DOGE 对决 USAID、加密框架、谷歌 750 亿美元 AI 支出、美国主权财富基金与 GLP-1

Jason Calacanis (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 wanna do that, it's very simple. You get the Calm Meditation app, you get the Eight Sleep Sleep, You get the fit bod for fitness. Speaker 2 (00:00:15): And then you get Nutrisense for erect. What a grifter. He's just talking about his investments. Those are the four things you focus on. The four essentials. You get Jason Calacanis (00:00:27): a good Athena system. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is all in NGO. USAID gave us 18,000,000 last year. Guys, I forgot to tell you about it. But don't worry. It's in an off shore account for all of us. When we get back to Ethiopia in Vietnam, we have an all in castle built there. Okay? Speaker 2 (00:00:46): The Ledger winner's ride. Rain man David Sacks. And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy David Friedberg (00:00:57): with it. Speaker 2 (00:00:57): Love you guys. Queen of Kim Wa. I'm going all in. Jason Calacanis (00:01:02): 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 Ferriss, and, Peter Attia combined. Yes. We've really started to grow the pod. And, if you want to, you can subscribe to the podcast on x.com, YouTube, Spotify, and all those other places, especially if you want to have an incredibly positive world, enlightening conversation with Ray Dalio, you can tune in to Friedberg and Ray Dalio on the channel. Great conversation. It's gotten three or 400,000 views already on YouTube. How's the feedback been, Dave? Got so much great feedback on you. Ray Dalio. Is it the end of the empire or were we coming back? David Friedberg (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 Besant and others in the administration have echoed trying to get government deficit below three percent of GDP. That seems to be the economic magical number. And if you can do that, rates drop. I think that's resonated. It was great to have him publish that a couple weeks ago, talk with us about it. It's great. Jason Calacanis (00:02:20): Great bonus content from the team at All In. Today, we're super excited to have our friend Antonio Gracias joining the show. Antonio is the CEO of Valor Equity Partners and he's made some yeah, he's made some solid investments. He was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, Athena, tons of great or he's a second investor in Athena after me. Welcome to the program, Antonio. You put slightly more in. Antonio Gracias (00:02:48): Thank you, Jason. I was also new with you too, by the way. Jason Calacanis (00:02:50): Yes. Yes. Antonio Gracias (00:02:51): You did the c. You did the Jason Calacanis (00:02:52): series a, I believe, or the b. David Friedberg (00:02:54): What did Jason Calacanis (00:02:54): you do? Antonio Gracias (00:02:54): We were in the b. You were in the b. Great. Yeah. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:02:57): Yes. You were in the Shervin round. Okay. Well, welcome to the program, Antonio Gracias. 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 seventeen days into the Trump two point o presidency and it seems like the main character gentleman 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 Aid and Doge maybe in three acts. The first one, let me just educate the audience on what US Aid is and then get y'all's general reaction to it. Most Americans probably haven't heard of US Aid. It stands for the United States Agency for International Development. It 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 $45,000,000,000 a year under Biden, and, that's about hundred $50 per American per year. They have at least 10,000 employees or did. 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 20,000,000,000 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. Dollars 2,500,000.0 to fund EV charging stations in Vietnam, Dollars Two Million for sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala, One Point Five Million to a Serbian LGBTQ group, 70 k for a DEI musical, 47 k for a transgender opera in Colombia. The DEI musical, by the way, is in Ireland. So if you get if you're if you make it to Galloway, you can see that DEI musical. Jason Calacanis (00:05:07): This went 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? Antonio Gracias (00:05:30): I mean, look, Jason. First, I wanna thank you guys for having me. It's great to see everyone. Speaker 2 (00:05:35): You can see the musical. Antonio Gracias (00:05:37): I'd like to see the musical. Jason Calacanis (00:05:37): No. I booked it. We're all going to the musical. Speaker 2 (00:05:40): What what is it called? David Friedberg (00:05:42): Is there actually a name of Jason Calacanis (00:05:44): the The musical. Yeah. It's d e I comma the musical. Antonio Gracias (00:05:48): Oh, man. Jason Calacanis (00:05:49): It's tough. It's a heartwarming story. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:51): I apologize. I apologize. Job. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Thank you very much. Jason Calacanis (00:05:54): Qualified for. I apologize. Antonio Gracias (00:05:56): Yeah. So I I think the 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 it to begin with. And, you know, when we got there, as you know, it was, basically breaking even. And there's there was gonna be 12 and a half ish billion dollars of debt to the company. So a billion and a half dollars in interest cost that there was no money to pay, which led to the turnaround, I think, which was the biggest turnaround, like, of all time. Literally, biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history. Second biggest tech deal ever done. 80% of the people gone. That doesn't include all the contractors that were there. And, you know, the company is now servicing its debt, and they just priced yesterday their one of their bank deals at 97¢. So this is a huge win. It Means the company's doing extremely well. The other people bought the bank debt, and then then the bank debt traded up to a little over 98, so 98 and 5 eights. You know, a a giant business success, a rousing business success. And Jason, you were there for part of it. You saw it. It was a disaster. This place was, you know, it was tampons in the bathrooms and every woken you could possibly imagine, and no one in the office. It was so bad that the pens had gone dry in the conference rooms. It was just incredible. And I think that that's how the David Friedberg (00:07:07): So you mean the pens Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:08): had gone dry because they were never being used or because they were being used so much? Antonio Gracias (00:07:11): They were never being used. Jason Calacanis (00:07:12): We got there on the, yeah, the Halloween weekend that we started whiteboarding and, you know The wet? No. Antonio Gracias (00:07:19): There is no work. Jason Calacanis (00:07:20): Next bed. No ink. Yeah. Antonio Gracias (00:07:22): Yeah. I mean, everything. It was it's incredible. And but but, flowers were impeccable, food being made fresh every day for thousands of people and thrown away, three times a day, tossed in the garbage. We didn't give it to the homeless. It was just it was shockingly bad. Burocracy 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 buying virus. You know, the interesting thing is they they do extra brand safety checks there now, and they have 99% rating in brand safety, now. Right? So stop the wolf buying virus and go in the world, number one. Number two, fix the company. And both have happened. It's been a couple years now. Right? Three years now, and both have happened. 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 warm up act for what's going on at Doge, which is, you know, the president of The United States, President Trump, wants to make America great again, and that, I think, begins with making the government great, and you gotta 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 Elon to make it happen in Doge. And so the numbers are pretty easy. Right? We're spending, 6 and a half trillion. We bring in 4 and a half trillion. We gotta find $2,000,000,000,000 somewhere. Interest costs a trillion dollars a year. The bond markets were going up. The the bond bond was going up a lot because people didn't believe that we 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 it's sort of extraordinary what's happening in the you know, Elon said this public right, fraud, waste, and abuse. It means kinda 10% of the budget is probably fraud. Antonio Gracias (00:08:52): I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about, you know, $6,650,000,000,000, a trillion waste. I think that's probably about right. That alone fixes the problem. But what's really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me when I when we first started thinking about this, and, look, I'm not there full time. You know, I'm, in and out a little bit and and try to help where I can, but I'm not there full time. When I thought when this started, I thought we had a democracy that had turned into a bureaucracy. K? 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 make you're making some jokes out of it, the DI musical. 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. There's 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 the nick of time, and I'm super grateful to all the people there. There's, you know, 80 plus people there, all patriots gone full time. Jason Calacanis (00:09:54): Okay. So, Chamath, you've been watching this. You hear from Antonio. What's your general take on what we saw in the first, I don't know, twenty days of Doge? Or no, fifteen days. Sorry. It's fifteen days of Doge. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:08): 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 really wanna 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 and then after Pearl Harbor, during the war process. Over seven years, that committee, and this is in $19.41 dollars, 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 6 and a half billion they spent. You know how much they saved? It's estimated they saved somewhere between 10 to $15,000,000,000 in 1941. That's a quarter of a trillion $20.23 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 can be done. Everything in that committee, it 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 lacked the awareness to know that their own party was the driving force for this two times before. Chamath Palihapitiya (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 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 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. Dollars 8,000,000 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. This is exactly what happened in the sixties and seventies where it turned out that record companies were paying DJ's 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 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:36): It's is 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, 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. Jason Calacanis (00:15:06): 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 Politico was averaging around 1,300,000.0 a year, but it suddenly ballooned up to 8,000,000 a year under Biden and you can see the quarterly payments here on this chart. So there's some normal amount to 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 34,000,000 that's been floating around. That's all years back to 02/2008, not just twenty twenty four less people have that number juxtaposed or or or, misattributed. When Political was acquired back in 2021, they were doing about 200,000,000 in revenue. So this would be about 4% of their revenue. It's pretty significant. The BBC also received 2,700,000.0 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 a hundred and $20,000,000 from the federal government since 2011. That's gotta 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 a hundred k a year to, like, 300. So the the New York Times 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 and, you know, about the interest payments. Two or three years ago, you were way ahead of the curve. Jason Calacanis (00:17:36): 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 Freidberg? Magnificent. Speaker 2 (00:17:47): Okay. David Friedberg (00:17:48): Magnificent. I mean, what else is there to say? Jason Calacanis (00:17:51): Eggplant emoji. David Friedberg (00:17:52): Yeah. This is the eggplant emoji. It's what we needed. If you zoom out on what Doge is doing, 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 OPEX, all of your expenses in running a company or running an organization down to the studs. You take it down to zero, and you rebuild it up 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. They're doing a zero based 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 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 universities? Should the government be providing loans for people to buy homes that are overpriced? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And as we start to ask the questions of how we're spending money, I think it ends up leading 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. Jason Calacanis (00:19:30): And and, Antonio, zero based 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. They had buildings that were a hundred dollars 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 referenced 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 did the math for those 20 meals just in the San Francisco office. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how 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. Antonio Gracias (00:20:42): 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 then see what happens because there are lots of people that shouldn't be getting paid, and sometimes they complain. And sometimes you find the people that complain the loudest are the ones who are committing the worst fraud. They're the worst fraudsters in the whole in the whole game. Right? The worst squifters are the ones who are saying they're they're they're crying, the 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 you know, they were in some ways correct. I would say, there were some issues with the with the user growth and dollars, etcetera, and the incentive plans, but the actual, like, you know, the cash flow numbers were pretty much correct. Here, the problem is much, much deeper, and it makes the zero day based budgeting question much harder, which is the way the government works, a department just basically asks for money from treasury and they send it out. We all run businesses. There's a reconciliation process. You you have a contract. Yeah. You issue a PO against it. Something comes in. You check that it came in. Service is is rendered, and then you issue a payable. And then, you know, some a month later, you pay it. Right? That doesn't happen at the US government. There is that that process is broken. 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 spends? Just hit the button in the computer and figure it out. Problem is that button doesn't exist. You know, we spent time early on. I was, at Mar A Lago with Elam trying to track through, like, how does the money actually flow? We no one could tell us how it actually flows. Antonio Gracias (00:22:14): Where is it going out? People didn't know. And Right. It's totally crazy. And it's the reason that Well, it David Friedberg (00:22:19): all goes through Treasury, Antonio? Or, like, can you just explain that to us? Antonio Gracias (00:22:23): Well, so I will try to explain it to 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 '70 in the seventies, in 1973. The Nixon administration at in '71, let me go back. They came off the gold standard, which allowed deficits. In '73, at the nadir of the Nixon presidency, Congress took away from the presidency the executive power, this thing called apportionments, which is the power of the executive to stop spending. So Nixon was abusing it by stop and see 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. So what's happening is the the government is is is put in a process where they would just have an authorized executive kinda stamp a bill that got paid. That broke. And I don't know when it broke, but it broke some time. So the money flow now 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. Jason Calacanis (00:23:31): Yeah. And that's it. David Friedberg (00:23:32): There's no there's no there's no controller. There's no controller function like there is in a normal company. Antonio Gracias (00:23:37): 100. There is no control. There is no controller. There's no reconciliation. The reason they can't pass audits, okay, they're the the reason this happens is because you can't audit something you haven't reconciled. You know, the only audit that I've seen is actually from the Social Security Administration. And when you read it, I've got one of my partners who have read the thing, it has it's just riddled with material weaknesses. There are problems David Friedberg (00:23:59): individuals that have made, like, millions or billions of dollars from missed payments 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? Antonio Gracias (00:24:10): Yeah. I mean, so what I would I don't know what happened in Ukraine. I don't. Jason Calacanis (00:24:13): It is story. Antonio Gracias (00:24:14): Yeah. Yeah. It is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid and Medicaid Medicare's payments. I wanted to make that better. Right? We we use this to make the world better. And we just stopped because we found we found so much fraud. I mean, I'm I'm certain that we literally have a rule here. Government payor in 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 this is why. We just found we found continuous fraud in the companies we're looking at investing in. Jason Calacanis (00:24:44): 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 Right. What bounces and, you know, and what happens. And then, of course, we start getting calls. And people started routing, obviously, because they knew Saks 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, etcetera. So you start figuring out to your point, okay. Is this software even being used? There were so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up. So it was just being 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, hey. You know, I 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 ninety days. Okay. This seems reasonable. We gotta take care of our country. That was part of his mandate for becoming the forty seventh president of The United States. So a couple of days later, the White House said, Hey, this USAID leadership is trying to circumvent the executive order. In other words, they're just gonna keep paying people even though the executive order came out. That alerted the DOGE team. So Elon confirmed this on X. He said, all DOGE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the president's executive orders the most. Jason Calacanis (00:26:33): 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 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 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 or it's not legal or it's against protocol or it is protocol. We're gonna find out. There's been tons of of of legal, cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID. Jay Cal, let me ask you a question. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:38): Where Sure. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad? Jason Calacanis (00:27:46): 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 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 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:38): Do you think there's a chance that some of these human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money? Jason Calacanis (00:28:45): Well, I do think that, you know, I 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 work working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etcetera. And then somewhere along the line, you know, the Amnesty International was tweeting about trans rights and that's the big focus. 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 and beheaded in certain places in the world. So there 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 USAID, which I'd like to get your thoughts on too, Chamath, is at what point did this switch from being the the left saying we should not intervene. Right? The left's position always in the eighties, nineties 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, a lot of people who are formally in government seem to be part of this NGO train. Jason Calacanis (00:30:33): So the whole thing's just turned out to be a grift and it's a bipartisan grift, obviously. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:39): I think the biggest It's infuriating. 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. Sure. And I think that that's gonna 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 gonna look really dumb in hindsight. David Friedberg (00:31:11): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:31:12): Alright. Antonio Gracias (00:31:13): I have some gratitude to our friend David Sachs here who's coming online. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:31:15): Here he is. David. Let me get Antonio Gracias (00:31:17): And and the one thing I I wanna, point out, this goes way back. I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried to explain to me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy, and they were Your question about why did Democrats change, why did Republicans change, etcetera, the neocons took over foreign policy on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist, muscular stance, which is bad for America. And I think, Jason, that answered your question as to why the Democrat shifted. Jason Calacanis (00:31:44): Alright. With us is David Sacks. How are you doing, brother? Are are you literally in the White House? David Sacks (00:31:50): I'm in the, EOB. Jason Calacanis (00:31:53): Ah, okay. David Sacks (00:31:54): There's, like, a podcast studio actually in the EOB. Jason Calacanis (00:31:57): Oh, fantastic. And you're wearing a suit every day. David Sacks (00:32:00): Yeah. No. You're right. I have to wear a suit and tie every day. I was just listening on your your conversation about Doge. Jacob, I'm surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USAID enterprise. I mean, everybody's on the take except you. David Friedberg (00:32:12): What's going on? Speaker 2 (00:32:13): If I had known, I Jason Calacanis (00:32:14): would have started an NGO. Where's my NGO? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:17): You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grit. You had the virtue signaling. You had it all except the actual money. David Sacks (00:32:23): Let me uplevel this for a second. Okay? So we knew the US government runs a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit every year. We're in debt almost $40,000,000,000,000. And we also knew that anytime anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder. 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 Crazy. Getting paid. Politico, getting paid. Bill Kristol, perennial warmonger, getting paid. Ukraine, getting paid. Like, 11 out of 12 publications, Ukraine, getting paid. Jason Calacanis (00:32:58): Incredible. David Sacks (00:32:59): 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. David Friedberg (00:33:14): BBC. BBC, you wonder why everyone in The UK is so yeah. Yeah. Like, everyone believe that BBC is getting paid. David Sacks (00:33:20): Every left wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund at USAID, which disperses about 50,000,000,000 a year. That's a billion dollars a week. That's actually a lot of money. And so it it just it makes you wonder. You know, the left in general tries to portray itself as a movement of the people that is 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? Jason Calacanis (00:33:58): Yeah. Crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework finally. I I caught some of it. 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? David Sacks (00:34:27): 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 principal's 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 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 will be 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 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 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 chairmen 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. 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 of the four committees that we're gonna 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. David Friedberg (00:36:25): I used to work in this because when I first launched Climate Corp back in the day, we actually were selling commodity contracts online. So we we set ourselves up as an exempt commodity trading platform. And I so I I remember all this old legislation. There was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, if I remember, when they 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, in the commodities world. That's why the legacy of all this stuff kinda sitting with agriculture. Is that the way this is likely gonna move forward? Is it's gonna look like a new extension of exempt commodities and kind of treated like that versus being securities? David Sacks (00:37:21): The question you're describing is called market structure. You know? Yeah. What are the definitions gonna be? Because digital assets can be many things. You can have 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. 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 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 was 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 French Hill's bill last congress. I think we could do a revised and updated version this congress. And that was one of the things they all the the chairman expressed support for. So I think there's a pretty good chance we can get this done in the next six months. David Friedberg (00:39:02): What's the opposition, Sachs? 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, can their structure that protects consumers, etcetera, etcetera. Why would people be opposed to moving this forward, moving the legislation forward, getting this all behind us? David Sacks (00:39:21): Well, I think this is an area where there's a really good 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 gonna 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 gonna be unanimous or anything like that because there are still forces that are hostile to crypto in Washington and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:58): Do you think it's gonna be a discreet bill, or do you I I mean, it seems like you're gonna have to get a border security and energy and budget bill passed. So it seems like everything's looking towards reconciliation, in which case Really? Would this be an adjunct, like a like an add on? David Sacks (00:40:17): The 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 Byrd rule. And that rule was definitely pushed pretty hard in the last administration. Remember that the Biden administration got the Inflation Reduction Act passed through reconciliation David Friedberg (00:40:43): Mhmm. David Sacks (00:40:44): 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. The other area is stablecoins. 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 gonna 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. Jason Calacanis (00:41:20): Sachs, I guess the question is the SEC was and Gary Gensler were the blocker previously with 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 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, if 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, people who might try to prey upon them. David Sacks (00:42:14): Well, the first thing you wanna do if you're gonna protect consumers is you wanna bring the activity onshore. 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 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. Yeah. Probably a recent Jason Calacanis (00:42:44): Little bit of a tell. Speaker 2 (00:42:45): A little bit of a tell. Yeah. David Sacks (00:42:46): 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 that are gonna 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. Mhmm. David Friedberg (00:43:01): So David Sacks (00:43:01): the number one thing we need to do is just bring the innovation onshore. 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 a crypto project. So all of that will be in the bill. And then in the meantime, the SEC has created a new task force under Hester Peirce, 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. 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 sent a Wells 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. 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. Jason Calacanis (00:44:32): This is absolutely awesome. We're super encouraged that you're doing this, and, we really appreciate you coming on the pod. 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. David Sacks (00:44:53): Well, the big thing is, like I talked about last time, the president rescinded the Biden EO, which was this hundred page monstrosity. It burned some regulation on our AI companies. I think that decision's been proven even more right in the wake of DeepSeq because we know that China has basically caught up or they're very, 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 burn some 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 and his EO is that we should devise a new AI action plan to replace that by NEO, and we're working on that right now. David Friedberg (00:45:42): Alright, David. Are we ready for this? Anecdotes from Doge you wanna share? David Sacks (00:45:45): I'll give you one anecdote, which is I've been working late here a number of nights at the EEOB. And And I won't tell you where the Doge guys are based, but, you know, 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 I mean, they're working there late up Friday night, and the facilities people don't know what to do because they've never had people, like, asked to stay late David Friedberg (00:46:14): on Friday night before. David Sacks (00:46:15): So they've had to create new, new facilities access Speaker 2 (00:46:19): for for David Sacks (00:46:19): these guys. Jason Calacanis (00:46:20): They're like, you're coming to the office and doing work? We don't have a protocol for that. What how does that work? I'm gonna need to get you a key or a badge to come to the building. Yeah. Well, it's absolutely awesome to see the progress you're making in the first two weeks and continued success. We're so proud of the effort. David Sacks (00:46:38): Alright. Thanks, guys. Jason Calacanis (00:46:40): Alright. David Friedberg (00:46:41): Do you guys think the Democrats are gonna lose people over their opposition to Doge? Like, is Doge really viewed as oppositional to Democrat party interests Jason Calacanis (00:46:52): This is David Friedberg (00:46:53): for the average person? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:54): 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 if the Republicans don't figure out how to fix themselves, they were gonna go and lose for the next ten or fifteen 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, 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 broke 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 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 eighteen months, but I think unless they figure out how to totally hard reset, they're gonna be in a really difficult struggle to find a cohort of people beyond 15 or 20% of the population for a long time. Jason Calacanis (00:48:51): Well, and it's so dumb to come out against waste, fraud, and abuse. So the best argument that 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 and how the money was wasted. This is the like height of not getting the point and not reading room. A % 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 you pointed out the last time somebody really addressed this in earnest was Clinton. So this has been going on. Obama, Trump one point o, Biden, everybody has been raising the debt. All of the script 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 issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only gonna make Trump more popular. Antonio Gracias (00:50:13): So, Jason, I I, kinda add what you and Chamath said. I think you're both right. Let me give you a a very concrete example. Rahm Emanuel is now back from Japan. Okay. He was chief of staff in both the Democratic White House's post, Roosevelt, Clinton and Obama. And he wrote an op ed this weekend, this past weekend, that basically said that Democrats have lost their way because they have forgotten what he calls kitchen table issues, the things people regular people care about. And, Shamath, you're right. I mean, the reality is, they forgot about inflation. They forgot that inflation is terrible for the average person. It's terrible for middle class 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. It's terrible. You know, Rahm makes this point that if the Democrats are gonna have to are gonna 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, DI, transgender, whatever, and that will never work. They'll never come back into power. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:17): Well, I mean, the the crazy thing is, like, the democratic policies are meant to favor capital holders, but capital holders, by David Friedberg (00:51:23): and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:23): 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 are 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. You just Antonio Gracias (00:51:55): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:56): And the fact that you didn't even know that is just pathetic. Antonio Gracias (00:51:59): Yeah. What's funny is that, you know, Margaret Thatcher famously said that the the problem with 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 it's how it finishes. It's 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 when I said earlier, we I was 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. Jason Calacanis (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 a country. It's almost universally based on natural resources. So 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 ninety days. And, the plan should include, quote, recommendations for 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 $36,000,000,000,000 in debt and we just pay down? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:59): Or Well, I I think it's not It's Jason Calacanis (00:54:02): not just money gonna come from. Yeah. David Friedberg (00:54:03): Well, it's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:03): 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 a hundred, hundred and $50,000,000,000, 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 gonna throw some names out there. David Tepper, Stan Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, John Doerr, or Mike Morris, 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 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. Jason Calacanis (00:55:08): Antonio, you think the government should be in this business? Antonio Gracias (00:55:12): So I have I I think it 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. Many of our strategic competitors around the world, in particular China, have a long term industrial policy, and they put enormous amounts of capital behind industrial policy. A sovereign wealth fund, I think, would be a stealthy way to create industrial policy in America. Jason Calacanis (00:55:40): So rather than having industrial policy in this context. So Example. Antonio Gracias (00:55:44): In China, they wanna they wanna build chip fabs, and they wanna catch up to to, TSMC. And so what do they do? They take the dollars as 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's free because 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 hundred year vision. The way it's it manifests is this industrial policy. We don't have that here at all. And we try to do it. We do like the Chips Act, and it goes through commerce. We have government bureaucrats deciding how to spend $200,000,000,000 to modernize Intel, which needs to happen. I mean, I'd much rather have Ken Griffin, Bill Gross, any of the guys Timothe mentioned deciding, okay. We have five industries in America we wanna invest in. Let's make great investments. Right? I mean, let's make great investments for America. They gotta be economic. They gotta they gotta make money for us, but they gotta be good for the country. I think that's what most of these sovereign wealth funds do. Some of them make portfolio investments, but many of them, like the the 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 Jason Calacanis (00:56:55): They're literally building cities in Neom. They've got Yeah. You know, dozen cities being constructed and and trying to take an oil economy and shift it to a tourism economy, a technology economy, a private equity economy. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:08): Antonio is totally right. Like Scott Bessen, part of his congressional testimony, you guys probably saw this, was he laid out this thing that he has that's called the three three three plan. Right? And the three three three plan says, we wanna see GDP growth of 3%. We wanna see deficits that are no greater than 3%, and we wanna have 3,000,000 barrels of oil, right, 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 and that 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 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. Jason Calacanis (00:58:22): Freyberg, 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 gonna 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 wanna do their pet projects? 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? David Friedberg (00:58:51): 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 $40,000,000,000,000 of federal debt. It doesn't make economic sense. Our cost of capital is 5%. That's how much the interest is on this ten to thirty 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 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 kinda 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 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, etcetera etcetera. So, you know, I I don't know if you guys remember all this, but there was, like, bit Bitcoin seizures that have happened over the years 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. David Friedberg (01:00:28): I would much rather have a capitalist making that decision. So I would view the, you know, the the sovereign wealth fund being less about raise capital from other means in the government, which effectively means borrowing money through treasuries because of the the the debt level we have and trying to invest it. And much more being about, okay, 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 I do think there's also an opportunity for managing Social Security in a smarter way. So Social Security's functionally gonna 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 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 in equities? So I would kinda think about that strategic pool of capital being managed by this as well 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 Jason Calacanis (01:01:46): When the Silk Road got, shut down, yeah, we seized a hundred and 44,000 Bitcoin, and that's sitting somewhere in some department of justice. Speaker 2 (01:01:54): I just found David Friedberg (01:01:55): off. Yeah. They sold I I think they sold it. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:01:58): No. I think we still have it. I think that was, like, the idea was that was gonna become the Bitcoin strategic reserve. I mean, you could also come up with the DOJ system. David Friedberg (01:02:05): The DOJ the DOJ selfie. So, like, who do you think of the DOJ's making the Bitcoin market decisions, and is that the right person to be monetizing these assets? Jason Calacanis (01:02:13): I mean David mentioned Antonio Gracias (01:02:15): you point out security. I gotta I just wanna follow-up on, which is when when you think about Social Security, it's 6, $61 of of our 30 strong debt, and it's actually a fake treasury bill. So just to one of the things we figured out early days before the inauguration on those is, like, that $6,000,000,000,000 sits on that ledger. It's just a paper ledger over. So, actually, if it gets paid out, it's also be very inflationary. It's just a fake treasury I lettered over at that pays a very low rate. And, here at, Valor, my partner, John Shulkin, has been reading to try to help. The the only the only thing we find in this audit in the government, the the Social Security Administration actually has an audit. It has an audit. And when you go through the audit, it's crazy, the material weaknesses going back to Doge, that you find. Yeah. It'd be way better to have that invested in a way that was economic for people with real money. That's By Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:04): the way, guys and they're pressing for this. Guys, as we're speaking, the Oh. The federal judge just put a temporary restraining order on Doge and has barred Elon and his team from accessing US treasury payments data. David Friedberg (01:03:17): Alright. Antonio Gracias (01:03:17): Boy. Jason Calacanis (01:03:18): So now we're gonna have a real grudge match between the public The David Friedberg (01:03:24): federal which judge was it? Federal judge? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:27): Federal judge. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:03:28): Would you Antonio Gracias (01:03:28): know why? Do you want to say why? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:30): No. But Elizabeth Warren is doing a victory lap, so I'm sure that, you know, she's part of it. Jason Calacanis (01:03:38): So the government agency set up by the president can't look at the database of the treasury? Antonio Gracias (01:03:44): So just to be double click here, Doge is not a new agency. It's the renaming of existing need and say, 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, to create an audit function to the government. What's crazy about this ruling to me is, Congress basically is the constitution delegates to the executive, the, the ability to spend the money, and they go through Congress. It gets actually appropriate in Congress, and the executive spends it. How can you spend money if you don't know where it went? I mean, how can you be responsible? Right? You have the authority to spend it without the and how can you responsibly spend it if you actually can't go look and see where it goes? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:26): 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. Oh, here it Antonio Gracias (01:04:51): I'm no longer I Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:52): already sold the team. I already Speaker 2 (01:04:53): sold my piece. I already sold my piece. Oops. Oops. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:58): Close the carried interest tax. Closed the carried interest tax deduction loophole, which allowed you to claim carried interest. David Friedberg (01:05:05): Sorry, Antonio. Oh, no. Oh, Antonio Gracias (01:05:08): I better run. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:09): Oh, no. Speaker 2 (01:05:10): I'll be back Antonio Gracias (01:05:10): in a few hours. He'll sell some things. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:15): Isn't that incredible? I mean, he is really going for the jugular. Wow. Amazing. I support this 100%. David Friedberg (01:05:22): The SALT deduction's coming back. Is that right? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:25): Yeah. Marginally, though. I don't think he's gonna give it the way that it was before, but isn't this incredible? I mean, I how who's gonna stand up and lay on the railroad tracks for being able to amortize a multibillion 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 admit nobody's gonna stand up for these things. Jason Calacanis (01:05:49): I think we should just stop doing venture and just start NGOs. We just start a whole rats nest of NGOs to ship money around. Antonio Gracias (01:05:57): You could have an incubator. Jason Calacanis (01:05:59): Yeah. Absolutely. An incubator. Speaker 2 (01:06:00): An incubator. Jason Calacanis (01:06:01): Come if you've got a great idea for an NGO Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:04): Jacob. Why why didn't you launch Launch in every single random developing country in the world? Jason Calacanis (01:06:10): I mean, if I I hadn't Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:11): known You would have 8,000,000,000 of AUM because of a USAID. Just launch one Jason Calacanis (01:06:16): in Vietnam, and we could have yeah. Antonio Gracias (01:06:19): I could just go Go launch. I love it. Jason Calacanis (01:06:21): We we could have had a yeah. A launch accelerator in Vietnam for transgender. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:26): The Jason Calacanis Launch Fund of Equatorial Guinea. Jason Calacanis (01:06:31): It is 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 Antonio Gracias (01:06:50): These are kitchen table issues like Rahm 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 Jason Calacanis (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 in EO yesterday for was such an obvious issue of fairness and has nothing to do with transgender. It just has to do with, like, biology. If a if a biological male plays basketball on a on a a biological female team, somebody's gonna get hurt and that person's gonna score a hundred points. It's just obvious. And the fact that the Democrats couldn't see that issue being a % for or 95% makes no sense. Like, it's just such an obvious litmus test of logic. Antonio Gracias (01:07:44): I mean, look, man. The the constitution is is a is a document about fairness. The people that found this country, the patriots found this country, they they did it because you're treated unfairly at home. All of us here, are one generation away, right, or two generations away from immigration. And the reality is that's why people come here, man. It's it's un American. It's un American. Jason Calacanis (01:08:01): So we got two people here who are immigrants. Yes. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:04): I'm reading the TRO, and it it looks like this TRO means temporary restraining order. And it and it's actually Nero's who from Doge Yeah. Can get read access down to two people, Tom Krauss and Marco Elez. Jason Calacanis (01:08:18): Oh, okay. 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. Antonio Gracias (01:08:30): I just wanna point out two people to to look at no matter how good they are. I'm just saying we're twenty four seven. Look at all the payments the US government is not a lot. Jason Calacanis (01:08:38): 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 wanna have some controls in place. Antonio Gracias (01:08:46): I mean, it feels like that's an administrative block. That's, like, the narrowest thing you could do. Two oh, okay. Yeah. You can come in, but you can just send two people and just these two people. So if they get sick or something happens, no one else comes in. That seems to me to be truly just administrative block to slow it down. Jason Calacanis (01:09:02): Yeah. Well, we're interpreting this in real time. The facts will come out over time. Let's wrap up on, Google. Google dropped 7% after reporting earnings on Tuesday, Chamath. Revenue up 12% year over year to 96,500,000,000.0. Wow. Cloud revenue was up 30% year over year, 12,000,000,000 YouTube ads surging 14% to 10,500,000,000. Net profit was around 26,500,000,000.0, up 28% year over year. So they are really focusing on profitability, obviously. Full year numbers. This is just extraordinary. Total revenue, 350,000,000,000 with a hundred billion in net profit. Cloud and YouTube finished 2024 with a combined run rate of a hundred and $10,000,000,000 YouTube is basically Netflix inside of, inside of Google and their Google Cloud is essentially AWS inside of Google. The thing that made investors get concerned, Chamath, is that Google said it would invest 75,000,000,000 in CapEx in 2025, '40 '2 percent jump over 2024, '20 '9 percent 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 75,000,000,000, obviously, in relation to what we saw with DeepSeek doing it with maybe a little bit less, maybe they're lying? Is this just an absolute waste of money or a gargantuan number, or is it something they can easily, with that amount of profitability and cash they have, absorb and use in the future? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:39): I think I should stipulate that Google's models are probably the best of all the models across 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'll 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. 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 75,000,000,000 gets segregated. How much of that goes to these AI enabled models that actually do better ads optimization? There's a there's a really interesting discussion by a former meta 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, you know, 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 the best. David Friedberg (01:12:13): Do you Jason Calacanis (01:12:14): have thoughts on this build out, Antonio? Obviously, I think you've been involved with XAI, and obviously involved with Twitter and X previously and Colossus' 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 it'll be too hard to monetize all that expense? Or is it, maybe a little bit of hand wringing and the opportunity in AI is so obviously huge that you just gotta take the leap of faith, and and and if you build it, the revenue will come. Antonio Gracias (01:12:48): Yeah. I think Chamath has the right framework here, which is return of us to 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 budget post training, the market would have seen that half the money has higher return capital. And Google's return capital is actually going up, after the implementation of of AI models into their into their company. And I I think that sort of abstracts the entire market, which is people are waking up that return invested capital and data central matter, that the models are basic commodities and super competitive. And the best case is kind of a a land war in Asia. It's a melee. In a in a worst case, it's total commodities. What does matter is the return on capital data center, which is influenced by how good the data centers are. So you mentioned the XAI data center. It's a hundred thousand 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 Exaio will have the highest churn on capital, and I also think the best trained data, and therefore will win. I think Google will also win because they have, their TensorFlow chips. They make their own some of their own chips. They do focus on ROIC, and they have a great monopoly to kind of fund it all. So I don't think it's overblown. I think that I think this is gonna be, as you guys have said before in the podcast, you know, bigger than industrial revolution, but, it's also true that you need to have a good ROIC. And if you don't and you're not transparent about it, you can see what happens. David Friedberg (01:14:12): I I would argue Google's probably been the most frugal, thoughtful, and well managed computing infrastructure investor of all time. You know, the ninety eight to two thousand five era at Google, it was all about just cheap throwaway rats. That that was the big advantage they had is they weren't using the expensive Oracle servers. And they had a two to three year kind of depreciation timeline on those, but they were super cheap. And so the 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 that were more energy efficient. As a result, they lasted longer. And then their 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 to four to five years. And then in 2021, I don't know if you guys remember this, they made this kinda 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. So I would view the $75,000,000,000 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 gonna have full utilization and great return on this. If you do the math, ROIC math on this, $75,000,000,000 assume a 20% ROIC, you've gotta be generating, call it, roughly an incremental $15,000,000,000 of profit a year, plus the amortization of the 75,000,000,000. So take the 75,000,000,000 divided by six. That's 12,000,000,000 plus 15,000,000,000. So what there's so, basically, they would need to make an incremental 27,000,000,000 of operating profit a year on the 75,000,000,000 for this to meet their ROIC performance. That doesn't seem crazy because that's just under 20% of their of their annual operating profit. David Friedberg (01:16:20): This is a very kind of, I think, important point, which is Google doesn't just do this to 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 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 gonna evolve to chat, you could look at this as being a really important proof point that Google has the confidence that they're gonna 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 underinvesting, I would be worried that they didn't know where to invest. But to see them make this degree of investment highlights the confidence in the strategy. Jason Calacanis (01:17:09): 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, OpenAI, launched their copycat version of this, product. Sorry. Antonio Gracias (01:17:21): I don't have Jason Calacanis (01:17:22): short feelings on it. I'm curious your thoughts on job displacement. We're looking at self driving. Obviously, Waymo's 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 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 ten 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? Antonio Gracias (01:18:09): There's a lot of hammering about this, and it's real. In prior moments of large disruption, there have been job displacements because there's, you know, generous people that get retrained for something else who can't retrain. So, you know, I think, there were studies, Milton Friedman 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. And that might happen here. But I'm gonna I have a more benign outlook, personally. What I think is gonna happen is that you will have job loss, but the amount of productivity that will be released in The US economy is gonna be extraordinary. Right? So so GDP growth is a function of the number of people working times productivity. It's very simple. Economists wanna make it more complex than that, but it's the number of people working times productivity. If you go if productivity goes up to five, six, seven, eight percent, you get a massive 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 the barrier to start a company is quite low. Things like launch probably explode because there's all these people who are don't have jobs anymore that were accountants and wanna start something. It's hard to know what happens. You know? I believe in American agility. I believe in this country. I believe that we will figure out 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 business to start. 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. Jason Calacanis (01:19:46): 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 that used to take Yeah. 25? So the efficiencies there. Trumont, your 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 be doing pretty well, or can be done pretty well by AI. Where where do you stand on this issue today? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:15): 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. And what you saw was a large cohort of people who supported themselves through farming. And then the total quantum of those jobs shrank by 90 when you had industrialized farming and tractors and whatnot. But the economy, 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 revolution. David Friedberg (01:21:10): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:10): But they can they can exist in twenty twenty something. And frankly, they can make a good job, the life coach. There are all these jobs that just kind of come out of nowhere. Jason Calacanis (01:21:17): Podcast or influencer. All of that. David Friedberg (01:21:19): Venture venture capitalist. Speaker 2 (01:21:21): Western capital allocator. Jason Calacanis (01:21:23): Absolutely. Mutant strawberry creator. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:27): Yeah. So I think that I think that you're 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 fifteen years. We've been trundling around except safe of a few companies, which we all know, 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 kinda diddling around naval 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? Yes. And I thought to myself park. Jason Calacanis (01:22:15): Yes. With a little swipe. It's in front Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:17): of me. Tragic is it that when you look at this and you're blown away? David Friedberg (01:22:23): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:24): 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. And so I think that the problem is we spent so much time losing the script. I think Antonio's 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 pain killer? David Friedberg (01:23:15): I not today. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:16): No. No. I know. I know. But could you do it, like, in a couple weeks? David Friedberg (01:23:19): Yeah. Not with you. The one I wanted to do is that new macro study on GLP ones, which I think is super interesting. Jason Calacanis (01:23:27): Oh, tell us. David Friedberg (01:23:28): Do you guys remember I talked a while ago about how they were able to mine VA data? So the VA, right, they they take care of veterans and they have all the medical records. 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 this dataset, 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, 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 one agonists, and they identified Jason Calacanis (01:24:17): all of the David Friedberg (01:24:17): health effects across multiple indications, the statistical difference between the cohorts. Okay. So this research team out of St. Louis pulled all the data from the VA database. And, basically, they looked at, you know, one point two million people with diabetes that didn't take anything compared to two hundred and fifteen thousand that took the GLP one receptor agonists and another six hundred thousand people that took other drugs for diabetes. So, basically, this cohort segmentation allows them to isolate the effect of the GLP one drugs. And as you can see here, this shows across hundreds of thousands of patients the effect of the GLP one on a hazard ratio, which means, like, how likely are you 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, eight percent or ten percent increase in nausea and vomiting. Jason Calacanis (01:25:19): Yep. Can't confirm. David Friedberg (01:25:21): Musculoskeletal complications, GRD, which is, you know, gastric reflux from Sleep disturbances. Indigestion. Yeah. And and sleep disturbance is dominated 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, hep hepatic failure, so liver failure, respiratory failure, cardiac arrest. In fact, on cardiac arrest, you see a thirty percent decrease in the probability of having cardiac arrest from the cohort that's on the GLP one versus malnouratives. Balenia? Wow. Schizophrenia. So 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 indications for the GLP one receptor agonist 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:22): Do we know why? And and if we don't know why, do you think it's because this is suppressing the food and it's the the lack of food or the change in the food consumption that's creating this? Do do you know what I'm asking? Like, do you think the drug is actually yeah. David Friedberg (01:26:37): Yep. So, you should watch the interview I did with Rick's. In fact, this is a good moment to call it out if you haven't seen it. It's actually yeah. 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 a gene expression cascade that occurs with certain compounds. So we know that the GLP one receptor agonist means that it binds to these GLP one 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 SIRT two genes, which can 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 Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:20): me ask you a question. David Friedberg (01:27:21): From these, these receptors being activated. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:24): Would you put your kids on this? No. Okay. Would you put your wife on this? David Friedberg (01:27:31): I would consider it, and I would consider it for myself too just for the anti inflammatory effects. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:36): How will you make that decision? David Friedberg (01:27:38): Well, for me, personally and the the the thing that I weigh against is the muscle loss and, the the bone density loss. So I think that if you look at the the biggest kind of effect on these on a on the downside basis is you should increase your protein in your diet. You have to do weight lifting. 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 weight lifting, you're actually gonna see very good health benefits from just doing those things that may actually outweigh the benefits you Jason Calacanis (01:28:04): get from being on the GLP one. Antonio Gracias (01:28:06): I I have a question for you, Dave, which is and this is the question is when when you look at that data and you talk to the the CEOs, how much do you think really long term when the long term says they're out is gonna be that it was the drug or just that being obese is very bad for you? And so when you take your body fat down dramatically, all these other gene expressions happen anyway. Right? So Totally. You think it which one will it be? David Friedberg (01:28:25): Well, this is this is what they're starting to isolate, and I will say, Antonio, they 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 they're using that are using these drugs. So they're they're seeing that cohort data now. Clinical studies, phase two were published, and I think we're gonna see phase three in 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 Right. Antonio Gracias (01:28:56): Right. David Friedberg (01:28:57): Everything gets better. If you lift weights Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:59): Friberg, can you tell us when you decide to do this? David Friedberg (01:29:02): I will. Yeah. If I if I do do a GLP one, receptor agonist, I will let you guys know. Right now, I'm I I actually feel like I wanna go through a process of increasing, my weightlifting routine more. I I you know, I've been trying to create a more kind of rigorous schedule. My schedule just sucks, so that's been the hardest thing for me. But I actually wanna go through that first before making that decision. Antonio Gracias (01:29:23): Yeah. That was kinda cool, David. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:25): No. I was just curious. Why why that order? I don't understand. David Friedberg (01:29:28): I wanna measure the effects. Because I do think that if you actually get into a a regular weight lifting routine and you increase protein in your diet, which is another thing I've been making a a concerted measured effort to do, which is hard as a vegetarian, by the way, 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 GLP one. I don't wanna kind of confound the two factors. Jason Calacanis (01:29:54): You know what I did that made it super easy for me, is I got, egg whites in a carton. Yeah. I don't have Yeah. And I have this incredible, crunchy spicy garlic thing that everybody in Momofuku 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 thirty, forty grams of protein first thing in the morning. And then doing the rocking Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:25): Well, this is is easy. Jason Calacanis (01:30:27): Like you just wear a 35 pound weight vest, Freeberg, and you walk a mile or two and you will get like Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:33): My problem, Jason, with all of this is that every time I see something so I saw Gary Breka on the Sean Ryan podcast recently, 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 x of 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, Freiburg, 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 wanna say gold standard because you can't say that, but that is like, what's the real bang for your buck? What Antonio said, you know, are you just better off just losing the 50 pounds and then David Friedberg (01:31:31): This is why these products are successful and I think will be continue to grow pretty dramatically, Antonio, is because it is papa pill, and it solves all those problems. It doesn't require a cognitive load after that. Jason Calacanis (01:31:42): Pill format soon. Right? I mean, the pills are almost here. Antonio Gracias (01:31:46): I wanna be very cool actually, David, if you do this, to Chivas' point about, you know, people being confused. If you did the every the every person's, kinda story around this journey and you documented it Totally. You know, like, you did you did, like, this is my weight. I did weight lifting first, then I did GLP one, and you actually did, like, a weekly thing where you checked in and even it was ten minutes up on x or something where you just gave people the journey, in a way that wasn't so complicated. Because I think people are confused. Jamast, right, I mean, I have, you know, I have very good doctors. You guys are good doctors. But if you don't, you don't know what to do. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:32:18): By the way, the 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 of my healthcare actually go down. Yeah. 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 three fatty acids. Otherwise, just eat this meal plan. And it it would help me a lot more than than I've had to cobble it together myself. Because by the way, when you see something like, you know, Gary Brecco is very, very articulate, very smart. But when I see him on the Sean Ryan podcast, the first thing I do is I go 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 Jason Calacanis (01:33:16): OCD, though, Jamat. I've known you for a long time. You get very obsessive with these things. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:33:21): Died because of poor health. My best friend died of poor health. I feel like you you should at least do the things that are preventable. Antonio Gracias (01:33:29): You guys see that that Post Jamont did with you? He was, like, half naked in the mirror. He looks great. David Friedberg (01:33:33): Oh, god. Jason Calacanis (01:33:34): What are you talking about? Antonio Gracias (01:33:35): He looks great. If if you you could look like that, you'd you'd do it too. Jason Calacanis (01:33:38): 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 taking the he's having, like, a piece of prosciut, then he's checking the glucose monitor. He just, like, literally becomes obsessive. Then we had Speaker 2 (01:33:55): a photographer. Antonio Gracias (01:33:56): There he is, Rich Chabot. Betty, come on. If that's Jason Calacanis (01:33:59): This AI stuff this AI. Where is the internet? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:01): So funny about this picture. All these clowns David Friedberg (01:34:05): on the Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:05): internet are like, they don't understand that when you're six foot two, these are big legs. When you're David Friedberg (01:34:10): six foot Jason Calacanis (01:34:10): two Those are not big So when you're Speaker 2 (01:34:15): short king. Yeah. When Jason Calacanis (01:34:16): you're a short king. David Friedberg (01:34:17): When you're a short king. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:17): When you're like five seven five eight. When you're five seven five eight. I get I get it while you guys. David Friedberg (01:34:23): Because you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:24): guys are all stubby and short. Jason Calacanis (01:34:25): I don't get it. This is the problem with generative AI. You can tell it's a fake photo. You can tell that that was generative AI because nobody has legs that thin. How could you have biceps and then legs that thin? That's what makes sense. Speaker 2 (01:34:36): Gonna keep blushing. Blushing. Unbelievable. David Friedberg (01:34:40): What a thirst trap. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:41): Now you now you guys are gonna David Friedberg (01:34:42): find photos of Antonio and I. We're gonna throw them on. Jason Calacanis (01:34:44): I know. Listen. 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 wanna do that, it's very simple. You get you get a calm meditation after you get the Eight Sleep Sleep. You get the FitBOD for fitness. That's right. Speaker 2 (01:35:03): And then you get Nutrisense for your diet. David Friedberg (01:35:10): You got NutriSensors. Are you dying? Those are the Speaker 2 (01:35:11): four things you focus on, baby. Make sure you have Zen Athena. Jason Calacanis (01:35:15): You get a good Athena assistant. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is all in NGO. USAID gave us 18,000,000 last year. Guys, I forgot Speaker 2 (01:35:23): to tell Jason Calacanis (01:35:24): 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 Speaker 2 (01:35:31): in castle built there. Okay? Jason Calacanis (01:35:33): We built, with our NGO. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:35): So good. Jason Calacanis (01:35:35): So good. Everybody next week. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:37): Love you, boys. Jason Calacanis (01:35:38): We love you. Antonio Gracias (01:35:38): Good to see you guys, man. Thank you. Jason Calacanis (01:35:40): Job, Antoni. Bye. Bye. Thanks. Speaker 2 (01:35:44): We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David Cyrus. And I said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kenwah. Besties are gone. 13. That's why they had a dog taking We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Let your feet be. Let your feet be. Where did you get murdered? Marquis are back.