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Tariff Mania
Recorded: April 5, 2025 Duration: 0:54:13Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, the speaker delves into the implications of recent tariffs, drawing parallels to historical economic strategies and emphasizing the need for national self-sufficiency. The conversation highlights trends in public sentiment, misinformation, and the evolving landscape of economic policies, particularly in relation to the crypto space and local production.
Full Transcription
All right. Hey, everybody. A little bit of an odd morning here. I had to resubscribe to my premium, so a little bit late.
And I know maybe many of you weren't necessarily expecting anything today.
But actually, today Animal's not here, and I've just felt so motivated to get on and talk about these tariffs
and kind of the reaction that we've seen.
Because I feel like I have some unique experience of it.
And I think right out of the gate, I just want to say I don't know that these are –
I really don't know what the net effect of these are going to be.
And I've found myself – it's so strange with Trump because
there are things that he does that I just, I can't stand. I think if you tuned in a couple
weeks ago, you would know, I mean, I just, there's just things I think he fails on.
And this may be another one. I don't know. But what I've seen, the reaction to these tariffs has been just so wild to me and filled
with, in my opinion, just inaccuracies and hysteria. People are blowing things out of
proportion. And I don't know, I just wanted to do maybe like, I don't know, maybe a half hour to an hour, talk about some of this stuff and why I think I have some input on it, but, um, no, so let's, let's see how it goes. But, you know, if you don't know, I mean, if you don't know what's going on, then I don't know what to tell you. You got to fucking wake up.
it's been nothing but tariff talk for the last,
I don't know,
few days since he announced he's on the second.
What Trump did is he essentially,
I guess I could pull up the white house announcement,
but if you don't know,
he essentially had some kind of wacky formula to determine who he's going to
hit with tariffs.
And that formula is probably the first thing that you would say
is just doesn't make any sense.
Essentially what he did is he said,
if we have a trade deficit with you,
then you're going to have the higher the trade deficit,
the higher the tariff,
which to me tells me that his focus is more on reducing imports. And I don't know. I don't
really know why. I feel like he went about this with a hatchet where he should have gone about
it maybe more surgically. I have a theory as to why. I think that the reason Trump did these large sweeping tariffs is similar to what Elon did at X. So I think when Elon bought X and he fired everybody and said, let's fire 80% of the people and then see what bubbles up.
see what bubbles up.
Who makes the most noise?
Which department really needs more people?
And which departments maybe don't say anything?
If marketing is stress-free after a couple months,
then guess what?
We had way too many people in marketing.
If sales, same thing.
If our guy's doing, I don't even know what Twitter does. I don't know who people do coding or whatever, customer service, whatever those things are. If those things don't make a lot of noise, then we don't have to replace them. And so they find out really where are their pain points here where it's let's tariff everybody, tariff every business across the board.
And we're going to get some pretty honest feedback from businesses really quickly saying, look, I cannot function without importing from another country.
And I'm going to go through some videos.
I don't think that's true a lot of times. I'm not doubting that there are facilities or capabilities other countries have that we don't have today in the United States.
I do think there's a lot of times where people think I can't get something overseas or except for overseas.
And what they mean by that is I can't do it as inexpensively as I can
here in the U S so that I want to try to go through this. I don't want to take forever on it.
Um, but I'm going to kind of back up a little bit because you guys know, I took a break. Um,
I tried that trust the experts thing to start a new podcast. And I don't know.
And I'm going to tell you why, because I kind of got tired.
I felt like crypto Twitter got burned out a bit on me early in the year.
All the talk about strategic Bitcoin reserve and just price pumping.
And I just felt like, man, crypto's just lost its way.
And it felt overwhelming to try to, in a sea of chartists and price pumpers and begging the government to buy.
And this company's going to buy it and that company's going to buy it.
It just felt like the real purpose of crypto got lost in that.
And I, maybe I just got, I just felt like it's an overwhelming task.
You know, there's guys out there doing it.
Guys like Vlad and Joel Valenzuela are all about, you know,
Hey, I'm going to get on here and talk about digital cash all the time,
but it's just very difficult.
And one of the things I felt was happening was I was in a silo and that anything with the label
of crypto, you know, Litecoin Underground, I have the name in there. There's an immediate response
to people who are non-crypto people. They're going to assume I'm like a crypto shill because
guess what? 99% of crypto accounts are crypto shills.
So I thought I want to get out of this and start broadening my reach to find because I do.
I mean, crypto is important and I'm not saying I'm abandoning talking about crypto.
What I'm wanting to do is find new audiences to talk about the things that make crypto important.
You know, if you don't understand why crypto was created, then it just is a speculative thing.
And the only way to bring new people into the audience is to make them feel comfortable to come and listen in the first place.
So that was kind of my thinking when I changed the brand.
But there was also something else going on. I really had a, I don't know, it doesn't get us anywhere.
And it's not realistic.
I made a post a few months ago about communists are these idealists.
Whenever you argue with a communist on Twitter, you're just like, these people have no understanding of how the real world works.
They don't understand how free markets work
and businesses work.
And they have a utopia fantasy
in their head
that in the future,
we could all like
have free health care
and workers could own
the means of production
and, you know,
rent controls should be in place
and we should charge,
you know,
there should be rules
about every little thing
in business to restrict the free market.
Right. And that's. We all know that that's loony because you're just giving power over to some people and people are imperfect.
And so you have to. Restrict the power, restrict the government from taking too much power.
Restricted the power, restricted the government from taking too much power. But on the other end of things, and I even I myself sometimes felt like I was this way was the extremism that free markets are. they are possible. I don't think that just as it's not possible to sustain a communist
society, I don't believe it's possible to sustain like an anarchist free society with like almost
no governance. You're in both situations, you're kind of turning power over to whoever, you know, I think animals said it might makes right, you know.
So I felt like, you know, I'm also kind of in a utopian world. And I think I find myself
wanting to be more of a realist. And there's a reality to what's happening here that the U.S. has lost an insane amount of capability to produce the products that we use every day.
And does the government have a responsibility to protect to, to be self-sufficient. I think if we exported the growth of all of our
food to other countries, most people would think that's kind of insane. You wouldn't want to put,
make yourself completely reliant on another country to produce all your food.
And that could be taken away on a whim or who knows,
there's some sort of catastrophe and shipping overseas no longer feasible.
Or yeah, there's a leader that comes into power in another country that decides they want to cut you off.
And now what do you do?
You scramble to make yourself self-sufficient.
And it's a nightmare.
It'd be a horrible scenario. So we can agree that, okay, food, we should grow in our country.
I think we all feel like we should probably be able to fend for ourselves just as an individual would,
you know, make themselves able to defend themselves, whether it's through
making yourself physically fit or, you know, buying a weapon or putting a security system on your home,
you as an individual understand what it is that I need to fend for myself.
I can't be reliant on someone else. And if what's, you know,
I actually have used this phrase,
total mental sidebar.
Forget what I was going to say.
So why would we not want the same thing of our nation?
That if our nation is not self-sufficient,
if we cannot function without others,
then how can i as an individual
be self-sovereign right so if i if i don't produce my own food i'm not self-sovereign
if i don't defend my own home i'm not self-sovereign if i don't save money and
save money and, um, yeah, save for a rainy day.
Am I really prepared for the worst? Right.
So I think the nation has to be the same way. And I don't know.
It's, it's funny because man, a year ago he'd asked me and I've,
I've said, I don't think tariffs are a good idea in general.
I think taxes are bad. I think taxes hinder, um, production they slow the economy. And in this scenario, I may change my mind on this, but my instinct today is that the government has a responsibility to protect the interest of its citizens.
of its citizens. People are very comfortable saying, I'm okay if we don't import cheap labor.
I think almost every conservative person on the planet is saying, hey, close the borders.
What's happening is we have a flood of immigrants coming in. They depress wages. They prevent our poorest people from going to work and they prevent them from making a on top of that, it takes any profits that are made and sends that money out of the country as opposed to keeping it within the country.
So I want to show you something because this thing came up a couple years ago on my feed and it's stuck with me ever since.
I'm wearing my hat.
I grew up Toledo, Ohio, heart of the Rust Belt, man.
Like if you came to Toledo in the 80s, you would have seen what I meant.
The place was, I grew up in like a hollowed out city.
Downtown was empty.
There were big skyscrapers that just sat
empty for years um and this is all through when i talk about the rust belt you're talking like
milwaukee chicago gary indiana fort wayne uh elk art indiana detroit lansing grand rapids Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Youngstown, Warren, Ohio, Akron, Ohio, Buffalo,
New York, Pittsburgh, Erie, Pennsylvania. I work in manufacturing. I sell packaging for a living.
And so my job for the last 15 years is that I've gone out to find manufacturers to try to sell
packaging. So my job is literally all working
with manufacturers of all levels, whether it's people making cars, people making steel,
people making, you know, I've had customers that they just fill bottles with soap and I have
customers that put kits together to send out like marketing kits. Customers that make trucks,
customers that make go-kart or golf carts,
customers that make the seats that go in cars, or they make ball bearings, or they make, you know,
just the variety of things we run across as well. Food production, and all the cash,
cheese manufacturers. I can't tell you how many different types of facilities I go into.
manufacturers. I can't tell you how many different types of facilities I go into.
And it's been a nice job because it's fun to see the variety of things that people do
and to understand how these different things are connected. Who their suppliers are, who their
customers are, where their costs come from, how does labor impact their profitability,
how does shipping or freight, what does retail make?
What are the profit margins everybody makes?
You start to get an understanding of how the supply chains all fit together.
And I've actually all across that, the thing I've taught,
I haven't been out to Milwaukee or Chicago really,
but Northern Indiana, Northern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Michigan,
Indiana, Northern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Michigan. That's been the heart of
where I've traveled over the past, uh, 15 years to find business. And it's, some of the cities are,
are getting better. I mean, it's like Toledo's a hundred times better today than it was in the
eighties. I mean, the downtown at least has some activity.
There are some businesses come in,
but there's a lot that are gone and gone forever.
Champion Spark Plug used to be in Toledo
and it's gone and the building just sits empty today.
Just this big, massive factory.
I mean, there's probably way more than that I could go into.
We were the glass capital of the world,
but I want to show you something that's really interesting.
And let me pull this up here.
I'm going to put a little bit of music on.
I love this.
I'll just do some simple music.
I don't remember which one's good.
I hope people are commenting.
All right.
Can you guys hear any music?
I don't even know.
I found last time it was too loud.
Please hold.
Okay.
So this is 1949. Okay.
The richest cities in America in 1949, I've got on this list, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee,
Chicago, Toledo, Dayton, Akron. Toledo, Ohio, richer per capita income,
median household income, higher in Toledo than San Francisco, the New York City.
I mean, mind-blowing to me. I saw this chart and I thought, you got to be kidding me.
I saw this chart and I thought, you got to be kidding me.
You don't understand how, how, how how out this city was.
And it's the city itself has gotten worse since I've, I live in a suburb now, but I still live in the area.
But a lot of the people that live there, it's getting good neighborhoods that I grew up either living in, or I had a lot of friends that lived in other neighborhoods where
they used to have a public pool. They have, you know, people had jobs and they produced things
and neighborhoods with lots of kids running around and, you know, you wouldn't think much of it.
They're now neighborhoods I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to go into. And to see these cities,
Youngstown, Ohio, go to Youngstown.
And you would be shocked to hear that at one point in time, it was the 10th richest city in the country.
It just is mind blowing.
And I understand things have changed.
I understand that we don't make things like we used to.
There's more of a tech driven thing.
And probably the items that were made back then maybe aren't even used, you know,
again, we're the glass capital of the world.
Glasses been wiped out a lot by plastics and other things.
So I understand things have changed, but to see this and realize like, wow,
what happened between 1949 last 75 years for Toledo to go from the fifth richest,
I don't even know where we are today let's see uh ranking of richest or highest per capita income the highest hey i can't type
I mean you could probably look at this and I don't even know that we'd be in the top 100
but at one point in time at this point in time one two three four five look at these names
okay just look at these Detroit Cleveland Milwaukee Now Chicago's probably still up there.
Chicago has a broad financial center.
Let's go through the pants.
This actually shocked me.
Lima, Ohio, when they got some military and defense manufactured down there.
Maybe that's where that comes from.
Longest Indiana, what are some of these okay let's try to find
to go down here if you see it you see something say something
109th
let me see if that's the average median gdp admitted gdp per capita
okay it's not quite these aren't the exact same metric but yeah go from
fifth to 109th rochester new york same thing they're a rust belt city
let's see if we can find some of these other, let's see if Youngstown is even on here.
I can almost guarantee they are not.
That's probably the most extreme example.
Cleveland, Ohio, 150 second.
Can you understand this?
Cleveland was second.
And now they're 150 second.
I mean, this isn't even, here's Akron 157 and they were, we're like seven.
But to understand how are we fallen because we exported over the course and there was, I don't have a history lesson for you I started to look up like tariffs historically because back then we did
have tariffs we had tariffs all the way up really through the 70s there were
restrictions on things in the 70s we started to relent a bit on these tariffs
and the wheels fell off everything started to go overseas we did a lot to
restrict imports back then right so even just in
restricting how many japanese cars compete for it and so the question is like is this
good or bad for america i don't know um i look at it and say is where i grew up
where manufacturing was strong was it a good thing for it all to leave?
Absolutely not.
Unequivocally not.
It was...
I mean, you should see...
You should see a couple of the high schools in Toledo.
They're like castles.
They're amazing.
This was a booming city,
and it just got hollowed out.
Now, so this is the question. This is where I kind of, I'm not really sure how I feel about it
because I look at like, hang on, I want to, I look at what's the purpose? Why are we,
why are we doing what we're doing? You know, if, if the end goal of everything we do is to bring costs down so that everything, you know, get the cheapest, highest quality product for the cheapest price.
I think a lot of people would say, yeah, that's a good goal.
We want good products for our citizens at the lowest possible prices.
But at what cost?
At what point does it become
detrimental to have that mentality
if you look at on a small scale why is the why is the ghetto
continuously the ghetto and this is going to be i always
forget this the phrasing the phrase or the term or whatever it is but
you know if you ask an economist one of the biggest problems is that the money
leaves the ghetto. You might go get a job. You live in the ghetto, you're saving some money.
You go to spend it. You go spend it at Kroger. Kroger has a headquarters, ironically,
Cincinnati, Ohio.
It just goes to corporate office.
It doesn't stay with your neighbor who owns the grocery store.
He doesn't make any money.
It doesn't go to your local, you know, it goes to Midas.
It doesn't go to a guy who fixes cars down the street.
It goes to a corporation.
And when that money leaves your neighborhood, it doesn't come back.
And so on a larger scale, that's what's happening in the United States. And I'm going to pull up a video because I got a lot of both sides. And like I said, I don't want to sit here and act like I'm
the authority on this because almost every economist you see is saying, this is the worst thing you can do. This is going to kill the economy.
But also all those people are freaking out that the stock market's down 10%. Guess what?
The stock market doesn't impact the bottom 80%.
The stock market impacts people who already have.
I have money in the stock market,
but it's the same as housing prices go up.
It's good for the people who own the houses,
but it's bad for everybody else.
And so what's the goal here?
What are we trying to do?
Do we wanna just on paper become wealthier?ier meaning and what i mean by that is that
the people who have get more or do we actually want to build a robust system i think so i've
kind of come to the belief this is really a matter of national security just as keeping the border closed is meant to prevent the deterioration of our
society, I guess you would call it.
We have to have some sort of ability to be self-sufficient, to protect ourselves,
and to grow together. I mean, I don't know. Again, I don't think this sounds crazy,
but going through X, it was like 99% of the posts
were saying this is just the worst thing in the world.
So I'm just gonna show you a couple of quick videos.
I hope I haven't rambled too much.
If you have any comments, comment.
I know I don't have a ton of people watching.
I've been taking so many breaks.
I thought these were interesting.
Hang on.
Is this my bookmarks?
Here.
This guy's...
I like this guy.
Let me see if you guys can hear this.
Sorry.
What? What? what all right I guess I have to I don't know which one of these is actually gonna get here hold on is it this one this one here we go okay sorry about that
so do you want to know the part that they're not telling you about tariffs
here's the reality that nobody's talking about nobody this lighter costs 25 in america to buy an american maple and again just he's probably
just using an example probably not 25 he's just trying to give you a widget this is a widget
product okay china makes one sells it for 20 here in america out of that 20 dollars five dollars goes
to whoever in america sells it 15 of it goes back to China. You buy the $25 one in America, all $25 stays in America.
So now we want to say, let's balance this out and we're going to put a 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
Now this lighter costs $30 to sell in the United States.
costs $30 to sell in the United States. Now you have the U.S. made one at $25. It is cheaper.
It's more expensive in the big picture. I get it, but it's now cheaper. So people are going to buy
the American made one. 100% of the $25 that you spend stays in America, stays here. The demand
increases for that business. That business has to hire employees.
When many businesses hire employees, that creates a supply shortage of employees,
which make wages go up. Is this more expensive for the consumer in the short term? Yes,
but you're getting a better product. You're getting a better product for your money,
and the money is staying local okay you're not
funding these other countries and their businesses that is the purpose behind all of this will we
have a recession yes will prices go up in the short term yes but the lagging effect is all of that money now stays here with us.
It's not leaving the country, which gives us more money in the United States to go around for everybody.
Of course, every nation in the world is going to say we're being bad neighbors and bad business partners.
Well, of course, we've made them rich.
And now we as a people are suffering. We want our money back. Why is that so hard?
It's not ideal, but it works and it makes sense. And I'm not a pro-Trumper at all,
but I believe in it. I'm a business owner.
I know how it works.
Have a great day.
So I'm going to back this up with another video, but that's really what I think this boils down to is who do we want to feed?
Do we want to feed ourselves or do we want to feed other people?
And I get we can't be isolationists. I'm not saying that we have to be totally closed door. And I really wish
these tariffs were done with a lot more precision than they were. I don't know that this is their
final form. I think we're going to find out what's going to be the net effect of this.
You know, rather than trying to track down every product and understand where it came from and how much more competitive it is than it is in the United States,
and do we have the ability to make it in the United States or do we not, you do this and it's going to bubble up.
You're going to figure out, oh, this particular product product line we don't have the ability to make in
the united states so maybe we need to dial it back uh temporarily while we find a way to
manufacture in the united states but i'll say this man like people all were are going oh that
it was a toaster i know my toasters became a thing everybody cared about suddenly the toasters are
going to go up maybe 20 you know you, you're going to double the price.
You're going to pay $40 for a toaster.
And I'm thinking, I've actually don't even own a toaster.
I have a toaster oven, but I don't really,
I bought that maybe 20 years ago.
It's not like it's a common purchase I have to make.
But either way, just last week,
I was in a facility in Ohio
that it's a large appliance manufacturer
that makes a lot of the, a lot of it is made in the U.S.
So that there's their fans that come in the U.S. are are made in Iowa. The they stamp the steel out.
They mold the plastic in-house and they just doubled the size of their facility. They're bringing on a new line.
It has nothing to do with these tariffs, but they have capacity.
And so the biggest challenge is going to be, is there capacity in the United
States to make these in the midst of the, we've been in a lull economically anyway.
So there's likely is capacity.
Like I know the business I work for, we've been cutting hours and I know a
lot of businesses are laying people off. What that means is that when you have factories, you have like
machine time. You have machine A can produce 10,000 widgets a day on one shift. On two shifts,
it can do 20,000 and three shifts, it can do 30,000. So if you have a factory that's running
24-7, all their machines are
absolutely at capacity.
They're obviously not an ideal candidate to bring on new demand, but generally,
you know, people still are working.
A lot of times they're working two shifts in five days a week.
And the things they do is they dial back second shift when demand is low, or
they go to four days a week or you know they're they
have to kind of dial in how much how much can they pay people they don't want people to be there just
to stand around they also pay people generally 40 hours a week people expect to pay they got to have
benefits they got lights on they got to pay their administrative staff sales hr all that type of
stuff is kind of a fixed cost there's a lot of cost that goes on and run these businesses.
It is not related to the widget they're getting from overseas.
And so when you have a thing like a car, there's so much cost in a car that is not related to the part itself.
You know, the parts that make up a car, you know, I actually don't know.
And I don't even want to, I'll spike it. Let's say a $50,000
car. The dealership probably, the salesman gets something. The dealership gets something.
Laborers that put the thing together are getting a lot. There's HRs, utilities, there's taxes.
Yeah, administrative costs, sales costs, marketing costs.
So let's say the raw material, the actual parts that go in that car maybe make up $10,000.
When you have a 20% increase in that, it's $2,000. That's a 4% increase.
And in that supply chain itself, there's room, there's wiggle room when you talk about costs.
A hundred times in my life, I've had customers call me and say, hey, on this one, I really need you there.
Can you tighten your, sharpen your pencil?
Can you tighten your budget?
You know, we need to really get aggressive on this in order to be competitive.
So what they know is that a lot of times I'm making whatever I'm making, let's say I'm making
20% margins. I can survive on 10 to 15. I can do that as a favor once in a while, but that's not
how I'm going to run my business. So a good customer, I am going to bring my margins down
because I want him to win business because if because I want him to win business.
Because if he wins business, I win business.
And so it's a very cooperative environment.
It's not this like absolutist thing.
I can't believe how many posts I've seen where people go,
if this company is selling this at $20 and their cost is 15 and you raise their price 50%, they're going to go out of business.
They're not going to go out of business.
They're going to raise their price.
Like this guy's saying, they're going to raise their price.
And does that make them uncompetitive?
Maybe.
I'm not denying that.
This is, like I said at the beginning, a tariff is a tax.
This may end up being a tax that hurts businesses to a point that they go out of
business. And that's a reality. Just like the man you, here, let me show you this, this
one, but just like all those factories went away. Did anybody cry for those factories
that left? I mean, we did, right? And that's kind of what everybody's doing right now. It's like, we need to get this back. But it's a,
I think what he's saying makes a really good point of we can have one or the other,
but in one scenario, like we need to have really cheap goods from overseas,
or we can have a robust workforce. Our costs are lower here, a little higher here, but at the end of the day, this
one, at least the money stays in our neighborhood and can be invested in that
money, gosh, people going to work and making money to spend at restaurants
and spend it.
I mean, I feel like this is what the democratic $15 an hour wage thing is right i understand it's the same thing it's price controls in a way
but i get it i understand why you would want to produce things in your own country it's
to be insane to outsource everything to other countries purely for cost. And so to me, this is a financial systems,
you know, the finance pros in Wall Street, they're the ones that are throwing a hissy
pit because the companies, the corporations can't take advantage and exploit cheap labor overseas. And that's exactly what's been happening for decades.
And it's making it where we're becoming a society completely dependent on others
that don't do anything for ourselves.
And we're watching, I mean, we know, we know our deficit's blown out of control.
We can't sustain that.
We need to produce things here and get people back to work.
I mean, I just think that's,
I don't know, maybe I'm crazy,
but look at this, look at this.
This was, I looked up an article
about tariffs over time.
And this is the global population
by income distribution,
real income gains in 1988 to 2008.
And I was a little bit older, obviously.
Look at where the growth is and look at where it isn't.
I mean, oh, shit, it didn't pop up.
I'm sorry.
Look at this.
This should be pretty telling the people
at one point in time
who lived in
the city like I'm talking about
Toledo and Youngstown
and Gary and Detroit and Cleveland
you know the Rust Belt
people that voted for Trump
and put him in that office
they watched this happen.
And if you don't live here, it's hard to understand it.
You know, I've been down in the last few weeks ago, I was traveling in South Carolina and Alabama and Georgia.
My newer job, I actually broadened my scope in this job. And everything down there
is growing, right? They don't have the hollowed out area. They don't understand what it's like
up here because everything's been new. They didn't have an existing manufacturing base down there
that emptied out. They just had nothing. And so now everybody's moved down to the South because generally unions and that type of thing.
And that's a whole nother conversation.
But yeah, I mean, it's something that is affected.
It affects everything when people go out of work.
So would you rather have people working and being productive?
Maybe they're a little little poor meaning they don't
have cheap trinkets from China like how important are these this shit I don't
want me look at this mug what do you think this mug is me gotta be made in the
US right it's a promotional item let's see let's see oh son of a bitch it's
made in China.
Patent pending.
So this is just like a stamped out mug.
Can something like this be made in the US?
Absolutely.
It's just like a milled, maybe aluminum, got some hollow in it.
So the company that made this probably is making it in China because it's probably incredibly cheap.
You know, they probably have their design drawings.
I've seen this.
They put their design drawings together.
They send it over to a factory in China.
Maybe this thing costs.
You know, the prices are going to be different.
This might be $2 today, and it might be like $10 to make it in the U.S.
I don't know.
But that's the type of stuff we're talking about. The stupid things that sit around
your house and take a bunch of space. I'm not saying own nothing and be happy. I'm just saying
that I think that what's the what are we what's the game here? What are we shooting for? So I'm
going to show you one other one because this is along the same lines. This woman
started playing. same lines this woman um start playing
i'm kind of curious what you're saying here
litecoin fan you are my biggest fan litecoin fan and no i'm not saying we are in a utopian world
world I'm saying that people who believe that communism is realistic they they have a utopian
fantasy they don't they don't believe like they think all humans at some point will change human
nature just like I I now believe that also people who are libertarians or like i'll call them anarch anarcho libertarians
anarcho capitalists are also in that same utopian world and so what's really unpopular on the
internet is being rational being a realist a pragmatist um And so that's why all the loudest voices are the ones that are extreme.
But the reality is these are real issues, man, with real people. And I don't know,
it bothers me that we can't have conversations and look at both sides. So I'm hoping somebody
will come on next week and be my sounding board or we can we can talk
about tariffs a bit. I had to look through various websites to even believe what I was
reading. 54% tariffs on imports from China. 54%. 54%. And that means my business is fucking
done. That means I have just lost my business because of him.
This is a tax on me.
So now I.
Now this is where she's right.
And this is where I think if you if you really follow the track, it's a tax.
It's absolutely a tax on.
Corporations that make things outside the United States, 54 percent extreme.
We got a lot of feedback.
Suddenly have a 54% tax on my product
just to bring it into the United States.
A product that I cannot make in the United States.
There are no factories to go into, right?
Shocking to me that she knows this within two days i'm guessing i could be wrong but i'm guessing
there's somebody out there that makes it in the u.s but it's more expensive or maybe she could buy
it somewhere besides china maybe it can be made in mexico maybe we can make in Canada. I don't know. But just keep going. So typically tariffs are used
when there is manufacturing in a country. You put that tax on it to retain your manufacturing
here in the U.S. That ship has sailed. Okay, this is the one that really has gotten to me. I last night posted about this.
In 1970, when we started opening up our trade,
I'm sure there were a lot of people going,
well, what are you worried about?
It's not like Japan even has factories today.
It's not even like China or Mexico has factories. So what are they going to, what's the harm? They're not going to make things in Mexico. Are you crazy? They're not going to make things in Vietnam. They're like a
third world country. Well, when you put the incentives in place, what happened? Corporations
took their money out of the United States and they went to those other countries
and they built the factories. And here we are 30, 40 years later and the incentives played out.
And so if the incentives reverse, that money logically will come back.
The question is, are we still at the heart of the...
I still think we're at the heart of the world economy.
I still think the U.S. dollar is far and away the strongest currency.
And these countries are much more reliant on us than we are on them.
And at the end of the day, there's no reason we can't produce for ourselves.
Why do we believe that we can't produce products effectively for ourselves?
It's an insane thought to think that somehow we're not going to be able,
that somehow they can make something overseas, ship it here,
take profit from it, have a middleman here in the U S taking profit from it.
And we would be completely incapable of doing that.
It doesn't make any sense.
And the extreme nature of the talk, the way that this has been the frantic oh my god this is the worst economic decision this is
going to destroy the economy uh all these businesses are going to go out of state out
of business it doesn't it's not it's it's uh it's just such extreme thinking i just don't see it i
know i know i'm like rambling but sorry our manufacturing left starting in the 70s so why do you think like legit why does
she not understand why that is that's what's so frustrating she acts like it was just a
so it just happened we had perfectly functional factories that companies decided to shut down for no reason at all.
The manufacturing left.
Why did the manufacturing leave?
That's to help families avoid plastic.
No, that's over.
Is Trump going to build me a $10 million factory?
Actually, she's looking for glass.
I live in Toledo, which was the glass capital of the world.
And they're still one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world in Toledo, Ohio.
They make 130 million glasses a year.
For my borosilica glass sippy cups and every other product in the U.S., no.
Nothing is made without raw materials from another country.
Shut the fuck up.
She has no idea what she's talking about.
Without raw materials.
Like we don't have plastic resins that are made in the U.S.
Like we don't have oil products, oil-based products.
Like we don't have steel.
Like we don't have aluminum.
Like we don't have... We're one of the largest countries in the world with an abundance of natural resources.
Sorry. 54%? That just put me out of business. Trump is literally just killing
small businesses for no fucking reason.
Tell me how I'm supposed to suddenly make that up.
Tell me.
Are my customers going to pay $60 for a sippy cup?
Fuck no.
There's no one that will make it here in the US.
So I don't know where we're going with this but um yeah it's not good and everyone's suffering every single company in the u.s
imports something from somewhere else because that's just how the world works
it's like if you have a kitchen do you grow everything in your backyard do you grow salt do you grow flour do
you grow olives to you know what's funny is like the largest corporations like mcdonald's does grow
their own potatoes specific to them make olive oil no you't. You can grow some veggies, but you can't make everything in house.
And that is like an analogy for the fucking United States. You need to be able to trade
with your partners because different countries have different specialties. This is fucking
stupid. That's going to kill small businesses like mine. My business, I'm fucked. It's done.
my business I'm fucked it's done this is this is bad and and not just mine like
like everybody is like not just mine like a lot of people's small businesses over
so she's like a you know she may have had an idea and I good for her I you know I think that's
I don't want to besmirch this lady i mean she
probably had an idea it's glass sippy cups i don't know if it's a patented thing or she's just
bringing them in from china and reselling them uh that part i don't know about her business so
i don't want to say if i were to speculate it's that she's branding something through a third party and selling it I wish I knew who this lady was maybe we'll find out
but you know I do think that there are going to be people that get hit particularly hard with this
and that's what's going to be difficult to fix.
And what I'm hoping is that seeing the worst part,
seeing where the pain is, is where we're going to see adjustments.
I don't know.
So I was going to go into a little bit about
kind of how the real manufacturing economy works,
at least in my mind,
like the supply chain is multi-layered.
A 10% increase is not going to, you're not going to see a 10% increase in the price of cars because of a 10% increase on some parts that come into the United States from Mexico.
They're only a portion of the cost.
a portion of the cost.
There's gonna be certainly a collective team effort
by suppliers and customers and sales and manufacturing
to offset that cost as much as possible.
We've actually even seen Ford this week
as reducing the prices of their cars
because they're trying to move inventory.
The biggest problem we have
is not the cost of materials is banned.
The economy is slowing because demand has cost of materials, it's demand.
The economy is slowing because demand has slowed down tremendously in the last year.
Interest rates have gone up,
which is making things very expensive.
So people don't have money to spend.
The demand is slowing down.
Demand slows down,
increasing the capacity of these manufacturers.
They can now produce more products from overseas
at a competitive price.
They have the machines, they have the manpower.
You just have to bring the tooling back from overseas
and they should be able to start producing
relatively competitively.
We, I mean, today we produce a ton of stuff
in the United States competitively without the tariffs in place.
So the spread is not as large as people are making out to people.
This, you know, are there items like this, like this mug that probably, I don't know,
again, I got it as like a marketing company from somebody we did business with in the past.
You know, let's say the promotional item
this thing was 15 bucks oracle net suite i'm going to say it was one of the worst experiences i've
ever had with the crm sorry net suite your product sucks but um this thing might cost five dollars
to import from china if you make it here, it might be $10.
And so instead of $15, it's going to be $30.
They want to keep their margins the same,
or it's going to be $20 or $25 in order to remain competitive
because maybe a mug, I don't know if I have a mug.
Let's see this one I got.
This one holds my pens.
What do you think this one's made?
It doesn't even say.
Maybe it's...
It doesn't say.. Maybe it's...
It doesn't say.
I'm sure a lot of things are made in China.
I'm not doubting that.
I think that that's absolutely true.
But just as, to me,
importing and exporting cheap labor are no different.
And I would rather that money stay in the U.S.
and go to people in the U.S.
that get up and go to work every day and build a society.
Society is built by people putting down roots and being invested in a community.
And if you don't go to work, if you don't have a care about your, you know, if everything you do is just being hollowed out by other countries,
we've seen the net effect of it. We've seen what's happened as people have worked less and
less and produced less and less. You're probably hearing pounding upstairs. So, well, I'm going to
go. I appreciate anybody that tuned in. Next week, we're going to relaunch with a new format.
I don't know how different it's gonna be i'm thinking about
rebranding again uh trust me i'm not abandoning litecoin i'm not abandoning crypto i'm trying to
broaden the reach i'm trying to bring more people into this conversation. And I think talking about important topics like this
is how I'm going to bring more people in and introduce them to the principles of cryptocurrency.
So thanks for sticking with me all the time, guys. And next week, Animal and I will be in here.
We're going to be doing in the next few weeks, a Lantern Fi. We're going to have interviews with,
I think we're going to talk to the light coin computer guys,
light coin summits coming up.
I might be there,
stack mobile.
Also,
I'm trying to get something set up with them.
If you remember them from the light coin summit,
they had,
they have a really cool product with some good discounts on your cell phone
network.
So anyway,
that's all I got for today.
And,
thanks for tuning in.
Everybody take it easy and, easy and have a good weekend.
Bye.
