Transcript of Howard Lutnick’s Interview on All-In Podcast

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: Well, no, I wasn’t the finance. I was the transition chair. Okay, so I ran transition, which we’ll talk about, but so let’s go through. So I’m friends with him. Right. But I’m building my business. Young guy building my business. And then 9/11 happens.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And so, you know, young lady works for me says, you know, my best friend is an HR person. They have to have capacity. But what they have capacity. Imagine we hire that person. Yeah. Now what happens is it’s not one big happy family, but people really, really care about the company. And that’s our company. That’s on the top five floors of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

When the plane hits, it kills everybody at the office. My brother Gary dies at 36. My best friend Doug, he dies at 39. I had just turned 40. That summer I had a party. 65 couples. It’s my 40th birthday, right? 27 people at my party get killed. My friends. These are my friends. So I’m driven to take care of the families of people who died. And I commit 25% of all of our profits. But the company is destroyed.

So we go from making a million a day. I was a rich guy, right? What’s the definition of a rich guy? No personal debt, no corporate debt. Ken Fitzgerald, no debt. So how do you survive 9/11? You don’t owe anybody any money. The only money you’re losing is your money. So we survive and we take care of our friends’ families, and then we build the company back up.

Maintaining Friendship Through Rebuilding

So you could see, like, I’m a special guest on the Celebrity Apprentice, the first season of Celebrity Apprentice, when Piers Morgan wins.

INTERVIEWER: Did he fire you?

HOWARD LUTNICK: No, no, I wasn’t a contestant. I’m a little beyond being a contestant. I was a special guest. I come in, like, if you see during the auction, I’m standing next to him at the auction, you know, and I’m helping him. Like, I’m just his friend, sort of as an extra all along the way, you know, every once in a while.

INTERVIEWER: You kept the friendship going as you’re rebuilding.

HOWARD LUTNICK: We’re friends all the way. But I’m rebuilding my company. Yeah. And then. So I’m not interested in politics. Okay. I don’t do anything in politics because I got my head down. Right. With the financial crisis. Canada for Children’s great in the financial crisis.

Political Involvement

INTERVIEWER: Had you ever donated to candidates at all or…

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah, New York candidates.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: New York. So think about it. You’re in New York. You try to pick social liberals, fiscal conservatives. Right. If that even exists anymore. Yeah, right. But you’re in New York. You have to pick. And look, I grew up in New York, so I’m socially liberal. What else could I possibly be? So, you know, so early, when Chuck Schumer was young, before he became what the president now calls a Palestinian, you know, I raised him money and gave money. Donald Trump gave him money.

INTERVIEWER: Same.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right.

INTERVIEWER: I did, too.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah. I mean, because he was… That’s what he said he was. He was social liberal, fiscal conservative. And so, you know, we don’t give to those kind of candidates, but mostly giving to get along.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And to be able to, you know, ask him a question if you needed to ask him a question. But there was really no… I had no drive in that. Like I said, the first four nights I slept in Washington in the last 20 years were when Donald Trump was elected. I had never slept here. I’d come down, visit a little, go home.

INTERVIEWER: Go home.

HOWARD LUTNICK: What am I staying here for? So he calls me at the end of October 23.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, so he’s already had his first term. You didn’t support or get…

HOWARD LUTNICK: No, no, I was… So I gave him money and I gave Hillary money.

INTERVIEWER: You gave Hillary money in the first term?

Supporting Both Sides

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

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And New York needed help, and Hillary was incredibly helpful. And I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships with a whole bunch of congressmen and they were going to do nice things, like Bill Young ran House Appropriations. Bill Young was my friend through a whole variety of things that had to do with… I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital and I used to walk around and I would bring music there for the men who got hurt from the military who were in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

And we would walk around. I’d go with my wife, and then I would engage the young man with music. I’d give music and ask him what CDs he wanted. This is when CDs were there. And I’d bring him a Walkman. And my wife would pull the family outside and she’d pay a year of their mortgage and all their expenses. Because what people don’t realize is your son loses his leg, right? Dad and mom come flying in, and they’re going to stay by his bedside.

Mom, what job do these people have that allows them to be at their son’s bedside? And their world is falling apart because their son lost his leg. So the world is falling apart, but at home, their world is falling apart.

INTERVIEWER: Falling apart. Yeah.

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Building Relationships and Trust

HOWARD LUTNICK: And no form, no nothing. Just give them the money and help them. So I would bump into Billy Young and his wife, who ran Defense Appropriations, and they were there just being good human beings. And so we became friends. He said to me once, “Is there anything I could ever do to help you?” I’m like, “Look, you’re a congressman from Florida who does Defense Appropriations. And I’m a Jewish guy from New York who’s in finance. If there ever were two SKUs that we’re never going to meet, this is two ships going in different directions. We got nothing.” So I said to him, “Look, we’re just going to be friends, right? We’re never gonna do anything.”

And then he runs House Appropriations. And when New York needs money to rebuild after 9/11, they go see Bill Young to try to get a bill passed. And he said, “How can you come see me without Howard?” You know, this is post 9/11. So I’m running New York, and Hillary does a really nice job for New York.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And I told DJT—I call him DJT because I’ve known him for always—I said, “I can’t forget. I’m just not the person who’s going to forget.” Of course I gave him money. And by the way, he still tortures me for it. So, you know what the best part is?

INTERVIEWER: A good friend does.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah, right. You know what the point is? See, other people would sort of curl back.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

My Relationship with Trump

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right after he gets elected, he has a dinner in New York. So he invites me to the dinner because I’m his friend. And then while he’s giving his talk at his first dinner in New York, he goes, “Wait, wait, Hillary supporter,” and he points at me. So I stand up, I go, “Hey, everyone,” and I sit down. You know, he’s just sassing me because I gave him tons of money. He knows I love him, and it’s fine.

INTERVIEWER: Okay? So we’re 2023.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So we’re 2023. And he calls me and he says, “Will you help me?”

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And I had not thought politics. Now, I gave him money in 2020 reelection, probably gave him 10 million bucks. I raised him 15 million bucks. So I was, you know, once I’m on his side the whole way through, I’m raising the money in 17, 18, 19, 20 while he’s president. I’m totally on his side. But I’m just his friend. I’m not engaged because I’m still rebuilding my life.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And then 2023 he calls me, says, “Will you help me?” And I actually thought about it. And that was the first time I really thought politics. And then I said yes. And I gave him 10 million bucks right then and there. And then I started talking to him. I started going on the campaign trail. I started doing research. I talked to him about everything. I talked to him all the time about everything.

INTERVIEWER: Did you love it? Because our friend Sacks, we were talking at dinner last night. He seems to love it.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Like, there’s nothing not to love. As Donald Trump says, this is a thousand Super Bowls for him, and for me, it’s only 100 Super Bowls. I mean, if you’re dedicated to America and you’re willing to wear America’s clothing and to stop worrying about yourself and only care about America.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And have no objective post.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Commitment to Public Service

HOWARD LUTNICK: The president hates when these people have, like, they raise money post from people they met in here. So I’m never going to work again. I’m never going to work. This is all I care about. I’m just going to help America. So he asked me to help, and I start thinking about it. I start studying everything, and I read everything, and I read everything about the White House. I read everything about everything I can possibly read because I’m just that way. And then I started helping him.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And I went to learn how he picked the judges and the Supreme Court. And I’m just very detailed. And so I started studying what transition is. And I started studying tariffs because he wanted to talk about tariffs. And he’s always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a rip off of America. And I started studying everything about it.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

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

INTERVIEWER: Okay. So we’re going to talk about tariffs in a sec. But double clicking to transition. What did you find that was so interesting?

Rethinking the White House Structure

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’ll give you an example. So there’s a book called “The Gatekeepers” that was written that people gave me. “Oh, you should read this book.” And it’s about chiefs of staff.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And basically, there’s another way to call it. It’s called “The Jerks.” Right. Because what they do—imagine you’re the gatekeeper. You’re the gatekeeper of what? Of the man who was elected President of the United States of America. He needs the gates kept from him? And if you listen to Nixon tapes, you hear him scheming to try to learn anything. Because what happens is the Chief of Staff, everybody reports to the chief of staff, and the chief of staff reports to you.

So you can’t get on Air Force One without asking the chief of staff. You can’t get a document unless you have the chief of staff. No one can come see you unless you have the Chief of Staff. And if they take your phone away, you know what you are? You’re imprisoned. And that’s the gatekeepers.

So I said to Donald Trump, “Look, you fired Reince Priebus, who was your chief of staff. Then you fired John Kelly was the chief of staff. Then you fired Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff. Then you would have fired Meadows, but you didn’t get a chance because of the next election. So I said, why don’t you fire the job?” What you need is a chief of staff who’s actually your chief of staff, not who’s the gatekeeper.

And so that was an example of how I changed it. And so Susie Wiles is perfect for Donald Trump. You know why? She lets him be him. John Kelly took away his phone.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So he couldn’t communicate with anybody. Whereas Susie embraces who he is, helped him get elected, ran a great campaign. She’s perfect for him in this role. And so that’s what I brought. So I brought an understanding of him.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And an understanding of the role.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And that’s why I convinced your friend David Sacks. Every time he said, “I can’t do it.”

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I would call him and say, “It’s an emergency, it’s emergency. I need to see you fly.” He goes, “What is it?” I go, “You need to join the administration.” He goes, “That’s what the emergency was?” I go, “Of course.”

The DOGE Initiative

INTERVIEWER: And Howard, was that when you conceived originally DOGE in that initial? Was that during the transition?

HOWARD LUTNICK: All right, so DOGE.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, we should talk about DOGE and tariff.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, so DOGE comes. It’s October before the election.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Early October.

INTERVIEWER: October 2024.

HOWARD LUTNICK: October 2024.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Like the beginning of October 2024. And I called the President and I said, “I need to spend an hour with you because I have my big ideas.” So he gives me—he says, “Look, I’m not sure what to do October 7th. Why don’t we figure out what I should be doing October 7th.”

So we decided we’re going to go out to the Ohel, which is a super religious, Hasidic Jewish messiah. You know, the people who wear black hats think he’s the Messiah and they have a crypt for him where you write a note and you put a note in. And so we agreed we’d go out to that grave site and we’d probably win 60,000 of those kind of voters, which is pretty cool for a day. And then we drove there and back together, just the two of us. So I had an hour and a half.

I said, “I want to balance the budget of the United States of America, and this is the way we’re going to do it.” We—no one’s ever checked the just under $4 trillion of entitlements. Every politician thinks what you have to do is you have to take the retirement age from 65 and make it 70. And you have to do this and this and this and this. Because they never think about the money. But people like us totally would say, what’s the first thing you do? What’s the value I’m getting for my money?

And what you find is nobody ever—like, as in ever, like, I could say the word “ever” 12 times—has looked at where the money goes. And so there’s not even a process to get it back. When you send it to the wrong person, you just send another one out.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Like, think about it. You just—”Well, I sent it accidentally.” Accidentally. Notice how it’s accidental? So it was accidentally sent to the wrong person. Really? You wouldn’t ever say, the 5.9 million people who work for the government, there could be some crooks in there?

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: No, no, no. It’s all accidental. What a load of nonsense this is.

INTERVIEWER: There’s some percentage of this.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But you would say, yeah, and you—

INTERVIEWER: Would say, no, just zero base it, and let’s figure out where.

HOWARD LUTNICK: It’s got to be 25%.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: We’d all say, if it’s never been checked, how could it not be 25%?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: How could it not be?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And the answer is that’s a trillion dollars a year. So I said, “I think we’re going to cut $1 trillion a year in expense, and then I think we can, through tariffs and other means, get revenues of a trillion dollars.”

INTERVIEWER: Incremental revenue.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Incremental revenue. And we’re going to balance the budget.

INTERVIEWER: But, sorry, let me ask one question. How did the tax cut to the extension of the tax cuts?

HOWARD LUTNICK: There is zero basis. I mean, zero basis where I was yesterday and where I am tomorrow, like, “Oh, it’s a tax cut.” No, it’s not. It’s the exact same thing as yesterday as today. To say continuing yesterday, tomorrow, it’s silly.

INTERVIEWER: So let me ask you on tariffs, having studied it yourself, when there’s higher tariffs, people purchase less, things cost more.

HOWARD LUTNICK: No, we’ll talk about tariffs. Let’s—

INTERVIEWER: Let’s just focus on—

HOWARD LUTNICK: Let’s just finish DOGE. So I’m in the car with him, right? And I said, “We’re going to balance the budget.” And I said, “But I have one favor to ask. If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year for the United States of America?” Which, by the way, is about 85% of America.

INTERVIEWER: Right, right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is he looks at me, goes, “Sure.” You realize the President of the United States said if you balance the budget—”Sure.” And he’s not lying. He’s not kidding. He’s like, “Yeah, that seems like a great idea.” And so, and then I tell him, “Okay, I’m going to go recruit Elon, because Elon’s all in.”

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: He’s already said he’s all in. He’s already said he’s going to Pennsylvania.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

Meeting Elon Musk

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. So I call Elon and I don’t know him, but he’s perfect for this. So I use my superpower, which is I call everybody else I know who knows him, and they arrange, and I’m texting with him, and he agrees to meet me on October 14th. So I fly down to Brownsville, Texas. He’s going to catch the rocket on October 14th. He’s not inviting me for the rocket catch. He’s just invited me down. That’s a good day for me to meet him. So I fly down, I see the rocket catch, which is awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. And then I expect to meet him.

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

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

INTERVIEWER: You’re still waiting?

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

INTERVIEWER: Love that.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But now, to his credit, he sends me all the executives from SpaceX to hang with me, but he’s dark. And what happened is he took a nap. He was up all night doing the engineering, and he went to sleep. So then when he finally wakes up, I’m just sitting there doing the thumb twiddle. I’m going, okay.

INTERVIEWER: You know, this guy, he had a couple of quesadillas.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m hoping he sees me, right? So then he wakes up, he says, come to my house, right? I’ll see you in my house. So his house is 1200 square feet. It’s got the furniture in it that I had when I graduated from college.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, right.

The Birth of DOGE

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding. 1200 square feet. And it’s got the furniture, plastic chairs and everything. So I say, we’re going to balance the budget. I need to cut a trillion. He’s like, I’m in. He says, I think we should cut 80% of the federal government. Because the essential employees. If the government shut down, essential employees are 450,000, and there’s 5.9 million people who work for the government. How can 450,000 be essential? And there’s 5.9 million. So he says, like Twitter, I think we should cut 80%.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And I say, I know how to cut 50. And he says, I want to cut 80. I said, I know how to do 50. He goes, are you with me or against me? I go, I know how to legally do it. What do you have? And my son says, it was like two alpha dogs just, like, fighting with each other first half hour. And then X comes in, right? And then he’s got to walk X. He’s got to walk his son X out. So he wants his son X out. And I’m thinking maybe the meeting’s over, right? Because we’ve been together half hour, 40 minutes, and maybe it’s over because he got up and he walked out. He comes back and he sits down. He goes, “Howard, this meeting is.” Right. That’s what he said. “This meeting is.” And we sit down and we map out the plan. I tell him what a gratis vendor is.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Because I designed. Because I was not going to go into the government. I was doing transition.

INTERVIEWER: What is a gratis vendor?

HOWARD LUTNICK: A gratis vendor is an approved vendor for the United States of America that gives product to the government, doesn’t sell it.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So therefore, I don’t have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor. Because you’re giving it to us. And then if you give it to Article 2, which is the President stuff, then the president can accept it. Right. Because it’s given.

INTERVIEWER: Sorry, what’s an example of this? Like, just to make it clear.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I write some software.

INTERVIEWER: You write some software?

HOWARD LUTNICK: I write some software for the Commerce Department to do a better job of xyz. You just give it to me, and then I do QA on it, and I can take it. If you sell it to me for $1, we go into government hell.

INTERVIEWER: Right. The whole rigmarole.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. But if you give it to me. Right. And then I set up, you know, so I said, I’m calling it DOGE, and I registered the name DOGE.

INTERVIEWER: You said that?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Of course.

INTERVIEWER: Were you familiar with Dogecoin and Elon?

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m going to tell you what happens. In the Defense Production Act in World War II.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

HOWARD LUTNICK: In order to get all the great executives of America to help with production, they named everything after jazz singers or things that would make the people who were on the committee laugh and smile.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. So I picked DOGE, so he would laugh and smile. And he said, “Get the F out of here.” Like when I said, we’re going to name it DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which I didn’t think of. It was on the Internet sort of floating around in June. But I literally registered it, as the Department of Government Efficiency, like, make it a real thing, as a gratis vendor. And I said, this is how I’ve done it for me. So that I can run Cantor Fitzgerald, you can run SpaceX. You don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff because you’re not working for the government. You’re just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself. But you’re not looking for anything. You’re not taking any money, you’re not owning anything, you’re not doing anything.

Launching DOGE and the Transition

We had fun. We talked for two hours. And then on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside and I put up, “Welcome to DOGE. We are going to rip the waste out of our $6.5 trillion government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump president.” And I posted that with my account. I probably at the time had 25,000 viewers and I got 45 million viewers.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. So it was me and Elon. And that was the beginning of Doge. Then I ran transition. For the transition, we had a room in Mar-a-Lago. Okay. Big conference table in the middle. Four 85-inch screens on one side and mirror four 85-inch screens on the other side so that you and I could talk to each other. So the President sat across from me.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Elon sat. Oh, and then I’ll tell you one other story about Elon. So Trump wins the election. President wins the election. He accepts it like Wednesday at 2:00 in the morning. Right. Elon’s not on stage. If you see, I’m on stage. Elon’s way in the back of the room. There’s a thousand people in the room. 2000 people. He’s way in the back. He goes home. Thursday afternoon, I call. I’m doing a dry run of the launch of my transition. Right. And the President is superstitious. He’s never had one conversation with me about transition. He totally trusts me.

INTERVIEWER: He doesn’t talk to you ahead of time about who?

HOWARD LUTNICK: About one job, about one thing.

INTERVIEWER: Because he doesn’t want to transition until the election.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Because he’s superstitious. Like, don’t waste your time.

INTERVIEWER: Don’t jinx it.

The Cabinet Selection Process

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. Just go win. You got to go win. So what happens is I’m doing a dry run. So I called Elon and I said, where are you? He goes, what do you mean? I’m in Austin, Texas. I go, what are you doing? I mean, what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected if you’re not going to help him pick the cabinet? Come on. Right. Because the way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions. And anybody who says, oh, the last person who sees him gets him, that’s because they don’t know him at all. Right, the answer is it’s an orchestra. Right. And I would say, okay, I’m the first violin. You know, at the time, I would say I was second violin. Right. So this is an orchestra.

So the president’s not going to make a decision with me and him alone. So it went like this: President sitting across from me, right, at the conference table. Elon to his left, Susie to his right. Right. JD to my left. Linda McMahon was my co-chair. Right. But she wrote all those EOs that he did. She was responsible for that. And I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. So she’s sitting to my right, JD sitting to my left, Don Jr., Stephen Miller. And there was always 12 people in the room. They were never like, me and him just in the corner doing this or that. And what we would do is I would put eight candidates on one screen.

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. And then big candidate on each screen.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Most beautiful AI picture of you you’ve ever seen.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And people would walk in and go, where’d you get that photo?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m like, what do you think I did? I took three of my photos.

INTERVIEWER: I’ve heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition, that you walk in and everyone’s photos up on the screen.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Everybody’s on the room.

INTERVIEWER: And so what happened, that’s a candidate for a role. And then you guys would debate it.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So what happened is a big picture of the person.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Their key highlights of the resume. Not boring their education.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And then you would click a button and you’d see them speaking 20 seconds at a time. Four of them. Right. So it was about 80 seconds. And you’re not speaking about the job, just like, how do you present? And what you can see is his whole cabinet can talk. All of them, totally. Because he picked them knowing. I need you to be able to talk, to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there. And that’s key to him.

The way I would joke to people is, how do you do it? I go watch pitch. So you throw him a curveball. He wouldn’t swing. You’d throw him fastball. He wouldn’t swing. You’d throw a slider. Hits the ball, hits it to my glove. I go, here you go. Well, how do you know that? I go, because I know the guy for 33 years. I know what he wants. And he loved the process. And you know what happened? You saw what happened, right? First day, eight candidates, 12 jobs, national security, okay. He says, what do you want? I go, eight to four. I put up eight candidates. I recruited everybody. I had 150 of the best Republicans in the United States of America. They each gave me five people, who then gave me 10 people. I had thousands of people to pick from. The whole government was set up to pick from. And then we picked candidates. I had eight for every job.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight to four. That’s Friday. Sunday comes in four to two in the morning. I fly everybody in for the two. I prep them. We go in and meet them two to one, final interview, give him the job.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

The Cabinet Selection Process

HOWARD LUTNICK: Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Monday, Tuesday, Monday, we’re done with national security. Okay? Now we’re rolling on. And it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate. Everybody knew it. Everybody was prepped. Everybody was aware. Everybody was done. You know, that’s why David Sacks. Because I needed David Sacks to be in the government. I recruited David. I pounded on David. You can ask David, right? I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said, okay, I’m going to do it. Right? And I did that for everybody. And I made sure he had the greatest choices. And then every once in a while, he would call me at night and say, throw this guy in. Throw this guy in. Throw this guy in. We did a vet on everybody.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But I didn’t take out anything negative. And I am not a negative person. You can tell. Yeah, I’m positive. So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate? And there was a pick.

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: Only one. And that was Matt. Matt.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: What happened.

INTERVIEWER: What happened with Matt Howard? How did that process.

The Matt Gaetz Situation

HOWARD LUTNICK: We. He was tortured by his attorney general in the first term, and we were not going to have that ever again. Right. So we needed strong backbone, strong capacity, of which Matt Gaetz has it, and I know Matt Gaetz, and he has it. But we did not know what that vet was going to say from that report from Congress. So here was the idea. We fight for him, and we fight for him to get through. And then we read the report. The report’s not bad. Remember, the President’s been tortured by people blaming him for stuff that never happened. Oh, 30 years ago, he raped this woman in the dressing room of Bloomingdale’s. I mean, what a load of crap, right? It’s just not true. None of it’s true. It’s ridiculous. So he comes at this saying, I know you’re going to get tortured with ridiculous, right? So then he says, if it’s ridiculous, then we support that. And if it’s not, we have Pam right here, right now.

INTERVIEWER: So that was lined up so that.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Everybody knows it’s right here, right now, and it’s 3D chess. So we read it. Pam.

INTERVIEWER: Okay?

HOWARD LUTNICK: It’s like Pam in a hundredth of a second, right? And Pam is a rock star. And you could argue that. You would say, well, why didn’t you pick her first? You know what? He’s the president. He plays 3D chess. He did it his way. And you know what? But there was no candidate up there who wasn’t right. And we could talk about all the detail and how we thought about it when he went, but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive and so right. And what does it produce? The greatest cabinet ever. The most capable, thoughtful, best able to communicate. I mean, it’s so fun to be in a room with these people because these are world class people, the best ever in government.

INTERVIEWER: I mean, we shouldn’t betray confidence. But I mean, we were in a room earlier this week with several of them, and everyone had a moment to speak. It was unbelievable. I mean, look, every single one of them. You’re like, could have been a leader of the country.

Recruiting the Best Talent

HOWARD LUTNICK: Like, everybody. They’re all great. That’s the point. He picked greatness. Now, I was the recruiter, so I was recruiter in chief.

INTERVIEWER: But I can understand why now, by the way.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Well, but think about it. If you take someone like me and you say, just be a headhunter.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever. Because think about it. What’s the odds of saying, okay, Howard, your whole job is just be a.

INTERVIEWER: Head hunter, find the best guys.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I promise you, I’ll be really good.

Balancing the Budget

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: With something called scoring. Yeah, right. That if it comes from their pen, it counts. If it doesn’t come from their pen, it doesn’t count. But the fact is, money always counts. It just doesn’t count for their scoring. But their scoring is only part of the game. Right? The outcome of the game is what matters to me. Elon, our cabinet, and Donald Trump. Okay? The outcome of the game. And I’m telling you, the outcome of the game by me and Elon.

Now, a funny part of it is, so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn’t want to leave Pennsylvania. Right. Because he, you know, Elon, he’s committed to Pennsylvania. So I convince him he’s got to come, and we have a plan. I’m going to say to him, so I. Everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God. I’m the only one who introduces Elon. So Elon comes on stage with me. There’s the two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden. The only time the two of us are on stage, I’m the fourth speaker. He’s the third from the end. JD is second from the end, and Donald Trump is last.

So he’s supposed to say, when I say to him, how much are you going to cut? The deal was he’s going to cut $1 trillion. And then he’s supposed to say, and how much are you going to earn? And I’m supposed to say $1 trillion. And then we’re supposed to say together we’re going to bounce the budget. United States of America. That’s the little sort of thing. So I asked Elon, how much are you going to cut? And he, because he said 2 trillion. Well, because we’re in front of 22,000 people and the place is erupting, he says 2 trillion. And then I’m sitting there going, and I’m like, I think I said alrighty then, all right, or something like that. You know, I’m like, whatever was I supposed to say?

INTERVIEWER: No, you were, you were caught off guard. But I mean, did he ask you how much are you going to earn?

HOWARD LUTNICK: No, no, I got it all.

INTERVIEWER: Don’t worry.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Howard. Yeah, like, like I said, all right, all righty then. And that was that. So then I walked on stage and you know, he said 2 trillion. So like, I mean, what am I going to say? But the answer was always right. That 25% of the waste foreign abuse is a trillion dollars.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And he’s got to cut and find the waste foreign abuse of a trillion dollars. Okay, okay. And that my job is to raise $1 trillion of exogenous new revenue.

INTERVIEWER: New revenue for the government and we.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. I’m telling you, I’ve been here now two months. Yeah, right.

INTERVIEWER: I am more confident it’s going to.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Happen and more excited.

Identifying Waste and Fraud

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: If you’re. I describe it to people this way, let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother in law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She thinks something got messed up and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. And if all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon, knows this by heart. Right. Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen yeah, because whoever screams is the one stealing.

Yeah, because my mother in law is not calling. I mean, come on, your mother, 80 year olds, 90 year olds, they trust the government to trust. Okay, maybe got screwed up. Big deal. They’re going to call and scream at someone, but someone who’s stealing always does. So what happens is we need to get to. So the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately getting the money, have an inside person who’s routing the money. They are going to yell and scream. But real America will give to be.

INTERVIEWER: Because here’s the key benefit of the doubt.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Not one penny should stop going to. We’re the richest country on earth.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Budget Realities and Smart Solutions

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, we lose $2 trillion a year. We have a $29 trillion GDP. Right. Which people don’t understand. Which I’ll explain a little bit. And we have 36 trillion in debt.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: What number didn’t I say to a business person, what’s our balance sheet worth?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

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

INTERVIEWER: We have to monetize our assets?

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

INTERVIEWER: That’s pretty smart, Howard.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right? Okay, like obviously right, but here’s what it is. I’ll tell you what I’m good at.

INTERVIEWER: You’re so right.

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

GDP Measurement Reform

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: Oh, GDP. Oh that’s. I get to talk about GDP and how I’m going to, how I’m going to clean up the nonsense in GDP. You know, I can explain that. If you make a tank and someone buys a tank, that is GDP. Yeah, but a thousand people thinking about buying a tank, right. Who take your tax money and I give it to them and they go and when should we buy tankana? The. That’s not GDP, Right.

INTERVIEWER: You’re saying government spending should not be counted in GDP.

HOWARD LUTNICK: No government spending to buy a tank.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Should be.

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Government spending that’s non productive, non productive.

INTERVIEWER: This is not, this is so important. I don’t think a lot of people realize this. How, how much of GDP is non productive government spending?

HOWARD LUTNICK: How about we do one thing?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: G, D, P. D means domestic. P is product, domestic production, it’s not consumption.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: If I go out and buy a Toyota.

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. That’s not GDP. Right. If I buy a Chevy that’s made in America, that’s a D. Right. So people think it’s like a consumption model metric. Yeah, right. That’s not it. And you can check another one is, is this gross domestic income?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: That’s also good. So by the way, they grow about the same rate. It’s kind of fun. So the key for me is to take out the part that if I cut non-productive, a million government employees who are non-productive, meaning they don’t make tanks.

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. If I take that out, it’s going to look like our GDP declined. But you’d say, but what really happened? No, our expenses went down.

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

Understanding Government Spending and GDP

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, if we put three people behind us and they sat behind us and they did nothing. And each of us gave them $125,000 just like this. Here you go. And they just sat there. Right. What is that? That’s not GDP. That’s actually me taking my money and giving it to them. We produce nothing. We’ve no purpose on earth. It was my money. The income, however I earned, my income was mine and I just gave it to them. They didn’t really earn income. It’s really a transfer pricing model that is currently considered in GDP and it’s nonsense. So if I stopped paying them.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. What would I do? The first thing you’d say is, well then why am I paying so much tax?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Bang.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, so now we’re in the concept of.

INTERVIEWER: So Howard, do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is? I’m sure if you take out non-productive spending.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So we release it because that’s the proper way to do stuff. Right. But. And I’m going to break that out.

INTERVIEWER: I think it’s 25% and I’m going.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m going to break it out and I’m going to break it out for the last 20 years. And what you’re going to see is every time the quarter just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there. And so all of a sudden you have this jump in GDP.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Total lie.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Total lie. I mean basically they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter so that we have that and you’ll see it, it goes the whoop.

INTERVIEWER: And then they can.

HOWARD LUTNICK: What do you think the first quarter is? Whammo!

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Or the second quarter’s whammo. Why? Because you pre-spent it. Right, right, right. And then you have this whole. And it’s gross.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. That’s the only way to us you’re like really. But so manipulated. Let me. And the answer is.

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

Addressing Waste and Reforming Trade

HOWARD LUTNICK: It’s going to. And that’s the idea. The idea is to take a trillion of waste, fraud and abuse out.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And then make a trillion from having other people resetting global trade. And once you understand global trade and how it makes sense and where it came from.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Can you explain that to us? Sorry, before we get there, I want to ask one last question on the cuts. Can we speak in a more empathetic way? Because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone’s pocket. Some percentage of that pays people a salary and they live on that income. And I think a lot of the. I think this is important for you to highlight because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and DOGE and the budget cut, saying, you’re destroying jobs. You’re taking money away from people that need their jobs. Why are you rich people taking away from jobs?

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m going to give you a sad example.

INTERVIEWER: And so like, help us understand. Are people going to lose their jobs?

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m going to give you a sad example. We all remember during COVID there was the PPP money.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Remember that?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, totally.

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

INTERVIEWER: What? Is that proven?

HOWARD LUTNICK: You just make up a company, right. You know Joe’s Deli? You make it up at Joe’s Deli. Right. Say you’re in trouble, file, and they sent you money.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So why wouldn’t Chinese gangs do that? Come on. So we show. Not me, but people showed the government, those people that money. And instead of stopping, they said, yeah, but we can’t stop because there are real people who need the money. And so what happens is because there’s no one’s ever been fired, ever for sending money to the wrong place. People send it on purpose. I’m not saying everybody sends it on purpose. I’m saying there are some people who send it on purpose. Some people are complete morons. And an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome, I mean, amazing people.

But what percentage? Okay, there’s 5.9 million people who work for the government. You’re like, wow, that’s like so many. And we’re paying them all. And how many do you really need? I mean, if the answer is 2 million. Wow. And we could talk about how we understand it and how we’re going to retrain society for the AI Industrial revolution is coming, which is going to create the greatest set of jobs and greatest set of growth ever.

INTERVIEWER: Ever.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, but that. But then we can talk about that. But the key is stop sending money to the wrong place so we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow, if I can stand it, to not pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits. I find it disgusting when we’re the richest country in the world and some politician says to, in order to save Social Security, rather than getting rid of the waste, fraud and abuse, we should move it to 70. Yeah. How about no? How about we’re rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain, of being a great American, but let’s put great people in charge?

INTERVIEWER: That’s really well said. That’s really well said. Okay, let’s put a pin in this because. So let’s. Howard, explain to us global trade as you understand it, and then the context of tariffs and maybe historically and what role they played now.

The History of Tariffs and American Trade Policy

HOWARD LUTNICK: So I remind people that on the Earth there was the Dark Ages. So the Dark Ages meant that the world knew how to read. And then because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books and literally the earth stopped learning how to read. For 500 years or 400 years, we didn’t know how to read. And we knew how to read before, so how could you forget?

So America was built on tariffs with no income tax. No income tax till 1913. None. Greatest richest country in the world. So when Donald Trump says make America great again, what he’s talking about is from 1880 to 1913, when the country had so much money that we had blue ribbon commissions, which you guys would have been on. Yeah, right. To try to figure out how to spend the money. Right, right. And no income tax.

Then we put in the income tax in 1913. Why? Because we’re entering World War I. Yeah. And don’t we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life? Right. Then what happens is the world goes into chaos. We come out of chaos. Right. And then we’re starting to think of, well, what do we do? What do we do? And then 1929, the stock market crashes. Right. 1933, we start to say, oh, God, we forgot we need to do tariffs. 1933, how can you do tariffs when the markets crash? The world’s going into depression and you’re going to do tariffs in 1933? You can’t charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world’s okay.

INTERVIEWER: That’s right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So it was too little, too late. Right. So then we come out of World War II, it’s 1945, we need to rebuild the world, okay? So we decide we’re going to take our tariffs down and we’ll let them. Here’s the key. We’ll let them have tariffs be up, and we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild. And we’ll let them rebuild. And that’s what happens.

So 1945, we have the Marshall Plan, right? And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt. What’s the difference? Right? So they need to be rebuilt. And then what happens? We have the 50s and we have the Korean War. So we let them rebuild, which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there, low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Then we have the Vietnam War, right? So now all of a sudden, we have all of Southeast Asia, low tariffs here, high tariffs there.

You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear? Kuwait. We spend almost $100 billion freeing Kuwait, right? You know what? The highest tariffs against the United States of America, the number one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America, Kuwait. And you think what that’s. But here’s what it is. If you go back to this, understanding the way America thinks, you need to be rebuilt, you were just destroyed, right? All their oils were. You remember Red? The guy’s name was Red something. And he was the guy who capped all the. There were fires and all the oil wells, and he capped them all. And it was amazing. So we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is that we forget, right. And we let it go.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So Donald Trump comes in and says, it’s got to stop.

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: We let it happen. We let it happen on purpose.

INTERVIEWER: But it’s an incredible thing you’re also saying, though, which is that it’s inexorably linked to this repetitive machinery of war, because those create these boundary conditions over and over again, always where there’s so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this, Correct?

HOWARD LUTNICK: That’s exactly. That’s exactly right. So what happens is, and then you say to yourself, okay, I get the 40s, I get the 50s, I get the 70s, right. But 80s, 90s, 2000, 2010, what time out 20. So Donald Trump gets elected 2016. Who understands this? Okay, let me give you a hint. Donald J. Trump. Who else?

INTERVIEWER: Nobody.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah, right. You’d say, wow, he understand. And how long has he been talking about it? 40 years.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Why? Because in the 80s he’s saying, what are you doing?

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

The Impact of Tariffs on American Industry

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. India has a 50% tariff. On average 50. We have on average 4. I would say to the person who said that, can I ask you a question? What are you talking about? They’re 50 and 4. Here’s what you’re talking about. When we’re all equal and everything is free and fair, if you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs, isn’t it bad for society? The answer is, of course it is. But there’s two differences.

Number one, let’s do human beings first. Before we go to the math, let’s go to human beings. Once upon a time we had an auto industry in Detroit and in Ohio. But Detroit, then some genius named Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement, or corporations, you can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada. Now if you were General Motors, I’d say it’s like my birthday. But if you’re a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio, they just signed, you know what they signed.

Worst statistic I’m going to tell you today, average life expectancy of high school educated workforce. So by the way, United States of America, two thirds is high school educated, one third is college educated. The difference today of average life expectancy between those two categories is seven years. Seven year average life expectancy. It’s not the air, it’s not the food, it’s not the medicine, it’s despair.

My grandfather worked in the auto factory, my father worked in the auto factory. I have a good life. I’m going to do Friday Night Lights and football. I mean, it’s going to be a good life. I have a good middle class life. I’m a member of the United Auto Workers. Life is going to be good. The factory moves to Mexico and I am just screwed because the government of the United States of America didn’t care about industrial policy and didn’t protect me at all and let cheap labor in Mexico.

I’m sure the Mexican people went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour, and they’re kicking it. But I destroyed you. And that is incredible failure of industrial policy, which nobody wants to talk about, but you talk about it as average life expectancy, and you’re talking about it about reshoring and building the life for the people who are America. That’s why you elect Donald Trump president.

Learning from President Trump

You elect him because I didn’t spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help him. But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this? And who taught me this? The President of the United States. This is not me teaching him, you understand? This is him teaching me. And you can see him talking about it in the 80s, right? He’s been talking about this for years.

And what it does is it means resources. So, number one, we have to care about human beings. That’s a globalist view. Yes. If I take my production and move it to Mexico, it’s better for me, Mr. Corporation, okay? But it’s not better for me, Mr. U.S. citizen of the United States of America who’s working at a car plant, that’s bad news for him, okay? And that’s number one.

And now let’s go to number two, which is the math of it all. If we say free and fair trade, I want to remind you, there ain’t no such thing. There is no country in this world that is free trade zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest because everybody else is higher and more protective. So they protect their farmers.

Here I’m sitting at the dinner, Modi comes to town and I say to him, when Donald Trump and I have dinner. And after the niceties, Donald said, goes ahead, go ahead, Howard. And I said, you have 1.4 billion people and you brag to us how amazing your economy is. Why won’t you buy a bushel of our corn? We’ll buy a bushel of our corn. So our farmers can’t go to him, but his, of course, can come at us. Right. Why is that?

Addressing Inflation Concerns

INTERVIEWER: But just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs. Talk to the average person who says the cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%.

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

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, so you’re right. This toy might be more expensive and that toy’s not. I get it. But that’s not inflation. Here’s inflation. Snap my fingers. Now we have 2 trillion, right. That water is a dollar fifty. That water is a dollar and a quarter. Yeah. Everything’s more expensive.

INTERVIEWER: Inflation.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay, so inflation without tariffs is everything’s a buck and a quarter now. Inflation with tariffs is a buck and a quarter and about fifty. And so you have to understand, inflation doesn’t come from tariffs. Certain products. If I put a tariff on a mango. Right. We can’t grow mangoes in America. We just can’t grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. But if the President chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive. That’s just becomes a consumption tax. It’s like a sales tax. Yes, right. It’s a sales tax. It’s a consumption tax. If I want to buy a mango.

INTERVIEWER: Cost more money, and you can offset that with a reduction.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So then that’s just like another version of income tax. Okay, so what, the idea is to not do that? Yeah, that’s the idea. The idea is to choose things that are going to reshore.

INTERVIEWER: This is so important.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Hire my people. Bring it home.

Entrepreneurial Opportunities from Tariffs

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: Someone will say trillion so far means been in office. Right? Like seven weeks, eight weeks.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: $2 trillion of committed domestic production coming back because of his tariffs. TSMC saying I’ll build, you know, semiconductor wafers. Everything we do, they’re going to build it here. That word is never coming unless the tariff. So what happens is you bring it here, you create the jobs here and then they avoid the tariff.

INTERVIEWER: And by the way, those jobs are better paying and they’re more productive than the government fund. What do you want to do about the narrow set of products that are more high value than the mango that maybe can’t be made here or at least can’t be made here in the next five to 10 years? So TSMC can make chips. I think that’s great. ASML, who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines as an example, can’t necessarily do that for another five or six years here. So there’s these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multi vendor solution. Right, but that’s still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff?

Three-Dimensional Economic Chess

HOWARD LUTNICK: You know the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is it’s giant three dimensional chess. Okay, so we all have Stockholm syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service. We think we like the Internal Revenue Service. We don’t say it, but when we say we’re going to charge a tariff and other countries who lean on us, who rely on us, who bleed on us, who can’t live without the oxygen that is our economy.

Because remember the thing about our economy is while we have a $29 trillion GDP, we are the consumer of 20 trillion. And this is the key thing. We buy everybody’s stuff. So who’s more important? Let’s say they have an economy that produces stuff and we have an economy that buys stuff. The customer is always right. We all know the customer is always right because if no one buys it, they can’t produce it.

So everybody needs our economy. When now? I mean to the fact that China consumes less than 10 trillion and primarily tries to figure out how to sell it to itself. Right. So they don’t buy anybody else’s. So we are the world’s consumer, we’re the world’s customer.

So that’s point number one. So we want them to come here and if they can’t come here, what if you pass? Okay, now let’s say there was a 20% tariff and in order to sell his goods he knows he can raise the price 10% but he can’t really sell it, raise it 20, so eats 10 and the price goes up 10. Let’s just say that 20 goes into the conference of the United States of America from the president, United States, who said we’re going to balance the budget.

Tax Reform and the External Revenue Service

And then his goal is to drive down income tax, United States of America, including waiving tax. So what has he said so far with that in his pocket, knowing that this is what we’re going to try to do? What does he announce? No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. No tax on Social Security. Why is he saying those things? Right. Because he knows that he’s got. Elon’s going to cut and Howard’s going to raise and he’s going to have the tools to deliver on his promise.

INTERVIEWER: And that’ll unlock money, more money for.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Folks to spend, and they’ll have more money to spend. Right. So if you actually get the External Revenue Service. Right. Which of course, I named. You know, I named it, but you know what the funny part is? I came up with the name. I wrote a truth. Right. And I sent it to DJT and I wrote, this is my huge idea, you know, with one of those things that goes like this.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. You know, like, huge idea.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. Because it’s the External Revenue Service. But it only matters because I work for him. Because if I worked for Joe Biden or anybody else, they wouldn’t care at all. So the fact that he loves a great idea the minute you say it and it becomes his idea, my idea is useless. A good idea in his hands.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. So speaking of value in the world.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So the External Revenue Service, if it. If we went back to make America great again.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Which is pre 1913, which is let them pay. You don’t pay. What that means is let them pay. Try to waive, balance the budget. Try to waive tax on everybody who makes less than 150,000.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. And look what you did for America. Holy moly. Look what you. Okay, so by the way.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Labor costs come smashing down because it’s tax free.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So if their earnings are tax free. Right. Then they’re happy to work because they get the money.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So what happens is cost of labor comes down because we’re run correctly as a government speaking. This is what I’m trying to do.

The Trump Card Initiative

INTERVIEWER: Speaking of potentially great ideas, can you tell us about the trump card?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Sure.

INTERVIEWER: So whose idea was that and how did that come about?

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

INTERVIEWER: Do you have.

Golden Card Program Launch

HOWARD LUTNICK: Of course, about two weeks from today, it goes out. Elon’s building me the software right now. And by the way, yesterday I sold a thousand.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, you did? I got a Polymarket I created on how many you guys are going to sell this year. Curious to see how many. That’s fantastic. Do you want to tell people just the rough… What are the terms?

HOWARD LUTNICK: So if you’re a U.S. citizen, you pay global tax. Okay. So you’re not going to bring in outsiders who are going to come in to pay global tax. If you have a green card, which used to be a green card, now gold card, you’re a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don’t have to be. And none of them are going to choose to be.

What they’re going to do is they’re going to have the right to be in America, maybe $5 million, and they have the right to be in America. They have the right to be an American as long as they’re good people and they’re vetted. And they’re vetted and they can’t break the law. We can always take it away if they’re evil or bad or something. Not mean, but, you know, if they do something horrible, you can take it away.

But the idea is, if I was not American and I lived in any other country, I would buy six. One for me, one for my wife and my four kids. Because God forbid something happens, I want to be able to go to America, and I want to have the right to go to the airport to go to America and then to say, hello, Mr. Lutnick. Hello, Mr. Lutnick and the Lutnick family. Welcome home. That’s what I want to hear. I don’t want to hear, I can’t come here when there’s a horrible war or whatever.

I want to be able to go home. And once I’m home, I might as well build a business. So you have the most productive people in the world going to start spending time here. They’re going to have a family office. They’re going to hire some people.

INTERVIEWER: You’re not going to tax their external…

HOWARD LUTNICK: Worldwide income, only tax the money they make in America, which is what we do now, but their global income stays out and they pay $5 million.

INTERVIEWER: And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world?

HOWARD LUTNICK: There are 37 million people in the world who are capable of buying the card, in case you were wondering.

INTERVIEWER: 37 million. That’s a lot more than ChatGPT told me.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Who are capable of buying. Now I’m not saying they will, but they’re capable buyers.

INTERVIEWER: How many do you think you’ll sell?

HOWARD LUTNICK: The President thinks we can sell a million.

INTERVIEWER: So $5 trillion. I think a million is reasonable. I mean, look, as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his citizenship and now pay global tax every which way known to man. If this were available 15 years ago after the Facebook IPO, that’s what I would have done. It would have been much better for me, theoretically. Now I’m happy to pay the tax.

Modernizing Government Systems

HOWARD LUTNICK: The idea is, and it’s going to go fast, meaning you apply, we take your money and you know, the way computers work now, they have these cool things, like these computer things, they’re amazing. You put stuff in and they actually check everything. It’s fantastic. You don’t even have to plug them in anymore. It’s amazing. Like they get the information through the air. I mean you could do a better vet than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second.

INTERVIEWER: So I’ll tell you a quick story. Monday night Elon was telling us about this, me and Sacks, and one of the things he’s saying is he’s been helping you build this site. But one of the most difficult parts of it is it turns out like all of the CBP infrastructure to do all these checks, it’s like a lot of COBOL mainframes and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten. It’s incredible that the most advanced nation in the world deployed systems in 1970, which at the time probably felt very cutting edge to everybody in the room at the time, but to your point, has not evolved in the last 50 years.

HOWARD LUTNICK: There’s always a reason, okay. And the reason is, it’s a great reason, which is that in the mid-70s we changed the way government accounts for software. We took a 10-year contract and you have to take the contract up front. So if I’m signing a contract with you for 10 years, a million a year, I have to take it against my budget for 10 million. So I’m not doing it. See, I’m only here for four years.

What happens is, when was last time we bought software? 1975. Where? Everywhere. Why? Because it’s illogical. Now what I’m doing is, I’m saying, okay, I got to collect tariffs. So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth and I say, I want you to give me – you’re going to build for me for America – you’re going to build the greatest customs processing ever.

We’re going to take a photograph. It’s going to know what it is. It’s going to go through AI. It’s going to know what it is, it’s going to know what the tariff is. It’s going to determine the percentage, it’s going to know the weight. So when you weigh the thing plus the package, you’ll know what it weighs. You don’t even have to open it to weigh exactly the right amount.

Public-Private Partnerships

INTERVIEWER: But what’s incredible is you’re convincing these companies to basically do right for America and build software for you. You think that’s going to be a movement throughout the government?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Here’s the idea. I say build it for me for free. I put it in for free. I don’t know what other countries in the world you think are going to buy now.

INTERVIEWER: If it works for us.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Well, remember, you have to connect to me. So every country is gonna buy. That’s a great business model. If the greatest customer in the world says they’ll take it, life’s good, right? So what should the greatest customer of the world get? I don’t know. A good deal.

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: When you say free, it’s not that hard. And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company. Then I use my superpower, which is my friendship with Donald Trump, and then I go in the Oval Office and we call them together. We call the CEO together and make them promise the President. Because promising Howard is like, really nice. Promising DJT, that’s something else entirely.

So I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they’ll build it. Now, let’s see them renege. It ain’t gonna happen. So, you know when you get Elon to say, I’m gonna build it for you, and he says in front of the president, like, how great is that? You got like, the greatest technologist, the richest guy in the world. He says, I’ll build it for you. You’re like, thank God.

And then I go to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon. They’re all for America building for us. For free. To make America better. Because they are great American companies. And in exchange for that, we’re gonna help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness, just towards fair. Because you can’t get me to do something outside the world of fairness. But I tell you what, if it’s unfair, I’ll be on your side as hard and as positive as I possibly can be.

AI Export Controls

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: All right, so I’ll give you an example that’s sort of live right now. So we have DeepSeek, we have Qwen, we have Baichuan. And I don’t think we should be having apps in America. And I don’t think we should have their website in America because they all go back home. But it’s open source, and I want our American companies, including college students, to be able to download it and build on it.

But I want to make sure that there’s no part of it that says send it home to data. Or store now and analyze later. So I need that out. So what I want to do is I’m going to embrace what you guys know. You guys used to do product evaluations. So let’s do security now.

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

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

But it’s got to go through the industry. And I wanted to feel and smell like what we’re good at. I don’t want to create like, oh, this is what government’s doing. I don’t want what government to do. I want us to do it. But I’ve got to figure out the right way to do that. And that’s important.

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: The only…

Post-Quantum Cryptography

HOWARD LUTNICK: The only thing I think I really need to do with regulatory is post quantum cryptography.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. I think that is vital to us.

INTERVIEWER: That’s right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah. Right. That, you know, asymmetric.

INTERVIEWER: I would bet this happens during this administration. He bets no.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I’m going to put it out because, you know, we all have passwords. Right. For those who are watching, you don’t know this. Our passwords called asymmetric. Right. Yours is different than mine.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: That’s the key. And cryptography is just the computing. So asymmetric key cryptography. You have your password, I have mine, and they’re the key. That’s right. Obviously, the central hub has our key. A quantum computer, we know, can break all of them in a nanosecond. Like all of them in the whole world, including the CIA. All of them are, say, 2048. All of them can get broken in a nanosecond by a quantum computer. So the defense of it is called post quantum cryptography. Right. We know how to do it, and we’ll come out with a rule that says America’s got to protect itself.

INTERVIEWER: New standards. And by the way, there are.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Because every once in a while, you need to have a new standard says it’s coming, we know what it is. Please, God, go put it in. Because we need to have it in. We need America to kind of segue.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Sovereign Wealth Fund

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: The greatest customer in the world, the United States government, the most powerful, the greatest customer buys stuff. We walk in, we’re going to buy is the example I like to use. We’re going to buy 2 billion COVID vaccines. When we buy it, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are going to triple. They’re going to triple. Then we say, everyone’s going to have this vaccine.

If I were after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could, Howard Lutnick walked in the room. Howard Lutnick would say, what do you think? 20% warrants? 20% warrants. Right, right. What, so we’d make $50 billion off of who? Nobody. Didn’t take from anybody. We didn’t do it. Okay. The shareholders of Pfizer, who we’ve just tripled them with our order right now. How many of my customers in my life have required that from me? All of them.

INTERVIEWER: All of them.

HOWARD LUTNICK: This isn’t like, oh, Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever. This is just business proper. So I don’t view risk of the sovereign wealth fund. I view the first couple of years of the sovereign wealth fund or Scott Bessent and I making money Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Say, well, but you can’t invest and lose. Don’t you lose money? No. Why? Well, if I have big daddy of the United States of America behind me, right.

And I’ll give you an example. We buy missiles episodically. Launch a missile. Buy a missile. Launch a missile. Buy some missiles. Right. The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings or good quarterly earnings, but they’re episodic.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Here we go. I will sign a contract with you, 10 year contract, cancel at the end of five years to buy X amount of missiles and I’ll pay you quarterly. Then they can take that contract, they can go finance it, their financing costs go, their earnings are steady and their multiple improves and their stock goes up. Yeah. And I say in exchange for that reasonable thought, how about a little warrants, right?

INTERVIEWER: Just for people that don’t understand. Give me some stock, give me a little bit of your stock.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But, but don’t give me some stock, just give me the upside. If I help your stock go up just a little bit, I get to share it and you know my beak a little bit. And then I take the money.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: For the United States of America and I put it into the Social Security system in that States of America.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, so why have then all of.

Social Security Reform

HOWARD LUTNICK: A sudden, right, so the Social Security System says it’s 4 trillion in the hole. Okay. If we cut the wage foreign abuse out, it becomes 1.5 trillion. And by the way, Frank Bisignano, the greatest executive, the greatest payments executive ever to join the US Government, is about to get confirmed and take over the Social Security system.

Okay. Frank ran Fiserv, $120 billion public payments company. And when Donald Trump asked him in his interview, can you handle Social Security, it’s 1.3 trillion a year. He goes, well, say I handle 500 billion a day. So Wednesday. Right. And he goes, my whole life, I. My whole life, all I worry about is getting rid of waste foreign abuse. That’s all I care about. Every single day. $5, $2, $1. He goes, this is going to be the most fun I’ve ever had.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: I mean this, yeah. Like this is a Donald Trump administration. This is something that’s another planet. Now, of course I recruit Frank and you know, I get to have my piece in the game. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it’s only a trillion four in the hole. We make a trillion four. Yeah, that baby is finished. So is the forever.

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

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

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay.

INTERVIEWER: But is that the objective is that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country, and it becomes like a sovereign wealth fund.

HOWARD LUTNICK: That we have a $36 trillion budget deficit. I’m in debt that. To the United States of America, and we have a budget deficit of 2 trillion. So Donald Trump wants to knock down the 2 trillion.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Budget Deficit and Economic Strategy

HOWARD LUTNICK: And then he’s focused on the 36 trillion, which the Social Security is part of it. Yeah. So how he allocates it. He was elected president, United States. I was not.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Okay. I like the Social Security idea because it’s really easy to explain to people and sell to people.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And so they understand it. But the fact is that it’s the same money if I put it in Social Security or I put it on the debt of the United States of America. And I’m going to let Donald Trump make that decision. You know why? Because it’s all like. Yeah. And none of it’s not mine. So he will decide that. Okay. And he will play it his way.

But Scott Bessent and I will make more than a trillion dollars for the United States of America during our term, which is pretty darn cool. Right. And we’ll use that. And if that reduces our debt. Right. But that’s not the policy of how we’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to balance the budget. Trump card tariffs, getting rid of scams.

I’ll give you a scam example. Every boat you’ve ever seen, like every single cruise ship, super tanker, container ship, you’ve never seen an American flag ever. In fact, you ever think about the flag you’ve actually seen? All of you would say, I have no idea what that flag is. Why is it some flag I never heard of? Liberia is number one. You go, what? No one even knows where Liberia is. Because the answer is it’s a flag of convenience. They sell the flag for, like, 10 grand. Like, they literally. Here, you can have a flag and you pay no tax.

So what happens is a cruise ship in the United States of America picks up American passengers, goes in the Caribbean, comes back to America and treats the port as an expense, and all the profits are made in the Caribbean where it pays no tax. That’s what I call a tax scam. It’s unfair to America. We’re going to fix that in America. We’re going to try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams.

Ireland is my favorite. The country of Ireland last year had a $60 billion budget surplus. So we lose 2 trillion and they make 60. You’d say Ireland. What do they do? Oh, they have all of our IP for our great.

INTERVIEWER: All the tech companies.

HOWARD LUTNICK: All our great tech companies and great pharma companies. And pharma, yeah, they all put it there because it’s low tax and they don’t pay us. They pay them. So that’s got to end. So when those things end, you, tariffs, trump card. Getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax. That’s my trillion. Elon’s got to do his trillion. So whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out and we have a strong conversation together.

Then you’ve got to do your trillion. So you got to focus not on small potatoes, right? Big, big, big, big, big. I need you to do your side of the trillion. Now, as it turns out, I’m going to do more than a trillion because I’m me. Elon’s probably going to do more than a trillion because he’s him. And then what we’re going to do is going to. Our objective is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change America.

And then imagine America. This is just an imagination moment. Okay? We have a balanced budget in the United States. We’re starting to knock down the deficit of America. We can cut tax. And we have a gold card, a trump card that you can come to America. Which entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn’t buy one and wouldn’t start building business when they think the tax rate here is going to come down? And eventually it’s going to come down to 20%, and eventually it’s going to come down to 15%. You won’t be able to find a plot of land in America.

Trump Cards and Economic Vision

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: But I’m going to. We’re going to take that money. We’re going to. Well, so we’ll sell them every year.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right. So they’ll knock down our budget deficit. And then eventually. Right. If Donald Trump is right. And ultimately we can sell 7 million cards. You realize there is no debt in America. No debt in America is a trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage. You know what that changes? That changes the Internal Revenue Service. You start to rethink.

And I just want to remind you, right. We are the richest country on earth. Our balance sheet is 500 trillion. I’ll give you an example. What’s the court system of America worth? Right. What’s it worth? How can Nvidia be worth 3 trillion without a court system that protects it?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So such thing. So just everything about us, the infrastructure. Awesome.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

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

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

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Let’s make Americans lives. Great.

INTERVIEWER: Howard.

Environmental Responsibility and American Resources

HOWARD LUTNICK: We want clean water. We want clean air. Okay. We do it better than everybody else. But if we don’t use one, like the hypocrisy. Right. We won’t mine lithium in America to make a battery. But so the Australians mine it with coal. And it’s messy because they do it like they do it messy. By the way, we breathe the air in 3.4 days, but who’s counting, right? Then we take it. We put on a truck. We put it in a super tanker. We drive the super tanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean, puts it in a truck and gives it to Elon to make an electric car. Why don’t we mine the lithium in Nevada?

INTERVIEWER: Right.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And by the way, we’d mine it cleaner. Right.

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

HOWARD LUTNICK: We need to care for us, make America, you know, America first. How about there’s another way to say.

INTERVIEWER: Well, maintaining clean environmental first. Well, maintaining environmental standards.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah. Don’t look, we’re never going to do something that’s not like a hundred times cleaner than everybody else because we care about clean water and clean air. There’s none of us who don’t care about clean water and clean air. But you know, like someone gives you a pill and says, this will save you, and then you look at the statistic and it saves one in a million people. You’d say, why am I taking this pill? It’s a. Well, it could save your life. You’d say, yeah, but it’s like one in a million. Right? That’s not logical.

That’s the point. You know, there’s a regulation that’s the right thing and there’s a regulation that’s the one in a million pill. Like, why do we give a baby a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand new baby and we hold it up and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine? You realize the only way you get hepatitis B is from unprotected sex or a needle. Like, why are we giving it to a baby? Why? And you know what it is? You know what the answer is? Corruption. That someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules.

And because there’s no justification. I haven’t met a medical doctor who says hepatitis B vaccines on brand new babies make sense. Because by the way, you know what the worst part is? They only last 10 years. You need a booster, so the baby’s going to be 10. We gotta really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans. And I think we can be. And I think that’s why I’m so excited. That’s why our cabinet is so excited. That’s why it’s so much fun to work for Donald Trump. Because I am just speaking from his playbook, right? Because if you had met me before, he said, will you help me? And he went out to dinner with me and said, so tell me about government. I’d say government. You mean I pay them taxes, like that’s it.

Working in the Administration

INTERVIEWER: Are you having the time of your life?

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

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But when I come up with the External Revenue Service, and he says, great idea, and then he speaks of it as annual address. Right. It’s his idea.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Because I can’t do anything with it.

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

Family Life

HOWARD LUTNICK: So I have the best wife. I’ve been married 30 years. She lets me be me. And she’s gorgeous, spectacular. I love my girl. She agreed. I mean, imagine this. I’m not joining the government. I’m not joining the government. I’m doing this DOGE thing with Elon. I’m not joining. I’m not joining. Honey, we got to move. Honey, we got to move. Two weeks after election Day, I’m like, we’re moving, and we’re going to in five weeks, we’re going to live in Washington. Okay?

And, like, so the fact that that wasn’t unsettling would be the understatement of a lifetime. But she’s been the most supportive and fantastic. I have four kids. My oldest son about to turn 29. I was taking him to kindergarten, so that’s why I’m alive. My second son, Brandon, I dropped him off in nursery school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten. So the two oldest boys are running Cantor now until I divest.

INTERVIEWER: Is it going well?

HOWARD LUTNICK: I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, yeah. Of course.

HOWARD LUTNICK: You’re not supposed to know. I would love to talk to them about it.

INTERVIEWER: You have no idea.

HOWARD LUTNICK: But I’m not allowed. Like, I literally am not allowed. Yeah. And, you know, we all know the phones.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

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

INTERVIEWER: If you’re listening, he’s doing great, as.

HOWARD LUTNICK: You can tell, but. And then my daughter is going to go to med school.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And she’s on a gap year now. And my youngest son, also on a gap year now, and he’s going to start Duke in the fall, so I have the best kids. My kids have lived with me, and they lived with this kind of energy and this positive sort of momentum. And my wife being just a spectacular mom, just keeping them. What we taught our kids, which is a fun one, is I taught them two things. I would sit down my kids and say, how great is your life? And this is only maybe something that people like, we can say. But I’m talking to my kids. I say, how great is your life? They go, great, because they came home and they say, I got a bad grade, teacher doesn’t like me. It’s a classic line, right?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Life Lessons for Children

HOWARD LUTNICK: And I said, well, how good your life? Really good. I go, could it be any better? No. Well, do you realize your teacher has given up her whole life and she makes how much money and she’s given her whole life to teach you?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: So can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you or is it your job for her to like you? Who’s failing in what you just said? Right. It’s your job to have her like you. So when she says, raise your hand, raise your hand.

INTERVIEWER: Right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: And the other thing is, do me a favor. Color inside the lines, okay? In high school, if she says the sky is orange, the answer to the test is orange. When you get to college, you can argue with the professor all you want. High school, color inside the lines. Give the teacher what she wants, make sure she loves you and you’re getting a good grade. That’s the rules of life.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And my wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls, in their moral character of someone who’s fighting for you, needs to have your love and respect back. You take them for granted. If you treat them badly, if you treat them like, oh, aren’t I so great? Then you deserve what you get. And my wife has taught that moral fiber into my children and resides in them.

And the other thing my kids have is they have empathy, which is a very unusual thing for young people. And it’s because they were raised with their father crying every day. I cried every day until October 21, 2004, every day. Because I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of, you know, or someone would say, 658 people die a night. I just. There was. You can’t process all of that death without crying. And the only reason I remember is because as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn’t cry today. And she wrote it down. That’s the only reason I remember.

So my kids are fantastic. They’ve been incredibly supportive. And my wife’s the best. And she lives with me in Washington. We bought Brett Baer’s house. So I have a nice house, big enough for my ego to expand.

Closing Thoughts

INTERVIEWER: Very important. Jamal hasn’t found one that big yet. He used to look at. You’re an incredible American. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything.

HOWARD LUTNICK: This is really fun. In coming to talk honestly, this has.

INTERVIEWER: Been one of my. I mean, my favorite conversation we’ve had. Absolutely. I mean, like, he’s like this all the time. I mean, not just. We have dinner at, like, Nikesha’s house. Is a good friend of our hours, runs Palo Alto Networks. And Howard’s like, you just push the button, and you can just sit and just listen. You can listen to him for hours. By the way, I will say I’ll echo the point you made earlier. I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. I mean, you’re, like, on another level, but, like, the storytelling, I think, is what’s so powerful about this cabinet and this administration. And I think it’s going to take some time to get the message out, but, man, are there incredible ambassadors to.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Do so with the president. Capable.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Each of them is so capable, so thoughtful. I mean, I am honored to be on this cabinet with them. But we all get to work for Donald Trump, who can intuitively tell you go fix eggs.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: And then Brooke goes fix eggs, and eggs are down, like, 40%. And Brooke fixes eggs. I mean, how awesome is that?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

HOWARD LUTNICK: Right? And gas is down 40 cents. Right. And he’s only just begun. If we get the Constitution pipeline in New York passed, and I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hochul on the unbelievable oil and fracking that they have in New York and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it, but they refused to unleash it. So he’s going to force the Constitution pipeline, which, by the way, will drop gas on the east coast of the United States of America in half.

I mean, this is. And that’s, you know, then you got. That’s Chris Wright, that’s Doug Burgum. You got Brooke Rollins. I mean, you could just go, you know, Scott Bessent, you know, so thoughtful and elegant. I mean, he just step by step by step. And you have, really, the most fun cabinet working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute desk. And we’re going to make America great again. Not as a slogan, but we’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to change America.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Howard.

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