Digital Social Hour
Tariffs, AI, Immigration & Corruption: Mike Nellis’ Most Honest Interview Yet | DSH #1636
23 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: Why is AI predicted to kill millions of jobs?
If you were a horse and buggy rider, you got killed by the car. Like that's just what happened. If you were a typist, you got killed by the personal computer. If you were a mathematician, if you were a computer, that's literally what they were called. You got killed by Excel and what they could do. So that's what's going to happen here.
So the job market is going to shift, but the government has a responsibility to step in and help people who are being displaced by that. Trump likes to talk about how he's going to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. That's what the tariff war was about. I can't see that. No, there's no way it happens.
But he was also like, we're going to get, what was it, 75 deals in 75 days and it never happened. Like we have five tariff deals. But let's say he's able to bring manufacturing jobs back. Let's say he can somehow pull them from China or Vietnam or anywhere else. And we're going to start building iPhones or cars in the United States.
If we do that, within the next five to 10 years, robots are going to be building. Yeah. And that's worth doing if like we could bring manufacturing back here, but isn't going to create jobs and it isn't going to revitalize those towns. To me, it's false hope and it's bad economic policy. Yeah. All right, guys. Mike Nellis here. Hope you didn't lose too much money last night.
But thanks for coming, man. No, no. I finished up by like $50. Nice. It's a huge win. OK. Blackjack? Blackjack. Yeah, that's the way to do it, man. Blackjack, baccarat. Poker, if you're good. Poker. So I was good at one time. Yeah? Yeah. I played in the World Series of Poker three times. Damn. Made like six or seven final tables at WSOPC events. Holy crap. Yeah.
And everyone's too good these days, right? Yeah. Everyone's too good. And then I got married, had a kid, started my career. Yeah. I feel like when the solvers came, I have on a lot of poker pros.
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Chapter 2: How do tariffs impact the return of manufacturing jobs?
The solvers just leveled the playing field, right? Yeah. Well, there's like that Chris Moneymaker boom, and then everything just kind of feels like it got out of control. Yeah, absolutely, man. A lot of game theory. Well, what's new these days? I'm sure you're super busy with all the stuff going on in politics. Yeah, super busy.
I mean, there's never a dull moment in American politics today, just a shit ton of news every day drinking from a fire hydrant. But trying to build up my company. So I've got a series of companies I work with. I run one of the largest digital fundraising and advertising firms for democratic and progressive causes. Then we do a bunch of other stuff like that.
And then being a content creator, so launching my sub stack, Endless Urgency, and trying to be out there. Obviously, I'm not a fan of the president, so trying to be out there. letting people know how I feel about what's going on. Yeah. How do you think he's doing so far? I would give him an F. An F? Pretty bad. I mean, I judge him this way.
When he campaigned last year for the presidency, he said, when I'm elected, everything's going to get cheaper. Day one, this is a quote, on day one, grocery prices will go down. And we're 10 months in, grocery prices are not down. It's harder for people to put food on the table, harder for people to buy a house.
I'm watching the president throw American farmers off a cliff buying beef from Argentina, letting China steal our soybean business. They're getting killed, and we're sending $40 billion overseas to Argentina to bail out their economy. So everything about this administration feels like it's either about enriching Donald Trump or enriching somebody that he knows.
I did see some graph of his net worth. It's gone up a lot this term. Something like 70% of his net worth he's made since January. Yeah, that's pretty nuts. No, I was just going to say, he campaigned on how he loses money while he's president. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't lose money while he's president. He likes to be like, well, I'm not taking my salary.
He'd be like, yeah, you're not taking your salary, but you're taking a $400 million bribe from the Qatari government. Have you seen this? Was that the plane thing he got gifted? Yeah, it was the plane. So they gifted him a plane. He says he's planning to keep it after he leaves. $400 million. And he goes, oh, it's not a bribe because there's no quid pro quo.
But a couple weeks ago, he signed an executive order giving Qatar Article 5-like protection. So right now, if somebody attacks Qatar, they have the same protections as an attack on the United States. Wow. Yeah, so that's what $400 million buys you. Holy crap. I don't think many countries have that protection. No, just NATO countries.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do U.S. farmers face due to trade shocks?
That's what we have with them. And then Taiwan, I think. That's pretty nuts, man. Yeah. Uh, he's also bulldozing the white house. You said, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's bulldozing the East wing of the white house. And look, I like, look, the white house is a historical landmark. And I know like people are really upset about it on that front.
Like I care, I care about that, but I care less about it in the context of like, whatever. Sometimes there's renovations that need to be done. Maybe this is right. Maybe it's not, but I tend to think about it. Like what's the way that we spend money in this government right now? This is, $350 million, now it's private funds, but we were able to find the money for that.
But right now the government's been shut down for 28 days. 40 million Americans are gonna lose their food stamps, their SNAP benefits on Saturday if they don't reopen the government and fund this. We can't find the money for that. We can find the money for this, we can find the money for planes, we can find the money for whatever.
They just gave Kristi Noem just bought her second private jet so that she could travel across the country and shoot content. So to me, it's the priorities of this administration are super off. And you can go, look, I'm a Democratic strategist. You might be watching this and going, this guy's full of shit. I don't believe anything that he says.
But there's an objective truth here, which is everything happening in Washington right now It's about enriching Donald Trump and his allies. It's not helping the vast majority of people. And he's running around talking about this golden age of prosperity that we're having. When does the golden age start? Unless you own a lot of AI tech stock, you're not doing very well right now.
There's no growth in the economy. Job market's getting killed. People can't afford to buy a house. Where's the things that we were promised? Where? I was just filming at ComplexCon this weekend, and all the vendors were like, dude, this is really bad. They weren't selling anything. Yeah, I remember at least I'm a local entrepreneur in Chicago.
Like one of my businesses is obviously Democrat strategy is what I do. But, you know, I know all these like small business owners and they're running like, you know, merchandise businesses and, you know, the chemical stuff and all these things that I don't really understand. But I know every single one of them says the same thing. It's harder to find customers. It's harder to sell.
They're having to lay people off. We just watched. I think Amazon laid off 3000 people yesterday. 30,000, 30,000 people. Jesus. I mean, it's not it's just not a great situation.
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Chapter 4: How is the gig economy changing the job landscape?
And I feel like the president is very disconnected from the day to day. He stands on the lawn of the White House. He's like, it's the best job market ever. We have no inflation. I've defeated inflation. We can't have a president that's that disconnected from reality. And you'll find people that are supporters of the president, they'll go, Mike Nellis has Trump derangement syndrome. And I don't.
I think there are things that Donald Trump does that are good every now and again. And look, he brought the hostages home from Israel a few weeks ago. Good. That's a good thing. I'm happy for that. But he refuses to accept that his economic policies are making everything worse.
And the flip side of that is you have a lot of Democrats that refuse to acknowledge that what Joe Biden did over the last four years wasn't enough to help the American people. We lost because inflation was poor, and we didn't help provide direct relief to the American people. Trump promised to fix that, and instead he dumped gasoline on an existing dumpster fire, so now everything's worse. Hmm.
I'll say this about the Amazon thing, not to defend him, but I think just with the rise of AI, a lot of jobs are going to get replaced. I don't know if that's Trump's fault too. I mean, I don't think it's Trump's fault, but I think it's Trump's responsibility. And this is one of the things that I think politicians don't understand is there's a lot of things that happen you can't control.
Like AI technology, nobody's going to defeat that. So if you're an AI skeptic out there and you're like, I don't want to use this shit, I think we should ban this shit. Like that isn't going to happen. Nobody has ever been able to stop that. Anybody who was like... If you were a horse and buggy rider, you got killed by the car. That's just what happened.
If you were a typist, you got killed by the personal computer. If you were a mathematician, if you were a computer, that's literally what they were called, you got killed by Excel and what they could do. So that's what's going to happen here. So the job market is going to shift, but the government has a responsibility to step in and help people who are being displaced by that.
If you're 22 and you're about to graduate from college, you are scared to get into the job market. I meet kids and hear from them all the time where they're like, I don't know what I'm going to do because there's no entry-level jobs. Entry-level legal jobs are getting killed. So if you're a law student, you have nowhere to go to clerk. Entry-level jobs are basically everything. It's just gone.
And right now, the only growth that you're seeing in terms of jobs in the economy is either a small amount of health care or you're seeing a lot of gig workers. So we have more people that are being Uber drivers, DoorDash drivers, which is fine. That's noble work. Those will get replaced too, though. Those are going to get replaced too. You see the drones?
In Chicago, they have these little weird drones that just bring you food. Yeah, they have the self-driving cars out here in Vegas now. Soon your food will be delivered by self-driving cars. There's going to be no drivers. Uber drivers, they're screwed, honestly, I think.
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Chapter 5: Why are entry-level jobs disappearing in today's market?
Yeah, and we're going to have to have some kind of shift in how we think about work. Because, I mean, these jobs are gone. They're going to be gone in the next 10 years. Trump likes to talk about how he's going to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. That's what the tariff war was about. I can't see that. No, there's no way it happens.
But he was also like, we're going to get, what was it, 75 deals in 75 days, and it never happened. We have five tariff deals. But let's say he's able to bring manufacturing jobs back. Let's say he can somehow pull them from China or Vietnam or anywhere else, and we're going to start building iPhones or cars in the United States.
If we do that, within the next five to 10 years, robots are going to be building those cars. And that's worth doing if we could bring manufacturing back here, but it isn't going to create jobs, and it isn't going to revitalize those towns. To me, it's false hope, and it's bad economic policy. Yeah, it's a really good point. So you're not a fan of the tariffs?
No, no, I think tariffs are stupid and I think they've been poorly planned. Like if you want to win a tariff war, you have to have allies. What he did was literally put tariffs on everybody. And I think the thing about Trump is, and I just say this as a Trump critic, I'm not like a hater. I don't really like the guy. I think he's a man of low moral character. He's good at identifying the problem.
Like he's right that America is getting taken advantage of in trade, like we are. He's right that there are countries that are over-tariffing us. There's a right way to handle that and a wrong way to handle it. I don't think coming out and putting a tariff on every single country makes any bit of sense. You need to create an alliance so that you have economic partners that can help you.
So coming out and putting a tariff on Canada and Mexico was really stupid if you want to win a tariff war with China. And what you're doing is you're pushing everybody to China. You're pushing everybody to other countries. Vietnam is another example. Vietnam is a trading partner that the United States has spent decades building up as a source of – economic opportunity for the United States.
Like having a place like Vietnam where we have a good relationship with them, given everything we've been through with them, it's actually incredible we have the relationship that we do. We're building more manufacturing plants there as a counter to China to hedge on their powers. They put massive tariffs on Vietnam. Like what the hell are we doing? You're just pushing everybody to China. Yeah.
Do you think the economy was better under Biden? Yes. But marginally so. So not a big. Yeah. I don't think the economy under Biden was good. I think it was improving. I think you have to take a full step back and go, there was a global inflationary crisis around the world. Let's be clear. But it was bad here. It was worse everywhere else.
So I think Biden deserves a modicum of credit for inflation not being as high as it was everywhere else. However, I think Democrats got so wrapped up in the numbers, they would go, Well, and I hear this all the time from Democrats. It'd be like 49 out of 50 Nobel Laureate economists say that our economy is the envy of the world. And most Americans are like, I don't give a shit about that.
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Chapter 6: How does immigration policy affect communities on the ground?
She says, I'm going with you. And she pushed me. And one of the things is the company that I was at before I started Authentic, which is the name of my business, kind of fell apart due to financial mismanagement and then the way they treated its staff. And when I told her I was starting my own company, the first question she had for me was like, how are you going to be different?
And like, I hadn't even thought about that. I was just like, I was just sort of like, fuck these guys. I can do a better job. And I hadn't thought about it. And like, I left that meeting and like, I wrote our first company handbook. I wrote our core mission statement. I started to really think about the intentionality of how I wanted to build that firm. And I did that because of her.
And I wish that people could have gotten a chance to see that. And they did it. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that. But I always thought she was a really great person. I'm sad that she's not president right now. I understand, though, why Americans voted for her. Yeah. Do you think if she had more time, she would have won? I think if she had more time, I think it's two things.
Time is certainly a factor, but we should have had a full, vibrant Democratic primary. Like Jake Tapper's book, Original Sin, I call it the most frustrating book I've ever read because I only believe half of it, and the other half of it is like the most maddening shit I've ever read in my whole life.
If Joe Biden had made the decision to not run for reelection, which is what I believe he should have done, he should have said in 2023, I'm not running. I believe I've done great work, but I'm 80 some years old. I need to step aside. Right. We could have had a full, vibrant Democratic primary. And Kamala Harris would have been the front runner for that primary as the vice president.
She likely would have won that. But she would have run against a field of 12 other highly qualified Democrats. She would have had more time and opportunity to build up a campaign. She would have done more podcasts like this. She would have become a better candidate. Or if she didn't rise to the moment, we would have nominated somebody who had. And I think that's incredibly important.
The last time we really had a full, vibrant primary, where we didn't have a sitting vice president sort of shadowing over the field, was 2008. And we nominated Barack Obama, who, in my opinion, is the best political talent that's been generated in the last 40 years. Really? 40 years? Wow. I mean, who's more politically talented than Barack Obama? Talented, yeah. It's hard to argue with that.
I mean, Trump is a talented politician. I'll give him that. I think Zoran Mandani is a talented politician in New York City. I think Josh Hawley on the Republican side deserves more credit for what he does. Yeah, but Obama, when it comes to just speeches and oration, was a monster. Yeah. I mean, I was at his first rally in Iowa. I dropped out of college to work for him. Oh, wow.
So was that the first political job you took? Yeah, it was the first. I mean, it wasn't a job. So they called it a, I was supposed to be in class. I can vividly remember it was supposed to be a music appreciation class. That's a class? Yeah, it was a class. I was appreciating music, which I did in my day-to-day life, usually like being high as a college student, listening to God knows what.
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Chapter 7: What role does mental health play in the current economic climate?
So somebody was walking the streets. And my neighbors, my whole neighborhood, was trying to prevent ICE agents, masked ICE agents from grabbing these people. They tear gassed people, block it halfway from the house. What? Yeah. Like, an hour before school got out. Holy crap. So it's crazy. And, like, to me, it's... Like, look, we can have a debate about immigration policy.
We can have a debate about what's right or what's wrong. People come in here legally or illegally. But, like, I don't think that masked federal agents driving unmarked cars should be grabbing people on the streets. That's pretty nuts. That's the literal definition of fascism. It scares the hell out of me. You know those, like...
those kind of gun nuts that live in Wyoming and they have like 4,000 guns and they're planning for, that's the type of shit that they warn about. And I'm living that a little bit in Chicago right now. To be clear, I'm super white, they're never coming after me. But we're watching that happen to my neighbors and I just don't think that's right.
But I think Democrats need to acknowledge that it's a consequence of how far to the left they went with immigration. When your policies don't make sense, People are going to embrace something that sort of slingshots back in the other direction. So I think Democrats have to acknowledge that. Still, Trump is responsible for that because he's allowing it to happen. Not allowing it to happen.
He wants it to happen. But we've got to acknowledge that we're the reason. He also did give fair warning, I feel. Fair warning to what? Like he was announcing that he was going to go pretty hard on deportations before he got elected. I mean, he did, but I think people just didn't believe him.
I mean, if you asked the American people today, they'd be like, we didn't think that that's what this was going to be. Like he promised in the campaign, I'm going to get rid of violent criminals, which is fine. I'm all for that. You can find anybody that's been violent in this country, get them the hell out. I'm all for that.
But if you're grabbing people at Home Depot who are trying to do a job, like that's not right. Yeah. And I sort of hate this idea of like, People come here legally, they come here illegally. That's a breakdown of the system. We have a border that isn't secure, and then we have an immigration system that doesn't work. We need these people to come here to do these jobs. We want them here.
I think we want anybody in this country that wants to work hard, that wants to take care of their family, and maybe every now and again they think about somebody other than themselves. To me, the immigration status at this point is a piece of paper.
And I know a lot of people don't like that, but I don't think there's a lot of difference between me and somebody who took a very dangerous journey to get here, and now they're raising their family and their kids, and they're trying to do whatever work they're doing.
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Chapter 8: How is corruption influencing American politics today?
But when it's the feds, we kind of know. They've got a lot of evidence. This version of the federal government, I don't know. Kash Patel's shown his ass more than a few times, but I do think this is the kind of thing they're probably right about. Well, the timing of that seemed weird because NBA just started and then he announced it. Yeah. So it just seemed very strategic.
Probably when the investigation was over with. I don't know. My dad is a 34 year veteran of the FBI. He retired a few years ago. I try to separate out like, again, like Cash Patel's a politician. He runs the FBI. I don't think he's qualified for it. But I know that the men and women who work at the FBI are hardworking, trying to keep us safe, trying to root out criminals like this.
So I want to trust that that investigation is right. Yeah. Well, my view of the FBI is I've lost faith. Not entirely, but I just feel like there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on these days. Like what? Like the Charlie Kirk thing. We don't have to get too conspiratorial. No, let's get it. I want to talk about this. I mean, it seemed fishy to me. You don't think that guy killed Charlie Kirk?
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So I buy that Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk. I don't buy some of the other stuff. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist. Those text messages are some of the weirdest shit I've ever seen. Weird, right? The text messages, if you've never seen them, folks, please look them up. They're literally like, hello, my love. I have murdered Charlie Kirk. I have left.
The gun at the following longitude and latitude for the FBI to find. They're so weird. But there is a conspiracy theory like the other way of that. So there's the one version is the FBI made those texts to whatever, blame it on liberals or whatever it is.
But the reverse side of it is I've seen this from Maga World a lot is that it's a Walter White, Skyler White situation from Breaking Bad where they sent those texts specifically so the FBI would have them later to make it look like the partner didn't do it. So I don't know. And part of this goes back to a fundamental problem of trust. You want to be able to trust the head of the FBI.
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