Episode 13

Manufactured Chaos

Marko and Jacob unpack the media frenzy and political theater surrounding the ICE raids and escalating protests in Los Angeles. Marko cuts through the noise, calling out the mutually parasitic relationship between Trump and the media, and argues that California’s political posturing may hint at deeper national fissures. They dig into immigration hypocrisy, federal overreach, and the geopolitical implications of a fragmented U.S. They also examine Trump’s pivot on China, the unraveling of the Elon alliance, and whether America’s populist moment is morphing into something more centrist—while the real victims, as always, are the self-driving cars.

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Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:32) - Los Angeles in Turmoil

(04:38) - Media's Role in the Crisis

(10:14) - Immigration and Policy Debate

(16:33) - Federal vs. State Authority

(34:00) - Economic and Trade Implications

(43:34) - Populism and Political Strategy

(44:29) - Populist Policies and Economic Impact

(46:08) - Immigration Policies and Political Shifts

(47:04) - Italy's Political Landscape and Georgia Maloney

(50:16) - US-China Trade Relations and Economic Strategies

(52:28) - Immigration and US Demographics

(01:16:41) - California Secession and US Political Polarization

(01:32:48) - Future Topics

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Jacob Shapiro Site: jacobshapiro.com

Jacob Twitter: x.com/JacobShap

Marko Papic Twitter: x.com/geo_papic

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Geopolitical Cousins is produced and edited by Audiographies LLC. More information at audiographies.com

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Jacob Shapiro is a speaker, consultant, author, and researcher covering global politics and affairs, economics, markets, technology, history, and culture. He speaks to audiences of all sizes around the world, helps global multinationals make strategic decisions about political risks and opportunities, and works directly with investors to grow and protect their assets in today’s volatile global environment. His insights help audiences across industries like finance, agriculture, and energy make sense of the world.

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Marko Papic is a macro and geopolitical expert at BCA Research, a global investment research firm. He provides in-depth analysis that combines geopolitics and markets in a framework called GeoMacro. He is also the author of Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future.

Transcript
Jacob Shapiro:

Welcome to another episode of Geopolitical Cousins.

Jacob Shapiro:

I am back on the road.

Jacob Shapiro:

Marco braving it from the fortress of Santa Monica.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, we talk about Los Angeles.

Jacob Shapiro:

We talk about, uh, a bunch of other stuff for this podcast.

Jacob Shapiro:

Just listen to it.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's why you're here.

Jacob Shapiro:

Are you not here to be entertained?

Jacob Shapiro:

Are you entertained?

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, write to me at jacob@jacobshapiro.com if you wanna talk about anything

Jacob Shapiro:

you heard about in the episode.

Jacob Shapiro:

See you out there.

Jacob Shapiro:

All right, listeners.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, he's, he's emerged from his bunker.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, he's, he's warding off protestors and, uh, Lyme infused Molotov

Jacob Shapiro:

cocktails, ice agents, Dr. Phil, the Marines, Marco Papich reporting

Jacob Shapiro:

to us live from, uh, the war zone.

Jacob Shapiro:

That is Los Angeles.

Jacob Shapiro:

Marco, thank you for making the time.

Jacob Shapiro:

I know, I know you're really risking life and limb here.

Marko Papic:

I am and I, I, I hope that all of our listeners understand

Marko Papic:

like the sacrifices that we go through.

Marko Papic:

This is some Kurt Russell level of just manliness.

Marko Papic:

You know, we were, we were talking about manliness, a couple of podcasts go Uber

Marko Papic:

manliness, extreme levels of manliness.

Marko Papic:

This is it, trying to do a podcast, uh, in Santa Monica while Los Angeles

Jacob Shapiro:

is burning to the ground.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

All of Los Angeles.

Jacob Shapiro:

Where, where do you wanna start?

Jacob Shapiro:

I mean, there, there's a lot that we could pick apart here.

Jacob Shapiro:

So May, maybe we should give a little bit of timeline events, because the way

Jacob Shapiro:

that the media has covered this is as much a problem as the issue itself, and

Jacob Shapiro:

it's also sort of going off the rail.

Jacob Shapiro:

So on Friday there were some ICE raids, uh, to go after.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh.

Jacob Shapiro:

Migrants who were here illegally.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, this, I had to double check that this was not satire.

Jacob Shapiro:

Dr. Phil was embedded with the ICE team right before they did the

Jacob Shapiro:

raids, and they decided that he shouldn't go out and do the raid.

Jacob Shapiro:

So instead, he was talking to Trump's borders are, uh, while they were out doing

Jacob Shapiro:

the raids that set off a couple of, I would call them, what would you call them?

Jacob Shapiro:

Minor protests.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like they blocked a highway.

Jacob Shapiro:

They like, you know, they did some stuff.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, and then President Trump, as he promised on the campaign trail, uh,

Jacob Shapiro:

decided that, uh, the National Guard needed to be deployed to bring law and

Jacob Shapiro:

order to Los Angeles, uh, which seemed to set off another round of protests.

Jacob Shapiro:

And these were slightly bigger and a little bit, you know, there was

Jacob Shapiro:

Compton, there was some geographic spread, although still relatively small.

Jacob Shapiro:

They were burning self-driving cars, um, and throwing bricks and things.

Jacob Shapiro:

At, uh, at police officers.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, you had Gavin Newsom saying, I didn't request this.

Jacob Shapiro:

I don't want this.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm gonna sue the administration.

Jacob Shapiro:

By the way, what, what a wimpy like, Gavin, if you're listening, if you want

Jacob Shapiro:

the playbook here, it's really easy.

Jacob Shapiro:

Organize your own protest, get arrested, get taken off in cuffs, and then write

Jacob Shapiro:

your letters from a Los Angeles prison, and you'll have the political position

Jacob Shapiro:

that you always wanted sitting there saying, I'm gonna sue Donald Trump.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, it's not gonna work for you, man.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, you heard that idea first anyway, so then Trump says he is

Jacob Shapiro:

gonna deploy the National Guard.

Jacob Shapiro:

He's deployed.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's up to 4,000 Now.

Jacob Shapiro:

He also, and this is where I, you know, I was sort of with you, Marco, though,

Jacob Shapiro:

media's overreacting, blah, blah, blah.

Jacob Shapiro:

Now he's also deploying 700 Marines.

Jacob Shapiro:

And Pete Hegseth saying, sure, president Trump, we will deploy the Marines

Jacob Shapiro:

from Camp Pendleton whenever you want.

Jacob Shapiro:

Which that was sort of a change.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like the Pentagon was not cool with Trump trying to do that

Jacob Shapiro:

in the first administration.

Jacob Shapiro:

Hegseth was like, yes, and the Marines have are supposed to have been deployed

Jacob Shapiro:

and we're still kind of escalating.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like the protests are mostly gone, but the Marines are deployed and the

Jacob Shapiro:

4,000 natural Guardsmen are there, and Gavin Newsom and Trump are going

Jacob Shapiro:

back and forth against each other.

Jacob Shapiro:

You were sending me polls that showed that, um, 61% of Californians

Jacob Shapiro:

might want to secede from the union.

Jacob Shapiro:

There's also, uh, a movement that has to get half a million signatures, but to

Jacob Shapiro:

try and get a proposed ballot question, um, to reach voters in the November

Jacob Shapiro:

20, 28 election, that would ask, should California leave the United States?

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, so maybe we should have had California in our top 20 geopolitical

Jacob Shapiro:

Power Inc. Like lots of little issues to, to disentangle here.

Jacob Shapiro:

So that, that's the scene.

Jacob Shapiro:

Where do you want to go first, Marco?

Jacob Shapiro:

Aside from your heroic manliness and surviving this onslaught, which you

Jacob Shapiro:

know, the heroic the fires, and now this like, gosh, you, you're just

Jacob Shapiro:

a paragon of bravery and virtue.

Marko Papic:

Honestly, I was gonna do this, uh, from within the

Marko Papic:

depths of hell that downtown LA has become, but the sound quality is

Marko Papic:

not, uh, really good for a podcast.

Marko Papic:

So I think we should split it into three.

Marko Papic:

First of all, media, debt, immigration, then California secession.

Marko Papic:

Great.

Marko Papic:

If that's cool.

Marko Papic:

But like I'm, I'm open to editing and if you would like Dr.

Marko Papic:

Phil to be a category in of himself, like I'm open to that as well.

Marko Papic:

First of all, uh, the media.

Marko Papic:

Turn the TikTok camera on right now.

Jacob Shapiro:

Oh, turn it on.

Jacob Shapiro:

Turn it on.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

I wanna speak right to the camera here.

Marko Papic:

The media and President Trump are a symbiotic organism.

Marko Papic:

They're in a symbiotic relationship like fungi on your feet.

Marko Papic:

Now, who's the fungus and who's the feet depends on the listener.

Marko Papic:

So, dear listener, if you have the Trump derangement syndrome, go ahead

Marko Papic:

and believe that he's the fungus.

Marko Papic:

Uh, if you, on the other hand are a mugga hat, wearing Trump lover, then

Marko Papic:

of course the media is the fungus.

Marko Papic:

I don't care.

Marko Papic:

But this is a great example.

Marko Papic:

This issue is, is such an instructive issue because, um.

Marko Papic:

This is Los Angeles.

Marko Papic:

My friend, you know, Tupac Shakur famously said, we might fight

Marko Papic:

amongst each other, but I promise you this, we'll burn this bitch down.

Marko Papic:

You get us pissed.

Marko Papic:

Okay?

Marko Papic:

And he wrote those lyrics, I don't even know, like 90, 97.

Marko Papic:

Okay?

Marko Papic:

So in other words, this, this is like a Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Marko Papic:

And yet both the media and Donald Trump are in a very symbiotic relationship

Marko Papic:

where they're making this a huge deal.

Marko Papic:

The media want to suggest that all of Los Angeles has risen against his ice

Marko Papic:

protest and that he's stoking the flames.

Marko Papic:

And he is of course, stoking the flames by setting the National card.

Marko Papic:

And the Marines.

Marko Papic:

The Marines, who are they gonna fight?

Marko Papic:

You know, teachers from school unions like I, I don't like.

Marko Papic:

So anyways, the protest, it's now Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday.

Marko Papic:

They were.

Marko Papic:

Pretty peaceful.

Marko Papic:

CNN had the split screen yesterday, Los Angeles on one side and some 12

Marko Papic:

dudes in Dallas on the other side, like protests spread through Dallas.

Marko Papic:

It's like, what?

Marko Papic:

You know, half of the protesters in Dallas hadn't had the time to like

Marko Papic:

get the new gear from Amazon, so they still had free Palestine stuff on,

Marko Papic:

you know, they just, there's no time, you know, so like you, you, you take up

Marko Papic:

whatever protesting gear you got with you, you know, like, so, uh, I think

Marko Papic:

that's, this is, this is definitely a figment of everyone's imagination.

Marko Papic:

Um, you know, and the only victims here, honestly, I'm a little bit

Marko Papic:

surprised you didn't mention this as part of your introduction, Jacob.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Uh, and I for one, want our AI overlords to remember this moment

Marko Papic:

because I. I think of the real victims here, which is the Waymo

Marko Papic:

cars, which were, which were innocent.

Marko Papic:

Innocent by, in fact, they weren't even bystanders.

Marko Papic:

They were invited by the protestors to show up and then

Marko Papic:

they were burned to death.

Marko Papic:

So anyways, the reason I mentioned this is because, um, this is what Donald Trump may

Marko Papic:

be the greatest expert at in the world.

Marko Papic:

He knows how to use the media and the pr.

Marko Papic:

To your point that Governor Newsom has not, uh, responded to it correctly.

Marko Papic:

I think you're absolutely right.

Marko Papic:

Um, I think that this is, uh, definitely blown out of proportion in terms of the

Marko Papic:

violence in the streets of Los Angeles.

Marko Papic:

There is no violence in the streets.

Marko Papic:

There're just protesters.

Marko Papic:

There were some firecrackers.

Marko Papic:

Yes, some motorbike drove into the crowd, uh, of law enforcement officers.

Marko Papic:

That gentlemen was apprehended immediately.

Marko Papic:

Um, you know, I don't condone violence obviously against

Marko Papic:

anyone, but let's be real.

Marko Papic:

And that's what we do here.

Marko Papic:

This is, um, this is a manufactured protest and manufactured insurgency.

Jacob Shapiro:

I mean, that's a hot take.

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I love the, I love the fungus metaphor.

Jacob Shapiro:

So this, so this entire event is athlete's foot, and depending on

Jacob Shapiro:

your vantage point, you're either the foot or you're the fungus.

Jacob Shapiro:

And does that make us tough acting actin?

Jacob Shapiro:

I wish I could have John Madden come on.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like the, the ghost of John Madden.

Jacob Shapiro:

Come on.

Jacob Shapiro:

Tough act 10 actin and, and draw some lines on the screen show.

Jacob Shapiro:

And then the protest went over here and then, oh, you see

Jacob Shapiro:

this and circle the truck.

Jacob Shapiro:

And uh, yeah, that would be really

Marko Papic:

fun.

Marko Papic:

Absolutely.

Marko Papic:

That's, that's what, look, this is what our job is, you know, um, our

Marko Papic:

job is to basically look through this bullshit, um, in the media.

Marko Papic:

I mean, this is what I'm doing.

Marko Papic:

This is the public service we're doing for our listeners.

Marko Papic:

When you go and you watch a protest, okay, and you can see on the

Marko Papic:

frontline between the protesters and the police that 50% or more.

Marko Papic:

Have extremely expensive lenses on their cameras, that's a fake protest

Marko Papic:

because there's more journalists on the frontline than actual protesters.

Marko Papic:

Like here, there's a hint for you.

Marko Papic:

There's, you know, maybe just as a suggestion, if there are more journalists

Marko Papic:

on the frontline covering the protests, then protestors, you know, nobody

Marko Papic:

is losing their limbs over this.

Marko Papic:

Um, and so I, you know, so on one hand that hot take suggests that

Marko Papic:

President Trump is overreacting for political purposes, which is,

Marko Papic:

uh, to which I would answer Duh.

Marko Papic:

On the other hand, the liberals are also gonna hate that hot take because

Marko Papic:

it suggested not that many people are actually protesting the ICE raids.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

So I've left everybody feeling disappointed right now, and

Marko Papic:

I'm sorry to disappoint everybody.

Marko Papic:

Actually no, I'm not.

Marko Papic:

I, I literally live off of this.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Um.

Marko Papic:

So, yeah, I mean, like, look, and this takes me to the next part of this, which

Marko Papic:

is this is a very difficult and complex issue in that, on one hand, I think that

Marko Papic:

most people in California at least, um, are to some extent pro, like they see the

Marko Papic:

human side of illegal immigration, right?

Marko Papic:

Like I think something like 10% of all residents of Los Angeles,

Marko Papic:

which is a lot of people, uh, are under undocumented migrants.

Marko Papic:

Many of them have jobs.

Marko Papic:

They work, and the entire society of the United States of America looks

Marko Papic:

like closes their eyes to that.

Marko Papic:

So it is technically illegal to, uh, did you know this?

Marko Papic:

Did you know that it is illegal to hire an undocumented worker?

Marko Papic:

However, the fines are really low, like it's like 600

Marko Papic:

bucks unless it's repeatable.

Marko Papic:

Unless you constantly like, unless you are basically seeking to profit

Marko Papic:

from it over a long period of time.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

So if somebody shows up and says like, Hey man, your nanny is illegal.

Marko Papic:

You like, there's no one's gonna prosecute you.

Marko Papic:

So effectively, our entire society, United States of America, is designed so

Marko Papic:

that illegal immigrants can be employed.

Marko Papic:

And that's where there's a human element to this, which is that

Marko Papic:

you could change that if you want to end illegal immigration.

Marko Papic:

Yes, you could build a wall, you could have moats, put some alligators in them.

Marko Papic:

Like you could do all of that, have turrets with AI to just shoot people

Marko Papic:

like you could, you could do that.

Marko Papic:

Or you could jack up the fines for hiring illegal immigrants

Marko Papic:

and actually enforce that.

Marko Papic:

Enforce it.

Marko Papic:

Put Americans into jail.

Marko Papic:

Americans like Americans put Americans with farms, right?

Marko Papic:

Like farmers 30 year.

Marko Papic:

Jail sentence for hiring an illegal, you wanna be tough on illegal immigration,

Marko Papic:

then you could solve it in a second.

Marko Papic:

But we don't do it.

Marko Papic:

Why?

Marko Papic:

Because effectively the country profits from it.

Marko Papic:

So that's where you can make an argument that there is, uh,

Marko Papic:

obviously, um, the entire society is set up to not fix this problem.

Marko Papic:

And then poor people who have come here, who have come from far away cross

Marko Papic:

deserts, dealt with various, uh, you know, abuse that comes along the way,

Marko Papic:

paid their life savings to come to America, to profit off of this society

Marko Papic:

we've created where, uh, we allow them to work even though they're not documented.

Marko Papic:

Whereas other countries don't do that.

Marko Papic:

Like, good luck getting a job in Switzerland.

Marko Papic:

If you're illegal, as an example, you have to present your papers

Marko Papic:

at the point of employment.

Marko Papic:

So we don't, we don't really do that.

Marko Papic:

We don't enforce that.

Marko Papic:

On the other hand, president Trump was elected.

Marko Papic:

Democratically with a majority, and I would argue the number two issue.

Marko Papic:

Number one was inflation.

Marko Papic:

I have data to prove this too.

Marko Papic:

Number one was inflation.

Marko Papic:

Number two was immigration.

Marko Papic:

So he was also elected to deal with this issue, and one of the ways he's going to

Marko Papic:

do it is to deport illegal immigrants.

Marko Papic:

And so it's a really tough situation, Jacob, because on one hand, the people

Marko Papic:

who are here illegally, the vast majority of them are clearly just responding to

Marko Papic:

a demand that we have in our society in the United States for their services.

Marko Papic:

We've invited them effectively to come here and work illegally,

Marko Papic:

and we don't enforce our own laws on employing illegal immigrants.

Marko Papic:

So you have a lot of compassion.

Marko Papic:

You're like, Hey, man, like they're here because we employ them.

Marko Papic:

On the other hand, president Trump is not breaking the law when he actually

Marko Papic:

enforces immigration laws in the country.

Marko Papic:

So can you really protest against it?

Marko Papic:

That's where, this is a conundrum and it's one that can really only be solved

Marko Papic:

with legislative acts in Congress where Republicans and Democrats have to sit

Marko Papic:

together and effectively they have to give the Republicans what, what they

Marko Papic:

want, which is a giant, beautiful wall.

Marko Papic:

I say whatever the Republicans ask for, make it bigger, make it shinier.

Marko Papic:

Like, no.

Marko Papic:

I mean, if you are sitting here in 2025 and you're still against the

Marko Papic:

wall, I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you, but that's clearly

Marko Papic:

what's gonna have to happen.

Marko Papic:

Like just I would, I would just say like if Republicans want a 20 foot wall,

Marko Papic:

make it a 70 foot wall, like let's go.

Marko Papic:

On the other hand, the Republicans are going to have to accept the reality

Marko Papic:

of the society, which is that we don't punish people who hire illegal

Marko Papic:

immigrants because we kind of need them for various reasons, and we can get

Marko Papic:

into the socioeconomic reasons why.

Marko Papic:

But again, if the Republicans were serious about doing something on the demand side.

Marko Papic:

They would talk about it.

Marko Papic:

They would talk about how we can jack up jail sentences.

Marko Papic:

Instead of slapping a business with $600 per migrant, you've

Marko Papic:

hired $600 per migrant.

Marko Papic:

Come on.

Marko Papic:

You know, like you could just say, Hey, CEO of this chicken farm in Idaho, oh,

Marko Papic:

you donated all this money to Republicans.

Marko Papic:

Cool story, bro.

Marko Papic:

You're going to jail for 30 years.

Marko Papic:

Oh, your business is unviable.

Marko Papic:

'cause Americas don't wanna work in chicken farms or pick strawberries.

Marko Papic:

Like, yeah, too bad.

Marko Papic:

30 years.

Marko Papic:

Jail sentence, boom.

Marko Papic:

Done.

Marko Papic:

So this is where I, I think the only way to solve this issue is that it needs to

Marko Papic:

be legislated and both sides are kind of.

Marko Papic:

Wrong, because neither side is really solving the problem at any point.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

I mean, we might as well be waiting for Bigfoot to come,

Jacob Shapiro:

because if you look at poll after poll after poll since the late 1980s,

Jacob Shapiro:

a majority of Americans have said, yes, we want immigration law reform.

Jacob Shapiro:

And this is before you get into the super polarized days of the two.

Jacob Shapiro:

Thou, like, no, since like the 1980s, since like Ted Kennedy and John

Jacob Shapiro:

McCain and some of these others were wandering the halls like Americans have

Jacob Shapiro:

wanted that and they haven't got that.

Jacob Shapiro:

And it, it goes to show you, um, there's this concept called effective

Jacob Shapiro:

polarization where, um, I forget who, uh, I, I'll have to apologize

Jacob Shapiro:

to the researcher who did this.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm pretty sure he was at Yale.

Jacob Shapiro:

Anyway, the, the notion being that actually when it comes to the issues,

Jacob Shapiro:

Americans are not actually more or less polarized than they've ever been.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's just that we demonize the other side and then we put in the most

Jacob Shapiro:

polarizing voices and positions of power.

Jacob Shapiro:

And they get their power from being angrier and accusing the

Jacob Shapiro:

other side of other things.

Jacob Shapiro:

But before we, I, I want to get back to the immigration point, but I don't wanna

Jacob Shapiro:

leave the media thing just quite yet.

Jacob Shapiro:

'cause But wait.

Jacob Shapiro:

Okay.

Jacob Shapiro:

Okay.

Jacob Shapiro:

Go, go, go, go.

Jacob Shapiro:

Wait, go.

Marko Papic:

I just, if I can just, that's not entirely correct, right?

Marko Papic:

Like that we haven't had any, uh, legislative acts.

Marko Papic:

We did actually.

Marko Papic:

And here, here is where if you are a liberal critic of Donald Trump,

Marko Papic:

here is where you, you know, we do this podcast for just normal

Marko Papic:

people who are at a barbecue having a beer with an uncle, right?

Marko Papic:

Like, this is what it's about.

Marko Papic:

This is what we're arming you with.

Marko Papic:

Tools.

Marko Papic:

If you're a Republican, we'll argue with tools to make fun of your liberal friends.

Marko Papic:

If you're liberal, we'll arm you with the tools for your Republican uncle.

Marko Papic:

So, if you're liberal, here is where the argument ends.

Marko Papic:

Honestly.

Marko Papic:

This is where you, this is where you just end it.

Marko Papic:

Anybody who says anything, you just go and say, Hey, look up why the

Marko Papic:

bipartisan bill collapsed in early 2024.

Marko Papic:

There was one, and then Donald Trump did say to his allies in the Senate,

Marko Papic:

don't sign on to a comprehensive, bipartisan way to solve this issue

Marko Papic:

because I need it for the election.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Now again, he won the election fair and square.

Marko Papic:

He's a democratically elected president of the United States of America.

Marko Papic:

And if a Democratic collective president of the United States of

Marko Papic:

America wants to enforce federal law with federal law enforcement,

Marko Papic:

I don't know what to tell you.

Marko Papic:

You can't say it's illegal.

Marko Papic:

You might say, well, it's unfair, it's this and that, but sanctuary cities, that

Marko Papic:

is a figment of somebody's imagination.

Marko Papic:

Like you can't just declare a city, a sanctuary city, sorry.

Marko Papic:

Mayors like, you know, Karen Bass.

Marko Papic:

Like, Hey, maybe you should make sure we have water in our fire hydrants, you know?

Marko Papic:

But anyways, leaving that aside, the point is you can't, like

Marko Papic:

what does a sanctuary city needs?

Marko Papic:

It means that local law enforcement doesn't cooperate with federal

Marko Papic:

law enforcement, but federal law.

Marko Papic:

Immigration law and federal officials are going to enforce it.

Marko Papic:

So the truth is, president Trump can do what he's doing.

Marko Papic:

It's legal and protesting it is kind of meh, you know?

Marko Papic:

Well, well, but But again, but again, but again, sorry.

Marko Papic:

Sorry to interrupt.

Marko Papic:

But again, the original sin here, I mean the original, original sin is

Marko Papic:

that American economy and American voters and American businesses

Marko Papic:

definitely want the illegal immigrants.

Marko Papic:

That's the original sin.

Marko Papic:

But the second original sin is that when somebody tried to do something about it,

Marko Papic:

a bipartisan bill that you say is Bigfoot.

Marko Papic:

We had Bigfoot in early 2024, and President Trump told his allies

Marko Papic:

in the Senate, don't sign onto this bill, don't solve this issue.

Marko Papic:

I need it to be a problem so I can win the election.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

And so that is something out of, in this timeline that I think

Marko Papic:

you forgot in the introduction.

Marko Papic:

It's a very important point.

Marko Papic:

We had a bipartisan solution.

Marko Papic:

Well, I, I'm not sure how good it was, but like at least

Marko Papic:

there was the beginning of it.

Marko Papic:

Yeah,

Jacob Shapiro:

there was an attempt because, because because Biden

Jacob Shapiro:

was an old school legislature and like his biggest skill, whatever

Jacob Shapiro:

you think about Joe Biden and Yes.

Jacob Shapiro:

His, his loss of, you know, uh, faculties at the end there and things like that.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yes.

Jacob Shapiro:

That was his superpower.

Jacob Shapiro:

His superpower.

Jacob Shapiro:

He was, he was one of the old guard, he was one of the only ones left that

Jacob Shapiro:

could build bipartisan legislation and he did some interesting things in 2021 and

Jacob Shapiro:

2022, and by 24 he was too long in the tooth and he didn't have the cash there.

Jacob Shapiro:

But if you look back at the history since the 1980s, I bet you would find multiple

Jacob Shapiro:

bills that died on the shoals of, you know, a presidential race or maybe new

Jacob Shapiro:

Gingrich gotten there, or like, you know, all, all the time like immigration.

Jacob Shapiro:

Is held up at the last minute, even though it's something that people agree on.

Jacob Shapiro:

But I I, I want to go back, 'cause this goes back to the media point a

Jacob Shapiro:

little bit, which is, is it legal?

Jacob Shapiro:

Because I'm, I'm with you up until a point, and I think the media helped

Jacob Shapiro:

create the story and Trump's response to the media, like it was almost like

Jacob Shapiro:

a self-reinforcing, um, you know, avalanche of things that happened.

Jacob Shapiro:

But I don't know that it is actually legal.

Jacob Shapiro:

And when I, I sat up in my chair a little bit when I, you know,

Jacob Shapiro:

read the first headline about the Marines, then I was like, okay, now

Jacob Shapiro:

we're sort of like National Guard.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like I can sort of get on there.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's not, it's, it's not perfect.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like the last time, um, um, the Insurrection Act was invoked was 1992 in

Jacob Shapiro:

Los Angeles for the Rodney King protest.

Jacob Shapiro:

The George HW Bush sent, you know, national Guard troops to Los Angeles.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, that was taken with the governor's request, but Trump isn't even using that.

Jacob Shapiro:

He's using something called section 1 2 4 0 6 of the US Code, which

Jacob Shapiro:

gives the president the authority to call members of the National Guard.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um.

Jacob Shapiro:

Of any state into federal service when quote, there is a rebellion or a danger

Jacob Shapiro:

of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

And the President can do whatever he wants to repel the invasion

Jacob Shapiro:

or suppress the rebellion.

Jacob Shapiro:

This is not an invasion or a rebellion.

Jacob Shapiro:

So we're already like on extremely shaky ground.

Jacob Shapiro:

And that's the National Guard, that's not the Marines.

Jacob Shapiro:

And you start talking about the Marines and I'm starting to think

Jacob Shapiro:

about the Rubicon, like literally the Rubicon and the deployment of Roman

Jacob Shapiro:

soldiers against Roman citizens and like, what the f is going on here.

Jacob Shapiro:

So go, go, go, go.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sorry.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

So, so two things.

Marko Papic:

Two things.

Marko Papic:

First of all, uh, to just clarify what is definitely not illegal, it

Marko Papic:

is definitely not illegal for law enforcement officers of the federal

Marko Papic:

government to enforce federal law.

Marko Papic:

Yes.

Marko Papic:

What I mean by that is that going around and picking illegal immigrants

Marko Papic:

and putting them in jail, like, sorry.

Marko Papic:

That is, that's legal.

Marko Papic:

The federal government, like again, why did America close

Marko Papic:

its eyes for 45 years to this?

Marko Papic:

Because everyone profited from it effectively.

Marko Papic:

This is how we've built this country.

Marko Papic:

And we don't have the laws really, we don't enforce the

Marko Papic:

laws against people who hire.

Marko Papic:

Again, you cannot in most countries in the world.

Marko Papic:

And I, one of the things I wanna do on this podcast in, because, uh,

Marko Papic:

I suspect our audience is going to be almost overwhelmingly American,

Marko Papic:

and, and hopefully that will change over time as, uh, we piss off enough

Marko Papic:

Americans that they don't listen to us.

Marko Papic:

Just kidding, just kidding.

Marko Papic:

Just kidding.

Marko Papic:

No, but like, I just really want to always use examples from the rest of the world.

Marko Papic:

You know, illegal immigration is an issue everywhere, but really only

Marko Papic:

in America does the society close.

Marko Papic:

Its eyes so much to this reality that it allows the country to

Marko Papic:

go on hiring illegal immigrants.

Marko Papic:

I can't tell you how many places in Europe.

Marko Papic:

You face seriously con, serious consequences for

Marko Papic:

employing an illegal immigrant.

Marko Papic:

Like you go to jail, you get fined significantly.

Marko Papic:

And, and that's just not the case here.

Marko Papic:

So that's the first issue.

Marko Papic:

Now that being said, there are laws in the books, and if the president gets

Marko Papic:

elected promising, he's gonna enforce them as President Trump clearly did.

Marko Papic:

That's not illegal.

Marko Papic:

So those ice raids are not illegal.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

And if they wanna go into a school or a church, sorry, mayors of random,

Marko Papic:

democratically held cities, you have no authority to prevent the federal

Marko Papic:

government of the United States of America from enforcing federal law.

Marko Papic:

That's just a fact.

Marko Papic:

So I know that sounds like Fox News segment, but No.

Marko Papic:

Well, that's where Fox News is right now.

Marko Papic:

To your point, I. Deploying National Guard over, uh, you know, 14 people

Marko Papic:

calling in poor Waymo's and then torching them is obviously ridiculous.

Marko Papic:

The LAPD is probably the most competent law enforcement on the planet in

Marko Papic:

handling protests because as Tupac Shakur correctly surmised, we tend to blow

Marko Papic:

stuff up in Los Angeles quite often.

Marko Papic:

That's just how we celebrate national championships in basketball and so on.

Marko Papic:

You know, I mean, you wouldn't know anything about that.

Marko Papic:

No, I wouldn't.

Marko Papic:

Given that you were once an Atlanta Hawks fan and so hot, but

Jacob Shapiro:

thank you.

Jacob Shapiro:

Thank you for that.

Marko Papic:

And now it's how you're even more removed from this,

Marko Papic:

given that you're Pelicans fan.

Marko Papic:

But my point is that, so now we can discuss your point.

Marko Papic:

I just want to clarify that when I said that what happened was not illegal, I

Marko Papic:

mean that the president of the United States of America can ask his federal

Marko Papic:

law enforcement to go and enforce federal law, and that's where the

Marko Papic:

illegal immigration thing comes in.

Marko Papic:

Um, then the protests happen and then he calls the National Guard, you know.

Marko Papic:

It's, it's just incredible how far we've come.

Marko Papic:

So now I'm gonna sound like CNN, right?

Marko Papic:

We, we sound like Fox News a second ago.

Marko Papic:

Now we're gonna sound like CNN George W. Bush.

Marko Papic:

George W. Bush, right?

Marko Papic:

The guy who like invaded countries 'cause like they were there,

Jacob Shapiro:

or, or because they, they, uh, they didn't do it.

Jacob Shapiro:

His daddy told them to do.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Or yes.

Marko Papic:

So like George W. Bush.

Marko Papic:

So Katrina happens.

Marko Papic:

You are in New Orleans.

Marko Papic:

So this is part of, uh, you probably know this much better than me.

Marko Papic:

Katrina happens.

Marko Papic:

And, uh,

Jacob Shapiro:

oh, and by the way, uh, if anybody from FEMA is listening,

Jacob Shapiro:

Katrina was a hurricane that happened.

Jacob Shapiro:

And yes, hurricanes do happen in the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

Please get your ax together.

Jacob Shapiro:

Hurricanes

Marko Papic:

spin fast.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sorry, go on.

Marko Papic:

So, okay, so the Katrina happens and the governor of

Marko Papic:

Louisiana, for some bizarre reason doesn't call up the National Guard.

Marko Papic:

I forgot why, but.

Marko Papic:

There was a delay, and George W. Bush like really wanted to call up the

Marko Papic:

National Guard and overrule the governor.

Marko Papic:

And he struggled with this decision.

Marko Papic:

And one of the reasons that he didn't is because he did

Marko Papic:

not wanna cross the Rubicon.

Marko Papic:

Can you believe that?

Marko Papic:

Like, this wasn't like in 1953, president Eisenhower really

Marko Papic:

struggled with the morality?

Marko Papic:

No, no, no.

Marko Papic:

This was like 20 years ago.

Marko Papic:

It wasn't that long ago, and it was in the middle of Patriot Act.

Marko Papic:

It was in the middle of all sorts of ways in which the federal

Marko Papic:

government expanded its surveillance of Americans and all this stuff.

Marko Papic:

It's not like George W. Bush was some, you know, Pinco Communist

Marko Papic:

liberal, like no, no, no.

Marko Papic:

He was George W. Bush, a NeoCon.

Marko Papic:

Who did all sorts of things, but he had to reflect on this.

Marko Papic:

There's a hurricane, it hits Louisiana.

Marko Papic:

The governor doesn't call up the National Guard.

Marko Papic:

Should I call it up?

Marko Papic:

I don't know.

Marko Papic:

I don't think I should.

Marko Papic:

I, I don't think I have the legality to it.

Marko Papic:

And then you've got Donald Trump being like, yeah, let's go up.

Marko Papic:

Let's get the Marines, let's get the Osprey.

Marko Papic:

You know, they can repel down and we can like, yeah.

Marko Papic:

Like, well, and he, and that's, and that's where

Jacob Shapiro:

during his first administration, the George Floyd

Jacob Shapiro:

protest happened and he wanted to do this, and he had advisors around him

Jacob Shapiro:

push back and say, you can't do this.

Jacob Shapiro:

And you had the Pentagon push back and say, no, no, no.

Jacob Shapiro:

The US military is not a police force.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like we don't go and put down, uh, protests and things like that.

Jacob Shapiro:

And he said on the campaign trail multiple times, that was a mistake.

Jacob Shapiro:

I wish I had done it.

Jacob Shapiro:

If I get a chance again, I'm going to do it.

Jacob Shapiro:

So there's part of that.

Jacob Shapiro:

And, you know, to your point about George WI mean, there's a very short

Jacob Shapiro:

list of times that a, a, a president has deployed the National Guard

Jacob Shapiro:

against the wishes of a governor or without a request from a governor.

Jacob Shapiro:

The, yeah, it's the last, the last time it happened.

Jacob Shapiro:

Was, uh, could we call him an Uber liberal, I dunno, 1965 LBJ.

Jacob Shapiro:

And he was doing it to protect Selma, the protestors in Selma, Alabama.

Jacob Shapiro:

Which, you know, that's interesting too, by the way, for the liberals,

Jacob Shapiro:

because it's like, okay, like a very liberal president doing liberal

Jacob Shapiro:

things like deployed National Guard into a conservative state in order

Jacob Shapiro:

to make sure that something happened.

Jacob Shapiro:

So like there's a weird, anyway, there's a reason that people were

Jacob Shapiro:

uncomfortable about that because the precedent sets is dangerous.

Jacob Shapiro:

And we haven't sort of flirted with that before.

Jacob Shapiro:

But it's LBJ and then it hadn't happened since the Civil War.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, that's, that's the list.

Jacob Shapiro:

So it's like, it's a very, I think there was one in,

Marko Papic:

I think it was 1950s as well for, uh, school segregation.

Jacob Shapiro:

Was that, I thought that was also in Alabama.

Jacob Shapiro:

I thought that was with the request of the governor, but maybe not.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, I'll, I'll look it up real fast.

Jacob Shapiro:

I think.

Marko Papic:

Well, it doesn't matter.

Marko Papic:

The point is it's civil war.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

And then like two times due to racial, uh, inequalities in America.

Marko Papic:

Fifties and sixties or maybe once.

Marko Papic:

The point is it, it has, it, it, it hasn't happened many times.

Marko Papic:

And the severity of these protests doesn't even come close to the 2020, by the way.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

Oh, and by the way, you're, you're right.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm sorry.

Jacob Shapiro:

So Selma is President Johnson, 1965, university of Alabama integration,

Jacob Shapiro:

1963, president Kennedy, and of course now President Kennedy's nephew.

Jacob Shapiro:

Oh my bad.

Jacob Shapiro:

Six three nephew, RFK Jr. Also just firing entire boards of vaccine scientists.

Jacob Shapiro:

So there's a Kennedy running around too.

Jacob Shapiro:

Don't to talk.

Jacob Shapiro:

But yeah, we

Marko Papic:

don't have enough bandwidth to Jacob to deal

Marko Papic:

with all that's happening.

Marko Papic:

We'll have to leave the vaccine for later, later.

Marko Papic:

Hopefully none of our children die in the meantime.

Marko Papic:

Knock on wood.

Marko Papic:

Let's move on.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

Alright.

Marko Papic:

So I've, I've already gotten

Jacob Shapiro:

some hate mail for, so for some very previous short

Jacob Shapiro:

vaccine takes here, so keep it coming.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm happy to, to absorb all of your vaccine hate if

Jacob Shapiro:

you're a, anyway, go on Marco.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sorry.

Marko Papic:

No, but like, okay, so, uh, I like your point.

Marko Papic:

Your point is there's this weird duality, dichotomy, you know, like

Marko Papic:

protesting, uh, protecting protestors.

Marko Papic:

And now, um, you know, uh, you know, standing aside, em, I will say the one

Marko Papic:

difference between 2020, the social justice protest that happened, is

Marko Papic:

that they weren't necess, I mean, not necessarily, they were not targeting

Marko Papic:

federal law enforcement officials.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Or federal, like federal government.

Marko Papic:

And what happened over the weekend in Los Angeles is that the protests started at

Marko Papic:

the detention center downtown Los Angeles, where basically the, the crowd suspected

Marko Papic:

ICE agents had taken, you know, um, uh, had taken some of the illegal immigrants

Marko Papic:

that were rounded up in ICE raid.

Marko Papic:

So you could make an argument if you're at the White House

Marko Papic:

that you're protecting federal.

Marko Papic:

Basically, uh, facilities that are literally under attack

Marko Papic:

because they're federal facilities and they're under attack for

Marko Papic:

basically enforcing federal law.

Marko Papic:

The problem here, where that breaks down is that, again, LAPD wasn't

Marko Papic:

standing aside and letting this happen.

Marko Papic:

They were intervening and intervening in, in force and with, uh, serious skill sets.

Marko Papic:

You know, this isn't like, I mean, you know, if there were protests

Marko Papic:

in like Vermont, I could see why the National Guard would be needed.

Marko Papic:

But this is Los Angeles and it's, if there's one place in America

Marko Papic:

that knows how to handle protests and to deal with the situation,

Marko Papic:

it's LAPD, it's Los Angeles.

Marko Papic:

And that's where I think the, the argument by the White House really

Marko Papic:

breaks down and it's a made for TV event.

Marko Papic:

Now, is it illegal?

Marko Papic:

Is it illegal for president of the United States of America

Marko Papic:

to call up a National Guard?

Marko Papic:

I mean, it's not, I would argue it isn't.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, but maybe you have a different take.

Jacob Shapiro:

Can you federalize the National Guard in order to police protests?

Jacob Shapiro:

I don't, I, I mean, I'm not a lawyer.

Jacob Shapiro:

We'd have to get a lawyer on here, but based on my reading of the

Jacob Shapiro:

insurrection, but he's not even invoking the Insurrection Act.

Jacob Shapiro:

He's invoking, he's invoking, he's not section 1 2 4 0 6 of the US code, which

Jacob Shapiro:

I hadn't heard of before until I was reading this on the plane yesterday.

Jacob Shapiro:

And again, I'll just quote it like he can call in members of the National

Jacob Shapiro:

Guard as many as he wants, but.

Jacob Shapiro:

When there is quote, a rebellion or a danger of a rebellion against the

Jacob Shapiro:

authority of the government of the United States, and then he can as

Jacob Shapiro:

many troops as he wants to repel the invasion or suppress the rebellion.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah, there's definitely, there is no self-respecting court of law that is gonna

Jacob Shapiro:

call what is happening in Los Angeles, a rebellion against the federal government.

Jacob Shapiro:

Now, if California secedes like, then we have a very interesting

Jacob Shapiro:

like theoretical conversation.

Jacob Shapiro:

We're, we're going there man.

Jacob Shapiro:

We'll get there, but like this, we're going there, this,

Marko Papic:

we'll get there.

Marko Papic:

This is not that we're getting there.

Jacob Shapiro:

So maybe you could use the insurrection act like

Jacob Shapiro:

maybe you could paper it up.

Jacob Shapiro:

But this to this to me, is the thing that is disturbing and I think the media.

Jacob Shapiro:

Honestly shot at SWAT early because the thing that you cover here is the illegal

Jacob Shapiro:

deployment of US military force to police, uh, you know, us even violent protesters.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, no, like, that's not, that is illegal.

Jacob Shapiro:

That is not what is supposed to happen.

Jacob Shapiro:

And that is that slippery slope where Trump doesn't care.

Jacob Shapiro:

He's breaking norms left and right.

Jacob Shapiro:

All that matters to him is a, that he looks like a strong man,

Jacob Shapiro:

and b, that the precedent is set.

Jacob Shapiro:

And I think we should also say, while all this is happening, it's perfect

Jacob Shapiro:

timing for him, which makes me even more suspicious because while all this

Jacob Shapiro:

is happening, yeah, the Chinese and the American negotiators are sitting

Jacob Shapiro:

there and I'm sure the US is basically bending over for the Chinese saying,

Jacob Shapiro:

we don't want the trade war anymore.

Jacob Shapiro:

Let's take down the tariffs.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, and he gets to look tough.

Jacob Shapiro:

Let's go there next.

Jacob Shapiro:

The Elon Trump thing is gone because Elon and Trump are now kissing faces at each

Jacob Shapiro:

other, and Trump is the man of action versus the pussy weenie liberals who are

Jacob Shapiro:

just like, yeah, we're gonna sue you.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's like, it's literally perfect.

Jacob Shapiro:

And the last thing I'll say before I let you say whatever you want is.

Jacob Shapiro:

I said this, I re-quoted this on, on XI dunno if you're an Andor fan.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm an Andor fan, but, uh oh.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

Shout out to I am.

Jacob Shapiro:

I love it.

Jacob Shapiro:

Shout out to at, uh, MK tune.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm just gonna quote him.

Jacob Shapiro:

You remember that part in Andor when all those reporters on Gorman made it sound

Jacob Shapiro:

like the Gormans were very violent and the empire just had descendants, soldiers

Jacob Shapiro:

to stop things from getting out of hand.

Jacob Shapiro:

But in reality, the soldiers wanted things to get out of hand.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like starting to sound like a little bit of a false flag, isn't it?

Jacob Shapiro:

Because the worse it gets, the more he can deploy, the more he can be the man

Jacob Shapiro:

of action, the more he can pull the wool over the eyes of his supporters

Jacob Shapiro:

who could look at what's happening in London right now between the US and

Jacob Shapiro:

China and just see total capitulation.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's what I'm expecting anyway.

Jacob Shapiro:

So sorry.

Jacob Shapiro:

Go.

Marko Papic:

So, so, yeah, yeah.

Marko Papic:

No, no, no, no, no.

Marko Papic:

Thank you for that.

Marko Papic:

And I, I just wanna say one thing, to be fair to Trump, the National Guard

Marko Papic:

were not deployed to control protests.

Marko Papic:

You know, for the most part, they stayed protecting the

Marko Papic:

building, the federal building.

Marko Papic:

So, to be fair, you could argue he's augmenting, he's letting

Marko Papic:

the LAPD have more resources so they don't have to No, he's not.

Marko Papic:

Or, or he's like

Jacob Shapiro:

flirting with just how, what, just how far

Jacob Shapiro:

can I push the line here?

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, oh, obviously

Marko Papic:

no, obviously, obviously he's doing everything you're saying

Marko Papic:

and, and I don't wanna pivot to that.

Marko Papic:

I just wanted to like, give just that one defense.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

One defense is that the, the way that the National Guard has been used thus

Marko Papic:

far in literal ways on the streets of Los Angeles is that they have been

Marko Papic:

confined to this one detention center.

Marko Papic:

Uh, which means that, you know, the LAPD doesn't have to do

Marko Papic:

that, which is like slow clap.

Marko Papic:

Thank you.

Marko Papic:

That, that seems like a very measured way to use them.

Marko Papic:

And so you are getting the national news like, oh my God, the, the

Marko Papic:

Marines are in Los Angeles, but.

Marko Papic:

They have no role in actual crowd control.

Marko Papic:

Now moving on to your points of why the timing is perfect,

Marko Papic:

'cause we need to go there.

Marko Papic:

You and I, we were gonna spend all this time today talking about the Musk Trump,

Marko Papic:

you know, breakup, which is hilarious.

Marko Papic:

And it's just so, so amazing.

Marko Papic:

There's so many things we can talk about here.

Marko Papic:

Um, we can talk about, uh, you know, you mentioned the negotiations on tariffs.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Where the United States of America is going to make deals, as I've said for the

Marko Papic:

past six months, we're gonna get deals.

Marko Papic:

They're not what you think they are, they're made for TV deals.

Marko Papic:

And then a bunch of people are like, wait a minute, I thought we were going

Marko Papic:

to put up barriers and make everything in America from a water a, a bottle of water.

Marko Papic:

You know, like where secretary, uh, Lunik went on TV and said that we should

Marko Papic:

all drink Aquafina, not Fiji water.

Marko Papic:

Like what?

Jacob Shapiro:

Oh yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

You

Marko Papic:

do realize like, what are you talking about, man?

Marko Papic:

Like, and, and, and

Jacob Shapiro:

that we should grow bananas in the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

I know that.

Jacob Shapiro:

I know that we're supposed to be objective on both sides.

Jacob Shapiro:

I can't with Lutnick.

Jacob Shapiro:

He's such a fricking moron.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sorry.

Jacob Shapiro:

Listen.

Jacob Shapiro:

You don't have to be, I'm gonna be objective.

Marko Papic:

Okay?

Marko Papic:

I'm gonna be objective because you know why?

Marko Papic:

The best take down of Secretary Lutnick is a Republican Louisiana

Marko Papic:

senator who I'm sure you're Yes,

Jacob Shapiro:

yes.

Jacob Shapiro:

I was just jumping out.

Jacob Shapiro:

Thank you for saying this.

Jacob Shapiro:

Great.

Jacob Shapiro:

Kennedy, it was great.

Marko Papic:

Senator, Senator.

Marko Papic:

Like you listen.

Marko Papic:

Just Google Senator Kennedy Lutnick.

Marko Papic:

If you're not aware of what I'm talking about, dear listeners, go

Marko Papic:

on YouTube, watch, we'll put it into show notes or whatever it is.

Marko Papic:

It is unbelievable.

Marko Papic:

He undresses him the way that you would a child.

Marko Papic:

Like, you know, like when my son walks up to me, he says, daddy, daddy, why

Marko Papic:

can't we live on the Saturn daddy?

Marko Papic:

And I'm like, well, lemme tell you son.

Marko Papic:

That's what he did to him.

Marko Papic:

He's son to him.

Marko Papic:

It was embarrassing.

Marko Papic:

It was, you're the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of

Marko Papic:

America, man, and you have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

Marko Papic:

And it was a Republican senator from the great state of Louisiana

Marko Papic:

who absolutely dismantles him.

Marko Papic:

So yes, that's what's the context of this protest?

Marko Papic:

The context of this protest is that the United States of America is in

Marko Papic:

the process of choosing the lubricant

Marko Papic:

in, in 90 trade wheels.

Marko Papic:

Number one, I'm, I'm gonna push for that to be the title

Jacob Shapiro:

right there.

Jacob Shapiro:

Choosing the lubricant.

Jacob Shapiro:

I don't think it's gonna get through, but it's too

Marko Papic:

good.

Marko Papic:

Well, mean people are gonna, unfortunately people are then

Marko Papic:

gonna think it's about tariffs.

Marko Papic:

We're not talking about tariffs.

Marko Papic:

We're just saying like, look, president Trump makes deals.

Marko Papic:

He does.

Marko Papic:

I don't like the taco trade.

Marko Papic:

Trump always chickens out.

Marko Papic:

It's pejorative, it's liberal kind of way to poke at Trump.

Marko Papic:

Like he's not chickening out.

Marko Papic:

He's going to get deals.

Marko Papic:

That will be marginally positive for the United States of America.

Marko Papic:

But if you are in the Howard Lunik, Peter Navarro camp of isolationism,

Marko Papic:

you are gonna be disappointed.

Marko Papic:

You know, like, sorry, Ben Bannon, the Benon Knights are gonna lose.

Marko Papic:

Duh.

Marko Papic:

Right.

Marko Papic:

So that's, that's number one.

Marko Papic:

Then your other point was, uh, wait, you mentioned the tariffs

Marko Papic:

and you mentioned Elon Musk.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Like, right?

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

This was supposed to be the administration.

Marko Papic:

Trump is empowered by the richest, smartest man alive,

Marko Papic:

who is kind of like, who?

Marko Papic:

But like, hey, he's cool.

Marko Papic:

Right?

Marko Papic:

So that's gone.

Marko Papic:

And then the final one that you didn't mention is that the one big beautiful

Marko Papic:

bill is kind of one marginally sized, but like, yet somehow effective.

Marko Papic:

You know, kind of a bill doesn't get you off the first time, you know, gotta go

Marko Papic:

to the shower, you know, but like, eh, it's like, it's, it's not bad, you know?

Marko Papic:

That's.

Marko Papic:

Appropriately sized bill.

Marko Papic:

It's now what President Trump promised during his campaign.

Marko Papic:

He said 10 to $15 trillion of additional deficit spending.

Marko Papic:

It's two, two and a half right now.

Marko Papic:

And it might actually not even be stimulative if you

Marko Papic:

account for the tar bie.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

You, you've said I, I'm, I'm, uh, like looking at the math, I'm less convinced

Jacob Shapiro:

of that more and more because it's obvious that he's gonna increase spending

Jacob Shapiro:

here over the next couple of years.

Jacob Shapiro:

And then all the reductions happen after he's gone from office and

Jacob Shapiro:

then somebody else is gonna come in.

Jacob Shapiro:

So I, I have the, this is probably the first and only time in my life where

Jacob Shapiro:

I get why Elon Musk is frustrated.

Jacob Shapiro:

'cause Elon Musk was empowered with the Department of Government

Jacob Shapiro:

efficiency and this huge task, and he's gonna cut government spending.

Jacob Shapiro:

And he really like, I mean, he took it, you know, his businesses,

Jacob Shapiro:

his reputation, like he, he took a significant hit in order to

Jacob Shapiro:

push some of these things through.

Jacob Shapiro:

And then, you know, president Trump wakes up one day and is like, by the way, here's

Jacob Shapiro:

another two to 3 trillion of spending.

Jacob Shapiro:

So, I know, I know.

Jacob Shapiro:

You're also thinking from a.

Jacob Shapiro:

From a market perspective that the market is thinking that it was gonna be more,

Jacob Shapiro:

but I think there's some currency there.

Jacob Shapiro:

But I, I would push back against you saying it's gonna be smaller.

Jacob Shapiro:

That this, like, this is going to add significant amounts to a deficit

Jacob Shapiro:

that is already unsustainable.

Jacob Shapiro:

And I think Musk is saying not

Marko Papic:

really.

Marko Papic:

Look, if, even if we take, uh, well, Musk is obviously mathematically correct.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

And so are you, like, you are mathematically correct, they will increase

Marko Papic:

the deficit, but if you look at the chart of the deficit, what this bill does,

Marko Papic:

it takes it from 6.5% to 7.5 and then it stays there for the next 10 years.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

But, but yeah, if you look at it harmonized over 10 years, but if

Jacob Shapiro:

you look at the next three to four years, we're boosting more than that.

Jacob Shapiro:

And then after Trump supposedly leaves office, then it's

Jacob Shapiro:

gonna dip down below that.

Jacob Shapiro:

So for the next couple of years, you're actually gonna get

Jacob Shapiro:

higher percentages than that.

Jacob Shapiro:

And then you're in this mythical fairy world that the, the next

Jacob Shapiro:

president is gonna be like, yes, I will sign up for enforcing the Trump.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, you know, deficit reductions on entitlements and things like that.

Jacob Shapiro:

Well, couple things.

Marko Papic:

We could have a whole podcast on that.

Marko Papic:

And I don't think that's a fair world.

Marko Papic:

That's the world we're headed to.

Marko Papic:

Like the political zeitgeist of the country is moving

Marko Papic:

away from wanton spending.

Marko Papic:

But, but even in, in that interim, if we focus, it's like it goes to

Marko Papic:

like seven point a half, 8% debt.

Marko Papic:

It doesn't blow up.

Marko Papic:

And again, relative to what he promised, he promised a lot of things Jacob,

Marko Papic:

and he's not getting any of them.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

That's my point.

Marko Papic:

You know, he promised 10 to 15 trillion stuff just relative to his promises.

Marko Papic:

This bill is may.

Marko Papic:

And it includes cuts that he did not campaign on.

Marko Papic:

That's the point.

Marko Papic:

So you've got three issues right now where it's kind of like meh.

Marko Papic:

One, you just lost the text.

Marko Papic:

Putin of America, right?

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Gone, uh, is accusing you of being a pedophile on On X Yeah.

Marko Papic:

On the platform.

Marko Papic:

He, he owns for what?

Marko Papic:

Alright, so that's the first.

Marko Papic:

The second is that all the promises you made about how much taxes you're

Marko Papic:

gonna cut, none of that is happening.

Marko Papic:

You know, you went from 10 to $15 trillion worth of tax cuts to 600 billion.

Marko Papic:

'cause I don't count extending the 2017 tax cuts.

Marko Papic:

That's not, that's not cutting anyone's taxes.

Marko Papic:

So no one's gonna have their taxes cut effectively.

Marko Papic:

Like you, you are not delivering on your campaign promises.

Marko Papic:

And in fact, you made fun of Nikki Haley for wanting to cut entitlements and

Marko Papic:

you're kind of cutting entitlements.

Marko Papic:

You know, not as much as like I. Mosque wants or conservatives

Marko Papic:

want, but you're cutting.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And then finally the trade deal.

Marko Papic:

The trade deal where basically like the us you know, he did the Liberation

Marko Papic:

Day and a lot of his Bentonite fans were like, yeah baby, we're gonna

Marko Papic:

make bicycles in this country.

Marko Papic:

You know, we're have John, we're gonna have summer, and, and Oh,

Marko Papic:

what's, what's a really good name?

Marko Papic:

Summer And Finn are gonna start working and picking strawberries.

Marko Papic:

You know, like, that's not gonna happen.

Marko Papic:

Those things are not gonna happen.

Marko Papic:

America's still gonna trade because the irony, and I said this on our

Marko Papic:

last podcast, podcast, the irony of all of this is that if you want to

Marko Papic:

collect revenue from tariffs, you kind of need trade because tariffs

Marko Papic:

are attacks imposed on imports.

Marko Papic:

So America has to continue to trade with the rest of the world

Marko Papic:

if we're going to actually generate revenue to offset the deficits.

Marko Papic:

So the point is that this administration is starting to

Marko Papic:

look less and less populist.

Marko Papic:

And here's where I wanna say something.

Marko Papic:

I know we are.

Marko Papic:

How many minutes?

Marko Papic:

We're 42 minutes.

Marko Papic:

We're always at a 45.

Marko Papic:

We're always 40.

Marko Papic:

45 minute when I think the biggest takeaway comes, I'm sorry, listeners.

Marko Papic:

This is, you know, this is just how it is.

Marko Papic:

This, this is the, if you're an advertising, this is

Jacob Shapiro:

the smic structure of our podcast.

Jacob Shapiro:

Ooh.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's a

Marko Papic:

It is, it is.

Marko Papic:

And if you're, if you're at a, if you're a, if you're an

Marko Papic:

advertiser, it's a great thing.

Marko Papic:

'cause everybody's gotta like wait until the gym comes later.

Marko Papic:

Right.

Marko Papic:

So here's what I'm getting at.

Marko Papic:

This is a playbook we've been watching in Europe for the last 15 years.

Marko Papic:

There is nothing new to what Trump is doing.

Marko Papic:

Nothing.

Marko Papic:

So for the past 15 years in Europe, anti-establishment populist, I don't like

Marko Papic:

the term right wing, but fine, right-wing.

Marko Papic:

Right wing, but it's not fair 'cause it's, there's a ton of left Wink.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Left wing populist parties in Europe.

Marko Papic:

True Fins, Swedish Democrats, Marine Lapin, Git Builders, uh,

Marko Papic:

Podemos, Vox, five star movement.

Marko Papic:

Fratelli, Talia, Leor, Lego, what?

Marko Papic:

Whatever.

Marko Papic:

There's a ton of them.

Marko Papic:

They've all followed the following model.

Marko Papic:

They start campaigning.

Marko Papic:

European Commission is a bunch of elitist, you know, bureaucrats.

Marko Papic:

They're not gonna tell me how much I'm gonna blow out the budget deficit.

Marko Papic:

I'm gonna spend as much as I want.

Marko Papic:

Structural reforms on retirement.

Marko Papic:

That was evil.

Marko Papic:

Increasing retirement age.

Marko Papic:

We're gonna reverse all those policies that the elitist imposed on you.

Marko Papic:

Trade.

Marko Papic:

Trade relationships.

Marko Papic:

Less America, more Russia.

Marko Papic:

Right?

Marko Papic:

Lots of these guys love Russia.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And then Euro area.

Marko Papic:

We don't want the Euro, we wanna leave the Euro.

Marko Papic:

So those are kind of the socioeconomic policies that a

Marko Papic:

lot of these populists walk into.

Marko Papic:

And then they come to power, or they become part of a governing coalition.

Marko Papic:

And the bond market riots yields go up, borrowing costs go up, equities

Marko Papic:

go down, the economy slows down.

Marko Papic:

People start worrying about their retirement savings.

Marko Papic:

They start worrying about their jobs.

Marko Papic:

And suddenly, suddenly all these populists, anti-establishment,

Marko Papic:

far left trotskyite far right, neo fascists suddenly enjoy the soft

Marko Papic:

leather, hand stitched leather in their government issued a eight saloon.

Marko Papic:

Suddenly they like the way that their suit.

Marko Papic:

Crunches with that smooth journeying engineering, the soft

Marko Papic:

closing of the door sounds nice.

Marko Papic:

They start liking it.

Marko Papic:

They like the smell of power.

Marko Papic:

They like being in charge and they don't want the society to collapse

Marko Papic:

so that they can have their, you know, like anti-establishment

Marko Papic:

revolt, and then they start migrating to the middle on every issue.

Marko Papic:

That actually matters to the pocketbooks of the people who they now rule or are

Marko Papic:

part of a coalition to rule, except on one issue, which is immigration.

Marko Papic:

Boom.

Marko Papic:

Instead, not only do they keep their policy, they tripled down

Marko Papic:

on anti-immigrant policies.

Marko Papic:

Why?

Marko Papic:

Because immigrants don't vote.

Marko Papic:

You know what I mean?

Marko Papic:

They don't vote.

Marko Papic:

And some asylum policies have gone outta whack across the western world.

Marko Papic:

Like facts, you know, like, what are we supposed to do here?

Marko Papic:

This is a fact.

Marko Papic:

Um, and so it's an easy win.

Marko Papic:

So when you lose your credentials as a populist, as a man or woman of the people,

Marko Papic:

when you lose those credentials on every single issue, how do you maintain them?

Marko Papic:

Well, you maintain them by tripling down on anti-immigrant policies.

Marko Papic:

That's the way to do it.

Marko Papic:

For example, Italy just had a referendum on citizenship and the Prime Minister

Marko Papic:

Georgia Maloney, effectively didn't want to say how she was gonna vote.

Marko Papic:

She didn't even wanna vote.

Marko Papic:

She showed up at the voting booth and did not cast a vote.

Marko Papic:

And by the way, this was not something to give everyone

Marko Papic:

in Italy, like a citizenship.

Marko Papic:

It was just like reducing the number of years from 10 to five, like very

Marko Papic:

modest changes on citizenship in Italy.

Marko Papic:

And you know, like the.

Marko Papic:

By the way, this is not about illegal immigration, right?

Marko Papic:

These are people in Italy who are, who are like, who working

Marko Papic:

and speak Italian fluently.

Marko Papic:

And, uh, and, and she was still opposed to that referendum, but

Marko Papic:

George Maloney is not, I'm sorry for Trump fans who might like her.

Marko Papic:

She's a centrist as it gets, man.

Marko Papic:

Like she's maybe the most competent policymaker in the entire western

Marko Papic:

world in terms of like navigating the markets and being fiscally responsible.

Marko Papic:

And you know, like George Meloy, I mean, she's basically a member of

Marko Papic:

a neofascist party for tele deity.

Marko Papic:

No, it doesn't matter.

Marko Papic:

She has become completely establishment, completely 180 degree

Marko Papic:

turn for that party even on Ukraine.

Marko Papic:

Even on foreign policy.

Marko Papic:

Well, she, she's also,

Jacob Shapiro:

she's an interesting, she's more interesting than most of them because

Jacob Shapiro:

she's always been anti anti-Russia.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like she has taken, she's like a weird mix of all these different

Jacob Shapiro:

things, and she's always had more of a head on her shoulders, which, you

Jacob Shapiro:

know, you said Fratelli Italia, like she's the sister in Fratelli Italia.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, she's the one who actually, like, she, she's always been a really,

Jacob Shapiro:

really compelling figure because she actually, I think, understand she is,

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I think most of the people you're talking about, it's instinctual.

Jacob Shapiro:

They sort of move that direction because they had, they have no other choice.

Jacob Shapiro:

Whereas my impression of Maloney is she is one of the few self-aware

Jacob Shapiro:

politicians who was like, no, no, no, no.

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I know where I want to go and I know how I want to get from point A

Jacob Shapiro:

to point B, and I know which levers I have to pull and whose ass I have to

Jacob Shapiro:

kiss and where I have to be seen and the right balance of all these things.

Jacob Shapiro:

No, that's fair.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like she's a, she, she's a, a head the cream of the crop.

Marko Papic:

But, but, and at the same time on immigration variant immigrant.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

And very successful in pursuing that.

Marko Papic:

So the, so I agree with you.

Marko Papic:

I, I, I think what we should do, by the way, for one of our next segments

Marko Papic:

is we should rank policy makers.

Marko Papic:

Yes.

Jacob Shapiro:

We should.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Trade value.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, trade value.

Marko Papic:

Oh, trade value.

Marko Papic:

Right.

Jacob Shapiro:

I can't wait.

Jacob Shapiro:

If you

Marko Papic:

could trade your, your president for, for another, oh God.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's so good.

Jacob Shapiro:

Let, let's do that.

Jacob Shapiro:

We got it.

Marko Papic:

I mean, I'm taking, I'm gonna, I'm gonna announce

Marko Papic:

my first pick right now.

Marko Papic:

Georgia Maloney.

Marko Papic:

I think she is absolutely crushing it on every, like the way she plays Trump.

Marko Papic:

I mean, she's just like so good.

Marko Papic:

She's so good.

Marko Papic:

Now the point still stands though.

Marko Papic:

We've seen this for 15 years in Europe.

Marko Papic:

Like I work with investors and clients in finance and they come to me and

Marko Papic:

for 15 years I've had to answer this stupid question, will Europe collapse?

Marko Papic:

No, it won't.

Marko Papic:

It will not collapse.

Marko Papic:

They're all faux populists.

Marko Papic:

Faux.

Marko Papic:

They're faking it.

Marko Papic:

Except alternative for deland has not actually changed its policies

Marko Papic:

on a lot of this stuff, but a lot of these other parties have, and I

Marko Papic:

think that we might be witnessing it.

Marko Papic:

This is how the protests in LA might be profound.

Marko Papic:

Jacob, we might be witnessing actually.

Marko Papic:

A shift in the Trump administration.

Marko Papic:

This may allow, so you are making fun of the Trump administration when

Marko Papic:

you say like, Hey, all this chaos is going on and they're sending the

Marko Papic:

national guards to la What I, what I see it as almost as a positive because

Marko Papic:

it allows the big man to be big.

Marko Papic:

It allows the populist anti-establishment, you know, white House to pretend there's

Marko Papic:

still populist and anti-establishment, but actually they start cutting deals.

Marko Papic:

Yep.

Marko Papic:

That a lot of liberals are gonna make fun President Trump for.

Marko Papic:

But at the end of the day, like deals are fine, deals are good.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

He promised the moon, he's gonna get us to the roof of the house.

Marko Papic:

Who cares?

Marko Papic:

At the end of the day, he might be pivoting towards much more centrism.

Marko Papic:

Than, uh, that people think, tell me why I'm wrong.

Marko Papic:

No, take the other side.

Jacob Shapiro:

Well, I'm not gonna take completely the other side, but I, I have

Jacob Shapiro:

sort of three things to throw in there.

Jacob Shapiro:

The first is just an aside, you're right about a FD but what's been

Jacob Shapiro:

interesting about the German context is that the C-D-U-C-S-U basically took,

Jacob Shapiro:

like, took that part of the a FD the part that would move to the center

Jacob Shapiro:

and was just like, okay, we're gonna take that for ourselves now so you

Jacob Shapiro:

can sit out there with the crazy shit.

Jacob Shapiro:

And now this E-D-U-C-S-U has rebranded, sort of more like, has taken those things.

Jacob Shapiro:

So it's like an interesting centrist party that is, and, and we'll see if it works.

Jacob Shapiro:

The other thing on the deals is, and this is, you know, one of those

Jacob Shapiro:

areas where things make sense up to a point and then it becomes farcical

Jacob Shapiro:

again because, you know, there are these US China trade talks coming.

Jacob Shapiro:

You and I have both been on this, that this is gonna be something that

Jacob Shapiro:

gets done sooner rather than later.

Jacob Shapiro:

Meanwhile, the US Japan trade talks continue to be absolutely abysmal.

Jacob Shapiro:

They just had their fifth round and the Japanese negotiator

Jacob Shapiro:

came out and said, we've agreed.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, let's see if I have the quote.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, uh, 'cause I want to get him exactly right because it

Jacob Shapiro:

was such an amazing quote.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, we have not found any point of agreement.

Jacob Shapiro:

On anything.

Jacob Shapiro:

They're not agreeing on absolutely anything.

Jacob Shapiro:

And that's like your closest ally there.

Jacob Shapiro:

So at the same, and you know, there was also that reporting about how they

Jacob Shapiro:

literally paused a trade negotiation because Lutnick and Cent, and I forget

Jacob Shapiro:

who the third one was in the room, but somebody else was in the room too,

Jacob Shapiro:

and they had to pause because none, uh, Jameson Greer, the US uh, trade

Jacob Shapiro:

representative, they were all in the room negotiating with the Japanese

Jacob Shapiro:

and they had different positions.

Jacob Shapiro:

So they had to tell the Japanese to stop for a second so the three of

Jacob Shapiro:

them could go like, figure out what they were actually talking about.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, there's just kind of an insanity there.

Jacob Shapiro:

But I, I want to go back to the, the point about immigration, and this is actually on

Jacob Shapiro:

my mind 'cause we haven't said this yet.

Jacob Shapiro:

The Willamette River is behind me.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm in Portland.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm speaking at a forestry event, timber event here in Portland,

Jacob Shapiro:

um, in just a couple of hours.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, and as you might imagine, um, this is a big issue for them, not because

Jacob Shapiro:

immigrants are cutting down trees or anything like that, but because the

Jacob Shapiro:

timber industry is thinking about real estate and home construction

Jacob Shapiro:

over a 15, 20 year time horizon.

Jacob Shapiro:

And it's been a really good last 15, 20 years.

Jacob Shapiro:

In part because in the early 1990s, you had a lot of immigrants come to

Jacob Shapiro:

the United States and even the illegal ones, eventually they stay here and

Jacob Shapiro:

eventually they wanna live in houses.

Jacob Shapiro:

And so if you have population growth, which is us, which for, if you're pro

Jacob Shapiro:

these sort of cyclical things, you want to have lots of natural births, but you also

Jacob Shapiro:

want to have lot, lots of immigration.

Jacob Shapiro:

So if you look at the early 1990s, mid 1990s, you could say, oh, well,

Jacob Shapiro:

natural births were falling a little bit, but still relatively high.

Jacob Shapiro:

And you had all these immigrants that were coming to the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

So you get this period where there's gonna be a lot of demand for

Jacob Shapiro:

lumber over the next 15, 20 years.

Jacob Shapiro:

Now I'm supposed to go to this audience and tell them, well, so they want to

Jacob Shapiro:

know over the next 15, 20 years, what are you thinking about these things?

Jacob Shapiro:

And most of, not all of 'em, I'm gonna make some contrarian arguments to them

Jacob Shapiro:

about why they should be optimistic.

Jacob Shapiro:

But most of the data.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sucks.

Jacob Shapiro:

And this data that really sucks is US demographics because US births have

Jacob Shapiro:

fallen off a cliff and we actually had a really high number of international

Jacob Shapiro:

arrivals last year, but it's making up for a couple years of none.

Jacob Shapiro:

And you can imagine after the travel ban and President Trump tripling

Jacob Shapiro:

down in immigration that these things are gonna go away in general.

Jacob Shapiro:

So I think it's easier for the Europeans to to crunch on.

Jacob Shapiro:

Immigration in part.

Jacob Shapiro:

'cause you know, they have, it's the gift that keeps on giving

Jacob Shapiro:

Angela Merkel lecturing the rest of Europe on being moral because

Jacob Shapiro:

they aren't taking their migrants.

Jacob Shapiro:

And also the nature of those migrants.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, yes, some of them are just hard workers, but Europe's a lot more exposed

Jacob Shapiro:

to jihadists that are coming up through the Middle East or things like that.

Jacob Shapiro:

Or folks that are, you know, not bringing tangible skills but are literally

Jacob Shapiro:

just looking for anywhere to go.

Jacob Shapiro:

Whereas the US.

Jacob Shapiro:

Sorry to be crude about it is getting a higher class of migrant

Jacob Shapiro:

that is coming to the border.

Jacob Shapiro:

You're getting in, you know, countries in South America, whether it's Ecuador

Jacob Shapiro:

or Columbia or Venezuela, like people who are skilled and educated and very

Jacob Shapiro:

good at what they do and escaping regimes that have become authoritarian

Jacob Shapiro:

or they've lost their political position.

Jacob Shapiro:

And so they're coming to the United States and they can do like everything

Jacob Shapiro:

from your menial labor all the way up into, into some of these things.

Jacob Shapiro:

And I guess the point I'm just making is like, it seems to me that

Jacob Shapiro:

President Trump, it's, even with the deals that he's making, it's not

Jacob Shapiro:

gonna look good for the US economy.

Jacob Shapiro:

And if you're gonna triple down on immigration too, which has always been

Jacob Shapiro:

a US superpower, our ability to attract the best, our ability to integrate them.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, and you're going to sort of knock that out too, like then all

Jacob Shapiro:

of the, the growth figures over the next 2, 3, 4 years and even longer.

Jacob Shapiro:

Look really bad.

Jacob Shapiro:

So I think that's the pushback.

Jacob Shapiro:

The pushback is not that the playbook is not gonna go the way that you think it is.

Jacob Shapiro:

I think that's exactly right.

Jacob Shapiro:

And I think that President Trump pulled a rabbit out of his hat because he gets

Jacob Shapiro:

to be the law and order president now, and he is gonna go after immigration,

Jacob Shapiro:

and he is got lots of support for that.

Jacob Shapiro:

But in doing that, combined with all the other things that he's done, like, it just

Jacob Shapiro:

seems to me that like the US macro picture goes from worse to worse every single day.

Jacob Shapiro:

Because if you're not gonna fix this thing, and like you're gonna have interest

Jacob Shapiro:

rates going up and the dollar is gonna continue to decline and like, like you

Jacob Shapiro:

just put the picture, the macro picture together, it starts to look very grim.

Jacob Shapiro:

So I guess that's the pushback.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

I mean, uh, I mean, look, that that might be the case if President

Marko Papic:

Harris was in the White House too.

Jacob Shapiro:

Not on, I think that not, not necessarily on migration.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Uh, I mean the problem.

Marko Papic:

Migration.

Marko Papic:

Is that and not

Jacob Shapiro:

on

Marko Papic:

trade?

Marko Papic:

Well, I don't know.

Jacob Shapiro:

Not on trade and not on migration.

Jacob Shapiro:

I not, I'm not saying President Harris would've been great.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm sure she would've had her fair share of mistakes.

Jacob Shapiro:

They would've been entirely her own, but they wouldn't have

Jacob Shapiro:

been this cocktail of mistakes.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

So, so I agree with that.

Marko Papic:

It's just that like, I think you're speaking of secular issues that, um,

Marko Papic:

like, you know, I think there's a lot of secular problems that the US has.

Marko Papic:

Uh, the number one being that the deficit is too high, that the public sector is

Marko Papic:

effectively crowding out the private.

Marko Papic:

And I think that that issue, uh, is truly bipartisan.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

If you are searching for a bipartisan, for a hope for bipartisanship,

Marko Papic:

it's in the fiscal deficit.

Marko Papic:

Like that's where it happened.

Marko Papic:

Um, but yes, no, I, um, what I would say is just that I think that when I

Marko Papic:

say that President Trump can move to the center and kind of shove under the

Marko Papic:

carpet some of his, uh, populism and anti-establishment rhetoric and trade, um.

Marko Papic:

I think that this issue will allow him to do that.

Marko Papic:

That's it.

Marko Papic:

Now, it, that pivot doesn't mean that you erase the scars that you produced

Marko Papic:

through the first three months of your presidency or six months now.

Marko Papic:

Um, so yeah, I mean, for sure.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, that's, and remember

Jacob Shapiro:

like he did a phase one US China trade deal in his first

Jacob Shapiro:

administration and the Chinese lived up to roughly, I have the number right here.

Jacob Shapiro:

58% of their commitment.

Jacob Shapiro:

Ak it wasn't a deal, to your point, it was a TV deal.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's, we sign a deal one day and we say there's gonna be X amount of trade

Jacob Shapiro:

and then there's not gonna be, and if you look at how China's doing things

Jacob Shapiro:

like, I don't think they're gonna like actually follow, they'll follow through

Jacob Shapiro:

on some things, but they're gonna vertically integrate and create domestic

Jacob Shapiro:

champions and have self-sufficiency.

Jacob Shapiro:

The other thing, listen, and I know you want to push back, but, um, Robin

Jacob Shapiro:

Brooks had a really good, he, he, he.

Jacob Shapiro:

He had some really good data that he put out just this week where

Jacob Shapiro:

he looked at US China trade, and it's down, if you look over the

Jacob Shapiro:

first like six months of the year.

Jacob Shapiro:

But you know where trade is up, like Chinese exports are up, they're up

Jacob Shapiro:

to Singapore, they're up to Thailand, to Thailand, they're up on Vietnam.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, like trade is like water.

Jacob Shapiro:

So like Chinese goods are actually probably still gonna

Jacob Shapiro:

get to the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

They're just gonna come through trans shipments markets.

Jacob Shapiro:

And unless you erect full bare, like the 70 foot tariff wall on

Jacob Shapiro:

all sides of the United States, like the stuff is gonna get in.

Jacob Shapiro:

So like, even there it's like, uh, but my point is just that, yeah, those

Jacob Shapiro:

scars, I think like China's gonna say one thing and then in the meantime it's

Jacob Shapiro:

gonna be like, oh, and we're creating our own semiconductor industry and

Jacob Shapiro:

we're creating our own biotech industry.

Jacob Shapiro:

And eventually once we have these things and we don't need you anymore,

Jacob Shapiro:

like you will encounter our Great wall and, and you'll enjoy it.

Marko Papic:

Well, so, okay.

Marko Papic:

Couple of things on that.

Marko Papic:

I think that phase one deal was called phase one because it was phase one

Marko Papic:

and I think that it could have been a great deal, but COVID happened.

Marko Papic:

Yes, COVID and, uh, I mean.

Marko Papic:

And I know I'm parroting what President Trump says, but I'm parroting it

Marko Papic:

because it is correct objectively.

Marko Papic:

And then Joe Biden took over and did not start any negotiations

Marko Papic:

with China over any trade.

Marko Papic:

In fact, he just kept putting tariffs.

Marko Papic:

So why would it, it's just not fair to President Trump and Robert Lighthizer.

Marko Papic:

What happened with that deal?

Marko Papic:

I mean, like they negotiated a deal.

Marko Papic:

China's not gonna keep buying soybeans and natural gas in the middle of a pandemic.

Marko Papic:

And then when the pandemic ends, there's a different president in

Marko Papic:

the White House who doesn't engage them in any conversations at all.

Marko Papic:

So why would they abide by the phase one deal?

Marko Papic:

And this is somehow, like, this is somehow put on President Trump's

Marko Papic:

balance sheet as his error.

Marko Papic:

But why It was the Joe Biden pre uh, presidency.

Marko Papic:

That refused to engage the Chinese with any negotiations.

Marko Papic:

Why?

Marko Papic:

Because they were afraid that the Chinese would say yes, this is

Marko Papic:

the irony of the Democratic party.

Marko Papic:

They cannot make a deal with China.

Marko Papic:

'cause if they do, any deal they make, even if it's incredibly good

Marko Papic:

for America, will be seen negatively domestically because they will be seen

Marko Papic:

as, you know, defeatists and you know, basically not good enough of a deal.

Marko Papic:

So what I'm getting at is that it was very difficult for the Chinese to abide by

Marko Papic:

the phase one deal because they expected there to be phase two, phase three.

Marko Papic:

And Joe Biden administration, they came in and they were like, nah, look, we can't,

Marko Papic:

domestically, we can't deal with you.

Marko Papic:

So I think it's an unfair, um, you know, it's an unfair

Marko Papic:

argument that phase one sucks.

Marko Papic:

And I hear this a lot, I hear this a lot from both conservatives who say that

Marko Papic:

you cannot make a deal with China, but you also hear it a lot with liberals who

Marko Papic:

both say that you cannot make a deal with China and that President Trump is weak.

Marko Papic:

The second thing I would say is that I think that this is where.

Marko Papic:

The Mennonites are going to eventually self emulate.

Marko Papic:

This is where, no, this is where eventually the reality of the planet

Marko Papic:

we live on is that you will absolutely have to continue to trade with China.

Marko Papic:

Like that's the reality of our debate that we had last time.

Marko Papic:

Like, you cannot stop trading with China because no matter what their

Marko Papic:

intentions are, because if you do, your own allies will come in and undercut you.

Marko Papic:

Like France is not gonna stop selling Airbus airplanes if you say China's evil.

Marko Papic:

And I don't wanna sell Boeing airplanes.

Marko Papic:

So America has to trade with China.

Marko Papic:

It has to, the question is, how is it going to do that?

Marko Papic:

And Donald Trump is quite frankly, the only hope that the US has to

Marko Papic:

negotiate with China because the rest of the Republican party is so full

Marko Papic:

of, uh, like national security hawks, but at an idiotic level, right, that

Marko Papic:

don't wanna engage with China at all.

Marko Papic:

So people who think that buying a bicycle from China.

Marko Papic:

Is a national security threat.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

So that's what I'm talking about.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And that the Democrats, the Democrats who understand the

Marko Papic:

mathematics, their problem is that they're politically extremely weak.

Marko Papic:

So they can't engage China in meaningful trade talks because they're

Marko Papic:

afraid of how to sell the deal they might make with China domestically.

Marko Papic:

So it's funny, but Donald Trump is actually the only human

Marko Papic:

being on the planet that can actually make a deal with China.

Marko Papic:

That's not halfway bad.

Marko Papic:

And the reason I see that is that it's perfectly fine for America

Marko Papic:

to keep buying Chinese goods.

Marko Papic:

And yeah, it's perfectly fine if those goods are, then you know that revenue

Marko Papic:

is taxed by the Chinese Communist Party and they build hypersonic cruise.

Marko Papic:

Miss sells with that revenue.

Marko Papic:

That's how the world works.

Marko Papic:

As long as America gets a fair deal where the Chinese are also buying US goods, and

Marko Papic:

that's what the Lighthizer approach was.

Marko Papic:

Phase one was like, Hey, buy some of our commodities.

Marko Papic:

I called it at the time, pejoratively a medieval trade

Jacob Shapiro:

deal.

Jacob Shapiro:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

What did America get from China?

Marko Papic:

Like, oh, buy our soybeans.

Marko Papic:

Whoa, great.

Marko Papic:

But the phase two is about, Hey man, you do not import any services from the us.

Marko Papic:

That is where we have an advantage.

Marko Papic:

The US has an advantage in services.

Marko Papic:

You have an advantage in like widgets and consumer electronics.

Marko Papic:

Cool, we'll buy your consumer electronics, but you can't stop our,

Marko Papic:

you know, insurance companies coming in and doing an m and a with yours,

Marko Papic:

like Geico should, should be allowed to come to China, buy a bunch of, you

Marko Papic:

know, poorly run Chinese insurance companies and like, boom, there you go.

Marko Papic:

That would be beneficial.

Marko Papic:

So that's where I think that cracking China open could be very beneficial

Marko Papic:

to the US and to the relationship.

Marko Papic:

Um, and I think that that's where he's headed and that's why I

Marko Papic:

think what's interesting is that negotiating with China first is a

Marko Papic:

brilliant strategy and here's why.

Marko Papic:

Telling Vietnam that they're not allowed to take Chinese.

Marko Papic:

FDI.

Marko Papic:

That's stupid.

Marko Papic:

Vietnam is going to laugh at your face.

Marko Papic:

So is Indonesia, so is Malaysia.

Marko Papic:

This was the Stephen Iran approach.

Marko Papic:

Like people owe us for our liberty, so they're gonna have

Marko Papic:

to like, make a deal with us.

Marko Papic:

Nobody owes America pretty much anything unless you're South Korea.

Marko Papic:

Israel, Ukraine, maybe Estonia.

Marko Papic:

Who did I miss?

Marko Papic:

Uh, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, may, no, Japan is a nuclear power.

Marko Papic:

I'm not even like Yeah, if they wanted to they have nukes.

Marko Papic:

They're fine.

Marko Papic:

Look, my point is it's, there's very, very, very few countries in the world they

Marko Papic:

can actually like us, can actually bully.

Marko Papic:

And so what President Trump did, instead of going with the Howard Lutnick, Peter

Marko Papic:

Navarro approach, he was like, okay, cool.

Marko Papic:

You guys don't wanna make a deal with us to keep our Chinese FDI out.

Marko Papic:

They, i'll undercut you because I'll negotiate with China first.

Marko Papic:

I'll make a deal with China.

Marko Papic:

And so that's, I I do think that there's like, that is a smart approach.

Marko Papic:

Uh, now.

Marko Papic:

Does he have a lot of, uh, weapons against China?

Marko Papic:

No, I agree with you.

Marko Papic:

The US is gonna have to do a lot of bending over here, uh, or, or kowtowing,

Marko Papic:

however you wanna describe it.

Marko Papic:

Um, so that, that I agree with, uh, but I don't think that it's

Marko Papic:

stupid to make a deal with China.

Marko Papic:

No,

Jacob Shapiro:

but, but I think you're onto something with what you said about

Jacob Shapiro:

immigration because you know, if you had asked me even eight weeks ago, like

Jacob Shapiro:

the bipartisan issue that you could get both sides to agree on and which it

Jacob Shapiro:

has been a bipartisan issue now since roughly 2015, is that China is bad.

Jacob Shapiro:

And what we're talking about here is the Trump administration saying,

Jacob Shapiro:

uh, like maybe China's okay, can we take it from China being bad?

Jacob Shapiro:

And both sides hating China to, Hey, immigrants are bad and, and China's okay.

Jacob Shapiro:

'cause we're gonna make a trade deal with them.

Jacob Shapiro:

'cause we need to trade with them and don't look too closely, abandon

Jacob Shapiro:

all the other guys the problem.

Marko Papic:

No, I hear you.

Marko Papic:

I hear the problem is that China is bad is for a children's book

Marko Papic:

that's like seven years, like.

Marko Papic:

People in Washington DC who say that have a mental for, uh,

Marko Papic:

like aptitude of a 7-year-old.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah, which I think also probably describes the median

Jacob Shapiro:

voter if, if you look back at Pew data, one of the really interesting

Jacob Shapiro:

things here, and this, this goes to a larger conversation about how like

Jacob Shapiro:

top-down political views eventually make their way to the median voter.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like if you go back 10, 12 years, um, older people were always suspicious

Jacob Shapiro:

of China 'cause they remembered the Cold War and China was communists

Jacob Shapiro:

and they remembered Mao or stories of MAO or things like that.

Jacob Shapiro:

But younger gen, the younger generation in the United States actually liked

Jacob Shapiro:

China, like had no negative feelings about them, didn't remember the Cold

Jacob Shapiro:

War, weren't thinking about communism.

Jacob Shapiro:

And if you trust the data on the Chinese side, it was relatively true.

Jacob Shapiro:

That has changed over the last 10 years and it's changed, I

Jacob Shapiro:

don't think, because young people suddenly decided to hate China.

Jacob Shapiro:

But because they have been fed an unceasing diet, to your point

Jacob Shapiro:

of the 7-year-old point of view.

Jacob Shapiro:

And it's one of the only things that they get any kind of bipartisan agreement

Jacob Shapiro:

from, which is China's a threat.

Jacob Shapiro:

And this has been a, this has sort of been a, a refrain in US politics for

Jacob Shapiro:

a hundred plus years that China's a threat and they were the original, not

Jacob Shapiro:

the original immigrants, but like, you know, you think about what happened

Jacob Shapiro:

in the early 19 hundreds out west, um, with Chinese immigrants, um, and all

Jacob Shapiro:

of that sort of dynamic there as well.

Jacob Shapiro:

So, no, I, I hear you.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

So

Marko Papic:

I hear you.

Marko Papic:

But I, but I would say two things.

Marko Papic:

First of all, um,

Marko Papic:

there can be a bipartisan consensus that, you know, we should all go to the moon

Marko Papic:

and live in its craters, but you cannot do anything about it 'cause it's insane.

Marko Papic:

And so what the United States of America has now found out over the

Marko Papic:

last eight years is that if we don't live in a bipolar world, if you don't

Marko Papic:

have your allies supporting you, then saying China bad is vacuous.

Marko Papic:

In the 19th century, people understood the reality of multipolarity, which is

Marko Papic:

you can have an adversary and you still have to trade with them because if you

Marko Papic:

don't, your own allies will undercut you.

Marko Papic:

This is a very important game theoretical dynamic that you know,

Marko Papic:

quite frankly, I described like six years ago, people thought I had

Marko Papic:

three heads when I described it.

Marko Papic:

It's been correct US has continued to trade with China.

Marko Papic:

Actually it's increased its trade with China over the last

Marko Papic:

five years despite a consensus.

Marko Papic:

Why?

Marko Papic:

Because you cannot unravel this relationship quickly.

Marko Papic:

In fact, in fact, you trade with your enemy in a multiple or ordering

Marko Papic:

of the world because the French, the South Koreans, the Japanese,

Marko Papic:

the Japanese who are right next to China, supposedly at risk of war with

Marko Papic:

them, the Japanese are not gonna stop selling goods and services to them.

Marko Papic:

And that's because geopolitical power is based on material wealth.

Marko Papic:

To accrue that material wealth, you need to actually trade with your adversary.

Marko Papic:

So I think that China is bad meme.

Marko Papic:

It's a meme, it means nothing.

Marko Papic:

And you cannot actually do foreign policy or trade policy based off of it.

Marko Papic:

Well, no.

Marko Papic:

If it meant, on the other hand, if

Jacob Shapiro:

it meant nothing, then he wouldn't have to do the pivot to

Jacob Shapiro:

immigration because like his base and a large swath of the American

Jacob Shapiro:

electorate does think China is bad.

Jacob Shapiro:

And he's been selling that since the first term.

Jacob Shapiro:

So he does have to do some, some like, um, some PR management around that.

Jacob Shapiro:

Because if he's gonna make a deal with Xi Jinping, he has to at least, and

Jacob Shapiro:

it doesn't have to be much like he has shown that he can do it fairly easily

Jacob Shapiro:

with the Magac crowd and his supporters.

Jacob Shapiro:

But he does have to just say like, Hey, you know, I got the deal.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like he kowtowed to me, like I'm the guy.

Jacob Shapiro:

China's with us now.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like they've made the deal.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like they have to make that move.

Marko Papic:

The second thing I would say to you, and this is more controversial.

Marko Papic:

But I think that the American view of China has peaked in

Marko Papic:

terms of how negative it is.

Marko Papic:

And actually the pure research, I'm looking at it right now, the pure

Marko Papic:

research study that you point out, uh, it basically negative view of

Marko Papic:

China was, uh, it was 50 negative, the 55 negative 35 positive in 2014.

Marko Papic:

And then right around when he started making those deals,

Marko Papic:

it kind of actually narrowed.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And then COVID just absolutely exploded to negativity.

Marko Papic:

Right.

Marko Papic:

It's actually rolled over.

Marko Papic:

That's good.

Marko Papic:

Now it's still in the seventies, but it's gone from 83 to 77

Marko Papic:

over the last three years.

Marko Papic:

And the favorable view has gone from 14 to 21%.

Marko Papic:

So I think we've seen the peak.

Marko Papic:

I don't think it's gonna go down to 50 50, but it's interesting.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, it's interesting that there is a decline, like the number

Marko Papic:

of, uh, people who believe.

Marko Papic:

Who have a very unfavorable view of China in America was in 2024 was 43%.

Marko Papic:

The varies down to 33%.

Marko Papic:

So that's a significance decline.

Marko Papic:

Um, and I think part of that, by the way, part of that is

Marko Papic:

that Trump is the president.

Marko Papic:

And I think part of that is that Trump understands this multipolar dynamic

Marko Papic:

that in a multipolar world, China's clearly an adversary of the US.

Marko Papic:

And to be fair to the Chinese America is clearly an adversary of China.

Marko Papic:

But that doesn't mean that you can decouple.

Marko Papic:

It's just impossible to do that

Jacob Shapiro:

Well,

Marko Papic:

and, and, and it's impossible because of the multipolar

Marko Papic:

world, unless of course the rest of the world decides to follow America on this.

Marko Papic:

But it would require China to do something like invade Taiwan or be

Marko Papic:

extremely negative in some way, or like to change the dynamic of the planet.

Marko Papic:

And so that's where I think the deal is inevitable.

Marko Papic:

And the weird thing that most of our liberal listeners don't want to hear.

Marko Papic:

The truth is that only really Trump can make a deal with China, just

Marko Papic:

like only Nixon could go to China.

Marko Papic:

As the old adage goes,

Jacob Shapiro:

yeah, the the Democrats.

Jacob Shapiro:

Have been stuck on China as an issue literally since FDR, you

Jacob Shapiro:

know, sort of picked the wrong side.

Jacob Shapiro:

And, and, uh, Truman picked the wrong side on the Chinese Civil War, and it's been

Jacob Shapiro:

a bugaboo for the Democrats ever since.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like, you could tie the decisions in Vietnam to the Democrats, insecurity

Jacob Shapiro:

about their decisions about China in the Korean War, and they just,

Jacob Shapiro:

they have not been able to clean out the skeletons in their closet.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, one other thing I want to, I wanna say, and then we can either

Jacob Shapiro:

go here or then we should talk about California secession, which is this

Jacob Shapiro:

also what you just said underscores why it's so important maybe for the

Jacob Shapiro:

Trump administration to get a deal.

Jacob Shapiro:

Now.

Jacob Shapiro:

I reject the notion that he thinks the world is multipolar.

Jacob Shapiro:

I will, I will go with you.

Jacob Shapiro:

That he has an instinct for where power is and that he could see that China is a big

Jacob Shapiro:

power that he needs to interact with them.

Jacob Shapiro:

But I, I don't think it's like intellectually codified that way.

Jacob Shapiro:

I think it's just instinctual.

Jacob Shapiro:

But you're right in the sense that US and China, they're

Jacob Shapiro:

trading more in an absolute sense.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's going much.

Jacob Shapiro:

And that China's actually a bigger share of US exports in a lot of different

Jacob Shapiro:

areas than it was even five years ago.

Jacob Shapiro:

But.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's not true for China.

Jacob Shapiro:

China's been reducing its dependence on the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

So even as it imports more, the US share of some of those things has gone down.

Jacob Shapiro:

So if you're looking sort of since 2008 mm-hmm.

Jacob Shapiro:

The United States has become more, dependent is the wrong word, but more

Jacob Shapiro:

exposed to exports and trade with China.

Jacob Shapiro:

And China.

Jacob Shapiro:

While it's still huge, it's still a huge vulnerability enough that

Jacob Shapiro:

they have to make the deals like they have to be at the table.

Jacob Shapiro:

They have to make a deal here too, for the things that are going on in

Jacob Shapiro:

their economy, but the graph is going in the opposite direction for them.

Jacob Shapiro:

They have been successful at very slowly diversifying from the United

Jacob Shapiro:

States, finding other export markets, building up vertical champions.

Jacob Shapiro:

So if you keep going, if you like extrapolate out, the United States

Jacob Shapiro:

is gonna become more dependent and China will become less dependent.

Jacob Shapiro:

Which to your point is maybe why the United States really has to say, look

Jacob Shapiro:

like this is our last, it's, it's not so much about, you know, it's only

Jacob Shapiro:

Trump can do it, but this is the last moment where maybe you have enough

Jacob Shapiro:

leverage to make the Chinese take you seriously in a trade negotiation.

Jacob Shapiro:

Literation like this might be the last chance, but that's 'cause if you don't

Jacob Shapiro:

do it now, five, 10 years from now, yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

There's probably not a deal that you like that is gonna be, is gonna be had.

Marko Papic:

Just to be clear though, um, when you look at the data, a lot

Marko Papic:

of their FDI is going into Vietnam and Mexico so it can access us.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

So it goes both ways.

Marko Papic:

It does, it goes both ways, right?

Marko Papic:

US trade imbalance with China has massively corrected, but it's trade

Marko Papic:

balance with the rest of the world continues to be negative because this

Marko Papic:

is all Chinese trade going from Vietnam.

Marko Papic:

So like, but that, that means also for China, that final demand

Marko Papic:

for China is not changing yet the final demand remains in the US and

Marko Papic:

Europe for their goods and Japan.

Marko Papic:

So, you know, like, and, and especially because they have not done

Marko Papic:

anything to boost their consumption.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

True geopolitical sovereignty.

Marko Papic:

Like if Xi Jinping is listening, turn the TikTok camera on.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

And very appropriate that it's TikTok camera.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Very.

Marko Papic:

Um, president Xi, you want to be independent, you wanna be sovereign,

Marko Papic:

then you need to do what you don't want to do, which is boost consumption

Marko Papic:

in your own country, over capacity, over production, the stuff that

Marko Papic:

rankles the west, the fact that you don't import enough Western goods.

Marko Papic:

This is all a product of an unbalanced macroeconomic feature of China, which

Marko Papic:

is that people don't consume enough.

Marko Papic:

So what I would say to you, Jacob, is that, uh, China hasn't

Marko Papic:

really, really shifted where the final demand is coming from.

Marko Papic:

It's still America and Europe.

Marko Papic:

They have just kind of like diverted it, but the final demand is still there.

Marko Papic:

And also their own demand in internally hasn't been supported.

Marko Papic:

Now, the irony here is that as China boosts its consumption, which I

Marko Papic:

think it will have to just because of macroeconomic amount as it does that

Marko Papic:

you might say, aha, they're gonna buy more Chinese goods and so on.

Marko Papic:

But like, nah, I think they'll still buy more.

Marko Papic:

Like if they boost their consumption as much as I think they need to in order

Marko Papic:

to become truly sovereign, they'll still import more from the US and Europe.

Marko Papic:

Now they'll.

Marko Papic:

They'll buy a ton more Chinese goods for sure, but the trading balances will

Marko Papic:

actually correct in a positive way where everybody can kind of sink kumbaya.

Marko Papic:

Uh, nonetheless, we kinda like went off, uh, from immigration

Marko Papic:

to trade because, you know why?

Marko Papic:

Because that's where the geopolitical, I think, uh, gravity takes us

Marko Papic:

in every conversation we have.

Marko Papic:

We end up going back to these trade negotiations and the

Marko Papic:

rebalancing of the world.

Marko Papic:

And I think that it, it's just, you can't escape it.

Marko Papic:

Right.

Marko Papic:

We started talking about immigration, what was going on in la but we

Marko Papic:

can't escape talking about this issue 'cause it's so important.

Marko Papic:

Well,

Jacob Shapiro:

and this is the great, I mean, geopolitics has plenty

Jacob Shapiro:

of blind spots and if you only.

Jacob Shapiro:

Use geopolitical analysis, you will get some things wrong, but this

Jacob Shapiro:

is the great virtue of geopolitics and the way that it cuts across

Jacob Shapiro:

disciplines and connects things that on the surface don't seem connected.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like there is absolutely an inextricable.

Jacob Shapiro:

Have you seen has, I would challenge, uh, listeners, if anybody has seen anyone

Jacob Shapiro:

analytically tying what's happening in Los Angeles to the US China trade

Jacob Shapiro:

deal, like deal making that's happening.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like that is the first place my brain went and all I'm seeing from the media is, oh

Jacob Shapiro:

my God, it's the end of Los Angeles as we know it in the United States coming apart.

Jacob Shapiro:

This seems like, no, no, the.

Jacob Shapiro:

All of these things are interconnected, and you have to be a very interconnected,

Jacob Shapiro:

you have to be a deep generalist and have enough, it's this weird combination

Jacob Shapiro:

of humility and arrogance to say like, you know what, like, I know enough

Jacob Shapiro:

about all of these different things to try and create this map of connections.

Jacob Shapiro:

And maybe I can start ascribing causality to some of these things could, because

Jacob Shapiro:

most people will just stay in their lane.

Jacob Shapiro:

The immigration expert will stay in their lane and the trade expert will stay in

Jacob Shapiro:

their lane and the California politic, like, you know, you have to connect

Jacob Shapiro:

all these different things together.

Jacob Shapiro:

But let's close on this, um, with, with our last 15 minutes here.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, you sent me some stuff about California potentially seceding.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, I don't think this is gonna happen anytime soon, but they are trying to

Jacob Shapiro:

get a question on the 2028 ballot, which would be, should California leave

Jacob Shapiro:

the United States and become a free and independent country if at least.

Jacob Shapiro:

First they have to get half a million signatures.

Jacob Shapiro:

If 50% of registered California voters cast ballots and it passes

Jacob Shapiro:

by 50%, then there can be a study about whether that's gonna happen.

Jacob Shapiro:

So it's not like these things are gonna happen like imminently or in

Jacob Shapiro:

real time, but we should talk about the notion of California secession and

Jacob Shapiro:

about the idea of secession in general.

Jacob Shapiro:

I don't think it's a zero, and I think you were right to send it to me.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, so I think, uh, you know, this is, you know, I can defend

Marko Papic:

President Trump with a lot of different things, but I think that where, uh, and

Marko Papic:

this is not just his fault, obviously it's fault of the left and the right,

Marko Papic:

but I think that if you want to think about the greatest danger to the United

Marko Papic:

States of America, it's not the deficit.

Marko Papic:

You know, it's not China, it's not any of these issues.

Marko Papic:

It's really itself.

Marko Papic:

And so, uh, the last time, as you said, national Guard was, I. Invoked

Marko Papic:

by the, uh, called up by the president against the wishes of the state

Marko Papic:

was the issue of segregation, which fundamentally was what the Civil

Marko Papic:

War was about as well on some level.

Marko Papic:

And now also also by the way, about

Jacob Shapiro:

low class labor that was paid nothing that everybody

Jacob Shapiro:

utilized, including the north.

Jacob Shapiro:

Like there's a nice little throughput there too.

Marko Papic:

Oh yeah, that's, that's a very good point.

Marko Papic:

Yes.

Marko Papic:

And underclass, right, uh, uh, in the labor market.

Marko Papic:

Uh, great tie in.

Marko Papic:

Um, and so, yeah, I think that, uh, this is another example, another example where

Marko Papic:

the US federal government is trying to do something that the states don't like.

Marko Papic:

And in this particular case, it's about immigration, but

Marko Papic:

it could be about anything.

Marko Papic:

You know, it could be about the, uh, other issues.

Marko Papic:

And don't forget, don't forget one of the things that launched this whole thing on

Marko Papic:

Friday, last Friday before the protest started against ice, there was this, uh,

Marko Papic:

news item that we now forgo, forgot, which is that the White House was seriously

Marko Papic:

discussing withholding federal funds.

Marko Papic:

From California because of the transgendered athlete who competed,

Marko Papic:

and I think she won some, uh, athletics championships in California.

Marko Papic:

And then Governor Newsom retorted, I don't know if you saw this on Friday.

Marko Papic:

It was like, it, it flashed across the news on Friday and was quickly

Marko Papic:

forgotten because LA got it.

Marko Papic:

It went into this, um, whole situation, but covering, Newsom returned it

Marko Papic:

by saying that he's gonna withhold some 70 odd billion dollars that

Marko Papic:

the California pays into the IRS when it collects federal taxes.

Marko Papic:

Hmm.

Marko Papic:

So California, in other words, is definitely what we would

Marko Papic:

call a, uh, uh, what is it?

Marko Papic:

Um.

Marko Papic:

A have, there's have nots and have states, right?

Marko Papic:

California's a have state, and I, I know people love to make fun of California,

Marko Papic:

but boy, do we make money here.

Jacob Shapiro:

Well, not, not just California.

Jacob Shapiro:

I mean, Los Angeles is, I had this data pulled for this for exactly for this.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's the second largest city in the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's the 24th largest city in the world just ahead of Moscow.

Jacob Shapiro:

The greater Los Angeles area has a GDP of over a trillion dollars.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's larger than the GDP of Switzerland or of Poland, or even Argentina.

Jacob Shapiro:

So just the Los Angeles area that you're picking a fight with, with right

Jacob Shapiro:

now would be on the menu of global powers in a truly multipolar world.

Marko Papic:

Right?

Marko Papic:

So, so this is where I think, you know, why do I say that?

Marko Papic:

I, I say this because forget the National Guard.

Marko Papic:

Forget the Marines.

Marko Papic:

There was a news item on Friday that was actually worse, which is that

Marko Papic:

President Trump says, I don't like that a transgendered athlete competed in one.

Marko Papic:

I'm gonna withhold federal funds.

Marko Papic:

Governor Newsom says that I would hold the money we pay into the treasury,

Marko Papic:

forget ice, forget National LA Guard, forget the protest.

Marko Papic:

This happened without any of that.

Marko Papic:

It happened because one transgendered athlete competed and won some stuff.

Marko Papic:

So the threshold for people to lose their shit is very, very low.

Marko Papic:

You know, it's like a couple, you know, like a healthy couple has fights all

Marko Papic:

the time, but an unhealthy couple like fights over really dumb things and

Marko Papic:

endos fights escalate right away within like five minutes to like divorce.

Marko Papic:

And that's what this was like.

Marko Papic:

One human being who happens to be transgendered wants some stuff.

Marko Papic:

I'm gonna withhold federal funding.

Marko Papic:

Well, no, I'm gonna like pull the plug on California financing

Marko Papic:

the United States of America.

Marko Papic:

What?

Marko Papic:

You know, so.

Marko Papic:

So I think that this is very unhealthy and so when you made fun of my Canada pick.

Marko Papic:

In the top 10.

Marko Papic:

What did I say to you?

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I don't remember.

Marko Papic:

It was a hedge.

Marko Papic:

It was a hedge.

Marko Papic:

It was a hedge.

Marko Papic:

Because my view is that the probability of this stuff getting really bad

Marko Papic:

in the US is very, very elevated.

Marko Papic:

And I can tell you that the people that are the happiest, other than the media

Marko Papic:

will love this stuff other than the media.

Marko Papic:

I think that the happiest people in the world are in Beijing and Moscow

Marko Papic:

and, and and elsewhere because these kind of fights are real.

Marko Papic:

And I think it's very dangerous.

Marko Papic:

And, and if the US were to kind of start on this path, like that is a redrawing

Marko Papic:

of geopolitics at a level that I think most people can't comprehend mentally.

Marko Papic:

Now, how does it get resolved?

Marko Papic:

Well, I think that it's just in the world we live in today.

Marko Papic:

Perhaps what needs to happen is some form of canonization, and this is a

Marko Papic:

very Republican conservative view.

Marko Papic:

Uh, traditionally, traditionally it was a Republican conservative view, but I think

Marko Papic:

President Trump has obviously become, uh, far less about state's rights because

Marko Papic:

he controls the federal government.

Marko Papic:

But in Switzerland, the cantons have massive power, massive power.

Marko Papic:

In fact, the federal government has very little power and cantons, even to the

Marko Papic:

point where they, they enforce immigration laws and citizenship laws of the country.

Marko Papic:

So, for example, the federal government has minimum requirements

Marko Papic:

for you to become a Swiss citizen.

Marko Papic:

Like you need to do X, Y, and Z to become Swiss.

Marko Papic:

A Canton will come in and say, no, no, no, you need to do X, y, z,

Marko Papic:

alpha, omega, and beta as well.

Marko Papic:

Like you need to do these three things.

Marko Papic:

In addition, in this Canton, you know, and cantons in Switzerland are states,

Marko Papic:

but some of them have population of like 30,000, you know, so it's not

Marko Papic:

like these are not large entities.

Marko Papic:

And I think that the United States of America may have to.

Marko Papic:

Over the next 30, 40 years, adopt that kind of a state's rights, cantonal

Marko Papic:

canonization view of the world.

Marko Papic:

Because if one human being competing as a transgender athlete causes us

Marko Papic:

to get to a point where we're talking about withholding financing of the US

Marko Papic:

government, I think like that's not a healthy situation that the US is in.

Marko Papic:

And so I, I can see this happening more and more.

Marko Papic:

In other words, I think we're finally at a point where both Republicans and

Marko Papic:

conservatives and liberals and Democrats may be ready to accept what we call in

Marko Papic:

the US context, states rights, and which I call in the global context canonization.

Jacob Shapiro:

Hmm.

Jacob Shapiro:

Uh, it reminds me of that episode in the West Wing where Martin Sheen

Jacob Shapiro:

is debating the guy from Florida.

Jacob Shapiro:

I can't remember the exact, uh, phrase phraseology that he uses, but he's

Jacob Shapiro:

basically like the, you know, the Florida governor who he's running against is like

Jacob Shapiro:

complaining about all the things that the federal government does, and Martin Sheen,

Jacob Shapiro:

president Bartlett is like, okay, great.

Jacob Shapiro:

So we'd like our tax dollars back, please, if, if you're gonna complain

Jacob Shapiro:

about all these other different things.

Jacob Shapiro:

So, once again, the West Wing and Aaron Sorkin predicting some of these things,

Marko Papic:

I mean, that takes Yes, but the problem with that Jacob.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

But the problem with that, Jacob, is I'm not sure that makes any, any sense.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

In Florida's case, or Texas's case or California's case, there's, there are

Marko Papic:

many states in the United States that are wealthier without the federal government.

Marko Papic:

Now you might say, well, wait a minute, Marco, like, the state

Marko Papic:

of California is in a deficit.

Marko Papic:

Yes.

Marko Papic:

And just to be clear, I am not at all advocating for any of this.

Marko Papic:

I'm analyzing.

Marko Papic:

I personally, I can tell you my personal view, like I do not want to

Marko Papic:

live in an independent California.

Marko Papic:

Because lemme tell you, there's gonna be some growing pains.

Marko Papic:

For the first 10 years or so, this is a one party state, and the one

Marko Papic:

party that runs this state has gotten very comfortable running it poorly.

Marko Papic:

So no, like I'm not advocating for that, but I am seeing like, look, if

Marko Papic:

the, if the relationship was redrawn, there'll be a whole lot more money

Marko Papic:

for California to keep to itself.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And same with Texas, and same with Florida.

Marko Papic:

I, I, I haven't looked at the data, so I might not fully know what I'm talking

Marko Papic:

about, but I know I'm talking what I'm talking about in terms of California.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, California will be fine.

Marko Papic:

The rest of America less so.

Marko Papic:

So this is where I'm not sure the Martin Sheen in that, in that

Marko Papic:

exchange is actually correct.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Like would Florida suffer if it was independent?

Marko Papic:

Would they have more or less money?

Marko Papic:

I don't know.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

And I mean, your Canada pick.

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I'm still gonna go after your Canada pick because it's ironic the way that

Jacob Shapiro:

Trump is treating Canada has led to this like, creation of Canadian nationalism.

Jacob Shapiro:

But like Canada has the same issues internally, uh, in, in some sense, some

Jacob Shapiro:

of them further, further developed.

Jacob Shapiro:

Um, but maybe the way that the United States is much further to develop is

Jacob Shapiro:

like doing these things, things actually actually creating a stronger Canada.

Jacob Shapiro:

But

Marko Papic:

my point was, my point was like, the reason that I want to

Marko Papic:

have Canada as a pick, the reason why I wanna halt Canadian assets in some way,

Marko Papic:

shape, or form, is it's a hedge against some apocalyptic decline of American,

Marko Papic:

uh, stability due to, um, polarization.

Marko Papic:

And if, if the United States of America were to split up, Canada is

Marko Papic:

the most powerful country in North America by default, automatically.

Marko Papic:

A like, it's the end of, end of story, you know?

Marko Papic:

And, and that's why I think that that's literally how I defended the pick.

Marko Papic:

I use, I use the term it's a hedge.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

But, but, but forget about that issue for now.

Marko Papic:

The bigger point is that, I know it's difficult to do this after an

Marko Papic:

hour and a half of talking about LA riots, but forget LA riots.

Marko Papic:

Forget them.

Marko Papic:

I, I wish they hadn't happened because we would still be talking about this.

Marko Papic:

Jacob, you and I would still have spent an hour and a half today talking about

Marko Papic:

this issue because one human being who happens to be transgendered, she competes

Marko Papic:

in a athletic meeting, wins some awards.

Marko Papic:

Whether you agree with that or not is not the point.

Marko Papic:

If you're very passionate and you disagree with it, God bless you.

Marko Papic:

It's fine.

Marko Papic:

Not, I'm not, I'm not criticizing, I'm just saying it's one human being and it

Marko Papic:

leads to the governor of California and the president of the United States of

Marko Papic:

America basically talking about divorce.

Marko Papic:

You know, that's like, that's like two parents talking about divorcing

Marko Papic:

themselves because one of their kids.

Marko Papic:

Came home and said they wanted to do bed instead of soccer.

Marko Papic:

And the dad is like, fuck no.

Marko Papic:

And the mom is like, no.

Marko Papic:

You have to let them express themselves.

Marko Papic:

And they, and in five minutes they're talking, let's divide up the assets.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Well, I'm gonna take the house.

Marko Papic:

You know, like, I mean, that's, that's unhealthy.

Marko Papic:

That's un that's unhealthy.

Marko Papic:

If I am objective and, and I, I, you know, we used to do this at

Marko Papic:

Strat for, uh, you know, something would happen and you pretend you are

Marko Papic:

like a journalist writing about it.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Writing about an emerging market country.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

If you are just writing an objective analysis of this issue that happened on

Marko Papic:

Friday pre-writing, you would say this is an unhealthy level of polarization

Marko Papic:

over a, over a issue that's not relevant at all to the future of America.

Marko Papic:

Sorry.

Marko Papic:

Both liberals and conservatives, 'cause both of you are not gonna self

Marko Papic:

emulate because the liberals are like, yeah, transgendered rights matter.

Marko Papic:

The conservatives are like, this is terrible.

Marko Papic:

I'm gonna tell you as a geopolitical strategist who works in finance,

Marko Papic:

that no, this will not determine the fate of the United States of America

Marko Papic:

at all, no matter which size wins.

Marko Papic:

And yet it led to a talk of divorce.

Marko Papic:

That's unhealthy.

Jacob Shapiro:

Well, that's bad.

Marko Papic:

That's a bad sign.

Marko Papic:

It

Jacob Shapiro:

is bad.

Jacob Shapiro:

And to your point, uh, you don't even have to pretend to do that exercise.

Jacob Shapiro:

The way I do this now is I just go to the People's Daily and I look at

Jacob Shapiro:

how the People's Daily summarizes these articles in English about what's

Jacob Shapiro:

going on in the United States, and it's exactly what you would expect.

Jacob Shapiro:

They're just very coldly, dissecting exactly what happened.

Jacob Shapiro:

And when you get this like Chinese Communist party view that is

Jacob Shapiro:

translated into English of what's happening in the United States.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah, it's very sobering.

Jacob Shapiro:

And to your point, like Xi Jinping, like while his negotiators are there in

Jacob Shapiro:

London, even if you're right, and even if like China has less leverage than I

Jacob Shapiro:

think it does in Beijing, everything is going according, not to the plan, but to

Jacob Shapiro:

the way that they think about the world.

Jacob Shapiro:

If you're a materialist, if you're a Marxist, if you're like the way that

Jacob Shapiro:

the Chinese leadership has been educated for generations, everything is happening

Jacob Shapiro:

the way it's supposed to happen.

Jacob Shapiro:

And maybe that leads to hubris eventually, but like all of the things that they

Jacob Shapiro:

were expecting to happen always does.

Jacob Shapiro:

Yeah.

Jacob Shapiro:

But like right now, in this moment, oh my gosh.

Jacob Shapiro:

They're like, oh my God, it's happening.

Jacob Shapiro:

The the capitalist hegemon is eating itself alive.

Jacob Shapiro:

Wow.

Jacob Shapiro:

What.

Marko Papic:

And just, and just, you know, like I, I know we're,

Marko Papic:

we're pushing one and a half hours.

Marko Papic:

So like, I do like to tie everything with a sports analogy.

Marko Papic:

Yes, do it.

Marko Papic:

But, uh, our, uh, our Lord and Savior, the one to whom we bestow

Marko Papic:

all of our gifts and prayers.

Marko Papic:

Bill Simmons, the great, he often talks about body language, right?

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

He's the body language doc.

Marko Papic:

He calls himself the body language doctor, for those of you who don't know

Marko Papic:

what I'm talking about, bill Simmons podcaster, historian of basketball.

Marko Papic:

Uh, we're modeling our, our, our analysis of geopolitics to

Marko Papic:

his analysis of, of basketball.

Marko Papic:

And he will often say, I watch the bench when I go watch the game live.

Marko Papic:

I'll watch the bench and I'll watch during timeouts are, are all the players engaged?

Marko Papic:

Are they high fiving?

Marko Papic:

Are they talking, do they have side passionate side conversations

Marko Papic:

about what happened in the game?

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

And, and it's so funny, it's such a qualitative analysis, has

Marko Papic:

nothing to do with data empirics.

Marko Papic:

It, it goes against the grain of sports analytics.

Marko Papic:

But he, he says like, look, this really matters.

Marko Papic:

Chemistry really matters.

Marko Papic:

And, and there's nothing better than body language.

Marko Papic:

You know, a bunch of dudes playing a sport, man, like body language

Marko Papic:

is going to come into it, you know, and that's what we're doing here.

Marko Papic:

Like, yeah, we can talk about National Guard.

Marko Papic:

Is it legal?

Marko Papic:

Is it not history?

Marko Papic:

We can talk about trade tariffs policy, there's multipolarity, blah, blah, blah.

Marko Papic:

At the end of the day, like it's a really bad sign that the body

Marko Papic:

language of the United States of America is where it is today.

Marko Papic:

And you, if you are, and if you're sitting here listening to this and saying, that's

Marko Papic:

Donald Trump's fault, you know what?

Marko Papic:

You got your head up your ass.

Marko Papic:

It absolutely is not his fault.

Marko Papic:

He is a symptom Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Of the fact that that's already there, right?

Marko Papic:

So like, it's not, it's not his fault if he, you know why that's important to say?

Marko Papic:

Because.

Marko Papic:

Whether you love him or hate him, once he's gone, it's not gonna get better.

Marko Papic:

And I think that that's very dangerous.

Marko Papic:

And it's dangerous for investors.

Marko Papic:

It's dangerous for people in the US And I would say it's also dangerous

Marko Papic:

for countries around the world.

Marko Papic:

Mm-hmm.

Marko Papic:

Uh, I, I say it's actually dangerous for China.

Marko Papic:

It's dangerous for Russia.

Marko Papic:

It is dangerous for a, it's, it's just there's very few things

Marko Papic:

that I, a truly devoted nihilist believes is just universally bad.

Marko Papic:

But the idea that the United States of America dissolves or there's a federal,

Marko Papic:

state sort of fight, I think that's universally bad, is gonna create a vacuum.

Marko Papic:

It's gonna create, uh, potential jingoism and Rev. And it's just

Marko Papic:

gen, genuinely a bad place to go.

Jacob Shapiro:

Well on that, Rosie, an optimistic note.

Jacob Shapiro:

Anything else you wanna tell the listeners before we get outta here?

Jacob Shapiro:

Mark?

Jacob Shapiro:

We'll come back next time with our Trade Value Leaders, uh,

Jacob Shapiro:

our, our trade value leaderboard.

Jacob Shapiro:

That sounds really fun.

Marko Papic:

Should we do that next for next week?

Marko Papic:

Yeah,

Jacob Shapiro:

let's do that for next week.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'm, I'm ready to roll on

Marko Papic:

that.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

We have enough time.

Marko Papic:

Yeah, of course.

Marko Papic:

Yeah.

Marko Papic:

Alright.

Jacob Shapiro:

I, I'm, I'm ready.

Jacob Shapiro:

I mean, you already had your first pick, which I'm, I'm fine.

Jacob Shapiro:

You can have Georgia.

Jacob Shapiro:

That's fine with me.

Jacob Shapiro:

I'll, I'll get

Marko Papic:

through it.

Marko Papic:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Marko Papic:

Wait, wait.

Marko Papic:

Right, right.

Marko Papic:

I, I flag that in a press conference.

Marko Papic:

Maybe.

Marko Papic:

Maybe.

Marko Papic:

Okay.

Marko Papic:

Maybe.

Marko Papic:

Let's see.

Marko Papic:

I just want some time.

Marko Papic:

I just want some time to go over it and, and see, but yes.

Marko Papic:

In the That's awesome.

Jacob Shapiro:

In the meantime, Marco, stay safe.

Jacob Shapiro:

I know, I know.

Jacob Shapiro:

It's very difficult.

Jacob Shapiro:

Thank you.

Jacob Shapiro:

I appreciate it.

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Geopolitical Cousins
Who's Driving the Bus???

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