Jean shorts & flip flops: Ron DeSantis on his first day at Yale | Trending Now

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0:40Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with Power Boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Goats only trust goats because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell. Hey guys, Graham here. It's Friday, which means we get to share with you another one of our most popular clips from a past interview. This week, Ron DeSantis. What you're about to listen to is trending this week on our Facebook page. Hope you enjoy. What do you think you learned from your mom? Well, I think if you look at where my parents are from, so my mom's from Youngstown, Ohio, and my dad's from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, which is western Pennsylvania.

1:26Those are steel mill town. So this is like blue collar, working class, salt of the earth. And so like my mom was a nurse and I would go, because I didn't have my own car, I would drive her to the hospital six in the morning. I'd go to school. I'd do that. I'd come pick out. But she's working these 12 hour shifts often and oftentimes a lot longer than that and doing very well. But the one thing I always remembered is people in the community, when they knew if they had been in the hospital and she attended to them, they would always tell me how great she was to do that. But it was a lot of hard work, and it's very exhausting when you're in kind of a, she was doing critical care, high intensity, on your feet for a long period of time.

2:11And so I definitely think work ethic and commitment to the task at hand. What about your dad? I think he really kind of taught me about baseball, about sports, about some of the things that became my passions over the years. Like he was very supportive of me, like collecting baseball cards in like the 1980s. And I always tell people, for those who know about baseball cards, they started overproducing them. So I'm getting all these 86 tops baseball, which are now worth nothing. I got so many of them. Had I gotten 86 Fleer basketball with Michael Jordan's rookie, I would be sitting on a gold mine if I was doing it, but I wasn't doing it though.

2:49So, so that was kind of learning about baseball, learning about sports, learning about those things. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. Hey, it's Bill from the Bill Simmons Podcast.

3:22FIFA World Cup 26 fans, listen up. As the official beer sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 26, Michelob Ultra is giving away$1 million worth of FIFA World Cup 26 tickets and prizes. Enter now at MichelobUltra.com slash superior access slash FIFA World Cup 26. Michelob Ultra FIFA World Cup 26, superior access, no purchase necessary. Open U.S. Residence 21 Plus begins on December 1st, 2025, ends on July 31st, 2026, multiple entry periods. Visit www.micloobUltra.com slash superior access slash FIFA World Cup 26 for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details. I'm sure when you were deciding on where to go to college, you could have gone to a place that would have cost less money, but you, I'm sure, very intentionally chose Yale.

4:03Why and what did kind of paying your way through entail for you? Well, first of all, to give them credit, I mean, they provided really generous financial assistance, including really significant grants, scholarship grants. So it made it doable based on kind of my family circumstances. Well, here's the thing. I didn't know anything about New England. I had never been to New England in my life until I went on my recruiting trip to Yale. I didn't know colleges were liberal. I didn't know anything about politics. I just knew that schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, you know, that meant something.

4:40If you do that, then that must mean that you're pretty smart. Martin, when you first went to Yale, your buddy Mike, who I was talking to yesterday, who was a quarterback from California, he's like, you know, Ron had his jean shorts and, you know, product-filled spiky hair, and we both didn't know what the hell was going on. So think about it. I'm a public school kid from West Central Florida. First day of school, I have flip-flops, jean shorts, and a cut-off T-shirt on. that is like a fish out of water up there, right? It was a different culture. And I kind of felt like people like me were viewed a little less favorably than had I come from a different culture.

5:23Did you actually feel that then? I felt a little, I mean, not that like, oh, I'm a victim. No, not a victim, but it just, it was, I think people back then, like, oh, you're from Florida. The only thing they knew was Miami and Palm Beach, right? So when I told them I'm from Duneno, what the hell's that? So I'm just like, you know what? I liked where I grew up. It was kind of, so it made me appreciate that a little bit more. But yes, it was, I was totally a fish out of water. I did not know what to expect. And despite the liberal environment, you felt you were actually more conservative by the time you left.

5:56So it's interesting. So as I said, I didn't know colleges were liberal. Where I grew up, I didn't even know who was a Republican or a Democrat. Like the kids I played baseball with, their families, all this stuff, I had no idea. but I had never been exposed to like anti-Americanism, some of the anti-religion, anti-God, anti-Christian. That's just, you would not do that whether you're Republican or Democrat. Well, I get there and I mean, it's very hot. Like, oh, the United States, they caused the Cold War, they did this. And I'm just thinking, well, that's not true, right? Because I'm here in the late 90s.

6:28So the fall of the Soviet Union was still kind of fresh in everybody's thinking. So you're seeing that. But I think parents worry, like conservative parents are like, I don't want to send my kid and have them undo 18 years because it's so liberal. I can just tell you with me, it had the opposite effect because I started to think about this stuff more critically. And I'm like, you know what? That's not right. That's ideology. Those are narratives that they're trying to push. Here's the truth. So I developed it. And then by the time I got to Harvard Law School, I was set kind of in my ways. So when I'm doing that first congressional campaign in Florida, I'm running, you know, I had Navy.

7:05I had, you know, my wife's pretty. You know, we had a lot going for us. But I had Harvard and Yale, which are scarlet letters in a Republican primary because our voters think this guy may be very liberal. And what I would tell people is, you know, we're so sick of sending people to Washington and they become part of the D.C. culture and they go native up there. How do you know I'm not going to do it? Well, here's why. I'm the only person in this country that went through both Harvard and Yale and came out more conservative than we went in. And then they were fine with it. As always, thanks for listening.

7:37To see more trending clips from my team, go to YouTube.com slash Graham Bensinger.