Howard Lutnick

Do you get the organ rejection, though, of career bureaucrats who think, wait a minute, Howard's out for my job, or this is just a totally different way of doing things.

I don't feel comfortable with this.

I don't necessarily agree.

We hear a lot about sort of this deep state, whatever that is, like this career lifers that sort of push back on radical change.

I want to jump into some of these verticals of expertise that you oversee, but it may be useful for the audience, actually, if you just gave an overview.

of the scope of commerce, because it is incredibly vast, from trade to job creation to NOAA to the Census Bureau to Spectrum.

There's a lot of things that you can shape on behalf of the United States.

Okay, so we're going to dig into as many of these areas as we can, but let's go back to the first one.

So can you bring us into the room leading into April 1st?

April 2nd.

April 2nd, sorry.

And bring us into the room

debating tariffs, debating where you wanted to start, debating the game theory.

What were the puts and takes and how did you come up with the decisions you made?

And then if you could just reflect back on what went right, what would you want to redo and what was maybe and still is misunderstood?

What you're saying is we became effective employees of the people that were producing the things that we created.

Let me just stop for a second.

That is the first time I've heard that it is an extremely elegant framing, actually.

It sets up

an incredibly powerful way to measure the effectiveness of tariffs.