TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @theallinpod
reSee.it AI Summary
David Friedberg argues Michael Burry’s data-center depreciation view is wrong, claiming hyperscalers extended asset lives (3→4 years; 3→5 for networking; 5→6 in 2023) to inflate earnings. He says AI shifted spending to processors, with 7–8 year TPUs/GPUs still at full use, justifying longer depreciation. Dakota Sidwell replies with a hostile take, expressing hope for a market collapse and harm to those involved.
@theallinpod - The All-In Podcast
David Friedberg: Michael Burry’s Datacenter Math is Wrong “I actually think Michael Burberry's got this wrong.” “What Michael Burry is saying is that all of these hyperscalers have extended their depreciation schedule or the useful life of their data centers by roughly 2x, which cuts the operating costs in half when they report it in earnings. And so it's making their earnings inflate.” “So he's claiming they're cooking the books. Google first made this change in Q1 of 2021, where they said the servers are now going from 3 to 4 years. Separately in 2021, Google took networking equipment from 3 to 5 years. And then in 2023, they took it from 5 to 6 years.” “And so this is a result of this effort where they went in and did an analysis. So what happened?” “What happened in the data centers is that the data centers transitioned from being primarily data storage and data transfer systems, where you would use hard drives and RAM and memory to store data and then transmit it back out, to being data processing centers because of the AI boom.” “So as AI became more important in the data center, more of the dollars that are going into data centers were allocated towards chips from data storage, which initially was hard drives.” “And then suddenly, when you put these processors in to process the data to do AI, the majority of the spend and the majority of the energy is going towards the processors.” “I made some calls and I checked around with some other friends, and everyone says the same thing: that these 7-8 year old TPUs and GPUs that are sitting in the data centers are still being used and they're being used at 100% utilization.” “So that actually justifies and validates the depreciation schedule being much longer versus shorter.”
@DakotaSidwell - D.Sauce (TIE)
@theallinpod I’ve never been more excited to watch a bubble pop than I am watching this grotesque circular money laundering machine collapse with such force that it claims souls on the way down. Everyone involved deserves to be financially harmed.
reSee.it AI Summary
e214 is live, and I'm excited to have Antonio Gracias join us! We dive into a breakdown of DOGE versus USAID and discuss crypto and AI frameworks with David Sacks. We touch on the shrinking base of the Democratic Party and explore the U.S. sovereign wealth fund, along with some breaking news on DOGE and taxes. Google’s plan to invest $75 billion in AI by 2025 is also on the agenda, highlighting the future of work in the age of AI. Finally, we wrap up with a science corner featuring a GLP-1 macro study.
@theallinpod - The All-In Podcast
e214 is LIVE! 🚨 the besties are joined by @AntonioGracias!! -- @DOGE vs USAID breakdown -- crypto/ai frameworks w/ @DavidSacks -- us sovereign wealth fund -- google projects $75b ai spend in 2025 -- science corner ++ more (0:00) the besties intro antonio gracias! (3:11) doge takes on usaid (31:44) sacks breaks in to talk usaid (34:00) sacks explains what he's working on: crypto/ai frameworks (46:41) the democratic party's shrinking base (52:33) us sovereign wealth fund + breaking doge/tax news (1:09:07) @google to spend $75b on ai buildout in 2025, future of work in the age of ai (1:23:21) science corner: glp-1 macro study
Video Transcript AI Summary
Get good sleep, exercise, maintain a healthy diet, and practice meditation. Use apps like Calm for meditation, Eight Sleep for better sleep, Fitbod for workouts, and NutriSense for diet tracking.
The All In podcast has grown significantly, discussing topics like USAID's budget and spending, which includes funding for various international projects. The conversation highlights the need for accountability in government spending and the potential for significant productivity gains through AI and other innovations.
The discussion also touches on the impact of job displacement due to automation, emphasizing that while some jobs may be lost, new opportunities will arise, fostering creativity and economic growth.
In summary, the focus is on improving personal health and addressing government inefficiencies while navigating the challenges and opportunities presented by technological advancements.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: I have four pieces of advice for people. Number one, get good sleep. Number two, exercise. Number three, diet. Number four, meditation.
And if you wanna do that, it's very simple. You get the calm meditation app, you get the eight sleep sleep, you get the fit bod for fitness,
Speaker 1: and then you get NutriSense for a year. What a grifter.
Speaker 2: He's just talking about his investments.
Speaker 1: Those are the four things you're focused on, puppy. The four essentials.
Speaker 0: You get a good Athena system.
Speaker 1: All of this is brought to
Speaker 0: you by my NGO, which is all in NGO. USAID gave us 18,000,000 last year. Guys, I forgot
Speaker 1: to tell you about it.
Speaker 0: But don't worry. It's in an offshore account for all
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 0: When we get back to Ethiopia and Vietnam, we have an all in castle built there. Okay?
Speaker 1: You let your winner ride. Rain man David Sacks. And instead, we open sourced it to the fans, and they've discovered reason for
Speaker 0: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the All In podcast. The number one, MAGA, finance, business, and personal optimization health. Yes. We are now larger in the health space than Huberman, Tim Ferris and, Peter Attia combined.
Yes. We've really started to grow the pod. And, if you want to, you can subscribe to the podcast on x.com, YouTube, Spotify and all those other places. Especially, if you want to have an incredibly positive world, enlightening conversation with Ray Dalio, you can tune in to Friedberg and Ray Dalio on the channel. Great conversation.
It's gotten three or 400,000 views already on YouTube. How's the feedback been, Dave? That's so much great feedback on you. Ray Dalio, is it the end of the empire or were we coming back?
Speaker 2: What's awesome is a lot of the recommendations he shared is becoming policy, it seems, for the Trump administration. Elon and Besant and others in the administration have echoed trying to get government deficit below 3% of GDP. That seems to be the economic magical number, and if you can do that, rates drop. I think that's resonated. It was great to have him publish that a couple weeks ago, talk with us about it.
It's great.
Speaker 0: Great bonus content from the team at All In. Today, we're super excited to have our friend Antonio Gracias joining the show. Antonio is the CEO of Valor Equity Partners and he's made some,
Speaker 1: yeah, he's
Speaker 0: made some solid investments. He was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, Athena, tons of great or he's a second investor in Athena after me. Welcome to the program, Antonio. You put slightly more in.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Jason. I was also with you too, by the way.
Speaker 0: Yes. Yes. You did the c you did the series a, I believe, or the b. What did you do?
Speaker 3: We were in the b.
Speaker 0: You were in
Speaker 1: the b.
Speaker 3: Great. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 0: Yes. You were in the Shervin round. Okay. Well, welcome to the program, Antonio Gracias. And, we've got a full docket today and we might even have a special caller from the White House today.
No promises, but you never know. We are seventeen days into the Trump two point o presidency and it seems like the main character, gentlemen, is Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. And, they seem to have found a little known agency, USAID. Let's unpack it and talk about USAID and Doge maybe in three acts. The first one, let me just, educate the audience on what USAID is and then get y'all's general reaction to it.
Most Americans probably haven't heard of USAID. It stands for the United States Agency for International Development. It's established by JFK by an executive order back in 1961. Wall Street Journal summed up its purpose as, quote, make friends and influence countries in the American interest. According to the US gov website, the purpose of USAID is to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster.
You got a budget of about $45,000,000,000 a year under Biden and, that's about hundred $50 per American per year. They have at least 10,000 employees or did. And as of 2023, they had programs in a 30 countries. Obviously, there's a 95 countries in the world. And, the budget doubled under Biden from '26 to '45.
The budget was between 15 and 20,000,000,000 during Trump's first term. But the White House and, I guess, Elon and the Doge team found out about this USAID, went in there and found all kinds of interesting spend, 2 and a half million dollars to fund EV charging stations in Vietnam. Two Million for sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala. One Point Five Million to a Serbian LGBTQ group. 70 k for a DEI musical, 47 k for a transgender opera in Colombia.
The DEI musical, by the way, is in Ireland. So if you get if you're if you make it to Galloway, you can see that DEI musical. This went on and on, and it has become quite a story. Antonio, you're our guest here this week. You and I and Sax and Elon spent a little time at Twitter during the takeover where I think a lot of these techniques were first put into action.
Your thoughts on what's happening with Doge?
Speaker 3: I mean, look, Jason, first, I wanna thank you guys for having me. It's great to see everyone.
Speaker 2: You can see the musical.
Speaker 3: I'd like to see musical.
Speaker 1: No. I booked it. We're all going to the We're going to the What is it called?
Speaker 2: Is there actually a name
Speaker 1: of the The Musical. Yeah. It's d e I comma the musical.
Speaker 3: Oh, man.
Speaker 0: It's it's a heartwarming story.
Speaker 4: I apologize. I apologize. Job. Yeah. Sorry, guys.
Speaker 0: I am not qualified for I apologize.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I I think the I think the Doge, story maybe starts with the Twitter takeover. Yeah. Right. So Twitter was spewing the woke mind virus in the world, which is why Elon did to begin with.
And, you know, when we got there, as you know, it was, basically breaking even. And there's there was gonna be 12 and a half ish billion dollars of debt of the company. So a billion and a half dollars in interest cost that there was no money to pay, which led to the turnaround, I think, which was the biggest turnaround, like, of all time. It literally biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history. Second biggest tech deal ever done.
80% of the people gone. That doesn't include all the contractors that were there. And, you know, the company is now servicing its debt, and they just priced yesterday their one of their bank deals at 97¢. So this is a huge win. Means the company is doing extremely well.
The other people bought the bank debt, and then then the bank that traded up to a little over 98. So 98 and 5 eights, you know, a a giant business success or rousing business success. And, Jason, you were there for part of it. You saw it. It was a disaster.
This place was you know, it was tampons in the bathrooms and every woken you could possibly imagine. And no one in the office, that the it was so bad that the pens had gone dry in the conference rooms, which is it is incredible. And I think that, you know, that's how
Speaker 4: the So you mean the pens had gone dry because they were never being used or because they were being used so much?
Speaker 3: They were never being used.
Speaker 0: Yeah. We got there on the yeah. The Halloween weekend that we started whiteboarding and, you know,
Speaker 3: The wet no. There is no work.
Speaker 0: Next time, no ink.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, everything, it was it's incredible. And, but but, flowers were impeccable, food being made fresh every day for thousands of people and thrown away, three times a day, tossed in the garbage. We didn't give it to the homeless. It was just it was shockingly bad.
Bierock has she gone mad. Bad and sin is people don't care. So it was both I think this turned into two things. One was just stop the wolf buying virus. You know, the interesting thing is, the the they do extra brand safety checks there now, and they have 99% rating in brand safety, now.
Right? So stop the wolf mine virus going in the world, number one. Number two, fix the company. And both have happened. It's been a couple of years now.
Right? Three years now, and both have happened. Not even three years, two and a half years, really, and both have happened. And I think you take that that that was sort of a warm up act for what's going on at Doge, which is either the president of The United States, president Trump wants to make him very great again. And that I think begins with making the government great, and you gotta fix it.
It's the turnaround. This is the biggest turnaround of all time, and president Trump has the, courage to do it. And he's got a great ally in Elon to make it happen in Doge. And so the numbers are pretty easy. Right?
We're spending, 6 and a half trillion. We bring in 4 and a half trillion. We gotta find $2,000,000,000,000 somewhere. Interest costs a trillion dollars a year. The bond markets were going up the the bond bond was going up a lot because people didn't believe that you couldn't stop spending, creating inflation.
You see those trading down now as DOGE is starting to take effect. We'll see it's real. The stuff you're talking about, is sort it's sort of extraordinary what's happening in the you know, I Elon said this public right, fraud, waste, and abuse. It means kinda 10% of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. So
Speaker 3: you're talking about, you know, $6,600,000,000,000, a trillion waste. I think that's probably about right. That alone fixes the problem. But what's really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me when I when we first started thinking about this, look, and I'm not there full time. You know, I'm, in and out a little bit and and trying to help where I can, but I'm not there full time.
When I thought when this started, I thought we had a democracy that had turned into a bureaucracy. K? What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy. I mean, a Latin American style kleptocracy. Okay.
The stuff you're talking about, that is pure fraud. And you're making you're making some jokes out of it, the DI musical. But if you go into the data that's coming out of USAID, what you find is, you know, there's a lot of political contributions going on. There, Politico itself being funded by USAID. I mean, that is pure corruption.
That's like a Latin American style, autocracy, and we cannot let it go there. I mean, I think we've I think this happened just in the nick of time, and I'm super grateful to all the people there. There's, you know, 80 plus people there, all patriots gone full time.
Speaker 0: Okay. So Chamath, you've been watching this. You hear from Antonio. What's your general take on what we saw in the first, I don't know, twenty days of DOGE? Or no, fifteen days.
Sorry. It's fifteen days of Doge.
Speaker 4: So let me try to give you a little bit of historical context because I think that that's important. I think whenever I hear so many people breathlessly saying some version of WTF, as if this is totally new, it's not new. And I'll give you two examples, but one that I really wanna double click on. The two examples I'll give you is that in 1941, the Truman Committee was formed because there was a fear that the spending by the Defense Department was completely out of whack. And over the next six or seven years, and this is really what gave Truman the credibility to then become Roosevelt's vice president, was they found incredible levels of waste, fraud, and abuse during the war, before the war effort and then after Pearl Harbor during the war process.
Over seven years, that committee, and this is in $19.41 dollars, they were tasked and budgeted with only 20 or $30,000. Okay? Over the next six years, they spent less than a million. Inflation adjusted to 2023, this is where I found the data, was about 6,500,000.0 they spent. You know how much they saved?
It's estimated they saved somewhere between 10 to $15,000,000,000 in 1941. That's a quarter of a trillion $20.23 dollars The second example is we did this under President Clinton, and that was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. So the first thing that I think it's important to acknowledge is this is not new. We've done Doge twice before. Both have been successful.
The Harry Truman one was incredibly important because it really set guardrails for how this can be done. Everything in that committee, it was a senate committee, was unanimous, so it was Republicans and Democrats that found waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere. They saved an enormous amount of money. The second, which is interesting, is these last two versions of Doge were driven and led by Democrats, the same people today who are basically saying, hey. Hold on a second.
We have congressional committees or we have inspector generals. And they lack the awareness to know that their own party was the driving force for this two times before. And I think it's important to just acknowledge that those methods are not good anymore. Right? Because I think what we're finding early days is the rot is super pervasive.
There's no accountability. And so I think you need people to look at it with fresh eyes. And what is Doge at the end of the day? What they are are read only auditors of the truth, and the press secretary in the White House made this very clear. It's incredible the power that read only access gives you.
All it allows you to do is just take the data and present the data. They can't manipulate it. And what they're able to do is publish all of this stuff in real time, and that's why this is so important. Because if it went into a congressional committee, to be honest with you, it would sit there and stew for six, seven, eight, nine months. You would maybe get small little tidbits of it, but now instead you're just getting the full thrust of it.
And what is the biggest thing that I find concerning? I think it's what Antonio said, which is that the media who are supposed to be this intermediary layer that's totally objective between the government and the people were not independent at all, but had all kinds of hidden incentives, dollars 8,000,000 to political, several million dollars to the BBC. I think it's important to ask what's going on. And by the way, that also has historical context. This is exactly what happened in the sixties and seventies where it turned out that record companies were paying DJs to pay songs.
There was a huge set of lawsuits and trial cases, and the result was a change in the law. Right? And we call that payola now, which is you cannot take this money without disclosing it. And so had this money been absorbed by these entities and actually disclosed, maybe we'd be okay. But Nick, I sent you a link.
Maybe you can throw it on the screen for these guys. This is a very simple manifestation of this cycle. We talked about this guys, and we didn't realize how connected it all was. But we were asking ourselves during the election cycle last year, why are all these articles buried? Why aren't we really getting the truth?
And it turns out that the people who were responsible for telling the truth, somewhere along the chain were cajoled or just told not to tell the truth, influenced by all of this back channel money that was going back and forth from the government to these folks.
Speaker 0: Okay. Yeah. Let me just give some numbers to, what you were referencing there. The USAID organization has been giving money, as have other agencies to journals, databases, and subscriptions. There's probably some amount of that that makes sense.
However, when we look at this, during Trump won, spend on Politico was averaging around 1,300,000.0 a year, but it suddenly ballooned up to 8,000,000 a year under Biden, and you can see the quarterly payments here on this chart. So there's some normal amount to spend on publications or for a library at an organization. And so what we're looking here is all federal agencies. And suddenly during Biden, there is a very suspicious ramp up in spend to Politico. All of this is breaking.
A lot of this hasn't been verified yet. So we'll we'll put that caveat on it. And then there is a number of 34,000,000 that's been floating around. That's all years back to 02/2008, not just twenty twenty four less people have that number juxtaposed or or or, misattributed. When political was acquired back in 2021, they were doing about 200,000,000 in revenue.
So this would be about 4% of their revenue. It's pretty significant. The BBC also received 2,700,000.0 in funding from USAID in 2023. That was 8% of their annual income. That's a little suspicious.
Thomson Reuters, which is the consulting arm of Reuters, they received a hundred and $20,000,000 from the federal government since 2011. That's gotta be looked at and double clicked on. And, half of that came during the Biden administration. New York Times hasn't actually received all that much. 370 k from the federal government last year.
Under Biden, it went from a hundred k a year to, like, 300. So the the New York Times data has been cleaned up a little bit. All of this is to say there's spending going on with the press that certainly doesn't look good and should be verified and challenged, obviously, and we are in a breaking news environment. So we'll see how that information shakes out over time, which is one of the great things I think about Doge is they're getting this information out there and citizen journalists are, looking at public databases, Friedberg. And, we're having a conversation about this, a conversation two years ago, Friedberg, when you kept harping on every episode about our debt and, you know, about the interest payments two or three years ago, you were way ahead of the curve.
And now here we are. We didn't think anybody would ever take this cause up. And now it is the cause of the moment. What are your thoughts on the first two weeks of Doge Friedberg?
Speaker 2: Magnificent.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Magnificent. I mean, what else is there to say?
Speaker 0: Eggplant emoji.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is the eggplant emoji. It's what we needed. If you zoom out on what Doge is doing, I think the best way to describe it is zero based budgeting. And in organizations that go through zero based budgeting, you do a cycle typically annually where you take all of your OPEX, all of your expenses in running a company or running an organization down to the studs.
You take it down to zero, and you rebuild it up and you say, what are we trying to achieve this year from first principles based on that set of objectives, those goals, what do we need to do? What's the minimal expense we need to run? You don't start with last year's numbers and say, what else do we need to do and start to add on top of that. You really do a hard level, high degree of scrutiny on every dollar moving out. And that's what DOGE is effectively doing.
They're doing a zero based budgeting on the federal government. They're looking at every line item, and they're asking the fundamental question, which I don't think we talk about in the public discourse enough, which is what is the essential role of government. And there is a great debate to be had around that point. Should government be providing humanitarian aid in international markets? That's a good debate to be had.
Should the government be providing security to nations that can't provide security for themselves? Does the US government have a role in that? Should the government be providing loans for people to go to universities? Should the government be providing loans for people to buy homes that are overpriced? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And as we start to ask the questions of how we're spending money, I think it ends up leading to the most important questions, which is what is the essential role of government, which I think is the debate that needs to be had in order for the democracy to last. So I'm very happy to see the effort of Doge, and I think that it's the beginning of what I hope will be kind of a long term process of asking the fundamental questions about essential government.
Speaker 0: And Antonio, zero based budgeting was the first thing you sort of introduced when the Twitter takeover happened. Just what do we need in terms of design? What does the sales team need to hit these sales numbers? How many servers do we need? And my Lord, the waste, fraud and abuse at that company was shocking.
They had buildings that were a hundred dollars a square foot, if I remember correctly, that were used for storage of the furniture from the previous building that had been upgraded and were storing them in class A office space. You reference the commissary, 20 people were having lunch a day, but they had never ratcheted down the amount of food they were making. So each meal was about $800 on average when you when you did the math for those 20 meals just in the San Francisco office. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the the shock and awe campaign, of just freezing spending and then seeing, hey, what actually is necessary to accomplish this task worked out at at Twitter and then how you see that being executed, you know, inside of our government.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Thanks, Jason. It was pretty extraordinary actually. The, you know, the Twitter experience, the first thing you do in a turn like that is try and get the checkbook and just turn payments off and then see what happens because they're lost for it shouldn't be getting paid. And sometimes they complain, and sometimes you find the people that complain them loudest are the ones who are committing the worst fraud.
They're the worst fraudsters in the whole in the whole game. Right? The worst scripters, the ones who are saying they're they're they're crying, the the most amount of foul. And the problem, at least in Twitter, there were financial statements. Like, we could actually there was an audit financial statement and they were basically, you know, they were in some ways correct.
I would say, there was some issues with the with the, user growth and dollars etcetera, and the incentive plans, but the actual, like, you know, the cash flow numbers were pretty much correct. Here, the problem is much, much deeper. And it makes the zero debt based budgeting question much harder, which is the way the government works, a department just basically asked for money from treasury, and they send it out. We all run businesses. There's a reconciliation process.
You you have a contract. Yeah. You issue a PO against it. Something comes in. You check that it came in.
Services is rendered, and then you issue a payable. And then, you know, some a month later, you pay it. Right? That doesn't happen at the US government. There is that that process is broken.
It used to happen. It's broken now. And so literally, money's flowing out. I used to ask myself this question, why are the numbers always revised? Why are they always wrong?
How can the government know how much money it's paying? Just hit the button in the computer and figure it out. Problem is that button doesn't exist. You know, we spent time early on. I was, at Mar A Lago, Illinois trying to track through, like, how does the money actually flow?
We no one could tell us how it actually flows. Where is it going out? People didn't know. And Right. It's totally crazy.
And it's the reason that But it
Speaker 2: all go through treasury, Antonio? Or, like, ex can you just explain that to us?
Speaker 3: Well, so I will try to explain it to you. I'm not sure I have full command of it. I'm not sure anyone does quite yet. It goes to treasury ultimately, but it was supposed to flow through the way it was supposed to work in the it was changed in the '70 in the seventies, in 1973. The Nixon administration at in '71, let me go back.
They came off the gold standard, which allowed deficits. In '73, at the nadir of the Nixon presidency, Congress took away from the presidency the executive power, this thing called apportionments, which is the power of the executive to stop spending. So Nixon was abusing it by stop and see he didn't want, and so Congress took away from him. What that means today is the executive, as he reaches in, it's very hard to just stop payments. So what's happening is the the government is is is put in a process where they would just have an authorized executive kind of stamp up bill that got paid That broke.
And I don't know when it broke, but it broke some time. So the money flow now department gets a budget authorized to it, by Congress. It goes to OMB. OMB allocates the budget. That department then just sends a money request to treasury to pay.
It is not reconciled against what happened. This is one of the reasons.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's it. There's no there's no there's no controller. There's no controller function like there is in a normal company.
Speaker 3: 100%. There is no control. There is no controller. There's no reconciliation. The reason they can't pass audits.
Okay? They're the the reason this happens is because you can't audit something you haven't reconciled. You know, the only audit, that I've seen is actually from the Social Security Administration. And when you read it, I've got one of my partners who have read the thing. It has it's just riddled with material weaknesses that are probably awesome.
Speaker 2: Individuals that have made, like, millions or billions of dollars from missed payments overseas? Like, is this kind of what's gone on in the missing money in Ukraine, do you think? Like, it's kind of found its way to the wrong places?
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, so what I would I don't know what happened in Ukraine. I don't today.
Speaker 2: Crazy story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have ex business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid and Medicaid Medicare's payments. I wanted to make that better. Right? We we use this to make the world better.
And we just stopped because we found we found so much fraud. I mean, I'm I'm certain that we literally have a rule here. Government payor in in those areas, if it's more than, like, a third of the business, we don't do it. And in the services space. This is, this is why we just sound, we found continuous fraud in the companies we're looking at investing in.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Just threading these things together. You know, you, the really interesting thing with the Twitter pausing of payments was, you know, at some point we were in a meeting, you know, at 1AM on a Saturday and it was like, Hey, let's turn the credit cards off to see what bounces and, you know, and what happens. And then of course, we start getting calls. And people started routing, obviously, because they knew Saks was there.
You were there. I was there. Hey. You know, a company who I shared an investor with or, you know, in another company said, hey, you know, we're not getting paid for this. And it was like some SaaS software that nobody was using, etcetera.
So you start figuring out to your point, okay, is this software even being used? There were so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up. So it was just being paid as pure graph. Now you said, Antonio, correctly, the people who come first, like, they're probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift because, hey, you know, I I figured out how to grift this money. How USAID got to the top of the Doge list, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of this story.
So if you remember, on January 21, Trump decided he would do a bunch of executive orders. Right? And one of them was to pause foreign aid for ninety days. Okay. This seems reasonable.
We gotta take care of our country. That was part of his mandate for becoming the forty seventh president of The United States. So couple of days later, the White House said, hey, this USAID leadership is trying to circumvent the executive order. They're in other words, they're just gonna keep paying people even though the executive order came out. That alerted the Doge team.
So Elon confirmed this on x. He said, quote, all DOSE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the president's executive orders the most. Turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus. And according to NBC, security officials at USAID tried to prevent Doge from even getting into the building or accessing the systems. To your point, Antonio, the person probably who's got the most to hide is the one who's going to fight the most.
Over the weekend, Doge gained access to USAID, and then people started tweeting out all of this, you know, crazy spend and things that any American who looks at it and says, wait a second. If we haven't fixed the goddamn water in Flint, Michigan, why are we sending money to Galway or in Ireland to do a DEI musical? This makes no sense. And that's, I think, the key piece of this, Antonio, is can you win the hearts and minds of Americans? Because some of this stuff, I don't know if it's legal or it's not legal or it's against protocol or it is protocol.
We're gonna find out. There's been tons of of of legal, cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID.
Speaker 4: Jay Cal, let me ask you a question. Where Sure. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad?
Speaker 0: Great, great question. You know, I've always felt that, the West should act in unison and if The United States is the greatest economy or the strongest, we should lead. There is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote this at the UN, and everybody tries to hit those notes. I think it's great that we try to reduce suffering in the world, but I think we should be doing it not unilaterally and not to try to manipulate governments.
And that's the piece of this that USAID is obviously a grift where people are trying to steal money for their pet projects. And I don't think they're acting in unison and above board to look and say, okay. Where's the most suffering in the world? How can we help that? You know, that that to me seems like a noble thing to do.
And if The United States has the budget to help fight AIDS in Africa or, you know, poverty
Speaker 2: Do you know there's a
Speaker 4: chance that some of these human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money?
Speaker 0: Well, I do think that he you know, I I I did this tweet recently, so yes is the answer. If you look at Amnesty International, Amnesty International where I worked was one of my first jobs. They were work working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etcetera. And then somewhere along the line, you know, the Amnesty International was tweeting about trans rights and that's the big focus. This is a very small amount of, you know, people on the planet.
And I don't think that those human rights violations in any way relate to the tragedy we're seeing of people being murdered, tortured, raped, and caned and and beheaded in certain places in the world. So there there is a way to look at suffering and say, we should handle this first. And, yes, somebody who, you know, feels they got misgendered, maybe that's way down the priority list compared to systematic rape of women in these, you know, war zones. Those will be the high order bits. And so this thing has gotten the other fascinating thing I think about USAID, which I'd like to get your thoughts on too, Chamath, is at what point did this switch from being the the left saying we should not intervene.
Right? The left's position always in the eighties, nineties when we were growing up was we shouldn't be doing these operatives in other countries. We should let democracy flow. Flow. Let these countries figure it out for themselves.
We shouldn't be doing empire building. We shouldn't be doing imperialism. And then all of a sudden, now it's just such a grift that I think everybody's got their hands in the pie. Lindsey Graham's on some nonprofit that gets money from this. I don't know if that's above board or not.
Everybody, a lot of people who are formally in government seem to be part of this NGO train. So the whole thing's just turned out to be a grift, and it's a bipartisan grift, obviously.
Speaker 4: I think the biggest creating. I think the biggest thing that we will have to confront is that many of the things that we thought were issues or problems may have actually been somewhat embellished because of this money cycle. Sure. And I think that that's gonna cause a lot of people to feel really they'll probably feel really foolish about some of the decisions they made. All the attempts at cancellation are gonna look really dumb in hindsight.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Alright.
Speaker 3: My suggestion to our friend David Sachs here who's coming online. Okay.
Speaker 0: Here he is. David. Getting good.
Speaker 3: And and the one thing I I wanna, point out, this goes way back. I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried to explain to me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy, and they were well, your question about, well, why did Democrats change? Why do Republicans change, etcetera? The neoclass took over form policy on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist muster stance, which is bad for America. I think, Jason, that answered your question as to why the Democrats shifted.
Speaker 0: Alright. With us is David Sachs. How are you doing, brother? Are are you literally in the White House?
Speaker 5: I'm in the, EOB.
Speaker 0: Ah, okay.
Speaker 5: There's, like, a podcast studio actually in the EOB.
Speaker 0: Oh, fantastic. And you're wearing a suit every day. Yeah.
Speaker 5: No. You're right. I have to wear a suit and tie every day. I was just listening on your your conversation about Doge. Jacob, I'm surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USA.
I mean, everybody's on the take except you. What's going on?
Speaker 2: If I had known,
Speaker 1: I would've started an NGO.
Speaker 4: Where's my NGO? You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grit. You had the virtue signaling.
Speaker 0: You had it
Speaker 4: all except the actual money.
Speaker 5: Let me uplevel this for a second. Okay? So we knew the US government runs a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit every year. We're in debt almost $40,000,000,000,000. And we also knew that anytime anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder.
Okay? So the question is just why. Well, now we know. The money is all going to them. It's like round tripping to them.
New York Times
Speaker 1: Crazy.
Speaker 5: Getting paid. Politico, getting paid. Bill Kristol, perennial warmonger, getting paid. Ukraine, getting paid. Like, 11 out of 12 publications, Ukraine, getting paid.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 5: Viktor Orban, who's the prime minister of Hungary, was saying that he's very popular in Hungary. His political opposition, funded by USAID. In Poland, the left wing political opposition funded by USAID, and on and on and on it goes.
Speaker 2: BBC. BBC. You wonder why everyone in The UK is so yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Like, every
Speaker 2: believe that BBC is getting paid.
Speaker 5: Every left wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund at USAID, which disperses about 50,000,000,000 a year. That's a billion dollars a week. That's actually a lot of money. And so it it just it makes you wonder, you know, the left in general tries to portray itself as a movement of the people, that it's grassroots. This is the exact opposite.
This is astroturf. This is basically money coming from the top down out of Washington to fund all of these groups, maybe not even in The United States, like all over the world. So it makes you wonder what is the real level of local support for these left wing policies all over the world.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework finally. I I caught some of it. Maybe you could just tell us, you know, from the bottom up, what is the mandate from the president and what is your advice to him on how to make crypto move out of the shadows offshore ICOs craziness to legitimacy?
What's the plan here to legitimize and regulate crypto?
Speaker 5: Well, the plan was really spelled out by president Trump in his week one EO on crypto, and it's all spelled out in there. The principles of the administration on crypto, the president said he wants to support the responsible use and growth of digital assets and blockchains across every sector of the economy. So the principles are all there. And yesterday, I was invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with the chairman of the important committees that will be that basically govern crypto. And so we had a press conference there to announce the legislative plan.
You can see there, there's chairman Tim Scott, who's the chair of the senate banking committee. To my left and then to my right is French Hill, who's the chairman of the house financial services committee. And then to his right is John Bozeman, who's the chair of the senate agriculture committee. And then to the left of Tim Scott is, GT Thompson who's the chair of the House Agriculture Committee. He's out of frame right now.
But those are the four committees that govern crypto and you may ask why is the Agriculture Committee involved in crypto and the reason is because the ag committee supervises the CFTC the commodities futures trading commission because commodities all came out of agriculture. So it's interesting you need four committees across the house and senate to get legislation done on crypto. It's not just house and senate. It's actually two committees in each of the house and senate. And so this is the first time where we've had four chairmen of the four key committees all come together and say that they're ready to support crypto legislation.
There are a lot of people on x who felt like this wasn't, you know, a mind blowing announcement. They wanted something that they could trade on right away. That's not what this was. This was basically a statement of commitment from the chairs, the four committees that we're gonna get legislation done this year, maybe in the next six months. I mean, that's really the goal, and we've never had that before.
So that is pretty monumental.
Speaker 2: I used to work in this because when I first launched Climate Corps back in the day, we actually were selling commodity contracts online. So we we set ourselves up as an exempt commodity trading platform. And I so I I remember all this old legislation. There was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, if I remember, when they deregulated the energy markets. But one of the features of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was that they created this concept of an exempt commodity contract, which was where you're not delivering a physical good.
And that's basically what weather derivatives were and energy derivatives and other kind of indices were created that didn't have a tangible physical supply, and it was still kind of shoveled in the, in the commodities world. That's why the legacy of all this stuff kinda sitting with agriculture. Is that the way this is likely gonna move forward? Is it's gonna look like a new extension of exempt commodities and kind of treat it like that versus being securities?
Speaker 5: The question you're describing is called market structure. You know? What are the definitions gonna be? Because digital assets can be many things.
Speaker 2: You can
Speaker 5: have some digital assets are cryptocurrencies. They're actually currencies. Then there's things that are crypto securities. Then there's things that are commodities. Bitcoin actually is regulated as a commodity right now.
And then you've got things that aren't securities or commodities or, like, collectibles, you know, like NFTs, things like that. So there's all these different categories, and one of the things that the market needs is just clarity around the definitions so that founders know what the rules of the road are, and they can actually just comply with them. So giving them those definitions and describing how a crypto project could start, for example, as a security and eventually the protocol could become decentralized enough or maybe it becomes a commodity, that whole idea that's called market structure. And there was a bill in the last Congress by French Hill who is the chair of the House and Interest Services Committee now that passed the House with 71 Democratic, votes. So it was fairly bipartisan, but then it went nowhere in the Senate because frankly the bank committee at that time was run by Sherrod Brown who is anti crypto.
So it got stopped in the Senate right away. Now we have Republican control of the Senate and Tim Scott's the new chair of the Senate Banking Committee and he's expressed support. So I think now we could get a bill on market structure like fit 21, again, which was Bill last congress. I think we could do a revised and updated version this congress, and that was one of the things they all the the chairman expressed support for. So I think there's a pretty good chance we can get this done in the next six months.
Speaker 2: What's the opposition, Sachs? I guess, it feels to me like with the market structure question being addressed and answered, you would have also more protection for consumers. Because now businesses know the rules of the road. They follow them, can the structure that protects consumers, etcetera, etcetera. Why would people be opposed to moving this forward, moving the legislation forward, getting this all behind us?
Speaker 5: Well, I think this is an area where there's a really good chance of having bipartisan support. We did in the last congress, like I mentioned, that the house bill got over 70 democratic votes. I think in the senate, we're gonna need seven votes, some seven democrat votes to get to 60, right, which is the number you need if you don't go through the reconciliation process. And I think there's a good chance this passes with significant Democratic support as well as Republican. It's not gonna be unanimous or anything like that because there are still forces that are hostile to crypto in Washington and
Speaker 4: You think it's gonna be a discreet bill or do you I I mean, it seems like you're gonna have to get a border security and energy and budget bill passed. So it seems like everything's looking towards reconciliation. In which case Really? Would this be an adjunct like a like an add on?
Speaker 5: The the question is what you can get through reconciliation. So in order for a bill to go through the reconciliation process where you only need basically 50 votes, it has to have a budgetary impact or predominantly a budgetary impact. I think it's called the Byrd rule. And that rule was definitely pushed pretty hard in the last administration. Remember that the Biden administration got the inflation reduction act passed through reconciliation
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 5: And all those subsidies for clean energy or whatever. So they've opened the window pretty wide on what can go through reconciliation, but that's the question. There's one other bill that I think is gonna move pretty quickly here too. So I just mentioned the market structure bill. The other area is stablecoins.
And senator Haggerty, he's on the banking committee. He just released a Stablecoin bill. There's counterparts in the house. And what the fore chairman indicated is actually they're gonna take up Stablecoins first, and then market structure will follow very quickly. So I think we could see a Stablecoin bill pass congress in the next several months.
Speaker 0: Sachs, I guess the question is the SEC was and Gary Gensler were the blocker previously with crypto, and they just said, hey. Listen. There's an existing set of rules here. Just follow those rules. Obviously, those rules don't exactly apply to the innovation happening in crypto.
So the question, I think, after stable coins, which feels like a layup and and a great place to start, that'll be a great early win. And it just makes people, I guess that would just reinforce the dollar supremacy, right, if it's tied to the dollar. So that's good for America. But
Speaker 4: maybe you
Speaker 0: could talk to protecting consumers because we all saw in the first couple of generations of crypto, all kinds of grips and ICOs and things that were never delivered. So how do you balance those two things? Protecting consumers who may get really enthusiastic about this versus, you know, people who might try to prey upon them.
Speaker 5: Well, the first thing you wanna do if you're gonna protect consumers is you wanna bring the activity onshore. Okay. Because, obviously, when all the activity gets driven offshore, then it's hard for regulators to supervise it. And moreover, it's hard for the market to know who's a good actor, who's a bad actor, what's a good project, what's a bad project. So the first thing you wanna do is have the innovation happen onshore in The United States.
By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that the biggest fraud in the history of crypto, which was FTX, was based in The Bahamas. Yeah. Probably a reason.
Speaker 0: Little bit of a town.
Speaker 1: A little bit of a town. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it'll be an even stronger tell when the good projects feel like they can come back into The United States, and then you've got the shady ones in The Bahamas or in other countries that are gonna stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone's gonna be able to understand that, oh, those guys are too shady to operate in The United States. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: So
Speaker 5: the number one thing we need to do is just bring the innovation onshore. In terms of the framework, I think the market structure bill is gonna define. Here's a security, here's a commodity, here's what you have to do. Here are the disclosure requirements around creating a crypto project. So all of that will be in the bill.
And then in the meantime, the SEC has created a new task force under Hester Peirce, who's a SEC Commissioner. And she is already starting to do work in that regard to define a better regime at the SEC for crypto projects. You mentioned that Gensler said that the SEC's doors were open to crypto companies and they should come in and talk to us and work with us. That was very disingenuous. Crypto companies would tell me they would go see the SEC.
The SEC would tell them nothing about what the rules were, but they would have enforcement people in those meetings just writing down everything they would say, and the next day they would get sent a Wells notice. So the truth is the SEC was not cooperating. They were not providing any clarity. They were just honeypotting founders basically to come in, and then they would immediately investigate them. I mean, it was really terrible.
Look. We expect founders to play by the rules and abide by the law and be compliant. But when you won't tell them what the rules are and then you prosecute them, there's no fair way for them to comply. So the most important thing is to give them a framework. I think the SEC now is doing that.
They're starting to do that already. And then, legislatively, we're gonna have a bill that does that, moving through congress over the next few months.
Speaker 0: This is absolutely awesome. We're super encouraged that you're doing this, and, we really appreciate you coming on the pod. Wish you could participate in the other three or four crazy discussions we're about to have, but we understand you've got to stay focused on the mission. Anything on the AI front that we can look forward to in the coming weeks that you're working on? I know that's the other part of your mission.
Speaker 5: Well, the big thing is, like I talked about last time, the president rescinded the Biden EO, which was this hundred page monstrosity. It burned some regulation on our AI companies. I think that decision's been proven even more right in the wake of DeepSeq because we know that China has basically caught up or they're very very close to catching up. It felt like that Biden Neo is written in a vacuum in which The US was the only player in AI, and that if we imposed a bunch of burn some rules on our companies that somehow wouldn't allow China to catch up, right? And I think it's pretty clear that China is very, very competitive.
If we hobble our AI companies, it's going to redound to China's benefit. So I think that was a very good decision. And what the President said and his EO is that we should devise a new AI action plan to replace that by Nio, and we're working on that right now.
Speaker 2: Alright, Dave. Are you there any other anecdotes from Doge you wanna share?
Speaker 5: I'll give you one anecdote, which is I've been working late here a number of nights at the EEOB. And I won't tell you where the Doge guys are based, but, you know, I know where their office is. So I just went by there to say hi. The whole room was full of young coders. I think they were engineers, but they're wearing, like, suits and ties.
So that's a little different, but they were all working really late. I mean, they're working there late up Friday night, and the facilities people don't know what to do because they've never had people, like, asked to stay late on Friday night before.
Speaker 1: So So
Speaker 5: they've had to create new, new facilities access for, for these guys.
Speaker 0: They're like, you're coming to the office and doing work. We don't have a protocol for that.
Speaker 1: What, how does that work? We're gonna need
Speaker 0: to get you a key or
Speaker 1: a badge to come to the building.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, it's absolutely awesome to see the progress you're making in the first two weeks and continued success. We're so proud of the effort.
Speaker 5: Alright. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 0: Alright.
Speaker 2: Do you guys think the Democrats are gonna lose people over their opposition to Doge? Like, is Doge really viewed as oppositional to Democrat party interests
Speaker 1: This
Speaker 2: is for the average person?
Speaker 4: It's a war shock task. I think the thing is that there was a coalition that the Democrats had, and there was a coalition that the Republicans had. The Republicans did a better job of reforming that coalition. And now I think what you're gonna see is a shrinking. I actually got this totally wrong.
I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, but my thought at the time was if the Republicans don't figure out how to fix themselves, they were gonna go and lose for the next ten or fifteen years. And the reason I said that was they would walk into every midterm and they would just get their ass handed to them. But I think they figured it out that this is sort of this thing that I've been thinking about a lot is there's a fight in Western societies, and it's a pendulum, between labor and capital. And it used to be the thought, the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans were pro capital and Democrats were pro labor. And the brilliance of Trump is he took over the Republican party and made it totally populist, which is to say pro labor.
And the crazy thing about the Democrats is that they are the most sophisticated liars. It because if you look at what happened under Biden, you had record high stock markets. So it was purely in favor of asset owners. Record high deficits, record high illegal immigration, record high wage suppression. All of these things are massively pro capital, but they tried to present themselves as pro labor.
That entire ruse is now being undone. And all of this data, what that does is it'll it'll consolidate the Democrats to a shell of their former self. It'll take a year or eighteen months. But I think unless they figure out how to totally hard reset, they're gonna be in a really difficult struggle to find a cohort of people beyond 15 or 20% of the population for a long time.
Speaker 0: Well, and it's so dumb to come out against waste, fraud, and abuse. So the best argument the Democrats had, it seems, was that, oh my god, people's Social Security numbers or people's privacy was being violated because they went in and looked at the data and how the money was raised wasted. This is the, like, height of not getting the point and not reading room. A % of Americans don't want their tax payments stolen. They don't care if you looked at their Social Security number.
This isn't a privacy issue that Doge is looking at some database, and that's what AOC and Schumer were doing. Oh my god. These people are looking at your Social Security number. They have access to your records. Who cares?
What matters is how much money is being stolen from the American public, and anyone at any point in time could have picked up this issue. This has been going on I think you pointed out the last time somebody really addressed this in earnest was Clinton. So this has been going on. Obama, Trump one point o, Biden, everybody has been raising the debt. All of the script has been going on.
It's only this time around that somebody picked up the free money and said, here's an issue. Now we, we see what happens when somebody picks up the issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only gonna make Trump more popular.
Speaker 3: So, Jason, I I,
Speaker 1: if you're
Speaker 3: gonna add what you and, Chamath said, I think you're both right. Let me give you a a very concrete example. Rahm Emanuel is now back from Japan. Okay. He was chief of staff in both the Democratic White House's post, Roosevelt, Clinton and Obama.
And he wrote an op ed this weekend, this past weekend, that basically said that Democrats have lost their way because they have forgotten what he calls kitchen table issues, the things people regular people care about. And, Shamath, you're right. I mean, the reality is, they forgot about inflation. They forgot that inflation is terrible for the average person. It's terrible for middle class America.
It's okay for people that own productive assets because they just go up in value, but it's terrible for people that are wage earners and that have any savings. It's terrible for older people that are living off savings. Terrible. You know, Rob makes this point that if the Democrats are gonna have to, are gonna reconform in some way, reform in some way, they're going to have to recapture these kitchen table issues. And if they don't, they'll just be about these fringe social issues, DI, transgender, whatever, and that will never work.
They'll never come back into power.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, the the crazy thing is, like, the democratic policies are meant to favor capital holders, but capital holders by
Speaker 1: and
Speaker 4: large deeply dislike the Democrats because of all of these other issues. So they have no home. There is no base from which to build from right now unless they go through a great reset. And part of it is that they have to understand that they are actually not pro labor. They are have been pro capital.
But that requires such a schism from the deepest believers of the Democratic party who thought, you know, eat the rich. You wear it on your dress. It's so important to you. In fact, actually, you were feeding the rich. You just
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the fact that you didn't even know that is just pathetic.
Speaker 3: Yeah. What's funny is that, you know, Margaret Thatcher famously said that the the problem with socialism, you eventually run out of other people's money, and you run deficits. Right? And you destroy the country. This happened in Venezuela.
It's always the end of socialism. It's how it it's how it finishes, how the movie ends. We've seen it around the world. Just look look south into South America. We were heading that direction.
That's when I said earlier, we I was I'm afraid we might become a kleptocracy if this doesn't stop, and I'm so grateful to all the great patriots at Doge and the government, the president for making it happen because we were heading that direction.
Speaker 0: So the Democratic Party is lost. They'll continue to be lost. Interesting thing came up this week. On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order laying out a plan to establish the first sovereign wealth fund for The United States. For those of you who don't know, a sovereign wealth fund is essentially an investment fund for a country.
It's almost universally based on natural resources. So Norway, Saudi, UAE, they all have, Australia sovereign wealth funds based upon minerals or typically oil. The United States is not known for having the oil reserves of the Saudis or UAE or Norway. This public investment fund would be apparently anchored by potentially the TikTok shares that Trump said he wanted to get half of by giving a license. A lot of that is, unclear what this license would be.
It's never existed but this is the concept. The treasury secretary and commerce secretary have been tasked with developing a plan over the next ninety days And, the plan should include, quote, recommendations for funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure, and a governance model. Chamath, you were tweeting about this. What is the point of having a sovereign wealth fund in The United States if we're $36,000,000,000,000 in debt? Should we just pay down?
Speaker 1: Or Well,
Speaker 4: I I I think it's not a It's
Speaker 2: not a
Speaker 0: Where is money gonna come from? Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, it's not an either or thing. And I think the point is that if there are assets that are minted effectively overnight, which I think the 50% share of TikTok would be, so call it a hundred, hundred and $50,000,000,000. The question is, what should you do with it? And who should govern it? And I think this idea that if you had a group of five elder statesmen so I'm just gonna throw some names out there.
David Tepper, Stan Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, John Doerr, or Mike Morris, Bill Gross, or some other bond guy. My point is, what you get are five people that are very sophisticated across all market categories. One of them could be the rotating CEO for some number of years. People should rotate in and rotate out. These are unpaid jobs because everybody that has these slots should be mega billionaires, so they shouldn't be doing it for their own personal advancement, and they should deploy that capital.
So as you sell down the TikTok shares, maybe as you sell federal lands and you generate more oil revenue, take it all and invest it on behalf of America into American companies. I think that's a great, incredible idea.
Speaker 0: Antonio, you think the government should be in this business?
Speaker 3: So I have I I think it I think it should, but and I agree with Shamath, that the governance is very, very important. I think he's got a good idea there. I think it for a different reason is that we don't have an industrial policy in America. Many of our strategic competitors around the world, in particular China, have a long term industrial policy, and they put enormous amounts of capital behind industrial policy. A sovereign wealth fund, I think, would be a stealthy way to create industrial policy in America.
Speaker 0: So rather than industrial policy in this context. So Example.
Speaker 3: In China, they wanna they wanna build cheap fabs, and they wanna catch up to to, TSMC. And so what do they do? They take the dollars of trade surplus they get from us every year, and they pour it back into making that stuff inside their country. And for decades, part of the problem we've had with, China is that capital is free because the banking system just pushes money out to manufacturers, and they move the manufacturing because the WTO from The US to China. That's industrial policy.
People say the Chinese have a long term hundred year vision. The way it's it manifests is this industrial policy. We don't have that here at all, and we try to do it. We do like the Chips Act, and it goes through commerce. We have government bureaucrats deciding how to spend $200,000,000,000 to modernize Intel, which needs to happen.
I mean, I'd much really have Ken Griffin, Bill Gross, any of the guys Timoth mentioned deciding, okay, we have five industries in America we wanna invest in. Let's make great investments. Right? I mean, let's make great investments for America. They gotta be economic.
They gotta they gotta make money for us, but they gotta be good for the country. I think that's what most of these sovereign wealth funds do. Some of them make portfolio investments, but many of them, like the the the sovereign wealth in Saudi Arabia, the PIF, they're making enormous investments domestically to remake the economy, you know, toward tourism example. And I think this is a great
Speaker 0: They're literally building cities in Neom. They've got Yeah. You know, dozen cities being constructed and trying to take an oil economy and shift it to a tourism economy. Tourism economy. A technology economy, a private equity economy.
Speaker 4: Antonio is totally right. Like Scott Bessen, part of his congressional testimony, you guys probably saw this, was he laid out this thing that he has that's called the three three three plan. Right? And the three three three plan says, we wanna see GDP growth of 3%. We wanna see deficits that are no greater than 3%, and we wanna have 3,000,000 barrels of oil, right, produced domestically in The United States.
But if you double click on that, if you look at the total energy reserves in The United States, they're three times greater than the total energy reserves of Saudi Arabia. Three times across all forms. So not just oil, if you oil nat gas plus coal. If we actually go, as Antonio said, towards an industrial policy that's pro energy, where the incremental cost of energy is effectively zero, where we want just a gross abundance of electrons flowing in America for all the great ideas that could pop up, it is by definition going to generate an enormous amount of revenue for the federal government. And so I think having the sovereign wealth fund be the rainy day fund, if you will, right, that can bank a percentage of all of that, I think starts to do a lot of really good for the long term strategic guidance of The US.
Speaker 0: Freyberg, what do you think here? Is this something where we're making the government too big and now we've got the government competing with BlackRock and Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and they're gonna be on the board of technology companies and energy companies and investing in it. And then what happens when, you know, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush, you get different people running these things and then they wanna do their pet projects. It seems to me like this could be get awfully conflicted, awfully quick. What do you think?
Should this be a business our government's in?
Speaker 5: I think one of the
Speaker 2: things the government sucks at is capitalism. So I wouldn't make capitalism the mandate of a sovereign wealth fund, certainly not when we have $40,000,000,000,000 of federal debt. It doesn't make economic sense. Our cost of capital is 5%. That's how much the interest is on this ten to thirty year debt right now.
So it's very hard to actually make real risk adjusted returns when our cost of capital is so high. So I don't think the mandate should be, hey, let's put a bunch of capital in a pool, go and invest it, and probably make money for The United States. That seems silly. But my point about the government being really bad at capitalism is that the United States government owns and has access to and will acquire through other means significant assets and resources that should be monetized in a smarter way. And so I would kind of think about the sovereign wealth fund as being more of a strategic vehicle for monetization of high value government assets.
So for example, if Trump does actually negotiate a 50% equity position in TikTok US, that needs to sit somewhere. It should not sit in the department of whatever. It should sit with a capitalist manager that then ultimately makes the decision on when and how to monetize that asset, return that cash to the treasury, and pay down the debt. Similarly, The US has large amounts of land, has access to other large assets that get transferred in seizures, etcetera, etcetera. So, you know, I I don't know if you guys remember all this, but there was, like, bit Bitcoin seizures that have happened over the years.
Yeah. It is the government has cracked down on criminal enterprises, then the government owns this Bitcoin. Do you think the smartest people are making the decisions on where and how to sell down that Bitcoin? I guarantee you not. I would much rather have a capitalist making that decision.
So I would view the, you know, the the sovereign wealth fund being less about raise capital from other means in the government, which effectively means borrowing money through treasuries because of the the the debt level we have and trying to invest it. And much more being about, okay, what strategic assets can the US government monetize and use this as the mechanism for doing that. And then, ultimately, I think the objective should be to return that capital. I I do think there's also an opportunity for managing Social Security in a smarter way. So Social Security is functionally gonna be bankrupt in eight years.
The way the trust is set up, the cash that's there, the assets that are there, and the demand on Social Security given the aging population and the rising payouts every year. So one of the other ways to think about this is what are the long term debt obligations, which is ultimately the point of these sovereign wealth funds, and can they be invested in a smarter way? Why is the Social Security entities ultimately owning, you know, 3% yielding bonds when they could be owning interest in in equities. So I would kinda think about that strategic pool of capital being managed by this as well and less about the mandate of go be a capitalist investor for The United States, raise money and make money. I think leave that to the markets.
But when it comes to strategic assets, I think this could be a good vehicle for
Speaker 0: When the Socras got, shut down, yeah, we seized a hundred and 44,000 Bitcoin, and that's sitting somewhere in some department of justice.
Speaker 1: They got sold
Speaker 2: off. Yeah. They sold I I think they sold
Speaker 1: that. Solved
Speaker 2: it? Yeah.
Speaker 0: No. I think we still have it. I think that was, like, the idea was that was gonna become the Bitcoin strategic. So I mean, you could also come up with
Speaker 2: the DOJ's the DOJ the DOJ sells these. So, like, who do you think of the DOJ is making the Bitcoin market decisions? And is that the right person to be monetizing these assets?
Speaker 0: I mean
Speaker 3: David mentioned you put out security. I gotta I just wanna follow-up on, which is when when you think about Social Security, it's 6, 6 to $1 of of our 36,000,000,000,000 debt, and it's actually a fake treasury bill. So just to we one of the things we figured out in early days before the inauguration on those is, like, that $600 sits on the ledger. It's just a paper ledger over. So, actually, if it gets paid out, it's also be very inflationary.
It's just a fake treasury I lettered over at that pays a very low rate. And, here at, Valley, my partners, John Shulkin has been reading to try to help. The the only the only thing that we find in this audit in the government, the the Social Security Administration actually has an audit. It has an audit. And when you go through the audit, it's crazy, the material weaknesses going back to Doge that you find.
Yeah. It'd be way better to have that invested in a way that was economic for people with real money.
Speaker 4: By the way, guys And as we're pressing for this. Guys, as we're speaking, the Oh. The federal judge just put a temporary restraining order on Doge and has barred Elon and his team from accessing US treasury payments data. Alright.
Speaker 0: Good boy. So now we're gonna have a real grudge match between the public Which
Speaker 2: federal which judge was it? Federal judge?
Speaker 0: Federal judge. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Would you know why? Too much to say why?
Speaker 4: No. But Elizabeth Warren is doing a victory lap, so I'm sure that, you know, she's part of it. So the
Speaker 0: government agency set up by the president can't look at the database of the treasury?
Speaker 3: So the just to be, double click here, Doge is not a new agency. It's the renaming of existing need and say, can't remember the name of it, we'll have to find it. Elon tweeted about this, some weeks ago. That was set up under Obama actually to do this, to do a credit and audit function to the government. What's crazy about this, ruling to me is, congress basically is the constitution delegates to the executive, the, the ability to spend the money.
And they go through congress, it gets actually appropriate in congress and the executive spends it. How can you spend money if you don't know where it went? I mean, how can you be responsible? Right? You have the authority to spend it without the and how can you responsibly spend it if you actually can't go look and see where it goes?
Speaker 4: Guys, this is flying fast and furious. President Trump just unveiled his framework for his tax plan. No tax on tips. No tax on senior social security. No tax on overtime pay.
Renew the middle class tax cuts. Adjust the SALT cap. So again, very pro, as I said, pro labor, pro populist. Eliminate all special tax breaks for billionaire sports team owners. Oh, alright.
I'm no longer I already sold the team. I already sold my
Speaker 1: fees. I already
Speaker 2: sold my fees.
Speaker 1: Oops. Oops.
Speaker 4: Closed the carried interest tax. Closed the carried interest tax deduction loophole, which allowed you to claim carried interest.
Speaker 2: Alright, Antonio. Long joke at least.
Speaker 1: Oh, I
Speaker 3: better run.
Speaker 1: Oh, no.
Speaker 3: I'll be back in a few hours. He'll sell some things.
Speaker 4: Isn't that incredible? I mean, he is really going for the jugular. Wow. Mhmm. Amazing.
I support this 100%.
Speaker 2: The SALT deduction's coming back. Is that right?
Speaker 4: Yeah. Marginally though. I don't think he's gonna give it the way that it was before, but isn't this incredible? I mean, I how who's gonna stand up and lay on the railroad tracks for being able to amortize a multibillion dollar sports team purchase or that when you make a fund investment, you should get long term cap gains treatment. Who is going to be that person in this admit nobody's gonna stand up for these things.
Speaker 0: I think we should just stop doing venture and just start NGOs. We just start a whole ratsness of NGOs to ship money around.
Speaker 3: You could have an incubator.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. NGO incubator.
Speaker 1: And incubator.
Speaker 0: Come if you've got a great idea for an NGO, now
Speaker 4: why why did you launch Launch in every single random developing country in the world?
Speaker 0: I mean, if I hadn't known,
Speaker 1: you would have
Speaker 4: 8,000,000,000 of AUM because of
Speaker 0: a USAID. Just launch one in Vietnam, and we could have yeah.
Speaker 3: I could just go Go launch. I love it.
Speaker 0: We we could have had a, yeah, a launch accelerator in Vietnam for transgender. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Jason Calacanis launch fund of Equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 1: It is
Speaker 0: so crazy though. To come out and, you know, watching the Democrats, just the self own of coming out and being like, we have to stop people from stopping wasteful spend. Like they just don't seem to understand how unpopular.
Speaker 3: These are kitchen table issues, like Rahm said. I mean, everyone cares about that. And if you don't care about that, if you care about these fringe issues and not the things people care about on the kitchen table
Speaker 0: Well, and if you think about the transgender sports issue, biological males playing in female sports leagues, That issue that Trump just did an EO yesterday for was such an obvious issue of fairness and has nothing to do with transgender. It just has to do with, like, biology. If a if a biological male plays basketball on a on a a biological female team, somebody's gonna get hurt, and that person's gonna score a hundred points. It's just obvious. And the fact that the Democrats couldn't see that issue being a % for more 95% makes no sense.
Like, it's just such an obvious litmus test of logic.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, man. The the constitution is is a is a document about fairness. The people that found this country, the patriots found this country, they they did it because you're treated on affiliate home. All of us here, are one generation away, right, or two generations away from immigration. And the reality is that's why people come here, man.
It's it's un American. It's un American.
Speaker 0: Fairness. We got two people here who are immigrants. Yes.
Speaker 4: I'm reading the TRO, and it it looks like this TRO means temporary restraining order. And it and it's actually Nero's who from Doge Yeah. Can get read access down to two people, Tom Krauss and Marco Ellez.
Speaker 0: Oh, okay. So they don't want to have the whole team be able to see what's at treasury. They just have to have a process and some sign off. Okay. That sounds not unreasonable.
Speaker 3: I just wanna point out two people to to look at no matter how good they are. I'm just doing it twenty four seven. Look at all the payments. The US government is not a lot.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It does seem like it needs to be more than two, but it doesn't seem like they're saying you can't look at it. They just wanna have some controls in place.
Speaker 3: I mean, it feels like that's an administrative block. That's, like, the narrowest thing you could
Speaker 1: do. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Two oh, okay. Yeah. You can come in, but you can just send two people and just these two people. So if they get sick or something happens, no one else comes in. That seems to me to be truly a submissive block to slow it down.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, we're interpreting this in real time. The facts will come out over time. Let's wrap up on Google. Google dropped 7% after reporting earnings on Tuesday, Chamath.
Revenue up 12% year over year to 96,500,000,000.0. Wow. Cloud revenue was up 30% year over year, 12 billion YouTube ads surging 14% to 10,500,000,000.0. Net profit was around 26,500,000,000.0, up 28% year over year. So they are really focusing on profitability, obviously.
Full year numbers, this is just extraordinary. Total revenue, 350,000,000,000 with a hundred billion in net profit. Cloud and YouTube finished 2024 with a combined run rate of a hundred and $10,000,000,000. YouTube is basically Netflix inside of, inside of Google, and their Google Cloud is essentially AWS inside of Google. The thing that made investors get concerned, Shamath, is that Google said it would invest 75,000,000,000 in CapEx in twenty twenty five, forty two percent jump over 2024, '20 '9 percent more than analysts expect.
Obviously, this has to do with data center servers and the AI build out. What do you think about that number 75,000,000,000, obviously, in relation to what we saw with DeepSeek doing it with maybe a little bit less, maybe they're lying. Is this just an absolute waste of money or gargantuan number, or is it something they can easily, with that amount of profitability and cash they have, absorb and use in the future?
Speaker 4: I think I should stipulate that Google's models are probably the best of all the models across a broad base of capabilities if you test for them. And so let's start there, which is whatever they're doing is working. The thing that they need to do is be able to translate those models now into better products. And I think that that'll happen slowly. Like, for example, if you look at deep research, most of the people online that are evaluating deep research would now say that OpenAI is both faster and just better on the margins.
All of these things can be improved. I don't think that's a comment on the base model. I think it's a comment on post training and how they're attempting to productize these things. So the other thing that Google has is a money machine that directly benefits from these AI driven optimizations on ad targeting. The only other company that has anywhere close to the same credibility is Meta.
So I think what both of these two companies need to do is do a better job of explaining how that 75,000,000,000 gets segregated. How much of that goes to these AI enabled models that actually do better ads optimization? There's a there's a really interesting discussion by a former meta machine learning engineer on x about how they did it. It's pretty amazing. It's staggering.
But if they could say half the money goes to that and the other half goes to more speculative, you know, pre training and post training, I think the market would have eaten it up. So it's probably more of a disclosure issue for Google because I would say right now their model quality is the best.
Speaker 3: Do you
Speaker 0: have thoughts on this build out, Antonio? Obviously, I think you've been involved with XAI, and obviously involved with Twitter and X previously and Colossus' colossal build out that was extraordinary to watch in such a short period of time.
Speaker 1: Do you
Speaker 0: have concerns that, like some people do, that this build out is too expensive and there'll be too hard to monetize all that expense? Or is it, maybe a little bit of hand wringing and the opportunity in AI is so obviously huge that you just gotta take the leap of faith. And and and if you build it, the revenue will come.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think Chamath has the right framework here, which is return of us to capital. And what he's saying by, you know, if Google had said, hey. Half the money is for ads and half the money is for budget post training. The market would have seen that half the money has higher return capital.
And Google's return capital is actually going up, after the implementation of of AI models into their into their company. And I I think that sort of abstracts the entire market, which is people are waking up that return invested capital and data central matter, that the models are basic commodities and super competitive. And the best case is kind of a a land where in Asia to melee. In a in a worst case, just total commodities. What does matter is the return on capital data center, which influenced by how good the data centers are.
So you mentioned the XAI data center, it's a hundred thousand GPU cluster. It's the most dense coherent cluster in the world, and it will just train faster and better than other clusters. And it's also built for the most cheaply and the fastest. So Exaio will have the highest churning capital and Biosl think the best trained data and therefore will win. I think Google will also win because they have, their TensorFlow chips.
They make their own some of their own chips. They do focus on ROIC, and they have a great monopoly to kind of fund it all. So I don't think it's overblown. I think that I think this is gonna be, as you guys have said before in the podcast, you know, bigger than industrial revolution. But, it's also true that you'd need to have a good ROIC.
And if you don't, you're not transparent about it, you can see what happens.
Speaker 2: No. I I would argue Google's probably been the most frugal, thoughtful, and well managed computing infrastructure investor of all time. You know, the ninety eight to two thousand five era at Google, it was all about just cheap throwaway rats. That that was the big advantage they had as they weren't using the expensive Oracle servers. And they had a two to three year kind of depreciation time line on those, but they were super cheap.
And so the the ROIC was quite good. Then they got into energy efficiency, which they realized was a big driving cost. They started to build systems that that were more energy efficient. As a result, they lasted longer. And then their their depreciation schedule moved up to three to four years, meaning they could kind of write down the value of the servers over three to four years.
And then from 2010 to 2015 era, their hardware system for cloud allowed them to kind of extend through repurposing the utilization, and they increased their depreciation from to four to five years. And then in 2021, I don't know if you guys remember this, they made this kind of big change to their depreciation schedule on data center infrastructure to six years. So when they invest CapEx in a data center, they would write down the servers over a six year cycle because of AI optimization on maintenance. So they started using AI just for internal management of
Speaker 1: the
Speaker 2: infrastructure. So I would view the $75,000,000,000 CapEx actually as a very positive signal for the company. I think that it means that they have a really strong line of sight on how they're gonna have full utilization and great return on this. If you do the math, ROIC math on this, $75,000,000,000 assume a 20% ROIC. You've gotta be generating, call it, roughly an incremental $15,000,000,000 of profit a year plus the amortization of the 75,000,000,000.
So take the 75,000,000,000 divided by six, that's 12,000,000,000 plus 15,000,000,000. So what there's so basically, they would need to make an incremental 27,000,000,000 of operating profit a year on the 75,000,000,000 for this to meet their ROIC performance. That doesn't seem crazy because that's just under 20% of their of their annual operating profit. This is a very kind of, I think, important point, which is Google doesn't just do this to to build that AI in the future. They have a really strong line of sight on how this can kind of increment, and you don't have a huge hurdle for them for this to pay back.
So I don't know. I would kind of to Antonio's point, I'd view this as a positive. I think if you use their historical ability to manage infrastructure and make predictions on investments as an indicator of the future, this is a strong and positive indicator. And I do think that for all the naysayers out there that think that search is gonna evolve to chat, you could look at this as being a really important proof point that Google has the confidence that they're gonna be able to move from search to chat. And as Chamath points out, they've got great performative models.
And I would view this more of as a positive than a negative. If they were under investing, I would be worried that they didn't know where to invest. But to see them make this degree of investment highlights the confidence in the strategy.
Speaker 0: Antonio, I don't know if you've been watching the agent space or deep research that came out from Google and then closed AI. I mean, OpenAI, launched their copycat version of this, product. Sorry. I might have short feelings on it. I'm curious your thoughts on job displacement.
We're looking at self driving. Obviously Waymo's got cars on the road, obviously, Tesla, which you were previously on the board of. And I know you were the first institutional investor in Tesla. Self driving is pretty good. I only get like one or two disengagements per hour and they tend to be the ones where I just want to take the turn a little sharper kind of thing.
So that's getting pretty close. BYD is very close. You got a lot of job displacement that occur. Millions and millions of drivers in ten years could lose their jobs. Researchers working at Gartner Group, whatever Boston Consulting Group, like it feels like there could be massive job displacement.
Do you have concerns about that in the American economy and globally?
Speaker 3: There's a lot of hand wringing about this, and it's real. In prior moments of large disruption that there have been, job displacements because there's, you know, generous people to get retrained for something else you can't retrain. So, you know, I think, there were studies, and then FEMA did the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the seventies that the cost of each steel worker job loss was about a million dollars to the economy because these people can be retrained. And that might happen here. But I'm gonna I have a more benign outlook, personally.
What I think is gonna happen is that you will have job loss, but the amount of productivity that will be released in The US economy is gonna be extraordinary. Right? So per so GDP growth is a function of the number of people working times productivity. It's very simple. Economists wanna make it more complex than that, but it's the number of people working times productivity.
If you go if productivity goes up to five, six, seven, eight percent, you get a massive boost in GDP growth. And then what happens? Well, people can get retrained. They can get different jobs, different services happen. People start companies.
The application layer of LLMs is just starting. The barrier to start a company is quite low. Things like launch probably explode because there's always people who are don't have jobs anymore that were accountants and wanna start something. It's hard to know what happens. You know?
I believe in American agility. I believe in this country. I believe that we will figure out figure out a way to make this all work. And if there's enough productivity and money in the economy that's flowing, people will find new jobs. They will find new businesses to start.
They will find new things to do. We have to get out of the way, take regulation down, and let Americans be creative and unleash the American productivity machine. Let's make that happen.
Speaker 0: Yeah. That's, I think, really strong thoughts. And I mean, that's the game we're seeing on the field. How many companies are we seeing hit a million dollars in revenue with five employees where that used to take Yeah. 25.
So the efficiencies there. Chamath, your your outlook on this issue since it seems to be coming up again specifically with truck drivers and Uber drivers and all kinds of other research jobs that seem to be be doing pretty well, or can be done pretty well by AI. Where where do you stand on this issue today?
Speaker 4: I think it's a process. Buffett wrote about this in an annual letter, and what he described was the changing nature of jobs during the agrarian revolution. And what you saw was a large cohort of people who supported themselves through farming. And then the total quantum of those jobs shrank by 90% when you had industrialized farming and tractors and whatnot. But the economy, to Antonio's point, grew around that business and added other kinds of businesses that didn't make sense in that moment.
And I think what you see is that when economies get more and more evolved, you see the growth of services, businesses that sort of are these things that can only happen when you have excess. Right? The person that you pay for closet organizing would not have had a job in the turn of the agrarian revolution or the industrial revolution. Yeah. But they can they can exist in twenty twenty something.
And frankly, they can make a good job. The life coach. There are all these jobs that just kind of come out of nowhere.
Speaker 0: Podcast or influencer, all of that.
Speaker 2: Venture venture capitalist.
Speaker 0: Capital alligator. Absolutely. Mutant strawberry creator.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I think that I think that you're Cut that. Waiting for this next turn of creativity. Like the big problem that we all have, maybe I'll take the more glass half empty version of what Antonio said is, we really haven't been unlocking people's creativity over the last fifteen years. We've been trundling around except safe of a few companies, which we all know and we can just repeat them endlessly, but we know which ones they are that are truly innovating and at the edge.
Everybody else is kinda diddling around naval gazing. So the real problem is that we have not had a lot of reps in being creative. I'll give you just a very simple example. Nick, can you find this? Even extremely state industries.
Did you see the BYD clip of the car?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 4: And I thought to myself park. Yes. With a little swipe. It's How tragic is it that when you look at this and you're blown away?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And you're blown away for two reasons. One is, a, I didn't think that that was possible, and b, why doesn't it exist in America? But the reality underneath the hood is extremely benign how this is implemented. And so I think that the problem is we spent so much time losing the script. I think Antonio is right.
When you unshackle people to not focus on the mental load of getting the pronouns right or the this or the that, you won't be so overwhelmed by things like this because you will have already been pushing the boundaries of human creativity. We need to get back to that. We need to let these creative people cook and I hope I hope that that happens. I think that that will happen. Freeberg, can you do a science corner on the FDA approval for the non opioid pain killer?
Speaker 2: I not today.
Speaker 4: No. No. I know. I know. But could you do it, like, in a couple weeks?
Yeah. Not The one
Speaker 2: the one I wanted to do is that new macro study on GLP ones, which I think is super interesting.
Speaker 0: Oh, tell us.
Speaker 2: Do you guys remember I talked a while ago about how they were able to mine VA data? So the VA, right, they they take care of veterans and they have all the medical records. And on an anonymized basis, they can make that data available to researchers. And so if you guys remember this, this is how they identified that the Epstein Barr virus or the virus that causes mono as being statistically certain to be the trigger for multiple sclerosis. In the cohort of hundreds of thousands of patients that were in this this dataset, no one got MS that didn't get Epstein Barr virus.
If you did not get Epstein Barr virus, you did not get MS. I don't know if you guys remember I did the Science Corner a while ago. Anyway, so the data set that you can mine at the VA is incredible. So they pulled all the data from everyone that's been on the GLP one agonists, and they identified all of the health effects across multiple indications, the statistical difference between the cohorts. Okay.
So this research team out of St. Louis pulled all the data from the VA database. And basically, they looked at, you know, one point two million people with diabetes that didn't take anything compared to two hundred and fifteen thousand that took the GLP one receptor agonists and another six hundred thousand people that took other drugs for diabetes. So, basically, this cohort segmentation allows them to isolate the effect of the GLP one drugs. And as you can see here, this shows across hundreds of thousands of patients the effect of the GLP one on a hazard ratio, which means, like, how likely are you to have the following health condition versus the population that's not taking the GLP ones.
And then, on the right, if you scroll to the right, Nick, are the increase in risk, and on the left are the things that go down. So the increase the only thing that increase is, like, you know, 8% or 10% increase in nausea and vomiting. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Can confirm.
Speaker 2: Musculoskeletal complications, GRD, which is, you know, gastric reflux from sleep disturbance. Indigestion. Yeah. And and sleep disturbance is dominated to indigestion. So it's all abdominal stuff.
Now if you go over here to the benefit side, so the benefit side is what conditions did you see a decrease in? So you have a decrease in shock, a decrease in, hep hepatic failure, so liver failure, respiratory failure, cardiac arrest. In fact, on cardiac arrest, you see a thirty percent decrease in the probability of having cardiac arrest from the cohort that's on the GLP one versus mallelative.
Speaker 0: Balenia? Wow. Schizophrenia. So so this goes to
Speaker 2: the point if you guys remember the interview I did a couple months ago with the CEO of Eli Lilly, that they have all these clinical trials going on right now for different indications for the GLP one receptor agonists that they're seeing that there's health benefits beyond just the weight loss in reducing things like kidney disease, obviously liver problems, mental problems, and so on.
Speaker 4: Do we know why? And and if we don't know why, do you think it's because this is suppressing the food and it's the the lack of food or the change in the food consumption that's creating this? Do do you know what I'm asking? Like, do you think the drug is actually Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yep. So, you should watch the interview I did with Rick's. In fact, this is a good moment to call it out if you haven't seen it. It's actually I think he highlights that this class of drugs, there are you know, genes get turned on and off. So there's a, you know, what's called a a gene expression cascade that occurs with certain compounds.
So we know that the GLP one receptor agonist means that it binds to these GLP one sites, and there's a cascading effect of genes that then get expressed. And what that seems to do is turn off things like inflammatory markers. It turns on things like SIRT2 genes, which can actually increase cellular repair. So there seem to be other benefits from these drugs beyond just the appetite control, and it's not the appetite control itself, but there seems to be other effects Let
Speaker 4: me ask
Speaker 2: you a question. From these, these receptors being activated.
Speaker 4: Would you put your kids on this? No. Okay. Would you put your wife on this?
Speaker 2: I would consider it and I would consider it for myself too just for the anti inflammatory effects.
Speaker 4: How will you make that decision?
Speaker 2: Well, for me personally, and the the the thing that I weigh against is the muscle loss and, the the bone density loss. So I think that if you look at the the biggest kind of effect on these on a on the downside basis is you should increase your protein in your diet. You have to do weight lifting. There's things that you would do. And, frankly, if you do those things anyway, if you increase protein in your diet and do more weight lifting, you're actually gonna see very good health benefits from just doing those things that may actually outweigh the benefits you
Speaker 0: get from the GLP one.
Speaker 3: I I have a question, David, which is and this is the question is, when when you look at that data and you talk to the the CEOs, how much do you think really long term when the long term says they're out is gonna be that it was the drug or just that being obese is very bad for you? And so when you take your body fat down dramatically, all these other gene expressions happen anyway. Right? So Totally. You think it which one will
Speaker 4: it be?
Speaker 1: Well, this is this
Speaker 2: is what starting to isolate and I will say Antonio, they are starting to see that there are other expressions that are not related to the obesity in people that don't have obesity that they're using, that are using these drugs. So they're seeing that cohort data now. Clinical studies, phase two were published and I think we're gonna see phase three in some of these indications soon. But it is looking very positive that it's not just the loss of obesity. Now to your point, being obese, not exercising, eating poorly destroys your health.
You stop that shit. Right.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Everything gets better. If you lift weights Friberg, can
Speaker 4: you tell us when you decide to do this?
Speaker 2: I will. Yeah. If I if I do do a GLP one, receptor agonist, I will let you guys know. Right now, I'm I I actually feel like I wanna go through a process of increasing, my weightlifting routine more. I I you know, I've been trying to create a more kind of rigorous schedule.
My schedule just sucks, so that's been the hardest thing for me. But I actually wanna go through that first before making that decision.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That was kinda cool, David. Oh, I'm sorry. But
Speaker 4: No. I was just curious. Why why that order? I don't understand.
Speaker 2: I wanna measure the effects. Because I do think that if you actually get into a a regular weightlifting routine and you increase protein in your diet, which is another thing I've been making a a concerted measured effort to do, which is hard as a vegetarian by the way, you see pretty significant, health effects. And so I'm trying to get through the process of increasing muscle composition before I'll make the decision on whether or not to add GLP one. I don't wanna kind of confound the two factors.
Speaker 0: You know what I did that made it super easy for me, is I got, egg whites in a carton.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't have yeah.
Speaker 0: And I have this incredible, crunchy spicy garlic thing that everybody in Momofuku and everybody makes and everybody's crazy about. Just in the mornings, I'll eat whatever it is, 10 ounces, 12 ounces of egg whites with that spicy stuff. It's delicious. It's awesome. And I just try to, you know, get that whatever thirty, forty grams of protein first thing in the morning.
And then doing the rucking Well, this is is easy. Like, you just wear a 35 pound weight vest, Freeberg, and you walk a mile or two and you will get, like, your My
Speaker 4: problem, Jason, with all of this is that every time I see something so I saw Gary Breca on the Sean Ryan podcast recently, and Sean Ryan asks him, like, what are a handful of things that you recommend for everybody? Right? And he recommends mineral salt, and then he recommends a methylated vitamin. He recommends amino acids, whatever. There's a protocol.
Then if you happen to catch a clip on X of Andrew Huberman, he'll have a protocol, and then Brian Johnson has a protocol. And the problem is all these protocols are slightly the same, but they're just different enough where it creates a huge cognitive load in a normal person like myself to your point, Freeburg, who's busy, who's got a job, who's got kids. How do you decide? And so I would really love something to be sort of like I don't wanna say gold standard because you can't say that, but that is like, what's the real bang for your buck? What Antonio said, you know, are you just better off just losing the 50 pounds and then
Speaker 2: This is why these products are successful and I think will be continue to grow pretty dramatically, Antonio, is because it is papa pill and it solves all those problems. It doesn't require the cognitive load after that.
Speaker 0: Tell format soon. Right? I mean, the pills are almost here.
Speaker 3: I don't think very cool actually, David, if you do this, to Shamash's point about, you know, people being confused. If you did the every the every person's, kind of story around this journey and you documented it. Totally.
Speaker 2: You know,
Speaker 3: like, you did you did, like, this is my weight. I did weightlifting first, then I did GOP one. And you actually did, like, a weekly thing where you checked in and even it was ten minutes up on x or something where you just gave people the journey, in a way that wasn't so complicated. Because I think people are confused. Thomas, I mean, I have I have very good doctors.
You guys are good doctors. But if you don't, you don't know what to do.
Speaker 4: By the way, the the problem for me, just to give you a sense of it, I had a doctor in LA. I had a doctor in San Francisco, I would have them do their own versions of things, then I would have somebody else help me compare. It cost me way too much money and all that complexity did was make the quality of my health care actually go down. Yeah. And instead, what I really wanted was just a very simple protocol that said, take the metformin because it's good for you, take the vitamin d, take the omega three fatty acids, otherwise just eat this meal plan, and it it would help me a lot more than than I've had to cobble it together myself.
Because, by the way, when you see something like, you know, Gary Breka is very, very articulate, very smart. But when I see him on the Sean Ryan podcast, the first thing I do is I go and populate an Amazon cart with all the things that he said because my instinct is, well, I should do the right thing for myself. This is a couple hundred bucks. It's worth the investment. But then the day after, somebody else has something else.
You know? So I'll be really interested
Speaker 0: OCD though, Jamont. I've known you for a long time. You get very obsessive
Speaker 4: with Well, my father died because of poor health. My best friend died of poor health. I feel like you you should at least do the things that are preventable.
Speaker 3: Did you guys see that that post Chamath did with you? He was, like, half naked in the mirror. He looks great. Oh, god. What are you talking about?
He looks creative. If you you could look like that, you'd you'd do it too.
Speaker 1: No. No. No. I'm talking about, like, when you
Speaker 0: had the glucose monitor. I'm sitting with him at the poker table. He's got the glucose monitor, and he's taking a sip of wine. He's checking the glucose. He's staying at the he's having, like, a piece of, then he's checking the glucose monitor.
Speaker 1: It just, like, literally becomes obsessive. Then what the you know, then we had a food allergy.
Speaker 3: There is, Rich, Bob. I mean, come on. If that's I don't
Speaker 0: want that this AI stop this chair
Speaker 1: in the band?
Speaker 4: You know what's so funny about this picture? All these clowns on the internet are like they don't understand that when you're six foot two, these are big legs. When you're six foot two, these are big legs.
Speaker 1: When you're six foot two, these are big legs.
Speaker 0: Those are not big. So this
Speaker 1: is a big big. When you're a short king Yeah.
Speaker 0: When you're a
Speaker 1: short king, when you're a short king, when you're a short
Speaker 4: king, when you're like five seven five eight, I get I get it why you guys suck. Because you guys are all stubby and short. I don't
Speaker 0: get it. This is the problem with generative AI. You can tell it's a fake photo. You can tell that that was generative AI because nobody has legs that day. How could you have biceps and then legs
Speaker 1: that day? That's a lot of people that keep flushing. It's a lot of people.
Speaker 0: What a thirst trap.
Speaker 1: Now you
Speaker 2: now you guys are gonna find photos of Antonio and I. We're gonna throw them on the list. I have four
Speaker 0: pieces of advice for people. Number one, get good sleep. Number two, exercise. Number three, diet. Number four, meditation.
And if you wanna do that, it's very simple. You get you get a calm meditation after you get the Eight Sleep Sleep. You get the Fitbot for fitness.
Speaker 1: Make sure you have a good Athena.
Speaker 0: You get a good Athena system.
Speaker 1: All of this
Speaker 0: is brought to you by my NGO, which is all in NGO. USAID gave us 18,000,000 last year. Guys, I forgot to
Speaker 1: tell you about it.
Speaker 0: But don't worry. It's in an off shore account for all of us.
Speaker 1: When we
Speaker 0: get back to Ethiopia in Vietnam, we have an all in castle built there. Okay? We built, with our NGO.
Speaker 4: So good.
Speaker 0: We'll see everybody next week.
Speaker 4: Love you, boys.
Speaker 0: We love you.
Speaker 1: Good to
Speaker 3: see you guys, man. Man.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Job, Antoni.
Speaker 4: Bye bye.
Speaker 3: Thanks. Guys.
Speaker 1: We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David. And it said We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. Ice cream.
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you s ice queen of quinoa. Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just business.
It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release that house. Wet your the feet.
reSee.it AI Summary
I initially believed we had a democracy, but it has devolved into a bureaucracy, which now risks becoming a kleptocracy. Elon Musk's comments about fraud and waste in government spending resonate with me; I suspect the figures could be even higher than he suggests. The corruption I see, particularly in USAID, feels reminiscent of a Latin American-style autocracy. However, I believe DOGE emerged just in time, rallying over 80 dedicated individuals to combat this trend, and I am truly grateful for their efforts.
@theallinpod - The All-In Podcast
Antonio Gracias: DOGE Happened Just in Time to Stop America from Turning into a Kleptocracy "When (@DOGE) started, I thought we had a democracy, but it turned into a bureaucracy." "What I'm afraid of now, is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy." @AntonioGracias on E214: "It's sort of extraordinary what's happening. "@elonmusk said this publicly, right? Fraud, waste, and abuse, he thinks kind of 10% of the budget is probably fraud." "I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about $650B, $1T in waste. I think that's probably about right." "But what's really serious about it, @Jason, for me and what scared me, and I'm not there full-time. You know, I'm in and out a little bit and trying to help where I can, but I'm not there full-time." "When this started, I thought we had a democracy, but it turned into a bureaucracy." "What I'm afraid of now. is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy." "I mean, a Latin American-style kleptocracy, okay?" "The stuff you're talking about, that is pure fraud." "And we're making some jokes out of it, the DEI musical." "But if you go into the data that's coming out of USAID, what you find is there's a lot of political contributions going on there." "I mean, that is pure corruption. That's like a Latin American-style autocracy. And we cannot let it go there." "I think (@DOGE) happened just in the nick of time. 80+ people there, all patriots, going full time to make this happen." "So I'm just so grateful."
Video Transcript AI Summary
Elon highlighted significant issues of fraud, waste, and abuse in the budget, estimating that around 10% could be fraudulent, amounting to about $600 billion to $1 trillion in waste. Initially, there was concern about a democracy devolving into bureaucracy, but now there's fear that it may become a kleptocracy, similar to those seen in Latin America. The data from USAID reveals political contributions that indicate corruption. It's crucial to prevent this shift towards autocracy. Fortunately, over 80 dedicated individuals are working full-time to address these challenges, and there's gratitude for their efforts.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: It's sort of extraordinary what's happening. Elon said this public right fraud, waste, and abuse. I think it's kind of 10% of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about 600,000,000,000, a trillion waste.
I think that's probably about right. What's really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me and I'm not there full time. You know, I'm, in and out a little bit and and trying to help where I can, but I'm not there full time. When this started, I thought we had a democracy that had turned into a bureaucracy. What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy.
I mean, a Latin American style kleptocracy. Okay? The stuff you're talking about, that is pure fraud. And we're making some jokes out of it, the DI musical. But if you go into the data that's coming out of USAID, what you find is there's a lot of political contributions going under.
I mean, that is pure corruption. That's like a Latin American style, autocracy, and we cannot let it go there. I think this happened just in nick of time. 80 plus people there, all patriots, gone full time to make this happen. So I'm just so grateful.
reSee.it AI Summary
In a conversation with @realDonaldTrump on @X, we discussed various topics. We covered the economy, federal debt, foreign policy (Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine, China), abortion, COVID origins, the border, JFK files, and a debate prediction. A post-interview debrief followed.
@theallinpod - The All-In Podcast
E184: in conversation with @realDonaldTrump, live on @X (0:00) bestie intros: big house talk! (1:37) economy: regulation, taxes, tariffs, taming inflation, de-dollarization (12:02) federal debt: growth, spend control, where to cut, role of energy, nuclear (20:22) foreign policy: ukraine/russia (25:05) foreign policy: israel/palestine (28:13) abortion: stance on a national ban (31:09) foreign policy: china (32:33) covid: origins, fauci relationship, deep state, bad deals (39:39) border: wall, immigration, h-1bs, recruiting global talent (46:07) jfk files: full release, importance of transparency (48:06) debate prediction (50:15) post-interview debrief
Video Transcript AI Summary
In this video, the speakers cover a wide range of topics including taxes, regulations, business challenges under the Biden administration, the relationship with China, foreign policy, and the origin of COVID-19. They also touch on issues such as the national abortion ban, the potential for war with China, and the role of Dr. Fauci. Education reform and the significance of nuclear energy are also discussed. The speakers express concerns about the current state of affairs and offer their perspectives on potential solutions. President Trump, in his hour-long interview, discusses firing top officials, withdrawing from international agreements like the Paris Accord and World Health Organization, and his views on the border situation. He expresses support for high-skilled immigration and giving green cards to college graduates. He also talks about the JFK files, his relationship with Dr. Fauci, and his thoughts on the upcoming debate. Throughout the interview, Trump emphasizes his pro-growth agenda, low taxes, reducing regulations, and negotiating peace deals. He focuses on transparency and negotiation rather than seeking revenge. The speakers in the video discuss the importance of having intelligent individuals around the president, the high costs of infrastructure projects in the US compared to China, and the need for unifying speech. They express skepticism towards Biden and praise Trump for his moderate tone during the interview. The conversation concludes with an invitation for Biden to join the podcast. The speakers emphasize the significance of forming one's own opinions and providing accurate data for listeners. Overall, they reflect on their interview with Trump and encourage independent thinking.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Here we go.
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody.
Speaker 2: Hello, mister president. Hey, Tim.
Speaker 1: I love that house he has. I love David's house.
Speaker 2: What a house.
Speaker 1: That made the biggest impression.
Speaker 0: Thank you, sir.
Speaker 3: I heard you have a
Speaker 0: pretty nice house too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have a you're in a nice house.
Speaker 0: We like house. Only worth 18,000,000. Right?
Speaker 1: Well, like, I know. The judge said 18,000,000 people who said Palm Beach has gone down a long way. Hello, everybody.
Speaker 0: Thanks so much for sitting down with us, mister president. The all in pods, basically, the the 4 of us having conversations. It's kind of a spectrum of different views. We got sort of like a little bit of some Fox News and then some MSD and C at the same time.
Speaker 1: So That's okay. Keeps it interesting.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. Anyway, Chamath and I, we we had a great time at the at the fundraiser that we did a couple weeks ago, and I think it turned out
Speaker 2: Great time.
Speaker 0: Turned out great. And I I heard the Winklevoss brothers are actually announcing that they're donating $1,000,000 each in Bitcoin to you tomorrow. So I think that's, a great result to come out of it as well.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Got to meet them for the first time at your house, and terrific. Terrific. They they did well. Like, they might have started the whole thing.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if that court case was proper, but, they were very nice, both of them.
Speaker 0: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Really nice guys.
Speaker 0: You know, and I think maybe this is a good place to start in our conversation is, you know, one of the things I think we heard a lot at that dinner was just the the difficulty that people in business were having under this Biden administration. You got the crypto guys who just want a framework. They just want the government to tell them how to operate and they can't get that. You got no M and A happening right now in tech. The real estate guys, they can't get loans because the interest rates are through the roof and there's a credit crunch.
So I think one of the common themes we just heard across that dinner was that it was just so hard to do business right now. And I guess maybe a good place to start would just be, you know, what what's the number one thing or maybe the three things that you would do to kinda get things moving again, you know, if you're reelected?
Speaker 1: So I'd say regulation, regulation, and taxes. Okay? You know, I gave the biggest tax cut in the history of our country and a lot to business. It took it down from look. As you know, they were paying people companies were paying 40%, 45%, including state and city taxes in many cases, and we got it down to 21%.
We'd like to get it down lower actually, but, we got it down and the revenues were were better than ever even with a lower rate. We had record record revenues which tells you a little bit about that. But also the regulations and when I asked a lot of people, a lot of big people, a lot of corporate types, big corporate types, I said, if you had your choice between just the taxes or just the regulations, where did I do better? He said, the regulations. I was the biggest cutter of reg in 4 years I cut more regulations than anybody by 4.
Nope. By far, not not even close. And when I spoke to different people about the regulation versus the taxes, I I don't think I've ever had anybody say and the taxes were a massive cut, you know, from 37, 38%, if you look at it just there, to 21%. I don't think I ever had anybody say that the taxes were more important than the regulation cuts. I made it possible to build.
I made it possible to do things to invest. I was able to get, companies with a lot of money outside of the USA to bring that money back in. You know, we cut the rate and it was crazy. The rate was like 55%. So that means if they bring the money back, they lose half their money before they even start.
But it was also, impossible from a standpoint, a structural standpoint, a legal standpoint. It's very hard And they were able to bring back I mean, Apple's an example. They brought 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars back from other countries into the United States and invested it here. So, but it's it's very interesting because I ask the question all the time, which was more important? And almost everybody said I did an even better job, and I got the biggest tax cuts.
The biggest tax cuts, bigger than the Reagan tax cuts, but they found regulations and the regulation cuts were even more effective. And that's where we had the great economy and that's where we had the most jobs ever produced.
Speaker 2: So there's this odd thing that happens in certain states where taxes keep going up, and then you start to see the states break. Right? Productivity breaks, crime goes up, and quality of life goes down. But then people don't understand that taxation and all of those things are correlated. Do you have an idea of why that is?
Like, why don't people understand universally that lower taxation is better for productivity?
Speaker 1: Well, they don't understand it and it's such an interesting question because you look at some of these places like Chicago and New York and and LA, and so many more. You know, I'd hate to even mention the 3 because there are worse examples than that. You look at what's happened in Oakland, and you look at what's happened into some cities that are disappearing. I mean, they're literally just crime waves. Nobody lives there except for criminals because you can't live there.
You can't survive there. Physically, you can't survive there. And when you look at the kind of crime that we're talking about and then they take the power away from the police, the police can't do anything. If they do anything to stop it, they end up losing their pension, their house, their family. They end up losing everything.
They get put in jail. And we're not talking about the rogue cops who do something really bad and should be taken care of badly. You know, be nasty. You gotta be nasty to them also. But mostly, I mean, they they these people, they wanna really like, 99%.
They wanna stop crime. They hate to see it. They're not allowed to even they're told not to do anything. When you see a department store that was so proud, they opened up a new store in a certain city, and all of a sudden this over the last couple of years this happened, this phenomena where 500 usually young people walk into the store and take everything. They have masks on, they walk out with television sets, air conditioners, they walk out with everything.
This is a new phenomena that's taken place and it's it's incredible. Look at drugstores. Look at what's going on. Like in New York, you walk into a chain. I've seen it twice.
I don't walk into too many drugstores but I used to love it. I used to love to walk around and just look at what it is, whether it's a drugstore or department store. But they told me just a little while ago, I had a meeting with some people and they say, you walk into a drugstore in New York and everything's covered up with bars and glass. And if you want just a little thing of aspirin or if you wanna buy a toothbrush, you have to wait a half an hour to get a clerk and they open up this vault and they give you a toothbrush or they give you it's how do you do business like that? This is a phenomena.
There's never been anything like this. They didn't use to have theft of of even the most minor items. They they had very little theft, relatively speaking. They didn't have theft, but they had the police would arrest them if they did something. Today, they don't.
They have limits sometimes. If you steal less than $2,000 you don't get arrested. So nobody steals more than $2,000. It's incredible when you see what's happened to the quality of life in our country, and it's happened so quickly. It's it's taken place so rapidly.
Nobody's ever seen anything. But you look at retail and I know the big deal. It used to be a big deal when a department store moved into a city or, you know, a certain store opened up even in a town. But it's usually the democrat run big cities where this problem is taking place. And I don't say that as a republican.
I just say, you look at the 25 cities, the top problems, they're just about all Democrat. They're Democrat run.
Speaker 2: And they're also high tax, high regulation states.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No cash bail. All all of these different things that have taken place, they're phenomena. It it's a phenomena. What's what's going on?
Nobody's ever seen anything like it, and it has to be stopped. It's a horrible quality of life. And on top of that, you can't walk to a store. You end up getting shot or mugged or something. The level of crime in the cities, in these big cities is is out of control.
Nobody has ever seen anything like it.
Speaker 4: Mister president, can I can I just ask on your point about the tax cuts? Larry Summers made a comment the other day, and I thought maybe you could respond to his tweet that the tax cuts coupled with the tariffs that you've proposed would cause a massive I think he called it the mother of all stagflation where you would have kind of inflation because of the tariffs. You would have economic decline because more money would start to fund an increase in prices with tax coming down, tax cuts being put in place. Can you maybe just comment on on on the comment made by Larry Summers and how we implement tax cuts without inflation.
Speaker 1: Well, let me say that I respect Larry Summers a lot. He's been right about a lot of things, and Obama and Biden have been wrong. Certain things that he said turned out to be true, certain things. And, he really I do have a good respect for him. He's a different kind of a guy, and he speaks his mind.
I happen to be a big believer in tariffs because I think tariffs give you 2 things. They give you economic gain but they also give you political gain. If if a country is out of control on something having nothing to do with economics or having nothing to do with with money coming in or money going out, but other things that are very political because there are a lot of other things involved in countries. You have tremendous power over a country. Now not everybody can say that but we can because we're the big piggy bank.
But our piggy bank is gonna get smaller and smaller all the time because we're losing power. We're losing a lot of, you know, countries on the dollar. I mean, they're going like flies. If we ever lose that, that's the equivalent of losing a a war. That would be a that would really make us 3rd world.
We have lost so many countries. I looked the other day. So Russia's gone, You you take a look. Ukraine doesn't sort of exist in a sense. Nobody knows what's going on there.
But when you look at China, it's essentially gone. They're trying to get out of it. They want they're a primary competitor. Iran is not there. The other day I read where Saudi Arabia is willing to now go in various different currencies instead of the dollar.
This is a tragedy. This is a big thing that's happening against our country, and we cannot let that happen. With tariffs, it gives you a tremendous power as an example not to let that happen. You say you wanna do that? We're going to put tariffs on your product coming into the United States.
But more importantly, and and that's a big importance, but probably of more importance is they tax us, we tax them, reciprocal trade. I think we should have a reciprocal trade act. If China's gonna charge us a $100 tariff or a 100% tariff on a car then we should say you're gonna pay a 100% to us. You know, I put on a large tariff on China cars coming in and it had a huge impact, a huge positive impact. But and Biden only is doing the electric cars.
I don't know why that is because the electric cars, they're gonna end up all being made in China, by the way. They're not gonna be made here. The United Auto Workers are gonna take a blow like no unions have. Between that and people coming in, pouring into our country, unions are getting absolutely decimated. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: President, Trump
Speaker 1: But the reciprocal the reciprocal act is, I think, a very important thing when these countries and I don't mean just China. We have other countries. You could take the European Union. They don't want our farm product and they don't want our cars and they don't want anything. We have a massive deficit right there.
But you could go with many countries and they essentially do things to us and we should do things to them. Basically, it should be reciprocal.
Speaker 3: One of the things we've talked about, President Trump, on this podcast a lot is the deficit. Under your administration we added close to 8,000,000,000,000. Under Biden it's gonna be paradoxically about the same number. Seems incredibly unpopular in Washington to cut costs, but that's something we're gonna need to do. What's your plan?
And it looks like you're gonna win a 2nd term here. What's your plan in your 2nd term to control spending? Can you get it under control? Is there the will in Washington to allow you to do that?
Speaker 1: Well, the biggest thing I think is growth because we can grow our way out. As an example, we have more liquid gold under our feet, I use the term. We have more oils. We have more wells. We have more everything than anybody else.
When I started, we were number 3. Now we're number 1. We were number 1. He's gonna keep it that way until after the election. If they ever won the election, there's no more oil coming out.
There's no more oil. They were going down. Oil is what caused the inflation. You'd have nothing coming out, it would be a disaster. So they were intelligent enough to let the the oil wells continue to go.
They're not happy about it. But if this election were won by them, I can tell you right now, you would be we would see oil go through the roof because they would really close it up. Already, they're taken out of the strategic reserves just for politics because they wanna try and keep the prices down as low as possible. But the big thing, we have tremendous growth potential and we have tremendous numbers of dollars that could be saved through efficiency. The way we're spending money, 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars, what Biden did with with the, 1,000,000,000 of dollars that he borrowed for COVID.
Now I had a different situation. We were getting ready to start paying off debt. We were getting ready to make a lot. We had the greatest economy in history. I had to throw a lot of money at COVID in order that we didn't end up in a 1929 type depression, which we could still end up in now because of what they've done.
But I threw a lot of money in and we ended up not in a depression and then we ended up with a very strong, you know, we I ended up with a higher stock market than it was just previous to COVID coming in, which was pretty much of a miracle according to most. But we had to throw money out there in order to keep our country going. We would have ended up if I didn't do that, we would have ended up in a depression. The problem is when Biden came in, he took 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 dollars for COVID. He didn't use it for COVID.
He used it for other things, but he took 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars out and that caused a lot of the inflation. Energy caused his energy policies caused inflation and his spending, the the unbelievable spending that they did caused inflation, tremendous inflation, and it's gonna have an impact for a long time to come.
Speaker 4: Can you talk about your impoundment authority intention? You mentioned that in the past that you could go in and reduce the bureaucracy and the spend. I always tell people my position going into the election is less than I'm interested in knowing what the government's gonna do for me, and I'm more interested in knowing what the government's gonna stop doing that doesn't do any good for anyone. And there seems to be a lot of that. And I'm really curious to hear, sir, how you think about using the impoundment authority vested in you as president of the United States to reduce some of the bureaucracy, wasteful spending, and create accountability, and what's the you you know, is there a team that that you built around you to help build a specific plan on on backing out of some of these issues?
Speaker 1: Right. We have a lot of money floating around that should be brought back into the government, should be given back to DC, to Washington. As you know, there's a lot of money given out over the last couple of years, especially over the last my money was given out to help us with COVID, then they took money and they have no idea what they're even doing with it. That money can be given back and it should be given back and things can be done with that money that are a positive. But we have there are many, many things.
I'll give you an example. Education. We spend more on education per pupil than any other country. We spend numbers that are and yet we're we're terrible at it. We're down at the bottom of the list and yet we're at the top of the list.
I would give I am going to very early in the administration. We're gonna send education back to the states. We're gonna give them approximately half the number of dollars, and they're gonna have so much money that, like, they've never had before because they can spend a fraction of what we're spending right now and have much better school systems. As an example, you go to very you could name many. You go to Nebraska, you go to Iowa, you go to many states.
We'll do a far better job than we're doing right now and they'll do it for a fraction of the cost. We'll save a tremendous amount of money and have better. Some states, I don't believe will do a very good job, but they're gonna have to learn to. But we have, I would say most of our states will do a much better job. I think all of them will do better than you can't do worse than what we're doing right now, but all of them will do better.
But some will be absolutely education, a factory in a positive sense, factories. We are going to close-up education. We'll have a tiny little group to make sure everyone's teaching at least English and perhaps proper math, etcetera, etcetera, but very little. Department of Education goes and education goes back to the states. And where it belongs.
I mean, where it absolutely belongs and you're gonna save a lot of money. You can look at interior with that. You can look at environmental with a lot of that, where the environment can be controlled by the states instead of this big bureaucracy in Washington DC. I mean, what do you do when China's burning all the coal and they're sending the they're sending the ashes over the United States? Because that's what happens.
Takes 3 and a half days and it blows over the United States. In the meantime, we're keeping things good. We produce clean coal. We're gonna produce clean energy, but we have to get back to energy. We're spending, a 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, on artificial weak energy that's not gonna fire up our plants.
Our plants have to be fired up. We have a phenomena coming up right now and I was talking about it the other day to David and that's AI. Little things simple tool, little simple letters, but it's big. And I realized the other day, more than any time when we were at David's house and talking to a lot of geniuses from Silicon Valley and other places, they need electricity at levels that nobody's ever experienced before to have to be successful, to be a leader in AI. The amount of electricity that is like double what we have right now and even triple what we have right now.
They are they are it's incredible how much they need to be the leader. And we're gonna have to be able to do that. And a windmill turning with its blade knocking out the birds and everything else is not gonna be able to make us competitive. You'll have China
Speaker 4: What about what about nuclear, mister president? Yeah. So let let me just give you a statistic
Speaker 2: on the China building
Speaker 4: a 150 nuclear reactors, and they're only spending about $25100 a kilowatt. In the US, we're not building any, and our cost to build them is about $10,000 a kilowatt. And China's about to build as much capacity as 20% of the total US production in nuclear. We clearly have a problem here in nuclear.
Speaker 1: We do and, nuclear is okay with me. And what we're doing is, you know, if you look at Alabama, you look at a couple of states where they built these plants and they had cost overruns that are nobody's ever seen anything like it. Where they're costing $25,000,000,000 to build a plant. There were a couple of them built in the south. I won't mention the places but you know the places and they came out at numbers that I think the most expensive things ever built in our country.
And the inspectors would go in, they say those walls aren't thick enough. Knock them down and build another wall. And, you know, the environmental people were brutal. You know, in France and in other places where they do have a lot of nuclear, they build small plants all the same and if they need double the amount, they'll build 2 of them as opposed to the nonsense that we've done where we build these massive plants and they never get built and they have cost overruns of of 3, 4, 500%. Nobody's ever seen anything like it.
No. I'm okay with nuclear, but you have to do it in a way that makes sense. And they they have nuclear applications today that can be built and can be built reasonably inexpensively, but nuclear certainly is very strong power.
Speaker 0: Can I shift the conversation to foreign policy just for a minute just to make sure we get we get time to talk about foreign policy? Is that okay with you guys?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Mister president, I really appreciate your your comments saying that you wanna bring a peace deal to the war in Ukraine so that people stop dying, and I wholeheartedly agree with with that sentiment. But I've seen that Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, is talking about actually putting NATO troops or French troops in Ukraine as potentially a next step and that could be a trip wire for more NATO troops coming in. Can you guarantee that no matter what, you're not gonna put American boots on the ground in Ukraine? Is that something you can say definitively
Speaker 3: on the ground?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do it. No. It's different for France. You know? They're neighbors more or less.
We have an ocean in between. It's different for Germany, although Germany is much less involved than they should be, and other countries. But, you know, we have a big ocean in between. One of the things I think is so unfair, David, I think it's terrible, is that we're giving probably we're at least a $100,000,000,000 more than Europe, meaning Europe as as a whole put together. And the economies are similar size, believe it or not.
That put together and us is about a very similar economy size. But it's much more important for them. It's important for everyone. You have to have look. This would have never happened if I were president.
It would have never Putin would have never done it. And it happened for two reasons. It also happened because oil went through the roof and he had he had all this money to prosecute the war. But the oil was at a much lower level, the price of oil. He wouldn't have been able to afford the war.
All of a sudden when it hit almost $100 a barrel, he said, you know, I mean, he he's one of the few to make money during a war because the oil has gone and it stayed very high. It's extremely high right now and it's going up. Oil prices all over the country are going up as you probably have noticed. But Yeah. I will tell you that would have never happened.
Ukraine would have happened never happened. The Israeli attack would have never happened, and inflation would have never happened. Those are 3 big things. Inflation would have never happened. But with Ukraine and now it's very much, look.
Ukraine is now I read the other day where they don't have the soldiers. They don't have the manpower. They wanna use children. They wanna use old people, very old people, people that are not really perhaps equipped to fight. They're not doing well.
Speaker 0: Of their soldiers, like, 43 now. So they're running out of they're literally running out of people. To make a peace deal there, would you be willing to take NATO expansion off the table if that's what it took to get the Russians and the Ukrainians to make a deal? Would you be willing to do that?
Speaker 1: No. For 20 years, I heard that NATO, if Ukraine goes into NATO, it's a real problem for Russia. I've heard that for a long time, and I think that's really why this war started. I'm not sure that this war would have started. Biden was saying all of the wrong things.
And one of the wrong things, he was saying no. Ukraine will go into NATO. That's one of the many things he said. When I listened to him speak, I said this guy is gonna start a war. Because as you know, for 4 years, there was never even talk of Russia going into Ukraine.
That would have never happened. Russia was not gonna attack Ukraine. As soon as I got out, they started to form along the lines, And I thought that Putin maybe will. He's a good negotiator. I thought he was gonna be doing that for negotiation purposes.
Then all of a sudden they attacked. And I said, what's going on here? But if you look at the rhetoric from Biden, he he was saying the opposite of what, in my opinion, you had to say. The things he was saying and he's still saying it. He's saying things that are so crazy.
Inflammatory.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I a 100% agree. And, you know, it turns out that the month before the Russians invaded, Blinken told Lavrov that the administration was not only gonna bring Ukraine into NATO, but that they thought it was okay for the United States to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine. So no wonder the Russians hit the roof. I mean, you talk about, provocation.
Speaker 1: Well, let's say you were running Russia, you wouldn't be too happy, and that's always been off the table. You know, they're it's a border. And it's always been you know, I don't think that they would have if they thought that that was going to remain sort of a territory where you don't have NATO but they don't wanna have soldiers right on their borders. They don't wanna have it. It's always been understood, and that's even before Putin.
It's always been understood that that was a no no. And now you can go against their wishes and it doesn't mean they're right when they say that, but that was very provocative. And now it's even more provocative. And they're talking about, I hear routinely they're now talking about Ukraine entering NATO, and now I hear France wants to go in a fight. Well, I wish a lot of luck.
I think good luck.
Speaker 2: Sir, can I ask you about Israel Palestine? So after October 7th, what's the right path to just resolve this once and for all and just move forward?
Speaker 1: Again, it's so sad to me because it would have never happened. Iran was broke. They had no money. I sanctioned countries that wanted to buy oil from Iran, and I would have made a fair deal with Iran. I was gonna get along with Iran.
I was gonna get along with everybody. We did the Abraham Accords. I think eventually Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords. We had 4 strong countries go in and nobody went in since I got out. That whole thing should have been loaded up right now.
Would have been it should have been full. They did nothing with the Abraham Accords that everybody said were great. They said we're gonna get the ultimate prize because of that. It was amazing. If anybody else did it if a Democrat did it, they would have they would have gotten, what they would have gotten every prize in the book every prize in the book.
But I did it, and it was a great thing that we did. It was a phenomenal thing. But when you look at what happened now and you see what's going on, it's very, very, very, very sad. That attack would have never happened in a 1000000 years. Iran didn't have the money for Hamas.
They didn't have the money for Hezbollah. They didn't have the money for any of the 28 other cells of terror or whatever you wanna call them. Iran was broke. I say respectfully. They had no money and they weren't given money.
And actually it was a big story when I was, toward the end of my term, there was a lot of big stories that there there was no terror going on because Iran didn't have the money. They had to survive. We would have made a deal good for everybody. Everybody would have been happy. The main thing is Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
That was my main thing. The deal was a simple deal. Iran can't have a nuclear, you know, it can't have a missile, can't have a nuclear missile. It cannot have that nuclear capability. Other than that, we talk about everything.
They would have been very happy. It would have been fine, and you would have had peace in the Middle East. The problem is I had them at a point where you coulda negotiated. A child coulda made a deal with them, and Biden did nothing. He did nothing.
Speaker 0: A child like to negotiate?
Speaker 1: A young man that do nothing or a young woman that do nothing in kindergarten could have made a deal with Iran at that time because they wanted to make a deal, and Biden never took advantage of it. Now they put back no sanctions, all of the different things that they gave him. China buys 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars of oil every month, many 1,000,000,000 of dollars a month other people are buying. So Iran now has $250,000,000,000 cash. They made it all in three and a half years, and now they're much tougher to deal with.
And I will tell you, I along great with Kim Jong Un. We solved that problem, but nobody was in danger. But this is a big problem. This is a real problem. And within 90 days or so, they're gonna have and could have very well a nuclear weapon.
And Israel is a big is a big difference in Israel between Iran with weapon, and lots of luck in that negotiation. That's gonna be a much more difficult negotiation.
Speaker 3: President Trump, I I wanted to ask you a question about, Roe v Wade. You promised, your base that you would overturn Roe v Wade. You added 3 people to the Supreme Court, and you delivered on that promise. This might be the issue that determines the election, and many people believe it is. Are you going to do a national abortion ban?
Would you support that? Yes or no?
Speaker 1: So, I don't need a national ban because it's up to the states. Right now, what I did is something that people have wanted to do for from day 1. 51 years it's been going on. And if you remember, over the years, you're too young, but over the years, all they wanted to do is they wanted to make take it out of the federal government and move it into the states. And I got that done with the selection of 3 great justices.
I got it done. And it was a big thing. But I will say over the last 10 years or maybe a little bit more than that, they started talking about the number of weeks and this and that. A lot of different subjects came in. It was no longer just simply bringing it back.
Every legal scholar from Democrat to Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted it brought given to the states. Because from a legal standpoint, from a lot of other standpoints including even a moral standpoint, they wanted it brought back to the states. And what I did is I got it back to the states. And now the states are in charge and the people are voting. And some votes are coming out the way certain people want it and some votes aren't coming out the way certain people want it.
I mean, if you look at Ohio, I would say it was a more liberal vote than people would have thought. And you could say that for Kansas, and then you look at Texas, it was a different story. But the people of the states have got that issue now and they're voting. And the one thing that we have to remember that there's been a lot of radicalism talked about and the radicalism is really on the left because they're willing to do abortions in the 8th 9th month month. And even beyond that, I mean, we have some people, the governor take a look at the governor of Virginia, the former governor of Virginia, where he talked about we will kill the baby after the baby is born.
That's a very radical stance and hopefully that's all gonna be taken off the table now. But just to put it simply, it's now up to the states. And like Ronald Reagan, I'm a believer in the exceptions, the 3 exceptions as you know. And, rape incest, life of the mother, the danger for the life of the mother. And we have a situation now where it's in the state's hands and the states are going to be, voting.
The last thing people want the people are gonna be voting. The last thing people want is for that to go back into the federal government. It was always fought and very importantly and people wanted it, they wanted it back in the states where it belongs legally and for a lot of other reasons.
Speaker 3: So you wouldn't support a national ban?
Speaker 1: No. I wouldn't support a national ban. No. I would not.
Speaker 4: Just shifting back to foreign policy for a moment, mister president, on the relationship with China. It's funny how Democrats and Republicans seem to have a unified voice and banging the drums on the the rise of China. Do you think that war with China is inevitable? And if not, how do we avoid it?
Speaker 1: I think it's not inevitable. I think it's unlikely. I know president Xi very well, and we got along great until COVID, then I wasn't so happy with him because they gave it to us. I said it came from the Wuhan lab. I was right about that.
They said then it started in Italy and then it started in France, it started everywhere but there, but it started in China. And it was a, many, many millions of people died all over the world and cost the world probably $60,000,000,000,000, which is more money than China has and more money than anybody has. The death and destruction has been unbelievable, but I think it's I think it's high if you have the right president, we can live at peace with China. We can do very well with China, compete with China, but we don't have the right president right now. He's not respected by China.
He's being laughed at by China, and he's a Manchurian candidate. I mean, he's received money from China, his family, and that makes him to me, somebody that shouldn't be negotiating. I think he's got a conflict of interest, but, no, I don't see war with China as being inevitable at all.
Speaker 3: President Trump, do you think that Fauci and our government funded gain of function research? And do you think we should really be pursuing the investigation deeply into that? And if we did fund gain of function research, what does that say about our government and taking ownership of it? Because a lot of us lost a lot of years. Kids didn't go to school and, it caused economic damage.
As you pointed out earlier, the amount of money you had to spend to try to avoid a depression was really severe. And if we funded that, what does that make you think about our government and then Fauci covering it up? If that is in fact true, what does that make you think about our government?
Speaker 1: So if you remember, I'm the one that stopped it. And I stopped it maybe for, a lucky reason or an unusual reason. I said, why are we paying money to China? It wasn't about gain of function or anything else. It was why are we paying money to China?
China's got a lot of money, and they're doing fine. You know, we're considered like, we they want us to consider them a growing nation, a a nation in distress, all sorts of things because they always take advantage of every treaty by saying that they need, you know, their, an improving nation. I heard the other day they have all different terms for changing, but they're a growing nation. Well, we're a growing nation too. We're a nation that's becoming a third world nation based on what we're seeing, But I was the one that stopped that when I saw that.
I was the one that stopped that. The Fauci thing is an interesting phenomena. He's a much I was not a big fan of his. As you know, he said, no. Let everybody come in from China.
I overrode him on that. I overrode him on a lot, but he wanted the people from China. When I heard about this, I stopped it. We had a room loaded up with people and nobody could even believe it, but I stopped it. We would have lost 100 of thousands of people more, maybe more much more maybe over the millions, but 100 of thousands of people more had I not stopped people coming in from China.
Speaker 3: Did he lie to you about the origin of COVID?
Speaker 1: Well, I've always said the origin was, you know, where it came from. Where it originally came from was the Wuhan lab. I happen to think it escaped from the Wuhan lab. I mean, I don't believe it came from, the bats in 2 1000 miles away caves. I don't believe it came from other countries as China tried to convince people it did.
I thought it should have been called the China virus because it was a very much more accurate term than COVID. Nobody knows what COVID even means. Why is it COVID? But, no. I was always,
Speaker 3: But did Fauci lie to you, I guess, is what the American people wanna know. Did Fauci lie to you? And if he did, should he be prosecuted?
Speaker 1: I don't think, I dealt you have to understand, Fauci was a much bigger factor in the Biden administration than he was in the Trump administration. I didn't rely on him that much because I didn't trust him. I would say, got along with him, fine. Not really, but I didn't trust him. And, again, I was the one that stopped the money going to China.
I didn't like it. I didn't stop it because of COVID. I didn't stop it because of anything other than why are we paying money to China? It was strange. They should pay us money.
We shouldn't pay them money. And one of the things I can tell you, the World Health Organization. So we pay them almost $500,000,000 and China pays them $39,000,000. And so I got out of the World Health Organization. They did absolutely nothing.
They called it totally wrong. I got out. They called me and they said we'll do anything to keep you in, anything anything. I said, well, why are they paying 39,000,000? We're paying almost 500,000,000.
And they said, well, we'll work out a deal where you could pay much less. I said, well, now you're starting to talk but even that, it was very popular when I got out. It was a very politically, it would have been very hard to go back in. People were thrilled that I got out. I could have made a deal to go in for 39,000,000.
They offered me a deal to go in for 39,000,000 and I actually turned it down. I said, you know, it should be a it should be, if you look at we're 350,000,000 and they're at 1,400,000,000 people. Right? So it should have been 25% or less than that, but I didn't wanna quibble. But I could have gone back in immediately for $39,000,000 as opposed to 500.
Then a a horrible, horrible election which helped destroy our country took place in 2020, and they went back in. And they're paying more than $500,000,000, and they knew I could have made a deal. Now it's a lot of money, not when you talk about the world, but it's still a lot of money and it but it shows you the stupidity of the whole thing. They could have made a deal for 39,000,000, instead they're paying much more than they paid even before. And that's the way the mindset of our country is.
And here's the big part, China totally controls the WHO. China totally controls them. We have very little control over them. And now they wanna give control over our whole country to them, which would be a terrible mistake.
Speaker 2: Fauci brings up sort of the kind of deep state personality that you talked about in 2016 that's kind of, like, riddled all over the government. How much progress do you think you made, and how what do you want to do if you become president in November? And do you have goals around the deep state this time around? And what are they?
Speaker 1: Well, I have a lot of things. I mean, I did a lot of things at the FBI. I fired a lot of their top people, including Comey, who's terrible at what he did, a terrible person and terrible at what he did. I fired McCabe and, you know, I don't have to go through Lisa and Strzok, you know, all of the the lovers and acquired a whole group of people. I got rid of them.
And, and, you know, so many of the agents are so incredible in the FBI down below, but, we got rid of a lot. We, you take a look at the world health again. We got out of the world health. We got out of the this is a similar thing that, you know, this is really similar to your answer, but we got out of the World Health Organization, which was a tremendous thing. We got rid of the Paris Accord.
The Paris Accord was a disaster for us. We were gonna pay a $1,000,000,000,000 and other countries were paying nothing. Russia was paying nothing. China was paying nothing. It didn't even kick in for China until 2030, whereas with us it kicked in immediately.
So I got rid of the Paris Accord. I did a lot of things having to do with not only people but tremendous amounts of money because the Paris Accord was so unfair. And I said, you know, when I do this, people are not gonna like it but I have to do it because it's right. People loved it. The public understood it.
They loved it. And now they've gone back into the Paris Accord at the same terms and even worse than the terms I got out. It's really a shame. It's so many things. It's so sad to see so many things.
I I mean, the WHO, the Paris Accord, you take a look at these things, they could have gone back if they wanted to go back, if they hadn't, they could have gone back for a fraction of what they were doing. And they're very unfair to the United States. We're like a lap dog for every other country.
Speaker 0: Mister president, I I know you're running out of time here. So but I we haven't had a chance to for you to speak to the border situation yet, so I wanna give you a chance to to address that because that's always been really one of the your main issues since always since 2016. You wanted to build a wall. The democrats did everything they could to thwart that. You built the the wall, but then Biden left a bunch of holes in it and then sold off the parts for scrap metal.
Speaker 3: And now
Speaker 0: we've had the and repealed your executive orders. So I wanna give you a chance to speak to that. Just but one piece I wanna just add in as a follow-up question is a lot of tech CEOs say, if we fix the border, can we get more h one b's for tech workers? So can you address that as well as what's going on at the border?
Speaker 1: Yes. So, we built hundreds of miles of well, David, as you know, and, we're very proud of it. We did it as per specification by the border patrol. They wanted exactly the wall that we did with the climb paddle on top with steel, concrete, and then rebar, and all of the things that they wanted they wanted to have vision through it, clearly through it. And because I thought about concrete plank, frankly, going up 40 or 50 feet, and they they didn't like that.
They wanted to have vision through, and I understood that too. I sort of disagreed with it but that's okay. We actually brought climbers in, Mount Everest climbers to climb and and we built a very hard wall to climb. It's it's a very effective wall. And we built, hundreds of miles and then we we're gonna add quite a bit at the very end, And we we bought about 200 additional miles and it was ready to be put up, could have been put up in 3 weeks, maybe 4 weeks.
And areas that were rough areas that were people coming in because as you build the wall they go in different areas. Right? They go further out. The it was so effective. It was so effective.
Mexico gave us a lot of troops for free because of a certain negotiation that I had with them. You heard that. But it was so effective, the wall. But Biden, they didn't wanna put up those slats that were going up routinely by us. That means you had gaps, you had, as an example, you had gates in certain area that we put up.
We were going to put up big powerful gates that we could open and, you could let equipment through etcetera etcetera, if you needed it. And they got rid of everything. They sold it for 5¢ on the dollar, much of it 5¢ on the dollar. I said, I can't believe it. And that's the first time that I said they're serious.
They actually want open borders. They want an open border. Nobody could believe it. I couldn't believe it because I never believed they wanted an open border because who would be stupid enough to want an open border? Look what's happened with an open border.
I was very proud of that. We built we had the safest border in the history of our country, and now we have the worst border in the history of the world. We had a safe border. I had a remain in Mexico policy, catch and release in Mexico, not in the United States. Everything was so good.
But the remain in Mexico was a big deal. Not easy to get, but it was a big deal. They were in Tijuana, 100 of thousands of people. They had to be approved to come into our country. And now, you look at what's happened.
We've been overrun. It's an invasion of our country by people. Many people come out of jails and prisons. They come out of mental institutions, insane asylums, and we have terrorists coming into our country at a level that we've never seen before. It's a very sad
Speaker 0: I never understood why the wall was so controversial. You know? Every country needs to have a border, and a wall's a really good way to enforce a border. I never understood why they were so animated about stopping you from building the wall after you ran on that issue in 2016, they held you up for years with litigation and then like you said, they wouldn't just finish the little pieces of it, and they left big holes in it. And I think you're right.
The only conclusion is they want an open border. I mean, how else do you explain that?
Speaker 1: They wanna destroy our country. You know, the fact is it's it's incredible. The big mistake I made, I should have said, I will not build a wall. We do not want a wall. And that wall would have gone up in 15 minutes.
Speaker 3: The more important point, I think, mister president, is we need high skilled workers in this country. Yes. We need to recruit the best and brightest in the world. Every time we get somebody super intelligent from India or Europe, any country,
Speaker 4: that's the ones immigrants, sir.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And 3 of the 4 here are immigrants, the ones without the ties. And we can get these great people into our country, and that's a loss for our adversaries and our competitors, and it's a gain for us, but I've never heard you talk about this. Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.
Speaker 1: I do promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promised. Otherwise, I wouldn't promise. Let me just tell you that it's so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools, and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came in and, you know, sort of dominated for a little while as you perhaps know.
But what I wanna do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college. You go in there for 2 years or 4 years. If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.
And you know more stories than I do, but I know of stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college. And they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can't. They go back to India. They go back to China.
They do the same basic company in those places, and they become multi billionaires employing 1,000 and thousands of people and it could have been done here. And a bigger example is you they they you need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies and they have to be smart people. Not everybody can be, less than smart. You need brilliant people.
And we force the brilliant people, the people that graduate from college, the people that are number 1 in their class from the best colleges, you have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people. It was such a big deal. Somebody graduates at the top of the class. They can't even make a deal with the company because they don't think they're gonna be able to stay in the country. That is gonna end on day 1.
Speaker 2: That's fantastic.
Speaker 0: Yeah. That's great. Well, I think we all wholeheartedly agree with that. Being being in the being in the tech industry, we we understand the importance of that. They're telling us that you have to go to DeDermis president, so thank you so much for spending so much time with us.
We really appreciate it. It's been great having this conversation with you.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I have to ask, sir.
Speaker 3: I have
Speaker 2: to ask one question, sir. When you got elected in 20 in the 2016 election, you said the first thing or one of the things you wanted to do was release the JFK file. And then you said later, I saw it and I just I wasn't really ready to do it. And then I saw a clip where you changed your mind and you said, I think we're ready to see this file. And I'm just curious What's in it?
What what I'm telling you right now. What happened? Like, what
Speaker 1: I actually did do it. I released a lot as you know. But when it came to the whole thing, I was hit by some people that worked for me that are great people that you would respect, and they asked me not to do it and I'm saying why? Tell me why. And they said, sir, I think it needs a little more time.
And I released a lot but I said, if they feel so strongly, I respect the people and would would have done that again. But this time, I'm just gonna do it.
Speaker 3: RFK says the CIA killed his his, uncle. Do you believe that?
Speaker 1: Well, this wasn't CIA that asked me, but I think CIA was probably behind it. But they didn't they would have preferred that I not release the rest of it. So we we did give quite a bit. It's gonna be done early on. A lot of people wanna see that.
And whatever it may say, I won't say. I sort of have an idea. But, whatever it is, it'll be very interesting for people to see, and we're gonna have to learn from it.
Speaker 3: Promise us she'll come back again, mister Hudson.
Speaker 1: You know, there are other things we're gonna release too. We're gonna release a
Speaker 3: lot of things. What else do you got?
Speaker 1: We'll talk to you about it off camera. Italians? By the way, I generally speaking and there are reasons not to release certain things, obviously. But, I general you know, it's transparency and I I think it's important that we release that. And there are other things too.
There are other things that, you know about. But people, more than anything else, they want the JFK files. We're gonna release that immediately.
Speaker 3: Do you have a prediction for the debate next week? What's gonna happen?
Speaker 1: Well, all I can say is this. I watched him with Paul Ryan and he destroyed Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan with the water. He was chugging water at a left and right. I didn't think a human being would be able to drink so much water at one time.
And he beat Paul Ryan. So I I'm not underestimating him. I'm not underestimating him. We it is what it is. We'll see what happens, but you take a look at the last one.
I'd happen to think he's incompetent for a lot of reasons. I think he's incompetent because he has gotten the worst policies both foreign policy and internal policy. I mean, who would not wanna have a wall? Who wants to have millions of people pouring in? Who wants to have high taxes?
You know, taxes are gonna raise by 4 times if this guy has this plan.
Speaker 3: Is he in cognitive decline? Do you believe he's in cognitive decline, mister president?
Speaker 1: I I shouldn't be the one to say that, but I don't think he's doing particularly well. But I didn't think he was well 25 years ago. I thought he was not a smart person, And that was told to me by a certain member of the Kennedy family who was actually very friendly with me through a Palm Beach relationship. And I was told that very strongly but so I was never a fan of his. But I will say he beat, he beat Paul Ryan.
Still years ago, but he beat Paul Ryan pretty badly. And, I assume he's gonna be, somebody that will be a worthy debater. Yeah. I would say. I think I I don't wanna underestimate him.
Alright.
Speaker 0: I think that's smart. Well, your your your team is telling us that, they need you to go to a dinner, mister president. Obviously, we could keep going for hours and hours, but, it's been
Speaker 1: great to
Speaker 0: to we could. But it's been great to great to have you for the last hour here, and it's been great to getting to know you at the the dinner that we did, and we hope that you'll come back on our show. Podcasts are getting bigger and bigger. So, hopefully, in your 2nd term, you'll come on here, and, talk to us again.
Speaker 1: Think Biden would do this interview? I don't
Speaker 0: think so. Not.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I don't
Speaker 1: think so.
Speaker 2: Lost I don't think so.
Speaker 0: The one question. Him.
Speaker 3: I don't
Speaker 2: think so. In these
Speaker 1: interviews. Yeah. So that's it's an honor to be with you all. Very good question.
Speaker 4: We appreciate it, sir. Thank you. Very appreciate
Speaker 2: it very much, sir.
Speaker 4: Thank you
Speaker 3: very much. Thank you, sir. There you have it. Wow. That was some hour, boys.
What do we think?
Speaker 4: Let's do a wrap up.
Speaker 3: I gotta do a do a
Speaker 2: little wrap up here. Whoo.
Speaker 4: J. Cal, what are your what are your big takeaways?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm undecided as you know. We do we had a limited amount of time with him and
Speaker 2: obviously just say it. Just say it. You like him. You didn't you were
Speaker 4: just say it.
Speaker 2: Just say it because it's written all across your face. Just say it. You like him. You're confused. I I
Speaker 3: have some water. He crushed
Speaker 0: your questions. No. He crushed
Speaker 3: your questions. Admit it.
Speaker 2: He crushed some questions. You you asked great questions, and he just dealt with them head on. Just admit it. You like them. You like him.
You look at him.
Speaker 3: Look. Well, I do
Speaker 4: like him. I told you you'd like him to become my point.
Speaker 2: Whether you whether you come out of here wanting to vote for the president or not Sure. Everybody needs to, I think, just sit in a room and just hear him out. If you're if you if you want me
Speaker 3: to answer the question, what I'll say is there there are some blockers I have that we didn't get to. January 6th, obviously. I did you know, one of the blockers I have is obviously Roe v Wade, and I think he handled that question really well. And I think we may have gotten a little bit of breaking news there in terms of him saying he would not do the national ban. And I I think that's a big concern people have, and I think that's maybe the issue according to a lot of experts.
I'm sorry to sound like Trump.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 3: A lot of experts. People believe that could be the deciding issue, of the election. And so I I think he handled it really well by saying the states are gonna choose, and he's not gonna do the federal ban. He is the exception.
Speaker 0: He was very unequivocal about that. Really clear that he would not do a national ban. Really clear that the states would decide. And furthermore, he understood that the states are deciding. There's been a bunch of referenda at the same level, and they are generally coming out at on the pro choice side, and he indicated that he understood that some of the votes are not turning out the way the people Which
Speaker 3: he's bought. 80% of people want. Right. Eighty percent of people
Speaker 0: He's gonna respect democracy. Yeah. He's gonna respect democracy on that issue. Yeah. So I think he he nailed that that question.
Speaker 2: I think he was very definitive about Ukraine not entering NATO, and I think he was very definitive about an h one b policy that's pro productivity and immigration.
Speaker 3: That was the part I like best if I'm being
Speaker 2: And giving grads green cards, that's like such a good
Speaker 3: That's breaking news too, by the way. I think we elevated the discussion about immigration beyond the wall and into recruitment, which is what I have been trying to do on this podcast for a couple of years here now. So to hear the president say, I will do that for you because I want that. That to me was palatable. And, you know, there's a lot of things I agree with him on.
And the January 6th up, we didn't get to. So apologies to the audience on that. I know a lot of people have feelings about it. But, you know, you can only get so much from 50 minutes of interview. I think you did a great
Speaker 4: job of that.
Speaker 0: Did a whole town hall on that issue. I mean, quite frankly, I felt like we dealt with a lot of substance here. So but, Shamath, I agree with you. He was really clear on Ukraine. He went further than he has in the past.
In the past, he said that he'll get a peace deal very quickly, and then he wants the people to stop dying. But in this interview, he went further. He said that if France or other European countries send in troops the US definitely will not participate in that we are not going to send American boots on the ground the Biden administration I don't think has said that definitively the way that president Trump said it. Moreover, he understood that a major cause of the war was the desire to bring Ukraine into NATO. And I've never heard I've never heard anyone in the administration say that.
And he went further and said they keep saying these provocative things about you know, even now they keep repeating that Ukraine's gonna be part of NATO. So he understood he understood the provocation there.
Speaker 3: What's your take on him? You haven't come out and said who you're voting for, but this is your first time interacting with him, albeit for 50 minutes in a group setting. But what are you
Speaker 4: what's your question? It's a diff it's a difficult forum because we can't go deep and ask responsive questions, and we don't have a lot of time, and there's 4 of us trying to ask questions. So the format is a little difficult to get to the heart of the matter on on some of these complicated topics like federal spending.
Speaker 3: Yes. We need 2
Speaker 4: hours. Debt. Yeah. And and I think you need to just be able to, like, hone in on the question. You know, his response on how we're gonna reduce kind of the bureaucratic overhead and the wasteful spending in the federal government and he kind of pivoted to the Department of Education.
That's 3% of the federal budget. I wanna talk about the rest of it and, you know, we're at it. It took us 200 years as a country to add a $1,000,000,000,000 to our federal debt to go from 0 to a trillion, and now we're adding a trillion every 100 days. And it's gonna take a lot more than just 1 to 3% cuts in spending to get us out of the, you know, the spiral, that we're in. I also am concerned very, I I think very rightly so, and I think he acknowledges the concerns that were mentioned by Larry Summers that tariffs plus tax cuts could lead to serious inflation and economic contraction.
Those are really difficult things to do together unless you have a very clear plan for massively cutting spending at the federal level. So I don't feel like I got to the heart of the matter on those points, and as you guys know, that's what I care so deeply about. I think we need to fix the machine to be able to do the things we want the machine to do over time, and I'm I'm very deeply worried about that.
Speaker 0: You know, I had a a couple of reactions to that. So number 1 is I thought it was interesting how he reacted to the question about Larry Summers because he knows Larry Summers, and he actually said several very complimentary things Yeah. Towards him. So he may not agree with him on everything, but he said that Larry had gotten a bunch of things right, and he's an interesting guy. And and Larry did get the inflation call right.
Remember at the very beginning.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 0: Of the Biden administration. So it was interesting. I thought that president Trump handled that question very tactfully, I think. It's not like he wasn't looking to attack anyone or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Do we really buy he's gonna do this terrorist thing anyway? Like, it seems like that's a bit of pandering maybe to the voter base. It sounds like a great solution. Right? But I don't think he's gonna do it.
Yeah.
Speaker 4: Once the economic advisers get together and look at the analysis and what this will do to cost of things, inflation will go up, etcetera. You know, maybe there's a rethink ultimately on how that's implemented and on what particular slices of the economy it's implemented. So I'm sure, as you point out, it probably gets toned down for this to, you know, to even become a reality. It seems quite
Speaker 0: a bit On the on the second piece, on the the deficit, you know, Jay, how you asked a pretty tough question there where you basically said, look, your your your def the debt has grown as much under your first term as it does under Biden. Remember that? The 8 trillion or something.
Speaker 3: It's almost exactly the gonna be the same. 6.5 to date from Biden's 7.8 trillion for
Speaker 0: Trump. Answer, which was that, look, We had the 1st year of COVID. We were dealing with, you know, a depress a potential depression. Yeah. Yeah.
That the economy GDP was down 30%.
Speaker 4: Yeah. He talked about 1929. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Exactly. So he basically explained that we had to do that. But then after that, we shouldn't have kept going. And I do think that Trump is just not as big a spender as Biden.
I mean, look, Biden's been in Washington for 50 years. He thinks government's the answer for everything. He loves spending money, and he spent trillions on COVID even after we didn't need to. So I get the sense that Trump was a reluctant spender. I'm not saying he didn't spend, Whereas Biden, I think, is a eager spender.
And Yeah. I just I I
Speaker 4: I think that I think any politician
Speaker 3: wants to spend because it's popular. I just think it's their nature.
Speaker 0: I think if Trump had the power by himself to reign in spending, I think he would. I think the issue is that the president by himself can't do that much.
Speaker 3: Which is what my follow-up question was. Right? I was trying to ask him, like, can you actually do it as president or not? Like, is there the wherewithal to do it?
Speaker 4: I think the other aspect I wanted to see I'm really glad he talked about dedollarization. And I he mentioned it upfront. And so that to me really resonated. It really rings true to the effect of US spending, US foreign policy. So much of this is driving, and I'm concerned about, right, driving the Saudis into the arms of the Chinese and and other foreign adversaries to the United States, and I would have really liked to have spent a little time with him on the Saudi relationship, where he sees that headed, how the Saudi relationship will affect the Middle East, and how the Saudi relationship could affect the US dollar and, and dollar reserves around the world.
But I think he's acutely aware of de dollarization and, foreign reserves in dollars being sold down and that the there are serious effects to that. I didn't hear a follow-up on, like, what the specific responses will be, you know, to, to the drivers there, which I I I would have loved to spend a little more time on.
Speaker 3: Shaf, what do you think will be the viral moments to come out of this, if any? What do you think the mainstream media or social media will take from this? Any moments you think we're breaking news or notable?
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a lot of clarity on a couple of important points. One is no federal ban on abortion. I think that that's important news for a lot of people. The second is this clarity on h one b's, which is very different from what has to be done at the border, and I think that was very clear and new. And I think it's very positive for our community, meaning the tech Absolutely.
I think Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's why I'm pushing it right now.
Speaker 2: We need that clarity because we're trying to hire these people and we are losing them every day. And then the third was, I think, the clarity on NATO was also very definitive, and I think that that's important. The 4th, which was an implication of what he said, which is a little depressing is I think there's a lot of us that wanna see this Israeli Palestine conflict resolved. And I think what he's saying is we can't because we've let the genie out of the bottle. We have an adversary now with a quarter of a $1,000,000,000,000 of excess cash who has no incentive to negotiate.
Speaker 3: Iran.
Speaker 2: That's right. So that's really depressing. And then the 5th one was around this JFK thing. I the reason why I asked the JFK question is not necessarily that I have a specific interest in JFK, but it's emblematic of it's a proxy for this deep state, this idea of secrets or this idea of there's a layer of people that are embedded in the United States government that decides on behalf of all of us. And I think when you have somebody who can push back against that and use transparency and sunlight as the cleansing function, that is what we need.
Speaker 3: If we're gonna rebuild trust in our government and institutions, we're gonna need a lot more transparency. And if that one's hanging out there, why not resolve it? I mean, I did he say he thinks the c I CIA did it? I think I heard him say that. I think CIA
Speaker 2: didn't. What I heard was he said the CIA was behind the people that were influencing him not to.
Speaker 4: No. I think what he said was they sent the information out. He also clear
Speaker 0: about that because it could be it could be quoted out of context. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We're gonna need to see the transcript on that.
Speaker 4: He did not say that he thought the CIA was behind.
Speaker 2: He didn't come anywhere close. Right. He said that he thought the CIA was behind Influence. That we're telling him Yeah. To not do it, and he listened to them out of trust and respect for them, which I think that's a reasonable judgment in the moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We gotta see that transcript. Yeah.
Speaker 2: My point is exposing that is a very important way of giving the influence and power back to the people. Absolutely. I've I've mentioned this quote from Mike Pompeo, which is really powerful, but it's something to the effect of, you know, the people on the top floor of the CIA do not believe it's a Democrat or a Republican that runs America, but that they do. And he said that in the context of being asked, what is the one regret you have or some of the biggest regrets you have in running the CIA. And Pompeo said that he didn't fix that.
So I think that there's a lot of embedded versions of this establishment class that lurk in many institutions, whether it's the EPA, whether it's the CIA, whether it's the NIH. And if there are ways in which the president can unlock the data that's necessary or the information for all of us to have a little bit more clarity on what's happening, I think it's important. And I do think for many people that the JFK file is representative of a lot of them.
Speaker 3: Well, and then dovetailing that, Sachs, the Fauci discussion where he said, I don't trust I didn't I never trusted Fauci, and then kind of pushing it on like, hey. Do you think you should be prosecuted? Did we fund it or not? Seems pretty clear. He believes we funded Dana Research.
His position was, I just didn't wanna spend the money, which I appreciate about it. With China. With China. Yeah. You wouldn't spend
Speaker 0: the money in China. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And and so I cut what did you think of that point? Yeah.
Speaker 0: Well, I I thought that his response on that was similar to a a lot of his responses, which is he did not take the edgy position that he was sort of being teed up to take. I mean, kinda like same thing with, like, the Larry Summers thing. You know, he he had mild criticism, I thought, for Fauci, but he didn't go scorched earth at all on on Fauci there. And
Speaker 3: Wait. So he didn't trust him. He said, I haven't trusted him. Nobody That's pretty much scorched earth for politicians.
Speaker 0: Nobody nobody trusts, Fauci. You asked him whether Fauci should be prosecuted. He did not take the bait on that. That's my point.
Speaker 4: Very respectful, actually. I I was very surprised to hear how he respected Fauci and how he framed the his response to that question, and I think that says a lot.
Speaker 2: But can I tell you why you're surprised? Because I think we have been fed. This is what I'm saying. We have been fed a narrative of what president Trump looks like. Now in fairness, we're also being fed a narrative of what president Biden is like.
And this is why you have to see these men up close and personal for yourself because, David, the fact that you're surprised is less about the fact that Donald Trump has changed.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It's more the fact that you've been told a narrative and you've believed it. And so now when you see the actual truth, you have to reunderwrite. Hold on a second. He's actually pretty thoughtful. He's pretty presidential.
He doesn't go off on people. That's not what you probably thought going in because that's not what the mainstream media portrays about what you should be thinking about.
Speaker 3: But he in fairness, he has gone in on people pretty hard of the last 8 years.
Speaker 0: He's a counter puncher. I don't think he hits people unless they hit him first. I mean, that's his pattern. But look. I I I agree with Chamath here that my overall take on this and, look, my position is is clear because I wrote a long post on x endorsing Trump a couple weeks ago.
But everything I heard here in this interview was consistent with the reasons why I stated I want to support him. He clearly favors a pro growth agenda. He wants to keep taxes low or and reasonable. He wants to reduce regulations. He's wanted to increase the number of h one b's, get the dream team over here for tech while sealing the border, while cutting down on crime in blue cities.
They talked about how crime was out of control. He wants to negotiate peace deals. He I think understands very well why we have this war going on in Europe. Overall, I heard a lot of reassuring things, and I didn't hear anything that I would put in the category of a grievance or a desire for revenge. You know?
The media is trying to portray him as, like, seeking vengeance or something like that.
Speaker 3: Well, that's because he says he is. Didn't get didn't get that out of nowhere. Again. Let's be clear. He said over again, I will be your retribution.
So he may not have said it on this podcast.
Speaker 0: Did you get any of that in this interview?
Speaker 3: No. I've just heard him say it 50 times in the last 60 days. So,
Speaker 4: But, Sacks, where would you like to have seen him be stronger?
Speaker 0: Clip played over and over again on CNN.
Speaker 3: Where would
Speaker 4: you like to have seen him be stronger or different on any of his major positions? What what would you as his adviser advise him to shift or double down on a bit?
Speaker 0: Well, I mean, I think Chamath is is right that with respect to the Middle East, the I think his position isn't perfectly clear because it's not only about Iran in the Middle East. Right?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 0: But the truth of the matter is, politically, I don't know that he could say more, and, you know, I think that's just a very, very tough issue where you're bound to alienate and polarize one side or the other. And so I think he's sort of definitely walking a tight rope there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When he said it would never have happened, like, I'm always like, you know, like, it would never happen to me. I would like to have a little more of the why. Why do you believe that? And he never gets into the details.
He just says that over and over.
Speaker 0: But maybe he's right. You know? Like, when I hear Trump talk, what I hear is someone who's a deal maker. He was a deal maker in business. Now he's a deal maker politically.
He's willing to have conversations with anybody. There was even a moment when he's talking about Iran where he said maybe he could have worked out a deal, but in any event, he's somebody who I think is willing to negotiate, which is I think is a positive thing because when's the last time Biden negotiated anything? He doesn't seem interested
Speaker 3: at all. I mean, I I didn't get to ask, but, you know, one of the things that had chewed up was, you know, I just think you've done a phenomenal job in talking to people who most people feel are difficult people to get along with, you know, Kim Jong Un, Xi, Putin. I think it's his superpower is talking to dictators, despots, people who are cantankerous and difficult, and he always seems to get the better of them or at least get he at least gets our interests as Americans aligned with whatever their interests are.
Speaker 4: So I think
Speaker 2: let me ask you
Speaker 3: give him any plus on that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I I don't wanna be insulting. I'm asking like, in the past, you've said that he was embracing the dictators and he was kowtowing to them. I think you've said comments like that in the past where you've you've yes. Or something that felt like he was more trying to embrace and engage with them in a way that's like, why would
Speaker 3: you I've always felt you should talk to everybody all the time. You know, that that's not my issue with Trump. You know, it's never been my issue with him.
Speaker 4: I think that's
Speaker 3: our superpower. The fact that he went into North Korea and stepped over in the DMZ, you you saw the look on Kim Jong Un's face. He just Kim Jong Un just wants a little attention. He wants a little recognition. And this idea, like, we're not gonna give him any recognition is stupid because if you give him a little recognition, now you're sort of tilting him towards, Hey, maybe you could be part of this.
Like, maybe you could come to the West and see a movie premiere or come to the NBA finals, as opposed to start lobbing, you know, dysfunctional missiles over Japan. Like, me looking kinda
Speaker 4: You know that video where they're, like, setting up their little press shooting in the in the conference room with oh my god. That video is so funny.
Speaker 3: Kim Jong un's face when
Speaker 4: he's in the process. You want me to go over?
Speaker 3: I'll go should I go over? Should I
Speaker 4: do it now? I'll I'll
Speaker 3: go over. Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna walk up. Okay. And Kim Jong un is beaming, and you're like, he just played them.
He played them. Like, he walked 10 feet into North Korea, and now Kim Jong un's like, you know what? I don't need this much.
Speaker 4: I guess my my my big unanswered question, I did wanna ask him about, like, Dalio's prediction of, like, the cycle of empires, 500 years, 600 years of cycles. With that.
Speaker 2: Well, let's just say counterfactual, Freebrook. What do you what do you how do you compare the answers you've heard to what you have heard or what you think president Biden's answers would be to the things that you care about?
Speaker 4: I honestly feel like there's a little bit of a blinder to the question, like there's a pivot back to what I've done, what I'll do versus the like, let's actually talk about where we are in the debt cycle, and this is exactly what like history repeating itself. At the time that you take on all the debt, you drive internal conflict. January 6th is a great, like, data point. You drive external conflict. We've had 2 or 3 wars start in the last 4 years.
How do we reverse those things so that we don't repeat history? And we sat down with Dali and we asked him this question, is there a way to not repeat history? And he said, yes, there is. And we talked with Graham Allison about this, and all these guys believe that there's a way to avoid it. There have been moments where we've nearly had the external conflict, and that's why I asked him about war with China.
But I wanna understand if there is this broader kind of construct of what is going on. Because he he hits on all the data points correctly. Deduollarization, increased spending, bloated bureaucracy, conflicts around the world without taking it all into perspective and saying, man, like, this is where empires died. I guess he does say that. Right?
He he does actually highlight exactly what Dalio
Speaker 3: He doesn't do what Malay does, though. Right? Like, Malay has said to the populace Malay Exactly.
Speaker 4: That's exactly. Yeah. Malay has just to talk.
Speaker 3: Next Malay staff and say, I will cut half the people working at these places. He kinda did say it when it came to education. I don't know what your interpretations were, gentlemen.
Speaker 4: Back to an entrepreneurial economy. Right? Allow capitalism.
Speaker 2: I think he did say around regulation. And then with respect to the bureaucracy, he pointed to education. He pointed to That
Speaker 3: was a good example, I think.
Speaker 2: Energy, he pointed to the EPA.
Speaker 0: The right things are on his radar screen. You know?
Speaker 3: I just hope he
Speaker 4: gets the right people around him, Sachs.
Speaker 0: Like, I
Speaker 3: mean, I I need you and there are no more Julanis and stupid people. You gotta if you're gonna we if put
Speaker 4: him put smart people around him. We got cabinet cabinet and advisers on nuclear on the 1 regulation in nuclear on AI.
Speaker 2: Like yeah. In 2016, there was not the kind of people that, for example, were at this fundraiser that David and I organized was, I think, entirely different than what you saw in 2016. And I do think there's an opportunity where if you dipped your hand, like there was a young man in the audience who answered this AI question and he talked about public key, private key cryptography. It was beautiful. It was amazing.
Very technical person. But there are all these people that are coming out of the woodwork. To your point, Freeberg, if he can figure out how to build a cabinet with those people, meaning these extremely technical thoughtful people, then there's a real shot that you can change. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I hope that's right. I pulled up some some data going into our conversation. I just wanna hear read this to you guys. Totally off topic, but I I just wanna say we can cut it out if you want. But, you know, construction for the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is 1.6 miles long when it was built in 1977, was a $141,000,000.
That's 740,000,000 in today's dollars. Today, they're estimating to repair you know, that's the bridge that collapsed, in Baltimore. They're saying it's gonna cost, you know, $2,000,000,000 or more to repair that bridge now, you know, 40 years later. California's bullet train project in 2008 was supposed to cost 40,000,000,000. We're 15 years into this thing.
We've spent 18,000,000,000. They're now asking for a 140,000,000,000 total to build a 171 mile track. That's a 1,000,000,000 a mile that's a 1,000,000,000 a mile. Let me just tell you this other fact. China just
Speaker 3: spent in
Speaker 0: the middle of nowhere. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And China just spent 300,000,000,000 to build 16,000 miles of high speed rail. They're spending 18,000,000 a mile. That's 2% of the cost of the California high speed rail system. 2% per mile. We are 50 times more expensive than China.
That is where superpowers shift. That is where that is the fundamental premise of the shift that we've seen 5 to 6
Speaker 3: times in
Speaker 4: the last 500 years. To That's the question for the president.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's is it just time
Speaker 4: to privatize the whole entire It's layers it's layers of, you know
Speaker 0: Of these 2 men, Trump or Biden, which one do you think is gonna be more skeptical of big government spending, and which one is gonna be more interested in being conducive to the private sector solving problems? I mean, to me, there's no comparison. No.
Speaker 2: I well, which one which one do you
Speaker 0: think? Obviously, Trump is is his all of his instincts are, let's empower the private sector. Let's cut regulations. Let's make taxes reasonable. Let's get the smartest people in the country.
Let's have peace deals. Let's have growth.
Speaker 2: What do you think, Krieber?
Speaker 4: I have heard conversations that there is an economic argument. I don't know if I buy it. That one of the reasons that they're trying to leave the border open is there is a low cost labor pool that grows that actually is is beneficial to economic growth that, there's just not enough in the workforce today to like, think about the cost of building that railroad in in China versus the US. You know, the the average, income in the US is is a a a couple turns on what it is in China.
Speaker 2: You can also say you don't wanna answer
Speaker 3: the question.
Speaker 2: Between the 2? Yeah.
Speaker 3: Man. Ask this question more specifically.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Ask him yeah. Honestly, who do
Speaker 2: you think is closer to your desired outcome? Trump or Biden?
Speaker 4: I I think Trump hits on it, like, way more than Biden does. Yeah. He definitely hits on the the concerns that I have. I don't know if he has, like, the path that makes me feel like, great. Let's you know, like, this is gonna work.
Does Biden
Speaker 2: does Biden And and I think the other
Speaker 4: thing I worry about is the leadership problem with Trump. Meaning, I don't mean him as a leader in in terms of effectiveness, but just this, like, Trump arrangement syndrome is not something to be ignored and to be disparaging of the people that we all you know, that not we all, but people say have Trump derangement syndrome. It's a fundamental, like, tilting that he does, and he tilts half the people in the country. He tilts them. And I think that that is really and maybe the other side of the screen as well.
Speaker 0: Maybe it's a psychological problem that a lot of people have. It doesn't mean we should have a worse president.
Speaker 4: No. So so that's one that's one argument or yeah.
Speaker 3: Or maybe he might try
Speaker 4: maybe there's a way
Speaker 2: to use unifying speech instead of divisive speech, and that is my other concern. It's just like or or you speak directly to the people and you end up where Jake Ellis at and where you're at, which is you've heard him face to face really for the first time.
Speaker 4: I I wanna hear Biden face to face. I wanna have a long conversation.
Speaker 3: I would love him not here.
Speaker 0: I do not agree. We invited Biden on here too, and we're waiting breathlessly for him to accept the invitation. You gotta give Trump a credit for coming on the show, like you said
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 0: And took all questions.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 0: So you gotta give Trump a lot of credit for that. But, Friberg, to your point about the TDS for a second, look. When Biden ran in 2020, he promised a return to normalcy. That was his sales pitch. We had just gone through COVID.
You know, there were a lot of people who had TDS or tilted by Trump, and what Biden said is we're gonna have normalcy. What actually happened? Well, I think Biden began this incredibly partisan and vindictive program of lawfare of trying to prosecute not just Trump, but a lot of other people. We had the border basically opened up. I mean, Biden repealed all those executive orders on day 1 and did create those holes in in the wall.
There was absolutely no reason for that. We had this war in Ukraine that was easily avoidable if they just said the right things back in 2021. And I mean, I could go on. I mean, on on the issue of tech, like we talked about, everyone feels frozen right now. Crypto can't get regulatory framework.
No one can do m and a. So have we gotten the normalcy that we were promised? I don't think so. And on the other hand, what I heard from Trump in this interview was like, it he was sort of softened. He did not go scorched earth when even when we invited him to.
He did not say
Speaker 3: cross Pew South. Agree. I will agree. He did not. He did not.
Speaker 0: He had nice words to say about Larry Summers.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 0: He was you know, I thought this was a very moderate sounding Trump.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's a different approach, and I'm wrong. And I'm just referencing the history with him. And I do agree with you that the way he spoke today about people that have been antagonistic about him or to him like Larry Summers and Fauci did surprise me, particularly after years of him sending out these tweets every morning about people that are antagonistic about him, and it was quite refreshing honestly, and it felt different. So, you know, I will give him credit on that point. I will I will, like, agree with you on that, Zach, for sure.
Speaker 2: The point is, I think that we had an opportunity to interview the president of the United States.
Speaker 3: And that was great. Congrats.
Speaker 2: I think we talked about a broad spectrum of issues. I wish we had more time. I think he answered them precisely, and I think he was candid, and I think that he gave us new information, which I think is important. And I think it allowed you guys to see what I saw, which is if you're an independent or not a republican quote unquote by name and you have a preconceived notion of what President Trump is like, it's very difficult to keep that notion, is my point, after you hear him and after you meet him. And I think that that's a very important thing to keep in mind because I don't think it says as much about president Trump as it does about the lens with which we are taught to think about all of these people, including President Biden.
So I would just say, you gotta think for yourself. And that's the most important takeaway, and I think that we are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion.
Speaker 3: Alright, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All in Podcast. Thank you, David Sacks, for getting president Trump to come on. President Biden, you are, of course, invited Come on. We encourage you to come on.
Give us 50 minutes. Give us an hour and a half, whatever you got.
Speaker 2: No. We've asked. We've asked. We're waiting.
Speaker 3: I'm just restating it for the record. And if you, by some means, somebody in this group says we should, you know, talk to the Allian team since they're our top 10 pockets and every other presidential candidate's been on. Who knows? Maybe somebody decides he's gonna be able to keep up with the group. I don't think he can keep up.
That's the big challenge. 4, the Rain Man, David Sacks, Jamat Palha Patia, your chairman, dictator, and the something of science, David Rupert. I am the world's greatest moderator. You didn't moderate today. I'm sure guest, Saks.
Great job. We'll see you next time. Great job, Saks Fifth.
Speaker 2: Love you, boys. Have you learned bye bye?
Speaker 3: We'll let your winners ride. We
Speaker 2: Besties are all. That is my dog taking it out of your
Speaker 3: We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge, orangey because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release that out. Wet your the feet. Your
Speaker 0: feet. Feet. What could you
Speaker 3: where did you get murdered? Keith's army.
reSee.it AI Summary
In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, we discussed his departure from Fox News and the pressing issue of rediscovering national alignment in the US. We explored how prosperity can lead to self-destruction, media control, the current political landscape, and his reaction to Elon Musk's comments at DealBook.
@theallinpod - The All-In Podcast
E155: In conversation with @TuckerCarlson (plus 25+ mins at the end breaking down the @OpenAI chaos) -- departure from Fox News -- biggest issue facing the US today: rediscovering national alignment -- why prosperity begets self-destruction -- media control -- current political landscape -- reacting to @elonmusk's @dealbook comments
Video Transcript AI Summary
In this video, Tucker Carlson is the guest on the All In podcast, where he discusses his firing from Fox News and his motivation as an independent journalist. He speculates on the reasons for his firing and the influence of advertisers on news coverage. The speakers also touch on the impact of technology, tribalism, and the rewriting of American history. They discuss the responsibility of various entities in creating social cohesion and express concern about the lack of a shared understanding of what it means to be American. Tucker suggests that making certain behaviors socially unacceptable could help foster unity. The video also covers topics such as declining birth rates, the impact of affluence on society, climate change, immigration, and potential presidential candidates. The speaker criticizes current immigration policies and expresses skepticism about certain potential candidates. They suggest that Gavin Newsom may be the Democratic nominee and discuss his ability to lie without showing guilt. Additionally, Tucker discusses the political culture in California, media bias, the control of information, and the future of his show. He emphasizes the importance of actions over virtue signaling and the need for a return to order. The video also discusses the recent events surrounding OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, including his firing and subsequent reinstatement. Speculations about the reasons behind the firing and the complex governance structure of OpenAI are mentioned, along with the importance of aligning employee incentives with company goals. The future of OpenAI remains uncertain, with more drama and revelations expected to unfold.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: This is Saxe's big day.
Speaker 1: There he is.
Speaker 0: Oh, there's talk oh, look at the smile on Saxe's face.
Speaker 2: This is the greatest day in the history of the all in part.
Speaker 3: Part. Shame with that. Yeah. Sachs
Speaker 0: would be so fun. I'm honored. Oh, woah. Sachs. Oh.
I guess you gotta get it back. This heated up quickly.
Speaker 2: How threatened do you feel right now? This is the highest rated hosting in cable history. This is the world's true greatest moderator.
Speaker 0: Exactly. No doubt. No doubt.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Sacks, where is this in relation part. Your marriage and
Speaker 4: the birth of your children.
Speaker 0: Don't ask.
Speaker 2: It's right up there.
Speaker 0: Up there.
Speaker 1: He's like, what children?
Speaker 3: It is for me.
Speaker 0: In to the fans, and they've just gone unreasonably. W s hasty. Queen of Kimball. Going all in. Alright, everybody.
We've got an amazing guest For you today here on the All In podcast, Sacks. His dream has come true. Tucker Carlson is with us today. You know Tucker, he was the number one TV host for much Of the past decade, including last year. When, shockingly, he was fired from Fox News on April 24th.
Reason for the firing, It's never been pinned down, but maybe we'll get into it today. And we're gonna find out what is motivating a post Fox News Tucker Who has obviously launched a show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. He's done 42 episodes and counting. He's had Everybody from Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, Dave Portnoy, and the newly elected president of Argentina on the program. So Welcome to the All In podcast, Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. It is it is a legit honor to be here.
Speaker 0: Two part question to kick us off here. 1st, have you figured out why you were fired from Fox? And let's get into that a bit. And second, given that you were the number one host for for much of the past decade, and I think Probably in the top 5 highest paid of all time. What's motivating you now?
What's the mission here as an independent journalist? Take those 2 questions to whichever order you like.
Speaker 3: Pot. I don't know why I was fired. I mean, it kind of is an Agatha Christie story. There are like so many suspects. You know what I mean?
But I don't know. I was never told I can only speculate. There were a lot of different things going on. I had a lot of opinions that were unpopular, you know, with people who might have Influenced, my show getting canceled. So I I I really don't know.
I will say, you know, right after it happened, people said, well, how can they fire the top guy and because that's what it is. I'm certainly not the 1st high rated host to get fired. It's not only about ratings. There are a lot of different factors. It's a big company.
You all have worked for and run big companies. And you know it's there's a lot of complicated stuff going on. And, and it's never exactly clear, you know, why things happen the way they do. But I was not shocked by it. I mean, I was shocked by it in the short term sense.
I didn't expect to have my show canceled that morning. But, but I was not shocked at all, when I thought about it for a minute. And I'd expected that you know, you can't kind of give the finger to everybody And persist in a in a corporate job. So I no hard feelings. I and I and I, in fact, I said that on the call when I received the news.
It's it's not my company. And I never felt like I had a right to be on the air. I was I was working at the pleasure of the family that runs the company, who treated me very well and and, And they wanted me off and so I was off.
Speaker 1: Do you ever have moments where somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, advertiser x y z is getting uncomfortable, or We're trying to land this new advertiser and
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: They want you to shape things in one route. Did you ever feel that pressure? Is that or is that just A thing that is kind of like a boogeyman that doesn't actually exist.
Speaker 3: Oh, wait. Well, it not only exists. It defines news coverage, especially on pharma, You know, because pharma is the biggest advertiser in television is. I know you know. And so, for sure, I mean, if, you know, Pfizer is sponsoring your show, you're not gonna question the facts.
I mean, it's kinda that simple. So absolutely. And, of course, that's why they're the biggest advertisers, so they can shape news coverage. I mean, that's that's the point. But, I personally never had a single person say to me, don't say this, that I recall.
I haven't thought about it too much. But that certainly I was there 14 years, and I I didn't have that experience Regularly or at all, really, that I can remember. And and I think, you know, my producers may have been told that. But it it didn't ever get to me because I was always really clear, which is I always said out loud to the supervisors there, you know, I work for your company. I don't own this network.
All I can control is what I say. If you don't like what I say, don't have me on TV. But as long as I'm on TV, I'm gonna say what I think is true. And in a 1000000 cases, I said only part of what I think, not because of my employer, but just because you shouldn't actually say everything you think. I mean, I have some crackpot views too, Or I have resentments that I didn't wanna work out on the air.
I mean, I did you know, you're straining yourself, and you want to as you do in your personal life. But On no question of principle did I ever pull back because I just I wouldn't do that. And, again, I was just super clear. If you don't like what I'm saying, take me off the air. But I'm not gonna, You know, toe aligned.
And because I was so clear about that, I I just think they didn't think it was worth having some kind of dispute with me. And to their great credit, For the time that I was there, and I said this many times in public, like, I took positions on the Ukraine war, on the COVID vaccine, on the COVID lockdowns, Among other issues that I think, you know, I've been vindicated on pretty conclusively on the origins of COVID. And all of those are super unpopular. On January 6th, which was So hated at the company where I worked that people a number of people, including on air people, 4 that I can think of, resigned in protest Over my over me suggesting that actually it was more complicated than it looked, and there were a bunch of federal agents in the crowd. How can you say that?
Are you claiming a false flag? Well, no. Not wouldn't use that phrase, but, like, this is something weird going on here. Well, I've been vindicated on that. That sounds like I'm bragging.
I'm not. I'm just stating factually That, I said things that were truly hated by a lot of the people who worked there, and they let me keep saying them. So it's kind of hard to complain, really, at this point, Right? Again, it's not my company.
Speaker 2: Just from a business standpoint, I think it's weird for a company to fire their top performer And to do so without giving any notes. I mean, if any of us had a superstar executive or a superstar engineer, like a 100x engineer working at one of our companies. And, like, day in and day out, they were, you know, hitting every milestone and crushing it. Like, if you had a problem with them, you would give them a note. You would just, like, try to say, hey, can we just, like so I just think from, like, a business standpoint, it's so weird.
It just seems like self destructive and I think it was. I mean, their ratings really cratered in the wake of making this change. Maybe they've come back a little bit, but I don't think it's ever been the same. I just think it's a crazy way to operate a business. So, yeah, it's their right.
I mean, they can do whatever they want, but I don't understand it as a way of doing business.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't understand it as a way of living either. I mean, you know, everybody in the course of life, whether it's a a parent or an employer or just a Friend has to deliver uncomfortable news or disagree with someone that you deal with, and you have a moral obligation to explain the disagreement. You you can't just, You know, levy the penalty and leave it at that. You have to explain why you're doing that. And and I think that's it's it's incumbent on us morally to do that.
I wasn't that mad about it, actually, because I know the rules of that particular business, which are are really harsh. And and I've been in it, you know, my whole life. And so I've seen a lot of people as talented or more talented than I meet bad ends And in you know, in for reasons that I thought were not justified. And and I I know them all really well. So I you you work in a business like that.
You know what it is. You know the black car is gonna show up at 3 AM and coach you to Louis Bianca, and that's just what it is. You know what I mean? You can't kinda whine about it, you know?
Speaker 0: Well, how much of it was the You know, this is a family owned business. Mhmm. And the patriarch obviously pioneered opinion based, You know, journalism slash entertainment commentary. And the younger ones maybe were on the other side of, the political aisle and maybe Were not as, I don't know, cutthroat or maybe didn't share the same philosophy of their dad. What was your relationship Like, with the the new generation, with Rupert, etcetera.
And how much did that play into it, do you think?
Speaker 3: Well, my my relationship with The father and son who were directly involved in that company was, from my perspective, very strong. And, I will say this about the Murdochs. They're Very polite. I mean, they're they're really kind of very Anglo, almost elaborately polite in a way that I'm not mocking. I'm complimenting.
And, they're not confrontational. They're not nasty in the way that they deal with people directly. And and I prefer that as sort Sort of a way of communicating with people. So I got along with them very, very well. I always liked them, and they were very nice to me, elaborately nice to me, and Always gave me assurances of my right to say what I thought was was true.
And so, again, I can only speculate. I will say, though, and you see this with Trump, especially, I don't think I'm anywhere near as divisive as Trump. Obviously, I'm not as powerful as Trump. I'm not the figure Trump is. But one thing that maybe Trump and I have in common is we're really disliked by a certain set of people, you know, affluent people, highly educated people, people who work at NGOs, government finance, you know, really kind of hate A certain brand of politics.
So it's not being conservative. You can be conservative in the sort of you know, I work at Cato or Heritage or I you know, we need to get back To free trade or whatever, that kind of thing, the Reaganite foreign policy, that's all fine. But if you start asking questions like, well, why doesn't our country act in its own interest? There's something about that It's uniquely offensive to them and to that whole class of people. Now, I could not have more contempt or loathing for those people having grown up among them.
I know how repulsive they are. So, You know, their their hatred of me, I wear as a badge of honor, actually makes me happy. But it's hard to take, I would say. I mean, again, I'm not I'm just speculating in my specific case, but I know more broadly, like, it's very hard to have lunch at the Four Seasons in Jackson During the winter because there's some private equity wife who's gonna scream at you on your way to the men's room because that world hates you. And so if you live in that world and you're employing someone like me, you know, you hear about it.
I guess that's my point. You hear about it. Like, what? That guy's a Nazi. What's the deal with that?
Speaker 1: I wanna actually pull this thread. I would love your perspective on the state of American society. Just Less on the political spectrum of republican versus democrat, but just just observe for us, Tucker, what do you see in American society? Where are we as a society? What has happened?
What is happening?
Speaker 3: Well, this isn't an 8 hour podcast. I could actually give you my very lengthy theories and views on that. But I will just say one thing that's I've been thinking about a lot recently. I just have been had my college roommate staying at my house and, you know, we're, of course, the same age, known each other our whole adult lives. He's been very successful, and he lives in a, you know, an enclave of very, very successful people.
And and so we're we're familiar with this culture. And we were talking about American and he's From an immigrant family. So he's got a kind of broader I would argue a broader perspective on, like, America. He's 54 as I am. And We're talking about how obviously, this is not a democracy.
It's not even a a sort of decent, facsimile of a democracy. It's to call it democracy is, like, Ridiculous, actually. But it's even worse than that. Our politics and not just our politics, but our public conversation Reflects the very specific and parochial concerns of a tiny, tiny group of people, which is Middle aged affluent women who tend to be very angry and tend to, mostly with their husbands, but probably for other reasons too, And exercise this, like, wildly disproportionate power over what we can talk about and think about and and the rules that the rest of us live by. It's just kind of amazing.
And he happens to live in Jackson, Wyoming. So and I go there, you know, to ski and to fish. And I have for a very long part. Time. And I always say to him, I can't go anymore because I yelled at at lunch over my Elk Chili or in the Lyft line or whatever Or at the, you know, Westside Market, literally, a relative of mine yelled at me while buying bananas in the, you know, in the Westside Market.
She lives there. And I'm thinking, what is it about this group of people that hates me so much when, again, I know them really well. I'm related, in some cases, to them. So And I'm not quite sure, but I just I I see our politics and our concerns, which if you take 3 steps back, are, like, insanely picayune. Like, trans black lives matter.
Well, I never said they didn't. But, like, if that's your main public policy objective to celebrate Trans black lives in a country of 360,000,000 people. It's got a lot of big problems. You are not seeing the whole picture.
Speaker 0: So, like, what is that?
Speaker 3: And what it is, again, is the disproportionate influence of a class of people and their neurosis. I wouldn't even say policy concerns, but, like, there are things they're worried about and their Weird personal ticks and, like, the results of years of therapy and SSRIs on their brains. Like, that kind of controls our whole Conversation. And, my friend was saying, because he's really smart. He's like, yeah.
But the good news is this can't last because it's just too stupid. And at some point very soon, the country's gonna revert to the place that all countries begin, which is in a conversation about things that matter. Like, Who comprises the population? Do we have enough water? Where are we on energy exactly?
How are we gonna manage these complex relationships with other countries? Like, the things that, You know, the stuff of government, the stuff of Resources. Of co Yeah. Well, of of course, resources. But, like, just the basic questions that should dominate the consciousness Of any of any country and should dominate our public conversation.
It's like our public obsessions are getting increasingly irrelevant, Actually. Increasingly, it's like crazy.
Speaker 5: As
Speaker 2: the palms get bigger. Yeah. The conversation The conversation becomes more inane as the palms get bigger.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Exactly. So when you look at
Speaker 1: that that cohort's disproportionate impact and then you translate it, for example, last night, there was, I guess, like, a almost riot protest when folks are trying to light the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, I guess, and there was, like, a huge Pro Hamas, I think. Somebody check me out if this is wrong. Protest and then people were pushing back on the cops and all of this stuff. And all these folks were trying to do was just light the Christmas tree. Can you connect the dots?
How does that cohort get to
Speaker 3: It it it no. But it it's actually a branch from the same tree. Christmas tree, in this case. Because that whole conversation, well, I think it's interesting, and I think it's, you know, geopolitically significant. And and I've, You know, been to those countries, and I know people there.
So I'm, like, interested in it. And there's a lot to care about and be interested in. But The displacement of all of our public passions onto a conflict in a foreign country, however important that conflict may be, Really kind of tells you a lot. It's like in other words, yeah, I care what's happening between Israel and Hamas. I have views on it, which are probably pretty mainstream views.
Whatever. I don't have any very interesting views on it. But it it it's a little weird for your entire country thousands of miles away to be so preoccupied with that Conflict that they miss big history changing events happening, like, in their own country. And I think that's, again, A species of the same problem. We are unable to the the problems that confront us are so big that we can't deal with them.
And I and, actually, my wife and I had this conversation the other night. I was, for years, a Magazine writer and I have to file every Friday. I work for Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard. And, obviously, I regret that. But it was interesting at the time.
And I have to file the story every week. And and I'd stay up all night because I'm very lazy, and I put stuff off. And I'd stay up every Thursday night all night. And my editor would call, It's going to the print you know, it's going to the printing press in Pennsylvania. This was back when it was in print, and you gotta file it.
And right around 8:30 AM on Friday morning, I would have this overwhelming urge to rearrange the books on my shelves in my library by title or by subject. I'd, like, have all these weird kind of, like, Librarian fantasies about rearranging books, which in a on a normal day, like, why would you do that? And better things to do. But as my problems mounted and I couldn't, Like, write the lead I wanted. I would transfer all my anxiety onto something I felt I could control or there was a lower stakes, less consequence.
And I think that's kind of what we're seeing a little bit. Like, we care more about foreign wars and trans lives as, like, The obvious things that hold our society together start to fall apart because, like, how do you even deal with that? Am I I'm I don't know if I'm being Very articulate, but
Speaker 4: actually, that's what's happening.
Speaker 0: Makes sense. What do you put on the top of that list of things we should be focused on, Tucker?
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean, but but From my perspective, by far the question.
Speaker 0: 1, 2, 3, this is what America needs to put its energy on.
Speaker 3: It's not even close. National cohesion, And by which I mean something specific. What does the majority of the country have in common with one another? Because, look, if it it it the arc of the last century's His American history is super, super interesting. So you have this massive influx of immigration, you know, the Ellis Island generation, Late, 18th or 19th, early 20th century.
And it's both good and bad. We only remember the good. But there was a lot of social volatility, Like, a lot. Like, the mayor of Chicago got shot in his house. There was bombings on Wall Street.
Like, the whole the Wobblies, the anarchists, like, the foot soldiers that were were immigrants, working class European immigrants. And part of the problem was there was a lot of immigrants and I mean, Sacco and Vanzetti, you know, who shot the Shot the clerk in, was it Brockton, Mass? Anyway, it was in mass outside Boston. They've been in the country for just a few years, and they immediately got sucked into radical politics. Well, why was that?
Well, because they weren't kinda bought in or rooted in or hadn't been fully assimilated into American society. So then you have the 1st World War. And we basically shut down immigration, and we have this period of settling where, like, all Americans, let's think through our civic religion, what ties us together. And then that leads into October of 29, and you do have this national crisis that lasts for more than a decade, and we didn't blow up. And we had a successful you know, the CCC.
We, like, had these big programs, which I'll say this is a conservative, kinda worked in keeping people fed and focused, gave them purpose, kept the country from from collapsing during the Great Depression. If that happened now, when there is no broad agreement on what it means to be an American, no agreement at all on what we all have in in part. I don't think we can withstand it, actually. I really don't. And I'm not even convinced it matters as much what that civic religion is As it does that we have 1.
If we don't have anything that ties us together when that day comes and you know what I mean. When the economic crisis comes because it's coming, Like, what's that gonna look like? It's gonna be very scary. And I so that's what I'm most worried about by far.
Speaker 1: How do you define national cohesion, I guess, maybe Like, what are the few elements that you think America needs to agree on as a as a majority?
Speaker 3: Wake me up from a deep sleep and ask me what it means to be an American. Okay. And then do the same to a 1000 other people, and we'll just do a survey on it. And do the majority of those people give the same answer? And if they don't like, so this is okay.
This I mean, I have all so many theories. God, donut. I'm gonna I'm gonna control myself. But I would just say one other thing, which is we Overestimate people's ability to metabolize change. It's you know, I'm not like a strict Darwinist or anything, but I do sort of believe that over time, people adapt to their environment.
And that, you know, in us is most of our abilities are inborn. Like, that's just true. Sorry. I have dogs. I know that.
And people just haven't you know, the world didn't change that much from, you know, 4 60 or whatever, the sacking of Rome, until the Renaissance. It just didn't. And then the industrial revolution to now has been, like, such massive change that it's driving people insane. People can't handle relentless change. And technologists love relentless change.
And I like a lot of technologists. Couple are really good friends of mine. But they're anomalies. A lot of them are literally autistic. I'm not attacking them.
I'm praising them, but they're different for most people.
Speaker 0: Sacks is on the road right now, Tucker. You're right. Wait. You know. Like, they
Speaker 3: can handle it. They can, Like, they want a world that's totally different from today's world tomorrow. They want that.
Speaker 1: They they they thrive in that flux. They like it. Right.
Speaker 3: But they just don't They they don't understand how rare they are. And if you impose that on a society and you don't ever have a Period where you pause and let things settle, you will blow up that society. And the Chinese, who I don't admire for many things at all, know this. And I admire that about them. They think that change for its its own sake is dangerous.
Now they think it's dangerous to their power, and they're absolutely right. But it's also dangerous Just like the idea of a society. What is a society? And so, anyway, I I could go on and on and on. But that that's my main concern.
Speaker 4: Let me propose a theory, and and see if you react to it. I think that there's a big orientation in society where it's constantly about trying to shift the Power dynamics, that everyone always feels, like, they don't have something that someone else has.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And
Speaker 4: another person that has it, for some reason, is advantaged in a way that to them always feels unfair. And everyone feels this way. Everyone.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: You're you're at the top of the food chain. You feel like Someone else has something you don't have, and it's unfair, and the system is set up that way, no matter where you sit. And as a result of that fu and and by the way, this goes bow I get, I get waxed super philosophical on this stuff, but, like, Buddhism's always had this point that, like, the desire that humans have is the one thing that causes all of Societal suffering behavior, everything. But it all comes down to this. It's that you see that someone else has something, you desire it, And then you wanna change the dynamic of how the system, how society's organized to, to fix that.
The thing about technology, if you think back, The catapult gave an advantage to an army that allowed them to win in a war. So did the rifle. So did the nuclear bomb. That ultimately technology was the enabling force that allowed a rapid shift in power dynamics. And all technology ultimately creates leverage For the creator of the technology initially, and then it diffuses to everyone.
But that is perhaps why I this is a theory I have, which is that there's generally Pessimism towards technology because it creates unfair advantages that shifts the power dynamic too quickly.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: And too advantageously. And it's also why I think you don't hear a lot of support for technology from most of society, because technology creators are such a small percentage of society. So I don't know if that that resonates with your point. But for me, it's always been like
Speaker 3: I think that's really smart, and I think it's indisputably true. Part. Abs absolutely. I will say you're making an argument, in addition to many other things, against tribalisms because tribalism accentuates these preexisting impulses in people, which, again, like, all impulses are just inborn. Like, the human nature is immutable.
So let's just start there. It cannot be changed. AI will not change human nature. It'll change everything but but human nature. And, you know, envy and, you know, The fact that the fact that prosperity is a relative measure above starvation Right.
So it's like there's a famous Russian proverb, like, You know, I've got a cow. My neighbor has a cow. He gets a cow. Now he has 2 cows. I kill his cow.
Speaker 4: Right. Totally
Speaker 3: right. It's just right. Okay. So so but but tribalism, especially in a country like ours, which as noted doesn't have a working majority of People with obvious connection to each other. It really, really exacerbates that a lot.
And because it makes it more obvious. So it's not so all of a sudden, it's not just like, hey. The smart kids are richer. They have 2 cows. It's like, The Jews are richer or the Indians are richer or the whites are richer or whatever.
You know? It's like, just name the group. And that once you go down that road, You know, it's it that that leads to violence and mass violence, actually.
Speaker 0: A lot of people listening right now, Tucker, are probably A little bit, confused hearing you talk about cohesion of the country when most people would look at, you know, the tribalism as almost Most manifested in cable news, you and Rachel Maddow every night were, you know, number 1 and number 2 in the ratings taking either side of the tribe. So Is this something that's evolved and how did your time in cable news inform you to this? Because most people would say, like, wait, Isn't Tucker and Rachel, like, isn't that aren't those those the 2 tribe leaders?
Speaker 3: I think I think there are dumb people who think that, but no. Here's the difference.
Speaker 0: My conference.
Speaker 3: My my views,
Speaker 0: part. Don't ask the only half of the audience to get their
Speaker 3: hair. To say. I'm sorry.
Speaker 0: It's all good. It's all good, Tucker. Why don't you do that? Different than the other panelists?
Speaker 3: Pots. No. I I love and not only do I love I don't always love, but I certainly think that reasoned disagreement is essential. It's the alternative to violence, by the way. That's what that is.
Debate and politics are the alternative violence. You get 2 choices. We're going to do it By arguing about it, we're going to do it by force. Okay? So so I absolutely think it's essential to debate things, because if we don't, then we just have to shoot each other.
And I'm against that. But that's very different from tribalism. Because tribalism is based on things that you can't change. So for example, In 2002, I hosted a show on CNN and it was the run up to the war in Iraq. I was uncomfortable with the idea that we would be invading Iraq to respond To an attack on America that had nothing to do with The Rock.
I did think that didn't make sense. But I was sold on the idea finally by someone, and I foolishly, parroted The Bush administration's line on that. So I was a pro war person for a time. Then I went to Iraq, and I changed my views completely. So I I switched sides Completely.
And I wound up on the other side, the antiwar in Iraq. And that took about a week. I was born a white man. You You were born whatever you are. Everyone's born whatever they are.
That can't change. So if we stoke division along lines that can't be changed, Then we're really the cul de sac. Our differences can never be resolved. You will always be what you are. You can't change it.
And the same for me. And so those are the things that wind up becoming generational conflicts, civil wars, Rwanda. And so I've always been against that my entire life. And my entire time on Fox, I argued against that. I think affirmative action is completely not only immoral Because it's an insult to the idea of America, which is, like, the people who do the best get the most.
But it is Also a recipe over time for violence. And I made that case I've made that case every single day, You know, since David and I had lunch 30 years ago, I've never not thought that. I've always had the Doctor. Seuss view of race relations, which is we should deemphasize race, And elevate, you know, merit, achievement, hard work, character, the things that we can control. And, and but the other side has gone and by the way, liberals used to agree with me.
That used to be a liberal position within my lifetime. And then all of a sudden, it became a Nazi position. And, you know, that's just a manipulation of language. But the truth is, on the race stuff, which is what matters over time, If you convince people to hate others on the basis of their race, you've committed a massive sin, and you've done a lot to wreck our country, that's coming from the left. I'm sorry.
That's just true.
Speaker 2: Just to connect these ideas, I think that is a major source of our division is one of the reasons why people have a hard time saying what it means to be an American because there are dueling visions of what it means to be an American. The left has been trying to change or rewrite American history. So for example, the key year in American history the founding of the nation was not 17/76 with the declaration of independence, it was 16/19, right? This is the base of the whole 16/19 project in the New York Times is that the founding of the nation began with the importation of slavery to the new world. That was the key year.
And so I think there's been an effort for a long time on the part of the left to rewrite what it means to be an American and and to rewrite American history. It's actually in a weird way, it's the opposite of what Deng Xiaoping did in China where Deng basically he flipped the all doctrine over there from communism to capitalism. He didn't outright declare it. He said that it doesn't matter whether a cat is white or black as long as it catches mice And they didn't change the name. They didn't change the party.
It's still the Chinese Communist Party. They didn't change the flag, but he did a hot swap of the back end to capitalism. And, you know, they changed what the country was about.
Speaker 4: And how did that work out? Economically.
Speaker 2: It worked out great for them. I think In a similar way, in the United States, they haven't changed the flag, they haven't changed the name, but there is an attempt to hot swap the back end of what it means to be an American. And I think this is the root of the conflict.
Speaker 3: I mean, I agree with that completely. And I don't think we've thought through what it means to change, You know, out of many, 1 to out of 1 many, I think that's, we've set ourselves up For something really, really scary for again, for for violent conflict. Because I don't see how that that resolves itself. You know, Wise people understand this. In a diverse society, plural society, whatever you call it, a society where, you know, you got a lot of different people, a lot of different backgrounds, and shades, and religions, and all that stuff.
You need to deemphasize the things that divide us inherently and emphasize the things that unite us. Like, that's not hard. And it's also So obvious that if you're not doing it, my first question is why are you not doing that? I mean, why are you not? And and that kind of explains The true loathing that I have for the people in charge on both sides because, like, if you did that in your household with your children, Your kids would be in rehab or jail or dead.
Is that obvious? Like, you would never do that to your kids. So why would you do that to your population?
Speaker 0: Sure. Zuckerberg, you had a question?
Speaker 4: Well, where does responsibility lie there, Tucker? What's the mechanism for doing that? Because we often and I find In conversations, everyone says the government should. And I often question why the government should anything. In my in my life, in in in my social settings, in how I live, how I do business.
Does the government, the federal government in the United States, have a role and responsibility to Do what what you're suggesting we need to do in the United States, or is it the media, or is it social leaders, Or is it business leaders? Or is it local governments? Who is responsible ultimately for creating the social cohesion necessary For the US to enter a new era of prosperity, and, and why is that the right group to be responsible?
Speaker 3: Well, look, I would say well, I it's a great question. And I would say you enter a era of prosperity. I don't think that's really the goal. We have prosperity. And I think it's a real question as to whether people want Right.
Do people want pro I mean, I think there's actually a lot of evidence that human beings sort of hate prosperity actually We're not designed to be prosperous. And the second we are, we invent climate crises to to to make us less prosperous. I mean, that's really what that is. Right? But, anyway, Leaving those aside, it's it's incumbent on all of us, anyone with authority, anyone with a voice, anyone with money.
And it's really kind of as simple. And and I do think, you know, government is kind of the last to fall in line. It's it's really as simple as making things socially unacceptable. We certainly see. I grew up in a world where people smoked on airplanes.
Okay? Now that was banned by the FAA, but it was also Made totally socially unacceptable. You couldn't light a cigarette in someone's kitchen. You just wouldn't think to do that. In the same way that you wouldn't think to give the middle finger to an old lady, Which is not actually illegal.
But nobody would do that because it's so appalling in the minds of everybody, and everyone's happy to say, what the what the hell are you doing? And and I feel the same way about the race stuff. It's like, oh, you know, race this, race that. Someone should say, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah. Stop that.
Speaker 1: There's part of what you're saying, which I think is which I really agree with, which is this idea that we have gone as the human race, okay, From having to make major adaptations over the arc of our evolution as a species to now, what you're kind of saying is we're now with all these minor adaptations and it kind of breaks the entire circuitry of the brain, which is like before we had to fight to evade the animals, to feed ourselves, To build a machine, to all of a sudden go from an agrarian to an industrial. These were huge adaptations. And now we have all of this almost surplus in excess. And it's a little bit of a head scratcher for a lot of people because now All the adaptations that are left are very minor in shape because all of these other things that would rather occupy your time, sustenance, survival, resiliency are taken off the table. I get that.
The other part of what you say, which is very Rene Girard, which is like, hey, there's all this copying of people and desire. There's going to be violence if we don't figure out how to de charge it. What do you think we need to do in order to do that discharge? How do you get these people To stop focusing on the small order bits. And how do we reorganize people to focus on the big order bits so that We minimize this risk of violence.
We minimize the 1 group of immutable traits fighting another group of immutable traits. How does that happen? Do you think
Speaker 3: You know, I'm I'm I'm pretty pessimistic about about a country this big. And We say the country. I mean, like, when I talk about the country, I'm talking about people I know or grew up with or people who speak my language. I mean, the country is so big That something can happen in New Mexico. Something big can happen in New Mexico or San Francisco, for that matter.
And, like, people don't even know. So, like but in general, I would say, You know, it's it's hard to see changing course before we're forced to. And so I, you know, I do think
Speaker 1: You think, basically, there has to be a moment Of something that's so egregious that causes a national reconciliation of some kind. Essentially, that says, hold on a second. You
Speaker 3: wanna know What I really think, which is, like, kind of crackpot, but I know that it's right. Yes. I I do think the problem is is is prosperity. And I've noticed this as a middle aged man as I've gotten older. And I know people who've been successful, in some cases very successful.
And I've noticed that, when they succeed, when they get everything they want, they destroy themselves. I've noticed this again and again and again. It's you are the dog who caught the car. And and it's and, actually, it's more than just having idle time. There's something there's a metaphysical quality.
There's there's there are factors here that I don't understand That are deeper, actually. But I just notice it. There's something about affluence That over time, convinces people to kill themselves. And you see it, like, in a literal sense in the euthanasia numbers out of Canada and out of
Speaker 1: Well, you you see in the you you see in a literal sense when you look at, you know, the incidence of diabetes as correlated to GDP.
Speaker 3: That's right. That's exactly right.
Speaker 0: And you look
Speaker 1: at these emerging economies and as GDP cranks. The first thing that happens is heart disease cranks up, and diabetes cranks up because to your point, Tucker, they start to enjoy The prosperity of their earned life.
Speaker 3: But they're not enjoying it. That's the thing. The other thing you see
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 3: Is they stop having children, which is a form of suicide. You're not reproducing. You you know what I mean? There's no other culture who has left a written record in history that didn't see having children as, like, The primary first of all, the primary shows of wealth, and not just because they worked on your farm, but because they exist and and so do your genes. So if you start to see every it's not just a matter of culture.
It happens in non Christian Japan. It happens in post Christian Spain. It happens in South Korea with a point 7 replacement you know, reproduction rate, 0.7. So, what is that? And, again, it's the same thing.
It's that affluence kills you. And if you don't believe it, fast for 3 days. Fasting, by the way, is a feature not just of, you know, Christian history. Every religion and every culture that I'm aware of, Has acknowledged fasting as an important religious ritual. Why is that?
Why would foregoing food Be so important. We'll try it for 3 days and experience you know, you're quivering like a tuning fork. You know, your sensitivity just explodes. There's something about eating too much, literally satisfying the most basic need of all, which is for calories, there's something about that that kills you. And there's something about foregoing it That enlightens you.
It's, like, super interesting. So I I and I'm look. There's so much I don't know. I'm the last person you wanna listen to. These are deeper waters that I'm qualified to wade in.
But my senses tell me very, very strongly that the core problem is having too much. And I'm not calling for taking things away. I think the global warming bullshit is bullshit. Okay? I mean, obviously, it is.
Climate crisis. It's propaganda, but it's coming out of it's also sincere to some extent. It's not such a power grab by Davos. It's more than that. It's people's gut level sense that we need to have less because this is killing us.
And that is real.
Speaker 0: Fredericksburg is Tucker said global warming is, bullshit. His
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna pull up the name
Speaker 0: for him. I just want
Speaker 4: his I just want his reaction to it.
Speaker 0: You just said that's insulting of science. Let's see.
Speaker 4: No. No. But I Let's not have a whole idea. No. No.
I think it's like, just on that topic, you know, data shows temperatures are getting warmer off of a baseline of years, and now things get warmer. No.
Speaker 0: No. No.
Speaker 3: I'm I'm so sorry. Can I can I just make a small correction? No. I'm not saying it's not getting warmer. It seems to be getting warmer.
I'm really saying this whole elaborate theory that humans are causing this rise in temperatures, and we know how to reverse it through, say, shutting down, You know, the history of hydrocarbons. Yeah. I mean and and even if that were true, what we're doing to affect those changes shows how fraudulent The whole thing is I mean, you you know the whole arguments. I'm but I'm not actually calling it a question that's changing. Temperatures always change.
I live in Maine, which was shaped by the glaciers 10000 years ago. So, like, yeah, we've had some climate change.
Speaker 4: Do you think that human civilization is not threatened by the changing climate? I just just this is a quick little point, but
Speaker 3: Do I think human well, sure. I mean, It's threatened in some ways. Probably helped in other ways. I personally hate hot weather. So, you know, I don't care for it.
I I think there's quite a bit of evidence that previous That that actually temperature changes can be much more radical than we think. And I'll just give you one example that no one's ever explained, but you're aware that they're all these Woolly mammoths found encased in ice in Siberia and the Soviet Yeah. You know, early Soviet 19 twenties expedition to map all of Russia found these things, And at least 1 stranded expedition ate them. Okay? They ate the woolly mammoth because it had been frozen so Thoroughly that the after 1000 of years, the meat was still edible.
Yeah. Well, the question is, like, how did that happen? And I think it was the guy who ran Birds Eye Frozen Food who was an pot. On freezing meat is like, wait a second. That weighs x 1000 pounds.
It would have to be frozen extremely quickly. And I know this from hunting too. You have to freeze meat very fast to keep it from spoiling
Speaker 4: from the vegetables.
Speaker 3: How did that happen? Well, no. No. For real, though. Because it decomposes very a big animal, If you shoot, say, a moose or a big deer or a mule deer, you have to open it up immediately or the meat will spoil because The bigger it is, the more heat it generates.
Right? We know. It's like, okay. So how exactly did hundreds or thousands of large animals get frozen So quickly that the meat is still edible 1,000 of years later. That's an honest question that no one's ever answered.
And the only potential or even plausible answer is temperature changed So fast, it flash froze them. Well, how did that happen? Like, what? No. These are sincere questions.
Speaker 4: And so, temperature look
Speaker 0: into it.
Speaker 4: I'll get back to you. I've not heard about this. No.
Speaker 3: No. But, like, what is that?
Speaker 4: Flash frozen. Well, that's interesting. No.
Speaker 0: I I
Speaker 4: It reminds me of that Marlon Brando film. Do you remember where he, like, goes to an island and eats the, like, super rare Food. It's like a Komodo dragon or something. The Graduates, Matthew Broderick's in it. So good.
It's like, the expedition to Siberia to eat the Flash frozen Holy man, that's to make a good sequel. But it's interesting. I'm gonna look into it. I don't know the answer to how and why But
Speaker 3: the point is the the climate here's the point. That we have physical evidence that the climate on earth within you know, inside our atmosphere has changed dramatically so dramatically that it would, you know, kill every person who Who was affected by it, like, a number of times that we know of over the course of the history of the earth. So, like, I mean, I think there could you know, we could be in for actual climate change that killed everybody. That's entirely possible. But the idea that it's the fault of the United States because of, You know, you drive an F150 is, like, so absurd.
It's, like, hard to believe anyone takes that seriously. There's, like, no evidence of that, actually. Sorry.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I'm generally just an I'm I'm an optimist about solutions anyway, but, you know, I think human ingenuity has always prevailed, so all this pessimism and catastrophizing. I I I do disagree with respect to, like, there is science that indicates that there are elements that were kind of affecting things in a in an adverse way, the challenging way, But I'm not concerned about the challenges, just because of where human technology sits, and the things we can do. So I'm I have a I have a slightly different point of view, but I I hear you on it. I don't wanna Yep.
Debate the point. Sorry, Chamath. Go ahead.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's a whole another thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just wanna up level this back to something, because I think if I had to summarize what you're saying is, You're saying, Chamath, our society is too prosperous. And as a result, that prosperity creates, small fringe issues that dominate, Which then creates an inability for us to be cohesive. So then, if we have something that allows us to be forced to be more resilient, We will actually wake up from this fever and say, hold on guys, what are the big issues? Let's really figure out what matters. Let's get organized and let's go after those.
And that Both is a healing of the country, but it's almost like our insurance policy. Is that kind of a is that a fair summary? Okay. If I To put what you're saying in a box or is that
Speaker 3: Well, I would I would hate ever to seem like I'm looking forward to catastrophe because I I'm not. And I I hope it I hope it doesn't unfold, though. No.
Speaker 1: No. No. No. You're you're I don't think so.
Speaker 3: No. I mean, I used to drink too much. And I know a lot of people used to drink too much and, you know, use drugs or whatever. And some of them didn't get better till they went to jail. You know, as people who drink too much tend to do over time.
That never happened to me. And I'm so grateful for it. Like, you don't need to, you know, Get to the bottom
Speaker 1: there. Right.
Speaker 3: You don't. I don't think that you do. I'm just I'm just really worried that we're not even having a conversation about this. And but I, again, Would point to what I said a second ago about there's something metaphysical here. There's something deeper than just, you know, the the search For advantage, which is a big motivator among people, but there's something more than that going on.
Why are we intentionally wrecking the society? And we are. And I and I hear people say, well, it's because some people are getting paid. Yeah. It's not really an adequate answer.
It's more than that. There's something going on. Like, Distinctively, people wanna some people want to tear it all down. And I don't think it's necessary so they can rebuild it To their own advantage. I think, like, destruction is the point.
And I just watch carefully. And I don't really know what's going on here, but something Much deeper than what we're acknowledging is going on here.
Speaker 4: Well, I think it comes back to this point about I can't get what these other people have. Yes. And there's now an insurmountable barrier That I cannot ever get there.
Speaker 3: Yes. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, that doesn't explain why but hold on. That that doesn't explain, like, why, for example, Dustin in Moscow is supporting revolutionary politics and Chesa Boudini and the BLO.
Speaker 0: I think it's a good example, Sacks. I think it does. When you have massive abundance, to Chamath's Point about the idle mind. You know, Dustin Moskovitz has achieved more than any human could achieve, 1,000,000,000 of dollars. And now he's got this surplus And then whatever, you know, to to Tucker's point, whatever he's dealing with personally now becomes this, you know, canvas under which he's gonna that wealth in an outsourced way.
I think it actually does explain it.
Speaker 2: It fits more with, like, luxury beliefs than with the idea that, like, scarcity or envy is somehow driving it.
Speaker 0: Yeah. But yes. So those are luxury beliefs, and he's got a huge bankroll. Therefore, it has an outsized impact as sort of Tucker's been saying.
Speaker 4: I think the the the luxury point is once you reach A certain point, your attention can then shift to morality. You you when you're starving in a street, and you need to feed your children.
Speaker 0: Correct.
Speaker 4: You're not focusing your whole day on the morality and better treatment of others in the world and extending, you know, morality to the rest of the world, but when you have that luxury, You have to focus your attention in in that sense. I do think that there's this large element that the term equality gets recast Into every aspect of society, which ultimately leads to this general point of view of Marxism, which is everyone has to have an equal outcome versus an equal opportunity, And that's where the prosperity takes this.
Speaker 3: You but I think I I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I I I think it's maybe more profound than that. I mean, You're absolutely right that only societies that have reached a certain point can afford to think about certain things. You don't see you know, hunter gatherer societies don't debate Effective altruism because they're looking for roots. Okay? So I I agree with that.
Yep. However, if you look at the behavior of, you know, some of the richest people in our society and I can't speak to Dustin part. Moskovitz, but I I have the you know, I know people like that. What they're funding are not exactly luxury beliefs. They're it's they're, like, funding destruction, actually.
And so, like, previous generations of liberal rich people funded things like public libraries, summer camps for poor kids. Remember the New York Times used to have Fundraisers, like Fresh Air Fund or whatever. And and people made fun of it. I always kinda like that. Like, you have extra money and, like, you know, help the poor kids.
You You know, whether it works or not, we can debate, but, like, I get it. But, Dustin Mosk if you're Dustin Moskowitz or any I don't mean to pick on him, but any, like, really rich person you and you're at Baker's Bay or some discovery property that, you know, you and your billionaire friends go to, you might occur to you, like, why not build one of these for, like, all the poor kids? But only poor black kids get to go to this resort for a week. And that might be it might work. It might not work.
Like, all of American Social re the history of American social reform is kind of species of that. Like, we're gonna help poor people by doing this or that. That's not what they're doing. It's like, hey, poor people. Here are some more crack pipes.
And, like, we're gonna it's immoral to criticize your drug addiction. What we need are more black people selling weed or it's cool to set fires, and we can't criticize you for burning down Wendy's. Like, what? That is not the same thing. That is super dark.
There's no even possibility of uplift or advancement. It's just the opposite. They know it. These are smart people. So, like, what are we looking at?
Pot. First of
Speaker 0: all, Tucker, he's in dust in dusting's mind. I'm sure he believes he's doing the right thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he's
Speaker 0: I guess he's kinda playing.
Speaker 2: He thinks he's funding social justice. I think, like, Soros would be an even better example, right? Where like it's hard to argue that what he's funding is not extremely destructive. So the revolutionary politics are not somehow coming from below the way you would expect a revolution to normally happen, they're being imposed from above by some of the biggest winners in our society. And that is weird.
That is a contradiction.
Speaker 0: They're not being watched
Speaker 2: all yet.
Speaker 0: It is it is a bizarre outcome.
Speaker 3: Let let's It's exactly what you'd expect. And it's exactly what happened in the Bolshevik revolution. I mean, half of the Romanoff household, the you know, Nicholas the second, who was murdered with his wife and children in the basement, as you know, by the Bolsheviks. His extended household supported the Bolsheviks. Rich People who are a small minority, by the way.
There are a 1000000 different revolutionary groups at the end of the 1st World War in Russia. Clearly, there was gonna be a change. Clearly, the monarchy was doomed. And there were a lot of different options. And the most radical, crazy, nihilistic, atheistic option was the Bolsheviks.
And they had the support of the rich people, And, like, including the Zarzaur's family. So, like, what is that? It's the same thing. Always the same thing. It's the people with the most Have the strongest desire to kill themselves and their society.
That's just true.
Speaker 0: It's an interesting theory. I mean, there are some people who are very Alright. You have Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos who are thinking about philanthropy in a very thoughtful way. Now, they can make mistakes, of course, but they're thinking, hey, where's the most suffering? How do I work backwards from mosquito tents to, You know, vaccines or whatever, you know, we perceive is, or they perceive is the most suffering they can relieve in the world.
So it does seem like it can go either way.
Speaker 4: Tucker, do you think it's because most people that get very wealthy very fast feel like it was unfair, And they feel guilty. I mean, they have to, like, destroy the system that got them there.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot I think that's such a deep point, though, because And you I know that, you know, you live of an among people. I mean, you're familiar with this world. So and only someone who is could say that because you're absolutely right. Rich people are not all the same. If you meet someone who made his money incrementally over time, he's much less likely to have The desire.
You know, you may not agree with him on everything. He may be a good person, a bad person, but he doesn't wanna tear it down. And he doesn't feel especially guilty for what he has. And I have found just Nonpolitical point. But as I get older, I wanna spend less time with people who hate themselves because they're not capable of loving other people.
Like, that's not a good place to start, actually, as a person to hate yourself or fear feel super guilty. It really isn't. You don't end up helping others when you feel that way. But when you find people who inherited a lot of money, we never talk about that. It's a huge problem in this country.
I'm not I'm not arguing for the death tax at all. But I'm just saying, as an observation, there are off there's a huge class of people with massive inherited wealth, and they're almost all horrible. Not all of them. I mean, I know, you know, very well. I know some of them, and they're fine.
They're some of them are great. But as a class, they're awful. And they don't help at all. And they're also super annoying and dumb. And I think it's the well well, it's just true and everyone knows it's true.
Speaker 4: But you don't wanna talk about it.
Speaker 1: We're about to do that for tens of millions of Americans. Right? You know? We're about to go The largest generation of wealth transfer beyond imagination. We're talking 1,000,000,000,000 and trillions and trillions.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: So I know. That problem that you just So we did we're gonna cascade across tens of millions of Americans. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Which also happened in Japan.
Speaker 3: I agree.
Speaker 0: And in Japan, they have a negative growth rate as well. Let let's Pivot to a a topic that Wait. Can we can I ask
Speaker 3: you, have you been to Japan recently?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I was there last year.
Speaker 3: Okay. So me too. So so I You know, peep you always read, like, all the libertarian economists and the Wall Street Journal. They're always like, oh, Japan's a disaster. Negative growth.
And then you go to Japan.
Speaker 0: Oh, it's the best place you could ever visit. It's my favorite country. Just hands down. Did you go to Tokyo? Did you go skiing in Nasako?
Where'd you go?
Speaker 3: I went to Kyoto and Tokyo, and I'll be back to ski on the North Island because it's like why wouldn't you? It's like Oh, have you ever
Speaker 0: skied Ressecco?
Speaker 1: I never have, but
Speaker 3: I'm It's incredible.
Speaker 0: I went last year. It is like 25 out of 30 days in January February, it dumps powder and the powder is like dust. It's it's like makes Utah powder look like heavy. It is insane. All.
Team. I'm going back if you wanna go.
Speaker 4: Part. Room, you guys would have, like, 1 housekeeping bed.
Speaker 0: This is gonna make Sacks
Speaker 4: lose his mind if Tucker and I caught in his cell phone.
Speaker 0: Wait. Wait. Can I just ask you a question? Like Yes.
Speaker 3: If If Japan is is is the butt of every joke that economists tell or
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: The focus of the concern of economy, you know, lots of chin tugging and threading about Japan's negative Economy. And then you go to Japan, and there's literally not 1 piece of litter, and 4 year olds ride the subway on a country
Speaker 0: Highest function society you could imagine, Okay. Birth rate is going down. That's the only thing The birth the birth rate
Speaker 3: is a real thing. I totally agree. That's probably the product of getting atomic bombs dropped on you. Right. And maybe the fact also that, like, the highest testosterone males flew their planes into US aircraft carriers or whatever.
I mean, there's probably a lot of reasons. Interesting theory. But it It what? That's a real thing, by the way. You kill all the high teen males, and your society changes.
But but I don't think that we're using the right measurements. And I do think that we're taking economists a little more seriously than they deserve because they're not describing what Japan actually is, which is freaking awesome And way more functional than our society despite the massive disparity in drug waste.
Speaker 0: You'll find is every person in Japan takes their job that they're doing As incredibly important and has massive pride in it. That's why when you go there as an American, you're like, wait, wasn't this what America was about? It's it's it's Really shocking is Americans are like, this is what I want society to be. I want the person who works in the subway or the stock market or the newspaper to take their job deadly serious and put their best effort in. Part.
And why should I care
Speaker 3: about growth? Right? Wait. But hold on. Why should I care about economic growth at least as measured
Speaker 0: in the conventional sense?
Speaker 4: The only reason is if you pot. A lot of debt.
Speaker 0: That's it. Yes.
Speaker 4: Right. If you if you if you didn't have all the debt, you don't care about it. You shouldn't care about economic growth rate with respect to the measure
Speaker 0: of prosperity. The strange that happens, I pie.
Speaker 2: Also, you know, if the pie isn't getting bigger and people aren't doing better, then that does sow the seeds for a revolution. I mean, all this divisiveness will start to explode if people don't feel like their circumstances are getting better off. This is where I mean in this in this one limited way, I guess I'd be in favor of rapid change, which is the technological area. I mean I'm against revolutionary politics, I'm against that kind of revolutionary change because it almost never works out but I do think that revolutionary change in the narrow category of technology is ultimately good for us. I know it creates challenges.
I know it creates disruption. People do lose their jobs and have to find new ones, but it is the basis for American prosperity and the basis for our economy being productive and America having a powerful military and all those things. So I I don't know if there's a difference between us, Tucker, but I do think that in this area of technological change, I'm not sort of a dispositional conservative. I mean, this is kind of like Peter Thiel, right? I don't want us to slow down.
Actually, I want us to be successful. And it feels like, actually, it's the people on the left who are generally in this camp of wanting to slow us down, admire us in regulations, and make it harder to Make progress technologically, because that's something they don't control.
Speaker 3: I agree with that. I just I guess the net result is what I care about. I think it's If you talk to old people, which I now that I'm getting older and I've talked to, you know, older relatives and stuff, like, what what bothers you? And I used to think it was, you know, taking a leak 6 times tonight. But it's really not.
The thing that bothers old people I've spoken to anyway is the change. It's like they don't just don't recognize it. And that's really hard for people to deal with. And so all I'm saying I'm certainly not calling for a halt to technological progress. That would be terrible.
All I'm saying is in tandem with those advancements should be the concern about people's ability To digest massive change. And, like, let's keep some things the same. You know, you just can't change everything. It's, like, bad. It's super bad.
So, like, maybe we get a a I, but let's keep Halloween.
Speaker 0: Part. Tradition and things that bring people together. This country was built off of, immigrants, Obviously. And, this is one of the most polarizing issues, Tucker, in each election cycle and in the country, writ large right now. What what are you what is your vision for how American immigration should work here in the 21st century?
Speaker 3: Part. Ideally or right now?
Speaker 0: Right now. And then then ideally. Let's let's start with what would you do right now, short term? Well, actually, let me
Speaker 3: if you don't if you don't mind, I'll quickly invert And say, of course, the goal is just a is just a rational immigration policy whose purpose is to help your country. What would that mean? I can see well, I can see an argument, for example, if you needed, You know? I don't know. I mean, there there was a time for the guy who was just saying, my college roommate, my best friend, came to this country from India because both his parents were physicians.
And there was a Lack of physicians with deindustrialization. Everyone's moving out of the small towns. And so we expedited the visas of foreign physicians. Most of them were Indians. I think most were Indians.
His His parents actually came from Africa. But whatever the point is, they're Indian doctors, and they came here, and they settled in a little town in Massachusetts, a rural town, dying mill town. And it was great. It was great for them. It was great for the town.
The guy became my best friend. I mean, like, that's just that's what you want. Right? We need this. And we're gonna, in a very smart, intentional way, try to get it on the world market.
And we can. We will. And I'm totally for that. What we're doing now is throwing open the doors to anyone who wants to come here from the poorest countries in the world at a scale that we can't possibly digest. So So how many people are here illegally working off the books?
Some estimates, 60, 70,000,000. Those are real estimates, by the way, not crackpot estimates. But the truth is we don't know. We have no idea. So we've completely lost control.
And we don't know who these people are. I honestly think most of them are here for a better life. I believe that. I think most of them are probably good people. I think most of them agree with my politics, actually, for whatever it's worth.
Definitely much more than the private unhappy private equity wives do, for sure. The average guy from Nigeria is, like, On my side. Every Salvadoran agrees with me. So I like that. But I also think it's too much, actually, at exactly the moment when native born Americans' birth rates are tanking, over a 100,000 people die of Fentanyl ODs.
And we're pushing euthanasia on the population, which we are. You're you basically, you're saying you have given up on the people who live here, whatever their color or background, and we're just gonna import new people and replace them with new people. That's literally what's happening. And when you say that out loud, they freak out and call you some sort of crazed bigot for saying the word replacement, but that's what it is. And it's happening in Western Europe and Ireland, particularly.
That's what those those riots were about. Not that I'm endorsed in the riots, but that's what that was. And that's, like, insane for a government to do to its own people. It's just it's totally insane. And and more than anything, it is an expression of loathing For the people who live there.
It's a dilution of their political power. It's a dilution of their economic power. It's the total destruction of the basic services that they paid for, like schools, hospitals, Roads. Like, those are gone. And so last thing I'll say is people say, well, immigrants are coming here looking for a better a a life, and I believe that.
Having talked to a lot of immigrants and grown part. In Southern California. I totally believe that. But the question for government is, am I making the citizen's life better? It's like no one even thinks that.
So it's importing people making the life so when my friend's parents came, both physicians, to the little town little mill town in New England, His parents made the town better for the people who lived there. They were the doctors. And they were super successful, actually, and great people.
Speaker 1: Tucker, can you give us a rundown of the current political landscape? Just tell us, I'm just really curious what you think about RFK, Biden, Trump, pot. Van. Maybe, like, 10, 15 seconds on each.
Speaker 3: It's so hard. It's so hard. I mean, I I mean, the thing that jumps out today, my view changes all the time. I don't think Biden can be the nominee. His only point was to, You know, stop Bernie Sanders, basically.
And he's, outlived his usefulness, so I think he'll be I'm pretty sure he'll place. But, as on the on the Republican side and the Independents, you know, it's so hard to know. I'm just mesmerized by the love for Nikki Haley, who's, like, The most and I'm sorry. And, like, for example, I saw Jamie Dimon who I really like and I know and I have always admired. But when Jamie Dimon starts, like, Free balling on, you know, Nikki Haley and saying nonsensical things with Nikki Haley.
I'm like, I wanna call him and say you're humiliating yourself. First of all, you're way out of your depth. You have no idea what you're talking about. But for another, you're just betraying how completely out of touch you are. And I think Jamie got and, again, I say this with admiration for Jamie Dimon, which is long held.
But, like, if you get to a place where you think that Nikki Haley has a shot of getting elected in a free and fair election, like, you have no idea what's going on in your own country. It's just embarrassing to say that. Super embarrassing.
Speaker 0: Explain to the audience. Unpack that. Why is Nikki Haley not gonna
Speaker 3: it really it's not personal. I actually don't care for Nikki Haley as a person, but that's immaterial. Nikki Haley's program, from what she stands for, what she believes, may be moral or immoral, God will judge. It's not popular with the with the public. And it's super easy to know that.
Speaker 0: On wars, specifically. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Or stands on war and in economics. And and we know that from looking at the Gallup poll, which is a rolling survey of people's attitudes on things. And in an actual democracy, you would see the leading candidates or people who hope to become the leading candidates articulate concerns and layout views that reflected the concerns of the population who are gonna vote them into office.
Speaker 0: But Nikki Haley the most Right now.
Speaker 3: Well, Trump.
Speaker 2: Is it fair to say Nikki Haley is basically an unreconstructed Bush republican? Yes.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 2: Her views are basically the same views of George w Bush. Pot. She once again is in all sorts of new wars and I don't even think she regrets the forever wars in the Middle East that were so disastrous. I haven't heard one word of criticism from her or remorse that she supported all those things. And on the economic policies, this is kind of this like corporatism.
It's like the whole Trump rebellion never even happened in the Republican party. It's just like it's just like right back to the past. And the fact that The establishment sort of coalescing around her kind of tells me that as much as I didn't want to believe this, I think that Trump is still the indispensable figure in the Republican Party, because if you take him away, they're going to revert right back to where they were. They're gonna Exactly. Go right back to the factory settings of Republicans, which is Bush republicanism.
Speaker 1: Tucker, can you just finish the rest of them? Yes. JFK, Vivek, Trump.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I you know, I know Vivek well personally, and I'm I'm it shows that I'm out of touch too. I mean, you know, 54. So I don't have my finger on every pulse. But so I like Vivek, actually. And and but I see these surveys where he's not, you he's not doing well and people don't like his personality or whatever.
He's he's a little overbearing. That never bothers me at all. I'm just not put off by that at all. And I'm a little bit confused by why he's not doing better. Again, that's a reflection on I've just made fun of Jamie Dimon.
Here I am doing it myself. Like, Why isn't Vivek doing better? I'm sure there are reasons. I just don't. I think his program is solid.
I think he's reasonable. I think he's smart. I don't think he has some creepy agenda. Pot. So but he's not he's not doing well.
That's just a fact. Bobby Kennedy, I know quite well and and think a lot of him. And, he's a very I think he's a decent man and a principled person. I think he's smart. You know, I'm I I don't have quite as much confidence in maybe some of the people around him.
I'm not I feel like maybe there are other Agendas that he's not aware of. You know, I don't know. I can't assess. But, yeah. So that's what I think.
Speaker 1: President Trump?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you know, the New York Times had a a piece. I think it was Jonathan Swan, was smart. And, had a a piece Telling you what you already knew, kinda, but proving it with numbers that Trump became the nominee in August of last year, 2022, When the FBI went to his wife's underwear drawer in his house. Like, that was so insane that even if you're like, I can't deal with more Trump and he didn't actually Do anything, put Jared in charge. You know, like, there are lots of frustrations you could have about Trump if you supported Trump, and you could be disappointed.
But the 2nd the FBI raids his house on a documents charge, and anyone from Washington, as I am, can tell you that's, like, insane. Like, every that's, like, so common. It's not if they're charging him for that, that's a joke. Where are the felonies he supposedly committed? I was led to believe he, like, murdered people and buried them in the meadowlands.
Do you know what I mean? Like, that's the best they got when they did that. I I know for a fact, and this piece showed it, but I knew it already, a lot of people are like, you know, I have mixed feelings about Trump, or I don't wanna deal with more Trump trauma. But if this is allowed to happen, our system won't continue. That's so outrageous that I mean, let's just stop lying about it.
That's a political prosecution. You can't have that. Of the presidential front runner? You can't have that. We already did it with Nixon.
You can't
Speaker 0: do that
Speaker 3: again. And so I think that's the key to his surge. I really do think that.
Speaker 4: Who's the Democratic nominee if you think Biden's not gonna be
Speaker 0: Oh, it's
Speaker 3: Gavin. Gavin. It's Gavin. For sure.
Speaker 0: Well, of
Speaker 3: course, because He's by far the most evil person in the Democratic Party. And in the end, they just sort of rise to the peak. You know, like, oil and water, man.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Tucker, just just comment on Gavin vetoing the bill that said that you could kind of remove the parents remove the child part. From the parents if the parents don't affirm the transgender rights of the child. That I think there was a a lot of folks who sit in your camp, typically, Who were shocked and surprised and said, wow. I didn't know Gavin actually, you know, had an span had a span of opinions, and this is interesting to see.
I mean, what's what, Like yeah.
Speaker 0: There's no one
Speaker 3: I know who thought that. And everyone I know who watched that thought the same thing they thought when he met with Xi, which is, oh, he's he's gonna be the nominee. Yeah. I mean, of course, that's what that was. I mean, I know I know Gavin Newsom.
And, you know, I I think a lot about Gavin Newsom, many different things about Gavin Newsom. But one thing I know for a fact about Gavin Newsom is he has the capacity to be the lie detector test. Gavin Newsom will say anything he needs to say not like Biden's not like this, actually. Whatever Biden's fault, he's not like this. Like, Biden would, You know, he has, like, guilt.
If he's lying to you, he gets twitchy. Gavin Newsom's palms don't sweat. His respiration doesn't increase. His body temperature doesn't change. Nothing changes in Gavin Newsom when he lies to your face.
And there are not that many people like that, actually. That's a rare quality. Like, to lock down the state, to keep people's kids from getting an education, and To arrest people for surfing and then go have dinner at the French Laundry, like, most people couldn't do that. They'd just be like You're saying
Speaker 0: he's a sociopath. Just he can lie and not care.
Speaker 3: I'm not a psychiatrist, but I so I don't know that I don't really know the category and I'm not gonna diagnose him, but I'll just say in 50 years of being around pot of people. I've met very few who can behave that way. Very, very few. It's a very unusual quality and, of course, it's probably useful In politics.
Speaker 1: Is he electable? Is he electable? Yeah. Exactly. Are the American people gonna see that the way that you see it?
Or
Speaker 3: Well, as you know, the system in California does not include elections. I mean, it has nothing to do with what the people think. It's a it's a machine state. It's the most corrupt out of 50. Kamala Harris was, like, by most Californians, and she, you know, was a sitting US senator.
Diane poor Diane Feinstein, my neighbor in Washington, I I don't I don't think she was a horrible person just for the record. But she was noncompass menis. And, like, she could have lived well beyond her death as a US senator. So it's like it's not a democratic state, small d democratic state. It's not run On the basis of what the population wants.
It's a fixed game in California. And so it does make me very uncomfortable that someone from that Political culture, which is an utterly corrupt political culture, an authoritarian political culture could, like, enter a presidential race. Because, like, Clearly, what are you running on if you're Gavin Newsom? As a native Californian, you know, I know what the state was like in 1985, because I lived there. And it's Completely degraded from that from that time.
And, like, how did that happen? Well, part of the big reason the big reason is the political leadership of the state. You've got nothing to run on. What are you running? Have you driven through LA recently?
Like, seriously. So the fact that he would get in the race suggests, You know, they think that they can win without the consent of voters, and that freaks me out.
Speaker 2: Well, he'll have the media working on overdrive for him. Right? I mean, they will turn him somehow into, like, John F. Kennedy or something. I mean, they will paper over All of his flaws and they'll, you know, they'll basically write puff pieces.
It'll it'll be, like, nonstop, and then they'll be attacking Trump. So the media will put him over the top, I think, if he
Speaker 3: Well, assuming that we have the same media that we had in 2020, that's true. But, I mean, that's why you just gotta pray every night for Elon's health. And I mean it, too. I mean it. It's the only platform at scale in the world that's pretty you know, there's censorship on it.
But there's not mass censorship, actually. There isn't. And that's the only platform of its kind At scale. It's the only one.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that actually. So I mean we've talked in this conversation about how our public discourse is Inane and self destructive and divisive. I would add another word to that, which is controlled, pot controlled. A good example of this I think was just on the Ukraine war. David Arakomia who is Zelensky's parliamentary leader who was the lead negotiator for the Ukrainians at Istanbul in the 1st months of the war when there was a deal on the table he just Testify, basically said in an interview, there was a deal on the table to shut the war down.
We just would have had to agree to make Ukraine neutral And of course, the Biden administration told them not to. This war is and has always been about NATO expansion. And yet, The party line from the media even as all of these proof points stack up I mean we're now on like the 10th person firsthand witness to say that this is what this war is all about you still can't get the media to honestly report this this is one example okay and I believe that this is one of the reasons why you were fired tucker is because you were literally the only person on mainstream network news saying what the war is really about. So this is like one really big example is that we cannot get any truth on an issue as big as Ukraine war. So I guess my question for you is like how does control like that happen like I I don't really understand it myself we live in a big What's supposed to be a big democracy, there's supposed to be a lot of media channels, but yet they all enforce a certain narrative on pretty much every issue, but even you know again I'm picking on I think one of the biggest issues right now which is this war we've got going on, I mean, how does that happen?
I I don't understand it. How do they maintain that control?
Speaker 3: This is one of my personal concerns about technology And about progress of all kinds, which is you don't actually know where it's going. You don't. I mean, your best forecasts are are mine have very often been wrong. And the you know, of course, the promise of the Internet Was diversity and access to information from a lot of different sources, unfiltered information. You can talk to people in foreign countries for free.
You know, every American will have an encyclopedia at his fingertips, and people are gonna be much more informed, and no one will be able to control it because it's it's free and open. And and the effect has been, you know, the opposite. There's less I I would argue there's been, less freedom, in information than there was 30 years ago. How did that happen? I mean, that's it's a very comp I mean, you guys are much better situated to answer that question.
Someone should think about that, I think. But the bottom line is, there are just not that many pipelines, actually. You know, in television, there were 3 big news channels. Cable, you know, broadcast Kind of receded in importance. It's mostly about prostate health now.
And, so 3 big channels. 2 of them were on one side. 1 was on the other. And then there were the social media giants, but there are not that many of them. And they were all locked down, and they were all riddled with intel.
In some cases, actual salaried intel officers. Matt Taibbi's amazing reporting has shown this. Not just American either from foreign countries. The whole thing was an op. It was insane.
And, and, you know, you could I'm not gonna beat up on Fox News, but there was a kind of a Fairly narrow band of acceptable views allowed on that channel. Is that control? Yes, it is. And so there there really was no remaining place with scale Where someone with a dissenting view could give it voice. And that's just crazy.
It's the opposite of what we were promised. But whatever. Not to whine about it. But the existence of x, where anyone around the world, or in most countries anyway, can get for free a whole range of opinions that aren't controlled, That changes everything. Like, the the the primacy of controlled information in a war cannot be overstated.
Like, that's You can debate whether it's more important than ammunition, but it's right up there. You know? And, so I think this election if that platform stays free for the next 12 months, You know, I think we have a shot at least of a real election, but if it does and I think they're gonna do whatever they can to shut it down.
Speaker 0: We also have web based shows, podcasts, And that even predated a little bit Elon taking over, you know, X. There is a self correcting mechanism here. If you feel too controlled, Like, maybe perhaps you felt or you felt pressure at Fox. I don't wanna speak for you if you did. Then all of a sudden, Joe Rogan, all in podcast, whatever, all emerge and now your show on X and I I'm sure it's gonna be on other platforms as well.
Maybe you can speak to what you think the impact of a post Fox Tucker Carlson Show will be, and and how will you be able to sort of shape the show differently, if at all? And what's the mission here? That was just my first question we never really got to, which is post Fox, post Money, post Fame, what is Tucker Carlson's Mission statement going forward. What is your goal?
Speaker 3: Just the same the same as before. And I should just be extra clear. I I wish I could tell harder stories about Fox, You know, forcing me to take some line or other. But they they really didn't. But, you know, they didn't want the show anymore, so that kinda tells you.
But anyway, the point is, My intent in hosting that show is the same as my intent in hosting the show we're about to launch on x, which is, you know, just do your best to say what you think is true. Bring perspectives and information that you don't think are widely covered to a larger audience. And, you know, try and stay firm in that. Admit when you're wrong. Like, just be honest.
It's it's actually not it's you know, I got in this business because I hadn't graduated from college. And my father's like, it's it's a pretty pure meritocracy in journalism. You should do it. And it's also pretty simple. No no real skills required.
Just be literate, which I was.
Speaker 0: And is the show gonna evolve a little bit? Because you you've been doing this experiment, done about 40 episodes.
Speaker 3: Well, here's the way here's way that it already has evolved. So I got laid off in in April. And I, you know, I like to I like to fish and bird hunt, so I did a lot of that. Then I was like, I need to do something. So I've been stuck in a studio for all these, you know, many, many years.
I couldn't really go anywhere. And I went I took 7 foreign trips in 4 months. I just went to all these places where I knew people. I was interested in what was going on. And I just found it amazing.
2 things I found amazing. One, The view of America, the advances you get from a foreign country on what's happening in your own is completely different. There's also a lot the whole world is reshuffling, in my view, After the Ukraine war, February 2022 really did change a lot, particularly with respect to America's place in the world. That's worth covering. And And the second thing I learned once I started putting videos up on X was that it's international.
I mean, I was just shocked by that. I mean, because think about it. I mean, I'm working for a US News channel. It's one of 3 US news channels I've worked for. CNN was international, but I was on CNN US.
So I'm just used to thinking about America being viewed by Americans having conversation about this country. I had no experience at all of a of an of a big international audience, and that platform has that. And so I was amazed by that. And so, we're gonna continue to cover the rest of the world. I'm going Over to Dubai in February interviewing a democrat
Speaker 0: Socratic opinion. Spending time And
Speaker 3: the state over it's just so inter it's just so interesting. There's so much going on. It's like crazy. People And this is not a political point. This is like a human point that bothers me almost more than anything politically, which is the death of curiosity.
It's like people are not curious. Like, what the hell? I thought the technological revolution would would set off, like, explosions in the brain of every person. Like, what is that? I wanna learn more, and it had exactly the opposite.
It's like lonely to sleep with TikTok. Don't tell me more. I don't want to know.
Speaker 4: Double down on what you already what you already believed. Yeah.
Speaker 3: What is it? Over and
Speaker 0: over and over again. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I know I'm less certain in my beliefs. I know that I know less than any time in my life, And I'm much more interested in many more things than I've ever been. I think that's normal. And I think there's something, like, in the water or something that's making people not care. The UFO thing.
Like, what? Whatever your views of that. Like, woah. What is that? Shut up.
And that's normal people. Don't wanna hear it. Why? I don't know. Whatever.
I don't wanna pre explain it.
Speaker 0: Post COVID, we still don't have an accounting of what happened. And, Tucker, what do
Speaker 1: you think about the the The clip yesterday of Elon.
Speaker 0: Let's play it for 45 seconds and then get your response, Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 5: Apology tour, If you will.
Speaker 6: This had been said online. There was all of the criticism. There was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob Iger. I hope
Speaker 5: they stop. You hope? Don't advertise.
Speaker 6: You don't want them to advertise? No.
Speaker 5: What do
Speaker 6: you mean?
Speaker 0: If somebody is going to try to
Speaker 5: black With advertising? With money? Go fuck yourself. But go fuck yourself. Is that clear?
Speaker 0: Yes, you go.
Speaker 5: I hope it is. Hey, Bob. Sure. New audience.
Speaker 6: Well, let me ask you then.
Speaker 5: That's how I feel.
Speaker 0: Alright, Tucker. Your response To the good for you, you know, g f y.
Speaker 3: I mean, I I Elon You know, interviewed people every week for Over 30 years. And so I know what it is to interview I just dropped my pair here. Excuse me. And I know, you know, I know I have a lot of experience interviewing people. I've interviewed you on.
You know? And I don't understand how the the New York Times character, fussy little guy from
Speaker 4: the New York Times
Speaker 0: how did you not laugh? Like, what? He just told Bob all. Fire to fucking tell you. Don't get me started.
You and I are in sync. Andrew Rorschachin is amongst the weakest of moderators interviewers. But
Speaker 3: he's just
Speaker 0: what a what a fussy little douche. Like, that's the mother. We just like huge douche. You were rough saying you were totally like, Are you joking? Elon Musk just told Bob Hager to fuck himself?
Like Yes. I've been texting my response. Blah blah.
Speaker 3: I know. No. Of course, I love it. I love it. I I am in the Iger thing.
I you know, I don't hate Bob Iger or anything. But, like, I keep hearing from people, You know, mutual people I know who know Bob Iger very well, they're just, like, very serious about running for president. And it's like, if you really think if you're Bob pot. You can run for president. If you have anything to offer people and they want you to be president, like, you're pretty out of touch.
So I like that. But, you know, big picture, I'm I'm really and I'm not just saying this because it it, you know, aligns with my interests of some kind. I mean it. I'm worried about the pressure this we brought to bear on that platform, on this platform, on x, because it's the only one, the only big one, A huge one. International one.
Tens of millions of people. Hundreds of millions of people. Like, they have to cut they, meaning the people who would like to maintain the status quo, Kinda have to shut it down. And I am just so hoping that, You know, I can help in any way and that all decent people, whatever their views, add their voice to a chorus that says, no. You can't shut down the 1 big Free speech platform in the world.
You can't do that because then it's just dictatorship. You're not free if you don't have free information, and you can't say what you really thought.
Speaker 0: You are Subject to a lot of these, advertising attacks. They they went after Fox and your show specifically and and and it worked. They got People to not advertise on your show. Yeah. So these advertising boycotts do work, media matters, whatever, you know, whoever's doing them.
So I'm curious what You see the business model being for your show and then how you hope to be resistant to it. Are you going to just go straight up subscription and hope that Half your audience or 10% of your audience pays and you put half out for free, half out for sub? What are you thinking?
Speaker 3: You gotta have a subscription component to it. And, of course, We're selling ads against our content, and we'll be doing that on x and on tucker carlson.com. We'll be hosting the the subscription Part of it. Of course, we're selling ads. We're you know, we'll have network ads too.
I mean, there are lots of different things you can do. But in the end, you have to have some subscription component if you're gonna do it at scale. I mean, we brought our whole staff almost our whole staff from Fox with us. So we got a bunch of people. We've got, you know, bigger ambitions than have been on display so far.
And, And we you know, you gotta have more information. And and I would just say this about just having been in this one business my whole life. The range of stories is the problem. It's not that the stories are all totally dishonest. Some are dishonest.
But some are not. They're technically true. But they're taken from such a small pot of stories that it's like it's crazy. There's all this stuff going on. And it's just not I mean, I was completely obsessed and remain obsessed with the industrial sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.
It's like that's like that's that's a major historical event. Like, you just you just ended the EU. You just hobbled the economic engine of Europe, which is Germany. And, like, who did that? And there were, like, very few stories on that.
That's, like, a very big deal. And, again, back to the curiosity thing, but it's more than that. It's like the People sort of know what where not to go. And I just feel like that's first of all, that's soul death. You're not a free man if You're that constrained in your thinking if you're letting somebody else tell you what you're allowed to think.
How can your wife how can your wife even sleep with you at that point? She no one can respect you if you live like that, a. B, you can't have a democracy. You can't have a free country under the circumstances. So I don't think I'm overstating it.
And so we're gonna try to, I hope, be one of many different similar efforts To just add to the sum total of information and analysis of that information.
Speaker 0: Well, the end of the end of democracy and sex would be kind of rough, I think. Yeah. Go ahead, Triple. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have a final question, and I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist. But, If one of the presidential candidates called you and said, Tucker, be my VP.
Speaker 3: And replace Kamala Harris? I mean, I don't think I can do that. She's a historic president. Tucker,
Speaker 1: would you consider it if Donald Trump gave you that call?
Speaker 3: Well, of course, I would consider it. I'd con I mean, You have no idea how open minded I am. I just
Speaker 0: don't consider anything, actually.
Speaker 3: But, I mean, the truth is I kinda don't respect people who do stuff like that. I really believe I've got a lot of theories which I will not inflict on you, but which I do inflict on my own 4 children. And my main theory of life is that you should do what you are designed to do. I don't believe this whole you can be whatever you wanna be thing. I think it's a absurd lie.
I think we're made for certain things. We have certain aptitudes. They're inborn. They can we can hone them, and we need to through practice, repetition. But It's very I I think it's a it's it's a sign of hubris, which is always the death of particularly of men, hubris, thinking you have more power than you do.
When midlife, you're like, well, actually, what I really wanna do is direct. It's like, you just won best actress, honey. Go back to acting. And I've never been involved in politics. I've never I haven't even voted in all elections.
I'm serious. So, like, the idea that I'm going to, at 54, like, Running for national office, I it's a little you know what I mean? Like, I don't take myself quite that seriously. I mean, I I can't imagine doing something like that.
Speaker 0: The reason my
Speaker 1: asking question is that if we're at least the the Republicans will now Prove that we've lived in a 12 year era of a non traditional candidate. That was essentially a media personality that was able to then curate A plurality of support. Right?
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 0: And
Speaker 1: there's gonna be something that comes after him. And so I'm just trying to get a sense of, if it's not you, it's probably, to be very honest, Somebody like you. Right? Yes. And what I'm So just talk to us about that for just a second.
Speaker 3: I completely agree with you, and I I love your characterization of is someone who's from a media background, because that that's closer to the I'm not diminishing. I'm from media backgrounds. I'm not attacking it. But that's a lot closer to the truth Than most characterizations, casino magnate, developer. He was a media guy.
You know, he had lots of businesses. But he was a media guy. He had the top show on NBC. And so I think you're absolutely right. My concern is and I have pure contempt for the Professional political class.
I've written a book about it. I've expressed it daily for a number of years now. So and it's real. However, I think That they're you know, these are complex systems, and it's better to have someone who understands the systems in an ideal world administer the systems because he's more effective at doing so. And I also think that once you decide that like, hey, we'll just go crazy, and you couple that with true Social disorder, like you get to a place where you can't buy anything at CVS because it's chained up because shoplifting has been legalized as it has been in California, What you're going to get is fascism because people can't live in in that and they can't live with chaos.
Like, that's the one thing they can't deal with. And I've covered a couple of wars, and that was my main conclusion. The main problem with war is not that people get killed. It's that people have to live with total uncertainty and craziness. And that's incompatible with what people want.
Like, that's the that's the worst thing. You know? Die we're all gonna die. Dying is not the worst thing. The worst thing is living in chaos.
And we're starting to live in chaos. And so the return to order is what scares me. I think it'd be very easy. And I do think Gavin Newsom is a fascist. I think he's the kind of person who have no problem, no hesitation About using the DOJ to to imprison his political opponents.
Now Biden is imprisoning his political opponents, but at least they're lying about it. Gavin Newsom is the kind of person who'd be like, well, yeah. You're you're a threat to the general order, and you're going to jail. And I think because we're in a moment of chaos right now, People kinda want that, actually. I think one of the purposes of degrading and confusing our society is to make way for authoritarianism even more than we have now.
So that kind of freaks me out, actually. I personally what I would really like is a kind of colorless, You know, boring, noncharismatic, like, Gerald Ford, Mike Pence without their views. Both of those men were bad men, in my opinion. But someone like that who could govern without making it about himself and restore the country to a sense of rules based Order. That's what I really want.
And I but I'm probably gonna be denied that.
Speaker 4: Tucker, I I feel like one of the one of the other Consequences of the way things have gone is that the solution has always been to throw more money at the problem, and we've got this kind of out of control fiscal condition. What's Your point of view on the fiscal condition of the US as a priority, the federal government that it has a priority. And, You know, do we need to shrink government? Shrink overall discretionary spending? Do we need to cut these entitlements?
Do we need to do it all? And How do we get there given that everyone gets elected by telling people I'm gonna give you more stuff? And then this just kind of cascades for decades until eventually Bad shit
Speaker 3: happens. Well, who's gonna buy our debt? I mean, that's that's, like it's scary. It's so scary. You know, this is, of course, the problem with democracy.
I mean, I since, you know, from the Roman Republican till 17/76, like, how many democracies were there?
Speaker 4: Exactly. Woo hoo.
Speaker 0: Let me
Speaker 3: let me do the math on that. Approximately 0 in that range. And this was the critique, of course, in Europe, of democracy at the time. It's not that it Gave too much freedom to the average person, but that it would result in tyranny. And when the majority discovered it could steal The goods of whomever it wanted, legally legally, you would wind up with dictatorship.
I mean, this is like a very well charted path. But, I mean, but I hope it doesn't get to that. I'm not making an argument against democracy. I'm just saying it's a little bit harder to perpetuate than we thought that it was. And, And this is kind of the fear that people have had for 100
Speaker 4: of years that we wanted
Speaker 0: to hear.
Speaker 4: Is the manifestation of that structural problem.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. That's exact exactly. That's exactly right.
Speaker 0: Let's end on this, Elon clip from yesterday just about virtue. I'd like to get your reaction to this, Tucker.
Speaker 5: Tesla has done more to help the environment Then all other companies combined. It would be fair to say that therefore as a leader of the company I've done more for the environment than everyone else, any single human on
Speaker 6: earth. How do you feel about that? No. No. No.
Speaker 0: Feel about that?
Speaker 6: Yeah. No. I'm I'm asking you personally how you feel about Because this goes we're talking about power and influence and Yeah. I'm saying I'm
Speaker 5: saying what I what I care about is the the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them.
Speaker 0: Your thoughts on Versha Signaling versus Ram.
Speaker 3: It was like it was like it was like the hand of God massaging my central nervous system, like, every erogenous town. Which is the
Speaker 2: awareness. Like, that
Speaker 0: I I
Speaker 3: couldn't even release.
Speaker 1: Whole kind of practically
Speaker 0: since the beginning. Wow. 7:30. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: No. But I just I so vehemently agree, and I don't even like electric cars. I don't think they help the environment. I didn't even agree with that point. I just love his point, which is the point, which is what actually matters is what you do.
It's not what Think. What matters is helping other people. And I also think that the fact that Andrew Ross Sorkin has a television job shows this is not a meritocracy. Gotta know how he
Speaker 0: felt that. That was my fault. His response to that was, like, he didn't even he he can't even like, I'll just kinda say
Speaker 3: this is, like, So inside baseball, but it's literally what I do for a liver, have done all my life. Yes. That's what we do, Tom. The united states. People.
Yeah. Yes. Is to listen to them. Larry King. I used to fill in for Larry King at CNN.
He was number 1, 9 PM, all the stuff. The 1st time I filled in for Larry King, there was no research On the guest, I had 2 guests, no research. And I said the producer Larry was, like, in Cabo with wife number 7. And I said, where's the research? Oh, Larry doesn't do research.
So I do the show. It went fine. And I called him after. I was like, dude, you you do no research? He goes and he was number 1 most dominant figure in cable news by far.
And he goes, no. I just listened. When someone says something weird, I pause, and I said, wait. Wait a sec. Wait a second.
Wait a second. You killed someone in 1962. Why'd you kill
Speaker 0: part. You follow-up. You're present in the interview Yes. And then you follow-up based on what this guest said.
Speaker 4: Jason's interrupting you right now. Sorry. Ahead. No.
Speaker 0: I listen. I'm reflecting back to what he said, which is what because game realizes that's right. It's a colloquy.
Speaker 2: Jake House treating this as validation.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. There's also another story of this,
Speaker 2: Tucker, that you don't need to know about. I
Speaker 0: can tell it's it's tantalizing. Oh, it is. It
Speaker 4: is. Trust me.
Speaker 0: Well, let's end here. I you know, we have a lot of fans of not only there's about 18% crossover between All In and your work, Tucker, and they send me images of you out there and about in the world. And, we just I just got this 1 in my DMs. I don't know what's going on. What's going on here?
Is that a park in New Hampshire where you guys can
Speaker 2: this is the bromance. These yet?
Speaker 3: That's so you know what? I'm not that's kinda hunky. I'm just being honest. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's a lot going on here. Well, listen, we got a good Vineyard Vines t shirt. See, the the bromance is now complete. Tucker, we'd love to have you back on a regular basis.
Actually, I thank you.
Speaker 4: Fun. That was super fun. That was great.
Speaker 3: And I'm sorry for talking too much. You guys spun me up in your frenzy, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: I understand I understand why you were number 1 in media. I that was so fun. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 0: Part. That's
Speaker 3: what I did. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Really, really good. Thank you very much, Tucker. Thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2: It was amazing.
Speaker 0: Good luck with the new launch. Everybody go to tuckerfarlson.com, and when the subs come out on day 1, give them a sub. Okay? Sub. Hey, Tucker sub.
Didn't come out exactly how I wanted to, but yeah. Sure. You could sub for Tucker Sachs. Are you gonna be a sub for Tucker Sachs? Are you subbing?
Speaker 2: I'm gonna dom for Tucker.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Poor Tucker. Alright. Thanks, Tucker. See you guys.
Speaker 4: What What'd you guys think? That was fun. That was great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Let's show it deeper.
Speaker 0: I'm a soccer for Tucker. I'll be honest. Like, can we get him on group chat? I mean, this can you imagine being on group chat with Tucker?
Speaker 4: Fun guy. Great guy.
Speaker 0: He's a great entertainer and you know what, he's into, I know he's right wing, but conservative, but he's actually, I think, a first principle thinker who thinks for himself. We, we didn't get into January 6th, we ran out of time, but, You know, he he was, you know, not happy about that. He wasn't happy about election denial. I think he's intellectually rigorous.
Speaker 2: Wow, J. K. How?
Speaker 4: What do you think, Subhash?
Speaker 1: I really liked it. I like talking to people that have opinions that force me to, like, actually rethink about how I think. And It was I think the the most impactful thing that he said to me, which touches upon my own life, was just How one feels when you have a little bit too much too early versus grinding slowly and compounding success over many years. I think it does create in moments an element of self sabotage. I have lived it in my own life, so that totally resonated.
This idea that there's just so much abundance that causes people to not really fight over the big issues and then fight over the the fringe issues. I I I do think that there's an element of huge truth in that. It was really, really good. I think, like, that this is probably one of the very few ones that we've done that I would Listen to over and over.
Speaker 4: I'd say that was, like, one of my favorite episodes or probably my
Speaker 0: favorite episodes or probably my favorite episodes. Just just
Speaker 4: just as a listener, I I just enjoyed listening the whole fucking episode thing.
Speaker 1: I I just wanted to I could hear him talk for hours probably. I know.
Speaker 4: I didn't wanna talk. I didn't have anything to say. I just wanted to chill and hang out, like, listen
Speaker 0: to him.
Speaker 4: That was great. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Me too.
Speaker 2: Have you done Tucker's show, Jamoff, yet.
Speaker 1: They asked me to do the show in December, which I couldn't do. And at some point in the spring, I will do the show, but then I was like, Can you come on, Arshad?
Speaker 0: Sure. There you go. I'm doing it right. It's
Speaker 2: amazing. Thanks, Adam. Yeah.
Speaker 4: That was amazing. Sacks, didn't you, like, go on his show? No.
Speaker 2: I've been on Tucker's show a couple of times when it was on Fox, and one appearance was about Chase Boudin, you know, the DA that we got tossed out and then
Speaker 0: Go team.
Speaker 2: I I went on a couple other times. I think one one was about the economy. I was on the show a couple of times for you know short segments but anyway I thought what was interesting about this conversation was that it was much more philosophical than I was
Speaker 0: expecting pot.
Speaker 2: We touched on a few like policy issues, but we spent most of the time talking about his deeper clinical diagnosis of American culture and American discourse. And I would say that one of the things that's maybe unique about his take and I mean definitely different than mine is it's much more psychological than
Speaker 0: Metaphysical even.
Speaker 2: Metaphysical and psychological. I mean
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like I don't Really asked too many questions about why people believe what they believe. I just sort of take it as a given and then discuss whether they're right or wrong, whereas he actually sort of psychoanalyzes why people have the views that they have. And, you you know what I mean? It's it's actually kinda interesting.
Speaker 1: That whole methodology, for whatever it's worth, resonates with me. I mean, I think it's very it's the reason early on I really gravitated to Rene Girard, because I thought it demonstrated a lot of how people behave to me in In a in a language that I could understand. So when Tucker describes problems in this context, to me, it's very powerful just because that is how I kind of frame things as I think humans are driven by psychological incentives. And I think that there is something very worth exploring here, which is these Western cultures Gets so prosperous that the big things we don't fight over, so then we fight over the little things, or we have to invent things to fight over.
Speaker 0: And the virtue signaling, he kind of brings up in his own personal part. Which is, hey, I go to Jackson Hole. I'm getting accosted, you know, in line at the lift. People's wives are upset at me. The husbands are upset at me.
The hedge fund people. These are all people of incredible wealth, incredible privilege who have extra cycles. And instead of having a debate over the issues In good faith. Full contact debate like we do here. They just wanna vilify people.
And, you know, I tried to listen to him and say, hey, what what does he get right here? Now I Obviously, I think he's wrong about climate change. I thought that was bonkers, but I do think he understands human nature pretty well from doing 30 years of interviews.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's It's definitely worth exploring, Jason, this idea that the more successful people get, the more self loathing there is. And then it manifests in some, you know, really destructive ways. I think especially
Speaker 0: if you don't have a foundation.
Speaker 4: Once you get successful enough, there's very little progress. I think a lot of human happiness comes from progress.
Speaker 1: Progress. Exactly. Pot. Yeah. The right.
Speaker 0: Where's the purpose?
Speaker 1: Well, there's just there's just no higher order bits. You buy the house, that's a huge accomplishment. But then when you buy your 2nd house or 3rd house? I think the diminishing returns are severe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Severe. And then and then these things are just baggage. They're like, I'll just trust them.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah. And then you're spending all this time dealing with headaches. Part. Yeah. Exactly.
What's your progress?
Speaker 0: What's your progress? What's the purpose of life? I mean, Sacks, when you bought your 6,000, I mean, You can cut that.
Speaker 4: Josh is busy reorganizing the US political establishment, so I think he's making progress, you know, in his own way.
Speaker 1: Sacks is making progress.
Speaker 0: Yep. Yeah. Well, I I I you know, he's where does he sit on the political spectrum today, Sacks? Because you and and he are both, Yeah. Because you're both kinda outcasts in the Republican Party now.
Right? Like
Speaker 2: I would describe Tucker as probably the most influential populist in part on the right. So there's a populism well, there's a populism of the left that I guess was Bernie Sanders before he told, you know, maybe like 5, 8 years ago or whatever.
Speaker 0: Describe us describe for the audience your perception of populism, You know, on the left and the right and what they share and what they don't share kind of thing. Because this does seem to be the emerging party, I think we would all agree, Is that people are sick of these extremes and they want something new and the something new seems to be populism.
Speaker 2: Well, One way to think about populism is just democracy. Populism is the word that the elite gives to democracy they don't like. So for example, Vast majority of the country wants our borders sealed. For some reason the elites don't want that, so that's labeled populism. I think the vast majority of the country regrets the forever wars in the Middle East and doesn't want us getting involved in more wars, the sort of hyper interventionism.
I think that's like a major part of the platform. And then of course I think the 3rd big area of reevaluation was around our free trade policies. You know, they really Ended up hollowing out America's industrial capability and exported a lot of manufacturing jobs
Speaker 0: Globalization.
Speaker 2: To to to China. Globalization. So, yeah, I think on the right, big picture, I would say that populism is a nationalist reaction to what the hyper globalization that happened, that was encouraged by the elites over the past few decades.
Speaker 0: And he he hit on that. He said, you know, at some point, are the politicians gonna match what the People want, and they they call this getting to Denmark. High functioning governments in the Nordics, You know, tend to reflect what, the the candidates reflect what what the people want. Right? And and we seem to have this kinda broken here.
We we have one other story people have wanted us to comment on when we had our week off. So I thought we'd get into the open AI thing. I just wanted to point out I don't mean to make this like a love triangle, Sachs, but Tucker and I did go skiing last year. We we tried to keep it, but now that it's out, you know, here it is. I'm sorry about this, but We were actually in the Saco at the same time, so it's gonna come out at some point.
Saks, we might as well talk about it.
Speaker 1: Look how old And nasty those ski clothes are.
Speaker 0: Oh. Yeah. Well, you know what? We're both very woke, and we don't want we're virtue signaling that we don't we wanna recycle. So we bought All this, no speed stuff on eBay.
I thought
Speaker 1: that was Phil Hellmuth on the left.
Speaker 0: I guess that's not Jacob. That's me before I was in Budapest. Alright. Let's do the Open Eye AI thing. If you guys have time, we can we go over this real quick?
I don't wanna
Speaker 2: We can. I just wonder if the story's stale, but.
Speaker 0: I mean, I I think one of the things we can do here is just sort of, now that the 3 acts are complete, we can actually talk about the epilogue just to, for for people who Have not all missed the news. I think
Speaker 4: the epilogue's about to drop, but
Speaker 0: yeah. Well, that's that's what we'll get at.
Speaker 1: I think we're still in the 2nd act here. I don't think this is over by a long shot. Alright.
Speaker 0: So let me I'll just check this.
Speaker 2: Let's see why I'm curious why that is.
Speaker 0: I'm gonna architect, then I'm gonna hand it to you, Jamar. Act 1, Sam's fired. Act 2, chaos for a week. We were off. You know, what were all the reasons?
Act 3, obviously, just yesterday. Sam's back. I think Ilya's out. Microsoft's an observer on the board. So I guess the epilogue, Chamath, is what we Wanna know is what happened?
Why did this all happen? Was there a major breakthrough? Was it Sam doing deals with Masayoshi san or In the Middle East to make, you know, AI chips, what do you, if we, if the epilogue does drop, or if like you're saying, this is the 2nd act and the 3rd act It's gonna begin, whichever metaphor you want to use. What will it say,
Speaker 1: Jim up? I think we can all agree on what happened, which is that The employees realized that in the absence of leadership, business leadership, that the enterprise value of that company was going to disintegrate. And what would have been imperiled was an $86,000,000,000 valuation secondary. So I think The employees did what was in their best interests, and it makes the obvious and logical sense, which is We need to circle the wagons and get the business leadership of this company back into this place, so that the value of the enterprise is sustained. They did that.
So I think this valuation is gonna hold. I think the secondary is going to happen. So I think, like, from that perspective, We don't yet have a full accounting of what precipitated all of the all of the decision making at the board, Number 1. Number 2 is the person who seemed to be the principal inventor He's now no longer on the board and I think based on Sam's blog post, could probably no longer be at the company. That seems like an important thing.
And then the third thing which I found odd was Brett Taylor, who I worked with at Facebook, who I've known for a long time, very sober, reasonable guy, Puts out his own addendum to the blog post that basically says, his chairmanship of this board is purely transitory.
Speaker 0: What do
Speaker 4: you take?
Speaker 0: What's what is that? Yeah. What do you take from that?
Speaker 1: My takeaway is whatever's happening is still TBD. There's enough question marks that look, I told my friends on the board without saying who it was, whatever you guys do, the most important thing that you need to do Is you need to retain great counsel and make sure that there and I said this publicly, make sure that there's phenomenal D and O insurance, and make sure that there aren't any Issues where you could be held personally liable for whatever happens in the future.
Speaker 0: Piercing of the vow, the corporate vow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now that's a generic thing that I think all corporate directors should do. I think it's even more important here because you have A non standard governance structure that could change, and it could change because the people involved wanted to change. But it could also could change because the government says, hey, hold on a second. This should never have been like this in the 1st place. I'll give you an example of that.
You know, at Facebook, there was a moment where we divested all of our IP to a subsidiary in Ireland, and for tax reasons. And 2 signatories to that deal. It was me and Zuck. And 6 or 7 years later, this is long after I left face, but The IRS says, hold on a second. You misvalued these assets.
We're owed x 1,000,000,000 of dollars in taxes. It was a huge, long, drawn out thing. So at a minimum, if there's great value created here, there will be consequences with respect to tax and who paid what And if you have the shielding of a nonprofit entity, there's theoretically a lot of taxes that could have been paid then not. So all of this to me says Lot of really open curious threads, which means it's not the epilogue yet. We're probably somewhere at the end of act 2.
Friedberg,
Speaker 0: my question to you Is. There's been speculation that there was an superintelligence AGI breakthrough possibly, and that's what spooked everybody. And maybe the claim that Sam Wasn't forthcoming with the board was that he didn't tell him about it. The second thing was there's been some 4chan posts. Again, this is pure speculation that maybe The AI they're working on could break in some way encryption, and that would have been caused a really chaotic global moment.
What are your thoughts on those 3 potential items or more? Are are any of those possibilities in your mind, Dave Freiberg?
Speaker 4: No idea. But
Speaker 2: I can do it without that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Go ahead, Sacks.
Speaker 0: Go ahead, Sacks. You take a sec.
Speaker 2: So I think the best theory on what actually happened here, what precipitated all of this was broken in a piece by Reuters. And what it said was that there was a letter to the board that was written in the few days before Sam's firing by the board in which they were raising concerns over the development of Q*STAR, which was A new breakthrough at OpenAI that allows these language models to do math, and previously, LLMs weren't very good at math. It would sort of predict the next word, but that wasn't actually based on mathematical reasoning. Q star actually allows the AI to do math. It understands mathematical reasoning.
Supposedly the capability is only at a grade school level right now, but it is highly accurate and it can be scaled up with more computing power and I don't think it was coincidental that Sam was supposedly in the Middle East seeking to raise 1,000,000,000 of dollars to create a new chip company, basically a new specialized chip or ASIC, to perhaps run these types of models. So they were going to scale up this capability and what mathematical reasoning allows to do is unlock a whole new problem set. So for example, in chemistry, in physics, in computer science, in cryptography Encryption. And encryption, all these things mathematical reasoning underpins all of these disciplines. And so it does Represent a major new piece towards AGI.
And so I think the best theory about what happened is that the board, but I'd say specifically, Ilya, had a panic or moment of panic or part.
Speaker 0: Concerned.
Speaker 2: You know, freak out or whatever concern whatever about this and it combined with probably under line concerns that the board had about Sam's other activity because he's got his fingers in a lot of eyes here.
Speaker 0: So it hits 2 of the 3 potential Reasons. You know, putting aside any personal behavior, it seems like there's no personal behavior here. So it's those 2. Right?
Speaker 2: Right. So they fired him, but they apparently didn't really think it through at all. And because they're new.
Speaker 4: These are not it's
Speaker 0: not a professional board. Yeah. That's constructive. Well, I
Speaker 2: don't know. I think Adam Adam is very pot.
Speaker 0: But the other 2 were considered early as tempers.
Speaker 2: And then the 2 others who were, you know, from nonprofits or just not very familiar. And so What happened is they took this drastic action but didn't explain it. And with each passing day, it became more glaring that they would not explain it. So the pressure sort of built on the company to explain itself and provide a good justification for this and then meanwhile I think Sam just ran a textbook counter to operation here. I mean, they got
Speaker 0: Hearts. Emojis.
Speaker 2: There was that aspect of it, but Sky is behind the velvet glove of all these hearts and saying I love you and all this stuff was the iron fist. The iron fist was they got Over 700 of the 770 open ai employees to sign a petition, they were going with Sam and Sam went to Microsoft and set up shop so the threat to the board was I'm going to take the whole company with me and set up shop over at Microsoft and that was sort of the compelling threat. Basically all the employees threatened to quit and go with Sam and so the board was under immense pressure And then at the same time you got the sense that Ilya was under a lot of personal pressure from his friends, from people he knew at the company. It's not Probably irrelevant that there's about to be a huge cash out. There's about to be a big secondary at a $86,000,000,000 valuation.
So All these early employees were about to make a lot of money. In any event, for all of these reasons I think I don't think Ilya is motivated by money, I think he's motivated by wanting to keep OpenAI intact. I think that he must have had a moment where he realized, wait a second, what we've done here in throwing out Sam is destroying the company and then he recanted. He basically apologized and signed that petition. And at that moment, it just became a fait accompli that Sam was going to get his job back and so Let's basically see what happened.
Now in terms of the epilogue, where I disagree slightly with Chamath is that Although they still have to form this board, they're going to form a 9 person board and they only have 3 members so far. I think the conclusion here is It's sort of a foregone conclusion, which is the board can never fire Sam again. I mean they're they're not going to go through that again, therefore he has total control.
Speaker 0: It would take a lot.
Speaker 2: It would take a lot. So I think that Sam has won and he's gonna consolidate his control over the company. By the way, I thought he already had control. I thought that
Speaker 0: Yeah. You outlined that in the previous episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Control. Apparently, he did not. Do you
Speaker 0: think he makes it a I think he spins it out and make it a for profit? You think it just makes it a for profit and then says, hey, we'll give x amount of the equity or whatever to this nonprofit, but we're gonna we're just gonna Flip this thing and and and separate it out and clean up the original sin.
Speaker 2: I think apparently there's like tax problems with doing that, but I but I think that what happens is, look, they already have this for profit LLC entity, which is where all the investors have have basically put their money into and they've gotten shares or membership interests or Some sort of profit interest.
Speaker 0: Synthetic shares, whatever
Speaker 2: it is. Shares, Phantom shares. And then the vast majority of that is owned by this foundation, the nonprofit foundation, that I always thought was under Sam's control but apparently it wasn't. I think it now will be. I think that I just think that what's going to happen in the next few months is that Sam will consolidate his control because He's proven that he has a total loyalty of the troops and they're behind him and there's no choice, so why won't he get everything he wants?
Speaker 0: Yeah, all of the, all of the smoke, I think leads to the fire that you point out, which is there was some great advance, There was some deals going on and those things, it matches what the board said. We didn't feel like he was being forthcoming with us And it could be on 2 issues like that. It just totally makes sense. It, it, it locks the puzzle pieces in place. Dave, let's assume that They have now not only done language models, predicting the next word and, and, and, you know, understanding that, but there is some reasoning going on here and they understand Math and it understands how to do the next math problem.
I don't know if we put that under reinforcement learning. It's obviously very different than language models. Explain what you think if that is what's happening here with the the q project, what that could mean on a scientific basis.
Speaker 4: I don't know enough. I'm sorry.
Speaker 0: I gotta That's I mean, this is why we love you, because you're honest when you don't know. Chamath, anything here as we wrap? In terms of watching this whole brouhaha,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably not the end.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. More drama. I think there probably will be more drama.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, it's a
Speaker 2: lot of drama.
Speaker 4: Did you see the article this morning
Speaker 0: part.
Speaker 4: Where they started saying all the houses that Sam bought. He bought all these houses. And so I think there's a lot of investigators digging around now, trying to figure out all the Story because the board was and so forthcoming with what happened and why they made this decision. There's a lot of people digging around trying to figure out more about Sam than they have been, You know, looked into in the past. So this will reveal all sorts of new threads that'll start to become part of the the narratives.
It's unfortunate. I think that the technology, the progress is what really matters here, not all the kind of personal people stuff. It's weird. I also the the other comment I'll make, I thought one of the the biggest takeaways for me on the whole drama last week, was that the employees basically got their way. Employees got together, voted, and said, this is what we want, and the board did what they wanted.
And it really, I think sets another precedent. Much like I think Elon set a really big precedent in Silicon Valley when he came in and slashed heads at Twitter. The precedent that it it triggered a lot of other executives to start to think, well, maybe that's Possible, and I should think about doing, you know, more cost savings and so on. This is another interesting precedent where an entire employee base gets together and says, we want x, And the board acquiesced and said, here you go. You can have x.
Does that mean that other start ups and other companies are gonna start to see employee groups band together Saying we want x in a more vocal public way. Possibly.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, Stryberg, this is not a new tactic. Right. But look, if the employees are willing to Sign a petition on mass and you get over 90% of them supporting something, and then you also threaten to all set up shop somewhere else. I mean, boards usually respond to that pressure. Yeah.
But look, I think that it's very clear that Sam has the support of the troops. I'm not questioning that, but I think it would be a mistake to just see this as some sort of spontaneous groundswell. I think there was clearly, like, some organization to it. Like I said, I think he ran a textbook operation there. Yeah.
And wasn't it Paul Graham who said something like if Sam were dropped on an island of cannibals, like kind of a Lord of the Flies situation, he'd be the one to come out on top? He's like really he's in his element. Don't don't just assume look. This is all covered up by hearts and I love you. I mean, I've never read a corporate announcement with the word loving it more times.
This was not about love and hearts all the you know, this is there's some
Speaker 0: He's a wartime
Speaker 2: ruthless, corporate in fighting here.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And he's just not on top. But look, the board was totally incompetent. I mean, listen, if if a board is gonna Take a drastic action of firing the founder CEO when everything is going great. I mean because everything's been going Great at OpenAI. It's incumbent on them to explain their actions, and there needs to be
Speaker 0: some stuff done. Do that? Why didn't they do that?
Speaker 2: Did they be up.
Speaker 0: Why didn't they do that? Even as a c s a o for their reputation.
Speaker 2: I'm saying it was totally incompetent.
Speaker 0: Yeah. They should have dropped it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well no, what I'm saying is either there's a smoking gun or there's not. I don't think you should take an action like this ever unless there's a smoking gun And if there is a smoking gun, you need to communicate
Speaker 0: that. Right.
Speaker 2: And I think with each passing day that they didn't communicate it, people came to the conclusion, there is no smoking gun. And so my guess is there is no smoking gun and they were overly hasty about taking this action.
Speaker 0: Yeah. This could have been a very simple discussion. Hey, Sam, can we Work on you telling us in advance when you're going and doing deal making so we can be in alignment on it. Like, it seemed like there was something that could have been done that Wasn't firing him
Speaker 4: in this space. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, you could you could put somebody on a pip. You could do all kinds of things. So taking the step of, yeah, letting somebody go in that way, with that orchestration. Again, I just, I just think that This stuff is too juicy and too interesting for the details to not come out.
Speaker 0: Oh, it it will come out. Yeah. The fact that it hasn't come out yet is crazy. I I would have suspect they would have come out in the 1st 72 hours.
Speaker 2: So you think there is maybe not a smoking gun, but there's something.
Speaker 1: No. No. No. I think it I think it's what what we said, which is that the economically rational decision for all the employees and for Sam and Greg Was to do what they did because it allows them to get an $86,000,000,000 valuation and a big secondary done, right? So that makes complete rational sense.
That is the Underlying chaos was happening that caused this decision to exist in the 1st place to not come out. I just think that the incentives for that decision to come out now, for example, from the 2 departing board members is quite high. How How do you get this information from the incoming board members? How do they not say anything? All the new 6 people will have, that join the board will have to get read into this thing, Right?
So you're just multiplying the number of people that knows whatever it is. And it's either going to be, David, to your point, Pathe, which is The board didn't know what they're doing and they acted hastily or, you know, the self preservation of here's what we knew. But it is just gonna come out and leak after leak after leak. And then to your point, The pulling the sweater of all of the other deals that may have been happening on the side or whatever, all of this stuff now comes up because it's just too salacious for too many people. The numbers are too big.
Everything just looks too juicy. Now you have this, like, hidden technology that could theoretically ruin the world. Everybody will be leaking to everybody. And that that's the that's the only guarantee here. Which is why I really think that You have to commend the leadership team for trying to become very militaristic about all of this.
Everybody had the same Tweets. They said the same things. They used the same heart emojis. I mean, it was extremely well managed.
Speaker 2: It it was mantras.
Speaker 0: It's It's amazing what a secondary will do to the troops and to know there's alignment of the stock price.
Speaker 2: The mantra. The mantra was that OpenAI is nothing without its employees or something like that. Right?
Speaker 1: We are nothing without our team or something like that.
Speaker 2: And that was that was basically something that on the surface appeared to be a positive affirmation of camaraderie, but like I sell said, iron fist beneath the velvet glove. It's a threat. It's a threat. We can set up shop.
Speaker 1: It's also the formula in in an Excel spreadsheet that says they are nothing without the team. The the enterprise value equals 0.
Speaker 2: Your company is a 0 without us, and we can go step shop somewhere else. So it was perfect velvet glove, iron fist type stuff.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well done, Sam. Well, well, well, Sam will be on the pod in the coming weeks, I think. I've been texting with them. So I think if Sam,
Speaker 1: I think what Elon said yesterday was also really interesting, which is He described Ilya as an extremely moral person who thinks about these things subtly. And so, again, and and I've known Adam for a long time. I think Adam is tremendous. He is
Speaker 0: From Quora, Adam D'Angelo.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He was the CTO at Facebook. We worked together in the trenches in war for years. He is just the best of the best.
Speaker 2: Totally. He's very smart.
Speaker 0: Oh, so incredible.
Speaker 2: You know, very He's so incredible. Very knowledgeable.
Speaker 1: This is not an irrational, emotional person.
Speaker 2: My guess is that that they had good reasons to want to act based on The Ilya's philosophy around AI safety. You may not agree with that philosophy, but their mistake was If you're gonna do something like that, you have to be able to defend it. You have to be able to communicate it. And I mean, if your concern here was around AI safety, write a manifesto, You know, explain the values that you're invoking and supporting.
Speaker 1: That's right. I think that's a takeaway for all of us, for for all of us on boards that At some point, have to make these decisions because we're all faced with them and we've made them. The lesson that I learned is We're at a point where it is so important that you give employees the transparency to re underwrite why they should stay. So when you make a decision like this in any company going forward, my reaction will be open the kimono and lay out the case Bear. So if you have to make a CEO transition, this is exactly why we did it.
This was the precipitating events that caused it. Here's the evidence, And here's what we're gonna do about it. And I think that that's probably a good takeaway for all boards to learn, which is that level of transparency is gonna be needed in the future so that Folks don't fill in the blanks with their own conspiracy theories.
Speaker 0: Also, there were apparently 2 companies or 2 organizations running in parallel here to build on your points, Jamap, which is Ilya and the nonprofit, this might have been the right decision for that organization. But the right decision for the employees who are incented by this secondary that was about To be shipping the employees, apparently, 1,000,000,000 of dollars, that for profit company, this would be the wrong decision. The for profit company should go fast, And it should be releasing where Jason
Speaker 1: and Jason, like the I I I from what was reported, there's, like, this Obligation. And it's hard to understand what it means of the board to determine when AGI is reached and then as a result, essentially Hit the kill switch on the commercial business. And if I were a board member dealing with that, I would want A gazillion trillion dollars of insurance to cover me. And the reason is that when that's litigated, not if, when that's litigated, It is that board that will be at the center of dealing with that financial responsibility and liability. This is the other masterstroke, I think, of what Sam did.
He's not even on the board, so that liability is no longer his.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So he's just Amazing. Complete we got part.
Speaker 1: We could talk about the business and and the actual fit none
Speaker 0: of the responsibility. And and
Speaker 1: the actual fiscal responsibility, he doesn't have to bear.
Speaker 0: Part. Can I
Speaker 2: speak to the kill switch for a second? So I I think it's a really interesting point. So so by the way, Jason, there is a for profit entity here. The for profit entity is this new LLC that was created.
Speaker 0: Correct.
Speaker 2: The nonprofit entity is above it at the governance layer and it kind of owns the LLC. Right. So again, investors and employees get compensated out of the LLC, and then this nonprofit foundation was supposed to exercise a really complicated org chart. There you go.
Speaker 0: Whenever an org chart has more than, like, 2 arrows,
Speaker 2: It's crazy. You're fucked. Right.
Speaker 0: How many arrows? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 arrows.
Speaker 2: That's 6,
Speaker 0: 6, 2 many.
Speaker 2: But my point is that this complexity was justified by this idea of the kill switch, that if the AI gets out of control, the AGI gets out of control, We're going to have this board of super wise people who are not motivated by a profit incentive, right, because that we can't trust the profit motive, right? And And so we're going to have this board of wise elders who are going to make this super intelligent decision. And if this whole episode shows anything it shows this structure completely failed I mean the board ended up acting in a completely incompetent way either they had Good cause to do what they did and didn't explain it which was incompetent or they had no cause at all which was incompetent either way you cannot say that this board Acted with a high degree of competence. No matter how competent any of the individuals are, I'm just saying that as a board dynamic, It completely failed. So they did not invent some higher form of governance as they originally claimed was necessary.
It's a franken structure.
Speaker 0: It's a franken structure.
Speaker 2: So it didn't work and I think this all I mean it's a I think important lesson in human motivations which is just because you take out the profit motive does not mean that human beings all of a sudden become noble they just pursue other agendas Basically political agendas or whatever. And so this idea that we're going to solve the AGI problem or alignment issue by creating nonprofit structures. I think that this episode proves that's not going to work. Like, look elsewhere.
Speaker 0: And you and I talked about this on Twitter Spaces and X Spaces, Which was, you know, people give VCs and and, you know, investors a hard time about, you know, I don't know, their existence and and how they operate in the world. Okay. Fair enough. I'm sure there's valid criticisms. But the share price and employees participating and the share price going up And secondaries occurring on a regular basis is the most perfect structure that has been created by humans to date For running an organization, I think we would all agree.
And it's super imperfect, and there's weird things that happen. But if you want everybody to grow in the right direction, Giving them some shares and then everybody watching the share price go up into the right is pretty phenomenal. This board did not have 1 VC on it. Pot. It was not.
Speaker 2: And all the VCs in the company were they were the biggest they were the most aggressive tweeters saying, you know, WTF, like, what are you doing? Because they could see their investment going up in smoke. Yes.
Speaker 4: They had a lot
Speaker 0: of money with the share price, But no control.
Speaker 2: So so as much as you don't like the profit motive, it does create alignment and that makes people predictable, and that's a good thing. And like Adam Smith Said in the 1700s, the reason we can trust that the butcher and the baker will serve us our dinner is because they're going to make a profit. They're aligned with us and we don't look to charity. We look to their self interest and like you said for all the shit that VCs take that if you properly align people, it can create, I think, it creates a great enterprise. It creates a potential
Speaker 0: for a
Speaker 2: great enterprise for great outcomes.
Speaker 0: Great outcomes. Absolutely. All right. This has been another extraordinary all in episode, probably top five. Thanks so much for Tucker Clawson for coming on the program.
And, for the sultan of science, David Friedberg, The Rain Man. Yeah. Definitely. David Sachs and the dictator himself, Jamala Paulie Happatia. Pot.
I'm the world's greatest moderator, and we'll see you next time. In park.
Speaker 2: Man David in
Speaker 0: part. We should all just get a room and just have this 1 big huge orgy because they're all just it's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Let in