Yet Another Value Podcast - Clashing Over Commerce (Fintwit Book Club April 2025)

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

In this episode of the Yet Another Value Podcast FinTwit Book Club, Andrew Walker is joined by Byrne Hobart of The Diff to discuss Clashing Over Commerce, a sweeping political and economic history of U.S. trade policy. Against the backdrop of current debates on tariffs, they explore how deeply tariffs shaped American politics, the surprising economic nuance found in 19th-century policy, and the recurring tensions between protectionism and free trade. From supply chain shifts to presidential power dynamics, they unpack what history might tell us about today’s trade decisions—and what it doesn’t.______________________________________________________________________Chapters[00:00:00] Introduction to the episode and the featured book, Clashing Over Commerce[00:03:33] Byrne Hobart on why reading the book made him feel better about modern tariffs[00:07:08] The role of modern supply chains in shaping today’s trade complexity[00:10:52] Reflections on historical perspectives: agrarian vs. industrial interests[00:14:41] How lobbying and special interests shaped tariff legislation[00:19:30] The political economy of tariffs from the Civil War to the Gilded Age[00:25:22] Evolution of U.S. revenue sources and tariff enforcement mechanisms[00:30:48] Historical voting patterns and their echoes in recent trade policy[00:35:19] Shift of tariff authority from Congress to the executive branch[00:40:51] Modern-day political identity vs. regional trade interests[00:45:37] How tariffs function as economic handouts or job guarantees[00:50:44] Presidential comparisons and the rhetorical lineage of tariff advocacy[00:55:28] Historical trade-offs in trade deals: from Britain to banana imports[01:00:16] The legacy of statehood as a political tool for tariff influence[01:03:33] Critiques of the book: length, editing, and lack of a strong conclusion[01:08:49] Final thoughts on the enduring impact of tariffs on U.S. political systemsLinks:Alphasense activism webinar: https://go.alpha-sense.com/wb-imp-genai-fs-yavp-inside-boardroom/?utm_source=pt_YAVP&utm_medium=sponsored&utm_campaign=WB_DG_04-21-25_IMP-GENAI_FS_Yavp-Inside-BoardroomThe Diff Newsletter - https://www.thediff.co/ Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

You're about to listen to today's episode of the Yet Another Value podcast. Today's episode is with Bern Hobart from the Diff. We're doing our monthly Finchwit Book Club. We're talking about clashing over commerce, a history of U.S. trade policy. I hope you like it and enjoy. This podcast is brought to you by AlphaSense. Those of you who've been following the podcast and the blog know that I've been doing a lot of work recently on shareholder engagement, particularly at these busted biotechs. You know, I've done recently a podcast on Sage and KROS.

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All right. Hello, and welcome to the yet another value Finchwit Book Hub podcast with me today. I'm happy to have on my co-host for the podcast from one of my favorite newsletters, the diff, Byrne Hobart. Byrne, how's it going? Great. Cool. Well, look, before we get us started, disclaimer, remind everyone, nothing on this podcast is

investing advice. There'll be a full disclaimer at the end and in the show notes so you can see it there. Burn, the book we're going to talk about, look, we are recording. It is April 28th for those of you who are listening to the podcast. three months, three years in the future, or have been under a rock. This month has been all about tariffs in the entire world. We had Liberation Day, was it April 6th or whatever, markets down, markets up. It's all about tariffs. So you chose clashing over commerce, a history of U.S. trade policy. I mean, it is deep. It is 1,200 pages. I budgeted a lot of times, treated, and I did

not. I'm still kind of just at the end of the Cold War, but I had so many questions. So let me start here. This is a full-fledged history of the tariffs. We can talk everything here. But when you read this book, the history of tariffs here, do they make you feel better, worse, or kind of neutral about the state of the world that we're in as we talk on April 28th? Yeah, so I actually ended up feeling a lot better. I think when I read it the first time, tariffs were just kind of a non-issue. It was sort of this history of, okay, we used to have them and now we don't. And kind of here's how that came about.

And then so, you know, when I would read it, I was kind of. more attuned to, okay, well, that sounds like an inconvenient thing I'm glad I don't have to deal with, et cetera. And then read it now from the perspective of, you know, there will be almost certainly higher, but who knows how much higher tariffs on many different trade partners. I was kind of coming into it expecting that I read all these really grim stories about, you know, how this is totally wealth destructive and, you know, completely messed with U.S. industrial development. And the book is actually just surprisingly neutral on tariffs. Like, it does mention that they have this deadweight loss, but it also mentions that just in terms of the scope of

things, they were not that big a deal. But I think that a lot of that has to be tempered with just observations about how modern supply chains differ from historical ones, where the other big contribution to free trade in the time period which tariffs went to roughly zero was containerization, which was also, it was effectively a cut in tariffs where it cut in the implicit tariff of it's expensive to load things onto and off of ships. If you can make that really cheap, then you can move more stuff around. And if you can move more stuff around in general, one of the things you can do is do high value added manufacturing in one place and then ship things for final assembly somewhere else.

So it doesn't mean that the economy is just more interconnected. And there are fewer places where fewer cases where you buy a product where everything is homegrown. And that's the best place for it to be. Like I was thinking about this a couple of years ago. And I was thinking about a loaf of bread. And if you buy a loaf of bread from a grocery store, you have this mix of different ingredients. And the one that is the most susceptible to free trade is probably either the plastic bag it's in or the twist tie. And the twist tie supply chain is going to include the extraction of whatever the hydrocarbon feedstock is and then the manufacturing of the bulk plastic and then the extrusion of the little twist tie thing. And then

you've got the metal and, you know, there has to be a supply chain for actually, you know, mining that and then refining it, forging it into something specific. And so what occurred to me is that the really expensive part of the bread is actually the part that we just get from the United States, that we grow wheat and bake it into bread. So it's American land, American labor. That's the expensive part. And then the incredibly cheap part is the kind, is the set of this that can pretty much circumnavigate the globe in terms of all of its inputs. And yet it's really, really cheap because it's all of those things are getting built in wherever in the world they're the cheapest to make because you can ship them pretty much anywhere.

So I think in some ways, like part of the way I reacted to the book was like I sort of felt like I did knock it out of it what I was hoping to. What I was hoping to get out of it is just, okay, here's some context and now I better understand Donald Trump. And then literally from the opening chapter, it sets up this model of U.S. politics where you have these different constituencies, you have people who were. mostly agrarian, mostly Southern, who really wanted just more trade, so they want low-tariff barriers. And you have northern, more manufacturing-oriented economies where they're competing

directly with U.S. trade partners, so they want barriers to trade. But then you have also in the north shipbuilding and just general trading businesses, and they want free trade. And then, like, none of that actually applies to the current debate. There, you know, it's really not the case that, like, someone in Greater Boston really opposes this because it's going to hurt their job, you know, really likes this because they'll keep their job of the textile mill. Like, we're a couple generations off from that kind of political economy. Let me pause you there. So you're, I was walking with my wife last night and I said the same thing you started this

out. And by the way, you hit on all the points I want to touch through this book. But I said the same thing you started out to my wife. I was like, look, I'm reading this book on tariffs. It's a bohemoth, but I'm like 700 pages in. And I will tell you when I read it, I alternate between feeling much better. Like, if I had read this on April 9th, when markets were really dropping, I would have been like, oh, we've been here before.

I think I feel better. I don't know. But I would alternate page by page between feeling much better. You know, you see so many parallels. This has happened so many times in history versus feeling much worse where I'd be like, look, after the Great Depression and the smooth holly tariffs, tariffs were kind of a settled issue. And like, yes, we've had big tariffs and big stuff before. But it's never great when you're saying, hey, we haven't really.

really been fighting over tariffs in 100 years. And the last time we had a really big fight over them, it was like not only leading to the Great Depression, like people argue, did this cause the Great Depression or not? So I'm kind of alternating between feeling better because it's happened and worse because, yes, it's happened, but it hasn't happened a hundred years. And by the way, the economy, you know, they're talking about export imports. I think of the revolutionary where they're like, the imports went up from $3.6 million this year to $600,000 this year, right? Like, that was like sending stuff on ships over weeks and stuff.

There wasn't a lot versus today where it's just in time shipping, really integrated. So I don't know. I didn't know if I felt better or worse. So I'd love for you to talk about you said, what made you feel better? I kind of laid out some of the things that made you feel worse. Tell me some of the stuff that made you feel worse as you're reading this book. Yeah. So part of what made me feel worse, like the book, it was also something where I kind of remembered

it as more of this economic history of terrorists, but a lot of it is actually a political history of how do we choose which terrorists to get. And, you know, secondarily, we consider the economic impact that people expected, the economic impact that happened. But one of the things that stands out is just once you have tariffs and once they're a live political issue, everything slows down massively because every company, you know, every interest group is embedded in some kind of supply chain. And so, like, it has that chart somewhere in the book of just how much time and how many pages of testimony were produced for different tariffs. If I can jump in, my favorite example of this is the Smoot-Hawley tariffs where they're setting, they're increasingly. the tariffs on literally everything. I think it takes 15 months for them to do it because literally every, every interest group comes in and says, hey, if we're increasing tariffs, you got to

protect us from everyone outside of us, right? And then when they're reducing them, when the Roosevelt administration is kind of doing the MFN's most favorite nature, nobody comes in because if you're reducing across the board, then nobody really cares. So as you're saying, once the tariffs get in, the special interest groups do it. And time and time again, the tariffs, it kind of gets picked to park, as people start saying, the deep state, this is just so right for special interest groups, fraud, lobbying, all this sort of. I didn't realize lobbying comes from something, I believe it was Cleveland who's hanging out in one of the hotel bars or maybe it was Grant. Yeah, yeah, Grant's hanging out at the hotel bars, smoking cigars, and so if you can walk by and, yeah. But it was related to

terrorists. It was big iron or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there was that, I think there was something like we have 15 pages of testimony about tomatoes and just the importance of protecting American tomatoes from foreign competition. And I think this was also kind of three days. It was 50 pages over three days if I remember correctly. Yeah. So like you, if you were a free trade person, I think you were probably losing some fights to just pure attrition.

Like I don't want the fourth day of discussing how important tomatoes are. So fine, we can raise the tariff on them. Many lawmakers over the 200 years that I've read so far in the book, They do one tariff reform. And they end and they'll say, that was the worst six weeks in my life. I will never do this again. Like, this is for the next generation to settle it. So you're right.

You lose a ton to attrition. And then one of the other interesting things in there was I sort of had this stereotype in my head of, okay, it's the Gilded Age, there's widespread political corruption in, you know, late 19th century. And so, and we also had high tariffs. So my assumption was it's all these captains of industry who are, you know, they purchase a senator and then they tell that senator, okay, here are the industries you're going to protect. And there was a little of that, but it actually seemed like a lot of the, the book actually calls this out that a lot of the biggest companies by 1900 or so, they actually were pretty indifferent to tariffs and did not spend very much money on lobbying because they were actually the largest, most efficient scale producers. And so they had an interest in more trade because they could totally dominate the U.S. market and they wanted access to Europe. So Europeans needed dollars to buy their stuff. So they were pretty neutral. It was actually the smaller companies that really care.

about tariffs. And if you think about just economically, what is the impact of a tariff? On the margin, it's the company that would not have, would not quite have been competitive enough without tariffs. But it is competitive enough with them. So those are often going to be less efficient producers. And maybe they are in industries where it doesn't make as much sense to do it in a high-cost labor market. And the book does point out that just from the beginning, like literally from even the colonial era, the U.S., what is now the U.S. just had higher wages. than the rest of the world. And originally, it was all down to just land.

There was more land per capita in the U.S. than in Europe. And so the market cleared price for getting someone to work on that land was quite high. Let me, so I should also know this book actually, my Kindle, I'm holding it up. It's blurred for those of you on YouTube, but this Kindle has been with me, trusty Kindle for seven years. It actually encouraged me to get a new Kindle because I was highlighting so much. I found so much interesting here. but let me start with one thing. Again, this is a book on tariffs. And if we had decided to read a book on

alcohol regulation, I think we would be shocked by how much alcohol regulation flows through the course of American history. You know, the Hamilton, the Hamilton, the musical line, when Britain tried to tax our tea, we got frisky, what you think is going to happen when they tried to tax our whiskey. There would be lots of fights over alcohol. This book makes it seem like tariffs, especially the first 150 years or so of American history, tariffs were the dominating force of American history. And there was a lot that I had forgotten. You know, obviously you think the Tea Party, that's a tariff, but I hadn't kind of thought about that. Taxation with outrepresentation, that was tariffs. But there's tons of other stuff. Like, for one,

South Carolina nullification crisis in the 1830s, I had thought that was related to slavery. It was actually related to tariffs. My question for you here is, is it because we're reading a book on tariffs that tariffs are like the through line of the first 150 years? Or do you think it really was. Tariffs were maybe, to our modern understanding, we don't quite appreciate how important it was in the 17, 1800s. There was no income tax. This was the government's form of revenue.

Yeah, so the book does talk a little bit about this where through the late 19th or early, yeah, I think it's through the early 20th century, tariffs were the main way that the U.S. government funded itself, and also the government was a lot smaller. And they actually mentioned very early on that it was something, I think the number is something like, your cost of collecting an excise tax was about 20 cents on the dollar and your cost of collecting a tariff was about two cents on the dollar just there are only so many ports that we can move things

through and so you know it's I guess at a high enough tariff smuggling probably still does make sense but at lower tariffs and also I guess if you have a pretty interconnected economy like the the smuggling thing gets tricky because now it's a bad idea to buy insurance and you probably get borrow and so you just, you know, it's sort of like when companies try not to use the dollar system or when they're kicked out of the dollar system and they find out, actually, it's just really a pain to do any kind of business with anybody now. So, yeah, they were a big revenue source and then unlocking the income tax as potentially much larger revenue source did make them less important. And so I think you can look at the pre-income tax tariff debates as partly this

debate over, okay, how big is the U.S. government supposed to be? and what is the expected scope of its activities? And that did become a contentious regional issue because people in the South recognized that tariffs were going to hurt their ability to export cotton and tobacco, and they also recognized that even though people in the North were talking about tariffs as just this generally good thing, and we need to protect American industry,

and we also need the revenue, et cetera, that they obviously had a direct economic interest in that too. Which is actually, like, I think that is a surprisingly And if you saw this too, I was surprised at just how sophisticated some of the economic thinking was, given that they just, you know, they didn't have a lot of the economic models that we have today, and these things weren't really in the water the way they are now. But people in the southern U.S. in the late 18th century still understood that if you want to sell more cotton overseas, you actually need people overseas to be selling stuff to you because otherwise there's just this imbalance that can't be sustained. I'd go back and forth between being impressed by how sophisticated analysis was. Like, basically, they figured out an export tax is an import tax pretty quickly if you were, as you said, I'd go back and forth between that and then kind of how unsophisticated

that thought some of it was, right? Like, you'd see time and time again, we'd enter a recession or a depression, the Great Depression. And people would say, hey, now is not the time to bring down these tariff rates. Like, the economy is suffering. If we bring down the tariffs, imagine the pain. And you're kind of like, well, again, we can agree to screw on tariffs. But if you think a terrorist tax, bringing down taxes generally one of the good ways. So or, you know, the economy would go into recession and tariff rates would drop and they wouldn't want to bring down tariffs because the government would say, oh, man, we're really in it now.

Like, that's all of our revenue. Now we're running a deficit. We need to raise tariffs to get our budget balance. You'd be like, no, that's not Keynesian. Like, you need to be the search of the man. He makes this really, Dougherne makes a really interesting point in the book that if, If you actually look at tariffs, tariff levels and U.S. economic growth, that what you actually see is that when there is a low tariff, there's often a financial crisis, and when there's

a high tariff, there's often rapid economic growth. But the reason for that is that they were the main source of revenue. So you would tend to see tariffs get cut when the U.S. government is running a surplus, and then tariffs get raised when it runs a deficit. And there's this funny bit, I think it's for the 1880s or 1890s, where the big crisis, looming crisis is the surplus is too big and we just can't spend money fast enough and we're worried that this is going to like we're worried that basically all the circulating currency is just going to be hoarded by the treasury by accident because they had these high tariffs and the economy

was growing very strongly and they didn't end up trying to solve that by just offering much more generous civil war pensions which also that is you know for for just that generation after the civil war that is actually one of the big through lines of american politics is that there is their civil war pensions you know very easy to argue for very tight to the republican party of course and um a very good vehicle for graft because after after the pensions are expanded from if you served you get money to you know if you were injured you know and then your kids get money your your widow gets money or your spouse gets money um so yeah it became a much a very gameable system and then you know that that kind of puts other later political issues into into

a different context. I feel like if I grew up in the deep south and it's the early 20th century, I would be very skeptical of just all the things that Yankees say about all of the good things they're going to do for the world because I would remember that this hugely salient issue was let's tax everybody but disproportionately the South in order to give benefits to our side. And I would, you know, I would recognize that this was originally a very public spirited and good thing to do, but also that they kept doing it well past that point. I have this every time I read a history book, but I mean, really with this book, you know, they say history doesn't repeat it rhymes.

And every time you read a history book, you'll see a little bit like, oh, I see echoes of this leaders here, what I'm hearing from this world leader right now. I mean, my God, you could, again, the reason I had to get a new Kindle because I was highlighting so much, and you could take a thousand quotes from here and maybe blur out the party, but a lot of times actually not blur out the party because the Republicans were the party of high tariffs. I can clip it today, and we could start a Twitter firestorm with people being like, that's the stupidest thing. They're like, hey, man, this was a hundred years ago. It was just crazy how much it rhymed. To go back to, I mean, you know, the Civil

War payments very much rhymes with those and Social Security right now. Obviously, there were lots of parallels between those. To go back to sophisticated analysis early on, I mean, one of the things I was kind of surprised by was how much the founding fathers thought about tariffs. Again, the main way they were going to fund the government. A lot of the revolution was over taxation without representation, which back then was terrorists. But, you know, there's a quote from Madison that Madison correctly anticipates the fundamental issue in trade policy is degree to which domestic producers should be protected from foreign competition. One of the reasons they have to deal away with the original, what did they call the original, the league of

the United States or whatever, one of the reasons they have to do. Oh, yeah, the Confederate. Yeah, I loved it when Britain was, Britain would take the competitor. And it'd be like, hey, New York, why don't you give us a lower tax than Pennsylvania? So they'd play all these things off each other. But yeah, I don't know where I want to go there. I was just really surprised by history doesn't rhyme. It repeats, but it was really rhyming from literally the beginning of American history. Yeah, yeah.

Like, it did seem like even some of the other factors, like the U.S. is less dependent on trade. It has a lot of internal resources. And when the book begins, it's the U.S. is a lot of these internal resources that we can explode on our own without importing stuff. And then at this point, it's more like partly because of that and partly because of the institutions that were built off of that. We do have this large, very competitive service sector economy where it really does not need any kind of protection from foreign competition, except to the extent that it's mitigating something unfair that other countries are doing. So something like, you know, I don't think the U.S. needs some kind of law that says that you can't start, you know, that if you're a French search engine or French social network that you have to pay some extra fee to do business with Americans. On the other hand, European, there seem to be like all these weird contours of European antitrust law and privacy law that mysteriously American companies are really good at tripping and that they have to pay big fines. and European companies are often somehow very safe from that.

So, you know, there are these other forms of protectionism, which I think we're just harder to get away with when you didn't really have something like a multinational corporation in the modern sense. Or if you did, it was actually, you know, it was multinational but mostly doing business with countries in Asia or Africa where it just, like, Europeans did not really consider them geopolitical peers. at all. So the companies were just kind of running, or the companies were just kind of running things more so than doing business and having to comply with local laws.

Let me give you one that kind of, you know, one of the things the book makes clear is, hey, one of the reasons tariff policy is so interesting is because it's a place where people frequently put constituents over party, right? Like if you are elected by your constituents and you're a Republican, a Republican of the 1800s, or the 1800s, and your constituents all, are all agricultural, you're probably going to be for pretty low tariffs because your constituents want to sell, right? They've recognized all the issues, despite the fact that the Republicans traditionally Northern Bays are high tariff policy. The reason I bring this up is I've been pretty surprised in the current climate. Oh, one more thing that the,

And this tends to persist over time. Like, if you were in the South, you tended to be in favor of low tariffs because you sold a lot of agricultural. And the book notes, I love to note that the correlation between voting on tariffs in 1828 and voting for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 was 60%, which is pretty high over almost 200 years, right? I also like the other, like you do, but I do like that the book will sometimes interject with, you know, the bill was passed or the bill failed. and, you know, every Democrat voted for it except the, except the representatives of Louisiana because they have a sugar industry and they want to keep the sugar out. Like, it's always, that's always the one where they are, they are not in favor of free trade because free trade means more, more competitive sugar from elsewhere.

The other thing I loved is time and time again, they'd be like, it would come down, whether it was a congressional vote or presidential election, they'd be like, it'd come down to the swing state of Pennsylvania. And I don't know how Pennsylvania's demographics have enabled it to be a swing state for, since the founding of our country. It's just crazy that it is, you know, Louisiana has sugar cane, New York has New York City, and I'm sure lots of other things about them, but Pennsylvania has swing state. I just don't know how it's been for 250 years. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Anyway, the thing, bringing its check, you know, the thing I've been kind of surprised by is, again, Republicans for 200 years are the party of high tariffs.

thing. Republicans, they are not Republicans of the 1860s. But I've been surprised by Republicans still seem to be Republicans today, for the past 20 years, Republicans have been low tax. And that's because a lot of their constituents would benefit from low tax. They shifted South. As we said, the South sends to favor lower tariffs. Today, you're seeing the Republicans be the high tariff party. And that's switched in three years, two years, six months. I don't know. Are you surprised by how the current cycle seems to be breaking the constituent over party message that you'd kind of get through the past 250 years of this book, if that question makes sense? I think a lot of it just comes down to Trump and his somewhat idiosyncratic preference for tariffs.

And so it's like you can try to reason into why that would be. But I think some of it is just that's something that Trump actually likes. And I guess you could argue, okay, there's the rise of China is more of a, more of a threat to U.S. manufacturing and, you know, U.S. economic self-sufficiency. that there's going to be one party that's more of a China hawkish party than the other. And Trump did talk a lot about China in even going back to the 2016 campaign. So it's, I think there's, the Republican Party would seem to be more likely than the Democrats to remain or, you know, rebecome the high tariff party. But it also seems like it is kind of a weird idiosyncratic result of just the current personalities at play.

I have no disagreement with you. And again, we're not pointing out anything unique. It's just you read this book and you would have almost 300 years of history of, hey, the one place where you'll really see representatives break from party. And obviously, the parties have been much weaker over times and much stronger over time. The one place you'll consistently see them break is on tariff policy. And yes, they're idiosyncratic is of Donald Trump. But it's always interesting when you see something that you've got 300 years of history.

And the current day for now, you're seeing. a divergence from that history. So that's just the only reason I mentioned. Anything else on that? Yeah. No, I think the other way, other point on it is that tariffs are, in part, a sort of dignified way for someone who does not have a college education and is in the workforce to basically accept a handout from the government while still having a job that they can actually take pride in. And I think there's a reasonable kind of utilitarian argument that that is actually a reason to have some non-zero level of tariffs, that if you have someone who could work in a factory job and does not find, you know, would prefer that just would prefer the vibe of that over the

vibe of working in a restaurant or, you know, at a retailer or in the healthcare space or whatever, if trade barriers make it harder for other countries with cheaper labor to compete with the U.S., and you are creating these jobs where it's not that the job is fake, like they are doing real work, but the job at that pay scale is an artifact of tariffs keeping the U.S. from importing something from a place where people make $2 an hour or $1 an hour or whatever. That is just a way to do a wealth transfer. There is deadweight loss, but it is a transfer to a constituency that Trump has actually done reasonably well with.

So I think that there's, I think that is another piece of it that you can look, like if you are in that constituency, you can look at tariffs as the reason that your job has not moved overseas and or the reason your job won't move overseas and that you know who to thank for that. I certainly hear you, though, you know, I think the book and economists would argue, like, there's a line from, I think it's when, I think it's Roosevelt, but when they're talking about lower tariffs and you're starting to see real momentum gain from people who are like, hey, let's lower all these tariffs, say, hey, yes, we understand that there's 1.2 million jobs that are kind of supported by these tariffs, but that is ignoring the tax on the other 13.2 million

people. And as you're saying, like, you'd have to measure the dead weight, but I would imagine it's a pretty high deadweight loss to kind of support these 1.2 million people who wants to be in a factory versus, you know, be a server and tax the rest of us. But that's kind of an argument for the history, Dave. Let me go to a different one. You know, one of the things I think that's interesting to bring it back to the present. I think it's interesting how the current arguments that we're having are almost a funhouse mirror version of the arguments you have over the past 200 years, right? For the past 200 years, it was the tariffs are high, man, it's really scary to try to lower the tariffs. What are we going to do? And say it's, hey,

they're low tariffs. Let's raise the tariffs for the past 200 years until kind of the Great Depression, Congress is just the acts in setting the rates, right? And that's one of the reasons so they have to go line by line set the rates. And that's one of the reasons you have a lot of kind of corruption and lobbying in there, whereas today it's, hey, the president has all the authority, and Congress is kind of looking at each other like, oh, man, should we, should we take this authority back? You know, it's funny. The 1930s, when they're arguing about it, the Congress is really worried about relegating

this power to them. So I'll just turn to you. What was your favorite, like, kind of fun house mirrors aspect of the past versus what we're seeing today? Yeah, I thought that, like, that piece was really interesting. There was also this shift around that time from tariffs on mostly particularly. products to tariffs mostly on specific countries or bilateral deals with specific countries. And it does make sense that Congress would be just really, really good, like any given

congressman is really good at getting benefits for their constituents in the form of protection for whatever the local jobs are. My boy, pig iron, Kelly. Yes, pig iron Kelly. And then this was part of the argument for giving the FDR more power to actually sign these bilateral deals was that, yeah, the president just, he cares more about the overall national party popularity than about the popularity in any one district. And so he's actually more of a disinterested party than anyone, any legislator on, for either party. And I think this is like

the kind of argument where if you're, if you're a Democrat at that time and you make that argument, it is perfectly sensible. If you're a Republican, you're listening to that argument, and you say, wait, wait a minute. It's very suspicious that, yeah, the job we can trust, you know, we can trust whoever has this job to do the right thing for the country and put collective interests over narrow interests. But he is on your side. He's your guy. So, you know, of course, there may be less of a degree of that kind of influence, but it still

exists. That's still directionally true that the president is probably going to, as both, I think both Bush and Obama did things that were specifically, did temporary terrorists that were specifically beneficial to the, I think one was Pennsylvania and then Michigan. So it still happens even when it's the president. And it especially happens if, as you mentioned, Pennsylvania is in the mix and it's a swing state. But yeah, I thought that that general evolution made a lot of sense. In terms of, you know, Fun House mirror stuff, there's, so one of the things that I guess was kind of a worrisome part of the Fun House mirror effect was that when the U.S. would

try to negotiate with Great Britain, part of what Great Britain, part of their backup plan was that they had this low tariff sort of free trade zone of Great Britain and the various colonies. And a lot of that was preserved even after that colonial period, that they still had pretty close trade relationships. And so they didn't need the U.S. all that much. At least they didn't feel the need to do what the U.S. told them to do. Whereas the U.S. just didn't quite have that implicitly we did with some of the Latin American countries where we did lower bilateral barriers because we had manufactured goods that they could buy and they weren't making and they had tropical produce that we also just couldn't grow here. So it didn't really matter if American bananas don't get some kind of privileged treatment because we're not going to grow all that many bananas.

but we can certainly consume a lot of them. It was another area where you see the parallels today where the administration, before the big tariffs were rolled out, there's the quote of Lutnik going to be like, look, we're not going to tariff mangoes because we're not exactly growing a lot of mangoes in the United States. And it was just funny when you're reading in the 1870s

and they're raising all these tariffs and they're like, well, of course we're going to exempt coffee, for example. And you're like, man, the more things change, the more they see the same. You mentioned British. And there was one particular piece of, pre-revolutionary war trade policy that I wanted to mention. You know, the British, one of the, I can't remember if they explicitly make it or if just the

book calculates it, but one of the arguments for the British tariffs is, hey, America, you guys, because you're one of our colonies, you get into the free trade zone, and the British Navy patrols all of the world's, all of the globe, and we make it safe for your ships to deliver your cotton, sugar cane, whatever it is, we make it safe for your ships to go. and the book even calculates the value of that protection. And I, you know, again, more things, history rhymes. I'm just struck by a lot of the arguments today, and this comes back to the dollar and everything, but you'll see the U.S. government, the Trump administration saying, hey,

the world is kind of piggybacking off America protecting the oceans, trade droughts, whatever it is, and we don't get any payment for that. So I just wanted to throw that out to you. I think it's a really interesting thing. I think it's really interesting 250 years ago. I think it's interesting today. I just want to throw that out right at you. Yeah, like, I think one model for that is just that that is actually a big U.S. export is this

combination of having a pretty coherent system of laws and having a really good financial system and having a widely used currency and then having a military to back all of that up and ensure that we can actually protect our economic interests and those of America's allies pretty much anywhere. And that you actually, if you do that, you actually get. reserve currency status as like the implicit payment that the rest of the world makes to you in exchange for that. And it's not done in a really bilateral way except through this accidental historical evolution, which is that Iran and North Korea do not really benefit

from that. Like I guess Iran gets the slight positive externality that there are fewer professional pirates out there attacking oil tankers because if they attack a non, they attack one that's protected by the U.S. That's a very dumb decision. And so they get some slight benefit from that, but they're not really supposed to be part of the dollar system, nor is North Korea. But yeah, everyone else just because of the general way that things work out, they end up wanting to buy dollar denominated assets and wanting to fund a trade deficit that the U.S. runs. And that trade deficit in part pays for things, that trade deficit and the government's fiscal deficit to create the very safe assets that are dollars denominated that these countries want

to buy, that that does actually fund the system that makes the U.S. such a trustworthy counterparty, and that makes it a little bit easier to, or a lot easier, actually, to trade overseas. So, yeah, like, if you model that as an export, then what we get is we get more consumption than we otherwise would be able to afford for a given level of local output, because some of the output is the unmeasured global consumer and producer surplus that is created by the U.S. Navy and by the dollar system. Nope. That's great.

Let's see. Just some other thing. Look, you probably more than me, read a lot of history. Obviously, there are historical parallels, presidential figures that, compared to Trump, I think Andrew Jackson gets started around the lot. But if I was limiting you to just rhetoric on tariffs and everything that are in this book, who's the historical figure that most reminds you of Trump? Because I had a surprising one, but I'd love to hear yours.

I think it talks a little bit about Hannah and McKinley. And, you know, McKinley seemed kind of similar, different level of, like, kind of polar opposite in terms of how he campaigned. Like Trump sort of campaigned like William Jennings, Brian. And then he governed like McKinley. So that was the one who seemed the most similar. There is some element of Hamilton in Trump's thinking, which is fun, because they obviously have a very different process, maybe slightly similar personal lives. Maybe history would be very different if dueling were still semi-tolerated.

But it's, you know, that Hamilton did have this vision that the U.S. is going to build a lot of stuff, and we're going to have a system that actively encourages that. He also just had a different kind of system in mind. And at that, when the gap is that long, we're just, we're talking about such different things, even if we do see some of the same policies show up. What was yours? I am surprised, you said Hamilton, because my surprise figure was Jefferson, actually. I just saw so much of Jefferson, you know, Jefferson is a protectionist in the late 17, early 1800s. He's, you know, when he's president, he's talking about tariffs.

And I've just got all these quotes, like one, again, this book broke my Kindle, I was trying to quote, Jefferson, when he's trying to get some tariffs going, some Republicans who are against them. He calls them pseudo-Republicans, which reminds me so much of rhinos. And there's just page after page of Jefferson. I mean, you know, Hamilton says, Hamilton, the musicals got Hamilton as the man with Tom, like, Jefferson could spend a pretty hot mic too. And there's just page after page of him dunking on people and trying to raise the tariffs for the, for the American people and for his beloved Virginia. So I'm surprised by Hamilton. McKinley, I'll be. obviously, you know, Trump talks about loving McKinley, the tariffs. McKinley, I hadn't realized

he comes to power because he's a congressman and he supports the McKinley tariffs in the 1890s and then becomes president. But I was kind of surprised. Like, he's known for tariffs. He's a president of tariffs. His mentions in the book are actually pretty small. Maybe it's a period and everything. But I thought he's, I thought I was going to be looking at a 200-page McKinley thing. It's like, nope, McKinley as a congressman gets the tariffs implemented. He's president and then on to the next one. Yeah. Yeah, there was less material. I think I was, I was kind of, I guess, implicitly thinking that we're going to have about the page count per year is going to be roughly a function of the level of tariffs. So when you've got a 60% average

tariff on dutiable imports, then you have a lot of stuff to say. But it turns out all you really have to say is, yeah, they passed a bill that raised the average rate from what it was to this higher rate and then they did it again and then they undid it and so on. Whereas there's actually a lot of material towards the end, which actually, like the book, it kind of, in some ways, it runs out of steam because we do just get to this arrangement where the tariff is a less important political issue and it just becomes a more technocratic one. It becomes one where people still have opinions, but a lot of the debate is about these narrow details and it is about just kind of managing this gradual process of reducing everyone's tariffs and everyone's trade barriers. And that's often

it's, I think this is one of the reasons that trade deals take so long to negotiate is that the deal is done between the governments of two countries and, you know, it's some kind of more executive branch flavored negotiation. But the impact is going to have a lot of regional variation and that's going to tie into intra-party and party-level politics. And so that's sort of you will probably automatically have some kind of game of telephone where someone wants to cut a trade deal between two countries and then they realize that this particular constituency, you know, this swing state is going to swing the other way potentially if this goes through.

No, look, and one of the, to your thoughts on intra-party deals and regional voting, you know, one of the things that's interesting here is you think of the United States basically brokering TPP and then rejecting TPP with the Asian countries and kind of the 2010s. Like, oh, that's weird, but then you go through the history here. You know, it's very easy to forget United States post-war over one League of Nations, and then the United States doesn't join the League of Nations despite sponsoring that. The United States strikes a trade deal with Canada.

I can't remember. Right. And then 1800s. Exit, yeah. Exactly. So what you're saying. Like, again, so much of the stuff you think, oh, this unique, a lot of the stuff is so similar here. Let's see.

What else here? You know who my favorite person in the book is? Roosevelt's, sorry, FDRs, he's the head of the export import agency and he's got a rising power in the administration. And he's kind of pro-tariff and he burns off. It's like he's a rising figure of the administration. And then his first deal is he strikes a deal with Nazi Germany, which again, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany is not like today we know Nazi. It's just Nazi Germany. It's another government.

But he strikes a deal with Nazi Germany to sell 800,000 tons. I don't know what it is of cotton. And for mainly German marks. And then he's immediately escorted out of tower. And I was just like, man, this guy had a rising figure. He was kind of on the other side of terrorists because FDR's lowering in tariffs. And he burns all his capital striking a deal with South cotton with Nazi Germany. Like, oh, man, that's a rough beat.

Yeah, yeah. And it sucks to make a mistake like that because that's always the thing that defines you is what was your most important job and how badly did you do? And that I'm sure he felt pretty bad the day after he realized. this is kind of the end of his career. And then looking at just how political, how political outcomes evolved after that, it just looks worse and worse that he's, he's always going to be the Nazi, Nazi trade deal guy. He would have been great in finance, though, because, you know, the whole Matt Levine thing, if you lose a million dollars is bad. If you lose a billion dollars,

you've got another job because you're like, oh, he risked it. He learned he would have been great in finance because if that's how you flame out in government, imagine how you would have flamed out in finance with that. Yeah. Let's see. I think we've covered a lot of it. Again, I could just list quote after quote. I've got one on my screen. United States has a Gordian not to undo in the matter of interference with world trade by tariffs, quotas, embargoes, and similar trade restrictions. Is that from today? Nope. Again, that's around the 1932s era. And I could find similar quotes for 1870s, 1820s, everything. Anything else, it's kind of interesting that you wanted to call up from the book or anything?

I mean, one of the things that was just funny to me was there's this bit where it's quoting a Texas legislator and he's just throwing out some numbers. And he says, many people talk about the tariff being for revenue, but actually, I bet that for every dollar of tax revenue, it generates $5 of private gain. And then six pages later, it's Irwin talking about macroeconomic, like econometric analyses of the impact of tariffs. And he says, well, it looks like the main part of the impact was about half a percent of GDP as tax revenue and about 2.5 percent of GDP. as gains for the producers. So somehow this random legislator just gets the number exactly right, just off the cuff,

which is great. And it just, you know, I wonder how much of that is just, you would have this more tangible sense if way more people are actually doing physical work and, you know, seeing things get made. They're growing things or they're making things. And then some fraction of them are in the service sector, but still a lot more adjacent to that. Like even if you're in the service sector, but you're in the service sector, but you're,

your job is you're a clerk at a warehouse or you work for the railroad. Like, you still just see the tangible evidence of this is what trade looks like, you know, and ships come in with this stuff on them. They come out with this other stuff on them. And so maybe people just had these more accurate intuitions about those kinds of things because it was closer to a lived experience. Whereas, you know, if you look at trade today and, you know, you're looking at something like an iPhone, it's, you know, this black rectangle and there's a whole lot of complicated stuff in here that was designed in a lot of different places

and built in a lot of places and all put together in China and you just don't have that sense of this object containing things that have collectively circumnavigating the globe many, many times before they got into that iPhone that then got to you. And so I think just the efficiency of the modern economy

makes it easy for us to sometimes under-approval appreciate trade and just to have really weak intuitions about how big a deal it is and how complicated it is. Look, I think that's a through line of the book, too, right? They mentioned it time and again, it's protecting the things that get made, the factory jobs like, hey, I don't know, but it's definitely through like with the iPhone, as you said, an iPhone cost, what, like $1,500? I think people kind of think, oh, because it's so small, you know, think about it.

If you had $1,500 of name your commodity, name your, it would take up so much room on a ship. So you're kind of like, oh, clearly that's way more important. The iPhone is like, no, you know, the iPhone actually probably more important. They've driven down costs and efficiency so much because it's so big. It's actually probably like carrying more than its weight in terms of value, even though I used weight, even though it's way smaller. Just some other random things I love in the, I think this is, yeah, they go after the, Smooth tariffs are passed, and then a few years later, they're rolling them back. They go to some congressmen and, you know, all the Republicans are saying, hey, giving FDR the power, the president the power to renegotiate.

Oh, yeah, I love that echo. Yeah, that there, I think I underlined some, some speech. Oh, yeah, the, here we go. Republicans went so far as to say that the, this bill giving the president power to negotiate tariffs would create a fascist dictatorship in respect to tariffs. And there would be no shackles upon the use of this extraordinary. tyrannical, dictatorial power over the life and death of the American economy. No, I'm on the exact same page because I love the whole point because, A, it has echoes in today, but then I love it because they'll go to individual senators who voted for the

community tariffs and then are going to vote for this and they're like, hey, what's going on? Or they'll go to some of the senators and be like, hey, you're saying it's unconstitutional to vote for this because they're going to lower tariffs. You voted for this when it raised tariffs. What are you going to do? And there's one congressman from its minimum. Minnesota, Harold Nusson. He says, look, I'll be honest with you. If I thought the president was going to raise tariffs, I wouldn't be making it. I'd vote for this bill in a second and I wouldn't be making a beep. But he's going to lower it. So by God, it's unconstitutional. I just love the honesty there. And again, you see parallels to today where 10 years ago you can find

any politician you want saying one thing and they're probably acting out differently. But I just love the honesty of being like, it's not in my constituents interest. It's not in what I believe. So voted for it, then voted against it now. Yeah, there's tons of other fun house mirrors things, but anything else jump out to you? Not really. I thought it was, it's just a, you know, it has a lot of texture to, like you mentioned before, a lot of, a lot of other historical debates where it just, it makes, it makes more sense and fills in some more gaps about how the tariff issue became this national issue and really

dominated politics for a while. And so, and then I guess it probably did end up just creating different political coalition. So you would end up with a low-tariff coalition that is also part of the pro-slavery coalition before the Civil War, and then you end up with this connection between high terrorists and being opposed to slavery and probably ties into just a bunch of other stuff. Like I could imagine that if you were the high-tariff party and you know that this means U.S. industry is protected, maybe this affects your view on immigration, where it does mean more people working in these jobs and mitigate some of the wage pressure.

And meanwhile, that increase in population in the earlier parts of the 19th century, that does mean more people who are going to eventually spread out into states that haven't determined whether they're free states or slave states. So maybe you end up with people in those states voting your party's way

because your party is the one that let them in in the first place. So we probably end up like, you know, it's like there's all this weird path dependency in economics and in politics and in history generally. And even though tariffs were a non-issue until a couple of weeks ago in U.S. politics or mostly a non-issue in U.S. politics, we still sometimes inherit institutions that were very much defined by tariffs when they mattered a lot more. You know, one thing, I liked in the book how you'll see, again, the correlation for voting for NAFTA and voting for the tariffs in 1830 was 60%. So it was actually quite high when you do it over two.

But I do love seeing where, you know, at first, if I remember correctly, the Midwest is kind of partnered with the, the north on higher tariffs. And then when roads get built, so the Midwest can start kind of shipping their grains out of, they go, hey, we're no longer high tariffs. We're low tariffs now. So I love seeing the evolution. One thing I did want to ask you before we wrap this up, and then I have a comment and then we can wrap it up. You know, you will see, especially around slavery, but even later too, when a party is worried the votes are starting to break against it, they add a bunch of states, right? And you see time and time again issue. And look, this is unrelated to terrorists. But as I was reading this and just read,

the history. I was surprised, there's the talks of Canada or Greenland, whatever, but I was surprised we haven't seen parties breaking to add more states in, especially the recent past where the, the temperature has gotten really hot between the two parties versus, you know, the 70s or 80s when, yes, people would like to be in power, but I don't think they were like saying every election was the fate of our democracy. I would say, have you been surprised we haven't started seeing the parties talk about adding states to kind of pack their votes a little bit? Yeah, I think you probably, you want things like that to happen when the temperature is really hot, but you can't actually make things like that happen unless it simmers down a bit. So, like,

I think it makes a lot of practical sense that NorCal and SoCal could be independent, you know, could be separate states. And maybe we keep the state count constant by having just Dakota. Oh, there's going to be some South Dakotans and North Dakota. Not many of them, but there's going to be somewhere mad at you. No, I mean, yeah, just like as an administrative matter and in terms of having the Senate be roughly representative of the overall population, on the other hand, if you do something like that, what you're basically saying is I think there should be probably one or two more Democratic senators and probably one or two fewer Republican senators. And so, of course, you kind of know how the votes will break down. And then you could say, okay, the actual compromise is

let's split California, but we'll also split Texas. And then the problem is that Texas, you know, Texas is full of Texas nationalists who actually do like Texas as its identity, you know, as part of their identity. And yeah, so I think, I think it is, it is true that you could probably, you could hypothetically have some kind of pressure release valve like that. It's just, it's a lot easier when your country is expanding its territory and is able to buy adjacent territory and also when land is a big factor of production. So if you have new territory, people can just go there and. actually improve their income just because they're going somewhere that's empty and so they can have their own farm, it'll be a larger farm that otherwise would. Whereas it's not like, you know, if we did annex Greenland, it's not like we're all going to be going up there and working the rare

earth mines and, you know, that the trading floors will be empty because the hedge funds just can't afford to keep all of their employees when they could be out there mining or, you know, whaling or something. So, you know, in that sense, it changes just what that feedback, you know, what that pressure release valve looks like. No, you say, and look, I said this off the cuff. This is me just talking out of turn. But I hear that I just in your, in what you said, you talked about the temperature dialing down a little bit.

And I'm just, you know, as I was reading this and getting the memory jog, the temperature was really high when they were adding states. So I definitely hear you would be easier if the temperature was coming down and people weren't worried about one senator flipping literally everything, the fate of American health care or whatever you wanted to be. But I'm surprised, you know, you've got Republican controlled. trifecta right now. And if history is any indication, like in the 1880s, I think the Republicans have been like,

hey, maybe we add in a couple states. You've got North Dakota and South Dakota. Why don't we have a West and East Dakota that are going to be a reliably Republican as well? And just kind of pat our majorities there because I've just been surprised by that. Last thing I wanted to say, going back to the book, really, really enjoyed this book again, highlighting a ton, the two areas that I thought it could improve, and we'll wrap up over this. the conclusion, he doesn't even give any thoughts. As you said, he just kind of lays it out there.

Here's the issue of the tariffs. And I thought he would have a conclusion. He just says, that's the history of tariffs. They've been important. Donald Trump's coming. We'll see what he does. I did think he was interesting. He wraps it up by saying, hey, the history of tariffs says that their tax policy and

tariffs are really slow to change. And the past 60 days kind of show otherwise there. But I'll let you comment then. And I have one last comment. Yeah, no, I thought it was a really good outline. And in some ways, I think, you know, if I got to the end of the book and he'd said, well, you know, here is, here is proof. You know, I think this book just proves that tariffs are always a terrible idea. Or he said, you know, this book proves

that tariffs have costs and it's always worth it in the end to preserve these jobs or whatever. I think, you know, either of those would have made me want to double check some of the quotes and references. But if he's just reciting a bunch of facts and, and they're interesting, and also he's able to say tariffs did have an impact, it's just not as big as you would think. And a lot of that was that trade was not as big in the past as it is now. You know, maybe his point is like you want to really belabor a point like that because it's not one of those ideas where you can come up with a really snappy explanation for why that would be so, and then everyone just instantly gets it.

So, yeah, I was pretty much fine with that, and I'm sure he has views, but I'm also, you know, I think generally people, economists who write a lot. about trade are almost always going to have a view that free trade is a good idea and that tariffs are rarely or never worth it. And so the fact that he was able to say things like, here's who benefited, here's who didn't, or here's where I think the dead weight loss was just not that big. I think that really adds to the credibility of the overall work. No, now that you say that, I think I agree with you.

I did kind of think, hey, this is an economist and a story in writing this. He's going to come out and at the end, he's going to dunk and be like, tariffs are terrible. you know, forget tariffs, let's lower income taxes, corporate taxes, all taxes are dead. But he does not say that. He's very balanced. The other thing, which I think you will agree with me, man, he could pay me. I wish he had gotten this book edited a little bit better because he will tell the same story

four times in a row. You know, again, the book runs probably 1,100 pages of actual reading and then 100 pages of footnotes. I could have gotten this down to 500 pages in three days. Just, I mean, he really tells the same stories and stuff. And I just wish he had to edit a little bit better. And I know you get a couple cool anecdotes when you can kind of run long. But several times I would read a page and then I'd read again.

And I'd flip back and forth, be like, did I just read the same page three times in a row? And it's because he would repeat the same story over and over. So I really am enjoying it. But man, I wish he had edited it just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I think there are, you know, you could definitely tell a story that is like this, but it is, okay, here are five big terror debates. We're going to detail what the situation was leading up to them and then how they

went. And it does seem like a lot more of it is just part of it maybe is that the tariff debate was pretty continuous. And in fact, there are a lot of bits in the book where he says, okay, here's the president. And then the next thing that happens is here's the big swing during the midterms because of something tariff related. And so, yeah, you do have this blow-by-below thing where especially when tariffs are being written mostly by the legislature, it's every two years. there is some turnover in who did what. And the more extreme someone, the more extreme of things someone did, the more likely it is that they're out and the policy changes again. So, yeah, you have this weird homeostatic mechanism where things, the tariff has to

bounce around in part because it responds to the economic cycle on a lag and in part because politicians' careers were partly tied to whether or not the voters proceed them as having done a good job on tariffs. It's one of the last thing in the more I do love, there are a couple of recurring characters, especially in the high tariff side. Henry Clay pops to mine, Pickard Kelly pops to mine, a few others. But I love when they're just popping up over and over again across a 30-year period. And I understand politicians are powerful. They tend to get sticky. But I almost felt like a sports fan. In 2006, I was reading for LeBron James. And now in 2025, I'm rooting for LeBron James. And, you know, when I'd see Henry Clay in the 1830s dealing

with Andrew Jackson, and then I'd see him 10 or 15 years later, I'd be like, oh, yeah, My guy's still out there kicking it. It's just, it's really fun to see that. But that's how politics is, but especially with tariffs in these figures popping up, I thought that was interesting. Any last thoughts? I think I've said that like four times. But again, I really liked it.

We read 700, 800,000 pages. Might as well have a lot of thoughts. Yeah, no, I think it was fun. I think it was this look at just a very different political structure than the one we have today in terms of how laws get made and in terms of what the pressures are on them. And it's also just, it's a lot more literal. and personal when it's a slightly smaller country and lobbying is literally you hang out in the lobby of the hotel where President Grant is going to be sipping bourbon and smoking cigars and you hope that you get a chance to have a fake chance meeting where you get to tell him all about the importance of copper mining or of protecting sugar farmers or whatever it is. So yeah, I think we always, we're always operating in systems that descend from a system that worked in a much more personal and literal way and just, seeing what that system was like and kind of tracing its ancestry to today was just really fun.

But the more things change, the more they see the same. I mean, you got a chance meeting with Grant. You had that happening at Marlago now. Yeah, yeah. The Deep State now, every 20 years with the terrorist there, would be like, hey, we think this is really impacted by the deep state. We need to drop all our terror perform and look into the impact of lobbying. It was just a really interesting thing. Anyway, Byrne Hobart, we're way over an hour at this point.

This has been great. Burn from the diff. Love it. I am two podcasts behind on your on on the riff so I was worried I'd ask you a question be like oh I just discussed this last week on the riff but I appreciate popping on and we will I've got some interesting books for next month we'll we'll chat next month all right all right fun always a pleasure this podcast is brought to you by AlphaSense those of you who've been following the podcast and the blog know that I've been doing a lot of work recently on

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