What was the feeling the first time you were on Air Force One?
Or Marine One?
Is there a special thing where you're just like, what is going on?
Yeah.
Yeah.
When you're on these things, it's amazing.
Yeah.
Right?
You are where real conversations happen.
You're part of history.
Putin.
So I get on Air Force One at 5 AM.
He gets on at 5 45.
We fly to Alaska.
So we're talking about it.
Then we were there for four hours with Putin.
And then we fly back.
Now, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff go take a nap, because we have to wait for Zelensky to wake up.
It's called Zelensky and we have to wait for the European leaders to wake up because it's the middle of the night.
So I stay up with the president.
And we're just chatting.
We're just chatting, watching golf.
I mean, it's a lot of hours.
So then Zelensky wakes up.
So they get on the phone with Zelensky.
And he talks to Zelensky on his phone.
And then when he calls the European leaders, when they get up they want to have this only secure call.
So there's three secure handsets in his office.
So he's on one.
Rubio's on one.
And Witkoff's on one.
And I'm just sitting on the couch.
This is in Air Force One.
In Air Force One, in his office.
So I'm just sitting on the couch.
And I've been up for like 20 hours.
And the president's been up for 20 hours.
But he's on the phone.
And the European leaders are talking.
So I'm just sitting there.
And they're all on handsets.
So I can't hear a word that anybody's saying.
And I'm just sitting there.
So I fall asleep.
Okay.
So I'm just sitting there, they're talking on the phone like right there, and I post like this
So I'm like that.
So Witkoff elbows the president, right?
Points to me.
And then the president unrolls a tootsie roll.
He goes like this.
I just throw it into my mouth.
It hits him in the face.
I wake up.
He goes, Howard, while you're napping, we're trying to settle world peace.
Well, welcome everybody to the All In interview.
I'd like to welcome Secretary Howard Lutnick, our esteemed Secretary of Commerce.
When we did the first interview with you, it was at the beginning of the administration.
It was almost a year ago.
And to be honest, it turned out to be one of the most popular things we've ever done.
There's the Elon Musk view factor, but then there was the Howard Ludnick view factor and they were pretty much side by side actually.
It's great that you gave us a chance a year later to come back and talk to you.
Let's just start with the general look back for you.
How has the year gone?
And specifically, I would love to understand What surprised you, as a businessman, walking into the government.
Let's just start with that.
So overall, you know, I have a goal, which is I want to be the cabinet secretary who has the most fun, right.
And so I set out with that goal.
And which means I am outcome driven.
I don't really buy into, I worked really hard at something and it failed.
If I worked really hard and it failed, it's a fail.
It's a fail.
Right?
If I got lucky and it just all fell into place and I did nothing, it's still success.
Because the outcomes are what matter.
You're not telling people how hard you worked and failed.
So how you get things done in government is fascinating.
It's just different.
What happened is?
Most people who've ever been in government tend to be incremental.
They come in, they say how did this work?
So someone explains how they work and they try to move the ball 10% forward.
They don't really rethink it entirely.
And so my objective was to come into this department which is an awesome incredible, diverse department and really think through its powers and its possibilities, reimagine them, rethink them, hire people and then mold those people to think outside the box.
And so the first three months was really getting people to think, can I really challenge this?
Can I really do this?
Can I really try to do this?
And then trying to convince everybody around me that this is an okay way to do it.
The way it was done yesterday isn't right.
It was just what they did yesterday.
You're not even saying it's wrong, you're just saying it's not.
You do you get the organ rejection though, of career bureaucrats who think, wait a minute, howard's out for my job, or this is just a totally different way of doing things.
I don't feel comfortable with this.
I don't necessarily agree.
We hear a lot about sort of this deep state, whatever that is like this career lifers, that sort of push back on radical change.
Well, In the beginning, we cut 20%.
I walked in the door here with 52000 people in this department and now there's 40000 people in this department.
So the idea is, if you're going to cut 12000 people, you have to do it fast right, so that everybody understands the next shoe is not going to drop tomorrow.
Right, and find where we had programs that just were like.
This program was started in 1978.
You'd be like why are we doing it now?
We had a department that was supporting advanced manufacturing, set up in 1986.
What were they doing as advanced manufacturing 40 years ago as opposed to what people are doing now?
So it was really not taking out what's the core.
And so we did that quickly.
And then I went and met every bureau at town halls.
I went to their offices and I basically told them where we were going, what we were doing and why.
What I learned about government is the people here are very narrow experts.
They're amazing, their knowledge of this particular topic.
So there's not generalists in government, but you have someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this.
And then your job as the secretary is to weave that blanket together right so that these specialists succeed, and so when you give them tasks that maximize their capacity, they get jazzed right, and so i'm getting amazing output from this department because they're jazzed, because someone appreciates their capacity and is driving it to success.
I want to jump into some of these verticals of expertise that you oversee, but it may be useful for the audience actually, if you just gave an overview of the scope of commerce, because it is incredibly vast, from trade to job creation, to NOAA, to the Census Bureau, to Spectrum.
There's a lot of things that you can shape on behalf of the United States.
So tariffs, which have been a big conversation.
There's two types of tariffs.
There's general tariffs.
That's in front of the Supreme Court.
And then there's sectoral specific tariffs.
Those that are specific, industry specific are in this bill.
And they're part of BIS, the Bureau of Industry and Security.
And that is both where we have export controls.
We don't want to sell our best chips to our adversaries.
We don't want to sell whatever is the fill-in That's the Bureau of Industry and Security.
Or do we want a license?
Just to make sure you use it in this sort of way or that sort of way.
All of that, and they have guns and badges.
So they have guns and badges because they have to protect and defend that.
And they fine people.
And they also control the auto tariffs, the steel tariffs, pharmaceuticals which we can talk about a bunch because it's been insanely successful driving down the price of pharmaceuticals in America and um.
So that's the bureau of industry and security bis.
Then you have ita um, which basically is the advocate for business, right where i'm the secretary of commerce.
So that's like a fun job, like you're in charge of commerce, so we help companies sell things around the world.
That's our job, and we help states sort of bring in business to build and grow here.
So we're sort of the import export assist model, right?
So we're always helping Boeing, you know.
So the guys, the senior executives of Boeing, follow me around like a puppy, because every time I do a deal and if you look at my big deals, at the end it says they buy 50 Boeing planes.
You know, they buy a hundred Boeing planes.
So we're always helping American companies sell overseas and we're helping companies invest in America.
Help them with their permits, help them with whatever they need to build and grow so we can grow our American jobs here.
So those are two examples.
Then we have NTIA. telecommunications, that includes spectrum.
How are we going to do 6G?
How are we going to do 6G?
How do the pieces fit together?
That's our responsibility as the lead advisor.
And then inside of that, of course, we have the AI, the Center for AI Advancement, right?
So we study and then we put out reports, like when DeepSeek comes out with their new model, right?
And there's all this press about it.
Our department literally painstakingly studies it as compared to our models and publishes.
What's the difference?
So that we actually there's a standard of knowledge, not the press making this, that or the other thing.
And then we put out GDP, right?
And we analyze.
And what's interesting about GDP is people don't realize what we do is we use the census, So there's business senses calling around to companies and it's not really calling around anymore.
It's more economic connection to companies through APIs and otherwise.
And one of the keys for me is to get rid of everything that's manual, that's left, and make it all automated, make it all connected with APIs, make it all, Make it make sense that you can do it amazingly well.
Create GDP.
And then we put GDP out on the blockchain.
Because if I'm publishing GDP, why not?
Like where's the holdup?
And you started doing that in July, I think.
I mean, how fun is that to say, why don't we do that?
And then, you know, we go to the Oval Office, I chat with the president, he goes, great.
And then we do it.
I mean, the reason you want to work for President Trump is his intuition is so extraordinary and his knowledge base is so amazing that I can go in and talk to him about should we put GDP on the blockchain?
And just before that, he was doing something completely different, something completely different.
And then he'll chat with you about three or five minutes and he goes, yeah, that sounds great.
And then you just go do it.
So it's really fun.
We have the patent office, you know, and if you think of how valuable intellectual property is, how do we protect it?
How do we defend it?
What's the right way to think about it?
So then you have Noah, which is, you know, we have inside of Noah, of course, is the word atmosphere.
Right, it's oceans and atmosphere.
What does that mean?
Oceans and above 50,000 feet is space, space commerce.
So I have now the office of space commerce, which I've taken out of NOAA and then put in my office so that I can reimagine how do we handle commercial.
Okay, so we're going to dig into as many of these areas as we can, but let's go back to the first one.
So can you bring us into the room leading into April 1st?
April 2nd.
April 2nd, sorry.
And bring us into the room debating tariffs, debating where you wanted to start debating the game theory.
What were the puts and takes and how did you come up with the decisions you made?
And then if you could just reflect back on what went right, what would you want to redo and what was maybe and still is misunderstood?
The president in his first term.
He's been talking about tariffs and how the trade deficit of the United States of America is really a ripoff of America.
That people who don't weigh in very deep say, well, you have a trade deficit with the supermarkets.
I mean, you're always buying from the supermarket, so you have a trade deficit with the supermarket.
That's just silly.
If you think about it, let's say there are two islands.
One produces and one invents.
So the inventor lets the other island produce and keeps buying it from that other island, pays them the money and that other island uses the money to buy the inventor's island.
And over a period of time, the producer owns The inventor's island.
And the inventor works for the producer because he ran an infinite trade deficit and kept paying his money away.
So what's supposed to happen?
When I was in college, my freshman and sophomore professors basically said if you run a trade deficit, you'll keep taking your silly paper money and giving it to them and buy their wine and buy their cars and buy all their cool stuff.
And sooner or later they're going to say hey, I don't want your stupid paper and your dollar would devalue, you wouldn't be able to buy their stuff and it would all balance.
And that's sort of free, foreign exchange, floating currency theory.
But what if you're America and you invent the light bulb, and then you invent the transistor, and then you invent the GPU?
And you're just too darn smart.
So what they do with those dollars is they come in and buy us.
In 1985, we had net ownership of the rest of the world.
So, comparing the rest of the world's ownership of America and our ownership of them, that counts everything their bonds, company stock, everything.
We were net an investor of $148 billion, more of them than they owned of us.
Fast forward to 2024, 26 trillion the other way.
They own 26 trillion of us.
More, more than we own of them.
What you're saying is we became effective employees of the people that were producing the things that we created.
Right, so when we call, so the beginning.
So Donald Trump says, we're getting ripped off, we need to fix this.
Mm-hmm.
And sort of like these junior economists fight it and say, no, no, no, no.
Let me just stop for a second.
That is the first time I've heard that it is an extremely elegant framing, actually.
It sets up an incredibly powerful way to measure the effectiveness of tariffs.
And is that how you think about it?
Which is that imbalance is the North Star?
Once we own at least the same of them as they do of us- That's balance.
That's balance.
We're balanced.
And right now we're at a $26 trillion- Why would we?
Why would we have that?
So what happens is you call a country up and you say, I'm going to set a tariff.
They say, wait, wait, wait, before you set a tariff, how about this?
We'll invest 200 billion in your country and Toyota will build a factory and Siemens will build a factory, and they'll all build a factory.
And I'm like, You're just buying us.
You're literally buying us.
I understand.
What's better for you, investing 200 billion in America or investing 200 billion where?
Where's better than investing here?
So what happens is that natural argument, which was always previously successful, falls on deaf ears.
And I'm pointing over there because that's his office, okay?
The White House is like right there.
And it just, he says, you're only investing here because it's great for you.
The answer is I want to rebalance.
And that's what we're out to do.
Build it here, sell it here, fine, fine.
Or pay for the privilege of selling it here.
How did you set the rates?
Well, the president on the campaign trail had two views, the debate.
And he was really debating with the team and inside his mind does he want to set a universal tariff or a specific country by country tariff?
Obviously, a universal tariff, it's easy. you know, Tuesday morning, you say.
Pick a number.
10%, Shazam.
Right.
But we settled on a country-specific model, much more complex, much more difficult, but much more nuanced, much more clever and much tougher.
And he couldn't do that in his first term because he didn't have believers around.
He had too much of the people who believed that sophomore professor's ideals.
And even though we were out $26 trillion, they thought that was too casual a comment.
And so this administration came in with incredibly sharp people me included, Jameson Greer, Scott Besson who were on side, on board, driving for these outcomes.
Let's double click into a couple of these deals because some of the terms you got.
It would be just great if you could walk us through how you convince them.
So let's look at Japan.
So the Japan trade deal you walked out with I think it was 550 billion of commitment and terms i i mean, i mentioned them as a pot.
I've never seen terms like this before which you can explain.
Which is basically you know japan gets your money back, then you get 90 of the profits.
But can you just walk us through when you go into the room with the japanese government?
Just get us to the outcome.
How do you negotiate that deal with them?
Okay, so let's spend some time in Japan because it's really, it's fascinating.
So when thinking about Japan, I reminded the president, in 1853 Admiral Perry went with an armada and cannons and still had trouble opening the Japanese market.
The Japanese market for cars, as an example, 94% of cars driven in Japan are Japanese.
They don't drive German cars.
They don't drive Korean cars.
They don't drive American cars.
The only American cars really in Japan are Chevrolets driven by the Yakuza.
So you know, I mean you can't come home with a Chevy and people think ooh, you know, you got a new job.
Right, right.
So it's a culturally... technically and economically closed market.
So, even if you opened it technically and even if you opened it economically, you may not be able to open it socially.
So what we did is we said, all right, you're going to pay a 25% tariff.
Simple.
You won't open your market, right?
I can't get you to really open your market.
So you just pay us 25%.
And that's simple.
We don't have to negotiate.
You know, we just pay for the right and the math will fix itself over time.
So their leadership called and said, we can't do that.
And when someone says I can't do that, I'm like- And when you say why-?
Yeah, and they explained why.
They said, look, the way the Japanese auto manufacturers work is the government subsidizes uh the machinery that went to small manufacturers so what they did is let's say company a could have a thousand small companies and they make the cup holder for this particular model right and and so they have 50 people who work at this company who make the cup holder And that, right, for Toyota, but that, the machinery was subsidized by the government.
And so you have thousands, tens of thousands of these companies, And so they can't pick them up and move them to America.
Let me ask you just a question before you go back to this.
Was it surprising to you that not just Japan but I'm sure you encountered it everywhere all these other governments would be willing to shape and subsidize their own domestic productivity, whereas Americans were a little bit more on their own?
Amazing.
The subsidies, the assistance, it's not a level playing field.
That everybody else does for their own domestic internal economy, but not on every product, but on many.
I mean, we set steel and aluminum tariffs.
You'd say, why do you do the whole steel and aluminum thing?
You'd say, well, if the Chinese give power give, G-I-V-E, the power to the steel producer.
Think of steel, right?
It's like brown dirt.
So you process the brown dirt to make an iron ore, but you've all seen it's like dirt.
And then you know how much power You have to put into that, to melt it, to make it look like one of those things we've seen on TV where you're pouring the iron ore.
And imagine if I gave you the power for free.
You'd be making your steel for 250 bucks a metric ton.
And you'd say, how much does it cost in America?
700 bucks a metric ton.
So they're going to put our guys out of business, which means they put our guys out of business.
And then Japan subsidizes it.
Korea subsidizes it.
So maybe they can do it for 400 bucks a metric ton.
And meanwhile, our... So we start with 40 steel blast furnaces.
Now we have 10.
And if we kept going, we were going to have... Zero.
Zero.
And then what happens is you become... basically subservient if you need steel.
You want to build your own missiles?
You have to call another country and they may be your allies, like Japan and Korea, and you can call them, but you are not self-sufficient.
So Donald Trump says, we need steel.
We need aluminum.
We need copper.
And we need to make our own semiconductors.
We need to make our own pharmaceuticals.
And once you understand this and you really think about it, Donald Trump, not only is he completely correct, it actually goes to the thank God.
Right, like you study pharmaceuticals and you really study them and you say well, these generic pharmaceuticals are made in India.
Good, India's our ally, but the ingredients come from China.
Exactly.
So that if you know, if there's one nut or bolt that you need and it comes from China, they don't send it to you.
Right.
There were these things called magnets.
Magnets go in a car.
The value of a magnet that goes in a car is 20 bucks.
20 bucks.
You're buying a $30,000 car.
It's a $20 part.
But if they don't have it, oh, sorry, it can't work.
Where do we get that part from?
Well, China sells them.
They buy the dirt. the ingredient for $55 a pound.
And they sell you the finished magnet for $55 a pound.
So no one's going to make the magnet if you could sell the raw material for 55 bucks.
So they're basically just losing money.
And the answer is, right.
Do you think that this mercantilism, was it a purposeful strategy to weaken America?
Or do you think it was just a byproduct of capitalism?
The answer is yes.
The Chinese economy is one of overproduction.
They have 50 mayors, provinces, and each of those provinces is trying to succeed.
So each of those provinces wants to build an electric car company.
And the government puts in all the money, builds the capital, gives them the power, invest.
So if you're the mayor, you want the winning electric car company.
Because remember, China does not have oil and natural gas.
So they have to build electric because they have coal.
So they have to build electric.
We don't.
We're being fools to think that we should have batteries and everything that they make that we don't.
That's just foolish.
So that means if you have 50 mayors, And they all have what, one electric car company?
No, no, they're probably going to have two just in case.
So that's a hundred electric car companies.
And they were all trying to kill each other, subsidized by the government so they can cut their price 30.
Why?
Because the government just says, look, let's just try to undersell everybody else.
And then they make so many cars.
What do they do with all these cars?
So then they dump them and they take the electric car, which cost them 30000, and they sell it in Europe for 15000.
So you go to an electric car in Europe and say, 15,000 for this car.
This is an amazing car for 15,000.
That's because it costs 30,000.
So what happens is that has the effect. of putting Volkswagen out of business.
So what happens is it's their model, which is an attack chaos model, but the attack chaos model has overcapacity.
And then they turn that overcapacity into an asset, says, let's dump the overcapacity.
We're going to lose a fortune.
Okay, but the government's just paying.
We're going to dump that overcapacity into America, right?
Or into Europe or into anybody who'll take it, right?
We'll put their industry out of business and then we'll have them over a barrel.
We'll turn our economic chaos into international prowess.
And leverage, right.
So that's- And so then the tariffs.
Now then, basically slow that leverage down, because it takes that economic incentive off the table.
Do you need to follow up with some other set of structural changes, though?
To right the ship in the long term, we have to domesticate production like what are the things that we need to do so that, in eight years or 12 years, if the tariffs were to change, if a different administration takes a different point of view, what is structurally going to be left behind that prevents this from happening again?
Well, with respect to China, If we blink, they will sell below cost in America and drive our domestic companies out of business.
And then we will be beholden to them.
That's sort of a simple math, right?
I mean, if you think about it, they spend a fortune convincing everyone that they should be environmentally friendly and have an EV car.
But if Europe doesn't make batteries and they say have all EV cars by 2030, then who are they going to buy the batteries from?
They have to buy it from China.
And now They need to buy it from China, which means what is their foreign policy with respect to China?
It's very positive.
That's all, right?
They trade economic.
You know basically, I've gotten prowess over you so that you're going to let me do this, that and the other thing.
And eventually, you know, they're not playing with the same rules that we play.
And so when you go around the world and you study the world, like Japan doesn't do cars by the same rules that we do.
So they had to have cars be lower than 25%.
25% was basically a number that choked them.
And so we analyzed together with them that 15% would be the number they could live with right?
And keep making cars and build more here.
And then I said well, but why would we, since you're not really going to open your market, you're not really going to let us have access?
How are we going to do it?
And then I spent months going back and forth with the Japanese and President Trump with different ideas.
How about this?
So if you suggested I got it right the first time, that would not be true.
I got it right.
You know, I've always described my business success in life.
I always came at it like this.
Okay, and then this, this, this.
And sooner or later, I got through.
So what we came up with was $550 billion that this is not foreign direct investment.
This is not Toyota building a factory in America.
This is.
They literally will finance Any project we want to build in America, as long as it's like a good cash-slowing project.
Nuclear.
We want to build $100 billion of nuclear plants.
They will pay for it.
So what happens is they'll borrow the money on like a 30-year bond.
In Japan.
So the Japanese government goes and raises the 550 billion from their domestic bondholders.
From their domestic bondholders.
Right.
So they're an LP to you, and you're the GP.
Exactly the right thing.
They're an LP.
They give us the equity.
We build the nuclear power plant and then it starts selling power and we split the cash 50-50 until they get back their money plus their interest.
So that means in 30 years the taxpayers of Japan broke even and their dividend was a reduced tariff, that every day they had a lower tariff, they had more employment, they had this and that, and you know what.
Their stock market's up 20s?
Up, not down.
Up.
So that's the point, which is it didn't cost their taxpayers money over time.
Right now we it's pretty simple to understand how much we're going to make.
You'd say well, if it's 550 billion and their interest rates are pretty low, so let's say, over 30 years you're going to get 650 billion.
When we pay them back 650 billion, if you say to me, how much did America make?
I would say 650 billion, because we split the money 50-50.
Yeah, exactly.
And after they get their money back, because nuclear power plants last a long time, then the cash flow goes 90 to America and 10 to Japan.
And when you say to America, is there an account?
How does that money then get spent or allocated?
The only bank the United States of America has, as far as, like the Secretary of Commerce sees, is called treasury.
Treasury.
So we have accounts at treasury and all the money goes into treasury.
So all the tariff money goes into treasury.
All this money just goes into treasury.
So it reduces our deficits.
And it reduces, it is taxes paid by others.
Right.
For us to get our house in order, right?
That's why the president talks about the external revenue service, right?
In this case, you're going to make you'd say all right well, over 20 years, you'd probably make 30 billion a year.
That's 30 billion a year.
You know how much tax we'd have to raise on Americans to cover 30 billion a year?
That's 30 billion a year just on those trades.
And then you have the tariffs are 500 billion a year now, and they will grow over time to a trillion a year.
And that money is not money we have to pay in taxes.
And eventually that puts our house in order, that lowers interest rates, drives our economy but, most importantly, we don't have to pay.
President Trump has talked about this.
He said that as you kind of execute the tariff plan and extract this incremental capital, you could see a rateable reduction in income taxes.
Is that the right way to think about this?
Or do you think there are other ways to spend the money first that we need to before we can?
Well, who paid for no tax on tips?
No tax on overtime.
No tax on Social Security.
Right?
Tariffs.
Tariffs.
So that's a down payment.
Right.
Right?
But that's the idea.
We should be able to reduce the tax burden. from the bottom up.
Help Americans who make less than 150000, who earn overtime, who earn tips.
Let's reduce their tax burden.
Let's help America.
And by the way, that's 85% of America.
It's not like it's a subset.
And so I think the president is deeply focused on using the power of his administration to right a whole bunch of wrongs that have been ripped off about our country, and that we are the richest country in the world.
And that means we don't have to take things away from people.
Everybody assumes to balance the budget.
If you asked a politician how you would fix Social Security, they would say take the retirement age out.
Out, right.
Right, take away.
They would never say, We are the greatest country on the earth.
We have the greatest economy on the earth.
Can't we figure out ways to enhance our revenues to keep the richest country in the world?
Should be able to give people retirement at 65.
We shouldn't change a darn thing.
And that is his thinking.
And that's why it's so much more powerful than any politician before.
Politicians think all they have to do is give or take, give or take, give or take, give or take.
The way that you've explained this, it makes an enormous amount of sense.
It's like you set the stage of here's the historical imbalance.
Here's how we want to reset it.
We want some investment that we're going to get you whole foreign country.
But at the end of the day, this is about American exceptionalism.
It's worked in Japan.
It's worked in Korea.
You did the deal with Europe.
You did the deal with the UK.
What's sort of out there?
That's still there.
I think India is kind of still out there, although it seems like they are capitulating a little bit.
I saw that they just bought a lot of liquefied petroleum gas from the United States in November.
What are the big sort of hot button places that you want to?
I'll tell you a story about uh India so um, If you remember so I did the first deal, the UK deal, and we told the UK that they had to get it done by two Fridays from now.
That that was the date that the train was gonna leave the station, by two Fridays, because I have a lot of other countries doing things and if someone else is first, they're first, and President Trump does deals like a staircase.
First stair gets the best deal.
You can't get the best deal after the first guy went.
Everyone says, I want the UK deal, I want the UK deal.
The answer is no, they were first.
They took the chance, they moved quickest, they're first.
Second, up a stair.
So that sets the floor.
Right, and then the next one's gotta be higher, and then the next one higher, and the next one higher, the next one higher.
So he does things that way because that way it incents you to come to the table.
You could have three countries who are the second deal.
They all get done at the same time.
But if you want to wait and see how it goes, it's at your risk.
So...
He does the UK deal, and they had to get it done by Friday.
And Thursday afternoon, Keir Starmer's on the phone, the president.
We have.
They do their deal Wednesday night and on Thursday we have a press conference and we announce it.
Okay?
So everybody asked the president, who do you think is next?
And if you look back at the time, he talks about a variety of countries, but he names India a couple of times publicly.
It's not like a big secret.
And we were talking India, and we told India, you had three Fridays.
You put them on a shot clock.
Well, they have to get it done because what happens is I have lots of other countries.
And when those other countries do their deal.
The staircase goes up.
Right.
And now the president.
During all these deals he would refer to me as the greatest table setter who ever lived.
Because you've never had anybody who is as successful as me as a businessman before.
Who's just the table setter.
Because what I would do is I would negotiate the contracts and set the whole deal up.
But let's be clear, it's his deal.
He's the closer, he does the deal.
So I said, you got to have Modi.
It's all set up.
You have to have Modi call the president.
They were uncomfortable doing it.
So Modi didn't call.
Wow.
So that Friday left middle of the next week, we did indonesia, the philippines right, vietnam.
We announced a whole bunch of deals.
So we did these whole bunch of deals.
So that's like that staircase and they were at, and because we negotiated them and assumed india was going to be done before them, I had negotiated them at a higher rate.
So now the problem is the deals came out at a higher rate.
And then India calls back and says, oh, okay, we're ready.
I said, ready for what?
It was like three weeks later I go.
Are you ready for the train that left the station three weeks ago?
So what happened is they just?
Sometimes there's that seesaw and people aren't just the wrong side of the seesaw.
When I was a young, when I was young in business and I was a trader.
So one of my first jobs was a trader.
And when I would start on the wrong side of the seesaw, you know, I'd buy and it would go down.
And then I'd sell, it would go up, and then the buy would go down.
When you're on the right side of the seesaw, you can't lose.
You buy it goes up and then you sell and it goes down.
And you buy it goes up and then sell, it goes down and you feel like you're the king.
But when you're on the wrong side of the seesaw, what I used to do is I used to put the phone down.
I used to go in the bathroom, fill a bucket with water, take a rag and I would wash the plants in the office because it was much cheaper than me picking up the phone.
And then people would call and say, you know, can I speak to Howard?
And they go, no, he's in a meeting.
And meanwhile they look up and there I am washing the plants because whatever I did, I would get back in there and I'd touch it and it would go the wrong way.
So what happened is India just was on the wrong side of the seesaw.
And it wasn't.
It was just they couldn't get it done when they needed to, and then they couldn't get it done, and then they couldn't get it done, and then they couldn't get it done.
And so what happened is all these other countries kept doing deals, And they're just further in the back of the line.
And now when they say but what I want is, I want the deal in between the UK and Vietnam, because that's what I negotiate.
And they remember, and I remember.
And they say, but you agreed.
And I said Then then, not now Then, and so that's that's the problem.
India will work it out, but it's just.
You know, there's a lot of countries and and they each have their own deep internal politics and And to get something approved by their parliament, or their diet or their, you know, these are deeply complex thing.
And we're dealing with the world, but we've gotten them done.
You know, we got Europe done, right?
We did Japan, then they did Europe, then we did Korea, and we've done country after country after country.
And these are durable, meaning these are deals that take care of the countries Autos, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, things that really matter.
And the tariffs have been incredibly effective, and you can use them to change the trade deficit.
But you can also use them to change behavior.
We should spend some time talking about drugs and pharmaceuticals.
Well, this is what I wanted to do.
Let's double click into AI and drugs, but let's start with drugs.
So you were pretty integrally involved in some of the the pharmaceutical repricing and manufacturing deals.
Just walk us through what the goal of those were and how Americans will feel the impact of the deals that you've been able to get done.
So everybody who studies pharmaceuticals um learns that america is the client, is the consumer, is the payer worldwide.
Worldwide we pay all the money.
So these drug companies make 75 of their revenues in america and it's a hundred percent of their problems.
Because what happens is we pay, let's say, a thousand dollars for a drug And then Europe says yeah, we have socialized medicine.
We're not buying it unless, what's your cost?
And the drug company says, 100 bucks.
So they say, we'll pay you $175.
You can make 75 bucks.
And then the drug company says, no.
And then Europe says, okay, I'm not buying it then.
You'd say, what do you mean you're not paying?
You're not going to give medicine to your people?
They go, no, we can't afford it, no.
So eventually the drug company says, ah, fine.
So we're paying a thousand.
And they're paying 175 bucks.
You know, six times less.
And you'd be like, what?
And that is how the whole world's drug model was working.
We're paying $1,000.
Everyone else in the world is paying $175.
So Donald Trump says, I want to fix it.
And I want MFN prices.
You want to charge us?
Most favored nations.
Most favored nations.
So we're the cheapest price in the world.
Right.
But you could charge them 500 and then you could charge us 500.
Fine.
Right.
But if you're willing to sell it to them for 175 bucks, don't come here and tell me that I have to pay a thousand.
Right.
It's just unfair.
You're not dictating price in America.
You're essentially dictating the lower bound price abroad.
We are dictating fairness.
Fairness, yeah.
Like if we're your biggest customer, Treat us like fairly.
We're not even saying treat us the best.
We're saying treat us fairly.
I mean, it's amazing.
So he writes a letter to 17 giant pharmaceutical companies and said, I want MFN.
And I got to tell you I don't know a single person in this administration who thought he could do it.
It was so audacious, so bold, so powerful.
I was like, oh, geez.
I mean, you know, you just write a letter to all the big drug companies saying you're going to give us MFN and you like write a stern letter.
And I'm like, Okay.
Good luck with that.
How's this baby going to work?
And then, so I sit with, we have this amazing meeting with Bobby Kennedy and his team.
And we say, look, I've got these 232 tariffs.
I could smash these companies.
Smash them, because they all make it overseas and then export it to us and we're all the money.
So we could charge them any tariff we want, but we charge them 500%.
So let's do something that's never been done before.
Let's literally be a team, okay?
You lead.
Bobby and his team who were amazing.
Dr. Oz, Chris Klopp.
I mean, these guys did spectacular.
They led, but I was the hammer, right?
From table setter to hammer.
To hammer.
So now I'm the hammer, right?
So I'm like in the background, like hammer.
And then like, say, look, You have two things we want from you.
We want your best drugs at MFN prices.
You can't sell it to anybody in the world at a better price than you sell to us of the countries that have money.
We're not talking about if you sell it to Sub-Saharan Africa.
We're talking about the big countries, the OECD.
Let's say, call it the Big 10 or the Big 20.
Charge us the same and reshore.
And I'll waive your tariff while you're reshoring, provided you do those two.
Or hammer.
Just hammer.
And what's a hammer mean?
I don't know, hundreds of percent tariff starting, I don't know, what do you think?
30 days from now?
Like, bang.
So- So you're just there in the corner.
They just see, just- I'm like the handsome guy in the back, just gonna, you know?
Like, so if you see me at the meetings, I'm like there, like, la la la.
But-
If you look at the pictures that are put out everybody puts out the picture of Bobby signing and me signing.
You say, what do you sign, Howard?
I'm signing the no hammer rule.
So the result is Ozempic and Moonjara are on Medicaid, and Medicaid for 149 instead of not on it, and generally for sale for thousands.
So think about it.
Instead of generally for sale for thousands, everyone in America can have it for 149 bucks.
And that's gonna reduce also.
I mean, it's going to change these drugs we had.
We had drug companies say you know what?
I'm just going to give it to you one of the drug companies, merc.
So they're going to just give us their number one drug in the world, right?
They're going to give it to medicaid medicare for zero right, right.
So we saved 25, 35 billion a year.
But, more importantly, we made drugs accessible to America at a fair price and stop always being the one who pays.
We are the richest country in the world.
And the world viewed us.
Remember when I was growing up there were all these cartoons on TV and there was always this one where there was a guy stuck on a desert island And he looks at the other guy and as the other guy walks by, he starts looking at him.
He looks like a big chicken leg.
You know, he's like starving.
So he looks at the other guy.
He sees him like, I mean, the world views us as a giant chicken leg.
You know, that they should just, we're so rich, we won't miss it.
And so they all, the trade deals were bad, the drug deals were bad.
You can go chapter and verse.
The immigration system is the most ridiculous thing.
Imagine we are the richest, most successful country in the world and we give a lottery a lottery.
So let's say we have a lottery to come into america.
If you win the lottery, you win right, but who's paying for the lottery?
We are.
So it's not, like you know, the normal lottery.
Everybody pays in a dollar and the winner gets x percent of the money.
Right here The people win the lottery and we lose.
It's like a win-lose.
And you would say, gosh, why would we do that?
And it's only because Donald Trump is willing to literally challenge.
Why are we doing this?
Why are we doing that?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we doing that?
He has incredibly capable people around him who are willing to challenge it and then come up with a better answer.
Attack that better answer and deliver the outcome, meaning just talking about it, as I said in the beginning, doesn't count.
You either change the immigration system, you change the price of drugs, you change the trade deficit, which halved, which is Awesome, right.
You change the budget deficit of the country.
That's $600 billion this year.
You just relentlessly deliver.
What happens is if you have a businessman in that office and Donald Trump has the best intuition of anybody I've ever met.
I could tell you stories and stories of, just like when they said to me I don't know, maybe we talked about it last time.
What's that flag on the back of those ships?
And I was like, I don't know.
He goes, you ever seen a flag on the back of a ship that you know where it was from?
I was like, no.
He goes, why is that?
And then you look it up.
And the number one flag on the back of a ship is Liberia.
All these ships, like all the tankers.
Like all the tankers, cargo ships.
And why is that?
It's a tax scam.
It's a flag of convenience.
Right.
And then what they do is they then...
So they make all their money on the seas and they charge the port as an expense.
So they pick it up from Europe, it's an expense.
They drop it off in America, that's an expense.
And all their profits are on the high seas where they pay no tax.
So what do you think they do?
Then they buy the ports.
It's all a tax scam.
So the president, by intuition, sends us out like he sends me out.
He loves to send me out stuff because I just love the stuff and I find it.
And we're going to attack it.
The next year you're going to see this government attack fraud and the fraud is probably a trillion dollars a year of people who just have figured out how to rip off the system.
And Remember America had open borders until 1914.
The reason they had open borders in 1914 is because it gave you nothing.
So if you were sick, you couldn't go to the hospital unless you could pay the bill.
So if you were sick, you'd die.
What do you want from me?
Right?
Get a job, take care of yourself or get lost.
And when we went to have a welfare state, you have to close the borders.
Because if the people are going to give their money They need to give it to each other.
You can't really open the border and say I'm going to give my money to anybody who wants to come in.
That's getting it wrong.
So when people say open immigration is how we built America, they are right.
And open immigration would be something interesting if we gave people nothing.
Because if we gave them nothing, if they weren't smart enough capable, entrepreneurial enough, driven enough, they would starve to death.
And so they wouldn't stay here.
They would self-deport and leave.
Right.
But if you're going to give them welfare and you're going to give them food stamps and you're going to give them housing and you're going to give them this, that then everybody's going to come and just leech off of us and we're going to pay and pay, and pay until
Now, on this immigration side, you've launched two versions of the Trump card, I think, right?
There's the million-dollar Trump card and then the $5 million card.
Where are those programs, and how have they been working so far?
It's out right now.
Trumpcard.gov is a really nice website.
And what happens is...
The idea is to stop letting people into the country without a clear benefit to the country.
You should come in if you're going to give us a clear benefit to the country.
It should be black and white.
We want you.
Right, you're going to help us.
So the average green card, if you looked for the last five years, the average American makes in the 60s 1000 a year.
And the average green card recipient made in the 40s.
So we are bringing in the bottom quartile.
Why we're the only country in the world who is bringing in the bottom more likely to be on welfare, more likely to be on food stamps, more likely to, you know, getting stuff from the government.
Because they were all coming to get stuff from the government.
Right.
And so the idea for us is, okay, here's the gold card.
You want to come in?
Prove to us you're going to make a benefit to this country.
Give the United States a million dollars, which pays off our deficit, reduces taxes we have to charge Americans.
And then you come in, you've proven that you're going to be a good citizen.
We have to vet you.
We spent 15,000 on the greatest vet we've ever done.
And then you come in and you're going to be top quarter.
Maybe top deca.
But you're going to help America be better.
Have you announced how many people have applied or the first batches yet that have been granted this?
No, the president the first week put out that we had sold a billion dollars worth.
In the first week?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
But there's a process.
And that this process is going along, fixing the immigration system, right?
Not letting people come in by lottery, selecting who they are not bringing in people who would take a trainee job right, people who graduate universities around the world and people who graduates.
Yeah, I mean look, I think H1B is fantastic for someone who makes 500000, who's a cool engineer, but it's not okay if it's a 60000 college graduate.
Hire from the universities of America.
Don't hire from the universities of the world.
It just doesn't make sense.
And what happens is people steal the history of America and they lie, change the peace shape and try to stick in it by saying you know America was born with, you know immigration and open.
Yes, that's when we gave nothing.
But if you're gonna give everybody the gift of America, we better get something back.
And that's why you're hearing about all this fraud.
These people came in in order to defraud America.
It's not like a random act.
They figured, This is the richest country in the world.
We live in a crap hole.
Let's get out of here.
And these morons are going to let us have a BMW.
Right.
And we're not going to be hardworking, industrious people.
We're just going to figure out the model and screw them.
And America was not designed with walls and barriers.
We were designed with an entrepreneurial spirit to make the world shine.
That's who we are.
When I give talks I say if you want to understand the greatness of America, close your eyes and imagine a world without America.
It's dark, really dark.
Now, open your eyes and say, what makes the world shine when America is shining the brightest?
So you'd say, well, if that's true, America reset the world order of trade, right?
And properly set the balance where, since we're the best economy, we're in the best positions.
And so, if you're right Howard, and the world shines brighter, when America shines brighter, then even though the world's paying America, they should be in better shape.
Korean stock market up 70%.
Japan up like 20s or 30s.
Europe up more than 15%.
Right?
All of these up.
And you'd say, well, I don't understand.
How could they pay us and be up?
Because the world, and you know, stocks are a long-term outcome.
That's right.
And the long-term outcome is if the United States is powerful and strong and creating the greatest weapons in the world and selling us the greatest weapons in the world and protecting us and defending us and building an economy that we can rely upon and trust upon, our companies are going to do great.
They're going to do great.
This is an excellent point that no one has actually made.
The narrative that the media has been trying to paint recently is this is a debasement problem for the US dollar.
But I actually think what you said is more accurate, which is what people looked through were the tariffs and saw a level of economic resilience in these other markets that made them very attractive in a way that they weren't attractive at the current course and speed.
That's why Korea did so well, Japan did so well, Europe did so well.
It's why a lot of these base commodities did well, because now you're seeing an increasing of demand, because you're going to see production capacity all over the country.
It was a huge change, actually.
It really resets how capitalism and capital markets will work.
I don't know if it was an intended consequence, but it's a very positive consequence.
I want to talk, though, about what you just said about 2026.
You said we will be surprised at the level of focus that you and the president put on fraud and you think there's a trillion dollars.
Can you just double click into what that means, how you're going to go after it?
Is it at the federal level, at the state level?
Just kind of give us the rough game plan, what you can say.
Sure.
So the president is the federal, right?
So if the federal government gives money to the state and the state gives it out, then we have a dog in the hunt.
If it's their money and they're giving it out, we don't really have a dog in the hunt.
But we have a dog in almost every hunt because they take the federal money it goes in and then they administer welfare.
But it comes from us.
So this is the success we had in pharmaceuticals was the Commerce Department and HHS working together in a way that these departments have never worked together before.
That he understood my power and I understood his power and together we changed the outcome to incredible success.
So that's how we're going to look at.
We're going to have a multiple departments working together, right?
No one has ever looked at if you're getting medicaid and medicare, how much money do you make?
No one's ever compared the two.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah, you're supposed to tell us.
But if you're a fraudster.
It's the honor system.
Yeah, but the world of America is built, but now with modern technology.
Right.
Then you have a beast like me right, right and and and probably the guy with the best intuition in the world sitting right over.
There was also a businessman right, and you know we'd say okay, we're going to build the technology to do this, we are going to build it and everybody's on board.
So you have the THS, you have HHS, you have commerce right.
We're all working together and we are going to come out with models and methods to seek the fraud out, and not on a limited to Minnesota scale.
Oh no, we're going to go after it Big time, right?
So you have that on one side and then you have the execution of the first year and the second year, which means you have the president saying we have 18 trillion of committed capital.
Okay, open your plan.
We have spreadsheets.
I went over them yesterday.
We have spreadsheets of promises.
All these people who made these promises.
Okay, call them.
30 construction projects launched that would never have been launched.
So here's my view.
I told you that I thought in the end of this year, we would get to 4% GDP growth.
I said it in the first quarter and 4.3.
Now the fourth quarter is going to be a mess because of the shutdown.
Seriously, this is accounting in America.
If someone works for the government, They count them as GDP.
And you would say, right, that face, exactly me.
You go, what?
So let's get, wait, stop, stop, stop.
So you hire someone in your department.
GDP just went up.
Even though they don't do anything.
I thought GDP would be like if you make a tank.
Productivity, something.
Like you do something.
Nope.
So here's the fun part.
When you furlough them on the shutdown, you're still paying them.
That's the deficit.
But they're not actually working at the government, so they're not productive.
So they take it away from GDP.
And you'd say, this is actually like the silliest thing in the world.
You're giving the guy the same amount of money.
What's the difference?
These are the rules.
So our fourth quarter GDP will be a point and a half lower than it otherwise would be.
For this oddity,
Just the furlough.
That's 150 basis points.
Like the common economists think the fourth quarter growth is going to be a point.
Okay.
They're just like wrong.
I said they were wrong in the third quarter.
I said they were wrong in the second quarter.
We have a 3.8 and then 4.3.
We'll probably be like two and a half.
But that would have been to your point four.
Four.
Right. next year with all this construction in the ground.
Like this Friday, I'm flying up to New York to Micron's groundbreaking of their tens of billions of dollar factory in upstate New York.
That's just another example.
Then I'm going to Detroit where they're doing a huge new build, a new auto plant, and they're building their engine plant.
And it's just fives.
You're going to see fives in the greatest economy in the world.
You're going to see fives.
And people think you can't, you can't.
5% GDP on a base this big is just, it's enormous.
We have a $30 trillion.
So 5% is 1.5 trillion in growth.
And if we cut rates, you'll see six.
And people do not would never before Donald Trump walked into that office.
They don't think that's possible.
And what's six mean?
Let's just put six in context.
Six was China at its peak, under central planning, with a tight control on every aspect of its economy.
That was what the world knew is what six looked like in the modern era.
And now the alternative version of six will be the president, you, the team in a much more open way.
I'll be shocked.
You would have said it could never happen.
I would be shocked.
I mean, that's an incredible.
You're going to put it this way.
You know, it wouldn't even be fun for you when we see the fives.
Yeah.
Because they'll be so soon.
They could be this quarter as in the first quarter.
So then I'd say well, you have to come back and see me when you do five, but then you'll come back in a couple of months.
And then you'd say Howard, I just spoke to you for an hour.
I don't, you know, I don't need to speak to you again, but you're going to see fives, like as in early in 26.
That's incredible.
And then if they cut rates and that's the thing I need, a new Fed chair who cuts rates.
And if they cut rates- Sixes
You'll see sixes.
And what you're going to see, what that means, is jobs are abundant.
Good jobs are abundant.
High paying jobs are abundant.
Construction jobs, you just get paid more money to be who you are.
You make more money and that is not inflation.
That is called 6% GDP growth.
See, if we have no growth and I pay you more, because you demand more, that's inflation, right?
But if I'm like trying to build a factory, because I'm kicking tail and I have to share some of my profits with you to convince you to come to work.
Well, I'll give you a perfect example of this.
I am the lead investor in a one gigawatt data center project in Arizona.
We have to pay electricians between 500 and 750 000 a year, which is more than what we pay the engineers that work at the models out of facebook.
But it's an example to your point of just the economy has created earnings potential across the board in ways that i've never seen in my career.
It's really quite incredible.
The society under Obama, the Obama view of the country.
He blew it right.
He got rid of shop class.
When I grew up, you took shop class.
There were things to use with your hands.
And then we sort of ruled that out in America. said you got to go to a liberal arts college.
You have to end up with $200,000 in debt, right?
And then these people thought like what job am I getting that gets me to pay off my 200000 in debt?
And then you have Biden jams in inflation.
So the price of a house goes up.
And then the American dream sort of slips further and further away.
And you get Donald Trump saying okay, the way to fix it is, I need to get the people working with their hands.
Six million Americans sitting on the sidelines because the jobs are not the right jobs for them.
Get them out.
Technicians, fix robotics.
I went out to Arizona to the TSMC plant and I met the, these guys were pipe fitters.
I met a pipe fitter.
And I said, so how's the job?
He goes, I played Tetris every day.
He goes, I've got to get these kind of pipes through this kind of thing in this kind of way.
They give me this much space and I got to do all this thing.
He goes, I had the greatest job ever.
Can I tell you something about that TSMC plant?
That's a four nanometer plant.
They are at better yields, or equivalent yields, than the best operating four nanometer plant in the world, which is in China.
Isn't that incredible?
American technicians are now dollar for dollar as good as what was happening in China.
It's incredible.
Nobody knows this, by the way, but it's incredible.
So TSMC, when I walked in, there was this CHIPS Act, okay?
So the CHIPS Act, had $52 billion because we make no chips in America, semiconductors.
By the way, so just as a sort of a fun story, a wafer, these are things you know, but a wafer is the size of like a pizza you get in a restaurant.
It's like a personal pizza.
Like a small pizza, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's like a 12-inch pizza, okay?
And then what they do is they break it in little chips.
And that's why it's called the semiconductor chip.
They literally like chip it, right?
So the beauty of AI, like these GPUs that Jensen builds from Nvidia is, instead of making 4000 little chips out of that pizza, they make 10.
Hey, these are big things.
Like this thing's the size of a refrigerator.
Like you think of a chip, think of the little teeny thing going in your iPhone, right?
And these things are the size of a refrigerator.
And so it's a different kind of model.
But, you know, they had, they gave Intel $10 billion, gave.
Yeah actually, let me just stop there, because I think one of the things that you did you basically just put a pause on the CHIPS Act and ripped it apart and restarted it effectively.
Because it was initially under Biden.
Again, just as an outsider looking at it, it was largely giveaways give, and i think you flipped it around and you essentially said stop.
My understanding is you actually haven't.
You've committed to a lot, but you've been pretty judicious and disciplined about giving the money out.
I think only six billion has gone out because there's a bunch of conditions and you have to actually meet these milestones, and the chips act is very different than how it started, so Is that fair?
Yeah, because the Biden administration viewed the $50 billion as, I'll give you 10%.
You build a $60 billion plant, I'll give you $6 billion.
And why does that not work?
Why would that not have worked?
Or why was that not working when you came in?
Why would you give 6 billion to TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, when their stock is worth a trillion?
So what Donald Trump does is says, hey, hey, how about this?
How about this?
I'll charge you 100% tariff.
How about that?
And then the guy says, okay, I'll build in America.
See, I don't have to give you six billion.
Like, you know, Donald Trump can dissect it in a paragraph.
In a paragraph.
So what we did is we said to TSMC, look, you signed the contract.
There's 20 pages of DEI stuff in it.
You need to hire a blind... DVI stuff.
Oh, you have to hire a blind contractor.
You have to have like... Let's stop.
You know, trans, lesbian engineers.
I'm not kidding, by the way.
And, you know, so think about the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, right?
How many lithography engineers does Taiwan have that are female, let alone what their sexuality choices are?
They've never had a female.
They're all men.
So I said, listen, you're in breach.
Everybody thinks like a Republican will just rip that stuff up.
Not this kind of Republican.
This kind of Republican reads a contract and says You know, you didn't build a daycare center in the middle of your clean room, fab.
Like you signed that contract.
So you're in breach.
Okay.
So how about this?
How about add a hundred billion?
So instead of building 60 billion, you build 160 billion, right?
And we agreed.
So now I feel better.
And then do you waive the DEI requirements?
Yeah, of course.
Hey, build another 100 billion.
We can rip that stuff up.
No problem.
So what happens is you now have a $165 billion plant going in.
And I think I'm going to let TSMC announce it.
But they are going to get much bigger, even from the 165 billion.
And this is remember, this is a factory that makes the stuff that Nvidia sells for five times higher.
Okay, let's talk about Nvidia for a second.
You did a deal at the end of this year.
I don't think we've ever seen a deal like this and you can tell me if it's wrong.
But you control the export licenses.
And, as you said Chamath, we don't want it our adversaries to get the most advanced silicon which makes sense.
And then you struck an agreement with Jensen, where now I think it's the H200s which are not quite the most advanced chips, but maybe one generation before.
They're more advanced than what China makes.
Right.
But in return you got a 25 marketing fee.
What do you kind of rev share tariff just describe to us the construction of that deal and what it means for these kinds of deals in the future?
So jensen wang, who runs nvidia, is obviously a businessman of extraordinary capacity.
Can't run a $5 trillion company unless you're like- Incredibly impressive.
Impressive.
So he comes in and I promised him in the beginning, when I first met him, that I would help him have really easy access to the present because he's a national treasure.
And our great companies are national treasures for America.
So his argument to the president buy it or not is that if you shut off China entirely, then all of their economics go to their national champion to build new stuff.
And all their economics go to that company, and that helps that company grow.
And that if you give them better than what they have, you don't have to give them your best.
You just have to give them better than what they have this is his argument then they'll give less to their champion and more to you, and it'll have a positive economic relationship with China and positive for us overall.
Now, there are plenty of people who disagree But that was Jensen's argument.
And that was the discussion, the argument, the debate that we had.
And then when that was done and over, then the president said, and you got to give me $25.
So the 25% was a throwaway.
But it was like, look, if I'm doing all this for you, you still got to give me 25%.
So the way we're doing it is he has to send the chips to America.
We test the chip to make sure that he hasn't enhanced it in any way.
Okay.
Because the H20 was oddly enhanced.
You know that it had less flops, but more memory.
In fact it had more memory than the H100, which one could argue was a little.
You know, not everybody knew that.
Let's say it that way.
So we test it.
On the way in.
We can charge it a tariff, regular 25 tariff, and then we can give export licenses to who he wants to sell.
And then he sends it to China.
And he sends it to China or he sends it to whoever he's selling it to.
So I think the president, this is the president's deal.
And my job is to make sure all the smart people are in the room with both opinions.
Never let one opinion.
People think, oh, the last person who met Donald Trump.
No, they don't.
Donald Trump hears so many different views that often he'll call the person he likes that he's going to go with the last one before he gives it.
Because that makes sense.
Like if I'm going to say yes to you, right?
I'm saying no to him, but I'm saying yes to you.
So what a shock.
I call him and say no, and then I call you and say yes.
And he'd say, oh, he called Shamath last, and that's why.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that was...
You know, Jensen did a great job making the case and convincing the President of the United States, who has a very, very detailed and nuanced view about China.
And not everybody agrees with him.
Right.
You know my take on having worked closely been his friend for 30 years but worked closely with him this year is he does have the best intuition of anybody I've ever met in the whole wide world.
And when he thinks it's okay, and I know he's had full information, right?
Right, and he makes, he makes.
Really, when you make strong decisions, you might disagree.
Yeah, doesn't always agree with me yeah, but it's a strong decision which has deep base, thought and balance to it, and he's done that, you know, every time.
And it's It's amazing, he does play a better game of chess.
He just does play a better game of chess.
And that's why it's so fun for me, because I was very successful in business and in my companies, which had I don't know 13000 employees I was the one up here.
And for me to work for somebody The bar is high.
The bar had better be high, and he's just the most fun to work for.
Do you think that the deals that we're seeing?
So there's a 25 rev share on the H200s from NVIDIA you were able to get, I think, 10 of Intel.
10%.
10% of Intel.
There's a lot of these deals where you could say all these companies that are on the bleeding edge of America, America's national treasures, they need help that only you or the president, the infrastructure of America can provide.
Should America get something in return?
I think the way President Trump thinks about it is that If you can do it on your own, you do it on your own.
But if you really need his help and you need him to open the door, to drive the door, to change it, you need America to make it happen for you.
Isn't there something for the American taxpayer there?
Right.
Right?
In the end, if we can balance the budget, then he can take care of the people who make less than 150000 a year and change America.
And that's what he wants to do.
So he's looking for, look, why would we give the money to Intel?
It was given to Intel.
Contract signed, given to Intel.
So to turn that around to where America owns 10% of Intel, right?
Use that money to fix social security.
Use that money to reduce our deficit.
Use that money to charge less in taxes.
Use the money to make America great right, and you know look, i think if we get rid of the fraud, that'll save the country a trillion dollars.
Right, if you figure out ways to make a trillion dollars, you could reduce our deficit or you could start the process of solving social security and not Like.
The scary part for me is if I say the word social security, it doesn't matter what you say with the word social security.
They assume you're taking something away from them, because every politician who's ever said social security says I'm gonna take something away.
But the answer is if you hit it with outside money and just start hitting it with money that you've made out here and you fix it, you take nothing away.
And that's it.
If we're the richest country in the world, if we can get rid of the fraud and we can run America smart, we can do it all.
Because we're the greatest country in the world.
Imagine if you grow 6%.
You're going to fix the deficit.
You're going to fix taxes.
You're going to fix all.
It's mathematical.
No, it's mathematical.
You start to do it.
You get full employment.
People get paid.
I think we can win.
And that's why...
I can achieve the goal of being the secretary who has the most fun because I'm in the room where it happens, right.
With Donald Trump, where he thinks about things and he thinks about them.
And I was in a meeting yesterday with him where there were like eight advisors sitting around the you know, the resolute desk and he's on that side, and they all had this opinion.
And he said, no, no, that'll have this derivative result, and we're not doing that.
And everybody in the room was like, yeah, he's right.
I mean, you got eight guys like you know, guys and women thinking you know, and he just says that.
I mean, he's great.
Great.
I have one final question, which is an audience question.
It's from Brandon L. from New York, who asks, who is your favorite child?
So I have four kids, okay?
So the joke in my house was I had the oldest.
It's my son Kyle.
I had the youngest.
My son, Ryan, had my only daughter, who's my daughter, Casey.
So my son Brandon, would sign his birthday card your fourth favorite because he was neither the youngest nor the oldest, nor the daughter.
So he would sign your fourth favorite.
And whenever one of the other kids screwed something up And one of the funniest things you've ever seen my wife and I would be sitting in our bedroom and Brandon would come running in and say third, and he'd run back out.
And he was doing this when he was like 12, you know, so it was hysterical.
So that's a really funny question.
And, you know, I have the best wife.
She's both, I've been married 31 years.
I love her to death.
She's just a wonderful woman and a spectacular mom.
And we have great kids, really smart, really capable because, you know, great mom, great mom.
And we're really close.
So people ask me like, where'd you go on vacation?
I said, simple question.
I asked my adult children where they wanted to go.
And that's where we went.
Because if I went somewhere else, they wouldn't go with me.
And I want them to be there.
And there was a picture of me with Bobby Kennedy in Aspen where there was absolutely no snow.
And so you say, well, why did you go?
I said, because my adult children are here and that's where I went.
We both were on the same.
You're on the same train.
Same pace.
So I think if you have, I found the right girl for me.
And so I have the best family, and it lets me do this and lets me be completely committed to the government.
And I was very successful in business.
I had.
Whatever company that did more than 10 billion of revenues a year, made lots of money, and I don't have it anymore.
I used to joke that I was the only commerce secretary who had patents.
But I have none because I had to divest all of them.
But I understand the patent office.
I understand business.
Donald Trump understands business.
And we have really, really impressive people in this cabinet who are fun to work with.
And you are going to see great things in the second year.
Howard Ludnick, thank you for joining all in.
It was really fun talking to you.
Thank you.
What did you guys think?
That was fun.
That was great.
