Matt Priest, President & CEO of FDRA – Global Trade This Week – Episode 243
In this episode of Global Trade This Week, hosts Pete Mento and Doug Draper discuss the impact of tariffs on the footwear industry with Matt Priest, CEO of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA). Priest highlights the industry's reliance on imports, noting that 97% of footwear comes from Asia, with China, Vietnam, and Indonesia being major suppliers. The discussion covers the U.S. government's tariff policies, which have increased costs significantly, leading to a $6.22 billion duty bill last year. Priest also discusses FDRA's advocacy efforts, including lobbying, data services, and media outreach, and emphasizes the industry's need for stable trade policies.
97% of U.S. footwear is imported from Asia, mainly China, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
U.S. tariffs on footwear have doubled, resulting in a $6.22 billion duty bill last year, significantly increasing costs for consumers.
FDRA (Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America) represents 98% of the industry and advocates for lower tariffs and stable trade policies.
The industry has shifted some production from China to Vietnam and Indonesia, but large-scale nearshoring or U.S. manufacturing is not feasible due to high costs and supply chain complexities.
FDRA provides lobbying, data services, consulting, and media outreach to support its members.
Tariffs are not effectively encouraging domestic production or benefiting consumers; instead, they raise prices and create uncertainty.
Policymakers often misunderstand the real impact of tariffs and rely on oversimplified talking points.
The footwear industry is a key indicator of consumer spending and economic health.
-
Keenan Brugh 0:01
You're watching Global Trade This Week with Pete Mento and Doug Draper.
Doug Draper 0:07
Welcome everybody to another edition of Global Trade This Week. My name is Doug Draper, and one of your hosts, but this is probably one of the most special episodes that we've had in quite a long time. Normally, Pete and I, his fans are back and forth, we're anti guests, we're not big fans of that. We have big egos, so we want to hold the screen. However, we found the absolute perfect guest to talk about our global trade, what's transpiring, and we're going to really hunker down into something that everybody wears every single day, and that is footwear. So, without further ado, I know there's a personal connection with Pete and our guest today. So, Pete, I'll let you do a proper intro, and then we'll get this party started.
Pete Mento 0:46
So, Matt, first of all, I can't thank you enough for lowering yourself to show like my friend. He's on MSNBC, he's on every single show you can possibly imagine. I've really, really gotten so many wonderful connections and opportunities because of FDRA. Matt, you are still the CEO, I hope, of
Doug Draper 1:06
FDR.
Pete Mento 1:07
You haven't been
Doug Draper 1:07
demoted.
Pete Mento 1:09
And when it comes to footwear, there are movers, there are shakers, and there are marketplace makers, and Matt is definitely one of those people. I'm very proud to call him my friend for many reasons, but probably the biggest is your internet beef with Peter Navarro that started this year, where Doug, I don't know if you've seen some of these videos, but Matt would say something, and it would piss off Peter Navarro so much that the next time he was on any kind of press, he had to address what Matt said. So this is someone who's like one of the personal advisors to trade policy to the President of the United States, and Matt is in his head. It was, I was so proud of him. I text you all the time, I was like, "Bat, I'm so proud of you, you're messing with this guy. It was so wonderful. So, first question, first, for everyone that does not know you, that isn't in the footwear industry, talk about what you guys do at FDRA, and how you ended up with this crazy job.
Matt Priest 2:03
Yeah, great question, Pete. I'm just happy to shave, because I don't think your head would have fit in the frame if your beard was digging. So, it's good to see you guys, and I appreciate the opportunity. Pete and I have been friends for a long time, and Doug, I look forward to the same. You know, I've been in this job 17 years. I worked in the Bush administration, the Commerce Department, when we believed in free trade, and we were pushing free trade, and prior to that I worked on Capitol Hill, and so my I've got the stereotypical kind of DC career trajectory, right, it's like hill work, administration work, trade association lobbyists hack, and so I can't think of a better industry to hack for, and that's the shoe industry, because as Doug, as you said, everyone's got to wear them for the most part. Some of our parts of Pete and I come from, not everybody wears them, but they.. it's just such phenomenal industry. It's a close-knit industry, but it's also one that really serves, you know, just about everyone you could think of. And so we've spent a lot of time lobbying and advocating, and to have Ron Vera and Pete Navarro, like, really, you know, be upset with me. I showed that to our board, because it was kind of a prideful moment when he called me that guy. I started being referred to as that guy, even amongst our staff at FDRA. I mean, it'd be great, we actually lowered duties. It's one thing to get trolled by Peter Navarro, but duty reduction would be much better. But here we are. One
Pete Mento 3:25
more thing, I would be remiss if we did not, if we did not add the Robin to your Batman. If we didn't talk about Andy real quick, but Andy is also a part of the gruesome twosome at FDRA. He's wonderful, and I think if anyone that is listening to this, does not have it, is in the footwear industry, and you don't have a relationship with the FDRA. You are out of your mind. This is the time when advocacy, advocacy groups are working so hard for you and doing everything they can to try to make sure the government knows the impact that these decisions are having. Andy one time said that he wanted, he wanted someone to show up with one of those big giant checks to pay for their tariffs to prove that, yes, in fact, we are, as Americans, paying the tariffs, right stuff. Just the clarity, the humor, the humanity that you bring to this very real topic. It doesn't matter if you're someone out there buying a pair of $1,000 Louboutins or if you're just trying to get your kids new shoes for school, it's each and every one of us, and these amounts of tariffs have been detrimental to your business and to society as a whole. It's a great way to point out that you know a little kid that's trying to get to kindergarten for the first time is excited to go to school, their parents are struggling right now to get them into shoes for that first day.
Matt Priest 4:36
That's right. Just to put a final point on it, Pete, our typical duty bill is about 3 billion a year on two and a half billion pairs of shoes a year. Our duty bill last year was $6.22 billion So the president doubled them in one year, and he said publicly in May of 2025 he doesn't want to make shoes here, so we're all kind of scratching our heads. Okay. Well, why are you charging us double to serve our customer of. And so those are those are the challenges we face. We've had a long-term relationship with duties since Moon Holly, since 1930 which we're coming up on 100 years of hard to believe, and that has a direct impact. We, we typically say about three times retail markup, so when you're looking at 6 billion, you're looking at 18 to $20 billion in additional costs that are pushed to the American consumer just to pay for those taxes on a product that almost has 100% import penetration, so it's, it's kind of nutso where we come from, but every day is a new day, and every day is some stranger thing that's we got to scratch our heads, say, why are we even doing this, and as the data comes out, because inflationary data is starting to really tick up for everybody and for our industry, you got to think politically that they're like, why are we doing this? I hope there are some people there thinking that, because that, you know, I mean, they got to come into their senses at some point, they're gonna get crushed. Back to toot Andy's horn, he did an analysis, and people can reach out to us, we'll send it to you. He did an analysis of what happens when a party raises tariffs that's in power, and the next election they get their asses kicked, and we're, I think, we're kind of being teed up to see that again, because guess what, prices go up and consumers get unhappy, and the economy suffers, so it's all replaying itself.
Pete Mento 6:15
And the last thing I'll say before I kick it off to Doug Henry, he's waiting for me to shut up, so can ask questions.
Doug Draper 6:23
I'm the more formal one of this whole of this.
Matt Priest 6:26
There won't be another guest after me for a while.
Doug Draper 6:29
No,
Pete Mento 6:30
no, no. We let me tell you, it's a love fest for FDR. There are a lot of industry, you see the word hacks, skills, right? There's a lot of people. I've never felt that way with FDRA. I've never felt like it was just some political show job. You guys really do deeply care about the people that pay their dues every year, you know, pay and the amount of work, and doesn't matter if, like I said, if they're bringing in shoes for little kids at mass retail or people that are bringing in fashion, FDR, a you guys, I can't recommend you guys enough. I never feel dirty after I talk to this particular group of lobbyists. I'll leave it at
Matt Priest 7:04
that. I appreciate that very much. We try our hardest not to make you, Pete, feel dirty after you talk about
Pete Mento 7:10
it's always the other way around. So, Doug, go ahead. Go
Doug Draper 7:13
ahead. No,
Doug Draper 7:13
no, it's a good, good segue. So, tell us more about the association, like, how many members do you have, and maybe, like, if a couple of bullet points of, hey, if I'm a member, what are you kind of doing for me? And what are the advantages of joining the club?
Matt Priest 7:26
Yeah, wow, this is.. I love this conversation. This is great. So, we have about 500 members. We represent 98% of the industry. So, our members are Nike and Adidas and Dick's Sporting Goods and Walmart and Target, and all the way down to mom and pop vendor vendors that supply a lot of those retailers that I mentioned, and so we try to.. I've been here, I'm only the third chief executive in 82 years of this organization. So, when I got here, there's a lot of low hanging fruit, and then I brought over Andy two or three years later, and we just started.. just, how do we not behave like a trade association? So, we popped up a podcast a decade ago, we started doing video on site. We started to get bored. If we are just about lobbying, people are not going to see the need. This is pre-Trump. They're not going to see the value of the organization, because in a good year, the congressional approval rating is like 15% So, we attach our brand to that. People are not going to want to be a part of it, so we do a lot of data services, we do a lot of consulting, we help classify shoes for our members for free. We host a lot of cool events, we don't take ourselves too seriously, we're not stuff, you know, kind of a stuffy typical DC trade association. So we kind of downplayed that for a while, that we also lobby, and then when the president's elected and people come running to the door for policy support. I mean, that's our core competency. So, we were, we were built, you know, I was a part of the Bush-Obama transition team heading into the election of 24 We built a transition team with our members of, you know, seven or eight core members to put into place what we would do strategically, should no matter who won and when the president won, we had our marching orders to kind of do what we've done. So last year did 200 interviews on on the news, just because we were laying the groundwork to be as effective as impactful as we can. So that's the benefit is you're in the know, and we're part of different advisory groups, the White House, and we're in town, and we're tracking this consistently. So that's that's, and we do a lot of other things. We co-founded the Black Footwear Forum. We do shoes for Cure, which we raised $65 million for breast cancer research. So it's kind of a all-in people come in and meet us where we meet them where they need to be met. It's been, we've been highly successful with that formula.
Pete Mento 9:37
I could tag onto that, Matt. One of the things I love about your group is, is that desire for both adversity and for service, and you need to talk a little bit more about what you've done with black creators, designers, talking about how women are a massive part of FDRA, massive, massive part of FDRA. And are you part of Souls for Souls? Is that you guys, are you just part of
Matt Priest 9:56
it? I'm on the board, so we've had a strong relationship, but it's a totally different entity. We partner with them immensely.
Pete Mento 10:01
Yeah, the amount of charity, the amount of outreach that's done here. Like I said, you never have to feel awful about yourself when you leave one of these meetings. And so, talking about the podcast that you've done, like for these different type of creators, and the sort of content you guys are creating.
Matt Priest 10:14
Yeah, so it was about a decade ago, it was Andy - this would be a lot of Pat and Andy on the back conversation, but he came and said, "Hey, what do you think about doing a podcast? I said, "You know, we can. I'm always like, "Let's try something, and that's.. I came from the Bush administration, where I had like 15 bosses, and we'd have one line in the State of the Union, and you would watch it, this even made it, and it's like, how many people have to clear on one line about how great trade is? And then I got to FRA, and there was no bureaucracy, like, we did do what we wanted, there was no check or balance, and if something sucked, we were just quietly sweep it under the rug. So we were all.. I'm always willing to try things out. So I remember the first day we were driving a studio in Arlington, Virginia, and this was in 2016 and we were doing five. We used to record five episodes at a time. We record the whole month in one city, which is brutal. I was like, I have no idea what we talk about for five episodes. This could be terrible.
Doug Draper 11:04
We've been
Matt Priest 11:05
doing that for 10 years, and we're up at 550 or 600 episodes, and it's one of the main ways we take complex issues like trade or sustainability or classification or even fashion, and we push it out. And anytime I go to one of our member companies' headquarters, and I kind of tour the facility, I always have people saying I listen to a shoe in religiously, and nothing will ever be viral or go to a million people, but it's hitting all the right people, and it's just another kind of service avenue we provide. We do a lot of videos, a lot of kind of video content. We started, gosh, eight or nine years ago, during a border adjustment tax conversation, I was like, "Let's go tape a video outside the IRS about how this thing sucks, and so we would go, and it was like a 32nd clip, and we just started posting that up, and I think it's just it was an indication to the industry that the lines between trade association, media company, advocate had blurred immensely, and we were, I think, filling in the holes of some of our historic legacy publications within the industry, which will remain nameless, that weren't covering at the detail that we could cover business issues in particular. So we kind of grabbed that mantle and ran with it, and we've been rewarded ever since.
Doug Draper 12:18
Nice. What one one question that popped in my head while we were just chit chatting, right. So, part of the reason for the tariffs is near shoring, friend shoring, you know. Hey, if you want to do tariff aversion, just move your product here, you know, just manufacture here in the US, or with one of our neighboring countries. Easier said than done, as we know, for everything, but as far as the shoe industry, do that pivot, it's not as easy as it sounds, right? So, are you seeing any of that? Right, we're one year in. I remember seeing you all over CNN a year ago, basically in May, whenever you were doing those 200 interviews, right? Like, okay, cool, we'll just set up a factory in Mexico and turn it on, and, and all the tariff problem goes away. Have you seen that happen at all, and then, like, do you see it happening at all in the next three to five years?
Matt Priest 13:05
Yeah, you know, it's like anti-American to say that near-shoring or onshoring is not a thing, but I've said it ever since I've gotten this job, because I've just heard it from our members consistently. In 2009 when I started, 88% of our volume for footwear to the US market came from China, and at that moment, Vietnam was in the single digits. That's our number two. And over time, this is pre-Trump, pre-first term, we started to slowly, because of higher prices in China, because of labor shortages. Chinese workers did not want to work in footwear, they wanted to work in services or technology, even if it was manufacturing. We started to see a slow move out of China, but Doug, to your point, this is not like moving the Baltimore Colts overnight to Indianapolis, you just pick up your pick up everything and you leave and disappear. It's highly capital intensive, there's a lot of labor that goes into footwear production, and it takes a lot of investment, a lot of capital investment. So we started slowly moving to Vietnam. I think what happened with the president's actions in the first term, in particular when it came to the first section 301 on China's forced technology transfers, and the like, that poured an accelerant on those plans, but they were already set in motion. So, since the first time since the Clinton administration, we are now below 50% volume from China, but it's still our number one supplier. We're 48% this year, and so it's still half of our supply, but what we've found is Vietnam has sucked up most of that, seeing Indonesia take on a little bit more, and so, and then Cambodia. So we went from like a big one, China to a big two, China, Vietnam to big three, China, Vietnam, Indo, and now we are kind of throwing Cambodia, and that that's 98% of our 97% of our volume. Everyone else is nibbling around the edges, so this notion that we're going to kind of bring stuff back to the Western Hemisphere, we're going to go to Mexico, we're going to go to Brazil. The challenge with that is that in Mexico the rules are onerous, it's very. Strict supply line, and they don't have all the materials that we need to make all the types of shoes we need to make there, or you're going to Brazil, where you know there's political 301 actions that drive up, you know, the tariff rate, and so when all things are said and done, you look at Asia, and it's in that 20, it's going to be essentially probably after these next three oh ones, and that 20% range, 19% here 18% You start to make your way west through Europe, you're at the 15% and then you get to the Western Hemisphere, it's 10% And so I think we're going to continue just to hang out in Southeast Asia, because there's not a lot of incentive. I mean, let's take the 301 on the one that's currently out there on excess capacity, they literally wanted us to leave China to get the heck out of China. We did it, and guess what, they're going to hit us over the head with 301 tariffs, because we, we jacked up capacity in Cambodia for footwear production. It irks me, because we did exactly what they want us to do, and they're going to penalize us for it. And so the notion we're going to come and make shoes back in the United States, that the volumes needed for our consumption is not going to happen, and maybe a little bit of dabbling in the Western Hemisphere, but these are micro doses, this is micro dose sourcing, I mean, this is not full on, you know, addiction. So I think that's kind of where we're going to hang out.
Pete Mento 16:18
Let me say what you're not going to say in that, right? It's adorable to think that we're going to bring this kind of production back at the prices that Americans want, and the consumer has grown accustomed to a certain level of cost of footwear, and to think that we're going to bring that back here, it's, it's just ridiculous. The math doesn't math, it doesn't math, man. I know we're moving along here.
Doug Draper 16:39
Yeah,
Pete Mento 16:40
just do halftime with him and see how he does. If Matt freaks out at halftime.
Doug Draper 16:44
Oh, that's hey, I love it. You don't even know where we're getting into this. Is this is the fun part. People like, what are you guys just screwing around talking about stuff that you want, or is this a global trade podcast? I'm like a little bit of
Speaker 1 16:55
both. So both, a
Pete Mento 16:56
little bit both.
Doug Draper 16:57
Yeah, so Pete, you do it. You start it
Matt Priest 16:59
off all
Doug Draper 16:59
right.
Pete Mento 17:00
So welcome to Halftime, brought to you by Cap Logistics. To learn more about Caplogistics, check them out at Capt logistics.com So, Matt, this is traditionally where Doug and I either talk about something we're interested in, or we do a lot of things like this or that, or would you rather? So, today I have some very special would you rathers. Okay, okay, let's do it. All right, so would you rather fight 100 lions the size of a chicken, or would you rather fight one chicken the size of a lion?
Matt Priest 17:25
100 lions size of a chicken, or you know what, I'm having to go the second option, because I feel like I'm, I would be too distracted by all the different, I think the kind of the battle lines would be too broad and too overwhelming. I think I would have like a David and Goliath opportunity to do something with
Pete Mento 17:45
to kill 112 100 pound chicken,
Matt Priest 17:47
I think. So maybe I can like jump on his back and ride it out or something, something like
Pete Mento 17:52
that. Yeah, I like where your head's at, it's pretty good. Would you rather be able to hold on? What would be worse to walk behind someone for the rest of your life who's always a couple of steps lower than you, always, or to never have anyone in front of you, but you're wearing one tennis shoe and one rollerblade.
Matt Priest 18:08
Oh my gosh, I'm I'm an Eagle Scout, and I went on a 51 a 51 mile, five mountain peak backpacking trip in high school, 10, it was a 10 day trip in the, in the mountains of Virginia, and they all.. I'm the tall, I'm six foot four, so they stuck me in the back, and it drove me crazy, and I wanted to, like, overtake all the short, slow people in front of me. So I'm gonna go with the second option, I'm gonna go rollerblade in one shoe, and just hope for the best, because I can't.. I can't stand being behind someone who's slow, slow walking, for sure.
Pete Mento 18:42
It's like the craziest version of Healy's ever, you know.
Matt Priest 18:45
And our CEO of the company owns Healy, so I got, I got great access to Healy's if that's necessary.
Pete Mento 18:52
It's not a bad one. Okay? Would you rather that everything you think you have to say out loud? You don't have a choice. There is no diplomacy, whatever you think you have to say out
Matt Priest 19:02
liar, liar Jim Carrey.
Pete Mento 19:04
Yes, yes, or you know exactly what's going on in everyone's heads around you. You have, I mean, complete access of exactly what they're thinking. So,
Matt Priest 19:13
I'm the father of three daughters, and I'm married, been married 26 years, and I women in general are more communicative, I think. On average, they say three times more words in their lifetime than a male, and so I feel like I live in the second version anyway. And I'll be damned if I verbalize everything I'm thinking to in my house, so I'm gonna go with the second option, because I'm pretty sure I live in that environment now.
Pete Mento 19:38
Okay. Last question, How much would it take? How much cash would it take for you to go on a 10 day holiday with Peter Navarro? Just the two of you, you're hanging out together now. You can give that money to charity. Okay, but you've, you've got to spend every waking moment with this man.
Matt Priest 19:54
What's 6.2 2 billion minus 3 billion, I. A 3.2 2 billion.
Pete Mento 20:03
I want to, I want to believe that he'll watch this, like at home, like mr. Smithers. Yeah, throwing pictures at a dart board of you over and over again, and maybe you know, dug it out, catch some strays from it. It's the best thing.
Matt Priest 20:14
Well, it takes me back, Pete, because the first term I was on Liz Clayman on Fox Business, and like I said something effective. There's not a, they're not economists outside of Peter Navarro that thinks that the Chinese pay the tariffs, and then he, he watched it, and he came on, and then she had me back in the tit for tat, and on air she said to me, Peter's coming back after you've been on, and Matt, he doesn't like you, that's what she said to me on the air, and I'm like, what am I supposed to say that, no kidding,
Pete Mento 20:41
no kidding. Yeah, well, listen, if he wants to go, I'll book the flights, but he's gonna come up with the money.
Matt Priest 20:46
Yeah,
Pete Mento 20:47
I don't have access to the kind of liquidity.
Matt Priest 20:49
None of us do. I mean, we're waiting for that refund now.
Doug Draper 20:52
So, Matt, here's a question for you. So, this is my kind of semi half time, right? So, there's been two running feats that have happened, right? Just a couple of weeks ago, they broke speaking about the marathon, and two gentlemen went under two hours, right? I feel horrible for the second guy, because nobody remembers him, even though he beat the two hour mark, right, and I think they were in Adidas shoes, and then I just read this morning, right, there was some woman named Rachel, and I'm looking at it here to make sure I spell it right. Entrakin, and there was this thing called the Coco Donna and 50 mile race, where she set a course record and beat everybody, men, women, the whole nine yards.
Matt Priest 21:32
Saw
Doug Draper 21:32
two days, she ran for 58 hours, 57 hours, 28 minutes, and 36 seconds, and she slept three times, one for five minutes and two for seven minutes during that whole race, and she just crushed it. I don't know what kind of shoes she was wearing, but do you see when there's amazing feats of strength, for lack of a better term, related to this, that those particular brands just skyrocket with with interest and sales.
Matt Priest 22:04
Yeah, it's a good question. I think at the end of that race she's like, I think I'm gonna go home now. She pulled a fourth gunp and made her way home. You know, it's funny how the brands and running space, Doug, are hyper competitive, and they look at, you know, they'll look at a race, a marathon in a key market, London, or you know, Hong Kong, or wherever, Shanghai, and they'll see, they'll, someone tracks which shoes are being worn the most, and it's like this unofficial competition amongst the brands, and that's why they pour so much marketing dollars into it, so they're trying to create that with that heat, or that brand heat with these moments, particularly with runners, and so it's I've seen charts, and I've seen it. The brand will remain nameless, but we had a brand where we, they were struggling in a certain market because of some of the policies at that market from the government perspective. So we went in and said, here's, here's the roster of shoes that were worn at your local marathon. Why don't they have access to your market, you have these non-tariff barriers that we're concerned about from a member's perspective. So, yeah, they track it seriously, and as they should, and it's kind of an arms race, to be honest with you, amongst the shoes, amongst
Doug Draper 23:12
interesting. Yeah, so you, you, I didn't hear that comment that she made at the end, but you heard about that race that just happened last week.
Matt Priest 23:19
I saw the headline, like anyone else's. All headlines are gone. That's interesting, but I didn't do a whole lot of reading. If I'm being honest,
Doug Draper 23:24
yeah,
Pete Mento 23:25
I don't want to drive 57 miles. I can't imagine.
Matt Priest 23:27
Yeah, tell me
Doug Draper 23:28
about
Doug Draper 23:29
no 57 hours and 250 miles. She, she did it like I think
Matt Priest 23:34
those things, drive 57 drive 200 walk to whatever it is.
Pete Mento 23:39
I'm bad with either one.
Doug Draper 23:40
Yeah,
Pete Mento 23:40
all right, Doug, I know we're getting close to, I told Matt, we wouldn't do much more than 20 minutes here, so
Doug Draper 23:46
yeah,
Pete Mento 23:47
any other questions you want to ask him before I wrap it up with them?
Doug Draper 23:50
Yeah, I do. I have one question, right? So, and we spoken a little bit about it with your frankness, right, but like the biggest misconception that policymakers have, right, everybody's out there doing their thing, they're in the swamp, and, and you know, getting paid to promote the good word, right? If there was like one or two misconceptions where you could just shake them and say, "Don't you understand this, and how important it is to be on the hill communicating in this form or fashion? What are those misconceptions?
Matt Priest 24:16
Yeah, right now we have this environment, Doug, where the hills kind of neutered. They really, you know, they'll tell you, and privately they'll be in the Republican Party. These tariffs are terrible, but I'm not going to stick my neck out there for this. In fact, we're going to hill this week, so I should have even more fun anecdotes after the fact. But the fact of the matter is, the President just has a lot of leverage politically with the tariffs, and the thing I hear the most, I heard it just a couple weeks ago with, with a met with a senator, was encouraging us to French, or, and I was like, French, or was I even mean, and I said, and a lot of his, like, well, these tariffs are bringing people to the table, and I'm like, this was a key senator, like, there's that's not what's happening, I mean, people are at the table, but they're nego. Shading these crap deals, and the tariffs are remaining elevated, and like importers are getting nothing out of it, consumers are getting nothing out of it, and so that's the biggest misconception, is that the problem is oftentimes the White House talking points are just absorbed by osmosis on the hill, and you get there and they're just regurgitated too, and you're like, this, that's not how it's operating, we're not seeing that, and, and that's that's the sad part about it. I worked on trade, I worked, we moved CAFTA when I was on the hill, we moved and helped negotiate Korea, the Korea Free Trade Agreement, when the Bush administration, there was a time when trade was actually highly serious, permanent, and you had to do a lot of things that were difficult, but you knew you're going to move it through Congress and get a vote on it, and I love you as to our, I think the professionals there are top-notch people, they work really hard, they're really smart. I think Ambassador Greer's really smart, I think he's wrong in policy, but at the end of the day, a lot of this is just kind of like for the press release and for the photo op for the president, and there's not a lot of substance behind it, and and so we're this just an environment where we've lost almost a generation of knowledge on the importance of permanent free trade agreements on PNTR, on the World Trade Organization, all these things that aren't perfect, but had a more structured, guided pathway towards sustainable growth and certainty, which is what business wants most. And so I think that's the biggest misconception,
Pete Mento 26:21
and now you've got poor Massey, who's the poster boy for disagreeing with the White House.
Doug Draper 26:25
I know,
Pete Mento 26:26
and the amount of money that's being dumped into people primarying him, and
Matt Priest 26:29
unbelievable.
Pete Mento 26:30
It's just not.. it's not a good time to have a.. to have a discerning what's word.. have a differing opinion with her
Matt Priest 26:37
center casting. Done, done, done. Great, man.
Doug Draper 26:44
It's not an easy
Pete Mento 26:45
time to have a dissenting opinion.
Matt Priest 26:46
No,
Doug Draper 26:47
yeah, yeah. Well, your spirit is there, and I appreciate it, right? Namaste to you, my friend, for sure.
Matt Priest 26:52
Because you're tight, I don't know what I say in response to that.
Doug Draper 26:55
Yeah, nothing, nothing,
Pete Mento 26:57
Matt. We would, we would absolutely love to have you back on the show anytime. You just want to come in here, and you know the 11 people that watch the show every week, we'd love to love to give you that audience.
Matt Priest 27:08
My mom will watch, there'll be 12, I promise you,
Pete Mento 27:10
3012 that's cool, man,
Matt Priest 27:12
that's cool. So,
Pete Mento 27:14
but we love to have you on the show, and like I said, of all the different commodities that we could talk about, one that is so universal that people really don't pay much attention to, but it's there every single day. It employs so many people, both in retail and production, distribution, marketing, all of it. It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous, and it's a great bellwether. It's an excellent canary in the coal mine of what's going on with people who are spending their money. To hell with the consumer price index when people stop buying tennis shoes, when they stop buying two or three pairs, it's a great indication things aren't going so well right now.
Matt Priest 27:45
That's so true.
Pete Mento 27:46
So we absolutely appreciate so much you coming on for a friend of the show, and we will do anything we can to help you in your message. And thanks for giving our viewers an opportunity to learn more about what you're doing and what's going on out there.
Matt Priest 27:57
Anything for you, Pete? Anytime, brother. Thank you.
Pete Mento 27:59
Likewise. Likewise. All right, Matt. Thanks so much. All right, so Doug, like we always say, if it's happening in global trade, we'll talk about it next week on Global Trade this week. Thanks, man. All right,
Doug Draper 28:09
catch you later,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai