Howard Lutnick：美国如何在2026年实现6%的GDP增长

What was the feeling the first time you were on Air Force One? Or Marine One—like, is there a special thing where you're just like, “What is going on?”

Yeah.

Yeah. When you're on these things, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Right. You are where real conversations happen.

We went to see Putin. So I get on Air Force One at 5:00 a.m. He gets on at 5:45. We fly to Alaska.

So we're there for 4 hours with Putin, and then we fly back. Now, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff go take a nap because we have to wait for Zelensky to wake up to call Zelensky, 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, watching golf. It's a lot of hours.

Yeah.

So then Zelensky wakes up. They get on the phone with Zelensky, and he talks to Zelensky on his phone. Then, when he calls the European leaders, they want to have a secure call. So there are 3 secure handsets in his office. He's on 1—

Rubio's on 1, and Witkoff's on 1.

And I'm just sitting on the couch.

This is in Air Force One?

In Air Force One, in his office on Air Force One. I'm just sitting on the couch, and I've been up for about 20 hours. The president's been up for 20 hours, but he's on the phone and the European leaders are talking. They're all on handsets, so I can't hear a word that anybody's saying. I'm just sitting there, and I fall asleep.

Okay.

They're talking on the phone right there, and I fall like this. So I'm like that. Witkoff elbows the president, points to me, and then the president unwraps a Tootsie Roll and tries to throw it into my mouth. He hits me in the face. I wake up. He goes, "Har, while you're napping, we're trying to settle world peace."

That's awesome.

When we did the first interview with you, it was at the beginning of the administration. It was almost a year ago, and, to be honest, it turned out to be one of the most popular things we've ever done. There's the Elon Musk view factor, but then there was the Howard Lutnick 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, right? So I set out with that goal. Which means I am outcome-driven, right? I don't really buy into, “I worked really hard at something and it failed.”

If I worked really hard and it failed, it's a fail. It's a fail, right? If I got lucky and it just all fell into place and I did nothing, it's still success, right? Because outcomes are what matter. You're not telling people how hard you worked and failed, right?

How you get things done in government is fascinating. It's just different. Most people who've ever been in government tend to be incremental. They come in and say, “How did this work?” Someone explains how it works, and they try to move the ball 10% forward. They don't really rethink it entirely.

My objective was to come into this department, which is an awesome, incredibly 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 3 months were really about getting people to think, “Can I really challenge this? Can I really do this? Can I really try to do this?” Then I tried to convince everybody around me that this is an okay way to do it. The way it was done yesterday isn't necessarily 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, from 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 the deep state, whatever that is—these career lifers who 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 are 40,000 people in this department. If you're going to cut 12,000 people, you have to do it fast, right? So that everybody understands the next shoe isn't going to drop tomorrow, right?

We found programs that were just like, “This program was started in 1978.” You'd be like, “Why are we doing it now?” We had a department supporting advanced manufacturing that was set up in 1986. What were they doing as advanced manufacturing 40 years ago, as opposed to what people are doing now?

So it was really about not taking out what was core. I went and met every bureau and had 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 that the people here are very narrow experts. They're amazing—their knowledge of a particular topic. There aren't generalists in government. You have someone who's great at this, someone who's great at that, someone who's great at this, and someone who's great at that. Your job as the secretary is to weave that blanket together, right, so that these specialists succeed.

When you give them tasks that maximize their capacity, they get jazzed, right? I'm getting amazing output from this department because they're jazzed—because someone appreciates their capacity and is driving it to success.

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

Tariffs, which have been a big conversation—there are 2 types of tariffs. There are general tariffs that are in front of the Supreme Court, and then there are sector-specific tariffs. Those that are industry-specific are handled in this building.

They're part of BIS, the Bureau of Industry and Security, right? That includes export controls. We don't want to sell our best chips to our adversaries. We don't want to sell whatever the relevant item is—that's the Bureau of Industry and Security—or we want a license just to make sure you use it in this sort of way or that sort of way. All of that is handled there, and they have guns and badges.

Right. So they have guns and badges.

Yeah. Right, because they have to protect and defend that. They fine people, and they also control the auto tariffs, the steel tariffs, and pharmaceuticals, which we can talk about a bunch because it's been insanely successful in driving down the price of pharmaceuticals in America. That's the Bureau of Industry and Security, BIS.

Then you have ITA, which basically is the advocate for business, right? I'm the secretary of Commerce, so that's 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 sort of the import-export assistance model, right? We're always helping Boeing. The senior executives of Boeing follow me around like a puppy because every time I do a deal—if you look at my big deals, at the end it says they buy 50 Boeing planes, or they buy 100 Boeing planes. We're always helping American companies sell overseas, and we're helping companies invest in America.

Right.

We help them with their permits and with whatever they need to build and grow, so we can grow American jobs here. Those are 2 examples.

Then we have NTIA—telecommunications—which includes spectrum. How are we going to do 6G? How do the pieces fit together? That's our responsibility as the lead adviser, right?

Inside of that, of course, we have the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. We study and then put out reports. When DeepSeek comes out with its new model and there's all this press about it, our department painstakingly studies it as compared with our models and publishes the difference, right? So that there's actually a standard of knowledge, rather than the press making this, that, or the other claim.

We put out GDP, right? We analyze it. What's interesting about GDP is that people don't realize we use the Census. There's the economic census, which calls around to companies. It's not really calling around anymore; it's more about connecting with companies through APIs and otherwise.

One of the keys for me is to get rid of everything that's manual and make it all automated, make it all connected with APIs, and make it all make sense so that you can do it amazingly well.

Create GDP, and then we put GDP out on the blockchain because if I'm publishing GDP, why not?

Yeah.

Like, where's the holdup?

And you started doing that in July, I think.

I mean, how fun is that to say, “Why don't we do that?” Then, you know, we go to the Oval Office, I chat with the president, and he goes, “Great.” Then we do it. The reason you want to work for President Trump is his intuition is so extraordinary and his knowledge base is so amazing that I can go in and talk to him about whether we should put GDP on the blockchain.

Just before that, he was doing something completely different. Then he'll chat with you for 3 or 5 minutes, and it goes, “That sounds great,” and then you just go do it.

So it's really fun.

We have the Patent Office, and if you think of how valuable intellectual property is, how do we protect it? How do we defend it? What's the right way to think about it?

Then you have NOAA. Inside NOAA, of course, is the word “atmosphere,” right? It's oceans and atmosphere. What does that mean? Oceans, and above 50,000 ft is space: space commerce. So now I have the Office of Space Commerce, which I've taken out of NOAA and put in my office so that I can reimagine how we handle commercial satellites.

Okay, so we're going to dig into as many of these areas as we can, but let's go back to the first one. Can you bring us into the room leading into April 1st and—

April 2nd?

April 2nd. Sorry. [laughter] 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 you want to redo, and what was—and still is—misunderstood?

In his first term, the president had been talking about tariffs and how the trade deficit of the United States of America is really a rip-off of America. People who don't weigh in very deeply say, “Well, you have a trade deficit with the supermarket, right? You're always buying from the supermarket, so you have a trade deficit with the supermarket.” That's just silly, right?

If you think about it, let's say there are 2 islands. One produces and one invents. The inventor lets the other island produce and keeps buying from that other island, pays them the money, and that other island uses the money to buy the inventor's island. Over a period of time, the producer owns the inventor's island, and the inventor works for the producer because he ran an infinite trade deficit and kept paying his money away.

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 to buy their wine, their cars, and all their cool stuff. Sooner or later, they're going to say, ‘Hey, I don't want your stupid paper,’ and your dollar would devalue. You wouldn't be able to buy their stuff, and it would all balance.” That's sort of free foreign-exchange, floating-currency theory.

But what if you're America and you invent the light bulb, then you invent the transistor, then you invent the GPU, and you're just too darn smart?

So what do they do with those dollars?

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 with our ownership of them—that counts everything: their bonds, companies, stocks, everything—we were a net investor of $148 billion, owning more of them than they owned of us.

Fast-forward to 2024: it was $26 trillion the other way. They own $26 trillion more of us than we owe them.

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

Right. So, at the beginning, Donald Trump says, “We're getting ripped off. We need to fix this.”

Mhm.

Right. And these junior economists fight it and say, “No.”

Let me stop for a second. That is the first time I've heard that, and it is an extremely elegant framing, actually. It sets up an incredibly powerful way to measure the effectiveness of tariffs, right?

Right.

Which is—and is that how you think about it? Is that imbalance the north star?

Yes.

Once we own at least the same amount of them as they do of us—

That's balance.

That's balance. We're balanced, right?

And right now we're at $26 trillion.

Why would we have—

What happens is you call a country up and you say, “I'm going to set a tariff.” They say, “Wait, wait, wait. Before you set a tariff, how about this? We'll invest $200 billion in your country, and Toyota will build a factory, Siemens will build a factory, and they'll all build a factory.” I'm like, “You're just buying us,” right? You're literally buying us.

I understand what's better for you: investing $200 billion in America or investing $200 billion somewhere else? 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.

He says, “You're only investing here because it's great for you.” The answer is, “I want to rebalance, and that's what we're out to do. Build it here, sell it here. Fine. Or pay for the privilege of selling it here.”

How did you set the rates?

The president, on the campaign trail, had 2 views. The debate was really inside his mind: Did he want to set a universal tariff or a specific, country-by-country tariff?

Obviously, a universal tariff is easy. Tuesday morning, you say—

Pick a number.

10%. Shazam.

Right.

But we settled on a country-specific model: much more complex, much more difficult, but much more nuanced, much more clever, and much tougher. He couldn't do that in his first term because he didn't have believers around him. He had too many people who believed in those sophomore professors' ideals.

Even though we were out $26 trillion, they thought that was too casual a comment. This administration came in with incredibly sharp people—me included, Jamieson Greer, Scott Bessent—who were onside, on board, and 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, was $550 billion of commitment and terms—I mentioned on the podcast I've never seen terms like this before [laughter]—which you can explain. Basically, Japan gets your money back, then you get 90% of the profits.

Can you just walk us through, when you go into the room with the Japanese government, how you get 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 thinking about Japan, I reminded the president that 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, is 94% Japanese cars. They don't drive German cars. They don't drive Korean cars. They don't drive American cars. The only American cars really in Japan are Chevrolets driven by the yakuza. You can't come home with a Chevy and have people think, “Woo! You got a new job, did you?”

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.

Mhm.

So what we did is we said, “All right, you're going to pay a 25% tariff.” Simple. You won't open your market, right? I can't get you to really open your market, so you just pay us 25%. That's simple. We don't have to negotiate; we just pay for the right, and the math will fix itself over time.

Mhm.

Their leadership called and said, “We can't do that.” When someone says, “I can't do that,” I'm like—

What do you do when they say, “Why?”

They explained why. They said, “Look, the way the Japanese auto manufacturers work is the government subsidizes the machinery that goes to small manufacturers. Let's say Company A has 1,000 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.

That machinery was subsidized by the government, and so you have thousands, tens of thousands, of these companies. They can't pick them up and move them to America.”

Let me ask you 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. Everybody else does this for their own domestic internal economy—

But not on every product, right?

But on many. I mean, we set steel and aluminum tariffs. You'd say, “Why do you do the whole steel and aluminum thing?” You'd say, “Well, if the Chinese give power—the power—to the steel producer free…”

Think of steel. It’s like brown dirt.

Yeah.

You process the brown dirt to make it iron ore. But you’ve all seen it—it’s like dirt. And then you know how much power you have to put into that to melt it, to make it look like one of those things we’ve seen on TV where you’re pouring the iron ore. Imagine if I gave you the power for free. You’d be making your steel for $250 a metric ton, right?

And you’d say, “How much does it cost in America? $700 a metric ton.” So they’re going to put our guys out of business. Japan subsidizes it. Korea subsidizes it. So maybe they can do it for $400 a metric ton.

Meanwhile, we started with 40 steel blast furnaces. Now we have 10. If we kept going, we were going to have zero.

Zero.

And then what happens is you become basically subservient. If you need steel and 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.

So Donald Trump says we need steel, aluminum, and copper, and we need to make our own semiconductors.

Yeah.

Right? We need to make our own pharmaceuticals.

Right.

Once you understand this, and you really think about it, Donald Trump is not only completely correct; it actually goes to the—thank God, right? You study pharmaceuticals and really study them, and say, “Well, these generic pharmaceuticals are made in India.” You say, “Oh yeah, good. India’s our ally.” But the ingredients come from China.

Exactly.

So if there’s 1 nut or bolt that you need and it comes from China, they don’t send it to you.

Right.

Right? There were these things called magnets, okay? Magnets go in a car. The value of a magnet that goes in a car is $20. $20, right? You’re buying a $30,000 car. It’s a $20 part, right?

But if they don’t have it, the car—

Oh, sorry. It can’t work.

Right.

Where do we get that part from? Well, China sells them. They buy the dirt—the ingredient—for $55 a pound, and they sell you the finished magnet for $55 a pound. So no one’s going to make the magnet if you can sell the raw material for $55. So they’re basically just losing money, and the answer is—right?

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

The answer is yes. The Chinese economy is one of overproduction. They have 50 mayors in the provinces, and each of those provinces is trying to succeed. Each of those provinces wants to build an electric-car company. The government puts in all the money, builds the capital, gives them the power, and invests.

So if you’re the mayor, you want the winning electric-car company because, remember, China does not have oil and natural gas. So they have to build electric because they have coal, right? They have to build electric. We don’t. We’re being fools to think that we should have batteries and everything that they make that we don’t. That’s just foolish.

So that means if you have 50 mayors and they all have what? 1 electric-car company. No, no. They’re probably going to have 2, just in case. So that’s 100 electric-car companies, and they’re all trying to kill each other, subsidized by the government, so they can cut their price 30%.

Why? Because the government just says, “Look, let’s just try to undercut everybody else.” And then they make so many cars. What do they do with all these cars?

Right?

So then they dump them, and they take the electric car, which cost them $30,000, and sell it in Europe for $15,000. So you go to buy an electric car in Europe and say, “$15,000 for this car. This is an amazing car for $15,000.” That’s because it cost $30,000.

And so what happens is that has the effect of putting Volkswagen out of business.

Right?

So what happens is, it’s their model, which is an economic-chaos model, but the economic-chaos model has overcapacity. And then they turn that overcapacity into an asset. They say, “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’ll 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.”

So the tariffs now basically slow that leverage down because they take that economic incentive off the table. Do you need to follow up with some other set of structural changes, though, to right the ship in the long term? We have to domesticate production. 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 companies out of business, and then we will be beholden to them.

Mhm.

That’s simple math, right? 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 they’ll have all EV cars by 2030, then who are they going to buy the batteries from?

Mhm.

They have to buy them from China, which means what is their foreign policy with respect to China?

It’s very positive. That’s all. Right?

They trade economic leverage—basically, “I’ve gotten leverage over you, so you’re going to let me do this, that, and the other thing.” And eventually, they’re not playing by the same rules that we play by.

When you go around the world and study the world, Japan doesn’t do cars by the same rules that we do. So Japanese cars had a tariff of 25%. Twenty-five percent was basically a number that choked them. We analyzed together with them that 15% would be the number they could live with, right, and keep making cars and build more here.

And then I said, “Well, but why would we, since you’re not really going to open your market? You’re not really going to let us have access. How are we going to do it?” Then I spent months going back and forth with the Japanese and President Trump with different ideas. “How about this?”

So if you suggested I got it right the first time, that would not be true.

I got it right. You know, I’ve always described my business success in life. I always came at it like this, okay, and then like this, like this, like this—this route to success. Sooner or 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 will literally finance any project we want to build in America as long as it’s a good cash-flowing 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, like, a 30-year bond in Japan.

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

From their domestic bondholders, right? So they’re an LP to you and you’re the GP.

Exactly. The right thing.

They’re an LP. They give us the equity. We build the nuclear power plant, and then it starts selling power. We split the cash 50/50 until they get back their money plus their interest.

So that means in 30 years the taxpayers of Japan broke even, and their dividend was a reduced tariff. Every day, they had a lower tariff. They had more employment, they had this and that, and you know what? Their stock market’s up 20%.

Yeah. Up. Yeah.

Not down.

Yeah. Up.

So that’s the point: 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, let’s say over 30 years you’re going to get $650 billion.”

When we pay them back $650 billion, if you say to me, “How much did America make?” I would say $650 billion, because we split the money 50/50.

Yeah. Exactly.

And after they get their money back, because nuclear power plants last a long time, then the cash flow goes 90% to America and 10% to Japan.

And when you say “to America,” is there an account? How does that money then get spent or allocated?

The only bank the United States of America has, as far as the secretary of commerce sees, is called Treasury.

Treasury.

So 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. So it reduces our deficit; it’s taxes paid by others—

Right.

—for us to get our house in order. That’s why the president talks about the External Revenue Service, right? In this case, you’re going to make—you’d say, “All right, well, over 20 years you probably make $30 billion a year, right?” That’s $30 billion a year. You know how much tax we’d have to raise—

Yeah.

—on Americans to cover $30 billion a year? That’s $30 billion a year just on those trades. And then you have the tariffs: $500 billion a year now, and they will grow over time to $1 trillion a year. And that money is not money we have to pay in taxes.

And eventually, that puts our house in order, lowers interest rates, and 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 ratable reduction in income taxes. Is that the right way to think about this?

Who paid for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security? Tariffs.

Tariffs.

That's a down payment.

Right.

That's the idea. We should be able to reduce the tax burden from the bottom up.

Yeah.

Help Americans who make less than $150,000, who earn overtime, and who earn tips. Let's reduce their tax burden. Let's help America. 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 to right a whole bunch of wrongs that have been perpetrated against our country. We are the richest country in the world, and that means we don't have to take things away from people.

Everybody assumes that, to balance the budget, if you asked a politician how you would fix Social Security, they would say, "Take the retirement age up."

Right.

They would say, "Take it away." They would never say, "We are the greatest country on Earth. We have the greatest economy on Earth. Can't we figure out ways to enhance our revenues?" The richest country in the world should be able to give people retirement at 65. We shouldn't change a darn thing.

That is his thinking.

Yeah.

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: Here's the historical imbalance; here's how we want to reset it. We want some investment that we're going to get you whole, foreign country, but at the end of the day, this is about American exceptionalism.

It's worked in Japan. It's worked in Korea. You did the deal with Europe. You did the deal with the UK. What's still out there? I think India is kind of still out there, although it seems like they are capitulating a little bit. I saw that they just bought a lot of liquefied petroleum gas from the United States in November. What are the big hot-button places that you want?

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 then. That was the date that the train was going to leave the station—two Fridays—because I had a lot of other countries doing things. If someone else is first, they're first.

President Trump does deals like a staircase. First in 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 step up the staircase.

So that sets the floor, right?

Then the next one's got to be higher, and the next one higher, and the next one higher, and the next one higher. He does things that way because that way it incents you—

To come to the table.

Right.

Right.

You could have 3 countries that are the second deal. They all get done at the same time, right? But if you want to wait and see how it goes, it's at your risk.

He did the UK deal, and they had to get it done by Friday. On Thursday afternoon, Keir Starmer was on the phone with the president. They did their deal Wednesday night, and on Thursday we had a press conference and announced it.

Everybody asked the president, "Who do you think is next?" If you look back at the time, he talked about a variety of countries, but he named India a couple of times publicly. It wasn't a big secret. We were talking to India, and we told India they had 3 Fridays.

You put them on a shot clock.

They had to get it done because I had lots of other countries, and when those other countries do their deal—

The staircase goes up.

Right.

Yeah.

Now, during all these deals, the president would refer to me as the greatest table setter who ever lived. You've never had anybody who was as successful as me as a businessman before who was just the table setter.

What I would do is negotiate the contracts and set the whole deal up. But let's be clear: It's his deal.

Yeah.

He's the closer. He does the deal.

So I said, "You've got to have Modi. It's all set up. You have to have Modi call the president." They were uncomfortable doing it, so Modi didn't call.

Wow.

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

Malaysia in that period.

We did this whole bunch of deals. That's the staircase. Because we negotiated them assuming 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, right? Then India calls back and says, "Okay, we're ready." I said, "Ready for what?" It was 3 weeks later. I said, "Are you ready for the train that left the station 3 weeks ago?"

What happened is, they were on the wrong side of the seesaw. When I was young in business and was a trader, one of my first jobs was as a trader. When I would start on the wrong side of the seesaw, I'd buy and it would go down, then I'd sell and it would go up. I'd buy again and it would go down, and sell again and it would go up.

When you're on the right side of the seesaw, you can't lose. You buy, it goes up; you sell, it goes down; you buy, it goes up; you sell, it goes down, and you feel like you're the king.

But when you're on the wrong side of the seesaw, what I used to do was put the phone down. I used to go into the bathroom, fill a bucket with water, take a rag, and wash the plants in the office because it was much cheaper than me picking up the phone.

People would call and say, "Can I speak to Howard?" They'd say, "No, he's in a meeting." Meanwhile, they'd look up, and there I was, washing the plant, because whatever I did, I'd get back in there and touch it, and it would go the wrong way.

India was just on the wrong side of the seesaw. 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. All these other countries kept doing deals, so they're just further in the back of the line.

Now they say, "What I want is the deal in between the UK and Vietnam," because that's what I negotiated, right?

Right.

They remember, and I remember. They say, "But you agreed—"

Then.

Then, not now. Then.

That's the problem. India will work it out, but there are a lot of countries, and they each have their own deep internal politics. To get something approved by their parliament or their Diet, these are deeply complex things.

We're dealing with the world, but we've gotten them done. We got Europe done, right? We did Japan, then I did Europe, then we did Korea, and we've done country after country after country.

These are durable deals, meaning they take care of the countries' autos, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors—things that really matter. The tariffs have been incredibly effective. You can use them to change the trade deficit, but you can also use them to change behavior. We should spend some time talking about drugs.

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. Walk us through what the goal of those was 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, the consumer, and the payer—

Worldwide. Worldwide, we pay all the money.

Worldwide.

These drug companies make 75% of their revenues in America, and it's 100% of their profits. What happens is, we pay, let's say, $1,000 for a drug, and then Europe says, "Yeah, we have socialized medicine. We're not buying it unless—what's your cost?"

The drug company says, "$100."

So they say, "We'll pay you $175. You can make $75."

Then the drug company says no, and Europe says, "Okay, I'm not buying it, then."

You'd say, "What do you mean you're not buying it? You're not going to give medicine to your people?"

They go, "No, we can't afford it."

So eventually the drug company says, "Fine." We're paying $1,000, and they're paying $175—6 times less. You'd be like, "What?"

That is how the whole world's drug model was working. We're paying $1,000; everyone else in the world is paying $175. So Donald Trump says, "I want to fix it, and I want MFN pricing."

You want to charge us—most favored nations. Most favored nations. So we're getting the cheapest price in the world.

Right. But you could charge them $500 and then you could charge us $500. Fine.

Right. But if you're willing to sell it to them for $175, don't come here and tell me that I have to pay $1,000. It's just unfair. [laughter]

You're not dictating the 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. So he writes a letter to 17 giant pharmaceutical companies and says, “I want MFN.” And I have to tell you, I don't know a single person in this administration who thought he could do it. It was so audacious, so bold, so powerful. I was like, “Jeez.” I mean, you just write a letter to all the big drug companies saying, “You're going to give us MFN,” and write a stern letter. I'm like, “Okay, good luck with that.”

How's this baby going to work?

Right? And then we have this amazing meeting with Bobby Kennedy and his team, and we say, “Look, I've got these Section 232 tariffs. I could smash these companies. Smash them, because they all make it overseas and then export it to us, and we're giving them all the money. So we could charge them any tariff we want. We could charge them 500%. So let's do something that's never been done before. Let's literally be a team. You lead.”

So Bobby and his team, who were amazing—Dr. Oz, Chris Klomp—I mean, these guys did a spectacular job.

They led, but you were the hammer, right?

From table setter to hammer.

To hammer.

So now I'm the hammer.

Okay.

Right. So I'm in the background, like, “Hammer.” And then I say, “Look, you have 2 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.”

Right.

We're not talking about if you sell it to sub-Saharan Africa. We're talking about the big countries, the OECD—let's call it the G10 or the G20. Charge us the same, and reshore, and I'll waive your tariff while you're reshoring, provided you do those 2 things. Or hammer. Just hammer.”

And what's a hammer mean? I don't know. Hundreds of percent tariff starting—I don't know—30 days from now. Like, just bang.

So you were just there in the corner? [laughter]

I'm like the handsome guy in the back, just going, you know. If you see me at the meetings, I'm there. But if you look at the pictures that are put out, everybody puts out the picture of Bobby signing and me signing.

Right. What are you signing, Howard?

I'm signing the no-hammer rule. [laughter]

So the result is Ozempic and Mounjaro are on Medicaid and Medicare for $149 instead of not being on it, right?

Right.

And generally sold for thousands, right?

Right.

So think about it. Instead of generally being sold for thousands, everyone in America can have it for $149. And that's going to reduce—I mean, it's going to change these drugs. We had drug 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.

Right. They're going to give it to Medicaid and Medicare for zero.

Right. So we saved $25 billion to $35 billion a year. But more importantly, we made drugs accessible to America at a fair price and stopped always being the one who pays.

We are the richest country in the world, and the world viewed us—remember when I was growing up, there were all these cartoons on TV, and there was always this one where there was a guy stuck on a desert island. As another guy walks by, he starts looking at him. The other guy looks like a big chicken leg, you know, because he's starving. The world views us as a giant chicken leg. We're so rich, we won't miss it.

So all the trade deals were bad, the drug deals were bad, and 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—to come into America. If you win the lottery, you win.

Right. But who's paying for the lottery?

We are. So it's not like the normal lottery, where everybody pays in a dollar and the winner gets a percentage of the money, right? Here, the people win the lottery and we lose. It's like a win-lose. You would say, “Gosh, why would we do that?”

Yeah.

And it's only because Donald Trump is willing to literally challenge everything: 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, 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 is awesome, right? You change the country's budget deficit by $600 billion this year. You just relentlessly deliver.

What happens is, if you have a businessman in that office—and Donald Trump has the best intuition of anybody I've ever met—I could tell you stories and stories. One day he said to me, “I don't know, maybe we talked about it last time. What's the flag on the back of those ships?” And I was like, “I don't know.” He goes, “Have you ever seen a flag on the back of a ship and known 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—the tankers and cargo ships. And why is that?

It's a tax scam. It's a flag of convenience, right?

Right. What they do is make all their money on the seas and charge the ports as an expense. They pick it up from Europe—that's an expense. They drop it off in America—that's an expense. 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.

Right.

Right. It's all a tax scam. So the president, by intuition, sends us out—he sends me stuff because I love this stuff, and I find it. And we're going to attack it.

The next year, you're going to see this government attack fraud. The fraud is probably $1 trillion a year from people who have figured out how to rip off the system.

Remember, America had open borders until 1914. The reason it had open borders until 1914 is because it gave you nothing, right? If you were sick, you couldn't go to the hospital unless you could pay the bill. So if you were sick, you died. What do you want from me? Get a job, take care of yourself, or get lost, right?

When we went to have a welfare state, you had to close the borders, because if people are going to give their money, they need to give it to each other. You can't really open the border and say, “I'm going to give my money to anybody who wants to come in.” That's getting it wrong.

So when people say open immigration is how we built America, they are right. And open immigration would be something interesting if we gave people nothing. Because if we gave them nothing—if they weren't smart enough, capable, entrepreneurial enough, driven enough—

Mhm.

—they would starve to death. They wouldn't stay here. They would self-deport.

Right.

But if you're going to give them welfare, food stamps, housing, and all of that, then everybody's going to come and just leech off of us, and we're going to pay and pay and pay.

Now, on the immigration side, you've launched 2 versions of the Trump Card, I think, right? There's the $1 million Trump Card and then the $5 million card. Where are those programs, and how have they been working so far?

They're out right now: TrumpCard.gov. It's a really nice website. 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.

Not you.

Right. You're going to help us.

Yeah.

So the average American makes in the $60,000s a year, and the average green card recipient made in the $40,000s. So we are bringing in the bottom quartile, right? Like, why? We're the only country in the world that was bringing in the bottom. They're more likely to be on welfare, more likely to be on food stamps, more likely to be getting things from the government, because they were all coming to get things from the government.

And so the idea for us is, okay, here's the gold card. You want to come in? Prove to us you're going to be a benefit to this country. Give the United States $1 million, which pays off our deficit, reduces the taxes we have to charge Americans, and then you come in. You've proven that you're going to be a good citizen.

We have to vet you. We spend $15,000 on the greatest vetting we've ever done. And then you come in, and you're going to be top quartile, maybe top decile, right? But you're going to help America be better.

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

Not yet.

No, the president—the president, in the first week, put out that we had sold $1 billion worth—

In the first week.

Yeah.

Oh, wow. But there's a process, and that process is going along, fixing the immigration system, right? Not letting people come in by lottery, selecting who they are, and not bringing in people who would take a trainee job.

Yeah. I mean, 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 doesn't make sense. And what happens is, people steal the history of America and they lie, change the shape, and try to stick it in by saying, you know, America was born with immigration and was 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.

And that's why you're hearing about all this fraud. These people came in in order to defraud America. It's not like it's a random act, right? They figured, "This is the richest country in the world. We live in a craphole. Let's get out of here, and these morons are going to let us have a BMW," right? And we're not going to be hardworking, industrious people. We're just going to figure out the model and screw them.

America was not designed with walls and barriers. We were designed with an entrepreneurial spirit to make the world shine. You know, 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.

Yeah.

Really dark. Now open your eyes and say, "What makes the world shine when America is shining the brightest?"

So you'd say, "Well, if that's true, America reset the world order of trade, right? And properly set the balance where, since we're the best economy, we're in the best 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.

Yeah. The Korean stock market is up 70%. Japan is up in the 20s or 30s. Europe is up more than 15%, right? All of these are up. And you'd say, "Well, I don't understand. How could they pay us and be up?" Because the world—and stocks are a long-term outcome.

That's right.

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

Yeah.

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 that this is a debasement problem for the U.S. dollar. But I actually think what you said is more accurate, which is that people looked through 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, and Europe did so well. It's why a lot of these base commodities did well, because now you're seeing an increase in 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 or unintended 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 $1 trillion. Can you just double-click into what that means, how you're going to go after it, and whether it's at the federal level or the state level? Just give us the rough game plan, what you can say.

Sure. The president is the federal government, right? So if the federal government gives money to the state and the state gives it out, then we have a dog in the hunt, right? 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. He understood my power, and I understood his power, and together we changed the outcome to incredible success. So that's how we're going to look at it. We're going to have multiple departments working together, right?

No one has ever looked at, if you're getting Medicaid and Medicare, how much money do you make? No one's ever compared the two.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah. You're supposed to tell us, but if you're a pro, it's the honor system.

Yeah. But America is built on the honor system. Now, with modern technology, right? And then you have a beast like me.

Right.

Right? The hammer, and probably the guy with the best intuition in the world sitting right over there, who's also a businessman.

Right.

And we'd say, "Okay, we're going to build the technology to do this." We are going to build it, and everybody's on board. So you have DHS, you have HHS, you have Commerce. We're all working together, and we're going to come out with models and methods to seek the fraud out—not on a limited-to-Minnesota scale. Oh, no, we're going to go after it big time, right?

And then you have the execution of the first year and the second year, which means you have the president saying, "We have $18 trillion of committed capital. Okay, open your plant." We have spreadsheets. I went over them yesterday, right? We have spreadsheets of promises, right? All these people who made these promises. Okay, call them. Thirty construction projects launched that would never have been launched.

So here's my view. I told you that I thought by the end of this year we'd get to 4% GDP growth. I said it in the first quarter.

Yeah.

And 4.3%. Now, the fourth quarter is going to be a mess because of the shutdown. Seriously, this is accounting in America. If someone works for the government, they count them as GDP. And you would say, right, with that face exactly, it makes you go, "What?"

So let's get—wait, stop, stop, 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 something, like you do something.

Like you do something.

Nope. So here's the fun part. When you furlough them on the shutdown, right, 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 amount of money. What's the difference?" But these are the rules. So our fourth-quarter GDP will be 1.5 points lower than it otherwise would be for this oddity.

Just from the furlough. So basically, the consensus economists think the fourth-quarter growth is going to be 1%.

Okay. They're just wrong. I said they were wrong in the third quarter. I said they were wrong in the second quarter. We have 3.8% and then 4.3%. We'll probably be around 2.5%, but that would have been, to your point, 4%.

4%.

Right. Next year, with all this construction in the ground—this Friday I'm flying up to New York for a Micron groundbreaking of its tens-of-billions-of-dollars factory in upstate New York. That's just another example. Then I'm going to Detroit, where they're doing a huge new-build auto plant and building their engine plant. It's just 5s. You're going to see 5s—5s in the greatest economy in the world. You're going to see 5s.

And people think you can't—you can't have 5% GDP growth on a base this big. It's enormous. We have a $30 trillion economy, so 5% is $1.5 trillion in growth. And if we cut rates, you'll see 6s. People would never have thought that was possible before Donald Trump walked into that office. They would never have thought that's possible.

Let's just put 6% in context. Six was China at its peak under central planning, with tight control on every aspect of its economy. That was what the world knew 6% looked like in the modern era. And now the alternative version of 6% will be the president, you, and the team in a much more open way. I'll be shocked.

You would have said it could never happen.

I would be shocked. I mean, that's incredible.

Okay, you're going to put it this way: you know, it wouldn't even be fun for you when we see the 5s.

Yeah.

Because they'll be so soon. They could be this quarter, as in the first quarter. So then I'd say, "Well, you have to come back and see me when it's 5%." 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 as early as 2026.

That's incredible.

And then if they cut rates—and that's the thing—I need a new Fed chair who cuts rates. And if they cut rates—

Sixes.

You'll see sixes. And what you're going to see—what that means—is jobs are abundant.

Yeah.

Good jobs are abundant. High-paying jobs are abundant, right? 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. That's right. But if I'm trying to build a factory because I'm kicking tail, and I have to share some of my profits with you to convince you to come to work—

I'll give you a perfect example of this. I am the lead investor in a 1-gigawatt data center project in Arizona. We have to pay electricians between $500,000 and $750,000 a year, which is more than what we pay the engineers who work on the models at Facebook. It's an example, to your point, of how the economy has created earnings potential across the board in ways that I've never seen in my career. It's really quite incredible.

The society under Obama—the Obama view of the country—he blew it, right? He got rid of shop class. When I grew up, you took shop class. Totally.

There were things to use with your hands.

Yeah. And then we sort of ruled that out in America.

They said you got to go to a liberal arts college.

You have to end up with $200,000 in debt—

Right?

And then these people thought, “What job am I getting that gets me to pay off my $200,000 in debt?” And then you have Biden's inflation, so the price of a house goes up, and then the American dream sort of slips further and further away.

Yeah.

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.”

Yeah.

Right. I went out to Arizona to the TSMC plant, and I met these guys—they were pipe fitters. I met a pipe fitter and I said, “So, how's your job?” He goes, “I play Tetris every day.” He goes, “I've got to get these kinds of pipes through this kind of thing and this kind of way. They give me this much space, and I've got to do all this.” He goes, “I have the greatest job ever.”

Can I tell you something about that TSMC plant? That's a 4-nanometer plant. They are at better yields or equivalent yields than the best-operating 4-nanometer plant in the world, which is in China. Isn't that incredible? American technicians are now dollar for dollar as good as what was happening in China. It's incredible.

Nobody knows this, by the way, but it's incredible.

So TSMC, when I walked in, there was this CHIPS Act.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. So the CHIPS Act had $52 billion because we made no chips in America—semiconductors.

Yeah.

By the way, just as a fun story, a wafer—these are things, but a wafer is the size of a pizza you get in a restaurant.

Yeah.

It's like a personal pizza. A small pizza. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's like a 12-inch pizza. Okay, and then what they do is they break it—

Into little chips.

Yeah. And that's why it's called a semiconductor chip. They literally chip it.

Yeah.

Right. So the beauty of AI, like these GPUs that Jensen builds at NVIDIA, is that instead of making 4,000 little chips out of that pizza, they make 10. These are big things. This thing's the size of a refrigerator. When you think of a chip, think of the little tiny thing going into your iPhone, right? These things are the size of a refrigerator.

And so it's a different kind of model, but they gave Intel $10 billion and gave G.

Yeah. Actually, let me just stop there, because I think one of the things that you did, you basically just put a pause on the CHIPS Act and ripped it apart and restarted it effectively—

Because it was initially under Biden—

Again, just as an outsider looking at it, it was largely giveaways.

And I think you flipped it around and essentially said, “Stop.” My understanding is you actually haven't committed to a lot, but you've been pretty judicious and disciplined about giving the money out. I think only $6 billion has gone out because there are a bunch of conditions, and you have to actually meet these milestones. The CHIPS Act is very different from how it started. So is that fair?

Yeah. Because the Biden administration viewed the $50 billion as, “I'll give you 10%. You build a $16 billion plant, I'll give you $6 billion.” And—

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

Why would you give $6 billion to TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, when their stock is worth $1 trillion, right? So what Donald Trump does is say, “Hey, hey, how about this? How about this? I'll charge you a 100% tariff. How about that?” And the guy says, “Okay, I'll build in America.” See, I don't have to give you $6 billion. Donald Trump can dissect it in a paragraph.

Yeah.

Right. In a paragraph.

Right.

So what we did is we said to TSMC, “Look, you signed the contract. There's 20 pages of DEI stuff in it. You need to hire a blind contractor. Oh, you have to hire a blind contractor. You have to have trans lesbian engineers. I'm not kidding, by the way.” And think about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company: How many lithography engineers does Taiwan have that are female, let alone what their sexuality choices are?

Right?

They've never had a female. They're all men. Right. So I said, “Listen, you're in breach.” Everybody thinks a Republican will just rip that stuff up. Not this kind of Republican. This kind of Republican reads the contract and says, “You know, you're in the DEI. 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? So instead of building $60 billion, you build $160 billion.”

Right?

And we agreed. So I feel better.

And then do you waive the DEI requirements? Yeah.

Hey, build another $100 billion. We can rip that stuff up. No problem. So what happens is you now have a $165 billion plant going in. 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—

Yeah.

—that makes the stuff that NVIDIA sells for 5 times higher.

Okay, let's talk about NVIDIA for a second. You did a deal at the end of this year. I don't think we've ever seen a deal like this, and you can tell me if it's wrong, but you control the export licenses. As you said, 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, the H200s—which are not quite the most advanced chips, but maybe one generation before—can go to China.

Advanced at what China makes.

Right. But in return, you got a 25%—

Tariff.

Tariff. Just describe to us the construction of that deal and what it means for these kinds of deals in the future.

So Jensen Huang, who runs NVIDIA, is obviously a businessman of extraordinary capacity. You can't run a $5 trillion company unless you're 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 president because he's a national treasure.

Yeah.

Right. And our great companies are national treasures for America. His argument to the president—you could 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. If you give them better than what they have, you don't have to give them your best. You just have to give them better than what they have.

Mm-hmm.

Right. This is his argument. Then they'll give less to their champion, right, and more to you, and it'll have a positive economic relationship with China and be positive for us overall. Now, there are plenty of people who disagree, right? But that was Jensen's argument, and that was the discussion, the argument, the debate that we had. And then, when that was done and over, the president said, “And you got to give me 25%.” So the 25% was a throwaway—

Right?

But it was like, “Look, if I'm doing all this for you, you still got to give me 25%.” So the way we're doing it is he has to send the chips to America. We test the chip to make sure that he hasn't enhanced it in any way.

Okay?

Because the H20 was oddly enhanced. You know, it had fewer FLOPs but more—

Memory.

In fact, it had more memory than the H100, which one could argue was a little—you know, not everybody knew that. Say it that way. So we test it on the way in. We can charge it a tariff—just a regular 25% tariff—and then we give export licenses to whoever he wants.

And then he sends it to China, and then—

And he sends it to China, or he sends it to whoever he's selling it to.

So I think this is the president’s deal, and my job is to make sure all the smart people are in the room with both opinions.

Okay?

Never let one opinion be the only one. You 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, the one he’s going to go with, last before he gives it, because that makes sense.

Like, 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 shock: I call him and say no, and then I call you and say yes. They’d say, “Oh, he called Chamath last, and that’s why you stopped.”

Yeah. Yeah.

So that was it. 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. Not everybody agrees with him.

But my take, having been his friend for 30 years and having worked closely with him this year, is that he has 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.

Yeah.

He doesn’t always agree with me.

Yeah.

But it’s a strong decision, which has deep-based thought and balance to it. And he’s done that every time. It’s amazing. He does play a better game of chess. He just does play a better game of chess.

And that’s why it’s so fun for me, because I was very successful in business and in my companies, which had 13,000 employees. I was the one up here.

Yeah.

And for me to work for somebody—

The bar is high.

The bar had better be high. And he’s just the most fun to work for.

Do you think that the deals that we’re seeing—there’s a 25% revenue share on the H200s from Nvidia. You were able to get, I think, 10% of Intel.

10%.

10% of Intel. There are 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, or 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 deal, to change it, you need America to make it happen for you—isn’t there something for the American taxpayer there?

Right.

Right. 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.

So he’s looking for—look, why would we give the money to Intel? It was given to Intel. Contract signed, given to Intel. So turn that around to where America owns 10% of Intel. That can fix—use that money to fix Social Security. Use that money to reduce our deficit. Use that money to charge less in taxes. Use the money to make America great.

And, look, I think if we get rid of the fraud, that’ll save the country $1 trillion.

Right?

If you figure out ways to make $1 trillion, you could reduce our deficit, or you could start the process of solving Social Security.

The scary part for me is, if I say the words “Social Security,” it doesn’t matter what you say with the words “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.”

Yeah.

But the answer is, if you hit it with outside money and just start hitting it with money that you’ve made out here [sighs and gasps], and you fix it, you take nothing away.

Right?

And that’s it. 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 if you grow 6%. You’re going to fix the deficit. You’re going to fix taxes. No, it’s mathematical. You start to do it. You get full employment. People get paid. It’s—

I think we can win.

And that’s why I can achieve the goal of being the secretary who has the most fun, because I’m in the room where it happens, with Donald Trump, where he thinks about things and he thinks about them.

I was in a meeting yesterday with him where there were like 8 advisors sitting around the Resolute Desk. He’s on that side, they all had their opinions, and he had his. He said, “No, no, that’ll have this derivative result, and we’re not doing that.” Everybody in the room was like, “He’s right.”

I mean, you’ve got 8 guys and women thinking, and he just says it. He’s great.

I have 1 final question, which is an audience question. It's from Brandon L from New York, who asks, “Who is your favorite child?”

I have 4 kids. The joke in my house was that I had the oldest, my son Kyle; I had the youngest, my son Ryan; and I have my only daughter, my daughter Casey. So my son Brandon would sign his birthday card, “Your fourth favorite,” because he was neither the youngest nor the oldest nor the daughter. He would sign, “Your fourth favorite.”

Whenever 1 of the other kids screwed something up—in 1 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 say, “Third,” and run back out. He was doing this when he was like 12, so it was hysterical.

That’s a really funny question. I have the best wife. I’ve been married 31 years, and I love her to death. She’s just a wonderful woman and a spectacular mom. We have great kids—really smart, really capable—because she’s a great mom. We’re really close.

So people ask me, “Where’d you go on vacation?” I say, “A simple question: I asked my adult children where they wanted to go, and that’s where we went.”

Yeah.

Because if I went somewhere else, they wouldn’t go with me.

Yeah.

And I want them to be there. There was a picture of me with Bobby Kennedy in Aspen where there was absolutely no snow. And so you say, “Well, why did you go?” I said, “Because my adult children are here, and that’s where I was.”

We were both on the same—

You’re on the same train—

Same page.

So I think if you have—I found the right girl for me. I have the best family, and it lets me do this. It lets me be completely committed to the government.

I was very successful in business. I had a company that did more than $10 billion of revenue a year, made lots of money, and I don’t have it anymore. I used to joke that I was the only Commerce Secretary who had patents, but I have none because I had to divest all of them.

But I understand the Patent Office. I understand business. Donald Trump understands business. And we have really, really impressive people in this cabinet who are fun to work with, and you are going to see great things in the second year.

Howard Lutnick, thank you for joining All-In.

It was really fun talking.

Thank you.