915 - Hero Hedge feat. Joe Weisenthal (3/10/25)

All I wanna be is Il Joco.

All I wanna be is Il Joco.

We ain't got embraces.

All I wanna

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, March 10th, and in just a little bit, Felix and I will be talking to Joe Wisenthal of the Odd Lots podcast about tariffs, the markets, the economy, what you tune into this show to listen to.

But

I can't start today's show, and I can't really complete today's show without talking about

the, I don't know, the rendition, the kidnapping of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil that took place this weekend over in New York City.

He's

a Columbia grad student, a Columbia grad student graduate who has been basically kidnapped by ICE out of his house in New York City, leaving his wife eight months pregnant at home and been rendered to an ICE facility in Louisiana in what is obviously an attempt to separate him from legal counsel.

I mean,

I don't know what to say about this other than it is probably the most terrifying thing that's happened in recent memory in American politics.

Then one of the most nauseating and

truly frightening

in terms of its implications.

Because like this guy is a legal resident of the country.

He's a green card holder.

They initially said that they were just canceling his student visa and then they said they were canceling his green card.

I mean this is probably the most profound attack on freedom of speech that I can think of in my lifetime.

And this is something that I think everybody needs to be aware of and be active in raising awareness about, talking about, protesting.

I mean, I know it sounds stupid in light of, you know, armed agents of the state just disappearing political activists for political free speech.

But like, this is really something I think you should consider contacting your representative, your senator, your local government about.

And if there's a protest, uh on his behalf, I would also consider really looking into joining that because if they, I mean, mean, if they can do this to a green card holder, there's not much that will prevent them from doing it to anyone who's a U.S.

citizen.

But I just want to make clear here that, like, this is not an immigration issue.

This is a freedom of speech issue.

And I don't think it's in any way an exaggeration to state that the Zionist project and its supporters in this country are the single biggest threat to our constitutional rights that exist

today.

Yeah, no, this is even if this just was about immigration, it would be horrifying enough.

But it is not an exaggeration to say that declaring someone's legal status and personhood as they exist in the United States by the standards of Betar or the ADL.

This is

a horrifying line that we have crossed.

And, you know, I mean, like, in no public statement has...

Has Mahmoud been accused of a crime, convicted of a crime, or like they're not even pretending that that's the case.

And if you look at the statement put up by the White House today, it said he's being deported for Hamas-aligned activities.

Like, and I see a lot of supporters of this crowing about

anyone who provides material support for terrorism should be deported.

Well, providing material support for terrorism is a crime.

And if that crime has been committed, it's usually you're charged with it and it's adjudicated in a court of law.

I think we should think very seriously about what being Hamas-aligned entails.

He committed no crime, he committed no crime whatsoever.

He is having his rights stripped away from him because he is a pro-Palestinian activist.

He is Palestinian himself, and he was organizing protests to demand that the university that he is a member of divest from companies that profit off the genocide of his own people.

Like, I cannot stress this enough.

A green card holder is entitled to all of the First Amendment rights that a U.S.

citizen is.

A green card holder is represented by politicians like Chuck Schumer, who has yet to say anything about this.

And just to think about this in light of the endless bleeding that we've heard about freedom of speech and freedom of speech on campus and the dire threat that anti-Semitism poses to Jewish college students.

What are they going to, I mean, like, where are these people going to be when they start deporting Jewish American students for doing the exact same thing that Mahmoud is accused of, which is to say nothing at all?

He's being accused of having an opinion that is

anathema to the agents of Zionism in this country.

Yes, and making statements in support of Hamas,

that just means anything other than complete fealty and subservience to Israel.

There's no other definition.

This country is not exactly shy about charging people with material support for organizations on the terror watch list or officially designated or whatever.

There's endless people who are rotting away in federal facilities or who have been deported or otherwise charged with this for, you know, things that if it were anyone else, it were any other charge, it would not withstand

the light of day or a decent attorney.

But they are not even doing that.

There is so little here in the way of an actual crime being committed.

But that's kind of the point.

The point is to scare the shit out of people.

Yeah, the crime is not supporting Israel.

The crime is supporting Palestine.

That's the crime here.

And if that encompasses the way you feel, I mean, I think you have a duty to

be very, very active in this regard.

I mean, I'm thinking about this in the context of a Gallup poll I saw that was released just this past week that said for the first time ever, a majority of Americans are more sympathetic with Palestine than they are with Israel.

And I think you're going to see like as the, you know, like a the cossuid bubble of public opinion and support that exists for Israel in this country and has been maintained for decades now through

politicians that are bought and paid for and you know extensive propaganda apparatus.

As that continues to evaporate, and like the effectiveness of the previous sort of peaceful, the carrot shall we say of of uh support for israel and american public continues to evaporate we are going to see like i said i think we're going to see agents of of israel of the zionist project begin to get ever more feral and desperate and and violent in terms of how they uh literally police speech that that uh they find uh unacceptable going back to what Will said about how it may seem silly to contact your elected representative or go to a protest in light of armed agents carrying out renditions

at the behest of a fascist ethnostate.

I remember at the start of all this, we talked about how

these next four years or however long,

it could be a test of a lot of things.

It could be a test of how much you are willing to risk, how much you are willing to put yourself in the line of fire, how much some of these things may really mean to you.

Right now, with attending a protest or contacting your elected representative, I mean, if that feels silly, we'll fucking do it anyway.

Because the first test of that is, is any of this at least worth you potentially feeling silly or like an asshole or like you are fighting a losing battle?

Yeah.

If it's not, I don't know what the fuck you're doing.

Yeah.

It's worth at least trying

anything.

And, you know, just to go off that, like the intention here is to

stifle freedom of speech in this country, to stifle a political opinion that is essentially held by the majority of Americans.

So

take some strength from that because there are more of us than there are of them.

So the power here is in continuing to speak out, continuing to make your voice heard, continuing to share and using the rights that we do have for the time being in this country to make a statement of political speech, which is that Israel and its surrogates in this country have no fucking right to tell us to dictate terms to anyone in this country of what is and isn't acceptable or what does and doesn't constitute support for terrorism.

I remember

at the start of the first Trump term during the Muslim ban, where

it was definitely a different environment and tone and tenor.

But they did attempt like a similar idea and obviously a different application, a different time.

But the idea behind it, which is

to

use

people's legal status and their freedom of movement as a tool to scare the shit out of people.

That was the attempt.

And that was met with a critical mass of people, with an overwhelming response.

And I know that people don't have a very long memory for these things anymore, but it did effectively scare them.

It didn't totally stop the policy, but it stymied them.

And it did gum up the works enough to make a potentially more horrifying presidency much more ineffectual.

These things are absolutely worth doing.

And

one last thought I'll share on this is if you are a professor at Columbia University, if you're in any way associated with Columbia University, and your attitude towards this is, I'm just going to keep my head down until things blow over.

I would suggest that you consider keeping your head down on a walk from the Brooklyn Bridge to the East River.

Because, like,

I'm just going to keep my head down during this.

Just look away.

Just look away.

Look off the Brooklyn Bridge to the water below would be my advice to you.

Yeah, there is no point in you fucking being alive after this, if that's it.

If it's not this, if this is not worth your ire, then fucking what is?

I could go to your house and sell your fucking hideous family to the Sheikh from Taken, and you would keep your head down.

Like I said, I'm sure we will have more on this story in the weeks to come.

I don't have much more to say about it right now, but I would just like to say

to you

to Mahmoud Khalil and his family, his wife, we are thinking of you.

We're thinking of everyone who supports you.

And like I said, if you're listening to this, I would really, really encourage you to make your voice heard on this issue in any way, shape, or form that you can, if you feel the same way.

And I can't imagine why you wouldn't.

All right.

On to Joe Wisenthal.

Okay, we're back.

And

the topic for today is tariffs.

NASDAQ, the markets, the global economy, crypto, all things that I know I'm way out of my depth talking about and hate thinking about.

But good news is we are joined by someone who fits the bill.

Joe Wisenthal of the Odd Lots podcast is with us this week.

Joe, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Our pleasure.

I'd like to begin with tariffs.

Yeah.

I'm just going to begin here with, this is a headline from CNBC.

Trump rejects pleas from business for more clarity on tariffs.

They always say that.

I'm just going to read here a little bit.

It says, the S ⁇ P 500 fell 3.1% for its worst weekly marks in September.

The Dow

fell 2.37, while the NASDAQ composite shed 3.45.

At the center of the storm were Trump's tariffs, Trump's stiff 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, which were initially paused for a month, then restarted Tuesday, only to be rained in Wednesday, and then partially paused for another month on Thursday.

So, Joe, I'm just going to begin.

What is this?

What are the status of these tariffs?

And

what do the markets say?

What do they mean when they say they want clarity from Trump on this yeah I mean these are both really excellent questions and so my understanding is that as of today

most of um the tariff the meat of the tariffs have been postponed yet again there are some tariffs in place uh somewhere but most have been postponed yet again But this has been a very strange and, you know, I think for the market, difficult rollout because I think at least if we're talking about in the context of Canada and Mexico, which is the big surprise here, everyone sort of knew the tighter trade against China was coming.

You know, I think there's some ambiguity.

It's like, what exactly is Trump asking for?

I think there's clear unclarity about that.

In theory, if the tariffs are in place and they're set policies, then businesses can.

begin to make a plan.

And so if they say, okay, we supply this or we source this from Canada and it no longer makes sense to do that because of the tariffs, then, okay, we can start the long, multi-year process of perhaps building a factory in the United States or something.

But none of that could really be done until they know exactly what they're going to look at.

Because to actually respond to the tariffs in a meaningful way from the business perspective.

Like if they're going to take the multi-year plan and allocate billions of dollars to build some new supply side capacity in the U.S.

to avoid the tariffs, they're not going to to do that unless they know, okay, these are in place for the long term, et cetera.

So, I think when you just, when you ask about like clarity, what does that mean?

Businesses always say they want clarity, they want to know what the rules are.

I'm making air quotes, et cetera, because you hear it for years.

That's simply what that means: that you don't want to make any investment plans until you actually understand the nature of the trading.

Joe, that is something I've been curious about.

You see that from a lot of like the Trump boosters, like the Sean Maguire types who are saying,

why would anyone be against

increased U.S.

manufacturing capacity?

And then when there's sort of like this typical Trump one pattern of like a flare-up, then a mutual drawdown, and then like it looks like the original policy is going to be put in place in an incredibly diminished capacity, they'll turn around and go,

oh, you know, everyone was freaking out about nothing when they were just saying two days ago, we're going to completely remake the American economy.

But to take them sort of like at face value here, with the original purpose

for these tariffs, like the protectionist idea for them, has anyone ever done that?

Like, has anyone ever pulled that off where they have this consumer economy that really relies on like a credit, like a strong currency,

cheap imports, cheap consumer goods.

And then they turn around and they make it a production, a producer export economy,

presumably with no central planning because it would be under like an absurd austerity regime.

Like has has that ever happened?

I mean, I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but the main reason that the answer is no is that there's, you know, there's never been an economy like the United States before, just in terms of its sheer wealth, its sheer power, its sheer size, et cetera.

You know, I think, look, I'll say two things.

One is that, you know, there certainly is a track record for some developing countries, for example, of protecting domestic manufacturing infant industries, so to speak.

and then becoming manufacturing expert powerhouses and protecting their local uh you know their local champions their local players and i think a lot of there's a lot of success stories typically people point to east asia as an example of this and but to your point and you said it it's like these typically come with a plan in addition in the successful instances where a country has become a manufacturing powerhouse there is some sort of real plan such that the investment domestically has a chance of succeeding.

So for example, they might say, okay, we're going to protect this local car maker or this local sneaker maker or whatever it is.

And you're going to sell them to the market.

You're going to sell, you're going to export, and we're going to subsidize you.

And the way we're going to subsidize you contingent on

your proving success in foreign markets.

Because one risk, obviously, when you're protecting local industries is that they just take public money.

and they just give it all to shareholders and they just get fat and happy and they don't actually do anything.

And so one way to protect this is you have a handful of companies that are all competing and you say, okay, go out into the world, sell your, sell your goods, and whoever gets the biggest market share in Europe and the United States and Japan, et cetera, will provide you with more cheap credit, et cetera.

And those of you who can't compete overseas, we're going to leave you to die.

And that way you sort of protect against the

you protect against the risk of corruption and cronyism, et cetera.

So there are examples of that working.

There are also logical examples why any country might want to just have more manufacturing domestically.

And I think there's like two distinct categories of this that I can think of.

One is issues of sort of like national security things where you have some sort of existential danger if you're cut off.

That's arguably why we have a strategic petroleum reserve back when we didn't produce much oil.

You could imagine say like, you know what, we really need to have a factory capacity in the United States to produce PPE equipment, which we obviously lacked when the coronavirus hit.

So you could say these are areas in which it would be really bad not to have domestic manufacturing.

And then the other category you could say is, well, we really want to have domestic manufacturing at the cutting edge of tech, particularly.

you know, like things like semiconductors.

There's like high margin, very crucial for having a sort of advanced, rich economy.

It's really important that we always maintain some sort of lead, have national security implications, et cetera.

Like both of those are sort of, to my mind, logical reasons why you might want to not have the sort of classical views of free trade, so to speak.

But the word treaty with Canada, this is, or in Mexico, and this is the part that I've been having trouble wrapping my head around.

It's like, I don't see many categories in either.

I didn't see many categories that are either the sort of like critical for national security that we have the canada is making that we have to make here nor do i see the sort of cutting edge high margin stuff that's also really important here so it's uh it feels like we're in sort of to your point uncharted territory yeah yeah like prior to these really big blow-ups i mean with mexico i kind of feel like cheinbaub has a very good handle on how to handle trump at least for that she's very skilled yes yeah she's very candy.

She has pulled the, I'll get some guys to look into that move on him repeatedly.

And it just, I always think, that's his move.

How does he keep letting her do it?

But,

you know, with Canada, this is less of the case.

But before that,

one of their big explosive moves was like, it was increasing tariffs on Taiwanese chips, right?

Yeah.

And that, like, initially, I kind of thought the same thing I thought with a lot of their actions, which is like, you know, why are you just gutting all the

benchmarks of post-war prosperity?

This entire thing that was built for 50 years.

But then, you know, you actually think about it, and it does kind of make sense from that perspective.

Like, this idea that we would protect our own, like,

a nascent chip industry that would theoretically, yeah, not be

over there and couldn't just be overtaken by uh someone else but with canada it's like yeah

well the funny possibly yeah so the funny thing that you mentioned and i totally agree that shinebaum seems very um very skilled uh at managing the trump relationship in a way that like you know well uh now trudeau isn't there anymore But like, you know, obviously Trudeau and Trump are like a very different wavelengths.

The funny thing, though, is this was like, this has been the best thing that's happened for the Liberal Party in Canada because, you know, they were getting killed in the polls.

It certainly looked several weeks ago that at the upcoming national elections, that the Conservatives, led by Pierre Polyev, were going to win.

And now they're being rewarded for taking maximum hardballs.

So they're free, like they, there's.

you know, typically you would think there is this danger, like the leader has to stand but they risk uh to the economy and so they play this game chicken but they really want to hurt their economy etc and then that makes a sort of negotiating difficult it actually looks like the canadian side has had a very easy time with the negotiations because they're getting rewarded so politically to play maximum hardball they haven't had to offer they haven't really offered much of anything and they've been pretty comfortable going um going tit for tat the ontario uh leader I forget the title,

I don't know, Dun Ford, he announced, you know, he's been totally

in alignment with the Liberal Party, even though he's a conservative.

He announced there's going to be a 25%

tax on Canadian electricity.

And so like

Scheinbaum seems to be playing it well from the Mexican side.

But actually the Canadian Liberal Party seems to have it very easy because they're getting rewarded in the polls for just refusing to budget.

Yeah.

I mean, like, like going back to the policy on the whole, it does seem emblematic of like a very specific to Trump too issue that they're having, which is you kind of see it in all their signature policies that they're kind of split down the middle.

Like,

Israel, it's sort of like Israel policy.

Like, on one hand, they are doing at times like this George H.W.

Bush-Reagan type thing, where they will treat Israel like any other American ally or vassal or proxy, and it will drive a lot of people in Israeli politics absolutely nuts.

But then on the other hand, it does seem like they're accepting policy dictates from like Betar or like someone insane or like Miriam.

With this, it's like the trade policy is, on one hand, it reminds me of like those people who they're like 37 and they're like, yeah, I think this is the year I get my shit together and I start a family.

That's what America is saying that we're going to start a domestic chip industry that replaces Taiwan's capacity.

That is the national equivalent of that.

Well, keep going.

Then on the other hand, it's this weird, like,

the only explanation I can give, but at least that's coherent, right?

Like, you kind of get what they're going for.

On the other hand, this Canadian

Mexican policy that you've talked about, it seems like Trump just like remembered that in 2016, he won partly on NAFTA and thought, oh yeah, NAFTA, right.

Those two countries, let's do something with that.

Yeah,

I mean, the tensions within this administration on economic policy in general are extremely stark.

And, you know, one thing I've been thinking a lot about is in 2016, you know, the night, you know, the markets liked Hillary.

So, you know, when it looked like Hillary was doing better, the markets went up during the campaign.

When it looked like Trump was doing better, markets went down.

The night of the election, famously, stock futures plunged once it became clear that Trump was going to win.

And then, you know, of course, like that first Trump administration was like a very normy Republican.

They did a tax cut.

And that is about it.

Right.

And like, the, you know, stocks did great during his administration.

It was pretty, and, you know, there was probably deregulation.

When he won this time,

you just had everyone on Wall Street sort of like, okay, we're going to get the tax cut and we're going to get deregulation and we're going to get liberalization of merger and acquisition rules.

And everything just went through the moon for a few weeks.

You know, every stock, every crypto is hit or which we can talk about later.

You know, it all shot up right afterwards.

And then it's been like this reversal.

A, interestingly enough, the new FTC chief has kept Lina Khan's merger guidelines in place.

So it's not clear that we're going to get a sort of liberalized M ⁇ A regime.

But then also you have

the serious, you know, yeah, like they're going to push for maintaining the tax cuts.

But outside of that, you know, this would not be Wall Street's number one pick by any measure of where to start politically.

It wouldn't even be the tech industries.

You know, there's like various stools.

There's the Wall Street backers.

There's sort of tech people who really came around to Trump and Trumpism over the last several years.

I don't think it's going to be any of their priority, the tariff stuff, but this is where it's beginning, and you sort of, you know, see the reaction.

But I do think it like from day one, it was obvious that there were going to be some like very deep economic splits in preferences.

And from my perspective, like this

was always going to be the story of like from a, you know, from the podcast covering the next four years.

I didn't quite expect it to cut me so stark right at the beginning of the administration.

Well, Joe, a point you made recently that stuck out to me was that obviously in MAGA part two,

leaders, you know, American firms and the people who work for them, we saw an article in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

They feel very liberated now that wokeness is over and they can speak freely about calling people gay retards.

But however, this freedom, it doesn't really seem to apply to like them openly sharing their opinions on Trump's tariff tariff policies.

No, it's funny.

Yeah, like if you ask a CEO right now, and I've watched financial TV over the last several days, if you ask the CEOs, they're really careful with their words.

Like, you would not think that they suddenly entered into a land in which they can just sort of speak their mind freely without

fear of reprisal.

Like, they're very going, well, we need to see more clear what the goal is here.

And of course, you know, it's very, very awkward, uncomfortable, practiced words, and they don't really say anything.

Look, can I read their minds?

No, I can strongly guess the vast majority of these CEOs hate the tariffs and think this is terrible policy.

And but very few are going to just say that.

They're going to, yes, they're being very careful.

Well, I mean, when this administration was incoming,

I wouldn't say I was excited about this, but I was certainly interested to see what the promise of these tariffs, like, would that be fulfilled?

Because heretofore I had assumed that, like, something so fundamental to the structure of global free trade and the U.S.

economy, I assume things like that were sort of removed from democratic consideration.

Yeah.

And I don't know, like, that question is still sort of open.

Because, like, what's going on here?

Like, they keep announcing it, and then they keep walking it back.

Like, you can take what they say at face value that, like, they intend these tariffs to, you know, raise billions of dollars to offset, you know, money that they're not raising through taxes.

And then it will also stimulate reshoring American manufacturing and things like that.

But, like, it doesn't seem like there's, it doesn't seem like there's much of a plan to accomplish the second part

of

this equation.

But I guess I'm wondering, like, can this be seen, is this a promise or is this a negotiating tactic?

And, like, how does this relate to a concept that you've talked about on the show?

Oral intuition is a concept.

You quote from a Jesuit scholar here in terms of like, what does one to make of these

pronouncements and then like the sort of, I don't know, the fizzling out of what it implies.

Yeah, you know, one of the funny things about Trump, I think obviously, you know, at this point, everyone sort of recognizes that he's, I was extraordinarily gifted at communicating in the year 2025.

He had for many years, he's had a sort of ability to get his message across across to the public in a way through sound wipes, through slogans, through insults, et cetera, in a way that's just like uncanny and he's funny.

And most people, most politicians just can't pull it off.

And one of the sort of like hobby horse I've had ideas that I've had, and the world is becoming more oral.

You know, in the age of pre-literacy, you think Homer, et cetera, you think, okay, everything has to be rhythmic, repetitive, viral, because if it's forgotten, then it disappears.

And so virality in the sort of oral age was required.

And that carries with it all kinds of interesting implications of how people think.

But there was a quote in Trump in 2016.

He was asked, he was like, something about bashing his opponents.

And he's like, oh, is that presidential?

And now people don't really ask him that anymore because everyone's sort of gotten over that and knowing.

But he's like, well, I'm winning.

I'm winning the race for the presidency right now.

This is March 2016.

He's like, therefore, it's presidential.

This idea that, like, if you're the president, it's presidential.

And so you think about like, you, many people would look at the back and forth on the tariffs.

Say, you know, they would say, this is crazy.

This isn't how world leaders are supposed to behave.

This is how, this isn't how presidents are supposed to behave.

You know, presidents are supposed to be steadfast and resolute, and they say one thing.

And, you know, you have these various adjectives and characteristics.

that you associate with what that term presidential.

And I think to Trump, he doesn't really buy that because he's the president.

He won.

And so he is per se presidential.

And so all of this back and forth stuff, which, again, I'm not sure it's a good, you know, other people can decide whether it's a good negotiating strategy.

I think to him, in sort of they sort of different logical framework from which he's thinking, from which his mind operates,

that is presidential.

Now, you know, like, I want to go back to something you said in the beginning of your question.

There is this tension on the tariff that's really interesting, which is like, what are they for?

So let's say they were in place.

There is one argument that like it's a revenue raiser.

And so you have this idea of like, oh, we're going to have tariffs or we're not going to be income tax.

I actually already doubt that's plausible, but setting it aside, that's a thing people say.

And then there's the idea, well, if we have tariffs, then we can have, we're going to rebuild U.S.

manufacturing.

But right now, it's not really clear like what the goal, like, it's not clear that those can coexist.

I mean, for one thing, if you imagine we consumed everything we bought here, we stopped importing, then we wouldn't have tariff revenue anymore.

And then that wouldn't be a very big source of revenue.

It wouldn't be able to replace the income tax.

So

part of the indicator and part of like what's perhaps confused Wall Street and many others about the tariffs is this idea of we don't even know what the goal is for the US economy because the administration themselves says different things.

Yeah, I think that makes it sort of, it's all very ambiguous, let alone, speaking of goals, goals, we don't even really fully know the ask of Canada.

Something to do with fentanyl, maybe, but it's not really clear like what the deliverable is for Canada because like, okay, I'm sad.

Well, if Russia invades, we want to be able to make our own fentanyl.

Joe,

before these tariffs are announced, how would you describe the economic relationship between the United States, Canada, and Mexico?

And conversely, what would be some of the goods that we would see really affected should these tariffs be instructed?

Well, I would say there are sort of two main things, which is one is the big auto companies all have supply chains that crisscross the borders in some cases several times.

You could imagine, for example, you know, I'm just making this up, you could imagine a steering wheel.

and then it crosses the border somewhere else to get the airbag put in it and then it crosses the border somewhere else to get attached to the thing that you know you uh for the uh windshield wipers whatever they have very

complex supply chains across the borders multiple times.

And that includes both Mexico and Canada.

If you go to Ontario, a lot of auto parts companies there, a lot of U.S.

companies have factories,

in some cases for final assembly, I believe, in Mexico.

So that exists.

And then the other big one is a lot of things related to agricultural goods.

And so some of that might be like fresh fruits and vegetables coming up through Mexico.

Some of that might be grain or meat coming in from Canada.

Dairy is obviously something that we get from Canada.

And then things like potash, so that's important for fertilizer and growing.

So it's really, and then from Canada, obviously oil and electricity.

And there are certain pipelines that come in from Canada to get oil.

I think those will be exempted in any.

tariff regime.

I don't think there's much political appetite to just sort of mechanically raise the price of oil because you see that in the price of gasoline.

But yeah, it's basically a lot of things related to do with auto and then some energy commodities and then a lot of agriculture.

One of the things that's striking to me about

the U.S.-Mexico relationship is I've been following Claudia Scheinbaum and the way she's been dealing with sort of these public pronouncements and these negotiations is that in her public statements about it, she is always referencing the equal equal relationship between two sovereign nations.

And she's always talking about not just the sovereignty of Mexico, but that all negotiations must be conducted as among equals.

And if someone raises an eyebrow to that, you might think, well, the United States is a much wealthier, bigger country than Mexico.

But like in terms of a trade relationship, Mexico and the United States are equals.

I mean, like, we import so much from Mexico.

Yeah, we are very reliant on Mexico for many, many things.

This is the tension, which that one country's reliance you know reliance goes in both directions so you know even if you're talking about us and china i mean the u.s is incredibly reliant on china for all kinds of manufactured goods by the same token china is incredibly reliant on the us for any demand for all of its manufactured goods.

There's not a big substitute for the sheer wealth of the U.S.

consumer.

So that means employment and, you the ongoing economic development in China.

But I think it's the same, you know, when you think about the in trade, both parties are

sort of equally reliant on something.

And so, yeah, the US is very reliant on Mexican produce and other things like that.

And of course, parts for cars and so forth.

And the flip side is that, you know, Mexico is very reliant on the US for money and dollars and everything we buy from them.

I think there is a a point to what she makes, basically, you know, and especially just thinking about it geographically.

If there were some islands out in the middle of nowhere that the U.S.

had a trading relationship, and if we just want to cut them off, you know, we probably could and find some other, ultimately find some other partner for them.

But these are like, you know, the there's an integral, a fairly integrated economic block, Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.

We don't, we can't like swap out our neighbors in this case.

And so, you think about like supply chains and something, you know, there's nothing like being able to ship something by truck across those borders.

And so, in the end, I think like all three countries are pretty reliant on each other in some deep ways, whether we're talking about the flow of money or we're talking about the flow of goods that makes it hard, even for a country as rich as the United States to say, like, oh, we're done with you.

Like, I think that's really tough.

We're just about ready to land.

Are you worried about a recession?

Maria Bertarov will ask you, and you kind of hesitated.

I'll tell you what, of course, you hesitate.

Who knows?

All I know is this: we're going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we're going to become so rich, you're not going to know where to spend all that money.

I'm telling you, you just watch.

We're going to have jobs, we're going to have open factories, it's going to be great, and the plane is landing, and thank you for a lot of good questions.

I'd like to move on now to questions of a question of political will.

And I'd like to highlight a statement made by the Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Bennett, the other day in New York City.

He said, quote, access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream, which is, you know, in a certain context, could be seen as

a very brave, courageous stand to take.

However, in a context in which housing, healthcare, and education are more expensive than they've ever been,

what does it say about like, what do you think the American public feels about the American dream right now and how cheap, whether cheap consumer goods are a part of that or not?

I mean, I think there's

a lot of us who like, I don't know, spiritually or somewhere deep down, I think there's a lot of people for whom a line like that, like, it's, it sort of resonates.

Yeah, that would be good if we weren't like all buying a bunch of random stuff in Costco or whatever.

But like, there is a sense in which people like the idea of like sacrifice, you know?

And I would say two things.

One is I think the idea of a sort of collective sacrifice really does require a lot of political buy-in from people.

And so people are just like, well, what is the end vision here?

What are we going to get at the other end for our sacrifice?

And obviously, the U.S.

is like a pretty divided country politically.

It's not clear what we're going to get at the other end.

But inherently,

I think one could envision a world in which, like, okay, like we're going to sacrifice cheap goods that we and sporting equipment and electronic equipment and various things like that are going to become more scarce because there's something more wholesome, right?

There's something, there's something more fulfilling on the other end.

I think a lot of people kind of like the sound of that, but again, I don't think there's, I'm skeptical that the political buy-in exists because I don't think people know what the end looks like, you know, or

very divided and so forth.

In the meantime, people really don't like paying more for for stuff, as we saw over the last four years.

And, you know, look, look, progress, economic progress is in some sense about more and more cheap goods, right?

We put in a certain amount of hours a day at work and with our wages, hopefully every 10 years, you can buy more with that than you can the previous 10 years.

or 10 years earlier or a year earlier.

Like that is sort of, it's hard to actually come up with some other measure of economic progress besides in its core, being able to consume more with less.

And that's what the word cheap implies.

So like,

yeah, in theory, like, A, sure, great, like, there's more to life than cheap goods.

But ultimately, what we want is,

well, what does that look like?

And then what does economic progress look like if it's something other than getting more stuff for the same amount of

The counterpoint that I have seen people offer to that that I think is interesting is this idea that the thing that would eventually replace cheap goods would be goods that cost a lot more and are manufactured here or partly manufactured here, but of such higher quality that

it's like a barber coat or like Red Wing boot.

Sure.

They last much longer.

But at the end of the day, that is sort of the same argument.

It is kind of argued.

You're buying less boots because you have the same boots for 30 years.

But

I do think there's something worthwhile there.

That said,

that said,

you're definitely right.

Yeah, that the idea of

bringing sacrifice to the American people in 2025 in like after a 51-48.5 election or 40-49.5

in like a sort of

popularity anywhere between 40 to 60, 55, 45, not in your favor.

I mean, crazier things have happened, I guess, but what are the odds, right?

Yeah, no, I think it's really tough.

And I think that, you know, one of the risks that Trump and Elon have is the idea of, I don't know what their information diet looks like.

I think Trump likes to watch that, the networks and cable news.

But I think Elon seems to be swimming in an information world of sort of echo chamber, so to speak.

And so he may, it's possible that if he sort of overstates or believes that in a, that there is a greater popularity or greater universality, perhaps he doesn't see any criticism.

of uh this sort of economic path.

I don't really know.

But maybe he thinks all the buy-in is already there.

I don't think it is.

And again, I think part of it is because I don't think we really know what that, like, what we're going to get from our theoretical sacrifice, what that looks like.

Now,

by the way, just to your earlier point, there's not really a trade-off as I see it.

On, you know, it's like a spectrum of like, we could have like nice things that are cheap and they last a long time.

That's quality.

That's great.

And like, I love stuff like that.

But at the end of the day, that doesn't really change the equation that what we want is sort of more consumptive power for anything, whether it's high-quality goods, whether it's more goods, for the amount of time that we like put in and have to lay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

What you said about like Elon's reading of the room, this is a problem.

This is something that

we talked about very early on before even, I think, in like right the first like month after he was forced to buy Twitter, that they were going to not just elon but just sort of like the right in america as a whole and maybe in the western world they were going to run a risk very similar uh to what happened to liberals and specifically uh people on the hillary 2016 campaign and the elizabeth warren campaign into a smaller scale the morales campaign for new york city mayor where staffers uh their their timelines are so curated yeah there is there is such a sort of amplifying effect where you go deeper and deeper into

bubbles where

you overstate the amount of not just support, but like recognition for these concepts and ideas.

Yeah.

You can inundate yourself with, there's so much content deluge.

You can inundate yourself with so much.

that you stare at your phone for 12 hours and then you go outside and you're like, everyone is noticing, you know,

a fucking single moms are making their kids gay.

Everyone's talking about it.

And then you talk to someone and they go, what the fuck are you talking about?

You sound insane.

The same thing could happen where you go, everyone loves paying $24 per egg.

Yeah, I think it's a real risk.

And I don't think anyone is really above me,

including Elon.

I mean, look, we're supposed to have...

you know, obviously elections are

one mechanism by which the public records

how it feels about how things are going.

But in the meantime, you know, there's polls and obviously now like social media is another sort of like daily election, so to speak, or

daily poll.

And I think if you're Elon or if you're certain people, you can, it's very easy to construct a world in which every day, you know, you have

universal 100% or close to that approval ratings.

And it seems risky, but it, you know, but it really gets to the core of the question of like well how much uh is there the buy-in for the the sacrifice i think the short you know like we don't really know what's going to happen with prices yet or whether tariffs are going to cause higher prices or whether inflation is going to pick back up etc

the most clear thing to my mind in the short term or in the immediate term is just like what's been happening with the stock market which does hit a pretty wide swath of people.

It's how people pay for education.

It's how people retire the base of like pensions and so forth.

And the feedback is like pretty quick on that.

And I think it can change the vibes.

And so to see like this pretty sharp deterioration, some of it, you know, I'm open to the idea that there's like the economy was slowing or the Trump's coming into office for various reasons.

Maybe the fence should have been more aggressive about cutting rates, whatever.

But, you know, One of the ideas that people talk about is like a Trump put.

So this idea that like at some point the stock market hits a level where he's like, I'm going to backtrack, et cetera.

And everyone wants to know where that is.

Everyone's trying to calibrate.

Oh, if we go down another 10%, does that mean we don't get tariff?

Like this is like a source of a lot of discourse and like Wall Street research and stuff like that.

But right now, like the continued message seems to me that like.

whether we're talking about like social media discourse, whether we're talking about lost reaction, so far there's no indication of like we're going to slow the trend up yet.

Well, I mean, according to the NASDAQ, SP, and Dow Joe, stocks have just gotten a lot cheaper.

So

everyone can buy them now.

Pay for retirement and education.

So that's one thing that's getting cheaper.

Yeah, that's right.

Business president.

This is it.

He's watching the stock market.

He knows all about, you know, he doesn't want the market to go down.

And now we've got tariffs and the market has been going down.

Well, not much.

I mean, in all fairness.

You said, look, we're going to have a disruption, but we're okay with that.

Is that what you meant?

The stock market going down was the disruption.

What other disruption were you alluding to?

Look, what I have to do is build a strong country.

You can't really watch the stock market.

If you look at China, they have a hundred-year perspective.

We have a quarter.

We go by quarters.

That's true.

And you can't go by that.

You have to do what's right.

What we're doing is we're building a tremendous foundation for the future.

Joe, I talked about Besnett,

Secretary of the Treasury, but there's also Howard Luttnick, who is Trump's Commerce secretary.

What can you tell us about

who they are, where they come from, and what their general macroeconomic philosophy is and how it might be guiding this current Trump administration?

Sure.

I think, so Scott Besson,

the Treasury Secretary,

what I would say is,

he used to work for Soros

and was a sort of like Soros right-handed man for a long time.

Then he started his own macro hedge fund.

You know, I think he has economic views that are like pretty well within the mainstream of like normie economics.

Some of it like a sub, I've been actually pretty impressed by.

He wrote this pretty great piece about Abenomics back in the day and Shinzo Abe.

And he has a really deep understanding of Japan and like pretty like, you know, like smart stuff.

Nothing like extraordinary groundbreaking.

He said some interesting things on a podcast a while back when it looked like he might be, you know, when people are starting to pay attention to him as a key name within the Trump orbit.

This idea of, okay, we want other

rethinking international security.

So we want the way we're going to pair security with our debt is like countries have to commit to buying long-term American debt.

And then they'll be under the U.S.

security umbrella.

So that is sort of interesting,

you know, but again, you know, I think it's like fairly mainstream.

Howard Lutnik, you know, I think his background, it's a very trader background.

So you think like Vesta is sort of like the macro guy and

likes thinking about things like albinomics and stuff like that.

Lutnick shop, Canter Fitzgerald, it's like a very like trading oriented thing.

And so like, I think that's like more of the culture of like poker and guys who like to make bets on stuff.

And on the in that world,

thinking too much about macroeconomics probably holds you back.

You know, you don't want to be too smart about stuff because then you like start getting in your own head.

There's a bet.

You like, make it.

The odds are in your favor.

The odds are against you.

And so you're just like always betting.

And so that's the world he comes out of.

So like, I don't think anyone like has a strong sense of like what Howard Lutnick's like take on global macro economic policy is.

I doubt he had one.

I'm not really sure.

But like, that's just like not the kind of background he came from.

Besides, being at the hedge fund, where he had to make these big macro batches, he's an economic thinker,

more of the trader background.

And so I think like, it's interesting because

before Trump decided on treasury secretaries, and it really seemed like those were the two names in large contention.

A lot of people in Wall Street wanted to see

Besant get their job because he sort of understood to be a fairly, you know, a deep thinker.

You know, the first Trump administration, Mnuchin was seen as an excellent pick, and that within the broad cabinet, like some better, some worse, Mnuchin stands out in people's memories.

It's like, for all the chaos in that administration, like Mnuchin was rock solid.

And so I think there was a hope that it's like, okay, Besant is going to be that for Trump, that he may surround himself with this whole cast of characters, but Besant will play that Mnuchin role of sort of being the ballast, the stabilizer.

And

that might be accurate, but it's interesting in the trade talk specifically, it feels like we're hearing from Lutnik quite a bit more.

And I think Bessant, we haven't heard from him as, you know, he's given interviews, but he's been within the sort of the chorus of various voices speaking for this administration.

I wouldn't say he's like established himself as like the anchor or like the voice.

He sort sort of uh feels like he's sort of um he's one of the cast i think like trump won is an incredibly useful framework to look at this all through and uh like in the first month of this i thought about trump won a lot because during that and especially the first year of that there's this sense of them uh you know doing the frank grounds thing going into the fuse box and zapping themselves But there was always like right before they could do something crazy, it seemed like there were guide rails.

Whether it was, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sitting him down in a room and going, you're going to die, we're going to kill you, or it was something much more subtle,

or just, you know, him backing off.

There was a sense of like, okay, we're going to go exactly this far and then revert to the mean of what a Republican in, you know, 2017, 2018 is.

This time, it does not seem like there are bumpers or

guardrails.

And it does make me think, like, we previously had, like, I think we joked that Mnuchin was like the perfect American version of an Otto von Bismarck, that our Bismarck would be a guy who produced Suicide Squad.

But yeah,

the Mnuchin stand-in now is...

lacks any of Mnuchin's powers because Mnuchin

did seem to have some special insight on how how to like talk Trump down.

And I think a lot of what we saw is like guardrails or bumpers or maybe people threatening him obliquely with it, you know, within the American government to get more fantastical about it.

That was all probably Mnuchin, or a lot of it at least, because we do know that Mnuchin did things like talk about an invasion of Venezuela and tons of.

really crazy ideas that were being floated around by both sort of like neoconservative elements within the administration and

every bad idea from Bannonites to the Jared and Navanka faction.

I think that like Bessett could have fulfilled a similar role, but yeah, just the dynamic is such that he either lacks his Mnuchin's personal persuasive powers, or it's just the personnel are laid out differently.

I don't know.

I mean, I think the big difference is the existence of Elon and the fact that that Trump from day one sort of outsourced, I don't know if that's the right word, but, you know, gave Elon this extraordinary role within his administration to carry out his agenda that there's no real precedent for in history.

To some extent, the various

bureau chiefs, secretaries, implicit, you know, to some extent, they report to Elon or, you know, Elon can say all of their employees have to send an email every week about what they're doing, what they're doing, et cetera.

I think that's really new.

I mean, who knows?

It's hard to, you know, how would Mnucha have operated in that environment?

I think it's really difficult to know.

You know, maybe, maybe there's like, oh, Mnucha would have, would never have stood for this, would never have, who knows where they, how, how these things go.

But also, like, you know, other, others, many people have made this point.

Like, Trump understands

the executive executive branch of the u.s government much better than he did when he took office in early 2017 and so he's hitting you know he's obviously hitting the ground running in a way that would have been impossible the first time around when he had never been there before didn't didn't have his feet on the ground etc you know they paid years to prepare for this i mean the whole like you know they didn't think they were going to win last time and the people around them didn't think they were going to win and there wasn't the full like media apparatus and think tank apparatus all of that that sprung up over the last several years about what to do with trump as a vehicle they were like starting from scratch basically and so yeah the uh the idea of it's really hard to know but like it's not surprising that you know they know where the fuse box is right now so to speak and they could just start going there they can just start going there immediately yeah and that like um in the first administration that was like a huge source of tension within Trump World that the administration was staffed by like, you know, these perceived never Trumpers and like Bush 2

and even like Obama alumni, just because it's like, yeah, you know, they didn't expect to win.

So they never thought, okay, how do we staff like our State Department?

This time, they definitely did not have that problem.

No, no, it's it, and it's evident.

It's a very different, different dynamic.

There's a full bench, there's a full slate of names, both obviously at the top level on down, and like, you know, people who are on the team.

So I don't want to let too much time go for it.

I have to ask you about something that I'm genuinely baffled by.

And that is the, and that is the announcement of an American strategic crypto reserve.

Yeah.

Like, first of all, like,

the idea that crypto is a strategic asset,

I don't know what even to say about that, but like, this to me seems the equivalent of like, if the like like railroad or oil barons of a previous era got to start their own bank that was capitalized directly by the U.S.

government.

I mean, the only difference being is that like oil and railroads are like useful to the economy.

Like, what is this strategic crypto reserve?

Like, what under what circumstance would we have to tap into the global strategic crypto reserve?

What if we're at war and we need to buy Molly?

I mean, like, it's, I have no idea.

You know,

Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lomes has been talking about this idea for a while that, like, you know, we need to, the U.S.

should have, should be stockpiling Bitcoin because in Bitcoin specific, you know, Bitcoin was going to be the new, you know, the new reserve asset in the future and something, something.

Honestly, it's hard for me to articulate the logic because I, the, I, the logic is so far-fetched to me.

I mean, but actually, like, we.

Like, I can articulate the logic surrounding tariffs, but like, this is something where my like analytic capacities fail me.

Yeah, because it's like, oh, we're hedging against the collapse of the US dollar, but then if the dollar collapses, like, what are we all doing here?

I mean, should the U.S.

government be hedging against the collapse of our currency?

That's

like something.

I mean, this is exactly like the right question, which is like, you're right, you're talking like, should the U.S.

government be hedging against the collapse of the U.S.

government?

Because like, right?

That's actually what it is.

It's just like, what is the scenario where, like, that makes sense?

Like, because that's really what you're saying.

Like, a currency doesn't just collapse overnight.

It collapses because the government collapses.

And so, as it's not sure, you're saying, well, we need a hedge in case the U.S.

government collapses.

But I would rather the U.S.

government not collapse or take steps to avoid a collapse.

rather than so I don't really understand anyway, but this idea has been out there and some, but to their credit, not all of the Bitcoiners have been championing this idea.

You know, then the crypto industry writ large obviously really got into

sort of swarmed around Trump or the last several years.

And so then he put out this tweet in which he named some others and he said, we're going to have XRP.

and Solano, which, you know, it's like, and Cardano and these random coins.

And then over the weekend, Dave and Sachs, who is the crypto czar, came out with a tweet and explained it.

And it's, it's going to be two things.

One is that they're just going to consolidate various coins that have been seized over the years in criminal seizures, and they're going to hold on to them.

All right.

It seems whatever.

Like, they want to give it a name.

It probably does make sense on some level to like have all of these be organized

and put together so that they can keep track of it all and if they want to call it something whatever there also is a line in there about they're not gonna buy any more bitcoin so in the end it's not like some huge reserve that's going to hedge against whatever it's a fairly modest sum but it's worth several billions of dollars because there have been a lot seized over the years.

But then there's been a line about deficit neutral means of further acquisition and i don't really know what that means so i guess they're saying one thing they're not gonna do they're not just gonna go out and like borrow money and buy bitcoin or you know use tax dollars directly to buy bitcoin or whatever so okay but like could it mean like some gold gets sold for bitcoin and gold i guess it's conceivable uh there is no more gold there is no more gold that's been replaced by shit coins and fortnox it's it's all meme coins now they're starting their own dark web drug market, I guess.

That's what it means.

I mean, like, this is such a Bobby Axe move.

We tricked them.

We destroyed the US dollar, our own currency.

But we went long on Bitcoin, which for some reason is responding positively to the reserve currency of the world collapsing.

Right.

Like,

in what fucking universe does...

like the America is

it's it's over but Bitcoin threw the roof this is actually interesting you know there's an interesting phenomenon which is that like some people were fairly right you know they'll be like oh bitcoin has gold like properties it could be a new global reserve currency kind of like gold etc and yet it holds value because people have decided it's valuable yeah

whatever but the the interesting thing is that bitcoin as a thing that trades does not trade anything but gold it trades like a tech stock so if if you overlay a chart with a Bitcoin and the NASDAQ, they don't look tremendously different.

And so, when you know, I talked about that post-election rally, everything went up.

And then you can see it all sort of peaked around the same time.

And this has been a phenomenon for a long time where, like, at least on a day-to-day basis or a week-to-week basis, cryptocurrencies more or less kind of look like stocks when you chart them against each other.

And so, even if theoretically Bitcoin has these sort of inherent properties that are gold-like, and other people can have that debate, there's no evidence in the market that they behave as such.

And so to your point, like every time there has been some sort of like big collapse in markets, March 2020, when the coronavirus really hit is sort of the most obvious example.

Every time when people are feeling like, oh, there's existential risk here, we're really worried Bitcoin has gone down there has never been a period that i can recall in which people are like losing their minds running around like oh i'm selling everything i'm selling my stock i'm selling my bonds but i'm buying bitcoin could it happen at some point in the future anything could happen but there is no evidence that as a trading or as an investment asset it behaves in the way that they claim i'm just

By the way, this is me saying this.

This is not Joe saying this.

It's hard to see the crypto reserve, as it's called, as anything except like a David Sachs enrichment project.

When I look at the actual utility, that seems to be the only case because all the stated reasons and goals just seem pretty self-defeating besides that.

It's certainly,

you know, he claimed that he had like divested a bunch of stuff.

I guess, but we'll have to see.

But like, I will say this, like the idea of like the president of the United States, like tweeting out specific tickers of random coins, I kind of get the Bitcoin thing, or I kind of, like, there is a world in which,

not the reserve, but there is a world in which I can see why the president is talking about Bitcoin.

Like, if I strain, well, like, when you see the president of the United States, like, tweeting about, oh, Solana and Cardano and all of these, yeah, it's very good for an industry that's been very,

very good to him over the last several years.

Yeah, I never want to hear about Solana again.

Like the other ones, the other ones, whatever.

Solana is like a currency in a free-to-play game.

I never want to hear about it.

I hate the name.

I hate how it looks.

So I got a quote here from Trump over the weekend.

He said, yeah, quote, from this day on, America will follow the rule that every Bitcoin knows very well.

Never sell your Bitcoin.

That's a phrase that they have.

I don't know if that's right or not.

Who the hell knows, right?

Like, Trump doesn't know anything.

He doesn't, he understands cryptocurrency about as well as I do.

I just think he knows that, like, people who love

crypto love him and give him lots of money.

You know what?

I think it is like he has some great.

I mean, look, this is another one of those things where, like, Trump has pretty great intuitions.

Someone tweeted, so I forget who.

After the

announcement, that, like, if you don't know what like Cardano is, like, go ask your taxi driver.

Your taxi driver knows what Cardano is.

And actually, like, I think that's spot on.

Like, even like people within the crypto industry or like the big crypto influencers at the VCs who take crypto seriously, like, you know, like the co-hosts of the all-in podcast and so forth, they like denigrate, you know, they'll sneer at Cardano.

So, you know, that's not really, that's not a real coin.

No one's bullying that coin, whatever.

But if you go out like in the real world and, you know, talk to to your borber they definitely heard of cardano and they're into

trump is trump i think he's going to put like his mention of those part of it is like to your point like yes many in the crypto industry professionally um will like his support for the industry but there's something even further actually in which i think he has his finger on the pulse of the average person out on the street who has some money in crypto yeah yeah that makes sense.

Okay, Joe, this is, before I get you out of here, I got one, one final question for you.

Okay, now this is why people tune into our podcast for financial advice.

So, Joe, in your professional opinion, is the U.S.

economy headed towards a recession?

In my professional opinion, there are real,

even prior to the tariff back and forth, There were some real risks emerging in the U.S.

economy.

The housing market is pretty mediocre.

The labor market has been slowing down.

The hiring rate is not great, et cetera.

There's already tension at the state and local level on the finances that are going to cause layoffs, et cetera.

Add into it all of the Doge cuts that we've seen and we saw today.

There was a headline that Harvard University is having a hiring freeze because they're concerns about federal funding.

that Stanford announced the same thing about a week and a half ago, et cetera.

So you have add in the Doge stuff,

add in the stock market decline, which is a negative wealth effect.

People are like, oh, maybe we don't need to take that vacation.

We don't need to eat out tonight because I'm feeling a little anxious because

the money in the account has gone.

And now add in the negative shock that the sort of tariff fact involved could have on investment because all those CEOs are

awaiting that clarity that they're so desperate for.

I believe that there is real risk of a recession.

And add in the fact that normally given these recession risks that we're talking about, you know, the impulse is for the Fed to keep cutting rates to offset some of the weakness, but they're anxious about the tariffs because they also have their,

they're worried about the effect that tariffs are going to have on inflation.

And so there is a risk that the Fed

finds itself behind the curve, not cutting as fast as perhaps they should.

And because they're anxious about the tariffs and what that's going to do to inflation, the risks are certainly not.

I mean, speaking for myself myself personally, I am very disturbed by what I consider to be a leading recession indicator, which is the number of commercials I see on TV for whole body deodorant.

If this is a product that's getting sold, people are going to be wearing barrels and selling pencils on the street corner pretty soon.

That's just, that's just how I feel.

I don't know how valid that is.

Just check that out.

Whole body deodorant signal.

Whole body deodorant signal could be, it could become one of those like famous Wall Street indicators that people look at

and all sorts of.

I think that's incredibly astute.

Like full-body deodorant is that if they had that 100 years ago, that would be the first thing you would buy after getting off a steamboat on Ellis Island.

That's right.

Okay.

Joe, I want to thank you for joining us.

The podcast is odd lots.

Thanks, Joe Wiesenstall, for coming on and talking to us a little bit about the economy.

Anytime.

I have one more pitch to you to begin by saying, shout out and love to everyone in New York City who came out this weekend to see Ephesus at Lincoln Center and IFC.

I would just like to continue to pitch you, haha, on this wonderful movie.

I don't know if you noticed, but it's been receiving some absolutely rave reviews.

It is the critics pick across the board.

It's been called the best baseball movie since Moneyball.

So once again, you can go to ephesfilm.com.

That's it's spelled, by the way, people have been asking about this, it's spelled E-E-P-H-U-S, ephesfilm.com to check on Showtimes coming to an area near you.

This is going to be rolling out over the next couple weeks, and the more people who see it in theaters, the wider the release will be.

We've had some excellent, amazing reaction to this movie so far.

I'm really excited.

It is a movie that is worth seeing in the theater.

It's like spending a warm fall afternoon among friends.

I can't think of a better description of this movie.

So, once again, please, I'm encouraging you to go check out Ephesus and see if we'll be playing in a theater near you.

All right, Choes, that does it for us today, everybody.

Bye-bye.

For a bull buys up and a bear sells down and a broker sells you out.

And here is a song they sing the whole day long.

Oh, the market's not so good today.

Your stocks look kind of sick.

In fact, they all drop down a point each time the tickers tick.

We'll have to have more margin now, there isn't any doubt.

So you better dash with a load of cash.

Or we'll have to sell you out.