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On the Tape.
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All right, welcome to a very special edition of the On The Tape podcast. I know I sound very formal here. I'm with a friend of mine who we text a lot. We talk every once in a while. We've seen each other a handful of times, but this seems very formal, this sort of medium. Tommy Vitor, he's a co-founder of Crooked Media. He is the co-host of Pod Save America and Pod Save the World.
He served in the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013. He was Assistant White House Press Secretary, served as a National Security Spokesman and Special Assistant to the President that would have been President Barack Obama. Tommy, welcome to the pod. - Thank you. - That guy. - Dan, good to see you. - Yeah, we potted once, I wanna say back in 2022, early '22. - Yeah, it was remote, right? - Yeah, and it was a different world back then.
You know, I think a lot of our listeners know I'm very interested in politics. I often speak about policy. That's the, you know, kind of the focus that we have here at Risk Reversal Media and also on CNBC. You and I
Talk politics. It leads us to policy, which is good. You know, you guys do a great job on your pods of doing both, right? And I think that drawing the line from politics to policy is something that a lot of folks who are not listening to podcasts, who are not watching MSNBC or Fox News, you know, it's kind of a hard thing for them to do. So we want to hit
the economy. We want to hit this kind of tech bro kleptocracy a little bit, as I know you have some things to say on that. We want to do taxes, trade, tariffs, all of the above. But first things first, and I promise you I'll shut up
You know, you guys were on the Colbert Report the other night. Yeah. And I thought it was super cool. He's a guy that I've admired for 20 plus years when he was on The Daily Show before he had the Colbert Report. And he has a sincere interest in what you guys do. He gave you guys 20 minutes on his show. I think that was amazing. Let's talk a little bit before we get to Crooked Media. Let's talk about the...
The regular media. Like, you know, talk about what it's like to go on the Cabr show. It's the most nervous I ever get before anything. That show. I mean, there's something about it. The history in that room. Like my dad was a huge Letterman fan. You know, so I think about him every time I go on. They warm up the crowd. So you can hear this kind of like thunderous like room noise.
next door as you're sitting in a green room waiting. And you know, it's, I don't know, it just feels like a big deal. And, but Steven's so kind to us. He makes you feel welcome. It is a big deal. I mean, when you think about it, like there's very few shows that are on TV now that get as much viewership as those late night shows. You know, it's funny, you say you're nervous. They always put you right next to him, right? Right to his right. And then the other guys are-
Again, it's truly amazing. You guys do an absolutely amazing job. I'm just curious in that green room, who's are some of the coolest people that you've met, like sitting in there waiting to go on? Well, so it's like you have your own little room, so you don't meet the people necessarily. But every once in a while, you'll be in like the makeup room. And I was in there with the lead singer from Lakeshore Drive. Okay. Great band. I'm trying to think who else you've seen there.
I don't know. What kind of intimidates you, though, is they have little Polaroids on the wall of like all the actual celebrities who have been on the show. And that's cool and also intimidating. Yeah. So it's funny that you say nervous. The crowd is what? A few hundred people tops. You guys do. Last year you did a tour. I saw you guys at a pretty reasonable sized theater in Brooklyn. I've seen you guys.
at the beacon, I mean, you guys get a raucous crowd. I mean, the people are super fired up. What do you think has resonated with your listeners? I've been a listener, I think, since when you guys were on The Ringer. And again, I just kind of happened upon you guys. I mean, what do you think the thing is that connects? Obviously, your politics, you guys have been very progressive. You're not only just progressive, you guys put your money where your mouth is. You raise a lot of money for progressive causes. You guys represent
rally and organize a lot of folks around those causes. And is it just politics or is it a combination, again, going back to the politics and the policy, because the fervency I think comes from the politics, but what you're really pushing people to do is get involved in the policy stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think we were very lucky when we started the shows early 2017. People were, I think, fed up with the way politics was covered on cable news in particular. Remember that time in like
In the 2016 campaign, when you turn on CNN, it would be that guy Jeffrey Lord getting yelled at by seven liberal pundits. And it was just terrible. And so we were basically shadowboxing cable news when we started. And we wanted to talk like normal human beings talk about politics, but go a little deeper. And so I think we were in the right place at the right time. And I think a lot of people in the first Trump election felt...
felt like the world was going crazy, like something was askew. And listening to us made them feel like they were not alone. I'm not really, I don't think that's totally how people feel this time. Like I think-
It's a very different reaction. You're seeing it on the streets. But I think that's what's been kind of durable about it is the sense of community. Like you're literally in someone's ears, right? So you feel like you're a part of that conversation. Yeah. You know, I mean, listen, we live obviously politically in a very polarized world. And, you know, we have lots of friends on both sides of the aisle. Some, even if you're on the left, you know, you might be kind of
left of center you know what i mean and then you recognize this there's also a huge faction that's far left right and so you know and the same thing obviously goes on the other side but it looks like you know there's one side that is just declaring victory not just from a political standpoint but obviously the policy in which they want to implement and so we're going to go over um
you know, a bunch of that. I just want to say one other thing is I think you guys know that Guy and I, you know, we do this every day. We think about a lot of policy through the lens of the markets and the economy. And I think that's how we can help our listeners. And again, it's not only just to help them. We learn a lot from our listeners. And so, you know, we're not trying to impose a lot of our personal views on folks. I don't do that on CNBC. There was a time that I did 15 and 16 and 17. And, you know, at the end of the day, it didn't
feel great. That's not what my mission was. Does that make some sense? Yeah. You're trying to help people make better decisions in the markets. Yeah. And the way you just described how you were shadowboxing or shadowing the mainstream media, I just want to say another thing. And I probably said this a couple of years ago in the pod. It's like when we created this company, I went to Guy in 2019 and I said, hey, listen, I really think we should be
about the markets. And he's like, what's podcasting? And that doesn't surprise you, you know, Guy. And then we worked through a little bit about these different mediums and how they're changing. And Guy was an original Fast Money member going back to 2006. And he has mastered the TV medium. I feel like I'm still learning every day. But the last thing I'll just say before we get to policy is like,
when I thought about what you guys were doing, I started, like I said, listening before it was pod, save America. I listened to Kara Swisher, which hers was probably one of the first podcasts I ever listened to. And then Bill Simmons and you guys have mastered, you know, the craft of doing it. And so hopefully one day when I grow up, I'm going to be like, you know, thanks buddy. I mean, I think,
It's a cool industry because there's no barrier to entry. There's a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can buy the equipment and record something and put it up. Now, it takes a lot of work, a lot of great editors to make it really special like a This American Life episode, but anyone can do the entry level thing. They think that the cool thing about
podcasting, I heard Chris Hayes say this the other day and it really resonated with me is it's one of the few media mediums that is not controlled by an algorithm. It's just an RSS feed. So you either, you can see a show on the charts and check it out. You can hear from a friend. It can be word of mouth. It can be something, I don't know, you just Google it, but it's not getting
fed to you by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or some platform. And I think that's kind of a unique thing about podcasting. But at the end of the day, you need to be out there and all these different media mediums because there is no discovery on the podcast. You know, that's really difficult. I think that that's why you guys, I think, started maybe a little more than a year ago doing YouTube. And if you think, or was it longer ago? Longer ago. But yeah, but YouTube has definitely been a huge...
opportunity for growth for us because it's just a search engine. Yep. 100%. And for us, it's been the same sort of thing. You know, again, we still love the audio audience. It's a lot of folks that probably look a lot like us old, you know, and that's how the younger people are finding you. All right. Let's talk about. I also like when you guys do your lives and a guy gets trolled in the comments and he just responds to them in real time. Yeah. One thing I want to say. So, no, that's a really good point. And so, like, I listen, like, for instance, Derek Thompson.
Plain English. It's an amazing podcast. He's one of the smartest, most prepared guys. He gets a lot of great guests. - Really smart. - His podcast, they're kind of, they can be evergreen. They're talking about something like, so what we do, very little of it is evergreen. It's very ephemeral, right?
But I can go back. See, here's the big difference, okay? So if I go to the podcast store, let's say I was going to be interviewing somebody at a conference. Let's say it's Gary Cohn, for instance, or something like that, which we've interviewed at a conference before. If I go to the podcast store and I search for Gary Cohn, there's a whole host of political podcasts, economic podcasts. And I might go back and listen to that, although it was meant to talk about tax policy at the time or something like that. So I think there's something to be said. You guys have had –
dozens if not hundreds of kind of a-list politicos and policy sort of people and i think they probably live in the world out there does that make some sense you know yeah and that's how people maybe help find you guys too um all right let's start with the economy the economy that the trump administration is inheriting when i think about this unemployment is at 4.1 percent we gained 256,000
thousand jobs in December. Pretty good. GDP last year was about 3% higher than expectations. This year, many folks are expecting 2.5%. It could be higher given some of the frameworks that have been put in place during the first administration. Inflation, okay, is down to about 3% or maybe a little bit lower depending upon how you measure it.
On its way, a lot of folks think towards that Fed target of 2%. And the last thing I'll just mention here, the stock market is not the economy, but a lot of economic stuff goes into the performance of the stock market. Under the first Trump administration, and I think if I went from inauguration to inauguration, it was up about 65%, the S&P 500. During the Biden administration, the same sort of time period, up 57%. So when I think about all that, Trump is inheriting
pretty decent setup. Yeah. He's inheriting a strong economy. And the question is, what does he want to do with it? And it's interesting. I mean, underneath a lot of the numbers you talked about are still some unique specific struggles, right? Like the cost of eggs became an indicator of inflation and the economy and how people were feeling. And it sounds like
Egg prices are going to continue to go up because there's an avian flu happening right now. And my question is, will voters notice that? Will voters blame Trump? Will they wonder why he has or has not solved the problem? I don't know. Because a lot of these economic numbers and how you feel about the economy, it's become partisan.
You know, especially with Republicans who feel better about the economy just because Trump is president. And that's their right. I'm not criticizing anyone. But it's just interesting how even economic data has become politicized in some ways. Yeah. You know, and Guy and I talk about this a lot because we're seeing it on a day-to-day basis. We have to focus on inflation reports or employment reports. I mean, the list goes on and on. And the narratives in and around that by different administrations, you know, they're always trying to hype, you know, a little bit about the benefits or what's going on to –
you know, the consumer or, you know, however you want to view them as a voter or whatever. You know, the Biden administration did a very poor job, like I think selling their achievements as it relates to the economy and the like. And so, you know, the flip side of that is Trump, you know, every day during his first administration, when we had a new high, a closing high in the S&P 500, he used to say, you know, you're welcome. You know what I mean? Like your 401ks and the like. Let's talk a little bit about
messaging because it goes both ways, right? If you're really pushing false narratives, sooner or later, you know, the chickens are going to go home to roost. And, you know, in two years, we're going to have a midterm election. And to your point, there was obviously a lot of swing voters, you know what I mean, in this last election. And if they're feeling it at the pump, if they're feeling it at the grocery store, I have to assume it swings back. Is that something you guys are focused on? I think so. I mean, I do think, you know, history suggests that, uh,
Most presidents lose seats in Congress at the midterms. If that were to happen and Trump lost the House, it would basically or it could potentially prevent him from passing anything legislatively after that. So it will be a really important marker. I do think you're right, though. I mean, Trump's communication style is
singular. Like no one's ever approached the job this way. He didn't just do an inaugural address that your team spends hours working on and shaping and perfecting. He did his inauguration speech and then he went to the overflow crowd and he just riffed for 30 minutes or whatever it was. And then he went to the Capital One Arena and did a huge rally speech. And then he went to the Oval and did a 45 minute press conference. It was day one.
The guy's got stamina. I'll just tell you that. It's absolutely amazing. I was listening to Rogan talk about his interview with Trump. And he was like, the guy walks in, didn't go to the bathroom, sat down for three hours, talked, left, didn't go to the bathroom. That's what you're about to do, by the way. So just strap it in here a little bit. Yeah, no, I mean, listen, he's very good at messaging. What we haven't seen is like a disgruntled Trump interview.
You know what I mean? Voter. 2020, I think, was such a weird situation with the pandemic and the like. And I'm just curious when you think about it. And I know you guys talk to scores and scores of voters. And I'm sure there's plenty of people in your own life. I know there have been in mine who were, you know, voted for Biden, but voted for Trump. And the stuff that they were focused on is a lot of stuff that we're talking about right now. And a lot of it, I think, had to do with the poor messaging. Yeah. I mean, look, I think the biggest problem.
Problem was Joe Biden was too old. Yeah, and he shouldn't have run for reelection That was a catastrophic decision and the Democratic Party tried to tell people that no no no your eyes aren't seeing what they're seeing and you'll be fine and just it Really early on, you know calling for you know a peaceful transition of power within this day You know what I mean? Like a six the way no I look we after the debate It was just very clear that he should consider stepping aside or should step aside. I wish I had been I
more honest about my views earlier. I mean, I think what happened was everyone thought Biden was going to be a one-term president. He promised to be this transitional figure. Then the midterm elections happened in 2022. Democrats did way better than expected, almost exclusively because Republicans ran crazy candidates like Herschel Walker. Georgians were like, "No, we're not electing this dude." And then Joe Biden decided that was an indication that people wanted him to run again.
And then he did the State of the Union and went pretty well. Then he went to Kyiv, took that nine hour train ride and sort of showed some vigor. And from my perspective, I was like, I don't know. I don't see the guy in person. I don't know if he's up for this or not. I don't think he is because age comes for all of us. But I think that was a huge mistake. And what Biden lost pretty quickly was the ability to communicate clearly or well about anything. Right.
You know, one of the things that I think is kind of interesting, we're going to get to what I think are some of the things that turned the election on a whole host of different sort of economic issues or market related issues. You know, I go back to, you know, who's around the president and how did it get this way? So if I think about the Biden White House and Guy and I talked about this a lot on the pods over the last couple of years, it's like,
Their insistence on coming after our national champions. What are our national champions? Some of the biggest, most innovative tech companies that have ever existed on this planet, right? And the funny thing is, it's like, yeah, you could look back and say after the 16 election, it was kind of bipartisan. I think the Republicans were coming harder at these social networks. But for eight years, it seemed like they were ping pong back and forth. But at some point,
In this last cycle, all of those crypto bros and all the big tech bros, they came to a conclusion that the Biden administration and the folks around him and the agencies that are being run under it were not for them anymore. So you're out in LA. How did you see that all playing out? I have plenty of friends on the West Coast who are involved in VC and crypto and in private tech companies and that sort of thing. I kind of felt it coming. I'm just curious how you guys thought about that.
I felt it coming too. I don't know. I'm curious when you say the Biden people came after, I don't know, say a Google or Facebook- The FTC and the DOJ. They launched some investigations, right? There was talk about breaking them up for the first time. Look, for the first time, these CEOs and these companies weren't treated like precious darlings, right? Mark Andreessen is very open about whining about this. He's like, the deal was we do what we want.
You leave us alone. We give our money to charity. You tell us we're brilliant. Right. And like they felt like that was that deal was broken by the Biden administration. I think these big companies deserve some scrutiny. We should talk about what harm Instagram may or may not be doing to teenage girls. That's a perfectly valid thing for the government to look into. I think when it comes to crypto, I.
I don't know. I mentioned you do too. Complete whiplash around the conversation about cryptocurrency. I'm not opposed to it. I've bought Bitcoin, I've bought Ethereum. You and I have talked about this a million times. I own some Solana for a while. I thought it was interesting. There's some cool use cases. The blockchain is interesting, but there's trash out there too. And people got really hurt by Sam Bankman Freed and some of the collapse of these companies. So I feel like these
big crypto investors, the A16Zs or whatever Andreessen's thing is called, are like whistling past the graveyard and asking us to pretend that there's not potentially
potential systemic risk to the financial system if all the guardrails come off and they have no real regulation. And if you see financial firms changing their structure so they're actually blockchain companies, so they have even fewer regulations going forward. So I'm a little worried about this setup because Trump is a late adopter of cryptocurrency because he knew the money would come in. And these big crypto companies spent well over $100 million on
on, uh, in super packs on races this year, including like taking out Sherrod Brown in the center race in Ohio. So like it feels, um, I don't know. It's precarious setup here. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'd never seen something so open, um,
as it relates to politics, because again, you know, these folks have lots of stakeholders, right? So they have employees, they have investors, they have customers. And I'm really talking mostly about publicly traded companies and obviously some some very big private companies. The crypto thing, you know, that is what it is. I think if you've been following it, I know you have for the last ten years or so. I mean, these are a different breed.
And it's almost like a religious sort of thing. And I said this on Stephanie's rules show. I think it was about a month before the election on MSNBC. I was like, listen, we're talking about these crypto guys getting behind Trump. And I said, you know, if you think MAGA is a, you know, an explosive or, you know, sort of religion as it relates to or fervent sort of thing, just wait until you meet the Bitcoiners. Because these people, you know, and I'm sure you know plenty of them.
Yeah, well, also, you know, I do try to think like put myself in the shoes of some of these young guys, right, who feel like they don't have great employment options. They see all these people getting rich. They have all this FOMO on social media and then cryptocurrency comes around and it's this generational opportunity to get rich.
But let's be honest what you're doing. Like you're investing in a speculative asset and hoping it goes up. Right? So like there's a totally understandable piece of it. There's a FOMO piece and there can be a really ugly kind of pyramid scheme piece and we need to protect people from that. Well, a lot of it is that.
Right. That's what all the meme coins are. And you and I, we talked about this for years, even during the bear market in 2022. It's like, how do you move money into and out of the market? And it really comes down to what is your time horizon, right? And what are some of the goals that you have? And so not too different, I would say, than the S&P or the NASDAQ. You should...
you know, dollar cost average all the time. Markets up, markets down, dollar cost average. If you had done that, you know, from the end of 21 and then we had this bear market, you know, in the S&P 500 and here we are now, you know, much, much higher, you know, you'd be okay with all those kind of purchases that you made high 21 and then low 20, you know what I mean? That sort of thing. And I think for crypto, it should be the same thing. You know, if Bitcoin has, you know, a nearly $2 trillion market cap and it's not going away, it's all the other stuff that folks
are playing for the quick profits. Not to mention the Trump and Melania stuff that you just mentioned. And that's where the grift is. And no matter what side of the aisle you're on, if you're listening to this right now, matter of fact, okay, these things are made for those folks to get rich and get out of. So when you think about that, you just mentioned that young male who doesn't see the American dream playing out for him. Let's just say those coins are gone. You know what I mean? Like they're zeros and they've lost a lot of money. They call them bag holders.
Yeah, I really worry about this. I mean, the Trump and Melania coins that came out, I mean, it was a shocking grifting opportunity and made Trump millions and millions of dollars. I mean, I think not only does a Trump company own like 80% of the supply of the company, but they also get paid money.
fees off of the trades. So they're making, you know, they're selling picks and shovels and they're digging the gold. And, you know, it seemed like there was a rug pull at some point when it went from, I think, 60 to 40. So anyone who bought in late got hosed. Who knows what will happen long term? Maybe it'll all go up. Maybe it'll all be fine. But I do think there's potentially some serious harm. And just from a policy perspective, like set aside the trump of it all, like the fact that you can just
pour money into the pocket of the president of the United States through the DJT stock. You can buy that. You can buy the Trump coin. You can stay at his hotels. There's all these ways to curry influence. And I don't think it's a partisan statement to say that that's
a bad setup. Yeah. Again, I don't know why Republican senators and anyone else who's paying attention just don't think that there is risk to, you know, Mar-a-Lago and what goes on in and around there. They know better. They're scared. No, I know. And supposedly real estate is like
doubled in Palm Beach because so many foreign, you know, folks are just kind of like camping out there. Elon supposedly has bought a lot of real estate there. And again, this should be a bipartisan issue, how policy gets affected by all sorts of interests. You remember like, you know, when you were in the White House, one of the biggest bugaboos that, you know, most folks had was like lobbying. You remember like, you know, like
that sort of thing and then campaign finance and everything. And it seems like all that stuff's out the door. - It sucks. I mean, yeah, Obama in 2006 was a big leader in the Senate on ethics and lobbying reform in the Senate. He ran on a lot of these reform issues. Like he didn't take PAC or lobbyist money in the 2008 campaign just to set a principle. And I think Democrats need to get back to that because the shorthand is a series of Supreme Court decisions
and just a neutered regulatory body that oversees campaigns has basically done away with all campaign finance limits. And corporations and wealthy individuals on both sides can just dump ungodly amounts of money into elections. And we should not be having multi-billion dollar, multi-year elections
every cycle, every year. It's disgusting. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the folks who've kind of funded this sort of stuff. And I think it's kind of interesting. We can call it MAGA and we can call it Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon. If you want to call it MAGA, you can do that too. And add Tesla at the end, you know,
At the inauguration on Monday, you had Mark Zuckerberg, you had Tim Cook, you had Sundar Pichai, you had Jeff Bezos, all representing their multi-trillion dollar companies. They're all standing very close to the president. These are all folks that Trump has come after repeatedly over the last eight years. And so if I look at this through the lens of Trump,
you know what i do here it's just egregious you know what i mean it's like you know these folks and there's lots of competing interests there right so elon musk in this proximity that he has to trump it seems unholy right if you really think a shadow president i don't know if we've ever had one here in america and he has the ability to primary anyone that he doesn't agree with it doesn't even have to be who trump doesn't agree with that's a scary place
So when I think about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, they are at odds with each other. Meta is at odds with half the other ones. You see Elon announced, he attacked this White House announcement today that included Altman, this big AI investment. Elon's like, ah, the money's not really there.
yeah i don't know that that's going to make trump very happy so it's funny let's talk about that what time he's referring to is stargate um and this was this kind of announcement uh this was on tuesday afternoon in the white house trump opened it up he had open ai ceo uh san alban he had larry ellison the chairman founder of uh oracle and then he also had masa son who is the ceo of softbank they suggested that there's going to be a half a trillion dollar fund to build out ai infrastructure
Here in the US, all those CEOs went and said a couple words. Now, let's be clear, you know, Musk,
OpenAI with Sam Altman. They're suing each other. There are major odds with each other. You know, Musk started XAI to compete with that. And he immediately, to your point, tweets out something. They don't have the money. So how is this all going to work in your mind? I don't know. It's crazy. I want to be clear. Okay. Let's go back to one of the things I love about your pods is the inside baseball. You guys had a front row seat.
for everything that went on during that, I guess it was the first Obama administration into the second a little bit for you. Was there anybody like that pulling the strings anywhere? - I mean, no, there was nothing close to that kind of ally. I mean, it's just,
Again, it's remarkable. Elon Musk spent $250 million on this past election cycle. He did it in a matter of a couple of months. And he bought himself a seat on the dais at the inauguration. And he has this sprawling remit as the head of Doge. He just ousted Vivek Ramaswamy, who was supposed to be the co-lead. Oh, did he oust him?
Is that today? Yeah, it was a day or two ago. I mean, there's all these reports that basically Vivek was so annoying that everyone just wanted to get rid of him. But also, I think Vivek wanted to do the Doge work, the government efficiency work via getting rid of regulations and kind of buy the book. And Elon just wants to invest in technology and do whatever he's interested in doing. And it's clear to me like,
You're never going to be a co-lead with Elon Musk. Give me a break. But to your broader point, I read that there was $11 trillion worth of market cap on stage at the inauguration. And it's just, I've never... Maybe there's a good version of this is you're showcasing American industry and businesses and innovation. I think more realistically in this case, it's like,
Donald Trump showing the world, like, look who's bowing down to me. Like these guys attacked me last time. Now they're my supplicants. A hundred percent. And, you know, and that goes back to, by the way, um, you know, right after in early 17, the Muslim ban, all of those CEOs or whoever their predecessors were, were, you know, uh,
really opposed to it and publicly opposed to it. Right. And they got, you know, a little reprieve in their opposition. They probably felt like, you know, pretty good about that. There were other instances where, you know, they all deplatformed Trump at some point at the end of his administration. So to do that about face is really staggering. And, you know, the number that you just threw out is like
$11 trillion in market cap. All of those CEOs have become 100 billionaires. Okay, so these are some of the wealthiest people in the world. They did it here in the US, whether the regulation was easy in the beginning or got tighter, and you are 100% correct. I think this is bipartisan. All of those companies should be in check or held in check because it has the potential to do massive damage to our populace. By the same token, it also has the ability to unleash
a whole host of innovation that exists right here. You know what I mean? So I just worry, though, when you hand the keys to the kingdom to those folks, it could go pear-shaped pretty quickly. Totally. I mean...
Yeah, I don't understand how these guys think they're victims. I mean, they are wealthy beyond all imagination. They're powerful. They're connected. Yeah, I mean, I worry about this, Dan, because I think every company needs some common sense regulations, but it seems like we're going into an area where we're going to loosen regulations on tech companies, all these other companies.
Stepping back a second, the decision to de-platform Donald Trump, the sitting president or former president, that's a very complicated one. There's real free speech equities. I'm not suggesting that was simple or necessarily the right thing to do in every instance. It's a complicated piece of it. But the idea that we should just trust Mark Zuckerberg with...
unfettered development of the next series of sort of AI advances when these are the same guys who fucked up like the like button. They really did. So it grates me. Yeah. You know, not to spend too much time on this, but I think it'll be interesting to see how long Elon Musk makes it in the seat. Let's be clear. He is the CEO of a trillion plus company.
uh market cap company that's tesla he is the ceo of a very important company spacex that also uh owns starlink a very important company xai a very important company as it relates to x as this kind of you know media platform i'm missing a couple others maybe it's boring company neural link that sort of thing so at some point um
you know, the rubber has to hit the road a little bit, or maybe he has to hit the road. It'll be very interesting to see how that gets unfurled because he is a very erratic sort of guy.
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Let's talk about it from a geopolitical standpoint. You know, I know you guys spent some time on Starlink as it relates to this is on Pots of the World as it relates to the war in Ukraine and his access or his ability to kind of turn it on and off and really, you know, affect the, you know, the course of that war.
How important him having that seat right now? He was talking to Putin back then or whatever. Like, I don't know, man. Like, help me make some sense of this. How can this work out well, I guess? I don't... It's just sort of a...
It's a setup unlike anything I've ever seen before because he's not just the CEO of major US companies. It's a CEO of these companies that project power into other places as well. For example, he spent the last few weeks and months attacking Keir Starmer, the new prime minister of the UK from the Labour Party. He's clearly trying to weaken him and he's trying to boost
the right wing party there. He was a Nigel Farage fan for a while then he ditched Nigel Farage overboard. Yeah, he's a creepy guy. Elon has gotten really focused on the German elections which are coming up in February. He's been boosting the far right AFD party
that some pieces of the AFD party are considered extremist groups by the German intelligence agencies. There are some candidates in parts of Germany that are in the AFD that have like, make allusions to the Third Reich and to Nazism. So these are very extreme guys. And Elon is saying only the AFD can save Germany. So he's kind of like banging around in global affairs
while also being seen as this right-hand man to Donald Trump and wielding immense power through industry. And again, this is kind of like oligarch setup that is just...
We've never seen this before in this country. Well, that coupled with Donald Trump and his first administration, you know, really cozied with Putin, with Bibi, with Victor Orban. I mean, like with Kim Jong-un. I mean, when you think about the folks that he had his best relationships with who ran, you know, these countries, the only one you can say is Iran. You know what I mean? That he's been...
very hawkish. And I guess with Xi Jinping, but like at the end of the day, you know, the Chinese economy is so weak. They actually need us actually more, you know, than we need them. You know, China used to be this kind of engine for growth for the world and they are just not. And now they're obviously dumping all these, you know, stuff that they make over there on us and others. And that's what Trump is really trying to rebalance. And, you know,
They're probably not that wrong for doing it. But let's go back to if you are some sort of multinational company from outside the U.S. and you want access to our markets, the uncertainty in policy, whether it be trade, whether it be tax, tariffs and the like here, I mean, it makes it really hard to do business here. That was the message from the first administration. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think what we've learned after the first Trump term is often his threats that seem crazy are like negotiating positions. So, you know, he talked in the campaign about across the board, 10 or 20% tariffs on everything. He talked about potentially 60% tariffs on Chinese imports. He's talked about 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. And like, it is
destabilizing those political systems and governments. And these leaders are trying to figure out what to do about it. What's most likely is that he views this as a negotiating position to reopen the USMCA trade agreement, the new NAFTA. By the way, that's what he negotiated in the first one. I don't understand. So he's unhappy about what they did eight years ago?
It's crazy. But if you're sitting in Canada right now, you don't really know what's coming. Is he actually going to implement these tariffs? Well, by the way, he helped displace their prime minister, right? And he's going to definitely pick a war with the new prime minister in Mexico. He did with the last one. And so when I think about that, again, this is through the lens of the economy and markets. Those negotiating sort of tactics are not
particularly useful right now, especially when our economy is doing just fine. That's how we started the pod. There's other places in the world that are doing very poorly. And Europe is one of those, right? We know that obviously, you know, Russia is a disaster. China, you know, I could say it's a disaster, but I want to go back to something like when you were in the White House, when you were focused, obviously, on foreign policy, how much did the global economy,
play. You know, like right now, I would think if we just take a lot of measures to continue to weaken China's economy, that won't end up particularly well as we think about tensions, whether it's China and Taiwan and the like. So like, help me think through that or help our listeners think through that, because we've been talking that as a risk. You know what I mean? But it really feels like a risk the weaker the Chinese economy gets. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, for Obama in the first term, the global economy was all consuming, right? Because we were coming out of the financial crisis
we had passed our stimulus bill, but there was a big debate internationally about whether it was time to cut budgets and reduce spending or spend your way out of these recessions. And Obama in the US was very much on the side of we need stimulus. The Germans, for example, were very much in the austerity mode. I think long-term it benefited the United States enormously that we tried to do stimulus and spend our way out of
the recession, although we probably should have spent more to get ourselves out of it faster. So it's an all-consuming thing to answer your question. And I think what's interesting, Dan, is like when you look around the G7 right now, it's a lot of countries...
in, in challenging spots like the South Koreans, the current president tried to declare martial law lasts about six hours. I loved your episode, by the way, with Ben Rhodes, you guys talked about how they had three prime ministers in like three weeks or something like that, that present fast forward, everybody like that president is, was arrested recently. So there may be a huge leadership change in South Korea. You mentioned Canada, Justin Trudeau, uh,
He got stepped down basically there. He prorogued their parliament, which basically means like, all right, we're done with this session, but it's not officially over. So there will be a new leader from his party who will become the prime minister, but they're going to have elections pretty soon. So you might see a really conservative leader, this guy Pierre Polyev in Canada soon. The French are a disaster.
Long story short, Macron called snap elections last July. It kind of blunted the far right in France, but it led to this situation where their parliament is now hopelessly divided and he can't have another elections until this July. So they're just like stuck and screwed for a while. And the Germans have a big election coming up in February. So basically we have the like
kind of former Mussolini fan in Italy, they're okay. They're relatively stable. And then labor in the UK who've stumbled hard out of the gate, but have some time to kind of write the ship. But like that's the G7. Those are our closest allies, the most advanced economies, the most advanced democracies, and everybody's in this sort of state of flux or challenge right now. And then
Into the breach comes the United States and Donald Trump and his tariffs and Elon Musk kind of banging around on Twitter, messing with these guys. Yeah. I can't remember. I was a poli-sci major. That might surprise you. And I loved geopolitics. It was something that kind of really made me consider other paths, not Wall Street and the like. But when I think, oh, by the way, have you ever been in 10 Downing Street?
No, I've never been. I was there. Did I go inside? I don't think so. I think I was with the press corps when we were there. So last week I was in London and I can't say anything about what happened in there, but myself and a handful of others. Oh, sorry. No, we went to a meeting in 10 Downing and we met with a guy who is a senior advisor to the PM on business and investment. And
A, it was super cool to be in there. And B, it was a really interesting meeting given some of the folks that we were with. But again, we can't speak of that. I guess I could speak about the fact that we were in there. And the other thing is I was watching, are you watching this Black Doves on Netflix? No, it was good. It was really good. It's with Keira Knightley and-
And there's a scene or a couple scenes when they're going into 10 Downing, the car pulls up right in front of it. That's not happening. From what I saw, it's like they made it look like it was a townhouse on some nice Chelsea block or something like that. No, it's pretty blocked off. Yeah. I mean, I think the point that you make, and this is why I was going with the political science major, is like,
I can't remember a time where like liberal democracy was under so much assault. Yes. Within their own government. Right. Within institutions. The problem is we, United States constructed the liberal international order after World War II institutions like the UN, right? Like we want sort of global rules of the road and a global justice system. And then, you know, the European Union was created to help, you know,
European nations come together and support democracy. And right now- Not to mention NATO, by the way. Let's throw NATO in there. Let's throw NATO in there. And now a lot of those institutions are under attack from within because in the EU, so much gets done through unanimous decision-making. And for a while, it was Viktor Orban and Hungary who were able to block things. But now you've got a lot of right-wing
representation in these European Union bodies and in leaders in these countries like Austria just it will likely have a far right chancellor pretty soon the Germans you could see the AFD party do really well in this election so it's like
There's a lot of uncertainty and instability, and a lot of it is coming from a very reactionary far right place. And it seems like the common thread though is immigration. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Common thread is people are rip shit pissed about the cost of energy. And a lot of that stems back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. People were pretty pissed about COVID and lockdown rules and lockdowns.
anything associated with it. - But what's interesting about that is that all over the world, people are, you know, they're blaming, you know, the left politics. - Incumbents. - You know what I mean? Incumbents, yeah, but also lefty sort of politics. You know what I mean? - Yeah, that's true. That is true. And I think, well then on the immigration piece, a lot of countries like Austria or Germany took in a lot of asylum seekers. They followed the rules and voters are mad about it. And this is where I think the far right comes in 'cause they, you know, sort of,
Textbook populism is you blame some other for all the ills and you find a way to demagogue that out group. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I guess the last point here is that it's been normalized. You know what I mean? A lot of that behavior and people can point around, they can point to a country next to them or a trading partner or something like that. Or, you know, I mean, think about the countries of NATO.
like like in the assault that we're going to continue to see on that and that sort of stuff makes me very nervous because let's just say there is some negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine there will never be peace right and if Russia and I learned this all from you guys but if Russia has you know like
If they have the thought that they want to continue to push towards Poland, I mean, what does that do for the European EU economy? It's a bit of a disaster. And especially if you have some of these right-wing governments who are not committed to participating in this, either from a financial standpoint or from a political standpoint, it makes me a bit nervous. I give Trump some credit. He helped secure this ceasefire deal in Gaza. It was really important. I'm really grateful that he didn't do that.
Also, though, when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, I do think...
Joe Biden did an amazing job early on in rallying the world around Ukraine, getting them weapons, getting them international support, bringing together 50 countries to get stuff to Ukraine, basically, weapons, material support, whatever. It's now been several years. And it was a stalemate, just a grinding stalemate where they were trading little bits of territory in Eastern Ukraine. I do think Trump coming in and saying, it is the policy of the US to get to a...
a peace deal, a peace agreement, a negotiated peace agreement is a good thing. Now, the devil's in the details. Like we don't want that peace agreement to mean Ukraine gives over 20% of its territory to Russia. They agree never to join NATO or to demilitarize. And basically they're just like sitting ducks in three years when Putin decides to take the rest. Like that's not a good deal, but we would like to see some sort of negotiated settlement that just ends the carnage. Now, if he keeps going West and he goes into Poland,
that will trigger an article five or should trigger an article five response from NATO which means attack upon one is attack upon all and there's
by the letter of the treaty, a direct response from NATO, which means the US. So no one wants to get there. And hopefully we never get there. But that is why people think like Putin needed to be stopped as early as possible in this process. By the way, in the first administration, obviously, you know, Trump, you know, was very, I don't know, he was threatening to the NATO alliance. And when you think about right now, NATO saves him politically.
with some sort of, you know, kind of peace with Ukraine and Russia, because again, he often said that, you know, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine. And so that NATO threat, like you just mentioned about attack on one attack on all kind of gives him like the ability to not have this kind of, you know, big dispute, I guess, with Putin, because no one knows how that will end. Well, the problem is, I mean, without the U S NATO isn't,
Worth nearly as much and early on in the first Trump term It was very hard to get him to reiterate his commitment to article 5 which you know terrified a lot of people shocked a lot of people did he ever do that I think he ultimately did or his staff did I can't remember exactly but You know what he the way he framed it was he wanted countries to spend more on NATO now He would talk about it in a dumb way as if these like the Germans owed us money because they weren't spending it off on defense That's not how it works. They're all supposed to spend
The goal is 2% of your GDP gets spent on your own defense. So you're not giving it to the US. You're building up your own military. Well, he used to say things like, they got to pay up. You know what I mean? Like they owe us money. It's idiotic. Now, the good news is a lot of these European countries have been spending more. Trump
We'll take credit for it. I don't care if he does. That's fine. I think it's far more likely that these countries started spending more on their defense because they watched the Russians invade Ukraine. But also NATO has gotten stronger because now it includes Sweden and Finland who have real militaries and can bring some assets to bear. So Putin's not in a better position.
today than he was before the invasion, not by any means. - Yeah, I wanna hit a couple more things before we get out of here. So going back to '17, you guys sell a lot of cool merch. And I remember I bought a shirt that said, "Repeal and go fuck yourself," which was basically when Trump came in, they wanted to kind of repeal Obamacare. - Right. - They also wanted to,
cut corporate taxes and taxes for the wealthy. So those are two things. They want to extend the tax cuts, and they still want to come at Obamacare, which actually really, really benefits a lot of red states and a lot of his voters, which you guys have been making that case since back in 2017. The tax cuts don't help them, right? And I love this phrase. I can't remember which one of you said. It's like they borrowed a trillion and a half dollars from the future, and you know what I mean, and just gave it all to large corporations.
and the donor class, right? And so again, if they're gonna extend that and try to get lower taxes, how do you deal with this $36 trillion deficit, right? And this is something that, when I came to New York in 1996, you used to hear this expression, Wall Street Republicans. And it wasn't, we had Republican mayors, and it's unthought of that that would happen here in New York City.
And we had Republican governors going back to a handful of ones in the last 50 years. And the whole idea was that you were socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And that seems like social conservative is a thing right now. And it flip-flopped. And now there is no fiscal conservativeness, I guess. Is that a word? Fiscal? Sure. It is today. Yeah. We just made it. So talk a little bit about that. Because states like New York, they flipped a
You know what I mean? At least if you're looking at the, yeah, to the electorate. Yeah. The electorate moved a lot of me, especially in, in, in blue states where there wasn't really a competitive election, but you saw pretty big shifts in vote share from Democrat to Republican. Um, I,
So my mantra for this second term, I'm obviously a Democrat and a liberal, but like I think where people like me, Democrats generally screwed up in the first term was getting outraged too much, reacting too much to what Trump said. And we need to focus more on what he does. And the rubber meets the road is
if you try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which, you know, through Medicaid expansion, let 20 million more people have access to health care and with nothing to replace. By the way, so these two issues are very tied to each other, right? So how do you pay for the tax cuts? You cut Medicare, Medicaid. That's exactly right. So, I mean, the 2017 tax cut, it was several trillion dollars. It went to the wealthiest people in the country. And corporations didn't necessarily pay
make jobs, right? They just did buybacks. Wasn't it some huge percentage of it went to buybacks? So they basically, initially, the tax cuts were going to be a trillion and a half. And over the next two years, 17, 18, large US corporations bought back a trillion and a half dollars of their own stock. And I mean, that's just astounding. Now, what did that do? It helped the stock market that Trump uses as a barometer of his success. Right. And so if he wants to do another big tax cut, I think it'll cost
two to five trillion over time. And at the same time, you have Elon Musk saying that Doge is going to find two trillion in cuts. So where's that money going to come from? The only way you can cut $2 trillion worth from the budget is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or you're digging into the Pentagon budget. And they say they don't want to do any of these things. There's just not enough money
in like the non-defense discretionary bucket to get those savings. So we're just gonna run a bigger, bigger deficit until something gives. - Yeah. Are you on TikTok? - I am. I mean, I'm just a lurker. - Yeah. And is Crooked Media on TikTok? - We are. - Yeah. And so how do you think about that?
again, this is something that Trump started back in 2017, 18. You know, this is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. You know, there's other aspects of it. Like we just said, it's rotting our kids' brains, but not just our kids. You know, we know a lot of people who are spending a lot of time. It rots my brain from time to time. Yeah. I don't have TikTok. I'm off of Twitter. I got to tell you, being off of Twitter as a former power user, both like personally and professionally, it's been one of the best things that's happened to me over the last year. I just, my brain has been
rewired to go look at the FT, look at the Wall Street Journal, look at the, you know, like, yeah, Bloomberg, CNBC, that sort of thing. And, you know, listen, was it easier? It was kind of like that news RSS feed. So how do you think about, you know, TikTok? It's just another example of just how...
whatever you want can be bought and paid for as it relates to this guy. It's very transactional. He likes to pick winners and losers. You know, his opinion on Tik TOK changed when one of his largest donors had revealed himself to be a large investor in bite dance, the company in China that owns, um, Tik TOK. He also said, well, it helped me win that sort of thing. What do you think should happen here? Because the, the Supreme court, many of those judges that he appointed, you know, they basically, um,
you know, they basically sided on the fact of the ban. How do you see that? Maybe TikTok's just one example. This is really important stuff here. And you guys used to say, hey, elections have consequences and that Supreme Court is stacked. But if he is not going to abide by some of the stuff that they rule on, how do we get through this? Because I actually think it's beyond TikTok. Yeah, you're right. There's two different issues here. There's a question of what risk TikTok may or may not pose given its connection to the Chinese Communist Party. And I think the challenge there is
360 members of the House voted for the ban. 79 US senators voted for the ban. So overwhelming bipartisan votes, but they didn't do a good job of laying out what their concerns were. I mean, I'm sure it was classified and based on intelligence collection, but if you're telling us this thing we like and use is a threat to us, you have to explain why. Well, at least you have to explain why you can't be surprised when people are pissed.
which is what happened. You described Trump's flip-flop. He wanted to ban TikTok. Now he's for it. You're right though. Like Congress passed a law. He passed, he released an EO saying actually TikTok is fine or whatever. Let's delay. You can't Trump a law with an executive order. You can't make a new law with an executive order. It's just not how it works.
So it seems like he's trying to force a sale maybe into the hands of someone like Elon that is more of a political ally. But he also wants a 50% cut. Like, I don't get how this is going to work. First of all, he's the worst negotiator ever. He basically said this thing. He said it publicly on Tuesday at this press conference. He said, it's worth a trillion dollars, OK? And we're going to do a deal. If you're trying to negotiate to buy something, you actually want to tamp down
down the valuation. You don't want to take it and make it 10x. You want to say, listen, this is a $100 billion company. You know what I mean? It should be... It was like I'm sitting there on a set of fast money because they just... This is what I'm going to have to do for the next year. They're going to cut to all of his pressers and the nonsense and the people who are coming to curry favor with him and stuff and listen to this ridiculousness because that was ridiculous. There's one other issue... The Chinese Communist Party is not going to let ByteDance sell unless they're good with the deal. ByteLaw
ByteDance has to do what they say or work with them or provide them information and data. So I don't understand the end game. Well, they're saying that they don't in the U.S., that it's a different operation and that their servers are here. Yeah, exactly. I actually think the bigger issue other than like the, I don't know, the espionage and data and all that sort of stuff is that our national champions,
Our social media companies, whatever it is, Amazon, eBay, Meta, I'm missing a couple, X, they are not in China. They cannot get by the firewall. Google, obviously. So if we're going to be hawkish on China, isn't that just low-hanging fruit? Wouldn't that be the easiest thing to demonstrate how you mean business? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's very interesting.
The first Trump administration had a bunch of China hawks and then it had a bunch of business guys like the Steve Mnuchin's treasury secretary, who I think were the yin and yang in terms of when Trump would be tough or easier on the Chinese Communist Party or on Xi Jinping. Trump likes talking to Xi. I think he makes him feel important. He likes autocrats. He likes people that can kind of do what they want.
I guess I could understand that as a US president because you're ostensibly the most powerful person in the world, but you get thwarted constantly and I'm sure it pisses them off. This time, his administration does seem even more full of China hawks. His national security advisor, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth, the SecDef is whatever Trump tells him to do. So it's just not clear to me how...
where the push and pull is going to be. I think Trump cares about markets and bad headlines, and that will kind of drive the outcome here. But I can think of no better way to crater the markets and 60% tariffs on all Chinese imports. Right. Yeah. It seems like that would be bad. Well, that would be, yeah, obviously horrible for them. It'd be horrible for the folks that, you know, are buying there. Let's just call it steel to build, you know, new bridges or, you know, the list goes on and on. Um,
You know, the one thing and I'll let you like I'll ask you one more question. But the one thing that makes me nervous and maybe you can answer this question, I'm going to answer for myself, is that in the first administration. And again, this has been bandied about a gazillion times. But, you know, there's people like Rex Tillerson and Mnuchin and, you know, Gary Cohn and, you know, eventually people like Barr. I mean, there was like people that were very well suited for it. Yeah. You know what I mean? And he and then the generals.
And he trounced all of them. You know what I mean? So now he's got a bunch of bootlickers here. And I worry that there's some accidents waiting to happen. Does that make some sense here? Because it's a very different crew around him than there was in 2017. It's a different crew. I mean, look, Trump and his team in 2016, they were surprised when they won. And they were not prepared.
They basically threw out the transition playbook that had been put together by Chris Christie and started anew. This time they're very prepared. They had executive orders ready to go. They had a vetted list of people they wanted to work with.
And it seems clear Trump didn't want a bunch of Jim Mattises. He didn't want people telling him what he didn't want to hear. He wanted a Pete Hegseth, who's a Fox News weekend anchor who doesn't know anything about defense policy. Passes out when he has too many beers. I like beers, Senator. Sorry, we got another one of those. So it's very different. And how that plays out, I don't know. But there's not going to be as much resistance. All right. I promise. Last question. What are you optimistic about over the next four years?
I'm just optimistic. Look, I think this country, I think there are 30, 40% of the country that's pretty dug in on their views and will never change. And then there's the middle. And I think that the pendulum swings back and forth in the middle. And that's where you see what can feel like a huge swing in an election, but really we're a 50-50 country. Even this past cycle. The
Trump's win feels more overwhelming than it is than it was by numbers. I don't know how I know It doesn't seem like a mandate. I mean the you know, the house is razor-thin I think the Senate majority is probably one of the biggest ones, you know, either parties had in a while Is that that's kind of correct, but he won the popular vote, right? Like he did he did better but it wasn't wasn't a wipeout. It wasn't Reagan
And 80. When you worked for Obama, again, this is my last question. When you worked for Obama and he said, you know, the things that unite us are bigger than the things divide us. Like if you had a leader, you know, a national leader say that to you today, and I know you just gave me some numbers about the percent that are dug in versus the middle. Do you still believe that? I think Obama really did believe that. He thinks that.
If you get people in a room and they actually talk to each other, they're probably going to agree on more things and find more common ground than not. And I think that's right. I think the challenge here is at times like this, leaders matter. And when you have leaders that are dividing us of any party, they can exacerbate the sort of splits we see. It helps to bring people together or at least try to. And I think...
Hopefully there will be an appetite for that. I mean, you see some of the rhetoric in Trump speeches. Maybe he'll continue to talk about being a president for everybody in unity. And I don't have a lot of confidence in that. But regardless, I do think the political pendulum will swing.
Everyone's going to be okay. You know, we just got to focus on the midterms, but it's going to be real bumpy. Yeah. I can't wait to hear what the first headline is where everyone, you know, on the right says, well, this is the day that Trump became president. I'm sure. All right. That was a kind of brutal sort of period that again and again, we kind of heard that and the actions were not, you know, reflective of those sorts of comments. Well, listen, Tommy Vitor, you were the host of Pod Save America, the host of
Pod Save the World. Hopefully, you guys can help me understand how to save Wall Street here a little bit because it seems like, again- It seems like you're doing okay. We're trying, man. Markets are ripping. Yeah. Guy wishes he was here. Really appreciate being here in studio. I hope we can do it again. Love to. Great to see you.