Vivek's Campaign: Outreach, Hurdles, & Don Lemon

Okay, so let me draw an analogy there and you tell me what you think about this. Um, it's frequently the case that new entrepreneurs who have created a product believe that the fundamental issue at hand is the product. Right? When I started selling things into the marketplace, I suffered from the delusion that it was 85% product and you know, 10% administration and 5% marketing and sales. That was like exactly backwards.

So, it sounds to me like a similar issue here that you presumed that, except in the political realm, you presumed that if you had your policy prepared, you were already a credible person. That that would be the bulk of the initial battle. But what turned, if I've got you right, what turned out to be the case was a very sudden realization that while you had to get in the conversation at all, and that sounds like a sales and marketing problem to some degree. This is, I think, why so many candidates who are credible turn to political consultants so rapidly, right? And that often sinks them.

Okay, so is that a reasonable analogy? You've put products in the marketplace before, and so in principle, you knew that on the commercial side. So, I would say something about this: I agree with you on your analysis on the commercial side. What I would say is that is on steroids in the political side, right? So even if you transpose the commercial instinct onto politics, you'd be missing it by a mile.

The other thing is, I came from industries that were a little bit different. I haven't really been in a consumer products industry or in the media industry. I mean, the industry that I spent the most time in was developing drugs for diseases that pharma had ignored systematically. That was an area where, look, it's a regulated process. I saw from a front row seat how broken institutions like the FDA really are.

But it's not an area where if you're pre-commercial—and everything that I did was in the research and development phase, not in the commercial phase—it actually, as entrepreneurs go, I actually did not necessarily have that same experience as many consumer interfacing entrepreneurs. So that may be idiosyncratic to me. Then I would say even for consumer interfacing entrepreneurs, Strive was a little bit closer to that because that's a fund management company that competes at Black Rock.

I had some experience. It was nothing close to what the importance is of that is in politics. It was all about— to call it sales and marketing in some ways undersells the problem. Because sales and marketing is once you're there, how much do you amplify? How many people hear your message? Whereas for me at the early stages of the campaign, and as I think about the last year and even some of the things that later came back to become headwinds for me when I was a front runner or a top four or top five candidate, were actually the path to getting there sort of set me up for the difficulties that I had later on.

But the first challenge was not even selling or marketing your message more effectively. It was literally like nobody would know that I was running for US president, even though I was running for US president. So, it was just getting on the map or being heard in the first place.

I just talked to Dean Phillips and his campaign obviously came to an end. For those of you watching and listening, Dean Phillips was until recently running against Biden on the Democrat side, and he faced this problem in spades. I think he probably faced all the problems you faced plus the additional problem that he was absolutely 100% shut out of the entire Democrat apparatus. People were literally told that if they worked for him, they would never do anything politically again in their life.

Then also, he had to face the same reaction from the legacy media. So, he didn't get it, and I don't think that he was attuned well enough to the alternative media, let's say the podcast crowd and all that, to capitalize on that quickly. Plus, they tend to tilt more in the classic liberal conservative direction anyways.

Okay, so you had to face this problem of getting on the map at all. So, how did that unfold? So, one of the things I did, and this is where I took good advice—you were one of the early people who offered a reflection on this—and I said, "What's the downside in trying? It makes a lot of sense to me. If the traditional media is ignoring you, go to the non-traditional media as a way to reach the people."

So, I adopted a strategy, let's call it a maxim early in the campaign, which was the "talk to everyone and anyone" strategy. Okay, left, right, center, cable news, non-cable news, print media, small time media, local media, individuals walking on the street recording it and putting it on social media. I wore a little camera or I'm wearing a little microphone right now. I wore a microphone pretty much everywhere I went; we just clipped the conversations and put it out.

Now, my social media following was a lot smaller than it ended up being at the end of the campaign, but still that was just a way of putting out my message into the world. What we started to notice was, you know, most of those things would get relatively small reach, but in a few instances, there were a lot of interactions where people actually began to take interest to say, "Wait a minute, that's an interaction of a kind that I haven't seen before. That's interesting to me."

Some of them were not necessarily casting me in the most flattering light; I might not have looked good, right? Just even visually, you know, the things that I would have said were sometimes a little bit unscripted, may not have been said as eloquently as I might have prepared for in a speech or a TV interview. But that was actually part of what made it appealing. That started to take off, I think, allowing the campaign—

There were a couple moments, and then I got called. I happened to be in New York City and they said, "Do you want to come on Don Lemon's show?" right? Because many Republican candidates aren't going to go on there, so they thought they have a Republican candidate who's running, "Why don't you go ahead and go on Don Lemon's show?"

We had a kind of interaction where this man lost, went haywire. I had just given a speech at the NRA meeting, and he picked on one particular thing that I said, which is a fact of history that black Americans in the United States did not get to enjoy their civil rights until they actually had their Second Amendment rights. The first anti-gun laws that were passed in the United States were designed to keep guns out of the hands of black Americans.

That was part of a broader historical trend where even countries like China or Iran or other countries around the world that claim to offer the same Bill of Rights that the US offers don’t have a Second Amendment. The funny thing happened, actually—I thought this would be a bit of an aside, but I'll offer it.

They said there was a list of topics—see, these are some of the tricks that the mainstream media plays. It was really interesting. There was a whole litany of topics they said this is what they would like to talk to you about. I forget what it was; it was something related to China policy, which you know I believe that the US needs to declare independence from China. They gave a couple of others, but I specifically remember that being one of them.

Then you go on the set and what do you know? They've airlifted quotes from my speech at the NRA meeting with their own commentary as the wraparound leading into the interview when they have purposefully given me—it's not like they didn't think about it or they said we're not going to tell you what we're going to talk about. They said this is exactly what we're going to talk about, a litany for a relatively new presidential candidate's first time on their show.

Here's a litany of what we're going to talk about, and it was not that. It was that they decided to change topics in a spontaneous way; it was designed as a trap.

So, in that case, anyway, I gave Don Lemon on air a history lesson, which caused him to— it ended up being a big favor for me on the campaign—lose his mind. You know, the earpiece that he had in? He was screaming at the people who were the producers in his ears, saying it was distracting him as he was engaged in this debate with me. It was such an uncomfortable moment for everybody involved, including anybody watching, that it ended up being the New York Times reported the next couple of days later the catalyst for Don Lemon actually getting fired by CNN.

I had a few interactions like that that started to kind of increase the steam behind people at least paying attention to my candidacy, and things went on from there. So, let me ask you about—well, let me ask you about that. So, I want to know what other moments went viral, right?

So, that's a really interesting one because one of the—well, there's two things about that that I find particularly interesting. The first is the way that these mainstream legacy media journalists set up the people that they're interviewing. So, the game seems to be—and this has happened to me many, many times—the game is very straightforward. The game is, we will poke and prod at you with ill-informed but provocative opinions, hoping that by being as annoying as possible, you will say something fatally stupid, demolish your reputation online, and elevate my reputation as a journalist, as an investigator, who can then walk away with like your scalp, so to speak, on his belt.

Now, that's the kind of interview you face where every single word the interviewer utters is a verbal trap. Okay, but my experience has been that if you keep your head during that interchange and you don't play the game, so you don't say anything stupid, you don't apologize, you don't get upset, that can turn viciously, viciously in your favor.

You said okay, and so that's interesting. So, I'd like to see your thoughts on that, and then I'd also like to know what other things you did in the alternative media and direct to consumer, direct to voter model that also went viral. You know, some of that's chance, right? If you put out 50 clips, you're going to get a Pito distribution of effect. But did you start to see a pattern for the clips that you got?

Okay, so let's unwrap that. Let's start with the gacha journalism first of all. Well, the gacha journalism—so my strategy ended up being, it wasn't really a strategy, I think it's sort of how I'm wired. First was to do exactly what you said, just rationally process exactly what they’re telling you and respond rationally. As the person on the other side increasingly loses their mind, you’re not doing what they expected or planned or set you up to do, which in turn I think makes them look far more illogical as a consequence.

When they were actually taking the raucous populist Republican to try to make fun of them, even for their own audience, they end up looking like the less reasonable ones. So, I went in The Breakfast Club, had a major viral exchange there where a woman, she was pressing me hard on the fact that I had only ever really had major accomplishments in the business world that had never been in public service, with utter unawareness that the last and I believe successful president of the United States, Donald Trump, came with a very similar background.

And yeah, I think she was frustrated that I wasn't falling into her traps, and then she ended up giving a soliloquy about her experience in sixth grade where she put together a coalition for lunch money or something like this, which to her own audience, which is a largely left of center audience, broadly panned saying that we don't want to really hear about your sixth grade experience.

We understand that somebody who has accomplished things in the business world can at least have a legitimate case for having his ideas heard. This is coming from the left. Don Lemon's firing—I had an exchange with Chuck Todd where he said, "How can you have the level of certainty that there are two genders?"

I explained in the manner of somebody who happens to have a biology degree, which I don't usually like using. You don't need a biology degree to know something about biology; you don’t need to have a Harvard degree to be able to have standing to speak on a subject of science. But I have those things, and for an audience that particularly wrongfully elevates their attachment of value to those degrees, I decided to use that in my favor and broke down for him.

Here’s what two X chromosomes mean; here's what an X and a Y chromosome mean, and that exchange went viral as well. I think this one was more by chance, but he quickly was no longer on the air at Meet the Press, which was his main show, shortly after I had done the same thing with Don Lemon—shortly after we had exchanges like that at The Breakfast Club.

Then, you think about the exchanges that I had on social media that ended up being the ones that really caught the public imagination were, again, interactions that I had in the field, let's call it, at the Iowa State Fair, at other places where we had protesters or people who were purposefully trying to either disrupt my events or others. I got to give them credit who were respectful but sharply disagreed with what I had to say and approached me in one-off conversations that weren't performative but were real conversations, authentic conversations between people who deeply disagreed on subject matter.

So, if I'm to put those together, both between the corporate media realm as well as in the, let's just say, real world translated into the social media digital realm, that’s the through line that I would draw. The thing that really ended up creating not just one-off but this ended up being a series of probably three, four months in there of repeated virality of interactions that were nothing more than the kind of interactions that I've been having for all of my adult life, which I enjoy, which I thrive on.

You know, think about the people I went to school with at places like Harvard or Yale; predominantly had political views that were different from mine. I leaned libertarian. Most of them lean liberal; some of them are even friends of mine and remain friends of mine to this day. Authentic, heated but earnest exchanges. In some cases, the person on the other side wasn't necessarily authentic in their motives, Take the Don Lemon, but you treat them as though they are, and then they self-immolate in front of you.

That ended up really lifting up the campaign in this case now far earlier than we expected. Okay, because when we saw me not lifting up off the ground, I think I calibrated myself to saying, "Okay, this is going to be a long haul. It’s going to be only after the debates begin, and let me at least try to qualify for those debates. Let me at least make that table stakes that I would qualify for the debates."

Then after that, it would be a steady buildup. Instead, something started happening where when I took the "talk to everyone" strategy, leftwing media, rightwing media, corporate media, podcasts and interactions, we actually saw a pickup that was then far earlier than I expected after I had recalibrated my own expectations, and that created new problems of its own, actually.