April 11, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:32
Participants
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unidentified
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This is our first podcast coming out as our true selves. | |
| We're furries! | ||
| Yeah, we've been holding it in forever. | ||
| This is my true identity. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
|
unidentified
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It just eats me alive to not tell how we met at a furry con. | |
| Ha ha ha ha. | ||
| Ha ha ha. | ||
| Ha ha ha. | ||
| All right, people. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and it's time for another Friday Roundtable Extravaganza. | ||
| And joining me is the president of the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, and an entrepreneur, investor, and author of How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Anthony Pompliano. | ||
| Jeffrey, Pop, welcome to the show. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good to be here. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am glad to have the two of you on because I respect you both at the human level as well as the economic level, and I think you have a slightly different tack on everything we've been talking about with tariffs all week. | ||
| So let's just dive right into it. | ||
| I normally let my guests chime in a little bit earlier, but I'm going to just throw to a couple elements here that I think will set us up. | ||
| So of course, let's just rewind a week here. | ||
| Originally was the Trump chart on Liberation Day, and you could see the crazy asymmetry that we've had with so many of these countries, and people were having all sorts of feelings on how they calculated some of this stuff. | ||
| But really what it birthed was the idea that we are getting screwed pretty much across the board, and it's been happening for decades. | ||
| Then Scott Bessent went out there the next day and basically said, hey, things have been a little out of whack, but we're going to fix it, and we're going to fix it quickly. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
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unidentified
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If you're starting to negotiate, how soon do you think we could see some deals be made? | |
| Well, we have a... | ||
| One of the Vietnamese officials coming in this week. | ||
| The Japanese are very eager to get over. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think you're going to see a couple of big trading partners do deals very quickly. | |
| All right. | ||
| And then suddenly it kind of looked like we were going to get into this tariff war. | ||
| We showed you this one yesterday, but the European Union proposes 25% tariff on U.S. goods. | ||
| And then I want to get to what happened on Wednesday, which basically changed the equation entirely. | ||
| And then we'll get your thoughts. | ||
| This is Truth Social from Donald Trump. | ||
| Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets, I am hereby raising the tariff charge to China by the United States of America to 125 percent effective immediately. | ||
| At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the USA and other countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable. | ||
| Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 countries have called representatives of the US, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury and the USTR to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to trade, trade barriers, tariffs, | ||
| currency manipulation and non-monetary tariffs. | ||
| And that these countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape or form against the United States. | ||
| I have authorized a 90 day pause and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff during this period of 10 percent. | ||
| I'll start with you because I have said on my show repeatedly for the past two weeks, I am not an economist. | ||
| I don't give financial advice or anything else. | ||
| But I felt all along that this was just a negotiation by Trump. | ||
| He was going to threaten these guys with big tariffs and a lot of people were going to come around. | ||
| Now it appears almost 70 countries are. | ||
| We're doing the pause. | ||
| I think you've been making a similar argument yourself. | ||
| I take it you're feeling pretty good about what's going on here at the moment. | ||
| Well, yeah, I think that the hardest part in these negotiations is basically, on one hand, you need to be really tough and strong on the tariffs because you need to negotiate a good deal. | ||
| So you can't show any weakness there. | ||
| But at the same time, financial markets, they want you to communicate clarity. | ||
| And so it's kind of this tightrope walk. | ||
| Really, what we just saw is that he stayed tough and strong on China. | ||
| He increased that 125%. | ||
| But also, we've now seen him go and drop it to about 10%. | ||
| And I've said all along that, to me, the sweet spot is 5% to 10% on all imports into the United States. | ||
| And then you remove the tariff for certain. | ||
| that you want to come into the country or that you need to come into the country. | ||
| And so at the end of the day, I think that he's very dead on the problems that we have. | ||
| This is one of a couple of solutions he could have pursued. | ||
| But really, this idea of kind of a moderate strategy or cooler heads prevailing while still staying tough on China is probably a place where the markets like it. | ||
| And he still remains with a lot of negotiating power at the table. | ||
| And so probably a pretty good spot for him to end up in. | ||
| Let me just ask you one follow-up to that before Jeffrey jumps in, which is, were you shocked at the amount of people that, on the day the market went down a couple days ago, that suddenly were like, oh my god, here we go, it's recession, it's depression, like, you know, throw the chickens out the window, like all hell's about to break loose? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's shocking, but also it's not shocking. | ||
| And one of the things I've learned over time is that whenever you get a very widespread consensus around an idea or a perspective, and dissent is outlawed, You probably know that the dissent is very on target. | ||
| And that's what we saw here, was everyone started to say, tariffs are bad. | ||
| If you support the tariffs, you're an idiot. | ||
| I mean, I had DMs all over every social media platform telling me how stupid I was. | ||
| And I just kept saying to myself, that probably means we're closer to the truth than they want to realize. | ||
| And part of it is the Trump derangement syndrome stuff. | ||
| But I think another part of it, frankly, is a lot of people aren't economists. | ||
| And so what they do is they read the mainstream media, the media says. | ||
| A 20% tariff leads to 20% higher prices. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| People get scared. | ||
| They see the stock market go down as they get on social media and they just regurgitate what they've heard elsewhere. | ||
| So Jeffrey, first, you know I have to do what I always do when I have you on the show, which is credit you for a guy that goes against the grain because you were the... | ||
| Best person on COVID period that I spoke to during all of that, against lockdowns, against all of the craziness. | ||
| You were one of the guys that went against conventional wisdom, as Pomp is talking about right there. | ||
| Before I get your specifics on this, I think you consider yourself a classical liberal, but in essence a libertarian, but you can clean that up if you want. | ||
| Can you give me the pure argument against tariffs first, and then we can dive into what's going on here? | ||
| It's difficult to give the pure argument because we don't live in a pure world. | ||
| In the 17th, 18th, 19th century and first half of the 20th century, free trade made perfect sense because we had perfect settlement between currencies. | ||
| We were on a gold standard, and we had a thing called the specie trade flow, which guaranteed that a long-run equilibrium in which prices and wages across countries would lead to the best country winning, comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. | ||
| You see the difference? | ||
| After 1973, when Richard Nixon pulled the gold standard away, that changed everything. | ||
| Suddenly we had a world of U.S. paper dollar supremacy. | ||
| And accounts would never settle. | ||
| And if you look at the charts of the trade deficit, that's exactly what happened. | ||
| We never had any settlement. | ||
| And now we have this weird situation for 50 years in which any country can accumulate dollar reserves, back their industrial infrastructure. | ||
| To sell products to the U.S. at much cheaper than we can make them, leading to a permanent situation where the U.S. is an importer country, and all other countries in the world with low wages were an exporter country, and then... | ||
| No surprise. | ||
| Anyone could tell you this would have happened. | ||
| We lost all of our industries. | ||
| One by one, dozens of them, they went away. | ||
| After 50 years, there's a widespread panic in this country. | ||
| What do we make? | ||
| What are we for? | ||
| How can we sustain this? | ||
| And that introduces Donald Trump to do something about it. | ||
| Okay, so with that in mind, I know you don't love using the levers of power, certainly to tax people, but in essence, if you're trying to get to that even playing field, I take it you also are at least somewhat happy with where we're at at the moment? | ||
| If you had called me on Tuesday, I probably would have been a little more gloom and doom. | ||
| But as a result of Trump's specific targeting of China in particular, and then You know, privileging every other country in the world that wants to negotiate. | ||
| I mean, this is a good place to be. | ||
| And, you know, if I had had my Preferred solutions, I would have done things in a very different order and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But nobody can predict what Trump's going to do, really. | ||
| But where we are right now, I think this is a good place. | ||
| I'm also very happy to hear. | ||
| I would like to see this subject go back to domestic reform, deregulation, tax cuts, and that sort of thing. | ||
| And maybe that's where we're headed. | ||
| Yeah, Pomp, do you think that's where we're headed? | ||
| I mean, my sense is it is. | ||
| Once we even out these trade deals, then we can get to what Trump talked about, which is now maybe even no income tax if you're making under 150, some more deregulation, etc., etc. | ||
| et cetera. | ||
| Yeah, I do think that there's kind of a second part of this equation. | ||
| You know, everyone knows about the tariffs, so they've been beaten like a dead horse. | ||
| But I do think that deregulation is a big piece of this and also those tax cuts. | ||
| And so if you look at this holistically, I think one of the mistakes that people have made is they've evaluated the tariffs in a silo. | ||
| And, you know, everyone is talking about all the details and the fallout and what the | ||
| game theory is. | ||
| But really, if you're able to cut all of the federal income tax that goes to the tens of millions of Americans that make $150,000 or less, that will be a massive boom to them. | ||
| And I think that smaller government kind of returning dollars to their pockets really big. | ||
| And then also, if you look at many of the biggest problems we have in our society, things like housing or healthcare, those places really have high prices and increasing prices because of government regulation. | ||
| So that deregulation should help on the pricing side, should allow entrepreneurs to go to those industries, solve those problems. | ||
| And so I think that the holistic plan, if executed how they have said they will execute it, this will be a very big boom. | ||
| And I expect asset prices back to all-time high. | ||
| Apparently, 80% of Americans make less than $150. | ||
| Now, a certain percent of those... | ||
| Those people already don't pay federal income tax. | ||
| But 80% of Americans, in essence, getting that money back, I think that's going to make a lot of people really happy real quick, right? | ||
| Because Jeffrey, that basically gets us out of theory and gamesmanship. | ||
| It's just literally like, look at my check. | ||
| Oh, federal income tax is gone. | ||
| Well, look, the number one issue here, as I talked about level playing field and comparative advantage between nations, U.S. has to reduce the production costs for business. | ||
| And that means deregulation, sound money. | ||
| The U.S. could balance its budget and stop generating debt for the world to use as collateral against which the U.S. has to compete. | ||
| It's a crazy system that Trump is targeting China in particular right now. | ||
| It's hardly an accident. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| China owns vast amounts of U.S. debt and they're using that debt as collateral to expand their industrial power against American business. | ||
| So the best way to fight back, To my way of thinking, is just to create a massive sea to shining sea enterprise zone of laissez-faire and productivity, low business costs, low barriers to entry, | ||
| really fire up the entrepreneurial sector in America. | ||
| Kind of where Trump began. | ||
| If you look at all of his executive orders, they were swinging in that direction. | ||
| And that ultimately is what's going to bring back manufacturing and fire back up the American jobs machine. | ||
| You gave me a great segue here, so I want to throw to Chamath Palapatiya from All In Podcast talking about how we've outsourced so much of this. | ||
|
unidentified
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You saw this in COVID. | |
| America is totally unprepared to fend for herself. | ||
| If push came to shove. | ||
| We can't make things here anymore, right? | ||
| We have, you know, we have kids that can make TikToks, but we don't have scientists that can make drugs. | ||
| That's not sustainable. | ||
| That's not a secure country. | ||
| Pomp, do you think that's what this is really all about? | ||
| I mean, now that Trump has got these 70-plus countries negotiating again, and we'll see what happens over the 90 days, and that this does now seem to be aimed at China, and if you just look back at COVID, where we were buying freaking COVID tests from China while they probably released the thing in the first place, | ||
| that this really was just all aimed at fixing something internally here so we are not so reliant on everybody else? | ||
| I think that's one part of it, right? | ||
| I do think that if you're going to have a tax cut, you need to raise government revenue. | ||
| If you want to bring back jobs and GDP growth and kind of accelerate those things, then you're going to need American manufacturing. | ||
| And then there's definitely a national security argument here. | ||
| And, you know, we do make a lot of things in America. | ||
| We're pretty good at producing reusable rockets or weaponry, pharmaceuticals and many other things. | ||
| But I think really what we noticed is that there's bare necessities. | ||
| There are things that in times of crisis we are going to need. | ||
| And so, you I think it's good policy. | ||
| It's very forward-thinking to do this. | ||
| Of course, the devil's in the details. | ||
| And so how do you incentivize it? | ||
| How do you use the market forces to go ahead and get the stuff built? | ||
| How do you actually make entrepreneurs believe that the government's cheering for their success rather than vilifying them if they're successful at building these businesses? | ||
| There's a lot of kind of complex details here. | ||
| And I think that's really what they're trying to figure out is what are the things the government should be involved in? | ||
| And then what are the areas where actually the government should say, we hope this happens, but let's stay out of it and let's let the market forces go ahead and get to the solution. | ||
| Jeffrey, is that kind of the beauty of Trump more than anything else? | ||
| I mean, he's got people suddenly thinking about what the role of government should be in their lives. | ||
| And he used Doge to expose fraud. | ||
| People are like, oh, wow, I was paying all this tax money for a bunch of crap that had nothing to do with my life or was actively working against me. | ||
| And now I see how other countries were also taking advantage of us for years. | ||
| So people are rethinking, actually, the basics, which we probably should have been doing maybe a while before. | ||
| We should have been doing this for the last 80 years. | ||
| So what Trump has done is truly remarkable. | ||
| I consider so many things that have happened since inauguration to be basically the greatest stuff that's happened since the end of World War II in terms of policy, getting some transparency on where the money is coming from, where it's going, what the regulations are doing. | ||
| And also President Trump trying to control the executive agencies. | ||
| I mean, this is the first time it's ever happened, and the Supreme Court's going to have to weigh in on this, but I can't imagine they're going to rule anything other than the president should be in charge of the executive branch. | ||
| That's gigantic if you think about it. | ||
| I mean, we've not really had any clarity about this. | ||
| Probably since the days of Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| So what Trump's done in this respect is extraordinary. | ||
| He's got great appointments in health and in economics. | ||
| What Doge has done has just been, in many ways, just fantastic. | ||
| So I'm deeply optimistic on many aspects of this. | ||
| I don't like the way the tariff policy is sort of... | ||
| Been implemented in a way that sort of distracts you from all those other things. | ||
| But I'm also, as of right now, in a little bit of a wait-and-see sort of attitude. | ||
| There's no question that we've turned our back on 80 years of trade policy. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| If that lands us in a pre-income tax world of, say, 1909 or the 1890s, this will be glorious for U.S. productivity, commerce, enterprise, and American prosperity generally. | ||
| Well, one guy who I know would love to be in a pre-income tax world is Senator Rand Paul, and here he is on just how the debate around tariffs has gone. | ||
| How did we all get here? | ||
| I mean, the whole debate is so fundamentally backwards and upsides down. | ||
| It's based on a fallacy. | ||
| And the fallacy is this, that somehow in a trade someone must lose. | ||
| That somehow when you trade with someone there's a loser and someone's taking advantage of you and China's ripping you off or Japan's ripping you off. | ||
| It's absolutely a fallacy. | ||
| Every trade that occurs in the marketplace is mutually beneficial. | ||
| If you have a free society and I trade with If you want to sell me your coat and I give you $200 for it, we both agree to it and we're both happy with the trade. | ||
| No American consumer trades with China. | ||
| They trade with Walmart or they may buy something from China, but they individually buy something they want and they make a decision. | ||
| The trade is always a win-win. | ||
| You can have this artificial accounting and it makes it look like a bad thing, but you have to ask yourself, is trade good or bad? | ||
| And if you look at the trade deficit, in times of a recession, the trade deficit goes down. | ||
| So if the terrorist push is in a recession, we could reduce the trade deficit because... | ||
| We're all buying less stuff. | ||
| We have to get back to the fundamentals of is trade good or is trade bad? | ||
| Pop, I like Senator Paul a lot. | ||
| I've had him on the show dozens of times. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of my economics lean that way. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything at Walmart, and we do get cheaper shit at Walmart because of how we've done manufacturing. | ||
| But is he missing a piece there as it pertains to it's not exactly that you, the consumer, are getting screwed. | ||
| It's that the people that don't have the jobs are getting screwed and that we can't, as a country, we can't operate that way forever. | ||
| Yeah, I think that it's the classic kind of a complex situation. | ||
| And so you have short-term optimization versus long-term optimization. | ||
| And so, of course, it's amazing for consumers to be able to go and buy tons of cheap goods. | ||
| They love that. | ||
| They want to keep doing that. | ||
| They actually don't want to see the prices go up. | ||
| At the same time, if you're trying to look out into the future and be forward-thinking, you need to have manufacturing. | ||
| You need to have that national security. | ||
| You need to be thinking about where are we going to get jobs. | ||
| I think one of the big misconceptions around manufacturing is actually people think that we're going to bring back sweatshops to make t-shirts and socks. | ||
| What we're really talking about is, again, America's very good at certain types of manufacturing, usually it's complex, high technology type manufacturing. | ||
| What we want is we want a level playing field. | ||
| There was this great interview that happened on CNN recently where a steel CEO was on the factory floor and he held up this basket that was made with steel for medical purposes and he said, if I take this and I ship it to Germany, there's like a $125 tariff tax that's put on it. | ||
| But if somebody in Germany makes this and they send it to the United States, it's like $1.25. | ||
| So he says, that is unfair. | ||
| And what he's really saying is that, look, we all want free trade. | ||
| That would be the ideal scenario. | ||
| It's just that the United States has been operating for the last 20 or 30 years thinking that everyone's engaged in free trade when actually they were subsidizing their producers. | ||
| They were using tariffs. | ||
| They were manipulating their currencies and many other unfair trade practices. | ||
| And so the U.S. has a choice. | ||
| We either continue to pretend like free trade exists and we try to play that game, or we realize that there is a new game, this kind of manipulated game, and let's become the best in the world at the new game. | ||
| And once we become the best and establish our dominance, we then can tell everyone, we'll stop playing the new game if we can go back to the old game of free trade. | ||
| And I think that's really what you're seeing here. | ||
| There's a lot of people who say, I'm cool with the tariffs if they're low, and if they ultimately lead back to more net new free trade than we had before the tariffs were originally announced. | ||
| Right, and that's exactly why, even though the market was melting down for a day and a half, I wasn't going crazy. | ||
| I was looking at my numbers, like, not happy, but I was like, this isn't the end. | ||
| This isn't the end. | ||
| I just won't be part of the hysteria. | ||
| Jeffrey, we're going to bring some of these jobs back here, but so are we not going to have people putting little screws into iPhones like some people are implying? | ||
| It's going to be better than that? | ||
| I think we have to leave it to the market, and the laissez-faire approach is definitely the best one. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of Rand Paul, and I've counted him a friend for many decades, and there's nothing he said that was particularly untrue. | ||
| The only qualifier I would add there is that what he said is especially true in a world of settlement between nations. | ||
| It's what you started by saying, actually. | ||
| Yeah. I mean, the problem is that under a gold standard, you would have, you know, kind of a law of one price, law of one wage in the Ricardian sense. | ||
| And everything you said was correct in a kind of a different world, a world that was left behind when Richard Nixon got us off gold. | ||
| So the U.S. became the fiat provider to the world, providing liquidity for the entire planet Earth. | ||
| And other nations figured out the game and pillaged all of our productive resources. | ||
| I don't know how else to put it. | ||
| And that's been going on for, you say, 30 years, but I would trace it all the way back to 50 years. | ||
| And this is a problematic situation. | ||
| It's basically unsustainable. | ||
| And so the U.S. has to do something about this. | ||
| It's a wonder that it's taken as long as it has. | ||
| So I don't like tariffs either. | ||
| But the present situation... | ||
| By the way, the theory, I think, of the Trump administration is we're going to use tariffs as a proxy for currency settlement like you would have had under a Bretton Woods-style system. | ||
| I'm not sure that that really works out exactly. | ||
| There's a lot of static, a lot of unknowns here. | ||
| But under the current situation, the status quo can't just... | ||
| Keep going on like this? | ||
| And it shouldn't have ever been allowed to go on. | ||
| So I love the idea that we're going to try to do something about it. | ||
| Again, the goal is to fire up American enterprise. | ||
| Dave, one of the things that's interesting about what happened after Nixon left the gold standard is that regulations increased. | ||
| Inflation kept going on. | ||
| The Fed kept watering down the value. | ||
| I did the numbers this morning. | ||
| If you look at the purchasing power of the dollar since 1973, if you put 1973 at that 100, right now we're at 13.4%. | ||
| I mean, that's how dramatic the inflation has been. | ||
| Plus all the regulatory agencies, hundreds have added, it's impossible to do business in the United States in the way it was. | ||
| Say, in the 19th century. | ||
| So if we can get rid of all that, stabilize the dollar. | ||
| And by the way, inflation is, in fact, dramatically down since the inauguration. | ||
| We're down to real-time inflation. | ||
| Last I checked, it was about 1.5%. | ||
| So it's not no inflation, but it's much better. | ||
| So we're making a lot of progress. | ||
| And if we keep making this progress, we can solve these imbalances in the world trade system and fire up American enterprise. | ||
| In all sectors. | ||
| And I'm not ruling out anything. | ||
| I mean, can manufacturing come back to the U.S.? | ||
| Probably. It probably never should have left, actually. | ||
| I think I'm optimistic about it. | ||
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| All right, so I want to read this tweet from Bill Ackman to you guys. | ||
| Bill Ackman, we've shown a lot of his stuff over the last half year or so as he went from, let's say, a kind of moderate liberal into a Trump guy. | ||
| He wrote this. | ||
| This is a couple days before Trump announced this 90-day pause. | ||
| He wrote, some have misinterpreted my thoughts on tariffs. | ||
| I'm totally supportive of President Trump using tariffs to eliminate tariffs and unfair trading practices of our trading partners and to... | ||
| I welcome the counterpoint. | ||
| So... The reason this tweet is interesting is this is exactly what Trump did, and it was only a day after. | ||
| Ackman was getting a ton of shit, basically, because he was saying he doesn't like tariffs. | ||
| Then he qualified it, basically saying, let's do this kind of 30, 60 day pause. | ||
| Lo and behold, that's exactly where we are. | ||
| Pomp, the reason I wanted to read that is, it's like this, it seems to me that a little sanity here and showing leverage and that we can use government power without being abusive of it. | ||
| That's how you create the widest, most like pro-America, pro-freedom tent. | ||
| And I think Bill's tweet right there, I don't know that Trump read it or someone read it to him, but it's like, man, that's exactly Yeah, look, I think that there's a lot of people who are kind of joking about the art of the deal. | ||
| But really, at the end of the day, that's what's happened here. | ||
| And you can't go and ask nicely and say, hey, will you pretty please allow us to align the entire world against you? | ||
| Right? You got to show up and you've got to show strength and you've got to have some negotiating leverage. | ||
| And it seems like that's exactly what's happened. | ||
| Now, I will. | ||
| Issue a word of caution. | ||
| This isn't over yet. | ||
| Obviously, China and the United States are going to have their horns locked and they're going to stay in this trade war for however long it takes to get to a solution. | ||
| But also, there's still a lot of trade deals that need to be done in terms of the various countries that also are aligning with the United States. | ||
| But we are in a much better place today than we were two or three weeks ago. | ||
| And I think that the longer this goes on, the more the United States and our citizens are going to realize we got a good position. | ||
| We got a good hand. | ||
| And China is going to have to come to Jeffrey, how much of this do you think is something that Pomp mentioned earlier, | ||
| which is that China just owns a ton of our debt? | ||
| And that in and of itself, putting aside IP being stolen and them selling us cheap stuff through Timu and everything else, that the debt problem was becoming sort of insurmountable and unsustainable, and we had to do something to address that. | ||
| So I totally agree with this, and this is actually, to my mind, the central issue. | ||
| You know, this debt problem began, you know, with Japan once China was introduced to the World Trade Organization. | ||
| China figured it out. | ||
| China's central bank owns vast amounts of U.S. debt that, again, serves as collateral against which they can compete with U.S. using permanently lower wages. | ||
| Look, Dave, I'm just telling you, there is no free trade theorist in history, from David Hume all the way to Gottfried Habler, about whom I wrote yesterday, who would approve of this situation. | ||
| I mean, it's just completely unsustainable. | ||
| One of the best ways that the U.S. can deal with this is to stop creating the debt. | ||
| Stop creating the debt and stop marketing it around the world to be held by central banks around the world. | ||
| That would be actually devastating. | ||
| And level the playing field just by itself. | ||
| I mean, this is a complicated economic situation, but the US is not helping things with this endless amounts of dollar debt asset creation that we're shipping all over the world. | ||
| Under normal free trade conditions, again, in past centuries... | ||
| The prices in the exporting nations would rise because they're importing the best amounts of money, and then the opposite would happen in the importing nations, right? | ||
| But we don't have that kind of settlement anymore, precisely because of the way the monetary regime is working. | ||
| Listen, I think ultimately, that's just a prediction here, I think where we're headed is to a new kind of Britainwood system, and it's going to be called the Mar-a-Lago Accord. | ||
| It's going to be all nations in the world. | ||
| And it's going to be a drive towards fixing probably global exchange rates within some sort of band, similar to what James Baker tried to do in 1985. | ||
| And it's going to be enforced by means of tariffs. | ||
| That's my guess. | ||
| That's where we're headed. | ||
| I think we're going to see that probably start to form up before the end of the year. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's something like that, too. | ||
| I think countries are either going to be like, yes, we're getting on board what America's doing, and maybe their deals won't be so favorable to them anymore, or they're going to just lean more towards China or something like that. | ||
| I think the other part that's been freaking people out is that we are not used to politicians saying things and then doing them. | ||
| And that is actually causing a certain amount of people to go crazy. | ||
| This is J.D. Vance a couple weeks ago, so this is before the tariffs were introduced. | ||
| And listen to him laying out exactly what the problem is, and then Trump giving us the solution basically this week. | ||
| Because there were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization. | ||
| The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things. | ||
| The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things. | ||
| But, I think we got it wrong. | ||
| It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. | ||
| There are network effects, as you all well understand. | ||
| The firms that design products work with firms that manufacture. | ||
| Now that was the first conceit of globalization. | ||
| I think the second is that cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that inhibits innovation. | ||
| I might even say that it's a drug that too many American firms got addicted to. | ||
| Now, if you can make a product more cheaply, | ||
| And so I'd ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. | ||
| Indeed, I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. | ||
| Both our working people, our populace, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. | ||
| And the solution, I believe, is American innovation. | ||
| Pop, in some way, it seems like he's basically saying that we were kind of outsourcing our dreams. | ||
| We thought we could just outsource the manufacturing, but in essence, it became what I talked about earlier in the week about Every time you buy an iPhone, it says, you know, conceived in Cupertino, but made in China. | ||
| And that over time, just conceiving something here, but then doing all the rest of it elsewhere, that's simply not going to work. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think this goes back to this idea that you got to be able to bet on American entrepreneurs. | ||
| We built this country by taking risks, by innovating, and by ultimately building things. | ||
| And I think that it is a drug to go and chase that cheap labor all around the world. | ||
| But now what you're seeing is you're seeing a renaissance of young startups who are saying, if the incumbents are not going to answer the call that our nation needs in order to be able to build this stuff, we will build new companies. | ||
| We will build new technologies in order to be able to go in and do that. | ||
| And I think you see these large venture capital firms pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies saying that we understand industrial manufacturing businesses can not only create a lot of shareholder value, but they also can create products and services that are good for consumers at lower prices. | ||
| Innovation and technology is a core component to that. | ||
| And so I look at it as we can complain about what's been going on or we can start competing. | ||
| And to me, that's not only... | ||
| inspirational, but I think it is also aspirational in that there's a lot of people in the world who they watch something like the social network movie and they wanted to go do a software startup. | ||
| The next 15 or 20 years of this country is going to be people saying, well, what if I go make physical products? | ||
| What if I go and build one of those companies? | ||
| And that kind of hard tech type pathway, I think, is something that more and more founders are going to go after. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeffrey, it would be pretty cool if we could build again. | |
| You know, a lot of my friends on the libertarian side of things are pretty hard on J.D. Vance, but actually he does understand the math of international trade in a way that so many people just have ignored. | ||
| He's complained about the dollar system, about the fact that the U.S. dollar is sustaining the world economy and it's too big a burden to bear. | ||
| It's connected with his doubts about the U.S. military empire, actually. | ||
| And he's been sort of in private, I don't know if he said it in public, but wanting to do something about the monetary system for a very long time. | ||
| And I'm not sure that he and Trump entirely agree about this point, but he's definitely in favor of trying the solution of tariffs as a proxy for international currency settlement as at least a fix. | ||
| Stop the bleeding, stop the industrial Outsourcing. | ||
| And try to bring back real enterprise and real productivity to the U.S. I think that there's certain aspects of this plan that are inconsistent with classical free trade doctrine. | ||
| On the other hand, as I said, classical free trade doctrine always presumes comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. | ||
| And that's the discussion, the debate that The Trump administration is forcing right now. | ||
| Alright, we're going to take a quick break, talk about 1775 Coffee, then we'll talk about Trump bringing the coal industry back, and, oh, scientists are bringing dinosaurs back. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| 1775 and Rumble just teamed up to launch their first-ever anti-aging coffee, and it's almost gone. | ||
| They've dropped a thousand longevity bundles, and after blowing through most of them, they've extended the sale and added a few more. | ||
| But this is the final push. | ||
| Once they're gone, they're gone for good. | ||
| For just 99 bucks, you're getting over $250 in value, including two bags of longevity. | ||
| Coffee, an ultra-rare Peaberry roast, and exclusive 1775 merch you won't find anywhere else. | ||
| This isn't just some cheap throwaway promo roast. | ||
| It's real, bold, high-quality coffee. | ||
| If you believe in America, this is your coffee, and here's the kicker. | ||
| Every dollar you spend is an entry to win a Cybertruck and $30,000 in cash. | ||
| That's 99 entries locked in, and with less than a month left, this bundle gives you a real shot. | ||
| Go to 1775coffee.com slash Ruben to grab yours, fuel up, live long, and start your morning. | ||
| Morning with coffee. | ||
| That stands for something. | ||
| All right, so let's jump into the other thing that Trump did this week. | ||
| This is from Autism Capital. | ||
| New President Trump signs four new executive orders. | ||
| One, end all discriminatory policies against the coal industry. | ||
| Two, impose a moratorium on Biden's anti-coal policies and ensure that coal plants can continue to provide power and jobs. | ||
| Three, promoting grid security and reliability and focus grid policies on safe and secure energy production and ending woke discriminatory policies against coal. | ||
| Four, instruct Pop, cheap energy. | ||
| Pretty good, right? | ||
| We seem to have decided it's not good and it's going to kill all of us, even though that's the thing that, you know, warms the houses for poor people when it's cold and everything else. | ||
| So this is kind of good. | ||
| I always tell people that the degrowth or de-energy movement is a luxury that is only afforded to those who have an abundance of energy. | ||
| Because you sit in a warm house, you say, maybe we don't need this. | ||
| But those who don't have the warm house, they want the warm house. | ||
| And so very similarly, there are no poor countries that have high energy production or access to cheap energy. | ||
| That is something that only the developed nations have. | ||
| And so naturally, although it seems like we were held hostage by the extreme voices that were on the fringe of these debates, I think now we're kind of returning more to a centrist policy. | ||
| And ultimately, I think that this is the will of the American people. | ||
| You're seeing exactly what the citizens actually want from a policy standpoint, from an innovation standpoint and a growth standpoint. | ||
| And so they went into the ballot box in November. | ||
| They voted somebody in who said this is exactly what he's going to go do. | ||
| And now he's executing on it. | ||
| And so far, it looks like the policies are going to work. | ||
| But let's see what happens. | ||
| And I think that the midterms and ultimately the next presidential election, a lot of what will happen in those elections is going to be determined by actually fulfilling these campaign promises. | ||
| But it looks like he's doing it so far. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Number one, coal's been growing for 50 years. | |
| Demand for coal's an all-time high last year. | ||
| It'll be at an all-time high again this year. | ||
| That's globally. | ||
| In the United States, yes, coal's been losing market share to natural gas. | ||
| That's market forces. | ||
| The shale revolution brought natural gas prices down so much that natural gas has taken market share from coal in the United States, but not globally. | ||
| If we want to grow America's electricity production meaningfully over the next five or ten years, we've got to stop closing coal plants. | ||
| And coal is a central one of those. | ||
| Coal's not just for electricity. | ||
| It's also for steel production and cement production. | ||
| It's for industrial activity. | ||
| I think this is a winning argument, Jeffrey, as it pertains to AI. | ||
| And if we're going to mine Bitcoin, we need electricity. | ||
| And if we're going to have the data servers, we're going to need electricity. | ||
| And we're going to be in an AI race, again, largely with China. | ||
| We're going to kind of need the energy to power it. | ||
| This is one of the great features of the Trump administration. | ||
| I mean, he's shut down the whole climate change, de-industrialization, end energy production. | ||
| It's been fantastic. | ||
| It was great to live in a world where we have a president who actually believes in using our own resources to do what we're great at. | ||
| And in a highly competitive global economy, in the end, nations do compete. | ||
| In part, or where they do have a direct comparative advantage is in resources. | ||
| And it's just crazy that the U.S. just abandoned this. | ||
| I'm from Texas, from West Texas, and I don't get back very often, but the last time I was there two years ago, you know, this is a place with oils, like an ocean of oil under everywhere. | ||
| And everywhere you look, there's wind turbines. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| It's just a sign of madness that was released on this country over the last, I don't know, 10 or 20 years or something. | ||
| So I think it's thrilling that Trump just sort of has seemed to wipe that away, not even NPR, as I said, is talking about climate change anymore. | ||
| So I think this is... | ||
| This is just amazing, and it's brilliant, and it took a lot of courage for Trump to do what he's doing. | ||
| This is where I'm mostly optimistic. | ||
| Pop, I know you're a tech guy. | ||
| You were once wise enough to join Dave Rubin's little startup a couple years ago. | ||
| I hope that made you some bank. | ||
| I guess you're feeling pretty good about what Trump's doing with AI and tech? | ||
| Yeah, look, I think that he really understands that he's not an expert. | ||
| And I think it's probably a pretty important part. | ||
| He simply went and surrounded himself with experts. | ||
| And he said, what do you think we should do? | ||
| And those people have some pretty big, bold ideas. | ||
| But I think the spirit of their policy is to embrace the entrepreneur, embrace the innovator, and say, this technology is important. | ||
| We want you to build this here. | ||
| You are welcome here. | ||
| And I really think that the last administration, frankly, just vilified success. | ||
| It vilified the innovators. | ||
| It prevented them from running their companies. | ||
| And so the more that you can lean into that and be a I will always, always, always bet on the American entrepreneur. | ||
| And I think that this administration is basically doing that in these new technology fields. | ||
| All right, let's talk about Rumble Premium for a minute. | ||
| And then, yes, it's true, the dire wolf has returned. | ||
| Free speech is under attack, but Rumble refuses to back down. | ||
| We've always believed in empowering voices no matter how unpopular, and now we're taking that fight to the next level. | ||
| When major advertisers conspired to pull their dollars, even brands like Dunkin' Donuts turned their backs, claiming Rumble had a right-wing culture. | ||
| But we're not here to fit a mold. | ||
| We're here to defend free expression. | ||
| To strengthen this mission, we're excited to offer Rumble Premium, a completely ad-free experience with exclusive benefits for viewers and creators. | ||
| All right, check this out from government-funded, but maybe not for much longer, NPR. | ||
| A biotech company has said it bred three animals with key physical features of the direwolf, a species that has been extinct for more than 12,000 years. | ||
| Colossal Biosciences says it used novel gene editing technology to alter gray wolf DNA that led to the birth of the pups. | ||
| Direwolves recently featured prominently in the HBO series Game of Thrones. | ||
| Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy direwolf puppies, Colossal CEO Ben Lamb said in a statement. | ||
| It was once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | ||
| Today our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation. | ||
| Lam added. | ||
| Colossal also announced that it had bred four cloned red wolves, the most endangered wolf species in the world, and said its technology could be used to help threaten animal populations across the globe. | ||
| Rebound. Jeffrey in Jurassic Park. | ||
| Jeff Goldblum says life finds a way. | ||
| Have we just proved it? | ||
| And are we all going to die because of this? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| I do believe in designer dogs, if that's what we're talking about. | ||
| The perfect house pet. | ||
| You definitely have a hairless cat. | ||
| I feel like you definitely have a hairless cat in that castle somewhere. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Well, I definitely think sometimes there's no way this guy could survive in nature, so we kind of do this. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know. | ||
| The technology, I do not understand it. | ||
| I think it's glorious. | ||
| To go back to the last point, encouraging technology and innovation is the way to go. | ||
| I would add to the point about AI, I'm so relieved that we have a pro-crypto administration. | ||
| We've gone through more than 10 years of government waging war on innovation. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And what a catastrophe that's been. | ||
| So this is a relief. | ||
| Pomp, you see what he did there? | ||
| He's not an expert in gene splicing and bringing back dead animals, so he turned it back into economics. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| I'm going to let you listen to the first dire wolf howl in over 10,000 years, and then you can comment on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
*crickets* | |
| They're going to kill us all. | ||
| Yeah, they look pretty cute right now, but something tells me they're going to get a lot bigger and hopefully they stay nice. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| People look at stuff like this and they say, oh, are we solving one problem but creating 10 more? | ||
| And that's usually what technology does to some degree. | ||
| We solve problems and then there are new problems that pop up. | ||
| And so that is a natural progression of technology. | ||
| But this technology also, yes, we're doing it in animals. | ||
| My guess is that they're only just scratching the surface of what the applications for the technology are. | ||
| And so imagine all the things that we're going to be able to do in the future, not only with animals, but other things in biology or maybe even humans. | ||
| And I think that's probably the most exciting part here. | ||
| That you have smart people who got together. | ||
| They took risks. | ||
| They were able to get a breakthrough from a scientific standpoint. | ||
| They were able to show the result. | ||
| This is not a white paper. | ||
| This is not some proclamation of what they're going to do. | ||
| It's here's what we did. | ||
| And now I think that they've got people's attention. | ||
| Let's see where they take it from here. | ||
| And a guy by the name of Elon Musk who knows something about building things and then all the things that happened after that. | ||
| He wrote this when he saw this about the howling wolf. | ||
| Please make a miniature pet woolly mammoth so we shall see. | ||
| My final question for you guys is despite this economy, despite everything that's happening, the bumps in the road of the last couple of days, will you both be spending some good, hard-earned American cash this weekend? | ||
| Pomp, what are you doing in New York, you crazy person living in New York? | ||
| Listen, I spend a lot of time with my family, but the one thing about New York is you definitely pay higher prices, but nothing can beat a nice little walk in Central Park, so that's what I'll be doing. | ||
| So not spending money. | ||
| Okay, interesting. | ||
| Jeffrey, you're in Connecticut with the hairless cat and the whole thing. | ||
| What are you going to be doing? | ||
| Well, exactly that. | ||
| I'm not going to be spending money. | ||
| This is my new thing, saving. | ||
| I'm part of this new movement, the No Spend 25. I try to find things that don't require money, getting back to nature, getting out in the sun, which they told us not to go out in the sun, you remember, for many years, because that's very bad. | ||
| So that's what I need to do more than anything else. | ||
| Reconnect the hikes. | ||
| This is what I love. | ||
| Visiting local farms. | ||
| This is... | ||
| This is what my life is like these days. | ||
| I'm tempted to just go to the Hard Rock Casino now and blow some money because you guys are just doing it naturally out in the sun, walking around and everything else. | ||
| All right, guys, thanks for joining. | ||
| I hope we cleared up some of this for you guys who are asking for some of a bit of a more nuanced conversation around tariffs and everything else. | ||
| Have a good weekend, everybody. | ||
| See you on Monday. |
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