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Howard Lutnick | All-In in DC! Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) Chamath and Friedberg welcome Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick!
(1:10) Howard describes his 30+ year relationship with President Trump and his road from business to politics
(14:44) Running Trump’s transition team, DOGE origin story, what it’s like working for Trump
(38:01) Balancing the budget and fixing GDP
(52:21) Tariff history and strategy, global trade
(1:10:34) Trump Cards, building better government software, AI thoughts
(1:22:49) Sovereign Wealth Fund strategy
(1:37:16) How his family reacted to his new role
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Howard Lutnick | All-In in DC! Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Howard Lutnick | All-In in DC! Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the All In podcast, the hosts engage in a dynamic discussion with Howard Lutnick, focusing on various topics including leadership, decision-making, and strategic planning. The conversation highlights the importance of having a clear vision and executing it effectively, with an emphasis on understanding which assets and strategies should be prioritized or avoided. Howard Lutnick shares insights into his family’s involvement in business, particularly his son’s role in running Canner, providing a personal touch to the discussion.
A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing leadership styles, particularly in the context of high-stakes environments like government and large corporations. The hosts and Lutnick explore how leaders like Elon Musk and Donald Trump make decisions, emphasizing the orchestral approach where multiple viewpoints are considered before making a final decision. This approach is contrasted with the misconception that the last person to speak to a leader has the most influence.
The episode also touches on the economic impact of large-scale government decisions, using the example of COVID-19 vaccine procurement to illustrate how strategic negotiations can significantly affect market dynamics, such as stock prices of companies like Pfizer and Moderna.
Actionable insights from the episode include the importance of having a well-rounded team capable of articulating ideas clearly, the value of strategic negotiation in business dealings, and the need for leaders to be adaptable and open to diverse perspectives. The recurring theme is the power of collaboration and strategic thinking in achieving successful outcomes, whether in business or government.
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Howard Lutnick | All-In in DC! Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:00
You live in New York much?
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00:02
Never. I I closed my house.
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00:05
Oh, wow.
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00:05
I basically, I tricked my wife. You know how your wife always wants to renovate your house?
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00:12
No idea.
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00:13
So my wife always
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00:14
what that’s like.
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00:15
My wife always wants to renovate my house. Right? Every minute I’ve been alive, my wife shah wanted to renovate parts of my house. So we moved out once a year and a half ago. We moved out for a year and a half about six years ago. And she only did half the house, and she still rues the day that she only did half the house.
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00:31
Really?
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00:32
Yeah. So that so this so that was the deal. What I did is I, went to House of Washington and said, do you wanna renovate the house? She said, yeah. I said, great. We hired a contractor.
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00:40
Well, you brought Brett Bearer’s house now. Yeah. That’s a beautiful house.
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00:43
We can
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00:43
talk Ai can talk about whatever you want, by the way. I’m happy to talk about serious things, casual things.
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00:48
No. Let’s just do this. Let’s ai
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00:49
roll because he’s Let’s roll. You’re fired. Already running. Right?
Speaker: 2
00:51
He’s on fire.
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00:54
Ai, besties. I I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions in there. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What’d you guys say? That was fun. That was great. I’m doing all in.
Speaker: 2
01:10
Howard, thanks for being here. Thanks for joining myself and David Freeberg on the All In podcast. I wanna take
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01:16
a step back before we talk about today and instead talk about your friendship with the president, how it started, how you guys got
Speaker: 2
01:24
to know each other, and walk us through the moment when you, you know, frankly, went out on a limb a little bit, stepped up, became the campaign finance chair, and then just that evolution.
Speaker: 1
01:34
So I’ve known the president since I was 30 years old. Sai, I used to go on the, call it, we call it the charity circuit in New York. Sure. So, there’s basically a charity party every night when you live in New York.
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01:47
Like the rubber chicken dinners.
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01:48
Ai, literally the rubber chicken. Yeah. And, so sort of every night you go out. And so the boss of my company, Bernie Kanter, he got tired of going, right? So he didn’t sana go. So he would send me with his ai, and I would be her walker. You know, I’m the 30 year old CEO of the company, and I’d take her to the party.
Speaker: 1
02:08
And, and after the party, I’d put her in a limo, and she’d go home, and DJT would say, well, let’s go out. And so we’d go out. It wasn’t planned, but he was at the party. He was 45. I’m at the party 30, and we chased the same girls. Okay?
Speaker: 1
02:26
It was basically it worked out fine. And by the way, here’s the thing about Donald Ram. He was the most famous, the most fun
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02:36
Yeah.
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02:36
The most interesting person. Thirty years ago, thirty three years ago. I mean, here’s the best thing. He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine 59 times.
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02:49
No way.
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02:49
And then he leans over to me and he goes, and 20 were good. And I’m like, but who can take that?
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02:55
Yeah.
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02:56
Ai mean, who could take it? Like other people when you have a bad cover of Ai Magazine, you’d crumple, right, and be sand on the floor. And sai he’s ai,
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03:04
But so Howard, is it is it that he’s just totally wired to understand that moment, like, of being a public figure? Or, like, what is it that’s so unique about what constitutes the ability to navigate that over forty years?
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03:18
I think it it it adds energy to him.
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03:22
To him.
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03:23
Right? So everybody else’s energy. What they don’t understand is people bring negative energy to Donald Ram. Right? And they’re just charging his battery. Okay? Your energy around him comes to him. So when I come at him with a lot of energy, he comes back with a lot of energy. Ai? It doesn’t matter.
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03:39
He never he never steps back. He just sort of takes it like the centrifuge
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03:43
Right.
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03:43
And then hurls it back at you. And he’s been that way always. So this is not new.
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03:50
This is just who he is.
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03:51
This is who he is. So he sai those other people who attack him
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03:54
Yeah.
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03:54
They think they’re attacking him. They’re charging his battery. Right. They’re literally charging his battery. So he comes back bigger, stronger, bigger, stronger. And once you understand the man, the most intuitive person that you’ve ever met
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04:09
Yeah.
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04:09
And people say, well, okay. So people who know me, I don’t suffer fools. And they have all these derogatory, my left liberal friends, all these derogatory statements about the guy. Right? And they know me really well.
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04:21
Yeah.
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04:22
Right? And they’d say, well, how can you work for him? I’d say, how can I work for him? The most intuitive person, he senses it. He knows it. He calls me up and he says, Panama Canal. That’s racist because Panama Canal, it just feels wrong. Right? And then he sends me on the quest to go I didn’t do anything. I just start the quest to go look at it.
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04:43
Yeah. Right?
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04:44
The mouth that’s east is a deep water port by the Chinese. The mouth, that’s west, is a deep water port by the Chinese. They’re building bridges over it. So our ships and our military ships should go under, right, in our hemisphere, a Chinese bridge. So then I said, okay, let’s go prove it.
Speaker: 1
05:06
So I have a friend of mine, he owns a big shipping company. I said, take two iPhones, put them on a stand, and just go through the Panama Canal. You know, the Panama Canal, they sort of drag ships through like this. And I said, just go video both ways. Yeah. Just video both ways.
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05:21
70% of every letter is Chinese. Then I’m talking like the sides of container ships, the stores, like, I’m not talking like
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05:32
The signage.
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05:33
Just just random signage ai you’re riding on a road. It’s all Chinese. And then I do the research, and I call him back, and I say the magic words between me and him. I have your path, which is Ai done it, I’ve done the legal work, I’ve done everything, right? So when you start talking about it, you have a foundation.
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05:53
It’s not just you talking. So people think he’s just talking. He’s never just talking. Yeah. He has people behind him who bring him his foundational, structural outcome.
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06:04
And then what does he do? He went and played golf that afternoon. He called me at seven in the morning. He sai, What’d he got? We talked from seven to eight. He went and played golf, Right?
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06:12
And that afternoon, there’s the American flag in the middle of the Panama Canal and some, you know, truth he puts out.
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06:19
Right.
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06:19
And that’s the fun part. Right? So you work for the the most intuitive ai. Yeah. Unbelievably smart, unbelievably thoughtful, who knows what he’s doing.
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06:29
So let let It’s
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06:30
so fun for me.
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06:31
Howard, let’s just go back one second. So you have this deep relationship with him. You guys are friends. Scott Besson told us this story that about eighteen months ago, though, he saw all this data about what was happening under Biden, and he was just so concerned that these deficits and debts were getting so out of control.
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06:48
He went to the president and said, how can I help? Can I help? That’s a story. But was there a moment for you that was, like, rooted in something other than friendship? Like, was there something on the ground where you sai, hold on a second.
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07:01
This is a train wreck and we need to
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07:03
get something because you you were the finance chair for the campaign.
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07:05
Well, no, I wasn’t the finance chair. I was the transition chair.
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07:08
Transition chair.
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07:09
Okay. So Ram ran transition, which we’ll talk about. But, so let’s go through it. So I’m friends with him, right? But Ai building my business, sai young guy building my business, and then nineeleven happens.
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07:22
Yeah.
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07:23
Okay? So I’m friends with the guy. I’m just friends with the guy, but then nineeleven happens. Kind, sweet, calls me all the ai, just good human being. Nice, warm, caring, good human being. Right? But then I’m knocked out. So what do I do next? I try to rebuild my company, take care of the families of nine eleven. You know, I had I lost 658 people who worked for ram.
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07:44
And, and we had a policy. We wanna work with people that we like. So when we had an opening, we didn’t use headhunters. We would say to everybody at the firm, does anybody know anybody who’d do this job? No.
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07:58
And so, you know, young lady works for me sai, you know, my best friend is an HR person. They have to have capacity. Yeah. But once they have capacity, imagine we hire that person. Yeah. Now what happens is it’s it’s not one big happy family. Yeah.
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08:12
But people really, really care about the company. And that’s our company that’s on the Top 5 Floors of the World Trade Center
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08:21
Mhmm.
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08:22
On 09:11 when the plane hits it. Kills everybody at the office. My brother Gary, he dies at 36. My best friend Doug, he dies at 39. I had just turned 40 that summer. Mhmm. I had a party. 65 couples. It’s my my fortieth birthday.
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08:37
Fortyieth
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08:37
birthday. Yeah. Right?
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08:38
27 people at my party get killed.
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08:41
Jesus. These
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08:41
are my friends. These are my friends. So I’m driven to take care of the families of the people who who ai. And I commit 25% of all of our profits, but the company is destroyed. Sai, we go from making a million a day, I was a rich guy, right? What’s the definition of a rich guy? No personal debt, no corporate debt, Ken Fitzgerald, no debt. So, how do you survive nineeleven?
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09:06
If you don’t owe anybody any money, the only money you’re losing is your money.
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09:10
Is your money.
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09:11
So we ai, and we take care of our friends’ families, and then we build the company back up. So you could see, like, I’m a I’m a special guest on the Celebrity Apprentice, the first season of Celebrity Apprentice when Piers Morgan wins.
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09:28
Did he fire you?
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09:29
No. No. I wasn’t a contestant. Oh, I
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09:31
was gonna
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09:32
I’m a little beyond being a contestant. That’s not a ai. I was a special guest. I’d come in, like, if you see during the auction, I’m standing next to him at the auction, you know, and I’m helping him. Like, I’m just his friend sort of as an extra all along the way, you know, every once in a while.
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09:44
You kept the friendship going as you’re rebuilding.
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09:47
We’re friends all the way, but I’m rebuilding my company.
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09:49
Yeah.
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09:49
And then so I’m not interested in politics. Ai? I don’t do anything in politics because Ai I got my head down. Right? We’re the financial crisis. Canada Fitzgerald is great in the financial crisis.
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10:00
Had you ever donated to candidates at all or not?
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10:02
Yeah. New York candidates.
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10:04
Okay.
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10:04
Ai. New York can sai think about it. You’re in New York. You try to pick, social liberals, fiscal conservatives.
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10:12
Right.
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10:13
If that even exists anymore. Yeah.
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10:14
Yeah.
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10:15
Ai? But if you’re in New York, you have to pick Ai, I grew up in New York, so I’m socially liberal. What else could I possibly be?
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10:22
Yeah.
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10:22
So, you know, so early when Chuck Schumer was young, before he became what the president now calls a Palestinian, you know, you know, he, you know Did he really? Ai did. I raised him. You know, I I raised him money and gave him money. Yeah. Donald Trump gave him money.
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10:36
Sai. Right? I I did too.
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10:37
Yeah. I mean, because he was he was, that’s what he said
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10:40
he was.
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10:40
He was social liberal fiscal conservative. And and, so I you know, we’d all give to those ai of candidates, but mostly giving to get saloni. Right. And to be able to, you know, ask him a question if you needed to ask him a question. But there was really no I had no drive Right.
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10:56
In that. Ai, I sai, the first four nights I slept in Washington in the last twenty years were when Donald Trump was elected. I had never slept there. I’d come down, visit a little, go home. Go home. What am I staying here for? So he calls me at the October ’23.
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11:16
Okay.
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11:16
So he’s already had his first tyler. You didn’t support or get involved.
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11:20
No, ai, I was sai I gave him money and I gave Hillary money.
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11:24
You gave Hillary money in the first ai.
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11:25
Meh, because Hillary was incredibly helpful to me post 09/11. Meh, she was a senator?
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11:30
Right.
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11:31
And New York needed help.
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11:32
Right.
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11:33
And Hillary was incredibly helpful. And I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships Yep. With a whole bunch of congressmen and they were gonna do nice things. Like Bill Young ran House Appropriations.
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11:46
Right.
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11:47
Bill Young was my friend
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11:48
Right.
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11:49
Through a whole variety of things that had to do with, I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and I used to walk around, and I would bring music there for the men who got hurt from the military who were in Bethesda Naval Hospital. And, we would walk around. I’d go with my wife, and then I would engage the young man with music.
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12:13
I’d give him music and ask him what CDs he wanted. This is when CDs were there, and I’d bring up a walkman. And my wife would pull the family ai, and, she’d pay a year of their mortgage and all their expenses. Because what people don’t realize is your son loses his leg. Right? Dad and mom come flying in, and they’re gonna stay by his bedside. Mhmm.
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12:34
What job do these people have
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12:38
Yeah.
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12:38
That allows them to be at their son’s world? And their world is falling apart because their son lost his leg. So their world is falling apart. But at home, their world is falling apart.
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12:47
Falling apart. Yeah.
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12:47
And so my my wife, would just just try to figure out how much money it was and just give them a check. Yeah. And no no form, no nothing. Just give them the money Yeah. And and help them. So I would bump into Billy Young and his ai, who were they were just, they ran then defense appropriations, and they were there just being good human beings.
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13:08
And so we became friends, and he said to me once, he said, is there anything I could ever do to help you? I’m like, look, you run you’re like a congressman from Florida who does defense appropriations. And I’m like a Jewish guy from New York who’s in finance. If there ever were two SKUs that we’re never gonna meet, this is two ships going, like, shoo, right? We got nothing.
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13:27
So I said to them, look, we’re just gonna be friends, right? We’re never gonna do anything. And then he runs House Appropriations. And so when New York needs money to rebuild after nine eleven, they go see Bill Young
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13:39
Yeah.
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13:40
To try to get a bill passed. Right. And he said, how can you come see me without Howard? Yeah. You know, this is post 09:11. So I’m running New York, and Hillary does a really nice job for New York.
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13:51
Yeah.
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13:51
And I told I told, DJT. I call him DJT because I’ve known him for always. I ai, I told him that I can’t forget.
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14:01
Yeah.
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14:01
I’m just not the person who’s gonna forget. Of course Ai gave him money. Right? But I gave and and ai the way, he still tortures me for it. Right. Ai You know what the best part is? As a
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14:11
good friend does. Yes.
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14:12
Right. You know what the point is? See, other people would would, you know, sort of curl back. Yeah. Ai? So here, right after he gets elected, okay, here’s the story for you. So right after he gets elected, he has a dinner in New York. Right? So he invites me to the dinner in New York because I’m his friend.
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14:27
And then while he’s giving his talk to his first dinner in New York, he goes, wait. Wait. Hillary supporter. And he points at me. Right? So I stand up.
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14:36
I go, hey.
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14:37
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
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14:38
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Okay? Because I gave him tons of dough. He knows I love him, and it’s fine.
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14:45
Okay. So we’re 2023.
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14:46
So we’re 2023, and he calls me. And he says, will you help me? Yeah. And I had not thought politics. Now, I I gave him money in 2020 reelection.
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15:00
Yeah.
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15:01
Probably gave him $10,000,000. I raised him $15,000,000. So I I was you know, once I I’m on his sai. The whole way through, I’m raising him money in seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, while he’s president. I’m totally on his side. Yeah. And I’m but I’m just his friend. I’m not engaged. Yeah. K? Because I’m still rebuilding my life. Yeah. K? And then 2023 calls me, says, will you help me? And I actually thought about it.
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15:27
Ai, and that was the first time I really thought politics. And then I said, yes. And I gave him $10,000,000 right then and there, And then I started talking to him. I started going on the campaign trail. I started doing research.
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15:44
I started doing knowledge. I sana I talked to him about everything. I talked to him all the time about everything. Did you
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15:48
love it? Because ai our friend, Sachs, we were talking at dinner last night. He seems to love it.
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15:55
Like There’s nothing not to love. As Donald Trump says, this is a thousand Super Bowls
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16:00
Right.
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16:01
For him. And for me, it’s only a hundred Super Bowls. Right.
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16:04
Ai just
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serious. But if you ever I mean, if if you’re dedicated to America and you’re willing to wear America’s clothing and to stop worrying about yourself and only care about America
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16:15
Yeah.
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16:16
And have no objective post. Yeah. The president hates when these people have like, they raise money post
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16:22
from
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16:23
people they’ve met in here. So I’m never gonna work again. Okay? I’m never gonna work. This is all I care about. I’m just gonna help America. So he asked me to help him. And I start thinking about it, and I start studying everything, and I read everything, and I read everything about the White House.
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16:36
I read everything about everything I can possibly read, because I’m just that way.
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16:41
Mhmm.
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16:42
And, then I started helping him. Yeah. Right? And I went to learn how he picked the judges, right, and the Supreme Court, and why he didn’t act. And I’m just very detailed. And so I started studying what transition is. Right. Right? And I started studying it, and I started studying tariffs because he wanted to talk about tariffs.
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17:05
And he’s always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a rip off of Meh, and I started studying everything about it.
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17:10
Yep. And
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17:11
so he and I would talk about it, and we knew everything about it, and then he picked me to run transition.
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17:16
Okay. Sai, we’re gonna talk about tariffs in a sec, but so, double click into transition, what did you find that was so interesting? Ai, what’s
Speaker: 1
17:23
I’ll give you an example. So, there’s a book called The Gatekeepers that was ai. People gave me, Oh, you should read this book. And it’s about chiefs of staff.
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17:31
Okay.
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17:32
And basically, there’s another way to call it. It’s called The Jerks. Right? Because what they do Imagine you’re the gatekeeper.
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17:40
Yeah.
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17:40
You’re the gatekeeper of what?
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17:41
Yeah.
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17:42
Of the man who was elected president of The United States Of America, that he needs the gates kept from him? And if you listen to Nixon tapes, you hear him scheming to try to learn anything. Because what happens is the chief of staff, everybody reports to the chief of staff, and the chief of staff reports to you.
Speaker: 1
17:58
So you can’t get on Air Force One without asking the chief of staff. Mhmm. You can’t get a document unless you have the chief of staff. No one can come see you unless you have the chief of staff. And if they take your phone away, you know what you are? You’re imprisoned. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
18:11
And that’s the gatekeepers. So I said to Donald Trump, I said, look, you fired Reince Priebus, who was your chief of staff. Then you fired John Kelly, who was the chief of staff. Then you fired Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff. Then you would have fired Meadows, but you didn’t get a chance because you, because of the next election. So I said, why don’t you fire the job?
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18:30
What you need is a chief of staff, who’s actually a chief of staff, not who’s the gatekeeper.
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18:38
Ai.
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18:38
Right?
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18:39
And so that was an example of how I changed it. And so Susie Wiles is perfect for Donald Trump. You know why? She lets him be him. John Kelly took away his phone. Right. So he couldn’t communicate with anybody.
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18:55
Oh, wow.
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18:56
Whereas Susie embraces who he is, helped him get elected, ran a great campaign.
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19:01
Yeah.
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19:02
She’s perfect for him in this role. And sai, that’s what I brought. So I brought, like, an understanding of him Right. And an understanding of the role. Right.
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19:14
And how
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19:14
to partner with tech. Convinced your friend David Sacks every time he said I can’t do
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19:18
it. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
19:19
I would call him and say it’s an emergency. It’s emergency. I need to see you in flight. I go, what is it? I go, you need to join the administration. He goes, that’s what the emergency was? I go, of course.
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19:27
And was it and Howard, was that when you conceived originally Doge in that initial was that
Speaker: 1
19:33
during the transition? Alright. So Doge Yeah.
Speaker: 0
19:35
We should talk about Doge and tariffs.
Speaker: 1
19:37
Okay. So Doge comes it’s it’s October of before the election.
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19:46
Okay.
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19:46
Early October.
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19:47
October ’20 ’20 ‘4.
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19:48
October ’20 ’20 ‘4. Yeah. Ai, the beginning Yeah. Of October 2024. And I called the president, and I said, I need, I need to spend an hour with you because I have my big ideas.
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19:59
Yeah.
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19:59
Yeah. Ai? So he gives me, he says, Look, I’m not sure what to do October 7. Right? Right. Why don’t we figure out what I should be doing October 7? So we ai we’re sana go out to the Ohel, which is a super religious Hasidic Jewish, Ai. You know, the people who wear black hats think he’s the Ai, and they have a crypt for him, where you write a note, and you put a note in.
Speaker: 1
20:23
Ai? And sai, we agreed we’d go out to that, to that gravesite, and we’d probably win 60,000 of those kind of voters, which is pretty cool for a day. And then we drove there and back together, the two of us, so I had an hour and a half just he and me talking. And I said, I want to balance the budget in The United States Of America. And I this is the way we’re gonna do it.
Speaker: 1
20:49
We no one’s ever checked the just under $4,000,000,000,000 of entitlements. Every politician thinks what you have to do is you have to take the retirement age from 65 and make it a 70. Ai. And you have to do this and this and this and this because they never think about the money. Totally. But people like us Totally.
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21:05
Would say, what’s the first thing you do? What’s the value I’m getting for my money? Totally. Ai? And what you find is if nobody ever, like as in ever, like I could say the word ever 12 times, has looked at where the money goes. Totally.
Speaker: 1
21:22
And so there’s not even a process to get it back when you send it to the wrong person.
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21:27
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 1
21:27
You just send another one out. Yeah. Like, think about it. You just well, I sent it accidentally. Accidentally. Notice how it’s accidental?
Speaker: 0
21:33
Right.
Speaker: 1
21:33
It’s always accidentally sent to the wrong person. Really, you wouldn’t ever say the 5,900,000 people who work for the government. There could be some crooks in there. Right. No. No. No. It’s all accidental. What a load of nonsense this is.
Speaker: 0
21:45
There’s some percentage of this.
Speaker: 1
21:47
What what you would say Yeah. And you would say
Speaker: 2
21:50
No. Just zero base it and let’s figure out where It’s
Speaker: 1
21:52
gotta be 25%. Yeah. We’d all sai, if it’s never been checked, how could it not be 25%? Right.
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21:57
How could
Speaker: 1
21:57
it not be? Right. Ai the answer is that’s a trillion dollars a year. Right. Okay? So I said, I think we’re gonna cut a trillion dollars a year in expense, and then I think we can, through tariffs and other means, we’re gonna get revenues of a trillion dollars.
Speaker: 0
22:11
K. Incremental revenue.
Speaker: 1
22:12
Incremental revenue. Yeah. And we’re gonna balance budget.
Speaker: 0
22:14
But all but sorry. Let me just ask one question. How did the tax cut to the extension of the tax cuts?
Speaker: 1
22:19
There there are zero basis.
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22:20
Ai me
Speaker: 0
22:21
Zero basis.
Speaker: 1
22:21
Where I was yesterday and where I am tomorrow, I meh, oh, it’s a tax cut. No. It’s not. It’s the exact same thing as yesterday as today. To say continuing yesterday tomorrow is, like, silly.
Speaker: 0
22:31
Sai let me ask you let me ask you on tariffs. Having studied it yourself, when there’s higher tariffs, people purchase less, things cost more.
Speaker: 1
22:40
No. We’ll talk about tariffs. Let’s let’s just finish Gotta focus on that. Finish Yeah. Doge. So I’m in the car with him. Right? And I sai, we’re gonna balance a budget. And I said, ai I have one favor to ask of you. If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year for The United States Of America, which by the way is about 85% of America.
Speaker: 1
23:05
Right. Right. And the reason you sana work for Donald Trump is he looks at me and goes, sure. Like, you realize the president of The United States said if you balance a budget, sure. And he’s not lying. He’s not kidding. He’s like, yeah.
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23:21
That seems that seems like a great idea. Right. Right? And so and then I tell him, okay. I’m gonna go recruit Elon. Because Elon’s all in.
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23:31
Meh.
Speaker: 1
23:32
Right? He’s already said he’s all in. Yeah. He’s already said he’s going to Pennsylvania.
Speaker: 0
23:35
Yes.
Speaker: 1
23:35
Right? So I call Saloni, and I don’t know Elon. I don’t know, but he’s perfect for this. So I use my superpower, which is Ai call everybody else I know who knows him, and they arrange. And I’m texting with him, and he agrees to meet me on October 14. So I fly down to Brownsville, Texas. He’s gonna catch the rocket on October 14. Right.
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23:56
So that’s
Speaker: 1
23:57
what he invites me down for the rocket catch.
Speaker: 0
23:59
That’s right.
Speaker: 1
23:59
Having not he’s not inviting me for the rocket catch. He’s just inviting me down that that’s a good day for me to meet him. So I fly down, I see the rocket catch, which is awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And then I expect to meet him.
Speaker: 0
24:10
By the way, very pivotal day in the in the campaign. If you remember, Biden sort of didn’t pay as much attention to it. Trump was pretty engaged. Elon was supportive of Trump. So when he actually caught the rocket, the media was almost, like, frozen waiting for it to fail. And it didn’t fail, and it worked.
Speaker: 0
24:25
And it was just incredible.
Speaker: 1
24:26
I was waiting for Elon. Okay? So I flew down to see Elon, and, with with my with my sana. And, so we watched the rocket, right? And then they sai, okay, he’s sana go hang out with his engineers and party with them. Seems reasonable. It’s like an hour, hour and a half. And then he just goes dark.
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24:46
You’re still waiting.
Speaker: 1
24:47
I’m just sitting there waiting. And then they take me and I go to like the equivalent of a Margaritaville. You know, where you have ai a basket and you get quesadillas and
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24:55
get a It’s
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24:56
a muffled flavor.
Speaker: 1
24:56
And you get a a diet coke in a in a in a red sort of plastic thing that’s about this tall. It’s like Yeah. Ai love that. 4,000 ounces of diet coke in it that comes in this big Love that. But now to his credit, he sends me all the executives from SpaceX. Yeah. Ai hanging with me. Yeah. But he’s dark. And what happened is, he took a nap. He was up all night Yeah. Doing the engineering, and he went to sleep.
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25:17
So then when he finally wakes up, so I’m just sitting there, like, you know, doing the ai, I don’t know him really. So I’m just doing the thumb twiddle. I’m going, okay. You know, this guy’s
Speaker: 2
25:27
He had a couple of tasty ears. He’s a
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25:28
good way.
Speaker: 1
25:28
Sees me. Right? Yeah. So then he wakes up. He says, come to my house. Right? I’ll see you in my house. So his house is 1,200 square feet. It’s got the furniture in it that I had when I graduated from
Speaker: 3
25:38
college.
Speaker: 0
25:38
Meh. Ai.
Speaker: 1
25:39
Okay? I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding.
Speaker: 0
25:41
Oh, we know.
Speaker: 1
25:41
It’s 1,200 square feet, and it’s got the furniture, plastic, chairs, and okay. So Ai say, we’re gonna balance the budget. I need to cut a trillion. He’s like, I’m in. Right? He says, I think we should cut 80% of the federal government because the essential employees if the government shutdown, essential employees are 450,000.
Speaker: 2
26:06
Yeah. Okay.
Speaker: 1
26:06
And there’s 5,900,000 people who work for the government. Meh. How can 450,000 be essential, and there’s 5,900,000? So he says, Ai Twitter, I think we should cut 80%.
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26:15
Yep.
Speaker: 1
26:15
And I say, I know how to cut 50. And he says, I sana cut 80. I said, I know how to do 50. He goes, Arya you with me or against me? I go, I know how to legally do it. What do you have? And my son says it was like two alpha dogs just, like, fighting with each other for the first half hour. And then, ai then, so then x comes in.
Speaker: 1
26:38
Right? And then he’s gotta walk x he’s gotta walk his son x out. So he walks his son x out, and I’m thinking maybe the meeting’s over. Right? Because we’ve been together half hour, forty minutes, and maybe it’s over.
Speaker: 1
26:48
Because he got up, and he walked out, and he comes back, and he sits down, he goes, Howard, this meeting is ai? That’s what he sai. This meeting is and we sit down, and we map out the plan. I tell him what a gratis vendor is. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
27:01
Because I designed because I was not gonna go into the government. I was doing transition.
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27:04
What is a gratis vendor?
Speaker: 1
27:06
A gratis vendor is, is a an approved vendor for The United States Of America that gives product to the government, doesn’t sell it.
Speaker: 2
27:15
Okay.
Speaker: 1
27:16
So therefore, I don’t have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor because you’re giving it to us. And then if you give it to Arya two, which is the president’s stuff, then the president can accept it. Right? Because it’s give.
Speaker: 2
27:32
Sorry. How what’s an example of this? Like, just to maybe
Speaker: 1
27:34
I write some software. You write some software. I write some software for the commerce department to do a better job of x ai.
Speaker: 0
27:41
Mhmm.
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27:41
You
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27:41
just give it to meh.
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27:43
And then
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27:43
I do QA on it, and I can take it. If you sell it to me for $1 we go into government hell.
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27:49
Right, the whole rigmarole.
Speaker: 1
27:50
Ai, but if you give it to me, right, and then I set up, you know, so I said I’m calling it Doge. And I registered the name Doge.
Speaker: 0
27:59
You said that.
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28:00
Of course.
Speaker: 0
28:00
And were you familiar with Dogecoin and all
Speaker: 1
28:03
of this? It’s Elon. I’m so sorry. Sai what happens is in in the Defense Production Act
Speaker: 3
28:10
Yes.
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28:10
In World War two
Speaker: 0
28:11
Yes.
Speaker: 1
28:12
In order to get all the great executives of America to help with production, they named everything after jazz singers or everything, that of the people who were on the committee, that it would make them laugh and smile.
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28:24
Okay.
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28:25
Ai? So I picked a doge sai he would laugh and ai, and he sai, get the f out of here. Like, when I sai, we’re gonna name it doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which I didn’t think of. It was on the Internet sort of floating around in June.
Speaker: 0
28:38
Yes.
Speaker: 1
28:38
Right? But I literally registered it. Right? As the Department of Government Efficiency, like, make it a real thing as a gratis vendor. And I said, this is how I’ve done it for me.
Speaker: 0
28:49
Yes.
Speaker: 1
28:49
So that I can run Cantor Fitzgerald. You can run SpaceX. Right? You you’re not you don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff. Because you’re not working for the government. You’re just giving stuff to the government. Yes. You are literally giving of yourself. Right. But you’re not looking for anything.
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29:06
You’re not taking any money. You’re not owning anything. You’re not doing anything. You’re not on that side of the wall. You’re on this side. Yeah. You’re outside. Yeah. Right?
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29:14
And so we we had fun. We talked for two hours. And then on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside, and I put up, welcome to Doge. We are going to rip the waste out of our ai, government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump president.
Speaker: 0
29:35
Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 1
29:36
And and I posted that with my I probably at the time had 25,000 viewers, and I got 45,000,000 views.
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29:43
Wow.
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29:44
Right? So it was me and Eli.
Speaker: 0
29:45
Yeah.
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29:45
And that was the beginning of Doge. Meh. Right? Then Ai ran transition, which is so for the transition, we had I had a room in Marlak.
Speaker: 0
29:55
Yep.
Speaker: 1
29:55
K? Big conference table in the middle. Four eighty five inch screens on one side and mirror four eighty five inch screens on the other ai. So that you and I could talk to each other. So the president sat across from me. Yeah. Elon sat oh, and then I’ll tell you one other story about Elon. So he wins the election. President wins the election.
Speaker: 1
30:12
He accepts it, like, Wednesday at 02:00 in the morning. Right? Elon’s not on stage. If you sai, I’m on stage. Elon’s way in the back of the room.
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30:21
There’s a thousand people in the room, 2,000 people. He’s way in the back. He he goes home. Thursday afternoon, I call. I’m doing a dry run of the launch of my transition, right? And the president is superstitious. He’s never had one conversation with me about transition. He totally trusts me.
Speaker: 1
30:38
He wins the election. Now he’s got a, like, you know, Ai sai on Jesse Waters But he
Speaker: 0
30:44
didn’t talk to you ahead of time about who
Speaker: 1
30:46
he wants. About one job, about one thing. Wow.
Speaker: 3
30:48
Because he’s
Speaker: 0
30:48
He transitioned until the election.
Speaker: 1
30:50
Because he’s superstitious. He’s superstitious. He’s just
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30:53
wanna be sick. Like, don’t
Speaker: 1
30:53
waste your time.
Speaker: 2
30:54
Just don’t jinx it.
Speaker: 1
30:55
Right? Just go win. Yeah. And you gotta go win. So what happens is he, so I’m doing a dry run. So I call Elon. And I said, where are you? He goes, what do you mean? I’m in Austin, Texas, whatever. I go, what are you doing? I mean, what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected if you’re not gonna help him pick the cabinet?
Speaker: 1
31:20
Ai, come on. Right? Because the way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions. Mhmm. He likes them.
Speaker: 1
31:33
And anybody who says, Oh, the last person who sees him gets him, that’s because they don’t know him at all. Ai. Right? The answer is it’s an orchestra. Ai?
Speaker: 1
31:42
And I would say, Okay, I’m the first violin.
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31:45
You
Speaker: 1
31:45
know, at the time I would say I was, you know, I would describe myself as second violin.
Speaker: 0
31:48
Yep.
Speaker: 1
31:49
Right? So this is an orchestra. So the president’s not gonna make a decision with me and him saloni? Yeah. -No, he’s gonna have Sai it went like this. President’s sitting across from me, right, at the conference table. Elon to his left. Susie to his ai. Right? J. D. To my left.
Speaker: 1
32:06
Linda McMahon, who sai my co chair, right? But she wrote all those EOs that he did. That was shah was responsible for, and I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. So she’s sitting to my right, JD sitting to my left, Don Junior, ai, Stephen Tyler. Yep. And he, there was always 12 people in the room.
Speaker: 1
32:24
They were never ai, meh and him, rushed in the corner doing this and that. Right. Never. And what we would do is Ai would put eight candidates on one screen.
Speaker: 0
32:32
Right.
Speaker: 1
32:33
Right? And then big candidate on each screen. Right. Most beautiful AI picture of you you’ve ever seen.
Speaker: 0
32:38
Right.
Speaker: 1
32:39
And people would walk in and go, wait to get that photo.
Speaker: 0
32:40
Right.
Speaker: 1
32:41
I’m like, what do you think I did? I took three of
Speaker: 0
32:42
my photos. Ai heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition, that you walk in and everyone’s photo’s up on the screen.
Speaker: 1
32:48
Everybody’s on the room, and
Speaker: 0
32:49
so what happens That’s a candidate for a role, and then you guys would debate it. Right.
Speaker: 1
32:52
So what happened is a big picture of the person
Speaker: 0
32:53
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
32:54
Their key highlights of the resume, not boring, their education
Speaker: 0
32:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
32:58
Right? And then you would click a button and you’d see him speak. Twenty seconds at a time, four of them. Ai, so it was about eighty seconds, and you’re not speaking about the job. Right. Just like how do you present? Totally. And what you can see is his whole cabinet can talk. Totally. All of them.
Speaker: 0
33:17
Totally.
Speaker: 1
33:17
Because he picked them knowing Ai need you to be able to talk to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there and that’s key to him. And what I would, the way I would joke to people is say how do you do it? I go watch. Pitch, so you’d throw him a curve ball. He wouldn’t swing. Meh would throw him a fastball, he wouldn’t swing. He’d throw him a slider, he hits the ball, hits it to my glove.
Speaker: 1
33:35
I go, here you go. You go, well, how do you know that? I go, because I know the guy for thirty three years. I know what he wants. And he loved the process. And you know what happened? You saw what happened. Right? First day, eight candidates, 12 jobs, national security. Okay? He says, what do you want?
Speaker: 1
33:52
I go, eight to four. I put up eight candidates. I recruited everybody. I had 150 of the best Republicans in The United States Of America. They each gave me five people who then gave me 10 people. I had thousands of people to pick from. The whole government was set up to pick ram.
Speaker: 1
34:09
And then we picked candidates. I had eight for every job.
Speaker: 0
34:12
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
34:13
Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight to four, that’s Friday. Sunday comes in, four to two in the morning, I fly everybody in for the two, I prep them, we go in and meet them, two to one, final interview, give them the
Speaker: 2
34:28
job. Wow.
Speaker: 1
34:29
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Monday, Tuesday, Monday we’re done with national security. Okay? Now we’re rolling on, and it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate, everybody knew it, everybody was prepped, everybody was aware, everybody was done. You know, that’s why I had to
Speaker: 3
34:45
keep the
Speaker: 1
34:45
heck out of David Sacks, because I needed David Sacks
Speaker: 0
34:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
34:48
To be in the government. I recruited David. I pounded on David. You can ask David. Right? I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally sai, okay, I’m gonna do it, right? And I did that for everybody.
Speaker: 2
34:59
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
34:59
Right? And I made sure he had the greatest choices. And then every once in a while he would call me at night and say, throw this guy in, throw this guy in, throw this guy in. We did a meh on everybody.
Speaker: 0
35:09
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
35:09
But I didn’t take out anything negative. And I am not a negative person, you can tell. Yeah. I’m positive. So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate?
Speaker: 0
35:19
And that was there was no game theory. A lot of people speculated there was game theory that we’ll put a mix of people that will assume some won’t make it out of committee and then we’ll end up with the the ones that we do want. Everyone was the number one choice.
Speaker: 1
35:32
Only one. Only one. And that
Speaker: 2
35:34
was Matt. Matt. Yeah. What happened with Matt Howard? How did that
Speaker: 1
35:38
process work? We he was tortured by his attorney general in the first term. And we were not gonna have that ever again. Right? So we needed strong backbone, strong capacity of which Matt Gaetz has it. Yeah. And I know Matt Gaetz and he has it, right? But we did not know what that vet was gonna say from that report from Congress. So here was the ai.
Speaker: 1
36:00
We fight for him, and we fight for him to get through. And then we read the report. The report’s not bad. Meh, the president’s been tortured ai people blaming him for stuff that never happened. Oh, 30 ago, he raped this woman in the in the dressing room of Bloomingdale’s.
Speaker: 1
36:16
I mean, what a load of crap. Mhmm. Right? It’s just not true. None of it’s true. Mhmm. It’s ridiculous.
Speaker: 1
36:22
So he he comes at this saying, I know you’re gonna get tortured with ridiculous. Right? So then, he says, If it’s ridiculous, then we support men. And if it’s not, we have Pam right here, right now.
Speaker: 0
36:36
So that was lined up.
Speaker: 1
36:37
So that everybody knows it’s right here, right now.
Speaker: 3
36:40
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
36:40
And it’s three d chess.
Speaker: 0
36:41
Okay.
Speaker: 1
36:42
Sai we read it, Pam.
Speaker: 3
36:43
Okay.
Speaker: 1
36:43
It’s like Pam in a hundredth of a second. Right. And Pam is a rock shah. And you could argue that you would say, Well, why didn’t you pick her first? You know what? He’s the president, he plays three d chess, He did it his way. And you know what? But there was no candidate up there
Speaker: 0
37:01
-Yeah.
Speaker: 1
37:01
-Who wasn’t right. -Yeah. -Right? And we could talk about all the detail and how he thought about it, when meh went, but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive, and so right. And what does it produce? The greatest cabinet ever. The most capable, thoughtful, best able to communicate.
Speaker: 1
37:19
I mean, it’s so fun to be in a room with these people because these are world class people, the best I’ve ever done.
Speaker: 0
37:26
We shouldn’t betray confidence, but Ai mean, we were in a room earlier this week with several of them and everyone had a moment to speak. It was unbelievable.
Speaker: 2
37:35
I mean look I
Speaker: 0
37:36
Every single one of them you’re like I
Speaker: 2
37:38
mean he’s been a leader
Speaker: 0
37:39
of the country. Ai
Speaker: 1
37:40
They’re all great. That’s the point. He picked. He picked greatness. Now I was the recruiter, so I was recruiter in chief. But I
Speaker: 0
37:47
I can understand why now, by the way.
Speaker: 1
37:48
Well, but think about it. If you take someone like me
Speaker: 0
37:51
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
37:51
And you say just be a headhunter Yeah. I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever to live. Because think about it. What’s the odds of saying, okay, Howard, Your whole job is just be ahead of you.
Speaker: 2
38:02
Ai the best guys.
Speaker: 1
38:02
I promise you I’ll be really good.
Speaker: 0
38:04
Can we go back to Doge? So you talked about the gratis vendors. Maybe there’s other stuff that you can do with executive action, the president can do with Doge, etcetera. Can we talk about congressional budgets? How how do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along? And is the plan to bring Congress saloni? I’ve asked this evescent.
Speaker: 0
38:24
I’ve asked this several times since we’ve been here, and it’s the thing that gives me the most heartache and the most headache ai I worry about whether this actually gets there given congressional interests.
Speaker: 1
38:34
I think congress works with something called scoring.
Speaker: 0
38:40
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
38:41
Right? That that if it comes from their pen, it counts. If it doesn’t come from their pen, it doesn’t count. But the fact is money always counts. It just doesn’t count for their scoring, but their scoring is only part of the game, right? The outcome of the game is what matters to me, Elon, our cabinet, and Donald Ram. Okay? The outcome of the game.
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39:08
And I’m telling you, the outcome of the game, by me and Elon. Now, a funny part of it is, so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn’t want to leave Pennsylvania, Right? Because he you know, Elon, he’s committed to Pennsylvania.
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39:21
Yeah.
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39:22
So I convinced him he’s gotta come, and we have a plan. I’m going to say to him, so I everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God. I’m the only one who introduces Elon. So Elon comes on stage with meh. There’s the two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden, the only time ai two of us are on stage.
Speaker: 1
39:39
I’m the fourth speak, he’s the third from the end, JD is second from the end, and Donald Trump is last. Okay? So he’s supposed to say, when I say to him, How much are you sana cut? The deal was he’s gonna cut $1,000,000,000,000 And then he’s supposed to say, And how much are you gonna earn? And I’m supposed to say, dollars 1,000,000,000,000.
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40:00
And then we’re supposed to say, together we’re gonna balance the budget of The United States Of America. That’s the little sort of thing. So I ask Elon, how much are you gonna cut? And he, because I don’t
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40:10
know what he said.
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40:10
He said 2,000,000,000,000.
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40:11
Well, because we’re in front of 22,000 people, and the place is erupting and he says 2,000,000,000,000. And then I’m sitting there going, and I’m like, I think I said all righty then.
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40:22
All righty then.
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40:23
Or something like that.
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40:23
You know what I mean?
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40:24
Like what was I supposed to say? Yeah. So later when he walks back to a trillion.
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40:28
You know you were you were caught off guard, but I mean
Speaker: 0
40:30
Did he ask quite how much he gonna earn?
Speaker: 1
40:32
No. No. Because he said 2,000,000,000,000.
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40:34
He’s ai, I
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40:34
got it all. Don’t worry, Howard. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
40:35
Like like I said, alright. Alrighty then. Yeah. And that was that. So then I walked off stage and, you know, he said 2,000,000,000,000. So ai, I’m gonna what am I gonna say? But the answer was always, ai? That 25% of the waste, fraud, and abuse is a trillion dollars.
Speaker: 0
40:49
Ai.
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40:49
And he’s got to cut and find the waste, fraud, and abuse of a trillion dollars.
Speaker: 0
40:53
Okay.
Speaker: 1
40:54
Okay? And that my job is to raise $1,000,000,000,000 of exogenous new revenues.
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41:00
New revenue for the government.
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41:01
And we right? I’m telling you, I’ve been here now two months.
Speaker: 0
41:05
Yep.
Speaker: 1
41:06
Right? I am more confident
Speaker: 0
41:08
It’s gonna happen.
Speaker: 1
41:09
And more excited.
Speaker: 0
41:10
Tell us how it happens.
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41:11
Well, hold
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41:11
on a second. So, Howard, let’s let’s finish this, and then we’ll move to tariffs and revenue generation. So there’s a lot of domestic terrorism. Is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house? Is it is it basically to put fear into people that are trying to find this waste and fraud? Is that is that what that is?
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41:29
The burning of the dealerships, the
Speaker: 1
41:32
If you’re I I describe it to people this way. Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their
Speaker: 2
41:38
checks Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
41:40
This month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. Mhmm. She just wouldn’t. She thinks something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.
Speaker: 0
41:51
Yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
41:52
A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling, and complaining. And if all the guys who did Vatsal, like Elon knows this by heart, ai? Anybody who’s been in the payment system, in the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
42:12
Because whoever screams is the one stealing. Yeah. Because my mother-in-law is not calling. I mean, come on. Your mother, 80 year olds, 90 year olds, they trust the government to trust okay. Maybe it got screwed up. Big deal. They’re not gonna call and scream at someone.
Speaker: 1
42:24
But someone who’s stealing always does. Yeah. So what happens is we need to get to sai the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately getting the money, have an inside person who’s routing the money. They are going to yell and scream. Mhmm.
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42:42
But real America
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42:45
is going to
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42:46
be rewarded because here’s the key.
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42:47
Benefit of the doubt.
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42:48
Not 1p should stop going to we’re the richest country on Earth. Yeah. Here’s the way I say it. I said, we have we have a ai budget. We have 4,500,000,000,000.0 of revenues. Meh. K. We lose $2,000,000,000,000 a year. Yep.
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43:03
We
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43:03
have a ai GDP, right, which people don’t understand, which I’ll explain a little bit. And we have 36,000,000,000,000 in debt. Meh. What number didn’t I say to a business person? What’s our balance sheet worth?
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43:16
Right.
Speaker: 1
43:16
I say $500,000,000,000,000 Right. The president says a quadrillion. But ai 500,000,000,000,000 or ai, 30 6 trillion? We’re rich. We don’t have to take 1 penny from someone who deserves Social Security. Not 1 penny from someone who deserves Medicaid and Medicare. What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s on disability for fifty years. It’s ridiculous. And they have another job.
Speaker: 0
43:42
And do we have to monetize our assets?
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43:44
We need to be smart.
Speaker: 0
43:47
Okay.
Speaker: 1
43:47
That’s all we need to be. And I’m gonna tell you things that are just smart. They’re not, oh ai god. This is the most brilliant thing ever. This is just smart. There are so many smart things we can do, like, you know, we’ll talk about the post office. Right? Think about this.
Speaker: 1
44:03
The post office has 625,000 people who work there, and they go to your house every day. You know what the census does? The census hires 625,000 people, trains them, teaches them, as interviews 2,000,000 people, trains and teaches them, hires cars. How about this?
Speaker: 2
44:16
That’s pretty smart. Genius. That’s pretty smart, Howard.
Speaker: 1
44:19
Right? Okay.
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44:20
Ai, obvious. Yeah. Right.
Speaker: 1
44:21
But here’s what it I tell you what
Speaker: 0
44:23
I’m ai.
Speaker: 1
44:23
So you’re so right. I’m really good at pattern recognition. Okay.
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44:26
Here’s one.
Speaker: 1
44:26
Like, tell me 625 of one and I sai point out 625 of another. This is the genius I
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44:32
bring to the
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44:32
government, sai. This is this
Speaker: 2
44:34
is core fundamental. You’re responsible for all the core data collection as well, aren’t you? Isn’t commerce responsible for generating a lot
Speaker: 1
44:39
of the Oh, GDP.
Speaker: 0
44:40
For economic analysis. Well, that’s why
Speaker: 1
44:41
I get to talk about GDP and how I’m gonna clean up the nonsense that isn’t GDP. You know, I can explain that if you make a tank and someone buys a tank, that is GDP.
Speaker: 0
44:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
44:50
But a thousand people thinking about buying a tank, ai? Who take your tax money and Ai give it to them and they go, and when should we buy a tank or not? That’s not GDP.
Speaker: 0
44:58
Right, you’re saying government spending should not be counted in GDP.
Speaker: 1
45:00
No, government spending to buy a tank. Right. Should be.
Speaker: 0
45:04
Right.
Speaker: 1
45:04
Government spending
Speaker: 0
45:05
That’s nonproductive. Nonproductive. This is tyler. This is so important. I don’t think
Speaker: 1
45:09
I don’t think
Speaker: 0
45:09
a lot of people realize this. How how much of GDP is nonproductive government spending?
Speaker: 1
45:15
How about we do one thing?
Speaker: 3
45:16
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
45:19
GDP. D means meh, P is product, domestic production. It’s not consumption.
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45:27
Ai.
Speaker: 1
45:27
If I go out and buy a Toyota.
Speaker: 0
45:30
Right.
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45:30
Right? That’s not GDP. Right? If I buy a Chevy that’s made in Meh, that’s a D. Right? So people think it’s like a consumption model.
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45:41
Meh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
45:42
Right? That’s not it. And you can check another one is this gross domestic income.
Speaker: 0
45:47
Right.
Speaker: 1
45:47
That’s also good. So ai the way, they’re about they grow about the same rate. It’s Right.
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45:51
It’s ai of fun.
Speaker: 1
45:51
Right. So the key for me is to take out the part that if I cut non productive, a million government employees who are non productive, meaning they don’t make tanks.
Speaker: 0
46:03
Right.
Speaker: 1
46:03
Right? If I take that out, it’s gonna look like our GDP declined. But you’d say, but what really happened? No. Our expenses went down.
Speaker: 0
46:11
This is so important, by the way, because people talk about a recession, and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about we’re gonna go into a recession if we cut all this spending. But the follow on effect of cutting nonproductive spending is that the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy where we make more things, we create more jobs, we create higher wages, and that’s the theory that you guys are trying to execute against.
Speaker: 0
46:37
Sai don’t think a lot of people in the general public fully understand that is so important to kind of explain and get across
Speaker: 1
46:45
here. If we put three people behind us and they sat behind us and they did nothing and each of us gave them a hundred and $25,000, just like this, here you go. And they just sat there. Right? What is that? Ai. That’s not GDP. That’s actually me taking my money and giving it to them. We’ve produced nothing.
Speaker: 1
47:05
We’ve no purpose of the earth. It was my money. The income, however I earned my income, was ai. And I just gave it to them. They didn’t really earn income. It’s really a transfer pricing model that is currently considered in GDP. Yeah. And it’s nonsense.
Speaker: 1
47:21
So if I stopped paying them,
Speaker: 0
47:23
Okay.
Speaker: 1
47:24
Ai? What would I do? The first thing you’d say is, well, then why am I paying so much tax?
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47:28
Yeah. Bang. Right.
Speaker: 1
47:29
Okay, so now we’re in the concept of where we’re going. So Howard,
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47:32
do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is? I’m sure you do.
Speaker: 0
47:35
If you take out non productive spending.
Speaker: 1
47:37
Yeah, but I I’m not sana talk about it until we release it because that’s the proper way to do stuff. Got it. Ai? But, and I’m gonna break that out.
Speaker: 0
47:44
I think it’s twenty five percent.
Speaker: 1
47:45
And I’m gonna break it out, and I’m gonna break it out for the last twenty years. And what you’re going to see 15%. Is every time the quarter, just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there. Right.
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48:00
And so
Speaker: 1
48:00
all of a sudden you have this jump in GDP. Right. Total lie. Right. Total lie. They basically they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter. Right. So that we have that, and you’ll see it. It goes the the the the whoop.
Speaker: 0
48:12
And then they can meh And then what
Speaker: 1
48:13
do you think the first quarter is? Wham o?
Speaker: 2
48:15
Yeah. Right.
Speaker: 1
48:16
Or the second quarter is wham o. Why? Because you pre speak it.
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48:19
Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
48:19
Right? And then you have this whole and it’s it’s gross.
Speaker: 2
48:23
Yeah. Yeah.
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48:24
K. That’s the only way to us, you’re ai, really?
Speaker: 0
48:27
But let let
Speaker: 1
48:28
me It’s so manipulated. Let me ask you. And the answer is
Speaker: 3
48:31
And I mean
Speaker: 2
48:31
and to your point that the the game that’s being played is we’re gonna take taxpayer dollars that people don’t understand once you give it to the government. We’re gonna create these waves of fake growth that try to tip elections sai that then the grift and the waste and all the fraud can then continue for as many years until the jig gets replayed over and over again.
Speaker: 2
48:53
And it seems like the buck is stopping with you guys because you’ve exposed it.
Speaker: 1
48:58
It’s going to. And that’s the idea. The idea is to take a trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse out Yeah. And then make a trillion from having other people resetting global trade. And once you understand global trade and how it makes sense and where it came from
Speaker: 3
49:17
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
49:17
Can you explain that to us?
Speaker: 0
49:18
Sorry. Before before we get there, I wanna ask one last question on on on the cuts. Can we speak in an, do we need to speak in a more empathetic way? Because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone’s pocket. Some percentage of that pays people a saloni, and they live on that income.
Speaker: 0
49:36
And I think a lot of the
Speaker: 1
49:38
No. No.
Speaker: 0
49:39
Okay. I think this is important for you to highlight because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and Doge and the budget cuts saying you’re destroying jobs, you’re taking money away from people that need their jobs, why are you why rich people are taking
Speaker: 3
49:50
money off.
Speaker: 1
49:50
Give you a sad example.
Speaker: 0
49:52
And so, like, help us understand. Are people going to lose their jobs?
Speaker: 1
49:54
I’m gonna give you a sad example. We all remember during the COVID, there was the PPP money. Yeah.
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50:00
Right.
Speaker: 1
50:00
Remember that?
Speaker: 0
50:01
Yeah. Totally.
Speaker: 1
50:02
So it was proven that 200,000,000,000 of the 1,200,000,000,000.0 was going to Chinese fraud gangs. What? Why?
Speaker: 0
50:13
Is that proven?
Speaker: 1
50:14
You just make up a company. Right. You know, Joe’s Deli.
Speaker: 0
50:18
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
50:19
You make it up ai Joe’s Deli, right? Say you’re in trouble, file, and they sana you money. Yeah. So why wouldn’t Chinese gangs do that? Come on. So we show, not me, but people showed the government, those people, that money, and instead of stopping, they said, Yeah, but we can’t stop, because there are real people who need the money.
Speaker: 1
50:39
And so what happens is, because there’s no, no one’s ever been fired, ever Mhmm. For sending money to the wrong place, people send it on purpose. I’m not saying everybody sends it on purpose. I’m saying there are some people who send it on purpose.
Speaker: 0
50:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
50:55
Some people who are complete morons, and an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome. I mean, amazing people, right? But what percentage? Okay, if there’s 5,900,000 people who work for the government, you’re like,
Speaker: 3
51:11
wow.
Speaker: 1
51:11
That’s ai so many, and we’re paying them all. And how many do you really need? I mean, if the answer is 2,000,000, wow. And we could talk about how we understand it and how we’re going to retrain society for the AI Industrial Revolution is coming, which is going to create the greatest set of jobs and greatest set of growth ever.
Speaker: 0
51:31
Ever.
Speaker: 1
51:31
Okay, but then, and we can talk about that. But the key is, stop sending money to the wrong place sai we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow, if I can stand it, to not pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits.
Speaker: 0
51:55
Yeah.
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51:55
Of course.
Speaker: 1
51:55
I find it disgusting when we’re the richest country in the world and some politician sai, in order to save Social Security, rather than getting rid of the waste, ram, and abuse, we should move it to 70. Yeah. How about no? How about we’re rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain Yeah. Mhmm. Of being a great Meh?
Speaker: 1
52:15
But let’s put great people in charge.
Speaker: 2
52:18
That’s really well said. I think that that’s really well said. Okay. Let’s put a pin in let’s put a pin in this because
Speaker: 0
52:23
Right.
Speaker: 2
52:24
So let’s Howard, explain to us global trade as you understand it and then the context of tariffs, and maybe historically, and what role they play now.
Speaker: 1
52:35
So I I remind people that on the Earth, there was the dark ages. So the dark ages meant that the world knew how to read. And then because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books.
Speaker: 2
52:49
Yeah. Right.
Speaker: 1
52:50
And literally, the Earth stopped learning how to read for five hundred years or four hundred years. We didn’t know how to read. And we knew how to read before, so how could you forget? So Meh was built on tariffs with no income tax. No income tax till 1913. None. Greatest richest country in the world.
Speaker: 1
53:14
So when Donald Trump says, Make America great again, what he’s talking about is ram 1880 to 1913, when the country had so much money that we had blue ribbon commissions, which you guys would have been on. Yeah. Right? To try to figure out how to spend the money. Right. Right? And no income tax. Then we put in the income tax in 1913. Why?
Speaker: 1
53:36
Because we’re entering World War I. Yeah. And don’t we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life? Mhmm. Right?
Speaker: 1
53:43
Then what happens is the world goes into chaos. We come out of chaos. Right? And then we’re starting to think of, well, what do we do? What do we do? And then 1929, the stock market crashes. Right? Nineteen thirty three, we start to say, oh, oh, oh, god. We forgot. We need to do tariffs.
Speaker: 1
54:02
ai, how can you do tariffs when the markets crash, the world’s going into depression, and you’re gonna do tariffs in 1933? You can’t charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world’s okay.
Speaker: 2
54:14
That’s right.
Speaker: 1
54:15
So it was too little, too late. Right? So then we come out of World War II. It’s 1945. We need to rebuild the world. Okay? So we decide we’re gonna take our tariffs down and we’ll let them here’s the key. We’ll let them have tariffs be up. And we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild. And we’ll let them rebuild. And that’s what happens. So 1945, we have the Marshall Plan. Right?
Speaker: 1
54:47
And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt. What’s the difference, right? So they need to be rebuilt. And then what happens? We have the 50s and we have the Korean War. So we let them rebuild, which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there.
Speaker: 1
55:01
Then we have the Vietnam War, right? So now all of a sudden we have all of Southeast Asia. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there. You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear? Kuwait. We spend almost $100,000,000,000 freeing Kuwait.
Speaker: 3
55:20
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
55:20
Right? You know who has the highest tariffs against The United States Of Meh? The number one country with the highest tariffs against The United States Of America? Kuwait. And you think, what? That’s it, but here’s what it is. If you go back to this understanding the way America thinks, you need to be rebuilt.
Speaker: 1
55:43
You were just destroyed, right? All their oils were, you remember Red, the guy’s name was Red something, and he was the guy who capped all the, there were fires and all the oil wells, and he capped them all, and it was amazing. So we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is? Then we forget. Right. And we let it go. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
56:04
So Donald Trump comes in and says, it’s gotta stop.
Speaker: 2
56:06
Okay. So that’s an incredible context now for tariffs. It’s ai, it was a long term strategy that essentially says, okay, great. There’s rebuilding to be done sort of almost out of the largest of America. We’re gonna enable that to happen. So we’ll lower tariffs here and we’ll support the high tariff regimes over there.
Speaker: 1
56:24
We let it happen.
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56:25
We let it happen.
Speaker: 1
56:26
On purpose.
Speaker: 2
56:26
But it’s an incredible thing you’re also saying though, which is that it’s inexorably linked to this repetitive machinery of war because those create these boundary conditions over and over again
Speaker: 1
56:37
Always.
Speaker: 2
56:38
Where there’s so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this. Correct.
Speaker: 1
56:44
That’s exactly that’s exactly right. So what happens is and then you say to yourself, okay, I get the forties, I get the fifties, I get the seventies. Right? But 80s, 90s, ‘2 thousand, ’20 ’10, what? Ai out, ’20 So Donald Trump gets elected 2016. Who understands this? Okay, let me give you a hint. Donald J. Trump.
Speaker: 1
57:10
Who else?
Speaker: 2
57:12
Nobody. Nobody.
Speaker: 1
57:13
Yeah. Ai? You’d say, Wow, he understand. And how long has he been talking about it? Forty years.
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57:19
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
57:19
Why? Because in the eighties, he’s saying, what are you doing?
Speaker: 0
57:22
Well, let me give you the economist’s counter, which and then you can respond to it, which is tariffs on imports in The United States will ultimately pass to the consumer. Higher prices, inflationary. So the things that our consumers, that our citizens are buying gets more expensive, and as a result, they buy less, and it’s recessionary.
Speaker: 0
57:43
It shrinks the economy. It shrinks spending. It shrinks, consumption. Can you kinda respond to the you know, that’s the the typical economist refrain on this independent, and maybe they’re isolating the imbalance. Okay.
Speaker: 1
57:58
India has a 50% tariff on average. 50. We have on average four. Okay? I would say to the person who said that, can I ask you a question? What are you talking about? They’re 54. Here’s what you’re talking about. When we’re all equal and everything is free and fair, if you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs, isn’t it bad for society? The answer is, of course it is.
Speaker: 1
58:34
But, there’s two differences. Number one, let’s do human beings first. Before we go to the math, let’s go to human beings. Once upon a time, we had an auto industry in Detroit, okay, and in Ai, but Detroit. Then some genius named Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement, or corporations, you can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada.
Speaker: 1
59:13
Now, if you were at General Motors, I’d sai, It’s like my birthday.
Speaker: 2
59:19
-Yeah.
Speaker: 1
59:19
-But if you’re a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio, they just signed you know what they signed? Worst statistic I’m gonna tell you today. Average life expectancy of high school educated workforce. Sai, by the way, United States Of America, Two thirds is high school educated, one third is college educated.
Speaker: 1
59:43
The difference today of average life expectancy between those two categories is seven years. Seven year average life expectancy. It’s not the air, it’s not the food, it’s not the meh. It’s despair. My grandfather worked in the auto factory. My father worked in the auto factory.
Speaker: 1
01:00:04
I have a good life. I’m gonna do Friday Night Ai, do football. I mean, it’s gonna be a good life. I have a good middle class life. I’m a member of the United Auto Workers. Life is going to be good.
Speaker: 1
01:00:14
The factory moves to Meh, and I am just screwed because the government of the United States of America had a didn’t care about industrial policy and didn’t protect me at all. And let cheap labor in Mexico I’m sure the Mexican people got went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour, and they’re kicking it. But I destroyed you.
Speaker: 1
01:00:34
And that is incredible failure of industrial policy, which nobody wants to talk about. But you talk about it at an average life expectancy, and you’re talking about it about reshoring and building the life for the people who are America. That’s why you elect Donald Trump president. You elect him because I didn’t spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help him.
Speaker: 1
01:01:05
But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this? And who taught me this? The president of The United States. This is not me teaching him. You understand? This is him teaching meh, and you can see him talking about it in the 80s. Right. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:01:25
He’s been talking about this for a lot. And what it does is it means reshore. So number one, we have to care about human beings. That’s a globalist view. Yes. If I take my production and move it to Meh, it’s better for me, Mr. Corporation. Okay? But it’s not better for me, Mr.
Speaker: 1
01:01:44
US citizen of The United States Of America who’s working at a car plant. That’s bad news for him. Okay? And that’s number one. And now let’s go to number two, which is the math of it all.
Speaker: 1
01:01:56
If we say free and fair trade, I want to remind you, there ain’t no such thing. There is no country in this world that is free trade. Zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest because everybody else is higher and more protective.
Speaker: 0
01:02:20
Yeah.
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01:02:20
So they protect their farmers. Here, Ai sitting at the dinner, Modi comes to town. And I say to him, when Donald Trump, we have dinner, and after the niceties Donald said, Go ahead, Howard. And I said, you have 1,400,000,000 people. And you brag to us how amazing your economy is. Why won’t you buy a bushel of our corn? We’ll buy a bushel of our corn.
Speaker: 1
01:02:44
So our farmers can’t go to him, but his, of course, can come at us. Right? Why is that okay? You know, and we can go into all the stuff that, oh, I mean, I don’t even sana go into it because if I had another hour, I could
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01:02:56
But just
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01:02:57
tell you the stories that are fun with that,
Speaker: 0
01:02:58
but just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs. Talk to the average person who says the cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%.
Speaker: 1
01:03:08
Inflation comes from printing more money. Okay? Let’s say The United States Of America had $1,000,000,000,000 That’s all we have. That’s it. No more, okay? And I sana buy a bottle of water and you wanna buy a bottle of water. One came from Meh, and the other one came from Fiji, right?
Speaker: 1
01:03:30
Then, and I tariff Fiji, then that water is a dollar and a quarter, and this water’s a dollar. That’s not inflation. That means that one’s more expensive. But I can choose to buy this one.
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01:03:41
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:03:42
Okay? So you’re right. This toy might be more expensive, and that toy’s not. I get it. But that’s not inflation. Here’s inflation. Snap my fingers. Now we have 2,000,000,000,000. Right? That water’s a dollar 50. That water’s a dollar and a quarter. Yeah. Everything’s more expensive.
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01:03:56
That’s inflation.
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01:03:57
Okay? So inflation without tariffs is everything’s a buck and a quarter.
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01:04:02
Now what about
Speaker: 1
01:04:02
Inflation with tariffs is a buck and a quarter, right, and a buck 50. And so you have to understand inflation doesn’t come from tariffs. Certain products, if I put a tariff on a mango, ai, we can’t grow mangoes in America. We just can’t grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive.
Speaker: 0
01:04:26
Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:04:27
Okay? But if the president chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive. That’s just becomes a consumption tax. It’s like a sales tax. Yes. Right? It’s a sales tax. It’s sai consumption tax. If I wanna buy mango, it costs more money.
Speaker: 0
01:04:42
And you can offset that with a reduction of
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01:04:43
income tax. Sai then that’s just ai another version of income tax.
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01:04:48
How do you how do
Speaker: 1
01:04:48
you Okay. So what the idea is to not do that. Yeah. That’s the idea. The idea is to is to choose things that are going to reassure. Yeah. Exactly. Come here.
Speaker: 0
01:05:00
This is so important.
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01:05:01
Hire my people. Yeah. Bring it home. Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:05:04
By the way, I wanna just speak as an entrepreneur. I see the economic incentive. When I see the price for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff, I’m like, why don’t we make that here? We should be doing that. And there’s gonna be a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things, and it this is just how the markets work.
Speaker: 0
01:05:24
Someone will say 2,000,000,000,000
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01:05:26
so far. I meh, he’s been in the office, ai, like seven weeks, eight weeks?
Speaker: 0
01:05:30
Yeah.
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01:05:31
$2,000,000,000,000 of committed domestic production coming back because of his tax. TMC saying, I’ll build, you know, semiconductor wafers. Yeah. You know, everything
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01:05:46
we do.
Speaker: 1
01:05:46
Yeah. They’re gonna build it here. That word is never coming.
Speaker: 0
01:05:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:05:49
Yeah. Unless the tax. Sai what happens is you bring it here, you create the jobs here, and then they avoid the tariff.
Speaker: 0
01:05:57
And by the way, those jobs are better paying and they’re more productive than the government funded this.
Speaker: 2
01:06:01
What do you wanna do about ai the the narrow set of products that are more high value than the mango that maybe can’t be made here or at least can’t be made here in the next five to ten years. So TSMC can make chips. I think that’s great. ASML, who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines, as an example, can’t necessarily do that for another five or six years here.
Speaker: 2
01:06:24
So there’s these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multi vendor solution. Right? But that’s still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff?
Speaker: 1
01:06:38
You know, the the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is it’s it’s it’s giant three-dimensional chess. Yeah. K? So we all have Stockholm Syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service. We think we like the Internal Revenue Service. And we don’t say it, but when we say we’re going to charge a tariff, and other countries who lean on us, who rely on us, who bleed on us, who can’t live without the oxygen that is our economy.
Speaker: 1
01:07:11
Because meh, the thing about our economy is ai we have a $29,000,000,000,000 GDP, we are the consumer of $20,000,000,000,000
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01:07:21
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:07:22
Right. And this is the key thing. We buy everybody’s stuff. So who’s more important? Let’s say they have an economy that produces stuff, and we have an economy that buys stuff. The customer’s always right. We all know the customer’s always right because if no one buys it, they can’t produce it.
Speaker: 0
01:07:42
Ai.
Speaker: 1
01:07:42
So everybody needs our economy. When? Now. I mean, to the fact that China consumes less than 10,000,000,000,000 and primarily tries to figure out how to sell it to itself.
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01:07:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:07:55
Right? Sai they don’t buy anybody else’s. Right. So we are the world’s consumer. Yeah. We’re the world’s customer. Right. Right? So that’s point number one. So we want them to come here, and if they can’t come here, what if you pass? Okay, now let’s say there was a 20% tariff, and in order to sell his goods, he knows he can raise the price 10%, but he can’t really sell it raise it 20.
Speaker: 1
01:08:22
So he eats 10, and the price goes up 10, let’s just say. That 20 goes into the conference of the United States of America from the president of The United States who said we’re sana balance the budget, and then his goal is to drive down income tax in Ai States Of Meh, including waiving tax.
Speaker: 1
01:08:40
So what has he said so far? With that in his pocket, knowing that this is what we’re gonna try to do, what does he announce? No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security. Why is he saying those things? Right?
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01:08:55
Because he knows that he’s got Elon’s gonna cut, and Howard’s gonna raise, and he’s gonna have the tools to deliver on his promise.
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01:09:04
And
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01:09:04
vatsal unlock what they speak. Money. More money for folks to spend.
Speaker: 1
01:09:07
And they’ll have more money to spend. Right? So if you if you actually get the external revenue service, right, which of course I named, you know Ai named it, but you know, but you know what the funny part is? I came up with the name, I wrote a truth, ai, and I sent it to to DJT, and I wrote, this is my huge idea, you know, with one of those things that goes like ai.
Speaker: 0
01:09:28
Yeah. You know,
Speaker: 1
01:09:29
and then, like, ai like a huge idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ai? And because it’s the external revenue service. Yeah. But it only matters because I work for him. Mhmm. Because because if I worked for Joe Biden or anybody else, they wouldn’t care at all. So the fact that he loves a great idea the minute you say it and it becomes his ai, my idea is useless.
Speaker: 1
01:09:53
A good idea in his hands
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01:09:55
Okay. So speaking of great ideas value
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01:09:57
in the world. Sai the external revenue service
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01:09:59
Yeah.
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01:10:00
If it if we went back to make America great again
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01:10:03
Yeah.
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01:10:03
Which is pre 1913
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01:10:05
Yeah.
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01:10:05
Which is let them pay, you don’t pay. And what that means is let them pay, try to waive balance the budget, try to waive tax on everybody who makes less than 150,000. Yep. Right? And look what you did for America. Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:10:17
Holy moly, look what you
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01:10:19
Okay, so
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01:10:19
that’s By the way,
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01:10:21
labor costs come smashing down because it’s tax free.
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01:10:25
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:10:26
So if their earnings are tax free, ai, then they’re happy to work because they get the money.
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01:10:31
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:10:32
Sai what happens is cost of labor comes down because we’re run correctly as a ai.
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01:10:37
Sai speak of
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01:10:38
This is what I’m trying to do.
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01:10:39
Speaking of potentially great ideas, can you tell us about the Ram card? Sure. So Whose idea was vatsal? And how did that come about? John Paulson
Speaker: 1
01:10:50
had a call with Donald Trump, and was talking to Donald Trump, and was kicking around the idea of we should sell, right? Why do we give away visas? We should sell them. And they’re talking about it. Donald Trump calls me, gets me on the phone, right? We all talk about it, right?
Speaker: 1
01:11:07
And then we go from there. And then my job is to figure out, like Sai always figure out, how to do it. What’s the path?
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01:11:14
Do you have
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01:11:15
the path? Of course. About two weeks from today, it goes out. Okay? Elon’s building me the software right now.
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01:11:24
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:11:25
Right? And then out it goes. And ai the way, yesterday, I sold a thousand.
Speaker: 0
01:11:30
Oh, you did? I got a poly market I created on how many you guys are gonna sell this year. Sai Cool. Yeah. Curious to see how many That’s
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01:11:36
fantastic. Do you wanna tell people just the rough numbers? Yeah.
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01:11:38
What are
Speaker: 0
01:11:38
the terms? Okay. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:11:39
So if you’re a US citizen, you pay global tax.
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01:11:44
Yeah.
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01:11:45
Okay? So you’re not sana bring in ai who are gonna come in to pay global tax. So if you have a green card, which used to be a green card
Speaker: 0
01:11:54
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:11:54
Now gold card, you’re a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don’t have to be. And none of them are gonna choose to be. What they’re gonna do is they’re gonna have the right to be Meh. They pay $5,000,000 and they have the right to be an American. They have the right to to be an Meh. Permanent, permanent, permanent residency. As long as they’re good people.
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01:12:16
And they’re vetted.
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01:12:16
And they’re vetted. And they can’t break the law. We could always take it away if they’re ai evil or mean or bad or something. Not mean, but, you know, if they do something horrible, you could take it away, right? But the idea is, if if I was not American and I lived in any other country, Ai buy sai.
Speaker: 1
01:12:34
One for me, one for my ai, and my four kids because God forbid something happens. I I sana be able to go to Meh, and I wanna have the right to go to the airport, to go to America, and then to say, Hello, Mr. Litnick. Hello, Mr. Litnick and the Litnick family. Welcome home. Ai. That’s what I wanna hear.
Speaker: 1
01:12:50
I don’t wanna hear, I can’t come here when there’s a, you know, a horrible war, a horrible whatever. Right. I wanna be able to go home, Right? And once I’m home, Ram might as well build a business.
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01:13:05
Yeah. So
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01:13:06
you have the most productive people in the world sana start spending time here. They’re gonna have a family office. They’re gonna hire some people.
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01:13:13
And you’re not gonna tax their external worldwide income.
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01:13:16
I only tax the money they make in America, which is what we do now.
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01:13:19
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:13:19
But their global income stays out.
Speaker: 0
01:13:21
And they pay 5,000,000. And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world?
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01:13:26
How many There
Speaker: 1
01:13:26
are 37,000,000 people in the world who are capable of buying the card. In case you were wondering.
Speaker: 0
01:13:31
37,000,000. That’s a lot more than Chad CPT told me.
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01:13:34
Who are capable of buying it.
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01:13:35
Who are capable of buying it.
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01:13:37
Now I’m not saying they will, but they’re capable of buying.
Speaker: 0
01:13:40
How many do you think he’ll sell?
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01:13:43
The president thinks we can sell a million.
Speaker: 0
01:13:46
So 10,000,000,000,000
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01:13:47
billion dollars.
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01:13:48
I think a million is reasonable. I mean, look, as as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his citizenship and now pay global tax every which way known to meh. If this were available fifteen years ago after the Facebook IPO, that’s what I would have done. It would have been much better for me theoretically.
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01:14:04
What’s that?
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01:14:04
Now I’m happy I’m happy to pay the taxes.
Speaker: 1
01:14:06
So the idea sai the idea is, and it’s gonna go fast. Meaning, you ai, right? We take your money, and, you know, the way computers work now, they have these cool things, like these computer things. They’re amazing. You’re ai, you know, you put stuff in,
Speaker: 3
01:14:21
and they
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01:14:21
actually check everything. It’s it’s fantastic. I don’t you don’t even have to plug them in anymore. It’s amazing. Like, they get them they get the information through the air. I mean, you could do a better vet
Speaker: 0
01:14:32
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:14:33
Than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second.
Speaker: 0
01:14:37
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:14:38
Better than they’d ever done it before.
Speaker: 2
01:14:39
Sai I’ll I mean, I’ll tell you a quick story. Monday night, Elon was telling us about this, me and Saxon. One of the things he’s saying is he’s been helping you build this site. But one of the most difficult parts of it is it turns out, like, all of the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks, it’s ai a lot of COBOL mainframes and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten.
Speaker: 2
01:14:59
And so this is a question.
Speaker: 0
01:15:00
Big opportunity.
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01:15:02
It’s incredible that the most advanced nation in the world deployed systems in 1970, which at the time probably felt very cutting edge to everybody in the room at the time. But to your point, has not evolved in the last fifty years.
Speaker: 1
01:15:17
It’s always there’s always a reason. Okay? And the reason is it’s a great reason, which is that, in the mid seventies, we changed the way government accounts for software. We we took a ten year contract, and you have to take the contract upfront. So if I’m signing a contract to you for ten years, a million a year, I have to take it against my budget for 10,000,000, so I’m not doing it.
Speaker: 1
01:15:41
Ai, I’m only here for four years. I’m not doing it. So what happens is, when was the last time we bought software? Mhmm. Nineteen seventy five. Where? Everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:15:52
Why? Because it’s illogical. Now, what I’m doing is I’m saying, okay, I gotta collect tariffs. Right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the Earth, and I say, I want you to give me You’re gonna build for me for America.
Speaker: 1
01:16:08
You’re gonna build the greatest customs processing ever. We’re gonna take a photograph. It’s gonna know what it is. It’s gonna go through AI. It’s gonna know what it is.
Speaker: 1
01:16:17
It’s gonna know what the tariff is. It’s gonna determine the percentage. It’s gonna know the weight. So when you weigh the thing plus the package, you’ll know what it weighs. You don’t even have to open it or weigh exactly the right amount, and you’ll do this and that.
Speaker: 1
01:16:26
And these are all things that I know and all things I could figure out. Because you know the way gold works? A gold bar is about 40 pounds. You know the way you know the gold bar is they weigh it, and they weigh it out 13 digits of decimals. So basically, if you touch the thing, it’s not gonna be 13 digits of decimals. So you have a perfect scale, and you weigh it, and that’s like the code.
Speaker: 1
01:16:45
Yeah. Right? Because you can’t touch it. If you touch it, you’ll change the and you can’t get it right out 13 digits.
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01:16:51
It’s
Speaker: 1
01:16:51
just not possible. So that’s what we do with stuff. You know what it weighs. Right? Three t shirts on a if you’re sending the same three t shirts, they always wear the same.
Speaker: 2
01:17:01
But what’s incredible is you’re convincing these companies to basically, like, do right for America and build this software for you. You think that’s gonna be a movement throughout the government, or is that?
Speaker: 1
01:17:10
Here’s the idea. I say build it for me for free.
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01:17:13
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:17:13
I put it in for free. I don’t know. What other countries in the world do you think are gonna buy now? Right.
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01:17:20
If it works for us.
Speaker: 1
01:17:21
Well, meh, you have to you have to connect to me. Yeah. So every country’s gonna buy.
Speaker: 0
01:17:26
Right.
Speaker: 3
01:17:27
And it’s
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01:17:27
sai great business model.
Speaker: 0
01:17:28
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:17:28
Right? If the greatest customer in the world says they’ll take it.
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01:17:32
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:17:33
Life’s good.
Speaker: 0
01:17:34
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:17:34
So what should the greatest customer in the world get? Ai don’t know, a good deal?
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01:17:38
Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:17:38
And you got a guy like me there. You know, everybody else is ai
Speaker: 0
01:17:42
Howard, you have to change how government operates if you’re gonna scale that. You can’t go negotiate every contract out there for every department. I mean
Speaker: 1
01:17:48
It’s not that hard when you say it’s free. You know, free is ai not that hard. I mean, you yes. It is. And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company
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01:17:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:17:58
Because I then I use my superpower, which is my friendship with Donald Trump. And then I go in the Oval Office, and we call them together.
Speaker: 0
01:18:04
Right. Right.
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01:18:04
And we
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01:18:04
call the CEO together and make them promise the president. Because ai Howard is, like, really nice.
Speaker: 0
01:18:09
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:10
Promising DJT, that’s something else entirely.
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01:18:13
Right. So
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01:18:14
I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they’ll build it.
Speaker: 0
01:18:18
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:18
Now let’s see him renege. Yeah. It ain’t gonna happen. Right. So, you know, when you get Elon to sai, I’m gonna build it for you, and he says it in front of the president, like, how great is that? You ai, like, the greatest technologist, the richest guy in the world who says, I’ll build it for you. You’re ai, thank God. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:18:34
And then I meh, you know, I go to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon. They’re all for Meh.
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01:18:44
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:18:45
Building for us.
Speaker: 0
01:18:46
Right.
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01:18:47
For free.
Speaker: 0
01:18:48
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:48
To make America better. Because they are great American companies. And in exchange for that, we’re gonna help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness. Just towards fair, because I you can’t get me to do something outside the world of fairness. But I ai you what, if it’s unfair, I’ll be on your side as hard and as positive as I possibly can be.
Speaker: 2
01:19:09
Talk to us about some of the hot button markets that you’re gonna have to navigate. You know, you are in charge of export controls, which is a very important thing in AI. We don’t allow export licenses for the most advanced NVIDIA chips. We don’t want training necessarily to be done outside of The United States. We’re okay with inference happening outside The United States in certain conditions.
Speaker: 2
01:19:32
Maybe just talk about that for a second. How, like, how do you how are you gonna navigate AI? How do you think about that from your sai? Seat?
Speaker: 1
01:19:37
Ai, so I’ll give you an example that’s sort of live right now.
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01:19:42
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:19:42
Ai? So we have DeepSeek, we have Quinn, we have Dobao, ai? And I don’t think we should be having apps in America, and I don’t think we should have their website in America because they all go back home. K? But it’s open source, and I want our American companies, including college students, to be able to download it and build on
Speaker: 2
01:20:05
it. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:20:06
But I sana make sure that there’s no part of it that sai, Send it home to Sana. Right. Or store now and analyze later.
Speaker: 2
01:20:15
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:20:15
Right? So I need that out. So what I sana do is I’m going to embrace what you guys know. You guys use two product evaluations. Yeah. So let’s do security now. Exactly. Right? And say your industry, and you can’t let it get overrun by Chinese. Because what happens is, if there’s a policy, right, all of a bryden, a hundred thousand people from China come in, and they say they’re John Smith and and and Todd Peterson, right, but they’re not, and then you think the vote is this way.
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01:20:45
Yeah. And
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01:20:46
it’s easily manipulated. So we have to be very careful. But my first instinct is to lean on and that and that’s why I see it’s important to have David Sacks as my partner. Right? Someone who knows it and and someone who can live and breathe the industry. Right? And so what we’re gonna have is we’re gonna have security evaluation.
Speaker: 1
01:21:06
Let’s say if the security evaluation model says that this is a good model
Speaker: 0
01:21:12
Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:21:12
Then people can download it.
Speaker: 3
01:21:13
Right. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:21:14
But it’s gotta go through the industry. And Ai want it to feel and smell ai what we’re good
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01:21:19
at. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:21:19
I don’t sana create like, oh, this is what government’s doing. I don’t want what government to do.
Speaker: 0
01:21:23
Yeah. The lie
Speaker: 1
01:21:24
I want us to do it, but I’ve gotta figure out the right way to do that. Right. And that’s important to work together.
Speaker: 2
01:21:30
Standards, articulate sort of the concept, and then let a lot of these private market actors kind of help fill in the gaps
Speaker: 0
01:21:37
and compete.
Speaker: 1
01:21:37
The only thing I I think I really need to do, and that’s with regulatory, is post quantum cryptography. Yeah. K. I I think that is vital to us.
Speaker: 2
01:21:49
That’s right.
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01:21:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:21:49
Right?
Speaker: 0
01:21:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:21:50
That that, you know, ai
Speaker: 0
01:21:52
I would bet this happens during this administration. He bets post.
Speaker: 1
01:21:57
Ai I know. I’m gonna put it out because, you know, we all have passwords. Right? For those who are watching who don’t know this, our password’s called asymmetric. Right? Yours is different than mine. Right. That’s the key, and cryptography is just the computing. So asymmetric, key cryptography, you have your password, I have mine, and they’re the key.
Speaker: 0
01:22:15
That’s right.
Speaker: 1
01:22:15
Right? Obviously, the central hub has our key. Duh. Yeah. Okay? A a quantum computer we know can break all of them in a nanosecond. Like, all of them in the whole world, including the CIA, all of them are, say, 2,048, all of them can get broken in a nanosecond by a quantum computer.
Speaker: 3
01:22:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:22:33
So the defense of it is called post quantum cryptography. Right? We know how to do it, and we’ll come out with a rule that says America’s gotta protect itself.
Speaker: 0
01:22:43
New standards. And ai the way, there are Because every once
Speaker: 1
01:22:45
in a while, you need to have a new standard that says it’s coming. We know what it is. Please, God, go put it in because we need to have it in. Ai need America to live
Speaker: 2
01:22:54
right away. Let’s let’s sort of segue now to couple things that we can enjoin together in this concept. Crypto, obviously, Bitcoin. You guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve. But broadly speaking, you also announced sort of this idea of the sovereign wealth fund.
Speaker: 0
01:23:09
Yes.
Speaker: 2
01:23:09
Can we talk about that? Sort of what is the what is the vision behind that? How do you want that to be executed? How do you think it should be run? What assets are on the table? What assets and strategies may should never be on the table? How are you thinking about it?
Speaker: 1
01:23:22
The greatest customer in the world, the United States government, the most powerful, the greatest customer, ai stuff. We walk in. We’re gonna buy here’s the example I like to use. We’re gonna buy 2,000,000,000 COVID vaccines. Mhmm. When we buy it, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are gonna triple.
Speaker: 1
01:23:43
They’re gonna triple. Because then we sai, everyone’s gonna have this vaccine. If I were after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal they could, if Howard Letnick walked in the room, Howard Letnick would say, what do you think, 20% warrants? Right? 20% warrants? Right. Right? What? So we’d make $50,000,000,000 off of who? Nobody. We didn’t take from anybody, but we didn’t do it. Okay.
Speaker: 1
01:24:10
The shareholders of Pfizer, who we’ve just tripled them with our order. Right. Now, how many of my customers in my life have ai that from me? All of them?
Speaker: 0
01:24:20
All of them.
Speaker: 1
01:24:21
Ai, this isn’t ai, oh, Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever. This is just Business. Proper. So Yeah. I don’t view risk of the sovereign wealth fund. I view the first couple of years of the sovereign wealth fund or Scott Besant and I making money Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Speaker: 1
01:24:42
Say, well, but you can’t invest and lose don’t you lose money? No. Why? Well, if I have big daddy of The United States Of America behind me, ai, and I’ll give you an example. We buy missiles episodically.
Speaker: 1
01:24:59
Launch a missile, buy a missile. Launch a missile, buy some missiles. Right? The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings or good quarterly earnings, but they’re episodic. Yeah. Here we go.
Speaker: 1
01:25:13
I will sign a contract with you, ten year contract, cancel it at the end of five years to buy x amount of missiles, and I’ll pay you quarterly. Then they can take that contract, they can go finance it. Their financing costs go, their earnings are steady, and their multiple improves, and their stock doubles. Goes up. Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:25:36
And I sai, in exchange for that reasonable thought, how about a little warrants? Right. And you
Speaker: 3
01:25:43
know what
Speaker: 0
01:25:43
Sai mean? Just for people that don’t understand, give me some stock. Give me a little bit of your stock.
Speaker: 1
01:25:46
But but don’t give me some stock. Just give me the ai. If I if I help your stock go up
Speaker: 0
01:25:50
Just a little bit.
Speaker: 1
01:25:51
I I get to share it and you know what? Wet meh beak a little bit. And then I take the money Yeah. For The United States Of Meh, and I put it into the Social Security system in The United States Of America.
Speaker: 0
01:26:01
Okay. So why have And
Speaker: 1
01:26:02
then all of a sudden right? So the Social Security system says it’s 4,000,000,000,000 in the hole.
Speaker: 0
01:26:06
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:07
Okay? If we cut the waste for an abuse out, it becomes, 1,500,000,000,000.0. And by the way, Frank Bizignano, the greatest executive, the greatest payments executive ever to join the US government is about to get confirmed and take over the Social Security system. K? Frank ran Fiserv, a hundred and $20,000,000,000 public payments company, and when Donald Trump asked him in his interview, can you handle Social Security? It’s 1,300,000,000,000.0 a year.
Speaker: 1
01:26:34
He goes, well, sai, I I handle 500,000,000,000 a day, so, Wednesday. Right? And he goes, my whole life Sai my whole life, all I worry about is getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s all I care about. Every single day, $5, 2 dollars, 1 dollar, he goes, this is gonna be the most fun I’ve ever had. Yeah. I mean, this Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:51
Like, this is a Donald Trump administration. This is something that’s another planet. Now, of course, I recruit Ram, and, you know, I get to have my piece in the game. Yeah. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it’s only a trillion 4 in the hole. We make a trillion 4. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker: 1
01:27:07
That baby is finished forever.
Speaker: 0
01:27:11
Is the sovereign wealth fund a balance sheet for social security? Does social security become more than what it is today? Does it over time offer bigger, greater benefits? And is it basically a pool that holds equities historically? And we talked about this on our show. It’s only ever held treasury, but it’s really kind of a fake treasury.
Speaker: 0
01:27:29
It’s got 2,700,000,000,000.0 today, but if we bought the S and P in 1971 when we went off the gold standard with the cash flows that have come in and gone out of Social Security, we’d have a $15,000,000,000,000 interest in the S and P today.
Speaker: 1
01:27:41
If it did have that that would have had you have Donald Trump be the president the whole time, which is not a thing.
Speaker: 0
01:27:45
Right. Okay. But is that is that the objective? Is that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country, and it becomes ai a sovereign wealth fund that
Speaker: 1
01:27:54
We have a $36,000,000,000,000 budget deficit. The I mean, debt.
Speaker: 0
01:27:58
Debt. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:27:59
To The United States Of America. And we we have a budget deficit of 2,000,000,000,000. So Donald Trump wants to knock down the 2,000,000,000,000.
Speaker: 0
01:28:04
Yep. And
Speaker: 1
01:28:05
then he’s focused on the 36,000,000,000,000, which the Social Security is part of it.
Speaker: 0
01:28:08
Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:28:09
So how he allocates it, he was elected president of The United States. I was not.
Speaker: 3
01:28:13
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:28:14
K? I like the Social Security idea because it’s really easy to explain Yeah. To people and sell to people. Yeah. And so they understand it. But the fact is that it’s the same money if I put it in Social Security ai I put it on the debt of The United States Of America. And I’m gonna let Donald Trump make that decision. You know why? Because it’s all his idea, and none of it’s not mine. So he will decide that, okay?
Speaker: 1
01:28:35
And he will play it his way. But Scott Bessent and I will make more than a trillion dollars for The United States Of America during our term, which is pretty darn cool.
Speaker: 3
01:28:47
Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:28:47
Right? And we’ll use that. And if that reduces our debt, ai? But that’s not the policy of how we’re gonna balance the budget. We’re gonna balance the budget, Trump card? Tariffs. Getting rid of ram. I’ll give you a scam example. Every boat you’ve ever seen.
Speaker: 1
01:29:05
Ai, every single cruise ship, supertanker, container ship, you’ve never seen an American flag ever. In fact, you ever think about the flag you’ve actually seen? All of you would say, I have no idea what that flag is. Be ai. Like, why is it some flag I never heard of?
Speaker: 3
01:29:24
Yeah,
Speaker: 1
01:29:24
exactly. Liberia is number one.
Speaker: 3
01:29:26
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:29:26
And you go, what? No one even knows where Liberia is. Because the answer is it’s a flag at convenience. They sell the flag for, like, $10. Like, they’re literally here. You could have a flag. And you pay no tax. So what happens is a cruise ship in The United States Of America picks up American passengers, goes in The Caribbean, comes back to America, and treats the port as an expense.
Speaker: 1
01:29:48
And all the profits are made in The Caribbean where it pays no tax. That’s what Ai call a tax scam.
Speaker: 3
01:29:54
Yeah. I mean,
Speaker: 1
01:29:55
it’s unfair to America. We’re gonna fix that in America. We’re gonna try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams. Ireland is my favorite. The country of Ireland last year had a $60,000,000,000 budget surplus. So we lose 2,000,000,000,000 and they make 60. You’d say, Ireland? What do they do?
Speaker: 1
01:30:19
Oh, they have all of our IP for our great tech
Speaker: 0
01:30:23
All the tech companies.
Speaker: 3
01:30:23
All our
Speaker: 1
01:30:24
great tech companies and great pharma companies.
Speaker: 0
01:30:25
And pharma, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:30:26
They all put it there because it’s low sai.
Speaker: 3
01:30:28
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:30:28
And they don’t pay us, they pay them. So that’s gotta end. So when those things end, tariffs, Ram card, getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax, that’s my trillion. Elon’s got to do his trillion. So whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out and we have a strong conversation together that you’ve gotta do your trillion.
Speaker: 1
01:30:53
So you gotta focus not on small potatoes. Ai. Big, big, big, big, big, I need you to do your side of the trillion. Now as it turns out, I’m gonna do more than a trillion, because I’m me. Elon’s probably gonna do more than a trillion because he’s him.
Speaker: 1
01:31:09
And then what we’re going to do is gonna our objective is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change Meh, and then imagine America. This is just an imagination moment. Okay? We have a balanced budget in The United States. We’re starting to knock down the the deficit of America.
Speaker: 1
01:31:29
We can cut sai, and we have a gold card, a Trump card that you can come to America. Which entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn’t buy one Yeah. And wouldn’t start building businesses when they think the tax rate here is gonna come down
Speaker: 3
01:31:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:31:47
And eventually it’s gonna come down to 20%, and eventually it’s gonna come down to 15%? You won’t be able to find a plot of land in America.
Speaker: 0
01:31:54
You know what I predict will happen? I predict they’ll just like in the medallion industry for sai cabs, there’ll be a financing industry that’ll build up around these, these gold cards or these ram cards. So that great entrepreneurs, great executives will be able to finance their purchase along with someone getting venture capital interest or equity interest in their business at the beginning.
Speaker: 1
01:32:11
We’re gonna take that money. We’re gonna well, so we’ll sell them every year. Yeah. Right? So they’ll knock down our budget deficit. And then eventually, right, if if Donald Trump is right and ultimately we can sell 7,000,000 cards
Speaker: 3
01:32:25
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:32:26
You realize there is no debt in America.
Speaker: 3
01:32:28
Ai.
Speaker: 1
01:32:28
No debt in America is a trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. Right. Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage? You know what that changes? That changes the internal revenue service. You you start to rethink. And I just wanna remind you. Right? We are the richest country on Earth. Our balance sheet is 500,000,000,000,000.
Speaker: 1
01:32:46
I’ll give you an example. What’s the court system of America worth? Right. Right? What’s it worth?
Speaker: 1
01:32:51
Well, how can Nvidia be worth 3,000,000,000,000 without a court system that protects it?
Speaker: 2
01:32:55
Right. There’s
Speaker: 1
01:32:56
no such thing. Sai just our, everything about us, the infrastructure is awesome.
Speaker: 0
01:33:02
Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:33:02
And you
Speaker: 1
01:33:03
know what happens? We actually, like, we get beaten upon it. We actually believe it.
Speaker: 0
01:33:07
Yeah. You could ask Doug Burgum about how undervalued a lot of our real estate is in this country and the potential for it.
Speaker: 1
01:33:13
We think about it. Biden closed 635,000,000 acres. This is this is electing Joe Biden head of Saudi Arabia, and he closes the oil wells. Yeah. And all of a sudden, Saudi Arabia falls off the face of the earth broke. Like, what are we doing?
Speaker: 3
01:33:30
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:33:30
Like, we care about Americans.
Speaker: 0
01:33:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:34
Let’s make Americans’ lives great. Howard. We want clean water. We want clean air.
Speaker: 0
01:33:39
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:40
Okay? We do it better than everybody else. But if we don’t here’s the one like the hypocrisy. Ai? We won’t mine lithium in America to make a battery.
Speaker: 2
01:33:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:49
But sai we so the Australians ai it with coal and it’s messy because they do it ai, you know, they do it messy. By the way, we breathe the air in three point four days, but who’s counting? Right? Then we take it, we put it on a truck. We take put the truck and put it in a super tyler.
Speaker: 1
01:34:03
We drive the super tanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean, puts it in a truck, and gives it to Elon to make an electric car. Why don’t we mine the lithium in Nevada?
Speaker: 0
01:34:19
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:34:19
And by the way, we’d mine it cleaner, right?
Speaker: 0
01:34:23
And by the way, it’s not just lithium. Almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the Continental United States. We just have had no incentive or no structure regulatory wise that enables the development of it, which is
Speaker: 1
01:34:38
This is we need to care for us. Make America, you know, America First. How about there’s another way to say it.
Speaker: 0
01:34:46
While maintaining clean environmental sana first. Ai maintaining environmental standards.
Speaker: 1
01:34:49
Yeah. Don’t look. We’re never going to do something that’s not, like a hundred times cleaner than everybody else because we care about clean water and clean air. There’s none of us who don’t care about clean water and clean air. But you know, like someone gives you a pill and sai, this will save you.
Speaker: 1
01:35:08
And then you look at the statistic and it saves one in a million people. And you’d say, why am I taking this pill? You’d say, well, it could save your life. You’d say, meh, but it’s like one in a million. Right? That’s not logical. Right? That’s the point. Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:35:24
You
Speaker: 1
01:35:24
know, there’s a regulation that’s the right thing. Yeah. And there’s a regulation that’s the one in a million pill.
Speaker: 3
01:35:33
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:35:33
Like why do we give a baby, a baby, a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand new baby, and we hold it up, and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine? You realize the only way you get hepatitis B was is from unprotected sex or a needle? Right. Ai, why are we giving them to a baby? Ai, why?
Speaker: 1
01:35:54
And you know what it is? You know what the answer is? Corruption. That someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules. And because there’s no justification. There’s no I haven’t met a medical doctor who says ai b vaccines on brand new babies make sense.
Speaker: 1
01:36:12
Because, by the way, you know what the worst part is? They’re gonna last ten years. You need a booster in ten years, so the baby’s gonna be 10. We’ve gotta really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Meh, and I think we can be. And I think that’s why I’m so excited.
Speaker: 1
01:36:30
That’s why our cabinet is so excited. That’s why it’s so much fun to work for Donald Trump because I am just speaking from his playbook. Right? Because if you had met me before he said, will you help meh? And he went out to dinner with me and said, so tell me about government.
Speaker: 1
01:36:47
I’d say, government? You mean Sai pay them taxes? Like, that’s it.
Speaker: 0
01:36:53
Are you having the time of your life?
Speaker: 1
01:36:55
Most fun ever. Because I have every idea either gets blown up or shot down. K? Meaning, I come up with lots of ideas, and he says, nah. Too complex. And you know what? That’s fine. Yeah. But when I come up with the external revenue service and he says, great ai, and then he speaks of it in his inaugural address, right, it’s his idea.
Speaker: 0
01:37:19
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:37:19
Because I can’t do anything with it. Howard,
Speaker: 2
01:37:21
last question as we wrap. Tell us about your family, your kids, how they think about all of this. Your son’s running Canner now. How’s that going? Just give us the lay of the land. How how’s the Lutnick family?
Speaker: 1
01:37:33
Alright. So I have I have the best wife. I’ve been married thirty years. Shah lets me be me, and she’s gorgeous, spectacular. I love my girl. She agreed. I mean, imagine this. I’m not I’m not joining the government. I’m not joining the government. I’m doing this doge thing with Elon. I’m not joining. I’m not joining.
Speaker: 1
01:37:51
Honey, we gotta move. Ai, like, honey, we gotta move two weeks after ai day. I’m like, we’re moving, and, we’re gonna in five weeks, we’re gonna live in Washington. Okay? And, ai, so the fact that that wasn’t unsettling would be the understatement of a ai.
Speaker: 2
01:38:06
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:38:06
But she’s been the most supportive and fantastic. I have four kids. My oldest son about to turn 29. I was taking him to kindergarten, so that’s why I’m alive. My second ai, Brandon, I dropped him off in nursing school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten. Sai the two oldest boys are running cancer now until I divest.
Speaker: 2
01:38:25
Is it going well?
Speaker: 1
01:38:27
I don’t know.
Speaker: 2
01:38:28
Oh, you
Speaker: 3
01:38:29
of course.
Speaker: 2
01:38:30
You’re not
Speaker: 1
01:38:30
supposed to know either. It’s kinda fun. I would love to talk to them about it.
Speaker: 0
01:38:34
You have no ai.
Speaker: 1
01:38:35
But I’m not allowed. Like, I I literally ai not allowed. Yeah. And, you know, we all know the phones. Yeah. So since the phone’s always with me, and I assume the phone is listening. You know, ever since we couldn’t take a battery out of our phone Yeah. You know the phone is listening. So, you know, I’m not no. So I never talk to my ai.
Speaker: 1
01:38:51
So, I’m sure they’re happy, but I don’t know how it’s going.
Speaker: 2
01:38:55
Guys, if you’re listening, he’s doing great, as you can tell.
Speaker: 1
01:38:58
But and then my my daughter is gonna go to med school. Yeah. And she’s on a gap year now. And my youngest son also on a gap year now, and he’s going to, start Duke in the fall.
Speaker: 3
01:39:09
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:39:09
So I have the best kids. Ai kids have lived with me, and they lived with this ai of energy and this positive sort of meh, and and my wife being just a spectacular mom, just keeping them. What we taught our kids, which is a fun one, is, I taught them two things. I would sit down with my kids and say, how great is your life?
Speaker: 1
01:39:32
And this is only maybe something that people like we can say. But I’m talking to my kids. I say, how great is your life? They go, go, great. Because they came home, and they say, I got a bad grade. Teacher doesn’t like me. It’s a classic ai, right? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:39:47
And I said, well, how could your life Ai really could. I go, could it be any better? No. Well, do you realize your teacher has given up her whole ai? Yeah. And she makes how much money? Yeah. And she’s given her whole life to teach you. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:40:03
So can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you? Or is it your job for her to like you? Who’s failing in what you just said? Right? It’s your job to have her like you. So when she says raise your hand, raise your hand.
Speaker: 2
01:40:21
Ai.
Speaker: 1
01:40:22
And the other thing is do me a favor. Color inside the lines. Okay? In high school, if she says this guy is orange, the answer to the test is orange. When you get to college, you can argue with the professor all you want. High school, color inside the lines, give the teacher what she wants, make sure she loves you, and you’re getting a good grade. That’s the rules of life.
Speaker: 0
01:40:42
Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:40:43
And my wife beat that into my children sai that they would have it in their souls, in their moral character
Speaker: 0
01:40:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:40:50
Of someone who’s fighting for you needs to have your love and respect back. You take them for granted. If you treat them badly, if you treat them like, oh, aren’t I so great? Then you deserve what you get. And my wife has taught that moral fiber into my children and it resides in them.
Speaker: 1
01:41:11
And the other thing my kids have is they have empathy, which is a very unusual thing for young people. And it’s because they’re they were raised with their father, crying every day. I cried every day until 10/21/2004.
Speaker: 3
01:41:33
Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:41:34
Every day, because I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of, You know? Or someone would say 658 people died, and I I just there was you can’t process all of that death
Speaker: 3
01:41:45
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:41:45
Without crying. And and the only reason I remember is because as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn’t cry today, and she wrote it down. There’s some reason I remember it. So, my kids are are fantastic. They’ve been incredibly supportive, and, and my wife’s the best. And she lives with me in Washington.
Speaker: 1
01:42:04
We bought Bryden Baer’s house.
Speaker: 3
01:42:06
So I
Speaker: 1
01:42:06
have a nice house big enough for my ego to expand, very important.
Speaker: 0
01:42:10
Jamal hasn’t found one that big meh, he’s still looking.
Speaker: 2
01:42:15
You’re an incredible American. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything.
Speaker: 1
01:42:18
This was really fun in coming to talk.
Speaker: 0
01:42:20
Honestly, this has this has been one of ai, I mean, my favorite ai we’ve had. Absolutely. I mean, like He
Speaker: 2
01:42:26
he’s like this all the time.
Speaker: 0
01:42:26
I mean, we’re not at dinner. No. We had dinner. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:42:29
We had dinner at, like, Nikesh’s house. He’s a good friend of ours, runs Palo Alto Networks. And Howard’s ai, you just push the button. You can just sit and just listen. It’s a
Speaker: 3
01:42:36
good one.
Speaker: 2
01:42:36
You can listen to him for hours.
Speaker: 0
01:42:38
Ai the way, I will say Ai I’ll echo the point you made earlier. I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. I mean, you’re, like, on another level, but, like, the storytelling I think It’s incredible. Is what’s so powerful about this cabinet and this administration.
Speaker: 0
01:42:50
And I think it’s gonna take some time to get the message out, but, man, is are there incredible ambassadors to do so with
Speaker: 1
01:42:56
the president? So Yeah. Capable. Yeah. Each of them is so capable, so thoughtful. I mean, I I am honored to be on this cabinet with them, but we all get to work for Donald Trump who can intuitively tell you, go fix eggs. Yeah. And then Brooke goes fix eggs, and eggs are down, like, 40%. And Brooke fixes eggs. I mean, how awesome is that?
Speaker: 2
01:43:21
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:43:22
Right? And gas is down 40¢, right? And he’s only just begun. If we get the Constitution ai in New York passed, and I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hochul on the unbelievable oil and fracking that they have in New York, and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it.
Speaker: 1
01:43:43
But they refused to unleash it. So he’s gonna force the Constitution ai, which, by the way, will drop gas on the East Coast Of The United States Of America in half. Ai mean, this is And that’s, you know, then you got That’s Chris Ai. That’s Doug Burgum. You got Brooke Rollins.
Speaker: 1
01:44:00
I mean, you could just go, you know, Scott Bessent, you know, so thoughtful and elegant. I mean, he’s just step by step by step. And you have, really, the most fun cabinet working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute desk. And we’re gonna make America great again, not as a slogan, but we’re gonna balance the budget. We’re gonna change America. Thank you, Howard. Thanks, Howard ai.
