← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Newt Gingrich on Going Big: Big Ideas, Bold Leadership, and a Vision for America’s Future
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- [00:02]
Kevin Gentry
Your message amplified. Ready to share your message with the world?
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Newt Gingrich
Start your podcast journey with Podbean. Podbean.
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Kevin Gentry
Podbean.
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Newt Gingrich
Podbean. Podbean.
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Kevin Gentry
The AI powered all in one podcast platform. Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts. Launch your podcast on PodBean today.
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Newt Gingrich
My school uses Podbean. My church too. I love it. I really do. Well, part of it was just the luck of history. Clinton was from Arkansas. He had governed with a conservative state legislature. He had tried to form a centrist Democratic party. He understood that the left wing of the Democratic party was a disaster. And if we had had Al Gore or Barack Obama, we probably couldn't have done it. We'd have had a very different relationship. But Clinton and I both, I think also having been a southerner, gone to Tulane in Louisiana, I had an ability and Bill had an ability to reach beyond our partisan position. We spent 35 days together writing the balanced budget face to face negotiating in the cabinet room for 35 days.
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Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to life. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button. Subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it means to truly go big. Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. On the Going Big podcast, we highlight leaders who have cast a big vision for change, who've taken on bold risks and have really challenged the status quo either through their ideas or action, and contributed and achieved big things as a result. Well, today, perfect for that theme is to have Speaker Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is a very consequential political leader, as you know, also an historian, a strategist, and through his action and leadership and challenging the status quo, he brought about the first Republican majority in the House of Representatives in more than 40 years with the Contract with America, then led sweeping reforms in welfare and government spending, always by being willing to challenge those who said these things couldn't be done. Today, Speaker Gingrich is advising global leaders. He is writing best selling books that challenge the status quo and his media company, Gingrich360, is really helping to shape public discourse, continues to cast a vision for, for the future of the country. Speaker Gingrich, it is a great pleasure to have you as our guest today on the Going Big podcast.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, thank you and listen, it's great, Kevin, to be with you and have a chance to talk about ideas.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, you are. Your brand is ideas, as well as leadership and as well as challenging the status quo. I'd like to start off by asking you to react to the quote by the great architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham. Make no little plans, he said. I think it's on a plaque as you enter Union station in Washington, D.C. little plans have no ability to stir men's souls and probably won't accomplish much. How do you react to what Daniel Burnham said back 150 years ago?
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Newt Gingrich
@ least for some people, it's good to make very, very big plans, whether it's, you know, the creation of America by the Founding Fathers or Elon Musk developing the reusable rocket or Edison inventing the electric light. I mean, lots of different. You know, I think Peter Drucker once studied who was effective, and he said it actually wasn't a question of iq that, that when you talked about the great scientist, the ones that really made a difference, ask bigger questions and they tried to solve bigger problems, and that's what made the difference. So I would say, I said, everybody, you know, think through what you dream of or what you believe in, recognize it's going to take hard work to do it and then go pursue happiness and lead a life of where you get to spend your time and your energy pursuing the things you love.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, you're an historian. Thinking back, and you mentioned Edison and Elon Musk and others. Are there two or three figures in whatever period of world history that jump out as those who cast that kind of big, bold vision and drove that extraordinary change? Obviously the founding of the country 250 years ago. I think that's a great example. What else springs to mind?
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Newt Gingrich
Well, I mean, certainly Jesus Christ and Muhammad and Moses, figures who defined entire cultures and who have an impact. You know, a thousand Christ case 2000 years after he was born, in Moses's case about 3000 years, Muhammad's case about 1400 years. I mean, those are huge cultural impacts politically in the US I spend as much time as I can studying Lincoln, who I think is the most complicated and probably the smartest of our presidents and who was faced with the greatest crisis of anyone since Washington won the Revolutionary War, so. But I also like to study entrepreneurs and people who have developed new approaches, new solutions. The Wright brothers, bicycle mechanics who every summer went down to Kitty Hawk, which had the best wind on the east coast, and they wanted the wind to help lift the airplane. They. Over a period of years, they made 500 efforts to fly at about a dollar per effort. And finally, on December 17, 1903, they actually flew a distance, about the same length as the wingspan of a 747, slow enough that the one brother could run alongside the plane, making sure it didn't flip over while the other brother was the pilot.
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Kevin Gentry
Isn't it true, I think Wilbur Wright even commented at some point that it would be, you know, 100 years or a thousand years before man would fly as they were trying that. Yet they persisted and eventually achieved something so consequential.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, I think people underestimate how sophisticated they were. They studied birds. They compared notes with people around the world. There were a lot of different people trying to invent powered flight at the same time. The Smithsonian actually got a $50,000 grant from the Congress, but had a design that was too sophisticated and too difficult, and it failed. And they showed their absolute lack of originality because they decided they would launch it from a platform in the Potomac river, which meant that when it failed, it went into the water, was torn apart by the current, and they couldn't figure out what went wrong. The Wright brothers, who knew they were going to fail, did everything at Kitty Hawk coming down a hill and would, you know, they would try it out, it would fail. They go back up and have a cup of coffee, and they, gee, what should we change? And they kept experimenting. And it infuriated the Smithsonian that these two guys, for about 500 bucks, had actually invented powered flight. And all the great geniuses at The Smithsonian with $50,000 couldn't do it.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, great stories, but great examples. You've touched on a dozen different themes we could go more deeply into. But I want to take this into sort of a bit of a chronology, a history of your own involvement in leadership, because I think it helps people understand and gives them the context. So 1978, you're elected to the United States House of Representatives. You had run before, been unsuccessful. It's not easy as a Republican to be elected in the south at that time. You were elected, came to Washington, Jimmy Carter's president, but the Republicans are in a. In a relatively small minority in the House of Representatives. When did you first realize that something different had to be done? Because Otherwise, the thinking was, overwhelmingly, Republicans will be in the minority forever.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, I ran in 74 during Watergate and then again in 76 with Jimmy Carter at the head of the Democratic ticket. So by the time I finally won in 78, I'd had a fair amount of experience. And that December, before I was sworn in, I said to the leadership, you know, we've been in the minority for 24 years. Shouldn't we have a plan to become a majority? And they said, that's a great idea. Why don't you chair the Planning Committee? So I hadn't even been sworn in yet, and that gave me legitimacy to ask the right questions, to go over and look at the Congressional Campaign Committee, to work with the Republican National Committee. But I always remind people, the effort we made to become a majority, we failed in 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90 and 92. So it wasn't like, you know, we had a lucky break in 1994. We were trying every two years. We were just failing. And we were. We were learning lessons about how challenging it is to gain control through the House, where you have 435 candidates in any given year, and you've got to be able to compete across the whole country. It was an extraordinary thing. And Joe Gaylord, who was my partner in doing this, he and I wrote a book called March to the Majority, which outlined literally the step by step process to actually create that majority, and then, equally important, to govern so well that we got reelected in 1996, which was the first time since 1928 that Republicans have kept the House.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, all right. I mean, your example, the Wright brothers already, and then the try, try, try again that you all went through in the 80s, makes a perfect connection. I'll just share a personal story. In 1985, I was working on the campaign for governor of Virginia, Wyatt Durrett. And I think it was Dave Mason, who was working for Congressman Trent Lottie, said, hey, you guys ought to talk with Newt Gingrich. And you had already established yourself. And a carload of us came up from Richmond and we sat down with you and Wyatt Durrett, the candidate for governor, and you gave the kind of strategic advice that was just invaluable, but this just didn't happen. And you weren't that long already into your career. So. So, I mean, did, did something happen when you got there? And like, wait a minute, this something's. How did you bring strategy into this?
- [11:47]
Newt Gingrich
I mean, I first decided in August of 1958 that I had three jobs to understand what it would take for America to survive, to learn how to explain it so the American people would give you permission, and then to learn how to implement it so that you could actually do the job that they'd given you permission to do so America could survive. So I started between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. And when you take those three together, it means you have to learn management, you have to learn planning, you have to learn politics, you have to learn communications. I mean, my life was an unending. It still is an unending process of learning because the world's bigger than you are, and because in order to achieve the scale of change that I thought America needed, you have to have pretty good knowledge of a remarkable range. I'll give you one example. Connie Mack was elected to Congress in 1982 and had been a bank president. And in early 83, we were sitting around chatting, and he looked, turned to me, he said, you know, I took this course on, on banking. And one of the things they taught us was you get what you inspect, not what you expect. And so that just hit through to me. And so from 1983 on, everything I've done has been built around the idea that you have to be able to inspect it to make sure you actually get it done.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, kudos to you for marrying management and organization and communications. I think that's lost on a lot of people. In fact, I think a lot of people just think, look, I'm good, I'm qualified, I'm right, I'll be successful. Now, you've got this great new book, Trump's Triumph, already a New York Times bestseller. And you talk about, he's an outside of the box thinker. He's challenged the status quo. You clearly went out were an outside the box thinker. How important is that as well?
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Newt Gingrich
Well, I mean, if you want real change, you have to be able to think creatively. If you just want to manage what already exists, you can stay inside the box. But if you really want to have the kind of creative change needed for the country to survive, then you've got to be prepared to think new ideas and to approach things in new ways. It's pretty straightforward.
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Kevin Gentry
All right, okay, but then how do you bring people to that way of thinking? Now, I'll give you another example. 1989, it was around March. I had worked for Congressman Herb Bateman. I had run his campaign. He invited me up to Capitol Hill. You may remember her. He was a Democrat turned Republican. He had a reception. He invited me to it. And you came by it. You may not remember this, but I think the leadership fight was the next day where you were challenging the leadership, and you said to Herb, you said, herb, I can make you chairman of the Armed Services Committee. And he laughed. And I'm sure he was going to vote the other way because he was more establishment. But you were right. You had that vision. How did you bring others, though, to that kind of way of thinking?
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Newt Gingrich
Well, I think two or three things. First of all, as younger members came in, they had a choice between joining a team that was defeated, had been defeated, and would be defeated, or joining this kind of slightly wild group that actually thought they could be a majority. Well, if you're a brand new member, why would you want to join the losers? And so we gradually, over a period of time, acquired more and more support because people just said, look, at least we have a shot. I mean, Newt may be crazy, but at least he's crazy trying to get us to a majority. I think that was part of it. The second part was we occasionally did things that proved that we mattered, that proved we were doing something. I mean, one of the decisive moments was in 1963 when Bob Walker and I had been attacking Congressman Boland from Massachusetts for having written a letter to the Nicaraguan communists and for offering an amendment which we thought was undermining our effort to defeat communism. Well, we hadn't thought it through, but Boland was one of the two roommates to Thomas P. O' Neill in the apartment of Washington. So Tip o' Neill loved him, wanted to protect him. So o' Neill got really angry and attacked me. And I was actually in Atlanta campaigning for reelection, and Trent Lott called me and said, you better get back here. The speaker just attacked you by name, and you have the right to a point of personal privilege, which gives you an hour on the floor. So I got back the next day and I went to the floor and I asserted my right to personal privilege, because what the speaker had said, it attacked me personally. And the parliamentarian ruled that that was right and that therefore I had control the floor for an hour. And o' Neill ignored the totally correct advice of his team, which is to get off the floor. And he was so mad at me that about 10 minutes into my defense, he got up and he said, well, the gentleman from Georgia yield. Now, o' Neill is a huge guy, and the House floor goes upward, so he's standing above me, and he said, oh, the gentleman from Georgia yield. And he said, well, of course I'll yield to the distinguished Speaker. And he then said, what I said was the most. I'm paraphrasing. What I said was the most despicable thing he had ever heard a member say on the House floor. Well, Trent Lott, to his credit, promptly jumped up and said, I move that we take the Speaker's words down because you're not allowed to defame another member. So then everything stops because the clerk has to transcribe it. Then the clerk reads it back. Then the parliamentarian makes a ruling. Well, my grand irony, the Speaker's other roommate, Joe Moakley. They're all three from Massachusetts. Joe Moakley's in the chair, having replaced the Speaker. So here's poor Joe, who has to read the parliamentarians ruling that, yes, what he said was a violation of. Of House rules, and therefore he could not speak for the next 24 hours, which is what he consequences. First round of an unto a speaker, I think, since 1793. At which point Lot again gets up and says, oh, I ask unanimous consent that the speaker be allowed to talk, because, after all, none of us want to take away his rights. Okay, now, what made this really important? It was great fun, great drama, but what made it important was that night, for the first time in the memory of any House Republican. House Republicans were on all three television networks. And all of a sudden, people said, I don't quite like this guy Gingrich, and he's too flamboyant and he gets into too many fights. But we were on national TV last night.
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Kevin Gentry
Podbean, your message amplified. Ready to share your message with the world. Start your podcast journey with Podbean. Podbean, the AI powered all in one podcast platform. Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts.
- [19:35]
Newt Gingrich
Use Podbean to record your podcast.
- [19:38]
Kevin Gentry
Use PodBean AI to optimize your podcast. Use PodBean AI to turn your blog into a podcast. Use Podbean to distribute your podcast everywhere.
- [19:48]
Newt Gingrich
Launch your podcast on Podbean today.
- [19:52]
Kevin Gentry
Wow, I did not know that story, but that speaks volumes. And I mean, the young turks, Trent Lott, Ben Weber, Bob Walker, you. I mean, just in. In, but willing to challenge, and then look what happens as a result. Okay, all right. There's still so much more to talk about, but let's go back to management a bit because you mentioned Peter Drucker. What did Peter Drucker teach you about this as well? Because what you just went through was some brilliant political strategy. Maybe some of us fortuitous, but it turned out really well. But what about the management side. What, what did, what would you offer to those listening about what Drucker might say?
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Newt Gingrich
Look, I, I tell everybody who's interested in leadership that they should get, they should buy in paperback. Drucker is the effective executive. 167 pages. They should underline it, reread it once a year till they thoroughly understand it. It's the most powerful single book I've ever read about being effective. And you know, part of if you're going to do this, you want to be effective doing it. I later on got to know Drucker. I read a bunch of his other books. I interacted with him a fair amount. I also had the remarkable opportunity to take a 90 hour tutorial with Edwards Deming.
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Kevin Gentry
Oh, wow.
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Newt Gingrich
Who's the father of the quality movement and who's not a very good writer, unlike Drucker. So it was really good for me that I could sit at his knee and ask questions. But, you know, you're both trying to lead a national movement. You're trying to manage the House, which means in our case we had 230 to 240 members. But what you're really trying to do is shape national policy and reshape this enormous bureaucracy. Well, if you don't have a fair amount of management skills, you can't possibly do all that stuff. And so I spent a lot of time studying management, how to manage, how to get things done, reading pretty widely in management literature in that period, and I think it was extraordinarily helpful in teaching me how to get a wide range of things done very fast.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, first of all, love that you're a lifelong learner and the humility even to say something like that. But you're obviously, I mean, you grounded things in history. You're talking about strategy, you're talking about business management, Deming, Drucker. All right, so you were well known for generating a lot of ideas. And I, and, and I was interviewing Richard Bigory the other day and he talked about how oftentimes you would go to that, that blackboard and put vision, goals, strategy, and I think tactics project. And, and you would go through that maybe once a day or however many times Joel would do that. Bob Walker and others come up with those sorts of things. But how did you set priorities? Because again, you had lots of ideas. How do you set priorities? Because there are only but so many things that you can do.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, first of all, we developed very early, and I think this is probably derived from Drucker, the notion of importing knowledge and exporting Work. So as often as possible, I recruit other people. You can't actually delegate. You don't have that kind of. It's not a structure like that. But I try to recruit other people and I try to find ways to collaborate so that I'm not having to do all of them myself. Second, you have to distinguish between large strategic projects, for example, balancing the federal budget, and specific small opportunities. I mean, there are times you can do something which moves the process forward, and you can do it in two or three hours. It gets done, it's over. It's not a big achievement, but you've moved the system a little bit. And then there are projects. When we went about balancing the federal budget, that was. It took us four years, and we are the only team in the last hundred years to have balanced the budget four times in a row.
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Kevin Gentry
Yep.
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Newt Gingrich
And we did it based on principles, not based on theory. I mean, we were applying very methodically management principles that work. And we were able to so decisively balance the budget that when I left office, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, gave a speech saying that he thought we would probably pay off the national debt by 2009.
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Kevin Gentry
And we quote that back a lot today.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, the people who followed us didn't have a clue what we were doing, and it all collapsed once I left.
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Kevin Gentry
Yep. But we quote that back a lot today. Those who are concerned about the debt and deficit, about that very thing. And what Greenspan observed, what you're doing, I want to tackle that a little bit later. There's so much to tackle. Okay, so the contract with America, 1994, how did that come about? What inspired that vision? I know Dick Armey was a big part of that, but I remember the summer meeting of the Republican National Committee in Los Angeles happened to be there. Our good friend Haley Barber was the chairman, and he said, you know, I think we've been saying all these years, there really is a chance this year to win. And then you all came out with the Contract With America. Talk about that.
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Newt Gingrich
Well, we needed a core document which couldn't be too long. So 10 was about the right number. I mean, 10 works for the 10 commandments. 10 is the way the Romans organized their legions. So 10 was the right number. And every issue in the Contract had to have 65 to 80% support. So that the act of saying it. Excuse me. If you were a local candidate, you'd never run for Congress before you're on talk radio. If you could just repeat the contract, you could get through the interview and on every single question you'd be in 2/3 to 80% of the audience would be agreeing with you. So that was the goal. And then second, we wanted it to be operational. We were very specific. We will vote on these. Excuse me. We didn't say we'll pass them because we couldn't guarantee passage. And in fact, we didn't pass line item veto and we passed balance budget amendment in the House, but not in the Senate. We've been lost by one vote in the Senate. So we wanted a measurable commitment that you could check off. And in fact, every time we did one of the 10, I'd go to the floor with the original document and I would put a paper clamp. You know, I put a hole punch in it. And that's now in the Smithsonian because we, we wanted to prove we were keeping our word. And that's part of why we got reelected in 96 for the first time in literally 68 years. I mean, that 96 in some ways was a bigger achievement than 94. And the other thing we did is a terrific book by Tom Evans called the Education of Ronald Reagan.
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Kevin Gentry
Yes.
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Newt Gingrich
Which describes his eight years at General Electric.
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Kevin Gentry
That was Lynn Bullware, the, the, the employee relations guy who was really trying to educate this very unionized workforce about the ideas of free enterprise. And Ronald Reagan was his partner.
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Newt Gingrich
Right. And if you read that and you understand what Bolvoire's concept was, which was if you move the mass of the voters, the leaders have to follow it, which led Reagan to characterize it as saying his job was to turn off the light on the American people so that they would turn up the heat on Congress. And in Reagan's mind, he triangulated between the American people, the Congress and himself. And as long as he and the American people are on the same side, they would force the Congress to do the right thing. Well, that was the model we applied. And so we were presenting Bill Clinton with a series of choices in which he could either be with the American people and get reelected, or he could oppose us and get defeated. And again and again he would pick working with us.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, okay, on that. Okay, that's worth another quick follow up. And by the way, Margaret Thatcher certainly also in that Reagan sense of, of knowing where the people were and touching it in that, in that way. And you've written about that. But Bill Clinton, it's hard today to see what working across the aisle were adversaries, clearly were adversaries, but you all had a relationship, you were in touch with each other. How did that work and what can we learn from it?
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Newt Gingrich
Well, part of it was just the luck of history. Clinton was from Arkansas. He had governed with a conservative state legislature. He had tried to form a centrist Democratic Party. He understood that the left wing of the Democratic Party was a disaster. And if we had had Al Gore or Barack Obama, we probably couldn't have done it. We'd have had a very different relationship. But Clinton and I both, I think, also having been a Southerner, gone to Tulane in Louisiana, I had an ability and Bill had an ability to reach beyond our partisan position. We spent 35 days together writing the balanced budget face to face, negotiating in the cabinet room for 35 days. Now, that requires you learn to listen to each other. You try to sympathetically understand, you know, what is it you need and what is it you can't give up. Now, let me tell you what I need and what I can't give up. Now, maybe in between there we can find something we can solve. And he was also a very positive person. He wanted things to work. And of course, when we won In June of 95, he had a huge fight in the White House. And all of his liberal staff said to him, you know, your job is to stand up to Gingrich and to defend liberalism. And Clinton said he had lost in 1980, he won the youngest governor in the country in 78.
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Kevin Gentry
Right.
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Newt Gingrich
Then he lost in 80, came back in 82, but he. But he had lost. And so after he listened to him, he said to him, look, if I do what you want, I am not going to be reelected, but if I work with Gingrich, I'll probably get reelected. And so he had. So the. One of the reasons the left didn't like Hillary was they saw Bill having sold them out.
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Kevin Gentry
Yes.
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Newt Gingrich
Which he did. Yeah.
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Kevin Gentry
I interviewed former Senator Phil Graham recently on the Going Big podcast, and he talked about the differences between Clinton to Obama to Biden, and just such stark difference, not only in approach, but also ideologically, ultimately, the consequences of how they really beat up. I mean, Biden did on so many of the. The sacrosanct institutions of what we have had in our society. But. All right, that brings me to today a bit with Donald Trump and again, your book, the Trump Triumph. He's an interesting guy. He really is. What have you learned from him and his approach? And does he also. An example of sort of Reagan and Thatcher in terms of sort of understanding the m. The majority, the. That connection. He clearly is a good marketer, understands his. His customer base will Say, what have you learned from that and what might you share?
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Newt Gingrich
You have to start with the idea that he is extraordinarily bright, maybe, maybe second to Lincoln among all of our presidents. He's truly extraordinary. He is deeply intuitive. That is, he operates off gestalt, he doesn't operate off of algebraic formulas. He has a very highly tuned sense of the American people. I mean, people forget he had a TV show for 13 years, The Apprentice, he ran the Miss Universe contest. He had a retail business with hotels and golf courses. So his sense of being customer oriented is very, very deep. He also understands Thatcher's rule that first you win the argument, then you win the vote. Right. He understands Rush Limbaugh's principle that you have to entertain people before you can educate them, that if you don't entertain them, you won't have their attention. And so a lot of Trump's behavior is like a vaudeville show. I mean, if you watch him at one of the big rallies, you're watching one of the great vaudevillians of all time who knows how to be amusing, how to be funny, how to go off on tangents, and you never quite know where he's going. So you have to pay attention, because if you don't pay attention, you'll be lost. At the same time, I always tell people he's not a movement conservative. He is the most effective anti liberal in my lifetime. And he's more effective at taking apart the establishment than Reagan was, partly because that wasn't Reagan's job. Reagan wanted to defeat the Soviet empire, but partly because it would not have occurred to Reagan, having come out of World War II, that it would make sense to take apart the majority or the establishment. Trump represented a later generation who was seeing that the left had metastasized, it had become anti American, it had become radical. It was using the bureaucracy to transform the country, and it was using a bureaucracy that was incompetent and, for example, after 23 years, failed in Afghanistan. So there were a lot of things going on that made Trump basically much more radical than Reagan, much more willing to confront the old order, much more willing to fight. Now, Reagan, Reagan could fight, but it wasn't his natural style. Right, Fighting is Trump's natural style. I mean, he's very comfortable being in fights. And sometimes I think when he starts to get bored, he goes out and picks one, just say, to sort of keep his hand in.
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Kevin Gentry
Well, they say that, you know, his enemies take him literally and not seriously, but his supporters take him seriously but not literally. But you Touched on something that we've been talking about in a way that Republicans were talking about winning a majority but Never did until 1994. Your leadership, contract with America. We've talked about dismantling the regulatory state and all of these things for a long time, but nothing ever was really happening. I mean nothing. And yet now consequential stuff is happening. Help us understand that it didn't happen in his first term. I think it's caught a lot of people off guard. It's almost like Milei in Argentina, but very, very different than the situation he had. What's going on? How do you explain that?
- [35:15]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I'd say first of all, if you actually look from the time he came down the escalator on June 15, 2015, he was a pretty radical candidate, maybe most obviously on the border. But his opposition to long wars, where he took George W. Bush head on, his desire to change the rules of trade, his desire to dramatically cut taxes, the degree to which he was anti bureaucratic and anti left wing, I mean, in many ways he was already. But, but he was a business guy who arrived in Washington after a long and grueling campaign and never got his feet under him. Because as we're now discovering from Tulsi Gabbard's releases, Barack Obama, in a way which verges, I think very close to treason, was using the CIA and the FBI to deliberately undermine and delegitimize the elected President of the United States. I mean, we have never seen anything like what Obama did at the end of his term. And so Trump spends four years getting a fair amount done, but all of it embroiled in fights go on and on with the elite media deeply opposed to him, with the Democratic House after the election of 18 impeaching him twice, but failing to convict him in the Senate with Mueller running a two year long investigation. I mean, think about all the stuff this guy's putting up with and there is no Trump team. I mean, this guy, this guy was a unique individual candidate and he's then faced with having to govern well. So he has to bring in lots of people. I mean, in national security, for example, some of the people who I admire very deeply agreed to work for him and these are people I have deep respect for. But they had the attitude, this guy is a novice, doesn't know what he's doing, and my job is to educate him well. He thought, you know, I'm a billionaire, I won the presidency, I actually know what I think. And your job is to execute what I want done. And so that led to a level of turmoil and infighting that taught Trump a lot. I think the election of 20 was rigged. There's no other way to. I mean, you can argue about when I was told on election day it was set up by the establishment that he couldn't win in a hundred different ways. So he's out of office and basically seen as a has been by the elites and sort of licks his wounds. To their great credit, Brooke Rollins goes out and organizes America's first policy institute, which brings together 400 Trump team who were the true believers in the first term. And they go to work preparing for either a second term or the future, depending on what happens. So Trump then comes back most, one of his most brilliant acts hires Susie Wiles to run the campaign. And Trump thinks deeply about one, how deeply radical the Biden team is. Biden is essentially Obama's third term. Obama is the most radical and most racist president we've ever had. And so you have the Biden team is the Obama team and they're taking the country way to the left. And at the same time, Trump is thinking through lessons he should have learned from what worked and what did not work in his first term. So ironically, the four years off, first of all gives him the time to become dramatically bolder, more thoughtful, and more committed to profound change. Second, it toughens him up because he has to survive four efforts to put him in jail and two efforts to kill him, and he's still there. And third, it gives him a sense of building a team that actually wants to be Trump's team, not Trump's tutors. And the result is an administration which I would say in its first six months has accomplished at least 30% more than I thought possible. I mean, it is an astonishing tour.
- [40:10]
Kevin Gentry
Divorce, I gotta agree. And by the way, I think you do a great job with this in your book, Trump's Triumph. Fascinating. Fascinating. Okay, I want to wrap this up with respect, how to bring us to 2025. You had a great book years ago, Breakout, I think it was, where you talked about the, you know, sort of coming confluence of a lot of things and innovation and technology and healthcare and. And now here we are today with artificial intelligence. And I mean, you've always been the sort of futurist as well. Where are we today in terms of this moment with respect to the country and where we are, not just with respect to the policy being driven by President Trump and his administration, but this moment with respect to the product of our economic prosperity and innovation.
- [41:01]
Newt Gingrich
Look, if we can avoid nuclear war and we can avoid being defeated by China. We are at the edge of a golden age where the average person will live to be 115 or longer and have the same energy level as a 60 year old today, where we will routinely go into space and we will colonize the entire solar system, where we will have breakthroughs. You know, I mean, look, I all. I play with ChatGPT all the time. I mean, if there's something I don't know, I just type it in and it finds it. One of the things I'm working on, which I wrote about many years ago and we didn't have the technology, is to move from disability to capability. Can we use technologies? So there are no, with rare exceptions, there are no people who truly have disabilities anymore because we can find ways to give them capabilities. Now that's just a tiny taste of how dramatically more interesting the next 30 or 40 years are going to be.
- [42:06]
Kevin Gentry
I'm sure you've heard about this. High agency versus low agency. Wilbur Wright had high agency. Abraham Lincoln had high agency. He was not going to accept his circumstances. He was going to drive it. And these people today that have so embraced the innovations associated with AI talk about agency in a similar way. You mentioned you use ChatGPT. How else do you use artificial intelligence?
- [42:31]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I have no idea. I mean, look, all of us use it at one level because we get in our car, plug in a location and this voice starts telling us to turn right and left and we do it and just, just start. The number of ways people today interface with advanced technology but take it for granted. It's. It's like the woman who wrote Wernher von Braun when he was developing the Saturn V to go to the moon. And she said to him, God does not want you to go to the moon. Why don't you stay home and watch television the way God intended? It didn't occur to her that television was an invention.
- [43:08]
Kevin Gentry
Nice. Well, you know, I do agree some people take it for granted. So many people are intimidated by it, skeptical about it, fearful about it. But just with all every innovative and technological change over time, when you run into the wind with your arms wide open to embrace it, there's just so much there, so much power there, so much excitement. Well, tell us, what are you doing today? You've got Gingrich360. What's the next big thing that you're working on? I wish you could fix the federal debt and deficit. Very, very concerned about that. I wish we could kind of go back in time to what you did before.
- [43:49]
Newt Gingrich
Well, we're trying to go forward in time and do the same thing. I'm working on a pledge for members to commit to balancing the budget. I'm working on a program for space that would guarantee that freedom occupied the solar system. I'm working on thinking through the remarkable breakthroughs in healthcare so we move from a sick care system to a genuine health care system. I am trying to rethink the strategic principles of our national security. I spend 80% of my time as a citizen trying to solve problems and 20% of my time trying to earn a living. Well, on, on, on.
- [44:32]
Kevin Gentry
With respect to our military. And you, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but, you know, yeah, if we can avoid a nuclear war, but we've got Ukraine or Russia, we've got China. With respect to Taiwan, we've got certainly Iran still with the Middle east and everything going on, but connected even with respect to technology and AI. Is our military today ready to fight a significant conflict? We're very impressed with what happened with respect to taking out the nuclear site in Iran. But I know you're concerned about this. Where are we?
- [45:08]
Newt Gingrich
I think we are at the edge of very large revolutions and capability and that our bureaucracies, including our military bureaucracies, are going to find it very difficult to go through the transition. I mean, just take the example of drones. The Ukrainians used drones to drive the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea, and they literally had to flee east to the, the Sea of Aof to get far enough away because they couldn't cope with the drones. Well, that means if you could put 20, 30, 40 drones on every merchant ship, and the Chinese have the largest merchant fleet in the world, each one of them, in a sense, is a, is a tiny aircraft carrier nobody's ever thought about. How do you, how do you defend an aircraft carrier if you have 3,000 drones coming simultaneously? You run out of ammunition. I mean, there's a whole range of things here where, furthermore, we have to go about, you know, we, we talk a lot about war fighting, which I think is, is exactly the wrong focus. What we should talk about is war. Winning, winning, winning. We fought brilliantly in Vietnam and we lost. We fought brilliantly in the second Iraq War and we lost. We fought brilliantly in Afghanistan and we lost. I mean, at some point you have to stop and say, you know, the trick here is, how do I win? Which takes you back to 500 BC and Sun Tzu's the Art of War, because the Sun Tzu Writes the greatest of all generals win bloodless victories. Well, we've lost that whole knack of thinking like that and that we're muscle bound by our bureaucratic cultures.
- [47:01]
Kevin Gentry
Well, good for you, and thank you for staying active in the way that you are. I mean, you talked about the drones and the Russian navy. You think about the Maginot line after World War I. That's going to stop the Germans. They'll never be able to come into France again. Well, they just come up with a different way. I mean, right. This is just crazy. Well, how do you. How do you stay so focused? What advice do you have for us to just, like, keep going at this every day? Maybe it's in your blood, but you're special here.
- [47:29]
Newt Gingrich
Callista keeps me paced a little bit because we try to get in nine holes of golf a couple times a week, and we like to go out to nice dinners. But I would say other than that, I get up in the morning and I'm fascinated with the world, not just Paulo. I mean, I'm fascinated with turtles, I'm fascinated with dinosaurs. I'm fascinated with the world. And I spend probably three hours a day learning just daily stuff. I'm not talking about deep learning. I'm talking about what has Trump done, what's the House done, what's the Senate done, what happened in Ukraine, what's going on with Iran? I mean, just trying to keep up takes about three hours a day. But then the other thing is I relax and just let my brain work. I mean, I know that I want us to be a better, more successful, more effective country. So I look for solutions that get us there. And I listen to people all day long trying to steal every idea I can find.
- [48:28]
Kevin Gentry
All right, thank you. Thank you for doing that. Two last questions. First, thinking of a younger version of yourself, what would you tell that younger version today if you could, to do any differently than you did?
- [48:42]
Newt Gingrich
I have a standard set of which my daughter Jackie and I wrote about years ago. Dream big, work hard, learn every day, enjoy life, and be true to yourself.
- [48:56]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, that you maybe have. Have answered my last question, but I think because you're such a going big embodiment, you can still leave us all. Very inspired and encouraged for everybody listening around the world, but hopefully, those who really love freedom, love the ideals of the founding of this special country. What advice would you give to anyone listening about how they should think about going big?
- [49:20]
Newt Gingrich
Look, I think people have to go big in their own unique way. I mean, if you want to be a ballerina, fine, be a good ballerina. If you want to be a cook, fine, be a really good cook. If you want to learn how to become wealthy, go out and try it out. I think people have to. The great joy of being human is that there are 8 billion stories being lived out on the planet and each one of us gets to define our peculiar path to what we think of as happiness.
- [49:51]
Kevin Gentry
Well, ladies and gentlemen, Speaker Newt Gingrich. Check out his newest book, Trump's Triumphant, but he's got 43 other great books, most of them all New York Times bestsellers. Gingrich, 360. Speaker 2 Gingrich, what a great pleasure to be with you today. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do.
- [50:11]
Newt Gingrich
Great to be with you, Kevin.
- [50:12]
Kevin Gentry
Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and, like, leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, goingbigpodcast.com Remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.