Howard Lutnick | All-In DC

26:06And there's 5 .9 million people who work for the government. How can 450 ,000 be essential? And there's 5 .9 million. So he says, like Twitter, I think we should cut 80%. And I say, I know how to cut 50. And he says, I want to cut 80. I said, I know how to do 50. He goes, are you with me or against me? I go, I know how to legally do it. What do you have? And my son says it was like two alpha dogs, just like fighting with each other, but first half out. And then, so then X comes in, right? And then he's got to walk his son X out. So he walks his son X out, and I'm thinking maybe the meeting's over, right?

26:45Cause we've been together half hour, 40 minutes, and then maybe it's over. Cause he got up and he walked out, he comes back, and he sits down and he goes, Because this meeting is, right? That's what it says. This meeting is, and we sit down and we map out the plan. I tell him what a gratis vendor is. Because I designed, because I was not going to go into the government. I was doing transition. What is a gratis vendor? The gratis vendor is an approved vendor for the United States of America that gives product to the government. It doesn't sell it. Okay. So therefore, I don't have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor, because you're giving it to us.

27:22And then if you give it to Article 2, which is the president's stuff, then the president could accept it. Right? Because it's give. Sorry, what's an example of this? Like just to make it... I write some software. You write some software. I write some software for the commerce department to do a better job of exercising. You just give it to me. And then I do QA on it and I can take it. If you sell it to me for $1, we go into government hell. the whole rigour moral. Right, but if you give it to me, right? And then I set up, you know, so I said, I'm calling it Doge, and I registered the name Doge.

27:59You said that, of course. And were you familiar with Dogecoin? Of course, it's Elon, I'm the only one. So what happens is, in the Defense Production Act, in World War II, in order to get all the great executives of America to help with production, They named everything after jazz singers or everything that of the people who were on the committee that it would make them laugh and smock Okay, right? So I picked a doge so he would laugh at somebody and he said get the F out of here Like when I said we're gonna name it doge the Department of government efficiency Which I didn't think of it was on the internet sort of floating around in June.

28:38Yes, right? But I literally registered it Right as the Department of government efficiency like making a real thing as a gratis vendor and I said said, this is how I've done it for me. So that I can run Canifith's Gerald, you can run SpaceX. Right? You don't have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff. Because you're not working for the government. You're just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself. Right. But you're not looking for anything. You're not taking any money. You're not owning anything. You're not doing anything. You're not on that side of the wall.

29:11You're on this side. You're outside. Right? And so we had fun, we talked for two hours. And then on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside and I put up, welcome to Doge. We are going to rip the waste out of our $6 .5 trillion government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump, president. And I posted that with my, I probably at the time, I had 25 ,000 viewers and I got 45 million views. Wow. Right? So it was me and Elon. Yeah. And that was the beginning of Doge. Yeah. Right? Then I ran transition, which is so for the transition, we had I had a room in Marlaga. Yeah.

29:55Okay? Big coverage table in the middle. Four 85 inch screens on one side and mirror four 85 inch screens on the other side. So that you and I could talk to each other. So the president sat across from me. Yeah. Elon sat. Oh, and then I'll tell you one other story about Elon. So So, he wins the election. President wins the election. He accepts it like Wednesday, two o 'clock in the morning. Right? Elon's not on stage. If you see, I'm on stage. Elon's way in the back of the room. There's a thousand people in the room. Two thousand people, he's way in the back. He goes, oh, Thursday afternoon, I call.

30:27I'm doing a dry run of the launch of my transition. Right? And the president is superstitious. He's never had one conversation with me about transition. He totally trust me. He wins the election. Now he's got a look, you know, I said on Jessi orders. He hasn't talked to you ahead of time about who he won. Not about one job, about one thing. Because he's superstitious. Like don't waste your time. Don't drink it. Right? Just go win. You gotta go win. So what happens is he, so I'm doing a dry run. So I call the line and I said, where are you? It was what he made. I mean Austin, Texas, whatever I go.

31:08What are you doing? I mean, what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected? If you're not gonna help him pick the cabinet. Like, come on. Right? Because the way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions. He likes them. And anybody who says, oh, the last person who sees him gets him, that's because they don't know him at all. Right. The answer is it's an orchestra. Right. And I would say, okay, I'm the first violin. At the time, I would say I would describe myself as second violin. Right. So this is an orchestra.

31:51So the president's not going to make a decision with me and him alone. Yeah. No, he's going to have. So it went like this. President sitting across from me, at the conference table, Elon to his left, Suzy to his right, right? JD to my left, Linda McMahon, who's my co -chair, right? But she wrote all those eos that he did. That was she was responsible for, and I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. So she sent me to my right, JD sent me to my left, Don Jr. right? Steven Miller, and he was always 12 people in the room. They were never like me and him, pushed in the corner doing this to that.

32:28And what we would do is I would put eight candidates on one screen, right? And then big candidate on each screen. Most beautiful AI picture of you you've ever seen. Right. And people would walk in and go, wait, get that photo. Right. I'm like, what do you think I did? I took three of you photos. I've heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition. That there were you walk in and everyone's photos up on the screen. Everybody's on the room. And so that happens. That's a candidate for a role. And then you guys would debate it. So what happens is there's a big picture of the person. Yeah.

32:54They're key highlights of the resume. Not boring. With their education. Yeah, right? And then you would click a button and you'd see him speaking 20 seconds at a time for them Right? So it was about 80 seconds and you're not speaking about the job Just like how do you present and what you can see is his whole cabinet Can talk although? Because he picked them knowing I need you to be able to talk to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there And that's key to him. And the way I would joke to people is how do you do it? I go watch. Pitch. So you throw him a curveball. You wouldn't swing.

33:32You throw him fast, but he wouldn't swing. You throw him a slider, he hits the ball, hits it to my glove, I go, here you go. You go, well, how do you know that? I go, because I know the guy for 33 years, I know what he wants. And he loved the process. And you know what happened? You saw what happened, right? First day, eight candidates, 12 jobs national security. Okay, he says, what do you want? I go eight to four. I put up eight candidates. I recruited everybody. I had 150 of the best Republicans in the United States America. They each gave me five people who then gave me 10 people. I had thousands of people to pick from.

34:07The whole government was set up to pick from. And then we picked candidates. I had eight for every job. Eight, eight, eight, eight to four. That's Friday. Sunday comes in four to two. In the morning, I fly everybody in for the two. I prep them. We go in and meet them. Two to one. Final interview. Give them the job. Wow. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Monday, Tuesday, Monday were done with national security. Okay, now we'll roll it on and it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate. Everybody knew it. Everybody was prepped. Everybody was where. Everybody was done. You know, that's why I had to be there.

34:45I had to have David Sachs. Because I needed David Sachs to be in the government. I recruited David, I pounded on David, you can ask David, right? I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said, okay, I'm gonna do it, right? And I did that for everybody. Yeah. All right, and I made sure he had the greatest choices and then everyone's probably called me night and say, throw this guy in, throw this guy in, throw this guy in, we did a vet on everybody. Yeah. But I didn't take out anything negative. And I am not a negative person, you can tell. Yeah. I'm positive. So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate?

35:19And there was no game theory. A lot of people speculated there was game theory that will put a mix of people that will assume some won't make it out of committee and then we'll end up with the ones that we do want. Everyone was the number one time. Only one. Only one. And that was Matt. What happened with Matt Howard? How would it that process be? We, he was tortured by his attorney general in the first term. And we were not going to have that ever again, right? So we needed strong backbone, strong capacity of which Matt Gates has it. And I know Matt Gates and he has it, right? But we did not know what that vet was going to say from that report from Congress.

36:00So here was the idea. We fight for him. And we fight for him to get through. And then we read the report. The report's not bad. I didn't remember, the president's been tortured. Like people blaming him for stuff that never happened. Oh, 30 years ago, he raped this woman in the dressing room of Bloomingdale. So I mean, what a load of crap, right? It's just not true, none of it's true, ridiculous. So he comes at this saying, I know you're gonna get tortured with ridiculous, right? So then he says, if it's ridiculous, then we support that. And if it's not, we have Pam right here, right now. So that was lined up so that everybody knows it's right here right now and it's 3d chess So we read it pa is like Pam in a hundredth of a second Right and Pam is a rock star and you could argue That you would say well why didn't you pick her first?

36:51You know what? He's the president. He plays 3d chess. He did it his way and you know what? But there was no candidate up there. Yeah, who wasn't right? Yeah, right? and we could talk about all the detail and how we thought about it when it went, but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive, and so right. And what does it produce? The greatest cabinet ever, the most capable, thoughtful, best able to communicate. I mean, it's so fun to be in a room with these people because these are world class people, the best people. We shouldn't betray confidence, but I mean, we were in a room earlier this week with several of them and everyone had a moment to speak.

37:33It was unbelievable. I mean, look, every single one of them, you're like, I mean, you could have been a leader in the country, like everybody. They're all great. That's the point. He picked greatness. Now, I was the recruiter, so I was recruiter in chief, but I would say, I can understand why now, by the way. Well, but think about it. If you take someone like me, and you say, just be a headhunter. I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever to live. Because think about it. What's the odds of saying, okay, Howard, your whole job is just be a headhunter. Find the best guy. I promise you I'll be really good.

38:04Can we go back to Doge? So you talked about the Grottis vendors. Maybe there's other stuff that you can do with executive action. The president can do with Doge, et cetera. Can we talk about congressional budgets? How do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along? And is the plan to bring Congress along? I've asked this a lesson. I've asked this several times since we've been here. And it's the thing that gives me the most heartache. And the most headache is I worry about whether this actually get their given congressional interests. I think Congress works with something called scoring.

38:41Yeah. Right? That if it comes from their pen, it counts. If it doesn't come from their pen, it doesn't count. But the fact is money always counts. It just doesn't count for their scoring. But their scoring is only part of the game. Right? the outcome of the game is what matters to me, Elon, our cabinet, and Donald Trump. Okay, the outcome of the game, and I'm telling you, the outcome of the game by me and Elon. Now, a funny part of it is, so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn't wanna leave Pennsylvania, right? Cause he, you know, Elon, he's committed to Pennsylvania. So I convinced him he's gotta come.

39:24And we have a plan. I'm going to stay to him. So I, everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God. I'm the only one who introduces Elon. So Elon comes on stage with me. There's two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden. The only time that two of us are on stage. I'm the fourth speaker. He's the third from the end. JD is second from the end. And Donald Trump is last. Okay? So he's supposed to say, when I say to him, how much are you going to cut the deal was, he's going to cut $1 trillion. dollars and then he's supposed to say and how much are you gonna earn and I'm supposed to say one trillion dollars and then we're supposed to say together we're gonna bounce budget and I'd say to America that's that's the little sort of thing so I ask Elon how much are you gonna cut and he he said two trillion but well because we're in front of 22 ,000 people and the places are up then he says two trillion and then I'm sitting there going and I'm like I think I said already then.

40:23Or something like that. You don't even like, what am I supposed to say? So later when he walks back to a trillion. No, you were caught off guard, but I mean, I said, it was quite how much you're gonna earn. No, because he said too trillion. He's like, I got it all to worry. Like I said, all right, all right, even. And that was that. So then I walked off stage and he said too trillion. So like, what am I gonna say? But the answer was always, right? That 25 % of the waste for an abuse is a trillion dollars. Right. And he's got to cut and find the waste for an abuse of a trillion dollars. Okay. And that my job is to raise one trillion dollars of exogenous new revenue.

41:00New revenue for the government. And we, right? I'm telling you, I've been here now two months. Yeah. Right? I am more confident. It's going to happen. And more exciting. Tell us how it happens. Well hold on a second. So Howard, let's finish this and then we'll move to tariffs and revenue generation. So there's a lot of domestic terrorism. Is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house? Is it basically to put fear into people that are trying to find this waste in fraud? Is that what that is? The burning of the dealerships. If you were, I describe it to people this way. Let's say so security didn't send out their checks this month.

41:41my mother -in -law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming and yelling and complaining. And if all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah. Because wherever screams is the one stealing. Yeah. Because my mother -in -law's not calling me, come on, your mother, 80 -year -olds, 90 -year -olds, they trust the government, they trust, okay, maybe got screwed up, big deal.

42:22Not gonna call and scream at someone. But someone who's stealing always does. Yeah. So what happens is, we need to get to. So the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately getting the money, have an inside person who's routing the money, they are going to yell and scream. But real America, is going to be rewarded. Because here's the key. Benefit of the dough. Not one penny should stop going to, where the richest country on earth. Here's the way I say it. I said we have, we have a $6 .5 trillion budget. We have 4 .5 trillion of revenues. Okay, we lose $2 trillion a year.

43:03We have a $29 trillion GDP, right? which people don't understand, which I'll explain a little bit, and we have 36 trillion in debt. What number did nice say to a business person? What's our balance you work? I say 500 trillion dollars. The president says they're quadrillion. But if 500 trillion or quadrillion, 36 trillion, we're rich. We don't have to take one penny from someone who deserves so security. Not one penny for someone who deserves Medicaid Medicare. What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who's not hurt, who's on disability for 50 years. It's ridiculous. And they have another job.

43:42And do we have to monetize our assets? We? We need to be smart. That's all we need to be. And I'm going to tell you things that are just smart. They're not, oh my god, this is the most brilliant thing ever. This is just smart. There are so many smart things we can do. Like, you know, we'll talk about the post office, right? Think about this. The post office says 625 ,000 people who work there, and they go to your house every day. You know what this census does? The census hires 625 ,000 people, trains them, teaches them as interviews, two million people, trains and teaches them, hires cars, how about this?

44:17You're genius. That's pretty smart, Howard. Right? Okay. Like obviously. Right, but here's what I tell you what I'm doing. You see it's so right. I'm really good at pattern recognition. Okay, here's one. Like tell me 625 of one and I can point that 625 of another. This is the genius I bring to the government. Sure thing. This is core fun. By the way, you're responsible for all the core data collection as well, aren't you? Isn't commerce responsible for generating a lot of the... GDP? Oh, GDP? I get to talk about GDP and how I'm going to clean up the nonsense. This is GDP. I could explain that if you make a tank and someone buys a tank, that is GDP.

44:50But a thousand people thinking about buying a tank, right? Who take your tax money and I give it to them and they go, hmm, I wouldn't this should be buy a tank or not? That's not GDP. Right. You're saying government spending should not be counted in GDP. No, government spending to buy a tank should be. Right. Government spending. That's non -productive. Non -productive. This is too much. This is so important. I don't think I'm going to go on to people realize this. Well, how much of GDP is non -productive government spending? How about we do one thing? Yeah.

45:20GDP. D means domestic. P is productive. Domestic production. It's not consumption. Right. If I go out and buy a Toyota, right, that's not GDP, right? If I buy a Chevy, that's made in America, that's a D, right? So people think it's like a consumption metric, right? That's not it. And you can check another one is this gross domestic income. That's also good. So by the way, they grow about the same rate. It's kind of fun. So the key for me is to take out the part that if I cut non -productive, a million government employees who are non -productive meaning they don't make tanks. If I take that out, it's going to look like our GDP declined.

46:08But you'd say, but what really happened? No. Our expenses went down. This is so important, by the way, because people talk about a recession and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about, we're going to go into a recession if we cut all this spending. But the follow on effect of cutting non -productive spending is that the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy where we make more things, we create more jobs, we create higher wages. And that's the theory that you guys are trying to execute against. I don't think a lot of people in the general public fully understand that is so important to kind of explain and get across here.

46:44Okay, if we put three people behind us and they sat behind us and they did nothing, and each of us gave them $125 ,000. Just like this, here you go. And they just sat there. Right? What is that? All right. That's not GDP. That's actually me taking my money and giving it to them. We produced nothing. We've no purpose of the earth. It was my money. The income, however I earned my income was mine. And I just gave it to them. They didn't really earn income. It's really a transfer pricing model. That is currently considered in GDP. And it's nonsense. So if I stopped paying them, okay, right? What would I do?

47:25The first thing you'd say as well, then why am I paying so much tax? Yeah, bang, right? Okay. So now we're in the concept of how do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is? I'm sure you take out non -productive spending. Yeah, but I'm not gonna talk about it. Yeah, so we release it because that's the proper way to do stuff. Got it, right? But and I'm gonna break that out. I think it's 25 % and I'm gonna break it out and I'm gonna break it out for the last 20 years. and what you're going to see is every time the quarter just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there.

48:00It's all of a sudden you have to jump in GDP, total lie, total lie, they basically they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter so that we have that and you'll see it goes the whoop and then they take it. When you take the first quarter is WAMMO, or the second quarter's WAMMO, why? Because you pre -spent it. Right. Right. And then you have this hole, and it's gross. Yeah. Okay, that's the only way to do it. It's to us. You like really? But let me. It's so manipulated. Let me answer is. And to your point, the game that's being played is we're going to take taxpayer dollars, that people don't understand once you give it to the government.

48:40We're going to create these waves of fake growth that try to tip elections so that then the grift and the waste and all the fraud can then continue for as many years until the jig gets replayed over and over again. And it seems like the buck is stopping with you guys because you've exposed it. It's going to, and that's the idea. The idea is to take a trillion of waste for an abuse out and then make a trillion from from having other people, a resetting global trade, and once you understand global trade, and how it makes sense and where it came from. Yeah, can you explain that to us? Sorry, before we get there, I wanna ask one last question on the cuts.

49:22Can we speak in a, do we need to speak in a more empathetic way? Because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone's pocket. Some percentage of that pays people a salary, and they live on that income. And I think a lot of the, okay, I think this is important for you to highlight because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and Doge and the budget cuts saying You're destroying jobs. You're taking money away from people that need their jobs. Why are you? Rich people are taking away a sad example and so like helpless understand are people going to lose their job? I'm gonna give you a sad example.

49:56We all remember during the COVID there was the PPP money. Yeah, remember that yeah totally so it was proven The 200 billion of the 1 .2 trillion was going to Chinese Freud gangs what why that proven you just make up a company, right? You know Joe's Deli. Yeah, you make it up at Joe's Deli Right say you're in trouble file and they sent you money. Yeah, so why wouldn't Chinese gangs do that? Come on So we show not we but people showed the government those people that that money and it's Instead of stopping, they said, yeah, but we can't stop because there are real people who need the money. And so what happens is because there's no, no one's ever been fired ever for sending money to the wrong place.

50:49People send it on purpose. I'm not saying everybody sends it on purpose. I'm saying there are some people who send it on purpose. Some people who are complete more odds and an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome. I mean, amazing people, right? But what percentage? Okay? If there's 5 .9 million people who work for the government, you're like, wow, that's like so many. And we're paying them all. And how many do you really need? I mean, if the answer is 2 million, wow. And we could talk about how we understand it and how we're going to retrain society for the AI industrial revolution is coming, which is going to create the greatest said the jobs and greatest set of growth ever.

51:31Ever. Okay, but that, but then, and we can talk about that. But the key is stop sending money to the wrong place so we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow, if I can stand it, to not pay somebody who retired at 65, their benefits. I find it disgusting when we're the richest country in the world and some politician says to in order to save Social Security, rather than getting rid of the waste for an abuse, we should move it to 70. How about, how about no? How about we're rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain of being a great American.

52:15But let's put great people in charge. That's really well said. Okay. Okay. Let's put a pin in this because. Great. So let's how it explained to us global trade as you understand it and then the context of tariffs and Maybe historically and what role they played now. So I remind people that on the earth there was the dark ages So the dark ages meant that the world knew how to read and then because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books. And literally the earth stopped learning how to read for 500 years or 400 years. We didn't know how to read. And we knew how to read before. So how could you forget?

53:00So America was built on tariffs with no income tax, no income tax till 1913. Not greatest richest country in the world. So when Donald Trump says make America great again. What he's talking about is from 1880 to 1913 when the country had so much money that we had blue ribbon commissions, which you guys would have been on, right? To try to figure out how to spend the money, right? And knowing complex. Then we put in the income tax in 1913, why? Because we're entering World War One. And don't we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life, right? Then what happens is the world goes into chaos.

53:48We come out of chaos, right? And then we're starting to think of, well, what do we do? What do we do? And then 1929, the Stockmark crashes, right? 1933, we start to say, oh, oh, oh, God, we forgot. We need to do tariffs. 1933, how can you do tariffs? When the markets crash, the world's going into depression and you're going to do tariffs in 1933, you can't charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world's okay. That's right. So it was too little, too late, right? So then we come out of World War II. It's 1945. We need to rebuild the world, okay? So we decide we're going to take our tariffs down and we'll let them, here's the key, we'll let them have tariffs be up and we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild.

54:41And we'll let them rebuild. And that's what happens. So in 1945, we have the Marshall Plan. Right? And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt. What's the difference? Right? So they need to be rebuilt. And then what happens? We have the 50s and we have the Korean War. So we let them rebuild, which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Then we have the Vietnam War. Right? So now all of a sudden, We have all of Southeast Asia. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there. You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear?

55:13Kuwait. We spend almost $100 billion freeing Kuwait, right? You know what, the highest tariffs against the United States of America, the number one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America. Kuwait. And you think, what? What? That's the same. But here's what it is. If you go back to this understanding the way America thinks, you need to be rebuilt. You would just destroy it, right? All their oils were, you remember, red, the guy's name was red something and he was the guy who capped all the, there were fires and all the, the, the oil wells and he capped them all and it was amazing.

55:57So we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is? Then we forget. Right. And we let it go. Yeah. So Donald Trump comes in and says it's got to stop. Okay, so that's an incredible context now for tariffs It's like it was a long -term strategy that essentially says okay, great. There's rebuilding to be done Sort of almost out of the largest of America. We're gonna enable that to happen. So we'll lower tariffs here And we'll support the high tariff regimes over there. We let it happen on purpose But it's an incredible thing you're also saying though, which is that it's inexorably linked to this repetitive machinery of war, because those create these boundary conditions over and over again, where there's so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this.

56:43Correct. That's exactly right. So what happens is, and then you say to yourself, okay, I get the 40s, I get the 50s, I get the 70s, right? but 80s, 90s, 2000, 2010, what time out? So Donald Trump gets elected 2016. Who understands this? Okay, let me give you a hint. Donald J. Trump, who else? Nobody. Right, it's a wow. He understands, and how long's he been talking about it? 40 years. Why? Because in the 80s, he's saying, what are you doing? Well, let me give you the economist's counter, which, and then you can respond to it, which is tariffs on imports in the United States will ultimately pass to the consumer.

57:34Higher prices, inflationary, so the things that our consumers, our citizens, are buying, gets more expensive, and as a result they buy less, and it's recessionary. It shrinks the economy, it shrinks spending, it shrinks consumption. Can you kind of respond to the, you know, that's the typical economist just to refrain on this independent and maybe they're isolating the imbalance. Okay.

57:59India has a 50 % tariff on average, 50.

58:08We have an average four. Okay. I would say to the person who said that, can I answer your question? What are you talking about? They're 50 and four. Here's what you're talking about. When we're all equal and everything is free and fair. If you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs, isn't it bad for society? The answer is, of course it is. But there's two differences. Number one, let's do human beings first. Before we go to the math, let's go to human beings. Once upon a time, we had an auto industry in Detroit and in Ohio, but Detroit. Then some genius named Bill Clinton, signs the North American Free Trade Agreement, or corporations you can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada.

59:12Now, if you were a general motors, I'd say, I'd say, my birthday. But if you're a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio, they just signed, you know what they signed? Worst statistic I'm going to tell you today. Average life expectancy of high school educated workforce. So by the way, United States America, two thirds is high school educated. one -third is college educated. The difference today of average life expectancy between those two categories is seven years. Seven -year average life expectancy. It's not the air, it's not the food, it's not the medicine, it's despair. My grandfather worked in the auto factory.

1:00:02My father worked in the auto factory. I have a good life. I'm going to do Friday night lights, football, I mean it's gonna be a life. I have a good middle class life. I'm a member of the United Order Workers' Life is going to be good. The factory moves to Mexico. And I am just screwed because the government of the United States America had a didn't care about industrial policy and didn't protect me at all. And let cheap labor in Mexico. I'm sure the Mexican people got went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour and they're kicking it, but I destroyed you. And that is incredible failure of industrial policy, which nobody wants to talk about, but you talk about it in an average life expectancy and you're talking about it, about reshoring and building the life for the people who are America.

1:00:55That's why you elect Donald Trump president. You elect him because I didn't spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help him. But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this? And who taught me this? The president of the United States, this is not me teaching him. You understand? This is him teaching me. And you can see him talking about it in the 80s, right? He's been talking about this for a lot. And what it does is it means reshore. So number one, we have to care about human beings. That's a globalist view. Yes. If I take my production and move it to Mexico, it's better for me, Mr.

1:01:40Corporation. Okay. But it's not better for me, Mr. US citizen of the United States of America is working at a car plant. That's bad news for him. Okay. And that's number one. And now let's go to number Number two, which is the math of it all. If we say free and fair trade, I want to remind you, there ain't no such thing. There is no country in this world that is free trade. Zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest because everybody else is higher and more protective. So they protect their farmers. Here, I'm sitting at the dinner, Modi comes to town. And I say to him, when Donald Trump we have dinner, and after the nice city's Donald said, go ahead, Howard.

1:02:32And I said, you have 1 .4 billion people, and you brag to us about amazing your economy is. Why won't you buy a bushel of our corn? Won't buy a bushel of our corn? So our farmers can't go to him, but he's of course, can come at us, right? Why is that okay? You know, and we can go into all the stuff that, oh, I mean, I don't even want to go into it because if I had another hour I could Reveal the stories that are fun with that, but just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs, talk to the average person who says the cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%. Inflation comes from printing more money, okay?

1:03:14Let's say the United States of America had one trillion dollars. That's all we have. That's it. No more Okay, and I want to buy a bottle of water and you want to buy a bottle of water one came from America and The other one came from Fiji Right then and I tariff Fiji Then that water is a dollar and a quarter and this water is a dollar That's not inflation. That means that one's more expensive, but I can choose to buy this one Right. Okay. So you're right. This toy might be more expensive and that toy is not. I got it, but that's not inflation. Here's inflation. Snap my fingers now. We have two trillion Right that waters a dollar fifty that waters a dollar and a quarter.

1:03:56Yeah, everything's more expensive. That's inflation Okay, so inflation without tariffs is everything's a buck and a quarter now what inflation with tariffs is a buck and a quarter Right and about fifty and so you have to understand inflation doesn't come from tariffs. Certain products, if I put a tariff on a mango, right? We can't grow mangoes in America. They just can't grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive. Yes. But if the president chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive. That's just becomes a consumption tax. It's like a sales tax, right?

1:04:38It's a sales tax. It's a consumption tax. If I want to buy a mango, it costs more money. And you can offset that with a reduction in a bet. No, but that's, so then that's just like another version of income tax. How do you hide your income? Okay, so what the idea is to not do that. Yeah. That's the idea. The idea is to, is to choose things that are going to resure. Yeah, exactly. Come here. This is so important. Higher my people, bring it home. Yeah. Right? By the way, I want to just speak as an entrepreneur. entrepreneur, I see the economic incentive. When I see the price for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff, I'm like, why don't we make that here?

1:05:15We should be doing that. And there's gonna be a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things. And this is just how the markets work. Someone will say. Two trillion so far. It means being an office, right? Like seven weeks, eight weeks. Two trillion dollars of committed domestic production coming back because of his tariffs. TMC saying, I'll build, you know, semiconductor wafers. Yeah. Everything we do, they're going to build it here. That word is never coming. Yeah. Yeah. Unless the tariff. So what happens is you bring it here, you create the jobs here, and then they avoid the tariff.

1:05:57And by the way, those jobs are better paying and they're more productive than the government fund is. What do you, how do you want to do about like the narrow set of products that are more high value than the mango that maybe can't be made here or at least can't be made here in the next five to ten years. So TSMC can make chips. I think that's great. ASML, who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines as an example, can't necessarily do that for another five or six years here. So there's these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multivender solution, right?

1:06:34But it's still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff? You know, the beauty of pretty Donald Trump of the White House is it's giant three -dimensional chess. Yeah, okay. So we all have Stockholm syndrome for the internal revenues. We think we like the internal revenues. We don't say it But when we say we're going to charge a tariff and other countries who lean on us who rely on us who bleed on us who can't live without the oxygen that is Our economy because remember the thing about our economy is while we have a 29 trillion dollar GDP We are the consumer of 20 trillion yeah, right and this is the key thing we buy everybody stuff So, who's more important?

1:07:29Let's say they have an economy that produces stuff and we have an economy that buys stuff. The customer is always right. We all know the customer is always right because if no one buys it, they can't produce it. So everybody needs our economy when, now, I mean, to the fact that China consumes less than 10 trillion and primarily tries to figure out how to sell it to itself. Send it by anybody else's. So we are the world's consumer. We're the world's customer. So that's point number one. So we want them to come here and if they can't come here, what if you pass? Now let's say there was a 20 % tariff and in order to sell his goods, He knows he can raise the price 10%, but he can't really sell it raise at 20.

1:08:22So each 10 and the price goes up 10. Let's just say that 20 goes into the conference of the United States of America from the President of the United States who said we're going to bounce the budget and then his goal is to drive down income tax in the United States of America including waving tax. So what does he said so far with that in his pocket knowing that this is what we're going to try to do. What is he announced? no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security. Why is he saying those things? Because he knows that he's got Elon's going to cut and Howard's going to raise and he's going to have the tools to deliver on his promise.

1:09:04And that'll unlock spending. Literally the money. More money for folks to spend. And they'll have more money to spend, right? So if you actually get the external revenue service, right, which of course I named, you know, I named it. But you know, but you know what the funny part is? I came up with the name. I wrote a truth, right? And I sent it to to DJT. And I wrote, this is my huge idea, you know, with one of those things that goes like this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:09:32Yeah. Right. And because it's the external revenue service. But it only matters because I work for him. Because if I worked for Joe Biden or anybody else, They wouldn't care at all. So the fact that he loves a great idea, the minute you say it, and it becomes his idea, my idea is useless, a good idea in his hands. Okay, so speaking of all the value in the world. So the external revenue service, if we went back to make America great again, which is pre -1913, which is let them pay, you don't pay. And what that means is let them pay, try to wave, balance the budget, try to wave tax and and everybody makes less than 150 ,000, right?

1:10:15And look what you did for America. Holy moly, look what you, and by the way, labor costs come smashing down, because it's tax -free. So if their earnings are tax -free, then they're happy to work, because they get the money. So what happens is, cost of labor comes down because we're run correctly as a government. So speaking of what I'm trying to do. Speaking of potentially great ideas, Can you tell us about the Trump card? Sure. So, who's idea was that? And how did that come about? John Palsam had a call with Donald Trump, and was talking to Donald Trump, and was kicking around the idea of, we should sell, right?

1:10:58Why do we give away visas? We should sell them. And they're talking about it. Donald Trump calls me, gets me on the phone, right? We all talk about it, right? And then we go from there. And then my job is to figure out, like I always figure out, how to do it. What's the path? Do you have a figure that, of course, about two weeks from today, it goes out. Okay, Elon's building you the software right now. Yeah. Right? And then out it goes. And by the way, yesterday I sold the house. Oh, you did. I got a polymark that I created on how many of you guys going to sell this year. Cool. Yeah, curious to see how many.

1:11:36That's fantastic. Do you want to tell people just the rough rough terms? Okay, yeah. So if you're a US citizen, you pay global tax. Yeah. Okay. So you're not gonna bring in outsiders gonna come in to pay global tax. So if you have a green card, which used to be a green card, now gold card, you're a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don't have to be. And none of them are gonna choose to be. What they're gonna do is they're gonna have the right to be in America. They have to be $5 million and they have the right to be an American. They have the right to be an American.

1:12:13It's always a good people. And they're vetted. And they can't break the law. We can always take it away if they're like evil or mean or bad or something, not mean. But if they do something horrible, you can take it away. But the idea is, if I was not American and I lived in any other country, I would buy six. One for me, one for my wife, my four kids, because God forbid something happens. I want to be able to go to America and I want to have the right to go to the airport, to go to America and them to say hello Mr. Lutnik, hello Mr. Lutnik and the Lutnik family, welcome home. That's what I want to hear.

1:12:50I don't want to hear. I can't come here when there's a you know a horrible war, a horrible whatever. I want to be able to go home. Right and once I'm home Man, I might as well build a business. Yeah. So you have the most productive people in the world. You're going to start spending time here. They're going to have a family office. They're going to hire some people. And you're not going to tax their external world lighting. They only tax the money they make in America, which is what we do now. But their global income stays out. And they pay five million. And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world?

1:13:26There are 37 million people in the world who are capable of buying the car. That's a lot more than chat. GPT told me. Who are capable of buying it? Who are capable of buying it? Now I'm not saying they will, but they're capable of buying. How many do you think you'll sell? The president thinks we can sell a million. So five trillion dollars. That's five trillion dollars. I think a million is reasonable. I mean, look, as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his citizenship, and now pay global tax every which way known to man. And if this were available 15 years ago after the Facebook IPO, that's what I would have done.

1:14:02It would have been much better for me, theoretically. Well, now I'm happy to pay the task. So the idea is, and it's gonna go fast. Meaning you apply, right? We take your money and the way computers work now, they have these cool things, like these computer things. They're amazing. You know, you put stuff in and they actually check everything. It's fantastic. You don't even have to plug them in anymore. It's amazing. like they get the information through the air. I mean, you could do a better vet than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second. Right. Better than they've ever done it before.

1:14:39So I'll tell you a quick story. Monday night, Elon was telling us about this, me and Sachs, and one of the things he's saying is he's been helping you build this site. Build it. But one of the most difficult parts of it is it turns out like all of the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks. It's like a lot of cobalt mainframes and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten And so this is a question big opportunity. It's incredible that the most advanced nation in the world Deployed systems in 1970 which at the time probably felt very cutting edge to everybody in the room at the time But to your point has not evolved in the last 50 years It's always there's always a reason Okay, and the reason is, it's a great reason, which is that in the mid -70s we changed the way government accounts for software.

1:15:29We took a 10 -year contract and you have to take the contract up front. So if I'm signing a contract for you for 10 years and a million a year, I have to take it against my budget for 10 million, so I'm not doing it. So yeah, I'm only here for four years. Yeah, everything is case, everything is. So what happens is, one was last time we bought software, 1975. 25, where? Everywhere. Why? Because it's illogical. Now what I'm doing is I'm saying, okay, I got to collect tariffs. Right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth and I say I want you to give me You're gonna build for me for America.

1:16:08You're gonna build the greatest customs processing Ever we're gonna take a photograph. It's gonna know what it is. It's gonna go through AI It's going to know where it is. It's going to know what the tariff is. It's going to determine the percentage It's going to know the weight so when you weigh the thing plus the package You'll know what it weighs. You don't even have to open it away exactly the right amount and you'll do this and that and these are all things that I know and all things I could figure out Because you know the way gold works a gold bars about 40 pounds You know the way you know the gold bars they weigh it and they weigh it out 13 digits of decimals So basically if you touch the thing it's like it'd be 13 digits of decimals So you have a perfect scale and you weigh it and that's like the code.

1:16:45Yeah. Right? Because you can't touch it, you touch it, you'll change the, and you can't get it right out, 13 digits. It's not possible. So that's what we do with stuff. You know what it weighs. Right? Three T -shirts. If you send them the same three T -shirts, they always weigh the same. But what's incredible is you're convincing these companies to basically like do right for America and build a software for you. You think that's going to be a movement throughout the government or is that? Here's the idea. I say build it for me for free. Yeah. I put it in for free. I don't know. What other countries in the world do you think they're gonna buy now?

1:17:20Right. If it works for us. Well remember you have to you have to connect to me. Yeah. So every country is gonna buy. Right. And it's a great business one. Right. Right. If the greatest customer in the world says they'll take it. Yeah. Life's good. Right. So what should the greatest is customer the world get. I don't know, a good deal. Right? And you got a guy like me there. Everybody else is like, how would you have to change how government operates if you're gonna scale that? You can't go negotiate every contract out there for every department. I mean, it's not that hard when you say it's free.

1:17:50You know, free is like that the hard. I mean, yes, it is. And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company. Yeah. Because then I use my super power, which is my friendship with Donald Trump. And then I go in the overall office and we call them together. Right. And we call the CEO together and make him promise the president because promising Howard is like really nice Right promising DJT Something else entirely right so I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that no build it right now. Let's see where you're neck. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen So you know when you get Elon to say I'm gonna build it for you And he says in front of the president Like how great is that you got like the greatest technologist the richest guy in the world who says I'll build it for you You're like, thank God.

1:18:34Right? And then I get, you know, I go to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon. They're all for America, building for us. For free to make America better. Because they are great American companies. And in exchange for that, we're gonna help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness. Just towards fair, because you can't get me to do something. outside the world of fairness. But I tell you what, if it's unfair, I'll be on your side as hard and as positive as I possibly can be. Talk to us about some of the hot button markets that you're going to have to navigate. You know, you are in charge of export controls, which is a very important thing in AI.

1:19:18We don't allow export licenses for the most advanced Nvidia chips. We don't want training necessarily to be done outside of the United States. We're okay with inference happening outside the United States in certain conditions. Maybe just talk about that for a second. How are you going to navigate AI? How do you think about that from your seat? All right. So I'll give you an example that's sort of live right now. Right? So we have deep seek. We have quen. We have dobao. Right? And I don't think we should be having apps in America. And I don't think we should have their website in America because they all go back home.

1:19:57Okay, but it's open source and I want our American companies including college students to be able to download it and build on it Right, but I want to make sure that there's no part of it that says send it home to Dada Right or or store now and analyze later, right? So I need that out So what I'm going to do is I'm going to embrace what you guys know You guys used to product evaluations. Yeah, so let's do security now exactly, right? and say, your industry, and you can't let it get overrun by Chinese. Because what happens is, if there's a policy, all of a sudden, a hundred thousand people from China come in, and they say they're John Smith and Todd Peterson, but they're not, and then you think the vote is this way, and it's easily manipulated.

1:20:47So we have to be very careful. But my first instinct is to lean on, and that's why I see it's important to have David said, taxes my partner, right? Someone who knows it and someone who can live and breathe the industry, right? And so what we're gonna have is we're gonna have security evaluation and say if the security evaluation model says that this is a good model, then people can download it. But it's gotta go through the industry and I want it to feel and smell like what we're good at. Right. I don't wanna create like, oh, this is what government's doing. I don't want government to do it. Yeah, the law.

1:21:24I want us to do it, but I've got to figure out the right way to do that. And that's important for a mayor. Articulate the standards, articulate sort of the concept and then let a lot of these private market actors kind of help fill in the gaps. The only thing I think I really need to do and that's with regulatory is post -quantum cryptography. I think that is vital to us. That's right. Right? That, you know, asymmetric. I would bet this happens during this administration. He bets polls. No, I'm gonna put it out because, you know, we all have passwords, right? For those who are watching, they don't know this.

1:22:02Our password's called asymmetric, right? Yours is different than mine. That's the key in cryptography is just the computing. So asymmetric key cryptography, you have your password, I have mine, and they're the key. That's right. Right? Obviously the central hub has our key, duh. Okay, a quantum computer we know can break all of them in a nanosecond. Like all of them in the whole world, including the CIA, all of them are say 2048, all of them can get broken in a nanosecond by quantum computer. So the defense of it is called post quantum cryptography, right? We know how to do it. And we'll come out with a rule that says, America's got to protect itself.

1:22:43New standard. And by the way, there are, because every once in a while you need to have a new standard. There are things. It's coming. We know what it is. Please God go put it in, because we need to have it in. We need America to live in. Great segue. Let's sort of segue now to a couple things that we can enjoy together in this concept. Crypto obviously Bitcoin, you guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve. What broadly speaking, you also announced sort of this idea of the sovereign wealth fund. Can we talk about that? What is the vision behind that? How do you want that to be executed? How do you think it should be run?

1:23:15What assets are on the table? What assets and strategies should never be on the table? How are you thinking about it? The greatest customer in the world, the United States government, the most powerful, the greatest customer, buy stuff. We walk in, we're going to buy, is the example I like to use. We're going to buy two billion COVID vaccines. When we buy it, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are going to triple. They're going to triple. Because then we say everyone's going to have this vaccine. If I were, after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could, Howard Lightning walked in the room, Howard Lightning would say, what do you think?

1:23:5820 % warrants? 20 % warrants? Right. Right? What? So we'd make $50 billion off of who? Nobody. We didn't take from anybody, we didn't do it. Okay. The shareholders of Pfizer, who we've just tripled them with our order. Right. Now, how many of my customers in my life have required that from me? All of them? All of them. This isn't like, oh Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever. This is just... Business. Proper. So, I don't view risk of the Sovereign Well Fund. I view the first couple of years of the Sovereign Well Fund or Scott Besson and I making money. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

1:24:42You say, well, but you can't invest in lose money. Don't you lose money? No. Why? Well, if I have big daddy of the United States America behind me, right? And I'll give you an example. We buy missiles episodically, launcher missile, buy a missile, launch a missile, buy some missiles, right? The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings or good quarterly earnings, but they're episodic. Yeah, here we go. I will sign a contract with you, 10 -year contract, cancel it at the end of five years, to buy X -Emmendomism, and I'll pay you quarterly. Then they can take that contract, they can go finance it, their finance across go, shh, their earnings are steady, and their multiple improves and their stock does.

1:25:35What's up? And I say, in exchange for that reasonable thought, I have it a little warns. Right. Give me what I stock. Just for people who don't understand. Give me some stock. Give me a little bit of your stock. But don't give me some stock. Just give me the upside. If I help your stock go up. Just a little bit. I get to share it. And you know what I do with that money. What might be a little bit? And then I take the money for the United States of America and I put it into the Social Security System in the United States of America. Okay, so why have... And then all of a sudden, right? So the Social Security system says it's 4 trillion in the whole.

1:26:07Yeah. Okay? If we cut the waste for an abuse out, it becomes 1 .5 trillion. And by the way, Frank Bizignano, the greatest executive, the greatest payments executive ever to join the US government is about to get confirmed and take over the Social Security system. Okay? Frank ran FICE serve, $120 billion public payments company. And when Donald Trump asked him in his interview, can you handle Social Security? it's 1 .3 trillion a year, he goes, well, say I handle 500 billion a day, so Wednesday. Like, right? And he goes my whole life, my whole life all I worry about is getting rid of waste for interviews.

1:26:44That's all I care about. Every single day, $5, $2, $1, he goes, this is gonna be the most fun I've ever had. I mean, this, like this is a Donald Trump administration. This is something that's another planet. Now of course, I recruit Frank, and I get to have my peace in the game. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it's only a trillion four in the hole. We make a trillion four. And that's so. And that baby is finished forever. Is the sovereign wealth fund a balance sheet for social security? The social security become more than what it is today. Does it over time offer bigger, greater benefits?

1:27:21And is it basically a pool that holds equities historically? And we talked about this on our show. It's only ever held treasury, but it's really kind of a fake treasury. It's got 2 .7 trillion today. But if we bought the S &P in 1971 when we went off the gold standard with the cash flows that have come in and gone out of social security We'd have a 15 trillion dollar interest in the S &P today If it you'd have that that would have had you have Donald Trump be the president the whole time, which is not a thing Right, okay, but is that the objective is that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country and it becomes like a sovereign wealth fund that we have a 36 trillion dollar budget deficit I mean, debt to the United States of America.

1:28:00And we have a budget that was sort of two trillion. So Donald Trump wants to knock down the two trillion. And then he's focused on the 36 trillion, which the Social Security is part of it. So how he allocates it, he was elected President of the United States, I was not. Okay, I like the Social Security idea, because it's really easy to explain to people and sell to people. And so they understand it, but the fact is that it's the same money if I put it in Social Security, Or I put it on the debt of the United States America and I'm gonna let Donald Trump make that decision You know why because it's quality like yeah, and none of it's not mine So he will decide that okay, and he will play it his way But but Scott Besson and I Will make more than a trillion dollars for the United States America during our term Which is pretty darn cool Yeah, and we'll use that and if that reduces our debt right?

1:28:52But that's not the policy of how we're going to balance the budget. We're going to balance the budget. Trump card tariffs Getting rid of scams. I'll give you a scam example. Every boat you've ever seen like every single cruise ship Super tanker Container ship you've never seen an American flag ever. In fact, you have to think about the flag you've actually seen. All of you would say, I have no idea what that flag is. Like why is it some flag I've heard of? Liberia's, number one, you go, well, no one even knows where Liberia is. Because the answer is it's a flag of convenience. They sell the flag for like 10 grand.

1:29:35Like they literally hear you get off a flag and you pay no tax. So what happens is a cruise ship in the United States of America, picks up American passengers, goes into Caribbean, comes back to America, and treats the port as an expense. And all the profits are made in the Caribbean where it pays no tax. That's what I call a tax scam. I mean, it's unfair to America. We're going to fix that in America. We're going to try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams. Ireland is my favorite. The country of Ireland last year had a $60 billion budget surplus. So we lose two trillion and they make 60. It's a Ireland.

1:30:17What do they do? Oh, they have all of our IP for our great companies. All our great tech companies and great former companies. They all put it there because it's low tax and they don't pay us. They pay them. So that's got to end. So when those things end, tariffs, Trump card, getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax, that's my trillion. Elon's got to do his trillion. So whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out and we have a strong conversation together that you've got to do your trillion. So you got to focus not on small potatoes. Big, big, big, big, big. I need you to do your side of the trillion.

1:31:01Now, as it turns out, I'm going to do more than a trillion because of me. Elon's probably going to do more than a trillion because he's him. And then what we're going to do is going to, our objective is to smash down the internal revenue source and change America. And then imagine America. This is just an imagination moment, okay? We have a balanced budget in the United States. We're starting to knock down the deficit of America. We can cut tax and we have a gold card, a Trump card that you can come to America. Which entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn't buy one and wouldn't start building businesses when they think the tax rate here is going to come down and eventually it's going to come down to 20 % and eventually it's going to come down to 15%.

1:31:52You won't be able to find a plot of land in America. You know what I predict will happen? I predict just like in the medallion industry for taxi cabs, there will be a financing industry that will build up around these gold cards or these Trump cards. It's that great entrepreneur, it's great executives will be able to finance their purchase along with someone getting venture capital interest or equity interest in their business. But I mean, we're going to take that money. We're going to, we'll sell them every year. So they'll knock down our budget deficit and then eventually, if Donald Trump is right and ultimately we can sell 7 million cards, you realize there is no debt in America.

1:32:27America. No, that in America is a trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. You know what that changes? That changes the internal revenue service. You start to rethink and I just want to remind you, right? We are the richest country on earth. Our balance sheet is 500 trillion. I'm giving you an example. What's the court system of America worth? Right? What's it worth? Well, how can an envy be worth three trillion without a court system that protects it? Right. So it's such a thing. So just or everything about us, is so awesome. Yeah, and you know what happens?

1:33:04We actually, like we get beaten upon it, we actually believe it. Yeah, you could ask Doug Burgham about how undervalued a lot of our real estate is in this country and the potential for it. We think about Biden closed 635 million acres. This is electing Joe Biden head of Saudi Arabia and he closes the oil wells. Yeah. And all of a sudden Saudi Arabia falls off the face of the earth broke. Like, what are we doing? Like, we care about Americans. Let's make Americans' lives great. We want clean water, we want clean air. We do it better than everybody else. But if we don't, here's one like the hypocrisy, right?

1:33:46We won't mind lithium and America to make a battery. Yeah, but so we so the Australians mind it with coal and it's messy because they do it like you know They do it messy by the way we breathe the air in 3 .4 days, but who's counting right then we take it We put on a truck we take put the truck and put it in a super tanker We drive the super tanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12 ,000 miles of ocean puts it in a truck and gives it to Eli and to make an electric car Why don't we mind the lithium in Nevada. Right. And by the way, we'd mind it cleaner, right? And by the way, it's not just lithium.

1:34:24Almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the continental United States, we just have had no incentive or no structure regulatory wise that enables the development of it. Which is, we need to care for us, make America first. First, how about there's another way to say, well maintaining clean air. A mere 10s first. Well, maintaining environmental standards. Yeah, don't look, we're never going to do something that's not like a hundred times cleaner than everybody else. Because we care about clean water and clean air. There's none of us that don't care about clean water and clean air.

1:35:03But you know, like someone gives you a pill and says this will save you. And then you look at the statistic and it saves one and a million people. And you'd say, why am I taking this pill? It's, well, it could sit your life. It's, yeah, but it's like one and a million, right? That's not logical, right? That's the point. There's a regulation, that's the right thing. And there's a regulation that's the one and a million pill. Like, why do we give a baby, a baby, a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand new baby And we hold it up and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine. You realize the only way you get a hepatitis B was, is from unprotected sex or a needle?

1:35:51Like, why are we giving them to a baby? Like, why? And you know what it is? You know what the answer is? Corruption. That someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules. And because there's no justification, there's no, I haven't met a medical doctor who says, Hepatitis B vaccines on brand new babies make sense because by the way, you know what the worst part is? There's the last 10 years. You need a booster or ten years. So the baby's gonna be 10. We've gotta really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans. And I think we can be and I think that's why I'm so excited That's why our cabinet is so excited.

1:36:32That's why it's so much fun to work for Donald Trump because is I am just speaking from his playbook, right? Because if you had met me before, he said, will you help me? And he went out to dinner with me and said, so tell me about government. I'd say government, you mean I pay them taxes? Like that's it. Are you having the time of your life? Most fun ever. Because I have every idea either gets blown up or shot down. Yeah. Okay? Meaning I come up with lots of ideas and he says, nah, two complex. And you know what? That's fine. Yeah. But when I come up with the external revenue service and he says, great idea and then he speaks of it as an all -you -all address, right?

1:37:18It's his idea. Yeah. Because I can't do anything with it. Howard. Last question is we wrap. Tell us about your family, your kids, how do they think about all of this? Your son's running canter now. How's that going? Just give us the lay of the land. How how's the Latinic family? All right, so I have I have the best wife. I've been married 30 years. She lets me be me and she's gorgeous, spectacular. I love my girl. She agreed. I mean, imagine this. I'm not I'm not joining the government. I'm not joining the government. I'm doing this douche thing with Elon. I'm not joining. I'm not joining. Honey, we got to move.

1:37:53Like, like, like, honey, we got to move two weeks after election day. I'm like, We're moving and we're gonna in five weeks, we're gonna live in Washington, okay? And like, so the fact that that wasn't unsettling would be the understanding of a lifetime. But she's been the most supportive and fantastic. I have four kids. My oldest son, about to turn 29. I was taking him to kindergarten. So that's why I'm alive. My second son, Brandon, I dropped him off in nursery school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten. So the two oldest boys are running canter now until I debast. Is it going well? I don't know.

1:38:29Of course you're supposed to know. It's going to fall. I was told to talk to them about it. You have no idea. I'm not allowed. And you know, we all know the phones. Yeah. So since the phone's always with me and I assume the phone is listening, you know, ever since we couldn't take a battery out of our phone, you know the phone is listening. So, you know, I'm not, no, so I never talk to my son. So, I'm sure they're happy, But I don't know how it's going. Guys, if you're listening, he's doing great. But and then my my daughter is gonna go to med school. Yeah, and she's on a gap year now and my youngest son also on a gap year now And he's going to start duking the fall.

1:39:09Right. So I have the best kids My kids have lived with me and they lived with this kind of energy and this positive sort of momentum and and my wife being just spectacular mom, just keeping them. What we taught our kids, which is a fun one, is, I taught them two things. I would sit down with my kids and say, how great is your life? And this is only maybe something that people like we can say. But I'm talking to my kids, I say, how great is your life? They go great. Because they came home and they say, I got a bad grade teacher doesn't like me. It's a classic line, right? Yeah. And I said, well, how could your life?

1:39:49I'm really good. I go, could it be any better? No. Well, if you realize your teacher has given up her whole life and she makes how much money and she's given her whole life to teach you. So can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you or is it your job for her to like you? Who's failing in what you just said? Right? It's your job to have her. like you. So when she says raise your hand. Raise your hand. And the other thing is do me a favor. Color inside the lines. Okay? In high school if she says this guy is orange the answer to the test is orange. When you get to college you can argue with the professor all you want.

1:40:33High school color inside the lines give the teacher what she wants. Make sure she loves you and you're getting a good grade. That's the rules of life. And my I'd like my wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls in their moral character of someone who's fighting for you. Needs to have your love and respect back. You take them for granted. If you treat them badly, if you treat them like, oh, aren't I so great, then you deserve what you get. And my wife has taught that moral fiber into my children and it resides in them and the other thing my kids have is they have empathy, which is a very unusual thing for young people.

1:41:18And it's because they were raised with their father crying every day. I cried every day until October 21st, 2004. Wow. Every day, because I thought of someone I hadn't thought of, You know, or someone would say 650 people died a night. I just, there was, you can't process all of that debt without crying. And the only reason I remember is because as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn't cry today and she wrote it down. This is a reason I remember. So my kids are fantastic. They've been incredibly supportive. And my wife's the best. And she lives with me in Washington. We bought bread, bears house.

1:42:06So I have a nice house big enough for my ego to expand very important Some of them found one that big yet. He's still looking You're an incredible American. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything. This is really fun and coming to talk Honestly, this has been one of my I mean my favorite conversation. We've had absolute I mean like he's like this all the time. I mean We have dinner at like Nakasha's house is a good friend of ours runs Paul all the networks and how it's like you just push the button. You can just sit and just listen. Well, you can listen to him for hours. By the way, I will say credible.

1:42:39All I could, the point you made earlier, I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. I mean, you're like on another level, but like the storytelling, I think, is incredible. Is what's so powerful about this cabinet and this administration, and I think it's gonna take some time to get the message out, but man, are there incredible ambassadors to do so? They are so capable. Yeah. Each of them is so capable, so thoughtful. I mean, I am honored to be on this cabinet with them, but we all get to work for Donald Trump who can intuitively tell you, go fix eggs. Yeah. And then Brook goes fix eggs and eggs are down like 40 % and Brook fixes eggs.

1:43:20I mean, how awesome is that? Yeah. Right? And gas is down 40 cents, right? And he's only just begun. If we get the Constitution pipeline in New York passed, and I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Huckle on the unbelievable oil in fracking that they have in New York, and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it, but they refused to unleash it. So he's going to force the Constitution pipeline, which by the way will drop gas on the East Coast of the United States of America in half. I mean, this is, and that's, you know, then you got, that's Chris Wright, that's Doug Burgham, you got Brooke Rollins.

1:44:00I mean, you could just go, you know, Scott Besson to, you know, so thoughtful and elegant. I mean, he's just step by step, by step. And you have really the most fun cabinet working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the resolute desk. And we're going to make America great again, not as a slogan, but we're gonna balance the budget. We're gonna change back. Thank you, Howard. Thanks, Howard.