The Ben Shapiro Show - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, it's drinking from a fire hose.

00:00:02.000 Tons of news on the economy.

00:00:04.000 We'll get to all of it.

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00:00:39.000 So, as I suggest, tons of economics news breaking.

00:00:42.000 Yesterday, of course, was a horrifying day in the stock market.

00:00:45.000 And people who are attempting to play this game where they say, well, you know, the stock market taking a massive dump.

00:00:50.000 That's that's okay.

00:00:51.000 I mean, that doesn't affect...

00:00:52.000 50% of Americans have stocks.

00:00:55.000 Maybe because they have 401ks.

00:00:57.000 This 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.

00:01:06.000 And, 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.

00:01:18.000 If the stock market tanks by half, that's a pretty good indicator, for example, that bad things are happening.

00:01:23.000 And if the stock market continues to gain steadily, That's an indicator that maybe some good things are happening.

00:01:29.000 And this isn't too tough.

00:01:30.000 It's not too sophisticated.

00:01:32.000 It doesn't mean that every time there's a little bit of a sell-off, it's the end of the world.

00:01:35.000 And it doesn't mean that every time there's a run-up, that means that amazing things are in the brewing.

00:01:39.000 What it does mean is that ignoring data is not, in fact, a good form of analysis.

00:01:43.000 The stock market does provide data.

00:01:45.000 And in fact, we have lots of it.

00:01:47.000 Investors have been shaken by President Trump's tariff regime.

00:01:51.000 They're not sure what to expect.

00:01:52.000 They're not sure what comes next.

00:01:53.000 There are a lot of conflicting messages coming out Of the White House.

00:01:56.000 So 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.

00:02:05.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, major stock indices dropped as much as 6% on Thursday.

00:02:10.000 Stocks lost roughly $3.1 trillion in market value.

00:02:13.000 That is their largest one-day decline since March 2020.

00:02:15.000 And of course, March 2020 was COVID.

00:02:18.000 And this is not being inflicted by an external shock like, for example, COVID.

00:02:22.000 This is being inflicted By a deliberate choice by the Trump administration.

00:02:26.000 In a little while, I'm going to try and steel man the Trump administration's position.

00:02:29.000 What's sort of the best case scenario for the thing that they are shooting for with these tariffs?

00:02:34.000 The market this morning again opened down very steeply.

00:02:38.000 Investors obviously are not sanguine about the situation.

00:02:40.000 There was a good jobs report that came out for March.

00:02:43.000 The employment report came out at 228,000 jobs added in March, which was more than forecast.

00:02:48.000 Of course, that is a backward-looking report, so it didn't have a massive impact on the markets today.

00:02:53.000 Because 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.

00:03:00.000 That is what the market is saying right now.

00:03:03.000 Now, again, that data came as a bit of a surprise because economists were expecting it to be a little bit slower.

00:03:09.000 This came amid a federal jobs decline.

00:03:11.000 So normally this would be like a point of giant celebration for the Trump administration.

00:03:14.000 Jobs increase, federal jobs go down.

00:03:17.000 But the problem, of course, is that policy just radically changed.

00:03:20.000 So 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.

00:03:27.000 So investors are freaking out.

00:03:29.000 The 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.

00:03:39.000 He says, I should have sold more.

00:03:40.000 Across 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.

00:03:47.000 They 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.

00:03:58.000 And this is the part, again, that is freaking out markets.

00:04:00.000 Markets 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.

00:04:10.000 So, one strategy is hold on for your life.

00:04:13.000 And let's be clear, I'm not giving investment strategy because I'm not legally Capable of doing so.

00:04:18.000 However, a long-term investment strategy says leave your money where it is over the long haul.

00:04:25.000 Don't sell during a dip is a pretty good piece of advice.

00:04:29.000 How long and prolonged that dip is, is another question.

00:04:32.000 But 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.

00:04:40.000 As far as the idea that this was going to They have a salutary impact on job creation in the United States.

00:04:47.000 The early indicators are at best mixed.

00:04:49.000 Stellantis, for example, has now temporarily laid off 900 workers in the United States.

00:04:55.000 This, of course, led to criticism from the UAW.

00:04:58.000 The UAW is very happy about the tariffs until precisely the moment the economic effects of the tariffs are felt.

00:05:04.000 Now, remember, this sort of economic policy, high tariffs, It's painful to see what a

00:05:35.000 ruinous decision From back in the 1920s, being repeated.

00:05:45.000 Now, insofar as he's using these tariffs to get very strategic things settled, and that he is satisfied with that.

00:05:56.000 But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history.

00:06:07.000 Okay, and of course, Sowell would know better than anyone else, and he happens to be correct.

00:06:11.000 There'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.

00:06:23.000 Jimmy Carter tried this routine as well during his Malay speech.

00:06:26.000 Well, Americans need to spiritually buck up, even if things are worse for them economically.

00:06:30.000 It turns out this is not a popular selling point.

00:06:32.000 Here is Harry Enten on CNN explaining.

00:06:34.000 It's the American people who are the naysayers. 1.00

00:06:37.000 Oppose new tariffs on other countries.

00:06:40.000 All goods.

00:06:41.000 Look at this.

00:06:41.000 56% of Americans oppose new tariffs on all goods.

00:06:45.000 How about cars in particular?

00:06:47.000 56% of Americans oppose new tariffs on imported cars and car parts.

00:06:54.000 Look, the bottom line is the American people oppose, oppose, oppose.

00:06:58.000 No, no, no.

00:07:00.000 They do not want new tariffs.

00:07:01.000 I looked at a ton of polling.

00:07:03.000 It's really hard to find any in which you find folks supporting new tariffs.

00:07:09.000 And that is going to be only more true if the economy actually declines on the back of all of this.

00:07:14.000 The stock market, and then more broadly, the economy, employment, investment opportunity, problems with mortgages.

00:07:20.000 One of the big problems here is that, of course, there's a lot of corporate debt in America.

00:07:24.000 Companies operate on marginal growth.

00:07:27.000 And if that marginal growth goes away and that corporate debt get called in, you got a problem on your hands.

00:07:32.000 And again, this is being created by the Trump administration.

00:07:36.000 As I mentioned yesterday, I mean, I know business people who import products.

00:07:39.000 These are domestic American businesses with American employees, and they have to import their inputs to their products.

00:07:45.000 And they're getting smashed by these tariffs.

00:07:47.000 So President Trump, one of the big problems here also is level of uncertainty.

00:07:50.000 There's a huge level of uncertainty as to what exactly President Trump is trying to accomplish.

00:07:55.000 The 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.

00:08:05.000 People 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.

00:08:15.000 So President Trump, the White House, they have put out a set of talking points to their allies that was obtained by Politico.

00:08:22.000 And here are their talking points.

00:08:23.000 And again, the problem with some of the talking points is that they're mutually exclusive.

00:08:27.000 President Trump is revolutionizing the global trade order to put the American economy, the American worker, and our national security first.

00:08:33.000 Okay, so, again, I don't know what revolutionizing the trade order looks like.

00:08:37.000 What is the end goal of the trade order?

00:08:39.000 If the end goal is everybody goes to zero on their tariffs and non-tariff barriers, sounds great.

00:08:45.000 But 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.

00:08:55.000 The 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.

00:09:07.000 Now 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.

00:09:14.000 You 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.

00:09:22.000 It is not a national emergency.

00:09:24.000 The United States economy remains the most powerful economic engine on planet Earth by a long shot.

00:09:29.000 It is not particularly close still.

00:09:31.000 China has bulk, but the United States has actual power.

00:09:36.000 Bulk and power, similar, but they're cousins.

00:09:38.000 They're not exactly the same.

00:09:41.000 The 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.

00:09:49.000 Because the question is what comes next.

00:09:51.000 Is President Trump going to try to cut bilateral deals with various countries to lower the tariffs back down to zero?

00:09:56.000 Or is he doing this because he just doesn't like trade deficits?

00:09:59.000 This is the problem I was pointing out yesterday.

00:10:00.000 That giant poster board that he was holding up that showed quote-unquote tariff rates for various countries on our goods.

00:10:06.000 It's not true.

00:10:07.000 Those were not tariff rates.

00:10:08.000 They had nothing to do with tariffs.

00:10:10.000 Those were trade deficits divided by imports.

00:10:13.000 Meaning 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.

00:10:25.000 It is the equivalent of you saying that you are running a deficit with your grocery store.

00:10:30.000 You're running a trade deficit with your grocery store because you gave them money and they gave you goods.

00:10:34.000 And the only way that you're going to achieve parity is by getting the grocery store to buy fan belts from your factory.

00:10:40.000 Well, Listen, all of this creates uncertainty.

00:10:43.000 There's a lot, a lot of uncertainty.

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00:11:20.000 The economic challenges we're facing took a long time to develop.

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00:12:44.000 The talking points go on.

00:12:46.000 For decades, the trade status quo has allowed countries to use unfair trade practices to get ahead at the expense of hardworking Americans.

00:12:52.000 And again, you want to label things that you want to get rid of?

00:12:54.000 I'm talking about using tariffs as leverage.

00:12:57.000 Good. 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.

00:13:06.000 The distorted trading system has caused the offshoring of our manufacturing base.

00:13:09.000 The reality is, our manufacturing productivity has gone up significantly since the beginning of NAFTA in 1997.

00:13:16.000 It has risen from about $1.7 trillion to $2.4 trillion, something in that neighborhood.

00:13:24.000 The manufacturing base in the United States, in terms of jobs, has actually been harmed, not predominantly by offshoring, but by automation.

00:13:31.000 If you're talking about jobs in factories, why those are going away, the answer is robots.

00:13:36.000 The answer is machinery.

00:13:37.000 That's why you don't see giant assembly lines of humans doing this stuff anymore.

00:13:40.000 You see robots doing this stuff.

00:13:42.000 And here's the thing, Howard Lutnick, who's a big proponent of the tariff strategy over at the Commerce Department, he is saying as much.

00:13:48.000 He was asked last night on Jesse Waters about reshoring manufacturing from places like Vietnam, which makes t-shirts.

00:13:55.000 And here is Lutnick's answer.

00:13:57.000 Now, we're not going to have all factories come back.

00:14:00.000 Like, clothing manufacturing, that's tough to bring back.

00:14:03.000 But what kind of manufacturing are you talking about returning here?

00:14:08.000 Well, don't you...

00:14:09.000 You can't just give that away.

00:14:12.000 See, what's going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor that we've seen all across the world.

00:14:18.000 I mean, think of what our factories did.

00:14:20.000 They 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.

00:14:34.000 But the pain is in our Okay, let's just be clear about this.

00:14:58.000 The robotics are one of the chief reasons for the decline in employment in the manufacturing sector.

00:15:04.000 So if the idea is we bring the factories back here and then robots replace the foreign workers, you might incrementally gain jobs. 0.97

00:15:10.000 You're not going to massively gain jobs because most of the work is going to be done by the robots.

00:15:14.000 Again, there are a bunch of different sort of priorities that are in argument with each other.

00:15:18.000 Because if you don't do that, then the prices on all of those goods and services rise dramatically.

00:15:21.000 If you just do it with American union labor, it's going to be way more expensive for American consumers.

00:15:26.000 Okay, other elements of the White House press release, the undermining of critical supply chains.

00:15:30.000 That one I agree with.

00:15:36.000 If we are talking about reshoring critical supply chains, okay, fine.

00:15:41.000 But then you get elimination of export market access.

00:15:45.000 The people are eliminating our ability to export to them.

00:15:50.000 Okay, 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.

00:15:58.000 They say that this has sold out the American middle class.

00:16:01.000 I showed you yesterday, the American middle class has not in fact been sold out.

00:16:03.000 Most of the American middle class turned into the upper middle class.

00:16:06.000 The 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.

00:16:15.000 This is a constant throughout American history.

00:16:19.000 Population movement is as old as de Tocqueville.

00:16:21.000 De 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.

00:16:27.000 And that is not a wonderful thing.

00:16:29.000 It's not an amazing thing.

00:16:30.000 It is a reality of an economy that does not just subsidize you in the place where you are.

00:16:36.000 The White House talking points continue.

00:16:39.000 Under the Biden administration's watch, our trade deficit soared to $1.2 trillion in 2024.

00:16:44.000 This status quo cannot continue.

00:16:47.000 Well, 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.

00:16:59.000 So it wasn't as though it got solved under the Trump administration.

00:17:02.000 And trade deficits are not, again, a good substitute for an explanation of why that's bad for the United States.

00:17:07.000 Trade deficits finance virtually our entire debt load.

00:17:10.000 Because let's say that we are buying more from another country than they are buying from us. 0.87

00:17:17.000 They 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.

00:17:25.000 Okay, and then the talking points.

00:17:27.000 Again, these are the talking points distributed by the White House to allies in Congress.

00:17:31.000 Gone are the days of America being taken advantage of.

00:17:33.000 There's a new sheriff in town and trade is a core issue in restoring American strength on the global stage.

00:17:37.000 Again, that's nice rhetoric.

00:17:38.000 I don't know what it means.

00:17:39.000 President Trump is correcting long-standing trade imbalances caused by non-reciprocal trade relations by imposing tariffs to level the playing field.

00:17:45.000 Again, if we're talking reciprocal, fine.

00:17:48.000 But 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.

00:17:56.000 So it's kind of a mishmash of various rationales.

00:18:00.000 Now, 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.

00:18:10.000 Besant is an excellent Treasury Secretary.

00:18:11.000 The case that he has been making is a more sophisticated case and it's laid out well by a policy analyst named Tanvi Ratna.

00:18:19.000 Tanvi Ratna is quoted by the investor extraordinaire Bill Ackman.

00:18:23.000 Here's what she writes today.

00:18:25.000 Trump's new tariffs aren't a trade tweak.

00:18:27.000 They're the first move in a full-spectrum reset.

00:18:29.000 $9.2 trillion in debt matures in 2025.

00:18:32.000 Inflation lingers.

00:18:32.000 Alliances are shifting.

00:18:34.000 One announcement just set a dozen wheels in motion.

00:18:36.000 Here's what really is happening.

00:18:37.000 Start with the debt.

00:18:38.000 $9.2 trillion must be refinanced in 2025.

00:18:41.000 If rolled into 10-year bonds, every one basis point drop in rates saves approximately $1 billion a year.

00:18:47.000 So, a 0.5% drop would save $500 billion over a decade.

00:18:51.000 Lower yields for a fiscal room.

00:18:52.000 Without them, core spending gets crowded out.

00:18:54.000 So the basic idea here is that what we need to do is drop bond yields.

00:18:58.000 So scare the crap out of people in the markets.

00:19:01.000 They move their money into what they think are more secure bonds.

00:19:04.000 And in doing so, they decrease the bond yields.

00:19:08.000 Meaning that the demand for bonds goes up.

00:19:09.000 When the demand for bonds goes up, it means that you can basically refinance the American debt.

00:19:14.000 People are going to buy American debt at lower interest rates.

00:19:17.000 And that means that when we pay off those interest rates, it will cost us less money.

00:19:22.000 So as she says, how to push yields down with sticky inflation and a cautious Fed?

00:19:26.000 Manufacture uncertainty.

00:19:27.000 You sweep in with tariffs, you spook the markets, you trigger a risk-off.

00:19:30.000 Money exits stocks, floods into long-term treasuries, a deliberate detox to cool the economy and cut refinancing costs.

00:19:36.000 And then you have to cut the deficit, and this is where Elon Musk and Doge are coming in.

00:19:41.000 With 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.

00:19:49.000 Tariffs come in as a trigger for domestic industrial revival.

00:19:51.000 The thing is, by making imports expensive, you create room for U.S. producers to step in.

00:19:55.000 But here is the problem.

00:19:56.000 It takes a while for American factories to scale up overnight.

00:20:00.000 In the meantime, they're offering near-term relief, like, for example, tax cuts or currency devaluation.

00:20:07.000 And the idea is the tariffs might bring in additional revenue.

00:20:10.000 But, as Ratna points out, this approach is not without risks.

00:20:13.000 If domestic supply chains can't catch up, or if global retaliation kicks in, inflation could start rising again.

00:20:17.000 If that happens, then the Fed actually raises rates, which blows a hole in the low-yield plan.

00:20:22.000 That's the tightrope.

00:20:25.000 And, not only that, tariffs could serve as leverage to renegotiate terms in terms of military deals with other countries, bilateral deals.

00:20:33.000 This 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.

00:20:50.000 If that's the plan, somebody ought to spell it out.

00:20:53.000 Again, 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.

00:21:00.000 Ratna sums this up well.

00:21:01.000 She says, if it works, it's a defining success.

00:21:03.000 Debt is more under control.

00:21:04.000 Manufacturing reborn.

00:21:05.000 Global leverage restored.

00:21:07.000 Trumpism vindicated in 2026.

00:21:08.000 If it fails, you get inflation, retaliation, lost midterms, and strategic drift.

00:21:13.000 So, that seems like a pretty good analysis of the case.

00:21:16.000 Which one do you think is more likely?

00:21:19.000 And the problem, of course, is that with total uncertainty, the chances of things like inflation go up.

00:21:26.000 With other countries retaliating.

00:21:28.000 Other countries have a say here in how this goes.

00:21:31.000 If those other countries come on Ben Dineen to President Trump and offer him a bunch of concessions, then okay.

00:21:37.000 But the administration isn't really being clear what it is looking for right now.

00:21:42.000 So the administration is sending some mixed signals.

00:21:44.000 On the one hand, President Trump is now suggesting that this is all prelude to negotiations, which, okay, fine.

00:21:49.000 I mean, hopefully he has some amazing negotiations out of this.

00:21:52.000 There's some early indicators that maybe you will.

00:21:54.000 Javier Mille is already attempting to make a deal with President Trump.

00:21:57.000 Bibi Netanyahu in Israel is attempting to make a deal with President Trump, pretty obviously.

00:22:00.000 Here's President Trump saying everybody's calling him.

00:22:03.000 Those tariffs have come in and every country's called us.

00:22:09.000 That's the beauty of what we do.

00:22:12.000 We put ourselves in the driver's seat.

00:22:15.000 If 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.

00:22:23.000 But we have tariffs, they've been set, and it's going to make our country very rich.

00:22:29.000 But are you open to deals with these countries if they're calling you?

00:22:33.000 Well, it depends.

00:22:33.000 If somebody said that we're going to give you something that's so phenomenal, as long as they're giving us something that's good.

00:22:40.000 So, maybe this is dealmaking, prelude to dealmaking, which is kind of what I suggested yesterday.

00:22:45.000 That's the probable path.

00:22:46.000 That this is on, so it's not going to be quite as bad as advertised, unless they just keep sticking with it.

00:22:50.000 But meanwhile, again, the market does not like mixed signals.

00:22:52.000 Peter Navarro, the president's trade advisor, was saying, no negotiations.

00:22:56.000 It's not a negotiation.

00:22:59.000 Guys, get on message.

00:23:02.000 This is not a negotiation, Jesse.

00:23:04.000 This 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.

00:23:30.000 So it's not a negotiation, but maybe it is a negotiation.

00:23:33.000 Well, how are countries to know?

00:23:35.000 Because if they think that it's not a negotiation, they're immediately going to reshift their trade relationships toward, wait for it, China.

00:23:43.000 And the mixed signals are part of the problem.

00:23:45.000 The messaging is part of the problem.

00:23:48.000 You know, President Trump is usually pretty open about what exactly he is looking for.

00:23:53.000 And so far, he has not been saying that he is looking for off-ramps with all of these countries.

00:23:57.000 His negotiation is possible, but Countries that have already offered an off-ramp.

00:24:01.000 Again, I use Israel as the key example here because they actually did it. 0.61

00:24:03.000 They literally just said zero tariffs.

00:24:05.000 And then they got hit with a 17% tariff.

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00:26:23.000 Well, the administration, again, is, I think, trying to, they're, let's put it this way, they're drawing on heavy political capital here.

00:26:30.000 They're basically saying, trust us.

00:26:32.000 It's trust us.

00:26:33.000 Well, markets are not in the business of trust us.

00:26:35.000 Markets 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.

00:26:42.000 President Trump, He says that he is confident the markets are going to boom.

00:26:46.000 The question is when, right?

00:26:48.000 If it's not soon, that's going to be a problem.

00:26:52.000 We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country and we've never seen anything like it.

00:27:00.000 The 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.

00:27:12.000 For many years, we've been at the wrong side of the ball.

00:27:16.000 And I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable.

00:27:20.000 Okay, well, okay, that's the case.

00:27:23.000 And then that is the case that Caroline Leavitt was making yesterday at the White House.

00:27:27.000 She said that there was not going to be pain incurred.

00:27:30.000 Again, you're getting mixed signals here.

00:27:31.000 There's Caroline Leavitt saying no pain, right?

00:27:33.000 So there are two messages.

00:27:35.000 You need pain in order to get long-term gain and there will be no pain message and they're kind of in conflict.

00:27:42.000 This won't be painful at all for American people and consumers, Caroline?

00:27:48.000 It's going to be...

00:27:49.000 There's not going to be any pain for American-owned companies and American workers because their jobs are going to come back home.

00:27:55.000 And again, as for prices, President Trump is working on tax cuts to put more money back into the pockets of Americans.

00:28:04.000 Okay. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is saying, we're not going to be able to fix things overnight.

00:28:08.000 Obviously, by the way, American workers are also American consumers.

00:28:10.000 They're the same.

00:28:11.000 You have a job and you also consume things.

00:28:13.000 Here's the vice president.

00:28:15.000 What I'd ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not going to fix things overnight.

00:28:21.000 Joe 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.

00:28:30.000 You don't fix that stuff overnight.

00:28:32.000 We know people are struggling.

00:28:33.000 We're fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it's not going to happen immediately.

00:28:42.000 Okay, well, this is a pretty big gamble here.

00:28:45.000 I mean, not immediate.

00:28:46.000 American politics works in terms of immediacy.

00:28:49.000 The stock market continued to tank today.

00:28:52.000 People are looking at that and they are not sanguine about it.

00:28:55.000 Is hiring going to be up this month based on these sort of expectations of what could come next or fear of what's going to come next?

00:29:03.000 And politicians, by the way, work on two-year cycles.

00:29:06.000 They work on 18-month cycles, increasingly.

00:29:09.000 A multiplicity of Republican senators have now come out and said, listen, we don't like this very much.

00:29:13.000 It has not been spelled out to us why this is necessary.

00:29:16.000 The strategy has not been explained to us.

00:29:18.000 What's the deal?

00:29:19.000 So Senator Rand Paul, who of course is a free market libertarian on this sort of stuff, he said this is clearly a tax.

00:29:26.000 Taxation without representation is tyranny.

00:29:31.000 Bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks and years leading up to the American Revolution.

00:29:36.000 It was non-negotiable.

00:29:39.000 This was what sparked the revolution.

00:29:43.000 And yet today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes.

00:29:51.000 Well, this is contrary to everything our country was founded upon.

00:29:55.000 One person is not allowed to raise taxes.

00:29:58.000 The Constitution forbids it.

00:30:02.000 Okay, but you say, well, you know, Rand Paul is always taking this sort of contraposition whenever it comes to government action.

00:30:09.000 He's sort of out there on his own, except he's not.

00:30:11.000 So, for example, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas has been a pretty solid Trump ally.

00:30:17.000 Here he was saying this is a risky thing that is happening here.

00:30:21.000 The consequences are yet to be fully known, but I would have thought they would have been less dramatic, less significant, and more targeted.

00:30:34.000 And 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.

00:31:00.000 He's been on the Trump bandwagon since then, basically.

00:31:02.000 Here's Ted Cruz saying, well, actually, this is a tax on consumers.

00:31:06.000 Because it is.

00:31:09.000 If 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.

00:31:18.000 Tariffs 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.

00:31:32.000 Okay, so again, I think that's everybody's hope in the Senate.

00:31:35.000 What's actually gonna happen in Congress?

00:31:36.000 So, the Senate's a different story.

00:31:38.000 Senators, they can say what they want because they've already moved to basically put limitations.

00:31:43.000 Chuck Grassley put forward a bill that says if there's no congressional renewal of this in 60 days, this stuff should just go away.

00:31:49.000 But the House of Representatives would have to sign on.

00:31:51.000 There's a massive misalignment of incentives in the House of Representatives.

00:31:54.000 Let's say that this tariff regime does not go particularly well.

00:31:57.000 And let's say that President Trump is willing, because he's not up for re-elect.

00:32:00.000 Let's say that he's willing to do the thing.

00:32:02.000 House Republicans are going to be split.

00:32:03.000 Many House Republicans are going to say, listen, I'm going to lose my seat.

00:32:06.000 In the next election cycle because of this deliberately created tariff policy.

00:32:11.000 So I don't like this very much.

00:32:12.000 But 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.

00:32:24.000 So basically, Trump better be right is what I got to say here.

00:32:29.000 Like either they better move off of this pretty quickly with bilateral trade deals or he better be right.

00:32:34.000 The 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.

00:32:44.000 And that does not just mean China.

00:32:45.000 China, of course, was going to retaliate.

00:32:47.000 China has now put forward a 34% tariff on American products, a direct response to President Trump's 34% tariff on China.

00:32:55.000 Listen, I have no problem with tariffing China. 0.96

00:32:57.000 I 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.

00:33:08.000 But the reason that China is doing that is because China is now stepping into the breach with our allies.

00:33:15.000 This is why we should not be treating Canada the way we treat China. 0.86

00:33:18.000 We should not be treating the EU the way we treat China.

00:33:20.000 Some of these places are allies of the United States and some of these places are enemies of the United States.

00:33:26.000 But, 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.

00:33:35.000 I take, for example, Canada.

00:33:37.000 It 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.

00:33:46.000 And Mark Carney, who is the definition of a global elite.

00:33:50.000 He's the definition of a globalist elite.

00:33:52.000 This guy, who was put in place by Justin Trudeau's party, He's out there excited as all hell about the trade war.

00:33:58.000 Why? Because now he gets to reorient Canada away from the United States and toward China.

00:34:02.000 So here is Mark Carney, who could not be more celebratory about this.

00:34:06.000 The 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.

00:34:20.000 And although their policy will hurt American families, until that pain becomes impossible to ignore, I do not believe they will change direction.

00:34:32.000 So, is Canada going to change direction?

00:34:35.000 Or does Mark Carney actually like the tariff war because the tariff war is keeping him in competition with Pierre Poliev?

00:34:41.000 How about the UK?

00:34:43.000 Do we think that Keir Starmer is going to come on bended knee to President Trump?

00:34:46.000 If so, why would he?

00:34:48.000 Because 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.

00:34:56.000 Here'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.

00:35:15.000 Nothing else will guide me.

00:35:18.000 That is my focus.

00:35:20.000 Meanwhile, by the way, Emmanuel Macron in France, he is urging everybody not to cut bilateral deals with the Trump administration.

00:35:31.000 Because the Trump administration has taken the side of Marine Le Pen, who's his chief opposition.

00:35:35.000 And so he is hoping that actually the trade war will escalate.

00:35:39.000 Other countries have a say in how the trade war goes.

00:35:42.000 And so there is this idea that no one will stand up to the United States and our economic power.

00:35:48.000 And that's a gamble, because there are a lot of places that don't like the United States very much.

00:35:52.000 Ursula von der Leyen, who's the leader of the EU, she was saying that the global economy is going to suffer.

00:35:58.000 The global economy will massively suffer.

00:36:02.000 Uncertainty will spiral and trigger the rise of further protectionism.

00:36:07.000 The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the globe.

00:36:13.000 Also for the most vulnerable countries.

00:36:16.000 Which are now subject to some of the highest US tariffs.

00:36:22.000 So let's say that this doesn't result in other countries lowering their tariffs immediately, it results in other countries increasing their tariffs.

00:36:30.000 You're likely to actually get price inflation.

00:36:32.000 The 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.

00:36:47.000 What's happening right now is a major gamble at best.

00:36:50.000 The best way to characterize it is a major gamble by the Trump administration.

00:36:53.000 Now maybe the gamble pays off, but what that's going to rely upon is President Trump making deals now.

00:36:58.000 Now it's dealmaker time.

00:37:00.000 Because 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.

00:37:17.000 I think if the headlines are bad, he adjusts.

00:37:20.000 We just don't know.

00:37:22.000 And uncertainty is, again, its own form of economic risk.

00:37:26.000 And investors know that.

00:37:27.000 So 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?

00:37:43.000 to 3.5%.

00:37:45.000 Currently, they're just below 4%.

00:37:47.000 And 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.

00:38:11.000 You could also get revenues that are taken in by the tariffs, which effectively, as I mentioned, is in fact a tax increase.

00:38:17.000 So 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.

00:38:26.000 Now, the reality is that over the long term, that isn't going to solve the problem.

00:38:30.000 Only serious restructuring of entitlements is going to solve the problem, particularly means-based entitlement programs.

00:38:37.000 However, 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.

00:38:46.000 And so it's a short-term pain in order to kind of hold steady.

00:38:51.000 That's the best case that you can make for these.

00:38:53.000 Maybe that's what President Trump is doing.

00:38:55.000 And 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.

00:39:08.000 Well, while Republicans are struggling over tariffs and what exactly is going to happen, Democrats have some serious struggles of their own.

00:39:14.000 Ezra 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.

00:39:23.000 He sounds kind of like a Republican sometimes.

00:39:26.000 Ezra, thanks so much for the time.

00:39:27.000 Really appreciate it.

00:39:28.000 Thanks for having me.

00:39:29.000 How are you feeling, Ben?

00:39:30.000 How liberated?

00:39:31.000 I 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.

00:39:39.000 And I'd like to see, you know, some stability out of the markets.

00:39:42.000 I'd like to see the president actually explain what he is doing and what he intends to do with the tariff regimen here.

00:39:48.000 But 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.

00:39:57.000 And 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.

00:40:10.000 And what you end up with is an unworkable system.

00:40:12.000 That seems to be one of the main themes of abundance.

00:40:14.000 Oh, that's a good connection.

00:40:15.000 I haven't thought of that.

00:40:16.000 So 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.

00:40:26.000 And then the everything bagel from everything, everywhere, all at once, which gets everything on and becomes a black hole.

00:40:32.000 There 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.

00:40:43.000 You 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.

00:40:53.000 Same thing can be said for California high-speed rail.

00:40:56.000 This 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.

00:41:05.000 It's by no means just a left-wing problem.

00:41:07.000 The Trump tariff policy, as far as I can tell, has at least four distinctive goals.

00:41:11.000 One is to raise money.

00:41:12.000 Another is to insource production that has gone to other countries.

00:41:17.000 Another is to create leverage against other countries.

00:41:21.000 And 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.

00:41:30.000 And you can't pursue all of those at once.

00:41:33.000 For instance, you can't raise the money and change the manufacturing structure.

00:41:37.000 You can't keep prices low but also move the manufacturing decisions.

00:41:41.000 You need a lot of stability for companies that are making five to ten year investment decisions.

00:41:45.000 So it's a good point.

00:41:47.000 So, you know, there are a few things here that there's so much in your book to talk about.

00:41:51.000 Let's focus in on sort of the regulatory side that you're talking about, the everything bagel liberalism that you're talking about.

00:41:58.000 One 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.

00:42:06.000 I'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.

00:42:13.000 But does that have to do with what people perceive to be the proper role of government in general?

00:42:18.000 You kind of separate those two questions a little bit in the book.

00:42:22.000 What is the proper role of government?

00:42:23.000 I agree with you.

00:42:24.000 In 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.

00:42:35.000 But it's really not big government versus small government.

00:42:38.000 It's more of the proper role of government.

00:42:40.000 And 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.

00:42:47.000 And to me, you can get into some messy definitions there.

00:42:50.000 How do you get into an area where it's not government overreach?

00:42:52.000 Because it turns out that the government can nearly always declare that something is a justice-based good.

00:42:56.000 And once it's a justice-based good, then you do have everybody trying to kind of put their fingers in the pie.

00:43:01.000 Well, you do.

00:43:02.000 You air-quoted justice-based goods, but that's not a term I use.

00:43:05.000 What 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?

00:43:14.000 Healthcare and housing and education.

00:43:16.000 And as such, both Republicans and Democrats alike have spent now collectively trillions of dollars subsidizing them.

00:43:21.000 The distinction I'm drawing there is just something like flat-screen televisions or a VR headset.

00:43:26.000 There are things that, if we do not have enough of them, Or the price discrimination is such that a lot of people can't buy them.

00:43:32.000 We don't consider that a matter of justice.

00:43:34.000 If you can't have an Oculus headset, it's fine.

00:43:36.000 You can't have an Oculus headset.

00:43:38.000 We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can have a home.

00:43:41.000 We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can get health care if you are sick.

00:43:45.000 I mean, we have a law that says hospitals have to treat people if you walk into that emergency room, irrespective of ability to pay.

00:43:53.000 And so we've made that set of decisions already.

00:43:55.000 What 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

00:44:09.000 We don't So, I is move liberals to think more about the supply of the goods that they want everyone to have.

00:44:38.000 I'm not really, nor is Derek in the project here, adding a bunch of ideas of categories of goods that we should subsidize.

00:44:45.000 What I'm saying is that we have a lot of things that we say we want everybody to have.

00:44:49.000 We 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.

00:44:55.000 And in many, many, many cases, we have allowed government So in the book,

00:45:21.000 how do you make the balance between, for example, things you need to subsidize more supply of?

00:45:26.000 How do you make the distinction between doing that in a market-based way and doing that in an actual direct subsidy-based way?

00:45:31.000 So, for example, you mentioned housing.

00:45:32.000 Obviously, one of the big restrictions on housing, I used to live in Los Angeles, is all the housing regulation.

00:45:38.000 Tremendous regulation in terms of how you build, can you build, can you rent your garage out to somebody.

00:45:43.000 This is a big thing when I was living there.

00:45:44.000 Can 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.

00:45:50.000 You were not allowed to do this as a sort of grandma suite.

00:45:53.000 Uh, for a very long time in California.

00:45:55.000 How 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?

00:46:07.000 And then how do you distinguish ideologically between what there is liberal versus what is conservative?

00:46:11.000 Because 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?

00:46:18.000 It's a great question.

00:46:18.000 So let me take that in a couple different pieces.

00:46:20.000 So 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.

00:46:28.000 So in the question you're asking, what would I subsidize?

00:46:31.000 What would I have the government do directly?

00:46:32.000 Let's take housing as the core example here.

00:46:35.000 In 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.

00:46:44.000 But 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.

00:46:53.000 I happened to read on an airplane last night a new report from the Rand Corporation, and it's a fantastic report.

00:47:00.000 I'm so much more enthusiastic about this report than other people are going to be listening to this.

00:47:04.000 But it's about the cost of construction of homes in California, in Texas, and in Colorado.

00:47:10.000 And it's about the cost of construction of multi-family housing of two types, one market rate and the other subsidized by the public.

00:47:17.000 And 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.

00:47:35.000 Per square foot, much more expensive than even the market rate housing.

00:47:38.000 Now, there's nothing inevitable about that.

00:47:40.000 In Colorado, it doesn't work that way.

00:47:42.000 And I don't think most liberals would say Colorado is a dystopic, conservative hellscape.

00:47:47.000 But 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.

00:47:58.000 My 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.

00:48:22.000 If 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.

00:48:37.000 are not gonna be affordable to get the things you want.

00:48:55.000 Publicly subsidized affordable housing.

00:48:57.000 So to my view, whether you call that goal liberal or conservative, it is a good goal and the right thing to be shooting for.

00:49:03.000 Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I'm no longer a Californian, specifically because California became such a hellscape.

00:49:06.000 I moved my entire family to Florida years ago.

00:49:08.000 But you were born there, right?

00:49:09.000 Of course, of course.

00:49:10.000 You can't completely give it up.

00:49:11.000 I'm in New York, but I'm in California next.

00:49:12.000 I gave it up pretty damn fast, man.

00:49:14.000 Florida's great.

00:49:14.000 But, 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.

00:49:25.000 It feels like that is increasingly not the case in the country in a lot of different ways.

00:49:29.000 But there is a means distinction.

00:49:31.000 I'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.

00:49:40.000 Maybe you can do that on individual one-off emergency projects.

00:49:43.000 Operation Warp Speed.

00:49:44.000 It's time for war. 0.97

00:49:45.000 We need to motivate Ford to start making airplanes.

00:49:48.000 And that's why I think people on the left are so fond of declaring wars on things.

00:49:51.000 It's a war on poverty.

00:49:52.000 It's a war on drugs.

00:49:54.000 It's a war on housing shortages.

00:49:57.000 Because if you declare it a war, that means you get to clear all the decks and now it's an emergency.

00:50:00.000 And with emergencies, you can sort of wipe everything off the bagel and just go with the bagel, right?

00:50:04.000 You 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.

00:50:13.000 But 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.

00:50:25.000 And the people who are elected are going to be answerable to a lot of those people.

00:50:30.000 If 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.

00:50:42.000 I think that the conservative argument would be the reason to minimize government.

00:50:46.000 In 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?

00:51:12.000 And by the people, I mean various lobbying groups and various industry groups.

00:51:16.000 And then is the best way to do that just to deprive the government of the cash and base yourself more on market-based solutions?

00:51:22.000 I think this is where it's very helpful to be grounded in both specific examples and specific policies.

00:51:29.000 Because yes, conceptually, all that is true.

00:51:32.000 And 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.

00:51:39.000 And 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.

00:51:52.000 And the difference there is not that Spain, France and Japan don't have governments.

00:51:58.000 It's not that they don't have unions.

00:51:59.000 They have higher union density than we do.

00:52:01.000 It's that they have a very different structure of how they do government.

00:52:04.000 So 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.

00:52:15.000 That was one way of trying to avoid tyranny.

00:52:17.000 But what you created is a very ineffective form of government.

00:52:20.000 So one thing I think worth just saying is that we can see this working very differently in different places.

00:52:25.000 as 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.

00:52:36.000 But 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.

00:52:45.000 This cleavage that I'm trying to cut occurs on both sides.

00:52:49.000 On 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.

00:52:59.000 So the New Deal left was very growth-oriented, very building-oriented.

00:53:03.000 It created a lot of physical infrastructure, created highways because Dwight Eisenhower was sort of part of this political order.

00:53:09.000 And it did things very fast.

00:53:11.000 And 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.

00:53:20.000 And, 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.

00:53:28.000 So these things often were bipartisan in their times.

00:53:30.000 But over time, they're not the right policy equilibrium for the next stage.

00:53:34.000 On the right, though, you have the same issue.

00:53:36.000 So you have a I don't want to call it an Yeah, absolutely.

00:53:46.000 And then you have a scarcity right, a populist right, which is currently the right in power.

00:53:51.000 And 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.

00:53:57.000 On the campaign trail again and again, they use it as an argument for deporting immigrants.

00:54:01.000 when 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.

00:54:35.000 So my view is that the sort of supply side of both parties has a fight on its hands.

00:54:40.000 And the fight is different, and it plays out in different ways.

00:54:42.000 But 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.

00:54:59.000 These are man-made processes that can be unmade or reformed.

00:55:03.000 And that should always give you a sense of hope.

00:55:06.000 So let's talk briefly about the two parties.

00:55:09.000 Obviously, I agree with a lot of your characterization of what you just discussed.

00:55:13.000 I 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.

00:55:21.000 And 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.

00:55:27.000 It seems like the left, what wing is left of the Democratic Party at this point that you would say is rich in abundance liberalism?

00:55:35.000 I can spot abundance conservatives everywhere.

00:55:36.000 Some of them are in hiding.

00:55:37.000 Some of them are being pretty quiet right now.

00:55:39.000 But 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.

00:55:47.000 Because that is kind of in the bones of, the Reagan bones are still part of the skeleton of the Republican Party.

00:55:53.000 The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left in a lot of different ways.

00:55:56.000 And 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.

00:56:03.000 I have been extraordinary.

00:56:04.000 I'll say two things about this.

00:56:06.000 One is it just somebody just released a book on this.

00:56:08.000 I've been extraordinarily pleased with how much the center of the Democratic establishment is engaging with this book quite quite seriously.

00:56:15.000 So 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.

00:56:20.000 And he's been he's been working on this and it's very and it's very interesting.

00:56:23.000 It'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.

00:56:29.000 To be fair, he shouted every book out ever written in his 25-hour speech.

00:56:32.000 It was a lot of hours, but nevertheless, he's read it, as have a bunch of others.

00:56:36.000 So, 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.

00:56:42.000 To 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.

00:56:52.000 At 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.

00:57:02.000 So the Biden administration, compared to the first Trump administration, compared to the Obama administration, was quite committed to an atypically physical Let's To

00:57:41.000 build 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.

00:57:47.000 Brian 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.

00:58:00.000 So 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.

00:58:28.000 And 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.

00:58:49.000 And 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.

00:58:58.000 That's the last point.

00:59:00.000 And I know you...

00:59:01.000 I know we have to run here, but I think that's the last point.

00:59:03.000 The coalition of the Democratic Party is not conducive yet to the kind of change that you're talking about.

00:59:09.000 The 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.

00:59:34.000 I 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.

00:59:45.000 And I think that has to do with Biden's particular issues and his age and where his focus was.

00:59:50.000 And I think that has to do with the culture of the Democratic Party that had sort of evolved over a period of time.

00:59:54.000 And now that's going to have to change.

00:59:56.000 I think it's quite widely acknowledged that that was a problem.

00:59:59.000 And 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.

01:00:08.000 Donald Trump has reshaped the Republican coalition, not by kicking everybody who is in it out.

01:00:13.000 In part, it's persuasion.

01:00:14.000 People have come to believe things they did not believe before.

01:00:17.000 You 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.

01:00:28.000 But look, Trump changed his party on immigration, on trade, on isolationism, on Europe, on Russia, right?

01:00:35.000 I 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.

01:00:42.000 Barack 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.

01:00:59.000 What's going to come next is going to have to be different.

01:01:01.000 It's not trying to re-put together the old thing.

01:01:03.000 The old thing has failed now.

01:01:05.000 It's going to be putting together the new thing.

01:01:06.000 I'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.

01:01:23.000 Well, the book is Abundance.

01:01:24.000 Ezra Klein is the co-author, along with Derek Thompson.

01:01:26.000 Ezra, really appreciate the time.

01:01:27.000 Congrats on the book.

01:01:28.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:01:29.000 I appreciate it.

01:01:29.000 Well, meanwhile, in other weird news from the White House, apparently President Trump had Laura Loomer in.

01:01:34.000 You remember Laura Loomer.

01:01:35.000 She was actually kicked off Air Force One on 9-11 because she was flying with the president.

01:01:41.000 There were a lot of his aides who were really kind of upset about it.

01:01:44.000 It wasn't Air Force One.

01:01:45.000 It was Trump Force One.

01:01:45.000 He wasn't elected yet.

01:01:47.000 And people were upset that Loomer was traveling with the president.

01:01:49.000 They were saying that she was saying kind of wild things to the president.

01:01:52.000 There's a lot of speculation about the kind of advice she was giving the president.

01:01:54.000 And, of course, she had some tweets about 9-11 that were...

01:01:57.000 Bad tweet.

01:01:59.000 And so the president sort of said, well, she doesn't need to be on the plane anymore. 0.88

01:02:01.000 Well, 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.

01:02:11.000 And he promptly fired a bunch of them.

01:02:12.000 That seems to be the best read on this story.

01:02:16.000 There's an all purpose term that is used by people who try to oust people inside the Trump circle, and that is neocon.

01:02:23.000 And so she basically just Apparently labeled a bunch of people neocons who are not in fact neocons.

01:02:26.000 Neocon is a specific designation for people who were democrats in the 1960s and 70s and then they became conservative.

01:02:32.000 Hence, neo-con.

01:02:34.000 They were new conservatives.

01:02:36.000 They were liberals who were mugged by reality.

01:02:38.000 Used to be the description of neocons.

01:02:40.000 And 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.

01:02:52.000 And that Wing of the Republican Party is just gone.

01:02:55.000 It does not exist anymore.

01:02:56.000 No one in the Republican Party, no one, believes in nation-building by the United States.

01:03:01.000 The United States needs 100-year occupations of places and full-scale nation-building.

01:03:06.000 It's a much more pragmatic Republican Party.

01:03:08.000 The 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.

01:03:22.000 In 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.

01:03:30.000 Two other National Security Council aides were let go on Sunday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

01:03:35.000 Those staffers worked on a series of portfolios, including intelligence, India, congressional affairs, and the impact of technology security.

01:03:42.000 Two people added this was the latest round of firings.

01:03:44.000 There will be at least 10 people ousted from the NSC by the end of the second round.

01:03:48.000 And 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.

01:04:01.000 Let's just say, I hope the staffing protocols at the White House are stronger than single recommendations by Laura Loomer.

01:04:11.000 I think that that is probably not the best way to staff an administration.

01:04:16.000 Let's just leave it at that.

01:04:18.000 And meanwhile, in lighter news, in cultural news, you know, I understand.

01:04:23.000 The markets are putting me in a bad mood.

01:04:24.000 Also, I want President Trump's plans to succeed.

01:04:27.000 As 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.

01:04:34.000 And so I'm in a bit of a bad mood, I'll be honest with you.

01:04:37.000 But 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.

01:04:46.000 Now, as y'all know, not a huge James Gunn fan.

01:04:49.000 Finding Guardians of the Galaxy, when it's all sort of like ridiculous humor, kind of gonzo humor, people unsurfaced.

01:04:56.000 His 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.

01:05:04.000 And 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.

01:05:13.000 And now he's directing the new Superman movie.

01:05:16.000 And we can watch this preview together.

01:05:20.000 It sucks.

01:05:21.000 It's bad.

01:05:21.000 I hate to break it to you.

01:05:22.000 It's just, it's terrible.

01:05:24.000 Here we go.

01:05:29.000 So for those who can't see, Superman is wounded and he is lying on the snow.

01:05:34.000 The original preview, it just showed at this point Crypto the dog arriving, but this preview is much longer.

01:05:39.000 Here comes Crypto.

01:05:40.000 He whistles for Crypto, the super dog.

01:05:42.000 So Crypto arrives.

01:05:44.000 And then Crypto proceeds to, for well over a minute, beat the living hell out of Superman.

01:05:51.000 He's screaming in pain as Crypto jumps on him.

01:05:57.000 And continues to nudge him, bite him.

01:06:05.000 Okay, I don't see the purpose of this.

01:06:11.000 So this is not dramatic, it's just silly and ridiculous.

01:06:15.000 And then finally Crypto figures out that he needs to take Superman back to the Fortress of Solitude.

01:06:24.000 Every James Gunn joke is a Monty Python joke, just lasts three times too long.

01:06:28.000 So now Crypto is dragging Superman's prone body through the snow back toward the Fortress of Solitude, which arises from the Arctic.

01:06:39.000 And it's a cool-looking Fortress of Solitude, I'll give you that.

01:06:42.000 But don't worry, it gets worse.

01:06:44.000 Once 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.

01:06:57.000 Superman! Superman!

01:07:02.000 Here come the robots.

01:07:06.000 They pick him up and they're carrying him.

01:07:15.000 Thank you.

01:07:16.000 No need to thank us, sir, as we will not appreciate it.

01:07:20.000 We have no consciousness whatsoever.

01:07:22.000 Merely automatons here to serve.

01:07:25.000 Meet Twelve.

01:07:26.000 She's new. 0.84

01:07:30.000 He looked at me.

01:07:32.000 With a healthy dose of yellow sun, we'll have you up and at him in no time.

01:07:39.000 Okay, and then they're going to hit Superman with a magnifying glass.

01:07:52.000 All right.

01:07:53.000 And now he's, uh, painfully absorbing the sun, which apparently was not available before.

01:07:58.000 So 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.

01:08:10.000 We 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.

01:08:20.000 The entire attitude here is wrong.

01:08:21.000 The entire attitude is wrong.

01:08:23.000 The gold standard for Superman movies remains the original Superman from the late 70s by Richard Donner.

01:08:29.000 By far the best Superman movie.

01:08:31.000 Not close.

01:08:31.000 Better than Man of Steel.

01:08:32.000 Significantly better.

01:08:34.000 Because 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.

01:08:44.000 And it's very...

01:08:46.000 The color palette is very rich, and very bright.

01:08:51.000 Man of Steel, they basically desaturate the entire film.

01:08:54.000 So, the entire color palette is grayscale, and kind of ugly, and dark, and the entire character of Superman is much darker.

01:09:03.000 The... Attitude here is totally wrong.

01:09:07.000 It's just Guardians of the Galaxy in a Superman suit, and that ticks me off.

01:09:10.000 It really does, because as a lifelong fan of the Superman brand, let me just say that it's not that hard to get Superman right.

01:09:16.000 He's supposed to be the embodiment of everything cool and heroic about America, and, of course, he's supposed to be charming as well.

01:09:23.000 That's the whole shtick.

01:09:25.000 So you don't need full-scale James Gunn.

01:09:27.000 He'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.

01:09:36.000 It's silly and stupid and bad.

01:09:38.000 Do not like.

01:09:39.000 Two thumbs down.

01:09:40.000 Very disappointed.

01:09:42.000 Ugh. Angry.

01:09:44.000 Okay. 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.

01:09:50.000 In 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.

01:10:00.000 So, 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.

01:10:06.000 I would hope so, because unfortunately, both leading actresses seem to be starving themselves into submission. 1.00

01:10:10.000 I mean, they really look rough out there.

01:10:13.000 Meanwhile, Spider-Man 4 has been...

01:10:16.000 The release of it has been announced.

01:10:17.000 July 31st, 2026.

01:10:20.000 That is one week after Christopher Nolan's new film, The Odyssey.

01:10:23.000 Which, again, I'm up for anything Christopher Nolan.

01:10:27.000 John Wick 5 has been announced.

01:10:28.000 And 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.

01:10:39.000 Obviously, he wasn't dead at the end of John Wick 4. That was obviously clear.

01:10:42.000 There was a joke going around, however.

01:10:44.000 He was supposed to be dead.

01:10:44.000 They're at his grave.

01:10:45.000 And so, John Wick 5, John Wick in Hell, was, I thought, a pretty funny pitch.

01:10:52.000 There's a Naked Gun reboot that is coming.

01:10:54.000 Now, again, I think it's kind of sad that the Zucker brothers weren't involved in the Naked Gun reboot.

01:10:59.000 They're the ones who were responsible for the first Naked Gun.

01:11:01.000 There's one funny joke in the Naked Gun reboot, and it's about O.J. Simpson.

01:11:04.000 It is a pretty good joke.

01:11:07.000 Hi, Daddy.

01:11:09.000 It's me, Frank Jr.

01:11:10.000 Love you.

01:11:11.000 Hey, Dad.

01:11:12.000 Boy, do I miss you.

01:11:17.000 And that joke put me in a better mood.

01:11:21.000 It did.

01:11:21.000 And 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.

01:11:36.000 There's no question.

01:11:37.000 It's clear in the books.

01:11:39.000 I mean, down to the resurrection of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

01:11:44.000 The voice is now going to be Meryl Streep, which makes no sense at all on a character level.

01:11:49.000 It makes no sense at all on a metaphorical level.

01:11:51.000 It's one of the dumbest things you could possibly do.

01:11:53.000 If you want to alienate the entire C.S. Lewis audience, this is the thing you should do.

01:11:59.000 Meanwhile, Charli XCX is apparently in talks for the role of the White Witch.

01:12:03.000 But why?

01:12:05.000 Why are you doing this?

01:12:06.000 Just adapt it straight.

01:12:08.000 It's not that difficult.

01:12:09.000 It's a good book.

01:12:10.000 Just adapt it straight.

01:12:12.000 This is the same as that ridiculous suggestion a while back that Cynthia Erivo was going to be cast in Jesus Christ Superstar as Jesus.

01:12:23.000 Stop with this stuff.

01:12:24.000 Stop it.

01:12:25.000 Just stop.

01:12:25.000 It's stupid and it's insulting and it's gross and you would never do this With any other religion, you wouldn't.

01:12:31.000 It's ridiculous and annoying and just demonstrative of how Hollywood spits on people who don't believe the things they believe.

01:12:40.000 And then takes classic intellectual property from those spaces and uses it against them.

01:12:45.000 Unpleasant. Bad.

01:12:46.000 Do not like.

01:12:47.000 Well, you know, the markets were down today.

01:12:50.000 It's been a rough couple of days, but I did want to leave you with a bit of a picker-upper before the weekend.

01:12:55.000 I sat down with Senator Dave McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, the authors of a brand new book titled Who Believed in You?

01:13:01.000 How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World.

01:13:03.000 It is out right now in bookstores.

01:13:05.000 Here's what our conversation sounded like.

01:13:07.000 Joining us on the line are my friends Dave McCormick and Dina Powell McCormick.

01:13:11.000 Dave, 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.

01:13:21.000 Guys, thanks so much for joining the show.

01:13:22.000 Really appreciate it.

01:13:23.000 Thanks, Ben.

01:13:24.000 Thanks so much, Ben.

01:13:25.000 Great to be with you.

01:13:26.000 You have a brand new book out that's coming out on April 1st called Who Believed in You?

01:13:30.000 How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World.

01:13:32.000 So, Senator, let's start with you.

01:13:34.000 Why was this book necessary?

01:13:35.000 What do you think makes this book good for this time?

01:13:38.000 Well, you know, we had an experience during COVID where our six daughters were with us.

01:13:43.000 They were disconnected from their friends, their family, their teachers, their coaches.

01:13:48.000 And Dean and I started to talk about how, at that same point in our lives, mentors Had made all the difference for us.

01:13:57.000 And 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.

01:14:06.000 For me, it was a football coach who saw promise in me and made me the team captain.

01:14:11.000 And that changed my life, helped me get into West Point.

01:14:14.000 Dina can tell her story.

01:14:16.000 And 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.

01:14:34.000 So, 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.

01:14:39.000 How much does mentorship mean with regard to entrepreneurialism?

01:14:43.000 You know what?

01:14:44.000 It is so critical, Ben.

01:14:45.000 When 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.

01:14:56.000 A lot of the work that I did through 10,000 women was female entrepreneurs in the US and around the world.

01:15:02.000 There's one really hysterical story about a woman in Egypt in Cairo, Egypt, who started a company called Pink Taxis, female drivers.

01:15:10.000 Female passengers, her husband was totally against it, said, you're not going to work. 1.00

01:15:14.000 She started making so much money, he became the COO.

01:15:17.000 And it took one mentor to say to her, you've got this, you can do it.

01:15:21.000 I know in our trailer, which we're so honored that you are in, you say something so important that even resonated with our kids.

01:15:27.000 You say, run to the fire, whatever position you're in, go to the hardest problem, run to the fire.

01:15:32.000 Believe 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.

01:15:41.000 Think about who believed in you, Ben, and that experience of shadowing them, following them.

01:15:46.000 We really think the country right now needs this generation to step up, be values-driven leaders.

01:15:51.000 And the path to that is every one of us investing in them.

01:15:54.000 So, 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.

01:16:03.000 Maybe 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.

01:16:13.000 Yeah, leadership and mentorship are really close cousins.

01:16:16.000 You know, when you're a leader, you have to stand up and help everybody find their best selves.

01:16:21.000 But mentorship is very personal, it's very intimate.

01:16:23.000 And 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.

01:16:33.000 You have to trust someone that they're with you, that you can be vulnerable with them, that they have your best interest in mind.

01:16:39.000 The second thing is values.

01:16:41.000 What we're trying to teach people through mentorship is the values that are going to guide them.

01:16:45.000 It's not just about the transaction of helping them get the next job.

01:16:48.000 It's about the values by which they're going to live their lives.

01:16:51.000 The third is commitment.

01:16:53.000 So it's a mutual promise to one another that you're going to engage and use that relationship for mutual benefit.

01:17:01.000 And then the final thing, and this came up over and over again, is confidence.

01:17:05.000 Because as you know, Ben, and anybody that's been successful knows, that it's not a straight line.

01:17:11.000 You're going to find adversity.

01:17:12.000 You're going to have to overcome failure.

01:17:14.000 I certainly did that.

01:17:15.000 I lost my first Senate race and then won my second.

01:17:18.000 Overcoming failure and having mentors give you the confidence To get into the arena, to find your place, that's what great mentorship does.

01:17:27.000 And at a very intimate level, it's hard to do that across a unit of 500 or 1,000.

01:17:35.000 You can do it very intimately on a one-on-one mentoring relationship.

01:17:38.000 So, Dina, obviously the story, the book, Who Believed in You, is filled with tremendous stories.

01:17:42.000 What's your favorite story from the book?

01:17:45.000 There are so many, you know, from Satya Nadella to David Chang, Brian Grazer, Condi Rice.

01:17:50.000 Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

01:17:52.000 I gotta say, I love her story.

01:17:55.000 She talks about two big mentors in her life.

01:17:57.000 Obviously, 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.

01:18:06.000 And President Trump, I mean, she was really attacked in that job in a ruthless way, as you remember.

01:18:11.000 And 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.

01:18:18.000 So don't let them see you sweat.

01:18:20.000 And 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.

01:18:30.000 You know, in my case, Ben, there were so many mentors that I had from the CEOs I worked for, obviously, to government leaders.

01:18:38.000 But 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.

01:18:54.000 to pay for college at the University of Texas in Austin.

01:18:57.000 And I, you know, was dutifully doing what my parents said.

01:19:00.000 They said, you got three options.

01:19:02.000 You can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.

01:19:04.000 That's why we left Egypt.

01:19:05.000 So you could pursue something like that.

01:19:08.000 I'd gotten into law school.

01:19:09.000 I was heading there and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison found me.

01:19:13.000 She started mentoring me.

01:19:14.000 She said, you got to defer law school and come work for me in DC for a year as an intern.

01:19:18.000 And I was like, my parents are never going to let me do that.

01:19:21.000 And I can't believe you think I can.

01:19:23.000 And she said, trust me, I'll get you the deferral to law school.

01:19:26.000 My dad, Ben, said, I don't even know why we left Egypt.

01:19:29.000 He was very upset.

01:19:30.000 But that is literally the way I got to Washington.

01:19:33.000 I worked for almost eight years for Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, and eventually for President Bush.

01:19:39.000 And after my business career, back to working for President Trump.

01:19:42.000 Just think about it.

01:19:43.000 Without that one person in my life, I would have never.

01:19:47.000 So, Senator McCormick, there are a lot of young people who don't know how to take the first step toward finding a mentor.

01:19:53.000 For many of us, a mentor is sort of natural.

01:19:55.000 For me, my father is a mentor.

01:19:57.000 My mom's a mentor.

01:19:58.000 I have lots of people around me.

01:19:59.000 And those of us who are lucky, we have that sort of naturally.

01:20:02.000 But mentorship, you can luck into it.

01:20:03.000 But for people who are actively seeking a mentor, what's the best way to take a first step?

01:20:07.000 Well, I think that often the best mentoring relationships happen organically.

01:20:11.000 You encounter someone in your life, and they take an interest, and you invest in them, and they invest in you.

01:20:16.000 But I think you have to be explicit and ask someone, hey, would you be willing to give me advice?

01:20:22.000 And you have to be committed to it and forthright about it, and you have to be respectful.

01:20:26.000 If you're the mentee, that the person that you're asking support from may not have all the time, so be very disciplined.

01:20:32.000 We talk in the book about how to be a good mentee.

01:20:35.000 And, you know, you don't get an hour.

01:20:37.000 Steve Schwartzman talks about a meeting, which was a remarkable meeting.

01:20:42.000 He wrote a letter to Avril Hairman, and Avril Hairman wrote him back and said, yeah, I'd be happy to sit down.

01:20:49.000 And Steve went and sat down with Avril Hairman, and Avril Hairman gave him advice on how to think about his career in life.

01:20:55.000 It wasn't like he sat down weekly with Avril Hairman, but he used that moment in a way that really changed his life.

01:21:02.000 My favorite story, It's about Brian Grazier, who I think you know, Ben.

01:21:06.000 Brian talks about this incredible encounter.

01:21:10.000 He 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.

01:21:23.000 And he had been writing two scripts.

01:21:26.000 He got in the meeting.

01:21:27.000 He was pitching his two scripts.

01:21:28.000 And the bird, she had a canary behind her in the birdcage. 1.00

01:21:32.000 fell off the stoop and died right in front of her.

01:21:34.000 And she had this hilarious reaction. 0.99

01:21:38.000 She 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.

01:21:46.000 But she took him on as a mentee, and she would take him around Hollywood and introduce him to all the big names.

01:21:54.000 But he kept getting, the meetings never followed up, like he never got further.

01:21:58.000 And she finally pulled him aside.

01:22:00.000 And this is key to mentorship.

01:22:01.000 It's tough love.

01:22:02.000 She pulled him aside.

01:22:03.000 She said, listen, I've gotten the feedback from these meetings.

01:22:06.000 I've been into myself.

01:22:07.000 You exaggerate.

01:22:09.000 People think you're not being truthful.

01:22:11.000 They think you're lying.

01:22:12.000 And so they're not following up.

01:22:14.000 You got a good start, but you finish weak.

01:22:17.000 And he was like, oh my God, people think that I'm not being truthful.

01:22:21.000 And that was like a major fork in the road, which changed The book, again, is Who Believes in You?

01:22:48.000 How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World Available.

01:22:51.000 April 1st.

01:22:52.000 Senator McCormick, Dina, great to see both of you and congrats on the book.

01:22:55.000 Thank you.

01:22:56.000 And if people want to buy it, they go to whobelievedinyou.com.

01:22:59.000 Thank you so much, Ben.

01:23:01.000 All right, guys, coming up, we'll jump into the mailbag.

01:23:04.000 Remember 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.

01:23:11.000 Do it right now.

01:23:11.000 Become a member.

01:23:12.000 Use code SHAPIRO.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - April 04, 2025

FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On

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