Business and podcasting titan Patrick Bet-David joins Charlie to discuss how Democrats (led by Barack Obama) squandered their dominance of America, why tariffs could utterly remake the U.S. tax system to reduce the payments of ordinary people, the new media landscape of America, and more.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, time to Charlie Kirk show. Patrick Bet-David joins the show for the entire program here. He'll be speaking at AmericaFest, so get your tickets right now at amfest.com. That is A-M-F-E-S-T dot com. Brought to you by Turning Point USA at amfest.com. That is amfest.com. We talk about Trump stamina, what it means that you can call Trump directly, and more.
Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up everybody, here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
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We have every major speaker, Steve Bannon, President Trump, and our next guest, Patrick Bet-David, who's just one of my favorite people. on the planet. He's an inspiration and I love going on his show. And he's in the vault right now.
He's the CEO of Valuetainment, host of the PBD podcast, author of Your Next Five Moods, and founder of an app that I'm using more and more called Manect, which I think we're going to talk about throughout this hour. Manect is amazing. In fact, I was just responding to some Manects in the break. PBD, great to see you. Great to see you. So thank you for taking the time.
And PBD, you're coming out this weekend to our event. I know you're very busy, and it means a lot that you're taking the time to come west. Talk about what you learned at the event last year and what you're planning to share with our audience.
Well, let me tell you, I loved the event so much last year that I'm trying to find a way to bring my 12-year-old
with me to your event this year and the reason why it's complicated is because i have to so this is what i'm doing by the way this is i'm only doing this for you and you'll know when i tell you the story my wife says babe i don't know how the hell you're gonna make this work with christmas to get away with the family tomorrow i'm traveling taking my family to the destination where we're gonna be at christmas i'll tell you when i'm with you
Then from there, first thing in the morning, I have to get on the jet, fly over to you, hoping I can get my son to come with me. Then right after that, when I'm done, I'm going to get on the jet to get back to spend the Christmas time with the family. But I do this because I have so much respect for what you're building. I'm so...
optimistic about the future, that there is a place being built where fathers can send family, they can send their kids somewhere to say, go learn some of these values. And guess what? You're going to meet potentially a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a friend, somebody to do business with.
I'm so glad something like this exists with a guy like you that, you know, the stuff you did the last 12 months, I put you as a top five MVP because For 2024 election. I said that to you on the podcast and I'm saying it here. So, yes, I mean, listen, if you've never been, do whatever you can to go to it. It's a life changing event.
Amfest.com. Thank you for saying that. And let's just pick up kind of something you said there. And it's it's highlighted in the shirt right behind you. One of the reasons I love watching your program and reading your books is that you are such an optimist. And that you've lived the American dream and the future looks bright.
I got to be honest, a lot of people in our audience did not feel that kind of hope, that optimism earlier this year. And the election obviously feels as if it's this national sigh of relief. The future does look bright. Talk about that and also speak about do you believe we're heading into a new golden era in America?
I think this is if we listen every once in a while, you're going to have an opportunity ahead of you. That doesn't happen all the time. There was a roaring 20s that a lot of people took advantage of. There are certain times this happens with Oklahoma land rush. It happens in real estate. It happens in investments. It happens with technology. It happens. There's eras that come.
And these eras are typically followed during a season of hard times. We've all read The Four Turning. We know these different seasons that come about that happens. But here's the thing. There's something very different about President Trump right now.
Very when you watch him in these interviews that he does, he is very poised the way he's answering, calculating, but very calm, respectful, not offended, doesn't nothing gets under his skin, but he's very quick to hold the person accountable. And it's just a very different style of what he's doing. Very, very different style of what he's doing.
Where everybody has to find a way to get through the system, you have to be America first. I don't care who you are. If your name is Justin Trudeau, you're visiting Mar-a-Lago, you better be America first or else next week you're going to be resigning and being afraid that maybe a guy named Pierre is going to take over your job.
And so he's calling you governor and saying, hey, Governor Trudeau, it was great to have you here. Why don't you become the 51st state and join us? If you're anybody, when he said 100 people called him. So let's kind of process this together from financial values and principles. We can do both. Okay. So where's my confidence comes from values and principles.
When you're around a lot of bullies, here's the profile of bullies. Bullies will typically bully lower level people. And they'll gradually try to climb up to bully tier two people. And then when they graduate tier two, they'll do tier three. Like, wow, we were able to convince these guys that fully aligned. All right, let's go and go bully tier fours and tier fives.
And then eventually, when you start getting a little bit higher, the guys that specialize in bullying bullies, they sit there and all of a sudden they say, listen, man, you just crossed the line. You woke my up. You wake the wrong people up. And then when those guys. You wake up, here's what you do. Those guys are all living their own lives. They don't need anybody.
They're making their own money. They're in their own industries. They have their own cliques. They have their own gangs. You bullies, what you did... The last eight years, you all of a sudden created the possible greatest gang ever put together. You did this. You got a liberal Elon Musk to align with Trump. And just a few years ago, they were talking smack about each other. You unified them.
You got Joe Rogan who said he'll never have President Trump on his podcast now sounding like he's 100% Trump on his podcast when you listen to it. You did that, the bullies. You got Tulsi Gabbard who ran as a liberal, then all of a sudden just because Hillary Clinton didn't like her. She talks trash. You forced her out.
You got one of the greatest last names of all time called Kennedy, and you started calling him Cuckoo and all these other things. You forced him to come up at an AMFEST event, your event on stage, which was one of the most electrifying moments of 2024, captured by Turning Point USA. You did that. The bullies did that.
And now you got all the brains, all the guys with guts and gals who are like true believers in America. Bullies did that. So for me, my confidence comes from the business model of bullies has a timeline. Eventually, the right people wake up now financially on the other side.
I think if you think about what the enemy is going to be doing, you got to sit there and think about what the enemy and Obama's and the establishment and the guys behind closed doors, the guys that the faceless leaders that we don't know about. Those guys are going to have to find a way to pin J.D. Vance.
against eric and laura because they're another power couple that could maybe one day run against vivek against uh elon against trump against the family they're playing behind closed doors trying to find ways to be ways of getting under trump's skin hey you know elon musk bought the presidency he's the puppet master they're gonna try to play these games and if that doesn't work
I think you could see 12 years of presidency of Trump and J.D. Vance or others being here, and that 12 years could be a historic 12-year run that will go on.
PBD, about a minute and a half here, I want to follow up on that. The state of the Democrat Party, if you were to look at this just through business terms, is this a Democrat Party that is looking like they're going to revamp, to redo their marketing and their approach? Or do you think as if they're going to double and triple down on their belief system that
predict your book is the next five moves what do you think is the democrat party's next move sure listen you hope they double down please double down go ahead do it go ahead and double down and not learn from you from your mistakes that's kind of like you got a seven game series you're playing against another team in the world series or basketball and you see what plays they keep playing you double down game two you double down game three you double down game four you get swept it's double dumb to do that
I don't think they're going to do that. But I think the one person that screwed the whole thing up for Democrats is the great Barack Obama. He's the one that destroyed the whole thing.
Obama is to blame? Explain.
So if you think about what happened the last 18 months with the conservative movement, just kind of go through... 18 months ago puts us June of 2023. OK, June of 2023 is two months after DeSantis comes out with his book. And the conservatives were second guessing Trump. That's kind of seen different factions. They're like, hey, you know, Trump is done.
We got to move on and we got to go with DeSantis. No, we got to go with this. And now, you know, the establishment. No, no, no. Nikki Haley. If you guys really get Nikki Haley, I'm all in. I know we got to go with this person. And what does Trump do? He's like, I'm sorry, what are we doing? I'm the guy.
But the thing that the establishment left and the establishment right and mainstream media did is they went after the head of the party. The Republican Party, which was Trump, the right move, by the way, because if they take him, if they take him out, everybody else collapses.
There's a massive division in the Republican Party because now they can use the terms to say, hey, look at the Republicans. They're broken up. They're all over the place. You have the Romney team. You have the Haley team. You have these guys and you have those guys and you have the Vivek and you have the America and you have this. They are scrambling, trying to figure this thing out.
They try to do it. What does Trump do? He stands tall. And slowly but surely, he wins everybody over on the right. Very, very important. Not easy to do. It was very, very hard because the DeSantis movement was very strong at the early stages of it. And we had him on the podcast and we had great conversations with him there. Now flip it on the other side. Peter Thiel is on the Barry Weiss podcast.
They're having a conversation. I love what Peter Thiel said in this podcast. He says, you guys don't realize how important 2024 was because he says, I remember when Musk said, I believe 2024 will be the most monumental election of our lifetime. And he says, Peter's like, look, when I hear stuff like that, I'm kind of like, give me a flip and break. He says, so I called Elon. He's telling the story.
And he says, I told Elon, you can't tell me it's a most monumental election. How can you say that? He says, let me tell you, here's why it is. And then he says, the more time went by, he says, the more I realized this was monumental. And here's why. Listen to what he said. Powerful. He says, imagine if Kamala won. You know what Democrats would be able to say today?
He says if Kamala won, they would be able to say Trump just got lucky. That was a fluke. MAGA is not real. There is no people out there that want these types of policies. That was a guy that just got lucky one time. It'll never happen again. And they wanted to destroy this entire movement. And by the way, within the movement... You would have Turning Point USA.
They would have tried to destroy and divide everybody. You got the MAGA. You got everybody. But what happens? Trump wins. So Trump winning, what was a fluke? Oh, the 2020 election was a fluke. That's right. So that was a fluke. And by the way, who chose Biden over Hillary to be the person for 2020? This guy named Barack Obama and Barack Obama to the left is the black Jesus. That's their God.
That's their MJ. That's the guy that walks on water in their eyes. Right. And then you see him on stage and his voice no longer has credibility. What? You see him on stage, he doesn't sound like himself anymore. Are you kidding? This is the 2004 DNC, one of the greatest speeches ever given in political history. That guy lost it.
He was able to go and sit down with Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, Fallon, anybody, and oh my God, look how amazing he is. You know, the energy that he has. That guy had the biggest loss of his career, the biggest public humiliating loss of his career. What do Democrats do now? They're allowing AOC to be now a story of this guy. You know, hey, she may run for office in 2028.
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So then you have Obama now is sitting there allowing AOC to come in. So let's just kind of play with the games. Like they need their own Elon Musk. We need our own Elon Musk. No, you had your own Elon Musk. No, we need our own Rogan. Who's going to be the Rogan? You see some guys right now seeing this as an opportunity that they're going after Rogan.
And there are guys that were on Rogan four or five times. I won't say their names four or five times that now they're turning against Rogan and trashing Rogan. But the same people that were trashing Rogan were the same people that supported Bernie Sanders. But now Bernie Sanders supports Elon Musk. So what the hell? Who is your God now? They don't have anybody right now.
Look, this is not a small loss, Charlie. This is if the conservatives, if Trump and the folks that are working closely together, if they can stay united and fight privately, disagree privately, if they can do that... This is a 12 year run. They don't have a solution right now. Their ideas suck. Family ideas they had suck. Hey, you can go get pure puberty blockers to kids.
And, you know, are you kidding? Like common sense is sinking in and bad policies got exposed in 2024 in waves we've never seen before. And by the way, that's what happens when you try to bully people. They're eventually going to be like, I'm out. I'm not with you anymore.
A big part of that is delivering on the agenda. Part of it goes into something I want to dive deep in with you that we haven't had a chance to discuss, which is Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. You're one of the best business minds out there. For those that do not know, PBD started and sold a very successful company. He's lived the American dream.
He's also a part owner of the Yankees. I'm not saying anything that's not public. So he understands business very, very well. It seems like Doge, if it is executed upon, can accelerate that 12-year trajectory. That can be one of the greatest, look what changed, look what we did. And it is bipartisan. It is with great agreement. People want the government to be scaled down and more efficient.
How should we think about Doge? Patrick, about David.
Oh, my God. Listen, that is so exciting. You know, so when Doge is taking place, we've been talking about the concept of tariffs for a few years. And you saw Mark Cuban coming out and said, well, you know, here's what you got to be careful with tariffs and, you know, protectionists. And that's not the right way to go. And we need free trade.
And this is why this and by the way, this conversation goes back to some people that are very big pro Nixon. Nixon was one of the greatest presidents of all time. And he did all this stuff. I mean, The argument could be a 50-50 argument. There's days that I sit there and I think Nixon did great, and there's days I sit there and I debate my own self saying, wait a minute, he strengthened China.
We got off of gold standard. We got into a bunch of debt because it was kind of like the U.S. dollar. So you can say the good, bad, and the ugly, and I'm sure I'm going to get a call from Roger Stone, hey, you know, don't you ever talk about my Nixon like that. But here's where I'm going with this part about this story with Doge.
So I sit there and we have our research team pull up the history of tariffs. Just about 140 years ago is where the U.S. revenue, 100% of the U.S. revenue that came in, the government got it from tariffs. That's what it was. We paid for everything through tariffs, right? We did that for many years. And then what happened?
All of a sudden, under a few, you know, whether you want to call Wilson or Truman, I mean, we'll go to Wilson. Some of the presidents all of a sudden, like, hey, 1913. Let's introduce taxes. Let's introduce Federal Reserve. Let's introduce this. Next year, it's war. Hey, let's allow the American people to agree to take their taxes out of their payrolls. People will never agree to that.
Americans are not dumb enough. No, I think we can. Who was the one that thought that was a good idea? You ready for this one? A guy that's in my painting of my house. Milton Friedman later on says, one of the biggest mistakes I made supporting an idea that was a horrible idea. Taking taxes out of my payroll. Why would I agree for the government to do that? You would get all the money.
End of the year, you would pay your taxes. Now you're letting the government get 11 months advance on your money that you could have made that interest investing it somewhere. Yes. Well, how the hell do we agree to this? Watch this. Everyone talks about tariff, tariff, tariff. Do you know? Roughly, the amount of business that we do, that we tax on tariffs, is around $3.7 trillion.
Let's say $4 trillion. Do you know what the average revenue, do you know how much U.S. government, I'm asking the listeners and the viewers, if I was to ask you right now, how much income did the U.S. revenue come in last year just from tariffs? You know what that number is on the $4 trillion? Only $80 billion. Mm-hmm. What do you mean by 80 billion?
That's all we're getting because the average is 2%. By the way, if we right now are spending our $4 trillion and we have to find a way to lower taxes to 0%, now watch what we could do. Here's a couple of things to be thinking about. Number one, if we made the average tariff on everybody 25%, that's a trillion dollars that we would get. You don't have a choice. Guess what? Here's what we're doing.
It's going to go up to a trillion dollars. It's 25% across the board for everybody. Really? Yes, we need that income.
But they say it's going to crash the markets. It's going to destroy the American economy.
They can say that all they want. What if we can increase some of the prices? The question the average person needs to ask is, are you willing to entertain the idea of prices on goods going up 25, 50% while taxes going to zero? Would you entertain that idea? Let's just kind of ask the question. Would you entertain that idea?
By the way, this guy named Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, you know what he did? They went from 7,500 employees to next week he fires half of them, 3,750. The 3,750 that quit called another 1,250 to quit. The guy went from 7,500 employees to 2,500 employees in around a month. So do you not think he, Bobby Vivek, can take the amount of employees we have and say, listen, guys.
All this stuff we're paying you, go find a job in the real world like everybody else. Look, I'm just happy the fact that we're looking at cutting spending and how we do that. I don't even know if we need 800 military bases around the world. Why? Why do we need 800? There's so many ways to cut it. The right people are leading it. I'm curious to know what their next 5, 10, 15 moves are going to be.
But whatever we're doing, cutting spending is coming. And that's only an argument for us to be able to lower taxes for you and I.
And so through the Department of Government Efficiency, you've gone into business before and you're able to identify waste, identify, let's just say, allocation of resources that are not efficient. One of the major issues that Doge is going to have, though, is dealing with the bureaucracy, actually being able to fire people, actually being able to lay them off.
If you were to give them advice as an outsider, as an analytical thinker, How should they go about this? Because at some point they're going to get an injunction from a judge saying you can't do this, you can't fire this. What is your open advice to Doge to make sure that they have a successful mission?
Well, I like what Vivek said about two, three weeks ago where he said we're going to need Congress, right? But think about it right now with what Elon showed just in the last few months with the amount of money that he put in different PACs.
Imagine him, the stories you hear about that he stayed in Pennsylvania, I think you said for 45 days, I don't know what it was, whether I heard it from you or somebody else. This guy went and realized Pennsylvania was the state and he stayed there. How many people lived in Florida for the last few months just to make sure this election was going to be done with?
I remember Tulsi saying she hasn't been to Hawaii since April. That's what I remember her saying in an interview. We have plenty of true believers there, but they're going to need Congress. So guess what? These are some of the things we're working on. A part of it is a little bit, you know, leverage game. This is purely a leverage game.
You want to get, you know, you want to go through the next phase of favor and additional things you're going to need. You want to be sponsored. You want to be able to get endorsed for your next one. We don't mind doing that. But look, you got to play ball. Here's what we want to do. These are ideas. FYI, Congress, left, right or center, specifically right. This is what America voted for.
America voted for these policies. We won on these policies. Do you want to get reelected? I do. Well, then guess what? Do what American people voted for to win those seven battleground states. We didn't win five out of seven, not three out of seven, not two out of seven, seven out of seven. So every time Congress or somebody doesn't support that and say, listen, you voted American people.
This person does not support what you put us in here to do. He's getting in the way. If you want us to keep continuing to do this, you have to make sure this person is going to prevent us from making this country more efficient. If you want us to get more efficient, you got to get somebody else to replace this house job seat that is an XYZ place. There's going to be a lot of power plays, Charlie.
But the reality, American people told you what they want. Every single Congress senator, everybody I talked to, I'm going to tell them, don't forget what American people said. And if you actually go back and think about the sequencing of Elon, you look at him right now, every time he retweets a video or something he posts, all he has to say is very interesting. 28 million views, 22 million views.
A bad one is 17 million views. Big one, 200 million views, 100 million views, 80 million views. The amount of influence he has with X, I think he's the most powerful man in America. I know I'm talking to an audience with a lot of folks that are... And I understand Trump and all that. I totally get it. I understand politically. I understand that. But Elon is going to be around for 20, 30 years.
OK, this game is not changing. He's going to be around for a while and he has access to maybe the most important news station out there called X. So a lot of these Congress guys, you know, they're going to need to they're going to need to play ball or else the American people are going to say we need to find somebody else to do your job for you.
I mean, I completely agree. I think that there's a whole paradigm shift in how we view politics in the art of the possible and all of our preconceived notions of the size and scope of government from how spending is done and appropriated. to just how we view our elected leaders. I think it's all changing. I think it's all changing, and that's because the media is changing itself.
PPD, before we get into the media thing, I want to make sure we have an opportunity. Can you please educate our audience on MNECT? We have that on the lower third, MNECT.com. I've been using it a lot. I'm using it increasingly. It's a wonderful platform. Please tell our audience about it.
Yeah, you know, it's a great question. This happened to me many years ago when I had a call with a lawyer. We had a seven-minute call. The guy billed me for 30 minutes. I said, why are you billing me for 30 minutes? He says, you know, minutes roll up. I said, I want to pay you by the minute. He says, there's no such thing as paying me by the minute.
I said, I'd like to build an app or something that I get to pay people by the minute to connect. So do you have a minute to connect? Let's connect. And connect, what it does is if you send a cold email to anybody right now, less than 1% response rate. If you send a DM, 3%. X LinkedIn, 5% to 8%. On Manect, there's a 91% response rate because you're paying for a response.
Everybody's time nowadays is valuable. If you want a response from Charlie, you got to pay for it. If you want a response from so many different influencers that are on Manect right now, you can get a hold of them. You can do a 15-minute call with them. You can do a... Video response, text response. But the app has become one of the best networking apps worldwide right now. We're in 46 countries.
By the end of the year, we'll be at 180 countries. But it's grown exponentially.
It's MNEC.com. We're going to be talking about it at AmericaFest as well. It's a way that I communicate with a lot of people in the audience. It's terrific. Okay, let's do this as a setup here. This is the changing media landscape. This is Stephanie Rule saying she got access to President Trump, and he told her to go away.
But if she wanted to get a hold of Vice President Harris, it was 50 layers of handlers. It's very interesting. I don't know if you saw this clip or not. Yes, I did. I did. Play cut 60.
Donald Trump had that crazy rally in Madison Square Garden. Oh, wow. Yeah. I rolled the dice and I called him on the phone. And he answered. Of course he did. Of course. I was able to get to him by dialing his phone. Now, that might be completely ape shit, and you're like, I can't believe people know this guy's phone number.
But the reverse of that, if I were to want to connect with VP Harris or President Biden, there's 50 people. Between me and that, I could write a note that maybe could get to somebody to get somebody then through Pony Express and a pigeon, something might end up in a mailbox near them. And I called DJT to say, yo, can I have an interview? And he answered. But I still was able to connect with him.
But he still picked up.
pbd that is so powerful let me tell you i'm gonna tell you a crazy story here so i'm i'm starting insurance agency i'm in a room and there's two different people debating whether you should be accessible to your insurance agents or whether you should seem like you're so busy that you're not accessible to create the aura of oh my god he's so busy you can never get a hold of him because this book called 40 allows a power and there's a heated debate going on
One girl says, nope, you got to be accessible. The other guy says, don't be accessible. You will spoil them because they can always get a hold of you. I went to the girl and I said, listen, man, I just think this is the right philosophy. We chose the philosophy of being accessible. Do you know how many opportunities you miss out on if you're not accessible? You know what's crazy?
When I had Dwayne The Rock Johnson at our event at the Palm Beach Convention Center, We're going back and forth. I'm inviting him to the event. He's calling me on a Sunday. We're texting back and forth, talking about the terms. And I said, I've dealt with a lot of celebrities that you bring to events. There is no way you're going to have a direct layer. He was a direct layer guy.
Mark Cuban, love him or hate him, had him on the podcast nine years ago. And when we spoke, he was not a hard guy to get a hold of. You don't have to like the guy, but you have to respect the guy that can get a hold of him. One of Trump's biggest gifts,
is that he's not afraid he'll pick up the phone and tell you no but he's not afraid and fyi when when vanity fair or a lot of these guys were calling us and asking us questions and saying what do you think about this manosphere podcast bros baron trump all of this stuff that he's doing you know why would somebody go and campaign on podcasts isn't that like almost beneath him and i'm almost listening to this guy saying
You're the problem. Look how pompous you sound. Look how arrogant and conceited you sound. This is why the American people is sick of you. They're sick of it. Right. And this guy is willing to go talk. She's telling the story and you can tell the guy to her left or right is on the left. And he's like very sarcastic and condescending about it. But guess what? He picks up Kamala Harris.
Oh, Rogan, why don't you come to us? No, you're in Texas. Come by. No, no, no. You know, we just, you know, we're too busy right now. You think you're busier than Trump? Do you really think you're busier? Trump has an event going on, I believe, in Michigan, if I'm not mistaken. That's right. He goes to Boston. That's right. There you go.
So he does the podcast with Rogan for three hours, flies to Michigan, gets there, I don't know what time, 10, 11 at midnight. And he still gives his talk. And he's 78 years old, Charlie. He's 78 years old.
So let me if I could just chime in. And I do have a direct question. We hosted the president in Atlanta, Georgia, two days before. Then we hosted the president in Vegas. So the president does three events in Georgia, ours being the last one ending at 11 p.m. Red eyes all the way to Vegas. does a whole tour out west, right?
Arizona, he goes up to Carson City, ends with us in Vegas, wakes up the next morning at 6 a.m., flies to Austin, does a press conference, does three hours sharp with Rogan, flies to Novi, Michigan, three hours late, ends at midnight, and flies down to Mar-a-Lago and holds court on the plane all the way until 3.30 a.m.
Eastern, holding court, making phone calls, waking people up, getting things going. Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here. I'm going to be realistic about my diet in December. It slips a little bit. It's got to be one of the worst months of the year in terms of eating right.
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The deeper question, though, is I love being able to just be able to call the president straight up. It's hard to describe how rare that is because do you think, PBD, the more layering is a sign of insecurity? Is it a sign of elitism? What is it? Psychoanalyze people that have platoons of handlers and you can't deal direct.
Listen, I do like that Susie Wiles. I believe she said, if you're going to let me do my job, you can't have an open-door policy with the White House, and you have to let me kind of protect it a little bit. So I do think there's extreme measures to that as well. So I kind of like the fact that there's a part of the strategy where some people do need to be filtered because –
They're wasting your time and they just want to take a picture and go back and say, hey, you know, so you need to do that part. But let me go to the other side. I said this to Jesse last night, maybe two nights ago. There's something very unique about a man who has been around many attractive women his entire life. Donald Trump.
What's powerful about that is your knees don't buckle when you're around beautiful women. You've seen many, okay? Number two, there's something very powerful when you have money and you've had to find your thing. The weird things like this door is made out of gold, like weird stories that just kind of like doesn't make any sense, right?
And a penthouse I sold to Bocelli, $45 million and you know, blah, blah, blah. partying with Salma Hayek and all these other people that you're being invited, being in movies like Home Alone and rappers, Tupac talking about you. Listen, you made the money. So nothing's going to, you know, hey, if you do this, we're going to give you a book deal.
And then number three, you've met so many people, you're not enamored by anybody. Who hasn't he met? Who's going to embarrass, you know, impress him? So even with that, you don't have any layers. Anybody I work with, Charlie... That always fake acted like, you know, the whole act as if you're busy, act as if you're rich. I totally agree. What was that movie?
The movie about the the movie about the stockbrokers, J.T. Marlin. I don't know what the movie is called, but it's a movie with Vin Diesel and a couple of these other guys. Boiler Room. That's what the movie was. It's the act as if mentality. Sometimes in life you meet someone that doesn't act as if he is. Kamala had to act as if. Biden had to act as if. Everybody on that set had to act as if.
There is no act as if. You want to talk to me? You can get a hold of me. It's a sign of a tough guy. I'm not afraid of you. What do you want to talk about? No.
It's a sign of confidence, isn't it? I mean, more than anything else.
In a major way. Major way. He said the other day over 100 world leaders called him. He's spoken to already over 100 world leaders. How many meetings is he having every night on Mar-a-Lago? Imagine if somebody else would have won. They would have been in Hawaii for three weeks celebrating. This guy's already working and everybody's coming to him. This is a very different story.
By the way, the biggest factor with this... I'm not worried about the next four years. I'm I'm looking at this as the next 20, 30, 40 years. OK, my hope is that the next guy or gal, while they're studying this case study of 2024, what they realize is it. Nikki Haley, we invited on the podcast, never showed up. OK, never. Why? She's above us.
Governor DeSantis, after God knows how much bullying we did, he finally showed up. Because it's like, well, well, well, finally you show up, right? President Trump showed up to our podcast, drove up with 36 different Secret Service helicopter, all this stuff. He showed up. But how many people didn't? Why didn't they show up? How many times did Bobby come and do a town hall with us?
How many podcasts did Vivek do? I just hope the takeaway from this isn't just that we have better ideas and policies. I hope the case study from 2024 has got to be, you've got to work your ass off, drive, go everywhere, be accessible. You have to earn every vote. You can't just think because you're better at your student.
You have to be able to take risks. I mean, the buried lead of the McDonald's thing is that there was no guarantee that that was going to fly. It could have come across as really cringe. It could have been like a Dukakis 2.0. You have to be able to take the risks, play to win, And in some ways, you look at Trump 2020 versus 2024. Trump played to win way more in 2024.
He had his back against the wall.
I agree. You made a very good point. No, he played offense. I think 2020 was a little bit upset. 2020 was kind of like it's not fair. I can't believe they're doing this. I think what happened to 2020, everybody at one point has a rough patch. You go to season like while you know you're right and you're trying to tell everybody you're right. And it's sometimes it can work against you.
It's unattractive. Right. But I think 2023, 2024 in 2024, he was in flow state. It was done. When he went into flow state, it was done.
No. And yeah, in 2020, look, COVID was tough for everybody and it was unexpected. And there was so much stuff that he was being blamed for that was second and third tier removed from him. And it was tough. It kind of they try to throw him off his game. But in 2024, he set the terms. And, yeah, they did try to throw him off with Lawfare and with, obviously, him getting shot.
But he was in that flow state. And evidenced by, you know, this PVD, and you probably coached this with all of the amazing people that come to you, is that you get energy that you didn't know you had when you're in flow state. He was up for 72 hours straight. 72 hours straight. It's the same. With just Diet Cokes, Big Macs, and Happy Meals.
So, PBD, being around the biggest CEOs, can you talk about how when you have aligned purpose, you are able to physically push yourself to places you never thought before? And I think President Trump embodied that. Because everyone marvels. They say, how does he do it? Look, there's a genetic component. I mean, he's just built differently, right?
He's just built differently than you and I. If I ate like him, I'd be 385 pounds. But the power of purpose. Dive into that, PBD.
Yeah, so look, you'll find a lot of guys in business that are just brilliant, and so they make money because they're extremely intelligent and brilliant, right? And then you'll have guys that are brilliant, extremely intelligent, and they were offended, and they have a certain drive to go to tell somebody, hey, I'm more successful than you.
Then there's those guys that are strategic that are in rooms and they can hear everybody talking aboard and they'll say, I think we need to do this, this. What do you think, Johnny? Johnny, what do you think about what Billy just said? Billy, do you agree with Johnny? I don't. Can you tell us why you don't marry? Whose side are you on? Those types of people behind closed doors, but it can do that.
Then you got the connectors, the Charles Schwab type of guys that know how to go shake hands and build a relationship and raise billions of dollars of money. Those are all good strengths that you have. But there's one thing that is by far, Charlie, the most intimidating quality of an entrepreneur, founder, CEO, businessman, athlete, anybody you want to talk about.
There is not a quality more intimidating than this. Not one quality more intimidating than this. When you know you're going to compete with somebody. The person here who knows they have this quality, they know they're not going to stop. In business, I learned you can outwork people and you'll win. Then most people read 50 books, 100 books. They take a few courses.
You can out-improve them, but eventually most people settle. You can out-strategize people and learn strategies on how to scale, grow, compete, technology, marketing, storytelling. Great. All of those three you can do, you still won't be the top 1% of 1%. The last one is the outlast. President Trump is the epitome of outlast. He's not going to stop.
The game of business, look how many people are sitting there watching Elon saying, you're worth $400 billion. How much more money do you make? People don't understand. Elon's not doing it because he needs another $400 billion and he just wants to go buy a house or big watch or a car. That's been out of his system for 20 years. He's on a mission. He's got a vision he's pursuing. President Trump
has the stamina that scares the hell out of everybody else on the other side. In the business world, anytime you have someone, the leader at the top that has stamina, I'll never forget the interview. This is very interesting, by the way. The former CEO of Starbucks said, was a former McKinsey guy, and I believe he was a Pepsi guy. He comes to Starbucks. They hire him.
He's doing an interview with Forbes, and he says, if anybody calls me after 6 p.m., I ask them, why are you calling me after 6 p.m.? Don't call me after 6 p.m. Let's talk about it tomorrow. I'm watching this interview. I'm like, you're running a $110 billion company called Starbucks, give or take. What the hell do you mean don't call me after 6 p.m.?
So at the time when this guy's the CEO of the company of Starbucks, $110 billion, he's only a CEO for 18 or 19 months. Somebody can correct me on this, but it's 18 or 19 months. Do you know in his time of being the CEO of Starbucks, Starbucks valuation went from $110 billion, give or take, to roughly $70 billion. He lost $40 billion of valuation of Starbucks.
Starbucks goes and hires a guy from a company called Chipotle. The CEO of Chipotle, this guy's a freak. I think his name is Brian Nickel. The CEO of Chipotle, who's been there for six years. During his six years there, he takes Chipotle from $7 billion in valuation to $71 billion in valuation. Nearly 10x, over 10x in the valuation of Chipotle.
The day Starbucks hires and announces the new CEO, I think his pay package was like almost $200 million. Everybody's like, oh my God, what a highly paid CEO. Why would Starbucks pay this Brian Nickel guy $200 million? He's not worth it. In one day, Starbucks' valuation went up $20 billion in one day. They pay this guy $150, $200 million. Somebody can verify it on this.
That day, Starbucks goes up $20 billion. Why? You need a leader that's running 24-7 that burden most people don't want. Most people are trying to be a president to kind of put it on their resume and checklist. Look who I am. I'm the president. They're going to make books and history books. They're going to write about me. Every once in a while, somebody's like, listen, man, I'm the president.
I'm a government employee that gets paid 450 grand a year, whatever the number is, which I give back to charity anyways. I love my country. It's America first. And I'm a tough guy, and I'm not going to let them do anything to my country. That outlasting your peers is so intimidating, and that's what Trump's got.
There's so much more we could discuss here, but the last one I want to ask is the CEOs coming and kissing the ring. It feels different than 2017.
Some of them did it in 2017, but it feels like this is a complete power realignment, that there's an understanding that Trump and his movement is here to stay, and that the Bezos, the Zuckerbergs, the Googles, that they want to be on the right side of this. It feels different than just, oh, I want to try to win Trump over for four years because I don't want the government to come after me.
Am I right in sensing that it's deeper than that, PBD?
You know what it's like? Let me kind of give it to you from this standpoint. A lot of us have been defending Trump for eight years. Where it was not cool to do so, okay? Like, I remember when I first started doing it, my channel was Valuetainment. Still till today, we have, you know, six and a half million subscribers. It was mainly business. I was talking business.
And one day I'm like, I can't help myself. I want to talk politics. My life is a little weird. I want to talk about politics. So we start PVD Podcast. We start talking about politics. Everybody said, oh, Pat's done. His stuff is going to die. These guys, your biggest mistake. You don't go from being the number one YouTube channel on entrepreneurship to not talking about it. He's done.
I'm like, no, I disagree. I think people want to talk about the topics you're afraid to talk about. I'm comfortable talking about it. No, you're screwing it up. You shouldn't be doing this. Some of us did this early on. There was a lot of guys that were afraid of talking about this. Some started four years ago. Some started two years ago. Some started a year ago. Some just started.
Some people started saying pro-Trump stuff after Trump won. So, for example, when Elon Musk is at the White House or Mar-a-Lago and Zuck shows up and you see the clip about Elon kind of like barking a little bit at Zuck, why is he barking? I think what Elon's trying to say is, where have you been? Huh? Where have you been? I put my on the line two years ago and look what they try to do to me.
Now you want to show up and you write that letter to honorable chair Jim Jordan. The fact that Biden and his administration bullied you a little bit and you take responsibility for it. Now you want to say it, which, by the way, I understand Elon's argument and it's fine. He needs to be that guy to push these guys around. But the other part of it as well is I don't mind it.
I don't mind the fact that Altman is giving a million dollars to inauguration. And Altman and Musk don't like each other because we know he went from a nonprofit to a for-profit and Elon's not having that, right? That's why he started a different company right now to compete directly with...
open ai i don't mind that zuck wrote that open letter that's humiliating for the democratic party i don't mind that he gave a million i don't mind that bezos is now coming and bezos you know elon tweets on and says hey did somebody tell me that bezos was doing this and then bezos responds back to elon and says that's not true i don't mind that elon is pushing his weight and checking everybody and getting all of these guys to get in line and you know being held accountable
But it's also okay for some people to realize and say, look, I effed up. I messed up. I was wrong. I'm here. You were right. What can we do to make this relationship better moving forward? By the way, Tim Cook, I'll put him as a complete outside. He was the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 100 company. Tim Cook, he was the first guy that came out and said that.
Do you know his relationship with Trump has always been good? They asked him, they said, hey, why is it that you have a relationship with Trump? He says, because whenever I called him, he'd pick up. Obama and others wouldn't pick up. Obama is a liberal. Tim Cook.
Do you realize how we got a rap? But it goes back to the same thing, which is like how much of life is just being accessible, listening? How much of it? It's so simple. Not laying yourself with Praetorian guards and fake handlers. No one's more important than Trump. And you could call him and say, hey, what's up? And he'll tell you, let's have lunch or go take a hike. PBD, you're the man.
See you at AMFest. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.