This is Gavin Newsom and this is new Kidkrich. I just wanted if I could just briefly up top. You sent out a couple of tweets over the last twenty four hours specific to Ukraine. Obviously topical issue, and I appreciated candidly your tweets which were a little more assertive pushing back on this notion that somehow time is our ally with Putin, that it's time to be a little more muscular, time to call him out. You also called out I thought an important fact that's not necessarily part
of the discourse. He spent twenty one years in Sweden. I mean, these guys have a longer.
View version that was actually the Napoleonic Wars.
Yeah, it was Putin who said, look, we fought Sweden for twenty one years. You think I want to slow down.
You think I'm going to slow down, So tell me, I mean, where are you in the over under? I mean, is you know, I appreciate your advocacy for trump et cetera. But I think, I mean it is the revelation that he's waking up to this new reality that this is not something you can snap your fingers. Putin's a different kind of character.
Well, I think that first of all, he probably shares a lot of people's concern that if you push Putin too hard you end up with a tactical nuclear war. And then maybe more so, I think there's a there's a dance around Putin that's a little more complicated than just yes or no. On the other hand, I think he actually believed from his first term when they did a pretty good relationship. Although he had sent lethal weapons to Ukraine. He is much tougher than Obama had been,
but he was pleasant. They had no major fights, and I think he had in the back of his head to look, we're reasonable, we can talk with each other. And it's taken him, I think, about five months to realize nothing Putin says matters. That what matters is what Putin does. And when he says to you, oh, I really like to get to a truce, but by the way, for the next three days, I'm going to bomb civilians. After a while begins to sink in. You know, it's
the opposite of George W. Bush. I'll never forget the day Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul, and I knew that was nuts, because you can't be a KGB lieutenant colonel have a soul. So with the whole concept of you know, somehow we try to make him a Western figure, he's not. He's a Russian figure, and Russia is a different culture than Western Europe.
And so the idea of what secondary oil sanctions you're advocating for.
Well, I mean I advocate four big things, more weapons, faster and something which the German minister Preme minister said today that they'd agreed to, which has used the weapons in Russia, so you start causing him pain in his territory.
And this is the longer range weapons, allowing them more range.
We've begun to give them weapons that can reach Russia, and of course they have lots of They're going to produce some astonishing number of drones this year. Yeah, I mean what I think, like a million five or something. I mean, people forgot Ukraine used to be a major industrial center for the Soviet Union. There's a lot of engineers in Ukraine, a lot of hardworking, smart people, and they now mobilize and fighting. I think, so second, you
give them permission to fight inside Russia. Third, you apply very severe sanctions on particularly sale of oil, which is their only currency that they generated, any hard currency. And fourth, I would start picking up all of the ships that are carrying illegal oil and just literally let it be known worldwide. You know, if you if you own a ship and you use it to carry Russian oil, you're going to lose the ship and we're gonna We're gonna
basically impound it forever. And at that point, his method of hiding from the sanctions collapses, his ability to sell within the sanctions collapses.
Uh.
And then the other thing I would do, which has some legal implications, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer, so I don't worry about that, is I would take the three hundred billion that is impounded in the West of Russian money, I give it all to Ukraine.
What has been the reticence of That's what I mean. It's interesting that Trump didn't move more aggressively to do that, or is it part of a tactical negotiation?
State Departminent Treasury will tell you there are all sorts of complicated questions about doing that, to which my answer, in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition is fine, let them fight it out in court. Take the money.
I appreciate it. Well, that's a perfect segue into your new book, Trump's Triumph, because I think a lot of that is sort of reflected, sort of this notion of action and moving beyond process and having a more entrepreneurial mindset in terms of governance, et cetera. But let's frame this book. This book comes out on June third, it's your how many, mister speakers, Seriously, how many books have you written?
Well, I'm told forty four. So are you?
And you're you're writing all these books. You actually write these books.
You have help, but I write all these books.
And this one unsurprising that you'd come out with a book about Trump's triumphs, but you But what surprised me a little bit is this notion that you place them as one of the five giants up there with Jackson and Jefferson and people like Lincoln and Fdr himself. I mean, is that your your current belief or is that one that reflects.
I believe that since the summer of twenty fifteen, because I watched him do two things that were kind of amazing. One was tap into the deeply felt emotions of at least half the country and particularly and this is one of the great ironies that I know you're wrestling with and I've heard you talk about it. You know, we're having this switch of which party is the working class party and which party is the elite party. Well, Trump intuited this, and people forget he had thirteen years of
doing The Apprentice at NBC. He was a natural salesman and a natural showman, so his instinct was to go right for the blue collar worker. And he did two things. In August of twenty fifteen. Vince Haley, who's now the Domestic Policy director at that time, was working with us, and he walked in one day in August and said, you have to see the c SPAN coverage of Trump in Arizona because Trump is talking about illegal immigration. And then he invites the father of a young man who's
been killed to come up on stage. And then Trump steps way back and allows this guy to have like five or ten minutes on stage. Was a willingness to give up the spotlight that most people watch Trump will thinks not likely and that most politicians would find very scary to give control of the microphone to this person.
And I watched the dynamics of that. And then you may remember the very first debate Chlis and I were watching in our living room and there was the one where he got this really nasty, embarrassingly personal.
Fight and was this the Megan Kelly Kelly?
I mean, it was just it was kind of like, ooh, I don't yeah, nothing about them.
I thought that was it. I thought it was over.
They were racing to the bottom, and I think he got there first. And which is a line actually that a year later somebody would use to describe the fight with Hillary in the last month that she was going towards the bottom, but we thought we could beat her to it. So so anyway, so we watched this debate and everybody, mean Frank once had a focus group. They all thought Trump had lost. Everybody, like you know, everybody
at our level thought Trump had lost. Watching these various online things and he's at seventy and eighty percent out of sixteen, and I'm thinking, I wait a second, that there's a mismatch here between everyday Americans and the elites on a grant, on a giant scale. And at that point I decided that what you had was a phenomenon who had somehow tapped into a core desire of the American people that they wanted to have a leader who
would profoundly change Washington. And in Trump you had somebody who, by personality and by background, was pretty enthusiastic. I mean, he's always wanted to be a person of consequence, and you know, if you're the guy who breaks up the Rooseveltian system after ninety years, you get to be a
person of consequence. And so it fit what his particular half of the country wants, it fit what I think is a historic necessity as a conservative, a political leader, and it fit you know, his personal desire to have a prime he wondered. And it's very interesting to think back to this in terms of the politicians you've known. His slogan wasn't Trump. His slogan was make America great again. So he was picking a topic bigger than himself within
what he could grow. And I think after surviving the two assassination attempts, he really personally believes that God spared his life for the purpose of actually achieving that. So I would My point is not whether you like him or just like him, but if you look at the great change agents, they really are. Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln and FDR. And I think there's a fifty to fifty chance. It's not a certainty yet. And I've told him, you know,
all he did was he earned a ticket to the dance. Now, if he dances well enough and he wins the twenty sixth election, then I'll learn a ticket to winning the twenty eight election. And then which will probably be JD. Vans on our side. And if we get the Trump vice president's only forty years old. If we get the Trump vice president on top of the Trump president, see, then he will be in a league with those guys.
We're going to get to that, and we'll get to twenty six in a second. But I want to go back a little bit.
I'm not doing your show, Fish, and by the way, you only thinking about it.
No, All I want to say is I'm grateful you're here. This is a hell of the thing that the two of us are having this conversation. So take me back. It's interesting, you know, and you're absolutely right, and I appreciate because we had Frank Lunz on and I want to talk a little bit about what Frank talked about in a minute a little bit going back the contract with America, et cetera. But Frank made that point about those focus groups. But I want to I'm curious your
point of view. Then with Trump. You must have known him tangentially. But you were the leader of the as you said yourself a second ago, conservative movement. Here's a former Democrat, kind of all over the place, no strong ideological mornings necessarily. I mean, you must have been pretty distrustful early on. Were you of Donald Trump? You weren't, for sure.
I've known Trump for a quarter century.
Right, Uh, politics, though he wasn't always a line.
I knew him back when he's a businessman. He was a very noisy businessman. And I'd read his two books, which I'd recommend everybody. If you want to understand Trump, you read The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback. Comebacks the more important of the.
Two, because it opens up with some very telling lines.
It's amazing. He opens up with, Uh, my property in Atlantic City's losing money. The economy is going down because of Iraq. I'm nine hundred million dollars in debt personally to the banks, and my wife just called and said, you wanted a divorce. And he has this great line. He says, this is the moment you either get depressed or you plan a comeback. This book is about that, which also tells you a lot about how he survived the last four years.
That's right.
This is a guy who's resilient on a scale that is historic. We first talked with him Pliston and I had breakfast with him in Des Moines, in all places, in February of twenty fifteen, and we talked about running for president because we'd run in twelve and learned the hard way that if the other guy has many millions more than you bet on the money. But I learned a lot of out running for president.
Even though you won easily by any objective measure, you want all those NAMN debates.
At least enough TV, the ads cout on do the debates.
For me. It was a wonderful learning experience, and I think in my willingness to take on the news media head on, I was probably a forerunner for Trump's invention of fake pop news. Well, we talked at length about running and it was very interesting, and you could tell that he had now moved from that would be an interesting thing to kind of a businessman thinking through what would it take, how much would it cost, how would
you structure it? And so I watched his development all through fifteen, and I I wasn't particularly pro Trump at that point, right, Frankly, if you remember, Jeb Bush was the front runner, He had the most.
Money, hundred million in a pack, he had his father and.
His brother, he had nationwide name mighty, and watching Trump psychologically take him apart low energy the case study, well, he got so far inside Jeb's head. The Jeb is running around New Hampshire in shorts jogging. Now the average New Hampshire writing regards the idea of a presidential candidate who's jogging has disqualification on ground just automatically, which which was really unfortunate. Jeb's actually was a very good reform
governor of Florida. But Trump just had this ability to somehow set the stage where you couldn't win.
Uh.
And it's a it's a very unusual capability.
So it's interesting. So I appreciate in twenty fifteen you started, I mean there was sort of the dance of sort of developing more of this formal relationship as it relates to the political and said, did you find him particularly policy driven then was he inquisitive in terms of tactics policy.
Look, he's talking about tariffs forty years ago. Yeah, true, talking about immigration, I mean the whole He's talking about the corruption of washermen. There are some basic themes. But what I was going to say, though, is, and this may help you understand where I'm coming from. Trump is not a conservative, right. Trump is the best anti liberal politician in my lifetime, better than Reagan. Reagan was the
great conservative articulator. I sort of stood on his shoulders with the Contract with America, and we came out of a formed philosophical background. Trump understands that the current doesn't work and that the woke phase of the American left is totally destructive of the American system. This is my view, obviously, and therefore he is prepared to fight everybody I want
to fight. Now. The fact that he doesn't read Bill Buckley and he doesn't have a National Review subscription, I don't care because I know that instinctively he'll get up every morning and think, you know what part of the left can I take apart today? And one day it'll be Harvard, and another day will be The New York Times, and another day it'll be some bureaucracy, but every day he will cheerfully go out and engage and tear apart the people who I think need to be torn apart.
So I'm very happy to have a non conservative, anti liberal, entrepreneurial activist with all the skills of a great businessman.
Well so, at peril, I jump right into the book and get chapters and chapters ahead. He's also taking on things that you've champion. I mean, you've highlighted in the book the importance of of genomics and synthetic biology and discovery and invest you know in R and D, the issues obviously with DARPA, et cetera. I mean, how concerned, including by the way, you just did a documentary with your wife on of all things, four letter word for
some of your friends PBS. Very proud PVS to me, but on journey to America on immigration, and so I'm curious just that tension. I get this sort of owning the lib and liberalism more broadly defined. But where do you are you? Where are you in this.
Sort of I think I think when everything shakes out, let's start with immigration. Trump is as pro legal immigration as he is anti illegal immigration. I mean, two of his wives are foreign born. His mother came from Scotland. Uh, you know he he's not going to jump up and down. And he has said openly, I mean he's come up with this idea of this five million dollar you know, avenue to America.
What happened to that?
Well, I suspect it will be implemented. He wants the money. I'm not sure his calculations are right.
Yeah, No, that's a little generous.
Enough people show up to make it a big deal. But Canada and other countries have had very similar, smaller scale example proudgets. There's no question that the most aggressive pieces of the Trump coalition would do things that I would regard as destructive. There's also no question if you look at, for example, the caliber of the people he's appointed at the Center for Disease Control or for the National Institute of Health. These are very smart, very senior people.
And and I just had a conversation with the new head of NIH, who clearly wants to clean out the underbrush. But and I say this as a guy who, while balancing the federal budget for four years in a row, the only time in one hundred years, we doubled the size of nih Well balancing the budget so deeply in science. But I'll also tell you it's now a big It kept growing. So what we doubled was the baseline from which it just kept growing. And it's a big bureaucratic
system with a lot of ballogne. I mean, when you're paying sixty five percent more than the grant so that Harvard or Stanford or somebody can pay for overhead, there's a lot you can do that doesn't hurt genuine reform.
You also have a big problem which I don't know how they're going to solve, and that is they've gotten into this ropidope system where people will file for a research project, not reach the conclusion because they've already filed for continuing and if they reached the conclusion, they have to go out and find a whole new topic. That's a fair amount of stating down research by your rocratizing it. So I mean, I'm passionate about this stuff. I'll give
you one other example. I am totally committed to space. I have been since in nineteen eighty one, I introduced the Northwest Ordinance for the Moon, saying that if you got to a certain population, you could apply for statehood, which at that time people thought was nuts. Now they still think it's nuts, but not quite as nuts.
I remember you in the debates talking about space and we were wondering what the you know, you were on the edge there, so you have been you consistent.
I'm just glad that Elon came along and maybe doable. And I'll give you an example. When the starship actually gets settled down and works properly, it has thirty three engines, it produces two point three times as much thrust as the Saturn five the rocket went to the Moon two point three times as much. So your choice is to go with the traditional NASA spend an amazing amount of money and maybe get two people in the surface of
the moon. Or this thing will lift one hundred people or one hundred and fifty tons, so you could put fifty to seventy people on the Moon in one bite. I mean, just boom.
But to your point, that requires ns It requires all of the innovation and entrepreneurs I mean, it requires research institutions, It requires presumably institutions of higher learning as well. Are you concerned about what's happening in terms of those partnerships? I mean, just I think about Sandia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Labs, I think about all the R and D that's happening with military and obviously with academia. I mean, you're concerned
that there's a recklessness. I appreciate solving for issues of some abuse or some inefficiencies, but there seems to be a blunt approach.
Now, first of all, I think there is. As a historian, I would argue that when you try to make change on this scale, you're going to have very sloppy margins. You cannot move slow enough to be careful or the old order will surround you and drown you. Here here you have you have to be, which means you're going to make mistakes and you're going to screw things up. You got to go back and fix them. At the same time, I would say, uh, I really I worry
about our greatest universities. Partially I suspect the opposite of your view, which is partially I think they're so left wing now that they're virtually to tolitarian, and that they create a group think that is really destructive. And yet at one point, just a generation ago, these were the greatest centers of learning, on the planet. Uh, And it does worry me. How how do you how do you keep the best of Harvard or the best of MI
I T or the best of Stanford or Berkeley? Uh, without well at the same time taking head on the kind of ideological group think that has become literally almost to tolitarian in its unwillingness to have any competition of ideas. And I think that's a real challenge and we don't truth is, we don't have a good answer.
No, I mean, how do you square that circle? Specifically on this notion of the journey to America? And I want to talk to about the timing of that. And by the way, congratulations ninety minute documentary on PBS that's really a love letter to absorbing the best and the brightest and who we are as America in the spirit of Reagan. You talked about the life force of new Americans,
that language evocative of who we are. But now we're starting to talk about twenty seven percent of the student body as international at Harvard, and you're basically saying now you don't need to apply, and they're opening up their arms and their wallets in places like China. How do we square that?
I think it's very hard. I think that there are two conflicting things going on, and we don't talk about them very honestly. I think what's happened in much of Europe, where the culture is literally being drowned, should be a much greater alarm, and it's something you can't even talk about. But if you look at places in Britain or France, or Sweden or neighborhoods and Brussels, you're seeing basically the
end of Western civilization. So on the one hand, you have to say, are there legitimate concerns about who comes here and why they come here? The other side of that is with the Chinese. A very great deal of China's technological advance has come from American universities, where Chinese students come, learn a heck of a lot and go
back home. And if China is our biggest competitor, which I think may turn out to be exaggerated a decade from now, nonetheless, for planning purposes, they are our biggest competitor. Do you really want cal Tech and MIT to be providing the best Chinese scientists in the world so they can go back home? I those are topics that deserve
a lot deeper and more conversation. And I think I'm perfectly happy to say that there will be pieces of the Make America Great Again movement that are going to have to go back and be fixed because they're going to be destructive. Some of them are just playing going to be wrong. I mean, I'm a very big advocate for science. I wrote a piece recently on why we
should not cut science funding at NASA. For example. On the one hand, I'm totally in favor of wiping out the Space Launch System, which is stunningly expensive and has accomplished nothing. And by the way, you could probably pay for a decade of NASA science with the cost of
the Space Launch System, you know. So I think there are ways that there are good things we should protect, and that's going to lead to fights, because you're going to have some people who are clumsy or sloppy, or who ideologically are pretty cheerful about being ignorant.
I mean, I mean, look, you you talk about Doge in the book, you write about it rather and you but you write about it very in laudatory terms, but you make the point you just made as it relates to if you're going to move fast, you're going to break some things. But this notion of iteration and time to move and speed. You you even highlight old Peter Drucker talking about excellence and efficiency, which I appreciated, But I mean, what is your over under just you know,
doge in particular? Is it? You know, are you satisfied with the two trillion dollars in savings?
It will turn out to have at least two patterns. One is more noise than achievement. Yeah, uh. And the other is that it will have exposed for us a number of things that were going on that are kind of astonishing. Uh. And that you you know, so on the one.
Hand, condoms in Gaza, which you know turn out not to be the case.
What do you mean? Well, for example, it's pretty clear that I think at least ten percent of the UN refugee workers in Gaza were pro Hamas.
Oh that's separate, separate. I'm just I'm just I'm lamenting on the sort of Orwellian notion of fifty million dollars of condoms, which the President reminded me of in the Oval office, which I told him was not true.
And there's a good California, and I'm sure you fondly remember Reagan.
I do, by the way, speaker, I'm in his office every day as a point of pride.
That's well, that's right, I mean right there, right there in the governorship. Yeah. Every once in a while, Reagan would see something in the newspaper and it was click in his head. I would repeat it endlessly. I see where you're going, And now look there there's a great rookie who is a German poet once said, if you
drive away my demons, will my angels flee? Also, well, talent's with the charismatic leader of Trump's power is there's five or ten percent where you go, really, and then there's this other stuff that is amazing and historic, and you may not be able to separate the two.
Yeah or yeah, I mean I may have a different I'm maybe ninety ten of your flipped.
That's one of the reason I wanted to do the show with you. I remember when we talked about Citizenville.
Yeah, and all the ideas you had decade ago before you ran.
Into the Sacramento bureaucracy.
God bless by the way, I still tell people that's a really worthwhile book.
I appreciate you for saying that. By the way, I think so much. It's interesting. I reflected on that our conversations and a little bit on that book. As reading your book, I mean, you talk about, you know, governing,
not just campaigning. You talk about issues around efficient and effective government and more novel and I think what's always interested me about you is your willingness to lean into the future and talk about healthcare differently than others, as you did again here even highlighted my friend Dean Ornige in terms of some of his work on wellness and prevention.
These four p's. You talk about predictability and personalization in the healthcare space, but you also take on other spaces which I appreciate as well, like the old Eisenhower frame on the military industrial complex. And I'm curious, in relationship to the DOGE question, why do you think there's been so little willingness to enter into that space, even the space launch example you just gave.
I think you know, I had one fight in the first bushes of Trump's first term over HUAWEIH and what we needed to do to dramatically strengthen American telecommunications, and it's the one fight that I clearly decisively lost, and I lost it because AT and T was on the other side, and AT and T is so big, big, contributes so much money as so many lobbyists by so many TV ads that you know, I just just ran over me. It was an exciting experience, but I felt
like a lot. I felt like the guy in Tanneman Square, the tankage. So I started with that. I mean it is. I think the space launch system is one of the best examples of the sickness of the old order and what Eisenhower did warn about. I mean, people should go back and read his farewell address because he's very clear, and this guy had been a five star general commander of Allied forces in Europe as well as president, so
he had pretty good knowledge and he's saying correctly. In order to build a system big enough to defeat or contain the Soviet Empire, you have to turn over so much money and power to a bureaucracy which will then hire a big corporations that you're going to have the permanent danger that they grow together into sort of a single organism which then operates for its own benefit. And that's an enormous problem across It's a problem in healthcare too. I mean, big health in many ways is as bad
as Big Defense. And I'm working on a paper right now which will amuse you when he finally comes out talking about Trump time and Trump's savings and going back to the skating rink in New York. Yeah, city had the rink had quit making ice, which makes it very hard if your skating rink, and the city had for six years tried to fix it and spent thirteen million dollars. Trump talks about this in his first in the book, The Art of the Deal.
This is one of his great successes.
Yeah, objectively, and he says, you know, he's looking at his apartment, looks out over the rink, the woman rink, and so he finally gets so pissed off at six years they can't make ice, and he challenges the mayor publicly and says, you give it to me, and I will fix it in less than a year for under three million dollars. Well, he fixed it in four months, and we came in twenty five percent below budget, and
they already spent six and a half million. He came in twenty five percent below the three million dollar budget, totally fixed in four months. And in the book, is this great line where he says, they had this firm in Florida that had won the contract and didn't know what they were doing. And so I said to myself, who builds skating rinks? I thought Canavan? I went, oh, excuse me. So he goes to the National Hockey League
and says, who builds the skating rinks? And this is firm in Montreal And they fly down and they look at it and they go, this is really embarrassing. This is so easy to fix, you can't believe it. And when he finally got it done, somebody said what happened? He said, it wasn't magic, it was common sense and management. Well, to the degree that we could bring common sense and management,
we would. I think you could get better defense for twenty five percent less than the current defense budget if you could clean out all the bureaucracy and all the cronyism and all the bad contracts. I tell every audience if you took the Pentagon and turned it into a triangle, and took the other two thirds and turned into a museum, you would get a better defense system overnight. And the reason simple. You'll understand. This is the governor of a
state with a huge bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in nineteen forty three so that twenty six thousand people could manage World War two with carbon paper, manual typewriters and filing cabins, And in fact, Marshalls chief of staff, used to run drills to see how fast you could find paper if you needed a certain document, where is and how do you get there? Well, everybody depending on now has a smartphone, an iPad, a laptop, computer, and I have never gotten you. You might be able to get
somebody caltech to figure this out. I've never been able to get an exchange rate. That is, if you have one person over here with a carbon paper distribution and one person over here with the smartphone or an iPad or computer, what's the relative exchange rate of information flow? My guess is it's above a million. Well, just one.
You have the same twenty six thousand people. Now, since they're not filing paper and they're not writing on carbon, what they're doing is writing each other to prove that their job is important so they can stay employed. So you screw up the whole system with the person A writing person B who writes person see, who then writes person A and they beat these things to death, and exactly the way New York City was failing with the ice rate, because you have a bunch of bureaucrats who
write papers that have no meaning. And I think I helped found the Military Reform Caucus in eighty one. I helped pass the Goldwater Nichols Reform in eighty six against every active duty senior officer, none of them wanted it. Nowadays, I'll tell you it's invaluable. We need a deep, thorough review of all of our national security, not just defense, all of it. If we're going to compete in the modern world.
It just seems of all things. And you know, I appreciate the skating rate because is a reminder of under promise over deliver. And we can talk about some of those day one actions that Trump may or may not have succeeded with in a moment. But I'm curious as it relates to the issues of the Pentagon. I mean, Trump's been bold, and he's provided a lot of space for Doge and certainly Musk in the last one hundred days, but the Pentagon does seem to be off limits. I mean, is that is.
That is that accurate? I don't think so. I think I think they will presently be as ruthless as the Pentagon as they will be anywhere else.
Interesting. F thirty five comes to mind? Huh, what F thirty five comes to mind?
Actually, I've gotten real pushback on that because I was one of the people who's really critical. Yeah, but three or four people who I'm writing this paper, and I was talking about examples of cost overruns, and I've had three or four people who do not work for Lockheed, aren't part of the system, but they're very smart right back and say to me, that is an inaccurate measurement that you actually look at the plane they have built.
It has no relationship to the original contract. It is vastly superior, and the price has dropped now to about a reasonable price for a fifth generation fighter. I mean, I was shocked. I took it out of my paper because there are too many people writing me back and saying, so the other examples are terrific, this one's just dumb. It's not seconically right. It's interesting because I would have a week ago I would have said to you exactly that.
Yeah, no, it's sort of it's we throw that one around. Now.
I'm getting beaten up by people who know a lot more than I do, saying now, I have a lot of good examples in my paper, but that ain't want to.
Them, that ain't want them interesting. So all right, so you'll you'll stipulate we should see some more. I mean, obviously the Secretary of Defense has done some personnel moves, et cetera, but they seem relatively modest compared to the overall reforms that that you're advocating for. But you know, one of the things I've struck in the book, and again unsurprising, is it's been a consistent theme with you is sort of anticipating the next war, not necessarily relitigating
and reflecting exclusively on on the last one. And the issues of electron electronic EMF issues are that you've been sort of focused on issues a space in relationship to defense, et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about what you sort of positive you least promote in this book as it relates to future security on national effects, I.
Think there are three big things. The first is we need to quit talking about war fighting and think about war winning. The fact that we have great taxical capabilities and wonderfully courageous people who go for twenty one or twenty two years in a place like Afghanistan and don't win should bother us because war fighting is not the goal. War winning is the goal. And as suns Sooo wrote, the group find five hundred BC, the greatest of all
generals win bloodless victories. So you know, the the question is can America design a war winning series of strategies rather than a war fighting strategies. The second thing I would say is you have to look at all of
national security. You mentioned, for example, the real threat of electromagnetic pulse attack, and a very close friend of mine, Go Fortune, wrote a remarkable novel called One Second After, in which he shows you a village in North Carolina after electricity has been cut off by an electromatic post. I mean, it is a breathtaking book. He was actually
invited to Sandia. You'd mentioned Sandia Labs earlier. He was invited there by the physicists who were grateful that somebody could explain what they worried about, and thought his book really was a very accurate projection. So you need to think about not just the Defense Department, but the totality of national security and then in the defense department itself, I've beengun writing something which only occurred to me. By watching Ukraine. We are seeing an extraordinary change in the
nature of warfare, and none of us understanding it. I'm actually going to write a paper on Podier, Crasie and Agincoreps, which are the three great battles in the Middle Ages where the British annihilate the French because the French cannot adjust. They have to be armored knights. Their culture requires it. And the British have developed a longbow which slaughters armored knight. And that takes place over a century, and in that entire period that a culture will not allow them to change. Well,
we may have a similar problem. We like big, expensive, sophisticated long to develop long to field systems you're now up against. As I said a while ago, I think the numbers for next year are for this year for Ukraine are going to be a million, five hundred thousand drums. Now, most of them are small, most of them are simple. Most of our guys would look down their nose at them.
But Lord Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar, set a one point numbers annihilate and if you take the combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, three D printing, new specialized kinds of chemistry. There's a firm in your state actually called Divergent, which is probably the most advanced factory on the planet, far ahead of anything in China, and they use those techniques to be able to shift what they make within a matter of hours. I mean, it's astonishing
to visit them. And they're in La not far from an in and out burger, and they I measure my trips to calig But anyway, when you when you start thinking about, for example, you don't just measure the Chinese warship navy. All the Chinese merchant ships have been designed now for twenty years to be capable of launching drones. Well, if I have a ship and it happens to have forty drones on it, is that an aircraft carrier or
is that a merchant ship? And if I have eighteen hundred of them, does that count as part of my navy or is that just an auxiliary group? And how many munitions does an American ship carry? And how many drones can it stop? If the other guy's able to send endless quantities, I'm just giving you a flavor. I don't think we realize yet. You know, I talked to occasionally to the Amazon people about their use of robotics, which is part of the reason they've been able to
be so amazing. We have no notion yet of how fast the modern battlefield is going to become and how complicated it's going to become. And our current bureaucracies, in our current procurement system makes it very difficult to be agile enough. And frankly, excuse me, the dominance of these big corporations, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, what have you read you on makes it very hard to have the kind of entrepreneurial change that you've seen in Silicon Valley for
your entire lifetime. You know, it's the small company today that's the giant company in twenty years. And if you can't grow the small companies because they can't get through the Defense Department's paperwork, then you're not ever going to have the rate and rhythm of innovation that you need.
No, And that's something you highlight sort of that framework of iteration, the sandbox and procurement reform, which is so foundational and it's it's really it's about you know, it's the incumbency racket. You talk about incumbency capitalism versus innovation capitalism, and that sort of innovation capitalism is a big part of what we focus on and obviously I think is part of the secret sauce to your point of Silicon Valley.
I'm curious just going back a little bit, and you know, and we're bouncing around a little bit here, but again back to timing, because Journey to America, you did it with your wife, and you guys have done how many documentaries? Now, you've done forty.
Four books'n we've done ten movies, and I've done forty four books. She and I have done I think four or five of them together. She wrote six children's books. Yeah, about Elis the Elephant and American history. Yeah. Well, Peignaterton because you know, she's a music major. She was a piano major, plays the French horn, spent twenty years in a professional choir at the Basilica in Washington. Uh So that's her natural background. Then she was a clerk in
the Agriculture Committee in the House. And she, you know, she works really hard. She works much harder than I do.
And tune in for the rest of the conversation with New Gingrich