DOGE 最新进展与「解放日」关税反应

David Friedberg (00:00:00): Just so you know, everything is archived by the White House right now, so everything we say is recorded. David Friedberg is a Chamuff, stop. You're being recorded. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:08): Good. I I will hope this is discoverable. White House. I just want you to know that. David Friedberg (00:00:14): Stupid. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:15): Also, he did not pay his taxes in 2016. David Friedberg (00:00:22): Don't you you really want me to start with you? Jason Calacanis (00:00:24): You want me to start? You want me to put the the archives? Oh my god. Here, let me put the the archives for you. It's like gonna feed my pet. I think you need to shut the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:31): fuck up is David Friedberg (00:00:32): what you need Jason Calacanis (00:00:32): to do. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:33): Sorry, One Mouse. Jason Calacanis (00:00:34): I'm gonna be my pets. He did it. He also has some of paid parking tickets for 2021. Yeah. You want me to start with you? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:43): Your winners ride. Rain man David Silas. Jason Calacanis (00:00:49): And I said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. Queen of Kenwa. I'm going all in. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. With me again today, Jamaf Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, David Freiber, our sultan of science, and two guests. Obviously, Ben Shapiro, very famous for having the number two podcast in the world. How are you, Ben? Ben Shapiro (00:01:14): I'm I'm doing I'm doing great. And just honored to be here, you know? Jason Calacanis (00:01:17): Yes. More work to do. You could exceed all in in the rankings. No. We we we always judge ourselves, Ben, on three things. In the rankings, when we look at how we're doing, what we see is Ben Shapiro, prayer from the Bible, okay, the New Testament, I don't think you've got it yet. You you have the Old Testament, but you haven't gotten the new you haven't gotten the sequel. And then number three, murder, also with us from the White House. Yeah. Welcome to all in, where we have a live feed into the White House today. My good friend Antonio Gracias is here. He is taking I guess you're taking would it be safe to say a hiatus or you're from Valor to do a little tour of duty, in our government working on Doge. Is is that the way to say it? Antonio Gracias (00:02:05): I'm still doing my day job too, man. Is this is a seven day a week, sixty to eighty hour day job because I've I'm, I'm trying to do both. I've got some great partners that are covering it for me, and that my firm has been tremendous in in allowing me to do this. But now I'm I'm still trying to do both. David Friedberg (00:02:20): Was it public prior to this week, Antonio, that you were doing this role? Could you announce it anywhere? Was were Antonio Gracias (00:02:26): people or no. The The New York Times, they wrote a story about, me going to SSA, you know, which is bet sort of New York Times style. Not not right, but I was I had been there. Yeah. Was out Woodland, Maryland. Jason Calacanis (00:02:37): 40 Percent. Correct. Yeah. Close enough. Antonio Gracias (00:02:39): Close enough for hand grenades. Jason Calacanis (00:02:40): Close enough. I'm sure they had no agenda. Antonio, how does it Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:43): how does it work? So when you volunteered, does is it that you and Elon and Steve just kind of figure out, let's put a senior person at every part of the administration where there's real opportunity. Why did you end up at SSA versus someplace else? Antonio Gracias (00:02:58): Interesting question, Shimon. And by the way, it's great to see you guys, man. Thanks for having me on. I can use your last you're you're you're, like, you're really making me laugh. Jason Calacanis (00:03:04): Really proud of David Friedberg (00:03:04): you, man. Antonio Gracias (00:03:05): Thank you, man. Thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:03:06): It's good to see you. Antonio Gracias (00:03:06): Thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:03:08): Suit looks great, by the way. Antonio Gracias (00:03:09): Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you for Jason Calacanis (00:03:10): having have to return it? Antonio Gracias (00:03:12): The rental is due at the end of the week. Okay. So yeah. No. What happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because that's kind of, you guys know, close to my heart. And, Elon said to me, look. Great. You can do that next, but will you go to SSA first and and see what's going on there because it's, you know, the biggest internal problem we have and and see what you find in fraud, waste, and abuse. And so, of course, I said, sure. I'll do that. And I ended up on Woodland, Maryland with the good people at the SSA, the Social Security Administration. And that that's where I started. That's how that's how all this started for me. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:43): And so do you, Antonio, go in there with a Doge engineer as your kind of sidekick per se, or you just go there solo and you show up and like, what like, what happens day one when you walk in into the place? Like, what do you do? Antonio Gracias (00:03:56): So I brought with me, two great professionals, you know, John and and Peyton from, from Valor. One of them an engineer. The other one, I'd say, a finance ninja. Both these guys are ninjas. And there was already a team there actually that was working with some great engineers. And one senior person, Scott Coulter, who's from actually worked at Lone Pine, started his own fun, and then had come here as a volunteer as well. So they were already doing some work, actually, particularly on the on the enumeration part of the part of the system. So that is the system that you have numbers, the whole cleaning of the database, the numbers, they had already started that project when I got there. Jason Calacanis (00:04:27): And what is the mandate as given to you, you know, as part of Doge? Antonio Gracias (00:04:32): Fraud, waste, and abuse. I mean, exactly what, you know, what the what Bill Clinton talked about, what Barack Obama talked about, what all presidents, but maybe president Biden talked about, going back in time. It was go figure out how to save some money. Man, the system's going bankrupt. It's gonna be bankrupt 2037. The country overall, as you guys know and talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy. You wanna do something and go go figure out how can save money. Go find a fraud. And that's what we did. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:04:56): Let's get to it. You, spoke at a rally, I think it was on Sunday, and you pulled up a chart. Here is that chart. Maybe you could explain to the American people here what this chart shows. Antonio Gracias (00:05:10): Yeah. So if if I might just step back and say I got it is I think it's important. You know, we map the the way we work you guys know we're very operational, Valerie. I've worked with all you guys various times. Jason Calacanis (00:05:18): Yeah. Antonio Gracias (00:05:18): And what we do is we map the entire system from beginning to end. We we map the system from enumeration. It's how you get your number all the way to the end, went to the offices, and saw the offices operate. And in that process, one of our engineers, Peyton, I mentioned, he found, the data. So we're looking at all the data enumeration, how it works, what what's going on, the typical stuff you'd look at. And he found this data, called enumeration beyond entry. Right? So that is the that's and it it had this giant ramp to it. You can see their baseline was kind of, you know, three, four hundred thousand people all the way to 2,100,000 people, and that just jumped out at us. And we're like, what's that? And so we dug into it, and that's how this started. Jason Calacanis (00:05:57): And so what that's showing is Social Security numbers that were issued to non American citizens or noncitizens. Am I correct that that's the number we're looking So these are non citizens getting security numbers. And for people who don't know, just like a little bit of background on the social security system, we do this. This is not abnormal for us to give social security numbers. This is part of the process that the government does. The social security number was created in 1936 for citizens to track their earnings. And in the 90s, we started giving them to non citizens who were authorized to work in The US so that we could collect taxes from them. And so if you are not a citizen and you're a green card holder, which some people in this program I think have been, you have to have a social security number in order to work and you pay into social security and Medicare, just like US citizens. And then eventually, I think you would qualify for those over some period of time. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:52): You can also get a Social Security number if you're a legal immigrant into The United States on a visa. So for example, when I first came to The United States Twenty Five Years ago on a TN visa, I was able to get my social security number because I had a valid visa to be in The United States. Jason Calacanis (00:07:08): Okay. Yeah. So we have social security numbers being given to noncitizens. That is not controversial, but there's something controversial about this chart. Antonio, tell us what that is. Antonio Gracias (00:07:20): So I I think if you look at the chart, you'll see there's it starts at, like, call it 300000 or so. Jason Calacanis (00:07:24): This is during the COVID period. Yeah? Antonio Gracias (00:07:27): Coming right out of So we the '21 is coming right out of COVID. Right? So if you go back even a couple years in '19, you'll see that, it's about four hundred thousand. Yeah. That exactly three fifty right there. So, what happened was this program was designed for some people you're talking about, you know, people that got visas. This is at numeration beyond entry since after you're in. There are some people in here that have h one b's, green cards, etcetera. And the way we thought about this was that's the baseline number. That's the 3 to 400,000 a year you see. That should be happen. That's like, you know, there are programs for Afghans example, the translators that came in after the war. Right? The people who brought in, they would be in these kinds of programs. And so the baseline number and and by the program goes back this particular program goes back all the way to '17 and end up a legitimate use, which was the kind of people we're talking about. People that we wanna let in, like the care programming, I'll I'll make an example, which is the Afghans, they would be in this number. And so what's what jumped out at us wasn't that this is here because it has legitimate use, It's that it's the growth. Why did it grow this fast? And what happened? And that that's we dug into. Jason Calacanis (00:08:28): Have you figured that out yet? Is it because of, like, a COVID overhang? The the one criticism I did see of the chart that I wanted to bring up with you is, hey, people wanna see the ten years, twenty years before this. What would we see if we were to look backwards a little bit? Do you have some theories? And is the COVID overhang theory valid? Or is this just Biden opened the border as we saw, know, especially, like, in maybe it was that third year of his term, the the 2023 year, and this is the overhang of the 2023 surge? What are your theories? Antonio Gracias (00:08:55): Well, the answer is no. I can't really know because the program really started it it started in 2017. So they probably worked on it before that. Right? A few things a few years put these into place. They worked at it by guesses, you know, back during the Obama administration. It actually became active in '17. You see a few numbers in '18, and it starts to get a little bigger in '19 and '20. Right? So that that's how we get this baseline number of nineteen and twenty. That's why we're using that data here. So you you there isn't I can't go back twenty years. It doesn't exist. And then when we dug into it, what we found was the vast majority of the growth, which relate to asylum programs and parolees And people that came in on on NTAs, this notice to appear into the country, either at the border, at the airports, mostly at the border. And then we dug further into it. Excuse me. We dug further into it. We found that there were this is about 5,400,000 people total. There were about 1,200,000 people that the status is marked as unknown and about 1,200,000 people that were marked as general parole. And they should have markings of, you know, what the program is they're under. Because if you if you claim asylum, you're supposed to claim, like, a real fear. I'm gonna be tortured by my country. You know, some something bad is gonna happen to So why can't you go home? What we find here is that a legitimate program was in the word I use abused. It the the the requirements were, like, super opened so that, more people come through. And the example I'll give you, you know, I have here actually the form. There's the form used to be going back in time, you know, a four page form that the officer had to fill out in the field, and the person that was claiming the asylum had to actually prove that they were had a really credible fear of being, you know, murdered, tortured by their government, that someone gathered them. That's that's what the sodom's for. It turned into a form, which I can't give you, but I'm gonna show you here. You can if you zoom in on it, it has four questions. Antonio Gracias (00:10:38): That's it. And the four questions are super leading. I'll just read the, you know, the like, one of the important ones here. Right? So do you have any reason for concern about being returned to your own country or being removed from The United States? I mean, could that be more leading? Right. What they did is they opened they just opened the aperture on these programs dramatically so they allowed people that were illegals at the border to come in legally. And as we've dug further into it, we found this took us so you you guys know me, man. I do like, I'm a very methodical, lean business process mapper. And we went all the way to the border, literally to Brownsville and Laredo to ask what happened. We couldn't find the data on what these these unknown categories were. And it turns out that when the the the folks at border who are great, by the way, they're they're really tried hard, and they suffered a lot in this. This is a bit of this is a human tragedy I haven't talked about. They were were giving people at times notices to appear. This is the the NTA. And what that allows you to do is come in the country, and then you're you're scheduled a court date, which is, like, six years out. So now you're in the country with some quasi legal status. You're waiting for your court date. And while you're waiting for your court date, which could be six six years out is the average, by way. It could be longer than that. You're waiting for your court date. They you could fill out an asylum application. So without an interview, just an application by filing a form. Once the application's in, you can, file another form, seven six five, to get a work authorization. Once you get that, you get a 766, which is the authorization, and we automatically send you a Social Security card in the mail. No interview at all. That that's that's the that is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers. David Friedberg (00:12:19): Is there any ID verification along the way, Antonio? Like, do we know that there are no duplications happening by validating that one individual is getting one Social Security number at any point in this process? Antonio Gracias (00:12:31): So it's a great question. No. The answer is there's no real ID verification. So you can you know, one of the things we found when we looked at this was the the people that that some people showed IDs, some people didn't. And one of things that we really Jason Calacanis (00:12:43): IDs, Antonio, from their home country. This would be a Venezuelan driver's license or something? Antonio Gracias (00:12:48): Yeah. I mean, it could be a passport, a driver's license, but here's what really sort of tipped us off and disturbed us. When we looked at the the birth certificate data that was presented at the border, the number one birth date was 01/01, and it was four times more likely to be born on 01/01 than any other, day of the year. Now we all know this Jason Calacanis (00:13:05): is a hit enter on that part of the four Yeah. Antonio Gracias (00:13:07): More they had external things. Could come the odds could come with nothing. Do we Jason Calacanis (00:13:10): take biometrics of people at the border? Do we take, like, an iris scan, fingerprints, all that stuff? Antonio Gracias (00:13:14): This is one of the issues. I mean, we do have photos of of people. We found that twenty three percent of the records looked at did not have fingerprints. And look. The the folks at the border were, overwhelmed. And we're not sure why this happened. I will tell you guys just to understand what went down there. Both border patrol and border protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. Okay. Over seventy over seventy of these agents committed suicide in this period. It's truly tragic because they knew what was going on. Ben Shapiro (00:13:45): Given the fact that that all this has happened, is the Trump administration going to try to claim the Social Security numbers back, invalidate them? What will be the proper action, or is it too late? Are they already sort of in the system, and now you can't do anything about it? Antonio Gracias (00:14:00): So, Ben, it's a great question. Right? And the the the the first question was, what are they doing? I mean, you know, like, where are these people? Where are they? How are they? And we've gone through a whole process of mapping this. So we mapped it through to the benefit programs. We found, in the benefit programs that every benefit program that was being accessed by these people. You know, 1,300,000 of them are on Medicaid right now, today. And by the way, it's just ramping. It's just starting. Just to figure your point. And then out of curiosity, I woke up at night, like, two in the morning. I I couldn't sleep. My mind was right on this. I sent the engineers a note saying, hey, guys. Let's look at the the public voter rolls, see what we find in some front instant friendly states. And we looked at voter rolls, and we found that thousands of them registered to vote in a handful of states. And then we went even further with those friendly states and found that the many of those people had actually voted. It was shocking to us. And if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. And so now the question we're asking ourselves is what do we do? We've referred some to prosecution that's ongoing right now. You know, we're thinking through how to do it, and the reality is they have various kinds of status, and it's a very detailed analysis legally they're working through right now about how to deal with it. Jason Calacanis (00:15:03): So thousands of those people registered to vote Yes. In the election. Antonio Gracias (00:15:09): Which is a federal crime, by the Well, Jason Calacanis (00:15:11): yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is, like, the Heritage Foundation has a very good project, you know, it's obviously right leaning, where they're studying all cases of fraud. I looked at it before we're here. There's only been 24 cases since 02/2003 of somebody who's a noncitizen trying to vote. Now those are people caught. So this would be incredibly dramatic if it was even a thousand people. Antonio Gracias (00:15:31): Oh, no. Jason, it's more than a thousand. I've I've seen it. I've seen the data myself, and it's more than a thousand in just a couple of states. I mean, it is shockingly bad. And this is the tip of the iceberg, guys. It's the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't include these 7,800,000 people that ICE has that have come in illegally and nowhere here, and all the people that came in legally we don't know are here. I mean, this is not a political issue. Wanna be really clear about this. Yeah. Antonio, about America. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:54): Let's just take one step back because I just want you to repeat this. So because I think it's important, and we may have just run over it a little too quickly. When you get a Social Security number, what you're saying is there's all of these important downstream consequences. One of the downstream consequences is you could show up, register to vote, and that's an illegitimate action that's breaking federal law. That's one. But the second is that without knowing who this person is, they can start to absorb resources that could have otherwise gone to an American. I guess that's, like, a fundamental part of this. Yeah. Absolutely. And so how do you how do you quantify that? Can you just maybe explain it a little bit more about all of the different ways in which you think now, you know, The United States ends up leaking services to these folks. Jason Calacanis (00:16:47): And, also, they could be contributing too. Right? They could be paying taxes into the system. So I guess there's both of those possibilities, and both of those have fingerprints to mouth. So, yeah, good question. Antonio Gracias (00:16:57): You know, we need to figure this out. This is a a very it's massively complex. You can see the map I have, on the whiteboard in our office. It's huge. And we're we're figuring it out right now, but let me just tell you this. In every benefit program we looked at, and this is just a handful of states, we found people on all the benefit programs. And we find them on unemployment. We find them on Medicaid. So adjacent to your point, people on Medicaid unemployment, they're not contributing. They're taking out. They're mooching. Right? There are criminals. I mean, look. We sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. They and I I don't wanna get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hard hits in the targeting center, of very bad people, criminals and people on terrorist watch list that are in this group. And so yeah. I mean, it's a it's a problem. You gotta figure out how to deal with it. And the, of course, there are people that are also, you know, have jobs and paying in the system. That's, you know, that's that's also true. All these things are true, and we're trying to sort of the data and figure out how to actually deal with it now. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:52): Antonio, one of the things about the data that you triggered, which because the data is is so important, frankly, is a lot of people started to try to find a way to nitpick and say, Antonio, you're cherry picking or Antonio, this is not really representative. And you had some pretty big names. Right? People that have credibility. Jim Chaneyos probably being one of the more prolific people, a very well known hedge fund manager. But I think you tried to articulate why their objections didn't make any sense. I think it's important to maybe give you a few moments here to identify what they said and maybe debunk it. Antonio Gracias (00:18:37): So the the chart that they're using, and you can see this I posted sitting on x about this, it was apples to oranges. You can you can see it here. They took a chart that included all enumerations, not the EB program, the enumeration band entry program, all enumerations and compared to our chart. Jason Calacanis (00:18:54): They put the So to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:55): be clear, this would have included somebody like me coming in on a TN visa or somebody on an EB one visa. Antonio Gracias (00:19:02): Yeah. I mean, the so those people would in RData too, but just enumerated via entry. The data on the left, of 2020 with the big bars, that includes people in the offices, that include people who got they got, Social Security numbers because they went to a consulate and, like you probably did, applied ahead of time before they came in, you know, those kinds of people. Jason Calacanis (00:19:19): So we need a stacked bar chart. So there's some fun with numbers going on there. David Friedberg (00:19:23): You flip back again? So your number for '24 was how much? 2,100,000.0. Antonio Gracias (00:19:28): Yep. Yep. And what they did is took they took our data. So this was you know, look. I don't wanna impute negative motives. They just maybe were confused. They took our data, and they can pick they added the total data. Right? This is just subsection. This is EB, and I'm just gonna use the acronyms. Okay, guys? This is EB only, enumeration beyond entry, which is a program, as I said, started in 2017, and then it kinda ramped up into '19. They took our data, and then they added the total data before that. Right? That is apples to oranges. That's why it doesn't work. And I I went through a whole analysis of this on x, and, you know, the person the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying, hey. You know, I'm deleting it because I get it. You're right. And apologized and asked me some questions. I I don't wanna get in you know, you guys know, but I don't post a lot on x. I don't wanna get into base with people. It's not worth it. There's The data speaks for itself. David Friedberg (00:20:21): There's bay it basically it basically became like a Rorschach test where people that did not wanna believe the points you were making latched on to that chart that was shown even though it was disproven, and that became the narrative for a good chunk of the Internet and a good chunk of for media responses. Antonio Gracias (00:20:38): I mean, look. You guys know me. You know me for a long time. This is not political, man. This is this is David Friedberg (00:20:42): political background again. We haven't talked about this on the show, Antonio, but I think it's worth letting everyone hear about your background a little bit just so folks understand where you're coming from. Antonio Gracias (00:20:51): Yeah. I was a democrat for twenty years. I mean, I I, you know, I knocked on doors for really good in Iowa. I was, you know, from Illinois. And look. I've got lots of good friends who are democrats. And when I explained the state of them, they're as shocked as I am. I don't believe Jason Calacanis (00:21:04): this is the were a Democrat is an understatement. You were a major donor and majorly involved with the Democratic party. Yes. Ben, you you tend to call balls and strikes on the program. What are your thoughts on immigration generally and how it should work here in The US and how maybe we can resolve this and get to Antonio, I want your answer to that question as well. Maybe some reconciliation here between the moderates, MAGA, original, you know, classic GOP Democrats and the woke lunatics. Like, is there any way out of this? And maybe perhaps what we're seeing here with somebody like Antonio, who's a lifelong democrat who now is, you know, helping the government, maybe there's some way with data and logic we can get through this? Ben Shapiro (00:21:50): I mean, I I think that what Antonio is doing here is is so important specifically for that because it it seems to me there's actually been a fairly wide consensus among the American population for a very long time what to do about immigration, particularly the southern border, which is number one, just stop the illegal immigration at the southern border. After Biden blew that out, a lot of Democrats turned to president Trump specifically because of that issue, and that has been the signal success of the Trump administration among all the other successes. The the numbers at the border have just plummeted to almost zero. I mean, the lowest numbers in recorded history, and that is an unmitigated success. And then I think everybody knows that we have to sort of figure out who gets to stay and who gets to go, who's already in the country, and what Antonio is doing by being able to discern who is here and is a net draw on the resources of the American people versus maybe who is a net taxpayer or who's actually contributing, who's a criminal. Right? There there's always been this bizarre supposition in in the in the political realm that there's no way on a one to one level to figure out who is who. You have to treat everybody as a class. Either everybody stays, everybody goes. And the reality is that even the way the Trump administration is doing this by first targeting, say, criminal illegal aliens for for removal and then maybe moving on to people who are net drawn resources, who came in falsely under claims of asylum and now are receiving Medicaid or disability. This I've made the argument for for, I think, my entire career actually on this that that we should be treating immigrants illegal immigrants who are in the country the same way we would treat people who are trying to get into the country, which is to say, are you going to benefit The United States, or are you not gonna benefit The United States? And the counterargument was always, well, how exactly are you going to determine who is who? And the answer I always give is, well, the IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year. So why should we not be able to do that? And so the kind of work Antonio is doing showing you actually can do that by tracking the Social Security numbers of people who came in illegally. Ben Shapiro (00:23:28): Because the truth of the number of unknown getaways is actually really, really compared to this, it's a it's a small number. Most of the people who are coming across the border, at least during the Biden term I went down to the border last year and and visited a native American reservation. It's right along the border where where the border patrol basically was not. And and they said that what was happening is people were arriving at the border. They were doing exactly what Antonio was talking about. They would literally say, I fear to go back to my home country. They'd be processed. They'd be let into the country with a with a a future date to come back, and that was all happening within seventy two hours. So being able to track those people and find out who who who should be in, who shouldn't be in, that that's that's huge. And I think that's the consensus. Jason Calacanis (00:24:06): So, should we are you in the camp? We should deport everybody, this sort of Steven Miller Miller, deport 20,000,000 people, Ben, or are you in the, hey. Let's get rid of the criminals, and, you know, that will get us to where we need to be? Ben Shapiro (00:24:19): Well, I don't think it's just the criminals. I mean, I think you also need to go after the folks who are are here to take advantage of the welfare benefits, for example, hard to draw on the system. But I don't think that the number is 20,000,000. I don't think president Trump actually thinks the number is 20,000,000. Jason Calacanis (00:24:35): Got it. Okay. But they they said it over and over again. All 20,000,000 are going, and it's Ben Shapiro (00:24:39): like Right. Jason Calacanis (00:24:39): But they they say a lot. It's Ben Shapiro (00:24:40): a it's a yes. It's a political campaign, and people say that sort of stuff all the time. Jason Calacanis (00:24:44): Antonio, let's talk maybe about reconciliation here. You spent your life as a Democrat, and now you've spent, I don't know, six months as a Republican here and helping this administration. How do we get the country to sort of get back together here and maybe reconcile on this issue? Because it seems like an unnecessary, to Ben's point, I think the number is 80% of people believe the border should be just shut, period, full stop, and everything should be legal. And I don't know the other 20, if they're just don't know how to take a survey. I've never met anybody who said there should be an open border at the southern border. So what are your thoughts on, given your inside knowledge, and I would describe you as a Clinton Democrat, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, correct me if I'm wrong there, what are your thoughts on reconciliation here? Because you really do care about that. Your parents, both immigrants, My besties here, three of the four people who host this program, immigrants. This is an immigrant country built by immigrants for immigrants, has always been. So how do we reconcile this issue and put it behind us? Antonio Gracias (00:25:47): And, Jason, I have asked myself this question, and I I think we gotta follow the truth. And that's that's the point. Follow the truth. And the truth is in the data. And as as Ben said, the numbers don't lie. Right? And so people are productive. We gotta find a way to allow them to be productive and stay. People that are are taking the system should not be allowed to stay. And, you know, I think we I don't wanna get into the policy at all because it's above my pay grade. I mean, the reality is for me, my remit is, as as Ben said, it's criminals, terrorists, and then people mooching out the system. And then, you know, a political question needs to be answered about what happens to the rest of those people. I I don't I don't know. I don't it's not my remit. Jason Calacanis (00:26:19): Free burn Antonio Gracias (00:26:20): But I will I will say this. Yeah. I think that all my friends who are still Democrats that I have may explain this data to, they all say the same thing you guys are saying. Man, this is a problem. We gotta figure this out, and let me tell you why. The bigger problem, the biggest problem here, I mean, it's it's it definitely is is taking off the system. But you gotta realize we gave 13 to $15,000,000,000 a year to human traffickers. That's what this system did. And the money magnet that attracted these people here, it wasn't like it was some crisis that, you know, an environmental crisis. The money magnet attracted these people, and many of them died on the way up. I mean, think about what that's like. Think about the Jason Calacanis (00:26:54): human crisis. Human suffering, the human rights tragedy. You have people who are getting sold into slavery and being abused at the border. At a at a minimum, every American should be against that. Antonio Gracias (00:27:05): Everyone is. Every American is. Jason Calacanis (00:27:06): Look, Antonio Gracias (00:27:06): man, this turned my stomach. When I went to the board and I heard the stories, it turned my stomach, man. Is we are America. Okay? We protect people like this. We don't give incentives to people to pay traffickers. If you pay 20,000 I heard 20,000 to $500 just across the border, $20,000. Mean, where does someone who's coming from Central America or Africa get $20 to pay the pay the traffickers that are walking them across the border? It's not free to walk up Mexico. Okay? It's controlled by the cartels. What happens? I mean, they gotta pay that back. How do they pay it back? They're basically detached servants. This is terrible. This isn't what we do in this country. Right? This country is about freedom, and we are here to protect it. We protect it around the world, protect it in our home country. And I don't think any American that I know, none of Democrats, Republicans, or anyone, thinks this is good. It's not good. It's bad for America, it's evil behavior. We shouldn't send it. We shouldn't we shouldn't give people a reason to do it. We should find legal ways to come in the country. And I think that's how we come together. David Friedberg (00:27:59): Do you believe that there is a Democratic party motive to increase voter base for the Democrats behind all of this as has been proclaimed by some? Antonio Gracias (00:28:09): Look. As I go through the data and I see it's all about the data. Okay, David? And I know you you you you you love the data. When you I've just in a handful of states, man, I'm talking about four states, we looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them on the voter rolls, and we found, many of those people had voted. Right? In one state in particular, well over a thousand voted. Yeah. I think this was a, a move to import voters. David Friedberg (00:28:32): But really importantly, just wanna make sure because when when I talk to politicians from the Democratic Party about this, they say there's aspects of human rights doing the right thing for people in need that is motivating some of this behavior. Is that a lie and they actually have a different motive, or do some in the party think that way, but there are real kind of kind of call it a small group of highly influential folks at the top of the Democratic Party that recognize that this is gonna grow the voter base, and they're they're kinda motivating this. What do you think is the construction of what sounds to some to be a conspiracy, and how much of this is really, like, widely understood? Antonio Gracias (00:29:15): Look, Ben. Here's I'll tell you what I have seen. I'll tell you the actual information. If you look at the administration, we set all defaults to kinda max open, no ID requirements. Right? You get a Social Security number, before we got here by walking in office, answering, you with with with a with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date the date of birth on it. That's it. Okay? We opened up we set the defaults to open on Social Security. We set the defaults to open on pay, paying people out, and we set the collections defaults basically to zero. So that's how the system looks. That's I'm just reporting reporting the facts. Do I think that the the average person is a democrat in the in in Illinois or, you know, the guys I knew up in Chicago, they know this? They don't know this. They don't know this. So were there people at the top of the system did this? Yeah. People created this policy. The former administrators of the of these agencies created these policies. I've seen them. I've read them myself. I've gone to the data myself. They've seen them. Now this isn't everybody. If you're the average person out there who's a democrat and you see what I've seen, you I believe, you will you'll conclude what I concluded, which is this isn't right. These policies are wrong. They're evil. They're wrong. We gave an incentive for people to get trafficked. That's terrible. I just don't I just don't think we'll know. The reason I'm even willing to do all you you guys know me. I'm pretty private. I come on your podcast because we're buddies. But, like, man, the reason I'm talking about this is is not political. It's because it's a human rights issue, and the human rights issue is being confused. It's not it's we are incenting people to pay traffickers to come to America. We were doing this. Right? We gotta find better ways to do that, and I just I don't believe any American, the 80% of people Jason's talking about that would say close the border. Antonio Gracias (00:30:56): That's the 80% who would come together on this issue, which is, man, we gotta take care of people. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:00): Antonio, can you talk about what the next big push of effort from you and your team will be? Is there David Friedberg (00:31:07): Good question. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:07): Some next chart? I'm not trying to be reductive, but is there something that you can demonstrate that is going to be equivalently as powerful as this first chart, which then helps us start to move these gears towards doing the logical and right thing? Antonio Gracias (00:31:23): I think the right thing is to figure out who's who. Right? Who are the criminals? Who are the terrorists? Yeah. Number one. And number two, who's mooching off the system? And then number three, the people that are working that Jason's talking about, you know, what we do with them. That's the right answer. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:39): I would add a fourth because I think that there's probably no more electric issue than this idea of voting impropriety. And I think it has become so brazenly partisan that everybody has suspended logic. Jason Calacanis (00:31:56): It turned Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:57): out if it turns out that there was a manipulated effort in 2020 and there is even a threat of legitimacy to Trump's claims, you would never be able to see the light of day because so many Americans just turned the turn off. Right? And that's because of the rhetoric that they've been fed. This is a really important thing that I would just offer to you is that if it is true that these people illegally voted, I think it's a thunderclap. And I think it opens wide the aperture on voting illegality and voting reform. And I think that irrespective of who you are, you should wanna make sure that people who are not allowed to vote are not voting, just to put it simply. Jason Calacanis (00:32:40): Yeah. Wow. What an incredible concept. Antonio Gracias (00:32:42): It's amazing. I can't I can't, I can't get an airplane in America without ID, but I can go vote in some states with ID. I think that's crazy. I think it's totally crazy. David Friedberg (00:32:52): That is crazy. Jason Calacanis (00:32:52): And we're down to, like Ben, you know the numbers. 15 states now are the ones that don't have voter ID. So this is becoming, like, a very obvious issue in the loop for us to close. Think the best next thing for you to do is actually publish this list of people who voted, get it to the Heritage Foundation, and put sunlight on it. The truth shall make you free, and sunlight is the best disinfectant because I think the whole issue is absurd because if you look at the votes in the swing states, it would take a hundred thousand, it would take tens of thousands, and it's illegal. I've spoken to the person at the Heritage Foundation who does this. They found like two thousand four hundred cases over forty or fifty years. The number of people voting illegally is minuscule. In order to swing even but one state, you would need a coordinated Can I say something, John? Hold on, let me finish. You would need a coordinated effort. I'm just giving you data, Chamath. No. I am not partisan. There are tens of thousands of votes that would need to be manipulated in each of these It's impossible. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:48): Here well, there's the keyword. Here's what I would ask you to consider. Jason Calacanis (00:33:53): Sure. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:53): You want to are only as good as your prompt. Your results are only as good as your prompts. Jason Calacanis (00:34:01): Say it in plain English. What do you mean? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:03): I suspect that if you put three or four of the smartest data scientists in the world, they would get to a very different answer than the answer that has been arrived to. I don't know whether that'll validate or invalidate the claim. But the quality of the people that are able to interrogate this data is directly correlated to the output that is created. Jason Calacanis (00:34:25): Well, listen, we all want the data clean. Ben, maybe I'll let you kind of answer the question from your perspective. Do you think there is any chance that a swing state could be swung by this strategy? And in addition to that, Trump is a populist. All these people and his biggest gains were with people from South America, Mexicans, etcetera, in this last election, so and non college educated. So if you were gonna plot this incredible strategy, it seems like the democratic strategy of importing a bunch of voters is the stupidest possible strategy because the Republican Party has won those people. Ben Shapiro (00:35:00): Well, I I don't think that it would be a great short term strategy because of the the problems that you mentioned in terms of the the size of the voting gaps even in closed swing states. Although, obviously, you have outlier cases like Florida in 2,000 where the entire state is being decided by hundreds of votes. And there, you actually could see a state actually shift on that basis. It's a rarity, but it does happen, and and in some cases, decides a presidential election. When when you're talking, however, about the long term play, I think the question that needs to be asked is if you are importing a bunch of people who are more dependent than average on the American government, for example, or who are not interested in assimilating to free market values, for example, or free speech values, or or who come in, and then many of these people are gonna get married. Many of people are gonna have kids. They're gonna marry American citizens. They're gonna have children who are American, and then they stay. Now you're talking about actually generating a change in the voting population, and that isn't a right wing point. That's a point that was made by Roy Teixeira all the way back in 02/2004 when he was a Democrat. And he was making the case, essentially, that there was a demographic wave that was going to shift the electorate in The United States in the direction of Democrats permanently. Now the point that you're making is that even as a long term strategy, that might be a bad play because it may be that these populations shift over time. That doesn't mean that that's not the intent in the moment. Jason Calacanis (00:36:08): Meaning Right. Maybe they're wrong. Right. They could have gotten it wrong. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:11): They could Jason Calacanis (00:36:11): have made a very bad strategic decision. Antonio, I think we have to drop you off here. Any closing comments you want to make? And I just want to thank you. I know you've got other things you could be doing in your life. But just on behalf of the American people who I speak for here on the program, we wanna thank you, all Americans, for your service to this country. And I know that you are balls and strikes, and you're gonna let the data speak. So I just wanna thank you Antonio Gracias (00:36:36): for your efforts. I I will close this on this conversation, which is go look at California. Look at California. Okay? Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, came to California. Ronald Reagan signed amnesty, and, you know, some forty years later, it is now a solidly blue state. And I think, some of us on this program, I know you, Jason, are a refugee from California because of that, because of some of those policies. And I wanna be I want you be careful about this because it is it is actually the tip of the iceberg, man. We are we have a very small sample of data in a couple of states. It's the tip of the iceberg. And so I don't know what the unintended concert will be long term, but I can tell you what we already have in America where an amnesty program actually turned a very large state, you know, from one one party to another. And I wanna leave you guys with this thought. This is not political. I'm not doing it. There's no political motivation in my mind. This is about America. It's about securing the American democracy, and we will shine light onto the data when we can. We prefer these people to prosecution, and we're gonna keep looking. We'll keep going, and and the data will lead us, and the truth will lead us. And, eventually, go on the sunlight. You're right. But we're gonna follow the truth. That's our primary motive. That that is the that is our operating parameter and what we're gonna do. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:52): Right on. Jason Calacanis (00:37:52): Alright. Thank you, Antonio Grasas, and continue to success. To see in thirty, sixty days when you have your next findings. Antonio Gracias (00:37:59): Thanks, guys. Thank you, sir. Jason Calacanis (00:38:00): You're a David Friedberg (00:38:01): you're a refugee from California too, aren't you? Ben Shapiro (00:38:03): Yes. Yeah. We took off in 02/2020. During during COVID, we we took off. My company took off. We we all got the hell out. I I was born in California, so I spent thirty, thirty six years there before before I moved. And, yeah, they they certainly did a good job of wrecking that state. Jason Calacanis (00:38:17): I mean, I did the same thing. You went to oh, I don't know if you're talking about where you Speaker 6 (00:38:21): oh, you're Ben Shapiro (00:38:22): talking I'm in Florida. Yeah. My company's in Tennessee. I'm in Florida. Jason Calacanis (00:38:24): Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Mean, it's just you can't raise kids in California, and you just think about the crime and taxes and what you're getting for your dollar. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, I don't Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:34): White House is off the Zoom, boys. Now we can start to open it up. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:38:38): Now we can open up the amateur. David Friedberg (00:38:40): For you. Woah. Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:43): What do you guys think about what you just saw? Jason Calacanis (00:38:46): Ben, I'll let you go first as our guest. Ben Shapiro (00:38:47): I I I wish the entire Trump administration were rolled out as well as Antonio just rolled that out is is what I would say. Jason Calacanis (00:38:53): Totally. Ben Shapiro (00:38:53): You know, I think that that is high levels of competence and expertise and a meticulous message that that is data first and difficult for anybody to deny. I think that the success of the Trump administration, the success that they've had are taking the 80 side of eighty twenty issues. And I think that the success of president Trump in 2024 was that he oddly became the normie candidate. He was the guy who was returned to normalcy candidacy in in the face of of Biden and the bizarreness of of hairness, of Harris. And, you know, I think that as we see many of Trump's policies rolled out, the ones that are rolled out the way that Antonio is rolling it out are incredibly well received by the American population because they're seeing serious people doing serious work that needs to be done. And the ones that are not rolled out that way, I think, are gonna be a little more unpopular with the American people. And that that's kinda I want president Trump to succeed at a lot of these agenda items, and I I don't want his his good agenda items getting essentially railroaded and and run over by by the by the bad rolled out of other agenda items. Jason Calacanis (00:39:47): So you think thoughtful is good, and well thought out, constructed, and communicated. What what, when you talk about this being done right, what do you think Antonio Gracias (00:39:57): is being done wrong? It could Jason Calacanis (00:39:58): be done better, I guess, be a a generous way of saying it. Ben Shapiro (00:40:01): What what could they communicate better? I mean, not to jump into the the pile of rakes that is the the tariff plan, but, I I think that the, I think that the way that the tariff plan was rolled out is about as bad a rollout as you could do. You know, the reason I say that is not just because of my disagreements on the actual policy. I'll either be right or I'll be wrong on that. But the way that it was rolled out with with very with with essentially kind of a surprise announcement. I don't mind a surprise announcement if what is then rolled out is not replete with with sort of contradictory justifications, you know, statistics that that are labeled one thing but really are not that thing. And and so it just it opens itself up to all sorts of critiques from every possible side of the eye. If you wanna make the argument, make the full make the full scale well thought arg argument, and then we can argue over whether it's true or not. But there's there's four or five different claims that are being simultaneously made about the tariffs. One, they're gonna raise revenue. Two, they're gonna reshor. Three, that you are going to somehow rejigger the world trading system. Some of these are mutually exclusive. If you're gonna if you're going to reassure, you're not gonna raise as much revenue, for example. Right? Those two things are are mutually exclusive, and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time. If you're gonna put out a giant chart that the president holds up that shows tariff rates plus unspecified, you know, variable, then what I'd like to know is what the actual tariff rate is as opposed to what the calculation seems to be, which was the trade deficit with a country divided into the imports to that country. And that that that has nothing to do with the tariff rate. I mean, just technically speaking, it has literally nothing to do with the tariff rate. And so what that means is now you're boxed in logically if president Trump wants to do a reciprocal tariff reduction, for example. Ben Shapiro (00:41:38): How do you do that? Because he actually has used a statistic for the tariffs that have nothing to do with the tariff rate and are actually just trade deficits. So the only way to actually rectify that statistic is to have Madagascar buy a bunch of American product, for example, in order to get their their, quote, unquote, tariff rate down. That that sort of stuff seems badly calibrated even if you like the policy, for example. Jason Calacanis (00:41:58): Alright. Yeah. So let's see. David Friedberg (00:41:59): Unless from a poker point of view, they spent many months declaring they're gonna do tariffs. And everyone thought they were bluffing and said everyone said there's no way you're gonna do tariffs. It's like someone in poker is saying, I'm gonna play every hand I get. I'm gonna be crazy. You don't believe them. And they actually have to do it in order to get the negotiating leverage that they need to be able to negotiate trade deals ultimately, and they have to look a little crazy maybe. I mean, that that Jason Calacanis (00:42:23): So you're Is that your position, Freiburg? They're the four d chess? Or David Friedberg (00:42:26): I'm trying to rationalize one kind of rational reason for why a lot of smart people would end up putting that board up, that poster board up, where to your point, Ben, they said that these are kind of the the tariffs that are being levied upon our country when in fact it is simply the math of imports minus exports divided by imports. That's what the number was. And and and it was and it was maxed out at that number or 10%, and that's what they did. So they did that basically as a way, in my opinion, it looks like, and I'm just trying to take a read on this, that they're using this as a way to anchor for negotiations going forward to make the case we are declaratively, crazily off the frigging ship, going to do whatever the heck we wanna do here in this administration. Now everyone takes them seriously. Now everyone shows up to the negotiating table, and now they can actually negotiate and then announce a series of win after win after win and say, we got this set of countries to capitulate today. This is the deal we worked out. It's a totally unique deal. This set of deals we worked out today. This set of deals we worked out today. And basically getting all the trade representatives to the table by making the case that they're actually willing to go all the way to the wall on stuff. So I that's the only way I can kind of rationalize this rollout, Ben. That's what it feels like to me. For months, they've been very declarative. We are going to do tariffs. Besson said it to us on our interview. Lutnick said it to us in our interview, and no one took them seriously. Ben Shapiro (00:43:49): I did. I did, by the way. I I will say that I took them totally seriously so much so that I called my financial adviser after the State of the Union address and told them to rejigger my my stock and bond ratio in my portfolio because I figured that something like this was going to happen. I think David Friedberg (00:44:02): You went heavy treasuries. Ben Shapiro (00:44:03): Yes. I I I I went light stocks. I'll say that. And and the and the reason for that is because, again, I think that the thing about president Trump is that you he he may not, you know, be serious in every single thing that he says, but he is very clear that when he says a thing over and over and over, there is no hidden motivation. And this is the part that I always have trouble with with sort of the the 40 chess reads on president Trump. There's almost never a hidden motivation. He pretty much just says the thing that he thinks. Right? That it's one of the things that makes him so popular and authentic is that there isn't a 40 chess game being played. If he if he says that he wants a thing to happen, it's because he actually wants the thing to happen. Now the thing about president Trump is he's also a realist. So if a bunch of bad headlines hit him, he may then change his mind and decide that he wants to drive a truck directly through the center of the tariffs because the prices are going up too much on, for example, semiconductors. So one of the big exemptions from these tariffs is in fact in the area of semiconductors. Again, there you see a sort of couple of different justifications that are that are mutually exclusive that are fighting each other. One of them is the idea we need to reshor semiconductor production because it's a national security asset, and the other is it's we we need to raise revenue on semiconductors. So he exempted them, which kind of, you know, kind of bollocks up the logic. And I I think that the the there there are a couple of tells that that isn't what's it may listen. I think it may end up being the thing you're saying. I think the most likely result of these tariffs is that within the next few weeks, the headlines are not good. President Trump starts driving trucks through the center of the tariffs, and then he starts getting wins from various parties outside that allow him to find an off ramp on some of these tariffs. Ben Shapiro (00:45:33): Now a company in in Belgium says they're going to build a factory in The United States. He has them to the White House. They have a big ceremony. And then he says, and as a result of this, we're now lowering the tariffs. And sort of the same way he did with with Columbia when he said not the university, the the country. When he said he was gonna hit them with tariffs unless you accept these these illegal immigrants, and and then they did. So that very well might be the offer. I don't think that's what's going on right now. I think what's going on right now is the strategy that Lutnick has repeatedly expressed, which is that they actually kinda like the tariffs. They actually think that this is good economic policy, and that between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history. And and so they Do Jason Calacanis (00:46:07): you agree? Ben Shapiro (00:46:08): I I think that that is a bad read on economic history because there are a lot of confounds there that are being ignored. Among those confounds would be the fact that David Friedberg (00:46:18): Industrial Revolution? Ben Shapiro (00:46:19): Yes. So few. Just just to name a few. In the Industrial Revolution, extraordinary high levels of immigration, by the way, during that period. So you had an incredibly cheap labor base that was actually coming in into The United States at that time. Massive expansion No income population. No income tax. David Friedberg (00:46:34): So free flowing capital. Ben Shapiro (00:46:35): A newly discovered continent. Right? Like like like, truly, like, many, many confounds. Right? And and by the way, less international trade generally. So tariffs aren't gonna have the same sort of impact on global supply chains as they would now, where every product that you buy has gone through 10 different countries in 10 different ways. And so so I no. I don't I don't think that that is a comp, but that doesn't mean that that Lutnick doesn't think that it's a comp, for example. And and I think that the when when it comes to, you know, the rollout, again, a methodical rollout yeah. I I I totally get the crazy man theory, and I think that sometimes president Trump does that. I'm hoping that that's what he's doing. But a good example of an off ramp he could have taken if that's the thing he's trying to do. So yesterday, in anticipation of this, Israel, which had very, very low tariffs on United States goods anyway, announced they'd removed all tariffs on American goods. Right? There were no tariffs on American goods anymore. And the administration that afternoon listed their tariff rate at 33% and then hit them with a 17% tariff Jason Calacanis (00:47:29): for a country that is David Friedberg (00:47:30): just taking away and just use them Jason Calacanis (00:47:32): as an example of a great partner. Ben Shapiro (00:47:34): Exactly. Exactly. David Friedberg (00:47:35): I think they Didn't didn't Canada do the same? Didn't Canada drop tariffs, like, the the morning of They were Jason Calacanis (00:47:39): on CNBC, and they said, we're totally willing to go to zero. And then the anchors correctly on CNBC were like, well, then why haven't you done that already? To Ben's point, Israel did do that. And but I think your theory, Ben, is, like, absolutely correct. If you make this analogy to what he did with overturning Roe v. Wade, it is the same exact thing. He told us over and over again, I'm going to put two, maybe three people on the Supreme Court, I'm going to overturn it. And then afterwards, he kind of wiped his hands through it and was like, Listen, it's up to you guys. I had nothing to do with it. He will tell you what he's going to do. He told you he was going to do these tariffs. He's done them. And I do think there's something embedded in what you said, Ben, which is I think he likes everybody to come to Mar A Lago or to come to the White House, and he loves doing deals. He's addicted to it. He wrote a book, The Art of the Deal. He loves people coming to him, hanging out. And Shamaque, maybe you could give us your perspective, crazy man, very crazy grandpa, or this is a negotiating tactic. Everybody has to come through him, or Lutnick believes it. As he said very clearly, I'm gonna add a trillion dollars in taxes here. What what do you think is going on here? Because if when I went through all the top people on the Internet, all our group of friends, who are deeply in finance, I can't find anybody deeply in finance who's not in the administration who thinks this is well executed or a good idea. What's your thought? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:00): Let me start by saying a couple things. To use the Donald Rumsfeld quote, I do agree with Ben tremendously that this was a known known. We mentioned this last episode. Donald Trump has been speaking about tariffs for forty plus years. Antonio Gracias (00:49:15): Yep. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:16): So this is not a new thing. And I think that he tried this in Trump one, but to your guys' point, it didn't really go well because he didn't have the team around him that had his back. And so it was inevitable that he would have tried it in Trump two. He said it, and he's been able to do it. So if you weren't planning for it, whoever was vested in this outcome, you really needed to be focused on this. It was a known known, and so there was a little dereliction of duty if you were caught off guard, I think. That's one. The second is and I we've said this all year since January 1 on this pod. We started it even with the with that polymarket bet that I made, which is the Trump administration does not care about the stock market. And by the way, this the trade actually closed out, so congrats to all these people that won $650,000 on Poly. Jason Calacanis (00:50:12): And let me just explain. Polymarket put a betting market suggested by Chamopi Hapatia. They are partners of ours. Magnificent Seven shrinks below 30% of S and P five hundred in 2025. Was free money. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:25): This was like the stock market giving up free money. But why did this happen? This happened because it was very clear to me early on that the rhetoric had shifted to say, we care about MAGA. We care about people that have working class and middle class jobs. None of those folks are deeply invested in the asset economy the way maybe some of us are. And so it was directionally clear. And by the way, Scott Besson, what a cold ass quote yesterday. The equity market sell off is a mag seven problem, not a MAGA problem. So there again, putting all of this into the realm of this is a known known. So I think it's pretty clear. One, Trump has had a forty year view on tariffs. They're gonna go through with this, and they're gonna see it through. I don't think you're gonna see this grand capitulation. Two, they are okay with the volatility in the equity markets. And then three, which is the other thing that we've been talking about a lot is, where does this move our practical financing cost? What is this? Right? We've talked about this. We have $6,000,000,000,000 we need to finance in the next nine months. So the singular goal, in my opinion, of the White House has been move the tenure as aggressively and as quickly as possible. And look what they've done. As of yesterday, it's unbelievable what's happened in the tenure. You know, you are kissing 4%. And we talked about this. If it had gone in the other direction, 30 or 40 basis points, and it touched 5%, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of extra money that would not have been found, that would have had to be printed. Right? And now this is hundreds of billions of dollars that we will save. Jason Calacanis (00:52:11): If we cut rates, if the Fed cuts rates, that's all predicated on No, no, no, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:16): this doesn't matter anymore. Jason Calacanis (00:52:17): No, this is the cut rates David Friedberg (00:52:19): and control the back end of the curve. On the treasury the treasury markets, the government sells treasuries. Jason Calacanis (00:52:24): Governments will not auction Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:25): ten years, and the auctions will clear at around 4%. That is an enormous like, as an American, what we should all be thinking is irrespective of what you think you know or what you think you like about tariffs, we should all have a moment where we exhale because the long end of the curve is giving us a respite in a storm and we should be incredibly thankful. Jason Calacanis (00:52:49): Because What I'm referring to, Chamop, is you said yesterday, Jerome Powell, you're on the clock. So maybe you could explain what you meant by that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:56): Okay. So this is that's a different part of the curve. Jason Calacanis (00:52:58): I understand it's a different thing, but I'm just trying to put these two things together because those are the two things we're saying this action took or this will enable. So Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:07): let's play the ball where it lies. Jason Calacanis (00:53:08): The Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:09): Wall Street smart money thought this was a $250,000,000,000 event. They were wrong. This is part of why the stock market has reacted so violently today. This is a $750,000,000,000 to trillion dollar event. Okay? This is a big moment in the market. So what does it create? It creates the risk of a recession. How do you minimize that risk? That is all about how easy it is for the average person to be able to borrow money. Where is that dictated? That is more dictated by the Fed and how they price the front end of the curve. So what we need to have happen now is while Scott is out financing $6,000,000,000,000 on the back end, we now need to get Jerome Powell to cut the front end. And if you do it aggressively enough, you can introduce liquidity in a moment where small and medium sized businesses can go and get financed to weather the storm. David Friedberg (00:54:04): Shamaq, I wanna add on to your point. Just so you guys know, there's roughly 12 to $16,000,000,000,000 of private corporate debt in America. So this is debt held by small businesses, medium businesses, partnerships that have on average, call it a 15% operating margin. So they're gonna be under pressure if there is some recessionary risk to make sure they have access to capital. And if you remember the interview that Besson gave to us a couple weeks ago, he was very clear that one of his mandates is to enable the releveraging of the financial system. Meaning, he wants to give banks the ability to issue more debt, to introduce more capital and more liquidity into the markets by kicking away some of the regulatory restrictions that have made it more difficult for the banks to issue credit to business owners and to individuals. So if they are successful in their deregulatory efforts, it will introduce more liquidity into the market coupled with deregulatory work that they're making in the other parts of the administration as this is their declaration, not mine. Their intention is to make sure that that capital flows into building businesses, building new businesses, underwriting new jobs, creating more employment. That's the theory that they're trying to execute. Obviously, it's part of this three legged stool, but if it doesn't all work, the stool falls over. Jason Calacanis (00:55:26): Okay. Shammoth, give us an example here. And I'm trying to get you to paint the entire picture here because Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:31): Thank you, James. Jason Calacanis (00:55:31): The tariff cudgel is not making sense to a lot of folks. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:35): All good news. Right? So let's let's paint the let's so I'll give a very specific example. A friend of ours runs a hundred plus year company. I'm just gonna say it in generic terms so that I don't betray his confidence. But No problem. This is a business that's been built over a hundred years, owned by an American family, an incredible family, and they make products that we all know and love. And what did this action do? So in their example, they're in a very difficult position because they have, as David said, a very tight operating margin because they have to compete ferociously against China. And they've done everything possible to maintain their capabilities in America, hire American workers in the heartland, but still compete against China. It's tough. And this action today swings them from profitability to a potential yearly loss in a meaningful order of magnitude, like hundreds of millions of dollars. So, Jason, that's the other side of this tariff coin. So we have to find a way of finding those examples. And as Ben said, excluding them somehow or giving them reprieve because that wasn't the intention, I think, of what Trump was trying to do yesterday. That's an example of a company that should be winning and should continue to win and fight the good fight against China and try to continue to employ thousands of Americans. But this thing, because they had some capacity in some other countries, not China, by the way Got it. Blows the thing up. And so now you have to fix those things. Jason Calacanis (00:57:10): All right, Ben, let me get you involved here. I'm gonna play you a quick clip from Rand Paul, and I wanna get your feedback on executive power and then on tariffs themselves. And if it's a good idea or a bad idea, put the clip. Speaker 6 (00:57:23): What's the rationale for getting behind this? Well, one, we should not live under emergency rule. The constitution said taxes are raised by congress. Most specifically, originate in the house and come to the senate. So I'm against emergency rule. We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada. Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else's product, it's mutually beneficial or you wouldn't buy it. If the trade is voluntary, it's always beneficial. There is no Canada versus The US. The consumer wins when the price is the lowest price. Tariffs raise prices, and they're a bad idea for the economy. Jason Calacanis (00:58:00): Ben, your thoughts on the two issues. Is trade good for consumers? This is what, you know, I think is on top of everybody's mind that the whole Trump presidency and he won in large part due to inflation and Biden economics and that he was gonna reduce inflation. And I think a lot of people believe inflation's about to come roaring back. Your thoughts on the two issues. Ben Shapiro (00:58:22): Well, I mean, obviously, on a macroeconomic level, I totally agree with senator Paul. When it comes to the powers of the presidency, I think that it's pretty extraordinary that we should be able to use the trade deficit as a national emergency sufficient to put down what effectively amounts to a $700,000,000,000 tax increase on the American people if you're talking about them paying the price of of the tariffs on on the other end. Congress, you know, I think that if things get bad enough there there are a bunch of, you know, streams obviously here that cross. One of the big things here is that congress is up for reelect in a year and a half. And if the Republicans lose congress in a year and a half, then whatever tricks president Trump is is trying to pull in terms of being able to rejigger the rate at which we are paying back our our national debt. All that stuff goes by the wayside because if Democrats win congress, pretty much everything comes to a crashing halt. And there are a lot of Republicans who are in swing districts or in, say, r plus five, r plus 10 districts who are suddenly gonna feel feel pretty vulnerable. A recession takes everybody with it. And it takes secretary Bessent. It takes the president. It takes J. D. Vance. It takes everybody with it. Recessions tend to crush the president who is in power at the time regardless of what their long term plan is. When they say short term pain for for long term gain, again, I think that that there are a few factors here that I would like to see played out. For example, if there is an inflationary effect to the tariffs in terms in terms of price, does that mean that Jerome Powell is going to eject additional liquidity into the markets by by decreasing interest rates? It's hard to see how. I mean, he's holding the interest rate steady right now without decreasing the interest rates despite president Trump basically blasting him publicly since before he was even the president formally. He's just the president-elect at that time. Ben Shapiro (00:59:57): So, yeah, again, it's hard for me to see how all of this squares into what looks like a a really well calibrated policy. And and then beyond that, in the long term, tricks that we play with regard to the rate of interest, paying back our national debt, are not gonna be sufficient to pay back our national debt unless we have robust economic growth. And so a lot has to be bet on the robust economic growth out outearning essentially the the levels of debt that we are are currently racking up. And while I love what Doge is doing, the systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by Doge. I mean, it's it's the it's the means tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long term drivers of our national debt. Jason Calacanis (01:00:33): And military, I think, would be number two. Yeah. Ben Shapiro (01:00:35): Military. Military as a percentage of of the of the GDP or as a percentage of the budget has been, you know, relatively stable and in some cases decreasing since since the end of the Iraq war. True. But that but that that when when it comes to the means tested welfare programs, those continue to grow as a percentage of the budget and over time are increasingly unfunded. Jason Calacanis (01:00:53): Yeah. As our population ages and the population grows, Freeburg putting aside executive power and the midterms, which, yeah, that that would change everything. What are your thoughts on just inflation and tariffs and the chance that this comes back and explodes in the administration's lap? David Friedberg (01:01:11): Well, I think there are three consequences not necessarily related to inflation that are just worth spending time on, one of which I don't think gets talked about enough. The first is just the challenge of tariffs in general. And I shared this clip with you guys over the group chat yesterday from Ronald Reagan talking Jason Calacanis (01:01:28): Oh, it's so funny. Haven't chewed up. I actually edited it. Let's do that. Let's play this clip and get your reaction. Speaker 7 (01:01:33): And today, many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period called the Smoot Hawley Tariff greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery. You see, at first, when someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is first homegrown industry start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then while all this is going on, something even worse occurs, people stop buying, then the worst happens, markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs. The memory of all this occurring back in the thirties made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity. David Friedberg (01:02:38): So let me just say three things that I think are gonna be important consequences, one of which doesn't get talked about much at all. The first is the important point about the decline in competitiveness that arises when you use protectionist tactics like import tariffs. So, ultimately, in order to be competitive in the market, you need to have a free market to test how good you are relative to your competitors. And if you use tariffs or other taxes or other government intervening systems to distort the natural forces of markets, meaning there's a buyer and a seller, there may be multiple sellers, and ultimately the buyer will choose the best seller, then you're creating a disincentive for American enterprise to be more competitive. We lost manufacturing because we weren't competitive in manufacturing. Putting a tariff on other manufacturing countries does not make Americans more competitive. It basically gives American businesses a crutch. Jason Calacanis (01:03:32): And ultimately David. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:03:33): So let's talk about manufacturing. So if I'm using a traditional assembly line with low efficiency systems, I'm gonna be more expensive to make a device than a Chinese factory that's built with a lot of automation, high efficiency systems, etcetera. And so if I'm saying, to buy the Chinese product, you gotta pay twice as much because there's a tariff now. The American company does not have an incentive to invest in automating or building better technology or adopting new technology to make themselves competitive in the marketplace. So that's the challenge with tariffs long term is that they distort economic consequences that arise in a traditional free market system. The second consequence I think is important is under this guise and in the near term, the effect of some of these tariffs is gonna be the loss of revenue for a significant chunk of the American businesses. In particular, I'll use one example. People may not remember this because it wasn't that big of a thing, but between 2016 and 2020 during the last Trump administration, there was a continued kind of tariff and trade escalation between Trump and China. And during that time, China stopped buying American ag exports, and China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products. As a result, the Trump administration had to issue two support payment checks to farmers that totaled $28,000,000,000 in 2018 and 2019 just because of that China stepping out of the buying market. American farmers represent a large amount of the voting bloc for the Republican Party. And so my I think that the second consequence is gonna be that there is gonna need to be financial support, which means increased government spending if we intend to keep the tariffs in place and the global market stops buying American exports. That's the second consequence. The third consequence, which is the one I am most worried about, which I think about a lot, is China had the state council meeting a couple days ago. And in that state council meeting, they announced a series of measures and a series of steps that they would be willing to take on IP infringement in the case of retaliatory tariff escalation in a trade war. David Friedberg (01:05:39): What that means is that China may step up and say, you know what? We are disregarding all of the IP rights held by IP rights holders around the world, and they could steal IP more openly, more brazenly. And because they have a lower cost of manufacturing, they have a larger manufacturing base, a lower cost of power, they could basically take the only thing that much of American enterprise relies on, which is our IP rights, and say, we're just gonna Well, people might say, oh, they already do that. They already do that. They do it to an extent. But imagine if China just made copies of Microsoft Word and started selling it around the world for $5 Jason Calacanis (01:06:12): Yeah. Mean, they did that internally for some period of time, then they started to respect it internally, but they've never done it, great point, by shipping Disney films overseas. David Friedberg (01:06:21): That's right. Yeah. So now imagine if they started taking all of American manufacturing drawings, blueprints, designs, and they have all this manufacturing capacity, and they sold everything at 10¢ on the dollar to all of the global markets that The US is now cutting trade ties with because of the the tariff escalation. And China says, we don't care about your IP rights anymore. We don't care because you've cut us off. The rest of the world needs someone that will sell to them. I will also say China, One thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is gonna go into production in q three of twenty twenty five and will end up being in full production in 2026. This will move the base from Taiwan potentially into China. They are developing lithography systems. They are developing advanced semiconductor manufacturing systems, and they will effectively have everything from energy to the minerals to the manufacturing capacity to support and service all and the software now, all of technology. And so we are in a really disadvantaged position if China does choose in this moment to disregard the IP rights of American businesses. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:20): So that's a Jason Calacanis (01:07:21): big They have the ability to to swing back at us. Chamath, you want to, wrap us up here? And Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:27): yeah. I'll take the other side of all of this. Yeah. I'll start with, again, there's no point prognosticating when they're just telling you what they intend to do. Nick, you wanna play the clip? Speaker 8 (01:07:40): I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering. It was something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods, or if you wanna go back, like a a treat something back to the steel agreements or the Treaty of Versailles. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:59): I mean, what what is that? Just to kind of, like, refresher. What are we talking about? We're talking about commercial relations between, at the time, 44 countries. Right? This is a big statement. I don't think that these kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour. And I think that people understand if you're kind of, like, steeped in the history of it, how important these kinds of statements are. So I think I take this similarly to how I take Trump's rhetoric on tariffs, And I'm spending some time trying to now understand how are the scenarios that could play out. Because I think David is right if you assume the status quo, meaning what are the risks? But what they're saying is we're gonna question this. We're actually gonna go here and just totally rewrite that. If that happens as part of this, all bets are off in my opinion. I don't think any of us know with any certainty what a new economic framework would look like. And if Scott is basically prepping himself to say, hey. Put me in, coach. I'm ready. I would take that seriously. Jason Calacanis (01:09:10): Ben, what should be let's talk about onshoring and bringing these jobs, bringing these factories back to America. It seems to me a bit crazy that we're gonna make fast fashion and people's Coachella wear and their anchor, you know, USB C cables here. Pharmaceuticals, sure, we need that. For strategic purposes, we obviously need the military and chips. But outside of that, is there some rationale here when we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime, and everybody wants to come here to immigrate to this country, to doing these tariffs and trying to create jobs here that we don't necessarily need? We have too much employment right now in the market and not enough bodies to fill all the open job wrecks. What are you, though? Ben Shapiro (01:09:57): Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's really fascinating is the the kind of difference in messaging that you hear between the treasury secretary, Howard and and the commerce secretary and the president. I mean, they're they're all messaging kind of different things. I think secretary Bessent is making the strongest case for for what's being done with this sort of long term, what's what does reordering look like? And and even there, I'm I'm still lacking clarity on what a reordered world trade relationship actually what is the end of the rainbow there? What does that actually look like when all is said and done so that I can kinda grasp exactly what that what he wants that to look like? Well, I think that, you know, secretary of the United States seems to actually just like tariffs, and president Trump seems to have a picture in his head when it comes to factories that that we're going to, you know, revitalize the steel mills, that we're going to be we we're going to be doing the kinds of jobs that we did back in the nineteen fifties. There's sort of nostalgia that that that president Trump has in sort of his own mind about these sorts of jobs that, by the way, nobody in modern life actually wants to work at. If if you were to work at a Ford factory in 1953 in a nonair conditioned factory riveting for a living, you would actually be quite unhappy, and and you should be very happy that actually there are machines that do that now. And and you hear this kind of talk sometimes bandied about not just with regard to offshoring, but with regards to technology and machines. I mean, I I've talked to I remember a few years back in 2018, I talked to Tucker Carlson on my program, and he literally said that he would outlaw self driving cars because it would it would get rid of white trucker jobs, you know, blue collar trucker jobs in in Ohio and Michigan. Ben Shapiro (01:11:19): And when I said, well, that sounds kind of Luddite. He said, well, the Luddites had a point, and and, you know, then suggested that on the basis of safety, he would ban it. And remember asking him, but those dry those self driving cars will presumably be more safe than than humans driving. So that that gets said safer. Yeah. Yes. And and and what he actually said was, well, you know, I you asked me on what grounds I would ban it, not not whether that was true or not. But Yeah. No. I I think that that that is the I think I think this is the danger that particularly tech runs when we're talking about these sorts of things is is to believe that the the animus for trade relationships around the world or the the anticompetitive nature of many of the the activities that are being taken are relegated solely to sort of the foreign sphere. I think that you could easily see that turn on, quote, unquote, job loss that is caused by AI or job loss that is caused by technological gain. And the truth is that if you're talking about job loss in the manufacturing sector in The United States, the vast majority of job loss in the manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring. It's due to technological advancements. Manufacturing productivity in The United States has actually dramatically risen since the since the nineteen eighties. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:12:20): Okay. So let's play conspiracy theorists for a second because okay. You're right, Ben. Like, you want that clarity. I want that clarity. Friedberg wants it. Jay Cal, everybody wants it. But if this moment, if it's a catalyst to your point where everybody is forced into the room and Trump leads a a grand bargain across the 50 or 60 most important trading partners in the world, what does that look like? Like, it's it's almost like, okay. We're reestablishing something that's akin to the United Nations and what the United Nations was meant to be post World War II, but that institution has totally failed. So this new thing exists purely on economic lines and cooperation. I don't know. I struggle actually, to your point, to kind of imagine what are the outcomes, but there's so many unbelievable outcomes in that scenario if they were able to get the top 50 commercial mercantile countries together in a room and say, let's hammer something up. Ben Shapiro (01:13:15): I mean, I totally agree with that. I think one of my questions, however, is the if you take a look at at some of the the examples that that Scott is using there when he talks about the Bretton Woods agreement or if you're gonna talk about, you know, what what Nixon did in debasing the dollar. Versailles. If you're talking I mean, Versailles, least, would be a better example in the sense that you didn't have a a global hegemon at at the time. Jason Calacanis (01:13:33): Right. Ben Shapiro (01:13:33): If you're talking about the Bretton Woods system, literally, the rest of the world effectively did not exist in the post World War two era. So what is everybody gonna bet on? They have to bet on the American dollar. There's no other choice. By the time that Nixon decides to go off the gold standard, essentially, he has to rely on the organization of the petrodollar in order to make sure that people don't dissociate from The United States. What is the thing that's going to draw people to The United States as opposed to looking to a comp rising competitor like a China. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:13:57): A great question. So what is that thing? What do Ben Shapiro (01:13:58): you think that Chamath Palihapitiya (01:13:59): that's a great question. What is that thing? Jason Calacanis (01:14:01): Mind. Yeah. I mean Ben Shapiro (01:14:02): AI is the only possibility, which is why I think the AI regime inside the Trump administration is so deeply important. I also think this is why I'm warning about, you know, the possibility that these sort of anti free market forces that are that are related to tariffs aren't just related to tariffs in some quarters. This is where populism can kind of run out of control and start to actually turn against some of its tech masters in some of these cases. And so one one of the things that I'm very concerned about is if I was talking with Danielle Smith, who's the premier of Alberta, the other day, and she was talking about the fact that Canada like, she's she's very conservative. Alberta tends to be a more conservative area of Canada. And she was talking about how if Mark Carney were to become prime minister of Canada instead of Pierre Poliev, that he actually is eager for the tariff war because it allows him to reorient toward China and away from The United States. And and there are countries that absolutely would love to do that. I mean, there there there's a case we made that the EU would love an easy off ramp with Russia and China and use this as an excuse as as a way of reorienting back toward Russian oil, for example Right. Then Chinese markets because that Chinese market Jason Calacanis (01:14:59): is lower. Inputs. Right? I mean, you have lower input costs, which makes life better for citizens, and citizens like cheap things. They like cheap oil in their cars, and they like cheap cars. They'll be bringing BYD cars into Europe. And and the Ben Shapiro (01:15:13): thing that I'm worried about is when when I look at the forget about Europe and forget about Canada for a second. The the the tariffs that that kind of shocked me when I looked at that list were all the tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries. Right? All of those countries where where where production has been shifting out of China to places like, for example, Vietnam or Cambodia, the the production has been shifting to those places specifically because companies know Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:33): To go Ben Shapiro (01:15:33): after China. States. Yeah. Because The United States is is going after China. Well, now why exactly would you manufacture in Vietnam when Vietnam is gonna be with a 46% tariff rate on the basis that we have a 90 Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:44): It's more than that, Ben. It's like they've made those investments over the last five or six years. And so you have tens and hundreds of, you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars of sunk cost. Now what do you do in that moment? Jason Calacanis (01:15:55): These were actually specifically designed, Ben, to be a diversification strategy. Japan was paying their companies to build factories outside of China. And Apple was doing India, Vietnam to build AirPods and laptops and even the iPhone being made outside of China. That diversification strategy K. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:13): Cal, did you Jason Calacanis (01:16:14): did you watch the did Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:15): you watch the presser yesterday? The the worst part for me, I only had one moment where I was like, oh gosh. He stopped on Sri Lanka. And he goes, oh, Lanka. Good old Sri Lanka. Jason Calacanis (01:16:27): Eighty Eight Percent. Amazing Sri Lankan. But Sri Lanka, very tough on us. Not very I was like, sir, I'm gonna Accepting. Go ahead, Ben. You can do yours. They can do your dueling about Sri Lanka. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:38): Just Sri Lanka. Do Jason Calacanis (01:16:39): a great Trump. Okay? And that is the reason why Ben Shapiro's podcast number two to all in now because of the Ben Shapiro Trump impersonation. Ben Shapiro, great American. Have you been to the White House? Ben Shapiro (01:16:52): I I have actually. Jason Calacanis (01:16:53): Yeah. You have. Have you been invited in this? Or are you still a never Trump or never Trumper? It was a nasty never Trumper. Now he's brought Trump. Ben Shapiro (01:17:05): Exactly. I had that I had the the the same exact trajectory as JD Vance, except I didn't have vice president of The United States. But, you know, the I I think that, you know, that, again, one when we talk about the rollout, the the fact that, for example, the meme online right now, and I know we all kind of live in memorial, but the meme is the president and JD Vance lecturing a penguin because on that chart Jason Calacanis (01:17:22): is the Heard Islands. Have you even apologized for eating all that mackerel? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:28): No. No. Wait. What are you guys talking about? Ben Shapiro (01:17:30): Oh, it's it's you missed There's David Friedberg (01:17:32): an island that got a 10% tariff, but there's nothing on the island except penguins. Yeah. It's a nature Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:38): of states. Ben Shapiro (01:17:38): This is where Jason Calacanis (01:17:39): I started to yeah. This. Oh, god. Let's start. Come on now. Have you even apologized? Okay? Ben Shapiro (01:17:45): You got no cards. Jason Calacanis (01:17:46): There are Ben Shapiro (01:17:46): no cards. This penguin has no cards. Jason Calacanis (01:17:49): It's just you have no cards to play. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:50): Okay? Stop. Stop. Jason Calacanis (01:17:52): You've got a great tuxedo. At least you showed up in a tux. Okay? Good stuff. Oh my god. By the way, I think that Ben's framing of Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:03): this thank you for that because that was really helpful to me. You're right. Like, if if we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we have to have an anchor asset. So it's a really great question. What is that anchor asset? It has to be AI. But then, you know, underneath that AI thing, we have these two very complicated problems. One is a meaningful energy problem. I've been talking about this now incessantly. We don't have enough electrons. We just don't. And then the second is what Friedberg mentioned before, which is that we have a very delicate technological supply chain to make the underlying silicon we need for these things. Neither are trivial. These are not things that can be easily solved. David Friedberg (01:18:44): Yeah. The AI supply chain is electricity. We're going from one terawatt to two. China's going from three to eight over the same time period, just to be clear. So they're accelerating. The second is rare earth materials that we don't mine for. We've outsourced mining. And Doug Burgum told me an interesting stat. He's our secretary of the interior. He said, we graduate 200 people a year in The United States with degrees in mining. Oh gosh. Beginning in the nineties, when globalization took off, we basically stopped mining in this country and moved everything to all the places because we had this nimbyism. We didn't wanna have mining in our backyard. The third, obviously, is the manufacturing of semiconductors, which we don't do. The components to do the manufacturing. So there's a company called ASML, which everyone that works in tech knows about. They have these advanced lithography systems to make the semiconductors. They don't sell to China. So now China's got their own homegrown lithography systems. The worst thing about Yeah. The worst thing make any of that in house. So we don't we don't mind. We don't have enough power. We don't have the materials, and we don't make lithography, and we don't have any fabs. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:48): I said this before, but one of the biggest national security threats that we created out of nowhere was when the Wall Street Journal was allowed to do a detailed article on ASML. And one of the craziest and scariest stats is that there's a person, literally one person, that can operate these machines that are trained by ASML and then forward deployed. And there was a woman that was profiled. And I thought, this is a national security risk. You should not be helping Jason Calacanis (01:20:17): who this woman is. She's gonna be kidnapped. David Friedberg (01:20:20): Brianna Hall. Exactly. At the end of the day, what The US has is the weights. We've got 70,000,000,000 parameters, and we call that an AI model. That 70,000,000,000 parameters, if someone gets a copy of it, they've got an AI model. So how much of an advantage do we really have? And and the other thing that we had was China's got the whole supply chain, and now they're making their own models. Ben Shapiro (01:20:40): And the thing that we had was our trade relationships with all the places that had all of these things that we actually needed. Jason Calacanis (01:20:46): Right? This is And it was so high functioning. Ben Shapiro (01:20:48): Yes. It was it was quite high functioning. And and then and then beyond that, you also have the problem of what happens if there's just less demand for for dollars on the world stage. I mean, the the exit of the dollar as the world's global reserve currency is gonna have some pretty nasty spillover effects, and and it's gonna require the government to start sucking in more dollars from the American population in order to pay off all of these these debts that we're racking up. So, I mean, all these things tend like, you could see a world where we magic our way out of this. But This David Friedberg (01:21:14): is what I've been saying to J Cal. De dollarization is what ends up happening. Jason Calacanis (01:21:17): I mean, I think that's right. What the stablecoins, I think, is set up to counter. People are now saying, hey, we're gonna have there's two stablecoin acts that are going around here. One of them doesn't require like know your customer, anti money laundering terrorism stuff, which is, you know, Tethers, according to many reports, bread and butter. And then the other one is to domesticate all this business, give it to Circle, give it to Stripe, give it to American companies and force them to buy a certain percentage of treasuries and allow them to give interest, which the stablecoin bills are now debating if they should give that. So I I don't know if you guys are watching that, but that would be So there's an analog to keep a buyer for, you know, our currency. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:00): There's an analog to this that I think is important. Like, when you look at the debt to GDP of Japan, One of the critical questions is how can you have a functioning economy at 250, two hundred and 60 percent debt to GDP. Right? And we're at sort of like hundred and teens. Right? One twenty something, whatever. And one of the critical advantages that they have is that they export a lot of incredible goods abroad, but they have an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers for their own Japanese bonds. And so there's this permanent bid that exists because the net buyer can be a Japanese person on the margins, and they're always there. And it's not necessarily a person. It's an insurance company. It's a pension fund, etcetera. The thing that US dollar stablecoins does is it starts to replicate one of those advantages, which, again, if you think about having a release valve for The US economy and if we needed to, all of a sudden scream to 200% debt to GDP. The real question is where's the incremental net buyer of The US bond? And it could be the person that has to back the stablecoin, which would then say the people in charge of the crypto strategy, we won't name names. Jason Calacanis (01:23:14): No. If anybody knows anybody. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:16): That legislation needs to be incredibly permissive. Because to your guys' point, we would want the bid to US treasuries to exist and to be as ferocious as possible. Right? Jason Calacanis (01:23:26): Yeah. But I don't think you should give let Tether do it until they do an attestate until they do a proper audit, and they stop doing money laundering and terrorism and all the crazy stuff. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:34): I'm not going all the way there. Allegedly. But what Circle does is, I think, quite structured and, Jason Calacanis (01:23:38): you know, well. That's I mean, I think that's Circle's USDC. That's their pitch. And I think the Trump family now just launched their own stablecoin this week. So you're gonna see 10. That is a great way to, you know, create competition. And, you know, I really David Friedberg (01:23:55): it's it's it's the right question that this administration has a responsibility to articulate. What is it that makes America the linchpin of the global economy, of the western democracy, of the world is we enter this new era with this rising power in China, and I'm not sure that there's clarity today Jason Calacanis (01:24:19): in that. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:24:19): What do think it is? David Friedberg (01:24:21): I'll tell you this. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:24:21): Both of you guys, what do you guys Jason Calacanis (01:24:23): think? Yeah. No. I mean, it's pretty clear what it is. The reason we keep winning and the reason China keeps stumbling is because we have rabid entrepreneurship and an investment and in crazy investment infrastructure. The fact that we will bet on entrepreneurs and allow them to become billionaires or allow them to flame out and start again tomorrow, that entrepreneurial spirit of America is what needs to be preserved. That's what created SpaceX. That's what created Circle we just talked about, Stripe. We need the American exceptionalism, and it has to be backed by recruiting, AKA immigration, of brilliant people like Sachs, like Freeburg, like Chamath, who were not born in this country. You can't do it just based on Ben Shapiro and Jay Cal. You need to be looking around the world for the smartest people and then plugging them into the entrepreneurial system here. That's the magic. David David Friedberg (01:25:11): What you Jason Calacanis (01:25:11): think of this? David Friedberg (01:25:12): David, what do you think Jason Calacanis (01:25:13): of this? That's a very good I mean, I think that's credible. David Friedberg (01:25:15): I honestly don't know if I can be dismissive of China like Jay Cal says they keep stumbling and blah blah blah. I I think that's absolutely wrong. There's a very good interview. What are those guys' names from the Brookings Institution that do that podcast? Ben, you might know these guys, the three guys. Ben Shapiro (01:25:32): Midas Touch. Is that who you're talking about, or is that a different podcast? I'm not sure. Jason Calacanis (01:25:36): It's not in the top 100. Like, it's better than don't know. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:38): Yeah. It's not in the top one. David Friedberg (01:25:40): They talked about China, and they talked about actually the rise in China where they 30 x GDP per capita and call it thirty years because they allowed entrepreneurs Are Jason Calacanis (01:25:49): you talking about Goodfellas? David Friedberg (01:25:50): Goodfellas sounds right. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:25:52): Yeah. The Goodfellas. The Stanford David Friedberg (01:25:53): Room. That's right. The Stanford one. Yeah. I think that was They had a pretty good podding. Good talk on a good talk on No. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:59): No. It's Waldorf and Stattler. Think that's their names. Jason Calacanis (01:26:02): Waldorf and Stattler. Those are the Hoover instruments are good fellows. That's a charming master in the office. David Friedberg (01:26:08): It is Nick, find a picture Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:10): of Waldorf and Steyler for Friedberg Jason Calacanis (01:26:11): to jog his so great. They're so great. David Friedberg (01:26:13): So, anyway, they made the point that because China allowed the entrepreneurism of the individuals to let the market run free. And they have this throttle. When they let the people run free, they let entrepreneurism thrive. And then sometimes they pull the throttle back, J Cal. And, you we've seen this Jason Calacanis (01:26:31): that, and they crashed the whole thing. David Friedberg (01:26:33): Now they've pushed it forward again. And that's what drives the growth and the improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy, in mining, and now in manufacturing. And it's, I think, gonna lead to a great era of prosperity for China. It's pretty clear with or without the conflict with The US. They've dramatically improved the conditions in that country over the last thirty years in a really profound historic way. So I don't I don't want I I'm not gonna be dismissive and say that they're stumbling. Jason Calacanis (01:26:59): Let's give it to Ben, then I'll Ben Shapiro (01:27:00): tell you Jason Calacanis (01:27:00): why I'm dismissing. Ben Shapiro (01:27:01): So so first of all, I think that China does face some serious, real serious structural problems ranging from demographics to debt. And and I also think that yeah. And I I also think that if you take a look at sort of the history of economic fascism, which is what they're attempting to do, which is sort of cap you know, using capitalist methodologies in order to prop up a a very tyrannical government that will In a centrally planned David Friedberg (01:27:22): way. Yeah. Ben Shapiro (01:27:22): Exactly. And and so for a short period of time, that seems like that will work. And then and then the problem is you can find yourself in a blind alley fairly quickly. And right now, AI is not a blind alley, but we also don't know exactly which way AI is gonna develop in the most profitable way. Mean, the amount of money that's been poured into AI has not yet been justified by the amount of of Complete. Net on the on return on Antonio Gracias (01:27:42): the on Ben Shapiro (01:27:42): the actual investment, obviously. And so if you don't this this is the benefit of the American market is that you have everybody chasing everything all the time, and one of those things is gonna hit. The the benefit of the Chinese market is you have everyone chasing one thing all the time. If that's the thing that actually hits, they'll do amazing. But it's possible that they completely miss it. But the problem is, I think, and this is where you get back to the political in The United States and the and the necessity of avoiding a recession, is that, to me, the scariest thing that that is happening in inside the Trump administration is not something that's bad. When president Trump was inaugurated, there was one picture that spoke of the that that kind of summed up the inauguration. Was president Trump there with Tim Cook and with the and with, and with Zuck and with Elon and with all the billionaires behind him, the all the tech bros right behind him. If there is a recession, what comes next is not going to be salutary to innovation, to investment, to technology, to anything remotely like that. And so the idea of short term pain, it better be really, really short term. The American people do not have patience for this. And if the and if if if it if it goes sideways, then what you're gonna get is a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right that is going to take down everybody who is even remotely connected with this idea of free market capitalism. And so I I think that one of the dangers in in sort of attempting to manipulate the economy this way is that we're saying, okay. We're gonna we're gonna try these kind of methodologies of government control in which we rejigger the world economy in this way and that way, and then we'll magic our way out of it with with stablecoin and AI. Maybe. Ben Shapiro (01:29:07): Or maybe the best way to do this would actually be to allow the thing to thrive that has always thrived in America, which is lower the regulations, let people innovate, let people fail, let people succeed, get the hell out of the way, and, yes, actually do the things that you need to do in cutting government debt by doing the hard things. And and the only way you're gonna be able to all those things is through continued success, not pain to get to some long term gain. Jason Calacanis (01:29:28): It's gotta be entrepreneurship, and there are some sub factors of it. In order to have a vibrant entrepreneurial community, you need to have immigration. That's why I asked Trump on this thing, on this program, can we get green cards? Can we get people who have degrees here, especially coming out of Stanford to stay in the country? He said yes, he'd staple them on the degrees. Great. The next thing is getting Lina Khan out and ending the wrath of Lina Khan. We need M and A because when you have M and A, the companies get bigger. The fact that YouTube and Android and AdSense were purchased by Google made it into the massive success it is on a global basis today. And the fact that Meta was able to buy things. You may not like it when these companies get too powerful, but what Jack Ma what happened to Jack Ma is the reason, Freeberg, that I don't believe a dictator will ever compete with our country if we stay entrepreneurial and not socialist. Socialism is a cul de sac, as you're saying, Ben, and it might work for a short period of time, but then someone like Xi Jinping is gonna do what dictators do, which is implode. He saw Jack Ma get popular. He sent them to get reeducated and do some painting, and he took up oil painting. He got rid of every educational company and pulled up the chart of Chinese investment, Nick, if you have it. Boom. It just got smashed, And this is what dictators do. They do what Putin did. He invades Ukraine. His economy goes off the rails, and this is what Xi Jinping did. They always implode. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:53): Let me give you a step ladder to get off your soapbox so I can ask Ben a question. Ben, when you said that in a recession Jason Calacanis (01:31:00): Definitely not. David Friedberg (01:31:01): That's exactly right. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:31:04): Come I'm a passion or something you guys have to give me a David Friedberg (01:31:07): hard time? Jason Calacanis (01:31:07): You're passionate rant, I give you kudos. Eight ball. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:31:12): What do you do? You just shake it in some stupid some stupid statement afterwards and concern? Jason Calacanis (01:31:16): It's like, oh, this is weird. Ben agrees American exceptionalism. And I that's it. I'm leaving the bureaucrats. Ben and I David Friedberg (01:31:23): are gay Let me rant against dictators for a minute and earn my kudos. Go ahead, Ben. No. Jason Calacanis (01:31:28): So Ben Yeah. Okay. You should just go rant about the Trump administration and get your cabinet position. Go ahead. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:31:33): Ben, when you talk about in a recession, they go after tech companies. What can you just explain that more? Just explain that. I'm not sure I understood that totally. Ben Shapiro (01:31:41): Okay. So so there there there's a recession. And president Trump just the way that people tend to think of politics is is not on a granular level. They tend to see it on sort of a pixelated level because most people don't engage with politics on a granular level. They see a Seurat painting. They don't see all the dots. They just see Sunday in the Park with George. Right? And so when when it comes to a recession, the image that's going to come to mind for the Trump administration is that this is an administration that is extremely friendly to business, particularly when it comes to tech. And so whoever is standing next to president Trump, if there if there is a serious recession, gets nuked to the gets caught in the fallout. And if that happens, then you will see a resurgent left led by a Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, not a sort of technocratic, you know, Ezra Klein abundance liberalism wing. You're you're gonna get a a resurgent Bernie Bernieism on the left that basically says, these rich people screwed you in order to get ahead. You can feel it because you're feeling the recession. They're still rich. You're still poor. And and so what you really need is a complete rejiggering of the American economy along the lines of fairness. And you're you're gonna see something similar happen on the right, by the way. So, my friend, Matt Continetti, who, is the the former editor of the the Washington Free Beacon, I believe, he has a great point about presidential elections. He makes the point that candidates don't become president unless they run against their own party. That that it is in order to actually capture the imagination of the American people, you almost always have to run inside your own party against your own party. So you saw this most obviously with president Trump, but this was clearly true with Barack Obama. It it was true to a certain extent, with, with George W. Bush even, who ran a compassionate conservative campaign against these sort of hard hearted Gingrich dole Republicans. Clinton. It's Clinton Clinton Clinton for sure did this. Ben Shapiro (01:33:17): So I I think it's a great point because then you have to start thinking, okay. Look at the we're turning to the right side of the aisle now. Let's say that you have a politician on the right side of the aisle. What does he run against in the because Trump has obviously taken command tremendous command of the Republican base and the Republican Party. What is there to run against? Well, if there's an economic downturn, do think that they're gonna run against Trump being not capitalist enough, or do they think they're gonna run against Trump being too capitalist, too friendly? Right. Exactly. And that's how you get a populist uprising on the right, and what you end up with is a horseshoe theory politics where both parties are in favor of David Friedberg (01:33:46): Lena Khan. Ben Shapiro (01:33:47): Right. But but both parties are in favor of Lena Khan. And by the way, this is not a rarity. Jason Calacanis (01:33:51): I mean David Friedberg (01:33:51): Man, socialist. I I Ben Shapiro (01:33:52): think I I think that the vice president is is an amazingly brilliant guy. He has also expressed kind of public support for Lena Khan from time to time. Right? And that's inside the Republican Party. And on the left, obviously, there's tremendous support for Lena Khan. So if what we're saying here is one of the things we need is not Lena Khan, we should be very careful not to step on the rake, and and then the thing that hits you in the face is Lena Khan. Jason Calacanis (01:34:11): Right. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:34:11): Right. And that's why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in, socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take. Jason Calacanis (01:34:21): But Well, mean, how do we avoid making the bottom half of society feel included in all this wealth generation, etcetera? What is the plan here? Is it universal healthcare? Is it lowering their taxes? I mean, administration says no taxes for people under 150 ks. We have to give something to the working man and woman of this country, the people who feel that they can't get rich, who can't get to the middle class. Does anybody here have a suggestion for that? Ben Shapiro (01:34:49): I mean, I do. I actually do have a suggestion, and it's it's actually shockingly easy. President Trump has a has a visceral connection to blue collar workers in this country. Yes. Clearly. He has a visceral connection. He should stop preaching that blue collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they're succeeding because it's actually telling Jason Calacanis (01:35:05): the truth. Ben Shapiro (01:35:05): Okay. Yes. Yes. I mean, I think that the the the fib that politicians always make bank on is the idea that, for example, the middle class in America is completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class. Okay? And and, actually, all Americans I I I say this on my show all the time. People have this, again, this sort of rosy eyed view of the nineteen fifties, which, again, was a historical outlier because the rest of the world didn't exist. It had been destroyed. But they also have this bizarre idea that that you were better off to be 30 years old in 1980 than you are to be 30 years old in 2025. And all I can say is in 1980, the only dude with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko, and he was a shoebox, and he was holding it to his head. Okay. The reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025 on a material economic level than it was Yes. In 1980. And the the lie that politicians tell in order to gain power is they say, you're you're getting screwed. Somebody is screwing you. I can unscrew the screwing. And so there's there's this constant sort of race to the bottom in terms of this rhetoric. And what you end up with is, in the end, what can I promise you that that I can then blame somebody else for not having fulfilled the promise? President Trump, I think, could avoid that because of this unique connection that he has with blue collar people, where he could say, listen. We're all on the same side here. Right? What we're doing here is innovation. I thought that the most important line that I heard from president Trump during his his victory speech the night that he won was he when he said to Elon and it was kind of a throwaway line. When he said, we love our geniuses. Right? He said, we love our geniuses. And I thought, yes. That's the thing we need. Jason Calacanis (01:36:27): Celebrate our geniuses. Celebrate success. Ben Shapiro (01:36:29): Celebrate entrepreneurship. And this could be you. And and not only and we're gonna have hiring programs. You know, as Marc Andreessen has talked to, we need to have hiring programs that are that are specifically designed to find the best people, not just abroad, but also in The United States who might be underserved in in rural areas of the country or in blue collar areas of the country. Find the next JD Vans. Find the next guy who really needs, you know, that that hand up. Like, all those things can be done. A rising tide will lift all ships, but this is the problem with the short term pain plan. Americans have a long memory. And when it comes to politics, it I think this happened with the Biden administration. Politic people their relationship with politicians is sort of like a married couple. And and good married couples, you know, they they kinda talk through the the minor problems that they're having in their marriage, and then and then things, you know, continue to maintain and grow and get better. Bad married couples, what happens is that they sort of ignore the the kind of minor annoyances for years at a time, and then something bad happens, and the bottom just goes right out. And the this is the thing that I'm afraid of for the Trump administration. Everybody's willing to ignore the things that are kinda mildly annoying, like penguins at the White House or whatever, up until the point where there's a serious recession. At that point, everybody kind of looks around and goes, why are we even doing this? I think that's exactly what happened with Biden with the Afghanistan withdrawal, for example. Making a misstep is the is the is why I'm being critical of the tariffs. It's not because I want Trump to lose. It's because I want Trump to win. Right? I think he's doing too many important things like the stuff that Antonio is doing. There are too many important things happening to to take to roll the dice on a strategy that isn't even being articulated. If you're going to make the case for a long term gain, I need to know what the long term gain is so I can make the case to the American public as to why they should endure the short term pain. You know you're having surgery because after the surgery, you're gonna feel better. Ben Shapiro (01:38:05): But if I say you're having surgery, there's gonna be some short term pain. You say, okay. How am gonna feel after the surgery? You say, well, I don't know. You know, maybe. Could maybe. Who knows? They might be having the surgery. Jason Calacanis (01:38:15): We have so many job openings. We have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. As you said, consumers today can get and live an incredible lifestyle that the rich didn't have in 1980. The car you can buy today can drive itself for $20.30, 40 ks. You can buy a used Tesla and have this car that's better than any car made in the last fifty years. So keep it positive. Then think about generation tool belt. You've got all these plumbing jobs, electrician jobs, construction jobs that pay massively hourly wages that are available for people today. We have too many job openings today, and and you never hear Trump say that. Your point, it's always this like David Friedberg (01:38:51): True. Jason Calacanis (01:38:52): True. Everything's a disaster, and I'll save you when in fact you don't need saving. Go ahead, Friedberg. David Friedberg (01:38:56): I'll answer to Moff's earlier question about what America can anchor to to attract the rest of the world, and I think it's what's been the American story from the beginning, which is ambition. We pioneered the West. We launched the industrial revolution. We went to space. We landed on the moon. We had the Manhattan Project. We unleashed the information technology revolution with the development of the transistor. The ambition is what's been kind of consumed by China. In the last twenty years, they've built 30,000 miles of high speed rail. In the next fifteen years, they're gonna add more electricity production capacity than The United States times two has today. There's nothing short of ambition coming out of China, and it's what we're lacking. All of our political gambits, all of our debates are all centered around what we're trying to fix that went wrong in the past, what we did wrong, and what we gotta do to make it right. And we don't talk at all about the ambition of where we can lead the world to next. China's the only one that's doing that. And I think that's where we need to kind of have a bit of a important pivot on the global stage if we wanna be able to kind of attract partners and also to have Americans think outside of this week, where are we headed? And I just I I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you guys agree, but I just feel like that's one of the key things that we've kind of lost track of. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:40:25): NERC put out a a study just like this is very tactical, but it's part and parcel of what you and Jason are talking about. Do you guys know that about 25% of all of our utility workers in America became eligible for retirement between 2017 and 2022? Jason Calacanis (01:40:43): I did not. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:40:43): No. So most of the people, fifty six percent of all utility workers now have less than a decade of experience. You know what that's resulted in? In 2021, the average US customer of of an electric utility experienced seven and a half hours of service interruptions, and it's just growing. Jason Calacanis (01:41:01): I think the average plumber's age is 50. We can't get people to become plumbers. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:41:07): NERC says that 19 states now in The United States can face rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions if these issues aren't addressed. And by the way, this is that's a human capital problem. But if you multiply that by ten and twenty and thirty times, there was a different tweet. I don't know, Nick, if you could find it, that talked about an organization trying to find people to help build nuclear submarines. Did you guys see this quote? Where they needed 100,000 people to build nuclear subs in The United States, and they could barely find like a few hundred? Jason Calacanis (01:41:38): Yeah. We need to get better at this stuff. I mean, the good news is we're we're gonna have robots to do this. Ben, you know, if I run for president, I'm one of the few people here on the pod who can. My position is going to be build three new cities with 5,000,000 homes in each because, know, starter homes, families can't buy starter homes. You ever consider running for office? And if you did, what would be your platform? Ben Shapiro (01:42:00): I mean, it would be pretty horrifying to run for office. It seems like a terrible job, and I think the age to run for president is now in your seventies. So I have, like, three decades to consider it. But, you know, if if I were gonna run, I I would be running on the basic idea that in this country, the only thing that you are promised is is the adventure. And and I'm not gonna make you promises that I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna make you promises that I can't keep about how I'm gonna fix your life because the truth is I really can't. All I can do is help get the obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and you can make your life better. And I can help break the institutions that have a stranglehold on on your future. And and there, when you're talking about electricians and plumbers, the truth is that we have set up an enormous con game that is our higher education system, particularly in the liberal arts Ridiculous. Subsidized by the taxpayer when most jobs that that we're talking about right here do not require a college degree. There are so many things that that the Trump administration should be doing and is doing that, again, that are great, that they could break the stranglehold on some of these things that allow for more opportunity. But I think the thing that people really you know, the the thing that I would say that I I really think that maybe no other politician would say, and I can say because I'm not a politician, is your future is re in America, your future is in your hands. It is not in somebody else's hands. It is your responsibility. It is your responsibility to go out and strive. It is your responsibility to go and succeed. We want you to be able to to try again if you fail, but we want you to go and we want you to try. Rugged individualism. And and also and also the, know, the the the kind of case that would that that was being made a little bit earlier about China, that that, basically, China is saying that it can do things. The one of the things that that drives me up a wall is when politicians say, I created x jobs or or we created x jobs. Ben Shapiro (01:43:41): You didn't create a job. Okay? The government does not create jobs. The government can take money from people and then give it to other people, but it is only entrepreneurs who can create jobs. And so the the way that you fight China off is not by the power of a centralized government directing people in a particular direction. The way that you fight off China is by unleashing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and ambition of the American people on an individual level to go out and do all of these unbelievable things. And that that would be the promise that I'd make to the American people. It's all get everybody the hell out of your way so you can succeed. That that would be the only thing I would I'd promise. Jason Calacanis (01:44:11): Guys, we got breaking news here. It turns out the more reciprocal tariffs have dropped. Look at this. Complaining about the docket. J Cal has put a 500% reciprocal tariff on that. Purchasing dogs from a breeder is now a % tariff. Friedberg, that's pretty stiff. And Chamath has put one on Laura Piana slippers. Yeah. Too many people have them. 200% tariff. Oh, looks like Ben Shapiro got in on it. Having Candace Owens on your podcast is now at 200%. Ben, what are you doing here? Ben Shapiro (01:44:45): I'm Unkind, guys. Unkind. Wait. David Friedberg (01:44:47): What's the Jason Calacanis (01:44:48): Palmer lucky one? Can you can you read that one a thousand this is the biggest one that just dropped. % tariff. I'm working with JKOW. Four. Chamath Palihapitiya. Oh, you're the Chamath Palihapitiya (01:45:00): chairman dictator. Wait. I have to do you wanna hear about this? Jason Calacanis (01:45:02): Do a little memory lane? We got so much show here. I'm trying to Ben Shapiro (01:45:04): get this out. But, okay, Jason Calacanis (01:45:05): you by the way, I've created a David Friedberg (01:45:07): a poly market on GDP. Oh. Annualized GDP growth in q three of this year being below five negative 5%. Jason Calacanis (01:45:14): Negative 5%? Yeah. Oh, that's brutal. David Friedberg (01:45:19): Checking out a poly What's the probability of that happening? Make your bets. Jason Calacanis (01:45:23): Oh, make your bets with our partner, Polymarket. Chamath, do you wanna do victory lap? We're gonna wrap here. What do you wanna do? Well, I actually think Chamath Palihapitiya (01:45:31): it's fun because we're gonna kick off a a different polymarket around this because I think it's interesting. So the thing that we haven't talked about is with all of the tariffs, with all of the financing questions, with all of the recession questions, short term rates, long term rates, the one thing that we haven't sufficiently talked about, It's not really in the press, but it needs to be talked about is there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today. And you would say, well, if long term rates go down, there's no real risk. But the tariff picture actually impacts revenues. Right? And the problem with that is that there's a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA. And so this is what I spoke about at the January, which is the one risk that is uncontrollable is what happens to corporate debt, And could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action? Nick, you may want to just play the clip and we can talk about what we can do about this. This is my pick for the best investment idea. Jason Calacanis (01:46:42): All right. Here we go. What do you got, Chima? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:46:44): So let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero. And six out of the remaining eight times, you make 10 extra money. And then the final two times you make anywhere between 100 to 1,000 extra money. This is a loser trade, but I would be long CDS. So what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I'm buying what's called protection that there is no default event in 2025. I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025 so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade loses money. But if it hits, it will be the best performing asset of 2025. And I Jason Calacanis (01:47:44): just want to be clear, this is Chamath Palihapitiya (01:47:45): not something I think will happen. It's not something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you, when you look at the concentration of the S and P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you look at rates spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing. It has hit. Nick, you can show the CDS graph. So this thing for every billion dollars of risk you would have put on, every billion dollars that you put on would have cost you about a million dollars, and that million dollars would have made you about $7,000,000 in about three months. Jason Calacanis (01:48:25): Did you put it on? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:48:26): I'm not gonna comment on my my trades, Jason. Jason Calacanis (01:48:30): Oh, okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:48:31): But we talked we talked about it off air already. Jason Calacanis (01:48:32): But if you did put it on, does that mean you're taking us all to Italy this summer? No. What's happening here? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:48:37): Are you Jason Calacanis (01:48:38): getting a boat for us to record from the haul in yacht? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:48:40): No. But there may be some boats for sale if this trade keeps going this way. Oh. Why is this important? The CDS actually represents the structural risk in The United States private economy, in the corporate economy. And so, Nick, if you just put it back on. So when you see these spreads blowing out, this is actually a very important warning sign. And this is actually a thing that I think Scott understands well. Howard understands well. I think they'll translate this to the president. If I have an opportunity to explain it, I will. But this is a really important market to pay attention to. This is what was the canary in the coal mine for the great financial crisis. This was the stuff that showed us that there was a big default event happening in the mortgage side of the market, but then that spilled over to the broader economy. And so the tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart, and I think it's something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to. Because I think now that this trade is in the money, the question is, I don't think we want this to happen, that one sigma, two sigma event where all of a sudden this trade returns a thousand x is really bad. Jason Calacanis (01:49:52): Well, you know, let's keep our eye on the markets. And, as of the taping here, we're down about 5% across the boards. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:50:01): Ben, you're excellent. Jason Calacanis (01:50:02): You should come back. Yeah. Well done, Ben. Fit David Friedberg (01:50:04): right We're in Florida, are you? We're doing an event in Miami at Jason Calacanis (01:50:08): the end of the fun. Okay. You're around? Ben Shapiro (01:50:09): Yeah. You should be yeah. That'd be fun. Let's do it. David Friedberg (01:50:11): You wanna come to Miami and hang out? We've got, like, Jason Calacanis (01:50:27): trip club is sponsoring all in this trip, but we'll figure it out. David Friedberg (01:50:30): Was awesome, Ben. Thanks for doing that. Ben Shapiro (01:50:32): Thanks, guys. That was a blast. Jason Calacanis (01:50:34): Wait. J Cal, take us out. Take us out. This is my favorite with Ben. Ben's like, and you know, there are security issues in Ukraine, and you have security issues as well. That's why you should use LiveWear. Man, you are the master of the fucking Segway. I have never I thought I was good. Ben Shapiro was like, and of course we have the tariffs and that's going down. But you know what won't go down? If you buy gold, buy your gold bullion at goldbullion.org. You are fucking great at this. Is it true? A hundred million in revenue for Daily Wire. Is that true? Ben Shapiro (01:51:04): Nine figures? Actually, last year was $2.02 20. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:51:08): Oh my god. Jason Calacanis (01:51:09): $2.20. And then what's going on? I saw some headline. You're going bankrupt. How are you going bankrupt with 220? Ben Shapiro (01:51:13): We're not going bankrupt. Jason Calacanis (01:51:14): Yeah. They're not going bankrupt. Restructuring going Chamath Palihapitiya (01:51:16): Actually, Ben, now that you saw what's happening with Newsmax, I mean, any thoughts to maybe brazing say capital? Ben Shapiro (01:51:22): Yeah. I mean, it has it has let's just put it has crossed our minds. Yes. For sure. Jason Calacanis (01:51:28): You're making 50 times the revenue of, Truth Social. Congratulations. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:51:33): But, actually, Ben, what do you think when you see the this newsmax thing trade like this? I mean, it's incredible. Yeah. Mean What is it saying, you think? Ben Shapiro (01:51:40): I mean, I I think it's saying a couple of things. I mean, one one, it's saying, obviously, look. I I think the PE ratios on on the newsmax trade are are, you know, ridiculous in the in the sense that it's gonna revert back to something closer to normalcy. I think that the the it was supposed to trade at $10, and it came out at 14. It spoke to, like, 240, so it's more like GameStop than anything else. There's a lot of retail traders who are fans of Newsmax who bought the stock, and then it it leapt. And I think it was today back down in the forties, something like that. It'll end up being you know, total market cap will probably be somewhere when it when it lands in, like, the 2 to 3 bill range, somewhere 3 to 4 bill. Mhmm. Something like that. I I think what it says is that, you know, the the stock market in in the short term is a voting machine, and in the long term, it is a weighing machine. Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, when when you when you look at at stocks that have name brand recognition, then you're gonna get a lot of voting in the early going. And then it's a question of whether you can David Friedberg (01:52:30): keep that Ben Shapiro (01:52:30): up so it turns into Wang. Jason Calacanis (01:52:31): Right. Fair enough. 39,000,000 in quarterly revenue. So they're at a hundred 50, hundred 60 million dollars a year, and their valuation right now, I don't have the market cap here, but what did it peak out at? 3 or 4,000,000,000 or something? Ben Shapiro (01:52:45): Oh, no. When it when it peaked, it peaked above 20, Bill. Yeah. Market cap. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:52:49): Yes. Went to 20 hundred and $70 or $200. Ben Shapiro (01:52:51): 2 hundred and 40 bucks. 2 hundred and 40 bucks yesterday. Yeah. Or two two days ago. It's just, know, getting stuck. Jason Calacanis (01:52:56): It's something weird going on there. Okay. Alright. Well, the All In and Daily Wire merger and IPO coming soon. The ticker symbol is All In Wire. All in Daily In Wire. The merger is complete, and we'll see you all next time. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:53:14): Love you, Jason Calacanis (01:53:15): folks. All in podcast. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:53:16): Love you, guys. David Friedberg (01:53:16): Welcome. Thanks, guys. Jason Calacanis (01:53:18): We'll let your winners Chamath Palihapitiya (01:53:49): We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.