Transcript of Howard Lutnick: How America Can Hit 6% GDP Growth in 2026

What was the feeling the first time you're on Air Force One? Or Marine one. Is there a special thing where you're just like, What is going on?

When you're on these things, it's amazing. You are where real conversations happen. We went to see Putin. So I get on Air Force One at 5: 00 AM. He gets on at 5: 45. We fly to Alaska. Alaska, right. Okay? Right. So we're talking about... Then we're there for four hours with Putin, and then we fly back. Now, Marco Rubio and Steve Wykow go take a nap because we have to wait for Zelenskyy to wake up. It's called Zelenskyy, and we have to wait for the European leaders to wake up, right? Because it's the middle of the night. So I stay up with the President, and we're just chatting. We're just chatting, watching golf. I mean, it's a lot of hours. So then Zelenskyy wakes up. So they get on the phone with Zelenskyy, and he talks to Zelenskyy on his phone. And then when he calls the European leaders, when they get up, they want to have us only secure a call. So there's three secure handsets in his office. So he's on one, Rubio's on one, and Wykow's on one, and I'm just sitting on the couch.

This is in Air Force One?

In Air Force One, in his office, in Air Force One. So I'm just sitting on the couch. And I've been for 20 hours. The President has been up for 20 hours, but he's on the phone, and the European leaders are talking, so I'm just sitting there, and they're all on handsets, so I can't hear a word that anybody's saying. And I'm just sitting there, so I fall asleep. Okay, so I'm just sitting there. They're talking on the phone right there, and I fall asleep. So I'm like that. So Wykow, elbow's the president, right? Points to me. And then the President unrolls a tootsy roll. He goes like this. I tried to throw it in my mouth. It hits me in the face. I'm like, I wake up, he goes, He goes, Howard, while you're napping, we're trying to settle world peace. That's awesome.

Well, welcome, everybody, to the All-In interview. I'd like to welcome Secretary Howard-Lutnik, our esteemed Secretary of Commerce. When we did the first interview with you, it was at the beginning of the administration. It was almost a year ago. To be honest, it turned out to be one of the most popular things we've ever done. There's the Elon Musk view factor, but then there was the Howard Lutnik view factor, and they were pretty much side by side, actually. It's great that you gave us a chance a year later to come back and talk to you. Let's just start with the general look back for you. How has the year gone? Specifically, I would love to understand what surprised you as a businessman walking into the government. Let's just start with that.

Overall, I have a goal, which is I want to be the cabinet secretary who has the most fun. I set out with that goal, which means I am outcome-driven. I don't really I buy into, I worked really hard at something and it failed. Have I worked really hard and it failed? It's a fail. It's a fail. If I got lucky and it just all fell into place and I did nothing, it's still success. Because the outcome is what matter. You're not telling people how hard you worked and failed. How you get things done in government is fascinating. It's just different. What happened is most people who've ever been in government tend to be incremental. They come in, they say, How did this work? So someone explains how they work, and they try to move the ball 10% forward. They don't really rethink it entirely. And so my objective was to come into this department, which is an awesome, incredible, diverse department, and really think through its powers and its possibilities. Reimagine them, rethink them, hire people, and then mold those people to think outside the box. The first three months was really getting people to think, Can I really challenge this?

Can I really do this? Can I really try to do this? Then trying to convince everybody around me that this is an okay way to do it. The way it was done yesterday isn't right. It was just what they did yesterday. You're not even saying it's wrong. You're just saying it's not you.

Do you get the organ rejection, though, of career bureaucrats who think, Wait a minute, Howard's out for my job, or this is just a totally different way of doing things. I don't feel comfortable with this. I don't necessarily agree. We hear a lot about this deep state, whatever that is, this career lifers that push back on radical change.

Well, look, in the beginning, we cut 20%. I walked in the door here with 52,000 people in this department, and now there's 40,000 people in this department. So the idea is if you're going to cut 12,000 people, you have to do it fast so that everybody understands the next shoe is not going to drop tomorrow. Find where we had programs that just were like, this program was started in 1978. You'd be like, Why are we doing it now? We had a department that was supporting Recording advanced manufacturing, set up in 1986. What were they doing as advanced manufacturing 40 years ago, as opposed to what people are doing now? It was really not taking out What's the core? We did that quickly. Then I went and met every bureau at town halls. I went to their offices, and I basically told them where we were going, what we were doing, and why. What I learned about government is the people here are very narrow experts. They're amazing. Their knowledge of this particular topic. There's not generalists in government, but you have someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this, someone who's great at this.

Then your job as the secretary is to weave that blanket together so that these specialists succeed. When you give them tasks that maximize their capacity, they get jazz. I'm getting amazing output from this department because they're jazz, because someone appreciates their capacity and is driving it to success.

I want to jump into some of these verticals of expertise that you oversee, but it may be useful for the audience, actually, if you just gave an overview of the scope of commerce, because it is incredibly vast, from trade to job creation to NOAH to the Census Bureau, to Spectrum. There's a lot of things that you can shape on behalf of the United States.

Tariffs, which has been a big conversation. There's two types of tariffs. There's general tariffs, that's in front of the Supreme Court, and then there's sectoral-specific Those that are specific, industry-specific, are in this building. They're part of BIS, the Bureau of Industry and Security. That is both where we have export controls. We don't want to sell our best chips to our adversaries. We don't want to sell whatever is the fill-in, that's the Bureau of Industry and Security, or Do we want a license? Just to make sure you use it in this way or that way. All of that. And they have guns and badges. They have guns and badges because they have to protect and defend that. And they find people, and they also control the auto-tariffs, the steel-tariffs. Pharmaceuticals, which we can talk about a bunch because it's been insanely successful driving down the price of pharmaceuticals in America. That's the Bureau of Industry Security, BIS. Then you have ITA, which basically is the advocate for business. I'm the Secretary of Commerce. It's like a fun job. You're in charge of commerce. We help companies sell things around the world. That's our job. We help states bring in business to build and grow here.

We're the import-export assist model. We're always helping Boeing. The senior executives of Boeing follow me around like a puppy because everywhere, time I do a deal, and if you look at my big deals, at the end, it says they buy 50 Boeing plans. They buy 100 Boeing plans. We're always helping American companies sell overseas, and we're helping companies invest in America. Help them with their permits, help them with whatever they need to build and grow so we can grow our American jobs here. Those are two examples. Then we have NTIA, telecommunications. That includes spectrum. How are we going to do 6G? How are we going to do 6G? How do the pieces fit together? That's our responsibility as the lead advisor. Then inside of that, of course, we have the AI, the Center for AI advancement. We We study, and then we put out reports. When Deep Seek comes out with their new model, and there's all this press about it, our department literally painstakingly studies it as compared to our models and publishes what's the difference. There's a standard of knowledge, not the press making this, that, or the other thing. Then we put out GDP.

We analyze. What's interesting about GDP is people don't realize what we do is we use the census. There's business census, calling around the companies. It's not really calling around anymore. It's more economic connection to companies through APIs and otherwise. One of the keys for me is to get rid of everything that's manual that's left and make it all automated, make it all connected with APIs, make it all... Make it make it make sense You can do it amazingly well. Create GDP. Then we put GDP out on the blockchain. Because if I'm publishing GDP, why not? Where's the holdup?

You started doing that in July, I think.

I mean, how fun is that to say, Why don't we do that? Then we go to the oval office, I chat with the President, he goes, Great. Then we do it. I mean, the reason you want to work for President Trump is his intuition is so extraordinary. His knowledge base is so amazing that I can go in and talk to him about, should we put GDP on the blockchain? Just before that, he was doing something completely different, something completely different. Then he'll chat with you about three or five minutes, and it goes, That sounds great. Then you just go do it. It's really fun. We have the patent office. If you think of how valuable intellectual property is, how do we protect it? How do we defend it? What's the right way to What do you think about it? Then you have Noah, which is... We have inside of Noah, of course, is the word atmosphere. It's oceans and atmosphere. What does that mean? Oceans. And above 50,000 feet is space, space commerce. I have now the Office of Space Commerce, which I've taken out of Noah and I've put in my office so that I can re-imagine how do we handle commercial satellites.

We're going to dig into as many of these areas as we can, but let's go back to the first one. Can you bring us into the room leading into April first? April second. April second, sorry. Bring us into the room debating tariffs, debating where you wanted to start, debating the game theory. What were the puts and takes and how did you come up with the decisions you made? Then if you could just reflect back on what went right, what would want to redo and what was maybe, and it still is, misunderstood.

The President in his first term, he's been talking about tariffs and how the trade deficit of the United States of America is really a ripoff of America. That people who don't weigh in very deep say, Well, you have a trade deficit with the supermarket. You're always buying the supermarket, so you have a trade deficit with the supermarket. That's just silly. If you think about it, let's say there are two islands. One produces and one invents. The inventor lets the other island produce and keeps buying it from that other island, pays them the money, and that other island uses the money to buy the inventor's island. Over a A year at a time, the producer owns the inventer's island, and the inventer works for the producer because he ran an infinite trade deficit and kept paying his money away. What's supposed to happen. When I was in college, my freshman and sophomore professors basically said, If you run a trade deficit, you'll keep taking your silly paper money and giving it to them and buy their wine and buy their cars and buy all their cool stuff. And sooner or later, they're going to say, Hey, I don't want your stupid paper.

And your dollar would devalue. You wouldn't be able to buy their stuff and it would all bounce. And that's free, foreign exchange, floating currency theory. But what if you're America and you invent the light bulb, and then you invent the transister, and then you invent the GPU, and you're just too darn smart. What they do with those dollars is they come in and buy us. In 1985, we had net ownership of the rest of the world. Comparing the rest of the world's ownership of America and our ownership of them, that counts everything. Their bonds, company stock, everything. We were net an investor of $148 billion, more of them than they owned of us. Fast forward to 2024, 26 trillion the other way. They own 26 trillion of us more than we own of them.

What you're saying is we became effective employees of the people that were producing the things that we created.

When we call the beginning, so Donald Trump says, We're getting ripped off. We need to fix this. And like junior economists fight it and say, No, no, no.

Let me just stop for a second. That is the first time I've heard. It is an extremely elegant framing, actually. It sets up an incredibly powerful way to measure the effectiveness of tariffs. Right. Is that how you think about it? Which is that imbalance is the North Star?

Yes.

Once we own at least the same of them as they do of us-That's balanced. That's balanced. We're balanced. Right. Right now, we're at a It's $26 trillion.

Why would we have that? So what happens is you call a country up and you say, I'm going to set a tariff. They say, Wait, wait, wait. Before you set a tariff, how about this? We'll invest 200 $300 billion in your country, and Toyota will build a factory, and Siemens will build a factory, and they'll all build a factory. I'm like, You're just buying us. You're literally buying us. I understand. What's better for you investing 200 billion in America or investing 200 billion where? Where's better than investing here? So what happens is that natural argument, which was always previously successful, falls on deaf ears. I'm pointing over there because that's his office. The White House is right there. It just He says, You're only investing here because it's great for you. The answer is, I want to rebalance. That's what we're out to do. Build it here, sell it here, fine, or pay for the privilege of selling it here.

How did you set the rates?

Well, the President on the campaign Trail had two views, the debate. He was really debating with the team and inside his mind, does he want to set a universal tariff or a specific country-by-country tariff. Obviously, universal tariff, it's easy. Tuesday morning, you say-Pick a number. 10%, Shazam. But we settled on a country-specific model, much more complex, much more difficult, but much more nuanced, much more clever, and much tougher. He couldn't do that in his first term because he didn't have believers around him. He had too much of the people who believe that that sophomore professors' ideals. Even though we were out $26 trillion, talks. They thought that was too casual a comment. This administration came in with incredibly sharp people, me included, Jameson Greer, Scott Besson, who were on-side, on-board, driving for these outcomes.

Let's double-click into a couple of these deals because some of the terms you got, it would be just great if you could walk us through how you convinced them. Let's look at Japan. The Japan Trade deal, you walked out with, I think it was $550 billion of a commitment. Terms, I mentioned them in the support. I've never seen terms like this before, which you can explain, which is basically Japan gets your money back, then you get 90% of the profits. But can you just walk us through, when you go into the room with the Japanese government, just get us to the outcome. How do you negotiate that deal with them?

Okay, so let's spend some time in Japan because it's fascinating. When I'm thinking about Japan, I reminded the President, in 1853, Admiral Perry went with an armada and cannons and still had trouble opening the Japanese market. The Japanese market for cars, as an example, 94% of cars driven in Japan are Japanese. They don't drive German cars, they don't drive Korean cars, they don't drive American cars. The only American car is really in Japan are Chevalets driven by the Yakuza. You can't come home with a Chevy and people are like, You got a new job. It's a culturally, technically, and economically closed market. Even if you opened it technically, and even if you opened it economically, you may not be able to open it socially. What we did is we said, All right, you're going to pay a 25% tariff. Simple. You won't open your market. I can't get you to really open your market. So you just pay us 25%. And that's simple. We don't have to negotiate. We just pay for the right, and the math will fix itself over time. Their leadership called and said, We can't to do that. When someone says, I can't do that, I'm like...

When you say why?

Yeah. They explained why. They said, Look, the way the Japanese auto manufacturers work is the government subsidizes the machinery that went to small manufacturers. What they did is, let's say, Company A could have a thousand small companies, and they make the cup holder for this particular model. Right. They have 50 people who work at this company who make the cup holder. For Toyota. Right, for Toyota. But the machinery was subsidized by the government. You have thousands, tens of thousands of these companies. And so they can't pick them up and move them to America.

Let me ask just a question before you go back to this. Was it surprising to you that, not just Japan, but I'm sure you encountered it everywhere, all these other governments would be willing to shape and subsidize their own domestic productivity, whereas Americans were a little bit more on their own?

It's amazing. The subsidies, the assistance, it's not a level playing field.

That everybody else does for their own domestic internal economy.

But not on every product, but on many. We set steel and aluminum tariff. You'd say, Why do you do the whole steel and aluminum thing? You'd say, Well, If the Chinese give power, give, G-I-V-E, the power to the steel producer. Free. Think of steel. It's like brown dirt. You process the brown dirt to make it iron ore. But you've all seen it's like dirt. Then you know how much power you have to put into that to melt it, to make it look like one of those things we've seen on TV where you're pouring the iron ore? Imagine if I gave you the power for free. You'd be making your steel for a $200 $150 a metric ton. You'd say, How much does it cost in America? $700 a metric ton. They're going to put our guys out of business, which means they put our guys out of business. Then Japan subsidizes it, Korea subsidizes it. Maybe they can do it for A hundred bucks of metric ton. Meanwhile, we start with 40 steel blast furnaces. Now we have 10. If we kept going, we were going to have zero. Then what happens is you become basically subservient if you need steel.

You want to build your own missiles? You have to call another country. They may be your allies like Japan and Korea, and you can call them, but you are not self-sufficient. Donald Trump says, We need steel. We need aluminum. We need copper. We need to make our own semiconductors. We need to make our own pharmaceuticals. Once you understand this, and you really think about it, Donald Trump, not only is he completely correct, it actually goes to the thank God. You study pharmaceuticals, and you really study them, and you say, Well, these generic pharmaceuticals are made in India. I said, Okay, good. India is our ally. But the ingredients come from China.

Exactly.

If there's one nut or bolt that you need, and it comes from China, they don't send it to There were these things called magnets. Magnets go in a car. The value of a magnet that goes in a car is 20 bucks. 20 bucks. You're buying a $30,000 car. It's a $20 part. But if they don't have it, Oh, sorry, it can't work. Where do we get that part from? Well, China sells them. They buy the dirt, the ingredient for $55 a pound, and they sell you the finished magnet for $55 a pound. No one's going to make the magnet if you could sell the raw material for $55. They're basically just losing money. The answer is, right.

Do you think that this mercantilism, was it a purposeful strategy to weaken America, or do you think it was just a byproduct of capitalism?

The answer is yes. The Chinese This economy is one of overproduction. They have 50 mayors, provinces, and each of those provinces is trying to succeed. Each of those provinces wants to build an electric car company, and the government puts in all the money, builds the capital, gives them the power, invest. If you're the mayor, you want the winning electric car company, because remember, China does not have oil and natural gas, so they have to build electric because they have They have to build electric. We don't. We're being foolish to think that we should have batteries and everything that they make that we don't. That's just foolish. That means if you have 50 mayors, and they all have what? One electric car company? No, they're probably going to have two just in case. That's 100 electric car companies. They're all trying to kill each other, subsidized by the government. They can cut their price 30%. Why? Because the government just says, Look, let's just try to undersell everybody else. Then they make so many cars. What do they do with all these cars? Then they dump them and they take the electric car, which cost them 30,000, and they sell it in Europe for It's $15,000.

You go to an electric car in Europe and say, 15,000 for this car? It's an amazing car for 15,000. That's because it cost 30,000. To make it, yeah. What happens is that has the effect of Volkswagen out of business.

Right.

What happens is it's their model, which is an attack chaos model. But the attack chaos model has overcapacity. Then they turn that overcapacity into an asset, says, Let's dump the overcapacity. We're going to lose a fortune. Okay, but the government's just paying. We're going to dump that overcapacity into America or into Europe or into anybody who will take it We'll put their industry out of business, and then we'll have them over a barrel. We'll turn our economic chaos into international prowess.

And leverage, right. So that's-And so then the tariffs now then basically slow that leverage down because it takes that economic incentive off the table. Do you need to follow up with some other set of structural changes, though, to ride the ship in For the long term? We have to domesticate production. What are the things that we need to do so that in 8 years or 12 years, if the tariffs were to change, if a different administration takes a different point of view, what is structurally going to be left behind that prevents this from happening again?

Well, with respect to China, if we blink, they will sell below cost in America and drive our domestic the company's out of business, and then we will be beholden to them. That's a simple man, right? I mean, if you think about it, they spend a fortune convincing everyone that they should be environmentally friendly and have an EV car. But if Europe doesn't make batteries, and they say, Have all EV cars by 2030, then who are they going to buy the batteries They have to buy it from China. Now, they need to buy it from China, which means what is their foreign policy with respect to China? It's very positive. That's all. They trade economic, basically, I've gotten prouce over you so that you're going to let me do this, that, and the other thing. Eventually, they're not playing with the same rules that we play. When you go around the world and you study the world, like Japan doesn't do cars by the same rules that we do. They had to have cars be lower than 25%. 25% was basically a number that choked them. We analyzed together with them that 15% would be the number they could live with, and keep making cars and build more here.

Then I said, But why would we, since you're not really going to open your market, you're not really going to let us have access, how are we going to do it? Then I spent months going back and forth with the Japanese and President Trump with different ideas. How about this? If you suggested, I got it right the first time, that It may not be true. I got it right. I've always described my business success in life. I always came out of like this. Then this, this, this.

It's sooner or later.

It's a little later I got through. What we came up with was $550 billion. This is not foreign direct investment. This is not Toyota building a factory in America. They literally will finance Any project we want to build in America, as long as it's a good cash-slowing project. Nuclear. We want to build $100 billion of nuclear plants. They will pay for it. What happens is they'll borrow the money on a 30-year bond in Japan.

The Japanese government goes and raises the 550 billion from their domestic bondholders.

From their domestic bondholders.

Right. They're an LP to you, and you're the GP.

Exactly the right thing. They're an LP. They give us the equity. We build the nuclear power plant, and then it starts selling power, and we split the cash 50-50 until they get back their money plus their interest. That means in 30 years, the taxpayers of Japan broke even, and their dividend was a reduced tariff. That every day they had a lower tariff, they had more employment, they had this and that. You know what? What's Their stock markets up? Twenties? Yeah. Up, not down. Up. That's the point, which is it didn't cost their taxpayers money over time. Right now, it's pretty simple to understand how much we're going to make. You'd say, Well, if it's 550 billion and their interest rates are pretty low, so let's say over 30 years, you're going to get 650 billion. When we pay them back 650 billion, if When you say to me, How much did America make? I would say 650 billion because we split the money 50-50. Yeah, exactly. After they get their money back, because nuclear power plants last a long time, then the cash flow goes 90 to America and 10 to Japan.

When you say to America, Is there an account? How does that money then get spent or allocated?

The only bank the United States of America has, as far as the Secretary of Commerce sees, is called Treasury. Treasury. We have accounts at Treasury, and all the money goes into Treasury. All the tariff money goes into Treasury. All this money just goes into Treasury. It reduces our deficit. It is taxes paid by others. For us to get our house in order, that's why the president talks about the external revenue service. In this case, you're going to make, you'd say, All right, well, over 20 years, you'd probably make 30 billion A year. That's 30 billion a year. You know how much tax we have to raise on Americans to cover 30 billion a year? That's 30 billion a year just on those trades. Then you have the tariffs are 500 billion a year now, and they will grow over time to a trillion a year. That money is not money we have to pay in taxes. Eventually, that puts our house in order, that lowers interest rates, drives our economy, but most importantly, we don't have to pay.

President Trump has talked about this. He said that as you execute the tariff plan and extract this incremental capital, you could see a rateable reduction in income taxes. Is that the right way to think about this? Or do you think there are other ways to spend the money first that we need to before we can-Who paid for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security?

Tariffs.

Tariffs.

That's a down payment. But that's the idea. We should be able to reduce the tax burden from the bottom up. Help Americans who make less than $150,000, who earn overtime, who earn tips. Let's reduce their tax burden, let's help them. By the way, that's 85% of America. It's not like it's a subset. I think the President is deeply focused on using the power of his administration administration to write a whole bunch of wrongs that have been ripped off about our country and that we are the richest country in the world. That means we don't have to take things away from people. Everybody assumes to balance the budget, if you ask a politician how you would fix Social Security, they would say, take the retirement age out.

Out, right.

Take away. They would never say, We are the greatest country on the Earth. We have the The latest economy on the Earth. Can't we figure out ways to enhance our revenues to keep the richest country in the world? Should be able to give people retirement at 65. We shouldn't change a darn thing. And that is his thinking. And that's why it's so much more powerful than any politician before. Politicians think all they have to do is give or take, give or take, give or take, give or take.

The way that you've explained this, it makes an enormous amount of sense. It's like you Set the stage of, Here's the historical imbalance. Here's how we want to reset it. We want some investment that we're going to get you whole, foreign country. But at the end of the day, this is about American exceptionalism. It's worked in Japan, it's worked in Korea. You did the You did the deal with Europe, you did the deal with the UK. What's out there that's still there? I think India is still out there, although it seems like they are capitulating a little bit. I saw that they just bought a lot of liquefied petroleum gas from the United States in November. What are the big hot button places that you wanted-I'll tell you a story about India.

If you remember, I did the first deal, the UK deal, and we told the UK that they had to get it done by two Fridays from now, that that was the date, that the train was going to leave the station by two Fridays, because I have a lot of other countries doing things. If someone else is first, they're first. And President President Trump does deals like a staircase. First stair gets the best deal. You can't get the best deal after the first guy went. Everyone says, I want the UK deal. I want the UK deal. The answer is no, they were first. They took the chance. They moved quickest. They're first. Second, up a stair.

So that sets the floor.

Right. Then the next one's got to be higher. Then the next one higher, and the next one higher, the next one higher. He does things that way because that way it incents you to come to the table. You could have three countries who are the second deal. They all get done the same time. But if you want to wait and see how it goes, it's at your risk. He does the UK deal, and they We got to get it done by Friday. Thursday afternoon, Kier Starmer is on the phone. The President, they do their deal Wednesday night, and on Thursday, we have a press conference, and we announced it. Everybody asked the President, Who do you think is next? If you look back at the time, he talks about a variety of countries, but he names India a couple of times, publicly. It's not like a big secret. We were talking India, and we told India you had three Fridays.

You put them on a shot clock.

Well, they have to get it done because what happens is I have lots of other countries, and when those other countries do their deal-The staircase goes up. Right. Now, Now, the President, during all these deals, he would refer to me as the greatest table setter who ever lived. Because you've never had anybody who is as successful as me as a businessman before who's just the table setter. Because what I would do is I would negotiate the contracts and set the whole deal up. But let's be clear, it's his deal. He's the closer. He does the deal. I They said, You got to have Modi. It's all set up. You have to have Modi call the President. They were uncomfortable doing it. Modi didn't call.

Wow.

That Friday left. In the middle of the next week, We did Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam. We announced a whole bunch of deals.

Malaysia in that period.

We did this whole bunch of deals. That's like... That staircase. Because we negotiated them and assumed India was going to be done before them, I had negotiated them at a higher rate. Now the problem is the deals came out at a higher rate. Then India calls back and says, Okay, we're ready. I said, Ready for what? It was like three weeks later. I go, Are you ready for the train that left the station three weeks ago? What happened is they just... Sometimes there's that seesaw, and people on just the wrong side When I was a young... When I was young in business and I was a trader, one of my first jobs was a trader. When I would start on the wrong side of the seesaw, I'd buy and we'd go and then I'd sell it, it would go down. Then I'd sell, it would go up. Then the buy would go down. When you're on the right side of the seesaw, you can't lose. Your buy goes up, and then your sell, it goes down, and your buy goes up, and your sell, it goes down, and you feel like you're the king. But when you're on the wrong side of the seesaw, what What I used to do is I used to put the phone down.

I used to go in the bathroom, fill a bucket with water, take a rag, and I would wash the plants in the office because it was much cheaper than me picking up the phone. Then people would call and say, Can I speak to Aaron? They go, No, he's in a meeting. Meanwhile, they look up and there I am, washing the plant. Because whatever I did, I would get back in there and I'd touch it, I would go the wrong way. What happened is India just was on the wrong side of the seesaw. It wasn't. It was just they couldn't get it done when they needed to, and then they couldn't get it done, and then they couldn't get it done, and then they couldn't get it done. What happened is all these other countries kept doing deals, and they're just further in the back of the line. Now when they say, But what I want is I want the deal in between the UK and Vietnam because that's what I negotiate. They remember, and I remember. They said, But you agreed. And I said, Then.

Then.

Not now. Then. That's the problem. India will work it out. But it's just there's a lot of countries, and they each have their own deep internal politics. To get something approved by their parliament or their diet or there. These are a deeply complex thing. We're dealing with the world, but we've gotten them done. We got Europe done. We did Japan, then they did Europe, then We did Korea, and we've done country after country after country. These are durable, meaning these are deals that take care of the countries, autos, pharmaceutical, semiconductors, things that really matter. The tariffs have been incredibly effective, and you can use them to change the trade deficit, but We can also use them to change behavior. We should spend some time talking about drugs and pharmaceuticals.

This is what I wanted to do. Let's double click into AI and drugs, but let's start with drugs. You were pretty integrally involved in some of the pharmaceutical repricing and manufacturing deals. Just walk us through what the goal of those were and how Americans will feel the impact of the deals that you've been able to get done.

Everybody who studies pharmaceuticals learns that America is the client, is the consumer, is the payer. Worldwide.

Worldwide.

We pay all the money. These drug companies make 75% of their revenues in America, and it's 100% of their product. Because what happens is we pay, let's say, $1,000 for a drug. Then Europe says, We have socialized medicine. We're not buying it. What's your cost? The drug company says, 100 bucks. They say, We'll pay you 175 dollars. You can make 75 bucks. Then the drug company says, No. Then Europe says, Okay, I'm not buying it then. You'd say, What do you mean you're not buying? You're not going to give medicine to your people? No. We can't afford it? No. Eventually, the drug company says, Fine. We're paying a thousand, and they're paying 175 bucks. Six times less. And you'd be like, What? And that is how the whole world's drug model was working. We're paying a thousand. Everyone else in the world is paying $175. Donald Trump says, I want to fix it, and I want MFN price. You want to charge us? Most favored nations. Most favored nations.

We're the cheapest price in the world. Right.

But you could charge them 500, and then you could charge us 500. Fine. But if you're willing to sell it to them for $175, don't come here and tell me that I have to pay a thousand.

It's just unfair. You're not dictating price in America. You're essentially dictating the lower bound price abroad.

We are dictating fairness. Fairness. If we're your biggest customer, treat us fairly. We're not even saying treat us the best. We're saying treat us fairly. I mean, it's amazing. He writes a letter to 17 giant pharmaceutical companies. It said, I want MFN. I got to tell you, I don't know a single person in this administration who thought he could do it. It was so audacious, so Too bold, so powerful. I was like, I don't know. Just write a letter to all the big drug companies saying, You're going to give us MFN, and you write a stern letter. And I'm like, Okay. Good luck with that. How's this baby going to work? Then Then, so I sit with... We have this amazing meeting with Bobby Kennedy and his team, and we say, Look, I've got these 2. 32 tariffs. I could smash these companies. Smash them because they all make it overseas and then export it to us, and we're all the money. We could charge them any tariff we want. We could charge them 500%. Let's do something that's never been done before. Let's literally be a team. You lead. Bobby and his team who are amazing, Dr. Oz, Chris Klopp.

I mean, these guys did spectacular job. They led, but I was the hammer.

From table setter to hammer.

To hammer. Now I'm the hammer. I'm in the background like hammer. Then say, Look, you have two things we want from you. We want your best drugs at MFN prices. You can't sell it to anybody in the world at a better price than you sell it to us. Of the countries that have money. We're not talking about if you sell it to sub-Sahara Africa, we're talking about the big countries, the OECD. Let's say, call it the Big Ten or the Big 20. Charge us the same and reshore. I'll waive your tariff while you're reshoring, providing How do you do those two. Or hammer. Just hammer. And what's a hammer mean? I don't know. Hundreds of % tariff starting, I don't know, what do you think? 30 days from now? Just bang.

You're just there in the corner. They just see just the-I'm like the handsome guy in the back.

If you see me at the meetings, I'm like, Yeah, or like, Oh, la, la. But if you look at the pictures that are put out, everybody puts out the picture of Bobby signing and me signing. You say, What do you sign, Howard? I'm signing the no hammer rule. The result is Ozempic and Mounjar are on Medicaid and Medicare for $149 instead of not on it, and generally for sale for thousands. So think about it. Instead of generally for thousands, everyone in America can have it for 149 bucks, and that's going to reduce goals. I mean, it's going to change these drugs. We had a drug company companies say, You know what? I'm just going to give it to you. One of the drug companies, Merck, said, They're going to just give us their number one drug in the world. They're going to give it to Medicaid, Medicare for zero. Right. So we saved $25, $35 billion a year. But more importantly, we made drugs accessible to America at a fair price and stop always being the one who pays. We We are the richest country in the world, and the world viewed us. Remember when I was growing up, there were all these cartoons on TV, and there was always this one where there was a guy stuck on a desert island, and he looks at the other guy, and as the other guy walks by, he starts looking at him, he looks like a big chicken leg.

He's starving, so he looks at the other guy. He sees him. The world views us as a giant chicken. The They should just, We're so rich, we won't miss it. The trade deals were bad, the drug deals were bad. You can go chapter and verse. The immigration system is the most ridiculous thing. Imagine we are the richest, most successful country in the world, and we give a lottery. A lottery. Let's say we have a lottery to come into America. If you When you win the lottery, you win. But who's paying for the lottery? We are. It's not like the normal lottery. Everybody pays in a dollar, and the winner gets X % of the money. Here, the people win the lottery, and we lose. It's like a win-lose. You would say, Gosh, why would we do that? It's only because Donald Trump is willing to literally challenge. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? He has incredibly capable people around him who are willing to challenge it and then come up with a better answer, attack that better answer, and deliver the outcome.

Meaning just talking about it, as I said in the beginning, doesn't count. You either change the immigration system, you change the price of drugs, you change the trade deficit, which has You have to be revved, which is awesome, right? You change the budget deficit of the country, that's $600 billion this year. You just relentlessly deliver. What happens is if you have a businessman in that office. Donald Trump has the best intuition of anybody I've ever met. I could tell you stories and stories of just... When they said to me, I don't know, maybe we talked about it last time, What's that flag on the back of those ships? I was like, I don't know. He goes, Have you ever seen a flag on the back of a ship that you know where it was from? I was like, No. He goes, Why is that? Then you look it up, and the number one flag on the back of a ship is Liberia. All these ships, like all the tankers.

Like all the tankers, cargo ships. And why is that?

It's a tax scam. It's a flag of convenience.

Right.

And then what they do is they then So they make all their money on the seas, and they charge the port as an expense. So they pick it up from Europe. It's an expense. They drop it off in America. That's an expense. And all their profits are on the high seas where they pay no tax. So what do you think they do? Then they buy the ports. It's all a tax scam. So the President, by intuition, sends us out like he sends me out. He loves to send me out stuff because I just love this stuff, and I find it. We're going to attack. The next year, you're going to see this government attack fraud. The fraud is probably a trillion dollars a year of people who just have figured out how to rip off the system. Remember, America had opened borders till 1914. The reason it had opened borders in 1914 is because It gave you nothing. If you were sick, you couldn't go to the hospital unless you could pay the bill. If you were sick, you'd die. What do you want from me? Get a job, take care of yourself, or get lost.

When we went to have a welfare state, you have to close the borders. Because if the people are going to give their money, they need to give it to each other. You can't really open the border and say, I'm going to give my money to anybody who wants to come in. That's getting it wrong. When people say, Open immigration is how we built America, they are right. Open immigration would be something interesting if we gave people nothing. Because if we gave them nothing, if they weren't smart enough, capable, entrepreneurial enough, driven enough, they would starve to death. And so they wouldn't stay here. They would self-deport and leave. But if you're going to give them welfare, and you're going to give them food stamps, and you're going to give them housing, and you're going to give them this, then everybody's going to come and just leach off of us, and we're going to pay and pay and pay until it's wrong.

On this immigration side, you've launched two versions of the Trump card, I think, right? There's the million-dollar Trump card, and then the $5 million card. Where are those programs, and how have they been working so far?

It's out right now. Trumpcard. Gov. It's a really nice website. What happens is the idea is to stop letting people into the country without a clear benefit to the country. You should come in if you're going to give us a clear benefit to the country. It should be black and white. We want you. Yeah.

Right.

You're going to help us. The average green card, if you looked for the last five years, the average American makes in the $1,000 a year, and the average green card recipient made in the '40s. We are bringing in the bottom quartile. Why? We're the only country in the world who is bringing in the bottom, more likely to be on welfare, more likely to be on food stamps, more likely on getting stuff from the government? Because they were all coming to get stuff from the government. The idea for us is, Okay, here's the gold card. You want to come in? Prove to us you're going to make a benefit to this country. Give the United States a million dollars, which pays off our deficit, reduces taxes We have to charge Americans. Then you come in, you've proven that you're going to be a good citizen. We have to vet you. We spend 15,000 on the greatest vet we've ever done. Then you come in and you're going to be top quartile, maybe top decia. But you're going to help America be better.

Have you announced how many people have applied or the first batches yet that have been granted this?

No, the President the first week put out that we had sold a billion dollars worth.

In the first week? Yeah. Oh, wow.

But there's a process, and that this process is going along fixing the immigration system, not letting people come in by lottery, selecting who they are, not bringing in people who would take a trainee job. People who graduate universities around the world and people who graduate.

Fixing the H-1B.

Yeah. Look, I think H-1B is Fantastic for someone who makes $500,000 who's a cool engineer. But it's not okay if it's a $60,000 college graduate. Hire from the universities of America. Don't hire from the universities of the world. It just does It doesn't make sense. What happens is people steal the history of America, and they lie, change the peace shape, and try to stick in it by saying America was born with immigration and open. Yes, that's when we gave nothing. But if you're going to give everybody the gift of America, we better get something back. That's why you're hearing about all this fraud. These people came in in order to defraud America. It's not like a random act. They figured, this is the richest country in the world. We live in a crap hole. Let's get out of here. And these morons are going to let us have a BMW. And we're not going to be hardworking industrious people. We're just going to figure out the model and screw them. And America was not designed with walls and barriers. We were designed with an entrepreneurial spirit to make the world shine. That's who we are.

When I give talks, I say, If you want to understand the greatness of America, close your eyes and imagine a world without America. It's dark, really dark. Now open your eyes and say, What makes the world shine when America is shining the brightest? So you'd say, Well, if that's That's true. America reset the world order of trade, and properly set the balance where since we're the best economy, we're in the best position. And so if you're right, Howard, and the world shines brighter when America shines brighter, then even though the world's paying America, they should be in better shape. Korean stock market of 70%, Japan up, like 20s or 30s, Europe up more than 15. All of these up. You'd say, Well, I don't understand. How could they pay us and be up? Because the world, and you know, stocks are a long-term outcome.

That's right.

The long-term outcome is if the United States is powerful and strong and creating the greatest weapons in the world, and selling us the greatest weapons in the world, and protecting us, and defending us, and building an economy that we can rely upon and trust upon, Our companies are going to do great. They're going to do great.

This is an excellent point that no one has actually made. The narrative that the media has been trying to paint recently is this is a debacement problem for the US dollar. But I actually think what you said is more accurate, which is what people looked through where the tariffs and saw a level of economic resilience in these other markets that made them very attractive in a way that they weren't attractive at the current course and speed. That's why Korea did so well, Japan did so well, Europe did so well. It's why a lot of these base commodities did well, because now you're seeing an increasing of demand because you're going to see production capacity all over the country. It was a huge change, actually. It really resets how capitalism and capital markets will work. I don't know if it was an intended consequence, but it's a very positive consequence. I want to talk, though, about what you just said about 2026. You said, We will be surprised at the level of focus that you and the President put on fraud, and you think there's a trillion dollars. Can you just double click into what that means, how you're going to go after Is it at the federal level, at the state level?

Just give us the rough game plan, what you can say. Sure.

The President is the federal. If the federal government gives money to the state and the state gives it out, then we have a dog in the hunt. If it's their money and they're giving it out, we don't really have a dog in the hunt. But we have a dog in almost every hunt because they take the federal money, it goes in, and then they administer welfare. But it comes from us. The success we had in pharmaceuticals was the Commerce Department and HHS working together in a way that these departments have never worked together before, that he understood my power and I understood his power, and together we changed the outcome to incredible success. That's That's how we're going to look at it. We're going to have a multiple department working together. No one has ever looked at... If you're getting Medicaid and Medicare, how much money do you make? No one's ever compared the two. Really? Yeah. You're supposed to tell us. But if you're a fraudster-It's the honor system. Yeah. But the world of America is built, but the world of America He's built. But now with modern technology. Then you have a beast like me.

Fabric. Probably the guy with the best intuition in the world sitting right over there, who's also a businessman. We'd say, Okay, we're going to build the technology to do this. We are going to build it. Everybody's on board. You have a THS, you have HHS, you have commerce. We're all working together, and we are going to come out with models and methods to seek the fraud out and not on a limited to Minnesota scale. Oh, no. We're going to go after it big time. You have that on one side, and then you have the execution of the first year in the second, which means you have the President saying, We have 18 $1. 2 trillion of committed capital. Okay, open your plan. We have spreadsheets. I went over them yesterday. We have spreadsheets of promises. All these people have made these promises. Okay. Call them. 30 construction projects launched that would never have been launched. Here's my view. I told you that I thought in the end of this year, we would get to 4% GDP growth. I said it in the first quarter, and 4. 3. Now, the fourth quarter is going to be a mess because of the shutdown.

Seriously, this is accounting in America. If someone works for the government, they count them as GDP. You would say, Right, that face. Exactly what you make. You go, What? Let's get... Wait, stop. You hire someone in your department. Gdp just went up. Even though they don't do anything. I thought GDP would be like if you make a tank.

Productivity, something.

Like you do something. No. Here's the fun part. When you furlough them on the shutdown, You're still paying them. That's the deficit. But they're not actually working at the government, so they're not productive. So they take it away from GDP. And you'd say, This is actually the silliest thing in the world. You're giving the guy the same A lot of money. What's the difference? These are the rules. Our fourth quarter GDP will be a point and a half lower than it otherwise would be for this oddity.

Just the furlough.

That's 150 basis points. The common economists think the fourth quarter growth is going to be a point. They're just like, raw. I said they were wrong in the third quarter. I said they were wrong in the second quarter. We have a 3. 8 and then 4. 3. It'll probably be like two and a half.

But that would have been to your point, four. Four.

Next year, with all this construction in the ground. This Friday, I'm flying up to New York to Microns, ground-breaking of their tens of billions of dollar factory in upstate New York. That's just another example. Then I'm going to Detroit, where they're doing a huge new build, a new auto plant, and they're building their engine plant. It's just five. You're going to see fives in the greatest economy in the world. You're going to see fives. People think, you can't.

5% GDP on a base this big is It's enormous.

We have a $30 trillion, so 5% is 1. 5 trillion in growth. If we cut rates, you'll see six. People would never, before Donald Trump walked to that office, they would don't think that's possible. What's 6 mean?

Let's just put 6 in context. 6 was China at its peak under central planning with a tight control on every aspect of its economy. That was what the world knew as what 6 looked like in the modern era. Now the alternative version of 6 will be the President, you, the team, in a much more open way.

You would have said it could never happen.

I would be shocked. I mean, that's an incredible-Okay, you're going to put it this way.

It wouldn't even be fun for you when we see the 5. Because they'll be so soon. They could be this quarter, as in the first quarter. Then I'd say, Well, you have to come back and see me when it's two, five. But then you'll come back in a couple of months, and then you'd say, Howard, I just spoke to you for an hour. I don't need to speak to you again. But you're going to see fives, like as in early in '26. That's incredible. Then if they cut rates, and that's the thing, I need a new Fed chair who cuts rates, and if they cut rates, you'll see sixes. What you're going to See, what that means is jobs are abundant. Good jobs are abundant. High paying jobs are abundant. Construction jobs. You just get paid more money to be who you are. You make more money, and that is not inflation. That is called 6% GDP growth. See, if we have no growth and I pay you more because you demand more, that's inflation. But if I'm trying to build a factory because I'm I'm kicking tail and I have to share some of my profits with you to convince you to come to work.

Well, I'll give you a perfect example of this. I am the lead investor in a one gigawatt data center project in Arizona. We have to pay electricians between $500 and $750,000 a year, which is more than what we pay the engineers that work at the models at a Facebook. But it's an example to your point of just the economy has created earnings potential across the in ways that I've never seen in my career. It's really quite incredible.

The society under Obama, the Obama view of the country, he blew it. He got rid of shop class. When I grew up, he took shop class. Totally. There were things to use with your hands. Then we ruled that out in America, said, You got to go to a liberal arts college. You have to end up with $200,000 in debt. And then these people thought, What job am I getting that gets me to pay off my $200,000 in debt? And then you have Biden jams in inflation. So the price of a house goes up. And then the American dream slips further and further away. And you get Donald Trump saying, okay, the way to fix it is I need to get the people working with their hands, 6 million Americans sitting on the sidelines because the jobs are not the right jobs for them. Get them out. Technicians, fix robotics. I went out to Arizona to the TSMC plant, and I met these guys were pipe fitters. I met a pipe fitter, and I said, How's the job? He goes, I play Tetris every day. He goes, I've got to get these pipes through this thing in this way.

They give me this much space, and I got to do all this thing. He goes, I have the greatest job ever.

Can I tell you something about that TSMC plant? If it's a four-nanometer plant. They are at better yields or equivalent yields than the best operating four-nanometer plant in the world, which is in China. Isn't that incredible? American technicians are now, dollar for dollar, as good as what was happening in China. It's incredible. They'll be great. Nobody knows this, by the way, but it's incredible.

Tsmc, when I walked in, there was this Chips Act. The Chips Act had $52 billion because we make no chips in America. Semiconductors. By the way, so just as a a fun story, a wafer, these are things you know, but a wafer is the size of a pizza you get in a restaurant. It's like a personal pizza.

Like a small pizza, yeah, exactly.

It's like a 12-inch pizza. Then What they do is they break it in little chips. That's why it's called the semiconductor chip. They literally chip it. The beauty of AI, like these GPUs that Jensen builds from NVIDIA, is instead of making 4,000 little chips out of that pizza, they make 10. These are big things. This thing is the size of a refrigerator. You think of a chip, you think of a little teeny thing going in your iPhone, and these things are the size of a refrigerator. It's a different model. But they gave Intel $10 billion. Gave?

Yeah, actually, let me just stop there because I think one of the things that you did, you basically just put a pause on the chipsack and ripped it apart and restarted it effectively. Because it was initially under Biden, again, just as an outsider, looking at it, it was largely giveaways. I think you flipped it around and you essentially said, Stop. My understanding is you actually haven't... You've committed to a lot, but you've been pretty judicious and disciplined about giving the money out. I think only six billion has gone out because there's a bunch of conditions and you have to actually meet these milestones. The Chips Act is very different than how it started.

Is that fair? Yeah. Because the Biden administration viewed the $50 billion as, I'll give you 10%. You build a $60 billion plant, I'll give you a $6 billion.

Why does that not work? Why would that not have worked? Or why was that not working when you came in?

Why would you give $6 billion to TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Corporation, when their stock is worth a trillion? What Donald Trump does is says, Hey, how about this? How about this? I'll charge you 100% tariff. How about that? Then the guy says, Okay, I'll build in America. See, I don't have to give you a six billion. You know, Donald Trump can dissect it in a paragraph. In a paragraph. What we did is we said to TSMC, Look, you signed the contract. There's How many pages of DEI stuff? You need to hire a blind. Dei stuff. You have to hire a blind contractor. You have to have trans, lesbian engineers. I'm not kidding, by the way. So think about the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. How many lithography engineers does Taiwan have that are female, let alone what their sexuality choices are? They've never had a female They're all men. I said, Listen, you're in breach. Everybody thinks like a Republican will just rip that stuff up. Not this Republican. This Republican reads a contract and says, You're in breach of the DEI covenant. You didn't build a daycare center in the middle of your clean room fab.

You signed that contract, so you're in breach. Okay, so how about this? How about I add 100 billion? Instead of building 60 billion, you build 160 billion. And we agreed. So then I feel better.

And then do you waive the DEI requirements? Yeah, of course.

They build another 100 billion, we can rip that stuff up. No problem. So what happens is you now have a 160 $165 billion dollar plant going in. And I think, I'm going to let TSMC announce it, but they are going to get much bigger, even from the $165 billion. And remember, this is a factory that makes the stuff that NVIDIA sells for five times higher.

Okay, let's talk about NVIDIA for a second. You did a deal at the end of this year. I don't think we've ever seen a deal like this. You can tell me if it's wrong. But you control the export licenses. As you said, Jamal, we don't want our adversaries to get the most advanced silicon, which makes sense. Then you struck an agreement with Jensen, where now, I think it's the H-200s, which are not quite the most advanced chips, but maybe one generation before. They're more advanced than what China makes. Right. But in return, you got a 25% marketing fee. What are you, rev share? Tariff. Tariff. Just describe to us the construction of that deal and what it means for these kinds of deals in the future.

Jensen Wang, who runs NVIDIA, is obviously a businessman of extraordinary capacity. Can't run a $5 trillion company unless you're like-Incredibly impressive. Impressive. So he comes in, and I promised him in the beginning when I first met him that I would help him have really easy access to the present. Because he's a national treasure.

Yeah.

Our great companies are national treasures for America. So his argument to the President, buy it or not, is that if you shut off China entirely, then all of their economics go to their national champion to build new stuff. All their economics go to that company, and that helps that company grow. And then if you give them better than what they had, you don't have to give them your best. You just have to give them better than what they had. This is his argument. Then they'll give less to their champion. And more to you. And it'll have a positive economic relationship with China and positive for us overall. Now, there are plenty of people who disagree, but that was Jensen's argument. That was the discussion, the argument, the debate that we had. Then when that was done and over, then the President said, And you got to give me 25%. The 25% was a throw away. But it was like, Look, if I'm doing all this for you, you still got to give me 25%. The way we're doing it is he has to send the chips to America. We test the chip to make sure that he hasn't enhanced it in any way.

Because the H20 was broadly enhanced. You know that it had less flops, but more memory. In fact, it had more memory than the H100, which one could argue was a little... Not everybody knew that. I'll say it that way. We test it. On the way in, we can charge it a tariff, regular 25% tariff, and then we can give export licenses to who he wants to sell it.

Then he sends it to China.

He sends it to China, or he sends it to whoever he's selling it to. I think this is the President's deal. My job is to make sure all the smart people are in the room with both opinions. Never let one opinion. People think, Oh, the last person who met Donald Trump. No, they don't. Donald Trump hears so many different views that often he'll call the person he likes that he's going to go with the last one before he gives it. Because that makes sense. If I'm going to say yes to you, I'm saying no to him, but I'm saying yes to you. So what a I call him and say no, and then I call you and say yes, and they'd say, Oh, he called Shabbat last, and that's why. Stop. Jensen did a great job making the case and convincing the President of the United States, who has a very, very detailed and nuanced view about China, and not everybody agrees with him. But my take on having worked closely, been his friend for 30 years, but been I've worked closely with him this year is he does have the best intuition of anybody I've ever met in the whole wide world.

When he thinks it's okay, and I know he's had full information, and he makes really strong decisions. You might disagree. He doesn't always agree with me, but it's a strong decision which has deep base thought and balance to it. He's done that every time, and it's amazing. He does play a better game of chess. He just does play a better game of chess, and that's That's why it's so fun for me because I was very successful in business. In my companies, which had 13,000 employees, I was the one up here. For me to work for somebody-The bar is high. The bar, it better be high. He's just the most fun to work for.

Do you think that the deals that we're seeing, so there's a 25% rev share on the H200s from NVIDIA, you were able to get, I think, 10% of Intel? Ten%. Ten% of Intel. There's a lot of these deals where you could say, all these companies that are on the bleeding edge of America, America's national treasures, they need help that only you or the President, the infrastructure of America, can provide. Should America get something in return?

I think the way President Trump thinks about it is that if you can do it on your own, you do it on your own. But if you really need his help and you need him to open the door, to drive the door, to change it, you need America to make it happen for you, isn't there something for the American taxpayer there? Because in the end, if we can balance the budget, then he can take care of the people who make less than $150,000 a year and change America. That's what he wants to do. He's looking for, look, why would we give the money to Intel? It was given to Intel. Contract signed, given to Intel. To turn that around to where America owns 10% of Intel, right? That can use that money to fix Social Security. Use that money to reduce our deficit. Use that money to charge less than taxes. Use the money to make America great. Look, I think if we get rid of the fraud, that'll save the country a trillion dollars. If you figure out ways to make a trillion dollars, you could reduce our deficit, or you could start the process of solving Social Security and not...

The scary part for me is if I say the word Social Security, it doesn't matter what you say with the word social security. They assume you're taking something away from them because every politician who's ever said Social Security says, I'm going to take something away. But the answer is, if you hit it with outside money and just start hitting it with money that you've made out here, and you fix it, you take nothing away. If we're the richest country in the world, if we get rid of the fraud, and we can run America smart, we can do it all because we're the greatest country in the world. Imagine, you grow 6%, you're going to fix the deficit, you're going to fix taxes. You're going to fix all.

It's mathematical. No, it's mathematical.

You start to do it. You get full employment. People get paid. I think we can win. That's why I can achieve the goal of being the secretary who has That was the most fun, because I'm in the room where it happens, with Donald Trump, where he thinks about things, and he thinks about them. I was in a meeting yesterday with him where they were eight advisors sitting around the resolute desk, and he's on that side, and they all had this opinion, and he had it. He said, No, that'll have this derivative result, and we're not doing that. Everybody in the room was like, Hey, He's right. He had eight guys, guys and women, and he just says that. He's great.

I have one final question, which is an audience question. It's from Brandon L. From New York who asks, Who is your favorite child?

I have four kids. The joke in my house was I had the oldest. It's my son, Kyle. I had the youngest, my son, Ryan. I had my only daughter, who is my daughter, Casey. My son, Brandon, would sign his birthday card, your fourth favorite, because he was neither the youngest, nor the oldest, nor the daughter. So he would sign your fourth favorite. And whenever one of the other kids screwed something up, and one of the funniest things you'd ever seen, my wife and I would be sitting in our bedroom, and Brandon would come running in and He'd say, Third. And he'd run back out. And he was doing this when he was 12. So it was hysterical. So that's a really funny question. I have the best wife. She's both I've been married 31 years. I love her to death. She's just a wonderful woman and a spectacular mom. We have great kids, really smart, really capable because great mom, great mom. We're really close. People ask me, Where'd you go on vacation? I said, A simple question. I asked my adult children where they wanted to go, and that's where we went. Because if I went somewhere else, they wouldn't go with me, and I want them to be there.

And there was a picture of me with Bobby Kennedy and Aspen, where there was absolutely no snow. And so you said, Well, why did you go? Because my adult children are here, and that's where I was. We both were on the same...

You're on the same train.

Same page. I think if you have... I found the right girl for me. I have the best family, and it lets me do this, and lets me be completely committed to the government. I was very successful in business. I had whatever company that did more than $10 billion of revenues a year, made lots of money, and I don't have it I used to joke that I was the only commerce secretary who had patents, but I have none because I had to divest all of them. But I understand the patent office. I understand business. Donald Trump understands business. We have really, really impressive people in this cabinet who are fun to work with, and you are going to see great things in the second year.

Howard Ludnik, thank you for joining all in.

It was really fun talking. Thank you. All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion.

People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely.

We crushed your questions.

In a minute, we are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What are you going to say? That was fun.

That was I'm going all in.