it, so we'll see you later.
And nevertheless, Princeton thinks that it's going to be the...
The Trump slayer, if you will.
And Trump has already hit out at Princeton.
The Trump people have suspended several hundreds of millions of dollars of government-funded grants to Princeton, and I think that there's a lot more to come.
But, Eisgruber told the New York Times recently, he is, quote, not considering any concessions to the administration.
And Princeton has been in the forefront of DEI.
Now, according to Eisgruber, he says, quote, Princeton is guilty of systemic racism.
And weirdly, he's correct.
The systemic racism, however, is not some legacy of white supremacy.
It's actually coming from him.
It's coming from the administration.
It is systemic discrimination in favor of minorities or at least preferred minorities against men.
Against whites, against Jews.
So basically, the world is divided into the oppressed and the oppressors.
And the systemic racism is directed against these fabled oppressor classes.
And it is a discrimination that is far more comprehensive than most people think.
Because when we think of anti-white discrimination, we think about, say, discrimination in college applications.
You want to get into Princeton.
Guess what?
If you're a white guy, it's not enough to have an A. You have to have an A+.
It's not enough to be in the 99th percentile.
You need to have basically a perfect SAT score.
Whereas if you're, say, black, you're perfectly fine coming in with like a B or even a B- average, and you don't even need anything close to 99% on the SAT.
Even if you're at the 85th percentile, no problem.
You're considered smart at least for blacks, and you're allowed to get in.
But the point I'm trying to make is that discrimination is not confined to that.
It goes into faculty hiring.
It goes into who gets promoted.
It goes into the hiring of administrators.
It goes into the massive diversity establishment that exists at the university.
Just dozens and dozens of deans and sub-deans and deanlets and director of this and supervisor of that.
In fact, they don't even allow people to be hired for jobs, including low-level jobs at the university, without, quote, having a minimum number.
Sometimes it's two.
At least two women and two underrepresented minority candidates must be in the finalist pool.
They don't have to be selected, but you're creating a structure in which, by and large, it's like, don't hire a white male unless there's basically nobody else for the job.
Princeton has institutionalized this, and it's important to realize that this is all blatantly illegal.
It's against the Civil Rights Act.
In the case of the gender issue, it's against Title IX.
And on top of it, you have another thing that is often overlooked here, and that is supplier diversity.
Universities are like little cities.
They contract for heating, and they contact for transportation, and they have massive purchases of supplies.
So they ultimately are doing DEI even there, which means university procurement contracts cannot be done unless they go through minority-owned or women-owned businesses.
So what you have is a whole university that has reoriented its mission.
Away from knowledge, learning, excellence, merit, certainly against colorblindness.
In fact, they treat colorblindness, they treat indifference to race as itself a form of racism.
And they brag about how race-conscious they are and how many race-based solutions that they have implemented.
They identify race-blind people, colorblind people, as being in the tradition of the segregationists.
Even though they are the ones who are segregating.
They are the ones who are engaged in official policies of race-based discrimination.
And so the Trump administration is really right to go after these people.
And I think the strategy here should be to take them down completely, to make an example.
And there's no better example than Princeton right here, because you've got a top-notch Ivy League university that is well-endowed.
In other words, that is a strong...
On the academic field.
And yet, they are the most brazen, blatant, self-confident violators of the Civil Rights Act.
So if you want to affirm the principles of civil rights, you're now in the position of Eisenhower in the 1950s with schools that refused to stop segregation.
And basically, Eisenhower brought in the National Guard.
Brought in some muscle.
Basically said this is non-negotiable.
This is something that is enshrined in law.
In fact, it's a core principle of the Constitution, namely non-discrimination.
Essentially, we're not going to stand for it.
And if we have to take your whole university to the ground, we're going to do it because that's going to send a very clear message to universities around the country, which is don't mess with the violations of federal law.
Otherwise, you're going to pay the price.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
It's Nathan Symington.
He is a commissioner of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission.
He was nominated by President Trump.
He's served since 2020.
Previously, he was senior advisor at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
He's also worked as senior counsel to Brightstar, which is an international mobile device services company.
You can follow him on X at Symington, S-I-M-I-N-G-T-O-N-F-C-C, or the website, of course, just FCC.gov.
Nathan, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
You recently published an article which you co-authored in The Daily Caller, which talks about the need for America to do smart re-industrialization.
Now, there's a lot of talk about re-industrializing America.
But the article goes into detail about some of the things that China is doing and areas in which China has made a lot of progress, contrary to what a lot of Americans think.
So let's begin right there.
Let's begin with the idea that for a lot of Americans, they think that we outsource things to China.
The Chinese have cheap, unskilled labor.
You got a bunch of guys sitting in the sweatshops.
They're working for just a couple of dollars an hour or maybe a few dollars a day.
That's how they can make this cheap stuff that they then sell to America and around the world.
And you're saying that...
Hey, that might have been China circa like 1989 or 1992, but China has come a very long way.
So let's begin by saying what you mean by that.
Yeah, absolutely.
So if you look at China in the 1990s, and that's a great time to start because Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, which is often...
Sort of taken as the start date for opening up China to some capitalist modernization.
That was in the early 90s, and the average Chinese person was so extremely poor in the 1980s and 1990s that the four things every family wanted to achieve were a wristwatch, a radio, a bicycle, and a sewing machine.
That was aspirational.
So China was starting from a very low base, and it's colored our view of that since.
I mean, the early 90s, that's not forever ago.
Some of my favorite Simpsons episodes were just hitting the air around that time.
My kids still watch those.
So it's not another world.
But in terms of production, it is another world, because the China of the 80s and 90s didn't make a lot that was interesting to international markets.
There was a toy industry along Pearl River Delta that...
China was synergistic with capitalist Hong Kong.
But other than that, there were a lot of uncompetitive state-owned industries that gave China some basic industrial capabilities.
But certainly, you know, no one would have thought of buying a Chinese car in the 1990s.
That would have been preposterous.
And yet, China became the world's largest exporter of cars a couple of years ago, surpassing Japan, surpassing Germany, and of course, surpassing the United States.
So something's changed.
And while I was doing some research for a talk that I gave recently at Harvard Business School, I came across an anecdote from a Chinese sink manufacturer.
Now, we don't think of sinks necessarily as high-tech products, but the ability to deliver cheap, high-quality sinks is appreciated by every builder.
And he was saying that he had replaced about 140 workers in a factory with a few machines that did a lot of the sorting and the polishing and the finishing work, and then there was just a little bit of human labor in the process.
Now, that human labor...
It might not have been the highest-skilled human labor.
But, you know, China is such a big country that it can support both automotive manufacturing, jet engine manufacturing, advanced materials, a big shipbuilding industry, and also those people who are fresh off the farm sewing backpacks that go on sale for Timu, you know,
for $3 or something like that.
So it's a big country.
It's a diverse country.
It's not fully modernized, but there's enough of China that's fully modernized that that part is, you know, sort of the same size as the American middle class.
And that's something to contend with.
And a lot of that is driven by technology.
And I think what I get from the article is that when it comes to 5G networks, when it comes to robotics, when it comes to artificial intelligence, the Chinese have come from the back of the line to the front of the line.
In many areas, they are now ahead of the United States.
For the United States to re-industrialize, I think you're saying, is not simply a matter of like, hey, listen, there are old steel towns and old automobile towns like Detroit and old towns which had a lot of blue-collar guys.
We want to put those guys back to work.
You're saying that re-industrialization now has to meet the world standard of integrating technology.
Into the kind of way we do things in America.
So we're not kind of going back to an old America.
We're trying to find a new way to compete and put people to work in this new global economy.
Is that right?
That's a great way of putting it, and that's right on the money.
If you could go to a steel town from the old days and reopen the steel mill exactly as it was, same equipment, all in pristine condition, all those workers who've dispersed all over taking whatever jobs they can back at their old jobs, well, you know, they'd have to be somewhat younger too.
But let's say that we could rewind the clock.
That steel mill would no longer be competitive by world standards.
It simply would not produce products at a price and quality that anyone would want to buy.
It was a great achievement for its time, and I don't want to denigrate the people and companies who built America.
No, no, no.
But what I mean to say is that China has not merely matched the level of productivity that we had in the 80s when we saw so many of our steel mills shutting down.
They have exceeded that, and no wonder, because there's been 45 years of technological development since that point, and it would be crazy if we didn't see some effects in major manufacturing industries like steel.
What's more?
And I found this part very interesting.
Now, there are, of course, a lot of Chinese people who are still working in sweatshop-style factories.
I don't want to pretend that doesn't exist.
China still has hundreds of millions of people that it wants to move out of very low-grade farming into any kind of factory work because that's a step up the economic and developmental ladder for them, and those people will have better lives for the same reason that people want to work in sweatshops in the United States instead of taking some kind of other job at the turn of the past century.
But nonetheless, even though there are these mass labor deployments in some Chinese industries, that is no longer characteristic of a lot of the industries where we have gotten this idea that China is primarily a cheap labor jurisdiction.
For example, in electronics manufacturing, the trend in China right now is towards reducing the role of labor as much as possible and automating as highly as possible.
It's a very different thing from sort of imagining those Foxconn factories back in 2007 with everyone putting in screws and glues by hand.
At this point, they're trying to take as much labor out of the production chain as possible.
Partly that's because there's a lot of investment in robotics and modernization.
But also it's partly just because those jobs aren't that desirable even in China anymore, and they can't keep workers.
I was talking to one American telecom manufacturer who's in the process of doing some onshore right now.
Very impressive work, by the way.
And he was telling me that in China, the average tenure in the factory whose product he's bringing back onshore is something like two months.
So it's...
Now, we're hoping that we can avoid that kind of a race to the bottom on labor and provide workers with the kind of dignified and meaningful work that manufacturing has always meant in the United States.
But nonetheless, it shows the point.
China is no longer simply a cheap labor jurisdiction.
Some portion of the population is still working in a cheap labor world.
But increasingly, China is working in a value-added world, sometimes in a cutting-edge value-added world.
And in some categories, yes, they're ahead of the United States.
You can buy a very good Chinese electric car for about $7,000 to $10,000.
And I don't care how cheap your labor is.
There are lots of countries where labor is much cheaper than China, and they're not making $7,000 electric cars.
This comes from advanced manufacturing and highly developed supply chains and very, very well-run factories, which, as you mentioned, include robotics, AI, and 5G as coordinating mechanisms.
One of the points you make in the article, Nathan, is you say that...
in our own commercial and political environment even the best private sector players are hamstrung by outdated regulations, capricious permitting processes.
Talk a little bit about what are the bottlenecks and blockades that we see in this country that make it difficult for us to Go straight on and develop these kinds of things and compete effectively on the international stage.
Absolutely.
Regulations or legislation because there was some particular abuse, often 40 or 50 years ago, that we were trying to correct.
And after all, we all remember back when there was a serious acid rain problem in the United States.
We all remember back when there was leaded gasoline and having potential effects on children's intelligence and such kinds of things.
I don't want to run that down and pretend that those weren't real problems that demanded democratic accountability and solutions.
That said...
That said, if you look at how China has addressed For example, the strategic competitiveness of Huawei.
Huawei has just been given an open door to acquire land, to make sales at losses internationally for a very, very long time.
It's been given a very high ability to acquire R&D money from the Chinese government, including, by the way, hiring lots and lots and lots of non-Chinese citizens.
I mean, probably half of Huawei employees are not in China and are not Chinese.
You put all that together, and it amounts to a concession in favor of a strategic industry, what we used to call an industrial policy.
But you don't have to go that far in the United States.
All you have to do is look around, and you can easily find regs that have been on the books for 40 years, 50 years, 60 years.
No one can anymore answer what problem those regs are solving, and working around them has become an entire cottage industry that is really nothing but a paperwork shuffling industry.
Anyone who's tried the...
There's always someone who doesn't want you to build and there's very often a heckler's veto that goes onto that person because of their connection with local politics or their ability to mobilize an environmental review or whatever it might be.
You can't get the financing until you have the permitting.
You can't get the permitting until you can show you've lined up the financing.
It becomes a game of incremental, incremental steps and tiny negotiations and maybe even sometimes some misrepresentations in favor of a goal.
And that's the life of a developer over here.
In China, there's much more carte blanche.
I don't think we have to copy the worst aspects of the Chinese system to admit that every regulation also comes with a cost, and we have to have a sense of what that cost really is, or else its existence is just no longer justified.
Part of what you're saying makes me chuckle in a certain rueful way, Nathan, because what you're saying is that here you have this country that has come Out of communism, and to some degree is still communist in its political structure, but you're saying,
I take it, that, you know what, they've got a much more free market when it comes to acquiring land, starting a new business, getting it going, raising capital, all the kind of things that make you function in a free market society,
and here we are, we think of the United States as the kind of apex free market society in the world.
And yet, not only at the federal level, but in many cases also at the state and local level, you've got all these bottleneck regulations.
Now, many of these have created, as you mentioned, encrusted bureaucracies around them.
Part of what I've seen over the last generation is how difficult it is to root out government bureaucracy, how difficult it is to get rid of these regulations.
Do you see a decent prospect that we can get there?
Or is this a case where things are not going to be looking good for us?
Well, I have high hopes.
So just within my own agency, Chairman Carr is well known for his deregulatory orientation.
Back when he was a commissioner in the first Trump administration, before he took the chair, maybe his signature project was permitting reform for small cells.
In other words, putting shot clocks rather than enabling permanent bureaucratic tie-ups for parts of our own 5G networks.
So I think we're coming from a good place within my own agency.
The chairman's got a long, established record of success in these areas.
I think that could be a sign for how we should be addressing this in the rest of the United States.
Obviously, the president has said that he's got a major priority to build and to unlock the creativity of the American people.
When we talk about raising capital, that's an interesting point, because the United States has almost a third of the world's investable capital.
I mean, obviously, this is a difficult metric.
But outside of housing, the statistic I've come across, again, preparing for talks, is that the United States has something like $67 trillion with a T in investable capital.
And as a result, I think it's really just a matter of getting the incentives right.
Now, you might ask, where's all that capital going?
Well, for the past 10, 15 years, I would say it's been predominantly going to software companies because software companies have been in a position to say, we don't have to have a large capital expenditure.
We can have a thin balance sheet with a big cash flow.
And if we look at this and we say that they have accounting-driven valuations in a certain sense relative to manufacturers, then it's no wonder that investment professionals seeking the best interest of their clients flooded into software.
This is another thing the United States government needs to get right, because I think that if there's the same kind of flood of capital into physical infrastructure and into the so-called world of atoms, then that will by itself sweep a lot of regulations out of the way as thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans start to see opportunity in a deregulatory world.
Software isn't a very heavily regulated industry.
It's also been an immensely successful industry with the highest EBITDA multipliers in any category.
I think that speaks volumes.
Yeah, if I can sum up what I think you're saying, it is that we have a world of physical objects, atoms if you want to call it, and we have a world of immaterial things, software,
and what...
Ultimately, the successful economy of the future is going to look like is the effective combination of these two.
In other words, harmonizing and maximizing the combination of physical atoms together with Electronics and software.
And that's really what the United States needs to be thinking about, how to create this optimum synergy or combination.
And the re-industrialization, as you call it, of America is going to be based upon getting that right.
I think that's a great way of putting it, because there are frankly some industrial jobs that we don't want back.
Anyone who's ever looked at the working conditions in textile mills in the old days knows that those were very tough jobs.
The people who took them obviously worked with pride, but it took a massive toll on their health.
You would often have lung disease from inhaling cotton fibers, all kinds of things.
So in the 90s, the calculation that we made implicitly was that these industrial jobs were, in a certain sense, always going to be...
Poorly paid, relatively unproductive, dirty and dangerous.
And that as a result, we were actually all better off if we let poor countries that would love to have those jobs as an alternative to subsistence farming take those jobs while we focused on advanced services.
The problem is, at a certain point, you're just buying everything from China and you're buying it increasingly with debt.
I think we let this run away too far, and instead of truly having a system of global trade, we had a system of debt-financed consumption with strong incentives domestically, both on the regulatory and capital allocation fronts,
against building an America.
And I just think this is unsustainable.
It's just absolutely preposterous.
It's not what any of the people who built America with pride in the old days would have recognized as their country.
The good news is we have an incredible depth of talent.
We have an incredible depth of capital in this country.
If we can figure out how to start getting out of our own way, we will come up with integrations of software and advanced manufacturing hardware that will, frankly, make the world remember the good old days of American greatness.
Nathan, I think you're onto something here.
Guys, the article is in the Daily Caller.
America needs smart re-industrialization to compete with China.
I've been talking to Nathan Symington, Commissioner of the FCC.
Follow him on X at Symington FCC.
Nathan, thank you very much for joining me.
It was absolutely a pleasure, Dinesh.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm continuing my discussion of Reagan and my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man.
Became an extraordinary leader.
This is the book with Cowboy Reagan on the front.
And, you know, it's in paperback.
You can get it on Amazon or Barnes& Noble.
And it's kind of a fun thing to get and follow along as we are talking about Reagan.
And as I said at the outset, my goal here is to look at Reagan partly as a kind of reference point of comparison and contrast with Trump and partly also to...
Try to draw out or excavate the core principles of effective presidential leadership.
Now, we're talking here about how Reagan became a leader, how he got there.
The chapter is called The Education of an Actor, but I've completed my discussion of Reagan's acting career.
As you can see, I'm not...
I don't know if I even mentioned a single movie that Reagan was in, so I'm not giving you a traditional biography.
In a traditional biography, Reagan made this movie in 1951 and this movie in 1954, and I give you none of that because my goal is not to do that.
It's to look at how Reagan became the political leader that he did.
And when we left off, Reagan had taken up as a motivational speaker for General Electric.
He would travel around the country from 1954 to 1962.
So eight years Reagan does this.
And he gives truly hundreds and hundreds of talks.
He gives talks on the factory floor.
He gives talks in auditoriums.
Occasionally he gives talks at universities.
Sometimes he's not even giving a talk.
He stops at a cafeteria and he talks there with just workers who are eating lunch.
Reagan sometimes gave multiple talks a day.
And he gave, of course, a lot of talks at the GE plant.
So he would go to General Electric plants around the country.
The country at that time, General Electric, employed 250,000 workers.
And at one time or another, Reagan spoke to, I don't know if it's a majority, but certainly a lot of them.
Now, originally Reagan gave a kind of standard free market speech.
That combined a celebration of the market with a kind of praise of General Electric as being a quintessential free market company.
So Reagan was giving a kind of traditional speech, peppered with some Hollywood anecdotes and stories.
But Reagan realized soon enough that that's actually not where the action was.
In other words, what Reagan realized was that there was something very important to be gained, not so much in what he was saying to them, his audiences, but in what they had to say to him.
So this is a very remarkable thing about speakers, because most speakers pay no attention to their audience.
Just like most authors of books, they start around, they go, I'm interested in economic policy, or I'm interested in this or that, I'm going to write a book about it.
And they don't pay attention to, well, who's my audience?
What do people want to read?
What problems do ordinary people have that this book directly addresses or solves?
And so Reagan himself began in this kind of generic way, but pretty soon he realized that he had a lot to learn by listening to people and what their concerns were.
And he realized that the people he was talking to were just ordinary guys.
Hardworking, they were decent, and yet their lives hadn't been entirely easy.
They would often talk about the fact that their attempts to improve their lives were frustrated by high taxes, by burdensome and arbitrary regulations, by a government intervening to block them from doing things that they wanted to achieve.
And the sheer inertia, the sheer irrationality, the stupidity of these rules and regulations Really frustrated people.
And Reagan realized, you know what?
I need to be the champion of these people.
I need to speak for them and with them.
I need to represent their concerns.
And I need to share the stories of their lives.
So Reagan now develops an element that would become recognizable throughout Reagan's career.
Reagan begins to now retell other people's stories.
And quite honestly, Reagan loved a good story.
And this went back to his Hollywood days.
And so it has to be admitted that when Reagan would hear a really good story, if you listen to Reagan over the years, his stories got better and better, which is to say he embellished a little bit.
If somebody was facing seven regulations, by the time Reagan was done, he was facing 37 regulations.
Reagan would pad his anecdotes for rhetorical effect, and this habit would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Later, media people would try to bust him.
Reagan said that this welfare queen had 36 fake IDs.
In fact, she only had 17 fake IDs.
Well, really?
So busting Reagan didn't really do anything because Reagan was right on the essence.
The story was valid.
It's just that Reagan had kind of exaggerated some of the details.
And the reason that Reagan didn't really mind doing this was that for Reagan, it wasn't the details of the story that were important.
It was the underlying, you could call it, morality tale.
In other words, Reagan's story was illustrating a broader theme.
And the theme was valid even if the details of the stories could be challenged or even discredited.
This detail could be erroneous, but it doesn't mean that the moral of the story is...
So what is Reagan's theme?
His theme really is the inability of government.
Government comes along and declares itself to be the solver of problems.
And for Reagan, government was the creator of problems.
Government, in fact, was to a large degree the problem.
And government was, to a large degree, the problem not because the government was just wasteful or inefficient.
We think now these days about Doge.
There's a lot of waste.
There's a lot of fraud.
There's a lot of inefficiency.
But we don't think about why government, in the nature of the beast, in the way that it is, is inefficient.
It's not that you have an attempt to be efficient that then falls short.
It's that government has no compass for efficiency.
Think of it, for a private business, the compass comes from your bottom line.
Did you make a profit last year?
No.
Well, you're doing something wrong.
You need to go back and look at your cost structure.
You need to look at your marketing.
Governments never do this because they don't have a compass.
They don't even judge themselves by free market standards.
How would you know if a government is wasting money?
Well, last year the education department spent...
$30 billion.
Let's just say next year it's going to spend $35 billion, and the year before it was $22 billion.
What is the efficient number?
Is it, in fact, $20 billion?
How would you know?
Why shouldn't it be $10 billion?
How about $3 billion?
So what I'm getting at is that there is a certain free-floating character here.
The government just rakes in as much money as it can, spends as much money as it can, doesn't like, in fact, not to spend the money it has because then it will look like it was under budget and its budget might be cut the next year.
So you really have a whole apparatus that is uprooted from any kind of measure of what efficiency even means.
Now, Reagan didn't talk in this language that I'm using, which is somewhat abstract and theoretical.
Reagan's view of presenting this was...
Here's Reagan.
He goes, It's aphoristic how effective Reagan is in framing his language.
And this is a sort of typical Reagan whimsical observation.
Reagan goes, well, you know, I was driving by the Hoover Dam the other day.
And he goes, and I saw a large sign, government property, do not remove.
As if somebody could actually remove the Hoover Dam itself.
So for Reagan, this is the nature of the government.
It's super dumb.
It's ineffective.
It doesn't do what it's supposed to.
And even worse, it mucks things up all the time.
Famously, Reagan said that the most dangerous words in the English language were, Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.
And Reagan's philosophy could be summed up by saying, No, the government is actually not helping.
The government is making things worse.
And I'll close out today with an anecdote that Reagan liked to tell.
I might have mentioned on the podcast before, I don't know.
But I find it to be quite amusing.
It's basically about a guy who goes in to see his boss and he says, hey, I would like to have a pay cut.
And his boss says, wait, what?
Most people come in for a pay raise.
Why do you want to get a pay cut?
And he goes, well, I've discovered that I can get subsidized housing.
I can get health and dental care.
I can get university scholarships.
I can get all kinds of welfare benefits if I make below a certain amount.
So the guy is basically saying he's making a little too much money, he wants a pay cut so he can qualify for all these government benefits.
So he says, this is Reagan's story, if I make less, the man says, would be eligible for an apartment in the city's new development, the one downtown with a pool, sauna, and tennis court, my son would qualify for a government scholarship, and we can get our teeth fixed at government expense.
So his boss says, okay, fine, I'll give you a pay cut just as you want, but on one condition.
Quote, If your work slips, you're getting a raise.
So this is very Reagan, the irony of this.
So the man's really grateful, and he tells the boss, he says, listen, you need to come over, play tennis with me, come over for a swim, I'm going to get a new place, I'm going to get all these government benefits, so perhaps you can enjoy them as well.
And then he tells his boss, he goes, his boss goes, wow, I mean, you have access to all that stuff?
And the man goes, yeah, you know, he goes, certainly.
He goes, I believe the poor need to share with the less fortunate.
So this is all classic Reagan.
And he is telling a story that has people kind of chuckling along the way.
But the underlying message becomes very hard to miss, which is that we have a...
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