Factually! with Adam Conover - The End of American Supremacy with Mark Blyth

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

For over 75 years we’ve lived in a world DEFINED by American economic supremacy. With the chaos of Trump’s tariffs and the rise of China it’s worth asking, is this era coming to a close? Today Adam is joined by Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics at Brown, and coauthor, along with Nicolo Fraccaroli of Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. Find Mark's book at factuallypod.com/booksEXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/adamconover Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. of the time only. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, the US-led global economic order and its institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the global free trade movement that we live under have been around in some form since after World War II. That's a long time. For over 75 years, we've lived in a world defined by American economic supremacy.

But now, with the chaos of Trump's tariffs and the rise of China, it's worth asking if that era is coming to a close. You know, this American dominated system was built for a different global economy and a different globe. The world today looks a lot different than it did in 1950. And since then we have seen profound changes. America has shifted from a manufacturing to a service-based economy. Women entered the workforce en masse, as did minority groups. Supply chains have spread across the planet

to maximize efficiency and profit at the cost of resilience. And now with the rise of China as a new economic superpower, the American order has a legitimate competitor again, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. So, is the neoliberal era actually ending? Is Trump causing it to end?

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And what the hell is going to replace it? Well, to discuss all those questions, we have one of the most brilliant, big picture economic thinkers out there. I cannot wait for you to hear this interview. Even if you are not a super smart person about the economy, I certainly have a lot to learn.

You are gonna get a lot out of this interview. And I wanna remind you that if you wanna support the interviews we bring you every single week with the big thinkers who give you the facts and the analysis just as it is and help you understand the world around you. Well head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free.

We also have an awesome online community of people who love to think and learn and question the world around them. We'd love to have you join patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And of course, if you want to come see me on the road, I am doing standup comedy all across the country. Coming up soon, I'll be in Charleston, South Carolina. Head to adamkonover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now, let's get to this week's interview. Mark Blythe is a professor of International Economics at Brown. He's a past guest on the show. He is an absolute brilliant big picture thinker on what is happening in the global economy

and explains it in a way that is clearer than almost anyone else I've ever spoken with. He's also the author of the new book inflation, a guide for users and losers. Please welcome Mark Blythe. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show again. It's great to be here. So how do you view, you know, what's happening in our economy

right now globally? Are we entering an entire new global economic regime? And if so, what is it going to be? Have you ever heard the great line that Richard Pryor did to describe his life? No. It's one he goes, this is my life until recently. And he likes a match and goes, and then he blows out the match. Right? So, you know, somewhere in that space. Where do you want to begin? There's a lot going on. But Richard Pryor told that joke

as he set himself on fire. Is that what we're doing? Are we setting ourselves on fire? Yes, that's exactly it. And we've kind of done the same thing. So pick an area and we'll go for it. And we'll just take that as a point of entry and go in. Where do you want to go?

There's so much going on. Yeah, let's start with the tariffs and the potential end of the globalized era of free trade that we've been in for my entire life. Yeah, that's a minor one. Let's get started there. Okay. Here's how I think about this. There's actually a serious point underneath the whole of this. Right? So think about this one. 1975, three biggest employers in the United States are General Motors, Ford, and what becomes Exxon. Fast forward to 2025, the three biggest employers are the Home Depot, Amazon Logistics, and Walmart.

Now, what does that tell you? It tells you that we don't make shit anymore, and we sell stuff that's made in other places. Now, on the one hand, this has been a great deal. You remember the Walmart advert from the nineties and two thousands, the prices keep falling, right? But what we've also done is we stopped making stuff. And when you stop making stuff, it turns out that's bad because when you need it, you might get cut off.

And you also lose the skills to make this stuff because we haven't made any of this stuff for twenty years so the whole project of re industrialization does actually have a logic to it. Are tariffs part of the certainly are in fact joe biden with his inflation reduction act which was an attempt to re industrialize on green lines. Use trumps tariff extended trump's but what do you also had going on was an extension of the capacity of the state, lots of grants and incentives and all this sort of stuff. Then the focus would have been on skills, etc. What we've got here is tariffs, hack the legs off the government and destroy your skills institutions called universities.

So tariffs are part of this, but it's only a part and it's only a beginning. And given that, everyone's kind of going, what is going on here? Because if it's just tariffs, this isn't going to work. Hence a lot of the noise and uncertainty that's going on. You said that tariffs cut the legs off state capacity universities. I mean, I know Trump is doing those things. He is specifically attacking universities as a supposed, I don't know, nest of evil leftists.

It seems to be that's the main reason. If only, I know all three of them. I know, the leftists were hardly doing well to begin with in the university system, but are you saying that the tariffs themselves hurt universities and state capacity? No, what I was saying with that is, if you're gonna do tariffs,

you also need to have other things in play, and you need to have a state that kind of guides where capital gets invested, what sectors you're going to pick. You need partnerships with industry. You need to do skills that you've forgotten how to do, which means educational institutions, not just universities. And none of that seems to be part of the equation. It's just tariffs and then we'll make things really expensive and then everything will

come home, and that's simply not gonna happen. But you think there's a world in which a version of tariffs could bring manufacturing back to America, and I just did a video, a monologue a week ago where I argued, this is something that happens to all sort of advancing, in quotation marks, economies,

they all become less reliant on manufacturing, they all become more service-based. A lot of that is because a lot of people prefer to kick their feet up in air conditioning and have a desk job rather than lose a finger to the bandsaw or et cetera. But is, you know, so in a way it's a ratchet that only goes one way.

Is it possible for tariffs or a combination of good policy to bring manufacturing back? Yeah, it doesn't even have to be good policy, right? When the Russians started to get freaked out about NATO expansion in 2007, 2008, Putin went to this big security conference in Europe and said, right, basta enough, we're not doing this. We're going to re-industrialize, we're going to rebuild the entire sort of military industrial complex. And everyone went, no, you're not. And that's exactly what he did. So if you put your mind to it, you can do this, right?

Think of other countries that are also big service sector economies, Germany, for example, Sweden, they also have a much larger manufacturing sector than we do. A lot of what we did was a policy choice and at the level of corporations. Even today, 40% of the exports coming out of China are from global corporations,

and an awful lot of them are American. So it wasn't just this natural evolutionary thing. A lot of people chose to do it this way because there was a lot of money in it. And tell me more about how that choice was made. I mean, I literally remember hearing the word NAFTA when I was a child in the 90s, and I know that that was

a big part of the swing. What caused it to happen and what were the effects? Been going on for a long time and this is where the story about it's not just trade is true, right? So go back to the 1970s, right? Around 1973, labor share of national income was at an all time high and capital share of labor income was obviously at an all-time low. Labor meaning workers themselves, not necessarily even unionized workers.

The workers took over 67% of GDP. That was the highest it's ever been. It's now down to about 55%. There's enormous swing over 40 years. You go to a state like Wisconsin at that point in time, you've got inflation in the economy, manufacturing's getting competition from around the world for the first time, from the Japanese, et cetera. You wanna basically lower your costs.

What do you do? There's no China to go to. You go south, you go to Texas, you go to right to work states. Wisconsin lost a third of its industry, not in NAFTA, but the right to work states. Then they go down to Texas, and then you do NAFTA, and that's the free trade agreement

and the links up Canada and in the United States into one big zone and a load of stuff goes down to Mexico and out to Canada. You'll remember maybe because you were a child at the time, there was a guy called Ross Perot who was a presidential candidate and his entire thing was there's going to be a huge sucking sound as all those jobs go down to Mexico and the guy wasn't wrong. Now, what did we get instead? We got cheaper prices. Was it a good trade-off for the jobs that we lost? We can argue about that, but that

was the choice that was made. Then, once you get NAFTA 10 years later, China comes into the global economy. Their capacity in manufacturing is something the world has never seen. And when they join the World Trade Organization and get better access to the US, it just devastates what's left of American manufacturing,

particularly in the Southeast and in the Midwest. So it's not just one thing. This has been going on for a long time. But it's a whole host of policy choices due to the firms that want to basically maximize profits. Now, go back to that 1970s point. Another way of thinking about who's got the money in the world isn't just which share of GDP goes to labor capital.

Another one is simply look at corporate profits. In the 1970s, corporate profits at an all time low. Today they're at an all time high. They're 12 and a half percent of GDP. It's an enormous swing. This was because corporations wanted it. The notion that, the one of the things that pisses me off on this is like, Oh, China's ripping us off. China is basically just a giant satellite base

for global corporations to use for cheap labor to send shit to us, right? If anybody's ripping us off, it's we ourselves who are doing it to make more cash. Right, it's American companies that said we can get a deal on labor if we do it somewhere else and then ship it back and forth. And of course the development of these. No badness in this one, right? Think about it as a competitive thing. So suddenly somebody

invents the container ship, which means that your ability to get shitting on off is like, so much better, right? Then at the same time, you get the information technology evolution. So you know where everything is and you can order things just in time. Once you put all that together, if you're the first firm to do this, you better not be the last because everyone else is going to eat your lunch. Yeah. So once that becomes possible and becomes part of the competitive dynamic between firms, you play the game or you lose.

So of course they all did it. And was that, so look, there's winners and losers in this, right? Do you think on balance it's the corporations that won and the workers that lost as a result of global free trade or were there, you know, are the other winners and losers a little more evenly distributed? Let me put it this way. There's a great paper you can get from the Rand Corporation that was done a couple of years ago and it has the most. I love the way you roll the R on Rand Corporation. I've never heard that.

Somebody has to. I mean, somebody has to. I think the R's have been under rolled in America for a long time. And I am here to roll your R. Oh my God. It's beautiful. The Rand Corporation, he says, making it even more ridiculous, has this, has this wonderfully anodyne titled paper called

Trends in Income, 1975 to 1980. And it's this incredible paper that shows that here's what actually happened. Imagine that we went on a time machine, and we went back to 1980, and we froze all the tax levels, all the regulations. We didn't change anything. And then we run history forward as we know.

What is the difference between that history and the one that we actually experienced? And the answer is $36 trillion went up to the top 10%. Wow. $36 trillion. And the skew in that is such that basically the more than half of that went to the top 1% and more than half of that went to the 0.1%. So that's where all the cash went. It's dead easy.

According to this analysis, counterfactually, your average American worker would have had around $14,000 to $15,000 a year more on income if they hadn't done all those changes. $13,000 to $14,000 more. Yes. Wow. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah.

So these are policy choices that were made and the purpose was to benefit these corporations or at least that was the effect. Yeah, absolutely. Because American corporations were really hurting in the 70s. I mean, people forget this, right? There's, what's his name again now?

He runs a big, there's a big foundation named after him in DC, Peterson, Pete Peterson. He was a Nixon advisor who scared the pants off of the Nixon administration by basically doing this presentation. He was like, lads, here's what we make. We make cars, we make ships, all the rest of it. We're about to have our lunch sheet and by everybody else who's emerging in the world to do this, we need to shift into new sectors.

We need to do technology. We need to do like pharmacy, all this sort of stuff. And at the time, the next administration was so like, you know, in a mess, they weren't able to do anything with it. Then you get through the whole Carter period, and then you get to the eighties, it's the Reagan guys that, poor, many of them are ex-Nixon guys, who picked this up, and they get together with corporations and say,

yeah, it's been a rough decade, hasn't it? What are we gonna do? Well, we basically gotta beat up on labor, restore profits, move our shit around as much as we can, and basically get things back on track in new sectors. And that's what they did. Yeah, I mean, all those things line up,

globalization, the attack on labor, the shareholder revolution. Exactly. You're talking about the shift to the neoliberal order happened around that time. Exactly, exactly. Which I think is an overdone term. I mean, essentially what you had was a world from 45 to 75

that really benefited labor. And the reason that we built that is because the last time we didn't, they became fascists and murdered everyone. So let's be nice to them. But eventually, if you run that system long enough, you end up over benefiting them. And profits decline.

You can't have capitalism with profits. And what you get is a kind of a revolt of business in the 70s and into the 80s that kind of restructures the bargain. And that's what we've been living with the consequences of. How do you mean labor became fascists? I'm curious what you mean by that. That your average German worker

basically became a fascist foot soldier because of the economic disruptions of the 20s and the 30s. Okay, you're talking about the rise of Nazi Germany. Exactly, and in Italy and in everywhere else, right? So the lesson learned from World War II was, if you don't want everyone to start murdering each other, maybe doing things like having trade unions

and sharing productivity gains might be a good idea. Well, that's really funny. That seems like a sort of European version of the history. The American version is about labor riots and things like that. But I think that for our history of World War II was different. Right?

Exactly, right. And that we industrialized and became the superpower as a result of World War II. And I think that Capitol gave labor a lot of slack in order to secure labor piece, but also it was part of the, the, the, the huge surplus after world war two, like this gigantic advantage that America had. I had absolutely, absolutely.

You guys basically crapped yourselves on the technological frontier at exactly the right moment in history. I mean, that was it. So there's a, I just saw the Led Zeppelin documentary. I don't know if you've seen this and there's a really brilliant bit in it where Robert Plant's talking about his childhood and he's saying, you know, we lived in Britain. It was miserable. It was rationing. Everything was so conservative, you know, even though the war is over, it didn't feel like a

victory. And all we had now was all this stuff coming from America, colored films and movies and above all music. And it was just this land where like you had endless abundance and people drove giant cars and could take time off and play rock and roll. And we were just like, what is this? I want this. Yeah. That's very different from the view that people around the world, I think have of America

now or at least that Americans have of ourselves. Like it's strange that at this moment when America's still the world's largest global economy, you know, you had as recently as a year ago, I remember the cover of The Economist, they're like the American economy is the envy of the world, all this sort of thing. And yet Americans themselves have felt

for the last 10 years a lot of scarcity, a lot of, you know, well, we don't have that much. Oh, things aren't as good as they used to be. Nobody can get enough. Um, how also because things are really expensive. I mean, that's what it is. I mean, the thing, the paradox of the United States is it's absolutely true. I tell Europeans us all the time.

You guys can get by on half as much money as we have because you don't have to pay for the stuff that we have to. Right. Just think for a family of three, my paycheck, what I got to pay in health care, along with my employer. Then you got a big deductible on your plan, so you got to burn through that, right? You live in a city, you don't like the schools, what do you do? You got to go private, right?

OK, that's a choice, but then you do this. Suddenly, just those two things is $40,000. That's a European income. Yeah. Right? All because all of that is taken care of by the state in Europe. Suddenly, just those two things is $40,000. That's a European income. Yeah. Right? Because all of that is taken care of by the state in Europe. So it's an entirely different thing.

And when you consider that housing costs have been going through the roof, education costs have been going through the roof, health care has going through the roof, and all the time the government's like, hey, we haven't had inflation forever. And you're like, you've got to be shitting me. You've got to be. So I've just written this book on inflation coming out in May 6th with Norton Inflation, a guide for users and losers.

Everyone should buy it. But it's really interesting when you look into this because all this stuff that they strip out of the inflation index to calculate the number correctly reduces the volatility of the index. And guess what they take out? Volatile items, which are food, fuel, rents. In other words, everything that everyone actually gives a damn about.

Wow. Yeah, exactly. And there's John Otters, who's a journalist at Bloomberg, kind of had an intuition on this and said, I wonder what happens if I take the index and I throw out everything except the volatile items. And you end up with a 12% to 14% inflation rate, which is what a lot of people are feeling.

Yeah. Right? So remember last year there was a whole thing about the disconnect because it seems that the economy is doing well, but people think it sucks, right? Yeah. Well, that could be why. Yeah, because the statistics left out the things that were most expensive to people.

And they're actually most important to people. Yeah, I mean, you know, on a weighted average, they don't matter that much, I guess. But, you know, if you're in the bottom 60% of the income distribution and you've been facing stagnant wages for the past 30 years as costs go through the roof, somebody like me goes on television and says, oh, the economy's doing great. No wonder you want to murder me.

Yeah, no, I mean, we had people saying that to us because we were talking about that issue prior to the election and you know, people said, no, the economy is bad. It's really bad for me. And it depends where you like anything else in life it's like inflation and everything else it depends where you are in the income distribution right if you're the bottom 20 percent and inflation is 10 percent that just murdered you because everything you have goes on consumption day to day keeping it together you know the top 10 percent if you could my line is

this if you can shop at whole foods you don't understand or care about inflation. Oh, dude the price of eggs at the group Look, I buy the most expensive eggs I always have right because I make enough money that like I'm not going broke buying eggs I'm only buying a dozen eggs a week. I can pay eggs. I buy the organic eggs the organic eggs have not gotten more expensive It's the cheap eggs that have gotten more expensive the ones that were 10 bucks a carton are still 10 bucks a carton. Just now the ones that are two bucks are like seven. Exactly. And if you were able to afford 10 bucks, you can afford 11 because it's actually a much smaller part of your overall income.

So you don't really care about it. That's it. This is the only reason Whole Foods exists. It's basically a wealth test when you go through the door. Yeah, because if you make a lot of money, you don't care whether your groceries cost a hundred bucks or 200 bucks because you're like, I'm not, it's not going to affect my overall finances. This is not the deal breaker right now. Imagine more and more Americans from the 20th percentile up to the 60 and even

the 70th percentile are in one version of another living paycheck to paycheck because it's such an expensive place to live. Yeah. You got to take care of healthcare, you gotta take care of education, you gotta do all these sorts of things, all of which the prices have been going up. So you can be like on 60,000 a year and be smack banging that median income

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off a subscription. That's right. 40% off if you go to groundnews.com slash factually. So talking again about the transition in our economy from the 70s to today, we globalized trade. A lot of stuff gets cheaper. That's a benefit for the average consumer. Hey, guess what? You can get a big TV, very cheap and a lot of the other necessities

of life. Clothing becomes very cheap. Yes, super cheap. Food is pretty cheap in America. As a percentage of income, I know that as well. But then the price of all these other things goes up, healthcare, housing, et cetera. And because the businesses have declared war on labor,

wages aren't going up. Correct. And unions can't fight for, say, a better healthcare plan like they used to be able to. So we end up in this situation where people are, some things are cheap, but the necessities of life, healthcare and housing end up being unaffordable. And as a result, people feel this impoverishment.

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And you can even do a generational twist on this, whereby if you are the generation just beyond me, I'm too young exactly it. And like you can even do a generational twist on this whereby if you are like the generation just beyond me, I'm too young to be a boomer. But if I was actually a boomer and I bought a house in the right market back in the eighties, I'm not sitting on a gold mine that I'm going to transfer to my kids, but only my kids. If you're a kid coming up now, you're a 20 year old, a 30 year old, right.

Uh, and you're trying to buy a house in a major metropolitan area, get married, or do any of that normal stuff. Good luck with that because it's too damn expensive. Right. Yeah, and so people are generationally able to sort of hoard and pass along the benefits of the previous economy, but there's a lot of people who are being left out of that. Yeah, most people are not members of somebody else's family.

Yeah. So when you draw the comparison, you say that in Europe in the 20s and 30s, labor had, workers were not able to get by so they became fascists. Is there a comparison between that and the political upheaval that we have now where people are voting in ways that some of the folks

who are well off are saying, wait, hold on a second, what's going on? Like these people have, has a whole bunch of the country become fascist? Is that the same pressure? Well, I mean, let's do some parallels without using the F word, right? In the 1920s, what did you have?

A series of financial crashes. What happened right all around the world? What happens after financial crashes, you get right wing populist movements angry at the government. If the government cannot stabilize the situation, those folks end up taking power. When they take power, they want to destroy existing institutions, limit democracy and have sort of a, um, leader principle whereby you bypass checks and balances so you can get things done with the right guy in charge

who's not gonna truck any opposition from the left. Sound familiar? Yeah, that sounds really fucking familiar, Mark. Funny that, innit? I'm reading a, I've said on the show before, I'm right now making my way through an audio book of the history of the Third Reich, the rise of the Third Reich, the rise of the Third Reich.

And yeah, I can see the comparisons, you know? Yeah. So here's the way I tell it in class when we cover this period. I go, all right, so imagine that you're a German kid. You're born in 1900. So things are going pretty well in your early teenage years, and thankfully you're too young to be slaughtered in World War I. So you get to 1918, and then there's a civil war

for two years and the country tears itself apart. Eventually there's some kind of short-term financing that comes from America that stabilizes the place. You get the roaring 20s, but it's really only roaring for a few people. The whole thing's politically unstable. It's a total mess. Your employment prospects are haphazard at best. And then in 29, the Great Depression hits. And for the next five to six years, you've got terrible unemployment, incredible poverty.

And everyone in the ruling classes tells you, well, we just need to tighten our belt. We can't have any debt. It's terrible. We need to do this. Look at the inflation we had before. We can't go back to that. That's terrible.

And then there's this one party that comes along and says, this is all bullshit. We don't need to do any of this. You know who I'm talking about. It's the NSDAP, right? And they come along, and then they start off as a minority party that's along and says, this is all bullshit. We don't need to do any of this. You know who I'm talking about. It's the NSDAP, right? And they come along and then they start off as a minority party. That's a joke, 4% of the vote.

And they end up within seven years of getting, what did they end up with now? 31% to 32 election. And I think it was over 40% in the 33 election when they slammed the door on democracy. So if I'm that guy who's had basically shit life syndrome my whole entire adult life, and someone says, we can do better,

and we can do different, and the people who are saying that we can't do anything else are the ones who are laughing at you, who are the ones who are taking advantage of you, that's a very powerful political message. And you're talking about why right-wing populist parties or movements are able to take power from liberals

or the center, right? Exactly. Why is that historically the pattern? Why isn't it that you see left-wing movements take power? It seems to be, when I look at history, it's tilted in one direction. Why is that? It's a really good question.

I mean, the short answer is, we all know three of them, and the three that constitute the left. It's a bugbear of the right. It's always made up. Remember Antifa? I think there were five people in Antifa. I mean, I'm not sure what actually that was.

But there's a thing where the left is bigger than it is. Even when the left is big, as it was in Germany in the interwar period, at that point in time, it was very much constrained by the second international Moscow communism, socialism, all that sort of stuff. And thirdly is the left, like nothing better than a circular firing squad. I mean, if they can fight with each other rather than unite and do anything, then they will absolutely do it. So, and the last one is like when they do get serious, like in France in 36 with the popular front, the establishment will

use every means necessary to undermine them. In fact, they fear them more than they fear the German fascists. Yeah, and that's the strange thing, because I imagine if, you know, I think I've said on this show before, if Bernie had taken power in 2016 or 2020,

he would have gotten massive pushback against doing something a third of the size of what Trump is doing right now. Yeah, absolutely. If he just tried to do Medicare for All or something like that, there would be full-scale pushback against doing something a third of the size of what Trump is doing right now. Yeah, absolutely. If you just try to do Medicare for all or something like that, there would be full scale pushback from society. But a national bankruptcy, it's the worst thing ever. We'll destroy our children's futures.

You can imagine the whole lot. Yeah. But meanwhile, Trump is currently taking apart the entire economic order in ways that his own backers are surprised and upset by. And everyone's just kind of shrugging and going like, damn, that's crazy. Like, wow, he's doing it. Okay. It's like watching a fight outside a casino.

You're strangely drawn to it, even though you know that you should try and put a stop to it. Well, so, uh, Trump is the, you know, the next version of this pattern that we see over and over again. He's destroying institutions. He's changing the economic order. But coming back to the ways in which he's changing it, you're saying that the way that he's instituting the tariffs

are not going to bring back manufacturing. They seem designed to do nothing but make America poorer, you know, hurt our corporations, you know, rather than really benefit them that much. At least if you look at some of the biggest American corporations like Apple, Apple certainly gets nothing out of what's happening. Wall Street is panicking about it.

So yeah, I mean, what do you make of it? So this is what happens when you got a small group of guys that only talk to each other and convince themselves that they're right. I've got a little, I've got a little magnet on my fridge that says religion is what happens when mansplaining gets out of control. And I think a version of that affects politics sometimes when you have this guy who's got an incredible sense of politics and an incredible way of

connecting with people, particularly those who feel, you know, they've been screwed over a grieve, et cetera, et cetera, that they've got an ax sense of politics and an incredible way of connecting with people, particularly those who feel they've been screwed over, aggrieved, et cetera, et cetera, that they've got an axe to grind. And also people who think that things are morally out of order. The one thing that liberals on the left are terrible dealing with is the question of order. They deal with prosperity. They want to talk about abundance, but a guy called Ganesh who writes for the Financial Times had this in a column this weekend, and I thought it was a really good point.

The left is terrible on order. People actually do concern themselves with immigrants. They care about border security. They care about police. They care about crime. And the left is like, that's just a giant social experiment for us in basically giving away free stuff. We do not take that stuff seriously,

and many, many people do. And he's able to package all that in such a way that he mobilizes this force. He didn't just win in 2016 by crushing the democratic machine. He came back and did it again. So this is an actual force to be reckoned with. Now, what is it in his message?

I want to make America great again. What exactly was Kamala's message? Anybody have any idea what that was at all? Other than I've got another celebrity endorsement. Look at me, right? Yeah. So he's able to push this stuff. Now that what matters then is the contents less important than the form. He's always had an instinctive thing about America's getting screwed in trade deals. He knows somehow that tariffs are important. Maybe somebody gave him a link him a McKinley biography to read.

If you think about the project, it's very much sort of like, let's go back to the 1950s in social and political sense, as well as manufacturing. So we have a 1950s imaginary of the economy with big American corporations producing at home. And then the security imaginary is pure 19th century. I mean, I didn't have Canada on my bingo card. And you start looking at the McKinley presidency, and he's the guy who goes after Cuba.

He's the guy who starts the Panama Canal. He's the guy who tilts at Greenland. He's the guy who puts a tariff on Canada designed to make them part of the United States. It's like, oh, hello. Wow. Somebody else has seen this playbook. Yeah, seriously, check out McKinley's presidency. It's really interesting. And then what you get is this kind of hemispheric realignment whereby the United States is like self-contained, very carbon heavy.

The green stuff, we could talk about that. It's really interesting why you're so anti-green, right? All of that, all the way right down. You get your sat traps in the South run by Bolsonaro. You get it run by Malay. And you have this kind of like post neoliberal, but kind of like hyper deregulated state capitalism run in a very anti-democratic authoritarian way. And then on the other side of the world, Europe just gets told to sod off and deal with the Russians.

And then China gets to basically deal in a, with that area, unless you piss off American interests. And then you're buffered by India on the other side. And it's this very 19th century imaginary. Now, I imagine if you all sit in a room and talk about this incessantly, this all makes sense. When you get in power and you try and make it happen and your only tool is tariffs, it's not going to work. But technically, for the tariffs to work, you need to be permanent. You need to go, all right, lads, it's not going to work. Particularly for the tariffs to work,

you need to be permanent. You need to go, all right, lads, here's the deal. Apple, everyone, they're coming in at 10%. Then we're going to put them up to 15. And if you don't think we're serious, we're then going to put them up to 20. I'm going to give you two years runway to get used to this. The end point is 40, and I'm going to get to 40.

And everyone goes, oh shit, he's serious. And then you do it, and that's it. You don't say, make up some formula that makes no sense. And then you tariff the entire world at ridiculous levels. And then when the bond market starts to crap itself, you don't reverse yourself and say, ha ha, it was all a cunning plan to isolate China. And everyone else now gets 90 days

to negotiate against the tariffs. Because you're like, so in other words, if it's just negotiation, you actually believe in free trade then, right? Cause all you're doing is reducing tariff barriers. So the whole thing makes no sense, which is why the markets are like, America doesn't know what it's doing.

And we've never been in a world where America doesn't know what it's doing. Yeah. Do you really think that they don't know what they're doing? Like is it, is it really just an old man's whims is what we're dealing with. I think that's what I mean. I'm pretty sure that there are some people in that administration that

actually, you know, have a background in finance and have run big financial firms and actually understand how the markets work. And I'm sure that they spend time telling the boss, look, you maybe want to do it this way, whatever. And he just goes, no, and nobody's going to tell him no, because he's the guy that won twice. He's the guy that got the popular vote. He's the guy that has in his mind a mandate and he's going to do him no, because he's the guy that won twice. He's the guy that got the popular vote. He's the guy that has in his mind a mandate and he's going to do what he thinks is right.

You're there to facilitate. You are there to implement. You are not there to decide. Yeah. It's interesting because it seems as though a whole big part of the right has decided, you know, in between, during the Biden years decided to hitch their wagons to Trump. When he won the first time, he was kind of a man alone. Like he won in what was seen as a fluke. No one had really attached themselves to him. And so there was, they spent a lot of time containing

him and saying, okay, we'll work around him, et cetera. This time a whole bunch of the right wing was like, no, that's our guy. We're going to achieve generational aims. This is project 2025. This is how exactly they just basically said he's going to get in again. This is Project 2025. This is Heritage. Exactly. They just basically said, he's going to get in again. Let's make sure this time we get our Christmas card list in early. And they're getting it, but it also means that when he, the one or two things that he actually rouses himself from redecorating the White House to care about, he actually has authority on, like they are really treating him like a king

in a way that they did not before, where the best they can do is manage him a little bit, but oh boy, when he puts his mind to something, we just got to deal with it. And that seems like the tariffs are the one thing that he's really giving shit about. Oh, that, and he really hates trans people. Yeah, I think he actually hates green investment even more.

I mean, the executive order that's coming out this week is that any 401, what do you call it again, 501c3 nonprofit, any nonprofit that's a nonprofit on green stuff is no longer a nonprofit. Wow. I'm serious. That's coming out this week, right? And this is mental because 501c3s are right across the political spectrum, right? So the deal that was kind of brokered was the following.

The Republicans leave foundations alone, like Ford and Soros, and they get to do all the lefty causes. And we, when we're in power, we will not go after your mega churches, and we won't go after Heritage and all the shit that you care about. That was the deal. And he's like, no, there's no deal. I'm just going to steamroll all of them.

I'm just taking them out. Now, here's why the green And he's like, no, there's no deal. I'm just going to steam roll or all of them. I'm just taking them out. Now here's why the green stuff is so important. And this is my next book that I'm writing just now. Um, I've been on this for a while. Right? So do this, do this one with me, Adam, do this in your head. Start in Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, East Texas, all the way through Texas, all the way to the Panhandle, Alabama, Louisiana,

flip back up, come back to West Virginia. What have you got? You've got the core of the Republican coalition. What do they have in common? They all have pretty sustainable, survivable business models in a financial sense. What do they make? Fuel, farms, fertilizer, food, carbon, plastics. That's what they do.

Now, what do the blue states do? Fertilizer, food, carbon, plastics. That's what they do. Now, what are the blue States do? Well, on one coast, they do software and movies and wine and agriculture and all that shit. What are they doing the other one? Government services, uh, finance, real estate, blah, blah, blah. The rest of the great. Yeah. All that stuff.

Right. Now, what is it? The blue States want to do, they want to decarbonize. Why? Cause they don't want to cook the planet. Fair enough. Whatize. Why? Because they don't want to cook the planet. Fair enough. What do the red states do? Give you the means to cook the planet.

They actually keep the trains running. They feed you with chemical fertilizer, which is made from oil, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in those states, they look at the Midwest and the Southeast, and they look at the Democrats and go, so let me get it straight. You've got a nice green deal for us, have you? So what we do is we give up our carbon assets with the whole country still runs on are you get your free electricity and solar and wind and all the rest of it i'm what happens to us are you gonna help us be cold are you is that what's gonna happen the same with the hillary said the coal miners could be cold as well why don't you take a big piece of it and stuff it because we are not going to go for that deal? This is existential for these guys.

If the IRA, if Biden had won again, assuming Biden was calm as menace, and Biden had won again, you would have went from IRA one to IRA two. IRA two was all about skills. Basically, you can build the factory, but you need people in them, and we haven't done that for a long time.

You build up the skills, you build houses, you do labor mobility, you get the country moving. All you need to do is flip Nevada or North Carolina or Virginia permanently into the Democratic column, Republicans never got elected again. And at which point, all of what you do in terms of policy is 100% existentially zero-sum against their business models in their states that make them profitable, that make them reasonable places to live.

So below all this sort of stuff is a carbon coalition, if you want to put it that way, which now powers the Republican party. And that is why they are going so hard against green stuff because they want to kill it so it never comes back. And do you think Trump personally feels that way? Or does he just understand it with his political intuition and the fact that he's now got people whispering in his ear telling him to do this? Yeah, I don't think there's any great master plan from him on this.

He intuitively thinks it's bullshit. He says that global warming is a Chinese government hoax. I don't think he made that up warming is a Chinese government hoax. I don't think he made that up. I think he sincerely believes that. After all, they're number one in green investment. They make all the green stuff, so it must be bad because it's made in China. Then you have everyone who's trying to defend their business model on the local level.

If you look at what's been going on in those Republican states, the whole state, the attorney general's taking financial firms to court because they mean in vinciting and green assets. Texas is a classic last year. I don't know if it's actually passed the legislature, but there were two bills in the Texas local Senate that basically said, if you want to open a green energy plant, whether it's a solar one or a wind one, you have to ask everyone within 25 miles what they think about it. Wow.

There's a great barrier right there. Yeah. And the other one was a rehypothecation tax, which is incredible, right? So here's the price of gas for producing electricity. Here's the price of solar. Oftentimes this happens. So rather than switching to solar, what Texas wanted to do was take the profits and give it to the carbon people

so that it leveled up the cost between the two of them. Wow. That's a great way to stop a transition and it's fast. It's just make it more expensive than it should be. This has been going on all through the Republican States. There's like hundreds of bills that have gone through there trying to limit what's called ESG investing, basically trying to like stop green investment funds and all the rest of it.

So yeah, this has been a long time in making it. It's not just Trump. Trump is basically the battering ram, the figurehead and the energy, but there's an entire train of action behind him. I had not thought about what you just said about the states, the red states being powered by the carbon economy. What you're really connecting for me is when Trump would go up and talk about,

oh, the light bulbs, they're taking away your light bulbs, or Energy Star dishwashers or whatever, which is just, from my perspective, in a blue state, I was like, who could be upset about a dishwasher that costs less power to run? It's just a more efficient dishwasher, just a straightforward improvement to a dishwasher. It's a hybrid car, just spend less money on gas. Like, just a more efficient dishwasher. Just a straightforward improvement to a dishwasher.

Hybrid car. Just spend less money on gas. Like what's the big fucking deal? So I thought it was just culture war stuff. Oh, we hate new things. What you're sort of illuminating is how the culture war and the economic war and the political war are all becoming one, one war that they see as zero sum war between their states and our states. Quotation makes, there was a great line. I posted it on Twitter because I couldn't believe it broke into the open.

You don't usually see this in the open this much. So when gas prices are really high in 2022 and Biden was releasing from the stockpile and he was saying to American producers, I need you to produce more. Come on, get out there and pump. And as a guy in either North Dakota or South Dakota who's a fracker and he's like, oh, let me get this straight. You want me to pump now so I can help you

so you can shut me down a few years from now? That's like literally what he thought Biden's master plan was to shut it down. And he's not wrong. I mean, the whole point of the Inflation Reduction Act was to make America run on green energy, in which case, bye bye fracking. Yeah. Why do you feel that the Biden economy that he was trying to build, right?

He was doing, he kept some tariffs going. He was trying to re-industrialize the CHIPS Act, the IRA. All of that was sort of the democratic version of the kind of policy that would help out average Americans who were left behind. And there was a lot of good faith effort to do that. They actually got bills passed in a way Democrats had not historically been able to on these issues. They were doing antitrust reform. They were doing all these sort of like progressive

working class wishlist things. Why did it not work politically at any rate? So I think two things. The first one is the lesson that we should draw is probably from Obamacare. When Obamacare was passed, it was passed by the most ruthless politics the Democrats had ever done to get that thing through. And nobody liked it. Nobody understood it.

There was a big individual mandate. It's another tax, whatever. And for the first five years, it was really vulnerable, just as the IRA was. But then he won again. And what it meant was you were able to solidify that and then real people started to get benefits. And when 25 people, 25 million people are actually getting healthcare, even if it's imperfect and it's got a big deductible, that's a huge weight off your mind if you've got a couple of kids. So that is how you got to allow it to cement, got to like embed it.

So IRA one is about get the investment, break the green fields. IRA two is like get the skills, get people in there. It's a 10 year project. They just didn't have 10 years to do it. I think the second thing was the intersection of the culture wars, particularly the events of 2020 with George Floyd and others, because the response of particularly corporate America to that was, right, everybody get in a training session on zoom now, you're all racists. Yeah.

And that, and nobody could say anything about that at the time, but that just backfired so badly. That played right into their hands. They couldn't believe it. It was like Christmas. And the more that the Democrats dug themselves into this one and the more they defended it along with trans rights, et cetera, the more they were just able to play that against them.

The dismaying part about that piece of the culture war is that the things that made people the angriest were the things that were least helpful, right? The corporate training session, who gives a shit? That's not actually ameliorating. It was totally window dressing. It was literally corporate sort of like race washing. Right, the cry from the public in the streets for criminal justice reform, for fairness in our economy,

for trans, right, those are all good things. But that's a real problem that is being elucidated, there's a real demand for change. But the actual changes that were made, it's a lot like plastic straws, right? Plastic straws got a lot of attention. For a little while you could not get a plastic straw, you still can't in many places in LA. Guess what?

Straws were not the fucking problem. You know, you're imagining a sea turtle choking or whatever, yeah, sure. But like, banning straws is not, you know, affecting're imagining a sea turtle choking or whatever. Yeah, sure. But like banning straws is not affecting the Pacific garbage patch. All that straws does is make people mad. Because guess what? That's the one piece of plastic they put in their fucking

mouths. Like it's the one that they interact with. Same thing is true with. What it does, it also seems to be incredible micromanaging, which it is, right? If you have a macro plan to tackle the Pacific garbage patch and reduce the amount of plastic in the environment, including the plastic in our bodies.

I think most people might get behind up. If your solution is we're going to ban straws. It's like, Oh, come on. Really? This is it. And it's that kind of, you know, real niggly micromanager people can't stand. Yeah. It's the same problem with racial justice issues, right?

That, you know, they end up focusing, creating false solutions that then become targets for people who don't want racial justice at all or don't want social justice in any way. Even the people who are very sympathetic to this, who were emotionally affected by the events of 2020 as well. But the minute you take them in their corporate environment and say, right, you know, rather than sitting around now

and we'll maybe sort of like talk about our own interactions with the police over time, maybe we'll notice the fact that like if we divide the room into like people who are minorities and white people, maybe you have different experiences, maybe we should take a moment to reflect on that. No, we'll hire some bullshit consultants who are gonna read a script and literally tell everyone

involved that you're actually racist. And if you say that you're not, it proves that you are because it's structural. Could you have done a worse way of doing this? It was amazing. So do you think the IRA, since Biden didn't have eight years to implement, it didn't have a full decade, when it was passed, it was heralded as, you know, this is finally, we're taking a real step towards fighting climate change. Uh, is that dead?

Uh, absolutely. I mean, there are still friends of mine who are like, no, he's going to keep it because it's popular. I'm like, no, he's not. He's going to rip the whole thing up root and branch. I mean, if you get into the point of you run a nonprofit on climate advocacy and you're no longer a nonprofit, He just canceled 20 billions worth of investment on offshore wind.

Why? Cause he hates windmills. No, because he wants to basically make sure that we're still using gas to make electricity. Cause that's what makes those states that are the core of his coalition work. Yeah. So it's, it's culture war and it's economic war

and it's political war all wrapped into one. And he's winning it currently. Do you think that, so what does this mean for the highest level of our economy, right? If he's putting on these insane tariffs that are wobbling around all over the place, up and down, left and right,

is this just going to make the few things that were cheap more expensive? Is it just going to make the few things that were cheap more expensive? Is it just going to like fuck with American business at the highest level? What's gonna happen to America's economy? So in terms of the tariffs, right, we don't know if they're on or off, what level they're at or whatever.

So it's impossible to predict, right? In principle, high sustained tariffs are gonna raise prices and that's gonna shrink economic activity. People are freaked out. You look at this confidence surveys, purchase managers, et cetera. It's all down. It's not looking great. The really big issue is the bond market. So the way that we've been paying for everything for the past 30 years, all the free TVs we've been getting is imagine the following, right? It could be China, it could be Japan, South Korea, whatever, right? And there's us. So they make a TV, they send it to us. We send them dollars. Is imagine the following right can be china could be japan south korea whatever right now is awesome.

So they make a tv the send it to us we send them dollars. No they're an exporter exporters work because of stuff cheaper than what we could make ourselves. I'm preferably of higher quality place. No if they take those dollars and turn them into yen or one or remand be and dump them in domestic economy one for one. All those workers are gonna to get a pay rise and then they're going to go out and party and prices and wages will go up and Chinese people will feel happier. But the problem is then their exports will get more expensive and then the magic stops. So what they do either at the commercial bank level, the central bank level is say, here,

you can have some domestic currency, but not quite as much, just enough to keep things going. We're going to take this foreign reserve stash and use it to manage our exchange rate, or maybe we'll just turn it into the easiest thing in the world to make an asset, a T-bill. So they take the money we just sent them, and they give it back to us, and we send them a digital certificate bearing 2% for 10 years. That's the trade. Problem is, when you do that, you end up with an awful lot of those certificates out there. And that means that the rest of the world banks in dollars and saves in dollars and

does all the stuff you can do in dollars. You can't do it in any other currency because it's so ubiquitous and so the markets are enormous. Now, here's the important part on this whole thing. At the end of the day, you've got all those dollar assets out there, which are in a sense liabilities. Why are they not liabilities? And most of the time, because treasurers are meant to be, here's the word information invariant. What does that mean? It means doesn't matter what the news is, treasury is still good. It's money. It's global money. Doesn't matter. I can take 10 bucks out of my wallet right now, shout out it.

It's still going to be 10 bucks. That's the idea. How do you get an information invariant asset contains no risk. That's your risk free asset. That's what the dollar is. And that's why people are willing to hold all these bonds. Now along comes Trump and Trump threatens the central bank, disturbs the corporate profits, starts to make lots of noises about things like immigration, et cetera, which are really going to be disruptive to top corporates and top earners and all the rest of it, right? And the markets start to go, what's going on here?

And they begin to realize that the thing that you're not meant to do, because you're meant to have an independent central bank that the markets believe in, you have a debt management office in your treasury that knows what it's doing. And then the third leg of the stool is politicians stay the hell away from this. He just broke the third leg of the stool. What that means is the Treasury is now no longer information invariant. Its value depends on the news. That means it's a risk asset.

It's no different from equities. Once you've done that, it's really hard to get it back. People don't realize this. He's already broke the bond market. How much? We don't know. Can it be repaired? Maybe, but it has been as a phase shift.

What was there and what is now are two different spaces. When he backed off the tariffs, right. With the 90 day pause and it seemed to be directly connected to what happened in the bond market was, it seemed to be him realizing that personally, going, having a little bit of an oh shit moment. Yeah. Do you think that he continues to try to stay away from that then, or is he just not going to be able to stop playing with his toys?

So I think that partly, well, the toys thing might be right. I think partly this is why you back into having a trade war just with China, because you think that's more containable. And this is more so if you're really serious about re-industrialization, you do what I said earlier, you phase them in and you make them permanent. And you basically give incentives for your companies to come home and the whole thing takes years. You use a carrot and a stick to get Apple to make shit over here over

the course of 10 years. It takes a while. Exactly. Right. And if you're not interested in that, because you have a two year time horizon, which seems to be the case with these guys, then who knows what the tariffs are for, right? They could, are they just there as sticks?

You're right. So we're in a world whereby you've broke the treasury market, at least to a certain extent, and that is now going to be a massive constraint on what you can do. So you back in your second position, which is, ah, it's really all about China. Now here's why this one gets really, really crazy. China locks down entire cities for a year and delivers food through the window with drones. If you don't get your coffee in 30 minutes, you kill someone.

These are very, very different economies and the notion that we're going to harm them when in fact they can strategically pinpoint and add pain to exactly what we need because we are the one that are dependent on their imports. This isn't going to work either. So this is something else the market is going to start to worry about. And at the end of the day, what they want is a reset to a world that Trump is never going to agree to, which is can we just get back to making money on a transnational basis?

And his answer is no. So we don't know where this is going to go. Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, isn't it weird how the things we turn to for comfort often end up making us feel worse? I mean, I definitely caught myself doom scrolling or getting stuck in an endless social media loop that leaves me feeling more disconnected from the world around me. And in a time when we're all stretched so thin between our physical and digital lives, building real, meaningful human connections

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Our link will also give you an extra four months on the two-year plan, go to Nord VPN.com slash Adam Conover. Our link will also give you an extra four months on the two year plan. And there is no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. That's Nord VPN.com slash Adam Conover. The point of, you know, what the, what the people of China and the Chinese government are prepared to do and the ways that, I mean, that they've transformed their own economy

in just the last 30 years. They've had massive change in lifestyle and in how their economy works. Clearly much better positioned to weather a trade war than Americans who are dependent on all this just-in-time delivery. And as soon as certain things became scarce during COVID, a couple supply chains break down,

the entire country freaks out. Yeah, totally. And elects Trump in the first place. And here's something to think about, right? Why did China have such a long COVID lockdown? Why did they insist on locking down major metropolitan hubs with like tens of millions of people? Imagine that you got into a war with the United States.

It's not going to hit your major cities, but it's basically going to be based over like the Straits in Taiwan, et cetera. You need to lock them down, do without imports, do without a whole bunch of stuff, and you need to know if you can get away with that. Was that a dress rehearsal we just saw? Cause if it was, they passed the test. And what did we do? We went, where's my couch?

I've got a story about this in the book. It's kind of brilliant, right? Please. So North Carolina's used to be where the United States made its couches. But then of course that they got in competitive and it all got made in China. And then we shipped it over, whatever. Right. And then when COVID broke down, suddenly these factories

in North Carolina were hanging on with their fingernails, had more orders than you knew what to do with. And what happened was it was all Zoom. Because when we all had to go on Zoom, everybody, apart from me, of course, everybody who does a Zoom room basically has this shitty office upstairs, qua spare bedroom, where you took the couch from downstairs that you've never really been bothered to throw out,

and it's behind you. And after about five Zoom meetings, the whole of America went, that's got to go. And we all tried to order couches at once. And at one point, I think it was in late 21, basically, if you go through the inflation index, the measure that is basically home furnitures

goes through the roof. Yeah. Well, first of all, you're describing my own home Zoom office. People can go look at past YouTube videos if they want to see my version of that couch. But currently, I'm redecorating. I'm like buying furniture now.

And I was looking at a Made in USA couch. And I was reading about the company on Reddit, you know, to see what people said about the couch a couple of years ago. And before COVID, this couch was like $3,000 cheaper. I was reading about the company on Reddit, you know, to see what people said about the couch a couple of years ago. And before COVID, this couch was like $3,000 cheaper, like, you know, or whatever, you know, basic home furniture went up and stayed up for that reason. It like was this very clear, huge jump.

This is the other thing about inflation is like that differs between policymakers and the public, right? When inflate, when policymakers look at an economist, look at inflation, you've got a about inflation that differs between policymakers and the public. When policymakers and economists look at inflation, you've got a glass of coffee or water in front of you, right? Hold it up for a second. You've got a glass of water there. Here it is.

Just a glass of water. Now, right at the top of that, you see the little line at the top, the surface level? That's what we look at. That's the rate of change. When you drink that, it goes down. Right? Yeah. Now, what do the public look at? They look at the water and say, fuck, that's gone up.

Right. It's a level story. What they notice is the price level goes up and it doesn't come down. Whereas what we look at is the rate of change in the overall index and go, oh, it went down. So we are telling them it's gone down and they're like, you're full of shit. Yes. Ah, because the rate of change versus the absolute versus the level.

Absolutely. And meanwhile, people's wages haven't gone up. So everything feels more expensive. Here's a hundred percent fact. Anyone who basically says, you know, Oh, but inflation benefits debtors. And ultimately you're able to push for higher wages because of inflation. There's an OECD paper that came out. They did the numbers on it.

Not one country in the whole of the OECD had a case where wages actually caught up with inflation. Not one. Over what period of time? Over the whole 21 through 24 period. Ah, okay. So like every single country, people are, workers are falling behind.

Yeah, they lost money. Basically in real terms, their purchasing power diminished because of inflation. Why? Because the more skewed your economy is, the more you're at the bottom 60%, the less money you've had for a long time, the more wage stagnation you've had. So just a little increment in inflation means that you're paying an equivalent to an extra tax on your income.

What else don't people understand inflation? You just wrote a book about it. Like what, you know, what is in your user's guide and the user's guide. Uh, a lot of it comes from the fact that like we get a lot of our information from the last time that this happened, which was the seven days and the consensus in the seven days, which wasn't wrong, was that basically there was a lot of public spending that was kind of pushing up already structurally, their inflation, a lot of a wildcard strikes, a lot of union stuff,

a lot of wages pushing on prices, so-called wage price spirals. And that's why we think interest rates are the way to go, because that's what Volcker did, and we take a lot from the 1970s, the playbook. What actually happened in the 70s was a whole bunch of supply shocks. It's just that they were like London buses. You ever been in London waiting for a bus?

There's none, and then eight of them come at once, right? Uh-huh, uh-huh. That was what actually happened. So think of the following, right? You're fighting Vietnam off the books, and you're not admitting the costs. You've got 5 million people in the army more than you would, basically, and you're paying all those wages.

And you're also pushing down the labor market so that the available workers are like 2% rather than 4%. Anybody can leave work at 12 o'clock and get a better job by 4, because labor markets are so tight. Wages have got to go up. The way that you pay for wages is you've got to have a link to productivity. Once wages go beyond productivity, you're hitting profits.

Guess what? Businesses start to get pissed, right? You push this on in prices because they can't keep up with it. Then the next thing comes along. Women and minorities included in the American labor market scale for the first time. They don't behave like white dudes. They don't save up and get a deposit. They come straight in as consumers.

So basically prices and wages continue to go up. Failed harvest, Soviet Union, Canada, bailed out by the United States global wheat reserve. Yes, we used to have one of those. Then the oil shocks, 73, 74. So it was all these things hit in at once that lasted a decade. This is why when we started this one, all the central banks are going, let's look at wages. We have to look at wages.

And it's like, dude, what happened was the Russians blew up Europe's gas supply. It has nothing to do with wages. No, we must look at wages, Luke, because that's where the droids are, right? And you've got this lesson from the 70s that it took them a couple of years to actually figure out, actually, wages is not where the droids are, right? And you've got this lesson from the 70s that it took them a couple of years to actually figure out, actually, wages

is not where the problem is. And they got to a good place in the end of it. Even the European Central Bank said that 40% of the inflation in the Eurozone in 2022 was caused by companies price gouging. They actually admitted it. But it was against every fiber of their being. But nonetheless, they're not impervious to information and they went, yeah, actually

it is this stuff over here. So you know how we think of Trump's, I think Trump's basically forcing us to rethink inflation because it's not to do with the government spending too much money. It's when the government detonates something in the bond market. It's when the government shoves up tariffs. It's when the government makes its own supply shocks as policy. We've never been in that world. When the government itself is causing a shock to the system.

Absolutely. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, how do you explain politically that we got to this point, that Trump got to this point with the support of businesses, right? I mean, the Republican party's traditionally point with the support of businesses, right? I mean, the Republican party's traditionally been for the past couple of days. Well, they've both been very pro-business parties,

but the Democrat is the pro-business party, the Republicans are the really pro-business party. That's the way I spend most of my life. You had a lot of Wall Street and billionaire support for Trump, as opposed to Biden and Harris who are gonna sort of continue things as usual. Trump was the candidate of the wealthy, and yet he is blowing up the economic system

in a way that seems shocking to them and seems designed to lose them money, despite the fact that he said he was gonna do these things. He said he was gonna institute tariffs. So how do you explain that? I think it goes back to, again, a sort of like very small groups of people who are all guys in their 50s and 60s talking to each other about the world that's lost and how we can bring it back

with very little touch on reality. And everyone's an expert and everybody knows how the world works and this is what it's really all about. And once you get that kind of dangerous group think, and then you're united by something you oppose, whether it is trans rights or wokeness or whatever it happens to be, when you build a coalition that's partly out of resentment and partly out of arrogance, the damage that you can do is absolutely astonishing. And that's pretty much what you've got. I mean, I just think the billionaire class

are just hilarious on this one. As you say, this is exactly what he said he was gonna do. Why are you in the least bit surprised by this? Yeah. Well, so let's talk about the actual new economic regime that we're entering. Like, do you think that the sort of globalization era, the neoliberal moment of trade barriers falling and all that is, are we truly moving out of that into a new regime?

It depends what the rest of the world does, because one of the ways in which this kind of like group think is toxic is it massively overestimates the importance of the United States. And the United States is a pretty important country. It's about 23% of global GDP, which is pretty amazing for a country of 330 million people that have a global population of nearly 8 billion. But if you basically just look at greater East Asia, it's probably about 10 times the size of population. It's got better demographics.

It's where everybody's growing at between 4 and 6% a year. They're not old like we are, particularly the Europeans, right? So structurally, the 21st century has already migrated over to about 40% of global GDP. If the Europeans ever get their shit together and if if there's ever been a wake-up call, it's definitely Trump telling them no security, no fun, and I hate your cars. So if they actually manage to get their act together, that's actually the richest part of the planet.

It's even richer than the United States. It is in total nearly 500 million consumers with an average wage of around $35,000. That's a chunk of change. You add that together with East Asia, and they're all getting pushed in the same direction because America hates you now and doesn't want anything that you make. Cause you're all just ripping us off. Then you could end up with a serious geopolitical realignment whereby everybody

else does free trade in the United States sits in its own little carbon, heavy, hemispheric realignment and lives the fifties in the 19th century. And ultimately to me, the real danger in all this is the carbon term. So fine and well, doubling down on carbon, but let's think about this from the point of view of the American auto sector. One of Trump's complaints is that American auto is a tariff in Germany. That's true. They are the met the Germans have this ridiculous thing about auto band

standards so that everything has to be proofed up to like 150 miles an hour. And it's just a tax to make sure you don't compete with German cars. Completely fair. But here's your problem. American car manufacturers are, forgive me, crap. You don't make cars.

You make light trucks. That's all you do is you make light trucks. Now, take the Ford F-150. It's a hell of a pickup truck. You could try driving this through anywhere in in let's say Italy, and you would literally get stuck in the street. There's just, there's no way to drive this. This stuff is massive, right?

And for better or worse, European countries tax gasoline a lot, which means it would take about half of your average wage just to fill the tank. Yeah. So this is not about competitiveness. This is about the fact you've created an ecosystem that only works in the United States and now you want the rest of the world to buy it. It's never going to happen dude. It's never going to happen.

Instead of which you've got BYD, which is building a hybrid next year that reportedly has a 1200 mile range and it's going to cost about 50 grand. So you got your Ford F-150 and the rest of the world is going to hit peak gasoline in probably under 10 years. And the way that they're scaling up EVs, even the Europeans are now just saying, yeah, minimum prices, come on, bring them and we'll swap them out. It's great. You're left with F-150s.

You're going to make them yourselves because you'll repatriated everything. Good luck. You'll have an F one 50 for $200,000 and the rest of the world's going to be doing this. Yeah. That's the real left behind story. You're going to leave yourself behind. I mean, what you're describing is fits with a lot of American history.

We're the country that has our own temperature system, our own weights and measures, you know, our own sports that nobody else plays. So we're the country that has our own temperature system, our own weights and measures, you know, our own sports that nobody else plays. So we're the best. We're the best at basketball in the world because we invented it. Nobody else plays it. Same thing with football and baseball. We make up our own dumbass shit and then we say everybody else should do what we do. And by the way, we're the best at it because we invented it. But at a certain point, I think that works after World War II, when, you know, we're the dominant power culturally, politically, economically.

You're 50% of world GDP, you're 60% of world finance. That was the peak. You're not that anymore. Yeah. And also, if you wanted to disengage, if you wanted to basically rebalance, if you wanted to re-industrialize, if you wanted to do that, you could actually have a talk with the other side and go,

look, it's not good for you to be constantly stiffing your workers just so you can sell more exports. You guys need to do more domestic consumption. We need to rebalance. We can do this. We did it with Plaza in 85. We can make this work. We can come to some kind of modus vivendi. That's what countries do.

Or you can just say, tariffs, you're all ripping us off. And eventually, and also, don't come to our country because you might disappear in some kind of like, you know, ice raid. And, uh, you know, a good example is we're meant to be hosting the world cup in soccer in 2026. Good luck when 40 countries will be on a band list by that point. So I don't know how we're going to do this one, right? So you're just making the place like, you know, really unpleasant and just like horrible and angry all the time. And the rest of the world just doesn't want to deal with it. Yeah. I mean, people literally don't want to come here cause they don't know what's

going to happen at immigration, right? They don't know if they're going to get hassled by some jumped up cop. I flew in, I flew into Boston last Saturday or just on Saturday there just now. Right. Economy was full. Premium economy, half empty business. That must've been three people in it. Hmm. That's what been three people in it.

That's what you need to worry about. That is, that just basically means we're just going elsewhere for business. Do you think that, uh, what we're looking at is, is an acceleration on the decline of American empire that this is sort of, you know, Trump and the tariffs, this is American Brexit on a bigger scale, us saying, we don't want to be a big global superpower anymore. We just want to be a little country, you know, and do our own thing and shrink. But we just want the Western hemisphere.

Yeah, we want the Western hemisphere to ourselves. And we want to have a huge military so that we can piss other people off and make them do what we want. It's a nice idea, but it's probably not going to work. But I think this is where it's headed. I mean, I don't like the idea of empire. I don't like the idea of decline.

America's a funny empire because it's still the number one destination for immigrants. Like we don't like that anymore, but like I'm one I've left you for 30 years. I'm a citizen. Like I think this place is absolutely awesome. And so does everybody else who wants to live here. And it seems to me that we're just pissing that up against the wall. Yeah.

You know, that was one of the greatest strengths of the United States. To go back to the Robert plant thing, right? Every European, even the most lefty person you can imagine, has a sneaking thing of like, fuck America's cool. Right. And it just does right. And whether it's through music or culture or movies or whatever, it's just, there's that thing and this is the place where shit happens and this is where you want to be.

I mean, on a very personal level, I'll tell you the story that I like to tell about this. I first came to the United States in 1990, and I saw something. I came in the winter, and I saw something that no Scotsman had ever seen before, which was the sun in winter. And within three weeks, I had a pair of running shoes. I was like, you know, totally transformative.

And when you live in a place like Scotland, people say things like, where are you from? School did you go to? What do you do? Team, do you support? You go to California, they say, what do you want to do? Right. The future is open.

What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? What do you, where do you, it's mind boggling. And when you have a whole country that works like that, that's open to possibility and not afraid of the future, not harkening back to the that works like that, that's open to possibility and not afraid of the future, not harkening back to the past, that's what is world beating. And we're just blowing that so badly.

Yeah. Well, in some ways it seems like that moment is over for us. Like I live in California and that's still the California spirit, right? Is like the optimism you can come here and be someone. You even feel that going from the East coast to the West coast, right? That like on the East coast, it's like, hey, what neighborhood are you from? The West coast is like the optimism you can come here and be someone. You even feel that going from the East Coast

to the West Coast, right? Like on the East Coast, it's like, hey, what neighborhood are you from? The West Coast is like, hey, everyone just got here a moment ago and the possibilities are open, except that it's now the most expensive housing market in perhaps parts of the world, right? Because we don't build new things.

Like the frontier has been filled, right? Cheap land is no longer here. because we don't build new things. Like the frontier has been filled, right? Cheap land is no longer here. It feels like maybe that moment, that American moment has sort of passed by, at least here in California and I think larger parts of the country. But I mean, this is true in general,

but it's because we stopped building houses for normal people in 1980. I mean, the reason that you had a lot of affordable housing was either because you had land that was subsidized by the government or you had big government institutions like Fannie and Freddie backing mortgages to lower mortgage rates. I mean, Americans don't know how lucky they are. A 30 year mortgage, the rest of the world is like, what? You get what? That's insane. But that's what you were able to do. And we still have those tools, but we just

don't build houses anymore. Whether it's NIMBY, zoning regulations, the people who have houses already don't want the competition. I'm thoroughly of the belief that if we just went on a massive house building spree and also trained people as electricians, plumbers, HVAC, techs, low voltage, all that sort of stuff, all skills

that you need that are real job skills, I mean, so many of our problems would be solved, just like just working on houses and building skills around it. Yet neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to even have that under vocabulary. Yeah, I mean, you know, Ezra Klein's new book, we're having them on the show in a couple of weeks to talk about it,

makes the point that, you know, in red states, they build tons of housing places like Texas. We don't do it in California, but even the Republicans don't run on that. They don't say, hey, we know how to build houses. We know how to build things. They just sort of let it happen.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, you know, culturally try to stop houses from being built. And as a result, we have these incredible places. Oh yeah, my favorite, so I live in Rhode Island and my favorite one when I got here, I liked to, I like to figure out tax scams. I should have a little file called tax cams. I'm too poor to use myself. And one of the favorite ones is conservation easements.

You ever heard about this shit? Oh, this is great. Right. So I'm a rich dude and I live in a really nice part of Rhode Island. And I've got friends who are also rich dudes and they live in this nice part of Rhode Island. And the last thing that we would want is people coming in and building loads of houses because you know, it wouldn't be such a nice part of Rhode Island. So what I can do is I can set up a conservation trust. And then with me and my rich friends, we can put a bunch

of money together and then we can buy this land and we get a huge tax credit for doing so because it's for conservation. And literally the tax code is filled with this shit. Yeah. Uh, I've seen that in, uh, you know, uh, I, uh, went to school in upstate New York, beautiful part of the country, uh, very underdeveloped the place I went to school, right? I went up there for a reunion a couple years ago, and I was like, why is it still so nice up here?

Why are there not subdivisions and strip malls everywhere? And then I started looking around, realizing, oh, this is an area where wealthy people used to buy manor homes, like a hundred years ago, and then they had these big plots of land, and then they either turned them into colleges, or donated them to a nature conservancy or they still just owned them. And as a result, nobody can build anything up there.

It's beautiful because the wealthy have stopped anything from being built. And it's very nice to drive on their streets and go in the parkland that they allow you to go into. But fundamentally, that's what happened. And we've allowed that to happen in so many parts of the country, rather than building things. And it strangely mirrors just talking about we don't build things in this country anymore for export or for our own consumption. We also just don't build our infrastructure. We don't build trains.

We barely even build roads, which we should be building less of. Yeah, absolutely. No, and then, you know, so trains is a good example of this one. I mean, the one functional part of the train system is the line that runs from basically the Northeast out to Chicago out to the West coast and then the Boston down to DC interconnect or down to Florida. That's pretty much as far as it goes. The rolling stock on that apart from the Acela, which is now 20 years old, is in some cases

30 or 40 years old. Yeah. I mean, it's astonishing. It's like, we just don't, we just don't do infrastructure. And you go to like, I mean, the classic that you go to Asia, go and I'll give you my best story on this one, right? The longest flight in the world used to be prior to COVID used to be Newark to Singapore.

So you go to Newark. Newark is the, I've got to put it. It's the, it's the sweat gland and the butthole of all airports, right? It's just awful. So it's a big Airbus 350. So you've got hundreds of people in this thing that looks like a bus station. You know, like the blue vinyl seats that have got tears in them. They've got one food court, which is all run by ex-cons by the look of it, right?

I mean, it's just like, it's just horrendous. You get on this plane, food's amazing, service amazing. They've got one food court, which is all run by ex cons by the look of it. Right. I mean, it's just like, it's just horrendous. You get on this plane, food's amazing. Service amazing. It's not an American airline. You get to Singapore and you get into this airport and the first thing you walk through is wait for it. A butterfly forest.

And then once you pass the bar, you get to the food court of all of Asia. Right. And you just stand in there just going, you get to the food court of all of Asia. And you just stand there just going, remind me again who's the superpower? Yeah. I mean, when you get off the plane at LAX, when I come, even from other cities in America, but especially when I come from overseas, it's embarrassing.

The idea that Los Angeles is supposed to be a world-class city, you get off the bus, what do you see, or you get off the plane, what do you see when you hit the curb at most airports? A way to get to the central city. You see a taxi stand, you see a train station. What do you see in LA? You have to look around to find the sign

for the shuttle bus that picks you up and takes you to the little parking lot where that's where the taxis and Ubers are. Why did they move them there? They moved them there because we had this rapacious company called Uber, fuck with the transportation system in every single city simultaneously, overloaded the taxi stands,

and so they had to move all the traffic out. Now they're trying to build a train station, they're trying to build a little people mover at LAX, they've been building it for 10 years. And in fact, the airport has been harder to use because there's been this under construction thing. It's a humiliation, right? To imagine that this is supposed to be one of the world's mega cities, the center of

arts and culture for the entire hemisphere. And that's what happens when you get off the plane. It's, it's, uh, and I'll add one thing to that. When you stand at the Uber stand and LAX and you look up, there's a giant digital billboard. Do you know what's on that billboard? What's on it? 24-7. This is the number you call to sue someone

for your Uber or taxi accidents. Yes. So again, I mean like rent seekers paradise, right? I mean, the only productive thing that comes out of this is a bunch of lawyers doing criminal injury. And you cannot have a country, if we want to be competing with China or whatever, we cannot be doing that when we're not building any infrastructure and they are. I guess I'd like to end with this question though.

Just talking about tariffs versus global trade, right? Knowing what globalization did to so much of the American economy, to manufacturing communities, et cetera, and knowing that, hey, there's some version of tariffs that could work, but not the version we have now. I'm also thinking about talking about climate change and about how the competition between nations is really like fighting our attempt to fix climate change, right?

That like, we, you know, huge parts of the American economy rely on fossil fuels, yet we must do something or we will all be poorer in the future. And so one of the real downsides of what Trump is doing right now is causing more competition between people, between nations, which will lead to more adverse outcomes. How do you look at, you know, I guess the global competition between nations and what policies we could put in place that would not cause people to, you know, lose, I don't know, their entire manufacturing base

or whatever, throw people into poverty, but would allow us to cooperate as a fucking species, you know? So I'll give you a little bit more of a hopeful twist on this, which goes like this. Back in the Bush administration, when we got all freaked out about the Kyoto protocols, we withdrew from Kyoto. And the argument is, without American leadership, it just dies. And it's another example of thinking you're more important than you are,

because what that did was, it got the Americans out of the room and the rest of the world was able to conclude an agreement and actually move on with it. When Trump withdrew from Paris in 2017, climate cooperation stepped up. It was at its peak prior to COVID and COVID really derailed it for a variety of reasons, but you've still got China now basically is the number one green producer in the world and the EU desperately trying to hang on to whatever it's got because China's eating its lunch, but nonetheless the direction of travel is clear. So there's this notion that we are the indispensable nation and it's a bit like when you're British

you believe in this thing called the special relationship. That because Britain and America both speak English and we're liberal peoples and we do individualism, we have this special understanding. And the Brits are just deluding themselves because the Americans couldn't give a shit about the special relationship. And ultimately I think now this Americans have got their own version of this, which is the rest of the world doesn't care, right? Ultimately we're going to get on with it because there's 7 billion of us who aren't American.

And that's just gonna happen. And you can be part of the conversation or not. You can isolate yourself in your little carbon hemisphere and continue to build light trucks while the rest of the world never goes to the gas station again. We don't care. We're gonna evolve as a species.

We always do, with or without the ones who don't wanna be part of it. That's hopeful and devastating at the same time, Mark. As a vision of the future. That's what one of my dates once said. I mean, to say that like, hey, the worst is happening, bad things are happening, but things might still keep getting better without us despite it.

Yeah, pretty much. That's hopeful in a sense, you know? It is. but things might still keep getting better without us despite it. Yeah, pretty much. That's hopeful in a sense, you know? It is. I mean, you know, they say that with age comes wisdom. Perhaps there's a bit of wisdom in that, which is we're always looking for like, person A is going to do thing B,

which is going to lead to outcome C. And it's like, it seldom works that way. And you know, the weird, I wrote a book back in 2020 called Angry Nomics, which is all about the rise of populism. People should check it out. But And, you know, the weird, I wrote a book back 2020 called angry nomics, which is all about the rise of populism. People should check it out. Um, but anyway, you know, one of the things that I started off with in the book was the world has never been richer.

Never. Why are we also goddamn angry? Yeah. And it's for a lot of the reasons that we've been talking about, right. Who actually benefited from all the changes, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, we're even richer now than we were five years ago. So we're not lacking the means. We're just lacking the basically joined up thinking and the desire.

And that's the sad part that it seems like we have less joined up thinking than ever, uh, between like even in, in the United States and then, you know, across the world, it's, uh, it seems like there's, there's a sheer lack of that right now. But yeah, I don't know how we can get it back, but thanks for being on here to tell us about the roller coaster ride. I really appreciate you being on, Mark. That's been great to be back.

Always enjoyed chatting with you. People can, of course, get a copy of your books at FactoryPod.com. slash books. Where else can they find you on the internet? My website has finally been reactivated. So you can find me at Mark Bly pod.com slash books. Uh, where else can they find you on the internet? Uh, my website has finally been reactivated. So you can find me at mark Blythe.com and I'm on Twitter as MK Blythe. Thank you so much for being here, Mark.

Pleasure. Well, my God, thank you once again to Mark Blythe for coming on the show. If you love that conversation as much as I did, I hope you'll support the show on Patreon, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode Of this show ad free you can also join our online community for 15 bucks a month I will read your name and in the credits of this very show and put it in the credits of every single one of my Video monologues this week. I want to thank Rodney Patnam Greg 0692 Riccarteus Marcella Johnson Matthew Bertelsen aka The Bunkmeister,

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And we're inviting incredible guests like Vanessa Barrett. Wow, I have so much to say. Lisa Kudrow. Feelings, they're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi. Matt Rogers. I'm like on the verge of tears.

So good. So good to join us and hopefully become our friends in real life. Take it out of the podcast studio and into real life. Along the way, we are also going to talk about dating. Yep. Spousing. True.

Parenting. Career-ing. Yeah. And why we love film, and Louisa and It's the Greatest Movie of All Time. Shouldn't need to be said. No, we said it. It's just a true thing. So please subscribe to Here to Make Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. And watch video episodes on YouTube. New episodes every Friday. Hey, I'm Jake Johnson, and I host the HeadGum Podcast, We're Here to Help, with my partner, Gareth Reynolds. We're Here to Help is a call-in advice show. Think car talk from back in the day. We're determined to help fix life's dumbest problems.

We also have guest helpers join us from the entire cast of New Girl to Michael Cera, Andy Sandberg, Jimmy Kimmel, just to name a few. So do me a favor and come check out an episode and then bounce around our catalog. We're over 150 episodes so far, so there's plenty of stories for you to discover. Subscribe to We're Here to Help on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday, and bonus episodes drop on Wednesdays.