PM Show Hr 1 | Yesterday's Conspiracy Theory is Tomorrow's Revelation

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and load Change.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
From Michael Varry Show is on the air.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
America first includes all Americans, regardless of their race, their gender,
or their sexual orientation.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Why don't we liberate these United States?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Were the one who need it works.

Speaker 4 (00:32):
Let the rest of the world help us forrchmange and
let's rebuild the mary.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
First power high is rig desert fund far who's blessed?

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Who has been cursed?

Speaker 2 (00:50):
There's things to be down all over.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
The world, but let's rebuild them married.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Our message to Black Americans tonight is this, we want
you what we want for every American. Safe neighborhoods, good jobs,
clean streets, a country where you are judged based on
the content of your character, not the color of your
skin or your political beliefs.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
And who's watching that, who's in charge of it all?

Speaker 3 (01:25):
God, let's disarmy got less, a liberty that un the
risk of it all. Get a man in posision back
and away freed emson stuck in. Let's get out of rack,
get back on the track, and let's rebuild and marry

(01:49):
the first.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Our message to gay Americans tonight is this, You're free
to marry who you want if you want, without the
government standing in your walk. Small, but that doesn't mean
that boys get to compete with girls and girls sports,
or you do genital mutilation and chemical castration on our children.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Why don't deliver right?

Speaker 3 (02:11):
These are United States, We're the ones who need it
the most.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
You think I'm brying to smoke bars.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
It ain't no doke.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
I make twenty fIF years coast codes.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
You get ahead in the United States with your own
hard work, your own commitment, your own dedication, and that
you know what You are free to speak your mind
at every step of the way.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
That is the American dream. That is what we are
running too.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
And that is what we get when we send Donald
Trump back to the White House.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
If that doesn't fry up and your wood is wet.
What Ted Cruise's father said one time in a speech,
and it's stuck with me for the year. He was
an evangelical preacher, still is, But I mean he preached
a lot back in the day, and that was one
of his lines that he would use when he would

(03:13):
recite one of his favorite verses.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
It was a call to action or a great comfort.

Speaker 5 (03:18):
He say.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
If that doesn't fire you up, then you're wood is wet.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Well.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
The blame game is in full effect.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
President Trump has his highest approval ratings since twenty twenty.
He is beloved for the actions he's taking, but it's
kind of one of those deals where he's got to
hit a home run every time up. If he strikes
out on one thing, they're going to pile on. And
they're telling people constantly things are bad. You're not happy,

(03:52):
things are bad. You're not happy. Hello, sir, just checking.
Do you think things are bad?

Speaker 5 (04:00):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (04:00):
No, yes, it seems like they are. Are you happy? Welcome?
Think of it? No, I'm not.

Speaker 6 (04:08):
It is.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
It is leading the witness, shall we say so.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
They're going to blame all of the problems that were
caused during the Biden administration on Trump. You know how
this happens, right, Because there's a lag, Right, there's a
tail to when these things happen. The full effect of
bad policies takes some time to occur.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
It's just a fact.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
So the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is no
fan of Trump, is now blaming recent price increases, even
as prices have started to come down. On tariffs, well,
the tariffs don't even take effect April second, So how

(05:03):
are the tariffs increasing prices if they haven't been applied yet.
There's no fee to pay on it. So what Why
is he saying that because he wants to blame Trump
because he doesn't like tariffs. He personally doesn't like tariffs,
and we know this from the statements he's made. But
here is him trying to blame Trump. Here is him

(05:25):
just like the district court judges around the country. Everybody
wants to be everybody wants to rule the world. Everybody
wants to be president who is not president?

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Okay, So how much of it is is tariff? So
let me say that it is.

Speaker 6 (05:41):
Going to be very difficult to have a precise assessment
of how much of inflation is coming from tariffs and
from other and that's already the case. You may have
seen that goods inflation moved up pretty significantly in the
first two months of the year. Trying to track that
back to actual tariff increases given what was tariff and
what was not, very very challenging. So some of it,

(06:03):
the answer is clearly some of it. A good part
of it is coming from tariffs. But we'll be working
and so will other forecasters to try to find the
best possible way to separate non tariff inflation from tariff inflation.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Milton Friedman has told us again and again it is
a scientific fact. The reason for inflation is overly abundant
money supply. Too much money in circulation causes inflation. What

(06:39):
happened was you started seeing the policies that led to
an inflationary effect when the trumpet, when the Bush administration,
remember you had all the bailouts and you had a
bunch of money pumped into Wall Street rewarding bad actors. Oh,

(07:04):
a few were allowed to fall away Layman Brothers, but
that was really just so someone else could scoop in,
could swoop in and scoop up cheap assets. We have
had policies dedicated to rewarding bad actors for a long time.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
And the way they reward them is you.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Get to keep your upside, but you're too big to
fail on the downside. If you could go in and
play blackjack and you've got you're showing sixteen, dealers showing seventeen,
and you could hit and if you win, if you

(07:47):
get a five or lower, you take your cash. If
you get a six or above and bust. Well, that's fine,
you don't. You still get to keep your cash. You
don't make any, but you don't lose any. This type
of effect led to reckless Wall Street policies, and it
led to horrible inflation, and then you had the quantitative easy,

(08:10):
the q E one q E two.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
That's why we.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
Are suffering with horrible inflation. And now you got to
get these addicts off this government spending, and that's why
they're pushing back against Elon and Trump.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
That's what this is about. Michael Berry's show, I saw
a CNN.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Pole a few days ago, and I made a note
about it and pulled the audio to use later, and
now is later. It shows a massive change in who
is most likely to believe conspiracy theories. Now, Harry Entton

(08:51):
on CNN is talking about the fact that Republicans are
more likely than Democrats to think that JFK was killed
in a conspiracy. As you listen to this, I want
you to come to your own answer as to why
you think that may be the case.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
The percentage of conspiracy theorists who believed that the United
States government was involved in the JFK assassination has gone
up over the past ten years, it is now the
plurality leader compared to the conspiracy theorists they used to
think of someone, Hey, maybe it was Cuba, maybe it
was the mob. That's actually down from forty percent to
twenty nine percent. And the overall number of folks who

(09:31):
believe in the conspiracy theory that JFK was killed by
more than one man is also up.

Speaker 7 (09:36):
So in this thing of we are in this odd
conspiracy fueld moment, I guess that fits.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Right right there.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
More people believe it, all right. Trump himself has.

Speaker 7 (09:44):
Has talked about conspiracies about this death, including one linking
Oswald famously to Ted Cruz's father.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Okay, remember that.

Speaker 6 (09:52):
One His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to
Oswald being a you know god.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
I mean, what would he be doing with Lee Harvey
Oswold right shortly before the death, before the shooting?

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Crazy?

Speaker 4 (10:11):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (10:11):
That theory, I just want to know was based on
a National Inquirer story that the former publisher testified.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
During Trump's trial last spring.

Speaker 8 (10:20):
Was made up.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
But Trump is not just speaking for himself, No, he's not.

Speaker 4 (10:24):
I feel like regis Philip and it's all bonkers things
that are going on. Look, the percentage of Republicans who
believe in the conspiracy theory that jf K was killed
by more than a woman is up significantly over the
last decade. Look at that, from forty nine percent to
now with a clear majority seventy one percent. Will Democrats
have fallen from sixty four percent to fifty five percent.
And that is because the Donald Trump based right, the
non college graduates, they are the most likely to believe

(10:47):
in the conspiracy theory, right, seventy three percent of them
compared to just fifty seven percent of those who just
have a contrary and forty four percent postgraduate degree.

Speaker 7 (10:55):
And this isn't the There are more conspiracy theories as
we were talking about, people believe them.

Speaker 4 (10:59):
Yeah, I mean, look, we've mentioned that JFK one, But
how about Obama not born in the US a quarter
of Americans? How about vaccines cause autism? That's up, that's
nearly a quart of Americans. And then you get ten
tons of Americans who believe the Earth is flat. It's
crazy them are here, don't.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
I don't even know what to say, But the numbers
of the numbers.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
It's hollow earth under the flatness, the nimbus of a numbus.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
So something very interesting.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
He notes there, he refers to Republicans who support Donald
Trump as the uneducated, the folks who do not have
a college degree. And that is shorthand for East Coast liberals,
liberal Democrats, that is shorthand for hillbilly dumbasses. But what

(11:47):
we actually know, and again this is about once something
gets a reputation, it's hard to change it. And so
there is this idea that you know, the doctors know everything.
They're the expert. If my doctor says to take the shot,

(12:07):
I gotta take the shot because I got to trust
him he's the expert. Well, study after study after study
after study after study now has said the vaccine causes
a lot of problems. It wasn't tested properly, it wasn't effective.
When Joe Biden told you if you get the shot,

(12:28):
won't you won't get COVID, And if you get the shot,
you won't share COVID or past COVID, both of those
were lies, and they knew they were lies. The reason
folks without the college degree believe in conspiracy theories is
because yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's revelation. Remember that crazy

(12:53):
oz worst one, Remember that crazy conspiracy theory. In October
of twenty twenty, Quinton New York Post did a story
on the fact that what did they make up?

Speaker 2 (13:05):
This is craz so crazy. Oh they said, Hunter Biden's laptop.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Was left at a computer repair store, and on that
laptop was proof that the Bidens received bribes from foreign governments,
that that he was involved in all these horrible, terrible things,
and his father was as well, that he committed all
these crimes.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Remember that, And they'd made all that up.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
New York posted, thank god before Trump, this before Elon
bought it.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Thank god.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Twitter banned The New York Post from telling that story,
and thank god the US government went to Facebook and said,
do not allow that story to be posted, banned people,
and they did, Thank goodness because free sometimes free speech
is dangerous. And Facebook and Twitter kept that story from
getting out, and so people didn't know about that, that

(13:56):
conspiracy story.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
And then last year.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
The US government, same government that pressured Facebook to take
that down, brought a case against Hunter or exactly what
they said wasn't true. Not only was it not true,
they didn't just deny. They called it a conspiracy theory.
This is what Hillary Clinton used to do. There's a

(14:25):
vast right wing conspiracy out there trying to bring my
husband down. Why do you say that that's what they're doing.
It's a vast right wing conspiracy. Oh did he bump
Monica Lewinskar didn't he? How about Jennifer Flowers? How about
all the others who sued him? Paula was her name,

(14:48):
Paula Jones? Are those part of the vast right wing conspiracy?
What are all these people they keep coming up dead
around you? What about Whitewater? Is that all vast right
wing conspiracy? Because there's the documents. What about the Russia collusion, which,
as Greg Guttfeld noted, they claimed it was Russian collusion

(15:09):
by Russia and Trump to cover for the fact that
there was Russia Russian collusion between Hillary and Russia. Yesterday's
conspiracy theory turned out to be tomorrow's true story.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Breaking news.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
How about the fact that two weeks ago, Jake Tapper
released a book, Jake Tapper, who refused to allow Laura
Trump to say in twenty twenty that Joe Biden is
suffering from some mental decline, and Jake Tapper said, stop,
you can No, you're not going to do that. Now.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Jake Tapper has.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Co written, which means he has a ghostwriter, but he's
going to push the book every night, a book to
talk about how shameful it is that Joe Biden was
in the throes of dementia and nobody, there were no
adults in the room to do anything about it. I mean,
you got to be a certain degree a shameless that's
almost admirable to pull that off. So yeah, and you

(16:11):
know why people without college degrees believe these quote unquote
conspiracy theories because many of them are true. And secondly,
when you don't go to college, you don't get brainwashed.
And this is what is killing the brand of college
itself today. The university experience is a place to go
and get drunk and watch football games and be indoctrinated.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
And more and more people are saying, nah, they.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Are telling what's called onesies, these little things clothing for
a baby.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
I like, lu goodbarish of all these onesies.

Speaker 3 (16:44):
I've played for you the clip of Chuck Schumer on
the View and during the mid terms, if the Republicans
don't use this it is such a golden opportunity. It
is in the long line of Barack Obama saying you
didn't build that, and then Chuck Schumer, well, just listen
to Chuck Schumer in his own words.

Speaker 9 (17:03):
And you know what their attitude is. I made my
money all by myself. How dare your government take my
money for me. I don't want to pay taxes? Or
I built my company with my bare hands. How dare
your government tell me how I should treat my customers,
the land and water that I owned. One of my employees.
They hate governments. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier
to stopped them from doing things.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
They want to destroy it.

Speaker 9 (17:24):
We are not letting them do it.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
That we're united, okay, then when you have to say
you're united, it's because you're not.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
See.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
The problem for Chuck Schumer is he can never do
enough to satisfy the extreme left of his party. He
can never make them happy, and that puts him in
a bad position. But if you think that was a
stupid thing to say, he's not the Democrat who said
the dumbest thing on there, the last major one. And
this could be the greatest of all time for an

(17:55):
elected official Democrat. Certainly, the most on the line at
the time was of Harris committing career, Harry carry or
Harry Carey if you like. When asked what would you
do different than Joe Biden?

Speaker 10 (18:08):
If anything, would you have done something differently than President
Biden during the past four years, there is.

Speaker 8 (18:16):
Done a thing that comes to mind in terms of
and I've been a part of most of the decisions
that have had impact.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Come on in just some look pro tip for you
here since you're running for president Joe Biden. You're running
for president because Joe Biden was going to lose and
the big boys said, hey, we cannot lose. Not only
do we have to have control of the government so
we can control all the money because we're stealing it.
But we've done very bad things to Trump. And if

(18:46):
you try to shoot the king, you better not miss.
We missed, okay. And Trump is just mean enough to
drag us to the calaboose, to put us into whoscal
to put us under the prison for what we've done.
That if he wins, he'll bring in cash. Betel Pam Bondy,
I mean, he'll be bad. Dan Bongino, we don't need

(19:06):
him being president again. We got to do whatever it takes. Okay,
So we've replaced Joe Biden. We stuck you in there
without having a primary because a primary would mean that
you ought to be fighting. Then that would expose more
of the problems. And we're already unpopular enough. So you're
our candidate. Okay, we got you as our candidate. Now
do some interviews and make people think that things are

(19:27):
gonna get much better with you as president next year
than Joe.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Bidenkay, you got that. Okay, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Now, one of the questions you're gonna get. We don't
know what all you're gonna get, but here's one. It's
going to be for sure. You're gonna get this question.
People are gonna say, hey, Biden has screwed everything up.
We're gonna pretend you weren't part of all that, even
though he has kept saying that you are. Biden has
screwed everything up. What would you do different than he did?
And you need to have a list of things. Just

(19:54):
take everything dumb he did and say I wouldn't have
done that. I wouldn't have done that. Okay, and we'll
work up a strategy of you could say you would
have done differently. But whatever it is, you make it
seem like when they say what would you do differently
than Joe Biden? You need to say how much time
do y'all have? Okay, but she didn't say that, she

(20:15):
said nothing comes to mind. Hey, Hmmler, before this firing
squad blows your brains off, give us one reason, this
one reason. Gimme, what would you if you had been hitler?
What would you have done differently? Starting in about we'll
go back before nineteen thirty nine, but we'll include all

(20:37):
the way through nineteen forty four if you want, or
forty five if you want. Let's go back to nineteen twenty.
What would you do differently if you were hitler than
you did? And based on that, we're gonna side whether.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
To kill you or not. Oh, I don't know, I
can't think of anything.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
All right, you're done. You've got Joe Biden. You got
Joe Biden as president, you're his vice president. We are
trying our hardest, because your campaign paid us to do this.
We are trying our hardest to help you out here.
We're going to throw you the fattest pitch. This is
coach pitch. Okay, you close your eyes and we'll put

(21:13):
it's one step up from t ball.

Speaker 10 (21:15):
We will.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
We just put it right here. You like it about
waste time? Oh you're a high swinger. Okay, we'll do
it at chess high and it's oversized softball.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
You just close your eyes and swing and we'll have
it right there for you. And don't know how to swing.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
This is one of the worst flubs I have ever
heard in American politics in recorded history. And I'm a
student of this and have been for thirty five years.

Speaker 10 (21:40):
If anything, which you have done something differently than President
Biden during the past four years.

Speaker 8 (21:47):
There is not a thing that comes to mind in
terms of and I've been a part of most of
the decisions that have had impact.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
It's one of the great great gambits in American political history.
It's one of the great dilemmas a good screenwriter, good
novelist will create. In the course of two hours for
a movie, you immediately establish your cast. You need the
audience to invest in them. They need to want good

(22:15):
things for them. That way, when you're hero, your protagonist,
when he's put in a tough situation, you feel for him.
You want him to emerge so that the narrative arc
of the next two hours or now five hours, he
things you onfair. The narrative art for the next two
hours is him despite all odds, winning him, emerging, him,

(22:37):
vanquishing those who have So you start with your star
character and he's he's a great guy. And then he
has the people around him who he loves, so he
wants to protect them, and they're going to be exposed
to great danger, so he's going to want to fix that.
And then you're introduced to the bad guys and they're
just evil. They're they're very one dimensional.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
They're just evil.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
They want to bring evil upon him, and you don't
mind if he kills them, because they're not full of
people with families. They're just they represent evil when he
represents good, and good must defeat evil. And so you
go along there and he wants to just storre him
into there and kill the bad guys, but that might
mean that the hostages would be killed first. So you
create this great dilemma. Well that's what this movie of

(23:15):
the last six months was about. Kamala Harris had a
true Abesian choice. It is the worst dilemma. Does she
say I haven't done anything as president as vice president
for the last four years. Well, then why should you
be president? You don't have any experience, and separate herself
from Joe Biden. So either she has no experience but

(23:36):
don't blame for Joe Biden, or as she chose to do,
which turned out to be a mistake.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
I've been right there beside him the whole time.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Why would I do anything differently because America hates what
y'all have done, because Americans are miserable right now. I
don't think you should be owning those decisions. I think
you should be able to say that you would.

Speaker 5 (23:53):
Have kind of lard.

Speaker 8 (23:55):
She and her and a woman sitting at the table wearing.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
I'm Michael Berry and my pronouns are v and Zar
Michael very. Joe Jadvance gave a.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
Speech recently on technology and artificial intelligence, and in the
speech this is where you see the difference between jd
Vance and say Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. Jd Vance
has had a varied life experience. You know, grew up poor,

(24:30):
which is not necessary to be a great leader, by
the way, or to be a renaissance man. And in fact,
it makes it less likely statistically that you will end
up quote unquote successful in life if you start off poor,
because there are a lot of things that can get
in the way. But for those who do make it,
it becomes an asset. It gives you an empathy, it

(24:53):
gives you a connection, It gives you an ability to
understand other people, and it also gives an ex accessibility
to you to other people.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
Hey, he grew up poor. Maybe I can ask his advice.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
He grew up poor. Maybe he'll be willing to mentor me.
Maybe he'll understand what's happened. Maybe he won't be judgmental.
And then he goes to the Marines. That is something
I haven't done, but I've studied it. It's not an
easy thing to do, but he did, and it's a

(25:33):
lifelong experience that someone should be proud of because it
changes you. It's tough to challenge, accepted and accomplished. Then
he goes to law school, and while in law school,
he writes a book that is one.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Of the most sweeping, powerful.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
Explorations of poor, of of of poor, broken life in America.
I honestly believe that that book is right up there
with the writings of James Baldwin or gays, Ralph Ellison

(26:30):
or blacks. And I guess in that sense it's more
Alex Haley with Malcolm X in that it's largely autobiographical.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
But it's more than just this is my story.

Speaker 5 (26:45):
It is It is a.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
It is a.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Powerful exploration the way he humanizes those who as he's
explaining that they're making dumb decisions. He lets you come
to that conclusion yourself, but you come to that conclusion.
He humanizes them, and not to elicit some sense of

(27:11):
tacit endorsement of it, but to bring you, the reader,
an understanding of it. Why do people make bad decisions?
Why do people get addicted to drugs be unable to
take care of their family. Why when they finally get
sent to rehab because they've made they committed a crime,

(27:33):
why do they ever try that drug again?

Speaker 2 (27:35):
What leads them?

Speaker 3 (27:36):
What level of dumb assy leads them to think that
they can conquer that drug that sent them to rehab
that they got out of a week ago. Why do
they keep moving back and forth. That's not solving their problems.
They go from one auntie to grandma to Uncle Buck.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
I had to bring Uncle Buck into this.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
So it's just amazing. He writes this book while in
law school, goes on to private equity mentors a long
way smart, smart people like Peter Teel. So when JD.
Vance offers an opinion to the American Dynamism Summit, this

(28:23):
isn't a guy who has arrived where he is in
life by just running for office and making promises. This
is a guy who's done things. John Corny's never done things.
He taught law and he got elected to office. He's
never run a business. He's never had to be a

(28:44):
big thinker. Joe Biden didn't have to think it is
you just keep running for office, just keeps smiling and
showing up at enough events. Kamala Harris same way. This
is a guy who has, like Elon Musk, has succeeded
across multiple platforms. Well, he's talking here about illegal immigration

(29:05):
being cheap labor and that it's fundamentally a crutch, a
crutch that inhibits innovation. This is an extraordinarily deep point.
So I'm going to ask you, if there are any distractions,
block them out and focus, or go back later on
the podcast and listen to this right here.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
There were two.

Speaker 5 (29:27):
Conceits that our leadership class had when.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
It came to globalization.

Speaker 5 (29:32):
The first is assuming that we can separate the making
of things from the design of things.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
The idea of globalization was that rich.

Speaker 5 (29:40):
Countries would move further up the value chain while the
poor countries.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Made the simpler things.

Speaker 5 (29:46):
You would open an iPhone box and it would say
designed in Cupertino, California. Now the implication, of course, is
that it would be manufactured, enginein or somewhere else. And yeah,
some people might lose their jobs in manufacturing. They could
learn to design, or, to use a very popular phrase,
learn to code. But I think we got it wrong.

(30:06):
It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing
get awfully good at the designing of things. Their network effects.
As you all well understand, the firms that design products
work with firms that manufacture. They share intellectual property, they
share best practices, and they even sometimes share critical employees. Now,
we assume that other nations would always trail us in

(30:28):
the value chain, but it turns out that as they
got better at the low end of the value chain,
they also started catching up on the higher end. We
were squeezed from both ends. Now, that was the first
conceit of globalization. I think the second is that cheap
labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that
inhibits innovation. I might even say that it's a drug

(30:49):
that too many American firms got addicted to. Now, if
you can make a product more cheaply, it's far too
easy to do that rather than to innovate. And whether
we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing
cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the
drug of Western economies. And I'd say that if you

(31:10):
look in nearly every country from Canada to the UK
that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you've seen productivity stagnate.
And I don't think that's not a total happenstance.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
I think that the connection is very direct.

Speaker 5 (31:24):
Now. One of the debates you hear on the minimum wage,
for instance, is that increases in the minimum wage force
firms to automate. So a higher wage of McDonald's means
more chiosks, And whatever your views on the wisdom of
the minimum wage, I'm not going to comment on that. Here,
companies innovating and the absence of cheap labor is a
good thing. I think most of you are not worried

(31:45):
about getting cheaper and cheaper labor. You're worried about innovating,
about building new things, about the old formulation of technology
is doing more with less. You guys are all trying
to do more with less every single day. And so
I'd ask my friends, both on the the tech optimist
side and on the populace side, not to see the
failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed,

(32:09):
I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a
problem precisely because it's.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Been bad for innovation.

Speaker 5 (32:17):
Both our working people are populous and our innovators gathered
here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I
believe is American innovation.