All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google's $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s

Starting point is 00:00:00 I have four pieces of advice for people. Number one, get good sleep. Number two, exercise, number three, diet, number four meditation. And if you want to do that, it's very simple. You get the calm meditation, you get the eight sleep sleep, you get the fit, body fitness, talking about is You get a good Athena system. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is all in NGO.

Starting point is 00:00:26 USAID gave us 18 million last year. Guys, I forgot to tell you about it, but don't worry. It's in an offshore account for all of us. When we get back to Ethiopia and Vietnam, we have an all in castle built there. Okay. All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast, the number one MAGA finance business and personal optimization health. Yes, we are now larger in the health space than Huberman, Tim Ferris,

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Starting point is 00:01:55 What's awesome is a lot of the recommendations he shared is becoming policy, it seems for the Trump administration, Elon, and that sent and others in the administration have echoed trying to get government deficit below 3% of GDP. That seems to be the economic magical number. And if you can do that, rates drop. I think that's resonated.

Starting point is 00:02:16 It was great to have him publish that a couple of weeks ago, talk with us about it. It's great. Great bonus content from the team at All In. Today, we're super excited to have our friend Antonio Garcia joining the show. Antonio is the CEO of Valor Equity Partners, and he's made some, he's made some solid investments. He was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, Athena, tons of great, or he's the second investor in Athena after me. Welcome to the program, Antonio. He puts more in. Thank you, Jason. I was also an Uber with you too, by the way.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Yes, yes. I did the series A, I believe, or the B. What did you do? We were in the B. You were in the B? Yeah. Okay. Yes. You were in the Shervin round.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Okay. Well, welcome to the program, Antonio Graciaz, and we've got a full docket today and we might even have a special caller from the White House today. No promises, but you never know. We are 17 days into the Trump 2.0 presidency and seems like the main character gentlemen is Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. And they seem to have found a little known agency USAID. Let's unpack it and talk about USAID and DOGE maybe in three acts. The first one, let me just educate

Starting point is 00:03:34 the audience on what USAID is and then get y'all general reaction to it. Most Americans probably haven't heard of USAID. It stands for the United States Agency for International Development was established by JFK by an executive order back in 1961. Wall Street Journal summed up its purpose as quote, make friends and influence countries in the American interest. According to the US Gov website, the purpose of USAID is to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster. You got a budget of about $45 billion a year under Biden, and that's about 150 bucks per American per year. They have at least 10,000 employees or did

Starting point is 00:04:13 and as of 2023, they had programs in 130 countries, obviously, there's 195 countries in the world. And the budget doubled under Biden from 26 to 45. The budget was between 15 and 20 billion during Trump's first term. But the White House and I guess Elon and the Doge team found out about this USAID went in there and found all kinds of interesting spend $ Two and a half million dollars to fund EV charging stations in Vietnam. Two million for sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala. One point five million to a Serbian LGBTQ group. 70k for a DEI musical, 47k for a transgender

Starting point is 00:04:59 opera in Colombia. The DEI musical, by the way, is in Ireland. So if you get if you make it to Galway, you can see that DEI musical this one on and on and it has become quite a story. Antonio, you're our guest here this week. You and I and sax and Elon spent a little time at Twitter during the takeover, where I think a lot of these techniques were first put into action. Your thoughts on what's happening with Doge? I mean, look, Jason, first of all, I think you guys were having me. It's great to see everyone.

Starting point is 00:05:35 You can see the musical. I like to see music. No, I booked it. We're all going to the musical in Galway. What is it called? Is there actually a name of this musical? DEI, the musical. Oh man.

Starting point is 00:05:50 It's a heartwarming story. I apologize. Of getting a job that you're not qualified for. I apologize. I think the Doge story maybe starts with the Twitter takeover. Yeah. Right. So Twitter was spewing the woke mind virus in the world, which is why Elon did begin with. And you know, when we got there, as you know, it was basically breaking even, and then there was gonna be $12.5 billion

Starting point is 00:06:13 at the end of the company, so a billion and a half dollars in interest costs that there was no money to pay, which led to the turnaround, I think, which was the biggest turnaround of all time. Literally the biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history. Second biggest tech deal ever done. 80% of the people gone.

Starting point is 00:06:28 That doesn't include all the contractors that were there. And you know, the company's now servicing its debt and they just priced yesterday, their one of their bank deals at 97 cents. So this is a huge win. Means the company's doing extremely well. Other people bought the bank debt and then the bank that traded up to a

Starting point is 00:06:46 little over 98. So 98 and five eights, you know, a giant business success or rousing business success. And Jason, you were there for part of it, you saw it, it was a disaster. This place was the it was tampons in the bathrooms and every woke thing you possibly imagine and no one in the office, that the it was so bad that the pens had gone dry in the conference rooms, It was just incredible. And I think that, you know, that's how the

Starting point is 00:07:08 So you mean the pens had gone dry because they were never being used or because they were being used so much? They were never been used. Yeah, we got there on the yeah, the Halloween weekend and we started whiteboarding and you know, no ink, no ink. Next time, no ink. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything. It's incredible. But flowers are impeccable. Food being made fresh every day for thousands of people and thrown away three times a day,

Starting point is 00:07:31 tossed in the garbage. We didn't give it to the homeless. It was just, it was shockingly bad. Bureaucracy gone mad. Bad incentives. People don't care. So it was both, I think this turned into two things. One was just stop the wolf-mine virus.

Starting point is 00:07:44 You know, the interesting thing is they do extra brand safety checks there now and they have 99% rating in brand safety now, right? So stock the Wolf-Mind virus is going in the world, number one, number two, fix the company. And both have happened. It's been a couple of years now, right? Three years now and both have happened.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Not even three years, two and a half years really, and both have happened. And I think you take that, that was sort of the warmup act for what's's going at Doge which is either the president states President Trump wants to make him very great again and that I think begins with making the government great and you got to fix it It's a turnaround this is the biggest turnaround of all time and President Trump has the courage to do it and he's got a great ally in Ilan to make it happen in Doge

Starting point is 00:08:22 And so the numbers are pretty easy, right? We're spending Six and a half trillion. We bring in four and a half trillion We got to find two trillion dollars somewhere interest cost two trillion dollars a year The bond markets were going out that the bomb bomb was going up a lot because people didn't believe that you couldn't stop spending creating Inflation you see those trading down now as Doge is starting to take effect We'll see it's real the stuff you're talking about It's sort of extraordinary what's happening in the,

Starting point is 00:08:46 you know, Elon said this is probably the right fraud, waste and abuse. He thinks kind of 10% of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about, you know, 650 billion, a trillion in waste. I think that's probably about right. That alone fixes the problem.

Starting point is 00:09:01 But it's really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me when I, when we first started thinking about this, and look, and I'm not there full time it, Jason, for me, and what scared me when I, we first started thinking about this, and look, and I'm not there full-time, you know, I'm in and out a little bit and trying to help where I can, but I'm not there full-time.

Starting point is 00:09:12 When I thought, when this started, I thought we had a democracy that had turned into a bureaucracy, okay? What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy. I mean, a Latin American style kleptocracy. Okay, the stuff you're talking about, that is pure fraud. And you're making some jokes out of it, the DIA musical.

Starting point is 00:09:32 But if you go into the data that's coming out of USAID, what you find is, you know, there's a lot of political contributions going on. The Politico itself being funded by USAID. I mean, that is pure corruption. That's like a Latin American style autocracy. And we cannot let it go there. I mean, I think we've I think this happened just in a good time. And I'm super grateful to all the people there. There's, you know, 80 plus people there all patriots gone full time.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Okay, so Chamath, you've been watching this year from Antonio, what's your general take on what we saw in the first, I don't know, 20 days of Doge? 15 days, don't know, 20 days of Doge. Or no, 15 days, sorry, it's 15 days of Doge. So let me try to give you a little bit of historical context because I think that that's important. I think whenever I hear so many people breathlessly saying some version of WTF, as if this is totally new, it's not new. And I'll give you two examples, but one that I

Starting point is 00:10:28 really want to double click on. The two examples I'll give you is that in 1941, the Truman Committee was formed because there was a fear that the spending by the Defense Department was completely out of whack. And over the next six or seven years, and this is really what gave Truman the credibility to then become Roosevelt's Vice President, was they found incredible levels of waste, fraud, and abuse during the war, before the war effort,

Starting point is 00:11:03 and then after Pearl Harbor during the war process. Over seven years, that committee, and this is in $1941, they were tasked and budgeted with only 20 or $30,000. Okay, over the next six years, they spent less than a million. Inflation adjusted to 2023. This is where I found the data, was about six and a half million they spent less than a million. Inflation adjusted to 2023, this is where I found the data, was about six and a half million they spent.

Starting point is 00:11:28 You know how much they saved? It's estimated they saved somewhere between 10 to $15 billion in 1941. That's a quarter of a trillion, 2023 dollars. The second example is we did this under President Clinton and that was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. So the first thing that I think it's important to acknowledge is this is not new. We've done Doge twice before. Both have been successful. The Harry Truman one was incredibly important because it really set guardrails for how this

Starting point is 00:12:05 can be done. Everything in that committee was a Senate committee, was unanimous. So it was Republicans and Democrats that found waste, fraud and abuse everywhere. They saved an enormous amount of money. The second, which is interesting, is these last two versions of Doge were driven and led by Democrats, the same people today who are basically saying, hey, hold on a second, we have congressional committees or we have inspector generals. And they lack the awareness to know that their own party was the driving force for this two times before.

Starting point is 00:12:40 And I think it's important to just acknowledge that those methods are not good anymore, right? Because I think what we're finding early days is the rot is super pervasive, there's no accountability. And so I think you need people to look at it with fresh eyes and what is Doge at the end of the day? What they are are read only auditors of the truth. And the press secretary in the White House

Starting point is 00:13:03 made this very clear. It's incredible the power that read-only access gives you. All it allows you to do is just take the data and present the data. They can't manipulate it. And what they're able to do is publish all of this stuff in real time. And that's why this is so important.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Because if it went into a congressional committee, to be honest with you, it would sit there and stew for six, seven, eight, nine months. You would maybe get small little tidbits of it, but now instead, you're just getting the full thrust of it. And what is the biggest thing that I find concerning? I think it's what Antonio said, which is that the media who are supposed to be this intermediary layer that's totally objective between the government and the people were not independent at all, but had all kinds of hidden incentives, $8 million to Politico, several million dollars to the BBC. I think it's important to ask what's going on. And by the way, that also has historical context.

Starting point is 00:14:07 This is exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s, where it turned out that record companies were paying DJs to pay songs. There was a huge set of lawsuits and trial cases, and the result was a change in the law, right? And we call that payola now, which is you cannot take this money without disclosing it. And so had this money been absorbed by these entities

Starting point is 00:14:31 and actually disclosed, maybe we'd be okay. But Nick, I sent you a link, maybe you can throw it on the screen for these guys. It's a very simple manifestation of this cycle. We talked about this guys, and we didn't realize how connected it all was. But we were asking ourselves during the election cycle last year, why are all these articles buried? Why aren't we really getting the truth? And it turns out that the people who were responsible for telling the truth

Starting point is 00:14:57 somewhere along the chain were cajoled or just told not to tell the truth, influenced by all of this back channel money that was going back and forth from the government to these folks. Okay. Yeah, let me just give some numbers to what you were referencing there. The USAID organization has been giving money, as have other agencies, to journals, databases, and subscriptions. There's probably some amount of that that makes sense. However, when we look at this, during Trump one spend on political was averaging around 1.3 million a year, but it suddenly ballooned up to 8 million a year under Biden. And you can see the quarterly

Starting point is 00:15:35 payments here on this chart. So there's some normal amount of spend on publications or for a library at an organization. And so what we're looking here is all federal agencies. And suddenly during Biden, there is a very suspicious ramp up in spend to Politico, all of this is breaking a lot of this hasn't been verified yet. So we'll we'll put that caveat on it. And then there is a number of 34 million that's been floating around that's all years back to 2008, not just 2024 less people have that number juxtaposed or misattributed. When

Starting point is 00:16:14 political was acquired back in 2021, they were doing about 200 million in revenue. So this would be about 4% of their revenue. It's pretty significant. The BBC also received 2.7 million in funding from USAID in 2023. That was 8% of their revenue. It's pretty significant. The BBC also received 2.7 million in funding from USAID in 2023. That was 8% of their annual income. That's a little suspicious. Thomson Reuters, which is the consulting arm of Reuters, they received $120 million from the federal government since 2011. That's got to be looked at and double clicked on. And half of that came during the Biden administration. New York Times hasn't actually received all that much 370 K from the federal government last year. Under Biden, it went from 100 K a year to like 300. So the New York Times

Starting point is 00:16:54 data has been cleaned up a little bit. All of this is to say there's spending going on with the press that certainly doesn't look good and should be verified and challenged, obviously, and we are in a breaking news environment. So we'll see how that information shakes out over time, which is one of the great things I think about Doge is they're getting this information out there and citizen journalists are looking at public databases, Friedberg, and we're having a conversation about this, a conversation two years ago, Friedberg, when you kept harping on every episode about our debt

Starting point is 00:17:31 and about the interest payments two or three years ago, you were way ahead of the curve. And now here we are, we didn't think anybody would ever take this cause up, and now it is the cause of the moment. What are your thoughts on the first two weeks of Doge Friedberg?

Starting point is 00:17:46 Magnificent. Okay. Magnificent. I mean, what else is there to say? Eggplant emoji. Yeah, this is the eggplant emoji. It's what we needed. If you zoom out on what Doge is doing,

Starting point is 00:17:56 I think the best way to describe it is zero-based budgeting. And in organizations that go through zero-based budgeting, you do a cycle typically annually, where you take all of your op-ex, all of your expenses, and running a company or running an organization down to the studs. You take it down to zero. And you rebuild it up.

Starting point is 00:18:12 And you say, what are we trying to achieve this year from first principles? Based on that set of objectives, those goals, what do we need to do? What's the minimal expense we need to run? You don't start with last year's numbers and say, what else do we need to do and start to add on top of that. You really do a hard level high degree of scrutiny on every dollar moving out and that's what Doge is effectively doing

Starting point is 00:18:30 They're doing a zero base budgeting on the federal government They're looking at every line item and they're asking the fundamental question Which I don't think we talk about in the public discourse enough Which is what is the essential role of government and there is a great debate to be had around that point. Should government be providing humanitarian aid in international markets? That's a good debate to be had. Should the government be providing security to nations

Starting point is 00:18:55 that can't provide security for themselves? Does the US government have a role in that? Should the government be providing loans for people to go to sh-ty universities? Should the government be providing loans for people to buy homes that are overpriced? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as we start to ask the questions of how we're spending money, I think it ends up leading

Starting point is 00:19:13 to the most important questions, which is what is the essential role of government, which I think is the debate that needs to be had in order for the democracy to last. So I'm very happy to see the effort of Doge. And I think that it's the beginning of what I hope will be kind of a long term process of asking the fundamental questions about essential government. And Antonio's zero base budgeting was the first thing you sort of introduced when the Twitter takeover happened. Just what do we need in terms of design? What does the sales team need to hit these sales numbers? How many servers do we need? And my lord, the waste fraud and abuse at that company was shocking.

Starting point is 00:19:48 They had buildings that were $100 a square foot, if I remember correctly, that were used for storage of the furniture from the previous building that had been upgraded and were storing them in class A office space. You reference the commissary 20 people were having lunch a day, but they had never ratcheted down the amount of food they were making. So each meal was about $800 on average when you when you did the math for those 20 meals just in the San Francisco office.

Starting point is 00:20:20 Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the the shock and awe campaign of just freezing spending and then seeing, hey, what actually is necessary to accomplish this task worked out at Twitter and then how you see that being executed, you know, inside of our government. Yeah, thanks, Jason. It was pretty extraordinary. Actually, the, you know, the Twitter experience, the first thing you do in a turn like that is try and get the checkbook and just turn payments off and to see what happens because there are lots of people that shouldn't be getting

Starting point is 00:20:53 paid and sometimes they complain and sometimes you find that people that complain the loudest are the ones who are, are coming the worst fraud. They're the worst fraudsters in the whole, in the whole game, right? The worst grifters, the ones who are saying, they're crying the most amount of foul. And the problem, at least in Twitter, there were financial statements. Like we could actually, there was an audit financial statement and they were basically,

Starting point is 00:21:14 they were in some ways correct, I would say. There were some issues with the user growth, DAOs, et cetera, and the incentive plans, but the actual, like, the cash flow numbers were pretty much correct. Here, the problem is much, much deeper. And it makes this zero debt based budgeting question much harder, which is the way the government works, a department just basically asks for money from Treasury and they send

Starting point is 00:21:35 it out. We all run businesses. There's a reconciliation process. You have a contract, you issue a PO against it, something comes in, you check that it came in, services is rendered, and then you issue a payable it, something comes in, you check that it came in, services is rendered, and then you issue a payable and then a month later you pay it, right? That doesn't happen with the US government. That process is broken.

Starting point is 00:21:53 It used to happen. It's broken now. And so literally, money's flowing out. I used to ask myself this question, why are the numbers always revised? Why are they always wrong? How can the government know how much money it's made? Just hit the button in the computer and figure it out. Problem is that button doesn't exist.

Starting point is 00:22:07 We spent time early on, that was Marlago-Leon trying to track through, like, how does the money actually flow? No one could tell us how it actually flows. Where is it going out? People didn't know. Crazy. It's totally crazy. The reason he has-

Starting point is 00:22:20 You all go through Treasury, Antonio? Can you just explain that to us? Well, so I will try to explain it you, I'm not sure I have full command of it. I'm not sure anyone does quite yet. It goes to Treasury ultimately, but it was supposed to flow through the way it was supposed to work. In the it was changed in the 70s in the 70s in 1973. The Nixon administration at 71, we go back, they came off the gold standard, which allowed

Starting point is 00:22:41 deficits in 73. At the nader of the Nixon presidency, Congress took away from the presidency the executive power, this thing called apportionments, which was the power of the executive to stop spending. So Nixon was abusing it by stopping what he didn't want, and so Congress took away from him. What that means today is the executive, as he reaches in, it's very hard to just stop payments.

Starting point is 00:23:01 So what's happening is the government is put in a process where they would just have an authorized executive stamp a bill that got paid. That broke. I don't know when it broke, but it broke sometime. So the money flow now, the department gets a budget authorized to it by Congress. It goes to OMB. OMB allocates the budget, that department then just sends a money request to Treasury to pay. It is not reconciled against what happened. This is one of the reasons. And that's it.

Starting point is 00:23:33 There's no controller. There's no controller function like there is in a normal company. 100%. There is no controller. There's no reconciliation. The reason they can't pass audits, okay, the reason this happens is because you can't audit something you haven't reconciled. The only audit that I've seen is actually from the Social Security Administration.

Starting point is 00:23:52 And when you read it, I've got one of the partners who have read the thing, it has, it's just riddled with your weaknesses. There are probably individuals that have made like millions or billions of dollars from mispayments overseas. Like is this kind of what's gone on in the missing money in Ukraine, do you think? Like it's kind of found its way to the wrong places? Yeah, I mean, so what I would,

Starting point is 00:24:12 I don't know what happened in Ukraine, I don't. Such a crazy story. Yeah, it is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid and Medicare's payments. I wanted to make that better, right? We used to make the world better.

Starting point is 00:24:25 And we just stopped. Because we found so much fraud. I mean, I'm certain, we literally have a rule here, government payor in those areas, if it's more than like a third of the business, we don't do it. And in the services space. This is why we just found continuous fraud

Starting point is 00:24:42 in the companies we were looking at investing in. Yeah, just threading these things together, you know, you, the really interesting thing with the Twitter pausing of payments was, you know, at some point we were in a meeting, you know, at 1am on a Saturday and it was like, hey, let's turn the credit cards off to see what bounces and, you know, what happens. And, of course, we start getting calls and people started routing, obviously, because they knew sax was there, you were there, I was there. Hey, you know, a company who I shared an investor with or, you know, in another company said, hey, you know, we're not getting paid for this. And it was like some SaaS software that nobody was using, etc. So you start figuring out to your point, okay, is this software even being used? There was so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up. So it was just paid as pure graph. Now, you said Antonio correctly, the people who come first, like they're probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift because

Starting point is 00:25:41 hey, you know, I figured out how to grift this money. How USAID got to the top of the Doge list, I think is one of the most interesting aspects of this story. So if you remember on January 21, Trump decided he would do a bunch of executive orders, right. And one of them was to pause foreign aid for 90 days. Okay, this seems reasonable. We got to take care of our country that was part of his mandate for becoming the 47th President United States. So a couple of days later, the White House said, Hey, this USAID leadership is trying to circumvent the executive order there.

Starting point is 00:26:16 In other words, they're just going to keep paying people even though the executive order came out. That alerted the Doge team. So Elon confirmed this on x, he said, quote, all Doge did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the president's executive orders the most turned out to be USAID. So that became our focus. And according to NBC, security officials at USAID tried to prevent Doge from even getting into the building or accessing the systems to your point, Antonio, the person probably who's got the most to hide is the one who's going to fight the most over the weekend Doge gained access to USAID. And then people started tweeting out all of this, you know, crazy

Starting point is 00:26:59 spend and things that any American who looks at it and says, wait a second, if we haven't fixed the goddamn water in Flint, Michigan, why are we sending money to Galway or in Ireland to do a DEI musical? This makes no sense. And that's I think the key piece of this, Antonio is, can you win the hearts and minds of Americans? Because some of this stuff, I don't know if it's legal, it's not legal or it's against protocol or it is protocol, we're gonna find out.

Starting point is 00:27:27 There's been tons of legal cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID. J. Cal, let me ask you a question. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad? Great, great question. You know, I've always felt that the West should act in unison. And if the United States is the greatest economy or the strongest, we should lead. There is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote this

Starting point is 00:28:02 at the UN and everybody tries to hit those notes. I think it's great that we try to reduce suffering in the world, but I think we should be doing it not unilaterally and not to try to manipulate governments. And that's the piece of this that USAID is obviously a grift where people are trying to steal money for their pet projects. And I don't think they're acting in unison and above board to look and say, Okay, where's the most suffering in the world? How can we help that, you know, that that to me seems like a noble thing to do. And if the United States has the budget to help fight AIDS in Africa, or, you know, poverty, you know, there's a chance that some of these

Starting point is 00:28:40 human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money? Well, I do think the you know, I did this tweet recently. So yes is the answer. If you look at Amnesty International, Amnesty International, where I worked was one of my first jobs, they were worked working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etc. And then somewhere along the line, you know, the Amnesty International is tweeting about trans rights, and that's the big focus.

Starting point is 00:29:12 This is a very small amount of, you know, people on the planet. And I don't think that those human rights violations in any way relate to the tragedy we're seeing of people being murdered, tortured, raped, and caned and beheaded in certain places in the world. So there is a way to look at suffering and say we should handle this first. And yes, somebody who, you know, feels they got misgendered, maybe that's way down the priority list compared to systematic rape of women in these, you know, war zones, those will be the high order bits. And so this thing has gotten the other fascinating thing I think about USA, which I like to get your thoughts on to Chamath is at what point did this switch from being the left saying we should not intervene, right?

Starting point is 00:30:04 The left's position always in the 80s 90s, when we were growing up was, we shouldn't be doing these operatives in other countries, we should let democracy flow, let these countries figure it out for themselves. We shouldn't be doing empire building, we shouldn't be doing imperialism. And then all of a sudden, now it's just such a grift that I think everybody's got their hands in the pie. Lindsey Graham's on some nonprofit that gets money from this. I don't know if that's above board or not. Everybody,

Starting point is 00:30:29 a lot of people who are formerly in government seem to be part of this NGO train. So the whole thing's just turned out to be a grift and it's a bipartisan grift, obviously. I think the biggest, I think the biggest thing that we will have to confront is that many of the things that we thought were issues or problems may have actually been somewhat embellished because of this money cycle. And I think that that's going to cause a lot of people to feel really, they'll probably feel really foolish about some of the decisions they made. All the attempts at cancellation are going to look really dumb in hindsight. Yeah. All right. My some great to our friend David Sacks here who's coming online.

Starting point is 00:31:15 Okay, here he is. David, looking good. And the one thing I want to point out, this goes way back. I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried explaining me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy. And they were your question about why do the Democrats change? Why do Republicans change, etc. The neocons took over foreign policy on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist muster stance, which is bad for America. And I think Jason, that answered your question as to why the Democrats shifted. All right. With us is David Sachs. How I think, Jason, that answers your question as to why the Democrats shifted. All right, with us is David Sachs.

Starting point is 00:31:47 How you doing, brother? Are you literally in the White House? I'm in the EEOB. Ah, OK. There's like a podcast studio, actually, in the EEOB. Oh, fantastic. And you're wearing a suit every day. Yeah, no, you're right.

Starting point is 00:32:00 I have to wear a suit and tie every day. I was just listening on your conversation about Doge. Jacob, I'm surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USA. I mean, everybody's on the take except you. What's going on? If I had known, I would have started an NGO. Where's my NGO? You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grip. You had the virtue signaling. Ha! You had it all except the actual money.

Starting point is 00:32:21 You had the virtue signaling. You had it all except the actual money. Let me up level this for a second. Okay, so we knew the US government runs a $2 trillion deficit every year. We're in debt almost $40 trillion. And we also knew that anytime anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder.

Starting point is 00:32:39 Okay, so the question is just why? Well, now we know the money is all going to them. It's like round tripping to them. New York Times, getting paid. Politico, getting paid. Bill Kristol, perennial warmonger, getting paid. Ukraine, getting paid. Like 11 out of 12 publications in Ukraine, getting paid.

Starting point is 00:32:58 Incredible. Viktor Orban, who's the prime minister of Hungary, was saying that he's very popular in Hungary. His political opposition funded by USAID in Poland the left-wing political opposition funded by USAID and on and on and on it goes BBC BBC you wonder why everyone in the UK so yeah yeah like every believe that BBC is getting paid every left-wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund USAID, which disperses about $50 billion a year. That's a billion dollars a week. That's actually a lot of money.

Starting point is 00:33:32 And so it makes you wonder, you know, the left in general tries to portray itself as a movement of the people, that it's grassroots. This is the exact opposite. This is AstroTurf. This is basically money coming from the top down out of Washington to fund all of these groups, maybe not even in the United States, like all over the world. So it makes you wonder what is the real level of local support for these left-wing policies all over the world? Yeah, crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework. Finally, I caught some of it.

Starting point is 00:34:08 Maybe you could just tell us, you know, from the bottom up, what is the mandate from the president and what is your advice to him on how to make crypto move out of the shadows, offshore, ICOs craziness to legitimacy? What's the plan here to legitimize and regulate crypto? Well, the plan was really spelled out by President Trump in his week one EO on crypto and it's all spelled out in there. The principles, the administration on crypto, the president said he wants to support the responsible use and growth of digital assets and blockchains across every sector of the

Starting point is 00:34:43 economy. So the principles are all there. And yesterday I was invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with the chairman of the important committees that basically govern crypto. And so we had a press conference there to announce the legislative plan. You can see there there's Chairman Tim Scott who's the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. To my left and then to my right is French Hill who's the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. And then to his right is John

Starting point is 00:35:15 Bozeman who's the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And then to the left of Tim Scott is GT Thompson who's the chair of the House Agriculture Committee. He's out of frame right now. But those are the four committees that govern crypto. And you may ask, why is the Agriculture Committee involved in crypto? And the reason is because the Ad Committee supervises the CFTC, the Commodities, Futures Trading Commission, because commodities all came out of agriculture. So it's interesting, you need four committees

Starting point is 00:35:46 across the House and Senate to get legislation done on crypto. It's not just House and Senate, it's actually two committees in each of the House and Senate. And so this is the first time where we've had four chairman of the four key committees all come together and say that they're ready to support crypto legislation. There were a lot of people on X who felt like this wasn't, you know, a mind blowing announcement.

Starting point is 00:36:08 They wanted something that they could trade on right away. That's not what this was. This was basically a statement of commitment from the chairs, the four committees that we're going to get legislation done this year, maybe in the next six months. I mean, that's really the goal. And we've never had that before. So that is pretty monumental. I used to work in this because when I first launched Climate Court back in the next six months. I mean, that's really the goal. And we've never had that before. So that is pretty monumental.

Starting point is 00:36:25 I used to work in this. Because when I first launched Climate Corps back in the day, we actually were selling commodity contracts online. So we set ourselves up as an exempt commodity. Trading platform. And so I remember all this old legislation, there was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, if I remember, when they

Starting point is 00:36:50 deregulated the energy markets. But one of the features of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was that they created this concept of an exempt commodity contract, which was where you're not delivering a physical good. And that's basically what weather derivatives were and energy derivatives and other kind of indices were created that didn't have a tangible physical supply and it was still kind of shoveled in the commodities world. That's why the legacy of all this stuff kind of sitting with agriculture. Is that the way this is likely going to move forward? Is it going to look like a new extension of exempt commodities and kind of treated like that versus being securities?

Starting point is 00:37:21 The question you're describing is called market structure. What are the definitions going to be? Because digital assets can be many things. Some digital assets are cryptocurrencies. They're actually currencies. Then there's things that are crypto securities. Then there's things that are commodities. Bitcoin actually is regulated as a commodity right now.

Starting point is 00:37:41 And then you've got things that aren't securities or commodities or like collectibles, you know, like NFTs, things like that. So there's all these different categories. And one of the things that the market needs is just clarity around the definitions so that founders know what the rules of the road are, and they can actually just comply with them. So giving them those definitions and describing how a crypto project could start, for example, as a security, and eventually the protocol could become decentralized enough, or maybe it becomes a commodity. That whole idea, that's called market structure. And there was a bill in the last Congress by French Hill, who is the chair of the House

Starting point is 00:38:21 Financial Services Committee now, that passed the House with 71 Democratic votes. So it was fairly bipartisan, but then it went nowhere in the Senate because frankly, the Bank Committee at that time was run by Sherrod Brown, who is anti-crypto. So it got stopped in the Senate right away. Now we have Republican control of the Senate and Tim Scott's the new chair of the Senate Banking Committee and he's expressed support. So I think now we could get a bill on market structure like FIT 21, again, which was Front Shield's bill

Starting point is 00:38:50 last Congress. I think we could do a revised and updated version this Congress. And that was one of the things they all, the chairman expressed support for. So I think there's a pretty good chance we could get this done in the next six months. What's the opposition, Sachs?

Starting point is 00:39:03 I guess it feels to me like with the market structure question being addressed and answered, you would have also more protection for consumers, because now businesses know the rules of the road, they follow them, the structure that protects consumers, etc, etc. Why would people be opposed to moving this forward, moving the legislation forward, getting this all behind us? Well, I think this is an area where there's a really good

Starting point is 00:39:24 chance of having bipartisan support. We did in the last Congress, like I mentioned, that the House bill got over 70 Democratic votes. I think in the Senate, we're going to need seven votes, some seven Democrat votes to get to 60, right, which is the number you need if you don't go through the reconciliation process. And I think there's a good chance this passes with significant democratic support as well as Republican. It's not going to be unanimous or anything like that because there are still forces that are hostile to crypto in Washington. And you think it's going to be a discreet bill or do you, I mean, it seems like

Starting point is 00:40:03 you're going to have to get a border security and energy and budget bill passed. So it seems like everything's looking towards reconciliation. In which case, would this be an ad junk like a, like an add-on? The question is what you can get through reconciliation. So in order for a bill to go through the reconciliation process where you only need basically 50 votes It has to have a budgetary impact or predominantly a budgetary impact. I think it's called the bird rule and

Starting point is 00:40:33 That rule was definitely pushed pretty hard in the last administration remember that the Biden administration got the inflation reduction act passed through Reconciliation and all those subsidies for clean energy or whatever. So they've opened the window pretty wide on what can go through reconciliation, but that's the question. There's one other bill that I think is gonna move pretty quickly here too. So I just mentioned the market structure bill.

Starting point is 00:40:57 The other area is stable coins. And Senator Hagerty, he's on the banking committee. He just released a stablecoin bill. There's counterparts in the House. And what the four chairman indicated is actually they're going to take up stablecoins first, and then market structure will follow very quickly. So I think we could see a stablecoin bill pass Congress in the next several months. Sacks, I guess the question is the SEC was, and Gary Gensler were the blocker previously with

Starting point is 00:41:29 crypto and they just said, Hey, listen, there's an existing set of rules here. Just follow those rules. Obviously, those rules don't exactly apply to the innovation happening in crypto. So the question I think after stable coins, which feels like a layup and a great place to start, that'll be a great early win. And it just makes people I guess that would just reinforce the dollar supremacy, right? It's tied to the dollar. So that's good for America. But maybe you could talk to protecting consumers because we all saw in the first couple of generations of crypto, all kinds of griffs and ICOs and things that were never delivered. So how do you balance those two things? Protecting consumers who may get really enthusiastic about this versus, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:11 people who might try to prey upon them? Well, the first thing you wanna do if you're gonna protect consumers is you wanna bring the activity on shore. Okay. Because obviously, when all the activity gets driven offshore, then it's hard for regulators to supervise it. And moreover, it's hard for the market to know

Starting point is 00:42:28 who's a good actor, who's a bad actor, what's a good project, what's a bad project. So the first thing you wanna do is have the innovation happen onshore in the United States. By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that the biggest fraud in the history of crypto, which was FTX, was based in the Bahamas. Probably a recent-

Starting point is 00:42:44 A little bit of a tell. A little bit of a tell. And it'll be an even stronger tell when the good projects feel like they can come back into the United States. And then you've got the shady ones in the Bahamas or in other countries, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb, everyone's gonna be able to understand that Oh, those guys are too shady to operate in the United States. So the number one thing we need to do is is bring the innovation onshore.

Starting point is 00:43:05 In terms of the framework, I think the market structure bill is gonna define, here's a security, here's a commodity, here's what you have to do, here are the disclosure requirements around creating a crypto project. So all of that will be in the bill. And then in the meantime,

Starting point is 00:43:20 the SEC has created a new task force under Hester Perce, who's a SEC commissioner, and she is already starting to do work in that regard to define a better regime at the SEC for crypto projects. You mentioned that Gensler said that the SEC's doors were open to crypto companies and they should come in and talk to us and work with us. That was very disingenuous. Crypto companies would tell me they would go see the SEC.

Starting point is 00:43:49 The SEC would tell them nothing about what the rules were, but they would have enforcement people in those meetings just writing down everything they would say. And the next day they would get Senna Well's notice. So the truth is the SEC was not cooperating. They were not providing any clarity. They were just honeypotting founders basically to come in and then they would immediately investigate them. I mean it was really terrible. Look, we expect founders to play by the rules and abide by the law and be compliant, but when you won't tell them what the rules are and then you prosecute them, there's no fair way for them to comply.

Starting point is 00:44:20 So the most important thing is to give them a framework. I think the SEC now is doing that. They're starting to do that already. And then legislatively, we're gonna have a bill that does that, moving through Congress over the next few months. This is absolutely awesome. We're super encouraged that you're doing this and we really appreciate you coming on the pod.

Starting point is 00:44:39 Wish you could participate in the other three or four crazy discussions we're about to have, but we understand you've got to stay focused on the mission. Anything on the AI front that we can look forward to in the coming weeks that you're working on? I know that's the other part of your mission. Well, the big thing is, like I talked about last time, the president rescinded the Biden EO, which was this 100 page monstrosity of burn some regulation on our AI companies. I think that decision has been proven even more right in the wake of DeepSeek because we know that China has basically caught up or they're very,

Starting point is 00:45:10 very close to catching up. It felt like that Biden-EO was written in a vacuum in which the US was the only player in AI. And that if we imposed a bunch of burdensome rules on our companies, that somehow that wouldn't allow China to catch up, right? And I think it's pretty clear that China is very, very competitive. If we hobble our AI companies, it's gonna run down to China's benefits. So I think that was a very good decision. And what the president said in his EO

Starting point is 00:45:35 is that we should devise a new AI action plan to replace that by an EO, and we're working on that right now. All right, David, any fun anecdotes from Doge? You wanna share? I'll give you one anecdote, which is I've been working late here a number of nights at the EOB. And I won't tell you where the Doge guys are based, but, you know,

Starting point is 00:45:52 I know where their office is. So I just went by there to say hi. The whole room was full of young coders. I think they were engineers, but they're wearing like suits and ties. So that's a little different, but they were all working really late. I mean, they're working there late at Friday night. And the facilities people don't know what to do because they've never had people like

Starting point is 00:46:13 ask to stay late on Friday night before. So they've had to create new facilities access for these guys. They're like, you're coming to the office and doing work? We don't have a protocol for that. How does that work? We're going to need to get you a key or a badge to come to the building. Well, it's absolutely awesome to see the progress you're making in the first two weeks and continued

Starting point is 00:46:34 success. We're so proud of the effort. All right. Thanks guys. All right. Do you guys think the Democrats are going to lose people over their opposition to Doge? Like, is Doge really viewed as oppositional to Democrat party interests for the average person?

Starting point is 00:46:55 It's a Rorschach task. I think the thing is that there was a coalition that the Democrats had, and there was a coalition that the Republicans had. The Republicans did a better job of reforming that coalition. And now I think what you're gonna see is a shrinking. I actually got this totally wrong. I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, but my thought at the time was,

Starting point is 00:47:16 if the Republicans don't figure out how to fix themselves, they were gonna go and lose for the next 10 or 15 years. And the reason I said that was they would walk into every midterm and they would just get their ass handed to them. But I think they figured it out that this is sort of this thing that I've been thinking about a lot is there's a fight in Western societies and it's a pendulum

Starting point is 00:47:39 between labor and capital. And it used to be the thought, the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans were pro-capital and Democrats were pro-labor. And the brilliance of Trump is he took over the Republican party and made it totally populist, which is to say pro-labor. And the crazy thing about the Democrats is that they are the most sophisticated liars. Because if you look at what happened under Biden, you had record high stock markets. So it was purely in favor of asset owners, record high deficits, record high illegal immigration, record high wage suppression. All of these things are massively pro-capital, but they tried to

Starting point is 00:48:25 present themselves as pro-labor. That entire ruse is now being undone. And all of this data, what that does is it'll consolidate the Democrats to a shell of their former self. It'll take a year or 18 months. But I think unless they figure out how to totally hard reset, they're going to be in a really difficult struggle to find a cohort of people beyond 15 or 20% of the population for a long time. Well, and it's so dumb to come out against waste, fraud and abuse. So the best argument the Democrats had, it seems, was that, oh my God, people's social security numbers or people's privacy was being violated, because they went in and looked at the data

Starting point is 00:49:08 and how the money was raised, wasted. This is the like height of not getting the point and not reading room. 100% of Americans don't want their tax payments stolen. They don't care if you looked at their social security number. This isn't a privacy issue that doge is looking at some database. And that's what AOC and Schumer were doing. Oh my god, these people are looking at your social security number, they have access to your records, who cares? What matters is how much money is being stolen from the American public. And anyone at any point in time could have picked up this issue. This has been going on. I think

Starting point is 00:49:45 you pointed out the last time somebody really addressed this in earnest was Clinton. So this has been going on. Obama Trump 1.0 Biden, everybody has been raising the debt. All of this grift has been going on. It's only this time around that somebody picked up the free money and said, here's an issue. Now we we see what happens when somebody picks up the free money and said, here's an issue. Now we see what happens when somebody picks up the issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only going to make Trump more popular. So Jason, I'm going to add to what you and Chamath said. I think you're both right.

Starting point is 00:50:18 Let me give you a very concrete example. Rahm Emanuel is now back in Japan. Okay. He was chief of staff in both the Democratic White Houses post-Roosevelt, Clinton and Obama. He wrote an op-ed this weekend, this past weekend, that basically said the Democrats have lost their way because they have forgotten what he calls kitchen table issues, the things people, regular people care about. Shamath, you're right.

Starting point is 00:50:42 The reality is they forgot about inflation, they forgot that inflation is terrible for the average person, it's terrible for middle class in America, it's okay for people that own productive assets because they just go up in value but it's terrible for people that are wage earners and that have any savings, it's terrible for older people that are living off savings, terrible. You know, Rahm makes this point that if the Democrats are going to reconform in some way, reform in some way, they're going to have to recapture these kitchen table issues. And if they don't, they'll just be about these fringe social issues,

Starting point is 00:51:12 DI, transgender, whatever, and that will never work. They'll never come back into power. Well, I mean, the crazy thing is like the Democratic policies are meant to favor capital holders, but capital holders by and large deeply dislike the Democrats because of all of these other issues. So they have no home. There is no base from which to build from right now unless they go through a great reset. And part of it is that they have to understand that they are actually not pro-labor. They have been pro-capital, but that requires such a schism from the deepest believers of the Democratic Party who thought, you know, eat the rich, you wear it on your dress, it's so important to you. In fact, actually, you were feeding the rich. And the fact that you didn't even know that

Starting point is 00:51:57 is just pathetic. Yeah, what's funny is that, you know, Margaret Thatcher famously said that the problem of socialism, you eventually run out of other people's money and you run deficits, right? And you destroy the country. This happened in Venezuela. It's always the end of socialism. It's how it's how it finishes, how the movie ends. We've seen it around the world. Just look, look south into South America. We were heading that direction. That's why I said earlier, I'm afraid we might become a kleptocracy if this doesn't stop. And I'm so grateful to all the great patriots at Doge and the government, the president for making it happen because we were heading that direction.

Starting point is 00:52:28 So the Democratic party is lost. They'll continue to be lost. Interesting thing came up this week. On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order laying out a plan to establish the first sovereign wealth fund for the United States. For those of you who don't know, a sovereign wealth fund is essentially an investment fund for the United States. For those of you don't know, a sovereign wealth fund is essentially an investment fund for a country. It's almost universally based on natural resources. So

Starting point is 00:52:51 Norway, Saudi, UAE, they all have Australia sovereign wealth funds based upon minerals, or typically oil. The United States is not known for having the oil reserves of the Saudis or UAE or Norway. This public investment fund would be apparently anchored by potentially the TikTok shares that Trump said he wanted to get half of by giving a license. A lot of that is unclear what this license would be. It's never existed. But this is the concept. The Treasury Secretary and Commerce Secretary have been tasked with developing a plan over the next 90 days. And the plan should include quote recommendations for

Starting point is 00:53:42 funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure, and a governance model. Chamath, you were tweeting about this. What is the point of having a sovereign wealth fund in the United States if we're $36 trillion in debt? Shouldn't we just pay down? Well, I think it's not a- Where's this money going to come from?

Starting point is 00:54:03 Yeah. Well, it's not an either or thing. And I think the point is that if there are assets that are minted effectively overnight, which I think the 50% share of TikTok would be, so call it $100, $150 billion, the question is what should you do with it and who should govern it? And I think this idea that if you had a group of five elder statesmen, so I'm just going to throw some names out there. David Tepper, Stan Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, John Doar or Mike Moritz, Bill Gross or some other Bond guy. My point is what you get are five people that are very sophisticated across all market categories. One of them could be the rotating CEO for some number of years. People

Starting point is 00:54:42 should rotate in and rotate out. These are unpaid jobs because everybody that has these slots should be mega billionaires. So they shouldn't be doing it for their own personal advancement and they should deploy that capital. So as you sell down the TikTok shares, maybe as you sell federal lands and you generate more oil revenue, take it all and invest it on behalf of America into American companies. I think that's a great, incredible idea. Antonio, you think the government should be in this business? So I have, I think it should, but, and I agree with Shamath that the governance is very, very important. I think he's got a good idea there. I think it, for a different reason, is that we don't have an industrial policy in America

Starting point is 00:55:31 many of our two competitors around the world in particular China have a long-term industrial policy and They put enormous amounts of capital behind the industrial policy A sovereign wealth fund I think would be a stealthy way to create industrial policy in America So rather than have an industrial policy in this context, so Example in China. They want to they want to build chip fabs and they want to catch up to TSMC. So what do they do? They take the dollars of trade surplus they get from us every year and they pour it back into making that stuff inside their country. And for decades, part of the problem we've had with China is that capital is free because

Starting point is 00:56:03 the banking system just pushes money out to manufacturers and they move the manufacturing because the WTO from the US to China. That's industrial policy. People say the Chinese have a long-term 100-year vision. The way it manifests is this industrial policy. We don't have that here at all. When we try to do it, we do like the Chips Act and it goes through commerce. We have government bureaucrats deciding how to spend $200 billion to modernize Intel,

Starting point is 00:56:25 which needs to happen. I mean, I'd much rather have Ken Griffin, Bill Gross, any of the guys Chamath mentioned deciding, okay, we have five industries in America we want to invest in. Let's make great investments, right? I mean, let's make great investments for America. They've got to be economic. They've got to make money for us, but they've got to be good for the country. I think that's what most of these sovereign wealth funds do.

Starting point is 00:56:44 Some of them make portfolio investments, but many of them, like the sovereign wealth fund in Saudi Arabia, the PIF, they're making enormous investments domestically to remake the economy, you know, toward tourism example. And I think this is a great idea. They're literally building cities in the Yom. They've got, you know, a dozen cities being constructed and trying to take an oil economy and shift it to a tourism economy, a technology economy, a private equity economy. Antonio is totally right. Like Scott Besson, part of his congressional testimony, you guys probably saw this, was he laid out this thing that he has that's called the 333 plan. Right, and the 333 plan says we want to see GDP growth of 3%, we want to see deficits that are no greater than 3%,

Starting point is 00:57:26 and we want to have 3 million barrels of oil produced domestically in the United States. But if you double click on that, if you look at the total energy reserves in the United States, they're three times greater than the total energy reserves of Saudi Arabia, three times across all forms. So not just oil, if you oil, net gas plus coal. If we actually go, as Antonio said, towards an industrial policy that's pro-energy, where the incremental cost of energy is effectively zero, where we want just a gross abundance of electrons flowing in America for all the great ideas that could pop up, it is by definition going to generate an enormous

Starting point is 00:58:06 amount of revenue for the federal government. And so I think having the sovereign wealth fund be the rainy day fund, if you will, right, that can bank a percentage of all of that, I think starts to do a lot of really good for the long term strategic guidance of the US. Freeburg, what do you think here? Is this something where we're making the government too big? And now we've got the government competing with BlackRock and Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and they're going to be on the board of technology companies and energy companies and investing in it. And then what happens when, you know, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush, you get different people running these things and then they want to do their pet projects.

Starting point is 00:58:44 It seems to me like this could be get awfully conflicted, awfully quick. What do you think? Should this be a business our government's in? I think one of the things the government sucks at is capitalism. So I wouldn't make capitalism the mandate of a sovereign wealth fund, certainly not when we have $40 trillion of federal debt. It doesn't make economic sense. Our cost of capital is 5%. That's how much the interest is on this 10 to 30-year debt right now. So it's very hard to actually make real risk-adjusted returns when our cost of capital is so high. So I don't think the mandate should be, hey, let's put a bunch of capital in a pool, go and invest

Starting point is 00:59:19 it and probably make money for the United States. That seems silly. But my point about the government being really bad at capitalism is that the United States government owns and has access to and will acquire through other means, significant assets and resources that should be monetized in a smarter way. And so I would kind of think about the sovereign wealth fund as being more of a strategic vehicle for monetization of high value government assets. So for example, if Trump does actually negotiate a 50% equity position in TikTok US, that needs

Starting point is 00:59:51 to sit somewhere. It should not sit in the department of whatever. It should sit with a capitalist manager that then ultimately makes the decision on when and how to monetize that asset, return that cash to the treasury and pay down the debt. Similarly, the US has large amounts of land, has access to other large assets that get transferred in seizures, etc. So I don't know if you guys remember all this, but there was Bitcoin seizures that have happened over the years.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Yeah. Is the government has cracked down on criminal enterprises, then the government owns this Bitcoin. Do you think the smartest people are making the decisions on where and how to sell down that Bitcoin? I guarantee you not. I would much rather have a capitalist making that decision. So I would view the sovereign wealth fund being less about raised capital from other means in the government, which effectively means borrowing money through treasuries because of the debt level we have and trying to invest it. And much more being about, okay,

Starting point is 01:00:43 what strategic assets can the US government monetize and use this as the mechanism for doing that? And then ultimately, I think the objective should be to return that capital. I do think there's also an opportunity for managing social security in a smarter way. So social security is functionally going to be bankrupt in eight years. The way the trust is set up, the cash that's there, the assets that are there, and the demand on social security given the aging population and the rising payouts every year. So one of the other ways to think about this

Starting point is 01:01:15 is what are the long-term debt obligations, which is ultimately the point of these sovereign wealth funds, and can they be invested in a smarter way? Why is the social security entities ultimately owning, you know, 3% yielding bonds when they could be owning interest in equities? So I would kind of think about that strategic pool of capital being managed by this as well.

Starting point is 01:01:35 And less about the mandate of go be a capitalist investor for the United States, raise money and make money. I think leave that to the markets. But when it comes to strategic assets, I think this could be a good vehicle for when the silver got shut down. Yeah, we seized 144,000 Bitcoin. And that's sitting somewhere in some Department of Justice. Yeah, they sold I think they sold it. Yeah, no, I think we still have I think that was like the idea was that was going to become the Bitcoin street. I mean, you could also come up with the DOJ, the DOJ sells these.

Starting point is 01:02:07 So like, who do you think of the DOJ is making the Bitcoin market decisions? And is that the right person to be monetizing these assets? I mean, David, I'm an interesting point about security. I just want to follow up on which is when you think about social security, it's $620 of our 30 strong debt, and it's actually a fake Treasury bill. So just to, one of the things we figured out in early days before the inauguration, I thought it was like that $6 trillion sits on the ledger. It's just a paper ledger over.

Starting point is 01:02:36 So actually if it gets paid out, it's also be very inflationary. It's just a fake Treasury ledger over that pays a very low rate. And here at Valor with my partner, John Shulkin has been reading to try to help. The, the only, the only thing that we find in this audit in the government, the social security administration actually has an audit. It has an audit. And when you go through the audit, it's crazy. The material weakness is going back to Doge that you find.

Starting point is 01:03:00 Yeah, it'd be way better to have that invest in a way that was economic for people with real money. That's it good thing. Well, and they're pressing for this. Guys, as we're speaking, the federal judge just put a temporary restraining order on Doge and has barred Elon and his team from accessing US Treasury payments data. All right. So now we're going to have a real grudge match between the public. Which judge was it? Federal judge?

Starting point is 01:03:27 Federal judge, yeah. Do you know why? Two months ago, they say why. No, but Elizabeth Warren is doing a victory lap, so I'm sure that she's part of it. So the government agency set up by the president can't look at the database of the Treasury? So just to be double-click here, DOGE is not a new agency. It's the renaming of existing agency. I can't remember the name of it. We'll have to find it. Elon tweeted about this some weeks ago that was set up under Obama, actually, to do this,

Starting point is 01:04:01 to create an odd function to the government. What's crazy about this ruling to me is Congress basically is the Constitution delegates to the executive, the ability to spend the money, and they go through Congress, it gets actually appropriated in Congress, and the executive spends it. How can you spend money if you don't know where it went? How can you be responsible, right?

Starting point is 01:04:21 You have the authority to spend it, but not the responsibility to spend it if you actually can't go look and see where it goes. Guys, this is flying fast and furious. President Trump just unveiled his framework for his tax plan. No tax on tips, no tax on senior social security, no tax on overtime pay. Renew the middle-class tax cuts, adjust the salt cap. So again, very pro, as I said, pro labor, pro populist, eliminate all special tax breaks for billionaire sports team owners.

Starting point is 01:04:49 Oh, all right. I'm no longer, I already sold the team. I already sold my piece. Sorry, Jamath. Oops. Close the carried interest tax deduction loophole, which allowed you to claim carried interest as- Sorry, Antonio. Oh, no, please. Long-term captain. Oh, I better run.

Starting point is 01:05:09 Oh, no. I'll be back in a few hours. It sells some things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that incredible? I mean, he is really going for the jugular.

Starting point is 01:05:18 Wow. Amazing. I support this 100%. The salt deductions coming back, is that right? Yeah, marginally, though. I don't think he's going to give it the way that it was before, but isn't this incredible? I mean, who's going to stand up and lay on the railroad tracks for being able to amortize a multi-billion dollar sports team purchase or that when you make a fund investment, you should get long-term cap gains treatment. Who is going to be that person in this?

Starting point is 01:05:47 Nobody's gonna stand up for these things. I think we should just stop doing venture and just start NGOs. We just start a whole rat's nest of NGOs to ship money around. You could have an incubator. Yeah, absolutely. An NGO incubator.

Starting point is 01:06:01 An NGO incubator. If you've got a great idea for an NGO. J.K. why did you launch launch in every single random developing country in the world? I mean, if I had known that 8 billion of AUM because of USAID just launch one in Vietnam and we could have, yeah, go launch. I love it. We could have had a launch accelerator in Vietnam for transgender. Yeah, the Jason Calcanis launch funds of equatorial Guinea. It is

Starting point is 01:06:32 so crazy though, to come out and, you know, watching the democrats just the self own of coming out and being like, we have to stop people from stopping wasteful spend. Like they just don't seem to understand how unpopular. These are kitchen table issues, like Ram said. I mean, everyone cares about that. And if you don't care about that, if you care about these fringe issues and not the things people care about on the kitchen table.

Starting point is 01:06:58 Well, and if you think about the transgender sports issue, biological males playing in female sports leagues, that issue that Trump just did an EO yesterday for was such an obvious issue of fairness, and has nothing to do with transgender just has to do with like biology. If a if a biological male plays basketball on a biological female team, somebody's gonna get hurt. And that person is going to score 100 points. It's just obvious. And the fact that the Democrats couldn't see that issue being 100% for more 95% makes no sense. Like, it's

Starting point is 01:07:40 just such an obvious litmus test of logic. I mean, look, man, the Constitution is a document about fairness. The people that founded this country, the Patriots founded this country, they did it because they're treated unfairly at home. All of us here are one generation away, right, are two generations away from immigration. And the reality is that's why people come here, man. It's un-American. It's un-American.

Starting point is 01:08:02 It's zero degrees. We've got two people here who are immigrants. Yes. I'm reading the TRO and it looks like this TRO means temporary restraining order. And it's actually narrows who from Doge can get read access down to two people, Tom Krause and Marco Elez. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 01:08:19 So they don't want to have the whole team be able to see what's at treasury. They just have to have a process and some sign off. Okay. That sounds not unreasonable. I just want to point out to people to look at how good they are. I'm sure they're going to work 24 seven, look at all the payments in the US government is not a lot. Yeah, it does seem like it needs to be more than two, but it doesn't seem like they're saying you can't look at it. They just want to have some controls in place. I mean, it feels to me that's an administrative block. That's like the narrowest thing you

Starting point is 01:08:49 could do to, okay, yeah, you come in, but you can just send two people and just these two people. So they get sick or something happens, no one else comes in. That seems to me to be truly some mystery block to slow it down. Yeah. Hmm. Well, we're interpreting this in real time, the facts will come out over time. Let's wrap up on Google Google drop 7% after reporting earnings on Tuesday, Chamath revenue up 12% year over year to 96.5 billion. Wow. cloud revenue is up 30% year over year, 12 billion YouTube ads,

Starting point is 01:09:22 searching 14% to 10.5 billion net profit was around 26.5 billion up 28% year over year. So they are really focusing on profitability, obviously, full year numbers. This is just extraordinary total revenue 350 billion with 100 billion in net profit. Cloud and YouTube finished 2024 with a combined run rate of $110 billion. YouTube is basically Netflix inside of inside of Google and their Google Cloud is essentially AWS inside of Google. The thing that made

Starting point is 01:09:57 investors get concerned, Chamath, is that Google said it would invest $75 billion in CapEx in 2025, 42% jump over 2024, 29% more than analysts expect. Obviously, this has to do with data center servers and the AI build out. What do you think about that number 75 billion, obviously, in relation to what we saw with DeepSeq doing it with maybe a little bit less, maybe they're lying. Is this just an absolute waste of money or gargantuan number or is it something they can easily with that amount of profitability and cash they have absorb and use in the future? I think I should stipulate that Google's models are probably the best of all the models across

Starting point is 01:10:43 a broad base of capabilities if you test for them. And so let's start there, which is whatever they're doing is working. The thing that they need to do is be able to translate those models now into better products. And I think that that will happen slowly. Like, for example, if you look at deep research, most of the people online that are evaluating deep research would now say that OpenAI is both faster and just better on the margins. All of these things can be improved. I don't think that's a comment on the base model.

Starting point is 01:11:16 I think it's a comment on post-training and how they're attempting to productize these things. So the other thing that Google has is a money machine that directly benefits from these AI-driven optimizations on ad targeting. The only other company that has anywhere close to the same credibility is Meta. So I think what both of these two companies need to do is do a better job of explaining how that $75 billion gets segregated. How much of that goes to these AI-enabled models that actually do better ads optimization? There's a really interesting discussion by a former meta

Starting point is 01:11:52 machine learning engineer on X about how they did it. It's pretty amazing. It's staggering. But if they could say half the money goes to that and the other half goes to more speculative pre-training and post-training, I think the market would have eaten it up. So it's probably more of a disclosure issue for Google, because I would say right now their model quality is

Starting point is 01:12:11 the best. You have thoughts on this build out, Antonio, obviously, I think you've been involved with X AI, and obviously involved with Twitter and X previously and colossus is colossal build out that was extraordinary to watch in such a short period of time. Do you have concerns that like some people do that this build out is too expensive and there'll be too hard to monetize all that expense? Or is it maybe a little bit of hand wringing

Starting point is 01:12:39 and the opportunity and AI is so obviously huge that you just got to take the leap of faith and if you build it the revenue will come. Yeah I think Chamath has the right framework here which is return of invested capital and what he's saying by you know if Google had said hey half the money is for ads and half the money is for much budget post training the market was seeing that half the money has a higher return capital and Google's return capital is actually going up after the implementation of AI models into their company.

Starting point is 01:13:07 And I think that sort of abstracts the entire market, which is people are waking up that return invested capital in data centers will matter, that the models are basic commodities and super competitive. In the best case, it's kind of a land war in Asia. It's a melee. In the worst case, just total commodities. What does matter is the return on capital data center, which is influenced by how good the data centers are.

Starting point is 01:13:30 So you mentioned the XAI data center, it's a 100,000 GPU cluster. It's the most dense, coherent cluster in the world, and it will just train faster and better than other clusters. And it's also built for the most cheaply and the fastest. So XAI will have the highest return on capital and buy also the best cheaply and the fastest. So XAO have the highest training capital and buy also the best training data and therefore win. Then Google will also win because they have their TensorFlow chips, they make some of their own chips.

Starting point is 01:13:54 They do focus on ROIC and they have a great monopoly to kind of fund it all. So I don't think it's over done and blown. I think this is gonna be, as you guys said before in the podcast, bigger than Industrial Revolution, but it's also true that you need to have a good ROIC. And if you don't, you're not transparent about it, you can see what happens. I would argue Google's probably been the most frugal, thoughtful, and well-managed computing

Starting point is 01:14:19 infrastructure investor of all time. The 98 to 2005 era at Google, it was all about just cheap throwaway racks. That was the big advantage they had, is they weren't using the expensive Oracle servers. They had a two to three-year depreciation timeline on those, but they were super cheap. So the ROIC was quite good. Then they got into energy efficiency, which they realized was a big driving cost. They started to build systems that were more energy efficient. As a result, they lasted longer.

Starting point is 01:14:49 And then their depreciation schedule moved up to three to four years, meaning they could kind of write down the value of the servers over three to four years. And then from 2010 to 2015 era, their hardware system for cloud allowed them to kind of extend through repurposing the utilization and they increased their depreciation from two, four to five years. And then in 2021, and if you guys remember this, they made this kind of big change to their depreciation schedule on data center infrastructure to six years. So when they invest CapEx in a data center, they would write down the servers over a six-year cycle because of AI optimization on maintenance. So they started using AI just for internal management of the infrastructure.

Starting point is 01:15:33 So I would view the $75 billion CapEx actually as a very positive signal for the company. I think that it means that they have a really strong line of sight on how they're going to have full utilization and great return on this. If you do the math, ROIC math on this, $75 billion, assume a 20% ROIC, you've got to be generating, call it roughly an incremental $15 billion of profit a year, plus the amortization of the 75 billion. So take the 75 billion divided by six, that's 12 billion plus 15 billion. So basically they would need to make an incremental 27 billion of operating profit a year on the 75 billion for this to meet their ROIC performance.

Starting point is 01:16:16 That doesn't seem crazy, because that's just under 20% of their annual operating profit. This is a very kind of, I think, important point, which is Google doesn't just do this to build out AI in the future. They have a really strong line of sight on how this can kind of increment. And you don't have a huge hurdle for them for this to pay back. So I don't know, I would kind of, to Antonio's point, I'd view this as a positive. I think if you use their historical ability to manage infrastructure and make

Starting point is 01:16:40 predictions on investments as an indicator of the future. This is a strong and positive indicator. And I do think that for all the naysayers out there that think that search is going to evolve to chat, you could look at this as being a really important proof point that Google has the confidence that they're going to be able to move from search to chat. And as Chamath points out, they've got great performative models. And I would view this more of as a positive than a negative. If they were under investing, I would be worried that they

Starting point is 01:17:04 didn't know where to invest. But to see them make this degree of investment highlights the confidence in the strategy. And Tony, I don't know if you've been watching the agent space or deep research that came out from Google and then closed AI, I mean, open AI, launched their copycat version of this product. Sorry, my feelings on it. I'm curious your thoughts on job displacement. We're looking at self-driving. Sorry, my feelings on it. I'm curious your thoughts on job displacement. We're looking at self driving. Obviously, way most got cars on the road, obviously, Tesla, which you were previously on the board of and I know you were the first institutional investor in Tesla, self driving is pretty good. I only get like one or two disengagements per hour. And they

Starting point is 01:17:42 tend to be the ones where I just want to take the turn a little sharper kind of thing. So that's getting pretty close. Byd is very close. You got a lot of job displacement that occur millions and millions of drivers in 10 years could lose their jobs. Researchers working at Gartner Group, whatever Boston Consulting Group, like it feels like there could be massive job displacement. Do you have concerns about that in the American economy and globally? There's a lot of hammering about this.

Starting point is 01:18:10 And it's real in prior moments of large disruption that there have been job displacements because there's no generous people to get retrained for something else. You can't retrain. So I think there were studies, one of the people did, of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the 70s that the cost of each steel worker job loss was about a million dollars to the economy because these people couldn't be retrained. That might happen here, but I have a more benign outlook, personally. What I think is going to happen is that you will have job loss, but the amount of productivity

Starting point is 01:18:42 that will be released in the US economy is going to be extraordinary. Right? So GDP growth is a function of the number of people working times productivity. It's very simple. Economists want to make it more complex than that, but it's the number of people working times productivity. If you go, if productivity goes up to 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, you get a massive boost in GDP growth. And then what happens?

Starting point is 01:19:04 Well, people can get retrained, they can get different jobs boost in GDP growth. And then what happens? Well, people can get retrained. They can get different jobs. Different services happen. People start companies. The application layer of LLMs is just starting. The barrier to start a company is quite low. Things like launch probably explode because there's all these people who don't have jobs anymore that were accountants and want to start something.

Starting point is 01:19:21 It's hard to know what happens. You know, I believe in American agility. I believe in this country. I believe in this country. I believe that we will figure out a way to make this all work. And if there's enough productivity and money in the economy that's flowing, people will find new jobs. They will find new businesses to start.

Starting point is 01:19:36 They will find new things to do. We have to get out of the way, take regulation down, and let Americans be creative and unleash the American productivity machine. Let's make that happen. Yeah, that's, I think, really strong thoughts. And I mean, that's the game we're seeing on the field. How many companies are we seeing hit a million dollars in revenue with five employees where

Starting point is 01:19:54 that used to take 25? So the efficiencies there, Chamath, your outlook on this issue, since it seems to be coming up again specifically with truck drivers and Uber drivers and all kinds of other research jobs that seem to be doing pretty well, or can be done pretty well by AI. Where do you stand on this issue today? I think it's a process. Buffett wrote about this in an annual letter, and what he described was the changing nature of jobs during the agrarian revolution. What you saw was a large cohort of people who supported themselves through farming. Then the total quantum of those jobs shrank by 90% when you had industrialized farming and tractors and whatnot. But the economy,

Starting point is 01:20:43 to Antonio's point, grew around that business and added other kinds of businesses that didn't make sense in that moment. And I think what you see is that when economies get more and more evolved, you see the growth of services, businesses that sort of are these things that can only happen when you have excess, right? The person that you pay for closet organizing would not have had a job in the turn of the agrarian revolution or the industrial only happen when you have excess, right? The person that you pay for closet organizing would not have had a job in the turn of the agrarian revolution or the industrial revolution. But they can exist in 2020 something.

Starting point is 01:21:12 And frankly, they can make a good job, the life coach. There are all these jobs that just kind of come out of nowhere. Podcast or influencer. All of that. Venture capitalist. Capital allocator, absolutely. Mutant strawberry creator. So I think that you're-

Starting point is 01:21:29 Cut that. waiting for this next turn of creativity. Like the big problem that we all have, maybe I'll take the more glass half empty version of what Antonio said is, we really haven't been unlocking people's creativity over the last 15 years. We've been trundlingly around, except safe of a few companies, which we all know,

Starting point is 01:21:50 and we can just repeat them endlessly, but we know which ones they are, that are truly innovating and at the edge. Everybody else is kind of diddling around navel gazing. So the real problem is that we have not had a lot of reps in being creative. I'll give you just a very simple example, Nick. Can you find this? Even extremely state industries. Did you see the BYD clip of the car?

Starting point is 01:22:14 And I thought to myself- Yes, parallel park, yes, with a little swipe. How tragic is it that you look at this and you're blown away? And you're blown away for two reasons. One is, A, I didn't think that that was possible, and B, why doesn't it exist in America? But the reality underneath the hood is extremely benign how this is implemented.

Starting point is 01:22:38 And so I think that the problem is we spent so much time losing the script. I think Antonio is right. When you unshackle people to not focus on the mental load of getting the pronouns right or the this or the that, you won't be so overwhelmed by things like this, because you will have already been pushing the boundaries of human creativity. We need to get back to that. We need to let these creative people cook. And I hope I hope that that happens. I think that that will happen. Freeberg, can you do a science corner on the FDA approval for the non-opioid painkiller?

Starting point is 01:23:15 Not today. No, no, I know. I know. But could you do it like in a couple weeks? Yeah. By the way, the one I wanted to do is that new macro study on GLP-1s, which I think is super interesting. Oh, tell us. You guys remember I talked a while ago about how they were able to mine VA data. So the VA, right, they take care of veterans and they have all the medical records.

Starting point is 01:23:39 And on an anonymized basis, they can make that data available to researchers. And so if you guys remember this, this is how they identified that the Epstein-Barr virus or the virus that causes mono as being statistically certain to be the trigger for multiple sclerosis. In the cohort of hundreds of thousands of patients that were in this data set, no one got MS that didn't get Epstein-Barr virus. If you did not get Epstein-Barr virus, you did not get MS. I don't know if you guys remember I did the science corner a while ago. Anyway, did not get Epstein-Barr virus, you did not get MS. I don't know if you guys remember I did the science corner a while ago.

Starting point is 01:24:09 Anyway, so the data set that you can mine at the VA is incredible. So they pulled all the data from everyone that's been on the GLP-1 agonists, and they identified all of the health effects across multiple indications, the statistical difference between the cohorts. Okay, so this research team out of St. Louis pulled all the

Starting point is 01:24:25 data from the VA database. And basically, they looked at, you know, 1.2 million people with diabetes that didn't take anything compared to 215,000 that took the GLP-1 receptor agonists and another 600,000 people that took other drugs for diabetes. So basically this cohort segmentation allows them to isolate the effect of the GLP-1 drugs. And as you can see here, this shows across hundreds of thousands of patients, the effect of the GLP-1 on a hazard ratio, which means like how likely are you

Starting point is 01:25:01 to have the following health condition versus the population that's not taking the GLP ones. And then on the right, if you scroll to the right, Nick, are the increase in risk and on the left are the things that go down. So the increase, the only thing that increased is like, you know, 8% or 10% increase in nausea and vomiting, muscular skeletal complications, GRD, which is gastric reflux from... Sleep disturbances. Obviously indigestion, yeah, and sleep disturbance

Starting point is 01:25:31 is probably related to indigestion. So it's all abdominal stuff. Now, if you go over here to the benefit side, so the benefit side is what conditions did you see a decrease in? So you have a decrease in shock, a decrease in hepatic failure, so liver failure, respiratory failure, cardiac arrest.

Starting point is 01:25:48 In fact, on cardiac arrest, you see a 30% decrease in the probability of having cardiac arrest from the cohort that's on the GLP-1 versus the alternatives. Schizophrenia? Bellinia? Wow. Everything. So this goes to the point, if you guys remember the interview I did a couple months ago with the CEO of Eli Lilly, that they have all these clinical trials going on right now for different

Starting point is 01:26:10 indications for the GLP-1 receptor agonists, that they're seeing that there's health benefits beyond just the weight loss in reducing things like kidney disease, obviously liver problems, mental problems, and so on. Do we know why? And if we don't know why, do you think it's because this is suppressing the food and it's the lack of food or the change in the food consumption that's creating this? Do you know what I'm asking? Like, do you think the drug is actually, yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:37 Yeah, so you should watch the interview I did with Rick. In fact, this is a good moment to call it out if you haven't seen it. I have, it's excellent. I think he highlights that this class of drugs, there are, you know, genes get turned on and off. So there's a, you know, what's called a gene expression cascade that occurs with certain compounds. So we know that the GLP-1 receptor agonist means that it binds to these GLP-1 sites and there's a cascading effect of genes that then get expressed. And what that seems to do is turn off things like inflammatory markers. It turns on things like CIRC2 genes, which can

Starting point is 01:27:11 actually increase cellular repair. So there seem to be other benefits from these drugs beyond just the appetite control. And it's not the appetite control itself, but there seems to be other effects Let me ask you a question. from these receptors being activated. Would you put your kids on this? No. be other effects from these receptors being activated. Let me ask you a question. Yeah. Would you put your kids on this? No. Okay.

Starting point is 01:27:29 Would you put your wife on this? I would consider it, and I would consider it for myself too, just for the anti-inflammatory effects. How will you make that decision? Well, for me personally, and the thing that I weigh against is the muscle loss and the bone density loss. So I think that if you look at the biggest kind of effect on these on a, on the downside basis is you should increase your protein in your diet.

Starting point is 01:27:51 You have to do weightlifting. There's things that you would do. And frankly, if you do those things anyway, if you increase protein in your diet and do more weightlifting, you're actually going to see very good health benefits from just doing those things that may actually outweigh the benefits you get from being on the GFP1. So I have a question for you, Dave, which is, and this is the question is, when you look at that data and you talk to the COs, how much do you think really long-term, when the long-term tests are out, is going to be that it was the drug or just that being obese

Starting point is 01:28:17 is very bad for you? And so when you take your body fat down dramatically, all these other gene expressions happen anyway, right? So which one will it be? Well, this is what they're starting to isolate. And I will say, Antonio, they are starting to see that there are other expressions that are not related to the obesity and people that don't have obesity that are using these drugs.

Starting point is 01:28:38 So they're seeing that cohort data now. Clinical studies, phase two were published, and I think we're going to see phase three and some of these indications soon. But it is looking very positive that it's not just the loss of obesity. Now, to your point, being obese, not exercising, eating poorly destroys your health. You stop that sh**. Right. Right. Everything gets better. If you lift weights. Friberg, can you tell us when you decide to do this? I will. Yeah. If I do do a GLP-1 receptor agonist, I will let you guys know right now. I actually feel like I want to go through a process of increasing my weightlifting routine more.

Starting point is 01:29:14 I've been trying to create a more rigorous schedule. My schedule just sucks, so that's been the hardest thing for me. But I actually want to go through that first before making that decision. Yeah. That was kind of cool, David. I'm sorry. No, I was just curious. Why that order? I don't understand. I want to measure the effects because I do think that if you actually get into a regular weightlifting routine and you increase protein in your diet, which is another thing I've been making a concerted measured effort to do, which is hard as a vegetarian, by the way,

Starting point is 01:29:43 you see pretty significant health effects. And so I'm trying to get through the process of increasing muscle composition before I'll make the decision on whether or not to add GOP-1. I don't want to kind of confound the two factors. You know what I did that made it super easy for me is I got egg whites in a carton.

Starting point is 01:30:00 Yeah, I've done that. And I have this incredible, crunchy, spicy garlic thing that everybody mumufuku and everybody makes and everybody's crazy about just in the mornings, I'll eat whatever it is 10 ounces, 12 ounces of egg whites with that spicy stuff. It's delicious. It's awesome. And I just try to, you know, get that whatever 3040 grams of protein first thing in the morning. And then doing the rocking. Well, this is easy. Like you just wear a 35 pound weight vest freeburg and you walk a mile or two and you will get my problem. Jason, with all of this is that every time I see something. So I saw Gary Brekka on the Sean Ryan podcast recently.

Starting point is 01:30:40 And Sean Ryan asks him like, what are a handful of things that you recommend for everybody, right? And he recommends mineral salt and then he recommends a methylated vitamin. He recommends amino acids, whatever, there's a protocol. Then if you happen to catch a clip on exit, Andrew Huberman, he'll have a protocol. And then Brian Johnson has a protocol. And the problem is all these protocols are slightly the same, but they're just different enough where it creates a huge cognitive load in a normal person like myself to your point, Freeberg, who's busy, who's got a job, who's got kids. How do you decide? And so I would really love something to be sort of like, I don't want to say gold standard

Starting point is 01:31:21 because you can't say that, but that is like, what's the real bank for your buck? What Antonio said, you know, are you just better off just losing the 50 pounds and then. This is why these products are successful. And I think will be continue to grow pretty dramatically. Antonio is because it is pop a pill and it solves all those problems. It doesn't require cognitive load and it will be in a pill format soon. right? I mean, the pills are almost here. I think it would be very cool actually, David, if you do this, since you've lost point about, you know,

Starting point is 01:31:50 people being confused, if you did the every person's kind of story around this journey, and you documented it. Totally. You did like, this is my weight, I did weight lifting first, then I did the GOP one, and you actually did like a weekly thing where you checked in, and even it was 10 minutes up on X or something where you just

Starting point is 01:32:08 gave people the journey in a way that wasn't so complicated because I think people are confused. Jamais rate me, I have very good doctors, you guys have good doctors, but if you don't, you don't know what to do. By the way, the problem for me, just to give you a sense of it, I had a doctor in LA, I had a doctor in San Francisco, I would have them do their own versions of things, then I would have somebody else help me compare. It cost me way too much money, and all that complexity did was make the quality

Starting point is 01:32:35 of my healthcare actually go down. And instead, what I really wanted was just a very simple protocol that said, take the metformin because it's good for you, take the vitamin D, take the omega-3 fatty acids, otherwise just eat this meal plan. And it would help me a lot more than I've had to cobble it together myself. Because by the way, when you see something like Gary Brekka is very, very articulate, very smart. But when I see him on the Sean Ryan podcast, the first thing I do is I go

Starting point is 01:33:01 and populate an Amazon cart with all the things that he said, because my instinct is, well, I should do the right thing for myself. This is a couple hundred bucks. It's worth the investment. But then the day after, somebody else has something else. You know, so I'll be really interested to- You have a little OCD though, Chamath. I've known you for a long time. You get very obsessive with these things. Well, my father died because of poor health. My best friend died of poor health. I feel like you should at least do the things that are preventable. Have you seen that post-Jamat did with you? He was like half naked in the mirror. He looks great. What are you talking about? He looks great. If you could look like that, you'd

Starting point is 01:33:37 do it too. No, no, no. I'm talking about like when you had the glucose monitor. I'm sitting with him at the poker table. He's got the glucose monitor and he's taking a sip of wine. He's checking the glucose. He's having like a piece of Bejewed. Then he's checking the glucose monitor. It's just like, literally he becomes obsessive. Then with the, you know, then we had a piddler.

Starting point is 01:33:56 Oh my God. I mean, come on. If that's what- This AI stuff, this generative AI. You know what's so funny about this picture? All these clowns- Enough with the generative AI. All these clowns on the internet are like,

Starting point is 01:34:06 they don't understand that when you're six foot two, these are big legs. When you're six foot two. Those are not big, oh, I'm gonna go back to the legs. When you're a short king. Look at the legs. Look at the legs.

Starting point is 01:34:14 I'm the captain now. When you're a short king, when you're like five, seven. I did lose my chopsticks. I lost my chopsticks. When you're five, seven, five, eight, I get it why you guys. Cause you guys are all stubby and short. I don't get it.

Starting point is 01:34:26 This is the problem with generative AI. You can tell it's a fake photo. You can tell that that was generally AI because nobody has legs that day. How could you have biceps and then legs? Unbelievable. What a thirst trap. Now you guys are going to find photos of Antonio and I. We're going to throw them. I don't believe I have four pieces of advice for people. Number one, get good sleep. Number two, exercise. Number three, diet. Number four, meditation. And if you want to do that, it's very simple. You get, you get the calm meditation app, you get the eight sleep sleep, you get the fit bod for fitness. You get a good Athena system. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is all in

Starting point is 01:35:20 NGO USA gave us 18 million last year, guys, I forgot to tell you about it. But don't worry. It's in an offshore account for all of us. When we get back to Ethiopia and Vietnam, we have an all in castle built there. Okay. We built with our NGO. We'll see everybody next week. Love you boys. We love you guys man. Great job, Antonio. Bye bye, Antonio. Thanks, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, attention but they just need to release them out.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google's $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s

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