In this episode, Ron DeSantis campaign strategist Dave Rubin joins me to talk about why we should lift the curtain and have a real conversation about the campaign and why it s important to have it live in the open, in the public eye, in real time, in order to have a conversation about it. We also talk about how important it is to have an open conversation about what s going on in America right now, and why we need more of them, not just in the campaign, but in every aspect of our every day life. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don t forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please take a moment to leave us a rating and a review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a friend who needs to know more about what we re doing. Thank you for listening, and we ll see you soon! -Vivek Shahan Malik and Vaynerchandran Singh Thanks for listening and supporting the podcast, Vayne Singh and Veejay Singh - Thank you so much for being a friend of the show, and thanks for supporting the show and for supporting it, and for sharing it with your friends and family, and your support, and thank you to everyone who shared it with their support and shares it with the rest of the world. Vavek and Veena, Veegan Singh and Dave Rubin, and all of your support and support the cause, and support Veevan Singh, and his support of the campaign. - Vayyan and his efforts to make it all around the country, and so much more. Thank you also, Vevan, and I hope you enjoy the podcast and you ll get a chance to be a part of the conversation, and hear it in the next episode, and more of it. -Veegan and Veyeejay Vayee, Vyayee and Vyee, and much more! -Vayeeee, - Veeeeeeeeee, thank you, and vayeee of course, and let me know what you think of this podcast, and what you re listening to this podcast? And thank you!
Transcript
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00:00:00.000I care a lot more about the what and the why than I do about the who.
00:00:29.000Okay, one of the things that irritates me about partisan politics is, Especially in the Republican Party, if I'm being honest, is that we obsess over the who.
00:00:42.000Without actually stopping to ask the question of what do we stand for and why do we stand for it?
00:00:48.000In fact, if we go in that order, it turns out the question of the who becomes a lot easier.
00:00:53.000And so that's why in the first number of weeks of this campaign, we've actually been focusing on the substance rather than on the partisan politics of it.
00:01:01.000That being said, one of the approaches that I've taken to making my policy positions known, one of the I'm not running the stuff I want to say through polls or tests or political consultants.
00:01:17.000I'm going to tell you what I believe without apology and I would rather lose this election and have actually been honest about what I believed at every step of the way than to play some game of snakes and ladders of what I'm supposed to say in some hollowed out husk of a path to victory.
00:01:33.000But it turns out that last week, or in the last couple of weeks, there was some element of the question of the who that was on my mind.
00:01:41.000When I saw some of the behaviors of Governor Ron DeSantis, Staying quiet about the Silicon Valley bailout in the back of the way the government stepped in following the Silicon Valley bank failure.
00:01:53.000When I saw him being conspicuously silent following news breaking that an indictment of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, appeared likely.
00:02:04.000I started to get a little bit Frankly, irritated to see a fellow leader in the Republican Party operate with this level of, frankly, cowardice, lack of courage that we should want out of whoever our next leader is to sit across the table from Xi Jinping.
00:02:21.000So anyway, that was the issue that weighed on me.
00:02:23.000And so I started to make comments about that transparently without going through political consultants, without going through a donor class, without going through a filter, just like I would on my policy issues.
00:02:33.000I got a text message from a friend, and I'm grateful for it, who basically told me that, you know what, I was alienating a lot of people.
00:02:40.000That that was something that didn't particularly sound great in this race.
00:02:46.000And you know what, we didn't end up having a long conversation because you know what I said?
00:02:50.000Let's actually have this conversation together.
00:02:57.000It's somebody who has been very supportive, a big supporter of Ron DeSantis.
00:03:00.000He's a well-known figure, Dave Rubin, who's joining me as my guest today.
00:03:04.000And you know what I said to Dave is, I appreciate that constructive criticism.
00:03:08.000Let's just make it an open conversation between you and I. And that's actually when it occurred to me that we should just make that the first episode of our podcast.
00:03:15.000Because the premise of the entire campaign, the premise of this podcast is that We're going to lift the curtain, all right?
00:03:21.000It's not going to be a private conversation between a leading media personality and a presidential candidate.
00:03:25.000We'll just have the same conversation we were going to have.
00:03:31.000Not just about Ron DeSantis, but on a wider range of issues relating to pursuing the presidency.
00:03:36.000But to bring you into it, and this is the first episode of a series daily from here on out where we're going to be doing just that.
00:03:42.000And I think we're going to kick off today with a bang with my good friend who sent me that text message a little bit ago calling me out on it.
00:04:36.000And then you go out and project to the public like you had known forever what you were going to say even though you just learned it 15 minutes before closed doors beforehand.
00:04:44.000And I think that that's in some ways part of the problem in America today.
00:04:48.000You and I have talked about this in other settings, this gap between what people are willing to say in public and what people are willing to say in private.
00:04:57.000That gap is about as big as I could remember in my lifetime over the last few years.
00:05:02.000If we close that gap, I think good things happen in this country.
00:05:29.000Why should we have this conversation just between you and I? Because I think it's a conversation that probably should be happening within the Republican Party across the country relating to leadership.
00:05:39.000I mean, what does it actually mean to be a leader?
00:05:41.000And we're talking today, like right now as we speak, waiting for what sounds like pending news of the Trump indictment.
00:06:25.000We're skating on thin ice as a country right now, and I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican, whether you're Joe Biden running against Donald Trump, whether you're me running against Donald Trump, or whether you're Ron DeSantis running against Donald Trump.
00:06:39.000It's a moment that calls for principle rather than political calculations.
00:07:00.000So let's start with the easy stuff, the agreement stuff.
00:07:02.000And for sure, the only thing we discussed before we started recording this is that we're going to get into everything sort of with no rules.
00:07:08.000And there are points of disagreement that we'll gladly get into.
00:07:11.000But I can very easily, just to jump off on the Trump stuff, completely agree with everything you said right there.
00:07:16.000We are potentially entering, and maybe we've entered it already, banana republic level stuff.
00:07:22.000You know, between two impeachments, between the Mar-a-Lago raid, between months of January 6th hearings, every other thing they tried to get him on over the years.
00:07:32.000Trump Jr. had lunch with a Russian for 15 minutes on the Upper East Side in 2017.
00:07:38.000The litany, the litany of just insane things that all either turned out to be nothing or just, you know, a shell game of truth or whatever you want to call it.
00:08:13.000But I will say in the short term, this is definitely good for Trump because his people are excited again and they needed something to be excited by.
00:08:33.000And that changes how you behave in this, which is actually that would get us to the reason I had called you about a week and a half ago on something.
00:08:44.000They might go ahead with this because this is what sort of the authoritarian left, which, you know, if you want to pick a place that may be ground zero for it, it would be a New York City DA's office.
00:08:59.000When you talk about that chasm between what people believe and what they're willing to say, you're right.
00:09:04.000It has diverged and become so large that it is very, very hard these days if you were in a restaurant.
00:09:12.000Let's say you were in a restaurant with 50 people sitting in that restaurant.
00:09:15.000You could probably go around that restaurant and ask people very, very basic questions about reality and get more than 50 responses that are completely different.
00:09:26.000That's a huge, huge problem, and I think that's going to be an interesting challenge for you and all the other candidates.
00:09:34.000What are the basic things that we can agree on so that we can begin growing a strong tree out of what many have turned into scorched earth?
00:10:26.000It's artificial if there's nothing greater that binds us together across that diversity or else we're just a bunch of different looking higher mammals roaming the geographic plane doing what our iPhones told us to do on a given day.
00:10:51.000Like, it can be a strength if you have a group of people that are from wildly divergent places whose lifestyles and paths to get there have been very, very different, whose cultural traditions and foods and music and clothes are all very different.
00:11:05.000That could be good if you put them together and you might find something in the sort of ether of that.
00:11:11.000But it's not necessarily your strength that There are many good things that can come out of having 10 roughly, say, similar people all on a similar mission.
00:11:22.000If your mission is freedom, if your mission is to strengthen individual rights, strengthen the ability for people to live as they see fit, why would I care about diversity if we're going to just talk about diversity of skin color or your genitals or this other nonsense?
00:12:01.000Are some of the basic concepts like the rule of law, that we apply the law even-handedly, no matter who you are, high or low, black or white.
00:12:10.000We're a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
00:12:13.000We're a nation that believes in free speech and open debate and the rights of political citizens of a nation to disagree politically in the open.
00:12:22.000I think we now live in a moment, though, where those basic ideas are themselves under assault.
00:12:28.000I mean, if you think about – actually, I was one of the weird guys back in college and shortly after who was arguing vehemently for the rights, the constitutional due process rights of the people in Guantanamo Bay.
00:12:47.000But the whole point is we have to know that they were the ones who were actually responsible for it before we subject them to punishment in the same way that you wouldn't want to be locked up mistakenly at a front door without going through that due process as well.
00:13:01.000We have these principles for a reason.
00:13:06.000Many of the people who were vehemently with me back then are pin drop silent today when it comes to, say, a January 6th peaceful protester or whatever who was locked up, potentially indicted, potentially convicted or in settlement.
00:13:25.000Without actually seeing exculpatory evidence, which is one of the fundamental principles enshrined effectively in the constitution that is codified in the case law, Brady rule and otherwise, this is wrong.
00:13:39.000Because you could say whether or not you're supporting the rights of somebody who's in Guantanamo Bay, which is classically a left-wing issue, whether or not you're supporting the constitutional rights of somebody who's being prosecuted for alleged crimes on January 6th, which is conventionally a right-wing issue, we agree or should agree, I think most of which is conventionally a right-wing issue, we agree or should agree, I think most of us still do, on the
00:13:59.000I mean, the whole premise of my being in this race is to call that bluff, the idea that we're divided by actually start talking openly again.
00:14:11.000And once we start to talk openly again, we realize what most of us suspect, which is actually that our neighbors and our colleagues and our classmates still agree on those basic rules of the road, even if we disagree on corporate tax rates.
00:14:27.000Look, that's a pretty good bedrock place to start a campaign from.
00:14:30.000And I do agree with you that I think most people, if you could calmly explain that to them and they really thought about what the issues are, they would agree with that.
00:14:39.000I would have one slight qualifier statement there, which I don't want to get too lost in this right now because it's a whole other conversation.
00:14:46.000You know, on the Guantanamo Bay thing, if you're not a citizen of the United States, I don't know that you deserve all of the protections of United States law, but let's.
00:14:57.000The point is, we should have equal protection under the law for American citizens.
00:15:02.000I think the reason that we got led to this crazy place that we are in right now, that would lead someone like you, who I'm guessing, I don't want to speak for you, but I'm guessing 10 years ago probably didn't have political aspirations, but now being right in the thick of this thing, is there are two things I think that really happened.
00:15:19.000I think that the first one's very unfortunate for me, which is that there was a failure of classical liberalism.
00:15:26.000The old school liberals, the JFK liberals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ed Koch liberals, old blue dog Democrats, they have completely failed the liberal experiment.
00:15:37.000And wokeism has completely infected now the Democrat Party, which should have been the party version of liberalism.
00:15:45.000And then I think, you know, Trump derangement syndrome for, although it sounds like a pejorative to some extent, I think it actually is a type of mental condition that a huge swath of people have, especially liberal elite who, who run our media basically.
00:16:02.000And the reason, so when you say, well, why don't these people apply their principles equally, regardless of whether it's Guantanamo Bay or January 6th is because suddenly many people saw Trump as the center of the universe instead of finding either God or some other belief system at the center.
00:16:19.000So if, if the center of your universe is something that you hate, absolutely hate that you believe is orange Hitler, You can take almost any position possible in an effort to destroy that thing.
00:16:33.000And I think that really is why so many people who I thought were really thoughtful, interesting, the type of people that were sense makers, Say, 10 years ago, have become so out of touch.
00:16:44.000And then I would add one other thing to that, which is that then you throw in COVID, which turned people, you know, completely upside down.
00:16:50.000There were three forces, at least, and I'm sure you can probably think of another couple, probably related to economics specifically, that just led us to this moment.
00:16:59.000Yeah, I think you're right about that.
00:17:01.000I look at it as the, you know, you kind of gave the hand, I'll give you the glove, right?
00:17:09.000You know, I think those forces are against the backdrop of what you alluded to briefly when you talked about the loss of belief in God, where you're right.
00:17:18.000I mean, I think Trump, the, you know, COVID you could put on the list.
00:17:22.000I think a lot of the economic excess in the back of the 2008 financial crisis created the conditions for this two people losing their mooring to how we create value in an economy.
00:17:39.000But I think that it's against the backdrop of losing our sense of grounding in the things that used to give us identity and purpose, right?
00:19:59.000But you have to do it for yourself first.
00:20:02.000No one's going to come in and make your bed.
00:20:03.000No one's going to brush your teeth and comb your hair.
00:20:06.000And if you can't do those things for yourself, well, then you're certainly not going to stop climate change.
00:20:11.000You're not going to stop any of the other tyrannical forces that you think are happening, the evils of capitalism or whatever it is that the social justice warriors think is coming.
00:20:20.000And I think by being around him, that really got ingrained to me And once I started doing those things more so for myself, well, then I was able to do a lot of other interesting things.
00:20:31.000I built a couple successful businesses.
00:20:33.000I never intended on being a businessman.
00:20:36.000I mean, I built a tech company in the middle of all of this.
00:20:39.000So that basic idea, if you do something for yourself, First, that then you can change the world is, I would say, the most important underpinning of all of this because everyone else right now, the whole system has it backwards.
00:20:54.000If you listen to the messaging out of corporate media and mostly out of the Democrats, Some Republicans too, but to a lesser extent, mostly Democrats.
00:21:02.000The idea is just give the government enough power, enough money, enough attention, and it will somehow solve all of the problems.
00:21:15.000And I always slightly butcher the number on this one, but I think as Ronald Reagan said, the nine scariest words in the English dictionary are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
00:21:24.000And I think that really is the problem right now.
00:21:26.000And that's also the challenge that you'll find, and Republicans always have to go uphill on.
00:21:32.000It's very easy for Democrats to always be like, yeah, we're going to take money from them and give it to you.
00:21:36.000We're going to give free this to that.
00:21:40.000And everyone's like, yay, we got all that stuff.
00:21:42.000The challenge for a responsible adult and for someone like you to get into a race and say to people, well, you're going to have to do a little something.
00:21:53.000You're a playable character in this game.
00:21:55.000You're not a non-playable character in a video game, an NPC. That's much more of a challenge because then people go, if I pardon my French for a moment, they go, oh shit, I got to do something too?
00:22:07.000And I think that's always the uphill battle that, let's say, right-leaning or conservative people face.
00:22:12.000I mean, to your point that then you can go on and address climatism or the evils of capitalism, I know you're saying it jokingly, but what you realize is that...
00:22:23.000When you're grounded – I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody who – James Lindsay actually.
00:22:28.000He was joking around that the opposite – but it's kind of true.
00:22:32.000He's like the opposite of woke is based but not like in the internet meme sense of the word but actually that you're based in something.
00:22:43.000I think when you have a sense of grounding, a lot of those alleged problems that you wanted to otherwise go out and solve – For your own sense of purpose that you were missing, when you actually have that sense of purpose fulfilled by something real, by something true, it's amazing how those problems themselves, many of them disappear because they were actually artificial.
00:24:06.000The harder part is that trick only works if you have a populace that's willing to say yes to the answer that Ronald Reagan posed, the nine scariest words, right?
00:24:20.000Someone wants to propagate ESG or stakeholder capitalism or woke capitalism or whatever.
00:24:24.000It only works really if there's a populace, a consumer base willing to buy up what they're selling.
00:24:30.000What is it within each of us that makes us want to bend the knee?
00:24:34.000That is that vacuum, that black hole that we need to fill.
00:24:42.000I think that related to a little bit of our exchange – our text exchange the other night that prompted me to want to have this conversation with you not just via text but in person or the next best thing.
00:24:57.000I think that that's part of what we're missing in our conservative movement and the Republican Party is a sense of leadership, a leader who can actually – I think a career politician is unlikely to do it,
00:25:15.000which brings us back to the issue of the Trump indictment and the Republican response to it, or in some cases, the absence thereof, that made me for a long time I really mean this.
00:25:50.000But the reason that I was called into this is I... Wanted to believe that someone like Ron DeSantis was up to this challenge, right?
00:25:58.000Was going to be the guy who helped lead us the way into filling that vacuum of purpose and showing us a better way forward.
00:26:07.000That does require courage, and my definition of courage is somebody who not only has convictions, but is willing to make sacrifices to act on those convictions.
00:26:19.000And that's what left me disappointed these last few days, this last week, when we saw the news of a potential pending indictment of a former president of the United States.
00:26:32.000I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican.
00:26:34.000I don't care if you're black or white.
00:26:36.000I don't care if you're running against him in this primary, as I am, as Ron DeSantis presumably is, or not.
00:26:43.000This is a moment for those first principles, those principles that unite us as Americans.
00:26:50.000And the fact that we had a professional politician class in our Republican Party that had so much trouble just coming out and stating something that is true, that most Americans hunger for, that our Republican base hungers for, is something that disappointed me.
00:27:08.000And I think that it's something that gives me even a greater sense of It's sort of that moment for the Republican Party, too.
00:27:32.000So, OK, so first off, I definitely want to address the specific reason I had texted you last week, which is a little bit of an offshoot on that.
00:27:39.000It's not on the Trump thing specifically.
00:27:41.000But let me address what you're talking about here, because I think we do have a difference of opinion.
00:28:22.000So do I. As a person and as a governor, I love him.
00:28:25.000Well, look, I always tell people, it's funny, like, I don't pretend to be a journalist.
00:28:29.000I tell people what I think, and you can agree or disagree or watch or not watch, but that's very different than, say, virtually everyone on CNN or MSNBC that's pretending they have no opinions as they sneak their opinions in the back door.
00:28:43.000So I don't pretend that I don't like the guy or he wasn't.
00:28:46.000One of the major reasons that I moved not only myself But two companies to Florida and a series of people that are in this room right now and that my life is unbelievably better because of his policies here.
00:29:00.000So I'm just putting that out there like I'm not hiding anything, obviously.
00:29:06.000What I would say on this is, Trump makes this statement, and what Trump is very good at, obviously, is getting everyone to always react to everything in the craziest possible way.
00:29:17.000There was no corroboration at that point.
00:29:19.000There hadn't been a leak from the DA's office saying this is what's going to happen on Tuesday, etc., etc., I didn't have a problem with waiting out the weekend when the news cycle is a little bit slow.
00:29:29.000And then, again, quite literally, first press conference Monday morning, he addressed it.
00:29:35.000And you also have to remember, not only did he say that this is an absolute abuse of power and it's a Soros funded DA, DeSantis fired a Soros funded DA in Tampa.
00:29:44.000He's in a legal battle about it right now.
00:29:47.000So it's not as if he has just sat on this thing.
00:29:50.000Now, I saw all the Twitter people and yes, the Twitter people say he's backing off and where was he all weekend?
00:29:56.000The thing is, and I think you'll find this more, and maybe this will get us to the issue that I texted you about, the higher your profile gets, you are not going to want to respond to every single thing Trump does in Trump time.
00:30:09.000That is a tactic of Trump to get the machine to always be in Trump orbit.
00:30:15.000And I think actually what's happening right now is that the Trump energy, which now has been re-energized by this thing, it's gotten a boost from this thing.
00:30:23.000I actually think it's DeSantis energy, believe it or not, because if you see what's happened over the last three days is a DA supposedly announces this thing or it leaks.
00:30:34.000So Trump gets it on Friday and then Team Trump for three days is attacking DeSantis.
00:30:40.000That tells you that their real focus is DeSantis, not even this case.
00:30:45.000So I think we're 100 percent agreed on the abuse by the DA and that this should be called I think DeSantis did it.
00:31:20.000So I don't think we have a major divergence there, but I don't see it as a lack of leadership at all, actually.
00:31:25.000See, you know, I just see it a little bit differently, David.
00:31:28.000I'm not looking at this from like, I mean, believe me, I'm running to win the presidency against Donald Trump and presumably if Ron DeSantis enters this race against Ron DeSantis and others, too.
00:31:39.000I'm looking at this from a bigger picture of first principles here, right?
00:31:44.000I mean, the New York Times and others were also reporting about a likely indictment early next week.
00:32:08.000I think the Republican Party obsesses about the question of the who without asking the question of the what and the why, which is actually if we go in the order of ask the what and the why first, then the question of the who becomes a lot easier.
00:32:47.000It's the same reason I actually reacted to the Silicon Valley bailout news before it actually broke out.
00:32:54.000I wrote on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
00:32:56.000I negotiated with them and said, look, they ran it online before the bailout announcement was announced because we have these rare windows when there's something really important to actually do whatever small part we can play to shape a really bad outcome away from happening.
00:33:20.000He's an incredibly accomplished governor.
00:33:23.000He's a relevant – to say the least, a highly relevant figure in this presidential race, and we just live in an important moment that just as I'm going to be in this podcast and in this campaign, totally unfiltered about where I am on policy, where I am on questions of culture, including untouchable issues with the left.
00:33:41.000I'm not going to wear kid gloves and not touch certain issues on how I feel even about the people in this race.
00:33:47.000I'm just going to be very candid about it.
00:33:49.000So today we happen to be talking about that.
00:33:54.000The time to actually speak out is when you can play a small role in preventing a bad thing from happening.
00:34:01.000Those of us who are in this race running against Donald Trump and, you know, let's just put the artifice of DeSantis running or not to one side.
00:34:11.000So Joe Biden to Ron DeSantis to myself, you're in a unique position to have credibility to say, yes, it will be almost certainly more politically convenient for everyone if Donald Trump were not in this race.
00:34:25.000But that gives you added standing, moral standing, ethical standing, credibility, personal standing.
00:34:34.000to nonetheless make a statement on principle to say that we are not a nation that should indict its political opposition.
00:34:51.000Think about the professional politician.
00:34:53.000This is just true about a professional politician is it's one thing where the shortest distance between two lines, between two points is in math class, you say a line in the real world.
00:35:04.000It's between a professional politician and a press conference.
00:35:07.000And Ron DeSantis fits that description pretty well on many national issues.
00:35:10.000OK, willing to take Florida money, your money to fly migrants from from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, which you could say has a nexus to Florida.
00:35:29.000I mean we don't want to leave the immigrant series.
00:35:30.000One of the governors doing something about it.
00:35:31.000But I think it would also be wildly popular to take potentially – or not, but at least to take a stand on a range of national issues, so be it.
00:36:17.000I don't buy this model of running it through a poll-tested, consultant-tested, donor-class-approved message where – But do you know that he did that?
00:36:27.000Well, of course he did, though, right?
00:36:29.000But you don't know that he did that, right?
00:36:31.000Well, here's what I'll tell you my experience.
00:37:17.000It's, you know, as you said, it's a post on social media.
00:37:19.000But, you know, there's other media outlets that presumably have some standard to at least verify a possibility saying that this could be coming next week.
00:37:27.000We're waiting for it as we speak today.
00:37:29.000What should – what do we actually care about?
00:37:35.000I don't want to see a former president of the United States who's a lead candidate in this race indicted because that leads us to a national divorce.
00:37:43.000That leads to a generation of a loss of public trust.
00:37:46.000And we have an opportunity to shape that outcome with credibility.
00:37:50.000Why wouldn't we be the ones, even if it's by a little bit, but with credibility to call, what did I do?
00:37:55.000I called on the Manhattan DA to abandon this politicized prosecution.
00:38:00.000I think the fact that not only that it took two days, but even when he says it, what do you say?
00:38:07.000We all know it's a popular thing amongst the Republican base to beat up on George Soros.
00:38:11.000But just to say explicitly that it would be wrong for Donald Trump to be arrested over a crime that actually would at most be a misdemeanor if it were ever charged at all.
00:38:38.000Well, David Sachs, who was one of the big proponents who I debated openly on this issue with gloves off, I think it was – I don't know what your perspective is on this, on the substance of it.
00:38:48.000Well, on a personal note, I like both of you guys.
00:38:50.000I've had you both on the show many times, but I've broken bread with both of you guys.
00:38:53.000It got, unfortunately, a little nasty at times, but everybody's...
00:38:57.000We have strong disagreements on this, especially when money's on the line.
00:39:00.000One funny thing about the Silicon Valley bailout situation is there's not one person who...
00:39:06.000I've heard publicly for that bailout of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem that did not have some personal vested interest in seeing it bailed out, whereas other financiers from Ken Griffin to Cliff Asnes and others, who also know a thing or two as well about banking instability in our system, who didn't have that exposure were against it.
00:39:26.000So it's amazing what self-interest does to people's perspectives.
00:39:29.000But the point I was going to make is, Ron DeSantis was pin drop silent about it.
00:39:34.000This is a guy who will speak about a national issue in a heartbeat if he needs to.
00:39:39.000Didn't say a thing about it in a notable act of silence.
00:39:44.000David Sachs hosting big fundraisers for Ron DeSantis.
00:39:46.000And so I just think that it's not about Ron DeSantis.
00:39:49.000It's about the professional politician class, where if we live in a moment that calls for leadership, calls for courage, making sacrifices to advance your personal convictions.
00:40:01.000That's what we need in the presidency.
00:40:04.000Maybe not what you need in the Senate.
00:40:05.000There you need people who work together within the system, are willing to participate in the sausage-making process.
00:40:11.000But in the White House, I think you need somebody who's actually willing to carry out their convictions even if it comes at some great political cost.
00:40:21.000And I will say that the silence of the professional political class – I won't even pick on Ron DeSantis here.
00:40:27.000He just happens to be the best of them and the leader among them.
00:40:32.000From Silicon Valley bailout to very carefully tiptoeing in 48-hour timelines around making sure that we're saying the poll-tested popular stuff by decrying – saying the magic words like Soros that you're supposed to say without just authentically coming out and saying that the 45th president of the United States obviously on these facts should not be indicted I think is an indictment of the absence of courage in the professional political class in the Republican Party,
00:41:16.000So first, let me give you the – Positive part on what you're saying, which is this is exactly why when I heard that you were running for president, which I heard sort of a few days before it was official, I was thrilled.
00:41:26.000And why I think when you get on the stage, that's going to really be where you shine.
00:41:31.000And regardless of where this ends, you are going to have a moment that will help shape things going forward.
00:41:37.000And I think that will be spectacularly good.
00:41:41.000You know, one of the lines that Peter Thiel always uses is that we have an evil party and a stupid party.
00:41:47.000The evil party is the Democrats and the Republicans are the stupid party.
00:41:50.000And I think what we're going to see, and then I'll get to the specifics of what you're talking about.
00:41:55.000I think what we're going to see on the debate stage, look, if you take Trump, DeSantis, you, Nikki, let's say Pompeo, and I don't know, you want to give me one more who might jump in, let's say Tim Scott, I don't know, somebody like that is a pretty solid set of people who are qualified, who have different, somebody like that is a pretty solid set of people who are qualified, who have different, interesting, divergent points of view, who I think can explain why they believe what they believe
00:42:20.000Think how profoundly different that is than what we saw just a couple years ago in the Democrat primary.
00:42:27.000Where you had a bunch of, I would say, radically far-left people basically trying to out-left each other, and then you end up with the guy who is like the most machine, you know, career politician, I would also argue mentally compromised, everything else.
00:42:41.000So let me, I just want to put that out there because that's the purpose of having a conversation like this, is that you are making a distinction between, at least in your view, a distinction between yourself and, let's say, the professional class.
00:42:55.000On the DeSantis thing specifically, you know, it's one thing to say it's easy to fight the woke now because it's become a little trendier now.
00:43:03.000But the guy's been doing it to the backdrop of COVID for two years at a state level like nobody else.
00:44:00.000And then you start forgetting about why things are working.
00:44:03.000So I think he does deserve a little more credit maybe than you're giving him on that.
00:44:06.000But maybe we should get that to the reason that I texted you, because I think that that'll show people a little bit of what's really going on under the hood here.
00:44:15.000So about a week or so ago, maybe it was 10 days ago, you were at a press conference.
00:44:20.000Do you know where you were at that point?
00:44:23.000You might have been in the press conference.
00:44:24.000I'm even trying to – you tell me which one it was and then I'll tell you where I was.
00:44:29.000Well, I know you had a bunch of cameras in front of you and they were asking a question about who you would talk to in media.
00:44:36.000And basically you said, you know, some candidates won't talk to certain media outlets, but I believe in more conversation and we should talk to everybody and everything else.
00:44:48.000And to me, that was obviously you were going after DeSantis because he no longer is talking to NBC because of how they've been treating him.
00:44:55.000Now, on the first principles, because I know you like the first principles thing, on the first principles part, I completely agree with you.
00:45:10.000Now, the reason I texted you about that, and I purposely wasn't doing it on Twitter, it was just, it was, and I think I even said to you in the text, this is unsolicited advice.
00:45:21.000The reason I texted you was because, you know, NBC over the last couple of months, they have, I mean, and we could do a version of this with the New York Times and Washington Post and everything else.
00:45:29.000They have lied so egregiously about virtually everything coming out of Florida, but DeSantis related, don't say gay, all of the ESG stuff, all of the gender stuff, the race stuff, African-American studies.
00:45:43.000That was the one that caused the question that you gave the response to that.
00:45:49.000Eventually, Andrea Mitchell was interviewing Kamala Harris and said, said to her, I can almost do it verbatim.
00:45:56.000What do you think Ron DeSantis wasn't, doesn't want American people to know about slavery and the aftermath of slavery?
00:46:09.000That DeSantis' campaign basically put out a statement and they said, look, until you guys apologize and retract, we're not talking to you anymore.
00:46:16.000And what I said to you, and then I'll stop.
00:46:18.000What I said to you was, I think what's going to happen here is it's somewhat easy for you to say, let's talk to everybody.
00:46:24.000But once you've been in the machine and when you get that spotlight, which is coming for you, it absolutely is for all the right reasons, Vivek, because you're going to get more momentum.
00:46:35.000Once you realize, man, they are lying about everything related to my family and my history and my opinions and my actions and my businesses, you might at some point pull a DeSantis and go, you know what?
00:46:48.000I will no longer talk to those people.
00:47:04.000And what I was trying to say to you was, you may like what it's doing to him at the moment, sort of optically, but when it turns on you, You might have a slightly different feeling.
00:47:16.000So I was really sending that purely as a friend and as someone that wants you to succeed in this.
00:47:35.000And I think at a certain point, you got to Pass the torch on, because there's no way that you want to drain the swamp.
00:47:42.000I'm sure it will drain part of you, too.
00:47:44.000That's on the administrative reform side of this.
00:47:46.000And so, you know what am I going to be?
00:47:48.000Probably, if I have a lot less hair, more of them are gray.
00:47:51.000I'm jaded, cynical, and given into the system eight years into a presidency.
00:47:56.000Time to get off, drop the mic, and pass it on to somebody else.
00:47:59.000And we have a system that's built on that principle for good reasons.
00:48:03.000So, Am I going to say exactly everything the same way 8 years from now or 10 years from now than I do today or even 4 years from now or even 2 years from now or even 18 months from now as I do today?
00:48:16.000That doesn't mean that I'll be more right then than I am today.
00:48:19.000I think that there's something to be said where when I say you need an outsider, that doesn't mean that It is me because I'm different.
00:48:28.000It's because you – every person is different when they're an outsider relative to when they've become somewhere between cynical and captured, and it's probably a combination of the two.
00:48:36.000It seems to be what politics does to you.
00:48:38.000Good title for a book, Between Cynical and Captured.
00:48:40.000That's exactly – I mean I'm just off the cuff here, but that's exactly what I see is this partisan political game doing to people.
00:48:47.000The donor class is a big part of this.
00:48:50.000I've never had this type of open conversation about Desantis in particular.
00:48:57.000I think it's kind of important, though.
00:48:58.000I really do ordinarily just focus on the what and the why in terms of policy.
00:49:03.000But this is important because I just think it is important for understanding openly, putting on the table how I feel.
00:49:08.000If I had squinted through my eyes and really saw what I wanted to see there last year, I wouldn't be in this race.
00:49:14.000But I actually do respectfully disagree with you, Dave, on a couple of things there.
00:49:19.000I do think that fear has something to do with it.
00:49:21.000I think that even you use the ESG and the BlackRock examples, we can sort of We can get into the details on this because I think they matter.
00:49:27.000The distinction between doing what is truly the right thing versus what appears to be popular, it's everything when determining whether you actually are putting somebody in the White House who's going to sit across the table from Xi Jinping and have to make tradeoffs and sacrifices.
00:49:44.000I mean, one of the things I've said is I want to declare independence from China.
00:49:47.000Sounds good as a slogan, but I also say, you know what?
00:50:02.000You're going to need somebody who is able to get to the truth rather than just doing the easy thing that allows them to trend on Twitter for a cycle.
00:50:18.000Better than anybody else that I would think of on the COVID response, okay?
00:50:24.000But since you brought it up on the ESG thing, Look, I mean, I don't want to bore people and get into specifics here, but it's the same pattern.
00:50:33.000The treasurer of the state ceremoniously pulls out $700 million some odd dollars out of BlackRock.
00:50:40.000That generates a great set of headlines and news cycles, but Florida wasn't the first to do this.
00:50:45.000They were like the fifth state, maybe the sixth or seventh or eighth state to do this.
00:50:50.000And I disagree with you on taking on the woke stuff.
00:50:52.000I mean, I... I know when it was unpopular to take on the woke stuff back in 2020, when I embarked on my journey writing Woke Inc and beginning to write in the Wall Street Journal, you know, Ron DeSantis came to that after it was – and I'm giving him full credit.
00:51:04.000But when the tides are already changing, but on the ESG thing, it's kind of a pattern I just want to point out here.
00:51:10.000Being the fifth or sixth or seventh person to then pull funds out of the treasury, which are like cash and cash-like securities.
00:51:17.000Great, $700 million sounds like a big number.
00:51:20.000Drop in the bucket when it comes to Florida's system.
00:51:23.000But then when it comes to actually pulling out the big dollars from the equity portfolios, behind closed doors, backroom deal, what they called a truce, left $13 billion with BlackRock anyway because the headlines had already captured the easy thing to do, which is a treasurer left $13 billion with BlackRock anyway because the headlines had already captured the Now, I could go into details on that, and that's specific, and I'm not trying to –
00:51:48.000You know, play gotcha on that one thing, but I am pointing out a professional politician pattern.
00:52:03.000I don't disagree with that characterization, but a big part of the reason why is the stupid party, if you will, is beholden to just getting the serotonin surge and the political points out of a short-term hit created by the artifact of modern social media culture to say the things that you're supposed to say.
00:53:48.000But if you if that's something that's going to cause you to say that I'm not going to talk to NBC News, which is, you know, still reaching half the country that I want to govern.
00:53:56.000I'm not sure that you're the right person to sit across the table from Xi Jinping, who's going to be breaking a lot worse.
00:54:37.000At this point, if you were to read the New York Times about any article about a Republican, if you just put the word not in front of every statement or you reversed every statement, it would be closer to the truth than what the articles are saying.
00:54:51.000And you wouldn't even have to do that just for Republicans.
00:54:53.000You could do a reverse version of that for Democrats.
00:54:56.000The corporate press is so in bed with the Democrat machine or whatever that thing is, that at some point, you can either just go back as an abused wife and just say, hit me again, hit me again, hit me again, I'll try to be better.
00:55:11.000You can try your different tactics again.
00:55:13.000You can make sure you record it on your side and all of that stuff.
00:55:31.000If I'm too close, let's say, for that, I mean, obviously I'm going to sit down with all of you guys in person.
00:55:37.000We already did our in-person last week with Nikki.
00:55:39.000I want to do in-person, one hour, unedited with everyone.
00:55:43.000But if I'm thought of as too close, then do three hours with Rogan and get around the system.
00:55:48.000The thing is, that's like, you know, to say you have to go to NBC or you have to go to the New York Times or something like that, which I know that's not exactly what you're saying.
00:55:55.000I know what I'm saying exactly, but yeah.
00:55:56.000But you're saying you have to play a little bit in that.
00:55:59.000To me, that's like saying, oh, there's a dinosaur jumping.
00:56:02.000Well, it's sort of like saying there's a dinosaur sinking in the tar pits.
00:56:43.000The thing is, the guy is also running a state.
00:56:45.000I think once you're in there doing all these things, you're just going to have priorities doing things.
00:56:51.000You know, when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago for the book, I said, you know, we did a lot of the reasons that Florida's great, but I said, Governor, I have to ask you something that's gonna be more challenging here.
00:57:01.000So I said, as a new Floridian, one of the things that I hear all the time is that house prices are just insane here.
00:57:07.000Now, on one hand, it's a product of success.
00:57:09.000If you get, we literally have 1,200 people moving here a day, almost a million people in three years.
00:57:14.000So eventually, you're gonna have a housing problem.
00:58:23.000I think that for a governor, for a congressman, For a U.S. Senator, for a state legislator, for an attorney general, for a state attorney general, for a state treasurer, for a lieutenant governor, he gets A marks, you know, maybe even A plus marks, okay?
00:58:43.000But going back to the topic you and I were talking about, which goes beyond a person here, we're in the middle of a national identity crisis.
00:58:51.000We have not just the problem of big government, but a hybrid of big government, big business, cultural forces, and education that together do what neither can on its own.
00:59:00.000But we have not only that hybrid, we have a deeper problem in our soul.
00:59:04.000We look inside and we see a black hole of a vacuum to half the populations, including the ones who do watch NBC News, who bow to religions that they don't even recognize are religions, and we can't even call them religions because they're really cults.
00:59:16.000At least religions have withstood the test of time.
00:59:30.000But that's a different question from who we need leading a national revival.
00:59:36.000And to me, that is a different question than someone who's just an important foot soldier or even a general in this.
00:59:44.000We're not talking about the general, we're talking about the president.
00:59:46.000And I think that the person that we need, whoever it is, I'm running because I believe it's me, but I'm not making the case for me.
00:59:53.000I'm making a case for the country and part of the case for the outsider as the model of being the president is that you need somebody who takes all of those assumptions of the system, whatever they are, and they're really challenging.
01:00:06.000There's a lot of cogs in that wheel just to reject those assumptions full stop.
01:00:11.000I'll give you one example of those in the federal government.
01:00:14.000There's a reason why Republican presidents have not shut down government agencies.
01:00:19.000Because if you've grown up in the system, the thing they teach you, if you've been a congressman, you've been involved in passing some of these laws, is that there's a civil service protection.
01:00:30.000Congress renews civil service protections.
01:00:32.000So it's part of the standard laws in the budget that gets re-approved, appropriations that say that, okay, this is a constraint that Congress applies to the chief executive such that even if the American people elect someone to be the US president, the US president can appoint a new head of the FBI, can appoint a new head of the Department of Education the US president can appoint a new head of the FBI, can appoint a new head of the Department of Education who themselves will make whatever incremental changes they can, but
01:00:59.000And then we can get real boring on this stuff, but there's other laws which say that, you know … Yeah, I mean, exactly.
01:01:06.000But, you know, the nuts and bolts of it matter, right?
01:01:09.000There's these other laws called these impoundment prevention statutes that say that if Congress appropriates the money for a specific cause, the president has to actually spend it on that specific cause.
01:01:21.000Like, this stuff isn't – Viewed as controversial, it's just viewed as that's just how the system is played.
01:01:28.000If you want to bring a baseball, if you want to bring a sledgehammer to just wreck that system, you need one hand constitutional conviction, on the other hand, outsider conviction to actually do it.
01:01:40.000So I've had my stage in life as a constitutional scholar, law school, all that stuff.
01:01:44.000But as a guy who's built companies, I'll tell you, if somebody works for you, and you can't fire them, That means they don't work for you.
01:02:13.000Are you the guy who is going to buckle to the Silicon Valley fear-mongering to say, well, I don't know.
01:02:19.000Maybe there's actually some kind of reason why this particular set of tech companies needed to be bailed out because my donors are telling me so.
01:02:26.000I know I need to win the presidency, but Donald Trump has done a lot of stuff wrong and I'm not going to get involved in that.
01:02:33.000You know, the Soros DAs, but, you know, I'm not getting involved in that, even though I'm aspiring to be a national leader.
01:02:51.000I think that that's part of a pattern.
01:02:54.000Okay, I'm going to get a trend to get off BlackRock, take $700 million out, but okay, we'll do a deal for $13 billion.
01:02:59.000We got the news cycle out of pulling some small pittance out.
01:03:05.000Is that the person, it's not even wrong to say this, the class of person who understandably are operating within the constraints of a really difficult system?
01:03:15.000There's just almost like a law of physics here.
01:03:17.000That can't be the person that actually tears down the system because they are necessarily a product of it.
01:03:23.000It's a first principle where I'm making the case that for the presidency, the GOP has to be the party that, at least as its default norm, nominates the outsider, or else you're just going to get the same darn thing over and over again, the same old thing.
01:03:38.000You got it, and you know whose fault it is.
01:03:40.000It's going to be our fault because that's the rules of the road and the hierarchy we set up.
01:03:44.000Okay, so let me just say, again, I disagree with some of your characterizations of what he's done, but we don't have to just bludgeon that point.
01:03:53.000To your point about what the Republicans should have going forward is this tear-it-down thing.
01:04:00.000That, in some ways, has been what the Trump energy has been, right?
01:04:19.000But I'm not sitting here as a surrogate or anything like that.
01:04:23.000So I think let's just move off that for a second.
01:04:25.000But I think you just probably explained, and maybe you didn't even realize you were fully explaining it, I think you maybe just explained the best argument for your own candidacy, which probably has more to do with going after Trump in a way, because...
01:04:38.000Your argument, in some ways, is the exact same thing as Trump.
01:04:41.000All of the FBI, the CIA, the deep state, this never-ending, always-growing monster that we're all frustrated with must be crushed at the knees.
01:04:52.000Now, I don't know that all conservatives want that, by the way.
01:04:56.000I think a lot of people look at America and they go, boy, we're pretty damn screwy.
01:04:59.000There's a lot wrong here, but we're still the best country in the world.
01:05:02.000And if we burn it all down, you know, it's not like you get freaking Shangri-La the next day.
01:05:06.000We might have a massive 20-year pain point to deal with and chaos and all sorts of stuff.
01:05:12.000And God only knows what the system would do against the guy that really could do it.
01:05:16.000But I think you might have just explained your greatest sort of way to get Trump, which is, OK, I actually agree with Trump on these big issues.
01:06:47.000I mean, just to bring people inside a little bit too, it's like one of the things that annoys the hell out of me right now is the, even the donor conversations that I need to have, right?
01:06:59.000So I've, I just cut an eight-figure cash check to seed the campaign with.
01:08:24.000But if that's what it actually takes to get elected, and then I've done that and I'm in that system for four years, I'm not an outsider anymore.
01:08:55.000You have to shut it down and build something new to take its place.
01:08:58.000But there's no way somebody who's been an insider, even four years in the presidency, even certainly a career as a career politician is going to do that because it's just the thing you're not supposed to do.
01:09:09.000I would say that that might I don't know exactly how true that is, because if you have a good track record of running, you know, that's why also we should probably mostly if you're going to choose a politician to be president, they should more so be governors than senators, because you have a chief executive of quite literally a piece of land and an organization.
01:09:29.000So so there is more expertise done there.
01:09:37.000Your frustrations with DeSantis would be, okay, you've done a lot of good stuff, I can see that, but you exist within a system.
01:09:45.000And I don't know that everyone's going to get on board the okay Vivek will burn down the system and that makes DeSantis bad because he did all of the things we wanted to do.
01:09:58.000But what could possibly win, or not even win, just get a certain amount of energy in your direction, is it's a lot easier for you to be on stage with the three of them and turn to Trump and be like, listen, man, I agree with a lot of your stuff, which, by the way, DeSantis is going to have to do, It's not like they have massive policy differences, right?
01:10:17.000So you're going to be able to look at him and say, hey, I agree with all of this stuff.
01:10:38.000Well, but I do think there is some sort of risk in the just, we must burn it down thing.
01:10:44.000Because even remember this, remember when the Democrats had their primary and Bernie was basically burn it all down.
01:10:50.000That was his main thing, burn it all down.
01:10:52.000And Pete, remember when Pete on stage said to him, you want to burn it all down?
01:10:56.000And he kind of just stood there like...
01:10:58.000The thing is, the Democrats are much more as a party willing to burn it all down.
01:11:03.000There now is a hatred of America within that.
01:11:05.000They don't view this experiment as positive.
01:11:07.000It's very different for the Republicans.
01:11:09.000We might all be frustrated, and I think virtually all of us are.
01:11:13.000And by the way, when I say we as Republicans, I've never been a Republican my entire life until I moved to Florida.
01:11:18.000So, you know, I guess I say that with some sense of irony.
01:11:22.000But as a general rule, conservative-leaning people or libertarian-leaning people or the independents who really I think will be attracted to you, they don't want to burn it down.
01:11:33.000They want some measured destruction appropriately.
01:11:37.000I think DeSantis, in effect, is doing that.
01:11:40.000I think your place in that, I think, remains to be seen, basically.
01:12:37.000I think That however dirty this is all going to get and nasty and really the horrible things that are going to be said about you and your family and they'll go after your parents and all of that stuff.
01:12:48.000I think there's a way for some set of us to be a little bit above that.
01:12:54.000It's going to be deeply hard for you as the candidate.
01:12:57.000It's going to be deeply hard for me as a guy that talks about this stuff.
01:13:01.000It's going to be hard for the average person who maybe was a Trump voter last time, but maybe is tired of it this time and is looking towards you or towards DeSantis.
01:13:12.000But I think the worst outcome of all of this is what the is what big tech will push on us It's what the corporate media will push on us, which is let's just, and I don't mean destroy the whole thing the way you described it before, but I mean just like let's scorch earth everybody to the point that we end up with Biden again, with the powers of ESG being furthered, with all of the woke stuff coming more, you know, just being pushed further towards us.