Looking forward to our thing in a few weeks. Yeah, I don't know if I'll end up being there, but I'm hoping to. I'm hoping to. What do you guys have like a liberal cuddle party or what do you do? Yeah, yeah. Larry takes a bunch of MDMA and we all sort of go into the corner and hang out together. God, that sounds incredible. Liberalism is wonderful, man. You should come try it. That's not liberalism. It's called something else. Sorry, Nikki, is our cryptos are joining us or no? He's, I'm talking to now. Looks like he is. Oh, zing, this is gonna be great. It's gonna be like ratings, bonanza.
All right, we do have David Sacks here. David and she have a quick time on. Look at Sacksie, please. Okay. So, it's residential. He looks thin, doesn't he? Oh, he looks fabulous. All right, here we go. Three, two, one. What? You're like your winter slide. Rainman, David Sacksie. And I said we open sources to the fans and they've just got the reason with them. I'm gonna be West. I'm Queen of King of the World. I'm going back to the number one podcast in the world. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis with my besties, Jamal Polyhapatia, our chairman, dictator, and live from, well, the administration. Mr. David Sacks, our czar for AI and crypto and amazingly too.
Fantastic guests this week. We have New York Times writer and host of the Ezra Klein podcast. It's got a new book with Derek Thompson Abundance, any co-founded Vox in 2014 and he's our guest here today before Trump ships him to El Salvador. Please welcome El Ezra Klein, are you sir? Glad to be here by the final hours of freedom. Okay. Great. Good to be here. Sorry, Sacks. And with us, of course, Larry Summers, economist, former treasury secretary, under Clinton, former director of the National Economic Council, under Obama. And the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006. Thanks for coming, Larry. It'll be with you.
Okay. We have a lot to get to here. So we might as well talk about the big news of tariffs. It's day 80 of the Trump presidency and a second presidency, his second term, and Trump tweeted that he paused tariffs for everyone but China on Wednesday. Basically, let me just queue up the details, Larry, and then we'll get your take on all of this. One week after liberation day, Trump announced on-truth social that, in effect, he was raising tariffs against China 125% based on their lack of respect, quote unquote, instead of negotiating and that he was pausing reciprocal tariffs on all other countries for 90 days.
And markets ripped 10%. Every post of this. And today, Thursday, when we tape, there's been a massive sell-off on Wall Street. So the roller coaster ride continues. What it will be on Friday when you consume this podcast is anyone's guest. S&P is down 5% today. For contacts, the S&P was at 5700 pre-liberation day. So about a 9% drop after these wild swings. And in fact, this has been historic volatility. Here are the top sell-offs in history. As you can see, three of them came during Black Monday in 1987. Three of them came during the financial crisis. Three of them came during COVID and coming in 11th is Trump's tariffs.
Also in the gainers, you have these big rebounds. Wednesday's 9.5% recovery was number three. The administration says this was all part of a master plan. We'll hear more about that later. And that they laid a trap for China. They laid a trap. Bessent has been the spokesperson during this retreat or whatever we're going to call the pause and quote. This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday and this was his strategy all along. I don't think we need to play the clip. That's the gist of it.
The White House count then tweeted in all caps. My favorite way to tweet. Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded. Wall Street Journal on the other side posted a story about why Trump blinked the chronicle the decision as being affected by Jamie Diamond who went on Fox to express fears of recession while saying the tariffs were valid and that he knew the Trump and cabinet will be watching him on Fox, other banking executives who felt they didn't have a lot of influence in this administration according to the Wall Street Journal started lobbying Republican lawmakers at the Trump tariff plan would tank the economy.
The Wall Street chief of staff, Susuile started receiving calls from executives and lobbyists expressing concerns. And the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was influenced heavily by Bessent. They were flooded with worried calls from Wall Street and that the president was lobby to find an off ramp. Trump ultimately relied on his instincts according to the administration. Larry is this 4D chess? Or is this something else? What are your thoughts? It's dangerous work with a sledgehammer on a pretty sensitive machine which is the global economy that's having really serious consequences.
First it's important to understand that there's more tariffs that are around than you described. And after the big back off there's a 10% across the board tariff, a range of structural tariffs like on steel and automobiles and a range of new tariff threats like on pharmaceuticals. Here's a kind of market based estimate of what the damage that the market thinks this is all doing to the US economy is. Let's take today's number 9% if that's right that would be about $4 trillion.
Of course the $4 trillion since liberation day of course markets were down coming into liberation day because of some anticipation of these policies. So let's be conservative and say these policies have taken $6 trillion off the stock market. Now the stock market only measures the adverse impact on corporate profits, not the adverse impact on workers, not the adverse impact on consumers. So you need to add to that stock market number. One way of thinking about adding to it would be to say that corporate profits were 10% of the economy. So you could argue for multiplying by a factor of 10. But maybe that's being too exaggerating or too bold. So let's multiply by a factor of 5. And what you get is a loss in the $30 trillion range as the present value as estimated by markets of what's being done.
Now I know that Trump administration sometimes likes to say it's working for Main Street not Wall Street. I noticed that they were pretty excited about the stock market rally yesterday in a way that wouldn't really go with not caring about markets. So I think what markets are seeing what's is what's true, which is three things. This is an inflation shock because you're adding to prices. The CEO of Amazon got it right. The secretary of the Treasury got it wrong. Increases in tariffs of this magnitude. The overwhelming part of them will be passed on to consumers.
So you've got an inflation shock. When you raise the prices of people and their income, at least in a short run is the same, they're poorer. And that means they can afford less stuff. And that pushes the economy down. And so you've got higher inflation. And you've got more less demand. And therefore more unemployment. All of that's bad for the economy and companies. And the last thing which I think is profoundly important is we are trading like an emerging market country right now.
For serious countries, for the United States, the pattern is that when the world gets risk here, the bonds go down in yield and the currency goes up in value because people come for the safe haven. When you're a country like Argentina, then the assets all move together. Falling stock prices go with higher bond yields, go with a weakening currency. And so because of our erratic behavior, we have changed the zeitgeist surrounding America from the traditional zeitgeist surrounding America to the kind of zeitgeist that surrounded one per ounce, Argentina.
And that goes with all the other things that are happening. The more protectionism, denying the independence of the central bank, fiscal irresponsibility, breakdown of traditional boundaries between government and business, substantial cronism as a strategy, authoritarian tendencies towards the opposition, lack of total respect for judiciary. Keep going, Larry. Keep going. Is a pattern of America being governed on the kind of one per-own Argentina model. And that sometimes produces some benefits for some people in the short run. That sometimes generates popularity for it.
Per-own kept coming back in Argentina. But ultimately, it's extremely costly for a society. You've heard Larry's take on all of this. Larry's giving it about a B plus on the Harvard grade scale, which might be inflated. I'm not sure. Sachs, obviously, in the administration, you cover two things, AI and of course, crypto. And you're a member of the pod. So let's get your take on what happened this week with these tariffs. Even the most ardent supporters of Trump have felt this is chaotic, not well executed, not communicated well.
在阿根廷,Per-own 不断回归。但最终,这对一个社会来说代价极高。你应该听过 Larry 对这一切的看法。Larry 按照哈佛的评分标准给了它一个 B+,这个评分可能有些水分。我不太确定。显然,Sachs 在政府里关注两个问题:人工智能和加密货币。另外,你也是这个播客的成员。因此,让我们来听听你对本周这些关税事件的看法。即使是特朗普最坚定的支持者也认为,这次行动混乱无序,执行不力,沟通不畅。
What's your take, Sachs, on how this was executed and could this have been done better? Well, I think what happened, if you go back to Liberation Day was only eight days ago, as April 2nd, if I had told you on April 1st that Donald Trump would find a way to get the entire world to eagerly embrace a 10% tariff on the American market, and not only would they not complain, but they'd actually be relieved that it was only 10%. You would have said that would be an April Fool's joke. If I had told you eight days ago or nine days ago that Trump would find a way to accelerate the United States's decoupling from China, which is something he's long wanted to do, and that Wall Street would basically breathe a sigh of relief over that, you would have said that there's no way that could happen. If I had told you eight or nine days ago that President Trump figured out a way to assert a presidential power in a way that gives America extraordinary leverage over virtually every country in the world, you would have said, I don't believe it, I don't, you know, what is that power?
And he proceeded to do that, and now basically every country in the world except for China is coming to Washington seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the United States on better terms for the U.S. If you told me any of that a few days ago, I would have believed you, and I would have thought the consequences would be a substantially deteriorated American economy and a substantially less secure. I don't think we know that. No, I don't think we know that. It's not any surprise. There's nothing surprising about the fact that the United States has the power to extort Lassotto. It's just, and that's the country that was singled out in the Trump formula for the highest level of protection. There is no surprise in that. There is no surprise that's not going to Washington right now. That's not going to Washington right now. It will be very, very costly. It will be very costly. It will be very costly.
It will be costly. It will be costly. Everybody's going to try to cut it. No one's going to come to Washington. But that doesn't. Never would have occurred to anyone with experience in government that the United States would have any difficulty getting any major country to come send a representative to the United States to have a discussion and a negotiation with a United States automatter that was of concern to the United States. Then Larry, why didn't they? Never could possibly have come as an enterprise. Okay, let me let Sacks reply to that and then Ezra, I'm going to bring you in. Sacks, go ahead, you reply.
Then why didn't they, Larry? Do you think that all these countries were going to renegotiate their trade deals with the U.S. if President Trump asked nicely, if he said pretty police, let's renegotiate our trade deals so you take down your trade bears, they would have done it. If he had said pretty police with a cherry on top, that's not the way these things were. He had to establish the leverage in the negotiation first. The fact that matters, he's the first president in decades who's been willing to do that. You don't get anywhere by just asking nicely. I think that what President Trump did over the last eight days is a, establish the leverage and be, get all these countries to now want to negotiate a new trade deal with the United States.
This is such a terrific thing. Why do markets think it's so terrible for the American economy? Maybe there's, maybe the markets just completely wrong, but at least another possibility is the market's judging this, the market, I mean, job of markets is to look forward. Just to look past the immediate, it's to see what the long run consequence are going to be. And markets are making a pretty devastatingly negative judgment. Not true. Not true. They're on this doubt. That feels emotional and nice, but it's just not accurate. So let's just establish a couple of facts about quote unquote the markets. Number one, there are two markets and they behave totally differently and sometimes inversely to each other. There's the stock market and there's the bond market with respect to the stock market.
What they are debating and you're right, Larry, is what is the effective long term rate of return? A dollar needs to generate in order to pay me back that dollar. That is what the fundamental stock market does. And what we have seen for many years with training balances, trade deficits and close to zero interest rates of which more of that happened under Democrats and Republicans. We have allowed the stock market to inflate past historical averages. What we've actually seen happen in the last week is what most people would call mean reversion. The stock market is still way above where it was last year, two years ago, three years ago. What has happened is that the forward multiples have compressed. So that's number one. That's the fact you can debate whether that's bad or good. And I'm willing to debate that with you.
Okay. Now let's go to bonds. And then with respect to bonds, what we are seeing now is there are two very complicated issues and we don't know what the unknown known is. And let me be very specific. In the last two days, we saw one part of the bond market totally get out of whack. And what we know is that the yields changed materially in a very acute way, which is a typical of how the bond market typically digests a philosophical change in approach to policy. Normally when you see an acute reaction in the bond market, the underlying reason tends to be some financial calamity in a participant. What we heard in the last 24 hours is a lot of this move may have been attributed to an enormous levered bet on US treasuries by a Japanese hedge fund.
It will take three and four and five and six weeks for us to really know separately. What we do know though, where the structural complexity of the market, and this is where Larry, I agree with you, is acute and important to observe is in the credit markets for private companies. And that is where you have to pay a lot of attention. Okay, Larry, let me let you respond to Shemaath's response to you. And then, Ezra, I promise you're going to come in next. Larry, go ahead.
Martha, as you will know, the vast majority of financial thinking emphasizes changes in the earnings prospects of companies associated with the strength of the economy as a major source of stock market fluctuations. And if you look at dividend strips, if you look at what's happening to analysts, revisions, that's got a lot to do. Negative prospects for the economy has a lot to do with why the stock market has turned downwards. The foreign exchange market is very big and it's a big referendum on whether people have confidence in the United States. Somehow tariffs, reduced imports are supposed to reduce dollar selling and make the currency go up. And not only is the currency not going up, it's going down substantially.
So we're seeing a pattern, maybe it's all just due to one Japanese hedge fund, but maybe we're seeing the pattern of this three days that really looks pretty much like the Argentine pattern. That's right, you are hearing this debate. I think there's no debate that this was done in a very extreme fashion at a minimum. Do you wonder if this could have been done in a more gradual or thoughtful way, which are taken on the execution here by the administration of these tariffs and their response to the market?
I can't say I wonder if it could have been done in a more gradual or thoughtful way. It could have. I defer to Larry on the market. I'm more of a connoisseur of arguments and something I've been thinking about over the past very long eight days is covering the 2024 election and covering Donald Trump's tariff promises. And it was a thing that liberals like me were doing where we do these shows and say Donald Trump is promising a 10% to 20% global tariff and then 65% tariff on China.
And if he does that, it'll have this set of effects, higher prices, it'll create financial uncertainty, etc. And what I would be told, like the counter argument was, oh, you lips. You always take him literally when you should be taking a serious ad. Vivek Ramaswami on my show, he said, he's not going to do that. That's just a negotiating play. And this was the common line from Trump allies on Wall Street.
And then I watched his, he began doing not just that, but layering a series with them by lateral tariffs on top of that plan. The markets began freaking out. All they were freaking out, a bunch of his defenders said, no, no, no, actually these tariffs, which we told you were never going to happen or actually a great idea. We need to reset the entire global financial system and you can't ship those tectonic plates without creating a few earthquakes.
Then the moment the tariffs paused, the 90 day pause on the tariffs on top of the 10% and the China tariff, then I heard, nope, that pause is genius, having you read the art of the deal. But what I would observe from this is it usually when an idea is good, you don't need people jumping back and forth on it so often going between these tariffs are a bad idea, but they're a smart negotiating ploy to these tariffs plus or an actually great idea. You should all calm down as Trump said, you should all be cool back to know these tariffs are a great idea.
I think something I'd love to hear from David. It's very hard to break the pattern being a podcast test. I would like to hear what the measure of success in two years is. We can sit here and speculate about the effect of these and I'm much more on Larry side the one I'm hearing from from Chimouth and David. But what are your measures? What in two years, if manufacturing and unemployment or whatever, is below X, will you be unhappy if GDP is what is a sort of objective yardstick where we could come back in 700 days and say, did this work out or was this a bad idea?
Good. I would say probably the biggest thing would be whether the US can re-industrialize to some extent so that we're not completely dependent for our supply chains on potentially hostile adversary. And what is the measure that is that the quantity of manufacturing we're making is that the share of manufacturing is something to understand. You know, during COVID, we learn from very tight points. I am saying it concisely. In COVID, we discovered that we were horribly dependent on a supply chain from China for some of our most essential products, for pharmaceuticals, for other medical gear that we needed during COVID.
Sure. So what would be if you were to put a metric on it? As one example, but we've also learned that our entire supply chain for all sorts of industrial products now is dependent on China and other countries. So let's be more precise. We have 4% unemployment at the record low of our lifetimes. And do you think Americans want to work in these factories? And if so, which factories? Obviously pharmaceuticals, that's a dependency. Obviously building ships and weapons, that's a dependency.
I think we can all agree on that. And that might be hundreds, low hundreds of thousands of jobs. Do you believe we should be making Nike sneakers here? Do you believe we should be making jeans here again? What would be the objective measure of success? Like a certain number of jobs, certain number of factories, certain types of factories? Because the other piece that I don't understand, and maybe you can inform me here, SACs. Is number one, who's going to do this work if we're going to be deporting millions of people?
And we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes. And we have automation coming to these factories. And Americans don't want to take these jobs historically. How is this all going to work? It seems a bit farcical to me that we're going to bring these things back. I don't think the millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the heartland because we let China into the WTO, which is something that Larry, I think, supported in championing the decade.
We're talking about decades ago. That's what started this whole thing. I don't think those millions of people want to lose their jobs. You're talking nonsense. What are you talking about, Larry? David, you were a Treasury Secretary when we won. You did, David. When we walked China into the WTO, and you were just still defending it. I was just watching an interview. All of them are Larry.
David? Larry, you just did it in your own way. You'll never get to that. Larry, ask me a question. Why am I asked what I got to talk for two seconds before I get interrupted? You guys give five to ten minutes. Finish your thoughts. Finish your thoughts for three minutes. I got to speak for two seconds. Then you interrupt me. You speak for five or ten minutes. Go right ahead.
Larry, I just saw you do an interview with Neil Ferguson, where he asked you, was it a good idea to bring China into the WTO? Was it a good idea to give them permanent normal trade relation status? Basically, MFM, which is something that Bill Clinton did in 2000. And I met, it was bipartisan. George O. Bush continued it. Was, and you were defending this as a good idea for the country. What was the result of that over the past 25 years?
Millions of industrial jobs were lost or export to China. Millions of factories shut down. The United States has a diminished and a hollowed out industrial base. We certainly can't make the products of the future like drones or semiconductors. Jason, just to answer your question. Yeah, obviously some industries are more strategic than others. Do I personally care about sneakers or textiles? No, I personally don't.
Do I care about semiconductors? Absolutely. Do I care about circuit boards? Do I care about drones? Do I care about robots? Do I care about EVs and cars? Absolutely. Okay. Those industries, we are no longer in a position. We are no longer in a position as a country to make those products. We exported our entire supply chain. I just let many factories to China have three questions. How was that a good idea, Larry? Okay. You have three questions here. And then as I'll go back to you and Shema, go ahead.
I have three questions for you. One, can you name a single trade barrier that was reduced? By the United States associated with China accession. A single restriction that existed in the United States that had not been in place for five years before that we removed during China's WTO accession. Can you name one? I don't think we said done any of it, Larry. We've opened our markets to China. I'm sure it's good. What restriction, your thesis is that we threw open the market and therefore we exposed ourselves to all of this China thing.
And question I'm asking you is, can you name any restriction on Chinese exports to the United States that was in effect in 1999 and was removed by our WTO accession in 2000? Can you name any such restriction? Just name one. This was a policy that built up over time. No. It was basically made permanent. It was made permanently walk China to the WTO and gave them MFN status. I'm sorry, David. I'll ask the question one more time. We had given them MFN status 15 years before. No one, they had MFN status. They had it for 15 years.
There was not a single reduction in a barrier to Chinese trade. So the way in which you're describing it is just there's no resemblance to what it was. So it's a restriction to the WTO. What was the point of bringing them into the WTO? The point of bringing them into the WTO was to use the leverage that we had to win a whole variety of concessions that enabled us to. Larry, let's go more to China. This is an extraordinary idea. It's called reciprocity. This is an extraordinary. Let's go beyond the history here.
Larry, let's move forward. I want to respond to this. I want to respond to this. You're totally not history. All right, listen. This is a bad deal. Hold on a second. Let's go back to this. Just a minute. I just want to know the whole argument you are making is about increased exports to the United States that had bad consequences. And so I'm just going to keep asking you what barrier that previously existed. Okay. I'll name them. I'll name them. I'll name them.
Let me get you one. Let me get you one. Prior to the WTO, China imposed a bunch of export duties and taxes on a whole bunch of goods to control of. Okay. That prioritized domestic supply. As part of coming into the WTO, China said, hey, hold on. We'll limit these export duties to only a specific set of products. And then they cap those duties at agreed rates. Number two, they eliminated export quotas. They historically had export quotas to manage the volume of goods.
Under that WTO commitment, they agreed to phase out all those quantitative restrictions on exports, except were explicitly justified under WTO. Number three, they removed the export licensing restrictions. Number four, they ended state trading monopolies for exports. Number five, they liberalized foreign trade rights. The point is people thought that China was going to be a honey pot of economic activity. And it turned out to be a sucking sound, a grand sucking sound of opportunity where the globalist corporation saw a massive labor arbitrage.
So it's fair to say that it was done with the best of intentions, but it was a bad deal. And they got one over on us. I really want to say that rather than having 30 minutes of debate over something that happened in the 90s, I would like to go back to this question. I keep not hearing. I would answer your question, because that was a great question. I would like to hear from David. But I'm, I'm, I'm love yours to talk.
Yeah, I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to have a chance to, I want to just see to just be talking in an anecdotal way about the industry. So, okay. We want him so forward. I would like to announce these policies and then there's never, there’s, give me, give me what indices you are going to look for where if it's, if in four, two years, it is under X, I can come back and we can have some metrics.
I'm sorry. Here's a matrix for you. Okay. Let's go back to Bill Clinton's speech that was given at Johns Hopkins on March 9th, 2000. No, he was asking about forward, David, forward looking metrics. What would you think would be successful two years from now? Not the history lesson. We haven't finished the debate about China and PNTR, okay? But my question predated that debate.
Yeah, we're trying to get to the subject. Let's just finish up on this topic. No, we're trying to move forward. That's all. We're trying to finish up on this topic, okay? Okay. Let's just get the last one about this. Okay. You can have a look. So March 9th, 2000, Bill Clinton announces PNTR at Johns Hopkins. It's a very famous speech. Learme, you can tell us about how I got written. Anyway, Bill Clinton promises several things. He makes a number of arguments for PNTR. He does not think that this does nothing.
Where your argument is that Bill Clinton didn't do anything. You're saying that somehow it happened under Reagan or something like that? That's not what Bill Clinton was arguing. He said, number one, there'd be huge economic benefits for the US. He says, quote, by this agreement, we will increase exports of American products. He means to China. That will create American jobs. Okay, did that happen the way we intend it? I don't think so. Number two is, he believed that we- You looked at the data on export flows from the United States to China.
It actually did happen at a quite substantial rate. But with huge trade deficits from the United States, you're arguing that they did not act in a discriminatory way towards our products. This idea that Americans could just do business in China the way that they could do business here is ridiculous. Anyone who tried to do business over there knows, you have to create a JV. You have to get a local partner, give him 51%. It was extraordinarily difficult. We were discriminated against, Larry. It was ridiculous to try and claim that somehow this was an equal relationship.
Okay. And we imported far more from them than we ever exported to them. So Bill Clinton was wrong about that. Number two, he said that signing PNTR and bringing China to the WTO would promote democracy in China. That we would export one of democracy's most cherished values, economic freedom. Did that happen? I don't think so. He said this would strengthen global trade by ensuring China adhere to international trade rules, reducing trade barriers and resolving disputes through WTO. Did that happen?
I don't think so. And then he said on national security, he said it would improve our national security to bring China to WTO and help make them rich. He said, quote, if we don't deal with China in this way, we will increase the prospect that they will turn inward. That's not what happened. We helped make China rich. We've exported millions of jobs to them. They built up their economy and their supply chain to the point where now they are a global competitor to the United States.
They're a peer competitor. We turned that baby dragon into a dragon-sized monster that can now challenge us in Asia and across the world for primacy. Why in the world have we done that? Disrupt for national security reasons. That was a very foolish thing to do. Okay. Larry, I guess I have to let you maybe self-grade. How did you guys do? Is there any regrets as Sax is pointing out there? Obviously, China has not magically become a democracy, but I guess you could argue they do have a middle class now.
We haven't gone to war with them, so I guess you could argue that this has been good for relations. But to Sax's point, they are incredibly powerful and they are our top adversary. How would you grade the history of this so we can move forward? I was a surging, growing, reforming economy. Growing at double-digit rates. That was before there was any WTO agreement. The WTO agreement did not change a single rule that represented a U.S. restriction on imports from China.
It did change a variety of rules, not as far as I would have liked, that let the United States export more to China and protected United States intellectual property in China that brought China more closely into the international system. You need a counterfactual for what would have happened if China had been excluded from the World Trade Organization. That counterfactual is not that they would not have sold goods to the United States. That principle had already been crossed 15 years before, not a single restriction was reduced.
I don't get the whole mindset here. I understand that we should have done more as a country for the Rust Belt and invested in it much more heavily. If I was worried about dependence and strategic and all that, the last policy I would have wanted to abolish was the chips act. That's the largest boldest thing the United States has ever done to avoid dependence in a national security area. Let me branch them off. The Trump administration has killed all of that.
You heard as original question and the history here from Larry and David looking at their some industries that we need strategically for a military cars. These are fairly obvious where earth minerals are obvious. But we also have the lowest employment of our lifetimes and Americans probably don't want to work in factories on mass. What is your take on going forward some metrics that this administration? should not sacks a saying this? You're saying it. What would you measure this success as in terms of ensuring and reducing dependencies? If to as was point two years from now, we would have graded. Give us some specifics here, Trima.
There is a major issue that the United States has that's much bigger than China, which can be framed in the lens of resiliency and the ability to defend for ourselves. There are supply chains that have many single points of failure. An independent of whichever country that single point of failure exists. It could be an ally or it could be a foe or it could be a frenemy. That creates risk. And I think what we are learning and David's right, it was really highlighted during COVID, we are not in a position to take care of what we need.
So if I had to very precisely answer Ezra's question, I would say that we need to measure and protect four critical areas. Everything else I think we can deal with some inefficiency, some single points of failure. But the following four areas Ezra, I would say are sacrosanct. Number one is all of the technology, both the chips as well as the enabling technology around artificial intelligence. It must be a robust, largely American supply chain. It must. You cannot have single points of failure outside the United States because what you see is even in allied countries, their posture towards things like free speech and other things can ebb and flow, their posture on trade, their posture on defense.
Okay, so that's number one. Number two is energy. We have a critical deficit of electrons in America. We do not have the capability we need to make the energy we need quickly in many ways. We have supply chain issues on that gas. We have critical supply chains that can be shut off by China around photovoltaics. So whether you believe in coal, whether you believe in that gas, whether you believe in clean energy, we are in a very bad, sure enough.
Okay, I think we're in agreement. We're going. Number three are there are critical material inputs that drive the material science of the future. Rare earths are an example going back to chips, things like gallium, things like phosphorus even. So we have a critical minerals and rare earths and material science input problem. And then the fourth, Ezra, are pharma APIs so that when American citizens get sick, we have the ability to not just make it, but also design it and manufacture it because some of these APIs, the active principle ingredients for many of the drugs require very convoluted and complicated processes, coal chains and the like.
And again, there we depend on folks whose view of the United States can change in real time. So if I had to say to you Ezra, what I would expect is if the United States government, whoever was in charge, would put those four things on a board, then detail out all of the key inputs, measure how much we can make ourselves versus import. And then basically try to level that playing field. We would be in a very good place.
A couple things because I think I probably agree with all of that and what it sounds like is an excellent argument for Joe Biden's policies, which were functionally, maybe not the pharmacide, just literally that. Let's pull out semiconductors and the semiconductor supply chain. Let's pull out energy. Let's plot a couple of things like that. What was it? A high fence around a small garden was what Jake Sullivan called it. Let's particularly try to restrict the supply chain export of AI critical materials to China. They had a whole set of policies about this.
Now the Trump administration, the thing we are in theory here discussing is an extraordinarily broad based set of policies. It is tariffs on not just China, it's on Brazil. It's not just on critical industries like Chimath is talking about, but it's on mangoes and avocados and lumber from Canada and basically everything else. I guess there's an argument I could sort of extract out of this that the Biden administration believed what they called Frenchoring, which is that you want to create an integrated supply chain of allied countries that we can work with and that we can rely on and the Trump administration.
I think believe something, depending on who's talking, more like that the entire supply chain needs to be onshore to America specifically. One of the problems and the reason I'm keep trying to push people to be very clear about their arguments and very clear about their metrics is that I feel like there's this kings cup of what we're trying to achieve here where one day it's that we're trying to achieve the reindustrialization of the American heartland and the next we're trying to replace the income tax with tariff income. The next we're just using it as all purpose surplus leverage against any country that does anything we don't like. The next day we're using it for an entirely third purpose and maybe we're just going to use it to isolate China but to bring in our friends. None of these, you can't do all of these things at once and it needs to be very stable if you're going to get companies to do these long term cap ex investment decisions that take decades to play out.
I know in the markets, you guys didn't want to change anything. You guys didn't want to change anything about anything. I wasn't in the I wasn't in the Biden administration number one. I'm cheating. Ezra and Larry as a team. I would love to change. I just want to make sure I would change all kinds of things. You mean the Democrats didn't want to change the cars. Let's see if we can let it won't even admit that PNTR did anything. We not keep doing PNTR for minutes. Let's look forward and not backwards. Look at the look at the chipsack. Look at the IRA act. They did the exact things we're talking about. Larry, go ahead. Let's see if we can find a little bit of agreement. Please.
Here. I agree with Jamoth's agenda. I may not agree in every detail, but I broadly agree with Jamoth's agenda. And I'll go a little further than that, Ezra. I think Joe Biden's attachment to energy security was kind of selective and heavily oriented to green technologies, not others. I thought canceling the keystone pipeline was a clear mistake. I thought the stopping a variety of things involving liquid natural gas were a clear mistake. So I think the Biden administration's approach to regulation that empowered every NGO with respect to stopping transmission lines with respect to constructing power plants because of the importance of democratic constituencies was a mistake. So I think energy security is a central objective of policy and that there's a lot of room to move beyond what the Biden administration did.
I actually believe that very strongly and agree with Jamoth and David. What I don't understand is chips absolutely right. The chips act was all about making there be an American semiconductor industry with production in the United States as a central priority. The Trump administration has declared war on that. Rare earths, we want to have a strategic petroleum reserve for any rare earth. You want to do more mining in the areas that Jamoth says we should in the United States or in friendly countries, I am all for that. Here's what I cannot understand Jamoth. They don't see how your resilience agenda drives anywhere near liberation day and the emphasis on tariffs. It drives towards a set of specific industrial policies, perhaps including tariffs in some particular product areas, but steel from Canada, anything from Lasoto, any natural resource product across the board tariffs on everything.
I think you are absolutely right about resilience and that traditional conventional economics has given it too little thought and that COVID pointed that up as a central issue. What I can't understand is why Donald Trump's echoing of Leia Cocoa from the A's about tariffs is responsive to any of that. But this is the point I'm trying to draw around Biden. I'm not saying I agree with every way the Biden administration defined its objectives. I just wrote an entire book about the failures of democratic policy making in this specific era. What I am saying is a Biden administration's view of trade with it. There are targeted industries. We should be putting a lot of both domestic policy and international policy into play in order to protect and restore or French or and the Trump administration's view is that you have a generalized problem running all across the world that requires highly general policies that then when I ask people to defend it, they sort of move to this targeted argument.
Donald Trump's view, I feel like we end up making something that is not that complicated into something much more complex than it is. Since the 80s, Larry's point about Leia Cocoa, Donald Trump has appeared to hold the view that any time the U.S. is operating at a trade deficit with someone else, that is evidence we are being ripped off. And that is how you get, at least the initial set of tariffs here, that work off of bilateral trade deficits and try to correct every single one with every single country, be it Lissotto or a collection of islands inhabited by penguins.
I think it's really important to be connected to the policy that was actually announced and not sort of projecting all of our own onto it. Like, yes, Larry's right, that you could have a different set of critical industries than Biden did. The Biden team is very focused on clean energy over other kinds of energy. I also do not agree with the liquid gas pause. I thought there were some, you know, there, and we did not do nearly enough on things like permitting reform. Right, there's a lot you could have done that they didn't do. But if what you have in your head is a targeted idea of reshoring specific industries or near-shoring or Frenchering or whatever, which is kind of what I'm hearing from a number of people on this call, then it seems like you would want targeted policies.
And what we have is not targeted policies. It's broad-based policies. So a 90-day pause on larger broad-based policies and a huge trade war with China. I would like to hear a defense from somebody. Ezra and I agree, specific policies. I'd like somebody to explain to me why it's a remotely sensible theory to say that the United States is being exploited by any country where the overall pattern of trade is such that we are running a trade deficit. And maybe in the process, you could explain to me why my grocery store is exploiting me because I'm running a massive trade deficit with that. Okay, trade deficit, Shemafer, Sachs, who wants to take it?
I can start the maybe Sachs and Sachs and so let me actually start by giving some credit to where Biden did do a few things, right? Just in the spirit of finding some common ground. Inside the IRA, I think that there were two things and I've said this pretty repeatedly, but I just want to put it on the record again. The ITC credits and the ITC transfer markets for those credits, the tax equity markets, are critical industries in America to support private investment in all kinds of very complicated markets, energy markets being the most important.
And what the Biden administration did to their credit was remove the uncertainty because those things had to be renewed over and over again and they gave us a very long window where we could underwrite investments to your point, Ezra. That was smart. But it's important to also remember that in order to get Biden's budget done, what they did was they had mentioned roll over on permitting reform. And Ezra, you know this probably better than all of us. When you look inside of the CHIPS Act as smart as that initial policy was, if you ask, why has nothing actually happened? Why have no fabs actually been built other than grandiose statements? The answer is that, which you speak to in your book. It's just this complete malaise and inability to actually get these things permitted and turned on even when it's right.
So I just want to acknowledge that that's there. So Larry, very, very importantly to your question, the thing that we have to acknowledge is that in certain countries, what you have is a very blurry line between private and public industry. And they have this very tight coupling. And again, I hate to go back to China, but it is the best example of this. Where what do they have? I choose one other country just for the sake of it. We can use Korea, we can use Japan, we can use Germany.
Okay. There are instances where the government balance sheets support private industry. They can support them in three different ways. Number one is the tax credits that they can use, the subsidies that they can use to build the things that they need. Number two is how then they can support that in the active selling and engagement in public spot markets to shape the demand curve of the things that are made. And then number three is the taxation on the back end, the terms of repayment and the capital cycle. Those are things that in the United States, we overwhelmingly turn the responsibility over to the private markets to do.
We are the cleanest, the purest form of capitalism in that sense. But many other countries are shades of this. And again, let's not talk about China, which is a thing. So Larry, you're in one second. So Larry, so what do you have is how do you defend dumping? How do you defend that? How do you defend spot market manipulation that drives American companies out of business? How do you fight that?
And I think here's the problem. If President Trump had announced a big broadening of... anti-dumping law to confront a variety of instances of what he said, the administration after careful economic analysis saw as inappropriate subsidy. I might or might not have thought that they were doing that in the right way. But we wouldn't be having this argument. The front pages would not be about tariff policy day after day. And the stock market would not be down by five trillion dollars.
The central thing we are discussing is not whether there are sensible modifications to trade policy to respond to bad practices in other countries or to promote resilience. Those are technical debates that frankly aren't that interesting to a large number of people. The question is whether declaring that we need a whole new era of US economic policy around universal tariffs against everything is so I think that I hear you.
Is a rational step forward or and what I would say by lateral trade surpluses. I'll talk now. We're talking about the Monte Carlo simulation of how to achieve the outcome. And what I am saying is there is just as much as you and I want to guess, the fundamental and honest answer is none of us know the people in the White House, what they know they will share a little bit at a time because the reality is if what you wanted was a white paper or if what you wanted was paint by numbers, I think back to David's point, all that would do is just take any leverage that they had and give people the opportunity to shape their response.
And I think in traditional game theory and again, in traditional game theory, I think the right thing to do is when you're playing poker, you play street by street, what's the flop? Make a set of actions. What's the turn? Make a set of actions. What's the river? Make a set of actions. And I think if you're going to play to win, this is what they should do. Keep their cards very, very close to the vest.
Realize that you can't necessarily surgically go and attack the Lithium market first, then the rare earth market because it all goes back to the same balance sheet. It's the same actor over and over. I think there's a useful analogy to draw here. I think a lot about an article Mark Daner wrote in the New York Review of Books many years ago about the Iraq War.
And it's an article that is stuck in my mind forever because what he says about it is that one of the difficulties of the politics of the Iraq War is there was no one war. There was everybody's private war that they were projecting onto the Bush administration. You had the liberal humanitarian vision of why we were going to war and what that war would look like. You had a realist vision for it. You had a vision that was more about weapons of mass destruction and keeping the whole land safe from terrorism.
You had people believe there was an Iraq al-Qaeda connection. There were really dozens of these, which is how you got as broad a coalition behind as bad a policy as that together because everybody said, you know, there being a little bit vague about what's really going on here and why we're really doing this. But I bet you, if you go into their heart of hearts, what they want is the thing I want.
Even though the policy doesn't quite match what policy you would get from starting from my premises. And that's really what I hear here. I hear it on this show, but I hear it in general in the discussion around this, that there are a lot of different objectives being projected onto Donald Trump and his trade war. The objectives do not fit the policies we're seeing.
The objectives are not stably articulated by Donald Trump or the people around him, nor is any specific objective being articulated in a stable way without contradicting objectives, also being articulated at the same time. And look, maybe in the end, and this is why I want to push you all on metrics, you get something you like out of this.
But you're giving away a lot of clarity just on the trust that what is happening is people are keeping a good hand of cards with a good strategy, a poker hidden from you. As opposed to what's happening is what we seem to be seeing in public, which is Donald Trump is a chaotic and erratic person. They are making policy in a chaotic and erratic way that policies having chaotic and erratic consequences.
And then they are operating and moving on the fly in chaotic and erratic fashion. So actually heard Ezra say that he feels this administration is being a bit chaotic in the approach here. What's the counter to that? You heard Shamaat say, hey, this is a really. thoughtful. They're holding their cards close to the chest. Maybe you could clarify what your position is. Is this too chaotic or is this crazy? I mean, hearing is a bunch of process objections to Trump's policy. And I'm hearing a bunch of nitpicking. What about the suit to or whatever? Okay. Look, this is a very unrealistic view of politics when we've had a bipartisan consensus in Washington for decades that unfettered free trade is a good thing no matter how big our trade deficits got, no matter how rich and powerful China got, no matter how unfair the trade practices got, no matter how many millions of our jobs and factories got exported overseas. This has been the bipartisan consensus in Washington.
And Larry, you're right that it started before the Clinton administration and the George W Bush administration definitely accelerated it. But there has absolutely been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that this sort of unfettered free trade policy was good for the country. Now, how do you change that? Now, look, you can nitpick this and you can make all the process objections you want. But Donald Trump has changed the conversation. I just want to get there. Let me finish. Let me finish. Keep saying I've offered a process objection when I'm objecting to the absence of your goals. You were pointing to Donald Trump's views when he was a public figure in the 1990s and 1990s on trade as somehow he was wrong. He was not wrong. He was one of the few people in the few public figures in America who was right about this.
I think most people today would say he was right about this that throwing open our markets to these foreign policy without taking the consequences of the mistake. You guys have me completely confused. Really you do. No, I can't use about the incursion of your position. Larry, Larry, you still believe that the Clinton administration, let's call it a bipartisan consensus, that era was correct. While at the same time you're arguing that PNTR didn't do anything. I think it is really telling that you are so much more low to defend what we are seeing than to attack what has been. If you want to, it's fine. I guess you could have, it would be interesting to have you and to me, there's the same thing.
It should have you and Larry go 12 rounds on the Clinton era. But, when I say to you, listen, there is not a stable set of objectives that fit the policy here. Can I ask that? You say that's a process? I just want to defend the thing they keep actually doing. I would like somebody to explain to me here. Anderson, Jamoth, resilience, central four sectors. Are we more resilient in the four sectors? What's the answer in two years from now? I got that. I agree. All that. I cannot make any linkage between a 10% across the board, Tara, a tariff on steel, a tariff on automobiles, and much of what the rest of the president says and you were very valid objectives. I hear David give this free trade, his destroyed America, and we're going to undo that and this reign in the heart. I can give it to you. I just want to understand how we'll know other ways.
Okay, look, I can answer this too. Good. Good. All right, look, Larry and Ezra, welcome to a political coalition. Different people have different objectives, dislike different people had different objectives for the policy that we had in place 25 years ago. Okay, there are some people who think that we should have an across the board, 10% tariff, to raise revenue because the country needs revenue and that that would be a better way to raise revenue than to say have income taxes or capital gains taxes. Stan Druckenmiller, who's not a fan of tariffs, nonetheless said that he would support a 10% tariff no more than 10, but up to 10 as a way to raise revenue.
Okay, that's his point of view. There are other people, and I would say I'm more someone who thinks about the geopolitical consequences of this, who think it was a huge mistake to throw up in our markets to Chinese products, basically feeding their economy to the point where they could become a pure competitor of the United States and the US, the threat in the US world order. There are different people, hold on, there's different people with different objectives. One more time because you're, you are just not speaking truth. I want to know one restriction that the United States had on Chinese products that was changed in the year 2000. You said seven times, throw open our market to Chinese products. I want to know one example in which the United States opened its market in 1999. The point of the point of the point of the point of the point of FN.
Well, can you name one product? Yes. Where restrictions were reduced. Okay, David Namin. Listen, you're mischaracterizing what PNTR did. We can play this like a GROC game if you want. People can go ahead and GROC this question, and they'll get this answer. Look, the answer is that before PNTR, China was granted MFN on a year by year basis by Congress. Correct? PNTR made it permanent. What does that do? It created a permanent new framework for trade relations between the United States and China. So it created permanence and it created a certain expectation. What did that enable? Massive investment by US companies in China. So all the bean counters from McKinsey started talking about outsourcing and just in time manufacturing. They started moving the factories over there in a much greater way. The Mitt Romney is in private. Exactly. We hope our secondary finish. We just think the Mitt Romney is in private equity. This is a great idea. Let's move all of our manufacturing.
Could we be that whether or not it was the WT on the bankers on Wall Street got to financialize and securitize all sorts of new products. Okay. That was the result of PNTR. The thing we have to decide really right now is a country is if the thing that you all are trying to replace this with is better. Right? If it will work. And so I want to go back to what you said a minute. Go David, when you're like, welcome to political coalitions. Larry has been in politics a long time. He was Treasury Secretary. I've covered politics for a long time. I'm familiar with political coalitions. In fact, a lot of my book is currently about the problems in the way the Democratic coalition with too many objectives all at once can end up destroying the ability of the policy to actually achieve a clear goal.
So this is precisely the non-procedural objection I am bringing here. This is why I think it is dangerous to be treating an appeal of the entire global financial system without a clearly defined objective that is connected to a policy. And so the question is, if the idea is that there are all these different players here who have all these different policy objectives that would connect to all these different policies and everybody's getting a little bit of them and Trump is kind of flipping back and forth through different versions of them, you could end up, despite yes, whatever mistakes were made in the free trade consensus, which I do agree that we had, you could end up with a bad and not even consensus, just a bad next policy, an unclear coalition that is fighting with itself and is making policy without a strong process can create not like nitpicky procedural problems, but actual damage and disasters.
Shemoff, let's look, let's try to look forward here. This obviously has been a cataclysmic, chaotic, intense, whatever descriptor you want to use of the past week productive is okay, sure. And it's certainly created massive swings in the market. Is this all going to cause a recession? Is this too violent of an approach to markets? That is, I think, a valid criticism that people have, including the majority of business leaders are saying, hey, I think I have to start layoffs. You had United Airlines say, we're not going to give any guidance. This feels to business leaders, Republican business leaders primarily and market participants as just far too chaotic and they can't plan. And if they can't plan, then they stop planning, which then is going to cause layoffs, it's going to cause bankruptcies. And who knows what the second and third-order consequences are going to be. So what's going to happen here over the next couple of weeks and months?
So just on the recession question, and I like to give an answer to Ezra and Larry. I think that, and I've said this for about a year, it was clear to me that we were sneakily in a recession before. And the reason was the vast amounts of money and deficits that were being pumped into government services that perverted the actual GDP picture in America. So as doge sort of slows down that money flow and as the consensus in Congress gets to a better budget, I think that you're going to see that the government was probably responsible for 100 to 150 basis points of just waste. And if you take that out, you will technically be in a recession. That was independent of these tariffs. And I think that that's where the true economy Jason was. And I think that we're going to just find that out.
So that's that. On where we go from here, I can give you an anecdote and I'll give you a projection. The anecdote is this weekend, my wife and I were in bed and a person called me, very successful businessman who was representing the president of a country saying, hey, Chimoff, I need some advice. What do we do here? And we walked through the three things that he and his government, that they government were trying to figure out because they wanted an off-ramp. They were like, I'm ready to cry, Uncle. We're ready to tap out. And again, he was calling me as a private citizen, but I think this conversation was very instructive.
Number one, he's like, look, we have these really high tariffs on inbound American products. We're happy to cut these things to zero. And I said, well, you should do that. Second, while we were exploring, he's like, yeah, you know, we have an enormous capital purchase with Airbus. I said, cancel it. Swap it to Boeing. He's like done. And then the third, which was interesting is he's like, we need to import an enormous amount of energy. And I said, well, who do you give that concession to right now? And it was a non-American company. And I said, well, why wouldn't you just RFP that to an American business and let them compete? And he's like, we'd be open to that as well.
So he said, you know, we're getting prepared. We want to find a way to talk to the Trump administration. And I'm like, great, however I can be helpful, I'll be helpful to you. I got off the phone. I looked at my wife and I said, if even 30 of the 75 countries do a deal anywhere remotely close to this, this was an enormous win. So let me give you my projection, Jason, of what the art of the deal could be here. What you do is you can rewrite Bretton Woods 2.0. What was Bretton Woods 1.0? It was fixing exchange rates. It was setting up the IMF. It was setting up the World Bank. Those were the conditions on the ground.
Post World War 2, it made a lot of sense. What would we do if we had to write the Mar-a-Lago Accords right now? I think what we would do is work backwards from the question that Ezra asked and the answer that I gave. How do we create resiliency in these critical markets? Number one, a framework for that. Number two is how do we create limits for government-sponsored intervention against capital for-profit companies, many of whom are American, so that we can actually compete on a level playing field. And then number three, very simply, if you can do business in my country, why can't I not do business in yours?
And I'll just give you that story for one second. I was responsible. I was the head of every single entity of Facebook outside of the United States. I opened every market. My team and I created a framework for dominating. I figured we figured out how to crack Brazil, India, Russia, you know, the one market that we never could ever make a single Iota progress. Say it, Jason, with me. China. China. Russia. No, we want in Russia. So my point is, in every single market except one, is it that we were just lucky in 174 markets and one we were stupid? No.
So I think that the Mar-a-Lago Accords, this sort of Bretton Woods 2.0, is the outcome Ezra. It will basically use tariffs as a way to get these governments to a table and allow us to negotiate a much fair economic quid broker. Here's my concern with this theory. I want to leave out, but I'll leave the sort of question of what the real economy looked like to Larry. This world in which what is happening is a business leader who represents a country is calling you and saying, okay, what do we need to do to deal? Right?
They're coming to Donald Trump and they are going to come to Donald Trump. As Larry said earlier, there's no doubt that the US economic leverage is enormous. And virtually every country faced with our might is going to try to cut a deal with us. But then there's a call they're not making to you that they're making to someone else, which is we have allowed or we have approached the US as a functionally benign partner for a very long time. And now they're becoming a dangerous partner. They are very, very strong and they will use that strength to crush country smaller than them when it suits the whims of a personless regime run by a person who his feelings, even about people that the US or countries, the US traditionally considered allies like Canada or much of Europe change.
And so yes, on the one hand, for the next year or two, we want to avoid getting a big tear of slap on us. And so we got to figure out what is it that if we offer to Donald Trump, he will say to himself, that was enough of a give that, you know, I can move on to someone else. I can make them the focus of my eye. And on the other hand, they're going to begin to build fortresses and deals and partnerships and approaches that make sure they're less exposed to our ability to wield this power against them in the future.
But before I came on the show, I had gone on X and I saw a clip of you going around, where you're saying that one of the problems with the Biden administration was that you couldn't get anybody on the phone. And then the Trump administration, you make the call, the deputy chief of staff picks up, you say, Hey, I need you to talk to this company. They, I work with them. They're freaking out about the tariffs. The deputy chief of stock, Kelsey company. They work something out. No, no, not that they work something out. They listen, they listen. This, this world in which we are doing the dealmaking by individual relationships, by who can get their calls answered, not by rules that feel clear as stable. That's how the, that's how the Biden administration. That's not what Moss said. And that's not what I said.
Well, Chema, you know, as you're trying to make it sound like corruption, hold on. I was George Clooney. That was making a call. Who cares what George Clooney thinks? Maybe you just say on why I was very, very critical by the guy. I saw that clip. As Ray, what Chema said, what Chema said is simply that the White House listens. They calls, whereas he can get his calls returned by the Obama administration. Great. I think we're actually not saying something all that. No, you mean it sound like corruption. What I'm, well, I just to help a company. What Trump is working through is deal by deal patronage based on how he sees the company.
I'm sorry, the other country. That's not what happened. As, can I just make sure that this is clear? Yeah. This is a 150 year old American business. I have no interest in that company except a friendship. These are Americans hiring Americans trying to compete with China who were very negatively affected. And all I said was, why don't you have a chance to explain what's happening on the ground? My point that I was trying to make and maybe I didn't make it clear enough. So let me set the record straight. The Trump administration, what I have seen as a businessman is willing to hear the conditions on the ground as a businessman when I was building Ezra just to be clear, critical rare earth supplies for America under the Biden administration.
Battery can materials to compete with China under the Biden administration. AI chips to be the best inference solution under the Biden administration. I couldn't get a call back. That's just the facts. Not because I wanted anything just to tell them what was going on. So fair enough. Okay, fair enough. I am not telling you that the Biden administration should have returned your calls. What I am saying is that the degree to which Trump first and then everybody around him as an example of him because culture comes from the top is working off this kind of individual call and deal making worries me because I believe that you had every one of these calls you're saying and they went exactly the way you say they went.
And then the calls that you are not getting and they. Two minutes ago, Ezra, you were saying that a 10% across the board tariff was too broad and we need to go industry by industry. Now you're saying that it's going to be too particular and he shouldn't do. And you see the word deal making listening to people. I am saying people is not deal making Ezra. It's just listening to people. Are you really going to be there? There is no telling me the way Trump himself works is not individual deal making here.
Here's what I've seen with David. David seems is this really is this really the argument here. I will tell you what I've seen and David seen much more. What I have seen from the president is he takes in hundreds of opinions and starts to figure out what the ground truth is. And the reason is when you only listen to one or two, every president probably deals with this. You have this information asymmetry problem because you are the president of the United States. And so how do you cut through it? You talk to hundreds and hundreds of people and you try and calculate what the truth is.
So it's not like he's giving any favor. He's collecting information. That is a good process. You want the most powerful person in the world to get to the ground truth. Go ahead, Larry. I am all for information gathering. I agree that the Biden administration did not do as good a job as it could have of maintaining relations with the business community. I agree that it's a good idea for there to be quite extensive connection. I am also appalled by the half dozen phone calls I have gotten from prominent people in business who have said I'm used to being shaken down when I try to do business in some parts of the world. It's a new experience to be shaken down by representatives of the president of the United States.
What's the shift when you have close connections? You help us. You contribute this way. That makes no sense at all. What the president has been trying to do is it's an amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing, maybe it is an erroneous perception to which I have been exposed repeatedly. But it is a pervasive total nonsense. You guys are very confident that you're actually not. Perception everybody else's aren't. It is a perception that is shared by almost everyone who has experience in the conflict of interest area, who has looked at the situation of Trump administration officials and those working as special government employees in the Trump administration.
What are you saying? I just went through that whole process, Larry. What is that mean? I can speak to this because I just went through this process. It took forever, it took like months. I went through the same process everyone else goes through. The OGE career staff have to go through all of your disclosures and they figure out what the conflicts are and then you have to divest them. It's the same process that everyone goes through. You're all over the place making all sorts of accusations here. If you have some proof or you want to accuse someone then want you to just do it. But otherwise what you're saying is just not true.
It's not backed up by anything. Great. They shook down Eric Adams. That's a direct accusation that happened in public. They shook down Eric. They shook down Eric Adams because they put him in this pocket. That's a big deal, y'all. Like that is the way they are viewing business here. You guys are all over the map making wild accusations. First, it was their big one second two seconds ago, to cause of their discomfort with being overruled by your colleagues in the Trump administration.
So the suggestion. They're all over the map five seconds ago. The same ethical standards that I was held and that other members of previous administrations, including the Bush administration, were held. Unfortunately, is not right. Well, that's false. All right. Well, this is true. You're talking about two different types of divest. Hold on. I had to divest a lot as I talked about in this show. Yes. Any event you guys are all over the map making wild accusations two seconds ago. The shakedown was at the level of companies. Then all of a sudden it was OG and ethics. Then it was something about Eric Adam. You guys are doing business. Nobody's making I like that you're like, who's Eric Adams?
We're not making no. I know Eric Adams says I supported him on this show. I know he is. It's a straightforward way that Trump does business at every level at which he operates. And so it is happening at can I give you my personal administration? I know you don't I know it's not that I it's not that I don't want to know how it's not I don't want to hear it. You know how this started is because I'm not sure if he wanted all our second Ezra you misquoted something Jamal said on another podcast where all he said was that I can get my phone calls returned by this White House where I couldn't with Obama or Biden.
And you guys have somehow morphed that into some sort of like broad ranging accusations of corruption something like that. I think I have no evidence. No clear about what the accusation of a Donald Trump works is Ezra your accusation of me tried to infer some form of corruption or some form of deal making none of that happened what I what I again I'll tell you I connected the White House so they could hear on the ground what's happening from a company who was very negatively impacted by the tear of so that they had the complexion of that feedback as well.
Okay. Do you deny the possibility that your experience with a Trump administration might be different than people who they feel are less allied to them than you are Ezra I'm willing to forward question. What are you sure that you're a good sample. I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. I think we're talking about right now is that people who donate to politicians have unique access to politicians. I think we all agree that that's not true. Just to be very clear I give I have given way more to the Democrats than I've given to Donald Trump and you were disappointed about that and by the way and by the way and where you're allied now and by the way like what's what's crazy is I was the same intellectual person I was under Biden that I am under Trump. It's just that it seems like the Trump administration is like well this is a smart guy with some opinions that we listen Biden and by the way and Larry you and you know this.
These are some very close friends of hours that we share mutually that would not even return my calls. So it is a little personal for me as well Ezra just to be honest with you I'm not going to go there but the point is that's fair. I have never I have never seen a single Iota of any form of anything other than just gathering information from the Trump and they've never asked me for anything. They've never tried to direct me to do anything. They just want to know what's going on when you ask them. Hey can you talk to such and such a person. I assure you that your experience is not the experience of quite a number of the nation's major law firms. It is not the experience of quite a number of the nation's business leaders.
It is not the experience of quite a number of the nation's universities that I am neither the first nor the hundredth person referencing efforts that extortion to use the movie The Godfather as a metaphor for the for aspects of the way in which our country is being governed. What a surprise democratic universities and democratic law firms are making accusations. All right let's move on we think we've read the tariff issue and I think we can all agree that if you donate money you might have better access to politicians. I want to talk about the future of the party Jason if you give 10% to the big guy then you really get access we could do these allegations all day long if you know yeah I there's a long list of people made donations and there's a long list of favorable things that have happened to them after across all administrations and we can debate cause and correlation all day long here but I wanted to talk about the future of the democratic party while we're here Ezra you have been on a tour talking about exactly how incompetent how terrible of the campaign they ran.
What is the future and Larry get you know his two cents in here as well is there any saving this party and if so what would it look like well well there's the problem of the party in the campaign let me bracket that because so my book abundance is more about how democrats govern about the state and and local and federal level and some of the pathologies of governance there then be it hard for for liberals to achieve their goals there are versions of this on the right but I'm not really writing about that in in this so my book about its dark Thompson is about the tendency democrats have to subsidize things where they're choking off the supply of the thing they want people to have more of so think about housing in California you get rental vouchers from the federal government but we make it incredibly hard to build homes clean energy which a lot of the Biden administration's policies were about putting huge subsidies behind the building of more clean energy but they didn't really do anything to make the permitting the citing the state capacity to do all of that capable of building that amount of clean energy at the pace they foresaw us building it right that they wanted us to build it and behind this and and I can sort of go into a lot of detail here but it's a diminishment of state capacity that comes from wrapping the state itself in red tape and regulation.
I think we think and have an intuitive way of thinking about the idea of deregulation on the private sector right when the government is imposing regulations on private companies and it's making it hard for those companies to act to do business etc. But this happens first and foremost on the government itself. One of my favorite examples I've been using lately is there’s a new RAM report that looks at how much it costs to construct square foot of housing in California, in Texas, in Colorado, and it does it on two kinds of housing: market rate and affordable housing subsidized by the public sector. The cost of creating housing in California market rate is 2x in California what it is in Texas, but when you get into that publicly subsidized housing where you have all these new standards and rules and regulations being triggered by the addition of public money it goes up to about 4.4x.
So you have this real problem I think in a way of governing that evolved in the 70s and 80s. There's a kind of small government version of the Democratic Party, the new left, more individualistic, that was worried about too much exercise of government power. Now that we are in a different world with different problems—we're thinking about reindustrializing, we have a housing shortage, and you have things like the Biden administration which really are thinking about how to build a lot more in America—but you don't have either a policy architecture or I would say a governing culture that makes that possible.
A lot of this came from Francis Foucaillama I think and Votocracy. Votocracy, how do you pronounce this? Yes, we're Foucaillama is a great sort of related concept of Votocracy which is the Votocracy. We also got another great concept for bringing up Foucaillama which is the Neo-Liberals which you've sort of been talking about here with a WTN. Other things he says people think about it as the veneration of the market, but it is first and foremost the degradation of the state, and I think that explains a lot more about the world we're in than people recognize.
You can agree with this, Francis Foucaillama is probably one of the most polarizing modern academics in America as you read. People end up being very pro Foucaillama or they think Foucaillama... well, because, yeah, I mean look because what happened is, I mean just to uplevel this for a second, is that you had Foucaillama right, the end of history which basically said that democratic capitalism is the end-all be-all and we're basically down to one system and the whole world's going to run on that system.
That philosophy then animated, I would say, a neo-liberal and neo-conservative consensus in Washington for 25 years and there were three key pillars of that, let's call it globalist consensus. Number one, we'd have open borders, free flow of labor. In fact, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which you know is considered to be conservative, actually supported a constitutional amendment saying that we'd have open borders. Number two, we'd have open flows of trade and capital—so basically the unfettered free trade agenda. Then number three, the third leg of it was Pax Americana: we deploy American troops all over the world to defend this consensus because they've agreed it as liberators, not occupiers. I think all three pillars have been refuted and the person who has represented the shift in this consensus to, I'd say, a new agenda of economic nationalism and geopolitical nationalism is Donald Trump.
Okay, I was going to get you have—listen when you have so this is a real reason for violence. End of history and the last man is a much more complicated, but let me finish the point here because I'm kind of on a roll here. Yeah, keep wrapping it, bring it home. When you have a bipartisan consensus that included both Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats around these three pillars of globalism and then I’d say that country turns against that, that's not going to be a smooth process. That is going to be potentially a violent process. It's going to be a disruptive process and you guys will raise like all these nippy objections and process or whatever.
Donald Trump is bringing that realignment question. The real question is: was that consensus correct or was it a failure? I would argue it's a failure. Larry, let me ask you a question then. When you see something like doge happening and people start taking a bit of a more unilateral, a quicker, a less veto-based approach, is that encouraging to you, Larry? Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because we haven't been able to get the government smaller since Clinton, so are you pro doge? Not doge, and do you think this sort of objection to hey, we're going too fast too violently, maybe that's what we need to do at times?
And then I’ll go back to you, Ezra, to answer the same question. I think Ezra is broadly right about the promiscuous distribution of the veto power. He's broadly right that we need to be able to do more things more quickly in the state if we're to be an effective government. I think we need much more reform. I think democrats have allowed themselves excessively to become hostage to particular groups, particular traditional concerns, and have lost touch in important ways with an American mainstream.
I think that in so far as the election outcomes in recent years have not been what they want to that is an important contribution to how that has happened and I agree with David that Donald Trump represents the transformative and profoundly different ideology that has been present in governing America before. I do believe that it is fundamentally not new under the sun just new in America that it is the one perone approach which is very familiar to students of Latin American history in particular.
And that the general experience of that approach is that its leaders, particularly when they have galvanizing personalities, can be very popular for a substantial period of time but that they are very rarely remembered well by historians of their countries. So my best judgment is that this project is going to end in disastrous failure despite having put its finger on some important concerns and issues. Of course there should be much more aggressive reform of the government than there is but that does not excuse or mean that it is likely to work out well for some of the mindless savagery that the dose is bringing to traditional American institutions.
It's going to work out well and to take just one example, my belief is that the revenue loss from the dosage destruction of significant part of the functioning of our nation's tax collection system is likely to exceed in terms of contributing more to the deficit than any savings. Can you describe that simply? What do you mean by that? What is identified the right thing but they're executing on it too much? Go ahead.
You know I have two questions. Larry, just tactically what do you mean by the destruction of the revenue collecting mechanism? That's question number one which was just I just want to understand what you meant higher. My second question which is more broadly if Larry if you were president for a day just give us the Larry Summers plan. Like what is the counterfactual to what's happening now? You can include tariffs; you can include those. I just want to understand how you would frame the solution to what ails us.
So maybe tactically just talk about the collections part because you referenced it and then just more strategically what the Larry Summers 2.0 plan is. We are firing on mass people whose job it is to audit people like you, and the results of that is that we are losing revenue directly. We are losing revenue further because people once audited go straight in subsequent years and we are losing revenue because more and more people are playing the audit lottery engaging in problematic practices in the expectation can I breath your bubble on this but they will not.
Okay, okay that they will not be caught. Let me tell you my experience. I get audited every year automatically and the reason you get audited every single year is typically the way that you acquire your wealth creates complexity. 700 800 900 page tax filings now you don't do that yourself what happens is you typically pay a large big for accounting for millions of dollars to do it Deloitte PWC Anderson etc every year that I've been audited the biggest delta has been about a thousand bucks in this case I actually was odour thousand by the US government last year which was spending on incredible I'll spend it everywhere so Larry just so you know well aware of everything you just said and I have no doubt about your personal integrity it's not the only part you think it is less than a quarter of people with incomes over 10 million dollars are audited so lucky it's just it's just not true let me ask you everybody is not true that everybody is that everybody is audited.
I get the sense Larry you're you like doge but you don't like the execution got it Ezra you talk about your book we got to move faster we got to do things faster we got to take more risk so are you pro doge or not and if you look at the democratic if you look at this administration I'm going to call it Trump 2.0 for clarity these are I would say two out of three people are on Trump whether it's Shamat your Rogan besent Howard even Trump himself are Clinton Democrats so it's basically Clinton going to say yourself what I don't matter Ezra are you happy about doge your book seems to be a plan to do doge like things I think building state capacity is two dimensions one is what the state can do and the second is a rules under which it doesn't doge seems to me to be fundamentally destructive of state capacity.
First and this goes again to my endless frustration that I feel like goals are not clearly laid out in the Trump administration what are the measures we are looking at and how will they achieve them is it just trying to cut spending dollars they've been very is that but that's not efficiency right I could save a trillion dollars no I could save a trillion dollars of ways it will make the let's put it this way what Larry was just saying right if you cut everybody the IRS right just cut every single one of them on the doge measure of how much dd save in headcount that will look like it counted up towards your save a trillion dollars goal but in terms of what Larry is saying which is the long term efficiency of us tax collections you would have just made the IRS much much much less efficient and we get that but they've also cut all these official software consulting nonsense there is a lot of stuff I am not going to tell you there are zero doge cuts that made sense but I am to say that what I see them doing overall is highly destructive state capacity or similarly a lot of things happening around USAID and say pep far funding is pep far efficient I mean yes you save money by not giving HIV retrovirols to children in Africa but I think it is good that you do that right so that's not the kind of efficiency I'm looking for.
I am interested in state capacity that is connected to achieving specific goals I've talked to a bunch of people around doge and again here you get a lot of different ideas of what the goals are some people say well what we're trying to do is save money but if what you wanted to do is save money you could say go to congress and do a very big bill there is a lot of interest in congress people like rocona who wanted to work with doge to identify big spending cuts that both sides could agree on defense being a big being a big piece of this and then they decided not to do it so doge to me it would be great if somebody tried it but I see this is much more of a discussion of state capacity and a hack and slash operation.
Larry Summers we're going to thank you for coming I know you've got to drop off right now thank you what about Larry Summers to point out could be a lot of opportunity would you like to do your Larry Summers? Yeah before you just know about the counterfactuals yeah what's your plan Larry counterfactual is focus on necessary strategic investments in infrastructure in making America the leading country unambiguously in the world in technology particularly disseminating in large scale artificial intelligence for collective benefit building a larger network of alliances so that we are in a position to counter China both with hard power in the form of increased military expenditures and with moral strength and the world as a whole as a whole behind us as a central organizing theme of foreign policy.
And reinvent our education system at every level to pick up on Ezra's notion of being about results and doing all of that while you're doing the abundance agenda as well of frames stuff up so that we're in a position for governments to get things done. I believe the country is best governed from the center not best governed from a radical fringe. And I believe moving to a transactional model of leadership is the approach of Latin American strong men and history does not find it to be a successful model and so I would venerate rather than denigrate the rule of law as part of governing the country.
All right they have folks Larry Summers appreciate you coming on the pod thank you Larry spicy spicy episode here sex you wanted agents to respond on the doge issue as we wrap well yeah I mean I'm pretty productive episode yeah let me let let me partially agree with Ezra here. I mean I think that he's trying to introduce this idea of an abundance agenda to the democrat party I think that's a good thing. You know I know you've talked about permitting reform and not tying up projects and so many hoops and so much environmental regulation and you know even DEI and all this kind of stuff so I think that is all well and good I mean we should we should do those things.
The thing that I take issue with is that you're on the one hand saying that there's way too much process around just getting things done right when you're talking about public works but the objection you're making to Elon is that he's not following enough process you know it's not enough niceties. Larry called it mindless savagery this is the problem is how do you expect anything to ever get done the reason why your public works projects don't happen is because there's too many special interests who get organized and they stop it. Okay what Elon is trying to do we have a two trillion dollar annual deficit he's trying to figure out how to cut it every single program that gets cut the interests who receive that money and we found out that it's hopelessly corrupt.
You know stacey Abrams gets a two billion dollars for a nonprofit and you have all these NGOs who are basically cashing in they're all going to do everything in their power to stop those cuts from happening and they're the ones who are ginning up this hysteria you know burning down card dealerships and so forth and so on. So this is the problem that I see is that you don't really have a kind work to say for the people are actually getting things done who actually are performing things Elon is one who's actually making has a difference.
Yeah can you find any good in this I mean you you sound like your cherry picking you when when I brought it up and a question you like you support does your first thing is to say like well here's my favorite pet projects I want to keep this but yes right like this is I think really important and weirdly it's the throughline of almost everything I've said on the show today knowing what you are trying to achieve is the first part of achieving it. So doji's cutting things that I think do good in the world I'm not going to say hey look they're making the government more efficient we no longer have us you know a strong foreign aid program or whatever it might be.
They've destroyed the Department of Education without knowing what they're cutting there I don't think doji's doing a good job because I don't think they have any in a thoughtful way connected means and ends and weirdly my critique off to the democrats is also that they have not been outcomes focused they've been process focused. So David's point here is actually not been the critique I've made here I would make procedural criticisms of doji but there's a world in which my hate on doji is look I agree with what they are trying to do but I wish they would follow the law but that's not my take on the common Harris continuing the spending that was going on or Elon and doji cutting which would you choose.
I would absolutely prefer to combo Harris administration to the Trump administration would I like to see democrats be significantly more reformist yes I've written a book about it I'm trying to persuade them of this. Our future book is about getting rid of this red tape and you just said you want to keep the people not just getting it's not just getting you just yeah you say you want to change this is radical change I agree but you just said you would rather have had the person and the administration that put nine trillion on top of the whole not all not all.
I'll never get that change as you guys all invited me here you'll never get the abundance agenda that you want I don't think it's people like Elon or Trump who get things done this is the way that politics work you have to have a paradigm shift to get what you want. I think getting dumb things done is not good change right I actually don't understand how this point is so hard to grok if you get a lot of change and the change is bad I am going to think that is bad not good. Hope that is true for all of you that if Kamala Harris or some other democrat came in and began wrecking things that you wouldn't say well we needed a bunch of change like let's break everything at sight.
I want to see things done well there should be good permitting reform I think so let me give you let me give you an example the kind of thing that I am looking for we talked about ships a bunch on this show I like the chips act I did a big piece that coined the term everything bagel liberalism about the way in which the ideas inside that act when they began building out the grant program layered on too many standards and programs and so on but one thing they then did was they passed a bill or by an signed a bill by Ted Cruz and Markelli taking chips out of the normal environmental review because I said look if this is a matter of national security and we're trying to build a semiconductor fab so quickly we cannot have this layered in years of environmental view which now take on average three and a half to four years.
So because I care a lot about clean energy one of my arguments is that we should have a speed run for clean energy it should knock through the normal levels of review what is happening California high speed rail we're had 12 years of environmental review was not in my view good idea at the same time that doesn't force me to say well I think we should build a bunch of coal plants with that environmental review because I can make distinctions between things I want to see happen in the world and things I don't I think you're totally right with that let me give you the more practical day to day example because those are these albatross projects that are largely a byproduct of ineptitude and corruption but let me tell you a more tactical example so that you can understand why what Elon and Trump are doing is so necessary.
So as I told you in 2020 on the back end of covid I started a business to build battery cathode active material in the United States okay so that's a business we need so that when you want to electrify everything you want to electrify there are batteries that we can make that's not reliant on the Chinese supply chain it made sense the guy that I started it with worked for Elon the other guy I started it with was a professor at Stanford and the third guy I started it with was the head of battery engineering at Toyota a more complete group of people I think you couldn't put together.
So we start to build we get a deal with general motors so far so good but eventually you hit a point where in order to really commercialize you need some form of government acknowledgement that you're good and the way that you do that is you apply to the DOE and the DOE has a very legitimate grant program that tries to accelerate these key things especially things that are critical we went through that program Ezra we paid a couple million dollars in consulting fees to the people that we were told to pay it to and we were rejected okay fine kept going I kept funding the business and then next year last year we applied again 125 companies applied 25 were shortlisted we all went through incredible diligence we won incredible validation at the end of that entire process.
So really two years from when I started and millions of dollars we got a hundred million dollar federal grant from the DOE and fifty million dollars from Michigan to build a plant in Michigan to help redemesticate battery cam in the United States it turned out that in that same period while we were going through that rigour roll stacey Abrams got two billion dollars after 30 days and I just asked the question what is broken inside of the government that that's possible that hopelessly corrupt that's exactly right company is fifty people fifty people where none of this money goes into our pockets we take that money and we then have to raise more money I have to put in more money we try to hire people we try to build a battery factory that can basically give us resilience against the Chinese which I think is great they're an incredibly forwarded you know strong and viable competitor in 30 days she got 20 times more than we did how do you explain it.
So here's what I'll say I'll see here's what I'll say on the two things and how do you fix I have not myself looked deeply in the stacey abrams story but I am very skeptical of the counts I keep hearing about it I suspect that if she had made two billion dollars in 30 days she wouldn't be now hosting a podcast on crooked media. she'd be on an island somewhere so I can't comment on that piece of it what I yeah the president of America it's a joke from Donald Trump actually very out the broader thing here though right which is you're getting at you're frankly what I worry about is that what you had in that DOE process was fairly quick for the government one of the things that I am targeting in the book is a way that even when members of the administration when governors want things to happen they are not willing to upend the process to pass the new bills to reconstruct the architecture of the federal or the state government to get it happen.
Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom wanted high-speed rail to happen can't you acknowledge it's insane that somebody can get two billion dollars after 30 days I am not going to acknowledge a story I've not looked into myself because I'm not sure I trust the count I don't think it's crazy I don't think it's crazy get the money after 30 days but it depends on whether or not the process was good hold on I want to stop before you guys move around a bunch of like I want to stay on the one thing that I want to stay on with abundance for a minute here is that the thing that I think would be useful to do is actually build legislation to make these processes work more quickly with more discretion from decision makers and then oversight after the fact rather than heavy process before the fact.
Jerry Brown 和 Gavin Newsom 希望高铁项目能够实现。难道你不能承认有人在30天后能获得20亿美元这件事听起来很疯狂吗?对于我没有亲自查证过的事情,我无法承认,因为我不确定自己是否相信这些说法。我不认为在30天后拿到钱是疯狂的,但这取决于过程是否合理。我想在你们继续讨论其他话题之前稍作停顿。我想集中谈谈一件事情,就是我认为需要制定立法,以便让这些流程运作得更迅速,同时给予决策者更大的灵活性,然后在事后进行监督,而不是在事前进行繁琐的流程。
I was talking to somebody highly involved in the role broadband programs under a Biden and one of the things they were saying to me was that there is this entire edifice as he put it of policy that is here to make sure I do nothing wrong what would be better and I think this is right is to allow me to act more and then look afterwards to see if I did something wrong and then hold the accountable for it I think too much of our regulation is precautionary as opposed to being able to let people move quickly and make decisions in the real world and then go back and see how they worked out I think that's a great point and I agree with you on that and I think there are a lot of people out there who would say that governments too too bureaucratic there's too much red tape in terms of getting things done any kind of project like the rural broadband takes 15 steps three of them were DEI that's crazy the environmental reviews and the lawsuits that bogged these projects down for years make them unfinanceable.
There are people who agree with you on that you know what they're called Republicans Republicans agree with this but you know who doesn't agree with you AOC and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders so maybe you're in the wrong party because I don't think you're going to convince Democrats of this but we'll see well I wish you well in that I hope you appreciate that yeah no I do I hope I think if you convince Democrats of this I think it'd be a great thing but look this is my issue with some of what you and Larry are saying is that you want Elon and Trump to abide by all these procedural niceties you want them to play by I don't say that Queenbury rules you keep saying this is my view but it's not my view you know who get things done and this is what we say in Silicon Valley you know who get things done disruptive people founders founder mentalities they're the ones who get things done.
Your response as you're as we wrap here and you have to getting dumb things done quickly is not a good idea Starlink is a much better idea than rural broadband neither batteries batteries are not dumb things you're asking me about what Trump and and Musco doing right now we started here on the tariffs what what you're watching with Trump is using expanded terror authorities to do things that have a bad process behind them and we'll have a bad set of outcomes so look I've asked you many many times here I don't really feel like I got the set of metrics I was looking for but we will maybe talk again in two or three years and we can decide together was this genius work by the disruptors or was this a really really dumb approach to economic policy.
What was the issue with the metrics that I gave you as you don't think they're good I don't think they're you want the unit of measurement kilograms I don't think they're completely complete I think you're processing us you're doing to us exactly what the government bureaucrats did to rural broadband what's your metric how long's it going to take you to deploy this we have to check this yeah exactly come on these are debate here's all you need to know asra it's a hundred bucks to get starlink it's 15,000 to do five you really think principles and you're trying to bog it down in procedural arguments hold on this is amazing to me you really think saying to you in two years what are three or four metrics that we gave me doesn't fit the poll I mean look we don't need to do this whole thing again but what you gave me doesn't fit the policy it's just re-industrialization hold on we said that we want to re-industrialize America in critical industries especially and reduce our dependence on foreign supply chains that are based in potential ever-cure countries concrete enough as well those are a sufficient objective because the other thing that I the part of you the part of it that I did not hear was okay where is the economy right there's got to be some cost you don't want to wait so what metric would you want
I'd like to see like okay GDP growth has been x I will you want positive GDP growth and we want resiliency for those four critical industries amongst others okay and it'd be nice for the trade deficits come down and you know those are your certain countries yeah get back to work then we're all going to get back to work we got the four critical industries we got the GDP increase and trade deficits it's it's an open debate all right Ezra climbs new book abundance is out in fine bookstores and amazon and all kinds of other places you can get it and you can hear him on podcasts incessantly when are you gonna stop this podcast where is oh man oh man it's a good thing to do one of the last absolutely all right we'll talk you soon Ezra by all thanks for having me thanks Ezra all right thanks Ezra how do you think the debate went I think is a good debate to have and we made progress here the paradox of all of this is what they're describing in some ways is what Trump and Elon are doing yes but it's a it's a bit too hot so if I were to give a criticism or room for improvement to the current administration to maybe pull some of these people over it's basically we're slowing down and explaining what's going on a bit better I give the administration and like I give doge any plus plus it's obvious like they're doing the right thing I give the communication like a B like just increase the communication and you can see they're doing that
我希望看到 GDP 增长,比如说,增加了多少。我们想要 GDP 的正增长,并希望在包括这四个关键行业在内的多个领域保持韧性。贸易逆差能减少就更好了,当然,还有某些国家的问题。大家都要重返工作岗位,当我们实现这四个关键行业的发展、GDP 的增长以及贸易逆差的减少时,这些都是可以讨论的话题。Ezra Klein 的新书《Abundance》已经在各大书店和亚马逊上架,你也可以在各种播客中不断听到他的声音。你什么时候要停下这些播客呢?哦,天哪,这确实是件值得做的事之一。好的,我们很快再聊,Ezra,再见,谢谢你邀请我。Ezra,你认为今天的辩论怎么样?我认为这是一个值得进行的辩论,我们在这里取得了一些进展。矛盾之处在于,他们描述的情况在某些方面类似于特朗普和埃隆正在做的事情,但有些过于激进。对于现任政府,我的建议是放慢步伐,解释清楚正在发生的事情,这样可以争取更多人的支持。我给政府的努力评一个高分,比如说,加密货币的推动,他们做得很好。但在沟通方面我打个 B 评级,只要加强沟通,就能更清晰地展示出他们正在做的正确事情。
Antonio went out and talked a bit about doge they did a round table and they're updating the website faster the more you do that the less the opposition's mind is going to wander the same thing with the tariffs if the tariffs will if if the cent was out there front center every day talking about methodically what their plan was instead of the shock and off I think people would be able to process it quickly let me just add one thing to that one person's opinion okay I like that obviously you can always say that communication should be better but but here's the reality of it take doge for example yeah you have crazy leftist fire bombing tesla dealerships painting swastikas on Tesla cars a costing Tesla drivers okay creating violence and payoffs and trying to depress tesla sales okay and who's to blame for that and then what people say is well somehow elons the disruptive figure here you have a crazy left wing that's reacting in crazy ways to sensible things that doge is doing and then what people do is they reinterpret this chaos has been created by the left is they put the blame for that on Elon
I think your explanation there is even more reason to be proactively communicating decisions so and that doesn't forgive anybody drawing swastikas on Tesla's obviously they should go to jail and if anybody's coordinating it that should be like a rico case we should find out who it is just if we're going to bring these two parties together which I think we came close to here of like finding some common ground.
I think chamafu outlining your four bullets and then at the end as we're saying well what's the impact on gdp and then you add into that sacks well what's the you know input on the trade difference for the first time you know these two sides I think we outlined what should happen what should the measure be in two years are have we ensured those important industries is gdp robust and is the trade deficit deficit more balanced.
This is the same debate we always had over immigration let's pick a number and work towards a number right and that's where the debate in our country breaks down in my mind is that we don't pick numbers we can agree that we need a ton of innovation.
Segue Jason go hey i chimap I saw that you were at the breakthrough prize a ceremony with the weekends are I couldn't make it you're I had family stuff but freeberg was there as well and as everybody knows this is the breakthrough prize is like kind of the Oscars for science they had hundreds of guests there and about a third of them were scientists the third were tech founders and you had a bunch of Hollywood folks there hosted by James cordon and you had Jeff Bezos you're emailing there as I mentioned zok vandizo surge and guenith and mr beast lots of excitement there.
And I know David you were at a secret conference that also I was almost invited to that you back when it's pal tro friend of the pop Jason my neck you can show some photos here oh we do have photos okay my wife my wife sent me a letter to read on the here so let me just open this up here what is it open letter it's an open letter to oh my god okay dear guenith pal tro cheese it's open love letter to guenith okay i'm just gonna read this here okay last night when I met you you i learned in that moment that fair amounts are not a myth they are real and apparently trademark by you.
You have the kind of femininity that could destabilize the stock market i left the encounter slightly dazed unsure if it was your presence or an as of yet unlisted group candle okay wait let's just stop you let me just man explain what she's trying to say here guys wait you are you saying that you got a crop right in a pot trust the stock market guenith pal tro is hot as balls okay that's the answer to try or saying she crashed the mark she has so much aura and ris david you have to i mean i don't know if we have the picture where david met her at the jpm conference but she is so kind she's got high EQ but i gotta say so cool i have to say like i've met a lot of stars that's like a star star that's a star star where you're just like holy you're just kind of like a little bit in awe hmm she's oh she's a star she's a star.
There she is fifth bestie guenith pal tro jeepo nat was done nat was stunned i was done we were all stunned so wait are you saying that nat has a girl crush i think so girl crush has been declared here for the first time on all in we have an official girl crush when i think it's just remarkable Jason though is that another conference lost your invitation in the mail i mean it is crazy you gotta talk to the post office about all these invites i keep getting lost in the mail i just started my white house invite this email man you must say what's going on i don't know i gotta get invited to something i think that you're a great i guess i'll see everybody enough one you're a great you're a great family man so at least you're but you're always busy with your family so you i think people know trying to prioritize the fam i got young girls what am i supposed to do you know oh my god all right big shout out big shout out to your enjoy your moment.
在那里,她是第五最好的朋友,Guenith Pal Tro Jeepo。Nat 完成了,Nat 惊呆了,我完成了,我们都惊呆了。等等,你是说 Nat 对一个女生心动了吗?我想是的,这里首次宣布一个女生心动事件,这次我们正式确认了一个女生心动。我觉得这真是太惊人了。杰森,你是不是又错过了一个会议的邀请?真的太疯狂了,你得跟邮局谈谈,我的邀请总是寄丢了。我刚才才收到我的白宫邀请函。你说这是什么情况?我不知道,我一定要被邀请参加点什么。我觉得你是个好人,我希望能见到大家。你是个出色的家庭男人,至少你总是忙于照顾家庭,所以大家知道你在优先考虑家庭。我有女儿,我还能做什么呢?天哪。好吧,给你一个大大的称赞,好好享受你的时刻。
I think yes incredible what they're doing to inspire people to get into science is just so you know they get the awards are enormous it's like three million dollar awards which I think it's just kind of like it's an amazing reflection of how important this stuff is and ever so far the last two years also had a little tier had a shed a little tier hmm because they do these things where like you know you you bring some of these folks that had been impacted positively there was a girl who had her jeans edited she was literally on on her deathbed and this guy david lu who won the breakthrough prize did a very targeted gene at it she's alive and thriving and she gets to present the award to him and you're just like oh my god it's you know sacks when he said he was shedding a tear or almost shed a tear i thought he was gonna say he saw his reflection in his tuxedo and just got a little drop about it because he's how good he looked rough does look good in that photo put it back up put it back let's see the photos you see how much you wear the silhouette the silhouette on your tuxedo is just uh outstanding.
Okay well that so net so net swearing our money pre-vae and i'm wearing loripiana which is like a double bracelet to see the double bracelet to see wow they make that cashmere as we're tuxedo i cannot comment on the material choice because it which is that is wow that's like gorgeous garment well actually you know freedberg was going to be on the program today but then he found out how many endangered species did you guys murder did you did you see that Nick do you have the picture of us with zoi saldana oh there's us in freedberg oh freedberg's good oh there's always some gunna the mr beast and her husband Marco perigo great guy this is zoi saldana's husband a cooler funnier fun dude you're not gonna that that guy should be at every party really every man bun every time it definitely looks like it's caring look at zoi saldana's tattoo in her honor chest.
i don't know if that i want to see if that clothe you know that clothes guy on x is always critiquing republicans oh he's awesome i love you i want to yeah dear i want to i want to know if he how he responds well that's terrible mr beast fails but i want to know your response to your tuxedo jamauth and finally gives you credit because i think he only comments democrats is sort of the problem oh is he really not uh yeah he's always picking on republicans jimmy look at you guys see the picture of julia's dress i just want to say one thing about julia's or did you see julia's dress i have them let's take a look here
我不太确定我想不想知道那个总在 X 上批评共和党的“衣服男”他怎么看待这个问题。他真的很厉害,我很喜欢他。我想看看他会怎么回应。这真是糟糕,Mr. Beast 失败了,但我想知道您对您的燕尾服的看法。最后给您一些认可,因为我觉得他只评论民主党人,这有点问题。哦,他真的是这样吗?是的,他总是挑共和党的毛病。Jimmy,你们看到 Julia 的裙子了吗?我只想说一件关于 Julia 的裙子的事,或者你们看到 Julia 的裙子了吗?我有图片,我们来看看。
this is an insane story so this is julia milner so the cool thing about this guys is this is this isn't very incredible and famous painting by rafael called the school of Athens yes this is like a visual manifesto of human knowledge and so there's all these very important people Aristotle Plato Socrates Pythagorean Pythagoras etc anyways she got the license i think from like the vatagon and then she worked with dolce and gabana to make it. into a dress for the occasion just to celebrate learning but there she is with with our boy jimmy donaldson so anyways it was a great event thank you jure and julia for including us
alright guys i got a wrap all right david i miss you thanks for the invite all right bison i will hand deliver jason's image yes i'm pretty sure i mean i have a phone number you could text me the invite i could you could send me a calendar i have a gcal i've got a google calendar you could invite i'm a good i'm a good i'm a good i'm a good i'm a good it's so funny that that event that sacks was at one of our mutuals was like hey guys this incredible events going on this famous person's hosting it the celebrities are coming j kow free bark everybody you're all invited and then like two weeks per day i was like um are we going to this thing because i'm just like my calendar and everything they're like i yeah yeah the event happening and i'm like for you jason did you send me event and they're like they're like i'm not sure you're my my your die you're my my my the i'm the invite but you didn't email it okay it's sure i will never go to an event that rejects you ever like a writer die baby for our chairman dictator another exceptional episode of the all-in-porkass we'll see you all loving it bye bye
oh what what besties are gone that's my dog taking it away she's right wait so wait it all oh man my natural meaty ass looks we should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all it's just like it's like sexual tension that we just need to release something what you're that big what you're here whose we used to get Russia's ok okay you