Will You Get a $5,000 Check? (Uncut) 03-13-2025

Will You Get a $5,000 Check? ‘Doge Dividend’ Explained | James Fishback

So I’m sorry, but I’m really not sorry that American hedge fund managers in Bridgeport, Connecticut or in lower Manhattan don’t see the big picture here, which is for 25 years, globalization was shoved down our throats. It didn’t actually come with no costs and all benefits. It came with real downside.

And if the markets want to throw a temper tantrum and hedge fund managers lose a little bit of money for the next couple of months, so be it. It’ll be good for which is for far too long has been neglected, overlooked and mistreated by both Republicans and Democrats. And Trump is breaking the status quo on that.

The Department of Government Efficiency Doge is aiming to cut up to two trillion dollars from the federal budget deficits by 2026. So what’s going to happen with the extra savings that the government may incur through this program? Well, we’re talking about this with our next guest, James Fishback, founder and CEO of Azoria Partners, who has come up with a very interesting plan for giving money back to Americans. Welcome to the show, James.

Good to see you, David. Great to be here. You’re all over the news, James.

Who is James Fishback is the title of this article from Newsweek that I see and investor who created Doge stimulus check plan. Is it a stimulus check? We’ll talk about that. Who is James Fishback? How are you involved with Doge? Let’s start there.

Who is James Fishback, man? That’s a daunting one. I am 30 years old. I am a macro trader.

So currencies, commodities, interest rate futures. I’ve been doing that for 10 years at two different hedge funds. Most recently at Greenlight Capital.

I left Greenlight a year or so ago to launch Azoria, what we call a free thinking investment firm. We’ll be out this spring with three really innovative ETFs. We launched the firm at Mar-a-Lago and was honored that President Trump was there for that as well.

And so this idea of a Doge dividend, I’ve been thinking about Doge for a long time now. Vivek has been a friend for a couple of years. Actually, Bill Ackman introduced us when he first ran for president.

So I was doing some advising for him as Doge was getting off the ground. But this idea, I kid you not, David, of a Doge dividend literally came to me in a dream a couple of weeks ago. I woke up.

I pulled in our head of research for Missouri who was working on a Fed research paper we were doing together. And I said, let’s go to Capitol Grill. Let’s sit down for a couple hours and let’s flesh this out.

We did. We posted it on X. And then in a couple hours, Elon Musk had said he was sharing it with the president. And then 24 hours later, the president had publicly supported the plan on stage in Miami.

And so it’s been a whirlwind since then. Last week, I was on the Hill meeting with senators and members of the House to talk about the specifics of what is a bold plan to take Doge full circle, David, not just to identify and root out waste, fraud and abuse. But it turns out when you send money to D.C. and it’s misused and abused, you have to then refund some of that money back to the same hardworking taxpayers who sent it there in the first place.

And that’s what this plan represents. And I’m honored that President Trump supports it. Well, let’s take a look at what Trump has actually said.

So let’s play this clip and we’ll react together. Is even under consideration a new concept where we give 20 percent of the Doge savings to American citizens and 20 percent goes to paying down debt because the numbers are incredible. Elon, so many billions of dollars, billions, hundreds of billions.

And we’re thinking about giving 20 percent back to the American citizens and 20 percent down to pay back debt and pay down debt, which is if you look at value, if it were a real estate balance sheet, the debt is tiny, but we still we still want to pay it down. Doesn’t matter. We don’t look at it as a piece of real estate.

It’s America. We’re going to get it down through intelligence, hard work. And as Elon said, a word called caring, you have to you have to care by doing this.

Americans will tell us where there is waste. They’ll be reporting it themselves. They participate in the process of saving money.

Can you walk us through the particulars of your proposal? 20 percent of the Doge savings. Roughly how much does that equate to per household, per American? Sure. David, let’s go from the top line.

It’s on the proposal. It’s my Doge dividend dot com. Encourage all of your followers to to go there and see it for themselves.

But here’s the here’s the big picture. We think Doge can save two trillion dollars over the next couple of years. If you take 20 percent of that as the Doge dividend calls for and send it back to taxpayers, 20 percent of two trillion is four hundred billion.

And there are roughly 80 million taxpaying households in America. So if you then go four hundred billion divided by 80 million, you end up with a check of roughly five thousand dollars to each taxpaying household. That’s we think we can get to.

But again, this plan is not predestined to the five thousand dollar number. If the savings come in above or below that, the check will be reflected accordingly. So again, the if the savings are only one trillion, which I think is awfully low, the check goes from five thousand to twenty five hundred.

If the check is if the savings are only five hundred billion, which, again, is really, really low, then the savings are only twelve hundred and fifty. But I think the president touched on something very important there, David, which is that the Doge dividend check, what it does more than anything is it incentivizes millions of Americans to report waste in government spending that they themselves see. Why would they do that? Because they have every incentive to do it.

The more the government saves with Doge, the bigger their Doge dividend check is. So I’ll tell you, most of the time, cutting government spending is not popular. Most of the time, there’s large resistance to it.

The Doge dividend re incentivizes the taxpayer to be on board with fiscal responsibility and cost savings, but also incentivize them to report it themselves. As the president said in that speech, if you see waste, if you see fraud, if you see abuse, let Doge know the more Doge saves, the bigger that Doge check is. And that’s a really radical, transformative idea to enlist the taxpayer on this fiscal responsibility journey.

OK, before we talk about the stimulus check itself, let’s just back up a minute, James. How likely is it that Doge will actually realize savings of up to two trillion dollars? That’s the underlying assumption here. Yeah, I think it’s actually really likely.

And you don’t have to roll back the clock, David, 30 or 40 years to see a world in which we have a much leaner government budget. In 2019, the federal budget was four and a half trillion dollars. Today, as you and I speak, it’s closer to seven trillion.

That’s an increase of over 50 percent. What on earth is going on? Right. I mean, where did that money go? We can break it down by individual sector.

But I think the overwhelming point is life isn’t all that different from 2019 to the most recent fiscal year of twenty twenty four to where there’s a 50 percent increase in the amount of the federal budget. So that is part of it. If we can get things back to where they were just a few years ago, we are not just in a position to balance the budget.

We’re in a position to actually deliver surplus and to really begin to start paying down this debt. And what better way to do that, David, than to send some of those savings right back to the taxpayers who sent it to D.C. in the first place? I know there’s this idea in the mainstream media that all of the government spending is somehow funded by government debt. That’s just not true.

Over the past five years, the government has spent about 30 trillion dollars. Only nine trillion has come from borrowing the rest. Twenty one trillion came directly from tax receipts from American taxpayers.

So 70 percent of all the money the government spends is not borrowed from other countries, but is directly sent to D.C. from like from from taxpayers like you, me and the listeners on your program. And so I think it’s only fair that they get some of the restitution back for what has been uncovered by those in just a short couple of weeks. What is the timeline then that we can expect? So at what point can enough savings be realized such that this proposal should be implemented, actually realize a distribution to American households? So those savings can happen over the course of, let’s say, the next 18 months to 24 months.

Doge was set to expire in July of twenty twenty six. That may end up continuing for another quarter or so. We don’t know.

But the plan here is not to look at two trillion in savings year over year, but to look at an aggregate of two trillion in savings for as long as Doge runs. And I’ll tell you, we’ve already hit one hundred billion in savings and we haven’t even touched the Pentagon. We haven’t touched the immense fraud within the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid system.

And so I’m confident we’ll hit that two trillion dollar number, may even go above it. And for that, the taxpayer deserves some restitution, a little bit of a refund to for for what has been uncovered. OK, now is this for all Americans? Are you proposing to have different, you know, stimulus checks amounts for, by the way, I’m calling it a stimulus check because that’s what the mainstream media calls it.

I don’t even know if that’s the accurate or fair term to use. I’ll let you comment on that. But the question is, before we get into that, the question is whether or not we’re going to have stratified checks to different Americans, depending on their income levels.

What’s the plan here? A flat five thousand dollars. Yeah, it’s a flat five thousand dollars. It’s much simpler that way.

There’s three criteria, David, the first of which is you file the federal tax return, which is to say you paid federal income tax. The second is you are currently receiving Social Security benefits. And the third is you are a member of the military, a past member, and you are receiving veterans benefits.

If you fall into one of those three categories, our proposal says you should receive whatever check amount corresponds to 20 percent divided by the number of taxpaying households. So that’s how we get. That’s how we get there.

Now, remind you that I would remind you that a stimulus check and I think you are right to be skeptical of the mainstream media’s use of that term. Every year we send out 100 million checks for tax refund season. We don’t call them stimulus checks.

And, you know, a stimulus check is something that’s designed to provide stimulus at a time of weak economic growth, like the 2008 financial crisis, like what happened in spring of 2020 with covid. So this is not a stimulus check precisely because it’s not designed to stimulate the economy was designed to do is to pay restitution and to incentivize the taxpayer. And I think that the concerns about inflation from this particular doge dividend process are way overblown because they neglect to focus on the nuance of this macroeconomic backdrop compared to what we saw with the extraordinary unprecedented conditions of a labor shortage, of lockdowns, of shutdowns, of supply chain dislocations and the massive infusion of fiscal and monetary stimulus that we saw in 2020 and 2021.

That’s clearly not the case today. You’ve had many guests on who have talked about recent Fed policy, but let’s be honest, Fed rates are above 4 percent today. They were pinned at zero in 2020 and 2021.

We were printing 100 billion dollars to buy mortgage backed securities and treasuries a month. We’re not doing that today. In fact, we’re in the process of shrinking that balance sheet.

And then lastly, let’s not forget the macro backdrop of a labor shortage was inflationary back then. We don’t have that today. The macro backdrop of high energy prices owing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 22.

We don’t have that today. In fact, we have drill baby drill, which is designed to increase production and lower prices. We saw immense regulations coming on the books in the Biden economy.

We see now deregulation. And so all of the macro backdrop factors during Biden, when the stimulus checks hit were inflationary. Today, a refund like this would be hitting in a disinflationary borderline deflationary environment.

That context is really, really important. So it wouldn’t push up inflation significantly is your is your point. And I bring this up because, again, going back to the point that we made earlier about whether or not this is a stimulus check, there has been research done about how stimulus checks during the pandemic have actually contributed directly to inflation.

This is a study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. And I’m just going to read a passage from the introduction of the abstract here. It says estimates suggest that fiscal stimulus support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about three percentage points by the end of twenty twenty one.

So let’s assume that your proposal is some sort of stimulus. The concern from people is whether or not this is going to contribute to inflation directly. How would you respond to that? Well, there’s two points there.

If you can pull the article back up just for one second, I want to highlight a particular word. We’ll do. Yeah, I enjoyed reading this Fed research, even if I disagree with it sometimes.

But this is actually pretty good. What you’ll note there is the key term, David. Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effects.

That’s not just stimulus checks. That was PPP. That was state funding.

That was all sorts of nonsense, totaling about six trillion dollars, by the way, between three different acts of Congress, the CARES Act, consolidated appropriations and the American Rescue Plan. So six trillion dollars of total fiscal stimulus. What of that was stimulus checks? Actually, less than 13 percent.

And so they’re right. That total fiscal support of six trillion did raise inflation by about three percentage points, but only a tenth of that roughly was due to stimulus checks. That’s the first thing.

And that’s just the demand side measure in isolation. What it neglects to do in the analysis is really tough to do. This is how do you separate the supply side effects of having millions of workers on the sideline refusing to work? How do you counteract that with the shutdown of businesses by the lockdown measures, which in effect restricted supply, which pushed prices higher? How do you factor in the geopolitical risk premium of active wars in places like Ukraine? And so they are right that fiscal support measures did do that.

But when you say fiscal support measure, that is not automatically mean stimulus checks. As I mentioned earlier, less than 13 percent of the fiscal support measures were the stimulus checks. That was three different rounds.

In this case, it’s one round. It’s not newly printed money. It is a refund of money that was recently sent to Washington by taxpayers.

If you take it even a step further, David, imagine this as a stylized example. Is it inflationary to give every single American a million dollars? Yes or no? Before you answer that. Oh, go ahead.

Actually, is it before I answered that? I’ll let you speak. Well, no, I actually I would want you to answer just because it makes the example, I think, more compelling is giving every American a million dollars inflationary. Oh, that is a very good question.

I am going to argue yes, based on the assumption that the propensity to spend stays the same, meaning the savings rate stays low and everybody spends a million dollars. Yes, it is inflationary. One hundred percent.

One hundred percent. That’s exactly right. So it depends is really the short answer.

It depends on what you believe the propensity to spend that incremental million dollars is. Now, a large check like a million dollars would obviously get spent, especially if it was distributed to lower income households who have a demonstrably higher propensity to spend money. But remember, it depends is the key word there.

Polling data from CNBC and jail partners suggest that 70 to 75 percent of a doge dividend check like this would not be spent, but would be used to pay down existing debt and to reorganize household finances. We talk a lot about national debt, David, but here’s the truth. Household debt is up 30 to 40 percent under the Biden Harris administration.

Why? Because they had to take out larger credit card balances to keep up with the large increase in inflation. And so if you get a five thousand dollar check and use that to pay down your credit card bill or your auto loan payment, that is not inflationary. In fact, paying down debt, David, you know this from your time on Wall Street, paying down debt is automatically deflationary because it takes money out of the economy that would otherwise be spent.

And so it really does depend how this money is spent. Now, look, obviously, in covid, if you send a family of four that makes thirty, forty thousand dollars, if you send them fifteen thousand dollars of stimulus checks at a time where there is reduced supply, there are lockdowns. No one has anything to do except to go online and to buy stuff on Amazon or Wayfair.

Then obviously there’s going to be an increase in price. Those macroeconomic backdrop factors are not present today. And the polling data that’s readily accessible, David, suggests that American households would use this money to start to dig their way out of the debt that they were forced to take on by President Biden to simply keep their head above water during the worst inflation in 40 years.

Let me just clarify what you mean by what do you mean they were forced to take on debt by the Biden administration? Let’s just clarify what you mean by that. Yeah, absolutely. So so the total CPI basket went up by 20 percent, which is an understatement.

You know that it doesn’t measure things like household mortgage costs as a pretty poor job of measuring food and energy. But if prices go up by 20 percent, that forces you to increase your credit card spend by 20 percent, which increases your debt level by 20 percent. So Americans took on a large portion of debt over the past four years, not because they wanted to, David, but because they were forced to, because prices went higher, not because of their own choices, but because macroeconomic policy decisions by the Biden-Harris administration, starting with the American Rescue Plan, starting with the geopolitical failures in Ukraine that led to a surge in energy prices, they were forced to absorb that and take on new debt, going on to things like the Green New Scam, also known as the infrastructure bill, et cetera.

Those things forced inflation higher, in turn, forced Americans to take on more debt. That debt is not was not their fault. I believe it was the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think the least thing we can do, by the way, is to send some money back to taxpayers, especially when polling data tells us that those very taxpayers would use it to pay down debt. OK, well, let’s take a look at how the Democrats are responding to this. Take a listen to this particular clip here by Senator Slotkin in response to the Trump address.

But Elon Musk just called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. While we’re on the subject of Elon Musk, is there anyone in America who is comfortable with him and his gang of 20-year-olds using their own computer servers to poke through your tax returns, your health information and your bank accounts? No oversight, no protections against cyber attack, no guardrails on what they do with your private data. We need a more efficient government.

You want to cut waste? I’ll help you do it. But change doesn’t need to be chaotic or make us less safe. The mindless firing of people who work to protect our nuclear weapons, keep our planes from crashing and conduct the research that finds the cure for cancer only to rehire them two days later.

No CEO in America could do that without being summarily fired. This isn’t a direct response to your Doge tax return proposal, but it is a response to how the Doge reduction of the deficit should or could be implemented. So can you just respond to what was just said? Absolutely.

I have respect for Senator Slotkin, but I got to tell you the truth. We also have respect for the taxpayer. The taxpayer has been summarily abused and lied to for years, that their tax dollars were being somehow spent on education and infrastructure and healthcare.

But it turns out that money was sent abroad for Iraqi Sesame Street or DEI scholarships in Burma. And so understand that the chaos is not Elon Musk cutting out waste, fraud and abuse, of course, by the way, as a direct hire of the duly elected president of the United States. The real chaos, David, is millions of taxpayers being lied to by their government for years about where and how their tax dollars would be spent.

That’s what’s chaotic. And simply ending that is not chaos. It is clarity.

Okay. Let’s turn the page now to markets, your investor, first and foremost. And I’m just curious to get your take on the recent volatility markets do not like the implementation or the execution of the tariffs that Trump has been talking about for ages now.

And, you know, my question is why the volatility now? Because we’ve seen this play out in 2017, 2018, right? The tariffs that Trump is talking about now is not a new concept. The markets didn’t like tariffs in 2018 and they shouldn’t be liking it now. But I just wonder why there’s such an adverse reaction to something that has been so well telegraphed.

Well, there’s so many examples, David, from from both of our careers where we could see, wow, that was really well telegraphed. That Fed hike was really well telegraphed and S&P futures sold off by three or four percent after the meeting over some misplaced comma in the statement. And so I, you know, I learned very early on as a macro trader, not to look too much into market price action, but a couple of things come to mind.

The first of which is this volatility, which is not particularly high. It’s not like the VIX is over 40 or 50. This volatility that we’re seeing today is being preceded by historic calm and a pretty large rally leading up to this.

The second thing is that markets, as you’re, as you pointed out, we went through the tariff situation in 18 and in 19. It turns out it wasn’t inflationary, as evidenced by the fact that inflation averaged one point eight percent under President Trump’s first term. Five point seven, by the way, under President Biden.

So it wasn’t inflationary. Markets did very well. And the last thing is a far more inherent factor to markets.

Markets are a moral and are fundamentally plagued with short termism. They’re always looking out just a couple of weeks or a couple of months and not at the bigger picture. And they’re really indifferent as to the national security concerns of the U.S. economy and our own sovereignty.

And so what President Trump is doing is not necessarily just making an economic argument. He’s saying it’s not good that over one hundred thousand Americans die every single year from fentanyl and China, Mexico and Canada to do something about it. Now, the market looks at that and says, oh, tariffs, bad inflation, bad.

The Fed might need to raise rates. But the markets seem to ignore that we’re losing one hundred thousand Americans every year. That’s actually bad for the economy and bad for the markets because the markets are a derivative of the real economy.

Why would losing one hundred thousand Americans be bad for the markets and bad for the economy? Well, let’s think about that for a moment. One hundred thousand people is one hundred thousand innocent lives. It’s also one hundred thousand workers.

It’s one hundred thousand parents and consumers. When you lose a father or a mother or a primary caretaker to a drug overdose that came from Canada, Mexico or China, you now have lost someone in your family who is supporting you and your household. That now triggers a vicious cycle that makes you more likely to get into debt, more likely not to have an independent income of your own, more likely to turn to addiction and feel the other vicious cycle.

None of these things are good for the real economy or good for the markets long term. And so the markets, again, you know this, David, from your time on Wall Street. You know this from your work today on your show that markets are a moral and are fundamentally short term.

And so I don’t expect them to understand President Trump’s game of chess with China, Mexico or Canada. I don’t expect them, honestly, bluntly to care that we’re losing two hundred people every single day. I lost my uncle growing up to poison that comes across the southern border every single day.

It’s time that President Trump reasserted the sovereignty and the borders of this country. He is doing that. And the fact that the S&Ps, those the temper tantrum, as it always does when something happens, whether it’s the Fed or the dollar yen carry trade and all of these things end up reverting in a matter of weeks, should not derail a president who won a historic mandate to restore national sovereignty and to bring borders back again.

I think Trump said that, and I think I’m paraphrasing it. I don’t remember the exact words, but yeah, tariffs will see a little pain, right? We’re going to have to endure a little bit of pain, I think is what he said. So he admitted that markets may throw a bit of a tantrum, but over the long term, America should prosper more because of these tariffs and these measures.

Do you agree? I absolutely agree. And by the way, a little bit of pain. How about a lot of pain? We had 20 million manufacturing workers at the turn of the century the year 2000.

Now we have 12 million. So you’ve got, oh, I don’t know, 8 million hardworking men and women across this country who had a manufacturing job and no longer do. 7 million, David, 7 million working age men in America are neither working nor looking for work.

And 40% of them, according to Princeton economist, Alan Krueger, are taking painkillers every day. Entire communities, whether they’re in Appalachia or in Monroe, Louisiana, or on the outskirts of New Haven, have been hollowed out, have turned factories into dens where now folks shoot up heroin, where they once would have built cars and assembled the next generation of American greatness. That is a real problem.

And so I’m sorry, but I’m really not sorry that American hedge fund managers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or in lower Manhattan don’t see the big picture here, which is for 25 years, globalization was shoved down our throats. It didn’t actually come with no costs and all benefits. It came with real downside.

President Trump is restoring fairness to free trade. And if the markets want to throw a temper tantrum and hedge fund managers lose a little bit of money for the next couple of months, so be it. It’ll be good for Main Street, which is for far too long, has been neglected, overlooked, and mistreated by both Republicans and Democrats.

And Trump is breaking the status quo on that. Wait, wait, wait, James, how is this going to bring back jobs to America? Right now layoffs are happening across the board in Canada and the US, by the way, because when you implement a tariff, the American company first has to pay for it. And so they realize that they have to either increase the prices or suffer a margin decrease, and they may not realize an increase in sales.

And so layoffs are happening as a result of that. What’s the connection here between bringing back American jobs and the pain that we’re seeing right now in the job market? Well, the bridge is, look at what Tesla did. Every Tesla sold in America is made in America.

There is no excuse that the Ford Mach-E is made in Mexico. When Tesla sells a superior car at a cheaper price and it’s built, whether it’s at the Gigafactory in Austin or it’s the Fremont factory in California, those cars are built here. Look, it’s not going to be easy.

There’s a Shanghai factory as well, though, right? Absolutely. No, there is a Shanghai factory, but those cars are not sold in America. Every Tesla sold in America is made in America.

And I’ve got one right here behind me, a Model 3 and a Model Y. You can rent a Model 3, you can lease it for $130 a month. It is by far the most advanced car on the market, the safest car on the market, and it’s made right here with American labor in either California or Texas. What we are simply asking is companies like Ford and Chevy and others, take a page out of Elon Musk’s textbook, build cars in this country again.

Why? It’s good for national security. It’s obviously good for the consumer, but it’s good for the worker. This is a question we thought about a lot in high school debate, David, which I did growing up, which is what do you value more? Do you value low cost or do you value good jobs? And so I got to tell you the truth.

If your goal is the cheapest air fryer and T-shirt possible, then yeah, let’s bring in all the cheap labor from China, oftentimes slave labor, and have them make air fryers and T-shirts and cups, and we’ll bring them to America. But if you actually value human dignity, if you actually value employing your brothers and sisters in our communities all across this country, you may be willing to accept a higher price so long as millions of Americans who are currently out of work and have been out of work for years actually have a shot at making a living, doing right by their family, and enjoying the independence and the self-sufficiency and the dignity and purpose that comes with gainful employment. And so it’s not strictly an economic question, although clearly Tesla has shown you, you can make cars in America.

There’s no issue with that. There’s also the bigger question of what do we value? Are we willing to pay $30 versus $21 for an air fryer if it means that that air fryer is made in Connecticut as opposed in Shenzhen? And I think that’s a big question that taxpayers have to have to ask. And clearly, President Trump made no secret of this tariff policy, of the policy of re-industrializing and bringing manufacturing back to America.

He won a historic victory on that. And so folks shouldn’t be surprised if the markets want to throw a temper tantrum, as they do with literally anything, by the way. The dollar-yen carry trade contributed to the VIX going above 60, as you covered back in August of last year.

That move was unwound within 15 days. Markets can and do throw temper tantrums all the time. But my message to President Trump is don’t get distracted by the whims and the short-termism of the market.

Keep your eye on the prize, which is delivering for hardworking Americans. And I’m confident that’s what the president’s going to do. Okay.

Let’s turn back to the markets. Stocks rose today on Wednesday, as we’re speaking on the 5th of March. The S&P is up about 1%.

The Nasdaq is up 1.5%. So according to the CNBC article, what happened was a rally after back-to-back losses as an exemption for automakers on President Donald Trump’s tariffs offered hope for more conceptions. Like I mentioned, the Dow Jones is up by 528 points, or 1.3%. The S&P is up about 1.2. So the White House said it granted a one-month delay for tariffs on automakers whose cars comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. I think you mentioned this just now, bringing back the manufacturing of cars to the U.S. Stellantis surged 10%, Ford, GM up more than 5% and 8% respectively.

How likely is it, I think investors want to know, how likely is it that Trump is going to rescind all broad-based tariffs if agreements are met? I think it’s very likely, actually. And so here’s the way I think about tariffs is if you are betting on tariffs long term, there’s strategic tariffs and there’s reciprocal tariffs. I think reciprocal tariffs should stay until they end up lowering their tariff rates or eliminate them entirely.

But these strategic tariffs, whether it’s on the fentanyl issue or the border issue, if you believe that Donald Trump is a great negotiator, as I do, that you should believe that these tariffs will come off because he will exact the right leverage on our trading partners and have them keep up their end of the commitment, which is to secure their border and to prevent poisonous drugs like fentanyl from pouring into our country. And so I would certainly bet that President Trump is going to get these concessions, which is to say he gets the concessions and the tariffs ultimately come off. He’s made it very clear these tariffs are linked to fentanyl, to migration, to the borders, to our sovereignty.

If these countries complies, I believe they will, given the leverage that Trump has, that these tariffs will come off and markets are free to freak out about their next tantrum. Okay. What are you doing as an investor then? What are you betting on, long term and medium term? So long term, I am betting at Azoria that AI is the biggest thing we’ve ever seen.

It’s bigger than the internet. It’s bigger than the discovery of fire. It is an absolute game changer to say that I can write on a napkin, I can sketch out a website, take a photo of it with the existing free models today, and in a matter of minutes, turn that into a fully deployable HTML, CSS code online.

That is massively deflationary. I spoke with a venture capitalist earlier this week, who a couple of years ago was quoted $8 million for a software development project. David, they just quoted him $800,000, given that the vast majority of it would be developed with AI coding tools like Claude and OpenAI.

And so think about that for a moment. A deflation of 90% from an upstream software developer means that all of the downstream beneficiaries, all of the downstream users will also see that deflationary impulse. We are in for a great deflation over the coming decades because so much of what we do is tied to labor.

Our economy, after all, is 70% services. The vast majority of that is labor, a lot of which is in the knowledge economy. So whether it’s a paralegal or a tutor, whatever it may be, you can now leverage artificial intelligence.

And that’s to say nothing, by the way, about self-driving cars. I own one. It drives me everywhere.

It’s unbelievably impressive in FSD13. And then you’ve got obviously humanoid robots taking this real world AI to the next level. And so we’ve got three ETFs coming out later this spring that folks can learn more at investasuria.com, can sign up for our email list.

I’m precluded from saying all too much more, given we have an SEC statement that’s currently being filed. But I would say bet big on AI and then look out for some funds later this year that allow investors to co-invest with our vision and our thesis for what this new age is for America. All right, James, excellent.

Where can we follow your work? Follow me on XJ underscore fishback and sign up for our mailing list at investasuria.com. Okay. Put the links down below. Make sure to follow James there.

Pleasure to host you today, James. Welcome to the show. Good to see you.

And we’ll speak next time. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, David.

Thanks for all you do. And thank you for watching. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.