The Dow and S&P 500 hit their worst day since March 2020 and wiped out $3.1 Trillion in market value. Is this a recession coming? Or is this just another day in the history of the stock market?
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00:00:39.000So, as I suggest, tons of economics news breaking.
00:00:42.000Yesterday, of course, was a horrifying day in the stock market.
00:00:45.000And people who are attempting to play this game where they say, well, you know, the stock market taking a massive dump.
00:00:57.000This notion that Main Street is totally disconnected from Wall Street, that it's just a few people at the top of the food chain who are playing with the money, that is not actually true in any way, shape, or form.
00:01:06.000And, obviously, the stock market, as a sort of gauge of investor confidence, makes a large-scale difference in availability of liquidity for startups and being able to raise money to, for example, hire new people.
00:01:18.000If the stock market tanks by half, that's a pretty good indicator, for example, that bad things are happening.
00:01:23.000And if the stock market continues to gain steadily, That's an indicator that maybe some good things are happening.
00:01:53.000There are a lot of conflicting messages coming out Of the White House.
00:01:56.000So yesterday, the U.S. market suffered its steepest decline since 2020 on fears that President Trump's new tariff plans would trigger a global trade war and drag the United States economy into a recession.
00:02:05.000According to the Wall Street Journal, major stock indices dropped as much as 6% on Thursday.
00:02:10.000Stocks lost roughly $3.1 trillion in market value.
00:02:13.000That is their largest one-day decline since March 2020.
00:02:18.000And this is not being inflicted by an external shock like, for example, COVID.
00:02:22.000This is being inflicted By a deliberate choice by the Trump administration.
00:02:26.000In a little while, I'm going to try and steel man the Trump administration's position.
00:02:29.000What's sort of the best case scenario for the thing that they are shooting for with these tariffs?
00:02:34.000The market this morning again opened down very steeply.
00:02:38.000Investors obviously are not sanguine about the situation.
00:02:40.000There was a good jobs report that came out for March.
00:02:43.000The employment report came out at 228,000 jobs added in March, which was more than forecast.
00:02:48.000Of course, that is a backward-looking report, so it didn't have a massive impact on the markets today.
00:02:53.000Because people are saying, well, yeah, I mean, the economy was doing fine and then Donald Trump decided to take a giant stick and stick it right in the bicycle spokes.
00:03:00.000That is what the market is saying right now.
00:03:03.000Now, again, that data came as a bit of a surprise because economists were expecting it to be a little bit slower.
00:03:09.000This came amid a federal jobs decline.
00:03:11.000So normally this would be like a point of giant celebration for the Trump administration.
00:03:17.000But the problem, of course, is that policy just radically changed.
00:03:20.000So looking at the jobs report based on a time when there were not these sorts of tariffs, that is not comparable to what is going to happen next.
00:03:29.000The Wall Street Journal quotes a man named Rob Citron, a 60-year-old hedge fund manager, watching from his Orlando, Florida home as President Trump announced his plans.
00:03:40.000Across Wall Street, money managers, brokers, bankers were reeling from what many described as an unprecedented shock, fearing it marked an end to the market's post-COVID rally.
00:03:47.000They might have lived through a bigger market swing, but this one, induced by a U.S. president bent on establishing a new paradigm for global trade at the expense of both rivals and allies, felt incomparable because it was the result of deliberate policy.
00:03:58.000And this is the part, again, that is freaking out markets.
00:04:00.000Markets can price in external shocks pretty quickly, but if the question is, you don't know what's going to happen next from the White House, people pull out their money in fear at what's going to happen next.
00:04:10.000So, one strategy is hold on for your life.
00:04:13.000And let's be clear, I'm not giving investment strategy because I'm not legally Capable of doing so.
00:04:18.000However, a long-term investment strategy says leave your money where it is over the long haul.
00:04:25.000Don't sell during a dip is a pretty good piece of advice.
00:04:29.000How long and prolonged that dip is, is another question.
00:04:32.000But if you have the ability to hold for long periods of time, then obviously that is a better investment strategy than selling as the prices decline.
00:04:40.000As far as the idea that this was going to They have a salutary impact on job creation in the United States.
00:04:47.000The early indicators are at best mixed.
00:04:49.000Stellantis, for example, has now temporarily laid off 900 workers in the United States.
00:04:55.000This, of course, led to criticism from the UAW.
00:04:58.000The UAW is very happy about the tariffs until precisely the moment the economic effects of the tariffs are felt.
00:05:04.000Now, remember, this sort of economic policy, high tariffs, It's painful to see what a
00:05:35.000ruinous decision From back in the 1920s, being repeated.
00:05:45.000Now, insofar as he's using these tariffs to get very strategic things settled, and that he is satisfied with that.
00:05:56.000But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history.
00:06:07.000Okay, and of course, Sowell would know better than anyone else, and he happens to be correct.
00:06:11.000There's also the problem that while the Trump administration can maintain that America is not just about the cheap and plentiful products, it turns out that Americans actually do like affordable and plentiful products.
00:06:23.000Jimmy Carter tried this routine as well during his Malay speech.
00:06:26.000Well, Americans need to spiritually buck up, even if things are worse for them economically.
00:06:30.000It turns out this is not a popular selling point.
00:06:32.000Here is Harry Enten on CNN explaining.
00:06:34.000It's the American people who are the naysayers.
00:06:37.000Oppose new tariffs on other countries.
00:07:27.000And if that marginal growth goes away and that corporate debt get called in, you got a problem on your hands.
00:07:32.000And again, this is being created by the Trump administration.
00:07:36.000As I mentioned yesterday, I mean, I know business people who import products.
00:07:39.000These are domestic American businesses with American employees, and they have to import their inputs to their products.
00:07:45.000And they're getting smashed by these tariffs.
00:07:47.000So President Trump, one of the big problems here also is level of uncertainty.
00:07:50.000There's a huge level of uncertainty as to what exactly President Trump is trying to accomplish.
00:07:55.000The uncertainty is its own form of risk because If the markets don't know what President Trump is doing, if they don't have a perspective on how long this is going to last, what the end goal looks like, people start pulling their money.
00:08:05.000People say, listen, I know I'm not supposed to sell into a dip, but I'd rather sell into a dip and have at least some dry powder in the back room than ride this thing out.
00:08:15.000So President Trump, the White House, they have put out a set of talking points to their allies that was obtained by Politico.
00:08:23.000And again, the problem with some of the talking points is that they're mutually exclusive.
00:08:27.000President Trump is revolutionizing the global trade order to put the American economy, the American worker, and our national security first.
00:08:33.000Okay, so, again, I don't know what revolutionizing the trade order looks like.
00:08:37.000What is the end goal of the trade order?
00:08:39.000If the end goal is everybody goes to zero on their tariffs and non-tariff barriers, sounds great.
00:08:45.000But totally unclear if that's the case at this point because, again, there are countries that have extraordinarily low tariffs with the United States who just got smashed by these tariff rates.
00:08:55.000The White House continues, foreign trade and economic practice have created a national emergency and President Trump's order imposes responsive tariffs to strengthen the international economic position of the United States and protect American workers.
00:09:07.000Now again, it is not true that foreign trade has created a quote-unquote national emergency by any technical terminology with regard to a national emergency.
00:09:14.000You can say you don't like the trade balance, you can say that you don't like that certain industries have been offshore and you want to reshore them for national security reasons or whatever.
00:09:41.000The idea that these are reciprocal tariffs or responsive tariffs, the problem there again is if I thought these were responsive tariffs, and I think if the market thought that, it'd be a lot more sanguine.
00:09:49.000Because the question is what comes next.
00:09:51.000Is President Trump going to try to cut bilateral deals with various countries to lower the tariffs back down to zero?
00:09:56.000Or is he doing this because he just doesn't like trade deficits?
00:09:59.000This is the problem I was pointing out yesterday.
00:10:00.000That giant poster board that he was holding up that showed quote-unquote tariff rates for various countries on our goods.
00:10:10.000Those were trade deficits divided by imports.
00:10:13.000Meaning the only way to get those numbers down to zero Would be for those other countries to just buy more American products regardless of whether they are poor or whether they even have tariffs on American products in the first place.
00:10:25.000It is the equivalent of you saying that you are running a deficit with your grocery store.
00:10:30.000You're running a trade deficit with your grocery store because you gave them money and they gave you goods.
00:10:34.000And the only way that you're going to achieve parity is by getting the grocery store to buy fan belts from your factory.
00:10:40.000Well, Listen, all of this creates uncertainty.
00:10:44.000And in these uncertain economic times, with tariff tensions, recession worries, stubborn inflation, it's no surprise gold prices keep breaking records.
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00:11:20.000The economic challenges we're facing took a long time to develop.
00:11:24.000The real questions are how long will recovery take, what's going to cost along the way, how much uncertainty will there be?
00:11:29.000Again, Gold has always been a hedge against uncertainty.
00:11:32.000There's a lot of uncertainty right now.
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00:11:39.000The people I trust with my own gold investments.
00:12:46.000For decades, the trade status quo has allowed countries to use unfair trade practices to get ahead at the expense of hardworking Americans.
00:12:52.000And again, you want to label things that you want to get rid of?
00:12:54.000I'm talking about using tariffs as leverage.
00:12:57.000Good. Tariffs without leverage, simply as a way of quote unquote rejiggering the global order, I don't know what you're going for, and neither do the markets, and that's why they're freaking out.
00:13:06.000The distorted trading system has caused the offshoring of our manufacturing base.
00:13:09.000The reality is, our manufacturing productivity has gone up significantly since the beginning of NAFTA in 1997.
00:13:16.000It has risen from about $1.7 trillion to $2.4 trillion, something in that neighborhood.
00:13:24.000The manufacturing base in the United States, in terms of jobs, has actually been harmed, not predominantly by offshoring, but by automation.
00:13:31.000If you're talking about jobs in factories, why those are going away, the answer is robots.
00:14:12.000See, what's going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor that we've seen all across the world.
00:14:18.000I mean, think of what our factories did.
00:14:20.000They went to the cheapest labor in the whole world, slave labor, cheap labor, the worst environmental conditions, polluting the heck out of it, and then we bring back those cheap products here and we feel good about ourselves because we don't see the pain.
00:14:34.000But the pain is in our Okay, let's just be clear about this.
00:14:58.000The robotics are one of the chief reasons for the decline in employment in the manufacturing sector.
00:15:04.000So if the idea is we bring the factories back here and then robots replace the foreign workers, you might incrementally gain jobs.
00:15:10.000You're not going to massively gain jobs because most of the work is going to be done by the robots.
00:15:14.000Again, there are a bunch of different sort of priorities that are in argument with each other.
00:15:18.000Because if you don't do that, then the prices on all of those goods and services rise dramatically.
00:15:21.000If you just do it with American union labor, it's going to be way more expensive for American consumers.
00:15:26.000Okay, other elements of the White House press release, the undermining of critical supply chains.
00:15:36.000If we are talking about reshoring critical supply chains, okay, fine.
00:15:41.000But then you get elimination of export market access.
00:15:45.000The people are eliminating our ability to export to them.
00:15:50.000Okay, well, they are likely to raise their tariffs on us right now, and we are starting to see that already, as we'll get to in a moment.
00:15:58.000They say that this has sold out the American middle class.
00:16:01.000I showed you yesterday, the American middle class has not in fact been sold out.
00:16:03.000Most of the American middle class turned into the upper middle class.
00:16:06.000The decline of small towns across America, the truth again, is that there are certain towns across America that have declined and there are other towns across America that have risen.
00:16:15.000This is a constant throughout American history.
00:16:19.000Population movement is as old as de Tocqueville.
00:16:21.000De Tocqueville talked routinely about the idea that people would go to a place, build a town, the town would then go defunct, people would move to the next town.
00:16:47.000Well, I mean, if we're just going to look at the U.S. trade deficit by year, what you will see is that the United States trade deficit was actually Quite high during the Trump administration as well.
00:16:59.000So it wasn't as though it got solved under the Trump administration.
00:17:02.000And trade deficits are not, again, a good substitute for an explanation of why that's bad for the United States.
00:17:10.000Because let's say that we are buying more from another country than they are buying from us.
00:17:17.000They take those dollars, those dollars are used as the world's reserve currency, and those dollars are very often traded for the American bonds that finance our debt.
00:17:39.000President Trump is correcting long-standing trade imbalances caused by non-reciprocal trade relations by imposing tariffs to level the playing field.
00:17:45.000Again, if we're talking reciprocal, fine.
00:17:48.000But it's not clear what reciprocality means at this point other than other countries need to buy more of our goods even if they don't have tariffs on us.
00:17:56.000So it's kind of a mishmash of various rationales.
00:18:00.000Now, to steel man what's going on here, there is the sort of Scott Besant theory of the case, the Treasury Secretary, who again knows economics really well.
00:18:10.000Besant is an excellent Treasury Secretary.
00:18:11.000The case that he has been making is a more sophisticated case and it's laid out well by a policy analyst named Tanvi Ratna.
00:18:19.000Tanvi Ratna is quoted by the investor extraordinaire Bill Ackman.
00:19:27.000You sweep in with tariffs, you spook the markets, you trigger a risk-off.
00:19:30.000Money exits stocks, floods into long-term treasuries, a deliberate detox to cool the economy and cut refinancing costs.
00:19:36.000And then you have to cut the deficit, and this is where Elon Musk and Doge are coming in.
00:19:41.000With these savings, says Tanvi Ratna, The big economic pillar to successfully deliver on Secretary Bestin's 3-3-3 plan is to get growth up.
00:19:49.000Tariffs come in as a trigger for domestic industrial revival.
00:19:51.000The thing is, by making imports expensive, you create room for U.S. producers to step in.
00:20:25.000And, not only that, tariffs could serve as leverage to renegotiate terms in terms of military deals with other countries, bilateral deals.
00:20:33.000This is sort of, again, the strong case for the tariffs is that this is the beginning Of a much more sophisticated strategy designed to essentially lower yields on bonds that we don't have to pay back as much in interest on our national debt and set the stage for reciprocal trade deals that are going to lower tariffs on both sides.
00:20:50.000If that's the plan, somebody ought to spell it out.
00:20:53.000Again, one of the big problems here is that they're not spelling out exactly what they want to do, what President Trump's plan is.
00:22:12.000We put ourselves in the driver's seat.
00:22:15.000If we would have asked some of these countries, almost most of these countries to do us a favor, they would have said, No, now they'll do anything for us.
00:22:23.000But we have tariffs, they've been set, and it's going to make our country very rich.
00:22:29.000But are you open to deals with these countries if they're calling you?
00:23:04.000This is a national emergency associated with chronic and massive trade deficits that are brought about by higher tariffs and higher non-tariff barriers that take our jobs, that take our factories, that lead to massive trade deficits that result in massive transfers of wealth into foreign hands that jeopardize our manufacturing base and defense industrial base.
00:23:30.000So it's not a negotiation, but maybe it is a negotiation.
00:23:35.000Because if they think that it's not a negotiation, they're immediately going to reshift their trade relationships toward, wait for it, China.
00:23:43.000And the mixed signals are part of the problem.
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00:26:23.000Well, the administration, again, is, I think, trying to, they're, let's put it this way, they're drawing on heavy political capital here.
00:26:33.000Well, markets are not in the business of trust us.
00:26:35.000Markets are in the business of trying to take in the best available information and then spit out what people think is going to happen next.
00:26:42.000President Trump, He says that he is confident the markets are going to boom.
00:26:48.000If it's not soon, that's going to be a problem.
00:26:52.000We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country and we've never seen anything like it.
00:27:00.000The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom and the rest of the world wants to see is there any way they can make a deal They've taken advantage of us for many, many years.
00:27:12.000For many years, we've been at the wrong side of the ball.
00:27:16.000And I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable.
00:28:15.000What I'd ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not going to fix things overnight.
00:28:21.000Joe Biden left us, this is not an exaggeration, Lawrence, with the largest peacetime debt and deficit in the history of the United States of America, with sky-high interest rates.
00:30:02.000Okay, but you say, well, you know, Rand Paul is always taking this sort of contraposition whenever it comes to government action.
00:30:09.000He's sort of out there on his own, except he's not.
00:30:11.000So, for example, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas has been a pretty solid Trump ally.
00:30:17.000Here he was saying this is a risky thing that is happening here.
00:30:21.000The consequences are yet to be fully known, but I would have thought they would have been less dramatic, less significant, and more targeted.
00:30:34.000And I think we ought to be focused on Senator Ted Cruz, who has been a really solid Trump ally ever since he lost the primaries in 2016 to President Trump.
00:31:00.000He's been on the Trump bandwagon since then, basically.
00:31:02.000Here's Ted Cruz saying, well, actually, this is a tax on consumers.
00:31:09.000If the result is our trading partners jack up their tariffs and we have high tariffs everywhere, I think that is a bad outcome for America.
00:31:18.000Tariffs are a tax on consumers and I'm not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers, so my hope is these tariffs are short-lived and they serve as leverage to lower tariffs across the globe.
00:31:32.000Okay, so again, I think that's everybody's hope in the Senate.
00:31:35.000What's actually gonna happen in Congress?
00:32:12.000But if Speaker Johnson were to step in and try to stop the tariff policy, there would undoubtedly be a Trumpist insurrection inside the Republican caucus to overthrow him and you'd get another Speaker fight.
00:32:24.000So basically, Trump better be right is what I got to say here.
00:32:29.000Like either they better move off of this pretty quickly with bilateral trade deals or he better be right.
00:32:34.000The problem here The real problem here is that other countries have a say, and many of those other countries not only don't like President Trump, they are not particularly fond of the United States these days.
00:32:45.000China, of course, was going to retaliate.
00:32:47.000China has now put forward a 34% tariff on American products, a direct response to President Trump's 34% tariff on China.
00:32:55.000Listen, I have no problem with tariffing China.
00:32:57.000I think that a trade war with China, so long as we are broadening and opening our trade relationships with everybody else, Isolating China, economically speaking, is actually not a terrible thing.
00:33:08.000But the reason that China is doing that is because China is now stepping into the breach with our allies.
00:33:15.000This is why we should not be treating Canada the way we treat China.
00:33:18.000We should not be treating the EU the way we treat China.
00:33:20.000Some of these places are allies of the United States and some of these places are enemies of the United States.
00:33:26.000But, in a lot of these countries that are led by people who don't like President Trump very much, they are perfectly willing To make time with the Chinese.
00:33:37.000It is of great annoyance to me that Pierre Polyev, who's a terrific candidate for the Conservative Party, is now lagging in the polls thanks to this trade war that President Trump declared on Canada.
00:33:46.000And Mark Carney, who is the definition of a global elite.
00:33:50.000He's the definition of a globalist elite.
00:33:52.000This guy, who was put in place by Justin Trudeau's party, He's out there excited as all hell about the trade war.
00:33:58.000Why? Because now he gets to reorient Canada away from the United States and toward China.
00:34:02.000So here is Mark Carney, who could not be more celebratory about this.
00:34:06.000The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over.
00:34:20.000And although their policy will hurt American families, until that pain becomes impossible to ignore, I do not believe they will change direction.
00:34:32.000So, is Canada going to change direction?
00:34:35.000Or does Mark Carney actually like the tariff war because the tariff war is keeping him in competition with Pierre Poliev?
00:34:48.000Because again, The sort of internationalization of the populist movement means that people like Keir Starmer are going to oppose that no matter what, even if it means economic damage to his own country.
00:34:56.000Here's Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK. Decisions we take in coming days and weeks will be guided only by our national interest, in the interests of our economy, in the interests of businesses around this table, in the interests of putting money in the pockets of working people.
00:35:20.000Meanwhile, by the way, Emmanuel Macron in France, he is urging everybody not to cut bilateral deals with the Trump administration.
00:35:31.000Because the Trump administration has taken the side of Marine Le Pen, who's his chief opposition.
00:35:35.000And so he is hoping that actually the trade war will escalate.
00:35:39.000Other countries have a say in how the trade war goes.
00:35:42.000And so there is this idea that no one will stand up to the United States and our economic power.
00:35:48.000And that's a gamble, because there are a lot of places that don't like the United States very much.
00:35:52.000Ursula von der Leyen, who's the leader of the EU, she was saying that the global economy is going to suffer.
00:35:58.000The global economy will massively suffer.
00:36:02.000Uncertainty will spiral and trigger the rise of further protectionism.
00:36:07.000The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the globe.
00:36:13.000Also for the most vulnerable countries.
00:36:16.000Which are now subject to some of the highest US tariffs.
00:36:22.000So let's say that this doesn't result in other countries lowering their tariffs immediately, it results in other countries increasing their tariffs.
00:36:30.000You're likely to actually get price inflation.
00:36:32.000The interest rates that President Trump would like to drop, those interest rates presumably actually stick or go higher, which undermines the thing that he's trying to do with the national debt, presumably.
00:36:47.000What's happening right now is a major gamble at best.
00:36:50.000The best way to characterize it is a major gamble by the Trump administration.
00:36:53.000Now maybe the gamble pays off, but what that's going to rely upon is President Trump making deals now.
00:37:00.000Because if it just continues to be confusion, or if this administration just has a vested interest in the idea that tariffs themselves enrich countries, and it's totally unclear what the case here is, or whether there is a good feedback loop that would allow President Trump to adjust, Again, I think President Trump lives in reality.
00:37:17.000I think if the headlines are bad, he adjusts.
00:37:27.000So again, to sort of explain the steel man theory of what President Trump is doing right here, I asked my friend, Perplexity AI, sponsor of the show, how much would the cost of America's debt service drop over the next year if the yields on the 10-year treasuries dropped from 4.75%, which is what they were in January or so?
00:37:47.000And Perplexity says, based on the provided calculations, if the yields on 10-year treasuries dropped from 4.75% to 3.5%, the cost of America's debt service would drop So theoretically, it could be a little bit more.
00:38:11.000You could also get revenues that are taken in by the tariffs, which effectively, as I mentioned, is in fact a tax increase.
00:38:17.000So you could talk about the reduction of the American debt servicing, if you used all that money to pay off the debt, for example, of several hundred billion dollars.
00:38:26.000Now, the reality is that over the long term, that isn't going to solve the problem.
00:38:30.000Only serious restructuring of entitlements is going to solve the problem, particularly means-based entitlement programs.
00:38:37.000However, if the idea is to bend the cost curve down, and then meanwhile, You're ramping up, for example, AI and productivity in order to make up for the vast expenditures.
00:38:46.000And so it's a short-term pain in order to kind of hold steady.
00:38:51.000That's the best case that you can make for these.
00:38:53.000Maybe that's what President Trump is doing.
00:38:55.000And what that's going to require is not only that the bond yields remain fairly low, but also it's going to require a pathway to getting off of the current tariff curve that we are on, because that carries its own inflationary risk.
00:39:08.000Well, while Republicans are struggling over tariffs and what exactly is going to happen, Democrats have some serious struggles of their own.
00:39:14.000Ezra Klein of the New York Times has a brand new book titled Abundance, all about how Democrats really need to abandon what he calls their everything bagel strategy regarding regulation.
00:39:23.000He sounds kind of like a Republican sometimes.
00:39:31.000I mean, on a scale of 1 to 10, there are certain areas in which I feel liberated and certain areas in which I feel a little bit More dicey, I'll be honest with you.
00:39:39.000And I'd like to see, you know, some stability out of the markets.
00:39:42.000I'd like to see the president actually explain what he is doing and what he intends to do with the tariff regimen here.
00:39:48.000But it does feel like we're living in a moment where almost everyone across all parties is engaged in a sort of chaotic game of let me not explain what I'm doing and just do things.
00:39:57.000And I think that that is something that you talk about in your book, Abundance, is sort of the stacking on of various MOs, various regulatory rationales on top of each other.
00:40:10.000And what you end up with is an unworkable system.
00:40:12.000That seems to be one of the main themes of abundance.
00:40:16.000So yeah, what you're describing there is an argument or an idea I call everything bagel liberalism, which I was trying to make a distinction between the delicious everything bagel, which has some things on it, but not too many.
00:40:26.000And then the everything bagel from everything, everywhere, all at once, which gets everything on and becomes a black hole.
00:40:32.000There is a tendency in the way Democrats govern to pile Standard and goal and aim and project after project after project into the same bill.
00:40:43.000You know, you're trying to do affordable housing, but you're also trying to achieve environmental goals and unionization goals and a bunch of other things in a way that means your housing never actually gets built or gets built at an insane cost level.
00:40:53.000Same thing can be said for California high-speed rail.
00:40:56.000This affected a bunch of different Biden policies, but it's actually, as you, I think, drew in a pretty smart connection there, you see this in the Trump tariff policy, too.
00:41:05.000It's by no means just a left-wing problem.
00:41:07.000The Trump tariff policy, as far as I can tell, has at least four distinctive goals.
00:41:12.000Another is to insource production that has gone to other countries.
00:41:17.000Another is to create leverage against other countries.
00:41:21.000And another is to get sort of, you know, The concessions on things like fentanyl and border policy, and another is something to reshape global trade flows and orders.
00:41:30.000And you can't pursue all of those at once.
00:41:33.000For instance, you can't raise the money and change the manufacturing structure.
00:41:37.000You can't keep prices low but also move the manufacturing decisions.
00:41:41.000You need a lot of stability for companies that are making five to ten year investment decisions.
00:41:47.000So, you know, there are a few things here that there's so much in your book to talk about.
00:41:51.000Let's focus in on sort of the regulatory side that you're talking about, the everything bagel liberalism that you're talking about.
00:41:58.000One of the things that you talk about in the book, and when you're making the case for what you call abundance liberalism, which is this idea that the government should do things, it should just do those things better.
00:42:06.000I'm wondering how realistic you think that is, because you do see it, you know, from time to time, as you mentioned, sometimes in red states.
00:42:13.000But does that have to do with what people perceive to be the proper role of government in general?
00:42:18.000You kind of separate those two questions a little bit in the book.
00:42:22.000What is the proper role of government?
00:42:24.000In the book, you say that there's sort of a false distinction between big government and small government because there are certain areas where, of course, conservatives favor big government, say, defense spending, and there are certain areas where liberals favor small government, say, morals regulations.
00:42:35.000But it's really not big government versus small government.
00:42:38.000It's more of the proper role of government.
00:42:40.000And early on in the book, one of the things that you say is, Well, you need the government to step in on justice-based goods.
00:42:47.000And to me, you can get into some messy definitions there.
00:42:50.000How do you get into an area where it's not government overreach?
00:42:52.000Because it turns out that the government can nearly always declare that something is a justice-based good.
00:42:56.000And once it's a justice-based good, then you do have everybody trying to kind of put their fingers in the pie.
00:43:02.000You air-quoted justice-based goods, but that's not a term I use.
00:43:05.000What I do say is that there are certain goods that, over time, the American public has made clear that they think access to them is a matter of justice, right?
00:43:38.000We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can have a home.
00:43:41.000We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can get health care if you are sick.
00:43:45.000I mean, we have a law that says hospitals have to treat people if you walk into that emergency room, irrespective of ability to pay.
00:43:53.000And so we've made that set of decisions already.
00:43:55.000What I am saying in that chapter, in that section, is that when we've decided to subsidize something, which we do a lot, we then have to ask this secondary question, which we've gotten quite bad at asking, which is, Do we have enough supply of the thing that we are
00:44:09.000We don't So, I is move liberals to think more about the supply of the goods that they want everyone to have.
00:44:38.000I'm not really, nor is Derek in the project here, adding a bunch of ideas of categories of goods that we should subsidize.
00:44:45.000What I'm saying is that we have a lot of things that we say we want everybody to have.
00:44:49.000We say that they're part of a flourishing life from, you know, the ability to go to higher ed to the ability to have a home.
00:44:55.000And in many, many, many cases, we have allowed government So in the book,
00:45:21.000how do you make the balance between, for example, things you need to subsidize more supply of?
00:45:26.000How do you make the distinction between doing that in a market-based way and doing that in an actual direct subsidy-based way?
00:45:31.000So, for example, you mentioned housing.
00:45:32.000Obviously, one of the big restrictions on housing, I used to live in Los Angeles, is all the housing regulation.
00:45:38.000Tremendous regulation in terms of how you build, can you build, can you rent your garage out to somebody.
00:45:43.000This is a big thing when I was living there.
00:45:44.000Can you actually take your garage, because you're paying too much in property tax or an income tax, and now you want to rent out your garage to somebody, and that was forbidden.
00:45:50.000You were not allowed to do this as a sort of grandma suite.
00:45:53.000Uh, for a very long time in California.
00:45:55.000How do you decide what to do as far as regulations, which I think is more of a generalized Republican proposal, get rid of the regulations, make it easier to build, let the market mechanisms take over versus direct subsidies?
00:46:07.000And then how do you distinguish ideologically between what there is liberal versus what is conservative?
00:46:11.000Because you seem to be talking, well, why wouldn't that just be called conservatism if you're removing regulations that allow for more housing to be built?
00:46:18.000So let me take that in a couple different pieces.
00:46:20.000So one, I am Much more focused on the end of what I'm trying to create more of than the policy means by which I get it.
00:46:28.000So in the question you're asking, what would I subsidize?
00:46:31.000What would I have the government do directly?
00:46:32.000Let's take housing as the core example here.
00:46:35.000In my view, we should have a lot more market rate development and a lot more affordable housing development, some of which I'm perfectly happy to have be public housing.
00:46:44.000But in all these cases, we have certainly in California, certainly in L.A. where the housing policies are quite bad, we have regulated this into a level of unaffordability.
00:46:53.000I happened to read on an airplane last night a new report from the Rand Corporation, and it's a fantastic report.
00:47:00.000I'm so much more enthusiastic about this report than other people are going to be listening to this.
00:47:04.000But it's about the cost of construction of homes in California, in Texas, and in Colorado.
00:47:10.000And it's about the cost of construction of multi-family housing of two types, one market rate and the other subsidized by the public.
00:47:17.000And one of the things the report shows, and something I've reported on too, is that specifically in California, when we subsidize housing, so the government says we want affordable housing for the poor, we layer on so many new regulations and demands and wage standards, etc., that we actually make that housing affordable.
00:47:35.000Per square foot, much more expensive than even the market rate housing.
00:47:38.000Now, there's nothing inevitable about that.
00:47:40.000In Colorado, it doesn't work that way.
00:47:42.000And I don't think most liberals would say Colorado is a dystopic, conservative hellscape.
00:47:47.000But in Los Angeles, what they have done to increase the cost per square foot of the housing that they are getting taxpayers to subsidize is crazy.
00:47:58.000My view on this is that it should be possible to have the government actually clear Thanks for At the very least, affordable and timely for the government to do it.
00:48:22.000If you've created rules by which government construction or things that are funded by the government for construction, from housing to high-speed rail, come in much more expensive and much over budget compared to letting the market do it or having it not happen at all, then in the end you're not going to get the things you want.
00:48:37.000are not gonna be affordable to get the things you want.
00:49:14.000But, you know, I think that one of the things that you're saying there, when you say the goals are the same, One of the things I like about that is that it gets back to a time when actually political conversation was possible because the goals were in fact the same.
00:49:25.000It feels like that is increasingly not the case in the country in a lot of different ways.
00:49:31.000I'll make the conservative argument here, which is that the minute you start to grow government, everything big of liberalism becomes almost a necessary component beyond a certain point.
00:49:40.000Maybe you can do that on individual one-off emergency projects.
00:49:57.000Because if you declare it a war, that means you get to clear all the decks and now it's an emergency.
00:50:00.000And with emergencies, you can sort of wipe everything off the bagel and just go with the bagel, right?
00:50:04.000You saw this in Los Angeles after the fires, when suddenly everybody started talking about, hey, maybe we shouldn't actually do all these environmental reviews before we rebuild all the housing in Pacific Palisades and all this kind of thing.
00:50:13.000But the problem is that just as a general matter, The conservative argument would be when you have a giant grab bag of cash that becomes the government and power that becomes the government, people are going to lobby for that cash and that regulatory power.
00:50:25.000And the people who are elected are going to be answerable to a lot of those people.
00:50:30.000If you look at labor regulations, for example, many of the labor regulations are being effectively indirectly written by unions that contribute to the members of Congress or to the governor or state senator to whom they're contributing.
00:50:42.000I think that the conservative argument would be the reason to minimize government.
00:50:46.000In the areas where you don't have to have it would be because it is almost an inevitability unless you're going to declare an emergency and do what you're talking about which which starts to verge on on possible tyranny because I mean again one of the things that happens here is the more public input there is the more you get everything on the bagel the less public input the less you get everything on the bagel and so you start to run into some pretty dicey questions about the power the singular power of government How do you divest the people from having a say?
00:51:12.000And by the people, I mean various lobbying groups and various industry groups.
00:51:16.000And then is the best way to do that just to deprive the government of the cash and base yourself more on market-based solutions?
00:51:22.000I think this is where it's very helpful to be grounded in both specific examples and specific policies.
00:51:29.000Because yes, conceptually, all that is true.
00:51:32.000And then you just look around and you realize that the policies work very differently and the interest group constellations are very different in different places.
00:51:39.000And I mean, that is true for like, look, we build, we, they build transit much better, much cheaper, much faster in Spain, in France, in Japan than we do.
00:51:52.000And the difference there is not that Spain, France and Japan don't have governments.
00:51:59.000They have higher union density than we do.
00:52:01.000It's that they have a very different structure of how they do government.
00:52:04.000So a big thing I'm focusing on in the book Is the way we have begun to restrain government in this country through process and adversarial legalism, where you can just tie it up in lawsuits again and again and again and again.
00:52:15.000That was one way of trying to avoid tyranny.
00:52:17.000But what you created is a very ineffective form of government.
00:52:20.000So one thing I think worth just saying is that we can see this working very differently in different places.
00:52:25.000as I just mentioned, Colorado and California have quite different housing outcomes, even though they are both currently governed by Democrats and they both have governments So I always think it's good to stay a little bit more grounded than that.
00:52:36.000But the other thing that I do think you're getting at is both parties, in my view, have a sort of scarcity side and an abundant side inside of them.
00:52:45.000This cleavage that I'm trying to cut occurs on both sides.
00:52:49.000On the Democratic side, on the liberal side, I see this as between, you know, you can call it different things, but the New Deal left and the New Left left.
00:52:59.000So the New Deal left was very growth-oriented, very building-oriented.
00:53:03.000It created a lot of physical infrastructure, created highways because Dwight Eisenhower was sort of part of this political order.
00:53:11.000And in doing that, it created a counter reaction, not just sort of conservatism, as we think about it with Ronald Reagan, but also the new left, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson.
00:53:20.000And, you know, this sort of raft of environmental legislation passed, by the way, under Richard Nixon, California Environmental Quality Act passed under Governor Ronald Reagan.
00:53:28.000So these things often were bipartisan in their times.
00:53:30.000But over time, they're not the right policy equilibrium for the next stage.
00:53:34.000On the right, though, you have the same issue.
00:53:36.000So you have a I don't want to call it an Yeah, absolutely.
00:53:46.000And then you have a scarcity right, a populist right, which is currently the right in power.
00:53:51.000And you look at Donald Trump, you look at J.D. Vance, when they look at the housing problem, they don't propose a lot of ways to make supply bigger.
00:53:57.000On the campaign trail again and again, they use it as an argument for deporting immigrants.
00:54:01.000when they look at trade, they don't make a lot of ways for us to make more things more easily and trade them with the world.
00:54:35.000So my view is that the sort of supply side of both parties has a fight on its hands.
00:54:40.000And the fight is different, and it plays out in different ways.
00:54:42.000But one of the things that should make us more optimistic rather than fatalistic about the inevitable pathway of government that sort of you're suggesting there, is if you look around at different countries, at our own country, and at our own even federal government at different times, you realize that these are pendulums that swing back.
00:54:59.000These are man-made processes that can be unmade or reformed.
00:55:03.000And that should always give you a sense of hope.
00:55:06.000So let's talk briefly about the two parties.
00:55:09.000Obviously, I agree with a lot of your characterization of what you just discussed.
00:55:13.000I think there is a much heavier tendency in the Republican Party and has historically been toward supply-side-ism, toward the idea that you need to increase supply.
00:55:21.000And this is true everywhere in sort of the right-wing focus on how do doctors get paid, to how do we get rid of regulation.
00:55:27.000It seems like the left, what wing is left of the Democratic Party at this point that you would say is rich in abundance liberalism?
00:55:35.000I can spot abundance conservatives everywhere.
00:55:37.000Some of them are being pretty quiet right now.
00:55:39.000But I think that if you poll the vast majority of people who voted for Republicans, they would actually agree with a sort of abundance supply side conservatism.
00:55:47.000Because that is kind of in the bones of, the Reagan bones are still part of the skeleton of the Republican Party.
00:55:53.000The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left in a lot of different ways.
00:55:56.000And it feels like it's going to be a while in the wilderness before Democrats realize they have to engage with the sort of arguments that you're making.
00:56:06.000One is it just somebody just released a book on this.
00:56:08.000I've been extraordinarily pleased with how much the center of the Democratic establishment is engaging with this book quite quite seriously.
00:56:15.000So I was on Gavin Newsom's podcast, Governor of California, and he said, you know, he completely agrees with the book and it's all correct.
00:56:20.000And he's been he's been working on this and it's very and it's very interesting.
00:56:23.000It's very hard, and I take that point, but, you know, Cory Booker was shouting the book out in his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor.
00:56:29.000To be fair, he shouted every book out ever written in his 25-hour speech.
00:56:32.000It was a lot of hours, but nevertheless, he's read it, as have a bunch of others.
00:56:36.000So, one thing I think is happening here is a bit of a permission structure for Democrats who actually have been worried about some of these issues for some time.
00:56:42.000To begin speaking about it more loudly, after parties get defeated in the way they did in 2024, it does create an openness to soul-searching that would not have been there otherwise.
00:56:52.000At the same time, I don't agree with your characterization from a minute ago, because much of the book is motivated by things happening that predate the book in the Democratic Party already.
00:57:02.000So the Biden administration, compared to the first Trump administration, compared to the Obama administration, was quite committed to an atypically physical Let's To
00:57:41.000build at that scale and at that level, at the speed that I think we need to do it, or frankly that they thought we need to do it.
00:57:47.000Brian Deese, the former NEC director under Biden, the director of the National Economics Council, has a great piece in Foreign Affairs about how America needs to build faster and how that's central to the kinds of things Biden was trying to do but will not be achieved unless we change laws.
00:58:00.000So in my view, you've actually had, driven by housing scarcity and the need for decarbonization, a turn in the Democratic Party over the past five or ten years towards Building things, not just creating social insurance, not that there's anything that might be wrong with social insurance, but having begun to make that turn, they have begun to confront, as I've had to begun to confront covering it, how ill-suited the architecture of procedural liberalism is to achieving those goals.
00:58:28.000And so what's I think the really difficult confrontation now is not whether this stuff is needed, but the confrontation that liberals are having with the overhang of their own past legislative achievements, things that might have made sense at one time, but are now not the right processes, not the right laws for the kinds of things that we are now trying to achieve and promising to achieve.
00:58:49.000And that it's in that space that a lot of the very, very difficult policy work and frankly, coalitional confrontations are going to have to happen.
00:59:01.000I know we have to run here, but I think that's the last point.
00:59:03.000The coalition of the Democratic Party is not conducive yet to the kind of change that you're talking about.
00:59:09.000The Biden administration, even if you assume what you're assuming here, which is that they wanted to build things, between the environmentalist side of their coalition and the DEI side of their coalition, and the sort of generalized interest group nature of the Democratic coalition, it made it nearly impossible for them to do any of these things without stacking up the kinds of regulation, even in the Build Back Better bill, for example, That they would need to ignore in order to actually get done the things they were saying they wanted to get done.
00:59:34.000I would say the great failure of the Biden administration was to be too coalitional and have too little, at least on domestic policy, strong executive leadership.
00:59:45.000And I think that has to do with Biden's particular issues and his age and where his focus was.
00:59:50.000And I think that has to do with the culture of the Democratic Party that had sort of evolved over a period of time.
00:59:54.000And now that's going to have to change.
00:59:56.000I think it's quite widely acknowledged that that was a problem.
00:59:59.000And look, I think if Donald Trump proves anything in American politics for all of his flaws, what he proves is that the coalitions and the cultures of the coalitions are malleable.
01:00:08.000Donald Trump has reshaped the Republican coalition, not by kicking everybody who is in it out.
01:00:14.000People have come to believe things they did not believe before.
01:00:17.000You know, it's a cottage industry on X to retweet old Mike Waltz or Marco Rubio tweets that seem to have a high level of contradiction to what they are now carrying out in the current administration.
01:00:28.000But look, Trump changed his party on immigration, on trade, on isolationism, on Europe, on Russia, right?
01:00:35.000I am not saying that I want to see a Trump arise on the left, I don't, but it is a mistake to think that these things are too settled.
01:00:42.000Barack Obama changed the way the Democratic Party worked and functioned, and I think, frankly, a lot of the problem ended up being that Biden was the fumes of the Obama coalition, but he didn't have the control over it that Obama himself had, so he wasn't able to drive it and govern it in the way that one needed to.
01:00:59.000What's going to come next is going to have to be different.
01:01:01.000It's not trying to re-put together the old thing.
01:01:05.000It's going to be putting together the new thing.
01:01:06.000I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know who can do it or how they're going to do it, but I can tell you, as somebody who covers the Democratic Party quite closely, that this is a period of rebuilding and rethinking, and that that is much more possible on both sides than people ever seem to believe it is in the moment.
01:01:59.000And so the president sort of said, well, she doesn't need to be on the plane anymore.
01:02:01.000Well, she was welcomed back to the White House where she proceeded to apparently unfurl a list of people in the National Security Council that she, Laura Loomer, believed were not loyal to President Trump.
01:02:11.000And he promptly fired a bunch of them.
01:02:12.000That seems to be the best read on this story.
01:02:16.000There's an all purpose term that is used by people who try to oust people inside the Trump circle, and that is neocon.
01:02:23.000And so she basically just Apparently labeled a bunch of people neocons who are not in fact neocons.
01:02:26.000Neocon is a specific designation for people who were democrats in the 1960s and 70s and then they became conservative.
01:02:36.000They were liberals who were mugged by reality.
01:02:38.000Used to be the description of neocons.
01:02:40.000And then, during the Bush administration, the neocons were associated with the sort of Wilsonian view of American foreign policy where we needed to transform Iraq into a democracy where America was a nation-building country.
01:02:52.000And that Wing of the Republican Party is just gone.
01:02:56.000No one in the Republican Party, no one, believes in nation-building by the United States.
01:03:01.000The United States needs 100-year occupations of places and full-scale nation-building.
01:03:06.000It's a much more pragmatic Republican Party.
01:03:08.000The term neocon is just thrown around now to mean people that President Trump shouldn't like, and it's usually thrown around by people who very often don't even agree with President Trump's foreign policy because they would term it neocon because it's too peace through strength quote-unquote interventionist.
01:03:22.000In any case, Laura Loomer apparently labeled a bunch of people disloyal to President Trump inside the national security infrastructure, and four National Security Council aides were then fired overnight.
01:03:30.000Two other National Security Council aides were let go on Sunday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
01:03:35.000Those staffers worked on a series of portfolios, including intelligence, India, congressional affairs, and the impact of technology security.
01:03:42.000Two people added this was the latest round of firings.
01:03:44.000There will be at least 10 people ousted from the NSC by the end of the second round.
01:03:48.000And during a Wednesday meeting in the Oval Office, Loomer told the President she had concerns about some of his staff, and President Trump then said she makes recommendations, and sometimes I listen to those recommendations.
01:04:01.000Let's just say, I hope the staffing protocols at the White House are stronger than single recommendations by Laura Loomer.
01:04:11.000I think that that is probably not the best way to staff an administration.
01:04:18.000And meanwhile, in lighter news, in cultural news, you know, I understand.
01:04:23.000The markets are putting me in a bad mood.
01:04:24.000Also, I want President Trump's plans to succeed.
01:04:27.000As I've said a thousand times here on the show, President Trump is doing too much important work for all of it to be waylaid by bad things happening.
01:04:34.000And so I'm in a bit of a bad mood, I'll be honest with you.
01:04:37.000But I decided to do something that put me in even a worse mood, and that was I watched the new preview for Superman that was put out by James Gunn.
01:04:46.000Now, as y'all know, not a huge James Gunn fan.
01:04:49.000Finding Guardians of the Galaxy, when it's all sort of like ridiculous humor, kind of gonzo humor, people unsurfaced.
01:04:56.000His old tweets that were kind of jokey, ugly tweets in early days of Twitter, James Gunn, based on those old tweets, was actually fired by Marvel.
01:05:04.000And I will say that I publicly supported the idea that he should be rehired because you shouldn't cancel people based on jokes that they made back when Twitter was a jokier place.
01:05:13.000And now he's directing the new Superman movie.
01:05:16.000And we can watch this preview together.
01:06:44.000Once Superman is brought inside, a team of robots, presumably of Kryptonian origin, then starts to handle him, and they have one of the most nonsensical exchanges in any James Gunn movie, which is to say, pretty nonsensical.
01:07:53.000And now he's, uh, painfully absorbing the sun, which apparently was not available before.
01:07:58.000So the, the sun, which, as, as we all know, illuminates the Earth, which is the planet we are currently spinning on, uh, apparently only the magnifying glass could, could make Superman better.
01:08:10.000We will notice the obvious incongruity of one robot explaining that the robots have no feelings and then the female robot being giggly like a little girl at Superman.
01:08:34.000Because It gets right the idea that there is a solemnity to Superman, that he is supposed to be the embodiment of America, and then the second half of the movie shifts into a more comic book, humorous mode.
01:09:25.000So you don't need full-scale James Gunn.
01:09:27.000He's the same character as, essentially, Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy, and all the jokes are the same as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
01:09:44.000Okay. So, I was going to be put in a better mood by that, and then I was just put in a worse mood by that.
01:09:50.000In other news, Wicked for Good, which is the second part of Wicked, the footage has now been presented to attendees at CinemaCon in Las Vegas by Universal.
01:10:00.000So, as I said, I liked Wicked Part 1. I'm sure Wicked Part 2 will be good, although I I assume they filmed these things at the same time.
01:10:06.000I would hope so, because unfortunately, both leading actresses seem to be starving themselves into submission.
01:10:10.000I mean, they really look rough out there.
01:10:28.000And I'm hoping that the John Wick Five is better than John Wick 4. As you know, I was a little disappointed in John Wick 4. You can go back and see my YouTube review of it.
01:10:39.000Obviously, he wasn't dead at the end of John Wick 4. That was obviously clear.
01:10:42.000There was a joke going around, however.
01:11:21.000And then I found out that Greta Gerwig's Netflix adaptation of The Magician's Nephew, which is the first book in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, The person who they are thinking about casting is Aslan, who is supposed to be, very obviously, a metaphor for Jesus.
01:13:05.000Here's what our conversation sounded like.
01:13:07.000Joining us on the line are my friends Dave McCormick and Dina Powell McCormick.
01:13:11.000Dave, of course, is Senator from Pennsylvania, and Dina is a senior business executive and former government official who worked in the Trump administration and serves in several leadership roles at Goldman Sachs.
01:13:21.000Guys, thanks so much for joining the show.
01:13:35.000What do you think makes this book good for this time?
01:13:38.000Well, you know, we had an experience during COVID where our six daughters were with us.
01:13:43.000They were disconnected from their friends, their family, their teachers, their coaches.
01:13:48.000And Dean and I started to talk about how, at that same point in our lives, mentors Had made all the difference for us.
01:13:57.000And we started to talk to some of our key friends, many of them very successful, and we realized that in their case, also a key person or two had made all the difference.
01:14:06.000For me, it was a football coach who saw promise in me and made me the team captain.
01:14:11.000And that changed my life, helped me get into West Point.
01:14:16.000And so we believe that when lots of people are losing trust in their officials, the media, That by focusing on helping individuals find their best selves, really grow and develop, mentorship offers the opportunity to really change the direction of the country and our communities.
01:14:34.000So, Dina, you've worked a lot in the private sector, obviously, and the public sector, and you've created a lot of jobs all around the world.
01:14:39.000How much does mentorship mean with regard to entrepreneurialism?
01:14:45.000When you look at entrepreneurs that are successful, they always had somebody that First of all, believed in them, oftentimes invested in them, but more importantly than anything, just gave them confidence.
01:14:56.000A lot of the work that I did through 10,000 women was female entrepreneurs in the US and around the world.
01:15:02.000There's one really hysterical story about a woman in Egypt in Cairo, Egypt, who started a company called Pink Taxis, female drivers.
01:15:10.000Female passengers, her husband was totally against it, said, you're not going to work.
01:15:14.000She started making so much money, he became the COO.
01:15:17.000And it took one mentor to say to her, you've got this, you can do it.
01:15:21.000I know in our trailer, which we're so honored that you are in, you say something so important that even resonated with our kids.
01:15:27.000You say, run to the fire, whatever position you're in, go to the hardest problem, run to the fire.
01:15:32.000Believe it or not, those words of wisdom for this generation that not only missed high school graduation or prom, they missed Like two or three years of mentorship.
01:15:41.000Think about who believed in you, Ben, and that experience of shadowing them, following them.
01:15:46.000We really think the country right now needs this generation to step up, be values-driven leaders.
01:15:51.000And the path to that is every one of us investing in them.
01:15:54.000So, Senator, you went to West Point, you served in the Army during the first Gulf War, and the military is imbued with the sense that mentorship has to be a part of it.
01:16:03.000Maybe you want to talk about that a little bit, because you can actually see a shift in the way people are thinking about serving in the military, thanks to the sort of new recapitulation of the military's image under the Trump administration.
01:16:13.000Yeah, leadership and mentorship are really close cousins.
01:16:16.000You know, when you're a leader, you have to stand up and help everybody find their best selves.
01:16:21.000But mentorship is very personal, it's very intimate.
01:16:23.000And we learned through our interviews and talking to a number of retired generals, in fact, that the key building blocks are, first of all, trust.
01:16:33.000You have to trust someone that they're with you, that you can be vulnerable with them, that they have your best interest in mind.
01:17:15.000I lost my first Senate race and then won my second.
01:17:18.000Overcoming failure and having mentors give you the confidence To get into the arena, to find your place, that's what great mentorship does.
01:17:27.000And at a very intimate level, it's hard to do that across a unit of 500 or 1,000.
01:17:35.000You can do it very intimately on a one-on-one mentoring relationship.
01:17:38.000So, Dina, obviously the story, the book, Who Believed in You, is filled with tremendous stories.
01:17:42.000What's your favorite story from the book?
01:17:45.000There are so many, you know, from Satya Nadella to David Chang, Brian Grazer, Condi Rice.
01:17:55.000She talks about two big mentors in her life.
01:17:57.000Obviously, her dad was such a big force in her life and just gave her outsized, and I mean that in a positive way, confidence and ambition.
01:18:06.000And President Trump, I mean, she was really attacked in that job in a ruthless way, as you remember.
01:18:11.000And he pulled her aside one day and he said, listen, you are really good at what you do and I believe in you and that's all that matters.
01:18:20.000And it is at those crucial moments when you are not sure of yourself, and frankly, especially for women, that that mentor, that piece of advice makes all the difference.
01:18:30.000You know, in my case, Ben, there were so many mentors that I had from the CEOs I worked for, obviously, to government leaders.
01:18:38.000But as an immigrant kid from a Coptan Christian community in Cairo, Egypt, moving to Dallas, Texas, not speaking English when I was five years old, Thank you.
01:18:54.000to pay for college at the University of Texas in Austin.
01:18:57.000And I, you know, was dutifully doing what my parents said.
01:20:37.000Steve Schwartzman talks about a meeting, which was a remarkable meeting.
01:20:42.000He wrote a letter to Avril Hairman, and Avril Hairman wrote him back and said, yeah, I'd be happy to sit down.
01:20:49.000And Steve went and sat down with Avril Hairman, and Avril Hairman gave him advice on how to think about his career in life.
01:20:55.000It wasn't like he sat down weekly with Avril Hairman, but he used that moment in a way that really changed his life.
01:21:02.000My favorite story, It's about Brian Grazier, who I think you know, Ben.
01:21:06.000Brian talks about this incredible encounter.
01:21:10.000He was sort of running as a runner on a big major motion picture studio and finally got a meeting with Deanne Barkley, who was the most prominent woman in Hollywood.
01:21:38.000She said, we're destined, you know, and she took an interest in him and bought his two scripts, which were the movie Splash and Night Shift.
01:21:46.000But she took him on as a mentee, and she would take him around Hollywood and introduce him to all the big names.
01:21:54.000But he kept getting, the meetings never followed up, like he never got further.
01:23:01.000All right, guys, coming up, we'll jump into the mailbag.
01:23:04.000Remember that you can only actually hear my answers to these questions or ask me a question yourself if you are a member at Daily Wire Plus.