Derek Thompson & Zach Weinberg: Trump’s Madman Tariffs & America’s Real Underlying Issues
EP 138 of The Logan Bartlett Show: For people building companies - from the people who’ve done it.
In a super timely conversation, Derek Thompson (Writer, The Atlantic) and Zach Weinberg came on the show to discuss Trump’s Madman Tariffs & America’s Real Underlying Issues.
Click here to view the episode transcript | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
➡️ The illusion of America not getting richer
Americans are getting richer, but the most important spending items — like housing — are getting more expensive even faster. In many markets, housing used to cost around 2x the local median income; now it's 6, 8, even 10x. That’s how both things can be true: Americans are earning more, but it still feels like key parts of life are slipping out of reach.
Zach pushes this further, arguing healthcare costs are hidden, regressive, and poorly understood — and that exposing them might be the path to meaningful reform.
➡️How well does the stock market represent the economy?
People say “the stock market is not the economy,” but as Derek puts it, nothing is (not the jobs report, not retail data, not local employment stats). The economy is 10,000 different things, and the stock market is one part of it — often one of the best real-time gauges, since it reflects millions of people making expensive bets on the future of America’s public companies.
Zach takes the argument further, arguing the stock market may be the single best national-level view of the U.S. economy, because it reacts quickly to expectations around things like rates and employment.
➡️Why Zach thinks the CHIPS Act is flawed central planning.
The U.S. government chose to prioritize chip manufacturing — the low-value, labor-heavy part of the semiconductor supply chain — instead of focusing on chip design, where the real innovation happens. Building TSMC factories in Arizona doesn’t make the U.S. more resilient, especially when the design expertise and global material dependencies are elsewhere. The government backed the wrong part of the supply chain because it doesn’t really understand how the system works, and this just one example of many idiocracies of central planning.
Derek’s response: markets are very good at seeing what part of the supply chain has the most value, and the value that we wanna have in the US is the design of the chips, not their manufacturing.
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