Howard Lutnick | All-In DC

(0:00) Chamath and Friedberg welcome Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick! (1:10) Howard describes his 30+ year relationship with President Trump and his road from business to politics (14:44) Running Trump's transition team, DOGE origin story, what it's like working for Trump (38:01) Balancing the budget and fixing GDP (52:21) Tariff history and strategy, global trade (1:10:34) Trump Cards, building better government software, AI thoughts (1:22:49) Sovereign Wealth Fund strategy (1:37:16) How his family reacted to his new role Thanks to our partners for making this happen: Gemini: https://www.gemini.com/allin Hims: https://www.hims.com | https://www.forhers.com iTrustCapital (use code allin): https://www.itrustcapital.com/allin Follow Secretary Lutnick: https://x.com/howardlutnick Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Friedberg?

  You go to New York much?

• 0:01Howard Lutnick?

  Uh, never. I closed my house.

• 0:05David Friedberg?

  Oh, wow.

• 0:05Howard Lutnick?

  Basically, uh, I tricked my wife. You know how your wife always wants to, uh, renovate your house?

• 0:12David Friedberg?

  No idea.

• 0:13Howard Lutnick?

  So my wife always...

• 0:14David Friedberg?

  No idea what that's like.

• 0:15Howard Lutnick?

  My wife always wants to renovate my house, right? Every minute I've been alive, my wife has wanted to renovate parts of my house. So we moved out once a year and a half ago. Uh, uh, we moved out four year and a half, about six years ago. And she only did half the house, and she still ruse the day that she only did half the house.

• 0:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Really?

• 0:32Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah. So that, so this, so that was the deal. What I did is I, uh, bought a house in Washington and said, "You want to renovate the house?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Great, we hired a contractor."

• 0:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, you bought Brett Baer's house, no?

• 0:42Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah.

• 0:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that's a beautiful house.

• 0:43Howard Lutnick?

  We can talk about whatever you want, by the way. I'm happy to talk about serious things, casual things.

• 0:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, let's just do this.

• 0:48David Friedberg?

  Leave it, it's fine.

• 0:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's roll, because he's on fire.

• 0:50David Friedberg?

  Just roll, you're already running, right?

• 0:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's on fire.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crush your questions, I admit. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What'd you guys think? That was fun. That was great.

• 1:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Howard, thanks for being here. Thanks for joining myself and David Friedberg on the All In Podcast. I want to take a step back before we talk about today, and instead talk about your friendship with the President, how it started, how you guys got to know each other, and walk us through the moment when you, you know, frankly, went out on a limb a little bit, stepped up, became the Campaign Finance Chair, and then just that evolution.

• 1:34Howard Lutnick?

  So, I've known the President since I was 30 years old. So I used to go on the, uh, call it, let me call it the charity circuit in New York.

• 1:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sure.

• 1:43Howard Lutnick?

  So there's basically a charity party every night when you live in New York.

• 1:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like the rubber chicken dinner.

• 1:48Howard Lutnick?

  Like, literally, the rubber chicken. And, uh, so sort of every night you go out. And, uh, and so...

• 1:55Howard Lutnick?

  The boss of my company, Bernie Cantor, he got tired of going. Right, so he didn't want to go. So he would send me with his wife. And I would be her walker, and I'm the thirty year old CEO of the company. And I'd take her to the party. And, uh, and after the party, I'd put her in a limo. And she'd go home. And DJT would say, well, let's go out. And so we'd go out. It wasn't planned, but he was at the party. He's forty five. I'm at the party thirty, and we chased the same girls. Okay, it was basically, it worked out fine. And, and by the way, here's the thing about Donald Trump. He was the most famous, the most fun.

• 2:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Howard Lutnick?

  The most interesting person thirty years ago.

• 2:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Howard Lutnick?

  Thirty-three years ago. I mean, here's the best thing. He's been on the cover of Time Magazine fifty-nine times.

• 2:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No way.

• 2:50Howard Lutnick?

  And then he leans over to me and he goes, and twenty, we're good. I'm like, but who can take that?

• 2:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Howard Lutnick?

  I mean, who could take, like, other people, when you have a bad cover of Time Magazine, you'd crumple, right, and be sand on the floor. Instead, he's like, brilliant.

• 3:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Isn't that he's just totally wired to understand that moment, like, of being a public figure? Or, like, what is it that's so unique about what constitutes the ability to navigate that over forty years?

• 3:18Howard Lutnick?

  I think it, it, it adds energy to him.

• 3:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To him.

• 3:23Howard Lutnick?

  Right, so everybody else's energy that they don't understand is people bring negative energy to Donald Trump. Right, and they're just charging his battery.

• 3:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hmm.

• 3:31Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, your energy around him comes to him. So when I come at him with a lot of energy, he comes back with a lot of energy.

• 3:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 3:38Howard Lutnick?

  Right, it doesn't matter. He never, he never steps back. He just sort of takes it like the centrifuge and then hurls it back at you. And he's been that way always. So this is not new.

• 3:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is just who he is.

• 3:51Howard Lutnick?

  This is who he is. So, so those other people who attack him.

• 3:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Howard Lutnick?

  They think they're attacking him. They're charging his battery. They're literally charging his battery. So he comes back bigger, stronger, bigger, stronger. And once you understand the man. The most intuitive person that you've ever met.

• 4:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Howard Lutnick?

  And people say, well, okay, so people who know me, I don't suffer fools. And they have all these derogatory, all my left liberal friends, all these derogatory statements about the guy. Right? And they know me really well.

• 4:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And they'd say, well, how can you work for him? I'd say, how can I work for him? The most intuitive person, he senses it, he knows it, he calls me up and he says Panama Canal. That's what he says, because Panama Canal, it just feels wrong. Right? And then he sends me on the quest to go, I, I didn't do anything, I just start the quest to go look at it.

• 4:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Howard Lutnick?

  Right? The mouth that's east is a deep water port by the Chinese. The mouth that's west is a deep water port by the Chinese. They're building bridges over it, so our ships and our military ships should go under. Right? In our hemisphere, a Chinese bridge. So then I said, okay, let's go prove it. So I have a, a friend of mine, he owns a big shipping company. I said, take two iPhones, put them on a stand and just go through the Panama Canal. You know, the Panama Canal, they sort of drag ships through like this. And I said, just go video both ways.

• 5:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Howard Lutnick?

  Just video both ways. Seventy percent of every letter is Chinese. Then I'm talking like the sides of container ships, the stores, like, I'm not talking like.

• 5:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The signage.

• 5:33Howard Lutnick?

  It just, just random signage, like you're riding on a road. It's all Chinese. And then I do the research and I call him back and I say the magic words between me and him. I have your path. Which is, I've done it, I've done the legal work, I've done everything, right? So when you start talking about it, you have a foundation. It's not just you talking. So people think he's just talking. He's never just talking.

• 5:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Howard Lutnick?

  He has people behind him who bring him his foundational, structural outcome. And then what does he do? He went and played golf that afternoon. He called me at seven in the morning. He said, what do you got? We talked from seven to eight. He went and played golf. Right? And that afternoon, there's the American flag in the middle of the Panama Canal in some, you know, truth he puts out.

• 6:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 6:19Howard Lutnick?

  And that's the fun part, right? So you work for the, the most intuitive guy.

• 6:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Howard Lutnick?

  Unbelievably smart, unbelievably thoughtful, who knows what he's doing. And it's so fun for me.

• 6:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Howard, let's just go back one second. So. You have this deep relationship with him. You guys are friends. Scott Besant told us the story that about 18 months ago, though, he saw all this data about what was happening under Biden. And he was just so concerned that these deficits and debts were getting so out of control. He went to the president and said, how can I help? Can I help? That's a story. But was there a moment for you that was like rooted in something other than friendship? Like, was there something on the ground where you said, hold on a second? This is a train wreck and we need to do something.

• 7:04David Friedberg?

  You were the finance chair for the campaign.

• 7:05Howard Lutnick?

  Well, no, I wasn't the finance chair. I was the transition chair.

• 7:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Transition.

• 7:09Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so I ran transition, which we'll talk about. But, so let's go through it. So I'm friends with him, right? But I'm building my business, a young guy building my business. And then 9/11 happens.

• 7:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so I'm friends with the guy. I'm just friends with the guy. But then 9/11 happens. Kind, sweet, calls me all the time, just good human being. Nice, warm, caring, good human being, right? But then I'm knocked out. So what do I do next? I try to rebuild my company, take care of the families of 9/11. You know, I had, I lost 658 people who worked for me. And, and we had a policy. We want to work with people that we like. So when we had an opening, we didn't use headhunters. We would say to everybody at the firm, does anybody know anybody who do this job?

• 7:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 7:58Howard Lutnick?

  And so, you know, a young lady works for me says, you know, my best friend is an HR person. They have to have capacity.

• 8:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Howard Lutnick?

  But once they have capacity, imagine we hire that person.

• 8:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Howard Lutnick?

  Now, what happens is it's, it's not one big happy family.

• 8:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Howard Lutnick?

  But people really, really care about the company. And that's our company that's on the top five floors of the World Trade Center. On 9/11, when the plane hits it, kills everybody at the office. My brother Gary, he dies at 36. My best friend Doug, he dies at 39. I had just turned 40 that summer. I had a party, 65 couples. It's my 40th birthday.

• 8:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  40th birthday, yeah.

• 8:38Howard Lutnick?

  Right? 27 people at my party get killed.

• 8:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jesus.

• 8:41Howard Lutnick?

  These are my friends. These are my friends. So I'm driven to take care of the families of the people who died. And I commit 25% of all of our profits. But the company is destroyed. So we go from making a million a day. I was a rich guy, right? What's the definition of a rich guy? No personal debt? No corporate debt, Ken Fitzgerald, no debt. So how do you survive nine eleven? If you don't owe anybody any money, the only money you're losing is is your money. Is your money. So we survive and we take care of our friends' families. And then we build the company back up. So you could see like I'm a I'm a special guest on the Celebrity Apprentice, the first

• 9:25Howard Lutnick?

  season of Celebrity Apprentice when Piers Morgan wins. Did he fire you? No, no, I wasn't a contestant. I'm a little beyond being a contestant. I was a special guest. I'd come in like if you see during the auction, I'm standing next to him at the auction, you know, and I'm helping him like I'm just his friend sort of as an extra all along the way, you know, every once in a while. You kept the friendship going as you're rebuilding. We're friends all the way, but I'm rebuilding my company. Yeah. And then, so I'm not interested in politics. Okay, I don't do anything in politics because I got my head down. Right? The financial crisis, Ken Fitzgerald's great in the financial crisis. Had you ever donated to candidates at all or not? Yeah, New York candidates. Okay. Right, New York candidates, so you think about it, you're in New York, you try to

• 10:08Howard Lutnick?

  pick social liberals, fiscal conservatives. Right. If that even exists anymore. Yeah. Right, but if you're in New York, you have to pick, and look, I grew up in New York, so I'm socially liberal. What else could I possibly be? Yeah. So, you know, so early when Chuck Schumer was young, before he became what the president now calls a Palestinian, you know, you know, he, you know, I raised him, you know, I raised him money and gave money, Donald Trump gave him money. Same, I did too. Yeah, I mean, because he was, he was, that's what he said he was, he was social liberal, fiscal conservative. And, and so I, you know, we'd all give to those kind of candidates, but mostly giving to get along. Right. And to be able to, you know, ask him a question if you needed to ask him a question.

• 10:53Howard Lutnick?

  But there was really no, I had no drive. Right. In that, like I said, the first four nights I slept in Washington in the last 20 years were when Donald Trump was elected. I had never slept here, I'd come down, visit a little, go, what am I staying here for? So he calls me. At the end of October 23. Okay.

• 11:17David Friedberg?

  So he's already had his first term.

• 11:18Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:19David Friedberg?

  You didn't support or get involved in it.

• 11:21Howard Lutnick?

  So I gave him money and I gave Hillary money.

• 11:24David Friedberg?

  You gave Hillary money in the first term.

• 11:25Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah, because Hillary was incredibly helpful to me post 9/11. Remember, she was a senator?

• 11:30David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 11:31Howard Lutnick?

  And New York needed help.

• 11:32David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 11:33Howard Lutnick?

  And Hillary was incredibly helpful. And I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships with a whole bunch of congressmen and they were going to do nice things. Like Bill Young ran House Appropriations.

• 11:46David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 11:47Howard Lutnick?

  Bill Young was my friend.

• 11:48David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 11:49Howard Lutnick?

  Through a whole variety of things that had to do with, um...

• 11:54Howard Lutnick?

  I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital. And I used to walk around and I would bring music there for the men who got hurt from the military who were in Bethesda Naval Hospital. And we would walk around, I'd go with my wife, and then I would engage the young man with music. I'd give him music and ask him what CDs he wanted. This is when CDs were there and I'd bring him a Walkman. And my wife would pull the family outside and she'd pay a year of their mortgage and all their expenses. Because what people don't realize is your son loses his leg, right? Dad and mom come flying in and they're going to stay by his bedside. What job do these people have?

• 12:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Howard Lutnick?

  That allows them to be at their son's world? And their world is falling apart because their son lost his leg. So their world is falling apart. But at home, their world is falling apart.

• 12:47David Friedberg?

  Falling apart, yeah.

• 12:47Howard Lutnick?

  And so my, my wife would just, just try to figure out how much money was and just give him a check.

• 12:53David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Howard Lutnick?

  And no, no form, no nothing, just give them the money.

• 12:57David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Howard Lutnick?

  And, and help them. So I would bump into Bill Young and his wife, who were, they were just, they ran then Defense Appropriations and they were there just being good human beings. And so we became friends and he said to me once, he said, "Is there anything I could ever do to help you?" I'm like, "Look, you run, you're like a congressman from Florida who does Defense Appropriations." And I'm like a Jewish guy from New York who's in finance. If there ever were two skews that were ever going to meet, this is two ships going, "Swoop", right? We got nothing. So I said to him, "Look, we're just going to be friends, right? We're never going to do anything." And then he runs House Appropriations. And so when New York needs money to rebuild after 9/11... They go see Bill Young to try to get a bill passed. Right.

• 13:41Howard Lutnick?

  And he said, how can you come see me without Howard? Yeah. You know, this is post nine eleven. So I'm running New York and Hillary does a really nice job. Okay. For New York. Yeah. And I told, I told DJT, I call him DJT because I've known him for always. I said, I told him that I can't forget. Yeah. I'm just not the person who's gonna forget. Of course I gave him money, right? But I give it, and by the way, he still tortures me for it. So like, you know what the best part is? As a good friend does, yes. Right. You know what the point is? See, other people would, would, you know, sort of curl back. Yeah. Right? So here, right after he gets elected, guy has a story for you. So right after he gets elected, he has a dinner in New York.

• 14:24Howard Lutnick?

  Right? So he invites me to the dinner in New York because I'm his friend. And then while he's giving his talk to his first dinner in New York, he goes, wait, wait, Hillary supporter. And he points at me, right? So I stand up, I go, hey, and I sit down, you know, he's just sassing me. Yeah. Okay. Cause I gave him tons of dough. He knows I love him and that's fine. Okay. So we're 2023. So we're 2023 and he calls me. And he says, will you help me? Yeah. And I had not thought politics. Now, I, I gave him money in 2020 reelection. Yeah. Probably gave him 10 million bucks. I raised him 15 million bucks. So I, I was, you know, once I'm on his side, the whole way through.

• 15:08Howard Lutnick?

  I'm raising him money in 17, 18, 19, 20, while he's president, I'm totally on his side. Yeah. And I'm, but I'm just his friend. I'm not engaged. Yeah. Okay. Cause I'm still rebuilding my life. Yeah. Okay. And then 2023 calls me, says, will you help me?

• 15:25Howard Lutnick?

  And I actually thought about it. Like, and that was the first time I really thought politics. And then I said, yes.

• 15:36Howard Lutnick?

  And I gave him 10 million bucks right then and there. And then I started talking to him. I started going on the campaign trail. I started doing research. I started doing knowledge. I wanted, I talked to him about everything. I talked to him all the time about everything.

• 15:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you love it? Cause our, our friend Sax, we were talking at dinner last night. He seems to love it.

• 15:55Howard Lutnick?

  There's nothing not to love. As Donald Trump says, this is a thousand Super Bowls. For him. And for me, it's only 100 Super Bowls. I mean, if, if you're dedicated to America and you're willing to wear America's clothing. And to stop worrying about yourself and only care about America.

• 16:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Howard Lutnick?

  And have no objective post.

• 16:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Howard Lutnick?

  The president hates when these people have, like they raise money posts from people they've met in here. So I'm never gonna work again. Okay? I'm never gonna work. This is all I care about. I'm just gonna help America. So he asked me to help him. And I started thinking about it. I started studying everything and I read everything and I read everything about the White House. I read everything about everything I can possibly read, cause I'm, I'm just that way. And, uh, and then I started helping him.

• 16:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And I went to learn how he picked the judges, right? And the Supreme Court and why it didn't that and, and, uh, I'm just very detailed. And so I started studying what transition is.

• 16:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 16:58Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And I started studying it. And I started studying tariffs. Cause he wanted to talk about tariffs. And he's always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a ripoff of America. And I started studying everything about it.

• 17:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Howard Lutnick?

  And so he and I would talk about it and we knew everything about it. And then he picked me to run transition.

• 17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay. So we're gonna talk about tariffs in a sec, but so double clicking to transition, what did you find that was so interesting?

• 17:22Howard Lutnick?

  Like, I'll, I'll give you an example. So there's a book called The Gatekeepers. That was written, the people gave me, oh, you should read this book. And it's about chiefs of staff.

• 17:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 17:32Howard Lutnick?

  And basically, there's another way to call it. It's called The Jerks. Right? Because what they do, imagine you're the gatekeeper.

• 17:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Howard Lutnick?

  You're the gatekeeper of what?

• 17:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Howard Lutnick?

  Of the man who was elected president of the United States of America? He needs the gates kept from him? And if you listen to Nixon tapes. You hear him scheming to try to learn anything. Because what happens is the Chief of Staff. Everybody reports to the Chief of Staff and the Chief of Staff reports to you. So you can't get on Air Force One without asking the Chief of Staff. You can't get a document unless you have the Chief of Staff. No one can come see you unless you have the Chief of Staff. And if they take your phone away, you know what you are? You're imprisoned. And that's the gatekeepers. So I said to Donald Trump, I said, "Look, you fired Reince Priebus, who was your Chief of Staff. Then you fired John Kelly, who was the Chief of Staff. Then you fired Mick Mulvaney, who was the Chief of Staff. Then you would have fired Meadows, but you didn't get a chance because of the next election."

• 18:27Howard Lutnick?

  So I said, "Why don't you fire the job? What you need is a Chief of Staff. Who's actually a Chief of Staff, not who's the gatekeeper."

• 18:38David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 18:38Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And so that was an example of how I changed it. And so Susie Wiles is perfect for Donald Trump. You know why? She lets him be him. John Kelly took away his phone. So he couldn't communicate with anybody. Whereas Susie embraces who he is, helped him get elected, ran a great campaign. She's perfect for him in this role. And so that's what I brought. So I brought like an understanding of him.

• 19:11David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 19:12Howard Lutnick?

  And an understanding of the role.

• 19:14David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 19:14Howard Lutnick?

  And that's why I convinced your friend David Sacks, every time he said, "I can't do it." I would call him and say, "It's an emergency. It's an emergency. I need to see you." He'd fly in and go, "What is it?" I go, "You need to join the administration." He goes, "That's what the emergency was?" I go, "Of course."

• 19:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Howard, was that when you conceived originally Doge? In that initial... Was that during the transition?

• 19:35Howard Lutnick?

  All right, so Doge...

• 19:35David Friedberg?

  Yeah, we should talk about Doge and tariffs.

• 19:37Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so Doge comes... It's October of, uh...

• 19:45Howard Lutnick?

  Before the election. Okay. Early October. October twenty twenty four. October twenty twenty four. Yeah. Uh, like, the beginning. Yeah. Of October twenty twenty four. And I called the president and I said, I need, uh, I need to spend an hour with you. So I have my big ideas. Yeah. Right, so, he gives me, he says, look, I'm, I'm not sure what to do October seventh. Right? Right. Why, why don't we figure out what I should be doing October seventh? So we decided we're gonna go out to the Ohel, which is, uh, uh, a super religious, uh, Hasidic Jewish, um, Messiah, you know, the, the people who wear black hats think he's the Messiah. And they have a crypt for him where you write a note and you put a note in. Mm-hmm. All right, and so,

• 20:26Howard Lutnick?

  we agreed we'd go out to that, uh, to that grave site. And we'd probably win sixty thousand of those kind of voters. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. For a day. And then we drove there and back together, the two of us. So I had an hour and a half, just he and me, talking. And I said, I want to balance the budget United States of America. And I, this is the way we're gonna do it. We, no one's ever checked the just under four trillion dollars of entitlements. Every politician thinks what you have to do is you have to take the retirement age from sixty-five and make it a seventy. Right. And you have to do this and this and this and this, because they never think about the money. Totally. But people like us. Totally. Would say, what's the first thing you do? Well, what's the value I'm getting from my money? Totally. Right?

• 21:11Howard Lutnick?

  And what you find is if nobody ever, like, as in, ever, like, I could say the word ever twelve times, has looked at where the money goes. Totally. And so, there's not even a process to get it back when you send it to the wrong person. Totally. You just send another one out. Yeah. Like, think about it, you just, well, I sent it accidentally, or accidentally, notice how it's accidental? Right. It's always accidentally sent to the wrong person. Really, you wouldn't ever say the five point nine million people who work for the government, there could be some crooks in there. Right. No, no, no, it's all accidental. What a load of nonsense this is.

• 21:45David Friedberg?

  There's some percentage of this.

• 21:47Howard Lutnick?

  But you would say.

• 21:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Howard Lutnick?

  And you would say. No, just zero base it and let's figure out. It's gotta be 25%. Yeah. We'd all say if it's never been checked, how could it not be 25%?

• 21:57David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 21:57Howard Lutnick?

  How could it not be?

• 21:58David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 21:58Howard Lutnick?

  And the answer is that's a trillion dollars a year.

• 22:00David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 22:01Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so I said, I think we're gonna cut a trillion dollars a year in expense. And then I think we can, through tariffs and other means, we're gonna get revenues of a trillion dollars.

• 22:11David Friedberg?

  Incremental revenue.

• 22:12Howard Lutnick?

  Incremental revenue.

• 22:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Howard Lutnick?

  And we're gonna balance the budget.

• 22:14David Friedberg?

  But all, but sorry, let me just ask one question. How did the tax cut to the extension of the tax cuts?

• 22:19Howard Lutnick?

  There, there is zero basis. I mean, where I was yesterday and where I am tomorrow, like, oh, it's a tax cut. No, it's not. It's the exact same thing as yesterday is today. To say continuing yesterday tomorrow is like silly.

• 22:31David Friedberg?

  So let me ask you, let me ask you on tariffs. Having studied it yourself, when there's higher tariffs, people purchase less, things cost more.

• 22:40Howard Lutnick?

  No, we'll, we'll talk about tariffs. Let's, let's just finish.

• 22:42David Friedberg?

  Go to focus of this.

• 22:43Howard Lutnick?

  Let's just finish, uh, dough. So I'm in the car with him, right? And I said, we're gonna balance the budget. And I said, I, but I have one favor to ask of you. If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax? For every person who makes less than $150,000 a year for the United States of America? Which, by the way, is about 85% of America.

• 23:05David Friedberg?

  Right, right.

• 23:06Howard Lutnick?

  And the reason you wanna work for Donald Trump is he looks at me and goes, sure. Like, you realize, you realize the President of the United States said, if you balance the budget, sure. And he's not lying. He's not kidding. He's like, yeah, that seems, that seems like a great idea.

• 23:23David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 23:24Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And so, and then I tell him, okay, I'm gonna go recruit Elon. Cause Elon's all in.

• 23:31David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Howard Lutnick?

  Right? He's already said he's all in. He's already said he's going to Pennsylvania.

• 23:35David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 23:35Howard Lutnick?

  Right? So I call Elon and I don't know Elon. I don't know, but he's perfect for this. So I use my superpower, which is I call everybody else I know who knows him and they arrange. And I'm texting with him and he agrees to meet me on October 14th. So I fly down to Brownsville, Texas. Uh, he's gonna catch the rocket on October 14th. So that's what he invites me down for the rocket catch. Having not, he's not inviting me for the rocket catch. He's just inviting me down that that's a good day for me to meet him. So I fly down, I see the rocket catch, which is awesome.

• 24:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Howard Lutnick?

  Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. And then I expect to meet him.

• 24:10David Friedberg?

  By the way, very pivotal day in the, in the campaign. If you remember Biden sort of didn't pay as much attention to it. Trump was pretty engaged. Elon was supportive of Trump. So when he actually caught the rocket, the media was almost like frozen, waiting for it to fail. And it didn't fail and it worked and it was this incredible moment.

• 24:27Howard Lutnick?

  I was waiting for Elon. Okay, so I flew down to see Elon and, uh, with, with my, uh, with my son. And, uh, so we watched the rocket, right? And then they say, okay, he's gonna go hang out with his engineers and party with them. Seems reasonable. It's like hour, hour and a half. And then he just goes dark.

• 24:46David Friedberg?

  You're still waiting.

• 24:47Howard Lutnick?

  I'm just sitting there waiting. And then they take me and I go to like a, the equivalent of a Margaritaville. You know, where you have like a, a basket and you can get quesadillas. And you get a Diet Coke in a, in a, in a red sort of plastic thing that's about this tall. It's like, I got 4,000 ounces of Diet Coke in it that comes in this big.

• 25:04David Friedberg?

  Love that.

• 25:05Howard Lutnick?

  But now, to his credit, he sends me all the executives from SpaceX. Yeah. Are hanging with me.

• 25:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Howard Lutnick?

  But he's dark. And what happened is he took a nap. He was up all night doing the engineering and he went to sleep. So then when he finally wakes up, so I'm just sitting there like, you know, doing the, like, I don't know him really. So I'm just doing the thumb twiddle. I'm going, okay, you know, this guy's.

• 25:27David Friedberg?

  You got a couple quesadillas.

• 25:28Howard Lutnick?

  I'm hoping he sees me, right? So then he wakes up, he says, come to my house. Right? I'll see you in my house. So his house is 1,200 square feet. It's got the furniture in it that I had when I graduated from college.

• 25:38David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 25:39Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. 1,200 square feet and it's got the furniture, plastic chairs and, okay. So.

• 25:48Howard Lutnick?

  I say, um, we're gonna bounce the budget. I need to cut a trillion. He's like, I'm in. He says, I think we should cut eighty percent of the federal government because the essential employees, if the government shut down, essential employees are four hundred and fifty thousand. Yeah. Okay. And there's five point nine million people who work for the government. Yeah. How can four hundred and fifty thousand be essential in this five point nine million? So he says, like Twitter, I think we should cut eighty percent. Yeah. And I say, I know how to cut fifty. And he says, I wanna cut eighty. I said, I know how to do fifty. He goes, are you with me or against me? I go, I know how to legally do it. What do you have?

• 26:29Howard Lutnick?

  And my son says it was like two alpha dogs, just like fighting with each other for the first half hour. And then, and then, um, so then X comes in, right? And then he's gotta walk X, he's gotta walk his son X out. So he walks his son X out, and I'm thinking, maybe the meeting's over. Right? Cause we've been together a half hour, forty minutes, and maybe it's over. Cause he got up, he walked out, he comes back, and he sits down, he goes, Howard, this meeting is... Right? That's what he says, this meeting is... And we sit down, and we map out the plan. I tell him what a gratis vendor is. Yeah. Cause I designed, cause I was not gonna go into the government. I was doing transition. What is a gratis vendor? A gratis vendor is, uh, is a, an approved vendor for the United States of America that gives product to the government, doesn't sell it.

• 27:15Howard Lutnick?

  Okay. So therefore, I don't have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor, cause you're giving it to us. Hmm. And then, if you give it to Article Two, which is the president's stuff, then the president can accept it.

• 27:30Howard Lutnick?

  Right? Cause it's give. Sorry, how, what's an example of this? Like, just to make it... I write some software. You write some software? I write some software for the Commerce Department to do a better job of XYZ. Mm-hmm. You just give it to me. And then I do QA on it, and I can take it. If you sell it to me for one dollar, we go into government hell. Right. The whole rigmarole. Right? But if you give it to me, right? And then I set up, you know, so I said, I'm calling it Doge. And I registered the name Doge. You said that. Of course. And were you familiar with Dogecoin? Of course! It's Elon! Yeah, so you're fault, okay. So what happens is, in...

• 28:08Howard Lutnick?

  In the Defense Production Act in World War II, Yes. In order to get all the great executives Yes. of America to help with production, they named everything after jazz singers or everything. That of the people who were on the committee, that it would make them laugh and smile. Okay. Right? So I picked a DOGE, so he would laugh and smile. And he said, "Get the F out of here." Like, when I said, "We're gonna name it DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency", which I didn't think of. It was on the internet, sort of floating around in June. Yes. Right? But I literally registered it. Right? As the Department of Government Efficiency, like, make it a real thing, as a gratis vendor. And I said, "This is how I've done it for me." Yes. So that I can run Cantor Fitzgerald,

• 28:52Howard Lutnick?

  you can run SpaceX. Right? You're not, you don't have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff. Because you're not working for the government. You're just giving stuff to the government. Yes. You're literally giving of yourself. Right. But you're not looking for anything. You're not taking any money. You're not owning anything. You're not doing anything. You're not on that side of the wall. You're on this side. Yeah. You're outside. Yeah. Right? And so, we, we had fun. We talked for two hours. And then, on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside, and I put up, "Welcome to DOGE. We are going to rip the waste out of our $6.5 trillion government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump president." Yeah. Right?

• 29:36Howard Lutnick?

  And, and I posted that with my, I probably, at the time, had 25,000 viewers, and I got 45 million viewers. Wow. Right? So it was me and Elon. Yeah. And that was the beginning of DOGE. Yeah. Right? Then, I ran transition, which is, so, for the transition, we had, I had a room in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. Okay? Big conference table in the middle. Four 85-inch screens on one side, and mirror four 85-inch screens on the other side. So that you and I could talk to each other. So the president sat across from me. Yeah. Elon sat, oh, and then I'll tell you one other story about Elon. So, he wins the election. President wins the election. He accepts it, like, Wednesday at 2 o'clock in the morning. Right? Elon's not on stage. If you see, I'm on stage. Elon's way in the back of the room.

• 30:21Howard Lutnick?

  There's a thousand people in the room, 2,000 people. He's way in the back. He, he goes home. Thursday afternoon I call, I'm doing a dry run of the launch of my transition, right? And the president is superstitious. He's never had one conversation with me about transition. He totally trusts me.

• 30:40Howard Lutnick?

  He wins the election, now he's got a, like, you know, I'd said on Jesse Waters, I'm ready.

• 30:45David Friedberg?

  He hasn't talked to you ahead of time about who he wants.

• 30:47Howard Lutnick?

  About one job, about one thing.

• 30:48David Friedberg?

  So the transition, until the election?

• 30:50Howard Lutnick?

  Because he's superstitious, like, don't waste your time.

• 30:54David Friedberg?

  Don't jinx it.

• 30:55Howard Lutnick?

  Right? Just go win. And you gotta go win. So what happens is, he... So I'm doing a dry run. So I call Elon. And I say, "Where are you?" He goes, "What do you mean?" "I'm in Austin, Texas," or whatever. I go, "What are you doing?" I mean, what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected? If you're not gonna help him pick the cabinet? Like, come on! Right? Because the way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions. He likes them. And anybody who says, "Oh, the last person who sees him gets him," that's because they don't know him at all.

• 31:39David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 31:39Howard Lutnick?

  Right? The answer is, it's an orchestra. Right? And I would say, "Okay, I'm the first violin." You know, at the time, I would say, I was, you know, I would describe myself as second violin.

• 31:48David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 31:49Howard Lutnick?

  Right? So this is an orchestra, so the president's not gonna make a decision with me and him alone?

• 31:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Howard Lutnick?

  No, no, he's gonna have... So it went like this. President's sitting across from me, right, at the conference table. Elon to his left, Susie to his right, right? JD to my left, Lyndon McMahon, who's my co-chair, right? But she wrote all those EOs that he did? That was, she was responsible for, and I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. So she's sitting to my right, JD's sitting to my left, Don Jr., right? Stephen Miller, and he... There was always 12 people in the room. They were never like, me and him, hushed in the corner, doing this, that, never! And what we would do is I would put eight candidates on one screen.

• 32:32David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 32:33Howard Lutnick?

  Right, and then big candidate on each screen.

• 32:35David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 32:36Howard Lutnick?

  Most beautiful AI picture of you you've ever seen.

• 32:38David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 32:39Howard Lutnick?

  And people would walk in and go, where'd you get that photo?

• 32:40David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 32:41Howard Lutnick?

  I'm like, what do you think I did? I took three of your photos.

• 32:43David Friedberg?

  I've heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition, that there were, you walk in and everyone's photo is up on the screen.

• 32:48Howard Lutnick?

  Everybody's on the room, and so what would happen is-

• 32:50David Friedberg?

  That's a candidate for a role, and then you guys would debate it.

• 32:52Howard Lutnick?

  So what happened is a big picture of the person.

• 32:53David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Howard Lutnick?

  Their, their key highlights of their resume, not boring. Their education.

• 32:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Howard Lutnick?

  Right, and then you would click a button and you'd see him speaking. Twenty seconds at a time, four of them. Right, so it was about eighty seconds, and you're not speaking about the job.

• 33:10David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 33:10Howard Lutnick?

  Just like, how do you present?

• 33:11David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 33:12Howard Lutnick?

  And what you can see is his whole cabinet can talk.

• 33:16David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 33:16Howard Lutnick?

  All of them.

• 33:17David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 33:17Howard Lutnick?

  Because he picked them knowing, I need you to be able to talk, to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there. And that's key to him, and what I, the way I would joke to people is say, how do you do it? I go, watch. Pitch? So you'd throw him a curveball. He wouldn't swing. You throw him a fastball, he wouldn't swing. You throw him a slider, he hits the ball, hits it to my glove, I go, here you go. You go, well, how do you know that? I go, because I know the guy for thirty-three years. I know what he wants, and he loved the process, and you know what happened? You saw what happened. Right? First day, eight candidates, twelve jobs, national security. Okay, he says, what do you want? I go, eight to four. I put up eight candidates, I recruited everybody, I had a hundred and fifty of the best Republicans in the United States of America.

• 34:01Howard Lutnick?

  They each gave me five people, who then gave me ten people. I had thousands of people to pick from.

• 34:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Howard Lutnick?

  The whole government was set up to pick from, and then we picked candidates. I had eight for every job.

• 34:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Howard Lutnick?

  Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight to four, that's Friday. Sunday comes in, four to two. In the morning, I fly everybody in for the two, I prep them. We go in and meet him, two to one, final interview, give him the job.

• 34:29David Friedberg?

  Wow.

• 34:29Howard Lutnick?

  Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Monday, Tuesday, Monday, we're done with national security. Okay, now we're rolling on and it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate. Everybody knew it. Everybody was prepped. Everybody was where, everybody was done. You know, that's why I had to beat the heck out of David Sacks because I needed David Sacks to be in the government. I recruited David. I pounded on David. You can ask David, right? I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said, okay, I'm gonna do it. Right? And I did that for everybody.

• 34:59David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And I made sure he had the greatest choices. And then every once in a while, he would call me at night and say, throw this guy in, throw this guy in, throw this guy in. We did a vet on everybody.

• 35:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Howard Lutnick?

  But I didn't take out anything negative. I am not a negative person. You can tell.

• 35:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Howard Lutnick?

  I'm positive. So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate?

• 35:19David Friedberg?

  And there was, there was. There was no game theory. A lot of people speculated there was game theory that we'll put a mix of people that will assume some won't make it out of committee and then we'll end up with the ones that we do want. Everyone was the number one choice.

• 35:33Howard Lutnick?

  Only one. And that was Matt.

• 35:34David Friedberg?

  Matt, yeah. What happened, what happened with Matt Howard? How did that process?

• 35:38Howard Lutnick?

  We, he was tortured by his Attorney General in the first term. And we were not gonna have that ever again. Right? So we needed strong backbone, strong capacity, which Matt Gaetz has it.

• 35:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Howard Lutnick?

  And I know Matt Gaetz and he has it. Right? But we did not know what that vet was gonna say from that report from Congress. So here was the idea. We fight for him and we fight for him to get through. And then we read the report. The report's not bad. And remember, the president's been tortured by people blaming him for stuff that never happened. Oh, 30 years ago, he raped this woman in the, in the dressing room of Bloomingdale's. I mean, what a load of crap. Right? It's just not true. None of it's true. It's ridiculous. So he, he comes at this saying, I know you're gonna get tortured with ridiculous. Right? So then he says, if it's, if it's ridiculous, then we support Matt. And if it's not, we have Pam right here, right now.

• 36:36David Friedberg?

  So that was lined up.

• 36:37Howard Lutnick?

  So that everybody knows it's right here, right now.

• 36:40David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Howard Lutnick?

  And it's 3D chess.

• 36:41David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 36:41Howard Lutnick?

  So we read it, Pam.

• 36:43David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 36:43Howard Lutnick?

  It's like Pam in a hundredth of a second.

• 36:45David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 36:45Howard Lutnick?

  And Pam is a rock star. And you could argue. That you would say, well, why didn't you pick her first? You know what? He's the president. He plays 3D chess. He did it his way. And you know what? But there was no candidate up there.

• 37:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Howard Lutnick?

  Who wasn't right.

• 37:02David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And we could talk about all the detail and how he thought about it, when it went, but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive, and so right. And what does it produce? The greatest cabinet ever. The most capable, thoughtful, best able to communicate. I mean, it's so fun to be in a room with these people. Because these are world-class people, the best ever in government.

• 37:26David Friedberg?

  We shouldn't betray confidence, but I mean, we were in a room earlier this week with several of them, and everyone had a moment to speak. It was unbelievable.

• 37:36Howard Lutnick?

  I mean, look, I'm-

• 37:36David Friedberg?

  Every single one of them, you're like-

• 37:38Howard Lutnick?

  I'm a huge fan of all these guys.

• 37:39David Friedberg?

  Could have been a leader of the country, like-

• 37:40Howard Lutnick?

  They're all great.

• 37:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Howard Lutnick?

  That's the point. He picked. He picked greatness. Now, I was the recruiter. So I was recruiter in chief.

• 37:46David Friedberg?

  I can understand why now, by the way.

• 37:48Howard Lutnick?

  Well, but think about it. If you take someone like me.

• 37:51David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Howard Lutnick?

  And you say, just be a headhunter.

• 37:53David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Howard Lutnick?

  I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever to live. Because think about it. What's the odds of saying, okay, Howard, your whole job is just be a headhunter? Find the best guys. I promise you, I'll be really good at it.

• 38:04David Friedberg?

  Can we go back to Doge? So you talked about the gratis vendors. Maybe there's other stuff that you can do with executive action. The president can do with Doge, et cetera. Can we talk about congressional budgets? How do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along? And is the plan to bring Congress along? I've asked this of Besant. I've asked this several times since we've been here. And it's the thing that gives me the most heartache and the most headache, is I worry about whether this actually gets there, given congressional interests.

• 38:34Howard Lutnick?

  I think Congress works with something called scoring.

• 38:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Howard Lutnick?

  Right? That if it comes from their pen, it counts.

• 38:46Howard Lutnick?

  If it doesn't come from their pen, it doesn't count. But the fact is, money always counts. It just doesn't count for their scoring, but their scoring is only part of the game. Right? The outcome of the game is what matters to me, Elon, our cabinet, and Donald Trump. Okay, the outcome of the game, and I'm telling you, the outcome of the game by me and Elon. Now, a funny part of it is, so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn't want to leave Pennsylvania, right? Because he, you know, Elon, he's committed to Pennsylvania. So I convince him he's got to come. And we have a plan. I'm going to say to him, so I, everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God.

• 39:30Howard Lutnick?

  I'm the only one who introduces Elon. So Elon comes on stage with me. There's the two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden, the only time the two of us are on stage. I'm the fourth speaker, he's the third from the end, JD is second from the end, and Donald Trump is last. Okay? So he's supposed to say, when I, I say to him, how much are you gonna cut? The deal was, he's going to cut one trillion dollars. And then he's supposed to say, and how much are you gonna earn? And I'm supposed to say, one trillion dollars, and then we're supposed to say, together, we're gonna balance the budget in the United States of America. That's, that's the little sort of thing. So I ask Elon, how much are you gonna cut? And he, because- He said two trillion.

• 40:11Howard Lutnick?

  Well, because we're in front of 22,000 people, and the place is rough, and he says, two trillion! And then I'm sitting there going, and I'm like, I think I said, alrighty then. Or something like that, you know, like, what was I supposed to say? You know, so later, when he walks back to a trillion- No, you were, you were caught off guard, but I mean- Did he ask you how much he gonna earn? No, because he said two trillion. He's like, I got it all, don't worry, Howard, yeah. Like, like I said, alright, alrighty then, and that was that. So then I walked off stage, and you know, he said two trillion, so like, I'm like, what am I gonna say? But the answer was always- Right, that 25% of the waste foreign abuse is a trillion dollars.

• 40:48David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 40:49Howard Lutnick?

  And he's got to cut and find the waste foreign abuse of a trillion dollars.

• 40:53David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 40:54Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, and that my job is to raise one trillion dollars of exogenous new revenue.

• 41:00David Friedberg?

  New revenue for the government.

• 41:01Howard Lutnick?

  And we, right, I'm telling you, I've been here now two months.

• 41:05David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Howard Lutnick?

  Right, I am more confident.

• 41:08David Friedberg?

  It's gonna happen.

• 41:09Howard Lutnick?

  And more excited.

• 41:10David Friedberg?

  Tell us how it happens.

• 41:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, hold on a second. So Howard, let's, let's finish this and then we'll move to tariffs and revenue generation. So there's a lot of domestic terrorism. Is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house? Is it, is it basically to put fear into people that are trying to find this waste and fraud? Is that, is that what that is? The burning of the dealerships, the...

• 41:32Howard Lutnick?

  If you're, I, I describe it to people this way. Let's say social security didn't send out their checks. This month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up and she'll get it next month.

• 41:51David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Howard Lutnick?

  A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling and complaining. And if, all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.

• 42:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Howard Lutnick?

  Because whoever screams is the one stealing.

• 42:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:15Howard Lutnick?

  Because my mother-in-law's not calling. I mean, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government, they trust, okay, maybe it got screwed up, big deal. They're not gonna call and scream at someone. But someone who's stealing always does.

• 42:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Howard Lutnick?

  So what happens is, we need to get to, so the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately getting the money, have an inside person who's routing the money, they are going to yell and scream.

• 42:41David Friedberg?

  Hmm.

• 42:42Howard Lutnick?

  But real America.

• 42:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We'll give the government.

• 42:46Howard Lutnick?

  Because here's the key.

• 42:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Benefit of the doubt.

• 42:48Howard Lutnick?

  Not one penny should stop going to, we're the richest country on earth.

• 42:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Howard Lutnick?

  Here's the way I say it. I said, we have, we have a $6.5 trillion budget. We have $4.5 trillion of revenues.

• 43:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, we lose $2 trillion a year. We have a $29 trillion GDP, right, which people don't understand, which I'll explain a little bit. And we have 36 trillion in debt.

• 43:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Howard Lutnick?

  What number didn't I say to a business person? What's our balance sheet worth?

• 43:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 43:16Howard Lutnick?

  I say $500 trillion.

• 43:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 43:19Howard Lutnick?

  The president says a quadrillion. But at 500 trillion or a quadrillion? 36 trillion? We're rich. We don't have to take one penny from someone who deserves social security. Not one penny for someone who deserves Medicaid and Medicare. What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who's not hurt, who's on disability for 50 years. It's ridiculous. And they have another job.

• 43:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And do we have to monetize our assets?

• 43:44Howard Lutnick?

  We, we need to be smart. That's all we need to be. And I'm going to tell you things that are just smart. They're not, oh my God, this is the most brilliant thing ever. This is just smart. There are so many smart things we can do, like, you know, we'll talk about the post office, right? Think about this. The post office has 625,000 people who work there and they go to your house every day. You know what the census does? The census hires 625,000 people, trains them, teaches them, as interviews 2 million people, trains and teaches them, hires cars. How about this?

• 44:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's pretty smart.

• 44:17Howard Lutnick?

  Genius.

• 44:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's pretty smart, Howard.

• 44:19Howard Lutnick?

  Right? Okay.

• 44:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like, obvious, yeah.

• 44:21Howard Lutnick?

  Right, but here's what it is. I'll tell you what I'm good at.

• 44:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're so right.

• 44:23Howard Lutnick?

  I'm really good at pattern recognition. Okay, here's one. Like, tell me 625 of one and I can point out 625 of another. This is the genius I bring to the government. This is core.

• 44:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, you're responsible for all the core data collection as well, aren't you? Isn't commerce responsible for generating a lot of the?

• 44:39Howard Lutnick?

  Oh, GDP?

• 44:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For economic.

• 44:41Howard Lutnick?

  Oh, that's right. I get to talk about GDP and how I'm gonna, how I'm gonna clean up the nonsense. This is GDP. You know, I can explain that if you make a tank and someone buys a tank, that is GDP.

• 44:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Howard Lutnick?

  But 1,000 people thinking about buying a tank? Right, who take your tax money and I give it to them and they go hmm, I wonder should we buy a tank or not? That's not GDP.

• 44:58David Friedberg?

  Right, you're saying government spending should not be counted in GDP.

• 45:00Howard Lutnick?

  No, government spending to buy a tank.

• 45:03David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:03Howard Lutnick?

  Should be.

• 45:04David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:04Howard Lutnick?

  Government spending.

• 45:05David Friedberg?

  That's non-productive.

• 45:06Howard Lutnick?

  Non-productive.

• 45:07David Friedberg?

  This is super, this is so important, I don't think, I don't think a lot of people realize this. How, how much of GDP is non-productive government spending?

• 45:15Howard Lutnick?

  How about we do one thing?

• 45:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Howard Lutnick?

  G D P, D means domestic, P is product, domestic production. It's not consumption.

• 45:27David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:27Howard Lutnick?

  If I go out and buy a Toyota.

• 45:30David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:30Howard Lutnick?

  Right, that's not GDP. Right, if I buy a Chevy that's made in America, that's a D. Right, so people think it's like a consumption model.

• 45:41David Friedberg?

  Metric, yeah.

• 45:42Howard Lutnick?

  Right, that's not it, and you can check another one is, is, is gross domestic income.

• 45:47David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:47Howard Lutnick?

  That's also good, so by the way, they're about, they grow about the same rate, it's, it's kind of fun.

• 45:51David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 45:52Howard Lutnick?

  So, the key for me is to take out the part, that if I cut non-productive, a million government employees who are non-productive, meaning they don't make tanks.

• 46:03David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 46:03Howard Lutnick?

  Right, if I take that out, it's gonna look like our GDP declined. But you'd say, but what really happened? No, our expenses went down.

• 46:11David Friedberg?

  This is so important, by the way, because people talk about a recession, and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about, we're gonna go into a recession if we cut all this spending. But, the follow-on effect of cutting non-productive spending is that the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy where we make more things, we create more jobs, we create higher wages, and that's the theory that you guys are trying to execute against. I don't think a lot of people in the general public fully understand that it's so important to kind of explain and get across here.

• 46:44Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, if we put three people behind us. And they sat behind us and they did nothing. And each of us gave them a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. It's like this, here you go. And they just sat there. Right? What is that? That's not GDP. That's actually me taking my money and giving it to them. We produced nothing. We've no purpose of the earth. It was my money. The income, however, I earned my income was mine and I just gave it to them. What? They didn't really earn income. It's really a transfer pricing model. That is currently considered in GDP. And it's nonsense. So if I stopped paying them.

• 47:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 47:24Howard Lutnick?

  Right? What would I do? The first thing you'd say is, well, then why am I paying so much tax?

• 47:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Howard Lutnick?

  Bang.

• 47:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 47:29Howard Lutnick?

  Okay. So now we're in the concept of where we are.

• 47:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Howard, do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is? I'm sure you do.

• 47:36David Friedberg?

  If you take out non-productive spending?

• 47:37Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah, but I, I'm not going to talk about it. Yeah. Until we release it, because that's the proper way to do stuff.

• 47:42David Friedberg?

  Got it.

• 47:42Howard Lutnick?

  Right? But, and I'm going to break that out.

• 47:44David Friedberg?

  I think it's twenty five percent.

• 47:45Howard Lutnick?

  And I'm going to break it out and I'm going to break it out for the last twenty years. And what you're going to see is every time the quarter just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there. And so all of a sudden you have this jumping GDP.

• 48:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 48:03Howard Lutnick?

  Total lie.

• 48:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 48:05Howard Lutnick?

  Total lie. Basically, they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter. So that we have that and you'll see it. It goes the, the, the, whoop.

• 48:12David Friedberg?

  And then they can make it.

• 48:13Howard Lutnick?

  And then what do you think the first quarter is? Whammo? Or the second quarter is whammo? Why? Because you pre-spent it?

• 48:19David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 48:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 48:20Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And then you have this whole, and it's, it's gross.

• 48:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Howard Lutnick?

  Okay? That's the only way, to us. You're like, really?

• 48:27David Friedberg?

  But let me.

• 48:28Howard Lutnick?

  It's so manipulated.

• 48:29David Friedberg?

  Let me ask you.

• 48:29Howard Lutnick?

  And the answer is, duh.

• 48:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And to your point, the, the, the game that's being played is we're going to take taxpayer dollars that people don't understand, once you give it to the government. We're going to create these waves of fake growth that try to tip elections. So that then the grift and the waste and all the fraud can then continue for as many years until the jig gets replayed over and over again. And it seems like the buck is stopping with you guys.

• 48:56Howard Lutnick?

  Well, it's going to.

• 48:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You've exposed it.

• 48:58Howard Lutnick?

  It's going to. And that's the idea. The idea is to take. A trillion of waste, fraud and abuse out. Yeah. And then make a trillion from having other people resetting global trade. And once you understand global trade and how it makes sense and where it came from. Yeah.

• 49:17David Friedberg?

  Can you explain that to us? Sorry, before we get there, I want to ask one last question on the cuts. Can we speak in a, do we need to speak in a more empathetic way? Because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone's pocket. Some percentage of that pays people a salary and they live on that income. And I think a lot of the.

• 49:38Howard Lutnick?

  No, no.

• 49:39David Friedberg?

  Okay, I think this is important for you to highlight because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and Doge and the budget cuts saying, you're destroying jobs, you're taking money away from people that need their jobs. Why are you, why, rich people are taking away jobs.

• 49:51Howard Lutnick?

  I'm gonna give you a sad example.

• 49:52David Friedberg?

  And so like, help us understand, are people going to lose their jobs?

• 49:54Howard Lutnick?

  I'm gonna give you a sad example. We all remember during the COVID, there was the PPP money. Yeah.

• 50:00David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 50:00Howard Lutnick?

  Remember that?

• 50:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah, totally.

• 50:01Howard Lutnick?

  So it was proven that 200 billion of the 1.2 trillion was going to Chinese fraud gangs.

• 50:12David Friedberg?

  What?

• 50:13Howard Lutnick?

  Why?

• 50:13David Friedberg?

  Is that proven?

• 50:14Howard Lutnick?

  You just make up a company. Right. You know, Joe's Deli.

• 50:18David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Howard Lutnick?

  You make it up, Joe's Deli, right? Say you're in trouble, file, and they send you money.

• 50:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Howard Lutnick?

  So why wouldn't Chinese gangs do that? Come on. So we show, not we, but people showed the government, those people, that money. And instead of stopping, they said, yeah, but we can't stop because there are real people who need the money. And so what happens is because there's no, no one's ever been fired, ever, for sending money to the wrong place, people send it on purpose. I'm not saying everybody sends it on purpose. I'm saying there are some people who send it on purpose.

• 50:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Howard Lutnick?

  Some people who are complete morons and an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome. I mean, amazing people, right? But what percentage? Okay, if, there's 5.9 million people who work for the government, you're like. Wow, that's like so many and we're paying them all. And how many do you really need? I mean, if the answer is 2 million. Wow, and we could talk about how we understand it and how we're going to retrain society for the AI. Industrial revolution is coming, which is going to create the greatest set of jobs and greatest set of growth. Ever.

• 51:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Ever.

• 51:32Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, but that, but then, and we could talk about that. But the key is stop sending money to the wrong place. So we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow, if I can stand it, to not pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits. I find it disgusting when we're the richest country in the world and some politician says to in order to save social security, rather than getting rid of the waste, fraud and abuse, we should move it to 70.

• 52:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Howard Lutnick?

  How about, how about no? How about we're rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain?

• 52:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Howard Lutnick?

  Of being a great American, but let's put great people in charge.

• 52:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's really well said. I think that that's really well said. Okay. Let's put a pin, let's put a pin in this because. Right. So let's, Howard, explain to us global trade as you understand it and then the context of tariffs. And maybe historically and what role they played now.

• 52:35Howard Lutnick?

  So I, I remind people that on the earth, there was the dark ages. So the dark ages meant that the world knew how to read. And then because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books.

• 52:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, right.

• 52:50Howard Lutnick?

  And literally the earth stopped learning how to read for 500 years or 400 years. We didn't know how to read. And we knew how to read before. So how could you forget? So America was built on tariffs with no income tax.

• 53:06Howard Lutnick?

  No income tax till 1913, none. Greatest richest country in the world. So when Donald Trump says make America great again, what he's talking about is from 1880 to 1913, when the country had so much money that we had blue ribbon commissions, which you guys would have been on.

• 53:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Howard Lutnick?

  Right? To try to figure out how to spend the money.

• 53:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 53:32Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And no income tax. Then we put in the income tax in 1913. Why? Because we're entering World War I.

• 53:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Howard Lutnick?

  And don't we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life?

• 53:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:43Howard Lutnick?

  Right? Then what happens is the world goes into chaos. We come out of chaos. Right? And then we're starting to think of, well, what do we do? What do we do? And then 1929, the stock market crashes. Right? 1933, we start to say, oh, oh, oh, God. We forgot, we need to do tariffs. 1933, how can you do tariffs? When the markets crashed, the world's going into depression, and you're gonna do tariffs in 1933? You can't charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world's okay.

• 54:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's right.

• 54:15Howard Lutnick?

  So it was too little, too late. Right? So then we come out of World War II. It's 1945. We need to rebuild the world. Okay? So we decide we're gonna take our tariffs down. And we'll let them, here's the key. We'll let them have tariffs be up. And we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild. And we'll let them rebuild. And that's what happens. So 1945, we have the Marshall Plan. Right? And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt. What's the difference? Right? So they need to be rebuilt. And then what happens? We have the 50s, and we have the Korean War. So we let them rebuild, which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there.

• 55:00Howard Lutnick?

  Low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Then we have the Vietnam War. Right? So now all of a sudden, we have all of Southeast Asia. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there. You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear? Kuwait. We spend almost $100 billion freeing Kuwait.

• 55:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:20Howard Lutnick?

  Right? You know who has the highest tariffs against the United States of America? The number one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America? Kuwait.

• 55:32Howard Lutnick?

  And you think, what? That's it, but here's what it is. If you go back to this understanding, the way America thinks, you need to be rebuilt. You were just destroyed, right? All their oils were, you remember Red? The guy's name was Red something? And he was the guy who capped all the, there were fires in all the, the, the oil wells? And he capped them all and it was amazing. So we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is? And we forget.

• 56:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 56:03Howard Lutnick?

  And we let it go.

• 56:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Howard Lutnick?

  So Donald Trump comes in and says, it's gotta stop.

• 56:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so that's an incredible context now for tariffs. It's like, it was a long-term strategy that essentially says, okay, great. There's rebuilding to be done. Sort of almost out of the largess of America. We're going to enable that to happen, so we'll lower tariffs here. And we'll support the high tariff regimes over there.

• 56:24Howard Lutnick?

  We let it happen.

• 56:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We let it happen.

• 56:25Howard Lutnick?

  On purpose.

• 56:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's an incredible thing you're also saying though, which is that it's inexorably linked to this repetitive machinery of war. Because those create these boundary conditions over and over again.

• 56:37Howard Lutnick?

  Always.

• 56:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where there's so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this.

• 56:43Howard Lutnick?

  Correct. That's exactly, that's exactly right. So what happens is, and then you say to yourself, okay. I get the 40s. I get the 50s. I get the 70s. Right? But 80s? 90s? 2000, 2010? What? Time out. 20, so Donald Trump gets elected 2016. Who understands this? Okay, let me give you a hint. Donald J. Trump. Who else? Nobody.

• 57:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Howard Lutnick?

  Right? You'd say, wow. He understands, and how long has he been talking about it? Forty years.

• 57:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Howard Lutnick?

  Why? Because in the 80s, he's saying, what are you doing?

• 57:22David Friedberg?

  Well, let me give you the economist's counter, which, and then you can respond to it, which is tariffs on imports in the United States will ultimately pass to the consumer. Higher prices, inflationary. So the things that our consumers, that our citizens are buying gets more expensive. And as a result, they buy less and it's recessionary. It shrinks the economy, it shrinks spending, it shrinks, uh, consumption. Can you kind of respond to the, you know, that's the typical economist refrain on this. Independent and maybe they're isolating the imbalance.

• 57:56Howard Lutnick?

  Okay.

• 57:58Howard Lutnick?

  India has a 50% tariff. On average. Fifty.

• 58:08Howard Lutnick?

  We have, on average. Four.

• 58:13Howard Lutnick?

  Okay?

• 58:15Howard Lutnick?

  I would say to the person who said that. Can I ask you a question? What are you talking about? They're 50 and 4. Well, here's what you're talking about.

• 58:24Howard Lutnick?

  When we're all equal. And everything is free and fair. If you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs. Isn't it bad for society? The answer is. Of course it is. But. There's two differences. Number one. Let's do human beings first. Before we go to the math. Let's go to human beings. Once upon a time. We had an auto industry. In Detroit.

• 58:54Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, and in Ohio.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 58:56Howard Lutnick?

  But Detroit. Then. Some genius. Named Bill Clinton. Signs the North American Free Trade Agreement. Or. Corporations, you can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada. Now, if you were General Motors. I'd say. It's like my birthday.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:20Howard Lutnick?

  But if you're a worker.

• 59:23Howard Lutnick?

  Who comes from. Michigan. Or Ohio. They just signed. You know what they signed? Worst statistic I'm gonna tell you today. Average life expectancy. Of high school educated workforce. So, by the way, United States of America. Two thirds is high school educated. One third is college educated. The difference today. Of average life expectancy. Between those two categories is seven years.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 59:50Howard Lutnick?

  Seven year average life expectancy. It's not the air. It's not the food. It's not the medicine. It's despair. My grandfather worked in the auto factory. My father worked in the auto factory. I have a good life. I'm gonna do Friday Night Lights, football, I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna be a good life. I have a good, middle-class life. I'm a member of the United Auto Workers. Life is going to be good. The factory moves to Mexico. And I am just screwed. Because the government of the United States of America had a, didn't care about industrial policy and didn't protect me at all. And let cheap labor in Mexico, I'm sure the Mexican people got, went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour and they're kicking it. But I destroyed you.

• 1:00:36Howard Lutnick?

  And that is incredible failure of industrial policy, which nobody wants to talk about. But you talk about it as average life expectancy. And you're talking about it, about reshoring and building the life for the people who are America. That's why you elect Donald Trump president. You elect him because I didn't spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help him. But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this? And who taught me this? The President of the United States. This is not me teaching him. You understand? This is him teaching me.

• 1:01:21Howard Lutnick?

  And you can see him talking about it in the 80s.

• 1:01:24David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:01:24Howard Lutnick?

  Right? He's been talking about this for a lot, and what it does is it means reshore. So, number one, we have to care about human beings. That's a globalist view. Yes. If I take my production and move it to Mexico, it's better for me, Mr. Corporation. Okay? But it's not better for me, Mr. US citizen of the United States of America who's working at a car plant. That's bad news for him. Okay? And that's number one. And now, let's go to number two, which is the math of it all. If we say free and fair trade, I want to remind you, there ain't no such thing.

• 1:02:05Howard Lutnick?

  There is no country in this world that is free trade. Zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest. Because everybody else is higher and more protective.

• 1:02:20David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Howard Lutnick?

  So they protect their farmers. Here, I'm sitting at the dinner, Modi comes to town. And I say to him, when Donald Trump, we have dinner, and after the niceties, Donald said, "Go ahead, Howard." And I said, "You have 1.4 billion people, and you brag to us how amazing your economy is. Why won't you buy a bushel of our corn? We'll buy a bushel of our corn." So our farmers can't go to him, but his, of course, can come at us. Right? Why is that okay? You know, and we can go into all the stuff that, oh, I mean, I don't even want to go into it, because if I had another hour, I could regale you with stories that are fun with that, but...

• 1:02:59David Friedberg?

  Just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs. Talk to the average person who says, "The cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%."

• 1:03:07Howard Lutnick?

  Inflation comes from printing more money. Okay? Let's say the United States of America had $1 trillion. That's all we had. That's it. No more. Okay? And I want to buy a bottle of water, and you want to buy a bottle of water. One came from America, and the other one came from Fiji. Right? Then, and I tariff Fiji. Then, that water's a dollar and a quarter, and this water's a dollar. That's not inflation. That means that one's more expensive. But I can choose to buy this one.

• 1:03:41David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:03:42Howard Lutnick?

  Okay? So, you're right. This toy might be more expensive, and that toy's not. I get it. But that's not inflation. Here's inflation. Snap my fingers now, we have 2 trillion. Right? That water's a dollar fifty, that water's a dollar and a quarter. Yeah, everything's more expensive.

• 1:03:57David Friedberg?

  That's inflation.

• 1:03:58Howard Lutnick?

  Okay? So inflation without tariffs is everything's a buck and a quarter. Inflation with tariffs is a buck and a quarter, right? And a buck fifty. And so, you have to understand, inflation doesn't come from tariffs. Certain products, if I put a tariff on a mango...

• 1:04:17Howard Lutnick?

  Right, we can't grow mangoes in America. We just can't grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive.

• 1:04:26David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 1:04:27Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, but if the president chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive. That's just becomes a consumption tax. It's like a sales tax.

• 1:04:37David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 1:04:38Howard Lutnick?

  Right? It's a sales tax, it's a consumption tax. If I want to buy a mango, it costs more money.

• 1:04:42David Friedberg?

  And you can offset that with a reduction in income tax.

• 1:04:44Howard Lutnick?

  So then, that's just like another version of income tax.

• 1:04:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you?

• 1:04:48Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so the idea is to not do that.

• 1:04:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Howard Lutnick?

  That's the idea. The idea is to choose things that are going to reshore.

• 1:04:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:59Howard Lutnick?

  Come here.

• 1:05:00David Friedberg?

  This is so important.

• 1:05:00Howard Lutnick?

  Hire my people.

• 1:05:02David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Howard Lutnick?

  Bring it home.

• 1:05:03David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Howard Lutnick?

  Right?

• 1:05:04David Friedberg?

  By the way, I want to just speak as an entrepreneur. I see the economic incentive. When I see the price for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff, I'm like, why don't we make that here? We should be doing that. And there's going to be a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things. And this is just how the markets work. Someone will say-

• 1:05:25Howard Lutnick?

  Two trillion so far. I mean, he's been in office, right? Like, seven weeks? Eight weeks?

• 1:05:31David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Howard Lutnick?

  Two trillion dollars of committed domestic production coming back because of his tariffs. TMC saying, I'll build semiconductor wafers.

• 1:05:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Howard Lutnick?

  Um, you know, everything we do, they're going to build it here. That word is never coming.

• 1:05:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Howard Lutnick?

  Unless the tariff. So what happens is you bring it here, you create the jobs here, and then they avoid the tariff.

• 1:05:57David Friedberg?

  And by the way, those jobs are better paying and they're more productive than the government funded.

• 1:06:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Howard, what do you want to do about like the narrow set of products that are more high value than the mango? That maybe can't be made here? Or at least can't be made here in the next five to 10 years? So TSMC can make chips, I think that's great. ASML, who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines, as an example, can't necessarily do that for another five or six years here. So there's these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multi-vendor solution, right? But it's still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff?

• 1:06:38Howard Lutnick?

  You know, the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is- It's giant three dimensional chess. Yeah. Okay, so we all have Stockholm syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service. We think, we like the Internal Revenue Service, and we don't say it, but when we say we're going to charge a tariff, and other countries who lean on us, who rely on us, who bleed on us, who can't live without the oxygen that is our economy, because remember the thing about our economy is, while we have a $29 trillion GDP, we are the consumer of 20 trillion. Yeah, right.

• 1:07:22Howard Lutnick?

  And this is the key thing, we buy everybody's stuff. So who's more important? The, let's say they have an economy that produces stuff, and we have an economy that buys stuff. Yeah. The customer is always right, we all know the customer is always right, because if no one buys it, they can't produce it. Right. So, everybody needs our economy. When? Now. I mean, to the fact that China consumes less than 10 trillion, and primarily tries to figure out how to sell it to itself. Yeah. Right? So they don't buy anybody else's stuff. Right. So we are the world's consumer. Yeah. We're the world's customer. Right. Right? So that's point number one.

• 1:08:05Howard Lutnick?

  So, we want them to come here, and if they can't come here, what if you pass? Okay, now let's say there was a 20% tariff, and in order to sell his goods, he knows he can raise the price 10%, but he can't really sell it, raise it 20. So he eats 10, and the price goes up 10. Let's just say. That 20 goes into the coffers of the United States of America, from the President of the United States who said, "We're going to balance the budget," and then his goal is to drive down income tax in the United States of America, including a waving tax. So what has he said so far? With that in his pocket, knowing that this is what we're going to try to do, what has he announced?

• 1:08:48Howard Lutnick?

  No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security. Why is he saying those things? Right, because he knows that he's got Elon's gonna cut and Howard's gonna raise and he's gonna have the tools to deliver on his promise.

• 1:09:04David Friedberg?

  And that'll unlock spending. More money for folks to spend.

• 1:09:07Howard Lutnick?

  And they'll have more money to spend, right? So if you, if you actually get the external revenue service, right? Which of course I named, you know, I named it, but you know, but you know what the funny part is? I came up with the name. I wrote a truth, right? And I sent it to, to DJT and I wrote, this is my huge idea, you know, with one of those things that goes like this.

• 1:09:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Howard Lutnick?

  You know, like this is my huge idea. Right? And, cause it's the external revenue service, but it only matters because I work for him. Cause if I worked for Joe Biden or anybody else, they wouldn't care at all. So the fact that he loves a great idea, the minute you say it, and it becomes his idea? My idea is useless. A good idea in his hands.

• 1:09:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so speaking of great ideas.

• 1:09:57Howard Lutnick?

  Is all the value in the world. So the external revenue service, if it, if we went back to make America great again.

• 1:10:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Howard Lutnick?

  Which is pre 1913, which is let them pay, you don't pay. And what that means is let them pay, try to waive, balance the budget, try to waive tax on everybody who makes less than 150,000.

• 1:10:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And look what you did for America. Holy moly, look what you, and by the way.

• 1:10:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Howard Lutnick?

  Labor costs come smashing down, cause it's tax free.

• 1:10:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Howard Lutnick?

  So if their earnings are tax free, right? Then they're happy to work, cause they get the money.

• 1:10:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:10:32Howard Lutnick?

  So what happens is cost of labor comes down because we're run correctly as a government. And this is what I'm trying to do.

• 1:10:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Speaking of potentially great ideas, can you tell us about the Trump card?

• 1:10:42Howard Lutnick?

  Sure. So.

• 1:10:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Whose idea was that? And how did that come about?

• 1:10:47Howard Lutnick?

  John Paulson.

• 1:10:50Howard Lutnick?

  I had a call with Donald Trump. I was talking to Donald Trump. I was kicking around the idea of we should sell. Right? Why do we give away visas? We should sell them. And they're talking about it. Uh, Donald Trump calls me, gets me on the phone. Right? We all talk about it. Right? And then we go from there. And then my job is to figure out, like I always figure out, how to do it. What's the path?

• 1:11:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you have a path?

• 1:11:16Howard Lutnick?

  Of course. About two weeks from today, it goes out. Okay, Elon's building me the software right now.

• 1:11:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And then out it goes. And by the way, uh, yesterday I sold a thousand.

• 1:11:30David Friedberg?

  Oh, you did? I got a poly market I created on how many of you guys are gonna sell this year.

• 1:11:34Howard Lutnick?

  Cool.

• 1:11:34David Friedberg?

  Yeah, curious to see how many.

• 1:11:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's fantastic. Do you want to tell people just the rough?

• 1:11:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, what are the terms on it?

• 1:11:39Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, yeah. So if you're a US citizen, you pay global tax.

• 1:11:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, so you're not gonna bring in outsiders gonna come in to pay global tax. So if you have a green card, which used to be a green card.

• 1:11:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Howard Lutnick?

  Now gold card, you're a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don't have to be. And none of them are gonna choose to be. What they're gonna do is they're gonna have the right to be in America. They'll be five million dollars. And they have the right to be in America. They have the right to be in America.

• 1:12:12David Friedberg?

  Permanent residency, yeah.

• 1:12:15Howard Lutnick?

  As long as they're good people.

• 1:12:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they're vetted.

• 1:12:16Howard Lutnick?

  And they're vetted.

• 1:12:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Howard Lutnick?

  And they can't break the law. We can always take it away if they're like evil or mean or bad or something. Not mean, but you know, if they do something horrible, you can take it away. Right? But, but the idea is, if, if I was not American, and I lived in any other country, I would buy six. One for me, one for my wife and my four kids, because God forbid something happens. I, I wanna be able to go to America and I wanna have the right to go to the airport, to go to America and then to say hello, Mr. Lutnick. Hello, Mr. Lutnick and the Lutnick family, welcome home.

• 1:12:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:12:49Howard Lutnick?

  That's what I wanna hear. I don't wanna hear, I can't come here when there's a, you know, a horrible war, a horrible whatever.

• 1:12:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:12:57Howard Lutnick?

  I wanna be able to go home. Right? And once I'm home.

• 1:13:02Howard Lutnick?

  Meh, I might as well build a business.

• 1:13:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Howard Lutnick?

  So you have the most productive people in the world. Gonna start spending time here. They're gonna have a family office. They're gonna hire some people.

• 1:13:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you're not gonna tax their external worldwide income?

• 1:13:16Howard Lutnick?

  I only tax the money they make in America, which is what we do now.

• 1:13:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Howard Lutnick?

  But their global income stays out.

• 1:13:21David Friedberg?

  And they pay five million. And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world?

• 1:13:26Howard Lutnick?

  There are thirty seven million people in the world who are capable of buying the card. In case you were wondering.

• 1:13:31David Friedberg?

  Thirty seven million? That's a lot more than ChatGPT told me.

• 1:13:34Howard Lutnick?

  Who are capable of buying.

• 1:13:35David Friedberg?

  Who are capable of buying it.

• 1:13:37Howard Lutnick?

  Now, I'm not saying they will. But they're capable of buying.

• 1:13:40David Friedberg?

  How many do you think you'll sell?

• 1:13:42Howard Lutnick?

  Uh, the president thinks we can sell a million.

• 1:13:46David Friedberg?

  So, five trillion?

• 1:13:47Howard Lutnick?

  That's five trillion dollars.

• 1:13:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think a million is reasonable. I mean, look, as as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his citizenship and now pay global tax every which way known to man. If this were available fifteen years ago after the Facebook IPO, that's what I would have done. It would have been much better for me theoretically. Now, I'm happy, I'm happy to pay the taxes in America, but...

• 1:14:07Howard Lutnick?

  So the idea is, um, and it's gonna go fast. Meaning, you apply, right? We take your money. And, you know, the way computers work now, they have these cool things, like these computer things. They're amazing. You're like, you know, you put stuff in and they actually check everything. It's it's fantastic. You don't even have to plug them in anymore. It's amazing, like they get them, they get the information through the air. I mean, you could do a better vet.

• 1:14:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Howard Lutnick?

  Than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second.

• 1:14:37David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:14:38Howard Lutnick?

  Better than they've ever done it before.

• 1:14:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I'll, I mean, I'll tell you a quick story. Monday night, Elon was telling us about this, me and Saxon. One of the things he's saying is he's been helping you build this site.

• 1:14:47Howard Lutnick?

  Building it.

• 1:14:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But one of the most difficult parts of it is it turns out like all of the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks, it's like a lot of cobalt mainframes and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten. And so this is a question.

• 1:15:01David Friedberg?

  Big opportunity.

• 1:15:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's incredible that the most advanced nation in the world. Deployed systems in 1970, which at the time probably felt very cutting edge to everybody in the room at the time. But to your point, has not evolved in the last 50 years.

• 1:15:16Howard Lutnick?

  Do you know why? It's always, there's always a reason. Okay, and the reason is, it's a great reason. Which is that in the mid 70s, we changed the way government accounts for software. We, we took a 10-year contract and you have to take the contract upfront. So if I, if I'm signing a contract with you for 10 years, a million a year, I have to take it against my budget for 10 million, so I'm not doing it. See, I'm only here for four years, so I'm not doing it.

• 1:15:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, everything's the case.

• 1:15:45Howard Lutnick?

  So what happens is, when was the last time we bought software? 1975. Where? Everywhere. Why? Because it's illogical. Now, what I'm doing is, I'm saying, okay, I gotta collect tariffs. Right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth and I say, I want you to give me, you're gonna build for me for America, you're gonna build the greatest customs processing ever. We're gonna take a photograph, it's gonna know what it is, it's gonna go through AI, it's gonna know what it is, it's gonna know what the tariff is, it's gonna determine the percentage, it's gonna know the weight, so when you weigh the thing plus the package, you'll know what it weighs, you don't even have to open it, it'll weigh exactly the right amount, and you'll do this and that. And these are all things that I know and all things I could figure out.

• 1:16:30Howard Lutnick?

  Because you know the way gold works? A gold bar is about 40 pounds. You know the way, know the gold bars? They weigh it and they weigh it out 13 digits of decimals. So basically, if you touch the thing, it's not gonna be 13 digits of decimals. So you have a perfect scale and you weigh it, and that's like the code.

• 1:16:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Howard Lutnick?

  Right? Because you can't touch, if you touch it, you'll change the, and you can't get it right out 13 digits. It's just not possible. So, that's what we do with stuff. You know what it weighs. Right? Three t-shirts, if you're sending the same three t-shirts, they always weigh the same.

• 1:17:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what's incredible is you're convincing these companies to basically like do right for America and build a software for you. You think that's gonna be a movement throughout the government, or is that?

• 1:17:10Howard Lutnick?

  Here's the idea. I say, build it for me, for free.

• 1:17:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Howard Lutnick?

  I put it in for free.

• 1:17:16Howard Lutnick?

  What other countries in the world you think are gonna buy now?

• 1:17:19David Friedberg?

  Right, if it works for us.

• 1:17:21Howard Lutnick?

  Well, remember, you have to, you have to connect to me.

• 1:17:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:24Howard Lutnick?

  So, every country is gonna buy.

• 1:17:26David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:17:27Howard Lutnick?

  And it's a great business model.

• 1:17:28David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:17:28Howard Lutnick?

  Right? If the greatest customer in the world says they'll take it.

• 1:17:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Howard Lutnick?

  Life's good.

• 1:17:34David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:17:34Howard Lutnick?

  So, what should the greatest customer in the world get? I don't know, a good deal?

• 1:17:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Howard Lutnick?

  Right? And you got a guy like me there, you know, everybody else is like...

• 1:17:42David Friedberg?

  Howard, you have to change how government operates if you're gonna scale that. You can't go negotiate every contract out there for every department.

• 1:17:48Howard Lutnick?

  It's not that hard when you say it's free. You know, free is like, not that hard. I mean, you, yes, it is. And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company.

• 1:17:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Howard Lutnick?

  Because then I use my superpower, which is my friendship with Donald Trump. And then I go in the Oval Office and we call him together.

• 1:18:04David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:04Howard Lutnick?

  And we call the CEO together and make him promise the president. Because promising Howard is like really nice.

• 1:18:09David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:10Howard Lutnick?

  Promising DJT, eh, that's something else entirely.

• 1:18:13David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:14Howard Lutnick?

  So I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they'll build it.

• 1:18:18David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:18Howard Lutnick?

  Now let's see him reneg. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen. So, you know, when you get Elon to say, "I'm gonna build it for you." And he says it in front of the president, like, how great is that? You got like the greatest technologist, the richest guy in the world who says, "I'll build it for you." You're like, "Thank God!" Right? And then I get, you know, I go to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon. They're all for America, building for us.

• 1:18:46David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:47Howard Lutnick?

  For free.

• 1:18:48David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:18:48Howard Lutnick?

  To make America better, because they are great American companies. And in exchange for that, we're gonna help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness. Just towards fairness, because I, you can't get me to do something outside the world of fairness. But I tell you what, if it's unfair, I'll be on your side as hard... And as positive as I possibly can be.

• 1:19:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Talk to us about some of the hot button markets that you're going to have to navigate. You know, you are in charge of export controls, which is a very important thing in AI. We don't allow export licenses for the most advanced Nvidia chips. We don't want training necessarily to be done outside of the United States. We're okay with inference happening outside the United States in certain conditions. Maybe just talk about that for a second. How like, how are you going to navigate AI? How do you think about that from your seat?

• 1:19:37Howard Lutnick?

  All right, so I'll give you an example that's sort of live right now.

• 1:19:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Howard Lutnick?

  Right, so we have DeepSeek, we have Quen, we have Dabao.

• 1:19:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Howard Lutnick?

  Right, and, and I don't think we should be having apps in America. And I don't think we should have their website in America because they all go back home. Okay, but it's open source. And I want our American companies, including college students, to be able to download it and build on it.

• 1:20:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:20:06Howard Lutnick?

  But I want to make sure that there's no part of it that says, send it home to Dada.

• 1:20:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:20:12Howard Lutnick?

  Or, or store now and analyze later.

• 1:20:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:20:15Howard Lutnick?

  Right, so I need that out. So what I want to do is I'm going to embrace what you guys know. You guys used to product evaluations.

• 1:20:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Howard Lutnick?

  So let's do security eval.

• 1:20:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:26Howard Lutnick?

  Right, and say your industry, and you can't let it get overrun overrun by Chinese. Because what happens is if there's a policy, right, all of a sudden 100,000 people from China come in and they say they're John Smith and Todd Peterson, right, but they're not. And then you think the vote is this way.

• 1:20:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Howard Lutnick?

  And it's easily manipulated. So we have to be very careful. But my first instinct is to lean on, and that's why I see it's important to have David Sacks as my partner. Right, someone who knows it and someone who can live and breathe the industry. Right, and so what we're going to have is we're going to have security evaluation. And say if the security evaluation model says that this is a good model,

• 1:21:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yep.

• 1:21:12Howard Lutnick?

  Then people can download it.

• 1:21:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:21:14Howard Lutnick?

  But it's got to go through the industry and I want it to feel and smell like what we're good at.

• 1:21:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Howard Lutnick?

  I don't want to create like, oh, this is what government's doing. I don't want government to do it.

• 1:21:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Howard Lutnick?

  I want us to do it, but I've got to figure out the right way to do that.

• 1:21:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:21:29Howard Lutnick?

  And that's important for America.

• 1:21:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Articulate the standards, articulate sort of a concept and then let a lot of these private market actors kind of help fill in the gaps.

• 1:21:36David Friedberg?

  And compete.

• 1:21:37Howard Lutnick?

  The only thing I think I really need to do, and that's with regulatory, is post-quantum cryptography.

• 1:21:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, I think that is vital to us.

• 1:21:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's right.

• 1:21:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Howard Lutnick?

  Right?

• 1:21:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Howard Lutnick?

  That, you know, asymmetric.

• 1:21:52David Friedberg?

  I would bet this happens during this administration. He bets post.

• 1:21:57Howard Lutnick?

  I know, I'm going to put it out because, you know, we all have passwords, right? For those who are watching who don't know this, our password is called asymmetric, right? Yours is different than mine.

• 1:22:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:22:06Howard Lutnick?

  That's the key. And cryptography is just the computing. So asymmetric key cryptography, you have your password, I have mine, and they're the key.

• 1:22:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's right.

• 1:22:15Howard Lutnick?

  Right, obviously the central hub has our key. Duh.

• 1:22:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, a quantum computer we know can break all of them in a nanosecond. Like all of them in the whole world, including the CIA, all of them RSA 2048, all of them can get broken in a nanosecond by a quantum computer.

• 1:22:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Howard Lutnick?

  So the defense of it is called post-quantum cryptography, right? We know how to do it and we'll come out with a rule that says, America's got to protect itself.

• 1:22:43David Friedberg?

  New standards. And by the way, there are.

• 1:22:44Howard Lutnick?

  Because every once in a while you need to have a new standard that says, it's coming. We know what it is. Please, God, go put it in because we need to have it in. We need America to live.

• 1:22:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Great segue. Let's sort of segue now to a couple of things that we can enjoin together in this concept. Crypto, obviously Bitcoin, you guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve. But broadly speaking, you also announced sort of this idea of the sovereign wealth fund. Can we talk about that? Sort of what is the, what is the vision behind that? How do you want that to be executed? How do you think it should be run? What assets are on the table? What assets and strategies may, should never be on the table? How are you thinking about it?

• 1:23:22Howard Lutnick?

  The greatest customer in the world.

• 1:23:26Howard Lutnick?

  The United States government, the most powerful, the greatest customer buys stuff. We walk in, we're gonna buy, here's an example I like to use. We're gonna buy 2 billion COVID vaccines. When we buy it, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are gonna triple. They're gonna triple, because then we say, everyone's gonna have this vaccine. If I were, after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could, if Howard Lennig walked in the room, Howard Lennig would say, what do you think? 20% warrants? 20% warrants? Right. Right? What? So we'd make $50 billion off of who? Nobody. We didn't take from anybody, we didn't do it, okay.

• 1:24:10Howard Lutnick?

  The shareholders of Pfizer, who we've just tripled them with our order. Right. Now, how many of my customers in my life have required that from me? All of them? All of them. This isn't like, oh Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever. This is just. Business. Proper. So I don't view risk of the sovereign wealth fund. I view the first couple of years of the sovereign wealth fund, or Scott Besson and I, making money, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Say, well, but you can't invest and lose, don't you lose money? No. Why? Well, if I have big daddy of the United States of America behind me, right? And I'll give you, I'll give an example.

• 1:24:55Howard Lutnick?

  We buy missiles episodically. Launch a missile, buy a missile. Launch a missile, buy some missiles. Right? The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings, or good quarterly earnings, but they're episodic. Yeah. Here we go. I will sign a contract with you. 10-year contract. Cancel it at the end of 5 years, to buy X amount of missiles. And I'll pay you quarterly.

• 1:25:26Howard Lutnick?

  Then they can take that contract, they can go finance it. Their financing costs go, their earnings are steady and their multiple improves and their stock doubles.

• 1:25:36David Friedberg?

  Yup.

• 1:25:36Howard Lutnick?

  And I say, in exchange for that reasonable thought, how about a little warrants?

• 1:25:42David Friedberg?

  Right. Give me a little stock, just for people that don't understand, give me some stock, give me a little bit of your stock.

• 1:25:46Howard Lutnick?

  But, but don't give me some stock, just give me the upside.

• 1:25:49David Friedberg?

  The upside.

• 1:25:49Howard Lutnick?

  If I help your stock go up.

• 1:25:50David Friedberg?

  Just a little bit.

• 1:25:51Howard Lutnick?

  I, I get to share it and you know what I do with that money?

• 1:25:53David Friedberg?

  Wet my beak a little bit.

• 1:25:54Howard Lutnick?

  And then I take the money.

• 1:25:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Howard Lutnick?

  For the United States of America and I put it into the social security system of the United States of America.

• 1:26:01David Friedberg?

  Okay, so why have?

• 1:26:02Howard Lutnick?

  And then all of a sudden, right, so the social security system says it's 4 trillion in the hole.

• 1:26:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Howard Lutnick?

  Okay, if we cut the waste foreign abuse out, it becomes 1.5 trillion. And by the way, Frank Bisignano, the greatest executive, the greatest payments executive ever to join the US government, is about to get confirmed and take over the social security system. Okay, Frank ran Fiserv, 120 billion dollar public payments company. And when Donald Trump asked him in his interview, can you handle social security? It's 1.3 trillion a year. He goes, well, see, I, I handle 500 billion a day, so Wednesday.

• 1:26:40Howard Lutnick?

  Right, and he goes, my whole life, I, my whole life, all I worry about is getting rid of waste foreign abuse. That's all I care about, every single day, $5, $2, $1. He goes, this is going to be the most fun I've ever had.

• 1:26:50David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Howard Lutnick?

  I mean, this, like, this is a Donald Trump administration. This is something that's another planet. Now, of course, I recruit Frank and, you know, I get to have my piece in the game. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it's only a trillion four in the hole. We make a trillion four.

• 1:27:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Howard Lutnick?

  That baby's, that baby is finished forever.

• 1:27:11David Friedberg?

  Is the sovereign wealth fund a balance sheet for social security? Does social security become more than what it is today? Does it over time offer bigger, greater benefits? And is it basically a pool that holds equities? Historically, and we talked about this on our show, it's only ever held treasury, but it's really kind of a fake treasury. It's got 2.7 trillion today, but if we bought the S and P in 1971, when we went off the gold standard with the cash flows that have come in and gone out of social security, we'd have a 15 trillion dollar interest in the S and P today.

• 1:27:41Howard Lutnick?

  But you'd have, that, that would have had you have Donald Trump be the president the whole time, which is not a thing.

• 1:27:45David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:27:46Howard Lutnick?

  Okay.

• 1:27:46David Friedberg?

  But is that, is that the objective? Is that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country? And it becomes like a?

• 1:27:53Howard Lutnick?

  Sovereign Wealth Fund that We have a $36 trillion budget deficit. That, I mean, debt. Debt, yeah. To the United States of America. And we, and we have a budget deficit of $2 trillion. So Donald Trump wants to knock down the $2 trillion. Yep. And then he's focused about the $36 trillion, which the social security is part of it. Yeah. So how he allocates it? He was elected President of the United States, I was not. Yeah. Okay, I like the social security idea because it's really easy to explain Yeah. to people and sell to people. Yeah. And so they understand it, but the fact is that it's the same money if I put it in social security or I put it on the debt of the United States of America. And I'm gonna let Donald Trump make that decision. You know why? Because it's wholly like, yeah, and none of it's not mine. So he will decide that. Okay, and he will play it his way. Right.

• 1:28:37Howard Lutnick?

  But Scott Besant and I will make more than a trillion dollars for the United States of America during our term, which is pretty darn cool. Yeah. And we'll use that, and if that reduces our debt, right, but that's not the policy of how we're gonna balance the budget. We're gonna balance the budget

• 1:28:57Howard Lutnick?

  trump card, tariffs, getting rid of scams. I'll give you a scam example. Every boat you've ever seen, like every single cruise ship,

• 1:29:09Howard Lutnick?

  super tanker, container ship, you've never seen an American flag. Ever. In fact, you ever think about the flag you've actually seen? All of you would say, I have no idea what that flag is. BBIs. Like, why is it some flag I've never heard of? Liberia is, number one. Yeah. You go, what? No one even knows where Liberia is. Because the answer is, it's a flag of convenience. They sell the flag for like 10 grand. Like, they're literally here, you can have a flag. And you pay no tax. So what happens is a cruise ship in the United States of America picks up American passengers, goes in the Caribbean, comes back to America, and treats the port as an expense. And all the profits are made in the Caribbean where it pays no tax. That's what I call a tax scam.

• 1:29:54Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah. It's unfair to America. We're gonna fix that in America. We're gonna try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams. Ireland is my favorite. The country of Ireland last year had a $60 billion budget surplus. So we lose 2 trillion and they make 60. He'd say, Ireland? What do they do? Oh, they have all of our IP for our great tech.

• 1:30:23David Friedberg?

  All the tech companies.

• 1:30:23Howard Lutnick?

  All our great tech companies and great pharma companies.

• 1:30:25David Friedberg?

  And pharma, yeah.

• 1:30:26Howard Lutnick?

  They all put it there because it's low tax. And they don't pay us. They pay them. So that's gotta end. So when those things end, tariffs, Trump card, getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax. That's my trillion. Elon's gotta do his trillion. So whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out and we have a strong conversation together that you've gotta do your trillion. So you gotta focus not on small potatoes.

• 1:30:57David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:30:57Howard Lutnick?

  Big, big, big, big, big. I need you to do your side of the trillion. Now, as it turns out, I'm gonna do more than a trillion because I'm me. Elon's probably gonna do more than a trillion because he's him. And then what we're going to do is gonna, our objective is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change America. And then imagine America. This is just an imagination moment. Okay? We have a balanced budget in the United States. We're starting to knock down the deficit of America. We can cut tax. And we have a gold card, a Trump card that you can come to America. Which entrepreneur have you ever met?

• 1:31:42Howard Lutnick?

  Who wouldn't buy one?

• 1:31:43David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Howard Lutnick?

  And wouldn't start building businesses when they think the tax rate here is gonna come down?

• 1:31:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Howard Lutnick?

  And eventually it's gonna come down to 20% and eventually it's gonna come down to 15%. You won't be able to find a plot of land in America.

• 1:31:54David Friedberg?

  You know what I predict will happen? I predict they'll, just like in the medallion industry for taxi cabs, there'll be a financing industry that'll build up around these gold cards or these Trump cards. So that great entrepreneurs, great executives will be able to finance their purchase along with someone getting venture capital interest or equity interest in their business.

• 1:32:11Howard Lutnick?

  But we're gonna, we're gonna take that money. We're gonna, well, so we'll sell them every year.

• 1:32:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Howard Lutnick?

  Right? So they'll knock down our budget deficit. And then eventually, right? If Donald Trump is right, and ultimately, we can sell seven million cards. You realize there is no debt in America. No debt in America is a trillion dollars a year in debt. Coverage. Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. You know what that changes? That changes the Internal Revenue Service. You, you start to rethink, and I just want to remind you. Right? We are the richest country on earth. Our balance sheet is 500 trillion. I'll give you an example. What's the court system of America worth? Right? What's it worth? Well, how can Nvidia be worth three trillion without a court system that protects it?

• 1:32:56David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:32:56Howard Lutnick?

  It's no such thing. So, just our, everything about us. Is so awesome.

• 1:33:02David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Howard Lutnick?

  And you know what happens? We, we, we actually like, we get beaten upon it. We actually believe it.

• 1:33:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you could ask Doug Burgum about how undervalued a lot of our real estate is in this country and the potential for it.

• 1:33:12Howard Lutnick?

  We, think about it. Biden closed 635 million acres. This is, this is electing Joe Biden, head of Saudi Arabia, and he closes the oil wells.

• 1:33:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Howard Lutnick?

  And all of a sudden Saudi Arabia falls off the face of the earth, broke. Like, what are we doing? Like, we care about Americans.

• 1:33:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Howard Lutnick?

  Let's make Americans' lives great.

• 1:33:37David Friedberg?

  Howard?

• 1:33:37Howard Lutnick?

  We want clean water. We want clean air. Okay? We do it better than everybody else. But if we don't, here's the one, like the hypocrisy. Right? We won't mine lithium in America to make a battery.

• 1:33:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Howard Lutnick?

  But, so we, so the Australians mined it with coal, and it's messy, because they do it like, you know, they do it messy. By the way, we breathe the air in 3.4 days, but who's counting? Right? Then we take it, we put it on a truck. We take, put the truck and put it in a super tanker. We drive the super tanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean. Puts it in a truck and gives it to Elon to make an electric car. Why don't we mine the lithium in Nevada?

• 1:34:19David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:34:20Howard Lutnick?

  And by the way, we'd mine it cleaner, right?

• 1:34:23David Friedberg?

  And by the way, it's not just lithium. Almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the continental United States. We just have had no incentive or no structure regulatory wise that enables the development of it, which is.

• 1:34:38Howard Lutnick?

  This is, we need to care for us. Make America, you know, America first. How about, there's another way to say it.

• 1:34:46David Friedberg?

  While maintaining clean environmental.

• 1:34:47Howard Lutnick?

  Americans first.

• 1:34:48David Friedberg?

  While maintaining environmental standards.

• 1:34:50Howard Lutnick?

  Yeah, no, look, we're never going to do something that's not like a hundred times cleaner than everybody else, because we care about clean water and clean air. There's none of us who don't care about clean water and clean air. But you know, like, someone gives you a pill and says, this will save you. And then you look at the statistic and it saves one in a million people. And you'd say, why am I taking this pill? They'd say, well, it could save your life. You'd say, yeah, but it's like one in a million, right? That's not logical, right? That's the point. You know, there's a regulation, that's the right thing. And there's a regulation that's, that's the one in a million pill.

• 1:35:33Howard Lutnick?

  Like, why do we give a baby, a baby, a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand new baby? And we hold it up and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine? You realize the only way you get hepatitis B was, is from unprotected, uh, sex or a needle? Like, why are we giving them to a baby? Like, why? And you know what it is? You know what the answer is? Corruption. That someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules. And, because there's no justification. There's no, I haven't met a medical doctor who says hepatitis B vaccines on brand new babies make sense. Because by the way, you know what the worst part is? They're in the last 10 years.

• 1:36:16Howard Lutnick?

  You need a booster in 10 years, so the baby's gonna be 10. We've gotta really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans. And I think we can be. And I think that's why I'm so excited. That's why our cabinet is so excited. That's why it's so much fun to work for Donald Trump, because.

• 1:36:36Howard Lutnick?

  I am just speaking from his playbook, right? Because if you had met me before, he said, will you help me? And he went out to dinner with me and said, so tell me about government. I'd say, uh, government? You mean, I pay them taxes? Like, that's it.

• 1:36:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are you having the time of your life?

• 1:36:55Howard Lutnick?

  Most fun ever, because I have, every idea either gets blown up or shot down. Okay? Meaning, I come up with lots of ideas, and he says, nah, too complex. And you know what? That's fine.

• 1:37:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Howard Lutnick?

  But when I come up with the External Revenue Service, and he says, great idea? And then he speaks of it in his inaugural address, right? It's his idea.

• 1:37:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Howard Lutnick?

  Because I can't do anything with it.

• 1:37:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Howard, last question as we wrap. Tell us about your family, your kids, how they think about all of this? Your son's running Cantor now? How's that going? Just give us the lay of the land. How, how's the Lutnick family?

• 1:37:33Howard Lutnick?

  All right, so I have, I have the best wife. I've been married 30 years. Uh, she lets me be me, and she's gorgeous, spectacular. I love my girl. Um, she agreed, I mean, imagine this, I'm not, I'm not joining the government. I'm not joining the government. I'm doing this Doge thing with Elon. I'm not joining, I'm not joining. Honey, we gotta move. Like, honey, we gotta move. Two weeks after Election Day, I'm like, we're moving, and, uh, we're gonna, in five weeks, we're gonna live in Washington, okay? And like, so the fact that that wasn't unsettling would be the understatement of a life thought.

• 1:38:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Howard Lutnick?

  But she's been the most supportive and fantastic. I have four kids. Uh, my oldest son about to turn 29. I was taking him to kindergarten, so that's why I'm alive. My second son, Brandon, I dropped him off in nursery school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten. Um, so the two oldest boys are running Cantor now, until I have asked.

• 1:38:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it going well?

• 1:38:27Howard Lutnick?

  I don't know.

• 1:38:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, you don't. Of course, you're not supposed to know.

• 1:38:32Howard Lutnick?

  It's kind of fun. I would love to talk to them about it.

• 1:38:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have no idea.

• 1:38:35Howard Lutnick?

  But I'm not allowed. Like, I literally am not allowed.

• 1:38:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Howard Lutnick?

  And, you know, we all know the phones.

• 1:38:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Howard Lutnick?

  So, since the phone's always with me, and I assume the phone is listening. You know, ever since we couldn't take a battery out of our phone, you know the phone is listening. So, you know, I'm not, no, so I never talk to my son. So, uh, I'm sure they're happy, but I don't know how it's going.

• 1:38:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Guys, if you're listening, he's doing great, as you can tell.

• 1:38:58Howard Lutnick?

  But, and then my, my daughter is gonna go to med school.

• 1:39:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Howard Lutnick?

  And she's on a gap year now. And my youngest son, also on a gap year now, and he's going to, uh, start Duke in the fall. So, I have the best kids.

• 1:39:13Howard Lutnick?

  My kids have lived with me, and they lived with this kind of energy and this positive sort of momentum, and, and my wife being just a spectacular mom, just keeping them. What we taught our kids, which is a fun one, is, uh, I taught them two things.

• 1:39:30Howard Lutnick?

  I would sit down with my kids and say, "How great is your life?" And this is only maybe something that people like we can say. But I'm talking to my kids, I say, "How great is your life?" They go, "Oh, great." Because they came home, and they say, "I got a bad grade, teacher doesn't like me." It's a classic line, right?

• 1:39:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:47Howard Lutnick?

  And I said, "Well, how good's your life?"

• 1:39:50Howard Lutnick?

  "Really good." I go, "Could it be, be any better?" "No." "Well, do you realize your teacher has given up her whole life?"

• 1:39:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 1:39:59Howard Lutnick?

  "And she makes how much money?"

• 1:40:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 1:40:01Howard Lutnick?

  "And she's given her whole life to teach you."

• 1:40:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Howard Lutnick?

  So, can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you? Or is it your job for her to like you?

• 1:40:11Howard Lutnick?

  Who's failing in what you just said?

• 1:40:15Howard Lutnick?

  Right? It's your job. To have her like you. So when she says raise your hand, raise your hand. Right. And the other thing is do me a favor. Color inside the lines. Okay? In high school, if she says the sky is orange, the answer to the test is orange. When you get to college, you can argue with the professor all you want. High school, color inside the lines, give the teacher what she wants, make sure she loves you, and you're getting a good grade. That's the rules of life. Yeah. And my wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls, in their moral character. Yeah. Of someone who's fighting for you, needs to have your love and respect back. Yeah.

• 1:40:57Howard Lutnick?

  You take them for granted. If you treat them badly, if you treat them like, oh, aren't I so great? Then you deserve what you get. And my wife has taught that moral fiber into my children, and it resides in them. And the other thing my kids have is they have empathy, which is a very unusual thing for young people. And it's because they're, they were raised with their father crying every day. I cried every day until October 21st, 2004. Wow. Every day, because I thought of someone I hadn't thought of, you know,

• 1:41:38Howard Lutnick?

  or someone would say 650 people died and I just, there was, you can't process all of that death. Yeah. Without crying. And the only reason I remember is because as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn't cry today, and she wrote it down.

• 1:41:53Howard Lutnick?

  That's the only reason I remember it. So my kids are fantastic. They've been incredibly supportive. And my wife's the best. And she lives with me in Washington. We bought Brett Baer's house. So I have a nice house, big enough for my ego to expand. Very important. She might not have found one that big yet. He's still looking.

• 1:42:15Howard Lutnick?

  You're an incredible American. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything. This was really fun coming to talk.

• 1:42:20David Friedberg?

  Honestly, this has been one of my, I mean, my favorite conversation we've had.

• 1:42:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's like this all the time.

• 1:42:27David Friedberg?

  I mean, not just in DC.

• 1:42:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We had dinner at Nikasia's house, who's a good friend of ours, runs Palo Alto Networks. And Howard's like, you just push the button and you can just sit and just listen. You can listen to him for hours.

• 1:42:38David Friedberg?

  By the way, I will say, I'll echo the point you made earlier. I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. I mean, you're like on another level, but like the storytelling, I think,

• 1:42:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's incredible.

• 1:42:47David Friedberg?

  is what's so powerful about this cabinet and this administration. And I think it's going to take some time to get the message out, but man, are there incredible ambassadors to do so.

• 1:42:56Howard Lutnick?

  They are so capable. Each of them is so capable, so thoughtful. I mean, I am honored to be on this cabinet with them. But we all get to work for Donald Trump, who can intuitively tell you, go fix eggs. And then Brooke goes fix eggs and eggs are down like 40%. And Brooke fixes eggs. I mean, how awesome is that? Right? And gas is down 40 cents, right? And he's only just begun. If we get, if we get the Constitution pipeline in New York passed. And I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hochul on the unbelievable oil and fracking that they have in New York

• 1:43:40Howard Lutnick?

  and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it. But they refused to unleash it. So he's going to force the Constitution pipeline, which by the way, will drop gas on the east coast of the United States of America in half. I mean, this is, and that's, you know, then you got, that's Chris Wright. That's Doug Burgum. You got Brooke Rollins. I mean, you could just go, you know, Scott Besant, you know, so thoughtful and elegant. I mean, he's just step by step by step. And you have really the most fun cabinet, working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk. And we're going to make America great again, not as a slogan, but we're going to balance the budget. We're going to change America.

• 1:44:24David Friedberg?

  Thank you, Howard. Thanks, Howard.