Just Asking Questions

Can Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put the country on a diet and Make America Healthy Again? Just asking questions.  The MAHA Report is a 73-page document put out by a government commission headed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFJ Jr. Its goal is to "study the scope of the chronic childhood disease crisis and any potential causes including the American diet." The report points out that childhood obesity rates in the U.S. remain higher than in other G7 countries. We invited Gary Taubes to join us today because he's a science journalist and researcher who has spent more than two decades studying the American diet. His books include Good Calories, Bad Calories, Why We Get Fat, and The Case Against Sugar. He writes about nutrition science in his Substack, Uncertainty Principles, where he has tackled the question of whether ultra-processed foods are the likely culprit driving America's obesity problem. We also discuss whether RFK Jr. is more likely to improve or derail U.S. health and nutrition research, the recent resignation of one of the National Institutes of Health's top nutrition researchers, and a challenge to Taubes' "sugar hypothesis" from the pseudonymous blogger Cremieux Recueil. Mentioned in the podcast: "The MAHA Report," by the White House Spectrum of processing of foods based on the NOVA classification "Are Ultra-Processed Foods the Problem?" by Gary Taubes "Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025," by the U.S. Department of Agriculture" "Nutrition Beliefs Are Just-So Stories," by Cremieux Recueil "Why Conventional Wisdom on Health Care Is Wrong (a Primer)," by Random Critical Analysis "Top NIH scientist speaks out, says research was 'censored' under RFK Jr.," NIH researcher Kevin Hall on MSNBC's All-In with Chris Hayes Chapters: 0:00—What does Gary Taubes think of the MAHA agenda? 2:10—What is wrong with the "American diet"? 6:48—Why is nutrition science so sloppy? 10:22—What's in the MAHA Report? 12:25—Have childhood diseases and disorders really been increasing? 17:02—How bad are "ultra-processed" foods? 27:42—Using "Occam's Razor" to figure out what's making Americans unhealthy 33:15—Taubes replies to Cremieux's criticism of his "sugar hypothesis" 40:42—Critiquing the "definitive" NIH study on ultra-processed foods 52:43—How much does willpower or self-control matter in controlling obesity? 1:03:14—Why a leading NIH nutrition researcher resigned from RFK Jr.'s HHS 1:08:22—Why Taubes thinks Jay Bhattacharya might make the NIH more functional 1:18:54—What's a question Taubes thinks more people should be asking? Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: Can RFK Jr. put the country on a diet and Make America Healthy Again? Just Asking Questions. The MAHA Report is a 73-page document put out by a government commission headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which aims to, quote,  "Study the scope of the chronic childhood disease crisis and any potential causes, including the American diet."  The report points out that childhood obesity remains higher in the U.S. versus other G7 countries. And we've invited Gary Taubes to talk about this today because he's a science journalist and a researcher who's written about and studied the American diet for more than two decades with books like Good Calories, Bad Calories, Why We Get Fat, and The Case Against Sugar. He writes about nutrition science at his Substack, Uncertainty Principles.  Gary, thank you for coming on the show. Gary Taubes: Thank you for having me, Zach. Liz Wolfe: However you feel about him, you can't exactly deny that RFK Jr. is a pretty major disrupter to the medical establishment. What has your reaction been so far to what he's done at HHS, but also the broader MAHA agenda? Gary Taubes: I mean, he is a major disrupter to the medical establishment. I have it fall kind of in the mid-range here in that all my research has been about nutrition and chronic disease, and I think that the medical establishment has made some significant mistakes that have led us to where we are today. And yet I tend to trust them more on other issues like vaccines than I do RFK Jr. and his colleagues. So I can comment on the nutrition. The many other ways in which he's disrupting the major medical establishment probably scare me as much as they scare anyone else. Zach Weissmueller: So yeah, what is your take then on the nutrition aspect? Before we get into the specifics of this report, just your overview, your early impressions of what they're pursuing. Gary Taubes: Clearly we have a problem in this country that's nutrition-related, a problem around the world, which are obesity and diabetes epidemics that begin to appear when populations Westernize their diets. So anywhere you look, from the Arctic on down, you'll find populations growing obese and diabetic in association with eating Western diets. And then the question is: What aspect of the diet is to blame? And everybody's got an opinion on that. And I think everybody has an opinion because the science has been so bad for the last century that it hasn't nailed anything down the way you would hope that science would give you unambiguous conclusions. So we have a problem. RFK Jr. admits we have a problem. The previous administration's approach to this was to push for personalized nutrition—the idea that we could somehow identify in advance what everyone's ideal diet would be.  And I think that's a pipe dream.  So I completely support the context for these reports. My work has always been arguing for far better science than has been done by the nutrition research community, and I'm not sure that the MAHA contingent knows what that means or has any idea how to do it. Liz Wolfe: Of the things that RFK Jr. in particular sort of fixates on, you hear a little bit of talk about eating whole foods—you know, a whole apple versus a bag of chips or apple juice or something like that. But there's also a lot of talk of avoiding ultra-processed foods. And then one of his sort of pet issues is avoiding certain food dyes. Of those sort of three claims, in a few seconds or less, what do you make of those claims? Is he getting it roughly correct, or is he really veering off course? Gary Taubes: I have major issues with the concept of ultra-processed foods in general, I don't know if we'll get to that—I'm sure we will get to that. The food dyes…I just don't know. Like, if I think of a classic example, is Fruit Loops, which were in the news about six months ago because they're made in the U.S. with a dye that's possibly considered harmful. So here's a product where it's refined grain, full of sugar. I don't know what the sugar content of a Fruit Loop is, but I'm going to guess it's in the neighborhood of 40 percent of the calories come from sugar. And then it's dyed to be colorful so it can be sold with a toucan on the cover of the box. What's the problem? The food dyes or the sugar? If you take out the dyes, now can whichever company produces Fruit Loops—Kellogg's, Post, whoever it is—can they now advertise this as healthy? Because it doesn't have deleterious, even though 40 percent of the calories come from sugar. I happen to be one of these people, old-fashioned, who thinks that the problem is the sugar content, and maybe the refined grain itself. And maybe the combination is particularly bad. But if you focus on the food dyes, or the number of artificial ingredients—which is what the concept of ultra-processed foods is driving at. This is an ultra-processed food, it's got multiple ingredients in it that are made in factories. It's got ingredients that you can't find in your own kitchen. And this is what makes it deleterious? And you can fix all of that—keep the sugar, keep the refined grain—and still sell a product that I think on some fundamental level, as I've written in my books and documented, could be the trigger of type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemics. But now it appears healthy because you've cleaned up the additives and the dyes in it. Liz Wolfe: So your take, if I may summarize it correctly—hopefully accurately—is: The fixation on artificial ingredients and on food dyes in particular is just basically a red herring. We don't really know—jury's still out—on how bad those are, or whether they're bad at all. But people are just allowing themselves to be really distracted by that, when in reality, we kind of have established that that amount of sugar is pretty bad for you. And so you're concerned about the sort of red herrings that are offered by the RFK crowd. Gary Taubes: Yeah, although those red herrings come from the nutrition crowd. So this is not distinct to MAHA. This is the nutrition research community in general. If you look at the history of the field—and my books are all, on some level, history-of-medicine books—beginning in the 1960s, we focused on dietary fat as a cause of heart disease, and that becomes sort of conventional wisdom. The reason people think butter will kill them is because of the saturated fat content. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, we started putting out public health guidelines to lower the fat content of the diet and replace it with carbohydrates. Everybody kind of vaguely hopes that the entire country will start eating like they do out here in Berkeley, California, where I live, but we don't. Instead, we started eating junk carbohydrates instead of the dietary fats. And this all coincides with this explosion in the prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes. If you are old enough in this country, as I am, you can remember a day when you were in junior high school and there was only one child with obesity in your junior high school class. And now it's 15 percent—something like that, 1 in 8 maybe. We've had this explosion in these diseases that's coincided with this focus on dietary fat—and an argument about sugar. And in the early 2000s, the nutrition research community, prompted by these researchers in Brazil, say, "Well, we've been arguing about macronutrients. We've been arguing about carbohydrates, sugars, about types of fat. And we don't eat macronutrients independently; we eat foods. We eat types of foods. So let's embrace this idea of the amount of processing that goes into the food."  People who are poor and suffer high levels of these chronic diseases tend to eat a lot of processed foods.  The wealthier you are, the more you can afford to be health conscious, the more you can avoid those foods. So we end up with this idea that looking at the macronutrients—the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats—and the type of carbs, proteins, and fats is 20th-century science, and we have to leave it behind. And instead, we're going to embrace the processing, the ultra-processing of the food. And then you get this idea where you're treating basically all junk foods alike. Zach Weissmueller: Before we start talking more about the ultra-processed foods issue, I want to, for the audience, I wanna make sure we're properly framing what the MAHA Report is. It's not coming to any particular conclusions necessarily. It's pointing out a bunch of different trends and then raising questions about what is causing these trends. I mean, they're kind of throwing a bunch of stuff out there. I'll just pull up some examples. They show a rise in autism rates among children, a rate rise in depression among teenagers, prevalence of food allergies going up, life expectancy in the U.S. lagging behind other advanced industrial countries. Although, yeah, as I'm pointing out here, I think there's possibly some other explanations for that, because you tend to spend more on health care as your country gets wealthier. But putting all that aside—your expertise, or what you spend a lot of time writing about, is nutrition. But they're really casting a wider net than that and saying these food additives and these other things—they might be causing some of these other issues.  Do you have any opinion on that and their kind of general sort of scattershot approach to things? Gary Taubes: Well, again, anything's possible, right? So I tend to think that the autism numbers come from changes in diagnostic criteria and changes in focus and issues like that. I don't actually find it compelling that the explosion in autism diagnoses is a significant change in the prevalence of the disease. But even if— Liz Wolfe: By that, really quickly, like, what do you mean by "changes in focus"? Gary Taubes: You pay attention to a disease. You start providing funding for the disease in schools—I'm sure you guys have covered all of this—and you start getting greater cases that might have been diagnosed as another cognitive disorder or as not diagnosed at all. We all know the weird kid in the family—who you used to just consider weird—and now he's diagnosed as on the autism spectrum. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I don't know why you have to talk about me like that, Gary.  ADHD is another example of this, where there's perhaps behavior that when I was growing up, people would have been like, "He's just a really wild, high-energy boy." And now it's kind of causing disruption in the classroom, and we need to get him an individual education plan. And for that, you need a diagnosis, things like that. Gary Taubes: And then if the school gets funding for that individual education plan, there's more motive—so there's a lot of forces. I first came upon this in heart disease because I'm trying to understand—there, in theory, was a heart disease epidemic that exploded in America after the Second World War. And this was sort of a mythology in the nutrition community because you have this explosion in heart disease prevalence, diagnoses, and it goes along with the change in diet. And the idea was: America started eating more saturated fat, fewer fruits and vegetables, and this caused the epidemic. And I'm talking to an administrator at the National Institute for Health Statistics, and he says, "You know, this heart disease epidemic that they're always talking about never happened." And I figured, well, he should know, right? He's a big deal with the National Institute for Health Statistics—whatever the technical name is. This is 25 years ago that I interviewed the guy. And so he gives me the gist of it. I look into it. It turns out that the American Heart Association, which was founded circa 1918, is a small organization of doctors. In the 1940s, during World War II, decides to become a major fundraising operation for heart disease, which has always been the nation's number one killer of men. But now they want to make sure everyone knows that it's the nation's number one killer of men. So they start broadcasting the idea—they have TV specials and huge fundraising events in which they're communicating this idea that coronary artery disease is killing people, and it's killing men particularly. And they get people to care. And among the people they get to care, are the doctors who examine patients. So as soon as you start getting people to care, you see an increase in the prevalence of the disease. And you actually see an increase in mortality of the disease because the doctors who have to sign off on the death certificates are more likely to put coronary artery disease as a cause of death now that they're aware that it is such a common cause of death. You can argue that virtually the entirety of the epidemic was caused by these changes in patients and physicians paying attention to the disease, patients worrying about whether they had the disease, insurance companies reimbursing for the disease, and the change in diagnostic criteria on death certificates, and the likelihood that a physician will choose one cause of death versus another when he's filling out the death certificate. The same thing happened in cognitive disease, as it clearly happened in Alzheimer's disease to some extent. We start paying attention to it as a public health entity, for the most part, in the 1980s. And as soon as you do, people who might have just been old, crazy Aunt Alice, who is demented, now become crazy Aunt Alice who has Alzheimer's disease. And the numbers go up. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I mean, this is an important caveat to keep in mind as we proceed with this—both the level of uncertainty around this and some of these other factors that could be contributing to "line go up" on these various graphs. I want to bring the conversation back to the ultra-processed foods in this document that we were talking about at the beginning of the episode. I've pulled a page from it where they reference it, and on the diet section, they write:  "The American diet has shifted dramatically towards ultra-processed foods (UPFs), leading to nutrient depletion, increased caloric intake, and exposure to harmful additives. Nearly 70 percent of children's calories now come from UPF, contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions." What are your objections to this category that we call "ultra-processed foods" that they are particularly fixated on? Gary Taubes: Okay. So let's say the numbers—everything they're saying—is right. I find them a little extreme, but who knows? Then the question becomes: Why? That's what we want to know. We're not going to get rid of ultra-processed foods. We're not going to get rid of processed foods. We're not going to make the entire country eat nothing but broccoli and wheat pilaf and pick your choice of low-fat proteins. So they're always going to be there. They're always going to have benefits. We need foods that have shelf lives, and that's going to require processing. We need food that don't go bad if you leave it out in the cabinet for two weeks. So why are they bad? What's causing the obesity, diabetes? And then the question becomes: Is it the ultra-processing? Which is, again, defined by the number of ingredients on the label, the place where the ingredients are made, the place where the food is made? For instance, a pizza that is made at home with four ingredients and the pizza that's made in a factory with six ingredients—one is ultra-processed and the other is not. Zach Weissmueller: This slide I've pulled up is the NOVA classification of what constitutes going from unprocessed in Group 1 over to ultra-processed in Group 4. For Group 1—unprocessed or minimally —they say fresh, dry, or frozen vegetables or fruits, grains, legumes, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, and seeds. The kind of whole foods Liz was talking about at the beginning. Group 4, on the other end of the spectrum, sugar-sweetened beverages; sweetened, savory packaged snacks; reconstituted meat products; pre-prepared frozen dishes; canned instant soups; chicken nuggets; or ice cream. And then, like right next to that would be just "processed foods," not ultra-processed, which is like canned vegetables, and meat, or cheese. Liz Wolfe: Cheese has to be cured, hermetic… Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. So are these categories that you are saying are not—it's not clear that they're extremely meaningful nutritionally? Gary Taubes: Well, so if a product becomes harmful because it's ultra-processed—the idea is, like I said, if you look at the pizza on the ultra-processed menu and the ultra-processed slice—if that product is harmful because it's ultra-processed, because of where it's made and the industrial ingredients, the fact that it's not made at home. Is that product literally more harmful than if I just—you know, we all have this image of the Italian family cooking at home. They're making the pizza dough and flattening it out, and we've got tomato sauce that Salvatore made with sugar and salt in it and garlic and tomatoes, and we've got pepperoni that we bought at the local market on Third Street in Little Italy. That's not made in a factory—it's made by Uncle Joe out in Staten Island. And that's a healthy pizza. So if I eat that pizza, I'm good. But if I eat the DiGiorno's pizza that I buy frozen in a box from the DiGiorno factory—that's also in New Jersey, I'm going to guess—that's an ultra-processed pizza.  And they have different health effects? Zach Weissmueller: And you're skeptical of that idea. Gary Taubes: Well, first of all, we should be skeptical. So the question is: Can we demonstrate that they have different health effects? And if they have health effects, that would be wonderful to know. Because now we could start identifying—we've got the gist that the pizzas are the same—the macronutrient content of the pizza, the fat content, the cheese, and the carbohydrate content in the dough, and the tomatoes, even the sugar content in the tomato sauce—that's all constant. We can leave that out. And we could identify the cause of why this ultra-processed pizza—the frozen pizza—is bad by some scientific study. We could figure out, "Well, it's this 12-syllable chemical preservative, and that emulsifier, and this food dye," and we've established in some kind of scientific manner that that's what differentiates the home-cooked pizza from the deleterious ultra-processed pizza. Now we can make the ultra-processed pizza in a way that's no longer harmful. Zach Weissmueller: So in that experiment, you would just feed people the DiGiorno's pizza for a week and feed another group the homemade, you know, Salvatore homemade pizza? Liz Wolfe: That's how I source all my… Zach Weissmueller: Maybe longer than a week—maybe a month. I don't know how long that would have to be. How would you design— Gary Taubes: First of all, it's got to go for more than a week. One of the fundamental problems in this whole field—in the epilogue of my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, my first nutrition book—I made this point: that the nutrition research community, on some profound level, doesn't seem to understand what science is and how to establish reliable knowledge. It's like they're playing science. They dress up in white coats and they use multisyllabic words, but they don't fundamentally understand science. So the problem is you're studying chronic disease. You want to know what causes obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even autism. Those diseases tend to develop over years to decades—not one week or two weeks. So you can't do studies for two weeks and expect them to tell you what's happening over 20 years. I mean, a classic example: We could make you start smoking cigarettes. One group can smoke tobacco, and the other group can smoke something more benign. And in two weeks, you're not going to see any evidence of lung cancer. On some level, you have to do this—and this is where we run into the problems that RFK Jr. and the MAHA crowd will run into. Because if you want to study the effect on chronic diseases, you'll have to take a long time to do it. And if you're studying it in foods—like just the pizza example—in an ideal world, we would make home-cooked pizza and the factory frozen pizza, and we would box them in such a way that our participants in our study didn't know which they were eating. Because you don't want them to think they're getting the killer ultra-processed food or the healthy home-cooked pizza. We would feed it to them for a year. We'd randomize, say, a thousand people to the home-cooked or the frozen pizza. Again, they can't know which they're getting. We deliver them the food. And at the end of the year, we would hope that we would see some difference in health status between the two. I was going to say, if we didn't, of course people who believe ultra-processed foods are killing people would say, "Well, that's because we only ran the study for a year. We didn't run it long enough." Or, "We didn't power it. If we had 100,000 participants getting pizza instead of just 1,000, we'd have seen the difference." And they'd be absolutely right. Maybe we didn't run it for long enough. So this is really difficult stuff to do. When you're dealing with the emulsifiers, and the food dyes, and the chemical additives, you can do toxicity studies in rodents. Rodents because they have shorter lifespans you could at least take up a far greater proportion of their life in the study. Run it for a year, you get a third of the mouse's lifespan. You don't know if what's bad for mice is bad for humans or what's good for mice is good for humans. So you run into other problems. But you could conceivably identify those problems. Okay. Go ahead, Liz. I'm sorry. Liz Wolfe: Well, I'm just really curious. With this discussion over ultra-processed foods that RFK Jr., he's not starting it, but we're very much going through a moment where that is a trendy thing to talk about. Is this all a distraction from what could be a simpler and more effective conversation, which is just: Care about your macros? Like, the American public needs to consume more protein on average than they are, a little bit less processed carbohydrates, and less sugar. Is there a way for this conversation to be done much better, where we focus on people's macros versus whether or not people are consuming ultra-processed foods, which, as you know, is a sort of fake category? In a sense. Gary Taubes: So that's the problem. The nutrition community has embraced ultra-processed foods because they failed to solve the macro problem. So the research is— Zach Weissmueller: You said in your writing that they call this 20th-century thinking. So it's like, we've gone beyond macros, and that's an outdated way. But you're saying that it was never actually settled. Gary Taubes: Well, this is the thing. So, you think of science—famous principle in science, right? Occam's razor, which is: Don't embrace a complicated hypothesis if a simple hypothesis will explain what you're dealing with. And so the idea is, you start with a simple hypothesis and you generate evidence testing that hypothesis. And if it turns out that hypothesis cannot explain the evidence, you either get another hypothesis or you complicate the hypothesis. You start adding other parts. So the simplest hypotheses originally were: maybe it's just sugar. We're loading these kids up with sugar. Worse than that, we loaded their mothers up with sugar when they were young. And so, if this sugar idea is right, their mothers grew up to become more likely to be obese and diabetic when they were of childbearing age. And then they pass it on to their children. And their children are born more predisposed to become obese and diabetic when they get older. And all of this is triggered by the sugar content of the diet. How would you study that? Well, then you have to tell people to get off sugar and basically see what happens. That's the easiest way to do it. But these hypotheses have been around since the 1950s, 1960s. There had been people arguing for sugar, and arguing for refined grains in general, and people arguing it's all about the fat and the calories. And again, it was because the research community never got together to solve that problem, to really test those hypotheses. And then around 2010, 2015, they just said, "Oh." Liz Wolfe: That's such a frustrating thing. Because when I look at what has improved my own nutrition and how friends of mine have lost weight, it hasn't been through—by and large—fad diets. It's been through embracing a relatively simple set of principles. Which is just like, "Wow, I really need to boost my protein content. Wow, I'm a little overnourished. I'm snacking, and I'm eating at times when I don't actually need that. And if I eat at discrete mealtimes and have a substantial amount of protein and a bit of fat at each mealtime, I notice that I'm kept full for longer. And so the temptations to drink my calories or to snack are just diminished. And so I'm able to get into a state where food isn't just this crutch that I use in states of boredom." You combine that with being aware of how much sugar you're drinking—whether that's alcohol or sodas. I don't mean to oversimplify the field that you have devoted your life to understanding and explaining, but when I think about what's made a difference in my own life, it's just that. And what if the MAHA messaging were something along those lines, versus trying to figure out whether Red Dye 40 is a big problem or not? Gary Taubes: The short answer is yes. Long answer is, we are going to get into an entirely different line of discussion. One of the issues we've always had in nutrition research is the leanish, healthy people tend to assume that the way they eat keeps them lean and healthy. And therefore, if everyone ate the way they ate, everyone would be lean and healthy. It's sort of a natural assumption. The more likely scenario is that people who are born with a predisposition to become obese and/or diabetic would become obese and/or diabetic if they eat like you, Liz. And if they make the changes that you made, they might be a little bit less obese and diabetic—or might delay their progression to obesity and diabetes—but not enough. And so the reason the fad diets exist is because those people find that they—and I used to be one of them—get heavier even when they're eating the whole foods, and healthy foods, and in moderation, and avoiding sugary beverages, and counting their calories. And so, because the conventional wisdom isn't working for them, they go looking for something else. And everything else in that world is a fad diet. But everything else in that world kind of divides down to: avoid sugars, or avoid carbs, or avoid fats, or eat a Mediterranean diet, or eat lots of plants and vegetables, or eat only plants and vegetables. So you have various buckets you can put those into. Somebody like you can get by with moderation. Somebody who's predisposed to being obese and diabetic cannot. Zach Weissmueller: They might need to take more extreme measures in cutting out all carbohydrates and sugars.  Gary Taubes: The reason ketogenic diets, Atkins, even carnivore, work for people is because they cut out all carbs. And people are predisposed to have to cut out all carbs. I could be wrong. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, let me ask you about some of the recent challenges to that hypothesis. Because as this, I think, in large part thanks to your influence, this way of thinking has gained in popularity and maybe even found some foothold. You've kind of at least nudged the government dietary guidelines away from what they used to be. But there are some critics out there. And I'm going to pull up one of them—it's a pseudonym. Goes by the pseudonym "CREMU." Pretty well known on Twitter and Substack. He posted a piece responding to your hypothesis that includes this graph, which we will link in the description. The yellow line is the share of sugar that has been taken in by Americans over time. This is all according to the— it's American sugar consumption down, according to WHO and NHANES—I'm not sure what agency that is. And then the other line is showing obesity: the share of overweight and obese Americans continuing to go up over that same time period. And CREMU here has even marked the second dotted line as "Gary Taubes coverage in like 2012," so therefore, the sugar hypothesis is invalid, and we need to move on. What's— Liz Wolfe: It's kind of an asshole way to make the chart, huh? Gary Taubes: Leave this up for a second. Because first of all, whoever CREMU is—he points out in this blog post that he only takes an hour to do the post. He actually has a timer. If he doesn't finish at the end of an hour, his program throws the post out. And I had a comment on this—on X—was: "Let's be serious. The guy needs to take more than an hour to do his work." I mean, I admire the time-to-hourly-wage. He's probably doing very well for himself, turning out a post in an hour. But unfortunately, things are more complicated. Liz Wolfe: Maybe he's hopped up on sugar. It's a natural stimulant for him. Gary Taubes: I mean, I actually, in my early years, in my second book which was on this scientific fiasco called cold fusion. I ate Danjou pears, five a day. I would basically have a cup of coffee, I would eat a pear, I would get a sugar rush, I would write for an hour. Then I would take a walk, smoke a cigarette, come back, have more coffee, eat a pear, write for an hour. It was all the sugar rush from the pear. Liz Wolfe: Cigarettes and sugar are the secret to your success? Gary Taubes: Yeah, I also gained 15 pounds. And back then I thought it was—because back then, this was the early '90s—we believed that if a food didn't have fat in it, it could not make you fat. That was one of the messages we were getting from the nutrition community. Turns out that, at least for me, that was inaccurate. But if we go back to that chart—can we show that chart for a second? If you look on the left-hand side, this is fascinating because it's sugar as a share of carbohydrates. So what it's saying is that from 1990 to 2000, 46 percent, roughly, of the carbohydrates we consumed were sugar. Which is fascinating, because carbohydrates also make up usually 50 to 55 percent of the diet. So roughly a quarter of the calories we were getting were from sugar. And then, because of the way he has it graphed, it looks like sugar consumption plummets in the early 2000s, which is pretty much coincident with the awareness of an obesity epidemic. And actually, if that were 2002, it could be my first sort of infamous New York Times Magazine cover story. But then it drops to only about 41 percent of all carb calories. So what he's implying is that sugar consumption, if we convert this to total calories, that sugar consumption dropping from, say, 24 percent of all calories to 21 percent of all calories should have been enough to blunt the increase in obesity prevalence in this country. And the graph on the right—well, it's not even worth getting into that. So, when I was first confronted with this kind of argument, it was made by this fellow Stephan Guyenet in a debate I had with him hosted by the Cato Institute. I pointed out that this is the equivalent of saying: Imagine we've established that cigarettes cause lung cancer. And if you actually look at the data on cigarettes and lung cancer, you have the same kind of chart—exactly the same kind of chart. Because per capita smoking in America starts going down in 1965—so it goes up, and then in 1965 it comes down—and lung cancer rates continue to go up for the next 30 years. What folks like CREMU and Guyenet were arguing was the equivalent of saying: If we went from an entire nation smoking a pack of cigarettes a day—20 cigarettes—to 17 or 18 cigarettes a day, that would stop the lung cancer epidemic and we would attempt to see it turn downward. Obviously it wouldn't. I mean, who knows? Maybe it would. Maybe it's such a tenuous epidemic that only smoking 17 cigarettes a day is benign, but smoking 20 causes lung cancer. But it's hard to believe that's true. And you have the same sort of phenomenon here. So, you go from getting 46 percent of your carb calories from sugar to 41 percent. And then you're assuming that 41 percent is benign. And there's sort of no reason to assume that. And then all kinds of other effects come in. The reason lung cancer rates went up for 30 years after per capita smoking started to turn down is because lung cancer has a threshold to develop of 20 to 30 years. So merely quitting smoking doesn't necessarily—even if you do quit entirely—it doesn't necessarily lower your risk. It takes about 20 years for your risk of developing lung cancer to get back to the risk of a nonsmoker. Zach Weissmueller: So another reason why the field seems to be interested in ultra-processed foods is that there was a large study that's often cited as the landmark study showing that ultra-processed foods are harmful compared to the alternative. You've had some critiques of that as well. In fact, you posted on your blog—a picture of basically they fed people for, I believe it was, two weeks?  Gary Taubes:  Two weeks on each diet.  Zach Weissmueller: They fed the people on the ultra-processed menu stuff like what's pictured on the left here. And then the unprocessed menu—so on the left you've got, you know, burger, fries, bunch of lemonade. And on the other side, looks like some salmon and green beans and sweet potatoes or something like that. This is often cited as, like I said, the landmark study. What is your criticism? What's wrong with the design of the study? Gary Taubes: Well, I mean, you think about it, "everything,"  would be the short answer. Again,I'm not defending ultra-processed food. Just step back for a second. When we were young, ultra-processed food was known as "junk food." And the reason it was known as junk food is because if you came from a health-conscious household, you weren't supposed to eat it. Because you knew it was bad for you. You didn't know why it was bad for you. It was junk. Then Michael Pollan comes along with his book In Defense of Food in the early 2000s, and he relabels junk food as "food-like substances." And you're not supposed to eat them because they're not really food—they're food-like substances. It's all the same argument. Now you get the "ultra-processed food." But again, we want to compare. We want to find out if the ultra-processed foods—they definitely associate with disease. If you look at the people who eat more ultra-processed foods, they have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than people who don't. But the people who don't are health conscious. And the people who don't tend to have higher socioeconomic status. They can afford to cook for themselves. They can afford to eat out at fancy restaurants and not go to McDonald's for dinner. They can prioritize their children's health over convenience. They have better doctors. They have better health care. There's a lot of reasons why they could be healthier, and the ultra-processed foods could just be a canard—something that happens to associate with being wealthy and health conscious. So now you come along and you do this study. And you put people into a metabolic ward—and this is why everyone loved Kevin's study. Because he has a metabolic ward, which is sort of a hospital ward but with a kitchen and equipment to monitor what they're eating. And also, you could measure their energy expenditure and things like this. And now you could feed them precise foods, and you could quantify exactly how much you eat. And nutritionists love this because now they can say, "This study is controlled." Zach Weissmueller: I have to wonder who signs up for these studies to be sort of locked in a ward for two weeks of being fed. Gary Taubes: It's a critical factor when you do this research, right? Because the people who don't have families, or because they don't have family responsibilities. And often who don't have jobs—because they'll typically get paid for these studies. If they do have jobs, they have to be able to leave the jobs, right, for a month. It's not two weeks on each diet. They have to be able to leave for a month to do the study. There's actually a population of people who basically do these studies for a living. But they're not typical humans. They're not typical Americans because they can step out. And that's a problem—another challenge to doing this research. So the point is—think about a drug study. When you do a drug study and you want to tell if the drug is harmful or beneficial, you randomize people to the drug or a placebo. And the reason you randomize them is you don't want a situation where only the rich, health-conscious people take the drug and only the poor people who can't afford to be health conscious take the placebo. Because then, if you see an effect of the drug, you won't know if it's because of the drug or the type of people who are taking it. So you randomize them so you get a little of everything in both groups. And then you give them the drug and the placebo. And the reason you give them the placebo is so they don't know that they're on the drug. Because if you know you're on the drug, you'll get placebo effects. And not just placebo effects—whatever subconsciously might happen that makes you healthier. People will also act differently if they think they're doing something helpful, like they might eat less. Zach Weissmueller: So you're saying there's not a placebo—or that's not really possible—when these are your options? Gary Taubes: When these are your options, you know when you're eating the unprocessed menu, even if you don't know why you're eating the unprocessed menu. And then there are other issues. Like, there's that reason hamburgers were invented. McDonald's, they know everybody likes a good hamburger. As long as they're willing to eat animal products. Salmon, green beans? Not so much. So if the endpoint of your study—what Kevin Hall found in this study—was that people ate considerably fewer calories of the salmon and the green beans than they did of the hamburger and the French fries, maybe they just didn't like the salmon and the green beans. I have two sons. One likes salmon, one doesn't. Liz Wolfe: But that is, you know, like a useful dieting strategy, right? Like sometimes, if I'm going out or whatever, I force myself to—it's such a dumb example—but to drink glasses of white wine or whatever. Because when you drink a sugary cocktail, you accidentally drink six of them, and you get more drunk than you want to, and you have more sugar than you meant to. And so like, I don't know—some of the healthy-person psyche, as I understand it, is like: force yourself to eat the thing that will have you consume more slowly, and ultimately less of the substance, right? Gary Taubes: Yeah. Again, a longer conversation we could have about this. It just reminds me—I had a friend decades ago who got acupuncture to quit smoking—in the earlobe. I remember—a very successful New York editor. And I asked her what the acupuncture was supposed to do. And she said, "It makes me not like the cigarettes." And I said, "Well, why don't you just smoke a brand you don't like? Instead of buying Marlboro Lights, buy Winstons." But it doesn't work because it's addictive. So again, it's sort of—they're not addictive to everyone, but they're very addictive to the people who end up smoking their whole lives. The point here is: yes, it could be a valuable strategy to only eat foods you don't like. Although then I would ask the question: Why is it some people have to only eat food they don't want if they want to fight obesity, and other people don't? What we're trying to establish is that the ultra-processed foods somehow are bad for you. And the assumption is they're bad for you because they make you eat too much. That was the conclusion of Kevin's study. Are we saying they're bad for you because we like them better? Because if you eat too much of a food—or you eat it too quickly—I would argue on some fundamental level, you like it more. But there's actually evidence in rodents—significant rodent evidence—that how much an animal likes a food is independent of whether or not it gets fat. You know, the best-tasting food in the world, from my opinion, has always been in Paris. I had the opportunity to live there for a couple of years. The food was delicious. And yet the Parisians have a lower level of obesity than most other industrialized nations. So the question is: If we can disassociate taste from obesity, and if we're doing a study where ultimately the answer is, "Well, I like this food more, that's why I ate more of it," we're not learning that much. Maybe we're not learning anything we didn't know before we started. And if this is considered a landmark study—and there were other issues with it—but as we said, they're only feeding people for two weeks. And at the end of two weeks, they are starting to eat less of the ultra-processed food. And so the effect that they report is vanishing. It may not vanish entirely. There's no way to know, because it's only done for two weeks. But you're always left with this question. Obesity is a physical and psychological burden. I understand why people who have obesity have to learn to accept and embrace their body size regardless. It's funny—it's difficult even to talk about this without fear of being canceled. But for the most part—and studies have shown this—obesity, in particular in children, is a burden. It's a psychological burden. It's a physical burden. And it comes with increased risk of chronic disease. And so if it's caused merely by these people eating too much of the processed food—ultra-processed food—then the question becomes: Why don't they eat less of it and prevent the obesity from occurring? That's what we think we would do. And maybe that's why we avoid ultra-processed foods. If I eat one McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I'm not satisfied. But if I eat two, I am. But if I knew that it was making me fatter, I think I could live with one. So you end up with a whole series of questions that imply that the difference between lean people and obese people, when confronted with ultra-processed foods, is that the lean people will resist eating too much, and the people with obesity—or predisposed to become obese—will not resist it. And then there's all kinds of technical mumbo jumbo that people try to evoke so that they don't blame that failure to resist on a lack of willpower. Because the one thing all obesity researchers say they agree on at the moment is that obesity is not an issue of character or willpower. But if they end up saying that the problem with the foods is that it makes people eat too much—and the difference in the people who stay lean in an environment full of UPFs and obesogens is how much they eat—then why don't… You get into these thought patterns. And part of what I end up arguing in my Substack and my books is that the obesity research community doesn't think about this very much. They get to the, "Oh, look, we have a two-week study showing people eat more of this food, we're going to embrace it because it agrees with all our preconditions." Liz Wolfe: It's frustrating because I understand the impulse to treat a demographic—especially when there is still a lot of unexplained science as to why some people are so predisposed to obesity and diabetes—treating this crowd with extraordinary empathy. That's, I think, very appropriate and kindly. But there is also a little bit of this challenging dynamic where it's like: if we talk about self-control, and if we talk about willpower in attempting to erase that from the equation…Which, by the way, Ozempic just kind of might do for us. Right? Technology might do that for us. But it ends up selling short the people who have worked really hard to use their self-control and their willpower to improve their circumstances in life. And so it ends up being very benevolent to one group, but ultimately kind of insulting to the other group. Of course, they're the group that you're allowed to insult, right? Versus the group of people who are struggling with obesity. Right? Like, I mean, I naturally—I want to eat endlessly. I love food. I'm a baker. But I make choices to not do that. And it's not necessarily something that comes naturally to me, but it's something that I care about. And so I prioritize it. And we also do know that people have some amount of variance in terms of how they're naturally wired in self-control—in all areas, in all areas of vice. But ok, all of this is a little far afield. I love how you've detailed some of the issues with actually conducting good studies in this area. But the thing that I'm really, really curious about is: If you replaced RFK Jr. and were in charge of the sort of new MAHA movement, what would you prioritize and focus on? Because we know the food pyramid and the standard nutrition guidelines have been pretty bad when run by the federal government for a while. But now the sort of alt-RFK Jr. movement isn't really doing a great job either. So if you were doing it, how would you craft a MAHA moment? Gary Taubes: Well, first of all, one of the joys of being a journalist is you can criticize people without actually having to offer up solutions. Liz Wolfe: That's why I got into it. Same with you. Gary Taubes: Let's be serious—offering up solutions… I mean, this is a very, very difficult problem. But it's true: all my books ultimately are calls for better research. So the first thing I think they have to do is—because again, the nation is polarized in a way that it doesn't feel like it's ever been polarized in the past—what I want… I started researching the nutrition–chronic disease connection in the late '90s for a series of investigative articles for the journal Science. And that led to my books and these New York Times Magazine covers. We need some agreement on what the problems might be. The way the nutrition community has embraced this is—they act as though they know the answers. And they clearly don't. Even with ultra-processed foods, they're all willing to say ultra-processed foods are the problem. But they've never thought deeply—I mean, some people have, but they tend to ignore those people—about the problem with the ultra-processed food definition. What it sweeps under the rug issues like: Is it the ultra-processed foods, or is it the food dyes? Or is it the sugar? Is it the refined grain? Is it the seed oils? There's a whole world of people, including RFK Jr., who are saying seed oils are toxic. Are they? I don't know. I haven't seen compelling research to convince me of that, but… Zach Weissmueller: If I could pull up one thing—I think it illustrates the point you're making. I came across this in your Substack. You compare—this is on the left, unprocessed oatmeal; on the right, processed oatmeal. I believe this was pictured in a Wall Street Journal article about all the processed foods. And then you point out—if you look at the ingredients on the back, what's the first ingredient? You know, they put these red boxes around these various processed additives, but you point out that the second ingredient behind whole grain oats is sugar. So does your argument boil down to: Maybe we should be looking at the second ingredient in the list, as opposed to… Gary Taubes: So the Wall Street Journal article was about how to identify ultra-processed foods in the supermarket. Those are their boxes. And when you're looking at ultra-processed foods, you care about things like the whey protein concentrate and the emulsifiers. But ultimately, what you have is a healthy food—a benign food—oatmeal. And that was "Old-Fashioned Oatmeal." So you get the full oats. Takes longer to cook. And then you refine the oats so it's easier to cook. And then you add sugar and artificial flavoring so it tastes like banana nut. Although they call it natural flavor, so "natural flavoring." Then you worry about, like I said, the whey protein concentrate. Whereas when I was growing up, my mother would not have let us eat the banana nut cereal because she would have recognized that as falling into the category of junk food. The question becomes: Why? How do we identify that? So again, now you can do a study where you could create the minimally processed version of that banana nut oatmeal that doesn't have whey protein concentrate, that doesn't have emulsifiers—but does taste like banana nut, whatever that tastes like. That's what you feed people for breakfast. One group gets this. And then in an ideal world—because time is limited—we're going to do this for breakfast, we're going to do the pizzas for lunch, and something similar for dinner. Dinner's probably harder to identify a minimally processed dinner that looks like an ultra-processed dinner. But if we put our heads together—we have the smartest people in the nation working on this… Anyway, if I were in RFK Jr. 's shoes—and leaving all the vaccine stuff out of it and the defunding of various medical groups out of it—and just focusing on nutrition… Unfortunately, I think we have to go back to kind of first principles. We have various hypotheses about what is causing the obesity and diabetes epidemics. My first book suggested refined grains and sugars. A lot of people think that's the problem. There are people who think seed oils are a problem. There are people who think just eating too many calories is the problem. And then there's food dyes and additives. So what I would want to do is put together a committee—because I want this to be bipartisan to bring people across. I don't want congressmen involved. I want the smartest scientists in the world. So we're going to get 20 retired Nobel laureates who are still young enough to be intelligent, but old enough to have free time. And we're going to put them on this committee. And then we're going to give them a staff of very, very bright postdocs. You could think of this as similar to the Supreme Court, which has its staff of clerks working for every justice—who are the best in the nation. They're going to collect all the information. They're going to read up on all these hypotheses. And these people are going to decide what's meaningful and what's not. Is there enough there that we should worry that sugar is uniquely toxic? Is there enough there that we should worry that seed oils are uniquely toxic? If seed oils—are there specific seed oils we should worry about? And if we worry about them, what research do we need to do to begin to establish whether they are or are not? And what should we recommend to the public in the meantime? Zach Weissmueller: So you almost need a kind of meta discussion here about what it is we actually need to study first—whereas they're coming in with a little bit of a preconceived idea. Gary Taubes: Like, the reason I'm on your podcast, right? Is because I wrote some books that you think are intelligent. Or your editors think are intelligent. They said, "Have Gary Taubes on. He's not an idiot." Zach Weissmueller: That was me. I had to fight for it, Gary. I had to fight for you. Gary Taubes: I remember. Thank you, Zach. So the question is: If I'm right—it's not the fat, it's not the saturated fat, it's the carbs. I wrote the book assuming that smart people would read this and say, "He makes some very good points. We really have to address this." And actually, some very smart people have read it and said, "He makes some very good points. I wish we would address it." But in general, let's get some really smart, unbiased people together. Is the hypothesis that I'm saying—that's been there since the 1960s—are the points valid? Because if they are, this has to be tested. And then we can design experiments to test it. In the 1970s and '80s, the NIH spent half a billion dollars—actually, in total probably a billion dollars—testing the idea that dietary fat causes chronic disease. And as I document in my book, they basically failed to confirm that hypothesis. So, if you spent that much money testing whether sugar and refined grains cause these chronic diseases that are now epidemic, you might also fail. That's the problem with testing any hypothesis. Failure is a very likely scenario. But you have to do it. Zach Weissmueller: Well, I'm curious, though—do you think there's any hope of an RFK-led HHS going down this path? And in particular, to get some insight into how they're thinking about all this—and what's going on with the internal politics of all this—you know, Kevin Hall, who designed that ultra-processed food study we were talking about earlier, has since resigned from the NIH. And after he resigned, he went to the press and publicly gave his reasons for resigning. He appeared on MSNBC on All In With Chris Hayes in April. I just want to play a clip from that interview where he explains why he resigned from the NIH after being there for years, and why he believes that there's a kind of anti-scientific attitude within the current administration. Roll that, please, John. (Kevin Hall Clip) Kevin Hall: What we were interested in doing was understanding: When people consume ultra-processed foods, do they really hijack the brain's reward system in a way that we know addictive drugs do—drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine? They cause this really large increase in dopamine in the brain. And we published this result, which was interesting. It seemed that these foods—while they may be addictive in many people—didn't cause the outsized increase in dopamine that many drugs that are highly addictive do. And it really challenged some of the narratives behind how these foods actually work to change your brain chemistry. And it was published. And we had a reporter ask for an interview to discuss the findings of that paper for a piece she was writing in The New York Times. And that interview was denied. Our press release was also quashed—for no reason given. And finally, the reporter at The New York Times asked, "What is it? Why can't I have an interview? I've actually interviewed Dr. Hall before. We'd really love his input on this paper." And then she actually received a telephone call from the HHS communications director, asking whether or not this was really a piece about RFK Jr.—because the paper didn't seem to fully support the preconceived narrative that ultra-processed foods are addictive. And so I was shocked to hear about this. And after that conversation, the reporter was given the ability to ask written questions—to which I responded through our press office and gave approval to some slight edits about whether drugs were "drugs of abuse" or "addiction." And then what I saw was fascinating. Because the responses that were then sent to the reporter had been edited—trying to downplay the study, saying it was very small, when it was actually the largest of its kind. And that the participants had only been in the hospital for five days—when this was actually the only study that had that level of control. And it struck me as really concerning. Because if people were willing to say, "There's a little bit of daylight between our preconceived notions about how the basic science of food addiction might work and the narrative that's going on," what is it going to be like if they want to start actually meddling in the research itself? That was my concern. Zach Weissmueller: So he's saying that even with this mildly… this study that cast just the tiniest bit of doubt on the ultra-processed food hypothesis—in that it found that ultra-processed foods don't affect the brain in the same way that crack does—was then met with a lot of resistance within the RFK-led HHS. And therefore, he's dubious of the idea that anything other than a finding supporting this hypothesis is going to be advanced. I know you've worked with Kevin Hall in the past. What is your impression of this whole kerfuffle? Gary Taubes: Tempest in a teapot. And I have worked with Kevin in the past, and Kevin and I have had some notorious fights. I think we kind of like each other, but professionally, I'm not a fan of his science and he's not a fan of mine. And that can get in the way of personal affections. First of all, this all happened pretty much before Jay Bhattacharya took over as head of NIH. And Jay was famously the target of censorship and attempts to cancel his career because of what he believed were his scientific obligations. And so I would have confidence that anything Jay Bhattacharya— the last thing Jay Bhattacharya would do—would be to censor somebody's results. So, you know, I listened to what Kevin said. I mean, one of the issues here—and I can see this happening. I do know people in the MAHA administration. Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, the head of the FDA, both blurbed—endorsed—my last book, Rethinking Diabetes. I think of both of them as friends. The MAHA Report has been very friendly to the sort of notion that carbohydrates are the problem—the refinement and the sugar content of the carbohydrates. You start talking to people who are advocating for tallow as a healthy fat and that we should not worry about our meat consumption—those people tend to be people from my side of the nutritional aisle. And so in my world, they're probably likely to do more good. You know, again, I have spent my entire career reporting on terrible science coming out of the NIH. It's funny, because I probably agree with Kevin's conclusions about the food addiction work. I had a colleague who, for decades, every time I told them that sugar triggered the same dopamine response in the nucleus accumbens of your brain—the reward center—as sex and drugs do, my colleague would say, "Yeah, but so does buying shoes. Are you going to say buying shoes causes obesity?" He was absolutely right. This part of the brain has been designed to maximize things that, evolutionarily, we might have wanted to feel pleasure to repeat as a species. I think a five-day study is not long enough. A small study—even if it's the biggest in the world—might still be a small study. So the point—and I've argued this before to public health people—is, if I were running NIH, I wouldn't want my press office writing press releases, and I would not want my researchers speaking to the press. Because the high likelihood is that anything they are talking about that they've done is either meaningless or wrong. That's the nature of science. And so you get this constant stream of meaningless or insignificant research being communicated to the media. I'm not sure I would disagree with the press office that said we have to rein these people in. But I don't think it says anything about the level of science going forward. The question always with RFK Jr. and his allies is: Are they willing to actually do the science, or are they just going to assume—or pretend—that they already know the answers? Zach Weissmueller: So, I mean, it sounds like—it's kind of like directionally, this might be an improvement, especially with people like Bhattacharya in there, even if it's kind of a mess with all these ancillary issues and focus on ultra-processed foods. That might be a distraction. But at least there are some bright spots, and they might start to look at what you're more interested in. I guess my last question for you is about: How hopeful are you actually about the prospect of being able to figure this out? You've been writing about it since 2002. You've outlined the problems—the huge challenges with studying this—probably the biggest one being how long such a study would need to be in order to tell us anything useful, since these are cumulative effects over time. I mean, how optimistic are you, epistemologically, that it's even possible to design the kind of study—and what kind of expense it would take to execute something? Should we be optimistic about that? Gary Taubes: There are specific questions you can ask that would be important to know. And the studies would be expensive by the standards of typical NIH funding—but not expensive by the standards of pharmaceutical industry research investments. So my hope is that Jay Bhattacharya, with RFK Jr.'s oversight, will say, "Look, there are studies we just have to do that are going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars each. They're going to be difficult, but we have all these brilliant scientists…" What brilliant scientists do is they overcome challenges to the research methodology. You figure out how to get these questions answered. I think that could be done. In an ideal world, I hope it would be done. Even if it's done, it would take a long time. So even if you do a study, say, for only five years—although I could imagine studies that would give us important, meaningful answers in one to two years—it still takes a year or two or three to set the study up, and a year to do the analysis. Five years would come… Zach Weissmueller: I mean, you would be surveilling what people are eating—to the calorie—for five years? Is that what you would pick? Gary Taubes: But again, it depends on the question you're asking. What level of knowledge you need about the calories consumed. And I'll give you an example—this is how I think about it. So, probably the last time we spoke, in 2016, I had a book, The Case Against Sugar, and I wrote the book because I felt that sugar and sugary beverages are the most likely explanation—I think are the most likely explanation—for the obesity and diabetes epidemics. But in the beginning of the book, I said, if this were a legal case, I would have enough evidence to indict. I would not have enough evidence to convict. So I can make the argument that sugar is the primary culprit for the obesity and diabetes epidemics—and maybe sugary beverages, particularly—that they are to obesity and diabetes what cigarette smoking was to lung cancer. I can't prove it because I don't have the experimental evidence. So now, let's think of how we're going to get that evidence. Well, he's talking about obesity and diabetes. Let's get 10,000 or 20,000 people, and we'll randomize half of them to eat a sugar-rich diet—what they've been eating all along—and the other half to avoid all added sugars. And after five years—he's saying the half that avoids all added sugars—they're allowed to eat fruit, but no sodas, no fruit juice, no sugar on their cereals, no sugar in their tomato sauces—they're going to be healthier. But in the process of avoiding their sugars, they're not going to have liked their food as much. We know from watching The Godfather that putting sugar in tomato sauce makes it taste better. So they're going to eat more of the food that has sugar in it. So telling them to avoid sugar—they're probably going to eat fewer calories. So maybe the benefit we saw only came from the fewer calories, not from the less sugar. So now we have a study that may have only told us what Liz believes: that if they just ate less, they'd be healthier. Sorry, Liz. Have we learned anything we didn't know—or we didn't think we knew—all along? The answer is no. That's when it starts getting complicated. You need people who are smarter than I am to say, "Ok, how are we going to fix this?" So we make sure they eat just as much as the people who are eating their usual sugar-rich diet, but one diet has sugar and the other doesn't? So we can rule out the possibility that they just ate less because they didn't like it as much. And that gets complicated. And the more you think about it, the more complicated it is. And like I said, science moves forward when people who are smarter than I am think of ways to overcome the challenges to doing the research. And we need people doing that in nutrition. In general, the nutritionists have made precious little effort. They give up. They say, "Let's just blame all ultra-processing," and then we don't have to worry about any of this stuff. But they do. And I'm hoping MAHA does. I know Jay Bhattacharya would. So I do worry about anything they do lasting more than three more years—as much as I worry about it not lasting more than three more years, either way. I get worried in this day and age. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Well, I hope that he gets this message. We've had him on Reason TV several times before, and I generally agree with you that I think he takes a careful approach to science, and maybe he can have some positive influence here along these lines. I want to bring the conversation to a close by asking you the question that we give to all of our guests. Very appropriate for Gary Taubes, you have lots of questions and uncertainty about the world. So what is a question that you think more people should be asking? Gary Taubes: What's a question I think more people should be asking? You couldn't give me this one in advance so I could think of something meaningful to say? Liz Wolfe: Everyone else comes up with something super profound, so we expect you to. Gary Taubes: Like I said, we live in a polarized world. Virtually all the issues that tend to interest us—that obsess us—tend to be issues that we almost can't talk about with some of our friends, because we differ so importantly. So I always think people should be asking themselves: "What is it that this person sees that makes him or her disagree with me as much as they do?" There's this concept from Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate—cognitive psychologist, behavioral… whatever you would call him—"what you see is all there is". He writes about it in Thinking, Fast and Slow. And it really resonated with me. People make their judgments based on what they see. So if you find people who disagree with you so profoundly—as we all tend to do, living in our silos—I always want people to say, "What is it that person is seeing that I'm not?" Because my assumption is, if I could see what they're seeing, I would understand why they disagreed with me. Zach Weissmueller: That's such a great question. That's very much in the spirit of this show. So thank you for that, Gary. You can find Gary Taubes's thought-provoking books on Amazon. You can read his work at the Uncertainty Principles Substack. Thank you for coming on the show. Liz Wolfe: Thank you so much, Gary. Gary Taubes: Thank you so much. Thank you, Liz.   The post Gary Taubes: MAHA, Ultra-Processed Foods, and Bad Science appeared first on Reason.com.

How much are you willing to pay to "buy American"? Just asking questions. In April, President Donald Trump unilaterally unleashed a series of so-called reciprocal tariffs, using emergency powers to punish countries with a trade imbalance, meaning they export more to the U.S. than they import from the U.S. Markets panicked, and Trump pulled back, setting a new deadline that he's now pushed back multiple times. It's now set to expire on August 1. But those aren't the only tariffs Trump has implemented, and there are some signs they may be already driving up prices. The administration says the stock market is strong, tariffs are bringing in billions in revenue, and American manufacturing is back, baby.  To help us figure out what tariffs might do to the U.S. economy, analyze how Trump is using trade as a foreign policy tool, and discuss the ultimate political aims of economic nationalism is Scott Lincicome. He's vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute and writes the Capitolism newsletter at The Dispatch. Chapters: 00:00—What are the current tariff levels? 02:21—Examples of tariff carve-outs 14:20—Political dynamics of tariffs 19:01—Tariff impacts on consumers 33:32—Tariffs as a foreign policy tool 34:00—Can tariffs lead to freer trade? 36:24—How tariffs affect foreign exporters 37:21—Global trade agreements excluding the U.S. 38:27—Trump's Brazil tariff threats 40:34—Consumer goods and tariff costs 52:30—Tariffs and price increase 57:06—Treasury revenue from tariffs 59:58—Tax cuts vs. tariff hikes 01:01:14—Tariffs as a regressive tax 01:05:19—Are tariffs less harmful than feared? 01:16:03—Manufacturing and tariff challenges 01:19:45—Economic growth and tariff effects   Mentioned in the podcast: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for June 2025 Trading Economics: United States Core Inflation Rate "Wholesale prices are flat in June, PPI shows, and point to muted effect of tariffs on inflation," by Jeffry Bartash at MarketWatch "US customs duties top $100 billion for first time in a fiscal year," by David Lawder Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: How much are you willing to pay to buy American? Just Asking Questions.  In April, Donald Trump unilaterally unleashed a series of so-called reciprocal tariffs using emergency powers to punish countries with a trade imbalance, meaning they export more to the U.S. than they import from the U.S. And markets panicked. Trump pulled back, set a new deadline that he's now pushed multiple times. It's now set to expire August 1st. But those aren't the only tariffs Trump has implemented, and there are some signs they may already be driving up some prices. The administration, on the other hand, says the stock market's pretty strong and tariffs are bringing in billions of revenue.  American manufacturing is coming back, baby. So, to help us figure out what tariffs might actually do to the U.S. economy, analyze how Trump is using trade as a foreign policy tool, and discuss the ultimate political aims of economic nationalism is Scott Lincicome, VP of Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute and writer of the Capitolism Newsletter at The Dispatch. Scott, thank you for coming on the show. Scott Lincicome: My pleasure, thanks for having me. Liz Wolfe: So what are the actual current tariff levels that we have with our major trading partners? Scott Lincicome: Nobody knows. Liz Wolfe: Least of all us. Scott Lincicome: Well, in all seriousness, the reality is that I think you would be really hard-pressed to get a consensus from people who study this every day on the exact tariff levels that we have. And in fact, if you look at the various experts, whether it is the Tax Foundation or Yale Budget Lab, or the guys at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, they all have slightly different tariff rates for the average tariff that's in effect. First of all, it changes constantly. Second, there are all sorts of carve-outs and exclusions and special rules. There's also— Liz Wolfe: Hold on. Really fast, can you give us a few examples of what those might be? Scott Lincicome: Of the carve-outs? Sure. So the big reciprocal tariffs had a huge carve-out for consumer electronics. They also have carve-outs for semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The theory of the case there is the Trump administration has initiated separate investigations of those products under national security under a different law, Section 232, and so they're going to apply the 232 tariffs eventually to those things. Trump has threatened 200 percent pharmaceutical tariffs and those things. So you have a lot of these carve-outs, but you also have additions. The steel and aluminum tariffs have what's called a derivatives rider. Which means that products that are made with a lot of steel and aluminum can also face tariffs based on the amount of steel and aluminum they have in them. You can petition the government to have your product included on this list of derivatives. Just recently, home appliances were included on the list. Suddenly, those appliances are getting hit with tariffs based on their steel and aluminum content. If you combine that with some of the rules for automotive goods—what qualifies as a USMCA product and what doesn't—because Trump has these tariffs on fentanyl-related goods from Canada, Mexico, and China, but there's a carve-out for Canada and Mexico related to goods that comply with the trade agreement that Trump himself signed, the USMCA. Demonstrating that compliance—I had two customs lawyers giving me two different opinions on what's covered, how easy it is to cover. I get somewhat hilarious—I mean, morbidly hilarious—emails from customs law firms talking to clients, trying to get all of this paperwork straight. It's halcyon days—that means boom days—for the lawyers and accountants out there. But it's really hard to nail all this down. This is frustrating for guys like me, but it's also economically important. The reality is that if you are in business—importing, exporting, whatever—if you're involved with this stuff and you don't know the exact tariff rate that applies today, tomorrow, you don't know what Trump's going to do next week with some new trade deal that he announces on Truth Social, planning your business is really hard. Do you front-load and try to get all your product in before the tariffs change? Do you wait because you think Trump is going TACO out—Trump Always Chickens Out, right? So the tariffs are going to go away. Do you think there are going to be deals that make things better? So on and so on. All of that uncertainty means less economic activity, less investment, and the rest. So we can laugh about it, and it is kind of funny, but it also has real economic harms. Liz Wolfe: If you're, say, a clothing company and you deal with textiles a lot and you get those textiles from China or Vietnam, Liberation Day was back in April. Now we're recording this in July, and another round of tariffs will allegedly go into effect on August 1st. The deals that Trump—you know, "90 deals in 90 days"—that Trump claimed he was going to do. What have these firms been doing? I mean, this is almost an entire quarter. How have they been making these decisions? What type of impact might this have? Like say I'm importing all these textiles—how am I making decisions right now? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, so you have to distinguish in this case between the big firms and the small, because there are really two completely different tracks. For big firms, they're engaging in a lot of creative tariff avoidance schemes. The most obvious one is they front-run the tariffs. When Trump got elected—and in fact, my newsletter tomorrow there's a great chart in there…You're going to see it—imports skyrocketed from November through February and into March. It was all importing companies—a lot of apparel and retail outlets, but also pharmaceutical companies and others—just bringing in as much of their product as they can. Getting it onshore and stocking it in warehouses to avoid tariffs. The CEO of Levi's in the spring said that they had enough product in-country to get them all the way into the fall. So imagine giant warehouses full of jeans, like in the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? It's just like these huge secret warehouses of jeans. But that's what a lot of giant companies did, and that's one of the reasons why we're not seeing tariffs show up so quickly in the price data—because a lot of companies built up these inventories. Liz Wolfe: Just real fast, is that a huge gift to Trump that consumers aren't really necessarily fully seeing this right now? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, yes and no. I mean, it's a gift to him in the sense that he can go out there—like he and J.D. Vance and others—and go, "Aha! The CPI has done nothing. Ergo, the economists, the elites, were wrong." But again, if you actually read the economists who are talking about this stuff, everybody saw these inventory levels and these import levels rise. And they went, "Oh, ok, so we're not going to really see major price impact until the fall." Assuming that holds, then actually Trump's going to kind of get hoisted on this in the fall—to the extent Trump can actually get hoisted on anything—because you will see the price impact. It'll just be delayed. So, going back to what the companies do: Big companies, they front-ran the tariffs, they adjust their supply chains. So instead of buying from China, you buy from Vietnam, or you buy from India, or you buy from Mexico and get that USMCA carve-out. So giant companies tend to have multiple suppliers and are pretty nimble. And again, armies of lawyers and accountants try to figure out how to do this. They do other things. They utilize bonded warehouses and foreign trade zones. All this kind of really creative—One of my favorite examples: Delta Airlines is ripping U.S.-made engines out of its Europe-based jets and bringing them into the country and installing them into grounded U.S.-based planes instead of importing the entire Airbus plane from Europe to avoid tariffs, right? So this is what giant companies can do, and they are doing. Little guys? They're screwed.  Little guys tend to have one supplier. Oftentimes, especially in the case of contract manufacturing in China, it's their product. The contract manufacturer is basically a big 3D printer in China. They have their own merchandise sitting in their own warehouses in China, and they have no other options. They don't have the giant warehouses for inventory, and that's it. I interviewed a guy in a long piece over at Cato. He has a small educational toy company out of Chicago—employs about 500 people. When those tariffs hit 140 percent, he just stopped importing. I asked him, "How long can you hold out?" This was, again, when the tariffs were 140 percent. He said, "I've got a couple months maybe, and then that's it. We don't have anything to sell." About 60 percent of his product came from China. So for the little guys, that's what you're seeing. You're seeing in the news now small retailers—particularly e-commerce folks that are working out of Etsy and eBay and Amazon—they're shutting down. And I think those are the types of things we miss when we have these very academic, wonky discussions about what is the CPI reading or whatever—and I'm sure we'll get into that in a sec. But we miss the fact that there are a lot of mom-and-pop shops that aren't going to show up in the data and yet are suffering real and in some cases catastrophic harms because they woke up one day and Donald Trump decided that he was going to tax their stuff at 40 percent or whatever, even though, you know, when they ordered that product two months ago, it was perfectly legit and at zero. Zach Weissmueller: I saw—I think this was linked in reading one of your articles prepping for this—this map that J.P. Morgan puts out that estimates the effect that tariffs have on these midsize—what they classified as midsize—firms, right?  You can see when that April 2nd announcement—full universal tariffs—went into effect, kind of the darkening of the color there, like how sensitive these midsize firms really are to this stuff in a way that the big guys aren't. It kind of reminds me, in a weird way, parallel to the COVID era when we had lockdowns and it was the big-box stores that got exemptions or were just otherwise able to adapt in a way the small ones couldn't. Scott Lincicome: Yeah, and that's actually another really important point. The big guys also have armies of lobbyists who can go to Washington—or the CEOs themselves, you know, good old Tim Apple can go sit and have dinner with Trump. And then boom, exemption for consumer electronics, right? The little guys—the toy guy I mentioned—he doesn't have that clout. If you look at all of the lawsuits against the Trump tariffs, they are all small businesses; they're not the big guys. And I think that is a reflection of this economic reality. And I think a bit of the politics of it as well—that the big companies don't want to have targets on their backs. Liz Wolfe: To that point—as you were talking about Tim Apple going to Washington—I was thinking about how Jeff Bezos sort of attempted to be the #resistance, at least when it comes to tariffs, and basically say, "Hey, we are going to have a policy where we attempt to convey to consumers that we're not just arbitrarily raising prices. Here's the impact that tariffs are having on each specific good. And we might not be able to do it fully across the board, but we'll at least be able to give consumers some sense of: we're not happy about passing these costs on to them, but we do have to, to some degree." And then immediately got called into a meeting with Trump and with White House officials. And I mean, that policy of Amazon's—was what, changed within two hours? Two hours. It was something crazy. I'm beginning to be worried because I like this idea of these big firms being—you know, they have this political influence that they can exercise, but they also have a certain sturdiness that makes it so that normal consumers aren't necessarily going to feel this. They're a bulwark against normal consumers feeling this until later in the game. And yet the biggest player in the entire e-commerce game—Jeff Bezos—was kind of strong-armed into compliance. What do you make of that? Do you think we're just going to see more of that dynamic? Scott Lincicome: I think so, unfortunately. There's a few things going on. First is basically political, right? You know the famous Michael Jordan quote, "Republicans buy shoes too." It applies.  Tariffs are a political thing.  If you look at the polling on tariffs, it is so depressing as a wonk because support for tariffs is so partisan now. Democrats now hate them, Republicans now love them. Ten years ago, it was exactly the opposite. And when Biden started talking up tariffs, then Democrats kind of changed their tune a little bit. Well, what does that mean? So if you're a big retailer like Amazon or Walmart, and you're out there bad-mouthing tariffs, you're effectively insulting half of your customer base—or in Walmart's case, maybe more than half your customer base, right? The other issue is, you will be attacked by, inarguably, the world's loudest person and his armies of fervent followers. So that's another thing to think about. Then there's also an economic issue. Consumers don't like increased prices, regardless of how they come about. And as libertarians and wonky folks, we're like, "Oh no, this is the tax. It's not their fault. It's the government's passing that on." Individuals aren't that rational most of the time. And so companies don't like to telegraph price hikes—even if it's the government's fault—if their competitors aren't doing the same. We're in a bit of a prisoner's dilemma on price hikes. That's why you combine all this together and—you know, we had this brief spurt of companies blaming tariffs for price hikes. And then all the shizzle hit the fan. Suddenly now, there are a lot of price hike announcements in the news, but they're blamed on "market conditions."  CEOs don't mention tariffs in their investor calls. It doesn't mean that the price hikes aren't happening, but they're avoiding that kind of target and blame.  Zach Weissmueller: I mean, but that's why I agree with Liz. I liked that brief moment where there was a little bit of transparency. It's like when you live in a county and go to the store, you get the sales tax separated out. There's something nice about that from a libertarian perspective. Scott Lincicome: I totally agree. And states have it for gas taxes, you know on the gas pump, there's a gas tax thing. I like it too. I think there is an untapped market for tariff trackers—like a Chrome plug-in that looks back at a product's price history and says, "Well, on January 20th, this product cost this much. And today it costs this much. Draw your own conclusions." Liz Wolfe: I've been doing this with Lululemon leggings. This is a very girly way of thinking about tariffs. I consider it my Lululemon Legging Price Index. Where I'm just tracking the price of this one particular sort of classic, iconic Lululemon style. They're already expensive pants, but holy cow, if they go up by 20 or 30 percent, not a single gal in all of New York City can afford them. Zach Weissmueller: The dude version of that is the Nintendo Switch 2, I believe. Scott Lincicome: Well, two things. First, Liz, you need to be buying the Costco knockoffs before Lulu sues them out of existence. Liz Wolfe: This is service journalism. Thank you, Scott.  Scott Lincicome: Second—maybe more on topic—I actually did the same thing because I was in the market for a car. My old beater was literally leaking out of the sunroof, and I couldn't even move the seat anymore. So I was price-tracking a certain car for a long time. I got to watch, depressingly, the price spike right after the auto tariffs were announced and there was this big rush. But I also got to see some of the consumer enthusiasm drop, and then the price kind of came back down. So there are things that, if you track this stuff, you can actually see the news in your own personal price track. Liz Wolfe: My husband keeps getting mad at me because he thinks I'm online shopping, and I'm like, "No, no. I'm thinking about tariffs. Don't worry." Zach Weissmueller: Research! So, you mentioned the way that now Democrats have started to talk about this. It's kind of flipped, and now Democrats are against tariffs. And they're suddenly, there's people—even Elizabeth Warren—talking this game of like, "Oh yeah, what we've been saying all along: When you tax a business, it gets passed on to the buyer." We actually have a clip of her making that case. Can you roll that clip, John? Elizabeth Warren (clip):  "Some of his CEO buddies are already lining up to pass along costs to American families or to ask Trump for special exemptions for themselves. If this sounds to you like chaos, that's because it is. And if you've turned on the news today, you can see just how badly it's going for our economy. What Trump is doing means that businesses will seize up and pull back on their investments. Americans' confidence in our economy will drop even lower. And companies are already talking about using this chaos as cover to raise their own prices even more so they protect their profits. But your costs go up. And now your next pair of shoes may not cost 50 bucks—it may cost 100." Zach Weissmueller: So she's framing it in that very Elizabeth Warren–esque way—this is still kind of a conspiracy of the greedy corporations protecting their profits. But she is acknowledging that this is the effect. Do you see that as a positive development or a step in the right direction? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, I do. In fact, I wrote a column talking about how Democrats are suddenly sounding like libertarians. Because the arguments that Liz Warren just made there are almost identical to the ones that free marketers make with respect to, say, corporate taxes. That it's not corporations paying the taxes—it's consumers and workers and investors. So to hear her sounding libertarian-ish is nice. Now, I'm not crazy enough to think that Elizabeth Warren is now a dedicated supply-side free marketer. But it is good that that type of thinking—that second-order effects–type thinking about taxes and uncertainty and the rest—those discussions are happening on the left. Warren, of course, is the populist, pretty far left. I think the even more optimistic thing is that moderate Democrats really seem to have had an awakening of sorts on this stuff.  This is not just a partisan thing. When I talk to self-identified Obama-neoliberal types, they're like, "This stuff is crazy." And they were like this when Biden was in office raising tariffs too. That's nice to see. Zach Weissmueller: Hold on—so that implies there might actually be something more enduring beyond pure partisan flip. Because when I hear Warren talking about it, the way she frames it still leaves her room to just go back to the idea that it's just the greedy corporations. Like the whole "greedflation" thing that was going on during the Biden era. Scott Lincicome: Yeah, I mean, I don't have a lot of hope for Senator Warren. But I do think there is a big chunk of the Democratic Party that has had an actual shift that is not just an anti-Trump reflex. We do a lot of work on The Hill at Cato. I talk to a lot of staffers and a lot of members. I in fact asked this exact question. I said, "How much of this is really just anti-Trump stuff, and how much is it an actual change in either your personal policy views or your base?" Because the Democratic base is shifting a bit. And the staffer said, "I gotta be honest—about half and half." But look, I'll take half. I cut my teeth in trade policy during the late '90s and 2000s when Democratic Congress was 90–10 of pro-protectionist. You had a few, but Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer—most folks in the Democratic caucus were anti-trade. FTAs back then were passed by Republicans with a handful of Democratic votes. It does seem there is a better split these days on that side. Now, of course, the depressing side is on the Republican Party. You've seen the opposite. I don't think the Republicans in Congress are 90–10 against trade and pro-tariff. But as long as Trump's running the show, that doesn't matter much. We have good outreach with Republican offices on the Hill about this stuff. But coming out publicly and voting against Trump… let's face it, we know. Zach Weissmueller: That turns you into Thomas Massie and you just get a million Truth Social posts about your primary. Scott Lincicome: Yeah, and you get primaried, and you're out of a job. And for what, right? Because when it comes to Congress, you always have to remember that Congress has already delegated so much tariff power to the president. Of course, Congress has the constitutional authority over tariffs and trade under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. But they gave it all to the president. Probably too much. And that's probably going to go to the Supreme Court. So to get that power back—this is why you shouldn't delegate it in the first place—you need veto-proof majorities. For Republicans, the calculus is pretty straightforward. Unless you are an uber-principled guy like Rand Paul, I mean, what's the point of casting some random vote that goes nowhere and then losing your job in 2 or 4 years? Liz Wolfe: Why exactly—I mean, this is pretty in the weeds—but why exactly did Congress abrogate their role here, and when did that happen? Scott Lincicome: Yes. It happened about 75—or now 85—years ago. Basically, Smoot-Hawley, as we all know from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, was the last major tariff bill that Congress implemented, because Congress used to pass these tariff bills, and they were pretty corrupt messes. If you're into this stuff, there are some great books that document just how seedy tariff politics was. It was really one of the original smoke-filled-room cronyism policy industries and created a lot of our modern lobbying systems today. Congress realized, following Smoot-Hawley and two world wars that had trade angles to them—not caused by trade, but had rival trading blocs and such—Congress realized they can't really be trusted with all this tariff power. And there was a foreign policy interest in a generally more open and nondiscriminatory trading system, where countries weren't getting into rival trading blocs and cutting each other off, because that creates foreign policy problems—maybe even wars.  So Congress delegated to the president two big powers: one, the ability to negotiate trade agreements; two, tariff powers. Over a series of laws, as Congress was lowering tariffs, generally through trade agreements. They didn't want to take away the government's ability to raise tariffs for national security reasons or whatever. So they gave that power to the president. And we have, I believe, five/six laws on the books that are pretty darn open-ended when it comes to the president unilaterally imposing rather large and broad tariffs. The biggest one is the one that's now being litigated—the one behind the reciprocal tariffs and the fentanyl tariffs—and that's the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which doesn't even mention tariffs. But it's so broad that Trump has used it for all this stuff. I mean, it's like a tariff switch in the Oval Office. And until the courts say he can't do that or that the law is an unconstitutional delegation, we're stuck with it. But even if the Supreme Court were to overrule it, we have to remember that there are other laws out there that he could use to eventually get to almost the same place. Zach Weissmueller: Yes. So Trump is using these tariffs not only because he believes in the economics of tariffs and onshoring manufacturing, but as this foreign policy tool that you're describing there. One of the big developments in the negotiations, apparently, is that he wants to slap the EU with—I believe it was—a 30 percent tariff. The rationale for that was to get them to remove barriers that were both tariff and non-tariff policies and trade barriers. "You need to fix those Europe, otherwise you're getting a 30 percent tariff for creating imbalanced trade." As a foreign policy objective, how legitimate do you see that as, and how realistic a demand is it from Trump? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, I don't see much of a real foreign policy angle here. And I don't see eliminating trade balances with tariffs as an economically realistic thing. The reality is, most economists will tell you that the United States' trade balance is driven by big macroeconomic things—savings and investment overall. It's not driven by trade policy. Trade policy can affect it at the margins, but in general, the U.S. runs a trade deficit because Americans spend more than they save—including the federal government, by the way. If you apply tariffs, you're going to reduce imports, but you're also going to reduce exports. At the end of the day, you end up in the same place. Economists are even more pessimistic about bilateral trade balances, especially because there are more than two countries in the world, and supply chains are pretty complicated.  Tariffs aren't a good way to achieve that goal. But they are a painful weapon for Trump.  Because yes, tariffs' first effects are for us, as American consumers, but they do also harm foreign exporters. If you jack up the effective price of an import, that foreign producer is going to lose sales in the importing market—either because there are just fewer people buying it, or because an American company is going to start gaining market share. So Trump has this tool, and he likes to throw it around. And he likes to pretend that it's about foreign trade barriers and all this stuff, but the reality is it's increasingly clear that it is just an excuse for Trump to raise tariffs. The deals with Vietnam—well, let's start with the UK. The United States barely got any sort of reductions in English trade barriers—whatever they might be, tariff or non-tariff. But at the same time, the United States didn't really give products from the UK much preference either. There's a little bit on aircraft and a little bit for autos, but nothing too major. Most of the tariffs Trump imposed unilaterally remain. And now we have these new deals with Vietnam, supposedly—we still haven't seen that text—and Indonesia, supposedly. But in that case, the United States is maintaining tariffs of around 20 percent. Those governments are lowering some tariffs, but we don't know exactly what. Trump says they're going to zero, but we need to wait and see the details. So what we're really getting out of these deals is not true free trade, as some in Trump's orbit have argued. We're just getting a mercantilist setup, where we get high U.S. barriers, slightly lower foreign barriers, and a still quite restricted trade overall. That's the reality.  My working thesis on all of this has, for a long time, been: Trump just likes tariffs. He thinks they're great. He thinks they're a great economic tool. He thinks they're a great way to get very powerful people to run to the White House and ask him for stuff. And he thinks they're a way to keep the Trump show running in the media. You put all that together, and it's a recipe for just constant tariff stuff. Liz Wolfe: I'm like 90 percent in agreement there, and then 10 percent of me is just a contrarian—and/or I want to steelman the Trump-defender case. Which is like: is there a level at which the tariffs on U.S. goods that are coming into other countries could be reduced to a point where the fact that Trump has basically started all of these trade wars and escalated them… Zach Weissmueller: Like "tariff our way to free trade," is what you're saying. Liz Wolfe: Yeah, exactly. I don't think we've seen that so far. But we are actually—in some countries, I think Indonesia might have been a good example of this; that was in the news this week—seeing a little bit of a reduction. Is there a case to be made there? Scott Lincicome: So yes and no. I do think it is worthwhile—and it's a point for Trump—that these tariff threats seem to have gotten these governments to reduce their trade barriers on U.S. exports. Liz Wolfe: You have to re-examine the barriers that they were imposing. Scott Lincicome: But this is, first of all, in a country like Vietnam—which has also apparently offered to lower its trade barriers. Vietnam wanted that for a long time. Vietnam was a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the United States used to be a member of, and which would have eliminated 99-plus percent of Vietnamese tariffs and non-tariff barriers on everything from the United States. And done in a much more comprehensive and coherent and transparent way. Indonesia is a different case. It's a very tiny market. I guess prying it open—there are a lot of people there, and that's a good thing. But is it economically significant? Eh. The bigger problem is that this is going to be bad for the United States. We are going to keep tariffs on—and very high tariffs on things from Vietnam and Indonesia and anywhere else.  And import tariffs mean fewer exports. I know that's hard to wrap your head around, but a tax on imports is a tax on exports. We call it Lerner symmetry. The basic idea is that—whether it's through higher input costs or currency changes or other wonky economic things—when you increase import tariffs, you tend to reduce exports. So even though these countries are lowering some barriers, because we're going to maintain high import barriers, we shouldn't expect a supercharged export industry. Liz Wolfe: Also, another knock-on effect I keep thinking about is: how are foreign exporters changing their behavior vis-à-vis the U.S. and their future plans? That's another component that continues to bother me. Scott Lincicome: That's another thing we have to consider in all of this. It's not just about the United States and the other country. It's about the other country and all the other countries. Because what you've seen over the last few years—because Biden wasn't a big free trader, he wasn't doing anything on trade agreements—what you've seen over the last few years is governments just doing free trade deals with each other and leaving the United States out of it. I think that's going to be the endgame for all of this: the United States is going to have a pretty high unilateral tariff wall in place, and other governments and countries and their people are going to be trading more freely with each other and just leaving us out of it. Liz Wolfe: That makes a lot of sense. So one of the weirdest developments so far in all of the tariff drama has been Trump's threats against Brazil—basically threatening Brazil with 50 percent tariffs for what he claims is a witch hunt domestically against Jair Bolsonaro and secret and unlawful censorship orders to U.S. social media platforms handed down by the Brazilian courts. The U.S. has a trade surplus with Brazil. So this is just pure politics. This isn't even about the trade imbalance that Trump is so bothered by. To me, this feels like—Trump has already given us five, six different excuses for what he's trying, five or six different justifications for what he's trying to accomplish with tariffs—but to me, this looks a lot like punishing political adversaries and being pissed off by what's going on domestically inside of Brazil. What do you think about Trump using tariffs in this way? Is this a new front that's been opened up? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, I mean, in one sense, I love it because it is just such an egregious and clear example of why the law under which all this is happening—the IEEPA—needs to be ruled unconstitutional and eliminated from our corpus. The reality is that if the president of the United States can threaten 50 percent tariffs on Brazil for what are clearly their own domestic political issues, then the law under which he's doing all of this is just totally bogus, right?  And it's just so indefensible. You're not going to find anybody—even someone who supports Trump—who's like, "Oh yeah, that's clearly a great use for tariffs." I'm hoping the courts that are ruling on this stuff will—if they don't expressly pay attention to it—at least implicitly pay attention to it. That said, in the meantime, it's troubling, right? Could you imagine a situation where a foreign government tried something like this related to a U.S. court case? I mean, we would lose our minds—rightly—over this. Right? So that type of interference, using that type of economic coercion for something so nakedly personal and political, is really messed up. Liz Wolfe: I also haven't looked too deeply into this, but I know one major Brazilian import to the U.S. is meat, for example. And so I'm curious about Trump and Tucker Carlson and all these right-wing types who are so pissed off by people switching to meat alternatives—it's like, well, you might've just jacked up the price of meat because you're worried about Brazilian courts attempting to hold Bolsonaro accountable for his attempted coup. Like, really consider… Scott Lincicome: Yeah, and coffee—that's the one I'm worried about. As a caffeine addict who gets the jitters if he doesn't have a calf in a couple of hours, I'm extremely displeased. Liz Wolfe: Pivot to cocaine, I guess? Scott Lincicome: No, that's a great point. This is a huge win for coke dealers across the United States.  Liz Wolfe: Cost rising…they don't have to deal with import— Scott Lincicome: …substitution effects. Right? So here we go. The other thing I read—very hilarious—is that there's apparently some caffeine alternative, coffee alternative, made in Texas called Yaupon or something. And I'm like, "Oh gosh." So now we're going to create a domestic Yaupon industry that is going to lobby to maintain the Brazilian tariffs because now "your jobs are on the line." It's going to become our next ethanol. Zach Weissmueller: It's all going to be like a delta THC for… Scott Lincicome: Right. We're going to march on Washington to keep the Yaupon jobs. Liz Wolfe: Guys we're libertarians. We welcome competition. We also welcome Delta-9. Scott Lincicome: The market has spoken on this. I'm sorry. This has been around for a long time. Coffee wins. It's over. Zach Weissmueller: So, speaking of prices, I did want to dig a little bit into the data here, because it's still somewhat early days and we're trying to read the tea leaves to some degree. But the BLS—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—just released the latest Consumer Price Index, which I'm going to pull up here. It's one that I've annotated with Trump's various tariffs along the way, so you can kind of see, okay, here's where the tariffs were. The blue line is all items. The red line is all items plus energy. And what we're looking at is the 12-month percent change in basically prices for urban consumers during that time period. Here's a more simple, cleaner version that just shows Trump's first tariff action there with the red line. And then I always like to zoom out so everyone can get the full context. So this is the core inflation rate over the past 10 years. You see that huge spike during the COVID era—it got up around 7 percent there. Now, in June, at the end there, you see the slight uptick. We're approaching 3 percent. I guess my question about all that, my first question is: how much do you think tariffs are contributing to that uptick—that little upticks there at the end? Scott Lincicome: Well, in fact, my column this week is on tariffs and inflation and this whole issue. Because if you talk to Trump supporters, if you listen to the president—J.D. Vance is out today talking about it—they always say, "Look at the CPI and the PPI, clearly the Producer Price Index—clearly the tariffs don't raise prices or cause inflation," right? And economists go, "Well, nobody in the economics profession or people who study this say tariffs cause inflation as we understand the term." Inflation is a persistent increase in the rate of change of consumer prices. It's 3 percent over a long period, 4 percent, whatever. Well that's not how tariffs work. Tariffs are more of a one-off increase in the price level. If it was a very clean, simple system, you'd basically see prices just jump up and then continue doing whatever they were doing. Because inflation—technically, properly understood—is driven by monetary and fiscal policy. It's not driven by things like tariffs, which is a bit counterintuitive, but that's the reality. So what we're waiting to see is this one-off spike—this one-time increase. Now, in the real world, of course—especially in Trump's world—Trump didn't just say, "Boom. 20 percent global tariff." He's done it in fits and starts and starts and stops and deals and non-deals and retaliation and carve-outs. So at the end of the day, what most economists think we're going to see is a gradual increase in the CPI, or in the personal consumption expenditures, which is what the Fed likes to look at, where it'll peak at somewhere around 3 or 3.5 and then it'll start heading down again. This is assuming no major changes in monetary or fiscal policy. So it'll go up, and then it'll go down. The question is when. And that's where you have to get into the weeds. Because another reason why all of this gloating from Trump and Vance and others about the CPI, and why it's nonsense is that, like we already discussed, companies are doing a lot of stuff to avoid an immediate tariff hit. Mainly, again, front-running the tariffs, importing tons of stuff, boosting inventories. So that, along with a lot of other things, creates a lag between the time the tariffs are announced and the time you would expect to see things show up in the CPI. Another issue is that companies might not pass on all of the tariff costs, right? We talked about whether it's for reputational reasons, political reasons, or economic reasons—they're going to eat some of the tariff. And that's going to be like a corporate tax. They're going to pass it on through their shareholders, or they're going to just hire less, invest less, or pay lower wages. It will never show up in the CPI—it's just going to be a corporate tax. And then there are the potential for tariffs not to show up where foreign companies do eat some of the tariff. That's Trump's favorite defense, right? "Foreigners are going to pay these tariffs." Well, Goldman Sachs looked at this. They said, "Actually foreigners are only eating about 20 percent, maybe, of the tariff cost—which is more than last time, but it still leaves 80 percent in the United States." There's some of that too. And then finally, of course, a lot of stuff we consume are services—health care, housing, and other things that are only indirectly affected by tariffs. And these are things that, again, won't show up in the CPI data, at least not quickly, if at all. So you put it all together, and there's absolutely no reason to think that the CPI of yesterday—this week's June CPI—should be showing a major inflationary spike, and certainly not something that's going to just be inflationary forever. That said, you noted that little uptick. If you actually dig into the numbers for June, you start to actually see tariff effects. A bunch of economists have dug into this—there are some great charts on Twitter—and what you can see is for tariff-affected goods—appliances… Zach Weissmueller: I've got some of that data here, actually. I did dig into it, and I'm going to pull it up and ask you what it means. So yeah, if you scroll down in that report they put out, you can see they break out exactly how much goods have increased in price over this time period. And we're looking at the time period from last month—May 2025—to June 2025. I just went through and highlighted things that were 2 percent or above. So what we see here are beef and veal—back to Liz's point, if we tariff Brazil, that might get higher. About 45 percent of the beef is produced domestically. The rest is imported, the beef we consume. Eggs have gone down. That's the big point of pride for the Trump administration since egg prices were famously high during the Biden era. Egg prices have gone down 7.4 percent. But continuing with things that have increased: some fruits like oranges and other fresh vegetables, non-frozen juices and drinks, coffee—you mentioned—2.2 percent, instant coffee—interestingly—5.1 percent—I don't know what's going on there— peanut butter 2.2 percent, olives, pickles, and relishes—which is some of my favorite stuff—4.9 percent. Food at employee sites, window and floor coverings—you mentioned appliances—all hovering around a 2 percent increase, and then non-electric cookware and tableware. So what is digging a little further like this? What jumps out to you? Scott Lincicome: Well, what jumps out to me are things like appliances and floor coverings and that type of stuff. Food is pretty volatile, so meat prices, egg prices—you look at a bit skeptically, other than coffee. Because coffee is a pretty clear one where you're going to get some tariff effects, but also, again, global market effects. It's more in the durable goods stuff—and apparel, textiles, footwear, appliances, cookware—you name it. Construction materials is another one where we're apparently seeing some frothiness. That's where you are starting to see tariff effects. Now, just again to be clear—and this is where I think all these inflation talking points from the administration are so bogus—is a standard inflation theory, standard economics will say: If you spend more on furniture, appliances, and food or whatever else because of tariffs, if there isn't a change in monetary or fiscal policy, you're going to have to spend less on other stuff. That means less demand for that other stuff, and prices for those services and the rest will actually go down. So you would not see a change in the overall CPI, even though the spending on each has changed and their price levels have changed. Some would go up, some would go down. That's a lot of what we're seeing right now. We had the Producer Price Index out today; that's what companies pay—the biggest declines were in services, the stuff were not subjected to tariffs. We saw a big increase in goods—the things that are subject to tariffs. Now, imports aren't included in the PPI, but domestic and imported goods travel pretty much in tandem—contrary again to what some protectionists might tell you. This is pretty textbook stuff. And if you go back to the CPI report, look at the areas where you would expect to see some inflationary—sorry, I shouldn't say that term… Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, just "price rises."  Scott Lincicome: Price effects, right? Thank you. You're starting to see it. And most everybody expects more of that to come. Zach Weissmueller: By the way, I think it seems like a technical point, but it is an important one—this idea. And it's one that libertarians are kind of sticklers about: the idea, you know, Friedman famously put it, that "inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon." And at least we're saying that when it persists, like you're saying, it comes from fiscal and monetary policy. So we're talking about prices going up—and that is what we're trying to get to the bottom of here. Scott Lincicome: Exactly. And I think it's a really important political point, because the administration is trying to wave away the tariffs because the CPI hasn't bulged. But that distracts from the real effects of the tariffs. And tariffs' real effects are not inflationary. They make us poorer. Because—going back to my example—if you have to spend more on food, clothing, and other tariffed goods, and thus you spend less on housing and health care and other things, you are materially worse off than you were before the tariff. You have less stuff that you're consuming overall.  You're worse off. You are poorer. That's how tariffs work. Zach Weissmueller: This was a kind of concerning trend line I came across, here. It looks at U.S. year-over-year real disposable personal income and spending. So that's how much you have saved and how much you are willing to spend. We've seen a pretty persistent…. There are some positive indicators in the economy that we're going to talk about in a second, but that is one that should be fairly concerning, I would think, if you're talking about tariffing consumer goods—the amount of actual consumption expenditure. But I want to ask you to zoom in on J.D. Vance's point. As you mentioned, he was gloating a little bit about some of this data. Specifically, I think it was the PPI—which is not consumer prices, it is basically wholesale prices. Scott Lincicome: Yeah, it's what producers pay. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Thank you. So what we've seen there—I'm going to pull up just a headline from MarketWatch that I think puts it well: "Wholesale prices are flat in June, PPI shows, and point to muted effects of tariffs on inflation." This is what J.D. Vance is saying—that if anything, "this is a leading indicator that prices are going to go down. If the inputs at the wholesale level are lower, all the economists were wrong and tariffs are not going to drive up your prices."  What do you say to that? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, so there are two big problems with that. Big shoutout to the economist Ernie Tedeschi, who's now with the Yale Budget Lab—he had a great thread on Twitter on this today that hit the two big points. The first point is that PPI does not include imports. So even though you expect domestic prices to track higher import prices, it is weird to talk about tariffs and the PPI on that basic point.  The more important thing is that—as Ernie shows—you actually are seeing exactly what you'd expect: goods prices increasing, services prices decreasing. Goods prices, of course, are the things that are going to be affected directly and more quickly by tariffs. Services are, again assuming a consistent monetary and fiscal situation, what you would expect to see decline. It's precisely what we've seen. So the fact that some professional forecasters got their prediction wrong of the overall level doesn't change what's under the hood. And what's under the hood are pretty much what you'd expect—again, given the delays, lags, and all that other wonky stuff I already talked about. Liz Wolfe: So, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, said at a Cabinet meeting that the government might take in $300 billion in tariff revenue this year. The Treasury basically reports more than $100 billion so far, which is the greatest amount that's ever been raised through tariffs. I believe in the past it's been roughly $50 billion a year, generally. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. So we're already double a standard year, and this is 5 percent of all tax receipts for the month of  June. It actually has generated a budget surplus for the month—which is all very uncomfortable for libertarians, right? There's been this plan offered by Team Trump all along which has been basically, "slash personal income taxes, try to cut income taxes to the greatest degree possible, and then the way we're gonna fund the federal government is through tariffs—tariffing the heck out of people." First of all, is this desirable from a libertarian standpoint? Like, is there any world in which that would be desirable? And two, if that is their sort of stated goal, are they kind of doing it, in fact? Scott Lincicome: Ok, so there's a lot to unpack there. But let's start with the budget surplus.  That was fake. A statistical anomaly due to the monthly reporting.  We get a lot of money in for the month, and it just happened. But if you look over the actual last year… Because if you look over a 12-month period, we're still in a massive hole. We're not going to wake up a year from now and be like, "Wow, we have a magic budget surplus. We had a magic budget surplus for the last year, we get it for one month,  and then it gets consumed by deficits for the rest…" Liz Wolfe: As a girl who struggles with her budgeting—as I've already mentioned in this podcast—let them have this one, damn it. Scott Lincicome: There are bigger problems, though. First, as we already said—even assuming a rather optimistic take on foreigners paying some of the tariff costs by lowering their prices—you're still looking at the vast majority of those billions coming from American companies and consumers. So this is just taxing. It's just a new tax. Just new tax revenue being paid mainly by Americans. Let's say $300 billion. 80 percent of that is coming from Americans. We  just are celebrating a $240 billion tax increase that, of course, was implemented unilaterally by the president without any input from Congress or various businesses. It just was slapped on there for whatever reason. Zach Weissmueller: I mean, but hold on. The latest bill that just passed is reducing other taxes—it's reducing certain income taxes. Liz Wolfe: I'm making out like a bandit with SALT… Zach Weissmueller: So is the swap actually beneficial? Scott Lincicome: So, you're certainly going to get some benefit from the tax cuts.  But the people hurt most by tariffs are the poor.  The poor pay the most of their disposable income toward tradable goods, and thus tariffs are a very regressive tax. The biggest tax cuts were—and the poor don't pay any income taxes, right?  Leaving aside the taxes on tips and Social Security, which gets really off the reservation—in general, swapping income tax cuts for tariff hikes is going to be very regressive. I It's going to be good for wealthy folks. They win.  It's not going to be so good for poor folks, who weren't paying much income tax and are now going to be paying tariffs via higher consumer prices. Liz Wolfe: But hold on. Isn't this part of some people's argument against the flat tax, which Rand Paul has historically been into and lots of libertarians have advocated? Scott Lincicome: Well, yes and no. If tariffs were a flat consumption tax, then you could make that argument. But they're not. Tariffs are a really narrow tax that isn't actually on end consumption. It gets distorted all through the supply chain in all the ways we've talked about. It's also a very narrow tax base. Imported goods are only roughly 10 to 15 percent of all of our consumption. So there's this 85 percent that's not getting taxed at all. That creates all sorts of distortions in how we spend our money, how businesses do their business, and it funnels economic activity toward less efficient enterprises. Put more simply, an ideal tax is going to be really flat—no carve-outs, very broad tax base, at a very low rate, and be very transparent. You're going to know what you get, and you're going to know what you're getting into in advance. Tariffs check off zero of those boxes. They're not transparent—they're applied at the border and then filtered through all these supply chains. They're also matched by price hikes by domestic businesses. So they're kind of this invisible tax that consumers pay but that doesn't actually end up in the Treasury at all. They have a very narrow tax base, and to raise a lot of revenue, they have to be very high—and that's going to be very distortionary for economic activity. So as a pure tax policy, tariffs are terrible. You're not going to find any tax wonks who are like, "This is a great way to fund the government." And then the final problem is that $300 billion is a drop in the bucket for federal spending. It wouldn't cover a single major part of the budget. It wouldn't even cover the interest on the debt these days. I'm not one to really celebrate, "Yay, we're getting more tax revenue"—but even as a simple matter of plugging the budget hole, it's not raising that much money. You still have to deal with spending. You still have to deal with entitlements and all these other things nobody wants to touch. The Big, Beautiful Bill didn't touch—other than a tiny bit on things like Medicaid. So we're still in a giant hole, and we're just collecting money in a much less efficient way than, say, a flat income tax or a flat consumption tax. Liz Wolfe: Ok, but is there any credence to this idea that—obviously, we saw initial stock market turbulence from Liberation Day, which liberated so many of us from our stock portfolios and any assurance of a healthy, decent retirement. So we saw stock market turbulence then. It has, in many ways, recovered since then, which is huge. But now we're seeing markets react somewhat favorably—maybe not specifically to the sort of weird patchwork that's cascaded upon us of tariffs, but this mixture of things. The domestic policy bill passing, the fact that there are some income tax cuts, which ultimately go to the upper middle class and the rich, but still. I mean, we haven't seen a market bloodbath, right? Is this ultimately—is this looking like there's some secret sauce in the Trump economy? Like, all of us are looking a little foolish right now. And it very well could be the case that several months from now we're all vindicated. But is there anything to the Trump defenders' defense that actually it's not nearly as bad as the sky-is-falling Chicken Little folks were claiming? Scott Lincicome: Yeah, no, and I think that's exactly the right way to put it. It's not as bad as some of the catastrophic rhetoric—fortunately, not for me—and it's not as bad as investors' worst fears. I think part of what the Liberation Day sell-off was about was a worst-case scenario situation. Extremely high tariffs that Trump has since walked back. I mean, yes, 10 to 20 percent is still very high historically, but it's much lower than the 40 or 50 percent that was being threatened on Liberation Day. More muted foreign retaliation, foreign governments that have actually been kind of smart about not butchering their own economies with their own retaliatory tariffs.And some of it is about simply expectations. Trump has, to his credit—brilliantly, whether intentionally or not—moved the Overton window so far into tariff crazy town that now, when he's pulling back on that, markets are like, "Yay, that's a win," because it's not the worst they were expecting. Markets are very much about what's coming, not what's past. But there are other, I think, bigger points. And this is something I'm glad I have stressed—on Twitter, in other podcasts, in writing—we always need to remember: The United States is a massive, $30 trillion economy that is mainly fueled by services industries. Most of those are not directly affected by trade policy—and particularly not goods tariffs. And we have a lot of tailwinds, not just the general strength of the U.S. economy, which has been pretty strong for a while. We have a very dynamic and flexible economy that can take some punches and keep rolling. We have tailwinds from AI—this massive AI boom that everybody keeps expecting. The Trump administration is enacting some good policy, whether it's energy deregulation or the excellent full expensing that the Big Beautiful Bill put in, allowing immediate deduction of business investments. These are good policies. So you put this all together, and it makes sense that stocks are not tanking. Now, does that mean it's good policy? No. The way I've often described it is: I can cut off my pinky and still live a pretty normal life. That doesn't mean cutting off my pinky was a good idea. It just means it wasn't catastrophic. It didn't kill me. You don't celebrate your amputated pinky. And that's important to remember, because a lot of the tariff defenses are: "See, it's not so bad." Well, great, it's still not good. It's just not catastrophic. Liz Wolfe: It's also premature for them to be claiming that, right?  Scott Lincicome: There's also a big risk with this type of victory lap, because I do think markets are a little too optimistic right now about all of this. There is this kind of "TACO" mentality—Trump Always Chickens Out—is problematic. One, because I don't think Trump does always TACO. But second, I've called it the "TACO trilemma" or the "TACO paradox," and that is that Trump only backs down when markets tank, but markets aren't tanking because they expect Trump to back down.  But if markets don't tank, Trump's not going to back down. So we could end up in a situation—and I think we will end up in a situation this fall—with very high tariffs, historically high: 20 percent, 18 percent on average. That would be the highest since the early 20th century. It would be extremely significant—for not just prices, but for growth and investment. That's not good. It's just not exactly clear how it's going to be reflected in the S&P. It's still just not going to be good. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I mean, as we bring the conversation to a close, I do want to bring up the kind of underlying promise of tariffs, which is really about bringing back manufacturing to America. That's what economic nationalism is all about. It's about securing critical supply chains, reinvigorating manufacturing… Scott Lincicome: That's what they say it's about. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, that's what they say. Maybe there's more to it that you can talk about here, but you're a skeptic of even that story, to say the least. You flag in one of your articles about it, this graph. Which is the ISM manufacturing index by component contribution—and you see a downward slope. Perhaps you could explain what this is and why it leads you to be skeptical of the economic nationalist story about onshoring. Scott Lincicome: Right. So the economic nationalist story—to the extent you buy it—is one that maybe made sense in the late 19th century, back when we had tariffs on wool and pig iron, and there wasn't a lot of trade. There weren't a lot of countries engaging in cross-border trade. Supply chains were simple. Products were simple. Today, however, it's a radically different world. There are three numbers I like to throw around when I talk about this stuff. The first is 50. 50 percent. About half of everything we import into the United States isn't clothes and shoes—it's manufacturing inputs: steel, aluminum, raw materials, energy, and the rest. These are things that other manufacturers use to make globally competitive stuff. Tariffs will raise the costs for these manufacturers and make them less competitive globally. So a lot of manufacturers—when you increase tariffs—they are actually more harmed than helped. That's counterintuitive, but it's true. The second one is 33. One-third of all global trade is companies trading with themselves—what we call intra-firm trade. Airbus in the Sunbelt—in the Carolinas, in the South—is not trading with some random company in France. It's buying from Airbus in France. What does that mean? It means that supply chains won't just move to the United States overnight. Airbus is headquartered in France, and has operations all over the world, and has a very complicated supply chain. So what is a tariff going to do in that case? It's just going to raise the costs of manufacturing in the United States for companies engaged in this intra-firm trade. I saw another stat, recently, along the same lines looking at NAFTA trade—Canada, Mexico, and the United States—and the intra-firm numbers in that case were way higher than one-third. Tariffs are just going to blow up these companies' trades with themselves. And by "bringing stuff back," you're not actually forcing these companies to go buy from the auto parts store down the street. You're forcing them to literally reinvent their own supply chains—which is extremely costly, if they're willing to do it at all, instead of just paying the tariff. The last number is 80. Eighty percent of all manufacturing workers in the United States work at companies that are engaged in global trade—imports and exports. These are all people that, at some level, are actually hurt by tariffs, and retaliation, and currency effects. So you put all of that together—along with the fact that the United States is a big player in the global economy but these days its one of many, with rival trade blocs in Europe, and in Asia, and Latin America—and the reality is that simply slapping tariffs on stuff does not guarantee a giant and thriving manufacturing sector. Then you throw in all the uncertainty surrounding this. With a tariff switch in the Oval Office, you have no idea what Trump's going to do next. Trade policy uncertainty is at its highest level ever—three times higher than it was during Trump 1.0. And that was found to reduce investment, because it's hard to invest when you don't know what's coming next. Trump 1.0 uncertainty reduced investment in the United States by between $20 billion and $40 billion. If we're three times as high today, we should expect more foregone investment—including in manufacturing. Put it all together, and it's just not a recipe for creating a big, thriving, resilient domestic manufacturing sector. It'll be good for some. The steel industry? They're making out like bandits. Nucor raised prices 35 percent—that's the biggest steelmaker in the United States.  They raised prices 35 percent over the last year. They're profit-taking like crazy. Good on you. For everybody who buys from Nucor? It sucks. And for us consumers, we're going to feel some pain too. None of that is good for the manufacturing sector. And I should note: Trump likes to brag about all this investment coming into the United States. We're seeing signs of some multinational manufacturers actually moving out of the United States. They say, "Look, the environment is too uncertain, there's too much tariff cost, and I might get hit by retaliation. Screw it. I'm moving to Canada, I'm moving to Europe, wherever." And again, none of that is good for the U.S. manufacturing sector. Liz Wolfe: My favorite podcast, Odd Lots, has spent a lot of time interviewing American manufacturers and people looking to beef up their manufacturing capacity here. One thing you hear consistently from people—regardless of whether they consider themselves Republican or Democrat, fans of Trump or opponents—is they just say, "Look, if he actually knew how our factories worked, or how long it takes to retrofit a factory—to go from one purpose to another, to make one widget and transition to making another—we simply need lead time. And we need the ability to import an awful lot of things—steel and raw materials—in order to do that." So the fact that this is hitting us so suddenly, and the fact that it's ever-changing, makes it so that—if his goal was actually to ramp up American manufacturing—boy, do we feel very crippled. We feel like we can't actually accomplish that objective, even though we want to. It would take us 2 years, 3 years of lead time to actually be able to do that effectively. And in the meantime, we would need a lot of these tariffs suspended. He's acting like it will all just happen overnight, and that's not how our industry actually works. Do you have concerns about that? Even putting aside the question of whether it's a laudable goal to increase domestic manufacturing? Are there just real logistical problems that these people are running into? Scott Lincicome: Yeah. Some of the more honest national conservatives and economic nationalists out there will be quite clear that, while they like tariffs and protectionism, they do not like how these tariffs have been implemented. Not only has it been very erratic, but it's been completely opaque. It has not given producers the lead time they need to make the investments that they can make to onshore production. So it's kind of the worst of all worlds in the sense that they're eating the tariffs—unless they can pass them on to consumers, actually means less hiring and investment here because they're basically eating these higher tariff costs.  They don't really have the certainty they need to make these massive, multiyear investments. Building an auto factory? You can't do it overnight. It's going to take you a couple of years at best. Qualifying new suppliers throughout these multitier supply chains takes a lot of time—whether in the United States or elsewhere. And in the meantime, if you're just eating tariff costs or reducing your output because you don't have the supplies you need, that's all bad for business too. I could steelman a protectionist plan that would minimize that kind of damage. I still think it's dumb, but it's less dumb than what we got. Zach Weissmueller: Let me ask you my final question for you. Since we're trying to learn—or I guess, as a society, we're trying to learn or maybe relearn—certain lessons, economic lessons, and that requires paying attention to what actually happens. We're running an economic experiment right now, and unfortunately, we're the guinea pigs. But at least hopefully we can learn something from this? So what should people be on the lookout for? Let's say August 1st, tariffs increase on Europe. I'm not going to say we can predict the exact levels they'll hit—but they increase in Europe, they increase in Mexico, they increase in Brazil and China. What are some of the effects you would expect us to see if that happens? Scott Lincicome: Well I think the place you start is looking at economic growth. Because while CPI can get tricky, and real incomes can get tricky, you're not going to be able to hide from the growth stuff. If you look at the estimates out there, the tariffs are going to completely offset any of the tailwinds that the Trump agenda has otherwise maybe given the economy. Whether it is deregulatory stuff or tax reform or whatever, tariffs are basically going to make it a wash. So, if we're a couple of years into this and we're just hanging out at 1.5 percent GDP growth, it's a pretty good sign that things are not going well for this experiment. The other area eventually real incomes—real incomes are what you take home, but also what you spend, including disposable income. Are we actually worse off in that regard? That's hard to parse out. It's hard to find causation for tariffs, but those are the places I'd think to look. And then the last one is: eventually we're going to have some pretty good economic studies of all this stuff. One of the silver linings of Trump 1.0 is we got a lot of new economics literature showing us how tariffs ripple through an economy, how they ripple through modern supply chains—something we really hadn't seen before. Turns out—maybe unsurprisingly, but still important—that global supply chains, for all their coolness and complexity, and how great they are. Supply chains can amplify the pain of tariffs and make them worse than what you might expect in a binary, linear model. Those are the types of things we're eventually going to see. But it's going to take a while to suss out. The immediate signs are going to be, again, in things like the GDP numbers. Liz Wolfe: Sort of a related question—but this is one we ask to everybody who comes on our show.  Scott Lincicome, what is one question that you think more people should be asking? Scott Lincicome: About trade or just in general? Liz Wolfe: Anything. I mean, you kind of just gave people a really useful template to assess warning signs that might emerge, but you could continue riffing on that, or you could ask life questions. Zach Weissmueller: Whatever you want.  Scott Lincicome: Man, this is such an opportunity. I'm kind of at a loss. No, you know, I think beyond the stuff I already said, one of the things that I think is really important when you talk about trade is to talk about everything else that's going on—so, not trade. The question I think we should ask is: How much of what we blame on trade policies—job losses and other things—is actually the result of other economic forces? Automation, when we talk about jobs. Interstate trade—I'm actually writing a paper on that. Interstate trade dwarfs international trade. And yet, we never talk about the jobs that Michigan lost to South Carolina, even though it's a huge issue—and one that's gone on throughout the history of the country, dating back to the beginning. So I think those are the types of things—what tax and labor and regulatory policy all these things. They all get blamed on China and globalization.  And I think we should be asking a lot more about: What are the real, main drivers of these things we don't like in the U.S. economy? And how much is it really about trade? And therefore, how much can tariffs really do to change it, even in the best case? Liz Wolfe: It's funny that you should say that nobody talks about interstate trade and competition, because we in fact had an episode with Gary Winslett on this exact topic—and this question of which states are competing with others and pulling capable workers away, and which states are really trying to make themselves as attractive as possible. He's also really frustrated that people just don't pay as much attention to this dynamic, when in reality, we see the rise of the Sunbelt, and there's a lot of attention paid to that narrative—but it also affects real people's lives and decisions. So I totally agree. Scott Lincicome: I've worked with Gary on both trade and interstate stuff before. His piece in The Washington Post was great. That's something, again, that is an essential issue—this interstate commerce issue—not just for understanding the U.S. economy, but also for talking about trade policy. One reason for that is that Americans intuitively get the benefits of trading across state borders. But when you change it to a national border, suddenly everybody freaks out, and the economic principles change. Now, we can have arguments about culture and all that kind of stuff, but the economics are the same. And yet, the script flips entirely when people think about interstate versus international trade issues. And again, it's also important because it is so much bigger than the international stuff. Some of the research I'm doing right now shows that just trade in goods by our highways is in the $20 trillion-a-year range, whereas we only import a mere $4 trillion a year in imports. So, we should be talking more about this stuff and yet we don't, much at all. Other than your podcast. Zach Weissmueller: No, it's fascinating, and we'll be watching for that research. Hopefully we can have you come back to talk about it once it's published. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott Lincicome. You can find his work at Cato and The Dispatch, and he has a great Twitter account as well, so follow him there. Thanks for coming. Scott Lincicome: My pleasure. Thanks. The post Scott Lincicome: How Much Will You Pay To 'Buy American'? appeared first on Reason.com.

What is the "Trump doctrine"? Just asking questions. President Donald Trump won his first term in office after breaking with the Republican establishment on a few fronts. One notable example: On the debate stage in 2016, he embarrassed Jeb Bush for his family's role in the disastrous Iraq War.  Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term, though he didn't end any either. This time around, he joined Israel's attack on Iran by dropping bombs on its uranium enrichment facilities. Although his vice president has said he does "not think that it is in America's interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine," Trump announced this week that the U.S. will ship more weapons to Ukraine, with his Defense Department describing the move as "integral to our America First defense priorities." Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, understands the contours of the foreign policy landscape on the right better than most, and he joined the show today to discuss Trump's latest foreign policy moves, the growing schism within the MAGA movement over the continued support for Israel and Ukraine, Trump's hostile dismissal of a question about the Jeffrey Epstein case, and what Trump's foreign policy "grand strategy" might be.  Timecodes: 0:00 - Trump ran against the Iraq War, and Vance against funding Ukraine 2:00 - What is the 'Trump doctrine'? 6:57 - What does Curt think of Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize? 8:58 - Are Netanyahu's demands reasonable? 11:40 - What do Trump and Netanyahu plan for the Palestinians? 15:58 - Were the Iran strikes a success? 25:59 - Can Iran rebuild its nuclear program? 26:30 - What is JD Vance's role in Trump's foreign policy? 30:10 - Why is Trump giving more weapons to Ukraine? 41:06 - Why doesn't Trump want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein anymore?   The post Curt Mills: Is Trump Still 'America First'? appeared first on Reason.com.

Inez Stepman, a policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, dives into the cultural appeal of socialism among young New Yorkers, particularly around the rise of socialist politician Zohran Mamdani. She argues that this trend stems more from cultural sentiments than economic need. The discussion explores the negative societal impacts of socialism, such as victimhood and diminished community spirit. Stepman also critiques political ideologies, emphasizing the importance of local cultural factors and the potential clash between socialist ideals and personal achievement in the city.

Ro Khanna, the progressive Representative from California's 17th district, tackles the pressing issue of war powers and the need for Congress to reclaim its authority. He challenges the current administration's military strategies in Iran, advocating for diplomacy over aggression. Khanna emphasizes the importance of bipartisan cooperation to curb executive war powers and the necessity for the Democratic Party to renew its anti-war identity. He also explores the role of trust in government and the push to eliminate corrupt money from politics.

Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst with extensive expertise in military intelligence, delves deep into America’s complicated role in the Israel-Iran conflict. He warns of unsettling parallels to the Iraq War, emphasizing the dangers of misinformation. Pillar discusses the implications of recent Israeli military actions, the significance of Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the potential for regime change. He critiques the oversimplified narratives surrounding Iran’s influence, advocating for careful diplomacy and bipartisan unity in U.S. foreign policy to navigate these tensions.

In this discussion, attorney Laura Powell, founder of Californians for Good Governance and a politically homeless former leftist, shares her take on the recent L.A. riots sparked by immigration raids. She argues that California's political leaders have exacerbated the unrest, while exploring the tensions between federal and state responses. Powell dives into law enforcement's struggles, the role of unions, and the implications of military deployment in civilian unrest. She underscores the need for political accountability and a shift in how immigration issues are handled.

Ruxandra Teslo, a Genomics Ph.D. student from the University of Cambridge, and Emma Waters, a bioethics policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, dive deep into the controversial world of in vitro fertilization (IVF). They discuss the ethics of embryo selection and the societal implications of such advancements. Key topics include the moral status of embryos, the impact of reproductive technology on women's careers, and the need for accessible fertility treatments. Their engaging debate raises crucial questions about the future of reproductive health and technology.

David Stockman, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, dives deep into the alarming state of the U.S. national debt, now at $36 trillion. He critiques President Trump's claims as a 'fiscal hawk,' arguing that the GOP's new spending plan is a dangerous gamble. Stockman highlights the flawed logic behind tax cuts without spending reductions, the impact of inflation on welfare programs, and the potential for an economic crisis if drastic measures aren't taken. This insightful discussion on fiscal responsibility is both urgent and eye-opening.

Gary Winslett, an Associate Professor at Middlebury College, explores the surprising reasons behind the Rust Belt's manufacturing decline. Instead of blaming China or automation, he argues that the South's business-friendly policies drew industry away. The conversation highlights the implications of immigration, labor dynamics, and the resurgence of blue-collar work in Southern states. Winslett challenges nostalgic views, prompting a reflection on where the American dream truly lies today—perhaps now in places like Nashville and Raleigh.