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This is Gavin Newsom.

And this is Newt Gingrich.

I just wanted, if I could, just briefly up top.

You sent out a couple of tweets over the last 24 hours, specific to Ukraine, obviously topical issue.

And I appreciated, candidly, your tweets, which were a little more assertive, pushing back on this notion that somehow

time

is our ally with Putin, that it's time to be a little more muscular, time to call him out.

You also called out, I thought, an important fact that's not necessarily part of the discourse.

He spent 21 years in Sweden.

I mean, these guys have a longer version of

that was actually the Napoleonic Wars.

Yeah, but

it was Putin who said, look, we fought Sweden for 21 years.

You think I'm going to slow down?

You think I'm going to slow down?

So tell me, I mean, where are you in the over-under?

I mean,

I appreciate your advocacy for Trump, et cetera.

but I think you, I mean, is the revelation that he's waking up to this new reality that this is not something you could snap your fingers, Putin's a different kind of character?

Well, I think that, first of all,

he probably shares a lot of people's concern that if you push Putin too hard, you end up

in a tactical nuclear war.

and then maybe more.

So I think

there's a dance around Putin that's a little more complicated than just yes or no.

On the other hand,

I think he actually believed from his first term when they'd had a pretty good relationship, although he had sent lethal weapons to Ukraine.

He was much tougher than Obama had been.

But he was pleasant.

They had no major fights.

And I think he had in the back of his head that, look,

we're reasonable.

We can talk with each other.

And it's taken him, I think, about five months to realize nothing Putin says matters.

That what matters is what Putin does.

And when he says to you, oh, I'd really like to get to a truce, but by the way, for the next three days, I'm going to bomb civilians.

After a while, it begins to sink in.

You know, it's the opposite of George W.

Bush.

I'll never forget the day Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and he saw his soul.

And I knew that was nuts because you can't be a KGB lieutenant colonel and have a soul.

So, I mean, the whole concept of, you know, somehow we try to make him a Western figure.

He's not.

He's a Russian figure.

And Russia is a different culture than Western Europe.

And so the idea of what, secondary oil sanctions you're advocating for?

Well, I mean, I'd advocate four big things.

More weapons faster.

And something which the German minister, Prime Minister said today that they'd agreed to, which is use the weapons in Russia.

So you start start causing him pain in his territory.

And this is a longer range weapons, allowing them more range.

We've begun to give them weapons that can reach Russia.

And of course, they have lots of, they're going to produce some astonishing number of drones this year.

I mean, what, I think like a million five or something.

I mean,

people forgot.

Ukraine used to be a major industrial center for the Soviet Union.

There's a lot of engineers in Ukraine, a lot of hardworking, smart people, and they now mobilize in fighting.

I think,

so second, you give them permission to fight inside Russia.

Third, you apply very severe sanctions on particularly sale of oil, which is their only currency that they generate any hard currency with.

And fourth, I would start picking up all of the ships that are carrying illegal oil.

And just literally let it be known worldwide.

You know, if you own a ship and you use it to carry Russian oil, you're going to lose the ship.

We're going to basically impound it forever.

And at that point, his method of hiding from the sanctions collapses.

His ability to sell within the sanctions collapses.

And then the other thing I would do, which has some legal implications, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer, so I don't worry about that.

Is I would take the 300 billion that is impounded in the West of Russian money.

I give it all to Ukraine.

What has been the reticence of that?

I mean, it's interesting that Trump didn't move more aggressively to do that, or is it part of a tactical negotiation?

State Department and Treasury will tell you there are all sorts of complicated questions about doing that,

to which my answer in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition is fine.

Let them fight it out in court.

Take the money.

I appreciate it.

Well, that's a perfect segue into your new book, Trump's Triumph, because I think a lot of that is sort of reflected sort of this notion of action and moving beyond process and uh having a more entrepreneurial mindset in terms of governance, et cetera.

But let's frame this book.

This book comes out on June 3rd.

It's your, how many, Mr.

Speaker, seriously, how many books have you written?

Well, I'm told 44.

And are you, and you're, you're writing all these books.

You, you actually write these books.

You don't have ghostwriters.

I usually have help, but I write all these books.

And this one, unsurprising that you'd come out with a book about Trump's triumphs.

But what surprised me a little bit is this notion that you place him as one of the five giants up there with Jackson and Jefferson and people like Lincoln and FDR himself.

I mean, is that your current belief, or is that one that reflects?

I've believed that

since

the summer of 2015,

because I watched him do two things that were kind of amazing.

One was

tap into the deeply felt emotions of at least half the country.

And particularly, and this is one of the great ironies that I know you're wrestling with, and I've heard you talk about it.

You know, we're having this switch of which party is the working class party and which party is the elite party.

Well,

Trump intuited this, and people forget he had 13 years of doing the apprentice at NBC.

He was a natural salesman and a natural showman.

So his instinct was to go right for the blue-collar worker.

And

he did two things in August of 2015.

Vince Haley, who's now the domestic policy director at that time, was working with us.

And he walked in one day in August and said, you have to see the C-SPAN coverage of Trump in Arizona.

because Trump is talking about illegal immigration, and then he invites the father of a young man who's been killed to come up on stage, and then Trump steps way back

and allows this guy to have like five or ten minutes on stage.

A willingness to give up the spotlight that most people who watch Trump will think is not likely, and that most politicians would find very scary to give control of the microphone to this person.

And I watched the way the dynamics of that.

And then you may remember the very first debate,

Chliss and I were watching in our living room.

And

there was the one where you got in this really nasty, I mean, embarrassingly personal fight.

And

was this the Megan Kelly?

It was Megan Kelly.

I mean, it was just, it was kind of like, ooh, I don't.

Yeah.

Nothing about that.

Candidly, I thought that was it.

I thought it was over.

They were racing to the bottom, and I think he got there first.

And which is a line, actually, that a year later

somebody would use to describe the fight with Hillary in the last month, that she was going towards the bottom, but we thought we could beat her to it.

So anyway, so we watched this debate.

Everybody, I mean, Frank once had a focus group.

They all thought Trump had lost.

Everybody like, you know, everybody at our level thought Trump had lost.

But I'm watching these various online things, and he's at 70 and 80% out of 16.

And I'm thinking, wait a second, there's a mismatch here between everyday Americans and the elites

on a giant scale.

And at that point, I decided that what you had was a phenomenon who had

somehow tapped into a core desire of the American people, that they wanted

to have a leader who would profoundly change Washington.

And in Trump, you had somebody who, by personality and by background, was pretty enthusiastic.

I mean,

he's always wanted to be a person of consequence.

And, you know, if you're the guy who breaks up the Rooseveltian system after 90 years, you get to be a person of consequence.

And so

it fit

what his particular half of the country wants.

It fit what I think is a historic necessity as a conservative political leader.

And it fit his personal desire to have a prize.

He wanted, and it's very interesting to think back to this in terms of the politicians you've known.

His slogan wasn't Trump.

His slogan was make America great again.

So he was picking a topic bigger than himself

within which he could grow.

And I think after surviving the two assassination attempts, he really personally believes that God spared his life for the purpose of actually achieving that.

So

my point is not whether you like him or dislike him, but if you look at the great change agents, they really are Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR.

And I think there's a 50-50 chance.

It's not...

not a certainty yet.

And I've told him, you know, all he did was he earned a ticket to the dance.

Now, if he dances well enough and he wins the 26 election,

then he'll earn a ticket to winning the 28 election.

And if they, then, which will probably be J.D.

Vance on our side.

And if we get the Trump vice president, he's only 40 years old.

If we get the Trump vice president on top of the Trump presidency, then he will be in a league with those guys.

We're going to get to that.

We'll get to 26 in a second, but I want to go back a little bit.

I'm not doing your show.

You're going to have 28, too.

And by the way,

otherwise you're only thinking about it.

No, all I want to say is I'm grateful you're here.

This is a hell of a thing that the two of us are having this conversation.

So take me back.

It's interesting.

You know, you're absolutely right.

And I appreciate it because we had Frank Luntz on, and I want to talk a little bit about what Frank talked about in a minute, a little bit going back, the contract with America, et cetera.

But Frank made that point about those focus groups.

But

I'm curious, your point of view then with Trump.

You must have known him tangentially but you were the leader of the as you said yourself a second ago conservative movement here's a former democrat kind of all over the place no strong ideological moorings necessarily i mean you must have been pretty distrustful early on were you of donald trump no you weren't

first of all i've known trump for a quarter century right uh

because you know his politics though he wasn't always a line on the no i knew him back when he was a businessman but yeah he was a very noisy businessman

And

I'd read his two books, which I recommend to everybody.

If you want to understand Trump, you read The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback.

And The Art of the Comeback is the more important of the two.

Because it opens up with some very telling lines, doesn't it?

Well, it's amazing.

He opens up with

my property in Atlantic City is losing money.

The economy is going down because of Iraq.

I'm $900 million in debt personally to the banks.

And my wife just called and said she wanted a divorce.

And he has a straight line.

He says, this is the moment you either get depressed or you plan a comeback.

This book is about the, which also tells you a lot about how he survived the last four years.

That's right.

This is a guy who's resilient on a scale that is historic.

We first talked with him, Plissy and I had breakfast with him in Des Moines, of all places, in February of 2015.

And we talked about running for president because we'd run in 12 and learned the hard way that if the other guy has many millions more than you,

bet on the money.

But I learned a lot about running for president.

Even though you won easily, by any objective measure, you won all those damn debates.

At least most of the time.

Enough TV dads could undo the debates.

For me, it was a wonderful learning experience.

And I think in my willingness to take on the news media head-on, I was probably a forerunner for Trump's invention of fake

news.

But

But we talked at length about running.

And

it was very interesting.

And you could tell that he had now moved from that would be an interesting thing to kind of a businessman thinking through what would it take, how much would it cost, how would you structure it.

And so I watched his development all through 15.

And

I wasn't particularly pro-Trump at that point.

Right.

Frankly, if you remember, Jeb Bush was the frontrunner.

Of course.

He had the most money.

100 million in a pack.

He had his father and his brother.

He had nationwide name ID.

And watching Trump psychologically take him apart.

Low energy.

The case study.

Well, he got so far inside Jeb's head that Jeb is running around New Hampshire in shorts, jogging.

Now, the average New Hampshireite regards the idea of a presidential candidate who's jogging as disqualification on grounds just automatically,

which was really unfortunate because Jebs actually was a very good reform governor of Florida.

But Trump just had this ability to somehow set the stage where you couldn't win.

And

it's a very unusual capability.

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So it's interesting.

So I appreciate in 2015, you started, I mean, there was sort of the dance of sort of developing more of this formal relationship as it relates to the political.

Did you find him particularly policy driven then?

Was he inquisitive in terms of tactics or policy?

Look, he's talking about tariffs 40 years ago.

Yeah, true.

Talking about immigration.

I mean, the whole, he's talking about the corruption of Washington.

There are some basic themes.

But what I was going to say, though, is, and this may help you understand where I'm coming from.

Trump is not a conservative.

Right.

Trump is the best anti-liberal politician of my lifetime,

better than Reagan.

Reagan was the great conservative articulator.

I sort of stood on his shoulders with the contract with America.

And we came out of a formed philosophical background.

Trump understands that the current system doesn't work and that the woke phase of the American left is

totally destructive.

of the American system.

This is my view, obviously.

And

therefore, he is prepared to fight everybody I want to fight.

Now, the fact that he doesn't read Bill Buckley and he doesn't have a national review subscription, I don't care because I know that instinctively he'll get up every morning and think, you know, what part of the left can I take apart today?

And one day it'll be Harvard, and another day it'll be the New York Times, and another day it'll be some bureaucracy.

But every day he will cheerfully go out and engage and

tear apart the people who I think need to be torn apart.

So I'm very happy to have a non-conservative, anti-liberal entrepreneurial activist with all the skills of a great businessman.

Well, so at Peril, I jump right into the book and get chapters and chapters ahead.

He's also taking on things that you've championed.

I mean, you've highlighted in the book the importance of genomics and synthetic biology and discovery and invest, you know, in RD, the issues, obviously, with DARPA, et cetera.

I mean, how concerning, including, by the way, you just did a documentary with your wife on, of all things,

four-letter word for some of your friends, PBS,

a very proud PBS to me, but on Journey to America on immigration.

And so I'm curious, just that tension, I get the sort of owning the lib and liberalism more broadly defined, but where do you, are you,

where are you in this sort of calculation?

I think when everything shakes out,

let's start with immigration.

Trump is as pro-legal immigration as he is anti-illegal immigration.

I mean, two of his wives are foreign-born.

His mother came from Scotland.

You know, he's not going to jump up and down.

And he has said openly, I mean, he's come up with this idea of this $5 million

avenue to America.

What happened to that?

Well, I suspect it'll be implemented if he wants the money.

I'm not sure his calculations are right.

Yeah, no, that was a little generous.

I'm not sure the enough people show up to make it a big deal.

But Canada and other countries have had very similar, smaller-scale

projects.

There's no question that the

most aggressive pieces of the Trump coalition.

would do things that I would regard as destructive.

There's also no question if you look at, for example, the caliber of the people he's appointed at the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute of Health.

These are very smart, very senior people.

And

I just had a conversation with the new head of NIH, who clearly wants to clean out the underbrush.

But I say this as a guy who, while balancing the federal budget for four years in a row, the only time in 100 years, we doubled the size of NIH while balancing the budget

so so deeply in science but i'll also tell you it's now a big i mean it kept growing uh so what what we doubled was the baseline from which it just kept growing and it's a big bureaucratic system with a lot of baloney i mean when you're paying 65 percent more than the grant so that harvard or stanford or somebody can pay for overhead there's a lot you can do that that doesn't hurt genuine reform.

You also have a big problem, which I don't know how they're going to solve, and that is they've gotten into this ROPA-Dope system where people will file for a research project, not reach the conclusion, because they've already filed for continuing.

And if they reach the conclusion, they'd have to go out and find a whole new topic.

Yeah, that's

a fair amount of slowing down research by bureaucratizing it.

So, I mean, I'm passionate about this stuff.

I'll give you one other example.

I am totally committed to space.

I have been since in 1981.

I introduced the Northwest Ordinance Ordinance for the Moon, saying that if you got to a certain population, you could apply for statehood, which at that time people thought was nuts.

Now they still think it's nuts, but not quite as nuts.

I remember you in the debates talking about space, and we were wondering what the, you know, you were on the edge there.

So you have been

100% consistent.

I'm just glad that Elon came along and made you doable.

I mean, I'll give you an example.

When the Starship actually gets settled down and works properly, it has 33 engines.

It produces 2.3 times as much thrust as the Saturn V, the rocket that went to the moon.

2.3 times as much.

So your choice is to go with the traditional NASA, spend an amazing amount of money, and maybe get two people on the surface of the moon, or this thing will lift 100 people or 150 tons.

So

you can put 50 to 70 people on the moon in one bite.

I mean, just boom.

But to your point, that requires NSF.

It requires all of the innovation and entrepreneurial.

I mean, it requires research institutions.

It requires, presumably, institutions of higher learning as well.

Are you concerned about what's happening in terms of those partnerships?

I mean, just I think about Sendia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Labs.

I think about all the RD that's happening with military and obviously with academia.

I mean, are you concerned that there's a recklessness?

I appreciate solving for issues of some abuse

or some inefficiencies, but there seems to be a blunt approach.

There is.

No, first of all, I think there is.

And as a historian, I would argue that when you try to make change on this scale, you're going to have very sloppy margins.

You cannot move slow enough to be careful or the old order will surround you and drown you.

Here, here.

You have to be, which means you're going to make mistakes and you're going to screw things up and you've got to go back and fix them.

At the same time, I would say,

I worry about our greatest universities, partially from, I suspect, the opposite of your view, which is partially I think they're so left-wing now that they're virtually totalitarian and that they create a group think that is really destructive.

And yet,

at one point, just a generation ago, these were the greatest centers of learning on the planet.

And it does worry me.

How do you How do you keep the best of Harvard or the best of MIT or the best of Stanford or Berkeley without, well at the same time, taking head on the kind of ideological groupthink that has become literally almost totalitarian in its unwillingness to have any competition of ideas?

And I think that's a real challenge.

And we don't, the truth is we don't have a good answer.

No, I mean, how do you square that circle specifically on this notion of the journey to America?

And I want to talk to about the timing of that.

And by the way, congratulations, 90-minute documentary on PBS.

That's really a love letter to absorbing the best and the brightest and who we are as America in the spirit of Reagan.

He talked about the life force of new Americans, that language evocative of who we are.

But now we're starting to talk about 20, 27% of the student body as international at Harvard.

And you're basically saying, now you don't need to apply.

And they're opening up their arms and their wallets in places like China.

How do we square that?

I think it's very hard.

I think that there are two conflicting things going on.

And we don't talk about them very honestly.

I think what's happened in much of Europe where the culture is literally being drowned

should be a much greater alarm and it's something you can't even talk about.

But if you look at places in Britain or France or Sweden or neighborhoods in Brussels,

you're seeing basically the end of Western civilization.

So on the one hand, you have to say, are there legitimate concerns about who comes here and why they come here?

The other side of that is, with the Chinese, a very great deal of China's technological advance has come from American universities where Chinese students come, learn a heck of a lot, and go back home.

And if China is our biggest competitor, which I think may turn out to be exaggerated a decade from now,

nonetheless, for planning purposes, they're our biggest competitor.

Do you really want Caltech and MIT to be providing the best Chinese scientists in the world so they can go back home?

I mean, those are topics that deserve a lot deeper and more conversation.

And I think...

I'm perfectly happy to say that there will be pieces of the

Make America Great Again movement that are going to have to go back and be fixed because they're going to be destructive.

Some of them are just plain going to be wrong.

I mean, I'm a very big advocate for science.

I wrote a piece recently on why we should not cut science funding at NASA, for example.

On the one hand, I'm totally in favor of wiping out the space launch system, which is stunningly expensive and has accomplished nothing.

And by the way, you could probably pay for a decade of NASA science with the cost of the space launch system.

So I think there are ways that there are good things we should protect, and that's going to lead to fights because you're going to have some people who are clumsy or sloppy or who ideologically are pretty cheerful about being ignorant.

I mean.

I mean, look, you talk about Doge in the book.

You write about it rather,

but you write about it very in laudatory terms, but you make the point you just made as it relates to if you're going to move move fast, you're going to break some things.

But this notion of iteration and time to move and speed, you even highlight old Peter Drucker talking about

excellence and efficiency, which I appreciated.

But I mean, what is your over-under, just you know, Doge in particular, is it,

you know, are you satisfied with the $2 trillion in savings?

It'll turn out to have

at least two patterns.

One is more noise than achievement.

And the other is that it will have exposed for us a number of things that were going on that are kind of astonishing.

And that you, you know, so on the one hand,

condoms in Gaza, which, you know, turned out not to be the case.

What do you mean?

Well,

for example, it's pretty clear that I think at least 10% of the UN refugee workers in Gaza were pro-Hamas.

Okay, that's separate, separate.

I'm lamenting on the sort of Orwellian notion of $50 million of condoms, which the president reminded me of in the Oval Office, which I told him was not true.

There's a good Californian, I'm sure you fondly remember Reagan.

I do.

And by the way, Mr.

Speaker, I'm in his office every day as a point of pride.

That's right.

Well, that's right.

I mean,

right there in the governorship.

Every once in a while, Reagan would see something in the newspaper and it would click in his head and it would repeat it endlessly.

I see where you're going.

And so, now look,

there's a great

Rilke, who's a German poet, once said, if you drive away my demons, will my angels flee also?

And the challenge with a charismatic leader of Trump's power is there's five or 10% where you go, really?

And then there's this other stuff that is amazing and historic.

And you may not be able to separate the two.

Yeah.

Or, yeah, I mean, I may have a different, I'm maybe 90-10 of your 10.

I'd want to flip that.

Yeah, I flipped the.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to do the show with you.

I remember when we talked about Citizenville

and all the ideas you had a decade ago before you ran into the Sacramento bureaucracy.

God bless.

By the way, I still tell people, that's a really worthwhile book.

I appreciate you for saying that.

By the way, I think so much.

It's interesting.

I reflected on our conversations and a little bit on that book as I was reading your book.

I mean, you talk about, you know, governing, not just campaigning.

You talk about issues around efficient and effective government.

And more novel, and I think what's always interested me about you is your willingness to lean into the future and talk about healthcare differently than others, as you did again here.

You even highlighted.

My old friend Dean Ornich in terms of some of his work on wellness and prevention, these four Ps you talk about, predictability and personalization in the healthcare space.

But you also take on other spaces, which I appreciate as well, like the old Eisenhower frame on the military-industrial complex.

And I'm curious, in relationship to the Doge question, why do you think there's been so little willingness to enter into that space, even the space launch example you just gave?

I think,

you know, I had one fight in the first Bush's Trump's first term

over Huawei and what we needed to do to dramatically strengthen American telecommunications.

And it's the one fight that I clearly, decisively lost.

And I lost it because AT ⁇ T was on the other side.

And ATT is so big, contributes so much money, has so many lobbyists, buys so many TV ads.

that, you know, I just, it just ran over me.

It was an exciting experience, but

I felt like the guy in Tiananmen Square with the tanks.

So I start with that.

I mean, it is,

I think the space launch system is one of the best examples of the sickness of the old order.

And what Eisenhower did warn about, I mean, people should go back and read his farewell address because he's very clear.

And this guy had been a five-star general, commander of allied forces in Europe, as well as president.

So he had pretty good knowledge.

And he's saying correctly,

in order to build a system big enough to defeat or contain the Soviet Empire,

you have to turn over so much money and power to a bureaucracy, which will then hire big corporations, that you're going to have the permanent danger that they grow together into sort of a single organism, which then operates for its own benefit.

And that's an enormous problem across it's a problem in health care, too.

I mean big health in many ways is as bad as big defense

and I'm working on a paper right now which will amuse you when it finally comes out

talking about Trump time and Trump savings and going back to the

skating rink in New York.

Yeah, the city had the rink had quit making ice, which makes it very hard if you're a skating rink.

And the city had for six years tried to fix it, had spent $13 million.

Trump talks about this in his first, in the book, The Art of the Deal.

This is one of his great successes.

Yeah.

Objectively.

And he says, you know, he's looking at his, his, his apartment looks out over the rink, the Walman rink.

And so he finally gets so pissed off at six years they can't make ice.

And he challenges the mayor publicly and says, you give it to me, and I will fix it in less than a year for

under $3 million.

Well, he fixed it in four months, and we came in 25% below budget.

Now, they already spent $6.5 million.

He came in 25% below the $3 million budget, totally fixed in four months.

And in the book, he has this great line where he says, they had this firm in Florida that had won the contract and didn't know what they were doing.

And so I said to myself, who builds skating rinks?

I thought Canadian rinks.

And I went, oh,

excuse me.

So he goes to the National Hockey League and says, who builds the skating rinks?

And this is Firman Montreal.

And they fly down and they look at it and they go, this is really embarrassing.

This is so easy to fix, you can't believe it.

And when he finally got it done, somebody said, what happened?

He said, it wasn't magic.

It was common sense and management.

Well, to the degree that we could bring common sense and management, we would, I think you could get better defense for

25% less than the current defense budget if you could clean out all the bureaucracy and all the cronyism and all the bad contracts.

I tell every audience,

if you took the Pentagon and turned it into a triangle and took the other two-thirds and turned it into a museum,

you would get a better defense system overnight.

And the reason is simple.

I mean, you'll understand this as a governor of a state with a huge bureaucracy.

They built the Pentagon in 1943 so that 26,000 people could manage World War II with

carbon paper, manual typewriters, and filing cabinets.

And in fact, Marshall's chief of staff used to run drills to see how fast you could find paper.

If you needed a certain document, where is it?

How do you get there?

Well, everybody in the Pentagon now has a smartphone, an iPad, a laptop computer, and I have never gotten, you might be able to get somebody at Caltech to figure this out I've never been able to get an exchange rate that is if you have one person over here with a carbon paper distribution and one person over here with a smartphone or an iPad or a computer what's the relative exchange rate of information flow my guess is it's above a million

well guess what you have the same 26,000 people

now since they're not filing paper and they're not writing on carbon what they're doing is writing each other to prove that their job is important so they can stay employed.

So you screw up the whole system with person A writing person B, who writes person C, who then writes person A, and they beat these things to death.

And exactly the way New York City was failing with the Ice Room,

because you have a bunch of bureaucrats who write papers that have no meaning.

And

I think I helped found the Military Reform Caucus in 81.

I helped pass the Goldwater-Nichols reform in 86 against every active duty senior officer.

None of them wanted it.

And nowadays, I'll tell you, it's invaluable.

We need a deep, thorough review of all of our national security, not just defense, all of it, if we're going to compete in the modern world.

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It just seems of all things, and you know, I appreciate

the skating rate because it's a reminder of under promise, over deliver.

And we can talk about some of those day one actions that Trump may or may not have succeeded with in a moment.

But I'm curious as it relates to the issues of the Pentagon.

I mean, Trump's been bold and he's provided a lot of space for Doge and certainly Musk in the last 100 days,

but the Pentagon does seem to be off limits.

I mean, is that

accurate?

I don't think so.

I think they will presently be as ruthless at the Pentagon as they will be anywhere else.

Interesting.

F-35 comes to mind?

Huh?

What?

F-35 comes to mind?

Actually, I've gotten real pushback on that.

I was one of the people who was really critical.

I've had three or four people who I'm writing this paper, and I was talking about examples of cost overruns.

And I've had three or four people who do not work for Lockheed, aren't part of the system, but they're very smart, write back and say to me, that is an inaccurate measurement.

That if you actually look at the plane they have have built, it has no relationship to the original contract.

It is vastly superior.

And the price has dropped now to about a reasonable price for a fifth-generation fighter.

I mean, I was shocked.

I took it out of my paper because there were too many people writing me back and saying,

the other examples are terrific.

This one's just dumb.

It's not technically right.

Interesting.

Because

a week ago, I would have said to you exactly that.

Yeah, I know.

It's sort of,

it's, we throw that one around.

Now I'm getting beaten up by people who know a lot more than I do saying, now there are, I have a lot of good examples in my paper, but that ain't one of them.

That ain't one of them.

Interesting.

So, all right, so you're, you'll, you'll stipulate we should see some more.

I mean, obviously, uh, the Secretary of Stance Defense has done some personnel moves, et cetera, but they seem relatively modest compared to the overall reforms that you're advocating for.

But, you know, one of the things I've struck in the book, and again, unsurprising because it's been a consistent theme with you, is sort of anticipating the next war, not necessarily re-litigating and reflecting exclusively on the last one.

And the issues of

electronic EMF, issues that you've been sort of focused on, issues of space in relationship to defense, et cetera.

Talk to me a little bit about what you sort of posit or you at least promote in this book as it relates to future security and national offense.

I think there are three big things.

The first is we need to quit talking about war fighting and think about war winning.

The fact that we have great tactical capabilities and wonderfully courageous people who go for 21 or 22 years in a place like Afghanistan and don't win should bother us.

Because war fighting is not the goal.

War winning is the goal.

And as Sun Tzu wrote,

from 500 BC, the greatest of all generals win bloodless victories.

So, you know, the question is, can America design a war winning series of strategies rather than a war fighting strategies?

The second thing I would say is you have to look at all of national security.

You mentioned, for example, the real threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack.

And a very close friend of mine, Bill Fortune, wrote a remarkable novel called One Second After, in which he shows you a village in North Carolina after electricity has been cut off by an electromagnetic pulse.

I mean, it is a breathtaking book.

He was actually invited to Sandia.

You'd mentioned Sandia Labs earlier.

He was invited there by the physicists who were grateful that somebody could explain what they worried about

and thought his book really was a very accurate projection.

So you need to think about not just the Defense Department, but the totality of national security.

And then in the Defense Department itself, I begun writing something which only occurred to me by watching Ukraine.

We are seeing

an extraordinary change in the nature of warfare, and none of us understand it yet.

I'm actually going to write a paper on Poitiers, Crecy, and Agincourt, which are the three great battles in the Middle Ages, where the British annihilate the French because the French cannot adjust.

They have to be armored knights.

Their culture requires it.

And the British have developed a longbow which slaughters armored knights.

And

it takes place over a century.

And in that entire period, their culture will not allow them to change.

Well, we may have a similar problem.

We like big, expensive, sophisticated, long-to-develop, long-to-field systems.

You're now up against, as I said a while ago, I think the numbers for next year, or for this year, for Ukraine are going to be 1,500,000 drones.

Now, most of them are small, most of them are simple.

Most of our guys would look down their nose at them.

But Lord Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar, said a one-point numbers annihilate.

And if you take the combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, new specialized kinds of chemistry,

there's a firm in your state actually called Divergent, which is probably the most advanced factory on the planet, far ahead of anything in China.

And they use those techniques to be able to shift what they make within a matter of hours.

And it's astonishing to visit them and they're in LA, not far from an in-and-out burger.

And they,

I measure measure my trips to California.

Trust me, a lot of people do have one of them too.

But anyway,

when you start thinking about,

for example, you don't just measure the Chinese warship navy.

All the Chinese merchant ships have been designed now for 20 years to be capable of launching drones.

Well, if I have a ship and it happens to have 40 drones on it, Is that an aircraft carrier or is that a merchant ship?

And if I have 1800 them,

does that count as part of my Navy?

Or is that just an auxiliary group?

And how many munitions does an American ship carry?

And how many drones can it stop if the other guy is able to send endless quantities?

I'm just giving you a flavor.

I don't think we realize yet.

You know, I talked occasionally to the Amazon people about their use of robotics.

which is part of the reason they've been able to be so amazing.

We have no notion yet of how fast the modern battlefield is going to become and how complicated it's going to become.

And our current bureaucracies and our current procurement system makes it very difficult to be agile enough.

And frankly,

the dominance of these big corporations, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, what have you, Raytheon, makes it very hard to have the kind of entrepreneurial change that you've seen in Silicon Valley for your entire lifetime.

You know, it's the small company today that's the giant company in 20 years.

And if you can't grow the small companies because they can't get through the Defense Department's paperwork, then you're not ever going to have the rate and rhythm of innovation that you need.

No, I appreciate it.

And that's something you highlight, sort of that framework of iteration, the sandbox and

procurement reform, which is so foundational.

And it's really, it's about, you know, it's the incumbency racket.

You talk about incumbency capitalism versus innovation capitalism.

And that sort of innovation capitalism is a big part of what we focus on.

And obviously, I think it's part of the secret sauce, to your point, of Silicon Valley.

I'm curious, just going back a little bit and, you know, and we're bouncing around a little bit here, but again, back to timing.

Because Journey to America, you did it with your wife, and you guys have done how many documentaries now?

You've done 44 books.

We've done 10 movies, and I've done 44 books.

She and I have done, I think, four or five of them together.

She wrote six children's books about Ellis the Elephant and American history.

I love it.

Yeah, well, it's particularly interesting because she's a music major.

She was a piano major, plays the French horn, spent 20 years in a professional choir at the Basilica in Washington.

So that's her natural background.

And then she was a clerk in the Agriculture Committee in the House.

And

she works really hard.

She works much harder than I do.

And tune in for the rest of the conversation with Newt Gingrich.

Be honest, how many tabs do you have open right now?

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Sounds like you need close all tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

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