Mackenzie Price Transforms Education with AI and Oren Cass on Tariffs and Trade Strategy
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Welcome back to Breaking Brattlegrounds. My name is Sean Noble. I'm guest hosting today for Chuck Warren and Sam. And I've got Kylie Kipper here with us. Yes, hello, hello. Great to have you. We are going to kick it right off with our first guest, who is an amazing woman. Mackenzie Price started a new learning model, a school. It's called the Two-Hour Learning Model. And Mackenzie, we are obviously all about learning.

choice in education, opportunities in education on this show. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you've created and why. Yes, I will absolutely do that. Well, first of all, it's a big day in Texas. The vote for school choice is happening today, and we are very hopeful that it is going to come through in our favor. Texas has been a little bit slow on getting school choice going on, but here's my thing. I am a huge believer that...

you know, kids should find models of school that work for them. I don't know if you guys have kids, but in my family of four, we can't even agree on the type of cereal that we all like. We, you know, all pick different kinds of cereal. And I think the same should be true with school. And so what I've done is I've created a school model where our students get completely personalized learning. They use an

AI learning platform to do that. And as a result, our students are able to learn twice as fast in only a couple of hours a day. And one thing I also know as a mom is that we often don't want our kids to come home after two hours. And so you think about what the whole school day is. And what we do with our school day is we spend the rest of our afternoons

doing life skills development. So teaching kids grit and how to give and receive feedback and teamwork and socialization and storytelling skills and financial literacy. I think all of those things that we as parents really believe kids should be learning. So in short, what I've done is I've taken the kind of teacher in front of the classroom model and turned it on its head.

turned it on its head so that kids can receive exactly the level and pace of learning that they need. And we're getting phenomenal results. Yeah, it makes total sense. And I speak from experience in this from the standpoint of I was homeschooled for a number of years.

I was the oldest of six and I had a younger brother who had dyslexia and had some challenges with learning. And so as a result of that, my mom decided she was going to pull him out and then she decided she was going to pull all of us out.

Wow, what a hero mom. I love it. Hero or crazy, one or the other. But this was in the 80s, actually. Yeah, well, just right around 79 or 80. Because I was just going into sixth grade or just coming out of sixth grade. So I homeschooled seventh, eighth, and my freshman year in high school. My younger siblings went longer. But by the time I got to high school, they didn't have the options back then.

that they do now. So I had to enroll in high school in order to play sports and participate in choir and drama. But we, the six of us all had a different learning style. And my mom, you know, took the time to figure out what that was for each of us. And I know that there are some people say, well, two hours, that's not necessarily, that's, there's no way that's enough time to teach the kids what they need to know. But if you really think about a typical school day in any school, public school, private school, whatever, um,

the actual learning time is probably less than two hours.

There is no question that is true. And, you know, when you think about it, I believe teachers have been given the most insanely difficult job in the world. They've been asked to empty the ocean with a bucket that's full of holes in it. And so if you imagine a teacher, no matter how devoted, no matter how well trained they are, trying to cater to 20 to 30 plus students who are all at wildly different levels of understanding in the material and have different learning styles,

It's really an impossible feat. And I'll tell you, learning science has known for 40 years since I was in elementary school, universities like Stanford and Harvard and Oxford have done research showing that the best way for a student to learn is in a one-to-one mastery-based environment. So think back in the old days, Aristotle...

you know, and Plato and, you know, getting tutored that way. You know, when the Industrial Revolution came out a few hundred years ago is when we realized, okay, we have to figure out how to educate the masses, right? And so that's where the teacher in front of the classroom model came about. But these learning science research shows that when you do one-to-one mastery-based tutoring, kids can learn two, five, ten times faster

when they're doing that. And, you know, I realized I, you know, first and foremost, I'm a mom. When my daughters were ready to go to school, I sent them to our local traditional public school. And just very quickly, they were sort of hit with this lack of ability to kind of

meet their needs where they were. And you think about that, there's so many kids who sit in school bored because they already know the material. And there's even more kids, especially in today's world, that are struggling. They're so far behind and there's just no way in a time-based system for students to be able to catch up and have their needs met. And when my oldest daughter looked at me in second grade and said, mom, I'm

I don't want to go to school tomorrow. And I was like, what do you mean? You love school. She said, school's so boring. I just had this moment of like, oh my gosh, it has taken two and a half years for this model of education, not about public or private schools, the model of education to wipe this passion away. And I just knew something had to be done differently. And fundamentally, what we believe is if a kid's going to go spend four

five days a week for 13 years all day long at school. Let's make it something that they love. And one of the reasons that we're able to make our environment something that kids love is because they are being met at the right level and pace for what they need academically. And then we're opening up the rest of their day to take classes

time to go find that intersection of their passions and their talents and what the world needs. And I think that's fundamentally what's going to help us raise, you know, great young citizens that go out in the world and do big things. Yeah, no question. Now, what, tell us about how you've, you know, what are the biggest pushbacks you get from parents? And then what are the biggest success stories you've seen over the years as you've implemented this?

Yeah, well, I'll start with pushbacks. And really, they're all fundamentally rooted in just the lack of understanding about what this is. When you hear about AI in education, people have this vision of like a robot teacher standing in front of the classroom, you know, and it's this very dystopian thing. They say, Oh, my gosh, you don't have adults, you know, you're letting AI teach, that is the opposite of what is true. In fact, a lot of people are saying, Oh, my gosh, you don't have adults, you know, you're letting AI teach.

critical to our success is the teacher that's in our classroom. The difference is we have transformed the role of the teacher so that instead of spending their time, you know, creating lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading papers and homework, our teachers are completely focused on motivational and emotional support and elite mentorship, really getting to know every single kid, understand what their interests are, what their challenges are, what do they say to themselves when they're feeling challenged and

And how can we help with like incorporating growth mindset to that? And so what we do is we let the technology in the form of an AI tutor and adaptive apps do all of the academics. So it is true. Our teachers do not teach academics.

Instead, we let technology handle that. We're able to meet every single student exactly where they're at. And then the teachers work on motivation. And it's really created this phenomenal experience where our classes are scoring in the top five

you know one and two percent in the country in fact i would tell you sean i don't think there's another school delivering the kind of academic results that we're delivering but even more so than that we're giving kids their most valuable resource back which is time to go learn life skills and do these really fun activities so as a result you know kids are doing big things for example we had our fifth and sixth grade students last year they ran a real airbnb

And that meant they were learning everything from understanding what short-term rentals are all about and their positives and negatives, understanding all about buying versus renting, doing customer segmentation to figure out, do we want to rent to Bachelor's?

parties or do we want to rent to families? They learned interior design. They had to learn budgeting and pricing skills. They had to learn customer service. And that's everything from managing the cleaners to managing the customers. Those are things that, by the way, when you give kids mentorship and support, they can do big things. Those kids, fifth and sixth graders now this year, are opening a food truck restaurant.

So they've got a food truck. So I will tell you, I think you guys are based in Arizona. They are willing to cater your next event. There might be a little bit of a transportation fee in there, but they are absolutely willing to cater and do that. And that's the thing is we always ask ourselves, like, how high is high? What are kids capable of doing?

when they're given high support, which they get from their teachers, and they're given that time to go do big things. And it's just incredible. We've had so many awesome success stories. And I think that's part of why, you know, we've been getting attention is because, you know, kids can do these incredible things.

Yeah, that's... I mean, and it makes sense because...

It does – when you talk about kids can do big things, I mean when you look back in the history of the world, United States world, whatever, you look at Da Vinci or you look at some of the founding fathers and then they were learning and they were doing really important stuff in their preteens and teens. I mean they were becoming lawyers at 15 years old. It's because they had this mentorship, right? This one-on-one learning experience. It wasn't a classroom experience like traditional schools.

And it does allow kids to really expand to their potential. Otherwise, they're kind of being – the top is whoever – whatever the average is for the whole class and you kind of get stifled. What has been your most proud moment or significant moment as you've done this and rolled this out over the course of the last few years?

You know, that's a great question. I will tell you, when I first started the school back in 2014, I was really just looking for a great option for my two children. And my husband and I would, you know, kind of wake up every day and just ask ourselves a question like, are children thriving in the environment that they're in? And day after day, week after week, and now year after year, what we found is that the schools that we've built

are providing that environment which allows them to thrive. And I remember last year, my oldest daughter graduated from high school and she got into her dream college and she looked at me and she said, okay, mom, now I can officially thank you for sending me to your weird school that you'd started on. So she was certainly a guinea pig. But I think when I look back at what I'm most proud of is this has gone from just serving a small population of students to really, I believe this model of education can impact families

billions of children, billions of children. And what we've seen already is that this model of learning works for kids across all demographics. It works for kids across all backgrounds and socioeconomic classes. We've rolled this program out to Ukrainian refugee students who literally didn't have schools to go to. This way of learning works, and it's something that's scalable.

and accessible for many people. And so I think when I think about, you know, just I'm excited about the idea that we can actually make a change. Education has been this industry that just hasn't, it hasn't been disrupted. It hasn't changed in any way. And if we can use artificial intelligence to raise human intelligence,

that's kind of the key. And we're doing that both academically for students, but also helping them with their emotional intelligence and their life skills development, and then allowing our human teachers to do what only humans can do well, which is connect with their students. And so that's awesome. Well, we'll be right back. We're going to continue with Mackenzie. We've got plenty to ask her and have her tell us. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm Sean Noble, guest hosting with Kylie Kipper today. We're filling in for Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. And happy Holy Week. Happy...

Easter time. Yeah, happy Easter. It's pretty important. The only thing as important as Easter, well, maybe nothing's as important, but pretty darn close is the education of our children. And we are talking to Mackenzie Price, who has started Alpha Schools. We've had the last segment. It was fascinating. Kylie, I know you wanted to jump in. Yeah, I want to get more into the AI aspect of it because I'm very fascinated with AI. I've been using AI a lot now since probably the fall. Mm-hmm.

Chat GPT to be specific. And I don't know if there's different ones that are better than others. But I want to know, I want to go back a little bit to when you guys developed your AI to so what you're using to teach these students and then how you're ensuring it's not delivering messages in a biased way in either direction.

direction, you know, politically or in any way, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, so when I first started the first school in 2014, even back then, we knew that we could use adaptive apps to give every kid kind of their level and pace of education. We knew it didn't take all day. So that's kind

been around for a while and of course artificial intelligence has actually been around a lot longer than you know just you know most of us have heard about in the last couple of years um but the big thing that happened about three years ago is we started seeing that generative ai was coming out

And what that has enabled us to do is we are using artificial intelligence to make sure that students are effectively and efficiently moving their way through the material. So when we think about AI, a lot of us think about those chat bots.

right? Going into chat GPT. We're actually not using the chat bot component of our AI system. Instead, what we're doing is AI is the underlying layer that is making sure that kids are, again, learning efficiently, that they're taking the right amount of time, that they're in the right level of challenge for their work.

If it's too easy, then we're able to kind of dial that up. If it's too hard, we're able to understand is it because they need to just review a certain concept or do they maybe need to go back and fill holes? And so as a result, we're not handing a kid an iPad and saying, hey, chat GPT, please teach fifth grade math.

We're not dealing with the hallucination issues that still are a challenge in artificial intelligence. Our curriculum is based on U.S. Common Core. And so our kids are learning the same material that students would learn in a traditional classroom.

without the bias of AI kind of coming in. The difference is we're making sure that, again, we can hit every single student at exactly their level and their pace. But I will tell you, here's what's so exciting about artificial intelligence and what we can do and are using is we can take that seven-year-old boy who doesn't really love reading

But the Avengers is his favorite movie. His best friends are the kids on his baseball team. And he loves his grandparents on his mom's side. And we can suddenly make a story where it's a choose your own adventure, Avengers style, save the world with him and his baseball team as the main characters. And they start out by having milk and cookie at grandma and grandpa's house before they go out to take on the world. And we can make sure that story is at

the reading level that that seven-year-old boy needs. And suddenly you have a kid who's like, okay, I like reading. This is really fun. Or you take that little girl who loves fashion and wants to be like a future fashion designer, but she needs to work on her math skills. You can now combine those interests that a student has with the knowledge that we're trying to teach.

And that's something that's really an exciting thing. The other thing that I think is really cool about artificial intelligence in education, and of course, when you think about what's happening in traditional schools, most schools are saying, "Hey, stay away from AI. It's a tool for cheating." And what we wanna do is help our students learn that AI is actually a tool that can give them really great superpowers, not for cheating, but for things like feedback. So for example, public speaking, which is a really important skill and communication,

We will have our students use AI apps that give them feedback on the speeches that they've written and are speaking. It can measure their intonation, the number of filler words that they're using, the number of words per minute that they're talking.

you know, things like that. We do a really cool teamwork exercise where we have students go out and play a sport. Like they get to go play sand volleyball and we mic them up and we use AI to give them feedback on their communication skills and their positivity ranking, right? So AI can do all these really cool things when it comes to providing students with feedback, giving them, um,

ability to spur on ideas. Another example is our third and fourth graders need to build businesses. They need to make $500 in profit from a business. And as part of that is they create business plans and then they use AI to provide feedback on their business plan

You know, or we had a student who's a third grader last year. She needed to raise $1,000 to reinvest into her business. She loves making jewelry. So she created a business plan and then got feedback from an AI app that gave her information on, okay, if I raise $1,000, how am I going to reinvest? I'm going to invest in better materials. I'm going to take a jewelry making class and I'm going to open a store on Etsy.

Those are all things that we're teaching our young people how to use AI to allow them to get even more creative. And one of the big things that I believe now, Kylie, is that in this day and age, it's no longer just about the three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic, right? It's now about the four C's, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. And artificial intelligence allows humans to

to kind of live out on that gray zone and go explore the frontiers of what humans can do. We have this incredible gift now that every piece of knowledge we could want is, you know, at the tip of our hands on a phone. We need to teach young people how to go beyond what we know and develop new interesting things. And artificial intelligence is such a great tool for that. That is awesome. That is so amazing. Well, it's what's,

Most encouraging about what you're talking about is traditionally schools right now are hunkering down, saying just like you said, stay away from AI. This is cheating, blah, blah, blah.

But AI is here. I mean, it's here to stay. And it's only going to get more involved in the stuff that we do in our life. And so by allowing your students to not only embrace it, but use it in their everyday learning, they're going to be light years ahead of other kids who have been told AI is a bad thing. Stay away from it. I would arguably say it's similar to the calculator on our phones when they told us we weren't going to have calculators the rest of our lives. Right.

That's absolutely true. I mean, if we said to, hey, don't touch the internet, that internet is a weird, scary place to be, which I will say it can be a weird, scary place to be, but it's also here. And, you know, the majority of jobs that an elementary school student is going to do when they graduate and go out in the workforce have not been invented yet.

And so it's even more important that we prepare our young people with life skills. And traditional school just doesn't have time to do that. And we have to make sure that kids are well prepared to go out in the world and be functional, not just functional, let's make them successful. And one of the other things that I think I'm really proud of is our schools work

we don't care where a student comes to us at. We don't say, oh my gosh, if you're a fifth grader and you're not reading yet, then that's, you know, sorry, you can't come into our school. We can meet kids exactly where they're at. So we can take kids who come to us in the 10th percentile and we can get them to the 90th percentile or above in two years. So the idea of being able to grab this whole

generation of kids that have fallen so far behind and help them catch up is phenomenal. And let's take those kids who again are so advanced that they're bored stiff in a traditional classroom and let's blow the ceiling off of what's possible for them. Mackenzie Price, thank you so much for being here. You can follow Mackenzie at Mackenzie Price on X and you can also go to her podcast The Future of Education. Mackenzie, thank you so much for being on Breaking Battlegrounds and we'll be right back folks.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm Sean Noble, guest hosting along with Kylie Kipper, in for Chuck Warren and Sam Stone today. You can catch me on a regular basis at the podcast Light Beer Dark Money. Thought I'd pitch that at least once in the show. Yeah, you should. We are happy to be joined now by Oren Kass. He is the chief economist at the American Compass, also the editor of the New Conservatives. It's coming out in June, right, Oren? Yes, June.

Great to have you. You have been very active in talking about tariffs, manufacturing, picking a lot of arguments with others in the movement. Tell us a little bit about just overall what your take is on Trump's tariffs as far as where we are now. I mean, people are paying attention to this. Then we can follow up.

Sure. Look, I think there's been obviously a lot of confusion around the initial rollout. There's course corrections underway, probably more that are needed in sort of the specifics. But I think in the direction, it's incredibly important what they're doing. And really the way to understand it is to see that at the sort of very broadest level,

You know, you hear folks like Secretary of State Rubio talk about is that we've had this what folks call the liberal world order that the United States was kind of going to preside over free and open world. And we were going to bear a lot of costs of keeping it free and open. But but we and everybody would benefit as a result.

And what we've seen is, especially as China has grown to be a real adversary and competitor, it doesn't work so well anymore. That that arrangement is over. It's not really a question of whether we want it to be over or not. It just is over. And I think you see the Trump administration really focused on, OK, well, then what comes next and what they think comes next, which which I think is entirely correct, is

The United States needs to be building an alliance, both on economic and security terms, of

of countries that are actually going to work with us and work with us on a fair and even basis where we have balanced trade. So they don't just get all the manufacturing jobs and sell the stuff and we just buy the stuff. Right. Where we all sort of share in the costs fully of defense and security. And then where we all agree to keep China out because it's not going to work if the U.S. keeps China out, but then Mexico lets China in and all the Chinese stuff just comes in from Mexico.

So I think that's exactly where we need to go. Obviously, it's going to be rocky to get from here to there. And I think that's what we're seeing is the first steps in that journey. Yeah. And it's fascinating you say it that way because as a Reagan baby, I've been Mr. Free Market for my entire life. And so I've always looked at tariffs with a bit of skepticism and saying, well, that's not really a free market approach. But I feel like...

As you talked about that world order that Rubio talked about, that that –

pretty much was working and it was important during the Cold War and it was kind of working, but it started to kind of unravel around 2000, 2001, right? I mean, not necessarily with 9/11, but with the advent of China's growth. I mean, so those of us who are free marketers have kind of, we kind of blew through the 2000s blindly thinking, oh, we're still, everything's fine. But the shift was happening then, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think you're making an important point, which is that I'm a free marketer too. I think free markets are exactly what we should be aiming for. What I think we missed was thinking, well, if you support free markets, then that must mean you want free trade with China, right? That's a free market.

And what we're seeing is, well, no, that's not true, right? Integrating your economy with a communist authoritarian state-controlled one doesn't make your market free. It distorts it and harms it in all sorts of ways.

And then the other thing that we're seeing with countries that are our allies, you know, countries like Japan and Korea and Germany, is that it's fine that we just want to pursue a free market. But they have been pursuing economic strategies that really rely on exporting a lot, on attracting the manufacturing jobs to their countries and then having the U.S. as the market to export to.

And to be clear, I think trade is great. But if you think about the way like you learn about trade in your textbook, you're supposed to be trading stuff for stuff. So they make stuff and give it, you know, sell it to us and we make stuff and sell it to them.

And instead, they've been pursuing a strategy where, no, no, no, they make the stuff and sell it to us and we don't sell stuff back. Right, right. And, you know, economists, a lot of economists look at that and they say, oh, this is great. Look, we're getting all this cheap stuff and we don't even have to make anything. And that's kind of a serious view in economics. But I think what most people see in the real world is, no, no, no, that's not right. We need jobs. We need an industrial base. We need to be able to make things too.

And so I think what Trump gets exactly right here is that making things matters and that, yeah, we want tariffs to be as low as possible, but that needs to be actual free trade that works for both sides. And we are willing to use tariffs to show other countries this old system is done. We're not going to tolerate that anymore. We have to come to the table and meet us in the middle. Right. We have Oren Kass. We'll be right back with Breaking Battlegrounds.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. It's kind of hard to say sometimes. That's the problem with being a guest host. This is Sean Noble filling in for Chuck Warren and Kylie Kipper is filling in for Sam Sown or vice versa. I don't know which of us is filling in for which one. Yeah.

I think we're doing okay. We're doing good. We're doing good. And the reason we're doing great is because we have an amazing guest. Oren Kass is with us talking about trade, tariffs, manufacturing. It's been a fascinating conversation and more to come. Yeah. And Sean was just talking about being free trade, open trade, that type of thing. What's the biggest reason we don't want to have a free trade world with China? Well, I think the problem is that

you know, a little bit as we were talking about China is also one of these countries that really counts on kind of building up the manufacturing at the expense of others, really exporting a lot, not buying from other countries. But China's a lot worse because it's not a market economy itself. So at the end of the day, these companies that we're asking American companies to compete with, the Chinese companies are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

And the Chinese Communist Party is deciding which of these companies do we want to see succeed? What's important for China's economic and military strength? And therefore, who are they going to help? And so Chinese companies get massive subsidies. They get cheap loans. They get free land, free energy. They get all sorts of other support from the government.

And if you're telling an American company, hey, we believe in free markets, so you have to compete with and beat this instrument of a communist party, that's not a free market at all. And if we just say, well, we're still a free market, then you're basically letting the Chinese dictate what they are going to win at. And we get left with the stuff they don't want. And there is no economic theory anywhere that says this...

this is a good idea or is supposed to work out. Well, and it's, and that's exactly right. When I looked at recently, I saw something that showed the number of, of like large ships,

Yeah.

When we talked about, you know, this guy has bananas, this guy has pineapples, and it was the trading of stuff. It wasn't, oh, you have all the bananas and I've got gold or, you know, some kind of a fiat money. It really does, you know, being a free market doesn't mean we're just buying stuff from cheaply from other places and not doing anything ourself because –

We have to have a manufacturing base in order to supply our military, pharmaceuticals. I mean, there's all kinds of things that are not only in our national interest from just generally, but from a security standpoint, that to rely on foreign companies

manufacturing seems absurd. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, I always encourage people to think about the manufacturing value from three points of view, because, you know, some people say, oh, you're talking about manufacturing, you're just nostalgic, you want, you know, everybody sitting in factories tightening bolts. That's not it at all. But

but, but we care about manufacturing for a few reasons. One is it, it really does provide good jobs, uh, you know, stable jobs, middle-class jobs, especially for people who aren't in big cities, especially for people who might not have college degrees. Uh, it really provides that sort of foundation for a healthy local economy. And we saw that when we lost the manufacturing, we lost all of that, right? The idea was, well, they'll get other jobs instead. And, and that just doesn't work. Right. Uh,

And so that's one thing. The second thing is that, you know, manufacturing is really important to innovation.

And we've tried to do this model where, oh, we'll design things in California and then they can go make them in China. And what we're seeing is that the place where you make things, ultimately, that's where you get good at the engineering. Ultimately, that's where you get good at working with the materials. Pretty soon, you're doing the design there too. And what are we left doing in Silicon Valley? Making social media apps. And so I think we've lost a lot in the actual like

productive ability of our economy. And then the third piece, as you said, is that resilience and national security. Because what we've tried to do is say, well, we don't care about all the other stuff. We'll just make sure that we can make the submarines and the aircraft carriers and the fighter jets resilient.

But first of all, if everything that you need to make those things has to come from somewhere else, you're in trouble. And second of all, you start realizing, actually, if you lose all that other stuff, you're not going to stay very good at making the submarines or the fighter jets either. Either you have a strong industrial base or you don't. You can't just pick the couple of things that are important and let the rest go away. And I think the U.S. economy and our security has really suffered from getting that wrong. Yeah, that's such a great point. And, you know, you talk about...

The creativity and the manufacturing here and all the things that goes along with it. I think that Tesla is a great example of advances that happened as a result of everything being right here. Yeah. Well, so I'm so glad you brought that up because it is both the example of the good and the example of the bad. Tesla today is essentially a Chinese company.

If you look at Tesla's impact report, they will tell you most of its stakeholders are in China. If you look at its biggest manufacturing facility, it's in Shanghai. Now, why did that happen? The U.S. supported the innovation. We had the brilliant engineers. Our government helped to fund it. But China had a 20% tariff.

And China said, well, if you want to sell Teslas in China, you have to come set up your factory here. And by the way, we will make it extra cheap for you to do that. So as Elon Musk do, he says, OK, cool. He goes and sets up in Shanghai. He says our Shanghai factory is just for the China market.

But within a few years, no, now the Shanghai factories for the whole rest of the world, now it's where they do the most work. And guess what all those engineers who he hired in Shanghai did?

They took his intellectual property and went to the Chinese company. Now Elon Musk and Tesla are getting their lunch handed to them in China by the companies that the CCP is subsidizing to use Elon's technology against him to the point where Elon has said these Chinese companies are going to wipe Tesla out unless there's more protection.

That's the model that doesn't work, that they don't teach you about in econ class. Elon, what a fascinating character from the standpoint of, I mean, the hero to the left and then all of a sudden the villain and then a hero to the right because he embraced Trump primarily because it was, you know, Biden's policies were such a failure. But I think he also understood that.

That there is there needs to be a manufacturing base in the United States. I mean, I think that people underestimate how much draw Trump brought to himself as a result of the discussion of manufacturing and tariffs. I think that's like a core that is like his main core article of faith and has been for decades. Right.

Yeah, I think that's right. And it's so interesting to see, you know, someone like Trump to come to the issue, really, I think, from more kind of an instinctive point of view, where you had, you know, you really needed someone like him who was willing to just ignore the experts, right? Because all of the economists, all of the experts were saying, no, no, this is how it's supposed to work.

It doesn't matter if you can make something here. If you can make something elsewhere and get it cheaper that way, that's better.

So a very famous line from an economist who is a senior advisor to George H.W. Bush, he said, potato chips, computer chips, what's the difference? And right. I mean, like that was the actual sort of standard way of thinking. There's a similar senior advisor to Obama who has said, look,

imports are the good thing. The reason you trade is because you want imports. Exports are the bad thing that you have to do to get the imports. There's actually this idea that the bigger your trade deficit is, the better because you're getting more cheap stuff without having to do any work for it. And that's just a short-sighted view. Yeah. It just seems so backwards. I mean, it

It really – I mean when you talk about the idea of free trade, it is this back and forth of basically the same amount of goods.

you know, going back and forth. This imbalance is just not very healthy. Yeah. And you made also another really good point when you mentioned like instead of, you know, bananas for oranges, it's, you know, bananas for gold because it's really important to remember they don't, you know, these other countries aren't actually sending us this stuff for free. They do want something back.

What they're taking back instead of stuff that we can make here is they're taking back our assets. So we essentially give them ownership of our real estate. We give them ownership of our corporations. And we give them a lot of debt. It's funny to think of debt as an asset. But what's really happening is the U.S. government...

gives them treasury bonds. We send pieces of paper that say, "We can't buy this. We don't have anything else to give you now, but here's a piece of paper that says we will pay you back at some other point." And so it's not that we just don't have to do the work and get the free stuff. It's like we've just been taking out credit card after credit card

And running up the balances on all of them and saying, wow, isn't this great? And it's not. We hollow out our economy today and we mortgage our future at the same time. So when I came across you on Twitter, because Chuck had asked me to find someone who understood Trump's tariffs and his position on them. And that's when I came across you. And I saw you had an interview with Democrat Congressman Jared Golden. What was his take on it? Was he supportive? Because I think you see a lot of people flip-flopping

I think Republicans, you see them sticking to they're not fans of tariffs. And then you see the Democrats saying they're also not fans or they're flip-flopping on their views. So I guess what was your conversation with him and –

Yeah, we'll go from there. Yeah, I really admire Congressman Golden. He's so he's a Democrat. He represents sort of the rural northern Maine. And he's been focused on this issue for a long time. He actually introduced the legislation that would create a global 10 percent tariff before the Trump administration moved forward on it. Interesting. And.

And so, you know, he has thought a lot about this. He hears from his constituents these exact issues. And it's funny, there they actually have problems with Canada. They look at the relationship with Canada and say, wait a minute, we see all of this stuff, you know, work we used to do here moving over the border to Canada, but we're not getting any other new, better jobs instead.

And, you know, he he talks quite openly about his frustration with other Democrats, because historically, Democrats have cared a lot about this stuff. And now that it's something that Trump is talking about, well, they just have to run. A lot of them are just running and saying they have to be on the other side. You know, he and the few other Democrats who are standing up and talking about the issue, they're getting attacked as why are you supporting Trump? Why are you helping Trump?

And they're saying, well, we're trying to help the workers who we represent. And I do think it speaks, though, to the fact that there is a lot of potential actually here in the long run. This is something that a lot of Republicans and Democrats can and do agree on. And especially when you get to the China side of it.

There is a lot of energy on both sides. There's legislation in Congress now with bipartisan support to really stick high permanent tariffs on China. And so I think this is the direction we're going. And I hope we can we can get more of a consensus around it. Speaking of consensus, and actually this is more of a lack of consensus, but you have Cato Institute. You've got a lot of the free market, you know, quote unquote output.

Franklin's tweeted out a chart that asked the question, you know, America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing. 80% of Americans agree and 20% disagree. And then I would be better off if I worked in a factory. 25% of Americans agree, 73% disagree. That created a lot of stir. Tell us a little bit about how you read into the reaction to that.

Yeah, it was really interesting. I'm glad you brought it up because, you know, I look at that and I say, oh, well, that's great, right? You have the data showing, you know, if 23, 25% of Americans think they'd be better off with a factory job, right?

That tells you that there's a lot of unmet potential there. There's a clear recognition that for lots of people, this is an opportunity that they would benefit from. And if 80% of Americans recognize that and say we should have more factory jobs, that's great. That's exactly what we should want our politics to do. But you have these folks and- Orin, we're going to have to cut you off because we just unbelievably run out of time.

We are definitely going to need to have you back because this will continue to be an issue, obviously. A lot of controversy. Please continue to write about it. Please continue to comment about it. We'll have you back on. Folks, thanks for listening in. You've listened to Oren Kass talk about tariffs and manufacturing. We're breaking battlegrounds. We'll be back next week.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. This is the podcast portion. I'm Sean Noble, host of Light Beer, Dark Money. Filling in for either Chakra Sam and Kylie. And I'm filling in for the other. Yeah. And it's my favorite part. It's my corner. This is the best part. Talking about crimes and the ones committed. Murder and mayhem in a world of sin and awe. Kylie's on a roll.

Welcome to my corner. I've got two, I love it too. I have one story today that's really sad, but I want to talk about really quick one thing that's

happier story. Mesa Police Department in Arizona solved 100% of its murders in 2024. Is that right? 100%? Yeah, so they just made an arrest on April 1st, Devin Mull, and they arrested him for second degree murder. And that made it that they solved 100% of their murders. So then I looked in, which across the country, on average, every year, 42% of murders go unsolved. Oh my gosh. Yeah, which I thought was very high. I looked into the others in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lubbock's,

Texas and Omaha, Texas. Those are the four police departments that solved Omaha, Nebraska. Yes. Wait, what did I say? Texas. Oh, my bad. So those are the ones that did 100%? Yeah. So those four departments. Yeah. So...

Great for them. That's the positive part of my story today. Now to the horrible part. This story scares me, which is why I want to talk about it, because I want to bring awareness to it as well. I don't have any kids. I just learned today that you have eight kids. That's true. And we're also talking a lot about the internet. So

On February 28th of this year, there was a 16-year-old named Eli, and he had just gotten picked up from school by his mom in a brand new Jeep. He was 16, about to get his license that week, and his mom wanted to surprise him with a new car. They drove home. They got him a haircut. They stopped and got flowers because it was his teacher's birthday or something the next day, so he wanted to give her flowers.

And then they returned home, had a normal evening. He was texting his he was in his room. He's texting his mom and he was saying tomorrow morning, why don't we go get coffee? Like just having a normal day.

That night at 1130 at night, his twin sister found him on the floor of the laundry room with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And yeah. And so when they rushed him to the hospital because he was still alive, he ended up passing away in the hospital. But investigators obviously immediately started looking into it. And within 45 minutes, they were able to discover that Eli was a victim of sextortion.

So someone had reached out to him on social media and used a photo that he posted, just a normal photo, and created an AI image of him, distorted to make it look like it's an inappropriate photo. And they were demanding $3,000 from him. And within about 30 minutes of him going to bed and making that choice with his mom is when the person messaged him. And he...

must have just felt like that his entire life was over and he felt like he couldn't go to his parents and so he took his life he ended up sending the um extorter i guess is what you would call them fifty dollars they were asking for three thousand and they said it wasn't enough so he had reached out to a friend who sent him eight dollars um which obviously they said it wasn't enough and he just couldn't convince himself that his life wasn't over or that he could go to his parents and this is the saddest thing because

I haven't heard a lot about this, but in 2022, 10,700 cases were reported to the FBI about this. And in 2023, one year later, it over doubled to 26,718 cases. Unbelievable. So there's a nefarious use of AI. Yes, yes. That's awful. I think there's a nefarious use of a lot of things. But I think it's more of...

I'm afraid, you know, I want to create that relationship with my child that they even in this moment, he's such a great kid. And everyone described him as just a loving person that they didn't even expect that this would happen even that evening or that. Well, it's it's it isn't shocking and it's sad because, you know, whatever you have to do as a parent to make sure that your kids feel safe in telling you everything is paramount because.

You never know when they're going to face something that they think is insurmountable. And if they don't feel like they have a place to go, this could happen. That is terrible. Yeah. So sad. So I want to talk about that just to bring awareness. Talk to your kids. I'm horrified, but I appreciate that you did. Yeah.

Especially since I have eight of them. I love my corners four. Yeah, your corner is to educate us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I had the positive story. 100% of the murders in Mesa, Arizona were solved. So the takeaway from this is love your kids, have an open door policy, and don't try to commit a crime in murder in Mesa because you're going to get caught. Exactly. There you go. Kylie corner summary.

Well, thank you, Kyla. Appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you everybody for listening. Have a great weekend. Thank you for guest hosting with me. You bet. Thanks for being here. Bye. Bye.