Ted Cruz Reveals What Trump Told Him Behind Closed Doors | PBD Podcast #851

0:00So I'm asleep and Matthew McConaughey comes rushing into our bedroom. He jumps on our bed, on all fours, and he's jumping up and down. Do you think there's anything you could have done to beat a guy like Donald Trump? Why are you saying that? There was a moment in the campaign that when I lay in bed and think back about, I think of as the most consequential way. So let me ask you, are you saying this to me because if you would have gone up against Hillary, you think you would have beaten him? Absolutely. You think you would have beaten a worse than Trump beat Hillary? The day of the meeting, Markov can't stop the meeting. No explanation. No explanation, just I'm not comfortable with. As he said this publicly, if he has, I have not seen him say it. Who supports you on the Republican side that Trump doesn't have? Do you know I'm asking that question? Do you want me to give you the reason why I'm asking the question? Sure. They know if they give their vote to the wrong person, a socialist could be a president in 2028. That's human. They just hate Donald Trump and they want to burn it all down. Why?

1:01It's confusing to me. Hucker is the single most dangerous devagog in America. He now says Donald Trump is the antichrist. That is a lot of things, but that ain't conservative in that A in America. Why can't we just go audit everybody and find it out? The anti-Semitic protests on college campuses, Cutter and China are both funding them. Again, I don't know that. How do you know? Is that factual? To weed out the people? I get frustrated out of my mind with people who say they're conservative. And they go to office and they turn into jellyfish. Show me what you've accomplished. Respectfully, that didn't ask my question. So I get what you want me to say. No, I want you to know. I'm someone I'm asking. We've became friends. We're making the case of Trump. And in the middle of it, that is when Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. I learned some curse words I didn't even know. That's the moment I will never forget of just like, OK, there's a hand grenade thrown in the middle of everything. I'm a very easy guy to understand.

2:02I actually believe this shit. There is an advantage to building a reputation for being willing to blow things up. Nobody thinks you're bluffing. OK, so it's great to be sitting down with a podcaster here. Very famous podcaster. He happens to be a senator as well as Senator Ted Cruz, but he's the only guy that's also a podcaster. So it's great to have you on. Pat, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Yes. Likewise, I'm looking forward to the conversation for the folks that are watching. I know he just came out with a book going further. I think August 25th, the incomparable clearance Thomas already number one on Amazon. If you haven't ordered it, we're going to put the link below. There's also a great interview with them, which maybe we put down as well at the end. If you want to go learn more about them, I thought the interview was great. So I want to start off with some tough questions at first. And then we go to the easy ones. OK, good. Let's go into it. You've been visiting Ohio. Iowa, you've been visiting some of the earlier states. You've been making endorsements. You've been kind of playing around with the stuff that's going off for 2028. I'm not going to ask if you're going to be running or not.

3:02I think if I'm a betting man, I'm guesstimating. You're going to be running for 2028. But if I were to hire you as a consultant, I'm going to run for office in 2028. I hire Cruz Consulting. Give me three to five issues to be running on in 2028. What do you think those issues should be? The fact that it starts with sitting down and talking to a little old lady who looks you in the eyes and said, are you telling me the truth? Are you lying to me? I don't want to hear talking points. I want to know who you are. I want to understand what kind of man you are. That process is really important. Look at Iowa when I ran the last time. Corn is kind of a big deal. And I am against subsidies. I'm against mandates. I think that's a bad idea for the federal government to do. So I am opposed to the ethanol mandate. Now, there's a whole big lobby in Iowa that is really strongly in favor of the ethanol mandate.

4:05And I remain to this day the only person in history to ever win Iowa opposed to the ethanol mandate. And the way I did it, and I had a lot of those Iowa corn farmers who ended up when they listened to what I had to say, they ended up supporting me. And I said, look, we shouldn't have subsidies across the board. There's an exchange. You can actually find it. I think still on the internet it's about a seven minute exchange where this big ol' farmer, I think an overalls, comes up to me. And he says something like, I really hate you and I hate what you stand for. And I said, well, sir, I'm sorry about that. I'm happy to talk with you about it if you'd like. And he said, all right, and he was a corn farmer and he was mad that I was against the mandate. And I said, well, sir, if you give me a minute, I'll explain to you why. And what's interesting is after that, about that eight minute exchange where the guy started off saying, I hate you. That's how the conversation began. At the end of it, he counted nods and looks at me and says, well, that makes sense.

5:08I really like what you're saying. And it was, that's, I think that's what politics should be, is listening to the voters and having a conversation, not changing what you say or do based on just today's poll. Okay, so then question would be, you won Iowa against Trump, right? You won, I don't know how many said, 13, 14, 15, say, you won quite a few states. You won 12 states. Utah, Wisconsin, Texas, was massive lead. And then it was Indiana and then from there on, it was, you know, he became the, but you had 551 delegates. I think you had three times what Marco Rubio had at the time, but that's 2015, 2016. You guys went up against somebody that's a anomaly, one of one, you will maybe never have a guy like that ever again, disrupt that the whole thing. You know, I went back and watched some of the debates with you and him just to kind of mentally get where you guys right at that time. How different is 2028 going to be? Because I think it's a free agency election. Absolutely. The big guys out how different is the approach going to be in 2028 than 2015?

6:10I think massively different. Donald Trump is a black swan event. There is simply nobody like him. I don't think there's ever been anyone like him that I'm aware of in history. And I don't think we're going to get another Donald Trump. Like I just think he's one of a kind and he broke the moan. Going forward, I think debates are always and elections are always a debate about the future, about what do we believe where are we going to go? Where's the party going to go? Where's the country going to go? You know, if you look back for a second to that 2016 election, when it started, we had 17 Republicans in the race, big crowded race, strong field. If you were laying odds at the very beginning, let's say March or April of 2015, who was going to win? And if you had 140 million to start off with, nobody I think would have been on Donald Trump. And nobody would have been on me.

7:10We might well have been 16 and 17 in the odds. If you were in New York or DC, why not you? Because I was a brand new senator, I was at one or two percent. At the end of the day, the single best predictor of what would happen in that election was blue collar voters. You looked at the polling of blue collar voters, truck drivers, steel workers, cops, firefighters, waiters, waitresses. Blue collar voters in almost every single state. Either Trump was one and I was two. Or I was one and he was two. And it was not, but not Marco. Marco couldn't compete with blue collar voters. Why do you think? Well, remember, he had been very vocal in support of the gang of eight amnesty. And, and amnesty is a great policy if you want to impress the Republican donors. Because Republican donors love amnesty. They view illegal immigrants as cheap labor. And Marco's strategy, he had joined up with the Democrats in the gang of eight to propose massive

8:13amnesty. I'd led the fight against the gang of eight amnesty. It was terrible. That's why all the donors like Marco, but the actual people whose jobs are being lost to illegal immigrants, they were pissed at him for it. And, and if you look at how that shook out, the states where I was one and Trump was two with blue collar voters are the 12 states I won. The states where he was one and I was two are the 24 states he won. And no other Republican won more than a single state. Kasek won Ohio, Rubio won Minnesota, and Trump and I won every other state in the country. And it was blue collar voters. And then you fast forward to the general. You know, I had had a million conversations where people say, okay, how do you win the general? How do you beat Hillary? And at the time, people thought Hillary was this unbeatable juggler. And my answer was twofold. I said number one, blue collar voters.

9:13And number two, evangelical voters. In 2008 and 2012, both of them stayed home. When John McCain was the candidate, when Mitt Romney was the candidate, evangelicals and blue collar voters, they didn't vote for Barack Obama. They just stayed home. They didn't like the candidates. They weren't inspired. They weren't energized. They didn't come out and vote. And my view was if you turn them out, if you energize them, if you give them a reason to be excited, that's how you win. People would ask me, what states can you win in 16 that McCain and Romney lost? And I would say, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, right up and down the rust belt. Those states, I remember on election day 2016, November 2016, so I'm out of it. I've been beaten. But we're having an election night party in Houston. I'm sitting there with my team and we're watching the results. And as Trump's general election results come in,

10:15those are exactly the states he's winning. And it just goes right down the list. And my wife Heidi, who is my best friend on planet Earth, as it's happening, she looks at me and she goes, I'll be damned. And I'm like, what? And she said, I've sat next to you a thousand times where you've told people, here's how you win the general. You win these states. I never knew you were right. Like what you were saying is, he's telling you she's telling me, yeah, I'd look, I mean, I totally get it. No, but you're married. You know, your wife, you're like, you say something, your wife's trying to be nice. She's kind of, maybe, but I don't know. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very 16 plus.

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12:34Get started at Vanta.com. For the tools you use every day. Plus, hands on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify. So this is election night while they're announcing him winning the states and she's realizing you were right about the states. So let me ask you, are you saying this to me because if you would have gone up against Hillary, you think you would have beaten her? Absolutely. You think you would have beaten her worse than Trump Eat Hillary? I don't know. I will say this. Look, if you look at how the party has shifted.

13:37In the last decade, the most consequential shift has been a socio-economic shift. That the old conventional wisdom was that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor in the working class. Now, I don't know if that was ever true. But if it was, it is totally flipped today. Today, the Democrats are the party of rich coastal elites. They're the party of billionaire hedge fund managers and billionaire tech leaders and Hollywood and academics. And today, the Republican party is a blue collar party. That's something Trump accelerated profoundly. That's something I've been fighting for from the day I got there. My base from the very first day I ran has always been blue collar worker. Those have always been my peeps and the elites, the establishment have fought like crazy against me from day one. That shift, I think, is really, really significant.

14:41I want us to be the party of workers, the party of jobs. And here's the path that is unbeatable. So blue collar voters moving right has made states that used to be purple more red. You take a state like Ohio. Ohio back in the bush years, but was permanently purple. It was like right on the edge. Missouri was another purple state, the show me state. Both of them, at least prior to this cycle and they're getting more purple this cycle. But let's take, let's take 24, the last presidential. Both of them were bright red. Trump won them by a big march. That's because they have a heavy blue collar population and that dynamic move them more right. There is a counter-cutting demographic move, which is suburban voters, particularly suburban women have moved left significant. And it's a lot of suburban women are not fans of President Trump. And you've seen that in states like Georgia and Arizona and Texas.

15:44So Georgia, one of the most suburban states in America, most of the population are in the suburbs surrounding Atlanta. You know, Georgia a few years ago had two Republican senators today. It has two Democrats senators. Arizona, most of the population is the suburbs around Phoenix, Maricopa County. Arizona, a few years ago, had two Republican senators today. It has two Democrats senators. That dynamic, whether we win a state, depends on the intersection of those two vectors. If the blue collar voters moving right outweighs the suburban women moving left, we win. But I'll say this, the killer general election coalition is if you can turn blue collar voters out, but do it in a way that doesn't scare suburban women away from you. And if you can bring some of those suburban women back, that's an unbeatable general election. Okay, so two questions for you. One, when you go back, you know how anytime I go and I'm doing a deal and I lose the deal,

16:44we do a debrief and we say, you know, what could we have done? And blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Do you think there's anything you could have done to beat a guy like Donald Trump? Anything. Trump generated an excitement and ended up being seen as an even bigger disruptor than I was. So that was one piece that was unanticipated. And I don't know that we could have anticipated that. There was a second component, which is the free media in that election. So in the 2016 election, my campaign raised $92 million of hard money. That is still the most money any Republican has ever raised in the history of presidential private. What I did not anticipate is the free media that the media would give Trump Trump received over $3 billion with a B in free media. They just covered him constantly. And it ultimately in the last 30 days of the election before I dropped out,

17:47Trump had $500 million of free media, 90% of which was positive. And that proved to be a tsunami that you could not overcome. Do you think the Democrats at the time were thinking, you know, there's no way Trump's going to win? Let's give him so much because they're going to take out crews and crews, you think that's what was a, and then a backfire on them? So we actually know that because if you look at the WikiLeaks from the Hillary campaign, the Hillary campaign talking to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN said elevate Trump because he's the worst candidate and we can beat Trump. So push Trump. And they did. And at the same time, Fox made the decision to go in all in behind Trump. And so it ended up, it was just this $92 million is a lot of money unless you have $3 billion on the other side. And that proved, that proved too much to stop. Now that being said, when, you know, you asked about what could have been done differently.

18:48There was a moment in the campaign that when I lay in bed and think back about the road not taken, I think of as the most consequential road, which is coming into the Florida primary. We were getting ready for the Florida presidential debate. And the day before the Florida presidential debate, my team did some polling. And we pulled in particular what happens if Marco Rubio and I joined forces? If we were on as a ticket with him as my VP. Marco doesn't know you guys are speaking. You haven't approached him yet. First, we just do the poll to see what the numbers are. So we do the poll and the numbers are compelling. I mean, remember Trump at the time was winning states with a plurality with 28, 30, 32 points. So you had 70% who were not voting for him. And Marco and I running as a ticket, what it did is it unified the non-Trump vote. You get the other 60. And so what happened, we looked particularly, our campaigns have always been intensely data-driven.

19:54We looked at the numbers. If Marco and I had joined together, we would not have won Florida. We would have won it on election day, but there were already enough early votes that were banked that Trump would have won Florida regardless. But at the same time, we would have won North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois by double digits. I mean, the effect on the numbers was massive. So I did the natural thing. We saw the poll and my team delivered it to Marco and I said, hey, we had to sit down and talk. And Pat, it was very, it was very cloak and dagger. It was the day before the Florida debate. And we were both in Miami. We were both staying at hotels. We picked this like little motel halfway between our hotels. And the plan was to come and meet and talk. The day of the meeting, Marco cancels me. Just says, I'm not coming.

20:57No explanation. No explanation, just I'm not coming. Which was frustrating. Is this public information? Yeah, I've told this story since then. But it was frustrating. And actually, Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, Mike is my closest friend in the Senate. I love Mike like a brother. Mike is also very good friends with Marco. In fact, they used to be roommates. They were in a house together. Mike had deliberately stayed out of the presidentially head endorsed anyone because Mike said, look, there's going to come a time when he felt he needed to broker the peace between me and Marco. And so Mike had stayed out. Mike flew down to Miami to be there in that meeting. So Mike was just going to be there when Marco and I talked. And listen, I don't want to overstate it. I did not offer the VP slot to Marco. Because we never had the conversation. But at one rocket science, you looked at the polling and the results just leapt off the page. I think it changes the entire outcome of the meeting. Have you ever confronted Marco on this? After Trump won when we were back 2017,

21:57I asked Marco to go out to dinner. And I just said, hey, man, why did you never come to the meeting? Like, why did we never have the conversation? And his response, he said, well, I just think Trump was unbeatable. That nothing would beat him and there was nothing we could do to change. Has he said this publicly? If he has, I have not seen him say it. Okay. So he thought Trump was in his eyes, Trump is unbeatable. In your eyes, collectively, we could have beaten him. You know, you could speculate that Marco's team told him, look, if Trump's the nominee, Hillary will crush him. Because that's what they believed in. Hillary was the inevitable. Hillary will be president. And then in four years, Marco, you'll come back as the golden child and be the nominee for your certainly. That's what I imagine his team told him. But it sure would have been nice to have had that conversation. So he would have been the VP, you would have been the president.

22:58And that's kind of how you guys would have gone. Yeah. That would have been very formidable. That would have been very interesting. And if the announcement was made earlier now, let me ask the question maybe in a different way. So when I think about leaders, I put them in four different categories. I give them a likability score. I give them a respect score, fear score, and a love score. Trump is feared because Trump will attack you hard. Oh yeah. So Trump's got UN Marco beat and fear. You guys can compete against him in the fear side. He will come for your throat and use any words possible. We're not accustomed to this as a president talking like that. That doesn't never happen. No president has been like him. No president has spoken like him. So that naturally UN Marco tried to talk like him. You guys feel you can't talk like him. That's his world. Is that a fair assessment? Because I would tweak it slightly. I think Marco tried to talk like it. Like for example, he came and said Trump had little hands and tried to like insult him.

23:59I don't think I went down that road. I decided not to emulate Trump. And we actually talked about like his nicknames were very effective. We talked about as a team. Do you come up with a nickname for Trump and we came up with a whole bunch of different ones. And I said, you know what, this is not real. What was the best one? Oh, you know, I didn't mean one of them. It's not worth going into it. You got to, you cannot leave the audience hanging with them. Listen, we went through things like, you know, crooked Donald. Oh, like the crooked Hillary similar thing. Before he'd done crooked Hillary. Oh, you were going to do crooked before he did it. That we batted around some insult name because he'd come up with Lion Ted. Which by the way, look, Trump has a marketing genius that is instinctual. And if you look at that race, my number one strength is that voters trusted me. That they believed I would do what I said that I was telling the truth.

25:00It's what made Lion Ted true genius because it was literally going right at the biggest strength of your opponent and undermining it. It did real damage. We went through lots of insults for Trump and brainstorm. And I said, you know what, it's just not me. I'm not someone that stands up there in insults. And I think voters can tell if you're not in that. But is it fair to say if you guys go pound for pound in, you know, rage baiting comments, you're not going to be Trump. Is that a fair assessment right? Absolutely. And I never intend to go. Great. But what I did do is I went head to head to him in debates on issues and substance. And if you look at in that campaign after every debate, my numbers went up. But likeability, where would you score yourself or the importance of being unlikable as a candidate to win as a presidency? Look, likeability certainly matters. I will say there is a differential that is a partisan differential because the way the American people

26:04perceive candidates comes through the lens of the media filter. And the media filter is massively different if you're a Republican or if you're a Democrat. So in the media world, every Republican is one of two things. You're either stupid or you're evil. And they put them into those two categories. So stupid. In their telling, George W. Bush was stupid. Dan Quail was stupid. Ronald Reagan was stupid. Got it. Evil. Dick Cheney was evil. Richard Nixon was evil. Trump is evil. By the way, between the two, stupid is better. Historically, stupid has been in less damaging. But they put you in one of the two categories. Which one do they put you in? They put me in evil. Yeah. I know you're not stupid. Units. Those are the only two categories. So what I would say on the question of likeability, because they've driven the whole narrative.

27:05By the way, they say just about every Republican they say is unlikable. That's part of their evil. I don't know if I agree with that. I'll push back a little bit. I don't know if I like to me. I would say Marco Rubio comes across very likable. Marco is very charming. Yeah, give me a second. I'm actually curious on where you're going with this. Give me a second example though. Give you a second example of likability. Yeah. I think there's a part of a president Trump that's very likable. Not according to the media. Look, I like... No, not according to the media. So if I went based on media, there's a lot of things that would be believing that's different. No, I think let's even talk to Republican voters. Just take Republicans independence. A 12% that maybe matters. I think people would say Trump is likable. When you're with them, there is a... I think Trump is hysterical. I like him a lot. Right. But you know what? I know him. You know him. If you know him. I'm saying the media narrative that they devote millions of barrels of ink. I think it's a very different world today, Senator. Respectfully, I think today he went on Theo Vaughan and you're like, I freaking like this guy.

28:06He went on a bunch of these jokes that he does would roguen and you'll like him. He went on shouts, you'll like him. There's a certain level of likability. You're right. The insight... I'm agreeing with you. But the insight you're having is if you want to get through to the people, you have to go around the gatekeepers, around the media that are trying to portray one specific image. And I think Trump did a very good job. Look, it's one of the reasons why I do a podcast every week. And I've got millions of people who listen to my podcast. It's one of the reasons I do podcasts like yours because you can actually get around the gatekeepers and talk to people. How do you view yourself when it comes on to likability for 2028? Look, my job is to communicate who I am and what I believe. I can tell you that when I go give a speech, when I go sit down with people one-on-one or in a group or breakfast or lunch or dinner and I talk to them, some of the most frequent comments I get is, holy crap, you're nothing like I thought you would be.

29:08You're supposed to be this crazy bomb thrower with dynamite strapped your chest. Like, I like to laugh. I like to cut up. You know, I'm on social media a lot. I'm a complete smart ass on Twitter. By the way, there's a general principle. So I do have a social media team. Social media team has the authority. They send tweets for me. If there's a tweet that is say, you know, write up the fairway, you know, if there's a tweet, we should secure our border. That's probably my team. They know what I believe and they send them. If there's a tweet that's just smart ass and getting in trouble, that is almost certainly me on my phone typing it in. So like a couple of years ago, when the whole Eric Swalwell thing broke, I sat down and I said, look, I can't count how many times I've said, screw the Chinese communists. Little did I know how closely Eric Swalwell was listening to. See that? You're very good with that though. See, that's the thing though. And I don't mind it.

30:09You're witty, you're sarcastic. You have that. Like, I can already picture what you were like at 20 years old. That's 16 years old. I see that childlike side of yours, right? But I don't know if I've seen you go in and sitting down with podcasts that maybe a little bit to get into in front of a new audience. Maybe that's going to be the strategy in 20, 7, 20, 8. I don't know. Maybe you're going to go and sit down and talk to those guys. But I think the game plan, okay? So now let's go to 20, 20, 8. If we go into 20, 28, what are the it factors? I wrote a few things down. I wasn't even prepared for this. I think number one, I want to ask you how much you think this matters. Number one is Trump's endorsement. Okay? Number two is money. Number three is likeability. Number four is how bad the president is doing at that time. Because, you know, if the economy is bad, the endorsement doesn't mean that much. You know how that works out? It's just kind of how it is. You know, so where do you put Trump's endorsement in whoever's going to be the next president in 20, 28?

31:11There's no question that President Trump's endorsement is enormously consequential. It carries a great deal of weight. I don't think it will be decisive in the presidential race. It carries weight. But I think the voters are going to make their own determination. And I think it is one thing President Trump has is very effective when he's on the ballot making the case for voting for Donald Trump. The simple reality is none of us are Donald Trump. And the voters don't think any of us are Donald Trump. And to be clear, this is not going to be an election where it's a never-trump election. I think there is no never-Trump lane in the Republican Party. Like maybe it's Liz Cheney and six people. But it's not there's no lane that matters that is a never-Trump lane. So the chances of a messy Tucker, where do you put that? Might they run sure? I think they have no prospect for success. And I think, look, Tucker and and messy, they just hate Donald Trump.

32:16And they want to burn it all down. Why, though? You have to know your NDC, it's confusing to me. Why is that? I have my own speculations, but I want to hear from you. Yeah, look, I don't know why if you look at Tucker. And I have been very, very outspoken on Tucker. I think Tucker is the single most dangerous damagog in America. I think he is doing enormous damage. And I think he has made a decision to go to a very dark place where Tucker right now, Tucker is almost indistinguishable for Milano Maher. If you look at what he is saying, almost every show he does is attacking Israel and attacking the Jews. His answer for everything wrong in life is the Jews did it, the Judas did it, the Jews did it. Half the shows he's done are attacking Donald Trump. He now says Donald Trump is the anti-Christ. He hates Donald Trump. One of the reasons this is so dangerous is that I believe anti-Semitism is the gateway drug

33:19to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism. That it quickly leads to all three. And you see that with Tucker. Look, you see that with Comrade Mondami in New York, where the Marxist and Islamists, the green red alliance, they come together. And they come together because they hate the same people. You have Tucker who's now done shows praising Comrade Mondami. He's done shows praising Nicholas Maduro. He's done shows praising Putin repeatedly. He's done shows with the president of Iran that were basically a love fest. He's done shows defending Sharia law. That is a lot of things, but that ain't conservative and that ain't American. And the problem is Tucker, a lot of young people listen to him. And there's a whole cloud of influencers that are around him that are Candace and Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene and now Massey has jumped into it that are telling young people

34:26that they hate Israel, they hate Trump, and they're very quickly getting to and they hate America too. I think that's dangerous as hell. And so I made a decision about a year ago that I'm going to stand up and fight this because I don't want that to be my party and I don't want that to be my country. And I will say in the Senate, most of my colleagues, the Republican colleagues in the Senate have told me privately, Ted, you're exactly right. I agree with you. And yet almost none of them are willing to say it because he's got one hell of a megaphone. Look, if you pull up my Twitter right now, I have, if I tweet good morning, I will get hundreds of anti-Semitic responses. Like it unleashes a constant barrage, most politicians are scared of criticism so they don't do something that results in criticism because they're scared of their own shadow. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor that the simplest explanation is usually the best.

35:28I'm a very easy guy to understand. I actually believe this shit. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe it with all my heart. And so standing up against what's they're doing, I think man matters in order. Have you ever had dinner with Tucker? Have I had dinner with Tucker? No, I have not had dinner with him. Have you guys broke bread? Have you guys had one on one? A couple hours sitting down at his place. At your place has there ever been a relationship between the two of you? So I have known Tucker for 25 years. We've never been terribly friendly. We haven't been overtly antagonistic when he had his Fox show. And by the way, I've reached out. I've invited him and he's not had a whole lot of interest in getting to know me. He has never been a fan of mine. I've done his Fox show a number of times. Inevitably, when you do his Fox show, you would know that he would come at me and he would come at me trying to paint me as insufficiently conservative, trying to attack me as B. And I did his show periodically knowing that

36:32he was going to be more hostile than meet the press was going to be. He was going to be more hostile than CNN. But I would do it anyway. Any typically failed in trying to prove that I wasn't really a conservative because I am a conservative. Tucker changed. He had had two rather odd shows that at the time I thought were just a weird aberration. And they were both defending Nazis. So he had one crackpot professor on who said there's a good argument that Winston Churchill is the villain of War War II and Tucker kind of owed an odd when that happened. And then he had a different crackpot professor on who said there's a very good argument the United States should have intervened in War War II on behalf of the Nazis. And we should have supported Adolf Hitler. And again, Tucker nodded. And those were kind of weird outliers. But he did not have this obsession with Israel,

37:32Israel, Israel that he now has. I think the show exists to attack. What happened though? Like you have friends that know him. What happened with that? I don't know. I will say following the interview with me, which by the way was both unhinged going after Israel and also utterly fact free. So listen, Tucker does a show where facts don't matter. So at one point I said, well, the IOTOLE is actively trying to kill Donald Trump. He's like, no, he's not. That's not true. That's simply not true. And I frankly wasn't prepared for an engaged person in public policy to just lie. It is true. There are two different instances of hit squads that the IOTOLE had hired to murder Trump. The IRGC put out a video that they made an animated video of a drone coming and attacking Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And they put it out from their own own language. And by the way, we now have at least one person convicted and in jail for being an Iranian hitman hired

38:39by the nation of Iran to kill Trump. Well, Tucker just insists it's not true. It's not true. You're just lying. It just didn't happen. And then bizarrely he said, and if it was true, well, then we should nuke Iran. I'm like, okay, no, that's stupid. It is true, but no, the right answer is not to nuke Iran. No one's saying that. And like two weeks later, he had the president of Iran on. Complete love fest. You know what I didn't ask him once? Why are you trying to murder President Trump? Like facts did not matter. So what happened? I don't know. But I will say the most common explanation I hear is that almost everyone I know believes he's being paid by Qatar. And he's being paid tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't have any proof of that. I have access to I know Anna Paulina Luna, you know, something came out two days ago where she is working on influencers that are getting paid by foreign media. Yes, this looks really interesting because I don't

39:41think he's the only person being paid. Listen, we know Qatar. Qatar is the number one foreign funder of universities in this country. They spend about $7.6 billion. Second is China, but Qatar's ahead. Most people think it's China, but China. Cutters number one. Yeah. And look, I the anti-Semitic protest on college campuses, Qatar and China are both funding those. Again, how do you know? Is that factual? This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Jim and I and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Jim and I and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability. Very 16 plus. Imagine a left brain and a right brain got together and came up with

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41:45engineer in the background. Finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor and Harvey who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Most AI coverage leaves you with one of two impressions. Everything is about to change or everything is about to end. I'm at LW and on my show the AI Daily Brief, I offer something more useful. Clear daily analysis of the stories that actually matter. Is the new model really better or just better on benchmarks? Should your team build agents or buy them? What does the latest lab drama mean for the tools you use every day? Plus hands-on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify. I think there are reasonable inferences. Can I point to documentary evidence to show you that? No. There's a combination of cutter and china and a ran and then also soros and the bill in

42:50the linda gates foundation. The latter is documented. I can show the latter. Is there any way you guys can because that would put the end to everything? Can you find a way to show proof 100% that cutter and china were behind the anti-Semitic, you know, the whole movement? Is there anywhere that you can find that out? You should be able to. I will tell you I've had this conversation with the attorney general the head of the FBI 50 times from the beginning of trump two and I've said the number one thing you should do is follow the money that that look it's one thing to arrest some punk who's violent and threatening people that's fine. But I'm not the only person to notice that that at the anti-Semitic protest the tense all matched. There was clearly organized funding actually your team pulled up Neville Roy Singhham. There's no doubt Neville Roy Singhham is an American billionaire sold a tech company for 800 million dollars. He is a communist. He is a Marxist. He's moved to Hong Kong. He lives in china now. He is clearly funding some of this. We

43:54know that he is funding the anti-AI movement. A Chinese communist who wants America not to build data centers so that we are reliant on China and China can win the race for AI. That's proven. Yes. That he is funding the anti-AI data center movement in the US. Yes. There's a report the House representatives put out that detailed it. I did a whole podcast walking through that report so I can send you that particular. Okay. So if you if you could you're a heavyweight in the Senate. If you could go find out who is getting paid by foreign countries foreign players. How would you go about doing it? The biggest thing you would do is you would have the FBI and DOJ beginning examining it, begin following the money. And look, I serve in the Senate. The Senate is a legislative body. I don't control executive authority. I don't control subpoena power. I don't have subpoena power. I don't control the ability to surveil, to get subpoenas for bank records, for example. And so it's got to be an executive and law enforcement function. And Pam Bondy, Todd Blanche,

44:55I know them both very well. Cash Patel, I know very well. I've probably urged them to follow the money 50 times. I don't know the extent to which they're doing so. I wish they were doing more on this because I think it is absolutely critical. It's dividing the nation. It's dividing the Republican. It's confusing a lot of the kids is what it's doing. And on the Tucker side, look, if you look back to Tucker, you and I are both old enough to remember when George W. Bush was present. And the Iraq war was happening. And Tucker at the time had a bow tie on and he was on TV basically as a cheerleader, just about with pom-poms cheering on the Iraq war. He was a big interventionist and loved the Iraq war. I think the Iraq war was a mistake. And I will say this is one thing that I think is important to clarify. Sometimes in political decisions, people simplify and so in foreign

45:56policy, they think of Republican foreign policy that they're just two camps. It's bipolar. You are either an interventionist and your solution to every problem is send the Marines. Or you're an isolationist and you just want to withdraw from the world and engage in nothing. Interventionists include people. I think John McCain would be a very typical interventionist. Lindsey Graham would have said he was an interventionist. Rand Paul and Ron Paul are both isolationists. I have long believed that both camps are wrong. I disagree with both strongly. And I've described myself as a third point on the triangle. That what I consider myself to be is a non-interventionist hawk. Now what does that mean? Because that's a little abstract. It means that we should be very reluctant to use US military force. And the sole touchstone for if and when we do should be protecting the vital national security

47:01interests of the United States. So where we went off track is doing other things, engaging in nation building. Look Iraq, you look at that 2016 presidential campaign. There were 17 of us on that stage. Set Rand Paul aside as his views being somewhat fringe. Of the 16 who remained, there were two and only two who opposed the Iraq war. Donald Trump and me. Both of us thought it was a mistake. The other 14 all said it was a great idea. The reason the Iraq war was a mistake is we were not acting to defend our national security interests. And instead we were engaged in nation building. There was this idea that we could go turn Iraq into a democratic utopia. We could turn it into Switzerland. I think the military is terrible at that. And that's not their job. Their job is to protect America and to kill our enemies. Now I also strongly disagree with the isolationist and where the difference is is Iran is qualitatively different when the IOTO is says death to America

48:06I believe in. And I think Iran getting a nuclear weapon the odds are unacceptably high Iran would use that nuclear weapon against the United States or against our allies. And so I strongly support what President Trump has done striking Iran to prevent that. I would not support if someone had a proposal, let's send 400,000 troops, ground troops on the ground to invade Iran and try to turn it into Switzerland. I'd be like, no, that's a very bad idea. What we need to do. And so a non-interventionist talk, by the way, I also think where I am on foreign policy is exactly where Donald Trump is. And it is also where Ronald Reagan was. What Ronald Reagan referred to that as is peace through strength. In eight years, the biggest country Reagan ever invaded was Grenada. But at the same time, he rebuilt the military. He won the Cold War without firing a shot. And he defeated the Soviet Union which collapsed because he was so strong that he didn't have to go to war. So you just said,

49:11this is kind of how I heard what you broke down. Republican has two sides, big government, small government. Then foreign, you said isolationist and you have your own hybrid model. But somebody that is more intervening. Okay, so if I'm reading this correctly, big government, small government, you're saying you're a small government and you're pinning Marko as a big government guy. Let me finish and he can correct me. And on the foreign side, I'm assuming you're putting in isolationist as a JD and you be in the opposite. Is that a fair assessment? Look where Marko is. He'll have to decide. I will say, if you look at, all right, let's take isolationism. JD on foreign policy has disagreed with President Trump on almost every decision Trump has made the second term. JD negotiated the MOU with Iran. That was a terrible deal. And I was the first and for a long time, the only Republican Senator to say that and say it

50:15publicly that it was a terrible deal. That MOU envisioned flowing $300 billion to the Iatola and the IRGC. That would have been staggeringly foolish. And what I said publicly is, look, history has shown that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a really, really bad idea. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in an act of colossal stupidity, flowed $100 billion to the Iatola. And that $100 billion they used to fund terrorism across the globe for 47 years Iran has been the leading state sponsor of terrorism. And in particular to fund October 7th, to fund the desquads that murdered 1,200 innocent people and that raped women and girls. That's what $100 billion produced. And the MOU proposed, let's triple that to 300 billion.

51:19I think it was a very foolish idea. I spend a lot of time talking to President Trump. I talk to President Trump every week, sometimes every day. And on foreign policy, I will say he has listened to me the vast majority of the time, not all the time, but a great deal of time. The MOU thankfully collapsed, had the MOU gone into effect, Americans would have died. That money would have been used by Iranian terrorists to murder Americans. So I'm glad we're not sending them the money. But I do think it was a very serious policy mistake. Who supports you on the Republican side that doesn't that Trump doesn't have? So look, I will say this Pat. Do you know why I'm asking a question? Do you want me to give you the reason why I'm asking a question? Sure. Every journey starts with a choice. People who inspire us don't wait for the path ahead. They create their own. From hand crafted Italian leather by generations of artisans engineered for life and motion. Every piece is

52:22created with purpose for the work, the journey, the moments that matter. For those who aren't defined by a title, but by how they live, the standards they set, the risks they take, the work they put in, engineered for performance, crafted without compromise. Because the future isn't something you wait for, it's something you move toward. Introducing the new FLB icon collection, the future looks bright. The reason why I'm asking a question is because you have to look at what you covered earlier, suburban women, you were kind of talking about some of the stuff earlier on where they're at and what they're going to be voting for. Trump was able to get an audience that the others didn't have. You kind of talk about a little bit blue collar, all that, you know, to get that audience. But if going in 2028, we know AOC, I've been saying AOC is going to be running for 18 months and people thought I was crazy. Now finally, it's shown up on the table. You're absolutely right. AOC is running

53:25100%. She's running and she could even be the, I think AOC and Gavin Newsom are the top two front runners on the Democrats. I think Newsom every day is just flip flop and make up your mind what you are and don't just go be a socialist just to say you have the social, I think his strategy is horrible, horrible, no backbone. He can't stand up for anything. I think that's going to back far on him. So the conservatives and let's just say to common sense guys, even some of the people that are center leftists who are like, look, there's no way I'm supporting men competing in women's sports. But I'm pro choice or I'm, you know, some of those guys, they know if they give their vote to the wrong person, a socialist could be a president in 2028. So then I have to choose between handful of names. You're going to be one of them. JD, some are saying Rubio may not run. I hope the Sanctus runs. I actually hope he's working behind closed doors to want to run. I think there's going to be a couple wild cards that no one's even thinking about right now that behind closed doors. Some kind of a Trump's going to get in there that no one is expecting and suddenly, you know, he goes.

54:26But a betting man who's protecting his vote has to sit there and say, who do you have that the others don't have? Who do you have that the others don't have? And a part of it is, is JD already have the endorsement from Trump because Trump behind closed doors is going and saying, hey, you think JD's going to be the guy. JD's going to be the guy and almost saying JD and Rubio need to run together as a, on a ticket. So what is different from Ted Cruz than the other two? So listen, I'll say that as we said at the beginning, I don't have an announcement about 28. I am right now not running for 28. My focus politically is on the. You went to Iowa, you went to all the states, you're making endorsements. These are all signs that you're running. And if you don't run, it's a fail. You have to run. It's free agency. My opinion, you don't have to make the announcement, but that's my opinion. Look as a voter. I get frustrated out of my mind with people who say they're conservative. And they go to office and they turn into jellyfish. And so if I'm deciding

55:31whom to endorse, I'm looking for show me your record. Show me when you stood up and fought for conservative principles. Show me when you bled. Show me what you've accomplished. This is serious stuff. So I'm not interested in tilting a win-win. Respectfully, that didn't answer my question. My question to you was what is difference between you, JD and Marco Rubio? So if that race happens, that'll be a decision the voters will make. I'm not laying that out right now. So I get what you want me to say. No, I want you to know. I'm asking all I'm saying, you ask me question right now. What is the difference between me and Tucker or me and you know, some of the other pot, I'll give you what the difference is for me. I'm asking you, what is the difference? Forget running. What on what issues do you, JD and Rubio differ? And who do you have that they don't have? What audience? So what I've said is a couple of things. Number one, I think the election is going to be a divide economically. What do we believe? Small government or big government?

56:32And foreign policy, what do we believe? Isolationist or American leadership? I think there are real and meaningful differences on those fronts. Okay, so good. I will say all of them, I say another thing, which is I think this next election is going to be a debate about who is best prepared to continue Trump's legacy, to continue winning victories and moving forward. What is the best thing about Donald Trump? The man has cast iron balls in a way that is epic in a way that we have never seen in the world. This is documented. This is proven. He is fearless and Trump is willing to stand and endure criticism and heat in a way we've never seen anyone do. There is a reason that I've spent 10 years as Donald Trump's strongest ally in the Senate. And when it comes to fighting side by side, we have won massive victories. Now I think you're

57:33also going to have a conversation about what any candidates record has been. And if you look at my record of fighting for conservative victories and winning conservative victories year after year after year leading, you look at the one big beautiful bill that passed last year, also called the Working Families Tax Code. Huge portions of that bill I wrote. And in fact, there are two provisions in particular that I think are the two most important parts of that bill. Let me take you back to April of last year. So April of last year, we have a retreat of all the Senate Republicans. And we're talking about what do we want to put in the big reconciliation bill. And I stood up at the time. I said, look, there are lots of things in this bill that are really important that we all care about. Securing the border, yes, rebuilding the military, absolutely. Cutting taxes, passing the biggest tax cut in American history, absolute.

58:37But I said to my colleagues, I said, look, at the same time, we have to stop and take a minute. And think about legacy. Think about what in this bill will make a difference in 10, 20, 30 years. And I said, if I could, I would like to humbly suggest two things. Number one, school choice. Which I think is the civil rights issue, the 21st century. And number two, what are today called the Trump accounts. Now, both of those provisions I wrote, both of those provisions are in the bill. What do they mean? Let me talk a little bit about it because a lot of people don't know the details of these. And I think it's enormously consequential. On school choice, what we passed, it starts next year. So it hadn't kicked in yet. So people have not yet seen the benefits in their own lives. They will start next year. Starting next year, every taxpayer in America can give up to $1,700 to a scholarship

59:40granting organization in the States. If you do so, you get a dollar for dollar tax credit for doing so. Not an deduction, a credit. That means if you write a check for $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization here in Florida, you owe $1,700 less to Uncle Sam. So from your perspective, it's free money. It cost you nothing. You're sending the money one way or the other. Do you send it to the IRS or do you send it to a scholarship granting organization? Secondly, the Trump accounts. On July 4th, the Trump accounts launched. Every child in America, all 70 million, will have an individual Trump account open for them and an investment account. Newborn children will have it seated with $1,000. Parents, family, employers can all put up to $5,000 a year in a tax advantage account. And this is the critical piece. All of that is invested in the S&P 500. It's

1:00:41invested in the stock market at a broad, broad-based equity index. Now, there are two massive advantages to this. Number one, something you understand exquisitely. Every child in America is going to experience the miracle of compound growth. Roughly half of Americans don't own a single-stocker bond. That's going to change for our kids a little girl born this year. She gets a Trump account open, $1,000 a seat it automatically. If her parents or family or an employer puts $5,000 a year in that account, if you assume the historical rate of growth of the S&P 500, which is 7% a year after inflation, by the time she's 18, she'll have $170,000 in that account. And if she keeps contributing, by the time she's 35, she will have more than $700,000 in that account. And that's not just the kids of rich people. That's the kids of a single mom waiting table. That changes this

1:01:42country. But here's the second advantage of Trump accounts that Pat makes me really excited. It's why I was proud to champion and author this provision. We're going to be creating an entirely new generation of capitalists. All of us have seen the young people who say they're losing faith and free enterprise. They think socialism's a good idea. Our kids now, I've talked about, look, 10 years from now, a little boy is going to pull out his phone and look at his app. And instead of being told corporations are big, mean, nasty things, he's going to say, I own a hundred bucks of Apple. I own 50 bucks of Boeing or 75 bucks of McDonald's. You know, it's when I size you up, and I watch it, I watch it very closely because I used to come and watch you and Mike Lee in DC, I would sit there and just watch you do your thing. Like, I'm like, I'm freaking good. I love my 10 years ago was some like that, 2015. But this is, I don't need, I'm not looking for a respond. I'm

1:02:46just kind of sharing my thoughts. I think in your eyes, JD's not at your level and Ruby is not at your level. It just so happens. The responsibilities that they got, Ruby was highlighted the last 18, 24 months in a massive way, massive way. And Mark was done an excellent job. Excellent job. Excellent job. And Marco is a gifted communicator. He always has been and super likable. And you're seeing his smart. So he's got the trifecta. But I don't know if the audience can make a case that JD's ahead of you in except for being a VP. I don't know if the market's going to be like, well, what has he done compared to a tent? I can see that being made. But if Trump endorses him, mag is going to go this route. So you were about to talk about the Republican party. And maybe, and then we, I asked you a question about mass and Tucker, we got a little bit of sidetrack. Maybe break down what the Republican party to you is. And what's going to happen when mag a post Trump and even what role Trump's going to play? Oh, look, Trump is not going to write off into the sunset. Trump is always

1:03:49going to be engaged and say exactly what the hell he thinks. And it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. But, but he's going to get in the way. I mean, you have to, he's going to get in the way because he's not going to give up that power. He's not going to do it. That's not his personality. He and I have a different relationship than most politicians in Washington have with him because he he views a lot of politicians in Washington as beta males. He doesn't view them as very strong. I'm the only person who's ever stood in the arena and he's punched me in the face as hard as he could and I punched him in the face as hard as he could. And I ended up winning 12 states, winning over and over and over again. Now he ultimately won. He beat me. And I made the decision to be at peace with that and became his strongest ally and a good friend of him. But having been through, look, you'll sit down with Trump and he'll go on and on with, you know, tons of people in his administration, but like, you know, they back to Ted. They back Ted instead of me. They shouldn't

1:04:49have back Ted, but they did. I mean, I've had a thousand conversations with senior Trump appointees where he just gives them grief on that. And look, that's, that's his prognon. I deeply respect the strength he has had. Now, what is Trump going to do in 28? Who knows? Nobody knows. I could easily see him essentially letting something like the apprentice play out. You know, you guys fight it out. Let's see what happens. He might not, but at the end of the day, I don't lose a lot of sleep speculating on things that neither I nor anyone else on planet earth knows the answer to. And so my approach to President Trump, I've spent a decade encouraging him to do good things and discouraging him from doing bad things. Now, on the discouraging side, I mostly do that in private because it's not helpful. It's not my job to go on CNN and attack Donald

1:05:52Trump. That is not helpful. And it's actually not productive. If you go do it, it pisses him off, and it does the opposite thing. Yeah. It's privately, privately, I'd call him I publicly always support. But all right. Look, I'll give an example. Let's let's take trade and tariffs. This is a story I've told before. So let's go back to April 2nd of last year. That's when the President announced massive new tariffs. And you'll remember the market collapsed. The next Tuesday there were a group of I think seven senators we called the President, about 11, 11, 30 at night, called the President. And we were saying, Mr. President, we've got to change the path we're on. This this current path is not working well. And my view on the question of trading tariffs is that there are two camps in the Trump administration. Camp number one, views tariffs or the threats of tariffs as leverage to get our trading partners to open up their markets to reduce their tariffs to repeal non-tariff barriers. I think Scott Besent is in that

1:06:57camp. I am very much in that camp. There's a second camp that views tariffs not as leverage to open up foreign markets, but as the end in and of itself, that they just want high tariffs forever. And it's it's pretty closely linked to an isolationist foreign policy. The idea is we don't want to deal with the world at all. We want high tariffs and just just stay at home and say to hell with everyone. Who's there? Who's in that camp? Um, JD would be in that camp. I think that's where his instincts fall. What I told the President on this call is I said, Mr. President, my advice, pick a country, pick any damn country. And tomorrow morning, announce that we are slashing the tariffs to that country and announce simultaneously that they are slashing tariffs on American goods. And I said, if you do that, two things will happen.

1:07:57Number one, it will calm the markets because the markets weren't freefall at the time. And I said number two, it will give people some confidence that we're on path number one and not path number two. People are not sure which direction we're going to go. And if you do that, people say, okay, these tariffs are meant to open up markets and expand trade. Trump did not like this conversation. He was in a bad mood. I've had conversations when he's in a great mood. He was really in a surly mood. He did not like what we were saying to him. And I went on to say, Mr. President, look, if we get to November of next year and people's 401Ks are down 30%. And people are going into the department store, grocery store, and spending 30, 40, 50% more to buy groceries and buy the goods they need. We'll face a blood bath in November. And you'll spend the next two years being impeached every damn week. To which his response was FU-10, although he did not abbreviate it.

1:09:01And that's, look, that is not a typical of a rough and tumble conversation with the president. Now, the conversation went past midnight. We hung up, I think, about 1230 at night. As we hung up the phone, Lindsey Graham was one of the other senators on the call. And Lindsey goes, well, that didn't go well. The next day, Wednesday at noon, Trump announced the pause. And he halted all of the tariffs that he had announced the week before. Imagine if this stability piece and the innovation piece were each other's missing piece.

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1:12:21And I said, Mr. President, congratulations, you just produced the single largest one-day increase in the stock market in the history of America. So I say that to say, look, a good friend doesn't just say to someone, everything you're doing is perfect, it's great. A good friend helps you solve a problem. And by the way, I wasn't saying this with this level of candor on television, I was saying it directly to the president. And that's part of why he and I have a good relationship because I think he knows I will tell him the truth if he likes it or not. And in my view, that's a better friend. Have you ever broke bread with JD? Oh, yeah. Oh, so there's a relationship there as well. Look, I like JD. JD is a friend. I barnstormed all over Ohio with JD to help JD get elected. I was very glad he got elected to the Senate. I've had JD as a guest on my podcast. I like JD personally. We get along and we're friends.

1:13:23He and I have meaningful differences on policy. What's your, do you have a funny president Trump story? Everybody, you know, people who have spent a lot of time with them, they all have some great stories. What's your one? First term, Erdogan from Turkey was visiting DC and he was in the Oval. And Trump invited five senators to join him in the meeting with Erdogan. And so it was me, Lindsey Graham, it was Jim Rish, Rick Scott and Joni Erns. It was the five of us who were there. And we were talking beforehand. The meeting was about two hours. And what Trump did there was unusual. It's something I've never seen him do in another meeting before. Two hour meeting. Trump spoke maybe five to ten minutes. He was quiet almost the entire meeting. That's not typical. He usually has a lot to say. What he did instead is he left the five senators speak almost the entire time.

1:14:27And I think Erdogan came in believing that the Congress was a rubber stamp. That Trump could do anything he wanted and we just stamp it because that's that's the situation Erdogan has. Whatever he does, he gets a rubber stamp from his parliament. And so what I told Erdogan is I said two things. I said number one. As long as you have the Russian S-400 missile defense system, you are not going to get the American F-35 fighter jet because we are not going to train the Russian missile defense system on our advanced, our most advanced fighter jets. Pick one or the other. You don't get both. If you get rid of the S-400, you can have the F-35, but you can't have both. And I told him I said, Mr. President, let me be clear, I have probably 95 votes in the Senate for that proposition. This is not close. This is overwhelmingly bipartisan. You ain't getting the F-35 if you keep the S-400.

1:15:27And then I said, secondly, the Kurds, Erdogan hates the Kurds. You're saying this in front of Erdogan? I'm saying this to Erdogan. I'm in the oval saying it right here. Trump's sitting there. Erdogan's sitting there. I'm sitting right here. Like this, this is face to face. Erdogan is as close to me as you are. And Trump's right right over there. I said, secondly, the Kurds, we're not going to sit by quietly, while you exterminate the Kurds. The Kurds have been exceptionally loyal to us. They have stood by us in military conflict, after military conflict. And we're not just going to let you exterminate. And Erdogan hated it. But it was an interesting dynamic because what Trump was doing is fascinating. It was brilliant. Is we were playing bad cop? And Trump kind of leaned back and he said, see what I have to deal with? And we were the bad guys. Trump said at the beginning, before Erdogan got there, he said, I got to say I like the guy. I don't know why I like dictators. I just do. We're like,

1:16:28yeah, we don't know why you do either. Don't do that. But it was a very savvy diplomatic move on Trump's part because he didn't have to play bad cop. He just, he knew what we believed. So he actually just said, you guys explain it and it became absolutely clear. And by the way, they didn't get the F-35 because he wouldn't give up the S-400. And he substantially reduced his efforts to go after the Kurds. So it was a very successful foreign policy meeting. But I remember thinking and learning a lesson, this is something a president should do more often. Like, bring in the bad cop to move a negotiation in a way you want to move it because I thought in that negotiation was very effective. Which world leaders have you met or have you been in the room with? Have you had meetings with Putin or Zelensky? Zelensky multiple times. I've not met Putin. Got him. So Erdogan, is he as intense as he seems to be or is there a softer, lighter site to be on closed doors?

1:17:32Oh, look, any world leader in the oval with the president is somewhat restrained. Donald Trump is the most powerful man on the face of the planet. Other than Zelensky, when he came in and was a jackass and it will go down as one of the most disastrous oval office meetings in history. But Erdogan was more restrained because he understood the power differential there. You think in 2028 an outsider stands a chance to win like Trump? Listen, there are a number of self-declared influencers who frankly monetize right now politics and and MAGA is profitable for them. I think the voters Trump changed politics and made the Republican Party a blue collar party. That ain't changed. That shouldn't change. I don't want to go back to country club Republicans. I've spent my entire career in the Senate fighting against the country club Republicans. I think we ought to be

1:18:35fighting for the truck driver, the steel worker. You look at the two bills that I authored in the reconciliation bill, school choice and Trump accounts. They're both focused on building, accumulating wealth and savings and getting education to achieve the American dream. You look at another bill I authored in that bill. No tax on tips. That's my legislation. I wrote that legislation past it in the law. No tax on tips as you? Yes. Really? Now, I'm going to give credit where credit is due. That was Trump's idea. But you executed it on the writing of it. Yes. Got it. That's sometimes geniuses in simple ideas. What a simple idea to pitch that Kamala Harris had to copy and hopeful said no, Trump didn't come up with it. Did you hear the story of how he came up with it? No. He was having lunch with all the Senate Republicans. It was a couple of days after he'd had a big rally in Vegas. He was having lunch before the rally at a restaurant. He said,

1:19:38a waitress came by and he said, and she was beautiful. She was beautiful. We're all cracking up laughing. And he said, I was just sitting there talking and she was complaining about how burdensome it was to keep track of her tips that the Biden administration had made it harder, made it more expensive to pay taxes on tips. And Trump said, he said, I just pulled over a notepad and I got out of pen and I wrote no tax on tips. And he said, I handed it to her and said, what do you think? She's like, that's awesome. So then he had the rally and he said, so I went to the rally and he sort of jokes and he says, I know you guys think I must have had a white paper and studied it. I didn't at all. I just stood up and said, said to the crowd, let's see how this goes. No tax on tips. And the crowd went wild. And they just loved it. And so he's telling us this story. This is like two days later. And I went back to my office. I grabbed my policy team. I said, this is a great

1:20:39friggin idea. It really was. Let's go draft it right now. So we wrote the legislation that became no tax on tips. It's massive because you know, folks who make money on tips, and by the way, you could flip Democrats with a simple thing like that. Do you know a Nevada 25% of the workers in Nevada are tipped workers. That makes sense. Which is why when I introduced my bill, both of the Nevada Democrats immediately co-sponsored it. They don't have a choice. I went to them and said, hey, do you want to spawn? They're like absolutely yes. Why is it important when you co-sponsored deals with a Democrat? What does it do? It just gives you more credibility. It helps you pass it. Got it. To get it passed into law, you've got to be able to work to build a broader coalition. You know, look, I've authored and passed over 100 different pieces of legislation. And doing that means I know how to fight. And I know how to battle ferociously. And all right, let's take school choice for a minute because I'll tell you a

1:21:43couple of stories about school choice. All right. All right, you want a Trump story. This is another Trump story you'll appreciate. So with a school choice provision, I went over to the oval to talk to Trump because I wanted to get him really enthusiastic and engaged in. And the case I made to him, as I said, Mr. President, we get this passed in this reconciliation bill. You will go down in history as the greatest civil rights president of the 21st century. And I said, your critics will never give you credit for that. But if we get this done millions of kids, many, if not most of whom are low income African Americans and Hispanics, will escape failing schools and be able to get a real education and have a real shot at a job and a future and at the American dream. And so we're making the case to Trump. And in the middle of it, that is when Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And so Trump now, he's not on his phone, any more nearly as much. So what happens when something gets tweeted is that printed out,

1:22:47Natalie comes in, printed on a piece of paper and hands it to him. And he literally reads that tweet. And I'm sitting in the oval and his knuckles turn white. You don't you also don't know the tweet yet. I don't know what it is yet. I mean, he shows it. It happens that second. Like that second, they hand it to him that second. I don't know. Sure, I get it. Yeah. It was. And he was so pissed. I joked. I learned some curse words. I didn't even know. And I will say our school choice meeting went off the rails that like we were done talking about school choice. And Trump had some technical reviews to say about Elon. Now I'm glad they have patched it up. I'm good friends with Elon as well. It was not good for America to have the two of them battling, but it was that's a moment I will never forget of just like the okay, there's a hand grenade thrown in the middle of everything. Here's another question for you, since you brought that up, you know, I got a call from a chief of staff of a country right now that's, you know, in war and they're having certain

1:23:50challenges. And we had a call. And it wasn't about, you know, it was about Elon Musk. And from talking to the entire team over the weekend, this past weekend specifically, it was very obvious how much the way they put it is they felt Elon's power was going to be longer than Trump's and they feared Elon more than they feared Trump. Is it at a point right now where an endorsement from Trump is valuable, but also an endorsement from Elon is just as valuable as Trump into us, Trump in 28 or no? Look hard to say. Elon has not made a lot of endorsements. Now he writes checks, which is a different thing. It's a form of an endorsement. It's a form of an endorsement. And I mean, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars in politics. So that is valuable. He has not typically been in the endorsement role. Listen, Elon has become a good friend. You mentioned I had him

1:24:51on on my podcast. There's a fascinating interview and it's great. One of the best interviews I watched for the year. Thank you. Look, he is hands down the smartest man I've ever met. And you and I have both been blessed. We've met some really smart people. And Elon is an order of magnitude. He's just, you know, the line I use is it's not that he thinks outside the box. It's that he doesn't know there's a box. So like one exchange I had with him, I asked him the question. I said, okay, most of my conversation was about his business career. And I said, look, in business and life, they're people who are big picture people who can see big ideas and and and have grand visions. And they're people who are execution people that are really good at getting things done. And I said generally, they're different people. They're normally not the same person. Somehow, you seem to be really damn good at both of them. How is that? Why is that? And he stops and,

1:25:52you know, Elon is, you know, he kind of looks off in the sky and he's silent for like 10 seconds and he processes. I mean, and he'll answer you, but he's like processing the answer. And he says to me, I think I probably know more about manufacturing than any human being who's ever lived. And my first reaction is, okay, that's an audacious statement. Like Henry Ford would beg to differ. And then I start to think about it. I'm like, okay, the guy is the CEO of Tesla. He's the CEO SpaceX. He's the CEO of the boring company. He's the CEO of Neuralink. He's the CEO of XAI. And at the time, he was running Doge. Like what he said was not crazy. And I will say, have you ever been down to starbase? It's amazing. I've been down there several times. Was down there with both Elon and Trump for a launch December last year. So like six years ago,

1:26:56Boca Chica was just an empty beach on the southern tip of Texas. Now there was sand dune and a couple of lizards there. There's nothing there. They built a whole city. They have manufacturing facilities where they are building a rocket ship a month with the precision down to less than a tenth of a millimeter. It is, and they're giant. I mean, there's size of the Empire State Building that they're building. It is extraordinary. They're launching them there. As I'm walking through with Elon, he's pointing at the stuff and he says, you know, this is all alien technology. And then he says something really unusual. He says, we don't patent any of them. He said, I assume everyone is going to steal everything I make. He says patents are for the week. But he said, by the time they steal it, I'm going to be five or six generations down the road and it won't matter. Now we both know a ton of businessmen. I've never heard any other business leader say that.

1:28:02That is what a powerful thing to say. What a powerful thing to say. Can you imagine like how little you it is like an insult to your competition to say, guys, I'm not even thinking about you. Like you're not two two topics before we wrap up and I appreciate your you being gracious with your time is your father was an amway at one point. Was he? Look, my dad's history has a lot of similarities to yours. You fled Iran. My father fled Cuba. And my dad's background in Cuba. He was born in Cuba, grew up in Cuba. And when he was a teenager, when he was 14, he began fighting in the Cuban Revolution. And he was actually fighting with Fidel Castro. So he was fighting against Batista. Batista was corrupt. He was a dictator. He was in bed with the mob. And my dad was throwing Molotov cocktails. He was blowing up bridges. I mean, he was a gorilla. When my dad was 17, he was captured. And he was thrown in prison. And they tortured him. They beat my father halfway to death. And he got out

1:29:10of jail. And at that point, my grandfather, my well, said, look, they know who you are. They're just going to kill you. You got to get out of the country. And so my dad at the time was a freshman at the University of Atlanta. He applied to three US universe. What year is this? This 57. Oh, wow. Okay. He applied to University of Miami, LSU and University of Texas. UT, let's him in. So while he's in Cuba, escaping. Yeah. So he gets Batista still in power. So he'd get a student visa. So he comes on a student visa because he was admitted to UT. He takes a ferry boat from Havana to Key West. And then it takes a Graham bus from Key West all the way to Austin, Texas. He's 18. He can't speak English. He has a hundred dollars that my grandmother's son and do his underwear. And he gets a job, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour.

1:30:11And he goes to school full time. Ends up being a math major. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability very 18 plus. Imagine if having your cake and eating it too was about banking, not baking. Silicon Valley Bank and First Citizens Bank have created a recipe that blends decades of innovation economy experience with more than a century of stability. Now, you don't have to choose between deep sector expertise and lasting financial security. Instead, you can enjoy them both. Silicon Valley Bank and First Citizens Bank. It's the best of bank worlds.

1:31:12Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sink your contacts into the address book. Get detailed accounting insights and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk. All from your desk. Join the four million businesses using stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast. Taxes and fees apply. Your team just added at 67thayi tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news, the Vantageant works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor and Harvey who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Most AI coverage leaves you with one of two impressions. Everything is about to change or everything is about to end. I'm at LW and on my show the AI

1:32:15Daily Brief, I offer something more useful. Clear daily analysis of the stories that actually matter is the new model really better or just better on benchmarks. Should your team build agents or buy them? What does the latest lab drama mean for the tools you use every day? Plus, hands-on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify. With your mother's a math teacher, wasn't she a man? Both my parents are math major. Okay, so that's how they met. So my mother is Irish and Italian, born in Wilmington, Delaware, blue collar family. Her mother was the second youngest of 17 kids. So Irish Catholic family, I joke they didn't know what else to do in Saturday night and so I've got hundreds of cousins in Delaware. My mother becomes the first person or a family ever to go to college and she ended up going to Rice and getting a degree in math in 1956. And she goes to work

1:33:19at Shell. She gets hired as a computer programmer and then the two of them meet in the 60s and New Orleans working together at a seismic data processing company. They meet there together, fall in love, get married, they move to Calgary and they start their own small business in Calgary. They start a seismic data processing company. I'm born in Calgary in 1970. And my dad at the time is a young man. He's partying quite a bit. He's living life. He's not a Christian and my father was partying a lot and having, you know, being out on the town and he ends up leaving my mom and me. So when I'm three years old, he decides I don't want to be married anymore. And so he gets on a plane and he flies back to Houston. And I'm back in Calgary with my mom. He's in Houston for several months and a colleague from the oil and gas industry invites him to come to church, invites him to Clay Road Baptist Church.

1:34:23And he goes there and he becomes a Christian. He becomes born again. It turns his life around. And my father goes and drives to the airport and he buys a plane ticket and he flies back to my mom and it is because of that that I wasn't raised by a single mom and I was raised. Both my parents, they're still living. I'm incredibly close to them both. My dad is 87. My mom's 91. And it's a year later we moved to Houston. I- One was the gap when he was gone? It was maybe four to six months. That's still a long time. It was several months. I don't remember it. I was three. So I know the story but I was too young to remember it. And then I grew up in Houston and they started a small business in Houston. Where does a multi-level, where does the network market income at? So it's, they start the small business in Houston in 75. It's a seismic data processing company. They have some success. It's doing well. Oil and gas is doing well. You get to the mid-80s

1:35:28and the mid-80s oil collapses. And my dad, like he had 25 employees and demand went to zero. Like he had him, he had clients who were regular clients who said, I don't care if you can tell us where oil is. We don't want any. Like the prices too low and my father ended up, he had some savings and he kept putting his savings into the business, trying to save the business. Thinking, okay, oil is going to turn around. It'll turn around. I still remember there was a day that I called Black Monday and it was a Monday morning when of his 25 employees. He laid off 19 of them. And I saw him. I was in high school at the time. I saw him come home. He looked like he'd been beaten with a tube before. He broke his heart. And he had employees arguing with him, Rafael, I don't want to leave. I'm not going to leave. And he would say to them, look, you have a wife. You have kids. I can't pay you. There's no salary. You need to get a job that will feed your family because I can't. They ended up going bankrupt. So they went personally

1:36:32bankrupt. The company went bankrupt. And so I'm in the middle of high school with my parents in bankruptcy. And so when I went off to college, my parents were bankrupt. They couldn't pay a penny. And so I ended up being financially on my own at age 17 and had to take student loans. You know, it's interesting. A lot of people think senators are born with a silver spoon in their mouth. That there's a trust fund. I don't got no trust fund. That is not my world. But I took student loans. I came out of college in law school with about 100 grand in student debt. I joked that I had a mortgage, but I didn't have a house. And I didn't pay it off until I was 38. So I paid on the loans for, you know, a decade to half. But my dad, when the oil business collapsed and Houston went into a recession. And it's a depression, really. I mean, it was the city. It crushed the city. And my dad had a period of time where he went from job to job to job. I was just trying to find a way to earn a living. And so he did multiple different multi-level marketing companies because

1:37:34it's a good salesman. And so he liked multi-level marketing because you could go and help people build their businesses. And so he spent several years doing that. And then he ended up becoming a pastor. And actually, my father should have become a pastor 40 years earlier. He is much happier as a pastor than he was at any state. Was he always a good public speaker or, you know, how did that happen? Because he, so he always was a, because you can see him. He knows how to rally. He knows how to get up and do his magic. He is a great public speaker. He is passionate. When I was a kid, he used to, I did, competed in speech contests. And he would be a harsh taskmaster. He would literally, if you'd give a speech and you'd say, um, or, ah, he'd be like, what are you? A cow? Moo! And it, but it was, look, a father who demands excellence of you. That's a real gift. Respect. You know, I always heard stories about Rich Divas. Never met him. Delayed Rich Divas. But he wrote a book called Compassionate Capitalism. And a man named Bill Vogel, who became a very

1:38:40good friend of mine. He said he heard Rich, ah, give a speech in 60, 69. It was called Selon America. And he knew how to sell America in a very good way. And of course, the Divas family now gives money to a bunch of different things. Betsy Divas, you know, she's done what she's done. Last but not least before we wrap up. And Betsy is a great friend, by the way. So Betsy was Trump's education sector. I remember. Yeah. And she and I worked hand in hand. So in the first term, when Trump rolled out his school choice plan, I authored it. And I rolled it out with Betsy DeVas at the Department of Education. And then Trump in the state of the union leaned in and said to pass it. But we were trying to pass it in a way that took 60 votes. And we couldn't get any Democrats. We tried what we actually linked, uh, scholarship tax credits for kids in K through 12 to tax credit for workforce development, because we were trying to get unions. We were trying to get trade unions to back it and to get some Democrats. And the Democrats just didn't budge.

1:39:41But I will tell you, when we were passing the school choice bill, Betsy was a huge ally. I was working with her day after day. School choice has been my passion for 35 years. I think it's the most important civil rights measure in our lifetimes. So I decided to argue it myself, which is weird. You normally have staff arguing it. I went in to argue it to the parliamentarian. Three different times the parliamentarian struck the bill down and said, no, this doesn't meet the bird rule. And so three different times my team and I, we rewrote it to get it to fit the bird rule. We were right at the end. It was a, we were right at the point when the bill was about to be voted on the floor. We were still not in yet. And, and I went to John Thune, the majority leader. John and I worked together very close. And I pulled John aside. I said, John, look, I've been an easy vote on this bill from day one. I've been a yes from day one. This is important. We're doing a lot of really important things on this bill. And I said, John, I want you to hear me very, very careful.

1:40:49If the school choice provision is pulled out of this bill, I will burn the effing bill to the ground. Now, there is an advantage to building a reputation for being willing to blow things up. Nobody thinks you're bluffing. And John did not think I was bluffing. I was prepared to do exactly that. We rewrote it one more time and we got it in the bill. And it is the most millions of kids are now going to be at this. Betsy was involved in this. Is that, is that, is that, I guess I was promised? Yes, yes. Betsy was, I've heard great things about the, the Betsy de Vos myself as well. But last thing, when I, when I saw the book, I thought I'm like, okay, just make sense. Why you would write going further, the incomparable clearance Thomas, which if you're watching, is we're going to put the link below to go by number one, a book writing on Amazon for you to go place the order. Why choose to write this book? Because I think it's an important book. I think it's a book that

1:41:51needed to be written. So this is my fifth book. And I spent some time thinking about what I want to write, what do I want to say? What do I want people to read? And I think Clarence Thomas is an extraordinary hero. I've known him for 30 years. He has a remarkable personal story. So two years ago, I went to Justice Thomas' chambers and I told him then that I was thinking of writing a biography of him. And I asked if he would sit for interviews with me to work on the book. And he kind of leaned back at his chair and he thought about it for a second. And he said, Ted, if it were anybody else, if you were a law professor, I'd say no. And Thomas is famously reluctant. He gives very few speeches. He gives very few interviews. But he said, because it's you, I'll do it. And so we spent nine and a half hours in one-on-one interviews where I'd go over to his chambers 8 a.m. sit there, just him and me in a room, I'd put a tape recorder down, and I'd ask him questions. And what the book does is really three things that are important. Number one,

1:42:55it tells his personal story. And I will tell you his personal story is astonishing. He was born an abject poverty in rural Georgia faced withering racism. He was raised initially by a single mom in squalor. Then he was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, most important man in Clarence Thomas' life. If you want to understand Clarence Thomas, you need to understand Myers Anderson, he called him daddy. And he was tough. He was a disciplinarian when Clarence and his brother showed up to work to move into the house. Daddy said, boys, the damn vacation is over. And he worked them. He would get the boys up at three and four in the morning. They would deliver heating oil in the frigid cold in the winter. He would not let the boys wear gloves. He thought

1:43:57gloves were for the week. And he would work them from way before dawn until late at night. And the one exception is school and reading. And both of Thomas' grandparents were illiterate. Neither one could read a write. And they wanted their grandkids to have a better future. So young Clarence Thomas would sit in the library and read book after book after book and he became an excellent student. And he decided that his vocation, his passion, he wanted to become a priest. And so the world almost didn't have justice, Thomas. The world almost had father Thomas. So he went to seminary, both in high school and college, faced enormous racism in seminary. This is early 60s. And he ultimately got disillusioned with the church. And the reason he left the church, as he thought the church was not doing nearly enough to stand up against racial prejudice and racial discrimination and not nearly enough to fight for civil rights. And sort of the straw that

1:45:00broke the camel's back, he was at seminary and Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And several of the white seminarians he was there studying with were cheering and celebrating. And that just, he said, I'm done. He left. And he went to college. He went to Holy Cross College and then Yale Law School. And at the time he was angry at the church, he was angry at God. And he became a left wing radical. He became a radical. He was wearing camouflage pants and combat boots in a poster of Malcolm X on the wall. He would go to black Panther rallies. He participated in a riot in Harvard Square. I mean, he describes himself as an angry young man. He hated God. He hated America. He hated white people. And so what I try to do in the book is three things. One, chronicle his amazing personal story, which is really inspirational that he rose from abject poverty and vicious

1:46:04racism to the pinnacle of American law. But secondly, I also chronicle the journey he had personally from a left wing radical, an angry college radical, to one of the most important conservative thinkers in the history of America. And then third, who flipped them? Was it Thomas Sol? Who played the role on it? So it was multiple people. I would say the person who flipped him was his grandfather and he didn't realize it. So Thomas Sol, there's an interesting story. He is in law school. And a friend gives him a book by Thomas Sol, the great economist, black conservative, brilliant. He gives him a book by Thomas Sol and Clarence Thomas reads a few pages of it and throws it in the trash. And he says, no black band has a right to think like this. Well, he was a liberally voted for George Begovar. I mean, he was a left wing radical. He didn't want to read what Thomas Sol had to say. Fast forward,

1:47:06so he comes out of Yale. It's very good students. Done quite well. No law firm would hire him. Every firm he went to so they wouldn't hire him. And he saw firsthand the negative consequences of affirmative action. Because when the schools were publicly letting you in based on your race and not based on merit, it meant that employers didn't believe you could do the job. And in fact, he took a 15 set sticker from a cigar box and stuck it on a jail law degree because that's what he said it was worse with 15 cents. The only job he could get is he got hired by the Attorney General's Office in Missouri, a Republican, Jack Danforth. And several years later, a colleague of his guy named Dick Wiler who was actually quadriplegic was paralyzed, called him and said, Clarence, there's another one who thinks like you. And Thomas says, well, what do you mean? And Thomas Sol had just written a new book and there

1:48:06was a book review of it in the Wall Street Journal. And he said, another black man who thinks just like you do. And Thomas at the time, Reddit, he remembered, hey, that was the guy I threw in the trash and wouldn't read. He read the review. He went and bought the book and he realized, you know, if you go back to to Myers-Anderson, he did not consider himself a conservative. But he was a rugged individualist and he believed in individual responsibility. So for example, even though Thomas's grandparents lived in poverty their whole life, they never once accepted government welfare. And Thomas's grandfather told him, Clarence, if you take welfare from the government, you give the government license to come into your home and to tell you how to live your life. And it's none of their damn business. I don't want them coming into my home. And that his grandfather believed, he believed in truth. He believed in its your responsibility. When Clarence Thomas quit seminary, it ruptured his relationship with his grandfather because his

1:49:10grandfather did not want him to quit anything. And it, that remains the most painful chapter of Thomas's life when his grandfather broke with him through him out of his house. How old was he at the time? 21 maybe. It's early 20s. Yeah. Through him out of the house and said, you're a grown man now, go live as a grown man. I am done supporting you. You've decided to quit and he said, you're going to end up, you're going to end up a failure and and and and no good, just like all these others. You know, his grandfather also had a phrase, it a lot of phrases, but one that I really like is he said to Thomas, boy, if it don't make no damn sense, it don't make no damn sense. And that I think is a through line in Clarence Thomas's opinion. So he's been on the court over 30 years. He is right now the second longest serving Supreme Court justice in history. In two years, he'll be the longest serving Supreme Court justice. But Pat, you asked, why did I write this bill? This book because our world is so divided, so angry that there's a shortage of role models in the

1:50:16world. And I, I believe Clarence Thomas is an American hero and I think a young person, I think anybody, we all need role models. And I don't think you could do better than Clarence Thomas. So I hope people buy the book. I hope they buy it for their kids and grandkids. No, and by the way, I want to show the clip, but you've seen this clip. This is the clip we've shown on the podcast multiple times. You just feel demands, character and conviction. Go for it. A friend of his to refuse is just not worth it. Judge, you're here though. Some people have been spreading the rumor that perhaps you're going to withdraw. What's what's Clarence Thomas going to do? I'd rather die than withdraw. If they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. So you'd still like to serve on the Supreme Court. I'd rather die than withdraw from the process.

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1:53:27lab drama mean for the tools you use every day? Plus hands on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify. Not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court but for the purpose of not being driven out of this process. I would not be scared. I don't like bullies. I've never run from bullies. I never cry uncle and I'm not going to cry uncle today whether I want to be on the Supreme Court. How do you not love this guy? It's who he is. It is so real. As you mentioned he did my podcast an hour and 20 minutes. The only podcast he's ever done in his life and and and he's open and candid. We're going to have the link to the podcast. They got to watch the interview. I'm going to tell you a final story just because I feel like it. So good buddy of mine. He's a guy named Eddie Margane

1:54:32in Austin. He's a good friend of mine. He's from Monterey Mexico. He and his wife are dear friends and Heidi and I vacation with them frequently and they have kids about the same age as our kids so we go out and go to the beach and have fun. So several years ago Eddie and Lorraine invite us to go to Wohaka Mexico. Have you ever been to Wohaka? Beautiful town in the interior just gorgeous town. And Eddie and Lorraine are good friends with Matthew McConaughey and his wife and his family so they invite the McConaughey's too. So the three couples and all the kids go to Wohaka. So people would come up and they'd ask for pictures and it was fascinating as Matthew would always say no and I'd always say yes and I felt bad because they wanted a picture with Matthew McConaughey and they got stuck with a picture with me unlike I'm sorry but if you want a picture sure. So the last night were there we rented the basement of a bar that was a karaoke club and our kids went on stage and did karaoke and they put on skits and did musical theater and it was awesome and we were just

1:55:36you know the parents were sitting back and they did a performance for a couple hours. So the next morning Heidi and I had to leave to go to the airport at 6am so at midnight we forced the girls were like all right you're going to bed now and the girls are so unhappy they're like dad this is terrible why are you making us go to bed come on come on it's midnight gotta get up to six let's go so we go back we'd all rented a house so we're all in this house so we go to bed a little bit after 2am Matthew and Eddie come back and let's just say they had been drinking steadily in the two hours since they left my skull is powerful it is powerful stuff yeah so I'm asleep and Matthew McConaughey comes rushing into our bedroom he jumps on our bed in all four on all fours and he's jumping up and down going Ted come drink with me and Heidi looks over and she says I don't care what you do but please get this man out of our bed

1:56:44and I reached over and I grabbed my phone and I remember it was 237 in the morning and I got to say Pat this is the first time I think I've ever felt old at 25 I would have gotten up and partied the night away of course I'm not 25 anymore I said Matthew I don't care what you do but I'm going back to bed please leave our bed you said no to partying with Matthew McConaughey and I went back to sleep and it and it did make me think that my wife had just thrown an academy award-winning actor and people sexiest man alive out of our bed which I guess I felt pretty good about that I'm like goes you over right look I was glad she didn't tell me to get out so that that much but it was just sort of what was he like actually I like him a lot is he would you say he's a conservative would you say because you know sometimes he went on the view and you know that whole scene and he's not super political it's interesting he's he's a motive he's

1:57:46sensitive he's an actor like I thought he'd be like his characters I kind of thought he'd be like a frat boy all right all right all right like that's just sort of and he can obviously play those roles really well but he's he is very much an actor what year is this this would have been like 2018 did he you you are you would be consider a super conservative guy was he worried about hanging out with you didn't seem to be and we're still friends I mean I saw Matthew last year at the UTA NM game I mean we're good for him that he didn't but you know there's rumors that he may run that there he has some interest look he is charming at a level just oozes charisma I mean he's fun I had a and I'm a massive movie junkie like I love movies so hanging out with him I would sit and talk about his movies he's not super political look he grew up in in East Texas which is a pretty conservative place but but his he's not deeply political I pointed out one of his best movies Dallas buyers club sick he's one of the most conservative movies ever made and he's like well what do you

1:58:50mean and and so Dallas buyers club a true story about a rodeo cowboy who gets badly injured and gets a transfusion and gets AIDS and this is right when the AIDS epidemic is beginning to know much about it and so he's got he's got AIDS and he's dying from it and the early cocktail of medicines to treat AIDS the FDA was incredibly slow on approving but McConaughey's character begins driving down to Mexico and buying the medicines that are needed to treat AIDS and then driving back up to Dallas and the overwhelming majority of the people that had AIDS were gay or lesbian so he's like in the gay lesbian community like providing them life saving medicines and saving their lives and I said look Matthew this whole movie is about how you have ridiculous government regulations that are stopping people from saving their lives I think that's immoral I think if you're

1:59:53sick and I'm in a big advocate of right to try I've been in big advocate of reforming the FDA so that particularly if you're sick and dying you shouldn't have to drive to Mexico or foreign country to get get life saving medicines and you should be able to take a risk on an experimental medicine particularly if it's if it's your life and you understand the risks and so but it's an interesting discussion because I don't think he had ever thought about the policy implications of the movie now he did lose something like 60 pounds I mean he was a maceate doesn't see by the way it seemed like some of it stayed off like his body changed yeah he looks different after that movie a lot of people say it's a great movie uh he's done a bunch of stuff he's a phenomenal guy to watch and I hope he gets into it I think he you know the book he wrote the what is it the green uh what is a book called that he wrote that the green doors I think is that what what is the book can you just type in a Matthew McConaughey book did this thing this thing so million

2:00:57some top of millions of copies and people swear by this book let's just give him a quick shot off for the book as well if you can go to a Matthew McConaughey right there and then just type in book next to it would green lights that's what it is to good book I was a little grumpy because that book came out at the same time as my last book and so he beat me so it's kind of grumpy got it's not right in the book yeah I'm glad this week there's not a new Matthew McConaughey book but senator this was phenomenal of talking to you and uh I'm excited to see what happens the next couple years I'm sure we're going to see you a lot for about an 18 month period you'll be on TV on a daily basis I have a feeling that's my speculation but I learned a lot about you uh that I didn't know and for the audience that's watching this if you enjoyed it as much as I did please go click on a link below show support order the book one for yourself your kids your boys your peers to uh gift them but with that being said thank you so much for coming out this was phenomenal appreciate you every journey starts with a choice people who inspire us don't wait for the path ahead they create their own from handcrafted Italian leather by generations of artisans

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