Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Inauguration Episode One: Josh & the Pro-Trumper

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Inauguration Episode One: Josh & the Pro-Trumper · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, well, it is almost upon us just a few more days of democratic party control
• 0:13
  of the United States.
• 0:15
  On Monday, outside the same capital building that was ransacked four years ago, the instigator
• 0:23
  of that trashing will be sworn in as president of the United States again, if this show is
• 0:30
  about creating a safe space for dangerous ideas, well, there are a few conversational spaces
• 0:37
  that feel as unsafe as fraught as a conversation between someone who thinks it's a great thing
• 0:43
  that Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House and someone like me who doesn't.
• 0:49
  So in the interest of this show doing what it says on the tin, I wanted to have an uncomfortable
• 0:54
  conversation with the best pro-Trump voice I could find, the smartest, most articulate,
• 1:01
  most highly educated pro-Trumper.
• 1:05
  This won't be the only piece of content from a Republican that you will hear before
• 1:10
  inauguration day, on the day itself, we will release an episode where you'll hear from
• 1:15
  the other side of the Republican Party in the form of David from a regular, well, I suppose,
• 1:22
  two-time guest on this podcast, one of the most influential figures in the George W. Bush
• 1:27
  era, Republican Party, who worked for the White House on September 11th, helped to sell
• 1:33
  the Iraq War.
• 1:34
  He wrote the president's most defining phrase from his state of the Union, President Bush
• 1:39
  that is, which is the axis of evil, David from detest Donald Trump, and in his journalism
• 1:46
  and his magazine editing, he champions a brand of American conservatism that has frankly
• 1:52
  been totally steamrolled by the make America great takeover of the Republican Party.
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  So you'll get the anti-Trump Republican on inauguration day, but today, the joys of a
• 2:03
  pro-Trump Republican.
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  Although to call her a Republican is probably even a little unfair, Barcia Angasaghan was
• 2:11
  a leftist, you know, considered herself to be a liberal.
• 2:15
  She's the opinion editor at Newsweek magazine these days, but when she was at the University
• 2:20
  of California Berkeley getting her PhD in English, she was very much a campus lefty.
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  She wrote two books, one is called Bad News, how woke media is undermining democracy,
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  and her most recent book is called Second Class, How the elites betrayed America's working
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  men and women.
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  And if those sounds sort of like, I don't know, anti-woke conservative talking points,
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  she and many others would say that that's only because she's trying to defend the conception
• 2:54
  of leftism, which focuses more on economics and less on cultural signifiers that became
• 3:00
  so dominant during the social justice reckoning of the past decade or so.
• 3:06
  She drifted self-admittedly from liberalism, from leftism towards what she calls leftwing
• 3:12
  populism.
• 3:13
  In other words, a position that is against American militarism, against rich elites who
• 3:19
  fly to environmental conferences in private jets to make themselves look good instead
• 3:23
  of supporting policies that defend the working class.
• 3:29
  You know what she actually reminds me a bit of is, do you remember eight years ago, Steve
• 3:33
  Bannon was kind of the Trump whisperer.
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  Steve Bannon was the person to whom progressives who were shocked and horrified by Trump's
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  ascendancy went to sort of understand the heartland of America.
• 3:45
  What just happened?
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  Steve will tell us, Steve Bannon understands the appeal of this man.
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  I think in this election cycle, the way in which Bata is being tapped by the mainstream
• 3:54
  media to explain the forgotten Americans of Trump's working class base is similar.
• 4:00
  You know, she works for Newsweek, she goes into the field, she does a little reporting,
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  she understands this mindset and now she professes to have this mindset herself and she
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  defends it very articulately.
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  And you know, I think it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating to speak to someone who is
• 4:16
  extremely smart and articulate and a one-time lefty who can be a fan of a president who
• 4:25
  I think is deeply, deeply problematic.
• 4:30
  So I got her on the line.
• 4:31
  Now just want to preface this with a back some background on the H1B visa fiasco.
• 4:38
  If you've sort of seen headlines about this or tweets about this or something, some other
• 4:41
  social media posts about it, you may not be totally across it, but Bata brings it up
• 4:46
  as quite pivotal and quite important and we spend a fair bit of time on the H1B story
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  in the context of explaining Trump's positions on immigration and the ways in which elites
• 4:57
  might have betrayed working Americans.
• 5:00
  So let's just take a moment to go through the sort of chronology of this fight within
• 5:06
  the Republican Party between Trump and I suppose Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, which is
• 5:10
  important to understand before you hear this conversation.
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  So the H1B visa, as you may know, it's a foreign workers visa.
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  It's not a permanent visa like a green card.
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  You know, for a certain amount of time tied to a certain specific job and it's for high
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  skilled workers.
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  You have to have a university degree and your degree has to be in the same field as the
• 5:29
  job that you're being offered and that job must require, and I quote, the theoretical
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  and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.
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  There are lots of problems with the program.
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  It is swamped.
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  There's a huge backlog there by some estimates.
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  If the immigration department in the United States actually got through all of the number
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  of applications for H1B visas that they get just from India alone, it would take more
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  than 50 years.
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  It is a broken program and everyone knows it, but the tech industry runs on it.
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  The geniuses who are inventing artificial intelligence are overwhelmingly, disproportionately
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  H1B visa holders.
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  And of those people, Indians make up 75% of H1B petitioners.
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  The next nearest country is China, which is 12%.
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  So it's no surprise that once conversations start turning to the H1B program and tech
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  billionaires talk about it in glowing terms, the working class, perhaps, I don't want
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  to say racist, but definitely let's say the portion of the Republican party that is
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  anxious about demography and about the unwiteening of America finds itself butting up against
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  this sort of capitalist tech wing of the party.
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  And this came to a head when Trump named one Indian American venture capitalist, Shriram
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  Krishnan, to a top artificial intelligence policy post.
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  And when that hit on social media, there was sort of floodgates of horrendous racist
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  bio-directed to Shriram saying, well, you can imagine, I mean, he's just an Indian who's
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  being brought over here as an indentured servant in order to do slave wage jobs and take
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  jobs away from local Americans.
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  I don't quite understand this whole idea about slave wages when you're talking about
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  Silicon Valley jobs, but are they only earning 150 grand a year instead of 300 grand a
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  year?
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  Either way, the complaint is that there's downward pressure on salaries and that we should
• 7:34
  be giving these jobs to Americans.
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  Now Elon posted back in November about this department of government expenditures, I think
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  it's called, it's not a department, it's not a government department.
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  This is just a name to troll lefties.
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  It's an assignment essentially that President-elect Trump has given to Elon Musk and to Vivakram
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  Aswami, who was one of Trump's competitors in the race for the Republican presidential
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  nomination this cycle.
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  So Vivak and Elon have been tapped to sort of look at government expenditures and see
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  where things can be curtailed and rained in and how efficiencies can be derived.
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  When Elon posted about this and he was basically saying on ex on Twitter, tell us what you
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  think, tweeters of the world, we should look at in this analysis that Vivak and I are about
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  to do.
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  And Krishnan, the venture capitalist who has this new position as an artificial intelligence
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  advisor, he said, he retweeted that and he wrote anything to remove country caps for
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  green cards or unlock skilled immigration would be huge.
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  We'll talk about pouring gasoline onto the fire, so he is this Indian guy who is already
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  being resented by the white supremacist wing of the party now talking about removing caps
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  on green cards and allowing lots more people to get permanent residency and also unlocking
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  skilled immigration.
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  There was a backlash of racially charged social media posts about Indians invading the
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  United States.
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  So the day after Christmas, Vivak Ramaswamy chimes in and obviously he's of Indian descent
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  himself and he posted this to Twitter.
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  I'm going to read the whole thing, it's long, you know, he's got a blue check marks
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  so he can tweet things that are essentially essays, but I think it gives you a good understanding
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  of the perspective, the anti-Trump or the non-Trump perspective of pro-Trump people who
• 9:48
  are in favor of retaining the H1B visa and you know, retaining the existing structures
• 9:55
  of legal immigration, perhaps reforming them, but still retaining the existing structures
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  of legal immigration and are only on board with Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric when
• 10:04
  it comes to illegal immigrants.
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  So Vivak posted on the day after Christmas, the reason top tech companies often hire foreign
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  born and first generation engineers over, quote, unquote, Native Americans isn't because
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  of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation, Vivak writes, a key part
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  of it comes down to the C word culture, tough questions, demand, tough answers, and if
• 10:35
  we're really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the truth.
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  Vivak goes on to write, our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence
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  for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer.
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  That doesn't start in college, it starts young.
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  A culture that celebrates the prime queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over
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  the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers.
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  A culture that venerates quarry from boy meets world or Zach and Slater over screech
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  ensaved by the bell or Stefan over Steve Irkall in family matters will not produce the
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  best engineers.
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  And then as an aside, Vivak Ramaswamy tweets, fact, I know multiple sets of immigrant parents
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  in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely
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  because they promoted mediocrity and their kids went on to become wildly successful stem
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  graduates.
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  Vivak writes, more movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of friends, more math tutoring, fewer
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  sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books,
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  less TV, more creating, less chill-on, more extracurriculars, less hanging out at the
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  mall.
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  At this point, I would just say it is adorable that Vivak Ramaswamy thinks that Americans
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  have been hanging out the mall any time since the 1990s.
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  I don't think people...
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  And correct me if I'm wrong.
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  I don't think people in the 2020s are hanging out the mall.
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  Anyway, he goes on to write on Twitter.
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  Most normal American parents look skeptically at those kinds of parents.
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  More normal American kids view those kinds of kids with scorn.
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  If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you'll achieve.
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  Now close your eyes, he writes, and visualize which families you knew in the 90s or even
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  now who raised their kids according to one model versus the other.
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  Be brutally honest, he says, I suppose this is an invitation for us to sort of racially
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  code this and say that East Asians and South Asians are more likely to be studious
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  than white people.
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  He says, normalcy doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent.
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  And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us by China.
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  This can be our Sputnik moment, Vivak writes, we've awakened from slumber before and we
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  can do it again.
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  Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only
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  if our culture fully wakes up.
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  A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity,
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  nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness.
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  That's the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood and just
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  wishing or legislating alternative hiring practices into existence.
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  I'm confident we can do it.
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  So Vivak writes that, on the same day, Elon writes a post in a similar vein.
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  Elon of course also is not an American, naturally born American citizen, he comes from South
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  Africa.
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  So he, like me, like Vivak, like Shriram, all came to the United States as foreigners.
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  And Elon posted on Twitter, the number of people who are super talented engineers and
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  super motivated in the USA is far too low.
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  He wrote, think of this like a pro sports team.
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  If you want your team to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever
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  they may be.
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  That enables the whole team to win.
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  This again was just pouring more fuel on the fire for the anti-immigrant wing of the
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  make America great faction who felt like they had brought Trump into power.
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  So you had right wing Marga activists like Laura Luma and Steve Bannon, who I mentioned
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  before going absolutely bonkers.
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  You had social media ablaze with, you know, not to mention right wing talk radio ablaze.
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  Even Nikki Haley, the moderate Republican who had, you know, some people thought might
• 14:54
  be the best chance to oppose Donald Trump and beat him in the Republican presidential
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  primaries, the former South Carolina governor.
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  She said the tech industry was being lazy and needed to invest in our American workforce.
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  Lefty's like Bernie Sanders agreed with this.
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  Bernie came out and said, yes, the H1B program is broken.
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  It's a way of suppressing the wages of local Americans.
• 15:18
  So you've got essentially this huge rift that is currently intention that Donald Trump
• 15:25
  is trying to straddle unless something massive has happened in this in the past week.
• 15:29
  Because as you listen to this, I'm currently on a South Pacific island.
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  One of the great benefits of living in Australia is not only that we have the
• 15:37
  Asia waves of the South Pacific breaking on our beautiful beaches, but that we are also close
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  to South Pacific island nations, although we're a very long way from anywhere else.
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  And that because our summer is in the northern winter, we get these ludicrously long summer
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  winters while everyone else is back to work.
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  So I, you know, just picture me scuba diving somewhere.
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  But as I talk as you hear my voice, I'm actually speaking to you on the ninth of January.
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  So I'm just hope that nothing dramatic happens to the H1B situation in the coming week.
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  Nonetheless, so this huge rift that exists as of this recording between the make America great
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  again loyalists who want a hard line approach to all forms of immigration and the pro-immigration
• 16:20
  tech billionaires and executives who include some of Trump's closest allies and advisors
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  from the tech sector.
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  That having been established, I think we can get straight into the conversation.
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  I hope you enjoy it.
• 16:34
  I think Barty was a great sport for coming on, knowing that I'm not a huge fan of Donald Trump.
• 16:40
  She's smart. She's incredibly articulate.
• 16:43
  She still baffles me quite a lot, but I hope you enjoy as much as I do.
• 16:47
  The one and only Barty at Angasada.
• 16:51
  What are you, how are you feeling at this point about Trump too?
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  And we approach the inauguration day?
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  I was feeling really good until the H1B visa thing.
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  Interesting.
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  And now I'm feeling why.
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  Why is that definitive?
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  His number one campaign promise was to reduce immigration
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  and control the supply of labor that has resulted in the downward mobility of America's working class,
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  which is why hundreds of thousands of people who were Democrats two years ago, or four years ago,
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  or eight years ago, or 20 years ago, if you go 20 years ago, it's already millions.
• 17:40
  Millions of people who were Democrats 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, voted for him
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  because he promised that he was going to bring back the American dream for the working class.
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  And you can't do that when you're giving good jobs to people from other countries.
• 17:56
  And so your worry is that he looks like he's siding with the Elon Musk faction and the Silicon
• 18:01
  Valley faction in sort of supporting a continuation of this visa, which provides a work permit for skilled
• 18:09
  foreign workers, mostly.
• 18:11
  I can't tell at the moment if he's playing me, or like if he's playing MAG or if he's playing Elon,
• 18:19
  but he seems to be talking the Elon talk and tweeting and retweeting things and
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  posting things, supporting expanding the H-1B visa program.
• 18:30
  So I feel pretty, but the people who are on my side of this debate in the MAGA movement
• 18:37
  who have more access to him than I do are not as worried as I am.
• 18:41
  And so I think maybe he's having conversations with people and telling them not to worry.
• 18:46
  So I'm sort of taking my emotional cues from them or at least I'm trying to, but this will be
• 18:50
  for me a huge deal breaker. I mean, like I, you know, this was this was the thing.
• 18:56
  Sorry, what would be if he if he didn't act on it or if he expanded it?
• 19:00
  If he was maintaining the status quo, be acceptable.
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  Honestly, it would have been if Elon hadn't made this a crucible,
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  but Elon Musk literally told the American people that they are too retarded to do these jobs.
• 19:16
  Like he literally retweeted something that called American workers retards.
• 19:21
  Newsflash, Elon being a provocative troll on X, it happens.
• 19:27
  Yes, I mean, that is just to be part of the price of admission, isn't that to the Elon show?
• 19:31
  I mean, I'm interested, I'm intrigued that this is your number one focus now.
• 19:36
  Because when you when you say that this is something that, you know, for the past 20 years,
• 19:41
  people have been deserting the Democrats on.
• 19:44
  Wasn't the core of Trump's message regarding immigration,
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  certainly prior to his first election, that we have to get a handle on it,
• 19:52
  illegal immigration, rather than that we need to net reduce legal migration.
• 19:59
  No, I mean, that's the way I took it.
• 20:03
  That's the way a lot of people took it.
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  Build a wall, get a handle on this, get this under control, figure out who's here,
• 20:08
  deport the illegals, you know, they're not bringing their best people,
• 20:12
  they're bringing their rapists and, you know, the gangs and the drugs,
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  and all this is coming from illegal immigration.
• 20:17
  He doesn't spend a huge amount of time saying that, you know,
• 20:21
  migrants like myself who I live in, you know, the United States on rolling residency visas legally,
• 20:29
  that those sorts of people are a detriment to the country.
• 20:34
  Well, if you think about it, labor is like everything else, right?
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  It adheres to the law of supply and demand.
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  So the more you have of something, the cheaper it is.
• 20:45
  And the less you have of something, the more expensive it is, right?
• 20:49
  This is obviously true.
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  This is never not true.
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  And this is also true of labor.
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  So when you bring in workers, legally or illegally,
• 20:59
  you're going to drive down the wages for native-born workers.
• 21:03
  Yeah, I'm not disputing that.
• 21:05
  There does seem to be downward wage pressure.
• 21:08
  Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm saying two things.
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  One would be, I'm interested, this is the way that this interview has started for you,
• 21:15
  because I did not regard the reduction of legal immigration as being one of the core components
• 21:22
  of the election campaign, I regarded it as illegal immigration.
• 21:27
  If Elon Musk hadn't come out the gate and called American workers' retards,
• 21:31
  I wouldn't be thinking about this right now.
• 21:32
  But does that about everybody all the time?
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  Like he and Vivek Ramaswami, who are put in charge of a department that has the right to question
• 21:42
  every single federal worker, called American workers retarded, lazy, and stupid.
• 21:48
  And they are just rhetoric.
• 21:50
  You can't say that you're going to write them off because they're using nasty rhetoric.
• 21:54
  I mean, people who support Trump have long ago made a deal that nasty rhetoric is not salient,
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  that like every time someone, every time someone lefty has their hair on fire,
• 22:05
  because Trump said something ridiculous.
• 22:07
  They say, well, don't panic at attention.
• 22:09
  Of course, he's going to troll you, look at what he actually does.
• 22:12
  Look at what Elon actually does.
• 22:14
  He employs lots of high tech, high intellect people from all over the world,
• 22:19
  one of whom is himself.
• 22:21
  So yes, I'll grant you downward pressure probably on wages.
• 22:26
  The trade-off is, in the opinion of a pro immigrant person that at least on highly educated,
• 22:32
  high skilled jobs, you're collectively like the whole country is gaining as a result of having
• 22:39
  a much higher level of higher educated, highly skilled people.
• 22:43
  Wait, but that's actually nonsense.
• 22:44
  The H1Bs are not high skilled.
• 22:46
  These are actually quite low skilled workers.
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  Elon Musk himself fired 4,000 workers and then applied for 3,200 H1B visas to replace them with.
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  The H1Bs, there are about 500,000 between 500,000 and 600,000 people on an H1B visa here.
• 23:03
  And 30% of tech jobs, STEM jobs are being done by people who are foreign-born.
• 23:08
  This is not the best and the brightest.
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  This is an indentured servant cast who work for about $40,000 less a year in the tech sector
• 23:19
  than American workers, which means that the best and the brightest Americans are now no longer
• 23:24
  going into tech because it pays $50,000 a year, $60,000 a year, and wages have not increased over
• 23:30
  the last 20 years because of all of these programmers who are being imported on these visas that
• 23:37
  tie them to a job. So they can't even leave that job, which of course reduces your wages by about
• 23:42
  25% economists estimate when you cannot threaten to leave.
• 23:46
  The whole thing is a scam. It is an anti-American, anti-worker scam.
• 23:52
  And you know what, if Trump was out there insulting American workers and calling Americans
• 23:56
  retarded, stupid, and lazy, he would not have gotten elected. He got elected because he told
• 24:02
  the people who have been called stupid, retarded, and lazy by the elites for the last 60 years,
• 24:08
  you matter, you deserve dignity, you deserve the American dream.
• 24:13
  To be surrounded by people, it's a counterfactual about you to know what would have been
• 24:18
  disqualifying for Trump supporters, but the experience of the past eight years is not an experience
• 24:26
  of it's not of him being held accountable for saying, yeah, but you're it's not a counterfactual to
• 24:32
  people who like spent the last 10 years interviewing thousands of Trump supporters, right? Like
• 24:39
  people who spend a lot of time with Trump supporters and working class people know what they
• 24:43
  liked about him and know what turned them off about him. And in the last three weeks, I've heard
• 24:48
  from hundreds and hundreds of people who see this exactly the way that I do. Like wow,
• 24:53
  on the substance, you may be right. I'm just quibbling with whether or not him calling
• 24:56
  workers retarded would have been saying it's like, I mean, he like he, yeah, I think we can
• 25:01
  park that. It's not that it's a story. I don't care about the slur part of it. It's the it's the
• 25:07
  no, no, I understand that it's not the fact that it's the R word. It's the fact that he's
• 25:10
  denigrating those people. But I mean, I just feel like the day before he denigrated John McCain,
• 25:15
  you know, during in 2015 or 2016 or whenever that was and said like, I like my war heroes,
• 25:21
  you know, who don't get captured. And for the day before he said that Iraq war veterans were all
• 25:26
  suckers because they were sent, you know, to die on a useless war or whatever language he used,
• 25:30
  you could have, there would have been many people in your position saying he cannot denigrate
• 25:35
  the military and military heroes and retain the credibility of the American heartland. And he
• 25:40
  did and he got away with it. And so he could probably say something about American workers and
• 25:44
  equally get away with it. And Elon will probably get away with this. That's all sort of a side show
• 25:48
  to your deeper point, which I think is a useful one, which is he has to find a way of not betraying
• 25:55
  the promises that the people who voted for him think that he made, regardless of whether those
• 26:00
  promises were promises that were made or whether they were sort of rhetorical flourishes.
• 26:06
  Can we zoom out a bit from just immigration and maybe paint a picture for me of what a successful
• 26:14
  Trump presidency, a successful Trump second term would look like. Like what's your,
• 26:18
  give me the wet dream scenario in four years time and then give me any concerns that you might have
• 26:24
  about it. Well, Trump was elected to do sort of three main things. He took a party, the GOP,
• 26:32
  which had been in its Reaganite version, a socially conservative party that supported free trade
• 26:38
  and free markets and supported foreign interventions. And he sort of took an axe to all three of
• 26:43
  those planks. He is not a social conservative. He's a social moderate. He is very anti-war. In fact,
• 26:50
  he's the anti, the standard bearer of the anti-war movement in America today. And he doesn't believe in
• 26:57
  free trade. He believes in protectionism. So those are the three things is, you know, to fight the
• 27:06
  kind of far left woke agenda with common sense social moderate views, which are reflected
• 27:13
  of 75, 80% Americans to not engage in foreign wars, but to protect the homeland and to do that
• 27:20
  through smart foreign policy. Tulsi Gabbard has this great line where she says, when it comes to
• 27:27
  terrorism, I am a hawk. And when it comes to counterproductive and pointless wars of regime change,
• 27:33
  I am a dove. That's, I think, the best encapsulation of the Trump foreign policy.
• 27:38
  And then just to keep protecting American workers and American wages through controlling the supply
• 27:45
  of labor by, you know, reducing immigration very significantly, both legal and illegal. And creating
• 27:53
  a lot of tariffs, new tariffs in order to make trade less appealing in terms of us importing
• 28:01
  cheap stuff from, for example, China. And to make it more compelling for companies to
• 28:07
  reshore manufacturing, manufacture here and buy the products of the labor of American workers and
• 28:13
  make those products, you know, both worth more, but also affordable relative to products that
• 28:19
  are coming from other places in the world, right? So right now, China's main competitive advantage
• 28:24
  is that it's willing to employ slave labor. That's unacceptable. And I think Trump has a very good
• 28:29
  handle on how to use tariffs in order to raise the wages of American workers. The way that he
• 28:36
  actually did very significantly in his first term, it's not something that you hear about a lot
• 28:39
  because the left didn't want to give him credit for anything. And the right hated it.
• 28:45
  But he actually was the first president in 60 years to shrink the income gap and the wealth gap.
• 28:51
  And, you know, so he's going to probably do a lot of that again. He's much more intentional.
• 28:54
  Right now, he's much more focused that you can see that in the cabinet picks and the way that he's
• 28:59
  even talking to the media. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to see. I don't see, you know,
• 29:04
  any indication that he's not very focused on these things. This new like manifest destiny thing,
• 29:10
  I don't know. It seems to me kind of like an attempted distract from each H1B visa stuff,
• 29:14
  but I guess we'll see where that goes to. One of the interesting wrinkles of his work on tariffs
• 29:19
  in the first term was that many lefties don't realize that the Biden administration continued
• 29:24
  some of those tariffs as well. That is correct. They even expanded them. Yes, but actually expanded
• 29:29
  some of them. There was a, I will probably agree, you and I will probably agree on quite a lot
• 29:38
  in terms of the betrayal of the middle class that was perpetrated by elites over the 80s and 90s
• 29:45
  and Norse in the sense that the deal with free trade was sold to everybody on the basis of,
• 29:52
  it makes everybody richer because Adam Smith, blah blah blah, each country does what it's really
• 29:57
  good at and exports what it excels in and everybody gets richer. And that is true except that
• 30:04
  unless you compensate the losers in that game, you end up with hollowed out industries and
• 30:11
  decrepit regions and lost towns and cities. And the deal was all of the excess wealth that gets
• 30:18
  generated by free trade should be then distributed to the losers that on balance everybody else,
• 30:24
  everybody will be better off. And that trade was just never made. There was no massive reinvestment
• 30:30
  in destroyed Appalachian towns as a result of the reduction of the manufacturing base
• 30:38
  when free trade sort of sprayed the upper classes with all of its benefits. The question is,
• 30:46
  are tariffs the most parsimonious solution to that or should we just have a better reinvestment
• 30:51
  of the fruits of free trade? Do you want Trump's tariff talk to come true or do you want it to be
• 30:56
  used as a bargaining chip? I agree with Trump. I think tariffs is one of the most beautiful
• 31:02
  words in English language, but it makes people poorer. It makes countries poorer.
• 31:06
  Every one of us is much richer. No, it makes the Americans who make the, say, washing machines
• 31:13
  that are suddenly, that suddenly have a massive tax on foreign versions of them richer.
• 31:18
  Correct. Because yeah. But then it makes everybody else poorer because washing machines cost more
• 31:23
  and are inferior. Actually, isn't true. I mean, that feels truthy so people think it's true,
• 31:29
  but it's actually not true. There's a lot of evidence that it just doesn't work that way.
• 31:32
  It turns out it actually costs a lot of money to ship things halfway across the universe. And
• 31:37
  you know, when you're making things at home, we know that it's not the case because in the first
• 31:42
  term, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum coming in from China and every single
• 31:49
  economist said exactly what you're saying now, washing machines are going to triple and cost.
• 31:54
  No one's going to be able to afford a toaster. You know, forget about it. You know, it's going to
• 31:59
  every economist said that. And it turns out that for about four months, yeah, the price of steel
• 32:05
  and aluminum went up a little. And then it came right back down because we have a very healthy
• 32:10
  free market economy within the United States. And so it just didn't bear out the way that
• 32:16
  everybody predicted it would. It turns out that the Chinese actually slashed prices by 25%.
• 32:25
  Everyone says the Chinese aren't going to eat the cost of this. Actually, they are because
• 32:29
  they have an industrial economy. They have to keep the factories going. So they need a lot of
• 32:35
  it's not if it's operating at a last budget. I'm sure that I'm sure that you can find a lot
• 32:42
  of historical economists. You can look this up. The Chinese actually slashed the prices by 25%
• 32:48
  and guess what? They raised them on Europe by 25%. Hang on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, just just get,
• 32:53
  I don't want to waste all of our time on minutia. The basic claim is which almost all economists
• 32:59
  who aren't hacks or loyalists to Trump agree with that tariffs do get the majority of a tariff
• 33:04
  it's passed on as a tax to the consumer. I mean, the reason why foreign companies are charging
• 33:09
  what they can in America is is because they're keeping the price as low as they can to keep their
• 33:14
  profits nonetheless as high as they can be. And when it's not like they have a huge amount of fat
• 33:19
  lying around in the system that they're just hoarding as foreign profits, they're trying to
• 33:23
  be competitive. I understand why it feels true to you, but I'm trying to tell you. I'm literally
• 33:28
  giving you data of an example that disproved that from the first Trump administration.
• 33:33
  Well, okay, let me respond with the washing machine data, which I've just looked up while
• 33:36
  you were talking. Trump's washing machine tariffs says they headline stung consumers while
• 33:40
  lifting corporate profits. New research, this is from the New York Times in April 2019.
• 33:45
  New research shows how a move meant to aid domestic manufacturers instead padded profits and
• 33:50
  raised prices on a wide variety of laundry items. That's just why I pulled washing machines out
• 33:54
  of my ass before because it must have been laying around in my brain as an example of one of his
• 33:59
  tariffs on imported washing machines. It had an odd effect. It raised prices on washing machines
• 34:04
  as expected, but also drove up the cost of clothes driers, which rose by 92% last year. So I mean,
• 34:09
  we've all got there are all always facts. I don't think you've disproven centuries of economic
• 34:14
  theory on the basis of what happened to steel prices in 2019. The bigger question is the one
• 34:22
  that I just sort of asked before, which is do you actually think it would be good if his tariff,
• 34:27
  because I regard his tariffs as being a shrewder play than it sounds like you do. I regard the
• 34:32
  tariff talk as being a way to try to force other countries a bit like what I hope the NATO talk is,
• 34:38
  which is bluster intended to frighten other countries and get them to, you know, come to the
• 34:44
  table on things that Trump wants them to come to the table on rather than things that he actually
• 34:48
  wants to do. I think it's very good that China slash 25% of its prices in order to absorb the tariffs
• 34:57
  that Trump put on them when he put those tariffs on. I think that's great. I think they ate it.
• 35:03
  I think the price of steel and aluminum did not go up, but the average steel worker makes $88,000 a year,
• 35:09
  and this is in the South. So we're talking about right to work states. These are not even union
• 35:13
  jobs, and that is a solidly middle class wage in the South. So from that point of view, in his first
• 35:19
  term, he proved that tariffs can be completely, completely effective. They had the exact,
• 35:25
  the exact effect that he had intended. He was able to raise the wages of the working class in 2019,
• 35:33
  4.5% wage increase of people in the bottom 25% of wage earners,
• 35:38
  but inflation was only 1.8%. So this is a person who understood how to manage an economy. So yeah,
• 35:45
  you can use tariffs as a negotiating tool. Great. Use it to get a better deal, but I think tariffs
• 35:50
  themselves actually work very well, because the problem right now is that the labor of American workers
• 35:57
  is too expensive relative to the cheap labor that you can get from places like China. And so we have
• 36:02
  to do something about that. That's not sustainable. Like I said before, slave labor is not a competitive
• 36:07
  advantage, and we should not accept it as such. We have to care about our workers first and foremost,
• 36:13
  and I think Trump has a very keen sense of how to do that. I mean, yeah, I hear all of that. I
• 36:19
  understand the sentiment, and I understand why that is emotionally compelling to people who work
• 36:25
  in jobs that can be done by Chinese people who earn next to nothing and who live in horrifying
• 36:31
  conditions. On the other hand, the most successful countries over the past few generations have
• 36:38
  been the ones that have had the courage to allow some of the low skilled industries to fall
• 36:43
  by the wayside, so that they can invest in higher value pursuits. My grandfather worked in the
• 36:51
  shoe industry in New Zealand. He worked all his life in this protected market where in New Zealand,
• 36:58
  you could only buy New Zealand products. There was no prior to the 1980s. There was no deregulation.
• 37:04
  So you just had a great job, a great cushy job making New Zealand shoes. Well, in the 1980s,
• 37:09
  in the era of Reagan and Thatcher, deregulation happened, globalization happened, and all of a
• 37:14
  sudden you could buy Asian-made shoes in New Zealand, and that industry was completely decimated.
• 37:21
  But now New Zealand is a much, much richer than they would have been if they tried to protect
• 37:24
  their shoe industries because they invest in high-end, clean agriculture, tourism, education,
• 37:29
  things which can't be done by a poor Chinese person. Well, but in America, they don't like
• 37:35
  Argentina, if they were protected. America's working class and middle class was much bigger and
• 37:40
  much richer in the 70s than they are today. So our GDP is much higher, but GDP, of course, is not
• 37:45
  evenly distributed, and so the rich people in America got much richer, and the middle class
• 37:50
  disappeared, and the working class are now struggling. That is unacceptable to me morally,
• 37:54
  spiritually, politically, economically, like that should be unacceptable to everybody.
• 37:59
  Yeah, I agree. That doesn't mean anything. You can't have a stable democracy without
• 38:05
  a middle class. It is unacceptable to live next door to people who will never be able to buy a
• 38:10
  home and employ them and know that because you were one of the winners, you made this point earlier
• 38:15
  about how they just didn't redistribute enough of the goods from globalization. I would totally
• 38:20
  disagree with that. Many more people today are on welfare than we're back in the 70s.
• 38:25
  Like, there's a lot of redistribution happening. The problem is that's not what people want.
• 38:30
  Working class people don't want to be bought off to sit at home on some universal basic income
• 38:35
  and watch their flat screen TV in some rented house, like they want the dignity of labor.
• 38:41
  They want to be paid. Well, this is what Trump understood and how he got all of these democratic
• 38:45
  voters because the Democrats model for the economy right now is basically we're going to ship
• 38:49
  all manufacturing to China. We're going to open the southern border and import a slave
• 38:54
  cast to do service industry jobs here. Bring a whole bunch of people from India to do all of the
• 38:58
  coding. Everybody who's in the knowledge industry with multiple degrees in a laptop job is going
• 39:04
  to make $250,000 a year. Everyone else will be on welfare. They're happy to pay that. Rich
• 39:12
  liberals love higher taxes. They're totally happy to be taxed much more and have people just sit
• 39:18
  at home watching television all day and like that's their model for the economy and what Trump
• 39:25
  understood was like, actually, that's not what working people want. They get a lot of dignity from
• 39:29
  work. They want to work. They just want their work to actually pay them enough to afford the most
• 39:34
  modest version of the American dream. That's the economy that he built. So that's the difference.
• 39:39
  Yeah. And just to clarify, when I say that the way in which the elites betrayed working people
• 39:46
  over the past few decades is that they failed to reinvest the gains of free economic progress
• 39:53
  to the people who fell by the wayside, my vision is not that that should be done by handing
• 40:00
  them a universal basic income and having them sit and watch their plasma TVs. There are countries
• 40:05
  that share exactly the sorts of concerns that you've got about the hollowing out of the middle class
• 40:10
  but have taken a more Bernie Sanders approach, Nordic countries, for example, or to some extent,
• 40:16
  countries like Australia, where the reinvestment comes in the form of training programs,
• 40:21
  investment in new industries, investment in affordable housing, investment in education,
• 40:26
  you know, policies to reduce the cost of tertiary education, ways of lifting people up so they
• 40:31
  can have a smaller liberal go at actually, you know, making something of themselves and pulling
• 40:37
  themselves up by their bootstraps, not by just sitting at home. But I completely understand that,
• 40:42
  you know, this is one of the interesting things that's happening in American politics and politics
• 40:45
  in so many places, which is that you've got a sort of a horse chewing of this,
• 40:52
  understandably enraged, populist reaction to elite betrayal. And that can come either in the form
• 40:58
  of a pro tariffs, sort of America first, nationalist vision, or it can come in the form
• 41:06
  ironically of Bernie Sanders, let's all be Denmark and share the spoils that way, vision.
• 41:14
  Do you know why you find yourself on one side of that equation rather than the other?
• 41:18
  Because that's where the American working class is. I mean, I wrote a book about this. I
• 41:24
  traveled around the country, interviewed hundreds of people, all of the polling suggests that is
• 41:27
  what American workers want. Then I want Medicare for all and affordable tertiary education.
• 41:32
  No, they actually, they do want much more access to affordable healthcare. They don't really trust
• 41:36
  the government to do it. They think that when the government gets its hands and stuff like that,
• 41:40
  they invariably mess it up. But I think people would support Medicare for all. Yeah, I think it's
• 41:48
  a great idea. I mean, that's not, they want much more access to healthcare and much less
• 41:52
  immigration. They hate welfare. They do not want welfare. They don't want to go to college.
• 41:57
  They're sick of being told that they're garbage because they didn't go to college. In fact,
• 42:01
  our economy is overproducing college degrees by about 50%. So one in two college grads are working
• 42:08
  in a job that doesn't require college degree. On the retraining, it's so ironic that when they
• 42:12
  started shipping their jobs off to China, Mexico to build up China, Mexico's middle class, they said,
• 42:17
  oh, you'll learn how to code. And now suddenly, it's like, oh, no, actually, we're going to bring in
• 42:21
  H1B visas to do all the coding. Like the whole thing is just a scam. It's our economy is an
• 42:26
  upward funnel of wealth from the middle class to the elites. And that's under, you know, the
• 42:30
  auspices of the Democrats. Sorry, sorry, sorry. There was a cartoon that I saw
• 42:38
  after the election of a bunch of MAGA hat wearing working class people who were down at Mar-a-Lago
• 42:46
  saying, yay, we managed to stick it to the elites and inside the walls of Mar-a-Lago, Elon and
• 42:51
  Donald Trump, drinking champagne. When people hear you say, you know, people are sick and tired of
• 42:57
  this upward funnel towards the elites, there will be a lot of people who think, well, hang on,
• 43:02
  we're talking about the richest people in America, billionaires, the Peter Teals, the Elon
• 43:06
  masks, the Donald Trumps, feathering their own nests. They're going to be writing laws that are
• 43:11
  great for SpaceX and are great for all the interests that they have. We've already seen what
• 43:16
  Trump's attitude towards cronyism and renting out his hotel to foreign dignitaries and his
• 43:21
  son-in-law getting billions of dollars from the Saudis as soon as he left office. I'm not saying
• 43:26
  this is unique to the Trumps. It's a common phenomenon of people feathering their own nests,
• 43:31
  but there is a certain shamelessness to it here that makes it sound a little bit rich when you say,
• 43:37
  oh, for too long, the working people have had to put up with elites feathering their own nests,
• 43:42
  now they're taking back power. How does Trump embody that?
• 43:49
  Anyone who thinks that should just talk to a normal person. Just talk to your
• 43:54
  but just because a normal person or a normal monkey on it, it doesn't mean they're right.
• 44:01
  I'm asking you a factual question and you're saying other people don't agree.
• 44:06
  The fact is is that in 2019, the bottom 25% of wage earners saw a 4.5% wage increase for the
• 44:13
  first time in 60 years and the top 25% of wage earners only saw a 2.9% wage increase.
• 44:19
  Like the facts, you cannot argue with the facts. The economy in 2019 was incredible before COVID due
• 44:25
  to very intentional policy put in place by Donald Trump to favor the working class over the elite.
• 44:35
  And working class people will point to the actual policies that help them.
• 44:39
  Now, if you want to sit there and say from the comfort of your job and your home and your,
• 44:44
  however much money you make, that you know better which policies would help struggling working class
• 44:49
  people, you can go ahead and do that. I don't believe in that. I don't believe that a person living on
• 44:54
  a shoestring budget has the has the luxury of being wrong about which policies help them and they
• 45:01
  were right. The economy was much better for them and they can point to the policies of why. They
• 45:06
  can point to the stuff that was put in place in the 70s when their parents were making a living
• 45:12
  wage doing the same jobs. Okay, let me let me let me let those things back and
• 45:18
  you look at the percentage of a of the country that was foreign born in 20 in 1971 which was the
• 45:24
  high water mark for working class wages. It was 4% and today it's between 15 and 16% which is the
• 45:31
  highest it has ever been in American history. The last time it came this close at 14% was the
• 45:36
  gilded age. Okay let's just come in equality. I just want to say one more thing. I am not a fan of
• 45:43
  Elon Musk. I'm not a fan of I think he's a China shill. I think that he is basically an aporotic
• 45:49
  of the Chinese Communist Party and I'm not thrilled that he's now you know having an impact.
• 45:55
  I hope he's not but if he's having an impact on policy I'm going to be very vocally opposed to
• 46:01
  that. The fact that Trump is rich is that somehow he was the person who took on both the Democrats
• 46:07
  and the Republicans and said this neoliberal economy that the two of you agree on I'm I don't want
• 46:15
  this. I don't like this and we're going to get rid of it. I can't think of another politician who
• 46:19
  took on both parties by himself stood there with no one behind him and said actually we're going
• 46:25
  to have a trade war with China so you can all pack it all up. You can't just act like that didn't
• 46:29
  happen. It didn't not happen because he's a billionaire. It happened and people know that it happened
• 46:35
  and that's why they voted for him. I just want to so let's just get concrete then and first I'll
• 46:41
  just want to just as an aside point out there there is a tired rhetorical chess move of like we're
• 46:48
  saying all right what is the capital of Belgium and instead of saying Brussels we say have you
• 46:54
  listened to the man on the street the innocent good hardworking Americans believes that the capital
• 46:58
  of Belgium is Paris so you out of touch elites sitting there with your cushy jobs with your cushy
• 47:03
  podcasts can say all you want that the capital of Belgium isn't actually Paris but I've been talking
• 47:08
  to the authentic man on the street who doesn't have the who doesn't have the time or the interest in
• 47:13
  engaging in this kind of like that's just irrelevant like what if we're talking about facts that
• 47:18
  talk about facts it's entirely possible to working people to be wrong about their interests and
• 47:22
  about policies in a democracy in a democracy the policy that the majority of the people want is
• 47:28
  supposed to happen of course but of course what they want actually does matter you can't just
• 47:33
  write it off no again that's a bad rhetorical chess move you say no one is disputing that what
• 47:38
  people have voted for is going to get enacted or has the right to be enacted we're evaluating whether
• 47:43
  or not it's a good or bad idea so no you ask why they don't hold it against Trump that he's a
• 47:50
  billionaire and I explained to you why they don't hold it against him you said isn't it so ironic
• 47:55
  that you on musk and Trump are sick you literally said your question to me but yeah I know what I
• 48:01
  asked you I'm careful with my words I did not ask you why middle Americans don't hold it against him
• 48:06
  I said it sounds a bit rich isn't it ironic so I explain why it's not ironic you said that there
• 48:13
  are lots of people who don't find it ironic which is different from actually giving me a reason why
• 48:17
  it's not ironic okay I think it's not ironic well okay so policy put in place was very good for
• 48:24
  working class people so if we're talking it's not ironic I mean it's surprising that a billionaire
• 48:30
  was the one who cracked the code and figured out how to actually make an economy that works yeah sure
• 48:35
  that's why I just asked the question that I've been trying to get to for five minutes which it
• 48:38
  which is if we're talking about this sort of funnel of wealth to the top end of town and you're
• 48:44
  saying that the reason why we should support Trump is because he's going to turn the volume down
• 48:50
  funnel is your claim that in four years the top end of town will not be as much richer than the
• 48:57
  bottom end of town as they are today the thing people don't understand about working class
• 49:01
  Americans is that they do not have class resentment against the billionaires and if you actually
• 49:07
  do look at the data and you compare 1971 to today so 1971 being that high water mark for
• 49:12
  working class wages when things were like really doing good when the majority of the GDP
• 49:17
  was in the middle the share of the GDP that at that time was controlled by billionaires and today
• 49:23
  is not very it's a little higher today but it's not like significantly different by an order of
• 49:27
  magnitude what is different is the top 20 percent so that upward funnel or wealth
• 49:33
  I'll reframe the question do you think that the top 20 percent the difference between the top 20
• 49:37
  percent and the bottom 20 percent will be less in four years so in 2019 the first time in six
• 49:43
  years that the top 25 percent of wage earners saw a smaller increase smaller percentage increased
• 49:50
  than the bottom 25 percent of wage earners now of course because they make so much more money
• 49:55
  I don't know I don't know I think the policies that Trump is putting in place are the kinds of
• 50:00
  things that shrink the income gap and the wealth gap they make working people without a college
• 50:05
  degree have more disposable income and have more of a fair shot at buying a home and raising
• 50:10
  their children and retiring indignity so I but you know that he accomplished that very clearly in
• 50:17
  the first term and he seems to want to do very much the same thing in a much more intentional way
• 50:23
  so I would yeah I mean like it looks like there's no reason to doubt that now anything could happen
• 50:29
  we can have another I know you you have limited time but but when you
• 50:40
  started this you were talking about three things right that he is sort of that you would hope
• 50:44
  that he fulfills his promises on one was anti-woveness the second was wars and sort of international
• 50:51
  order and the third was the economy we've only talked about the third but let's just quickly touch
• 50:55
  on I guess the second one going in reverse order yeah so the international order do you should we
• 51:02
  leave NATO should America leave NATO I don't really understand why NATO still exists because the
• 51:08
  Soviet Union does not exist anymore but I you know if if I think that if NATO is paying its fair
• 51:16
  share and we are not bearing the burden of protecting Europe from a threat that certainly is not a
• 51:22
  threat to us and it is I know that there are like reasons for us to think that this is a good thing
• 51:31
  for us to be a part of in terms of if we want to be maintain some sort of leadership in the role
• 51:39
  and in the world I'm not totally against America being part of NATO ideally we would put this
• 51:45
  to a referendum and ask the American people is this something that you think is important I think
• 51:50
  invoting for Trump what the American people are signaling on whether we should stay in NATO or not
• 51:55
  is yes we should stay in NATO but it should be fair we should be getting more bang for the buck
• 52:01
  that we are investing there because that is what Trump represented in the first term
• 52:06
  for me coming from a country that's a friendly a friendly foreign country and a medium-sized
• 52:10
  country that is the most intertwined with China of any free rich country the let me try out a
• 52:18
  possible argument for NATO or for and and this is not just about NATO but about I guess the stability
• 52:24
  of the international order that was established after the World War II and the importance of alliances
• 52:30
  of standing up to Putin and Ukraine and so on which would just be that throughout most of history
• 52:37
  in most times and places countries and federations and statelets and royal families have had to
• 52:44
  devote enormous amounts of money and effort and energy into maintaining standing armies
• 52:51
  because countries just randomly invaded each other when they could and took the spoils of war
• 52:56
  and that was the norm almost everywhere almost all the time and it ended up with two catastrophic
• 53:01
  world wars in the 20th century and after that everyone got together and said well let's raise
• 53:08
  the stakes and put in sort of trigger suicide triggers so that it becomes really really really
• 53:16
  expansive for people to declare war any other and roll tanks every other borders and so you know
• 53:22
  one was the mutually assured destruction idea of nuclear weapons and the other was NATO in the
• 53:27
  form of an attack on one is going to be an attack on everybody and my worry is that things are
• 53:33
  just going to become a lot more expensive because and a lot more unstable because everyone no one's
• 53:37
  going to know whether or not their neighbours are going to start to invade when they whenever they
• 53:41
  can if you don't have the linchpin of a bunch of rich free countries or standing shoulder to shoulder
• 53:47
  and saying you fuck with one of us you fuck with everybody does that resonate at all certainly
• 53:54
  makes me more anxious as an Australian you know what what becomes of Australians and South Koreans
• 53:58
  and Japanese and New Zealanders and Estonians and everyone I mean I don't think I I think that you
• 54:05
  know if we I will support an anti-China NATO like an alliance that said you know we're gonna
• 54:12
  take on China because China is actually an enemy of ours and a threat to us I don't see Russia
• 54:19
  as an enemy or a threat of the United States so I think it seems like it's pointed in the wrong
• 54:25
  direction well then you could bolster NATO I mean you couldn't you know you could invite
• 54:31
  Australia and Japan and South Korea into NATO the Chinese wouldn't like that yeah they probably
• 54:38
  wouldn't I think Americans Americans are sort of they're sick and tired of a lot of the foreign
• 54:46
  entanglements especially when we have so many problems here and I think that's very much my focus
• 54:52
  as well on workness just the first let's not let's wrap this up with your first thing do you
• 54:57
  think that Donald Trump turns the volume down on the craziness of the left he already has because
• 55:09
  when Democrats lose the hate losing Republicans don't mind losing because they lose they're used
• 55:14
  to it but Democrats I don't know why if I think to remember he kind of tried to raid the
• 55:19
  capital building in January after he did not lose gracefully but that's actually unusual for
• 55:25
  Republican Republicans don't the Democrats are really hate and they they really do open themselves
• 55:30
  up for a few months so you're already seeing the wokeness receding we hit peak wokeness I think in
• 55:36
  like 2020 so it's already kind of on the on the decline I don't think Trump is very interested in
• 55:42
  this I think he's really interested in foreign policy and I think he's really interested in the economy
• 55:46
  this is kind of the red meat for the elites of his side you know it's like elites always think that
• 55:52
  we're fighting culture cultural battles but we're actually fighting economic battles it's actually
• 55:58
  it's class warfare but to the elites because they don't have those pressing economic needs they
• 56:04
  prefer to fight each other and squabble over the cultural issues so I really I think this is going
• 56:09
  to recede into the background I mean you might see a few bills you might see some bathroom bills
• 56:13
  some sports bills you know keeping trans women out of women's sports which is you know
• 56:17
  supported by 85% of Americans so you might see stuff like that just wait that's very popular
• 56:25
  do you think that the left will be more reasonable under Donald Trump than they would have been under
• 56:29
  a Nikki Haley administration yeah really oh yeah from your lips to gods ears I hope so my instinct is
• 56:37
  that he arranges them the last question I started by asking you what you're most looking
• 56:43
  forward to or like what your wet dream of the next four years is what are you worried about what
• 56:47
  what would be what would be a bad thing that the Trump administration might do that would have you
• 56:54
  most frustrated disappointed despondent expand the each one be visa program
• 57:03
  you're a dog with a bone on this bacha it's not me I mean this is you know this is what he was
• 57:10
  elected not to do so you know it's it's not me it's people are really really up in arms about this
• 57:18
  and it's amazing because he did an hour long press conference and nobody even asked him about
• 57:23
  this because again the journalist belongs to the elite class the only question he got on this was
• 57:28
  someone asked him mr. president is it appropriate for Elon Musk to be insulting a foreign you know
• 57:35
  the prime minister of England like it's they're so it was just so I know it's so if you're
• 57:42
  adding the way I know I know I hear the way the media has responded is like so so petty every step
• 57:49
  of the way um bachi great to talk to you thanks for your time let's keep in touch throughout the
• 57:53
  Trump administration I'd love to chat to you again thank you so much take care