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Quest Means Business
Trump Raises U.S. Tariffs to Highest Level Since Great Depression; Maersk CEO: China is Pushing a New Age of Globalization; Netanyahu: We Intend to Take Control of All of Gaza; Farms Facing Worker Shortage Due to Fear of ICE Raids; Interview with Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim; OpenAI Launches GPT-5, Upgraded Version of ChatGPT. Aired 4-5pm ET
Aired August 07, 2025 - 16:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[16:00:12]
RICHARD QUEST, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST, "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS": Museum of the City of New York ringing the closing bell. Closing bell ringing on Wall
Street as trading comes to an end on this Thursday, and the market has been down. It was up at the beginning, and then just basically it all just
petered away, and it is all to do with tariffs and economic worries and woes and everything.
One, two, three. Strong gavels. Trading is over. The markets and the main events of the day. The President Trump tariff reality is now with us.
Massive new levies on imports take effect. The highest level in a century.
The Israeli Prime Minister says he wants to take military control over all of Gaza, what does it actually mean.
And a high flying debut for Firefly. Shares in the tech space travel company, up 40 percent on day one of the IPO. I will be talking to the
chief executive.
We are live from New York on Thursday. It is August the 7th. I am Richard Quest and I mean business.
Good evening.
The biggest shift in global trade since the great depression. The U.S. tariff experiment has begun. President Trump has levied dozens of trading
partners with high tariffs and it all started at midnight last night.
The effective U.S. tariff rate is now more than 17 percent. It is the highest since the 1930s. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the trade
deals are largely completed and done, and President Trump will now focus on the cost of living in the U.S. The U.S. Trade Representative, Jamieson
Greer, says the White House is remaking the world.
In an article in "The New York Times," he writes: "Our current nameless global order, dominated by the WTO is untenable and unsustainable." And
what he now calls the Trump Round -- not the Doha round, the Uruguay round, now he is calling it the Trump round of tariffs.
Kevin is with me. Kevin Liptak at the White House.
Before we do anything, lets actually put tariffs to one side. I want to do first, Stephen Miran is to fill the vacant spot of the Fed Board of
Governors that's about to become available. Miran is currently the Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and now, what do we make of
it?
KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Yes, and we should note it is a temporary replacement. He will be in this job until the end of
January. This seat was vacated last week by one of the governors.
It does allow the President to put in someone who is a loyalist at heart, someone who agrees with the President on interest rates, which is obviously
the President's big grudge with the Federal Reserve at the moment. It is not the big job. We are still waiting to hear from the President on who he
will nominate to replace Jay Powell once his term is up in May.
There had been a thought that perhaps the President would put essentially a successor in waiting into this governor seat, but that doesn't appear to be
what the President has done here. He still has a number of other names in mind for that big job, but obviously Stephen Miran is someone who has, I
think, become a more recognizable face over the last several months. He is on television quite frequently, explaining the President's economic
policies, his tariff policies.
He is someone who the President has clearly taken quite a liking to, and so he will fill this post until January. The President says he is still in
search for one, a permanent successor for this governor's seat, but also for that big job.
We know that there are a number of names in mind, including who he calls the two Kevins, not myself, but Kevin Hassett, the top economist at the
White House; Kevin Warsh, the economist at Stanford who was a governor on the Fed Board about 15 years ago.
And so we are still waiting for that big job, expect to hear about that soon, I think.
QUEST: Back to tariffs, pivot, if you will. I was interested to hear Scott Bessent basically saying that the negotiations are over. We know China is
still out there to be wrapped up, but it does sound like, you know, this is what most countries will now have to live with, and the government, the
administration is still banking on the fact that there is no or marginal increased inflation, and they don't believe it is going to get worse.
LIPTAK: That seems to be the play right now. I do think, you know, as time goes on, if prices start to rise, if companies start to increase these
costs on American consumers, I wouldn't doubt that President Trump could potentially see some flexibility in these tariff rates. That has been sort
of a defining feature of this entire tariff regime so far.
[16:05:12]
The President puts the rates on, takes them off, increases them, decreases them. For now, these rates are fixed, and according to Scott Bessent, the
trade deals are sort of done and dusted. I think the exception, as you said, is China. And we do expect now shortly to hear that they are
extending this deadline for a deal to be reached as they try and negotiate some of these finer points.
The other one is Switzerland, I hope -- I think in the hopes of the Swiss, that their deal and their tariff rate is not fixed. They seem to be still
going back and forth on that. But I guess for all of these other countries, it seems as if this is the final answer for now.
QUEST: In his op-ed the USTR Jamieson Greer talks about -- I am just trying to look at it, he says, "In a few short months, the United States has
secured more foreign market access than it had in years of fruitless WTO negotiations. President Trump uniquely recognizes the privilege of selling
into the world's lucrative market is a carrot -- a mighty carrot." So it is pottery barn principle. They've sort of bought the shop, they've broken it.
If they've broken it, they'll own it.
LIPTAK: Yes, I think that seems to be the case and I think for President Trump, you know, Jamieson Greer and the other economists at the White House
talk about tariffs as a way to reorient the global trade. I think President Trump sees it as a much bigger thing. You know, he has used these not only
to realign trade imbalances, but also to exploit some of these geopolitical concerns that he has, whether it is in Brazil on the persecution of the
President there, whether it is on India and what he says is the purchase of Russian oil.
The President sees this as kind of like a cure all for every ill that he sees around the entire world, and so Jamieson Greer, obviously, he is the
Trade Representative. He is looking at this through the trade perspective. You know, reorienting a system that has been sort of out of place for
decades and decades, starting with the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.
President Trump, I am not sure, is thinking about Bretton Woods conference. He is looking at these tariffs as his sort of main arbiter of the way he
wants to bend the world to his will, and you've seen that over and over again, and that's where I think he will keep going.
You know, we have heard from the President that there are still tariffs to come on, pharmaceuticals, on semiconductors -- all of these other areas
that I think the President feels emboldened to just sort of keep going now that this new trade era has begun.
QUEST: Kevin, I am grateful -- so many Kevins, but there is only one Kevin for us, Kevin Liptak.
Kevin, many thanks, sir, for joining us from The White House.
Now, the Swiss government, they are still shock in Switzerland after the 39 percent tariff took effect today and the government there says they are
going to fight to have that changed. But Switzerland isn't the only country reacting to the dramatic levies being imposed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JACQUELINE HUG, GENEVE RESIDENT (through translator): Making small countries like us pay, I find that wrong. I won't say unfair. It is a bit
stupid, but it is shocking. Worrying.
PIETRO PICCHIONI, ROME RESIDENT (through translator): This makes it impossible to look to a future with a peace of mind. Personally, I have no
confidence in stability in a bright future because Trump is unpredictable.
STEVE MALLIA, CANADIAN BUSINESS OWNER: We were making money. The revenues were on course with what we had projected. As soon as the tariffs started
to really take place, that disappeared. So now we are at a shortfall.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
QUEST: And so to the QUEST MEANS BUSINESS tariff basket.
Now the new tariffs on a lot of the goods won't be immediate because if it was loaded onto a ship before yesterday and it arrives before October, then
it will face the old tariff rate, but we have been keeping a track on certain items since Liberation Day in April.
The QMB basket: Let's start with olive oil. In early April, it costs $16.89. The price is now $17.59, almost a full dollar higher today. Coffee
-- coffee has gone from $8.00 to $8.89. Now, you think of it as that way. But, you know, that's quite a hefty rise in terms of price. That's a 10
percent rise in price.
So if you drink that and bearing in mind this doesn't allow for coffee from, say, Brazil, where they grow an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, as the
song says, this is Colombia, but there we go, which has, I think, a 15 percent tariff rate. But you get the idea. When that starts, it will really
add up.
Some items have actually fallen, for example, cheese. Where's the cheese? The cheese has gone from $6.29 to $6.19.
Now overall, we haven't also tagged -- allowed for apparel, which is one of the larger items. Overall, our groceries cost us $59.00, slightly less than
in April The basket of electronics went to $1,100.00, that's up 40 from our April calculation. Clothing is $42.00 -- pretty much the same, and the
other essentials around, just bits and bobs.
Andrew Hollenhorst is the chief U.S. economist at Citi.
Now. Andrew, I am going to tell you what you already know, which is that our tariff basket hasn't gone up that much, largely because, A: A lot of
the tariffs are being eaten by the manufacturers, producers or importers. And B: They were structured so they haven't fully taken effect. But you I
think believe like others, it is just a question of time.
ANDREW HOLLENHORST, CHIEF U.S. ECONOMIST, CITI: I think that's right, Richard. There is a question of time here. How long is it going to take
before we see some of these price increases come through into for certain goods? And we know that some businesses would have had inventories that
they hadn't paid tariffs on. So all of this can take months before it comes through with the data.
I think the important thing though is to just stay focused on a good space inflation, which would be my view and not spread more broadly. That's when
you really start to worry about from an economy-wide perspective, is this a real new inflationary shock broadly, or is this kind of a one-time rise in
certain goods prices?
QUEST: What's your feeling on that?
HOLLENHORST: I think what we are going to see in this scenario is more of a one-time price shock, and the reason why is because of the other things
that are going on in the economy. If you look at consumer spending, it is slowing down. If you look at the housing sector, we actually have a pretty
weak housing sector right now with house prices that have been falling.
So the other sectors of the economy, the domestic economy is a disinflationary economy. Yes, you'll probably see some price rises in
certain goods, but I don't think this is the type of economy where demand is really strong and firms are going to be able to push up prices and
continue to push them up.
QUEST: So is the President -- and essentially right, Jamieson Greer, who points out, you know, he Jamieson Greer in his article says that basically
this -- the worst cases of prognosis are not going to happen. The money is going to roll in, which will help negate, if not fully at least mitigate,
the deficit and therefore the naysayers are wrong.
HOLLENHORST: Well, if you go back and think about the worst case scenarios, it does look like we've avoided some of those. Now, partly that's because
some of these tariff rates have come down. If you remember, not that long ago we were concerned about 150 percent tariffs with respect to China. This
would have really snarled supply chains and greatly increased the cost of certain inputs and made some imports just unaffordable as producers are
trying to create their products.
So those are the scenarios where you could have seen really big spikes in prices and really negative implications for growth. I think that has
largely been avoided. And the other thing that's been avoided so far is a lot of retaliation. That was the other concern that would we see other
countries raising tariffs against the U.S. So far, we haven't seen a lot of that either.
QUEST: So can we say that the President's policy is succeeding?
HOLLENHORST: I think what we can say so far is that we have an economy that was a strong economy, and that has been resilient. We need to watch to see
if these price increases are going to come through or not, in terms of the goods' prices, but in terms of, is this tariff regime going to be something
that pushes the economy into a recession or causes persistent higher inflation? It really looks like that's not the case so far.
QUEST: And on the bigger, wider issue, which is -- which we can't really know for maybe 20 years, a lot of the supply chains today were built around
optimization of efficiency and therefore if we now have production in less efficient places to avoid collateral issues like tariffs, then eventually
does the U.S. economy perform at a less productive -- I mean, it may look like a headline, but actually you're making things that really shouldn't be
made here, but they are being made here so that companies don't get clobbered for other -- you get where I am going with that.
HOLLENHORST: Yes. I mean, it is still a very big question, how much is production really going to reallocate? You mentioned 20 years. That's
probably the kind of timescale we should be thinking about for, you know, really big shifts in terms of where production is happening. Now, we know
some of that will happen in the near term. And it could be that the cost of producing some goods is higher, producing goods with U.S. labor is going to
be higher than producing goods with foreign labor, but that's a policy decision, right?
[16:15:10]
That's something that we should think about as a society, as a country. Do we want to pay a little bit more for shoes, for instance, and have those
shoes produced in the U.S., or pay less and have them produced abroad? You know, that's what politicians are figuring out. I am just trying to do the
economics here.
QUEST: Okay. Andrew, though, when you were learning your economics and you were -- did you ever think you would see a U.S. trade regime that was fully
based on tariffs again?
HOLLENHORST: This is really a big change from where we were over the last 20 years, over the last 30 years, as you had tariff rates that were coming
down globally. You had just a completely different regime.
So when I was a graduate student, when I was teaching graduate students, did I think this was going to happen? No, this was not something that I
expected. And that's one of the great things about this job is we are always analyzing new and surprising situations.
QUEST: And the moment you have your analysis, I look forward to you being back on QUEST MEANS BUSINESS to give it to us. Thank you, Andrew. Always
good to see you, sir. Very grateful.
HOLLENHORST: Thank you.
QUEST: One country -- forgive me -- one company that's been resilient amongst all this tariffs is Maersk. The shipping group has raised its
profit outlook. On Thursday, the shares were up.
Maersk chief executive, Vincent Clerc told Anna Cooban, China's manufacturing rebound is helping offset other areas.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
VINCENT CLERC, CEO, MAERSK: In the rest of the world, we seem to have entered now a new phase of globalization, pushed by China and what is going
to be interesting to see in the coming quarters or years is whether there is a response to that from some of the countries in terms of protectionism
or whether this is going to continue and be a major trend for the industry for the years to come.
ANNA COOBAN, CNN BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS REPORTER: And so it is interesting what you said about a new era of globalization. I think many people would
be surprised to hear that.
Do you see the U.S. playing any part of that?
COOBAN: No. I think that the U.S. actually have taken the view that that this second phase of globalization was happening and that in many sectors
this was posing a danger to their ability to guarantee the National Security, to have the amount of manufacturing and skill within the country
and strategic independence that they have ambition to have.
And you see this materializing into some of the trading policies and trading views that are coming from the United States. This has been a step,
actually, to counter this new phase of globalization, whereas the rest of the world so far has mostly accepted it or had discussions which at least
have not managed to either stem it or slow it down.
To the contrary, we are seeing an incredible resilience in volumes out of Asia. It has been a trend for quite a while, and as we are well into the
third quarter, it just shows no signs of abating.
COOBAN: So I just want to come back to the issue around U.S. protectionism and the U.S. trying to bring manufacturing back to its own shores. We will
have seen this investment pledge by Apple in the past few days. Do you think that if the U.S. successfully brings back manufacturing into the
U.S., that this is something that will help or harm you as a company?
CLERC: We look at the coming decades, even assuming a rise of protectionism and a new different phase of trading order and so on as being a long term
opportunity for us.
For almost eight years now, we have been diversifying away from purely a shipping play into a full logistics and supply chain play, which means that
as the global supply chain gets rewritten or rejigged, and rebuilt with a different structure with either nearshoring or friend shoring or reshoring,
or a combination of those, there is going to be a lot of need for a lot of companies for the type of solutions and products that we bring, and it is
going to be a vector of growth for us in the long run.
It will create some volatility for our shipping business, there is no doubt about it because of these changes, but these changes will take time to
materialize. Supply chains are long. They have many tiers of suppliers. And to move all of this is likely to actually create more growth in the short
term, rather than shrinkage.
And while this may come later on and create some turbulence, I think that in the short run we see a continued pretty strong growth opportunities and
more opportunities for growth and creating value for our customers within the logistics field.
COOBAN: So what would you say your biggest concerns at the moment?
CLERC: I think, you know, right now we have two, I would say main concerns if you think about the macro part --
(END VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST: Let's leave that for the moment.
Donald Trump is at the White House. Let's join.
[16:20:02]
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: -- and I want to thank Steve for being here. I saw this today. They came out. What he
puts out gets a lot of coverage and I saw some of them and then he had a couple of others.
And, I'd like to ask Steve maybe to discuss a few of these numbers that were just released. I mean, literally just released. And then we are going
over and we are going to do Purple Heart. We have some incredible, brave people that I look forward to.
So we are going to do that right after this.
Steve, could you say a few words about the various charts?
STEPHEN MOORE, TRUMP ECONOMIC ADVISER: Thank you, Mr. President. So I called the President because I had some very good news from some new data
that we've been able to put together that no one has ever seen before.
And I will just very quickly go through these. So I was telling the President that he did the right thing in calling for a new head of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, because this shows that over the last, two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by
1.5 million jobs. That's a -- Mr. President, that's a gigantic error.
And I don't know if she is --
TRUMP: That might not have been an error. That's the bad part.
If there is an error, it would be one thing. I don't think it is an error. I think they did it purposely.
MOORE: Whether that -- you may well be right, but even if it wasn't purposefully -- it is incompetence.
TRUMP: Right.
MOORE: Okay, so 1.5 million jobs overestimated.
We have access to the -- we have access to the -- some data that no one else does on what has happened month by month with median household income.
This is based on unpublished census bureau data. It will be released sometime in the next six months, but we get an advanced look at it.
And so I was telling the president in his first five months in office, starting in January through the end of June, the average median household
income, adjusted for inflation for the average family in America, is already up $1,174.00.
QUEST: That's an incredible number. It just came out.
MOORE: It just came out. So that's a giant game.
QUEST: And if I would have said this, nobody would have believed it.
There's your number. We're doing well.
MOORE: So the next one compares -- we finally have the 2024 data on what happened with real family income in the United States. And so what I did
was I compared the record and Donald Trump's first term with the Joe Biden first term.
And you can see that, by the way -- these dotted lines here, Mr. President, that's COVID. So if it had not been for COVID, these numbers would have
been substantially better.
But even taking account President Trump's last year in --
QUEST: You have there in The White House, bringing out Stephen Moore to do a glowing economic report on Donald Trump's time so far, also to cast doubt
on the BLS and their jobs numbers, which, of course, was the whole business of the firing of the head of the BLS.
Interestingly, interestingly, Donald Trump sort of still pushing this notion that it was Machiavellian and a conspiracy. Stephen Moore, who knows
a lot about these things, saying, well, maybe not incompetence, maybe, but let's not go there.
But essentially, we will need a few hours or so, I wouldn't say a few minutes to look at these claims and counterclaims and work out what's true,
what's not, what's sort of been embellished in a sense, for the purposes of this, because Stephen certainly knows his stuff very well. He is a very
respected economist.
And so what he is saying most definitely is worthy of very serious consideration in that respect.
Now, in a moment or five, Israel's prime minister says his country plans to take control of all of Gaza. His military chief has reportedly already
warned against the plan.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[16:26:30]
QUEST: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country plans to take control of all of Gaza. It was the message shortly before stepping
into a Security Cabinet meeting where the issue is going to be discussed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL HEMMER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL ANCHOR: Will Israel take control of all of Gaza?
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there; enable the population to be free
of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel. That's what we want to do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
QUEST: Now, if it goes ahead, it is a major escalation in the nearly two- year-old conflict.
Oren is with me.
The devil is in the detail with this one, Oren, because if you listen to you that, as you listen carefully to what the Prime Minister says is, he is
basically saying, look, we don't want to own it. So this isn't the Gaza, this isn't the -- you know, Riviera. This is -- we just want to make sure
that whoever does become the civilian government isn't committed to the destruction of Israel.
OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF AND CORRESPONDENT: That's what he has said, the problem is neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor
Israel have put forward a plan for governance in their vision of a post- Hamas Gaza and the devil is in the details there as well. Israel has never laid out how that transition is supposed to happen, or how it is supposed
to work.
And then, of course, there is what they've been discussing now in the Security Cabinet for some five hours. Netanyahu almost certainly has the
votes to push this forward, a major escalation. Israel says it already controls some 75 percent of Gaza, so this would be pushing into the last 25
percent. And Netanyahu, at least from that interview we just saw, appears to be ready to do this, even as the IDF chief-of-staff has warned that it
would endanger additional Israeli soldiers, it would endanger the hostages who are believed to be held in these areas. And there is widespread public
opposition to this, and that's not to mention the humanitarian and starvation crisis we are already seeing unfold.
But from what we can see, Richard, Israel looks poised to move ahead with this. Perhaps they don't vote tonight, perhaps they do. Either way, the
votes are there, and Netanyahu can proceed on this in all likelihood.
QUEST: Okay. And this idea that maybe the military is saying, don't do it, don't do it.
LIEBERMANN: But the military doesn't have a vote here. The chief-of-staff is taking part in the Cabinet discussions. He was part of a limited
Security meeting earlier this week where he issued these warnings. That meeting lasted three hours.
But when it comes down to it, it is the political echelon that will vote. Netanyahu, members of his far right government that have pushed for this,
but the military doesn't get a vote here, neither does the public.
QUEST: Oren, I did have another question, but I do need to hear some more from Donald Trump, who has just been speaking more at The White House. So
bear with me on that, because also what we were listening to with Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office, his potential meeting, we know he said
he is going to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin.
Who, what, where, when and why? We don't know. We found out some more.
REPORTER: So you're willing to, that's actually important because the President -- President Putin said this morning he was pretty dismissive of
this idea of meeting with President Zelenskyy.
TRUMP: Who was?
REPORTER: President Putin was.
TRUMP: I don't know. I didn't hear him.
REPORTER: If you were to meet with him, he doesn't have to agree to meet with Zelenskyy, is that what you're saying?
TRUMP: No, he doesn't. No, no.
REPORTER: So what do you think that means --
TRUMP: That they would like to meet with me and I will do whatever I can to stop the killing. So last month, they lost 14,000 people -- killed last
month. Every week is four or five thousand people.
So I don't like long waits. I think it is a shame. And they're mostly soldiers. They're Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and some people from the
cities where you know, missiles are lobbed in and we lose 35 to 40 people a night, which is terrible. But no, mostly, it is soldiers and we are talking
about on average, 20,000 a month, 20,000 people are dying a month. Young, generally young people, soldiers. We're going to speaking about soldiers.
We'll see you over for Purple Heart.
Thank you. Thank you, everybody.
QUEST: So, and I'm really the wiser about what, where, when and why in terms of that meeting. But there we are.
Shares of Firefly Aerospace soared on Thursday. The chief executive, there he is. We'll be talking to Jason about the IPO and what he's going to do --
what's he spending the money on and how difficult it's going to be. It's all after the break.
QUEST MEANS BUSINESS. Good evening to you.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
QUEST: Hello, I'm Richard Quest. Together a lot more QUEST MEANS BUSINESS. We'll talk about the immigration crackdown is driving some migrant laborers
to hiding. And the farms that they are working, well, they've just grinding to a halt. And OpenAI has released GPT-5. Our tech guru puts it to the
test.
We'll only get to it after the headlines because this is CNN, and on this network, the news always comes first.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, says he'll likely meet with President Trump next week. Mr. Putin suggested the UAE as a possible
location for the summit. This follows President Trump's deadline for Moscow to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, or face tough sanctions, and that's
expected -- that expires on Friday.
[16:35:02]
Sanctions and tariffs are now in place in the United States for their trading partners. President Trump says the levies will help boost the
American economy. Economists are warning, or some are, that they'll likely lead to higher prices on products such as appliances, toys and consumer
electronics.
Eli Lilly's new obesity pill has failed to beat the rival numbers. The pharma company said the new pill led to a losing 12.4 percent body weight
in 72 weeks. That's less than Nordic's injectable Wegovy. 10 percent of patients dropped out of Lilly's study due to the side effects. The shares
are down 15 percent almost on the report.
U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested 16 people during a raid outside her Home Depot in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The operation was dubbed Trojan Horse.
The report says the agents sprang out of the back of an unmarked commercial rental truck after pulling up to a group of day workers in the parking lot.
A government spokesperson said those arrested are from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has criticized the
raid.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR KAREN BASS, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: It is hard for me to believe that that raid was consistent with the court order that said, you cannot
racially profile, you cannot racially discriminate. What I saw on the video, what I saw on the pictures that were sent to me, looked like the
same guys chasing people through a Home Depot. This is something that is not acceptable. And we are not going to stand for it in Los Angeles.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
QUEST: The immigration crackdown is driving some migrant workers into hiding, and the effect of that is a labor shortage in industries like
farming.
CNN's David Culver now talks to one farm worker and sees how living in the shadows has affected her entire household.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Are any of them still salvageable or not?
IAN CHANDLER, FARMER FACING WORKER SHORTAGE: No. There's not really anything you can do with them at this point.
CULVER: You've got more than 30 acres of this farm with rotting fruit. I mean, these are cherries that at one point were pretty appetizing but right
now were more than two weeks past their prime.
CHANDLER: It's also lost revenue for the workers that would have been able to pick them had they been here.
CULVER (voice-over): Oregon farmer Ian Chandler says about half his usual crew didn't show up this season.
You're calling them, I assume, individually and saying, what's going on?
CHANDLER: Yes. Yes. Yes. And so --
CULVER: What are they telling you?
CHANDLER: Well, in the beginning of the season, it coincided, unfortunately, with a lot of really strong immigration enforcement down in
Southern California, where our workforce comes from.
CULVER (voice-over): While Ian says his workers are hired with what seemed to be a valid I.D. and work papers, fear of ICE raids kept many of them
from traveling north this year. To understand why, we head south to Central California.
So we're hoping that one of those farm-working families will actually talk to us here and give us a sense of what life is like in hiding.
Thank you. I think you're good. No names or anything there.
(Voice-over): Behind closed doors, making dinner with her mom, we meet Lisa.
LISA, MIGRANT FARMWORKER IN HIDING: Like every single summer, we would go up there. My parents or myself, we will pick cherries. But this year, we
decided to stay home just to be safe.
CULVER: Because you're living essentially as though you're going to be targeted at any moment.
LISA: Yes.
CULVER: You've got to buy food.
LISA: Yes.
CULVER: You've got to go shopping. Do you do leave for that?
LISA: Yes, I have to. I mean, someone has to in the house.
CULVER (voice-over): Lisa is here under DACA, a program that gives temporary protection to people brought to the U.S. as children. Her three
young kids, all U.S. citizens.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is my new avatar.
CULVER: You can tell they get kind of bored, like cooped up inside, spending hours in front of the TV and on their phones, tossing a frisbee
with himself.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It says life is good.
CULVER: Life is good.
(Voice-over): Lights stay off to keep cool. Shades down for privacy. Her husband and dad undocumented but working to keep money coming in as they're
out.
Is that your phone?
LISA: Yes, that's my phone.
CULVER: Go ahead if you want to get it.
(Voice-over): Every alert from her phone sparks a brief panic.
LISA: It's OK. I'll call him back.
CULVER: But it's her mom she thinks about most. Still picking crops in her 60s.
LISA: I would like to point that out. My mom is not a criminal, and it hurts. Sorry.
Back in 2020, when the whole pandemic happened, my parents were being considered essential workers. And now they have to hide.
[16:40:00]
CULVER: Back north in Oregon, farm manager Manuel Nava also noticed several no shows this year.
MANUEL NAVA, CREW SUPERVISOR: Last year we probably have like, probably five families coming from California. They just do the picking and this
year we miss them.
CULVER: They didn't show up.
NAVA: They don't show up.
CULVER: Others continue working. One woman, 75 years old, and determined to keep working even once the hour has stopped, asking, can I just collect two
more buckets?
(Voice-over): She says she doesn't find the work too difficult compared to jobs she had in Guatemala. Workers here earn about $5 a bucket and average
anywhere from $15 to $35 an hour.
KATIE BOTTON, FARM OWNER: We hire them just like any other employee. We have an I-9. And W-4 filled out for every employee.
CULVER: Are they paying taxes?
BOTTON: Yes. All of that is taken out of their checks.
CULVER (voice-over): While some may be using false IDs, others here have legal status. But it doesn't matter. Fear runs deep.
Katie started to post more and more signs, making it clear this is private property. This one even requesting that anybody who comes on to property,
visitors and vendors, must go through the office here to sign in. She's done this as a way to reinforce to her workforce that they're in a safe
space, to try to protect them and to be a barrier of anyone who might come in and target them.
NAVA: Right now you can see this 84 people watching what's going on.
CULVER (voice-over): Manuel says WhatsApp is just one piece of a growing underground network that many migrant workers rely on.
Francisco Aguirre is one of the voices behind those warnings. From the basement of a Portland church he's getting the word out.
FRANCISCO AGUIRRE, ACTIVIST AND ASYLUM SEEKER: We are OK with the government enforcing the law and detaining those who come and do bad in the
country. But that's not what is happening. We are detaining families who sustain this country.
CULVER: I was noticing on my Ring app that there are now notifications about where ICE may or may not be. And then people on Waze, the app, will
even choose icy conditions on the road to signify that there's some sort of federal operation going on.
AGUIRRE: We have our own ways to communicate that we don't disclose. You know.
CULVER: You won't tell me some of those ways.
AGUIRRE: We won't.
CULVER (voice-over): Francisco has lived in the U.S. undocumented since the mid '90s, fleeing violence in El Salvador. Despite prior arrests, he says
he's not interfering with ICE, but rather trying to clarify what's really happening amid rumors and fear. And he is not hiding.
AGUIRRE: I mean, I am afraid. I would lie if I say no, I'm not afraid. You know, but I'm trying to do the right thing.
CULVER: What do you say to folks who say, just by you talking about this, you're attracting potential ICE attention?
CHANDLER: Well, they are part of our community. Just like my arm is connected to my body, they are part of us. So it's not just a matter of
just like cutting them off and be like, all right, see you later. If we lose them, we lose part of who we are as well.
CULVER: One of the things that stood out to us in speaking with those farmers is that they point out this could go well beyond agriculture
impact. They say that these workers that follow the fields all the way north, following the crops to work throughout the season, will move from
farm to farm and then into other industries. Construction, landscaping, even making Christmas wreaths for the holiday season.
They say if the workers aren't going up there to pick the crops, then they're not going to be in place to then help those other businesses.
David Culver, CNN, Los Angeles.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST: Fascinating that, as David.
Still to come, the U.S. IPO market comes roaring back. The Firefly chief executive.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[16:47:06]
QUEST: That's Firefly Aerospace marking its IPO at the Nasdaq marketplace ringing the bell. Its shares soared 34 percent in its first day of trading.
Firefly made history in march as the first private company to land upright on the moon. There you go.
Firefly's chief executive Jason Kim joins me now.
Jason, Congratulations, first of all on landing on the moon upright, which I guess is the greater achievement in a sense. But even so, it's quite a
sizable pop on your IPO for day one. And you must be very pleased?
JASON KIM, CEO, FIREFLY AEROSPACE: You know, we're very pleased because this is a momentous occasion for all of our Firefly employees. We have over
750 employees, most of them were in Briggs, Texas, today, but we had a few of them, quite a few of them in New York with us. It was really just a
testament to all their hard work over all these years, all their sacrifices.
QUEST: Right. I always wonder, though, and regular viewers on QUEST MEANS BUSINESS will know what question I'm going to ask you now, which is
whenever I see a first day pop of 30 percent or 40 percent, I always wonder whether you think that the -- that the offer was mispriced in a sense you
left money on the table, which I agree is, you know, great to sort of get the pop. But you could have -- you could have IPOed at a higher price.
KIM: Well, it's a win-win for everybody.
QUEST: Actually.
KIM: You know, whenever there's American companies that are successful doing manufacturing, that's a big win. You know, we had a lot of conviction
and a lot of advocacy and support and engagements from the investor community. And that's really helpful for our business. You know, when we
raise funds it's going to go towards really improving our technology and our products rating up the delivery capacity of our products as well,
because there's way more demand than there is supply.
And there's missions to the moon. We have annual missions to the moon, and there's infrastructure that wants to be built up in the moon. So we want to
be able to support those kind of missions as well as have more frequent launches of our Alpha Rocket. It's the only one ton rocket on the market,
and there's a lot of demand for that. And then in addition, we're building a 16 ton reusable rocket.
There's a tremendous demand for that, especially in the 2027 time frame when there's a lot of scarcity for that kind of capacity.
QUEST: Right. And the rockets and the demand is coming from whom? I mean, we had earlier in the week the story of how NASA is looking to build
nuclear -- pre-modulated nuclear reactors on the moon. But that's some way off. So who are your main customers for your rockets?
KIM: Well, for our one ton Alpha Rocket, there's a tremendous amount of national security demand for tactically responsive space launches.
[16:50:06]
As you know, we did the first and only tactically responsive space launch of a 24-hour turnaround back in September for the Space Force. Space Force
wants more of those. They also want rockets to launch test missions as well as operational missions for Golden Dome. For the 16 ton reusable rocket,
there's a lot of demand from the commercial world for these constellations that are rating up themselves, as well as national security space launch
program.
QUEST: It's fascinating. What I -- because we think of space, you know, I'm of that generation when space was done by states, not by private companies.
And now we're seeing this bifurcation of research and so much of it being done properly by, if you will, governments and agencies, but if you will,
the hard labor, the grunt labor, the bit that has to be done to make it happen is being done by the private sector, which seems to be a very
acceptable and welcome development.
KIM: Yes, absolutely. The technology has really caught up to the point where we could take advanced technology from the commercial world and apply
it to these once dominated missions that only nation states could do. Case an example, we landed successfully on the moon, stable and upright, did 14
days of surface operations, yielded 120 gigabytes of data for NASA. You know, it used to be five countries that did that before us for billion-
dollar budgets. We did it for $100 million as a commercial company.
QUEST: All right. Last question to you, sir. Last question. What is your moonshot project? What's the one that you just want to do? If you do
nothing else, you just want to do before you retire or fall over?
KIM: Well, you know, being a veteran myself and having served in the U.S. Air Force, we're an American company. We're based in Austin, Texas, and we
want to support national security. We're a space and defense company and things like Golden Dome are really something that we are prioritizing.
QUEST: I'm grateful to you, sir. How honored to have you on the program tonight. Thank you. We'll talk again. Thank you.
KIM: Thank you.
QUEST: In just a moment. ChatGPT -- look, I confess, I use it hourly, but now there's an upgrade. Interestingly. What does it do? And is it going to
cost me more? After the break.
QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[16:55:05]
QUEST: OpenAI has unveiled an upgraded version of its chatbot, ChatGPT. The tech giant says its GPT-5 is significantly faster and more capable.
Our tech editor, Lisa Eadicicco, got an early look. With me now. Tell me all about it.
LISA EADICICCO, CNN BUSINESS TECH EDITOR: Absolutely. So GPT-5 is really designed to kind of help ChatGPT get better at the things that people are
using it for the most. So that's things like answering health questions, writing. A lot of people use these tools to draft e-mails and reports and
things like that, and also coding. One of the big emphasis that we saw during this presentation was how GPT-5 is better at writing code. So even
things like debugging, right. These are things that developers do during their jobs every day.
And then -- but one of the biggest things that I think is going to be really, really important is some of the new safety upgrades that OpenAI
claims this model has. So according to OpenAI, this model should be more accurate, which means it won't provide information that isn't true or
that's false. Sometimes A.I. tends to do that. And it should also be more transparent when it when it can't actually accomplish a task. In the past,
there have been times where it could say it could do something and then it couldn't do it so --
QUEST: Oh, ChatGPT and I have had long arguments about when it's done something wrong. It's very good at sort of self-flagellating, oh, I'm the
worst thing that's ever happened. Oh, how can you forgive me? But at the end of the day, it's worming its way into our lives at a speed that I don't
think I've seen before.
EADICICCO: Absolutely. And I think that's why the safety piece of this is so important because tech giants like OpenAI and other business leaders as
well, kind of have this vision of A.I. agents that are one day going to do everything for us. But if we can't trust the information that they're
providing, or if they're not always -- if there's a chance that they're not always going to be honest with us, how can we really rely on them to do
things, whether it's something as simple as planning a party or something maybe really important for your job, like working on a Web site or
something.
QUEST: I'm grateful, Lisa. Thank you very much indeed.
We'll take our "Profitable Moment." By the way, ChatGPT, when asked it about QUEST MEANS BUSINESS, says, yes, it's good, especially if you enjoy
business news with a generous side of showmanship. Couldn't have put it better myself.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
QUEST: All right. Tonight's "Profitable Moment," forget tariffs. I've said enough about that. Let's talk ChatGPT instead. And whether it's chat or
perplexity or any of the others, genius, whatever they are, I've been using -- I use them a lot. You use them a lot. We all use them a lot. They're
worming their way into our lives, and I do not have a problem with that. Absolutely not. And my questions are getting longer, and I'm more involved.
And I'm starting to ask difficult stuff.
Well, it's not difficult for ChatGPT that can code goodness knows what. But it's a revolution that's taking place. And we've -- I feel anyway, at least
I need to be on top of it and dealing with it and learning how to use it to my best advantage. So it's told me how to reprogram the coffee machine.
It's told me what I need to know about something in politics. It's told me what I need to know about how to fix this, that, or the other.
And I guess it's just going to get stronger and stronger. But what the real art is not asking ChatGPT, it's asking the prompt question afterwards,
because that's what really gets to where you want to go.
And that's QUEST MEANS BUSINESS for tonight. I'm Richard Quest which ChatGPT says is a magnificent program. I hope whatever you're up to in the
hours ahead, well, you know the rest. I hope it's profitable.
END
