00:00:00
do you go to New York much Uh never I I closed my house Oh wow I basically uh I tricked my wife You know how your wife
00:00:09
always wants to uh renovate your house No idea So my wife that's like my wife always wants to renovate my house right
00:00:17
Every minute I've been alive my wife has wanted to renovate parts of my house So
00:00:21
we moved out once a year and a half ago Uh uh we moved out for a year and a half
00:00:25
about six years ago And she only did half the house And she still rued the day that she only did half the house
00:00:31
Really Yeah So that so this so that was the deal What I did is I uh bought a house wash and said "You want to
00:00:37
renovate the house?" She said "Yeah." I said "Great We hired a contractor." Wait
00:00:41
you brought Brett Bear's house No Yeah that's a beautiful house We can I can talk about whatever you want By the way
00:00:45
I'm happy to talk about serious things casual things No let's just do this Let's roll because he's roll You're
00:00:51
already running right He's on fire All right besties I think that was another epic discussion People love the
00:00:58
interviews I could hear him talk for hours Absolutely Oh he crushed your questions I made it We are giving people
00:01:03
ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion What do you guys think That was
00:01:07
fun That was great Howard thanks for being here Thanks for joining myself and David Freeberg on the
00:01:14
All-In podcast I want to take a step back before we talk about today and instead talk about your friendship with
00:01:22
the president how it started how you guys got to know each other and walk us through the moment when you you know
00:01:29
frankly went out on a limb a little bit stepped up became the campaign finance chair and then just that evolution So
00:01:35
I've known the president since I was 30 years old So I used to go on the uh call
00:01:41
we call it the charity circuit in New York Sure So there's basically a charity party every night when you live in New
00:01:47
York Like the rubber chicken dinner Like literally the rubber chicken And and uh
00:01:50
so sort of every night you go out and uh and so the boss of my company Bernie Caner
00:01:58
he got tired of going right So he didn't want to go So he would send me with his
00:02:02
wife and I would be her walker You know I'm the 30-year-old CEO of the company and I'd take her to the party and uh and
00:02:10
after the party I'd put her in a limo and she'd go home and DJT would say "Well let's go out." And so we'd go out
00:02:19
It wasn't planned but he was at the party He's 45 I'm at the party 30 And we chase the same girls Okay It's basically
00:02:28
it worked out fine And and by the way here's the thing about Donald Trump He was the most famous the most fun Yeah
00:02:37
the most interesting person 30 years ago 33 years ago I mean here's the best thing He's been on the cover of Time
00:02:46
magazine 59 times No way And then he leans over to me and he goes "And 20 were good."
00:02:54
Like but who can take that Yeah I mean who could take like other people when you have a bad cover of Time magazine
00:03:00
you'd crumple right and be sand on the floor and said he's like but so Howard is is it that he's just totally wired to
00:03:09
understand that moment like of being a public figure or like what is it that's so unique about what constitutes the
00:03:16
ability to navigate that over 40 years I think it it it adds energy to him to him
00:03:23
Right So everybody else's energy what they don't understand is people bring negative energy to Donald Trump right
00:03:29
And they're just charging his battery Okay Your energy around him comes to him So when I come at him with a lot of
00:03:36
energy he comes back with a lot of energy Right Right It doesn't matter He never he never steps back He just sort
00:03:42
of takes it like the centrifuge and then hurls it back at you And he's been that
00:03:46
way always So this is not new This is just who he is This is who he is So so those other people who attack him they
00:03:54
think they're attacking him they're charging his battery They're literally charging his battery So he comes back
00:04:00
bigger stronger bigger stronger And once you understand the man the most intuitive person that you've ever met
00:04:09
Yeah And people say "Well okay so people who know me I don't suffer fools." And they have all these derogatorial my left
00:04:16
liberal friends all these derogatory statements about the guy right And they know me really well Yeah Right And
00:04:22
they'd say "Well how can you work for him?" I'd say "How can I work for him?" The most intuitive person he senses it
00:04:29
He knows it He calls me up and he says "Panama Canal." That's what he says He goes "Panama Canal." It just feels wrong
00:04:37
Right And then he sends me on the quest to go I I didn't do anything I just start the quest to go look at it Yeah
00:04:43
Right The mouth that's east is a deep water port by the Chinese The mouth that's
00:04:51
west is a deep water port by the Chinese They're building bridges over it So our
00:04:57
ships and our military ships should go under right in our hemisphere a Chinese bridge So then I said "Okay let's go
00:05:06
prove it." So I have a a friend of mine He's owns a big shipping company I said "Take two iPhones put them on a stand
00:05:13
and just go through the Panama Canal." You know the Panama Canal they sort of drag ships through like this And I said
00:05:18
"Just go video both ways." No just video both ways 70% of every letter is Chinese Then I'm talking like
00:05:29
the sides of containers ships the stores like I'm not talking like signage just just random signage like you're riding
00:05:35
on a road It's all Chinese And then I do the research and I call him back and I say the magic words
00:05:42
between me and him I have your path which is I've done it I've done the legal work I've done everything Right So
00:05:50
when you start talking about it you have a foundation It's not just you talking So people think he's just talking He's
00:05:56
never just talking Yeah He has people behind him who bring him his foundational structural outcome And then
00:06:05
what does he do He went and played golf that afternoon He called me at 7:00 in the morning He said "What do you got?"
00:06:09
We talked from 7:00 to 8 He went and played golf right And that afternoon there's the American flag in the middle
00:06:15
of the Panama Canal in some you know truth he puts out right And that's the fun part right So you work for the the
00:06:23
most intuitive guy Yeah Unbelievably smart unbelievably thoughtful who knows what he's doing So it's so fun for me
00:06:31
Howard let's just go back one second So you have this deep relationship with him
00:06:35
You guys are friends Scott Besson told us the story that about 18 months ago though he saw all
00:06:42
this data about what was happening under Biden and he was just so concerned that
00:06:46
these deficits and debts were getting so out of control he went to the president
00:06:49
and said how can I help can I help that's a story um but was there a moment for you that was like rooted in
00:06:56
something other than friendship like was there something on the ground where you
00:07:00
said hold on a second this is a train wreck and we need to do this you were the finance chair for the campaign Well
00:07:06
no I wasn't the fighting chair I was the transition chair Transition Okay So I ran transition which we'll talk about
00:07:11
but so let's go through So I'm friends with him right But I'm building my business Young guy building my business
00:07:20
And then 911 happens Yeah Okay So I'm friends with the guy I'm just friends with the guy But then 911 happens Kind
00:07:28
sweet calls me all the time Just good human being Nice warm caring good human being Right But then I'm knocked out So
00:07:37
what do I do next I try to rebuild my company take care of the families of 911 You know I had I lost 658 people who
00:07:44
work for me And uh and we had a policy We want to work with people that we like So when we had an opening we didn't use
00:07:52
head hunters We would say to everybody at the firm does anybody know anybody who'd do this job No And so you know
00:08:00
young lady works for me says you know my best friend is an HR person They have to
00:08:03
have capacity Yeah But once they have capacity imagine we hire that person Yeah Now what happens is it's it's not
00:08:10
one big happy family Yeah But people really really care about the company and that's our company that's on the top
00:08:19
five floors of the World Trade Center on 911 when the plane hits it Kills everybody at the office My brother Gary
00:08:26
he dies at 36 My best friend Doug he dies at 39 Uh I had just turned 40 that summer I had a party 65 couples It's my
00:08:36
my 40th birthday 40th birthday Yeah Right 27 people at my party get killed Jesus My friends These are my friends So
00:08:45
I'm driven to take care of the families of the people who who died And I commit 25% of all of our profits Uh but the
00:08:52
company's destroyed So we go from making a million a day I was a rich guy right What's the definition of a rich guy No
00:08:59
personal debt no corporate debt Ken Fitzgerald no debt So how do you survive 911 If you don't owe anybody any money
00:09:08
the only money you're losing is is your money Is your money So we survive and we
00:09:14
take care of our friends families and then we build the company back up So you could see like I'm uh I'm a special
00:09:21
guest on the Celebrity Apprentice the first season of Celebrity Apprentice Piers Morgan wins Did he fire you No no
00:09:29
I wasn't a contestant I'm a little beyond being a contestant I was a special guest I'd come in like if you
00:09:36
see during the auction I'm standing next to him at the auction you know and I'm helping him like I'm just his friend
00:09:41
sort of as an extra all along the way you know every once you kept the friendship going as you're rebuilding
00:09:47
We're friends all the way but I'm rebuilding my company Yeah And then so I'm not interested in politics Okay I
00:09:53
don't do anything in politics because I'm I got my head down Right We had the financial crisis Cander children's great
00:09:59
in the financial crisis Had you ever donated to candidates at all or not Yeah New York candidates Okay Right New York
00:10:05
C So think about it You're in New York You try to pick uh social liberals fiscal conservatives
00:10:13
right If that even exists anymore Right But they if you're in New York you have to pick and look I grew up in New York
00:10:18
so I'm socially liberal What else could I possibly be Yeah So you know so early when Chuck Schumer was young before he
00:10:26
became what the president now calls a Palestinian you know you know he you know I raised him you know I I raised
00:10:33
him money and gave him money Donald Trump gave him money Same I I did too Yeah I mean because he was he was uh
00:10:39
that's what he said he was He was social liberal fiscal conservative and and uh so I you know we'd all give to those
00:10:45
kind of candidates but mostly giving to get along right and to be able to you know ask him a question if you
00:10:52
needed to ask him a question but there was really no I had no drive right in that like I said the first four nights I
00:11:00
slept in Washington in the last 20 years when when Donald Trump was elected I had
00:11:05
never slept here I'd come down visit a little go home go home What am I staying here for So he calls me at the end of
00:11:14
October 23 Okay So he's already had his first term You didn't you didn't support
00:11:19
or get No I was so I gave him money and I gave Hillary money You gave Hillary money in the first term Yeah because
00:11:26
Hillary was incredibly helpful to me post 911 Remember she was a senator right And New York needed help right And
00:11:33
Hillary was incredibly helpful and I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships with
00:11:40
a whole bunch of congressmen and they were going to do nice things Like Bill Young ran House Appropriations right
00:11:47
Bill Young was my friend right through a whole variety of things that had to do with
00:11:53
um I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital and I used to walk around and I would bring music there for the men who
00:12:03
got hurt from the military who were in Bethesda Naval Hospital And uh we would walk around I go with my wife and then I
00:12:09
would engage the young man with music I give him music and ask him what CDs he wanted this is when CDs were there and
00:12:16
I'd bring up a Walkman and my wife would pull the family outside and uh she'd pay
00:12:22
a year of their mortgage and all their expenses because what people don't realize is your son loses his leg right
00:12:30
Dad and mom come flying in and they're going to stay by his bedside What job do these people have that allows them to be
00:12:39
at their son's world And their world is falling apart cuz their son lost his leg
00:12:43
So the world is falling apart but at home their world is falling apart Falling apart And so my my wife uh would
00:12:49
just just try to figure out how much money was and just give them a check Yeah And no no form no nothing Just give
00:12:56
him the money Yeah And and help them So I would bump into Billy Young and his wife who were they were just they ran
00:13:05
then defense appropriations and they were there just being good human beings And so we became friends And he said to
00:13:10
me once he said 'Is there anything I could ever do to help you I'm like look you run you're like a congressman from
00:13:17
Florida who does defense appropriations And I'm like a Jewish guy from New York who's in finance If there ever were two
00:13:23
skews that we're never going to meet this is two ships going like right we got nothing So I said to him look we're
00:13:29
just going to be friends right We're never going to do anything And then he runs House Appropriations And so when
00:13:34
New York needs money to rebuild after 911 they go see Bill Young to try to get a bill passed And he said "How can you
00:13:42
come see me without Howard?" Yeah You know this is post 911 So I'm running New York And Hillary does a really nice job
00:13:50
Okay For New York Yeah And I told I told uh DJT I call him DJT because I've known
00:13:56
him for always I said I told him that I can't forget Yeah I'm just not the person who's gonna forget Of
00:14:03
course I gave him money right But I give it and and by the way he still tortures
00:14:08
me for it So like and you know what the best part is A good friend does Yes Right You know what the point is See
00:14:14
other people would would you know sort of curl back Yeah Right So here right after he gets elected okay here's a
00:14:21
story for you So right after he gets elected he has a dinner in New York right So he invites me to the dinner in
00:14:26
New York cuz I'm his friend And then while he's giving his talk to his first dinner in New York he goes "Wait wait
00:14:33
Hillary's supporter and he points at me right?" So I stand up I go "Hey everyone." And I sit down You know he's
00:14:40
just sassing me okay Cuz I gave him tons of dough He knows I love him and it's fine Okay So we're 2023 So we're
00:14:49
2023 and he calls me and he says "Will you help me?" Yeah And I had not thought politics Now I I
00:14:58
gave him money in 2020 re-election Yeah Probably gave him 10 million bucks I raised him 15 million bucks So I I was
00:15:05
you know once I I'm on a side the whole way through I'm raising him money in 17 18 19 20 While he's president I'm
00:15:11
totally on his side Yeah And I'm But I'm just his friend I'm not engaged Yeah Okay Because I'm still rebuilding my
00:15:18
life Yeah Okay And then 2023 calls me says "Will you help me?" And I actually thought about it
00:15:28
like and that was the first time I really thought politics And then I said "Yes." And I gave him 10 million bucks
00:15:37
right then and there And then I started talking to him I started going on the campaign trail I started doing research
00:15:44
I started doing knowledge I wanted I talked to him about everything I talked to him all the time about everything Did
00:15:48
you love it Cuz our our friend Sachs we were talking at dinner last night He seems to love it Like there's nothing
00:15:56
not to love As Donald Trump says this is a thousand Super Bowls right For him and
00:16:02
for me it's only a hundred Super Bowls I mean if if you're dedicated to America and you're willing to wear America's
00:16:11
clothing and to stop worrying about yourself and only care about America Yeah and have no objective post Yeah the
00:16:20
president hates when these people have like they raise money post from people they've met in here So I'm never going
00:16:25
to work again Okay I'm never going to work This is all I care about I'm just going to help America So he asked me to
00:16:30
help him and I start thinking about it I start studying everything and I read everything and I read everything about
00:16:35
the White House and I read everything about everything I can possibly read because I'm I'm just that way And uh and
00:16:43
then I start helping him Yeah Right And I went to learn how he picked the judges
00:16:48
right and the Supreme Court and why it didn't And and uh I'm just very detailed And so I started studying what
00:16:56
transition is right Right And I started studying it and I started studying tariffs cuz he wanted to talk about
00:17:04
tariffs And he's always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a ripoff of America And I started studying
00:17:09
everything about it Yeah And so he and I would talk about it and we knew everything about it And then he picked
00:17:15
me to run Transition Okay So we're going to talk about terrorists in a sec but so
00:17:18
double click into Transition What did you find that was so interesting Like what's I'll give you an example So
00:17:24
there's a book called The Gatekeepers that was written that people gave me "Oh you should read this book." And it's
00:17:30
about chiefs of staff Okay And basically there's another way to call it It's called The Jerks right Because what they
00:17:37
do imagine you're the gatekeeper Yeah You're the gatekeeper of what Yeah of the man who was elected president of the
00:17:44
United States of America that he needs the gates kept from him And if you listen to Nixon tapes you hear him
00:17:50
scheming to try to learn anything because what happens is the chief of staff everybody reports to the chief of
00:17:56
staff and the chief of staff reports to you So you can't get on Air Force One without asking the chief of staff You
00:18:02
can't get a document unless you have the chief of staff No one can come see you unless you have the chief of staff And
00:18:07
if they take your phone away you know what you are You're imprisoned And that's the gatekeepers So I said to
00:18:14
Donald Trump I said "Look you fired Ryance Prieous who was your chief of staff Then you fired John Kelly as the
00:18:19
chief of staff Then you fired Mick Mulaney as chief of staff Then you would have fired Meadows but you didn't get a
00:18:24
chance cuz you cuz the the the the next election So I said "Why don't you fire the job
00:18:32
What you need is a chief of staff who's actually your chief of staff not who's the gatekeeper." Right Right And so that
00:18:39
was an example of how I changed it And so Susie Wilds is perfect for Donald Trump You know why She lets him be him
00:18:51
John Kelly took away his phone right So he couldn't communicate with anybody Whereas Susie embraces who he is helped
00:18:59
him get elected ran a great campaign She's perfect for him in this role And so that's what I brought So I brought
00:19:09
like an an understanding of him right And an understanding of the role right Right And that's why I convinced your
00:19:16
friend David Sax Every time he said "I can't do it." Yeah I would call him and say "It's an emergency It's emergency I
00:19:21
need to see." You'd fly and go "What is it?" I go "You need to join the administration." He goes "That's what
00:19:25
the emergency was." I go "Of course." And was And Howard was that when you conceived originally Doge in that
00:19:33
initial Was that during the transition All right So Doge yeah we should talk about Doge and tariffs Okay so Doge
00:19:38
comes it's it's October of uh before the election Okay Early October October 2024 October 2024 Yeah
00:19:50
Like the beginning Yeah of October 2024 And I called the president and I said "I
00:19:55
need uh I need to spend an hour with you because I have my big ideas." Yeah Right
00:20:00
So he gives me he says "Look I'm not sure what to do October 7th right Why Why don't we figure out what I should be
00:20:07
doing October 7th So we decided we're going to go out to the Oell which is uh uh a super religious uh hedic Jewish um
00:20:17
Messiah You know the the people who wear black hats think he's the Messiah And they have a crypt for him where you
00:20:21
write a note and you put a note in All right And so we agreed we'd go out to that uh to
00:20:29
that grave site and we'd probably win 60,000 of those kind of voters which is pretty cool for a day And then we drove
00:20:38
there and back together the two of us So I had an hour and a half just he and me
00:20:42
talking And I said I want to balance the budget in the United States of America And I this is the way we're going to do
00:20:49
it We no one's ever checked the just under four trillion dollars of entitlements Every politician thinks
00:20:55
what you have to do is you have to take the retirement age from 65 and make it a
00:20:59
70 right And you have to do this and this and this and this because they never think about the money Totally But
00:21:04
people like us totally would say what's the first thing you do What's the value I'm getting for my money Totally right
00:21:11
And what you find is if nobody ever like as in ever like I could say the word ever 12
00:21:19
times has looked at where the money goes Totally And so there's not even a process to get it back when you send it
00:21:26
to the wrong person You just send another one out Yeah Like think about it You just Well I sent it accidentally or
00:21:32
accidentally Notice how it's accidental It's always accidentally sent to the wrong person Really You wouldn't ever
00:21:36
say the 5.9 million people who work for the government there could be some crooks in there right No no no It's all
00:21:42
accidental What a load of nonsense this is There's some percentage of this But you would say
00:21:50
and you would say no just zero base it and let's figure out where it's got to be 25% Yeah we'd all say if it's never
00:21:55
been checked how could it not be 25% How could it not be And the answer is that's
00:21:59
a trillion dollars a year right Okay So I said I think we're going to cut a trillion dollars a year in expense and
00:22:06
then I think we can through tariffs and other means we're going to get revenues have a trillion dollars incremental
00:22:12
revenue incremental revenue and we're going to balance the budget but all but sorry let me just ask one question how
00:22:17
do the tax cut to the extension of the tax cuts there they're there is zero basis that means where I was yesterday
00:22:22
and where I am tomorrow like oh it's a tax cut no it's not it's the exact same thing as yesterday as today to say
00:22:28
continuing yesterday tomorrow is like silly So let me ask you let me ask you on tariffs Having studied it yourself
00:22:35
When there's higher tariffs people purchase less things cost more No we'll talk about tariffs Let's let's just
00:22:42
finish Let's just finish uh Doge So I'm in the car with him right And I said "We're going to balance the budget." And
00:22:48
I said "I have one favor to ask of you If we can balance the budget for you will you agree to wave all income tax I
00:22:58
see for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year for the United States of
00:23:03
America which by the way is about 85% of America Right Right And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is he
00:23:10
looks at me he goes "Sure." You realize the president of United States said "If you balance the
00:23:17
budget sure." And he's not lying He's not kidding He's like "Yeah that seems that seems like a great idea." Right
00:23:24
Right And so and then I tell him "Okay I'm going to go recruit Elon because Elon's allin." Yeah Right He's already
00:23:32
said he's all in He's already said he's going to Pennsylvania Yes Right So I call Elon and I don't know Elon
00:23:39
I don't know But he's perfect for this So I use my superpower which is I call everybody else I know who knows him and
00:23:45
they arrange and I'm texting with him and he agrees to meet me on October 14th So I fly down to Brownsville Texas Uh
00:23:54
he's going to catch the rocket on October 14th Right So that's what he invites me down for the rocket catch
00:23:59
That's right Having nothing he's not inviting me for the rocket catch He's just inviting me down that that's a good
00:24:03
day for me to meet him So I fly down I see the rocket catch which is awesome Yeah Awesome Awesome Awesome Awesome And
00:24:09
then I expect to meet him By the way very pivotal day in the in the campaign If you remember Biden sort of didn't pay
00:24:15
as much attention to it Trump was pretty engaged Elon was supportive of Trump So
00:24:18
when he actually caught the rocket the media was almost like frozen waiting for it to fail and it didn't fail and it
00:24:25
worked and it was just incredible I was waiting for Elon Okay So I flew down to see Elon and uh with with my uh with my
00:24:33
son and uh so we watched the rocket right And then they say "Okay he's gonna go hang out with his engineers and party
00:24:40
with them." Seems reasonable It's like an hour hour and a half And then he just goes dark
00:24:46
You're still waiting I'm just sitting there waiting And then they take me and I go to like a the equivalent of a
00:24:51
Margaritavville you know where you have like a a basket and you can get quesadillas and get and you get a Diet
00:24:57
Coke in a in a in a red sort of plastic thing that's about this tall It's like got 4,000 ounces of Diet Coke in it that
00:25:04
comes with this big But now to his credit he sends me all the executives from SpaceX are hanging with me but he's
00:25:11
dark And what happened is he took a nap He was up all night doing the engineering and he went to sleep So then
00:25:18
when he finally wakes up so I'm just sitting there like you know doing the like I don't know him really So I'm just
00:25:23
doing the thumb twiddle I'm going okay you know this guy's got a couple I'm hoping he sees me right So then he wakes
00:25:30
up He says "Come to my house right I'll see you in my house." So his house is 1,200 feet It's got the
00:25:36
furniture in it that I had when I graduated from college Yeah Right Okay I'm not kidding I'm not kidding It's
00:25:41
1,200 feet and it's got the furniture plastic chairs and Okay So I say um we're going to balance the budget I
00:25:52
need to cut a trillion He's like I'm in He says "I think we should cut 80% of the federal government because the
00:26:01
essential employees if the government shut down essential employees are 450,000." Yeah Okay And there's 5.9
00:26:07
million people who work for the government How can 450,000 be essential and there's 5.9 million So he says "Like
00:26:13
Twitter I think we should cut 80%." Yeah And I say "I know how to cut 50." And he
00:26:19
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
00:26:26
legally do it What do you have?" And my son says it was like two alpha dogs just
00:26:31
like fighting with each other for the first half hour And then and then um so then X comes in right And then he's got
00:26:39
to walk X 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
00:26:45
Because we've been together a half hour 40 minutes and maybe it's over because he got up and he walked out He comes
00:26:50
back and he sits down He goes "Har this meeting is right." That's what he says this meeting and we sit down and we map
00:26:57
out the plan I tell them what a gratus vendor is Yeah Because I designed cuz I was not going to go into the government
00:27:03
I was doing transition What is a gratus vendor A gratus vendor is uh is a an approved vendor for the United States of
00:27:10
America that gives product to the government Doesn't sell it Okay So therefore I don't have to go through the
00:27:17
whole process of becoming a proper vendor because you're giving it to us And then if you give it to article
00:27:25
two which is the president's stuff then the president can accept it right Because it's give Sorry how
00:27:32
what's an example of this Like just to make I write some software You write some software I write some software for
00:27:37
the commerce department to do a better job of XYZ Mhm You just give it to me and then I do QA on it and I can take it
00:27:45
If you sell it to me for $1 we go into government hell right The whole rigomearole right But if you give it to
00:27:51
me right And then I set up you know so I said I'm calling it Doge and I registered the name Doge You
00:27:59
said that of course And were you familiar with Dogecoin and Elon It's Elon So what happens is in
00:28:08
in the Defense Production Act in World War II yes In order to get all the great executives Yes of America to help with
00:28:16
production They named everything after jazz singers or the things that of the people who were on the committee that it
00:28:23
would make them laugh and smile Okay Right So I picked Doge so he would laugh and he said get the f out of here Like
00:28:31
when I said we're going to name it Doge the Department of Government Efficiency which I didn't think of It was on the
00:28:36
internet sort of floating around in June Yes Right But I literally registered it
00:28:41
right as the department of government efficiency like make it a real thing as a gratus vendor and I said this is how
00:28:48
I've done it for me Yes So that I can run Caner Fitzgerald you can run SpaceX right You you're not you don't have to
00:28:55
sign the conflict form and all this stuff because you're not working for the government You're just giving stuff to
00:29:01
the government You are literally giving of yourself right But you're not looking
00:29:05
for anything You're not taking any money You're not owning anything You're not doing anything You're not on that side
00:29:10
of the wall You're on this side you're outside Yeah Right And so we we had fun We talked for two hours And then on my
00:29:20
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
00:29:29
of our $6.5 trillion uh government and balance the budget We must elect Donald J Trump president."
00:29:35
Yeah Right and and I posted that with my I probably at the time had 25,000 viewers and I got 45 million views Wow
00:29:44
Right So it was me and Eli Yeah And that was the beginning of Doge Yeah Right Then I ran transition which is so for
00:29:51
the transition we had I had a room in Maraga Yeah Okay Big conference table in the
00:29:57
middle Four 85in screens on one side and mirror four 85in screens on the other side so that you and I could talk to
00:30:04
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
00:30:10
he wins the election President wins the election He accepts it like Wednesday at
00:30:14
2:00 in the morning right Elon's not on stage If you see I'm on stage Elon's way
00:30:20
in the back of the room There's a thousand people in the room 2,000 people He's way in the back He he goes home
00:30:26
Thursday afternoon I call I'm doing a dry run of the launch of my transition right And the president is superstitious
00:30:34
He's never had one conversation with me about transition He totally trusts me He
00:30:40
wins the election Now he's got a look you know I said on Jess he hasn't talked to you ahead of time about who he about
00:30:47
one job about one thing So until the election because he's superstitious like don't waste your time Don't jinx it
00:30:55
right Just go win You got to go win So what happens is he So I'm I'm doing a dry run So I call
00:31:03
Elon and I said 'Where are you?' He goes 'What do you mean I'm in Austin Texas or
00:31:07
whatever I go what are you doing I mean what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the
00:31:17
guy get elected if you're not going to help him pick the cabinet Like come on Right Because the way President Trump
00:31:25
works he makes decisions by orchestra He likes lots of views and opinions He likes them And anybody who says "Oh the
00:31:35
last person who sees him gets them." That's because they don't know him at all Right Right The answer is it's an
00:31:41
orchestra Right And I would say "Okay I'm the first violin." You know at the time I would say I was you know I would
00:31:47
describe myself as second violin Yeah Right So this is an orchestra So the president's not going to make a decision
00:31:52
with me and him alone Yeah No No He's gonna have So he So it went like this president sitting across from me right
00:31:59
at the conference table Elon to his left Suzie to his right right JD to my left Linda McMahon who was my co-chair right
00:32:09
But she wrote all those EOS that he did That was she was responsible for and I was responsible for personnel but she
00:32:15
was with me for personnel So she's sitting to my right JD sitting to my left Don Jr right Steven Miller any and
00:32:22
and he there was always 12 people in the room They were never like me and him hushed in the corner doing this and that
00:32:27
Never And what we would do is I would put eight candidates on one screen Right Right And then big candidate on each
00:32:35
screen Most beautiful AI picture of you've ever seen Right And people would walk in and go "Where'd you get that
00:32:40
photo?" I'm like "What do you think I did I took three of your photos." I've heard secondhand stories of this room
00:32:45
during the transition that there you walk in and everyone's photo is up on the screen Everybody's on the room And
00:32:49
so that's a candidate for a role And then you guys would debate it And so what happened was a big picture of the
00:32:53
person Yeah they're they're key highlights of the resume not boring their education right And then you would
00:33:00
click a button and you'd see them speaking 20 seconds at a time four of them right So it's about 80 seconds and
00:33:08
you're not speaking about the job Just like how do you present Totally And what you can see is his whole cabinet can
00:33:15
talk Totally All of them Totally because he picked them knowing I need you to be
00:33:20
able to talk to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there and that's key to him and what I would the
00:33:25
way I would joke to people is say how do you do it I go watch pitch so you throw
00:33:29
him a curveball he wouldn't swing you throw him fast ball he wouldn't swing you throw him a slider he hits the ball
00:33:34
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
00:33:40
know what he wants and he loved the process and you know what happened you saw what happened right first A eight
00:33:48
candidates 12 jobs national security Okay He says "What do you want?" I go "Eight to four." I put up eight
00:33:55
candidates I recruited everybody I had 150 of the best Republicans in the United States of America They each gave
00:34:02
me five people who then gave me 10 people I had thousands of people to pick from The whole government was set up to
00:34:09
pick from And then we picked candidates I had eight for every job Yeah Eight Eight Eight Eight 8 to four That's
00:34:16
Friday Sunday comes in 4 to 2 in the morning I fly everybody in for the two I prep them We go in and meet them Two to
00:34:26
one Final interview Give him the job Wow Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Monday T Monday
00:34:33
We're done with national security Okay Now we're rolling on And it just pounds out Why Because he had every candidate
00:34:40
Everybody knew it Everybody was prepped Everybody was aware Everybody was done You know that's why I had to beat the
00:34:45
heck out of David Saxs because I needed David Sachs to be in the government I recruited David I pounded on David You
00:34:52
can ask David right I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said "Okay I'm going to do it." Right And I
00:34:58
did that for everybody Yeah Right And I made sure he had the greatest choices And then every once in a while he would
00:35:04
call me at night and say "Throw this guy in Throw this guy in Throw this guy in."
00:35:07
We did a vet on everybody But I didn't take out anything negative I am not a negative person You can tell I'm
00:35:13
positive So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate until I get picked There was no game
00:35:21
theory A lot of people speculated there was game theory that we'll put a mix of people that will assume some won't make
00:35:26
it out of committee and then we'll end up with the ones that we do want Everyone was the number one choice Only
00:35:31
one Only one Only one And that was Matt Matt Yeah What happened what happened with Matt Howard How did that process He
00:35:39
he was tortured by his attorney general in the first term and we were not going to have that ever again Right So we
00:35:47
needed strong backbone strong capacity of which Matt Gates has it Yeah And I know Matt Gates and he has it Right But
00:35:55
we did not know what that vet was going to say from that report from Congress So
00:36:00
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
00:36:07
Remember the president's been tortured by people blaming him for stuff that never happened Oh 30 years ago he raped
00:36:13
this woman in the in the dressing room of Bloomingdales I mean what a load of crap right It's just not true None of
00:36:20
it's true It's ridiculous So he he comes at this saying I know you're going to get tortured with ridiculous right So
00:36:28
then he says if it's if it's ridiculous then we support Matt and if it's not we have Pam right here right now So that
00:36:36
was lined up so that everybody knows it's right here right now And it's 3D chess So we read it Pam Okay It's like
00:36:44
Pam in a hundth of a second right And Pam is a rockar And you could argue that you would say "Well why didn't you
00:36:51
pick her first?" You know what He's the president He plays 3D chess He did it his way And you know what But there was
00:36:59
no candidate up there Yeah Who wasn't right Yeah Right And we could talk about all the detail and how we thought about
00:37:06
it what it went But it was so thoughtful so intuitive and so right And what does
00:37:12
it produce The greatest cabinet ever The most capable thoughtful best able to communicate I mean it's so fun to be in
00:37:21
a room with these people because these are worldclass people the best ever in government We shouldn't betray
00:37:26
confidence but I mean we were in a room earlier this week with several of them and everyone had a moment to speak
00:37:33
It was unbelievable I mean look every single one of them you're like could have been a leader of the country Like
00:37:40
they're all great That's the point He picked He picked greatness Now I was the recruiter So I was a recruiter and chief
00:37:46
but I can understand why now by the way Well but think about it If you take someone like me Yeah and you say "Just
00:37:52
be a head hunter." Yeah I swear to you I can be the greatest head hunter ever to
00:37:56
live Because think about it What's the odds of saying "Okay Howard your whole job is just be a head hunter Find the
00:38:02
best guys I promise you I'll be really good Okay Can we go back to Doge So you talked about the Gatus vendors Maybe
00:38:08
there's other stuff that you can do with executive action the president can do with Doge etc Can we talk about
00:38:15
congressional budgets How how do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along And is the plan
00:38:22
to bring Congress along I've asked this of Bessant I've asked this several times
00:38:25
since we've been here And it's the thing that gives me the most heartache and the
00:38:28
most headache is I worry about whether this actually gets there given congressional interests I think
00:38:37
Congress works with something called scoring Yeah Right That that if it comes from their pen it counts If it doesn't
00:38:46
come from their pen it doesn't count But the fact is money always counts It just
00:38:53
doesn't count for their scoring But their scoring is only part of the game right The outcome of the game is what
00:39:01
matters to me Elon our cabinet and Donald Trump Okay The outcome of the game And I'm telling you the outcome of
00:39:10
the game by me and Elon Now a funny part of it is so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden He doesn't want to leave
00:39:18
Pennsylvania right Because he you know Elon he's committed to Pennsylvania Yeah So I convince him he's got to come and
00:39:24
we have a plan I'm going to say to him so I everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God I'm the only one who
00:39:31
introduces Elon So Elon comes on stage with me There's the two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden The only time
00:39:37
the 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
00:39:43
Trump is last Okay So he's supposed to say when I I say to him "How much are you going to cut?" The deal was he's
00:39:53
going to cut $1 trillion And then he's supposed to say "And how much are you going to earn?" And I'm supposed to say
00:39:59
"1 $1 trillion." And then we're supposed to say "Together we're going to balance
00:40:02
budget United States of America." That's that's the little sort of thing So I ask
00:40:06
Elon "How much you going to cut?" And he because he said he said two trillion Well because we're in front of
00:40:13
22,000 people and the place is erupting He says two trillion and then I'm sitting there
00:40:18
going and I'm like I think I said allighty then or something like that you know like what was I supposed to say you
00:40:26
know so later when he walks back to a trillion no you were you were caught off guard but I mean it's quite how much you
00:40:31
going to earn No cuz he said two trillion I got it all don't worry like like I said all righty then and that was
00:40:37
that So then I walked off stage and you know he said two trillion so like what am I going to say But the answer was
00:40:43
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
00:40:52
an abuse of a trillion dollars Okay Okay And that my job is to raise $1 trillion
00:40:59
of exogenous new revenues new revenue for the government And we Right I'm telling you I've been here now two
00:41:04
months Yeah Right I am more confident it's going to happen and more excited Tell us how it happened Well hold on a
00:41:11
second So Howard let's let's finish this and then we'll move to tariffs and revenue generation So there's a lot of
00:41:16
domestic terrorism Is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house Is it is it basically to put
00:41:24
fear into people that are trying to find this waste and fraud Is that is that what that is The burning of the
00:41:31
dealerships The If you're I I describe it to people this way Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks
00:41:40
this month My mother-in-law who's 94 she wouldn't call and complain Mhm She just wouldn't She'd think something
00:41:48
got messed up and she'll get it next month Yeah Mhm A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming
00:41:58
yelling and complaining And if all the guys who did PayPal like Elon knows this by heart right Anybody who's been in the
00:42:06
payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen
00:42:12
Yeah Cuz whoever screams is the one stealing Yeah Cuz my mother-in-law is not calling I mean come on Your mother
00:42:18
80 year olds 90 year olds they trust the government They trust Okay maybe it got
00:42:21
screwed up Big deal They're not going to call and scream at someone But someone who's stealing always does So what
00:42:28
happens is we need to get to so the people who are getting that free money stealing the money inappropriately
00:42:36
getting the money have an inside person who's routing the money They are going to yell and scream But real America
00:42:45
is going to be rewarded because here's the key benefit of the doubt Not one penny should stop going to we're the
00:42:52
richest country on earth Yeah Here's the way I say it I said "We have we have a $6.5 trillion budget We have $4.5
00:42:59
trillion of revenues." Yeah Okay We lose $2 trillion a year We have a $29 trillion GDP
00:43:06
right Which people don't understand and which I'll explain a little bit And we have 36 trillion in debt Yeah What
00:43:12
number didn't I say to a business person What's our balance sheet worth Right Right I say 500 trillion Right The
00:43:19
president says a quadrillion But at 500 trillion or quadrillion 36 trillion we're rich We
00:43:27
don't have to take one penny from someone who deserves social security Not one penny for someone who deserves
00:43:32
Medicaid Medicare What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who's not hurt who's on disability for 50 years
00:43:40
It's ridiculous And they have another job And do we have to monetize our assets We We need to be smart That's all we
00:43:48
need to be And I'm going to tell you things that are just smart They're not oh my god there's the most brilliant
00:43:55
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
00:44:02
right Think about this The post office has 625,000 people who work there and they go to your house every day You know
00:44:07
what the census does The census hires 625,000 people trains them teaches them has interviews 2 million people trains
00:44:14
and teaches them hires cars How about this You're genius That's pretty smart Howard Right Okay Like obvious right But
00:44:21
here's what it is I'll tell you what I'm going to I'm really good at pattern recognition Okay Here's one like tell me
00:44:27
625 of one and I can point out 625 of another This is the genius I bring to the government Seriously this is this is
00:44:33
core fun By the way you're responsible for all the core data collection as well aren't you Isn't commerce responsible
00:44:38
for generating a lot of the GDP for economic Oh that's I get to talk about GDP and how I'm going to how I'm going
00:44:43
to clean up the nonsense is in GDP You know I can explain that if you make a tank and someone buys a tank that is GDP
00:44:50
Yeah But a thousand people thinking about buying a tank right who take your tax money and I give it to them and they
00:44:56
go I wonder should we buy a tank or not That's not GDP right You're saying government spending should not be
00:45:00
counted in GDP No government spending to buy a tank right should be right Government spending that's nonproductive
00:45:07
Non-productive This is so important I don't think I don't think a lot of people realize this How how much of GDP
00:45:13
is nonproductive government spending How about we do one thing Yeah G DP D means domestic P is prod domestic
00:45:24
production It's not consumption Right If I go out and buy a Toyota right Right That's not GDP
00:45:34
Right If I buy a Chevy that's made in America that's a D Right So people think it's like a consumption model right
00:45:42
That's not it And you could check another one is is there's gross domestic income right That's also good So by the
00:45:48
way they're about they grow about the same rate It's it's kind of fun So the key for me is to take out the part that
00:45:55
if I cut nonproductive a million government employees who are nonproductive meaning
00:46:02
they don't make tanks Right Right If I take that out it's going to look like our GDP declined But you'd say "But what
00:46:08
really happened?" No Our expenses went down This is so important by the way because people talk about a recession
00:46:15
and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about we're going
00:46:19
to go into a recession if we cut all this spending But the followon effect of cutting nonproductive spending is that
00:46:26
the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy where we make more things we
00:46:32
create more jobs we create higher wages And that's the theory that you guys are trying to execute against I don't think
00:46:38
a lot of people in the general public fully understand that is so important to kind of explain and get across here Okay
00:46:45
If we put three people behind us and they sat behind us and they did nothing and each of us gave them
00:46:52
$125,000 just like this Here you go And they just sat there right What is that right That's not GDP That's actually me
00:47:02
taking my money and giving it to them We produced nothing We've no purpose of the
00:47:07
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
00:47:13
income It's really a transfer pricing model that is currently considered in GDP and it's nonsense So if I stopped
00:47:22
paying them okay right What would I do The first thing you'd say is well then why am I paying so much tax Bang Okay So
00:47:30
now we're in the concept of where Howard do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is I'm sure you if you
00:47:36
take out non-productive spending Yeah But I I'm not going to talk about it until we release it because that's the
00:47:41
proper way to do stuff Got it Right But and I'm going to break that out I think it's 25% and I'm going to break it out
00:47:47
and I'm going to break it out for the last 20 years and what you're going to see 15% every time the quarter just
00:47:55
before an election All the government spending happens right then and there And all of a sudden you have this jump
00:48:01
in GDP right Total lie right Total lie They basically they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter
00:48:09
so that we have that and you'll see it It goes Whoop And then they can what do you think the first quarter is Whammo or
00:48:16
the second quarter is whammo Why Because you pre-spent it Right Right Right And then you have this whole and it's it's
00:48:23
gross Yeah Okay That's the only way to us You're like really But it's so manipulated Let me ask and the answer is
00:48:31
I mean and to your point the the the game that's being played is we're going to take taxpayer dollars that people
00:48:37
don't understand once you give it to the government We're going to create these waves of fake growth that try to tip
00:48:45
elections so that then the grift and the waste and all the fraud can then continue for as many years until the jig
00:48:52
gets replayed over and over again And it seems like the buck is stopping with you
00:48:55
guys because you've exposed it It's going to and that's the idea The idea is to take a trillion of waste fraud and abuse
00:49:04
out Yeah and then make a trillion from having other people um resetting global trade and once you understand global
00:49:14
trade and how it makes sense and where it came from Yeah Can you explain that to us Sorry Before before we get there I
00:49:19
want to ask one last question on on on the cuts Can we speak in um do we need to speak in a more empathetic way
00:49:28
because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone's pocket some percentage of that pays people a
00:49:34
salary and they live on that income And I think a lot of the Okay I think this is important for you to highlight
00:49:40
because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and Doge and the budget cuts saying
00:49:45
you're destroying jobs You're taking money away from people that need their jobs Why are you why rich people are
00:49:50
taking away I'm going to give you a sad example And so like help us understand are people going to lose their jobs I'm
00:49:55
going to give you a sad example We all remember during the co there was the PPP money Yeah Remember that Yeah Totally So
00:50:02
it was proven that 200 billion of the 1.2 trillion was going to Chinese fraud gangs What Why that proven You
00:50:14
just make up a company right You know Joe's Delhi Yeah You make it up Joe's Deli right Say you're in trouble File
00:50:23
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
00:50:31
government those people that money and instead of stopping they said yeah but we can't stop because there are real
00:50:38
people who need the money And so what happens is because there's no no one's ever been
00:50:44
fired ever for sending money to the wrong place People send it on purpose I'm not
00:50:51
saying everybody sends it on purpose I'm saying there are some people who send it
00:50:54
on purpose some people who are complete morons and and an enormous number of people who work for the government who
00:51:00
are awesome I mean amazing people right But what percentage Okay if there's 5.9 million
00:51:08
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
00:51:15
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
00:51:23
to retrain society for the AI industrial revolution is coming which is going to create the greatest set of jobs and
00:51:30
greatest set of growth ever Ever Okay But that but then and we can talk about that But the key is stop sending money
00:51:38
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
00:51:49
can stand it to not pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits I find it disgusting when we're the richest
00:51:58
country in the world and some politician says to in order to save Social Security
00:52:02
rather than getting rid of the waste fraud and abuse we should move it to 70 Yeah How about How about No How about
00:52:09
we're rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain Yeah Mhm of being a great American but let's put great
00:52:17
people in charge That's really well said I think that that's really well said Okay let's put a pin in let's put a pin
00:52:22
in this because so let's Howard explain to us global trade as you understand it and then the context of tariffs and
00:52:32
maybe historically and what role they played now So I I remind people that on the earth there was the dark ages So the
00:52:41
dark ages meant that the world knew how to read and then because of religious and other actions they burned all the
00:52:49
books Yeah Right And literally the earth stopped learning how to read for 500 years or 400 years We didn't know how to
00:52:56
read And we knew how to read before So how could you forget So America was built on tariffs with no income tax No
00:53:07
income tax till 1913 None Greatest richest country in the world So when Donald Trump says make
00:53:16
America great again what he's talking about is from 1880 to 1913 when the country had so
00:53:25
much money that we had blue ribbon commissions which you guys would have been on Yeah Right To try to figure out
00:53:30
how to spend the money Right Right And no income tax Then we put in the income tax in 1913 Why Because we're entering
00:53:37
World War I Yeah And don't we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life Right Then
00:53:44
what happens is the world goes into chaos We come out of chaos right And then we're starting to
00:53:51
think of what do we do What do we do And then 1929 the stock market crashes right
00:53:57
1933 we start to say oh oh god we forgot we need to do tariffs 1933 how can you do tariffs when the
00:54:07
markets crash The world's in going into depression and you're going to do tariffs in 1933 You can't charge the
00:54:12
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
00:54:20
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
00:54:28
tariffs down and we'll let them here's the key we'll let them have tariffs be up and we
00:54:35
will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild and we'll let them rebuild and that's what
00:54:44
happens So 1945 we have the Marshall Plan right And we do it in Japan of course because they need to be rebuilt
00:54:50
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
00:54:56
So we let them rebuild which means low tariffs here high tariffs there Low tariffs here high tariffs there Then we
00:55:02
have the Vietnam war right So now all of a sudden we have all of Southeast Asia low tariffs here high tariffs there You
00:55:10
know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear Kuwait We spend what almost hundred
00:55:18
billion dollars freeing Kuwait Mhm Right You know who has the highest tariffs against the United States of America The
00:55:25
number one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America
00:55:31
Kuwait And you think what That's it But here's what it is If you go back to this
00:55:38
understanding the way America thinks you need to be rebuilt You were just destroyed right all their oils were
00:55:45
You remember red The guy's name was Red something and he was the guy who capped all the there were fires in all the the
00:55:52
the oil wells and he capped them all and it was amazing So we let them put up high
00:55:59
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
00:56:06
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
00:56:12
essentially says "Okay great There's rebuilding to be done sort of almost out of the large s of America We're going to
00:56:19
enable that to happen So we'll lower tariffs here and we'll support the high tariff regimes over there We let it
00:56:25
happen We let it happen on purpose But it's an incredible thing you're also saying though which is that it's
00:56:29
inexurably linked to this repetitive machinery of war because those create these boundary conditions over and over
00:56:37
again Always where there's so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this
00:56:43
Correct That's exactly That's exactly right So what happens is and then you say to yourself okay I get the 40s I get
00:56:50
the 50s I get the 70s right But 80s 90s 2000 2010 What time out 20 So Donald Trump gets elected
00:57:03
2016 Who understands this Okay let me give you a hint Donald J Trump Who else Nobody Nobody Yeah Right You'd say "Wow
00:57:15
he understand." And how long's he been talking about it 40 years Why Because in the 80s he's saying "What are you
00:57:22
doing?" Well let me give you the economist's counter which and then you can respond to it which is tariffs on
00:57:29
imports in the United States will ultimately pass to the consumer higher prices inflationary So the things that
00:57:37
our consumers that our citizens are buying gets more expensive and as a result they buy less and it's
00:57:42
recessionary It shrinks the economy it shrinks spending it shrinks uh consumption Can you kind of respond to
00:57:48
the you know that's the the typical economist refrain on this independent and maybe they're isolating the
00:57:55
imbalance Okay India has a 50% tariff on average 50 We have on average four Okay I would say to the person who said
00:58:16
that can I ask you a question What are you talking about They're 50 and four Here's what you're talking about when
00:58:24
we're all equal and everything is free and fair If you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs isn't it bad for society
00:58:32
The answer is of course it is But there's two differences Number one let's do human beings first before
00:58:45
we go to the math Let's go to human beings Once upon a time we had an auto industry in Detroit
00:58:54
Okay And in Ohio but Detroit then some genius named Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement or
00:59:06
corporations You can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada Now if you
00:59:14
were a General Motors I'd say it's like my birthday Yeah But if you're a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio
00:59:27
they just signed you know what they signed Worst statistic I'm going to tell you today
00:59:33
Average life expectancy of high school educated workforce So by the way United States of America 23 is high school
00:59:41
educated one-third is college educated The difference today of average life expectancy between those two categories
00:59:49
is seven years Sevenyear average life expectancy It's not the air It's not the food It's not the medicine It's
00:59:59
despair My grandfather worked in the auto factory My father worked in the autoactory I have a good life I'm going
01:00:06
to do Friday night lights and football I mean it's gonna it's going to be a good
01:00:09
life I have a good middle class life I'm a member of the United Auto Workers Life
01:00:13
is going to be good The factory moves to Mexico and I am just screwed because the
01:00:20
government of the United States of America had a didn't care about industrial policy and didn't protect me
01:00:25
at all and let cheap labor in Mexico I'm sure the Mexican people got went from $4
01:00:30
an hour to $5 an hour and they're kicking it But I destroyed you And that is incredible failure of industrial policy
01:00:43
which nobody wants to talk about But you talk about it at average life expectancy
01:00:47
And you're talking about it about reassuring and building the life for the people who are America That's why you
01:00:56
elect Donald Trump president you elect him because I didn't spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help
01:01:05
him But when he asked me to help him I started spending time with him When did I learn this And who taught me
01:01:13
this The president of the United States This is not me teaching him You understand This is him teaching me And
01:01:21
you can see him talking about it in the 80s Right Right He's been talking about this for and what it does is it means
01:01:28
reshore So number one we have to care about human beings That's a globalist view Yes If I take my production and
01:01:37
move it to Mexico it's better for me Mr Corporation Okay But it's not better for
01:01:43
me Mr US citizen of the United States of America who's working at a car plant That's bad news for him Okay And that's
01:01:51
number one And now let's go to number two which is the math of it all If we say free and fair trade I want to remind
01:02:02
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
01:02:16
dumbest because everybody else is higher and more protective Yeah So they protect
01:02:21
their farmers Here I I'm sitting at the dinner Modi comes to town and I say to him when Donald Trump we have dinner and
01:02:29
after the nicities Donald says "Go ahead Go ahead Howard." And I said "You have 1.4 billion people and you brag to us
01:02:36
how amazing your economy is Why won't you buy a bushel of our corn We'll buy a bushel of our corn so
01:02:44
our farmers can't go to him but his of course can come at us right Why is that okay?" You know and we can go into all
01:02:52
the stuff that oh I mean I don't even want to go into it because if I had another hour I could retell you stories
01:02:57
that are fun with that but just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs Talk to the average person who
01:03:04
says the cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50% Inflation comes from printing more money
01:03:14
Okay Let's say the United States of America had $1 trillion That's all we had That's it No more Okay And I want to
01:03:23
buy a bottle of water and you want to buy a bottle of water One came from America and the other one came from
01:03:29
Fiji right Then and I tariff Fiji then that water is a dollar and a quarter and this water's a dollar Yeah that's not
01:03:37
inflation That means that one's more expensive but I can choose to buy this one Right Okay So you're right This toy
01:03:44
might be more expensive and that toy is not I get it But that's not inflation Here's inflation Snap my fingers Now we
01:03:50
have 2 trillion right That water is a $150 That water is a dollar and a quarter Yeah Everything's more expensive
01:03:57
That's inflation Okay So inflation without tariffs is everything's a buck and a quarter Now what inflation with
01:04:03
tariffs is a buck and a quarter right And a buck 50 And so you have to understand
01:04:09
inflation doesn't come from tariffs Certain products If I put a tariff on a mango right We we can't grow mangoes in
01:04:19
America The we just can't grow a mango If you put a tariff on a mango the mango would be more expensive Yes Okay But if
01:04:29
the president chose to put a tariff on a mango then the mango is more expensive That's just becomes a consumption tax
01:04:37
It's like a sales tax Yes Right It's a sales tax It's a consumption tax If I want to buy a mango it costs more money
01:04:42
And you can offset that with a reduction in but that's so then that's just like another version of income tax How do you
01:04:48
how do you Okay So the idea is to not do that Yeah That's the idea The idea is to
01:04:54
is to choose things that are going to reshore Yeah Exactly Come here This is so important Hire my people Yeah Bring
01:05:02
it home Yeah And by the way I want to just speak as an entrepreneur I see the economic incentive when I see the price
01:05:09
for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff I'm like
01:05:14
why don't we make that here We should be doing that And there's going to be a lot
01:05:17
of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things And it this is just how the
01:05:23
markets work Someone will say two trillion so far I mean he's been in office right like seven weeks eight
01:05:30
weeks Yeah.$2 $2 trillion dollar of committed domestic production coming back because of his tariffs TMC saying
01:05:41
I'll build uh you know semiconductor wafers Yeah Um you know everything we do they're going to build it here That word
01:05:48
is never coming Yeah Yeah Unless the tariff So what happens is you bring it here you create the jobs here and then
01:05:55
they avoid the tariff And by the way those jobs are better paying and they're more productive than the government
01:06:01
funded What do you what do you want to do about like the the narrow set of products that are more high value than
01:06:07
the mango that maybe can't be made here or at least can't be made here in the next 5 to 10 years So TSMC can make
01:06:14
chips I think that's great ASML who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines as an example can't
01:06:22
necessarily do that for another five or six years here So there's these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market
01:06:29
or perturb a market where there is no multi- vendor solution right But that's still critical How do you think about
01:06:36
that set of stuff You know the the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is it's it's it's giant
01:06:43
three-dimensional chess Yeah Okay So we all have Stockholm syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service
01:06:52
We think we like the Internal Revenue Service and we don't say it but when we say we're going to charge a tariff and
01:07:01
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
01:07:11
Cuz remember the thing about our economy is while we have a $29 trillion GDP we are the
01:07:19
consumer of 20 trillion Yeah Right And this is the key thing We buy everybody's stuff So who's more important The let's
01:07:29
say they have an economy that produces stuff and we have an economy that buys stuff Yeah The customer is always right
01:07:37
We all know the customer is always right because if no one buys it they can't produce it right So everybody needs our
01:07:45
economy when now I mean to the fact that China consumes less than 10 trillion and
01:07:52
primarily tries to figure out how to sell it to itself Yeah Right So they don't buy anybody else's stuff Right So
01:07:58
we are the world's consumer We're the world's customer Right Right So that's point number one So we want them to come
01:08:08
here and if they can't come here what if you pass Okay Now let's say there was a 20%
01:08:16
tariff and in order to sell his goods he knows he can raise the price 10% but he
01:08:21
can't really sell it raise it 20 So he eats 10 and the price goes up 10 Let's just say that 20 goes into the coffers
01:08:30
of the United States of America from the president of the United States who said
01:08:33
we're going to balance the budget and then his goal is to drive down income tax United States of America including
01:08:39
waving tax So what has he said so far with that in his pocket knowing that this is what we're going to try to do
01:08:47
What does he announce No tax on tips no tax on overtime no tax on social security Why is he saying those things
01:08:54
Right 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
01:09:01
tools to deliver on his promise more money for folks to spend and they'll have more money to spend right
01:09:08
so if you if you actually get the external revenue service right which of course I named you know I named it but
01:09:16
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
01:09:25
I wrote this is my huge idea you know with one of those things that goes like this Yeah You know on the like my huge
01:09:31
idea right And because it's the external revenue service but it only matters because I work for him
01:09:41
Mhm 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
01:09:48
the minute you say it and it becomes his idea My idea is useless A good idea in his hands Okay So
01:09:56
speaking of all the value in the world So the external revenue service if it if we went back to make America great again
01:10:03
Yeah Which is pre-1913 which is let them pay you don't pay And what that means is
01:10:09
let them pay try to wave balance the budget Try to wave tax on everybody who makes less than 150,000 Yeah Right And
01:10:16
look what you did for America Holy moly Look what you by the way labor costs come smashing down because
01:10:24
it's taxree Yeah So if their earnings are taxfree right Then they're happy to work because they get the money right So
01:10:32
what happens is cost of labor comes down because we're run correctly as a government This is what I'm trying to do
01:10:39
Speaking of potentially great ideas can you tell us about the Trump card Sure So
01:10:44
whose idea was that And how did that come about John Pollson had a call with Donald Trump and
01:10:52
was talking to Donald Trump and was kicking around the idea of we should sell right Why do we give away visas We
01:10:59
should sell them And they're talking about it Uh Donald Trump calls me gets me on the phone right We all talk about
01:11:06
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
01:11:14
the path Let's go figure it out Of course about two weeks from today it goes out Okay Elon's building me the
01:11:23
software right now Yeah Right And then out it goes And by the way uh yesterday I sold a thousand Oh you did I got a
01:11:31
poly market I created on how many are you guys going to sell this year So yeah Curious to see how many That's fantastic
01:11:36
Do you want to tell people just the rough terms Okay Yeah So if you're a US citizen you pay global tax Yeah Okay So
01:11:46
you're not going to bring in outsiders going to come in to pay global tax So if you have a green card which used to be a
01:11:53
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
01:12:01
none of them are going to choose to be What they're going to do is they're going to have the right to be in America
01:12:07
They'd be pay $5 million and they have the right to be an American They have the right to be an American as long as
01:12:14
they're good As long as they're good people and they're vetted and they're vetted and they can't break the law We
01:12:19
could always take it away if they're like evil or mean or bad or something Not mean but you know if they do
01:12:24
something horrible you could take it away right But but the idea is if if I was not American and I lived in any
01:12:32
other country I would buy six One for me one for my wife and my four kids because
01:12:37
God forbid something happens I I want to be able to go to America and I want to have the right to go to the airport to
01:12:43
go to America and them to say hello Mr Lutnik Hello Mr Lennox and the Latin family Welcome home Right That's what I
01:12:50
want to hear I don't want to hear I can't come here when there's a you know a a horrible war a horrible whatever
01:12:56
right I want to be able to go home right And once I'm home I might as well build a business
01:13:05
Yeah So you have the most productive people in the world going to start spending time here They're going to have
01:13:11
a family office They're going to hire some people and you're not going to tax their external worldwide income I only
01:13:17
tax the money they make in America which is what we do now But their global income stays out and they pay 5 million
01:13:23
And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world How many There are 37 million people in the
01:13:28
world who are capable of buying the card in case you were wondering 37 million That's a lot more than Chad GPT told me
01:13:34
Who are capable of buying Who are capable of buying it Now I'm not saying they will but they're capable of buying
01:13:40
How many do you think he'll sell Uh the president thinks we can sell a million So five trillion trillion dollars I
01:13:48
think a million is reasonable I mean look as as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his
01:13:54
citizenship and now pay global tax every which way known to man if this were available 15 years ago after the
01:14:01
Facebook IPO that's what I would have done It would have been much better for me theoretically Now I'm happy I'm happy
01:14:05
to pay the tax So the idea So the idea is um and it's going to go fast Meaning you apply right We take your money and
01:14:15
you know the way computers work now they have these cool things like these computer things They're amazing You like
01:14:20
you know you put stuff in and they actually check everything It's It's fantastic I don't You don't even have to
01:14:24
plug them in anymore It's amazing Like they get them they get the information through the air I mean you could do a
01:14:31
better vet Yeah Than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second right Better than they've
01:14:38
ever done it before So I'll I mean I'll tell you a quick story Monday night Elon
01:14:42
was telling us about this Nean Sachs And one of the things he was saying is he's
01:14:46
been helping you build this site these builders But one of the most difficult parts of it is it turns out like all of
01:14:51
the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks it's like a lot of cobalt mainframes and the amount of technology
01:14:58
that has to get rewritten And so this is a question big opportunity It's incredible that the most advanced nation
01:15:04
in the world deployed systems in 1970 which at the time probably felt very cutting edge
01:15:11
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
01:15:18
a reason okay and the reason is it's a great reason which is that uh in the mid70s we changed the way government
01:15:27
accounts for software we we took a 10-year contract and you have to take the contract up front So if I if I'm
01:15:35
signing a contract with you for 10 years a million a year I have to take it against my budget for 10 million So I'm
01:15:40
not doing it See I'm only here for four years So what happens is when was the last time we bought software 1975
01:15:49
Where Everywhere Yeah Why Cuz it's illogical Now what I'm doing is I'm saying okay I
01:15:56
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
01:16:05
me you're going to build for me for America You're going to build the greatest customs processing ever We're
01:16:13
going to take a photograph It's going to know what it is It's going to go through
01:16:16
AI It's going to know what it is It's going to know what the tariff is It's going to determine the percentage It's
01:16:20
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
01:16:23
to open it It'll weigh exactly the right amount And you'll do this and that And these are all things that I know and all
01:16:28
things I could figure out Cuz you know the way gold works like gold bar is about 40 pounds You know the way I know
01:16:34
that gold bar is they weigh it and they weigh out 13 digits of decimals So basically if you touch the thing it's
01:16:40
not going to be 13 digits of decimals So you have a perfect scale and you weigh it and that's like the code Yeah Right
01:16:46
Because you can't touch if you touch it you'll change the and you can't get it right out 13 digits It's just not
01:16:52
possible So that's we do with stuff You know what it weighs right Three t-shirts
01:16:58
on a if you send in the same three t-shirts they always weigh the same But what's incredible is you're convincing
01:17:04
these companies to basically like do right for America and build this software for you You think that's going
01:17:08
to be a movement throughout the government or is that here's the idea I say "Build it for me for free." Yeah I
01:17:14
put it in for free I don't know what other countries in the world you think going to buy now Right
01:17:20
If it works for us well remember you have to you have to connect to me Yeah So every country is going to buy right
01:17:27
And it's a great business model Right Right If the greatest customer in the world says they'll take it Yeah life's
01:17:34
good right So what should the greatest customer in the world get I don't know a good deal Yeah Right And you got a guy
01:17:39
like me there You know everybody else is like Howard you have to change how government operates if you're going to
01:17:44
scale that You can't go negotiate every contract out there for every department I mean it's not that hard when you say
01:17:49
it free You know free is like not that hard I mean you Yes it is And then what I do is I get the head of that
01:17:57
technology company Yeah Because I then I use my superpower which is my friendship
01:18:01
with Donald Trump and then I go in the Oval Office and we call him together right And we call the CEO together and
01:18:05
make him promise the president Promising Howard is like really nice right Promising DJT that's something else
01:18:13
entirely So I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they'll build it right
01:18:18
now Let's see him reag Yeah it ain't going to happen So you know when you get Elon to say "I'm going to build it for
01:18:23
you." And he says it in front of the president like how great is that You got like the greatest technologist the
01:18:29
richest guy in the world He says "I'll build it for you." You're like "Thank God." Right And then I get you know I go
01:18:36
to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon They're all for America building for us right
01:18:47
For free right To make America better because they are great American companies And in exchange for that we're
01:18:53
going to help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness Just towards fairness because I you can't get
01:19:00
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
01:19:08
as positive as I possibly can be Talk to us about some of the hot button markets
01:19:12
that you're going to have to navigate You know you are in charge of export controls which is a very important thing
01:19:18
in AI We don't allow export licenses for the most advanced NVIDIA chips We don't
01:19:25
want training necessarily to be done outside of the United States We're okay with inference happening outside the
01:19:30
United States in certain conditions Maybe just talk about that for a second How like how do you how are you going to
01:19:35
navigate AI How do you think about that from your seat All right So I I'll give you an example that's sort of live right
01:19:41
now Yeah Right So we have DeepSeek we have Quinn we have DOBA Yeah Right And and I don't think we should be having
01:19:52
apps in America And I don't think we should have their website in America because they all go back home Okay But
01:19:58
it's open source And I want our American companies including college students to
01:20:04
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
01:20:10
home to Dada Right Or or store now and analyze later Right Right So I need that out So what I want to do is I'm going to
01:20:19
embrace what you guys know You guys are used to product evaluations Yeah So let's do security val Exactly Right and
01:20:27
say your industry and you can't let it get overwhelm overrun by Chinese because what happens is if there's a policy
01:20:35
right all of a sudden a 100,000 people from China come in and they say they're John John Smith and and and Todd
01:20:41
Peterson right But they're not and then you think the vote is this way Yeah And it's easily manipulated So we have to be
01:20:48
very careful But my first instinct is to lean on and that and that's why I see it's important to have
01:20:56
David Saxs as my partner right Someone who knows it and and someone who can live and breathe the industry right And
01:21:04
so what we're going to have is we're going to have security evaluation and say if the security
01:21:08
evaluation model says that this is a good model then people can download it Yeah but
01:21:16
it's smell like what we're good at I don't want to create like oh this is what I don't want to do I want us to do
01:21:25
it but I've got to figure out the right way to do that right And that's important Articulate the standards
01:21:31
articulate sort of the concept and then let a lot of these private market actors
01:21:35
kind of help fill in the gaps and compete The only thing I I think I really need to do and that's with
01:21:43
regulatory is postquantum cryptography Yeah Okay I I think that is vital to us That's right Yeah Right That that you
01:21:51
know as I would bet this happens during this administration He bets post I I know I'm gonna put it out because you
01:21:59
know we all have passwords right For those who are watching who don't know this Our passwords called asymmetric
01:22:04
right Yours is different than mine right That's the key and cryptography is just the
01:22:10
computing So asymmetric key cryptography you have your password I have mine and they're the key That's right Right
01:22:16
Obviously the central hub has our key Duh Okay A a quantum computer we know can break all of them in a nancond Like
01:22:25
all of them in the whole world including the CIA all of them RSA 2048 all of them
01:22:30
can get broken in a nancond by a quantum computer Yeah So the defense of it is called postquantum cryptography right We
01:22:38
know how to do it and we'll come out with a rule that says America's got to protect itself New standards And by the
01:22:44
way there are because every once in a while you need to have a new standard that says it's coming We know what it is
01:22:49
Please God go put it in because we need to have it in We need America to deliver
01:22:54
Great segue Let's let's sort of segue now to a couple things that we can enjoin together in this concept Crypto
01:23:01
obviously Bitcoin You guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve but broadly speaking you also announced sort of this
01:23:08
idea of the sovereign wealth fund Can we talk about that sort of what is the what
01:23:11
is the vision behind that How do you want that to be executed How do you think it should be run What assets are
01:23:16
on the table What assets and strategies may should never be on the table How are
01:23:21
you thinking about it The greatest customer in the world the United States government the
01:23:27
most powerful the greatest customer buys stuff We walk in we're gonna buy here's
01:23:33
the example I like to use we're gonna buy two billion COVID vaccines When we buy it FISA and Madna stocks are
01:23:43
going to triple They're going to triple because then we say everyone's got to have this
01:23:49
vaccine If I were after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could if Howard Lutnik walked in the room Howard
01:23:56
Lutenic would say "What do you think 20% warrants Right 20% warrants right Right
01:24:03
What So we'd make $50 billion off of who Nobody We didn't take from anybody We didn't do Okay The shareholders of Fizer
01:24:11
who we've just tripled them with our order Right now how many of my customers in my life have required that from me
01:24:20
All of them All of them Like this isn't like oh Howard this is the greatest new idea ever This is just business proper
01:24:27
So I don't view risk of the sovereign wealth fund I view the first couple of years of the
01:24:35
sovereign wealth fund or Scott Bessant and I making money Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday Say well
01:24:43
but you can't invest and lose Don't you lose money No Why Well if I have big daddy of the United States of America
01:24:51
behind me right And I'll give you I'll give you an example We buy missiles episodically Launch a missile buy a
01:25:02
missile Launch a missile buy some missiles Right The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings or
01:25:10
good quarterly earnings but they're episodic Yeah Here we go I will sign a contract with
01:25:17
you 10-year contract cancel it at the end of five years to buy X amount of missiles and I'll pay you quarterly
01:25:26
Then they can take that contract they can go finance it their financing costs go their earnings are steady and their
01:25:33
multiple improves and their stock doubles up Yeah And I say in exchange for that reasonable thought how about a
01:25:42
little warrants right Give me stock Just for people that don't understand give me
01:25:45
some stock Give me a little bit of your stock But but don't give me some stock Just give me the upside If I if I help
01:25:50
your stock go up just a little bit I I get to share it And you know what I do Wipe my beak a little bit And then I
01:25:54
take the money Yeah For the United States of America and I put it into the social security system in the United
01:26:00
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
01:26:06
the hole Yeah Okay If we cut the waste for abuse out it becomes uh 1.5 trillion And by the way Frank Biznano the
01:26:14
greatest executive the greatest payments executive ever to join the US government
01:26:20
is about to get confirmed and take over the social security system Okay Frank ran Fiserve $120
01:26:27
billion public payments company And when Donald Trump asked him in his interview
01:26:32
can you handle social security It's 1.3 trillion a year He goes well see I I handle 500 billion a day So uh
01:26:39
Wednesday right And he goes my whole life I my whole life all I worry about is getting rid of waste fraud abuse
01:26:44
That's all I care about every single day $5 $2 $1 He goes "This is going to be the most fun I've ever had." Yeah I mean
01:26:51
this Yeah Like this is a Donald Trump administration This is something that's another planet Now of course I recruit
01:26:56
Frank and you know I get to have my piece in the game But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion then it's only a
01:27:03
trillion four in the hole We make a trillion four Yeah That baby's that baby is finished forever Is the sovereign
01:27:11
wealth fund a balance sheet for social security Does social security become more than what it is today Does it over
01:27:18
time offer bigger greater benefits And is it basically a pool that holds equities Historically and we talked
01:27:25
about this on our show it's only ever held treasuries but it's really kind of a fake treasury It's got 2.7 trillion
01:27:31
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
01:27:37
gone out of social security we'd have a $15 trillion interest in the S&P today But you'd have that that would have had
01:27:43
you have Donald Trump be the president the whole time which was not a thing right Okay But is that is that the
01:27:47
objective is that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country and it becomes
01:27:52
like a sovereign wealth fund that we have a $36 trillion budget deficit I mean debt debt Yeah To the United States
01:27:59
of America and we we have a budget deficit of two trillion So Donald Trump wants to knock down the two trillion
01:28:04
Yeah And then he's focused on the 36 trillion of which the social security is part of it Yeah So how he allocates it
01:28:11
He was elected president of the United States I was not Yeah Okay I like the social security idea because it's really
01:28:16
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
01:28:24
put it in social security or I put it on the debt of the United States of America
01:28:28
And I'm going to let Donald Trump make that decision You know why Because it's all he's like and none of it's not mine
01:28:33
So he will decide that Okay And he will play it his way But but Scott Bessant and I will make more than a trillion
01:28:41
dollars for the United States of America during our term which is pretty darn cool right And we'll use that and if
01:28:48
that reduces our debt right But that's not the policy of how we're going to balance the budget
01:28:54
We're going to balance the budget Trump card tariffs getting rid of scams I'll give you a scam example Every boat
01:29:04
you've ever seen like every single cruise ship super tanker container ship you've
01:29:13
never seen an American flag ever In fact you ever think about the flag you've actually seen All of you would say "I
01:29:21
have no idea what that flag is." Like why is it some flag I never heard of Liberia is number one And you go what No
01:29:29
one even knows where Liberia is Because the answer is it's a flag of convenience
01:29:33
They sell the flag for like 10 grand Like they literally here you can have a flag and you pay no tax So what happens
01:29:39
is a cruise ship in the United States of America picks up American passengers goes in the Caribbean comes back to
01:29:45
America and treats the port as an expense and all the profits are made in the Caribbean where it pays no tax
01:29:52
That's what I call a tax scam Yeah I mean it's unfair to America We're going to fix that in America We're going to
01:30:00
try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams Ireland is my favorite The country of Ireland last year had a $60 billion
01:30:10
budget surplus So we lose$2 trillion and they make 60 He'd say Ireland what do they do Oh they have all of our IP for
01:30:22
our great tech all the tech companies All our great tech companies and great pharma companies And pharma Yeah They
01:30:26
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
01:30:33
end tariffs trump card getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax that's my trillion Elon's got to do his trillion
01:30:46
So whenever I see him getting off the rails he and I go out and we have a strong conversation together that you've
01:30:52
got to do your trillion So you got to focus not on small potatoes right Big big big big big I need you to do your
01:31:01
side of the trillion Now as it turns out I'm going to do more than a trillion cuz
01:31:05
I'm 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
01:31:13
our objective is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change America And then imagine America This is
01:31:20
just an imagination moment okay We have a balanced budget in the United States We're starting to knock down the the
01:31:28
deficit of America We can cut tax and we have a gold card a Trump card that you can come to America Which
01:31:39
entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn't buy one Yeah and wouldn't start building businesses when they think the
01:31:46
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
01:31:50
down to 15% You won't be able to find a plot of land in America You know what I predict will happen I predict the just
01:31:56
like in the medallion industry for taxi cabs there'll be a financing industry that'll build up around these uh these
01:32:01
gold cards or these trump cards that great entrepreneurs great executives will be able to finance their purchase
01:32:07
along with someone getting venture capital interest or equity interest in their business But I'm going to we're
01:32:12
going to take that money We're gonna we so we'll sell them every year Yeah Right
01:32:16
So they'll knock down our budget deficit and then eventually Right If if Donald Trump is right and ultimately we can
01:32:24
sell 7 million cards Mhm You realize there is no debt in America No debt in America is a trillion dollars a year in
01:32:30
debt coverage Right Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage You know what that changes That changes the Internal
01:32:36
Revenue Service You you start to rethink and I just want to remind you right We are the richest country on earth Our
01:32:45
balance sheet is 500 trillion I give you an example What's the court system of America worth Right Right What's it
01:32:51
worth Well how can Nvidia be worth three trillion without a court system that protects it Right There's no such thing
01:32:57
So just our everything about us the infrastructure is awesome And you know what happens We we we actually like we
01:33:05
get beaten upon and we actually believe it Yeah You could ask Doug Bergam about how undervalued a lot of our real estate
01:33:10
is in this country and the potential for it We think about Biden closed 635 million acres This is this is electing
01:33:19
Joe Biden head of Saudi Arabia and he closes the oil wells Yeah And all of a sudden Saudi Arabia falls off the face
01:33:27
of the earth broke Like what are we doing Like we care about Americans Yeah Let's make Americans lives great Howard
01:33:37
we want clean water We want clean air Okay We do it better than everybody else But if we don't Here's the one like the
01:33:44
hypocrisy right We won't mine lithium in America to make a battery Yeah But so we
01:33:50
so the Australians mine it with coal and it's messy because they do it like you know they do it messy By the way we
01:33:56
breathe the air in 3.4 days but who's counting right Then we take it we put it on a truck We take put the truck and put
01:34:02
it in a super tanker We drive this super tanker that pollutes the living heck out
01:34:05
of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean puts it in a truck and gives it to Elon to make an electric car Why don't
01:34:15
we mine the lithium in Nevada right And by the way we'd mine it cleaner right And by the way it's not
01:34:24
just lithium Almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the
01:34:29
continental United States We just have had no incentive or no structure regulatory wise that enables the
01:34:36
development of it which is this is we need to care for us make America you know America first How about there's
01:34:45
another way to say well maintaining clean environmental first Well maintaining environmental standards Yeah
01:34:50
Don't look we're never going to do something that's not like a hundred times cleaner than everybody else cuz we
01:34:58
care about clean water and clean air There's none of us who don't care about clean water and clean air but you know
01:35:04
like someone gives you a pill and says "This will save you." And then you look at the statistic and it saves one in a
01:35:12
million people and you'd say "Uh why am I taking this pill?" You say "Well it'll
01:35:16
it could save your life." You'd say "Yeah but it's like one in a million." Right That's not logical Right That's
01:35:23
the point You know there's a regulation That's the right thing Yeah And there's a regulation that's that's the one ina
01:35:32
million pill Like why do we give a baby a baby a hepatitis B vaccine Do you realize we have a brand new
01:35:40
baby and we hold it up and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine You realize the only
01:35:44
way you get hepatitis B was is from unprotected uh sex or a needle Like why are we
01:35:52
giving them to a baby Like why And you know what it is You know what the answer is corruption that someone in the
01:36:00
government got paid to put that in the rules and because there's no justification There's no I haven't met a
01:36:08
medical doctor who says hepatitis B vaccines on brand new babies make sense because by the way you know what the
01:36:14
worst part is They only last 10 years You need a booster in 10 years So the baby's going to be 10 We've got to
01:36:21
really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans And I think we can be And I
01:36:28
think that's why I'm so excited That's why our cabinet is so excited That's why it's so much fun to work for Donald
01:36:34
Trump Because I am just speaking from his playbook right Because if you had met me
01:36:42
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
01:36:49
"Uh government You mean I pay them taxes?" Like that's it Are you having the time of your life the most fun ever
01:36:56
because I have every idea either gets blown up or shot down Okay Meaning I come up with lots of
01:37:05
ideas and he says "Nah too complex." And you know what That's fine Yeah But when
01:37:11
I come up with the external revenue service and he says "Great idea." And then he speaks of it in his inaugural
01:37:16
address right It's his idea Yeah Because I can't do anything with it Howard last
01:37:22
question as we wrap Tell us about your family your kids how do they think about all of this Your son's running caner now
01:37:28
How's that going Just give us the lay of the land How how's the Lutnik family All
01:37:33
right So I have I have the best wife I've been married 30 years Uh she lets me be me and she's gorgeous spectacular
01:37:41
I love my girl Um she agreed I mean imagine this I'm not I'm not joining the government I'm not joining the
01:37:48
government I'm doing this Doge thing with Elon I'm not joining I'm not joining Honey we got to move Like honey
01:37:54
we got to move two weeks after election day I'm like we're moving And uh we're going to in five weeks we're going to
01:37:59
live in Washington okay And like so the fact that that wasn't unsettling would be the understatement of a lifetime But
01:38:06
she's been the most supportive and fantastic I have four kids Uh my oldest son about to turn 29 I was taking him to
01:38:13
kindergarten so that's why I'm alive My second son Brandon I dropped him off in nursing school and then took my oldest
01:38:19
son to kindergarten Um so the two oldest boys are running caner now until I Deb asked Is it going
01:38:26
well I don't know Oh you of course you're not supposed to know you It's kind of fun I
01:38:33
would love to talk to them about it You have no idea but I'm not allowed Like I I literally am not allowed And you know
01:38:39
we all know the phones Yeah So since the phone's always with me and I assume the
01:38:44
phone is listening You know ever since we couldn't take our battery out of our phone you know the phone is listening So
01:38:49
you know I'm not No So I never talked to my son So uh I'm sure they're happy but
01:38:54
I don't know how it's going Guys if you're listening he's doing great as you can tell but and then my my daughter is
01:39:00
going to 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
01:39:07
uh start Duke in the fall right So I have the best kids uh my kids have lived with me and they
01:39:15
lived with this kind of energy and this positive sort of momentum and and my wife being just a spectacular mom just
01:39:22
keeping them what we taught our kids which is a fun one is uh I taught him two things uh I would
01:39:30
sit down with my kids and say how great is your life and this is only maybe something that people like we can say
01:39:36
but I'm talking to my kids I say how great is your life they go great cuz they came home and they Hey I got a bad
01:39:42
grade Teacher doesn't like me It's a classic line right Yeah And I said well how good's your life
01:39:50
Really good I go could it be be any better No Well do you realize your teacher has given up her whole life Yeah
01:39:59
And she makes how much money Yeah And she's given her whole life to teach you Yeah So can I ask you a question Is it
01:40:06
her job to like you or is it your job for her to like you who's failing in what you just
01:40:14
said right It's your job to have her like you So when she says raise your hand raise your hand Right And the other
01:40:22
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
01:40:28
test is orange When you get to college you can argue with the professor all you want High school color inside the lines
01:40:35
Give the teacher what she wants Make sure she loves you and you're getting a good grade That's the rules of life Yeah
01:40:43
And my wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls in their moral character Yeah Of
01:40:51
someone who's fighting for you needs to have your love and respect back If you take them for granted if you treat them
01:41:00
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
01:41:07
fiber into my children and it it resides in them And the other thing my kids have
01:41:13
is they have empathy which is a very unusual thing for young people And it's because they're they were raised with
01:41:22
their father crying every day I cried every day until October 21st 2004 Wow every day because I thought of someone I
01:41:37
hadn't thought of you know or someone would say 658 people died and I I just there was you can't process all of that
01:41:44
death Yeah Without crying And and the only reason I remember is cuz as I fell asleep I told my wife that I didn't cry
01:41:50
today and she wrote it down That's the only reason I remember So um my kids are are fantastic They've been
01:41:58
incredibly supportive and uh and my wife's the best and she lives with me in Washington We bought Brett Bear's house
01:42:06
so I have a nice house big enough for my ego to expand Very important Tomorrow hasn't found one that big yet to look at
01:42:13
Howard you're an incredible American Thank you very much for everything This was really
01:42:19
fun in coming to talk Honestly this is this has been one of my I mean my favorite conversation we've had
01:42:25
Absolutely I mean like he's like this all the time I mean not just like we have dinner at like
01:42:31
Nicasha's house who's a good friend of ours runs Paul Altera Networks and Howard's like you just push the button
01:42:35
and you can just sit and just listen You can listen to him for hours By the way I
01:42:38
will say I'll echo the point you made earlier I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller I
01:42:44
mean you're like on another level but like the storytelling I think is what's so powerful about this cabinet and this
01:42:49
administration And I think it's going to take some time to get the message out But man is are there incredible
01:42:55
ambassadors to do so with they are so capable Yeah Each of them is so capable so thoughtful I mean I I am honored to
01:43:05
be on this cabinet with them But we all get to work for Donald Trump who can intuitively tell you "Go fix eggs." Yeah
01:43:14
Yeah And then Brooke goes fix eggs and eggs are down like 40% And Brooke fixes eggs I mean how awesome is that Right
01:43:22
And gas is down 40 cents right And he's only just begun if we get if we get the Constitution pipeline in New York passed
01:43:30
And I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hokll on the unbelievable oil in fracking that they
01:43:39
have in New York and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it but
01:43:44
they refused to unleash it So he's going to force the Constitution pipeline which
01:43:48
by the way will drop gas on the east coast of the United States of America in half M I mean this is and that's you
01:43:56
know then you got that's Chris Wright that's Doug Bergam you got Brook Rollins I mean you could just go you know Scott
01:44:02
Bessant you know so thoughtful and elegant I mean he's he just step by step by step and you have really the most fun
01:44:10
cabinet working for the most intuitive smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute desk and we're going to make
01:44:16
America great again not as a slogan but we're going to balance the budget we're going change America Thank you Howard
01:44:24
Thanks [Music] Howard I'm going all in