Howard Lutnick

When we...

did the first interview with you, it was at the beginning of the administration.

It was almost a year ago.

And to be honest, it turned out to be one of the most popular things we've ever done.

There's the Elon Musk view factor, but then there was the Howard Ludnick view factor, and they were pretty much side by side, actually.

It's great that you gave us a chance a year later to come back and talk to you.

Let's just start with the general look back for you.

How has the year gone?

And specifically, I would love to understand

What surprised you as a businessman walking into the government?

Let's just start with that.

You're just saying it's not you.

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.