welcome to new beginnings with karen dell i am so pleased to have with me chris mather a friend and colleague and we're going to have an interesting discussion one that many people don't have with their colleagues because we travel in many different circles and we're going to talk about the election post and in particular about president elect donald trump we have different points of view if you have but i am definitely thrilled and was looking forward to the show so thank you chris for joining thank you very much for having me yeah so you and i were chatting before the election and you and i have come across each other in different circles in which we travel i think we had an instant click in terms of liking each other wanting to do stuff together yes and as the i don't know there yes it should be we talked in between and now you know president elect donald trump is you know just really less than two weeks away from his inauguration and you and i saw each other recently and we said you know let's do a show on this we are proof we are brave we are brave and so you know what we want to do is to understand because hillary didn't win so this is not a show about you know hillary versus donald it is really a show to understand why why donald why you supported him what you see in him for those of us who don't see the things that you  see this is really a show to have a better understanding of him so without further ado let's go right so before we even delve in i think it's important for the listeners to understand who you are obviously you have a british accent yes but you were born in england i was born in india but right in the fifty's and sixty's my dad was building textile mills in india and so i appeared over there and was sent back to england for schooling at the age of seven because if you don't get into the in the school system by seven you know sort of out and so i spent the next twenty or so years there and finishe english accent is forty two years out of date but yes i have been there and i ended up in princeton because i went from corning to a series of companies in new york to such and such which was at the time in the eighty's the largest ever agency in the world and then to into a brand which was probably the foremost branding company and i was managing director of the new york operation there and my biggest client was johnson and johnson so now you can see where this is going right they asked me to come inside and i was vice president of their wellness to vision johnson and johnson health management and moved to princeton that's what brought me here ok all right and you also have affiliation with the university your family does been doing various things with the university they gave him an honorary degree so he said all right i'm going to give you a present and at the time the university was very close to oxford he had been a graduate of oxford and he said  supporting the campaign for donald j chart i have to go back a long way to get into that it started maybe in the early two thousand as i was working with a company called leader technologies and  chairman and founder of leader technologies had in fact created the software that became the basis for facebook and a lot of other things and there was as you know a whole rumpus about whether facebook really invented that technology or whether indeed came from leader technologies and we do not need to get into that it's been discussed for years but in working with mike mckibben on the background to this we discovered some rather unattractive things through his research about the globalists in the world who had their eyes on america and were sort of infiltrating here and so we started to say this is going to be a very very challenging thing to ferret out and so we re doubled our efforts and so on and slowly and surely we came along to the election time when he said if anyone's going to have to deal with this it's going to have to be a very strong person so i come hillary and bernie upcoming i think it was the seventeen republican candidates so we started to watch them and say you know who do we think might be able to deal with this global this threat that's coming along and it sounds like an orwellian sort of conspiracy theory that the stuff is going on but in my opinion it really is a fact and you know julian the son who was i believe on hannity last night talking about you know where he gets his information from and so on it seems that there are these groups of people around the world seemingly not really including russia honestly but people like george soros and the builder book group and some rather powerful people around the world who are trying to get to become very influential here and so then the primar started and it was fairly evident that donald trump despite his foot in mouth disease was going to be the lead can do that where how does become fairly obvious as many people missed it well i don't think that really very good question  question and i have a butterfly mine for which i apologize so i tend to jump and i think it was in the way that he controlled the others you know the fact that he was strong enough michel and i decided that it would need to be decided we think that it should be an incredibly strong person to deal with this threat or this incursion or whatever and one by one the others fell by the wayside and so my butterfly mind jumped really to the end of the primaries where he was defeating the left right and center and of course hillary is an extremely strong candidate as we both know and so the thing that was slightly worrying to us it appeared that hillary might be slightly close to these global he bill clinton had been somewhat close to them and  she seemed to be right in that arena so we thought if she's she's certainly equally strong as mr trump but if she's closer to the group that we're worried about let's focus on mr trump so mike and taboo come to say absolutely but we thought if you look at the things that he has done he's had a very very up and down track record over thirty years he has had six bankruptcies as the new york times and the washington post and a few other people that very fast to point out but we looked at the things he had achieved and he seemed to have achieved an incredible number of good things around the world built this empire and so we were very impressed that he had the strength and he had the breadth of experience and knowledge to deal with world things not people have said all the time but he's never been a politician he's never been you know a military general or whatever but the other thing that was becoming evident to us in a little world was that there was an enormous amount of corruption in washington both in the republican and democratic side and that maybe there was a time to drain the swamp and that's not jumping all the way to the present very unattractive and all of the things we discovered in this period of several years on that blog they're all double checked triple checked all facts they're not really even opinions they just basically say this is what we found and then a son started to come along and he was finding exactly the same things now i've never talked with julie in this but it was like goose dumpy strange that he and we were coming up with the exact same things and then we got really where we said w think the country might be in more trouble than anyone you know and the general public would know and certainly sadly in my opinion if you read the new york times or the washington post you do not get a fair representation of what's going on  said we are really going to have to redouble our efforts to find out what we can and we started to things that would suggest we needed a very strong person and that of the republicans he looked like he was the only really strong candidate  and that's because he is not a politician he's not a politician he's not you know he goes sort of to the ten reasons what i thought that he should would be a good president and one of them was th bought and so sold i mean basically i suppose anyone can in some way shape or form but he is so wealthy he's been so successful he's been winning for so long that he doesn't need for his ego to have a job like the president of  because you know what has i think also been evident that his ego is extremely needy that you could even call him a narcissist he certainly quite a lot of people quite comfortable so it's interesting that you say his ego doesn't need it because i would suggest that his you know he died has dominated the news anyone would feel that he's not assisting and i don't know whether he is or isn't and i certainly can't defend him on that subject because he certainly gives all kinds of indications that he might need his ego feeding but what was coming through to me and to the people i was working with is that he maybe kid more about the country and what was happening with the country than even his own needs for ego feeding and support that with with evidence well i would say the evidence was that he started to put down things that indicated he knew where the bad things were and he actually doesn't tell a lot of things that he doesn't know i mean he keeps an awful lot to himself one of the things that he's mad about is people saying oh we're going to go do this and letting everyone know what's about to happen he likes to keep things him so from and just check them out with his you know very close contacts and comments and so on and then he started to  that he was not happy with certain things in the republican party and the democratic party he suggested that he knew what he might do about the things he was worried about and he said you know he got my attention with the debt when when he said things like people here we have a twenty trillion dollar debt but they can't relate to it it goes sort of right over the head and to he said one day does anyone know what a trillion seconds looks like and i guessed and various people in the room and we all got it horribly wrong a trillion seconds is actually thirty one thousand seven hundred ten years in seconds and so twenty trillion it is about six hundred and thirty four thousand years in seconds that's how big this debt is and then he said you know i want to deal with getting the debt down whilst rebuilding the infrastructure in the country while having a strong military and all of these things started to say well there's some contradictions in there and then he started to explain how he might do this for instance he is and has always been in my opinion i've read various of his books starting with the art of the deal and so on always in favor of peace  if you look i think he consistently has been against war but the leaders in the strong military his theory being that if you have a strong military people won't mess with you so i started to look at some of his things i looked at his contract with the american people to see that he he created this document which was just like contract with the american people and relates to what he would do in his first hundred days and so on and in reading those documents i began to be convinced he didn't know what he was talking about and then i look back at the rest of his career and he had had these strange things that he'd been involved with like the apprentice in the miss america pageant so whatever those pat i realized that he'd had an enormous number of years of experience of interviewing people judging people and that he might actually be quite good at judging people you know i know that he's been accused of having a  cabinet rather old white male ish i would counter that by saying in the and we by the way don't meet directly with donald trump and they're actually in mitt directly with donald trump myself i've known him and people around him johnson and johnson events too so i had a tangential passing acquaintance with him but a fascination in him as to whether he was a good guy or the narcissistic person he is portrayed to be and evidently i have come out on the side of saying no i think he really does care i think he really doesn't know what the problems are i think that more than anybody else i can think of which means more so than hillary i think he can deal with those problems and i started to read these things about what would he do one of them of course was safety security protecting the borders the richard wall discussions and i do think he might be serious about building that war and i do actually think he might get mexico to pay for an awful lot of it if not all of it and one of the reasons for that is all of the things he's done he has believed in the win win situation in other words he doesn't want to just go out and negotiate a tough deal and those guys get hurt and we win he wants a win win and if he negotiates with mexico that we're going to have a war it's going to somehow benefit both mexico and ourselves you've heard recently in the news that he's had fo and other people pull back carry a sword on building plants in mexico you have to know that he's offering things to mexico as well like access to market the certain of the things that mexico has he has always believed in the w so when i started to hear and read about his ideas as to how he would deal with the problems the huge debt the safety and so on somebody came up with these ten reasons why they thought he would be a great president and i just latched on to those those ten reasons ok so i want to pause again because we do have a trillion dollars in debt yes we didn't have debt after clinton bill clinton left and so we've gotten into debt through wars which he did you know say on public television or radio that he supported the war now maybe he changed his mind he spoke to other people in private but he's on record as having supported the iraq war but i'm not going to debate that because that's also fact but he is a person who is highly leveraged and i think he feels that his skill set is to be highly leveraged so i also see this ironic that he is concerned about national debt when i think he is probably and i obviously don't have facts around this but he himself says you know i use other people's money it makes me smart spin my own and getting mexico to pay for it is an example of using other people's money so i hear what you're saying but i i don't know that in his business dealings or in his personal dealings that he is you know he's not one to pay down on debt he's going to leverage debt to the hil we're leverage country as it is and so i mean in some respects maybe that supports your term or your viewpoint but i don't see him as a slayer of debt i don't think that's how he's been successful the second question i want to ask is what other than his empires that he's built around the world what other success are you pointing to i think basically i am pointing to the empire that have built around the world ok and you know having been in business why so for a long time i realized what an achievement it is when it really was i think in tough industries in difficult times an amazing success building those various businesses around the world the other thing that i think he achieved which i think is absolutely fantastic if you look at his family he's a fabulous dad you know he has this incredible family of five kids all of whom seem absolutely terrific and he didn't seem to have sacrificed all kinds of other things to be successful in business and i know there are stories about the fact that he maybe doesn't pay contractors and so on i have been privy to one or two of those stories and in fact they're always as usual two sides of the story or three and some of those stories that i know about the didn't pay because he didn't think the work was done right and he is he has a very hard times must you know he's reputation is you're fired if you don't do what he contracted you to do if you're outside the contract over time over budget you know he is tough there's no question on the other hand he's a very generous person as well you can go on the internet and see the various things that he's given to charity you can so he's and one of the other things i like about him is he has a great family he's generous he rescues things i don't know if you know the story about the woman ice rink ice skating rink in central park with yes mayor koch had been trying to resurrect for years over time over budget and so on so forth and he said this is ridiculous i'll take it over do it and he did it and he did it within time within budget and so on and you know that's to his credit that's to his credit i don't hear a lot of others and that goes back thirty years at least because mayor catch hasn't been mayor right in that long so you know we do hear that even for some of his rallies where he had people perform he didn't compensate them timely until they were pressed he you know the stories around people doing quality work and maybe there's a nick you know it's not that it was a botched job great but it was a minor nick in you know or they he went along on the pay out so you know small business who he favors because he can leverage us real attractive and it's very unattractive yet so i  haven't heard an overwhelming number of small businesses sing his praises which i find strange you know what i mean i find strange and i find that really hard i  don't see a lot of charities saying you know what he paid us frequently i hear well he paid us when we pressed you know and then of course you hear the story where he used his others people's money because i think that's his thought process ok and if that makes him smart it makes him smart so he does it personally does it really is foundation he does it with his business that he used other people's money to bid on two norma's pictures of him so now maybe that's our legal ok there's nothing ethically wrong great but there's the smell test you know there's the above the fold you pick the newspaper the financial times if you don't like the new york times the washington post there is some decorum where you think you know this this doesn't smell right it may be legal you know but it's not kosher you know i mean it doesn't feel like this is the way to go and i think he he from what i've read he pushes things to the envelope and that's a negotiation tactic ok so i do think he's a stronger go shader i think he uses all the tools at his disposal some of them are you know honorable tools when when i'm big believer and when women as opposed to win lose but some of them you know and i think that's where people get concerned about temperament they could get so concerned about that and you may not need to be a government i don't want to say operative with us the words coming to run are expert experience but but you do need to know there's a place for diplomacy there's you know there's  place for everything it can't all be that people are stupid that you know the way they you know they're i'm smart you're not his campaign certainly didn't seen it that way and you know as you said he key did control those seventeen other sixteen other candidates but he didn't do it in a way that was very attractive you know not not in the way that i was raised was was appropriate or polite was your yeah and so you know if political correctness goes out the window and then you say ok we're going to be friends later because i won it's my rules you know  those are those are not what we've seen as the way to behave as an adult as a leader of any sort you know of private industry of government it's just not the way that we conduct ourselves of carse we're now seeing more of that right but it doesn't necessarily feel right i hear you and you know it goes back to one should respect ones president and the you're touching on do we respect someone who does those sort of things my version of that is you don't have to love your president he has to be or she has to be the right person for the job and you know one of the things i do here is to record books for learning l i which used to be called recording for the blind and dyslexic and one of the books i did this year was william and just as book line well i have to tell you i had to stop reading at some points because i thought whoa churchill was so awful as a person you know he was basically he drank i think a bottle of scotch and maybe half of brandy a day he smoked cigars incessantly he was very rude to women he he said terrible things p c didn't come close to anything you did but he was the right man together with roosevelt and some very fine generals and so on to save the world from tyranny you don't have to like churchill and he was thrown out fairly soon after the war because he had done his thing he did what he set out to do with roosevelt and a whole bunch of other people and then his false began to show through and people said we don't like you're out you know and donald trump has got away with stuff in his life and you know we work fairly closely with his team on a daily basis and in the dia period which was a few months ago when he wasn't doing well at  all we were making suggestions and he wasn't listening evidently and he you know i'm not saying that we were right and he was wrong but he can't get away with some of the things he did when he was with the apprentice and so on he is now the leader of one of the most powerful collapse in the world he has to change his behavior absolutely so with all of that i have to say that i do agree with you it comes back to the team and i play very strongly feel this feel that the situation is so strongly in need of a very very strong leader that despite all of those things we can throw at him he is the right person for the job and yes he does have these slightly unattractive sides to his character but if everyone in life is a balance sheet and if you want the little best person for the job the reason i spent a year of my life and you know volunteered for him was because i think head shoulders and waste is the best person for dealing with the challenges of the things that are going on there are things that are going to come out i think in the next few months of people just don't know about yet about the global his threats and about some of the things the very unattractive things that have been going on in government chris thank you so much thank you very for being on the show and thank you for