00:00Well, I think that the, it's interesting you mentioned the American dynamism speech, because I do think that's actually where the synthesis is, right?
00:09That if you believe in growth and you believe that, you know, to have any opportunity to make people's lives better, you actually need sustained GDP growth,
00:20then you actually need to have the kind of industries that can support broad-based technological innovation.
00:25And so I think that really is the combination, like, why do I care so much about manufacturing?
00:29Why do I care so much about the kind of educational institutions we have to support those industries?
00:34It's because, yes, I care about workers and I care about their wages, but I do very much care about innovation, and I don't think you can have one without the other, right?
00:42So the classic way of talking about this is to say, well, you know, if you open up an iPhone and you look at the box, it will say, designed in Cupertino, California, right?
00:53And, of course, the implication is that it's manufactured in Shenzhen.
00:57In reality, it's not necessarily even designed in Cupertino, California anymore.
01:01It's increasingly designed in the place that's manufacturing it.
01:04This idea that we can separate the making of things from the innovating of things is, I think, totally farcical.
01:11You see this in pharmaceuticals in particular, where I think the countries that are really good at manufacturing pharmaceuticals, especially, like, the next-gen biologics and large molecule pharmaceuticals, those guys are increasingly really, really good at innovating in pharmaceuticals, too.
01:27And, you know, one way this has come up in our work in the White House, and I won't get into sort of too many of the hairy details, but, you know, we've been thinking about how to solve a particular problem, meaning a particular kind of product that right now we have access to, but we're starting to ask ourselves these questions about, like, well, what happens if the country that we're trading with completely cut off access to this stuff?
01:49And so we're thinking a lot about the supply chain, about how brittle our supply chains are.
01:54And, by the way, like, one thing that is shocking about the prior government, about the government we inherited the White House from, is if I, on January the 21st, in fact, I did ask this question, where are the biggest deficiencies in our supply chains?
02:08What are the 100 products that were completely reliant on some other entity to make for us?
02:15Where are they made, and how hard would it be to onshore that manufacturing?
02:19I asked that explicit question, and the answer was, we don't know.
02:23Nobody in the prior government had actually asked these very fundamental questions.
02:27And so what is so crazy about the hyper-globalized era is that you had these basic questions about the brittleness of our supply chains that were completely uninvestigated by the very people who supported globalizing those supply chains.
02:42We were actually governed by complete morons, and we didn't even realize it until the Trump administration started to get underneath the hood of our government.
02:54But to take it back to sort of the point that I was trying to make, okay, if you want to onshore this one piece of the supply chain, what kind of talent would you need in the labor force to make that possible?
03:09And I started talking to, you know, venture capitalists and technologists and people who run sort of industries in this space, and what kept on coming back is, okay, yes, there's a tariff question.
03:20There's a revenue guarantee question.
03:21There's a capital question.
03:22You know, how do you actually form the capital?
03:24How do you get the capital goods necessary to make the stuff that you're going to have to make?
03:28But the thing that everybody kept on coming back to is we don't even have the people who are skilled in this particular trade anymore because we've so offshored it.
03:40And, you know, you realize your point about trade policy, all of this stuff is connected.
03:44But when you atrophy critical skills in the economy, it's not easy just to flip that switch back on.
03:52And I think that was the way in which the advocates of globalization were the most wrong is they allowed the best skilled trades workforce in the history of the world to become a little bit atrophied.
04:06And I think we're still very good.
04:09Like, we actually have a pretty strong foundation from which to build, but we're actually not as good as we were 30 years ago in the basic question of skilled craftsmen who are able to do a whole host of different things very rapidly.
04:21That's one of the things that we have to fix in order for us to accomplish the things that we need to accomplish.
04:25The president's very focused on that, but it drives home, I mean, how much of a national emergency we're in that we've lost critical skills and we weren't even aware that we had lost those skills until a few months ago.
