Political Mastermind: How to Influence Others and Get What You Want - Karl Rove

I want the American dream. So what does that mean? You can dream big?

Is this the worst time to be in American politics?

No. Don't tell me that we're screwed up today. We've been screwed up before.

You know, watching the debate was fascinating.

That's one way of putting it. Who can win?

You're not supposed to talk about it, but everybody does it.

Where are the things where they're most at odds with public opinion? And go at the thing that they think is their strength. Strong and wrong means weak and right. Strong is what we look for in a leader, particularly as president of the United States.

Did you watch Vice ever?

I'm taller than Cheney. I am taller than Cheney in every single instance. The actor playing me is shorter than the guy playing Chaney.

Let me introduce you to the architect, often called the mastermind behind the Republican Party. An expert in persuasion, influence, and how power truly works in this country. And for you. So today I'm honored to bring former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, senior advisor to George W. As well as consultant to presidents, governors, senators, Sir Karl Rove, President. Gonna talk about how to speak so that people actually listen. What is actually going on in politics today. How to sell anything. Get what you want and the science from learning from the most powerful people in the world over the last decades. Subscribe like ring the Bell on YouTube. I wanna make sure that we get in your ear every single week, not all that other noise out there. Thanks for being here. I love this podcast because I love talking to friends about how they made their millions and helping business owners solve their problems. It's fulfilling. I love sharing all the secrets. But when I can't meet in person, there's only one tool I use. It's called Riverside. Riverside ensures I can talk to someone anywhere in the world. Recorded in 4k so the quality of the video matches the quality of the humans. You're listening to Riverside records separate audio and video tracks so we can easily cut out those awkward interruptions that are my least favorite part of interviews. They have in platform editing software based off a 99% accurate AI transcription. And if that's not simple enough, they take AI one step further for their show notes. It summarizes your entire content into an SEO optimized description and chapters all automatic. Saves me a ton of money. So you can use Riverside for pun. Podcast, interviews, panel discussions, presentations, webinars, more and best of all, it's simple. Try Riverside for yourself with link in the description. Use code Cody for an exclusive discount. I get A deal. You get a deal. I want to start with maybe something that everybody's thinking today, which is this is the worst time to be alive in American politics. The country's falling apart and we're barely going to make it without some sort of insurrection or civil war.

Right.

You are a noted historian. If people don't know that. And you would probably quarrel with the word historian.

But you've written, I'm a historian, but I'm not noted. Let me put it that way.

You know, and I think it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on. Is this the worst time to be in American politics?

No, it's not. It's bad. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's cheery and wonderful, but even in the lifetimes of people who are around today like me, it's been worse. You know, the 60s and 70s were terrible. We were deeply divided as a country over the issue of race. We have a bigot running for president in 1968 who wins five states. And in 1972, he runs for the Democratic nomination and runs 1.8% behind the ultimate winner, Eugene George McGovern, in the popular vote. We have the peaceful protests, mostly peaceful protests of the 1950s give way and the 1960s to violence begins in 1964 and, excuse me, 1963 with the major riots in big cities. Harlem. 1964 and 65, more riots, including Watts. Seven days. The center of our great American city is burning. In 1967 is called the long hot summer. 100 over 140American cities are racked with huge protests over race. April of 1968, Martin Luther King is assassinated. Gunned down in front of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. And over 140American cities burst into flames within a matter of hours. And 47Americans die. And we have political violence. November 1963, the president of the United States is assassinated in Dallas. April of 68, Martin Luther King has gone down. Six weeks later, Robert Kennedy Sr. Is gunned down in a hotel in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic primary in California. You know, 1975, squeaky fromm is a matter of four or five feet away from Gerald Ford, pulls out the pistol and pulls the trigger and the gun misfires. Otherwise he would have been dead. And In March of 1981, the President of the United States, newly inaugurated president, is shot in front of the Capitol Hilton. Ronald Reagan nearly dies. We are also deeply divided over a war, an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Campus protests began in 1965. 35,000 people attempt to storm the Pentagon in 1967 to shut down the war. 10,000 people gather in Grant park in Chicago in the summer of 68 in an attempt to shut down the Democratic convention. I'm a young kid as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention, 1972 and Miami Beach. And in the midst of tens of thousands of protesters, the President of the United States cannot be motorcaded into the convention center to receive the nomination of his party. He has to be helicoptered in because the access to the convention center is blocked. By 1970, it's routine for campuses to erupt and for governors to call out the national guard. And in 1970, the governor of Ohio does so. And kids die at Kent State University. And within a matter of hours, 300American campuses are shut down by an estimated 3 million student protesters. And many of them don't open up again that spring for the balance of the year. We have, you know, we have the country, you know, two presidents are forced from office. One over an unpopular war in Southeast Asia, the other one over a, you know, second rate burglary at the Pentagon. And our politics looks broken. And in 1976, in desperation, we turn to an untested guy. Seemed like a good Christian man, Southern, moderate Democrat named Jimmy Carter becomes president. He'll restore dignity and honor to the White House. But he turns out to be weak. He's a good man, but weak. And we have double digit inflation, double digit interest rates, and double digit unemployment. We coin a new term called stagflation. The Russians are on the move. They're moving in Afghanistan, they're moving in Europe. It looks like America is on the downward slope and we're desperate. As a country, we look broken. And we have one debate in the 1980 election. And Jimmy Carter makes the ultimate mistake in the debate of saying that he talked to his 14 year old about nuclear disarmament. And this guy was supposed to be way too conservative. Keeps talking about how he was the governor of the most populous state in the union. And California had a different reputation then. And he asked the right questions. Are you better off today than you were four years ago? And is a country more respected today than it was four years ago? And we take a chance and American politics heals. But 1930s, our country is deeply divided. One out of every four Americans is out of work. We have populists on the left and the right. On the left it is Huey Long. Every man a king, he screams, take from thems that got to give thems that don't. And on the right we have father Coughlin broadcasting 50,000 watts every night from Detroit. All across the country, it's the Jews that have created this economic disaster. One of the leading movements in the country is the America first isolationist movement that says we don't need to worry about what's going on in Europe and in Asia. It's none of our business. We're protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific. We do not need to come to the aid of those that are standing up to Adolf Hitler or to Tojo. We need to just stay focused here at home. And it's led by one of the most popular figures of the time, the aviator Charles Lindbergh. And we come this close. We come this close to not being prepared for what ultimately comes to our doorstep on December 7th of 1941. And we have a million people marching through the streets of New York City in a parade supporting the Communist Party of the United States of America. We have a rally at Madison Square Gardens packed to the rafters for the German Bund heralding Adolf Hitler. Broken the Gilded Age. It's worse. You think it's bad today? Go back to the Gilded age, where for 25 years, we have divided government. We have five presidential elections in a row. Nobody gets 50% of the vote. Nobody. Two of the elections, the winner wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote. In three elections, the difference between the winner and the loser is less than 1%. And we are divided because what happens is we're fighting the Civil War again only in the halls of Congress. When the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in 1874 for the first time in 18 years, they do so by flipping 96 Republican seats and making them Democrats. And 56 of those Democrats are former Confederate generals and officials, including the vice President of the Confederacy is now sitting in the House of Representatives, representing Georgia. And they fight the Civil War all over again and do nothing for 25 years because they hate each other's guts. And we have an election in 1876. Remember the 20 days from hell in 2000, where we have 20 days during which we don't really know who the president is because we've had an election in November. But before December 6th, there's a controversy over the electoral votes of Florida. In 1876. The winner on election night, 250,000 votes up, is the Democrat governor of New York. But surprisingly, the Democrats claim to have won the votes of South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. Now, what's strange about that, because a majority of the eligible voters are black men who are overwhelmingly Republican. So how could the Democrat win those three states that have a black majority, overwhelmingly Republican? It was by fraud, intimidation and murder. And so the US Congress says there's a controversy over who the electors are from these three states. The election depends on that. They say under the Constitution, we're supposed to take up this issue, but we're going to appoint a special commission of judges to adjudicate who won the votes of those states. On March 2nd of 1877, that commission unanimously awards the votes of those three states to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, who becomes President of the United States by a vote of 185 to 184 in the electoral College and is sworn in as president two days later on the constitutionally mandated date of March 4. Politics is screwed up today. Go back then when these men hated each other. They hated each other. We remember the years leading into the Civil war. You know, 1856, you, maybe when the first time you took a history course. There's the little woodcut of Sumner, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts being caned by Preston Brooks, the Democrat. We all see that little one. It didn't. It wasn't. That's 1856. It's not four years, it's 30 years. There's a brilliant book by a woman named Joanne Freeman, a terrific historian called Field of Blood. And what she. The point she makes is, for 30 years after the election of 1824, it becomes routine for members of Congress to show up on the floor of the House of Representatives armed to the teeth because they hate each other and they're fighting over issues not just the enslavement of 4 million of our fellow Americans, but also in 1838, a Democrat from Kentucky kills a Whig from Maine, or maybe it's a Whig from Kentucky kills a Democrat from Maine in a duel where the argument is banking regulation. So, you know, the election of 1800 ends in a time the Electoral College, not between the winner Thomas Jefferson and his opponent, John Adams, but between Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. Because back then, you cast two votes. The guy got the most votes became President. Number two became Vice President. Aaron Burr is supposed to tell some of his fellow New Yorkers, be sure and throw your vote away so that Tommy Jay becomes President. But no, no. In December of 1800, when the Electoral College meets, it's a tie. It goes to the House of Representatives. Remember, we had 15 votes to select Kevin McCarthy as speaker. There are 36 votes to select the President of the United States in 1801. And on the 36th ballot, Thomas Jefferson is elected president by the intervention of an unlikely figure, Alexander Hamilton, who has earlier written a letter to George Baird, a Federalist congressman from Delaware, the only member of Congress from Delaware, saying, I hate him. I hate them both. But at least Jefferson has concern for his character, for his reputation, whereas Aaron Burr is a man of extreme ambition and will be held responsible for all the mistakes he made. So take the lesser of two evils. Go for Jefferson. And on the 36th ballot, Baird takes a walk, convinces his Federalist colleagues from Maryland, South Carolina, and Vermont, who have deadlocked their delegation so it can't vote for either candidate, to take a walk. And on the 36th ballot, Thomas Jefferson is elected President, United States. So don't tell me that we're screwed up today. We've been screwed up before, but we've always found a way through it, and we'll find a way through it in this as well.

Interesting. Yeah. So I guess Twitter battle's not as bad as actual gunfights.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pulled in slightly less. Yeah. And remember, there is a price for everything. Four years after the 36 ballot, Aaron Burke kills Alexander Hamilton in a duel. So there are consequences.

Yeah. That would really up the ratings for Twitter if people murdered each other because of Twitter tweets. Do you think that we just forget history is this human nature where after a certain period of time, we can no longer emotionally relate to history or we actually don't know it? Why do we.

I think it's both. I think it's both. But it's normal. I mean, you know, we go through a period and then we enter another period, and, you know, it's the natural progression. People who've actually lived during these periods, you know, ultimately die. And so the knowledge of, you know, can you imagine somebody who was on a college campus in 1970 and saw kids killed at Kent State? Or somebody who lived in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 and remembers, you know, there are people, you know, older audiences, you can say, do you remember where you were in November 1963? And everybody remembers, but our memory slides as time passes.

Yeah. And now with the advent of information technology coming at us so quickly, you know, you can find yourself really worked up from events that you can't actually touch or see or feel.

Yeah. Well, that's another thing, though, that it's important to keep in context. We've been through that before as well.

Interesting.

Can you think about the moment in 1844 where information stopped traveling at three miles an hour and began traveling at the speed of light with the telegraph used to be that it took three, which is basically how fast a horse would walk from Boston to New Orleans. It would take three miles an hour to get that information. And now suddenly, with the advent of the telegraph, information, you know, that's Samuel Morris, the inventor was called the Lightning man, because suddenly you need information, travel. Imagine what it was like when we went from maybe 100 newspapers to several. To several. Hundreds of newspapers in the 1840s, and then thousands of newspapers by the 1870s with the invention of cheap printing presses for rotary presses for newspapers. At one point, there are 18 daily newspapers in the city of New York. Imagine how much information changes the collection of information with the adoption of the transatlantic cable. Now suddenly we know the world. Imagine what happens when radio comes along, what happens when television comes along. What happens when the Internet comes along. What happens when, you know, these little devices that we now carry around when this pops up. So we've been through this moment where increasing fragmentation of our sources of information, and particularly today with social media, I mean, we are slicing and dicing 330 million Americans into lots of different groups where we get our information in lots of different ways.

So what do you think about when people then say, this is the end of the American era? You know, the American dream is dead?

You know, you travel, I bet, and the American dream is real to people. I was in Abuja, Nigeria, and the cab driver says, where are you from? And I said, texas. He said, oh, America. He says, I want the American dream. I said, what does that mean? He said, you can dream big. I was in New York recently and got in a car. And when I travel, people don't have a sign that says Coral Rove, because sometimes they get abused. So it had the name of my agent on it. And so I got in the car and he said, you're the Bushman. You're the Bushman. And he said, I love Bush. And I said, well, tell me a little bit about you. He said, I was a peasant in Taiwan and I came here with nothing. And he said, I have a. I have two children. One is a. You know, I think a healthcare professional. One is some kind of a sophisticated Wall street type. And I said, you drive a car, you drive a. You drive a limo. He said, this is my second job. He says, I do this so that I can provide for my grandchildren's education. And he said, I love America. He said, I came here with nothing. He said, only in America. So, no, you bet against us, and you're putting you're going to. You're going to come up short.

I like that. Isn't it true that in parts of Africa, the Bush's first names are some of the most popular names for children? I heard that statistic. Is that true?

Well, I don't know if it's true, but I do know this. I was in, on that same trip in Nigeria. The guy came up and introduced himself to me and he said, I am a governor of the state in the Delta region of Africa. And he said, do you know what the most common birth names are for young men and young girls and boys and girls in my part of Nigeria? And I said, I have no idea whatsoever. He said, george and Laura, he said, tell America thank you for Pepfar, for saving our people, 25 million people alive today because of the generosity of the United States. And, you know, it was. George W. Bush was a vehicle to do that, but it was an expression of America. We did this after World War II. You know, we saved a continent that had been ravaged by war, and then with Pepfar, we were saving a continent that was ravaged by disease.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I was reading a statistic the other day that America has the highest level by like 23 percentage points on average of. I don't know if the right word was happiness, but let's say happiness or excitement for those who earn and win. Whereas in other countries, you know, there are a lot of people on our varying businesses that are immigrants, and they say one of the reasons that they come to America is not just that it's easier for you to win, for sure, but also that there's a culture of appreciation for the ability to earn and win.

Well, part of it is, I think, because in America, people, you know, in other countries it might be you become rich because you've got a lobbyist and a loophole and a buddy in government. Here it's, you know, you come up with a brilliant idea and work your ass off.

Yeah, that's right. Now, you have a fascinating background and have been, you know, at the epicenter of numerous presidential elections, gubernatorial elections, congressional elections. And there was this one story I found and I thought was so interesting that is relevant maybe for people today, because I think today in some ways we're a little softer speaking than we've been. We don't give as much feedback, and especially sometimes we don't speak truth to power in organizations. And I have this story about, in 1982, the governor of Texas Clements loses his reelection campaign, but then goes to win the next campaign.

1986. Yeah.

Do you have a photographic memory?

No.

I have wild recollection of stats.

It's an obsession. It's what my brain is wired weirdly interesting.

Yeah. I remember I was at your house for one of your political events, and somebody asked you something about some race at some time, and you just rattled off every single district and what the points were you won or lost by. Does your wife ever go, carl, please stop?

Yeah, she does. You're an idiot. She says, stop saying.

She's like, can we talk about the weather or something? Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so I found a strategy memo that you wrote to Clements on the eve of his election, and you basically gave really harsh feedback. Like, voters see he was arrogant. You know, among the politicos, there's a belief you won't listen, shoot from the hip, and can be mean and insensitive. And correlation is not causation. But it sounds like you helped him win. How do you get powerful people to listen to you saying the quiet part out loud?

Yeah. Well, that was a weird circumstance. Clements had. I've been close to clements in my 20s, he had made me his deputy chief of staff. And we had a great relationship. But he was a tough character. He never graduated from college, came from a wealthy family that went bust in the Depression, was forced to drop out of smu, goes to work as literally a roustabout in oil fields of South Texas.

What's a rouse about?

Well, he's a guy who literally is one of the common laborers on a drilling rig. On a rig. And which gave him an understanding of, you know, ordinary people. Because here's a guy from Highland Park, Texas, you know, tony suburb of Dallas, who suddenly, you know, his family's so broke, he's got to go help support the family by, you know, doing the hardest work. He. Some of the hardest work you could ever do. Anyway, he had. He had said. I went to him as the 1986 campaign approached, and several people were talking about running, and they were talking to me about helping them on their campaign. I went to see him and said, I'm not running. So then. So I threw in with another candidate and said to him, if Clements changes his mind and wants me to be involved, I gotta go. Because he literally set me in business. I was. When I started my company, he was my first client and another candidate. I agreed that was never going to happen. But if it did, you know, so be it. Well, I was on a company retreat at the little, you know, hippie place up in The Hill Country. And this was a pre cell phone. And the guy comes in and says, I got Governor Clements is on the line for you. And I have no idea to this day how he found me. But I go to him, he says, I'm going to run for governor, and I've declared this morning, and I want you to help me. And I was like, I didn't have a choice. But so I thought to myself, I better tell him what he's facing. I mean, it was like, you know, I'm not going to go along just for the ride. If he's in this and I'm stuck in it, I'm going to win. And the only way to do that is to be blunt. And so I told him what I thought needed to be done. And somebody sent me a copy of that memo. They were going through papers, Clements papers, and found it and sent me a copy of it. And I remembered it, but I did not remember. Clements had this habit of if he read something, he'd put a check mark and his initial C in the top right hand corner, and then he would put some check marks elsewhere where there were things that he agreed. And so he, you know, he took it. And not a lot of people in politics can take, you know, take it with a bark off. And my feeling is that people who tend to be successful, really successful in really hard politics have that ability. And he was one of them. And he was also had a terrific wife who understood politics. She'd been Republican National Committee woman, and she understood practical politics. And so I suspect that one of the reasons that the memo was effective was that it said things that she had already told him. And so I was reinforcing what Rita had said. And that helps carry the day.

Do you. So you think one of the keys to winning in politics or in general, is an ability to hear something really tough about yourself, internalize it and change it, and not make emotional pleas, Right?

And also behind that is something else, which is you have to create an environment in which people can consistently say, with all due respect, I disagree. And this was Clements. Clements was a tough guy, but he had the ability to listen. But really, I saw this really with George W. Bush when he was president, because one of the things I became aware of was none of the easy decisions show up in the Oval Office. All those get settled elsewhere. And when somebody is sitting behind that big desk, they have to have people who walk in and can lay out the different options that they have, pluses and minuses, and then let the principal, the president make the decision and then support that decision. But you have to create an environment in which people are not pulling their punches publicly and trying to solve it privately behind the scenes, or I want to be the last person that talks to the president. That's really not helpful. And so what I saw was Bush. You know, people, you know, think of him, you know, geez, simple guy, son of his dad. He's the history major from Yale and the Harvard mba. And he thought very carefully about this, first as governor and then as president, and worked hard to create an environment which people would walk in and say, you know what? I disagree. And I got a different opinion. And here's my opinion. And that's hard to do, particularly if you're president. I'd have people sitting in my office, you know, member of Congress, you know, you're a bunch of idiots and secretary so. And so is a buffoon. And what you're trying to do on this issue. If I had five minutes with the president, I'd tell him how bad this is and what we got to do to set it right. And I'd say, you know what? There's a little time on his schedule here. Why don't we just peek in and see if he can see? And, you know, Mr. President, you haven't been to see Congress.

Oh, how.

Mr. President, how are you? How's Barney? How's Laura? You look great, Mr. President. No, you know, and it just overwhelmed him. Overwhelmed them. And, you know, but Bush understood that, and so he tried very hard and succeeded in getting people to. You know, you'd have some junior G person from the Department of Widgets and Gadgets on one couch and Condi Rice on the other, and they'd be talking about something with different viewpoints. And if you did a good job and you walked out of the. As you got ready to walk out of the Oval, he'd peer over his glasses and say, you did really good today. And that, you know, he did lots of things that created an environment which people said, I got a different view. Can I lay it out?

Yeah. I think that the smartest dealmakers I've ever met are often from a place like Texas. Have a little drawl. Say something up front like, well, I'm just a simple man from Texas. Proceed to murder you.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

I think a lot of times people mistake charisma for intelligence. And if you can have the right people surrounding you, then I'm not sure IQ actually translates as much to success as people like to say.

Well, I think you have to Be pretty darn smart. But being pretty darn smart means you realize you're not going to be. Right. Right. All the time.

That's true.

And you can be smarter if they're smart. The smarter the people around you, the smarter you are.

Well, you. You know, let's talk about this. I think this is one of the things that you're probably most famous for. Many among them, you've written a few books. I really enjoyed the book on McGinley.

Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. A lot of fun.

Not covered very much.

No.

And just a fascinating segment of history.

The first modern president overshadowed by the guy that he made, that he rescued from oblivion and put him on a path to being the figure that we know today. Theodore Roosevelt. Right.

So, yeah, it's almost like. Well, I guess the winners do write history, but also you need a really good PR man.

Yeah. And look, the historians that came. That came after the turn of the century were progressives and liked the notion of Theodore Roosevelt. And McKinley was too nice. I mean, he really is a reformer. I mean, the things that. When Roosevelt takes over, one of the things that he does to settle the country, because the country is. I mean, we've lost Abraham Lincoln in 1865. We now lost in 1901, McKinley, who's the last Civil War veteran to serve as president. And the country is. I mean, we have no sense of. I mean, 500,000 people line the railroad tracks from Buffalo to Washington, D.C. there are so many people who jam the station. 30,000 people show up at the station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that the governor of Pennsylvania cannot force his way through the crowd to pay his respects to Mrs. McKinley. And when the train begins to pull out of the station, people begin singing patriotic songs. It plows into the station in Baltimore through a couple hundred yards of flowers that have been strewn on the tracks. You know, when the reporters are writing as they pull out of Baltimore for Washington on the final run. It's dusk and the sun is setting and the tracks are lit by fires along the railroad track. Mostly poor black farmers standing there next to the fires, hats off, saluting their former president. And when he is taken and buried, the school children of Nashville, Tennessee, have collected pennies, nickels and dimes to send a train carload of sweet pea flowers, which are strewn on the streets leading into the cemetery. And several thousand grizzled Civil War veterans dressed in their old uniforms stop and pick up the flowers and put them in their lapels. And the entire cabin is sitting there, many of them weeping. And one man stands apart. And he stands apart because he's afraid that if he sits with his colleagues, he will be overcome by emotion. So Theodore Roosevelt stands apart in order to calm the country. He says, I will continue the policies of our predecessor. It's an amazing guy. But historians who came afterwards said, we're tired of that generation. We want the new young, progressive. And even though Roosevelt is following in many instances the policies laid down by his predecessor, he gets the writing and McKinley didn't.

This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just need to hit pause and refresh. An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break. It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing, still the same great taste. Diet Coke make time for you. Time.

Hello, friends. Guess who? That's right, it is I, the replacer. Once again, I've been called on so you can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now. Rated M for mature.

That gives me the chills. You know, you are obviously known for the President George W. Bush legacy and for not just getting him into the presidency, but also into the governorship. And, you know, through that, you know, you had multiple wins, multiple losses, and.

A lot more of the former than the latter.

Yeah, exactly. Yes, you did. Well, I think. Who is it Naval always says you only need one big loss? I mean, you only need one big win.

Yeah.

To get rid of all the other losses. Do you remember a moment where you thought you might lose the presidency when you were first starting with George W. Because it seems in retrospect like it was naturally going to happen. Yeah, but do you remember like a dark.

Oh, yeah, New Hampshire. Yeah, we, that morning we got the, you know, got the early morning exits and we were getting our ass kicked and it was clear we were not going to win. And I thought this could be the end. And Bush called everybody together and said, we're going to have a bad night tonight and it's on me and not you. So I want everybody to know that I have confidence in you. Let's take a day or two off. I want everybody to think about what we need to do different and how we're going to get back. We had 19 days until South Carolina and to me that was leadership. Because the normal candidate would have been raging and angry and how did this happen? And instead his was I know we ran out of. We didn't give him a reason to vote for us here, and so we gotta do it different, but it's me. And, you know, sometimes you can get away with firing your entire staff. Reagan did it after New Hampshire, fired his staff. But if you're gonna win, ultimately, you have to lead a team. And Bush said, I have confidence in my team. And of course, went on to win South Carolina with it, the nomination.

You get to see behind these scenes a lot of big political characters. Is that so abnormal? Like, would they really typically rage and not.

Oh, sure, yeah. No. And, you know, anger is mostly an unconstructive emotion inside a political campaign. So, no, I've seen that, and that ain't helpful.

Yeah, You've also seen a lot of good and bad leaders. Are there other leaders that maybe people don't think about who have been exceptional when it comes to being somebody out front, but maybe we don't recognize them for that?

Yeah, well, there are lots of great leaders, and we've seen them. I mean, you know, one of the most interesting things to me was, you know, Ronald Reagan was a great communicator, and we always attributed it to great speech writers. You know, so and so came up with, you know, tear down that wall. And somebody else came up with Star wars, etc. But one of the interesting things, Marty Anderson was his domestic policy chief. And Marty was at Stanford. And after Reagan's presidency, he set out to find the answer to a big question that Reagan devotees who wrote the radio addresses. Reagan loses the nomination in 1976, but has a radio program after he leaves the governor's office. And the question. And they were great. They were these little short, 3 minute, 5 minute little speeches by Reagan. And they were on every week. And they went for a couple of years. So you're talking several hundred of these. But the question was, who wrote them? So Anderson got one of his, I think, grad students to go through the Reagan archives and sure enough, founded scripts which were on yellow pads, yellow pad paper. And they were in Reagan's handwriting. Reagan wrote them, and then he would go through and scratch out things and if need be, rewrite them entirely. And then, you know, he was literally editing up to the moment. He sat there on the. And but here are these. I mean, they're really. They're taking complex conservative ideas and simplifying them in a way that ordinary people can get their hands around them and conveying them in powerful imagery and common sense words and practical thinking. And it was him and to me, that said, you know, because every president can get a good speechwriter. Every president can get a teleprompter.

Not all of them can read it.

All of them can read it. And many times they can even make sense when they read it. But there was the workings. And we got to see his mind. We got to take a look at. Here was his rough draft, and here's what he. Here's his final. Here's what he was next to final. And then when we look at the little hand scratchings on it, here was his final. And so, yeah, we don't get to get those many insights anymore with, you know, the way that we organize things and collect information. We don't have voluminous papers like Jefferson and others had.

But no, but did you have. I can't remember for Bush's campaigns, were there moments where you thought, wow, we've really distilled the complex and the overly sophisticated down to the.

Yeah, compassionate conservatism.

You guys came up with that term?

Yeah, yeah. How did it come about? Well, there were two. There was a guy named Marvin Lasky, Marvin Olasky, who was teaching at ut, lived on the east side of town, the bad part of town, and was a devout Christian and was concerned with what we call mediating structures. Conservative theologian Michael Novak. Catholic theologian Michael Novak. But these are the little battalions of Edmund Burke. These are the things in between the state and the individual that help us live our lives. And Alaskie, and to a lesser extent, Michael Novak had written about the role of these mediating structures. And Bush was very taken with it. And so compassion conservatism was an attempt to say, we as conservatives can be compassionate, but we don't need to rely upon the hand of big government to deliver. We can organize things in such a way that we encourage these mediating structures, whether it's church, whether it's community groups, whether it's social action groups, to step in and play this role of caring for every person. Like we'd like to be cared for ourselves and. But it just, it was a way to say, I'm a different kind of. I'm a different kind of conservative. We were coming off of this era where conservatism was defined primarily by opposition to Bill Clinton and, you know, particularly over the Monica Lewinsky situation, which had sort of blown up in our faces. And Bush wanted to say, I'm a different kind of Republican. And here's one of the things that I want to do, which is unleash faith based and community based organizations to confront these problems that we have as a society.

Brilliant. And did you. Do you feel like conservatives today are still thought of as compassionate? Is that segment.

No. No. When we have Marjorie Taylor Greene saying we must stop AIDS relief effort in Africa because we've got bigger problems here at home. It's just not thoughtful. We spend a pittance, a relative pittance of what this country has on saving lives, human lives. I thought we were pro life. And the expenditure of a modest amount of money saves an enormous. Has saved an enormous number of lives. And so, yeah, I don't know. We've got. Conservatism is today in flux, and it's because, in part, success. Both parties are suffering through this liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. But, you know, we each, in our own way, have been successful at certain things. The Democratic Party had become the party of civil rights. We've become the party of, you know, limited government. And, you know, we've succeeded at certain things, and it's caused, you know, us to figure out what's next. And so we have populism who. Populists like her, who want to basically isolate us from the world and then spend our money in rewarding our constituencies. You know, it's like I saw Steve Bannon the other day was talking about how during the battle over the tax cut bill, he wanted to raise taxes so it was 50% on the top bracket, didn't want to lower it. He wanted to raise it because government ought to be able to take away 50% of what anybody makes. And my theory is, if you can take it from some people, you can take it from anybody.

Rich doesn't have a great definition.

Yeah. And, yeah, the point at which you become rich also has something that's open to. Definitely.

Yeah. I mean, that's the right audience for this. We're all about efficient use of capital. And you typically want to give. Just like in a business, if you think about government, it's so fascinating. It's really the only entity where power is determined by how much money you spend, not how much money you make. I couldn't imagine running a business like that. Everybody would be fired. This whole group is fired. And yet we don't really think about what the incentive structure is or what wags the dog. That must be frustrating after you've been in the highest levels of power. The deputy chief of staff to the President of the United States of America, and then leaving that power, is that really hard? What was that like?

Well, first of all, it was time to go and look you better not be vested in that moment as a human being. We all have experiences, and if you stay stuck in something, whether it was a great experience or a bad experience, it's bad. And so I was grateful for the opportunity. Look, I was there a long time. The average tenure of a senior White house aide is 18 months. I was there seven years. So I enjoyed it. It was hard. I liked hard work. I had hair, and it wasn't gray when I went there, but it was time, and you better not stay stuck there. I look back now and say, that was a great experience, high point in my life. And, God, think about how wonderful it's been since the things I get to write for the world's greatest newspaper every Thursday. I get to go on Fox TV 5.1 times a week. I get to go give speeches. I get to write books. I get to, you know, travel. I get to learn interesting things. I get to be involved in interesting things. I get to pick and choose not because I need to do that in order to make a living, but because I get to do that because I want to advance a cause, and I get to do it as a volunteer. So, you know, it was great. And, yes, there was a period of adjustment, but I. You know, I have colleagues who are still stuck, and I feel sad for them.

Do you think a lot of politicians stay stuck and that's why we have like a. I don't know, not to call out names, but a Nancy Pelosi, that's there forever, way past the point of return. Like, what happened?

Yeah. Why did we do that? Well, look, I gotta tell you, I have to. Let me speak. This will sound odd. She was effective right up to the moment she gave up her speakership. Now, I am surprised she stayed a year, but she's withdrawn. And I think it's that she has served a very valuable role in mentoring, if you will, her chosen successor, Hakeem Jeffries. But what I really worry about are these people who, you know, Strom Thurman, I mean, he was just not there. And, you know, it was like, you know, it was like a very sophisticated, you know, senior care program. And there's a difference. I mean, Chuck Grassley, he's all there, but there are people that are sort of burned out, and it's time to move on. But everybody gets to make a choice.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I think the other part that's interesting is in business, you have such set KPIs, and you understand why this actually happens, one reason or not. But I remember One time I was in China doing some business and they had, at that time, I'm not sure if they called them governors, but governor of a particular region and they had, yeah, they had direct KPIs. It was largely focused on economics. So it was like GDP growth, I think unemployment, maybe two or three more. And if they hit those KPI metrics and grew, then they were scored well and they left a few things out like the environment. And so they had sort of their reversion. But I always wondered why is there no scoreboard or KPI for government in the us Is that just impossible to do?

Well, yeah, because remember in China the head of the Communist party sets those for you. We don't have that similar top down management here. And I'm glad we don't really. Why? Because at the end of the day, you know, you touched on it, you're going to grow this many jobs, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we don't care what happens over here. I like it when the people get to decide and express it from the bottom up. And sometimes they're far more liberal than I would like in Massachusetts. Sometimes they're different, just come out with different conclusions than I would. But I feel better about it than having one guy sitting up at the top. Because think about, do we really today have any confidence whatsoever in any economic number that comes out of China? No, because they all got into a system of organized deceit. Because if I wanted to remain the governor of whatever province, I had to hit those marks and whatever was necessary to hit those marks, which might be building up an enormous amount of debt over real estate because that was the easiest way to put people to work and grow my economy. So be it. But now the chickens are coming home to rooster.

Yeah.

And also we find out that there's you know, it's sort of institutionalized corruption. Because you had to hit those markers. Because you had to. You had to. There was one guy who was going to decide whether you stayed or went. And it wasn't the people of your province, it was the boss.

Yeah. That we definitely do not want.

Yeah, exactly.

Speaking of which, you know, watching the debate was fascinating and there was a lot of.

That's one way of putting it. One way horrifying might be another word ending in ing.

Yeah, you were on Fox News afterwards commentating on it. And I want to talk about a few things there, but one, I kind of. I'm confused somehow. It seems like every presidential debate they both quote, unquote, lie about a lot of things, like they don't use real numbers. And I have to imagine take cognitive ability out of it. If they're just forgetful, why do they do that? Why don't they just use real numbers? Does it not affect their ability to get voted?

Well, look, I think it's gotten worse. I don't think this has been, you know, I don't. Used to be. For whatever reason, we sort of help people to account for all the. But. But now so much is said by. By both major party candidates that is, you know, undeniably wrong that we just sort of say, okay, well, that's what they do. Not healthy, though.

Yeah, bizarre. I always wonder, you know, I get massacred on Twitter if I accidentally mess up one number. But when it comes to politicians, I suppose since we've seen the trust level decline to so low of levels, we just assume both are liars and we bought we somehow vote on party lines.

Right, right.

Fascinating.

Okay, well, we've largely voted upon party lines. The interesting thing is that the number of people who identify as independents has grown, though a lot of them are in essence operationally Democrats or Republicans. But the number of swing voters is a decline, but it makes them more important because the two parties are a relative parity. So if the shrinking pool of people are really up for grabs, they have a bigger impact on the outcome of the election.

Interesting. So, for instance, that leads me to RFK and his. What was he calling it? The real debate. What did you think about that? Was that a good idea, a bad idea?

It was an attempt to get attention. It didn't get much attention. It might have gotten more attention had the other debate been more traditional. But look, third party candidates are, you know, they are the successful ones. By success, I mean they have an impact on the outcome of the general election in a clear, measurable fashion, is because they've got a consistent platform that somehow, you know, I'm Jill Stein, I'm the Green Party candidate, and here's my Green Party agenda. Or I'm Joe Jurgensen, the Libertarian Party candidate. Here's my very limited government platform RFK is trying to apply to both wings of the political spectrum. I am the environmental wild man, and I'm the vaccine denier. And I've got all kinds of crazy theories over here. You know, 5G causes cancer, you know, that kind of thing. So I'm dubious that he's going to have a big impact on the election. Now. That's because Mindlee is going to be like. More like Evan McMillan, who ran in 2016 and got on a, you know, 20 some odd state ballots and got votes in like 30 some odd states and less like Jill Stein, who was on 50 state ballots in 2016 and got more votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania than Hillary Clinton lost those states by or Jurgensen, who was on the libertarian ballot in all 50 states and got more votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia than Donald Trump lost those states by. So third party candidates in essence could concede, could be said to have lost the help to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump lose the elections in 2016 and 2020.

Yeah. So you obviously what I love about the way you think about the world is how mathematical you are. And you know, it's not very emotional. You're like, I don't really care what you think one way or the other. Here's what I think the numbers are going to do for us, which is really how you should look at business. And also probably if you want to win elections, what do you think about if you vote for RFK and take whether you like RFK out or not? Not you, but anybody listening, Is that just throwing away your vote? Because that has basically little to no impact on.

No, it has. It decides the election.

Interesting.

Because otherwise, if you've been forced to pick one of the other two, you might have decided the election for them. So it's sort of like what that is. You are basically saying, neither one of these two is worthy of my vote, but I still want to participate in the process. And then if push came to shove, if I were not allowed a third party choice and I wanted to participate, then I'd take the lesser of two evils. But, well, I'm allowed to vote for neither one of them if I think neither one of them is worthy of the office.

Yeah. Interesting. So one of the other things I want to talk about is there's obviously a lot going on online about the most recent debate. You called it an unmitigated disaster. And when we were talking, we were both kind of saying we were both a little surprised even to the degree. Talk to me about what you think about the debate and whatever you're comfortable talking about with the current two candidates that are. Ed.

Well, I thought neither man had a good night. It's just that, you know, Biden had a really, really, really, really bad night. It's not that Trump had a great debate. I mean, he failed to prosecute the issues. You know, he'd say immigration, immigration, border, border, border. But it would have been a lot more powerful if he had said, here are three things I want to do. Because we'd say, you know, I want to return to Mexico, return to Mexico policy like I had before, and I want to do this and I want to do that. So we had a sense he had a second act in him when it came to inflation, cost of living. It's one thing to say, they're up. It's another thing to say, and you know what, here's the reason why and here's what I'm going to do differently. But he won. No ifs, ands or buts, because the other guy lost badly. I mean, it was shocking. It was painful to watch. We've all seen somebody in our family, you know, grapple with the ravages of age. And we all, you know, age at a different rate and we all have different histories. I mean, people forget. In 1988, Joe Biden nearly died because of an aneurysm. He's had two aneurysms and you got it. You cannot tell me that that didn't leave some kind. That didn't affect something to do with how his brain operates at this age. But no, it was painful to watch. I mean, and painful for our country. You want, I think we feel, we used to feel better. We used to be in a place where a significant number of us said, you know what, no matter who wins, I think the country is going to be in good hands. And now we think, oh my God, no matter who wins, we're not going to be in good hands. And that's not healthy.

Hi, this is Deechen Lackman and I am here to tell you Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals. Deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability, like the stylish and efficient Camry, the ready for anything rav4. Or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota. Let's go places.

Rince takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you.

Mmm.

Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave. Or even tea time. Tea time, tea time you.

Mmm.

So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry rinse. It's time to be great.

You've been sort of behind the scenes with politics throughout this you know, Biden administration and far before it. What do you think about, did a lot of people know his rate of decline?

Oh, absolutely. In fact, that's the thing, is this is, this is, and this criticism is, you know, now, now people are popping up saying, I was in meetings and I was worried. I mean, I've been. I mean, I've been worried for a couple of years. I mean, I thought I was saying a year and a half ago, I cannot imagine why he's running again. I mean, he's in bad shape now and he's only going to get worse. And so literally, you know, Jill Biden and Valerie Biden Owens, his sister, wife and sister are the two most powerful people in affecting him. And for their own reasons, they've decided we want Joe to remain and to run. And it's not going to be good for him. It's not going to be. If he were to win, it would be terrible for the country, but he's going to lose. And so they're going to be sort of. You had a chance to step aside to be the. We all thought he was going to be a transitional figure. That's how he got elected. I'm going to end the chaos. I'm the transitional guy. There are lots of new people coming up, younger people, but it's me versus him. I've got the responsibility of ending his political career, serving as a transitional figure, and then we can go to a bright future. No, I'm the only one who can defeat Donald Trump, is what I think he's saying to him himself. But, no, it's. I don't know if the reports are true, but they said the reports of the family meeting at Camp David this weekend is one of the strongest voices for staying in was Hunter Biden. Yeah, let's count on that guy's good judgment. I don't need to pay my taxes. I can have an affair with my brother's widow. I can spend money, massive amounts of money, on illicit drugs and a gun and prostitutes. And I can go into business in Ukraine, having no experience in corporate governance, energy or Ukraine, but I can get 80 grand a month and it's going to look really good.

All I can just picture is, honestly, the scarf and the.

Yeah, well, please, that's, it's for you. That's why President, please, please just wanted.

To place that for you. But so why if I always try to, like, think second and third order effects. So if so many people realized his cognitive decline within their own party and they knew he was going to Go on stage. And they. They, I think, assumed that something like this might happen. Why. Why continue to back it? Don't they look foolish?

I think. I think they hoped against hope that he would be, you know, State of the Union, Joe.

Yeah.

That he'd show up and.

Yeah.

That he'd be good. They'd be okay. Yeah. And if it. I don't think anybody thought if it goes bad, it's going to go this bad.

Right.

I mean, it was just horrific.

Yeah. It makes you hard to. It makes it very hard. I think, as a normal human who's not involved in politics, it just completely makes you lose trust in not only the mainstream media, which I think is worth us talking about, you know, but certainly the political system. And so I was reading the other day this Pew study that shows that for the first time ever, we're seeing that people under 30 believe social media at the same level that they believe mainstream media. And it looks like we're only about, I don't know, 10 to 20 points off for most other age ranges. And that, to my knowledge, has never happened before. What do you think's happening there?

Well, we're seeing the fragmentation in the media now. We've seen fragmentation before. I mean, we've gone from relatively small number of sources to a large number of sources to an extraordinary large number of printed sources to electronic sources to visual sources, to the Internet to cable tv. We've seen the fragmentation, and this is continuing it. But, yeah, social media. I'm trying to understand the impacts of social media. In fact, David Axelrod and I exchange articles about the fragmentation and the impact and so forth. And in a lot of it, the algorithms are rewarding bad behavior. You know, say ugly things get retweeted, say, you know, I mean, people say the most extraordinary things in order to draw attention to themselves. There's a book written a long time ago by Daniel Boorstin, who was the Librarian of Congress, called the Pseudo Event, and the Pseudo Event, American Politics. And he's talking about the 1950s and 60s, and he's talking about the creation of things for the purpose of attracting attention, and he's talking about the corrosive influence that has on Democratic values. Well, that was when we were talking about, you know, PR agents and stunts for local news. And now we're talking about, you know, an infinite number of channels of social media influencers attempting to gain attention for themselves in order to monetize it.

Yeah, I mean, we can see it firsthand. Since we have a pretty large media company, we can See, everybody A, B, tests their titles, right? And so when we're testing titles during a period of fear, which we usually determine just by economic, like what's happening in the economy, Fear based economy as opposed to greed based economy, you know, post 2020 versus today. Today we're in a fear based economy. And so if you use a subject line that is negative in some way, shape or form or kind of gnarly or mean, you. You can see sometimes somewhere between 20 and almost 50% increase, same content, but just with a gnarly slant as opposed to a positive slant. And so I think you're absolutely right. One thought I have around that is, do you think, like, what happens with mainstream media channels going forward? Because there is, at least theoretically, some sort of. There's a screen, right. They can have Karl Rove on there, who's actually been behind the scenes of presidential campaigns and really understands what's happening, or you can have the 21 year old who's really good at social media but actually knows nothing about politics as the main source. Like, what do you think happens in the future? Do we just.

I can't forecast. I'm trying to figure it out. I mean, I do because on the one hand, also the other thing that traditional media have is an editor who says, you know, and fact checkers.

Yeah.

And that seems, you know, that seems almost, you know, and they have books where they describe how they. What. What are the rules. And we don't have a rule book. We don't have a style book. We don't have editors, we don't have fact checkers. We've got somebody going on and saying, what is the most extraordinarily wild thing that I can say that will attract me more retweets, more viewers, more listeners, more likes.

We need to get you on Instagram. Instagram's nicer. Twitter is a place for meetings.

It is a meeting. I have like 650,000 Twitter followers. I do not read my. Oh, that's fine.

Don't do it. Don't go into the comments.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, you never have.

I did for a while and then said, why am I wasting my time on this?

Or drinking too much?

Yeah, I don't drink. So I don't have that. I don't, I don't. That doesn't. I don't have the ability to save my, my woes that way.

So what do you do?

I remain happy.

Shove them down.

No, no, just ignore it. Just ignore it, you're saying. Yeah.

Even when you Were in highly stressed situations inside of the presidency or now in your campaigns, do you have an outlet for how you dress?

Oh, yeah, I read. I have friends. I have a great family. I have a terrific dog. I have the world's greatest dog.

You have a very cute dog.

Yes. Yeah. Doc Holliday.

I forgot that was the name.

Doc Holliday. Rove. Yeah.

That seems very wholesome and healthy. I have friends and I hang out with my family.

Yeah, exactly the right answer.

Okay, so who do you think is going to win the presidential election?

Election. Were today it would be Trump. And if Biden remains on the ticket, I think it will be Trump. If they swap him out, it'll be a horse race.

Is. Is how does that make you feel about the swap? Does that feel like they took the democratic process out by not allowing constituents to actually elect the.

Yeah, they won't have primary results, but they'll have delegates. And that party will have to step in and make delegates. Will have to make a choice.

Do you get conspiracy theory ever and think this was the plan?

No, no, no, no, no. I just, you know, this says one people in the White House knew about this and didn't talk about it. Leaders of the Democratic Party knew about it and they didn't see a way around it. And when they were given an option, the option was too weak. You know, an unknown congressman from Minnesota.

Yeah. Who do you think they hot swap.

Them for if they do hot swap them? I don't know. But. But it won't be Newsom.

Thank God. Whoops.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, yeah. And look, California's got a bad reputation. So the Democrats understand that they're not going. And also they have a 12th amendment problem. You cannot replace Kamala Harris. She's going to be the running mate of whoever. And you can't cast California's votes for a president. A vice presidential candidate from the same state. So from can't have a California governor and a California senator. Now California vice president to be on the same ticket. So I don't know, but they got a bunch of people. Polis of Colorado wants to run. Whitmer of Michigan, who might be the front runner. Amy Klobuchauer from Minnesota, Cory Booker, the governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce secretary. Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, though he's got real problems at home. There'll be a mini boomlet if it were to happen by some of the Clinton people from Mitch Landrieu. So now I don't know. I do know this. First of all, I'm pretty confident it wouldn't be an acrimonious process because people would say, you know what, this is a weird circumstance. If I look like I'm the, you know, I've got a sharp knife and I'm going after the other people, then it ain't going to look good. Look for me in the short, look good for me in the short run and it'll be bad for me in the long run. And this is going to be a high wire act. And if I don't get the nomination, then I want to be in a position where if we win, I've got a shot to get in and if we lose, I don't want to ruin my opportunity for 2028. And so I think, you know, everybody would be dropping oppo packages on the media and hoping the media would do the dirty work for them. But I think people would recognize under the short time frame that they got, they've got to try and cobble together, we'd see lots of endorsements. Who can I get to come out and say nice things about me? What positive things can I say that will attract normal Democrats will go to the Democratic convention? Out of the 3,900 and some odd delegates, all but 100 have been slated by the Biden campaign. So this is not going to be 45% Bernie Bros and Democratic Socialists. They're going to be normal Democrats. They're going to go to the convention. Nobody would have a majority on the first ballot and on the second ballot and every ballot thereafter. The House of Lords now gets to vote. The Democratic superdelegates. So Donna Brazile and all these people who've been active for years in the Clinton, Obama, Biden administration, Democratic leaders, they get to vote, which means it's more likely to be a more normal Democrat and being chosen on the basis of who can win. And they'd have an interesting convention. We'd all be watching it. It'd be really interesting. We'd have speeches, we'd be may take the judge and take the measure of these people. Somebody would win. And for the next week, between then and Labor Day, the entire country would say, who is that person and how do we get to know them better? And they would be smart enough to be running around the country laying out positive things, laying out their agenda, saying things that would cause us to say, well, you know what? That person has what it takes. When Nikki Haley was looking like she had a shot, she started to be included in some of the national polls. What if it was Joe Biden versus Nikki Haley and she was up by double digits and what did we know about her? Not a hell of a lot. All we knew was. Seems well spoken, was ambassador to the un Was governor of one of those southern states, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, one of them bad down there. And she seemed like she got a head on her shoulders and boy, she's really, you know, she's a role model and we're for her, which is an expression how desperate the country was for something other than a rerun.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't look like they're going to get that, most likely.

Yeah, exactly.

When you are called into some of these campaigns, do you also help with ads and how they position themselves with marketing?

Yeah, no. If I get, you know, I get how do we go. How do you go about doing this? So I'm not. I'm not the ad maker, but it's like, you know, here's what the things that are important for you to be doing and defining yourself and, you know, being able to articulate a message and so forth.

It's so like say Tom is running for a big governor ship. They call you Tom calls you and says, can you help me think about how to win this? And you say, let me run the numbers.

No, I say, why are you running? What matters to you? What do you think people are really concerned about? And also what are you really concerned about? Because, you know, we've got these movies about politics. The candidate, you know, with Robert Redford, you know, and so forth, and the general theory behind them, you know, wag the dog, you know, the general theory behind him is the masses are asses. All we got to do is contrive some kind of a cute ad and depict our candidate in an attractive way. And then we win the voters. And it's more that ain't the case. In fact, the best analogy is the emperor's new Clothes. You know, particularly if you're running for president, you're going to be buck naked at the end of that parade and they're going to see it all, all the warts. And you got to hope that they say, you know what you're looking at the best you can look on that day. And so authenticity matters. So, you know, these people say, well, what do I need to talk about in my campaign? I can say, well, you know, big issues today, immigration and cost of living, but what do you. And you got to be prepared to talk about those. And you better care about what your Answers are, but what do you really care about, particularly when you run for governor? When Bush ran for governor, he ran on four big issues. Educating, making sure that every child learned to read by the fourth grade. Education reform, welfare reform. What do we need to do to encourage people to move from dependency on government to work? Junk lawsuits. We had a terrible situation where our litigation climate, small businesses were being sued left and right, and juvenile justice reform, about which nobody cared anything, but he did. And so by going out there and talking about how we're discarding a generation of young people who get into trouble, and our answer is to toss them into a system that will not help them, and we better figure out how rather than when we get the kid who's acting up in school and turning out to be a problem, and our answer is kick him out of school, we got to figure out how we save him. And the fact that Bush had such passion about it caused people to say, you know what? A, he cares about it and B, I should care about it, and C, I'm learning about who this guy is. So sometimes it's important for people to. Always important for people to talk about the issues that the country is concerned about today. Inflation, the border, our status in the world. But it's also important for people to gain a sense of who you are as an individual. So you better. You also ought to better be thinking about what it is you really, really believe and the things you really, really care about.

Yeah, it's beautiful. When you were deputy chief of staff, you ran arguably the biggest company in the world, the US Government, in some ways. And that must be incredibly difficult because you have a position which has theoretically a lot of power but not a.

Lot of operational control.

Yes, exactly. So how do you get people to do what you want them to do in that role?

Well, you have to. You know, you're right. Any president, and look, I was a functionary, so, you know, here's the president, and we all, you know, served at his pleasure and in advance of his goals. What a president needs to do is to put people in place who share his goals and can operationalize them because it's too big. It's like think about all the operating divisions of a company. Think about how writ large that's the U.S. government. So. But you've got to have clarity of vision, and you've got to have people who then share that vision and can execute it.

But even, I mean, I sort of think maybe this is wrong. But is it slightly like a COO in some ways? Like, you're kind of taking all of his ideas. The vision comes from the President. But then you're like, all right, now it's my job to kind of help figure out how I think we can do this and who we need to get in line with.

Well, the people who operate are the heads of the various divisions. We call them departments. Those are the people who have to execute the administrative agencies and departments of government. That's where you need. You need to have a secretary of commerce who says, I'm doing this. If my goal at the Interior Department is to make certain that we expand opportunities for environmentally sensitive drilling on federal lands, that's where that happens. If you're the guy who's in charge of the every 20 or 30 year modernization of our nuclear weapons program as the Secretary of Energy, which is really weird, you better have a physicist who can help you, advise you on how to do that. So each. But you've got to pick people in each one of those agencies who are capable of operationalizing your vision.

And then what do you see as the chief of staff's role? Like, what was it for you?

Well, I was the deputy chief, so I was the deputy chief for policy, which was sort of the hardest job. I was senior advisor all seven years. I was there as deputy chief of staff staff for two and a half. And I had to keep my mouth shut because my object was in the policy process, make certain that everybody had a fair shot at laying it out. And so my boss, Andy Cardin and Josh Bolton, said, be careful. In fact, Dick Cheney had given me that advice at the very beginning. He said, you've been a friend of the president elect since he was 26 and you were 22. Be careful, because people will try and figure out where you are in order, thinking that that will have an inordinate influence on where he is. And that may or may not be true. But you want people to be saying, here's what I believe. Yeah. Shane Cheney had been a White House chief of staff at the age of 34. So he knew the pressures and he knew how important it was that the chief and the chief and some of the senior advisers around the President encourage a robust discussion of any issue, not discourage it. And sometimes they could discourage it by simply voicing their opinion too early.

Right. And so that's kind of an interesting way to go down. Dick Cheney, very controversial man, too, but very successful man in many different ways.

Right.

Did you watch Vice ever? Did you watch the. Some of those?

Yeah, I did.

And how do you feel about your.

Well, look, I'm taller than Chaney. I am taller than Cheney in every single instance. The actor playing me is shorter than the guy playing Chaney.

Is he fitter? You remember?

Well, I'm generally like it overall.

You thought he was short, but he was sort of handsome. No, you didn't like any look.

I didn't like look, to me it was like I was always the roly poly guy. Yeah, sure. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, anyway, so can I tell you a Cheney story? Can I tell you a Cheney story? So we're thinking about the vice who's going to be the running mate. And it's like May of 2000. And Bush is sort of, you know, the more the process goes along, the more he likes Cheney. We got nine other people we're looking at and Cheney's in charge of the process, he and Liz. And they have a gigantic collection of material that they've condensed down into a thick notebook on each one of the nine. And we're going through these and talking about who it ought to be. And Bush is on the campaign trail. I think he was like in Iowa or something. And I had a red phone on my desk. Only one person had that phone number. So, you know, headphone wings. Yes, sir. He says, look, I'm coming home tonight, as you know. And he said, I'm getting close and I know you're not for Cheney. Meet me at the Governor's mansion tomorrow at 10am and tell me why I should not go with Cheney. So I show up at the Governor's mansion, which you, you've seen. It's not a big place. The Austin library is about the size of this room. And I'm sitting on one side of the room, about as far away from Bush as you are, maybe a little bit further. And he says, okay, it's 10 o'. Clock. He says, okay, why shouldn't I go with Cheney? And I had my list of eight reasons. Number one, Wyoming, three electoral votes. Don't need to worry about it in our camp. Pick somebody from a battleground state, you know. Number two, Cheney had his first heart attack at the age of 34. Been working on perfecting it ever since. Had three more people say, won't last four years. Cheney was a very conservative congressman from a very conservative state 18 years ago, and he cast some really stupid votes, like being one of three members of the House of Representatives to vote against a resolution calling on the apartheid regime of South Africa to move Nelson Mandela from the island prison where there was no doctor, to the mainland Prison where there was a doctor and he could good health care. And Cheney one of three members to vote against it. You know, we've worked really hard to identify you as your own man, not mini me to your dad. So what the hell, let's pick your father's secretary of defense in a time of war and make him your running mate. Everybody's going to say, Cheney's running on the West Wing. You know, people are concerned about you being a Texas oilman. What the hell, let's have. As your running mate, the guy runs the world's largest oil field service equipment company. And, you know, 12th amendment problem. Anyway, Bush is not a monologue guy. So this is like World Wrestling Federation. I say, stupid vote. He says, nobody's ever going to bring that one up. Well, how about this stupid vote? Well, that's a lot. How about this stupid vote? You know, oil men, nobody's. Well, what about the data here? Powell says this. Powell says that. Only going to get worse. So anyway, this goes on for about 30 minutes, and literally at the end of it, I realize I cannot open my jacket because I have sweat through my shirt. I've just been. This has been so, you know, and I've been laying out the case, why not to go with Cheney. And when we're finished, Bush says, got anything else? I said, nope, that's it, sir. He says, good. Really good. Turns to the guy next to him, says, dick, got any questions for Carl? Cheney had been sitting there for 30 minutes while I chewed on his ass. And as we're walking out, Cheney says, I agree with what you have to say. And that night, Bush is back on the campaign trail. And the red phone rings again. And I pick it up and he says, really good today. He said, really good. He said, very convincing. He said, you outlined eight political problems, and they are real problems. So put on your little beanie hat with a propeller and start thinking about what you're going to do about it, because I'm going with Cheney. And he said, your job is politics. That's not my job. My job is to pick who'd be the best partner to me in the Oval. And if something bad happened to me, who would the country say, we've got confidence in that guy. And he said, that's going to be Cheney. So I'll be back in a couple of days, whatever, and be prepared. Give me your thoughts on what we need to do to prepare on each.

One of these this episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me is now playing only on Netflix. So you're about to make a trade based on a friend's text, but which you do you listen to is it we could buy a house in Tulum, get optioning those options. We could lose everything. Or let's do a little research, get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart you've talked in other places about strong versus weak leaders and how important a strong leader is to the country, even in just representation.

Right.

What makes a strong versus a weak leader in your eyes?

Well, vision, clarity of purpose, willingness to listen, ability to articulate an agenda. And also when it comes to the international season, also when it comes to Congress, the ability to develop personal rapport and personal relationships. You know, we look back at these things, you know, Winston Churchill and Franklin and Delano Roosevelt, we look at the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, we look at the relationship between Brian Mulroney and Cole of Germany and George at H.W. bush and all those are important. So, but, but strong, you know, a strong leader is somebody who has a vision and a clarity of that vision, an openness to talking about ways forward and an ability to communicate and the ability to build those kind of relationships. But vision is the most important.

Do you think that there are very many candidates today that come off as weak? It seems like strength and at least projection of strength is now critical with social media.

Yeah. Well, Biden is.

That'll be a good one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In fact, that's one of the big things. If you look at Trump, even if people disagree with him, they recognize that he has strong opinions. And so it was Clinton who once, I think it was Clinton who once said strong and wrong means weak and right. But I think that may be the case. But strong is what we look for in a leader, particularly as president of the United States.

You know, sometimes I think that you learn more from reading biography books of billionaires and the very, very successful than you do from self help books.

Right.

If you had to tell people three books of world leaders to read, what would they be?

I'd read almost anything by Winston Churchill that has to do with the great moments in his life, which is the books on World War II. I would. I'd say Reagan. Reagan's an elusive person in many respects, but there are a couple of good biographies of him. You know, Lincoln, there's some great. There's a plethora of good books on Lincoln. Andrew Jackson, John Meacham has a great book on him. Thomas Jefferson, There are several good volumes on Jefferson. But, yeah, I love reading biographies of great leaders. And I love also the books that they write themselves. I mean, Lincoln did not write. Jefferson wrote notes on the state of Virginia. But, like, Churchill is like. You can just hear him. You can see his mind at work. When you read about World War II, you learn a lot about Reagan from his autobiography, but what you learn is how he shaped his life in such a way that he hid the inner man, you know?

Anyway, I want to close out on a couple questions here. So the modern political system seems to require raising a ton of capital and doing a lot of fundraising behind the scenes in the right type of capital from the right people. And I'm just now starting to understand this from some of the groups. That is where I've met you before. But you really understand the inner workings. What do you think the average American doesn't understand about fundraising for political candidates and how it actually happens today?

Yeah, well, you know, today it's, you know, the high net capital comes in the old traditional way. You ask somebody to write a check or make a credit card contribution, but increasingly also a large sum of it comes through the Internet, in which case it is lots of small dollars from lots of small donors who give continually to the kind of candidate they like to see. And then to a lesser extent, mail, which is. I was sort of there during the. When mail hit its peak. But the other thing that is misunderstood about political mail, excuse me, political fundraising, is the sums may sound big. A billion dollars each side is going to spend a billion dollars. Well, we're at, what, $22 trillion economy, which is, you know, 22, you know, thousands. I mean, 220,000 billions. I mean, it's like, tiny. Yeah. I mean, the advertising budget for Amazon is bigger. I bet the advertising budget for Coca Cola is pretty big.

Yeah, you're right. I noticed with the. I signed up for both campaigns to see what their drip sequence was for fundraising. And what's fascinating to me is the use of drops now. So, you know, in. In E commerce and in. In my world, in business, you have drops which is like, hey, here's a limited time XYZ that you get. Here's a, you know, scarcity Exclusivity, timeliness, ability for you to go fly on XYZ's jet. And I don't know how much that actually lends itself to how much they're able to fundraise for it. But I've noticed both candidates do these sort of daily or weekly drops. Is this new? I don't remember that last election or the election before.

A lot more merch merchandise.

Yeah, I remember before they would ask just for money, you know, please donate. The other person's gonna ruin the world if you don't do this. And now they're like, do you want this gold hat?

Yeah, yeah.

Which is fascinating.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you see that? Only at the presidential level.

Not at like I seen it, I'm starting to see it below. I mean, you know, but particularly big races for senator or governor and maybe for Congress because you have to get at a certain volume of, you know, your special water bottle or your, you know, your gold hat or whatever.

Yeah. So bizarre. I thought that was fascinating. The other thing that's not very popular in business to talk about is going after your competitors weakness. It's like that 48, you know, laws of power. You're not supposed to talk about it, but everybody does it. And yet in politics, it seems you actually have to think about what are your competitors weaknesses and go hard at them. How do you case a competitor or analyze a competitor in the political sphere? And what could business people learn from that?

Yeah, well, I'm looking at, when I look at it, my opponent, I'm looking for, first of all, what are their weaknesses? You know, where are the things where they're most at odds with public opinion. And then I'm also looking for what are the things that they think are strengths that are in essence weaknesses. And go at it, go at the thing that they think is their strength that really is a weakness.

So what would be an example of that?

Well, John Kerry liked the fact that he was, you know, you know that he had. He wanted to be pure, thoughtful and so nuanced. But what it made him look like in reality was like he was fully capable of going here and going there. So that we've got it. Mark McKinnon picked up on this with an ad. With an ad. We got footage of him windsurfing on the Columbia River. And so, you know, he. First he said this, you know, this, then he said that. You know, it's like he voted against. He voted against. While we're in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, he votes against an $87 billion war funding bill. And we bought 11,000 or $14,000 worth of ads in Huntington, West Virginia. I think it was February or March of 2004. He was going to be appearing the next day in front of the VFW audience to talk about his military experience versus Bush's lack of it. So he ran these ads talking about how he voted against while American troops are under fire in combat. He voted against the $87 billion war funding bill. And because he wanted to be shown as thoughtful and nuanced, he stood up the next day with a microphone in front of the veterans and said, I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it. Which became the line that exemplified the 2004 election. So we took what he thought was a strength. I'm a nuanced, thoughtful person, and turned it against him because he was constantly going, I'm against the war in Iraq, but if I voted, I voted for the war in Iraq, and I'm against the war in Iraq today. And yet if I was forced to vote on it again, I'd support it again. So I voted, I voted for, against the $87 billion after I voted for the $87 billion, and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. So find some, particularly something that they want to end up defending as a strength and go after that.

Yeah, I know you haven't always been the biggest fan of Trump in some ways, and you guys have had some fun little go back and forths, but he does seem to be quite good at this. He picks up on the subliminal thing we don't realize we're thinking, and then kind of, kind of names them.

Yeah, look, the best way to think of him is the executive producer of the Apprentice. He has a highly rated TV show. And his object is to think about what is it that attracts the viewer, holds the viewer, and can surprise the viewer. Think about how he's doing it with the vice presidential pick here. You know, I've got a list of names. I've already made the decision, I'm not going to tell you who it is. And blah, blah, blah, blah, BL blah, blah, blah. And I mean, we're all paying attention to it.

It is marketing 101. I remember actually, Tanner and I were sitting in a back room at an event where Vivek and I were both speaking. And at that time, that was before, you know, early, early on. And he had a really bad Instagram, like, a really bad Instagram, Silly technical things. Like he would do videos this way, not this way. And he wouldn't hit. He was thinking about it almost like Twitter, you know, Twitter gives you a little bit more pause. It allows for you to have like a really hard hitting one liner. Anyway, so I didn't really think much of it, but, you know, when he was chatting with us, I was like, oh, let me see your Instagram. And I was like, well, this is really bad and you should. And how. And then I said, how much money do you spend on this? And they told me how much money. And I was like, well, this is awful. Like, you should be spending one tenth of that to get something a lot better. Yeah, Ramaswamy. And what was interesting is we showed him Trump's. I guess that. Would that have been pre Truth social? I guess it must have been. But he was somewhere at the time, maybe it was like Rumble or one of those other platforms. And the man's ability to get to the hook immediately is second to none. But then Vivek kind of applied the same idea of immediate hook to his Instagram, and now it's doing really well. Although I remember talking to you about it and I was like, what do you think about Vivette? Could he win? And you're like, he's not gonna win. He's not gonna get even close. Which you were right. But as an outsider, I can't tell at all who will win.

Yeah, I can't either.

Well, you're right there.

Yeah, I was right there.

You were right there. Okay. The last thing I want to end on here is was there a time besides Carrie, with, you know, somebody more recent day in the advent of social media usage where you did the same thing, where you saw, hey, your competitors doing this. We should do it this way.

Well, we've done it a number of times in this. I'm involved in the Senate Leadership Fund. And then they're constantly doing things like that, using social media to eviscerate. I'm lost at a moment here as to exactly who. But we've done it. We constantly are doing that.

How often is it just one ad can turn the tide?

For one ad can't turn a tide. One ad can. Can. If the tide is turning, it can. It can accelerate it. But no, look, that's the thing about it is consistent, persistent messaging. It's not, you know, sort of one explosive ad. For example, look, all the concern now about Biden and his debate performance would not be as strong and powerful and determinative as it is if we hadn't seen this before. We've already seen him We've already, we've already had our doubts and those doubts have been lingering and growing and this just sort of taps it and forces it to have a much bigger impact.

Did you see the Kamala Kamala Bet ad?

No.

With Taraji Henderson? Oh, it's so good. We should play it right now. Yeah, girl, I'm out here in these streets and let me tell you, you're right, Taraji. There is so much at stake in this moment. The majority of us believe in freedom and equality, but these extremists, as they say, they not like us. But now the ad that they created is actually being used against her.

Good ads. Good ads. There's a great guy who was ad maker in the 50s and 60s and 70s, Tony Schwartz, and he said the importance of an ad is its resonance with what's already in our minds. So he wrote a. He had a 15 second ad. All it had, this is a 1968 campaign. He had one word on there, Agnew, and 15 seconds of canned laughter because everybody thought Agnew was a joke. And so the ad ads that reinforce what we have already sort of have concluded about it and give and put it in a frame of importance are the most powerful ads of all.

That's a really good thing to remember because often I think they're trying to do something completely different. You know, they're trying to make themselves look cool.

Yeah, it's less. It's less. You know, let me tell you something then. What's already in your minds and how do I then evoke a response based on what's already in your mind?

That's really good. I think I want to end with 9, 11. I've heard you tell a story before about that moment and I'd love for you to talk about that day, that moment and what it was like.

Well, I'll give you the short version because it can go on for a while because, you know, if you're in a place like I happen to be that day, you remember everything. I mean, we all remember when something big in our lives happened. And that was a big, big moment. And I was with the President in Florida and at 8:48am my assistant Susan Ralston called and said a plane has flown into the World Trade Center. We don't know if it's jet or prop commercial or private. And he was standing about 10ft away from me and I went over and told him. A few minutes later, Condi Rice called with the same sketchy information and we went into the Emma Booker Elementary School and He went into. We went into the staff hold room next door to where he was going to be watching a reading demonstration with a bunch of kids. And then he walked in there and we were watching on television. Then the second plane flew into the World Trade center. And Andy Card knew he needed to go tell him and did. That's a famous photograph of, you know, he's cupped his hand and he's telling the President, I've known the President a long time. And a different person came back into that staff hold and his voice was steel and he was quiet, but you could hear it. And he said, we're at war. Give me the director of the FBI and the Vice President. We jumped on the secure phones in the staff hold, got a hold of Robert Mueller, FBI director, who had started work 10 days before. But we couldn't get Vice President Cheney because at that moment he was being grabbed under his armpits by two Secret Service agents who were running down a hallway in the West Wing to get him to a secret entrance to the piac, the President's Emergency Operations Center. But, you know, there is a fog of war. And the President, after he came in and he had those. Had one conversation. We needed to say something to the press. He sat down. His classroom had been emptied of adult furniture. So it had that little table for the kindergartners and a little chair. And he sat down and a scribbling with Dan Bartlett. Ari Fleischer and I are talking to him about what he might want to say, and he is sort of outlining what he wants to say. And Eddie Marenzel, the head of the Secret Service detail that day, came up. Tall, thin guy, I mean, short thin guy, came up and said, Mr. President, we need to get you to Air Force One and Airborne as quickly as possible. His whereabouts were known, and what they were worried about was there were going to be another hijacker who was going to fly into Admiral Bucharest Elementary School. So we got on the motorcade a few minutes later and went to the airport. So we were going to the motorcade. He whistled to me and pointed to the backseat of the limo, presidential limo, Stagecoach, codename Stagecoach, to ride with him to the airport. And nobody said much on the way to the airport. Andy Card sitting backwards, looking at us, President on the right side, I'm on the left side. And the phone rang, a little phone in the corner. He picked it up and held it to his ear. And I could hear only one side of the conversation, but I knew it was bad when he said his rums Felt alive. The strike on the Pentagon got to the airplane. Normally, I'd be in a cabin. He'd be in the. He'd get onto Air Force One, and there'd be the first cabin as his private office. And then there's a hallway, and then there's the stairwell up to the cockpit, and there's a little medical unit and a little galley. And then there's the senior staff cab, and four people sit in there and senior staff. And then a big conference room and then regular seating for guests of the president and then, you know, staff. And then at the back of the plane, you know, just sort of like Southwest Airlines seats for the media. But again, I didn't even get to the staff cab. And he whistled and had me sit down across from him. And that's where I spent most of the day with. In the private office with him. And it was a day. I remember at one point, I mean, there was an argument as to whether or not we should return to Washington. And he was like, I'm coming back to Washington. Finally, the Air Force, you know, Cheney called him, said, don't come back. We don't know. Rumsfeld stops fighting the fires and leaves to come and call, said, don't go. Finally, Tom Gould, who was the Air Force military aide, came in and said, Mr. President, we have too many people on the plane. The plane was full, so we have too much weight. And we're not full. We don't have a full fuel load. We got to the airport a heck of a lot before we were supposed to. So he said, if we get over Washington and can't land, we're not going to be able to rotor as long as we want to rotor. So he said, I recommend we land at a military base that's on lockdown, offload, unessential personnel, fuel the plane up, and then we can return. Which the President reluctantly agreed to. But then they, you know, it was sort of a dodge. They were trying to keep him from coming to Washington. So we were literally, like, near Naval Air Station Jacksonville. Instead, we bend west. Don't land there. Don't land at Tyndall. Don't land at Eglin, don't land at Keesler. Instead, we land at Barksdale Air Force Base in North Louisiana. Because they were on lockdown the day before, they had started. Started a test drill. This was the headquarters of the 8th Air Force. And they kept losing nuclear weapons, you know, so they said, we're going to have a training program for a few days. So there were no civilian personnel on the base. And it was completely locked down and we landed there. And as we're on final approach, nobody knows where we are. As we're on final approach, literally the local TV station has a camera on the flight path, and so they pick up Air Force One landing at Barksdale. That's the first time the Wood Nation knows where we are. Remember, this is before. I mean, we have radio telephones on the plane, but they're being used. So I have a BlackBerry that I have to carry for political messages from the rnc. And we passed it around so that people could email their spouses and say, I'm okay, I'll be back in touch with you and spool up the messages. And then when we'd finish, fly over, you know, wherever, you know, Panama City or Pensacola, it would download the messages and people would be able to communicate with their families.

The Subaru Share the Love event is on from November 20th to January 2nd. During this event, Subaru donates to charities like Meals on Wheels and so far has supported the delivery of nearly 5 million meals to our aging neighbors. When you purchase or lease a new vehicle during the 2025 Subaru Share the Love event, Subaru and its retailers will make a minimum $300 donation to charity. Visit subaru.comshare to learn more. When you walk into a Burlington, you're walking into amazing prices and great gifts. That's main character energy. Because at Burlington, the holiday savings aren't the only things turning heads. Discover quality finds and perfect, perfect presents for everyone on your list, even those who are hard to shop for toys and jewelry to new beauty brands and styles. These gifts go seamlessly from our stores to under your tree. Seriously, with these savings, why shop anywhere else? Burlington deals brands. Wow, what a moment in history. If you had to leave with people. If you had to leave people listening with sort of one reason to be positive about where we are today, what would you leave them with?

Our country is a great country, full of compassionate, creative, energetic, entrepreneurial people. There's a great deck I saw this past weekend that measured our country. We're the most competitive, we're the most entrepreneurial, we're the most creative. We have a standard of living that is amazing for the world. People want to come here. Like of the top 25 universities that are attended by foreign foreigners, we're like, you know, 20 of the 25. I mean, people want to come here because of the strengths and compassion and energy of our country. Our country is, think about it. Our country was founded and replenished over the centuries by the losers, lightweights, and discards of the world. The wretched refuse. My great grandfather was a peasant from Norway. You know, I suspect there's somebody, a struggler not too far back in the background of you and every American. And yet we are who we are as a country. The strengths of our country are enormous, and we will falter only when we lose confidence in ourselves. And the American dream, the American theory that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unyielding rights, that that our Constitution, which gives us a form of, you know, representative democracy, all these things are enormous strengths that have created the greatest nation on the face of the earth in history. And those strengths are still there. They do not lie in any one individual. It's not like we're, you know, a monarch. It's not in one institution. We're not the Communist Party of China, you know, we are the United States of America. And as a result, we have unique strengths that we can call upon in moments of danger and challenge. And this is a moment of challenge, and it will be a moment of danger in the world that we live in. But I have every confidence in our country and its institutions.

Mr. Karl Rove.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for coming.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

A couple things stand out to me about Karl Rove. I've been at some of his political events in Texas and been in rooms where he is speaking, and you don't get to the highest levels of political office or appointment without being pretty brilliant. But there are two things that stuck out with me the most from Karl Rove, and that is when I asked him how smart he was, he said, I'm not that smart, but I'm super obsessed. That is hard to compete with. An obsessed person will beat a curious person any day of the week. And so as you're listening to this, I think the question to ask yourself is, where could you become so obsessed with that? You sound like Karl Rove about the thing that you're talking about. He has this monologue in there where he goes through every single reason why we are not at one of the worst points in American history. And he tells it by month and date for, like, 100 years over the course of American history. And you cannot remember that kind of thing if you are not obsessed. I think a lot of times in life, we do the things that we are told to do. You're in a job maybe because somebody told you that you should take that job, that that career was a good One that you'd make a lot of money that it might be a good fit for you. But where does your mind go where you get so entrenched in the thing that you're doing that nobody else can beat you because you'll just force function more time on it. And I want you to ask yourself that. I also really left with this feeling that America's alive by a man who's like suffered multiple losses. You know, he's lost presidential campaigns, he's been fired, he's lost congressional campaigns, he's been beaten up on Fox News, he's been yelled at at Twitter. You know, as he mentioned, he can't even have a sign with his name on it at the airport because some people will heckle them because you know immediately if you out for either party, 50% of the country hates you. And yet look at the optimism on this man. And that to me was something to really lean into. I think a lot of times as we age, we get more negative and pessimistic, like, well, kids these days, not how it was back in my day. And that is absolutely and completely not the theory that he has. He's the opposite. He's like, there's no better time to be alive and the best and brightest future is in front of us as long as we don't lose hope as we continue to believe. In America, there's this Japanese tradition where they take a vase that's been broken, or really any piece of ceramics or pottery that's been broken. And as opposed to throwing it away, they glue it back together with this gold glue so it kind of looks like veins running through the pottery. And the reason that they do that is they say because the broken parts are what makes us beautiful. The cracks are where the light comes in. And the famous words of Leonard Cohen, one of my favorite poems. And I think it's really important for us to have this perspective in this day and age. The months to come are going to be awful. Listening to two former president and a current president yell at each other and call one person stupid, the other person stupid. My golf game's better. Your golf game's better. You're the worst president. You're the worst president. No, I'm the best president. No, I'm the best president. That's not fun for anybody to listen to. You know, I don't want to listen to my family members do it. I certainly don't want to listen to third party people do it. And yet that is going to be what's in front of Us taking a little zoom out and having some perspective and being able to do what's called go to the balcony. So one of my favorite mentors back in the day, her name was Yang Butler, used to tell me that the way she came from the Philippines, having no money, came to the us, Immigrated, went to Harvard, became one of the senior executives at State street at the time, I think has gone on to be a senior executive at another firm and has kids, has this incredible life, has done really well for herself, was this one idea. And the idea is anytime you're in the midst, imagine like a mosh pit at a, at a concert where everybody's yelling, they're throwing each other around, you can't see over the fray, you can't find your friends, you're just in it, taking blows everywhere, right? And she's like, that's what usually happens in our day to day. We're in the mosh pit, stuff's happening all around us. We're being reactive. We don't have context. We can't step out of the fray. She goes, I want you to imagine yourself, every time that happens, being able to walk up and stand on a balcony. So imagine now you can see over the mosh pit and into the broader picture. And what do you realize? You realize the mosh pit is actually this small. It's the size of a quarter on a football field. And all around the football field are actually pretty normal people walking around, having a drink, having a pretzel, listening to the music way in the back. It's only right in the front where things are the gnarliest, where you stood, that the mosh pit is happening. And I remember that often for when I'm having difficult moments, when I'm getting trolled, when my businesses are struggling, when things are going wrong in my marriage or relationship, how can I get up on the balcony and see that the world's not all on fire? I just happen to be standing next to a fire pit. And so this episode did that for me. I hope it does it for you. Oh, if you guys haven't already, do me a huge solid like and subscribe to this podcast, wherever you listen to it. That is the only way we grow. And a lot of you guys, turns out like 40 to 50% of you listen to all of these and then don't subscribe. So I want to make sure that we get to you every single week in a moment where you're going to get a bunch of stuff in your ear you don't need. Hopefully this is one of the things you do need. Thanks so much. We'll see you next week on the Big Deal podcast.