DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

Just so you know, everything is archived by the White House right now, so everything we say is recorded. David Freeberg is a... Chmuff, stop. You're being recorded. Good. I will hope this is discoverable. White House. I just want you to know that. Stupid. Also, he did not pay his taxes in 2016. You really want me to start?

with you. You want me to start? You want me to put some shit in the archives? Oh my god. Here, let me put some shit in the archives for you. I'm going to pee my pants. I think you need to shut the fuck up is what you need to do. Sorry, White House. I'm going to pee my pants. He did it. He also has on my paid parking ticket.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world with me again today. Jamal Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, David Freeberg, our sultan of science, and... Two guests. Obviously, Ben Shapiro, very famous for having the number two podcast in the world. How are you, Ben? I'm doing great. I'm just honored to be here, you know. Yes. More work to do. You could exceed all in in the rankings. No.

We always judge ourselves, Ben, on three things. In the rankings, when we look at how we're doing, what we see is Ben Shapiro. prayer from the bible okay the new testament i don't think you've got it yet you you have the old testament but you haven't gotten the new you haven't gotten the sequel and then number three Murder. Also with us from the White House. Yeah, welcome to All In, where we have a live feed into the White House today.

My good friend Antonio Gracias is here he is taking I guess you're taking would it be safe to say a hiatus or you're From Valor to do a little tour of duty in our government working on Doge. Is that the way to say it? I'm still doing my day job too, man. This is a seven day a week. 60 days an hour a day job because I'm trying to do both. I've got some great partners that are covering it for me and my firm has been tremendous in allowing me to do this. But no, I'm still trying to do both.

Was it public prior to this week, Antonio, that you were doing this role? Did you announce it anywhere? I didn't announce it anywhere. No, the New York Times read a story about me going to SSA. you know which is better certain your time style not not right but i was i had been there yeah i was at woodland mary 40 correct yeah close enough close number hand grenades Close enough. I'm sure they had no agenda. Antonio, how does it work? So when you volunteered...

Is it that you and Elon and Steve just kind of figure out? Let's put a senior person at every part of the administration where there's real opportunity. Why did you end up at SSA versus someplace else? Interesting question. And by the way, it's great to see you guys, man. Thanks for having me on. I can use your laughs. You're really making me laugh. I'm really proud of you, man.

Thank you. It's good to see you. Thank you. The suit looks great, by the way. Thank you. When do you have to return it? The rental is due at the end of the week. Okay. So, you know, what happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA. because that's kind of, as you guys know, close to my heart. And Elon said to me, look, great, you can do that next, but will you go to SA first and see what's going on there? Because it's the biggest internal program I've ever had.

and see what you find in fraud, waste and abuse. And so, of course, I said, sure, I'll do that. And I ended up out in Woodland, Maryland with the good people at the SSA, the social administration. And that's where I started. That's how all this started for me. And so do you, Antonio, go in there with a Doge engineer as your kind of sidekick, per se, or you just go there? solo and you show up and like what like what happens day one when you walk in into the place like what do you do

So I brought with me two great professionals, John and Peyton from Valor. One of them an engineer, the other one I'd say a finance ninja. Both these guys are ninjas. And there was already a team there, actually, that was working with some great engineers. And one senior person, Scott Coulter, who's from, actually worked at Lone Pine, started his own fun, and had come here as a volunteer as well. So they were already doing some work.

Actually, particularly on the enumeration part of the system. So that is the system that you have numbers, the whole cleaning of the database, the numbers, they had already started that project when I got there. And what is the mandate as given to you? fraud, waste, and abuse. I mean, exactly what Bill Clinton talked about, what Barack Obama talked about, what all presidents, but maybe President Biden talked about.

going back in time. It was go figure out how to save some money. Man, the system's going bankrupt. It's going to be bankrupt 23 to 7. The country overall, as you guys know, talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy. You want to do something and go figure out how you can save money and go find the fraud.

Okay, so let's get to it. You spoke at a rally, I think it was on Sunday, and you pulled up a chart. Here's that chart. Maybe you could explain to the American people here what this chart shows. Yeah, so if I want you to step back and say I got it, I think it's important. You know, we map the way we work. You guys know we're very operational, Valerie. I've worked with all you guys various times. And what we do is we map the entire system from beginning to end.

So we mapped the system from enumeration. So I get your number all the way to the end, went to the offices and saw the offices operate. And in that process. One of our engineers, Peyton, I mentioned, he found the data. So we're looking at all the data enumeration, how it works, what's going on, the typical stuff you'd look at. And he found this data called enumeration beyond entry.

Right. So that is the that's it had this giant ramp to it. You can see their baseline was kind of, you know, three, four thousand people, all the way to 2.1 million people. And that just jumped out at us. What is that? And so we dug into it. And that's how this started. And so what that's showing is social security numbers that were issued.

to non-American citizens or non-citizens. Am I correct that that's the number we're looking at? So these are non-citizens getting security numbers. And for people who don't know, just like a little bit of background on the social security system.

We do this. This is not abnormal for us to give Social Security numbers. This is part of the process that the government does. The Social Security number was created in 1936 for citizens to track their earnings and In the 90s, we started giving them to non-citizens who were authorized to work in the US so that... We could collect taxes from them. And so if you're not a citizen.

and you're a green card holder, which some people in this program I think have been, you have to have a social security number in order to work and you pay into social security and Medicare. just like U.S. citizens. And then eventually, I think you would qualify for those over some period of time. You can also get a social security number if you're illegal.

immigrant into the United States on a visa. So for example, when I first came to the United States 25 years ago on a TN visa, I was able to get my social security number because I had a valid visa to be in the United States. Okay. So we have social security numbers being given to non-citizens. That is not controversial, but there's something controversial about this chart. Antonio, tell us what that is.

So I think if you look at the chart, you'll see there's, it starts to like call it 300,000 or so. This is during the COVID period. Yep. Coming right out of it. So 21 is coming right out of COVID, right? So if you go back even a couple years, 19, you'll see that it's about 400,000. Yeah, exactly. Right there. So what happened was this program was designed for. So we're talking about, you know, people that got visas. This is that numeration beyond entries is after you're in.

There are some people in here that have H-1Bs, screen cards, etc. And the way we thought about this was that's the baseline number. That's the three to four thousand a year you see. And that should be happening. That's like, you know, there are programs for Afghans, for example, the translators that came in after the war, right, the people who brought in, they would be in these kinds of programs. And so the baseline number, and by the program goes back, this particular program goes back.

all the way to 17 and had a legitimate use, which was the kind of people you're talking about. People that we want to let in, like the care programming, I'll make an example, which are the Afghans. They would be in this number. So what jumped out at us wasn't that this is here because it has legitimate use. It's the growth. Why did it grow this fast? And what happened? That's what we dug into.

Have you figured that out yet? Is it because of like a COVID overhang? The one criticism I did see of the chart that I wanted to bring up with you is... hey, people want to see the 10 years, 20 years before this. What would we see if we were to look backwards a little bit? And do you have some theories? And is the COVID overhang theory valid? Or is this just...

Biden opened the border, as we saw, you know, especially like in maybe it was that third year of his term, the 2023 year, and this is the overhang of the 2023 surge. What are your theories? a category no because the program really started it it started in 2017 so they probably worked on it before that right a few things a few years put these into place they worked at it by guesses you know back during the administration it actually became active

In 17, you see a few numbers in 18, and it starts to get a little bigger in 19 and 20, right? So that's how we get this baseline number of 19 and 20. That's where we're using that data here. So there isn't, I can't go back 20 years, it doesn't exist. And then when we dug into it, what we found was the vast majority of the growth was related to asylum programs and parolees and people that came in on NTAs as noted to appear.

into the country, either at the border, at the airports, mostly at the border. And then we dug further into the, excuse me, dug further into it. We found that there were This is about 5.4 million people total. There were about 1.2 million people that the status is marked as unknown and about 1.2 million people that were marked as general parole.

And they should have markings of what the program is they're under. Because if you claim asylum, you're supposed to claim a real fear. I'm going to be tortured by my country. Something bad is going to happen. That's why I can't go home. What we find here is that a legitimate program was, and the word I use, abused. The requirements were super opened so that more people come through. And the example I'll give you, you know, I have here actually.

The form, as the form used to be, going back in time, a four-page form that the officer had to fill out in the field, and the person that was claiming the asylum had to actually prove that they had a really credible fear of being murdered, tortured by their government. That's what the asylum's for.

It turned into form, which I can't give you, but I'm going to show you here. If you zoom in on it, it has four questions. That's it. And the four questions are super leading. I'll just read the, you know, the, like one of the important ones here. Right. So. Do you have any reason for concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States? I mean, could that be more leading?

Right. What they did is they opened, they just opened the aperture on these programs dramatically. So they allowed people that were illegals at the border to come in legally. And as we've dug further into it, we found this took us, so you guys know me, man. I do like, I'm very. methodical lean business process mapper. And we went all the way to the border, literally to Brownsville and Laredo to ask what happened. We couldn't find the data on what these unknown categories were.

And it turns out that when the folks at the border, who are great, by the way, they really tried hard and they suffered a lot. And this is a bit of a human tragedy I've talked about. We're giving people at times notices to appear. This is the NTA. And what that allows you to do.

is come in the country and then you're scheduled a court date, which is like six years out. So now you're in the country with some quasi legal status. You're waiting for your court date. And while you're waiting for your court date, which could be six years out is the average, by the way, it could be longer than that. You're waiting for your court date. You could fill out an asylum application. So not even interview, just an application by filing a form.

Once the application's in, you can file another form, 765, to get a work authorization. Once you get that, you get a 766, which is the authorization, and we automatically send you a social screen card in the mail. No interview.

That is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers. Is there any ID verification along the way, Antonio? Like, do we know that there are no duplications happening by... validating that one individual is getting one social security number at any point in this process. So it's a great question. No, the answer is there's no reality verification. So one of the things we found when we looked at this was

Some people showed IDs, some people didn't. These would be IDs, Antonio, from their home country. This would be a Venezuelan driver's license or something. Yeah, I mean, it could be a passport, a driver's license. But here's what really... sort of tipped us off and disturbed us when we looked at the birth certificate data that was presented at the border. The number one birth date was 1-1.

And it was four times more likely to be born on 1-1 than any other day of the year. Now, we all know this isn't true. So they just hit enter on that part of the form. They also could come with nothing. Do we take biometrics of people at the border? Do we take like an iris scan, fingerprints, and all that stuff? This is one of the issues. I mean, we do have photos of people. We found that 23% of the records looked at did not have fingerprints.

And look, the folks at the border were overwhelmed. And we're not sure why this happened. I will tell you guys just to understand why it went down there. Both Border Patrol and Border Protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. Okay, over 70 of these agents. committed suicide in this period. It's truly tragic because they knew it was going on. Given the fact that all this has happened, is the Trump administration going to try to

claim the social security number back, invalidate them? What will be the proper action or is it too late? Are they already sort of in the system and now you can't do anything about it? So Ben, it's a great question, right? And the first question was, what are they doing? I mean, you know, like, where are these people? Where are they? How are they? And we've gone through a whole process of mapping this. So we mapped it through to the benefit programs.

We found in the benefit programs that every benefit program that was being accessed by these people, you know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now, today. And by the way, it's just ramping. It's just starting. Just to give you a point.

And then out of curiosity, I woke up at night like two in the morning. I couldn't sleep. My mind was right on this. I sent the injured note saying, hey, guys, let's just look at the public voter rolls who we find in some friendly states. And we looked at voter rolls and we found that thousands of them registered to vote in a handful of states.

And then we went further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted. It was shocking to us. If I hadn't seen it in my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. And so now the question we're asking ourselves is, what do we do? We refer to some of the prosecution that's ongoing right now.

You know, we're thinking through how to do it. And the reality is they have various kinds of status. And it's a very detailed analysis. Legally, they're working through right now about how to deal with it. So thousands of those people registered to vote. Yes. In the election. Which is a federal crime, by the way. Well, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is like the Heritage Foundation has a very good project. You know, it's obviously right leaning.

where they're studying all cases of fraud. I looked at it before we were here. There's only been 24 cases since 2003 of somebody who's a non-citizen trying to vote now those are people caught so this would be incredibly dramatic if it was even a thousand people oh no jason it's more than a thousand i've seen it um i've seen the data myself and it's more than a thousand in just a couple of states i mean it is shockingly bad

And this is the tip of the iceberg, guys. It's the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't include the 7.8 million people that ICE has that have come in illegally and nowhere here. And all the people that came illegally, we don't know are here. I mean, this is not a political issue. I want to be really clear about this. This is about America. Let's just take one step back because I just want you to repeat this. Because I think it's important and we may have just run over it a little too quickly.

When you get a social security number, what you're saying is... There's all of these important downstream consequences. One of the downstream consequences is you could show up, register to And that's an illegitimate action that's breaking federal law. That's one. But the second is that without knowing who this person is, they can start to absorb resources that could have otherwise gone to an American. I guess that's like a fundamental part of this.

And so how do you quantify that? Can you just maybe explain it a little bit more about all of the different ways in which you think now? you know, the United States ends up leaking services to these folks. And also they could be contributing to right they could be paying taxes into the system. So I guess there's both of those possibilities. And both of those have fingerprints to mop.

So yeah, great question. Look, we need to figure this out. This is a very, it's massively complex. You can see the map I have on the whiteboard in our office. It's huge. And we're figuring it out right now. But let me just tell you this. And every benefit program we looked at, and this is just a handful of states, we found people on all the benefit programs. And we found them on unemployment, we found them on Medicaid. So adjacent to your point, people on Medicaid and unemployment.

they're not contributing they're taking out their mood There are criminals. I mean, look, we sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. And I don't want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hard hits in the Targeting Center of very bad people, criminals and people on terrorist watch list that are in this group.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's a problem. We got to figure out how to deal with it. And the, of course, there are people that are also, you know, have jobs and paying in the system. That's also true. All these things are true. And we're trying to sort through the data and figure out how to actually deal with it now. Antonio, one of the things about the data that you triggered, which because the data is so important, frankly. is a lot of people started to try to find a way to nitpick.

And say, Antonio, you're cherry picking or Antonio, this is not really representative. And you had some pretty big names, right? People that have credibility, Jim Chanos probably being. one of the more prolific people, a very well-known hedge fund manager. But I think you tried to. articulate why their objections didn't make any sense. I think it's important to maybe give you a few moments here to identify what they said and maybe debunk it.

So the chart that they're using, and you can see this, I posted sitting on X about this. It was apples to oranges. You can see here, they took a chart that included all enumerations. Not the EB program, the enumeration grant entry program, all enumerations and compared to our chart. So just to be clear, this would have included somebody like me coming in on a TN visa or somebody on an EB1 visa. Yeah, I mean, so those people would be in R data too, but just enumerated behind entry.

The data on the left of 2020, the big bars. That includes people in the offices, that includes people who got, they got social numbers because they went to a consulate and like you probably did, applied ahead of time before they came in, you know, those kinds of people. So we need a stacked bar chart. So there's some fun with numbers going on. Can you flip back again? So your number for 24 was how much? 2.1 million. Yep.

Yep. And what they did is they took our data. So this was, you know, look, I don't want to impute negative motives. They just maybe were confused. They took our data. And they added the total data, right? This is just subsection. This is EB. And I'm just going to use acronyms. Okay, guys. This is EB-only, Enumeration Beyond Entry, which is a program, as I said, started in 2017, and then it kind of ramped up into 19. They took our data, and then they added the total data before that.

Right. That is apples to oranges. That's why it doesn't work. And I went through a whole analysis of this. on x and you know the person the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying hey you know i'm deleting it because i get it you're right

and apologized and asked me some questions. I don't want to get into it. You guys know, I don't post a lot on X. I don't want to get into basic people. It's not worth it. The data speaks for itself. It basically became like a Rorschach test where people that did not want to believe the points you were making. latched on to that chart that was shown even though it was disproven.

And that became the narrative for a good chunk of the internet and a good chunk for media responses. Yeah, I mean, look, you guys know me. You know me for a long time. This is not political, man. Tell us about your political background again. We haven't talked about this on the show, Antonio, but I think it's worth letting everyone hear about your background a little bit.

Just so folks understand where you're coming from. I was a Democrat for 20 years. I mean, I, you know, I knocked on doors for really Clinton, Iowa. I was from Illinois. And look, I've got lots of good friends who are Democrats. And when I explain this data to them, they're as shocked as I am.

I mean, to say you're a Democrat is an understatement. You were a Democrat is an understatement. You were a major donor and a majorly involved with the Democratic Party. Ben, you tend to call balls and strikes on the program. What are your thoughts on... immigration generally and how it should work here in the U.S. and how maybe we can resolve this and get to, and Tony, I want your answer to that question as well.

Maybe some reconciliation here between the moderates, MAGA, original, you know, classic GOP, Democrats and the woke lunatics like. Is there any way out of this? And maybe perhaps what we're seeing here with somebody like Antonio. Who's a lifelong Democrat who now is, you know, helping the government. Maybe there's some way with data and logic we can get through this. I mean, I think that what Antonio is doing here is.

So important specifically for that, because it seems to me there's actually been a fairly wide consensus among the American population for a very long time what to do about immigration, particularly the southern border, which is number one, just stop the illegal immigration at the southern border. After Biden blew that out, a lot of Democrats turned to President Trump specifically because of that issue. And that has been the signal.

success of the trump administration among all the other successes the the numbers of the border have just plummeted to almost zero i mean the lowest numbers in recorded history and that is an unmitigated success

And then I think everybody knows that we have to sort of figure out who gets to stay and who gets to go, who's already in the country, and what Antonio is doing by being able to discern who is here and is a net draw on the resources of the American people versus maybe who is a net taxpayer or who's actually contributing.

who's a criminal, right? There's always been this bizarre supposition in the political realm that there's no way on a one-to-one level to figure out who is who. You have to treat everybody as a class. Either everybody stays, everybody goes. And the reality is that even the way the Trump administration is doing this, by first targeting, say, criminal illegal aliens for removal.

And then maybe moving on to people who are net drawn resources, who came in falsely under claims of asylum and now are receiving. Medicaid or disability. I've made the argument for I think my entire career actually on this, that we should be treating immigrants, illegal immigrants who are in the country.

The same way we would treat people who are trying to get into the country, which is to say, are you going to benefit the United States or are you not going to benefit the United States? And the counter argument was always, well, how exactly are you going to determine?

Who is who? And the answer I always give is, well, the IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year. So why should we not be able to do that? And so the kind of work Antonio is doing, showing you actually can do that by tracking the social security numbers of people who came in. illegally because the truth of the number of

Unknown getaways actually really, really compared to this. It's a small number. Most of the people who are coming across the border, at least during the Biden term, I went down to the border last year and visited a Native American reservation that's right along the border where the Border Patrol basically was not.

And they said that what was happening is people were arriving at the border. They were doing exactly what Antonio was talking about. They would literally say, I fear to go back to my home country. They'd be processed. They'd be let into the country with a future date to come back. And that was all happening within 72 hours. So being able to track those people and find out who should be in, who shouldn't be, that's huge. And I think that's the consensus.

So should we are you in the camp? We should deport everybody. This sort of Stephen Miller Miller. deport 20 million people, Ben, or are you in the, hey, let's get rid of the criminals and, you know, that will get us to where we need to be? Well, I don't think it's just the criminals. I mean, I think you also need to go after the folks who are here to take advantage of the welfare benefits, for example, or just draw on the system.

But I don't think that the number is 20 million. I don't think President Trump actually thinks the number is 20 million. I don't think anybody realistically thinks the number is 20 million. Got it. Okay. They said it over and over again. All 20 million are going and it's just marketing. Yes, it's a political campaign and people say that sort of stuff all the time. Antonio. Let's talk maybe about reconciliation here. You spent your life as a Democrat and now you've spent.

I don't know, six months as a Republican here and helping this administration. How do we get the country to sort of get back together here and maybe reconcile on this issue? Because It seems like an unnecessary, to Ben's point, I think the number is 80% of people believe the border should be just shut, period, full stop, and everything should be legal. And I don't know the other 20 if they're just don't know how to take a survey.

i've never met anybody who said there should be an open border at the southern border so what are your thoughts on given your inside knowledge uh and i would describe you as a clinton democrat fiscally conservative socially liberal correct me if i'm wrong there What are your thoughts on reconciliation here? Because you really do care about that. Your parents, both immigrants.

My besties here, three of the four people who host this program, immigrants. This is an immigrant country built by immigrants for immigrants, has always been. So how do we reconcile this issue and put it behind us? And Jason, I have asked myself this question and I think we got to follow the truth.

And that's the point. Follow the truth. And the truth is in the data. And as Ben said, the numbers don't lie, right? And so people are productive. We've got to find a way to allow them to be productive and stay. People that are taking the system should not be allowed to stay.

And, you know, I think I don't want to get into the policy at all because it's above my pay grade. I mean, the reality is for me, my remit is, as Ben said, it's criminals, terrorists, and then people mooching out the system. you know, a political question needs to be answered about what happens to the rest of those people. I don't know. It's not my remit. I will say this. I think that

All my friends who are still Democrats that I have explained this data to, they all say the same thing you guys are saying. Man, this is a problem. We've got to figure this out. And let me tell you why. the bigger problem the biggest problem here i mean it's it's it definitely is taking off the system but you've got to realize we gave 13 to 15 billion dollars a year to the human traffickers

That's what the system did. And the money magnet that attracted these people here, it wasn't like it was some crisis, you know, environmental crisis. The money magnet attracted these people and many of them died on the way up. So this is a human suffering, a human rights tragedy. You have people who...

are getting sold into slavery and being abused at the border. At a minimum, every American should be against that. Everyone is. Every American is. This turned my stomach. When I went to the border and I heard the stories, it turned my stomach, man. We are America, okay? We protect people like this. We don't give incentives to people to pay traffickers. If you pay $20,000, I heard $20,000 to $500 just across the board, $20,000.

I mean, where does someone who's coming from Central America or Africa get 20 grand to pay the pay the traffickers that are walking them across the border? It's not free to walk up Mexico. OK, it's controlled by the cartels. What happened? I mean, they got to pay that back. How do they pay it back? They're basically dentured servants. This is terrible. This isn't what we do in this country, right? This country is about freedom.

And we are here to protect it. We protect it around the world, protect it in our home country. And I don't think any American that I know, none of them, Democrats, Republicans, or anyone, thinks this is good. It's not good. It's bad for America and it's evil behavior. We shouldn't send it. We shouldn't give people a reason to do it. We should find legal ways to become the country. Antonio, do you believe that there is a Democratic Party motive to increase voter base for the Democrats?

behind all of this as has been proclaimed by some. Look, as I go through the data and I see it's all about the data. Okay, David. And I know you love the data. When you have just in a handful of states, man, I'm talking about four states, we looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them on the voter rolls, and we found many of those people had voted, right? In one state in particular, well over a thousand voted.

Yeah, I think this was a move to import voters. But really importantly, I just want to make sure. Because when I talk to politicians from the Democratic Party about this, they say there's aspects of human rights doing the right thing for people in need that is motivating some of this behavior.

and they actually have a different motive? Or do some in the party think that way, but there are real kind of, kind of call it a small group of highly influential folks at the top of the Democratic Party that recognize that this is going to grow the voter base? And they're kind of motivating this. What do you think is the construction of what sounds to some to be a conspiracy? And how much of this is really like widely understood?

Look, Ben, I'll tell you what I have seen. I'll tell you the actual information. If you look at Social Security Administration, we set all the defaults to kind of max open, no ID requirements, right? You get a Social Security number before we got here by walking in office. answering with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date of birth on it. That's it. Okay. We opened up, we set the defaults to open on social security. We set the defaults to open on pay.

paying people out, and we set the collection to defaults basically to zero. So that's how the system looks. I'm just reporting the facts. Do I think that the average person is a Democrat in Illinois or the guys I knew out of Chicago, they know this? They don't know this. They don't know this. So were there people at the top of the system that did this? Yeah.

People created this policy. The former administrators of these agencies created these policies. I've seen them. I've read them myself. I've gone to the data myself. They've seen them. Now, this isn't everybody. If you're the average person out there who's a Democrat and you see what I've seen, you, I believe. You will conclude what I concluded, which is this isn't right.

These policies are wrong. They're evil. They're wrong. We gave an incentive for people to get trafficked. That's terrible. I just don't think people know. The reason I'm even willing to do all, you guys know me. I'm pretty private. I come on your podcast because we're buddies.

But like, man, the reason I'm talking about this is not political. It's because it's a human rights issue and the human rights issue is being confused. It's not, it's we are incenting people to pay traffickers to come to America. We were doing this. Right. We got to find better ways to do that. And I just I don't believe any American, 80 percent of people who Jason's talking about that would say close the border.

That's the 80% people coming together on this issue, which is, man, we got to take care of people. Antonio, can you talk about what the next big push of effort from you and your team will be? Is there some next chart? I'm not trying to be reductive, but is there something that you can demonstrate that is going to be equivalently as powerful as this first chart? which then helps us start to move these gears towards doing the logical and right thing.

I think the right thing is to figure out who's who, right? Who are the criminals? Who are the terrorists? Number one. And number two, who's mooching off the system? And then number three. The people that are working that Jason's talking about, what we do with them. That's the right answer. I would add a fourth because I think that... There's probably no more... electric issue than this idea of voting impropriety. And I think it has become so brazenly partisan that everybody has suspended logic.

If it turns out that there was a manipulated effort in 2020 and there is even a thread of legitimacy to Trump's claims, you would never be able to see the light of day because so many Americans just turn off, right? And that's because of the rhetoric that they've been fed. This is a really important thing that I would just offer to you is that if it is true that these people illegally voted.

And I think it opens wide the aperture on voting illegality and voting reform. And I think that irrespective of who you are, you should want to make sure that people who are not allowed to vote. are not voting just to put it simply yeah wow what an incredible it's amazing i can't i can't uh i can't get an airplane in america without id but i can go vote in some states that id I think that's crazy. I think it's totally crazy. And we're down to like...

Ben, you know the number. It's 15 states now are the ones that don't have voter ID. So this is becoming like a very obvious issue in the loophole for us to close. I think the best next thing for you to do is actually publish this list of people who voted, get it to the Heritage Foundation and put sunlight on it. The truth shall make you free and sunlight is the best disinfectant because I think the whole issue is absurd.

Because if you look at the votes in the swing states, it would take 100,000, it would take tens of thousands, and it's illegal. I've spoken to the person at the Heritage Foundation who does this. They found like 2,400 cases over 40 or 50 years. The number of people voting illegally is minuscule. In order to swing even but one state, you would need a coordinated effort. Can I say something, though? Hold on, let me finish.

You would need a coordinated effort. I'm just giving you data, Chamath. I am not partisan. There are tens of thousands of votes that would need to be manipulated in each of these markets. It's impossible. Well, there's the key word. here's what I would ask you to consider. Sure. Your results are only as good as your prompts.

Your results are only as good as your prompts. Say it in plain English. What do you mean? I suspect that if you put three or four of the smartest data scientists in the world... they would get to a very different answer than the answer that has been arrived to. I don't know whether that'll validate or invalidate the claim, but the quality of the people that are able to interrogate this data is directly correlated to the output that is created.

Well, listen, we all want the data clean. Ben, maybe I'll let you kind of answer the question from your perspective. Do you think there is any chance? that a swing state could be swung by you know, this strategy. And in addition to that, Trump is a populist.

All these people, and his biggest gains were with... people from south america mexicans etc in this last election so and non-college educated so if you were going to plot this incredible strategy it seems like the democratic strategy of importing a bunch of voters is the stupidest possible strategy

Because the Republican Party has won those people. Well, I don't think that it would be a great short term strategy because of the problems that you mentioned in terms of the size of the voting gaps, even in close swing states, although obviously you have outlier cases like Florida in 2000 where the entire state is being decided.

by hundreds of votes, and then you actually could see a state actually shift on that basis. It's a rarity, but it does happen, and in some cases decides a presidential election. When you're talking, however, about the long-term play, I think the question that needs to be asked is if you are importing a bunch of people who are more dependent than average on the American government, for example. or who are not interested in assimilating to free market values, for example, or free speech values.

or who come in, and then many of these people are going to get married, many of these people are going to have kids, they're going to marry American citizens, they're going to have children who are American, and then they stay.

Now you're talking about actually generating a change in the voting population, and that isn't a right-wing point. That's a point that was made by Roy Teixeira all the way back in 2004 when he was a Democrat, and he was making the case essentially that there was a demographic wave that was going to shift the electorate in the United States.

in the direction of Democrats permanently. Now, the point that you're making is that even as a long-term strategy, that might be a bad play because it may be that these populations shift over time. That doesn't mean that that's not the intent in the moment. Meaning, maybe they're wrong. They could have gotten it wrong. They could have made a very bad strategic decision. Antonio, I think we have to drop you off here. Any closing comments you want to make? And I just want to thank you.

I know you've got other things you could be doing in your life, but just on behalf of the American people who I speak for here on the program. We want to thank you all Americans for your service to this country. And I know that you are balls and strikes and you're going to let the data speak. So I just want to thank you. I would close this on this conversation, which is cool to California. Louis, California. Okay. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Cape California.

Ronald Reagan signed Amnesty. And, you know, some 40 years later, it is now a solidly blue state. And I think some of us on this program, I know you, Jason, are a refugee from California because of that, because of some of those policies. And I want you to be careful about this because it is actually the tip of the iceberg. We have a very small sample of data.

In a couple of states, it's the tip of the iceberg. And so I don't know what the unintended consequences will be long term, but I can tell you what's already happened in America, where an amnesty program actually turned a very large state. You know, from one party to another. And I want to leave you guys with this thought. This is not political. I'm not doing it. There's no political motivation in my mind. This is about America.

It's about securing the American democracy, and we will shine light onto the data when we can. We've referred these people to prosecution, and we're going to keep looking. We'll keep going, and the data will lead us in the truth. will lead us into an adventure command in the sunlight. You're right. But we're going to follow the truth. That's our primary motive. That is our operating parameter and what we're going to do.

Right on. All right. Thank you, Antonio. Gracias. And continued success. And we'd love to talk to you in 30, 60 days when you have your next findings. Thanks, guys. And you're a refugee from California too, aren't you? Yes. Yeah, we took off in 2020 during COVID. We took off, my company took off, we all got the hell out. I was born in California, so I spent 30... 36 years there before I moved. And yeah, they certainly did a good job of wrecking that state.

I mean, I did the same thing. You went to. Oh, I don't know. I'm in Florida. I'm in Florida. My company's in Tennessee. I'm in Florida. Yeah, got it. Yeah. I mean, it's just. You can't raise kids in California and you just think about the crime.

taxes and what you're getting for your dollar, it doesn't make any sense. White House is off the Zoom, boys. Now we can start to really open it up. Now we can open up the aperture. No more FOIA. All right. Okay. What do you guys think about what you just saw? Ben, I'll let you go first as our guest. I wish the entire Trump administration were rolled out as well as Antonio just rolled that out is what I would say. Totally. You know, I think that that is high levels of competence and expertise.

and a meticulous message that is data first. and difficult for anybody to deny. I think that the success of the Trump administration, the success that they've had, are taking the 80 side of 80-20 issues. And I think that the success of President Trump in 2024 was that he oddly became the normie candidate. He was the guy who was a return to normalcy candidacy in the face of Biden and the bizarreness of Harris.

And, you know, I think that as we see many of Trump's policies rolled out, the ones that are rolled out the way that Antonio is rolling it out are incredibly well received by the American population because they're seeing serious people doing serious work that needs to be done.

And the ones that are not rolled out that way, I think, are going to be a little more unpopular with the American people. And that's kind of I want President Trump to succeed in a lot of these agenda items. And I don't want. His good agenda items getting essentially railroaded and run over by the bad rollout of other agenda items. So you think thoughtful is good and well thought out, constructed and communicated. What?

When you talk about this being done right, what do you think is being done wrong? It could be done better, I guess, would be a generous way of saying it. What could they communicate better? I mean, and not to jump into the pile of rakes that is the tariff plan. But I think that the way that the tariff plan was rolled out is about as bad a rollout as you could do. The reason I say that is not just because of my disagreements on the actual policy. I'll either be right or I'll be wrong on that.

But the way that it was rolled out with very – with essentially kind of a surprise announcement. I don't mind a surprise announcement if what is then rolled out is not replete with sort of contradictory – justifications, statistics that are labeled one thing, but really are not that thing. And so it just, it opens itself up to all sorts of critiques from every possible.

If you want to make the argument, make the full-scale, well-thought argument, and then we can argue over whether it's true or not, but there's four or five different claims that are being simultaneously made about the tariffs. One, they're going to raise revenue. Two, they're going to reshore. Three, that you are going to somehow rejigger the world trading system.

Some of these are mutually exclusive. If you're going to reshore, you're not going to raise as much revenue, for example. Those two things are mutually exclusive, and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time. If you're going to put out a giant chart that the president holds up that shows...

tariff rates plus unspecified you know, variable, then what I'd like to know is what the actual tariff rate is, as opposed to what the calculation seems to be, which was the trade deficit with a country divided into the imports.

to that country. That has nothing to do with the tariff rate. I mean, just technically speaking, it has literally nothing to do with the tariff rate. And so what that means is now you're boxed in logically if President Trump wants to do a reciprocal tariff reduction, for example. How do you do that? Because he actually has used a statistic for the tariffs. that have nothing to do with the tariff rate and are actually just trade deficits.

So the only way to actually rectify that statistic is to have Madagascar buy a bunch of American product, for example, in order to get their quote-unquote tariff rate down. That sort of stuff seems badly calibrated, even if you like the policy, for example. All right. Yeah. Unless from a poker point of view, they spent many months declaring they're going to do terror.

And everyone thought they were bluffing and said, everyone said, there's no way you're going to do tariffs. It's like someone in poker is saying, I'm going to play every hand I get. I'm going to be crazy. You don't believe them. And they actually have to do it. in order to get the negotiating leverage that they need to be able to negotiate trade deals.

ultimately, and they have to look a little crazy, maybe. I mean, that's your position for 4D chess or I'm trying to rationalize one kind of rational reason for why a lot of smart people would end up putting that board up that poster board up. Where to your point, Ben, they said that these are kind of the tariffs that are being levied upon our country, when in fact, it is simply the math of...

imports minus exports divided by imports. That's what the number was. And it was maxed out at that number or 10%. And that's what they did. So they did that basically as a way, in my opinion, it looks like, and I'm just trying to take a read on this. that they're using this as a way to anchor for negotiations going forward to make the case.

crazily, off the friggin ship, going to do whatever the heck we want to do here in this administration. Now everyone takes them seriously. Now everyone shows up to the negotiating table. And now they can actually negotiate and then announce a series of win after win after win and say,

We got this set of countries to capitulate today. This is the deal we worked out. It's a totally unique deal. This set of deals we worked out today. This set of deals we worked out today. And basically getting all the trade representatives to the table by making the case.

that they're actually willing to go all the way to the wall on stuff. So that's the only way I can kind of rationalize this rollout, Ben. That's what it feels like to me. For months, they've been very declarative. We are going to do tariff.

Besant said it to us on our interview. Lutnik said it to us in our interview, and no one took them seriously. I did. I did, by the way. I will say that I took them totally seriously so much so that I called my financial advisor after the State of the Union address. and told them to rejigger my stock and bond ratio in my portfolio because I figured that something like this was going to happen. You went heavy treasury.

Yes. I went like stocks. I'll say that. And the reason for that is because, again, I think that the thing about President Trump is that. He may not be serious in every single thing that he says, but he is very clear that when he says a thing over and over and over, there is no hidden motivation. And this is the part that I always have trouble with, with sort of the 40 chess reads on President Trump.

there's almost never a hidden motivation. He pretty much just says the thing that he thinks, right? It's one of the things that makes him so popular and authentic is that

There isn't a 40 chess game being played. If he says that he wants a thing to happen, it's because he actually wants the thing to happen. Now, the thing about President Trump, he's also a realist. So if a bunch of bad headlines hit him, he may then change his mind and decide that he wants to drive a truck directly through the center.

of the tariffs because the prices are going up too much on, for example, semiconductors. So one of the big exemptions from these tariffs is, in fact, in the area of semiconductors. Again, there you see a sort of... a couple of different justifications that are mutually exclusive that are fighting each other. One of them is the idea we need to reshore semiconductor production because it's a national security asset. And the other is we need to raise revenue.

on semiconductors. So he exempted them, which kind of bollocks up the logic. And I think that there are a couple of tells that that isn't what's happening. Listen, I think it may end up being the thing you're saying. I think the most likely result. of these tariffs is that within the next few weeks, the headlines are not good. President Trump starts driving trucks through the center of the tariffs, and then he starts getting wins from various.

parties outside that allow him to find an off ramp on some of these tariffs. You know, a company in Belgium says they're going to build a factory in the United States. He has them to the White House. They have a big... And then he says, and as a result of this, we're now lowering the tariffs in sort of the same way he did with with Colombia when he said not the university, the country, when he said he was going to hit them with tariffs unless you accept these these illegal immigrants.

And then they did. So that very well might be the offer. I don't think that's what's going on right now. I think what's going on right now is the strategy that Lutnik has repeatedly expressed, which is that. They actually kind of like the tariffs. They actually think that this is good economic policy and that between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history. Do you agree? I think that that is – A bad read on economic history because there are a lot of confounds there that are being.

ignored. Among those confounds would be the fact that actually- The Industrial Revolution? Yes. So a few, just to name a few. In the Industrial Revolution, extraordinary high levels of immigration, by the way, during that period. So you had an incredibly cheap labor base that was actually coming in into the United States. At that time, massive expansion of the American population. No income tax.

So free foreign capital. A newly discovered continent, right? Like truly like many, many confounds, right? And by the way, less international trade generally. So tariffs aren't going to have the same sort of impact. on global supply chains as they would now, where every product that you buy has gone through 10 different countries in 10 different ways.

So, no, I don't think that that is a comp, but that doesn't mean that Lutnik doesn't think that it's a comp, for example. And I think that when it comes to the rollout, again. A methodical rollout, I totally get the crazy man theory, and I think that sometimes President Trump does that, and I'm hoping that that's what he's doing. Bye. A good example of an off-ramp he could have taken if that's the thing he's trying to do.

So yesterday, in anticipation of this, Israel, which had very, very low tariffs on United States goods anyway, announced they'd removed all tariffs on American goods, right? There were no tariffs on American goods anymore. And the administration that afternoon listed their tariff rate at 33% and then hit them with a 17% tariff. For a country that is 0% terrified. And just use them as an example of a great partner. Exactly. Exactly. Didn't Canada do the same? Didn't Canada drop tariffs?

like the morning they were on cnbc and they said we're totally willing to go to zero and then the anchors correctly on cnbc were like well then why haven't you done that already To Ben's point, Israel did do that. But I think your theory, Ben, is like... Absolutely correct. If you make this analogy to what he did with overturning Roe v. Wade, it is the same exact thing. He told us over and over again, I'm going to put two, maybe three people on the Supreme Court. I'm going to overturn it.

And then afterwards, he kind of wiped his hands through it and was like, listen, it's up to you guys. I had nothing to do with it. He will tell you what he's going to do. He told you he was going to do these tariffs. He's done them.

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

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

To use the Donald Rumsfeld quote, I do agree with Ben tremendously that this was a known known. We mentioned this last episode. Donald Trump has been speaking about tariffs for 40 plus years. Yep. So this is not a new thing. And I think that he tried this in Trump One. But to your guys' point, it didn't really go well because he didn't have the team around him that had his back. And so it was inevitable that he would have tried it in Trump too. He said it and he's been able to do it.

If you weren't planning for it, whoever was vested in this outcome, you really needed to be... focused on this it was a known known and so there was a little dereliction of duty if you were caught off guard i think that's one The second is, and we've said this all year since January 1 on this pod, we started it even with that polymarket bet that I made, which is the Trump administration does not care.

By the way, the trade actually closed out. So congrats to all these people that won $650,000 on Polymarket. And let me just explain. Polymarket put a betting market. suggested by Chamath Paihapitiya. They are partners of ours. Magnificent Seven shrinks below 30% of S&P 500 in 2025. This was free money. This was like the stock market giving up free money. But why did this happen? This happened because it was very clear to me early on that the rhetoric had shifted to say we care about MAGA.

We care about people that have working class. and middle-class jobs, none of those folks are deeply invested in the asset economy the way maybe some of us are. And so it was directionally clear. And by the way, Scott Besson, what a cold-ass quote yesterday. The equity market sell-off is a MAG7 problem, not a MAGA problem. So there again, putting... All of this into the realm of this is a known known. So I think it's pretty clear. One, Trump has had a 40-year view on tariffs.

They're going to go through with this and they're going to see it through. I don't think you're going to see this grand capitulation. Two. They are okay with the volatility in the equity markets. And then three, which is the other thing that we've been talking about a lot is where does this move our practical financing costs? What is this, right? We've talked about this. We have six. trillion dollars we need to finance in the next nine months.

in my opinion, of the White House has been move the tenure as aggressively and as quickly as possible. And look what they've done. As of yesterday, it's unbelievable what's happened in the tenure. You know, you are kissing 4%. And we talked about this. If it had gone in the other direction, guys, 30 or 40 basis points, and it touched 5%,

You're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of extra money that would not have been found, that would have had to be printed, right? And now this is hundreds of billions of dollars that we will save. we cut rates. If the Fed cuts rates, that's all predicated on them. This doesn't matter anymore. The Fed doesn't control the back end of the curve.

On the treasury markets, the government sells treasuries. Governments will not auction 10 years, and the auctions will clear at around 4%. It is an enormous, like, as an American. What we should all be thinking is, irrespective of what you think you know or what you think you like about tariffs, We should all have a moment where we exhale because the long end of the curve is giving us a respite in a storm. And we should be incredibly thankful.

What I'm referring to, Jamal, is you said yesterday, Jerome Powell, you're on the clock. So maybe you could explain what you meant by that. Okay, so that's a different part of the curve. I understand it's a different thing, but I'm just trying to put these two things together because those are the two things we're saying this action took. Okay, so let's play the ball where it lies. Okay.

Smart Money thought this was a $250 billion event. They were wrong. This is part of why the stock market has reacted so violently today. This is a $750 billion to trillion dollar event. This is a big moment in the market. So what does it create? It creates the risk of a recession. How do you minimize that risk? That is all about how easy it is for the average person to be able to borrow money. Where is that dictated? That is more dictated by the Fed and how they price the front end of the curve.

So what we need to have happen now is while Scott is out financing $6 trillion on the back end. We now need to get Jerome Powell to cut the front end. And if you do it aggressively enough, you can introduce liquidity in a moment where small and medium-sized businesses can go and get financed to weather the storm. Shamath, I want to add on to your point. Just so you guys know, there's roughly... 12 to 16 trillion dollars.

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

meaning he wants to give banks the ability to issue more debt. to introduce more capital and more liquidity into the markets by taking away some of the regulatory restrictions that have made it more difficult for the banks to issue credit to business owners and to individuals. So if they are successful in their deregulatory efforts, it will introduce more liquidity into the market.

coupled with deregulatory work that they're making in the other parts of the administration as this is their declaration, not mine. Their intention is to make sure that that capital flows into building businesses, building new businesses, underwriting new jobs, creating more employment. That's the theory that they're trying to execute. Obviously, it's part of this three-legged stool, but if it doesn't all work...

Okay, Chamath, give us an example here. I'm trying to get you to paint the entire picture here because the tariff cudgel is not making sense to a lot of folks. Okay, so it's not all good news. Yes. So I'll give a very specific example. runs a hundred plus year company. I'm just going to say it in generic terms so that I don't betray his confidence. Sure, no problem.

And this is a business that's been built over 100 years, owned by an American family, an incredible family, and they make products that we all know and love. And what did this action do? So in their example, they're in a very difficult position because... a very tight operating margin because they have to compete ferociously against China.

And they've done everything possible to maintain their capabilities in America, hire American workers in the heartland, but still compete against China. It's tough. And this action today swings them. from profitability to a potential yearly loss in a meaningful order of magnitude, like hundreds of millions of dollars. So Jason, that's the other side of this tariff coin. So we have to find a way.

of finding those examples, and as Ben said, excluding them somehow or giving them reprieve, because that wasn't the intention, I think, of what Trump was trying to do yesterday. That's an example of a company that should be and should continue to win and fight the good fight against China and try to continue to employ thousands of Americans. But this thing, because they had some capacity in some other countries, not China, by the way. Got it.

blows the thing up and so now you have to fix those things all right ben let me get you involved here i'm going to play you a quick clip from rand paul and i want to get your feedback on and then on tariffs themselves. And if it's a good idea or a bad idea, play the clip. What's the rationale for getting behind this?

Well, one, we should not live under emergency rule. The Constitution said taxes are raised by Congress. Most specifically, taxes originate in the House and come to the Senate, some against emergency rule. We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada.

Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else's product, it's mutually beneficial or you wouldn't buy it. If the trade is voluntary, it's always beneficial. There is no Canada versus the U.S. The consumer wins when the price is the lowest.

price tariffs raise prices and they're a bad idea for the economy then your thoughts on the two issues is trade good for consumers this is what you know i think is on top of everybody's mind that yeah the whole trump presidency and he won in large part due to inflation and Biden economics and that he was going to reduce inflation.

I think a lot of people believe inflation's about to come roaring back. Your thoughts on the two issues? Well, I mean, obviously, on a macroeconomic level, I totally agree with Senator Paul. And when it comes to the powers of the presidency, I think that it's pretty extraordinary that we should be able to use the trade deficit. as a national emergency sufficient to put down what effectively amounts to a $700 billion.

tax increase on the American people if you're talking about them paying the price of the tariffs on the other end. Congress, I think that if things get bad enough, there are a bunch of streams obviously here that cross. One of the big things here is that Congress is up for reelect in a year and a half.

And if the Republicans lose Congress in a year and a half, then whatever tricks President Trump is trying to pull in terms of being able to rejigger the rate at which we are paying back our national debt, all that stuff goes by the wayside because if Democrats win Congress, pretty much everything comes to a crashing halt. And there are a lot of Republicans who are in swing districts or in, say, R plus 5, R plus 10 districts.

who are suddenly going to feel pretty vulnerable, a recession takes everybody with it. It takes Secretary Bessent, it takes the president, it takes J.D. Vance, it takes everybody with it. Recessions tend to crush. The president who is in power at the time, regardless of what their long term plan is, when they say short term pain for long term gain.

Again, I think that there are a few factors here that I would like to see played out. For example, if there is an inflationary effect to the tariffs in terms of price. Does that mean that Jerome Powell is going to eject additional liquidity into the markets by decreasing interest rates? It's hard to see how. I mean, he's holding the interest rates steady right now without decreasing the interest rates, despite President Trump basically blasting him publicly.

since before he was even the president formally. He's not just the president-elect at that time. So again, it's hard for me to see how all of this squares into what looks like a really well-calibrated policy. And then beyond that, tricks that we play with regard to the rate of interest paying back our national debt are not going to be sufficient to pay back our national debt unless we have robust economic growth. And so a lot has to be bet on the robust economic growth out.

the levels of debt that we are currently racking up. And while I love what Doge is doing, the systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by Doge. I mean, it's the means-tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long-term drivers of our national debt. And military, I think, would be number two, yeah.

Military as a percentage of the GDP or as a percentage of the budget has been relatively stable and in some cases decreasing since the end of the Iraq War. True. But when it comes to the means-tested welfare programs, those continue to grow as a percentage of the budget. and over time are increasingly unfunded. Yeah, as our population ages and the population grows. Freeberg, putting aside executive power in the midterms, which, yeah, that would change everything.

What are your thoughts on just inflation and tariffs and the chance that this comes back and explodes in the administration's lap? Well, I think there are three consequences not necessarily related to inflation that are just worth spending time on, one of which I don't think gets talked about enough. The first is just the challenge of tariffs in general.

I shared this clip with you guys over the group chat yesterday from Ronald Reagan talking. Oh, it's so funny. I have it tuned up. I actually edited it. Let's do that. Let's play this clip and get your reaction. And today, many economic analysts and historians argue.

that high tariff legislation passed back in that period, called the Smoot-Hawley tariff, greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery. You see, at first when someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, It looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs, and sometimes for a short while at work.

but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is first homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. People stop buying. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.

The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington. to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity. So let me just say three things that I think are going to be important consequences, one of which doesn't get talked about much at all. The first is the important point about the decline in competitiveness that arises when you use protectionist tactics.

like import tariffs. So ultimately, in order to be competitive in the market, you need to have a free market to test how good you are relative to your competitors. And if you use tariffs or other taxes or other government intervening systems to distort the natural forces of markets, meaning there's a buyer and a seller, there may be multiple sellers, and ultimately the buyer will choose the best seller. then you're creating a disincentive.

for American enterprise to be more competitive. We lost manufacturing because we weren't competitive in manufacture. Putting a tariff on other manufacturing countries does not make Americans more competitive. It basically gives American businesses a crutch.

Give an example, David. So let's talk about manufacturing. So if I'm using a traditional assembly line with low efficiency systems, I'm going to be more expensive to make a device than a Chinese factory that's built with a lot of automation, high efficiency systems, etc. And so if I'm saying, well, to buy the Chinese product, you got to pay twice as much because there's a tariff now.

The American company does not have an incentive to invest in automating or building better technology or adopting new technology to make themselves competitive in the marketplace. So that's the challenge with tariffs long term is that they distort economic consequences that arise in a traditional free market system.

The second consequence I think is important is under this guise and in the near term, the effect of some of these tariffs is going to be the loss of revenue for a significant chunk of the American businesses. In particular, I'll use one example. People may not remember this because it wasn't that big of a thing, but between 2016 and 2020, during the last Trump administration, there was a continued kind of tariff and trade escalation between Trump and China.

And during that time, China stopped buying American ag exports. And China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products. As a result, the Trump administration had to issue two support payment checks to farmers that totaled $28 billion in 2018 and 2019. Just because of that.

China stepping out of the buying market. American farmers represent a large amount of the voting bloc for the Republican Party. And so I think that the second consequence is going to be that there is going to need to be financial support. which means increased government spending if we intend to keep the tariffs in place and the global market stops buying American exports. That's the second consequence. The third consequence, which is the one I am most worried about, which I think about a lot.

is China had the state council meeting. a couple days ago. And in that state council meeting, they announced a series of measures and a series of steps that they would be willing to take. in the case of retaliatory tariff escalation in a trade war. What that means is that China may step up and say, you know what, we are disregarding all of the IP rights held by IP rights holders around the world.

and they could steal IP more openly, more brazenly. And because they have a lower cost of manufacturing, they have a larger manufacturing base, a lower cost of power, they could basically take the only thing that much of American enterprise relies on, which is our IP rights.

and say, we're just going to, well, people might say, oh, they already do that. They already do that. They do it to an extent. But imagine if China just made copies of Microsoft Word and started selling it around the world for $5. Yeah, I mean, they did that internally for some period of time. Then they started to respect it internally, but they've never done it. Great point.

by shipping Disney films overseas. That's right. And so now imagine if they started taking all of American manufacturing drawings, blueprints, designs, and they have all this manufacturing capacity and they sold everything at 10 cents on the dollar. to all of the global markets that the US is now cutting trade ties with because of the tariff escalation. And China says, we don't care about your IP rights anymore.

We don't care because you've cut us off. The rest of the world needs someone that will sell to them. I will also say China, one thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer. semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is going to go into production in Q3 of 2025, and will end up being in full production in 2026.

This will move the base from Taiwan potentially into China. They are developing lithography systems. They are developing advanced semiconductor manufacturing systems. And they will effectively have everything from energy. to the minerals, to the manufacturing capacity, to support and service all, and the software now, all of technology. And so we are in a really disadvantaged position if China does choose in this moment.

to disregard the IP rights of American businesses. So they have the ability to swing back at us. Chamath, you want to wrap us up here? Yeah. I'll take the other side of all of this. Yeah. I'll start with, again, there's no point prognosticating when they're just telling you. Nick, you want to play the clip? I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have

some kind of a grand global economic reordering. It was something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods, or if you want to go back, like a treatment. Something back to the steel agreements or the Treaty of Versailles. I mean, what is that? Just a kind of like refresher. What are we talking about? We're talking about commercial relations between, at the time, 44 countries, right? This is a big statement.

I don't think that these kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour. And I think that people understand, if you're steeped in the history of it, how important these kinds of statements are. So I think I take this similarly to how I take... Trump's rhetoric on tariffs, and I'm spending some time trying to now understand How are the scenarios that could play out? Because I think David is right if you assume the status quo, meaning what are the risks?

But what they're saying is we're going to question this. We're actually going to go here and just totally rewrite that. If that happens as part of this. All bets are off, in my opinion. I don't think any of us know with any certainty what a new economic framework would look like. And if Scott is basically prepping himself to say, hey, put me in, coach, I'm ready.

Ben, what should be, let's talk about onshoring and bringing these jobs, bringing these factories back to America. It seems to me a bit crazy. that we're going to make fast fashion and people's Coachella wear. anchor, you know, USB-C cables here. Pharmaceuticals, sure, we need that for strategic purposes. We obviously need the military and chips. But outside of that, is there some rationale here when we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime?

And everybody wants to come here, you know, to immigrate to this country to doing these tariffs and trying to create jobs here that we don't necessarily need. We have too much employment right now.

in the market and not enough bodies to fill all the open job wrecks. What do you think? Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's really fascinating is the kind of difference in messaging that you hear between the Treasury Secretary, Howard Lutnick, and the Commerce Secretary and the President. I mean, they're all messaging kind of different things. I think Secretary Besant is making the strongest case for what's being done with this sort of long-term, what does reordering look like?

And even there, I'm still lacking clarity on what a reordered world trade relationship actually – what is the end of the rainbow there? What does that actually look like when all is said and done so that I can kind of grasp exactly what that – what he wants that to look like? I think that, you know, Secretary Lutnik seems to actually just like tariffs and President Trump.

Seems to have a picture in his head when it comes to factories that we're going to revitalize the steel mills, that we're going to be doing the kinds of jobs that we did back. In the 1950s, there's sort of a nostalgia that President Trump has in sort of his own mind about these sorts of jobs that, by the way, nobody in modern life actually wants to work at. If you were to work at a Ford factory in 1953 in a non-air-conditioned factory, riveting for a living.

you would actually be quite unhappy. And you should be very happy that actually there are machines that do that now. And you hear this kind of talk, sometimes bandied about, not just with regard to offshoring, but with regards to technology and machines.

I mean, I've talked to I remember a few years back in 2018, I talked to Tucker Carlson on my program and he literally said that he would outlaw self-driving cars because it would it would get rid of white trucker jobs, you know, blue collar trucker jobs in Ohio and Michigan. And when I said, well, that sounds kind of Luddite, he said, well, the Luddites had a point. And, you know, then suggested that on the basis of safety, he would ban it. And I remember asking him, but.

those self-driving cars will presumably be more safe than humans driving. A magnitude safer, yeah. And what he actually said was, well, you know, you asked me on what grounds I would ban it, not whether that was true or not, but I think that that is...

I think this is the danger that particularly tech runs when we're talking about these sorts of things is to believe that the animus for – trade relationships around the world or the anti-competitive nature of many of the activities that are being taken are relegated solely to sort of the foreign sphere. I think that you could easily see that turn.

on quote-unquote job loss that is caused by AI or job loss that is caused by technological gain. And the truth is that if you're talking about job loss in the manufacturing sector in the United States, the vast majority of job loss in the manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring. It's due to technological advancement.

manufacturing productivity in the United States has actually dramatically risen since the 1980s. Okay, so let's play conspiracy theorist for a second because, okay, you're right, Ben. Like, you want that clarity. I want that clarity. Freeburg wants it. J. Cal, everybody wants it. But if this moment, if it's a catalyst to your point where everybody is forced into the room and Trump leads a grand bargain. across the 50 or 60 most important trading partners in the world.

What does that look like? It's almost like, okay, we're reestablishing something that's akin to the United Nations and what the United Nations was meant to be post-World War II. But that institution has totally failed. So this new thing exists. purely on economic lines and cooperation. I don't know. I struggle actually, to your point, to kind of imagine what are the outcomes, but there's so many unbelievable outcomes in that scenario if they were able to get the top 50.

commercial mercantile countries together in a room and say, let's hammer something up. I mean, I totally agree with that. I think one of my questions, however, is If you take a look at some of the examples that Scott is using there when he talks about the Bretton Woods Agreement or if you're going to talk about –

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

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

AI is the only possibility, which is why I think the AI regime inside the Trump administration is so deeply important. I also think this is why I'm warning about. You know, the possibility that these sort of anti-free market forces that are related to tariffs aren't just related to tariffs in some quarters. This is where populism can kind of run out of control and start to actually turn against some of its tech masters in some of these cases.

And so one of the things that I'm very concerned about is if I was talking with Danielle Smith, who's the premier of Alberta the other day, and she was talking about the fact that Canada like she's she's very conservative. Alberta tends to be a more conservative area of Canada. And she was talking about how. If Mark Carney were to become prime minister of Canada instead of Pierre Polyev, that he actually is eager for the tariff war because it allows him to reorient.

toward China and away from the United States. And there are countries that absolutely would love to do that. I mean, there's a case to be made that the EU would love an easy off-ramp with Russia and China.

and use this as an excuse as a way of reorienting back toward Russian oil, for example, and then Chinese markets, because that Chinese market is enormous. These would be lower inputs, right? I mean, you have lower input costs, which means life better for... citizens and citizens like cheap things they like cheap oil in their cars and they like cheap cars they'll be bringing byd cars into europe

And the thing that I'm worried about is when I look at the – forget about Europe and forget about Canada for a second. The tariffs that kind of shocked me when I looked at that list were all the tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries. All of those countries where production has been shifting out of China to places like, for example, Vietnam or Cambodia.

The production has been shifting to those places specifically because companies know that the United States, yeah, because the United States is going after China. Well, now, why exactly would you manufacture in Vietnam when Vietnam is going to be with a 46% tariff rate? on the basis that we have a 90... It's more than that, Ben. It's like they've made those investments over the last five or six years. And so you have...

tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars of sunk costs. Now, what do you do in that moment? These were specifically designed, Ben, to be a diversification strategy. Japan was paying their companies. to build factories outside of China. And Apple was doing India, Vietnam to build AirPods and laptops and even the iPhone being made outside of China. That diversification strategy is wiped out. Did you watch the presser yesterday? The worst part...

For me, I only had one moment where I was like, oh, gosh. And he goes, Sri Lanka. Good old Sri Lanka. 88%. Amazing Sri Lankan. But Sri Lanka, very tough on us. I was like, sir, I'm America. Accepting. Go ahead, Ben. You can do yours. You can do your dueling about Sri Lanka. I'm a great Trump. And that's the reason why Ben Shapiro's podcast number two to all in now because of the Ben Shapiro Trump impersonation.

Ben Shapiro, a great American. Have you been to the White House? I have, actually. You have? Have you been invited in this? Or are you still... Anti-Trump or Never-Trumper? He was a nasty Never-Trumper now. He's pro-Trump. Exactly. I had the same exact trajectory as J.D. Vance, except I didn't end up vice president of the United States.

But, you know, I think that, you know, again, when we talk about the rollout, the fact that, for example, the meme online right now, and I know we all kind of live in meme world, that the meme is the president and J.D. Vance lecturing a penguin. Because on that chart is the herd islands. Have you even apologized for eating all that mackerel? No, no, wait, what are you guys talking about? There's an island that got a 10% tariff, but there's nothing on the island except penguin.

Yeah. This is where I started. Come on now. Have you even apologized? Okay. You got no cards. There are no cards. This penguin has no cards. It's just, you have no cards to play, okay? Stop, stop. You've got a great tuxedo. At least you showed up in a tux, okay? Good stuff. Oh, my God. By the way, I think that Ben's framing of this, thank you for that, because that was really helpful to me. You're right. If we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we have to have an anchor asset.

So it's a really great question. What is that anchor asset? It has to be AI. But then underneath that AI thing, we have these two very complicated problems. One is a meaningful energy problem. I've been talking about this now incessantly. We don't have enough electrons. We just don't. And then the second is what Friedberg mentioned before, which is that we have a very delicate technological supply chain to make the underlying silicon we need for these things.

neither are trivial. These are not things that can be easily solved. Yeah, the AI supply chain is electricity. We're going from one terawatt to two. China's going from three to eight. over the same time period, just to be clear. So they're accelerating. The second is rare earth materials that we don't mine for. We've outsourced mining. And Doug Burgum told me an interesting stat.

He's our Secretary of the Interior. He said, we only graduate 200 people a year in the United States with degrees in mining. Because beginning in the 90s, when globalization took off... We basically stopped mining in this country and moved everything to all the places because we had this nimbyism. We didn't want to have mining in our backyard. The third, obviously, is the manufacturing of semiconductors, which we don't do. The components to do the manufacturing. So there's a company...

called ASML, which everyone that works in tech knows about. They have these advanced lithography systems to make the semiconductors. They don't sell to China. So now China's got their own homegrown lithography systems. Yeah, we don't make any of that in-house. So we don't mine, we don't have enough power, we don't have the materials, and we don't make lithography, and we don't have any fabs. I said this before, but one of the biggest national security threats that we created out of nowhere...

was when the Wall Street Journal was allowed to do a detailed article on ASML. And one of the craziest and scariest stats is that there's a person, literally one person. that can operate these machines that are trained by asml and then forward deployed and there is a woman that was profiled And I thought, this is a national security risk. You should not be outing who this woman is. She's going to be kidnapped, Brianna Hall. Exactly. At the end of the day, what the U.S. has is the weight.

We've got 70 billion parameters and we call that an AI model. That's 70 billion parameters. If someone gets a copy of it, they've got an AI model. So how much of an advantage do we really have? And the other thing that we had was... Meanwhile, China's got the whole supply chain. our trade relationships with all the places that had all of these things that we actually needed, right? And it was super high-functioning. Yes, it was quite high-functioning.

And then beyond that, you also have the problem of what happens if there's just less demand for dollars on the world stage? I mean, the exit of the dollar as the world's global reserve currency is going to have some pretty nasty spillover effect.

And it's going to require the government to start sucking in more dollars from the American population in order to pay off all of these debts that we're racking up. So, I mean, all these things tend, like you could see a world where we magic our way out of this. This is what I've been saying to J-Cal, de-dollarization is what ends up happening.

I mean, this is what the stable coins, I think, is set up to counter. People are now saying, hey, we're going to have there's two stable coin acts that are going around here. One of them. doesn't require like know your customer anti money laundering terrorism stuff which is you know tethers according to many reports bread and butter And then the other one is to domesticate all this business, give it to Circle, give it to Stripe.

give it to American companies and force them to buy a certain percentage of treasuries and allow them to give interest, which the stablecoin bills are now debating if they should give that. So I don't know if you guys are watching that, but that would be. The greatest way to keep a buyer for our currency. There's an analog to this that I think is important. Like when you look at the debt to GDP of Japan.

One of the critical questions is how can you have a functioning economy at 250, 260% debt to GDP, right? And we're at sort of like 110s, right? 120 something, whatever. And one of the critical advantages that they have is that they export a lot of incredible goods abroad, but they have an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers for their own Japanese bonds.

And so there's this permanent bid that exists because the net buyer can be a Japanese person on the margins and they're always there. And it's not necessarily a person, it's an insurance company, it's a pension fund, et cetera. The thing that U.S. dollar stablecoins does is it starts to replicate one of those advantages, which again, if you think about having a release valve for the U.S. economy and if we needed to.

all of a sudden scream to 200% debt to GDP. The real question is, where's the incremental net buyer of the U.S. bond and it could be the person that has to back the stable coin, which would then say the people in charge of the crypto strategy, we won't name names, No, if anybody knows anybody. That legislation needs to be incredibly permissive because to your guys' point, we would want the bid to US treasuries to exist.

and to be as ferocious as possible, right? Yeah, but I don't think you should let Tether do it until they do a proper audit and they stop doing money laundering and terrorism and all the crazy stuff. No, I'm not going all the way there. Allegedly. But what Circle does is, I think, quite structured. Oh, circles. I mean, I think that circles...

USDC. That's their pitch. And I think the Trump family now just launched their own stablecoin this week. So you're going to see 10 stablecoins. That is a great way to create competition. I still think it's the right question that this administration has a responsibility to articulate. What is it that makes America... the linchpin of the global economy, of the Western democracy.

of the world is we enter this new era with this rising power in China, and I'm not sure that there's clarity today. What do you think it is? Oh, I'll tell you. Both of you guys, what do you guys think? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear what it is. The reason we keep winning and the reason China keeps stumbling is because we have rabid entrepreneurship and an investment and crazy investment infrastructure.

The fact that we will bet on entrepreneurs and allow them to become billionaires or allow them to flame out and start again tomorrow, that entrepreneurial spirit of America is what needs to be preserved. That's what created SpaceX. That's what created Circle we just talked about, Stripe. We need the American exceptionalism, and it has to be back. aka immigration, of brilliant people.

like Sachs, like Freeberg, like Chamath, who were not born in this country. You can't do it just based on Ben Shapiro and J-Cal. You need to be looking around the world for the smartest people and then plugging them into the entrepreneurial system here. That's... The magic. That's the golden goose of America. David, what do you think it is? That's a very good, I mean, I think that's credible.

I honestly don't know if I can be dismissive of China like J. Cal says they keep stumbling and blah, blah, blah. I think that's absolutely wrong. There's a very good interview. What are those guys' names from the Brookings Institution that do that podcast? Ben, you might know these guys, the three guys. Midas Touch? Is that who you're talking about? Or is that a different podcast?

I'm not sure. It's not in the top 100. I don't know. Yeah, it's not in the top. They talked about China and they talked about actually the rise in China where they 30x GDP per capita and call it 30 years because they allowed entrepreneurs. Are you talking about Goodfellas? Goodfellas sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. That's the Stanford one. That's right. The Stanford one. Goodfellas.

Goodfellas, yeah. I think that was it. Yeah, it's a pretty good pod, actually. A good talk on... No, no, no. It's Waldorf and Statler, I think that's their names. Waldorf and Statler, those are... No, the hover instruments are good. fellows. That's what it is. H.R. McMaster, Neil Ferguson. Nick, find a picture of Waldorf and Stadler for Friedberg to jog his ring. Oh, they're so great. They're so great. Okay, so... Anyway, they made the point that because China allowed...

the entrepreneurism of the individuals to let the market run free. And they have this throttle. When they let the people run free, they let entrepreneurism thrive. And then sometimes they pull the throttle back. They just did that, and they crashed the whole thing. Now they've pushed it forward again. And that's what drives the growth and the improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy, in mining, and now in manufacturing.

And it's, I think, going to lead to a great era of prosperity for China. It's pretty clear with or without the conflict with the U.S. They've dramatically improved the conditions in that country over the last 30 years in a really profound, historic way. So I'm not going to be dismissive and say that they're stumbling. Let's give it to Ben, and then I'll tell you why I'm dismissive. So first of all, I think that China does face some serious...

real serious structural problems ranging from demographics to debt. And I also think that if you take a look at sort of the history of economic fascism, which is what they're attempting to do, which is sort of using capitalist methodologies in order to... prop up a very tyrannical government that will step in. Exactly. And so for a short period of time, that seems like that will work. And then the problem is you can find yourself in a blind alley fairly quickly.

And right now, AI is not a blind alley, but we also don't know exactly which way AI is going to develop in the most profitable way. I mean, the amount of money that's been poured into AI has not yet been justified by the amount of. net on the return on the actual investment, obviously. And so if you don't, this is the benefit of the American market is that you have everybody chasing everything all the time. And one of those things is going to hit.

The benefit of the Chinese market is you have everyone chasing one thing all the time. If that's the thing that actually hits, they'll do amazing. But it's possible that they completely miss it. But the problem is, I think, and this is where you get back to the political in the United States and the necessity of avoiding a recession. is that, to me, the scariest thing that is happening inside the Trump administration is not something that's bad.

When President Trump was inaugurated, there was one picture that kind of summed up the inauguration. It was President Trump there with Tim Cook and with Zuck and with Elon and with all the billionaires behind him, all the tech bros right behind him. If there is a recession, what comes next is not going to be salutary to innovation, to investment.

to technology, to anything remotely like that. And so the idea of short-term pain, it better be really, really short-term. The American people do not have patience for this. And if it goes sideways, then what you're going to get is a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right that is going to take down...

everybody who is even remotely connected with this idea of free market capitalism. And so I think that one of the dangers in sort of attempting to manipulate the economy this way is that we're saying, OK, we're going to we're going to. try these kind of methodologies of government control in which we rejigger the world economy in this way and that way, and then we'll magic our way out of it with stablecoin and AI.

Or maybe the best way to do this would actually be to allow the thing to thrive that has always thrived in America, which is lower the regulations, let people innovate, let people fail, let people succeed, get the hell out of the way. And yes, actually do the things that you need to do in cutting government debt by doing the hard things.

And the only way you're going to be able to do all those things is through continued success, not paying to get to some long term gain. It's got to be entrepreneurship. And there are some sub factors of it in order to have a vibrant entrepreneurial.

Community, you need to have immigration. That's why I asked Trump on this thing, on this program, can we get green cards? Can we get people who have degrees here, especially coming out of Stanford, to stay in the country? He said yes, he'd staple them on the degrees. Great. The next thing is getting Lena Kahn out and ending the wrath of Lena Kahn. We need M&A because when you have M&A, the companies get bigger. The fact that YouTube...

and Android and AdSense were purchased by Google made it into the massive success it is on a global basis today. And the fact that meta was able to buy things, you may not like it when these companies get too powerful. But what Jack Ma, what happened to Jack Ma is the reason. Freeberg that I don't believe a dictator will ever compete with our country if we stay entrepreneurial and not socialist.

Socialism is a cul-de-sac, as you're saying, Ben, and it might work for a short period of time, but then someone like Xi Jinping is going to do what dictators do, which is implode. He saw Jack Ma get popular. He sent them to get re-educated and do some painting. And he took up oil painting. He got rid of every educational company and pull up the chart of Chinese investment, Nick, if you have it.

Boom. It just got smashed. And this is what dictators do. They do what Putin did. He invades Ukraine. His economy goes off the rails. And this is what Xi Jinping do. They always implode. Let me give you a stepladder to get off your soapbox so I can ask Ben a question. When you said that in a recession. Definitely not. That's exactly right.

How come when I have a passion for something, you guys have to give me a hard time. When you go on your passionate rant, I give you kudos. What do you do? You just shake it in some stupid... Some stupid statement. Ben agrees with me. Ben agrees American exceptionalism. Ben and I, that's it. I'm leaving the program. Ben and I are doing all in 2.0. Let me rant against dictators for a minute. Go ahead.

No, you should just go rant about the Trump administration and get your cabinet position. Go ahead. Ben, when you talk about in a recession, they go after tech companies. Well, can you just explain that more? Just explain that. I'm not sure I understood that totally. Okay, so there's a recession. And President Trump, just the way that people tend to think of politics is not on a granular level. They tend to see it on sort of a pixelated level because most people don't engage with politics.

on a granular level. They see a Surratt painting, they don't see all the dots, they just see Sunday in the Park with George, right? And so when it comes to a recession, the image that's going to come to mind for the Trump administration is that this is an administration that is extremely friendly to business, particularly when it comes to tech.

And so whoever is standing next to President Trump, if there is a serious recession, gets nuked, gets caught in the fallout. And if that happens, then you will see a resurgent left led by a Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, not a sort of technocratic. you know, Ezra Klein, abundance, liberalism, you're going to get a resurgent Bernieism on the left that basically says,

These rich people screwed you in order to get ahead. You can feel it because you're feeling the recession. They're still rich. You're still poor. And so what you really need is a complete rejiggering of the American economy along the lines of fairness. And you're going to see something similar happen on the right, by the way. So my friend Matt Cottonetti, who is the former editor of the Washington Free Beacon, I believe.

He has a great point about presidential elections. He makes the point that candidates don't become president unless they run against their own party. In order to actually capture the imagination of the American people, you almost always have to run inside your own party against your own party. So you saw this most obviously with President Trump, but this was clearly true with Barack Obama. It was true to a certain extent.

with George W. Bush even, who ran a compassionate conservative campaign against these sort of hard-hearted Gingrich dole Republicans. Clinton. Clinton for sure did this. So I think it's a great point because then you have to start thinking, okay, look at the, we're turning to the right side of the aisle now. Let's say that you have a politician on the right side of the aisle. What does he run against?

Because Trump has obviously taken tremendous command of the Republican base and the Republican Party. What is there to run against? Well, there's an economic downturn. Do you think that they're going to run against Trump being not capitalist enough?

Or do they think they're going to run against Trump being too capitalist, too friendly? Exactly. And that's how you get a populist uprising on the right. And what you end up with is a horseshoe theory politics where both parties are in favor of Lena Kahn. Socialism. Right. Both parties are in favor of Lena Kahn. And by the way, this is not a rarity.

I think that the vice president is an amazingly brilliant guy. He has also expressed kind of public support for Lena Kahn from time to time, right? And that's inside the Republican Party. And on the left, obviously, there's tremendous support for Lena Kahn. So if what we're saying here is one of the things we need is not Lena Kahn.

We should be very careful not to step on the rake. And then the thing that hits you in the face is Lena Kahn. Right. Yeah. Right. And this is why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in socialist policy and the response to some of the... actions the administration might take. But how do we avoid making the bottom half of society feel included in all this wealth generation? et cetera. Like what is the plan here? Is it universal healthcare?

Is it lowering their taxes? I mean, the administration says no taxes for people under 150K. We have to give something. to the working man and woman of this country, the people who feel that they can't get rich, who can't get to the middle class. Does anybody here have a suggestion for that? I mean, I do. I actually do have a suggestion. And it's actually shockingly easy.

President Trump has a visceral connection to blue-collar workers in this country. Clearly, he has a visceral connection. He should stop preaching that blue-collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they're succeeding.

Because it's actually true. Tell the truth. Okay, yes. Yes, I mean, I think that the fib that politicians always make bank on is the idea that, for example, the middle class in America is completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class.

OK, and actually all Americans, I say this on my show all the time, people have this, again, this sort of rosy eyed view of the 1950s, which, again, was a historical outlier because the rest of the world didn't exist. It had been destroyed.

But they also have this bizarre idea that you were better off to be 30 years old in 1980 than you are to be 30 years old in 2025. And all I can say is in 1980, the only dude with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko and it was a shoebox and he was holding it to his head. The reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025 on a material economic level.

than it was in 1980. And the lie that politicians tell in order to gain power is they say, you're getting screwed. Somebody is screwing you. I can unscrew the screwing. And so there's this constant sort of race to the bottom in terms of this rhetoric.

And what you end up with is in the end, what can I promise you that that I can then blame somebody else for not having fulfilled the promise? President Trump, I think, could avoid that because of this unique connection that he has with blue collar people where he could say, listen.

We're all on the same side here, right? What we're doing here is innovation. I thought the most important line that I heard from President Trump during his victory speech the night that he won was when he said to Elon, and it was kind of a throwaway line, when he said, we love our geniuses. Yes, that's the thing we need. Celebrate billionaires, celebrate success, celebrate entrepreneurship. And this could be you.

And we're going to have hiring programs, as Mark Andreessen has talked about. We need to have hiring programs that are specifically designed to find the best people, not just abroad, but also in the United States. who might be underserviced in rural areas of the country or in blue-collar areas of the country. Find the next JD Vans. Find the next guy who really needs that hand up. All those things can be done. A rising tide will lift all ships, but this is the problem with the short-term pain.

Americans have a long memory. And when it comes to politics, I think this happened with the Biden administration. their relationship with politicians is sort of like a married couple. And good married couples, you know, they kind of talk through the minor problems that they're having in their marriage and then things, you know, continue to maintain and grow and get better.

Bad married couples, what happens is that they sort of ignore the kind of minor annoyances for years at a time. And then something bad happens and the bottom just goes right out. And this is the thing that I'm afraid of for the Trump administration. Everybody's willing to ignore the things that are kind of mildly annoying, like penguins at the White House or whatever, up until the point where there's a serious recession. At that point.

everybody kind of looks around and goes, why are we even doing this? I think that's exactly what happened with Biden, with the Afghanistan withdrawal, for example. Making a misstep is why I'm being critical of the tariffs. It's not because I want Trump to lose. It's because I want Trump to win, right? I think he's doing too many important things. Like the stuff that Antonio is doing, there are too many important things happening to take, to roll the dice.

on a strategy that isn't even being articulated. If you're going to make the case for a long term gain, I need to know what the long term gain is so I can make the case to the American public as to why they should endure the short term pain. You know, you're having surgery because after the surgery, you're going to feel better. But if I say you're having surgery, it's going to be some short term pain. You say, OK, how am I going to feel after the surgery? You say, well.

You know, maybe. Maybe. Who knows? Why am I having the surgery? We have so many job openings. We have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. As you said, consumers today can get and live an incredible lifestyle that... the rich didn't have in 1980. The car you can buy today can drive itself.

For 20, 30, 40K, you can buy a used Tesla and have this car that's better than any car made in the last 50 years. So you got to keep it positive. Then think about generation tool belt. You've got all these. plumbing jobs, electrician jobs, construction jobs that pay massively hourly wages.

that are available for people today. We have too many job openings today. And you never hear Trump say that. To your point, it's always this like, everything's a disaster and I'll save you when in fact you don't need saving. Go ahead, Freebird. I'll answer to Moff's earlier question about... what america can anchor to to attract the rest of the world and i think it's what been the American story from the beginning, which is ambition. We pioneered the West

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

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

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

About 25% of all of our utility workers in America became eligible for retirement. between 2017 and 2022? I did not, no. So most of the people, 56% of all utility workers now have less than a decade of experience. You know what that's resulted in? In 2021, the average... US customer of an electric utility experience seven and a half hours of service interruptions, and it's just growing.

I think the average plumber's age is 50-something. We can't get people to become plumbers. NERC says that 19 states now in the United States can face rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions if these issues aren't addressed. And by the way, this is...

That's a human capital problem. But if you multiply that by 10 and 20 and 30 times, there was a different tweet. I don't know, Nick, if you could find it, that talked about an organization trying to find people to help build nuclear submarines. Did you guys see this quote? where they needed 100,000 people to build nuclear subs in the United States, and they could barely find like a few hundred.

Yeah, we need to get better at this stuff. I mean, the good news is we're going to have robots to do this. Ben, you know, if I run for president, I'm one of the few people here on the pod who can. My position is going to be. build three new cities with 5 million homes in each because, you know, starter homes. Families can't buy starter homes.

You ever consider running for office? And if you did, what would be your platform? I mean, it'd be pretty horrifying to run for office. It seems like a terrible job. And I think the age to run for president is now in your 70s. So I have like three decades to consider it. But, you know, if I were going to run. I would be running on the basic idea that in this country, the only thing that you are promised is the adventure. And I'm not going to make you promises.

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to make you promises that I can't keep about how I'm going to fix your life because the truth is I really can't. All I can do is help get the obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and you can make your life better. And I can help break the institutions that have a stranglehold on your future. And there, when you're talking about electricians and plumbers.

The truth is that we have set up an enormous con game that is our higher education system, particularly in the liberal arts, subsidized by the taxpayer. When most jobs that we're talking about right here do not require a college degree. There's so many things that.

the Trump administration should be doing and is doing, again, that are great, that they could break the stranglehold on some of these things that allow for more opportunity. But I think the thing that people really, you know, the thing that I would say that I really think that maybe no other politician would say, and I can say because I'm not a politician, is. Your future is in America. Your future is in your hands.

It is not somebody else's hands. It is your responsibility. It is your responsibility to go out and strive. It is your responsibility to go and succeed. We want you to be able to try again if you fail. But we want you to go and we want you to try. Rugged individualism. And also the kind of case that was being made a little bit earlier about China, that basically China is saying that it can do things.

The one of the things that drives me up a wall is when politicians say I created X jobs or we created X jobs. You didn't create a job. Okay, the government does not create jobs. The government can take money from people and then give it to other people, but it is only entrepreneurs who can create jobs. And so the way that you fight China off,

is not by the power of a centralized government directing people in a particular direction. The way that you fight off China is by unleashing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and ambition of the American people on an individual level.

to go out and do all of these unbelievable things. And that would be the promise that I'd make to the American people. I'll get everybody the hell out of your way so you can succeed. That would be the only thing I would promise. Guys, we got breaking news here. It turns out the more reciprocal tariffs have dropped. Look at this. J. Cal has put a 500% reciprocal tariff on that. Purchasing dogs from a breeder is now 100% tariff. Friedberg.

Oh, that's pretty stiff. And Chamath has put one on Laura Piana's slippers. Yeah, too many people have them. 200% tariff. And, oh, looks like Ben Shapiro got in on it. Having Candace Owens on your podcast is now at 200%. Ben, what are you doing here? Unkind, guys. Unkind. Wait, what's the Palmer Lucky one? Can you read that one, Jacob? Palmer Lucky has put a thousand. This is the biggest one that just dropped. Thousand percent tariff. I'm working with Jacob. Four.

Chamath Palihapitiya. Oh, your chairman dictator. Wait, I have to, do you want to hear about this? Oh, would you like to do a little memory lane? We got so much show here. I'm trying to get this out, but okay. Oh, by the way, I created a poly market on GDP. Oh, annualized GDP growth in Q3 of this year being below five, negative five.

Negative 5%? Yeah. That's brutal. Check it out on Polymarket. What's the probability of that happening? Make your bets. Oh, make your bets with our partner, Polymarket. Chamath, do you want to do victory lap? We're going to wrap here. What do you want to do? Well, I actually think it's fun because we're going to kick off a different poly market around this because I think it's interesting. So the thing that we haven't talked about is with all of the tariffs.

With all of the financing questions, with all of the recession questions, short term rates, long term rates, the one thing that we haven't sufficiently talked about. It's not really in the press, but it needs to be talked about is there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today. And you would say, well, if long-term rates go down.

But the tariff picture actually impacts revenues, right? And the problem with that is that there's a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA. And so this is what I spoke about at the beginning of January, which is the one risk that is uncontrollable. is what happens to corporate debt?

And could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action? Nick, you may want to just play the clip and we can talk about what we can do about this. This was my pick for the best investment idea. All right, here we go. Let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero and six out of the remaining eight times.

you make 10 extra money. And then the final two times you make anywhere between 100 to 1000 extra money. This is a loser trade, but I would be long CDS. what am i buying i am buying insurance i'm buying insurance using credit default swaps i'm buying what's called protection that there is no default event in 2025. i would like A little bit of an insurance policy in 2025.

so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think that there is a small chance. some volatility next year i hope it doesn't happen i hope that this trade loses money but if it hits it will be the best performing asset of 2025 and i just want to be clear this is not something i think will happen it's not something i want to happen but i do think that if you look back

in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you. When you look at the concentration of the S&P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you look at rates spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance.

may not be a bad thing it has hit nick you can show the cds graph So this thing, for every billion dollars of risk you would have put on, every billion dollars that you put on would have cost you about a million dollars. And that million dollars would have made you about $7 million in about three months. Did you put it on? I'm not going to comment on my trades, Jason.

Oh, okay. But we talked about it off air already. But if you did put it on, does that mean you're taking us all to Italy this summer? No. What's happening here? Are you getting a boat for us to record from the all-in yacht? No, but there may be some boats for sale if this trade keeps going this way.

Oh, why is this important? The CDS actually represents the structural risk in the United States private economy in the corporate economy. And so, Nick, if you just put it back on. So when you see these spreads blowing out. This is actually a very important warning sign. And this is actually a thing that I think Scott understands well, Howard understands well. I think they'll translate this to the president.

If I have an opportunity to explain it, I will. But this is a really important market to pay attention to. This is what was the canary in the coal mine for... the great financial crisis. This was the stuff that showed us that there was a big default event happening in the mortgage side of the market, but then that spilled over to the broader economy.

The tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart. And I think it's something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to because I think now that this trade is in the money. The question is, I don't think we want this to happen, that one sigma, two sigma event where all of a sudden this trade returns a thousand X. is really bad. Well, let's keep our eye on the markets. And as of the taping here, we're down about 5%.

across the boards and you're excellent you should come back Yeah, well done, Ben. You fit right in. We're in Florida, are you? We're doing an event in Miami at the end of the month. Yeah, that'd be fun. Let's do it. Do you want to come to Miami and hang out? We've got like this nightclub. We're doing a stage. We've got the...

trackside at Formula One. Are you kidding me? Ben's got a table at 11. It's got his name on it. Ben Shapiro's table. We're going to live. We're going to live. We're going to live. Stop with the 11. We're going to live. Okay, sorry, sorry. I don't know which strip club is sponsoring all in this trip, but we'll figure it out. That was awesome. Thanks, guys. That was a blast. Wait, J. Cal, take us out. Take us out. This is my favorite with Ben. Ben's like, and you know...

There are security issues in Ukraine and you have security issues as well. That's why you should use lifeline. You are the master of the fucking segue. I have never. I thought I was good. Ben Shapiro is like. And of course, we have the tariffs and that's going down. But you know what won't go down? If you buy gold, buy your gold bullion at goldbullion.org. You are great at this. Is it true? 100 million in revenue for Daily Wire? Is that true? Actually, last year was 220.

Oh, my God. What's going on? I saw some headline. You're going bankrupt. How are you going bankrupt with $220 million? We're not going bankrupt. Some restructuring. Actually, Ben, now that you saw what's happening with Newsmax, I mean, any thoughts to maybe... Yeah, I mean, it has, let's just put it, it has crossed our minds. Yes, for sure. You're making 50 times the revenue of Truth Social.

Congratulations. But actually, Ben, what do you think when you see this Newsmax thing trade like this? I mean, it's incredible. What is it saying, do you think? I mean, I think it's saying a couple of things. I mean, one, it's saying, obviously, look, I think the P.E. ratios on the Newsmax trade are... you know, ridiculous in the sense that it's going to revert back to something closer to normalcy. I think that it was supposed to trade at 10 bucks.

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

I think what it says is that, you know, the stock market in the short term is a voting machine and in the long term it is a weighing machine. And I think that, you know, when you look at stocks that have name brand recognition. then you're going to get a lot of voting in the early going. And then it's a question of whether you can keep that up. So it turns into weighing. Right. 39 million in quarterly revenue. So they're at 150, 160 million dollars a year. And their valuation right now.

I don't have the market cap here, but what did it peak out at? Three or four billion or something? Oh, no. When it went and peaked, it peaked above 20 bill. Yeah. The market cap. Yes. Went to like 170 bucks or 200 bucks. 240 bucks. 245 bucks yesterday. Yeah. Or two days ago. You know.

something weird going on there okay uh all right well the uh all in and um daily wire merger and ipo coming soon the ticker symbol is all daily in wire all in daily in wire the merger is complete and we'll see you all next time love you You're the bee. We need to get merges our back.