178. Gavin Newsom: The Next President Of The United States?

14:06Gavin Newsom:But there's certainly California derangement syndrome. It's 24-7. And it makes sense because careers, industries, Fox News, Murdoch, I mean, they're defined by what we're against. our success runs counter to their entire argument of the case.

14:21Alastair Campbell:You say in the book, there is no Trump without Murdoch.

14:24Gavin Newsom:Correct. I really believe that. I absolutely believe that. I just think his weaponization, his ability to shapeshift what Murdochs have done for him, it's Pravda, Fox News, primetime lineup. And I mean, the Rubio speech today was interesting. I mean, the shapeshift, compare that to Vance's shift. I mean, they celebrated Vance a year ago. They're going to celebrate Rubio tonight. Whatever the dear leader, whatever position, repositioning they advance, I've never seen a network like this. You've more experience in this space. Murdoch, of course, is bringing a little bit of his East Coast bias to the West Coast, has created the California Post, whose purpose is to take down folks like myself.

15:05Gavin Newsom:That's who these guys are.

15:06Rory Stewart:The Secretary of State speech this morning began with a statement that he wanted America's allies in Europe to be strong. And he wanted them to stop being guilty and stop being apologetic and instead to be proud of their heritage, proud of their civilization, proud of being part of the greatest civilization on Earth. I already understand that. What's he trying to say? I guess the suggestion is you are not, which is a hell of a statement.

15:35Gavin Newsom:I mean, that's a perhaps a consistent thread of what Vance was saying.

15:38Rory Stewart:What does he and Stephen Miller think civilization is? When Stephen Miller's standing up saying, you know, we're the heirs to a great European civilization. Color of your shirt.

15:46Gavin Newsom:Or the National Security Council says, you know. I like the way he said it. Color of your shirt. Right.

15:51Rory Stewart:Right.

15:51Gavin Newsom:That's exactly what they mean. I mean, that's what the migration. That's, I mean, these are all the code words and then we know them well. These are the dog whistles in the vernacular of the 80s with Reagan, Nixon and others.

16:01Rory Stewart:And it's a weird thing, isn't it? Given that America has a history of being against empire, many ways of progressive history, to have the United States trying to say to us that, I mean, the way I heard it, but maybe I'm exaggerating it, is that he's almost saying, you know, we should be proud of the French and British empires. But there's this extraordinary kind of Western civilization.

16:22Gavin Newsom:Yeah, I mean, look, if he's talking about the best of the Roman Republic, the best of Greek democracy, this notion of popular sovereignty, co-equal branches of government in the vernacular of democracy or republic, bring it on. Amen. right the rule of law not the rule of don donald trump in this respect rules-based order versus you know law of the jungle might makes right or perhaps he does mean what you're suggesting we have i believe an imperial presidency that is inspired by might makes right and the law of the jungle uh if you have something he wants you're a target period full stop and that will continue to be the case.

17:03Rory Stewart:And Govan, just final thing on this. There's something that's very difficult to understand, which is on the one hand, the Trump presidency seems to say they want us to be strong. On the other hand, when it suits them, they seem to say they want us to do what Trump says. And these seems to be intention because on the one hand, he wants everybody for understandable reasons, buying American weapons, accepting the dollar, accepting his trade terms, giving goods. On the other hand, he's trying to push Europe to be more independent, pushing them away, which will undermine all those things. I'm trying to work out what do you think is going on.

17:40Gavin Newsom:I don't think he's working it out in real time. That's to suggest there's a value proposition that's clear and consistent. It's not. It's mercurial. It's whim. It's feeling. It's news cycle. It's 24-7. It's shock and awe. It's iterative in this context. Throw things out, see what works. But right now, the entire theory of his case is in retreat. They're in retreat in terms of their attitudes towards their alliances in the European Union, based on what Rubio said today. In retreat, obviously, in Greenland, in retreat, even domestically, as it relates to domestic forces. You know, mass men, the secret police that he sent out to cities like Minneapolis and Minnesota, they're pulling back.

18:26Gavin Newsom:His own domestic agenda is fraying. He's historically unpopular at the moment, trying to address the issue of affordability. He's out on an affordability tour. He is in a very iterative mindset because he's about to get crushed in the midterms. And so he's weakness masquerading as strength. But he does respect strength in this context. He senses weakness and he exploits it. That's his expertise. And so I thought it was important what Carney said in Davos. I thought it was important, what continues to be important, what is being said yesterday, last night, today, here in Munich. And I think the European Union, I think global leaders are starting to recognize the approach to Trump cannot be of appeasement.

19:15Gavin Newsom:It has to be from a position of strength.

19:18Alastair Campbell:is that one of the reasons why you've taken this very aggressive social media strategy that has got a lot of attraction around the world because it's kind of going for him and likewise i thought it was really into one of the most i was kind of laugh out loud moment in your book is when trump comes down when you've got these terrible fires raging you paint a picture of a guy who's still utterly self-obsessed completely narcissistic only thinking about how he's going to look on fox news and you tell this incredible story about he's got Jared Kushner sitting alongside you and he's basically saying, I wish that Ivanka was marrying Tom Brady, not him.

19:59Gavin Newsom:What are we dealing with? How do I impact this? How do I impact it? Well, you're dealing with a malignant narcissist. I mean, for one. Someone who's remarkably engaging one-on-one. And that's universally understood. Anyone has had extended interactions with him. I've had perhaps the most interesting, I would argue, relationship with him of any Democrat, because we worked together during COVID. And we worked very, very collaboratively during that period of time. I don't think any other Democratic governor can claim that.

20:30Alastair Campbell:Were you in favor of taking bleach to do?

20:32Gavin Newsom:I was, you know, I remember doing bleach. We had our differences. But in the context of at least engagement, the biggest surprise to me on the international stage was the Zelensky meeting. It was so unlike Trump. He doesn't like conflict and friction one on one.

20:49Alastair Campbell:But that was Vance, wasn't it?

20:50Gavin Newsom:It was Vance. Yeah, exactly. And so to understand Trump is to understand that. And I think, look, part of that is he's easily manipulated. And that's from a foreign policy perspective. I mean, for Xi and Putin and these others, I mean, that's legendary. And that's a point of some deep caution. But he has a deep desire to get along, for you to appreciate, to engage him, slap you. on the backhand on your knee, to engage in the kind of banter, sometimes crude, infamously, sometimes rather insulting and degrading to poor Kushner in the context of the Brady comments.

21:30Alastair Campbell:And at the end of that, you go off, so you see him close up, you're trying to work with him on dealing with these fires. And then not long thereafter, and your social media put out, we've got to get an administration that's less corrupt and more competent than this. And he phones you up almost like a pleading. He was hurt by it.

21:45Gavin Newsom:Yeah, he was hurt by it. He said, I thought we had something. And I said, well, that was maybe a little tough. It was pretty mild. And he immediately goes, yeah, it's all good. We're good. We're good. He just wanted to make sure we're good. He called me right before he federalized. You want to talk about the origin story. You didn't ask, but I'm going to take advantage of you bringing up my social media. It radically shifted last June. And it shifted after a phone call that I had with Trump. Trump called me late at night, about 1.30, almost 2 in the morning, his time. and unknown number, Palm Beach.

22:16Gavin Newsom:I didn't even answer it. Then I listened to voicemail and it was the president. I checked back in. I thought it was particularly late. I wasn't even sure. I checked in with his chief of staff first and said, I know it's late. I got the call, call him tomorrow. I said, no, you should call him now. So I called him. It was a 19 minute conversation about, quote unquote, the riots in Los Angeles. And it begins with the following. God is my witness. He goes, hey, hey, yeah. I mean, this is 10 o 'clock my time, PM. He goes, what do you think of New Scum? You know, the nickname New Scum. He calls me New Scum.

22:48Gavin Newsom:Worst governor. And I said, he goes, pretty original, right? I said, no, it's not original. I said, Mr. President, in eighth grade, it's actually in the book, they were calling me New Scum. He goes, ah, you know, he goes, what about MAGA? Pretty good. I said, oh, yeah, make America great. But I said, that's not original. I mean, Reagan, how did he get? Cuts me out. He goes, how many hats do you think I sold last month? This is right when we allegedly had riots on the streets of Alabama. Had no interest. 17-minute conversation. Did not once bring up Los Angeles. Had no interest in that. Wanted to get back into the debate performance with Kamala.

23:21Gavin Newsom:He says it was four against one. I said there was only two people that were across exam. He says a cameraman. The cameraman. I'm like, Jesus, Mr. Brown. And this is literally, 15 hours later, he tweets out, said, I read news from the Riot Act and we're federalizing the National Guard. 4 ,000 National Guard are federalized, 700 active duty Marines. He didn't talk about that. Didn't even talk about it. Completely made up. But it was at that moment that my mind radically shifted. That this is, I mean, for all the banter aside, the fact that he's sending thousands of troops to the second largest city in the United States, not overseas.

23:56Gavin Newsom:Remember, this was the first city that he did it. Just shifted in my mindset that we've crossed that red line. And what I started to do is put a mirror up to that. And I did it in very crude ways. in ways that were profoundly controversial because I started to mimic him for a reason. I mean, dressing up as the Pope, the President of the United States, I mean, this is not normal. And the best part about it, we had some fun with it, is Fox News, again, back to Pravna, and his enablers, they were so offended. One of their well-known hosts and one of their biggest programs said, this Newsome, where is his wife?

24:32Gavin Newsom:He should be washing his mouth out with soap. This is not once recognizing their lack of situational awareness. They've not said a thing about Trump's tweets this entire time. So we haven't doubled down on it. We have made it kind of an art. And if you haven't checked my social media out, I encourage you to check it out.

24:50Alastair Campbell:OK, Gavin, we'll be quick breaking them back for more.

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26:34Rory Stewart:Hilton for this day.

26:40Rory Stewart:So how did your own experience growing up and this sort of development from quite a shy, insecure boy into becoming who you are today? How does that help you understand bits about the president? I mean, when you look at him, can you recognize people in your life who's a bit like him and other hints of his personality you're picking up? Well, I mean, we all want to be loved.

27:04Gavin Newsom:We all need to be loved, even the President of the United States. Look, he's a broken man in so many respects. Let's not forget, he's the guy who tried to light democracy on fire and wreck our democracy after January 6th. He's a very dangerous person. One should not underestimate what he's capable of doing on a daily and hourly basis. I don't think people fully have absorbed what we're up against day to day. He is trying to wreck this country. It's 250th anniversary of this historic project of our founding fathers. And he is doing everything in his power to break the core tenets, the spirit of those values.

27:42Gavin Newsom:That said, he's not complicated. He just simply wants you to understand how wonderful he is. how, you know, what a good chap he is. What a good bloke he is. He wants to do the right thing. Just give him a hug. He didn't get many, clearly, from his parents. I don't know that it's more complicated than that. However, he's also a guy, I've described him as a T-Rex. He will either devour you or you have to mate with him. It's almost impossible to work with him. You only work for him. And so I have iterated in that respect as governor. We have tried the path of least resistance. It doesn't necessarily go so well.

28:28Gavin Newsom:And now we're taking an approach that's a little bit more aggressive, a little more assertive. And interestingly, I think he responds to that with a little more respect than most people would otherwise appreciate.

28:39Alastair Campbell:Who do you despise might be too strong a word, but who do you despise more, him or the people who enable it? Oh, the enablers. I do.

28:52Gavin Newsom:They know better. They should know better.

28:54Alastair Campbell:Rubio?

28:56Gavin Newsom:Vance, Miller, where are we? Well, don't get me started. I mean, you talk about the dark heart of this administration. You're talking about Miller, the dark heart of the administration.

29:07Alastair Campbell:Here we are in Germany. Is he Goebbels?

29:12Gavin Newsom:I don't want to get me in trouble in that respect. I don't know. I mean, I think maybe other members of the administration may fill that slot. He's a hard right white supremacist. And Trump, I've had conversations with Trump where he's implied that he goes, he's a tough guy, tough guy, which is Trump's way of saying, you know, he's not a useful idiot, but he's very intentional sent out there. And look, the entire mass deportation strategy is a Stephen Miller strategy. And his, you know, I mean, you saw Miller defend the Venezuelan action in a way that was a little understated, alarming, even by Trump's standards.

29:50Gavin Newsom:And it started to pull him back a little bit. But look, I think Rubio talk about putting a mask on. He's put a mask on and his face is growing into it. I don't recognize Marco Rubio, nor do the Democrats in the Senate that worked with him as a college.

30:05Alastair Campbell:He saw that today. He was doing Trump's bidding, but doing it in a way that was not as upsetting as Vance was last year. Sitting here now, you're bound to think, let's say that you do win the nomination. Who do you think is going to fight for the Republicans next time around?

30:26Gavin Newsom:Look, Donald Trump's a lame duck president. He hates those words. Donald Trump is a lame duck president.

30:33Alastair Campbell:What do you say? Three times.

30:35Gavin Newsom:As a lame duck president. He will be remembered in years, not decades. Time of life, not state of mind. He would run for a third term in a nanosecond if he was a younger man. I believe that. He's the most corrupt president in American history. The self-dealing, the graft is next level. It's not about policymaking. It's about profit making for the entire family. I mean, it's extraordinary what he's been able to achieve in a very short period of time. And his enablers allowing that every second of the day. But in terms of Trump's tenure, it's about to come to an end as we know it today in November.

31:12Gavin Newsom:He's going to, as I said earlier, get shellacked in the midterms.

31:15Alastair Campbell:I'm absolutely sure about it.

31:16Gavin Newsom:I'm absolutely sure of it. I have said this before, and it's absolutely important to underscore. He's an historic president, historically unpopular. That's the pivot with Rubio today. That's the pivot with Greenland. That's the pivot in Minnesota. I mean, Susie Wiles is no idiot, his chief of staff. I mean, they recognize how existential this. All of a sudden, the U.S. Senate's now in play. That wasn't even on the table. That was never. I mean, we could have theorized it. We could have promoted it as good partisans. But to believe it, now it's a chance. And so this ends. Lame duck with Congress, now with subpoena power, real authority and oversight, but the ability now also to generate some attention.

32:01Gavin Newsom:And that's what he hates most. And I want to go to the Vance question. It's all about attention. He doesn't care if he's the heel or the hero, as long as he's the star. That's Donald Trump. The idea that he's going to sit back and watch a primary unfold in organic ways and look around and wonder where CNN is in the Oval Office and like, well, sir, CNN is with J.D. Vance in Iowa at the primary. He won't put up with that for a second. So he has to be, I mean, this is the apprentice 2.0. He'll make that determination is the answer to your question. He'll have some fun. He'll throw it out as he does with everything.

32:37Gavin Newsom:His focus group are his rallies. He'll go as it Vance. It's like the gladiator, thumb up or thumb down. It's not complicated. And he'll, so it's, no, it's Rubio Vance, Nadia. And he'll throw out some other names and he'll do this until the last breath. And so it's interesting. I think about the nomination for whoever the Democratic president is. I know all of us want to move, and we do rightfully, from resistance to renewal. What's the positive alternative message? What's the journey we can all go on in all of us? I mean, Democratic Party, what do we stand for as opposed to who we stand against?

33:11Gavin Newsom:I get all that. We all recognize that. It's going to be an interesting and challenging environment because Trump will continue, despite his weakened stance as it relates to now no longer having the House of Representatives and being a lame duck. It's still going to be defined in so many ways by Donald Trump.

33:28Rory Stewart:How did Kamala Harris lose the last election? And how is the next Democratic candidate going to win the next one?

33:34Gavin Newsom:Well, I mean, well, we can go on a journey together on punditry on this. Yeah, we can start with many theories. Incumbency. All right. There's one theory. Interest rates. There's another theory. Inflation scars. There's the third theory. Israel. There's the fourth theory. Combination of all of the above. The fifth. Wokeism. The sixth. Let's talk about transport. I mean, we can go down that list. Not sufficiently independent. Wrong answer on The View. Didn't go on Joe Rogan. Which article, which pundit do we want to highlight and recognize? A combination of all of the above? Perhaps. 107 days. It was 108.

34:10Gavin Newsom:It would have been different. current open primary, I can continue. I don't know, but I'm in the process of trying to understand. It's why I created a podcast, offended a lot of folks. My first guest was Charlie Kirk. My second was Steve Bannon. I almost didn't get a third guest because there was a, what the hell is going on over there? Who's this guy? I just had Ben Shapiro on talking about the mega movement and the split now within the mega movement. I mean, again, back to weakness, masquerading strength. There's something happening there. You saw it on the tariff vote too, those in six congressional representatives on the Canadian tariffs.

34:46Gavin Newsom:But that said, Trump cleaned our clock, just objectively did. I know it was 170 ,000 votes, perhaps in the aggregate. Okay. But still, seven swing states, popular vote, historically unpopular person, yet still was successful. So, look, we have to learn from that. And I don't think we've done the forensics. And our party, interestingly, did, but is unwilling, the Democratic Party, to actually make public their analysis.

35:19Rory Stewart:So it's the whole process that the party's done, but we don't really know what that conclusion is. Well, we don't know what it is.

35:22Gavin Newsom:I don't know that that's healthy. I imagine it will open up wounds and scars, and I think we're feeling better now because 2025 was a good year for us. Not the beginning of 2025. We were weak. I think, look, my whole thing, you guys have talked about this before on the podcast, and Scaramucci, others are absolutely right. And Clinton said this years and years ago, given the choice, the American people will always support strong and wrong versus weak and right. Weakness is another part of this whole story. It's not just policy. It's a sense of how Biden stepped down, this sort of sense of weakness.

35:56Gavin Newsom:After the loss of the election, the party's weak. You know, Schumer, leaders of the party, decided not to move, but the government shut down early on. The base of the party frustrated, outraged. There was no real resistance. And then it started to merge a little bit from the states, the front lines of these battles, increasingly states. And there was a little bit more muscularity. Then all of a sudden, people started showing up on the streets in a way, these no kings rallies that actually bucked up our party a little bit. And then at the end of 2025, we got these gubernatorial races. We're winning in these state races, were winning races, you know, for a dog catcher that we had never won across the board.

36:35Gavin Newsom:And then Prop 50 for me and the work we did to push back against election rigging. So now I think we found our footing a little bit more. And when we take back that gavel, we take back the House of Representatives even more aggressively.

36:47Alastair Campbell:Where would you fit on a kind of UK political spectrum? Or give me an American. If we put Bernie and AOC over here and the kind of more conservatives over here. Where would you be in that?

37:00Gavin Newsom:Well, I'm a guy who doesn't begrudge other people's success. I say that because there's a tendency in my party, a little bit of that. I've just never been that guy. Nature, nurture. I grew up in sort of the Clintonian mindset. I'm not talking about triangulation third way here. So I want to be cautious about that. But this notion of the value, the prism to which Clinton made decisions, community, opportunity, responsibility. And I think on the responsibility question, we've fallen short. We can talk in terms of community and opportunity, but the issue of responsibility and patriotism, service, contribution, the Democratic Party can do more.

37:36Gavin Newsom:Uniting around the things that bind us together, I think my party can do a better job. In the vernacular of Clinton, we celebrate our interesting differences, but we don't do enough to focus on what unites us together. For example, could you see yourself running alongside AOC with a kind of a shared agenda that could reach out to the country? Well, look, our system is broken. 10 % of people own two-thirds of the wealth in the United States. If you're 30 years old, particularly a young man in terms of gender terms, we have a crisis of masculinity, more broadly defined, not just the toxicity of a Donald Trump, but more broadly what's happening to boys and men in the crisis in that space in terms of suicides, dropout rates and the like, educational achievement, et cetera.

38:21Gavin Newsom:The broader issue of populism is so dominant now in our party that there's a reason people, The reason AOC is out here, the reason Bernie and AOC still fill out stadiums, it's very resonant. I mean, we're going to have the first trillionaire class. We don't need more trillionaires. Happy to have more millionaires, but we don't need any more trillionaires or any trillionaires, frankly. And so I think these class politics is going to play a big role and that populism is going to be dominant in our politics. So it's what, you know, how do you dial that up or dial that down in a way that doesn't push people away?

38:55Gavin Newsom:Ultimately, be that termination. So forget the personalities. I think, you know, tonally, we've got to address these systemic issues. There's a sense you can't play in the margins with the established order of things. And so I think some more radical thinking without being radical or radicalized will be in order.

39:12Rory Stewart:Can I pick you up on this challenges of young men and what you think the approach should be?

39:18Gavin Newsom:Well, I've been working with Richard Reeves. I've been working with Scott Galloway and others. I mean, they've been thought leaders in this space. We did a very significant comprehensive executive order in this space. We have dozens of initiatives from some as simple as this. We looked around at how many kindergarten teachers were men, realized very few. And that relationship to a young child to see someone that, you know, represents something. So we're out there recruiting more male teachers as just one example. We have an initiative to organize 10 ,000 new mentors and coaches, young men. You talk about Boys and Girls Club, a lot of these NGOs that we have, there are not many boys, the Boys and Girls Club.

40:02Gavin Newsom:And so we're recruiting men as mentors. We have volunteer initiatives, the largest, larger than the Peace Corps in the state of California, points of pride. I think we should do required public service in the United States of America. I think it should be compulsory. I think that is foundational. We need to work together across our differences in the spirit that I think defines the best of us. We have to have shared experiences. And so all of those are part of this larger fabric that we're trying to quilt together. Are you definitely going to run? I don't know. To be determined. The four people that will decide, five are my four kids and my wife.

40:40Gavin Newsom:And it depends on any given day how they feel about it. My oldest daughter has a calendar that counts down the days that she will be quote unquote free where I'm no longer governor. My nine-year-old has one interest and that is Air Force One. My 12-year-old just wants dad to be home. And dad hates that I'm here, literally. And it breaks my heart. And she's just amazing. And I'll tell you, that's what this book was for them. I mean, it's the dedication of the book. I didn't write it for anyone else. The third way, I can't control. People, how they review the book, whether they buy it, I wrote it for them.

41:18Gavin Newsom:And it's a book of second chances. You saw that in there. And I'm not going to screw that up again. And that's the only thing ultimately that's enduring and matters is my family.

41:27Alastair Campbell:Okay. So given the scale of the challenge of winning the nomination, raising the money, touring the country, getting there and then possibly being president, is there not a danger that if that's the decision making process that the doubts are going to win?

41:44Gavin Newsom:I'm pretty honest and transparent about it. There's no picture of me with a former president that's been on my mantle since I was a kid. I didn't know that was my destiny. And nor am I prone to that. I think biggest mistake the Democratic Party has made in the past is we fall in love. It's about the guy or gal on the white horse to come save the day. We're not doing the hard work, bottom up. It's always top down. And so we tend to chase that. We're focused on 2028. My entire focus last year was on 2026. And that's why I did this proposition, Prop 50. But look, I said to someone when they directly asked me, I'd be lying if I said, I haven't thought about it.

42:22Gavin Newsom:I think the moment in many ways chooses you as well. Do you meet the moment? I do think the obstacles away in the vernacular of the Stoics, What stands in the way becomes the way. And the impediment to action becomes the action. Trump, in many ways, is defining. It's defined this last year for me in a bit of a, you know, ascendancy and name recognition and identity. I didn't expect that phone call from Trump. That 17 minutes changed the directory of things. So I think it sparks the consciousness and depends on the flatness of the surrounding terrain as well. as I say he only appears eminent because of this flatness of the surrounding terrain there's humility in all this grace and we'll see where the journey takes us governor so many directions

43:07Rory Stewart:to go but one of the things that I've been thinking about is is you in California and tech and you mentioned we're about to have a first trillionaire so much money now embedded in very very few individuals, all of whom you've met and know, and who are worth tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars. And they don't want AI regulated. They don't want tech regulated. They don't want the taxes too high. And yet you're going to have to persuade someone to give you money. I mean, how on earth do you sort out the kind of systems we need given those kind of pressures? Well, we're doing it.

43:44Gavin Newsom:I mean, we're doing it. And we're doing it better than anyone else and we have a lot more work to do. We're the only state, well, New York just modeled our frontier model AI regulations, first in the nation. I worked on that for two years. Tell us a bit about that. Well, I mean, it's about dealing with truth, trust. It's also dealing about, you know, the fear and anxiety around these large language models and making sure that those models are more transparent. And that information is shared in an open way. Worked with Fei-Fei Li, worked with Stanford University, Berkeley, worked with MIT, did a white paper, built consensus with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, some of the other major frontier players.

44:28Gavin Newsom:And we're able to put together and knit together a legislative package as a first step. We did 18 AI bills on watermarking, on robot calls, you name it. We're out there on child safety. We're litigating constantly with these same folks. We have the most progressive tax policy in the United States of America, infamously. I did my state of the state arguing in favor of it, not defensively, but making a case for progressive tax policy. So we're leaning in. At the same time, look, it's in the book. I think there's a chapter that begins, they were known by their first names back then. There's a wonderful interaction that I had with Larry and Sergey, with Steve Jobs, where Steve literally pulled out of his pocket, said, hey, come over here to Larry and Sergey.

45:15Gavin Newsom:I was the plus one and came over and we started to swipe. And it was the iPhone that he was about to release a few days later at the Moscone Center. And so I've had that privilege of seeing this in the front row. I don't begrudge them, but some of them have become vestiges of themselves. I don't know or recognize them. They've completely sold out increasingly to Trump and Trumpism, to darker impulses and instincts. There was a libertarian bent always with these folks, but now it's increasingly grown darker. And I don't know if it's aided and embedded by AI or times I wonder how many are microdosing on an hour to hour basis.

45:56Gavin Newsom:And that's, I'm serious about that. And that darkness is reflected in the proximity many have to J.D. Vance, to the Vance question, and the concern I have about our country. And so at the same time, there are a lot of enlightened folks that have shapeshifted, that showed up in inaugural, that will shapeshift right back when the prevailing winds move in the opposite direction when this pendulum swings back. And so I have a little more confidence.

46:23Alastair Campbell:Well, listen, we're running out of time. You've got to go and do something else. but it's great to talk to you. Hope you do go for it.

46:30Gavin Newsom:God bless you. I appreciate it.

46:32Alastair Campbell:And also, what did Paul McCartney sing to your daughter, Montana? Oh, my God.

46:36Gavin Newsom:I have the video, and I can't remember this song, but come on. I know. I know. I was in my baby, Bjorn, and he just comes up, and he doesn't stop. And I went quietly and handed the phone to someone. I said, are you recording this? He says, McCartney's right here with Montana, my beautiful Montana, who's still going to, maybe it was Paul that got her into these concerts, which are costing her dad a pretty penny. Another reason I may need another job, not just political office. I can't afford this.

47:06Rory Stewart:Thank you so much. Very generous of your time. And thank you. It's great to be with you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I thought really intriguing. I mean, and I really warmed him. My encounters with him in the past, I'm afraid I only saw the surface and it's actually sort of rather kind of wonderful where somebody who comes across as a kind of high school hero and he was a kind of high school hero he's like a sports star and he got an amazing sports scholarship this kind of thing reveals the sort of insecurities and the awkwardness of his childhood and and as he says that part of the being the great kind of all-american hero was for him for some years a mask which he's now had to get into and examine

47:52Alastair Campbell:I think he's really got something. I was rather alarmed at the end when he said that it would be down to the wife and the kids.

47:59Rory Stewart:Yeah, because you, I mean, normally when I try to say that kind of thing, when I was running to be mayor of London and prime minister, people would like, cut, stop. People want to know you're 100 % committed that this is the thing you think about all the time. They don't want a leader who's a little ambivalent about the job.

48:13Alastair Campbell:Well, it's the old phrase, where there is doubt, there is no doubt. Right. And so are there doubts in there? I mean, look, I think he's very, very clever, very, very charming, very, very smart. His analysis of Trump, I think, is spot on.

48:26Rory Stewart:And he's worked out a way to deal with it. And very clever, but in nonconventional ways. He says he's so dyslexic, he could barely read at the age of 11.

48:33Alastair Campbell:Yeah. And I mean, look, we know that famously Trump doesn't sort of read briefs. I think doing any big executive job where you're really struggling to read and write is really, really difficult. But he's done it as the various political positions he's had. I thought, you know, there's a frankness about him. Yeah, California's a bit of a problem. The book is very, very open about some of his issues in the past to do with alcohol, to do with he had an affair with the wife of one of his staffers. It's very kind of out there. And I think that's the lesson that he's taking from what you talked about, asking about this sort of new way of new politics that we're in.

49:08Alastair Campbell:It's why he does spend four hours talking to somebody on his podcast.

49:11Rory Stewart:It's very much not Keir Starmer, is it? I mean, British politics doesn't feel as though it's in that state. British politics still feels as though maybe it's better that the slightest scandal. And, you know, if you look at Angela Rayner's mortgage or whatever, I mean, that compared to the kind of stuff that he's going through, that a lot of American politics is not. So British politics is still actually quite cautious, watching your words one step out of line. The journalists are after you and you're being pushed to resign.

49:39Alastair Campbell:Well, other than, you might say, other than Farage. Right. And other than, when he was there, Boris Johnson. So I think a lot of it will be down to the personality. So, for example, what I saw there was somebody who, whatever is going on around him, has got confidence about what he's done. And by the way, the one moving there, he moves his hands just like Bill Clinton. Right. The left-hand movement is identical. And I wouldn't be surprised if... What does it look like, this left-hand movement? It's sort of, it's very relaxed. And then occasionally he uses the finger to point, but it's not a kind of aggressive point.

50:15Alastair Campbell:It's a, it's a, I'm connecting with you point. But I was at a football match, a Burnley game recently, and I was talking to the chairman of the club that we were playing against, who was quite sympathetic to Labour. But he says something really interesting. He said, you know, whenever they come on the telly, they remind me of managers are explaining why they're just lost. And he has that sense of maybe it is an American thing. They're just much more positive about themselves and what they're trying to do.

50:41Rory Stewart:What was extraordinary was the elegant way with which he avoided the question of how Kamala Harris lost. Because, of course, he said whatever he else said. Yeah, yeah. Because answering that question tells you, are you with Seth Moulton? Are you with AOC? And he says, well, let's do the punditry. Could be this. Could be that. Could be the other. Could be the other. We don't know. It's almost two years since she blew herself up.

51:05Alastair Campbell:Also, I think what I thought he was going on to say, which he kind of did, was in the end, whatever happened then, we now have to shape something and create something much, much better to take us forward. But he didn't quite complete that pivot there, did he?

51:17Rory Stewart:He was still giving this very intellectual.

51:19Alastair Campbell:Well, he was making sure that people understood that, listen, we can't just blame Trump. We screwed up ourselves. So he was saying what everybody else was saying. Again, I thought I was quite clever. I did see touches of Bill Clinton in him, not just in the hand movements. But differences too, right?

51:35Rory Stewart:Oh, huge differences. But Bill Clambs is a much more bookish man, right? Bill Clambs sort of consumed books endlessly, went to Yale Law School.

51:41Alastair Campbell:But I think in terms of, I thought it was really interesting. I'm not doing it. I thought it was really interesting when he went on that thing about community, opportunity and responsibility. That was a big thing. That was a big thing for New Labour as well. But it was basically saying we can't just become the kind of, you know, we're providing people with better health service, better education, better this, better that. There's got to be a sense of shared ownership of the responsibility. And I think that would be a very powerful message if you could land it. And the other thing I think he showed, I think is one of the reasons why he kind of is emerging in the way that he does, is this thing of calling out Trump.

52:19Alastair Campbell:and having Trump, as I said, this comes out in the book, when he calls him out, wanting to know why he called me out.

52:26Rory Stewart:I love the count of those conversations. I mean, it's interesting. We don't get as much as we should of really getting a sense of how Trump works.

52:34Alastair Campbell:Because all the people he normally talks to are the world leaders, are the Republican politicians. They're scared to say this is how the guy behaves. You know, and honestly, in the book...

52:46Rory Stewart:What do you think about the name, Newscum? Great name, right? Well, no, they said that in eighth grade.

52:52Alastair Campbell:Anyway, I hope he does run for it. I think it would be, it certainly lightens things up.

52:56Rory Stewart:I thought he was terrific. Thank you. That was very much something that you brought in. He's an admirer of yours. So thank you for getting him. And I thought that was a great, great podcast. See you soon.