all right everybody welcome back to the number one podcast in the world the all-in podcast and uh you can subscribe to us on youtube apple podcast yada yada you know the drill we're gonna go to miami for an epic f1 weekend All In podcast live on stage Saturday, May 3rd. A couple special guests. Go to allin.com slash events to buy a ticket. And we're really excited today because for the first time.
In all in history, we have a comedian. We have somebody talented on the program. Ain't that the truth. You know, ain't that the truth. Real comedian, someone that knows how to make good jokes. All right. It's true. Andrew, I feel like that was a dick to me, but okay. Andrew Schultz is here. How we doing, boys? Thank you for having me. Schultz, pleasure. You're on the heater right now. You took time to come on the All In Pod. Thank you for doing that.
Of course. Your Netflix special is crushing it. Top 10 around the world. It's called Life. L-I-F-E. Pretty cool. It's about your low sperm count. Tell us that. I am the face of sperm. Which, that's kind of like... Crazy because you've got a mustache of a 70s porn star. I think I'm overcompensating. Is that what it is? I think I got to trick people with the stache. What a reality. Yeah, yeah. The balls. You're firing blanks. Dude, it's just pure old man. It's bad. Yeah, it's- This special.
is so good. Oh, thank you for watching, man. I appreciate it. We all watched it. It's hilarious. And you got... three old guys here who also have had to deal with some of these issues. Do you guys have IVF? You guys do IVF for the babies?
Chamath, you want to be honest here? Are you au natural? Did you hit the three from half court? Logo shot? What happened? My first four kids were natural. My fifth was IVF. Okay. I don't think we're surprised. There's like two billion of you guys. You know, it's easy to get the job.
You know, there was a period after the Facebook IPO, I swear to God, I would look at chicks on Instagram and get them pregnant. Oh, really? It was brutal. Are they coming to collect? Hope not. How many supplements you got, Shimon? How many NDAs? All right, Freeburg. I like this episode. Yeah, we're off to a hot start here. Freeburg, you look like you have a low sperm count, but you have a fourth kid on the way.
But apparently, what's the story? Are you au natural? This is for the first time ever. Nobody knew this. Breaking news. Freeberg, au natural with your 3.5 babies. 100%. 100%. Wow. A vegan who's shooting with a sniper rifle. I love it. I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I'll find you guys a great study about veganism and libido. Is that right? Yeah, very impressive. What does it do? Reduce the woman's? Exactly. Exactly. Oh my God. I know a place with the best roast cauliflower.
And David Sack. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kindle. By the way, can I just tell you how much I hate cauliflower? Everywhere I go, that is the dish. I had it for dinner last night. Oh, it's the main course. Yeah, it's the main course in restaurants. It's just like having a rib eye, except it's disgusting.
There's two things they offer you, portobello mushroom and roasted cauliflower. That's what Sean does every time you show up at the house. Are you an impossible meat guy? No, I don't like that stuff. It's gross. Okay. By the way, you guys want to hear a quick science corner?
You know how we talked about Yamanaka factors? There is a roaring yes. Wow. He's like, yeah, I don't care. This is nice and topical. Let me hit this real quick because I know we're never going to get to it because you guys just... bullshit around talking about politics for an hour. This is important science talk, Sheltie. Hit us, hit us.
You know how you can use Yamanaka factors. We talked about these to basically turn a cell into a stem cell, right? Of course. And that's what goes on in the lab. Andrew, you're familiar with the Yamanaka. Everybody knows about the Yamanaka factors. You've been all over it for a while. Dude, I've seen Squid Game.
Yeah, absolutely. You think I don't know about the Yamanaka factor? I can tell you. The Yamanaka factor. Everybody knows about it. You didn't visit the Yamanaka factory when you were in Kyoto? I went to the Yamanaka factor. And I swear to God, that guy showed up 15 minutes late and he stabbed himself in the stomach right there. Right there? He killed himself right there. Yeah, it's called Sudoku. Exactly. Sudoku. He did Sudoku in under a minute. Sudoku.
Okay, never mind. We'll come back to the science. Tell us, tell us. So the interesting work going on right now is you basically can take any cell from a person's body, turn it into a stem cell. and then turn that stem cell ultimately into an egg cell. So you no longer need to go harvest eggs. And so you don't need to actually go get the eggs from the woman. You can make eggs from skin cells, for example.
So in the next couple of years, there's a few little technical breakthroughs that are happening right now that will enable this, where fertility clinics may end up just taking a little bit of your skin cell. creating stem cells, creating egg cells, and that's how we're going to end up doing IVF in the future at any age. So you can make eggs at any age and you can ultimately produce offspring at any age. You don't need to actually have active healthy eggs. And this...
You like that, right? Because this is a nice workaround for the people that are trying to ban IVF because of the abortion protocol. their base because it basically light believes uh begins a conception as part of their belief right but and the idea you could take one egg cell you could take one exactly make what you do
For those people who don't know, but what you do with IVF is you try to harvest as many as you possibly can because not all of them are viable. And it's a pretty brutal process for the woman to go through. But if you could just grab something from the skin, you'd have almost unlimited eggs. When a woman is born, she has all her eggs in her body.
And as she ages, those eggs get depleted and eventually she doesn't have very good viable eggs left over. So this gets around that problem of not having viable eggs. We can be very selective about the eggs. And so there's a future here in the next couple of years. where fertility becomes a simpler, hopefully easier and more widely available service than it is today, where it's really challenging technically and you've got to go do something that's invasive.
you know, you've got to hope that there's good healthy eggs and there's a good number of eggs and so on and so forth. So really interesting science. This is awesome. This is awesome. Schultz, did they sit you down and give you like the embryos that were viable and then the grades and the gender and you pick one?
And what did you pick? We just picked the best. So this is a lot of pressure on that first one. Like all the other kids afterwards, I feel like don't have as much. Yeah. Come out of the gate strong. Have a good first quarter. 100%. It's all good. I got to ask you. Wait, you didn't say if you had the IVF. I was about to. I'm about to put it out there. I didn't have IVF. Okay. But the first time we had the first kid.
Wife says, hey, I'm ovulating. I said, put me in the game. Boom. First shot, half court, logo, pregnant. Then she says, I want to wait before I have the next one. It's a little traumatic to have a kid. And she waits six years. Then we try for a year, nothing for one year. So now I'm like, man, we waited too long. It's a lot of pressure. You talk about this in the special. It's like for women, this is anxiety producing. So she's like, you got to go get checked out.
and this is when the most humiliating day of my life occurred i don't know andy what it was like when you went but uh They found all these grifters. Can they identify grifters through the microscope? No, no, no. I walk in and the thing opens and there's three women at the counter, at the reception. And they're like, hey, Jason Calacanis, you're here to give a, you know, I'm like, yeah, I am.
And then they walk you to a room. Oh, that's the spookiest thing. They walk you to a room and then they open it up. And it's like some nightmare scenario where there's a motel eight room. And there's a couch that's about three feet wide. And there's a towel on it. And there's a towel on it. And that sofa is not clothed for a reason. No.
It needs to be cleanable. In fact, it looks very much like the hotel you're in, Schultz. I don't know what's going on with the Netflix budget. Why do you think I'm staying there? Maybe they could put you in the Four Seasons or the Peninsula. It's so brutal. So you did this, right? You had to go? The grainy television with the porn. Oh, you're lucky you got the TV. I had no porn. No, I went to the phone. I went to the phone. Yeah, I had no porn. I had nothing.
I didn't even have any service in there, which was another thing that was annoying. So what did you do? You Rolodexed it? No, Spank Bank. You have to go to Spank Bank. That's what I'm talking about. The Rolodex. You roll through all the memories. Think about the memories, man, of my wife and only my wife. Nobody else. That's what I was thinking about. All those great moments with your wife. All those great moments. Maybe there was accident.
Incidentally, one or two that got left in from when you were on the road. It's possible some like absolute. would jump into the dreams that I had with my wife. That might be possible. I would never want them to be there. No, that was the director's cut. There's nothing I could do. But yeah, it is also funny how we dramatize our experience. We got the easiest thing to do in the whole thing.
just got to go into a room and jerk off as if that's hard for us but we're like the room is destitute and brutalist and the furniture was uncomfortable speaking of a jerk-offs uh yeah Speaking of jerk-offs, Gavin Newsom's got a podcast. So I think that this is a great idea. Despite what you think about his politics, is he a plastic bag in the wind? Yes. But it is a great demonstration of like how Americans admire bravery or courage. And we don't like put.
I think that's what the Democrats kind of displayed in the last election. I don't want to get too political about this. It's more just like I responded culturally. I don't give a fuck about the tribalism in politics, but I'll just be honest with you. So having him have like Charlie Kirk right there, who's like a professional arguer that he is, whatever, you know how like some people are autistic for dinosaurs. He's that for arguing. Right. And to like sit across from him.
to even address the French laundry. I was like, okay, this is actually the right thing to do. So as easy as it is for us to sit here and go, okay, this guy just wants to be president. Like, this is a dumb thing. blah, blah, blah. It's actually what the Democrats should be doing. So I think we need to reward, I think we need to reward this behavior. We want more conversation. We want conversation with people, especially that like you may disagree with.
And like the second podcast he put out, I thought was the most impactful. There was one piece that was incredibly impactful. He's talking to some guy. I don't know who he was. Somebody I grew up in like San Francisco. He's like Mike Savage. He was talking about the taxes and like he's paying all this money in taxes in California. And what does he get from it? And then Newsom said that like, yeah, rich people are going to pay more.
But your actual functional tax rate, if you're middle class, would be more if you lived in Florida because of the other stuff you get taxed on. This is the type of information that you guys might be privy to, but the average person doesn't. They hop on an internet trend. So you're saying he's being human and addressing real issues.
Instead of like culture war issues and just talking like... I think he's going culture war. Like that's culture war. But he's actually putting out valuable information that defends the positions he may have taken in government. that the average person doesn't really know. Like the average person like me just goes, all right, I'm in New York. I'm getting clipped at 50% and 5% city tax. Like I'm getting crushed. But if I lived in Florida or Texas, I'd say 13% and it'd be a complete wash.
when there might be someone making 50 grand a year and they move from California to Texas and they lose money. And they don't know that because they're just listening to rich guys on podcasts talk about how much money they save when they move to Texas. You don't have to take a shot at this, but yeah. Okay.
It's a little personal. I moved to Texas this year. It was more of a shot at me and Freeburg, but go ahead. Okay. Chamath, your thoughts on Gavin's new podcast. What do you think? You know, there was famously a little...
dip of the toe where somebody made a a podcast i'm sorry a landing page that you were going to run for governor we had a little fun with that what do you think of gavin what do you think of his podcast i think he's an excellent politician it's clear he's starting the 2028 campaign okay I think he's done a really good job so far. I think Schultz is right. He is unwinding all of the landmines that the Democrats have stepped on.
I think he's learned what Kamala did wrong. And now he's taking this very narrow path, which is like, I'm going to basically disavow all the stuff that people don't care about. All the gender woke ideology stuff, I don't think you're going to hear him talk about. He'll try to drive a narrow wedge on these economic issues. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's going to create a really dynamic 2028 campaign if he gets momentum, by the way.
his popularity has gone up, which is insane. Which after the fires and all of the ineptitude in California, all of the corporations that have run away, all of the people that have left, the chaos in San Francisco. After all of that, he started a podcast and his popularity has gone up. It's really incredible. Coming around the horn, Friedberg. What do you think of Gavin Newsom? Look, I think the podcast was brilliant. I think when I watched it, I was hooked.
Because there are two things that I think were critical in how he runs it. Firstly, is he is showing for the first time, I think, that I have ever seen a Democrat do or a Republican. in modern politics, active listening to the other side. It seems so crazy that this is some sort of special event and special concept, but this active listening moment.
where you see a politician, it totally breaks down the walls where you immediately feel on guard or on offense against that person. Because if someone's actively listening to you...
you actually feel like you're on the same side somehow and you're trying to come to a conclusion together. And so what that does is it invites the person on the other side, in this case, the audience, the listener, to be with Gavin, part of the kind of coming together. The second thing I think he did that's really brilliant.
is so much of the modern political bimodalism where you're in one camp or the other means that everything is a one or a zero. You know, Andrew talked about this. We're all generally, I think, none of us would consider ourselves political party affiliates. We are all generally people that like to think for ourselves on a topic or an issue, and we don't care about what party is associated. But the way modern politics has evolved is you don't debate the topics, you debate the one or the zero.
because of what the party says. My party says this is the position. Therefore, I'm a one and you're a zero. And the other side says, I'm the one, you're the zero. Meaning everything has to be binary. I'm completely right, you're completely wrong. And I think what Gavin has done...
is he's shown that these are not ones and zeros. They're 80-20 or 60-40 or 55-45. And he's willing to acknowledge that. He's showing that, you know what? We might be only 45% right. And on so many topics, the Democratic Party... has ended up slightly wrong. They're 45-55. It's not that they're a zero or a one. They're slightly off on taxes. They're slightly off on social issues. And they're off just enough that they lost the election.
They're not just enough that they lost their house. Breast tax. Breast tax. Andrew, 2028, Trump's running for his third term versus Gavin Newsom. Who do you vote for? We got to run it back for a third term for Trump. No doubt. Of course. No, obviously, I believe. No, but theoretically, if it wasn't a third term, Gavin versus Trump, who would you go?
I mean, I got to see what his policies are and I got to see where America is. I think the big misunderstanding with this last election is that at least the Democrats who are still trying to vilify these figures on the right. What they don't understand is they think that this was like some populist election where like people just fell in love with Trump and they just loved it so much they would just do whatever he says. What I think is harder for them to grapple with is the self-reflection.
of a rejectionist vote. So I think people rejected the democratic proposal. A hundred percent. And they went with what the other alternative was, which was Trump. And that's a way tougher pill to swallow. You have to look back at everything you've done and go, wow, we're off. We're not listening to the people. This guy listens to the people. I mean, it seems like I'm fluffing Trump here, but like, I would say that his greatest skill is listening to what people say. And I think a lot of times.
There's this Ivy League pretentiousness in the Democratic Party where it's like, we know it's better for you. And I know you say you want these things. You don't really want that. Let us. We studied and we've talked about it in our little thought experiments in class. So we know what you need. You just shut up. It's condescending. And exactly. So I think that like when people go, ah, the food is giving me cancer. And then he.
appoints the guy who says the food is bad to run the food the american people go well that kind of seems like a good thing i like that you know it is like an acute understanding and listening to what people are saying And sometimes to his disadvantage, like he came out against that. They were putting some like tax on people who drive into Manhattan or whatever. Like, yeah.
Congestion pricing and initially people really rejected it. Right. And then, uh, so he was like, we're getting rid of congestion pricing. And like two weeks after they put that congestion pricing thing, everybody I knew with a car was like, This is the greatest thing the city is. Yeah, you can actually move, right? You can take a taxi and it's faster than taking the subway. Government overreach is good. Bureaucracy is nice. Lock it down. Yeah, you want a car, stay in the boroughs.
Exactly. You don't get a car in Manhattan. Explain this to people. It's a little bit egregious. I mean, you and I do, Jason, but everybody else shouldn't have it. Exactly. Our lives should be different. You know what I mean? Absolutely. What's the point of us having nice cars? If we can't drive them whenever we want. Yes.
Yes. And, you know, we grew up at a time on the Lower East Side. You know, you could go to Tribeca. We could go to a club limelight. You could park outside the limelight at night. You could go to Palladium. You could park on 14th Street. I park right on 14th Street. OK, I go to what used to be a church. Right. And then.
And, you know, I sniff. Can I just say something? You do a little whatever. It's four in the morning. You don't even know. Goofballs. Between your stupid mustache and your ozempic turkey neck, I am totally for turkey neck. Go to something useful. Are we going to let Chamath sit there in MacGyver's funeral outfit? Tell us that we're goofballs? I don't know. This guy's wearing a vest with a collar. He looks like he's going to a Punjabi wake. I can't believe that he would even talk shit.
about the way that you're dressed and how you look. This is custom Laura Piano, boys. This is Laura Piano, really? Why does it look like you got it at Zara? All right, listen. More importantly, let's stay on track. Yes, yes, we gotta stay on track. Can I tell you guys something about tariffs from a layman? Yeah, please. You guys are acutely aware of maybe how these things affect markets and yada, yada, yada. And most people don't have any fucking clue. So the average person, right?
I look at this and I'm like, man, it kind of sucks that you got to negotiate your bid for a car that you're going to buy publicly, right? So this is my assumption. And maybe I'm a little bit more optimistic than most about the administration. But if I go to buy a car and the car is listed at 100K and I go offer the guy 80, right? I don't want everybody around me yelling out loud, how can you insult him by offering him 80? This is an insult. And then I...
I can't go to them and I go, I'm actually trying to settle at 90. I'm just saying 80. So he comes down a little bit. But the unfortunate thing when you litigate these things in front of the entire world.
is that they look at that first measure, this 200% tax, and Trump can't balk at it. He can't go, yo, I'm just fucking, I'm just playing around with that number. I'm actually just getting them to come down 20% or 10%. Getting them to come down anything is a win. He can't say that because he loses all his leverage.
So he's got to sit here and then get criticized by, I don't know if it's half the country. I don't know who really ends up caring about what these tariffs do. Obviously, there are repercussions in the market. I got a buddy of mine building a hotel out in Joshua Tree, and he's like, I don't even know if I can get shit.
brought into the country from Canada. So it does affect people in real time. But it's impossible to do these negotiations with any leverage if you have the people within your own country questioning your ability to negotiate in real time. That is what the layman would think.
Well, I do think you're right in the sense that in the early days, when Trump was talking about tariffs, initially, everyone was like, oh, my God, he's going to use tariffs. He's unpredictable. And then the narrative became he's using it as a negotiating tactic.
The problem is, just like in poker, once everyone knows that there's this kind of action, it's exploitable. And so this is now kind of an exploitable mode of negotiation where everyone now assumes he's just trying to negotiate so no one actually takes him seriously. The question now is the response going to be that he's going to be serious about it, or is he actually exploitable? And you saw what China's response was. I kind of view China as like AI.
Like stuff goes into China, the AI processes it and it comes back out. China is like obviously the way they're kind of structured. You have very little psychosocial bias like you do with other democratic governments. It's very systematic. It's systematically processed. Every piece of data. is systematically processed every action is systematically processed
And so I think when you look at how the Chinese ambassador responded to Trump on Twitter a few weeks ago, where they're like, you want war? We'll give you war. This is a hot war, a cold war, whatever you want. We've never seen that from an ambassador to the United States president before.
done on Twitter like this, let alone the Chinese ambassador. So I think it says a lot about how the Chinese AI is processing the Trump negotiating tactic or the Trump positioning statements on tariffs, which indicates that there may be now
I mean, we can talk about what game theory optimal play might be in this kind of poker game, what's going to come next. But there's a real assessment that they've made on how far he is willing to take it. They've got a conclusive statement and they believe that this is the fastest way to kind of win their negotiating position.
But it says a lot about where this is all going. Everyone now understands or views this as an exploitable moment, which unfortunately means that tariffs may not work or they're actually going to have to stick, which can be really ugly. Yeah, it could be painful. Could be painful. forever your thoughts on uh the tariffs and andrew's what is the i think it's it's like 120 some odd years nick maybe you can find this tweet that i had but almost the majority of years as a nation
or close to a majority of the years as a nation, we had no income tax. And the way that we would fund the programs that we needed was not from insiders, but from outsiders. And that's where the tariff was born, right? It's people domestically in America don't pay any taxes on the things that they do. And instead, if you'd like to sell into the United States, you pay a reasonable tax. So this is how many years? So it's 126 years.
from 1776 to 1861. Then we paused it for a few years because of the Civil War. We restarted again in 1872. And you notice when it stopped. When it stopped was right around World War I where this entire war machine broke out and we've never looked back. So I don't know. I think that one way to think about this is we're probably going to go back and explore.
Isn't it better if we have this incredibly vibrant and rich country of 330 million people with a ton of purchasing power? What happens if we put the burden not on them? to fund the American infrastructure and social programs and safety net. But if we put the burden on all the companies in the other 7.7 billion people in the world in the 185 plus countries that want access to these folks.
Should there be exceptions? Probably. Should there be waivers in very specific and narrow cases? Absolutely. But I think that that's where these guys are going. And I think that you heard this, by the way, yesterday from Howard Lutnick. I don't know if you guys saw this. But he said the Trump tax plan is going to cut federal income taxes to zero for anybody making 150K or less. I saw that. It's crazy. What would the vulnerability in that be? Like putting the burden on.
all of these expenses that we would incur on other countries? What would that vulnerability for us be? There are two. The first is that- If we keep the expenses. That's- That's the key. We keep the tariffs. If we charge them to come into the market, we charge them an extra 25%. We talked about this last week. If you cut the budget, then it can be net neutral. That's part of what they said. Got it. But he's saying, what is the strategic vulnerability? I think the strategic vulnerability is two.
The thing with tariffs is, and you're pointing out this, let's just say today you say there's a tariff and then tomorrow you say, oh, we found an agreement and we're going to take it off the table. piece of logic would say, wow, that's great. We're able to change our mind on a dime. The problem for countries and companies is that they can't think in 24-hour blocks of time, right? They're making decisions in five and 10-year blocks of time. It's like...
I'm going to go and borrow a billion dollars. I'm going to go and build a data center. I'm going to borrow $10 billion. I'm going to build tanks. Once you start that, you can't just stop it and then restart it. So that's one strategic problem, which is that if you are not careful, some of these markets that are really crucial, I'll give you one which we talked about last week. Right now, 95% of all of the energy we generate in America is from renewables.
Whether you like it or not, that's just what it is. The reason why that's possible is because America has a very sophisticated market where all these people come from all corners of the world. insurance companies, life insurance companies, banks, and they fund all of it. And the reason is they can take a tax credit, they can lower their effective tax rate, they get a higher rate of return. It's all super complicated. But the point is, these incentives exist. If all of a sudden...
you play around with that market, half that energy would go away, electricity prices would rise, inflation goes up. And then if we have to go and compete against China for AI and a bunch of other stuff. Where is the energy going to come from? You're going to brown out people. You're going to just turn their energy off so that you can fund a data center so that the TikTok algorithm is better. That's literally what we would have to decide. So that's one way. And then the second way is...
If you're providing a critical service or a good to American people for which there is no alternative, that becomes really problematic because that person can then pull that product and say, I can't afford to make it. The obvious example is if you make pharmaceutical drugs for rare diseases, what do you do? And again, those are all things that are like multi-decade long decisions. Yeah.
You'd love to make them and unchange them at every 24 hours, but it's just not possible because you just make these decisions and you're stuck with them for a long time. That's where the tariff thing becomes problematic if you change them often enough. If you implement them and you're like, this is what it's going to be.
the world can adapt and people can figure it out. I mean, the other problem is just the communication of this has been terrible. We were on the program last week or two weeks ago, Joe Lonsdale's like, this is about fentanyl. So is it about fentanyl? Is it about getting rid of income tax at the federal level? Is it about supply chain resiliency? These guys get like a D in my grade book for communication. It's terrible communication. And this idea that you can't take
Trump too seriously about his claims, like, well, he said he was going to overturn Roe v. Wade. He did it. He said he was going to close the border and send people home. He did that. You know, he said he'd do a Muslim ban. He actually did that. So for every time he says something and you're like, that's cap, no way he's going to do that. I actually think people are starting to realize he's going to do something here with these tariffs. They're not just a negotiating position.
And the other problem I think a lot of people have with this is it centralizes power. Anybody can go to Trump now and say, I want an exception. I'm a car company. I want an exception. a solar company i you know i need an exemption and then now you've got everybody going to mar-a-lago to kiss the ring to give him a donation to bow down
And it centralizes more power with them as opposed to having rules. Yes. And we need to have rules in this country that apply to everybody, not just people who give a million dollars like Bezos and Tim Cook and everybody and Zuck, the weather vane. gave him we don't want to live in that world where you're just bribing trump to get your tariff and that's how people feel that's how the business community feels that's the reality right now people are bribing trump
giving him a million dollars to the inauguration to get close to him, to go to Mar-a-Lago, and it looks really bad. You need to have a clear strategy here for what the rules of the game are, and he's changing the rules, so you have to go to him, and he loves that. That's actually, I think what he's trying to do is get everybody to go through him. It's a really clever hack, I think. Yeah. And perception is reality. So you have to react to people's perception.
Like we can throw data points all we want at people and we can throw research and all this other shit. But if people aren't meeting you there, then you're not going to be communicating with them effectively. And I think it. That's something that especially you guys need to know. You guys have proven the information that the average American probably is not. And we can bitch and complain about how they don't read or how they're not looking up.
you know, what happened in 1913 to change the course of American history and how we started to, or we can go, okay, we need to find a way to disseminate this information so that they can make these decisions. And I guess, or feel comfortable with the results of these decisions. Do you think America would be okay with this idea of taxing outsiders and then relying on it versus income tax paid by its own citizens?
I think that the second half is really all that would matter. I think the majority of people are thinking about the next week. So if you say that, I don't have to pay taxes. And I think this is what Republicans are doing way better than Democrats right now.
Democrats don't have build the wall. They don't have slogans. They don't have things that immediately tap into like core emotional feeling, regardless if you're going to do it or not. We want Greenland. OK, that's cool. Democrats need eggs or a dollar. Democrats need things that like echo.
their sentiments and how they want to like take care of people and provide for the disenfranchise. But it has to be done in a way where it's digestible. You can chew on it. If you want to make housing more affordable, then you say, yeah, we're seizing public land. We're building 10,000 units. You have to tap into what Americans need, which is a feeling of not just comfort. Every American thinks they're going to be a millionaire. That's what this country...
drives off of, right? It's every poor American. That hope, that hope, yeah. And the second they stop thinking they will be, or they can be, it falls apart. And then some healthcare CEO gets shot and people celebrate. they're, they're celebrating because they no longer feel the hope that they could be in that position. Yeah. They feel so disenfranchised. And this is what, like, I'm telling you, like the, you guys are the world.
need to pay close attention to because there's going to be no empathy if anything bad happens. Oh, the stock market is down. No Americans are invested in the stock market. Like that's all you guys. I've been saying it. No, no, no. I've been saying this for months. I've been saying it for months. Nobody cares about the stock market, nor should we. And the reason is because we, people who own these assets.
have overly benefited more than we've deserved for the last 15 years. Ever since the great financial crisis in the United States, people who, as Jason said, could cozy up, and by the way, Jason, I think the- The claim that you made, which is severely true for how from 2007 up until now, has played out. Because if you look under all the programs...
If you could have lobbied Obama in those critical years of the GFC, oh my God, the amount of money that was- No, because we took interest rates literally to zero. Anybody like us who could have gone and gotten levered up and gone into the stock market was richly rewarded. And the problem is we left everybody else behind. And I think the great thing about Trump...
is he is going to reset that. He is going to take a lot of wealth away from asset holders. You're seeing it every day, 500 billion, 500 billion. There is no sympathy. I think it's fantastic. That's great to hear you even saying that because I feel like a lot of people that are in maybe your guys' position don't understand that disconnect. And that is important to understand.
Even what happened in the Palisades, like in LA with like the fire, the second people heard it was like rich people's houses, there was no empathy for it. They didn't. $4 million house. Yeah. It was like, I don't even have a house. I can't find a house.
You burned your house down and you went to your vacation house. Now, oh, I'm sorry, you're living at your ski house? That's a tragedy. Like, literally, you're right. It probably explains why we don't hear anything in the news anymore about anything that's happening with respect to reconstruction or...
Any of the disruption that's happening, it's a rich person problem. It's a rich person problem. And, you know, I think putting together what you just said, Schultz, and you, Chamath, Trump is a master at connecting with people and listening to them. I thought one of the greatest things he...
he he did during this last election is when he said no tax on tips when he said no tax on tips he was going right for nevada he was going right for that swing state you know to get those folks who live off tips but what he was also doing is saying I know that there's a bunch of y'all that sometimes get cash tips. You put it in your pocket. It's the gray market. I get it. I got caddies who get a Hyundai from whatever, taking somebody out on the course.
We're just going to make it official. You don't get taxed on tips because we know that you're the bottom third of the country in terms of your economic power. Those kind of statements really do connect with people. Trump has just mastered this. This party is.
Trump is the Democratic Party that we grew up with. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy, right? And then the Democrats became this elitist group that seemed to be in the pocket of business interests. I don't know what bizarro world we're living in. I think you tapped into it right there. It's like... I think that they could easily win the next election if they made it a class war, but they don't because it feels like they're in the pockets of...
these billion dollar corporations. So they can't really, I mean, Bernie did it really effectively, right? Like this random Jew that lives in Maine or something like that is like, yo, we got to get some money from these rich people, give it back to the poor. And all of a sudden, all of America.
turned him into like our surrogate grandfather. So you can, and then he got shivved by Hillary and the machine. And, and I mean, what did they say about his fans like they went very specifically they're like he has a his the bernie bros have a sexism and bigotry problem right they made him radioactive
Right. So now you killed the working class. Now the working class is no longer supporting the Democratic Party. So who do they have left? They have the identity politics groups. So they can't piss off the identity politics groups because they're like, that's all we got left. They did the same shit with us during the election, right? They're like, the podcast bros have a sexism and bigotry problem. They try to make people radioactive and it's like...
That card's been played so many times that people are desensitized. It don't work anymore. I think there's one big shoe left to drop. I think we've started the process of really, really taking a bunch of heat out of the asset markets like equities. So we've taken trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth away.
I think we're going to take trillions more. But the next big market, and this is actually where, Andrew, to your point, we reestablish some hope, I think for a lot of people, is we are going to whack the housing market. It's just going to happen.
Let me just say something about that. How is that going to happen, Chamath? Explain it. Because there are 7 million homes that we still need to build to service just current demand. How does that actually happen with the supply-demand problem in your mind? There are a bunch of mechanisms. that have to get cleaned up right now. So one mechanism is that there are a whole host of mortgages that are basically being propped up.
It was a program that really got out of control under the Biden administration. Nick, you can find this article. It was in the Wall Street Journal. We are going to figure out how to get these two. government-related agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, out of what's called conservatorship. And these are the folks that are responsible for essentially wrapping guarantees around mortgages so that the mortgage market can function.
The details don't particularly matter that much, but the point is that what we are doing is we are unwittingly propping up with American taxpayer dollars, the US housing market. Why is that bad? It is locking an inordinate number of people from that first critical step that actually makes them feel like they are winning and they're on their way to achieving their dreams, which is.
Can I make a deposit on a home and then can I live this out? And you have these artificially inflated prices all around the country as a result of this. So I think this next wave is deeply beneficial to the middle class. which is there is no reason like you guys see it when you read the wall street journal i think it is the dumbest in the world when i see an article which is like this house just is 65 million dollars
On 0.4 acres in some rando place in Miami. I was thinking Malibu, but yeah. But what is this? This makes no sense. And so when you re-rationalize a bunch of equity values. and you re-rationalize the cost of a home, I think what you're going to do is you're going to allow a lot more people to find a more reasonable way to enter the housing market. And I do think that that's a really big step in allowing them to feel like they're part of the dream.
You lower asset prices. You can own some stocks. Maybe you own a 401k. Or if you've never had a 401k, but your employer offers it for the first time, it may actually make financial sense to put a small amount of it in there. You've never been able to own a home.
all of a sudden home prices are whacked 30 or 40%, you're able to do that. Because of how Trump goes after the budget, when his rate of borrowing for the US government goes down, your mortgage rate goes down. Now all of a sudden you can enter in because home prices are less.
and you can actually get a mortgage. They may all seem very random, but they can come together in giving 50, 60 million people a shot that they have been screaming since the great financial crisis they don't have. This is so huge because... On like a core emotional level, you want as many Americans as possible invested in American success and excellence. Totally. And the greater the delta between like them and their first home or their first investment in stock.
the greater that distance the more disillusioned they become in america in general when they feel like like you said earlier like the way that you guys got into the market when you could basically take out loans for nothing and then you saw these incredible gains they feel left behind The second they feel like they're in on it, they own an apartment. They own some shares of Tesla. That's why crypto is so popular. It feels like it's their only access. Yeah, it's like...
Yeah, it's like comedy in some ways. Like all I need is a microphone or music. Like there is a path for me. And crypto obviously is a giant fucking scam. It's a scam, sure. But I can get a piece of this. I can get a piece of this American dream. And I would rather that they were invested in a Vanguard account or something like that. I would rather they're invested in the entire market. I mean, there's this idea, and I'm sure you poke holes and tons of holes into it.
But this idea like every American born gets a thousand bucks put into a Vanguard account. Yeah, it's a friend of ours, Brad Gersten, with this Invest America is the concept. And regardless if the concept is good or not, the emotional connectivity to the success of American industry.
is really important. When you know at 22 that you could get this thing that's been compounding for 22 years, you could pay off some college loans, you could put something down on a house, you could pay for trade school, whatever it is.
I think you have a different energy towards America and its success. And then you have a lot less of these kids who are just like, America's this horrible place and capitalism is bad. Yeah, capitalism is bad when you're left behind. When you're invested in capitalism, it's great. Baby. Absolutely. We're on the express train. Let me give you guys, I did an analysis. I wasn't sure if I should put it out, but I'll tell you guys the numbers.
The U.S. Social Security program is meant to be kind of the retirement program for folks that don't have access to private retirement accounts, okay? And this program was set up... in the 1930s after the Great Depression. And there's a trust fund, the OASDI, which is the fund that they invest the capital. So every year we all put money in with our social security taxes out of our paychecks, goes in there.
and it gets invested. You know what it gets invested in? It gets invested in one thing, U.S. treasuries, which have averaged about 4.8% return. since the beginning of the program per year. Meanwhile- What if you put it into the market? Meanwhile, the S&P has been averaging 11%. So here's the math. If in 1971, which was the year that we went off the gold standard in the United States-
If we invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the S&P, the balance of the Social Security Trust Fund today would be $15 trillion. That would be roughly one-third of the value of the total S&P 500. which would be jointly owned by all Americans who took their capital. Now, here's what's up. What's up is that the middle class people who had access to private retirement accounts benefited by buying the S&P 500 and the wealthy were able to access it.
So all of the equity value that accrued from American enterprise and the prosperity of the American system accrued to the people that had access to the private accounts. Meanwhile, the people that only had access to the public accounts got stuck owning treasuries. The Social Security Trust Fund has $2.7 trillion balance. And based on the outflows and inflows, it's going to go bankrupt in 2032. That means Social Security is either going to get cut.
or the Fed's going to print a ton of money to keep social security benefits. Retirement age goes up a little bit. Yeah, it's a lot of levers. Yeah. Wow. So I did the math. If you assume that the S&P 500 continues to grow at 10.5% a year.
On average, there's ups and downs. And sure, there could be basically drawdowns and all these other sorts of things. But here's an important point. We could put about $500 billion in the trust fund today, and it will not go bankrupt again. And it will continue to grow every year. And then...
All Americans have participation in American enterprise. And importantly, this becomes the world's largest sovereign wealth fund ever. You don't need a separate sovereign wealth fund. We already have one. We have it. It's called the Social Security Trust Fund.
is we've totally mismanaged it. And I went back to try and understand why this is the case. Why have we only ever bought treasuries? Early on, the U.S. needed someone to loan money. So they basically forced the citizens to loan the government money in the form of treasuries. But today...
The Social Security Trust Fund owns only less than 10%, about 8% of the total treasury bonds outstanding. The rest are owned by the Fed and foreign investors and private investors and others that want to own it. So why are we forcing all the American citizens to participate? Yeah, we're propping it up for no reason. And we're discouraging access. So basically, we've created, through the social security system, we've created the deep inequity we see in this country.
If instead we had allowed the social security system to invest in the S&P 500, to buy American enterprises, to fund American businesses, then every American would be wealthy. and that middle class that uniquely participated by basically arbitraging the market, where they forced the treasury bond yields on the poor, and they got to take access to the equity yields.
would have not happened. Yeah, they had 401ks, right? They had 401ks, they brought the IRAs, and they were able to participate with brokerage accounts and buying in the market. But what we can do right now is we can fix it. And here's the important point. People will then argue, oh, well, what if there's a down year or two down years in a row?
You know what? We're already going to be printing money to make up the hole in Social Security. We're not going to let Social Security go bankrupt. We're not going to let it dry out. So we're already going to print money to make the Social Security hole. So if that's the case, we can create a backstop for Social Security. We're going to have to do it either way, but we might as well take on the bank. No, no, no, Thomas, you were going to say something.
The reason why we didn't do it goes back to what you said before, which is we have a bunch of, we had a bunch of very, quote unquote, well-educated Ivy League trained people running these institutions and the feedback. I don't even know what it said, but I can tell you what the memo said. There's too much risk. We've sensitized this model. It doesn't make sense. This is the safest thing to do. So it goes back to just like we need a little bit more practical thinking.
Like at the end of the day, why the S&P 500 exists is of all the thousands and thousands and thousands of companies in the world, you know how many companies in the world make more than a billion dollars a year? More than 20,000. And of that 20,000, the S&P 500 is just the 500 best. It's the best of the best of the best. So to your point, Freeberg, it didn't take a PhD from Harvard to figure out that if you just owned an index.
Of the absolute 500 best things happening at any given point in time, it would have gone up. Also, since when are Americans risk intolerant? Like there's something baked into the DNA. of the people that decide to leave their families and move here. Totally. Immigrant country. And to your point, imagine logging in, like we've all had, I'm assuming a 401k account, and I remember how exciting it is to log in.
and see the account. And Schultz, I want to say something that's really important. Like you talk about us people, like, you know, early on the commentary, which is something I hear a lot. My first job was making $4.25 an hour cleaning toilets in a pool hall in upstate New York, Chamath.
has similar stories. JCal has similar stories. Like any of us that participated- I made 455 Canadian working at Burger King. Yeah. And I had like, and then the worst part about my job in the pool hall was that then the manager made me go play poker at his house. And he took all the money back. I stole the chicken fingers at night and bring them home. My mom would whip them up. But it was so exciting in my career, in my life to be able to like go from that moment.
to the moment where I had a 401k and I could log in and I could see the businesses that I owned. And I understood that. And I saw the value go up and I got to participate that. Imagine if every American, when you get your social security statement today, all it tells you is a dollar amount and how much you're going to get in the future.
Imagine if you logged in and you got to see all the businesses you own a piece of. Every single day. You feel connected. Every single day. You would be lighting a Tesla on fire. And we can fix this. And by the way, we can solve both the sovereign wealth fund question and the social security trust fund question every dollar.
that's going into the sovereign wealth fund ideas, or if they come to fruition, or in my opinion, and obviously I haven't spoken about this, but the crypto fund and all this other sort of stuff, every dollar that should go into the social security trust fund. And that social security trust fund should be for the benefit of all Americans. And it should be equities. It should be ownership. It should be participation in what the American dream enabled us all to succeed.
And it should enable everyone else to participate in shares and equity in American enterprise that can come to market. It's not about a thousand bucks when you're born. It's about an ongoing participation, putting your money in and having that money allocated in a way that smart and wealthy Americans get to allocate it, which is into owning shares and businesses. That's it. Chelsea, go.
No, I think it's great. And hopefully you guys don't feel like I'm like discrediting you by saying you guys, but I'm just trying to give you guys. It's an important framing because it's like. You're 100% right, but we see comments on YouTube like, oh, you guys, and I'm like, dude, I remember, it feels like yesterday.
When I was in frigging debt, I graduated college with a bunch of debt, and I went and found a job and worked my ass off, and I was working 20-hour days and never slept. It wasn't easy. I mean, I feel very emotional about this right now. Sorry, hang on. It was hard. It wasn't easy, bro. It wasn't given to you. None of us inherited it. We came to America and to see the joy.
to see what we all benefited from. I'm getting emotional about this, but it's like- Well, it's because the American dream's broken. Listen, we gotta fix it, Andy. Fix it for us right now. To have people talk about it as if being successful and getting there.
is a crime. It makes you a bad person. No, it's a dream. It's a dream. Schultzy, go. I think the framing, this is very important. My mom is also an immigrant. She came here from Scotland. She has no education. They stopped going to school at 14 or something like that.
comes to America and she's this massive success here in terms of like where she came from, where she got to, right? And what she was able to buy. She was able to buy a home in the East Village of New York City. She was able to buy a beach house, like just off of like grinding hard work. And what she saw here, which I'm sure a lot of you guys also saw, is opportunity. She had ambition and opportunity. And I think that that's what I think a lot of times that's what immigrants.
see when they come here because they probably come from places where they feel absolutely no opportunity. So the second they feel like there's a little of it, if they work those 20 hours a week, I mean, I saw my parents grind. My work ethic just comes from watching them.
You know what I mean? Just watching them just kill it every single day. So what I think that you guys are speaking to, which is really important. And I think it's important that people know your story as well, because it becomes more accessible when they see you guys and they know what you came from and they know you're working.
Burger King and now you guys are worth billions of dollars. It's very important that Americans know that that's possible for them. Maybe not to hit a billion, but maybe to hit a million, maybe hit 300,000, maybe to buy a house that's a hundred thousand dollars that they're really. And own it outright. And the fact that this is accessible, like what you just said to me is just hope and abundance. Like that's the messaging of what you just said.
You said something that made it seem very simple to me. We put this money here. Everybody's now invested in the success of the American economy. And now when we see the stock market ticker look green, which is all the average person sees, green or red, we don't really know anything.
But when we see green, we get excited. We go, wait, wait. Yeah. And now we start. Number goes up. And we start rooting. Kamau feels that way too. Yeah. He's getting excited right now if you're saying it. He's going to start crying. Oh, wait, it's green today? Yeah.
It's been ruined for a week. But think about like CEOs, right? Like these people have become villainized, right? And it's because we are not attached to the success of their companies. That's right. If your biggest holding is Tesla, please believe. You're not upset. I think people think that their success now works against your best interests. Yes. And the system's rigged and the system's rigged and you can't be part of it and you're being ground down.
This is, I think, a really good proposal, Friedberg. And if you look at housing, that's the other one. If I run for president, you know what my position is going to be, Schultz? What's that? I'm going to build five cities with three million homes in each.
And you can only buy them if you make under X amount per year. It's not going to be like the projects or like, you know, subsidized housing in New York. It'll be Stuyvesant Town. It's not going to be Stuyvesant Town, okay? It's going to be like nice housing. It's pretty good if you can get it, yeah. State Town's not bad, but not like projects. I'm talking about like proper homes. We are the most innovative country.
society ever created i mean since the greeks they were pretty great too but we could build five new cities why the can't we build five new cities with three million homes in it let's do some like manhattan project for housing and then health care how the hell do we
not have like good healthcare for everybody in this country with the richest country in the world, greatest economy, whatever, we should be able to solve those problems. And that's why people don't feel like they're part of this is because basic housing, basic healthcare. end your retirement it's not like it's rigged against you this sounds crazy but for young people i think they would forgive health care if they were invested in the market
And I think that being invested in the market is just so daunting. But the feeling that everybody else is getting rich when you're not is the reason why I bought crypto not knowing anything about it. It's the reason why everybody else bought it. It's this feeling that the train is running away and you're not going to be part of it. So how do we get them to feel part of that success? I think really importantly, you know, today, just to give you guys some other statistics.
60% of a middle-class household's net worth is in their home. Only 10% of their net worth is in owning the S&P 500 in index funds or whatever in their retirement accounts. And so by creating this American dream around housing and allowing the federal government to provide loans on housing, we've increased the cost of housing. We've created a very destructive housing bubble in the sense that it has reduced people's exposure.
to participation in productive value creation. And that's through the ownership of businesses. Instead, we've stored our net worth in a house. And in order to keep the economy and the social structure stable, we've created policies that allow the continuation of the growth in the value of houses so people feel like their net worth is incrementing. You're 100% right. And that's unfortunately very unnatural. They restricted making new housing, which makes it worse with the restrictions.
Have you guys heard of Warren Buffett's most public failure? No. Warren Buffett's most public failure was when he was brought on as an advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger when Schwarzenegger was running for governor. And Buffett... kind of looked at the laws in California. And there's a law in California when you own a home that when you pass on, you can pass it off to your kids and you can basically keep the cost that you paid.
in terms of setting the real estate taxes. And it's had an enormously negative effect in unlocking turnover of homes. And that's a large driver of why homes are so expensive in California. So Buffett looked at this. And there was a lot of fanfare. Schwarzenegger's like, here's my economic genius. And first thing he said was, guys, I think we should repeal this law. He was gone two days later. Wow. He's not popular. And by the way, there's a lot of other policies like this.
Two days later, you have to resign. If you do the true macro analysis as an investor, you should probably have about 20% of your net worth in the US in real estate, not 60%. And so we need to give people the ability and we need to think about all the follow on and trickle effects of creating a set of laws, a set of policies.
that basically incentivize almost all of your net worth to go into a single asset, your home. And what that then means in the fact that we have to keep pumping up the value of that home, and we have to have a system in order for people to feel like they're getting ahead, keep inflating, and eventually people can't afford homes. And that's where we are today.
When did you guys first start your education in the markets? At what age did you feel like you sought out? I bought my first stock in the company I was working for. Oh, the parent company, the company I was working for in 1989 when I was 18 years old. So 18. What about you, David? I bought $300 in stock.
I signed up for an E-Trade account in college because I saw that TV show called Bull. Do you remember that TV show? It was about investment banking during the dot-com bubble. It was such a, no one knows that show.
And I was like, man, Wall Street is so cool. I want to learn about stocks because I was an astrophysics major. I didn't know what I was going to do after I was going to go to graduate school or whatever. And then I got caught up in the dot-com bubble and I started reading the Wall Street Journal every day. I would take it down to the...
frigging Plaza and I would read the journal at school during lunch. And I tried to learn about tech and business and markets because I've always been a tech guy. And I'm like, man, there's all these startups and this is how the markets work. So I set up an E-Trade account. I put some money in it and I started and I bought some stocks and I read the Investor Business Daily on what stocks to buy. They had a rating.
And I bought those stocks and they went up and I'm like, man, this is awesome. Like, I love owning stocks. And that kind of kicked me off. And then I got an investment banking job after college and it totally changed my career trajectory. I was like, I want to go work in the tech industry and work in business. What about you, Chamath? And it shifted it up. When did you buy your first?
But by the way, sorry, let me just say one thing. What you asked is a really important question. I just realized this, Andrew, because my interest in that stock market thing at that time. actually changed my career trajectory. And it really reset what I was going to do with my life to get involved in business and go work in the tech industry as opposed to work in science as a researcher.
And that was a really big shift for me. So it gave me that kind of a feeling of like, oh, I got to learn more. And then that kind of changed my career. Sorry, go ahead, Shema. I was 14 or 15 years old. And there was a, this is when Rodney King had the show. kicked out of him and almost died for all these race riots in LA. And nothing had changed actually in America, but where I was growing up in Canada.
The provincial government created a program that said, if you're a minority and you're on welfare, we'll pay for you to get a job. I was a minority on welfare. So I got a job. And it was at a startup that was just going parabolic. And their stock was going nuclear. And I lived in this shitty part of town. And I would see the controller of that company drive past me every day.
while I was waiting for the bus. And one day he stopped. And I went with this guy, Sam Legg. He drove me that whole summer. And he taught me, what does the company do? Why is the founder a billionaire? What the hell does this even mean? He unpacked. And so I saw firsthand what it meant to work not for a salary, but to get a stake in the thing that you're working for. I bought a couple of shares. It went up.
And it was great. But then I really fell in love with this idea that I could understand something and own a piece of it. And then it really accelerated when I graduated from college because I was like Freeburg, I was in debt. And I was like, how the do I get out of debt? And I traded stocks on behalf of my boss, this guy, Mike Fisher, who I thank to this day. And I made so much money right before the dot-com crash. He gave me the money to pay off my student loans.
Wow. And then ever since then, I was hooked. I was like, okay, I can learn this and I can deal with the vicissitudes of this. Look, the markets are brutal. There are moments where you just wake up and it looks like everything's working. And then there are moments and this is what...
Everybody needs to understand, though, if some of these programs work, where it literally looks like the bottom is falling out. And I cannot describe to people the pressure you will feel on behalf of you and your family when it looks like you're taking a... 30 or 40 or 50% negative downturn to your net worth. Yeah. It inflicts a level of psychological damage that I cannot describe to you. And the bigger the numbers get.
By the way, I told this story on Tucker. There was a period where I would wake up and I could just tweet and the markets would go up. They were like, what's he going to say next? And then it all stopped. And then there was a two and a half year period where I gave it all back and then some.
That's frustrating. The Midas touch goes away. It's beyond frustrating. It shakes you to your core. So if we do these programs, I think the Friedberg idea is just beautiful. It's lovely. What about you, Schultz? When did you make it? But just to finish, if we do it, we have to try to teach people how to deal with the drawdowns because that's where if you don't teach them how to deal with the vol, the volatility of losing money, it's great when everything's green.
But those red days, man, how you comport yourself, how you act, how you treat other people in the red days are the only days that matter. Yeah, it's a growing experience. What about you, Schultz? When did you buy your first equity? I was probably... 35. Think about it. How old are you? I'm 41.
So maybe even a little bit later. Now, I might have like owned stock without even realizing it type of thing where like I had like a business manager who set up some retirement fund or something like that, but not me actively choosing a stock and buying it. My wife's father-in-law is a very successful businessman, and he's... I don't want to say predicted the markets really well, but he has. He was in NVIDIA super early, early, early, early, and a bunch of others.
We were like sitting down in like Aspen somewhere. And he like said, Hey, listen, what do you mean? You don't own anything. He goes, Hey, can you take a, you know. I don't know if we said 10 grand or a hundred grand or something like that. He goes, can you just put it in these different stocks? I go, okay, sure. I open up this like E-Trade account or whatever the fuck it was. But an interesting thing right there is like, you guys were so young. It was 18, 22, 14.
To me, I think like the education of this is really important. Like my parents did really well, but they're financially illiterate. Like there was no passing on this like knowledge of like investing when, what it means to invest.
They made their money by like working every single day for it. Not like you guys don't, but like they were teaching dance lessons. So it's like, this is how much the dance lesson costs and you pay me and maybe I'll have 40 people in the class. Okay. More people are paying. And now other teachers can also teach, but.
it was intimidating to them it was intended intimidating to me it still is intimidating to me well this is the i think the upside of crypto in some ways also the upside of prize picks or you know gambling poker It's the upside of Robinhood and Coinbase and all these things being available. This generation, Generation Bet, like they love to gamble these young kids. This is my concern. No, but they're learning. They're learning how to take the downdrafts. I think that's my position.
learning so maybe like the barrier of entry is less but my concern is that they're treating it more like gambling than investing and i think that we've almost like tricked the american public into thinking that investing is gambling When the way that you guys are describing is it's not. It's like investing in the S&P and then leaving it there and taking those downturns and waiting for it to come back up.
Yeah, but here's the thing. You have to learn these lessons at the poker table. You cannot play poker without real money or else you're not going to get the burn. You're not going to stay up at night. So that's what these kids are doing. How do we educate them? It's not every kid, right? The education comes from doing. And if you let these kids trade, they will figure it out over time. And then what happens is, like you,
they get married, they get a baby, they want to get a house, and then they say, you know what, I'm going to stop buying meme coins, I'm going to start buying Bitcoin, I'm going to stop buying Bitcoin, I'm going to buy Nvidia and things with real revenue. I think they just get addicted to gambling. Exactly.
I agree with Schultz. I don't think that – I think you're being super reductive like, oh, they'll get on the – all of a sudden understand Dave Swenson's Yale endowment asset allocation model. Bullshit. They won't. I've seen – they won't. I have seen – thousands and thousands and thousands of guys over time who deeply steeped in this business wash out. Yeah. And each to a one, the more sophisticated they get, they all fall to the same pressures, which is-
They don't know how to simplify and they don't know how to be patient. These are things that every human being needs to learn. And I don't think time in the market. actually solves those two traits. Those are psychological traits that you have to go and figure out in a different way. You look inside yourself, and you have to figure those out. Okay, yeah, fair enough. But between the choice of
Hey, we're going to grow up blue collar. We have no access to these markets. We have no way to trade in them. We have no way to learn. And then today, I think the system we have today is better. Can people go off the, you know, jump the fence and lose all their money? Of course they can.
But they could go to Vegas and do that. Prior to that, they could work with a bookie. They could do football sheets. I think they're learning. And when you use some of these modern apps and you look at the strategies and you see people on Reddit.
working on these stocks and their thesis, I think it's trending in the right way. There can always be more education, but this is- Let's hope. Don't bet on the Jets, right? You said it before. Don't bet on the Jets. I think the average American doesn't even know what compound interest is.
I agree with you. In fact, I'll tell you a great story. One of the best things that happened when I invested in the Goals of State Warriors, I bought 10% of the team in 2011 or something. I got to meet all of them. And I got to meet a lot of my heroes. And I remember one meeting where I sat with a goatee-like player. Let's just put it that way. We'll bleep it out. We'll bleep it out. No, I don't want to say his name. Okay. Fair enough.
And he asked me the most incredible question. He's like, Chamath, can you explain compound interest? And Schultz, I can tell you, I still have this spreadsheet. I just showed him a compound interest table. And he had no idea how 8% versus 10% is like gargantuan. Over 50 years, over 20 years, yeah. And to your point, it...
was illuminating that you're right. Unless you go and you jump into it and you live it. And Jason, I agree with you. Like there's nothing like, look, Stan Druckenmiller says the same thing. Invest, then investigate. Like there's nothing like putting the risk on. There's nothing like playing a hand in poker. There's nothing like taking a shot at a different strategy in blackjack. Win or lose, you get feedback. But my point is most people don't get better. And so that's what you have to solve.
How can you make it interesting, fun? How can you talk about the losses? This is a thing that I had immense trouble with. I still do today. I think I've gotten better with it, is to be able to talk about the losses. How do you talk about getting whacked for $4 billion? I can do it now, but it's brutal. It stung for a while for you, but you know what? You're a better person since then. You saw me go through it. How ashamed was I for the two years that I had to unwind that shit?
It was hard for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I imagine your whole identity is built into you being successful in these markets. And you measure it the wrong way. You point to the number in the bank account, not the way your wife treats you. Not the way your kids treat you, not the way your friends treat you. And then you're like, okay, well, I'm 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80% poor. So I'm just that much less of a human being. Yeah. But that's a good reality check.
to lean into family and those things that matter. So my point is like, if you can, if we can get people more into the market, I think it's an incredible thing, but you have to wrap it in these guardrails that have nothing to do with the market. They have everything to do with who you are as a person. And I think like the first step is showing like, what is the most simplistic version?
of the benefit of the market. And I think it's compound interest. I really think that that is, if we start there, like remove the stock market, don't even talk about it. Just like what happens if I left it? in a savings account that's getting 4%. And I don't touch it right now. You know the rule of 72? That was the one that opened my brain up. So the rule of 72 is whatever the percentage you grow per month.
divided into 72 so let's say you were growing 7.2 percent in the market per year divide that it takes 10 years to double your money so it's a time to double your money okay if you were growing seven percent a month you know on whatever your investments are let's say you got a great business that's growing like facebook or something like that that means you double the number of users or revenue every 7.2 months once you understand that you can do it quickly
Just like in poker, you know the number of outs. Each card represents roughly 2% chance because there's 50 of them, right? So they each count for about 2%. Then you can start doing this stuff in the back of your head. I had this idea. I think I talked about it here on the program of doing the kids investment club and I bought the domain kids investment club. I actually need to do this. I've got to prioritize this and find a CEO for it.
or do it as a nonprofit or something. Just kids need to learn this early. Robinhood or somebody should make an app where they can invest like a shadow, but it's, you know, like with their parents, maybe they can make the trade, the parent approves it, something like that.
There's something where we should be learning all this in high school. They should be like, what's more important than this? Remove the fear. Remove the fear. And the reason it's important is what we were saying earlier. Get the American people invested in American success. And you will find so much more patriotism. You will not find us nitpicking on all these little things that a lot of us maybe go, why is this such a big deal?
bathroom, like most of us are unaffected. I cannot begin to explain how quickly we'll forget about the bathrooms. When the S&P is up 15% and you're looking at your portfolio and you're like, you could take a wherever you want. Okay. Absolutely. Yes. I have something else to focus on. Absolutely. Look at this. Hey, Friedberg. Here's your time machine. Check it out. There's your favorite show. I don't want to make you more emotional, but there is your guy.
Stanley Tucci from Bull, I think on TNT. I think it only made it one season, right? One season, but Tucci gang in full effect. I was such a tech nerd growing up, but I never thought about the business of technology. And then the startup boom happened. And you got this bull show on TV. And I'm like, man, this is so much more exciting than sitting in a frigging lab doing mathematical modeling where I was like pulling my frigging hair out. I'm like, I want to get after that.
And the rest is history, you know? Have you guys watched Stanley Tucci on HBO where he tours Italy and he does these little- So great. And on TikTok. I have seen it. And I've seen him cook on TikTok. He's like, today, is it rolling? It's rolling today. I'm going to make you a fruta de mer, but I'm doing it in the carpaccio base, and we're going to put... And I'm like, I just...
Can this guy do ASMR or put me to bed at night? Tucci's the best. I've got a man crush on Tucci. Tucci's the best. I would like to roll with Tucci. Can you imagine if we went to Italy and just roll with Tucci through Italy? I love that guy. Any dream is possible, J. Cal. You could pull it off. I know. We're all dreaming here. We're all dreaming here. All right. We're still dreamers, by the way. Really important. Everyone should know that. I think there's no...
The thing that a lot of people assume, this is true about humans in general, is there's an end to the rainbow, but there isn't. You ride the rainbow till you die. That's it. And there's always hope. There's always dreams. There's always more. And it doesn't stop.
That's what makes it fun. Are you taking the ketamine in Austin or something? What happened? You just got all full of... I'm a little hungover today. I started drinking at 10 a.m. yesterday. We went to the mothership last night, Andrew, and we... Well, we hung out with a couple of your boys, I think. Who'd you hang out with? Tony? Well, Tony. Of course, Tony.
Tony was very nice. Shane Gillis was there. Shane Gillis was there, but he was big time. He was big time. There was a mob around. We didn't get to meet him. The guy, Bert, who I didn't recognize. Yeah, he had his shirt on, so I didn't recognize him. You didn't know who he was. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I was like, but then I saw the body shape, and I was like, yeah, that's probably him. When did you start in comedy? I think it's almost been like 18 years or something like that.
So you started in your early 20s in New York going to the funny bone or what? I have a question actually, yeah. How'd you get into it? How do you keep your, like how do you pay for your life before you make it? Like what? Like, is it that you have a normal day job? I lived, I lived with my parents for like a very long time. Like my parents lived in these village. So I was walking distance from like multiple comedy clubs. It was, you know, I mean, I worked like with my parents for a little bit.
manage restaurants and I like just manage them. You manage restaurants in Manhattan? Yeah, I did. I started in Santa Barbara when I was going to college. That's where I did my first comedy gig. And then I managed a restaurant out in Brooklyn. Oh, really? Which one? Would I know it? It was called Biscuit Barbecue. It was in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
And then I started to make a little money in standup. And it was like enough to like buy a Moon's falafel. I like had like a five to ten. You had falafel money. I had a five to ten dollar a day budget. And I like I could eat cereal for breakfast. And then.
And I saved some money because I was going to school. When I was going to school, I was working at that restaurant. And I saved some money. And I had a little pipe dream of opening up a bar with a friend of mine in New York. And then I was like, you know what? I'm just going to spend this money.
trying to be a comedian and i hope by the time i get rid of the money i'm making money at comedy and it came down to like 700 in my bank account i was like renting out the room where i slept in and i would sleep in a closet in my apartment and uh
It just, and it worked out. It just worked out. I started making a couple of money, do a couple of gigs, start touring, got on a TV show. And then it kind of worked out. Was there a moment that where, because when you, when, you know, when the cancel culture was alive and well. That's when I first encountered you. It was initially on TikTok, actually. And you were on fire because you were saying stuff nobody else was saying. And I thought, how does he even dare to pull this shit off? And-
So was there a moment where you broke or you tipped or not? It's interesting. You kind of break and then you go away. So I broke on some MTV shows and I was doing all these things on MTV. I had my own shows and all that kind of stuff.
And then I kind of, you know, the MTV thing kind of dried up and then I kind of went away. But I was luckily doing this podcast with Charlemagne and the podcast was very popular. And that was like providing for me. And then I was doing some shows on the road and, you know, people would come out from the podcast.
But, um, and then I really couldn't get any traction in standup world. So when I was doing like comedy stuff with MTV, it wasn't really in the standup world. And that's because my standup maybe wasn't of the ilk of what was like popular at the time. And I have a lot of empathy, by the way, for the people who are just working at a network. They're producing these shows. They're kids in private school. I want to tell a crazy joke about women.
gays or whatever the it is. And they're like, I'm not trying to get fired. And like, I'm just trying to, my kids are private school. We just got them into Dalton. I don't want to rock the boat. Like, you know what I mean? You understand? Like, I don't think that they're self-preservation. Exactly.
But I didn't want to change my comedy. So I was like, okay, where can I put it out? And luckily we were putting the podcast out on YouTube and it was successful. And I just started putting things out on YouTube. I started doing these shows and these shows start selling out. It was like really weird. Like the first thing I put out, I sold out the next weekend and I was never going to sold out. How many seats? These are like 300 seat clubs and you do maybe four or five shows a weekend.
And you get 50 bucks a seat, 20 bucks a seat? No, not even. You get a flat rate. You get two grand to do the weekend or something like that. And a lot of these times the comedy clubs would just like call people and say, hey, do you want to see this guy and give away the tickets for free? It was really the old model was basically it's like a bar. So you just get the people in and they sell the drinks.
So the weekend would sell out. Then another one would sell out. And I was like, holy shit, maybe there's something, there's a conversion rate that I didn't see. And I kept putting stuff out on YouTube. I would do a new clip every week for a year on YouTube. And then I put these, a special on YouTube instead.
And then I learned very quickly that there was this huge white space in the market. The comedy on TV was corny and people didn't really like it. And nobody was putting out the quote unquote real comedy. There's different versions of comedy, but I'm being very simplistic. And the more edgy stuff I put on YouTube and it just exploded. And yeah, my career kind of really took off from there. And then COVID came around and there was, I was able to be a little bit more.
honest because I wasn't tied to a network and worried about maybe losing my job at the network. Yeah. And then it just, I think in America we reward bravery. Yeah. You just signed a Netflix deal, right? I mean, you did this show. Yeah. We're actually doing the show in Austin tonight where we're going to talk with some folks about this general concept where you start out as kind of an independent.
Say whatever you want. You're totally free. It's your own platform. It's your own voice. And then you go sign a deal with another platform. Like, are you now... You know, do you find it hard to trade the money for whatever might come along with that? There's restrictions. There's two ways to look at it. Right. It's like there's one like I think that. I don't want to give myself too much credit here, but like I think that what we.
did is created another marketplace for comedy that the streaming networks had to now compete with. So they were losing comics to YouTube because it was more advantageous to put your comedy up on YouTube and build a following and then go sell tickets on the road.
Whereas before, the only way you could like really make a big chunk of money on your comedy is if you've got one of these fancy specials. Now people are like, I don't even want to do this special because if I put it on YouTube, I can tour for years and really build a fan base. So they have this autonomy.
The Netflix thing is interesting because like Netflix is the second biggest, I guess, streaming service on the planet. It's like YouTube and Netflix. So if I already have this huge imprint on YouTube, it would only be. smart for me to now tap into the second biggest and see if there's some people there that aren't consuming my content on YouTube. So then back to the guy who's got the kid at Dalton now, when you go and negotiate a deal with Netflix, are they basically silent?
Not a single note. Yeah. So you do whatever you want and it is what it is. Let it rip. Now, my last special was supposed to be with Amazon. So it was with Amazon and they had some notes and I bought it back from them and I put it out myself. Really? Wow. Yeah.
And I sold it myself, and it was actually one of the coolest things ever because I think I'm maybe one of the only comics that actually knows what they're worth. Yeah. You don't really know what you're- Well, walk us through that. So you do it, and what do the notes say that you're like- Yeah, it was two jokes. And I get it. They make money selling toilet paper. Why are they going to have this huge...
You made fun of the toilet paper industry. I got it. Big toilet paper. Big TP. Very powerful lobby. You know what's funny is culture has changed and I feel like a lot of times the streamers are like... downriver from culture. So I bet now I would be able to put it out on Amazon and be totally fine. But at that time, it was maybe very edgy and a volatile time culturally. So I was able to put it out. But you had the choice, right? You could have taken the jokes out and kept it.
But then instead, you took the harder path, which is I'm just going to buy it back. Yeah. And I take the risk and I'll figure it out later. Yeah. I'm not risk averse at all. I actually enjoy risk. It kind of excites me.
What excites me more is putting out the piece exactly how I want to put it out. And I can't scream about censorship and comedians should do the jokes we want to do. And then the second somebody gives me a big check, I go, whoa, we don't have to do the joke. I have to be at least consistent on that.
And culture continued to change. And you got to give Netflix credit, too. They took a lot of hits for putting out comedy that some people thought was maybe a little bit too offensive. I mean, the Chappelle stuff. I put them in the crosshairs. Exactly. They stood strong, right? Absolutely. They stood strong. And seeing that gave me a lot of confidence. I was like, okay. And they literally, we just made the whole thing and they just gave us money.
So they were not involved at all in the creation, so to say. They were involved in giving us money for it. And then they're involved in the marketing, obviously, and their algorithm and getting it out. That's all Sarandos. He believes in comedy. Yeah, but he's like a huge comedy fan from back in the day. I think people don't realize that about him. Like you need somebody who actually loves the art and is not just looking at it as a thing that they can monetize.
There's a term this guy used that you have to find somebody spiritually aligned with you. And that's not mumbo jumbo. They truly understand the intention of comedy. So things aren't as hurtful or painful to them because they understand what you intend to do. It's interesting too. They tried to cancel you? What was the joke? Who? The mobs.
Because they went after Tony Hinchcliffe twice. Oh, yeah. And each time he went 10x. They came after Chamath on this program. That was the first level up. We got three times the audience after they tried to cancel Chamath. Yeah.
The White House released a statement. It doesn't really work when you have core fans that believe in you. And I feel like you guys have probably built that. The relationships you've built with your fans, there's probably people very grateful of the information that you give them. And so when they try to paint you in a certain light, you actually have like a hundred hours of time with those people that they know you to be more than that one statement that you've said.
So now they're not as concerned about that thing you said that maybe is taken out of context or people have been offended by. I think that the biggest thing that people miss about comedians is like. You're allowed to be offended by the joke that I say. You're allowed to react however the fuck you want to react about it. You had your life. You went through some crazy shit.
Maybe you were bullied as a kid and you don't want other people to potentially have those feelings. So you see a joke that could elicit that and you're like, I want to protect them from that. That's kind of noble. I'm like, I'm cool with that. If you yourself tell me you don't like me teasing you, I'm not going to tease you personally ever again. I want you to feel good. But it doesn't mean that I won't continue to make those jokes somewhere else. And I think my shows.
Like I got the most diverse audience in comedy history. Yeah. So it's like you come out to one of my shows, you can't tell me that people don't like these jokes. And I tried very hard to like. Like if I'm curious about your culture, you'll know it through the jokes. It's not some little bullshit. Like I'll try to dive deep and even surprise you about something that I might know. And I think in that way, people start to feel seen and they don't feel bullied.
They actually feel like represented and they're like excited about it. Look, you said something at the beginning, which I thought was really interesting, which is you're like a, you have to, great comedians are great observers of culture. So can you, can you just tell us like, just observe the cultural moment?
We talked a lot about it, but I just want you to be maybe like put a point on it. Where are we? Where's America? What the hell is going on? Like what's happened? What's happening? However you feel that question, like what the hell is going on? All-time low confidence in institutions. Low confidence in information. There's an obsession with conspiracy because there's...
I mean, that's twofold. One, like it's the easiest way for dumb people to feel smart. Like when you know something no one else knows and you get to share with people, like there's that like dopamine hit where like, I bet you didn't know this happened, you know? Yeah. But those thrive in times where there's not real transparency.
So I think everybody's looking for answers and nothing is exactly how it seems. And the only way to reinstill that confidence is, I think, like brutal transparency. Like you got to just be like really honest with the people. This is what it is. And we're Americans. We're proud people.
So we can get through whatever you say, but you got to tell it to us as it is. And I think we're just assessing relationships right now. And I think like when the economy is rough, like you're seeing all the Jewish stuff right now, right? Like, obviously, it's crazy.
Well, this is the thing you got to understand. Like most people have never met a Jewish person. Like most Americans have no clue what a Jewish person is outside of Kirby Enthusiasm or Seinfeld. They don't know what it is. They think Jews are Upper East Side New Yorkers.
Like Seinfeld or they think it's like Hasidim. It's just like one or the other. Exactly. They don't even know what a Sephardic Jew is. They don't know what an African Jew is or a Moroccan Jew. They have no clue what that is. And they shouldn't. They're like... How many Jews are there? There are like more people from Laos than there are Jews, right? Like it's like a very small population. So I think there's like a little bit of a disconnect. And, you know.
When you don't know a people, and I think this is probably true, and I could be off, but I think there's like an ambient feeling towards Jews from people who don't know Jews. It's an ambient light. The stereotypes are probably not like the best. They're not exactly negative as long as the economy is good. Right. They're like, oh, they.
They're successful. They kind of stick together. They own businesses. They whatever. And as long as the economy is good, everybody's cool. And then eggs get expensive and you're behind on your rent and you don't feel hope. And you know, and then you start going, why do they got all that? What the fuck?
what are they about why are they why are they separatists you know like i'm here proselytizing i'm trying to get everybody to go to heaven and they just got their own thing what and it's very easy for them to become this like other group and then you extrapolate that with what's happening like Palestine and Israel. And you get people to start like assessing like the relationship between America and another country. Like you saw America become very uninterested in Ukraine quickly.
The second the economy goes down, we start going, well, what do they do for us? Why are we giving them? And they're starting to ask similar questions about Israel. There's a lot of anti-Semites that are jumping on it and they're muddying the whole thing. They're going, ah, this is what they control the government. They do this. Every conspiracy. We told you so. By the way, you're speaking a profound secret that.
Many administrations in government have known for a long time, and I think this is where some of the mistrust comes from. I talked about this like maybe it was like a couple months ago, but the most incredible stock market was actually under Biden. The most amount of money printed was under Biden. The most cumulative total budget deficits was under Biden. The most amount of short-term refinancing of debt.
was under Biden. And part of what you can explain is that if you keep the signals that everything is healthy or up, you're allowed to propagate all of these other things that would get very quickly recapitulated. And when you take the gas out of the market and you take the gas out of all these other markets and all of a sudden the price of energy is up and the price of this is up and the price of that is up, then you start to question, hold on a second, why are all of these things as important?
you know, the above the line, below the line conversation that we have tried to have several times on this pot, Jason. And you have to like meet people, you have to meet people where they feel in order to communicate with them, right? Like they could like.
When people right now are assessing America's relationship with Israel, you hear these soundbites, like, that's our closest ally. And then they go, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, let's explain to them what that means. Let's explain the importance of that relationship and how it's beneficial to Americans.
Because if you don't explain it and you just go, oh, just be quiet, whatever, then they start to look at these lunatics on Twitter and start to go, wait, is that true? Yeah, and then they're down the conspiracy hall. Exactly. Like, you have to explain.
I don't know what the mineral deal was about, but I know with Ukraine, but I know for a second there were some Americans who go, oh, we're going to get some minerals out of that? All right, minerals sound good. They're going to pay us back. It's that simplistic, right? So it's like, I think.
I think that kind of communication is important and it will actually help understand these relationships, which I imagine are very important. I'm not privy to all the geopolitical decisions that are going on there. Who knows, intelligence from Israel could have thwarted 20 more 9-11s. Yeah, maybe you can't say that because you exposed the intelligence operatives you have in the field.
But it would, I think, be helpful to understand the value of that for the everyday American so that when you see something crazy on Twitter, you can go, okay, you're just an anti-Semite and you're looking for a justification for your hate. I mean, this is your point about Trump. Sometimes he has these take care. We'll see you later, bro. Take care, David. This is like, I think.
There's going to be a conspiracy theory about that right now. I just want to let you know. Yeah, you just talked about Israel and he's like, all right, I'm out of here. Yeah, and the one Jewish guy left. I'm ready to go. Way to go, Chelsea. This is how it starts, David. David, this is how it starts. You drove him out. Thanks a lot. You drove him out. Right. Chelsea, when you said, you know, Trump's a masterful kind of communicator here, Biden gave all these weapons to Ukraine under.
the auspices of what's called a loan lease. They have to pay them back. But Biden never communicated that well. And then Trump comes out and he's like, you know what? We gave them 180 million, 180 billion. They're going to give us 500 billion back. We're making a 40. He basically described a 42% compounded return. Sounds good to me. Yeah, better than anything that's ever happened. I mean, he is.
out there in terms of his ability to communicate it. Chamath, as we wrap here, any final thoughts? What do you think about Trump and how he's doing and what he's doing so far? And what do you think about Elon and Doge? Okay, so Trump and what he's doing, how he's doing so far, I don't know. In other words, I don't know if I can assess it right away. Maybe I'm giving him a little bit longer.
uh like landing strip or whatever than other people because i have a little bit more hope or optimism again if you don't like the guy you're going to see how horrible this is immediately but i'm going to give him a little bit more leeway to see if it doesn't work out and it's really horrible i'll be the first person to call it out
He's in power. We should definitely check the people in power. But I'm hoping that these actions in the short term are beneficial in the long term. Is everyone going to work out? No. Doge is like, I'm so depressed about, not depressed as stupid, but I'm bummed about because I don't think there's any American that is pro-waste, inefficiency, and bloat. This should be a bipartisan issue.
All Americans should be coming together going, oh my God, the DMV is going to get better. This sounds awesome. And I think, you know, I have a lot of respect for Elon, but I think sometimes on Twitter, he's like twisting the knife a little bit. And it's like, you don't need to twist the knife. Like we all want this. This is something we can come together with as a country and support. This sounds great. Don't twist it.
Just kind of let it be. Show your wins. When you do something wrong, we can acknowledge the things that we did are wrong and we'll respect that. It bums me that this has become so partisan. And I do understand. There are a lot of people on the left that are making this partisan as well. They're weaponizing it. Absolutely. There was this crazy clip between Rogan and Elon where Rogan was like, how does all this go down actually?
And he's like, well, I can't really speak about the corruption because I'm afraid it would get me assassinated. He's like, actually, if I tell you what I know, it was the weirdest like two minute clip. And then they just kind of left it and moved on. And my brain was like, what are they talking about? What?
What must be going on? I mean, there's a lot of money going out the door. Yeah, but who's killing Elon? If we are going to have World War III, don't you want the guy that has the rockets to go to Mars on your side? Yeah, you kind of want the super genius on your side, for sure. Another thing that's really interesting to me is people keep doing these things like, what is Elon's play? What is he doing here? Is he actually going to take over? And it's like...
Elon has been dealing with local government for so long, trying to push through. He is not an American citizen. He cannot be present. He is at the highest position he will ever be in his lifetime in America. You can't get higher. than being the right-hand man of the president since you're not from America. You can't ever be president. So I think he's going to behave really well because now he's in the most powerful position he will ever be in. If you want to talk about like power plays.
you got to watch out for JD. That guy's high emotional intelligence. That's somebody that I would be keeping my eyes on if I'm Trump. But Elon, he's going to be a good, he's going to be your best friend. Because it's only downhill if he pisses Trump off. Interesting. Interesting. A little Manchurian candidate for J.D. No, no, no. I'm not saying that he's going to do anything bad, but he is like, don't.
Don't treat him lightly. We got this thing. Don't sleep on JD. New Yorkers, we do this all the time. We hear someone with a Southern accent. We think they're a goofball. And it's like, that guy went from like a broken home to Yale. Appalachia to Yale and then the VP and he's 40. He's your age. He's like 40. He called Trump Hitler or something and he ended up as his VP. He said, I'm a never Trump guy.
So to say that he's not emotionally intelligent, to say that he doesn't know how to manage up or whatever that term is. He's sappy. Hey, keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on him for sure. All right, listen. Andrew Schultz is playing at the Funny Bone on April 16th and 17th. He'll be by Chuckles on the 20th and 21st. Two drink minimum. Two drink minimum by the VL. You know where to find them. Incredible. Incredible.
Netflix special. Who do you think? Last question. Who do you think is the funniest? If you had to just take a wild stab at who the funniest person. Can't pick Chappelle. No, me, me, Jason, or Freeview. Oh, of us. Between the three of you? Okay, so... You can say me. So Jason is the most naturally inclined to be funny. He's probably just the most funny being around. Chamath will probably get the biggest laughs when he says something funny because he's like...
he's not asking for much. Like he'll just say something that's like a dart and it'll kind of like hit you and you'll be like, Oh, and then. I think David will like structure something really funny. And you'll be like, oh, that was a clever. I see how you did that right there. I was actually when I was an astrophysicist, Chelsea, I am. So that would be my myself. I did summer stock.
I think if we're off the pod, I think Chamath says some wild shit that everybody goes, what the fuck? I think you say that the most. That's what I would say. There you go. All right. Andy Schultz picks me. They have it, mom. I would like to clip that and yeah. All right. Continued success. Come back anytime. I like the way Schultz pronounces, but I may go to Chamath. I like that. Chamath. Chamath. Yeah, Chamath is too, it's too used actually. We should go to a different pronunciation.
I love Chamath. Chamath is just so incorrect. It's tough with the, I know you're Sri Lanka, but it's tough with the names from over there. Like my podcast co-host Akash, right? Akash. Everybody calls him Akash. His name is spelled with two A's. A's. Akash. So it's like Akash. If it's got two A's next to each other. Yeah, you want to go there. After the K, you go there. But it's Akash. Akash. Akash. It is tricky, but he said like his parents specifically.
picked a name he thought that Americans would be able to pronounce. They calculated that. They were trolling him. I think that's a really beautiful thing for a kid. They could have named him John. Steve, if they wanted it. They had to keep it real, though. They still had to keep it real. They would keep it real. I was about eight when I could read and write English. Well, eight, okay? Because it was my second language. And when I saw my name written out, I was like...
What the did they do to me here? What is this? My middle name is like 15 other letters. My middle name. A name that has math in it. Like they knew what they wanted. Yes. They were like, if you can, if you can pronounce this, you can solve the Pythagorean theorem. This is, this is harder than the Pythagorean theorem. My son is going to be an engineer. This guy's going to be rich. I'm so proud of him.
He's going to figure it out. He'll get us two months. He's going to get us. Let me ask you a question, Andrew. Is it racist if I do an Indian impersonation? Because I know I can do Italian and Irish, but can I do Indian? No, it's funny, bro. I don't think so, but I think it's like. Is it the intent? I don't even think it's the intent. I think if you like, if you say certain things, like if you say bitter, right? Like if you say that, like.
That's like my love. Like, you know, if you say little things that are more than just the sound, but if you tap into the culture, like to let them know, hey, listen, I didn't learn this from the Simpsons. And I learned it from my buddy's family. Then I think you'll see people who are like Indians, Sri Lankan, they'll be like, oh, he's got friends. He knows. I'm going to go ahead and until I make my move to comedian, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to save it to when I get my...
Tony, kill Tony's set. Yeah, what's your Korean accent? Can you do that? Like, can we go through? I can do Korean because my wife's Korean and her dad. Oh, you can't. I can because my dad. And my father-in-law, I went to China. He's an industrialist. He's there. And I said, hey, listen, I'd like to marry your daughter. And he said, okay. Two conditions. And I said, okay. And he said.
Do it fast. And he poked me, Andrew, so hard. Like a reinforced poke with his finger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On my shoulder, get a bruise. I'm like, oh. Yeah. And then he goes, and I said, what's the second thing? He says, no refunds. He says it just like that. And I was like, okay, okay. I don't marry your daughter. No refunds. Do it fast. And I literally had to marry her within a year because he knew. He was like, listen, I got, he had four daughters.
And he's like, I got to move inventory. I love it. And I was the first. I married the oldest daughter. None of the other daughters could get married until I married my wife, which was the greatest thing I ever did. Three beautiful kids. You know how it is. And listen, good luck. You're going to have a second and third? I hope so, man. God will. Three's the right number. If you want to do a half Elon, you can go with Chamat's plan. He's on six or seven. I'm on five, bro. I'm on five.
possible. And then Freeberg's on four. I'm on three. I think three's the right number. I'm going to catch up, boys. I'm going to catch up. All right. Listen, continue success. Thanks for doing this. Thank you so much for having me, guys. Cheers. Rain Man, David Sachs. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wes. I'm the queen of kinwa. We should all just get a room and just have one big Hugh Georgie because they're all just useless.
like sexual tension, but they just need to release them out. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. We need to get merch. I'm going.