All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

Starting point is 00:00:00 Just so you know, everything is archived by the White House right now. So everything we say is recorded. David Freeberg is a f***ing c***. Chamath, stop. You're being recorded. Good, I will hope this is discoverable.

Starting point is 00:00:10 F***ing c***. F***ing c***. There, White House. I just want you to know that. Stupid. Also, he did not pay his taxes in 2016. Just... Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world with me again today. Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, David Freber, our Sultan of Science, and two guests,

Starting point is 00:01:09 obviously Ben Shapiro, very famous for having the number two podcast in the world. How are you, Ben? I'm doing great, and just honored to be here, you know. Yes, more work to do. You could exceed all in in the rankings. No, we always judge ourselves, Ben, on three things in the rankings. When we look at how we're doing. What we see is Ben Shapiro. Prayer from

Starting point is 00:01:33 the Bible. Okay, the New Testament. I don't think you've got it yet. You have the Old Testament, but you haven't gotten the news. You haven't gotten the sequel. And then number three. Murder also with us from the White House. Yeah, welcome to all haven't gotten the sequel. And then number three, murder also with us from the White House. Yeah, welcome to all in where we have a live feed into the White House today. My good friend, Antonio, process is here. He is taking, I guess you're taking would it be safe to say a hiatus or you're from valor to do a

Starting point is 00:02:01 little tour of duty in our government working on doses? Is that the way to say it? I'm still doing my day job to man this is a seven day a week, six days an hour day job. I'm trying to do both. I've got some great partners are covering it for me and that my firm has been tremendous in in allowing me to do this. But now I'm still trying to do both. Okay, public prior to this week, Antonio that you were doing this

Starting point is 00:02:23 role. Did you announce it anywhere? I didn't announce it anywhere, no. The New York Times, they wrote a story about me going to SSA, which is sort of New York Times style. Not right, but I had been there. I was out with Maryland. 40% correct. Close enough.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Close enough for Hangerdines. Close enough. I'm sure they had no agenda. Antonio, how does it work? So when you volunteered, is it that you and Elon and Steve just kind of figure out, let's put a senior person at every part of the administration where there's real opportunity? Why did you end up at SSA versus someplace else? Interesting question, Mark. And by the way, it's great to see you guys, man. Thanks for having me on. I can use your laughs. You really make me laugh.

Starting point is 00:03:04 We're really proud of you, man. Thank you. We're really proud of you. It's good to see you guys, man. Thanks for having me on. I can see your laughs. You're like, you're really making me laugh. I'm really proud of you, man. Thank you. It's good to see you. Thank you. Suit looks great by the way. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:03:12 When do you have to return it? The rental is due at the end of the week. Okay. So, you know what happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because that's kind of, as you guys know, close to my heart. And Elon said to me, look, great, you can do that next, but will you go to SSA first and see what's going on there?

Starting point is 00:03:28 Because it's the biggest internal problem we have. And see what you find in fraud, waste, and abuse. So of course I said, sure, I'll do that. And I ended up out in Woodland, Maryland with the good people at the SSA, the Social Security Administration. And that's where I started. That's how all this started for me. And so do you, Antonio, go in there with a Doge engineer as your kind of sidekick per se,

Starting point is 00:03:48 or you just go there solo and you show up and like what happens day one when you walk into the place? Like what do you do? So I brought with me two great professionals, John and Peyton from Valor. One of them engineer, the other one I'd say a finance ninja, both these guys are ninjas. And there was already a team there, actually, that was working with some great engineers. And once your person, Scott Coulter, who's from, actually worked at Lone Pine, started his own fund, and then had come here as a volunteer as well. So they were already doing some work, actually, particularly on the enumeration part of the part of the system. So that is the

Starting point is 00:04:22 system that you have numbers, the whole cleaning of the database, the numbers, they had already started their project when I got there. And what is the mandate as given to you, you know, as part of Doge? fraud, waste and abuse. I mean, exactly what you know, what the what Bill Clinton talked about, what Barack Obama talked about what all presidents but maybe President Biden talked about going back in time, it was go figure out how to save some

Starting point is 00:04:44 money, man, the systems went bankrupt, it's gonna be back from 237 the country overall. I mean you guys know talk about many times is on its way to a beggar. She went to something and go go for how we can save money go find fraud. And we don't let's get to it. You spoke at a rally. I think it was on Sunday. And you pulled up a chart, here's that chart. Maybe you could explain to the American people here what this chart shows. Yeah, so if I went to step back and say, I got it, I think it's important.

Starting point is 00:05:14 We map the way we work. You guys know we're very operational, Valerie. I've worked with all you guys various times. And what we do is we map the entire system from beginning to end. So we map the system from enumeration, so I get your number, all the way to the end, went to the offices and saw how the offices operate.

Starting point is 00:05:28 In that process, one of our engineers, Peyton, who I mentioned, he found the data. So we're looking at all the data enumeration, how it works, what's going on, the typical stuff you'd look at. He found this data called enumeration beyond entry. right? So that is the, that's, it had this giant ramp to it. You can see their baseline was kind of, you know, three, 400,000 people, all the way up to 2.1 million people. And that just jumped out at us. We're like, what's that?

Starting point is 00:05:54 And so we dug into it and that's how this started. And so what that's showing is social security numbers that were issued to non-American citizens or non-citizens. Am I correct? That that's the number we're looking at. So these are non-citizens getting security numbers. And for people who don't know, just like a little bit of background

Starting point is 00:06:13 on the social security system, we do this. This is not abnormal for us to give social security numbers. This is part of the process that the government does. The social security number was created in 1936 for citizens to track their earnings. And in the 90s, we started giving them to non-citizens who were authorized to work in the US so that we could collect taxes from them.

Starting point is 00:06:36 And so if you're not a citizen and you're a green card holder, which some people in this program, I think, have been, you have to have a social security number in order to work and you pay into social security and Medicare, just like you as citizens. And then eventually I think you would qualify for those over some period of time.

Starting point is 00:06:52 You can also get a social security number if you're a legal immigrant into the United States on a visa. So for example, when I first came to the United States 25 years ago on a TN visa, I was able to get my social security number because I had a valid visa to be in the United States. Okay. Yeah. So we have social security numbers being given to non-citizens. That is not controversial, but there's something controversial about this chart. Antonio,

Starting point is 00:07:19 tell us what that is. So I think you look at the chart, you'll see there's, it starts to like call 300,000 or so. This is during the COVID period, yeah. Coming right out of it. So we, the 21 is coming right out of COVID, right? So if you go back even a couple of years, 19, you'll see that it's about 400,000. Yeah, that exactly 250 right there. So what happened was this program was designed for, so we were talking about, you know, people that got visas, this is at Numerations Beyond Entries, this is after you're in. There are some people in here that have H-1Bs, screen cards, et cetera, and the way we thought

Starting point is 00:07:51 about this was that's the baseline number. That's the three to four thousand a year UC, and that should be happening. There are programs for Afghans, for example, the translators that came in after the war, the people who brought it, and they would be in these kinds of programs. The baseline number, and by the program goes back, this particular program goes back all the way to 17 and had a legitimate use, which was the kind of you were talking about people that we want to let in, but the care programming, I'll make an example, which the Afghans, they would be in this number. And so what jumped out of this wasn't that this

Starting point is 00:08:20 here because it has legitimate use. It's that it's the growth. Why did it grow this fast? And what happened? That's what we dug into. Have you figured that out yet? Is it because of like a COVID overhang? The one criticism I did see of the chart that I wanted to bring up with you is, hey, people wanna see the 10 years, 20 years before this.

Starting point is 00:08:37 What would we see if we were to look backwards a little bit and do you have some theories? And is the COVID overhang theory valid or is this just Biden opened the border, as we saw, you know, especially like, and maybe it was that third year of his term, the 2023 year, and this is the overhang of the 2023 surge? What are your theories? Well, the answer is no. But can we know because the program

Starting point is 00:08:58 really started it, it started in 2017. So they probably worked on it before that, right? If you take a few years, put this into place, they worked at it, before that, right? It takes a few years to put these into place. They worked at it by guesses, you know, back during the administration. It actually became active in 17. You see a few numbers in 18 and it starts to get a little bigger in 19 and 20. Right? So that's how we get this baseline number of 19 and 20. That's where we're using that data here.

Starting point is 00:09:19 So there isn't, I can't go back 20 years. It doesn't exist. And then when we dug into it, what we found was the vast majority of the growth, which related to asylum programs and parolees, and people that came in on NTAs, this is noticed to appear, into the country, either at the border, at the airports, mostly at the border. And then we dug further into it, we found that there were, this is about 5.4 million people total. There were about 1.2 million people that the status is marked as unknown and about 1.2

Starting point is 00:09:50 million people that were marked as general parole. They should have markings of what the program is there under because if you claim asylum, you're supposed to claim a real fear. I'm going to be tortured by my country. Something bad is going to happen to me. That's why I can't go home. What we find here is that a legitimate program was in the word I'll use abused. The requirements were super opened so that more people come through.

Starting point is 00:10:14 The example I'll give you, I have here actually the form. The form used to be, going back in time, a four-page form that the officer had to fill out in the field and the person that was claiming asylum had to actually prove that they had a really credible fear of being murdered or tortured by their government. That's what the sign was for. It turned into a form, which I can't give you, but I'm going to show you here if you zoom in on it, it has four questions. That's it.

Starting point is 00:10:39 And the four questions are super leading. I'll just read one of the important ones here, right? So do you have any reason for concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States? I mean, could that be more leading? Right. What they did is they opened, they just opened the aperture on these programs dramatically. So they allowed people that were illegals at the border to come in legally. And as we've dug further into it, we found this took us, so you guys know me, Matt, I'm a very methodical, lean business process mapper. And we went all the way to the border,

Starting point is 00:11:13 literally to Brownsville and Laredo to ask what happened. We couldn't find the data on what these unknown categories were. And it turns out that when the folks at the border, who were great, by the way, they really tried hard and they suffered a lot in this. This is a human tragedy I've talked about. They were giving people at times notices to appear. This is the NTA and what that allows you to do is come in the country and then you're scheduled a court date, which is like six years out. So now you're in the

Starting point is 00:11:43 country with some quasi-legal status. You're waiting for your court date. Where you're waiting for your court date, which could be six years out is the average, by the way. It could be longer than that. You're waiting for your court date. You could fill out an asylum application. So not even an interview, just an application by filing a form.

Starting point is 00:12:00 Once the application's in, you can file another form, 765, to get a work authorization. Once you get that, you get a 766, which is the authorization, and we automatically send you a social security card in the mail, no interview at all. That is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers. Is there any ID verification along the way, Antonio?

Starting point is 00:12:22 Like, do we know that there are no duplications happening by validating that one individual is getting one social security number at any point in this process? So it's a great question. No, the answer is there's no real ID verification. So you can, you know, one of the things we found with this was the people that, some people showed IDs, some people didn't.

Starting point is 00:12:42 And one of the things- These would be IDs, Antonio, from their home country. This would be a Venezuelan driver's license or something. Yeah, I mean, it could be a passport, a driver's license, but here's what really sort of tipped us off and disturbed us. When we looked at the birth certificate day that was presented at the border,

Starting point is 00:12:58 the number one birth date was 1-1, and it was four times more likely to be born on 1-1 than any other day of the year. Now, we all know this isn't true. So they just hit enter on that part of the floor or they had a couple of things I could have come they also could go nothing biometrics of people at the border Do we take like an iris scan fingerprints and all that stuff? This is one of the issues I mean, we do have photos of people we found that 23 percent the records looked at did not have fingerprints and

Starting point is 00:13:22 Look the folks the border were Overwhelmed and we're not sure why this happened. I will tell you guys just to understand when I went down there, both border patrol and border protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. Okay, over 70 of these agents

Starting point is 00:13:40 committed suicide in this period. It's truly tragic because they knew what was going on. Given the fact that all this has happened, committed suicide in this period. It's truly tragic because they knew what was going on. Given the fact that all this has happened, is the Trump administration going to try to claim the social security numbers back, invalidate them? What will be the proper action or is it too late? Are they already sort of in the system and now you can't do anything about it? So Ben, it's a great question, right?

Starting point is 00:14:02 And the first question was, what are they doing? I mean, you know, like, where are these people? Where are they? How are they? And we've gone through a whole process of mapping this. So we mapped it through to the benefit programs. We found in the benefit programs that every benefit program that was being accessed by these people, you know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now today.

Starting point is 00:14:22 And by the way, it's just ramping. It's just starting. Just to figure your point. And then out of curiosity, I woke up at night like two in the morning, I couldn't sleep, my mind was right on this. I sent the injured a note saying, hey guys, let's just look at the public voter rolls

Starting point is 00:14:32 who we find in some friendly states. And we looked at voter rolls and we found that thousands of them registered to vote in a handful of states. And then we went even further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted. It was shocking to us. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it.

Starting point is 00:14:48 And so now the question we're asking ourselves is, what do we do? We referred some to prosecution that's ongoing right now. You know, we're thinking through how to do it. And the reality is they have various kinds of status and it's a very detailed analysis, legally they're working through right now about how to deal with it.

Starting point is 00:15:03 So thousands of those people registered to vote. Yes, in the election, which is a federal crime, by the way. Well, yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is like the Heritage Foundation has a very good project, you know, it's obviously right leaning, where they're studying all cases of fraud, I looked at it before we're here, there's only been 24 cases since 2003. of somebody who's a non citizen trying to vote. Now those are people caught. So this would be

Starting point is 00:15:28 incredibly dramatic if it was even 1000 people. Oh, no, Jason, it's more than 1000. I've seen it. I've seen the data myself. And it's more than 1000 in just a couple of states. I mean, it is shockingly bad. And this is the tip of the iceberg guys. It's the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't include the 7.8 million people that ice has that have come in illegally and know we're here and all the people that came illegally we don't know are here. I mean, this is not a political issue. I want to be really clear about this. This is about America. Yeah, Antonio, let's just take one step back

Starting point is 00:15:55 because I just want you to repeat this. Because I think it's important and we may have just run over it a little too quickly. When you get a social security number, what you're saying is there's all of these important downstream consequences. One of the downstream consequences is you could show up, register to vote, and that's an illegitimate action that's breaking federal law. That's one. But the second is that without knowing who this person is, they can start to absorb resources that could have otherwise gone to an American. I guess that's like a fundamental part of this. And so, if that's-

Starting point is 00:16:34 Yes, absolutely. So, how do you quantify that? Can you just maybe explain it a little bit more about all of the different ways in which you think now, you know, the United States ends up leaking services to these folks. And also they could be contributing to right, they could be paying taxes into the system. So I guess there's both of those possibilities and both of those have fingerprints to mop. So yeah, good question. Yeah, look, we need to figure this out. This is a very, it's massively complex. You can see the map I have on the whiteboard in our office. It's huge.

Starting point is 00:17:05 And we're figuring it out right now. But let me just tell you this. And every benefit program we looked at, and this is just a handful of states, we found people on all the benefit programs. And we found them on unemployment. We found them on Medicaid. So adjacent to your point,

Starting point is 00:17:17 people on Medicaid and unemployment, they're not contributing. They're taking out, they're mooching. Right? There are criminals. I mean, look, we sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. I don't want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hardheads in the Targeting Center of very bad people, criminals and people on a terrorist watch list that

Starting point is 00:17:35 are in this group. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a problem. We've got to figure out how to deal with it. And of course, there are people that also have jobs and paying in the system. That's also true. All these things are true. And we're trying to search the data and figure out how to actually deal with it now. Antonio, one of the things about the data that you triggered, which because the data

Starting point is 00:17:57 is so important, frankly, is a lot of people started to try to find a way to nitpick and say, Antonio, you're cherry picking or Antonio, this is not really representative. And you had some pretty big names, right? People that have credibility, Jim Chaynos probably being one of the more prolific people, a very well-known hedge fund manager. But I think you tried to articulate why their objections didn't make any sense. I think it's important to maybe give you a few moments here to identify what they said and maybe debunk it. So the chart that they're using, and you can see this, I posted something on X about this. It was apples to oranges.

Starting point is 00:18:44 You can see it here. they took a chart that included all enumerations, not the EB program, the enumeration beyond entry program, all enumerations and compared to our chart. So just to be clear, this would have included somebody like me coming in on a TN visa or somebody on an EB1 visa. Yeah. so those people being already at two, but just in your entry, the data on the left of 2020, the big bars, that includes people in the offices, that include people who got, they got sister numbers

Starting point is 00:19:14 because they went to a consulate. And like you probably did, applied ahead of time before they came in, you know, those kinds of people. So we need a stacked bar chart. So there's some fun with numbers going on. Can you flip back again? So your number for 24

Starting point is 00:19:25 was how much? 2.1 million. Yep. Yep. So what they did is took they took our data. So this was, you know, look, I don't want to impute negative motives. They just maybe were confused. They took our data. And they can pick they added the total data, right? This is just subsection. This is EB. I'm just going to use Zacker. It's okay, guys.

Starting point is 00:19:47 This is EB only. Enumeration beyond entry, which is a program, as I said, started in 2017. And then it kind of ramped up into 19. They took our data and then they added the total data before that. That is apples to oranges. That's why it doesn't work. And I went through a whole analysis of this on X and you know, the person the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying, hey, you know, I'm deleting it because I get it, you're right. And apologized and asked me some questions. I don't want to get into it. You guys know, I don't post a lot on X. I don't want to get into base people. It's not worth it. The data speaks for itself. There's basically it basically became like a Rorschach test where people that did not want to believe the points you were making latched on to that chart that was shown even though it

Starting point is 00:20:31 was disproven. And that became the narrative for a good chunk of the internet and a good chunk of for media response. I mean, look, you guys know me, you know me for a long time. This is not political man. This is also about your political background. Again, we haven't talked about this on the show, Antonio, but I think it's worth letting everyone hear about your background a little bit. Just so folks understand where you're coming from.

Starting point is 00:20:51 I was a Democrat for 20 years. I mean, I you know, I knocked on doors for really Clinton, Iowa. I was, you know, from Illinois. And look, I've got lots of good friends are Democrats. And when I explained the state of them, they're as shocked as I am. I don't believe this. I mean, to say you're a Democrat is an under you were a Democrat is an understatement. You were a major donor and a majorly involved with the Democratic Party. Yes, then You tend to call balls and strikes on the program. What are your thoughts on? Immigration generally and how it should work here in the US and how maybe we can resolve this and get to an Antonio what your answer to that question as well. Maybe some reconciliation here between the moderates, MAGA, original, you know, classic GOP, Democrats and the woke lunatics like,

Starting point is 00:21:37 is there any way out of this and maybe perhaps what we're seeing here with somebody like Antonio, who is a lifelong Democrat who now is, you know, helping the government. Maybe there's some way with data and logic we can get through this. I mean, I think that what Antonio is doing here is so important specifically for that, because it seems to me there's actually been a fairly wide consensus among the American population for a very long time what to do about immigration, particularly the southern border, which is number one, just stop the illegal immigration at the southern border. After Biden blew that out, a lot of Democrats turned to President Trump specifically because

Starting point is 00:22:09 of that issue. And that has been the signal success of the Trump administration among all the other successes. The numbers of the border have just plummeted to almost zero. I mean, the lowest numbers in recorded history, and that is an unmitigated success. And then I think everybody knows that we have to sort of figure out who gets to stay and who gets to go, who's already in the country and what Antonio is doing by being able to discern Who is here and is a net draw on the resources of the American people? Versus maybe who is a net taxpayer or who's actually contributing who's a criminal, right?

Starting point is 00:22:35 There's always been this bizarre supposition in the in the political realm that there's no way on a one-to-one level to figure out Who is who you have to treat everybody as a class. Everybody stays, everybody goes. And the reality is that even the way the Trump administration is doing this, by first targeting, say, criminal illegal aliens for removal, and then maybe moving on to people who are net drawn resources, who came in falsely under claims of asylum

Starting point is 00:22:55 and now are receiving Medicaid or disability. I've made the argument for, I think, my entire career actually on this, that we should be treating immigrants, illegal immigrants who are in the country country the same way we would treat people who are trying to get into the country, which is to say, are you going to benefit the United States or you're not going to benefit the United States? And the counter argument was always, well, how exactly are you going to determine who is who? And the answer I always

Starting point is 00:23:17 get was, well, the IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year. So why should we not be able to do that? And so the kind of work Antonio is doing showing you actually can do that by tracking the social security numbers of people who came in illegally, because the truth of the number of unknown getaways is actually really, really compared to this, it's a small number. Most of the people who are coming across the border, at least during the Biden term, I went down to the border last year and visited a Native American reservation that's right along the border where the border patrol basically was not. And they said that what was happening is people were arriving at the border. They

Starting point is 00:23:48 were doing exactly what Antonio was talking about. They would literally say, I fear to go back to my home country. They'd be processed. They'd be led into the country with a future date to come back. And that was all happening within 72 hours. So being able to track those people and find out who should be in, who shouldn't be. That's huge. And I think that's the consensus. So are you in the camp? We should deport everybody, this sort of Stephen Miller deport 20 million people, Ben? Or are you in the, hey, let's get rid of the criminals,

Starting point is 00:24:17 and that will get us to where we need to be? Well, I don't think it's just the criminals. I mean, I think you also need to go after the folks who are here to take advantage of the welfare benefits, for example, hard to draw on the system. But I don't think that the number is 20 million. I don't think President Trump actually thinks the number is 20 million. I don't think anybody realistically thinks the number is 20 million. Got it. OK. They said it over and over again. All 20 million are going and it's like, it's just marketing. Yes, it's a political campaign and people say that sort of stuff all the time. Antonio, let's talk maybe about reconciliation here. You spent your life as a Democrat,

Starting point is 00:24:50 and now you've spent, I don't know, six months as a Republican here and helping this administration. How do we get the country to sort of get back together here and maybe reconcile on this issue? Because it seems like an unnecessary, to Ben's point, I think the number is 80% of people believe the border should be just shut period full stop, and everything should be legal. And I don't

Starting point is 00:25:10 know the other 20 if they're just don't know how to take a survey. I've never met anybody who said there should be an open border at the southern border. So what are your thoughts on giving your inside knowledge? And I would describe you as a Clinton Democrat, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, correct me if I'm wrong there. What thoughts on reconciliation here, because you really do care about that. Your parents, both immigrants, my besties here, three of the four people who host this program, immigrants, this is an immigrant country built by immigrants for immigrants has always been. So how do we reconcile this issue and put it behind us? And Jason, I had asked myself this question and I think we gotta follow the truth.

Starting point is 00:25:51 And that's the point, follow the truth. And the truth is in the data. And as Ben said, the numbers don't lie, right? And so people are productive. We gotta find a way to allow them to be productive and stay. People that are taking the system should not be allowed to stay. And I think I don't wanna get into the policy at all because it's above my pay grade. I mean, the

Starting point is 00:26:07 reality is for me, my remit is, as Ben said, it's criminals, terrorists, and then people who chew up the system. And then, you know, a political question needs to be answered about what happens to the rest of those people. I don't know. It's not my remit. Free America. But I will say this. I think that all my friends who are still Democrats that I have been able to explain this data to, they all say the same thing you guys are saying. Man, this is a problem. We're going to figure this out.

Starting point is 00:26:30 And let me tell you why. The bigger problem, the biggest problem here, I mean, it's, it's, it definitely is taking off the system, but you got to realize we gave 13 to $15 billion a year to human traffickers. That's what this system did. And the money magnet that attracted these people here, it wasn't like it was some crisis, you know, environmental crisis, the money magnet attracted these people and many of them died on the way up. I mean, think about what that's like.

Starting point is 00:26:54 Think about the human crisis. So this is a human suffering, the human rights tragedy. You have people who are getting sold into slavery and being abused at the border. At a minimum, every American should be against that. Everyone is. Every American is. Look, man, this turned my stomach when I went to the board and I heard the stories. It turned my stomach, man. We are America, okay? We protect people like this. We don't give incentives to people to pay traffickers. If you pay 20,000, I heard 20,000 to 500 bucks just across the border, $20,000. I mean, where does someone who's coming from Central America or Africa get 20 grand to

Starting point is 00:27:26 pay the traffickers that are walking them across the border? It's not free to walk up Mexico, okay? It's controlled by the cartels. What happens? I mean, they got to pay that back. How do they pay it back? They're basically dead to its servants. This is terrible.

Starting point is 00:27:37 This isn't what we do in this country, right? This country is about freedom and we are here to protect it. We protect it around the world, protect it in our home country. And I don't think any American that I know, none of Democrats, Republicans, or anyone thinks this is good. It's not good. It's bad for America and it's evil behavior. We shouldn't send it. We shouldn't give people a reason to do it. We should find legal ways to come in the country. And I think that's the way to come together. Do you believe that there is a Democratic party motive to increase voter base for the Democrats behind all of this, as has been proclaimed by some? Look, as I go through the data and I see it's all about the data.

Starting point is 00:28:12 Okay, David, and I know you love the data. When you have just a handful of states, man, I'm talking about four states, we looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them on the voter rolls, and we found many of those people had voted, right? In in one state in particular well over a thousand voted Yeah, I think this was a a move to import voters, but really importantly. I just want to make sure Because when I talk to politicians from the democratic party about this they say There's aspect of human rights Doing the right thing for people in need that is motivating some of this

Starting point is 00:28:46 behavior? Is that a lie? And they actually have a different motive? Or do some in the party think that way, but there are real kind of, kind of call it a small group of highly influential folks at the top of the Democratic Party that recognize that this is going to grow the voter base and they're kind of motivating this. What do you think is the construction of what sounds to some to be a conspiracy and how much of this is really like widely understood? Look, Ben, I'll tell you what I have seen. I've told you the actual information. If you look at social administration, we set all the defaults to kind of max open, no ID requirements, right?

Starting point is 00:29:25 You get a Social Security number before we got here by walking in office, answering with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date of birth on it. That's it. Okay. We opened up, we set the defaults to open on Social Security. We set the defaults to open on pay, paying people set the defaults to open on pay paying people out and we set the collections defaults basically to zero. So that's how the system looks. That's I'm just reporting the reporting the facts. Do I think that the average person is a Democrat

Starting point is 00:29:56 in Illinois or you know the guys I knew at Chicago, they know this, they don't know this. They don't know this. So were there people at the top of the system that did this? Yeah. People created this policy. The former administrators of these agencies created these policies. I've seen them. I've read them myself. I've gone to the data myself.

Starting point is 00:30:13 They've seen them. Now, this isn't everybody. If you're the average person out there who's a Democrat and you see what I've seen, I believe you will conclude it. I conclude it, which is this isn't't right these policies are wrong. They're evil They're wrong. We gave an incentive for people get trafficked. That's terrible I just don't I just don't think we'll know the reason I'm even willing to do all you guys know me I'm pretty private. I'll come in your pockets because we're buddies

Starting point is 00:30:36 But like man the reason I'm talking about this is is not political It's because it's a human rights issue and the human rights issues being confused It's not it's we are incenting people to pay traffickers to come to America. We were doing this, right? We got to find better ways to do that. And I just, I don't believe any American, the 80% of people Jason's talking about that would say close the border. That's the 80% of people coming here on this issue.

Starting point is 00:30:58 We got to take care of people. Antonio, can you talk about what the next big push of effort from you and your team will be? Is there some next chart? I'm not trying to be reductive, but is there something that you can demonstrate that is going to be equivalently as powerful as this first chart, which then helps us start to move these gears towards doing the logical and right thing? I think the right thing is to figure out who's who, right? Who are the criminals, who are the terrorists, number one. And number two, who's mooching off the system. And then number three, the people that are working that Jason's talking about, what we do with them.

Starting point is 00:31:37 That's the right answer. I would add a fourth because I think that there's probably no more electric issue than this idea of voting in propriety. And I think it has become so brazenly partisan that everybody has suspended logic. If it turned out, if it turns out that there was a manipulated effort in 2020 and there is even a thread of legitimacy to Trump's claims. You would never be able to see the light of day because so many Americans just turn off, right? And that's because of the rhetoric that they've been fed. This is a really important thing that I would just offer to you is that if it is true that these people illegally voted, I think it's a thunderclap. And I think it opens wide the

Starting point is 00:32:26 aperture on voting illegality and voting reform. And I think that irrespective of who you are, you should want to make sure that people who are not allowed to vote are not voting, just to put it simply. Yeah, wow. What an incredible concept. It's amazing. I can't I can't, I can't get an airplane in America with an ID, but I can go vote in some states that ID. I think that's crazy. I am totally crazy. That is crazy. And we're down to like, Ben, you know the number, it's 15 states now are the ones that don't have voter ID. So this is becoming like a very obvious issue in the loop for us to close. I think the best next thing for you to do is actually publish this list of people

Starting point is 00:33:04 who voted, get it to the Heritage Foundation and put sunlight on it. The truth shall make you free and sunlight is the best disinfectant because I think the whole issue is absurd. Because if you look at the votes in the swing states, it would take 100,000, it would take 10s of 1000s and it's illegal. I've spoken to the person at the Heritage Foundation who does this. They found like 2400 cases over 40 or 50 years. The number of people voting illegally is minuscule in order to swing even but one

Starting point is 00:33:35 state you would need to coordinate something hold on let me finish. You would need a coordinated effort. I'm just giving you data Chema. I am not partisan. There are tens of thousands of votes that would need to be manipulated in each of these markets. It's impossible. Here, well, there's the key word. Here's what I would ask you to consider. Sure.

Starting point is 00:33:53 Your results are only as good as your prompts. Your results are only as good as your prompts. Say it in plain English. What do you mean? I suspect that if you put three or four of the smartest data scientists in the world, they would get to a very different answer than the answer that has been arrived to. I don't know whether that will validate or invalidate

Starting point is 00:34:16 the claim. But the quality of the people that are able to interrogate this data is directly correlated to the output that is created. Well, listen, we all want the data clean, Ben. Maybe I'll let you kind of answer the question from your perspective. Do you think there is any chance that a swing state could be swung by, you know, this strategy? And in addition to that, Trump is a populist. All these people, and his biggest gains were with people from South America, Mexicans, etc. in this last election. So and non college educated. So if you were going

Starting point is 00:34:51 to plot this incredible strategy, it seems like the democratic strategy of importing a bunch of voters is the stupidest possible strategy, because the Republican Party has won those people. Well, I don't think that would be a great short term strategy because of the problems that you mentioned in terms of the size of the voting gaps even in closed swing states, although obviously you have outlier cases like Florida in 2000 where the entire state is being decided by hundreds of votes and there you actually could see a state actually

Starting point is 00:35:14 shift on that basis. It's a rarity, but it does happen and in some cases decides a presidential election. When you're talking, however, about the long-term play, I think the question that needs to be asked is, if you are importing a bunch of people who are more dependent than average on the American government, for example, or who are not interested in assimilating

Starting point is 00:35:32 to free market values, for example, or free speech values, or who come in, and then many of these people are gonna get married, many of these people are gonna have kids, they're gonna marry American citizens, they're gonna have children who are American, and then they stay, now you're talking about actually generating a change in the voting population. And that isn't a right-wing point.

Starting point is 00:35:48 That's a point that was made by Roy Teixeira all the way back in 2004 when he was a Democrat and he was making the case, essentially, that there was a demographic wave that was going to shift the electorate in the United States in the direction of Democrats permanently. Now, the point that you're making is that even as a long-term strategy, that might be a bad play because it may be that these populations shift over time. That doesn't mean that that's not the intent in the moment. Meaning, maybe they're wrong.

Starting point is 00:36:09 Right. Maybe they're wrong. They could have gone wrong. They could have made a very bad strategic decision. Antonio, I think we have to drop you off here. Any closing comments you want to make? And I just want to thank you. I know you've got other things you could be doing in your life, but just on behalf of

Starting point is 00:36:24 the American people who I speak for here on the program, we want to thank you all Americans for your service to this country. And I know that you are balls and strikes and you're going to let the data speak. So I just want to thank you. I would close this on this conversation, which is go to California, California. Okay. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, came California, Ronald Reagan signed Amnesty. And you know, some 40 years later, it is now a solid blue state.

Starting point is 00:36:53 And I think, uh, so much on this program, I know you, Jason, are a refugee from California because of that, because of some of those policies. And I want to be, I want you to be careful about this because it is, it is actually the tip of the iceberg. We have a very small sample of data in a couple of states. It's the tip of the iceberg. And so I don't know what the unintended consequences will be long term, but I can tell you, it's already happened in America where an amnesty program actually turned a very large state from one party to another.

Starting point is 00:37:22 And I want to leave you guys with this thought. This is not political I'm not doing that. There's no political motivation in my mind. This is about America It's about securing the American democracy and we will shine light onto the data when we can We prefer these people to prosecution and we keep looking we'll keep going and the data will lead us and the truth Will lead us and eventually come on the Sun that you're right write but we're going to follow the truth that's our primary motive that that is that is our operating parameter and what we're going to do right all right thank you Antonio Grasso and continued success and good to see you talk to you in 30 60 days when you have your next findings thanks guys thank you you're a refugee

Starting point is 00:38:02 from California too aren't you yes yeah we took off in 2020 during COVID. We took off, my company took off, we all got the hell out. I was born in California. So I spent 36 years there before I moved. And yeah, they certainly did a good job of wrecking that state. I mean, I did the same thing. You went to, oh, I don't know if you talk about where you-

Starting point is 00:38:22 Yeah, I'm in Florida. My company's in Tennessee, I'm in Florida. Yeah, got it. Yeah, I mean, it's just, you can't know. I'm in Florida. Oh, yeah, I'm in Florida. Yeah, my company's in Tennessee. I'm in Florida. Yeah, got it. Yeah. I mean, it's just you can't raise kids in California and you just think about the crime and taxes and what you're getting for your dollar. It doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 00:38:33 I mean, I don't. White House is off the zoom, boys. Now we can start to open it up. Okay. Open up the aperture. Okay. What do you guys think about what you just saw? Ben, I'll let you go first as our guest.

Starting point is 00:38:47 I wish the entire Trump administration were rolled out as well as Antonio just rolled that out, is what I would say. Totally. You know, I think that that is high levels of competence and expertise and a meticulous message that is data first and difficult for anybody to deny. I think that the success of the Trump administration, the success that they've had, are taking the 80 side of 80-20 issues.

Starting point is 00:39:08 And I think that the success of President Trump in 2024 was that he oddly became the normie candidate. He was the guy who was returned to normal candidacy in the face of Biden and the bizarreness of Harris. And I think that as we see many of Trump's policies rolled out, the ones that are rolled out the way that Antonio is rolling it out are incredibly well received by the American population because they're seeing serious people doing serious work that needs to be done.

Starting point is 00:39:31 And the ones that are not rolled out that way, I think are going to be a little more unpopular with the American people. And that's kind of, I want President Trump to succeed at a lot of these agenda items and I don't want his good agenda items getting essentially railroaded and run over by the bad roll out of other agenda items. So you think thoughtful is good and well thought out, constructed and communicated. When you talk about this being done right, what do you think is being done wrong? It could be done better, I guess would be a generous way of saying it. What could they communicate better? I mean, not to jump into the pile of rakes

Starting point is 00:40:05 that is the tariff plan. But I think that the way that the tariff plan was rolled out is about as bad a rollout as you could do. The reason I say that is not just because of my disagreements on the actual policy. I'll either be right or I'll be wrong on that. But the way that it was rolled out with essentially kind of a surprise announcement, I

Starting point is 00:40:23 don't mind a surprise announcement if what is then rolled out is not replete with sort of contradictory justifications, statistics that are labeled one thing but really are not that thing. And so it opens itself up to all sorts of critiques from every possible side of the aisle. If you wanna make the argument,

Starting point is 00:40:41 make the full-scale well-thought argument, and then we can argue over whether it's true or not, but there's four or five different claims that are being simultaneously made about the tariffs. One, they're going to raise revenue. Two, they're going to reshore. Three, that you are going to somehow rejigger the world trading system. Some of these are mutually exclusive. If you're going to reshore, you're not going to raise as much revenue, for example. Those two things are mutually exclusive, and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time. If you're going to puthore, you're not going to raise as much revenue, for example. Those two things are mutually exclusive and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time. If you're going to put out a giant chart that the president holds up that shows tariff rates plus unspecified variable, then what I'd like to know is what the actual tariff rate is

Starting point is 00:41:18 as opposed to what the calculation seems to be, which was the trade deficit with a country divided into the imports to that country. That has nothing to do with the tariff rate. I mean, just technically speaking, it has literally nothing to do with the tariff rate. And so what that means is now you're boxed in logically. If President Trump wants to do a reciprocal tariff reduction, for example, how do you do that? Because he actually has used a statistic for the tariffs that have nothing to do with the tariff rate and are actually just trade deficits. So the only way to actually rectify that statistic is to have Madagascar buy a bunch of American product, for example, in order to get their quote unquote tariff rate down. That sort of stuff seems badly calibrated, even if you like the policy, for example.

Starting point is 00:41:58 All right, yeah, so let's see this. Unless from a poker point of view, they spent many months declaring they're going to do tariffs. And everyone thought they were bluffing and said, everyone said, there's no way you're going to do tariffs. It's like someone in poker saying, I'm going to play every hand I get, I'm going to be crazy. You don't believe them. And they actually have to do it in order to get the negotiating leverage that they need

Starting point is 00:42:17 to be able to negotiate trade deals ultimately. And they have to look a little crazy, maybe. I mean, that's- So you're in, that's your position, Freiburg? They're in the 4D chess or? I'm trying to rationalize one kind of rational reason for why a lot of smart people would end up putting that board up, that poster board up,

Starting point is 00:42:34 where to your point, Ben, they said that these are kind of the tariffs that are being levied upon our country, when in fact it is simply the math of imports minus exports divided by imports. That's what the number was. And it was maxed out at that number or 10%. And that's what they did. So they did that basically as a way, in my opinion, it looks like, and I'm just trying

Starting point is 00:42:56 to take a read on this, that they're using this as a way to anchor for negotiations going forward to make the case we are declaratively, crazily off the friggin ship going to do whatever the heck we want to do here in this administration. Now everyone takes them seriously. Now everyone shows up to the negotiating table. And now they can actually negotiate and then announce a series of win after win after win and say, we got this set of countries to capitulate today. This is the deal we worked out. It's a totally unique deal. This set of deals we worked out today this set of countries to capitulate today. This is the deal we worked out. It's a totally unique deal.

Starting point is 00:43:25 This set of deals we worked out today. This set of deals we worked out today. And basically getting all the trade representatives to the table by making the case that they're actually willing to go all the way to the wall on stuff. So that's the only way I can kind of rationalize this rollout, Ben. That's what it feels like to me. For months, they've been very declarative. We are going to do tariffs.

Starting point is 00:43:44 Besant said it to us on our interview. Lutnik said it to us in our interview and no one took them seriously. I did, I did by the way. I will say that I took them totally seriously so much so that I called my financial advisor after the state of the union address and told them to rejigger my stock and bond ratio

Starting point is 00:43:59 in my portfolio because I figured that something like this was going to happen. I think- You went heavy treasuries. Yes, I Let I went light stocks. I'll say that and the and the reason for that is because again I think that the thing about President Trump is that you? He may not you know be serious in every single thing that he says But he is very clear that when he says the thing over and over and over there is no hidden motivation And this is the part that I always have trouble with, with sort of the 40 chess reads on President Trump.

Starting point is 00:44:27 There's almost never a hidden motivation. He pretty much just says the thing that he thinks, right? It's one of the things that makes him so popular and authentic is that there isn't a 40 chess game being played. If he says that he wants a thing to happen, it's because he actually wants the thing to happen. Now, the thing about President Trump,

Starting point is 00:44:41 he's also a realist. So if a bunch of bad headlines hit him, he may then change his mind and decide that he wants to drive a truck directly through the center of the tariffs because the prices are going up too much on, for example, semiconductors. So one of the big exemptions from these tariffs is, in fact, in the area of semiconductors. Again, there you see a sort of couple of different justifications that are mutually exclusive that are fighting each other.

Starting point is 00:45:00 One of them is the idea we need to reshore semiconductor production because it's a national security asset. And the other is we need to raise revenue on semiconductors. So he exempted them, which kind of, you know, kind of bollocks us up the logic. And I think that the there are a couple of tells that that isn't what's happening. Listen, I think it may end up being the thing you're saying. I think the most likely result of these tariffs is that within the next few weeks, the headlines are not good. President Trump starts driving trucks through the center of the tariffs, and then he starts

Starting point is 00:45:27 getting wins from various parties outside that allow him to find an off ramp on some of these tariffs. Now, a company in Belgium says they're going to build a factory in the United States. He has them to the White House. They have a big ceremony. And then he says, and as a result of this, we're now lowering the tariffs in sort of the same way he did with with Columbia when he said not the university, the country, said he was gonna hit them with tariffs unless you accept these these illegal immigrants and then they did So that very well might be the offer. I don't think that's what's going on right now

Starting point is 00:45:53 I think what's going on right now is the strategy that Lutnick has repeatedly expressed which is that they actually kind of like the tariffs They actually think that this is good economic policy and that between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history And and so they agree that this is good economic policy and that between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history. And so they do agree. I think that that is a bad read on economic history because there are a lot of confounds there that are being ignored. Among those confounds would be the fact that actually Revolution. Yes. So a few just just name a few in the Industrial Revolution, extraordinarily high levels of immigration, by the way, during that period.

Starting point is 00:46:26 So you had an incredibly cheap labor base that was actually coming into the United States at that time, massive expansion of the American population. No income tax. So free flowing capital. A newly discovered continent, right? Like truly, like many, many confounds, right? And by the way, less international trade generally.

Starting point is 00:46:42 So tariffs aren't going to have the same sort of impact on global supply chains as they would now, where every product that you buy has gone through 10 different countries in 10 different ways. And so, no, I don't think that that is a comp. But that doesn't mean that Lutnick doesn't think that it's a comp, for example. And I think that when it comes to the rollout, again, a methodical rollout, I totally get the crazy man theory. And I

Starting point is 00:47:05 think that sometimes President Trump does that. I'm hoping that that's what he's doing. But a good example of an off ramp he could have taken if that's the thing he's trying to do. So yesterday, in anticipation of this, Israel, which had very, very low tariffs on United States goods anyway, announced they'd removed all tariffs on American goods, right? There were no tariffs on American goods anymore. And the administration that afternoon listed their tariff rate at 33%, and then hit them with a 17% tariff for a country that is just taking a win and just use them as an example of a great partner. Exactly. Exactly. I think that didn't kid didn't Canada do the same? Didn't Canada drop tariffs like the morning of CNBC and they said we're totally willing to go to zero and

Starting point is 00:47:43 then the anchors correctly on CNBC were like, well, then why haven't you done that already? To Ben's point, Israel did do that. And but I think your theory, Ben is like, absolutely correct. If you make this analogy to what he did with overturning Roe v. Wade, it is the same exact thing he told us over and over again, I'm going to put two maybe three people on the Supreme Court, I'm going to overturn it. And then afterwards, he kind of wiped his hands through it and was like, Listen, it's up to you guys, I had nothing to do with it. He will tell you what he's gonna do. He told you he was going to do

Starting point is 00:48:12 these tariffs. He's done them. And I do think there's something embedded in what you said, Ben, which is I think he likes everybody to come to Mar-a-Lago or to come to the White House. And he loves doing deals. He's addicted to it. He wrote a book, The Art of the Deal. He loves people coming to him hanging out. And Tramok, maybe you could give us your perspective. Crazy man, very crazy grandpa. Or this is a negotiating tactic. Everybody has to come through him or Lutnick believes it. As he said,

Starting point is 00:48:42 very clearly, I'm going to add a trillion dollars in taxes here. What do you think is going on here? Because if when I went through all the top people on the internet, all our group of friends who are deeply in finance, I can't find anybody deeply in finance who's not in the administration who thinks this is well executed or a good idea. What's your thought? Let me start by saying a couple of things.

Starting point is 00:49:02 To use the Donald Rumsfeld code. I do agree with Ben tremendously that this was a known known. We mentioned this last episode, Donald Trump has been speaking about tariffs for 40 plus years. So this is not a new thing. And I think that he tried this in Trump one, but to your guys's point, it didn't really go well because he didn't have the team around him that had his back. And so it was inevitable that he would have tried it in Trump too. He said it and he's been able to do it. So if you weren't planning for it, whoever was vested in this outcome, you really needed to be focused on this. It was a known known. And so there was a

Starting point is 00:49:46 little dereliction of duty if you were caught off guard, I think that's one. The second is, and we've said this all year, since January one on this pod, we started it even with the with that poly market bet that I made, which is the Trump administration does not care about the stock market. And by the way, the trade actually closed out. So congrats to all these people that won $650,000 on PolyMarket. And let me just explain PolyMarket put a betting market suggested by Chamath PolyHuptia.

Starting point is 00:50:17 They are partners of ours, Magnificent 7 shrinks below 30% of S&P 500 in 2025. This was free money. This was like the stock market giving out free money. But why did this happen? This happened because it was very clear to me early on that the rhetoric had shifted to say, we care about MAGA. We care about people that have working class

Starting point is 00:50:42 and middle-class jobs. None of those folks are deeply invested in the asset economy the way maybe some of us are. And so it was directionally clear. And by the way, Scott Besson, what a cold ass quote yesterday. The equity market sell-off is a mag seven problem, not a mag a problem.

Starting point is 00:51:02 So there again, putting all of this into the realm of this is a known known. So I think it's pretty clear. One, Trump has had a 40 year view on tariffs. They're going to go through with this and they're going to see it through. I don't think you're going to see this grand capitulation. Two, they are okay with the volatility in the equity markets. And then three, which is the other thing that we've been talking about a lot is where does this move our practical financing costs? What is this? Right? We've talked about this. We have $6 trillion we need to finance in the next nine months. So the singular goal, in my opinion, of the White House has been move the tenure as aggressively and as quickly as possible. And look what they've done.

Starting point is 00:51:46 As of yesterday, it's unbelievable what's happened in the tenure. You know, you are kissing 4%. And we talked about this, if it had gone in the other direction, guys, 30 or 40 basis points, and it touched 5%, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of extra money that would not have been found, that would have had to be printed, right? And now this is hundreds of billions of dollars that we will save. So if we cut rates, if the Fed cuts rates, that's all predicated on them.

Starting point is 00:52:15 No, no, no, no, no, this doesn't matter anymore. No, this is, this is, the Fed doesn't control the back end of the curve. On the treasury, the treasury markets, the government sells treasuries. Governments will not auction 10 years and the auctions will clear at around 4%. It is an enormous, like as an American, what we should all be thinking is, irrespective of what you think you know or what you think you like

Starting point is 00:52:36 about tariffs, we should all have a moment where we exhale because the long end of the curve is giving us a respite in a storm, and we should be incredibly thankful. What I'm referring to, Chamath, is you said yesterday, Jerome Powell, you're on the clock, so maybe you could explain what you meant by that. Okay, so this is, that's a different part of the curve. I understand it's a different thing, but I'm just trying to put these two things together, because those are the two things we're saying this action took, this will enable. Okay, so let's play the ball where it lies. The Wall Street smart money thought

Starting point is 00:53:11 this was a $250 billion event. They were wrong. But this is part of why the stock market has reacted so violently today. This is a $750 billion to trillion dollar event. This is a big moment in the market. So what does it create? It creates the risk of a recession. How do you minimize that risk? That is all about how easy it is for the average person to be able to borrow money. Where is that dictated? That

Starting point is 00:53:39 is more dictated by the Fed and how they price the front end of the curve. So what we need to have happen now is while Scott is out financing $6 trillion on the backend, we now need to get Jerome Powell to cut the front end. And if you do it aggressively enough, you can introduce liquidity in a moment where small and medium sized businesses can go and get financed to weather the storm. Jamal, I want to add onto your point, just so you guys know, there's roughly 12 to $16 trillion

Starting point is 00:54:12 of private corporate debt in America. So this is debt held by small businesses, medium businesses, partnerships that have on average, call it a 15% operating margin. So they're going to be under pressure if there is some recessionary risk to make sure they have access to capital. And if you remember the interview that Besant gave to us a couple of weeks ago, he was very clear that one of his mandates is to enable the re-leveraging of the financial system. Meaning he wants to give banks the ability

Starting point is 00:54:43 to issue more debt, to introduce more capital and more liquidity into the markets by taking away some of the regulatory restrictions that have made it more difficult for the banks to issue credit to business owners and to individuals. So if they are successful in their deregulatory efforts, it will introduce more liquidity into the market coupled with deregulatory work that they're making. In the other parts of the administration, as this is their declaration, not mine, their intention is to make sure

Starting point is 00:55:12 that that capital flows into building businesses building new businesses, underwriting new jobs, creating more employment. That's the theory that they're trying to execute. Obviously, it's part of this three legged stool, but if it doesn't all work, the stool falls over. Okay, Chamath, give us an example here. And I're trying to execute. Obviously it's part of this three legged stool, but if it doesn't all work, the stool falls over. Okay, Chamath, give us an example here. And I'm trying to get you to paint the entire picture here because the tariff cudgel is not making sense

Starting point is 00:55:34 to a lot of folks. Okay, so it's not all good news. Yes. So let's paint the, so I'll give a very specific example. A friend of ours runs a hundred plus year company. I'm just going to say it in generic terms so that I don't betray his confidence. Sure, no problem.

Starting point is 00:55:51 And this is a business that's been built over a hundred years, owned by an American family, an incredible family, and they make products that we all know and love. And what did this action do? So in their example, they're in a very difficult position because they have, as David said, a very tight operating margin because they have to compete ferociously against China. And they've done everything possible to maintain their capabilities in America, hire American workers in the heartland, but still compete against China. It's tough.

Starting point is 00:56:30 And this action today swings them from profitability to a potential yearly loss in a meaningful order of magnitude, like hundreds of millions of dollars. So Jason, that's the other side of this tariff coin. So we have to find a way of finding those examples. And as Ben said, excluding them somehow, or giving them reprieve because that wasn't the intention, I think of what Trump was trying to do yesterday. That's an example of a company that should be winning and should continue to win and fight the

Starting point is 00:56:56 good fight against China and try to continue to employ thousands of Americans. But this thing, because they had some capacity in some other countries, not China, by the way, got it, blows the thing up. And so now you have to fix those things. All right, Ben, let me get you involved here. I'm going to play you a quick clip from Rand Paul and I want to get your feedback on executive power and then on tariffs themselves. And if it's a good idea or a bad idea, I'll play the clip. What's the rationale for getting behind this? Well, one, we should not live under emergency rule. The Constitution said taxes are raised by Congress.

Starting point is 00:57:32 Most specifically, taxes originate in the House and come to the Senate. Some against emergency rule. We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada. Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else's product, it's mutually beneficial or you wouldn't buy it.

Starting point is 00:57:48 If the trade is voluntary, it's always beneficial. There is no Canada versus the US. The consumer wins when the price is the lowest price. Tariffs raise prices and they're a bad idea for the economy. Ben, your thoughts on the two issues, is trade good for consumers? This is what I think is on top of everybody's mind,

Starting point is 00:58:06 that the whole Trump presidency, and he won in large part due to inflation and Biden economics, and that he was gonna reduce inflation. And I think a lot of people believe inflation's about to come roaring back, your thoughts on the two issues. Well, I mean, obviously on a macroeconomic level, I totally agree with Senator Paul. When it comes to the powers of? Well, I mean, obviously on a macroeconomic level, I totally agree with Senator Paul.

Starting point is 00:58:25 And when it comes to the powers of the presidency, I think that it's pretty extraordinary that we should be able to use the trade deficit as a national emergency sufficient to put down what effectively amounts to a $700 billion tax increase on the American people, if you're talking about them paying the price of the tariffs on the other end.

Starting point is 00:58:44 Congress, I think that if things get bad enough, there are a bunch of, you know, streams obviously here that cross. One of the big things here is that Congress is up for re-elect in a year and a half. And if the Republicans lose Congress in a year and a half, then whatever tricks President Trump is trying to pull in terms of being able to rejigger the rate at which we are paying back our national debt, all that stuff goes by the wayside because if Democrats win Congress, pretty much everything comes to a crashing halt. And there are a lot of Republicans who are in swing districts or in, say, R plus five, R plus 10 districts who are suddenly going to feel pretty vulnerable.

Starting point is 00:59:16 A recession takes everybody with it. It takes Secretary Besson, it takes the president, it takes JD Vance, it takes everybody with it. Recessions tend to crush the president who is in power at the time, regardless of what their long-term plan is. When they say short-term pain for long-term gain, again, I think that there are a few factors here that I would like to see played out. For example, if there is an inflationary effect to the tariffs in terms of price, does that

Starting point is 00:59:39 mean that Jerome Powell is going to eject additional liquidity into the markets by decreasing interest rates? It's hard to see how. I mean, he's holding the interest rate steady right now without decreasing the interest rates despite President Trump basically blasting him publicly since before he was even the president formally. He's not just the president's elect at that time. So again, it's hard for me to see how all of this squares into what looks like a really well-calibrated policy. And then beyond that, in the long term, tricks that we play with regard to the rate of interest

Starting point is 01:00:10 paying back our national debt are not gonna be sufficient to pay back our national debt unless we have robust economic growth. And so a lot has to be bet on the robust economic growth out earning essentially the levels of debt that we are currently racking up. And while I love what Doge is doing, the systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by Doge.

Starting point is 01:00:28 I mean, it's the means-tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long-term drivers of our national debt. And military, I think, would be number two, yeah. Military as a percentage of the GDP or as a percentage of the budget has been relatively stable and in some cases decreasing since the end of the Iraq War. True.

Starting point is 01:00:45 But when it comes to the mean-estested welfare programs, those continue to grow as a percentage of the budget and over time are increasingly unfunded. Yeah. As our population ages and the population grows, Freeburg, putting aside executive power in the midterms, which, yeah, that would change everything. What are your thoughts on just inflation and tariffs and the chance that this comes back and explodes in the administration's lap? Well, I think there are three consequences not necessarily related to inflation that are just worth spending time on one

Starting point is 01:01:17 of which I don't think gets talked about enough. The first is just the challenge of tariffs in general. And I shared this clip with you guys over the group chat yesterday from Ronald Reagan talking. Oh, it's so funny. I haven't chewed up. I actually edited. Let's do that. Let's play this clip and get your reaction. And today many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period called the smooth Hawley tariff greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery.

Starting point is 01:01:45 You see, at first, when someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is, first, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. People stop buying. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.

Starting point is 01:02:28 The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity. So let me just say three things that I think are going to be important consequences, one of which doesn't get talked about much at all. The first is the important point about the decline in competitiveness that arises when you use protectionist tactics like import tariffs. So ultimately, in order to be competitive in the market, you need to have a free market to test how good you are relative to your competitors. And if you use tariffs or other taxes or other government intervening systems to distort the natural forces of markets, meaning there's a buyer and a seller, there may be multiple sellers, and ultimately the buyer will choose the best seller, then you're creating a disincentive for American enterprise to be more competitive.

Starting point is 01:03:20 We lost manufacturing because we weren't competitive in manufacturing. Putting a tariff on other manufacturing countries does not make Americans more competitive. It basically gives American businesses a crutch. Give an example, David. So let's talk about manufacturing. So if I'm using a traditional assembly line with low efficiency systems, I'm going to be more expensive to make a device than a Chinese factory that's built with a lot of automation, high efficiency systems, etc. And so if I'm saying, well, to buy the Chinese product, you got to pay twice as much because

Starting point is 01:03:50 there's a tariff now. The American company does not have an incentive to invest in automating or building better technology or adopting new technology to make themselves competitive in the marketplace. So that's the challenge with tariffs long term, is that they distort economic consequences that arise in a traditional free market system. The second consequence I think is important is under this guise and in the near term, the effect of some of these tariffs is going to be the loss of revenue for a significant chunk of the American businesses. In particular, I'll use one example. People may not remember this because it wasn't that big of a thing, but between 2016 and 2020 during the last Trump administration, there was a continued kind of tariff and trade escalation between Trump and China.

Starting point is 01:04:34 And during that time, China stopped buying American ag exports and China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products. As a result, the Trump administration had to issue two support payment checks to farmers that totaled $28 billion in 2018 and 2019. Just because of that China stepping out of the buying market, American farmers represent a large amount of the voting block for the Republican Party. And so I think that the second consequence is going to be that there is going to need to be financial support, which means increased government spending if we intend to keep the tariffs in place and the global market stops buying American exports.

Starting point is 01:05:13 That's the second consequence. The third consequence, which is the one I am most worried about, which I think about a lot, is China had the State Council meeting a couple days ago. And in that State Council meeting, they announced a series of measures and a series of steps that they would be willing to take on IP infringement in the case of retaliatory tariff escalation in a trade war. What that means is that China may step up and say, you know what, we are disregarding

Starting point is 01:05:43 all of the IP rights held by IP rights holders around the world, and they could steal IP more openly, more brazenly. And because they have a lower cost of manufacturing, they have a larger manufacturing base, a lower cost of power, they could basically take the only thing that much of American enterprise relies on,

Starting point is 01:06:00 which is our IP rights, and say, we're just gonna, while people might say, oh, they already do that, they already do that, they do it to an extent but imagine if China just made copies of Microsoft Word and started selling it around the world for five dollars yeah I mean they did that internally for some period of time then they started to respect it internally but they've never done a great point and then imagine Disney films overseas that's right and so now imagine if they started taking all of American manufacturing drawings bl blueprints, designs, and they have all this manufacturing capacity and they sold everything at 10 cents

Starting point is 01:06:29 on the dollar to all of the global markets that the US is now cutting trade ties with because of the tariff escalation. And China says, we don't care about your IP rights anymore. We don't care because you've cut us off. The rest of the world needs someone that will sell to them. I will also say China, one thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is going to go into production in Q3 of 2025, and will end up being in full production in 2026. This will move the base from Taiwan

Starting point is 01:06:58 potentially into China. They are developing lithography systems, they're developing advanced semiconductor manufacturing systems, and they will effectively have everything from energy to the minerals to the manufacturing capacity to support and service all and the software now all of technology. And so we are in a really disadvantaged position if China does choose in this moment to disregard the IP rights of American businesses. So that's a big they have the ability to to swing back at us

Starting point is 01:07:24 to map you want to wrap us up here? I'll take the other side of all of this. I'll start with, again, there's no point prognosticating when they're just telling you what they intend to do. Nick, you want to play the clip? I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have

Starting point is 01:07:44 some kind of a grand global economic reordering. There's something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods, or if you want to go back, like a treat, something back to the steel agreements or the Treaty of Versailles. I mean, what is that just to kind of like refresher? What are we talking about? We're talking about commercial relations between, at the the time 44 countries, right? This is a big statement. I don't think that these kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour. And I think that people understand if you're kind of like steeped in the history of it, how important these kinds of statements are. So I think I take this similarly to how I take Trump's rhetoric on tariffs. And I'm spending

Starting point is 01:08:31 some time trying to now understand how are the scenarios that could play out because I think David is right if you assume the status quo, meaning what are the risks. But what they're saying is we're going to question this, we're actually going to go here and just totally rewrite that. If that happens as part of this, all bets are off. In my opinion, I don't think any of us know with any certainty, what a new economic framework would look like. And if Scott is basically prepping himself to say, hey, put me in coach, I'm ready,

Starting point is 01:09:06 I would take that seriously. Ben, what should be, let's talk about, on-shoring and bringing these jobs, bringing these factories back to America. It seems to me a bit crazy that we're gonna make fast fashion and people's Coachella wear and their anchor, you know, USB C cables here, pharmaceutical shore, we need that for strategic purposes,

Starting point is 01:09:31 we obviously need the military and chips. But outside of that, is there some rationale here when we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime, and everybody wants to come here, you know, to immigrate to this country, to doing these tariffs and trying to create jobs here that we don't necessarily need. We have too much employment right now in the market and not enough bodies to fill all the open job wrecks. What do you think? Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's really fascinating is the kind of difference in messaging that you hear between the Treasury Secretary, Howard Lutnickick and the Commerce Secretary and the President. I mean, they're all messaging kind of different things. I think Secretary Besant is making the strongest case for what's being done with this sort of long-term, what does reordering look like? And even there, I'm still lacking clarity on what a reordered world trade relationship actually, what is the end of the

Starting point is 01:10:20 rainbow there? What does that actually look like when all is said and done so that I can kind of grasp exactly what that, what he wants that to look like when all is said and done so that I can kind of grasp exactly what he wants that to look like? I think that Secretary Letnick seems to actually just like tariffs and President Trump seems to have a picture in his head when it comes to factories that we're going to revitalize the steel mills, that we're going to be doing the kinds of jobs

Starting point is 01:10:39 that we did back in the 1950s. There's sort of a nostalgia that President Trump has in sort of his own mind about these sorts of jobs that, by the way, nobody in modern life actually wants to work at. If you were to work at a Ford factory in 1953 in a non-air-conditioned factory riveting for a living, you would actually be quite unhappy. And you should be very happy that actually there are machines that do that now.

Starting point is 01:10:59 And you hear this kind of talk sometimes bandied about not just with regard to offshoring, but with regards to technology and machines. I mean, I've talked to, I remember a few years back in 2018, I talked to Tucker Carlson on my program and he literally said that he would outlaw self-driving cars because it would get rid of white trucker jobs, you know, blue collar trucker jobs in Ohio and Michigan. And when I said, well, that sounds kind of luddite, he said, well, the luddites had a point and, you know, then suggested that on the basis of safety, he would ban it.

Starting point is 01:11:26 And I remember asking him, but those drive those self-driving cars will presumably be more safe than humans driving. So that's safer. Yeah. And what he actually said was, well, you know, you asked me on what grounds I would ban it, not not whether that was true or not. But yeah, I think that that is I think I think this is the danger that particularly tech runs when we're talking about these sorts of things, is to believe that the animus for trade relationships

Starting point is 01:11:50 around the world or the anti-competitive nature of many of the activities that are being taken are relegated solely to sort of the foreign sphere. I think that you could easily see that turn on, quote unquote, job loss that is caused by AI or job loss that is caused by AI or job loss that is caused by technological gain. And the truth is that if you're talking about job loss in the manufacturing sector in the United States, the vast majority of job loss in the manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring and due to technological advancements.

Starting point is 01:12:16 Manufacturing productivity in the United States has actually dramatically risen since the since the 1980s. Okay, so let's play conspiracy theorists for a second because okay, you're right, Ben, like you want that clarity, I want that clarity, Freeberg wants it, J. Cal, everybody wants it. But at this moment, if it's a catalyst to your point where everybody is forced into the room and Trump leads a grand bargain across the 50 or 60 most important trading partners in the world, what does that look like? It's almost like, okay, we're re-establishing something that's akin to the United Nations and what the United Nations was meant to be post-World

Starting point is 01:12:52 War II, but that institution has totally failed. So this new thing exists purely on economic lines and cooperation. I don't know. I struggle actually to your point to kind of imagine what are the outcomes, but there are so many unbelievable outcomes in that scenario if they were able to get the top 50 commercial mercantile countries together in a room and say, let's hammer something up. I mean, I totally agree with that. I think one of my questions, however, is if you take a look at some of the examples that Scott is using there when he talks about the Bretton Woods agreement, or if you're going to talk about what Nixon did in debasing the dollar.

Starting point is 01:13:27 Versailles. Versailles at least would be a better example in the sense that you didn't have a global hegemon at the time. If you're talking about the Bretton Woods system, literally the rest of the world effectively did not exist in the post-World War II era. So what is everybody going to bet on? They have to bet on the American dollar. There's no other choice.

Starting point is 01:13:41 By the time that Nixon decides to go off the gold standard, essentially, he has to rely on the organization of the petrodollar in order to make sure that people don't dissociate from the United States. What is the thing that's going to draw people to the United States as opposed to looking to a rising competitor like a China? That's a great question. So what is that thing? What do you think that?

Starting point is 01:13:59 That's a great question. AI comes to mind. Yeah. AI is the only possibility, which is why I think the AI regime inside the Trump administration is so deeply important. I also think this is why I'm warning about, you know, the possibility that these sort of anti-free market forces that are related to tariffs aren't just related to tariffs in some quarters.

Starting point is 01:14:15 This is where populism can kind of run out of control and start to actually turn against some of its tech masters in some of these cases. And so one of the things that I'm very concerned about is if I was talking with Danielle Smith, who's the premier of Alberta the other day, and she was talking about the fact that Canada like she's very conservative, Alberta tends to be a more conservative area of Canada. And she was talking about how if Mark Carney were to become prime minister of Canada instead of Pierre Poliev, that he actually is eager for the tariff war because it allows him to reorient toward China and away from the United States. And there are countries that absolutely would love to do that. I mean, there's a case to

Starting point is 01:14:48 be made that the EU would love an easy off ramp with Russia and China and use this as an excuse as a way of reorienting back toward Russian oil, for example, and then Chinese markets because that Chinese market is enormous. These are the lower inputs, right? I mean, you have lower input costs, which makes life better for citizens and citizens like cheap things. They like cheap oil in their cars and they like cheap cars. They'll be bringing BYD cars into Europe. And the thing that I'm worried about is when I look at the forget about Europe and forget about Canada for a second, the tariffs that kind of shocked me when I looked at that list were all the tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries, right?

Starting point is 01:15:23 All of those countries where where where production has been shifting out of China to places like, for example, Vietnam or Cambodia. The production has been shifting to those places specifically because companies know that the United States is going after China. Well now, why exactly would you manufacture in Vietnam when Vietnam is going to be with a 46% tariff rate on the basis that we have a 90%? It's more than that, Ben. It's like they've made those investments over the last five or six years. And so you have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars

Starting point is 01:15:53 of sunk costs. Now what do you do in that moment? These were specifically designed, Ben, to be a diversification strategy. Japan was paying their companies to build factories outside of China, and Apple was doing India, Vietnam to build AirPods and laptops and even the iPhone being made outside of China. That diversification strategy is wiped out. Jake, did you watch the presser yesterday? The worst part for me, I only had one moment where I was like, oh gosh, he stopped on Sri Lanka. And he goes, Sri Lanka. Good old Sri Lanka.

Starting point is 01:16:27 Okay, Chamath, amazing Sri Lankan, but Sri Lanka, very tough on us. Not very accepting. I was like, Sir, I'm American. Go ahead, Ben, you can do yours. You can do your dueling about Sri Lanka. Just do a great Trump. Okay. And that's the reason why Ben Shapiro's podcast number two to all in now because of the Ben Shapiro Trump impersonation. Ben Shapiro, a great American, have you been to the White House? I have actually. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:54 Have you been invited in this? Or are you still anti-Trump or never Trumper? He was a nasty never Trumper now. He's pro-Trump. Exactly. I had the same exact trajectory as JD Vance, except I didn't end up vice president of the United States. But you know, the I think that, you know, that again, well, one of when we talk about

Starting point is 01:17:14 the rollout, the fact that, for example, the meme online right now, and I know we all kind of live in me moral that the meme is the president and JD Vance lecturing a penguin, because on that chart is the hurt islands. Have you even apologized for eating all that mackerel wait what are you guys talking about? there's an island that got a 10% tariff but there's nothing on the island except penguins yeah it's a nation state this is where I started to think of this

Starting point is 01:17:40 come on now have you even apologized? Okay. No cards, there are no cards. This penguin has no cards. You have no cards to play. Okay. You've got a great tuxedo. At least you showed up in a tux. Okay. Good stuff.

Starting point is 01:17:58 Oh my God. By the way, I think that Ben's framing of this, thank you for that, because that was really helpful to me. You're right. If we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we have to have an anchor asset. So it's a really great question. What is that anchor asset? It has to be AI.

Starting point is 01:18:18 But then, you know, underneath that AI thing, we have these two very complicated problems. One is a meaningful energy problem. I've been talking about this now incessantly. We don't have enough electrons. We just don't. And then the second is what Friedberg mentioned before, which is that we have a very delicate technological supply chain to make the underlying silicon we need for these things. Neither are trivial.

Starting point is 01:18:41 These are not things that can be easily solved. Yeah, the AI supply chain is electricity. We're going from one terawatt to two, China's going from three to eight over the same time period, just to be clear. So they're accelerating. The second is rare earth materials that we don't mind for we've outsourced mining. And Doug Burgum told me an interesting stat. He's our Secretary of the Interior. He said, we only graduate 200 people a year in the United States with degrees in mining.

Starting point is 01:19:10 Oh, beginning in the 90s, when globalization took off, we basically stopped mining in this country and moved everything to all the places because we had this NIMBYism. We didn't want to have mining in our backyard. The third, obviously, is the manufacturing of semiconductors, which we don't do. The components to do the manufacturing. So there's a company called ASML, which everyone that works in tech knows about. They have these advanced lithography systems to make the semiconductors. They don't sell to China. So now China's got their own homegrown lithography systems.

Starting point is 01:19:40 The worst thing about it. Yeah. We don't make any of that in-house.. We don't mine. We don't have enough power. We don't have the materials. And we don't make lithography. And we don't have any fabs. I said this before, but one of the biggest national security threats that we created out of nowhere was when the Wall Street Journal was allowed

Starting point is 01:19:55 to do a detailed article on ASML. And one of the craziest and scariest stats is that there is a person, literally one person, that can operate these machines that are trained by ASML and then forward deployed. And there was a woman that was profiled. And I thought, this is a national security risk. You should not be outing who this woman is.

Starting point is 01:20:18 She's gonna be kidnapped, Brianna Hall. Exactly. At the end of the day, what the US has is the weights. We've got 70 billion parameters and we call that an AI model. That 70 billion parameters, if someone gets a copy of it, they've got an AI model. So how much of an advantage do we really have? And the other thing that we had was- Meanwhile, China's got the whole supply chain and now they're making their own models.

Starting point is 01:20:40 And the thing that we had was our trade relationships with all the places that had all of these things that we actually needed, right? This is and it was a reason functioning. Yes It was quite high functioning and and then and then beyond that you also have the problem of what happens if there's just less demand For for dollars on the world stage I mean the the exit of the dollar as the world's global reserve currency is gonna have some pretty nasty spillover effects and And it's gonna require the government to start sucking in more dollars from the American population in order to pay off all of these these debts that we're racking up. So I mean, all these things tend like you

Starting point is 01:21:10 could see a world where we magic our way out of this. But this is what I've been saying to J Cal de dollarization is what ends up happening. I mean, I think that's what the stable coins I think is set up to counter people are now saying, hey, we're going to have there's two stable coin acts that are going around here. One of them doesn't require like know your customer anti money laundering terrorism stuff, which is, you know, tethers, according to many reports, bread and butter. And then the other one is to domesticate all this business, give it to circle, give it to stripe, give it to American companies and force them to buy a certain percentage of treasuries and allow them to give interest which the stablecoin bills are

Starting point is 01:21:51 now debating if they should give that so I don't know if you guys are watching that but that would be so there's an analog keep a buyer for you know our currency. There's an analog to this that I think is important. When you look at the debt to GDP of Japan, one of the critical questions is how can you have a functioning economy at 250, 260% debt to GDP? We're at sort of like hundred and teens, right? 120 something, whatever. One of the critical advantages that they have is that they export a lot of incredible goods abroad, but they have an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers for their own Japanese bonds. And so there's this permanent bid that exists because the net buyer can be a Japanese person on the margins and they're always there. And it's not necessarily a person, it's an insurance company,

Starting point is 01:22:42 it's a pension fund, etc. The thing that US dollar stablecoins does is it starts to replicate one of those advantages, which again, if you think about having a release fell for the US economy, and if we needed to, all of a sudden scream to 200% debt to GDP. The real question is where's the incremental net buyer The real question is where's the incremental net buyer of the US bond? And it could be the person that has to back the stablecoin, which would then say the people in charge of the crypto strategy, we won't name names. No, if anybody knows anybody. That legislation needs to be incredibly permissive because to your guys' point, we would want the bid to US treasuries to exist and to be as ferocious as possible.

Starting point is 01:23:25 Right? Yeah. But I don't think you should give, let Tether do it until they do a proper audit and they stop doing money laundering and terrorism and all the crazy stuff. I'm not going all the way there. Allegedly. But what Circle does is I think quite structured and, you know, as well. Circle's, I mean, I think that's Circle's USDC.

Starting point is 01:23:44 That's their pitch. And I think the Trump family now just launched their own stable coin this week. So you're gonna see 10 stable coins. That is a great way to create competition and- I still think it's really, it's the right question that this administration has a responsibility to articulate.

Starting point is 01:24:01 What is it that makes America the linchpin of the global economy, of the Western democracy, of the world is we enter this new era with this rising power in China. And I'm not sure that there's clarity today. And what do you think it is? Oh, I'll tell you. Both of you guys, what do you guys think?

Starting point is 01:24:23 Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear what it is. The reason we keep winning and the reason China keeps stumbling is because we have rabid entrepreneurship and an investment and crazy investment infrastructure. The fact that we will bet on entrepreneurs and allow them to become billionaires or allow them to flame out and start again tomorrow. That entrepreneurial spirit of America is what needs to be preserved. And that's what created SpaceX. That's what created circle we just talked about stripe, we need the American exceptionalism and it has to be backed by recruiting, aka immigration of brilliant people like sacks like freeburg like

Starting point is 01:24:58 Chamath, who were not born in this country, you can't do it just based on Ben Shapiro and J Cal, you need to be looking around the world for the smartest people and then plugging them into the entrepreneurial system here. That's the magic. And that's the golden goose of America. David, what do you think? That's a very good, I mean, I think that's credible. I honestly don't know if I can be dismissive of China, like J Cal says, they keep stumbling and blah, blah, blah. I think that's absolutely wrong. There's a very good interview. What are those guys names from the Brookings Institution that do that podcast, then you might

Starting point is 01:25:30 know these guys, the three guys might as much is that who you're talking about? Or is this different podcast? I'm not sure it's not in the top 100. I don't know. Yeah, it's not in the top. They talked about China. And they talked about actually the rise in China where they 30 x GDP per capita and call it 30 years Because they allowed entrepreneurs good fellows good fellows sounds right. Yeah Good fellows, yeah It's Waldorf and Statler I think that's their names Waldorf and Statler those

Starting point is 01:26:04 Whoever instruments are good fellows Waldorf and Statler, I think that's their names. Waldorf and Statler, those are the quiver instruments. Good fellows, H.R. McMaster, Neal Ferguson. Nick, find a picture of Waldorf and Statler for free, Berk de Jogh is written. Oh, they're so great. They're so great. Okay, so anyway, they made the point that because China allowed the entrepreneurism

Starting point is 01:26:20 of the individuals to let the market run free, and they have this throttle. When they let the people run free, they let entrepreneurship thrive. And then sometimes they pull the throttle back, J Cal. And they just did that. And they quote, now they've pushed it forward again. And that's what drives the growth and the improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy, in mining and now in manufacturing. And it's I think going to lead to a great era of prosperity for China.

Starting point is 01:26:47 It's pretty clear with or without the conflict with the US, they've dramatically improved the conditions in that country over the last 30 years in a really profound historic way. So I don't want, I'm not gonna be dismissive and say that they're stumbling. Let's give it to Ben and then I'll tell you what I'm dismissive. So first of all, I think that China does face some serious, real serious structural problems ranging from demographics to debt. And I also think that if you take a look at sort of the history of economic fascism, which is what they're attempting to do, which is using capitalist methodologies in order to

Starting point is 01:27:18 prop up a very tyrannical government that will step in. In a centrally planned way. Exactly. And so for a short period of time, that seems like that will work. And then the problem is you can find yourself in a blind alley fairly quickly. And right now, AI is not a blind alley, but we also don't know exactly which way AI is going to develop in the most profitable way. I mean, the amount of money that's been poured into AI has not yet been justified by the amount of net on the return on the actual investment, obviously. And so if you don't, this is the benefit of the American market is that you have everybody

Starting point is 01:27:48 chasing everything all the time. And one of those things is gonna hit. The benefit of the Chinese market is you have everyone chasing one thing all the time. If that's the thing that actually hits, they'll do amazing, but it's possible that they completely miss it. But the problem is, I think, and this is where you get back to the political in the United States

Starting point is 01:28:02 and the necessity of avoiding a recession is that? To me the scariest thing that is happening inside the Trump administration is not something that's bad when President Trump was inaugurated There was one picture that spoke of the that kind of summed up the inauguration as President Trump there with Tim Cook and with the end With and with the Zuck and with Elon with all the billionaires behind him, all the tech bros right behind him. If there is a recession, what comes next is not going to be salutary to innovation, to investment, to technology, to anything remotely like that. And so the idea of short-term pain, it better be really, really short-term. The American people do not have patience for this.

Starting point is 01:28:38 And if it goes sideways, then what you're going to get is a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right that is going to take down everybody who is even remotely connected with this idea of free market capitalism. And so I think that one of the dangers in sort of attempting to manipulate the economy this way is that we're saying, okay, we're going to try these kind of methodologies of government control in which we rejigger the world economy in this way and that way, and then we'll magic our way out of it with with stable coin and AI. Maybe or maybe the best way to do this would actually be to allow the thing to

Starting point is 01:29:10 thrive that has always thrived in America, which is lower the regulations, let people innovate, let people fail, let people succeed, get the hell out of the way. And yes, actually do the things that you need to do in cutting government debt by doing the hard things. And the only way you're going to be able to do all those things is through continued success, not paying to get to some long term gain. It's got to be entrepreneurship. And there are some sub factors of it. In order to have a vibrant entrepreneurial community, you need to have immigration. That's why I asked Trump on this thing on this program. Can we get green cards? Can we get people who have degrees here, especially coming out of Stanford to stay in the country? He said yes, he'd staple them on the degrees. Great. The next thing is getting Lena con out and ending the wrath of Lena con we need M&A. Because when you have M&A, the companies get bigger. The

Starting point is 01:29:55 fact that YouTube, and Android and AdSense were purchased by Google made it into the massive success it is on a global basis today. And the fact that meta was able to buy things you may not like it when these companies get too powerful. But what Jack Ma, what happened to Jack Ma is the reason. Freebird that I don't believe a dictator will ever compete with our country. If we stay entrepreneurial and not socialist. Socialism is a cul de sac, as you're saying're saying Ben and it might work for a short period of time But then someone like Xi Jinping is gonna do what dictators do which is implode. He saw Jack Ma get popular He sent them to get reeducated and do some painting and he took a little painting He got rid of every educational company and pull up the chart of Chinese investment Nick if you have Boom, it just got smashed and And this is what dictators do. They do what Putin did.

Starting point is 01:30:47 He invades Ukraine. His economy goes off the rails. And this is what Xi Jinping did. They always implode. Let me give you a step ladder to get off your soapbox so I can ask Ben a question. Ben, when you said that in a recession, definitely not. That's exactly right. How come you don't have a passion for something,

Starting point is 01:31:06 you guys just have to give me a hard time. When you go on your passionate rant, I give you kudos. You're a virtue signaling eight ball, what do you do? You just shake it in some stupid statement, aphorism comes up. Ben agrees with me, Ben agrees.

Starting point is 01:31:18 American exceptionalism, M&A, Ben and I, that's it. I believe in the big question. Ben and I are doing all in 2.0. Let me rant against dictators for a minute and earn my kudos. Go ahead, Ben. No. You should just go rant about the Trump administration

Starting point is 01:31:31 and get your cabinet position. Go ahead. Ben, when you talk about inner recession, they go after tech companies. Can you just explain that more? Just explain that. I'm not sure I understood that totally. Okay, so there's a recession.

Starting point is 01:31:43 And President Trump, the way that people tend to think of politics is not on a granular level. They tend to see it on sort of a pixelated level because most people don't engage with politics on a granular level. They see a Surat painting, they don't see all the dots, they just see Sunday in the Park with George, right? And so when it comes to a recession, the image that's going to come to mind for the Trump administration is that this is an administration that is extremely friendly to business, particularly when it comes to tech.

Starting point is 01:32:06 And so whoever is standing next to President Trump, if there is a serious recession, gets nuked, gets caught in the fallout. And if that happens, then you will see a resurgent left led by a Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, not a sort of technocratic Obama-esque Ezra Klein abundance liberalism wing. You're going to get a resurgent Bernieism on the left that basically says these rich people screwed you in order to get ahead. You can feel it because you're feeling the recession.

Starting point is 01:32:33 They're still rich, you're still poor. And so what you really need is a complete rejiggering of the American economy along the lines of fairness. And you're going to see something similar happen on the right, by the way. So my friend, Matt Contenetti, who is the former editor of the Washington Free Beacon, I believe, he has a great point about presidential elections.

Starting point is 01:32:50 He makes the point that candidates don't become president unless they run against their own party. In order to actually capture the imagination of the American people, you almost always have to run inside your own party against your own party. So you saw this most obviously with President Trump, but this was clearly true with Barack Obama. It was true to a certain extent with George W. Bush, even, who ran a compassionate conservative campaign against these sort of hard-hearted Gingrich Dole Republicans.

Starting point is 01:33:15 Right. Clinton. Clinton for sure did this. So I think it's a great point because then you have to start thinking, OK, look at the — we're turning to the right side of the aisle now. Let's say that you have a politician on the right side of the aisle. What does he run against in the because Trump has obviously taken

Starting point is 01:33:27 command, tremendous command of the Republican base and the Republican Party. What is there to run against? Well, there's an economic downturn. Do you think that they're going to run against Trump being not

Starting point is 01:33:35 capitalist enough or do they think they're going to run against Trump being too capital, too friendly? Right. Exactly. And that's how you get a populist uprising on the right. And what you end up with is a

Starting point is 01:33:43 horseshoe theory politics where both parties are in favor of Lena Con. Socialism. Right, but both parties are in favor of Lena Con. And by the way, this is not a rarity. And socialism. I mean, listen, I think that the vice president is an amazingly brilliant guy. He has also expressed kind of public support for Lena Con from time to time, right?

Starting point is 01:33:59 And that's inside the Republican Party. And on the left, obviously, there's tremendous support for Lena Con. So if what we're saying here is one of the things we need is not Lena Con, we should be very careful not to step on the rake. And then the thing that hits you in the face is Lena Con. Right. Yeah. Right. That's why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in

Starting point is 01:34:16 socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take. But how do we avoid making the bottom half of society feel included in all this wealth generation, etc. Like what what is the plan here? Is it universal health care? Is it lowering their taxes? I mean, the administration says no taxes for people under 150k, we have to give something to the working man and woman of this country, the people who feel that they can't get rich, who can't get to the middle class. Does anybody here have a suggestion

Starting point is 01:34:48 for that? I mean, I do. I actually do have a suggestion. And it's actually shockingly easy. President Trump has a has a visceral connection to blue collar workers in this country. Yes, clearly has a visceral connection. He should stop preaching that blue collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they're succeeding, because it's actually true. Tell the truth. Okay, yes, yes. I mean, I think that the the fib that politicians always make bank on is the idea that, for example, the middle class in America is completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class, okay? And actually all Americans, I say this on my show all the time, people have

Starting point is 01:35:22 this, again, this sort of rosy-eyed view of the 1950s, which again was a historical outlier because the rest of the world didn't exist, had been destroyed. But they also have this bizarre idea that you were better off to be 30 years old in 1980 than you are to be 30 years old in 2025. And all I can say is in 1980, the only dude with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko and his shoe box and he was holding it to his head. Okay, the reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025 on a material economic level than it was in 1980 and the the lie that politicians tell in order to gain power is they say you're getting screwed somebody is screwing you I

Starting point is 01:35:54 Can unscrew the screwing and so there's there's this constant sort of race to the bottom in terms of this rhetoric And what you end up with is in the end What can I promise you that that I can then blame somebody else for not having fulfilled the promise? President Trump I think could avoid that because of this unique connection that he has with blue-collar people where he could say listen We're all on the same side here. Right? What we're doing here is innovation I thought the most important line that I heard from President Trump during his his victory speech the night that he won Was he when he said to Elon and it was kind of a throw a line when he said we love our geniuses They said we love our geniuses and He said, we love our geniuses.

Starting point is 01:36:25 And I thought, yes, that's the thing we need. We love our geniuses. Celebrate billionaire, celebrate success, celebrate entrepreneurship. And this could be you. And we're going to have hiring programs, as Marc Andreessen has talked about, we need to have hiring programs that are specifically designed to find the best people, not just abroad, but also in the United States, who might be underserviced in rural areas of the country or in blue collar areas of the country.

Starting point is 01:36:46 Find the next JD Vans, find the next guy who really needs that hand up. Like all those things can be done. A rising tide will lift all ships, but this is the problem with the short term pain plan. Americans have a long memory. And when it comes to politics, I think this happened with the Biden administration.

Starting point is 01:37:03 People, their relationship with politicians is sort of like a married couple. And good married couples, you know, they kind of talk through the minor problems that they're having in their marriage and then things continue to maintain and grow and get better. Bad married couples, what happens is that they sort of ignore the kind of minor annoyances for years at a time, and then something bad happens and the bottom just goes right out. And this is the thing that I'm afraid of for the Trump administration. Everybody's willing to ignore the things that are kind of mildly annoying, like penguins at the White House or whatever, up until the point where there's a serious recession.

Starting point is 01:37:31 At that point, everybody kind of looks around and goes, why are we even doing this? I think that's exactly what happened with Biden with the Afghanistan withdrawal, for example. Making a misstep is the is the is why I'm being critical of the terrorists. It's not because I want Trump to lose. It's because I want Trump to win. Right. I think he's doing too many important things, like the stuff that Antonio is doing.

Starting point is 01:37:48 There are too many important things happening to take, to roll the dice on a strategy that isn't even being articulated. If you're going to make the case for a long-term gain, I need to know what the long-term gain is so I can make the case to the American public as to why they should endure the short-term pain. You know you're having surgery

Starting point is 01:38:03 because after the surgery, you're gonna feel better. But if I say you're having surgery, it's going to be some short-term pain. You say, okay, how am I going to feel after the surgery? You say, well, I don't know. Maybe, who knows? I'm having the surgery. We have so many job openings. We have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. As you said, consumers today can get and live an incredible lifestyle that the rich didn't have in 1980. The car you can buy today can drive itself for 20, 30, 40 K. You can buy used Tesla and have this car that's better than any car made in the last 50 years. So you get a keep it positive. Then think about generation tool belt. You've got all these, you know, plumbing jobs, electrician jobs, construction

Starting point is 01:38:41 jobs that pay massively hourly wages that are available for people today. We have too many job openings today. And you never hear Trump say that to your point. It's always this like, everything's a disaster and I'll save you when in fact, you don't need saving. Go ahead, Freebird. I'll answer to my officer earlier question about what America can anchor to, to attract the rest of the world. And I think it's what's been the American story from the beginning, which is ambition. We pioneered the West. We launched the Industrial Revolution.

Starting point is 01:39:14 We went to space. We landed on the moon. We had the Manhattan Project. We unleashed the information technology revolution with the development of the transistor. The ambition is what's been kind of consumed by China. In the last 20 years, they've built 30,000 miles of high-speed rail. In the next 15 years, they're going to add more electricity production capacity than the United States times two has today.

Starting point is 01:39:46 There's nothing short of ambition coming out of China. And it's what we're lacking. All of our political gambits, all of our debates are all centered around what we're trying to fix that went wrong in the past, what we did wrong and what we got to do to make it right. And we don't talk at all about the ambition of where we can lead the world to next. China is the only one that's doing that. And I think that's where we need to kind of have a bit of an important pivot on the

Starting point is 01:40:12 global stage, if we want to be able to kind of attract partners and also to have Americans think outside of this week, where are we headed? And I just, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you guys agree, but I just feel like that's one of the key things that we've kind of lost track of. NERC put out a study, just like this is very tactical, but it's part and parcel of what you and Jason are talking about.

Starting point is 01:40:32 Do you guys know that about 25% of all of our utility workers in America became eligible for retirement between 2017 and 2022? I did not know. So most of the people, 56% of all utility workers now, have less than a decade of experience. You know what that's resulted in? In 2021, the average US customer of an electric utility

Starting point is 01:40:56 experienced 7 and 1 half hours of service interruptions, and it's just growing. I think the average plumber's age is now 50 something. We can't get people to become plumbers. NERC says that 19 states now in the United States can face rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions if these issues aren't addressed. And by the way, this is, that's a human capital problem. But if you multiply that by 10 and 20 and 30 times, there was a different tweet, I don't know, Nick, if you could find it, that talked about an organization trying to find people to help build nuclear submarines. Did you guys see this quote?

Starting point is 01:41:28 Where they needed a hundred thousand people to build nuclear subs in the United States, and they could barely find like a few hundred? Yeah, we need to get better at this stuff. I mean, the good news is we're going to have robots to do this. Ben, you know, if I run for president, I'm one of the few people here on the pod who can. My position is going to be build three new cities with five million homes in each because, you know, starter homes, families can't buy starter homes. You ever consider running for office? And if you did, what would be your platform?

Starting point is 01:42:00 I mean, it'd be pretty horrifying to run for office. It seems like a terrible job. And I think the age to run for president is now in your 70s. So I have like three decades to consider it. But you know, if I were going to run, I would be running on the basic idea that in this country the only thing that you are promised is the adventure. And I'm not going to make you promises that I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to make you promises that I can't keep about how I'm going to fix your life.

Starting point is 01:42:26 Because the truth is, I really can't. All I can do is help get the obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and you can make your life better. And I can help break the institutions that have a stranglehold on your future. And there, when you're talking about electricians and plumbers, the truth is that we have set up an enormous con game that is our higher education system, particularly in the liberal arts subsidized by the taxpayer when most jobs that we're talking about right here do not require a college degree. And there's so many things that the Trump administration should be doing and is doing that again that are great that they could break the stranglehold on some of these things that allow for more opportunity.

Starting point is 01:43:00 But I think the thing that people really, you know, the thing that I would say that I really think that maybe no other politician would say, and I can say it because I'm not a politician, is your future is, in America, your future is in your hands. It is not in somebody else's hands. It is your responsibility. It is your responsibility to go out and strive. It is your responsibility to go and succeed.

Starting point is 01:43:18 We want you to be able to try again if you fail, but we want you to go and we want you to try. And- Rugged individualism. And also, you know, but we want you to go and we want you to try. Rugged individualism. And also the kind of case that was being made a little bit earlier about China, that basically China is saying that it can do things. One of the things that drives me up a wall is when politicians say, I created X jobs or we created X jobs, you didn't create a job.

Starting point is 01:43:43 The government does not create jobs. The government can take money from people and then give it to other people, but it is only entrepreneurs who can create jobs. And so the way that you fight China off is not by the power of a centralized government directing people in a particular direction. The way that you fight off China is by unleashing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and ambition of the American people on an individual level to go out and do all of these unbelievable things. And that would be the promise that I'd make to the American people. I'll get everybody the hell out of your way so you can succeed. That would be the only thing I'd promise.

Starting point is 01:44:11 Guys, we got breaking news here. It turns out the more reciprocal tariffs have dropped. Look at this. Complaining about the docket. J-Cal has put a 500% reciprocal tariff on that. Purchasing dogs from a breeder is now 100% tariff. Friedberg, that's pretty, that's pretty stiff. And Chamath has put one on Laura Piana slippers. Yeah, too many people have them. 200% tariff. And oh, looks like Ben Shapiro got in on it. Having Candace Owens on your podcast is now 200% then what are you doing here? I mean, this is guys unkind. What's the lucky one? Can you can you read that? I'm lucky. It's put a thousand. This is the biggest one that

Starting point is 01:44:52 just dropped 1000% tariff. I'm working with Jacob for Chamath Pali hopatea. Oh, you want chairman dictator? Wait, I have to do you want to hear about would you like to do a little memory lane? We got so much show here. I'm trying to get this out. But okay, by the way, I created a polymarket on GDP. Oh, annualized GDP growth in Q3 of this year being below five, negative 5% negative 5%. Yeah. That's brutal.

Starting point is 01:45:18 Check it out. I'm trying to get what's the probability of that happening. Make your bets. Oh, make your bets with our partner, Polymarket. Chamath, do you want to do victory lab? We're gonna wrap here. What do you want to do? Well, I actually think it's fun, because we're going to kick off a different polymarket around this, because I think it's

Starting point is 01:45:35 interesting. So the thing that we haven't talked about is with all of the tariffs, with all of the financing questions, with all of the recession questions, short-term rates, long-term rates, the one thing that we haven't sufficiently talked about. It's not really in the press, but it needs to be talked about is there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today. And you would say, well, if long term rates go down, there's no real risk. But the tariff picture actually impacts revenues, right? And the problem with that is that there's a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA. And so this is what I spoke about at the beginning of January, which is the one risk that is uncontrollable is what happens to corporate debt. And

Starting point is 01:46:31 could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action? Nick, you may want to just play the clip and we can talk about what we can do about this. This was my pick for the best investment idea. Go right here we go from gotcha. best investment idea. Go right here we go from you got your mouth. Let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero and six out of the remaining

Starting point is 01:46:56 eight times you make 10 extra money. And then the final two times you make anywhere between 100 to 1000 extra money. This is a loser trade, but I would be long CDS. So what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I'm buying what's called protection, that there is no default event in 2025. I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025, so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace.

Starting point is 01:47:32 I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade loses money. But if it hits, it will be the best performing asset of 2025. And I just want to be clear, this is not something I think will happen. It's not something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make, and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you, when you look at the concentration of the S&P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you

Starting point is 01:48:01 look at rate spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing. It has hit. Nick, you can show the CDS graph. So this thing for every billion dollars of risk you would have put on every billion dollars that you put on would have cost you about a million dollars. And that million dollars would have made you about $7 million in about three months. Did you put it on? I'm not going to comment on my my trades, Jason. Oh, okay. But we talked we talked about it off air already. But if you did put

Starting point is 01:48:33 it on, does that mean you're taking us all to Italy this summer? No, what's happening here? Are you getting a boat for us to record from the all in yacht? No, but there may be some boats for sale if this trade keeps going this way. Oh, Why is this important? The CDS actually represents the structural risk in the United States' private economy, in the corporate economy. And so, Nick, if you just put it back on. So when you see these spreads blowing out, this is actually a very important warning sign. And this is actually a thing that I think Scott understands well, Howard understands well. I think they'll translate this to the president. If I have an opportunity to explain it, I will. But this is a really

Starting point is 01:49:11 important market to pay attention to. This is what was the canary in the coal mine for the great financial crisis. This was the stuff that showed us that there was a big default event happening in the mortgage side of the market, but then that spilled over to the broader economy. And so the tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart. And I think it's something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to, because I think now that this trade is in the money, the question is, I don't think we want this to happen, that one sigma, two sigma event where all of a sudden this trade returns 1000X

Starting point is 01:49:51 is really bad. Well, you know, let's keep our eye on the markets and as of the taping here, we're down about 5% across the boards and- Ben, you're excellent. You should come back. Yeah, well done, Ben. You fit right in. Ben, we're in in Florida. Are you we're doing an event in

Starting point is 01:50:07 Miami at the end of the month? Okay. Yeah, that'd be fun. Let's do it. You want to come to Miami and hang out. We've got like this nightclub. We're doing a stage. We've got the trackside and Formula One. Ben's got a Ben's got a table at 11. It's got his name on it. We're going to live. We're going to live. Stop going to live. Okay, sorry. Sorry. We're going to live, okay, sorry, sorry. I don't know which strip club is sponsoring all in this trip, but we'll figure it out.

Starting point is 01:50:30 That was awesome, Ben. Thanks for doing that. Thanks guys, that was a blast. Wait, J. Cal, take us out, take us out. This is my favorite with Ben. Ben's like, and you know, there are security issues in Ukraine, and you have security issues as well.

Starting point is 01:50:43 That's why you should use lifeline. Man, you are the master of the fucking segue. I have never, I thought I was good. Ben Shapiro is like, and of course we have the tariffs and that's going down, but you know what? Won't go down if you buy gold, buy your gold bullion at goldbullion.org. You are fucking great at this.

Starting point is 01:51:01 Is it true a hundred million in revenue for Daily Wire? Is that true? Actually last year is to 220. Oh my god I saw some headline you're going bankrupt. How do you go back over to? Yeah, we're not going bankrupt. Yeah Restructuring actually been now that you saw what's happening with Newsmax. I mean any thoughts to maybe Hmm Yeah, I mean it has it has let's just put it has crossed our minds. Yes, for sure. You're making 50 times the revenue of truth social.

Starting point is 01:51:31 Congratulations. But actually, what do you think when you see the this Newsmax thing trade like this? I mean, it's incredible. Yeah, I mean, what is it saying? Do you think? I mean, I think it's saying a couple of things. I mean, one, it's saying obviously, look things. I mean, one, it's saying, obviously, look, I think the P.E. ratios on the Newsmax trade are, you know, ridiculous in the sense that it's going to revert back to something closer to normalcy.

Starting point is 01:51:51 I think that it was supposed to trade at 10 bucks and it came out of 14. It spoke to like 240. So it's more like GameStop than anything else. There's a lot of retail traders who are fans of Newsmax who bought the stock. And then it leapt. And I think it was today back down in the 40s, something like that. It'll end up being, you know, total market cap will probably be somewhere when it lands in like the two to three bill range, somewhere three to four bill, something like that. I think what it says is that, you know, the stock market in the short term is a voting

Starting point is 01:52:19 machine and in the long term it is a weighing machine. And I think that, you know, when you look at stocks that have name brand recognition, then you're gonna get a lot of voting in the early going. And then it's a question of whether you can keep that up. So it turns into weighing. Right. Fair enough. 39 million in quarterly revenue.

Starting point is 01:52:35 So they're at 150, $160 million a year and their valuation right now, I don't have the market cap here, but what did it peak out at? Three or four billion or something? Oh, no, when it went in peak to peak above 20 bill market cap. Yes, what's his 170 bucks or 200 bucks 240 bucks 245. Yeah, or two days ago. You know, game stuff. Something weird going

Starting point is 01:52:57 on there. Okay. All right. Well, the all in and daily wire merger and IPO coming soon. The ticker symbol is all daily in wire, all in daily in wire. The merger is complete and we'll see you all next time. Love you. Love you. Well done. Thanks guys. We'll let your winners ride.

Starting point is 01:53:19 Rain man David Sack. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it Love U West, the queen of Ken Wives What your winners line? What your winners line? What your winners line? Besties are gone That's my dog taking an illness to your driveway

Starting point is 01:53:37 Sacks Oh man My habitat sure will meet me at the end of the road We should all just go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm gonna go home I'm going 13. That's my dog taking an illness in your driveway. Sex.

Starting point is 01:53:46 Oh man. My habitat sure will meet me. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like sexual tension but they just need to release them out. What? You're the bee. What? You're a bee.

Starting point is 01:54:02 Bee? We need to get merch. I'm doing all in! I'm doing all in!

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

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