Presidential Candidate Dean Phillips in conversation with the Besties + Xi's SF visit & more

Phillips asks to be called Dean. He says he bought an old International Harvester Metro van for Talenti promotions, saw how quickly people took to it, and built a government repair truck on the same idea for his congressional run.

The hosts introduce Phillips, 54, as the fourth presidential candidate in the series. He represents Minnesota's 3rd district. He says his father died in Vietnam when Phillips was six months old, and that a stepfather, Eddie Phillips, adopted him at three. He counts himself lucky, since many children who lost fathers in Vietnam had no such second parent, and says his job is to give others the same chance.

In 1993 Phillips, his father and a partner visited Poland and noticed striking vodka packaging. He says his father sketched on a napkin that if Absolut and Stoli sold for about $15, a $25 vodka could work. The family won distribution rights, then bought the distillery and intellectual property after privatization. He later applied the template to ice cream: where two big rivals dominate, they fight to the bottom, leaving room for an affordable luxury.

He now judges the launch too timid, since Belvedere sold by the bottle and only through restaurants and bars, so the family underestimated the category.

We didn't do a damn thing that had anything to do with anything that wasn't true.

A Jay Z video featuring the vodka, he says, made the brand pop within two weeks. The company also mailed 200 bottles to 200 influencers, and he says Robert De Niro then ordered a Belvedere martini at a bar that did not stock it.

Asked about selling to LVMH, Phillips says the buyer was very disingenuous and did not keep promises made to close the deal. He also calls the family's decision to skip a competitive sale process a mistake.

After 2016 election night left his daughters in tears, he says, he ran in a district that had not elected a Democrat since 1958. The incumbent had won a fourth term by 14 points. Phillips won by 12, campaigning from a coffee van.

Arriving in 2019, Phillips says Democrats and Republicans were put on separate buses, which he calls a systemic segregation strategy. He argues leadership keeps members too busy to threaten its power, and that only the two parties want to protect the duopoly.

His example of legal corruption is a PAC handing a $5,000 check to a member at a steakhouse, with that member sitting the next day on a committee where the donor has business. He cites 10,000 hours per week spent fundraising and has a bill to bar it from 8 AM to 5 PM.

He joined the Problem Solvers Caucus, which he says has 32 Democrats and 32 Republicans, and says Trump invited him and three other Democrats to the Situation Room during a shutdown. Surveys rank him between first and tenth among the most bipartisan members, he says.

a focus on fighting each other instead of fighting for each other.