Lee Zeldin: Jasmine Crockett's Epstein Claim, Trump Meets Mamdani + Cloud Seeding Is REAL! | PBD 687
Patrick Bet-David sits down with Lee Zeldin to break down Jasmine Crockett’s explosive Epstein claims, Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Zohran "Kawame" Mamdani, and whether cloud seeding is real or a conspiracy theory.
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TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Show intro
00:58 - Jasmine Crockett's Epstein claims.
10:03 - Mamdani's trip to the White House
27:39 - Hochul vs Stefanik for NY governor.
36:23 - Affordability crisis in the U.S.
51:38 - EPA's work to deregulate industries.
58:44 - EPA's role in the California wildfires.
1:10:05 - Are cloud-seeding & chemtrails real?
1:29:00 - Nuclear energy in the U.S.
1:37:15 - Negotiating with President Trump.
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ABOUT US:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Head of EPA, Representative Lee Zeldon, youngest attorney in New York at the time, lieutenant colonel in the military, in a short period of time, you've done a bunch of different things.
But it's great to have you on a podcast.
Man, you don't want to live your life filled with boredom and regret.
You know, we only get one shot at it.
Everyone out there in the audience, you know, it's the start of the day.
How are you going to spend it?
Make it count.
I'm with you.
Now, I love it.
We're on the same page with that.
But right now, the name Lee Zeldon, the last 48 hours, is everywhere.
Everyone's looking at Lee Zeldon because apparently, according to this lady, I don't know if you know what her name is, Crockett, Jasmine Crockett.
According to her, not only did you have one Jeffrey Epstein donor, you had two of them.
That's how great you were doing.
And I just want to start off with reacting to this real quick and then we'll get into all the other stuff because it's trending right now.
So here is Jasmine Crockett.
Two days ago, the subcommittee on oversight on stage talking about you tied to Jeffrey Epstein.
Go ahead, Rob.
Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly, Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldon, George Bush, Wynne Red, McCain Palin, Rick Lazio.
I just want to be clear.
If this is the standard that we're going to make, just know we're going to expose it all.
And just know that the FEC filings, they are available for everybody to review.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
So now she's saying this.
She called you.
When you first heard this, what was your initial reaction?
I mean, I read your tweet, but what was your initial reaction when you heard this?
So the first reaction was like, I'm pretty sure that Jeffrey Epstein never donated to me.
I contact a couple people on the team and I'm like, can you just confirm this for me?
Because I'm pretty sure that that Jeffrey Epstein never donated to us.
And you could search it.
She said that a 20-minute Google search, whatever.
It comes up so fast and it says occupation physician.
That Jeffrey Epstein that she's talking about obviously is not a physician.
And then you look at the date and talking about common sense, head scratching, the date of the donation is after that Jeffrey Epstein was dead.
Stop it.
That I didn't know.
Yes.
The donation came in after that Jeffrey Epstein wasn't even alive anymore.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay, there you go.
April 2020 and August 2020, $1,000 donation from a Dr. Jeffrey Epstein in New York, which by the way, can you imagine if your doctor's name is Jeffrey Epstein?
People ask you, honey, where are you going today?
I'm going to go see Dr. Epstein.
Which doctor?
Dr. Jeffrey Epstein.
That guy has to change some part of his name to have to deal with this here, right?
To give money to you.
But you've seen Office Space.
Yes.
Right.
And there's that scene that the one character is Michael Bolton.
And the same point was made.
It was like, okay, well, why don't you just change your name?
He's like, why should I have to change my name?
He's the one who sucks.
Michael Bolton in the 90s.
He had a couple, couple hits, right?
If you know Michael Bolton, you have to be over 40 years old.
There's no way somebody in their 20s or 30s know Michael Bolton.
Oh, yeah.
No, I think maybe 100% of your listeners right now under 40 are like, what are they talking about?
Who is Michael Bolton?
By the way, what I love about talented people in politics, how great they are at spinning.
Some of them who know how to spin, you got to give them credit for how great of a job they're spinning.
So here's Caitlin Collins asking Crockett about the mistake she made.
And this is her answer about tying you to Epstein.
And she still is defending herself.
Go ahead, Rob.
Talked about Republicans taking money from a Jeffrey Epstein.
what you said cabinet secretary he responded and said it was actually Dr. Jeffrey Epstein who's a doctor that doesn't have any relation to the convicted sex trafficker Unfortunate for that doctor, but that is who donated to a prior campaign of his.
Do you want to correct the record on the people?
I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein, just so that people understand when you make a donation, your picture is not there.
And because they decided to spring this on us in real time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen because I knew that they didn't even try to go through the FEC.
So my team, what they did is they Googled.
And that is specifically why I said, A. Jeffrey Epstein.
Unlike Republicans, I at least don't go out and just tell lies.
Because it was not the same one, that's fine.
But when Lee Zell didn't have something to say, all he had to say was it was a Jeffrey Epstein.
He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein.
So at least I wasn't trying to mislead people.
Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is?
I have not.
So I will trust and take what he says is that it wasn't that Jeffrey Epstein, but I was not attempting to mislead anybody.
I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.
Yeah, but people might see that and say, well, you're trying to make it sound like he took money from a registered sex offender.
No, but I literally did not know.
When you search FEC files, and that's what I had my team to do, I text him and I say, listen, we're going up.
They are saying that she took donations.
Right.
But somebody might say, well, your team should have done the homework to make sure it wasn't the conviction.
Within 20 minutes, you could not find that out, not from just doing a quick search on FEC.
So number one, I made sure that I was clear that it was a Jeffrey Epstein, but I never said that it was specifically that Jeffrey Epstein because I knew that we would need more time to really dig in.
How do you react?
The occupation is like you said, we just go to FEC and it says Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah, it says occupation physician.
We were talking about the dates a second ago.
And if you don't know yet, then you do more research before you go to the floor of the House of Representatives.
Now, I mean, I feel like as far as your audience, medical disclaimer, I mean, if you feel inclined to watch that video more than once, I would caution you not to watch that video more than like four or five times because I actually think that that could do brain damage.
Yeah.
You could maybe do three, four tops.
Don't watch it more than that.
She may be their leading candidate for 2028, if not one of them.
Can you imagine like the Democratic Party chooses her as their candidate for 28th?
I know with the whole redistricting thing, she's probably going to end up losing her job.
And we were talking about earlier, she may run for Senate.
But maybe before we even move on with this topic, you were in New York.
What did you know about what Epstein was doing in New York?
There's a bunch of things right now.
The Epstein, you know, they voted for it, I think, Tuesday, 427 to 1.
Senate majority out.
It's going to be out there.
Who was Epstein to you when you were in New York?
Because you almost beat Hochul as a governor, first person to get that close as a Republican to being a governor of the state of Florida, less than 6%.
That's how close it was.
They never thought you would be that close.
So you're someone that's a strong power player in New York.
Who was Jeffrey Epstein to you?
I mean, the moment the story popped, it was, I mean, that was it, like game over as far as this guy goes.
I mean, yeah, I guess he gets his day in court.
You're innocent until proven guilty.
We have a criminal justice process.
But, you know, there was, I mean, I didn't have people around me all like, I don't know.
I think he's innocent.
I mean, it was just.
You had people around these people.
No, the opposite.
Like, I can't think of anyone at any point around me in New York saying, you know, like defending this guy.
I mean, it was the guy went down pretty fast.
Yeah, he did.
And now, you know, releasing the information, you're seeing what Larry Summers is doing.
Just out of curiosity, I mean, I thought Bill and Hillary Clinton were going to be, weren't they supposed to do something in September or October that they kept delaying it?
Were you aware of this, that they were supposed to, they were subpoenaed?
And there's even a clip of James Comer saying, hey, what are you going to do?
Are these guys eventually going to testify?
Is it going to happen?
Is it not going to happen?
Yeah, right there.
Clinton subpoenaed to testify in congressional Epstein investigation.
Are you aware if anything's eventually going to happen with these guys?
Are we going to see them having to answer questions about Epstein?
I would have to completely defer to the congressional committees, the chairs to be able to answer that question.
I don't have any inside scoop on that one.
Got it.
Okay.
So let's talk about your job, which is the administrator of EPA.
Okay.
There's a few things I want to talk to you about.
One is governorship in New York, because polls just came out with Hokul against Stefanik.
I think it's a Sienna poll that shows Hokul is ahead by 20 points.
I don't know if you saw that or not.
I'd like to see that for governor of New York.
Two, Mamdani.
I think Mamdani is coming to visit the White House with the president and the president's incredible, noble, generous tweet about him inviting him.
I don't know if you saw the tweet, how he coined it.
It's very interesting.
I want to talk about that.
And then with EPA, you know, a lot of things are tied to you.
So fires, I think wildfires are under you.
I think you got a bunch of different elements that are with you, right?
So even right now with what's going on with Iran, me being from Iran, Iran tested cloud seating like Dubai did.
And now they got flooding going on all over Iran, Abada, and all these other cities.
We got a lot to talk about.
We got a lot to talk about.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's what I'm interested in seeing where we're at with this.
So let's start off with New York.
So Mamdani wins the mayoral seat.
Okay.
So he's the mayor of New York.
He's in there, takes out Sliwad, takes out Andrew Cuomo.
And the moment he's in, President Trump now tweets this, I think, yesterday on his Truth Social.
Communist mayor of New York City, Zoran Kwame, very important to put that middle name in there, Mamdani, has asked for a meeting.
We have agreed that this meeting will take place at the Oval Office on Friday, November 21st.
Further details to follow.
What do you think that meeting is going to look like?
So I have spent a lot of time with President Trump where the topic of New York City comes up.
And this is personal.
This is his life history, his business, his family, his upbringing.
If you ask President Trump about what he wants for the future of New York City, he genuinely, deeply wants to see safer streets.
He wants to see economic prosperity.
He wants New York to succeed and thrive.
His concern over the issues that will come up at that table, it's not like this is some business meeting, professional meeting that lacks that strong personal connection that the president has.
He wants to help, and he is concerned with the direction of the city, as we all are.
I mean, I saw it during eight years of de Blasio, and it was amazing that the city survived those eight years, especially what we experienced there in 2020.
When I was running for governor in 2022, inside New York City, there were so many Democrats, independents, people who are not Republicans, who were supporting our campaign because they wanted to be able to get to their job without fear of getting attacked.
They wanted to ride a subway.
They wanted to be able to afford to survive.
Now they're adding this like congestion pricing, this tax in order to be able to get into the city and it's hitting people who can who are struggling to make ends meet.
It's like one more thing that gets them closer to that final last straw where they leave.
When I'm running, New York State at that time, 2022, it's 22% Republican.
3.5 million more Democrats than Republicans.
New York State.
New York State.
And you have so many people who have gone to Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, because they feel like their money will go further.
They'll live life freer and safer.
And, you know, and this isn't about putting New York City in timeout.
Like, they're gone permanently, not looking back.
And what so many people are worried about in this moment with Mamdani coming in and wanting to increase taxes on people who shockingly are still there after all of it is that it will be that breaking point for more people that and like when that billionaire leaves, it's like, oh, the billionaire can afford to pay taxes.
Yeah, but the billionaire, would you rather have the billionaire give you whatever he's giving you today or she's giving you today or zero?
Because they're leaving down to Florida and elsewhere so easily.
The business, the jobs, and you just, you're not going to be able to get back.
So I think for the president, the meeting is personal in a very positive way.
Like he's the president of the United States and you have his full focus and attention and he genuinely wants to help.
But I'll tell you what, like don't expect this president to play along with the destruction of the city.
Like if you come in, you're like, this is going to be some kind of negotiation.
We're going to talk to the president into playing along with something that's going to set the city back.
Don't try to go down, you know, try to open up that door with this guy because that isn't a door.
Yeah, I agree.
And by the way, what gave me that feeling is this tweet.
He doesn't say the mayor of New York City, Mamdani, is coming for a meeting.
He said the communists may.
So this tweet isn't for us.
This isn't for you.
This isn't for the voters.
This is only for one person that he voted the way that he did.
It's to Mamdani.
He wants Mamdani to know, you're not coming here in a friendly place for us to sit down, come and see what you're going to be doing.
How much does Mamdani need him?
Because, you know, when he got elected, he said, you know, we're going to raise taxes by 2% on billionaires, and that's going to give us this much.
And we're going to raise the corporate taxes and match what it is in New Jersey because it's going to be an increase of 4.2%, 4.3%.
And that's going to give us our $6 billion or $5 billion that he needs.
I don't know the exact numbers, but to be able to fund the free buses, the this, the that, the this, right?
And then Hoku, while he's running, she's not saying anything, and then he wins, then she says, no, we're not raising taxes on billionaires on the city.
Now, three days ago, four days ago, they had a meeting.
Now she's saying she's willing to entertain raising taxes, corporate taxes on businesses in New York City.
She's willing to entertain it right there.
Considering raising corporate taxes, sources says of November 14th after the meeting.
So, but how much does Mamdani, obviously he needs Hoku, but how much does he need President Trump?
So here's the first threshold question.
What's more important to Mamdani?
Is it to get reelected in four years?
Is it to win a Democratic primary for New York City mayor or something else in the future?
Or is his priority right now the future of New York City?
Is he prioritizing his job?
Like he cares about the city he was just elected to be mayor of.
Because if it's the latter, then he needs President Trump a lot.
If he's only focused on trying to win a Democratic primary, then Mamdani's coming into this meeting and he's thinking, okay, I don't really care what happens behind closed doors.
But as soon as it's over, I can't wait to get to the media cameras.
This is like the Senator Schumer play.
This is what you see.
I was inside of the West Wing when Senator Schumer came into the White House and like he was sprinting past me to get out with and Hakeem Jeffries was right behind him.
He was sprinting out to get to the cameras right outside of the West Wing.
And then after he does his talk with the journalists, the reporters, whatever, he comes back in and he's like at a third the speed and he's like catching his breath.
If Mamdani's focus going into that meeting is just to sprint out to the cameras afterwards, then maybe it doesn't matter in his mind what happens inside because all he cares about is speaking to that base.
But what's most important, I mean, like there's a time for government, there's time for politics.
If it's the, you know, the day before a Democratic primary and you're messaging to those Democratic voters, we all get it.
We expect it.
The election is over.
Now it's time to lead the city.
And as it relates to the money that the federal government ends up sending towards the state, if it's about the partnership, it's safety.
I mean, President Trump is securing big cities.
I've seen it inside of Washington, D.C. When President Trump sent in the National Guard in August, like overnight, all of a sudden, things just started to immediately get safer.
And he's doing that in other cities as well.
Like the president doesn't want to bring these resources to New York City for the purpose of setting a city back.
He's not doing it for a bad intention.
Like he wants to clean up the city that he loves.
And there's so many federal resources, even beyond money, where having this support, building those bridges shows that you're a real leader.
I mean, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're elected to become a mayor, a governor, or a president, having the ability to reach out across party lines and build a coalition, President Trump, I've seen it so often.
When a member of Congress calls, I remember there was this member of Congress comes in in the first term and he says, can you introduce me to President Trump?
I said, you're a member of Congress.
Just call the White House.
I gave him the number.
I said, just say it's Congressman so-and-so, and I'd like to speak to the president.
I said, he'll probably either come right on the phone immediately or he's busy with something.
He is actually busy with something.
And he'll call you right back.
You're a member of Congress.
And sure enough, I mean, it was that easy.
And this member of Congress who's never spoken to, never met President Trump, is instantly on the phone having a conversation with the President of the United States.
The president, like, he is so accessible and he's a great listener.
Like, there's a great opportunity for Mamdonin to come in to state a case on anything and everything where there can be common ground and bridges built.
And then this president who wants to see New York City successful, this guy is a, he's a man of his word.
The president will come through and help New York City thrive.
So the important question is, what do you need?
Well, I mean, what he needs, I don't think the president agrees with because you said something.
It's what does he want to do, right?
So after he won, remember when he gave that divisive speech, I know there's one person listening right now, and that's President Trump.
I got four words for you.
Turn up the volume.
And then, boom, you know, whatever he said about volume and they start raising, you know, and then afterwards, like, I said we didn't need any more money.
We need money.
And then now he's talking about $65 million he wants to raise for his transgender, you know, gender-affirming surgeries, whatever he's talking about.
This was a couple of days ago.
So what can he ask for that the president's going to say yes to?
President's not going to agree to raising taxes on the city.
I mean, he can't be involved in that because that's the state.
That's hockey.
What can he agree with?
Where could there be something that they have a commonality with?
I mean, if I had to guess, Mamdani comes in wanting to talk about supportive congestion pricing.
He wanting to talk about infrastructure projects, stuff like rebuilding Penn Station, the Second Avenue subway.
I imagine there'll be some type of a conversation about law enforcement, whether or not they, Mamdani wants to get into it where it's divisive and he's not trying to agree on anything and just wanting to have a debate and just wants to trash talk the great, amazing ICE officers and others in law enforcement.
I mean, that would be non-productive.
But if he wants to broach some of these other topics and find common ground, I mean, right now there's investment.
The president of the United States is bringing in trillions of dollars investment all throughout the entire country.
Since I was confirmed in February, I've been to all 50 states.
And whether I'm in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where a new nuclear facility just broke ground, in Cheyenne, Wyoming with a new data center, West Memphis, Arkansas with a new data center.
I'm going to these locations, not where it's like, hey, in three years, we're planning on spending $4 billion.
I was just in West Virginia where multiple businesses I was visiting are all ramping up.
They're all scaling up.
And I was with the president in Pittsburgh for an AI summit, and they were announcing $93 billion coming to the Keystone State that day.
And I'm sitting there as a New Yorker for a moment, putting that hat on, and I'm thinking, man, none of this money is getting announced to go to New York.
Why is that?
It's not a coincidence.
The reason why the money is going to Pennsylvania and not New York is because of the policies.
In New York, where you don't allow the extraction of natural gas, you're not approving enough of these pipelines.
You're banning gas hiccups on new construction.
You want to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles.
You set climate goals that you will not achieve.
And in the attempt to achieve it, you will cause a lot of economic pain on the people who can least afford it.
Maybe Mamdani is smart enough to come in and say, hey, I see you're bringing in trillions of dollars to the United States of America.
What do we need to do in New York City to be part of it?
Because I don't want to be pushing out people and businesses and jobs.
I want to bring them into the city.
And then Mamdani should just shut up for the moment and listen to the president because the president has a lot of ideas and experience and ways he can help.
So then the question becomes, but if he, let's just say he knows the optics as well, if it seems that they are too friendly and he is agreeable, that's not a good look for AOC.
That's not a good look for the crew that wants to paint him as the enemy because they can't, to risk their lies.
And he's aware of this because to me, Mamdani gives me vibes of R. Zelensky, where Zelensky came the first time around and he said, well, you know, you, you, you yourself, and you don't have the cards.
I'm not playing cards, Mr. President, right?
That meeting, the first one.
And then second one, he came, he wore a suit.
I think Mamdani is a Zelensky type of a guy that it's optics.
And between the loyalty of the people that elected him that want free things versus also the people that kind of AOC kept retweeting his stuff.
So AOC is a major kingmaker of New York in a strange way.
She is.
She's got a lot of power and a lot of juice.
He can't lose that.
He can't lose them.
He sold Trump as the enemy.
If all of a sudden now they're seeing Mushi-Mushi friendly, they're going to be like, wait a minute, you're a traitor.
So the likelihood of me seeing this going that way, I also think if he comes in trying to push too hard, would he want a face-off with Trump to say, I'm not afraid.
I went to the White House and I told him to his face that if you don't do this to the great state of New York, city, blah, blah, blah.
I see that.
I see optics.
I don't see diplomacy with him wanting to work with the president.
Am I wrong?
There's a massive range of possibilities of how this can go.
And I don't know Mamdani well enough to know, like, when he wakes up tomorrow morning, like, who's like, which shoulder?
By the way, I don't know if it's like a dark voice speaking to him on both shoulders or if there's a part of him somewhere, like there's a voice, there's counsel, somebody he listens to who would provide him good advice.
Like, okay, the election's over.
You now have to be the mayor of New York City.
The best thing that you could do, if you're thinking about your future years down the road, is to be able to put together big successes, like real big successes.
And if over the course of four years that you are the mayor, the city becomes less safe.
You have massive more budget issues.
People are fleeing and you raise taxes and people are leaving because of it.
This is an opportunity for you to show X, Y, and Z. Like if he's got that voice that maybe he wants to listen to tomorrow, I mean, then there's a totally different path and opportunity for him.
But I don't know him well enough to know what side of the bet he's going to wake up on.
So for me, Rob, can you check one thing?
Because this is a big thing.
Has AOC ever met with Trump?
Has AOC and Trump ever met in person?
Ever?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I'm not sure, but I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
But maybe, maybe I'm wrong.
So let's see here.
Let's see if they've ever met in person.
So there's no credible records of person documented here, but we know that they have engaged in substantial conflict public, including back and forth, thank you so much tweets and commentary.
AOC referenced a meeting between Trump and Ted Cruz, but not herself.
News.
Okay.
So this is very big because if you would have asked me who's going to meet with Trump first, AOC or Mamdani, Mamdani is meeting with Trump first.
Okay, Hokul has obviously met with Trump many times as the governor of New York.
And it makes me also go to the next step with Mamdani.
I think his last phone calls are going to be AOC is going to be one of them.
I think if he's asking about what do you think, what do you think, what do you think one of them is going to be AOC?
But when you're saying long term with Mamdani, what is his long term?
He can't run for president.
If you think about mayors of New York City typically run for president, de Blasio ran for president.
Bloomberg ran for president.
Giuliani ran for president.
I don't think Adams is going to run for president, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point if he just goes in there and says, I'm going to run for president, gets his one point with Capedios as presidential candidate, and he's off to the races, right?
We don't know that.
So I don't know what his role is going to be long term.
I just don't see him being that willing to work with the president because it changes the brand that he has.
If I have to put a split, it'd be a 70-30 split of him coming in to try to do more showmanship than anything else and then go back and say, I met with the president.
And I told him to his face, I see something like that that he tries to do.
And if he does, we'll see what happens.
Let's talk about New York State.
So you go up against Governor Hokul.
I think she wins by 5.7%.
I don't know what the number is, 5.7, 5.8%.
She spent $60 million.
She got 3 million votes.
That's 20 bucks a vote, if I'm not mistaken.
Give or take the numbers.
And then every day when we were watching, we're like, whoa, Lee is coming up.
And then every time you're like, oh, this is getting closer.
This is getting closer until the day.
People were sitting there saying, there could be a massive surprise today of you beating her.
And it would have been a historic victory for that to have taken place.
So respect you for your fight because you kept fighting and you came out of nowhere.
But now today, a lot of people would say, well, you know, if that was the case, it should be a lot closer.
And the name we keep hearing about is Stefanik.
Stefanik.
Stefanik.
She's a fighter.
She's tough.
You know, she probably went viral.
One of the first times was she went and called out the president of one of the universities.
I don't know if it was Columbia or Harvard, but it was one of them that she went strongly.
Like, I like this girl's fight.
And she's young.
She's attractive.
She's well-spoken.
But the polls are saying Stefanik is behind by 20 points.
And this is Sienna.
With Sienna's a 50-50 poll.
It's not like it's some of the polls that you trust a little bit more.
But still, what is the likelihood that New York State could flip and be a Republican?
So two things.
One is being in my current position because of the Hatch Act, there's certain very candid thoughts that I'm not able to share.
There's one other point is that I can't ever, and I won't ever get ahead of the president while in this position.
If the president hasn't endorsed the race or he hasn't said or have gotten particular guidance, I'm following his lead on all political races everywhere.
With all that being said, even though I said earlier that the state was 22% Republican, you just pointed out we got just under 50% of the vote.
That doesn't happen unless there are a whole lot of people who are not Republican who have decided enough is enough.
They've hit their breaking point and they want to save the state.
I mean, that was something that I was talking about a lot then, and that's a lot that you're hearing now.
And you need, I mean, basically, you have over 60 counties in this state.
What we did was we had a vocal in every single county, broken down by party.
And we knew that we couldn't get any less than 30% in New York City.
If we get less than 30%, we have no shot of winning.
If we get more than 35% of the vote in New York City, depending on how far above 35%, the math starts flipping the other way, it starts to become really difficult or impossible to lose.
We ended up spending a very disproportionate amount of our time for the general election inside of New York City to get to the 30%.
And I think that it would have been a lot better if we were able to get to 35 and I could have spent a lot more time throughout the rest of the state.
What we found in 2022 was that upstate, the number one issue was the economy.
The number two issue was crime and public safety.
Downstate, the number one issue was crime and public safety.
The number two issue was the economy.
And across the entire state messaging cashless bail.
And every time there was some kind of crazy criminal incident, which was like every day inside of New York City, you can count on the next morning.
I was going to be there at that particular location talking about how our policies would have prevented it.
If we implemented this is how things would get better.
And then we weighed in on other issues as well.
The money is also important to raise name recognition.
Like, if you see some polls come out now, like Hochul is the governor.
She's been the governor now for four years.
More people know who she is.
By the way, I feel like the more people who know her, the more they dislike her.
So the disapproval number has risen as well.
So it cuts both ways.
More name ID, but also more disapproval.
Over the course of a campaign, you know, it starts with structure.
At the beginning, you put together the right team, you set the right vocals, you raise the funds that you need, you figure out what your messaging is going to be.
I remember the start of my campaign in April of 2021.
I would get asked on my announcement day, I did a lot of media interviews.
They say, what's the top three issues?
And I was talking about these top three issues at that moment based off of what the voters were saying are their top three issues.
If you asked me at the end of the campaign, what are the top three issues of the campaign?
I would have said, and I did say, whatever the top three issues are of the people.
And what happens too often, and Hochul was doing this during the campaign in 22, she was saying that the top three issues were whatever she wanted the top three issues to be based on her polling.
So while she was talking about abortion and Trump, I'm talking about crime in the economy.
And I'm talking about what is the number one issue for 75% of the voters, and for many of them, the number one and number two issue.
And not only are we winning on those issues, she's seeding them to me.
She's not even talking about them.
So we get to a debate in October, late October, and we're having this back and forth over crime.
And you probably remember this.
She's like, I don't understand why this is so important to you.
And the audience heard that.
I didn't even have to respond.
I'm like, wow, okay, that speaks for itself.
And then they moved on to another topic and she got hit for it.
So message is important and substance and having policy and ideas and your style on the trail and hard work.
There's a saying in New York.
By the way, to Schumer's credit, there's something called the full Schumer.
You go to every county in New York State in one year.
And it's something that he's prided himself in for a very long time.
Well, in the first six months of the campaign, I went to every county twice.
So I'll tell Schumer, give him a hard time, rib him.
I'll tell him that's called the full Zeldon, which is twice as much in half the time.
But that pays off.
So you also have to work real hard.
So I think that there's a lot in, you know, in answering the question as far as like, where is this going to go looking forward?
I think it's very informative also to analyze what happened in 22, the lay of the land, how voters reacted, what the issues were.
I think there are a lot of lessons learned there.
Yeah, is this the clip wrap where it says, I don't know why locking up criminals is so important to you.
Is this it?
Yep.
I'd love to see it.
Go for it.
Player a crime emergency and suspend Castle's bail and these other pro-criminal laws because there is a crime emergency.
My opponent thinks that right now there's a polio emergency going on, but there's not a crime emergency.
Different priorities that I'm hearing from people right now, they're not being represented from this governor, who still to this moment, what are we halfway through the debate?
She still hasn't talked about locking up anyone committing any crimes.
Okay.
Anyone who commits a crime under our laws, especially with the change we made to bail, has consequences.
I don't know why that's so important to you.
All I know is that we could do more.
Well, when I say that.
We could do more.
Excuse me, I'm speaking.
Sure, go ahead.
We could do so much more if there was a nationwide ban, but certainly a state ban on teenagers be able to get guns, assault weapons.
I mean, that's what happened in Buffalo.
A teenager walked into a shop and was able to buy an assault weapon, the kind you use on military battlefields.
It happened just yesterday in St. Louis.
When are we going to start talking about the crimes that are the most frightening?
And that's murders and shootings, which across this country are down about 2%.
New York State, because you've worked so hard on this since I became governor, they're down 14%, down 18% on Ranking Island.
I don't know why it's just so hard to articulate what needs to get done.
When you have a district attorney refusing to inform...
That's pretty wild to say.
I don't know why locking up criminals is so important to you.
So it's interesting to me because you said issues, right?
So whatever is the issues of the people instead of whatever is the issue of the individual, which is her.
To me, she is slightly a better candidate than Kamala Harris because she can actually deliver her message, unlike Kamala.
Kamala doesn't know how to deliver the message, but she's not a very likable candidate.
It's not like people like her.
You were very liked when you were coming up, and that was a way on a national stage, because governor of New York is a national thing.
It's not like it's governor of Arkansas or governor of Oklahoma.
Nothing wrong with these states, but there are certain states that when you compete, everybody's paying attention.
And I get the fact that you can give commentary on Stefanic and get ahead of it with the president.
I fully agree.
But this takes me to the next issue.
What we're learning right now with what happened with the election a month ago, six weeks ago, whatever the timeline was, no, just a couple of weeks ago, is the concept of affordability.
And that's becoming something that across the board, everybody's talking about.
You know, last month, data came out showing, we just talked about it yesterday with Tom Ellsworth, the rejection of new loans, refinance.
It's the highest it's ever been since they started tracking this number.
Rob, I think they sent you an image of it.
Brandon did.
You can just show it because you have it in your file.
It's the highest it's ever been.
Okay.
The amount of loans that are being rejected right there.
I don't know if you've seen this.
So zoom in a little bit.
So application rate, rejection rate among applicants for loans and application rate.
So obviously, if you go to 2021, the blue is the application rate.
It starts declining because that's when we start raising interest rates.
Makes sense.
And in 2024, you notice the application rate goes up a little bit, the blue, because we start lowering the rates a little bit.
2024, go a little bit more right there.
But look at the rejection rate.
Banks are simply not giving loans out.
So now we have to get creative.
And if FDR came up with the 30-year, we're talking about the 50-year.
Now we're talking about there's a word they're using that people are not even used to yet.
It's called mortgage.
It's like a mortgage transfer where if I have a 3.5% portable mortgage, I can transfer my 3.5% mortgage to a new loan that I'm getting.
Going into 2026 midterms, Calci has Democrats winning at 72% rate, 73% rate midterms.
And that doesn't mean anything.
A couple of years ago, they said it's going to be a bloodbath and Republicans were going to win.
They didn't win, right?
It was a completely different scenario right here, Calci.
73% Democrats are favored to win midterms.
And then you have 2028, Trump won't be running.
So it's not like Republicans are scored away because, yeah, Trump's going to go out there.
No, no.
It's, well, you know, with JD, but Marubio, they're great candidates.
They're no Trump to be able to fight the fight that he fights.
How are Republicans going to win the argument on affordability moving forward?
Well, the update as of fall of 26 is going to be the biggest variable.
You know, we obviously have the conversation now 10 months out from that moment.
You get post-Labor Day and how people feel about the economy as it impacts them in September and October.
And the economy is an interesting topic where when things are going well, people aren't talking as much about the economy as their top issue.
It usually pops more of their top issue when they're upset with their ability to afford what they want in order to be able to survive.
But no matter what, the economy is always like a top two or three issue.
So you can rely on it being up there towards the top.
But how much it plays towards November of 26 is where we're at just before.
When people actually have to vote at that moment, how do they feel about their life then?
Understanding the American dream, I mean, it's different for a lot of people, but you're getting into home ownership.
And if you ask people, okay, like what's one thing that is most important to you about achieving the American dream?
It's well, I want my family, you know, with my wife, my husband, our two kids to be able to get the keys to move into our own first home that's ours.
Now, when you owe the bank a lot of money, you can make a debate as to whether or not it's really yours.
But for a lot of people, when they get those keys, they sign those papers, like that is the biggest thing to achieve the American dream.
Having a job, unemployment is one thing, underemployment is another, making enough in order to make ends meet, and then all sorts of other aspects of the cost of living.
And the economy is also a very difficult issue to gaslight someone on to convince them that their status is, that their position is something other than what it actually is.
Crime is like that as well.
I would say on the economic issue, it's very important too for whoever's campaigning a particular House race or Senate race that you're talking honestly and credibly with that person, understanding what it is that they're going through.
As far as trajectory goes, I mean, like I just said, there's a lot of groundbreaking that's going on.
I could tell you that there are a whole lot of parts of this country where there are a lot of jobs that are coming online.
I think that there's a lot of states where things are going very much in the right direction.
The states where I feel like things are going in the reverse direction happen to be the bluest states in the country.
I think there's a reason for that.
I think where the energy policies are the smartest, what I'm experiencing in my travels, it is the red states where manufacturing is going the right direction and permitting reform is going well.
It's in the red states.
So where are these battleground Senate seats and House seats?
And I think you look at the Senate map, every two years, it's not the same seats that come up.
And who's up?
I think that there's a different calculation than if you look over at the House.
Having gone through serving in the House of Representatives during the last two years of President Trump's first term and having spent a lot of my time in Schiff Smelly Skiff in the basement of the Capitol doing all this impeachment stuff and sketchy skiff.
It is something that is so counterproductive for this country.
I want to see our country heading in the right direction.
I think a lot of voters, when they show up to vote in November of 26, they're going to have memories for better or for worse.
If you're a Democrat and you want to relive, you're trying to impeach, resist, oppose, obstruct everything and anything.
Well, you know where to vote, where to go.
For Republicans who maybe sat it out in 2018, maybe they remember the consequences.
The president was more on the ballot for Democrats in 2018 than he was for his supporters.
A lot of his supporters in 2018, they kind of sat back because you go to vote, you don't see Donald Trump as a candidate on the ballot.
But for all the Democrats showing up, they feel like Donald Trump was on the ballot.
In 26, I think that that's another aspect for voters when they come out is not just, I mean, you can expect that the people who don't like President Trump are going to show up to vote as if his name was on the ballot.
I think for President Trump's supporters, the message will be relayed to them very strongly early and often how important it is with not just a hypothetical, like, here are the consequences.
They'll impeach me a thousand times.
Now it's like really believable.
And you had a couple of assassination attempts as well.
You know, and what they did to Charlie Kirk two months ago.
I mean, shit, it's one of those moments where you just can't sit on the sidelines.
And I think I hope that people are realizing it.
No, I'm with you there.
The question I got is, you know, 28, there's not going to be a Trump.
You know, unless if it's Eric running or Don running, which I don't know if either one of them will be running then, but maybe Eric will.
But there's not going to be a Trump, Donald Trump Jr. that's going out, Donald Trump, that he's going out there driving the way that he is.
And there's this notion that, you know, you'll see the meme going around, you know, Trump this many years, Trump this many years, then it's going to be JD, then it's going to be this, then it's going to be that.
And we're going to have it for the next 25 years, which, by the way, there's nothing wrong with being confident and playing offense and being aggressive and assertive.
You should be.
You should have that mindset that we're winners, we're going to keep winning.
And this is the winner's mindset.
But, you know, the enemy is sitting there and asking themselves, say, if there's not a July, you know, the assassination attempt that took place at Butler.
Because that speech he gave RNC, the energy the way it was, it was magical.
Something happened to it.
Musk came in.
I'm in the day.
I've never seen anything like this before, right?
And then Rogan came in and did the podcast at the end.
And then he went on all these other podcasts and did what he did, the president.
He worked his tail off to win.
But say that doesn't happen.
You know, say Biden stays in.
Say, you know, they mix it up.
Say, so to me, 2028 is a little bit weird.
And the reason why I'm asking this concern is because even on MAGA, there is Republicans in D.C., then there's online Republicans, then there is MAGA Twitter, then there's those that are now going against it.
There is a little bit of a, you know, challenge going on with these different opinions and factions that you have politically.
And some of it has to do with Israel.
You know, Israel became a very, very divisive topic.
You know, you're bot, you're APAC, you're this, you're that.
And then let's come out.
Yeah, those guys are AIPAC supporters.
No, the United States, it's, so that's created a little bit of the division between them.
Netanyahu is really making a decision, and they're getting bigger and bigger louder online social.
Some of it is, you know, tempered, you know, gone a little bit lower.
But what do you foresee happening with this little civil war that's going on with the social media influencers of MAGA?
Which, by the way, they may say it's not mainstream.
It's not a big deal.
These are nobodies.
They're just social media guys.
I don't think that's true.
I think they're getting millions on top of millions of people that are paying attention to them.
And I think it's going to matter more in 28 than it did in 2024.
How do you manage that relationship?
Two sides that are completely on the opposing side to say, guys, why don't we find a way to come together and win this thing?
How do you see that happening?
Well, I certainly think it's very important, the message towards the people who are listening and like the younger generation trying to figure things out.
I mean, I remember being 18, 20, 22, having questions on different issues that were important to me.
I didn't have the answers to everything.
I didn't have it all figured out.
And if you're trying to figure it out and you are looking up to these voices with followings, maybe you're listening to different opinions and you're trying to form your own judgment.
I mean, like, we need to lean into speaking to young conservatives.
There are a whole lot of that younger generation who, like, they're very interested in the government.
Like, they care about the country.
They care about service.
They're raised with great values.
They want to participate in the process.
They're proud of being conservatives, but they don't have it all figured out yet.
And no one should expect them to have it figured out.
We need to be speaking to them.
And it's not, there isn't just any one way to get to this audience.
I remember not that long ago, I mean, dating us, like I had a 13-inch TV that had a knob of 13 channels.
And with the antenna above my black and white TV, you try to maybe get reception for like seven or eight of them.
I remember when all of a sudden there was a 24-hour news cycle that was crazy.
Like every day the news would change.
There's a seven-hour news cycle.
Now we'll spend this time together.
And while we're sitting here, there'll be all sorts of different news that's popping.
And with social media and with podcasts and with people who, I guess, they go to cable news, they go to radio, they go to newspapers.
It's so diluted, though.
And podcasts are rising and social media platforms have amazing reach.
It's important to be meeting this audience everywhere, meeting them where they are.
There was a time when I first got into politics.
I mean, I ran for Congress in 2008.
You do a poll, like, where do you get your news from?
And it was a multiple choice question.
And I would have to go back and look at the poll, but I'm pretty sure I didn't say podcasts.
You know, Twitter wasn't a thing back then.
It's very important for us to be getting into all of those mediums and to have those conversations.
This is one thing I love about Charlie Kirk.
Charlie would show up at these universities and he was a dear friend.
And it's maddening that he is not with us right now.
That he would go to these university campuses and encourage people to come up.
If you agree with him on 19 topics out of 20, he would want you to come up on the one topic you don't agree on.
This is actually the guy who spoke just before he was assassinated was somebody who agrees with Charlie on like everything except religion.
Apparently, I was watching some interview and he wanted to then approach Charlie on religion and engage.
Charlie Kirk was meeting these young conservatives where they were at on their college campuses, on podcasts, on radio, TV, on social media.
We really need to do a better job of that between now and 2028 and answer these questions.
Because what happens is if you leave the vacuum, then some of these voices with the wrong answers only, and they might do it with an incredible amount of, they might be filled with charisma.
They might have a sense of humor.
They might be young as well.
And if they're the only voice answering the question and they're making enough sense, then they're moving people towards thinking, all right, well, maybe that wrong thing is actually the right answer.
And then they end up adopting it as their own.
So I think that's the biggest thing between now and 2028.
There are many places that you're not going to find conservative leaders and voices, people who do have the right answers on these questions, these young conservatives have, but there's this disconnect and Those sound voices in the movement have not yet made it to that young 18-year-old.
Or maybe it's a 15-year-old right now who will be registered to vote by 28.
Yeah, I agree.
I think you got to talk to them.
I think you got to be aware of them.
And I think you got to, if you sit there and think these guys are not going to be formidable, they're just getting bigger.
I don't think they're going to get any smaller.
I think the momentum is here.
And I think 2028, 2032, 2036, some of them are going to be on the ballot competing against others.
We're playing a very different game.
Politics is a sport today.
It's always been a sport, but it's a contact sport like never before.
And it's getting interest of younger kids that once were never entered.
Like, why would I care about this?
And I was like, wait a minute, do you see the competition?
I want to be able to outdo this person.
So there's a certain level of excitement with it.
But, you know, transitioning into you being ahead of EPA, kid, you're the 17th, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, the administrator of EPA.
And you have a lot of things that fall under your jurisdiction.
If you don't mind, you know, maybe share a minute, what are some things that fall under the jurisdictions of being ahead of EPA?
So there are these landmark laws that have been on the books for a long time: Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Tosca, Chemicals, CERCLA, RICRA, Solid Waste Management.
There's these laws that create these statutory obligations that require EPA to do a bunch of different things.
President Trump wants us to advance cooperative federalism, to improve our relationships with the states, to grant what's called primacy, to approve applications requests from states to be in charge of their land, air, and water, as opposed to unelected,
faceless bureaucrats sitting in some office in Washington, D.C., deciding what is best to resolve some very local issue that the state is more than capable to do a better job of taking care of themselves.
So we have all these obligations.
We are trying to partner with states as much as possible, approve state implementation plans, their requests on primacy to take over everything from coal combustion residuals if they're in that part of the country with coal, with underground different aspects of regulation related to water, where they'll request that primacy as well.
So that's a key fundamental principle.
Now, the core mission of EPA is protecting human health and the environment.
Under President Trump, we call it powering the Great American Comeback, where the first pillar is what President Trump has spoken about often, clean air, land, and water for all Americans.
Conservatives care about protecting our environment, but that's not the end of it.
We at the Trump EPA are different than the Biden EPA because at the Trump EPA, we choose to both protect the environment and grow the economy.
We choose both.
What's different between conservatives and liberals?
We don't view this as a binary choice.
We don't say that in order to protect the environment, we have to strangulate out of existence entire sectors of our economy.
So we have four other pillars of powering the Great American Comeback.
Again, pillar one, clean air, land, and water for all Americans.
Number two, unleash energy dominance.
U.S. energy dominance.
Pillar three, permanent reform and cooperative federalism.
Four, make America the AI capital world.
Pillar five, protect and bring back American auto jobs.
This fulfills a lot of presidential priorities that the president campaigned on.
All the stuff that we're doing at EPA to fix everything, it's not like President Trump hasn't campaigned on all of it.
Now, if I had to do the math, it's possible that at least half of the president's deregulatory agenda is at our agency at EPA.
We will do more deregulation in one year than entire federal governments in the past have done across all federal agencies combined across entire presidencies.
One agency, one year, more deregulation than you've ever seen.
One proposed act of deregulation alone.
A proposed rescission of the 2009 Obama EPA endangerment finding and all the greenhouse gas emissions and light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles, and the off-cycle credits on the annoying things like the start-stop feature of vehicles, which very annoying.
It's not animals.
It's so good for the cars, by the way.
So dumb.
If finalized, that proposal will be the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America.
Now, if anyone was only listening to last 45 seconds of what I said, they're like, oh my gosh, you're talking about all this deregulation.
Yeah, we never lose sight of our core mission of protecting human health and the environment.
We just put out a, these are the three best press releases that we put out this year.
On the 100th day of President Trump's term in office, our top 100 environmental actions from those first 100 days on President Trump's 200th day in office, the next top 100 environmental accomplishments from the next 100 days.
And just this past week, on the 300th day of President Trump's term in office, our next top 100 environmental accomplishments, 300 environmental accomplishments, 300 days, we're never going to lose sight of it.
And the last piece of this is on the operational front.
The budget, the operating budget EPA is about $10 billion a year.
I have canceled about $30 billion a year, $30 billion a year of savings from our effort this year.
So you're very much getting what the taxpayers are paying for in 2025, not so much before that.
Because when the Democrats had one party rule, they had the Inflation Reduction Act.
They came up with this creative name.
They're good with coming up with names, by the way.
They're very deceiving.
Getting back to Jasmine Crockett's point earlier about misleading.
They're very good at that.
Although Crockett didn't do a great job misleading on this one.
She got busted.
Even CNN had to call her out.
They appropriated so much money that the EPA didn't have spent it.
In 2024, EPA obligated and spent over $60 billion.
That number is completely getting reversed this year.
I've canceled the entire greenhouse gas reduction fund.
That's three different pots of money totaling $27 billion.
Over $2 billion worth of environmental justice grants on top of it.
$750 million in staff efficiencies.
A million dollars.
Something about 15,000 employees.
You're going to go get rid of a third of them by the end of the year to be at 10,000.
We had over 16,000 when we came in.
At the end of 2025, we'll have 12 and a half.
So it's about a quarter of the agency that saves about $750 million a year.
$750, got it.
Over $20 million saved so far in real estate consolidations, and that's an annual savings.
And that number is going to continue to go up $1 million in canceled media subscriptions.
I shut down an EPA museum that I'm sure none of your listeners knew even existed or ever visited.
It cost $4 million to build, $600,000 a year to operate.
We closed down the EPA museum.
Added up, all told, we're talking about $30 billion of savings.
So on the operational side, we have a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse.
On the environmental side, we are prioritizing our statutory obligations.
We will do more with less.
We will get more done with 12,500 employees than they did previously with over 16,000.
And on top of it, we're going to do the largest deregulation that anyone has ever seen in the history of the United States of America.
I love that you're doing that.
So now there's two angles I want to go with this, but let's first go with California.
So California, I lived there for 20-some years, 24 years, and these fires that keep happening.
We saw the Palisades, we saw the fires, you know, all over the place, the tens of thousands of acres, people's family stories, memories, homes that they grew up in that's been passed generation to generation, completely gone, right?
You're right on the water.
This is environmental.
You're in a state that this guy had a $24 billion surplus.
Now he's at $17 billion deficit that he has, the governor who wants to run for president in 2028.
What can the EPA do?
Because it doesn't seem like California is doing it.
It doesn't seem like Newsom is ahead of it.
What can the EPA do to help the Californians who live there, who love their state, who don't want to leave, to not have to go to sleep at night wondering what the hell is going to happen with my house if another fire happens this summer, if another idiot goes out there and drops a match or a cigarette and then boom, we're being negatively impacted by it.
What role can you play as a head of EPA to help our Californians?
Yeah, there's a lot and we've been doing it.
And President Trump, when we talk, he often speaks about California and specific ways to be able to assist from getting water to those areas that need it.
Many conversations about water, many conversations about prescribed fires, forest management, planning for the future and the way that the rebuild is done.
So President Trump got inaugurated, as you remember, just a few days after the wildfires.
He comes in, he signs an executive order right away and he says, EPA, you have 30 days to complete your hazardous material removal phase one so that the Army Corps can come in for their phase two debris removal.
The immediate response was that is impossible.
You'll be lucky to be able to complete this by the summer.
There was over 13,000 properties that were destroyed.
But President Trump signed an executive order declaring that you're going to use Trump speed and you're going to get it done.
We figured it out, got it done in just under 30 days.
The Army Corps came in.
They've since completed their phase two debris removal.
The federal government has done everything that is needed to be done in order to allow all these residents and businesses to be able to rebuild.
The slow rolling of all of the permits that are coming, the lack of green light that so many of these property owners are waiting for from the city, the county, the state, it's bullshit.
It is so frustrating to watch.
I can't even imagine what it's like for the people who actually live there.
Because I was there the week after I was confirmed.
I was in the Palisades.
I was like right away.
It was days later.
And I was visiting houses where the contractor was already at the house.
The contractor is ready to rebuild the house.
This is like three weeks after the fires.
And now we're having this conversation.
It's the middle of November and people are still waiting for their permits.
I mean, there's all sorts of words that, you know, I'll keep in my head so I'm not insulting those who don't want to hear me dropping F-bombs, but I'm telling you, it really gets your blood pressure up when you think about it.
And then, you know, you hear Gavin Newsome go after President Trump saying that the federal government hasn't done anything.
You look at everything that the EPA did to complete the hazardous material removal and all the lithium-ion batteries and all of that work.
All the debris removal that the Army Corps did, everything that President Trump does rallying the Army Corps, EPA, Bureau of Reclamation to make sure that water is moving from dams, that reservoirs are full, that you have water to be able to fight fires.
EPA has done, has been working on deregulation on what's called exceptional events rulemaking, on state implementation plans, on what's called PM 2.5.
Like there's technical rulemaking that we've been working on to allow these Western states to be able to lean into forest management.
They shouldn't be forced to put an area into non-attainment because you're doing a prescribed fire.
We should encourage the prescribed fire to prevent the larger wildfires.
Something that was frustrating in Canada this summer, there were these massive wildfires.
And, you know, I was happy that Canada was engaged in good communication with EPA.
We'd ask questions.
They'd provide updates.
But strategy was just to let the whole thing burn.
And they were just monitoring their critical assets.
And as long as it wasn't going to touch a critical asset, just let it burn.
So they let so much of their country just burn.
And then I'm at the G7 two weeks ago, Energy and Environment Administers conference in Canada.
And by the way, Canada was very good hosts.
And we had a great conference.
And there was a lot that was done there that was amazing.
It's just, it's a very different approach where you let so much of your country burn and then you go into this international setting and you're telling the world, we just had our second largest wildfire in the history of the country.
It's like, yeah, because you didn't put it out early enough.
What can you do to overlap those permits though?
Because these guys are losing their minds.
They don't want to leave the state.
There's some people that are like, you don't want to take care of me?
I'm going to go somewhere else.
And they're done with it, right?
And they'll go to Texas or they'll go to Nevada or they'll go to Arizona, but they want to leave California.
But the other 95% don't want to leave.
They want to stay there and make it work.
What can you do?
What can we do to overlap and say, hey, here's what's going on with the permit?
Is there a way to say this is a crisis that we had because of that, the government's stepping in and they're accelerating the number of permits.
And here's what we're doing with this.
I was with a Goleman Sachs event two days ago in Dallas and the governor of Oklahoma was there.
What's his name?
Stit Skit.
Oh, yeah, Stit.
Stit.
Yeah, very, very impressive guy.
I think he's got one more year left as a governor of the state.
He was there and he said something.
They had a rule that if in the state of Oklahoma, if the permit isn't given within 30 days, you can't get paid for it.
So he created an, and maybe, you know, I'm paraphrasing what he said.
So you're not given a permit, you're not going to get paid for it.
So you got 30 days to get paid $600, $800, $500.
If you take longer than 30 days from the day the person asked for it, boom, we're gone.
You can't accept payment from it.
But what can we do from the top to make the situation better for Californians that were directly impacted by fire and prevent future fires?
These are two questions I want to ask.
Well, sure.
Well, so the first part is the federal government has given a total green light.
Like there's nothing that anyone is waiting for from the federal government.
The roadblock is at that local level.
And I mean, first off, there's ways to go to the courts to try to get judges involved.
You have elections.
If somebody is not doing a good job, you could boot them out.
But the EPA does not do zoning permits for a house on a corner of the Palisades.
Now, we will do our part to help make sure that every single possible roadblock that can ever be in front of you that the federal government is responsible for, can help with, is cleared.
And it's been cleared.
Everything has been clear totally as far as everything that's required of the federal government.
But I, as the EPA administrator, I don't have the power to say, OK, your mayor is not giving you your permit, but this EPA permit to rebuild your house.
The White House can't overlap.
So let's just say, does that mean locally I have so much power to abuse my constituents and my voters and my citizens and destroy their lives?
The problem is the flip side.
So when Obama was in office, he got so heavily engaged in local zoning issues and getting into all sorts of minority requirements.
And in New York, Westchester ended up in Westchester County ended up in the courts, got overturned.
It is a very dangerous road to go down to allow the federal government to get involved in these zoning decisions because when you have a President Obama and his housing and urban development, when you have a President Biden or, you know, God forbid, a President AOC, like what it means to say that the President of the United States has the ability to engage in those zoning decisions, well, I mean,
the courts have already weighed in and said no because of what they did in the past.
Now, if there is any way maybe like where you're not getting stronger with the zoning, you're getting looser in some type of an emergency, that's a question that I can ask.
And instead of trying to shoot from the hip on something that I don't have the answer to, I can ask.
Yeah, the percentages of permits, if you see how long it's taken, the stats are insane when you're seeing that.
And these are not.
It's like a taking of property.
If I'm running the state or the city, I'm like, you want to get back in and stay?
You're not wanting to leave yet.
Dude, accelerate it.
Accelerate it.
Give them the permit.
Let them go do what they're building.
Why are you lagging it?
You have a customer that wants to do business with you.
They don't want to leave you.
Why don't you make their life better?
Instead of them finally saying, screw it.
I'm going to take this money that I have and I'm going to go build it elsewhere.
I don't understand the speed, the process of what they're doing there.
Lastly, on this fire, one other point, by the way, is that on the flip side, so let's say there's a President Obama who is in, there's a fire that hits, the power is given to the president to be in charge of these zoning and permitting decisions.
They will then claim power to take, okay, we have a single family home and it's some and single family, a community of single family homes, which is basically what we're dealing with in L.A.
And they could say, okay, with the power invested in me, like using that as an opportunity to rebuild where like you can't be rebuilding as a single family.
So I think one of the important questions, taking what you and I are talking about to the next level to research whether or not a power would ever exist, it would be important that you couldn't change the zoning where you're stripping away a property right.
I think it would be very important how you do it because if the Democrats were in charge and you set the wrong precedent and they had the power to change that zoning, they would be rebuilding local communities how they see fit in a way that would strip away private property rights.
This is catastrophic if you're running a state and you don't want to lose your job, business owners, your job creators.
They'll leave.
They'll go to a different place.
Yeah, and they are.
Definitely they are.
So let's go to the next thing.
Is there anything when you when you drive in LA, you'll see the downtown black clouds.
You'll go over the, you know, not even the four or five freeways, not the five, but one of the freeways you go down, two freeway, and you'll see the cloud.
You're like, whoa, look at the cloud in LA.
Black, dark, nasty, right?
Okay.
The preventing of future fires, what can the EPA do?
Because this isn't good for the environment, anyways, right?
So this kind of falls under the APA.
What can we do, a sort of technology, maybe incentivizing and saying any entrepreneur that comes out with a technology?
Because look, we're going to talk about what's going on with Iran right now with, you know, geo with cloud seeding and what they're doing, similar to what they did with Dubai.
And we used to say, no, that's conspiracy theory.
There is no such thing as cloud seeding.
That's BS.
Dubai did it.
California did it.
I mean, Iran did it.
Iran's in floods.
We'll get into that.
Can't we create a technology that incentivizes entrepreneurs and say, if you're able to find a solution for fires, we are willing to give XYZ to accelerate the process of eliminating fire.
Because, you know, anticipation is one, and then prevention is better than while you're in it, let me go get helicopters coming back and forth.
What can the EPA do to prevent more of these big fires from happening?
So we've been working on it this year, working primarily with the Western governors, and I've met with them multiple times in D.C.
They had a gathering in New Mexico and meet with them individually as I've traveled to their states.
The way this system was set up, was set up under the Biden EPA is that they are discouraged.
They are disincentivized from engaging in control burns, prescribed fires.
They are punished for doing it because when they do the prescribed fire, it releases particulate matter into the air.
And then that community, that state, will end up in non-attainment.
And if they end up in non-attainment, then the consequences include loss of federal funding and more.
So they are discouraged and they are disincentivized.
What we're working on doing is reversing that.
We want to incentivize these states to engage in forest management, these prescribed fires, these exceptional events.
So on March 12th, I announced so much deregulation in one day.
If you were an energy and environment reporter in Washington, D.C., you got a press release from me once every five minutes for two hours, just announcing different deregulatory actions.
And multiple press releases that were included in that day's announcement included different aspects of what I'm talking about here to encourage and incentivize states to lean into prescribed burns and forest management.
I don't want them to be punished at all for engaging this because if they don't do it, the consequences are worse.
You end up with a wildfire and then people lose their homes, their businesses, their lives, and the cost ends up becoming even greater.
Now, another piece of this, which you got into in your question, you mentioned cloud seeding.
I want to say as strongly as I possibly can that I do not agree at all with the idea that humans should be playing God with the weather.
I don't feel comfortable with it at all.
I don't feel like it's studied enough.
And by the way, when it is studied, I don't like the idea at all of it being studied outdoors as opposed to being studied somehow indoors.
Now, I would say for the now, some states have legalized cloud seeding.
Some U.S. states have legalized cloud seeding.
They believe in it.
Which ones are these?
Like the list might be, maybe there's like a more lead or red, or would it be a combination of both?
It would be a mix.
Would it be?
Interesting.
And what's the argument?
What's the reasoning behind it?
Because I know, I think the Sanskrit came out and said there's none of that going on in Florida.
Okay, so there you go.
So we're going to call it.
So you got about nine or ten on that list, right?
Interesting fact that Texas is on there, Nevada's on there, and California's on there.
Yeah, it's a mix, right?
And, you know, I've heard some from like an agricultural standpoint, like if you're in a drought, if you if you engage in cloud seeding, you can add precipitation over, you know, help with the harvest.
So you don't lose season, you don't lose that season.
I've heard it be mentioned in the respect of ski slopes and being able to produce precipitation so you have a natural powder going onto the ski slope.
I've heard Colorado.
I've heard it mentioned from that respect.
But I just'm just not the right person to be able to defend the practice.
Now, as far as federal agencies go, this is primarily NOAA as the lead.
I mean, some people would look at EPA, they look at FAA, look at some of the other agencies.
There's different types of geoengineering and solar radiation modification and stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening.
And it's like there's all different kinds of ways to engage in geoengineering.
I would say for the people who are out there who care about the topic, it is very, very important to communicate it about it accurately.
And I think that one of the things that have undermined people who have been active in this space is they'll say things that just aren't true.
Like if you walked outside and you saw a line come out of the back of an aircraft and you're like, oh my gosh, we really need to stop this stratospheric aerosol injection that I'm showing you on my X page.
Like that is just, that's not stratospheric aerosol injection.
Now, there is an entity that we know of that puts sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.
And they do it a very low quantity.
Like it really doesn't even accomplish anything.
It's more a fundraising operation to raise money.
Maybe they could scale up.
But you kind of wonder whether or not these are people who are like far left or like they're just punking everybody.
Because it's like, how do you, in the name of combating climate change, put sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere?
The only requirement that they have is to notify NOAA that they're doing it.
They don't have to ask for permission.
They just tell NOAA, I'm going to put sulfur dioxide.
It's one entity I'm talking about.
It's called Make Sunsets.
They put sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere and all they have to do is notify NOAA.
So something that Congress can take a look at is statutory obligations to tell an agency that they want an agency to regulate, that they're telling these entities that they want these entities to obtain permission, that these agency, that an agency or agencies would have the ability to be able to regulate it more than just receive a notice.
But getting back to the way that we communicate it publicly, one of the most controversial one to like step on the third rail and Make people happy or sad to hear me say it.
That line that's coming out of the back of an aircraft, there are a lot of people out there who think that this is the United States government engaging in population control.
Like they think that the federal government is like you look up, you see all these lines, and all these different agencies are just poisoning the population.
That is not what you are looking at.
And you have the way that these engines work, you have what is almost 100% water vapor coming off of the end of a hot engine exhaust that comes in contact with lower temperature and higher humidity.
The higher the humidity, the more persistent that trail is that you see following the aircraft.
Now, if we want to talk about what that is that you're looking at as far as the line in the sky, let's just be accurate about it.
And one last thing I'll mention too: it's also important that you're amplifying real pictures, real videos.
And there's a lot of real pictures and real videos out there.
I'm not saying that everyone who's posting on it, that they're putting fake stuff out.
But there's also in this world of AI, I see on social media people rallying behind, sometimes it's an account with following, a video or a picture that is just not accurate.
So communicating accurately, speaking truth, using the right terms, I think can advance this conversation and this debate much further.
And no, the United States government is not engaging in population control.
I've asked all the questions, by the way.
I actually came in and I told, with all the meetings that I had earlier this year, I said, I have a whole lot of questions.
These are questions from the American public.
Everything that you tell me, I'm going to be putting on my website.
There's nothing that you're going to tell me and you're going to be like, oh, well, that's just our little secret.
Like, I am going to, there's nothing I will know as EPA administrator that I'm not going to communicate publicly on.
But I had a lot of questions on behalf of people, and I will continue to ask those questions and know the EPA does not engage in those activities.
And NOAA doesn't, and FAA doesn't, and the others don't.
The U.S. government does not engage in this.
But doesn't this make you be concerned that if a candidate in the future, if an enemy, China, Iran, if they really wanted to flirt with,
you know, messing with our elections, you know, in certain states for voting because it's so close and it's coming down to one state, they can create things like this to happen to disrupt an election in America and cause a massive, you know, chaotic situation here.
How do you fight against, like, how do you fight against the enemy creating this here for us?
Yeah, so this is a really important question.
And you brought up this point earlier.
There are, there's all sorts of international activity in a geoengineering space.
There's a lot of it.
I mean, you referenced a bunch of countries, by the way, China as well.
Here in the United States, in the past, and by the way, the not too distant past, like during the Biden administration, there was U.S. government funding and support that propped up geoengineering.
I'm speaking in, as of November of 2025, but you could go back years and decades, and there has been U.S. government activity in this particular space in the past, and there have been congressional appropriations.
Like this isn't even a secret.
You can go pull language, and I put this on my website, epa.gov slash geoengineering.
References to, and anyone out there in the audience can go check it out, references to past government support of this activity.
Going forward into the future, you know, maybe you end up with some kind of an administration that feels like we should be playing God with the weather.
Maybe they feel like, in the name of combating global warming and climate change, what we should be doing is pumping stratospheric aerosol injection to be changing the temperature, that maybe we should be putting clouds into the sky for the purpose of deflecting sunrays off so that they don't hit the earth.
Like trying to decide what the weather impact should be, what the temperature impact should be.
And I mean, you mentioned in the context of an election, you could say it in the context of a thousand things, impacting the economy, way of life.
And if you try to ramp it up very quickly and it hasn't been properly tested and you start studying it outdoors, I have a problem just with the outdoor experiments, let alone the actual putting it into practice.
And while we can have the right policy here in the United States, this is very much an international topic because there's a whole lot of money that we see getting invested in this overseas.
Yeah, and not only that, I see the investment into overseas, but I see more the election interference, the gamification, the manipulation.
There's so much you can do with this.
If you think about the last six weeks, look at how many of these cloud companies have had issues.
Not one.
It's not just AWS.
It's not just quite a few of them that have had these issues.
Just I think Uber was down two days ago.
Was it two days ago, Rob?
I think Uber was down.
I want to say Twitter was down for a few hours.
And why is this happening?
Is it a new way of, you know, who was a cloud fire?
Yes, they restore services after outage.
But how many of these cloud companies have had this?
It's not just them.
You know, Amazon had it.
Quite a few of them had it.
So then it gets me to wonder and say, let me think like the enemy.
If the enemy wanted to disrupt and create the next COVID, what would that look like?
Would it be more an environmental thing you do?
Would it be more of a cloud?
You know, you take our service out, so now we can't log in and day-to-day activity.
Would it be a banking way of doing it?
You know, you have to play preventative.
It's just a wiring.
I lived in Iran for a long time.
So, you know, you're always tempted to sit there and be concerned about what somebody can do to destroy your life, especially a country like Cars, the greatest country in the world.
They're going to want to come and target a place like this.
So that's why I was asking a question of the enemy using that against us.
If you show the video of what's going on in Iran right now while they're messing with us, this is Iran.
This is in a place called Abadan, if you want to press play.
This is from cloud seating.
Okay, drought turns into flooding in Iran after cloud seeding efforts.
Iranian authorities issued flood warnings for six Western provinces on November 17th.
Country has been suffering from severe drought for more than now five years.
So this was their way of making up.
So if you can create this type of flooding in Iran and say I'm an evil leader who hates this country, I mean, this is a great opportunity for me that I can use these types of events at unique times to disrupt an election.
No?
Yeah, and cloud seeding is an actual real thing that has been around for decades.
For a long time, they used to say it was a conspiracy theory, but it's a real thing.
It is not a conspiracy theory.
Cloud seeding is real.
It's been legalized in a bunch of United States states.
And for people who are out there who aren't familiar with what cloud seeding is, the idea of just thinking that this is some crazy idea.
It's a crazy topic.
It couldn't possibly be real.
This is actually a thing that other countries are doing.
And we actually have it taking place here inside the United States.
Having more of a conversation, here's one of the problems: is that a lot of the people who, you know, earlier on, I was talking about the people who care about these issues and the way they communicate.
And my best advice is just making sure you're always communicating accurately and honestly with truth.
Because if you slip up at all, it will undermine, like if 10% of your argument or 5% of your argument is not accurate, you will undermine the other 90 to 95% of your argument.
Just don't do that.
As far as everybody else goes, if you think that everything that we're talking about here is just like one big conspiracy theory and nothing that we just said in the last 10 minutes is true, and you're just going to insult everybody else, that doesn't make it go away.
It's going to make it worse.
And I would say, like, for leaders in government, if like if you're in Congress and you listen to the last 10 minutes of this conversation and you're like, for whatever reason, somehow you're miraculously hearing it for the first time, or you're actually listening for the first time, don't just move on with your day and then ignore this topic because you all have constituents who care about it.
And it's important to respect people who are your constituents, who have questions.
And if you don't give them answers, then you're forcing them to go online, to go on social media, to try to put the pieces together themselves.
You, the elected official, are in the best possible position on behalf of these constituents to find out the truth.
The same thing with what we see Secretary Kennedy leading with the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again Commission, is that there are these Maha moms and dads and they have questions.
And instead of them being treated as outcasts and you're disrespecting these parents who want to make the right decisions and be great parents, I think it's a responsibility to follow sound science, gold standard of science, to be transparent with it, to answer these questions for the public and have policies that meet the moment.
So these are just two examples where I feel like in the past, before President Trump, for too long, you have these people who are ignored.
And the people in government are like, wow, there's only a few million of them.
And that's not a lot because we have this massive country of hundreds of millions of people.
I sit down with President Trump and he'll talk to me about the flow of a shower, a faucet, a toilet, the flow of a gas can, the light bulb.
Earlier we're talking about start stop feature on vehicles.
Each of these topics, let's say maybe there are only a few million people who care about them.
The fact is, the president respects that he has so many different Americans who care about these issues and they might seem small.
And there are a lot of people out there who care about geoengineering.
And the middle finger that they've gotten from the government on their questions for years has actually made this moment worse, not better.
Good point.
Next question in regards to nuclear, okay?
Because what we're noticing right now is whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's crypto, whether it's AI, whether it's, you know, you're noticing Microsoft, some of these companies are realizing we need nuclear energy that's going to be cleaner to deal with.
So, one, and then we see how many facilities China's been building and they're playing offense in this.
We've fallen behind for decades, not even like a decade, four decades.
I think it was in the 70s, 80s when we stopped completely Chernobyl couple.
These happens, we're like, listen, we're pumping the brakes.
We're not building these facilities anymore.
And even if you, Rob, go to the images to show how we're building versus others, nuclear facilities, you'll see we haven't done any in a long time.
There's a couple charts they can go to.
There's a better one than this one.
But how do you repackage that?
You know, like you said earlier, Inflation Reductionary Act or whatever, the names that they give to it, right?
What do you do to bring confidence to others that, guys, we kind of do need to build these nuclear generators, nuclear facilities, because we need this energy long-term?
Maybe you do, maybe you don't.
Where do you stand with that?
Yeah, we need a lot more baseload power in this country.
And we need more nuclear.
We need more gas pipelines.
We need to make sure that coal plants all across the country aren't just getting closed down.
The people who are talking about wind, which is an intermittent source as if it is a substitute for baseload power, are just so out of touch with the reality of the moment.
We need not only more energy production from within our own country, but we also need to do it at cheaper costs.
And with this push for AI, there's a lot of people out there who are kind of spooked about AI and the uncertainties and will it take jobs and all the information power that will exist.
And I get all of it.
I understand.
But the idea that we just hit the brakes and allow China to win it, it's going to be a lot harder for us to catch up later if we don't just win this race for AI right now.
In order to win this race for AI, need more baseload power.
And I mentioned earlier on in this discussion we were having about all the groundbreakings that we visited.
I was in, I mentioned I was in West Memphis, Arkansas.
There was a $4 billion Google project that broke ground just a couple of weeks before I had gotten there.
They entered into an agreement with the state of Arkansas and Entergy.
That's the energy company in the area.
Arkansas relies on nuclear in a big way.
And they're able to come up with this project that is a net benefit for the energy ratepayer of just over a billion dollars.
So when we do it, we can also do it smartly.
It's also important to talk about water reuse.
There are other aspects of running these operations that we can have maximum efficiency.
So that's great for the environment.
It would be good.
It's best for our own economy, for our national security, and for our environment because we tap into these energy supplies so much better than so many other countries do elsewhere around the world.
The president has been advancing Nessie pipeline to get natural gas into New York.
That just got its approvals from New York and New Jersey.
There's a push for a pipeline called Constitution Pipeline to deliver natural gas into New England.
There's talk about a liquid natural gas pipeline in Alaska along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline route.
The Transwestern pipeline, they're doing an expansion of $5.3 billion to deliver natural gas from New Mexico into Arizona.
And the other thing that I want to mention, too, is the need to tap into our rare earth materials and to also build out the entire supply chain because we are relying on countries like China way too much from both the original extraction and especially with the way China's done the expansion with the Belt and Road Initiative.
But then not just with the extraction out of the ground, but also the whole process of putting together that battery, that chip, until that point where you get the final product.
We start to finish need to work on this here in the U.S. Magnets, batteries, chips, the list goes on.
Getting that investment here is important.
I mentioned Idaho Falls, Idaho.
That was a nuclear facility that Oclo, OKLO, just broke ground on, and they want to build a bunch of others.
So these small modular reactors, SMRs, something that is becoming a reality, not as a hypothetical for a few years from now, but stuff that's actually getting built at this point today.
And the efficiencies are so much better.
Like the innovation, like you care about the environment.
We have come along so far with stationary sources.
We just mentioned a whole bunch.
And as well with mobile sources, light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles.
And one other thing I wanted to mention is something that's really interesting to me, advanced recycling.
I was in Texas in this place called Baytown.
And I think it's maybe owned by ExxonMobil.
It's a lot of partnerships with a lot of different companies.
And there's so much concern about recycling plastics.
And you'll hear many in the left talk about plastics in the ocean.
And you get bipartisan support for some of these bills that have passed Congress in the past, like Save Our C's, the Save R Seas Act or Save RC 2.0.
Advanced recycling isn't just breaking down plastic into smaller plastic.
It is breaking it down to its original compound.
It's amazing how far innovation has gone right now.
And it's incredible.
Yeah, right.
On the environmental front, the opportunities that are in front of us.
So for all the Americans out there who you want to go rally behind some environmental NGO to boycott Keystone Pipeline or whatever's next.
You want some litigation to stop all this innovation and investment in the country.
All you're doing is empowering countries like China.
You're weakening the United States, and you're out of touch really with how far these advancements have come right here in America.
I think this is good that you guys are focused on this.
I think we need to win the energy war as well, long term.
It's going to cause all this.
What number was it yesterday?
Was it $15 trillion, $16 trillion that the president's gotten commitment of, maybe even $18 trillion of commitment of people, of companies and countries investing here?
You saw he talked to MBS and just on a five-minute conversation got him from $600 billion to $1 trillion.
Those folks that are going to be investing here, you need the resources to be able to make the investment, knowing I'm going to get a rate of return, and energy is going to be a big part of it.
So it's great that you guys are working jobs, they pay taxes.
And by the way, people out there are like, oh, that's not true that trillions of dollars are coming into the United States.
When President Trump was talking about this, I was at the White House for this dinner with MBS this week, and the president's saying it, sitting next to MBS for a $1 trillion Saudi commitment.
And then you look a few people down and you see Tim Cook from Apple and they've pledged $500, $600 billion.
You look a few more seats down the table and you see Jensen from NVIDIA.
They've pledged $500, $600 million.
And there was so many other people inside that room.
I mean, you might have been it.
For all I know, if you added up the amount of pledged investments from just inside of the East room of the White House that night, you are way above all of the left-wing fact-checkers who are trying to claim that this money isn't coming in.
Now, if this continues and you guys get the results in the right person campaigns in 28, this could be, because in order to really build on this momentum, you guys need 12 years.
You need more than four years.
So a big part of the concern for me is who's going to come afterwards?
We know he's a doer.
Who's going to be a doer at his level to continue to trust for voters to say, I got somebody in there that's going to continue.
By the way, what's your best Trump story?
Do you have a Trump story of spending time?
I'm sure you spend money.
I'll give you a good one from a recent memory.
He calls me up.
It's late at night.
I'm laying down in bed.
Lights are out.
I'm ready to go to sleep.
Fortunately, he didn't call me a little bit later because I actually was about to be asleep.
I wasn't asleep yet.
Phone rings.
He's talking about an issue that he's pretty fired up over.
He wants me to call another cabinet member and one other person and then get back to him.
So, you know, Mr. President, it's getting kind of late at night.
If I reach them right away, I'll definitely call you back.
But let's say it's hard for me to reach one or both of them and it gets really late.
Do you want me to just call you back in the morning?
He says, no, whatever time it is, I'll be up.
So I call the first person up and he answers the phone.
It's a five-minute conversation.
Box is checked.
I had what I needed.
Hung up the phone.
All good.
Call the second person.
Can't reach him.
I'm calling over and over and over again.
I'm texting.
I'm using different messaging apps.
I'm using different devices.
I cannot reach this other person who's a member of the cabinet.
Eventually, I do hear back from the person.
We have a call, got the information I need, boxes checked.
We hang up.
I'm looking at time.
It is extremely late.
It's the middle of the night.
The president said, whatever time it was, I'll be up.
So I call him.
He is wide awake.
I mean, he is, you would think, like for a normal person, you're like, dude, you just drank like seven Celsius.
And he's talking India.
He's talking China trade.
He's talking about all these other issues aside from what, on top of what we were talking about.
And he's fired up over this topic that he had called me about.
He was passionate about it and he was really engaged.
And if you were listening to the conversation, you might say the president was emotional about it, like maybe almost in a bad way.
And if you said that, you would have been wrong.
Because right when maybe that thought would have crossed your mind, and you could tell he was smiling on his end of the phone, he says, don't you love this?
Aren't you having fun?
And I'm like, yeah, absolutely, Mr. President.
I'm like, and the conversation immediately became lighthearted.
And even though he is passionate about what he is doing and he gets fired up over these topics that are really important to him and this country, he is really enjoying being able to do this in like a very positive way.
It's one thing to have four years in the White House, to have four more years to reflect on it.
The two assassination attempts, you win all the battleground states, you win the popular vote, you have these four years and you want to make it count after all of his experience in life, all of his experience as president, the team he puts together with the great chemistry, we work together.
There's no competition and friction and conflict.
We all want to make sure that these four years are as successful as possible.
And this president does not sleep.
He does not stop working for the American public.
And we're coming off of a president who would wake up at like 1.05 and they'd call Lid by 1.30.
And now we have a president who he just doesn't stop.
And, man, that's just one of so many stories.
But it really goes to show you the type of president that we have right now who's fighting so hard for all of us.
Yeah, Corinne Jean-Pierre said one time, yeah, you're not going to get a hold of Biden after 9 p.m.
You remember that, Rob?
Was it after 9 p.m.?
I think it was 8.
Yeah, 8 p.m.
You're not going to get a hold of him.
Oh, it was, you can't get a hold of him before 9 a.m.
You can't get a hold of him after 8 p.m.
And that's Karine Jean-Pierre.
She rounded up like five hours, by the way.
She rounded up five hours.
What works with the president when you're negotiating with him?
What does not work?
When you're trying to do a deal with him from what you've witnessed, what works, what doesn't work?
Well, I mean, the president's an amazing listener.
If you have a good idea, I mean, he's going to hear you out.
And if it's a great idea, like, hey, Mr., if it was someone who rolled in, like, hey, I have an idea of how to solve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Like, the president's listening.
By the way, if it's a terrible idea, he's going to let you know.
So if you're going to pull that card, you better come up with something good.
But the president, like, he wants to be surrounded with smart, intelligent, substantive feedback people, ideas, and he wants to be decisive in making the right call to help this country succeed and thrive.
As far as engaging with the president, it's good to, you know, like earlier on, towards the beginning of this conversation, we're talking about Memdani.
Like, how is Memdani going to start the conversation?
Is Memdani going to sit down inside of the Oval Office on the other side of the Resolute desk and his initial tone, substance, body language is going to be about, hey, I want confrontation?
Because President Trump will give you confrontation.
He's not backing down from anyone.
He's the alpha male in every room.
He's the alpha dog in every room.
And that is on an international stage of world leaders or it's with communist mayor-elects in cities here in the United States.
But if you sit down at that table, despite the fact that there's all the Memdani history anti-Trump, he rolls in there as the mayor-elect of New York City, and he has the tone, the substance, the body language, the demeanor, and he's engaging this president, saying, Mr. President, I want to work with you to be able to make New York City successful.
This president, without any convincing needed, is ready in the next sentence to get substantive and deep to make it happen.
So, yeah, best advice: you know, be real, make a connection.
Don't try to challenge him to a fight because he'll kill you.
And just know that he's a guy, like in his heart, he wants to make it count.
Hopefully, Kwame is listening to this.
Middle name Kwame Mamdani is listening to this on the approach.
Last question before we wrap up: You're Jewish, your wife's Mormon.
Is that true?
True.
Okay.
Have you watched Truth and Treason?
I haven't.
You're joking.
You're giving me an assignment, though, for next time.
You don't know the story?
I haven't watched it.
Okay.
So you have to watch it.
I haven't been able to watch much of enough TV.
Let me just tell you.
Where am I going to find it?
I don't know where you're going to find it.
I'm sure they'll find a way to, I'm sure the guy is going to reach out to you, find a way to bring the movie to you.
But it's a story about a Mormon kid in Germany, okay, during the true story, by the way.
This is a 16, 17-year-old kid who is fighting for his Jewish friend because they know what they're about to do to him.
And I don't even want to tell you what ends up happening to the story at the end.
I just think you need to watch it.
This just came out two weeks ago.
When I looked at the profile, I said, wait a minute.
He's married to a Mormon.
You and your wife and the kids have to watch this together.
The history of it is absolutely amazing.
What this young boy, Mormon boy, I used to work with a lot of Mormons before.
And I know about Gordon B. Hinckley, the virtues, and all this other.
We work with a lot of the stake presidents that were very, very good people.
Some of the best people I've worked with in my life, they were Mormons, a lot of good people.
And I think you'll enjoy this book.
So if there's anything or recommendation for you and your family, it's done by Angel Studios, which Angel Studios also did sound of Freedom.
So just so you know, where the background of who is putting it up, and you're not going to know a single actor in it, and they all crushed it.
All the actors in this movie did such a great job.
I recommend everybody to go watch that movie.
I'm going to watch it.
I thought it was appropriate to tell you.
Love it.
This was a blast having you on.
Appreciate you for coming out.
And all the best to you.
You guys got three more years to go get things in order.
So everybody in America wants you guys to continue.
And I know you're just getting started.
You're a young guy.
Your future looks very, very bright for you.
And we're the same age, but in politics, you're a very young guy when it comes down to this.
And you're a fighter, formidable.
So excited that you're on the team doing your work.
Oh, man.
Great to be on with you.
And to all of your listeners, they're out there loyally.
I come across them all the time.
They're all across America.
They're tuning in every time, every word, every show.
I could tell you behind the scenes, getting a chance to spend some time with you that you're the real deal.
And there are a lot of people who are following you for a voice of reason and they're getting it.
