April 7, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
49:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| And so I think that the right has also been complicit at times in failing to persuade the public of what we actually stand for and resorting to when the managerial machine was available for us to exploit for us doing it. | ||
| And what the left effectively saw was, if you can't beat them, join them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| I mean, if you take this case, part of the managerial machine in politics is the advent of super PACs and the disproportionate importance that they play in shaping elections. | ||
| Remember, the left used to be the wing of our political spectrum that said, get money out of politics. | ||
| We're against the super PACs. | ||
| The right was the one defending the shadow of Citizens United and saying, no, no, no, this is something that we have a God-given right to do. | ||
| Pay millions of dollars to prop up a given politician, even though technical campaign finance law prohibits it, that there's a side door to do it. | ||
| The left effectively came to the conclusion that, all right, if you can't beat them, join them. | ||
| Play their own game. | ||
| and they've actually been much more effective at it than the right ever has. | ||
| All right, before I do anything else, I'm going to call you Vivek, because I've interviewed | ||
| you a thousand times, calling you Vivek before sort of the masses knew you. | ||
| And you never corrected me. | ||
| You never said, Dave, Dave, we've been doing this for a while. | ||
| We've broke bread. | ||
| Like, never. | ||
| So I believe in best efforts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not like a picky, you know, pronunciation corrector, but yeah, Vivek, like cake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Vivek. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, you know, it's funny. | ||
| I, when we realized you were coming to town a couple of days ago, I texted you and I said, you know, we, we've obviously had some tips on Twitter and all that nonsense and it's politics. | ||
| And I was like, maybe we should do the show with a drink. | ||
| You've said that you're not much of a day drinker. | ||
| 10 a.m. | ||
| is a little early for me too. | ||
| Um, but I think it's what it's like. | ||
| But in spirit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, well, you've got water, you've got coffee. | ||
| Um, politics just kind of makes everybody crazy, right? | ||
| Like, is that, is that your main takeaway after campaigning this whole time? | ||
| I think it does make a lot of people crazy, but I also think it's a blood sport, you know? | ||
| And it's like any other competitive activity when you're competing with people on the battlefield. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| You have people who might, on the court, be ready to trash talk, and you know what? | ||
| Off the court, could be on the same team the next day once the players reshuffle. | ||
| But a lot of people struggle with that notion, right? | ||
| I think a lot of people do struggle with that. | ||
| That's why I was glad that your team reached out and everything. | ||
| Yeah, we're in Miami. | ||
| I'm going to the tennis tournament later today and you and I hadn't seen each other and I promised you I would let you know when I'm in town. | ||
| So it's good to sit down. | ||
| And the thing I actually do love about politics is at its best, it is about actual ideals, right? | ||
| And it's easy to forget that in the blood sport of it, right? | ||
| And those are two things. | ||
| You have an idealism on one sense that guides you and a blood sport That, you know, it was a required process to get to your destination. | ||
| But, you know, I learned a lot over the last year. | ||
| A million small things I would do differently, but no regrets, you know, in the big picture in terms of what we accomplished and what I hope to accomplish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What would be, like, one of the small things if you just had to pick one? | ||
| Oh, a million small regrets. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Like, oh, alright, so there's a million, so let me just pick one. | ||
| A lot to choose from. | ||
| I think a lot of it is like micro tactical. | ||
| I think I would recommend people start with See, I'm coming in as an outsider. | ||
| And so I'm thinking, okay, there's certain technicals that need to be accomplished in a campaign. | ||
| And so set up whatever is a standardized turnkey operation. | ||
| Turns out the industry of politics is broken. | ||
| It's like a machine. | ||
| It's an industry. | ||
| And so if I was to treat this more like I was starting a company, I would actually ask what's actually necessary and build from the ground up. | ||
| As opposed to just plugging into a pre-existing system of the way these campaigns are run. | ||
| What is that system? | ||
| Because you obviously ran as an outsider. | ||
| And I want to talk about some of the stuff that you did at debates, which at times I thought was incredible. | ||
| And then also at times I thought was like a little nutty, but like, but like what was the, but that was sort of the magic of it, you know, very honestly. | ||
| Um, but what was like the, what is the plug and play that you then get into? | ||
| Cause that's what people are always wondering. | ||
| How did these people seem sane? | ||
| And then, and then there's this machine that everyone's operating. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And you were hitting the machine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And look, I grew over the course of the campaign really weary of the entire machine. | ||
| I'm really grateful to the team that I worked with, the individuals on that team. | ||
| But I'm talking about the entire process. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's designed to turn candidates into being a product, right? | ||
| The candidate's the product. | ||
| I'm used to being a CEO. | ||
| I'm used to actually running the show. | ||
| And one of the things that's really tough about in a campaign is, in some sense, the candidate is the product and the people are buying, the voters are buying and selecting off a menu. | ||
| And so that's the part of you that offers a message. | ||
| That's the part of you that speaks outwardly about the policies that you want to offer. | ||
| But the machine is, okay, how do you actually deliver that message to the people? | ||
| That's like a company in its own right. | ||
| And so I went back and forth between periods where you'd be... I was at my best where I'm just focused on delivering my message. | ||
| But by my nature, I'm also wired to be a CEO, and I think that that was the struggle over the course of the campaign, is trying to change the game and the way the game is played. | ||
| Just even just the building of the basic building blocks of looking at the ROI of different tactics. | ||
| Most campaigns spend money on things that literally do not move the needle, but they just do it because that's what the industry of politics says you're supposed to do. | ||
| Most hires in a political campaign, just like in the federal government, you probably don't need 75% of the people who are there. | ||
| I think the same goes for the way most campaigns are constructed too. | ||
| But I was never able to be at once the CEO of the campaign and the product and be at my best in both. | ||
| And so we would go through periods where I was doing one or doing the other. | ||
| And part of the reason is we started in February of, what is it, February 2023. | ||
| I only had decided that I was going to run in January, a month before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Cause I think I saw you in, was it January? | ||
| Like right early January? | ||
| I don't remember when. | ||
| At that PragerU event that the Sants was also at. | ||
| And that morning you came up to me and you were like, you know, I'm thinking about something. | ||
| I'll, I'll let you know. | ||
| I'll let you know. | ||
| I'm the kind of person where it sort of, once you have an idea like that, I can't just sit around on it. | ||
| I figured we would fire first and aim later, and that's what we did, in getting the thing off the ground. | ||
| It's a lot of learnings, but anyway, I think one of the learnings is, it's impossible to be both the CEO and the product at the same time, but if you actually have laid that groundwork for even a matter of months, as opposed to a matter of weeks, I think you would be in a position to preserve your sanity. | ||
| So if you ran again, for whatever capacity, is that something that you would fundamentally do different, like hand the reins of the machine part of it, maybe more to somebody else, and then you just focus? | ||
| Because the message part, that's where you shine. | ||
| In order to do that, and I've built a number of companies over the course of the last 10 years, one of the things that I've learned is, you can't, like, the handoff of, you can't found a company and then, like, day two, hand it off. | ||
| You really have to have your own imprint on the way that's done, the culture that you build, and then probably a couple cycles of people who you really trust in each of the key roles, and then you go on and it stands on its own two feet, and it's a beautiful thing when that happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| First major company I founded that took seven years. | ||
| A couple of companies I've founded since then have actually been able to compress that, but you're still talking something that is measured in years. | ||
| maybe even in a campaign setting in months, but not in weeks. | ||
| Right, and by the way, when you and I were squibbling over little DeSantis things, | ||
| I always wanted him to campaign more like he governed than like he campaigned. | ||
| So nobody does it perfect. | ||
| Well, Trump may be the only one that does it. | ||
| I think Trump did it outstandingly well. | ||
| Pretty damn well. | ||
| He actually did it really well. | ||
| And I'm pleased, I mean, look, if we look back over the course of the last year | ||
| for all the million small things I would have done differently, | ||
| the main obstacle I had when I first declared is nobody, it was no different for the world | ||
| that i was running for president that i was a Right. | ||
| And that was actually kind of a surprise. | ||
| I'm like, hey guys, I'm here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, and, you know, at least the rest of the media and the, even much of the Republican Party establishment First few months of the campaign behaved like I was not present. | ||
| And by August I was at the center of the debate stage. | ||
| I was proud to be one of the last remaining candidates in what I thought was a productive cycle of policy debate within the Republican Party. | ||
| And I hope we had a positive impact on the on the future direction of of our movement. | ||
| And I think that there's a lot of work yet to go. | ||
| So I'm proud of what we accomplished, but a lot of learning as well along the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I think your best moment, I was actually there for it, and I don't think most people really understand the context of it, but was at the Miami debate, which I was in the audience for. | ||
| And Ronna McDaniel comes out first before it's televised. | ||
| And she kind of gives a talk about the future of the Republican Party. | ||
| Everybody in the room was like, we do not like this woman. | ||
| And you could just feel it. | ||
| You absolutely could feel it. | ||
| And then the debate opens and you just ripped it. | ||
| You went after her, you went after the moderators, the whole thing. | ||
| How much of that were you planning to do? | ||
| And did you also, was it sort of like, okay, I'm going to hit both directions right now because you're going after the head of the RNC and you're going after, in essence, the DNC because that's what NBC is. | ||
| It was a day of instinct, actually. | ||
| One of the things I learned from the debates is I'm at my best when I'm unconstrained. | ||
| And the second, latter part of the campaign, certainly I kind of made the decision that I'm done with taking political advice. | ||
| I'm done with calculating what is or isn't going to work. | ||
| Because first of all, I don't think anybody who's forecasting that's very good at it anyway. | ||
| Certainly I'm not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And second of all, What's the point of going through the motions if you're not presenting the actual true view that you have at a given time? | ||
| There's risks with that. | ||
| Risk number one is you may not say things in a genteel way. | ||
| Risk number two is, you know what, not everything I believe today is exactly what I believed eight years ago. | ||
| Fine, but I'm going to tell you You know, from the 99% of things that are the same, I believe with greater conviction because I'm tested, and 1% of things that are different, great. | ||
| We're human beings who should be open to argument. | ||
| But with that said, I'm going to tell you right now what I believe, and I'm going to tell it to you in an unconstrained way. | ||
| And so that was my approach to the debates. | ||
| And so that morning, that was literally the day after the 2023 election cycle, where we again got thrashed. | ||
| I mean, Republicans had disappointing results across the board. | ||
| No different than in 2022. | ||
| No different than in 2020. | ||
| It was literally the day after. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Because when she walked out, everybody was like, oh, here we go again. | ||
| And for me also, like, that wasn't something that I was... I mean, I didn't know what the results were going to be, the Virginia elections and so on. | ||
| But you see that the day of and you wake up and I was kind of pissed off. | ||
| 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018. | ||
| It's starting to become a pattern without any iota of accountability. | ||
| And then I'm actually literally the day of like that morning. | ||
| I couldn't have told you who the moderators were gonna be the night before. | ||
| But looking at who the moderators are, asking what the hell the Republican Party is doing | ||
| hiring these people to be the moderators. | ||
| So it was Kristen Welker, who was it? | ||
| Lester Holt. | ||
| Oh yeah, Lester Holt, you know, exactly. | ||
| And so I'm reading this, I'm looking at Ronna McDaniel and the results, the person who chose this. | ||
| And by the way, now play that forward. | ||
| Ronna McDaniel joins NBC. | ||
| Right, well it was a hell of a day she had over there. | ||
| It was a hell of a day she had, but I think it was ridiculous that she chose NBC | ||
| in the first place to be the moderator. | ||
| The RNC chose the NBC to be the moderator. | ||
| Now we're seeing, in retrospect, how poor of a choice that was. | ||
| And yet we're going to go walk out, have a debate in the aftermath of another bloodbath disaster. | ||
| Bloodbath. | ||
| Disaster for Republicans. | ||
| And we're all going to just be silent about it? | ||
| And so yes, I just decided to let loose a little bit and call out what everybody wanted to at least hear some accountability for and said, why is Kristen Welker moderating this debate? | ||
| Why is Lester Holt moderating this debate? | ||
| By the way, these are the same people who, in the name of checking Republican candidates on facts, were the same people that have lied systematically about... He goes straight down the list. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Truth about what happened, the Russia collusion hoax. | ||
| Truth about the origin of COVID-19. | ||
| People forget about that. | ||
| You'd be silenced, censored, and reprimanded for saying that it began in a lab in China, when we now know it began in a lab in China. | ||
| Hunter Biden laptop. | ||
| I believe truth about January 6th. | ||
| Very fine people on both sides. | ||
| Yeah, you could just see Smollett coming to Catholic Kids. | ||
| I mean, straight down, the same people have looked themselves in their audiences and their camera in the eye and lied, pretending to be the arbiters of truth, selected by the RNC to moderate a Republican debate, asking questions that no Republican primary voter cares about. | ||
| And Ron and McDaniel, a failed leader of the RNC, were all supposed to sit around and pretend like there isn't a cancer in that organization. | ||
| I said, I'm taking it off. | ||
| And a lot of people were... I'm glad you said a lot of people liked it, because a lot of people were pissed off within the Republican Party. | ||
| I'm not sure that it particularly helped me to sort of do it that way either, but I thought it was useful. | ||
| The reason I thought it was particularly good having been there was because they don't air her speech at the beginning and you could feel the hatred in the room towards her. | ||
| I wasn't there for that too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now that you remind me that it was literally the day after, it's like, oh, it all fully makes sense. | ||
| So what do Anyone that's not a Democrat, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you do about that? | ||
| What you just laid out there? | ||
| There is a structural machine from, you know, what you can partly call it the deep state, but it's much bigger than that because it's media and the whole thing that puts everyone who is not a Democrat in a system that is, that is basically rigged against them. | ||
| What, I mean, what do you do? | ||
| So even if you were running four years from now, like, what do you do about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I have come to an even more firm conclusion that the machine, and we'll talk about what constitutes the machine. | ||
| It's not just the three-letter agency, so that's the biggest mother of all of the managerial bureaucracies. | ||
| In a university setting, the associate deans of God knows what. | ||
| In a corporate setting, the HR bureaucracies permeating corporate America, and even many of the people who are professional board sitters at Fortune 500 companies. | ||
| Would you call that sort of the rent-seeking elite, something like that? | ||
| We use the word elite so much that it has sort of, it's over inclusive. | ||
| I call it the committee class, right? | ||
| The people who professionally sit. | ||
| It was called sitting on a board of directors. | ||
| The sitting committee class, the managerial class. | ||
| It's kind of the horizontal deep state in and outside the private sector. | ||
| The undersecretary of God knows what. | ||
| Ambassador to some second rate, you know, ambassadorship to the person who's the associate dean of diversity or whatever they're supposed to do to the HR bureaucracies in corporate America. | ||
| It's the same I have come to the conclusion that whether you're talking about a university or even in a corporate setting or certainly in the federal government, that can't be reformed. | ||
| You have to be willing to take an axe and actually break the machine, shut it down. | ||
| Mass firings, even in a political campaign, the industrialization of politics from the way all these campaigns are run, it's the same kind of horizontal class of people who will be running one super PAC to go to another campaign, rebuild the same machine. | ||
| That managerial class, I think, really has to be Has to be. | ||
| You have to take a jackhammer to the thing. | ||
| You can't take a chisel. | ||
| You've got to take a chainsaw to it. | ||
| And there's risks with that. | ||
| There's risks with that. | ||
| Taking the federal government, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or a company. | ||
| I mean, was there risks to Elon saying, I'm going to fire, what, 80 plus percent of the employees at Twitter? | ||
| Of course there is. | ||
| There's a risk that certain things aren't going to work. | ||
| But you've got to jump off that cliff. | ||
| And in that case, we discover That actually nothing broke. | ||
| The sun still rose in the east and still set in the west, and the thing actually worked better afterwards rather than before. | ||
| I think you'll generally discover the same thing, but we've got to be honest that we're taking some small risks of inconvenience along the way. | ||
| Some small risk that some inconvenience at a federal agency or whatever is going to be the consequence of cutting 75% of the people there. | ||
| But I don't think it can be reformed. | ||
| I think it can be shut down. | ||
| And if you're going to take the risk between not cutting enough versus cutting too much, cutting too much fat that you might also cut some muscle, I will take that risk every day of the week because you can at least add back on a fresh scaffold rather than an eight-headed hydra. | ||
| If you cut off one of its heads, it grows right back. | ||
| That's the mode that we've otherwise fallen into. | ||
| Is 75%? | ||
| Is that what you've said before? | ||
| That's what I've said. | ||
| At least 75%. | ||
| You know, I mean, usually the pushback I get is that's too extreme. | ||
| When I talk to a guy like Elon Musk, he says that's not enough, which is the more pushback that I would like to get. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I think, yeah, maybe 75% is too modest. | ||
| But the existing machine has to be Fundamentally broken, as fundamentally you have to take a jackhammer to the whole thing. | ||
| Start with as close to a blank slate as you can. | ||
| When an institution has lost its essential purpose, has gone so far astray that it is captured by the managerial class that's taken control of it, you can't do it incrementally. | ||
| So now let me ask you the hard one on that because I'm with you on the idea for sure. | ||
| Do you, is there any evidence that in terms of government that it can be done? | ||
| So I get you that Elon went in and chopped away 80% fine, but that the government structure and its connections, you know, you're talking about the three letter agencies and the media, like you're talking about the whole damn thing. | ||
| Like, is there any evidence that you or Trump or anyone else could actually do it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'll give a couple of things. | ||
| I mean, it hasn't been done in the United States, which is exactly why every cycle, at least the last century, it hasn't been done. | ||
| It becomes more and more important that somebody steps up and actually brings the baseball bat. | ||
| Now, I can back into that. | ||
| One is we have a Constitution. | ||
| There's good evidence that the Constitution, when followed, got us 250 years in. | ||
| It wasn't betraying the Constitution, which says there's three branches of government. | ||
| Executive, legislative, and judicial. | ||
| Not an administrative fourth branch of government. | ||
| Well, if that got us this far, at least as a hypothesis, the base hypothesis is, if you're going back to that, Good things have happened, not bad things have happened overall. | ||
| That's sort of point number one. | ||
| Point number two is we're seeing in other parts of the world at least the beginnings of what this experiment looked like. | ||
| Look what Javier Mele is doing in Argentina. | ||
| Argentina is a better country today, even then in the short period that he's running on economic outcomes, on national pride, on a sense of revitalization, both in perception and in fact, after bringing not small firings, but mass firings to the table. | ||
| And so it's a shame in some sense that we in the United States have to have a safety net of watching somebody else do it to say that that gives us permission to do it here. | ||
| But the positive version of that is great. | ||
| If we've seen it work somewhere else, why not bring that mentality to the United States as well? | ||
| And so, yes, I do think that there is strong evidence, and I don't think the private sector is that different. | ||
| I mean, a lot of these are, like, poorly run companies. | ||
| The three-letter agencies are, like, badly run. | ||
| You know, Boeing effectively is an embodiment of the poorly run way in which a Department of Transportation is being run right now. | ||
| The principles aren't that different from one organization to another. | ||
| When you have an organization that's lost its true purpose, And the reason it's lost its true purpose is because a bunch of managerial bureaucrats are holding it hostage. | ||
| Get rid of the managerial bureaucrats. | ||
| Do you think it was also by design that so many of these things became so calcified and broken? | ||
| Like some, in some ways it seems like it was obvious that we would be sort of where we're at right now. | ||
| I mean that from the educational layer to the media layer to the three letter agency, they were all designed in a way to get stuck and then we'd be left with no choice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it's a more complicated story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that there has been a, You could think about it as intelligent, really visionary segment of the... | ||
| Marxist left that has looked at every institution and asked ourselves, how are we going to take over media, Hollywood news, take over government, take over universities? | ||
| And I think that's a really small sliver of the left, but that's been really sort of forward thinking. | ||
| And one of the things that they realized is a lot of the bureaucrats, the manager of bureaucrats in charge of those institutions, aren't necessarily ideological, actually. | ||
| It's not that the bureaucrats themselves or even the bureaucratic machine has an ideology. | ||
| So I think what they have managed to do is exploit bureaucratic failure to be able to advance their own agendas and incentives. | ||
| I'll give you an example of what I mean, and I can give you examples in different spheres. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Take the educational system. | ||
| OK, the easy thing to do is to say that that far left strand say they'll say math is racist. | ||
| Math isn't racist. | ||
| What they want to do is eliminate objective truth, eliminate the pursuit of excellence, and so that is their inherent goal. | ||
| But they find in the managerial bureaucracy a self-preservation instinct that allows that math is racist dogma to serve their self-preservation goals. | ||
| Because what happens, that's the managerial bureaucracy that shut down schools for two years during COVID-19, failing to teach kids how to do math. | ||
| It's a lot easier for that bureaucracy to defend itself by then adopting that left-wing dogma by saying math is racist than it is to actually succeed in achieving its own objective. | ||
| Or the bailouts in 2008, right? | ||
| I mean, you have the managerial bureaucracy in the Wall Street infrastructure and the financial institutions. | ||
| Well, it's a lot easier to muse about racial injustice and climate change than it is to face down Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| And so that machine was able to adopt some of the slogans of that new left that then took control over our financial institutions. | ||
| Or even one more example is it would be the military, right? | ||
| A lot of the criticism of our own military's foreign misadventures in places like Iraq or even Afghanistan Used to come from the left, right? | ||
| But it's not as though it was intentional on behalf of that managerial machine to foster dogmas of systemic racism and CRT in the military training. | ||
| But what they recognized was, hey, we can deflect that criticism from the old left if we just say the things they want us to say. | ||
| But that allows us to escape accountability for our own failures. | ||
| And so it's sort of the managerial machine is mostly apolitical. | ||
| Its goal is self-preservation and avoidance of accountability. | ||
| In cases where that used to get criticized from the left, what they effectively did was just adopt that ideology as their own. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's kind of how we got to where we are. | |
| What do you think the right missed for all these years while this happened? | ||
| You know, like, I mean, some people were talking about this, you know, a decade ago or even two decades ago, small amount of people. | ||
| But like, what do you think happened? | ||
| Is it just that people on the right tend to be a little more functional and busy and working and busy with their family? | ||
| Like, is it that simple, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that we would be remiss to say. | |
| Some of the right isn't complicit in this, right, as I said, the managerial machine is. | ||
| Not fundamentally partisan. | ||
| And so I think there have been times where you've had the right that's exploited some of those same phenomena as well. | ||
| Some components of the right, right? | ||
| That managerial machine was Dick Cheney's apparatus when, you know, he was, as the joke would be, George Bush was always one heartbeat away from the presidency. | ||
| It was actually run by the managerial machine. | ||
| And so I think that you've had a marriage of convenience that's often gone in the other direction too, right? | ||
| What I talked about is maybe the Post 2000s version where the left managed to take over the managerial machine. | ||
| I think there have been periods maybe even heading into that under the Bush presidency and maybe arguably before where parts of the right found marriages of convenience with the managerial machine as well. | ||
| And so it's for me, it's less about left versus right. | ||
| I'm on the right. | ||
| But I think that for basic table stakes that we can unite as a country is to say that every institution should actually stand for the purpose of the people it's supposed to represent. | ||
| People we elect to run the government should run the government. | ||
| The purpose of a university is to educate students, not to advance some other separate social agenda. | ||
| The purpose of a company is to provide a product or a service to people who want it and to make a profit by doing it without apologizing for that, not to advance environmental or social or orthogonal agendas. | ||
| And that, I think, is something that actually principled minds on the left and principled minds on the right should be able to agree on. | ||
| By hell or high water, we might disagree, but at least the people who we, through our jointly agreed process, to elect around the government better be the ones who actually do. | ||
| And so I think that the right has also been complicit at times in failing to persuade the public of what we actually stand for and resorting to when the managerial machine was available for us to exploit for us doing it. | ||
| And what the left effectively saw was, if you can't beat them, join them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I mean, if you take this case, part of the managerial machine in politics is the advent of super PACs and the disproportionate importance that they play in shaping elections. | ||
| Remember, the left used to be the wing of our political spectrum that said, get money out of politics. | ||
| We're against the super PACs. | ||
| The right was the one defending the shadow of Citizens United and saying, no, no, no, this is something that we have a God-given right to do. | ||
| pay millions of dollars to prop up a given politician, even though technical campaign finance law prohibits it, that there's a side door to do it. | ||
| The left effectively came to the conclusion that all right, if you can't beat them, join them, play their own game. | ||
| And they've actually been much more effective at it than the right ever has. | ||
| And so that's what I think has actually happened is in some ways, the lazy And or unsuccessful elements of the right that lazily resorted to betraying the way things are actually supposed to work created this machine that the left actually managed to be far more effective at exploiting. | ||
| So is that is that the magic of Trump that he just innately understands that? | ||
| And then I guess my question with that would be if he becomes president again, I mean, it seems to me that you actually communicate some of that in a technical way better than he does. | ||
| He kind of gets it at this level and you're getting it in a way that can be communicated further. | ||
| I think Trump understood it in a gut instinct in 2015, 2016 better than anybody who's shown up on the scene of American politics or culture. | ||
| And I think most people across this country, most everyday citizens get it in their gut instinct as well. | ||
| And I think what Trump did is he provided a voice in a way that could actually have impact in a way that nobody had against the managerial machine. | ||
| It wasn't against the radical left, just the radical left. | ||
| It was against the entire machine itself that over the years, over the decades, had frankly been exploited by both sides. | ||
| And he was the best darn chance we have been given in a generation or more, possibly a century or more, to say, I'm going to bring a baseball bat and tear the thing down. | ||
| Now, I think that one of things I have appreciated about getting to know Donald Trump better in the last, even recent months, is that he's ambitious about learning from that first term to say, OK, yes, we had a great first term, but what are we going to have learned about facing down that challenge of taking on a deep state that we're actually going to implement the second time around and go even further than we did in that first term? | ||
| Each of us has our own unique skill sets, right? | ||
| Donald Trump has his unique skill sets. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a once in a century, you know, candidate and leader. | ||
| And, you know, I think I have my own skill sets. | ||
| You have your own skill sets. | ||
| And so I think it's up to every one of us to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, how are we going to use our own unique God-given talents? | ||
| To do what we believe is right for this country. | ||
| And I believe that shutting down that machine, that's my passion. | ||
| That's the calling for the next stage of my career and whatever I can do to revive those constitutional principles in this country. | ||
| Three branches of government, not four. | ||
| Shutting down the managerial machine, making sure the people we elect to run the government actually run the government. | ||
| And even if it's not through the government, the private sector do the same thing. | ||
| Exercising or exercising ourselves out of the ESG cancer that holds corporations hostage. | ||
| I'm going to, that's what I'm going to do in the next phase of my life. | ||
| And we're going to see what shape that takes. | ||
| So if you got the call to be VP, which clearly a lot of the base is into, I think you just answered the question. | ||
| I'd be, I'd be honored to serve, you know, this country in whatever way has maximal impact. | ||
| I think that we can fall into a trap right now. | ||
| And I see us kind of falling into it, looking at the poll numbers now and believing that You know, oh, all honky dory. | ||
| I don't think complacency is a strategy. | ||
| I think that in some cases that's a trap to fall into. | ||
| So would I be honored to serve this country and to serve in a second Trump administration? | ||
| Yes, I would. | ||
| But do I think that now's the time to talk about that? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I think now is a time to focus on actually delivering a victory that is far from a foregone conclusion. | ||
| And actually, this can be really complicated here. | ||
| I don't think this is going to be some linear path or it's going to be a front door, good faith fight between Trump and Biden. | ||
| And then somehow we have a a cleanly ordained winner. | ||
| I think there's going to be a lot of twists and turns this year. | ||
| And the left, you know, many elements of the left understand we are in the middle of a they see it as middle of a war in this country. | ||
| They treat it accordingly. | ||
| And I think many on the right have not woken up to the way in which we are in a kind of cold war in this country. | ||
| And I don't use that word lightly. | ||
| It's a war in two senses, right? | ||
| One is the basic worldviews on either side are at this point irreconcilable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Either you believe in merit or you believe in group quotas. | ||
| Either you believe in free speech, you actually believe in free speech, or you believe in censorship. | ||
| Either you believe that nations have borders, or you don't. | ||
| Either you believe in American exceptionalism, yes, that these are the best darn ideals that have formed the backbone of a nation in human history, or you don't. | ||
| You can't have both of those things at the same time. | ||
| That's sort of... | ||
| Litmus test number one that you're in what you'd call a war time for actual choice. | ||
| And the second is when one of those sides is now weaponizing the basic rules of the road and the financial system, the legal system, the judicial system, the conduct of the political system, even the electoral system. | ||
| You look at the ballot removal attempts, etc. | ||
| That's using force rather than free speech and open debate to settle a question. | ||
| So if you have irreconcilable views, and at least one of the sides is using force rather than debate to settle a difference, you know, it's not physical force, certainly not yet, and God forbid we ever get there, but it's force rather than debate. | ||
| We're in a kind of lowercase w war in this country, and I do think that it's up to our side to not actually turn that into American Revolution in the 1776 sense, but the spirit of the American Revolution to say that we're going to stand for those ideals like the as if the future of our kids lives depends on it, because it does. | ||
| So with that in mind, I mean, if if you saw the states really going their own ways, and I actually don't talk about this a lot because I don't like giving energy to it, and I can see you're a little hesitant to. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you want to speak things into existence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, and I'm very aware of that. | ||
| However, I can tell you having, as you know, I lived in California and I campaigned against Newsom and I got audited by the state three days later. | ||
| I'm now here. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Three, three days later, audited by the state. | ||
| I put my house for sale that day. | ||
| I was here in two months. | ||
| Um, here I live in a very functional. | ||
| place with good infrastructure and safety and you squatters don't have rights. | ||
| It's not a real thing. All of the stuff that you know is wrong with things. | ||
| So if I saw it, well, I feel like it's happening no matter what, whether we speak it into existence, | ||
| it already is happening. But if you right, if you saw even as it pertains to the border, let's say | ||
| Texas just doing what it has to do to protect the border and Florida helping as it could in the red states like | ||
| that is the baked into the code of the Constitution and federalism and all that. | ||
| So you, so I suspect you'd be okay with it, but it's not the, it's a tough question. | ||
| It's not the way I want to see this country go. | ||
| And I see us in a window and this is where, when I say we're in the middle of a war in this country, I'm using it thankfully still figuratively. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to use that as a wake up call to say that, okay, if that's where we're headed, We have to change course in order to be one nation again, e pluribus unum, from many one. | ||
| I think that still exists, that possibility still exists in this country, but I don't think it's going to exist for much longer, right? | ||
| If my kids are in high school before we get this right, then I think I think we're done. | ||
| I don't think we have a country left. | ||
| That's the window we're working within. | ||
| And so, first, put aside my presidential campaign. | ||
| This has actually been a motivation of mine for the last several years, looking at some of my efforts in the private sector. | ||
| One of the main causes I've taken on is taking on the ESG movement. | ||
| What's at stake there? | ||
| Why have I been obsessively focused about the politicization of corporate America? | ||
| Part of it is I saw it land on my own former company's doorstep. | ||
| I founded a biotech company. | ||
| It was a multi-billion dollar company. | ||
| I'm CEO, led it for seven years, and suddenly George Floyd dies and there's a demand that I make a statement on behalf of BLM. | ||
| It's ridiculous, but actually, there was real conflict around that. | ||
| My refusal to do it led some prominent advisors from my company to step down, resign, ceremoniously, six months later, and I had to make a choice, and I chose to step down and speak my mind freely. | ||
| There was, at that point, an entire succession that was able to take the company to the next level, but part of why I focused on that is You know, I then started Strive, which is a company that's offering alternatives to BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard financial products that vote your shares for pro-profit principles, pro-capitalism principles, rather than pro-left-wing political principles. | ||
| But why is that important? | ||
|
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Right? | |
| It's not just that those companies are going to be hopefully more valuable if they're focused on their mission rather than politics. | ||
| That's what Milton Friedman would have appreciated, and I appreciate that as well, and that was the premise of Strive and its fiduciary focus. | ||
| But it's also important in a different sense for reuniting the country. | ||
| Because even if we fight like hell in the realm of politics, if there are other spaces outside of politics that unite us, right? | ||
| The sports stadiums of this country. | ||
| I'm going to one right after this. | ||
| The museums of this country, right? | ||
| The companies where you go to work. | ||
| Those other spaces are required for solidarity. | ||
| And actually, this has been true for America for all of our history. | ||
| Alexis de Tocqueville was the first person to observe this. | ||
| he traveled the country, says, a diverse, geographically expansive democracy | ||
| that does not have a common ethnic heritage or a common national identity glue | ||
| other than that civic idealism isn't meant to last. | ||
| It's gonna crumble in a generation or less. | ||
| I mean, that's what Tocqueville believed, unless, unless, and these are his words, | ||
| there are intermediating or intermediary institutions. | ||
| Capitalism is one of those intermediary institutions that you're bound not by black or white or red or blue, but by the common pursuit of excellence of value creation that you share in and allows you to live a better life. | ||
| Same thing with respect to hobby interests like sports or otherwise. | ||
| But when those themselves get infected by politics, Then I think we're done as a country. | ||
| And so prior to running for president, that was a big part of my focus. | ||
| But then you pull on the string and you ask, where are some of those forces coming from? | ||
| The mother of all of the a lot of those problems, if not all of them, come from a lot of the overreaches of a federal bureaucracy that has, for the reasons we talked about earlier, overgrown its use. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of that ESG movement, for example, comes from regulations at the SEC, at the EPA, et cetera, that require companies to behave this way. | ||
| But those were never passed by actually the elected representatives in the first place. | ||
| Which is another reason why we're not united, because at least if the people who we elect to run the government are the ones who actually run the government, at least we can agree to disagree that the right person got elected or the wrong person got elected. | ||
| But if that's not even the person making the decisions in the first place, then that feeds a lot of the division that then flows downstream. | ||
| So that's what I think's going on. | ||
| So all of that being said, and because you just a moment ago said, do you think there'll be some shenanigans and twists and turns before the election? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me we're in a very strange spot. | ||
| I'm with you on this. | ||
| We're in a very precarious moment in this country because it, let's say Trump wins. | ||
| So Trump wins. | ||
| We now know, we already know what the machine will do because it already did this. | ||
| We'll have riots on the streets and all of that stuff. | ||
| And they'll say, somehow they'll say, it'll be okay to say you stole an election again and all of that. | ||
| So that's one. | ||
| Oh, they're getting ready for it. | ||
| But I think there's another version that's going to be a problem, which is if he loses, the people on the right, Trump believes, or you can speak to this if you want, as I understand it, Trump believes the last election was stolen. | ||
| So if he believes that, he automatically will have to say this one was stolen. | ||
| It's sort of baked into the thing. | ||
| Well, then the people on the right, I don't think they'd be as inclined to be violent, but you'll have basically another juiced up version of people saying none of this works. | ||
| So those two things, the tension there seems you can't hold that for very long. | ||
| So look, I think we're skating on thin ice as a country right now. | ||
| I mean, that is why I stepped aside from my business career to do what I'm doing now and why, you know, I think Donald Trump is doing what he's doing since he's run for president as well. | ||
| I'm focused on how do we get to a better place on the other side of it without worrying | ||
| about them. There's a lot of bad possibilities. Right, right. There's a lot of bad | ||
| possibilities. We can sit here and worry and correct. And that one will do over drinks. And like | ||
| correctly, I mean, correctly worry about the about the spectrum of possibilities of how this nation | ||
| falls apart. But I'm doing what I'm I'm sure part of your motivation doing what you're doing. | ||
| And I think that a lot of the other people who are stepping up across this country are doing up with doing what they're doing, because we want to avoid that. | ||
| So how do we avoid that this year, I think there's an opportunity to, I think there's an opportunity for this to be a landslide election, like what Ronald Reagan delivered in 1980. | ||
| And again, in 1984, And say what you will, a landslide minus some shenanigans is still a decisive victory that unites this country. | ||
| And one of the things I have appreciated and really, you know, I would say really cheered on is Some of the messages I've heard from Trump, even towards the tail end of this primary and after the effective end of the primary, success will be our vengeance. | ||
| That's a line he's used several times over. | ||
| I think it's a beautiful way to channel the instincts of vengeance towards success as unifying. | ||
| Excellence is unifying. | ||
| Excellence is what unites us. | ||
| Excellence is how we heal this country. | ||
| Success is how we heal this country. | ||
| Success will be our vengeance. | ||
| And so, You know, I think that I certainly am going to be among the people in our movement, and I think there are many of us who are going to advocate for saying we're going there. | ||
| OK, we understand we're not going to deny. | ||
| The travails of the past, right, we got to see a problem with clear eyes, we can't just paper it over and say it's morning in America because anyone with eyes can see that it's not. | ||
| It irritates me when somebody will just come in in this current environment, say it's morning in America. | ||
| Ronald Reagan wouldn't say that today because it's a lie. | ||
| It's not true, but it can be. | ||
| It can be. | ||
| I don't think the sun has permanently sunk in the West. | ||
| I think it can still be morning in America. | ||
| It's not, you know, some people say the American dream is alive and well. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Ask most people across this country who are frustrated seeing wages stay flat as prices and, you know, inflation and mortgage rates and everything else has gone up. | ||
| Young people have been sold a dream to say that you're going to get a four-year college degree in some gender studies major program in California and somehow that's going to get you a head start in the American dream. | ||
| Hasn't worked out that way. | ||
| You're saddled with debt instead. | ||
| I can't tell people the lies of just papering over the fake optimism to say the American dream is alive and well. | ||
| It is alive and hanging on for life support. | ||
| That's where we are now. | ||
| So we have to see that with sober and clear eyes and describe it unsparingly, right? | ||
| We have a managerial machine in both parties forking over more money to some kleptocrat, the Ukrainian bureaucrat, than we are to actually take care of our own citizens or our own borders or our own cities here at home. | ||
| But we have to marshal that sense of vengeance to say that Success will be our vengeance rather than something else that could be our vengeance. | ||
| So when you see all these people pouring over the border and the fact that for six months as we all saw it the media just didn't cover it or said it was made up or and then finally eventually it kind of burst forth into mainstream. | ||
| Even now that you've seen the inside of how the thing works, do you still sort of marvel at the way it gets away with it? | ||
| Meaning there's still a certain set of people that don't think there's a problem at the border. | ||
| There's still a certain set of people that think that Joe Biden is cognitively aware and running this operation. | ||
| Like it still has that that veil that works. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that there's an incentive structure here, right? | ||
| I mean, it's no accident that the very people who are in favor of what I will call open border policies, they would chafe at that. | ||
| But in favor of policies that allow for so expansive asylum | ||
| rules that nobody else would have ever recognized | ||
| them as asylum rules, 10 million people crossing over the border | ||
| and continuing to do so daily, on a daily basis, that those are exactly the same people | ||
| on a completely different issue are against voter ID laws to vote, right? | ||
| Because in principle, you should predict a distribution of two independent questions. | ||
| Independent questions. | ||
| Should voter ID laws be required to vote or not? | ||
| And should people be allowed to enter this country without legal basis for entering the country? | ||
| Those are independent questions. | ||
| So why is it that the very people who are most committed to people being able to enter this country with broad asylum laws and without any accountability for illegally entering are also the same ones who are in favor of a totally different issue, whether you or I have to show our voter I.D. | ||
| as a condition to vote. | ||
| You don't have to be a genius to do that. | ||
| I see what you're doing here. | ||
| So those two things are deeply linked. | ||
| And so when you have somebody has an incentive to see a problem in a certain way, they're going to see the problem in that way. | ||
| And so, no, am I mystified that people will still say, oh, there's no problem? | ||
| No, of course not, because they have an incentive not to see it that way. | ||
| And most human beings, I mean, Sartre would say this, the greatest lie is the lie you tell yourself. | ||
| I think a lot of these people are able to speak with that level of conviction because they themselves believe it, but they believe it because it's their, in the long run, electoral incentive of their worldview to say that this is how we secure lasting electoral majorities for Democrats. | ||
| And you don't have to make this up because 10 years ago, this is exactly what much of the Democratic Party was saying was part of their long run objective to secure lasting electoral majorities. | ||
| And so once you see that it's intentional, it actually makes sense. | ||
| It's not that mystifying. | ||
| Doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of work cut out for us to fix it. | ||
| But at least you know what you're fixing where We fall into the trap sometimes of saying, oh, can't we just build the wall? | ||
| Here's the proof for how that would work. | ||
| Or aquatic barriers in the Rio Grande, which are cheap and mobile and they work. | ||
| Yeah, here's how we would do that. | ||
| And here's the plan for how much more effective that would be. | ||
| As though we're solving a problem of nature, right? | ||
| How to send, how SpaceX sends a ship and aircraft into space is tackling a problem of nature, okay? | ||
| In the forces of, physical forces of the universe, gravity and otherwise. | ||
| We're not tackling a problem of nature here. | ||
| We're tackling a man-made problem. | ||
| And so if we pretend like it's a problem of nature and try to create an engineering feat of how many more feet of border wall construction we need and debate the technicals, we're missing the point. | ||
| The country that put a man on the moon can get this done. | ||
| This is a man-made problem. | ||
| And man-made problems are generally problems of will. | ||
| And every, the beautiful part about man-made problems is every man-made problem has a man-made solution. | ||
| Problems of nature sometimes will be solved and sometimes they won't. | ||
| I was in the biotech industry. | ||
| Some diseases, if you don't understand them, you're gonna fail. | ||
| And many drugs that have been developed, including at my companies and across my competitors, | ||
| fail, and that's just part of the business. | ||
| It doesn't have to be that way when you're taking on man-made problems. | ||
| And I think that that's something that we have to | ||
| wisen up to, and the way we approach this is we have to recognize | ||
| the intentionality of the other side, unsparingly. | ||
| But our goal isn't just to crush the other side and point out their hypocrisies, it's to say that we're going to actually be successful and our bet is success will be unifying and let success be our actual vengeance rather than hard vengeance being our vengeance. | ||
| So if man can fix some of these man-made problems, I think this is going to be a little bit of a trickier one for you. | ||
| So let's say you were in the administration, doesn't matter what role you're in. | ||
| Are you confident that Trump would be able to staff it properly to do this? | ||
| Because that, oh, I voted for Trump last time. | ||
| I like Trump. | ||
| I'm going to vote for him this time. | ||
| It's not even a choice at this point. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Obvious. | ||
| Like it's, it's beyond obvious. | ||
| Like we need a new word for how obvious it is basically. | ||
| But one of my main concerns I've heard that objection. | ||
| I don't think that that lands with me. | ||
| I don't think it makes sense. | ||
| I mean, I'm not going to say this boastfully. | ||
| turns against him, whichever way you want to go with it, that good, the excellent people that you want | ||
| to solve these problems will be afraid to do it. | ||
| I've heard that objection. | ||
| I don't think that that lands with me. | ||
| I don't think it makes sense. | ||
| I mean, I'm not gonna say this boastfully. | ||
| I'm saying this in a first personal sense. | ||
| I don't have authority on a lot of things, but I have authority on my own intentions and views, okay? | ||
| So, I said earlier to you, and I stand by it, that I would be honored to serve in a second Trump administration if it was able to have a maximal impact on the country, right? | ||
| Well, I like to think of myself as somebody who is a qualified person who's gonna be able to drive real change. | ||
| I'm 38 years old, I've built multi-billion dollar companies, I've been educated in different spheres. | ||
| Run for US president, I believed that I was going to be capable of doing that job. | ||
| And so if I'm going to be willing to serve in that administration, I can imagine a lot of other people who are similarly situated would say the same thing. | ||
| And I know they are too. | ||
| I mean, countless people across this country. | ||
| What would you say to somebody? | ||
| What would you say to somebody now? | ||
| Now having known Trump in a new way, what would you say to somebody that was worried about that? | ||
| First of all, the question is, what are you doing for your country? | ||
|
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Right? | |
| I mean, your country has given us, those of us who have lived the American dream, The ability to live the life that we have. | ||
| What inheritance do we actually want to give our kids? | ||
| Is it a bunch of green pieces of paper? | ||
| Or is it a country where they're able to live that same American dream? | ||
| George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| They made immense sacrifices for this country. | ||
| By the way, a number of them, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. | ||
| included, were younger than both you and I at the time they made those sacrifices. | ||
| So if we're going to face them in the afterlife, They're going to tell us about the sacrifices they made, their lives, their treasure. | ||
| Many of them went bankrupted themselves. | ||
| Others of them died. | ||
| Others of them risked their life along the way. | ||
| They're going to tell us about the sacrifices they made. | ||
| What sacrifice did you make? | ||
| If they're asking you that, you better have a damn good answer to that question. | ||
| So it's about the country, and then the people of this country have chosen somebody to lead who has done something that no one else in the Republican primary field had done, myself included, which is actually proven himself in that role. | ||
| Say what you will about the results of the Trump administration, Biden's administration's results pale in comparison to even that first term, and we're shooting for a second term that's more successful than the first. | ||
| That's a rare opportunity that voters have, right? | ||
| It's a once-in-a-century, literally more than a once-in-a-century opportunity. | ||
| I think it was Grover Cleveland was the last time voters were given this opportunity to say that usually you have an incumbent and then a challenger, and I would have been one of these people, Ron Sanders would have been one of these people, any other candidates would have been one of these people, who say, here's what I'm going to do, and here's what this incumbent has done, and here's why we should defeat him. | ||
| With Donald Trump, you have a different proposition, and I think this is the main reason why the Republican primary electorate treated it like a really easy choice, and it was probably the most lopsided primary that we've had in modern history, if not all of the last century. | ||
| It's that this isn't somebody promising to do things based on what you have to believe he's going to do. | ||
| You have a president for four years who delivered one set of results. | ||
| You have another president who delivered a different set of results. | ||
| Make your choice accordingly. | ||
| And so I think that when you're thinking about people who are, if the voters of this country and the voters of the Republican primary base felt that overwhelmingly strong about saying that here's somebody who has executed, we're gonna go for the tried and true, somebody who's gonna take that to the next level, as their, not incremental choice, but their resounding choice, Then yes, are we going to be able to find the few hundred or few thousand people who are going to step up and serve their country, the very best, not just good ones, the best of the very best to step up and do it? | ||
| Yeah, I think we're darn sure that we're going to be able to do that. | ||
| If we found millions of voters across this country resoundingly endorsing that vision for the country, then yes, are we going to find a thousand plus, thousands upon thousands of the very best in this country to step up and serve the next administration? | ||
| I'm fully confident we will. | ||
| Rebecca, I called you Vivek at the end. | ||
| You know, I would tell you some of my high school friends back in high school, a lot | ||
| of people call me that too. | ||
| So my friends from high school, if any of them call me the same thing, don't worry about | ||
| it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you want to mispronounce Dave to end this, that would be appropriate. | ||
| Dave, it's been great. | ||
| I am glad that we did this. | ||
| Politics makes everyone a little nutty, but it's good to just sit with you. | ||
| And I don't have a last question because you just wrapped it up like a pro, so it's good to see you. | ||
| It's good seeing you, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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