Wilbur Ross - Former United States Secretary of Commerce | From The ‘King of Bankruptcy’ ($400 Billion Deals) to Trump's Cabinet

American dream has always been, work hard, keep at it, succeed, and you end up being more prosperous and more happy than even your parents were. Usually within a problem there also lies an opportunity. Our educational system, I think, is failing the younger generation. We're not doing a good job teaching kids what they need to know to have a good career. Entrepreneurship takes a lot of work, but somebody is starting their own business. It's not a question, do I work 40 hours, 41 or 42? You're starting your own business and you don't even think about am I working overtime. A lot of people have gotten rich collecting rent. I don't know anybody who got rich paying rent. Big lesson is the only person who can hold you back is you yourself. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Now, HubSpot is the resource that you need to tap into if you are an entrepreneur. It's no secret that starting a business is hard. Even if you have an amazing idea, bringing it to life can feel overwhelming. With HubSpot's new entrepreneurship kit, you can go from idea to IPO with the help of a company that knows a thing or two about growing better. This all inclusive kit gives you step-by-step guidance and frameworks to help you crush every stage of starting a business with tools tailored to help all steps of the entrepreneurial journey is packed with templates for project management, emails, skill development templates, there's also a solo printer guide. It's got freelancing pricing worksheets and lots more that you can use to get up and running immediately. And best of all, it's free. With expert guidance and frameworks from HubSpot, starting a business doesn't have to be hard. So don't wait to start yours. Go to HubSpot.com slash ENT to download the guide right now. Thank you for coming on. I'm excited to do this. I want to start just to understand because you've had a life that's been shared with so many different things that you've worked on and so many different things that you've built. I want to just go back and understand as a child what was an inflection point or a moment that happened or a series of moments that happened that sort of set you up and put you on the road to where you are today. Okay, well that's a very good question and I'm delighted you started off with it. But when I was a kid I was very scrawny, undersized for my age in a bookworm. So I was a perfect candidate to be a victim for bullies. And for a while I was getting bullied and then my father got me a punching bag and some instruction and that accomplished two things. One made me feel more self-confident and two the few times I had to use the instruction it pretty well solved the problem. So it both gave me more self-confidence and reduced the need for actual finding. So that was one very very big step. The other one was when I was about 10 years old my paternal grandfather took me to a recreation hall. He was a great baller. In fact he bowled in his lifetime three three hundred games. Well for me at my age the bowling ball was too heavy so I couldn't do that with him. But the rec hall also had a shooting range and so he took me down there to see if that would be interesting. Turned out I had a very good aptitude for it and I became a real marksman. And that's what led to the most interesting second turning point. That was this. I became such a good marksman that at age 14 I won the New Jersey State Championship and at age 16 I set the U.S. junior record over the Olympic small ball rightful course and they were trying Winchester was trying to get me to drop out of school for a while and just spend full time shooting to get ready for the actual Olympics. Well that event which was an outdoor event was unique and that I was great that we set the record but the spotter they had given me to make sure I fired the right number of rounds because you had a target the real target and a fake target. The fake target was so that as the wind adjusted you could change your sight and make sure you were well he undercounted so it was a bittersweet victory. Here I set a national record as a young kid but I did so with firing one round less than I could have fired so it would have been even a better score. That taught me a lesson that is stuck with me ever since. Namely you can delegate authority but at the end of the day responsibility stays with you. So that got me to be kind of a micro manager in later life and I really tried to supervise very carefully the people that are helping me. So when you look at your career and sort of like these moments that gave you confidence and showed your own ability and really just turned you from a boy into a man at the end of the day. How did those impacts your career, your life, what you chose to work on because obviously now well I mean even years ago you were known as the king of bankruptcy but you didn't start there. That's after a career of a lot of work and a lot of ups and downs and wins and losses it gets you to that point and then you go from private to public to serving the government. I'm very curious as you started your career at least and obviously as a long career so you don't have to do the whole thing but what were some of the things that pushed you down the paths that you went on? Well in the very beginning I went to Yale and then directly to Harvard Business School and I had been in ROTC at Yale because in those days we had universal military training, the draft and I thought it'd be better to go in as an officer than as an enlisted man. So they gave me a deferment so I could go directly to HBS. So I go in the military and I was supposed to be six months active duty seven-and-a-half years reserved but the loan came to the Cuban Missile Crisis so I ended up spending a year and a half in the army. During that period my employer to be a very hot money manager called Emery DuVay died, died two weeks before I was scheduled to show up for work and on his deathbed sold the firm to a very wealthy client called Robert Winthrop from the Massachusetts Winthrop family. They agreed to hire me anyway so now I show up the firm is now called Winthrop DuVay so I changed employers before I even got my first paycheck. Two weeks later in came Jack Doran's but then was the CEO of Campbell Soup and between him and the pension fund they had several billion dollars of money with us so they had a nice chip chat over lunch and then Doran said, God why do my accounts have so much lucky Friday silver mines in them. And Mr. Winthrop turned to me and said, well but do my accounts have lucky Friday silver mines as well and I said yes and they do all of our accounts have some lucky Friday silver mines and then explained why. Well that made it clear to Doran's that this was not the same kinds of hand-on senior management that he'd been used to before Emery DuVay died so the following Monday they pulled all three billion dollars out from under our management so Bob Winthrop a little later that week was at a board meeting of city bank he had been on the board of city bank and he the CEO of city bank on hearing his problem and we bought the sperm and just lost this big account and how embarrassing it was he said Bob Sam Millbank is desiring to pull out his money from a nice old line farm called Woodstrothers if you put a few billion more dollars in by him out they'll call it Woodstrothers and Winthrop and you'll never be embarrassed again so he did that you know as you as you walk through your career and we I I I agree with this as well and it's something that I've seen you spoken about you obviously believe the concept of hard work and you speak about this in your book it's obviously something that's very important to you talk to me about the concept of hard work and talk to me about it from the perspective of when you started your career and what you had to put in versus perhaps even what you see now with people in their careers sure well uh we had been a barely middle class family and then when I was at Yale my father died and since I had two younger siblings that my mom who was a third grade school teacher had the support and hopefully help get the real education so as a result of all that I had to work my way through school so I went on aid at Yale and did a variety of odd jobs to get spend money and to pay tuition and all of that so um that's probably there's no bad thing about working hard because I was taking a regular curriculum then you had to do all these jobs because at Yale when you got student aid you didn't just get the aid you had that any worked out of a billing system and you had to work so many hours a week from the university to make up for the fact that they were giving you aid and then I had to find odd jobs for uh spend money so that was when I started really working hard because Yale was obviously a challenging curriculum and when I went through to the business school at Harvard it too was a challenging curriculum but again I didn't have any money and so I had to do odd jobs so I wrote articles for a magazine called Financial World I wrote the anonymous research reports for a little brokerage for and I was even a census taker during the decennial census going door to door I was trying to get people to fill out their census forms and that was a real challenge because they gave me a bad section of Boston to go to so I'm wearing this little white skull patrol that sort of shoulder thing with a big make-believe silver badge on it well in that section of Boston when you show up at a door with a badge if they open the door at all then more like you're gonna have a dog come out after you then they are to let you interview them so that's a lot about the fact that you can survive and argue with school day plus a lot of part-time jobs that you needed to do to survive so it became a habit and it's like anything else once you get used to it and once it's a routine that you work long hours and hard hours it doesn't become so challenging what bothers me about today is that the kids don't like the idea of work I found a while ago there's actually a reddit site that had six million members totally devoted to anti-work and there would be postings on it one very similar to one I'm quoting now it said I just can't force myself to go to work anymore so the notion that work is an aberrant behavior than something you have to be forced to do or force yourself to do rather than being a natural and a part of the whole growing up and adulthood process this is troubling because that everybody now wants things easy quick not joining work and you see people saying things you a very real bright young people saying things like I'm only gonna do the bare necessary amount of work so I don't lose my job or they'll say I don't want a real job I just want to do gigs and I'll just do enough gigs to get by the idea of just getting by and not liking work is the antithesis of the American dream the American dream has always been work hard keep at it succeed and you end up being more prosperous and more happy than even your parents were so to me it's a very very sad phenomenon that there's this attitude the younger people today are also very fragile of with many of them you say boo they wet their pants or they go hide in a safe room or something like that it's a wrong system there are challenges there are problems that everybody will face but usually within a problem there also lies an opportunity and if they were sensible they would look through the problem find the opportunity grab it and advance themselves what do you think what do you think caused this mindset I have a couple I have a couple ideas but I don't know I don't know if it was a whole bunch of small little things or if it was a cultural shift but all those people on that reddit thread will say well there's no way we're going to be as happy as our parents we can't even afford the attached home anymore and cost of living has gone up and salaries having kept up and now if I want to live in a city where I could get potentially a great job like a you know a New York or any any coastal city really any big major US city well the renders through the roof and that's just for a single bedroom apartment so all of these things probably stressed people out but maybe there was a breaking point and I don't know what that breaking point was when people just threw up their hands and they said you know what I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try and do and build the life that my parents had I'm gonna try and build a different life and I think maybe that's what led to this mindset I don't know if you have ideas or opinions on what caused yes I have a couple of thoughts one we've been through a period of unique prosperity in the country and as a result a lot of parents have made more income than they ever thought that they could make and that meant the kids had a very full fairly easy lifetime themselves so I think in one sense our prosperity kind of spoiled the picture for young people but I think there are also a couple other phenomena that contributed to it particularly the government policies during the pandemic and even leading up to it where quite a few people in this country are now being paid more for not working than they ever earned when they were working and that creates a very bad mindset it creates a mindset of entitlement that you don't really have to do any work government will just take care of you so I think that's a second factor and I think a third factor is our educational system I think is failing the younger generation and the generation that immediately preceded it we're not doing a good job teaching kids what they need to know to have a good career when I was a kid I had there were two tracks that people would be on as you probably know something like two thirds of adult Americans do not have a college degree but in the old days there was a track for kids who were headed to college and one true ones who were not and the ones who were not they had a class called manual training we nicknamed the shop class I don't know quite why and that taught them skills that would let them become electricians plumbers appliance people all kinds of trades many of which turn out to be very high paying trades what wasn't that it was condemning them to a bad life you'll look at what you pay an hour for a plumber or an electrician in plenty of room for good economic result but the our country now as the least vocational training of any OECD country big leagues in the high schools and the middle schools no longer even offer manual training courses just not part of the curriculum so that disadvantages the kids who were not on a college track for the ones who are on the college track there are also being disadvantaged because we're not teaching the fundamentals we're not teaching in the lower grades arithmetic reading and writing in most of those skills young Americans in grammar school rank around 30th in the world how can we be staying as the number one world country when we rank 30th in primary education and it gets worse when they get to high school when they get to high school there no longer teaching high school math physics chemistry all those skills that you need to survive in a technologically advancing country so I think it's partly a self-inflicted wound in the school system it's partly that their parents had such an easy time of it that the kids got spoiled I've been amazed with how many young people don't get a summer job when they're out of school forget about getting a job while they're in school they don't even have summer job they're allowing around on the beach I don't know why the parents permit that when my two girls were teenagers and one of them first got a driver's license the question came up what would they do for a summer job we go out to the hamptons in the summer what would they do so I bought a food truck a stainless steel food truck got them the food concession for one of the beaches and they worked pretty hard during the whole day because nothing like making hamburgers and hot dogs and cutting up fruits and everything and then serving the customer because of one of them to learn even though they would not have to do that just to make tuition I wanted them to learn you don't have to be a productive person you're not just going to sit around on the beach I don't think there's enough of that in the parental attitude so I think it's a whole series of factors that have led to it but I think it's a very bad phenomenon. Hey guys Scott here I just wanted to take a quick moment to say a heartfelt thanks to every single one of you six years of this show and it's really all because of you your listens your support your shares it will keep this thing going when I started I had no idea how big this would get how many lives we touch the stories we share the lessons that we learned together it's truly humbling and I believe that we're building something really special here a community where no one has to reinvent the wheel we're all in this together learning and growing and here's my ask if you love this show it's made a difference for you please share it with somebody who needs it hella friend host on social whatever works it's the best way to keep this thing going strong bring on even better guests and share more life changing wisdom and you can find us on all the spots so you can go to successstorypodcast.com if you like listening to podcasts if you like video you can go to youtube it's youtube.com slash c slash Scott Declary or the newsletter newsletter dot Scott Declary.com just spread the word I'm eternally grateful for each and every one of you let's keep learning let's keep growing and let's keep making this world a little bit better together all right let's get back to the show very interesting because I mean I don't even consider myself that old I'm 34 and I remember during university I would work during the day and I would push my classes and I'm also came from I didn't come from a you know a hard life growing up like I didn't really have to concern myself with tuition but for me it was more about I want to get my career started early and I want to figure out how to get some reps in and and get some experience so I would push my classes to tonight and weekends so that I could work during the day but it's it's a very slippery slope now and it's only listen not that that was only a couple of years ago and it seems like there's been this entire culture shift I mean again you came from a generation the you know previous to mind where you had to work you there was no there wasn't the economic prosperity that I grew up with when you were a kid like you had to figure out life and work and whatnot and at least for the majority of people so if you look forward it must be very concerning for you where this country's going if we don't find a way to turn it around well it it is very concerning because unlike when I grew up I was born in the depression 1937 and that was more or less the peak of the depression so it was a very different time as you point out but um in those days we were unchallenged as the world's leading economic power now there are lots of challenges you obviously have China being very aggressive pushing education very hard and having very hard working very dedicated population so now there's the added challenge for our country how do we sustain ourselves as a number one power or even as a shared power when you have a country like China where education is highly prized the people are very hard working and where they have a real mercantile instinct if we lose our entrepreneurship then it's really going to be over with we live if we lose innovation and entrepreneurship well entrepreneurship takes a lot of work with somebody who's starting their own business it's not a question do I work 40 hours or 39 or 41 or 42 you're starting your own business you're in it you're in it up to your eyeballs and you don't even think about am I working overtime so the danger is that these other societal problems that you and I have been discussing may very well spill over into the entrepreneur ship that creative this country and one alarming trend in that regard of the institution only back venture capital companies in the last 10 years 40% have a foreign born person who's either the CEO or the co CEO 40% so you think about that it's great that we've had that influx of very entrepreneur and skilled foreigners but it also suggests that we'd not have as much entrepreneurship if it weren't for the foreigners and that's a scary thing that would lead more and more foreign help just to keep going um I mean you you've seen you I mean I think that if you look at some of the CEOs of major tech companies you see people that come from other parts of the world that move to the US that take up these positions again which is great but you you do have to have a culture of entrepreneurship of hard working of not being afraid to build things and fail and I think that we're so we're moving so far from people being willing to do uncomfortable work that we're not even talking about like you said entrepreneurship we're just talking about people working a nine to five Monday to Friday job because if you're gonna if you're gonna be a successful entrepreneur like I came from a nine to five environment and I worked hard there then I realized it I wasn't moving fast enough my career wasn't progressing as quick as I wanted to so then I'm gonna take that into my own hands and instead of working nine to five Monday to Friday I'm working 24 7 365 but at least I can now move at my own pace but the nine to five was because I didn't have entrepreneurial parents the nine to five was this this a little bit of like an incubation for me as a professional to then say okay this is great but I want to go farther if I had never even had the exposure to the nine to five or if I was I see some people traveling all over the world and working the gig economy again there's nothing inherently wrong with that but if a culture promotes that and social media promotes lifestyle and all that I think that I think that again another component that you didn't mention is we look on social we think other people's lives are so great and how can they work two hours a week and make you know a million dollars a year well that's not reality but social media is a megaphone and it broadcasts this reality and people assume it's the reality so then they try and architect their lives like that and amongst all the other things you mentioned it's just a very um we're gonna we're in a dangerous place I think because there's so much influence telling us how we should live or what hard work should be or shouldn't be and I think that it's I think we're kind of messing up the minds of a younger generation as to what life can look like well I agree with that and I think you see it in another context it used to be people's dream was own your own home that was a big big dream get married have a kid own your own home was part of the cultural scene now people are not so interested in owning things they've seen this settle for having the use of things there's even an industry now where people are renting their clothes rather than buying I mean what could be more weird and what could be gross actually efficient then renting your clothes because you know the guy running them to you is making a high rate of return well whereas his rate of return coming from was coming from you because you're such a fool you won't even want to front end the price of your clothing and so I think it's gotten to a very very extreme point there's nothing wrong with wanting to own things and for most families owning the home was central to their ability to develop some semblance of wealth because homes tend to appreciate over time my father had a pretty good saying even though he was not wealthy he said I know a lot of people have gotten rich collecting rent I don't know anybody who got rich paying rent and that's a philosophy that the people don't seem to have everything is measured in terms of monthly payment not am I earning owning something not am I getting somewhere not am I getting ahead it's a whole attitude little thing that as you point out is very very dangerous you know what I'm actually I'm really concerned because it seems to be compounded with shortsightedness what will happen is people will make enough money to rent their whole life and then what happens when you can't work anymore or when you have some when you when you get sick or or when you do just of old age you can't put in those hours or the cognitive performance just isn't there or the physical performance isn't there I mean we haven't really seen that generation get to that age yet and that's going to be scary unless something is done because the generation that is of the age that can no longer work most of them will have pensions or they'll have some sort or they came from the mentality of I want to buy my house I want to invest yeah it's it's very scary the people that are you know 70 80 90 now did not rent their clothes when they were growing up well as sociologists that I met at a cocktail party had an interesting encapsulation of that he said one of the real problems of the younger generation is the inability to postpone immediate gratification that's what leads to they want everything quick easy now very accessible the idea of saving up to buy a home is quite different from that that generally especially for younger people used to mean some postponement of immediate gratification because you put away a little money put away a little money and then you got to do something by way of the home with it but they're happy to rent the house happy to run a car when they need it happy to run even their clothes and it's a dead end street because what they're doing is raising their current cost of living to the point where they're not going to be able as you point out to have something to take care of them later on and that in turn is producing and encouraging the very unfortunate relationship between the population and government remember the old communist manifesto the way to make socialism permanent is first of all get to where a majority of the adult population pays no tax well we're just about there second is get to the point where a majority of the adult population depends on government for its livelihood that's where we're starting to head with all these programs and once we get through that second thing if we do unfortunately and most people pay no tax and or dependent on government forget it society as we've known it our culture as we've known it and tragically our economy as we've known it will be no more talk to me about it actually just a point I have I want to talk about your transition to public service but can you just explain that point the because I understand being dependent on government but can you explain the pay no tax point well it is theoretically true that almost half the battle in Americans do not pay any tax because they have all these tax credits in refund when the government says I'm going to give you a tax credit for having a child let's say now that may be a worthwhile idea to help people have children but what it works works works out to in reality is if you don't have enough income that you really paying tax you get that money directly so instead of being what it's presented as which is just a tax credit slot it's an actual gift to the people who don't have taxable income and in some cases even if they do it small and again it becomes a tax a cash payment rather than a tax credit so it encourages the wrong behavior basically yes yes and I'm not opposed to child care I'm not opposed to people having families obviously those are important but when you create those two things nobody pays tax and people are dependent on government now you've changed the whole society and it is a very very slippery slope because the theory of it is that somehow the rest of society can afford not only to maintain themselves but pay the bills to government to maintain the half that aren't working then aren't productive well that's a very different world from the world that we used to have I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast network for supporting success story the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the product boss hosted by Jacqueline Snyder and Mina Kuhnlo Sithep if you want to take your physical product sales and strategy to the next level to create your dream life you need to listen to the product boss they sit down for an hour they do a workshop style podcast they're going to talk about everything that you need to know to up level yourself social media marketing if you're a consumer package goods if you have any sort of physical widget you need to tune into the product boss wherever you get your podcasts that makes sense I understand um talk to me about I mean I've I've I've had this conversation with a lot of people why somebody would want to go work in the government go work in public service because listen this is not like you needed this for your career you you've made a lot of money doing what you're very good at and government always seems like it just seems like a lot of headache it seems like your life is picked apart people criticize you know was ever happy with you this is like the life of of government so at this point in your career I mean you've made by anyone standards what was the purpose in your mind of going to serve the government going to serve the people it was several things but first of all it came at a point in my life where I could afford to do it because I had made enough to take care of myself forever and forever so there was the potential for doing it and making the economic sacrifice to go into government and in fact when I had my sort of job interview for the cabinet post with President Trump and the others it was weird because it was the first time in my life I was ever eager to have a job that paid a tiny fraction of what my old job had paid but nonetheless I felt it was at a point in time where I could afford being more importantly I felt that what Trump was trying to do was what the country needed I felt that he was the only one of the either democratic or republican candidates who understood how badly abused middle class and lower middle class working America were in favor of people who were not working the other candidates didn't even understand it so I felt the only one who's going to try to fix this is somebody who at least understands the problem the other candidates didn't even know that it was a problem so I felt there was a societal need for somebody to try to help fix this problem because I love this country country has been very good to me and I felt it was time to try to give back as part of an enterprise in the government to regain some of what we had been losing and I mean when you announced that you were even supporting Trump I think from what I remember that was a little bit of a surprise to the public yes it was what happened back then this was before the Republican primaries in the 2016 election I was on squawk box in the morning and toward the end of the interview one of them said if Trump is the presidential nominee for the Republicans will you support him and they were thinking my answer would be no because at that point most of Wall Street was anti-Trump and strangely a lot of Wall Street remains democratic I would say a majority of the senior people have been Democrats I don't quite understand why but anyhow so that shocked people and then I explained why my theory that he was the only one who understood the societal problem that you and I have been discussing and that in turn led to my getting involved with the campaign so I started doing editorial mostly in regional newspapers he would send me as a surrogate to debate with the left wing people things like that and then ultimately he asked me to go into the cabinet. Talk to me about some of the some of the policies that you implemented while you were in in his government but also I also want to understand going forward obviously right now we'll we'll try and keep this interview evergreen but you know in a couple months we're going to see a very new US government and I'm curious what do we have to do going forward to sort of continue the work that you did? Well fortunately unlike most of the Biden cabinet people Gina Romando who is my successor has pretty well continued the tariff policies and the export control policies that I put into effect during the Trump administration so for the moment the Democrats have been relatively supportive of the tariff initiatives and denying potential enemies access to high-tech materials sanctions things of that sort so so far it hasn't been a problem what worries me in case it's Kamala Harris is a lot of things one of which is we have no idea what her trade policies are going to be she's not made any real statement about trade so I can't judge what she might do or not to the second thing though I think she's more interested in changing the educational system away from what I think it should be which is the manual training and the high-tech training she's more interested in making it a sociological instrument making it very woke well woke it is really in many ways the direct antithesis of the American dream because woke says you should be embarrassed to be a citizen of the United States woke says your four bearers were abusers and that's a really bad thing and we need retribution so I'm worried that while I think the educational system needs reforming in the direction of going back to what it used to be I think her visualization of education is very different and it's resulting in young people having very little understanding of what's really going on and there was a university somewhere in the Midwest that took a survey of people 18 to 25 and it asked them a whole variety of questions two that struck me as really dangerous one was the question who was Andrew Jackson as you know he was very controversial person the most popular answer was Michael's brother wow he had nothing to do with each other the second question that he asked was where was slavery invented and the most popular answer there was in the United States now it's not only historically inaccurate by thousands of years but it's also inaccurate by thousands of miles and these young people genuinely did not understand the answer to either of those questions now there were many others they also had funny answers too but when your misconception is that the US is what created the whole slavery problem you don't understand where anything is coming it's found when I was in government one of the tasks I occasionally did was swear in citizens naturalized citizens who had come legally into this country and when you are a legal immigrant seeking citizenship you have to study a lot you have to study about the constitution and I concluded that the legal immigrants who became citizen were better informed about our country than most young people and that's really an unfortunate thing they were also wonderful in that their eyes were filled with happy tears when they became citizens they were proud as could be whereas a lot of young people know the question whether the US is a good place the question said their own sexuality the question what kinds of things what they don't question is why am I not learning what I should learn to be a productive battle and therefore I'm very worried about the direction in which Kamala Harris might very well take this country you know you mentioned something that's very interesting to me and I never quite understood it because all the different things that people question I never understood why anybody would question if the US was a good place and I see that I mean there's a lot of things people question like he just mentioned people question their own sexuality their pronouns you know what they want to do with their life their career those are whatever you can you can make a comment on whether or not those are things that people should question or shouldn't question that's more personal my biggest issue is it seems like there's so much hate for for the US from from a younger generation and I don't I don't understand it I don't get where that came from because the US is giving these people all the abilities in the world to question all these different things and to choose all these different things like this is the country that's affording you that opportunity I never understood that and I actually you know just to give you perspective I'm Canadian so I actually have to go through an immigration process and I've gone probably spent about at this point coming in through a visa and then going through this visa process that eventually getting green card probably 40 50 thousand dollars in fees and applications and just time spent and getting referral like it's a very arguing as process but very grateful I mean now my business is down here now my connections are down here network is down here and and Canada is like listen Canada is not a third world country Canada is Canada but even the contrast between Canada and the US I see a hundred X more opportunity and and and and my career moves exponentially quicker so it's just interesting I can't for any reason understand how people can hate the US it's very confusing to me well if you really thought that the only reason there was slavery in this world was the United States that we literally invented it that would probably give you a guilty feel of certainly teaching people that that's the case is meant to give you a guilty it's not even true it's not even close to true it's it's so far from reality oh of course so but remember Garibald's the big propaganda minister under Hitler he said if you tell a big lie often enough then if you can control the media so that they don't dispute it too much then it becomes the truth then the real truth becomes a lie and I think that's what's happening because the young people and our educational system both are totally intolerant of any other opinion and if you try to talk to a young piece of Purbran and say that is just not true that slavery was invented here you get a real argument if if they will even respond rather than just walk away so there's an intolerance to disagreement and you see it on the campuses if if a non-left wing professor wants to give a talk on a campus they get booed they get picketed and buried few colleges will even let them come so whereas you would think educations of learning were meant to be open to different ideas now they're very close to them and in a funny way the extreme left and the extreme right have that one thing in common that they're both intolerant of any view other than their own extremes and it's a very worrisome thing because it's starting to tear apart the heart of society you saw with this young kid trying to assassinate Trump we see it in all kinds of violent outbursts there's a real anger that's been developed in people partly I think because they feel hopeless about their own careers as we talked about earlier but also there's been inculcated in them by the school systems this negatism toward the US negatism toward traditional values and that's gotta be fixed and so my biggest worry I think our educational system is more of a danger to this country than China is I think it's more of a danger than Russia is I think it's more of a danger than Iran is because those of things we're gonna have to cope with but our educational problems are self-inflicted wounds and the most crazy way to die is through a self-inflicted wound but I think that's I think that's the most concerning way and it's actually interesting because you talk about universities not allowing right wing thought leaders on the campus I was always under the assumption that history was history and then university and college was a place for debate and conversation and critical thinking about policies moving forward not not about trying to rewrite world history this is a very very strange because if somebody who's a a right way and I say that in air quotes because there's some very moderate thinkers and and very middle of the road thinkers that I think are now labeled as more right wing than they really are but I mean even Trump was a Democrat he he lived in New York City his whole life like he was he was always a Democrat he was always very forward thinking person but you see these you see that these people are being turned into like right wing individuals when really they're just trying to they're just trying to provide a different lens or a different perspective on on what's happening in society which I always thought was as as as an individual I want to get access to as much information as possible and I want to hear arguments and I want to hear debate and I think that's how society moves forward I think that's I think that's a healthy to hear as much information and to study and to research and to do your own due diligence this is the way that I grew up this is the way that my career moved forward it's not just business information it's it's getting societal and cultural and political and financial information from all these different people it just made me a better individual well it's true and what when I was a young teenager there was a very popular TV show that consisted of debates between Bill Buckley a very right-wing very scholarly right-winger and Gore Vidal very intelligent left-wing one and it was the kind of show that no longer would appear on any television station or any probably even any cable network it was an thinking hour long thing there were both different in their thinking they both probably disliked each other as individuals so a major good TV but the point was in those days the media welcomed debate and then it's not just the editorial page that expresses opinion the news columns are really editorials for the most part and that's wrong that's not what media news should be the news should be what it is and just as you said history is what it is it is what it was it shouldn't be tampered with it's a factual thing but they change it what are you you know when you look forward they just touched very briefly on on Russia China Iran and then of course they're not all the same entity there are nuances to how each each one of those nations builds their country and interacts with the US but going forward on a global level what are some thoughts about biggest risks biggest concerns things that the US should be aware of things that the average person should be aware of based on your experience well but on the geopolitical sense what I'm worried the most about is Russia China and Iran seem to be getting more and more into the becoming the Axis powers they've seen to band together in a lot of activities and if you look back to what led to world too it was treaties between Germany and Japan that started it they started a mutual defense treaty Germany and Italy did the same thing then what next happened was Germany made an agreement with Poland with Russia to a mutual defense agreement and what they didn't disclose was that part of the agreement was to divide up Poland so two weeks after they signed that agreement Germany invaded Poland overran it and did split it up with the Russians so where his knees more and more they're operating jointly the why is that a problem that's a problem because Germany itself and even Japan were very small economies relative to the US so when you put even the two of them together didn't come near ours but China is already about more than two-thirds of our economy you add to that Russia you add to that Iran and you have the potential that we could become engaged in World War III and be fighting it on three fronts fighting it in the mid-East fighting it in the Asian sector and fighting it in Europe that's the really scary thing and it's why it bothers me that the Democrats don't seem to understand my attitude about bully remember I said bully needs a willing victim well the US is acting nowadays more like a willing victim than like anything else we beg Iran to make a treaty with us and I think it was a national disgrace that the Iranians few weeks ago after all these years of Biden's growing around with them trying to get into what would have been a terrible nuclear treaty anyway they announced they have no interest in any further negotiation well for the world's number one power to be brushed off by a third or fourth rate power that never would have happened under Trump or any other sensible similarly look at what's been happening China floated a spy balloon over the whole country later they've been developing a huge intelligence operation in Cuba and God knows what else they're putting in there and then recently they had one of their vessels in a Russian nuclear submarine dock in Havana 90 miles off our coast well what did we do what was our response nothing lately Russia and China had a joint bombing exercise a drill off Alaska what did we do nothing meanwhile China and Russia consistently support Iran and the Houthis and as well and all that in the Middle East the Houthis have totally disrupted the Red Sea and it's disrupting shipping what are we doing a very very limited defense I think instead we need to go back to Teddy Roosevelt's philosophy which was speak softly and carry a big stick these fellas speak loudly and they don't have any stick at all so that's my scary analysis of what's going on geopolitically but I think if we can fix the educational system make Americans feel patriotic again make Americans be better educated restore the hardware concept restore the entrepreneurship concept then we can combat all that but if we stay as a willing victim geopolitical things are going to get worse they're not going to get better and I think a key turning point in the Trump administration was when we had the first date visit came from president G and at more largo in Palm Beach a lot of components to the story which are in my book risks and returns but I'll just summarize one segment that afternoon we had a national security council meeting and we voted up that meeting to launch the 52 missiles into Syria then reprisal for their efforts to blow up one of our bases in the mid-East but we just the Trump decided not to postpone the implementation he decided to do it at 7.15 that night and with minutes the the ceremony will then enter with praise to the NJ well I didn't he do that first of all I think far and look what I will do it was obviously also a message to Iran or anyone else who wants to do us arm push me too far and you're going to get a response you don't like and if you notice during the Trump years we didn't have these incursions from China or Iran made a little trouble but not so much Russia didn't invade Ukraine until well into the Biden presidency that's not an accident I think they got the message from what Trump did that night at more largo and from other things that he did privately and publicly I think they got the message you can't go too far with this guy that's a message we have to get back to because if we let them keep becoming more and more bold and if we be becoming weaker and weaker and less patriotic that's not a good formula that's a formula that will lead to a war and a war that we may have a tough time when I have one last one last question just about about China and then I want to I want to just understand where people can go to get your book and connect with you as well but the last the last thought that I had because I've had the conversation about China with several people and I don't look at China in the same lenses around China China seems to be not interested in anything like military compared to Iran which seems like to be Iran seems to be very hostile exceptionally hostile but I've had a conversation with Keith Crack about Iran as well as Dimitri Alprovich about about China excuse me and there's just different views on how to manage and engage with China so in terms of your perspective trade and agreements and and how we sort of interact with China would it be better for the US to entrench further into China and try and put more businesses in China and do more trade and make them to some degree dependent is that even possible or is it better to completely remove and isolate and and not engage with them at a commercial level if that's even viable no I don't think either extreme is the right answer I think what we need is a more finely tuned policy and what I mean by that is the following it's inevitable that we will need to trade with China China is the second largest hour in the world it's a very large and until recently growing market so I think the idea of total disengagement simply doesn't work the world is a more complicated place than that and further if we were somehow to totally disengage from China all that it would do is to divert their exports to other countries and then in term would have to export more to us so it would just scramble things up I don't think that's a practical solution the problem with putting more businesses into China is that the businesses they're mostly interested in are the high tech businesses and most of the output of high tech is what we call dual use semi conductors have peaceful use but they also are very critical to military applications so you can't build a semi conductor plant that doesn't really turn out both kinds so and then China you don't really have been dependent with it even if it's America now there's subject to all kinds of constraints all sorts of requirements that we don't have here so I don't think putting more investment into China is the I think we need to figure out a serious adult level way to coexist with them and I think part of it has to be the realization that they will become more of a power they're already a meaningful power we can't just dismiss them and say it will go away won't go away they are an ambitious country and under President Xi are a very tightly controlled country you perhaps aren't aware but of their billion three or four hundred million population only 65 million are members of the communist party so a tiny percentage of the entire population is even communist so that's an interesting dimension for people to think about but what it basically means is the bulk of the population is totally disenfranchised that leads to making it easy for dictatorship and while the technical form of government it may be communist and the reality is China's a dictatorship Russia's a dictatorship certainly Iran is a dictatorship and that's the real problem is the ideological problem I don't know of a single communist country that hasn't turned out to be a dictatorship and if you have a gigantic and powerful country that's a dictatorship all you have to run into is one successive dictator who really wants to take over the world then I'm not saying that Xi is necessarily that person but he's getting old there he won't be the dictator forever someone else will be and it could very well be some right wing general so I think we do need an accommodation but it needs to be an accommodation unequal footing it can't be that we let them win in trade because of violating rules taking advantage of intellectual property things like that we need a rule-based trading system and one that's fair and one that has a mechanism for resolving honest disputes that's the way to solve the trade problem ultimately but we need to get the other parties to agree to it now on the book which is which is my balance of trades issue yes so this is risk and returns creating success in business and life and that's what's out now that's correct and it's available on Amazon right now and the formal publication date is September 10th so to be readily available and bookstores all over by then it's an anecdotal autobiography that takes the anecdotes many of which are the meaner to say and interesting and tries to draw loose lessons from them lessons that could of their career and their life that may happen to be so I'm running all around the countryside doing a book signing parties and as we have a website or the book it's called risks in returns dot net and I would urge anybody who enjoys this discussion enough to want to learn more about the book look on that website and you'll find a lot of information so you'll see you'll the book will encapsulate basically your life anecdotes we'll talk about politics we'll talk about business all of that I mean you've done over 400 you've restructured more than 400 billion dollars in assets and you've been named Bloomberg's 50 most influential people so this is going to be a very interesting book so we'll link that in the show notes as well and if you're in by the way it will but if you're in Miami let me know we'll have to create some content around the book signing sometime if you're ever down here well I will be doing some stops in Miami so I'd love to take you up on that on that offer and that'll also force feed you a book so it's a two birds one stone that works perfect um okay so we'll get all those links in the show notes so people can go they can pre-order the book now by the way on Amazon if they want to pre-order it or you can get it probably any any book stores on September 10 um well but I really appreciate your time I really appreciate you just sort of covering a wide range of different topics because I just sort of threw everything at you you're about a very interesting life so I wanted to get a little bit of I want to get like a sample of all the different things that you've you've taken on um if you were going to leave the audience you can pick you can pick an insight or a lesson something that you would tell your younger self your 20 year old self after your career in private and public service what would that what would that one lesson be but my one big lesson is the only person who can hold you back is you yourself and if you yourself instead really work hard sees opportunities and take an occasional risk you can become pretty much whatever you want to so there's no reason to hide in a safe room get out there in the open get into the real world the rough things up a bit and if you get roughed up some along the way that's good because that's a learning experience but bottom line the only one who can hold you back is you yourself