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- [00:02]
Mike Pesca
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- [00:31]
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- [00:58]
Mike Pesca
Podcast terms apply hello, just podcast listeners Podcast an audio medium. But really I've been gearing up to make the big time. Yes, the Gist is now on Instagram. We started an Instagram page. It's a way to foment discoverability. I just always, whenever I was doing my interviews I never realized that what I really wanted was to extract a one minute clip with subtitles and big block letters. But it's really cool and it's a really good way to help people find the show because people don't pass around audio, but they pass around video. And we're populating the Instagram feed. Please go to Peska Gist if you're on Instagram or join Instagram in order to go to Peska gist. It's Wednesday, April 9, 2025 from peach fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca Dow up almost eight S&P, up nine and a half. NASDAQ. Sorry, the tech heavy NASD deck. We just officially change the name to that. By the way. That was up over 12. This Trump fella is something of a genius. No. Okay, no. Follow me then. Suppose Trump wanted to impose a 10% tariff on the world. And we don't have to suppose because he did want to do that. He does want to do that, and he did that. But after that was announced, if that was the only thing announced, Goldman Sachs and Citi and the academic economists who study such things would say as they did on just the 10% tariff. Whoa. Oh, this is going to shave 0.2 0.3% off GDP. It will probably raise inflation, so the markets would punish that. So how should he do it? What did he do? He said, and I don't know if he said this or it just worked out, but the genius said, all right, I'll impose the 10% on everyone, but I'll impose a lot more on some countries, including some heavily penguined countries. I'll go up to almost 50% on Canada. I don't know, let's say 125 on China and the stock market, they're gonna hate that. So then we send Scott Besant outside to say something. Scott Besanty. And then everyone will love it. So what can we get Scott Besant to say? How about.
- [03:17]
Scott Besant
And we saw the successful negotiating strategy that President Trump implemented a week ago today. It has brought more than 75 countries forward to negotiate. It took great courage, great courage for him to stay the course until this moment. And what we have ended up with here, as I told everyone a week ago, in this very spot, do not retaliate and you will be rewarded. So every country in the world who wants to come and negotiate, we are willing to hear you. We're going to go down to a 10% baseline tariff for them, and China will be raised to 125 due to their insistence on escalation.
- [04:05]
Mike Pesca
And with that news, that should have tanked the markets, right? Should have shaved.2% off GDP, actually thrilled the markets because the specter of full tariffs would have been so much worse. Could have lopped off not 0.2%, but 2% off GDP. That is half a trillion dollars, $5,000 per household. TRUMP is a hero. Trump is a genius. You know the old Malcolm X line about pulling a knife only partway out of your back and that not being progress?
- [04:36]
John McWhorter
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress.
- [04:40]
Mike Pesca
Well, in this scenario, Trump was the one who stuck the knife into his own back and then he pulled it out. So only 10% of the knife was still in. Or with the Chinese version of the knife. He push it in a lot further, but who cares? Markets are up today big time. You really got to hand it to this Trump fella. They love the 90 day pause, do the markets. They have every reason to believe that in 90 days, Trump will get really good at macroeconomics. He'll learn a lot. He'll study the charts, he'll read a textbook. There's really no downside to anything that we've gone through since Independence Day. It was a very fruitful period. I'm glad it happened. Great branding too. Well, maybe one downside. All the Americans who are depending on all those manufacturing jobs coming back, sadly they will stay overseas. And the domestic back knife industry will barely be a shell of its former self. On the show today, more on Trump's thinking and his talking about his thinking. But first, John McWhorter is a distinguished linguist and a very effectual public intellectual. His new book is called Pronoun Trouble, the Story of Us in Seven Little Words. And he is on the Gist next. You know how much we hate the middleman, but sometimes the middleman looks really good. I mean, he looks sharp. If the middleman is wearing Quint's high quality travel essentials, you can't really begrudge him at least his sartorial style. I've been wearing quints for a while. I got some pants, I got a button down shirt, I got a sweater. I'm gonna get the shorts and shirt for the change of season. Now why I mention the middleman, this good looking middleman, this middleman who's dressed to the nines, he's the guy who got cut out from the entire process to allow Quince to give its high quality items to you at an extremely low cost. And I have to say I'm glad the middleman is availing himself of Quince's offerings because he looks good and he's gonna have to save some money and maybe go on a job interview. And there's dressy, there's less dressy, there's cash. Middlemen, all men, women too can benefit from the cut and quality of a quince piece of clothing. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from quince. Go to quince.com the gist for 365 day returns plus free shipping on all your orders. That's Q U I n c e.com the Gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the Gist we're joined once more by John McWhorter, one of my favorites. And people have been coming up to the Columbia professor of linguistics and the New York Times columnist. And they've been saying, john, you need to write a book about pronouns. And he would say, who me? And they would say no, who me? And he would say yes. I guess I really do need to write a book about pronouns. The book is out. It is called pronoun trouble. John McWhorter, welcome back to the Gist.
- [08:01]
John McWhorter
Thanks for having me, Mike. I like that that version of the story. Let's keep that for the movie. But yes, pronoun trouble. That's right.
- [08:08]
Mike Pesca
And pronoun trouble comes from one of our great. It's not Chomsky. Who was it? Oh, yeah, Daffy Duck.
- [08:14]
John McWhorter
That's right. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Daffy Duck. It's really from basically the Looney Tune rabbit seasoning where Daffy and Bugs have this exchange where Bugs switches the pronouns on Daffy Duck so that he gets shot in the face and Daffy says, oh, wait a minute. Pronoun trouble. And I'm not really great with titles, but that one just jumped right out at me. I thought, this book is called Pronoun Trouble. And the truth is, when I wrote it, which is now a couple years ago, we weren't talking as much about issues such as whether it's wrong to say they and them for one person and it being connected with trans issues, etc. I was writing tongue in cheek. I was writing a happy book. Now, pronoun trouble almost seems more current than it did then because we think of pronouns as trouble. But I'll just take what I can get.
- [08:58]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, well, it is a happy book. I think it ends in a happy place. It gets through the use and the me's and the eyes. I was hoping for a who, so. But there's no whoso in the book or even a whomso.
- [09:12]
John McWhorter
I didn't want the book to get too long. And what's interesting is that who was on the COVID I was thinking, so people are gonna wish that I did who, But I'm not sure. Laymen always think of who as a pronoun per se. And these days, to be honest, I like a book to be processable because there's so much to distract us, including me. And if I had gone through literally everything that qualifies as a pronoun, it would start to become not a stocking stuffer, but a stocking buster. If people give this as a present. And so I wanted to keep it, you know, folks see that it's compact and so not. It's not a pamphlet, but it's compact. So I kept it that way.
- [09:45]
Mike Pesca
Is our pronouns of our parts of speech, they are the shortest words, but do they have the fewest members in their part of speech family? I mean, there are so many. There is a countless number of nouns and verbs and adverbs, but pronouns we could probably put on one very manageable chart that we hang on the wall in English.
- [10:06]
John McWhorter
Yeah, that's not true in all languages, especially ones that are especially obsessed with levels of formality and levels of deference. You can have a few dozen pronouns and maybe more. English is definitely not one of those languages. We think of having a compact set of pronouns as just the way a language should be. And the Western European languages that we tend to learn first, or even Chinese, happen to be like English. But the truth is we're rather pronoun poor, which is why we have to put so much burden burden on, for example, you, and then also they. But yeah, there are an infinite number of nouns and verbs and a vast number of adjectives, for example, and even a huge generous sprinkling of prepositions, depending on what you call one. With our pronouns, though, really, it's just a little squirt. And it's the sort of thing that makes you end up writing a book about.
- [11:03]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, as well. It's manageable. So you mentioned the formality. The ust usted would it be in.
- [11:10]
John McWhorter
In Spanish, right?
- [11:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And cometali vous and vous has, I guess, changed a little bit in actual usage in French. But what is. I know these aren't really decisions, but what has English lost by removing these formalities from our pronouns?
- [11:27]
John McWhorter
It means that in our language, unless we work hard at it, we can't ongoingly connote differences in respect, differences in our sense of social level, or even just not want to push so hard. And so instead of saying you, saying something along the lines of your highness or sir or something like that, and we can do it, but in a normal language, frankly, most languages in the world, there are ways of conveying that difference that we're probably, most of us today, most familiar with with Spanish. So we learn, if we're English speakers in Spanish, that there's tu. And we think, oh, that's how you say you. And then one of the first things you learn within the first couple of weeks is if you're conveying deference, you say usted. They're two U's. And back in the day when French was the langu language, most people knew it was the same thing with d and vu. And you think, oh, how exotic. No, not really. If you go all over Europe, that's the way languages tend to work. English is weird in us having only lonely little you. And it used to be that you can make a difference between thou and you. And it's so hard to wrap your head around this today, but you used to only be plural. You meant you guys. Thou was what you said to one person, and it wasn't formal. Now we think of it as archaic and we figure, well, thou, and we're in breeches and it's probably 300 years ago or in a bad play or something, but it used to be you look at one person and you say, thou come here. And then you all stay over there and that flakes away starting in the 1600s, and here we are with just you. It's an impoverished way of having a second person pronoun, but we think it's normal because it's all we know.
- [13:03]
Mike Pesca
So there is a story that is very appealing perhaps to us as Americans, as English speakers, about a classlessness of our society or the lack of formality, but that's not why it happened.
- [13:17]
John McWhorter
Right.
- [13:17]
Mike Pesca
That just happens to be a coincidence that the largest English speaking country, America, was formed in a more. In a more egalitarian way that would lend itself to dispensing with formalities. But it wasn't anyone's choice. That's a coincidence, right?
- [13:34]
John McWhorter
Yeah. And you want to tell that story. You want to say that we dispensed with the sense of hierarchy that the French and the Bulgarians and the Norwegians and the Russians. But then you notice right there, when that comes out of my mouth, it's not true. If you went back to the 1600s or the 1700s in Britain, for example, one of the things that we would have to most adjust to is how naked class bias was and how casual it was that a lowly person addressed a person of higher birth in a certain way. There was nothing slangy or informal about Britain in the 1700s. And yet this strange thing happened, and there's a more sophisticated idea that, that it had something to do with people from many regions coming together into the big cities and having to deal with one another and that encouraging a sense of equality, et cetera. But no, not that either, because that exact same thing was happening in lots of European countries. And yet they kept their tu and usted. And so the unsatisfying truth is, unless you read the book where I present some theories that are a little less intuitive but I suspect are true, the truth is you think it might just have been chance because it's not any of the reasons that you would think think it would be so as American.
- [14:45]
Mike Pesca
Are the pronouns in America, and in English are they unlike European or other languages, I analogize those languages with all their different variations to this. Perhaps you've seen, if you've done any work, a 68 piece ratchet set, and every single ratchet has a specific length, whereas, you know, you could just buy a set of pliers, and they're adjustable. And so America English are pronouns. They're more like the adjustable pliers rather than the fine, finicky ratchet set.
- [15:18]
John McWhorter
I really like that idea, but I think that part of it is that we just inherited the weird thing that happened to have gone on in England, because we're always trying, for example, to reinvent a plural you. And so we use you for singular and plural. But there's y'all from the south, there's yews from the vernacular Northeast, and yuns. If you go to Pittsburgh, the Pittsburghers always want you to talk about yuns. So there you go. And so people want there to be a y'all yous yuns, because that makes the language normal. You need to distinguish between singular and plural, and we're trying to do that. You can look at black slang and see some really exotic things, such as In Baltimore about 15 years ago, yo started being used not to mean yo and not to mean you, but yo as opposed to you, which these kids use. Yo started to mean that person over there, whether they're male or female. That person over there, yo has some funny pants on. That doesn't mean your pants are funny. It means that person over there. Probably a teacher or somebody we're making fun of. Yo has some funny pants on. That's more of the human desire to elaborate. And so I don't think that we're hot dog people. I think it's just that we inherited an impoverished web of pronouns.
- [16:34]
Mike Pesca
So, yeah, yo is to refer to someone who is yon or hither and yon. And now I like that. Let us pause the conversation. Say, what is the difference between hither and yon? Do you know? I don't know.
- [16:46]
John McWhorter
You know, that's. That's more of English always taking it light. And this going back to when English sounded like this, because it used to be here, there, and yawn, just like in Spanish, a key a and ayi. Normal languages don't just say here, there. Usually you have to say here, there, or way over there. And in some languages. And the truth is, this gets worse. The smaller and more obscure and less written the language is. Often they're like five distinctions, like right here, here, there, over there, a mile away. That's a normal thing a language can do. We drop jan. And so English likes to take it light, not because we're the American English of Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump, but this goes back to something that was happening way in late Middle English and then really Kind of catches on after that.
- [17:35]
Mike Pesca
You know, I've always been told by smart people, language is a tool. And one of the reasons people say this is not to be prescriptive. It's a tool, and if it works for you. But it seems like you are saying that there are many ways that our pronouns, other parts of speech, aren't really optimally working for us. And when you get to the they chapter, it's about people trying to invent that and address that need. But you just said that we always keep trying to invent a plural you. It's a paucity in our language. So how does a language, first of all, would you agree with that diagnosis? And then how does a language invent like a toolmaker might, a tool that serves the people using it?
- [18:18]
John McWhorter
Those are really good questions. English gets along. You know, a language can get along with even fewer pronouns than we have. There's a language spoken in New guinea called Barrack, where all they have is I, we, you, and then basically and means he, she, it, and they. It's not. I forget what it is, but they do fine. And the language is extremely complicated otherwise. It's not that they're somehow primitive in their speech or in any other way. So you can get along so well. We can deal with it. However, it can itch that sometimes you have to say, I don't mean you guys, I mean just you. Or it can itch that we don't have a gender neutral pronoun if you don't feel like being specific about it, or if a societal trend happens where a representative bunch of people say, we would like to not be referred to as he and she. And a critical mass of people agree we would like to accede to that request. And so what happens is, this is the problem. If you're going to come up with something new, then you can't just make it up. It's fine to make up pronouns like Z that in groups of people might use, but it's never going to get beyond that, because pronouns, in a way, aren't words. They are gestures. They're so deeply set in our minds. And so if you're going to come up with a new one, you have to make it up based on material that existed before. It's very Darwin. And so maybe they're pronouns in other languages that you might grab if you're desperate, but they have to be pronouns. You can't just make up something and what that means, especially a pronoun. You might, if you're Japanese, you know, you say Boku. Boku means eye in Japanese. It's one of about 15 ways of saying I. It originally meant servant, but nevertheless it made sense to use that word servant to mean I. They didn't just make up some little grunt like v to be the pronoun. You just can't do it. So we end up doing things like saying you all, or we end up taking they and using that as the gender neutral pronoun because it's the closest equivalent and that's the best that it can be. And so what we're watching is an attempt to have English be more precise in that realm, because languages tend to do that just because. But it can't be by just yanking something in, as colorful and as interesting as it may seem. And that's why we're so frustrated about they. Because we're not used to hearing they used, as in, my girlfriend is in the hospital and they need a haircut. That's different. And you have to wrap your head around it, especially if you're past a certain age. But if you want it to be, my girlfriend's in the hospital and Vaguki wants a haircut, it'll never work. We can't accept Vaguki. We can't accept ka. We can't accept he shit. As they tried in the old days. So clever, he and she. He. You want that to work, but it can't. You can't.
- [20:57]
Mike Pesca
If I can interrupt, why did Ms. Work then?
- [20:59]
John McWhorter
Because Ms. Responded to a very specific need. And Ms. Is not a pronoun. It is an appellation. And so people decide it. Let's. And also notice Ms. Was a variation on Mrs. If they had said instead, what we're going to do is we want to say gabooz in for. For, you know, women to not specify if they're married. It would never have caught on. Ms. Felt like a variation on something else.
- [21:25]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, and I would say a couple big gatekeepers at a time when gatekeepers were more important, like the magazine and then the New York Times saying, we are going to endorse this. And they weren't leaders on this. This had been festering up.
- [21:39]
John McWhorter
Festering.
- [21:40]
Mike Pesca
Now there's been bubbling up in the women's movement. It was more. It was more natural. Another factor is, I guess we could, if we put our heads to it, think of quickly talking in a sentence where the use of miss or misses Might be misleading. But of course, we could do this with they, you know, Tanya and John came to the apartment and they wanted pizza, but they wanted asparagus is a very confusing sentence. If we had used he and she, it wouldn't be confusing at all. And there are these sentences that come up. You talk in the book about a written piece about Judith Butler who uses they, and it was very hard to parse. Now you'll say your children. I don't know if they're reading about, you know, famed feminist scholars in the New Yorker because they're young girls, but your children are very easy and adept with using they. Would they, meaning your plural, two daughters, have a hard time parsing that written portion that you included in the book about Judith Butler?
- [22:37]
John McWhorter
Do you think you know what? Yeah, and I think that this is something that I didn't include in the book, but that I'm going to start calling for, which, you know, know, probably won't catch on. But if that article about Judith Butler had been a conversation and you're going from one little context to another, the they's probably would have panned out, naturally. But in print, I remember reading that in particular and thinking, this is a very interesting article. I respect that Judith Butler wants to be called they, but this is hard. And I thought what would have solved it is just to capitalize the T when it's referring to an individual person. If we do it with I, which frankly never made any real sense and was just based on the fact that it was easier to parse in print. Well, why not with they? Because if we're going to keep it, it would really have solved the whole problem for me reading that piece if they were capitalized when it referred to the single person, as opposed to all these French people surrounding her, where they were. They's too. So that's my feudal suggestion for this decade. And maybe it'll catch on.
- [23:38]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. While traveling in Brazil, where they had helped organize a conference on democracy. I mean, that they really can refer to Brazil or Judith Butler. Right. You speak in this way. You speak in this way. The woman replied, they listen to you. And if they listen to you, they will stop defending Israel. Like, who is that they in that sense? Every single. There were landmines of they. 75. I looked up the original article, 75 uses of they, and I have to say 35 of them. Them made me stop and say and do mental math in my head, which is not how language is supposed to work.
- [24:11]
John McWhorter
No. And I should say that it stuck out for me so much because the New Yorker is so very conscious of elegance, of pros. They work hard on it and they succeed. You know, it's the most buttery English prose I'm aware of. And I thought if this is the best they can do, then I wonder if we could make. Make sailing a little smoother.
- [24:32]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. But you're in favor of it and you have many sentences in the book that were once pointed to as well. This is an incorrect use of they as a plural. And that doesn't. Maybe 90% of these do not seem odd to our ear. Every nation have their refinements. Now, to me the have is weirder than the there in that sentence. Neither gave vent to their feelings in words. Everybody will become of use in their own fittest way. I would say the vast majority of people, because everybody and somebody, or especially none, which I guess supposed to mean no one doesn't strike people as singular these days.
- [25:18]
John McWhorter
Exactly. And I mean a lot of those sentences. You're talking about this collection of oldie sentences that I got from some guys in, I believe, 1895, and they're talking about all of these things as wrong. And it's these beautiful, elegant sentences from all these people with three names and Jane Austen. You would never think there was any problem with them. And they don't like just the grand old singular they. So tell each student they can pick up their paper after 5:00. And I think there has always been a cohort of people who insist that that's somehow wrong. I would say 99% of them probably use it in speech all the time, but they say that it's not something that you should write down. And the ice was thawing on that starting in the 21st century already because it's just something somebody made up in the 1700s that kind of got around. But really English has done that since Chaucer, using they in the singular because it feels right. And now that there are people who are saying that they want a non binary pronoun, you could think of it as a short Darwinian natural selection step from something that we were already doing. Although it's a challenge to use they to mean someone specific as opposed to someone indefinite or hypothetical.
- [26:30]
Mike Pesca
But.
- [26:30]
John McWhorter
But not such a challenge as if somebody decided to make the new pronoun foe. That that would have been frankly impossible for most people.
- [26:39]
Mike Pesca
And is that essentially what happened with Latinx? It just never had the buy in of the Latino and Latina people.
- [26:46]
John McWhorter
That's one of those things where I don't know if Latinx would have been impossible if a critical mass of Latino people were deeply, viscerally committed to pulling attention away from the gender binary but the fact is, for better or for worse, the vast majority aren't. I live in a very Latino neighborhood. I have never heard a single person who I live among in 10 years use Latinx. It's something I only hear in academic and artistic places. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. I mean, it's going to be a kind of a jargon. It's not an insult to say Latinx, but it is never. The guys in the barbershop across the street, the women who run the hair salon up the street from them, or even the school principal three blocks away. She's never gonna say Latinx. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that either.
- [27:37]
Mike Pesca
I wasn't chafing against Latinx a few years ago. I was saying, all right, maybe if this is gonna be the new way of talking, I'll try. I'll try to say it. And then I came across Philippine X. Filipino X. And I said, okay, this is. I can't. That's a bridge too far. I can't. I do not even understand why Filipinos and Filipinas start with an F, but the Philippines starts with a ph. I have a theory, by the way. Do you know the answer to that?
- [28:03]
John McWhorter
Well, roughly, for some, I've never looked into it, but yes, in terms of the ethnicity and the language, you use f, but you use the ph from when it was named after king Philip up 600 years ago. I'm not sure when that was decided. That's. That's a good question.
- [28:20]
Mike Pesca
All right, that's possibly the greatest natural cliffhanger I've ever created on the show. Tune in tomorrow where we will talk. John McWhorter and I will talk about the whole they them thing, but quite crucially, why a Philippine is with an F, but the Philippines are with a p and so much else. Join us tomorrow. John McWhorter, author of Pronoun Trouble, will be back.
- [28:52]
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- [29:25]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. Donald Trump spoke outside the White House today, surrounded by a phalanx of Race car drivers. The questions turned to tariffs and Trump put the pedal to the metal.
- [29:37]
Donald Trump
No other president would have done what I did. No other. I know the President. They wouldn't have done it.
- [29:42]
Mike Pesca
He knows him. He knows all of them. Chad, Arthur, Millie, Philly, all four Johns, both Johnson's, both Harrison's, both Franklin's, Delano Roosevelt, and Pierce. Don't forget Pierce. And none would have done this. And you know what? I think he's right. I believe him. So what we hear is that the President has started with the truth. And I will tell you, he will end with the truth, too. But before that, that he got into the world trade picture.
- [30:05]
Donald Trump
Last year, China made $1 trillion off trade with the United States. That's not right. And somebody had to do it.
- [30:15]
Mike Pesca
We also bought a trillion dollars worth of goods from China, which would have cost us something like $2 trillion had they not been made in China. We have $36 trillion of debt for a reason.
- [30:28]
Donald Trump
We don't have a debate there for fun. They have it for a reason.
- [30:31]
Mike Pesca
And I don't know, it's a little bit of fun thinking about, say, $1 trillion stacked end to end going to the sun 40 times. I mean, probably get singed when it got to the sun. But still, 37 or $36 trillion weighs six times the weight of the Hoover Dam. Also true. We don't have it for no reason. But one reason that we have $36 trillion in debt, debt about a quarter to a fifth of the reason is that during Trump's first time in office, he added $8 trillion to the national debt. The president then segued into an area very comfortable for him. Where do immigrants come from?
- [31:08]
Donald Trump
And there were people from mental institutions.
- [31:11]
Mike Pesca
Insane asylums, looney bins, funny farms, daffy day spas.
- [31:15]
Donald Trump
They were taking their mentally insane and they were dumping them into the.
- [31:20]
Mike Pesca
Into our country, just as the Chinese were dumping steel. So what we're going to do is we're going to tariff them for dumping the mentally ill. For every one insane Guatemalan they dump, we're going to charge them 1.25 insane Hondurans. That is Liberation Day.
- [31:36]
Donald Trump
Think of it. They take over. They want these people coming back trend Iraqwa from Venezuela to Venezuela, jails that cut off the fingers of a man in Colorado. They cut off his fingers because he called the police looking for help. They said, did you call the police? He said, yes, I did. Put your hand down. And they cut off the fingers. This is what they want to bring these people back now.
- [31:59]
Mike Pesca
And what this gang did, when you think about it, was impose a 10% finger tariff. They cut off one pinky. Then the rival gang retaliates. They raise it to 125% finger tariff, which is 10 fingers and two and a half toes. I say, can you take the toes first? But the answer is no. No, you can't. Also little note to you if you're ever in that position when asked by a Venezuelan gang, did you call the police? Say no. Say no. Try it. The president then returned to more explicitly economic issues.
- [32:30]
Donald Trump
If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn't be doing that if I didn't do this. They'd just keep building them in China.
- [32:40]
Mike Pesca
Here's what Apple actually announced. Apple is planning to temporarily source more iPhones from India to send to the United States in a bid to offset the impact of President Trump's tariffs on China. Trump was then asked if he'd consulted with any heads of industry or top bankers.
- [32:56]
Donald Trump
Well, I watched Jamie Dimon on Maria Bartiromo show this morning and he was very good. He said that, actually made the statement to effect that something had to be done with the tariffs and trade. He said that. He said, look, at some point, but he said something has to be done with tariffs and, and trade. He understood it.
- [33:15]
Mike Pesca
Here is what Dimon actually said. Note his description of the Trump administration's understanding of its own plan. So what do you think about the tariff plan?
- [33:24]
Jamie Dimon
I think it is perfectly reasonable for someone to say that trade was unfair. There were unfair trade things. And remember, it's not just tariffs, it's tariffs. I think they have the VAT wrong. How they understand it. I think they should really get a better understanding to make it easy to negotiate. But there are all these non tariff barriers around food and energy and then subsidies, which you know, China is famous for. So it's totally reasonable. Say we want to make trade better. But I also want to point out to the Americans we have the best economy in the world. Our GDP per person is $85,000, China's is $15,000. So you got to put a little bit into context. But you know, and then of course, when they put the tariffs and it was way beyond what people expected, that will cause a little inflation, slow down growth. Both.
- [34:05]
Mike Pesca
Yes. So quite the opposite of an endorsement. And finally, the President concluded by answering how he knew which companies deserve a.
- [34:12]
Donald Trump
Break, just instinctively more than anything else. I mean, you almost can't take a pencil to paper.
- [34:19]
Mike Pesca
And that too not being able to take pencil to paper that ranks as fact check true. And in the final few moments, he turned to the race car drivers next to him and analogize their job to his saying, I could say, here's a wall. I'm going to go through it. Sometimes you have to be able to go under the wall, around the wall, or over the wall. These guys know better than anyone. And they all nodded because it's easier than saying, We're IndyCar drivers, not the cast of the Road Warrior. What the hell are you talking about? And with that, the President strode off. Having overseen a hugely successful policy that only led to four straight days of trillions of dollars worth of losses, he then, in the tradition of any IndyCar driver who crashes headfirst into a wall on the first turn, took his victory lap. That's it for today's show. The gist is produced by Cory Wara, working late and Michelle Pesca working later. Later, G. Peru. Do Peru, and thanks for listening.