E145: Presidential Candidate Chris Christie in conversation with the Besties

00:00:00.000 | All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. We're very excited today to do our third

00:00:05.760 | deep dive long form discussion with presidential candidates for the 2024 election started with

00:00:11.760 | RFK. And he got a huge boost in the ratings after it was on the pod. We had Vivek and now

00:00:17.600 | Governor Chris Christie is with us. Governor, thanks for coming.

00:00:21.680 | My pleasure. Thanks for having me guys.

00:00:23.120 | Alright, so it's a little bit different here than I think some of the other news hits

00:00:27.840 | that you do. This is not short form is long form. We like to, you know, have a thoughtful discussion

00:00:33.760 | with the candidates, not with talking points. And I know that you're a straight shooter. So I think

00:00:39.920 | you'll fit right in here with the other boys. I think you're very unique amongst candidates

00:00:44.800 | that you've actually brought up the deficit, as we know, just two facts here. And then I'll hand

00:00:50.720 | it over to free bird for his question. Last two administrations have run up the deficit massively.

00:00:57.840 | Here's a chart of our debt, Trump added almost a trillion Biden's added 4 trillion. And this is

00:01:06.720 | obviously an unpopular issue to bring up. As you've mentioned, bringing this up is unpopular

00:01:12.800 | doesn't get you votes necessary to say we have to cut spending. And free bird and I are very much

00:01:18.800 | I'll speak for myself. This is my number one issue in terms of picking a candidate freeberg. I think

00:01:23.040 | you said it's your number one issue. So freeberg I'll hand it over to you in terms of a question

00:01:27.280 | for Governor Christie. Yeah, Governor Christie, nice to see you. You and I sang on a karaoke

00:01:32.480 | stage together in Idaho a few years ago. But it's I do remember that. Yeah. Is that a sly way of

00:01:38.560 | saying Idaho, I had to put that two and two together there. Everyone nice free bird was a

00:01:43.600 | small bar in Idaho. Oh, small bar in Idaho, small establishment classes for all gather up with a

00:01:51.120 | few few folks who happen to be in a bar together at the B conference that shall not be named.

00:01:56.000 | Rain Man David Sacks.

00:02:02.640 | We watched the Republican primary debate a few weeks ago. And I think what struck me at least

00:02:20.480 | was how little focus and attention is given on the fiscal situation, the US government deficit

00:02:28.480 | in excess of $2 trillion this year, debt to GDP in excess of 130% 30 plus percent of US debt is

00:02:36.960 | coming to you in the next year, which means it's going to get refinanced at the higher rates of

00:02:40.320 | probably five and a half percent plus. And then when you look at the demands on Social Security,

00:02:45.280 | Medicare, forecasts are that both of those systems necessarily go bankrupt, unless there's

00:02:51.520 | some extraordinary measures taken. And that seems to be a very kind of hot topic, golden goose that

00:02:57.600 | can't be touched or debated. All of this seems to be largely ignored. And so much of the conversation

00:03:04.320 | is around social issues in the United States, military issues, war, etc. When fundamentally,

00:03:11.040 | there's no gas in the tank. I guess the point of view I'd love to hear from you is how do you think

00:03:15.920 | about that? Does that matter to you right now? Or do we think that this is a can that we kick down

00:03:20.240 | the road and we'll solve this problem later, we'll grow our way out of it. If we cut some spending,

00:03:24.960 | it'll fix itself. It seems so core to me that the future of the United States is going to be

00:03:31.360 | dependent on how we're going to manage this fiscal emergency that we're facing.

00:03:34.400 | Well, look, David, it's core to me, too. And I'm, you know, if you've seen any of the excerpts from

00:03:40.800 | any of the town hall meetings I've done so far, you know, I've been talking about both the issues

00:03:45.760 | you just raised. First off, I think on the deficit and debt side, I learned about this after becoming

00:03:55.600 | a prosecutor and having to come to New Jersey and inherit two problems immediately. We had a $2

00:04:02.160 | billion short-term deficit for the last five months of the fiscal year that I inherited.

00:04:07.920 | And then we had an $11 billion deficit on a $29 billion budget for the fiscal year starting July

00:04:14.640 | 1 of 2010. And I had to deal with both those things. And as you know, unlike the chart that

00:04:20.880 | was just shown, you don't get to run it up. You have to square it. And so, you know, I learned

00:04:28.800 | how hard it is and how ugly it's going to be for your popularity to do these things. So on the

00:04:35.280 | first piece, on the $2 billion, we sat down, I refused to raise taxes, and we sat down and we

00:04:40.800 | eliminated 683 individual programs completely and then swept every surplus from a school board in

00:04:50.800 | the state. And the way we did that was we reduced their state aid by the amount they had in surplus

00:04:58.560 | to get the $2 billion in balance. And then extended that into the next budget cycle,

00:05:06.960 | kept all those cuts in place, which did some structural, you know, refiguring of the deficit,

00:05:13.120 | and then made additional cuts after that. You know, I'd gotten elected with 48.5% of the vote.

00:05:20.960 | And after I did that, my approval ratings went down below 40 in my first six months.

00:05:28.400 | But what I knew was it was absolutely necessary because in our state, we were already overtaxed,

00:05:35.360 | and the idea of raising taxes again was not an option that was, to me, viable. So when you learn

00:05:41.840 | and you go through that process, and then you look at what we're dealing with federally, I think you

00:05:47.040 | realize three things right off the bat. One, it is an imperative that we need to reduce spending.

00:05:53.520 | What it's doing to inflation and the long-term ability of the country to grow,

00:05:57.600 | it makes it absolutely necessary. Two, to me, kicking the can down the road is not an option

00:06:04.880 | because the problem's only gonna get worse, and it's going to begin to impact our ability to be

00:06:11.200 | able to do some of the core things that government is supposed to do. And then third, that you've got

00:06:17.920 | to be willing to sacrifice popularity for results. And I'm not gonna sit here and say it'll be fun to

00:06:27.600 | do. It won't be. But I went through it once already on a smaller scale, and quite frankly,

00:06:32.960 | you have a much longer runway to do it at the federal level than I did at the state level.

00:06:38.400 | I had hard deadlines of June 30, 2010, and July 1, 2010 to accomplish both.

00:06:47.360 | On the entitlement side, I think I'm the only person who's been talking about this

00:06:51.520 | and saying out loud, "We've got to consider raising retirement age, and we've got to consider

00:06:57.360 | means testing and eligibility for Social Security." And those also, I remember watching Biden's

00:07:06.320 | State of the Union address, and to me, the most disgusting part of it was when he said,

00:07:10.640 | "Can we all agree we're not gonna touch Social Security?" And both sides stood up and cheered.

00:07:15.360 | Yeah, I agree. That was the worst moment for me as well.

00:07:18.720 | Liars and hypocrites. They all know it's going broke in 11 years, and that's an automatic 24%

00:07:25.040 | benefit cut on the Social Security side, and automatic 25% Medicare benefit cut on that side.

00:07:31.680 | So you're not gonna be able to let that happen. And so you gotta deal with those issues,

00:07:37.680 | and I think you can deal with them through both eligibility issues regarding means testing,

00:07:45.120 | and you can deal with it by also dealing with retirement age. Retirement age, I would do it

00:07:50.640 | over the longer term, not for people in their 50s and 60s currently, but for people in their

00:07:55.920 | 40s and below.

00:07:57.440 | And let me just say one follow-up, because to your point, I think the recent polling showed

00:08:02.560 | something like 83% plus of Americans support the benefit they get from these two programs,

00:08:08.320 | Social Security and Medicare, that it should not be touched, that that is the popular

00:08:12.240 | opinion, that is what the voters are saying. Do you not think that you put yourself at risk

00:08:17.840 | in your campaign by making these statements? And how do you get elected and instigate change?

00:08:24.480 | I put myself at risk by running, let alone put myself at risk. I just think you have to be

00:08:31.280 | honest with people. It's 11 years, it's not 20 years, it's 11 now. And it means that if the next

00:08:38.480 | president doesn't deal with it, then it is going to be in absolute crisis mode when it has to be

00:08:44.560 | dealt with. We'll be inside three years. And at that point, the options will be even fewer. So

00:08:51.040 | yeah, of course, it's, and I know someone will run a commercial...

00:08:53.680 | By the way, is that the part, is that the behind closed door conversation? Is that what's going on?

00:08:57.920 | Is the folks that you know, that you talk with, everyone behind the closed door, when they're not

00:09:02.400 | in front of the camera, are saying, "We are going to have to deal with this in the next

00:09:05.440 | presidential administration"?

00:09:07.120 | Yeah. But they all say, "I can't believe you're saying it out loud."

00:09:11.360 | Right.

00:09:12.560 | But to me, we are in such a bad place in politics in this country. If we don't start telling the

00:09:19.520 | people the truth about the problems we have, we're never going to have an opportunity to solve them.

00:09:25.200 | And that's risky, but my entire candidacy is risky. So you might as well just go for it and

00:09:32.720 | tell people what you really think. And I do think there are a number of people out there who are

00:09:36.800 | thinking people. I think most people who answer that 83% number, you know, David, are people who

00:09:44.320 | don't even know that we're 11 years away from insolvency, because nobody talks about that part.

00:09:51.600 | And if you don't talk about that part, why would any of them want Social Security touched?

00:09:58.080 | But I'm finding in my town hall meetings, when I tell people, "It's 11 years from insolvency,"

00:10:02.960 | how would you deal with a 25% cut, 24% cut in your Social Security benefit?

00:10:08.400 | People, older folks in particular, look horrified. And so, you know, I think it's an educational

00:10:16.880 | process. And I've always tried to treat politics at least in part that way, that, you know,

00:10:24.080 | something I say in New Jersey all the time when press would ask me about a poll that didn't like

00:10:28.560 | a position I was taking on an issue, I'd say, you know, a leader's job is not to follow polls,

00:10:34.080 | it's to change them. And my job is to change them and to persuade and convince through facts and

00:10:41.600 | argument that this is the right way to go. And sometimes you'll win and sometimes you won't.

00:10:45.920 | But if you don't tackle the problems, what the hell are you doing there? You know,

00:10:52.160 | the housing behind you is nice, but, you know, frankly, it's not worth it to me if I'm going to

00:10:58.000 | go there and just be another one to kick this can down the road as, you know, Obama, Trump,

00:11:05.920 | and Biden have all done. Bush tried to do something about it, and the Congress rejected it.

00:11:10.880 | But Obama, you know, Trump, and Biden have done nothing.

00:11:14.560 | What are your top two areas where you would cut in order to save entitlements? What are the other

00:11:21.760 | areas where you would go to find savings? Well, look, I think we have to look at social spending

00:11:29.200 | in general that's really drastically increased post-COVID, and those increases have not been

00:11:35.520 | taken back. So, I think you have to look at all the programs that were ramped up during COVID

00:11:40.800 | and say, "Okay, what's it going to be to bring it back to pre-COVID spending to start?" And then,

00:11:49.760 | after you do that, a further evaluation of those programs to see if they're effective.

00:11:55.200 | And I think that would get you a good part of the way there, given how much spending

00:12:01.120 | increased during COVID. I think, secondly, we need to look at the way we fund education in

00:12:09.200 | this country as well, and whether or not when we're spending $800 billion, what do we do with

00:12:17.360 | the $80 billion the federal government spends? Another place, an interesting place to look.

00:12:21.760 | Small in comparison to a $2 trillion debt, I understand, but that's another place I would look.

00:12:29.360 | And the only place I really wouldn't look is on the military side at this point,

00:12:34.480 | because I think you've got to increase efficiency and effectiveness at the Pentagon.

00:12:39.440 | But on the other hand, I don't think that this is the time to be cutting back there when our Navy

00:12:46.480 | and Air Force are both in the conditions they're in.

00:12:48.240 | It's a good segue with the military. Obviously, one of the major differences in thinking on this

00:12:55.600 | pod and a big debate inside the Republican Party is around, should we defend Ukraine?

00:13:02.720 | And then, eventually, will we defend Taiwan? And so, maybe I'll hand it off to David.

00:13:09.440 | I'm stunned that this is coming up on your pod.

00:13:11.520 | Yeah. It's a point of contention.

00:13:15.840 | I won't speak for Sachs, but I'm for it, Governor.

00:13:19.440 | Yes, sir. As does my oldest son listen to it. So, in times when I miss, my son Andrew is...

00:13:27.200 | And he wanted to give me a full briefing before I was going to go on the pod today.

00:13:32.960 | And his evaluation of all of you. I told him I was going to refrain from that because I didn't

00:13:38.000 | want to bring his biases into the interview. But...

00:13:41.200 | Can you at least tell us what his evaluations were?

00:13:43.440 | Well, afterwards I will.

00:13:45.520 | Afterwards, yeah.

00:13:46.400 | Absolutely. Well, okay.

00:13:47.520 | By the way, our path to presidential candidates is through the sons, it seems.

00:13:51.040 | It's kind of a common...

00:13:52.320 | It's actually RFK's sons, very big into the pod. David, of course, is a pacifist. He's a

00:13:58.400 | longtime GOP member, but doesn't believe we should be fighting never-ending wars.

00:14:02.640 | Let me go back. Yeah, let me level set here on foreign policy first, before we get into Ukraine.

00:14:06.960 | I want to go back to the Bush era, forever wars, the Iraq war. One of the reasons why Trump,

00:14:13.680 | I think, really took off in 2016 is he was the first Republican to really come out and say

00:14:20.240 | that the Iraq war and all these Middle East and forever wars we got into was a big mistake.

00:14:24.320 | And even though he was for it when we did it.

00:14:27.840 | Okay. Well, fair enough. But he said on the campaign trail...

00:14:30.000 | Well...

00:14:30.400 | Hold on, let me just finish the question. In 2016, he said that Bush lied us into the war,

00:14:34.880 | and he said, "No more Bushes." Putting aside Trump for a second, we can get to Trump.

00:14:39.520 | What is your view on it? Do you fundamentally agree with that, that we were lied into the Iraq

00:14:43.360 | war? Do you defend it? No, I think that most people would admit that we were misled. I wouldn't use

00:14:51.040 | the word lied. I would say misled into the Iraq war because of the WMD issue. I mean, I supported

00:14:58.960 | the Iraq war because of WMD. And I thought if Saddam Hussein had WMD, that that was something

00:15:05.920 | that we had to deal with in the context of the post-9/11 world. When it turned out that he didn't

00:15:12.400 | have WMD, I don't think there would have been many people who would have been supportive

00:15:16.080 | of the Iraq war absent WMD. So I thought Trump's statements in 2016 were typical for him.

00:15:25.120 | He changed his opinion, and instead of giving a rational reason for it, he gave a sophomoric one.

00:15:33.200 | And so I don't give him a whole lot of credit for that, but...

00:15:35.680 | Nat: Well, you did at the time in a sense. I mean, when Bush said... Sorry, Trump said that

00:15:41.120 | Bush lied us into the Iraq war at the South Carolina debate. That was on February 13th.

00:15:45.760 | You endorsed him on February 26th.

00:15:48.000 | Reid: Yeah. So what's that mean?

00:15:49.600 | Nat: Well, I mean, if you thought his answer was sophomoric, why'd you endorse him two weeks later?

00:15:54.880 | Reid: I endorsed him because I was convinced he was gonna be the Republican nominee for president,

00:16:00.320 | and I didn't want Hillary Clinton to be the president. And so having been in that race,

00:16:05.760 | competed with him, after he won South Carolina, convinced he was gonna be the nominee,

00:16:10.320 | and having at that time had a 15-year relationship with him, my view was I could go in there and try

00:16:15.120 | to make him a better candidate, and if he won, a better president. And that's why I endorsed him.

00:16:19.360 | Absolutely nothing to do with his sophomoric answer on that. I didn't like his answer on the

00:16:24.720 | wall either saying Mexico was gonna pay for it. I thought that was sophomoric as well. But you know

00:16:29.760 | what? In American politics, you don't get to all vote for the candidate you wanna vote for.

00:16:35.360 | You get to vote for the ones who are left. And if I had my first choice in '16, it would have been me,

00:16:41.680 | but that didn't work out. So I defaulted into Trump because I thought he was a better choice

00:16:47.760 | than Hillary Clinton. And by the way, still do think he was a better choice than Hillary Clinton.

00:16:51.760 | Nat: Okay.

00:16:52.560 | Reid: But you probably agree with that, right, Sax? You thought Trump would be a better choice

00:16:57.520 | than Hillary Clinton?

00:16:58.240 | I mean, honestly, back in 2016, I wasn't sure what to make of Trump because he was such a,

00:17:02.480 | you know, outsider and sort of a wrecking ball. I agree with him about the Iraq War,

00:17:07.200 | but I can accept the governor's answer that we were misled on that war. And if we had known

00:17:12.880 | the truth about it, we never would have gotten into it. So I think we can all agree on that.

00:17:16.400 | Nat: Yep.

00:17:17.040 | Reid: I wanna get to Ukraine, but just quickly, 2012, do you regret not running in 2012? There's

00:17:23.280 | a lot of commentators who say that you kind of were the Trump before Trump, you had this combative

00:17:28.640 | style, this kind of take no prisoners sort of attitude, and you kind of had a moment in 2012

00:17:35.440 | where it looked like maybe you could have been the front runner or the candidate. I guess,

00:17:40.160 | why didn't you go for it in 2012? And I mean, do you regret that at all?

00:17:43.440 | Reid: I don't regret it, and I wasn't ready to be president, and that's why I didn't run.

00:17:48.400 | I know it seems quaint now after Barack Obama and Donald Trump have been president, but back in 2012,

00:17:56.720 | I really felt like it was necessary to feel in your heart and your mind you were ready. When

00:18:02.240 | people started talking about me running for president, I hadn't even been governor for a year.

00:18:08.000 | And before that, I'd been a prosecutor. And in my heart, I just didn't feel like

00:18:16.240 | I was ready to be president. And if I don't feel something in here, I'm not gonna be very effective

00:18:23.760 | at making the argument politically, nor am I gonna be able to convince people to give me their money,

00:18:29.040 | which you need to do as well. And so, no, I don't regret it. And by the way, all those

00:18:33.920 | commentators who say that never ran for a goddamn thing in their lives. And they all can think,

00:18:39.680 | "Oh, you would have won. You would have beaten Romney, and you would have beaten Obama."

00:18:43.840 | Maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn't have, but that's kind of like the dog catching the garbage

00:18:48.080 | truck. If you don't think you're ready and you catch it, the worst moment wouldn't have been

00:18:54.400 | losing that election. The worst moment might have been winning it and getting into the Oval Office

00:18:58.640 | for the first time and saying, "Oh my God, am I really ready to do this?" So I don't have any

00:19:03.840 | regrets. I really don't. And everybody who usually commentates in that way are people who have never

00:19:12.000 | put their name on a ballot for anything. And until you do that, you don't know what it feels like and

00:19:17.520 | what it means to have to offer yourself up to people for anything, let alone for president.

00:19:23.680 | - Yeah. Okay, fair enough. Going chronologically here, 2014, Biden is now Obama's vice president.

00:19:31.920 | He requests the Ukraine portfolio to run it for Obama. There is a famous phone call that gets

00:19:37.680 | leaked where our deputy secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, is on tape picking the new

00:19:43.440 | government of Ukraine, which takes effect a few weeks later after the violent overthrow

00:19:48.160 | of the democratically elected Ukrainian government, the Yanukovych government.

00:19:52.640 | Three months after that, Hunter Biden is appointed to the board of Burisma.

00:19:56.720 | Do you believe that that appointment was made for any other reason than Joe Biden

00:20:03.120 | was the de facto ruler of Ukraine? - I don't know about him being the

00:20:09.520 | de facto ruler of Ukraine. - I mean, he was the one...

00:20:12.080 | - I don't think Joe Biden can be the de facto ruler of anything, but...

00:20:15.120 | - Well, no, let me clarify what I mean by that. On the Victoria Nuland phone call, she says she

00:20:22.160 | needs to get approval from Biden and Jake Sullivan as national security advisor for this new Ukrainian

00:20:29.200 | government that she's picking. So she basically is saying that Biden is the boss, he's gonna sign

00:20:34.400 | off on this. They apparently get the approval from Biden, and that government does go into effect

00:20:40.880 | after what appears to be a US-backed coup. So Biden clearly has enormous influence over that

00:20:48.480 | country. Now, okay, it's a little too glib. - Or Jake Sullivan.

00:20:52.000 | - Or Jake Sullivan. So look, it's too glib to say he's the ruler of the country, so I don't mean

00:20:55.840 | that. I just mean he's the ultimate authority, it seems like, in approving or picking this new

00:21:01.920 | government. Three months after he does that, Hunter Biden's appointed to the board of barisma.

00:21:07.120 | So my point to you is, what reason could there be for Hunter Biden's appointment other than

00:21:11.840 | Joe Biden's influence over that country? - None.

00:21:15.120 | - There you have it. - What else you want me to say?

00:21:19.440 | - So a year later, so 2015... - I don't know why Sachs became a

00:21:24.480 | venture capitalist. He should have been a prosecutor. - Absolutely.

00:21:27.440 | - It's just incredible. I'm overwhelmed at the moment as a former prosecutor.

00:21:31.520 | - Because he's sweating, oh my God. Sachs has you on the ropes.

00:21:35.680 | - Well, no, I'm just, I'm trying to get a great presidential...

00:21:37.680 | - Sachs, flip to page 13. - Yeah, come on, Sachs.

00:21:40.560 | - No, no, no, I want to get... - This is a four-hour podcast.

00:21:44.720 | - Yeah, it feels like... - This is gonna be quick.

00:21:47.520 | - We're gonna go day by day over the last decade. - No, this is gonna be quick.

00:21:50.160 | - And then Hunter Biden's gonna crack. - I want to establish common ground.

00:21:52.800 | - When you were 14 years old on the middle school playground and you pushed that kid Bobby,

00:21:57.200 | what were you thinking? - No, I'm actually establishing

00:22:00.640 | common ground with the governor before I get into areas you might disagree. Okay.

00:22:04.080 | - Okay, here we go. - Excellent.

00:22:05.600 | - Okay, so 2015, you have this prosecutor named Shokin, this Ukrainian prosecutor who is

00:22:11.840 | investigating Burisma. Joe Biden, according to his own acknowledgement on a videotape,

00:22:18.160 | I think he was speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, says that he gets Shokin fired.

00:22:22.560 | And then magically, the investigation into Burisma stops. Do you think that was in

00:22:27.680 | furtherance of stopping corruption in Ukraine or was that an effort by Joe Biden to protect himself

00:22:33.600 | or his son from this investigation? - I think we're gonna find out as

00:22:38.000 | continued congressional oversight occurs and the special counsel, I hope, investigation broadens.

00:22:44.880 | So I'm not ready to say I know that for sure, but I'll tell you this much, there's enough smoke

00:22:50.880 | there that we gotta see where the fire is. And I'd also say about Biden, I would never discount,

00:22:58.480 | not as a substitute motivation, but perhaps as an additional one, the fact that he likes to pretend

00:23:04.960 | he's in charge of things. But instead, his staff is really in charge. And that's how you get trained

00:23:12.240 | in the United States Senate. Your staff really runs everything, at least with many of the senators.

00:23:18.640 | And that's why it's such a bad training ground for the presidency in my view. But I digress

00:23:26.000 | myself. I'd say it is a likely motivation. It may not be the only one. And it's something I'm

00:23:33.040 | certainly intrigued to find out about as oversight moves forward. And I hope the special counsel's

00:23:39.360 | investigation broadens into the specifics of then Vice President Biden's involvement

00:23:45.760 | with his son's business dealings. Let's talk about that for a second. There was,

00:23:49.280 | I guess, the most recent revelation is that Joe Biden was communicating with his son under

00:23:53.600 | a pseudonym or a burner account. Was it Robert Peters? In your experience as a prosecutor,

00:24:00.560 | is there any legitimate reason why somebody would wanna use a pseudonym for communicating

00:24:06.080 | with their son? Look, burner accounts always raise my eyebrows as a former prosecutor.

00:24:14.560 | But what I will say is that I would understand someone in public life, if they're communicating

00:24:20.320 | with family, wanting to do that in a way where it wouldn't be detected by folks who are prying in

00:24:27.840 | one way or the other, whether that might be media, but more particularly hackers and other folks

00:24:33.280 | who are able to do things that I really don't have much understanding of,

00:24:37.600 | except to be fearful of them. So I don't wanna say that is a de facto proof point, David.

00:24:44.560 | But again, going back to my seven years as a US attorney, when I saw someone having a burner phone

00:24:51.360 | or other types of burner accounts, definitely made me say, "Let's take a look a little more

00:24:56.400 | closely at that and see what we can find." So at a minimum, it's suspicious for sure

00:25:02.560 | and deserves inquiry. Yeah, especially after Biden said he had no involvement with his son's

00:25:07.280 | business dealings. And we found out from Devin Archer's sworn testimony, who is Hunter Biden's

00:25:11.600 | partner, that Biden participated in 20 phone calls with clients to be the brand. So it's-

00:25:16.880 | If we go too far down the Biden and Trump well, which will give us tons of, I think, material,

00:25:26.880 | maybe we can get to Ukraine, which the Ukraine war and who do you think's ultimately responsible

00:25:34.640 | for the invasion of Ukraine? Do you think the United States-

00:25:36.960 | Obviously, the governor has said he supports Ukraine and he believes that Putin's responsible.

00:25:39.840 | I'd like to hear from him, Sachs. Yeah, so maybe just in terms of governor, do you think

00:25:45.600 | the United States is responsible for the invasion of Ukraine because we didn't do enough in terms

00:25:51.280 | of taking NATO off the table, like some people think? Or do you think Putin is responsible for

00:25:57.760 | invading Ukraine because he invaded Ukraine? I don't wanna lead the witness.

00:26:03.760 | You already did. But my answer is that Putin is responsible. Now-

00:26:09.760 | Shocking.

00:26:10.160 | I do think, though, that United States inaction and bad signal sending to Putin,

00:26:19.920 | going all the way back to George W. Bush, who said, "I looked into his eyes and saw his soul,"

00:26:27.360 | then to Barack Obama, who was completely uninterested in anything. And when Putin moves

00:26:36.800 | on Ukraine under the Obama administration, he did nothing, to Donald Trump, who saw it as an

00:26:43.520 | opportunity to extort Vladimir Zelensky to get dirt on Joe Biden in return for military aid,

00:26:52.240 | to Joe Biden, who I think has been a hand-wringer on this issue. And when he said, "Well, maybe a

00:26:58.000 | small invasion wouldn't be so bad," it reminds me of something I said to folks when I was US attorney,

00:27:06.880 | everybody's definition of the word small is different, and you can't assume what they mean

00:27:11.920 | is the same thing you mean. So I do think there were American actions and inactions,

00:27:17.200 | which contributed to sending signals to Putin that maybe we wouldn't care if he did it. But

00:27:23.760 | that's a small sliver, in my view, of the responsibility, the lion's share of the

00:27:28.320 | responsibility is, in my view, on Putin. Fair enough. Would you admit Ukraine into NATO?

00:27:34.320 | Well, I think in the situation we're in now, David, it's almost a de facto point at this

00:27:42.400 | point. I think that given that we permitted Russia to do what they did, given that they have now

00:27:51.200 | executed what they've executed in terms of their aggression against Ukraine, and the NATO support

00:27:57.920 | from a military hardware and intelligence perspective for Ukraine, I think it is now

00:28:05.600 | a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will be admitted to NATO. And frankly,

00:28:11.200 | it's got to be now I think one of the penalties and one of the prices that Putin pays for his

00:28:15.520 | aggression. But when would you do that? I mean, so Jens Stoltenberg at the Vilnius Summit made

00:28:20.400 | it explicit that Ukraine's future is in NATO, but it could not happen unless and until they win this

00:28:26.800 | war. Would you admit them sooner than that? No. Okay. No, I would not. Because that would lead

00:28:33.200 | to World War Three, obviously. That's what I'm attempting to avoid. Yeah. Okay, fair enough.

00:28:38.880 | Would you have been willing to take NATO expansion off the table in 2021 in order to avoid a war?

00:28:45.920 | No, I think that was too late. If you were going to take NATO expansion off of the table,

00:28:53.200 | if you were going to do it, it would have been done much earlier. Because if you did it then,

00:28:57.280 | that would essentially be giving in to Putin's threat. And I think that would have sent an even

00:29:04.240 | worse signal than some of the signals that I mentioned before. So no, I wouldn't have been

00:29:08.640 | willing to do it in '21 in order to avoid it. Because quite frankly, I don't believe that it

00:29:13.760 | would have avoided it. It just would have forestalled it. Do you believe that we made

00:29:17.360 | the correct decision? I mean, I know I'm going way back here, but in 2008 at the Bucharest Summit,

00:29:21.440 | we declared our intention to bring Ukraine and Georgia for that matter into NATO, but we didn't

00:29:26.880 | have a plan to do it. Do you believe that was a mistake? I think it was a mistake not to... If

00:29:32.000 | you're going to do it, you should have a plan that lays out exactly how and when and why.

00:29:37.360 | And I think just expressing aspirational goals in that regard is dangerous in foreign policy

00:29:46.560 | in that regard. And so I think the mistake was made, not necessarily by ever having Ukraine

00:29:52.000 | in NATO, but by doing it the way it was done, again, was in my view an unnecessary, or at least

00:30:00.000 | not well thought out, provocation. Is there anything about Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine

00:30:05.360 | that you would change? Yeah, I would have been much more aggressive in providing military hardware

00:30:12.080 | much sooner than what he did. And I think he's been the ham ringer on it. Every step has been

00:30:20.800 | preceded by fretting and furrowing brows and ham ring. And I think if you're going to be in this,

00:30:33.120 | you have to give them the tools they need to win. When I met with Zelensky a month ago,

00:30:38.960 | he made it very clear to me he had no interest in American or allied troops in Ukraine,

00:30:46.800 | now or ever. He felt this was Ukraine's war to win or lose, but that they needed the military

00:30:55.040 | hardware necessary to compete in this war against Russia. And that my view of what their biggest

00:31:04.080 | concerns were, which the ones that I agree with, are the pace and amount of armaments that have

00:31:10.400 | been given, not only by the US, but by the rest of the NATO allies as well.

00:31:14.960 | I mean, for a lot of us, let me just ask a couple of quick follow ups here, and then we can move on.

00:31:19.680 | I mean, for a lot of us, Biden has not been half hearted about this. He sought $113 billion

00:31:24.160 | appropriation. That seems like a ton of money that could have been spent domestically. What

00:31:28.400 | little hand wringing there was, was on the giving of F-16s and Abrams tanks. And the reason for that,

00:31:35.520 | Biden said, was that it could lead to World War Three. I mean, are you not concerned about those

00:31:40.800 | kinds of escalations? I mean, isn't that a good thing to be concerned about, not dismissive about?

00:31:45.200 | It's always important to be concerned about it, but you have to be thoughtful about it

00:31:50.320 | and look at what the alternatives are. And to me, the alternative of allowing the combination of

00:31:57.120 | China and Russia to route Ukraine is something that's not in the US vital interests and will

00:32:07.840 | lead to other problems as well with China going forward. And so, none of these are easy decisions,

00:32:15.200 | Dave, but what they are, are the ones that you want someone who is thoughtful and has some

00:32:21.840 | experience making them as president. And I don't think Biden checks either of those boxes

00:32:27.920 | sufficiently. And I think his conduct has shown that. And by the way, the same applies to Trump.

00:32:33.600 | Paul What do you think the resolution is here? And if in, I don't know, 16 months,

00:32:39.200 | you're president or when you're president, how would you deal with this if the war is still

00:32:44.000 | raging here?

00:32:45.600 | Dave Well, I think it depends on what

00:32:47.520 | disposition the war is in at that point. Jason, I think you have to evaluate how successful

00:32:53.840 | has Ukraine been in pushing back. They've made some success in the past couple of weeks in terms

00:33:00.400 | of breaking through some of the Soviet initial defensive lines. I think we have to see exactly

00:33:05.920 | how successful they've been. But what I would say is that there's no question that this is a conflict

00:33:16.480 | that we need to support and send a clear message, messages that have not been, as I said earlier,

00:33:23.360 | sent it all clearly to Putin that, you know, this is a guy who has openly discussed the reassembling

00:33:29.200 | of the Soviet Union. And I have no, no illusions about the fact that this former KGBer thinks that

00:33:39.280 | the Soviet Union were the good old days. And if he thought he could get away with assembling as

00:33:44.240 | much of it as he possibly could, he would. And I think that we have to send a very clear message

00:33:49.920 | on that to him and a very clear message on that to China regarding authoritarian expansionism.

00:33:56.400 | And this is where I think the Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy foreign policies are so hopelessly

00:34:04.960 | ill-informed and naive. The idea that we're going to go to Putin, who yesterday was sitting with

00:34:12.640 | Kim Jong-un, and persuade him, the better place is to be with us. Go away from your communist

00:34:19.040 | brothers in China and North Korea and come with us because it'll be a much better deal for you.

00:34:25.360 | And that Donald Trump is going to do that in 24 hours or Vivek Ramaswamy is going to do it

00:34:30.960 | by virtue of his winning personality. I mean, to me, he looks like the guy you wanted to stuff in

00:34:36.400 | the locker in the 11th grade. But I don't think that's the guy who's going to persuade Vladimir

00:34:41.360 | Putin to leave the communist Chinese and to, you know, come to the America's side.

00:34:48.160 | - But Governor, you have to admit the war is not going well for the Ukrainians. I mean,

00:34:52.400 | this counter offensive, here's what we were promised. Remember, just several months ago,

00:34:56.880 | before the counter offensive, you had people like Petraeus and Ben Hodges saying that the

00:35:01.440 | counter offensive would be like a blitz. They would rapidly penetrate the Serb-EUKIN lines.

00:35:06.640 | They would march across the country to the Sea of Azov. They would cut off the land bridge to Crimea.

00:35:11.360 | All this would happen within weeks, and it would be a significant Ukrainian victory. It has been

00:35:15.840 | almost a total failure. The Ukrainians have taken even the Washington Post and Politico

00:35:21.840 | publications like that have said their losses have been staggering. The battlefield reports

00:35:26.480 | have been sobering. These are our top blob publications saying this. So, we have been

00:35:32.480 | unsuccessful. Moreover, you say we should give them more weapons, but we've run out. We've run

00:35:36.720 | out of the key type of ammunition in this war, which is artillery shells. That's why we're giving

00:35:40.640 | them cluster bombs. We got the cupboard is bare. So, I'm just wondering, how exactly would you

00:35:47.760 | turn this around given that the Ukrainians are losing this war very badly? Well, first off,

00:35:52.880 | there was a lot in there. All right, let's go back to the predictions from Petraeus and others. You

00:35:58.720 | didn't hear me making those predictions because I think anybody who was briefed on the deficiency

00:36:05.600 | of armaments for Ukraine would not have said something like that unless it was wishful

00:36:11.760 | thinking. Secondly, I understand the reports regarding our own deficiencies in providing them

00:36:22.080 | with more armaments. We have, I think, work to do with the rest of our allies in NATO in terms of

00:36:29.920 | they're providing more of the artillery and other armaments that are needed by the Ukrainians.

00:36:36.240 | But the Europeans have even less than we do. I mean, you know...

00:36:38.880 | Well, but look, this is going to have to be something that we're going to have to

00:36:42.240 | cobble together to get it done. And it also shows what I was saying earlier in regards to the budget

00:36:50.000 | question that this massive military buildup that Donald Trump says he did was baloney.

00:36:57.040 | I think you have an interesting point there, actually, which is to me one of the biggest

00:37:00.080 | surprises of this war is that we spend 877 billion on the Pentagon and that we could run out of ammo.

00:37:06.000 | Right.

00:37:06.880 | So, I mean, without blaming Trump per se or Biden, I just think we're getting ripped off.

00:37:12.160 | I mean, the military industrial complex is royally screwing the American taxpayer. How can we spend

00:37:17.200 | 877 billion dollars and not have ammo? Can you explain that to me?

00:37:21.680 | Or have food insecurity for a lot of members of the military, not have paid leave, not have

00:37:27.120 | healthcare. The idea that you don't want to look at that budget is an enormous...

00:37:33.440 | That's not what I said.

00:37:34.480 | That is what you said.

00:37:35.440 | No, it is not.

00:37:36.400 | What did you say? You said you wouldn't touch it.

00:37:38.320 | No, no, I did not say that. What I said was that the Pentagon has to be made more efficient and

00:37:45.200 | more effective with what it spends, but not reduce what it spends. And that goes right to the point

00:37:51.600 | that David just made, which is you have to get answers as president to the questions of what

00:37:57.920 | are you spending 877 billion dollars on if we're running out of ammo, and there's food insecurity,

00:38:05.360 | and there's not paid leave, right? So, what I was saying through the answer I gave you on the

00:38:10.560 | budget was I did not see that as a place to cut, but I did say very clearly that it's a place where

00:38:19.440 | we have to make the Pentagon more efficient and effective. And we need a Secretary of Defense

00:38:25.040 | and a president who want to demand answers to those questions first.

00:38:29.520 | Are you not sympathetic to the idea that efficiency sometimes means spending less

00:38:34.240 | to get the same or more?

00:38:35.680 | If that's the conclusion we come to after examining it, then I'm very sympathetic to that.

00:38:40.480 | So, then you are opening to cutting the defense budget.

00:38:42.800 | I'm open. It is a secondary issue, the primary issue on defense.

00:38:49.200 | No, I understand. I just want a clear answer so I understand where you're coming from. You

00:38:52.160 | want to look at the defense budget. You have an intuition that there's potentially

00:38:56.800 | extreme levels of waste.

00:38:59.360 | Right.

00:38:59.680 | And so, if you find that waste, will you just cut it?

00:39:02.880 | No.

00:39:03.120 | Or you just reallocate it?

00:39:04.480 | Reallocate.

00:39:05.120 | Why?

00:39:06.400 | For the very reasons that David's just talking about. If we're running out of ammo,

00:39:10.640 | if our submarine capacity is not where it should be, which I believe it is not,

00:39:15.360 | if our ship capacity is not where I believe it should be, and it is not in my view,

00:39:20.480 | and if our monetization of our Air Force is not where it should be, which I believe it is not,

00:39:26.960 | then you reallocate that money.

00:39:29.600 | Okay, so there's a principle in capitalism called zero-based budgeting, which I

00:39:33.840 | actually like what you're saying, but just to kind of double-click on what that is.

00:39:36.960 | Zero-based budgeting starts with the principle that you just started, which is,

00:39:41.200 | what are our priorities? What do we want to accomplish? And then you go and systematically

00:39:45.600 | build up where the budget actually starts at zero dollars. Hey, Pentagon, you get zero,

00:39:49.600 | not 800 billion. What do we need to accomplish? Oh, we need bullets? Okay, we need armaments?

00:39:54.960 | Okay, we need to have food security for all of our armed service men and women? Absolutely.

00:40:00.880 | And then what happens if that number gets to 350 billion? Do you just cut half a billion,

00:40:05.600 | or do you find ways to spend the other half a trillion dollars?

00:40:08.480 | Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that's what I did as governor.

00:40:11.760 | I was the first governor who did zero-based budgeting, and I did it,

00:40:15.280 | first governor of New Jersey to do it, and I did it because of the dire straits that we were in.

00:40:23.840 | I didn't think we could assume any longer anything in terms of our spending. So,

00:40:28.960 | I absolutely would want to take that approach. Now, I don't think you're going to go from 877

00:40:34.960 | billion to 350 billion and say that we've met all of our defense needs and the needs of our

00:40:42.880 | fighting men and women with that number. But let's just leave the number blank for a minute.

00:40:50.880 | If I concluded that we could do everything we needed to do through the re-engineering

00:40:57.520 | of how we were spending in the Pentagon, and that ultimately it would check the boxes I

00:41:04.080 | want to check in terms of some of the issues I just talked about, and it turned out to be

00:41:08.480 | less than 877 billion, of course, I would look not to spend 877 billion. But that assumes a lot

00:41:17.600 | of things in there, as you know, but the principle of zero-based budgeting, from my perspective,

00:41:23.920 | worked when I was governor, not only in terms of keeping our spending at an increase of 2% a year

00:41:32.240 | annually for eight years, but it also educated me much more on the intricacies of the budget as the

00:41:40.160 | ultimate decision-maker. And I think that was useful. Chris, you were a very effective prosecutor,

00:41:45.680 | and part of that is having a good intuition. So I'm just going to ask you, your intuition,

00:41:49.760 | how much waste do you think is in the military-industrial complex in that 877 billion?

00:41:55.840 | Do you think there's 30 cents of waste? Do you think there's 40 cents of waste? Do you think

00:41:59.120 | there's five cents of waste? Or do you think there's like 70 cents of waste? My intuition

00:42:03.760 | tells me that it is significant. I can't put a number on it. It'd be irresponsible for me to

00:42:08.000 | put a number on it. But there's no doubt that when you see us spend the 877 billion, and we don't

00:42:14.400 | have 155 millimeter artillery shells, that there's waste. Let's talk about governance and just like

00:42:21.520 | civil society and government for a second. But let's just finish on this military-industrial

00:42:25.440 | complex. Why is it? How does it come to be that so much corruption and graft gets introduced

00:42:36.160 | into the military budget? Explain just how it happens? How does all of this waste end up

00:42:42.640 | happening? Where on the one hand, you ask people, men and women, oftentimes poor, oftentimes

00:42:48.720 | minorities to come and serve and put their lives on the front lines. You don't even give them

00:42:53.040 | enough food. Somebody's clearly making money out of the 877 billion. Just explain how that waste

00:42:59.520 | comes to be. And the influence peddling and the revolving door just so that the average person

00:43:05.200 | can understand it. Well, first off, and I'll answer your question specifically, but let me say,

00:43:12.160 | by answering it this way, I don't want to imply in any way that this waste and corruption happens

00:43:19.440 | just in the military budget. Because it happens, it's been my experience, it happens across budgets,

00:43:25.280 | across disciplines. With that being said, I would say it happens in a number of different ways.

00:43:31.520 | First of all, not doing zero-based budgeting contributes to that because people no longer

00:43:37.120 | have to rationalize or justify the existence of a program. They just need to hire enough lobbyists

00:43:42.480 | to keep it getting put in there. So that's one way that it happens. Secondly, incompetence in

00:43:48.800 | administration. So people who are either purely incompetent in the job or alternative two is,

00:43:57.280 | are corrupt in the job. And so they look the other way on waste because they want to get a job

00:44:04.160 | through the revolving door you talked about on the other side. Third way that I think it happens

00:44:10.480 | is extraordinary events that cause political overreaction. So you'll have an extraordinary

00:44:22.000 | event that occurs from a national security perspective. And then politicians want to look

00:44:29.360 | like we're responding to it. And the way we're responding to it is we're going to spend x tens,

00:44:36.480 | hundreds of billions more on this broad category of initiatives without really digging into whether

00:44:45.680 | that can be spent effectively that way or not. And then once it gets in there, for the reasons I gave

00:44:52.000 | to you in the two examples before, it doesn't get out. So you layer it over and layer it over and

00:44:58.240 | layer it over and layer it over. And then that's the way that stuff happens. So I think it's a bit

00:45:04.480 | of a nutshell presentation on that for you. But I think those are the three most important elements

00:45:14.400 | that I've observed personally in governing a state with 60,000 employees and a $34 billion budget.

00:45:25.120 | You think the antidote to that is a is to start with zero based budgeting? Or are there other more

00:45:29.760 | radical changes you would want to make, whether it's the CIA or the NSA? How do you think about

00:45:35.600 | getting to the root cause of or root answer of the truth?

00:45:39.680 | Look, I think that that there's two ways to do it initially. And zero based budgeting is one of them.

00:45:46.560 | And secondly, is to try to select competent people for those positions, who understand clearly from

00:45:56.640 | the leader, what their mission is,

00:45:58.640 | would you, for example, be willing to do an EO that said, if you serve in these roles,

00:46:03.360 | you're banned from serving any of these folks for 20 years or something like that,

00:46:06.960 | something that just makes it clear that there's no financial motivation,

00:46:09.840 | for somebody to walk out the door and then go and work for Lockheed Martin or

00:46:14.240 | just augment that let's talk about these former generals, like the ones we were quoting,

00:46:18.000 | who predicted the counter offensive would be this wonderful success.

00:46:20.800 | They're all now on the boards of weapons manufacturers. So the people in the Pentagon,

00:46:27.120 | who make a lot of these procurement decisions about weapons systems,

00:46:30.640 | when they retire, they go off to serve on these boards. I mean, the big weapons companies are

00:46:37.120 | basically their retirement program. I mean, that seems like a horrible set of incentives.

00:46:41.840 | I mean, would you do something like ban the revolving door between

00:46:44.800 | people working in the Pentagon and then working for a weapons company?

00:46:48.800 | - Well, I certainly would be willing to consider if they worked with a particular contractor,

00:46:57.520 | they had supervisory or decision-making authority over a program run by a particular contractor,

00:47:03.520 | not being able to go back out and work for that contractor.

00:47:05.440 | - But the problem isn't when they go back in, the problem is they know in advance that their

00:47:08.880 | retirement program is gonna be working on one of these boards. So they're not as tough as they

00:47:12.800 | should be when they're actually in the government job.

00:47:15.200 | - Tough problem.

00:47:15.600 | - So you're talking about the revolving door on the way in or the way out?

00:47:18.160 | - No, I'm talking about on the way out. Like basically you work your way up to general,

00:47:20.880 | and then you retire, and then you join the boards of these Raytheon and Lockheed and all these guys.

00:47:26.000 | - Well, I think that there are appropriate restrictions that can be put on in terms of

00:47:32.160 | number of years to make it go past the period when that person could have direct political

00:47:37.520 | influence on the administration that's in play. But I also think we need to be careful about the

00:47:43.040 | fact that we don't wind up throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the sense that

00:47:50.320 | there are some people who are legitimate people who are not looking to do it in a way that is

00:47:58.160 | corrupt or unethical, but who develop great expertise in certain areas. And that expertise

00:48:04.640 | can be very helpful. We're only looking at the negative side of it. So I think there are ways

00:48:09.360 | to do what we need to do with the political influence, and that it would be to ban it for

00:48:13.920 | the rest of that administration. So if you serve in a particular administration, for the rest of

00:48:19.920 | that administration, you can't go back out and work on the issues that you were working on when

00:48:25.680 | you were there. That to me just seems to be reasonable. I don't know whether 20 years makes

00:48:30.640 | sense or not. But we've identified the problem. Now let's figure out how to fix it. I'm willing

00:48:39.440 | and open to do that, but I want to make sure I do it in a way that is not creating a whole

00:48:46.080 | different set of problems that we'll then be talking about. And the analogy I make in part on

00:48:52.320 | this is the wall between CIA and FBI and the problems that that I think precipitated regarding

00:49:02.080 | 9/11. So, you know, there are fixes to these things. And I'm telling you guys is I'm willing

00:49:09.200 | to be open about how to do it. I favor the concept. I think we're negotiating over length of

00:49:16.240 | years and how it applies. Should that be the case for all government administrative jobs, Governor?

00:49:20.720 | Sure. So FDA into healthcare, healthcare into FDA, USDA, like, should that be the case everywhere?

00:49:28.400 | It's the same principle. Yeah. How should that then be applied to Congress people?

00:49:32.640 | Well, since the EO won't cover members of Congress in the same way that that's why they don't have

00:49:39.920 | term limits, which I believe they should have. And why none of this stuff will ever apply to

00:49:44.480 | Congress. So let's tell the truth. It'll never apply to Congress because they'd have to pass

00:49:50.480 | it for it to apply. And it will never happen. But the president could do what he could do about his

00:49:57.120 | branch of government and should, and I would. Let's pivot to one of the most controversial

00:50:02.000 | topics between the two parties, which is immigration. And I'll pull up two charts

00:50:06.640 | here to queue up the discussion. Here's the first chart. Just since 2000, we've been,

00:50:13.520 | net migration United States just on a steady stream down at around 5 million. Second chart

00:50:19.440 | is border crossings. That orange line there that you're seeing, that's COVID. And then the blue

00:50:24.880 | line obviously is the return from COVID. But the border agency seems to think not much has changed

00:50:30.240 | over the last couple of years at the border. However, we have and that's across obviously

00:50:35.440 | multiple administrations. Other countries have point based systems, they have very logical

00:50:42.000 | discussions over immigration. Is this person going to add and be a creative to the society?

00:50:47.760 | Is this person going to be a drain on society? And, you know, they just UK, Australia, New Zealand,

00:50:52.560 | countless countries now use this point based system. It's incredibly polarized here. And we

00:50:58.960 | have the lowest, we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime, plenty of jobs, we still have 1.6

00:51:04.720 | jobs per American who is who are looking for jobs. I'm curious why you think this immigration

00:51:12.720 | discussion is so polarized, and not factual, and how you as president would resolve this issue,

00:51:21.680 | and maybe make it make more sense to the American public.

00:51:25.680 | Well, look, I think the first thing the first part of the question is, how has it gotten so

00:51:31.760 | polarized? And I think it's because people in political life have used this as a weapon

00:51:39.280 | on both sides of the aisle to try to promote their own political agendas. Democrats have wanted

00:51:46.800 | this perception on their positive side from their perspective, that they'll let anybody in because

00:51:54.320 | they think ultimately, those folks who come in will be their voters, ultimately, over the long

00:52:00.720 | haul. And they also want to raise restrictions, they want to raise the issue of restrictions

00:52:07.680 | that are placed by Republicans on this, to make us seem to be heartless, uncaring, unfeeling people.

00:52:15.760 | On our side, we want to make the entire system seem completely lawless, because that plays into

00:52:26.640 | our view of ourselves as the law and order party and the Democrats as the party who could give a

00:52:31.920 | damn about law and order. And we want to play into the populist side of it, which says that

00:52:38.400 | any person who comes over the border is likely to take your job, not just a job, your job.

00:52:44.720 | And then when you present it to people that way, they of course, are going to be anti-immigration,

00:52:51.520 | because they'd like to keep their job and support their family and have a life that they want to

00:52:56.720 | look forward to, and for their kids as well. So, that's my explanation on the first part as to how

00:53:05.440 | we got here. Seems logical, yeah. And fair, by the way. Your assessment of both parties, by the way,

00:53:10.400 | on these topics, I think is excellent. By the way, completely unfair way to have conducted this

00:53:16.240 | stuff. The problem has been that we haven't had presidential leadership on this issue since Reagan.

00:53:24.160 | Reagan ultimately, and I think he learned this as a conservative governor in a blue state,

00:53:31.280 | where he had to deal with Jesse Unruh running his legislature. And Reagan, it's all front of

00:53:38.080 | mind because I just finished writing a book on Reagan, so it's fresh in mind to me. Reagan learned

00:53:47.920 | that it was only he, the governor, who could force people into a room to get issues resolved.

00:53:56.720 | In the same way, when he was president, he didn't love the deal he made on immigration,

00:54:04.560 | same way he didn't love the deal he made on social security, but he liked it more than he liked the

00:54:11.920 | alternative of doing nothing. I think the only way we're going to resolve the immigration issue,

00:54:18.240 | Jason, is to have a president, as I said in response to David Friedberg's earlier question

00:54:24.960 | on debt, a president who's willing to sacrifice some popularity to try to force a resolution.

00:54:32.320 | And I do think that most Americans would support a merit-based immigration system.

00:54:40.480 | Why does it never come up? I mean, these other countries have had such great success with it,

00:54:44.560 | why won't any politician say it? I haven't heard you say it in the debates. I don't know if you

00:54:49.200 | have, I haven't heard everything you've said, but... They didn't even ask us about immigration

00:54:52.000 | in the debates. They didn't ask us about immigration, entitlements, or the debt.

00:54:56.320 | Three things we've already talked about here today, but they had time to ask me about UFOs.

00:55:02.000 | Yeah, that was pretty bizarre. They're like, "Hey, let's give you the most meaningless question

00:55:07.360 | of anybody in the debate." Governor, that's what the base wants to hear. Come on.

00:55:10.640 | Yeah. Wrap it up for us, Governor. Let's talk about UFOs. I mean...

00:55:15.360 | What did you think of the ending of secession, Governor? Go.

00:55:17.920 | Yeah, I mean, it's like... So, I have talked about it in my town hall meetings about

00:55:24.400 | Republicans should be advocating for a merit-based immigration system. But we need to also recognize,

00:55:33.840 | while I think both parties should be in favor of a secure southern border,

00:55:40.480 | if for no other reason than the fentanyl and drug-related issues that are involved.

00:55:47.520 | Why is there such a debate over the numbers? Because I just pulled up those numbers,

00:55:53.280 | and that's the Border Patrol, and that's across multiple administrations. And then people are

00:55:56.720 | saying... You're living in some kind of simulation, Jason. Did you see the Washington Post

00:55:59.840 | just last week? The headline is, "Families crossing U.S. border illegally reached all-time

00:56:05.360 | high in August." This is the Washington Post. Oh, you trust the Washington Post now?

00:56:10.560 | I'm saying that if a liberal Democrat publication that serves the DC blob is

00:56:17.760 | admitting this problem, why can't you admit it? Oh, I'm not saying that it's not at all-time

00:56:23.440 | highs, but it doesn't seem to have gotten much different than over the last two administrations.

00:56:28.800 | Do you want to act like it's not a serious problem?

00:56:31.280 | No, no, I don't, actually.

00:56:32.080 | I promise you I'm not worried about my job.

00:56:33.760 | I brought it up at...

00:56:34.560 | I'm worried about the fact that the United States can't absorb a million migrants a year.

00:56:40.240 | That's my question. Obviously, I care about it. So don't tell me I don't care about it.

00:56:43.600 | I'm just fact-checking that.

00:56:44.720 | It's fine to fact-check, but even though it's at all-time highs, if you look at that chart,

00:56:49.840 | it seems like there's a big debate on the numbers that, hey, it may be at all-time highs,

00:56:53.680 | but it's been relatively the same. And so that's what I'm trying to get at,

00:56:58.640 | Governor. Why can't we get good numbers on this?

00:57:01.040 | Well, we do get good numbers on it, but everybody slices the numbers differently.

00:57:06.080 | You know, I used to work in a deli when I was in high school for a period of time,

00:57:13.040 | and, you know, everybody had the same big chunk of bologna, but depending on how you sliced it,

00:57:20.800 | it looked different. And so I agree with David that it is a very serious problem right now,

00:57:29.680 | and it's because of Biden's policies and his rhetoric. He sent a very clear signal during

00:57:38.080 | the 2020 campaign, "If I win, the border's open. Let's go. Everybody come on in." And it has caused

00:57:47.360 | a crisis in a number of levels. Also, Democratic politicians saying that they were willing to be

00:57:53.360 | sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. Well, now I see the front page of the New York Post every day,

00:58:00.480 | and here's Eric Adams complaining that he needs help. He needs help. Well, you should have shut

00:58:09.120 | up and not said you were a sanctuary city, and then you wouldn't need the help. But it's easy.

00:58:16.080 | Did you see the video yesterday? He said in all his time in New York, he's always seen an end to

00:58:21.280 | every problem. There's always a solution. He says, "I have not seen, I cannot see an end to this

00:58:26.320 | problem. I don't see a solution." Yeah. I might be paraphrasing a bit.

00:58:29.600 | You just broke Jason's heart. You were his perfect candidate until that answer.

00:58:32.880 | No, no, no. I'm in favor of the point-based system, have been very consistent about that.

00:58:38.800 | I think we should actually have a thoughtful discussion of how many people we can actually

00:58:42.480 | bring in and sustain. That's the obvious discussion. Well, I think we all agree on

00:58:46.320 | merit-based. We all agree on merit-based immigration. The thing that I have an issue

00:58:50.000 | with, Jason, is just you pretend like the border's not in crisis. It is in crisis.

00:58:54.080 | Oh, yeah. I think it hasn't been resolved for decades. I mean, we have not had a solution

00:59:02.400 | there. When's the last time the border was functional, I guess?

00:59:04.560 | Well, Trump at least had a remain in Mexico policy, and then Biden revoked it, and now

00:59:08.480 | they're thinking about bringing it back because they have no way to control the huge number of

00:59:12.080 | people who are streaming across. Yeah. I'm just trying to advocate for a point-based system.

00:59:15.680 | By the way, on the numbers, that's what should be part of a negotiation between Republicans

00:59:22.080 | and Democrats in Congress and the White House based upon the current circumstances. We can't

00:59:29.600 | deal with all the stuff that's happened before, but what we know now is we have current circumstances

00:59:34.720 | now, guys, which are not only impacting quality of life in terms of crime and quality of life

00:59:43.920 | in terms of education because you see what's going to happen in the New York school system.

00:59:48.400 | You are going to have thousands of immigrant children who now are going to show up at the

00:59:56.960 | New York City public schools to be educated. That's why the uncontrolled part of what David

01:00:06.160 | Sachs is talking about is so vital right now. And thirdly, but most importantly to me,

01:00:13.520 | is the fentanyl issue because when you have 110,000 people dying of overdoses last year

01:00:20.000 | in this country, and you have overdose being the number one killer of men between 18 and 34,

01:00:26.640 | it is a crisis. And it is a crisis which is not created entirely by the border,

01:00:31.520 | but is contributed to mightily by what's going on at the border.

01:00:36.080 | Would you send, there's been talk of this, I think, from certain candidates, would you send

01:00:41.200 | troops into Mexico to take out the cartels or is that crazy?

01:00:46.240 | No, I would not. I would put National Guard at the border to work with Customs and Border Patrol

01:00:53.280 | to stop the fentanyl cartels from getting in to our country. And I would use our intelligence

01:01:01.680 | community to do what we always do with enemies of that nature, which is to target them and to

01:01:08.720 | make sure that if they're going to do what they're going to do, that they're dealt with.

01:01:12.320 | But in terms of a Ron DeSantis full-scale invasion of Mexico, yeah, I think I'd probably demur on

01:01:19.760 | that one. So you'd whack these people, bring in the fentanyl and you just wouldn't do it?

01:01:23.200 | On the soil in Mexico.

01:01:24.880 | Correct. And also, and I'd whack them within the laws of the United States.

01:01:31.600 | It would not be a vigilante system where everybody goes down there and just starts

01:01:36.160 | popping somebody they think is a fentanyl dealer as they come over the border.

01:01:39.600 | But what I would also say to you is we've got to also make sure we deal with this

01:01:48.400 | diplomatically with the Mexicans. And by diplomatically, I mean, not like being nice,

01:01:53.200 | through very hard negotiations with them, to say to the Mexican president,

01:01:57.920 | you are importing precursor chemicals from China into your country to make fentanyl

01:02:06.320 | with the sole purpose of profiting from and killing Americans.

01:02:11.040 | That's not something we're going to tolerate.

01:02:14.080 | So you wouldn't send Fioreo? We got it.

01:02:17.040 | I mean, we do it the smart way, not the way that lets you pound your chest and pretend you're a

01:02:23.360 | television tough guy.

01:02:24.160 | Let me double click on that since you brought up fentanyl. We have this crisis here in San

01:02:28.240 | Francisco, open air drug market, cheapest fentanyl you can get. Plus we give subsidies if you come

01:02:32.720 | here and you're a fentanyl addict, we pay for you to come here. Essentially, it's absolute chaos.

01:02:38.240 | We keep getting promises in San Francisco that we're going to turn it around and we're going

01:02:41.440 | to take it seriously. It never happens. Given that, is there not a case for the feds coming in

01:02:47.840 | and cracking down on the fentanyl trade here? And if you were president, would you come in and

01:02:52.880 | usurp the local authorities and just take out all these crazy open air drug markets in some

01:02:58.800 | cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco? I actually said that in the debate. What I would do

01:03:04.000 | would be to instruct the attorney general to instruct the US attorneys in the cities with

01:03:11.280 | these kind of problems that we are taking over the prosecution of violent and drug crime in

01:03:17.760 | those cities. If the prosecutors on the state level are unwilling to do it, the US attorneys

01:03:23.120 | have the laws on the federal books to do it. We have the rooms of the federal prisons and we will

01:03:28.480 | police these cities until they get their act together. You just got a couple million votes

01:03:33.760 | in California because people here are fed up with the locals. Governor, can I just push back on that?

01:03:38.160 | I recently started reading the Federalist Papers again, sacks, I don't know when you last reviewed

01:03:43.120 | them. And I'm just struck by how so much of our modern political rhetoric is driven by what the

01:03:49.200 | federal government will do for you on a national basis, a state basis, and now even a local basis.

01:03:55.280 | Is that really the role of the federal government? No, or should each state and each city ultimately

01:03:59.840 | decide what the hell kind of city they want to build what they want to live in, and then deal

01:04:04.400 | with the consequences and let the federal government become responsible for the things

01:04:08.880 | that were defined in our constitution and that the Constitutional Republic was meant to set out

01:04:13.840 | to do for the federal government, rather than use the federal government as a hammer to smash

01:04:18.400 | all nails everywhere, at some point the hammer is going to break. So let me answer the question,

01:04:25.520 | which is no, it's not the role of the federal government to do it. Unless the discord and the

01:04:32.800 | inability of the states to deal with an issue begins to affect the entire country. And I believe

01:04:40.320 | that this failure, and it's by the way, it's a planned failure, David. This is the Soros group

01:04:47.440 | going around and electing these completely liberal prosecutors who say, "No, I'm not gonna

01:04:55.360 | prosecute these crimes anymore." It begins to affect the very nature of the entire country.

01:05:01.760 | If we don't have functional cities, David, we can't have a functional country. And so no,

01:05:07.280 | I would do this only because I think by the time I get there in January of 25,

01:05:13.040 | we are going to be at last resort world. Now, if in the interim between now and January of 25,

01:05:20.080 | the discord in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and others

01:05:28.400 | got so bad that the citizens there rose up and demanded something different

01:05:32.000 | and the states and cities started to respond to it, I have no interest in doing this unless we are

01:05:38.640 | the law enforcers of last resort. And so philosophically, I completely agree with you,

01:05:44.960 | but we're now in a situation where when I was in New York City all day yesterday,

01:05:52.720 | it is the worst I've seen New York City since the late '70s.

01:05:58.000 | I agree, yeah.

01:05:59.680 | And I was old enough then to go in, I was a high school student in the late '70s,

01:06:04.160 | and go into the city and my parents used to be petrified if I insisted on going into New York

01:06:09.520 | to go to a basketball game or a hockey game. The walk from the Port Authority bus terminal

01:06:14.640 | on 41st and 8th to Madison Square Garden on 33rd and 8th was an absolute youthful education

01:06:23.520 | on drugs and porn and violent crime. So I agree with you philosophically on that,

01:06:31.680 | but I think in the instance we're in right now, this is what we'd have to do in order to get it

01:06:37.280 | back under control. And so I'm not thrilled about it, but I think it's absolutely necessary.

01:06:42.960 | In the United States, we have somewhere between two and three million Americans incarcerated,

01:06:47.840 | one of the highest per capita incarceration rates of any country in the world.

01:06:52.880 | And a lot of this justice reform movement arose from what are considered to be very deep inequities

01:07:00.800 | in the imprisonment of American citizens for various petty crimes, misdemeanors that turn

01:07:09.120 | into felonies that turn into three strikes that turn into spending your life in prison.

01:07:12.880 | And that obviously, there's a big racial divide and how this affects the population.

01:07:17.120 | And from that movement arose this effort to try and address the social inequities and how the

01:07:22.480 | prison system has become to some an extension or the follow on to America's toward history with

01:07:29.360 | slavery. What is your point of view, then? Do we have inequities in the prison system in how we

01:07:37.360 | address crime in this country? And if so, what would the right path have been looking back now

01:07:42.640 | at the efforts and the dollars that have gone into trying to solve this problem through

01:07:46.000 | decriminalization that has obviously led to massive problems in inner cities? Is it a problem,

01:07:51.440 | the criminalization in this country, the incarceration in this country? And if so,

01:07:54.640 | what's the right path to addressing it? And obviously, you have an intimate history here.

01:07:58.480 | So you would know this better than most that we would talk to.

01:08:00.880 | Look, I think it is a problem. And let me tell you what I did as governor.

01:08:04.720 | We did criminal justice reform in New Jersey, and we did it in a bipartisan way. And this is

01:08:10.000 | what we did. I thought that the biggest problem we had in New Jersey was our state constitution

01:08:19.360 | required. It was a shall issue state on bail. Everyone was entitled to bail under our constitution.

01:08:28.400 | And the only factor that could be taken into account constitutionally, David, was risk of

01:08:35.760 | flight. So if you had a rap sheet as long as my arm and your arm put together, that could not

01:08:42.080 | be considered by a judge in whether or not to grant bail or not, nor could the nature of the

01:08:48.240 | violence you committed in those acts. I saw that as an enormous problem. I agreed with Democrats

01:08:55.760 | that on a lot of these minor drug crimes, and I don't mean dealing crimes, I mean possession crimes

01:09:00.960 | with addicts being arrested for small amounts of possession, that we had become a debtor's

01:09:09.120 | prison in New Jersey. That if somebody couldn't afford the 500 bucks for the minimum bail,

01:09:16.320 | which was usually $5,000, they spent more time in county and state prison than they ever would

01:09:23.440 | have spent if they'd just pled guilty and been allowed to plead guilty and get sentenced. So

01:09:29.840 | the deal we made was this. On certain defined non-violent crimes, I would agree to the state

01:09:39.040 | law allowing release on people's own recognizance. In return, the Democrats would amend our

01:09:47.520 | constitution to make it a may issue state on bail and to add dangerousness to the community

01:09:54.640 | as a factor to be considered in granting bail or not. What's happened since then? Crime in New

01:10:01.120 | Jersey is down since we did this. We closed two state prisons and we have not had any spike in

01:10:10.880 | violent crime like you've seen in New York since then because we did it smartly and in a way that

01:10:17.120 | was balanced. And what you've also seen is 98% of the people released on their own recognizance

01:10:25.200 | have shown back up for their court hearings. So we're not having some people running around

01:10:31.440 | and jumping the ROR release that they've gotten. And I took one of the two state prisons we closed

01:10:38.960 | and turned it into a drug treatment prison so that folks who had documented drug and alcohol

01:10:47.280 | addictions while in prison were able to go for the concluding parts of their term

01:10:53.680 | to this secondary prison to get, which is fully secure, and they were detained,

01:11:01.040 | but they also got drug and alcohol treatment while they were in there. And what we've seen with that

01:11:06.480 | is we've seen recidivism drop among those people who've gone through that program

01:11:11.600 | by nearly 40%. There are ways we can do this without having the results New York has had

01:11:18.880 | through their ridiculous criminal justice reform. We can do it the right way across the whole

01:11:25.360 | country. Have you seen other states follow New Jersey's leader or New Jersey's model?

01:11:29.360 | I have seen a couple of other states that have done it. I don't think anybody's done it as well

01:11:34.560 | as we did it. And imagine this, a Republican governor got support from the PBA and the FOP

01:11:46.560 | for that reform, so from law enforcement professionals, and got an A+ from the ACLU.

01:11:53.200 | Now, when you can get both of those, it's kind of hard to get that done. And I think we've gotten

01:12:02.160 | it done, and we just had a, at my policy institute, we just had a seminar on this from people from

01:12:08.160 | the public defenders to private criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors, and cops all on a panel,

01:12:16.320 | and not one of them had an objection to criminal justice reform in New Jersey.

01:12:19.520 | And this is now nearly 10 years after we did it. So I think there are ways to do this. Unfortunately,

01:12:28.560 | a lot of people don't want to have a long-form conversation on criminal justice reform.

01:12:35.600 | They want to have either the Joe Biden approach from when he was in the Senate,

01:12:40.320 | mandatory minimums for everybody, throw everybody in the can, three strikes, you're out,

01:12:45.520 | all that stuff. Or they want to have the George Soros conversation, you know, where nobody who

01:12:52.560 | commits a crime really meant to do it, and all jail is unfair. Both of those are dead wrong.

01:12:58.560 | - Governor, you mentioned the FBI briefly before. One of the revelations that came out during the

01:13:03.520 | Twitter files is that we had 80 FBI agents monitoring American social media accounts

01:13:10.640 | and submitting takedown requests to Twitter. This is pre-Elon Twitter, and presumably many other

01:13:18.560 | big tech companies, because I'm sure they weren't just doing this with Twitter.

01:13:21.520 | What business is it of the FBI to be monitoring and censoring Americans? Do you think there's

01:13:27.520 | any justification for that? What is your view of that? - I think the only reason to monitor

01:13:32.880 | those kind of things would be for terrorist information. And I think that would be reasonable

01:13:39.280 | to do. But I don't think for any other reason, other than terrorist activity, domestic or foreign,

01:13:48.000 | I think the FBI has a right to do that. And I think it's the right thing to do.

01:13:52.400 | But I don't think under any other circumstances, David, they should be doing that.

01:13:57.280 | - Are you willing to say to Chris Wray, as I understand it, you recommended Chris Wray for

01:14:02.240 | the position many years ago, and I think you're a fan of his. Are you willing to say to him,

01:14:08.240 | "Knock this off. You should not be involved in censoring American social media accounts."

01:14:14.320 | - I'm willing to say to Chris exactly what I just said to you. And by the way,

01:14:18.720 | I've known Chris long enough. I mean, we were in the Bush Justice Department together

01:14:24.000 | starting back at nine, right in the immediate post-9/11 period. So I've known Chris now for

01:14:29.360 | 22 years. I will say exactly what I think to Chris and will instruct him appropriately

01:14:36.240 | with the Attorney General. And let me just make a point, David, since you brought that up.

01:14:40.240 | I don't think presidents should be involved in the criminal investigatory activity of the

01:14:47.120 | Department of Justice in any way. And so you should set policies that say like that, you know,

01:14:55.200 | your work should be restricted on monitoring just domestic or international terrorism.

01:15:02.640 | But you shouldn't be commenting in any way on what they're doing from a criminal investigatory

01:15:09.520 | perspective. I think that started in the Obama years with Eric Holder. When you appoint your

01:15:15.280 | wingman Attorney General, I guess that's what happens. And the fact is that it's continued

01:15:21.440 | through the Trump years and now through the Biden years. And my instruction to my Attorney General

01:15:25.520 | will be the same as it was, because in New Jersey, we don't elect Attorney General, we appoint them

01:15:30.400 | like you do in the federal system. And what I said to each of my attorneys general was,

01:15:35.040 | I know I was the US Attorney for seven years, I got expertise and opinions on criminal prosecution,

01:15:40.960 | I'm never going to call you ever. And I never did. Because once you decide to be a political figure,

01:15:47.840 | and not a law enforcement figure, you should stay out of criminal investigations.

01:15:51.680 | So I know you didn't ask it. But it struck me when you were talking about that.

01:15:55.840 | Governor, let me ask you one last question from my end, which is why are you running for president?

01:16:01.520 | Recent polling data show the 52% unfavorable rating 23% favorable, and you're three and a

01:16:07.120 | half percent in the average of the national polls. What's the goal here? Help us understand how you

01:16:12.320 | think about the campaign and how you think about your future as a political operator and what your

01:16:18.080 | goal is with the campaign. My goal is to be President of the United States. And since I've

01:16:24.000 | been doing this for a while, I don't pay attention to national polls, because we don't have a national

01:16:28.720 | primary. And in fact, we don't have a national general election. What we have is 50 individual

01:16:34.160 | state elections. That's the way we nominate candidates. And if you look at the most recent

01:16:38.640 | poll in New Hampshire, I'm in second place in New Hampshire at 14%. Ahead of Ron DeSantis,

01:16:44.480 | ahead of Vivek, ahead of Nikki, ahead of Pence, and behind only Trump. And now I'm behind by 20

01:16:51.440 | points. I'll give you that. But I'm behind a guy who's only at 34% in that poll. And so I absolutely

01:17:00.480 | believe I can win New Hampshire. And I believe if I win New Hampshire, David, then the whole race

01:17:06.240 | changes. You have a line there. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So let's start off with I'm running because I want

01:17:11.680 | to be President of the United States. Yeah. And that's the only reason to run. I think I don't

01:17:16.560 | need to run to become famous. I'm famous enough. I don't need to run to get a book deal,

01:17:24.320 | because you know what? I've already written two books and my third one's getting ready to come

01:17:28.720 | out. I don't need it to get a job on TV. I gave that up to run for President. So I'm running for

01:17:34.880 | President to be President, David. And that's why I'm doing it, and for no other reason.

01:17:40.720 | Should Donald Trump be in jail?

01:17:42.000 | We'll find out when these trials happen.

01:17:45.440 | What do you think?

01:17:46.480 | I'm willing to give everybody the presumption of innocence because that's what the Constitution

01:17:49.920 | demands that I do. Do I think that he can...

01:17:53.440 | What's your prosecutorial intuition?

01:17:55.600 | I would have indicted both federal cases. I would not have indicted the New York case

01:18:01.200 | or the Atlanta case as to Donald Trump. I think on the New York case, the Manhattan DA

01:18:06.000 | has much more important work to be doing than bringing a case on a seven-year-old payment

01:18:11.600 | to a porn star that he was having an affair with to keep it from the American people after the

01:18:16.800 | American people already know everything they need to know about it. So I think that was useless and

01:18:20.800 | purely political. In the Atlanta case, once Jack Smith indicted Trump on election interference

01:18:27.840 | federally, I know that Fannie Willis was probably very upset that she had been investigating it for

01:18:34.640 | two and a half years and he beat her to the punch, but he beat her to the punch. And there's no

01:18:39.280 | reason to indict somebody for the same acts twice. And so I wouldn't have indicted him in Atlanta.

01:18:46.240 | I would have indicted him for sure on the documents case, but I will tell you since you asked,

01:18:54.160 | I wouldn't have indicted him on the documents. I would have just indicted him on the obstruction

01:18:58.400 | of justice and the lying. I think by indicting on the documents, he just made it a much more

01:19:03.840 | complicated case that may not get to trial for a year and a half or two because of the classified

01:19:09.200 | documents involved. And I would have indicted him on the January 6th case because I believe his

01:19:14.240 | activity from election night forward is worthy of the probable cause standard. Now we'll see

01:19:23.760 | if the government can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt on both those cases. I will tell you.

01:19:30.560 | But on those cases that you would bring, that you would indict as a prosecutor,

01:19:34.320 | what sentence would you seek? Because these Democrat prosecutors are seeking over 500 years

01:19:40.400 | of jail time for Trump. I mean, what do you think the appropriate punishment to seek is?

01:19:45.120 | David, that's just the statutory number. It's not whatever is done. And people do that all the time.

01:19:50.720 | They look at the statutory maximum. They add up each count in the statutory maximum and they come

01:19:55.440 | up to 500. It never happens. And it's never asked for. And it's never asked for. What you do is-

01:20:01.680 | If you were the prosecutor, what punishment would you be seeking?

01:20:04.720 | I don't think that it makes any sense for Donald Trump to go to jail. And it's not just because

01:20:12.560 | he's Donald Trump. It has more to do quite frankly with the fact that he'd probably be 79 years old

01:20:19.360 | before he'd be ready to go to jail. And when I was prosecuting cases, I really felt like when you get

01:20:25.680 | to that age and you send someone into the atmosphere that federal prison is, even the minimum security

01:20:31.520 | federal prison, that you're essentially giving them a death sentence. And unless they've done

01:20:36.960 | something, like Bernie Madoff, for instance, which is worthy of a death sentence, then I would not

01:20:44.560 | think that sending him to jail would be appropriate. Now, a judge may feel differently.

01:20:52.000 | And in the end, all the prosecutor does is make a recommendation. The judge makes a decision.

01:20:58.080 | If I were president of the United States, while I would not consider pardoning Donald Trump

01:21:03.120 | if he were convicted, unless the trial for some reason showed itself to have unconstitutionally

01:21:09.520 | unfair elements that were not corrected by the courts, other than that, I wouldn't pardon him.

01:21:16.000 | But if he were sentenced to jail, I certainly would consider commuting the sentence

01:21:20.720 | for the reasons I just said. Let's talk about what happened on January 6th for a second.

01:21:24.960 | A lot of folks in the Republican Party are framing it as like, you know, a day out at the park. And

01:21:30.640 | we just saw Trump appointed judges give the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys sentences,

01:21:38.000 | multi-decade sentences for seditious conspiracy. Do you think these sentences that have been handed

01:21:45.120 | down by Trump appointed judges are part of a deep state conspiracy against the Republicans? Or do

01:21:51.040 | you think these people are domestic terrorists and that they got appropriate sentences?

01:21:55.440 | You know, I don't want to, Jason, give an answer on each one of the cases because I quite frankly

01:22:00.960 | could tell you that I haven't followed the cases, each one of them closely enough.

01:22:04.880 | You just did on the other four.

01:22:06.000 | To give an opinion, pardon me?

01:22:07.600 | You just did on the other four, though.

01:22:08.800 | I don't know. There were no, you're asking me about, that was the Trump cases.

01:22:16.400 | Yeah, yeah. So now I'm asking about this.

01:22:17.440 | And I'm talking about, and I said that because of his age.

01:22:20.640 | Okay.

01:22:21.760 | All right? And so none of these folks on the Proud Boys, I think were in their 70s.

01:22:26.240 | Okay.

01:22:27.440 | So that's the difference between the two. But I'm gonna try to answer your question.

01:22:31.360 | Great.

01:22:31.600 | I just don't want to say I'm giving an opinion as to each and every sentence.

01:22:35.920 | Okay.

01:22:36.800 | What I want to say about it, though, is that what they did on January 6th was unlawful,

01:22:44.560 | it was extremely serious, and it requires imprisonment.

01:22:48.800 | Okay.

01:22:50.320 | And so each of these individual cases have nuances and individual facts to them

01:22:54.800 | that I'm not, I will tell you, I'm not completely conversant in.

01:22:58.080 | Okay.

01:22:58.880 | So the difference between a 15-year sentence and an 18-year sentence or a 22-year sentence,

01:23:04.160 | if I sat down and I delved into what was presented at trial and what was presented

01:23:10.240 | in the sentencing memoranda, I'd give you an opinion.

01:23:13.360 | But I haven't done that. I have to be honest.

01:23:14.720 | Can I ask one final question? From my perspective, one of the reasons that

01:23:19.840 | the polling can sometimes veer this way is that in the Republican polls, a lot of the attacks

01:23:28.160 | against you, Governor, focus on, obviously, Bridgegate and Beachgate, and then this kind of

01:23:34.640 | theoretical corruption allegations directed at you and your staff.

01:23:41.040 | Now, your staff was convicted of wire fraud, but then the Supreme Court overturned it 9-0.

01:23:45.840 | Right.

01:23:46.800 | And now what they said, though, was that there was corruption, but there wasn't corruption

01:23:51.520 | to try to get money, which is why the wire fraud, I think that's what Elaina Kagan said

01:23:55.360 | in the ruling, the majority ruling, it was, and it was 9-0. So it was very, very clear that

01:23:59.280 | the DOJ just kind of took, again, to your case, talking about Trump, the wrong charges almost,

01:24:06.080 | okay, and what they did was not illegal, even if what they did may have been illegal under a

01:24:09.920 | different statute. In any event, it would be great for you to set the record on Bridgegate

01:24:15.600 | and Beachgate.

01:24:16.640 | We're really calling Beachgate?

01:24:18.800 | Well, I'm just calling out what the press...

01:24:21.040 | Like, really?

01:24:22.160 | Well, I think what people got upset was, and I'm just going to repeat this, I don't have an issue

01:24:25.520 | with this, is there was a state beach that was closed, and there was pictures of you and your

01:24:29.680 | family on that beach when everybody else was told to stay at home. That's, I guess that's what

01:24:33.920 | people point to. I'm just giving you that, just say, just address it however you want, so you can

01:24:38.640 | be definitive in your own language.

01:24:40.640 | All right, so let's deal with the beach situation. Every beach in New Jersey that day was open,

01:24:49.760 | except for one. Every beach in New Jersey. So the idea that people across the state of New Jersey

01:24:57.600 | were kept off the beach that day, and me and my family were the only people on the beach,

01:25:02.800 | is completely wrong. So everybody who wanted to go to the beach that day could go to the beach

01:25:10.480 | somewhere in New Jersey, except for the state park, and the reason the state park was closed

01:25:15.520 | was because the legislature did not send me a budget in time. If they'd sent me a budget,

01:25:22.080 | I would have signed it, and the beach would have been open. They refused to send me a budget.

01:25:25.920 | Now, having said that factually, contextually, it was a mistake for me to go on the beach.

01:25:32.960 | Now, I told everybody when the budget standoff was going on that my family was going to be at

01:25:40.800 | that house, and they were going to go on the beach, but we were not going to use any services,

01:25:46.240 | lifeguards or garbage service or anything else, because it wouldn't be open. So I told everybody

01:25:52.320 | that up front. I shouldn't have gone out there myself because I was the governor. It was a

01:25:59.360 | mistake. I went out there and spent an hour with my family. It was a mistake. I heartily think it

01:26:05.440 | merits a gate. - Yeah, I wouldn't give it a gate.

01:26:08.800 | - A kerfuffle, maybe. - And I would heartily call it

01:26:12.000 | corruption, okay? - Yeah, no, it's not corruption.

01:26:14.560 | - On bridge gate. Let's remember, this has been investigated by a democratic state legislature

01:26:23.360 | with subpoena power, by a democratic US attorney with an ax to grind, for me, with subpoena power,

01:26:31.600 | and in both of those, and also an investigation that we authorized internally. All three of the

01:26:43.120 | investigations agreed on one thing. I had no knowledge of what happened. No one told me what

01:26:48.480 | was going on, and I didn't find out about it until well after the fact. And nobody's ever

01:26:55.520 | disputed that who's done an investigation. And if they thought I'd done something wrong,

01:27:00.240 | given the ridiculous indictments they brought, I'm sure they would have thrown me in there too

01:27:05.680 | if they had anything they could have gone with. These were three employees

01:27:09.920 | who did something extraordinarily stupid, and they should have been fired, and they were.

01:27:18.880 | As soon as I found out about it, they were all fired. They should never work in public office

01:27:24.480 | again. But what they did was stupid, not criminal. And if we start criminalizing every time someone

01:27:31.920 | does something stupid, we won't have enough jails. And when you get Ruth Bader Ginsburg

01:27:38.320 | and Clarence Thomas to agree on an overreach by the Department of Justice, it was a politically

01:27:45.200 | motivated prosecution because I had just been reelected with 61% of the vote in a blue state

01:27:51.440 | and was ahead of Hillary Clinton by eight points in national polls.

01:27:54.800 | That's why they did it. They thought they were going to get me.

01:27:58.400 | They cooperated the guy who admits he was the mastermind of the situation. They cooperated

01:28:05.920 | him to try to get me. And once they realized they couldn't get me, they had to indict somebody.

01:28:12.320 | So, they indicted the two other people. I believe you. I think that the DOJ engages in a lot of

01:28:18.160 | political prosecutions. Why isn't Jack Smith's prosecution politically minded? And the point

01:28:22.800 | I'll come back to is that Merrick Garland did this analysis when he first came in on whether

01:28:29.440 | Trump was guilty of incitement on January 6th. And they had like a memo come back saying,

01:28:34.080 | "Sorry, we can't get him for that." There was then a leak in the Washington Post from Biden himself

01:28:40.000 | saying that he thought Merrick Garland was being kind of wimpy and that they should go after Trump.

01:28:44.160 | And then lo and behold, Merrick Garland appoints Jack Smith to go get Trump.

01:28:48.880 | And Jack Smith's case depends on knowing the inner workings of Trump's mind,

01:28:52.640 | this like fraud on the American people idea that he not only made up this stolen election narrative,

01:28:58.000 | but he knew it was false, which I don't see how they're ever going to prove beyond a reasonable

01:29:01.840 | doubt. So, why isn't that a political prosecution? I mean, Biden clearly wanted it. He instigated it

01:29:08.480 | through a leak to the Washington Post, or at least that seems to be the chronology,

01:29:12.560 | whether it was deliberate or not. And it requires Jack Smith to prove this impossible

01:29:16.800 | theory because it requires knowing what Trump was really thinking when he was saying all this stuff.

01:29:21.760 | All right.

01:29:22.160 | So, how is that not an equally political prosecution?

01:29:25.120 | All right. So, let me separate the two. So, you're talking just about Jan 6th,

01:29:30.000 | not about the classified documents.

01:29:32.000 | Correct. I'm just talking about the Jack Smith theory that Trump perpetrated a fraud because

01:29:36.160 | he knew his stolen election narrative was false.

01:29:39.360 | Well, look, I think that there is going to be a lot of interesting testimony

01:29:43.600 | that will be given in that case regarding what Donald Trump really knew and what he really

01:29:49.760 | thought, what he was telling people at the time. And I don't think it's as clear cut as you're

01:29:54.240 | making it out to be. Now, what I said at the time when he brought the Jan 6th case is,

01:29:59.840 | it is aggressive. There's no question it's an aggressive prosecution.

01:30:04.800 | Do I believe it's political? I don't know, but I will say it's aggressive. It's much more

01:30:11.280 | aggressive than the classified documents case because you're exactly right that state of mind,

01:30:18.960 | which is a part of every criminal case, will be a part of this one. And trying to get inside

01:30:23.360 | Donald Trump's mind is a dangerous thing because he says so many contradictory things, right?

01:30:29.920 | So he was saying to me during debate prep in 2020 that he was absolutely convinced

01:30:37.040 | that he could lose this election. Not that it would be stolen, that he could lose it

01:30:43.920 | because of COVID and COVID ruined his great economy and now he's going to lose.

01:30:49.360 | So he said a lot of different things to a lot of different people over time.

01:30:54.400 | And all I'd say, David, is that it is going to be an aggressive case to prove. And by the way,

01:31:01.840 | if they don't prove it, it will be a stain on the Department of Justice for bringing the case at all.

01:31:07.840 | I happen to believe... So then why support it? I mean, look, so... Hold on. Let me agree with you.

01:31:12.720 | I'm going to finish that. Okay, okay. I know what you're going to say, so I'll finish it.

01:31:16.160 | I believe, given what I know, that Donald Trump does not believe that the election was stolen.

01:31:24.240 | That's what I believe from knowing him for 22 years and from being with him in much of the

01:31:31.840 | pre-election period and him expressing his very genuine concerns about the fact that he was losing

01:31:38.560 | to Biden and that he could lose to Biden, not because of mail-in ballots, because of COVID,

01:31:43.920 | that I don't believe he really believes the election was stolen.

01:31:48.480 | But can you prove that beyond a reasonable doubt?

01:31:50.480 | Well, that's the part that's aggressive, David, and I don't know all the evidence they have.

01:31:54.880 | I suspect they've got a number of people who are going to tell the jury that Trump told them

01:32:01.520 | that he thought he lost. But we're going to see. But we're going to see. And that's why I call it

01:32:08.240 | aggressive. By the way, let me just get on the record here that I agree with you that a lot of

01:32:11.760 | the underlying behavior was really bad. And I've said so on the pod before. I'm not defending the

01:32:16.080 | underlying behavior. What I question is the wisdom of one president, basically Biden,

01:32:21.840 | his Justice Department going after the former president who is currently the leading candidate

01:32:28.480 | in the election against him and doing it within a year before the election as opposed to

01:32:34.480 | three years ago. How is that wise?

01:32:36.960 | David, let me ask you a question. First off, if they had indicted Donald Trump

01:32:43.040 | six months after January 6th, you know what everybody would have said? Rush to judgment.

01:32:47.760 | No good investigation. They had this predetermined. You can't win as a prosecutor on that one.

01:32:56.080 | Either you went too quick or you waited too long. So I don't buy that at all. I think it's bull.

01:33:02.400 | Now, on the question of whether or not a president should allow his Justice Department

01:33:11.280 | to charge someone who is his predecessor and potentially an opponent again,

01:33:17.600 | well, what's the alternative? Let's take it away from the January 6th one and look at the documents

01:33:24.320 | one. If he obstructed justice, if he lied and obstructed the grand jury subpoena, if he kept

01:33:32.960 | classified documents he was not entitled to keep and then hid them from his own lawyers when they

01:33:37.840 | were trying to respond to that, if he instructed people to delete surveillance camera video,

01:33:43.520 | which would have shown him having people move those documents, then all you have to do is

01:33:48.800 | declare for president and you don't get prosecuted. I mean, I understand it's a lousy situation,

01:33:55.680 | but there are a number of people who believe that the only reason Donald Trump is running

01:34:01.200 | for president again is to be able to make that argument. And so I understand it's an awful

01:34:07.840 | — no, no, I think he wants retribution from the seat of power for everybody who thinks that he's

01:34:15.360 | wrong. Okay, hold on, I want to ask you a question. You did four in a row. No, no, no, no, I want to

01:34:18.560 | ask why. You did four in a row. I'll do one. So, Governor Christie, let me ask you a question,

01:34:22.720 | because you know Trump. Do you think he tried to overturn the election? And do you think,

01:34:27.680 | given the chance to overturn the election and steal the election, Donald Trump, based on your

01:34:32.720 | knowledge of his character for multiple decades and working with him, do you think he would have

01:34:36.800 | done it? Do you think he's that criminal-minded? I don't think he would have any — he would have

01:34:43.040 | had any problem with the election being overturned. Okay. And I think if it was,

01:34:49.600 | he would have been more than happy to have his rear end sleeping in the White House tonight.

01:34:54.960 | Now, I think he evolved to that position in this respect. I've had the opportunity to meet

01:35:06.160 | a number of different presidents, every president going back to Bush 41. Every one of them,

01:35:12.480 | regardless of my disagreements with them on policy, were matured and humbled by the office,

01:35:22.720 | except for him. Okay, well said.

01:35:25.760 | The office made him worse. It made him a worse person. I've known him for 22 years. The guy I

01:35:34.080 | met in 2001 would not have done what 2020 Donald Trump did. And I think he is a perfect example

01:35:42.720 | of power having corrupted someone to the point where he was willing to not only engage in that

01:35:51.200 | conduct, but to essentially threaten his own vice president to try to get him to do something.

01:35:58.560 | Do you think Russiagate played a role in that? I mean, meaning, here, Donald Trump,

01:36:02.960 | he's the ultimate outsider, maybe has a chip on his shoulder about not being accepted

01:36:07.200 | by certain elements of society. He wins the White House, it's this huge shock.

01:36:12.560 | And rather than accepting it, the entire Democratic Party said his election was illegitimate,

01:36:16.880 | and they claimed that basically somehow Putin masterminded it. And then they subjected him to

01:36:21.040 | two years of this Mueller investigation, which turned up nothing, but they claimed that he was

01:36:25.680 | basically an agent. Turned up a lot.

01:36:27.680 | You still believe in the PTA. A lot of people went to jail.

01:36:30.160 | You still believe in the spill. A lot of people went to jail.

01:36:31.360 | You still believe in the Steele dossier. Okay, the rest of the world.

01:36:34.960 | But a lot of people went to jail, and he did ask the Russians for help.

01:36:37.600 | The Steele dossier was completely made up.

01:36:39.360 | I didn't talk about the Steele dossier. I'm talking about their relationship with Russia.

01:36:42.160 | That was the basis for the whole Russiagate hoax.

01:36:43.920 | I'm talking about him asking for help from Russia.

01:36:46.320 | You're the last person to live in that simulation, Jason.

01:36:48.080 | That's not correct.

01:36:48.960 | I'm asking the governor a question. Do you think the two years of this Russiagate hoax

01:36:53.760 | basically drove Trump to this behavior, or played a role in it?

01:36:58.880 | I'll go with your last piece, not the first one.

01:37:02.560 | I have no doubt that it contributed to his feeling that people were after him. No doubt.

01:37:09.200 | And I said from the beginning, I thought the Russia thing was complete crap.

01:37:12.640 | And the reason I thought it was, was because I was there in 2016.

01:37:15.920 | That campaign was so bad and so disorganized, they couldn't have arranged a two-car funeral,

01:37:24.560 | let alone conspired with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

01:37:28.800 | I was there. It was amateurish. And it won because they ran against the worst

01:37:37.360 | presidential candidate in my lifetime, in Hillary Clinton.

01:37:41.040 | So I said from the beginning, I thought the Russia investigation was illegitimate

01:37:46.240 | and was wrong. Do I think it contributed to his attitude? I think it did.

01:37:49.680 | But I don't think, David, it would be fair to say that that's what made him that way.

01:37:55.440 | Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I appreciate that answer.

01:37:58.240 | But I think there's a lot more that contributed to it than that. But yeah, I would certainly

01:38:03.280 | concede that because I objected to the Russia investigation at the time in real time, publicly.

01:38:10.400 | Kudos to you for that because I think you've been vindicated by what's happened in the last few

01:38:13.760 | years. I do too.

01:38:14.400 | Last question for me on documents. Okay. Do you think that there's a selective prosecution

01:38:20.960 | issue here? Because Sandy Berger stuffed documents in his pants from a clean room,

01:38:25.680 | never prosecuted. Petraeus had a huge classified documents problem, slap on the wrist. I mean,

01:38:31.600 | it seems like, and by the way, Biden had documents by his beloved Corvette

01:38:36.560 | and in offices all over the place going back many years. So I mean, isn't this documents case,

01:38:42.240 | it seems like no one really wanted to prosecute this law until Trump did it. And now it's like,

01:38:47.760 | get Trump.

01:38:48.800 | Now, look, I think Trump did this one to himself, David. If he had turned over the documents he

01:38:54.560 | illegally had at any point when he was being requested to from February of 2021 through to

01:39:03.280 | when the search occurred, there would be no prosecution.

01:39:06.880 | Well, I agree with that.

01:39:07.760 | And the proof of that-

01:39:08.800 | I agree with that. But why not prosecute these other guys?

01:39:10.640 | Because they gave the documents back.

01:39:12.160 | Because look, Biden gave the documents back. I mean, Pence gave the documents back when asked.

01:39:19.360 | What this guy did was obstructed it in every way he could. I don't want people looking through my

01:39:25.440 | boxes, my boxes. This guy is like a freak about these boxes. I'm telling you. I used to campaign

01:39:33.120 | with him. He would have a box of documents. Now, back then it was 2016, it was a box of documents

01:39:39.120 | from Trump Tower. No one could touch them. No one could look at them. He'd go through them a little

01:39:45.200 | bit, but he literally had a seat for his box of documents next to him on his plane. No one could

01:39:52.640 | sit next to him. The box of documents went next to him. So there's a psychosis here on the documents,

01:39:58.800 | David, that's deep. All right?

01:40:00.880 | Okay. But maybe that indicates this is a-

01:40:02.240 | He did this to himself. He did it to himself.

01:40:05.120 | I agree he walked into it. I agree he totally walked into this.

01:40:07.440 | No, no. He sprinted into it with his arms wide open and he screwed himself. But in the process,

01:40:14.720 | he screwed the country.

01:40:16.080 | But what you're describing is an idiosyncratic issue. He liked his boxes. He had mementos in

01:40:20.800 | them. This was not a national security issue. And there's-

01:40:23.120 | Oh, sure it was.

01:40:24.080 | How?

01:40:24.400 | Sure it was.

01:40:25.360 | How?

01:40:25.600 | You cannot permit the president of the United States to be flashing around in a ran war plan

01:40:31.840 | on the deck at Mar-a-Lago. Sorry, not allowed.

01:40:35.920 | Bingo.

01:40:36.560 | Especially not after your president. And you know what? He could have declassified any

01:40:41.360 | documents he wanted to when he was president. He didn't. And now he's trying to say he mind

01:40:45.440 | melded them to be declassified. Come on, David. This stuff is such bullshit. It's laughable.

01:40:52.160 | But you agree the president has an unlimited authority to declassify documents, right?

01:40:56.640 | Of course.

01:40:57.520 | So he didn't do it through the process he wanted, but who's to say that he didn't do it?

01:41:02.000 | No. His attorney general said he didn't do it. His White House counsel said he didn't do it.

01:41:06.240 | His view is he didn't. So who's to say he didn't?

01:41:08.400 | His view, he declassified other documents the appropriate way. These he just thought

01:41:13.840 | about declassifying, therefore they were declassified. Come on. Come on, seriously.

01:41:18.640 | I agree it's a bad argument, but I guess-

01:41:20.320 | No, it's not a bad argument.

01:41:21.360 | But David will make it anyway.

01:41:22.800 | David, it's not a bad argument. It's not an argument.

01:41:25.840 | Come back anytime you want, Chris.

01:41:27.440 | It's not an argument.

01:41:27.920 | I think you got to sit in. I think you got to sit in.

01:41:29.760 | I mean, look, I will tell you guys, I am very sympathetic to executive authority.

01:41:36.800 | I've been a governor of the state that has the strongest constitutional governorship in America.

01:41:43.200 | But you got to follow the law. When the law empowers you to the extent that the United

01:41:50.240 | States president is empowered, that should be enough. You shouldn't have to act outside the law.

01:41:56.320 | And here's why he did it. He didn't do it to sell the documents.

01:42:00.560 | He didn't do them to give them to some foreign power. He did them to show off.

01:42:05.360 | Look what I have. Look, I'm still really the president. This is the real core problem with him,

01:42:13.840 | David.

01:42:14.240 | But doesn't this pale in comparison to the crimes of the Biden family? I mean,

01:42:18.080 | Robert Peters sold the Huffington Post.

01:42:20.480 | I don't know. Do we have time to talk about the two billion dollars that Jared Kushner has gotten

01:42:26.560 | from the Saudis and why he got that money? Is it because he's such an expert investor?

01:42:32.960 | The guy who bought 666 Fifth Avenue and nearly bankrupted his entire company?

01:42:37.600 | I mean, he's actually a pretty smart guy. I mean, oh, yeah. Oh, no. He's a genius.

01:42:43.680 | He's an absolute genius, David. And that's why the Saudis gave him two billion dollars.

01:42:48.800 | He was out of office. We're talking about...

01:42:50.720 | For three weeks.

01:42:51.120 | We're talking about...

01:42:51.840 | You just talked about earlier, Sachs, that we have to stop the grift.

01:42:53.600 | We're talking about the Biden family. Biden is vice president and his son is running around

01:42:57.840 | the world collecting money.

01:42:59.360 | David, why would a president of the United States, when he has somebody like Mike Pompeo

01:43:06.080 | as his secretary of state, who's been a congressman, a West Point graduate,

01:43:11.520 | member of the military, CIA director, secretary of state, why is he sending Jared Kushner over?

01:43:19.200 | Grift.

01:43:19.600 | To negotiate with the Saudis.

01:43:20.080 | Are you arguing with the results? He got the Abraham Accords done.

01:43:22.720 | No, no, no, no.

01:43:23.440 | Wait, wait, two things he wants.

01:43:24.000 | And by the way, now he gets... Wait, no, no, he gets the... Oh, so now we're not giving

01:43:28.480 | Pompeo the credit for the Abraham Accords. It's Jared Kushner. Look, in the end, Pompeo

01:43:35.360 | closed that deal.

01:43:35.920 | Do you think the Abraham Accords were a good idea or a bad idea?

01:43:38.400 | Great idea. Great idea.

01:43:39.840 | Why don't you give Kushner credit? He was definitely involved.

01:43:42.480 | Well, hold on. No, no, no. He's involved. Congratulations.

01:43:45.040 | In fact, he may have been the lead person involved.

01:43:46.480 | Why was he sent in the first place? Because of his extensive foreign policy experience?

01:43:51.680 | Maybe he has fresh ideas.

01:43:52.800 | Managing apartment buildings in New Jersey? That's what he was doing. So look,

01:43:59.920 | I absolutely believe that, as I answered your question very directly before,

01:44:06.640 | that the only reason Hunter Biden was hired for these things was to get influence with his father.

01:44:11.440 | Absolutely. And I think he should go to jail. But we can't look at Jared and Ivanka making

01:44:18.240 | 40-plus million dollars a year while they were in the White House, getting $2 billion from the

01:44:23.440 | Saudis to invest after they leave the White House, and say that's not a grift as well, not to mention

01:44:30.240 | the fact that he's spending campaign money to pay his legal fees when he's supposed to be

01:44:35.680 | a billionaire. How about you sell the Trump Tower apartment since you don't live there anymore

01:44:41.200 | and pay your legal fees with that? Or how about sell one of your frigging golf courses

01:44:46.240 | to pay your legal fees with that? But instead, a $100 average donation from Americans who donated

01:44:53.440 | to something called Save America, which was supposed to fight the steal of the election,

01:44:59.840 | is now being spent to pay his legal fees because he took classified documents illegally out of

01:45:05.360 | the White House. And by the way, that same organization paid Kimberly Guilfoyle 60 grand

01:45:11.360 | to give a three-minute speech on January 6th and paid $208,000 to Melania's stylist

01:45:18.480 | as political strategy.

01:45:21.280 | She looks great.

01:45:21.840 | There's plenty of grift to go around. And I'll tell you this.

01:45:24.320 | The grift is deep.

01:45:25.600 | The Christie administration, no member of my family will make money off the fact that I'm

01:45:30.240 | president. You can't say that about Trump or Biden.

01:45:33.680 | Okay, this has been an amazing two hours.

01:45:37.200 | Killing me.

01:45:37.760 | With Governor Chris Christie. Well done. So honest.

01:45:40.960 | Well done.

01:45:41.760 | Great debate.

01:45:42.000 | Thank God I had these lozenges, or I'd have no voice.

01:45:44.480 | Final question. When you did this karaoke with David Freeburg,

01:45:49.920 | did you do Thunder Road, Living on a Prayer, Rosalita? What was the song? Or did you guys do

01:45:57.600 | Don't Go Breaking My Heart, a duet?

01:46:00.000 | I don't remember which song David and I did together, but I did do Thunder Road

01:46:05.040 | karaoke in that small bar in that little town in Idaho.

01:46:10.160 | The Beep event.

01:46:11.360 | I think I do also remember there being a karaoke on a Backstreet Boys song.

01:46:18.720 | Oh, that's definitely Freeburg. Yeah, that's definitely Freeburg.

01:46:22.000 | And I don't think Freeburg was in that one. I don't think.

01:46:25.280 | Do you remember, David, which song we did?

01:46:26.960 | Endless Love?

01:46:28.400 | I don't remember.

01:46:29.760 | I know. It definitely wasn't that.

01:46:30.960 | There was a group thing.

01:46:31.600 | Don't Go Breaking My Heart, T.D. Elton John?

01:46:33.840 | Yeah.

01:46:35.200 | There's got to be one in there. Listen, Governor, we really appreciate you coming on.

01:46:39.680 | We wish you great success. Congratulations on New Hampshire.

01:46:42.640 | And really, really, thank you. Did a great job today.

01:46:46.400 | Thank you for being so forthright.

01:46:47.840 | Thank you guys for giving me the… Look, I love the opportunity to be able to go

01:46:52.800 | into more depth about this in anything other than UFOs. So that's really good.

01:46:59.120 | Oh, wait, we have another hour of UFO questions.

01:47:01.200 | I would really encourage you to spread this gospel of the most thoughtful way to beat back

01:47:07.920 | corruption is something like zero-based budgeting across the entire federal government.

01:47:12.240 | Yeah, I like that too. That was a great…

01:47:13.760 | Nobody says it. People are… I think RFK and Vivek scratch it, but I think you could nail

01:47:22.000 | it if you take it and want to run with it. And there's just a lot of money that's probably

01:47:28.080 | sloshing on the sidelines that needs to get reallocated.

01:47:30.720 | And you… Not probably.

01:47:31.520 | I'm sure you saw how viral John Seward's interview with the Undersecretary of Defense for Budget went.

01:47:36.800 | That was an incredible interview. And obviously, it hits a nerve with a lot of people. So,

01:47:41.040 | it's a really important point. It speaks a lot to the broader issue.

01:47:43.840 | Well, I'm glad to be here. I'm happy that I did not take my son's briefing,

01:47:50.320 | but I can guarantee you that he's going to be listening. He's very stressed. He's actually…

01:47:55.520 | He works for the New York Mets. He's down in Dominican Republic today.

01:47:58.960 | Oof. What a shit show.

01:47:59.520 | And he called me from the DR and he said, "Is today the all-in day?"

01:48:02.800 | And I said, "Yes, today's the day." He goes, "Call me right afterwards." So, he's fine.

01:48:07.760 | What are you going to tell him? What are you going to tell him?

01:48:09.280 | I'm going to tell him it was great. We had a great two hours, and he's going to enjoy

01:48:12.240 | listening to it. And anytime you guys want me back, I'm back.

01:48:16.080 | Yeah, now also fix the Mets. Fix the Mets.

01:48:18.000 | Thank you. Thank you very much.

01:48:18.480 | Yeah, I'm on the board there too. I think that's a bigger problem.

01:48:20.800 | Yeah, a little bit of work to do.

01:48:21.920 | That may be worse than zero-based budgeting. I don't know.

01:48:24.160 | Yeah. At least the Knicks look like they built a nice foundation here. I like where my Knicks are.

01:48:28.320 | Don't give up on the Mets yet. Wait till next year.

01:48:30.480 | Oh, I'm not giving up. We'll get there.

01:48:32.400 | All right. Two hours with the governor, going around the horn here. Friedberg,

01:48:37.200 | your thoughts after two hours with Governor Christie. Where was he strong? Where do you

01:48:42.000 | disagree with him? What do you think of his presidency after two hours of intimate discussion

01:48:46.160 | here on All In Podcast? I don't know if I've got a huge shift in

01:48:52.160 | opinion. He's a very personable guy. He has a good command of the subject. He's got good experience

01:48:58.400 | running a state. So those are good qualifying criteria. Obviously, this is a very challenging

01:49:03.120 | race for him. I'm not sure if he hits any zingers that really helps accelerate him past

01:49:07.920 | the momentum that Vivek has and obviously the lead that Trump has with the conservative party

01:49:15.120 | support with DeSantis. So it seems like it's going to be a tough campaign and a tough race for him.

01:49:19.600 | I'm not sure he brings anything today that shows how he's going to kind of get ahead of this

01:49:24.240 | problem. So that's the campaign. Let's talk about for you, if you were to contrast him to other

01:49:30.240 | Republican candidates, DeSantis, Hallie, Vivek, where does he fall for you personally?

01:49:37.360 | Yeah, I remain of the concern that there's a giant meteor, hitting a fiscal meteor hitting

01:49:43.040 | the United States. Okay. And everyone's talking about a lot of other stuff.

01:49:46.720 | Okay. And it's the don't look up documentary to me.

01:49:49.600 | Okay. And he's the most attuned to that in your mind or Nikki?

01:49:52.960 | He's a good point of view. I think his alignment around keeping military spending and you know,

01:49:58.880 | this, this discussion around corruption, it's, it's such a, a micro problem relative to the macro

01:50:05.760 | condition. Again, 31% of US debt coming up for refinancing this year. It's going to be,

01:50:13.120 | you know, and we're already seeing, by the way, this year interest expense on the debt

01:50:16.800 | is greater than the military spending. If you had to pick two candidates on the Republican Party

01:50:22.160 | that were most intriguing to you for your vote, which two would they be?

01:50:25.840 | I'm going to skip that question for now. Okay. Chamath, I'll go to you post this two hour

01:50:30.720 | discussion. He I thought he was great. I'm curious how you thought were the strong points in this

01:50:36.080 | discussion. And then I guess we can talk about his campaign as free bird just did. But then we

01:50:42.080 | could also talk about how he resonates with you. And in terms of getting your vote, maybe where he

01:50:47.360 | sits, I don't think my opinion has changed much before or after. I mean, I think that he's a,

01:50:53.040 | he's a very personable, charming guy. But I'm not sure that he says anything that's different

01:50:59.280 | from the establishment wing of the Republican Party. And I think that the winning candidate,

01:51:05.920 | whether I agree with it or not, is irrelevant at this point. But the formula has been laid

01:51:11.600 | bare for everybody to see. And I think that you have to have radical ideas. And so when you think

01:51:17.040 | about the people that are getting the most attention on both the Democratic and the

01:51:21.520 | Republican side, what they're essentially pushing back on is all of this orthodoxy.

01:51:28.080 | And if he really wants to win, he has to embrace being unorthodox and heterodox. And he doesn't

01:51:37.680 | have enough heterodoxical policies to cut through. So he just cannot win as a practical matter. So

01:51:44.640 | if he embraces those heterodoxies, because he believes in them,

01:51:48.960 | he's he has a chance, but if he doesn't, it's going to be Trump versus Vivek.

01:51:54.400 | So if it winds up being Biden, Vivek, Trump, Christie, Nikki in this sort of like final,

01:52:04.560 | you know, race towards finish line, which two candidates you find most appealing right now?

01:52:08.400 | Not not saying you'll vote for them, but which two are resonating with Chamath

01:52:12.960 | Polyhapitiya most?

01:52:14.000 | I'm still pretty open minded. I haven't decided. I know who doesn't resonate with me.

01:52:18.800 | Okay, tell me.

01:52:19.520 | Is DeSantis.

01:52:20.720 | Okay, so DeSantis is off the table. Everybody else is still

01:52:23.200 | and I was very clear early on that his campaign was do away. And I think that that's probably

01:52:28.080 | just going to he's going to have a withering kind of embarrassing and to the campaign,

01:52:34.640 | unfortunately for him, but I think the the the heterodoxical rhetoric is going to get ramped up

01:52:40.320 | both by RFK and by Vivek. And I think it's going to put a lot of pressure and by Trump. And I think

01:52:47.200 | it's going to put a lot of pressure on Biden. And it's going to put a lot of pressure on the other

01:52:51.040 | Republican nominees to cut through the noise here.

01:52:53.520 | It's an interesting point to Chamath because if the chorus becomes this heterodox

01:52:58.320 | point of view, it's it looks really bad. Biden is almost in this truly defensive mode,

01:53:05.360 | because then you have multiple parties speaking similarly about the establishment.

01:53:09.520 | I think there's a very good chance that Biden's son,

01:53:12.240 | he's indicted this week,

01:53:13.600 | is in jail by the time the election comes around, which I think also speaks very poorly

01:53:20.320 | to the risk that there is some clear links of corruption that come out. And I think that

01:53:28.320 | that's going to put the election under severe pressure. And I think you can you can bet that

01:53:35.920 | every single Republican mega donor is going to come out of the woodwork to fund a super PAC

01:53:42.640 | that's going to blast the airwaves all across the country with that content. So that's I think a

01:53:48.640 | foregone conclusion, if it looks like there is fire where there looks right now is smoke. And

01:53:54.480 | if David Weiss acts this decisively, and it moves to trial quickly, which I suspect it will, this is

01:54:02.080 | all bad news for Biden. And so, you know, you have that on that side, the Republicans have the red

01:54:07.520 | meat that they need. The heterodoxy on both sides is what's getting all the attention.

01:54:11.840 | So, you know, I think I think what Donald Trump did in hindsight was really break the glass on

01:54:17.440 | being able to say the things you couldn't say. And that will now be the formula for candidates to win.

01:54:25.120 | Yeah, just for folks who haven't been watching the news, Justice Department is believed to

01:54:31.520 | indict Hunter on the gun charges this month, I think they're still investing gating the potential

01:54:37.200 | corruption where there's smoke, maybe there's fire. And if it leads to Biden, and so this whole

01:54:42.480 | race could be totally flipped upside down at any moment. Same with Trump and his indictment.

01:54:46.400 | The gun charges are nothing charge, just so everyone understands what that is when he applied

01:54:50.880 | to get a firearm. You know, you have to take you have to check off these checkboxes on the form.

01:54:56.400 | Yeah.

01:54:56.880 | And one of them is I apparently that you don't have a drug problem.

01:55:00.320 | Yeah.

01:55:00.640 | And so he lied on that form, I guess. But that that's the kind of charge that I personally

01:55:08.480 | don't believe they should be going after him for because I don't think they would prosecute an

01:55:11.520 | ordinary person for that.

01:55:13.520 | Yeah. And in his defense, Hunter said, I have no problem scoring drugs. So I don't have a

01:55:16.960 | drug problem. I can get them anytime I need them.

01:55:18.880 | It's one of these weird kind of almost again, like a paperwork charge. And remember that what

01:55:24.080 | the DOJ tried to do was a settlement with Hunter Biden, where he had plead guilty on that same gun

01:55:31.360 | charge, because it's kind of a nothing charge, but then buried deep in that settlement was a

01:55:36.240 | broad immunity on all the foreign lobbying he was doing the FARA Act violations. And then it came

01:55:42.160 | out and the judge said, wait a second, like, that's too much. Like, what are you doing? And

01:55:46.560 | they reject the judge rejected the settlement. So frankly, I view the charges by the DOJ on the gun

01:55:53.200 | charge as a misdirection of what the real issue is with Hunter Biden. He was running around the

01:55:57.760 | world collecting money with being an unregistered foreign agent, foreign lobbyist. Yeah, that's the

01:56:04.720 | crux of the issue is that's the corruption.

01:56:09.120 | alleged but the point is, that's what the DOJ should be looking at. Not these like,

01:56:13.520 | that's what they were looking at. Yeah, that hunter use drugs.

01:56:16.320 | That's the David I think I think looking at the tax evasion tax fraud charges, that is their way

01:56:20.400 | of looking at that. So I think it's going to come out. I think at this point, they're looking at

01:56:24.320 | both. Everybody will have the truth. If the Biden's are truly not guilty, that will be clearly

01:56:30.720 | established now in this process. But if he was acting as an unregistered agent of these foreign

01:56:36.320 | governments, that is also going to come out. And if there were links between him and his father,

01:56:41.360 | and communications, that's also going to come out. I think that he hasn't even been indicted on that

01:56:45.360 | yet. Right? Yeah, I think it takes time. I think they will thoughtfully put it together. But

01:56:51.280 | I'm not confident about it, given that they wanted to give him broad immunity on those charges.

01:56:55.520 | I think no, but I think I think David Weiss is under such a microscope right now. The idea that

01:57:00.080 | he doesn't act conclusively here, I think would be a huge problem. And then the next president,

01:57:04.720 | if it's Republican, will reopen it. So whatever happens here will need to be definitive. And I

01:57:09.280 | think the special prosecutor probably understands that at this point.

01:57:12.320 | So let's go back to your impressions before we go down the Biden, Biden, Biden rabbit hole here.

01:57:17.520 | What are your thoughts after two hours with Chris Christie, anything change in your outlook on him?

01:57:23.360 | And then I'm curious, are you still team to Santa's all the way?

01:57:27.520 | Okay, so on Christie, I like talking to him more than I thought I was going to.

01:57:34.320 | I think he was easy to talk to, I think the two hours went by pretty quickly.

01:57:37.520 | I think he brought his energy level down to the right place for a podcast. I mean,

01:57:43.840 | it was a little different than when he's very pugnacious on the debate stage and can kind of

01:57:48.560 | grandstand and he, you know, engaged in a discussion with us. So I thought that was

01:57:53.360 | positive. The only time his energy really changed was basically in the last five minutes, when he

01:57:58.480 | went on to a full on like Trump diatribe. And it was almost like, you know, a little bit of TDS

01:58:05.040 | kicked in. That being said, his position on Trump was a little bit more nuanced than I was expecting.

01:58:10.240 | First of all, he admitted the whole Russiagate thing was total baloney. Second, he said that

01:58:16.160 | with respect to the state charges, the Alvin Bragg in New York and the Fannie Willis in Atlanta,

01:58:21.520 | those charges should not have been brought. Yeah, that was pretty good. I kind of agree

01:58:24.800 | with him on those. I agree with his. I thought that was intellectually honest. Did you feel

01:58:28.960 | intellectual honesty from him? Yeah, I think he really believes this. Yeah. Third, I took a couple

01:58:33.600 | of tries by Chamath and then me to get him to say this, but he said he would not put Trump in jail.

01:58:39.760 | He's too old for that. And I thought that was, I wasn't sure where he was going to come out on

01:58:43.680 | that. I didn't know if he was going to say Trump deserves a life sentence. Yeah, we should have

01:58:47.440 | asked him if he would pardon him if he was president. He said, he said, I didn't pardon

01:58:51.120 | him. But I commute his sentence. So he didn't have to spend time in jail. So I thought that was

01:58:56.000 | new information. And again, a more nuanced view than I was expecting on the documents case. He

01:59:02.400 | said that Trump ran into the charges, which frankly, I agree with I think, yeah, I've kind

01:59:06.320 | of avoided that easily. However, Christie said he did it for idiosyncratic reasons. He loves his

01:59:11.760 | box of mementos. Yes, didn't really address my very you and I have Yeah, yeah. And you know,

01:59:17.360 | who else loves their mementos? I have I have a handful of kids under the age of five who love

01:59:21.840 | blankets. And yes, the blankie pacifiers, Teddy. Yeah, I would just go a little further and just

01:59:28.720 | say, Listen, if he did this for idiosyncratic reasons, rather than nefarious reasons,

01:59:32.720 | like selling state secrets, then I think you apply the same standard of prosecution

01:59:37.280 | as they did to portray us or to Biden himself. The thing you keep missing is that those people

01:59:43.760 | gave those back. You keep missing. I don't know why you have that blind spot. Because he basically

01:59:48.400 | said that Trump has an anxiety complex and he sued he self soothes with that box of documents.

01:59:54.160 | That's what he said. Gaga, Google Gaga. But that's what he that's what he said.

01:59:59.280 | I would treat Trump the same way as Sandy Berger. I mean, come on, those guys.

02:00:03.120 | This is moving justice. Are you still moving on?

02:00:08.480 | The last point was on the Jack Smith charges where he admitted that Jack Smith has to prove

02:00:16.160 | beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew that his election denial argument was false. And I think he

02:00:23.840 | pretty much admitted that that would be a very, very hard thing to prove. But he said he wanted

02:00:28.960 | to wait to see what evidence they had. To me, that kind of begs the question of why you bring that

02:00:33.440 | case in the first place. Any event, so that's on Trump. I think what I saw there was a little bit

02:00:38.240 | of TDS, but a more nuanced overall perspective when you got into the details on foreign policy.

02:00:43.440 | I think we had a lot of interesting conversation there about the mismanagement of the military

02:00:50.320 | industrial complex. And I think Jamal had some really interesting questions there that that I

02:00:55.200 | followed up on. And really, you couldn't get him to say anything other than he wouldn't necessarily

02:01:01.680 | increase the size of the defense budget until you did the efficiency survey. But he kind of had to

02:01:06.640 | be pushed to even get there. And what I would just say is that on that question on military spending,

02:01:12.800 | combined with the question of Ukraine, he pretty much has the standard establishment Republican

02:01:18.400 | position, which is the only thing Biden has done wrong is not move aggressively enough on Ukraine.

02:01:24.640 | That giving mixed messages, not being hawkish enough. I'm sorry, but Biden has had the most

02:01:30.560 | hawkish policy on Ukraine that any president's ever had. And the only reason there's been

02:01:35.600 | hand wringing about giving them f 16s is because it could start World War Three. And I personally

02:01:40.720 | want Biden thinking about that, you know, so again, I think this neocon Republican position

02:01:46.480 | that involves Chris Christie and Haley and Pence and Mitch McConnell, you know, basically the whole

02:01:52.640 | Republican establishment, they basically believe that Biden who says we need to support Ukraine

02:01:58.080 | for as long as it takes as much as it takes, he's still not doing enough. I just don't fundamentally

02:02:02.400 | buy that argument. You still teams the sentence. Here's my view on it. So look, I would support

02:02:07.440 | the sentence. I also would support Vivek for me. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is new information.

02:02:12.240 | So you're saying you are now equally open minded to the vague and the Santa is not equally minded.

02:02:18.480 | But look, for me, what percent most? Here's the way I divide it, I divide candidates at this point

02:02:23.520 | into acceptable versus unacceptable. Okay. And for me, the number one issue is whether the president,

02:02:30.160 | the next president will seek to deescalate or end the Ukraine war, or they will seek to escalate it.

02:02:36.800 | God's Christy, along with all these others, by saying that Biden has been too dovish on Ukraine,

02:02:42.160 | is effectively saying he wants to do even more on Ukraine. So we're not willing to take,

02:02:47.520 | I'm not willing to live for the next four years on the knife's edge of war three, I don't want

02:02:53.760 | to put you in residence camp to put what I want the sort of war three.

02:02:57.920 | So that puts you in Vivek's camp?

02:02:59.520 | Well, no, I think that the candidates who said that they would either end or deescalate Ukraine,

02:03:06.400 | or Vivek, DeSantis and Trump has said it. They're the only three Oh, and sorry,

02:03:10.560 | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

02:03:12.080 | Okay, but you're not gonna vote for him. So that puts you in Vivek.

02:03:15.760 | Well, I don't know. I mean, he might be my favorite, to be honest.

02:03:18.800 | Would you pick him over Trump?

02:03:19.920 | I would certainly take Kennedy over Trump.

02:03:21.680 | You would Wow, this is incredible. Breaking news, folks. This is, this is all incredible.

02:03:26.720 | Wow. Look, for me, this is the limits test issue is are you going to escalate or deescalate the

02:03:31.280 | Ukraine war? And I think that these hawkish Republican candidates pose an unacceptable

02:03:37.680 | risk or three. What do you think, Jason? Yeah, Jason, what do you think? I thought he broke

02:03:41.440 | your heart there in a couple of places.

02:03:42.880 | No, actually, I don't expect all candidates to line up with my belief system perfectly.

02:03:48.160 | Obviously, he's well spoken. Obviously, he's qualified. I'm looking for a moderate like

02:03:54.560 | Freeberg. I think the existential crisis of the balance sheet is my top issue. I voted

02:03:59.520 | Republican about 25%. And Democrats 75%. I'm literally a moderate and an independent and

02:04:06.400 | right now, I really don't think Biden can be president or Trump. So that leaves me with

02:04:11.760 | RFK on one side. And it leaves me with Nikki Haley and Christie on the other side. And Nikki

02:04:18.560 | Haley and Christie are really into balancing the budget. And so I'm leaning towards voting

02:04:22.880 | Republican, if those are the two candidates. Now, the thing that I think handicapping this

02:04:28.240 | election is not being talked about all that much, because we have the Trump Biden rematch

02:04:34.560 | taking while they are in the room is I don't know that Biden makes it to the starting line,

02:04:38.000 | nor do I think Trump makes it to the starting line. And so that changes everything. And who

02:04:42.400 | knows what percentage chance that is, I don't think any of us can give it a perfect

02:04:45.280 | handicap. But let's say that is the case. Then I think it's, you know, there's a lot of lanes

02:04:51.440 | open here. And I think the election will be once again, determined by moderates. And I think women

02:04:55.920 | who are still very much upset about the Roe v. Wade issue. And I think those two things are

02:05:01.520 | going to play a significant role. And that's where I think Nikki Haley and Chris Christie

02:05:04.720 | believe it's a state's issue, and they're not into the national ban for abortion. I think

02:05:10.640 | moderates are not into Biden. I think they will or I don't think they're going to be into RFK.

02:05:15.280 | I think they're going to be into Nikki Haley. And I think Nikki Haley could happen. And I

02:05:18.400 | think Chris Christie, so I hope we get Nikki Haley on here, because I don't know her enough,

02:05:22.160 | but I would like to have that to our discussion. So I'm leaning towards Haley, Christie if they

02:05:26.880 | make it. All right, this has been an amazing episode of the All In podcast. We went for over

02:05:32.080 | two hours. Enjoy the one and a half times episode, everybody, because next week is the All In Summit.

02:05:38.000 | And we're not going to tape next week. So you get a week off from the pod, while we bank,

02:05:43.920 | I think like 20 amazing, amazing guests from Ray Dalio to Elon Musk to Mr. Beast.

02:05:50.400 | I mean, the list of people Gwyneth Paltrow that Freeburg has put together is extraordinary.

02:05:58.000 | Congratulations to Freeburg on a program even better than last year's program is an unprecedented

02:06:05.120 | success here. So great, great job, Freeburg, and the team over at the production board.

02:06:10.640 | The parties might be fun, too. I got my tux I'm ready to go. We will see you all in Los Angeles

02:06:17.360 | or some portion of you about 1% of you in Los Angeles next week. Sorry for the FOMO everybody,

02:06:23.440 | but Freeburg will be releasing the episodes on Twitter x and YouTube are the exclusive

02:06:28.960 | location. So you're not going to get in your podcast feeds flooded with the 20 talks,

02:06:34.080 | you got to go to x follow all in podcast on x, prematurely, foremostly known as Twitter,

02:06:39.040 | and search all in podcast on YouTube, you can subscribe and then there's a bell there you put

02:06:42.960 | on the alert. I think you're going to drop them every day or every two days Freeburg something

02:06:46.960 | in that sort of pace. So you got 20 days of content coming at you coming at you for the

02:06:52.080 | dictator himself to mock poly hop at the Sultan of science David Freeburg chair person of heel

02:06:57.520 | and summit 2023. Great job and rain man, the architect himself with that incredible Gordon

02:07:04.880 | Gecko hair. Wow, looking great. I am the undisputed world's greatest moderator according

02:07:11.680 | to the YouTube comments. We'll see you next week. Bye bye. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David

02:07:20.400 | Sachs. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. I'm the queen of

02:07:29.200 | Kenai. Besties are gone. My dog taking a notice in your driveway.

02:07:47.040 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all

02:07:50.080 | like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

02:07:54.800 | Your baby. We need to get Merck is our

02:08:02.000 | ♪ I'm doing all in ♪

02:08:07.000 | ♪ I'm doing all in ♪

02:08:12.980 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

E145: Presidential Candidate Chris Christie in conversation with the Besties

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